What should we call a project that poleaxes the economy, destroys our global reputation and threatens political stability in Northern Ireland? If we had known what would come to pass, how would we have voted on it six years ago?
We don’t even have to cast our minds back to the EU referendum. Imagine for a moment that a vote was being proposed today. In the wake of the pandemic, in the middle of a cost of living crisis, and during a war in Europe that demands unity and solidarity across the continent—how would the British public respond to a political party that proposed Brexit? The idea of splitting the UK from its European neighbours would be seen as indulgent or preposterous—self-evidently absurd.
But of course the case against Brexit does not need to rely on counterfactuals. We can look at the real world, in which the project is failing on every discernible level.
Britain’s economy has suffered a slow puncture. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that Brexit will ultimately reduce our GDP by 4 per cent compared to if we had remained. According to the Financial Times, the decline equates to around £40bn a year in lost revenue for the Treasury—over twice as much as the Leave campaign falsely (but famously) claimed we were sending to the EU in £350m weekly instalments. The FT also notes that business investment is now 9.4 per cent lower than it was just before the referendum.
Meanwhile, a report from the LSE has found a 25 per cent drop in imports from the EU relative to the rest of the world. Many UK businesses have simply been cut out of EU supply chains. Most top economists now agree that Brexit is the main reason why Britain is experiencing higher inflation and lower growth than its neighbours. According to the OECD, only sanctions-hit Russia is expected to do worse in the G20 next year.
But of course the unfolding calamity is also a political one, not just in terms of the degradation of national discourse, or the entrenched division of society; to understand the damage done we have to consider the legacy of a recent civil war.
A government which cared even slightly for Northern Ireland’s stability would not have countenanced a project which threatened it. Yet this government plays politics with peace. For years ministers denied the Irish border problem, refusing to accept that their Brexit implied a border on the island. Then they denied they would place one in the Irish Sea. Now, having voluntarily agreed to do so, they are seeking to break international law by removing it.
The government thinks it is being very clever by breaking the Northern Ireland protocol. It imagines it successfully deceived both the EU and the British electorate, and can now wave a magic wand to undo the damage. Really its behaviour is a sign that it cannot, even now, accept the consequences of its own actions. It cannot even admit the premise of them. The prime minister calls the adjustments in the protocol bill “relatively trivial” while proposing to disapply the majority of the agreement.
The protocol is simply the latest example of government ministers having to fix something that was broken before it even existed. The fundamentalist Brexiteers on the backbenches, meanwhile, see that their project is failing and proffer ever-more extreme schemes and scapegoats to disguise it. Because they cannot concede the inevitable failure of their project, it must be the failure of its delivery that is to blame. The impurity of this Brexit, rather than Brexit itself.
A project that was always irrational must grow more so in order to justify itself. And so the government is still justifying the basic lie at Brexit’s core. The lie that Brexit can work without causing harm.
Here is the original falsehood from which all the misery flows. Acceptance of it is required for entrance into much of public life. Everyone knows that the project is going badly but no one is allowed to say so. Brexit is the new omertà: not only must its consequences be denied, they must never even be named.
And because nobody can acknowledge the carnage, nobody can do anything about it. To mitigate it, political leaders may only attempt piecemeal and ineffective measures which won’t require anyone to tell the basic truth about what has happened. Nobody can talk about the single market or customs union; senior ministers and shadow ministers cannot even concede that Brexit has anything to do with the weak economic forecasts.
Sustaining the lie is not an abstract endeavour. It exacts a heavy price from the people of the UK. It requires us to accept a less competitive economy, lower trade and weaker growth for the short and long term. That means more businesses struggling and more people in poverty. It requires Northern Ireland to face permanent instability in the place of a delicate equilibrium. Politics in the province has now reverted to a zero-sum game: if Sinn Féin is happy with the protocol settlement it means the DUP is not, and vice versa. Whereas frictionless trade before Brexit was guaranteed both east to west and north to south, now only one can be ensured. None of this is solely about the protocol. As the putative future first minister Michelle O’Neill said, the threat to the Good Friday Agreement is Brexit itself.
The lie has become impossible to expose because it is now entangled with the idea of Britain itself. Brexit is the product of UK exceptionalism: the idea we can disregard rules and get something others can’t, while other people suspend their interests and laws to accommodate us. If we accept the truth about Brexit, we must also accept the truth of our place in the world. We can’t and don’t.
And so we are condemned to denial. No major politician can break the spell and admit what is clear to the outside world: that Brexit is a generational disaster; one of the worst blunders by any British government; a project so impossible to defend in reality that only naked lies can stop it collapsing in on itself.
How do we account for something that has caused so much destruction and misery in so short a time? Millions of words have been written but in the end, just three will do. Brexit is poison.
