Different Brexiteer tribes have been let down by reality of EU exit: Yorkshire Post Letters

One almost has to admire the tenacious way that a small band of remaining ‘Brexit’ supporters continue to write to The Yorkshire Post trying to convince us, and increasingly it seems themselves, that the UK’s retreat from the EU was a good idea. Almost.

In the real world there is a growing realisation of the extent to which ‘Brexit’ has failed to deliver the benefits promised by the Leave campaign back in 2016. Recent polling reported in The Yorkshire Post’s sister publication the Evening Post indicates that only 9 per cent of Britons consider ‘Brexit’ more of a success than a failure. It is telling that even such a longstanding Eurosceptic as Nigel Farage has admitted it has failed. Meanwhile ‘Brexiters’ in government such as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are seeking ways to water down the hard ‘oven ready’ but half-baked ‘Brexit deal’ left by Boris Johnson’s chaotic administration. There have even been mutterings of a “Swiss-style” Brexit to try and repair damaged trade relations with the EU.

One of the most surprising – though perhaps in hindsight predictable – things is that increasingly the most anger and disappointment with ‘Brexit’ seems to be amongst those who initially supported it. If you take three of the main ‘Brexit’ tribes this is clear.

Firstly, those who backed leaving the EU from a nationalistic, anti-immigration, sometimes racist and xenophobic anti-European stance. This group is raging in the face of the high net-immigration to the UK figures published recently and can be heard complaining that we have not ‘taken back control’ of our borders and sometimes still trying to blame the EU, or other European countries, for this.

The second group of ‘Brexiters’ who are deeply disgruntled are those of a ‘neoliberal’ and/or ‘libertarian’ bent. This group, whose members often like to style themselves as ‘Brexiteers’, take their cues from elite think tanks and right-leaning economists who saw leaving the EU as an opportunity for a ‘bonfire of regulation’ and to ‘turbo charge’ the UK economy by promoting a ‘Global Britain’ that would trade with the ‘rest of the world’. Of course, we always traded with rest of the world, and the new trade deals done since leaving the EU are either ‘roll over’ copy and paste versions of what we had as EU members, or in some cases where the terms have been varied, are predicted to harm key economic sectors in the UK such as agriculture.

Finally, there is dissatisfaction amongst those who preferred to call themselves ‘Lexiters’. This was the small but influential group who supported ‘Brexit’ for ‘left wing’ or ‘social reasons’ and apparently believed that aligning themselves with the two groups mentioned above would usher in some kind of new socially-focussed Britain. Brexit is cited by LSE economists as a cause of a third of food price inflation in the UK, having added £7 billion to grocery bills. In the midst of the Brexit-aggravated cost of living crisis the Lexiters’ always highly unrealistic expectations about the social benefits of leaving the EU are thus laid bare.

What the UK needs now is politicians with the vision and courage to follow the public and admit it has failed and cannot be fixed with window dressing and minor tweaks. We need a new national conversation on our place in the EU. But who will lead it?