Stuart Carroll is a former Cllr and cabinet member for adult social care, health and children services and former member of the UK Vaccines Taskforce. He currently chairs the Conservative Health Policy Forum and has been advising the Conservative Party on health, life sciences, welfare policy and Northern Ireland.
Brexit was never going to be a painless divorce.
Yet returning to an unhappy marriage simply because separation has proved difficult would represent an extraordinary failure of political judgement. A decade after the referendum, Britain should be looking forward rather than reopening a constitutional argument which consumed the country for far too long. An argument that caused horrendous splits and also showed our political system, media and politicians at its worst.
I can best be classified as a “depressed leaver” in 2016. I believed the referendum was the wrong question at the wrong time, conducted through two deeply unsatisfactory campaigns. Neither side covered itself in glory, and both demonstrated a scant disregard for the complexity of the decision confronting the British people. Ultimately, my vote was about choosing the least worst alternative rather than embracing some romantic vision of Brexit. I calculated divorce was better than sticking in an unhappy marriage and I stand by that analysis today.
The Remain campaign relied excessively on economic fear, with George Osborne’s warning of an emergency Budget involving tax rises and spending cuts emblematic of an approach which too often confused legitimate economic risks with exaggerated certainty. Remainers even egregiously invoked images of a possible world war should the UK leave the EU. All about as credible as the disgustingly repellent Russell Brand’s conversion to God.
The Leave campaign was scarcely more honest. The notorious £350 million a week NHS claim was misleading, while the enormous complexities of disentangling decades of economic, legal and institutional integration were routinely brushed aside. I remember many Brexiteers assuring me freedom would be amazing much to my instinctive scepticism. The Brexit campaign far too often resembled a merry stag do of giddiness only to awake to the reality of rashness and thumping hangovers the following day.
Perhaps most troubling was the extraordinary lack of serious discussion about Northern Ireland. As someone who is half Irish, I was profoundly concerned about the implications for the Good Friday Agreement, the delicate constitutional settlement and the practical realities of maintaining an open border on the island of Ireland. These were not peripheral considerations. They went to the very heart of the peace settlement and the relationship between two countries whose histories are inextricably intertwined. I personally spent disproportionate amounts of time dealing with the wreckage of the Northern Irish Protocol when working at the centre of government through the Vaccines Taskforce and collectively Brexit delivered serious opportunity costs due to a distinct lack of pre-planning for a potential Leave vote.
That was self-evidently not freedom.
That neither campaign adequately confronted these issues was deeply disappointing. The referendum needed a considerably longer run-in, allowing for a comprehensive and independently scrutinised cost-benefit analysis of both remaining in and leaving the European Union, presented clearly and honestly to the public. Voters deserved a proper understanding of the economic, constitutional, diplomatic and practical consequences of either choice, rather than competing slogans and selective forecasts. Crucially, a longer timetable would also have allowed the Government and Civil Service to undertake serious contingency planning for both outcomes. A decision of such constitutional magnitude demanded careful preparation, not political complacency. The failure to prepare adequately for a Leave victory was lamentable, and the subsequent administrative improvisation made an already difficult process unnecessarily painful.
This was a botched and rushed divorce of ugly proportions.
Yet there was a more fundamental reason for my reluctant decision to vote Leave. Britain’s relationship with European integration had been growing increasingly uncomfortable for decades. When we joined the European Economic Community in 1973, we effectively became engaged to a European project primarily understood in Britain through the prism of economic cooperation. However, as the relationship developed, the partners increasingly wanted different things. What began as an engagement gradually became less like a marriage and more like distant friends trying to maintain a difficult relationship despite fundamentally different ambitions.
Britain remained outside the Euro and Schengen, negotiated an opt-out from the Social Chapter before subsequently accepting its provisions, and resisted important elements of European financial regulation and political integration. We also, with legendary imagery, had Mrs T handbag the club for £5 billion big ones as way of rebated loot. Our position was not one of complete detachment, but of increasingly selective participation. The EU is a federalist club that believes sovereignty can be pooled and nation states can all happily subjugate to the unaccountable decisions of a monolithic, Byzantine and fundamentally undemocratic bureaucracy in Brussels. The special arrangements which once made membership tolerable, in fact at times rather attractive, were becoming a substitute for genuine agreement about the Union’s destination. We were neither fully committed to the European project nor comfortable with the direction in which it was travelling. As the world changes, not least because of the thorny issue of tectonic demographic shifts across the globe, the idealism of freedom of movement started to destroy the very notion of a functional country as borders became borderless and elected national governments became powerless. Whether in or out, Remain or Leave, the idea the EU was an apotheosis of brilliance and a text book case study in progressive administration is best left to those buzzing around Cloud Cuckoo Land.
