In the middle of last week, speculation about the timing of an election reached a fever pitch among Westminster journalists. Barely able to contain their nerves, there was a trickle, then a stream, then a flood of reports that Rishi Sunak was going to call an election for early July. That afternoon, his suit getting steadily soaked by the rain, Sunak duly obliged. For the next six weeks, Britain’s political parties will be in campaign mode.
Soon after the big announcement, Michael Heseltine, former Chancellor and notable pro-EU campaigner, declared that this would be the most dishonest election campaign in modern times. The reason? Neither the Tories nor Labour are willing to talk about Brexit. With the Tories running scared of Reform and Labour nervous that it could lose Leave-voting seats, Britain’s two main parties refuse to address the elephant in the room, the one single policy that has had more impact than any other during the 14 years since the Conservatives took charge.
Yet politicians should not think that merely because they decide not to talk about something that it will play no role in the election.
For one thing, it’s obvious that many voters are going to sanction the Tories for their failures on Brexit. In the case of those who have switched to Reform, it is mostly in response to the Conservatives’ failure to bring down immigration. While many prominent Brexiteers argued that the introduction of a ‘points-based system’ under Westminster’s control would bring immigration down, it has in fact had the opposite effect, with net migration figures reaching new records. This was a predictable consequence of switching from an organic, responsive and more equitable system when we had EU freedom of movement, to a system based on bureaucratic top-down assessments. Nonetheless, a minority of voters still believe that the Tories just need to clamp down harder and that the party must pay the price for their unwillingness to do so.
Other voters (indeed, a much larger group) are sanctioning the Tories on Brexit for different reasons. These voters are mostly switching to Labour or the Liberal Democrats and are more generally disillusioned with the failure of Brexit to live up to its promises of ‘sunlit uplands’. Public services have continued to deteriorate in spite of the UK no longer needing to pay EU budget contributions. The quality of much of our natural environment, especially our rivers and coastal areas, has fallen drastically as a result of excess sewage being pumped out into our waters. The cost of living has risen and life has become harder for people right across the country, with bold new free trade deals across the world failing to generate meaningful economic growth. Meanwhile the barriers of Brexit - for small businesses trying to grow their exports, for larger companies managing international supply chains, or for people who just want to go and have a nice holiday or a quiet retirement in the sun - are building up in a seemingly never-ending ratcheting of misery.
But it’s not just the government paying the price for the recent Brexit past, all our parties are finding themselves constrained by the Brexit future too.
Brexit has had a long-term, negative impact on UK GDP. Most analysts estimate that our national output is around 4% lower than it would have been if we had stayed in the EU. Hardly a surprise when Brexit has required creating an additional layer of UK-specific certification and form-filling, on top of the existing EU rules and standards. While only a few percentage points deducted from the headline figure, that loss is no small matter. Equivalent to billions of pounds, it represents a noticeably smaller economy that is less able to respond to the demands of climate change, geopolitical instability and an ageing population.
Party leaders may decide to swear a vow of silence and refuse to so much as utter the word Brexit during the six weeks of campaigning, yet the issue will be shouted from every manifesto that finds itself limited in its ambitions by the need to manage a constrained economy and weak growth. Labour dropping their spending pledges on climate change, Tories abandoning the idea of more tax cuts – every time a dream or aspiration is struck from the main parties’ list of policy pledges, it is, at least in part, a demonstration of how the impact of Brexit continues to drive our national policies.
Even once the election is over and normality is restored, relations with the EU will be the first issue the new government will be forced to grapple with. Now, I don’t mean this in the general sense that many of the UK’s deep-seated challenges, like decarbonisation, illegal migration or defence, will require degrees of EU integration and cooperation to even begin to address them - though that is certainly true.
Rather it refers to the much more direct and literal imposition on the governmental timetable flowing from two international summits taking place in July. First, a NATO meeting on 9-11 July where one of the principle issues will inevitably be support for Ukraine (whose struggle for democracy and freedom is intimately linked to its own ambition to join the EU). Second, on 18 July, the UK is set to host the next meeting of the European Political Community, an organisation whose stated purpose is to strengthen links between EU and non-EU states (most importantly those non-EU countries that are hoping to join the EU in the future but who may be frustrated with the slow pace of progress).
We must hope that a new government, upon taking office, will have already devised a comprehensive strategy for re-engagement with the EU to work together on our shared fate, lest we continue the drift and myopic tendency of the last few years.
Our leaders do not wish to talk about Brexit. That is their decision, for in truth, no one can force them to do otherwise. Yet the question of which issues shape the national discourse and hold greatest sway over our national wellbeing is not solely within the gift of politicians. Make no mistake, like it or not, this is a Brexit election.
In the United States, Donald Trump is likely to win a second term, which means Labour won’t have a cooperative partner for a trade deal, and a variety of other portfolios — from defense to climate change — will be more complicated. I think your new Labour government should anticipate this reality and come to grips with the need for more ambitious EU partnerships — approaching a return to the Single Market — as a result.