Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

Parliament is set to debate the consequences of Brexit for the very first time after a petition demanding MPs discuss the subject passed 100,000 signatures.

Ant-Brexit campaigners pushing for inquiry into the impact of Britain’s exit from the EU on the economy and other areas welcomed the development as frustration with Brexit grows.

Petitions which reach 100,000 signatures are almost always debated under parliamentary rules – through they usually take place in Westminster Hall rather than the main Commons chamber.

The past year has seen a rise in Brexit regret – or “Regrexit” – as opinion poll saw an increasing number of Britons saying it has gone badly and record high support for re-joining the EU.

In October, a Redfield and Wilton Strategies poll found record support for reversing Brexit at 57 per cent, compared to just 43 per cent who want to stay out of the EU.

And in December some 65 per cent of all voters told Opinium that Brexit is going badly, while only 21 per cent believe it is going well – the highest level of negativity since Boris Johnson’s trade deal came into force.

Peter Packham, chair of the campaign for a public inquiry into the consequences of Brexit, said poll findings demonstrated a “widespread feeling” that an independent look at the impact of leaving the EU was needed.

“The public has a fundamental right to know the reality of what Brexit has done to our country,” said Mr Packham. “It’s entirely wrong that the government wants to deny the British people their right to know.”

Recent studies have shown that Brexit cost the UK billions in lost trade, investment and growth, and cost households further billion in higher supermarket bills. Experts have also pointed to labour shortages after Britain’s exit from the bloc.

The Conservative government has previously stated that the consequences of Brexit is not “an appropriate subject for a public inquiry”.

But Mr Packham said Brexit was the country’s most significant event in the 21st century. “It is quite extraordinary that there has never before been a parliamentary debate, dedicated to its impacts and consequences. We hope that large numbers of MPs will attend the likely debate.”

For a generation, the high-speed Eurostar train under the English Channel has stood as a sleek, ingenious emblem of a new closeness between Britain and continental Europe. Now, it risks becoming a symbol of the friction caused by their Brexit breakup.

Until two years ago, passengers could just show their passports for often quick checks, but since 2021, after Britain left the European Union, British travelers in both directions have been required to get their passports stamped. As long as the pandemic kept travel to a minimum, the added time hardly mattered, but as ridership surged in recent months, lines — and waits — grew longer.

The Eurostar company has responded by capping the number of passengers it takes, leaving hundreds of seats unsold on some trains rather than run the risk that the passport bottleneck will delay them. On some trains that would normally carry up to 900 riders, the company is limiting capacity to about 600. The cap took effect months ago, but only drew widespread attention this week, when it was reported by several British news outlets.

While the effects of Brexit on the British economy are still the object of studies and debates, some concrete consequences are becoming clear. For Brexit opponents, the Eurostar problem is one more piece of infuriating proof that Britain never should have left the European Union.

“Every day, in so many ways, more and more evidence of Brexit” making Britain “poorer, weaker, less efficient and less respected in the world,” Alastair Campbell, who was an adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, wrote on Twitter. “It is the most enormous act of national self harm and the country won’t begin to recover until we admit it.”

Last summer, when long lines of vacationers waited for their documents to be checked at the port of Dover before boarding ferries across the channel, British officials blamed it on the fact that French authorities had not deployed enough border police to speed up the checks. France’s Transport minister, Clément Beaune, retorted that “France is not responsible for Brexit.”

Mark Smith, a former train station manager and the founder of a website that advises Britons on how to travel by train, said that he was among the first to ride the Eurostar when it began service in 1994, offering travel between Paris and London. At first, it ran from Waterloo Station in London, but it moved in 2007 to a gleaming new terminal at St. Pancras, a service launched on a tide of champagne, and heralded as a harbinger of closeness between the two nations. In addition to Paris, Eurostar serves other European cities such as Amsterdam and Brussels.

The terminals for Eurostar, which whisks passengers between Paris and London in about two hours and 15 minutes, were designed for a Europe in which travelers could move smoothly among countries, Mr. Smith said.

“They were not designed for a situation in which an iron curtain descends,” he said. “They were not designed for Brexit.”

“Brexit,” he added, “by definition has created a hard border between France and Britain in the middle of the channel.”

