 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the director of research here at the IIA in Dublin. I'm most sincere welcome to this event today, this webinar on what went wrong with Brexit and what can we do about it. We're delighted most sincerely to be joined by Peter Foster, public policy editor at the Financial Times and former Europe editor at the Telegraph, who'll be a stranger to nobody on the call, I imagine. Peter is going to be talking about the content of his recent book, which is the same title as this webinar, which is published by Canon Gate, which I can strongly recommend to anybody. Our chair today is Professor Katie Hayward. I'm delighted that Katie has taken the time to be with us. Katie is the Queen's University Belfast Professor of Political Sociology, working in and on the island of Ireland on topics including Brexit, protocol, the border and much else. Thank you both to our chair and to our speaker today and for all of our audience and I'm very happy now to hand over to Katie. Thanks. Thank you very much Barry and thanks to you and the team for inviting me to chair this session. It's a great pleasure and an honour to chair Peter. So I would like also to commend the IIA on the timing of this. You couldn't get a better speaker for the week that's in it and we're really looking forward to hearing what you're going to say, Peter. In relation to your book on what went wrong with Brexit and what we can do about it. So Peter is going to speak for about 20 minutes or so and then we will go to Q&A. You can see the Q&A function there. Please type in your question, including your name and affiliation please and we'll come to those as soon as Peter's finished his presentation. A quick reminder that the presentation and the Q&A are both on the record today and you can join the discussion on X using the handle at IIA. Please tag us in any posts that you share about the event. So to introduce Peter, he is a journalist, author and the public policy editor at the Financial Times in a career spanning almost 30 years. He's reported across Europe, Asia and the US and his current brief covers almost sorry all aspects of UK policy, including skills, investment and the implementation of Brexit. His book, What Went Wrong with Brexit and What We Can Do About It, was published in September last year. He joined the Financial Times in April 2020 from the Daily Telegraph where he'd held the position of Europe editor since 2015, focusing on the Brexit negotiations. And I was reflecting, Peter, the first time I saw you in person, I don't know if you remember this, was at the All Island Civic Dialogue in Dundalk. In April, May 2018, it seemed much longer ago actually than 2018, been quite a journey since much of which is recounted in your book. And we look forward very much to hearing you talk about that now. So hand over to you. Thank you. Thanks a million, Katie. You know, that does not seem that long ago, although, you know, here we are on the fourth anniversary. Greetings everyone from Brexit land. The fourth anniversary yesterday, of course, was the moment where the last piece of legal legacy from the 2017 joint report was finally cleaned up. Remember that joint report where the UK agreed a national alternative solution was found to remain, keep Northern Ireland remained aligned with the European Union. You know, that is nearly eight years ago, four years since we left the European Union. And in the 20 minutes that I've got, I just want to talk, I think, a little bit about what went wrong with Brexit, really, because I don't think you can have a proper discussion about what to do about it until you've understood why it went wrong and why it so roiled British politics. And I think, you know, going back to that period, 2018, I'd say there were two words that sum up the kind of big problem with Brexit. And they were uttered by Boris Johnson at a parliamentary or other diplomatic reception for the Queen's birthday. I think it was in the Belgium embassy and someone came up to him and said, Foreign Secretary, what are all these complaints for business? What are they going to do about rules of origin? What are they going to do about custom checks? What are they going to do about regulatory divergence? What are they going to do about their supply chains that they spent 30 years integrating into Europe? And Johnson's response famously in a story that was actually printed in the telegraph and broken by my former colleague, James Crispin, myself, was, as we all know, F-business. And I think it's worth interrogating why Johnson said that and what it says about the way in which the British political establishment responded to the challenges of Brexit. It wasn't a considered response. It wasn't a response that acknowledged the complexities of what leaving the single market would mean. It was an expression of frustration, an Anglo-Saxon expression of frustration, of fundamental incoherence, F-business. I don't care. You know, I just want to do this. I just want to be free. I just want to leave. And I think when you apply that filter to pretty much everything that happened next, that's where you end up. So when Parliament tried to stop a no-deal Brexit as Johnson was dicing with the European Commission, you know, Johnson's response was F Parliament. He tried to paroch it. And when the judges ruled unanimously that the prorogation was illegal, the response was F the judges, F the judiciary. And, you know, that, I'm afraid, kind of speaks to the fundamental incoherence of the British state's response to the Brexit conundrum, which was fundamentally complicated. I think it also speaks to the fact that, and you see this even now, Boris Johnson talking in a tweet after the DUP deal that came out yesterday, that