Brexit’s forgotten fifth birthday

No one much wants to mark the fifth anniversary of Brexit this week, despite the event’s seismic significance. For the victors, it was too disastrous; for the losers, it is too painful.

It is not just the economic turbulence of the last five years which makes it hard for the “leave” camp to celebrate any “Brexit benefits”. Far worse for them is the surge in immigration, which is the precise opposite of what almost all Brexiteers said should and would happen after we “took back control”.

Nigel Farage may have won the 2016 referendum, but he never had to take responsibility for its consequences. He was always going to campaign against any Tory Brexit deal as a betrayal. But the immigration surge, caused largely by Boris Johnson’s decision to make visas freely available to low-skilled migrant workers, is an added bonus. There are virtually no Tories prepared to defend the increase in non-EU immigration, and Farage can now attack the Brexit deal without having to talk about the economy.

We thus have the spectacle of Farage and new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, united in condemning the Tory failure to curb immigration after Brexit—both legal immigration and the “small boats” crisis of tens of thousands of “illegal” migrants who have been crossing the Channel each year. With Reform UK surging in the polls and Farage now an MP (and maybe the best-known politician in the country), “Brexit betrayal” has become the dominant narrative among the Brexiteers themselves.

As for the opponents of Brexit, they are demoralised and disunited. Demoralised by defeat, and disunited over what to do about it.

A large chunk of the former “remain” camp, notably the Labour leadership under Keir Starmer, decided not only to accept the irreversibility of Brexit, but to pledge against any move to re-enter the customs union and single market, which would have been possible as a half-way house. They don’t want to highlight Brexit as a cause of the UK’s economic weakness, despite the urgency of their quest for economic growth.

Even among those who want to see a big step back towards the EU, there is a sense of wariness and exhaustion about reigniting the Brexit campaign.

There is the war in Ukraine, which is this century’s biggest crisis in Europe. Not only is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine far greater in its implications for European security and prosperity than Brexit, but it isn’t much affected by Brexit either. The UK continues to be a stalwart member of Nato, which so far has been the principal mechanism for rallying the west to Ukraine’s side.

It is fateful that the fifth anniversary of Brexit comes at the start of Trump’s second term. Before long, if Trump abandons Ukraine or starts a tariff trade war with Britain or the EU (or both), the UK may be forced by conditions of crisis to revisit Brexit. But for the immediate future, Starmer is united with Farage in talking up the “special relationship” with the US, and our distinctiveness from the rest of Europe. We pray for the best of both worlds.