We’re just a few months away from our annual Independence Day celebration. You might not know it yet, but this great celebration of Brexit has become a symbol of Britain’s new golden age. Or at least, that’s what the Tory peer Daniel Hannan predicted on 21 June 2016, just days before we voted on whether to stay in the EU.
“As the fireworks stream through the summer sky, still not quite dark, we wonder why it took us so long to leave,” he wrote, lost in reverie. “The years that followed the 2016 referendum didn’t just reinvigorate our economy, our democracy and our liberty. They improved relations with our neighbours.”
You may have noticed that this did not happen and that the Independence Day celebrations do not exist. There is a reason for that. It’s because Brexit has been a disaster. Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of when we left the EU.
When something is a success, people generally like to associate themselves with it. But this week was noticeable for how quiet the Daniel Hannans of the world were. They seem awfully keen to change the subject.
At the time, it felt as if perhaps Hannan had gone mad. This wasn’t the Conservative rhetoric we were used to: pragmatic, practical, sceptical, suspicious of change. It was utopian, manic – more Robespierre than Burke.
What we did not know at the time was that Hannan was not unusual. Some strange mania had overtaken the right. It had burrowed into their brain and started to turn them mad.
Soon enough, Hannan insisted, Britain would be “the region’s foremost knowledge-based economy”. It would “lead the world in biotech, law, education, the audio-visual sector, financial services and software”. It would stand as the chief power in a “22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU”.
These dreamscapes were only marginally more fantastical than the material put out by the official campaign. Vote Leave promised “tariff-free trade with minimal bureaucracy”.
In actual fact, as anyone who understood trade could have told them, leaving the customs union meant goods needed extensive paperwork and physical checks. Goods trade was hit hard. Since 2019, the total value of UK goods exports has risen by just 0.3 per cent each year compared with 4.2 per cent across the OECD.
The Leave.EU campaign video from the time might as well be a sci-fi film. “You’ll benefit from better care provided by our NHS,” it said. False.
“Your wages will rise thanks to better-controlled immigration.” False.
“Your weekly food shop will become cheaper.” False.
“You and your family will benefit from a resurgent economy.” False.
“Politicians both local and national will become more accountable.” False.
On and on it went.
Even after the vote, as the nation stood in a state of shock, the proponents of Leave were still offering impossible promises. Boris Johnson took to The Daily Telegraph to insist everything would be fine. “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down,” he wrote.
That was all nonsense, of course. If he had wanted such freedoms, he could have fought for Britain’s membership of the single market, which allowed for free movement. Instead, he spent the next few years agitating for the hardest possible Brexit, eradicating our ability to move to Europe.
Elsewhere the failure was not so much about imagination or consistency, but self-regard. “The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want,” Michael Gove said. In fact, the EU had decisive leverage over the UK. If time ran out of the Article 50 exit process, Britain would fall out without a deal and into a regulatory black hole. The EU would be in the same position it was originally.
From this fact alone, you could see that Britain had put itself in a uniquely disadvantageous position.
This dynamic defined the black comedy that came next, as the UK was battered around by a superior, better-prepared negotiating partner. Figures like Gove either did not understand this, or were not honest about it.
When David Davis became Brexit secretary, he radiated a similar sense of entitlement and intellectual superiority. He had it all figured out. He would make sure that talks over trade would take place in parallel with talks over the divorce, allowing Britain to maximise its leverage.
“We have to establish the ground rules,” he said. “The first crisis or argument is going to be over the question of sequencing.” He caved on the first day of talks, 19 June 2017.
Once Johnson finally secured a deal in 2020, the nonsense machine whirred itself into operation once again. Nearly every comment the then-prime minister made during this period has turned out to be false. “There will be no non-tariff barriers to trade,” he said. It turned out that there were, of course. Their ruinous impact meant that exports to the EU by smaller businesses have dropped by 30 per cent, with around 20,000 firms ceasing exports entirely.
“There will be no border down the Irish Sea,” Johnson promised on 13 August 2020. Six months later he insisted that “there will be no checks on goods going from GB to NI, or NI to GB”.
This was also false. His own government documents stated there would be a range of measures on GB-NI trade, including customs declarations, food safety checks, regulatory checks on product standards.
It was left to Rishi Sunak to fix the deal when he was prime minister. And even then, as others tried to patch up his own catastrophically flawed work, Johnson voted against it.
No wonder they don’t like to talk about it any more. Because if we do talk about it, we start to recognise the gulf between their words and reality. If the world made the slightest bit of sense, we’d never take anything else they say seriously again.
翻译：
This Labour Government is about to get a whole lot more Tory