There’s a common thread for most of the malaise in Britain: Brexit

There was a point a few years ago, in 2019 I think, when writing about Brexit began to feel like having lost a bet. I’d left a full-time reporting job two years earlier for a range of reasons, one of them being that I could not face the prospect of writing about the B-word every day for months and years.

I then spent some time writing around Brexit; trying to avoid it whenever I could and, when I couldn’t, opting for quirky or obscure angles. I wished something would finally knock it off the political agenda and, somewhere in the distance, a monkey’s paw had curled.

Until recently I did not write about Brexit and neither did most political journalists. There were, you may have noticed, bigger things to worry about. Still, with the virus now becoming less of a concern, other topics have begun returning to the surface.

The only problem, really, is that I cannot even begin to make myself pay attention. Brexit in 2022 reminds me of the alien in Matt Smith’s first episode of Doctor Who; the one that hid just out of the corner of your eye, that your brain refused to focus on even though it knew something was in the room with you. At times it feels like the opposite of a superpower; show me anything that mentions Brexit and my brain will turn to static.

It is an issue, both because it is my job to care about these things and because, more broadly, Brexit is still everywhere we look. There is the row about the Northern Ireland protocol bill, obviously, but it is only the tip of the iceberg.

“You have exhausted ministers, you have exhausted people in opposition, who have exhausted constituency MPs”, well-liked Conservative MP Charles Walker told The i over the weekend. Walker is standing down at the next election; after 17 years in the Commons, he has decided that he just doesn’t have “the stomach for it”.

How many more respected parliamentarians are planning to leave soon, bruised by, among other things, the Brexit wars? How many will stay but not be as effective as they could have been, knackered and unwilling to cause more infighting?

And then there is the country at large. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, Brexit has so far reduced Britain’s GDP by about 1.5 per cent, with another 2.5 per cent still to come. Brexit has also reduced UK trade by 15 per cent. Of course, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have made things tough for many other countries, but we remain in an overall worse position, with higher inflation and lower economic growth.

Still, we do not really talk about it. The think tank UK in a Changing Europe released new analysis on the impact Brexit has had on the country recently, to little fanfare. It feels absurd; the referendum and ensuing fallout changed the British political landscape in a very fundamental way yet, six years later, we have seemingly moved on. It feels like a psychological phenomenon ripe for future generations to study. An earthquake, some devastation, then silence.

“Understand how many people remain determined to prevent Brexit from actually meaning anything”, chief secretary to the Treasury Simon Clarke tweeted on Sunday, “and you understand 90 per cent of contemporary British politics”.

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He wasn’t entirely wrong, but perhaps not in the way he’d intended. It is true that the country seems stuck on the topic, but it is everyone’s fault. The diehard Brexiteers unwilling to accept that Brexit has not been wholly good are unhelpful. The diehard Remainers insisting on pointing out every drawback and nothing else aren’t being productive either.

Finally, the vast grey area in between, where people – myself included – just want to be left alone is less than ideal. It doesn’t matter if they are bitter but resigned Remain voters, ashamed Brexit voters or dispassionate agnostics; Brexit will not stop shaping the country anytime soon. It cannot be ignored.

It may be unpleasant and frustrating at times but we do not have a choice; I did not want to start writing about Brexit again but, sometimes, needs must. What do we want Britain to look like in five years? Ten years? Fifteen? It is an important question, perhaps the biggest one at any given time in politics, and it cannot be answered truthfully if we do not take our recent past into account.

Just don’t ask me to care about Lord Frost. We all have our limits.