Brexit is putting Britain’s standards in jeopardy

In the run-up to the EU referendum, and in the weeks after it, one of the more absurd promises made was that Brexit was the breakthrough that would allow the UK to reassert its values in a troubled world. The first international trade secretary, Liam Fox, became very excited at thought of the country rejoining the World Trade Organisation as an independent member rather than through the European Union. Britain, apparently, was back.

It will come as a shock to no one, not merely that such an outcome has failed to come to pass, but that the opposite is true. Much was made, and is still being made, about the opportunities to sign new trade deals as an independent country. On countless occasions, we have been told that Brexit means the UK can insist on higher standards; that it enables Britain to make demands, in its negotiations with potential trading partners, on issues that the EU might have overlooked.

More recently, the current international trade secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, has given assurances to the House of Commons that “human rights” would play a role in any future trade deals, especially in those undertaken with Middle Eastern countries and with Gulf states that have a poor record on such matters.

A leaked document seen by The Independent has revealed that this promise is being quietly abandoned. Again, this is no surprise. The UK already sells huge volumes of weapons to Saudi Arabia, with scant concern for the fact that they are used by the Saudi government in the civil war in Yemen, which has been described by the UN as the world’s most severe humanitarian disaster. Why any government would use trade negotiations to make demands on human rights of a country to which it is already selling billions of pounds’ worth of weapons could hardly be less clear.

But it further illuminates Brexit’s central deception. The EU is a huge market, and the UK was once an enormously influential country within it (and could have been far more influential, had it chosen to be). The UK’s power to influence human rights abroad was far greater while it was a member than it is from the outside.

The trade department is still on a desperate mission to sign deals all around the world, in an ultimately impossible mission to make up for the damage caused by Brexit, and so it continues to accept whatever terms it might be offered, for scant economic benefit.

No doubt the Tories will continue to argue the case for human rights around the world, only to be undone by their actions. The next prime minister also looks set to continue extracting the cost of the resettlement of Ukrainian refugees from the international development budget, depriving some of the world’s least fortunate people of funds that really were being used to improve human rights.

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We will also have to see if the next prime minister bows to rising pressure to scale back the UK’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights – an action that large numbers of Tories, along with the elements of the media that exert pressure on them (including Nigel Farage), have convinced themselves will enable a solution to the growing small-boats crisis. It will not.

Most of Brexit’s biggest promises have been broken, but they were never made to be kept. Michael Gove promised to cut VAT on energy bills once Britain had left the EU. It hasn’t happened, in the middle of an energy crisis. He also promised “even higher” environmental standards. Instead, water companies have been liberated to flood the country’s prime swimming beaches with raw sewage, to the extent that small children on holiday in Devon and Cornwall and on the Sussex coast are not able to swim in the sea.

What remains to be seen is whether there will be an electoral cost for all of this. Brexit, by any fair assessment, is not proving to be all it was cracked up to be. If the people who voted for it start losing patience, then an already impossible job for the next prime minister will become even harder.