Neverland: the strange non-death of cakeism in conservative European thought

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has linked the hard Brexit outcome to the legacy of ‘cakeism’ in Conservative thought and the belief that the economic and political aspects of European integration could be separated. Yet the persistence of cakeism is puzzling given its failure in practice and clear evidence that such arrangements were not available. We argue cakeism persisted in the face of confounding evidence because of its ability to maintain party unity and because of the confounding effects of hard bargaining, which interpreted failure as a problem of insufficient resolve. The result is a cyclical process in which ever-harder designs on Brexit are brought about by the intensification of hard bargaining. We trace the origins and development of this mode of thinking from the post-war period to the present, showing how a hard Brexit was brought about by the occlusion of factional differences and the interpretation of failure as insufficient hard bargaining.