Why Brexit won't go away

The fortnight since my last post seems to have been packed with important news, not least the resounding defeat suffered by Trump in the US mid-term elections and the continuing, even intensifying, discussion within the UK about its relationship with the EU. Within that there are many reminders not so much of why the question of Brexit is back but of why it can never really go away.

Mr Brexit’s mid-terms

In terms of the focus of this blog, the result of the mid-terms is important for two reasons. One is just the general sense in which Trump and Brexit have been linked, going right back to 2016 when he hailed the referendum result and frequently compared his own campaign for the presidency with that to leave the EU, dubbing himself “Mr Brexit”. In turn, Brexiters, and especially Nigel Farage, regarded Trump’s first presidential election as indicative that there was a transatlantic populist tide which both had caught. In a similar way, Farage was cock-a-hoop when his hero won a second term in 2024.

Farage downplays his admiration nowadays, presumably well aware that it is not shared by the vast majority of British voters (or even most Reform voters), whilst Trump publicly snubbed his erstwhile friend earlier this year. Yet Farage remained invested, to the extent of anticipating that the experts would be confounded by a Republican success in the mid-terms, a prediction which, like so many he made for Brexit, did not survive contact with reality.

Beyond this ideological linkage, it was always a key part of the Brexiter prospectus that leaving the EU would yield the (supposedly wonderful) prize of a free trade deal with the United States, especially under Trump. As ever, this was highly contradictory since, at the time of the referendum, another part of that prospectus was that Brexit would allow Britain to avoid the (supposedly awful) consequences of being part of TTIP, the then anticipated EU free trade deal with … the United States. At all events, even Brexiters have now grasped that Trump has little interest in free trade and zero capacity to make any kind of ‘deal’ worthy of the name about trade or anything else, so it has become another part of their dream which has quietly died.

The second reason why Trump’s mid-term defeat is important lies in what it means for the geo-political landscape faced by post-Brexit Britain. To some extent that remains to be seen, but most commentators agree that it would be a mistake to think that it heralds a return to what we used to think of as normality. Trump may be politically wounded, but he will still be in power for the next two years and his initial response to the mid-term results gives a strong suggestion of how he will use that power. In particular, the appointment of the deeply loathsome Stephen Miller (£) as his Chief of Staff implies a foreign policy even more closely aligned in favour of Russia and against Ukraine as well as hostile to Europe more generally.

Looking further ahead, there is no reason to assume that subsequent US Presidents will be significantly different, at least in the substance of their foreign policies. It’s not just that the American electorate has chosen Trump twice, and may well choose someone similar again. More pertinently, it’s that even a far less malicious, corrupt and capricious American administration is unlikely to be willing to act as a permanent guarantor of European security. A more benign administration would not support far-right nationalist movements in Europe, and might manage its withdrawal from European security in a more responsible way. But that withdrawal pre-dates Trump and will post-date him. And, after all, the US role in Europe’s security was an artefact of the Second World War and its Cold War aftermath. There’s no reason to expect that it will, or even should, continue in perpetuity.

The fact of the EU

That fundamental historic shift directly relates to Brexit. It inevitably means that Europe as a continent is going to have to collectively manage its own security and defence to a far greater extent than in the past. If the EU did not exist then that might perhaps imply the creation of a security and defence alliance between European nations – a kind of European NATO. But the EU does exist, and this means that it is also inevitable that it will be the central actor within continental security, not least because security and defence cannot readily be decoupled from economics generally and from specific areas such as industrial policy, technology policy, public procurement, and trade. This being so, a discrete security and defence partnership between the UK and the EU will always be sub-optimal (for both parties, but especially the UK because it means it will be peripheral to decision-making) compared with EU membership.

This point has a wider import. It is increasingly being said, even by British pro-Europeans, that EU membership is becoming less attractive, and riskier, because of the possibility of far-right electoral success in France, especially, but also Germany, Spain or other member states. The implication seems to be that the UK would do well to steer clear of such possibilities. But, again, this is to ignore the fact that the EU exists, and will continue to exist, and the UK will be affected by it, and by what happens within its member states, anyway. Being out of the EU does not prevent that, but it does prevent having any influence at all on what happens to the EU as a result. The saying ‘you have to be in the toom’ may be a political truism, but only because it is true.

