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21 January 2025

The tide is starting to turn against Brexit

Interventions by Ed Davey and Kemi Badenoch show how the European question has been reopened.

By David Gauke

The received wisdom in Westminster is that the Brexit process was so bruising and divisive that no party aspiring for power will want to go near the European question for at least a decade. Radical reform, such as rejoining the single market and the customs union, let alone full EU membership, will be off the table, just as it was a non-issue in the 2024 general election campaign. 

It is a familiar theme of these columns to question that opinion for three reasons. The economic and geopolitical arguments for a much closer relationship are fundamentally strong; public opinion has largely concluded that the 2016 Leave vote was a mistake; and our political parties will eventually recognise that there are votes to be won by taking a more ambitious approach.

In the past few days, there is evidence that all three contentions are gaining ground.

I will not return in detail to the state of the UK economy, but it is clear that the government’s attempts to promote higher growth require much greater intensity. Reducing trade barriers with our biggest trading partner can only help the UK. As for the geopolitical case, isolation from the EU, in the second Trump era, does not look like a wise move.

On public opinion, the polls have long and consistently shown that, given the choice, a majority of the public would favour re-joining the EU. More striking in recent days were Kemi Badenoch’s criticisms of the Conservatives for triggering Brexit without developing a plan for growth.

This argument was made in a speech conceding that the Conservatives made mistakes in office. As a new opposition leader, Badenoch has to acknowledge these mistakes to gain a hearing from an electorate that has abandoned her party. In that sense she was following the playbook of previous leaders who have taken their parties into government, but implicit in her remarks was that Brexit has not been a success.  

This, of course, is not to say that Badenoch is arguing that leaving the EU was a mistake but it is certainly not a robust defence of the status quo. The Conservative Party owns Brexit but even its leader is now acknowledging that it is not working.

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On the merits of her case, speaking as a member of the cabinet when our departure from the EU was triggered, she has a point that it would have been better to have come up with a plan for Brexit beforehand. But, in practice, delaying our departure would have been politically impossible given the views of Brexiteer MPs. Delay would quickly have been seen as betrayal. And even if we had taken more time, the same trade-offs and challenges would have existed. To put it another way, we would still have ended up with a situation that would have made it harder to grow the economy than if we had remained. It is a myth to believe that there was ever a brilliant Brexit growth plan out there.

This point will be challenged by Leave supporters. But, given her remarks, the onus is now on Badenoch to devise her own plan to make a success of Brexit. Assuming she lasts the distance, she will have four years to work out how it can be done. A good test of whether the Tories have really changed will be whether they can devise something that is more realistic and credible than the boosterism and wishful thinking of the Boris Johnson era. Unfortunately for Badenoch, this will require a closer relationship with the EU, not a more distant one.  

On our future relationship with the EU, however, the most important contribution to the debate came from Ed Davey (not a phrase often written). The Liberal Democrat leader argued that given Trump’s return, now is the time for the UK to re-join the EU’s customs union.

Davey’s announcement was significant not because it is a change of policy (if you looked closely enough, this was the Lib Dems’ policy at the last general election) but a change of tone. Rather than simply basing their appeal on not being the Tories (which worked well for them last year), the Lib Dems are willing to trumpet a policy position that puts some distance between them and Labour. This gives them something distinct to say in the important growth debate, thus raising their profile, and should appeal to Labour voters and former pro-Remain Tories in the Home Counties.

If it works, the significance of the Liberal Democrat strategy will be its impact on Labour and the Conservatives. Badenoch has so far done little to win back moderates but if she sees more Tory centrists defect to the Lib Dems, she may have to change her approach. More importantly, Labour’s support base is strongly pro-European and the party cannot afford to lose many of these voters to the Lib Dems. If that starts to happen, a more vibrant internal debate within the government would surely follow.

Nothing is inevitable here but the debate is picking up. Brexit – as an issue – might well be about to return.

[See also: Donald Trump’s techno-futurist inaugural address]


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