Brexit is not the point any more – there are other difficult questions to answer

Finally, we find ourselves in the post-Brexit era – and the moment has been marked by an outpouring of opinion pieces asking what prime minister Boris Johnson actually intends to use Brexit for. ^[1]

Even before Covid-19 rendered it more acute, it was a popular question with both champions and detractors of the UK’s departure from the EU. If this whole saga is about sovereignty – control of our borders, money and laws – then to what end? For some ardent Brexiteers, the question has been treated as an invitation to declaim excitedly about the boundless potential of new trade deals and slashed regulations, often requiring some version of the verb “buccaneer”. For the sulky Remainer, the point was to mock the supposed emptiness of the whole project. Name any public policy agenda and there was plenty you could do without tearing the country out of the world’s largest free trade zone.

There is a certain amount of evidence for the Remainer side. For example, go back to 2013 – in retrospect, the last year in which our relationship with Europe did not overshadow UK politics. The Coalition government, for which I was working as a special adviser, put together a “Mid-Term Review” to guide the 30 or so months remaining. ^[2] Its themes ranged across the economy and the need to improve public services to political reform, a determination to be “the greenest government ever” and beyond. What mentions of the EU can be found were pretty insignificant – a determination to avoid ‘gold-plating’ regulation here, a review of EU legislation there, some positive noises around enlargement of the bloc. It was hard to detect much connection with the urgent domestic problems of the day, be they unemployment, low productivity, the high cost of living or a dysfunctional banking system. Trade deals garnered barely a mention because they didn’t merit one: the EU-South Korea agreement was worth a mere £500m to UK exporters. Instead, we used to agonise about how much better Germany was at selling into Brazil than we were, despite doing so under exactly the same trade regime.

Remainers and Leavers must stop fighting the battle of whether Brexit was right

Having seen 54 months pass between the act and its consequence, there is now a horrible temptation to see all public policy through the lens of the Brexit referendum. Brexiteers want to prove that it was worth it, Remainers that it wasn’t. At worst, this risks deteriorating into the sort of nonsense heard around the UK’s early approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, with foolish claims that this reflected a dynamism only possible outside of the EU (never mind that the vaccine was developed in Germany by people of Turkish descent). Both sides need to lay down arms. In public policy, the worst mistake is not to answer the question wrongly but to answer the wrong question. “What should we be doing with Brexit?” is a classic example: alienating the Remain side (for whom the answer will always be “regretting it”), while sending the Brexiteer side off in irrelevant directions. If every policy agenda becomes an attempt to make specific use of newly-discovered Brexit freedoms, only a narrow set of questions will be addressed: most of Britain’s problems are nothing to do with these freedoms. Nothing outside of the UK’s borders was stopping us building the right infrastructure or educating people in the ‘skills of the future’. Let us by all means pursue trade deals but put them in context: any policy that raised the productivity of the UK’s countless small companies would do more for our prosperity than any number of trade deals.

Remain-minded thinkers need to get behind projects like the need to rethink the UK’s competition architecture. There is potential for a nimbler system than what we followed in the EU (as set out in a recent Institute for Government report, Beyond State Aid) and a whole new agenda in the form of digital competition. ^[3] Doing this well – as we have committed to in the EU-UK Free Trade agreement – is important if we are to create the kind of open, free-trading Britain that Remainers worried we would lose as we left.

The crisis may help to focus minds and force decisions

In my opinion, the point is not to ask what Brexit is for, but why so many longstanding policy problems remain unsolved decades into their discovery. Why, a dozen years after Tim Leunig set out a way to give local authorities more of the uplift in land value from planning permission, is the Financial Times still calling for this reform? ^[4] Why do none of the ideas intended to address regional inequality work? How can Britain’s unproductive small company problem have lasted so long? Why do we find large-scale infrastructure so difficult to deliver?

My answer is that these and a host of other policy problems were all soluble – but the constant ferment and changeable leadership that has pervaded British government since 2008 has hobbled attempts at consistent policymaking. Issues that are a challenge for a stable, long-term government become impossible when political minds are focussed on lasting out the year or scoring a partisan point.

I hesitate to portray the dire backdrop of winter 2021 as an ‘opportunity’ for anything. The challenges facing Boris Johnson and his chancellor Rishi Sunak were daunting even before covid shattered the economy. But, as I argued in my recent report on industrial strategy, crises help to concentrate minds and force decisions that are evaded in easier times. Leaving the EU may not provide many opportunities that weren’t there before. But the chance to set a steadier course is there for a government willing to grab it – so long as it is not made all about Brexit.

1.  For a selection: George Parker, “How will Boris Johnson use Britain’s hard won ‘freedom’ from Brussels?”, Financial Times, 1 January 2021; Tom Newton-Dunn, “Johnson has his cake at last. Now he must work out how to eat it”, Sunday Times, 3 January 2021; Camilla Cavendish, “On Brexit, the Tories have fallen prey to magical thinking”, Financial Times, 11 December 202
2. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/229486/HMG_MidTermReview.pdf
3. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publications/state-aid
4. Edward Davey and Tim Leunig, “Auction land to ease the housing crisis”, Financial Times, 24 July 2007