This massive collection of essays by 43 different authors, including seven lords, four baronesses, one dame and three knights of the realm, may be the nearest we will ever get to a semi-official reflection on the causes and consequences of Brexit. Its editor, Sir Anthony Seldon, is honorary historian at 10 Downing Street and has written definitive works on successive 21st-century British administrations.
Yet the phrase “English nationalism” appears precisely once in its 600 pages – in a glancing reference to the line taken by the Daily Mail during the referendum campaign of 2016. Strikingly, while there is a fine essay by Aileen McHarg called On Scotland, there is none called On England. There is no attempt to provide even a broad overview of the tensions, contradictions and anxieties within the part of the UK where Brexit was won: non-metropolitan England. For much of the political and intellectual establishment, it seems, Englishness is still the condition that dare not speak its name.
This absence matters, not just to the understanding of the recent past, but to the immediate future of the UK. It evades the most urgent question: why, when even many of those who voted for Brexit now regard it as a failure, is the man who did most to make it happen nonetheless a plausible contender to be the next prime minister?
Peter Kellner shows, in his incisive contribution, that a third of those who voted to leave now say it has been a failure and, startlingly, a quarter of that cohort say Nigel Farage is “very” responsible for their disappointment. Slightly more of them blame Farage than blame the European Union itself. Yet Farage is still setting the agenda in English (and to some extent in Welsh) politics.
But if a distinguished contemporary historian such as Seldon doesn’t feel it’s worth trying to understand the nationalist impulses that led to Brexit, then Farage’s success also becomes impossible to explain. The collection doesn’t even have a specific essay on him – making it, if not quite Hamlet without the prince, perhaps a Punch and Judy show without Mr Punch.
That Brexit is indeed an objective failure is hardly worth denying. The most recent independent study, from Stanford University, finds that by 2025 Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8% compared with what it would have been. Investment shrank by between 12% and 18%, while both employment and productivity were reduced by 3% to 4%.
For all their blather about the dawn of the new golden age, intelligent Brexiters pretty much knew that something like this was going to happen. What they really thought was that the economic pain was a price worth paying for political renewal. Taking back control was, as the winning slogan had it, the actual point. And there might even have been some nobility in this – there is more to life than economics.
But as the jurist and historian Jonathan Sumption puts it in a withering introduction to the book, “Britain’s own ability to exercise ‘control’ over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the EU”. The UK is still profoundly affected by EU decisions but it has no say in them. As for immigration – seen by many voters as the tangible evidence of lost control – Migration Observatory director Madeleine Sumption reminds us in her essay that it actually rose to record levels after Brexit, which thus failed “spectacularly to deliver on its clearest promise”.
If voters traded growth for sovereignty, they got a bad deal on both sides of the equation. Brexit did not herald the re-emergence of a liberated governing class whose brilliance had been occluded by continental clouds. Amusingly, the pro-Brexit former Tory MP Conor Burns writes in his essay that Simon Case, the cabinet secretary appointed by Boris Johnson, was “lightweight” – “that’s why he was appointed.”
Amusing because Case himself also pops up to spread the blame: “The vision of a nation released from the shackles of Brussels bureaucracy rapidly became a reality of muddled thinking, fruitless negotiations, Parliamentary quagmire and administrative confusion.”
The veteran anti-EU campaigner and former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell concludes glumly that “Vote Leave might have gained us self-government. We have yet to govern ourselves well.” Six prime ministers since 2016 and a seventh on the way make one wonder whether post-Brexit Britain is governable at all.
Disappointment, though, was always part of the package. The nature of Brexit was that it was doomed to become an instant lost cause – a mirage that dissipated as soon as it was approached. Victory was snatched away and, as Carswell puts it, “we still have the European disease”. Gisela Stuart, the ex-Labour MP who was prominent in the leave campaign, believes Britain is “still overshadowed by the ghosts of fifty years of EU membership”. Paul Stephenson, communications director of Vote Leave, describes its triumph now as “bittersweet”: “We wrestled victory out of the jaws of defeat, but then promptly allowed it to be snatched back off us again.”
Nowhere among the Brexiters is there any real reckoning with their own failures. Burns refers to the intractable issue of the Irish border as “the problems the Irish had created”, apparently unaware that Northern Ireland voted to remain and the Irish government very obviously did not want Brexit to happen.
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Patrick Minford, the economist who promised a golden age, writes (in an essay co-authored with Zheyi Zhu) that while “in the short run Brexit is bound to cause disruption”, its whole point is “to improve long-run performance”. We might adapt John Maynard Keynes and wonder whether in this long run all the leave voters will be dead before they see these economic benefits. The economists Paul Johnson and Robert Johnson argue here that, in fact, “it seems unlikely that the long term hit to national income will be less than 4 per cent, and it might well be more”.
Yet there’s no great evidence in this book that remainers are better at facing the identity crisis that lay behind Brexit. In her essay, Susan Greenfield acknowledges that “the all-important question of whether to leave or remain in the EU was somehow tied in with our identity”. But (reasonably enough for a neuroscientist) she goes on to think about identity only at a cognitive level. This is fascinating in itself but it serves largely to draw attention to the absence of any real attempt to define that “somehow” in concrete political and social terms.
For that, one must turn elsewhere – for example, to the rolling Future of England surveys conducted by the political scientists Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones. The most recent one finds that supporters of Farage rank “being English” above “being a parent” as a marker of who they think they are.
Those for whom being English is the essence of their identity were not happy in 2016 and they are no happier now. Henderson and Wyn Jones find them “deeply conscious of what they clearly regard as a jarring contrast between past glories and a present brought-low; an England whose eponymous national group seems to feel besieged both from within and without; an England that has secured major changes (not least, Brexit) in order to assuage its concerns, yet remains deeply dissatisfied with the results”.
Brexit was a dishonest and self-harming response to the English question. But the great and the good seem loth even to hear it, let alone try to provide a better answer.
