//Take the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill set to replace the EU’s innovation-crushing GDPR. It was only set out last May and, after endless delays and distractions, there is little hope of getting anything workable passed before the next election. With two years at most until the next election, it would be next to impossible now for the Tories to launch a wholesale review of regulation to jump-start ground-breaking research, or exploit our freedom from state aid rules to channel funding to specific projects – even if they were minded to.
Where are the Brexit Spartans? They don’t seem to be interested in this big picture stuff. They are too busy down in the trenches, fighting their last heroic battle – an attempt to force through a bill which aims to scrap 4,000 EU-derived laws by the end of the year. By failing to explain how specific sectors would benefit from divergence, however, many voters will be wondering what the point is.
This is how Brexit dies. The received wisdom in Westminster is that it will none the less live on, not as a material thing, but as a political phantom – a subject that both parties avoid discussing at all costs, as the referendum’s legacy stalks Parliament, deformed, inviolable, forgotten.
I fear that it is more likely that we end up rejoining the EU – and sooner than many people think. Not for the reasons the alt-Remainers believe, best expressed through their favourite cliche: nobody voted to be poorer. Brexit has not been an economic disaster, GDP growth has not collapsed compared to our European peers, while foreign direct investment has remained strong. The real problem is that nobody voted for nothing to change. And Brexit has not brought about the kind of national reset that millions of people expected. Instead, it is beginning to look slightly rubbish, even pointless.
If anything, the country is moving in a polar-opposite direction to what Brexit was supposed to entail. Leaving the EU was meant to result in the UK taking back control of immigration policy. Instead, the Government flees from a frank national conversation about the trade-offs between the economy’s insatiable appetite for cheap labour and the popular desire to limit numbers. Brexit was meant to make our economy more competitive. And yet the Government has increased taxes to a peacetime high as the big business lobby obstructs deregulation efforts lest it increase competition. Brexit’s only major achievement to date is that it has scathingly exposed the ineptitude of this country’s political class.
Unsurprisingly, the polls have shifted significantly in favour of Remain: while 54 per cent now think that it was wrong to leave the EU, only 35 per cent maintain that it was the right decision.
This may not mean that voters have any appetite for rejoining yet. But if we do so, it will not be as the result of an elaborate elite conspiracy. Sir Keir Starmer’s insistence that the matter is settled may well be genuine. But the political sands are shifting in ways that make a closer relationship with the EU inevitable. The Labour Party, to secure its longevity over the next generation, still has to win back Scottish – largely Remain – votes with a big political gesture. Should support for Brexit continue to plummet in the Red Wall, a policy change may become irresistible.
What of the Tories – the party that little over three years ago received a historic mandate to “get Brexit done”? If the first elephant in the room is that Brexit’s days are numbered, then the second is that the Conservative brand cannot possibly survive such an ignominious outcome. Could we finally see the emergence of a new centre-Right party that genuinely has a chance of taking power? As the revolution goes up in flames, this may be the only thing that can save it.//