Five years on: stuck

As we approach the fifth anniversary of officially leaving the EU, even those who still profess to support Brexit are hard-pressed to explain what the point of it was, and scarcely bother to try. That lack of purpose was underscored by Kemi Badenoch's recent admission that the Conservatives took Britain out of the EU “without a plan for growth”. This wasn’t, as some have taken it to be, an expression of ‘Bregret’, but it was the first time a senior Tory has accepted that the manner in which Brexit was enacted was flawed and, at least by implication, flawed in ways which have done economic damage. Effectively, Badenoch repeated the critique Farage made in 2023 of the Tories’ handling of Brexit, one which Rishi Sunak denied at the time.

In that sense, it was a relatively easy critique to make, since the Tories are no longer in power, and Brexit is always at its shiny best when presented by those without responsibility for its implementation. What, like Farage, Badenoch cannot admit is that this lack of a growth plan (or any plan) was inherent to Brexit and not simply a matter of ‘mismanagement’. On the one hand, there was no way of delivering Brexit that would not have been economically damaging. On the other hand, there was no consensus view amongst Brexit’s advocates and voters as to what the (economic) plan of Brexit was meant to be. So it’s not just that any Brexit plan would have been damaging, it’s that there was no political basis on which to make even a damaging plan.

A Brexit wobble?

Nevertheless, Badenoch’s admission is significant, especially when taken in conjunction with the very different intervention from the LibDem leader Ed Davey, calling for the UK to agree a new customs union with the EU. As Lewis Goodall of the News Agents pointed out on his Substack last week, these developments mark a “wobbling” of the “shallow but broad political consensus in Westminster [whereby] no-one much liked [the Johnson agreement] but few wanted to re-open it, for fear of the daemons therein”. That assessment of Westminster is broadly true, especially given the reduced SNP presence in the current parliament, and it is certainly true that for both Tories and LibDems what their leaders have now said represents a departure from their election manifestos.

It is, however, only a ‘wobble’. Brexit still isn’t, for now at least, a major, overt part of political debate, and I think Goodall is right to say that the immediate consequences for how the government acts in relation to post-Brexit decisions are quite limited. Badenoch’s comments at least give cover for Keir Starmer’s line that the Tories made a mess of Brexit, whilst those of Davey at least potentially extended the terrain of what is discussable. But – and it is a very big ‘but’ – there is very little sign that the government has any desire, or even any idea, of how to escape from the very narrow parameters it has assigned to Brexit.

Labour’s narrow vision

More specifically, it is striking that, the ‘reset’ notwithstanding, Starmer’s government’s approach to Brexit sounds very similar to Badenoch’s, and, actually, to Rishi Sunak’s. Thus, Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds dismissed Davey’s intervention as showing that the LibDems “only ever think about Europe” and babbled about how “this is a government that wants to improve that relationship with the EU but also wants to do work with the US, with India, with the Gulf”. That’s boilerplate Brexiter stuff, which could as easily have been said by Sunak.

Where both Reynolds and Rachel Reeves have an at least arguably better case is in saying that part of the cost of Brexit was the political instability and business uncertainty it created, and that revisiting the question of a customs union would mark a return to that. After all, how viable would it be to do so when there is a fair prospect of a Tory, or even a Tory-Reform, government returning, Trump-like, in 2029 to reverse it? On other hand, if economic growth is the government’s central mission, that is what should be driving policy. There’s not much point in banging on about having a ‘Plan for Change’ and then discounting change because it would produce instability. At all events, even if the government judges that a customs treaty is not politically feasible now, Starmer could still have made use of the opportunity Davey provided to nudge Labour’s Brexit parameters just a little.

Even leaving aside a customs union, the most obvious way to do so would have been to signal an intention to rejoin the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention on rules of origin. The case for doing so has been discussed again recently by customs expert Dr Anna Jerzweska and, crucially, it is something which would sit within the framework of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Significantly, this week Maros Sefcovic indicated that the EU is open to the idea of the UK joining PEM.

Even for the most rabid Brexiter, PEM membership is actually fairly uncontroversial, to the extent that the ‘instability’ argument almost certainly doesn’t apply. It’s not difficult to imagine that the Sunak government would have done it, and it’s quite likely, in my view, that it will eventually become Labour policy (the government had already begun consulting businesses about the idea). But it would have been far better had the overture come from the government when Davey provided an opening (if not, indeed, before) as something the UK is pro-actively seeking as being in the national interest.

As it is, Sefcovic’s comments have already been reported in the pro-Brexit press under the headline “EU plots to drag UK back into bloc”. No doubt something similar would be said had Starmer proposed it, but had he done so it would have put the government on the front foot. Instead, Labour are reduced to making the mealy-mouthed response that the UK “does not currently have plans” to join PEM, whilst confirming that doing so would not cross the government's 'red lines'. This keeps the door ajar, but also invites cries of ‘giving in to the EU’ were the government ever to step through it. It’s truly pathetic.

An even more striking illustration of the continuity of Labour and Tory policy is how, when Badenoch was asked how she would approach Brexit if she were in power, she came out with exploiting areas like technology and AI. This, of course, was Sunak’s pet project and, now, has been adopted by Starmer as the key to delivering “a decade of national renewal” with his rather oddly-worded desire to “mainline AI into the veins of this enterprising nation”. Such an ambition might not, in itself, be related to Brexit, but the government clearly sees it as being so. Thus, according to Reeves:

“There are opportunities outside the European Union, opportunities, for example, like AI, where we have a very different regulatory approach to AI compared to the European Union’s approach. That makes Britain a more attractive place for AI and tech companies to invest than in other European countries.”

Once again, this is boilerplate Brexiter stuff.

Strategic incoherence

The convergence of how Starmer and the previous Tory government talk about AI regulation is the starting point of an excellent piece by Joël Reland of UKICE. In it, he points to other ways in which the current government shows a proclivity to “flirt” with regulatory divergence whereas, in practice, “its revealed preference … is to align with EU standards”. This preference was further revealed by the government’s decision this week not to allow the ‘Stormont Brake’ to be pulled over chemical labelling regulations. This was the latest evidence that, as the BBC’s John Campbell argues, the government’s general approach will be to align the whole of the UK with any EU rules which apply, by virtue of the Protocol and Windsor Framework, to Northern Ireland.

There are several points within Reland’s analysis which are worth flagging or amplifying. One of these is the basic fact “that the UK is a second-order regulatory power”, and always liable to be pulled by ‘the Brussels Effect’ towards EU regulations. This would be the case anyway, because so much of the UK’s trade and supply chains are bound up with the EU, but, as the story about chemicals labelling illustrates, Northern Ireland makes it more so. That’s because, at least as regards goods regulation, UK-EU divergence also has the consequence of GB-NI divergence, so to avoid the latter requires also avoiding the former.

Another important point made by Reland is that Labour’s approach has, or potentially has, numerous contradictions because decisions taken in one regulatory area can conflict with those taken in another. This, I think, is the flip-side of, or perhaps just another way of expressing, the argument I made last August about Labour’s lack of a post-Brexit strategy. That argument was more focussed on what the government wants from ‘the reset’ per se but this is inseparable from a coherent regulatory strategy.

