According to the London Economic, Brexit could cost the UK economy £311 billion by 2035. Could it be Labour’s lethal weapon that causes Reform’s downfall? We live in Brexit Britain and our place in the world is outside of the EU. But Brexit has failed, according to one of its chief architects, Nigel Farage, who seems to have no burning desire to fix it.
Brexit – a majority finds it a bad idea
The experts in various fields who said Brexit was a bad idea, and who we were told to ignore, have largely been proved correct. We still haven’t been able, and show no signs of being able, to implement Boris Johnson’s deal in full on the UK side of our newly resurrected hard border with the EU.
The endless worldwide disasters dominating the news agenda have taken priority over the real-time reporting of Brexit, paired with the fact that the media has failed in large part to report on it properly.
However, current polling finds 55% of the public of the opinion that leaving the EU was a bad idea compared to just 30% who think the opposite. The much talked about Brexit reset has delivered improvements but still sticks to the basic framework of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) while not acknowledging its critical faults, hindering significant progress.
No resistance to Reform
To trace the roots of Labour’s Brexit failures you have to dig up some uncomfortable truths that have perplexing parallels today. There was and is nobody seriously taking the fight to the right. Jeremy Corbyn, himself a committed Eurosceptic, led Labour’s virtually non-existent Remain campaign in the face of a highly organised, laser-focused Leave.EU movement fronted by Farage. The winner of this bout was always going to be highly influential in the Brexit vote, and so it proved. The fact that the fight put up by Labour was so weak not only had dire consequences for the country, but it must have also given Farage, Tice and their ilk the confidence to believe that waltzing their way into the political mainstream would meet little resistance.
Fast forward to today and Reform have MPs in the House of Commons, hugely positive polling, and dominate the national political news agenda. They are steamrollering Starmer in what should be his honeymoon period, while he and his party don’t seem to know who they are, and what to do. Alleged links to Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer seem believable, but whoever is behind Reform has a clear plan, and critically, the resources, to create a ruthlessly effective political machine.
The laser focus of Leave.EU has been transplanted to an upgraded infrastructure making Reform an increasingly formidable force. In the meantime, the previous titans of British politics seem increasingly incapable of facing them down. This lack of leadership is brilliantly summed up here by Patrick Cockburn in the I newspaper: Keir Starmer is the UK’s Joe Biden.
Reform’s rise started with Brexit, so could its downfall
As Cockburn points out, populist nationalist parties are essentially propaganda machines, and Trump and Farage are experts in dealing with and exploiting the media. I have long thought that there is a huge amount of thought and energy dedicated to communicating the information that the people behind Reform and Leave.EU think will lead them to victory, but more importantly for them, to power and influence. Labour, on the other hand, has won a landslide by default after defeating a Tory party eaten from the inside out, in large part, by Brexit.
Labour’s strategy before the election seemed to be one of playing it safe and just not being worse than the Tories, but that was never going to work once in power. Blaming 14 years of Conservative failure is already wearing thin and the party doesn’t seem to know how to strike a blow to Reform. I, and many others who try and assess the real-world impact of our exit from the EU, are increasingly frustrated that Starmer and Labour seem unaware of how to use what is potentially their most lethal weapon – Brexit.
Time for serious moves to fix Brexit
I was told that the public are bored of Brexit when pitching television ideas a few months ago. The same person subsequently told me that the 10-year anniversary of the referendum will undoubtably need covering and that commissioners are open to ideas about how to do this. There could be no better time for Labour to fully let the cat out of the bag about how bad Brexit has been for the country and will continue to be if we don’t make some serious moves to fix it.
If Labour fully commits to this, harness the narrative and drive it home, they will be able to take credit, for example, for the upturn in fortunes a decision to rejoin the Single Market/Customs Union would inevitably bring. They can also use it to totally discredit Farage and Reform as political decision makers, along with any other politicians on the right who noisily supported Brexit. One of the strengths behind this is that Starmer and his team probably believe Brexit is genuinely bad for Britain, and they would also be roundly supported by experts in many areas who can now prove it.
What does Labour have to lose?
Current polling at the time of writing puts Reform on 29% with Labour on 22% and the government doesn’t seem to have any effective strategy to counteract the momentum being achieved by the party that has evolved through various identities (Leave.EU/UKIP/Brexit Party) and is currently on course to compete for power.
The government’s strategists will be mulling over their next move. There is a fascinating potential for a huge shift in voter dynamics if Labour announces an equally huge shift in its Brexit policy: go hard on the negatives of Brexit and even harder on the ways to fix it. Reform will be in unknown territory; instead of blaming others for the status quo while providing untested, idealistic solutions, they will now have to come up with realistic answers to a problem that is a part of their political DNA.
Starmer announcing that he will act in Britain’s best interests to fix Farage’s mess with constantly clear messaging about the options available, while forcing Reform to reveal their alternative in meticulous detail, could be highly effective. This could start with declaring the TCA as unworkable and pushing the case for a European Free Trade Association (EFTA)-style arrangement to boost trade. This would still honour the vote to leave the EU, and while it would enrage the right-wing anti-Freedom of Movement (FOM) brigade, Starmer could challenge Farage to provide a practical alternative.
Such bold engagement with reality could gain significant political momentum for the PM while seriously derailing the Reform ideology. I believe facts and truth to be the enemy of Brexit; I see no reason why the same isn’t true of Reform. Bring one down and you enable the downfall of the other. Britain deserves an alternative to both.
