There’s a huge, Brexit-shaped hole in this election – that’s why there’s such an air of unreality about it
Remember Brexit? For a topic that dominated several years of British political life after 2016, and the last general election, its near-total absence from this one is remarkable. Brexit did not come up once in the BBC leaders’ debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. It did once in the seven-way debate on Friday, raised by the SNP’s Stephen Flynn, who described it as an unmitigated disaster. The silence is beginning to feel less like omission than an act of collective repression.
Between the Tories and Labour there is a silent agreement, perfectly observed in the English tradition of avoiding uncomfortable conversations. It is increasingly jarring. Brexit’s consequences are now part and parcel of our layered crises. It features in the cost of living crisis – it has driven up inflation, accounting for a third of food-price inflation since 2019, according to an LSE paper. It lurks in the labour market, where higher immigration from outside the EU has not plugged a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of EU workers.
It holds back growth, clobbering small businesses and choking bigger ones desperate for labour. As was the conclusion of a report this year summarised by London mayor Sadiq Khan: “The hardline version of Brexit we’ve ended up with is dragging our economy down.”
The Tories naturally have no interest in discussing any of this, and Labour is wary of raising the effects of Brexit lest they open themselves up to the charge of questioning the “will of the people”. The result is that the referendum and its continuing aftermath are being treated like a mortifying family secret. What a corrosive influence it has had. Its seductive, empowering idea of “taking back control” has been displaced on to an exhausting fixation with small boats crossing the Channel, which has engulfed our politics and given us nothing but even more bickering about high immigration. Its main stars and protagonists have disbanded, fallen out and been disgraced, and the party they belonged to rent asunder by the whole adventure. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, is back.
Crucially, the spirit of Brexit still runs our politics. Not in its pugnaciousness, big claims and large personalities, but in the pretence that there is a magic bullet for the country’s problems that will work without addressing any of our fundamental economic and political arrangements. Brexit was a way to divert grievance away from the domestic and on to a foreign bogeyman. The reality was that Britain’s major problems were authored at home. These include a system that is based on the disfranchisement of millions through regional inequality, paltry investment in infrastructure and skills to offset deindustrialisation, a concentration of political and economic power in the capital, the weakening of labour rights, and the defunding of state services and education subsidies that enable people to prosper.
Actually reversing these trends
would involve policies that seem to be forbidden. We cannot nationalise poorly run public utilities. We cannot better tax wealth and capital gains and invest the proceeds. We cannot be honest about the fact that we need immigration for everything from funding universities to social care. When Sunak and Starmer pitch their allegedly transformative agendas without any of these potential solutions, they invoke the spirit of Brexit – selling change they cannot deliver.
Then they offer more magical thinking. Sunak holds the electorate to ransom over Rwanda deportations as if they were some absolutely crucial breakthrough. Labour tells us that the country’s myriad economic problems are because of post-Covid state finances that we can do nothing about but which will be vanquished by “growth” and “efficiency”. Both tell us that immigration is too high but do not mention the colossal spending that will be required to wean the country off it. It is all broadly theatre because there is an electric fence, erected by the rightwing media and political consensus, around the policies that will bring about the sort of change that both parties are promising.
When the political mainstream feels so narrow, is it any wonder that Brexit was so beguiling? Not just to Brexiters but to remainers as well, who expended much energy campaigning for a second referendum. It was a useful displacement for them, too, to project on to Brexit the country’s very undoing. Better to focus instead not on the legacy of decades of Thatcherite consensus on deregulation, privatisation, our asset-driven economy and the abandonment of regional planning and industrial strategy, but on Brexit as a supremely corrosive event. And then, when it all predictably came to nought, better to pivot to lamenting the state of the country and focusing on the spectator sport of Tory malfeasance.
This is why the overriding sense of this election is that of disembodiment, of the separation of our material lives from political events. There is breathless talk of the gaffes, the interviews, the debates and the memes. And yet it feels like there is little connection other than registering that they are happening. It is a quality that characterises a weak political culture – a constant state of high action and no momentum, like cycling furiously on a stationary bike.
It all reminds me of a thought from EM Forster’s A Passage to India, a novel with a traumatic event at its heart that is never fully resolved for the reader. Towards the end, an Englishman working in colonial India takes stock of his performance during the episode, and of his whole life so far, and finds the moment profoundly unsatisfying. “He experienced nothing himself,” Forster writes. “He felt he ought to have been working at something else the whole time – he didn’t know at what, never would know, never could know, and that was why he felt sad.”