E.U. citizens can move freely from one member country to another and remain indefinitely, but travelers from other parts of the world, including Britain, are limited in how long they can stay.

As a result, French border police stamp the passports of Britons — who make up about 40 percent of Eurostar ridership — in both directions, to show when they entered the bloc and when they returned home. Britain so far has not imposed a similar requirement on E.U. citizens taking the train, making their travel a bit smoother.

A spokeswoman for Eurostar said in an email that the delays and capacity constraints are linked to a combination of border police understaffing and lack of space at its terminals, especially at St. Pancras Station in London and at Gare Du Nord in Paris, for additional border infrastructure.

The French government said that in 2020 and 2021, it had assigned 15 additional border officers to the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord to handle the new passport checks, but declined to say whether it had deployed any more people at St. Pancras.

Matthieu Ellerbach, an adviser to the French interior minister, said that France’s border police are “fully mobilized” to face these flows and that new border police would be assigned to the task in the next months.

“They were not designed for a situation in which an iron curtain descends,” he said. “They were not designed for Brexit.”

“Brexit,” he added, “by definition has created a hard border between France and Britain in the middle of the channel.”

E.U. citizens can move freely from one member country to another and remain indefinitely, but travelers from other parts of the world, including Britain, are limited in how long they can stay.

As a result, French border police stamp the passports of Britons — who make up about 40 percent of Eurostar ridership — in both directions, to show when they entered the bloc and when they returned home. Britain so far has not imposed a similar requirement on E.U. citizens taking the train, making their travel a bit smoother.

A spokeswoman for Eurostar said in an email that the delays and capacity constraints are linked to a combination of border police understaffing and lack of space at its terminals, especially at St. Pancras Station in London and at Gare Du Nord in Paris, for additional border infrastructure.

The French government said that in 2020 and 2021, it had assigned 15 additional border officers to the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord to handle the new passport checks, but declined to say whether it had deployed any more people at St. Pancras.

Matthieu Ellerbach, an adviser to the French interior minister, said that France’s border police are “fully mobilized” to face these flows and that new border police would be assigned to the task in the next months.

“They were not designed for a situation in which an iron curtain descends,” he said. “They were not designed for Brexit.”

“Brexit,” he added, “by definition has created a hard border between France and Britain in the middle of the channel.”

E.U. citizens can move freely from one member country to another and remain indefinitely, but travelers from other parts of the world, including Britain, are limited in how long they can stay.

As a result, French border police stamp the passports of Britons — who make up about 40 percent of Eurostar ridership — in both directions, to show when they entered the bloc and when they returned home. Britain so far has not imposed a similar requirement on E.U. citizens taking the train, making their travel a bit smoother.

A spokeswoman for Eurostar said in an email that the delays and capacity constraints are linked to a combination of border police understaffing and lack of space at its terminals, especially at St. Pancras Station in London and at Gare Du Nord in Paris, for additional border infrastructure.

The French government said that in 2020 and 2021, it had assigned 15 additional border officers to the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord to handle the new passport checks, but declined to say whether it had deployed any more people at St. Pancras.

Matthieu Ellerbach, an adviser to the French interior minister, said that France’s border police are “fully mobilized” to face these flows and that new border police would be assigned to the task in the next months.

This (tweet) is from Adrian Wooldridge, the Bloomberg business columnist and former auther of the Economist’s Bagehot column, on when the benefits of Brexit might materialise.

Quote:

A Brexiteer recently said to me that judging the results of Brexit today is like trying to judge the results of the Henrician Reformation in 1540. We will have to wait at least until the beginning of the 18th century!

Guy Hands, founder and chairman of private equity firm Terra Firma, said the only way Brexit could have worked was a “Liz Truss utopia” of complete deregulation and privatisation.

“It’s been a complete disaster. The reality is, it’s been a lose-lose situation for us and Europe,” Mr Hands told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “The reality of Brexit was, it was just was a bunch of complete and total lies.”

“The only way that the Brexit put forward by Boris Johnson was going to work was if there was a complete deregulation of the UK and we moved to a sort of Liz Truss utopia of a Singapore state and that was just never going to happen,” he added.

Mr Hands said the British population was “never going to accept” the privatisation of the NHS and scrapping of labour laws – accusing Brexiteers of “complete and total absolute lies” about the economic boost from leaving the EU.

