The Department for Business and Trade published a glossy Brexit Fourth Anniversary Update to mark the fourth anniversary of the UK’s EU departure. Purporting to provide “an overview of Britain's Brexit successes over the last four years”, the document has Kemi Badenoch's fingerprints all over it. Or her photos, at least, taking up two precious pages out of 24.

“The statistics and successes contained within the pages of this booklet tell a powerful story,” her lengthy Foreword intones. As powerful as many another work of fiction. The Foreword continues: “When we left the European Union, there were many forecasts of inevitable decline. These have been proved false.”

If anything is begging to be proven false, it is this blatant propaganda exercise. Accompany me on a stroll through some of its more egregious exaggerations and distortions.

“This newfound agility was crucial in helping us get through the pandemic with the fastest vaccine roll out in Europe – which in turn allowed us to re-open our economy even sooner.”

The false claim of a connection between the COVID-19 vaccine and Brexit seems harder to kill than the villain in a horror franchise. It has been disproven by the UK medicines regulator, by Full Fact, by the BBC and Channel 4 fact checking teams, by the Institute for Government, and by numerous other credible sources. And yet it continues to linger like a turd too buoyant to flush.

“My department has negotiated free trade agreements with 73 countries from Mexico to Malaysia. And we have secured the most comprehensive deal that the EU has ever agreed to in its history.”

Almost all are rollover copies of the ones we enjoyed as an EU member. Important aspects of our temporary Canada deal have recently fallen away, with negotiations to replace them at an acrimonious standstill. The UK’s Australia and NZ trade deals put British beef, sheep and dairy farmers at risk by removing all import quotas over time. By contrast, the EU’s own deal with NZ preserves quotas indefinitely. As for that most comprehensive deal with the EU itself, it is like a rusted-up piston compared to fully frictionless EU membership.

“The UK will also shortly be joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. It will make over 99% of UK goods eligible for zero tariffs in some of the world’s most dynamic economies.”

We already have trade deals with all but one CPTPP member, so this is likely to produce pitiful incremental improvement. Indeed, official government projections peg it at just 0.04% of GDP in the long run. And that’s if Canada agrees to ratify our accession to the group, as unanimity is required.

“Within the EU, the UK would not have been able to cut VAT on the installations of solar panels, heat pumps and insulation to zero.”

This statement harks back to a lost past. The EU isn’t frozen like an ant in amber; it evolves. Its VAT regulations changed in April 2022, and Germans currently pay no VAT on solar panels and batteries.

Watch Byline TV's documentary with Mike Galsworthy

“We listened to industry and announced proposals that will increase flexibility for businesses who manufacture and sell products on the GB market. This includes continued recognition of CE rules alongside the introduction of UKCA rules, which will reduce burdens and increase flexibility for businesses.”

Misleading. This applauds the non-imposition of a ridiculous new regime, the UKCA. But businesses are not benefitting from extra flexibility. Nor is their burden being reduced. It is merely not increasing. The retention of the status quo should not be passed off as a benefit.

Related aside: The Tories deployed an identical tactic in their PR for incoming border checks. Their press release on the subject included this helpful note to editors:

“Government analysis estimates that traders will save around £520m per annum under the new model”.

But that figure is benchmarked against an older, never-executed plan. When benchmarked against the reality of the pre-checks status quo, traders won’t save anything. Indeed, their costs will soar by hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

“Since leaving the EU, the UK has secured market access for UK steel and aluminium into the US market. We ended the US ban on British beef and lamb, markets estimated by industry to be worth £66 million and £37 million to UK exporters respectively over the next 5 years”

Another boastful claim that fails to account for the EU’s dynamic nature. In reality, the UK has played catch-up at every stage. The USA lifted its tariffs on EU steel in January 2022, while it took until June 2022 for UK steel to enjoy normal access again. EU beef was allowed back into the US in stages from 2015, but market access to UK beef was only granted in March 2020. Had we stayed in the EU, things would have improved quicker.

