The Lessons Are There To Be Learned From Brexit's Failure

Just the other day, The Restorationist called me an “eternal grump”. This not something I dispute. I have every right to be grumpy. As a veteran blogger of the Brexit wars, I can see history repeating – and all for the same reasons.

Brexit was intended to be more than what it ended up being. It was supposed to be a turning point, allowing us the freedom to make necessary reforms and liberate the economy from top-down agendas. It didn’t happen. Brexit was a damp squib.

There’s a few reason why this is the case. Brexiteers blame Olly Robbins and Theresa May, but I maintain the view the fault lies squarely with the Brexit movement itself – not least Dominic Cummings, Nigel Farage, and latterly, Boris Johnson.

As early as 2013, some of us were anticipating the rise of UKIP would eventually lead to an in/out referendum on EU membership, and took the view winning it, and making a success of it, was contingent on having a Brexit plan, and if we didn’t have one, we would not be able to reassure voters, and would walk into a number of ambushes.

As we approached the big day in June 2016, I had all but given up hope of winning. The Vote Leave Campaign had been disorganised, contradictory and, in my view, dishonest. That we won the referendum was more down to the obnoxiousness and elitism of the Remain campaign than anything Vote Leave did. And it should be noted that we only won by a very narrow margin.

Subsequently, the Brexiteers took that mandate as a blank cheque to push for radical trade liberalism and a libertarian deregulation agenda – based on a very flimsy understanding of WTO rules and an even weaker understand of the role of regulation.

There was no serious war-gaming of Brexit negotiations in advance because they never planned to negotiate at all, instead believing we could leave unilaterally by repealing the European Communities Act 1972 – and let the chips fall where they may.

This might have been a viable approach had the EU been a mere trade bloc, but as the Eurosceptic campaign had been arguing for the previous twenty years, it was much more than that. It was a system of government encompassing food safety regulation all the way through to energy markets and air travel. Sudden death departure was never a serious proposition – and it was always going to be defeated by parliament.

As such, that left Britain with few options, not least because Northern Ireland was always going to be the fly in the ointment. Moreover, given the interplay between regulation and trade, the sweeping deregulation agenda preferred by radical Brexiteers was always a fool’s errand - not least because most EU regulations are based on global standards and conventions. In particular, while automotive regulations are enacted by the EU, they are global UNECE standards for a global market in vehicles.

Forearmed with this knowledge, we could have taken a more pragmatic approach. I was of the view we would always end up retaining the vast majority of standards and regulations because many of them are mandated by WTO agreements. A point completely lost on those pushing for a “WTO Brexit”.

There were always going to be a intractable dilemmas to our departure from the EU and it required a more informed, more pragmatic approach. I took the view we would be better off with a compromise option, staying in the EEA. Though it was always a suboptimal option, it at least meant the agreement was governed by the EFTA court, whose rulings are non-binding. The only other option available was continued “dynamic alignment” with the ECJ as arbiter.

Since Remainers and Brexiteers were united in their opposition to the EEA option, we ended up with the only remaining option, which has since evolved into the Windsor Framework, essentially locking us in to the full stack of EU law under indirect ECJ jurisdiction for the duration.

I do not blame Theresa May for this. Poor old Mrs May was really just trying to square the circle, attempting to reconcile the unrealistic and unpopular demands of Brexit headbangers, with the reality of modern trade. While May’s backstop agreement was bad, Lord Frost and Boris Johnson barged in to turn the backstop into a permanent front stop and now we’re stuck with it.

Cutting to the chase, Johnson then won a thumping majority and a mandate to get on with the Brexit revolution. But nothing happened. The big ticket trade deals didn’t exist, the deregulation bonanza evaporated, and Brexit was rapidly brushed under the carpet. Johnson went to the policy cupboard to find that the cupboard was bare. Nobody had done any planning or put any policies together, or devised any alternative regulatory systems, so they resigned themselves to maintaining the status quo.

This has gone down in history as the greatest wasted opportunity of all time, and is a large part of the reason why the Tory party may never take power again. In the absence of a revolutionary agenda, Johnson doubled down on weak slogans such as “Build back better”, “levelling up” and the Net Zero “green jobs revolution”. And we all know how that turned out.

