The eighth summer of Brexit: pragmatism without honesty

The recurring word in most commentary on this summer’s Brexit events is ‘pragmatism’. It refers to the range of ways, some quieter than others, in which the government is trying to soften or avoid some aspects of the damage of Brexit. It’s a fair description, so far as it goes, and there is something to welcome in the damage limitation measures it is applied to, so far as they go. It may be further evidence that, as I suggested last March, Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ is finally breaking. However, it is very far from showing anything like honesty about Brexit, and it consists of ad hoc measures rather than a coherent post-Brexit strategy.

Nevertheless, there is an emerging pattern. For, although this summer’s Brexit news stories are quite disparate in nature and detail, they are all variations on the same theme in being attempts to deal with the consequences of the delusion that Brexit meant ‘taking back control’ without admitting that it was a delusion. It is this which means that such pragmatism as there is still lacks honesty about what Brexit actually means.

How independence brought dependence

This is evident in the only event that prompted me to post during this summer break, namely the decision to indefinitely postpone the introduction of the UKCA mark. I won’t write about it in detail again now, but it was always one of the most hubristic examples of the supposed ‘independence’ that Brexit would bring, and although it has long been on the cards that it would be dropped, much cost has been incurred in indulging that hubris. And whilst dropping it is, indeed, ‘pragmatic’ the government, and Brexiters generally, are reluctant to spell out that it means that Britain is now dependent upon CE marking, dependent upon EU approved bodies to test and certify conformity to the standards necessary for this marking, and effectively accepting the same product standards as the EU.

The UKCA announcement was swiftly followed by reports of yet another delay in the introduction of import controls although, incredibly, it was not until the end of August that the government formally confirmed this.  This also creates a dependency in that, in effect, the UK is now dependent upon the EU to ensure that the goods it exports are safe and meet all requisite standards. But the EU has no responsibility and no system to do this for third countries. As I discussed at some length last time import controls were postponed, this creates increased risks because the UK is no longer part of the eco-system of single market institutions that reduce those risks. Hence the British Veterinary Association has warned that this latest postponement “is putting the UK’s biosecurity at serious risk of imported diseases”.

Those and other risks are real, but they are trumped by the fact that Britain simply can’t afford to implement Brexit import controls. This latest postponement was perhaps the first time the government overtly admitted that doing so would cause inflation, especially of food prices, although it wasn’t the first time that it had been admitted it would cause costs. Jacob Rees-Mogg had already conceded that at the time of the previous postponement. Such admissions also at least implicitly acknowledge the costs in the other direction of trade, in other words the EU controls on UK imports which have been in place since the end of the transition period.

There is perhaps some honesty in this, but even that is concealed by the government’s pretence that its border strategy involves “using Brexit freedoms” and the usual tedious, and again hubristic, rhetoric that when import controls are introduced they will be part of a high-tech “world-class border”. Mere competence, of course, is as disdained as it is elusive. It’s a boast which seems all the more vain given that this summer also saw the very quiet announcement of “a new phased approach” (meaning, again, delayed) to introducing the Customs Declaration Service (CDS), the system meant to replace the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) service. CDS is supposed to provide a much more streamlined service so as to mitigate some of the Brexit frictions but, as I noted in a post in January 2021, it has been subject to persistent delays, going back to at least February 2019.

Freedom to do … not much

The decisions about UKCA and import controls are similar in responding to the impracticality and costs of ‘taking back control’ by acting as if Brexit hadn’t happened. It turns out that the best way to use the wonderful freedoms of Brexit is not to make use of them at all. That is unsayable for the government, and on the same day as the UKCA decision was announced, with the timing perhaps designed to sweeten the pill for Brexiters, the UK’s new post-Brexit alcohol duties regime came into force, complete with the populist tag of the ‘Brexit Pubs Guarantee’.

Here, at least, is something that can be said to have been made possible by Brexit, although whether the specific issue of cheaper beer in pubs required Brexit is disputed by breweries, as are its benefits to the pub trade. More generally, most parts of the alcoholic beverages industry are unhappy about the new regime, and, far from cutting red tape, it introduces a far more complex structure of duties and looks set to create strange anomalies in, for example, the pricing of different strengths of wine.

But even if it is to be counted as a result of Brexit, there are only a very small number of these “micro-divergences” in tax policy, and it is unlikely that there will be many more to come, according to KPMG UK’s Head of Tax Policy. Indeed, in most respects Brexit ‘freedoms’ are unused, not just in relation to tax policy divergence but regulatory divergence, as the latest edition of the UK in a Changing Europe’s regulatory divergence tracker, released in July, shows.

This isn’t, as the Brexit Ultras moan, through lack of political will, but again because doing so is too impractical and costly. However, that doesn’t mean that continuing the pre-Brexit status quo of regulatory alignment in most areas is cost-free. Once outside the single market, it isn’t enough simply to be aligned, it has to be formally demonstrated by individual firms selling into the EU, just as it does by those of any third country. That entails both direct costs, and indirect costs in terms of delays – precisely the kinds of costs that single market membership gets rid of. In short, leaving the single market makes regulatory alignment expensive, but regulatory divergence is even more expensive. So we pay for the price of a freedom we cannot afford to exercise, and Brexiters call this sovereignty.

