Book review: When two tribes go to war …

(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’. My normal fortnightly post will appear next Friday.) 

Hobolt, Sara & Tilley, James (2026) Tribal Politics. How Brexit Divided Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198911715 (Hardback). 243 pp. £30

This excellent new book is a major addition to the academic literature on Brexit, as well as being accessible and fascinating for non-academic readers interested in Brexit or contemporary British politics generally. Indeed, one implication of the book is that it isn’t really possible to understand contemporary British politics without understanding Brexit because of the endurance of the identities of ‘leaver’ and ‘remainer’.

It is these identities which are the subject of the book. That is to say, this is not a book about the referendum, the parliamentary politics which followed, the negotiations with the EU, or the impact of Brexit on economics or international relations. Whilst all of these are touched upon, the specific focus is describing and explaining Brexit identities amongst the public/ voters and how and why, as the title suggests, these have proved sufficiently divisive to take on a ‘tribal’ character.

The idea that such Brexit identities exist is not, of course, a new one. Apart from being familiar from everyday experience, it has previously been recognized by academics (e.g. Sobolewska & Ford, 2020) and the authors of this book, two eminent political scientists based at LSE and Oxford respectively, rigorously reference and discuss the extant literature. However, Hobolt & Tilley provide the first comprehensive study of how and why, despite EU membership having been an issue of low salience for most voters prior to the referendum, these identities came to exist and have persisted for so long after Britain actually left the EU and after Brexit ceased to feature prominently in the news.

Summary of book

The basic fact of that persistence is most clearly summarized in a chart (p. 88) showing the percentage of people thinking of themselves as remainers or leavers over the period 2017-2026. In essence, the chart shows that those identifying as one or the other, whilst falling from 75% in 2017, was still 60% in 2025. At the outset of the period, each group had about the same level of identification, at about 37%. That figure persists for remainer identification but, after 2020, the figure for leaver identification falls to about 23% by 2025. The authors explain the various reasons for this disparity, some of which are more obvious than others, but, overall, they argue that its significance should not be exaggerated and that “the difference in the trajectory of the two groups is … much less interesting than the similarity between them” (p. 96).

The explanation of why an issue (in this case Brexit) can give rise to issue-based identities is given in terms of the existence of three conditions (pp. 3-4, and more extensively pp. 19-22). These are “issue contestation” (there is strong conflict between groups around a salient, meaning essentially non-trivial, issue); “issue expression” (expressing, in word or deed, commitment to that issue cements identification with the group); and “issue alignment” (the issue doesn’t align with existing identifications, such as political parties, so can become the basis for an identity in its own right). Brexit, the authors suggest, “provided the Goldilocks mixture” (p. 1) of these conditions.

This explanatory framework derives from Social Identification Theory, which is elaborated in chapter two of the book (pp. 10-27) as an alternative (or perhaps a supplement) to rational choice theories of political behavior (p. 11), and the next three chapters explain how and why the issue of Brexit was able to become the basis for such social identification. An important argument within that is Hobolt & Tilley’s demonstration that Brexit identities can’t be reduced to pre-existing characteristics such as educational level but “were ultimately the product of the vote and the political context of the vote” (p.74). So, contrary to what is often believed, Brexit marked a distinctive rupture and not simply a reprise or rebadging of established patterns of political sociology.

Equally important are the chapters thereafter, which explain how these identities have persisted and, in some respects, intensified over time through processes of “affective polarization” (pp. 96-119). Some of this is explained in terms of personality traits (pp. 153-159), but perhaps more interestingly by the ways in which Brexit identities, once in place, tended to create “a set of incentives to adjust one’s views accordingly” (p. 145). That is, to avoid “cognitive dissonance” (pp. 121-124) people tend to take on all of the views of their ‘tribe’ and to interpret developments through that lens. In this and other ways “confirmation bias” (p. 122, and pp. 120-146 generally) has tended to solidify leaver and remainer identities

Such solidification evidently connects with the familiar idea that social media has led us to exist within ‘echo chambers’, re-enforcing our pre-existing views and even making them more extreme. However, the authors provide strong evidence to support their claim that “the real echo chamber” (p. 169) is not social media nearly so much as it is real life family and friendship networks. At all events, leaver and remainer identities have proved sufficiently durable to at least contribute to realignments in voting patterns, which are the subject of the final chapter (pp. 176-188).

There is obviously much more in the book than I have summarized here, and indeed it would be impossible to do justice to the formidable amount of data, analysis and scholarship within it. To my delight, given my great interest in the novels of C.P. Snow as a source of political insights, it even includes reference to one of his novels (p. 153).

Limitations and criticisms

The book does, however, have some limitations (as all books do). One is that the data presented are almost entirely quantitative (mainly large-scale longitudinal surveys). That has many strengths in terms of charting attitudes over time, and can capture things like emotional attachment to identities (see pp. 101-105), but does not provide the kind of insights into the meaning of Brexit identities for those who hold them which could be disclosed by including qualitative data. To put that another way, despite the focus on ‘tribes’ there is little anthropological sensibility in the analysis.

