Britain's Brexit dream is dead – POLITICO

The bonfire of EU law

Similar dynamics have played out on issues ranging from workers’ rights to environmental protection. The threat of turning Britain into an overseas anarcho-capitalist paradise, a rhetoric British negotiators sometimes use to intimidate their EU counterparts, has not actually worked any better in Bristol or Birmingham than it has in Brussels.

For many Brexiteers, deregulation was the point of leaving the EU, and it is because the cause has such deep roots in the Thatcherite right of the Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher herself complained in 1988 that she had thrown back the boundaries of the domestic state for a decade, only to see Brussels reimpose the touchstone of modern British Euroscepticism.

But efforts to clean up the UK’s statute book of EU law have also been aborted. One of the most memorable videos from Rishi Sunack’s Conservative leadership campaign showed a man in a suit putting a stack of documents labelled EU law into a shredder, along with Sunack’s pledge to review or repeal all EU law within 100 days of becoming prime minister.

Conservative MPs were delighted, but the idea was quickly abandoned during his term. The legitimacy of the 180-degree turn? I am not an arsonist. I am a Conservative. Badenoch was left to defend the Euroskpetic MPs who were disappointed last year.

According to Leland, it's never been attempted before, and for good reason: No one has ever tried to unilaterally remove a core pillar of our legal system overnight.

The Conservatives' election manifesto still boasts of cutting thousands of laws from the statute book, but fails to mention that most of the removed regulations have long since ceased to do anything practical.

According to Leland, 99 per cent of them are duplicates and relate to issues such as the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease crisis and trade relations between the EU and the Solomon Islands.

For many Brexiteer leaders, deregulation was the point of leaving the EU. | Justin Tallis/Getty Images

Some Conservatives still dream of a deregulation campaign like the one originally envisioned. Conservative Chancellor Baker said regulation should be thoroughly reviewed to eliminate anti-competitive distortions in the market and promote welfare through competition and productivity.

“I don't think the Labour party would do something like that. They would just increase bureaucracy and state power, and that would only further ruin our country,” he said.

Record-breaking migration levels

Other Brexit visions have also tended to explode as they clash with competing government priorities.

Immigration, perhaps the most prominent driver of the 2016 Brexit vote, is the only area where the rules have actually been overhauled on a large scale since Britain left the EU.

However, despite the end of freedom of movement with the continent, net migration to the UK has increased dramatically in the years since the UK left. At the end of 2019, the Office for National Statistics recorded net migration of 332,000 people. By 2023, this figure is expected to soar to 722,000.

Despite virtually every politician in Britain telling voters that immigration levels should be reduced, economic pressures have forced ministers to use their absolute control over immigration rules to quietly liberalise immigration.

Ben Breendel, a researcher at Oxford University's Migration Observatory, said the increase in net migration between 2019 and 2023 was mainly due to non-EU citizens arriving on work and study visas.

As universities faced worsening financial hardships, they began recruiting international students, and social service providers began hiring immigrant social workers to fill vacancies as limited government funding made it increasingly difficult to retain staff, leading to lower wages and working conditions.

Elsewhere, bold promises made in the EU referendum to revive Britain’s beloved National Health Service by diverting money from Brussels have also gone unfulfilled. OECD figures compiled by the Health Foundation thinktank show Britain will still spend at least a quarter less on its health service in 2022 than France, the Netherlands and Germany.

Stephen Rocks, an economist at the Health Foundation, told POLITICO: Britain’s economy is already small and will grow even more slowly because of Brexit. Weak economic growth has been at the heart of our struggle to adequately fund health care and other public services for more than a decade. Max Warner, a health economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, added that NHS performance on many measures was significantly worse in 2016-17.

Beyond the Brexit Peak

It all adds up. Guy Verhofstadt, Belgium's outspoken former prime minister who represented the European Parliament at talks between London and Brussels, thinks Brexit peak has already been reached.

“I think after the election, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to gradually move back to a more prudent approach,” he told POLITICO.

The EU referendum also failed to deliver on a bold promise that Britain’s beloved National Health Service could be revived by transferring funds from Brussels. | Peter Nicholls/Getty Images

I think the moment when the hardliners in the Conservative Party decided to pursue a hard Brexit policy was the high point. I don't think it can get any further than that.

According to Verhofstadt, who is now chairman of the European Movement campaign, Brexiteers' biggest mistake was deciding to leave the EU single market.

If you cut ties with your major export markets, you're going to have a hard time. Every economist has said that.

I think what's happening now will continue. The UK is back in Horizon. Tomorrow there's probably Erasmus, and then there's the customs union, defense, etc.

And later people will ask themselves, why aren't we there? Because we are following these rules, and maybe it would be better to have a say in what these rules are.

But Baker is now contemplating a life outside government in a country that is far removed from his vision of a post-Brexit Britain, and the prospect of actually returning to the EU still looks remote.

“The EU doesn’t want us back,” he said. And they don’t want to renegotiate an agreement that took eight years to reach.

We can expect reasonable adjustments and improvements to the two key post-Brexit agreements the UK has with the EU, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the Windsor Framework. This will happen under any government.

But I think the overall framework of our relationship with the EU has now been fixed for a generation, and it would be magical thinking to believe otherwise.

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