In that sense, the old membership model was becoming increasingly unsustainable and frankly dysfunctional. The EU failed to address the red flag warning signs redolent of an elite arrogance that rolled into a lazy partner assuming the other will never possibly leave me. The most ardent Remainer needs to now concede, the EU was an increasingly unloving, distant and pompous partner that failed to listen, make changes and fix the marriage. Britain wanted the economic benefits of integration without embracing the political destination favoured by many of its European partners. This was not necessarily unreasonable, but it was becoming an increasingly awkward basis for a lasting relationship. Sometimes divorce, however painful, is preferable to remaining in an unhappy marriage where both parties ultimately want different things.
A decade later, I remain convinced that reopening the Brexit question would be a serious mistake. Not because Brexit has been an unqualified success and not because I do not believe a union of sovereign cooperating nation states would ultimately not be optimal. It would because the challenges of today and tomorrow need sovereign allies to work together, but that word sovereign is critical and the EU has no interest in it. The EU’s answer to the world’s problems is to pool more power and flog the nation state on the political equivalent of e-Bay. It is no surprise it is an alien institution to the European man on the street.
Plainly, Brexit has been mismanaged too. There have been economic costs, unnecessary disruption, missed opportunities and political failures. To follow my analogy of divorce, the bloody lawyers are the only ones who have got rich, whilst we have parochially squabbled over who is having the kids. The absence of a coherent long-term post-Brexit economic strategy has been particularly disappointing. In short, the UK has lacked a vision about what sort of country it wants to be in a brave new world of rampant migration, technological changes and new risks and opportunities. Yet acknowledging these failures does not mean that reversing Brexit would somehow solve them. Such thinking risks mistaking nostalgia for strategy. That is a bit like tunnel visioning the good times and employing emotional amnesia to the countless bad times and pretending it will somehow be alright on the night. Sadly, it won’t.
Moreover, the EU is confronting major changes itself. Germany is declining quicker than Usain Bolt can run the 100 metres and France is currently tearing itself up like some unseemly UFC street clash. Should Madame Le Pen, as many polls currently predict, become the next occupant of the Elysee Palace, then serious EU carnage awaits with potential Frexit or at least some form of la revolution francaise. This is before we get to countries such as Italy and Spain, which have been economically sluggish for decades amidst stagnant growth and failing fiscal policy. What EU would we be negotiating with and on what terms? Andy Burnham is scrambling around for those answers. You should not reopen a debate when you cannot answer the first question in play. Across the continent, demographic decline, sluggish productivity, excessive bureaucracy and technological underperformance present formidable challenges. Europe’s dependence on American security guarantees and its difficulties competing with the United States and China expose further structural weaknesses.
The EU is not about to disappear tomorrow. It retains significant collective economic strength and considerable institutional resilience. Yet it increasingly resembles a ship taking on water while its officers debate whether the solution is a larger engine or greater authority for the bridge. That hardly constitutes an irresistible invitation for Britain to climb back aboard.
Nevertheless, there is an essential distinction between ideological rigidity and political pragmatism. I am half Irish, and my attachment to Ireland informs my perspective considerably. I understand why EU membership has been important to Ireland’s economic development, international positioning and national confidence. Indeed, were Ireland to hold a referendum tomorrow, I would vote to keep it inside the European Union. Some might consider that contradictory. I consider it common sense. I still think Ireland should be preparing longer term for a collapse of the EU and squirrelling away a sovereign fund for such an inclement day.
However, the idea Ireland can just rip itself out of the EU is back to Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Ireland’s economic geography, political circumstances and strategic interests differ from Britain’s. For Ireland, continued membership currently offers advantages which outweigh the disadvantages. Britain’s calculation is different. Conservatism should recognise that political decisions must reflect national circumstances rather than abstract ideological purity. What works for Dublin need not work for London. Pragmatism must accompany vision. Without vision, politics becomes managerial drift. Without pragmatism, it descends into ideological fantasy. Our politics has so badly lacked this in recent times and that only hurts, what Labour and others, like to call working people.
