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→ Britons feel Bregret
Eight years after the Brexit vote, Keir Starmer is looking to strengthen ties with the continent — without rejoining the EU, of course. Meanwhile, Britons seemingly aren’t feeling the benefits of forging a divergent path from Brussels. New polling from YouGov shows that over half the population believes “the negatives of Brexit have outweighed the positives”, while just 17% believe the reverse.
While respondents become more boosterish about Brexit the older they are, none of the age groups surveyed, from 18-24 to 65+, think that leaving the EU has been a net positive. The North of England is the most Brexit-friendly region measured, but even then only 20% of Northerners think the positives outweigh the negatives, compared to 48% who believe the opposite.
Looking at respondents by politics, it shouldn’t be surprising that three-quarters of both Lib Dem and Labour voters think that Brexit has broadly been a bad thing. More striking, however, is that only 34% of Conservatives and 39% of Reform UK voters judge Brexit to have been successful. Is Starmer right that Britain won’t rejoin the EU in his lifetime?
→ The dastardly plot to tie Kamala Harris to Joe Biden
Republicans have launched a nefarious smear campaign against Kamala Harris, insinuating that the Democratic candidate is somehow politically tied to Joe Biden.
‘Our corrupt leadership’: Vance tries to tether Harris to Biden during Michigan rally https://t.co/0LWM4gq5C7
— POLITICO (@politico) August 27, 2024
“[JD] Vance tries to tether Harris to Biden during Michigan rally”, Politico observed. That Harris is currently Biden’s vice president, and has been for nearly four years, is neither here nor there.
Harris, meanwhile, has been distancing herself from the administration. She recently flipped on the border issue, pledging to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the project the current administration has actively opposed. She also came out against electric vehicle mandates this week, a policy the White House has pushed. Will she come out against Biden himself?
→ James Cleverly goes for the youth vote
Have Tory politicians learnt from their widely-mocked use of social media during the general election campaign? Whatever the case, one leadership candidate is doubling down on capturing the youth vote. James Cleverly’s campaign posted its own take on a popular meme featuring Canadian rapper Drake this afternoon, all while nicking Jeremy Corbyn’s slogan of “JC for leader”.
How are the rest of the Tory field faring? Robert Jenrick’s online campaigning has been acclaimed as “slick”, while Kemi Badenoch has kept her social media feed peppered with attacks on Labour. They still have some catching up to do when it comes to matching Reform for Zoomer appeal.
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SubscribeOnce again, the wrong question is being asked about Brexit, and therefore the wrong conclusions drawn. This is about the fifth or sixth tine Unherd has published polling figures, based on this error.
The real question (never seemingly asked) is “Have our political class made the most of the opportunities presented by Brexit”.
The answer of course, is No. Anyother question is pretty irrelevant since this failure colours the answers.
Precisely so. Apart from Badenoch, they just lost interest.
If the Conservatives had approached the last election with: “You voted to get Brexit done. We got Brexit done. And with the new-found freedoms that gave us, we made your lives better by….. And if you vote for us again, we’ll use these freedoms to make your lives better still by —-“, they would have won a landslide majority.
And what would they have done with the new freedoms to deliver this? Trade agreements with the US etc? Was never gonna happen in a million years was it.
Another Brexit defender who can’t get beyond the rhetoric to the reality?
More “deflection” and ‘playing the man”. You know you can do better than this…
Not really. Just your well of knowledge runs dry fairly quickly and you appear to be unable to respond to the specific. I’ll try again – what freedoms and where would you have used them?
Perhaps you should try answering your own questions for once, rather than merely posing them and assuming that by some obscure process of logical osmosis this constitutes an argument or a refutation.
