The Brexit Trap: How the UK Became A Prisoner of Its Own Mistake
Six years after the vote to leave the EU, Brexit continues to haunt our national politics, writes Hardeep Matharu
In this preview of our upcoming December print edition, Byline Times’ editor Hardeep investigates why the Brexit debate so deeply affects our politics, even though many of our politicians remain too scared to talk about it.
On the top floor of a building a stone’s throw away from the European Parliament sits a grey plinth with a half-open red velvet box on top. Inside is a square of red and white coloured fabric secured with red ribbon. Our flag. But not just any flag – it’s the Union Jack that flew outside the Committee of the Regions, alongside all the other member states, and which was removed at 8pm on 31 January 2020.
Casket-like and strangely inviting, the folded ensign is memorialised funereally within the box.
After being taken down, it made its way to the House of European History in Brussels, home to an exhaustive exhibition charting the development of the continent and the project now at its heart, the EU. From the myth of Europa to the Enlightenment, two world wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall and modern European integration, it seeks to explain why the EU exists – a story in which Britain is always uncomfortably at the margin.
Six years on from the EU Referendum, public sentiment towards Brexit appears to be shifting. More people are expressing regret at voting to leave. The detrimental impact of the hard exit we ended up with is being raised by experts and finally being put under the spotlight by the media. But politicians of various stripes remain unwilling to engage with its realities.
An open casket invites us to face what we have lost and come to terms with the grief. But open caskets, common in both Europe and the US, are very rare at British funerals.
How are we burying this historic – perhaps tragic – moment in our history? And what are the consequences for Britain's understanding of itself?
The Brexit Trap
“It’s a tragedy within the Tory party that the whole country has to pay for” is how Annette Dittert describes Britain’s Brexit saga.
Four Conservative prime ministers have “imploded because they cannot solve the Europe problem” and Rishi Sunak may well end up coming to the same sticky end.
“Looking into the numbers, Sunak will see he cannot solve the problem of the British economy if he doesn't align British laws more with the EU, but he's too weak to do that,” she says. “I think Sunak knows he would need to do the exact opposite of what he is forced to do now to get growth.”
It’s complicated, according to the German journalist, by the “really tricky inherited internal contradiction and tension within the party” Sunak must grapple with. There are the “ERG right-wing populist Tories, who basically are dictating the tone”. Then there are the “Trussites who say we need growth”. The problem is “growth and the ERG form of Brexit exclude each other”.
For Dittert, the hard Brexit we have ended up with, and the political climate it has all created, is “like the original sin”. With both Sunak and Labour unable to confront its consequences, she believes the country has trapped itself.
“It's impossible to not open this box, if you want to really move on in this country,” she says. “You have to start cleaning up the mess before you can solve the problems that have stemmed from it. It's true that the current problems do not all stem from Brexit, but a considerable part have – and it's not over yet… It goes on and on, unless you stop and say ‘this was all nonsense and we have to start again’ – which is impossible for them to do, right? It seems impossible.”
Dittert, senior correspondent and bureau chief at ARD London, believes “rational, efficient and professional government” cannot happen “as long as this original sin, and the gaslighting that came with it and the inner contradictions of Brexit, aren't clearly put on the table and discussed”.
That Starmer has “doubled-down” on not challenging Brexit is “really depressing”. She cites a YouGov poll last month that showed one in five who voted to leave now think it was the wrong decision. “They have no party they can vote for anymore,” she observes.
“People know Starmer knows that Brexit has not been the best idea in the world… it is simply not a good idea to cut yourself off from the biggest market in Europe while not having any other ideas of what you want to do…. All these trade deals that have been done so far have been ‘cut, copy and paste’ deals or even detrimental to British farmers or fishermen. I expected more. This is just more populism now from Labour. Also, it's a high price that the country has to pay for this tactic… you cannot really solve a problem when you don't acknowledge it.”
“There is no way out” if Starmer follows this path, Dittert says. “If he goes into an election saying he will make Brexit work – which isn't possible – he won’t have the mandate to change that position. That means the country is trapped even longer.”
Freed
David Goodhart doesn’t agree. Brexit isn’t a trap – it has made Britain “a more democratic country” than it was in 2016.
“Brexit was collateral damage, in a way, for the divisions that have been bubbling away beneath the surface for two or three decades,” he believes.
Head of the demography, immigration and integration unit at the conservative think tank Policy Exchange, Goodhart’s 2017 book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics became a talking point for its analysis of the ‘values divide’ he says helps explain Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.
He’s a “60-40 remain voter” who “had some sympathy with a lot of the Brexit arguments” but thought the vote to leave was “absolutely a no-brainer – we've got to do it, we're a democracy”.