For example, it was reported in the FT on 8 January (£) that UK plans to diverge on gene editing regulation* are being delayed as they would potentially make the government’s key stated reset objective of an SPS deal impossible to achieve. However, the article reported:

“Defra declined to comment when asked whether it was delaying the legislation as a result of the warnings from Brussels. It also declined to repeat on the record its previous commitments to introduce the legislation or set a timetable for doing so.” 

Yet the next day, in the same paper, it was reported (£) that the Environment Secretary had said that the UK (presumably, Great Britain) would go ahead, with the legislation to come into force by the end of March.

It remains to be seen what will happen, but the point is that these reports, in a reputable outlet, written by reputable authors (including Peter Foster, who was a co-author of both of them), and published just a day apart, were able to tell quite different stories because the government itself failed to provide a consistent line.

What this illustrates isn’t (simply) the incoherence of the government’s approach, it is the incoherence of Brexit itself. Specifically, Brexit was wrongly seen as a way of removing regulatory ‘red tape’ and also as a way of gaining regulatory independence. From that, a great deal has flowed for what Brexit has meant in practice, but two issues, in particular, are now coming to the fore.

Lack of regulatory capacity

One, which is highlighted by Reland and by yet another recent piece by Peter Foster in the FT (£), is that it has thrown so much responsibility for regulatory infrastructure on to domestic agencies. It is not just post-Brexit trade and customs bureaucracy which have made nonsense of the Brexiter claim that leaving the EU would reduce ‘red tape’, it is also the repatriation of regulatory functions. Regulatory independence does not simply mean, as the Brexiters’ simplistic slogan had it, “taking back control of our laws.” It also entails developing regulatory capacity, as what was once provided on a pooled basis by the EU now has to be provided by the UK.

Right across the board, the British State is creaking under the weight of these demands, with underfunded, understaffed, and underperforming agencies. Examples given by Foster include the Food Standards Agency, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Health and Safety Executive, and the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Now, and partly in response to this, the government has created the Regulatory Innovation Office, to update regulation and speed up decisions, with a particular focus on high-tech areas.

This may be no bad idea, including its recognition of the interconnectedness of some of these areas, but that also means that it sits astride a number of existing agencies, including some of those just mentioned. Arguably, that just adds another layer of organizational complexity and cost to an already creaking regulatory infrastructure. After all, there is something rather ‘Yes Minister’ about a kind of ‘regulator to regulate regulators’ in order to ‘cut red tape’. So, for now, the jury must be out on whether all this can possibly add up to the regulatory ‘nimbleness and agility’ promised by Brexiters in the past, and now embraced by Labour as part of its growth agenda.

The cold world of geo-politics

Whilst the Brexit policy of ‘regulatory independence’ creates many new costs, the second issue arising from it is that it is based on an illusion which founders on the rock of geo-political reality. This is partly the familiar matter of there being two or perhaps three regulatory superpowers, the US, the EU, and China. But, more particularly, it is about how, exacerbated by the return of Donald Trump, regulation is both an arena and a weapon of international conflict and competition. That is currently most evident in relation to social media regulation and AI regulation, but it also extends to less high-profile areas.

Many of these issues are highlighted in a recent, excellent, report from Marley Morris of IPPR on UK trade strategy. It is a wide-ranging analysis which is well worth reading in full, but, to take one example, before long, the UK needs to decide about whether to seek linkage of EU and UK Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS). Doing so, as Foster points out in his discussion of the IPPR report, is likely to be seen negatively by Trump. So, whilst this may be a decision for the UK, it is not one which can be taken in isolation.

The wider implication is that Trump’s ‘with me or against me' world view means that he will treat any UK decision – not just about relations with the EU, but with China, Russia, etc. – as a hostile act and a personal affront. And, in Trump-world, that means punishment. It is this world view which, as Rafael Behr argues, is rapidly going to force the UK to make “hard choices” which need to be “informed by a coherent strategic purpose”, and these choices go well beyond, though they include, those relating to trade and regulation.

In turn, this exposes the paucity of Brexit as a project of ‘sovereignty’. Not only was ‘freedom from Brussels’ largely illusory, it also increased Britain’s exposure to international power plays at precisely the time they have become more vicious and less predictable.

Is a strategy even possible?

In this sense, post-Brexit Britain’s problems are not simply those of lacking a plan for what to do with Brexit, they are those of being saddled with something with which little can be done. Having been touted as the solution to all Britain’s problems, Brexit has now become Britain’s foremost insoluble problem.

The Brexiters certainly don’t have an answer, and, if they say anything at all, simply continue to repeat already failed ideas, the most recent example being an embarrassingly feeble analysis by ‘Brexit brain’ Shanker Singham. It includes another outing for wide-ranging ‘mutual recognition agreements’ as the solution to the damage of Brexit. Meanwhile, poor old Robert Tombs, one of the original ‘Brains for Brexit’ is reduced to pondering why he was wrong to have “imprudently predicted that life outside the EU would so quickly be taken for granted that it would be hard to find anyone admitting to having voted ‘Remain’” only to come up with the half-baked idea that “Anti-Brexitism has become part of the ‘woke’ agenda.”

However, the Labour government has no real answer either. And whilst I agree with Behr, Reland, Marley and others who, in various ways, argue about the need to develop a coherent post-Brexit strategy, perhaps the stark reality is that no such strategy is possible: Brexit was strategically incoherent from the outset, and has only become more so. If that is so, there are just different versions of muddling through, some slightly better and some slightly worse, although the difference, small as it may be, shouldn’t be completely dismissed.

Of course, many people, perhaps especially readers of this blog, would say that there is an obvious answer, and it is to join the EU. And, although that wouldn’t resolve every problem for Britain, with Trump embarking on a far more internationally aggressive presidency than his first, and his acolytes explicitly attacking our country, the case to openly re-evaluate Brexit is stronger than ever. But, the recent ‘wobble’ notwithstanding, there’s no real sign of that happening. In May 2019, I wrote about Brexit as “an aporia, a pathless path, with no way forward and no way back”. Five years on from leaving the EU, that remains the case.

 

 

*This has long been seen, not just by Brexiters but by many scientists and commentators, as a regulatory area where the UK could benefit from divergence, and legislation has long been in progress (see my post of February 2022 for some discussion). But my point here isn’t about whether it is desirable or not, but about how it illustrates the lack of a coherently designed and clearly communicated regulatory strategy.

Mustn't grumble

There is a stereotype about the British, and perhaps especially the English, that we are unwilling to complain, and will put up with quite a bit of privation with little more than a few grumbles or, even, with the observation that ‘oh well, we mustn’t grumble’. We even sometimes seem to recognize this placidity as a characteristic of national political conduct, as when it is observed that if such-and-such ‘was happening in France then they would be on the streets’.

Whether this really is generally true, or more so than it is in other countries, I’m not sure. Nor am I sure whether, if true, it should be regarded as an endearing stoicism or an appalling apathy. It’s not even clear whether it betokens a rather cowardly fear that making a fuss would be an embarrassment or just a resigned acceptance that doing so would be pointless. But, at all events, it does seem to characterize public sentiment about Brexit.

Brexit: plenty to complain about

That, at least, is one reading of the very extensive recent polling conducted for the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) research centre at King’s College London (which is well worth studying in its entirety). It certainly suggests that people have something to complain about. In particular, this latest survey confirms the pattern that has been clear for some time now with only 10% of all voters (and just 18% even of 2016 leave voters) thinking Brexit has turned out well or very well (p.30).