Amongst the areas of EU “competence” that were returned to the UK following Brexit were, in no particular order:
Foreign Policy
Trade policy
Economic policy
Territorial rights
Agricultural policy
Environmental policy
Industrial policy
Employment policy
Competition policy
Energy policy
Consumer policy
And there are several more, which I’m sure, if you can be bothered to do some research of your own, you will uncover. In all these areas, and others, post Brexit UK was free to make its own decisions and no longer be subject to Brussels rules. Even those of the meanest intellect can see that within this broad list there are a myriad of areas and opportunities for cutting red tape, encouraging entrepreneurship, encouraging trade and creating the environment for economic growth thereby improving the lot citizenry at large. And if you want to know what actual policies might look like I suggest you look at reforms manifesto, or the SDP or read any number of papers from policy forums, think tanks and the like. Here’s one for you to mull over: reduce import tariffs to zero on any product that the UK does not produce itself.
The fact that the political classes failed to take advantage of these opportunities is the issue, not that the opportunities did not exist, and continue to exist. They do. They are just not being taken advantage of.
The reality of Brexit is that the strategy was correct and the execution abysmal.
Your question amounts to asking” In a parallel universe, where we had a completely different government, would Brexit have been a good idea”? And the answer, of course, is that it does not matter. We do not live in a parallel universe, and we have the governing class we have. You might as well have asked “If the EU had sacrificed its interests to help Britain, would Brexit have been a success?” You do not even get as far as considering the – highly dubious – proposition that there was a path to a successful Brexit that some divinely qualified politician might have found.
Nonsense RF. Your ‘equivalence’ question is no such thing, and might i suggest you haven’t got the faintest clue about the opportunities that still exist but which your reading of the MSM hasn’t allowed you to consider.
The first and foremost is, of course: immigration to the UK which, if our political class had the guts to take Brexit to its logical conclusion and remove these islands from the purview of the ECHR, might now look rather different and which would almost certainly have prevented the riots we’ve seen on our streets from occurring – mainly in places which voted for Brexit and which found themselves betrayed and disenfranchised by both the Tory and now the Labour governments.
Ok so we are back to the ECHR and immigration, forgetting the ECHR tied into multiple international agreements and furthermore is only an issue regarding illegal migration – much the smaller element of migration. You’ve shown your limitations here on supposed Brexit opportunities LL. The cupboard is bare.
Now had you said we’d rapidly invest in training and investment to reduce legal migration over the course of a set time period and swallow the pain of the tax rises to help us kick-start that then perhaps Brexiteers would at least have been honest. But they weren’t and you aren’t. Finding someone to blame and missing the point.
More deflection and playing the man. ….
JW can you swallow your pride and admit that New Labour’s mass immigration policy was an idiotic political decision.
The rate last year was over 3 times higher than under any year of the previous Lab Govt. And to repeat – the Right has had 14 years to correct if it wanted.
I’ll add though – alot of migration is v beneficial and will continue to be so. We should be grateful. I for one won’t be apologetic about stating that.
However had we invested more in our own we could have managed with less.
Back to New Labour – I would agree the decision to not apply the brake clauses permissible under the Lisbon Treaty a mistake. The calculation was much less migration would occur. That was a mis-calculation. I don’t ‘buy’ the conspiratorial interpretation at all though. Regardless 14 years to change things had the Right truly wanted to – it hasn’t because of other contradictions it struggles to square and be honest about
Absolutely no one here is defending the last 14 years of Tory inability to reduce out of control immigration.
J Watson sums it up pretty well (except for the insults): Both sides agree that the Brexit we have now is bad, it cost a lot and did not give us any of the things we wanted. The question is who to blame for that.
Would you agree so far?
We remoaners have the easier job, since we expected this to fail and we were proved right. You claim that it was a great idea that was let down by the politicians who carried it out, but you knew all along what the situation was. Here we had a huge difficult task that would determine the future of your country, that would take a lot of effort, and that had many enemies working to make it fail, in the EU and (you claim) also in the UK. And you embarked on this project, trusting to Boris Johnson both to make the plan and to execute it successfully. I mean, really? Boris Johnson? How can you be surprised afterwards that the politicians were not up to the job?
“You expected it to fail” – actually it was worse than that wasn’t it? In a lot of instances remainer elites actively campaigned to make it fail, including one “second referendum” Kier Starmer, who is now actively seeking to undo as much as he can.