Freedom to … follow

But it’s actually worse than that. Not only can we not afford to diverge, we cannot afford not to follow. Even without the UK making any active choices to diverge from EU regulations, ‘passive’ divergence occurs whenever the EU itself changes regulations. Each time this happens it puts pressure on the UK to shadow the EU, partly because of the costs to British businesses and organizations of not doing so, and partly because in many cases a failure to do so increases divergence between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thus ‘thickening’ the Irish Sea border. As time goes by the significance of this “ratchet effect” becomes ever-clearer (£).

The imminent introduction of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a significant case in point, and we will hear much more about it when transitional implementation arrangements begin this October. As with most things Brexit, the technical details are ferociously complex, but in essence it means a tax on embedded carbon in EU imports of goods in many sectors, with an associated system of trading in carbon certificates, as well as systems of reporting and monitoring. British firms exporting to the EU will be immediately and directly affected (if they are to continue to export), imposing considerable new costs, although reports suggest that most of them are unaware of what is about to happen (£) with CBAM (and with several other major upcoming EU regulatory changes).

At the same time, the UK is planning to have its own CBAM system, although it is unlikely to be ready until at least 2026, and it is possible that in outline it will be very similar to the EU’s. However, unless there is an agreement linking the two systems then British firms will have to show compliance with both. This sounds rather like the ill-fated plan to have ‘our own’ UKCA mark, but UK CBAM is perhaps more akin to the still postponed UK REACH system for the chemicals industry in that both could only link to the EU’s equivalents by agreement with the EU. It is a subtle difference, but an important one. Whereas things like delaying UKCA and import controls, or passive regulatory alignment, can be done by the UK without any agreement from the EU, things like creating linkage or mutual recognition with EU systems overtly make the UK a supplicant to the EU.

Brexit Britain’s supplication

This is evident in a much more politically visible policy area, which has permeated this summer’s news, namely the frenzy over ‘stopping the boats’. Entirely unsurprisingly, the government has discovered that, here too, ‘taking back control’ does not actually have any substantive meaning, and that its policy requires agreements with others – not just the EU, but some of its members, such as France and Italy (£), and other countries, such as Turkey.

Of course, irregular migration is very much an issue across the EU, and were the UK still a member it would have a significant role in shaping EU policy, as well as benefitting from its shared arrangements, such as the Dublin 3 Regulations. That can include the right to return asylum seekers for claims processing in the first safe participating country they reached, and it is reported that Rishi Sunak (£) would like to replicate that right in a UK-EU agreement. Indeed, a returns agreement is something that was sought during the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations, but the EU turned it down. Reportedly, it has done so again.

It is not difficult to see why. The UK, because of its geographical position, is very unlikely to be the first safe country arrived at (unless arrival was by air) and, if it is, unlikely to then be used as a point of departure to an EU country. So a ‘returns policy’, in itself, would be almost entirely one-way, which is hardly in the interests of the EU or its members. Inevitably, Brexiters are incapable of understanding this, with bone-headed former MEP David Bannerman tweeting rancorously about “our so called friends in the EU showing their true colours again”, and an Express article trotting out the usual paranoid and self-pitying line about “Brexit punishment”.

By contrast, the Labour Party’s plan, which hit the headlines this week, is rather more honest and realistic in recognizing that any deal with the EU needs to offer something for both sides (though it can’t be assumed the EU will agree to it). It seems to include offering agreement to take some asylum seekers from the EU, via managed routes, in exchange for EU agreement to accept returns of those arriving in the UK by irregular routes. But the government reaction to this more, well, pragmatic proposal was to denounce it as surrendering control to Brussels and making Britain a “dumping ground” for “illegal migrants” (sic), whilst the Brexit Blob went into predictable hysteria.

This serves to illustrate the continuing dishonesty – as well as the stupidity – that surrounds Brexit, which precludes a realistic post-Brexit strategy. Rather than accept the reality of being a supplicant to the EU, the Brexiters either expect to be gifted what they want, and denounce the EU as malevolent for not doing so, or, if some deal is made or even proposed, they denounce it as ‘surrender’ and betrayal of Brexit. They certainly haven’t grasped that being outside the EU means less, not more, control, something which will be shown again in this policy area if, as a report this week suggests, the UK is about to sign a deal to access the EU Border Agency, Frontex. Such ‘opt-ins’, for all that they may be desirable to both the UK and the EU, are invariably different in character from full membership, and invariably shaped by the fact that it is the UK ‘joining in with’ an EU programme or initiative rather than vice versa.

