The spectre at the feast of Britain's election

The Conservatives cannot talk about Brexit. A Labour government cannot ignore it

Whatever happened to Brexit? It seems only yesterday that Britain’s departure from the European Union was the raison d’etre of Britain’s ruling Conservative party. The last election was the Brexit election. Rishi Sunak was a true believer from the very beginning. In 2020 Boris Johnson dashed to the Meridian line at Greenwich to declare the rebirth of a global Britain after “getting Brexit done”. And now, as Sunak seeks a new term? Scarcely a whisper.

National Service for 18-year-olds, tax breaks for pensioners, cutbacks in courses for feckless university students, refugees expelled to Rwanda, a tough line towards gender identity - in his relentless bid for the votes of the elderly, Sunak has been doing his utmost to frame the general election as the chance to reclaim the past. 

Unsurprisingly. The Conservatives have become the old people’s party. The opinion polls suggest that only among 65-year-olds and over can the Tories hope for a majority. Among those in the 18-24 age bracket, Sunak will be very fortunate if he gets the backing of 10 per cent. Why don’t you like young people, one (youthful) voter asked the prime minister during one of his forays on the campaign trail? Because you don’t like us, would have been the honest answer.

But wasn’t Brexit the ultimate exercise in nostalgia? The old voted for it and the young against it. By hauling up the drawbridge with the rest of the European continent, Sunak and his allies declared, Britain would rediscover past glory.

A Downing Street strategic defence review pushed aside the parochial preoccupations of Europe to recall those halcyon days when Britain still had a formidable presence east of Suez. An aircraft carrier was duly dispatched to the South China Sea to sound a warning to Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime in Beijing. True, something of a rewrite was required soon afterwards when Vladimir Putin sent the Russian army into Ukraine. But never mind such details, buccaneering Britain would soon be signing trade deals with everyone that mattered.

The silence now speaks to the reality that the Brexiters have run out of hiding places. The passage of time has mercilessly exposed the toxic mix of hubris and deception at the heart of their manifesto. Britain has been left poorer and weaker. Trade and investment flows have shrunk. The promised trade deals with the United States, India and the rest have not materialised. The economy has stagnated and, robbed of resources, the public realm has fallen to decay. As for the pledge of lower immigration, the workers who travelled to and fro from Europe have been replaced by much larger numbers from Asia and Africa.

The Conservatives’ campaign website lists eight “bold actions” and five “priorities” for the next Sunak term, covering everything from the abolition of national insurance contributions, to higher defence spending to “stopping the boats” that carry asylum seekers across the channel. And Europe? Brexit, global Britain, trade deals? Not a word. Nor, of course, is there any mention that a sizeable majority of voters now think of the Brexit decision as the calamitous act of self-harm it always was. For years it seemed that Conservatives could speak of nothing else but national sovereignty - a term now excised from the Tory lexicon.

 Keir Starmer’s Labour party, on course for a crushing victory on July 4, has its own reasons for not pointing up this rather glaring omission. The most obvious is tactical. Putting aside the flights of fancy of the Westminster commentariat (No, the vast majority of voters are not at all interested in Starmer’s spat with the left wing former MP Dianne Abbott), the election is being fought on territory of Labour’s choice. 

The economy, the dismal condition of the health service, broken railways, the implosion of the criminal justice system, rivers overflowing with raw sewage - these are all reasons to vote against the Conservatives. Why should Labour, the party’s senior figures reasonably ask, let the government off the hook by changing the agenda to a discussion about Europe?

They have a point. But it should not be allowed to obscure the strategic challenge that will face a Labour government. Britain is not about to reverse Brexit - not least because the EU 27 have no interest in such a negotiation unless and until it becomes the settled will of British politicians across the spectrum. Nor is Brussels about to allow a Starmer administration to “cherry-pick” the areas of collaboration its wants in any new association agreement.

The inescapable truth for the next government, however, will be that a sustained economic recovery in Britain, grounded as it must be in rising competitivness and productivity, will depend on a closer, less obstructed, relationship with the continent which accounts for most of its trade and investment. That’s before it abandons the absurd proposition that it can underpin its security without its European partners. In the vain hope that it might soften the blow that the voters are about to inflict on them, the Tories have stopped talking about Brexit. Starmer will not have that choice.