Those who misled the country over Brexit are usually quieter these days. They do not hang their heads in shame, but change the subject whenever they can. They deflect with their new war-cry that Britain must also leave the European convention on human rights.
As the effects of their wicked Brexit folly worsen by the month, they rarely get a chance to whoop: “We were right!” So their glee was unrestrained when the great US global bully gave Britain a less hard beating with a 10% tariff on its goods, compared with the EU, which was walloped with 15%.
Their joy overflowed when the business and trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, conceded: “I’m absolutely clear, this is a benefit of being out of the European Union, having our independent trade policy, absolutely no doubt about that.” But what else can a trade secretary, speaking through gritted teeth, actually say? In his attempts to attract foreign investment, he can hardly tell the truth about the damage done by leaving the EU.
These advocates of Brexit should gloat while they can. When the French prime minister called the EU’s deal with Donald Trump a “soumission” (submission), Kwasi Kwarteng seized on the word in a piece for the Telegraph, writing: “For the French, with their memories of capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, the word is even more associated with abject humiliation than it is in English.” Yes, that’s the same Kwarteng who hurled the British economy over a cliff only three years ago.
“This trade deal is the EU’s greatest humiliation since Britain voted to leave”, read the headline on his column. But he would never confess that the difference between a 10% and 15% tariff with the US is minimal, since we trade twice as much with the EU as the US. It barely equates to the regular variation in exchange rates: in other words, it’s “a rounding error”, the Centre for European Reform’s trade expert, John Springford, told me, when compared with the hammer blow Britain gave itself with Brexit.
The UK-India trade deal signed with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, last week was greeted with another Brexiter whoop from the Conservative peer Daniel Hannan. Also writing in the Telegraph, he said: “My party, and Brexiteers more widely, should be taking credit for having done what all the clever Europhiles have spent six years telling us was impossible. Instead of moaning, we should welcome Starmer’s belated understanding that world’s biggest and fastest-growing markets are outside the EU.” But the Tory leader took another view: “Keir Starmer called this ‘historic.’ It’s not historic, we’ve just been shafted!” Kemi Badenoch said, dismissing the India agreement as a bad deal that would increase immigration.
I don’t know whether clever men like Kwarteng and Hannan are blinded by Brexit monomania or paralysed by the awful knowledge of the damage they have inflicted on their country, unable to confess an act of treachery and delusion hardly matched in British history. But as ever, facts are too inconvenient for them to deal with.
Yes, the India deal is the biggest and most substantial trade deal since leaving the EU. Yes, it’s a deal that would have been impossible to do from inside the union. But how big is it? It will add 0.13% to our economy. That’s better than the Australia agreement, worth just 0.08%, the New Zealand deal, worth 0.03%, or the proposed US agreement, worth 0.16%, according to Department for Business and Trade analysis. But our fragile economy needs all the help it can get, so hurrah for Brexit and our new trade deals!
But the gloaters ignore the context: our great Brexit losses. Here’s the Office for Budget Responsibility’s assessment: “Our forecasts have assumed that the volume of UK imports and exports will both be 15% lower than if we had remained in the EU.” That 15% loss in trade “will lead to a 4% reduction in the potential productivity of the UK economy”. In other words, as Jonty Bloom of the New World calculates, we need 50 India trade deals to make up for Brexit, because Britain does more than 40% of its trade with the EU – more if you include the European Economic Area and Switzerland. India has just 2% of our trade.
Brexiters bleat that Labour is sneaking us into the EU by the back door, with deals on Horizon, the EU’s research and innovation funding programme; soon, hopefully, Erasmus; and maybe a youth experience scheme. We hope for agricultural products and energy deals. But even these, say the trade experts, are still small potatoes. Major attempts to rescue Britain’s 4% loss in productivity since 2020 hit the concrete walls of Boris Johnson’s monumentally bad trade and cooperation agreement. Brexit zealots protest against agreements to keep a dynamic alignment with EU standards that would make trade easier. But it doesn’t apply to our internal environmental standards: outside EU rules, we have let our water quality fall behind the EU. More than 85% of bathing waters in the EU are rated excellent compared with just 64% in the UK, with the gap rising every year, reports the European Movement.
Public opinion has shifted rapidly: we are now a “Bregretful” country, where only 31% still think it was right to leave and 61% say Brexit has been more of a failure than a success. Who do they blame? The Conservatives and Boris Johnson are top of the list, with 88% and 84% respectively holding them responsible. More than two-thirds (67%) blame Nigel Farage. A majority of Britons (56%) want to rejoin the EU as the grim reaper carries off old Brexiters, replacing them with young, pro-European voters.
Don’t expect bolder moves from the Labour government in its current frame of mind. Though defence and security draw us towards ever closer union, public opinion is not to be trusted. If people were confronted now with actual re-entry terms – paying in, free movement, joining the euro, no special deals – their answers might change. The mood might also be different if the far right continues its gains in EU countries, dividing the union’s values.
What might it take to throw off the economic, political and psychological darkness of Brexit? A clever – or Cleverly? – new Tory leader daring to break with the past, confessing the error of Brexit and taking us back into the EU, once and for all. It may take another generation to recover.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
