This week in Brexitland, October 21st, 2022

1. Brexit and Britain’s chaos and declinism

No one can look at the events of recent days in Westminster and feel pride at what is happening to our country. It became clear that Liz Truss simply did not have what it took to be the prime minister and she mercifully resigned. This went beyond any ideological considerations; she just did not have the necessary skills to do the job at anywhere near the required level.

The question of Brexit rears its head in all of this, with Remainers making the clear link between the disaster of the Truss premiership and the vote to Leave the EU in 2016. Leavers, as ever, attempt to argue that all of this chaos has nothing to do with Brexit, undermining this thesis by simultaneously claiming that we are facing a “Remainer coup”, which suggests Brexit definitely does play a factor.

One of the things that the Remain campaign found extremely difficult in 2016 was framing the argument around why the UK should stay in the EU without having to talk about the country’s role and position in the world in negative terms. As we are discovering now that we have left the European Union, the dream the Brexiters had of a revamped United Kingdom, out of the EU and able to retake some kind of exalted position on the world stage, was dangerously false. The fantasy that departing the EU could free Britain up to change the way world trade functions and become a power commensurate with the United States of America was just that.

This delusion goes some way towards explaining why the latest thing that some Conservatives are reaching for is the possibility of bringing Boris Johnson back as prime minister. That’s almost Brexit in a nutshell - while it was presented to us by Leave campaigners as the entering of a brave new world, what Brexit has really always been about, to possibly everyone in the UK apart from Dominic Cummings, is nostalgia and a desire to retreat back into Britain’s glorious past. Having Boris back in Number 10 is just the latest comfort blanket of nostalgia the Brexiters wish to wrap themselves up in.

I liken the choice to stay in or leave the European Union in 2016 to this: you’re fifteen years old, living with your parents in a boring suburb and you’re desperate to get out. Your parents are mostly fine but you sense there’s a great big world out there, waiting for you.

You run away from home. And what you find is that one, the world is full of peril you vastly discounted and two, you had things pretty good at your parents’ house. All your needs were taken care of, and you’ve jacked that in to live on the street. Eventually, you have to admit that your own personal Brexit was a bad idea.

My biggest fear now is that leaving the EU has permanently damaged Britain’s ability to be something truly great. Our role as the link between America and continental Europe has been destroyed by Brexit, as is clear by the Biden administration’s nonchalance in talking Britain down; being outside the Single Market has exposed how reliant on goods produced outside of our shores we truly are. And I often fear that the declinism Truss spoke of in fear of is unavoidable now. This week, we as a nation were very much like that teenager who ran away from his suburban home only to find ourselves in a surreal drug den, confused, surrounded by discarded needles, wondering what the hell happened over the last 24 hours.

Yet perhaps decline isn’t inevitable. First things first, the Conservative party has demonstrated definitively now that it cannot govern. I don’t mean it cannot govern well, I mean it cannot govern at all. It is too riven with factions, too split in all sorts of ways that cross political and social boundaries to be able to come together with anything like a coherent plan and strategy for how to get the country out of the mess it is currently in, a situation that is mostly the making of successive Tory governments. Whichever Tory MPs becomes the next PM, I can’t see how they bring the party together enough to do anything meaningful. The right despise Sunak and will go out of their way to see him fail; if Johnson somehow makes it through, the whole party will blow apart within a few days; Braverman would be Truss 2.0, perhaps lasting even less time in Number 10; Mordaunt would be its own form of Tory declinism, limping into the next general election only to get decimated.

We need a general election and for Labour to win a majority, preferably a sizeable one. I know some of you reading this would prefer in your hearts a hung parliament with the Lib Dems coming into play, but the reality is this would be unwieldy and would not last, meaning the Tories might come back into government before they’ve even begun to sort any of their issues out.

After that, the UK needs to re-enter the European Single Market. This is inevitable and needs to be campaigned for openly and vocally the moment we’ve taken care of the first order of business, i.e. placing the Tories back into opposition. Decline will not be truly reversed while we are outside of the SM. This will begin to be understood by more and more people, inside and outside of the Westminster bubble, as time goes on.

Doing these two things as soon as possible would make the prospect of the UK re-energising itself and recovering its position in the world a running possibility. The only problem is, it’s difficult to see how either of those two things mentioned above happen all that quickly. The Tories will avoid a general election as long as possible and Labour won’t even start talking about single market re-entry until at best a few years into their time in government. That means, in a best case scenario, we seem to be five years away from seriously contemplating this.

Does Great Britain have that much time to spare? I have to hope so since the alternative is too much to bear thinking about.

2. Trade between UK and EU has massively declined

A report out this week from the Irish think tank ESRI (the Economic and Social Research Institute) called “How has Brexit changed EU-UK trade flows?” answers the question posed in its title in a very negative way for Britain. UK trade to the EU has declined by 16% against what would have been considered normal if we’d stayed in the EU. To be clear, the report appears to take into account all mitigating factors, like Covid and Ukraine.

This is fairly intuitive - in fact, I’m sort of surprised the number isn’t worse. When you put up trade barriers between you and a partner you previously traded openly with, trade is logically going to fall as a result. What’s more interesting to me about the report is that it finds that trade from the EU to the UK has declined by 20%. This feels weird because at present, the government is not enforcing checks on goods coming into the UK from the EU mostly to avoid this very decline. Yet it is happening anyhow. Trade in both directions, between the UK and the EU, has sizeably diminished.

I believe this gets to the heart of something that is usually difficult to quantify about Brexit but is nonetheless key to understanding it: the role basic psychology plays in how Brexit has turned out. It’s possible that a lot of firms in the Single Market planned for the trade barriers to be even worse than they have turned out to be and therefore made plans in a different direction. In other words, the feel of Brexit made continental firms involve themselves in less trade with the UK than they did pre-Brexit because of the anticipation of what the difficulties of trading with a post-Brexit Britain might look like. New supply lines get set up and stay that way.

Some Brexiters would argue that this only proves that Brexit would work if people saw it differently and acted accordingly. This, however, is in fact an idiotic argument, particularly for anyone coming from the centre-right or the right. Communism would have worked if everyone had seen it differently and acted accordingly. Any number of things would be possible if human beings were fundamentally different than we are, but planning public policy around any of these fantasy versions of ourselves would be deeply stupid. And yet, that’s a lot of what the argument for Brexit amounts to - if only people were different, leaving the EU would have worked out beautifully.

Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. I’ll be back next week, as ever, with the worst of Brexit, whoever the prime minister is by that point.