The Foreign Secretary has said it would be “probably a fair assessment” to suggest that the UK’s exit from the European Union has been “tricky”.

James Cleverly was responding to SNP MP Richard Thomson, who questioned him in the House of Commons over the impact of Brexit, exactly three years since the UK’s withdrawal.

The MP for Gordon referred to the negative outlook from the International Monetary Fund’s latest report, before asking: “Is there a single aspect of our prosperity or standing in the world that he can think of that has been enhanced in any way by the terms on which we’ve left?”

The Foreign Secretary replied: “I can assure the honourable gentleman that if he is suggesting that our exit from the European Union has been tricky, I think that is probably (a) fair assessment.”

Amid laughter from the Opposition benches, Mr Cleverly continued: “If he thinks that’s tough, imagine what extricating Scotland from one of the longest and most successful unions in human history would be like.

“And I have absolutely no doubt that our good professional and strong working relationship with Maros Sefcovic and his officials and other members of the European Commission will ultimately be successful.”

The Government and the European Commission have been locked in talks to resolve the dispute over post-Brexit Northern Ireland trade arrangements over the last few months.

Updating MPs on the talks, Mr Cleverly later said that having “professional but discreet negotiations are the route to success”.

Mr Thomson was not the only MP to raise Brexit during questions to Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) ministers, with Conservative James Sunderland suggesting it has actually helped improve the UK’s image around the world.

The MP for Bracknell said: “The recent Ipsos poll of 33 countries has found that people around the world are now more likely to believe that the UK is a positive influence than in 2016.

“Given our fantastic soft power, given our fantastic global presence around the world, does my right honourable friend agree that Opposition claims of reputational decline may be premature?”

The Foreign Secretary rebutted: “I think it’s noteworthy that 92% of Ukrainians believe the UK has had a positive influence on world affairs, second only to Canada, that 86% of Americans have a favourable opinion of the UK – 34% of Americans have a very favourable opinion of the UK, which is up 4% since Labour left power.”

The divorce between Britain and the European Union has become the dark thread that, to many, explains why Britain is suffering more than its neighbors.

Brexit Turns 3. Why Is No One Wearing a Party Hat?

LONDON — The third anniversary of Britain’s departure from the European Union passed without fanfare on Tuesday, and why not? Brexit has faded from the political forefront, unmentioned by politicians who don’t want to touch it and overlooked by a public that cares more about the country’s economic crisis.

The severity of that crisis was underscored by the International Monetary Fund, which forecast this week that Britain will be the world’s only major economy to contract in 2023, performing even worse than heavily blacklisted Russia.

The I.M.F. only indirectly attributed some of Britain’s woes to Brexit, noting that it suffered from a very tight labor market, which had constrained output. Brexit has aggravated those shortages by choking off the pipeline of workers from the European Union — whether waiters in London restaurants or fruit and vegetable pickers in fields.

The effects of Brexit run through Britain’s last-in-class economy because they also run through its divided, exhausted politics. In a country grappling with the same energy shocks and inflation pressures that afflict the rest of Europe, Brexit is the dark thread that, to some critics, explains why Britain is suffering more than its neighbors.

“One of the reasons for our current economic weakness is Brexit,” said Anand Menon, a professor of West European politics at King’s College London. “It’s not the main reason. But everything has become so politicized that the economic debate is carried out through political shibboleths.”

Years of debate over Brexit, he said, had contributed to a kind of policy paralysis. “If you look at it, it is astounding how little actual governing has happened since 2016,” Professor Menon said. “It has been seven years, and virtually nothing has been done on a governmental level to fix the country’s problems.”

Those problems continue to proliferate. Inflation, though it has eased slightly, continues to run at a double-digit rate. Britain’s National Health Service is facing the gravest crisis in its history, with overcrowded hospitals and hourslong waits for ambulances. On Wednesday, Britain will face its largest coordinated strikes in a decade, with teachers, railway workers and civil servants walking off the job.

Not all these problems are wholly, or even principally, a result of Brexit. But tackling any of them, experts said, will require bolder solutions than the government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has yet proposed. Owing largely to Brexit, Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party remains torn by factions that thwart action on issues from urban planning to a new relationship with the European Union.

