Resetting the Country by Imploding the Party... and the Policy
Brexit fatigue, welcome policy U-turns, Rayner’s leaked memo — and why Labour’s biggest threat may eventually end up being itself
The government will claim victory over the optics of an EU reset — and for once, they might not be entirely wrong.
One small risk is that it will open old wounds on Brexit. The government can probably sustain this because the good thing is that it makes those complaining look like throwbacks from another era singing their greatest hits rather than providing any new material.
Incidentally, we can thank Boris Johnson for this.
Sort of.
Brexit fatigue, more than Brexit fervour, won the Conservatives their 2019 landslide. "Get it done" wasn’t a rallying cry — it was a mercy killing. Ironically, what followed was neither mercy nor finality. The government’s latest flirtation with a reset proves what everyone already suspects: Brexit was never done. Just deferred.
It's also deeply unfashionable in context of more pertinent and current issues. The fact that it dominated political discourse for so long brought the government's legislative agenda to a standstill — if the Conservatives sought to do anything positive between 2015 and 2020 (not that they were ever going to), it could not because talk of Brexit dominated all.
As such, the noise being generated from all of the usual quarters five years later could end up flying back in their faces.
Farage is an example of this; he can't cry ‘surrender’ now — not when his own past pitch looked suspiciously like what he now condemns. He once praised the Swiss model, conveniently skipping the parts about free movement, annual payments to Brussels, and eternal negotiations.
The fact that one can point out Farage’s shifting position on what Brexit looks like — and how it has evolved since he was UKIP leader — is part of the problem. Immediately, if you point out the shift, anybody who has vague memories of the social media ‘Brexit Wars’ from a decade ago will say, "hang on! I said this back in 2016!"
To save them the work and experience the sheer exasperation of having to dig out their old laptop filled with pro EU/anti-Farage memes - in their own dedicated folder - to point out the contradiction of what Farage is saying in 2025, here’s one Farage made earlier:
The Brexit wars are political dead weight. The faces are familiar, the arguments unchanged, and the contradictions just as glaring. Yet nobody wants to relive the fight — especially not the victors, who now have to defend the aftermath.
It isn't just because it's unfashionable, however.
Talk of Brexit is unpopular because since we left the EU, it's extremely hard for those who voted for it to justify their decisions (and the cost) when it doesn't look as though we got the sunlit uplands we were promised.