Another limitation is that the deployment of Social Identification Theory, and especially the work of Henri Tajfel, is not accompanied by any real discussion of the criticisms made of it (e.g. Dashtipour, 2012: Schnur, 2024). Personally, I don’t mind that too much, perhaps reflecting the fact that I am now an ex-academic, but having worked in a field where identity theories (in the plural) are of central importance (e.g. Kenny et al., 2011) I can imagine some of my former colleagues bridling a little.

What I would be slightly more critical of is where this theoretical framing leads. The things which are presented as conditions for the formation of Brexit identities are arguably rather circular. That is most obviously so as regards the condition of ‘issue contestation’, since the existence of strong conflict between groups about a salient issue presupposes that which it seeks to explain: if there are already groups in strong conflict about an issue, those groups will already have members, and membership implies at the very least proto-identification (and almost certainly some degree of ‘issue expression’).

Relatedly, what makes an issue ‘salient’, in the sense it is used here, is that something important is at stake apart from, and at least to some extent prior to, the identities which coalesce around it, but this is somewhat occluded by the theoretical framing of this book. The original work of Tajfel was, as the authors explain (pp. 11-12), based on experiments in which participants were found to embrace tribe-like identities even when the issues dividing them were arbitrarily assigned and had no objective, non-trivial basis. On such an account it is the psychological need for identification, not the issue, which is primary.

Whilst Hobolt & Tilley recognize that the “lab-based experimental paradigm” (p. 19) is neglectful of the social and political context of issue-based identities, the trace of this psychologistic, ‘Tajfelian’ account persists. The result is that remainer and leaver identities are treated as equivalent, differing in political content but not in psychological process. That makes the analysis non-partisan, which is in many ways admirable both for its academic detachment and because it is no doubt true that the psychological processes constituting remainer and leaver identities (affective polarization, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias etc.) are very similar.

However, political actors – voters – people – don’t develop identities irrespective of the substance of what makes issues contestable. Thus, contestation over salient issues is both a condition and a consequence of political identities, and political identities are both a condition and a consequence of contestation over salient issues. This isn’t to deny the authors’ point (e.g. p.135) that policy opinions can be, and often are, substantially shaped by political identities, but nor does that point negate mine: it’s not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.

Moreover, connecting to my earlier comment about the absence of qualitative data about meaning, whilst it is highly plausible that the processes through which remainer and leaver identities develop are very similar, it doesn’t follow, and probably isn’t the case, that what it means to remainers to be remainers is the same as what it means to leavers to be leavers. And it is also quite likely that, in both cases, this meaning has changed over time even though the identity-labels have persisted. This in turn may well mean that what the ‘issue’ is understood to be, and the reasons for its ‘salience’, have changed over time, which is another way of saying that there is a recursive interaction between ‘issue’ and ‘identity’.

There’s certainly much about Brexit which can be analyzed in political-psychological terms, and I sometimes do so myself on this blog and elsewhere. But there's a limit to the traction of viewing it in terms of tribal identities, as if it were akin to the dispute between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Swift’s (1726) political satire Gulliver’s Travels, unless political conflicts are to be detached from political rationality and subsumed within psychological rationales. If, as this book amply demonstrates, Brexit identities have become strongly embedded then it is at least in part for reasons which lie beyond identity, in the same way as is true for other political identities (such as those based on political parties). In what is a broadly ‘rationalistic’ (albeit not a ‘rational choice’) analysis it is perhaps slightly surprising that the focus is so resolutely on the arguers and so relatively little on what they are arguing about.

Conclusion

These criticisms (or, perhaps, they are just variants of a single criticism) do not affect my opening assessment that, overall, this is an excellent book providing compelling analysis of an important topic. It is packed with highly informative data and acute interpretation, and is written with admirable lucidity, especially given the complexity of some of the material. It is, indeed, strange to think that, only ten years ago, the identities of leaver and remainer simply didn’t exist and yet are now a familiar part of political life and the political lexicon. As with all the best social science, this book interrogates the familiar whilst making the strange explicable.

After the Brexit reset, how about a Brexit review?

Very much as anticipated in my previous post, the ‘reset Summit’ has come and gone as if it were simply a passing event. There has certainly been little political or media follow-up to what was announced, once the flurry of Brexiter fury had died down. Perhaps that is in part because, as John Elledge points out in the New Statesman, that fury, and the screaming headlines it gave rise to in the pro-Brexit press, simply isn’t matched by public opinion. The same seems to be true of attempts to whip up fears of Brexit ‘sabotage’ over the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, which passed its third reading this week.

That’s partly because, as Elledge says, in general terms the public tends to support closer ties with the EU, but I suspect it’s also because the public don’t really care that much either way. It is striking that every poll on the reset, whether conducted before the Summit or afterwards, shows high numbers of ‘don’t knows’, usually about 30% of respondents. Moreover, the YouGov post-summit poll shows that as well as 30% who ‘don’t know’, another 16% think that ‘the deal’ agreed is neither good nor bad. I also suspect that even those who oppose it struggle to muster the angry energy of the headline writers.

Actually, in this case at least, a ‘don’t know’ response is not necessarily a reflection of the public’s disinclination to be acquainted with the facts. It would be a perfectly reasonable response from even the most assiduous and well-informed voter. For, as I highlighted in that previous post, all that has really been announced of ‘the deal’ is a whole series of discrete potential agreements between the UK and the EU, but without almost any announced processes or timetables for their negotiation, let alone for their completion.

