TeaHis vast collection of essays by 43 different authors, including seven lords, four baronesses, a dame and three knights of the realm, may be the closest we have to a semi-official reflection on the causes and consequences of Brexit. Its editor, Sir Anthony Selden, is Honorary Historian of 10 Downing Street and has written the definitive work on 21st-century British administration.
Yet in its 600 pages the phrase “English nationalism” appears exactly once – in a brief reference to a line taken by the Daily Mail during the 2016 referendum campaign. Surprisingly, while there is a good essay called On Scotland by Aileen McHarg, there is no essay called On England. No attempt has been made to provide a comprehensive overview of the tensions, contradictions and concerns within the part of Britain where Brexit was won: non-metropolitan England. It seems that for most of the political and intellectual establishments English is still such a condition that they do not even dare to mention its name.
This absence matters not only for understanding the recent past, but also for the UK’s immediate future. This dodges the most pressing question: Why, when many of those who voted for Brexit now consider it a failure, is the person who did most to make it happen still a potential contender to become the next Prime Minister?
Peter Kellner shows in his incisive contribution that a third of those who voted to leave now say it has been a failure and, surprisingly, a quarter of that group say Nigel Farage is “very” responsible for their disappointment. Slightly more of them blame Farage than blame the EU. Yet Farage is still setting the agenda in English (and to a lesser extent Welsh) politics.
But if a distinguished contemporary historian like Seldon does not think it is worth trying to understand the nationalist impulses that led to Brexit, then Farage’s success also becomes impossible to explain. There’s also no specific essay on him in the collection – making it, if not exactly Hamlet without the Prince, then perhaps a Punch and Judy show without Mr. Punch.
It is difficult to deny that Brexit is indeed an objective failure. Latest independent studiesResearchers at Stanford University found that by 2025, Brexit would have reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8% compared to what it was. Investment declined between 12% and 18%, while employment and productivity both declined by 3% to 4%.
For all their claims about the dawn of a new golden age, intelligent Brexiteers largely knew that something like this was going to happen. He genuinely thought that economic suffering was a price worth paying for political renewal. Taking back control, as was the victorious slogan, was the real issue. And there may have been some nobility in this too – there is more to life than economics.
But as jurist and historian Jonathan Sumption says in the book’s weak introduction, “Britain’s ability to ‘control’ its own destiny is inevitably more limited outside the EU”. Britain is still deeply influenced by EU decisions but has no say in them. As far as immigration is concerned – which many voters have seen as concrete evidence of lost control – Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, reminds us in her essay that it actually reached record levels after Brexit, which thus “failed spectacularly to deliver on its clear promise”.
If voters traded development for sovereignty, they got a bad deal on both sides of the equation. Brexit did not herald the re-emergence of an independent ruling class whose talents had been blocked by continental clouds. Intriguingly, Brexit-supporting former Tory MP Conor Burns wrote in his essay that Simon Case, the cabinet secretary appointed by Boris Johnson, was a “lightweight” – “that’s why he was appointed.”
Entertaining because the case itself appears to spread the blame: “The fantasy of a nation free from the shackles of Brussels bureaucracy rapidly became a reality of muddled thinking, fruitless negotiations, parliamentary quagmire and administrative confusion.”
Veteran anti-EU campaigner and former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell disappointingly concludes that “Vote Leave may get us self-governance. We have yet to govern ourselves well.” Six prime ministers since 2016, and an incoming seventh, have left one wondering whether post-Brexit Britain is worth governing at all.
However, disappointment was always part of the package. The nature of Brexit was that it was doomed to become an immediate lost cause – a mirage that dissipated as it approached. The victory was snatched away and, as Carswell says, “we still have the European disease”. Ex-Labour MP Gisela Stuart, who was prominent in the Leave campaign, believes Britain is “still haunted by the ghost of fifty years of EU membership”. Vote Leave’s communications director, Paul Stephenson, describes its victory now as “bitter-sweet”: “We won from the jaws of defeat, but then immediately had it snatched away from us again.”
There is no real accounting of its failures anywhere among Brexiteers. Burns refers to the difficult issue of the Irish border as “problems caused by the Irish”, apparently unaware that Northern Ireland had voted to remain and the Irish government clearly did not want Brexit to happen.
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Economist Patrick Minford, who promises a golden age, writes (in an essay co-authored with Zhe Zhu) that while “Brexit is bound to cause disruption in the short term”, its entire purpose is “to improve long-term performance”. We could adapt John Maynard Keynes and wonder whether in the long run all retired voters will die off before we see these economic benefits. Economists Paul Johnson and Robert Johnson argue here that, in fact, “it seems unlikely that the long-term impact on national income will be less than 4 percent, and it may even be higher”.
Yet there is no substantial evidence in this book that Remainers are any better off coping with the identity crisis behind Brexit. In her essay, Susan Greenfield acknowledged that “the most important question of whether to leave or remain in the EU was somehow connected to our identity”. But (reasonably enough for a neuroscientist) she thinks about identity only at the cognitive level. This is fascinating in itself but it largely serves to draw attention to the absence of any real attempt to define “somehow” in concrete political and social terms.
For that, one has to turn elsewhere – for example, to rolling future of england Survey conducted by political scientists Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wynne Jones. the most recent one found that Farage’s supporters ranked “being English” above “being parents” as an indicator of who they are.
Those for whom being English is the essence of their identity were not happy in 2016 and are not happy now. Henderson and Wyn Jones find him “deeply aware of an apparently stark contradiction between past glory and the poor state of affairs in the present; an England whose eponymous national group feels under siege both within and without; an England that has achieved major changes (not least, Brexit) to address its concerns, yet is deeply dissatisfied with the results”.
Brexit was a dishonest and self-defeating response to the English question. But the great and the good are reluctant to even listen to it, leave alone try to provide a better answer.