“The UK has signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with seven US states with a combined GDP of £3.4 trillion, similar to the GDP of Germany”

This is like describing a plan to buy a chocolate bar from Tesco as potentially being worth £20 billion, the total market cap of the company. MoU are not trade deals. They are also not legally binding, a fact emphasised by FCDO guidance: “A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) records international commitments, but in a form and with wording which expresses an intention that it is not to be binding as a matter of international law”.

“In February 2023, the UK and Italy agreed a trade partnership to boost exports, help create jobs, increase wages, and grow the economy. The partnership has strengthened our post-Brexit export and investment links with Italy and boosted a trade relationship worth £51 billion”

Italy is in the EU. Logic dictates that we could have concluded the same arrangement while still a member.

“Keeping our own tariff revenue to spend on public services rather than sending it to the EU.”

Although tariffs are imposed on importers, they usually end up being passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. So this statement is celebrating UK consumers effectively being forced to funnel additional tariff revenue to HMRC.

The points above cover the document’s worst offences, but plenty of smaller devils lurk in the detail. Given its copious flaws, it should be impossible to take anything this booklet says seriously. And yet our right-wing press are already according it the same unquestioning reverence as if it were carved on tablets of stone.

I’ve always thought that adopting the Northern Ireland rules provides Labour with an acceptable way out of the EU dilemma. After all Northern Ireland is (for now at least!) actually one part of the UK… To adopt Northern Ireland rules throughout the UK clearly would not be ideal – but it would be a start…... Read more

Rishi Sunak’s Government has, over the Christmas break, quietly and unceremoniously dropped proposed plans to legislate for the large-scale increased use of the imperial system in the UK. It tried to hide the humiliating announcement behind a fanfare of publicity for a proposal to allow the sale of still and sparkling wine in pints – supposedly Churchill’s favoured measure of champagne.

It’s an embarrassing row-back on a project which began in earnest in the summer of 2022. Twenty months ago, Boris Johnson’s Government shared a public consultation on one of the then Prime Minister’s signature “Brexit Dividends” – the greater use of imperial weights and measures in the UK.

The survey was assembled by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), then under the oversight of the minister charged with identifying “Brexit Benefits”, Jacob Rees-Mogg. As many commentators pointed out at the time, the consultation survey itself was poorly constructed and strongly biased in favour of Mogg’s stated preference – increased use of the imperial system. It contained questions like

“If you had a choice, would you want to purchase items:

giving no option, for example, to express a preference for metric alone.

Originally, options for responding to the form were also limited, with respondents being asked to download a form, fill it in and email or post it back. Only after a public outcry was an online form made available to allow a more universally accessible way for respondents to share their opinions.

Despite these obstacles commentators were keen to encourage people to make their feelings on this important issue heard. And over the course of the consultation more than 100,000 people felt sufficiently moved to do just that. The feedback received was overwhelmingly in favour of the metric system. Just 0.4% of respondents (400 people) favoured moving to a completely imperial system, while 98.7% were in favour of allowing the use of metric alongside imperial (the current status quo) or metric only.

In the face of such strong opposition, the Government had little choice but to backtrack on their plans. However, the fact that the consultation was proposed and executed in the first place smacks of a government woefully out of touch with their electorate and indeed with the practicalities of modern science and business.

Seemingly the whole affair was never anything more than a plan to stoke an under-fuelled culture war designed to reinforce the divisions introduced by Brexit. The consultation document talks hyperbolically of the “ban on the use of imperial units for sales and marking”, but it has never been illegal to sell products in imperial measurements. The EU Weights and Measures Directive, introduced in 2000, simply required that metric be displayed as well (except in a small number of exceptional cases) and be at least as prominent as the imperial measure.

Upon hearing of the plans being dropped, Jacob Rees-Mogg, champion of the original survey, said “It is hard to see why this harmless little measure is not being implemented, especially as our largest trading ­partner, the United States, still uses imperial units."

Setting aside the fact that the EU is still by far the UK’s largest trading partner, Rees-Mogg is also incorrect about the United States using imperial units.

