It is the right way to go: leaving the EU has been a disaster. But refusing to admit it has cost Labour precious time and credibility
The UK government is trying out a new Brexit stance, not to be mistaken for a change in policy. The shift is tonal.
Previously, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves talked about Britain’s detachment from the rest of Europe as a feature of the natural landscape, awkward to navigate perhaps, but nobody’s fault. Now they are prepared to say it is an affliction.
Speaking at a regional investment conference on Tuesday, the chancellor listed Brexit alongside the pandemic and austerity as causes of persistent economic lethargy. She made the same point at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington last weekend, observing that the country’s “productivity challenge has been compounded by the way in which the UK left the European Union”.
It was a careful formula, diagnosing harm not in Brexit itself, but in the manner of its implementation; blaming the politicians who did it, not the ordinary people who willed it. Reeves needs that distinction to be clear when she delivers her budget next month. She wants to attribute some of her grim fiscal predicament to a bad deal that Boris Johnson negotiated, without appearing to denigrate the aspirations of leave voters.
