Despite all this wailing, Brexit is for the best

Defending Brexit these days is a thankless task. Anyone who has tried it knows you can be left looking like Perkins, the young RAF officer in the Beyond the Fringe sketch from 1960. In the Second World War skit, Peter Cook’s officer character tells Perkins, played by Jonathan Miller, that things are not going well for Blighty. He is being sent on a doomed mission. We need a futile gesture. The pointless death of the airman will raise the tone of the war. As he departs, Perkins asks whether it is au revoir. No, he is told by Cook, it’s goodbye.

Who backs Brexit in public now? It has become the doomed mission to end all doomed missions, with only a handful of true believers insisting any problems cannot possibly be the fault of Brexit itself, that it has never been tried properly or pursued with sufficient vigour. Polling shows the public is not buying it. Leaving the EU is now viewed as a mistake in almost every seat in the country.

On these pages, as a Brexiteer, I have several times acknowledged the real trade and diplomatic problems. The painstaking business of improving the relationship with our EU friends and neighbours is going to be a fact of politics for a decade or so, whichever party is in power.

But the deep, encircling gloom has now become so comical in its intensity, especially around this week’s third anniversary of departure, I’m starting to remember why I voted to leave and why I continue to be glad Britain is no longer a member of the EU.

The advantages of greater autonomy manifested themselves in the vaccine race and Ukraine policy. There is an argument to be had about the scale of the advantages, certainly. In the case of vaccines the head start was weeks. On Ukraine, not being tied up negotiating with pro-Russia Hungary, as the EU was, liberated the UK to help Ukraine early.

Perhaps the main advantage is that as a country we are left with no one else to blame. In previous decades, Brussels was a convenient bogeyman for leaders, scribblers and voters. If in doubt, blame Brussels. No longer. Now we’re out, there is no easy get-out. The challenges — on productivity, innovation, investment, improving financial markets, migration and public sector capacity — are our own to fix, or not.

Although departure was a shambles, it brought about an adjustment that was always going to happen. Britain was destined to leave because it had never fully committed to an organisation built since the 1980s on the relentless logic of closer union, a single currency, a permanent bureaucracy and a supreme court. The voters were never asked to approve this. Given the choice in 2016, they chose the nation state.

The tension created by being in, but not fully, had unbalanced British politics to such an extent that by the time of David Cameron’s Bloomberg speech in 2013, when he promised a renegotiation and a referendum, the situation was dangerously combustible. Cameron is presented by Rejoiners as having arrived at the decision casually. This is unfair. The Conservatives were being consumed by insurgent Ukip, and the Labour Party could have been smashed in time too.

The counterfactual in which no referendum takes place would not have produced a smooth George Osborne-led pro-EU government. It may have become a populist fight between Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn or another leader from the far left.

Leaving is also going to turn out to be positive for the EU. Even if some northern European countries say they miss the British as a counter balance to the Franco-German alliance, the EU project is about long-term closer integration and obstreperous Britain is no longer there as a hindrance.

Encouragingly, there is now a recognition from President Macron that a much looser tier of European co-operation on security and other matters is required, involving non-member states in the neighbourhood such as Britain. Macron convened the European Political Community for this purpose and Britain is involved.

This is the encouraging backdrop against which an Anglo-French summit is planned for March, and a compromise on the Northern Ireland protocol is in prospect.

Instead, in Britain we’re getting ever deeper into self-flagellation. Anything and everything bad that happens ends up being attributed to leaving the EU. The latest forecasts by the IMF suggesting Britain will be the only G7 country to suffer negative growth this year produced an outpouring of Brexit anniversary analysis, a splurge of media remorse. Bust Britain has been broken by Brexit, again.

It was a long way down most news stories before the reader got to an acknowledgement from the IMF that the UK had been the fastest growing economy in 2022, although these studies are endlessly revised. Almost exactly a year ago, the IMF produced its forecasts for 2022. They turned out to bear almost no resemblance to what then happened. Even at the time, anyone paying attention could see Europe was on the brink of a war. The US, UK and Canada were preparing for it publicly.

Undeniably, low-growth Britain has problems. Its gigantic financial system was over-exposed to the crisis of 2008 and the economy was scarred. Covid exposed our creaking public services, and we’ve since had an energy crisis amid a war. Brexit is too small an event in that context to be the root cause of our discontents.

Three years on from our departure, we are left with a choice: weep and wail, or focus on constructive efforts to fix what can be improved on trade and security co-operation with Europe.