This is precisely why reopening Brexit would be so damaging. Britain has already endured years of constitutional division, political instability and institutional distraction. Another referendum would reopen wounds that have never entirely healed, consuming political energy desperately needed elsewhere. A vote against rejoining would hardly silence those determined to reverse Brexit. A vote in favour would initiate another prolonged and uncertain negotiation, without any guarantee that Britain could recover its previous membership arrangements, including its historic opt-outs and budget rebate.
Meanwhile, the country’s underlying problems would remain. Britain needs stronger productivity, greater investment, energy security, improved infrastructure, serious public service reform and a credible economic growth strategy. None of these challenges disappears through closer institutional alignment with Brussels. Nor should anyone imagine that returning to the EU would restore the political and economic circumstances of a decade ago.
That does not mean treating the EU as an adversary. Britain should pursue constructive cooperation on trade, security, scientific research and shared strategic interests. Our European neighbours remain indispensable partners. Northern Ireland must never again be treated as an inconvenient constitutional afterthought. Cue, this raises key questions on any proposed ECHR withdrawal, which has merit given its sovereign emasculation, and how Northern Ireland will be secured. Protecting the Good Friday Agreement, respecting the identities of both communities and maintaining practical cooperation across the Irish border are enduring responsibilities, irrespective of Brexit. However, cooperation is not the same as political reintegration.
The greater danger is that Britain’s political establishment, having failed to make sufficient use of the freedoms and responsibilities of Brexit, concludes that the answer is simply to abandon the enterprise. That would represent an abdication of leadership. The European Union faces profound challenges. Its economic model requires reform, its democratic legitimacy will continue to be tested, and the tensions between national sovereignty and further integration are unlikely to disappear.
Britain should wish Europe well, cooperate closely and learn from its successes and failures. We should not assume that the safest place aboard a troubled ship is necessarily the cabin we previously chose to leave. Brexit was never a guarantee of prosperity. It was an opportunity to assume greater responsibility for our own future. The tragedy would not be that we left the EU. It would be that, having left, we lacked the imagination, competence and courage to make independence work.
The answer to a difficult divorce is not automatically remarriage. It is to build a better life afterwards. Britain must now get on with doing precisely that and with a government that gets it.
Stuart Carroll is a former Cllr and cabinet member for adult social care, health and children services and former member of the UK Vaccines Taskforce. He currently chairs the Conservative Health Policy Forum and has been advising the Conservative Party on health, life sciences, welfare policy and Northern Ireland.
Brexit was never going to be a painless divorce.
Yet returning to an unhappy marriage simply because separation has proved difficult would represent an extraordinary failure of political judgement. A decade after the referendum, Britain should be looking forward rather than reopening a constitutional argument which consumed the country for far too long. An argument that caused horrendous splits and also showed our political system, media and politicians at its worst.
I can best be classified as a “depressed leaver” in 2016. I believed the referendum was the wrong question at the wrong time, conducted through two deeply unsatisfactory campaigns. Neither side covered itself in glory, and both demonstrated a scant disregard for the complexity of the decision confronting the British people. Ultimately, my vote was about choosing the least worst alternative rather than embracing some romantic vision of Brexit. I calculated divorce was better than sticking in an unhappy marriage and I stand by that analysis today.
The Remain campaign relied excessively on economic fear, with George Osborne’s warning of an emergency Budget involving tax rises and spending cuts emblematic of an approach which too often confused legitimate economic risks with exaggerated certainty. Remainers even egregiously invoked images of a possible world war should the UK leave the EU. All about as credible as the disgustingly repellent Russell Brand’s conversion to God.
The Leave campaign was scarcely more honest. The notorious £350 million a week NHS claim was misleading, while the enormous complexities of disentangling decades of economic, legal and institutional integration were routinely brushed aside. I remember many Brexiteers assuring me freedom would be amazing much to my instinctive scepticism. The Brexit campaign far too often resembled a merry stag do of giddiness only to awake to the reality of rashness and thumping hangovers the following day.
Perhaps most troubling was the extraordinary lack of serious discussion about Northern Ireland. As someone who is half Irish, I was profoundly concerned about the implications for the Good Friday Agreement, the delicate constitutional settlement and the practical realities of maintaining an open border on the island of Ireland. These were not peripheral considerations. They went to the very heart of the peace settlement and the relationship between two countries whose histories are inextricably intertwined. I personally spent disproportionate amounts of time dealing with the wreckage of the Northern Irish Protocol when working at the centre of government through the Vaccines Taskforce and collectively Brexit delivered serious opportunity costs due to a distinct lack of pre-planning for a potential Leave vote.
