The Brexit that never was

By Pete North - April 3, 2021

In another timeline Covid didn’t happen, the EU wouldn’t be ballsing up its vaccine response, and the news, it is safe to assume, would be focused on the fallout of Brexit. I would likely be writing blogs every other day on the subject pointing out the stupidity and hypocrisy of both sides.

Instead, Brexit has all but dropped off the agenda. The FT and Guardian occasionally remember to cover it, but leaden with bias, whining and self-satisfaction. The Brexit hashtag on Twitter is a nest of remainer obsessives and if there is still any reasoned discourse going on, it’s not on my radar.

Until recently I’d been working on the assumption that when Covid tails off, Brexit would come rushing back as unfinished business, but I’m starting to doubt it. Covid has provoked wider geopolitical turbulence, rendering Brexit something of a backwater concern.

Already it doesn’t really register that things are looking prickly in Northern Ireland. The armoured land rovers are out stomping on recreational riots, but with civil disturbances happening just about everywhere, it doesn’t really rate as news.

More to the point, the mainstream of politics is generally not interested in the minutia of Brexit and never has been. The culture war takes priority every single time, and Brexit as a facet of the culture war has been and gone. Despite the ravings of AC Grayling, there is no appetite to rejoin now or in the future.

At some point we might see a resurgence of trade debate, but for the time being, the Tory propaganda narratives hold and Liz Truss can do no wrong with the party faithful. You would think that after a week of a large ship jamming the Suez Canal it might raise questions on the wisdom of pivoting our trade further afield, particularly as east Africa may erupt into war, increasing the risk of terrorism and piracy.

As to UK-EU relations, I don’t see any major change to the relationship happening any time soon, particularly while the Tories are in office and the tone from the UK is confrontational. It’s really for a successor government to reset relations with the EU, but for as long as Labour is in the grip of the woke virus, and the wider left is an abomination, we are, fore the foreseeable future, a one party state.

Being that is so, there won’t be much of a debate on trade if the government doesn’t wish it. The right wing press will obligingly distract the debate, leaving the issue to a narrow band of specialist correspondents who will find they are increasingly related to the middle pages.

Further still, though there is more bickering over Northern Ireland to come, with ministers still none the wiser about what they signed up to, we will gradually see the government climb down. They’ll just drag their heels about it. For a time we must simply resign ourselves to the fact that post-Brexit, we do substantially less trade with the EU and less trade overall.

The political noise in the near future is more likely to settle on the catastrophic after effects of Covid, particularly the NHS backlog, and the cost of living. The conversations will be connected to Brexit, but the blame will be cast directly on the government.

It’s difficult to anticipate how the economy will reorder. I think wage freezes are a given, along with a rise on the cost of consumer technology and services. There will be winners and losers, but the effects will be gradual. The further we get from Brexit, the harder it is to blame Brexit. We may see rows as new checks on imports from the EU interrupt supply chains but the Tories might well succeed in keeping it out of the media.

There’s also one other factor I don’t think has been priced in. With Brexit now done in a political sense, a lot of people simply won’t to know. Anyone who gave their vote serious consideration when voting to leave did so with some trepidation though accepting the risks. There is a particular British stoicism where once a decision is made, we accept it and get on with it and adapt.

After what will be essentially two years (at least) of Covid restrictions on travel and interactions, many have already made the adjustments in the knowledge that the world will never be quite the same again. The gears of global change are in motion, and the stakes become far higher than Brexit. We are returning to a more essential form of politics than the procedural and administrative. We are laying the foundations of a new century in history – to which Brexit may just be a footnote.