Brexiteers are still furious about this, but I only feel a sense of resignation because it all went more or less how I predicted - all because nobody could be bothered putting serious plans or policy together.

Consequently, we are pretty much back at square one, almost as though we never left the EU. The most notable difference is that we exchanged sexy young poles for a two million third world illiterates. That’s “global Britain” for you.

By 2024, Farage was out of the picture, leaving only a rump of the Brexit movement still in the game. Reform was struggling under Tice without Farage, and one couldn’t help but notice none of the lessons were learned. The party was and is an incoherent populist rabble with nothing even approaching serious policy to its name. To date, it has only its intellectually threadbare “Contract with the people” – a collection of slogans and obsolete tropes.

To be fair, Ben Habib was highly receptive to my criticisms and set about addressing reform’s deficiencies, but this “Reforming Reform” agenda was never going to withstand the return of arch-populist Nigel Farage. Acting in good faith cost Habib his position in the party. He wasn’t the first and was not to be the last.

That then brings us to the Rupert Lowe Saga, which I’m sure needs no elaboration with readers of The Restorationist. This culminated in Lowe’s highly predictable acrimonious departure. In April, Rupert Lowe MP, launched a full broadside on Reform, declaring, “I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power.”

This, of course, was music to my ears. This is precisely what I’d been saying for the previous two years. There is no point in Reform making an electoral breakthrough if our second bite of the Brexit cherry ends up on the rocks for all the same reasons.

In the meantime, I was contacted by the chairman of UKIP, asking if I would write them a manifesto. As it happens, I was planning on putting my money where my mouth was. I’d already made submissions to Ben Habib, and was already dabbling in policy development.

What emerged from that was a manifesto that was broadly in line with the ideas of UKIP and Ben Habib, centering on a broad agenda of treaty withdrawals and repeals, with a view to reversing the Blairite constitutional revolution. I was quite pleased that UKIP adopted most of it – even if they reneged on their promise to pay me the agreed sum – cheating swine that they are.

It was not wasted effort though. It was a useful thought exercise. I established a few things – not least policy development is harder than it looks, and it’s impossible for any single person to have an informed and credible opinion on everything that should go in a manifesto. As such, some of my work, like a lot that appears on these pages, is absolute bollocks. Still, though, my amateur bollocks was still light years ahead than anything else in circulation on the right at the time.

Not long after, Rupert Lowe launched his Restore Britain initiative. Given his previous remarks about Reform’s lack of substance I was quite encouraged by this development, especially given the people involved. It takes a team to do this well – and it takes time and resources I simply do not have.

When it launched, though, I wasted no time in attacking it. It was the same lightweight bullet point populist slop we get from Reform and Habib’s various enterprises. It transpires this is all the right is capable of producing.

This, for me, was very much a kick up the arse to do what I’d been intending to do with the manifesto I wrote, turning it into an interactive online manifesto – to at least show the right what it should look like, even if one does not agree with the content. It should at least identify the problems and propose joined-up solutions based on an established set of agreed principles.

This process, though, has led to an evolution in my thinking. In the months between I’d set about producing an independent report on why we should leave the ECHR. This was very much a turning point.

I’d assumed the case for leaving the ECHR would be a relatively straightforward one, but as with Brexit, it was necessary not only to set out the reasons why we should leave, but also game the mechanics of leaving and set out a model of what replaces it. That’s where it all falls over. One should never begin a radical transition without a clear idea of the destination. I’m leaning heavily on Chesterton’s fence.

While there have been a number of works on the subject, none of them adequately address the politics of leaving the ECHR. Braverman, Lilley and Wolfson concur leaving the ECHR does not breach the Good Friday Agreement, but that is a contestable opinion, therefore it will be contested. The parties to the Good Friday Agreement, and the EU, will seek to exploit the process for what they can get. We can expect a tsunami of lawfare and unproductive politics which takes up most of the runtime of any government attempting it.