That was self-evidently not freedom.
That neither campaign adequately confronted these issues was deeply disappointing. The referendum needed a considerably longer run-in, allowing for a comprehensive and independently scrutinised cost-benefit analysis of both remaining in and leaving the European Union, presented clearly and honestly to the public. Voters deserved a proper understanding of the economic, constitutional, diplomatic and practical consequences of either choice, rather than competing slogans and selective forecasts. Crucially, a longer timetable would also have allowed the Government and Civil Service to undertake serious contingency planning for both outcomes. A decision of such constitutional magnitude demanded careful preparation, not political complacency. The failure to prepare adequately for a Leave victory was lamentable, and the subsequent administrative improvisation made an already difficult process unnecessarily painful.
This was a botched and rushed divorce of ugly proportions.
Yet there was a more fundamental reason for my reluctant decision to vote Leave. Britain’s relationship with European integration had been growing increasingly uncomfortable for decades. When we joined the European Economic Community in 1973, we effectively became engaged to a European project primarily understood in Britain through the prism of economic cooperation. However, as the relationship developed, the partners increasingly wanted different things. What began as an engagement gradually became less like a marriage and more like distant friends trying to maintain a difficult relationship despite fundamentally different ambitions.
Britain remained outside the Euro and Schengen, negotiated an opt-out from the Social Chapter before subsequently accepting its provisions, and resisted important elements of European financial regulation and political integration. We also, with legendary imagery, had Mrs T handbag the club for £5 billion big ones as way of rebated loot. Our position was not one of complete detachment, but of increasingly selective participation. The EU is a federalist club that believes sovereignty can be pooled and nation states can all happily subjugate to the unaccountable decisions of a monolithic, Byzantine and fundamentally undemocratic bureaucracy in Brussels. The special arrangements which once made membership tolerable, in fact at times rather attractive, were becoming a substitute for genuine agreement about the Union’s destination. We were neither fully committed to the European project nor comfortable with the direction in which it was travelling. As the world changes, not least because of the thorny issue of tectonic demographic shifts across the globe, the idealism of freedom of movement started to destroy the very notion of a functional country as borders became borderless and elected national governments became powerless. Whether in or out, Remain or Leave, the idea the EU was an apotheosis of brilliance and a text book case study in progressive administration is best left to those buzzing around Cloud Cuckoo Land.
In that sense, the old membership model was becoming increasingly unsustainable and frankly dysfunctional. The EU failed to address the red flag warning signs redolent of an elite arrogance that rolled into a lazy partner assuming the other will never possibly leave me. The most ardent Remainer needs to now concede, the EU was an increasingly unloving, distant and pompous partner that failed to listen, make changes and fix the marriage. Britain wanted the economic benefits of integration without embracing the political destination favoured by many of its European partners. This was not necessarily unreasonable, but it was becoming an increasingly awkward basis for a lasting relationship. Sometimes divorce, however painful, is preferable to remaining in an unhappy marriage where both parties ultimately want different things.
A decade later, I remain convinced that reopening the Brexit question would be a serious mistake. Not because Brexit has been an unqualified success and not because I do not believe a union of sovereign cooperating nation states would ultimately not be optimal. It would because the challenges of today and tomorrow need sovereign allies to work together, but that word sovereign is critical and the EU has no interest in it. The EU’s answer to the world’s problems is to pool more power and flog the nation state on the political equivalent of e-Bay. It is no surprise it is an alien institution to the European man on the street.
Plainly, Brexit has been mismanaged too. There have been economic costs, unnecessary disruption, missed opportunities and political failures. To follow my analogy of divorce, the bloody lawyers are the only ones who have got rich, whilst we have parochially squabbled over who is having the kids. The absence of a coherent long-term post-Brexit economic strategy has been particularly disappointing. In short, the UK has lacked a vision about what sort of country it wants to be in a brave new world of rampant migration, technological changes and new risks and opportunities. Yet acknowledging these failures does not mean that reversing Brexit would somehow solve them. Such thinking risks mistaking nostalgia for strategy. That is a bit like tunnel visioning the good times and employing emotional amnesia to the countless bad times and pretending it will somehow be alright on the night. Sadly, it won’t.
