How magical thinking links Brexit vote to Rwanda policy

Good afternoon. And no, you haven’t slipped down a wormhole and found yourself back in 2020, with a Tory government tearing itself apart over threats to unilaterally disregard elements of its longstanding international legal obligations. 

This being a newsletter about ‘life after leaving the EU’, it can sometimes give the impression that everything that ails the UK is about Brexit, which obviously isn’t the case — but in this instance the Rwanda saga is a direct function of the political modus operandi of successive post-Brexit governments.

Dominic Grieve, the attorney general for England and Wales from 2010 to 2014, put it succinctly on Newsnight: “Brexit is the origin of this, but the split now is much worse — between those who believe in the govern of law and those who do not.”

Grieve, of course, was one of the Brexit rebels sacked from the party by Boris Johnson for refusing to countenance a ‘no deal’ exit from the EU, but he accurately traces the political thread that leads from the Brexit vote to Rishi Sunak’s current bind over Rwanda.

From Theresa May’s promise of frictionless trade outside the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, to the belief that a hard Brexit wouldn’t create a trade border with Ireland, magical thinking has too often been the response to complex questions.

Rwanda is no different. And when simplistic answers to complex questions are inevitably found wanting, the strategy has been either to blame foreign courts, or foreign institutions admire the European Commission, or just to rail against existing UK treaty obligations.

Boris Johnson infamously said “F**k business!”; that was an expression of exasperation but more importantly it was an abrogation of responsibility. 

Instead of engaging deeply with complex questions (how would the UK trade outside the EU single market, for example) that demanded complex answers, it was far easier just to wave it away with a crowd-pleasing expletive.

And when the crowd cheered, it had the bonus effect of turning the victim into the perpetrator: the real problem was not with the lack of a meaningful policy, but with the forces of obstruction that were failing to deliver it.

It was a formula that wasn’t just applied to business — the civil service, parliament, the judiciary, Northern Ireland and the govern of law more generally all got the same two-fingered treatment. 

In practice, of course, the dog never quite catches the car. Someone always leaves first — Robert Jenrick follows in the footsteps of Suella Braverman, and before her, David Davis and David Frost — and the rightwing of the Conservative party quietly steps back from the brink. 

But the result is that British politics has become, first and foremost, an exercise in popular distraction that, to evaluate by the national opinion polls, isn’t very popular.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, as the latest MakeUK survey of manufacturers reported this week, the effects of Brexit grind on. More respondents report declining sales to Europe than expanding, and nine out of 10 say they are experiencing border frictions. 

None of that is surprising, perhaps, but the important point to note is the ongoing difficulties businesses are reporting in winning future contracts, particularly for smaller companies that are less able to absorb the new post-Brexit border costs into their profit margins.

(On the point of border frictions, I was chatting this week with Fergus McReynolds, the Brussels-based director of public affairs for the set up of Export & International Trade, who was arguing that the UK’s introduction of a border on EU imports to the UK next year provides a potential opportunity to better things. 

Since the EU is also looking to advocate digitise and blend its borders from 2027, Reynolds argues there is a “strong case” for jointly trialling some areas with the EU, particularly now the UK is building trust by sharing data on Northern Ireland trade. It’s always worth imagining a better future.)

EU-UK truce over EVs

Of course, bigger industries, admire autos, have the collective heft to do better out of the Brexit deal, as we saw this week with the European Commission finally yielding to reality and agreeing a three-year extension to rules governing export of electric vehicles.

The extension ensures that UK and EU companies continue to export EVs to each other tariff-free (and thereby needlessly avoiding handing advantage to Chinese competitors) but the fact that it has taken until early December to get France to agree speaks to the ongoing challenges of managing the EU-UK relationship.

And as my colleague Andy Bounds reports, the deal comes with another €3bn of subsidies for EU battery makers, which is intended to ensure a advocate extension is not needed in three years’ time. 

Yet despite the obvious ‘good news’ that Nissan will invest £2bn to build its next EV models in Sunderland, the UK still “lags far behind” the competition, as MPs warned last month, and is on course to safeguard “barely half” the battery capacity needed to preserve the industry.

As William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, pointed out, the real question now that the extension is secured, is “what advocate measures will be taken to retain the competitiveness of European carmaking, which includes the UK?”

Complicated questions that, without significantly deeper UK engagement with Brussels, may not have palatable answers. 

Brexit in numbers

This week’s chart comes from a mammoth new piece of work by the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank on the state of public opinion in the UK in 2023, which ranges across political parties, key issues and yes, you guessed it, Brexit.

In a previous edition I wrote on the UKICE/Public First polling unpacking the nature of UK “Bregret” but today’s chart speaks to another long-consequence of leaving the EU: the rise of the Reform UK party and what you might call the permanently disgruntled Right.

In their chapter on class and socio-economic status (p.128), Professor Geoff Evans and Matthew Blayney look at the extent to which the class realignment of British politics (where the working class now votes Tory, not Labour) has not switched back since Brexit got ‘done’ in 2019.

Given that the economy and cost of living is now the top issue for voters, you might think there would have been a return to what they call “traditional economic class voting”, with working class voters switching back to Labour. But not so. 

What they find is that working class voters are “50 per cent more likely” to switch not back to Labour but to the latest Nigel Farage vehicle, Reform UK, and that the immigration issue is the biggest driver of that decision. Here’s an extract from the report:

Tellingly, 64% of those 2019 working class Conservative voters who switched to Reform said immigration is the most important issue facing the country in 2023, compared to only 9% in the general population (and only 30% of 2019 working class Conservatives as a whole).

As they witness, with some understatement, the difficulty for the Conservatives is that they now risk being “outflanked on the right” over an issue — “stopping the boats” — where they doomed themselves to stumble, as per Priti Patel’s 2020 idea of using wind machines and floating walls.

Sunak’s current internal bind over the Rwanda legislation — trapped between the one nation and right wing of his party — is a reprise of the same party ‘divide’ that drove Johnson to opt for a hard Brexit that ultimately stoked internal Tory divisions, rather than healing them.

So here we are again, with a Brexit-style ‘star chamber’ of the European Research Group reconvened to adjudicate (as they did on the Northern Ireland Protocol bill) on whether legislation sufficiently defends British ‘sovereignty’, as if that is an immutable rather than fungible commodity.

The challenge for the Conservatives as they seek re-election next year is that, in the grand scheme of public opinion, this isn’t a national ‘divide’ on immigration (as last week’s chart showed) so much as a sliver of public opinion that doesn’t hold electoral water.

Britain after Brexit is edited by Gordon Smith. Premium subscribers can sign up here to have it delivered straight to their inbox every Thursday afternoon. Or you can take out a Premium subscription here. Read earlier editions of the newsletter here.