Something similar applies to the last of this summer’s main Brexit stories, with the UK finally, and belatedly, agreeing terms to re-join the Horizon Europe programme. Again this is widely seen by sensible commentators as a sign of an emerging pragmatism. Yet, as with the other examples, there is little honesty from the government about what that pragmatism means. In particular, not only has the UK’s absence from the scheme in itself done significant damage to British science, but the new associate membership, which operates without freedom of movement of people which does so much to promote easy and flexible cooperation, is inferior to what we had before.

So this is a recurring theme. When particular instances of the damage of Brexit become undeniable, the government sometimes seeks to patch them with some kind of solution, be it a delay, quiet alignment, or cooperation, but there is no honesty about the fact that the ‘solution’ is rarely as good as what has been lost, or, even if it is, that the very need for ‘solutions’ demonstrates that Brexit is the cause of so many problems, and that all the effort used to create such solutions is itself a cost of Brexit.

At the same time, even these sub-optimal solutions come in the teeth of Brexiter opposition with, in the case of Horizon, the Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn (£) sneering at all the scientists and industrialists relieved that there has been at least a fix of sorts, on the grounds that they apparently don’t recognize that “Europe is finished” and is a “failing bloc”. But whatever Brexiters may want to think, the UK wanted and badly needed Horizon, and for all that they continue to rail against the implementation of the Windsor Framework they refuse to see that it was only that agreement that unlocked the possibility of being in the Horizon scheme. In this sense, the EU’s refusal to agree Horizon terms until the Northern Ireland Protocol row was settled was an effective negotiating lever.

Yet a quite astonishingly ignorant Telegraph editorial (£) insisted that the delay over Horizon showed the EU to be irrational and self-harming and that, far from being a supplicant, the UK’s participation was needed to prevent the EU becoming a “scientific backwater”. Indeed, the article suggests, it was a clear case of ‘them needing us more than we need them’ whilst the Express reported it as the EU “backing down”. But even here there is no consistent logic, with still other Brexiters, such as David Frost, warning that the UK will be ‘held hostage’ by Horizon membership.

And this, too, is a recurring theme. Endless claims that the EU is failing, that it ‘needs us more than we need them’, but that, paradoxically, it is able to punish and hold hostage the UK are amongst many examples of how the Brexiters have learned literally nothing from the last seven years. Indeed, now they are making ever more strident calls for a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the ECHR. That may come to nothing, but the vociferousness of the demand, and its reach well into the higher ranks of the cabinet, is an important sign that the madness of Brexitism is alive and kicking, despite the failure of Brexit. This enduring madness sustains the tension, which has existed in various forms throughout the entire Brexit process, between the practical realities of what Brexit means and the implacable demands and fantasies of Brexiters within and outside government.

Brexiters’ continued denial

One sign of this is the way that, even now, the Brexit Ultras continue to claim that Brexit has had no adverse effects on trade and the economy generally, or even that its effects have been positive. This summer seems to have seen an upsurge in such attempts, in ways which are as brazenly dishonest as they are desperate. These attempts have shown all the now familiar tricks, including cherry-picking particular data points (especially relating to the pandemic), citing trade figures without adjustment for inflation, or making comparisons between the UK and the EU (or individual members) rather than between the UK when an EU member and when not.

The latter of these, something to which anti-Brexit commentators are also sometimes prone, is especially misleading because, of course, whether or not a member of the EU, the UK economy is often, if not always, better or worse performing than the EU average, or the Eurozone, or individual EU members (Germany being a currently popular comparator). To see how asinine such comparisons are, consider whether, when the UK was a member of the EU, Brexiters would have argued that the relative performance of the UK and the EU had any implications for the case for belonging to or leaving the EU. Undoubtedly, they would (and probably did) say that if the UK was performing better than the EU it ‘proved’ we did not need to be a member, and were held back by being ‘shackled’ to the EU; but if the EU was performing better than the UK it ‘proved’ we should not be a member as the EU was ‘rigged’ to our disadvantage.

But even comparing the UK during and after membership is not really sufficient. What is necessary is to estimate the ‘counterfactual’ of how the UK would have performed had it remained a member of the EU compared with how it has in fact performed since leaving, the OBR’s being the best-known and most authoritative example. Such estimates are difficult to make, and bound to be imperfect, but although the Brexiters are happy to dismiss all such estimates (£) they fail to provide a convincing one of their own. Instead, they frequently simply assert that Brexit has had a beneficial effect, effectively positing an implicit and indefensible counterfactual, especially by pointing to increases in the nominal value of trade (ignoring inflation, as well as things like unusual energy trade fluctuations, changes in statistical methodology etc.).

The endless and varied kinds of chicanery used to make these assertions has the effect, no doubt intended, of making it exhausting to debunk each individual example. But, even without doing so, it is easy to demonstrate their hollowness. For, crucially, no Brexiter is able to explain how Brexit could conceivably be responsible for increasing trade or economic growth, or how even sustaining their levels could be because of, rather than despite, Brexit. It has increased trade barriers with the EU, and, even if the much-vaunted new trade deals are going to have much value (they won’t), it is far too early for them to have had any impact, as those with Australia and New Zealand only came into force at the end of May, whilst CPTPP membership has yet to begin. Nor can any supposed Brexit boost have come from deregulation since, as noted above, and as Brexiters themselves constantly and vociferously complain, there has been almost no regulatory divergence.

