As long as Brexit lasts it will remain on the political stage. For six years since the 2016 referendum, Britain’s relations with the EU have been soured. The reason is simple, you cannot erect a barrier against the 40% of trade that is with your closest neighbour without pain.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that Brexit’s impact on the economy is now “adverse” over the medium term to the tune of 4% of GDP. This is massive self-harm. Not a week passes without cries of protest from traders, truckers, farmers, hoteliers, care homes, scientists and even performing artists. Trade bureaucracy has soared. Every exported cow needs a vet certificate. Unskilled labour has dried up. A crushing verdict on referendums is that public opinion has swung dramatically towards hostility to Brexit, with just 32% still in favour and 56% of people professing buyer’s remorse. Yet politicians of all parties clap their hands over their ears and scream, “Brexit is over. Forget it.”
It is not over. A new gulf has opened. On the one side are purists for whom “hard” Brexit is not a trade policy but a quasi-religious cult. They answer only to anti-immigrant voters in so called red-wall seats and regard the very initials EU as toxic. On the other side are those in business and government who must wrestle daily with Brexit’s frontline consequences. The CBI is this week repeating its litany that labour shortage is the chief impediment to growth. The idea that leaving the EU would release Britain from “vassalage” is rubbish. The promised “Brexit opportunities” have proved a rhetorical fantasy. The one new deal, with Australia, has infuriated farmers. The reality is that most British trade is with Europe, and Brexit has crippled it.
Meanwhile, the ongoing failure to reach a compromise with Brussels over Northern Ireland proves the old maxim that the country’s grim steeples of religious divide will forever plague British politics out of all proportion. Unionism’s mesmeric hold over the Conservative party has never lost its potency. Rumours of a practicable “landing zone” on the Northern Ireland protocol are stymied by Rishi Sunak’s reluctance to face down the fundamentalists in the province and on his own far right. Certainly the EU’s hardliners have hardly been cooperative, but what did the Brexiters expect?
Every country’s trade policy is a constantly shifting landscape, best conducted beneath the political radar. For Britain to leave the single market as well as the EU was always a mistake, a move dictated entirely by Boris Johnson’s personal ambition to topple Theresa May. It may be more than political flesh can stand to reverse it now, but that does not mean “single markets” plural cannot be negotiated piecemeal. There must – and will – be pragmatic routes forward. Britain’s commercial relations with China have veered 180 degrees in just the past decade.
Hence the regular talk in Whitehall of various options. A fee for British tourists starting next year has already been agreed. Talks on academic and scientific cooperation may require a British “donation” to the EU, but so be it. As for immigration, Whitehall is giving out work permits for “qualified” non-EU migrants like never before, currently more than replacing former EU ones. As for why the government cannot release thousands of incarcerated Albanian asylum seekers on to the labour market is a mystery known only to the dark arts of politics.
The latest talk of a deal with the EU on a par with that of Switzerland and other members of the European free trade area has been squashed. Even Johnson promised ad-hoc trading deals, of which Switzerland has reached more than 120 with the EU over the years. However, since becoming prime minister Sunak has sensibly sought better dealings with France and Germany, hopefully as a prelude to movement on Northern Ireland. This may have upset his most xenophobic backwoodsmen, but that is part of his job. It is hard to see what conceivable harm repairing six years of hostility towards Europe can do to British interests.
Labour’s Keir Starmer is no help, albeit battered and bruised by his past U-turns on the subject. His emphatic rejection of any easing towards a single market is not in line with public opinion or with the public interest. It certainly cannot accord with what should be a serious challenge facing him if he finds himself in Downing Street. This must be to take forward Sunak’s normalising of trade with Brussels, and that means accepting whatever compromises on standards and tariffs such normalising may require. The essence of freer international trade is compromise to mutual benefit. The economic success of postwar Europe has been rooted in this reality.
Britain’s proximity to Europe has been vexed throughout history. It has bedevilled the internal politics of the Tory party for the past half a century, and is now bedevilling the British economy at the worst possible time, one of looming recession. Brexit is a fact. Britain is not about to rejoin the EU, but it is still in Europe. Over Ukraine it has shown itself an active participating member of Europe’s political community, and done so without descending into vassalage. So, whether it likes it or not, it is a participating member of Europe’s common economy. It has yet to find a way of behaving like one.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