It's true that the beliefs lying behind that are varied with, for example, 61% of leave voters thinking it will turn out well or very well ‘in the long run’, though only 30% of all voters think this (p.32). And there are many more caveats and qualifications to be made about the ‘headline’ finding about the lack of success of Brexit. These include the extent of neutral responses and ‘don’t knows’ within different voter groups, and the variety of reasons given for why it hasn’t been a success. But that headline finding is clear and important. Brexit was, after all, promoted as something which would be an unalloyed success, so the fact that so few think it has been or is going to be is, just in itself, a reason for the public to feel disgruntled.

Of course, Brexit is in some ways an abstract, or at least general, concept and, apart from those with strong commitments for and against it in abstract or general terms, it’s reasonable to think that many people are more concerned with specific issues that affect their daily lives. Yet, if so, then there, too, they have reasons for complaint about Brexit. For example, of the 79% of people who have personally noticed the cost of goods increasing over the last year, 19% think this is entirely the result of Brexit and 41% that is partly the result of Brexit. The 65% who have noticed food shortages are even more likely to think they are wholly due to Brexit (47%), with another 36% thinking them partly so. Travel delays, and staff shortages in the NHS, social care, and hospitality, are also amongst issues where, of those who have personally experienced them, the large majority think they are wholly or partly the result of Brexit. (All figures in this paragraph from p.20 of the UJICE report.)

Taken together, then, there is plenty for people to complain about in Brexit, regardless of whether they attribute it to Brexit in and of itself or only to the way in which Brexit has been undertaken. That is all the more striking considering that other likely candidates for the causes of the problems people experience in their daily lives – Covid, Ukraine, or global factors generally – are less obviously attributable to domestic political choices. For although people may well consider that the government handling of Covid, to take the most obvious example, was defective in various ways it is surely obvious that the virus was something that affected every country, one way or another. Only Brexit is entirely home-grown and entirely unique to this country.

Brexit fatigue

Yet, as Anand Menon and Sophie Stowers of UKICE highlight in their commentary on the report, “there’s a real sense of fatigue around the Brexit debate and high levels of indifference towards the future of the UK-EU relationship”. It may be (the report doesn’t cover this) that, because Brexit is so closely associated with the Tories, complaint about Brexit is manifesting itself, along with other factors, in the government’s unpopularity. But there isn’t majority support for another referendum and, were one to be held, it is by no means clear it would yield a large majority, or even necessarily a majority, to rejoin the EU.

That said, there is clear support (64%) for a “stronger relationship” with the EU, and considerable support (50%) for a “closer relationship” (pp.48-49). What lies behind the discrepancy between the two is not obvious, but perhaps it is because respondents don’t know, any more than I do, what ‘stronger’ and ‘closer’ mean in specific terms, or how they differ. At all events, although there is a degree of support for an improved relationship, in some sense, with the EU, the overall point that emerges is that most voters don’t see Brexit itself as a burning issue, even though they see it as a factor in other issues, like the cost of living and the state of the NHS, which they do see as high priorities.

Some of the reasons for this can be glimpsed in the qualitative research which accompanied the polling data, including the fatalistic one that “we’ve made our bed, let’s all lie in it” (p.28) and the idea that it would be “embarrassing” (p.47) to re-open the issue of membership. These comments both came from leave voters, but even 42% of remain voters wish “we would stop talking about the issue altogether” (p.53). There’s also a widespread sense that it is de-stabilizing and divisive to continue to do so, something which is frequently said by politicians of both main parties.

Trapped by Brexiter blackmail  

All of these things may make some kind of sense, and goodness knows there must be plenty of us – including, I imagine, many readers of this blog – who are sick of Brexit and continue to feel traumatized by the divisions it unleashed. But it is important to understand that such sentiments arise in large part from a trap, or traps, which have been created by Brexiters.

On the one hand, even if they no longer try to claim that Brexit has been a success, some of them now seem to count it as a victory that they have created a situation in which it is too difficult to deal with its failure. So, far from having delivered the ‘will of the people’ for a ‘national liberation’, the Brexiters are now gleeful that the British people are stuck with something they don’t want: not just a bed, but a bed of nails, they have to lie on. On the other hand, the continuing vitriol the Brexiters have poured, daily, into the media ever since their referendum victory is an ever-present reminder that re-opening Brexit would, indeed, be hugely divisive. In effect, it is political blackmail: the constant threat that if the British people attempt to undo Brexit then Brexiters will unleash such extreme toxicity into politics that it will become unbearable.

So, in terms of that stereotype of the ‘uncomplaining Brit’, the situation is rather like being in a restaurant which, having promised a gourmet meal under its new ownership, has provided what most on the table consider to be a s*** sandwich (the asterisks aren’t my coyness, but because certain words create problems for blog feeds and search engines). But why complain? For better or for worse, the meal has been eaten and it’s ‘too late’ to make a fuss now, and anyway it would be ‘embarrassing’. Moreover, the waiter looks distinctly surly and the chef is ostentatiously, and ominously, sharpening knives in the kitchen, so it would be imprudent and possibly dangerous to do so. And, after all, there are at least some of the diners who claim to be delighted with what they have had. All in all, it’s better just to put up with things. Mustn’t grumble.

An ongoing condition

However, one of the ways in which this analogy breaks down is that Brexit is not a finite event, like a single meal at a restaurant. It is an ongoing condition: this is where we will be eating every day for the rest of our lives. A key aspect of how this is now playing out is revealed in another major recent piece of work from UKICE, Joël Reland’s latest version of the UK-EU regulatory divergence tracker which, in general terms, continues to show what is becoming an established pattern of there being relatively little divergence from the EU.

As if in confirmation, the day after that update was published, it was reported (£) that the government would not proceed with its attempt to scrap the ‘nutrient neutrality rules’, environmental protections inherited from the EU which restrict where houses can be built. On the other hand, this week the idea of scrapping EU rules capping bankers’ bonuses has to have been revived (£), having previously been seen as politically maladroit amidst Johnson’s promises of ‘levelling up, then pursued under Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng (£) as part of their deregulatory agenda before being kicked into the long grass of consultation from which it has now re-emerged.

That these developments point in different directions partly reflects the strategic incoherence of Rishi Sunak’s ad hoc approach to Brexit, which I’ve remarked upon before. These particular cases may also derive from attempts to set pre-election political traps for Labour, the first one by suggesting that Labour’s own opposition to axing nutrient neutrality rules is at odds with its promise to cut the ‘red tape’ that impedes housebuilding, the second by challenging Labour to oppose this divergence and risk damaging its attempts to develop good relations with the City.

Such political games aside, Reland, in his accompanying commentary, suggests “that non-divergence is now the status quo” in the sense that it is both Sunak’s policy, even if inconsistently so and not announced as such, and, more explicitly, is set to be Keir Starmer’s default policy if Labour win the next election. Yet, as Reland points out, there is an important difference in that, whilst the Conservatives are undertaking little in the way of ‘active divergence’ (UK changing regulations away from those of the EU), they are allowing far more ‘passive divergence’ (UK not following regulatory changes made by the EU) than, it seems, a Labour government would countenance.