we mustn't let the tail wag the dog. We mustn't allow us to be creeping into alignment with the European Union because we need to seize the deregulatory benefits of Brexit. And as I outlined in the book, you know, that is born of a sort of mythical view that somehow the UK was this hyper-competitive, innovative economy that was being held back by the sclerosis of the European Union. We were famously shackled to a corpse and that somehow by being outside the European Union, we would benefit from being nimbler and quicker and, you know, more innovative. Of course, the truth is that that view of the world fundamentally failed to understand what the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties have done, what had happened to supply chains as they'd integrated over the 30 or 40 years since the UK had joined the EU. And that basic understanding is still not really filtering into the public discussion of Brexit. You've still got Johnson and Frost saying we need to cling to this idea that there's a deregulatory crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. And I think, you know, that brings us to the kind of other big misunderstanding about Brexit, which was that the UK was much more deeply integrated into the EU than the political and public conversation had admitted. And so what you find now is that not only did British trade suffered significantly as a result of the borders that we erected, the reverse trade deal that we effectively did with our largest market. I mean, extraordinary to step back for a minute and think that the same people who were arguing that Buccaneering Britain would prosper by lowering trade barriers with distant trade partners, by doing trade deals with India and Australia and New Zealand would at the same moment raise trade barriers with the market that took half our trade. In fact, a market that third quarter of 2023 took 53% of our trade, not because trade is booming with Europe, but because actually we've struggled to grow our trade with the rest of the world, particularly as, you know, actually trade is regionalising at the moment, all that business about near-shoring. But that parenthesis aside, what you see is a slow dawning. And this is, I think, reflected in the public opinion polls that show British opinions souring on Brexit, a slow dawning of how actually life is much more complicated and much more integrated than the original sort of political pitch, economic pitch, Sonny Upland's pitch for Brexit admitted. And I'd say that the next piece of that puzzle is understanding that if you look at the trade surveys, understanding that that pain increases over time, that there is a baked in structural uncertainty as a result of the UK's relationship with the EU post-Brexit. So in the old days, of course, regulation came much that we've got, the regulation came down the pipe from Brussels, it was enacted into UK law, business often complained about it, but it was the route by which business access to common market of 500 million people. What we see now, of course, is what I call Brexit 2.0 issues, where actually the European Union is regulating on carbon border taxes, is a good example, supply chain, due diligence, plastic packaging taxes. And what you see is that business is consistently saying that actually trading with Europe is getting if anything harder, not easier. And I think that also hasn't been fully internalised, that every turn of the regulatory wheel in Brussels poses a question in London, and the horizon scanning that's required in London to make a decision about where you effectively align, bearing in mind that alignment doesn't get you access, or where you diverge creates a huge amount of bandwidth problem for the British civil service, and for businesses that are scanning the horizon and trying to make decisions about where they want to invest. And so when you add all that together, I don't think it's entirely surprising that Brexit has damaged the UK's trade, our trade intensity has been, which is a portion of trade, exports, imports added together as share of GDP, it's the lowest in the G7 since Brexit. You see a dawning, I think, among the public that Brexit has actually made things more expensive, it's made it harder to get stuff from Europe, it has raised the cost of living, it has made the NHS less robust than it was, harder to get skilled people, and I think that has opened the door, going on to what to do about it, has opened the door to a new government that doesn't carry the same baggage as this government to try and reopen the discussion with Europe. Now, if the opinion polls are to be believed, that it will be, of course, Secure Starmer, the head of a Labour government with a majority, depending on which polls you believe, but probably a relatively decent-sized majority. Now, Starmer has said that he won't rejoin the EU single market and he won't join the customs union. And so, you know, if you plug those two red lines into the machine in the European Commission and you wind the handle, what drops out at the bottom is something very like the trade and cooperation agreement which Labour likes to derive, the deal that Boris Johnson signed. So, the question I ask in the book is not whether the UK should rejoin, but it's what can you do within those parameters without being overly cakest? And I think Labour will look to do two or three things. The first thing they will do, bearing in mind what's happened in the decades since we voted to leave. So, if you clearly look at Ukraine, the European security problem, it's potentially possible that we'll have Donald Trump in the White House, the entire framing of the EU-UK relationship and the differences between London and Brussels, leave aside the process that happens in the Commission, the