Brexit Unfolded: How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

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Of course Brexit, in the literal sense of the UK not being a member of the EU, will not simply die. It will continue unless it is reversed, and as I argued at the end of last year that will be a marathon not a sprint. In brief, it would require a government to be elected with a manifesto pledge to hold a referendum, which almost certainly isn’t going to happen in 2024, so would be 2029 at the very earliest. Personally, I think that the entire British polity has been so scarred and traumatised by the 2016 referendum that it will be much longer than that before any government contemplates repeating it. Either way, if and when it happens, that referendum would have to be not just held but won by re-joiners. I decided to take a couple of weeks off blogging in anticipation of a quiet period for Brexit news over Christmas. It wasn’t the most astute of predictions given David Frost’s resignation on 18 December, but perhaps there’s some value in having had a few days for the dust to settle on that before commenting on it. Firstly, the hard-right, deregulatory, ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ Brexit (not that they ever understood what ‘Singapore’ would mean) is, for now and the foreseeable future, off the political agenda. I have consistently argued, and taken quite a lot of flak for doing so, that those remainers who insist that ‘this was always the real agenda of Brexit’ make exactly the same error as those Brexiters who insist that ‘this is what true Brexit means’. Both miss the point that Brexit had multiple and contradictory meanings, and it could develop in multiple different ways. However, that’s not to deny that Brexit most certainly could have gone in the hard-right direction, and under Liz Truss it very nearly did. But, for the most part, it hasn’t.

The vote on triggering Article 50? But that was passed with a massive majority. The votes on May’s deal? But her deal was voted against by the Brexiters, on the basis it was not real Brexit, so that can’t have been an attempt to “subvert the result” of the referendum. A motion to hold another referendum (if that would be considered subversion)? But no such motion was passed. The vote on Johnson’s deal? But his Withdrawal Amendment Bill had passed second reading and its passage was only interrupted by his decision to hold the 2019 election. I suppose, for Brexiters, the other possible answer would be the Benn Act. But that was a vote to prevent no-deal Brexit, which was never proposed as an even conceivable version of Brexit at the referendum. As a result, they are doomed to conclude that Brexit isn’t working ‘as it should’ because it ‘hasn’t been done properly’ and that it hasn’t been done properly because it has been ‘betrayed’. Yet at the very same time they continue to be surprised that those who never supported it remain unpersuaded. That applies especially strongly to those, like Farage and Tice, who endlessly rant about how Brexit has been betrayed. There is an obvious contradiction, if not an impossibility, in simultaneously denouncing Brexit for not having delivered its promises and expecting those who always knew those promises were bogus to cease denouncing it. To put it another way, Brexit leaders and commentators can hardly tell leavers that they have been defrauded by Brexit and expect to convince remainers to get behind the very fraud they are complaining about.

Normally, two arguments are made about Project Fear by its critics. One is that since some of its worst predictions didn’t come true that means that all predictions of any Brexit damage, then or since, can safely be ignored. The other is that, since some of the predictions were worse than has actually happened, Brexit is vindicated. The first suffers from an obvious illogic (‘some warnings were false, therefore all warnings are false’). The second isn’t, to say the least, compelling defence of Brexit (‘it’s good because it’s not as bad as the worst that some said it would be’).