There are very good reasons to avoid both passive and active divergence, which I have rehearsed so many times on this blog that I won’t do so again (see also Peter Foster’s recent book on Brexit, which I reviewed in last week’s post). One particular emerging example, the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), mentioned by Reland and briefly discussed in one of my recent posts, forms part of an interesting analysis in Gerhard Schnyder’s most recent Brexit Impact Tracker blog. He explains that its likely effect will be to reduce UK tax receipts by billions of pounds, whilst correspondingly benefitting the EU. This, he argues, is part of a pattern whereby the ‘benefits of Brexit’ do indeed exist, but are invariably experienced by countries other than the UK.

Thus, increasingly, it is emerging that in ‘taking back control’ of its laws – which according to the UKICE polling data was the biggest motivation for leave voters (p.6) – Brexit means that what the UK loses on the swings it also loses on the roundabouts. That is, the more the UK diverges from the EU the more expensive Brexit becomes, but the less it diverges from the EU the more pointless Brexit becomes*. And all of this is quite apart from the remorseless, crunchingly negative effect of Brexit on GDP compared with what it would otherwise be – an effect exacerbated by any divergence but not ameliorated by non-divergence (and only very slightly ameliorated by greater alignment).

The full absurdity of what this all means can be seen by reference to the various models of Brexit that used to be propounded. Perhaps we could be in the single market, like Norway, gaining its economic benefits but, it was said, losing sovereignty because we would be subject to ‘fax democracy’ – receiving legislative instructions from Brussels**. That always somewhat understated the influence that Norway has but, anyway, it was deemed unacceptable, indeed deemed not to be Brexit at all, by the ‘hard Brexiters’. So we left the single market, taking the economic costs, but, now, we take legislation from Brussels not ‘by fax’ but by the inexorable economic and political logic of non-divergence.

The (ir)responsibility of the British people

It is re-visiting the form of Brexit, quite as much as re-joining the EU, that the Brexiters have made so difficult with the traps within which they have ensnared the British people. But, whilst they deserve to be judged harshly for having created them, I think that voters, and political journalists and politicians more generally, bear some responsibility. Indeed, although no doubt it would be denounced as ‘elitist’ by populists like Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (Eton & Oxford), and is far more ‘unsayable’ than the supposedly silenced ‘debate’ about immigration, I despair of the constant vox pops showing so many voters to be puffed full of self-righteous indignation and galvanized with an invincible ignorance for which they feel pride rather than shame.

As regards Brexit, although there’s not much point harking back to it, the casual irresponsibility with which some voted for it in order to ‘give Cameron a kicking’, or because ‘it was time for a change’, or because they ‘never expected leave to win’ was disgraceful. It is far less excusable than those who were taken in by the false promises about money for the NHS or the rejuvenation of the fishing industry. It’s certainly worse than indefensible for leave voters of the former type to say that ‘we’ve made our bed, and now we must all lie in it’.

More importantly, now, there’s a deeply childish vein amongst the electorate, and the polity, in treating Brexit as if it were ‘all in the past’, ‘yesterday’s news’, from which ‘we should all move on’. It’s a mentality which is not just about Brexit; it is equally evident in relation to Covid, with people and politicians talking and acting as if it were now all over when, apart from anything else, an estimated 1.9 million people are suffering from long Covid. Perhaps politics has always been like that, but I think that the attention span is now even shorter because of the twin effect of the 24/7 news cycle and social media. Perhaps, too, the contemporary culture of victimhood, so central to Brexit but evident more generally, is antithetical to the concept of taking responsibility for choices made.

Yet Brexit, and Covid for that matter, demands a more serious response. After all, it was a major shift of the UK’s entire economic and geo-political strategy, and one which only came into practical effect less than three years ago, when the transition period ended. And this is hardly a ‘remainer’ complaint. Surely Brexiters should be the most disgruntled if their great achievement, their national liberation from ‘the EUSSR’, is now only fit to wrap fish and chips? But the answer to that is all too obvious: so evidently has it failed that they would far rather it just be accepted, undiscussed, as ‘just one of those things’ about which we ‘mustn’t grumble’.

The open secret that Brexit has failed

Of course, there are many who remain keenly attentive to Brexit and vocal in their complaints about it, by which I mean not just re-joiners but the Brexit Ultras. And, of course, it was inevitable that, gradually, the politics of Brexit and British politics generally would become less and less distinguishable. Yet there is a quiescence about the failure of Brexit which, given its centrality to politics since 2016, seems astounding.

In my previous life as an academic I co-wrote a book about secrecy in organizations, drawing in part on the concept in political anthropology of ‘public secrecy’. In very brief, this refers to shameful things which everyone knows and yet doesn’t know, an all but unsayable knowledge, akin to what is often called an ‘open secret’, of which examples can be found in many families, organizations or, as seems to be the case in Britain today, in national polities. The result is that what Schnyder calls “the Un-British Brexit benefits” are met with the all too British response of embarrassed silence.

Writing recently in the Guardian, George Monbiot discussed the political silence around Covid, and especially around its continuing effects on those with long Covid or the clinically vulnerable. His eloquent conclusion is that: “These facts – and these people – are treated as social embarrassments, locked in the government’s moral attic like a relative with a mental illness in Victorian England. They’re the country’s family secret. That coughing noise upstairs? Nothing that need concern you.”

In a similar way, the failure of Brexit and the possible solutions to it are only semi-discussable, publicly known and yet not known. For that we should blame the Brexiters who have blackmailed us into making it so, the media organizations who consider it old news, the politicians who purport to lead and to be willing to make ‘hard choices’, but follow the focus groups which want to avoid such choices. But we should also blame the electorate from which those focus groups are drawn, an electorate which, after all, made a big choice in 2016 but which now, whether from boredom or fear – or, perhaps, in some cases, shame – insists that we ‘mustn’t grumble’ about its consequences.

 
Notes
 

*To this should be added the particular dynamic as regards Northern Ireland, which in some respects is obliged to remain aligned with the EU. Thus, the more the UK (or at least GB) diverges from the EU, the ‘thicker’ the GB-NI Irish Sea border potentially becomes. This poses a particular paradox for those Unionists who are also hard Brexiters, since they desire both increased divergence and a thinner, or non-existent, Irish Sea border.

**Younger readers who may be puzzled by the reference to a ‘fax’ are referred to the Museum of Obsolete Objects. Less frivolously, Norway and its lessons for what ‘sovereignty’ means for post-Brexit Britain is the focus of what looks to be (I haven’t read it yet) an interesting new book.

Brexit: unsettled and still not settleable

The most striking thing about Brexit is that, as many of them now accept, the Brexiters have failed to secure public support for actual Brexit – that is, the form of Brexit that exists. Indeed, some of the most committed Brexiters, including Nigel Farage, regard actual Brexit as having been a failure. But if actual Brexit has few defenders, every alternative to it has highly vocal attackers.

Brexit unsettled

I mention in the updated edition of my book on Brexit that David Frost suggested in an interview 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.” That was in June 2022, and over a year later there’s every sign that this test of failure is going to be met. It has not ‘settled in the British polity’, not least so far as public opinion is concerned.

Thus, the latest opinion poll (p.9 of report accessible via link) shows 49% would vote to rejoin, 38% to stay out, 7% don’t know and 5% would not vote. With the odd outlier, that has been pretty much what the polls have shown for two years now. Meanwhile, on the slightly different question of whether it was right or wrong to leave the EU, the latest poll shows 56% think it was a mistake to leave and just 32% that it was right (with 12% don’t knows), a lead for ‘mistake’ which has been slowly but steadily growing for the last two years. These polls are all the more remarkable given how little mainstream political support there has been to rejoin the EU, and the extent to which the pro-Brexit media have trumpeted the supposed success of Brexit.

