After 10 years, Brexit has inflicted serious, lasting harm on the United Kingdom. That is not opinion. It is fact, documented and measurable.
Authoritative independent analysis tells us what many already feel in their bones: a 6-8% loss to GDP, a £60-90bn annual reduction in public revenues, investment down by 15-18%, trade with Europe reduced by 15%, employment and productivity both lower than they should be – and all of this visited upon an economy already hollowed out by austerity, then battered by coronavirus, Putin's criminal war, and now the chaos of Trump.
Not one of the glib, deceitful promises made by the leading Brexiters has been fulfilled. None of them ever will be.
But what strikes me most forcefully is that the British people already know this. Not because they follow the tedious detail of economic data and not because our media has told them, because with honourable exceptions it has been either passive or propagandist on the subject. They know it because they feel it. In their pockets. In their jobs. In opportunities that never came, and journeys that became ordeals.
A new Best for Britain report, Is It Time To Talk About EU Membership?, makes this very clear. Public awareness of the damage is real and growing numbers want greater closeness with Europe: not out of sentiment, but out of hard-headed self-interest. That is, as it happens, the rational and patriotic response.
Not one of the glib, deceitful promises made by the leading Brexiters has been fulfilled. None of them ever will be
Not one of the glib, deceitful promises made by the leading Brexiters has been fulfilled. None of them ever will be
The government recognises it too. Cautiously, understandably, it is seeking to re-establish trust, rebuild relationships, and develop negotiated re-alignment with the EU. It is doing so because economic growth requires proximity to unimpeded markets. The law of economic gravity is immutable, whatever the Brexiters told us.
It is doing so, also, because security requires common purpose. In the era of Trump’s tariffs and tantrums, China’s colossal advance, Putin’s war on the west, and intensifying turmoil in the Middle East, it is geographically obvious: Britain’s “special relationship” must be with our neighbours, not across the Atlantic.
That relationship must be rebuilt carefully, to reassure both European partners and our own people. It must be mutually advantageous. It must be durable enough to withstand the next generation of myth-mongers, because they will persist. And it can only be sealed through a democratic mandate: an election commitment or a referendum.
It must mean discarding the illusion that isolation is strength, and restoring the normality of shared power in our continent. For a country of Britain’s size and significance, there can be no “pick and mix” participation that involves all pay and no say. Which means, in the end, rejoining the European Union. Or, to be more accurate and forward-looking about a changed Europe: joining again.
I am 84. I will probably not see it.
Newsletters
Choose the newsletters you want to receive
View more
For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy
But I have no doubt it will come. The realism and self-interest of the British people will bring it, just as they always eventually cut through the noise when their future is at stake.
After all, as David Davis once rightly said: “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.”
He was right then. The question now is whether we have the common sense to act on it.
Neil Kinnock was leader of the Labour party from 1983 to 1992 and was a European commissioner from 1995 to 2004
Photograph by Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty Images