“Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.” – Otto von Bismarck
“Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” – Boris Johnson
Today, Keir Starmer is off to Brussels. Five years after we formally left the European Union, the Prime Minister hopes to negotiate a “reset” in our relations with the bloc.
Reports differ as to how enthusiastic Ursula von der Leyen et al are about his ambitons, especially with the distractions provided by Donald Trump, Ukraine, and domestic turmoil. But Starmer will be hoping for tangible results. Alongside appeasing backbench MPs nursing a tendresse for membership, Starmer hopes agreements on trade, security, crime and more will help on the domestic front.
Whatever the Prime Minister comes back with, we can expect the usual cry to go up from ourselves and Reform UK: “sell out”, “betraying Brexit”, “overturning the referendum”, and so on. Tim Shipman suggests the Europeans plan on driving a hard bargain over access to British fish stocks for EU trawlers and are keen to reintroduce some form of free movement for the under-30s.
Both cross long-standing Brexiteer cause célèbres. Large concessions on both would generate considerable noise across the Right-Wing Entertainment Industry. GB News is squared; the Mail and Express are quite prepared. The usual suspects will be wheeled out to parrot the usual lines, revelling in their righteous impotence as Starmer and von der Leyen smile for the cameras.
Will voters notice? Recent polls have found only 30 per cent of those surveyed though the UK was right to leave the European Union, against 55 per cent who said it was wrong to. The same figure with to rejoin, and 64 per cent want a closer relationship of some kind. A separate poll showed 54 per cent backing for Starmer’s bid, and 57 per cent support for an under-30s migration deal.
In short, one can suggest that this putative “reset” is one of Starmer’s most popular policies, amongst a bleak and uncompetitive field. Yet it’s a triumph for Leavers that a Prime Minister who half a decade ago strained to overturn the referendum result is frit enough of a Brexiteer backlash to avoid anything more than tinkering with the existing relationship. All power to Morgan McCummings.
In his frantic attempts to salvage this rudderless and self-destructive government, he seems keener on preserving the spirit of 2016 than most of its leading proponents. Think back to those front and centre a decade ago. Many of Brexit’s leading proponents are now either out of Parliament, discredited, or irrelevant. They have returned to their valleys, their farms, and their blogs.
Only Nigel Farage remains as a Brexiteer with a realistic chance of holding power and he wasn’t a member of Vote Leave. Even if he is smiled upon more than before, with a consciousness that he is the most plausible avatar for an Anglo-Project 2029, he remains a flawed avatar for Eurosceptic hopes. An ECHR campaign led by him and Suella Braverman would be, ahem, fun.
The interminable debates over how “well” Brexit is going or how “worth it” leaving was will continue. The two sides will choose their own terms of debate, talk past each other, and deploy their own stats. Pandemics and invasions will be conveniently forgotten by Remainers; immigration statistics lamented by those Leavers self-aware to know we had one job and ballsed it up.
Bring out the counter-factuals. What if David Cameron had stayed on, and negotiated a softer Brexit that left us in the Single Market? As Iain Mansfield highlights, that would have been easier to get past Parliament, and prevented Tory thinking about welfare reform ending on the 24th June 2016. If we’d retained freedom of movement, would migration levels remained lower?
On we go. What if Boris Johnson hadn’t sodded off to play cricket? What if enough Labour MPs had broken to back Theresa May’s deal? What if we hadn’t Covid or Russia’s invasion But there’s no point in debating alternative timelines. We are out of the European Union. A future government might take us back in. Indeed, right-wingers might find the coming Brussels more attractive company.
Starmer’s “reset” represents the reality of our independence: permanent negotiation. A constant and never-ending process of debate, argument, reconciliation, and bartering, as ministerial churn, governmental evolution, and the relentless process of events force us to drift further apart or closer together. Freedom is messy, diplomacy interminable, Bregret inevitable.
We have so far used our renewed independence in ways that Brexiteers of all stripes find deeply disappointing. The vaccine rollout wouldn’t have happened as it did without a Leave vote. But any goodwill that engendered has long since been crucified on the alter of the Boriswave. Pointing out the Germans have it worse doesn’t make a single British voter better off.
Yes, we have achieved that great original ambition. We are masters of our own fate. Governments no longer have the crutch of blaming Brussels. They are free, as political circumstances allow, to diverge, and be held accountable for it. We are out of the ratchet of ever closer union. But Brexit has also shown us that the fault was not in Europe, but in ourselves.
We have been forced to think much harder about the domestic foundations of our stagnation. We are victims of our own politicians. A project of national renewal required an a Bismarck, a Lee Kuan Yew, or a Nayib Bukele, not Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. It’s hard not to flick through Shipman’s four volumes and wonder if that junta of Belgian ticket inspectors were so bad.
But just as Trump is teaching us that sovereign governments can just do things, so did Brexit prove that the clock can be put back, and that the Ascendancy can be beaten. As tragic as the last decade might have proved for our faith in our political class, the fortunes of the Tory Party, and the Shipman’s summer holidays, the Brave New Right have learnt valuable lessons.
All the energy that earlier generations of sensitive young men put into campaigning against the Euro has been redirected. A much better picture of why we are so poor and our governance so underwhelming can be produced now there’s an illusion that, freed from the Brussels yoke, broad sunlit uplands awaited. If there is hope, it lies in the anons, Yimbys, and Substacks.
Politics was awful before Brexit but has only become far more so since. It was the last opportunity us right-wingers really had to be hopeful about anything, and we spaffed it up a wall. But even if it hasn’t started as we would have liked, the other side got 45-odd years to test their approach. Starmer or no Starmer, “reset” or no “reset”, Brexit needs its time to teethe.
Leaving has not been as disastrous as Remainers feared, nor as beneficial as Leavers hoped. It is an unfinished revolution, overtaken by events. Any enthusiasm on the parts of all but the truest believers has long since disappeared. British history reached its turning point and failed to turn. Neither joining or leaving really mattered as much as we made out. Nothing does.
But an end to grand illusions can be the start of something greater. Knowing how bad things really are can be wearying, but can also be a spur to action. A hard rain still needs to fall.