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

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If all that comes to pass, then it will be the prelude to the next chapter in which it will be possible for a future government, and political culture generally, to take the logical next step and ask the question: why doesn’t the UK join the EU? The issue about the economic studies is simply that, as the BCG report itself states in relation to trade, although without attempting to quantify it, “Brexit has undoubtedly had a significant impact”. Quantification is useful in estimating the extent of that impact but, fundamentally, the point is that whatever other factors are in play, in a world where economic growth is hard to find, Britain, uniquely, has chosen to make it significantly harder by the addition of Brexit to these other factors. For another way to contextualize the magnitude of estimates of lost GDP growth, such as the NIESR figure of 2.5% for 2023, is to compare them with the latest OBR forecasts of what GDP growth will be: 0.6% (2023), 0.7% (2024), 1.4% (2025). The staggering success of Brexit in transforming Britain’s economic prospects has been such that in his Autumn Statement speech the Chancellor mentioned it, well, just once, and that to refer to the fatuous “Brexit Pubs Guarantee”. This is the policy, first trailed in Rishi Sunak’s 2021 budget, and which came into force last August, whereby duty on a pint of beer bought in a pub is guaranteed to be less than when bought in a shop. As Brexit benefits go, this might be thought rather meagre but, in fact, it’s not even a Brexit benefit, as it could have been done whilst being a member in the EU. This is not to say that Johnson could not have become Prime Minister without Brexit (and Cummings). Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog this week has an interesting discussion of this. It has been known for some time that the ERG’s membership has fallen, and the group is much less organized than in its 2018-19 heyday. Its members, or ex-members, are also split, and some of those in government, especially Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker, were closely involved in, and became advocates of, the WF. Indeed, in Baker’s case, that led to the one-time ‘Brexit hard man’ being thrown out of the ERG’s WhatsApp group whilst being described as a “little weasel” by Nigel Farage. As Robert Shrimsley, Chief UK Political Commentator of the Financial Times, observed, “the revolution eats its own children”. Perhaps more to the point, it is the latest example of the difference between taking responsibility for the realities of delivering Brexit and the luxury of espousing Brexit purity from the sidelines.

But for hard core Tory Brexiters, the loathing of Cameron goes far deeper than that. Even before the referendum, many of them regarded him as ‘not being a real Conservative’, meaning too socially liberal, too green, too metropolitan, too globalist. Before Brexit, that was still perhaps a relatively marginal view, but the Conservative Party now is very different even to that of 2015 or even 2017. Brexit saw most of the more centrist and socially liberal Tory MPs expunged or marginalized, and Brexit itself has now morphed from just being about leaving the EU into Brexitism or Brexitist populism.* This is misguided in two ways. One is that although big firms may be better placed to deal with Brexit this doesn’t mean, as McBride blithely puts it, that they “can easily absorb any additional costs”. It is rather that, as Allianz Trade’s Head of Economic Research recently said, Brexit has “become a structural hurdle for UK exports” (the same is true of imports, and will become even more so if the latest promise to introduce UK-EU import controls next January is kept). Many big firms may indeed ‘absorb’ these costs, but they are still real, impacting on competitiveness, prices, employment, tax base or any number of other things. But it is also misguided because of the particular economic, social, communal and, indeed, emotional and psychological costs of Brexit’s impact on SMEs. GB News is also becoming unusually favoured in being granted interviews by Tory Ministers, who sometimes are even interviewed by Tory MPs moonlighting as presenters, with the approval of Ofcom, whilst on other programmes these same Tory MPs – Rees-Mogg again is an example– feature as interviewees. And, of course, GB News is only part of the wider and more established media phalanx pushing similar agendas, especially still influential print titles including the Telegraph, Mail and Express.My suspicion about the shallowness of any conversion to centrism Sunak may have had on Monday was amply justified within two days, following Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling that the government’s ‘Rwanda’ policy is unlawful. That created immediate political pressure for Sunak because, whilst it seems unlikely that Braverman, herself, has a great personal following amongst the Brexitists, her views do, and Rwanda is a policy issue for them to rally around. It's also important to repeat that all these studies do seek to strip out Brexit from other effects, and in doing so they recognize that the UK economy – including the specific issues of trade performance and productivity – faces many challenges other than Brexit, including some that pre-dated Brexit. This matters when reading, for example, another recent report, this time from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) about UK trade performance and policy. For this report, whilst making many good points about the non-Brexit challenges, still finds it necessary to repeatedly make the strawman claim that “most commentary” ascribes the challenges facing UK trade to the single factor of Brexit. In fact, it is hard to think of a single serious commentator on trade or economics who does this, and, manifestly, the NIESR, OBR and CER do not. For the reality, of course, is that the “dream” has imploded quite independently of Johnson. It collapsed under the weight of its repeated encounters with reality. For that matter, even if, under Sunak, government policy is becoming more pragmatic about Brexit, that does nothing at all to stop the continuing damage Brexit is causing, damage still being assiduously charted by Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downside Dossier. At best, it means ceasing to add new damages on top of the existing ones. It has become increasingly difficult to separate out Brexit as a topic from British politics generally, and the politics of the Conservative Party in particular. That has been true for a while, but brought home with force this week with yet another outbreak of the Tories’ long-running civil war. It is a war in which Brexit features as both cause and consequence and, whilst it may have begun with a relatively genteel skirmish between ‘Eurosceptics’ and ‘Europhiles’ in the Tory Party, it has now become a full-blown culture war which has spread way beyond the party, or even Westminster politics. It’s also true that multiple connections exist between Babson Global and free-market think tanks and their staff, many if not all of whom support Brexit. It’s undoubtedly true that they meet, talk, share funding sources, and sit on each other’s governing bodies. It’s true that they are often very secretive, especially about their sources of funding. But that doesn’t mean they are secretly running some ‘live experiment’ on the people of Britain.