An SPS agreement?

The most important of the possible economic agreements, at least from the perspective of the Labour government’s explicitly stated reset aims, is a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. On that, my assumption that the government would take the possibility of its completion to justify the further postponement of full import controls on goods coming from the EU has been proved correct. Thus it was announced this week that the next phase of controls, which after several delays was meant to be implemented in July, has been paused, in effect indefinitely although the government press release stated they are deferred until January 2027 [1].

It's worth standing back from this latest announcement to recall just how ridiculous the situation is. Successive British governments, having embarked on Brexit with a referendum held almost nine years ago, and having fairly soon decided that this meant ‘hard Brexit’, went on to delude themselves and to mislead the public about the fact that this was going to entail import controls. Indeed it was not until February 2020 that any Cabinet Minister, specifically Michael Gove, formally and publicly stated that import controls would have to be introduced. By that time, Britain had already left the EU and was in the transition period, a transition period which the government had previously resisted and which it refused, despite the pandemic, to extend.

Since Gove’s announcement, there have been years of preparations, with huge costs for both government and businesses, and so many delays and multiple phasings, with different delays to the different phasings, that it is all but impossible to catalogue them in their entirety (see my post of April 2024 and the links within it for some of the detail). Meanwhile, the EU was ready to introduce controls on imports from Great Britain on the day after the transition period ended (to complaints from Gove about EU ‘over-rigidity’).

SPS controls, or even import controls generally, are not, in themselves, amongst the biggest costs or consequences of Brexit (an SPS deal is estimated to be worth less than 0.1% of UK GDP per annum) although they have proved to be one of the costs the UK has been most unwilling to pay. But the whole saga, and the fact that it is still playing out with this new supposed deadline being set for well into the next parliament, is a potent symbol of the utter ignorance, incompetence and dishonesty that has characterised Brexit as a whole. It certainly, in various ways, makes a mockery of the slogan about ‘taking back control of our money, our borders, and our laws’ if, indeed, anything more than the slogan itself were needed to induce mockery.

Risks and reactions

Coming back to the specific issue of the latest postponement, a few points stand out. One is the now familiar one that the lack of full import controls constitutes a risk which will now continue for even longer. As I noted in my last post, it will certainly be months, and very possibly years, before an SPS deal is both agreed and implemented and, meanwhile, Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland) risks importing shoddy or dangerous goods. For reasons I’ve discussed before, that isn’t because EU products have ‘ceased to be safe’. It is because the UK no longer has full access to the ‘eco-system’ relevant databases, and as a result is more vulnerable to accidental or criminal introductions of, for example, animal diseases, African Swine Fever being the most high-profile example.

From this point of view, reported food industry concerns that an SPS deal would increase those risks, because it would ultimately enable the UK to remove those phases of the post-Brexit import controls which have been introduced, are wide of the mark. If and when any such deal is done, it would, according to paragraph 31 of the statement released after the reset Summit, include full database access and thereby return risks to pre-Brexit levels (or to the same level as for member states of the EU which, of course, can never be zero). The real concern is that, meanwhile, the remainder of the necessary import controls will remain unimplemented.

If some have misunderstood the implications of an SPS deal, others have been wrong-footed by it. A particularly delicious example is an article in the rabidly pro-Brexit Express. Those who only read the headline, “‘Brexit reset deal’ to hit grocery bills next month – how it affects your pockets”, could be forgiven for thinking that Starmer’s craven betrayal of the Brexit dream was about to hit hard-pressed consumers in their wallets. But - what’s this? – the report goes on to explain that it will reduce business costs by £200 million a year, which will “gradually work its way down to consumers” who will see lower prices and greater availability of produce. Some “hit” [2].

All this aside, there was something decidedly odd about the announcement. The fact that the government is not going to continue to develop full border controls, and may even start selling off some of the ‘white elephant’ border facilities, seems to suggest either that it is completely confident of reaching an SPS agreement with the EU (which is exactly how the press release reads) and/or that it is determined to do whatever is necessary to reach such an agreement. Much of the media discussion certainly talks as if the deal already exists or is at least a fait accompli.

In fact, as things stand there is no agreement and, although I think it is very highly likely that there will be, it is impossible to be certain or to know how long it will take. If there is no agreement, and in the meantime there has been no further development of import controls, then there will be an even longer period until full controls are operational. They certainly aren’t going to spring into action in January 2027, the supposed new deadline. But even if there is an agreement, the longer it takes to be made and implemented the greater the chance that the risks involved will eventuate and that, in turn, carries a political risk for the government [3].

A detour into Brexitology

One thing which can be said about an SPS agreement, if it happens, or any of the others identified at the reset Summit, is that neither it nor they will constitute ‘cherry-picking’. I’m returning to this point reluctantly since, as I said when I last discussed it, my original passing remark about it, in a footnote to an earlier post, led to much critical, and some hostile, comment on social media.