But if there is something like a consensus that Brexit has failed, and a strong, though not overwhelming, degree of public support for rejoining as the solution, there’s almost no political consensus about the reasons for the failure and even less for rejoining being the solution. In particular, the leaders of the two main parties are committed to slightly, though, as I argued in last week’s post, genuinely, different versions of how the failures of actual Brexit can be remedied without fundamentally changing its institutional form, let alone rejoining the EU.

I say ‘the leaders of the two main parties’ because it is very clear that, within the Tory Party, there are many powerful groups, including most of its rank-and-file membership, which want a radically different, and much ‘harder’, policy than Sunak’s ad hoc fixes of aspects within the current Brexit. It’s not even as if the most important of those fixes, the Windsor Framework, can be seen to have ‘settled’, in that it is still strongly opposed by Northern Irish unionists and many Brexiters and, anyway, has yet to be implemented.  

Likewise, although perhaps less vocal, there are many in the Labour Party, and especially in its own rank-and-file, who would like something much softer, up to and including rejoining the EU, than Starmer’s more comprehensive softening of the current Brexit. For example, it is telling that Gordon Brown, whilst endorsing Starmer’s approach, advocates ultimately seeking to rejoin the EU. In this sense, the difference between the two parties’ approaches is greater than it appears on paper. For, behind it, lie much bigger differences in where the internal pressure on the leaders is pushing them.

Overall, having once been touted as a solution to Britain’s problems, actual Brexit is now almost universally understood in the commentary upon it to be a problem in need of a solution. However, since neither main party can explicitly, and certainly not fully, acknowledge this, their proposals are to different degrees anaemic. It’s difficult to think of any other issue in modern British political history, especially an issue of the magnitude of Brexit, where the substantive discussions occur to so great an extent outside formal politics. It’s almost the opposite of the way that, in the 2017-2019 period, the chaos and division in parliament very much represented that within the country. Now, such parliamentary debate about Brexit as occurs is a pale imitation of the wider discussions.

Associate membership?

One such discussion concerns the plan, floated in an academic report commissioned by the French and German governments, for forms of EU associate membership that could include the UK. In effect, this would be a form of soft Brexit and could include single market membership. Although, as I noted in last week’s post, a Labour spokesperson immediately dismissed it, it has found considerable support within the business community, which may well continue to pressure a future Labour government to at least give it serious consideration.

As for the Brexit commentariat, a common reaction was that this suggestion had come too late, and should have been made before the referendum. So said Patrick O’Flynn in the Spectator, Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph (£) and Roger Bootle, also in the Telegraph (£). The latter two, at least, seem to think that, prior to the referendum this would have been an acceptable outcome, but all three are adamant that it would no longer be so, although the arguments they advance for that – mainly about the UK being a ‘rule-taker’ – don’t really explain why, if that would have been acceptable before it has ceased to be. Indeed, if anything, that argument (which in any case somewhat understated the influence that, say, Norway has over single market rules) now looks weaker as, in practice, we have seen that hard Brexit in many ways makes the UK a de facto rule taker because of the impracticality of divergence.

In any case, it is disingenuous to say the idea has come too late, as it was floated several times in the years before the referendum, including in 2012, when some Brexiters (as we would now call them) dismissed it as a “Brussels plot to make Britain a second-class member”. It’s true that others of them welcomed it, and it’s also true that some Brexiters, including Hannan, advocated soft Brexit during the Referendum campaign (he even claimed, mendaciously, that “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”, when clearly many were). But it is misleading to suggest, as Hannan does, that this outcome was lost because the EU refused it (it was, after all, one, or depending how defined, three of the steps on the ‘Barnier staircase’ of Brexit options) or that it was simply down to Theresa May’s hostility to immigration.

Actually, it happened because ‘liberal Brexiters’ like Hannan hitched themselves to the hard Brexiters, knowing that their promotion of Brexit in order to end freedom movement of people was necessary to win the vote to leave. Then, afterwards, and without much opposition from the ‘liberal Brexiters', the hard Brexiters successfully bulldozed the idea that only leaving the single market would be ‘true Brexit’, enabled by May and her advisers, especially Nick Timothy.

Whilst this is now in some ways ancient history, it remains very much alive given the re-emergence of discussion of an associate membership model, in the new context of EU debates about enlargement. Equally, it remains alive for the UK given dissatisfaction with Brexit, and might well be the basis for public consensus. After all, not only do the articles mentioned provide no obvious reason why ‘soft Brexiters’ should not, now, support such a model given that they did before, they also acknowledge that it would have an appeal to some, probably many, remainers. And whilst O’Flynn claims “it would settle nothing and satisfy almost no one politically” he gives no real explanation of why that might so, whilst ignoring the fact that the same could certainly be said of the current situation.

Arguably, some form of soft Brexit would have been the most logical and consensual way of delivering the close Referendum result, given that it had happened, and the associate membership version of it would surely be a more logical position for a Labour government, inheriting a desperate economic situation and unburdened by the Tories’ fetishization of divergence from the EU at all costs. If Starmer’s fear is that it would mean freedom of movement of people then, apart from the fact that the UK continues to suffer serious labour shortages as a result of Brexit, those for whom the allure of hard Brexit was reducing immigration must surely by now to have realized that, for good reasons, that has not been its effect. Moreover, given that Labour recognize the need for a mobility agreement for travelling performers, there’s no real logic to refuse to see the damage that ending free movement has done more generally.

In fact, the main argument for a Labour government not to pursue associate membership (acknowledging that, as things stand, it is only an idea, not something that is on offer from the EU) is the possibility that it would be reversed by a future Tory government, making it harder to negotiate with the EU. For what very little it is worth, my guess is that something like associate membership is probably where both parties will settle within about ten years and, then, it will become the UK’s settled position in the EU.

The National Rejoin March

The unsettled nature of Brexit was illustrated by, as well as being the background to, last Saturday’s National Rejoin March, apparently, and if so shamefully, not reported by the BBC. Predictably, it was mocked by GB News as an “epic failure” on the basis that it had only attracted 5000 people, which, taken in conjunction with the Brexiters insistence that ‘the elite’ are on the point of rejoining, provides a fresh illustration of populists’ proclivity to depict their enemies as both hopelessly feeble and threateningly potent.

Actually, the march organizers claimed the police estimate to be over 20,000 which would be quite impressive, but even 5000 would have been a decent number. Any demonstration only mobilises a small fraction of those who support its cause, and that’s especially so when there is no current, live proposal on that cause, in this case to rejoin the EU, let alone a decision point on such a proposal. So the march was bound to be attended only by the hard core of the hard core of rejoin campaigners.

As such, it was fronted by some familiar figures. Without any disrespect to them, eventually a successful campaign will need both different and more high-profile figureheads, as Nick Tyrone argues in the Spectator, including a high-profile ex-Brexiter if one could be found. I don’t, though, think Tyrone is right to propose veterans like Ken Clarke or Michael Heseltine as alternatives; better would be people who hold, or might reach, the levers of conventional political power. It will also need a more pro-active and forward-looking message than ‘reversing Brexit’.