The most comprehensive work on the issue; that of Lord Wolfson, seems to imply there will need to be “substantive equivalence” for Northern Ireland, and it implies an independent panel of judges able to call upon the full gamut of ECHR jurisprudence. Together with Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which makes for a very messy technical compromise that could defeat the entire point of the exercise. The alternative is a complete unravelling of the entire Northern Ireland settlement – and, potentially, a trade war with the EU.

The more I look at it, the more ECHR withdrawal looks like a fool’s errand, especially when you consider the Strasbourg court rarely rules on UK immigration cases. The most egregious rulings of late come from compromised British judges in British courts. The case for leaving is weak. The problems are much closer to home – and addressing them is a far better use of parliamentary bandwidth.

This is also where much of The Restorationist’s work falls over.

We are all working loosely on the premise there will be a right wing government in 2029. There is no certainly, though, it will be coherent and united government, or it will have a thumping mandate. It may have a sizable majority, in the way Labour does now, but will have limited political capital – and will face a rainbow of opposition, from the blob, the judiciary, the House of Lords, the legacy media, the bond markets, and the wider population. It should be noted that according to YouGov, the public are opposed to withdrawing from the Convention by 46% to 29%.

As such, I am increasingly unconvinced ECHR withdrawal is a worthwhile endeavour – and applying the same thinking to a broader restoration agenda, I come to much the same conclusion. Ultimately the public will not thank us for indulging in lengthy and controversial constitutional wrangling when their top concern is immigration.

I now find there are a few people working on grand blueprints for a great restoration, centring on the legalities, but none (that I can see) are looking (realistically) at the practical politics of attempting it. My point is the public wants to see results now.

Here we should remind ourselves why illegal immigration got so badly out of control. Since the 1990’s we’ve seen a gradual dismantling of local authority enforcement, from meat hygiene inspectors, through housing inspectors, and trading standards officers who are all essential to detecting organised crime and the illegal immigration that goes with it. Similarly, through amalgamations and centralisations, we have seen a retreat from community policing and the dismantling of the justice system.

This is not remedied by ripping up treaties and repealing laws. The immediate job is to rebuild local authority enforcement capabilities. This is a point that’s half understood in Restore Britain’s report on mass deportations this week, but still, most of the report is devoted to ECHR exit and legal tinkering.

Consequently, the Manifesto Project is taking a different turn, looking at more pragmatic interim reforms. That is not to say that grand scheming; the type we see on the pages of The Restorationist, should not be done. It is valuable work even if I disagree with much of it. It’s just that many of our problems can be resolved with better leadership, political will, and precision amendments instead of sweeping repeals.

As much as anything, any government, even with a popular mandate and a functioning majority usually only manages to get half a dozen things done in its first term, and must take the necessary precautions to ensure they are re-elected. The more ambitious the reform agenda, the more opportunities there are to derail it, the more opposition it will mobilise, and the greater the chances of creating an almighty mess that sees any government turfed out on its ear.

On a final note, much of the thinking on the right is gravitating towards a pre-1997 Starkeyite restoration, which is fundamentally flawed in my view. A lot has happened since 1997. The previous regime was predicated on a functioning establishment comprised of Parliament, the Church and the Monarchy, all of which are now probably debased beyond repair. We should also note that the constitution which existed in 1997 never had to live alongside the 24/7 scrutiny of social media. I’m of the view the old regime died with Queen Betty, and should not be resurrected.

If we are going to dismantle the Blair regime, we have to acknowledge rights protections will have to be part of it, ordinary citizens must have access to justice, and the people demand more of a say, suggesting greater use of direct democracy rather than a reversion to the aristocracy of yore. This is the direction of my thinking.

The work on the Manifesto Project is ongoing, if only as a thought exercise to establish what can be done without taking a wrecking ball to the constitution. I expect it will be widely ignored since I don’t have prestige within the Westminster bubble, and can never hope to compete with the profile of Rupert Lowe and others - but all the same, somebody has to be the “red team”, so it might as well be me, as it was during Brexit.

You are, of course, free to disagree with my findings, but my central point stands. Unless there is a comprehensive and serious policy platform for the right, then the Brexit 2.0 revolution we’re leading up to will implode the same way as the first attempt. If all we’ve got to go on is more of the same lofty fantasies, slogans and lazy populist slop, then we will fail – and the failure will be richly deserved.