My basic argument is that this term has now ceased to have analytical value because, now that the UK is a third country to the EU, any agreements made will simply be between those two polities, in the light of their own interests. Some seemed to think this showed my supposed ‘UK-centrism’, and perhaps even my own hidden Brexity nature, or was just some inexplicable lapse from cogency on my part. All of which seems rather strange given that for almost ten years I’ve been writing about cherry-picking (and related concepts like ‘cakeism’), repeatedly using it as a concept to analyse Brexit and to criticise the UK’s conduct.

I only return to this now because last week no less a person than the EU Ambassador to the UK, Pedro Serrano, described the term as being “no longer helpful” and went on to say of the reset that “this is not about cherry-picking or not cherry-picking. We have identified a number of issues that are of mutual interest.” The report of these remarks, by Jon Stone in Politico, goes on to say that “in the Berlaymont, too, the [cherry-picking] line is seen as passé”, although gives no specific evidence of that and it’s not clear to me that, as the report claims, this term has been “officially retired” by the EU (or what form ‘official retirement’ would take). Nevertheless, it is clearly significant that someone of Serrano’s stature said what he did and, unless the suggestion is that his posting to London has made him fall prey to ‘UK-centrism’, it suggests that my own observation was an accurate one.

Moreover, the report goes on to quote Charles Grant, the widely-respected Director of the Centre for European Reform, saying that the cherry-picking line had been “a product of the strained relationship that followed the referendum, and the EU’s concern that other countries should not follow the UK’s example.” That is exactly my point, or part of it: not just the word, but the concept, relate to a time which legally and institutionally has ceased to exist, namely the period during which the Withdrawal Agreement and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement were being negotiated.

This isn’t (or isn’t simply) an ‘I told you so’ on my part (and, even if it were, there are plenty of things, often more important than this, which I’ve been wrong about over the years). Actually, it’s a fairly minor issue which I never expected to cause so much fuss. Nevertheless, it does have a wider significance which is worth mentioning.

It has become almost a truism of ‘Brexitology’ (for there is such a thing) that Brexit is a ‘process not an event’, an observation only ever necessary to make because of the bone-headed inability of most Brexiters to grasp that simple fact. But that doesn’t mean that the process ‘unfolds’ in the sense of going in a particular direction, like the unrolling of a carpet to reveal a recurring pattern. For whilst it is undoubtedly true that there are endless recurrences and repetitions – to a degree that is sometimes almost soul-destroying – it is also the case that the direction and content of the process modulates over time, and will continue to do so. As that happens, anyone who is serious about understanding Brexit needs to be attuned to both the continuities and the changes.

I think that most readers of this blog would have no difficulty agreeing with the suggestion that those Brexiters who are still, for example, droning on about ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border are simply stuck in a groove whereby not just the terminology but the entire situation it relates to have been superseded. What may be less palatable is that the same can apply to some of the idées fixes of those on the ‘remain’, ‘rejoin’, ‘FBPE’ (or whatever term we want to use for it) side.

The Strategic Defence Review

One important reason why the Brexit process does not have a single fixed direction, mandating a fixed repertoire of analytical terms, is that this process does not take place in isolation from the wider world. The most obvious example is the Ukraine War, which has had a profound impact on UK-EU post-Brexit relations ever since its outbreak in 2022. That impact continues to develop, and is itself one of the things impacted by the other most obvious example, Trump’s second presidency. The EU-UK Security and Defence Partnership, announced at the reset Summit, is the most tangible consequence of these two developments.

The Ukraine War had already prompted the 2023 ‘refreshed’ Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (IR23). As I discussed at the time, this represented something of a retreat from the hubris of the original Integrated Review of 2021 (IR21) with its puffed-up post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ framing, and put more emphasis on the centrality of European-Atlantic security. Now, just two years later, the government has published its Strategic Defence Review (SDR).

I’m not qualified to discuss the military details of the SDR, for which see Professor Lawrence Freedman’s expert analysis, but, on my reading of its geo-political framing, it does not really continue the direction of travel from IR21 to IR23. It is true that, as Freedman explains, the SDR is very much informed by the threat from Russia and by the military lessons of the Ukraine War. It is also true that it does not explicitly replicate the ‘Global Britain’ language of IR21. Nevertheless, it retains a strong emphasis on the UK as a global military power, centrally anchored in its relationship with the US and its membership of NATO.

Of course, that is not a surprise, any more than it is a surprise that it is only very gently hinted at that the reliability of the US as a defence partner has been compromised by Trump, and may well never recover. But it is, if not surprising then at least of note, that the partnership with the EU is given so little emphasis, and even that in rather muted tones (see especially p.75). In the process, what had seemed in IR23 to be the beginning of a recognition that the UK is primarily a regional power has been diluted. It’s difficult to be sure, precisely as so much is about tone and emphasis, and thus very much open to different interpretations, but, at the very least, I don’t think it is suggestive of the kind of Europe-first foreign policy which Foreign Secretary David Lammy talked about in Opposition.

A different review?

That rather tentative analysis aside, the SDR prompts the thought that, whatever it does or does not imply about the UK-EU defence partnership, there is literally nothing in it which could not, and probably would not, have been written had Brexit not happened. AUKUS, which features extensively in the review, is sometimes trumpeted by Brexiters as a ‘Brexit benefit’, but the fact that France, an EU member, was originally to have been the US and Australia’s partner gives the lie to that. But if Brexit has brought no defence and security benefits, what costs and disbenefits might it have brought?

