There’s a growing understanding in Britain that the
country’s vote to quit the European Union, a decisive moment in the
international rise of reactionary populism, was a grave error.
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Just as critics predicted,
Brexit has led to inflation,
labor shortages, business closures and travel snafus. It has created supply
chain problems that put the future of British car manufacturing in danger.
Brexit has, in many cases, turned travel between Europe and the U.K. into a
punishing ordeal, as I learned recently, spending hours in a chaotic passport
control line when taking the train from Paris to London. British musicians are
finding it hard to tour in Europe because of the costs and red tape associated
with moving both people and equipment across borders, which Elton John called
“crucifying.”
All this pain and hassle has created an anti-Brexit majority in Britain
According to the U.K.’s Office for Budget and
Responsibility, leaving the EU has shaved 4 percent off Britain’s gross
domestic product. The damage to Britain’s economy, the OBR’s chair has said, is
of the same “magnitude” as that from the COVID pandemic.
All this pain and hassle has created an anti-Brexit majority
in Britain. According to a YouGov poll released this week, 57 percent of
Britons say the country was
wrong to vote to leave the EU, and a slight
majority wants to rejoin it. Even Nigel Farage, the former leader of the
far-right U.K. Independence Party sometimes known as “Mr. Brexit,” told the BBC
in May, “Brexit has failed.”
This mess was, of course, both predictable and predicted.
That’s why I’ve been struck, visiting the U.K. this summer, by the curious
political taboo against discussing how badly Brexit has gone, even among many
who voted against it. Seven years ago, Brexit was an early augur of the revolt
against cosmopolitanism that swept
Donald Trump into power. (Trump even
borrowed the “Mr. Brexit” moniker for himself.) Both enterprises — Britain’s
divorce from the EU and Trump’s reign in the U.S. — turned out
catastrophically. Both left their countries fatigued and depleted. But while
America can’t stop talking about Trump, many in the U.K. can scarcely stand to
think about Brexit.
“It’s so toxic,” Tobias Ellwood, a Tory lawmaker who has
called on his colleagues to admit that Brexit was a mistake, told me. “People
have invested so much time and pain and agony on this.” It’s like a “wound,” he
said, that people want to avoid picking at. The
London mayor, Sadiq Khan, one
of the few Labour Party leaders eager to discuss the consequences of leaving
the EU, described an “omertà,” or vow of silence, around it. “It’s the elephant
in the room,” he told me. “I’m frustrated that no one’s talking about it.”
Just as critics predicted, Brexit has led to inflation, labor shortages, business closures and travel snafus
Part of the reason that no one — or almost no one — is
talking about Brexit’s consequences lies with the demographics of the Labour
Party. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of Labour voters supported
Brexit, and those voters are concentrated in the so-called Red Wall —
working-class areas in the Midlands and northern England that once solidly
supported Labour but swung right in the 2019 election. “Those voters do not
want to have a conversation about Brexit,” said Joshua Simons, the director of
Labour Together, a think tank close to Labour leadership.
Sheer exhaustion also contributes to making Brexit talk
unwelcome: Between the vote to leave the EU in 2016 and the final agreement in
2020, the issue consumed British politics, and many people just want to move
on. Simons argues there’s also a third factor: a sense that the results of a
democratic referendum must be honored. He cites a point that a mentor of his,
political philosopher Danielle Allen, made after the 2016 vote. “In the end, in
democracy, sometimes you all do crazy things together,” Simons said. “And what
becomes more important is not whether the crazy thing was a good or bad thing
to do. It’s that you’re doing it together.”
As someone from a far more polarized country, I found this
idea somewhat foreign. If the Trumpist electorate had imposed such a costly and
ultimately unpopular policy on the country, I suspect there would be a rush
among Democrats to reverse it. But in the U.K., referendums — which are rare
and held only to address major issues — have a political gravity that it’s hard
for an outsider like me to understand.
According to the U.K.’s Office for Budget and Responsibility, leaving the EU has shaved 4 percent off Britain’s gross domestic product.
“You’ve got to respect the referendum,” Khan said. “What you
can’t have is never-endums, referendum after referendum after referendum. That
disrespects the electorate.”
Still, he argues that without facing the harm that Brexit has
caused, the country can’t move forward: “Unless you can diagnose what the
problem is, how can there be a prognosis?” Britain is not, at least in the near
term, going to rejoin the EU. But both Khan and Ellwood argue that it can still
forge
closer trade and immigration ties than it has now, and perhaps eventually
return to the European single market, the trade agreement encompassing the EU
countries, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein.
“After the next election, I can see all parties embracing
the idea of rejoining the single market,” said Ellwood, adding, “I put money on
it that it happens in the next five years.”
One silver lining to Brexit is that it offers a cautionary
tale for the rest of Europe. After Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016,
there’s been fear, among some who care about the European project, that France
or Italy could be next. But as The Guardian reported, as of January, support
for leaving the EU has declined in every member state for which data is
available. As governments across the continent move rightward, the EU itself is
moving in a more conservative direction, but it’s not coming apart.
“I don’t think you’re going to see other countries in the
EU leaving the EU if for no other reason than because they’ve seen the impact on
us,” Khan said. But there’s a larger lesson, one most Western countries
seemingly have to continually relearn. Right-wing nationalist projects begin
with loud, flamboyant swagger. They tend to end unspeakably.
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