No, we campaigned to stop it, and to keep the disastrous consequences to a minimum, since with the best will in the world there was just no way that we could see it ending up as a success. But, again, you knew how hard it would be, and you knew how hard the opposition would be. If there was no one around capable of making the project work, why did you embark on it?
No it doesn’t. It is the distinction between strategy and execution. A good idea remains a good idea irrespective of the universe, parallel or otherwise. Universal suffrage – a good idea – just because this hasn’t been implemented in, China for example, doesn’t make it any less a good idea does it?
We are not talking about ideas, but about actions. Transforming Afghhanistan by force to a progressive democracy was an extremely good idea – it would have been a great achievement – were it not for the fact that there was no way it could possibly be made to work. Starting a project that you know will fail in the real world is never a good idea.
Spot on! (And I voted to remain!)
And if the question had been, did our political class made the most of the EU would you have been happy with that too? Or have our leaders made the most of all the talent in the UK etc? We could go on with each anodyne questions.
I think in truth it’s a bit of a scramble for an excuse LL. There is a real paucity in what these opportunities were, beyond over-simplistic slogans. At some point supporters have to ‘own’ fact it’s been a sh*tshow.
To mimic your simplistic and abusive language … “At some point “remoaners” need to own the fact that they were lied to as much as everyone else”
Well, arguably the political class DID make the most of the EU, or at the very least they found ways that made European integration work really well for some. I’m sure that all that stuff was absolutely great if you had a bubble priced house and fancied a sangria retirement, or you were an employer looking for some labour arbitrage, or you had a buy to let empire or you are a freewheeling sort with the money and capacity to make the most of ski season or you are a responsibility-free Bulgarian with a contact in A8/A2-only labour agencies. The problem was that there were not enough of those people to sustain a majority.
At that point what happened was the constitutional deficit came to the fore. The EU does not have a democratic deficit, but it absolutely has a constitutional one. As more and more felt the downside – the lack of reciprocity in free movement being the big example – so more and more became sceptical.
Arguably what the voters have just done is what you are suggesting – taken the blame for UK domestic failure to control migration down and taken it out on the conservative in a way they never could take it out on the European Commission. They now have the benefit of being able to do that – and Keir Starmer is clearly rather wary the same can happen to him.
My French friend would absolutely like to hold the Commission to account for not adequately securing the EU external border. And that’s before we get to the single currency.
What the political establishment – EU and UK – has zealously pursued over decades is the ‘open agenda.’ Open to flows of goods, people, money. The divide now in European societies is largely between those who do well out of open and those that do not. If your argument is that we should all just bang out the Ode to Joy and think of the integration that’s fine, but you have no expectation that everyone else will accept a constitutional deficit that bakes in an open agenda (or as some might say, Treasury Orthodoxy) that really was not doing a lot of people a lot of favours.
I would suggest that the REMAIN campaign’s failure to understand the politics is ultimately what did for them. And 8 years on they still insist on talking about nothing but economics to people who have spent decades losing out in our economy.
Yes, and Communism is an excellent system of government, it’s just that it has never been implemented properly.
One half of your (I’m not a Brit) political class advocated for Brexit. A vote for Brexit was a vote for them, and their supposed competence. So if they didn’t implement Brexit properly…
Or putting it another way, if your political class are too stupid, inefficient, corrupt (or whatever adjective you prefer) to implement Brexit properly, then logically their stupidity, inefficiency, corruption or whatever undermines the credibility of their claims about how wonderful Brexit would be.
Maybe Harris should just take the Trump campaign platform, and cut and paste it on to her website. Now she’s against EV mandates. Unbelievable. US automakers have literally invested hundreds of billions reworking their assembly lines to build cars that no one wants, and now Harris says; “My bad. Don’t worry about it.” If automakers are silent about this flip flop, they are spineless drones who deserve the economic ruin they now face. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence knew this was a disaster in the making, and they let it happen.
Kamala Harris is not against electric car mandates. Her campaign is playing word games.
