Brexiters haven't changed- but the country has.

At least, that's the Starmer gamble.

Close your eyes, hold your breath, listen hard- and it all comes back. The fevered talk of surrender, the endless tedious cascade of zero sum arguments, accompanied by the sum of zero insights- an obsession with fish. To listen to British political discourse on 19th May 2025 was to be transported to the endless slog of the late 2010s, or to put it another way, to my late twenties. It was to live a day inside a truly knackered political jukebox- the same old records, played in the same order, to a world much changed and changing all around it. “Keir didn’t even bother with a second referendum!”, the brainless Twitter accounts screamed. It was a reminder, that in so many ways, much of the UK media/political class has simply not moved on or reckoned with the actual realisation of Brexit at all.

If anything- it’s got worse. The Overton window of politics and digital political communication has moved sharply to the radical right and there is even less challenge than there was before. Yesterday was a reminder that much of the pro-Brexit commentariat became deeply radicalised by the Brexit process, and came to believe that only the hardest, most doctrinaire version of state sovereignty mattered. This speaks to many of commentators and politicians’ deep privilege: they can afford (and always could afford) to be obsessed with recherché, recondite points of political principle and lofty discussions about sovereignty. For all of their bloviation, they do not run businesses, they generally do not have mixed-European families and they are largely unaffected by the bureaucracy which arose at their own hand, and if they were they are well placed to navigate it. They have not been forced to sit for hours upon hour on a Kent or Nord-de-Calais scrap of hard shoulder, waiting for a veterinary certificate which never seems to come. They have not lost a single customer or a single penny. Indeed if anything, they have cut cloth from the whole thing, their thoughts in much demand by a media ecosystem that became replete with people often (though not always) pretending to be more stupid than they were.

So yesterday invoked what was always my deepest frustration with Brexit- which was not in its fact. I well understood why many voters disliked the EU. I’ve reported from Brussels many times and I would defy anyone to walk around the airless, titanic, grey halls of the Berlaymont building and not believe that this is, on some level, an imperial project. I too had reservations about the accountability of this vast, largely unknowable institution. I disliked the way that many Brexit voting voters (which included most of my own family) were patronised and I always felt deeply uncomfortable about another referendum and the conspiratorial thinking of many liberals assuming that some underhand force must be at play. But what I found irritating at first, and then corrosive, was the fantasy land in which much of its fiercest proponents lived and the tactics they used to delegitimise anyone (especially journalists) who wouldn’t travel with them and who dared asked questions about their grand projet.

This was a conceptual world which (largely) never accepted that trade offs existed. This was a conceptual world which believed all problems stemmed from a lack of self-belief, or worse, patriotism. This was a conceptual world which never reckoned with the realities of British power. The reason Boris Johnson’s rushed Trade and Co-operation agreement was so threadbare and rackety (leaving the UK more politically and economically distant from the EU than any other European state save Belarus) and Theresa May’s negotiation so difficult was nothing to do with a lack of will- it was intimately connected to the realities of UK/EU relative strength. In short, Britain always had cards, but never a winning hand. The EU was a bigger market, a bigger economy and in relative terms had less to lose than we did. This was a deeply imperfect position from which to start a negotiation, and in one form or another it remains the case. The Brexiter argument always rested on a fundamentally contradictory conceit: (i) that the EU had become a massive part of our politics, our economy and our lives (true) and (ii) that it would be easy to leave and straightforward to do so without a deal, therefore meaning our leverage was strong (untrue). Any other European political class, faced with a similar negotiation, would have been more honest about the realities of their country’s relative power and expectations would have been managed. At no point did any senior politician acknowledge Britain’s relative supplicancy, only for it to be realised for all to see on television in the humiliation of a British Prime Minister being summoned in the dead of night by the European Council to be told just how long she would have an Article 50 extension for and on what terms. It was a death knell for Theresa May’s premiership but it was an encapsulation of a strategic reality. There was much smug nonsense talked by liberals about the idea that Brexit was an example of a post-imperial mindset- this was largely nonsense. But our politicians’ lack of willingness to confront the realities of Britain’s diminished status either to themselves or their voters was, I think, one of them.

I wrote about this during the process, as did many others, but to do so then (as now) was to be greeted with comical howls of being a Quisling, or worse hating Britain itself. The same phenomenon happened yesterday. It was entirely predictable that exactly those you would expect instantly take to the language of “surrender” and “betrayal”. They still refuse to accept that we will generally end up giving more than we take because that is the reality of the relative power. That is one of the reasons we joined the EEC in the first place- to exercise our power from within as a member of the club. The opponents of this deal complain about the consequences of their own actions and desires- they made Britain more sovereign, but less powerful.

Something else which has not changed is media and political elites’ deep condescension. To listen to the endless stream of words which flows from their mouths, you might think that not a single person in the fabled “Red Wall” has never nor will ever (i) go abroad (ii) go to university (iii) worked abroad (iv) had a latte. This is the laughable ersatz vision of working class Britain that deeply middle class illiberal metropolitan elites possess- a north of England which is at the end of the line and forever end of the pier. They expose their deep eccentricity as they obsess over the outrage of an agriculture agreement, whilst dismissing Britain’s potential re-accession to schemes such as Erasmus, or e-gates as “middle class obsessions”. They have nothing to say to the millions of ordinary people who travel to Europe every year, or who have family there. They have nothing to say to working class kids who actually need state support most to expand their horizons to other countries. They speak on behalf of a group of people about whom they largely have little conception, and who are convinced share the same abstract political neuroses as they. It speaks to a fundamental of British politics: both liberal and illiberal metropolitan elites are deeply unrepresentative of the public, and it’s only the liberal ones who know it.

That is not to say that Starmer’s approach has been blameless. I’ve written before about the inadequacies of his communication style and strategy: there has been precious little pitch rolling for this deal. Up to now they’ve largely refused to address Brexit it all, and the shift on the inadequacies of the Johnson deal has happened far too late. That’s all the more bizarre considering this was all promised in the Labour manifesto. Nonetheless, Starmer’s gamble is clear- they believe that there is now serious political space on Brexit and dissatisfaction with the settlement they inherited. So long as the fundamentals are not unpicked and there is no sense of the Brexit wars being seriously reanimated, the public will be entirely unbothered by a series of technocratic ameliorations. In other words, that the country has moved on while the hard-line Brexiters have not. Moreover, they hope- in wanging on about them, they can make Farage and Badenoch seem quite absurd. It’s a fair bet, so long as Starmer owns the deal and talks about it with confidence, at length, all the time. The worst thing to do would be to move on with another message of the week and leave the vacuum to be filled by those same people who continue to live, quite untroubled, in the hermetically sealed bubble that is Brexit-Westminster land.