The European Union and Union Jack flags are flown outside the Houses of Parliament, in London, on Feb. 9, 2022.TOM NICHOLSON/Reuters
Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe.
This week marked the seventh anniversary of Britain’s fateful vote, on June 23, 2016, to leave the EU – and the state of U.K.-EU relations is superficially encouraging and structurally depressing.
Britain is like a sailing boat faffing around in the middle of the English Channel. Most of its passengers want it to steer closer to the continental coast, and even the captain seems willing to make some modest adjustments to his course. But strong winds and currents are pushing the boat further away from the continent. Convergence will require a much more decisive change of course from a new captain, after a different crew comes aboard next year.
In YouGov’s regular poll, taken last month, 56 per cent of those asked said Britain was wrong to leave the EU, against 31 per cent who said it was right. Brexit has been “more of a failure” according to 62 per cent, against just 9 per cent who said it was “more of a success.” In a poll by Opinium, 36 per cent of British respondents chose “we should rejoin the EU,” while another 25 per cent said “we should remain outside the EU but negotiate a closer relationship with them than we have now.”
The politics lag behind the public. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can see the pragmatic case for better economic relations with the U.K.’s biggest single market, but he’s also a more genuine Brexiter than his disgraced predecessor Boris Johnson ever was. Given the continued strength of the Brexiters in his party, and the intimidating power of the Eurosceptic press, only small incremental improvements can be expected on his watch.
Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer, meanwhile, is relentlessly focused on winning next year’s general election. He believes this requires winning back voters in the “Red Wall” seats who felt passionately about Brexit and therefore switched to the Conservatives in Mr. Johnson’s 2019 “Get Brexit Done” election. Mr. Starmer recently had an article in the right-wing, fiercely Eurosceptic Daily Express in which he roundly asserted that “Britain’s future is outside the EU. Not in the single market, not in the customs union, not with a return to freedom of movement. Those arguments are in the past, where they belong.”
If Labour wins the next election, the new government will undoubtedly seek a better deal with the EU. It’s not implausible to think that by the 10th anniversary of the referendum vote in 2026, a cross-Channel review of the EU-U.K. Trade and Cooperation Agreement scheduled for 2025 might have opened the door to a closer economic relationship. This might include significant elements of involvement in the EU single market and customs union, with corresponding regulatory alignment. It’s hard to see how Labour can even remotely hope to achieve its hugely ambitious target of “securing the highest sustained growth in the G7″ without reducing the post-Brexit friction with the country’s largest market.
With every passing month, the U.K. and the EU are visibly drifting apart. Once-strong cultural, commercial, artistic, scientific and political ties are weakening. A British university vice-chancellor recently told me that his intake of EU students has fallen by 90 per cent. Britain actually has more immigration overall than before the Brexit vote, but less from the EU.
I have spent time recently in Ireland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden. In all these North European countries, which once looked on the British as special partners and friends inside the European Union, Britain is now barely mentioned, except as the object of pity, ridicule and contempt. The grimy farce around Mr. Johnson’s resignation honours list and his disgracefully Trumpian departure from the House of Commons have only reinforced those sentiments. These countries have forged new partnerships, as people do after they separate.
So has the EU itself. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, and above all to the war in Ukraine, Europe’s core political community is experiencing a period of rather dynamic integration in areas of vital interest to Britain: security policy and defence procurement; digital policy and the regulation of AI; large-scale support for industry to make the green transition, competing with U.S. Bidenomics on the one hand and Chinese industrial policy on the other.
Although the sails on His Majesty’s Ship “Global Britain” may be flapping in mid-Channel, Britain is not standing still either. Both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition are developing their own variants of those policies, which may diverge from and compete with the EU’s. In several key areas, such as tech, AI, creative industries and financial services, Britain still has strengths that make it a serious competitor.
Still, it will take a lot of bold strategy from a new British government, and goodwill from both sides, to counter these deeper currents of divergence.