Bringing up Brexit won’t save your Budget, chancellor…

Brexit is back! Rachel Reeves is the latest in a line of senior Labour figures to come out fighting and blame Brexit squarely for at least some of our current economic woes.

Listen carefully, and you’ll hear the Remainers rejoicing. “Surely,” they’re saying, “if they’re admitting this, it’s only a matter of time before the logic of the argument leads them to revisit that ill-fated decision?”

Logical that argument may be. Accurate, it is not.

The government is trying to play a clever game here. To score political points by blaming Brexit – and therefore Nigel Farage – for economic pain, while doing precious little about that pain.

Consider the much-vaunted “reset” undertaken since last year’s election. Ministers like Nick Thomas-Symonds have been keen to talk this up – the prospect of removing red tape from most food and drink imports and exports, eGate access for British passport holders, and an “ambitious youth experience scheme” to allow mobility for under-30s in and out of the UK.

But the reality is that all we’ve actually agreed with the EU since Keir Starmer took office is a deal on… fisheries. The rest of the agenda, spelled out at the summit last May, is still to be negotiated.

And even if it is, the government’s own estimates put the estimated economic benefits at under 1 per cent of GDP – well shy of the 4 per cent figure the Office for Budget Responsibility has put on Brexit as a whole.

The government’s own oft-stated red lines – no single market, no customs union – mean it has ruled out really tackling the economic damage inflicted by leaving the EU. Indeed, while bemoaning that damage, the chancellor yesterday even underlined how she intended to make use of “Brexit freedoms” to deregulate in areas such as planning, AI and financial services. As if the price of those freedoms wasn’t the very Brexit impact she earlier bemoaned.

So this is as much about politics as it is about anything else. Blaming Farage for economic harm while steering clear of addressing that harm. Criticising the way Brexit was done without criticising Brexit itself.

Can this line hold? Yes, as long as there is no organised political force willing to challenge it. The Liberal Democrats are the only national party that claims to want to go further in revisiting Brexit, yet they are curiously reluctant to talk about this too much.

Partly this can be explained by public attitudes. While there are clear signs in the polling that the public would like a closer relationship with the EU (Best for Britain has some interesting numbers), surveys make it equally clear that Brexit is simply not a priority for the British people. Focus groups, meanwhile, reveal a strong aversion to ever talking about the damned B-word ever again.

Partly, too, this is about political timetables. Even if the government wanted to go beyond its own red lines and negotiate something far more ambitious than Boris Johnson’s trade and cooperation agreement (which, remember, is still the basis for our trading relationship), this would take time and not yield any benefits before the next election.

And that’s assuming – heroically – that the EU would be interested in such a conversation. Not only do EU countries have plenty of other big issues to worry about, there is also the real question as to whether they’d consider it worth their time to undertake a long and complex negotiation with a partner who – according to the polls – might be thinking about putting Nigel Farage in Downing Street.

And so here we are. Aware of the cost of Brexit, but unwilling to do anything much about it. In some ways, this is a quintessentially British outcome. Brexit is becoming a bit like the weather. Something we moan about with quiet, understated resignation.

Professor Anand Menon is director of UK in a Changing Europe