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Brexit Means...

Did Theresa May Actually Say Anything New in Her Big Brexit Interview?

An analysis of the Prime Minister's Sky appearance.
Picture by John Stillwell PA Wire/PA Images

Brexit is a crisis of interpretation. Six months after the referendum, this is all we know. Although "Brexit means Brexit" became such a beg-the-question tautology that the Prime Minister stopped using it, speculative Brexits continue to be fleshed out in increasingly experimental forms – soft, hard, red white and blue, ambitious, protracted, sincere, sarcastic, solid, gelatinous – all of which disclose little about its content. Brexit is everything and nothing; it's the reason you won't get a pay rise; it's the reason you haven't been sleeping properly; it's the essential condition of the British state's disintegration and it feels like there's nothing we can do but interpret it.

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To introduce some clarity and purpose to events, the Prime Minister gave her first broadcast interview of the year on Sunday on Sky News. The country's political and media class – not to mention a panicked judiciary – awaited her words. 'She'll transform the constitutional and political chaos into order,' they thought, 'outlining the government's strategy to make Britain's exit of the European Union a meaningful proposition. All using her mythical brand of competent, hard-nosed, Dunkirk-spirit spunk.'

This is what she said in response to a question on staying in the single market:

"This is where it's important for us to look at this issue in the right way. Often people talk in terms as if we are somehow leaving the EU but still want to kind of keep bits of membership of the EU. We're leaving. We're coming out. We're not going to be a member of the EU any longer. So the question is, the question is, what is the right relationship for the UK to have with the European Union when we're outside."

Once you're done picturing Theresa May practising the phrase, "kind of keep bits of" in a mirror for 30 minutes – an overwrought simulation of how normal people are said to speak – try to work out what, if anything, she actually said. The evasions even generated a hashtag, #speaklikemay. She found a new way to say "Brexit means Brexit" – "We're leaving. We're coming out." – which, although sounding clear, obscures whether access to the single market comes under the category of "keeping bits of membership" of the EU. The press were left to decide for themselves and concluded it did. Maybe.

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By Sunday evening, the implication of a Britain without any "bits of membership" was being reported by BBC Radio 4 as a coded suggestion that May wanted Britain to leave the single market. On Monday, Bloomberg picked up on May's subliminal "hints" at leaving too (adding that the value of the pound weakened as a result). But it takes a decent level of confidence in your interpretation abilities to find anything conclusive in what she said: single market access isn't exclusively a "bit of membership of the EU"; Norway isn't a member of the EU and has access to the single market through the EEA.

The government's rhetorical paralysis faced by a challenge this immense is to be expected. Most British politicians haven't had to think politically their entire careers – at least since the end of the Cold War and decimation of the organised working-class, when politics entailed, at least superficially, a struggle over radically different values. Their efforts at resolving contradiction through policies and ideas – "The Strategic State", "The Big Society", "Alarm clock Britain", etc. – are created as soundbites, on the assumption they won't really matter in a few months. Their intellectual formation at Oxford Union debates were premised on the eternal, unchanging foundation of British statecraft and capitalism.

Brexit has generated, among others, a constitutional crisis; it is an existential, as well as technical, event. Expect more prevarication; expect the evacuation of meaning from words you once understood. It's going to be a hard – or soft – 2017.

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@YohannK

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