A pregnant pause

This post is slightly shorter than usual because the last fortnight has been a fairly quiet period for Brexit-related news, with the dominant domestic story having been the continuing fall-out from Keir Starmer’s ill-judged appointment of Peter Mandelson. Even that does have some Brexit angles, though. Certainly Morgan McSweeney claimed this week that the choice of Mandelson was animated by the post-Brexit need to have a good trade relationship with the US. Actually, I suspect that, even if it’s true that Mandelson was appointed for his supposed ‘Trump-whispering’ credentials, something which is contested [1], this rationale would have applied regardless of Brexit because of the non-trade issues at stake in the UK-US relationship (i.e. defence and security).

Perhaps the more important Brexit angle is that one of the things Starmer’s government was expected to achieve was a substantial improvement in the relationship between politicians and civil servants following the huge damage done to it during the Brexit process. Yet the summary ejection of Sir Olly Robbins from the Foreign Office brought that relationship to what is probably a new low, made all the more noteworthy by the fact that Robbins at one time led the UK Brexit negotiations and, in that role, became almost a hate-figure to Brexiters.

However, in general terms there a sense of Brexit being on pause, but it is an unusually expectant pause, awaiting three imminent events.

The coming elections

The first of these is the English local council, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections which will be held next week. The results of these will have numerous consequences but one of them is that, assuming Labour do as badly as is expected, Starmer will face enormous pressure to reinvent or to resign his premiership. If the outcome is ‘reinvention’, then one very possible aspect of that will be to move from Labour’s “crabwise” approach to UK-EU relations to something quicker and deeper. If the outcome is ‘resignation” (whether willing or forced) then it is highly likely that discussion of such a move will feature strongly in the race to succeed him, and that his successor, whoever it is, will embrace a reinvented policy.

In some ways, this would only be the continuation of the existing direction of travel. It is not so long since Labour had a virtual omerta on even mentioning Brexit. Starmer very reluctantly broke that silence in July 2022, although only to insist on his ‘red lines’, and for most of the period since then has relied on formulaic repetitions of the reset policy. It is really only in the last couple of months that he, Rachel Reeves, and other ministers have openly spoken of the damage Brexit has caused. But that openness has had the inevitable corollary of exposing the limitations of their plans to repair the damage, and increases the pressure for a far more ambitious policy.

A move in that direction would also be a continuation of Labour’s emergent realization, especially since losing to the Greens in Gorton & Denton, of the electoral need to offer its anti-Brexit members and voters a reason for loyalty. In particular, a shift to a full-throated project to ‘rejoin’ (probably articulated in terms of a future manifesto commitment rather than an immediate policy) might be seen as a way to out-flank the rather cautious ‘customs union for now’ position of both the Green Party and the Lib Dems. Whether such calculations, especially if transparently designed to save Starmer’s job, constitute the kind of principled commitment which could yield a genuine partnership with, let alone eventual membership of, the EU is another matter.

The coming UK-EU Summit

The second imminent event is the next UK-EU Summit. Unless I have missed it, the date of this has still not been agreed but in a speech at the beginning of April Starmer said that it would be announced “in the coming weeks”. This summit will really be the point at which the ‘reset’ has to have tangible outcomes, turning the rather vague aspirations of last May’s meeting into definite agreements. In particular, but also at the very least, the SPS or ‘veterinary’ agreement, which the government constantly talks of as if it were a done deal, will have to be delivered if there is to be a chance of getting it to the point of implementation by the next general election.

However, the reality is that the May 2025 Summit, which even at the time was rather insipid, now seems woefully inadequate given the scale of events since, most obviously the endless raging storm of Trump’s tariff policy and the successive international crises he has provoked, most damagingly in the Middle East. For example, the impact of an SPS deal on UK food prices, which was never going to be that great, now looks like very small beer in the face of the inflation of food and many other prices which is coming down the track as the result of the Iran War. So delivering on the 2025 Summit will not be enough and Starmer’s April speech said as much:

“I can tell you, at [the next] summit, the UK will not just ratify existing commitments made at last year’s summit. We want to be more ambitious. Closer economic cooperation. Closer security cooperation. A partnership that recognises our shared values, our shared interests, and our shared future. A partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.”

What this means in practice is, as usual, very vague. But it is hard to see how Starmer can go on and on making such vague promises without delivering and, in conjunction with the issue of how he responds to the May election results, this means that the next Summit is going to be a crucial moment in post-Brexit relations. It will show whether there is any momentum to the reset, any momentum to go beyond the reset, or whether we are stuck in the sludge, muddling along with nothing really changing since, effectively, the point at which, with Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework agreement in February 2023, a kind of post-Brexit status quo was achieved, more through exhaustion than anyone being especially satisfied with it.

At the time, I wrote of that perhaps being the moment when Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ broke (in the sense of ending the period of open hostility towards the EU, with British threats to renege on the agreements made etc.) and would be followed by a long, slow process of convalescence. Arguably, that is what we have seen since then and, if so, the question is whether we are still in that process or whether there will be a new phase of more rapid recuperation.

The coming anniversary

The third imminent event is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, on 23 June. At that point, there will be a rash of re-evaluations of Brexit, and already the anniversary is being invoked as a moment to initiate a renewed debate. That would be occurring anyway, just because ‘ten’ is a round number, but it has an added salience because of the context of international crisis and domestic disarray and, with that, the pervasive sense of a country adrift. As the economics and politics commentator Simon Nixon put it this week, with remarkable rapidity Brexit has ceased to be a taboo subject in British politics.