In particular, whilst, like the other recent reviews, the SDR rightly identifies the threat Russia poses to the UK, and the very wide-ranging forms it takes, the entire question about how Brexit relates to this threat remains one of the major unventilated issues of recent history. I’ve never been one of those who ascribes the referendum result to Russian interference and, in some ways, I think doing so serves to deflect responsibility from those, including the voters, with whom it lies. But it is undeniable that Brexit was in line with Russian interests, and we know the pro-Putin views of many of its leading advocates, including Nigel Farage.

At issue here is not so much the failure to investigate what role Russia played in 2016, it is how, right now, in 2025, and in the future, Brexit continues to serve those interests. We are told that the SDR puts the UK on a “wartime footing” in the face of the “immediate and pressing threat” from Russia. A country which was really serious about that would be conducting a review not just of defence strategy but of why it is persisting with an entire national strategy which may not have been chosen for it by Russia but is exactly what Russia would have chosen for it. Whilst we are at it, we might also undertake a comprehensive official review of all the economic and political consequences of Brexit.

After all, if the dramatic changes in the world are such as to require three defence reviews in the five years since Britain formally left the EU, then it surely isn’t unreasonable to think that Brexit itself warrants at least one.

Notes

[1] Apart from at least recognizing that an SPS deal may not be done, the reason a date is stated is very likely in order to forestall any action against the UK at the WTO. As things stand, the UK is discriminating against non-EU countries, whose imports face SPS controls. But for so long as the UK can claim to be in the process of introducing controls on the EU and negotiating a deal with the EU, it is unlikely that any other WTO member will bother to start raising a complaint.

[2] In another article, even the Express couldn’t find a negative spin to put on one aspect of the potential SPS deal, namely that it would make it easier to take pets to and from the EU by a “reversal to Brexit rules”. This possible return to the pet passport scheme shouldn’t be confused with another development this week, introducing the Pet Travel Document to simplify taking pets between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is nothing to do with the reset or any SPS agreement, but is part of the ongoing implementation of the Windsor Framework.

[3] Of course there are political risks either way. If the government continued to roll out import controls which, along with those already developed, were subsequently rendered redundant by an SPS agreement then it could be accused of wasting money. Even so, that would be considerably less damaging (both politically and economically) than if, prior to an agreement, the absence of full controls led to, say, foot and mouth disease being imported.

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 new Brexit consensus

Last week’s seventh anniversary of the referendum saw a surge of interest in Brexit, with numerous commentaries, including my own, looking back or taking stock. What all of them had in common was some kind of acknowledgement, even if only implicit, that Brexit has not proved to be popular and is widely viewed as having been a mistake.

For those who always opposed Brexit, this is no surprise because we never expected it to be a success. Brexiters, however, are in a more complex situation. They are torn between wanting to argue, like former Trade Secretary Peter Lilley, that Brexit actually has been a success (£), and wanting to argue, like the IEA boss Mark Littlewood, that the government has failed to “reap the true rewards of Brexit” (£). It is a tension which has been the defining feature of the years since the end of the transition period and, as I’ve remarked before, is one of the prime reasons why Brexiters have lost the ‘battle for the narrative’ in that period: why would public opinion swing to the view that Brexit was the right thing to do, when so many Brexiters spend so much time complaining about it?

Although the idea it was the right thing to do, but it was done in the wrong way, isn’t likely to build support for Brexit, there is polling evidence that it holds sway amongst 2016 leave voters. Of the 37% of leave voters who think Brexit has been a failure, some 75% of them think that it could have been a success, whereas of the 89% of remain voters who think Brexit has been a failure only 24% think it could have been a success.

Despite these differences, there is within this the very slender basis of a political consensus: whatever they ascribe it to, a miserable 9% of the public think that Brexit has been a success. Far from solving any of Britain’s problems, Brexit is now itself a problem in need of a solution. So what might the solution be?

The Brexiters’ solution part 1: Back to the future

For some Brexiters, notably Northern Ireland unionists and those close to them, one part of the solution lies in endlessly propounding the same solutions they have always wanted. Thus this week the Centre for Brexit Policy unveiled its great way forward for Northern Ireland which – it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry – turns out to be the idea of ‘Mutual Enforcement’, which it proposed in almost identical terms in its September 2021 report and before that in its February 2021 report. Indeed, its roots lie in the stream of ‘alternative arrangements’ proposals for the Irish border during 2018-2019.

It's not going to happen because, as border expert Professor Katy Hayward pointed out at the time of the 2021 version, it doesn’t meet the basis tests of what is needed. Not only has it been rejected by the EU, but it has been rejected by the UK government. Moreover, George Peretz KC has eviscerated this latest report’s claims about the legal basis for voiding the existing agreement. In any case, although the report talks of the arrangements for Northern Ireland being an ‘unresolved’ issue, politically, the chance of Rishi Sunak ripping up the Windsor Framework – one of his few tangible achievements as Prime Minister – is precisely the square root of Sweet Fanny Adams. That of the EU negotiating a new deal even less than that.

