As we approach the anniversary of the EU referendum, public opinion leans heavily towards rejecting the outcome and rejoining the EU. Recent polling by Best for Britain suggests that around 53 per cent want to rejoin, with only 32 per cent opposed and the rest undecided. So is it time to undo Brexit?
The hard truth is that rejoining the EU is not going to happen any time soon. The government is camped behind its manifesto redlines, which rule out attempting to get back into the Single Market and Customs Union, never mind the EU itself. That caution is perfectly understandable. Just over half the population wanting back in is not a sufficient margin of support to withstand the inevitable tussles of a re-entry negotiation, with all the messy compromises that will involve.
Moreover, a negotiation requires two willing partners. The EU itself will look askance at a rejoin proposition until it can be pretty certain that this time it will be for keeps. With two of the UK’s major parties still viscerally opposed to the idea, those conditions simply do not pertain.
So should we give up on the idea? I think not. Just as momentum to leave was built up over many years, so the case for rejoining will require patient advocacy if we are to reach the point where a solid majority of the people of the UK believe that it is firmly in the national interest.
We have more data now to assess where our national interest lies, since we have the experience of being outside the EU to compare with what we knew when we were in.
We can begin to make a hard-headed assessment of whether leaving the EU has been a success. On the most basic level, of course, it has been; we have left the EU and we have our sovereignty back. Or rather, we no longer choose to pool elements of that sovereignty; we can make our own decisions in policy areas formally governed by our EU obligations.
That freedom has turned out to be less transformational than the advocates of Brexit might have hoped. To put it at its mildest, there is no sign that the UK will any time soon reach the sunny uplands of significant outperformance of the EU economy. Instead, many economists still cleave to the more dismal reckoning that leaving the EU has knocked around 4 per cent off our growth prospects.
Why has freedom from EU rules proved less liberating than anticipated? One possibility is that those rules were rather less inhibiting than was portrayed. While Germany and France might not have had their economic troubles to seek, EU membership has not stopped, for example, Spain and Poland from growing at a decent clip in recent years.
And perhaps we have learned more about ourselves. So many drivers of economic growth were in the UK’s hands even during our time in the EU. Training and skills, planning, infrastructure, support for technology and enterprise; EU rules touched only peripherally on much in these policy domains. Now that we are no longer in the EU, there can be no hiding; the primary responsibility for creating the conditions for growth rests, as it always has, here in the UK. Maybe the priority should always have been reform of the British state itself.
Moreover, there is little evidence of public appetite for the sort of thorough-going deregulatory agenda envisaged by the vision of the UK as a Singapore-on-Thames. Undoing protections for workers’ rights and the environment have not proved popular causes. More broadly, and paradoxically, we seem to have become more European since Brexit in our expectations of the warm embrace of the state; whatever the crisis, the cry is for the state to do more, not less.
It is true that in some policy areas, notably AI and to an extent financial services, the UK has sensibly used Brexit freedoms to devise more agile regulation that works better for UK interests. The challenge, then, is to weigh up in the years ahead whether those freedoms can compensate for the loss to British businesses of free access to the Single Market, a Single Market that itself will continue to evolve.
Above the economic context looms the changes in the geopolitical order that no one envisaged back in 2016. Our near abroad has suddenly become a lot more vital for our defence and security. As this harsher world evolves, the question becomes whether we can afford, in the national interest, to stand aside from the counsels of the organisation that will continue to shape Europe’s future, and with it our own.
That is the debate we need to have.
Philip Rycroft was permanent secretary at the Department for Exiting the EU from 2017 to 2019
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