Opinion | The Weird Silence About Brexit’s Disastrousness

This mess was, of course, both predictable and predicted. That’s why I’ve been struck, visiting the U.K. this summer, by the curious political taboo against discussing how badly Brexit has gone, even among many who voted against it. Seven years ago, Brexit was an early augur of the revolt against cosmopolitanism that swept Donald Trump into power. (Trump even borrowed the “Mr. Brexit” moniker for himself.) Both enterprises — Britain’s divorce from the E.U. and Trump’s reign in the U.S. — turned out catastrophically. Both left their countries fatigued and depleted. But while America can’t stop talking about Trump, many in the U.K. can scarcely stand to think about Brexit.

“It’s so toxic,” Tobias Ellwood, a Tory lawmaker who has called on his colleagues to admit that Brexit was a mistake, told me. “People have invested so much time and pain and agony on this.” It’s like a “wound,” he said, that people want to avoid picking at. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, one of the few Labour Party leaders eager to discuss the consequences of leaving the E.U., described an “omertà,” or vow of silence, around it. “It’s the elephant in the room,” he told me. “I’m frustrated that no one’s talking about it.”

Part of the reason that no one — or almost no one — is talking about Brexit’s consequences lies with the demographics of the Labour Party. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of Labour voters supported Brexit, and those voters are concentrated in the so-called Red Wall — working-class areas in the Midlands and Northern England that once solidly supported Labour but swung right in the 2019 election. “Those voters do not want to have a conversation about Brexit,” said Joshua Simons, the director of Labour Together, a think tank close to Labour leadership.

Sheer exhaustion also contributes to making Brexit talk unwelcome: Between the vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the final agreement in 2020, the issue consumed British politics, and many people just want to move on. Simons argues there’s also a third factor: a sense that the results of a democratic referendum must be honored. He cites a point that a mentor of his, the political philosopher Danielle Allen, made after the 2016 vote. “In the end, in democracy, sometimes you all do crazy things together,” Simons said. “And what becomes more important is not whether the crazy thing was a good or bad thing to do. It’s that you’re doing it together.”

As someone from a far more polarized country, I found this idea somewhat foreign. If the Trumpist electorate had imposed such a costly and ultimately unpopular policy on the country, I suspect there would be a rush among Democrats to reverse it. But in the U.K., referendums — which are rare and held only to address major issues — have a political gravity that it’s hard for an outsider like me to understand.