Even Iain Duncan Smith, launching the report, seemed to have no great expectations of it, but ascribed this to Joe Biden being “anti-British” and imagined that Brexit wouldn’t be “completed” until there was a different US President. As ever, the leprechauns have hidden the pot of gold but there are still some Brexiters searching for the end of the rainbow. Even more fantastical is the revival, on the wilder fringes of the Brexit Blob, that it would have been better to leave the EU with no deal at all. To change the metaphor to one I’ve used before on this blog, it is as if some Brexiters are stuck on a Mobius Strip, endlessly going around the same loop in the vain hope of arriving somewhere new.

The Brexiters’ solution part 2: Onward to the promised land

However, I think that most Brexiters realise that, to change the metaphor again, the dead horse of re-visiting the terms of Brexit isn’t going to run, still less win the Derby, no matter how hard it is flogged. Instead, for Littlewood, Lilley and almost all the Brexit Ultras, the solution to the problem of Brexit’s failure lies in ‘making use of Brexit freedoms’. However, they are remarkably coy about what this means. One reason for the coyness is that such Brexiters have rarely wanted to spell out their agenda in terms of cutting employment rights and environmental protections, knowing how little public support it has. Another is that when it comes to the more palatable-sounding ‘regulatory divergence’ they don’t really know what they mean.

Writing in the Mail, Andrew Neil (who would no doubt abjure being labelled a ‘Thatcherite Brexiter’, but whose writings on Brexit seem indistinguishable from theirs) began his referendum anniversary article by acknowledging that there is, indeed, a problem, with neither remainers nor leavers being pleased with Brexit. Towards the end of a long and largely vapid discussion, he suggests the solution is to make the most of Brexit, meaning:

“A dynamic digital economy. Low, competitive taxes for individuals and business. Light-touch regulation of new technologies. A robust welfare-to-work programme to tackle poverty and labour shortages. The reskilling of our people for the digital age.”

There are several things that are striking about this list, most obviously that much of it doesn’t even require Brexit (and Neil implies as much by saying they are “probably easier to achieve” outside the EU, although he doesn’t say why). But, just taking the ones that could be Brexit-related, which are those concerning regulation of new technologies and, probably, the one about the digital economy (as presumably it implies light-touch data protection regulation), what is also striking is how vague they are. I realise this is an article in the Mail, and that Andrew Neil isn’t exactly on all fours with Wittgenstein as a profound thinker, but, still, after seven years, this is very thin on detail.

Same old problems

Crucially, it doesn’t even begin to acknowledge the central problems with divergence towards light-touch regulation. I’ve rehearsed these so many times on this blog that I won’t repeat them in detail here, but the principal problems are that any UK national regulatory system forces those UK firms who also export to face the costs of double regulation, unless the UK system becomes widely used internationally, which is unlikely because the UK isn’t large enough.

These are essentially the points made just this week by the Chair of vehicle-maker Ford, Tim Slatter. Arguing that Britain should continue to follow EU car regulations “otherwise, what we're going to see is a lot of extra cost come into the cost of developing vehicles and producing vehicles”, he continued that:

“It's very important that Great Britain maintains good regulatory alignment with the European Union. There are sort of three big regulatory environments for automotive in the world. There's the North American one, the European one and the Japanese one. And it's really important that we maintain really good alignment to the European one, because that's where we build and sell most of our vehicles.”

This, or versions of it, is the constant, practical, block to post-Brexit regulatory divergence. In this sense, the deregulatory Brexiters are as stuck in a loop as those Brexiters still droning on about Mutual Enforcement and replacing the Protocol (in fact, they are very often the same people). They keep calling for the same things and keep failing to understand why they haven’t happened to any great extent, as shown by the latest edition of the UKICE regulatory divergence tracker. But, rather than reflect that this is because of the fundamental flaws in their ideas, they persist in blaming remainers and insisting that the solution depends on stronger belief in Brexit.

When faith meets reality

Thus Andrew Neil recognizes that Sunak is not going to follow a “radical Brexit Britain agenda”, but ascribes it to him not being a “true believer” in Brexit. Belief can mean many things, but amongst the more cult-like Brexiters there is the sense that it means something like ‘faith’, in a quasi-religious way, such that reality will bend if faced with a sufficiency of it. For commentators and politicians who are not in power, it is easy to sustain that faith, but almost invariably, when in power, it becomes impossible to do so in the face of reality. That is why so many Brexiters, when given the power to implement it, went on to resign. Brexit Secretaries David Davis and Dominic Raab are both examples. They preferred to keep their faith intact rather than face reality, but others did the opposite and faced reality, for which the faithful inevitably despised them.

That is what Theresa May did, having embraced hard Brexit, when, as regards regulatory divergence, she came to the view in the Chequers Agreement that there needed to be a “common rule book” for goods, at which point the Brexiters turned on her as being ‘Theresa the Remainer’. In a more limited way, Kemi Badenoch did the same thing when reining back the scope of the Retained EU Law Bill, for which she too was reviled by some Brexiters. In a somewhat different way, Steve Baker also made that journey in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol, and, again, was denounced by the Ultras.

Even Johnson, for all his bluster, never actually enacted the regulatory divergence the Brexit Ultras want, and always drew back from completely violating the Protocol or even from following through on his many threats to invoke Article 16. Perhaps in his case that was aided by the plasticity of both his faith in Brexit and his relationship with truth, but the general point is that the practical realities of governing always, at least so far, and just about, trump faith in Brexit.

