The breakthrough moment for Brexit has arrived

Sometimes we need our friends to tell us when we’ve made a mistake. French president Emmanuel Macron telling Keir Starmer that Brexit has failed is not one of those times.

By a ratio of 62:11, the UK population overwhelmingly believes Brexit has been more of a failure than a success. Even those who sold us Brexit agree with that. Yet Starmer appears to be holding onto the fantasy that he can make Brexit work. So, at the Brussels summit, the EU leaders (who all know Brexit is dead) will have to watch Starmer desperately giving mouth-to-mouth to a corpse. It’s almost painful to witness.

It makes political sense for Macron to hammer home the fact that Brexit has been a disaster. Brexit helped him in France. In 2019, his biggest rival, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, abandoned her policy of taking France out of the EU. It’s almost as if three years of the UK flailing about trying to find a version of Brexit that wouldn’t plunge millions into poverty had not been a great advert for “Frexit”.

While they remain deeply critical of the EU (like many people across the political spectrum), Europe’s far-right movements aren’t really that keen on actually leaving it any more. In fact, the failure of Brexit has acted as a cautionary tale for them. So, in that sense, the main success of the UK leaving the EU was strengthening it. Who could have imagined that?

Five years on from the UK’s departure from the EU, Brexit is only getting more and more farcical. We have a prime minister who campaigned against Brexit for four years, now the one saying he can make Brexit work outside the single market.

Meanwhile, Reform leader Nigel Farage says Brexit has failed. And a few days ago, when interviewed about the fifth anniversary of Brexit, Farage said that “everything, from financial services to fisheries, is probably more difficult now than it was”.

He’s right. Michael Mainelli, former lord mayor of the City of London, says Brexit has cost 40,000 financial services jobs, and the National Federation of Fishermen’s Associations says Brexit could cost them £300m by next year. That’s a staggering figure for an industry already struggling.

An admission like that from Farage, the man who said that fisheries would be the “acid test” as to whether Brexit was a success, means Brexit is well and truly dead. It's a powerful, ironic admission.

When Labour leaders are telling us to believe Brexit can work, and Farage is making the strongest case for it to be scrapped (whether he realises it or not), UK politics is truly upside down. But there's hope yet – it can still be saved.

Just yesterday, David McAllister, the chair of the European parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said that the ball is now in the UK’s court to propose ways to improve our trade.

It’s Starmer who has taken the option of joining the single market and customs union off the table. This, from a man who once said: “It is vital that we retain the benefits of the single market and customs union: options should not be swept off the table.”

But why? The UK’s current direction is clearly out of sync with public sentiment. The UK public (55 per cent) say it was wrong for the country to vote for Brexit in 2016, largely because two-thirds (65 per cent) can see that Brexit is making us poorer. So, who is he trying to impress by keeping us out? I really hope it’s not Donald Trump, who today is threatening to impose tariffs against much of the world.

President Trump said the UK is “out of line” on trade with the US but thinks the situation “can be worked out”. This is likely a nod to his plan to make all foreign countries pay more for their medicines, to take the financial burden off the US, which pays three times as much as we do.

So, on one side, we have America, with whom we do 17.6 per cent of our trade, threatening to impose destructive tariffs unless we make our NHS pay more for medicines – putting British lives in danger. On the other side, we have the EU, with whom we do 46.7 per cent of our trade, offering to improve our trade – which the Nuffield Trust claims will improve the NHS.

I think we can all agree that any politician who chooses option A doesn’t have the UK’s best interests at heart. Maybe the other success of Brexit is giving us a way to judge which politicians are really on our side.