That in turn has an even more fundamental significance. Brexiters often said, or at least implied, that by leaving the EU the UK would return to the situation which existed before joining what was the EEC in 1973. That was nonsense in general (time doesn’t go backwards), but it was also nonsense in a specific way. Before 1973 the EEC comprised only a handful of West European countries. Ireland, which figured so significantly within Brexit, was not a member. Spain and Portugal were still dictatorships. Germany was divided. Much of eastern and central Europe was within the Warsaw Pact and under de facto Soviet control. Yugoslavia not only existed but was still ruled by Tito. There was no single market. Indeed there was no EU.

It is such an obvious point to make that it may seem almost banal. But it is also crucial. It doesn’t matter whether, as some Brexit supporters often say, ‘we managed perfectly well before’ even if that were true (which it isn’t). It doesn’t even matter whether one thinks the EU is ‘a good thing’ or not. And it certainly doesn’t matter that the EU is imperfect and has many problems. It is simply a fact that the EU exists and, as such, it affects a huge amount of what happens in the UK irrespective of whether the UK is a member or not. That would be true anyway, but it is a truth thrown into even clearer relief by the new geo-politics being created by the US, China and Russia.

Inescapable strategic questions

I am stressing this obvious point now because it is what ultimately lies behind the renewed ‘conversation’ about Brexit which Andy Burnham has initiated and which I have been discussing in the last few posts on this blog. It isn’t just that Brexit has lost such public support as it had in 2016. It isn’t just that the economic damage of Brexit is biting especially hard in the context of pervasive low growth rates. It is that the strategic reality of being detached from the dominant political structure of the continent where the UK is geographically, economically, and philosophically located is impossible to ignore.

On 31 January 2020, the day that the UK formally left the EU, the historian Robert Saunders wrote a prescient essay arguing that the big strategic questions faced by Britain since at least the end of the Second World War created the conditions in which it became settled policy to seek to join what became the EU, and eventually to do so. He also argued that, albeit in different conditions, those questions would not disappear with Brexit and would be re-posed as a consequence of Brexit.

And so it has proved. For all the attempts to imagine a strategy based on ‘Global Britain’, or a transatlantic partnership, or an Asia-Pacific pivot, or the Anglosphere, or CANZUK, or an enhanced Commonwealth, and for all the insistence that Brexit has been ‘done’ and is yesterday’s news, the ‘European question’ persists. Its most obvious consequence is that even the rather limited UK-EU relationship established by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the Northern Ireland Protocol/Windsor Framework entails permanent, ongoing dialogue and negotiation. The relationship is inescapable: the only question is about its terms, scope and nature. It may be a while since Brexit featured so prominently in the news but the reality is that it never went away, it just dropped out of the headlines.

The Brussels Effect revisited

Its re-emergence in the headlines now is partly because the ‘reset’ initiated by Keir Starmer is finally coming to fruition, with reports that a series of draft agreements have been circulated to EU member states. As well as the long-anticipated agreements on Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) regulations, Youth Mobility, and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) linkages, it is now reported that there will be a health security agreement relating to supplies of medicines. The expectation is that the final version of these will be announced at the UK-EU summit in Brussels next Friday (although there are have been reports of a possible delay if the UK does not agree terms on university fee levels for EU students).

No doubt these agreements will be discussed future posts but already there has been an inevitable Brexiter backlash against them (as prefigured by my post of December 2024). Most of it is predictable, ranging from the usual squeals about betraying the referendum result (it doesn’t; Britain left the EU and this doesn’t change that) and ceding ‘sovereignty’ (it doesn’t; it is a use of sovereignty) through to drivel about smoky bacon crisps being banned (untrue, although there might be changes to what they can be called and what flavouring additives can be used).

It is obviously true that, in relation to SPS and some other areas, Britain is going to become a ‘rule-taker’ (as, in Northern Ireland, it already is), but that itself is an indictment of Brexit: we gave up having a say. It is also true as a corollary that this means foregoing the right to enact different regulations in these areas (for example, even if not immediately, gene editing of crops seems likely to be forbidden). As a result, the usual stale arguments about the supposed benefits of regulatory independence have been rolled out by the usual suspects, such as David Frost. But as always this ignores that in practice those benefits have proved as nugatory as many of us warned. Thus the general post-Brexit pattern has been of very limited active divergence from EU rules.

This is not, as Brexiters would have it, due to political timidity or remainer resistance. It is for the simple reason that very few desirable opportunities exist [1]. And even if it can be argued that this or that divergence is desirable, the issue is the overall cost and benefit (in both economic and non-economic meanings) of alignment and, from that, whether sovereignty is better used by choosing to align or by not doing so.