Sunak’s solution

As for Sunak, although regarded by some as having never been a ‘true Brexiter’, he is in fact a particular sort of Brexiter, a technocratic globalist rather than nationalist, and therefore neither viscerally antagonistic to the EU nor bothered by the supposed sovereignty violations of international or trans-national regulation. For example, as Neil points out, his approach to Artificial Intelligence has been to seek to lead global regulation, rather than to be hostile to regulation.

In that, as discussed in my recent post on the topic, Sunak displays one kind of Brexit delusion – about the UK as a global regulatory leader – and thus it doesn’t make him less of a Brexiter, but does show that (like Thatcher herself, in fact) by no means all Brexiters, even on the Thatcherite right, are advocates of national regulatory divergence. This is also shown by the fact that, as Chancellor, he signed up to the OECD agreement to set a 15% minimum corporation tax rate (presumably with Johnson’s acquiescence). It is also shown by the announcement this week that the current Chancellor (presumably with Sunak’s blessing) signed the long-delayed Memorandum of Understanding with the EU over financial services regulation, something unlocked by having agreed the Windsor Framework. Equally, Badenoch’s retreat on Retained EU Law must have been at least authorised, and very likely advocated, by Sunak.

The other Brexit consensus

All of this clearly infuriates the ‘diverge and de-regulate’ Brexiters, since it is precisely the opposite of what they see as the solution to the Brexit problem. But, just as the difficulty they have always faced is lack of political support for their deregulatory agenda, so, now, they face the specific difficulty that this is absolutely at odds with how the public see the solution to the Brexit problem.

For there is one other slender piece of consensus, apart from the near-universal acceptance that Brexit has not been a success. It was revealed by a poll conducted for the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) last week, asking respondents which option they favoured for the UK’s relationship with the EU over the next ten to fifteen years.

Amongst all voters, the preferred option of 43% is to re-join the EU, 13% to re-join the single market (but not the EU), 22% to re-join neither but seek a closer trade and security relationship with the EU than at present, 7% to keep the relationship as it is, 5% to minimise economic and security ties, and 10% don’t know.

Amongst leave voters, with those options in the same order, the preferences are: 13%, 21%, 37%, 8%, 9%, 11%

Amongst remain voters, with those options in the same order, the preferences are: 73%, 6%, 8%, 5%, 2%, 6%

So this suggests that 78% of all voters, and even 71% of leaver voters, would prefer some version of a closer relationship with the EU, and note that this is a large increase from the 53% who favoured closer ties in a May 2023 poll (though differences in survey methodology may account for some of that). Obviously the majority of voters, and the vast majority of remain voters, want more than just closer ties without any form of rejoining, so there is only limited consensus about what a ‘closer relationship’ would mean. But it can certainly be said that there is a clear consensus against the standard Brexiter view of wanting greater divergence, which in the TBI poll only has 5% support amongst all voters and only 9% support even amongst leave voters.

It can also be said that, whilst there is no clear consensus on what a ‘closer relationship’ should be, there is at least an implicit consensus for a closer relationship outside of the EU and the single market. This needs to be phrased very carefully: of course, there isn’t a consensus view for that as the preferred option, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone who preferred to re-join the EU, or preferred to re-join the single market, would actually object to closer ties without doing either.

Many of those might say that there is no point in it, on the basis that it won’t make enough, or any, difference, but that wouldn’t be to object to doing it per se. Conceivably, some of those might say that doing so might, by ameliorating the damage of Brexit, undermine the momentum towards re-joining, and object on that basis. But anyone making that objection would at least implicitly be accepting that following this option would ‘make a difference’, as otherwise it could not adversely affect the case to re-join.

Thus, overall, there is a certain kind of consensus here, around three things: the vast majority of electors do not think that Brexit has been a success and the great majority of voters do not support greater divergence from the EU and the great majority of voters either support or at least do not object to the UK seeking a closer relationship with the EU. It’s not inevitable that this consensus will hold but it’s also more than possible that it will grow, for example when the fresh costs and disruption of starting to implement import controls on goods from the EU begin to emerge in October.

Delivering the consensus view

This very limited consensus is reflected by the current leadership of the two main Westminster parties. But Sunak’s ability to go very far with it is highly constrained by the fact that, whatever voters think, many of his MPs will vociferously disagree with him doing so. Notably, he has still failed to reach an agreement over UK participation in Horizon, to the major detriment of UK science and industry (though in that case he has been reported to have his own reservations, as well as facing the inevitable demands from the Brexiters to stay out). In any case, it is unlikely he will be in power after the next election and the Tory Party will, almost certainly, head off in the most dogmatic and extreme direction about relations with the EU, deregulation and just about everything else.

So it is really the anticipated Labour government which matters. Quite how far that government will choose to seek, and more importantly be able to agree, closer relations with the EU remains to be seen. But there are quiet noises that Starmer is getting bolder, and that Labour will try to maximise the closeness of ties with the EU, within the considerable limits of remaining outside the EU, single market and customs union.