So there is no reason in principle why Brexit could have a positive, or even neutral, effect on trade or the economy generally. Moreover, the claim that it does so flies in the face of what businesses themselves say. Even in the fanatical pages of the Express, an article headlining business backing for Brexit and hostility to any idea of re-joining was replete with examples of businesses saying the exact opposite, primarily because of the ‘red tape’ barriers to trade that Brexit has created. By contrast, there are no examples of businesses for whom trade with the EU has become easier as a result of Brexit. The latter is important, because Brexit was supposed to have a positive effect, not just ‘to not to be (too) negative’. This point is also relevant to the wholly bogus way that Brexiters treat any post-Brexit good news - such as this week’s announcement of BMW’s investment in the Mini plant – as if it were somehow attributable to Brexit. Again, the question is: what investments, if any, have been made that would not have happened without Brexit, and how do they compare with those investments which would have been made, but for Brexit?

So what happens now?

The consequence of the continuing power of this invincible stupidity is a kind of political drift. Where the economic or political costs are high enough, and those affected lobby strongly enough, we see the government seeking accommodations of various sorts to mitigate or minimise some of them, but in cases where the immediate costs are not too high, such as its dismissal this summer of the EU’s offer of formal ‘strategic dialogue’ (£), we see the government pandering to the Brexit Ultras.

This is why the government’s supposed ‘pragmatism’ over this summer only consists of ad hoc, sub-optimal fixes, which may slightly reduce the damage of Brexit in a few policy areas but are constrained by the ongoing ‘conspiracy of silence’ which prevents honesty about the reality even of those fixes, let alone about the abject failure of Brexit across every single policy area. That silence is shared by the Tory and Labour Parties, and it comes from the fear both have of the unquenchable and unreasoning fury of the Brexit Ultras, a fury so hair-triggered that it is provoked even by the waving of EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms. I don’t think we will see an end to the power of the Ultras at least until a few of the high-profile ones publicly admit that Brexit, in principle and not just in delivery, was a catastrophic error.

Even so, it is possible that a Labour government might be able to fashion ‘pragmatism’ into a more coherent strategy, to the extent that it might pursue closer ties with the EU across all policy areas (it will in any case inherit, perhaps by Tory design, some of the present government’s delayed or deferred implementations, such as import controls). At least such a government would not have the dead-weight of Brexit Ultra MPs that makes this impossible for the Tories, and although it would still face the massed ranks of the pro-Brexit media – a taste of which we saw with this week’s furore over its asylum plans - it might, when in power, be more able to resist or ignore their attacks. However, there is little sign that Labour will be any more honest about the costs and limitations of such an approach, since to do so would open up the obvious question of why that approach was not bolder.

Yesterday saw the publication of the revised edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted (and why they were never going to). When the first edition was published, in 2021, the sub-title was perhaps provocative. Now, it is almost a truism, whilst also being a taboo for the main parties. The new edition tells the story of what happened from the end of the transition period up to last June, and concludes that the situation is that “now they can’t agree what to do about it”, creating, at least for now, a political – and national – impasse.

So what happens now? Seven years ago, I returned from holiday and wrote the first post on this blog. It finished with the words “it is this strange new landscape that I will comment on in the months and years to come”, but I did not really anticipate that I would do so for so many years as I have, and certainly didn’t anticipate that the blog would receive the attention it has (for which, as always, I am grateful). The landscape now is just as strange, if not even stranger, although in some ways depressingly unchanged. Entering the eighth year of blogging, I will continue to try to record and analyse it.

Book review: Plus ça change?

Bale, Tim (2023) The Conservative Party After Brexit. Turmoil and Transformation. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-1-5095-4061-5 (Hardback). 368pp. £25

(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’.)

By any reckoning, the last seven years of British politics have been tumultuous, and at least one measure of that is the extraordinary churn of Prime Ministers – five, counting Cameron, since 2016 – and with that four Tory Party leadership contests and two General Elections. The Brexit referendum was the trigger which began this period, and the Brexit process that followed provided much of the content and context that ran through it.

Charting what happened during those years is a daunting and serious task, and in Tim Bale it has a serious and impressive analyst. Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, he has longstanding research expertise in, amongst other things, the Conservative Party. It is this party, and especially its leadership, which is the focus of this superb book. In it, Bale presents an assured, detailed account of the exceptionally complex story of the premierships of May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, with the emphasis on the first two, reflecting the brevity of Truss’s tenure and, at the time of the book’s writing, the newness of Sunak’s.

