Brexit is the new communism

“Look at the mess we’ve made of it,” Vote Leave co-founder and former MP Douglas Carswell says of the post-Brexit world. “We have seen a succession of missteps and missed opportunities”. 

Brexiteer pundit Melanie Phillips complains that “ever since the Brexit vote, the opportunities that it offered the country have been squandered”, acknowledging that “given the chance, most people would now choose to rejoin”.

Leave-supporting entrepreneur Luke Johnson joins the chorus, writing of the need to “save Brexit”, with the startling innovation of “growing our economy”. 

The consensus is there, after a fashion: this isn’t the Brexit we voted for, the UK should simply just ignore EU standards, let rip, and Brexit will suddenly work – and the people will presumably fill the streets with Union flag bunting and rejoice with tea and Victoria sponge.

It is all mind-numbingly familiar. Almost a decade on from the referendum on EU membership, the exact same arguments are being aired again and again, when any freshness left them years ago. 

The Leave campaign deliberately didn’t set out any positive vision of what Brexit would actually look like, which allows Brexiteers of every stripe to say that our current existence simply isn’t what they were asking you to vote for. The version they wanted was the one that would’ve worked, but inexplicably isn’t being done.

Brexit is now inevitably and inextricably like Communism: not only has a true Brexit never been tried, it will never be tried – as any real-world policy could never live up to the impossible aspirations set out for it.

The Brexit advocates still stubbornly refuse to compromise with reality, and applaud themselves for doing so. Why doesn’t the UK simply stop complying with EU product safety standards and other red tape, they ask – ignoring the glaringly obvious answer that you cannot sell people a product that does not meet those standards into the EU. And now we’re out of the bloc, we have no say on how those standards change – meaning any UK manufacturer who wants to sell to the EU would have to abide by the rules, whatever the government says.

Writing in the Times, Phillips similarly boggles at the idea that “more people back closer arrangements with the EU rather than more trade with America”. “Are they all completely nuts?” she asks, rhetorically, wondering why people might think trade with our near neighbours is more important than a country several thousands of miles away. However digital the modern economy has become, proximity is still by far the single most important factor in trade.

She also conveniently ignores that the EU is a larger market than the USA, and that because we were in a union with them for decades, our supply chains, standards, regulations and more start much closer to alignment with the EU than they do with the US. 

Phillips is left clutching at the flimsiest of straws to dismiss voters’ stubborn desire to trade with their neighbours. “The EU economy is set to grow by 1.5 per cent in 2025. Yet the IMF and OECD are projecting a UK growth rate of 1.6 per cent and 1.7 per cent respectively,” she writes. “So why on earth would anyone want to rejoin Planet Sclerosis in preference to trade links with the most powerful country in the world?”

Perhaps never in the course of punditry has so much been made out of a 0.1 percentage point difference in a GDP forecast.

The Brexiteers’ various arguments end up in an all-too-familiar place: the UK should agree a comprehensive trade deal with the USA. That’s what is wanted, and is imagined to supercharge the UK economy. 

One problem with this is that Donald Trump is very obviously not interested in signing trade deals that benefit the USA’s foreign partners – he wants America to ‘win’, to such an extent that he has promised his voters that their public services will be paid for by taxes paid by the rest of the world. He has even set up an “External Revenue Service” to that end. 

Trump ran on a platform of protectionism and tariffs, not on setting up yet more frictionless global trade. The Donald Trump that is chomping at the bit to sign a trade deal that’s in Britain’s best interests exists only in the fever dreams of its Brexiteer advocates. Yes, every country wants to sign trade deals that benefit itself more than its partners – this is why negotiating as part of a bloc the size of the EU tends to result in better deals than going it alone.

But that’s only one half of the US trade deal problem. The other is that the UK public absolutely hates the conditions that would go along with any deal that had any hope of passing the Senate, in which the USA’s agricultural sector holds huge sway. 

Carswell’s article in the Telegraph is headlined “Everyone would happily eat chicken in the US like Nick Clegg”, and while he may be right that Brits will tolerate it on holiday, we do not want US food standards here.

80% of the British public oppose hormone-fed chicken or beef being sold in the UK, and the same proportion oppose chlorinated chicken (a cleaning process that compensates for tolerance of higher levels of bacteria in live birds) being sold here. 75% are against routine feeding of antibiotics to dairy cows – making it through to the milk – while 79% don’t want to eat vegetables sold with pesticides banned in the EU.

These majorities are huge (there is less than 10% support for any of those items) and they sustain across party divides. And that’s just the public opinion side: if Brexiteers think UK farmers are currently angry about inheritance tax, they should imagine that tenfold if the UK came remotely close to signing a deal that would force them to compete with ultra-cheap US imports. 

A trade deal with the US would kill British farming outright – but as it’s not going to happen, that’s almost a distraction. There are only two explanations for Brexiteers’ continued insistence that everything would be okay if the UK just let rip and signed a US trade deal.

One is that, like the cold ar campus Marxists before them, dissonance has taken over the UK’s Brexiteers and they are left to repeat the same old mantras with less and less conviction over time, rather than face up to the fact they may have got it wrong. 

The other is that they are such cynical opportunists that they understand seizing on a US trade deal – which politically will simply not happen – as what would make Brexit work means they can claim to be right, knowing the proof will never arrive.

The 2016 referendum effectively functioned as an entirely blank cheque signed by the British public to an amorphous group of grifters. It should, then, be all too unsurprising that they are refusing a refund.