The paradox of Brexit is that, if this ultra-free market project incubated by the hard right is to have any chance of success, it must trigger an unprecedented wave of economic and social activism, mobilisation and intervention. A project conceived by Thatcherite ultras who wanted to throw off the regulatory “yoke” of Brussels and sclerotic Europe can only deliver to the disillusioned, left-behind people who correctly wanted a dramatic change in the status quo by a massive state-led restructuring of the way Britain works. They did not vote Leave for an intensification of free-market globalisation and more libertarian carelessness about the condition of the country beyond London. To make a success of Brexit, Britain has to become more European.
This book, arguing that Brexit requires and will cause a great, state-directed, British reboot, exemplifies the paradox. For large parts I was cheering the author along with his searing account of how Britain has decadently sold so many of its strategic assets overseas, while offering a rollicking (and highly readable) account of Britain’s remaining and undersung strengths in high technology, financial services, universities, pharmaceuticals and the creative industries. What we have to do, declares this convert to Brexit, is to abandon free-market decadence and instead demand the public and private sectors seriously get behind our economic strengths as they never have before. And that must be accompanied by federalising the country, renewing our shot-through social contract with, for example, an innovative social insurance scheme for social care, giving local government the autonomy to tax and borrow, supporting key institutions such as the BBC as key underpinnings of the creative industries and overhauling everything from how companies are governed and owned to how we organise training.
I agree with almost all of this long list of liberal, radical centrist reforms. Like Alex Brummer, my former Guardian colleague and now the much liked and respected City editor of the Daily Mail, I too opposed the sale of Britain’s hi-tech jewel Arm to Japan’s Softbank in the months after Brexit and, like him, thought the claim by the May government and Nigel Farage that it proved that Britain was “open for business” was mindless babble. Great countries don’t pawn their strategic assets to the extent Britain does – to do so betrays deep structural weaknesses. I too was horrified by the City’s and the government’s indulgence of the opportunistic American bids for Unilever and AstraZeneca and delighted they were fought off by chief executives who, importantly, were both European nationals who wanted to protect European assets. But to lay so many of our ills – whether the malfunctioning state, supine institutional shareholders or the crazed housing market – directly or indirectly at the door of the EU is stretching credulity beyond limits.
A vignette is his comparison of the way last year Germany gave a Rolls-Royce subsidiary £500m to support a hybrid power project while the UK could find only a paltry £18m to support the company’s development of small, modular nuclear reactors. The UK must be more ambitious, he declares. He is right. But how come Germany, groaning under EU “shackles” that allegedly prevent state support and simultaneously so tied into the European economy, can both find such cash and be triumphantly successful exporting to China? Maybe the EU isn’t the enemy of British enterprise he thinks it is.
It’s the question inevitably posed as you read the uplifting chapters – a kind of love letter to British enterprise – on a succession of successful British industries, companies and individuals – Stormzy, Formula One, Premier League football, financial technology, Burberry, Darktrace, AstraZeneca and many more. All this success was generated while we were in the EU and was partly caused by it. For example, I know Oxford well, having been principal of an Oxford college for nine years, and Brummer rightly praises its research and spin-outs. But Oxford’s (now impossible) leadership of EU-wide research projects, while launching a wave of startups with access to the European single market, has been integral to that success, as it has to all our top research-intensive universities. The university has had to create an arm in Berlin, to qualify as being inside the EU, to try to offset the mortal threat to its capacity to continue in the same way. It is third-best to being a full EU member.
Brummer deplores some of the egregious pay awards at the top of British business, hardly justified by the underlying performance on growth and productivity. Too much of British business is not made up of the innovators he praises, but, rather, quasi-monopolists milking their market dominance to extract high profits, achieve short-term share performance and thus extravagant bonuses. His suggested reforms will have to go much further to tackle this, but these deformations are firmly made in the UK. They have nothing to do with Brussels or its alleged shackles.
But maybe he and I could both be right. We largely share an analysis of what is wrong and what needs to be done – a reset-cum-reboot of British capitalism and a remade social contract accompanied by the political federalisation of the country. It may take Brexit to jolt Britain into developing fit-for-purpose, lookalike European institutions, but I have the severest doubts that Johnson’s cabinet of placemen and women have the conviction and ability to fashion such change. Theirs is not the supercharged Heseltinian tradition now needed. The necessity, though, will become ever more obvious. Meanwhile, as the fabled land of wonderful trade deals and global Britain turns into the ashes of economic and political marginalisation and slow growth, a Britain more at ease with its need to Europeanise – and a humbled political right – will have to accept that the only viable British future is with the continent of which we are part. Brummer’s book, the ultimate paradox, is part of the long road to that ultimate destination.
• The Great British Reboot: How the UK Can Thrive in a Turbulent World by Alex Brummer is published by Yale University Press (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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