How does one even measure the benefits or negatives of Brexit beyond just a ‘feeling’ when everything else going on in the country is apparently crap?
Stand in a queue at an airport or ferry terminal and hear the murmurs. Even more when the biometrics kick in later this year and next.
Well I don’t. Even though it has become obvious, after the event, that our political class have become stunted because of their gold plated following of the bureaucrats of Brussels.
This was accompanied by the empowerment of the Civil Service who under that system were probably more important than our national politicians.
How many times does it have to be spelled out? Most of the Brexit ‘regret’ from the Leave side STEMS FROM BREXIT BEING POORLY DELIVERED BY PEOPLE WHO WERE MAINLY OPPOSED TO LEAVING THE EU AND WHO HAD NO INTENTION OF REDUCING IMMIGRATION EVEN THOUGH THE VOTE TO LEAVE WAS LARGELY MOTIVATED BY A DESIRE FOR IMMIGRATION TO BE DRASTICALLY REDUCED.
Clear now? Or do I have to act it out with sock puppets?
They can regret it all they like. Britain isn’t going back.
That is true, at least for a generation, and if we go back suspect EU will have further evolved anyway.
But doesn’t mean those who promulgated the disaster shouldn’t be repeatedly reminded of their culpability. Democracy requires accountability
Out of interest JW, what do you consider the ‘disasters’ of Brexit to be?
Interesting to see if MrW can “play the ball” for once …
Just have IB and not difficult.
Spending c8years on it rather than on our real problems probably the biggest. It’s crowded out so much we needed to fix entirely within our gift – the culture of UK investment, skills & training plans, social care, etc. Hardly anything done on these. That is the biggest disaster whilst the Brexiteer berks think Brexit was going to solve these issues.
And as that generally right-leaning publication – the Economist – recently said – ‘…just as predicted, Brexit has led to inflation, labour shortages, business closures and travel snafus…created supply chain problems that put …car manufacturing in danger’ etc
As we already know, and is about to get worse, Brexit has, in many cases, turned travel between Europe and the U.K. into quite an ordeal. British musicians are finding it hard to tour in Europe because of the costs and red tape associated with moving both people and equipment across borders. Crackers. Who voted for that?
As you’ll probably know already the OBR said leaving the EU shaved 4 percent off Britain’s GDP – that’s billions.
And of course net migration increased too to add salt into the wound. Labour shortages and less EU migration led to seeking that from elsewhere round the Globe which then required some reasonableness on family coming too. And the whole process increased costs in the process. As regards illegal migration, leaving Dublin Agreement reduced what we could return and our negotiating position. The withdrawal from data sharing agreements and joint crime prevention agencies reduced our ability to target the smugglers.
On the less measurable side – anyone think our international status anything but diminished? Most of the World thinks we lost our senses, and for a period we did.
Total sh*tshow.
Brexit has certainly been a distraction. But a major chunk of that distraction was due to those that opposed it trying to prevent it. Are they to blame too? Or do you think it is reasonable for one group to cause issues but not the other? Perhaps people that continually dismissed the concerns people had with the EU prior to 2016 bear some responsibility for not listening?
Most of the inflation that just happened was due to other factors, as evidenced by high inflation across the west. Brexit is a small component. It’s a similar case with supply chain issues – the pandemic dwarfed any effect of Brexit.
Labour shortages was kind of the point for many Brexit voters – the shortages would give them higher wages.
Undoubtedly there have been business closures but our growth since Brexit is similar to France and better than Germany. So it’s difficult to call it a disaster. Travel delays are annoying, they are not a disaster. British bands seem to be touring Europe just as much as ever despite the complaints about how difficult it has supposedly become.
I get fed up of trying to explain the OBR report to remainers. It is a prediction (or to be precise an average of predictions) for the mid 2030s or so. It hasn’t happened yet and maybe never will.
Brexit did not reduce migration but I’ve made my response to that on another post. It should have done and the unwillingness/inability of politicians to deliver should not stop people from voting for it if that is what they want. If we let political failure, incompetence and corruption determine how we voted none of us would ever vote again.