Yet, whilst being a serious and detailed book, written with the academic rigour that would be expected of the author, it is highly readable. Some Amazon reviews disagree about its readability, so perhaps it depends on what you are used to, but in my view Bale writes crisply and with brio, and for all the command of detail displayed it is never stodgy. There is also a certain amount of wry humour. To give just one example, recording that Truss did not offer David Frost a role in her administration, Bale adds the laconic observation “or at least not one he felt was commensurate with what he regarded anyway as his considerable talents” (p. 271). The ‘anyway’ adds a particular sting.

It is, very much, the story of the premierships both in the sense that these provide the structuring frame of the book and that the focus is largely on individuals. Most obviously that means the leaders themselves, but also what might be called the ‘high politics’ of their tenures. Thus the analysis includes the composition of different cabinets, the coalitions of support in leadership elections and parliamentary votes, the role of advisors, the tactical calculations of party political advantage, the opinion polls and their interpretation, the electoral manoeuvres, and the role of the media.

This is a deliberate choice, flagged up in the introduction, to capture the way that “individuals, and therefore parties as a whole, are as much tactical and reactive as they are strategic and proactive” (p.3). The consequence is, perhaps, to downplay the role of ideology, but it is an approach which is helpful in revealing how much of the Brexit process was haphazard and, certainly, ‘unstrategic’. Anyone who still thinks there was any kind of ‘a plan’ for Brexit will be firmly disabused of that idea by reading this book.

Distance and engagement

That last comment reflects the way that, given the focus of this blog, which in turn reflects my own preoccupations, I approached the book primarily through the lens of Brexit. But, as I read it, I began to see that this is not, actually, a very sensible approach. Of course, as the title suggests, Brexit is a more than major presence, but this is first and foremost a book about the Conservative Party, and that observation, which may seem trite, is an important one. It is not just about delineating the empirical scope of the book but about the way that Bale brings an impressive, and to me usefully disconcerting, perspective, that is at once distant and engaged.

It is distant, in the sense that he manages to stand back a bit from the tumult of the events he describes so that, whilst they are in some sense extraordinary, they can also be seen as ‘business as usual’. So Brexit, rather than being some huge disjuncture in political life, can be read in the context of, and having some of the characteristics of, “the really big splits in the Conservative Party’s long history” (p.3). That point isn’t heavily emphasized in the text, but it is an implicit ‘viewing point’ throughout, and re-reappears right at the end when the possibility of an impending heavy electoral defeat is discussed alongside reminders of defeats in the mid-1940s, mid-1960s, and mid-1990s (p. 294).

So whereas all of us who have lived through the last few years may feel – as perhaps people at any period do – that there is something special and unprecedented about these ‘Brexit years’, Bale gives us a glimpse, at least, of how political historians may well come to write about it. It is the slight jolt that this gives (at least to me) which explains why I referred to it being a ‘usefully disconcerting’ perspective. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Bale provides, perhaps earlier than any other academic, the second draft of the history of Brexit (or, at least, those aspects of it with which the book is concerned).

Yet it is also an engaged approach, in that by delving into the weeds of political tactics and the ad hoc responses to the pressure of immediate events and headlines, Brexit is also re-positioned, but this time as being continuous with the mundane realities of politics and so, in that different sense, again understandable as ‘business as usual’. For example, although this may reflect my own naivety, I was struck by the way that, throughout this account, Tory politicians are shown to have approached Brexit not – or not simply, or even primarily – as a massive upheaval of national geo-political strategy but as an opportunity to gain party political advantage.

So, to give an example within that, whereas I had probably assumed that May would have spent her early days immersing herself in the technical complexities of Brexit, Bale suggests that “the new Prime Minister and her advisers seemed to be seizing opportunistically … on the way Brexit had ripped apart Labour’s already fraying electoral coalition.” (p. 23). Of course, it might have been better all round had my assumption had been right, but Bale’s account is all too plausible.

Similarly, I tend to see events like the resignations of leading Brexiters (e.g., David Davis, Dominic Raab, p.63 and p.72 respectively) as being about their perennial preference for fantasy over reality; or the crucial parliamentary votes over Brexit as being, centrally, about the implacability of the Ultras’ ideology. But, here, although the “near religious” (p.73) fervour of some of the Brexiters features, such events are configured as being at least as much about the perennial issues of party management, careerism, whipping operations, and ‘counting heads’.

A corrective to Brexit-obsessives?

The wider issue these examples point to is that Bale’s analysis is a useful corrective for those who, like me, tend to write, at least implicitly, as if Brexit was pretty much the only political issue of the last seven years. That is just about defensible for the period up to January 2020, when the UK left the EU, but it is simply not true after that. That’s not exactly a news item, even for Brexit obsessives, but I suppose I still had a residual sense that Brexit ‘ought’ to have been central, because it is so important, with other events being seen as a distraction. But Bale’s account suggests to me that, for the political actors themselves, in the press of events, Brexit was not experienced in that way. This may well also be true of voters, and perhaps explains why, to my puzzlement at the time, the details of Brexit were actually rather little discussed during the general elections (or indeed the leadership elections) of this period.

