British politics is still polarised around Brexit, although 10 years on from the referendum, the terms of debate are very different. Or they should be. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has moved discussions of European solidarity from the realm of abstraction to a matter of urgent defence partnership. Donald Trump’s presidency in the US, marked by scorn for European democracies and indulgence of Vladimir Putin, has undermined confidence that Britain can rely on any “special relationship” with Washington.
Under these circumstances, it would be absurd to deny that a reappraisal of Brexit is in order. The prime minister acknowledged this in his speech at the Labour party conference last month, calling for a national conversation about the future relationship with every option, including rejoining, on the table. The Eurosceptic opposition are having none of it. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, accuses the government of stirring division by raising the European question. She told MPs this week that Labour should thank the Tories for the Brexit deal they negotiated.
The Tories and Reform UK like to remind Andy Burnham of comments he made when campaigning in Makerfield earlier this year for the seat that became his launchpad to reach No 10. Mr Burnham said that rerunning the old Brexit arguments was “the last thing we should do right now”. That can be made consistent with his current position in the sense that an exact rerun of the 2016 debate would indeed be pointless, which is why something different, more future-facing, is being proposed instead. Mr Burnham’s critics see that as sleight of hand to conceal a flagrant change of line. But the distinction between relitigating outdated arguments and engaging with present realities is a vital one.
The Tory position, shared with Reform, contains no audit of Britain’s foreign and economic policy interests. It is based on ideology and fear of confronting the facts that such an evaluation reveals. Brexit has made Britain poorer and diminished its influence on the world stage. The public know this all too well, as evidenced by opinion polls indicating majority support for a closer EU relationship.
Mrs Badenoch’s position is also disingenuous, given her commitment to pull Britain out of the European convention on human rights. That would pointlessly reopen some of the most fissile Brexit arguments because of the ECHR’s codification in the Good Friday agreement for Northern Ireland.
A phenomenon that Mrs Badenoch and Mr Burnham have observed, but respond to differently, is that voters have no desire for a return to the poisonous political atmosphere of the immediate post-referendum period. The Tory leader uses that aversion to justify her lack of a strategic concept for Britain’s future relationship with its continental neighbours. The prime minister’s approach is to sound ecumenical, saying that he aspires to national consensus on the best way forward, while sounding vague about his personal preferences.
That ambiguity has given the opposition cause to accuse the prime minister of conspiring to undo Brexit, but it has also dissolved some of the taboo around discussion of much closer models of reintegration with the EU, which is a necessary condition for a healthier fact-based debate. That isn’t a conversation the Conservatives want to have, but for the prime minister to share in their denial would be, as he has said, a dereliction of duty.
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