macro framing of that relationship will be different. And I think Starmer is committed to trying to make a big diplomatic play that the UK, under his leadership, doesn't want to be a zero-sum player. It wants to be a strategic partner in Europe. Now, we saw last year, didn't we, that even where there's a mutual strategic interest, for example, on adjusting the EV tariffs as part of the TCA, where from March or April it was clear that industry on both the EU and the UK side didn't want to have a situation where 10% tariffs were going on electric vehicles when we're all trying to get strategically less reliant on the Chinese. Nonetheless, it took until December to get a deal. Now, I think what Starmer will try and do is reframe the discussion about the EU-UK relationship and say, actually, we don't want to be in a zero-sum relationship. We want to be strategically part of Europe and that's a security offer. So not just on Ukraine, but also on the Balkans, et cetera. But then I think a wider play that looks at energy and net zeroes. So Starmer could look, for example, to link the UK and the EU carbon markets. That would avoid the barriers put up by the carbon border adjustment mechanism, but also would be a statement of his commitment to looking at the neighborhood in a strategic way. I think mobility is a big area where the rubber really hits the road for a lot of ordinary people. Our young people on both sides of the channel can't be a pairs in each other's country. There's no exchange program for apprenticeships and visas. It's difficult for young people to go and work, young Europeans go and work in the UK and vice versa. My son, actually, at the moment is doing a ski season on his year off in the Alps and all of his colleagues, all the seasonare, most of the foreigners are Australians and Canadians because I think France has a mobility, youth mobility deal with those countries. It's easier for an Aussie to go and work in France than it is for a young Brit. And I think that central conceit of Brexit, that somehow we should treat everybody equally regardless of the fact that the EU is in our neighborhood, I think will be unpicked by Stam. I think he will look to do a mobility deal and it's possible that that deal will be relatively deep. Some of the suggestions that have been kicked around the European Commission at the moment suggest that it doesn't seem impossible that you might get some professional mobility. Now, that's different from mutual recognition and professional qualifications, but I think you can see a world where a strategic play by the Brits to get everybody back in the room and rethink the relationship and bleed that security, strategic offer into other areas like energy security and energy connectors, the regulation, for example, of pharmaceuticals in a world where we're suffering from pandemics. I think that is the kind of thinking, the space that Labour are in. Now, of course, the difficulty is migrating that into an iterative negotiation in the European Commission. Obviously, the bureaucracies on both sides are deeply scarred. It's not just the European Commission that's scarred by butting heads with David Frost and Boris Johnson. The UK bureaucracy is pretty scarred by butting heads with the European Commission. And of course, the Labour Party is probably still internally guilty of various pieces of cacism. But I also think that if you allow the last 10 years to be the benchmark for the next 10 years, to be the template for the next 10 years, none of us are going to get anywhere. And the hope, I think, is that the geopolitical situation is going to put the EU-UK differences in some considerable perspective. It's not that long ago that Mayin Le Pen was talking about Brexit. You don't hear that now. I think the European Union, for all its internal problems at the moment, can engage with the Brits in a way that is different, if it wants to, than it was last time round. Some of that, and in the book, I go into endless, what I call the nitty-gritty, where when you add all that stuff together, you start to at least build a platform that brings the EU and the UK back into a much more cooperative space. And that, I think, is Labour's intention. I think it's perfectly possible that it runs out of steam, that the European Union finds it easier, as it always has in the past, to hide its own differences by essentially taking what I call the highest government that nominates a negotiating bridge. I hope that doesn't happen. It's going to take political and diplomatic leadership on both sides to seize the inflection point that will, I think, come from the election in Washington and from the election in London and from the elections in Europe. When you add all those together, I think 2025 will present a moment at which the really macro damage done by Brexit can start to be undone. And we can start to move back to a more symbiotic, less abrasive approach. Now, of course, that's not the single market. That's not the customs union. Who knows where that process leads? But I think you have to start somewhere. And I'm relatively optimistic in the sense that you can already see outside the Johnson Frost semi-fancy world that they cling to this vision of Brexit that they originally advanced. You can see a kind of exhaustion developing. And we've seen this week, it's amazing how you get there in the end. The deal with the DUP, ultimately, the wins the framework, but with a lot of assurances. I mean, the British government felt it didn't need to go and negotiate it with Brussels, which kind of told you the extent of that situation. The introduction of the border controls between EU and GB will, I think, start to level the playing field and make it realize that this is a mutual game of hurt. