Can the UK escape the curse of Brexit?

Or has Boris Johnson doomed us for eternity

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On 18 July 2022, as his own disgusted MPs were throwing him out of Downing Street, Boris Johnson gave the British a parting curse.

“Some people will say, as I leave office, that this is the end of Brexit,” he told the Commons. “The Leader of the Opposition and the deep state will prevail in their plot to haul us back into alignment with the EU as a prelude to our eventual return. We on this side of the House will prove them wrong, won’t we?”

Indeed they would. Johnson and his Trumpian mumblings about the deep state are gone.  But his curse blights the UK, and looks as if it will carry on blighting the land for decades. There is a magical element to power of the Johnson curse because, as far as anyone can tell, Brexit has lost its democratic legitimacy.

The damage it is causing grows more evident by the day. Getting close to two-thirds of the public now believe that leaving the EU was a mistake. In the next Parliament, a majority of MPs will agree with them and regard the 2016 referendum result as a national disaster.

Even supporters of Brexit don’t bother to pretend that it’s benefitting the UK any more. They just jeer that we have no choice and cannot eescape the mess they made.

They appear to be right. Responsible voices tell us that there is next to nothing the British can do to save their country.

In the Financial Times this week, its political columnist Robert Shrimsley, said that Brexit is simply not an issue opposition politicians want to talk about. No major figures are contemplating rejoining the European single market or Customs Union, and as for full membership of the EU, even “dedicated pro-Europeans like Tony Blair see this as generations away”

Shrimsley was describing what I will call for want of a better description the remainer establishment view. I am not disparaging him or his argument. I accept that serious people who want the best for the UK agree that the next Labour government won’t be able to offer much beyond small adjustments to Johnson’s cursed settlement.

I think they are missing how fast public attitudes are changing and how deep our post-Brexit economic crisis is biting. As a matter of tactics, Labour leaders are also underestimating the political dangers of failing to level with the electorate. Acting as if Brexit does not matter may appear a smart strategy in 2023 and 2024 but it will look dumb and dishonest once Labour are in power.

As everyone from the Labour leadership through to the liberal press and think tanks accepts the established view that significant changes to the UK’s relationship with the EU are impossible, however, it is only fair to explain why they think what they think before criticising them.

Rejoining would require another referendum, which would divide the country again, they say. In any case, even if the British government could convince all the other EU governments to let us back in, we would never be offered the generous rebates and exemptions we enjoyed before 2016.  Rejoining would almost certainly mean the UK committing to adopt the euro at some point in the future.

If these are not reasons enough for you, consider that, however badly they are defeated next year, the Tories may still have a veto. The EU may well say that it will not bother negotiating re-entry or any other substantive change to our relationship with Europe if an incoming Conservative government in 2029 or 2034 could destroy the deal. It would have to be sure that support for Brexit doomed the Conservatives to permanent opposition. This may happen, as the middle classes turn on a party that has betrayed them, but has not happened yet.

Meanwhile, you will have noticed that there is no enthusiasm in Brussels for reopening the Brexit question. It’s done and we’re out as far as they are concerned, and it will take years of good-faith gestures on our part to persuade the EU to change its mind

Perhaps we do not need to rejoin. From an economic point of view, the UK is being hammered by our departure from the European single market. We might boost the economy merely by rejoining the market and allowing free trade to flow again. Like Norway, we could be outside the EU but inside the single market.

It is not going to happen. The democratic deficit would be intolerable. The UK would be accepting rules it had no say in making. In his excellent What Went Wrong With Brexit (out next week) Peter Foster of the FT, writes,

“Is it realistic to think that any British government would allow the City to be a passive rule- taker from EU financial regulators, without having a seat at the table where those regulations were agreed? Norway also makes hefty financial contributions to EU programmes, and accepts the free movement of people, which polls suggest is not something that would currently win popular support in the UK.”

He's clearly right. The arguments about sovereignty were largely bogus in 2016. But there would be real questions of democratic legitimacy if the UK, a member of the UN Security council and G7, were to take EU rules in the single market without having a say in their creation.

It seems that Johnson has cursed us to live with his disastrous settlement for as far ahead as anyone can contemplate.

I can see the attraction to Labour people of closing their eyes, putting their fingers in their ears and going along with it.  Polling in June 2023 by Deltapoll for the Tony Blair Institute found that, when asked to consider the UK and EU’s future relationship on a 10-15 year time horizon, 78 per cent of voters said they wanted a closer relationship – either rejoining the EU, re-entering the EU single market or seeking a closer trade and security relationship more generally. As Blair himself summed it up in an article in late 2022: ‘It is what it is. There are ways to fix the relationship. It is crucial it is fixed.”

Yet Labour politicians who have not retired and need to win elections remain in thrall to the tyranny of a minority. A subsection of largely elderly non-graduate voters in working-class seats still support Brexit. Under the first-past-the-post electoral system Labour cannot ignore them if it wants to retake power.

Yet it cannot ignore the reality of the UK’s decline either.  Brexit isn’t a one-off event but a continuing, scarring disease. No government that is serious about arresting the UK’s decline and rebuilding the economy and public sector can maintain the insistence of today’s Labour leaders that we can ignore it.

To quote from Foster’s book, the Bank of England estimates that Brexit has pushed the level of UK goods trade to 10 per cent to 15 per cent below what it would otherwise have been. Jonathan Haskel, professor of economics at Imperial College London, and Josh Martin at the Bank of England calculated that Brexit caused a 10 per cent hit to business investment in 2022 which equates to an estimated reduction in GDP of £29 billion – or £1,000 for every household in the UK. And they warned that the pain would not stop there.

Those very same “Red Wall” manufacturing heartlands that Johnson was so jubilant about stealing from Labour face some of the biggest potential downsides of Brexit. The industries that support a disproportionate number of the best-paying jobs in those communities – automotive, chemical, advanced manufacturing – are the ones most exposed by leaving the EU single market. If opposition politicians cannot introduce honesty into the political conversation and level with voters in the Midlands and the North they will not be able to explain why the post-Brexit economy is destroying the prospects of voters’ children.

Meanwhile the Tories are leaving the UK a diminished power. Whitehall is shut out of decision making in the EU. The potential exists for the whole of Europe to unite against the UK, a disaster every ruler since Elizabeth I has struggled to avert. Brexit also impacts our every other strategic relationship, sapping the UK’s wider credibility, including in Washington, which can no longer use the UK as a diplomatic hinge with Brussels.

Is it too naïve to hope that a public, which has been misled for years, is now ready for an adult conversation? Opposition politicians do not need to commit to a second referendum, but they do need to lay out honestly the suffering Brexit has brought down on the British.