Sooner rather than later, the new Labour government in Britain is going to have to ask when it will judge the success of Brexit and how it is to be done.
The answer will concern everyone affected by Brexit, including expatriates living in France and other EU states where there are grumbles of Eurosceptic dissent.
If the experiment is to be copied, we should know whether or not it was successful. The essence of the Leave campaign was that there would be permanent benefits to the people of the UK in going it alone.
Shifting goalposts
Diehards today maintain that the utopia of national independence is still around the corner, but they sound much less certain than they once did about when it will happen.
It would be wise, therefore, to set a date of review and devise a checklist to measure progress.
Fortunately, earlier this year, Leave supporter and Daily Telegraph columnist Roger Bootle (also author of The Trouble with Europe) set out the criteria by which he wants his pet project to be assessed.
He admits that the results are disappointing, including that Brexit would allow the UK to make its own free-trade agreements. Treaties were necessary to replace and improve on the advantages of the Single Market.
Only a few relatively minor accords have been signed, says Bootle. In 2016, a prominent Brexiter assured me “they need us as a trade partner more than we need them”, but he has never produced any evidence for this.
The UK’s economy has struggled since Brexit, even if it is not the only cause of its malaise.
The EU, meanwhile, has not registered any negative impact to its economic health. Another anticipated benefit was that the UK would stop conforming to EU regulations, but, says Bootle, “the UK has done next to nothing to recast its regulatory regime”.
This is not least because of the problem caused by Boris Johnson’s deal on Northern Ireland’s land border with the south, which makes the province a de facto part of the EU Single Market.
The website globalbritain.co.uk offers “over 50 Brexit benefits” of reduced regulations. All are dubious or double-edged.
For instance, travel companies have fewer regulations to cope with – the very regulations that protect their customers’ interests. And the UK can decide which brands of wet wipes to authorise for domestic use.
None of these claims should be taken at face value. Although the UK will no longer have to pay into the annual EU budget, Bootle concedes it still must contribute “just over £2billion”, a figure never written on the side of a bus.
Even when contributions end, it is doubtful UK citizens will notice a Brexit bounce.
Moreover, a supposedly newly independent UK would be able to make its own immigration policy post- Brexit.
You only have to glance at the news to see that illegal migration is worse than ever. The reduction of legal migration from EU states into the UK has deprived many industries of vital labour.
All the above depends on a misrepresentation – or a lie, if you prefer.
Nothing here makes Brexit a success that other countries would want to emulate. Bootle, however, says we should see the gain of Brexit as being “essentially political”.
“The EU,” he tells us, “is a profoundly undemocratic institution.”
Was Brexit a win for British democracy?
So is the EU undemocratic and is the UK any more democratic now than in early 2016?
First, the European Commission might be difficult to hold to account, but the EU was created by democratic countries and it has an elected parliament.
Secondly, Britain’s quirky electoral system hardly makes it a model of democracy. Many decisions are made behind closed doors and some are implemented by secondary legislation, which means effectively by decree.
You will remember that the underlying reason for Brexit was to regain sovereignty. This stands logic on its head. The UK never lost its sovereignty to the EU, as proven by the unilateral ability to hold a referendum.
Only a sovereign country can hold a plebiscite - “the largest act of democracy... in British history”, according to Baron Frost – Boris Johnson’s chief negotiator for exiting the EU – on its international obligations, and act on it.
Lord Frost claims that he and Boris Johnson “smashed through the barriers and delivered the referendum result” but then contradicts himself.
Brexit has not yet been a complete success, he says, because he had not realised “how much the levers of control are outside the government’s hands and how ineffective the British state really is”.
An easy way to measure success
By Brexiters’ own criteria, then, the enterprise has been, at best, a questionable success.
I would, therefore, like to propose a commonsense test of whether it was all worth it.
There is only one way to judge the success of Brexit: its impact on individual Britons: Add up the winners and losers and compare the two numbers.
If the former outnumber the latter, chalk it up as a win. Otherwise, it is a catastrophe.
I have yet to meet anyone who has become happier as a result of Brexit, other than Brexit supporters. I see no gains, only disadvantages.
Look at British expats living in EU states. We have had our local votes confiscated, lost the right to move residence easily between EU countries, and we pay more in customs duties for packages sent from the UK.
If Brexit is such a triumph, there must be hundreds of thousands of cheerful people whose lives have been turbo- boosted? Who are they? I cannot name one.
If you are a Leave supporter, I invite you to write to this paper and identify the cheerful souls whose lives have been immeasurably improved by Brexit.
By this, I mean ordinary people, not politicians, campaigners, bureaucrats, economists, journalists, and anyone else with skin in what has always been a flawed, emotive, ideological game.
