Brexit Unfolded: How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

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It’s no good Brexiters constantly (and, actually, inaccurately) saying that ‘this was the biggest democratic exercise in British history’ and then expecting us to forget all those promises. It’s not just that in some relatively minor ways the UK has chosen to diverge from the EU, it is that EU regulations themselves are constantly changing, but with no UK commitment to track them (or to be bound by any disputes arising from them) or any process to do so, or even the state capacity to create such a process. We shouldn’t by the way, let the Brexiters off the hook by saying ‘not yet’, given that David Davis, when Brexit Secretary, claimed “it will be possible to secure bilateral trade deals with the rest of the world that are larger than the value of the EU single market within two years”. But, more importantly, it will require a repudiation of the systemic factors that lay behind Brexit. But the fact remains that there are now at least four major counterfactual estimates, from the CER, the NIESR, the OBR and, now, Cambridge Econometrics which all show that Brexit has been damaging, albeit with a range from GDP (or in the latter case GVA) being 4% lower than it would have been to 10% lower by 2035.

Nor is the issue just one which affects those who have not applied for, or not yet been granted, ‘settled status’. Moreover, whilst the decline in the number of clinical trials undertaken in the UK began before Brexit, its continuation has been attributed in at least some part to Brexit. According to the3million, the main campaign group for EU citizens living in the UK, at least 140,000 people are in Maria’s situation of having Certificates of Application, but awaiting the outcome. This is the exact opposite of the central Brexiter proposition about trade, which is that the EU has a declining share of world economic growth and so, ‘unshackled from the corpse’ of the ‘EU protectionist racket’, the UK would re-orientate towards the fast-growing areas of the world.In fact, the reason the Brexiter proposition has failed to materialize is because it was always a fallacy, for multiple reasons. Of all those whose lives have been damaged by Brexit, EU citizens who were living in the UK, most of whom were not even entitled to vote in the referendum, along with UK citizens living in the EU, some of whom could not vote, have surely been the worst and most directly affected.

The reason why the EU insisted that Citizens’ rights must be dealt with in phase one was because protecting those rights was very high on its list of priorities – higher, perhaps, than protection of UK citizens’ rights was to the British government. The latest trade figures show that the percentage of UK trade done with the EU is now higher than before the referendum, at about 53. However (although, really, it is another aspect of the same basic issue) the situation of post-Brexit Britain is worse still than that of largely maintaining alignment with single market standards whilst not reaping the benefits of single market membership. Now, he is quite ludicrously* castigating Keir Starmer for having been Director of Public Prosecutions when the postmasters were being prosecuted and, of course, he made much of his ‘victimization’ when de-banked by Coutts. What, to my discredit, I’ve discussed less often is the third of the phase one issues, Citizens’ rights.I don’t think that point is affected by Rachel Reeves’ mention of the negative impact of Brexit this week which, although of note, seemed more aimed at the political chaos around the UK’s departure from the EU rather than at Brexit itself. Certainly the tide went out on the Rwanda Bill rebellion, with only eleven Tory MPs – dubbed the ‘New Spartans’ by oddball ex-MEP David Bannerman – voting against the government. And perhaps there is a harsher diagnosis here: it’s easy enough to join in with the baying crowd of condemnation now that there is such a crowd, but rather more difficult to do so when the cause was unfashionable and the outcome had to be fought for. This explanation is partly based, as with some other examples in the article, on the idea that ye olde Englishe measurements are somehow ‘natural’, and so “what most people like”.