There are many good reasons to criticise Brexit, and one thing that its critics can take pride in is that, largely speaking, their case is based on facts, evidence and logical argument. But that is not always so – and a recent explosion of false claims about Freeports and Charter Cities provides a cautionary tale. But, that aside, my point is that, for all that the vote on the Windsor Framework may betoken that we have passed the high-water mark of Brexiter extremism in parliament and government policy, it has metastasized into something wider or more general, but which retains Brexit as its primary point of reference. For that reason, rather than call it Conservative populism or even, taking a tip from Goodwin, the ‘new populism’, it is most apt to call it Brexitism. This book confirms Chris Grey’s status as one of the most acute and authoritative analysts of Brexit. Forensically detailed yet approachably written, this fully updated edition provides invaluable perspective on what looks destined to become one of the greatest public policy disasters of the twenty-first century. If you want to understand why, there really is no better guide to the whole sorry mess.” Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, Queen Mary University of London One is that they aren’t economically effective, being more likely to relocate activity from adjacent parts of the country with little or no net benefit. The other is that they may have disbenefits, especially in facilitating tax evasion and money laundering or in leading to lower environmental and labour rights standards. Moreover, Frost fails to mention that, until July 2020, the UK had the possibility of seeking to extend the Transition Period, something which the EU would almost certainly have agreed. Doing so would have helped the UK to deal with Covid, by taking away the urgency of the negotiations and the imminency of the changes that the end of the transition would bring. It would also have helped the UK to deal with Brexit, by deferring completion of the trade deal until the exigencies of the Covid emergency were over. For although the focus of attention arising from the Hallett hearings is how Brexit got in the way of dealing with Covid, it is equally the case that Covid got in the way of dealing with Brexit. For Frost to use the Transition Period as a defence against there having been such mutual impacts whilst ignoring his government’s refusal to extend the period, which would have reduced or contained them, is absurd.

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Frost, especially, has been vociferous in insisting that this political crisis was also a constitutional crisis, because it enabled, on occasion and most notably with the 'Benn Act' of October 2019, the House of Commons to take control of its business from the Executive. But this was absolutely consistent with the Constitution: Parliament is sovereign, and the Executive only has power to the extent that it commands a parliamentary majority. As regards ‘no-deal Brexit’ in the sense of no WA (the subject of the Benn Act), it did not. Much of this Conservative populism has nothing to do with Brexit directly, and many of its causes and tropes long pre-date Brexit. However, Brexit is now its touchstone, being both an article of faith and the one occasion when one of its causes was voted on and won. That strengthens the longstanding populist idea of speaking for ‘the silent majority’, and by a kind of osmosis the narrow vote to leave the EU became configured as ‘the will of the people’ and then ‘the will of the people’ for Brexit got repurposed to present many other populist causes as if they, too, bore the imprimatur of having been subject to ‘the biggest exercise in democracy our country has ever seen’ (sic). This has not happened suddenly. It began to emerge early in the Brexit process, and by October 2017 I was writing that Brexit was “becoming a battle for Britain’s political soul”. At that time, that may have seemed like hyperbole, or at least pessimism. Seven years later, it seems almost a truism. This leads to a bigger point. For many erstwhile remainers, and certainly for re-joiners, the obvious solution to the damage of Brexit is to re-join the EU, or at least to re-join the Single Market and/or create a customs treaty with the EU. For them, any divergence from EU regulations is misguided in itself, and also an obstacle to future re-joining. For Brexiters, the converse applies: divergence is seen as a good thing in itself, simply for being divergence, and will make re-joining in the future more difficult.