This week in Brexitland, July 11, 2024
How the general election result killed Brexit - but its corpse may be with us for some time yet
The main feeling I get from the Westminster bubble at the moment is shock. No one yet knows how to deal with the new landscape and different people are dealing with this is in different ways. For instance, some commentators and politicians are trying to pretend like Labour didn’t really win (these people are the most confused, of course). Some are insisting that the election result proves what they’ve been saying has been right all along - even if they just lost their formerly safe Tory seat. The right-wing press appears to have had a complete nervous breakdown - I didn’t think the Telegraph could get more deranged than it was pre-general election and I have been proven definitively wrong on that one.
Just as Brexit wasn’t discussed by almost anyone during the whole of the campaign, so it is that we can’t discuss it in anything approaching rational terms now. This is because everyone knows what’s just happened. Brexit is dead. By that I don’t mean we are magically back in the EU, just that the concept of Brexit, the ideology of Brexit, is dead. Some people will point to Reform getting 4 million votes as proof against this. I would counter with two things: one, they only got five seats and it is difficult to see how they could ever get more than 15 under First Past the Post; two, I would even go as far as to say that them doing as well as they did in of itself proves that Brexit is dead. Reform’s relative success, married to the Tories being destroyed, demonstrates that Brexit can only exist as a magical concept, something that once it touches reality, falls to pieces. Brexit, like communism, can only succeed in the imagination of its adherents.
Labour know this but are scared of several things. One is that they have promised to “make Brexit work”, and as much as that probably helped them win, at least in theory, they are now shackled to that corpse. They know they need to at least try (and as I have argued in the past, Labour actually trying to make it work is an important step in Britain rejoining the EU eventually). Another thing Labour are scared of is Reform. They shouldn’t be, but they will, at least early on in this parliament. It’s possible that the whole Reform thing blows apart spectacularly in public over the next couple of years (or sooner) and this makes Labour relax a little. Even if this happens, I still think the final thing Labour will be worried about on the EU relations front is this idea that a significant chunk of their electorate voted for them again because they “accepted” Brexit, and they’d be scared of losing Brexity seats if they approached anything that was too Remainer-flavoured.
Of course, the Tories could discover their salvation if they gave up on Brexitism altogether. If they could see that it only helps Farage, and that all those seats they just lost to the Lib Dems would return to them next election if only they said that Brexit had been a mistake and that we should at the very least rejoin the single market. It would immediately repair their damaged reputation to a large degree - and they could take a lot of the country with them who aren’t quite in that space yet. If the Tories admit it was a bad idea, it would allow a lot of other people to finally admit it as well.
The Tories doing this would instantly put pressure on Labour. With their voters being somewhere around 80% in favour of rejoin, Labour would struggle to keep up the “make Brexit work” line in the face of a suddenly pro-European Conservative party. “Make Brexit work” only functions as a result of the right continuing to sound like stoned cult members on the topic, so if they turned around and got sensible all of a sudden, it would call Labour’s bluff in a hurry.
But, let’s be honest here, this isn’t going to happen. The Tories are going to choose Badenoch or Jenrick or Patel as the next leader and whichever one it is, it will be a total, complete and utter disaster. They will languish in the teens in the polls, Reform probably ahead of them, and they will constantly wonder why this is while they regurgitate Faragisms with around one-tenth the conviction and smoothness of his Farageness himself.
That’s why Brexit is dead, but we’re going to be living with its corpse for a while. No one in SW1 is ready to admit that it’s dead and we should do something about that. They’ll just complain about the smell and try and spread some blame for it anywhere but onto themselves. One day, Westminster will realise Brexit is dead. It could be a painfully long wait though, all things considered. But you never know. We could get lucky somehow. We can always hope.
Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, and I’ll be back next week with tales of Brexit’s corpse in action.
July 4th was fantastic night. I am over the moon about the political impact. We are suddenly being governed by professionals, experts and grownups. Oxfordshire has gone from true blue to a LIbDem stronghold or Labour, much as the councils outside of Oxford and Banbury towns, which remain Labour.
The Tories knew that all the Oxfordshire seats they held were all vulnerable and yet there was almost no ground game visible. I think I received 3 leaflets from them, probably via paid deliverers and the Royal Mail, there was no visible door knocking and I only saw one Tory poster, a giant one, as only appear at the homes of senior figures. They have relatively few councillors left and almost no activists. The Tory Party is now mainly a pool of donated and dodgy money, bidding for the attention of needs of multi millionaires and billionaires, or developers seeking planning permission. That pool of money as well as public funds available will now largely dry up.
With Farridge's mob splitting the right and yet a merged version being a nasty death knell for them in much of Britain, they are a long way down a hole. Labour's majorities in seats are often small, but they have so many of them and the ability to call on the LibDems and others if they should need to after the next election. Also, the demographics for the Tories are poor for the under 65's and terminal for the under 50's, which are only going to get worse in years ahead. Meanwhile, the LIbDems have probably not topped out their potential and could take further Tory seats.
A new era has dawned and Europe will have to play a bigger part.
Labour should make a big deal about agreeing to Reform’s demand for a referendum on changing the voting system - and tag an EU advisory ref on exactly the same day.