This week in Brexitland, November 2, 2023

There are two logical paths for Britain to take from here. Unfortunately, neither are politically possible

As a country, Britain is stuck. Brexit was advertised as the way out of this rut back in 2016; even the most ardent Brexit supporter would have to admit that this hasn’t happened. I think I’ve concluded why we’re marooned in a less than ideal place - but not how we manage to get free, which unfortunately, as I will explain, is a next to impossible task given the current state of British politics.

I believe there are two clear paths the country could embark upon from here. Well, there’s actually three including “let just keep muddling along”, which is almost certainly the path we’re going to be taking. But there are two basic shapes of direction we could go in if we genuinely wanted to escape from the place we’re in right now and give the country a path to something different.

The first is to pursue a pro-growth agenda wholeheartedly. This would be where we decide to build, build, build, expand, expand, expand - not just housebuilding but infrastructure construction as well, all done on an industrial and unprecedented scale (for Britain, at least). New towns, even new cities. We expand the economy as much as we practically can do.

This has elements that please the right and in fact, they are the ones who most explicitly talk about growth as being a positive (Liz Truss might have mentioned it once or twice). The problem is that the right in Britain are completely unable to accept the parts of going for broke on growth that would entail things that they really don’t like, including several things they never shut up about being adamantly against.

Building a lot of new things would require many skills that are in short supply in this country and beyond that, a lot of people we don’t currently have to do all kinds of work. This means immigration. It almost certainly means a lot of immigration, at least short term wise. I don’t see a way around this - people from places other than Britain would be required given the scale and ambition of the project. And yet, the right is pretty much united in being anti-immigration, one of the few things they all agree on, even though they supposedly all want growth as well. It would also require building a lot of infrastructure, like say, a high speed rail that zips across the country. And the right have united in killing that project off as well.

On the other hand, large parts of the left actively don’t want growth, a lot of times for supposed ecological reasons. And yet they want immigration to increase, even though that only makes sense if we’re growing the economy to accommodate the growth in population.

Now, before I get to the second logical path to choose for the country, I want to lay down my cards and say that the growth path is the one I distinctly favour. I like growth, I like high speed rail and I like immigration. So, there are no paradoxes here for me to internally resolve.

The second logical path to go down for Britain is a zero growth strategy. We accept that what we favour as a nation is containment and certainty, with economic growth be damned. We accept that Britain is what it is now, a large European economy that is in relative decline and whose importance will fade as the next few decades go by - and that we are perfectly fine with that. We care about Britain being a green and pleasant land more than anything else.

This path would require limiting immigration as much as possible. After a while this should become straightforward: people will eventually stop coming to Britain, as the job opportunities become non-existent. There is no point in being an economic migrant to a country whose economy is imploding. Taking this path, people in the UK will be poorer over all, but there will almost certainly be a lot more cultural homogeneity (as in, England will feel more English, whatever that might mean in practice). The streets should get cleaner. Public policy easier to manage as the choices narrow.

Many on the right weirdly gravitate towards this vision emotionally but not when it is spelled out what it actually entails since it is basically their most hated word made flesh: socialism. That’s what we’d become under this second path, a socialist country. Socialism in one country, if you will.

Socialism is the best form of government if you want to stop immigration. This isn’t just theory either - the socialist governments of the 20th century did most things badly, but they did do stopping people from coming into their countries (or leaving them, to be fair) extremely well. It’s easy to accomplish if you’re not running a liberal democracy.

I don’t like Path Two at all. I don’t like the jingoism and flat out racism that I believe lies at the heart of it. As I say, I don’t like socialism either. But at least explicitly going down this path has an innate logic to it; it is a direction, however much it’s not my cup of tea.

Spoiler alert: we’re not going to take either path any time soon because no one is interested in resolving the political paradoxes that lie within each of them. Liz Truss’ premiership imploded in less than two months because she went charging ahead on Path One without bothering to come to terms with the things she’d have had to embrace to make it work. If a government tried either of the paths I outlined above without resolving the issues as described, they would implode just as quickly.

Bringing this all back to Brexit for a moment: what’s so funny is that we could have done Path One while still being in the EU, but there’s no way we could have done Path Two whilst remaining a member. We couldn’t have limited immigration, just for a start, and EU competition laws would have crushed our ability to run the economy in a purely socialist fashion. As a passionate Remainer, I’ve always disagreed with Brexiters of all stripes, but at least the left-wing ones like Mick Lynch are logical in their reasons for having wanted to leave the EU. The right-wing Brexiters are the ones getting constantly slapped with their own contradictions.

In conclusion, whatever government comes next, either Starmer (as seems likely) or another round of zombie government under Rishi Sunak, we will take Path Three, ie muddling along as best we can, not making any sudden movements. The other two paths are too difficult and require too much forward thinking, breaking out of moulds and being happy to borrow things from both left and right at the same time. And sadly, we won’t even have membership of the European single market to cushion the blow.

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