Brexit Unfolded: How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

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I blog in a personal capacity and all views expressed are mine, not those of any institution or organization. With his exquisitely lucid analysis, Chris Grey does something no politician has so far achieved – he makes sense of the messy contradictions and frustrations of Brexit. Argument Honestly held opinions and provocative argument based on current events or our recent reports. A second myth is that metrication made it illegal to use imperial measures, whereas in fact it only prohibited the use of those measures alone, without also displaying their metric equivalent more prominently (it was for refusing to do this that the ‘Metric Martyrs’ were prosecuted and, in some cases, convicted). This re-balancing was supposed to mean that, whilst financial services would benefit from Brexit by being freed from EU bureaucracy, other sectors would benefit even more.

Moreover, although EU citizens’ rights are overseen by the Independent Monitoring Authority (IMA), which is formally an “executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice”, it would seem that, as with the Post Office case, the effectiveness of political and public accountability is limited. Now, even with settled status, there has been a definitive loss of previous full rights of freedom of movement, and all the ongoing practical problems attendant to that loss for families and relationships. Building on these myths, ever since the referendum the idea of restoring imperial units of measurement has regularly been dangled in front of leave voters, almost half of whom supported it according to a 2017 opinion poll*. But even if so, the point holds: extra costs, uncertainties and complexities are incurred to no conceivable benefit or advantage, and with an outcome which in substantive terms is defined by the EU rather than the UK.At stake, here, is the bigger battle of the ‘ Five Families’ or ‘Brexitists’ to slough off the last, moth-eaten, remnants of ‘traditional’ Conservatism.

On all of the topics discussed in this post – import controls, medicines, environmental protection, and steel – there is much more that could be said than space allows here. All that effort and expense, and the outcome is not just to stay aligned with the EU but to actually lose all control over its decisions. Everyone who cares about the issue, for and against, needs this level of expertise and knowledge at their fingertips. But it is a battle which is far from over and, as time goes by, it will change in its nature, as the effects of Brexit become harder to disentangle from other factors. And what of David Maddox, Political Editor of the rabidly pro-Brexit Express, who this week penned possibly the most dotty commentary on the Post Office scandal so far, opining that: “the real big picture story here is that this was once again an example of the establishment circling in to protect and reward itself while dumping from a great height on the little ordinary people – aka the decent hard-working folk who keep this country ticking over.

That this has failed to materialize isn’t because the UK has not (or not yet) developed many major new free trade agreements, for example with the US or India. Hitchens’ article actually touches on it when he notes that it is “because that is the size of bottle most people like.

So in evaluating Brexit, the real test is whether it has delivered these promises – promises of specific, concrete, often economic, benefits, and not simply ‘sovereignty’ as an abstract ideal; promises sold using grotesque emotional manipulation, and made with no suggestion that they would take decades to transpire, or would have any downsides at all. One example is the shortage of many medicines, especially those used for the treatment of epilepsy and diabetes. It is an issue which is about come to the fore again when the UK finally begins to implement full import controls on goods coming from the EU at the end of this month (unless there is a sixth delay in doing so). That same report shows how the government does not even have a consistent or logical approach, so that, having dropped the general requirement on UK firms to adopt the UKCA mark rather than continuing to use CE, the construction sector is still supposed to do so by 2025.It will just mean that the relative gap between the rates of UK-EU and UK-ROW trade growth will have shifted. Above all, it’s a searing account of the deep failure of political leadership in our country at a moment when it was so desperately needed. Moreover, whilst the decline in the number of clinical trials undertaken in the UK began before Brexit, its continuation has been attributed in at least some part to Brexit.