This week in Brexitland, June 3, 2022

1. Why did Tobias Ellwood make the case for re-joining the Single Market? And what does it say about the state of Brexit?

Ever since we ended up with that incredibly awful trade deal with the EU at the end of a long process of Brexiting in December 2020, with Nigel Farage idiotically declaring “the war is over” and Starmer rolling over on it in way that was slightly nauseating, even to someone like me who’d like to see him win the next general election, I have figured it was only a matter of time before a reasonably well known British politician advanced the case for re-joining the Single Market. It makes so much sense, it is completely inevitable, particularly in the face of all of the problems of Brexit, most of which would be solved by Single Market re-entry. However, two things to say on this: one, I didn’t think it would happen for a few years yet, certainly not until after the next general election; and two, I didn’t think it would come from a Tory MP. I have been joyfully proven wrong on both counts.

A few days ago, Tobias Ellwood, MP for Bournemouth East and chair of the Defence Select Committee, wrote an article for The House in which he stated, in no uncertain terms, that Britain should re-join the Single Market. His reasoning? To “upgrade Brexit and ease the cost of living”. Ellwood describes briefly all of the negatives Brexit has brought and then makes the convincing case that being back in the SM would solve most of the problems that have been created.

What helps Ellwood here is that he is of course 100% correct. This was never going to stop the high priests of Brexit attacking him, saying his idea is mad without ever making any genuine arguments against it. Tobias has been subjected to the usual stuff, about how being in the Single Market would mean “accepting rules from Brussels”. You could see a genuine panic amongst them that a Tory MP would, this early into the Brexit period, dare to suggest SM re-entry. It suggests the foundations for Brexit are even weaker than they fear in their quietest moments.

And that’s what hinders Ellwood, career-wise at least. In extremis, this might even lead to the whip being withdrawn at some point nearer than he might think (the Tories like to talk a good game about freedom of speech, but aren’t actually all that keen on it in practice). At the very least, this article of his will severely hurt his standing in the Conservative party in the short to medium term, where full conversion to the Brexit religion is now demanded of all participants.

Yet the fact remains that ending up like Norway would be a fair place to land after the close result of the 2016 EU referendum. Out of the EU, but still in the Single Market. We’d have freedom of movement back, which would be huge, and it would solve all of the NI Protocol issues in one fell swoop. Of course, there are downsides to the Norway model, but Brexit is a bad idea, so what are you going to do? Getting most of the advantages of being in the EU while fulfilling the remit of the referendum seems like a good place to try and bury the hatchet on the culture war around Brexit that simply will not die. I would certainly be happy with that state of affairs and move onto thinking about other things - I would declare, in Farage-like fashion, “the war is over” at that stage. Not that I wouldn’t harbour hopes of full rejoining at some stage, but the desire to harp on about it all would diminish sharply once the bullshit about Brussels dictatorships, American trade deals that will never happen and imaginary fixes to the Northern Ireland issue were dispensed with.

The question then is why did Ellwood write the piece, surely knowing what the effect would be on his standing within his own party. My answer to that is that he might be able to see a future for centre-right politics that isn’t completely batshit mental. Don’t underestimate what Tobias Ellwood has done with his intervention - he has challenged current Conservative orthodoxy and plotted a new course for Tory politics, away from UKIP-land and back towards the people that used to vote for them in droves throughout large portions of the country. Perhaps he sees the long-term gain in being the first Tory politician out of the gates toward what must be where British centre-right politics returns at some point - about free markets and free trade, not bizarre Trumpian parochialism and big state white elephant projects that never seem to come off. If I’m right, Ellwood is a more talented politician than I would have ever previously guessed.

2. What the new visa scheme tells us about Brexit

This week, the UK government unveiled a new plank of its immigration policy, which is based around “high potential individual” routes. What this seems to mean in practice is that graduates of several noted universities around the world will be fast-tracked toward UK visas, should they want them. It’s making it easier for people from elite schools around the globe to live and work in Britain.

What’s so strange to me is that so much of the culture war stuff around Brexit has been about the triumph of the ordinary working person over the international elite, the whole “citizens of nowhere” routine, and yet this visa scheme is about rewarding that same international elite over the common, ordinary person. It’s about saying that someone who gets a degree from Harvard is more welcome here than the 20-year-old kid from France who wants to escape the snobbishness and inflexibility of the French workforce and start his or her own business in open Britain. The Home Office says what’s important in all this is to “put ability and talent first, not where someone comes from”. Except, this all about where someone comes from - those who had the ability to go to Yale or Harvard or Princeton over those who just want to come to Britain to get on in life. The elites over the plebs. Which again, is the opposite of what Brexit said it was going to do, wasn’t it?

Yet even worse than all of this is the way this is being sold as another “Brexit benefit”, when, like almost all Brexit benefits presented by this government, it is something we could have done while still in the EU. As a member of the bloc, we had total control over non-EU immigration - we could have happily started a visa scheme to let people from Harvard come and work here, we didn’t need Brexit to gain that ability. I find it constantly amusing that the only things the government seems able to discover as being “Brexit benefits” are things that are either so minor they are laughable, genuinely bad ideas we should not even consider doing (lowering qualifications for medical staff and taking away agency workers right to holidays spring to mind) or, and this is the most populous category, things that cannot be classed as Brexit benefits given we didn’t need to leave the EU in order to make them happen.

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I’ll be back again next week with the worst of Brexit.