We need a Labour revolution on Brexit

And not just any old Tory, but the architect of austerity; the man who managed to persuade millions that Gordon Brown caused the global financial crash when in truth Gordon did more than anyone to deal with it; the man who failed to persuade David Cameron NOT to call the EU referendum despite knowing, and arguing privately, it would be a disaster; the author of a Project Fear campaign which failed, with disastrous consequences, leaving the UK now weaker, poorer, less powerful and respected in the world, and much of its politics in a state of delusion and denialism from which it shows little desire to escape… George Osborne

I quote a recent statement of his: “There is such an easy trap here for the Labour government to set for the Conservatives, with the immediate economic benefit of doing something that’s going to help your GDP in the next few years. Do some kind of trade deal with the EU, of the kind that’s talked about; for example, making it easier to do agricultural checks, so we’re not spending billions of pounds at the border doing that… so you’re basically digging a pit, you’re putting the spikes in, and you’re inviting Kemi Badenoch to walk into the pit. 

“Because once the deal is done, every British business will start to adjust to the new trading relationship that they have with the EU, new customs arrangements, which will be an improvement on the ones that exist today. Then you get to the general election, and the Conservatives will say ‘it’s outrageous, they betrayed Brexit, they’ve conceded some power to the European Court of Justice,’ or whatever.

“They’ll try and re-run the Brexit campaign from 2016 which will be ancient history by then, and every business will go ‘we are not going back to that. We are absolutely not going back into the Brexit chaos.’ And the Labour Party will win over the business community in that single manoeuvre, and the Tories will be stranded on a kind of ideological argument that really only has resonance with a small portion of the population.” 

He got a lot wrong in his time as chancellor. But here he is, 2025, getting something right.

That Labour needs to win over the business community, or perhaps that should be “re-win over”, is not in doubt. I did an event last week, 300 business people, and asked them, on a show of hands, whether the Labour government was a) performing as expected; b) better than expected, or c) worse than expected. When I spoke to this kind of audience before the general election, many in business, sometimes including lifelong Tories, were not just resigned to a change of government, but positively relishing it.

So, as a Labour supporter, it was disappointing that my exercise had zero hands raised for “better than expected”, around 20 per cent “as expected”, but an overwhelming majority “worse than expected.”

And yes, in the discussion, obvious things that might annoy business came up… the rise in national insurance, action on non-doms, VAT on school fees, workers’ rights – at least the last three of these were promised in the manifesto – but disappointment on the much-vaunted “reset” with Europe was right up there too.

Many of you will know I am obsessed with sport. Not just for entertainment reasons, but because of what you can learn from it, about leadership, teamship, strategy, innovation, communication, and crisis management. I collect great quotes from great sportspeople.

Try this one from perhaps the world’s best ever ice hockey player, Canadian Wayne Gretzky, who explained his greatness thus: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

It strikes me that the reason why Labour may fail to recognise that Osborne is right is not just because he is George Osborne, but because the debate is largely stuck where the puck has been for almost a decade now… “will of the people, Brexit means Brexit, no going back, don’t reopen old divisions, let’s not scratch the scab for fear we do more damage.”

But the puck has moved, and it is now moving faster than it was in 2016, and faster, too, than last year when Labour were elected on a mandate for change. 

There have been several factors which have moved it. Let’s start with a few economic facts, and let’s never stop reminding people of them, and never stop challenging our largely tamed and timid post-Brexit media to start covering them.

Name me any other event, any other crisis, any other set of circumstances, which takes between four and five per cent out of our economy, and yet which leads to a weird national shrugging of the shoulders, or a near Parliamentary and media blackout on the real-life consequences. 

With thanks to the Independent for a great front page on the fifth anniversary of Brexit last month, some facts. The £30bn divorce settlement; the 15 per cent long-term hit on trade, as assessed by the Office for Budget Responsibility; the £27bn drop in exports attributed to new Brexit trade barriers; the 118,000 tonnes fall in seafood exports since 2019.

The 16,400 businesses, some of whom may well have bought the idea Brexit would mean less, not more red tape, which have just given up on exporting to the EU because of the bureaucracy and the buggeration; the 56 per cent of dairy producers struggling to find staff; the 1.2million EU nationals who have left us.

