Keir Starmer said something rather noticeable in his speech yesterday. He mocked the politicians who’d told voters that “Brexit lies on the side of that bus, click here for your new country”. That made the ears prick up. It’s the first time in a very long time that the Prime Minister has spoken critically about Brexit.
Then, moments later, he did it again. The “self-appointed champions of working people”, he said, “lied to this country, unleashed chaos and walked away after Brexit”.
That makes it a communication strategy. You don’t do the same thing three times in 24 hours by accident. And that suggests something profound: that the view of Brexit as a failure is now settled. It has ossified into a national consensus, without us ever really realising it was happening. Even the Labour leadership, which is usually petrified of this issue, believes it can safely criticise it.
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The truth is, people are terrible at owning up to their mistakes. They very rarely admit that they were wrong about something. Instead, they turn into mini-Stalins, expunging their historical record and replacing it with one in which they were always right. People have very poor memories, especially when it comes to their own errors.
But this is not how it felt at the time. Back then, there was broad and animated support for the war. The Telegraph, Times, Mail, Sun, Express and Star all supported the war. With a combined circulation of 9.4 million, they massively outweighed the three papers opposing the war – the Guardian, Independent and Mirror, which had a combined audience of 2.7 million.
Fine, so people changed their minds. Well, not quite. That would have involved a degree of honest introspection most people are incapable of. Instead, they simply rearranged the past so that it reflected their newfound view.
Slowly but surely, the same thing seems to be happening with Brexit. There was no one central event, no great moment of epiphany in which the nation realised what an error the whole thing was. But slowly, like rising damp, a sense of disdain, mockery and disappointment has taken over. A settled view has developed, without drama or surprise, without anyone even really noticing that it’s happening.
People will find different ways of framing their box-fresh opposition. They’ll say politicians missed the opportunities, or we had bad leadership, or the EU sabotaged us. But the truth is, it was a failure because it was a bad idea. It’s no more complicated than that. Voters were convinced to support a project to give the political class a kicking. In fact, they simply damaged themselves and their livelihoods.
Labour is not about to commit to rejoining the EU. Of course not. But it is pursuing a plan for a really quite intimate relationship with it: regulatory alignment in many areas, deep cooperation on defence, and now the Chancellor is confidently promoting an extensive youth mobility scheme – something which the party was reticent about supporting just a few months ago.
Brexit was always a terrible mistake. But now, at least, people recognise it. And with that, things might just start to improve.
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