None of this is to imply that Bale downplays Brexit. It is, rather, that he contextualises it, showing how it became imbricated with multiple other strands of politics. To take just a couple of numerous possible examples, Johnson’s initial, and as it turned out short-lived and ill-fated attempt, to protect Owen Paterson from the effects of the lobbying scandal that ended his career was bound up with the latter’s longstanding place amongst ‘Eurosceptics’ (p.215). Likewise, the overlap between ‘lockdown sceptics’ and the Brexit Ultras illustrates how ostensibly different issues were intertwined with Brexit (p. 173). Conversely, no one reading Bale’s account of Johnson’s downfall as Prime Minister (pp. 258-260) could possibly be taken in by Johnson’s own subsequent claims that he had been the victim of vengeful remainers.

So, in all of these ways, Bale’s book is a valuable challenge to Brexit-obsessives - including me and, very likely, many readers of this blog - by providing an account which has an implicit historical distance alongside an explicit focus on the everyday practicalities of politics. It certainly made me think differently. Equally, it could be seen as a challenge to the most ideologically-committed of Brexiters in that, for all they may have believed themselves to be engaged in a revolution, the outcome has been far less dramatic than they thought. Indeed, there’s already a discernible disappointment amongst such Brexiters not just with Brexit but with its failure to usher in a ‘new way of doing politics’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?

It is worth saying that in this respect my reading of the book differs from most, if not all, of the other reviews of it I have seen (e.g. Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian), which makes me wonder if mine is fallacious – though evidently not to the extent of revising it. Most reviews put great weight on Bale’s undoubtedly well-founded suggestion that the Conservatives have “slipped their moorings as mainstream centre-right party” (p.291). Nevertheless, what I found more striking was how, despite everything that has happened, the political process itself, and the terms of political debate, have not dramatically changed. Yes, the norms and conventions of political conduct have been strained and frayed and, yes, political discourse has substantially coarsened and polarised, but the basic contours of both remain recognizable. In terms of the book’s subtitle, then, the ‘turmoil’ is undoubted, but the ‘transformation’ is less clear-cut.

Whether that was Bale’s intention I am not sure but, at all events, he leaves open the question of what is going to happen to the Conservative Party now. That’s wise, because it isn’t yet possible to have a genuine historical distance and so it remains unknowable whether the ‘final draft of history’ (if there could ever be such a thing) will conclude that Brexit marks a fundamental shift for British politics in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, or whether it is only an episode, possibly important or conceivably only ephemeral. My own expectation, for what very little it is worth, is that, assuming defeat at the next election, the Tories will spin off into the weird world of the emergent ‘National Conservatism’ before electoral defeats, and the realities of electoral demographics, pull them back to something more recognizably normal. The only rider to that is that things would change dramatically if the ‘first past the post’ system were reformed in the meanwhile, but that doesn’t seem likely.

Encore!

Overall, this is an excellent book and a hugely important addition to the emergent literature on the politics of Brexit. It is also an exemplar of how academics can and should write for general audiences, something still rarer than it should be.

If I have a criticism, then it is that I would like to have seen more fine-grained analysis of the party membership, and also of party funding. Of course, the huge significance of the membership as a ‘selectorate’ of the leadership is made abundantly clear, as is the way it has all but driven out the relative liberalism of the Cameron period (e.g., pp. 126-127). Even so, there’s still something puzzling to me about just how radicalized the membership seems to have become in recent years, and in the extent to which both its members and its funders seem to have become so out of tune with the mainstream of, especially, business interests.

Moreover, it is curious that they seem to have done so in different ways, with the membership so obsessed with social traditionalism and the funders (I suspect) increasingly reflecting highly untraditional ‘disruptor’ or even ‘disaster’ capitalism. Might this be the long-term unwinding for the always fragile coalition of social traditionalism and economic liberalism that Thatcher’s Conservative Party managed to sustain? Might it reflect the changing nature of British capitalism?

These are questions of political sociology and political economy which perhaps can’t be answered within what I’ve called the ‘high politics’ focus of this book, for all the virtues of that focus. For that matter, perhaps they are questions that would need another book and, if so, then undoubtedly Bale would be its ideal author. Equally, it would be fascinating to read, as a companion volume to this one, his analysis of the Labour Party after Brexit. But, just as the finest performances are greeted with multiple cries of ‘encore’, it is hardly a criticism to conclude, after having read a book, that I’d like to read two more books by the same author.

UKCA: a symbol of the folly of Brexit

I said that I would break the ‘summer recess’ of this blog if a Brexit event of sufficient interest or importance occurred and it has, with the government’s announcement today of an “indefinite extension to the use of CE [Conformité Européenne] marking for British businesses”. It sounds dull enough to make you weep, but, actually, both in and of itself and as an illustrative case, it blows a huge hole in the entire case for Brexit. So it should be a cause for weeping, though not tears of boredom but, first, tears of laughter at the utter farce of what has happened and, then, tears of rage at what it means.