And – remember “take back control”? – the 2.3million net migration into the UK since EU free movement ended. India, Bangladesh,.Nigeria … oh how their people have benefited from the catastrophic act of self-harm inflicted on June 23 2016, and by the Brexit deal that only Johnson and Frost are left defending.

There are plenty more facts, and everyone listening should know them, memorise them, never tire of using them.

Subscribe to the New European if you want to keep abreast of them. Or learn German, and listen to the latest episode of my favourite German podcast, Acht Milliarden, which has done an analysis of Brexit five years on, with the kind of stories you rarely hear on UK media, of small businesses overwhelmed by new paperwork, of food exports stuck in customs halls so long they end up being destroyed, of businesses losing business not just in the EU, but in Northern Ireland too. 

There are plenty more factors driving the puck forward to a changed debate, which requires a changed politics.

There’s geopolitics. Remember the promises of the great new trade deals, not least with the US. A fantasy when it was promised, an even bigger fantasy now, with an unreliable, unpredictable, anti-European, “America First and this time I really mean it” Donald Trump back in the White House.

I can see why, given his tariff fixation, some in the government might want to wait to see whether he goes for the EU next, and we can somehow carve ourselves some kind of exemption. But let’s stop kidding ourselves that because his mum was Scottish, and he liked meeting the Queen, that we are likely to be spared the whims, the excesses, the infantile narcissism and toxic nationalism.

If ever we were to be confronted with the dangerous falseness of the choice the right wing want to present – “it’s Europe or America, take your pick” – may the last 24 hours alone shake us out of that nonsense. What a day of triumph yesterday was for Putin.

No return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders, says the Fox News defence secretary. No hope of Ukraine joining NATO. President Zelensky and Europe seemingly cut out from a cosy Trump-Putin deal, made in Saudi Arabia.

When it comes to defence, Europe has to get real. And Europe knows that means closer relations with the UK, and we need to know it too.

There may have been a time, given the pain barrier EU leaders went through with Brexit, when the door on any proper meaningful reset for the UK would have been very hard to push open. Not any more. 

There are those who will argue, ‘why do we want to get closer again, given Labour at least won a big majority, whereas in Europe it is the hard right and the pro-Putin populists who appear to be on the rise?’ The AfD set to be the second biggest force in the Bundestag; Marine Le Pen in with a chance of becoming president of France; Viktor Orban perhaps the most influential leader of a country of fewer than ten million we have ever known. Austria; Slovakia; Italy; the Netherlands.

But think of it another way… imagine the leadership role a UK government could and should be playing when seeking to work with others to meet the enormous challenges of our times. The puck has moved for Europe too, because the US, China and Russia are no longer where they were in 2016, none of them.

They want us more involved than they did. But they need to see more about what the reset is meant to mean.

Now Labour can say that there can be no return to the customs union, the single market or freedom of movement, because that was the basis on which they were elected. I might say, and indeed I did, many times, that they did not need to go that far, but they did, and so I cannot argue that they won on that basis.

But even with those red lines in place, with Osborne’s suggestion in mind, take a look at the report commissioned by Best for Britain, who asked Frontier Economics to analyse the impact of a better deal with the EU on the UK economy, staying within the redlines, but striving for closer alignment on goods and services.

And the answer? A boost to our GDP somewhere between a low of 1.7 per cent and a high of 2.2 per cent. That would claw back up to half of the Brexit hit to our GDP.

They assess the gain to the UK economy at £32bn plus, and to the EU £29.7bn. And they say Yorkshire and the Midlands are the regions which would fare best.

These are places full of those so-called Red Wall seats where, if you believe the press and all too many of our politicians, there is a homogenised population sitting there warning that any tampering with the great Johnson-Frost deal would see them taking to the streets. It’s nonsense.

“Make Brexit Work” is never going to work, as a slogan, let alone as a strategy. “Fix the bloody Brexit mess” – that has a chance. 

This weekend Mark Carney, former Bank of England Governor turned Canadian prime ministerial hopeful, is coming on The Rest Is Politics, and so as part of my research I have been rewatching an interview we did with him, some time last year. He was explaining why Project Fear turned out to be if anything an underestimate.

During the “Brexit means Brexit” phase, when we hadn’t actually left, supporters of Brexit could claim that the worst predictions didn’t materialise. But the fall in the value of sterling was a signal, and he said that since we left, whether you look at growth, productivity, investment, trade deals, “the warnings have proven to be directionally right. To all but the most ardent supporters of Brexit, that much is now very clear.”

Of course the Frontier Economics report was not considered newsworthy by most of our media, partly because to admit Brexit was a disaster would require them to admit their role in the battle that led to Cameron calling the referendum, and then losing it. But the more they and the populists they support try to hide the truth about Brexit, the more we need to tell it, and keep telling it, because here is perhaps the biggest puck-mover of all… public opinion has moved.

Substantially. The public are well ahead of the politicians on this one.

Even with the continuing media bias, the easy ride given to Brexit’s main perpetrators, continuing nonsensical bleating by some Tories and ReformUKers that Labour are trying to reverse Brexit by stealth – if only! – because of the facts, because of the reality that people see in their own lives and livelihoods, public opinion has shifted, and keeps shifting.

It’s why Nigel Farage barely talks about it, having moved on to pretending to be a farmer, or running in absentia the Clacton branch of the Donald Trump fan club.

And here is my final point about what Labour should do now. Stop debating Brexit on your opponents’ terms. Stop being so defensive about spelling out the facts, the scale of the disaster that the Brexit deal inflicted on us.

Stop treating Nigel Farage like some exotic celebrity who manages to play the media like a fiddle, and start treating him for what he is… a man who thinks he can become prime minister, but knows it can only happen if his ideas and his policies, in so far as he has them, are spared the kind of scrutiny that usually happens to someone who wants to be prime minister. Treat him like a politician, take apart his arguments, expose his record, show that beneath the bonhomie and the bluster is an agenda that would take this country in a dark and dangerous direction.

That Acht Milliarden podcast I mentioned was titled “the crazy comeback of Nigel Farage.” They quoted the promises he made for Brexit, the promises to leave the country if it failed, alongside his admission it had failed, although obviously it wasn’t his fault, of course not.

The presenter couldn’t understand why Farage was not politically finished, given his role in something even he said was a failure. Der Spiegel’s London correspondent essentially said it was an expression of the weakness of his opponents, rather than any strengths of his. l

But how on earth have we allowed Farage, along with Johnson the prime mover and the prime driver of Brexit, to reinvent himself so that he can flit from studio to studio, and the B-word, and his role within it, never gets mentioned? When it does, he really doesn’t like it.

I saw that for myself when I was on BBC Question Time with him a few weeks ago. He seems to want to talk about anything but Brexit. Brexit is all he should be allowed to talk about. It’s the one thing he has achieved.

The man who gave us Brexit, and the economic hit I’ve outlined, now telling us he is the man to get our economy on its feet.

Who poses as a man of the people yet is down on his knees begging for millions from the richest man in the world, currently busy punishing the poorest in the world.

Who claims to be for the little people, but wants to demolish the welfare and health systems on which so many of them depend.

Who, having done damage to the UK via Brexit, now wants to damage the whole world by becoming the UK voice for the billionaire climate change deniers across the Atlantic.

He is not a cheeky chappy. He is a very bad man, but a clever man, well-funded and well plugged into the international hard right campaign that is, let us admit it, on the march, and with Trump in power feeling there is nothing they cannot do, nothing they cannot get away with.

So we have to do a better job of mirroring the internationalisation of their campaigns; of learning from how they do it as well as exposing how they do it; not stooping to their level maybe, but recognising that the media landscape has changed out of all recognition, and realising that this changes the nature of campaigns and communication, and indeed the way that politics is done.

The optimist in me says the populist right will come a cropper. The realist in me says do not take it for granted, and do not underestimate the damage they have already done, are doing now, and can do well into the future.

They will only be stopped if we stop them, and to do that, in the UK, the US, in Europe and around the world, we have to do a better job than we have thus far. 

But let me end on a note of optimism. If public opinion has moved as much as it has on Brexit, even with a hugely biased media, the Brexit blackout, the politicians continuing to lie about what they promised, and about the effect of what they actually did, and with so much else happening in the world in such turbulent times, imagine how much faster it could move if we really got our act together, saw where the puck was heading, and put together the campaign to get there ahead of it.

Mandela said “everything is impossible, until you make it happen.” That was the mindset that drove the Brexit campaigners and they won. That is the mindset we must have now.

Labour’s position needs to change, because the country’s position needs to change. It can, and it must.

We cannot keep pretending that the damage is not real, and deep; but nor can we ever stop believing that something can be done to fix it.