Britain, 10 years on

With a weakened government and an uncertain future outside the EU, the U.K. is facing a generational challenge as it forges a future on its own. On the anniversary of its decision to leave, a POLITICO symposium asks what the next 10 years are likely to bring.

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Britain, the awkward years

In 1962, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously observed that Great Britain had “lost an Empire but not yet found a role.” Having mourned its status as a formerly great imperial power, Britain took its first steps towards finding a new role by joining what became the EU. And that membership, however fractious it was over the years, helped the U.K. to remain one of the top five economies and powers in the world.

The loss of empire after World War II was forced on the U.K. Its exit from the EU was not. It was an entirely voluntary act of self-harm, which will leave the country in 10 years’ time feeling rather as it did in the early 1960s. It will have lost a European identity but not yet found a role. It will be undergoing the same sense of mourning and decline — but this time with no very obvious route out.

Britain’s economy, hurt by falling trade and lower foreign direct investment, will have dropped out of the world’s top five. The country may be struggling to retain its seat on the U.N. Security Council. Its military might will have been denuded by spending cuts forced on successive governments by lower tax revenues. As a result, the so-called special relationship with the U.S. will have frayed: A poorer U.K. outside the EU will be less useful both as a military ally and as a diplomatic partner.

Relationships with other non-EU countries — including the friendly Commonwealth countries — won’t have taken up the slack. Fast-growing economies such as China and India will still be disinclined to strike generous trade deals with Britain while its visa demands for their citizens are so onerous. And the British government’s fixation on cutting immigration won’t help relax those restrictions.

Like a bolshy teenager who can’t help acting in a way that makes those around him dislike him, Britain’s act of masochism in leaving the EU will create a country that is unpopular, self-hating and insecure about its identity. Unfortunately, its adolescence is likely to last longer than a few years. In 10 years’ time, it’s very doubtful that the U.K. will have “found itself.”

Mary Ann Sieghart is a broadcaster and journalist. She chairs the non-partisan Social Market Foundation think tank.

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A long, drawn-out whimper

There will have been no big bangs.

The bad news will have trickled in and, on the edges of the argument, the news will be held up like a blazing banner declaiming a told-you-so truth. But for the most part, the news will be ignored — the people, worn down by how politics became so self-sustaining, so self-serving, so far removed from those it was supposed to support.

There will be no game-changing trade deals. The economists’ old saw that “double the distance equates to half the trade” will prove depressingly accurate. Trinkets to India, China, America will not have replaced lost trade with neighbors next door.

The NHS won’t have fixed itself. Nor will social care. Nor our pension problem. Nor our infrastructure.

Badges are seen ahead of a rally for the “Vote Leave” campaign before the Brexit vote in 2016 | Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images

There will have been no new centrist uprising, no Macron. Not for lack of need, but because the incumbents had the game sewn so tight it was impossible to tear open. And because we had no Macron.

There will have been many losses. But because they were losses in only hundreds, or low thousands, of families, and in pockets of the country that didn’t count, it won’t have registered beyond the third item of the BBC 10 o’clock news.

London will have carried on, undiminshed, powered as ever by its own brand equity.

And because London is fine, Westminster, and the BBC, will say Britain is fine.

Scotland will have gone nowhere. In every sense. Wales too. Though Northern Ireland, spurred on by deeper longings, may have moved away from us with an alacrity we hadn’t expected.

There will have been occasional bouts of public disquiet and disorder. But they will be contained and contextualized and the people condescended to for a little while until the situation becomes, once again, normal; one of chronic but ignorable dissatisfaction.

The disasters to befall the EU27 won’t have befallen them. They will, instead, have continued to evolve their community, grow their economy, taken heed of lessons played out across the Channel, made things better.

We’ll have discovered that fixing our relationship with Europe didn’t fix Britain’s relationship with itself. That we should have looked closer to home in the first place. The EU never was the problem.

There will have been no big bangs in Britain’s demise as a first-rate nation of global influence and prosperity. Just a long, drawn-out whimper.

Unless…!

Matt Kelly is the editor of the New European. 

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Leveraging emotion

To debate the near future of Britain, we need to be clear about post-Brexit reality.

The decision to leave the EU has not only transformed Britain’s domestic politics and foreign policy, it has also profoundly affected the language of politics.

When I first moved to Britain about eight years ago, I was struck by the controlled calmness of most of the political debates and conversations in this country. Before and during the Brexit referendum, however, that began to change. People became increasingly more emotional when they talked politics. It was a subtle but visible detail, even in daily life.

There is more passion, more anxiety, more anger, more restlessness around politics today.

And that is certainly understandable, given the uncertainty we’ve faced in a short amount of time: a massive referendum, the end of 40 years of EU membership, unpredictable elections and a string of horrific terror attacks.

All of this deepened the perception that we are living in a less solid, much more liquid world. Uncertainties make people more emotional.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the role emotions play in politics. They can drive the youth to activism — they are neither apolitical or apathetic and that is certainly a good thing — but they can also deepen a sense of nationalism or isolationism.

What Britain will look like in the next 10 years very much depends on how we speak about these challenges today.

What won’t — and should not — change is Britain’s commitment to shared values of coexistence, appreciation of diversity, liberal pluralistic democracy, freedom of speech and internationalism.