Whilst it is true that the US remains one of only three countries worldwide not to make extensive use of a metric system, their US customary units are not the same as the UK’s imperial measurements. An imperial pint is 1.2 pints in the US. A US gallon is approximately 0.83 imperial gallons. Either Rees-Mogg knew this and hoped that the rest of the country would buy his weak justification, or he didn’t and was himself ignorant of the difference between the two anachronistic measurement systems.

Indeed, the story of the United States’ Mars Climate orbiter, presents a cautionary tale of the use of mixed measurement systems – US customary units for most everyday usages and metric for science and engineering.

Software controlling the Orbiter’s thrusters was designed to send out data in US customary units. NASA, one of the foremost scientific institutions of the world, was, unsurprisingly, expecting those measurements in standard international metric units. As a result of the mix up, when trying to reach its final altitude, the Orbiter fired its main thruster too vigorously and consequently was sucked too far into the Martian atmosphere where it disintegrated.

In an echo of the Mars orbiter, the Government’s out-of-touch plans for greater use of imperial units have spectacularly fallen apart. As Conservative MP Alicia Kearns tweeted at the time “This isn’t a Brexit freedom. It’s a nonsense”, but hopefully, in light of the consultation response, a nonsense that won’t have to be dealt with again any time soon.

In Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash reflects on European history and political transformation from the mid-20th century to the present. Deftly interweaving analysis with personal narratives, Garton Ash offers a compelling exploration of recent European history and how its lessons can help us navigate today’s challenges, writes Mario Clemens.

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. Timothy Garton Ash. The Bodley Head. 2023.

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Almost ten years ago, I heard the then-German Foreign Minister (and current Federal President) Frank-Walter Steinmeier say that we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that in the near future, crises will become the norm. What sounded like a somewhat eccentric assessment now appears to be an apt description of our reality, including in Europe. How did we get here?

As Timothy Garton Ash argues in Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Western Liberals made the mistake of relying on the unfounded assumption that history would simply continue to go their way. Post-cold-war-liberals failed, for example, to care enough about economic equality (237) and thus allowed Liberalism to make way for its ugly twin, Neoliberalism.

Western Liberals made the mistake of relying on the unfounded assumption that history would simply continue to go their way.

Whether we want to understand Islamist Terrorism, the rise of European right-wing populism, or Russia’s revanchist turn, in each case we find helpful hints in recent European history. What makes Garton Ash the ideal guide through the “history of the present” is his three-dimensional experience: that of a historian, a widely travelled and prominent journalist and a politically active intellectual.

What makes Garton Ash the ideal guide through the “history of the present” is his three-dimensional experience: that of a historian, a widely travelled and prominent journalist and a politically active intellectual.

Garton Ash started travelling across Europe fresh out of school, “working on a converted troopship, the SS Nevada, carrying British schoolchildren around the Mediterranean” (27). Aged 18, he was already keeping a journal on what he saw, heard and read.

He nurtured that journalistic impulse and soon merged it with a more active political one, eventually becoming the “engaged observer” (Raymond Aron) that he desired to be. In the early 1980s, he sat with workers and intellectuals in the Gdańsk Shipyard, where the Polish Solidarity movement (Solidarność) emerged. Later in the 1980s, he befriended Václav Havel, the Czech intellectual dissident and eventual President. Garton Ash chronicled and participated in the movement led by Havel, which successfully achieved the peaceful transition of Czechoslovakia from one-party communist rule to democracy. Since then, Garton Ash has consistently enjoyed privileged access to key political figures, such as Helmut Kohl, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair and Aung San Suu Kyi. Simultaneously, he has maintained contact with so-called ordinary people. All the while, he has preserved the necessary distance intellectuals require to do their job, which in his view “is to seek the truth, and to speak truth to power” (173). His training as a historian, provides him with a broader perspective, which, in Homelands, allows him to arrange individual scenes and observations into an encompassing, convincing narrative.

Garton Ash has published several books focusing on particular themes, such as free speech, and events, such as the peaceful revolutions of 1989. In addition, he has published two books containing collected articles that cover a decade each. History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s and Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name, which covers the timespan between 2000 and 2010. Homelands now not only covers a larger timespan, the “overlapping timeframes of post-war and post-wall” (xi) – 1945 and 1989 to the present – but the chapters are also more tightly linked as had been possible in books that were based on previous publications.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century we had, for the first time ever, a generation of Europeans who had known nothing but a peaceful, free Europe consisting mainly of liberal democracies.

