Brexit: a recipe for mitigating the disaster

Peter Foster, Brexit whip at the Financial Times, proposes solutions based on one premise: first put the UK in order.

Brexit as a symptom. In his articles, columns and newsletters, Foster has been mercilessly attacking for years those who are behind the UK’s exit from the European Union. Each text is a dart. From the French schoolchildren who have to cancel their study trip due to a lack of visas to the flower company in the English countryside whose business is ruined by bureaucratic obstacles, the journalist has dissected with an entomologist’s meticulousness the small daily shipwrecks of an operation that, let’s be clear, in his opinion should never have happened.

What went wrong with Brexit
Peter Foster
Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 2023
192 pages.

But the ballot box spoke, and realism evaporated. The “original sin” – as the book’s introduction unequivocally titles – was to promise that outside the EU it would be easier to face the challenges of today’s world. British politics then embarked on a journey of magical thinking to nowhere. Of all the possible Brexits, Foster believes, the United Kingdom chose the worst. With negative consequences, moreover, that were not only predictable, but known.

This work is based on the assumption that eight years have been lost – since the referendum – and it is time to wake up from the reverie. The first part of the book is a compendium of the disasters caused by leaving the EU and, above all, by the “hard Brexit” trade agreement signed in December 2020 by Boris Johnson.

Foster is merciless about the anti-business attitude of the Conservative leaders. The party that presents itself to the electorate as the “party of business” inflicted on companies – with their complicit silence, the author accuses – a minimal agreement that introduced greater obstacles. Advantages of Brexit? Foster cites one proclaimed by the British negotiator, David Frost: reintroducing the Crown seal on pub pints. And so on.

Regulatory divergence, which Brexit trumpeters sold as one of their great opportunities, has been reduced to what the journalist calls “performative divergence”: saying one thing when the truth is just the opposite.

The second part of the book offers suggestions for trying to correct the direction of the relationship. For a start, the United Kingdom must put an end to the “betrayal narrative” as soon as possible. Any criticism has been presented as part of an anti-Brexit conspiracy, which has tied up the debate. Ultimately, nothing will be resolved with Brussels until things are cleaned up at home. “Fixing Brexit will not be, above all, about Brexit. It will be about putting the United Kingdom’s own house in order,” he writes.

However, it cites areas where there should be room for progress, especially when the mandatory five-year review of the agreement arrives in 2026: phytosanitary controls, visas, carbon market, VAT, rules of origin or certifications are identified as areas with potential for improvement.

Foster could be criticised for using data and figures that are still very recent, which prevent a clearer assessment of the effects of Brexit. Even more so when one takes into account that the exit from the EU became effective in the middle of the pandemic and shortly before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

Although, perhaps where the book suffers most is in its eminently economic focus, only briefly addressing the political causes behind Brexit, with immigration at the forefront. Which was a harakiri The economic question is almost incontestable. But Brexit moves in other coordinates: sovereignty, tribalism, emotion. And perhaps a million books can’t do much against that.