Brexit: no longer an issue

By Richard North - June 24, 2023

I suppose I was never going to get away without commenting on the 7th anniversary of the EU Referendum, but it was as well to wait until the pundits had had their say before moving in to sweep up the droppings – rather like following the horses in the Lord Mayor’s parade.

For naysayer central, the obvious place to go was the Guardian, with pride of place given to Jonathan Freedland, who blithely tells us that, “With even leavers regretting Brexit, there’s one path back to rejoining the EU”.

Actually, I don’t think leavers are regretting Brexit – at least not according to The Times which conveys news of a poll which has the majority of voters who supported leaving the European Union in 2016 still believing that Brexit will turn out to be a success in the long run.

This was a poll of 4,000 people, carried out to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the Brexit referendum, when more than 70 percent said they would still vote Leave if another referendum was held today, compared with 16 percent who said they would vote Remain.

On that basis, of course, we would lose the referendum, except that there isn’t going to be another Brexit referendum as, much to the chagrin of the Freedlands of this world, we have already left the EU. If we are to have another referendum on the EU, it will be one on whether we should rejoin, and the battle lines have not really been joined on that issue.

Freedman, however, seems to think otherwise, suggesting that it is only a matter of time before we reverse what he calls “this national act of self-harm”, especially – he asserts – “if we learn from Nigel Farage”.

That leads us into a diatribe, where he proclaims that we should “let Nigel Farage be our inspiration, let John Redwood be our role model”, although not the way they would want, “revered as the founding fathers of Brexit, toasted on this day every year as the men who led us to glorious independence from the hated empire of Brussels”.

Rather, he suggests, when you’ve ploughed through his verbiage, rejoiners need to look to the likes of Farage and Redwood for inspiration. The long march from 1975 to 2016, he says, required a dogged, even obsessive, persistence and, as important, a strategic patience. He adds:

They didn’t move straight to their end goal: before they were Brexiters, they posed as mere Eurosceptics. They were prepared to play the long game, inching incrementally – a rebellion over the Maastricht treaty here, opposition to joining the euro there – towards their ultimate goal of exit. Sad to say, it worked.

I’m comforted by these assertions because they demonstrates that, for all his pompous air of superiority, Freedman doesn’t really understand the battle against UK membership of the EU. For a start, Farage wasn’t around in 1975 – he only joined the movement after Maastricht, when the opposition was already well-founded and had been in place since the ’60s.

As for Redwood, I don’t think he ever was a Eurosceptic. Like so many Tories, his main interest was himself, and his contribution to the movement was minimum. In the business of politics where trust is a dangerous luxury, this is a man on whom you wouldn’t rely for the time of day.

The thing is though, we didn’t pose as “Eurosceptics” – I don’t where that name came from but it sort of stuck, and that’s what the media called us. Many in the movement called themselves “Eurorealists” but that label never really took off. When “Brexit” arrived, that replaced all the other labels. There was no artefact, no pretence. It just described what we were, people who wanted to leave the EU.

With his distorted view of how Euroscepticism worked, Freedman wants rejoiners to emulate our campaign. Start, he says, with commonsense, popular demands – like a new, reciprocal exchange scheme for young people, closer cooperation on security or shared food safety and environmental standards – moves only an ideologue could oppose.

But that’s not how we worked. The main thrust of the campaign was to portray the EEC, the EC and then the EU as a shite organisation, anti-democratic, cumbersome, expensive, and bureaucratic – the “evil empire” populated by hoards of unfeeling, corrupt Eurocrats, all intent on destroying us liberty-loving Anglo Saxons.

In other words – and right up to the day we cast our votes – the campaign was totally negative. I wish it had been otherwise and did my best to make it so, but most Leavers who went to the polls voted against the EU, not for some grand vision of how the post-Brexit world might look.

Freedman, though, is so up his own fundamental that, like Labour’s Lammy, he somehow believes we can renegotiate the current Brexit deal, with a review due to start in 2026. Little do they understand that the “review” will be limited to discussions of the implementation of the deal. With its own stresses and preoccupations, the EU is not going to expend an ounce, or even a gram, of political capital, on reopening the book or changing a single word.

Such is the fantasy world in which these people live, however, that Freedman thinks that, with a Labour government in place, this event could be the vehicle for steady, gradual convergence. What he doesn’t realise is that, just by standing still, we are diverging from the EU, as Brussels continues to build on the acquis and develop policy initiatives.

Despite that, what in fact will be a non-event, this is supposed to open the “Overton window” sufficiently open “to let in a conversation about re-entering the customs union and the single market”. And, says Wonder Boy, “once you’re talking about that, rejoining the EU itself becomes the natural course of action”.

This is where we know we can wind down any efforts to counter the “rejoiners” in the certain knowledge that they’re not going anywhere. Time and time again, through the Brexit talks, the EU stressed that the “four freedoms” of the Single Market” are indivisible – the free movement of goods, services, capital and persons.

There is no way that the EU will entertain participation in the Single Market without the UK buying into the whole package, which simply isn’t going to happen. And, as to the Customs Union, this is the EU’s organisation, and a central part of the founding treaty. We can’t “re-enter” the Customs Union” without first re-joining the EU.

If Freedman and others think they can use either to smooth the way for our rejoining – as evidently they do – then they’ve learnt nothing and, after all this time, have shown they’re not capable of learning.

Even though the Guardian can parade its own poll results, showing that 58 percent would vote to re-enter the EU – the highest level since 2016 – while respondents said they trusted the European Commission more than the UK government, the hurdle of a real referendum is an altogether different thing.

In the way of things, neither of the two main parties will want to devote the next electoral cycle to the long-drawn-out and the disruptive process of a referendum, and neither side will have a mandate – or ask for one – to hold a referendum.

This shunts a poll into the post-2029 cycle, when net-zero is likely to dominate the political agenda, whence I cannot see the parties wanting the distraction of an EU referendum.

Effectively, that puts any prospect of an EU referendum way beyond 2034, even if the EU was prepared to entertain a UK application to join – which is by no means certain. All we need is a latter-day Charles de Gaulle, and entry would be blocked.

By that time, though, the EU will be very different to what it is now and the degree of divergence with the UK could be huge. By then, we will be looking to close to 30 years of separation and the gap could be unbridgeable.

Yet even that period will not be enough for the “rejoiners” to learn something about the EU that they so love. We are safe in our glorious “isolation” for a long time yet, with plenty of other battles to fight. EU membership is no longer an issue and will not be for the foreseeable future.