Five Years ...

And we're still waiting for Brexit to get 'done'

Pushing thru the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over,
We had five years left to cry in

Five Years, David Bowie (1972)

We left the European Union a little over five years ago. Ever since, there has been no end to the ‘sighing’ and the ‘crying’ from those who rather wish we hadn’t. Even those who voted for it are understandably angered by the failure to do much more than get it over the line, or ‘done’ as Boris wrongly put it. Whether you think this was a good decision or a bad decision, the world has changed beyond recognition since we made it. The election of Donald Trump (twice) in the US. Wars in Europe and the Middle East. The unprecedented closing down of the world economy. The locking down of citizens in their homes, for months and years, in response to a virus.

The world, in other words, has been turned upside down. But we still need to be able to explain it, and the dominant narrative couldn’t be further from the truth. No, it wasn’t the fault of Brexit or Trump. Was it the death of (a surely Eurosceptic) David Bowie in early 2016? This comes up surprisingly often - the idea that it was his demise that led to our decline. Or everything going to shit soon after, as those rather fond of the status quo (but definitely not Status Quo) only half-jokingly wonder out loud. While his death shook this fan too, no it wasn’t him either. As Ross Clark in The Spectator argues, there is a lot of misinformation about our current plight:

Falling economic growth, rising inflation, empty supermarket shelves – all these came to be blamed on Brexit, ignoring the rather large spanner which had been thrown into the works of the global economy.

As Clark explains, far from a ‘stagnant UK falling behind a buoyant EU’, both are ‘trapped in the same cycle of relative decline’ - with even its greatest powers, France and Germany, in a lot of economic and political trouble. Across the continent, industry and public services are failing and strangled by risk-averseness and bureaucracy; there are clampdowns on the the free movement of migrants, and our cities are becoming less safe as violent crime and terror incidents become an ever more familiar feature on our streets.

While this commonality of a Continent in decline is hardly anything to celebrate, it does suggest that our relative freedom to act in our own national interest is the one thing that distinguishes the UK from our European cousins. That and the relative absence of xenophobic sentiment - save the disturbing rise in Antisemitism - does put us in a better position. Or at least it should. But five years later, we still haven’t found anybody or anything with the political will to take advantage.

Whether or not it was a good idea to bring decision-making back in-house, so to speak; it is important that we should have a good relationship with our neighbours. Indeed, the whole point of being a proper nation state is that you are fully in control of your political faculties. And, as a consequence, are able to engage with other countries on that independent basis. But that isn’t the same as ‘realigning’ with the EU. Or as John Oxley, writing for Unherd, describes it: ‘reconciliation’. That, he argues, is the direction in which this government is taking us. The ‘vibes’ are certainly Eurofriendly.

Which is more than can be said of European leaders with regards Trump and his threat to walk away from the Continent. Not withstanding Starmer’s call for the United States to act as a ‘backstop’ if Europe’s defence of Ukraine falls short. (That Brexit again.) No wonder they are at odds with the US President and each other over the defence of that battered nation if, as a Telegraph leader put it, we don’t have a ‘viable alternative, and the necessary fiscal muscle to maintain it’. This has only added to the sense that far from taking control, our society has never felt so out of control. Again, this is something we have in common with our friends.

The US has administered what Tom McTague, for Unherd, describes as a ‘geopolitical shock to Europe’. Starmer and Macron are fighting to take the initiative. To be the one to rally the Continent around efforts to renegotiate the Transatlantic relationship, as well as to manage away their own fraught internal problems. Starmer, the dull technocrat, may be strangely suited to the former when feelings are running high and there is demand for the calming influence of a grey mediator. But, as McTague says, we’re badly in need of conviction politicians if we’re to address the latter. The only convictions our PM has are thoroughly authoritarian and, therefore, part of the problem.

So where are the solutions coming from? Well, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves what that vote on June 23 2016 was supposed to be about. It wasn’t just a vote. It wasn’t even just about leaving the European Union. It was, as Claire Fox argued at the Oxford Union, a response to the ‘economic, cultural and democratic alienation of huge swathes of the country’ and, importantly, ‘the start of a democratic revolution’. As Fox says, the EU itself is now beset by populist revolts among its member states. A good thing too. No doubt there are Little Englanders and those who long for Empire - though its tricky to be both - but for me (and as an old lefty) there was always something appealingly internationalist about Brexit.

Precisely by appealing to the virtues of sovereign nationhood, it encouraged others to take control of theirs’ too. Or, as Fox puts it, ‘it let the genie out of the bottle’ and, to slightly mix her metaphors, has ended up ‘sweeping away the deadwood across the Western world’. Removing this particular obstacle to democratic accountability - or ‘tearing up excuses’ as Fox nicely describes it - was a way of ensuring there would be nowhere to hide for our politicians. Except it was never the only obstacle. There was always the awkward reality that the UK’s own political class were very much against it. And (as we discovered) would do everything they could to frustrate it.

They were also clueless and not up to the challenge anyway. Next stop the local elections.

Image: RayanS93