There’s no such thing as Brexit

“It’s now painfully obvious Brexit hasn’t worked, and is actively harming us economically. (It didn’t even control our bloody borders!)”

So spake Piers Morgan, in response to the latest polling showing another fall in the share of voters who think we were right to leave the EU. Such findings are grist to the mill of the hardcore Remainer holdouts, of course — but Morgan’s framing reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what Brexit actually was.

Consider the phrasing: “It didn’t even control our bloody borders!” What is that supposed to mean? What is the “it” to which Morgan is referring?

In his conception, Brexit seems to be imagined as some sort of golem, a tulpa willed into existence by the 52 Per Cent to stand sentinel at the white cliffs and turn away the millions of people trying to get into the country each year. Having made a blood sacrifice of GDP to call this dream-construct into being, it is now failing in its purpose. 

Hopefully, having the implicit logic of Morgan’s framing spelled out like that reveals how mad it is. To borrow a turn of phrase from Margaret Thatcher (and risk getting misinterpreted in the same way): 

They are casting their problems on Brexit and who is Brexit? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women … 

We heard from one of those women last week when Priti Patel appeared on Harry Cole’s chat show. Patel, whilst serving as Boris Johnson’s home secretary, oversaw what has come to be known as the “Boriswave”, or the single most dramatic increase in immigration in modern British history. And she’s proud of it.

Johnson himself is no better. Having won a landslide on an explicit promise to use the freedoms offered by Brexit to get numbers down, he jacked them up. Incredibly, he has since said that Britain needed “the hands to do the work” in order — and this is the best/worst part — to prevent upward pressure on wages.

In the case of border control, Brexit simply exposed an entire cadre of senior Conservatives as deeply inadequate poseurs

Assuming that Morgan doesn’t actually think Brexit is a misfiring tulpa, the problem is that he (and many others) insist on assessing Brexit as if it were a single policy, and all its consequences a single package.

But this isn’t the case; whilst it was a single foreign policy decision, Brexit is better understood not as a policy but a change of state. Where once the United Kingdom was locked into European policy on a huge range of areas, Westminster now has much more freedom to chart its own course — and cannot hide behind Brussels when the voters hold it to account.

To some, that is a perfectly worthwhile end in itself. For those more interested in the utilitarian calculation (whether or not Brexit “worked”) it will come down to how our political class uses that freedom. Getting a big head start on vaccine policy was a big win; the Boriswave a huge loss. How that ledger balances out over time is where any fair assessment of whether Brexit “worked” will be found.

In the case of border control, Brexit simply exposed an entire cadre of senior Conservatives as deeply inadequate poseurs. Posturing against the EU whilst we were in was easy gesture politics, but the likes of Johnson and Patel turned out to have absolutely no ideas for how to wield the control they clamoured to take back. The first time they faced any sort of challenge, they resorted to the usual Treasury-brain fix of human quantitative easing, on steroids.

Johnson, ever trying to maintain the image of the king over the water and a political illusionist of rare talent, is still trying to keep up the politics of the golden tomorrow that served him so well in the past. The benefit of Brexit, he now says, is that you have the freedom to get numbers down later. Thus, he lays into the Government for considering a youth movement deal with the EU whilst papering over his own record.

The tactic will be familiar to anyone with even passing familiarity with creative accounting; current losses written off as one-time events, whilst purely hypothetical future gains are banked to get through the next quarter. Yet Johnson and Patel are merely learning an old lesson: that the Smartest Guys in the Room always get found out in the end.

Johnson and Patel are both boats against the current, beaten ceaselessly into the past by every fresh revelation about the scale of the catastrophe they oversaw. We are importing millions of people who will never be net contributors, and in the lifetime of this parliament the vast bulk of them will qualify for Indefinite Leave to Remain.

As the country gets poorer and the connections between mass immigration and the material hardships of voters — especially over issues such as housing — grow more obvious, British politics will have no place for Johnsonism, or for any of the many other flavours of fantasy and pretence which have dominated our national debate for so long.

If Brexit is anything, it is that: the stripping away of illusions and excuses from the people who claim the privileges of public office. It’s tipping Grandpa Joe out of bed and demanding he walk, because he can. It’s finding the courage to take off the emerald spectacles and gaze into the abyss that generations of inadequacy and neglect have made of our government.

And the abyss, of course, gazes back. Illusions and excuses are comforting and comfortable; it is not pleasant to realise that this country is poor not as a result of any foul foreign conspiracy but the accumulated stupid decisions of its own leaders and, being a democracy, of its voters. Britain’s faults were not in twelve golden stars, but in ourselves. 

Crawling back into the womb of the EU might make our politicians feel better about their inadequacies, and ourselves perhaps feel better about our choice of politicians. It would not, however, make us better off. Our long-term trajectory would remain a doom spiral.

There is nothing to be done with that gaze but meet it. This country’s problems are several and severe, but fixable. Controlling immigration, solving the housing crisis, building the railways and power plants needed to power a 21st-century economy — all these things are doable. We simply have to choose to do them, to pay the price of doing them, and to fight and defeat the vested interests that prevent us from doing them.

Nothing else is going to fight those battles for us. “Brexit” was not the exchange of one external authority for another. Taking back control was never the same thing as proving worthy of it. Having chosen to gaze into the abyss, it’s up to us to make sure it blinks first.