This week in Brexitland, October 27, 2022

Does the assent of Rishi Sunak into Number 10 spell the end of the Brexit “dream”?

One of the many strange things about the Sunak v Truss contest for prime minister this summer was that Truss, who had campaigned for Remain in 2016, was touted as the uber-Brexiter, while Sunak, who had campaigned for Leave in 2016, was the supposed Remainer, despite the fact that he has never publicly wavered in his support for Brexit and has actually been a Eurosceptic since primary school.

Some commentators said this was the ultimate example of “Brexit as a vibe” - that Truss was somehow just more intrinsically Brexity in feel than Sunak, in a manner that is difficult to pin down exactly, despite whatever their actual positions on the UK’s relationship with the European Union over the years have been. I think there is something to that. Yet I believe a larger issue was at stake, one now highly relevant to Sunak’s nascent premiership.

The Liz Truss pitch to the Tory members was basically this: so far, Brexit hasn’t gone as well as we’d hoped because we didn’t use the opportunity leaving the EU provided us with to tear up the old way of doing things. ‘The Orthodoxy’ which is beloved by ‘The Blob’ has been holding us back and needs to be eliminated as step one. I will do that and get us to those sunlit uplands; I will complete the revolution.

This is exactly what most members of the Conservative party wanted to hear, at least at the time.

Sunak’s approach was old school Tory, and by ‘old school’ I mean any Tory government that has existed from the formation of the party until somewhere around 2018. We are facing an uncertain time in international politics and economics. Markets are fluctuating wildly. There is a war in Ukraine. Actioning a load of tax cuts, particularly for the wealthy, when we are going to have to be bailing people out of their energy bills using the Treasury coffers would be deeply unwise and cause a negative reaction from the markets.

Our current prime minister turned out to be true in everything he said. However, it was exactly the opposite of what the members wanted to hear back then, all those weeks ago, and that’s why he lost to Truss. The ‘sovereignty’ Brexit was meant to confer upon the United Kingdom has grown in the minds of the Brexiters to mean that the British government should be able to do anything it wants so long as it is roughly in line with what the British people desire. Nothing, not even the free market itself, should hold us back from having whatever we so choose. Brexit, it seems now, was meant to restore the UK to something approaching empire status, with the ability to push other countries, even the US, around at will.

Of course, the Truss disaster exposed this fantasy for what it is. And now Sunak is in Number 10 and his basic shtick is that he’s the grown up who is going to fix this mess and make everything better again. Or at least, as good as it can be given the circumstances.

Except, the major thing he can’t touch at all is anything to do with Brexit, which means the major levers available to fix our economy are ones he must ignore. In fact, we come back now to the fact that Sunak has always believed Brexit was the right thing to do - and during the previous leadership campaign, he even constantly championed things like ‘Brexit freeports’ and other supposed ‘Brexit benefits’.

He says he wants to get rid of the fantasy politics and economics, but he himself clings to it with his insistence that Brexit can come good somehow. It’s not the same level of delusion involved in the Truss version of Brexit - hers being that leaving the EU somehow confers onto the UK the magical ability to create its own physical reality, one where the citizens of Great Britain and Northern Ireland can bend physics to its will - yet it is a version of Brexit delusion nonetheless.

This devotion to his own version of Brexit does not stop Tory members going on about Sunak as a “globalist” or superimposing the new prime minister’s head on top of a snake. Anyone who doesn’t demonstrably buy into the fantasy that Brexit means Britain now rules the world is ripe for take down. Brexit created the situation Sunak faces at the moment in that the Conservative party has never been able to come together again after the EU referendum. The vast majority of those Tory MPs who campaigned for Remain in 2016 have since vocally embraced the idea that Brexit had to happen - but that’s not the same thing as buying into every aspect of what the Brexit cult demands. As Sunak found out during the summer, simply to assert the basic fact that we live in an interconnected world with money markets that are out of the UK government’s control is to blaspheme the church of Brexit.

This means that Sunak was expected by huge chunks of his party, almost unconsciously, to make several cabinet choices based on Brexity-ness as opposed to simply picking the most qualified and experienced people for the jobs in question. And what happened as a result? There was some good there, most notably, Jacob Rees-Mogg making a long deserved retreat to the backbenches. However, there was a lot of very bad as well, with Raab getting the Justice portfolio again, presumably to try again to inflict a British Bill of Rights on us all. To add insult to injury, Raab was also made Deputy PM. But the worst hire by miles was Suella Braverman getting to be Home Secretary once more. This, again, only seems possible in a post-Brexit world, one where the numerous faults of Braverman can be overlooked on account of the fact that she carries so much weight in the party due to her inherent Brexity-ness.

This week, a poll on our relationship with Europe had 61% of the British public wanting to rejoin the EU, with 39% opting to stay out. Some Europhiles in the UK will take this as a sign that the Labour party should start being vocally anti-Brexit, even pledging to take the UK back into the single market or even further, full membership again. This is to misread the situation. One thing that pro-Europeans have on our side is time. The younger a person is in Britain, the more the likelihood of them wanting to rejoin the European Union increases dramatically. In five years time, I think we’ll be getting regular polls putting rejoin on 70%. When that happens, then we can start agitating. To do so ahead of time simply risks a repeat of 2016-2019, when the pro-European movement ended up with exactly what it did not want. We’ll get there, guys. Everything is going our way. Just exercise a little patience.

And while you’re doing that, watch as Brexit destroys the premiership of yet another Tory leader, the fifth in a row. For it is inevitable that Sunak will be politically ripped apart by the same contradictions that plagued his predecessors - we are already seeing that happen and it hasn’t been a week yet. Which proves this truism: whatever form of Brexit you subscribe to, it won’t work out for you in the end.

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