I’d like to expand on this a bit more –
“the culture of UK investment, skills & training plans, social care, etc.”
Has it occurred to you that these have become issues in part because of migration? No need to invest so much when you can hire cheap labour, don’t bother training when you can scoop up people already trained overseas.
A much bigger economic issue than Brexit is the UKs productivity, which stopped increasing in the mid 00s. Right after large scale immigration started (along with the stupid pumping of the housing market).
Which brings me to another issue – what do you think is impacting the lives of young people more – Brexit or the inability to buy a house without parental wealth? They’re two separate issues, to some extent anyway, but in terms of the lives people actually lead house prices (and the associated cost of renting) absolutely dwarfs Brexit. People not being able to start families or get on a path to financial stability – that is a real disaster for those affected, and a lot more important than having to queue a bit longer at an airport.
The same with mass immigration JW but you’re always brushing that off.
Migration increased by Brexit – greater labour shortages and desperate to prop up our academic sector with income from foreign students. Well done.
Nothing to do with me. It was Blair who increased migration by a factor of 5 in his time in office (and didn’t reveal it to the electorate) and it was that clown Portes who didn’t put in place the A8 employment restriction which most of the other EU countries did.
It was Blair who decided to increase admission targets to universities that led to their ridiculous buisness model.
Factors that added to the Brexit vote, so well done… slow hand clap.
14 yrs AR, and 16 to Blair. Truly remarkable how much you want to forget who’s been in power.
Being obtuse again JW (no surprise). It was the above decisions that led to the huge inequality and the societal disruption that we see today which all led to the Brexit vote.
How quick you are to forget all of that 🙂
Great to see that there is an “Undercurrents” item written by an UnHerd member of staff that you can finally relate to.
Rubbish. Bojo had a Cabinet stacked with Brexit supporting charlatans and a sizeable Parliamentary majority.
Hear one of them ever be honest about what it was going to take for a number of sectors to reduce reliance on legal migration and timescale. Even Braverman, who meanwhile signed off the Visas?
Pathetic deflection. The moronic belief of many Brexit supporters that things just change if you say it beggars belief. Brexit was going to involve hard choices and Brexiteers ducked them because they knew that’s not what the public voted for.
And even Kemi realised what a shambles it was when she refused the bonfire of regulations. You see each Brexiteer that gets power and had to confront reality took a step back. Was preordained because of the underlying fallacy.
In a democracy it is reasonable to expect the Govt to at least attempt to do as directed, and the Brexit vote was primarily about (legal) immigration.
The issue isn’t going to go away here, across Europe or in the US. In fact it will almost certainly become a bigger and bigger issue.
You are right in one of your other posts though – we need to start to train the people already here better. The fact that there has been no attempt at this demonstrates Jimmy’s point – there was no intention from the political class to reduce migration even over the long term.
I think they ran into one of the key conflicts – to train more of our own we have to invest and that would cost and take some time. They had no industrial strategy too because wedded to ‘market’ will resolve ethos. Then they ran out of time and knew ceasing legal migration would collapse a number of industries quickly. Thing is Tories had 14yrs to get ahead on this but never really had a coherent discussion, let alone strategy, about what it was going to entail.
You forget that after Brexit vote MPs and civil servants tried everything to stop it from happening.
Then we had covid delusion with Labour Party shouting for stricter and longer lockdowns and other restrictions while money was pumped into NHS without any improvements in patient outcomes.
So I would suggest, as per Chinese PM asked about French revolution, that it is too early to say whether Brexit was success or not.
But at least now, uk failures are down to uk politicians whom we can vote out.
Unlike European Commission.
Addressed this on the bigger post but I broadly agree here. The neoliberal idea that the market will sort everything is part if the problem. Large scale economic migration is a part of that neoliberal idea.
Is this a joke ?
“Republicans have launched a nefarious smear campaign against Kamala Harris, insinuating that the Democratic candidate is somehow politically tied to Joe Biden.”
