February 01, 2025

The Brexit Files: From Referendum to Reset - Review

Updates February 01, 2025

The Brexit Files: From Referendum to Reset - Review

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Review by Mark English, Policy and Media Adviser to European Movement UK (personal views)

The Brexit Files, published this week, is UKICE’s epic research work marking the fifth anniversary of you-know-what. There are three parts and 40 short, fact-packed chapters. The tone is neutral and sober, as befits an academic work. But the conclusions that readers will draw are stark.

The first part covers The Brexit Process. It shows how those who campaigned for and negotiated Brexit did not know – or deliberately misrepresented - what it would mean. They also had no plan, as some now admit. The result? A referendum intended to put an end to years of division made those divisions worse in every conceivable way.

Part Two, Brexit Impact and Aftermath, highlights a litany of adverse effects, on everything from trade in goods to investment to agriculture to prices on the High Street.

Part Three of The Brexit Files – The Future - is shorter. But just as stark. It shows that the EU holds most of the cards in future negotiations. The analysis confirms that getting back inside the single market and/or the customs union is key to achieving the kind of sustainable growth the government seeks.
There are also stark messages for pro-EU campaigners. As leading pollster Sir John Curtice and others emphasised at the launch (video here), while public opinion has swung against Brexit, there is as yet limited appetite for reopening the debate.

Furthermore, the British public can see that many EU countries are – just like the UK - in a parlous economic state, with a major political threat from the far right. So we need to show that far from causing such problems, EU membership offers the best chance of finding a route through them. Indeed, getting the UK back inside could contribute to economic growth and to tackling the far right both in the UK and across Europe.

Think-tank reports on Brexit are ten a penny. But the impact of the Brexit Files has been out of the ordinary. Even the Minister for Relations with the EU, Nick Thomas-Symonds, turned up to the launch.

Mr Thomas-Symonds’s Cabinet Office civil servants will no doubt have pored over the report and added it to the massive pile of evidence in Whitehall’s own Brexit files. The only proper remedy for Boris Johnson’s Brexit is to move the UK step-by-step back towards the heart of EU.

Many of those in or near government probably realise that. Nevertheless, fear of the hot breath of Reform on the necks of many Labour MPs means we will not in the short-term see the disappearance of Keir Starmer’s red lines ruling out rejoining the single market or customs union.

However, those red lines may fade to a more agreeable shade of pink as Ministers realise that is the only way to get real results from their reset with the EU. European Movement UK, meanwhile, can deploy evidence like The Brexit Files – and this week’s YouGov poll showing detailed public awareness of how Brexit is eating away at the UK - to back our case.

Sir John Curtice directly urged us (1:26’ in the video), to “change the public mood in this country so that the politicians decide that yours is the direction in which they need to go.” What no academic report can provide is an empowering vision to turn what we have currently – very wide but weak support for joining the EU - into an overwhelming public desire for change.

A vision that moves people emotionally is needed to catapult ‘Europe’ from its current low ‘salience’ (polling jargon for how much people care) back to the top of the list of political issues voters feel passionately about.
But facts and stats do matter. Even leading Leave campaigners like Johnson and Gove loved quoting numbers – they even daubed some on the side of a bus. It’s just that they weren’t true. Those lies have now been exposed by the harsh light of reality.

Luckily, UKICE and other academics and think-tankers are working hard to make sure that the real facts about the UK’s relationship with the EU are in front of politicians, journalists and voters. Meanwhile, we in European Movement UK can draw on The Brexit Files and other such work in building winning arguments.

 


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