But that’s for the future. For now, what’s most important, even speaking as someone who thinks any prospect of rejoining is a long way off (or perhaps especially because I think that), is for that hard core of campaigners simply to ‘keep the dream alive’.  The Brexiters of GB News and elsewhere should be wary of mocking that. In the years before Brexit, their ‘dream’ of leaving was similarly only the passion of a hard core and, unlike that dream, the rejoin cause not only has a far clearer level of support in the opinion polls, it also has demographics on its side.

Rejoining and electoral politics

However, the current rejoin movement does differ from what became the Brexit movement in its relationship with political parties. It has no equivalent of UKIP, and there’s little sign of one developing. That seems wise, for two reasons. Firstly, whereas UKIP, ironically, was able to parasitically exploit proportional representation in the European Parliamentary elections to secure itself representation and legitimacy, this is obviously no longer open to a hypothetical rejoin party. Secondly, both for that reason and more generally, UKIP operated by pressurizing the Tory Party from the outside towards ‘Euroscepticism’ and, eventually, to hold the referendum. But, currently, partly because Brexit is not the only issue at stake, even for many rejoiners, such a tactic applied to pressurize the Labour Party, or even the LibDems, would carry what for many would be the unconscionable risk of enabling a Tory government, and very likely make any path to rejoining even longer, and to make Brexit even more damaging in the meantime.

The latter issue also makes life complicated for the individual voting decisions of rejoiners. There really isn’t much choice outside Scotland, where the SNP has a rejoin policy, although, naturally, that is very much a policy for Scotland joining the EU after gaining independence from the UK*. That lack of choice is partly for all the familiar reasons of the First Past the Post system, and the limitations that imposes even on tactical voting in many constituencies. But those reasons are compounded by the fact that no major party, even if the Greens are included amongst them, is offering a ‘rejoin now’ policy, although in Wales Plaid Cymru has a policy to rejoin the single market (I think, but may be wrong, without delay).  Labour’s position, discussed in my previous post, is at least currently opposed to ever rejoining, whilst the LibDems offer is ‘one day, but not now’.

So all that rejoiners really have as an option at the coming election is voting against the Tories, whatever the most effective way of doing that may mean in individual constituencies, on the basis that their Brexit position is the worst of the lot, and that the other parties might, in the future and with pressure, become closer to, or even come to embrace, rejoining. Not voting at all, or voting for a very fringe party that does support rejoin, might feel principled, but in practical terms just leaves it to others to decide what happens. And, beyond all that, rejoiners need to recognize that influencing UK policy is all they can do, and that is only one side of the equation because, of course, ultimately rejoining could only happen with the agreement of the EU and its members.

What should rejoiners do now?

One of the benefits of having re-opened comments on this blog, is that it enables me to respond to queries or even to requests for topics to be covered in posts. Last week, commenter Vivienne Pay asked for my “thoughts on what an active campaign movement to rejoin should look like to be effective”. I’m not the best person to answer, because I’m an analyst more than a campaigner and because, as noted above, I’m fairly cautious about the prospects for rejoining. I also suspect that some of my thoughts will be unpopular with some readers. But, for what little they may be worth, here they are:

DO …

·         Keep going. Whether rejoin is an immediate or, as I think, long prospect, it will only happen if there is pressure for it, and the more pressure there is the more likely it becomes. At the same time, recognize that it is going to be a long haul

·         Keep pointing to the failures of Brexit. That may be negative, and, ultimately, the campaign case for rejoining needs to be positive, but we are not in that campaign yet. Although public opinion may have turned against Brexit to keep it that way, and to harden and extend it, the message of its failure, and of the failed promises made for it, still needs to be communicated. That doesn’t, of course, preclude also pointing to the positive advantages of membership which, in many cases, will be the flip-side of the negatives of Brexit anyway.

·         Be prepared for support for rejoin and opposition to Brexit to fluctuate in the opinion polls, especially to the extent that they are bound up with the current unpopularity of the Tories and the current cost-of-living crisis. Opinion polls matter hugely, but they’re not, in themselves, a reason to argue for or against rejoining. The case for doing so would be the same, even if it had less support. Equally, the current polls are by no means overwhelming, and public support for rejoining shouldn’t be over-stated or taken for granted.

·         React positively to leave voters who openly express regret. Their votes will be needed, and the more who publicly recant without being pilloried, the more likely it is that their numbers will grow. Even saying ‘I told you so’, whilst hugely tempting, is self-indulgent and counter-productive.

·         Ignore getting tangled in issues about whether rejoining means joining the Euro, or Schengen, or what it would means for budget contributions. For one thing, it’s too early to know what it means. For another, it risks getting drawn into the old transactional mentality of ‘what do we put in’ and the old Eurosceptic mentality of ‘what can we get out of’ that blighted our original membership.

·         More generally, configure the issue as ‘joining’ rather than ‘rejoining’: it’s about the future, not resurrecting the past. Both the UK and the EU will be different.

DON’T …

·         Keep banging on about the 2016 Referendum having ‘only been advisory’. It was always a politically meaningless argument, and after the Article 50 vote in parliament it was legally meaningless, too. It’s backward-looking, and just feeds the Brexiter narrative of remainers ‘refusing to accept the result’. If you don’t agree, just try to imagine who on earth is going to hear you say it for the umpteenth time and suddenly think ‘oh, well, in that case I think we should rejoin’. The answer is literally no one.

·         Keep banging on about how ‘only 37% of the electorate voted for it in 2016’. That, too, was always a pointless argument - votes are decided by those who vote. Again, if you don’t agree, ask yourself the question who is going to hear you say it for the umpteenth time and suddenly think ‘oh, well, in that case I think we should rejoin’? Again, the answer is no one.

·         Assume that individual EU politicians saying that the UK is welcome back any time it is ready is the same as that being the position of the EU or its members. Think instead about making the case for why the rejoining could be made more attractive to the EU (this point is developed in some detail by Niall Ó Conghaile in East Anglia Bylines). Don’t repeat the Brexiters’ mistake of seeing everything in terms of UK politics and UK needs, or of assuming that the UK knows ‘what is in the EU’s best interest’.

·         Dismiss any progress short of rejoining as a waste of time. Even if the immediate practical benefits are tiny, they are better than measures which do even more harm, and simply repairing the damage to the UK’s reputation and trustworthiness in the EU is helpful and will take time – and will be one pre-requisite of making any UK application to join appealing to the EU.

Brexit un-settleable

How the rejoin movement conducts itself, and how it develops, will be one factor in what happens with Brexit. The outcome of the next election will be another. Ultimately, Brexit will not ‘settle’ until there is a durable political and public consensus, and the leadership to deliver that consensus, whether it be for some version of hard Brexit, for some version of soft Brexit – perhaps in some form of associate membership – or for rejoining, whether fully or in a different form of associate membership.

The situation we face seems to be far better understood abroad than here. If Brexiters’ really had global vision, as opposed to a hubristic vision of Global Britain, they might be aware of the withering way Brexit is now reported in India (“Brexit: Fatal for Britain?”), China (“UK public realizes Brexit folly, but return to EU not so easy”) or the United States (“In the UK, a disaster no one wants to talk about”). Notably, all these reports concern the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the effects of Brexit and the public view of it and, on the other, the politics of Brexit.

Indeed, what seems so obvious from abroad, and to many at home, is still barely hinted at within formal politics. Some of that is fear of leave voters, of whom there are still many. Some of it is fear of reviving the political toxicity of Brexit, though that is probably more specifically fear of the pro-Brexit media. In fact, though it is a topic for another day, the nature of the British media is perhaps the single biggest cause of the current Brexit impasse. That’s not because the media are all-powerful. It hasn’t stopped the British people coming to the view that Brexit has failed. But it is certainly one of the reasons why so many politicians are too scared to say that out loud, and to propose – or even debate – genuine solutions.

 

 

*It’s not clear to me, and I would be happy to be enlightened, what the SNP view would be of the UK rejoining the EU. Would it welcome and support that, on the basis that Scotland never wanted to leave? Or see it as taking away a potent argument for Scottish independence from the UK?

Note: This post was updated at 09.00 on 29/09/2023 to remove a claim made about numbers on the rejoin march which turned out to refer to a previous march.

The Brexiter elite are lining up their excuses, but it may backfire on them

Boris Johnson’s much-trailed speech – discussed in more detail in my previous post and witheringly dissected by John Crace – seems already to have sunk without trace. It certainly hasn’t injected the optimism and positivity which he believes is lacking in the government’s approach (and one can, at least, agree that Theresa May hardly exudes or inspires enthusiasm). The reason is something I touched on in that previous post: it was a speech campaigning for Brexit, not a speech about delivering it; a speech for 2016, not 2018.

That is partly about Johnson’s own manifest limitations as a politician, but it is also indicative of the much wider mess that the Brexiters have got themselves – and thereby our country – into. It is by now obvious to all but the most unreflectively doctrinaire amongst them that the process of leaving the EU is going to be far, far more complicated, risky and damaging than the Leave Campaign told voters would be the case. During the campaign every warning was contemptuously dismissed, and yet every one of them has proved to be correct – from the implications for the Irish border, to those for business (see here for the latest damage), to the time constraints on negotiating a deal, to the economic and cultural benefit of freedom of movement to Britain and to Britons, to the impossibility of cut and pasting EU agreements with third countries, right through to the absurdity of the overarching claim that Britain could retain all of the features of EU membership it wanted without having those that it (or at least that Brexiters) disliked.

For that matter, many issues have surfaced which were scarcely, if at all, discussed before the vote. Things like Euratom membership, chemicals and medicine regulation, and all the arcana of international trade such as Rules of Origin, Most Favoured Nation status, or Mutual Recognition Agreements. Almost every day some new aspect or consequence arises, even as the time until Brexit happens drains remorselessly away. On the other hand, no one suddenly discovers some previously unexpected benefit of Brexit. Indeed about the only concrete benefit Brexiters now routinely try to claim is that of having an independent trade policy, the economic value of which will be, at best, nugatory and more than offset by the costs of leaving.

The profound difficulty this poses for Brexiters is that they now have responsibility for what happens. Their policy is the government’s policy, and many of their leading figures – for example Johnson, Fox, Davis, Fernandes, Baker, Raab, Mordaunt, Gove, Leadsom – hold government positions and in some cases have direct responsibility for implementing Brexit. There is no longer any escape from dealing with all of these complex practicalities and they can’t bear it. The absurdity of that is well-illustrated by the way that these Brexiters in government dismiss their own economic forecasts as worthless, if not deliberately biased. But that trick won’t work anymore. Outside of the hardcore, most people, including probably most leave voters, have wised up to the fact that, whatever the exact figures turn out to be, they are only going in one direction.

Johnson’s response, of trying to pretend he is still campaigning, rather than being responsible, for Brexit is ludicrous but relatively urbanely expressed (albeit, not benign). Far more widespread is the vicious aggression exemplified by Digby Jones this week, accusing “remoaners” of “undermining our country” and saying they will be “to blame” for Britain getting a “lousy deal”. This Brexit McCarthyism has been on display since the day after the Referendum – the day, in fact, that, according to this same Digby Jones, “Germany would immediately want a free trade deal” - but will only grow as things get worse for the Brexiters. Anything rather than take responsibility for their failed promises, their ignorance of basic realities, and their lies. Anything to sustain their sense of betrayal and victimhood.

A different kind of evasion comes from those Brexiters who claim that leaving the EU was always going to be damaging, in particular economically, but that people had voted for cultural reasons or for sovereignty and both knew and were prepared to pay the economic price. That may have been true of some leave voters, but it certainly isn’t the way that Brexit was pitched to them. On the contrary, the constant rebuttal of ‘Project Fear’ was in the main an economic claim to the effect that Brexit would at the least have no adverse consequences if not, indeed, that it would have positive consequences.

Moreover, the infamous £350M a week for the NHS lie was nothing if not an economic argument for Brexit. Most Brexiters lightly dismiss this now, with word games or just the open admission that it was a lie. But it was believed by many voters, including some of the poorest (as, for example, this recent report shows). Even the argument about immigration was in part an economic one (the supposed negative effect on wages and public services). Whatever they say now, Brexiters ran a campaign that was every bit as economic-focussed as it was cultural, and that’s not surprising: had they argued for Brexit on purely cultural lines they would have lost the vote. That, indeed, has been admitted by Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings. The deeper point is that economics and culture are not separate things: I heard some leave voters explain their decision in terms of the de-industrialization of their towns. They were bemoaning loss of jobs and loss of community, not just one or the other.

We also now begin to hear another evasion, of a sort beloved by proponents of many political and religious ideologies and for that matter by many a management consultant, that nothing was wrong with the ‘idea’ of Brexit but that its ‘implementation’ was mishandled. So whatever mess we end up with is not ‘proper Brexit’. It’s true that the government have approached Brexit in an incredibly incompetent way – the premature triggering of Article 50 and the consequent election being the most egregious examples – and in this sense have made it even worse than it needed to be. But however it had been handled it would have been damaging, and most (though not all) peddlers of the ‘not a proper Brexit’ line are advocates of UKIP’s approach of unilateral withdrawal without Article 50 or, now, walking out of the talks. Incompetent as the government have been, a Brexit on UKIP lines would have been an order of magnitude worse.

From the moment the Referendum result was announced, when Johnson and Gove stood shocked and blinking like frightened rabbits at their press conference, Brexiters just haven’t been able to get over winning. As I’ve remarked elsewhere, there’s long been a sense that they would really have preferred to lose. Now there’s an increasingly tangible feeling that they see things going wrong and are getting their excuses ready: blame and betrayal being the key words.

Those words may boomerang on them. At the moment there are only small signs of ‘Bregret’ in the opinion polls but there does seem to be a growing realization that the promises made were false. Perhaps for now the sentiment amongst voters is that ‘we should get on with it’ and ‘hope for the best’ – showing the more endearing qualities of the British rather than some of those that have been on display since the vote. Plus, undoubtedly, many voters have tuned out the daily twists and turns of Brexit and will not take much interest until there is some decisive outcome or event. When they tune back in, they are not going to like what they see. Brexiters are preparing for that by lining up a list of culprits and excuses and they may succeed. But they have also ramped up hostility to the ‘out of touch London elite’. When the dust settles, voters may just decide that since it is the Brexiters who are now in charge it is they who now constitute that elite – and they who must shoulder the blame for betraying the unkeepable promises they made.

Why is there so little Bregret and what might change that?