“Freedom and Europe” says Garton Ash, are “the two political causes closest to my heart” (xi), and he had the good fortune to witness a period where freedom was expanding within Europe. Now that history seems to be running in reverse gear, he worries that this new generation don’t quite realise what’s at stake: “By the second decade of the twenty-first century we had, for the first time ever, a generation of Europeans who had known nothing but a peaceful, free Europe consisting mainly of liberal democracies. Unsurprisingly, they tend to take it for granted’ (23-24).

Thus, one critical aim motivating Homelands is to convey to a younger generation what has been achieved by the “Europe-builders,” men and women who have been motivated by what Garton Ash calls the “memory machine,” the vivid memory of the hell Europe had turned itself into during its modern-day Thirty Years War (21-22). While nothing can equal this “direct personal memory,” he argues that there are other ways “in which knowledge of things past can be transmitted” – via literature, for instance, but also through history (24), especially when written well.

A gifted stylist, Garton Ash makes history come alive by telling the stories of individuals

A gifted stylist, Garton Ash makes history come alive by telling the stories of individuals, for instance, that of his East German friend, the pastor Werner Krätschell. On Thursday evening, 9 November 1989, Werner had just come home from the evening church service in East Berlin. When his elder daughter Tanja and her friend Astrid confirmed the rumour that the frontier to West Berlin was apparently open, Werner decided to see for himself. Taking Tanja and Astrid with him, he drove to the border crossing at Bornholmer Strasse. Like in a trance, he saw the frontier guard opening the first barrier. Next, he got a stamp on his passport – “invalid”. “‘But I can come back?’ – ‘No, you have to emigrate and are not allowed to re-enter,’” the border guard replied. Horrified because his two younger children were sleeping in the vicarage, “Werner did a U-turn inside the frontier crossing and prepared to head home. Then he heard another frontier guard tell a colleague that the order had changed: ‘They’re allowed back.’ So he did another U-turn, to point his yellow Wartburg again towards the West” (146).

History, written in this way, “as experienced by individual people and exemplified by their stories” (xiii), may indeed help us to “learn from the past without having to go through it all again ourselves” (24).

Though he emphasises the wealth, freedom and peace in late 20th-century Europe, Garton Ash also reminds us that post-war European history, even its “post-wall” period, is not an unqualified success story.

Though he emphasises the wealth, freedom and peace in late 20th-century Europe, Garton Ash also reminds us that post-war European history, even its “post-wall” period, is not an unqualified success story. Notably, right after the Cold War, there were the hot wars accompanying the dissolution of Yugoslavia. He regards the fact that the rest of Europe “permitted this ten-year return to hell” as “a terrible stain on what was otherwise one of the most hopeful periods of European history” (187).

Garton Ash is equally alert to the danger of letting one’s enthusiasm for Europe’s post-war achievements turn into self-righteousness. “That post-war Europe abjured and abhorred war would have been surprising news to the many parts of the world, from Vietnam to Kenya and Angola to Algeria, where European states continued to fight brutal wars in an attempt to hang on to their colonies” (327).

While such warnings qualify and differentiate Homelands’ central message – that today’s Europeans have much to lose – they do not reverse it. But knowing that one is bound to lose a lot can also have a paralysing effect, as many of my generation currently experience. Here again, history can help: to understand our present, we need to know what brought us here. Garton Ash is convinced that we can learn from history; he, for instance, claims that the rest of Europe should “learn the lessons of Brexit” (279).

Those who seek orientation through a better understanding of the past should turn to this extraordinary, eminently readable exploration of recent European history.

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe perfectly complements Tony Judt’s extensive Postwar (published in 2005). While Judt’s work offers a detailed and systematic account of European history after 1945, Garton Ash’s book seamlessly blends personal narratives, insightful analysis, and astute critique. Those who seek orientation through a better understanding of the past should turn to this extraordinary, eminently readable exploration of recent European history.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: struvictory on Shutterstock.