From its entry to the EEC in 1973 to its formal exit from the EU in 2020, the UK's commercial and trade policies were governed by a diverse and changing set of supranational rules and institutions. When the country joined the EEC it also joined a European customs union and Common Commercial Policy (CCP), removing tariffs on goods traded within Europe and adopting a common external tariff in relation to imports from outside Europe. When the EEC became the EU in 1992, and the single market became a reality, EU policy focused on removing “non-tariff barriers’ (NTBs): both within EU member states and in external FTAs with individual countries and trading blocs. This move reflects how the concept of “free trade” has shifted from a focus on eliminating tariffs on goods to harmonizing behind-the-border regulation of goods and services where “any divergence in regulatory practice” is increasingly viewed as “a trade irritant to be eliminated” (De Ville & Siles-Brugge 2018: 243). Tariffs have thus decreased while highly technical and complex regulatory concepts and processes continue to multiply. The single market, enshrining the free movement of goods as well as services, capital and people – the so-called four freedoms – at its core and setting its sights on NTBs, makes Europe the quintessential twenty-first-century liberal trade power.

In the wake of the 2016 EU referendum, the British Conservative Party under Theresa May chose to pursue a “hard” form of Brexit: fully exiting all EU economic institutions, from the customs union to the single market. The subsequent 2020 TCA, which, despite the rhetoric of the Johnson government, strongly reflected the outline deal negotiated by May before she was deposed, was remarkable in that, for the first time in modern trading history, two deeply integrated and highly proximate advanced economies signed an FTA that made commercial relations between them less free. The UK thereafter faced the painful task of reconstituting its trade panorama from a position that seriously disadvantaged its exporters. Moreover, it had to do so immediately, since, as noted in the book's Introduction, the TCA came into force essentially overnight.

Nowhere was the political debate on the free movement of people in the EU more heated and divisive than in Brexit Britain, including on the British left. But in government at the turn of the century, the Labour Party had enthusiastically supported the free movement regime. Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to immediately open UK labour markets to citizens of the new member states following the 2004 “big bang” enlargement, when he was not legally obliged to do so (Watt & Wintour 2015). For New Labour, this policy of opening had economic benefits and was consistent with a broader cosmopolitan Third Way ideology and its embrace of the EU as a single market (see Chapters 1 and 4). But the numbers of people that came to the UK from central and eastern Europe far exceeded the estimates (largely because they had assumed most member states, including Germany, would also open their labour markets in 2004) (Dustmann et al. 2003) and the issue grew in political salience, particularly after the 2007 economic crisis. As a result, long before the Brexit referendum in 2016, many in the Labour Party had come to regard Blair's 2004 decision as a spectacular policy failure: a critical juncture in the party's subsequent electoral decline. And with hindsight, given the breadth of opposition to the free movement regime by 2016, it is often regarded as a key moment in the country's drift towards Brexit (Constardine 2015; Geddes 2014; Evans & Mellon 2019).

Those associated with an old right Blue Labour and hard left anti-marketeer/ Lexiteer position discussed in Chapter 2 (position B, Figure 1.1), are among the most longstanding and vociferous critics of the free movement of persons regime. They opposed it in part for strategic reasons: as broad public opinion became critical of the regime it made little electoral sense to continue supporting the status quo. As we detail below, it was largely on this basis that many pro-European MPs in Labour and on the broader British left came to also express concerns about the party's positioning on the issue, both before and after the 2016 referendum.

In March 1998, Tony Blair gave the first-ever speech by a British prime minister to the French National Assembly. This coincided with the UK beginning its sixmonth rotating EU Council presidency. He delivered the speech in immaculate French to a parliament dominated by a Socialist Party sceptical of New Labour's market-friendly direction of travel. Blair emphasized the importance of “global political engagement” and insisted it was about more than simply “commercial exchange”, encompassing all areas of legal, social and cultural life. The “cohabitation” of French people living in Britain (and vice versa), he argued, was a great success worth celebrating. He remarked that his “neither laissez-faire nor rigidly statist” Third Way project sought to reconcile the supposed contradictions between free enterprise and competition, on the one hand, and social action and poverty reduction, on the other, in a world of rapid and inevitable economic and social change. He also came to “dispel any doubts” that the UK would be anything other than “a full partner of Europe”. Noting the country's absence from monetary union, he carefully suggested that the door remained open to joining in the future. He also discussed how fears of distant institutions and dilution of national identity drive Euroscepticism, arguing that purposeful reform and striking a balance between supranationalism and nationalism could ward them off by ensuring “integration, when justified; diversity permitted by subsidiarity, when not” (Blair 1998).