Polling shows relatively little evidence of ‘Bregret’ (Brexit Regret). There has only been a small shift towards people thinking that in retrospect it was the wrong decision to vote to leave, and were there another in or out referendum today there is no real reason to think that the outcome would be different to what it was in 2016.

This might seem surprising in view of the mounting evidence of economic damage and the evident lack of progress in the exit negotiations, and whilst it is quite possible that opinions will change as that evidence continues to grow I suspect that they are unlikely do so to any great extent. That matters, because only sustained and significant polling evidence that a significant majority of people now want to remain will change the political dynamic of Brexit, and if that is going to have any effect there is not much time left for it to happen.

One reason explaining the lack of Bregret goes back to the Referendum itself, which showed that the political saw ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ is not a reliable guide and, hence, the almost entirely transactional case for EU membership put by the Remain campaign failed to win enough support. Hence David Davis’ comment to German business leaders on Friday that it is a mistake to put politics ahead of prosperity was so widely mocked, since that is precisely what Brexit does.

However, that does not mean accepting what is now often said, that the vote to leave was about cultural identity rather than economics. For one thing, the NHS £350M claim, which certainly had some effect on the result, was, for all its well-documented flaws, an economic argument. More generally, apart from the fact motivations to vote leave were variegated (as were those of remain voters) and all single factor explanations are facile, culture and economics are not separate realms but interact in all sorts of ways. For example, during the campaign I heard some leave voters talk about issues of deindustrialisation and its malign effects on community. Their mistake, in my view, was to believe that EU membership was the cause of this and that leaving the EU would redress it – but my point here is rather that these voters made an explicit link between economics and culture.

So instead of thinking about the vote – and any propensity now for Bregret – in terms of economics versus culture I think it is better to think in terms of the gap between Brexit as a symbolic act and Brexit as a series of concrete legal, economic and political arrangements. In a post last May, I wrote about how there is the strange sense from those who argue most vociferously for Brexit that, somehow, Brexit won’t change anything. For example, I’ve seen Brexiters ridicule the idea that leaving the EU could mean needing visas to travel to the EU or that it could mean restrictions on air travel within the EU. Or that security cooperation with EU countries would be diminished. Or that European fruit and vegetables might be less easily sourced. Or that British people would face restrictions on retiring in EU countries. Or, possibly the most ubiquitous (and for those on the receiving end, most hurtful and infuriating) since the referendum, leave voters saying to their friends and neighbours from EU countries: ‘oh, but we didn’t mean you when we said there were too many immigrants’.

I don’t think that these things are necessarily to do with the idea that Britain can ‘cherrypick’ some parts of the EU that they like. Rather, what underlies such sentiments is two related things. One is a taking for granted of the familiar accoutrements of modern life without realising that they are the product of extensive, albeit largely invisible, institutional arrangements. So of course ‘nowadays’ planes fly us to wherever we want without restrictions, as if this were not the outcome of complex agreements such as the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA), and of course we can travel visa-free in Europe, as if that were not the outcome of freedom of movement rights. In some ways, Brexiters, who despise technocrats and bureaucrats and rail against extra-national decision making, also treat it as an act of nature that there are Europe-wide regulatory systems. But they are not an act of nature – they are concrete legal arrangements from which, on Brexit, British citizens can be excluded. There is no ‘of course’ about it.

The related underlying issue is that for many Brexiters the vote to ‘take back control’, with all its emotional resonance, was not thought about in concrete legal or institutional terms but as a kind of symbolic, feel-good act. That, indeed, is the implication of the Brexit White Paper which affirms (para 2.1) that sovereignty was never lost by EU membership but that “it has not always felt like that”.

What this now means is well-illustrated by the Channel 4 News report this week about how Grimsby, where some 70% voted to leave, is now seeking special exemption from any new tariffs or barriers for its principal fish-based industries. There have been similar calls from leave voting areas like Cornwall and Wales for special protection from the loss of EU grants and subsidies. The Grimsby report was widely mocked by remainers for indicating stupidity or hypocrisy, but I think it is better understood as an expression of this disconnect between Brexit as a symbolic act and as something that entails non-symbolic consequences.

The same kind of disconnect can be seen across many aspects of the ongoing Brexit developments. In my previous post I mentioned the example of those Brexiters who are blaming the EU for suggesting that hard Brexit means a hard border in Ireland, rather than being an inevitable consequence of Britain’s choice to leave the single market and customs union. That argument is being heard more and more widely as the border issue rises in public consciousness – for example, it was made very vociferously by the Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley on the BBC’s Dateline London show today.

The underlying thought process seems to be – these are not the consequences that we wanted from the Brexit vote and ‘therefore’ they are either nothing to do with that vote (denial) or are being unnecessarily forced on us by the EU and/or obstructive remainers (blame). It is true that there are some pro-Brexit people who do neither of these things and who not only accept that Brexit brings certain adverse consequences but, even, think that this can be seen as positive in terms of restoring national resilience. I have heard some leave voters say something like this, and it seems to be the view of, for example, pro-Brexit blogger Pete North and, in a different way, one of the Leave campaign’s biggest donors, Peter Hargreaves, the latter arguing that the insecurity caused by Brexit will be fantastic.

This, explicitly in the case of Hargreaves, is the kind of ‘Dunkirk’ vision of Brexit but – whatever else one could say about it – it is not the platform that the Leave campaign fought on, and it certainly does not seem to be how most leave voters see things. The Grimsby voters, for example, appear not to be embracing their new-found insecurity but are seeking an exemption from it, just as those making the Janet Daley argument want there to be no border controls once we have taken back control of our borders. But nor is there any evidence that they regret voting to leave the EU. Writ large, this is significant for those expecting widespread Bregret to put a last minute halt to Brexit. If the consequences of Brexit are either denied or blamed upon the EU, and not attributed to or accepted as resulting from the vote to leave, then no such Bregret can be expected.

If all this is right, then there are only two ways that Bregret could occur. One would be for the narrative to change and for leave voters to link the consequences with their vote. But this is extremely unlikely for basic, psychological reasons - there is a technical term for this which I can’t recall, but it is essentially because people don’t find it easy to admit that they have made a mistake. And that’s likely to be especially so if this is pointed out to them by precisely the disdainful ‘elitists’ and ‘experts’ who proved so ineffective during the campaign.

The second possibility is far more conceivable. It is to redirect the narrative of blame on to the leading figures in the Leave campaign. On to all of those who repeatedly and in various ways claimed that leaving would be easy, and would lead to sunny uplands where cake would be both had and eaten. And on to all those who failed to mention, or denied, the consequences on things as diverse as nuclear medicine and the Irish border. In short, it is far more likely that leave voters will accept the proposition that they were fooled by politicians – as indeed they were – than that they fooled themselves. It is also likely to have far more traction than, for example, repeatedly insisting that the referendum was only advisory, or that only 37% of the electorate voted to leave. The idea that politicians lie is not, after all, an especially outlandish one nor is it an especially complex one. If leave voters – not all of them, but just, say, 20% of them – come to believe that they were lied to about Brexit then Bregret becomes a possibility.

 

Update (19/11/17): Thanks to various people on Twitter for reminding me that the psychological concept that eluded me in the penultimate paragraph was cognitive dissonance. This was, indeed, what I was thinking of. However, Dr Garrett M. Morris has helpfully suggested that a better psychological concept to capture what I was trying to express is one that I was not aware of, namely the backfire effect.