This week in Brexitland, November 10th, 2022

Why Rishi Sunak in Number 10 is the next phase of Brexit’s downfall - and why Prime Minister Starmer is the one after that

As has been written about many times, here and elsewhere, what was odd about the Truss v Sunak Tory leadership contest in the summer was that Truss was billed as the diehard Brexiter despite having campaigned for Remain in 2016, while Sunak was the supposed Remainer despite having always been publicly Eurosceptic. However, I think the Brexiters might have been onto something after all.

I’m starting to see how Rishi Sunak’s premiership is a key phase in the falling apart of Brexit. Not consciously on the part of the current prime minister mind - I have no doubt that Sunak probably believes in the power of Brexit as much as he ever did. Yet he’s proving by his actions that he has taken Brexit to its next definitive phase: one where there is at least some attempt by the government of the day to try and reconcile the rhetoric around Brexit with reality. And as you already know, Brexit always struggles when faced with materiality of any description.

The magic of Truss, despite her incompetence being so apparent to anyone who wasn’t wilfully trying not to see it, was this: she promised the continuation of Brexit as a fairy tale. There was an almost gleeful approach she took to essentially promising not to try in any way to face the problems Brexit had presented us with. Nothing exemplifies this approach better than her line about how she had become a Leaver because the disruption from Brexit had supposedly not been as bad as she thought it was going to be in 2016. This was at the same time as she had declared that we needed an NI Protocol Bill to deal with the disruption caused by the situation Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement had created. Brexit as a fairytale, just like the Brexiters would like to keep it, in other words.

Sunak failed to win over the summer because he slammed this approach from Truss as being unrealistic and destined to cause huge problems. He was proved correct on this point 44 days after Truss had won, when her premiership unravelled completely. He became prime minister after that debacle but he now has a task ahead of him no one is going to ever thank him for attempting to complete, particularly within the Conservative party: trying to find some middle ground between keeping the fairytales afloat and ameliorating the worst of Brexit at the same time, thereby rescuing the British economy.

This double mission has already, only a couple of weeks into his time as prime minister, played out in several ways. One is the manner in which Sunak was making noises last week that sunset clauses for EU derived legislation would be ditched. Then yesterday, an official Downing Street spokesperson said, "We are legislating for this currently, the Bill is progressing through parliament, there are no changes,” when asked about the 2023 sunset clause. Just to explain this briefly: the idea is that the government will identify the laws that arose due to an EU Directive and then spend time trying to look at ways to dick around with them to make them more “UK friendly”. But ultimately, if they don’t get to them all by the close of 2023, then the rest of these laws just fall off the books completely.

We were in the EEC, then the EU for 47 years. Over that time period, many things were formulated at EU level and because of our membership, we didn’t separately legislate for them. Had we never joined, we still would have needed some legislation around most of what was covered by the EU Directives. What I’m saying here is we risk losing stuff we actually need; where we would have had something similar covering the same terrain had we never joined. The 2023 sunset clause, if it actually goes ahead, will create additional constitutional and then commercial chaos, leading to less foreign direct investment, a lowering of GDP, far less growth - you know, all the things the Tories endless say they care most about stopping.

Or take Northern Ireland. You sense the same push and pull there, the desire from Sunak to come to terms with the EU on this and just put it all to bed, but the understanding at the same time that the Brexit loons within his party won’t wear this and so he needs to sound Johnson-esque on the matter at times. But at least the former impulse is there, the understanding that for the sake of the country some practical resolution must be found. Sunak is the first prime minister since Theresa May at the very, very least to feel this impulse at all, so although this isn’t much progress, it is progress of a kind.

Which brings me to the final part of this piece, where I have to say something many of you probably won’t like. One of the reasons I have consistently said Starmer’s acceptance of Brexit is necessary is that he needs to make the next general election not be about Brexit, at least from Labour’s perspective. That’s still true. But I also think a Starmer government that goes one step beyond Sunak’s, from being sort of half committed to trying to iron out the worst of Brexit, while still half in the ERG bar drinking the acid-laced Kool-Aid, to being a government fully committed to taking Brexit from unicorn-Liz Truss land to full-blown reality, is necessary. A government, a Labour government that attempts to genuinely make the best of the UK being outside the EU, with no ideological attachment to the terrible Johnson UK-EU trade deal, or even any aspect of the Brexit religion itself, one that simply, objectively tries to do the best we can outside the EU and indeed, the single market and customs union is an unfortunately required next step in the ultimate destruction of the Brexit project.

As much as I wish we could at least join the single market again in the next five years and get round this step, I don’t see a way for that to happen. I think we need a government that actually tries to make the stupid thing work for real so that enough people who are still on the fence or even lightly pro-Brexit can at last see that the whole thing was a genuinely terrible idea. I also think we need Labour to give Brexit a real go in government in order to gain the credit to be able to say it has definitively failed at some point. Whether they will do that some day or not, I don’t know, but I have to think that if they win the next election and the one after that - and by then, the polls will probably be around 70% in favour of rejoining - that they’ll see the political writing on the wall. In the meantime, the conversation around Brexit will gradually change (it’s already changing now, in fact).

Sunak is the next phase of Brexit, whether he realises it or not. The bluster is still there, but the doubts shine through, with a clear desire to move on from the whole debacle but it being clear that too much of his party do not wish to do that in any way, shape or form. This is a clear stage on from Johnson’s orthodoxy and Truss’ fundamentalism. Brexit is melting - but slowly.

Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so. I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.