21 October 2019

Financial Times: Brexiternity: The Uncertain Fate of Britain, by Denis MacShane

The British are entering “Brexiternity”, as Denis MacShane puts it. Under any circumstances, Britain and the EU will enter years of agonising negotiations over what their future trade relationship should be.

[...]three and a half years after the referendum, Brexit grinds on. The bad news for the British public is that the purgatory won’t end any time soon. The great illusion about Brexit — in many ways the greatest of all the many Brexit illusions — is that there is going to be one breakthrough moment, one fine hour when it all gets settled — and then the country can get back to the things it should really be focused on like soaring levels of knife crime, underfunded schools and the desperate need to solve the crisis in social care and mental health.

Instead, as Denis MacShane puts it, the British are entering “Brexiternity”. We have years ahead in which the B-word will never be far from our lips.

Why so? In part, as MacShane observes, it’s because even if a Brexit deal gets endorsed by MPs, Britain and the EU will enter years of agonising negotiations over what their future trade relationship should be. Mr Johnson thinks a trade deal can be agreed by December 2020. It is going to take a great deal longer than that.

But much more troubling is the fact that any Brexit pact — in particular the hard “Canada-minus” break that Johnson aims for — will generate years of political and economic turmoil. The special new economic status that Johnson has agreed for Northern Ireland — tying it closer to the Irish Republic — will reopen the dreadful sectarianism of the past. Scotland’s clamour for independence will be turbocharged as it enviously eyes Northern Ireland’s special economic deal. And that’s before we get to the implications of the Johnson pact for UK manufacturing, workers’ rights, food standards and much else.

MacShane is a former Labour MP who was Europe minister under Tony Blair. Back in 2015 (when the overwhelming consensus in UK politics was that Remain would win an EU referendum) he published Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe.

Brexiternity is another title with foresight and flair. But the book itself is less a description of the future, more a cri de coeur from a passionate Remainer about the condition of Britain and how we got here.

In analysing why Brexit happened, MacShane hits out at the usual suspects. David Cameron “never missed an opportunity to sneer and mock at Europe” and was therefore bound to lose the 2016 referendum. Theresa May made a “mess” of the Brexit negotiations by failing to build a cross-party consensus on Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn has been “unable to define a convincing position on Brexit since 2016”. Labour today is therefore “a national and global laughing stock”.

MacShane is also clear-eyed about the failures on the Remain side. The campaign for a second referendum has never found a leader who can galvanise the public like Johnson and Nigel Farage. Business has often been too hushed in pointing out the dangers of Brexit which means “the economic debate has never caught fire”. Think-tanks and academics too often adopt a “solutionist” approach, trying to find ways to make Brexit work rather than saying plainly that it’s bad for Britain.

MacShane’s main hope is that even after a Brexit deal is agreed, those who did not want it to happen will keep up the fight. He wants people to rally to the cause of defeating the isolationists who aim to remove the rights of millions of young British citizens to travel and who will fundamentally weaken the country in the decades to come. In the meantime, he predicts that Johnson will fall victim to the whirlwind that he has sown: “He will find the crushing weight of Brexiternity making normal politics and governance all but impossible.”

Full article on Financial Times (subscription required)

© Financial Times