A brief history of UKCA

The origins of this saga go right back to 2019 (£), when the government began to plan for a ‘no deal Brexit’ and realized that one consequence would be for the use of CE conformity assessment marking of products. This is the system whereby many types of goods offered for sale in the EU single market must bear a mark showing conformity to EU safety, health and environmental standards. Crucially, this isn’t just about placing a mark on the product or its packaging, but about registering, at a cost, the evidence that the product actually does meet the relevant standards via a ‘notified body’ within an EU member state (although in some cases self-declaration is possible).

In the face of a possible ‘no deal Brexit’, the government announced that, were it to happen, the CE mark could and would go on being used in the UK until, at some unspecified point, being replaced by a UK system, of an unspecified nature. In the event, ‘no deal Brexit’ was averted, both in the original sense of leaving without a Withdrawal Agreement and the later sense of leaving without a trade agreement. However, in line with the Johnson-Frost ‘sovereignty first’ Brexit, it was still intended that the UK would have what by that time we knew would be called the United Kingdom Conformity Assessed (UKCA) system. During the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) talks, the UK sought a ‘mutual recognition agreement’ as between CE and UKCA systems, but this proved impossible.

At the time the TCA was struck, so much attention was focused on the issue of post-Brexit terms of trade, not to mention on the still-raging pandemic, that what UKCA was going to mean was scarcely recognized outside those businesses affected by it, and not always even by them. But once the transition period ended, and the TCA dust settled, it became clear that manufacturers were going to face dual systems of conformity assessment. I think that this was the first time I mentioned what I called this “especially absurd consequence of Brexit” on this blog, and I have returned to it several times in the years since.

The absurdity was that, at least initially, the actual standards to which conformity would be assessed were in almost all cases identical. So a firm selling identical goods in both Great Britain (GB) and the EU would have to mark them differently, and register their conformity assessment separately. For British exporters this represented costly duplication, which was especially onerous for small firms but no less real for big firms, and created a disincentive to serve both markets. Equally, overseas firms (not only, but including, those of the EU) exporting goods to Britain faced the new costs of UKCA, thus potentially increasing prices or, especially if their UK market was quite small, simply not offering their goods for sale here, thus potentially reducing consumer choice. The situation was even more nightmarish in Northern Ireland where, as discussed in an August 2021 post, the CE mark would continue to be used because it effectively remains in the EU single market for goods, in some cases alongside a new UKNI mark (but not if the good was bound for the EU), but goods made in Northern Ireland that were bound for GB would need the UKCA mark.  

Unsurprisingly, at least to anyone who understood it, the introduction of compulsory UKCA marking has been repeatedly postponed from what was initially going to be January 2022, reflecting both the time and effort needed from businesses as well as persistent lack of governmental clarity about how it would operate, and also the lack of registration capacity. Meanwhile, in February 2022, even Jacob Rees-Mogg seemed to have grasped the ludicrous burden of extra ‘red tape’ it required, although the government continued to insist that it was on course for implementation, at that point in January 2023. Subsequently, in November 2022, that date was extended to January 2025.*

What does the new announcement mean?

It is that latter deadline which has now been indefinitely postponed, with the CE mark now being indefinitely valid for firms to place goods for sale on the UK market (including Northern Ireland), as well as in the EU single market. This doesn’t mean the end of the UKCA mark. Companies can still use it to place goods on the GB market (but not Northern Ireland or the EU) if they are confident that they only sell in GB and are only going to sell in GB. Some such firms, especially if they have already made the transition, may well do so. However, even for these, there must now be a question mark as to the extent to which consumers will recognize and be convinced by what will surely be a minority usage. Moreover, these firms may find that their goods are unacceptable when offered to other UK firms as components in finished goods destined for the EU or Northern Ireland.

I suggested in May 2023 that the writing might be on the wall for UKCA once the government retreated on its plans for the wholesale scrapping of Retained EU Law (REUL). For what that seemed to presage was the abandonment of ideas for widespread divergence from EU goods product standards. This latest UKCA announcement presumably points even more strongly in the same direction since unless the UK continues to adhere to the relevant EU standards then the CE mark will not be achievable. Perhaps there will be some cases where UK standards do diverge and there, too, there will be an ongoing role for UKCA, but it hardly makes sense to tell firms that they can go on using CE marking in the UK if there is also an intention to depart extensively from EU standards.

True, that implies consistency in government policy where there has been little so far. For example, in June 2021, almost unnoticed, it was agreed that UK would continue to participate in CEN (the European Committee for Standardization) and CENELEC (the European Electrotechnical Committee for Standardization), which seemed to imply an intention to remain aligned with EU product standards even though the process for scrapping REUL, which began in September 2022, might have (and, some Brexiters surely hoped, did) implied otherwise.

