All the old gang were there: a reunion of the Brexit triumphalists. I was one of the guests in the stately drawing room of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Georgian townhouse in Westminster last week, as the Bruges Group met to cheer the launch of the new book 75 Brexit Benefits: Tangible Benefits from the UK Having Left the European Union. Tory Brexiteers Iain Duncan Smith, Bill Cash and John Redwood were all there, a gathering of the kind of Eurosceptics John Major once called the “bastards”.
Our host, Rees-Mogg, was in jubilant form, celebrating Keir Starmer’s recent speeches that named the economic damage done by Brexit. In Labour’s new willingness to touch the Brexit live rail, the Bruges Group members welcomed the revival of the grand old conflict as their way back to referendum glory days. Rees-Mogg chortled: “Starmer’s view that re-entering the European Union is the answer to our economy is as true as everything else he says.” Much mirth, as he departed early for his State of the Nation slot on GB News.
Are they right that Labour reopening the Brexit wound will reignite toxic old referendum passions? Nothing ever divided the country as much as that mendacious, xenophobic and in essence frivolous leave campaign. Its leaders were in it for fun and personal advancement: the Tory party was destroyed by it, only Nigel Farage has benefited. The bitter campaign split families, workplaces and neighbourhoods, stirring anti-migrant hate. Nothing in my lifetime has caused such deep political grief.
For all the anguish it caused the losing side, it was soon plain it gave no corresponding joy to most leave voters, who are still facing its real-life effects. Soured political attitudes spring partly from the empty hyperbole of “Take back control” and a “sovereignty” signifying nothing. Who feels empowered by the failure of a country falling further behind? The pernicious warning that 88 million Turks could “flood” into a UK remaining in the EU, and Farage’s “breaking point” poster showing streams of refugee men (not on their way to the UK) entered the political bloodstream. Now some of the wave of newly elected Reform politicians are caught out in the crudest racism, echoed by a Tory party unrecognisable from the days Enoch Powell was ejected from the shadow cabinet for “racialist” speech: Robert Jenrick would have been out on his ear back then.
The cover of 75 Brexit Benefits. Photograph: Richard Gardner/Shutterstock
Until now, Labour has lived in fear of what that referendum demagoguery fired up. Best to pretend to agree, despite knowing that “make Brexit work” was an impossibility. Laying down red lines against joining the customs union and single market is now as deeply regretted by many Labour people as the manifesto’s fateful tax straitjackets. But the dam has broken because there is no disguising the truth about what Brexit does to UK growth.
At last, Starmer publicly acknowledges that Brexit “significantly hurt our economy” when “wild promises were made to the British people and not fulfilled”. Rachel Reeves first dared speak the forbidden words, stating: “The cuts to capital spending and Brexit have had a bigger impact on our economy than was even projected back then.” Wes Streeting said Labour should undo “the economic damage done by Brexit”, while David Lammy refused seven times in one interview to rule out reversing Brexit, arguing it had “badly damaged our economy” and Britain needs closer integration with Brussels, though rejoining the customs union was not “currently” government policy. No one will be sacked for breaking the line. Let’s have more ministerial truth-tellers preparing the country for rocky trade-offs on the long pot-holed road back. To deter others, Britain won’t get any deals that make leaving the EU look anything but semi-suicidal. Other models beckon – Switzerland and Norway – but they cost in money and free movement. Voters need to be prepared.
Tories gloat that Labour has fallen into the remainer trap. The Mail accuses Starmer of wanting “to unravel Brexit”, the Telegraph talks of a “cabal of … remoaners” in a “plot to reverse Brexit”. But that old ploy may be dead now that the public thinks Brexit a calamity, by 56% to 31%. Even the vast Brexit-backing media struggle these days to find actual positives: those vaunted trade deals outside Europe offer minuscule gains compared with what is lost. Worse reports roll in weekly, the latest from economists John Springford and Andrew Sissons’s detailed analysis of this trading nation floundering when cut off from the EU. Grim new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research puts the loss at 6-8% of GDP cumulated so far up to this year, £240bn in wealth and £90bn in tax revenue every year. Think how that would have changed last month’s budget. “You do not need to have a PhD in economics to know that erecting unnecessary trade barriers with your biggest trading partner will hurt growth and raise the cost of living,” Starmer wrote in the Guardian.
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This Labour about-turn may warm the cockles of some remainer hearts, but as with its decision to scrap the two-child benefit cap, has it been left too late to bring back defectors repelled by political cowardice until now? Twice as many Labour voters are considering fleeing to the Liberal Democrats and Greens as to Reform – a fact which has finally percolated through to strategists who had been over-obsessed with regaining Faragists. Monday’s meeting of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron at No 10 presses the crisis case for unity, though collapsing UK negotiations on defence contributions shows no EU deals are easy, however life-and-death urgent.
Meanwhile, in the Rees-Mogg salon, their book of 75 alternative facts looked like a remnant from bygone days. Unfortunately the facts that are true are insignificant, while Brexit’s economic tsunami is airbrushed away. Some facts are right: yes, we can have stricter animal protection laws since leaving Europe. Some are not: the cost of motor insurance is increasing far less rapidly in the EU than it is in the UK. Yes, Brexit made it possible to reduce the price of bananas, already cheap, even more. And yes we do escape £14-19bn in EU contributions, but missing from this text is that up to £90bn a year is lost in Treasury revenues.
“You lot only talk economics. We talk of freedom that has no price,” a Bruges Grouper tells me. That’s a good reminder of how they won the referendum: these cavalier romancers trounced the roundhead number-cruncher remainers. Surely the country wouldn’t be fooled by the same trick twice.