This represented a vision for Europe and, crucially, for Britain in Europe. At the time, it seemed like a watershed domestically. The battles that had disfigured and, when combined with Black Wednesday (see Keegan, Marsh & Roberts 2017), ultimately destroyed John Major's Conservative government over Maastricht just five years earlier appeared to be from an entirely different era. Blair's young, modern, metropolitan party wore its pro-European sympathies comfortably. It had changed the terms of debate decisively since coming to power with an enormous majority. From signing a Social Chapter that Major had resisted, to laying the groundwork for potential membership of the single currency, it was difficult to envisage anything other than the gradual intensification of meaningful UK participation in EU affairs. But what agenda would be pursued via that engagement?

During the 1975 referendum campaign, Roy Jenkins spoke of the implications of a no vote: ‘For Britain to withdraw from Europe would be to retire into an old people’s home for fading nations. I do not think it would be a very comfortable old people’s home … I do not like the look of some of the wardens’ (cited in Campbell 2015: 448). Jenkins was prescient. Nearly half a century after Britain’s first membership referendum and close to a decade after it voted, by a narrow margin, to leave the EU in 2016, post-Brexit Britain found itself to be a particularly uncomfortable ‘fading nation’. It lagged behind almost all other advanced industrial economies on almost every relevant indicator, including growth, productivity, real wages and inequality (OBR 2022). As for the wardens, the Conservative Party had elected five different leaders in fewer than ten years, having been consumed with infighting over the terms and content of Brexit. The cheerleaders who once promised to ‘guide Britain to the sunlit uplands’ could not muster a modicum of enthusiasm for the project, instead turning on each other for its failures.

For their part, many on the Eurosceptic British left were suggesting by the mid-2020s that leaving the EU had been a necessary but insufficient step towards transforming the nation into a more inclusive, sustainable and democratic state (see Chapter 2; Cunliffe et al. 2023). But it was not obvious what would constitute a sufficient step, nor how it could actually be achieved. Indeed, the Lexiteers own ‘sunlit uplands’ were apparently, just like those very different uplands of their right-wing Brexiteer fellow travellers, still just over the next hill. At the time of writing in early 2024, there was a very real risk that a Labour government and prime minister in waiting were succumbing to similar wishful thinking. Echoing Boris Johnson’s ‘get Brexit done’ slogan, the Labour leader Keir Starmer promised to ‘make Brexit work’. But it was entirely unclear how it could be made to work in support of any meaningfully progressive agenda.

Industrial policy was a key issue in debates leading up to and following the EU referendum. The 2007 GFC and its aftermath exacerbated stark disparities in the UK, which had been widening since the 1970s. The decline of mining, steel, shipbuilding and other manufacturing industries in the central and northern regions of Britain since the 1970s proceeded in parallel with the ongoing concentration of wealth in the City of London (see Chapter 7). Inner London is among the wealthiest regions in the EU, while as many as nine British regions are among the relatively poorest in Europe and the absolute poorest among other northern European industrial countries. By 2017, the UK recorded by far the largest gap between domestic regions as measured in GDP per capita. Inner London was over six times the EU average, with Luxembourg in second place at just two and a half times that average. Almost every region outside of the southeast was below, and in many cases well below, the EU mean. Notably, this EU average included the post-2004 central and eastern European accession countries (Eurostat 2019). At the same time, many wealthy EU states, in contrast, had registered declining regional inequality, even though the gaps between their richest regions and the poorest parts of the southern periphery (and the British periphery) had widened (see MacKinnon 2017).

The period of austerity following the 2008 GFC, and the election of the Cameron‒Clegg coalition government in 2010, with its subsequent pursuit of a radical austerity agenda, drastically exacerbated these inequalities. The 2010 coalition government invested less in public services, including the NHS, and infrastructure, including public transport links. They cut social support just as many citizens and their communities, reeling from the aftermath of the financial crisis, required further government assistance. The meagre economic growth that recommenced once the initial period of austerity abated did little to assuage this situation, and actually reinforced Britain's dysfunctional pre-crisis development model (see Berry 2013; Chapter 7). Brexit arose in this specific, even peculiar, context.