Moreover, the EU is confronting major changes itself. Germany is declining quicker than Usain Bolt can run the 100 metres and France is currently tearing itself up like some unseemly UFC street clash. Should Madame Le Pen, as many polls currently predict, become the next occupant of the Elysee Palace, then serious EU carnage awaits with potential Frexit or at least some form of la revolution francaise. This is before we get to countries such as Italy and Spain, which have been economically sluggish for decades amidst stagnant growth and failing fiscal policy. What EU would we be negotiating with and on what terms? Andy Burnham is scrambling around for those answers. You should not reopen a debate when you cannot answer the first question in play. Across the continent, demographic decline, sluggish productivity, excessive bureaucracy and technological underperformance present formidable challenges. Europe’s dependence on American security guarantees and its difficulties competing with the United States and China expose further structural weaknesses.
The EU is not about to disappear tomorrow. It retains significant collective economic strength and considerable institutional resilience. Yet it increasingly resembles a ship taking on water while its officers debate whether the solution is a larger engine or greater authority for the bridge. That hardly constitutes an irresistible invitation for Britain to climb back aboard.
Nevertheless, there is an essential distinction between ideological rigidity and political pragmatism. I am half Irish, and my attachment to Ireland informs my perspective considerably. I understand why EU membership has been important to Ireland’s economic development, international positioning and national confidence. Indeed, were Ireland to hold a referendum tomorrow, I would vote to keep it inside the European Union. Some might consider that contradictory. I consider it common sense. I still think Ireland should be preparing longer term for a collapse of the EU and squirrelling away a sovereign fund for such an inclement day.
However, the idea Ireland can just rip itself out of the EU is back to Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Ireland’s economic geography, political circumstances and strategic interests differ from Britain’s. For Ireland, continued membership currently offers advantages which outweigh the disadvantages. Britain’s calculation is different. Conservatism should recognise that political decisions must reflect national circumstances rather than abstract ideological purity. What works for Dublin need not work for London. Pragmatism must accompany vision. Without vision, politics becomes managerial drift. Without pragmatism, it descends into ideological fantasy. Our politics has so badly lacked this in recent times and that only hurts, what Labour and others, like to call working people.
This is precisely why reopening Brexit would be so damaging. Britain has already endured years of constitutional division, political instability and institutional distraction. Another referendum would reopen wounds that have never entirely healed, consuming political energy desperately needed elsewhere. A vote against rejoining would hardly silence those determined to reverse Brexit. A vote in favour would initiate another prolonged and uncertain negotiation, without any guarantee that Britain could recover its previous membership arrangements, including its historic opt-outs and budget rebate.
Meanwhile, the country’s underlying problems would remain. Britain needs stronger productivity, greater investment, energy security, improved infrastructure, serious public service reform and a credible economic growth strategy. None of these challenges disappears through closer institutional alignment with Brussels. Nor should anyone imagine that returning to the EU would restore the political and economic circumstances of a decade ago.
That does not mean treating the EU as an adversary. Britain should pursue constructive cooperation on trade, security, scientific research and shared strategic interests. Our European neighbours remain indispensable partners. Northern Ireland must never again be treated as an inconvenient constitutional afterthought. Cue, this raises key questions on any proposed ECHR withdrawal, which has merit given its sovereign emasculation, and how Northern Ireland will be secured. Protecting the Good Friday Agreement, respecting the identities of both communities and maintaining practical cooperation across the Irish border are enduring responsibilities, irrespective of Brexit. However, cooperation is not the same as political reintegration.
The greater danger is that Britain’s political establishment, having failed to make sufficient use of the freedoms and responsibilities of Brexit, concludes that the answer is simply to abandon the enterprise. That would represent an abdication of leadership. The European Union faces profound challenges. Its economic model requires reform, its democratic legitimacy will continue to be tested, and the tensions between national sovereignty and further integration are unlikely to disappear.
Britain should wish Europe well, cooperate closely and learn from its successes and failures. We should not assume that the safest place aboard a troubled ship is necessarily the cabin we previously chose to leave. Brexit was never a guarantee of prosperity. It was an opportunity to assume greater responsibility for our own future. The tragedy would not be that we left the EU. It would be that, having left, we lacked the imagination, competence and courage to make independence work.
The answer to a difficult divorce is not automatically remarriage. It is to build a better life afterwards. Britain must now get on with doing precisely that and with a government that gets it.