Moreover, even without formal alignment, in many cases (most famously tethered plastic bottle caps) British businesses simply follow EU regulations as a matter of commercial choice. For the same reason, businesses have continued to use the CE conformity assessment mark and the plan to make UKCA marking mandatory was indefinitely postponed under the previous Tory government. Indeed, one of the most telling moments in the whole ‘regulatory independence’ strand of Brexit came in 2022, when the arch-Brexiter and then Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg finally twigged that UKCA marking represented a ‘pointless’ replication of ‘red tape’. (For a fuller account of the sorry, but highly instructive, saga of the UKCA mark, see my post of August 2023.)

Another argument which has recently been revived in response to the impending reset fails for somewhat similar reasons. That argument [warning: link to X] is that it is damaging or unnecessary that all British businesses will have to follow EU SPS regulations even if they are not exporting their goods to the EU. In fact, this is necessary precisely because, without it, border checks or certification would be required to prevent leakage of non-compliant goods between markets. But it is not damaging, because it is cheaper for businesses to produce to one standard and, in any case, it prevents what would otherwise be an ossification whereby industries are effectively segmented into ‘non-exporters’ and ‘exporters’. This would also have the effect of locking ‘non-exporters’ out of the supply chains of ‘exporters’ (i.e./ e.g. because a ‘non-exporting’ grower of, say, potatoes would not be able to supply a supermarket exporting, say, a shepherd’s pie ready meal to the EU).

Indeed it is striking that Brexiters never acknowledge that the businesses actually affected by the reset are keenly anticipating the new agreement. It’s the Brexit ideologues who object. It’s telling that on social media the most high-profile critique of the draft reset agreements over the last fortnight has been the report by Catherine McBride published by the Great British Business Council. The name of that organization might suggest to the unwary that it is some kind of representative body of British business. In fact, it is reported to be a lobby group created by Nigel Farage’s supporters, which according to its website is “funded by private donations from [unnamed] concerned citizens”. For long-term followers of the Brexiter eco-system, this may recall the similarly coy ‘Alliance of British Entrepreneurs’, another body which implied it had some representative function (see my post of December 2021, though note that the relevant links are now dead). It seems to have disappeared without trace apart from a boosterish post in 2018 from Brexit ‘hard man’ Steve Baker [warning: link to X].

As for the grandiose sounding ‘Great British Business Council’, its CEO is none other than, er, Catherine McBride herself (of ‘Briefings for Britain’, formerly Briefings for Brexit, and formerly of the Institute for Economic Affairs and of the Centre for Brexit Policy – which also appears to be defunct). Commenting on some of McBride’s claims about the reset agreement, trade expert David Henig remarked [warning: link to X]: “in short, the usual combination of misunderstandings and outright fabrications which ensured Brexit was such a failure because officials were ordered to listen to this kind of nonsense instead of reputable specialists.”   

If the previous paragraphs seem rather cursory it is because, frankly, it is exhausting to keep going over all this old ground about the nature of regulation. But, also, it is because I think, or at least hope, that it is all becoming rather redundant. That is, Frost, McBride and their ilk will certainly rehearse the familiar lines come what may, and they will be believed by a hard core of Brexit-supporting voters, but the cut through with the general public is probably quite limited. Most people either don’t understand and don’t care, or they do understand and don’t mind.

And why should they? For most consumers, what matters about regulation is that products are safe and reliable, rather than the source of that regulation. At all events, polling suggests that 61% support closer relations with the EU (albeit without joining it, or the single market) whilst 18% are opposed and 21% don’t know. So it seems unlikely that the backlash against the reset agreements is going to have much impact.

Reframing the Brexit debate

However, the re-emergence of Brexit in the news headlines is not just because of the impending reset deal. It is because this has now become entwined with the Burnham ‘conversation’, which makes the stakes much higher. One indication of that is the report that Nigel Farage and Arron Banks are discussing reactivating the Leave.EU campaign group to oppose not just regulatory alignment but any attempt to join the EU. Another indication is an article by Chris Ward, the Labour MP who was closely involved in writing the ‘red lines’ into Labour’s 2024 manifesto, arguing that these should be dropped when the next manifesto comes to be written (a sentiment subsequently echoed by Nick Thomas-Symonds, formerly the ‘Europe Minister’ under Starmer).

Ward’s article is notable for two reasons. One, which was prefigured in my previous post, is that we are really only at the beginning of this latest phase – call it the ‘Burnham phase’ – of the Brexit saga. There is no switch that is going to be flicked to create some new resolution, but rather a grinding process within which the next staging post is going to be the general election in (most likely) 2028, at which point the Labour manifesto position will be crucial to whether such a resolution is even a possibility.

