Brexit has broken Britain, but there’s no stomach for another bloody battle in the trenches

Brexit divided Britain as never before. Not only did it split the country over the question on the referendum paper, it also created two new identity tribes, Remainers and Leavers. It was a story of bad winners and bad losers, which has left Britain much more divided seven years after the vote than during the 2016 referendum campaign itself.

There has been a significant shift of opinion towards regret, but the much more dominant mood is of exhaustion. Most Leave voters have not changed their minds, though a fifth have. Those too young to vote in 2016 think it was a bad idea by a four-to-one margin. But the overwhelming emotion is that of not wanting to hear more about Brexit from anyone.

In the latest Ipsos issues index, 1 per cent of people think Brexit is the most important issue facing Britain, and 7 per cent rank it as a priority. Though unconvinced that they have seen any benefits from Brexit, only 4 per cent of the under-35s consider it a priority compared to 9 per cent of the over-55s. Some say that everything people care about more – the economy, inflation, the NHS, climate change and immigration – is connected to Brexit, but that is not the common feeling across the country right now.

So what should Keir Starmer do about Brexit? “Making Brexit work” is now one of the priorities of the government he hopes to lead.

This is not a role that the Labour leader would have imagined trying to play when he first entered parliament in 2015, anticipating neither the Corbynite insurgency in his own party, nor that the effort to keep Britain inside the European Union would fail to persuade a majority, changing the political context. Nor would he have been expecting to play it in the years after 2016, when he was among those trying to keep the prospect of another referendum before Brexit on the table.

If Labour does come to power, it will be the first time that the “losers” of the referendum will get to grapple with Brexit in a position of power. Starmer’s instinct is now to bridge the divide, since the electoral geography of the party’s 2019 defeat means that he affords strong priority to the minority of Leave voters who now intend to vote Labour – though he will have been elected primarily by people who find the idea quixotic, and for whom “making Brexit work” sounds primarily like an exercise in damage limitation.

Starmer’s emphasis on accepting Brexit is combined with the knowledge that making Brexit work must involve more practical cooperation with our friends in Europe.

But every move to try will see cries of betrayal from political opponents, and in the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, though there is enormous public will for a gradualist exploration of closer cooperation on a case-by-case basis.

How far this post-Brexit gradualism mitigates the disappointment of would-be Rejoiners remains to be seen. The appetite and capacity on the EU side for bespoke negotiations with Britain may be limited, though the success of Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework shows some willingness to reciprocate a constructive agenda – particularly given wider shared interests, from security in a volatile continent to the challenges of climate change.

Let us be clear: there will be pressure to put the single market back on the agenda by the second half of the decade. Both Sunak and Starmer want to rule that out, a position that they will surely maintain during the next general election.

But after that? It is easy to see how the next Labour leadership contest – maybe early in the 2030s – could be won by a candidate campaigning to put the question of rejoining the single market back on the table. It’s a position that is attractive to most of the party’s members and voters, as long as the party thinks it can handle the issue of freedom of movement better than it did last time, when a loss of confidence in how the scale and pace of immigration was handled following EU enlargement after 2004, both under New Labour and David Cameron, undoubtedly contributed to the pressure to hold the Brexit referendum, and was a significant factor in the 52 per cent vote for Leave.

It would seem logical for the Liberal Democrats to seek to outflank Labour on the matter of the single market, on which the party’s “blue wall” target voters, often Conservative former Remainers, might be somewhat softer than Labour’s red wall target vote; though the party has been somewhat backwards in coming forwards to make it an issue, after its anti-Brexit position failed to take off in either 2017 or 2019.

Rejoiners will need a longer march still. In principle, opinion polls now show a majority for rejoining the EU, but that support may well be rather shallow. It may be that UK voters would consider going back in on the old terms, but those will never be available again. EU governments would be unconvinced by a polarising, narrow argument that a subsequent government could seek to overturn.

It took the Eurosceptic movement four decades, largely in the wilderness, to overturn the 1975 decision of the public to stay in. It is possible that Rejoin campaigners could persuade a major party – most likely Labour – to make a referendum pledge to revisit the question of membership in, say, 2033, 2037, 2041 or later. However, developments in the architecture of the European Union and the wider continent in the intervening years could well place this question in a different context by then.

The challenges of grappling with what happens after Brexit will not go away for years, even decades, to come. But there are good reasons why many people will be reluctant to get back into the old referendum trenches once more.

Sunder Katwala is director of British Future and the author of ‘How to Be a Patriot’ (Harper North)