Here we read Starmer’s end as yet more proof of the failure of “Leave”. But the English crisis goes back further than the referendum
Giving the British people the opportunity to vote “Leave or Remain” was the greatest exercise in direct, bottom-up democracy that has ever happened in the European Union after Maastricht, among other things with a consultative and non-binding referendum. But that triggered the resignation of then Prime Minister David Cameron, who “institutionalized” the referendum. Contrary to the rule of the pro-European fathers, who were determined to keep the people out of the door. And, in fact, where the vote was allowed it ended badly (France and the Netherlands rejected what was then the Treaty of Lisbon in 2005, putting it back on track with ratification through parliament; Ireland, obliged for constitutional reasons, rejected Lisbon in 2008, and had to vote again by sweetening the pot to obtain the Yes vote). Italy, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg – the countries that built Europe – have never submitted any treaty to their citizens. (A bit as if the Constituent Assembly had decided between a republic and a monarchy without involving the Italians… try to think about it now that we are 80 years old since that vote).
Therefore, the lesson of the great European project is: you involve the people when you are reasonably sure of the result; if the result is wrong, it is ignored or repeated. Not in Great Britain. And, although some say that the majority of British people are disappointed by Brexit and would like to get closer to the EU, no party would ever dream of saying so openly; perhaps also because the political “godfather” of that referendum is called Nigel Farage and is flying in the polls.
Asking whether the British were right or wrong to leave makes no sense, because almost the entire Brexit debate is built on a logical fallacy: it compares the post-Brexit United Kingdom with an imaginary counterfactual, i.e. a United Kingdom that would have remained in the EU and prospered. But that counterfactual does not exist. There is, however, a Eurozone which – in the same period – went through the sovereign debt crisis, the pandemic, the Italian and French stagnation, the German demographic crisis, the wars, the energy crisis. Judging Brexit in isolation from this context is an intellectually dishonest exercise.
Keir Starmer leaves the scene on the tenth birthday of Brexit in favor of Andy Burnham, who will have to compete with the person who wanted that referendum, namely Farage. So how do the desire to return to the EU and the expectation of entrusting the keys of government to Mr. Brexit coexist? This question puts all the data to rest and puts the discussion back to the Go box: the pathologies that are now attributed to Brexit were already present and in some cases more acute before the 2016 referendum. The geographical and social inequalities between London and the rest of the country – the gap between the financial City and the post-industrial cities of North and Wales – were structural and growing since the Thatcherite 1980s. Brexit didn’t create them: the areas that voted Leave to a greater extent were those with the lowest median incomes, the greatest deindustrialisation, the worst public health indicators.
Brexit accelerated and radicalized an already ongoing crisis, it did not generate it. The financially driven economy – with the capital as the global hub of markets and the rest of the country in relative manufacturing decline – is a structural choice that dates back to the 1980s. Finally, even the pro-European narrative according to which Europe was able to face crises with its new instruments, let’s be careful: there is a fundamental and insurmountable difference between a state with its own central bank – such as the United Kingdom with the Bank of England – and the Eurozone states, which use the euro without controlling it. As for the Pnrr, it is market debt, not monetary creation. The narrative that presented the Plan as a historical turning point similar to a federal budget is misleading: it is about supranational debt on the markets, without the coverage of a true fiscal union or a central bank that can monetize it.
To the post-Covid debt is now added the pressure for common defense spending, also oriented towards supranational debt instruments (such as the Safe programme). The Pnrr model therefore risks becoming the precedent for financing every major European priority with market debt, worsening the overall repayment profile of the Member States without resolving the structural issue: the absence of monetary sovereignty.
