The Brexit report that names the guilty parties.. and why it will be so hard to rejoin

We have detailed this in the New European down the years but now the UK In A Changing Europe think tank (UKICE) has published its own 142-page summation of how we blew things so badly and what the future might hold. It’s called the Brexit Files and can be downloaded here.

The catalogue of disasters begins with David Cameron’s motives for holding a referendum in the first place – a ‘clever’ party political move designed to end a schism in the Conservatives which ended up making an entire country poorer. The only satisfaction to be gained is that Tory politics are considerably more volatile than they were before he started this ball rolling and a party hijacked by extremists is now facing deserved oblivion.

But if you think Cameron comes out of Brexit badly, the report makes it clear how subsequent PMs have mainly made things worse. Theresa May had a chance to unite a shellshocked country and party but sealed her own fate with pointless red lines of her own making.

Her chancellor Philip Hammond tells how this left him “completely stunned… I was completely and utterly horrified by what I felt was almost a coup: a definition of Brexit without any proper Cabinet consultation at all”. 

It is also clear now that even May did not understand what she had done and the consequences. When told by our ambassador to the EU Ivan Rogers “we’re leaving the customs union” (the necessary corollary of an independent UK trade policy), the prime minister responded: “I have agreed to no such thing.” Well, she had, and a lot of what has gone wrong since can be laid at her door. 

It’s not worth wasting much time on Boris Johnson, who lied and lied and was both shameless and stupid. Liz Truss passed her sell-by date before much damage could be done, and Rishi Sunak did manage to get the Windsor Framework signed in an act of making a bad thing slightly less bad. 

The economic damage is expertly explained. If you want a clear explanation of why trade is more difficult, investment lower, and the UK a poorer place this is the report for you.

It is also clear that far from reinvigorating parliamentary democracy as Brexiteers claimed it would, the House of Commons has been sidelined time and again because of Brexit. The civil service does not come out of the report well either. This is a rare case of abject failure having many fathers. 

But running throughout this report is a thread that you come back to again and again – the damage of Brexit cannot be undone and even attempts to ameliorate its worst consequences are often doomed by the fact that politicians know what needs doing but cannot do it for fear of alienating voters.

As a result, the prospect of rejoining the EU now seems non-existent and even Keir Starmer’s “reset agenda” is hidebound by a government and a civil service that are uncoordinated and unclear of what to do. 

As the Brexit Files make clear, even on the single issue of a carbon trading deal with the EU “the issue has implications for net zero policy, business interests, tax revenue and the Union – meaning the departments (involved) could all hold different positions on how best to proceed.” 

Any “reset” by this government is, I think, probably doomed before it has even been properly started. The very process of Brexit, the imaginary benefits, the red lines and the appalling negotiating tactics have lumbered the UK not only with a lousy deal but with no coordinated and agreed path ahead, nor seemingly with the bandwidth, government coordination or capacity to agree on one. 

One of the report’s conclusions is depressingly familiar to anyone who has watched the Brexit process for nine years “The desire of the Starmer government to revisit the Johnson deal testifies to the fact that UK-EU relations have not reached a stable equilibrium. Far from it. 

“The relationship is characterised by so many moving parts – ongoing points of contention, timetabled renegotiations of elements of the TCA, the reset itself and of course the management of day-to-day interactions – that stability will be difficult to achieve.”  

What UKICE is saying is that Britain has made such a mess of the Brexit process that we have not even got a basic, stable base upon which to set future improvements. We blew up the foundations and what we are left with is shifting ground which we are too timid to secure and then build upon.

And it was supposed to be the “easiest deal in history”.