Part of the problem, experts said, is that the neither the government nor the opposition Labour Party is prepared to acknowledge the negative effects Brexit has had on the economy. The government may not ring the bell of Big Ben to celebrate the anniversary, as it did on Brexit day in 2020. But to the extent that Mr. Sunak refers to Brexit, he still portrays it as an undiluted boon to the country.

“In the three years since leaving the E.U., we’ve made huge strides in harnessing the freedoms unlocked by Brexit,” Mr. Sunak said in a statement marking the anniversary. “Whether leading Europe’s fastest vaccine rollout, striking trade deals with over 70 countries or taking back control of our borders, we’ve forged a path as an independent nation with confidence.”

His predecessor, Boris Johnson, also cited the early authorization and rapid deployment of a coronavirus vaccine as proof of Brexit’s value — never mind that health experts said Britain would have had the authority to approve a vaccine before its neighbors, even it had been part of the European Union.

“Let’s shrug off all this negativity and gloom-mongering that I hear about Brexit,” Mr. Johnson said in a video posted on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon. “Let’s remember the opportunities that lie ahead, and the vaccine rollout proves it.”

There is little evidence that Mr. Sunak and Mr. Johnson are convincing many people. Public opinion has turned sharply against Brexit: Fifty-six percent of those surveyed thought leaving the European Union was a mistake, according to a poll in November by the firm YouGov, while only 32 percent thought it was a good idea.

And the sense of disillusion is nationwide. In all but three of Britain’s 632 parliamentary constituencies, more people now agree than disagree with the statement, “Britain was wrong to leave the E.U,” according to a poll released Monday by the news website, UnHerd, and the research firm, Focaldata.

The three holdouts are agricultural areas around Boston and Skegness on the country’s eastern coastline, where immigration is still a resonant issue. And even in these places, public opinion about Brexit is finely balanced.

At the same time, few people express a desire to open a debate over whether to rejoin the European Union. The prospects of doing that on terms that would be remotely acceptable to either side are, for the moment, far-fetched. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, prefers to frame his party’s message as “Making Brexit Work,” having lost an election to the Tories in 2019, whose slogan was “Get Brexit Done.”

Britain’s problems are exacerbated by the fact that the one leader who proposed radical remedies, Liz Truss, triggered such a backlash in the financial markets that she was forced out of office in 45 days. To restore the country’s reputation with investors, Mr. Sunak has scrapped her tax cuts and adopted a fiscally austere program of higher taxes and spending cuts that the I.M.F. says will curb growth.

“Although we no longer have lunatics running the asylum, we have essentially a lame-duck government that doesn’t have any semblance of a plan to restore economic growth,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics at King’s College London.

The trouble is that the bitter squabbling over Brexit has made obvious responses politically perilous for the prime minister. Even the I.M.F.’s projection for Britain’s growth ignited a storm of commentary on social media about whether it would help the cause of “Remainers” or reopen the Brexit debate.

The fund’s assessment was not completely gloomy despite its prediction of contraction in 2023. Britain, it estimated, grew faster than Germany or France last year. After inflation cools and the burden of higher taxes eases, it said, Britain should return to modest growth in 2024.

Professor Portes said that there were policies Mr. Sunak could pursue, from liberalizing planning laws to overhauling immigration rules to ease the labor shortage, that would stimulate growth. “If you put all those together,” he said, “there is a reasonable, feasible strategy that could make the next 10 years better than the last.”

But he added, “Any coherent strategy involves repairing the economic relationship with Europe, and that will depend on the political dynamic.”

One of the UK’s most prestigious universities has seen its funding from a large European research programme plummet from £62m a year to nothing since Brexit, new figures show.

The latest statistics from the European Commission reveal that Cambridge University, which netted €483m (£433m) over the seven years of the last European research funding programme, Horizon 2020, has not received any funding in the first two years of the new Horizon Europe programme.

Meanwhile, Oxford, which won €523m from the earlier programme, has only been awarded €2m to date from Horizon Europe.

Britain’s associate membership of the €95.5bn Horizon Europe programme was agreed in principle as part of the Brexit trade deal negotiations in 2020, but ratification was disrupted after the UK failed to implement the Northern Ireland protocol. Such funding is vital to UK universities because it enables research collaborations with institutions across Europe and carries considerable international prestige.