Thus, in the last fortnight there have been several high-profile interventions, including that of Sir Philip Rycroft, the former Permanent Secretary of the erstwhile Department for Exiting the European Union. Writing in The Times (£), he argued that the promises made for Brexit had not materialized, and that changes in public opinion and the international situation meant that it was time to make the argument for ‘rejoining’. Meanwhile, last weekend’s Observer made the call to rejoin its front page and carried an article by Neil Kinnock (£) arguing the case for doing so, as well as a report by the paper’s political and economic editors (£) (quoting Kinnock, Rycroft, Sadiq Khan, and a former President of the CBI, amongst others) of there being pressure on Starmer to at least begin a conversation about rejoining.

Notably, all of the interventions I’ve mentioned refer to a report entitled “Is it time to talk about EU membership?’ just published by the Best for Britain which presents and analyses new public opinion survey data showing support/opposition for rejoining at 53%-32% and suggesting that, ultimately, this would be a more politically sustainable policy than, for example, seeking single market membership. What’s notable is not so much the figures, which are in line with other recent opinion polls, but my impression, at least, that campaign groups like Best for Britain (which not long ago was proposing what in my view was a variant of the flawed ‘mutual recognition solution’) and the European Movement are now more vocal, or more confident, in talking about ‘rejoining’. That is only an impression, but it will be interesting to see, for example, the level of support for the next National Rejoin March, which will be held on 20 June, and perhaps even more interesting to see the extent and the nature of the media coverage it receives.

The coming conversation

Obviously these three imminent events link together, with the idea of a ten-year anniversary ‘national conversation’ being part of the attempts from outside and within the Labour Party to push for a new policy in preparation for the expected election results and in anticipation of the summit. And, to the extent that this new policy is envisaged as being more ambitious than the reset, that pretty much implies the abandonment of Labour’s ‘red lines’, as was argued this week by Labour MP Marsha de Cordova [2]. Whether that will happen any time soon I doubt, not least because I doubt whether the opinion poll support for joining the EU is yet large enough or reliable enough for Starmer or any other Labour leader to depend upon it.

Nevertheless, it is already clear that the coming months are going to see a revival of debate about Brexit and that will include, as indeed reactions to these recent interventions have already shown, a ferocious reaction from leading Brexiters. In that sense it will show that, in line with the book I reviewed in an ‘extra’ post on this blog last week, the “tribal divisions” of the 2016 referendum have persisted. For that matter, whilst the May election results may well push Labour to a more anti-Brexit position, the expected gains of Reform UK will be a fillip to the confidence of Brexiters. That is another reason why beginning the process of joining the EU is not an imminent possibility, but this certainly doesn’t mean that a revived debate about doing so will be unimportant or meaningless.

No doubt I will write more about that when we get to the tenth anniversary, but, for now, an important point to make is that the continuing Brexit divisions show just how comprehensively Brexit has failed, in at least two ways.

Firstly, whilst those divisions have persisted, and much of the debate about Brexit is extremely repetitious, the underlying dynamics have shifted and will likely continue to do so.  In 2016, the Brexiters’ case was primarily about how good the effects of leaving the EU would be. Now, their argument is just that it hasn’t been as bad as was warned or as is claimed. That is, it has become a fundamentally defensive case, and, moreover, that case is necessarily undermined by their constant claim that Brexit has been ‘betrayed’. It is hard to mount a convincing defence of something whilst also disdaining it.

The ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’ – but in the end this term will have to be dropped) case has also altered, in that it is now possible to demonstrate the damage of not being a member and also possible for joining the EU to be presented, as leaving once was, as a radical disavowal of the status quo in favour of a new and desirable future. Indeed, ultimately, the viability of the ‘join’ case, not least in the eyes of the EU, will depend on it being articulated in positive terms and not just as an escape from the hardship of a failed experiment.  

The second point about the ongoing debate is, simply, the fact that it is ongoing. In the second edition of my book about Brexit I wrote that according to its advocates and supporters “… Brexit was intended to be the start of a confident national renewal, a reinvigoration of national purpose, prosperity and standing. It certainly wasn’t proposed as, or supposed to be, the prelude to a country permanently divided on the wisdom of Brexit, still less to an interminable debate about whether it had been the right thing to do ….” (p.285) and I went on to quote David Frost saying that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.”

He said that in June 2022, so we haven’t quite reached the point he specified, but there’s absolutely no sign that his test will be met. As the writer and journalist Matt Carr puts it in his recent, excellent Substack post:

“Ten years after Brexit, the UK is yet to find either peace or acceptance. Roiled by angry, vicious dreams and fed on a diet of toxic delusions, it recognises the folly of the decision that it took in 2016, but does not know how to change it, or simply does not dare.”

Yet, depressing as that is, it would be even more depressing if Frost’s test had been met, we had ceased to debate Brexit and it had settled in the British polity.

Notes

[1] I express this conditionally because, although that has always been my understanding, and one shared by, amongst others, the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr, another eminent political commentator, Stephen Bush of the Financial Times, is adamant that the sequence of events shows that the government’s desire to appoint Mandelson preceded Trump’s re-election. Whatever the truth of this, it doesn’t affect my point that the idea it had a Brexit rationale is questionable.

[2] It should not, however, be thought that all the pressure within the Labour Party points towards erasing the government’s red lines, or even towards a more ambitious reset within those red lines. For example, it was reported this week (£) that (unnamed) ministers are concerned that Labour’s increasing commitment to alignment with EU regulations, above and beyond that entailed by the reset, of will impair the UK’s ability to set its own regulatory regime for AI. And the regulatory alignment envisaged by the existing reset policy also has critics, some of whom may well be Labour voters and members, who are opposed to the fact that an SPS deal will prevent Britain adopting its own animal welfare protections.