On New Year’s Eve, conservative politicians and pundits delivered a common message: Brexit was now resolved, and after five long decades, the argument about Europe was settled for a generation.
The generation has lasted less than two weeks. Now begins Brexit’s next chapter: the breakdown of the coalition which held it together.
The reason for the trouble is that Brexit has now taken place. As such, five years of warnings are now becoming reality. We have quickly learned that Remainers’ predictions were not fearmongering and that Brexiters couldn’t resolve problems by simply “believing in Britain.”
The fishing industry is watching stocks rot in lorries, and some are announcing their companies are no longer viable. Lorries without the required paperwork are being denied access to Europe. Businesses are discovering they can no longer operate export hubs from Britain, and supply chains are being cut or re-routed. Meanwhile, performers are facing crippling new visa regimes to tour in the EU. Extraordinarily, the UK reportedly declined an EU offer to exempt musicians, out of reluctance to reciprocate. Boris Johnson famously said “fuck business,” and now he has.
The first site of visible discontent is Northern Ireland. Supermarkets are reporting extensive disruptions to their deliveries and consumers are being locked out of product ranges. The promised “light-touch” regulation in the Irish Sea has in fact become a hard economic border.
Last Wednesday, Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley Jr called for the invocation of a safeguard mechanism in the Northern Ireland Protocol, or failing that, the removal of the Protocol altogether. He described it as an “unmitigated disaster” and “impediment to trade.” The Prime Minister continues to deny the existence of such barriers, even in the face of documented evidence. But this damage was both foreseeable and foreseen. It was, indeed, the reason so many people on all sides of the Brexit debate opposed Boris Johnson’s deal and Theresa May’s before it. That is unlikely to placate the DUP.
Northern Ireland is also essential to the second fracture. The UK government now has a crucial choice: whether to privilege independence or close harmonisation with the EU. The “Singapore-on-Thames” model, so beloved of Brexit’s free-market wing, could involve rapid divergence from Brussels. The problem is not simply retaliatory EU tariffs, with all the implications. It is also the hardening of the border in the Irish Sea. From now on, any British divergence from the EU will also be a divergence from Northern Ireland. The more Westminster “breaks free” from the EU’s single market, the more it breaks up the UK’s. That could have significant constitutional as well as economic implications for a constituent UK nation now firmly in the EU’s (and thus Ireland’s) regulatory orbit. Brexiters, in effect, must decide if they want to “take back control” of British rules or the British union.
But of course the choice is not only about the union. A whole range of arguments now wait to split the Leave movement. An early row has emerged over bee-killing pesticides banned in the EU. Others will soon follow. These tussles will pit left against right, environmentalists against the agriculture industry, and animal welfare against the trade lobby. Such contests and trade-offs were never even acknowledged before. Now they will become inescapable.
The government’s problem is that the more decisions it takes, the more people it alienates. Prime among them are voters in the Red Wall constituencies. When, last week, Johnson was asked to identify tangible benefits of Brexit to voters who felt left behind, he could only think of two: free ports and the ban on pulse fishing. Many commentators noted that Johnson was being dishonest, and we didn’t need to leave the EU to accomplish either, and yet this seems the least of the PM’s problems. These were not the issues which people in the north and midlands believed would improve their daily lives. When challenged to list concrete benefits, Johnson could not accurately name a single one.
This matters. Voters in the Red Wall—most not natural Conservatives—may be angry when they see that Brexit offers no dividend but instead a deficit. Britain will now become rapidly less competitive and someone will take the blame. The EU can no longer be the government’s scapegoat and the Brexit deal belongs to the government.
Some will be looking to capitalise on this unhappiness. There was only one problem in leaving the EU with any kind of deal: it left a hook on which the most diehard Brexiters could hang the myth of betrayal. We will shortly hear much about the burdensome level playing field provisions, how the UK was blindsided and outmanoeuvred by its wily opponents and how, inevitably, the deal wasn’t the Brexit the people voted for.
Hardline Tory MPs will suddenly realise that the 1,200-page deal being published only four days before it was debated in the Commons meant it was impossible to apply adequate scrutiny. That, of course, is true—and the fact that they happily signed it off will be irrelevant. In exactly the same way as followed the Withdrawal Agreement last year, a number of Brexiters are going to find faults when it is too late to change them, and call for the deal to be scrapped entirely. They will be joined, inevitably, by figures from the Brexit Party who would love nothing more than a fresh grievance to re-establish relevance.
It is unlikely that Johnson would wish to cancel his own agreement. For all its numerous faults, “delivering on Brexit” remains a political “accomplishment.” But as the problems gather, we cannot discount the possibility that such a temptation will arise. Johnson is nothing if not an opportunist—and picking a fight with the EU is the only reliable distraction a modern Tory prime minister has ever known.
The fundamental problem here is that Brexit promised to be all things to all people: an opportunity to make Britain more isolated and more global, more cared for and more deregulated, more protectionist and more buccaneering. For five years the Leave tribes projected disparate hopes and ambitions onto a blank canvass. Now, finally, someone will have to fill it. This problem is not going away and Brexit is not finished. It has literally just begun.
