Decline is a policy choice

For reasons I don’t fully comprehend, it’s about this time of year when I really struggle to get to to sleep, so I’ve got into the habit of listening to a political podcast at bedtime in the hope it will bore me asleep. As a rule it works, but I made the mistake of listening to a ten year Brexit retrospective which was infuriating awful - to the extent that I’m wide awake now. It beggars belief how little is understood about one of the most significant political events in modern British history.

What particularly irritates me is the claim that Brexit hasn’t worked and was mis-sold - as though Brexit was only ever mooted as an economic proposition. Some otherwise sensible people still talk about the EU as though it were a trade bloc rather than the political union we grew to despise - with its own geopolitical and military ambitions. Had the EU only ever been a trade bloc, along the lines of a regulatory and customs union, it would never have been such a contentious issue.

The grievance of the leave camp was that the EU is a supranational government, on a path of “ever closer union” meaning greater technical and legislative integration on matter well outside of trade - all without consultation or consent. Nearly half a century of technocratic governance, embedded at all levels on everything from local government procurement through to waste policy, energy and public health, has quietly (but profoundly) changed the functioning of the British state and undermined genuine democracy.

The suggestion, then, that the success or failure of Brexit can be ascertained by sifting through Covid distorted trade data, is to misunderstand completely the entire point.

What we can say about Brexit is that in the grand scheme of things, is we are no worse off than we would otherwise have been. You can very plausibly argue that we have taken a hit to our trade, and that travel is marginally less convenient, but the state Britain is in presently is part of a much longer trajectory which is a direct consequence of EU membership.

Britain currently has some of the highest energy prices anywhere, a growth killing planning regime, a stagnant jobs market, moribund agriculture, and a broken waste policy that makes it ruinously expensive to keep our streets clean. Among other things. You simply can’t pretend that thousands of directives and regulations from this so-called “trade bloc” had no part in that.

You can argue Britain has its own ways of crushing competitiveness but that’s because our political class thinks much the same way as EU technocrats. Brexit has not brought remedy to any of this because while our politicians have had the power and the opportunity to change tack, they simply don’t want to.

Consequently, Britain is in the same state of managed decline it was in prior to the referendum - which explains why we still have anti-establishment populism. Decline is a policy choice. There are plenty of things we could and should have done in the ten years since Brexit, but nobody wants to grasp the nettle.

The Tories never did anything with Brexit because they never wanted it to begin with, and had no plans to implement it - and neither did the Brexiteers, while Labour exists only to maintain the status quo at any cost. Labour will keep us closely aligned in the hope of one day re-joining, oblivious the the fact that Europe is also a political and economic binfire.

Here’s worth noting that Brexit is not the outlier in Europe. Britain was just the first domino to fall. Ever since we’ve seen the rise and rise of AfD and other populist movements, spurred on by the collapse of German heavy industry - which is a direct consequence of EU net zero policies.

Meanwhile, tone deaf as ever, the EU has become ever more paranoid, tyrannical and bureaucratic - and refuses to read the signals. Once you throw unchecked and unwelcome immigration into the mix, you have the perfect recipe for a broader collapse across Europe. Dumber even than the notion that “Brexit has failed” is the notion that undoing Brexit will lift Britain out of its political and economic malaise.

As long time readers will know, I always said that Brexit would be a long process. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would be a perpetually stalled process. There was always a risk that Brexit would be kicked into the long grass, and I believe I predicted as much, but this is far more surreal. We have a political class that learned no lessons from it whatsoever and memory-holed it.

The tensions that produced it, though, are still bubbling - not just below, but on the surface, causing a decade-long churn of prime ministers, growing instability and white hot resentment. The sentiment behind Brexit was that the technocratic liberal consensus has rendered our democracy toothless, and that hasn’t changed at all. Many who voted in the referendum had not voted previously and have not voted since. I haven’t.

In many ways (every way that matters) contemporary politics is a continuation of Brexit politics, with the nation divided on similar lines between those who benefit from the status quo and those who demand change.

This should have been resolved in 2019 by a government willing and able to reboot Britain, but now it falls to an incompetent populist party if it can even get elected at all. It is likely that the absence of a viable alternative means that we miss the window for a peaceful resolution. The failure to arrest the decline and prevent a collapse will be the real failure of Brexit - but mainly because it didn’t happen soon enough.