The conventional politics of “left versus right” no longer apply; today we have new divisions, and the political party that can transcend party lines and speak to people across the ideological spectrum will be the rising voice in the next 10 years.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and political commentator, writing in Turkish and English.

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Survival instincts

“Take back control,” the simple slogan of the Leave campaign, succeeded not because the British electorate is dumb. It succeeded because it encapsulated a deep unease at the direction in which the EU is headed — and at the readiness of Britain’s leaders, ultimately, to go with the flow. Brexit is a logical outcome of an earlier parting of the ways with Brussels, when Britain insisted on opting out of the eurozone and keeping the pound sterling.

If Europe is to make the euro viable as a single currency, it will need something akin to a European economic government, with all the constraints that will involve. Voters sensed that, outside the EU, Britain, by contrast, will be freer to set its own goals. Making the break with Brussels will be hard to do, expensive and confidence-sapping. If accompanied by stiff curbs on immigration, Brexit will be a suffocating error. But it can also be an opportunity for the land that gave birth to Adam Smith to play to its strengths.

What strengths? Forget for a moment the assets of language, solid legal institutions, and longstanding embrace of open markets and free trade. The U.K. is well-placed to thrive in the knowledge economy, in biotechnology and life sciences, and even in the City, which somehow failed to evaporate when Britain declined to join the euro and which will survive Brexit too.

But more than that, it’s a fluid society with, particularly among the young, a can-do mindset that you don’t see much in France or Italy. Not least thanks to Margaret Thatcher, it’s a country used to the unexpected. A decade hence, it will begin to be possible to see how much more strongly Britain is positioned to participate in “The Wealth of Nations.” There are reasons to be cheerful.

Rosemary Righter is an associate editor at the Times of London and a commentator on foreign affairs.

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A pro-Europe demonstration in March 2017 | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images

A smaller island

The Britain of 2026 will be a smaller, meaner place.

Exiting the European Union will only be the start. Without the ballast of the EU, our trade relationships are likely to suffer as our governments’ forced focus on domestic affairs diminishes the U.K.’s global authority.

Because there will be governments — plural and multiple — between now and 2026.

The chaos that was unleashed by the Brexit vote and the 2017 election-that-never-should-have-happened won’t have disappeared.

It is unlikely that either of the main political parties can survive in their current forms, given the pressures their internal coalitions are already under. The emergence of a new, centrist party would perhaps be a rare positive to follow on from Brexit; but even by 2026, that may still not be achievable.

And that necessary realignment won’t help us economically, at least not at first.

Major companies and financial bodies may not all have deserted us overnight but the general downgrading of Britain as a great power will have its own inexorable effect on our ability to attract talent.

Austerity was supposed to be out of fashion by now, but without money coming in from overseas, where are the taxes going to come from to fund the improved health care, increased student numbers and fabulous infrastructure we have been promised?

And by 2026, who will be left to work in those hospitals and universities, as our foreign nurses return home and we cease to become an international beacon for learning?

It is frightening to think of what other genies this tumultuous year will unleash, the impact of which will surely continue to be felt 10 years down the line.

The recent terrorist attacks on our streets are an assault on our way of life as much as they are our flesh and blood. If they continue, in a decade’s time no doubt we will be a little less tolerant as a nation, a little less open-hearted, a little less permissive.

And our laws might be adjusted accordingly. By 2026, who can tell what infringements to our civil liberties will have been introduced in the name of keeping us safe. And by then we won’t have recourse to Europe to stave them off, either.

Rosa Prince is the author of “Comrade Corbyn, A Very Unlikely Coup” (Biteback Publishing, February 2016).

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A throw of the dice

What a fine mess we are in. As author Robert Harris tweeted recently, “The Tories have trashed the country.” First, by holding that stupid referendum and then by calling an utterly unnecessary election that has rendered the country almost ungovernable. In both cases purely for the purpose of sorting out internal differences within their own party without regard for the national interest.

As much as I love Jeremy Corbyn, he’s no Messiah. And as prime minister, it’s unlikely he could fix this mess. Remarkable though it was, the recent election result was achieved by promising everything to everybody. Ultimately, that is undeliverable and will only lead to disillusion and disappointment.

I see only one way that Britain could be better off in 10 years than it is now — and it is a slim chance. Tony Blair’s government made a mistake when it decided to opt out of the seven-year moratorium on free movement that was on offer after the former Eastern bloc countries joined the European Union. We did so on the basis that the number of migrants from Eastern Europe was likely to be small, easily absorbed and that they would provide skills which were in short supply in the U.K.

Of course, as we now know, the scale of migration from Eastern Europe was neither of those things, and it fueled the anxiety about migration which, in turn, fueled the Brexit vote.

Might it be possible — just — to persuade our fellow EU members to offer us all or part of the moratorium to which we were entitled, but unwisely declined. Were they to do so, having addressed one of the principal causes of popular British dissatisfaction with the EU, there might then be a basis for holding a second referendum, giving us a chance to dig ourselves out of the deep, dark pit that we have dug for ourselves.

A long shot, I know. And one entirely dependent on the goodwill of our EU partners whose patience we have sorely tested. But surely it’s worth a throw of the dice. The alternative is a long slow decline into insularity and irrelevance. As of now, that is the most likely scenario.

Chris Mullin is an author and former Labour minister. His most recent book is “Hinterland: a memoir” (Profile Books, 2016).