One thing is for sure, whilst doing so will attract anger from the pro-Brexit media, Starmer will not have anything like the drag-anchor of the ERG to constrain him. Rather, he is more likely to face pressure from within his party to go further, both in what he promises before the election, which, after all, is still likely to be over a year away, and what he delivers afterwards. Moreover, whatever noise the Brexit media make, the issues involved are mainly going to be too technical and abstruse for the public to get worked up about – indeed the reality is that, outside the Brexit blob, hardly anyone ever remotely cared about having sovereign control of, say, SPS regulations, or had even heard of them.

The TBI polling referred to earlier was within a report setting out in some detail what a maximal approach would be (perhaps one should call it – maximal within minimal), and, as Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times recently discussed (£), the TBI looks set to be a major influence on the Labour government. The report is also worth reading as it disposes of some of the standard objections to Labour’s approach, such as that it is a new version of ‘cakeism’ or of ‘cherry-picking’. As for the question of how much the EU will agree to, it is certainly important not to be starry-eyed about this and to repeat the Brexiters’ naivety about the EU’s power and determination to pursue its own self-interest. However, Mujtaba Rahman, one of the best-connected and best-informed analysts in this area, has recently argued that there is more room for flexibility than the EU’s official position suggests.

There’s another point here which I don’t think is ever discussed. Even if a Labour government failed to achieve any change at all in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, at the very least it can remove the spectre of regulatory divergence which is ever-present under the Tories. A report this week in the Financial Times (£), which was mainly about how post-Brexit border frictions are pushing British firms out of EU supply chains, mentioned in passing how “uncertainty about UK regulation, which no longer tracks EU rules” is a deterrent for investors. Such uncertainty is also the reason why the EU hasn’t granted an equivalence agreement on financial services (£), and is unlikely to do so whilst it persists, notwithstanding this week’s Memorandum of Understanding. These kinds of uncertainties could be removed for years by a Labour government simply giving a commitment to continued alignment, which requires no agreement from the EU, and this appears to be consistent with Labour’s stated policy.

Beyond the consensus: Re-joiners have more to do, but much to celebrate

Naturally none of this will satisfy most of the 55% of voters who would currently vote to re-join the EU. But, for now, it is the only game in town, in the literal sense that there isn’t the remotest sign of any UK government holding a referendum in the next parliament which takes us to, probably, 2029. That doesn’t imply that re-joiners should cease to campaign for what they want, as the only way the game will change is by moving beyond the current, very limited, consensus. Their task is to sustain and build a durable majority in the opinion polls for re-joining over the coming years so as to make it politically viable for the UK and for the EU. If that seems a rather dour and depressing analysis, I don’t think it should. Considering all that has happened since 2016 it is truly remarkable and noteworthy what has been achieved.

Firstly, the hard-right, deregulatory, ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ Brexit (not that they ever understood what ‘Singapore’ would mean) is, for now and the foreseeable future, off the political agenda. I have consistently argued, and taken quite a lot of flak for doing so, that those remainers who insist that ‘this was always the real agenda of Brexit’ make exactly the same error as those Brexiters who insist that ‘this is what true Brexit means’. Both miss the point that Brexit had multiple and contradictory meanings, and it could develop in multiple different ways. However, that’s not to deny that Brexit most certainly could have gone in the hard-right direction, and under Liz Truss it very nearly did. But, for the most part, it hasn’t.

Secondly, remainers and rejoiners have, certainly for now (although it is never over), won the ‘battle for the narrative’ which, as I argued in January 2021, would follow the end of the transition period. In May 2022 I wrote that Brexiters were losing that battle and by December 2022 that Brexit was slowly being discredited. In the months since then it has become ever-clearer that this is so. That is shown not just by the opinion polls about Brexit being a mistake and a failure but also by those now showing a fairly consistent, though by no means unassailable, majority to re-join the EU.

Both of those achievements would have seemed incredible in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, or in some of the dark days which followed, such as when the Mail dubbed High Court judges “enemies of the people” or when Tory MEP David Bannerman called for those with “extreme EU loyalty” to be tried for treason. It took a lot of resilience, and even some courage, for those who knew Brexit was a terrible, catastrophic mistake to keep saying so over the long years since, and that has reaped rewards. But the ‘de-Brexitification’ of Britain is going to be a long, slow process, calling for still more tenacity, and a considerable degree of patience.

 

Summer Recess: On that, hopefully relatively upbeat, note, I am going to take a long summer break from blogging. Although there’s always some Brexit news to discuss, experience suggests that the summer political shutdown means that it slackens off (last year being a notable exception). If something major relating to Brexit happens, or just something which particularly captures my attention, I will write a post. Otherwise, I don’t plan to post again until Friday 15 September when I will begin what will be the eighth year of writing this blog.

As always, my huge and sincere thanks to all the tens of thousands of people who read each week via various channels. I know very well that this blog competes for limited time and attention with any number of other sources, and I never take your readership for granted.

Finally, in case of interest, a new edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) will be available on (provisionally) Tuesday 19 September. This updates the previous edition by adding the ‘story’ of what happened from the end of the transition period (when the first edition ends) to the seventh anniversary of the referendum in June 2023. It can already be pre-ordered from Biteback Publishing, and the same link will be updated with more details about the new edition over the summer.