She’s only been working for him for the past 3.5 years. And they’ve recently appeared in public telling us all how much they agree with each other and get along.
Get some decent editors please and stop publishing such obvious rubbish.
OMG! Kamala Harris is in some way associated with Joe Biden?
Yes, that surely was a joke, as suggested by the two sentences:
‘ “[JD] Vance tries to tether Harris to Biden during Michigan rally”, Politico div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>observed. That Harris is currently Biden’s vice president, and has been for nearly four years, is neither here nor there.’
Still, I wonder why Politico thinks it’s a bad thing to tie Harris to (supposedly) the greatest US president since Washington, one who deserves to have his likeness carved on Mt Rushmore, etc. You’d think they would welcome it. [But of course, it’s all smoke and mirrors…]
Of course it’s a joke. That whole bit is cheeky, with tongue firmly thrust in cheek. Well done, I thought.
Is your comment intended to be the same sort of cheekiness? If so, it’s not so well done. Too hard to tell if you’re serious or joking.
Yes, it’s a joke. Get someone to explain the concept of irony to you.
Claiming three quarters of Labour and LibDem voters think Brexit was bad sounds legitimate. That is until one looks up the election result and sees that Lab.LibDem only fot 45% of the votes.
In other words only 30% of voters actually think .brexit was a bad idea. That doesn’t make such a good headline.
Then consider the likes of Sue Grey. A supposedly impartial civil servant who is so impartial she is a natural fit into the labour administration. As a top civil servant, she had huge input into the lousy deal delivered by .whitehall.Clearly she was not acting impartially when employed as a civil servant.
Your assumptions faulty there UH. The GE asked a different question and wasn’t a referendum on Brexit was it.
As regards Grey’s involvement in the exit negotiations – she wasn’t. You need to do a bit more research all round.
Applying your approach to the actual Brexit referendum, Leave won by 52% on a turnout of 72%, which means that only 37-38% of voters thought that Brexit was a good idea.
Similarly, in 2016 Donald Trump received 46% of a 60% turnout, which means that only about 28% of American voters thought that a Trump presidency was a good idea.
Applying your approach to the actual Brexit referendum, Leave won by 52% on a turnout of 72%, which means that only 37-38% of voters thought that Brexit was a good idea.
That’s true BUT that still means that, approximately, only 30 – 32% of voters (who actually could be bothered enough to actually vote) thought remain was a good idea.
In addition, these polls only ask based on a “status quo” scenario.
I imagine that the number of Leave/Remain voters would significantly change side as the EU becomes (as an example) more or less federalist centre left or less federalist centre right (or indeed vice versa.)
The Brexit opinion poll findings were always inevitable. It really isn’t any surprise. The whole project was based on lies, dog whistles and immaturity. And even Farage said it’s been a disaster.
The difference between the arch Brexit defenders (many here on Unherd) and majority of public is who they blame. The Brexiteers maintain a search for someone or something other than themselves and their idiocy, whereas majority of the public realise they were duped, think the Brexiteers largely morons, but because they recognise allowing oneself to be duped includes some personal responsibility would sooner we didn’t have a big post mortem. Instead they’ll quietly welcome a gradual move towards a softer form of Brexit.
Just to caveat – EU was not without major faults. Just the UK should have stayed and sorted them rather than run away like a petulant child.
At the risk of being declared an irredeemably solipsistic Brit (apologies), is there not a cost to the EU of the UK leaving?
The UK was the third leg of the EU triumvirate and vocally, at least, as well as on currency, the most opposed to integration beyond the EU being an economic club and trading bloc. Since Brexit, the extent of the EU’s political remit has been less restrained, as in Von der Leyen’s “we have ways…” comment on the Italian elections.
I don’t regret BREXIT one bit. The UK will become a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership on 15 December. Exports to the CPATP will become tariff free. Something that could not be achieved whilst an EU member. Since leaving the EU the UK has become the 4th largest exporter (£1.75 trillion for the year to 30 June 2024).
I regret the incompetence of our government that could have made so much more of BREXIT, sooner.