“For higher education and research, there are no new opportunities and no actual possible upsides from Brexit,” said Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford.

He described Brexit as a “historic error of monumental proportions” and said the new data on Oxford and Cambridge – usually the top performers in Europe – was “very worrying”. The losses reached beyond money, he added, with the UK also becoming less attractive to high-quality European researchers and students.

The government has guaranteed it will cover all successful Horizon Europe grants applied for by the end of March, but after watching the political wranglings for more than two years, many academics are now leaving the UK, saying they no longer believe their vital European research partnerships will be protected.

In August last year, Professor Augusta McMahon, an archaeologist specialising in the Middle East, left Cambridge University, where she had worked for 26 years, to return to Chicago University. Although she was wooed to the US by what she calls “the best job in my field”, she says Brexit uncertainty was a big factor. “I no longer thought the government would either associate [with Horizon Europe] or provide replacement funding,” she said.

With the number of EU students coming to UK universities more than halving since Brexit, she was noticing their decline on campus. Meanwhile, she said fewer European lecturers were applying for jobs here.

Professor Paul Pharoah, who researches the genetic epidemiology of ovarian and breast cancer, left Cambridge after 26 years at the end of last year and now works at Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles.

Pharoah, who was involved in two large EU-funded research projects in the past 15 years, said it was becoming much harder to find funding for his field in the UK: “And the lack of opportunity to apply for EU funding made the outlook even more bleak.”

Gáspár Jékely, a German professor of neuroscience who was based at Exeter University, started work at Heidelberg University last week. He has taken his high-cachet European Research Council (ERC) advanced grant with him.

“The lack of security around European collaborations and funding was one of my reasons for going,” he said. “Recruiting researchers and post-docs from Europe was becoming increasingly hard.” He added: “A colleague of mine at Exeter has just won a prestigious ERC grant, but we don’t know what will happen with it. No one wants to lose a €3m award.”

Last April, the ERC gave 150 grant winners in the UK two months to decide whether to move with their grant to a European institution or lose the funding. In the end, UK Research and Innovation, the government research funding organisation, matched the funding of those who stayed, but one in eight left the UK.

Vassiliki Papatsiba, an education expert at Cardiff University who has researched the impact of Brexit on universities, said the UK might continue to lose talented researchers this way. “Nearly 50% of ERC UK-based grant winners are nationals of a different country, so that would predispose them to outward mobility,” she said.

As the European parliament’s former Brexit coordinator, the Belgian politician Guy Verhofstadt, recently said: “The devil is not in the detail – the very idea of Brexit is unworkable. As long as Starmer continues to rule out rejoining the single market and the European Union, Britain will be poorer, as is the EU.”

The judges said: "Parliament, by enacting the 2018 Act and the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020, authorised the making of the protocol.

"The clear intention of Parliament in enacting these Acts was to permit the Crown to make the protocol."

On the second ground the court said the relevant part of the Northern Ireland Act only concerns a referendum about whether Northern Ireland remains part of the UK or joins a united Ireland.

On the third ground the court found that Parliament had empowered the secretary of state to lawfully make changes to voting rules.

'Union is broken'
Responding to the ruling, a government spokesperson said: "We welcome that the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the sovereignty of Parliament in approving and legislating for the agreement negotiated in 2019.

"However, this does not change our determination to address the real problems the protocol is causing in Northern Ireland. Intensive talks with the EU continue to that end, looking across the full range of issues we have raised."

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) withdrew from the power sharing executive in Northern Ireland in February 2022 in protest at the protocol.

DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said the legal challenge "had highlighted why unionists are opposed to the trading arrangements".

"A solution to the protocol was never going to be found in the courts, but the cases have served to highlight some of the reasons why unionists have uniformly rejected the protocol," he added.

"The government must consider this judgment, their own arguments to the court and take the steps necessary to replace the protocol with arrangements that unionists can support."

Jim Allister of TUV said the court's ruling greatly strengthens his party's stance and it "must embolden the political campaign against the protocol".

"The fact the Supreme Court is satisfied it was lawfully made does not in the least affect its political unacceptability, nor its dire constitutional consequences," he added.