"Make Brexit Work"
An absurd slogan for an impossible task
The most dispiriting three-word slogan in current British politics is, of course, “Stop the Boats”. And for me the second worst is Labour’s pledge to “Make Brexit Work”. Both mini-jingles fulfil a purely electoral function since neither are achievable. But if we think it likely that the inventors of STB may be out of office within a year or so, what MBW means to Keir Starmer and his colleagues will probably be of far greater significance.
So let’s get to it. Making Brexit Work is, I suppose, like making amputation work. You don’t get the leg back and you’ll never quite run again, but there are better and worse ways of living with your loss. Which is a huge one. Mark Carney was merely the latest senior figure to remind us this week of the price we have paid for that vote in 2016 – in this case in the form of additional inflation which will quite possibly lead to a recession next year. Brexit is the ulcer that keeps on weeping.
Back in 2011, 15 months into the coalition, I wrote for The Times that the argument for Europe was being lost by default. In that piece I criticised Labour – by then led by Ed Miliband - for mounting a lacklustre defence of the EU in the face of “Eurosceptic” attacks. Their attitude, I said, seemed be one of “let the Tories stew and don’t frighten the horses”. “but”, I added:
The horses need to be bloody terrified. We are not sleepwalking into a federal Europe, we are sleep-arguing ourselves out of the European Union. And the price wouldn’t be some add-on to our economic wellbeing, but a catastrophic loss of influence in setting the rules and terms for the place where — right now — we do more than 50 per cent of all our trade with the entire world. It is still as Mrs Thatcher argued it was 25 years ago.
No British government, no matter how it starts out, has ended up believing that disengagement is in our interests. But unless the argument is made, that is what could happen. John Major’s handful of bastards have grown in a few short years to fill half the Tory back benches. We’ve nearly gone too far.
I’m reminding myself and you of this because (a) it makes me look quite good and (b) it’s an indicator of the terrible dangers of letting important arguments go by default, on the basis that you don’t think it’s in your short-term interests to fully engage with them.
The referendum changed a lot of things, but one of the most interesting was to alter the balance of arguing forces on the question of the EU. After the summer of 2016 colleagues who I had signally failed to persuade of the strategic importance of the Union and of our membership of it, changed their view pretty abruptly when they realised what losing meant. Never mind the Red Wall, there is now – as there hadn’t been since the 70s, a significant and committed pro-European movement in Britain.
In spring 2021 the polls crossed for the last time, with more people regretting our departure from the EU than celebrating it. That trend has deepened. The last survey by Yougov showed that 31% of respondents believed that it was right for the UK to have left the EU, with 56% saying it was wrong. I hardly need add that among younger voters that trend is even more pronounced.