As prime minister, Keir Starmer should order a full public inquiry ... into Brexit

Even Nigel Farage agrees that Brexit has been a disaster. A judge-led inquiry could get to the bottom of how that happened, writes Tom Peck

Electoral politics is making it impossible for most politicians to tell the truth about the EU referendum (PA)

Britain’s future is outside the EU. Not in the single market, not in the customs union, not with a return to freedom of movement,” wrote Keir Starmer earlier this week, in the pages of the Daily Express.

He’s only been an MP since 2015. One has to suspect that if you could have told him then that within eight years these were the words he’d be coming out with, he’d have run a mile. Back then, nobody of note had dared come out with anything this radically right wing. These words would have landed Starmer well to the right of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks, indeed absolutely anyone.

Back then, Farage and co changed their mind every few weeks. Sometimes they were tempted by the “Norway model”, which they didn’t appear to understand meant remaining in the EU’s single market and thus accepting freedom of movement from other single market member countries. Or there was the possibility of joining the European Free Trade Association. Daniel Hannan and various others were well up for that, even though it meant remaining in the EU’s customs union, and therefore accepting almost all EU product regulations, making it essentially impossible to have an independent trade policy.

Starmer teed up these once radical words with the following: “Express readers deserve their politicians to be clear about where they stand. So let me spell it out simply.”

That is what counts for honesty in the year 2023. Being “clear about where you stand” means announcing that you now passionately believe in something you know to be a terrible idea. But Starmer knows he can’t say any differently. There’s an election coming and even though every poll on the subject shows a very clear majority of people in agreement that Brexit was a terrible idea, the divide is still sufficient to split both parties’ core vote. Remainers, in short, are easier for both parties to take for granted. There’s also the clear fact that people are so utterly weary of it that they’ve just privately reconciled themselves to a quiet life made worse.

But Labour will still need radical ideas from day one, they always do. (Gordon Brown granted independence to the Bank of England in his very first meeting with them).

So how about this one? Never mind the Covid inquiry, how about a public inquiry into Brexit? Not how it happened. We know how it happened. There was a referendum and the people voted for it.

But a public inquiry into everything that’s happened since. How it came to delivered so badly. How it came to be that, by the year 2023, people like Keir Starmer had to hold positions of Euroscepticism far more radical than anything anyone from Vote Leave dared utter seven years before.

On the basis that there is now near unanimous agreement that Brexit has been a disaster, there should be wide public support for the plan. Nigel Farage thinks it’s a disaster, he said so himself last week, so he can’t possibly object. And it’s clear to see that normal electoral politics are, by freakish coincidence, conspiring to make it impossible for almost any politician to tell the honest truth about it.

Jeremy Hunt is chancellor of the exchequer, he campaigned for and voted for Remain, he is currently trying to get to grips with terrifying inflation, but he can’t bring himself to repeat matters not of opinion, but of fact. Food inflation is currently soaring at a staggering 24 per cent, and analysis by the London School of Economics puts eight of those 24 percentage points down to trade barriers that are a direct result of Brexit. But he can’t come out and say it.

On Friday, a spokesperson for Boris Johnson was doing his best to deny an incredible story they know to be true. That in the negotiations for a trade deal with Australia, he caved in and allowed the weight of beef imports to be calculated with regard to the joints of meat in the cow, not the whole animal. A staggering concession that was so astonishingly bad for British farmers that the Australian negotiator rushed a message to the Australian High Commission, via a note scrawled out on a piece of toilet paper, then photographed, who then formally typed it out and had it rushed down the negotiations to be signed.

Johnson denies it, but nobody believes those denials, so a public inquiry it is, then.

A public inquiry could also look into how it was that he fought an election campaign on an “oven ready deal” that was absolutely not oven ready, and which he never understood. A public inquiry could investigate how he came to tell Northern Irish businesses that there would never be any customs checks in the Irish Sea, a promise that he either knew to be untrue, or should have known to be untrue. There are no other options.

By voting for Brexit, it is fair to say that a slim majority of the country chose sovereignty over economic prosperity. It was an extremely significant decision, and there is now a convincing weight of evidence that an extremely large number of people now believe they made the wrong choice.

Nobody voted for anything that came afterwards. Theresa May’s version of Brexit was put to the voters and they rejected it. Boris Johnson’s was put to the voters and they said yes, but then he rejected it.

Keir Starmer’s absurd words in the Daily Express make only one thing clear, and it’s not what he says. It is that it is beyond the wit of the two party system to level with voters about how badly Brexit has been pursued, even in the face of such widespread agreement that it has been disastrous.

If the country requires an inquiry to help it get over Covid, then why not Brexit? The pain is not going to go away on its own.