For him, Brexit was about ‘somewheres’ revolting against ‘anywheres’.
“In the ‘end of history’ period, we had the triumph of liberal economics, the great liberalisation on issues of gender and race and sexuality… a lot of people were discomfited by rapid change, by a sort of great openness, both economically and culturally,” Goodhart says. “A lot of people in more traditional, industrial communities up and down the country felt left behind by many of those developments.
“I think there wasn't really a recognition of that either from the centre-right or the centre-left… There was a sense that, things have not been perfect in the past, but people's voice – perhaps their collective voice through trade unions and through the Labour Party and so on – was heard in the corridors of power… a lot of people felt that was no longer the case and that they had become disenfranchised.”
The creators of this disenfranchisement were a class of people “with the kind of attitudes that we now associate with a liberal graduate”. Goodhart says “these were views that would have been held by the Bloomsbury group and a few other fringe intellectuals in the past” but an explosion in university education meant “suddenly, these views became dominant in the ‘anywhere’ class”. “I never in the past thought that they were governing on its own behalf, because they weren't, and suddenly they were,” he adds.
Goodhart uses Talcott Parsons’ concept of “achieved and ascribed identities” to explain.
“The better educated, the more mobile you are, the more your sense of yourself tends to come from your own achievements – you've done well at school, gone to a more-or-less good university, have a more-or-less successful professional career, and that gives your identity a kind of portability; you can fit in anywhere. But lots of people's identity isn't really based so much on their own achievements but on the group they belong to, the place they come from.
“That is a very useful way of looking at it and I think it partly explains the obliviousness of the anywhere class to their domination – they thought everybody was like them and didn't realise that lots of people's identities have a different foundation to theirs. And it's a foundation that is much more, potentially, discomfited by rapid change.”
After his book was published, he says he had to clarify that there are “lots of different kinds of anywheres” and “lots of different kinds of somewheres” and an “in-between a group too”; that these social categories “don't necessarily apply to the complexity of an individual”.
“Both of these worldviews are perfectly decent, at least in their mainstream form – there are the less acceptable, more xenophobic, attitudes of the somewhere extremes, and another extreme of an anywhere living in an airport lounge not wanting to pay taxes anywhere. The problem has been for politics that one group has been consistently dominant… building Britain around its own interests”. Goodhart says this includes the “progressive worldview that tended to downplay national identity” and “prioritised diversity”.
People “worried about rapid change and about immigration being very high, changing the nature of places they live, or indeed, in the country as a whole”, he says, even though the “highest anxieties about immigration, as is often said, are in places where there is relatively little immigration”.
“It's not as irrational as it seems,” he adds. “Because you have an identification with the country as a whole.”
Empty
When Annette Dittert moved to the UK in 2008, she liked the more “adventurous approach” to life she found here – but not when it comes to Brexit.
There was no “forward planning'' of what leaving the EU would mean. “Germans do forward planning a lot and it's really boring,” she says. “I liked this more adventurous approach to life when I came here, but it's not really good on such a big scale and certainly not when you have a government who operates accordingly.”
Is Britain going through an identity crisis? “There is surely some identity problem, but it's more within the Tory Party… they have drawn the country into this identity crisis – it was originally their identity crisis,” she says. “I cannot remember anybody before 2016 ever mentioning the EU as a big thing that would occupy their lives.”
‘Global Britain’ “doesn't really mean anything… it's a slogan that hasn't been filled with any content” and so there is “no real strategy. There is no vision. There is no perspective. And there is no idea of what this could be now”.
“The result I see is that people are totally disillusioned and frustrated with politics now – they don't believe anything anymore,” Dittert says. “There’s a feeling all politicians lie. So that is probably the worst result.”
In the eyes of our former EU partners, “Britain has presented itself as a basket case” this year, according to the journalist.
“Especially in Germany, people are still very fond of Britain and really wish it would come back to a more normal state,” she says. “There was a lot of hope when Sunak started, that maybe now the so-called grown ups were back. But I can already see that Sunak isn’t strong enough to fulfil those requirements – to have a government of moral integrity or professionalism… the incompetence in this Cabinet is as bad as in Johnson's, and that is seen in Europe.
“I think Europe is waiting for the old Britain to come back at some point, not necessarily within the EU, but as a serious and adult grown-up partner they can rely on. Europe needs Britain, especially when it comes to security and foreign policy. If you look at what's going on in Germany at the moment [over the war in Ukraine], I do find the British position so much clearer and decisive. It's being sorely missed.”
But Goodhart believes other countries in Europe – which are “used to having rules imposed on them” – fall behind Britain because it has a “more robust democracy”.