However, I think that most Brexiters realise that, to change the metaphor again, the dead horse of re-visiting the terms of Brexit isn’t going to run, still less win the Derby, no matter how hard it is flogged. Instead, for Littlewood, Lilley and almost all the Brexit Ultras, the solution to the problem of Brexit’s failure lies in ‘making use of Brexit freedoms’. However, they are remarkably coy about what this means. One reason for the coyness is that such Brexiters have rarely wanted to spell out their agenda in terms of cutting employment rights and environmental protections, knowing how little public support it has. Another is that when it comes to the more palatable-sounding ‘regulatory divergence’ they don’t really know what they mean. Naturally none of this will satisfy most of the 55% of voters who would currently vote to re-join the EU. But, for now, it is the only game in town, in the literal sense that there isn’t the remotest sign of any UK government holding a referendum in the next parliament which takes us to, probably, 2029. That doesn’t imply that re-joiners should cease to campaign for what they want, as the only way the game will change is by moving beyond the current, very limited, consensus. Their task is to sustain and build a durable majority in the opinion polls for re-joining over the coming years so as to make it politically viable for the UK and for the EU. If that seems a rather dour and depressing analysis, I don’t think it should. Considering all that has happened since 2016 it is truly remarkable and noteworthy what has been achieved. Perhaps the answer to all this is that Frost is as useless at drafting resignation letters as he is at everything else. Because, despite a slimy eulogy in Conservative Home, and his own high estimation of his achievements, it’s important to recognize just what a failure Frost has been. He was the one who negotiated the NIP – the supposedly crucial difference to Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement – that he and Johnson later disowned. He also agreed the Political Declaration that they both disowned immediately. He negotiated the Trade and Cooperation Agreement which wasn’t, as he claims, something people said couldn’t be delivered but a thin agreement limited by the government’s own self-harming restrictions. The damage of that to UK trade has already begun, and will worsen when, from next week, UK import controls are introduced. Despite his supposedly ‘hard ball’ approach, Frost got precisely nothing from the EU that wasn’t on offer anyway. Add to that the poison that approach has contributed to the UK-EU relationship and, now, his jumping ship before the NIP talks are concluded and it makes for a record of lamentable incompetence, mediocrity and inadequacy. But for Brexit, and Johnson’s patronage, he would never have achieved any prominence at all. Yet, so far as I know, not a single high-profile Brexiter has publicly said such a thing. Will any of them ever have the courage and honesty to do so? Or will they continue to chunter on that all would have been well had true Brexit been delivered, even as historians begin to write epitaphs to their lies and hubris? Will they go to the grave unrepentant, even as the ashes of their failed project are scattered to the winds?

Brexit Unfoldedis a must-read for anyone who cares about what happened following the momentous decision Britain took in the 2016 referendum. Grey is not a neutral observer, but his analysis is scholarly and balanced. He writes with engaging clarity as he navigates through toxic headlines and political slogans. It will be a long time before this illuminating account is rivalled.” Jonathan Dimbleby, broadcaster and author A much less predictable piece about ‘Project Fear’ appeared, also in CapX, written by Phil Craig. There has been so much written about Brexit now that it is very rare indeed to find a new take on it, but Craig succeeds, albeit only by dint of almost mind-blowing perversity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it was hailed as “a great article” by that fine judge of intellectual quality and coherent argument, um, David Frost. Many of those might say that there is no point in it, on the basis that it won’t make enough, or any, difference, but that wouldn’t be to object to doing it per se. Conceivably, some of those might say that doing so might, by ameliorating the damage of Brexit, undermine the momentum towards re-joining, and object on that basis. But anyone making that objection would at least implicitly be accepting that following this option would‘make a difference’, as otherwise it could not adversely affect the case to re-join. Were this ambition to be met it would not, of course, be a benefit of Brexit – the UK could just as easily have proposed itself for this role as an EU member, and for reasons discussed below would have been in a better position to do so – but it is clearly part of an attempt to define Britain’s global role after Brexit.

The ‘utter humiliation’ suffered by this outdated forecast was that, according to Eurostat, the UK economy in fact grew by a dazzling 0.1% of GDP in each of the last two quarters. Wowza! Not only that but, to complete the humiliation, the Eurozone has “plunged into” a recession, having “slumped” by 0.1% in those same two quarters. Like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Clark attaches great significance to this as a justification of Brexit, although it is not at all clear why, since the UK was never part of the Eurozone, and its economic cycle rarely, if ever, coincided with it. Nor it is clear why a Eurozone recession should be good news since it is still such a major export market for the UK.Meanwhile, the two main strands of Brexit politics, those of the Northern Ireland Protocol and the EU Retained Law Bill, drag on undramatically, yet with the capacity to unleash crisis and chaos in the near future. Both are dominated by the never-ending toxicity of the internal dynamics of the Tory Party. For there is one other slender piece of consensus, apart from the near-universal acceptance that Brexit has not been a success. It was revealed by a poll conducted for the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) last week, asking respondents which option they favoured for the UK’s relationship with the EU over the next ten to fifteen years. The very obvious counter to all this, apart from the fact that the Committee’s report was unanimously agreed by its members who included Brexiters, lies in the composition of the Commons vote on whether to accept its findings and recommendations. It’s true that, shamefully, some 225 Tory MPs chose to abstain*, including, disgracefully, Rishi Sunak whose weak leadership has been plainly exposed, and another seven voted against. That is a terrible reflection on the willingness of Johnson’s supporters to pervert important democratic safeguards, though listening to some of their contributions to the debate it wasn’t always clear they even understood what the vote was actually about. For example, Lia Nici, holding the report containing all the evidence in her hands, declared that there was no evidence of Johnson’s wrongdoing on the wholly extraneous grounds that she had once been one of his Parliamentary Private Secretaries.