However, although there was always a strong possibility that CE marking would continue to be valid, it would have been a brave firm which acted on this assumption, so although today’s announcement is a sensible one, in and of itself, it doesn’t obviate the fact that many firms have sent considerable amounts of money (how much will probably never be known) on what has turned out to be unnecessary. It is perfectly possible that some have even already gone out of business as a result. It is also possible that some UK firms have already decided to cease trading with EU customers, or overseas firms with UK customers, and they may or may not now seek, or be able, to revive that trade. In other words, although now abandoned, the replacement of the CE mark with the UKCA mark has already been highly costly.

In this sense, the government’s suggestion that this today’s change of policy is part of its plans to “ease business burdens” and “cut red tape” shows extraordinary chutzpah, if not downright shamelessness. Not only has it already created costs, but to the extent it is now reducing them it is only taking away costs its own Brexit policies have created. That it made a similar suggestion when postponing introducing post-Brexit import controls, currently set to begin this October, gives cause to wonder if these, too, may once again be postponed or watered down.

The bigger picture

The bigger aspect of this fiasco is that it reveals two central features of Brexit. One is just how much unnecessary aggravation and cost has been caused by Brexit hubris and by the rush to get Brexit done. As this today’s announcement shows, it was not a necessity of Brexit to ditch CE marking and it only arose because of the hubristic desire for ‘sovereignty’ and the almost frenzied desire to expunge all traces of EU membership. And even having adopted that position, it was unnecessary and unrealistic to try to do it so quickly, which itself was part of a wider refusal to create a long, or even any meaningful, transition period.

Secondly, and more profoundly, the fact that the government has finally been forced to change policy reveals the utter vacuity of the ideas of sovereignty and regulatory divergence that inform so much of Brexit. Akin to the ‘gravity’ effect of geographical proximity on trade, there is what Professor Anu Bradford of Columbia Law School labelled the ‘Brussels Effect’ which exerts a regulatory pull on nearby, smaller, economies. That applies not just to conformity assessment but to regulation in a more general sense, and explains why, for all the Brexiters’ bombast, there has so far been fairly limited regulatory divergence and what, according to Joël Reland of the UKICE research centre, is a growing trend towards ‘managed divergence’ via UK-EU agreement.

To the extent that the continuation of CE marking implies continuing alignment on many kinds of goods standards it also shows the myth of sovereignty in the Brexiter sense: it seems that in most cases goods sold by UK firms in the UK will conform to many of the standards set by the EU, which also generally means changing as and when the EU changes those standards. Moreover, those firms will in many, perhaps most, cases require assessment to be registered via an EU-approved notified body within an EU member state.

So this is what ‘taking back control’ means in practice: almost the opposite of what it promised. The Mail has described the CE decision as a “another Brexit climbdown” by Rishi Sunak, and it is not yet clear to what extent there will be a backlash from Brexiters. Will the average leave voter care about, or even be aware of, this? Almost certainly not, and there is no reason why they should. But, by the same token, the idea that leave voters either had a burning desire for, or gave a mandate to, the scorched earth theory of sovereignty that Brexiters claimed to flow from the 2016 referendum is also ludicrous.

As for the rest of us, UKCA now stands as a literal symbol – if there is such a thing – of the waste, stupidity, hubris and sheer folly of Brexit itself. In that context, several possibilities suggest themselves for what the ‘C’ and the ‘A’ might stand for, few of which are suitable to be spelled out for younger readers.

 

 

*Note that the various deadlines referred to had some exemptions/ variations, especially as regards conformity assessment marking of medical devices. Also note that, as ever with Brexit, there are all sorts of deeper complexities, qualifications and exceptions in relation to what goods, what standards, and what forms of registration are affected. I’ve tried to skip over these by the use of various qualifiers (‘most’, ‘many’, ‘often’ etc) so as to stick to the main contours of the issue.

Updates (3 August 2023): 

1. The retention of CE marking does not quite mean, as some commentators suggest, that the UK is simply a 'rule-taker' of EU standards. This is because, as mentioned in the text, the UK participates in CEN and CENELEC (and also, though not mentioned, ETSI) as a non-EEA member. As such, it (via BSI) can participate in discussions and vote, and in some very specific circumstances not adopt standards which it didn't vote for. However, it is of course the case that the UK no longer has any say in the wider policy and legislative frameworks within which and from which particular standards may derive. In any case, the sovereignty point in this specific development isn't primarily about standards, it is that it shows the impracticality of a national system of conformity assessment marking and registration.

2. Subsequent to writing this post, it emerged that neither the construction industry nor the medical devices industry were included in the announcement of indefinite postponement. In both cases, unlike the general situation where CE validity in GB was due to end at the end of 2024, these already had later deadlines (June 2025 for construction and various dates in 2028 and 2030 for medical devices). It is not clear if this discrepancy will persist, or what its rationale could be. No doubt more in future blogs.

3. As briefly pre-figured in this post, a couple of days later the government announced a further delay in introducing import controls. Crucially, this was attributed to the potential inflationary effects of doing so, a tacit admission of the extra costs of post-Brexit trade. For discussion of the import control issue, including the risks posed by postponement, see my post of April 2022. Again, no doubt there will be more in future blogs. 

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.