“There's a completely false story that Brexit was about imperial nostalgia,” he says. “The remarkable thing about Britain and Empire was how quickly it was dissolved and how very, very little Imperial nostalgia there was. However, I think it is true that, as a big country that set the rules both for itself, and for quite a few other people for a period of 150 to 200 years, we were not used to or comfortable with accepting rules from outside.
“Now, obviously, you can see the logic of doing that with certain limited kinds of coalitions like NATO and other specific, limited, international treaties... But the EU was always more than that. And I think people forget that most countries in the EU are quite small. There are a few like Germany, France, Italy, Spain… but the vast majority of countries are quite small and therefore used to taking rules or fitting in. So the geopolitical experience of being in the EU is completely normal to small countries or countries that helped to found and shape the EU itself, that were broken in different ways by the Second World War. We had neither of those things.”
Goodhart says the problem for the “somewhere impulse” is that it “almost has to express itself as a negative” – against free movement, for instance – but that this overlooks the positive Brexit story “about democratic accountability and national sovereignty”.
“Those things will become rarer and rarer in EU countries,” he claims. “For the EU to survive, they are going to have to take more and more majority decisions over more and more important things. Had the EU Referendum gone the other way, I think we would have probably left the EU in 10 years or so.”
Missing
“Brexit is one problem, let's say the original sin, but these problems go back much further and they started much earlier,” Dittert believes.
Some argue that, unlike in Europe, Britain doesn’t have a right-wing or far-right populist party here, she says, and so “Britain is in much better shape than, for example, Germany with the AfD – I think the opposite is true”.
“The Tory Party has taken in the far-right and the far-right has eaten it up from inside. It's much more difficult for people to know what they're voting for because it's so untransparent – you don't really know who the ERG is or how much influence they have.”
Goodhart believes Brexit provided a “better balance between anywheres and somewheres – but that doesn't mean that it's not very messy”. He also says “Brexit is now becoming a convenient excuse for any failure”.
“The dominant narrative is that Brexit is only about problems, which to some extent is true,” he says. “Although Brexit is a big, long-term thing, so the fact that Britain’s GDP is going to be 4% smaller than it would have been over a 20-year period seems relatively small” compared to the win for democracy.
With a Home Secretary who declared an “invasion” of England’s southern coast, has Brexit fuelled a toxic political climate in which xenophobia has been normalised and culture wars waged?
“No, there's always been that,” Goodhart says. “It's not such a horrendous thing to call it an invasion… it is kind of an invasion of people arriving in your country illegally, uninvited, without any sort of process. It would have been described as that whether Brexit had happened or not, would have been described in even more clear language probably 20 or 30 years ago.
“Brexit revealed the anywhere-somewhere polarisation, it didn't create it… and it doesn't go away because Brexit happened.”
He suggests there are problems closer to home for me to consider.
“A lot of people, many of the people around your publication, are still deeply angry and hurt by Brexit and are still in revolt against it – and that is quite a small fraction of British society, which has quite a loud voice. I mean, not that many people read Byline Times, but… [that] worldview is disproportionately influential and gets noticed. The vast majority of people know it's done now and we're not going to go back in and want to make the best of it.”
For Goodhart, “the somewhere centre of gravity” is the ‘missing majority’ – who are “slightly to the left of centre economically and to the right of centre culturally”. “That combination is extremely popular and no political class anywhere in the rich world seems to represent it,” he says.
After the 2019 General Election, “the Tories ended up with a higher blue collar vote than Labour but they weren't able to turn that into a national story that combined with the more traditional southern-based, more affluent, voters even though clearly they had certain things in common… it looks quite a difficult thing to do”.
Annette Dittert also believes new coalitions are needed – but not the kind engineered by political parties figuring out how to win over a more mixed bag of voters.
“It's high time to change the electoral system,” she says. “If you had a more proportional representative system, like in the Scandinavian countries or in Germany, politicians would be forced to make coalitions. Identity isn't that easy anymore. You're not either Labour or Tory – identity has become way more multifaceted, and that's why I think a system with different parties where people have a political home, would be much better.
“I find that really striking, that if you think Brexit was a mistake, you have no political party really who you can vote for wholeheartedly anymore.”
The spectre of Brexit still haunts our politics. Those who want to resurrect the debate about what happened before and after the EU Referendum are dismissed. But those who try to bury the issue, end up raising it again through their avoidance.
Britain may no longer be at the heart of Europe. But Europe – in one way or another – is still at the heart of Britain.
Beautifully written🤍
So if staying in the EU was as bad as people make out why did we join in the first place?