Who killed Brexit? (No Paywall)

The war is over but it was the Tories wot lost it

The kiss of death for Brexit

Who killed Brexit? It’s an intriguing question now that the decade-long war between the two Britains – Leavers and Remainers – appears to be over. And I think it is over, even though the UK is still outside the EU single market and the customs union. The guns have fallen silent as the Brits have, figuratively speaking, climbed into the railway carriage to sign the armistice. We know where we are going, and it is back to the European Union by stealth.

As someone who voted to Remain, I can hardly complain about this development. We were always going to be the weaker partner in this avoidable geopolitical conflict. No Leaver has offered a convincing argument that Brexit has improved the wellbeing of those “left behind” communities that voted so enthusiastically for Leave.

But the circumstances of Britain’s reversion to rule-taker in Europe do still stick somewhat in my Remainer craw.

The Brits have had to make humiliating concessions to the EU negotiators, at least according to Boris Johnson, who described Keir Starmer as Brussels’ “orange ball-chewing manacled gimp”. The most notable capitulation was selling out the UK fishing community and accepting the infamous “dynamic alignment” with the rules of the EU Court of Justice over food and agriculture regulations. That is surely only the beginning. Having conceded the principle, regulatory creepage will inevitably draw Britain further into the Court’s orbit. Britain will assuredly not be free, for example, to develop its expertise in gene-editing crops.

We got very little in exchange for all this – just promises to make it easier for British goods and citizens to cross EU borders without stultifying bureaucracy and regulations. These should never have been there in the first place, Brexit or no Brexit. The sanitary and phytosanitary checks that prevented British bangers being sold in the EU were transparently anti-competitive. You didn’t need to be a Brexiteer to see that.

We gain some kind of access – at a price – to the £150bn EU defence fund, and probably access to the Erasmus programme, which allows students to study or do internships in Europe. The talk is of a youth mobility scheme similar to the one the UK has with Australia, which allows free movement for workers under 35 years of age. Is that a concession or a win? I don’t really know. I don’t think anyone really objected to all those young Spanish and Lithuanians who came to work in Scotland’s restaurants and hotels. But it is pretty obviously a smoothing of the path to free movement for over-35s as well.

But look, I never agreed with leaving the European Union in the first place. It was only the idiocy of our parliamentary legislators, during those hectic Westminster debates in 2018, that prevented us from remaining in the single market even as we left the political institutions of the EU. It never made sense to abandon the UK’s largest trading partner abruptly and with no rational free trade agreement to replace it. The very politicians who condemned the SNP’s plans for a border with England were hypocritically erecting economic barriers to Europe.

Brexit did not “restore sovereignty”. As I expected and forecast, the European Union retaliated brutally to Britain’s exit by imposing lorry-loads of regulations to impede British trade, to punish the miscreants. Just ask Sainsbury’s, who reportedly had to fill in 700 separate documents in order to ship a truck full of food. We saw this most egregiously in Northern Ireland, where Theresa May and Boris Johnson allowed the EU to conduct a regulatory annexation of part of the UK. Sovereignty my arse, as the US President might have put it.

But what did we expect? I don’t want to fight the Brexit war all over again, but Britain actually had a rather good deal pre-2016. We had an opt-out from the single currency for a start, which insulated the UK from the sovereign debt crisis of 2012. We at least had a say on many of the regulations which we had to observe to send goods and services to the European Union – a market of 500 million people. The EU itself has turned against mass migration. Any trading arrangement involves concessions – just look at what we had to accept from Trump over the UK–USA deal: ten percent tariffs across the board. The EU is tariff-free for members.

We had free movement in 2016, which some people certainly found objectionable, but it was the kind of free movement that didn’t have the cultural overtones of the global free movement that replaced it. Those 17 million Leave voters thought they were “taking back control” of the borders and capping immigration. Exactly the reverse happened. Non-EU immigration rocketed to nearly a million post-Brexit, to the dismay of working-class voters who had expressed resentment at their communities and culture being radically altered without their consent.

This is where we begin to understand just who killed Brexit. It was the Brexiteers themselves – and above all, Boris Johnson. He was the one who boosted immigration from non-EU countries even though he had promised not to “reach for the lever of mass immigration” to address labour shortages. He not only reached for it – he pulled it so hard that it broke completely.

When Keir Starmer talks of the “failed experiment in open borders” and how Britain risks becoming “an island of strangers”, he is turning Tory rhetoric back on themselves. For it was Theresa May and Boris Johnson who “got immigration done” by ransacking North Africa, India and the Asian sub-continent for cheap labour.

The Conservatives, like Kemi Badenoch, can hardly complain now about the “surrender” to Europe when they capitulated to hyper-globalisation. Allowing the migrant equivalent of the population of a city like Glasgow to enter year on year after promising to do the reverse was morally reprehensible, socially irresponsible, and economically illiterate. We see the consequences of that betrayal now in the rise of Reform and the anti-immigration far right.

The Brexiteers are condemned from their own mouths. They made such a burach of Brexit that even its supporters are lost for words. Keir Starmer can roll his Remainer steamroller all the way to Brussels now, and no one will care. The battle of Europe is over – but the ugly war over migration has only just begun.