20/05/2023, 16:47 They’re openly saying it: Brexit has failed.

it has failed. But what comes next may be very dark indeed | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian

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They’re openly saying it: Brexit has failed. But

what comes next may be very dark indeed
Jonathan Freedland

The ‘remoaner elite’, the civil service, the BBC, universities,

unions, refugees: anything is blamed but Brexit itself
Fri 19 May 2023 17.06 BST

t lasts no more than a second, but it is a moment for the ages. Interviewed on BBC
Newsnight on Monday, Nigel Farage made a confession that, by rights, should end
the debate that has split this country down the middle for much of the last decade. A
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20/05/2023, 16:47 They’re openly saying it: Brexit has failed. But what comes next may be very dark indeed | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian

month ahead of the seventh anniversary of the 2016 vote that took Britain out
of the European Union, Farage said three words of striking simplicity and
truth: “Brexit has failed.”

You can watch the clip over and over, for it is something to behold. Here is the
arch-Brexiter himself, the man who dedicated his life to the cause of rupture from
the EU, admitting it has been a disaster. Of course, as we shall see, he and his fellow
Brexiters do not blame that failure on the idea itself, but it’s the admission that
counts. It offers grounds for modest celebration: now, at last, the contours of an
emerging national consensus are visible, as remainers and leavers alike can join in
agreement that this thing has not worked. And yet it comes at a price, one that also
became darkly visible this week.

Start with the facts that even Farage can no longer duck. During the referendum
campaign, he and his allies promised that Brexit would be a boon for the UK
economy, unshackling it from Brussels red tape and releasing it into a roaring future.
Seven years on, we can see the reality: a country in the grip of a cost of living crisis
that means millions can no longer afford what they once regarded as the basics.
Britain is becoming poorer and falling behind its peers. Ours is now forecast to be
one of the worst performing economies in the world, not merely seventh in the G7
but 20th in the G20 – behind even a Russia under toughening international sanctions
– according to the International Monetary Fund.

The consequences of being poorer are seen and felt everywhere, whether it’s in the
3m food parcels delivered by food banks last year, the family who can’t get a mental
health appointment for a troubled child, or in courts that are jammed and
backlogged for years. For a while, the Brexiters could blame all our woes on anything
but Brexit: Covid or Ukraine. But there’s no hiding place now.

This week came a warning that post-Brexit trading arrangements with the EU
threaten the very existence of the entire UK automotive industry, which employs
some 800,000 people. Ford, Jaguar Land Rover and the owners of Vauxhall called on
the government to renegotiate the Brexit deal. Such demands are getting louder.
Next month, a thousand businesses, alongside representatives of farming and
fishing, will gather in Birmingham for the Trade Unlocked conference, called to
discuss a post-Brexit landscape most say has made commercial life infinitely harder
and more bureaucratic. “Business is beginning to find its voice,” one organiser tells
me.

But it’s not just the economic numbers. Remember, Farage and the others argued
that a hit to GDP would be worth it, so long as Brexit fulfilled its other promises –
most cherished among them, a reduction in the number of immigrants to the UK. Yet
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20/05/2023, 16:47 They’re openly saying it: Brexit has failed. But what comes next may be very dark indeed | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian

if you were among those persuaded, against the evidence, to see immigration as a
cost, rather than a benefit, to the country, Brexit has failed on even that measure.
Immigration has gone up, not down, since we left the EU, with one analysis
suggesting net annual migration figures published next week could see a rise to
700,000 or even 1 million. Turns out Britain needs migrants – but now they have to
come from far away, rather than in reciprocal movement between us and our nearest
neighbours.

Given all this, what are the Brexiters to do? Some still deny reality altogether,
insisting that we should disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes. The rest admit that
Brexit has failed, and then face one of two options. Either they can atone for their
role in visiting this calamity upon the nation and move to correct it. Or they can
blame others for not doing it right.

On Newsnight, Farage made the latter choice. Yes, it was true that Britain had “not
actually benefited from Brexit economically” but that was because “useless”
politicians had “mismanaged this totally”. It’s the manoeuvre perfected in an earlier
era by western communists confronted by the brute realities of the Soviet Union:
nothing wrong with the communist idea, they insisted, it just hadn’t been
implemented properly.

But that logic is tricky for the Brexiters, because it’s they who have been in charge.
The exit deal was signed, sealed and pushed through parliament by one of their
own, Boris Johnson, and a conviction Brexiter is in Downing Street now, in the form
of Rishi Sunak. So there has to be someone else to blame, other shadowy forces who
betrayed the cause.

Some point to Sunak himself, aided by Kemi Badenoch, who this month halted the
planned shredding of thousands of EU-tainted regulations. For others, it’s the Blob
or the “remoaner elite”, made up of the civil service, the BBC, the universities, the
unions: anyone who, along with desperate refugees in small boats, can be blamed
for standing between Britain and the promised Brexit nirvana.

This is hardly a new dynamic. Nationalism, with its impossible promise of a perfect
future, always has to have a traitor to blame for perfection’s delayed arrival. That is
the process we are witnessing now: the steady nurturing of a stab-in-the-back myth
for Brexit. History suggests that this hunt for the wielder of the treacherous dagger
will only get nastier.

Which is why many were rightly alarmed by this week’s gathering in the name of
“national conservatism”, where the writer Douglas Murray declared that
nationalism need no longer hide its face just because the Germans had “mucked up”

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20/05/2023, 16:47 They’re openly saying it: Brexit has failed. But what comes next may be very dark indeed | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian

in the last century – a novel way to describe the murderous record of national
socialism. That conference was a three-day search for those whose betrayal could be
blamed for the failure of the Brexit project.

The quest will intensify as the damage caused by Brexit piles up. The worse the
economy gets, the higher interest rates rise, the tighter incomes are squeezed, the
louder and more vitriolic the attacks on the supposed true culprits will have to be – if
only to quieten the obvious thought: namely that it is Brexit itself that is to blame.

It means those who opposed this madness from the start now have two reasons to
break the understandable, if still bizarre, omertà on Brexit that prevails in
Westminster. The first is the need to point to the source of our national ailing: if the
patient is losing blood, you cannot keep ignoring the wounds where he shot himself
in both feet. Less obvious, but no less urgent, is the need to acknowledge that
Brexit’s failure is injecting a new toxin into the system, one that will spread the more
apparent that failure becomes – and spread faster if we refuse to name its actual
cause.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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