The other important point in Ward’s argument is his insistence that if there is to be a new debate about the UK and the EU it has to be conducted in new terms. And whilst I am not suggesting for one moment that he was inspired by, or even reads, this blog, Ward frames this in precisely the same terms as I have been doing in numerous recent posts, namely the dramatically changed geo-political landscape. It is this, rather than a sour re-hash of the economic costs of Brexit, which should be at the centre of attention.

Taking these two points together enables a third to be made. Whilst it is the case that the general election will be the next staging point in the process, the period until then matters in the sense of shifting debate towards this new focus. If not then, to take an example from the current backlash against the reset, the focus will be on such inanities as what regulatory alignment means for “the Great British breakfast”. One way to respond to a story like that is to unpack its various flaws or falsities (e.g. that sausages will be banned). But what is more important is its utter inadequacy to address the challenges and dangers Britain faces. It’s not just silly, or wrong: it’s irrelevant. If that isn’t established in the coming years then the chances of moving beyond the Brexit debate of 2016 are slim.

From that point of view, Michel Barnier’s recent comments were also rather unhelpful. This isn’t because he was wrong to say that the ‘four freedoms’ are indivisible and that Britain cannot rejoin the single market or the EU without adopting them, which is certainly true. It’s because this point, which he was obliged to reiterate whilst leading the Article 50 negotiations, is now well-established. So whilst it is true that in the immediate aftermath of the referendum some Brexiters either did not understand, or did not accept, this fact, it is now all but impossible to find anyone, of any shade of opinion, who argues otherwise.

Indeed, Professor Anand Menon, outgoing Director of UKICE and incoming Director of the Centre for European Reform [2], makes a wider point. Writing in the Financial Times (£), he urges caution in attaching huge significance to what any particular individual within, or associated with, the EU, however eminent, might say about the prospects for the future UK-EU relationship. He concludes, rightly I think, that it is best to “take whatever you hear about what will happen next with a huge dose of salt. We just don’t know how any UK accession process would play out. Member states are the ultimate arbiters and will make decisions based on their own interests.”

What is at stake?

That is an important point to make not just as a warning against attaching too much importance to the pronouncements of this-or-that individual. It is also, first, a reminder that the EU is, indeed, a union of nations each of which – Brexiter beliefs notwithstanding – retain sovereignty. Any debate about a new relationship must not fall back into the fantasy that only France and Germany matter, or that only Brussels matters. It is also a reminder that what is at stake is something quite stark, and almost cold. There are many idealistic reasons to support the European project but there is no need to be starry-eyed: fundamentally it exists, like any other form of union, because it is, on balance, in the interests of its members that it does so. Or, more accurately, because those interests are shared with others and best served collectively.

It is that which also explains why Brexit is the subject of a renewed debate within the UK. In my own post on 31 January 2020 I quoted an Irish Times editorial saying that “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”. It wasn’t just rhetoric. It is the reason why the government has sought the upcoming reset and it is the reason why Burnham has made it clear that this reset is insufficient. It is also the reason why, as the pillars of the post-1945 international order are crumbling, Britain is, once again, revisiting the question of its relationship with Europe which now means, ineluctably, the question of its relationship with the EU. All that is, or should be, obvious. What is not so obvious is whether or not the impetus for self-harm remains too strong to provide a sensible answer.

 

Notes

[1] This also links to the non-event of the anticipated UK-US trade deal which would likely have entailed substantial divergence from EU SPS regulations. Brexiters are not generally raising this as an objection anymore because it is so obvious there will be no such deal, but they have revived it to suggest that an SPS deal could be incompatible with the UK’s membership of CPTPP. The word ‘could’ is key here because, as Emily Lydgate and Achyuth Anil of the UK Trade Policy Observatory argue, it is far from clear whether this is so and whether any significant practical consequences would arise even if it is.

[2] This may be a good moment to mention the recent announcement that UKICE (the UK in a Changing Europe research centre/ thinktank, a network centred on King’s College London) is to close at the end of this year. It is sad news because, since its foundation in 2015, UKICE has been the preeminent source of reliable evidence and excellent analysis about Brexit in ways which exemplify the value of applied social science research. Speaking personally, its work has been an invaluable resource and I would guess that more than half of the posts on this blog have made reference that work and the many researchers who have been employed by, or affiliated with, the centre. It seems all the more regrettable that it is coming to an end just as Brexit is once more being widely discussed and when it is far from impossible that there will be another referendum in the not-too-distant future.