Rishi Sunak faces Brexit challenge

The in-tray of a prime minister is rarely light, but the one on Rishi Sunak’s desk is particularly daunting: energy crisis, cost of living, Ukraine, inflation, mountain of debt, crisis in health service, to name a few burning issues. These require immediate attention, but there is one item that has serious immediate and long-term implications: Brexit, which has proved to be something of a guillotine that abruptly ended the tenures of at least four prime ministers since the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. In several ways, the political tremors that rocked Westminster in 2022 and earlier can be traced back to the leave vote.

Brexit will be an act of self-harm, insisted those against leaving the EU, including the David Cameron government that produced an official dossier before the referendum with figures and charts to substantiate its position to remain in the bloc. But the leave vote happened, and critics of Brexit – dubbed ‘remoaners’ – have since been on the backfoot, because expressing pro-EU views is seen as tantamount to disrespecting the democratic result of the referendum.

But six years down the line, serious questions are being asked about how exactly Brexit is benefiting the United Kingdom. Several experts and think-tanks have produced data that show falling trade with EU, the country losing about 4 per cent of its GDP due to Brexit, the economy facing contraction, manufacturers unable to sell to EU, and mounting export bureaucracy, among the adverse effects.

Meanwhile, it has been a rollercoaster ride in public discourse, with new terms emerging: ‘Get Brexit done’ (Johnson), ‘Brexit means Brexit’ (May), and ‘Make Brexit work’ (Keir Starmer) and ‘cakeism’ (having the cake and eating it too), attributed to Johnson, who claimed that the UK could have all the benefits of the EU single market while leaving the EU. Themes have moved from Cameron seeking a reform of the EU before 2016, instead of leaving it, to a soft Brexit that May tried to negotiate, to a hard, uncompromising Brexit favoured by Johnson, to what is seen as a ‘fantasy Brexit’ of Truss.

The UK was facing severe challenges even before the 2016 referendum, but the effects of Brexit are being increasingly felt as the country emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic. Recent data shows that on indicators such as trade, foreign direct investment and economic recovery, the UK’s economy has taken a more severe hit than any other in G7.

Since Sunak is credited with economic gravitas, there are demands that he cuts through the unrealistic claims and promises made by Brexiteers about ‘sunlit uplands’ – critics call them outright ‘lies’ – and rejoin the EU single market and the customs union. The fact is that no amount of trade with the Commonwealth or the US can compensate for the loss of access to the biggest market on the UK’s doorstep: the EU single market, which allows frictionless trade and movement of goods. Brexit has also adversely affected UK universities, with several EU faculty members leaving or reluctant to join, UK-based experts excluded from large EU funding projects, and less number of EU students enrolling.

Sunak will need to deal with the inherent contradiction in the Brexit project: the claim of a more prosperous future by cutting off from the UK’s largest trading bloc. It was claimed that the UK, as a member-state of the EU, was being held back on its path to progress and prosperity by rules and regulations made in Brussels. But fact-checkers and experts have increasingly pointed out that the EU regulations were not exactly holding the country back.

“This Brexit built on lies can't be undone, but the new prime minister has a chance to minimise the damage”, Jürgen Maier, vice-chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a leading voice of business and civic leaders in north England, writes in The Guardian. “This does not mean opening a debate about rejoining the EU. That ship sailed some time ago. But there is a new possibility. The EU has held out an olive branch: to join a grouping of European countries that don’t want to be part of the EU but do want to benefit from its single market and many collaborative bodies”.

There are also indications that public opinion on Brexit is shifting. In a recent YouGov poll, only 34% of those asked said Britain was right to leave the EU, while 54% said it was wrong. There are also allegations that there is a conspiracy of silence across the political spectrum around the effects of Brexit.

There are already signs that Sunak would take a more realistic approach to the Brexit conundrum. For example, he is likely to de-prioritise a bill going through parliament that seeks to ‘switch off’ by the end of 2023 over 2,000 EU laws that are still applicable in the UK. He has reportedly been told that a large number of staff would need to be deployed to review each of the laws in all departments. Instead of 2023, Sunak may advance the sunset clause to 2026, which would be the tenth anniversary of the EU referendum.

A more immediate sub-crisis facing Sunak is the row over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which is part of the EU withdrawal agreement signed by the Johnson government, but has proved intractable, given the unique geographic and political situation of Northern Ireland: it is part of the island of Ireland, next to Ireland (an EU member-state), but within the jurisdiction of the UK, which has implications for checks on the movement of goods from Britain to Northern Ireland, since the UK is now a third country, outside the EU. There is no land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and there are several stakeholders in the row: Ireland, the Northern Ireland assembly, EU, the UK, as well as interests of the United States.

An interesting sidelight in December would be two Indian-origin prime ministers trying to resolve the row: Sunak and Leo Varadkar, who will take over Ireland’s prime minister as part of a power sharing agreement between the ruling coalition partners.

There has been a slow but sure drum-beat in recent months about the ill effects of Brexit. Lists have emerged of ‘10 reasons why Brexit has been disastrous’, while the Johnson government produced a booklet in January on ‘The benefits of Brexit: How the UK is taking advantage of leaving the EU’. Fact-checkers quickly pointed out that some of the benefits listed could have been achieved without leaving the EU, and that most would happen at some point in the future, if at all. As Brexiteer David Davis admitted some time ago, Britons may have to wait for a decade before they see significant benefits of Brexit.

Meanwhile, no one is willing to bet on how many more prime ministerial tenures may be cut short by reasons that can be traced back to Brexit.

- The writer is a senior journalist based in London