Brexit Unfolded: How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

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After all, few of us are familiar with the intricacies of other countries’ politics – mostly, we just notice the headline fact that, say, ‘the Italians’ have elected Meloni, or that ‘the Australians’ have voted against the indigenous voice change to their constitution. Meanwhile, Simon Berry, Chairman of Berry Bros and Rudd wine importers, a keen Brexiter who has campaigned for the re-introduction of champagne pints, mentions that the Conservative politician and diplomat Duff Cooper was bemoaning its demise as early as the First World War, and Berry’s own campaign started in the 1970s. For if ‘staying aligned’ demolishes the central argument made for Brexit by its advocates, it still does relatively little to allay the costs of Brexit: Britain is aligned with single market rules, which is certainly less costly than diverging, but does not get most of the benefit of that in terms of single market membership. And all communities of Northern Ireland are severely affected by the ongoing collapse of the power-sharing institutions and its consequences, of which this week’s mass public sector strike is one of the most serious examples. As with Britain’s economic problems, that dishonesty isn’t solely the result of Brexit but Brexit created a tipping point, embedding dishonesty to an extent from which it seems almost impossible to recover.

It featured in Iain Duncan Smith’s TIGGR review in May 2021 and again in the government’s January 2022 ‘Benefits of Brexit’ report. In some ways, the battle for the post-Brexit narrative that began at the end of the transition period has been lost by Brexiters, as opinion polls attest. And, in any case, whilst being in the EU assists trade with the rest of the EU, it does not preclude trading outside the EU. It will just mean that the relative gap between the rates of UK-EU and UK-ROW trade growth will have shifted. Others were more ebullient, none more than the ever-peculiar Mail columnist Peter Hitchens who rejoiced at this “blow against the metric commissars”, apparently not grasping that the only thing that has been achieved is to allow bottles of a distinctly metric 568 ml.For example, whilst the relaxation of EU rules on gene editing/ genetic modification, with the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act, 2023, is strongly opposed by some campaigners, others see it as a positive development, and it is even possible that the EU will move in a similar direction as part of a drive towards ‘sustainable’ agriculture. Hand-in-hand with that is the need to keep hammering home the more fundamental point that Brexit was not supposed to lead to an endless debate about how bad it has been. Now fully updated with an afterword covering each element of the Brexit debate since the end of the transition period in 2021, this new edition remains the essential guide to one of the most bitterly contested issues of our time. Yet, on another aspect, where it investigated the effectiveness of the issuing of Certificates of Application for EUSS, making three recommendations for improvement, the Home Office, in its response of September 2023, was able simply to dismiss two of the three, apparently with impunity. They all concerned issues arising for EU citizens who had been living in the UK before Brexit, and the government’s EU settlement scheme (EUSS), and they point to another scandal emerging under our noses but with little of the public outcry that the Post Office scandal has now provoked.

What, to my discredit, I’ve discussed less often is the third of the phase one issues, Citizens’ rights. But that it would be de-stabilizing in some way or another was inevitable, if only because the fact that both Ireland and the UK were members of the EU enabled a crucial de-dramatization or blurring of issues of identity, identification, and allegiance. Each comes from a credible source, each is independent, each uses a different modelling or calculating technique, and all show a negative impact.In this clear-headed assessment, Chris Grey argues that this painful legacy was all but inevitable, skilfully unpacking how and why the promise of Brexit dissolved during the confusing and often dramatic events that followed the referendum. For this reason alone, it’s worth discussing as an antidote to the still active, albeit increasingly risible, Brexit lie factory. After working as a lecturer at Leeds University, he moved to Cambridge University where he became Professor of Organisation Studies at the Judge Business School and was a fellow of Wolfson College. Nor do fast growth rates in other countries mean that, even if their international trade grows at the same rate, the absolute value of increased trade with the UK necessarily grows very much (i.