If this election all feels a bit flat, a bit sad, it’s because we ought to have been working on something else the whole time.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
talk up their chances, even he says the new seat of Godalming and Ash is on a “knife-edge”. Hunt has reportedly donated more than £100,000 of his own money to local Conservative campaign funds. Energetic local activists involved with the left-leaning pressure group Compass – drawn from a range of non-Tory parties and now in positions of local power – have long extolled the wonders of both tactical voting and the kind of cross-party cooperation that now ties together the coalition that runs the borough council and spans the Lib Dems, Greens, Labour and local independents. A decade ago, 53 of its seats were taken by Tories; now that number has crashed to 10.
One fact above all others explains what may happen here on 4 July. Back in 2016, Godalming was part of an area where nearly 60% of voters backed remain. It is not the kind of place where people enthuse about Nigel Farage and wring their hands about immigration and “small boats”. Its dominant middle class is educated, outward looking and fuller than ever of the values that define the capital city where so many local people make their living – conservative with a small “c”, perhaps, but also discernibly modern. What really runs deep, moreover, are shared ideals about business and success, which surely stand in sharp contrast to a ruling party now defined by incompetence, dogma and the dire economic results of our exit from the EU.
Outside the local branch of Caffè Nero, everything became clear in the course of a 15-minute conversation. Next to their mud-encrusted mountain bikes, four sixtysomething men were nursing their espressos and flat whites, and when I asked them about the election, they could barely contain themselves. They spoke in the confident tones of people used to chairing meetings and networking with clients, but everything they said was shot through with a deep sense of loss.
“Jeremy Hunt is a very, very good MP for this district,” said one of them. “But I have a major issue with him in that nobody seems to be talking about the major issue, which is Brexit. Every politician is denying that, and that’s why I can’t vote for him.”
I wondered if he had voted Conservative in the past. “Always,” he said, and he then told me a simple story. “I have a local business. Market research. Ten years ago, 40% of our clients were European. We now have no European clients. It’s just seen as not appropriate for European companies to use a British supplier.”
He said he was going to vote Lib Dem, “just to give Jeremy Hunt a bit of a shock”. One of his friends – another lifelong Tory – exasperatedly ran through a few of our recent prime ministers, starting with David Cameron: “Once we had the referendum, he just buggered off. Theresa May was doing the very best she could. But Johnson was just a charlatan. A liar.” Another said he would vote Labour, because he wanted “a new generation of politicians – it’s time for the dead wood to go”.
These are very familiar opinions. Over the last 10 years or so, I have heard them from people in such old Tory redoubts as Guildford, Maidenhead and High Wycombe, and in the comfortable suburbs of Cheshire and Greater Manchester. They have been reflected in seemingly endless byelection results and in one council contest after another. Now, as this strange and surreal election campaign takes shape, the same views are defining a growing subplot about what some people call the blue wall: seats across the south of England – and beyond – now suddenly being eyed by both the Lib Dems and Labour.
But this story is not just about the Conservative party. A lot of it centres on a modern middle class still often thought of as reactionary and illiberal but that is actually worldly, worried about the climate crisis and infuriated by Brexit. It is also about a chunk of the English establishment that has completely lost touch with the people and places it still thinks it speaks for. If the next week sees Reform UK overtake the Conservative party in the polls, the siren voices gathered around the Mail, Telegraph and GB News will presumably insist that the answer lies in more populism and shrillness, and some deranged political realignment whereby Faragism will come to define the Tory soul, much as Donald Trump has taken over the Republican party. But that way lies extinction, definitely as a force that aspires to power. England is not America. Surrey certainly isn’t.
Still, the Tory pantomime that has estranged such a huge part of the party’s old base looks set to carry on. The arrant stupidity of Rishi Sunak’s early departure from Normandy last week lay in how it was guaranteed to enrage both parts of his party’s crumbling electoral coalition; they spat feathers in Stoke-on-Trent, but they were also livid in the south-eastern commuter belt. Meanwhile, voters who once saw the Tories as the party of business, stability and basic economic sense now behold something utterly different – a motley crew of reckless ideologues who will respond to defeat by moving even further to the right. Such is one of modern history’s most mind-boggling turnabouts: the self-styled heroes and buccaneers of 2019 suddenly revealed as hopeless lemmings, glorying in their own encroaching irrelevance.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist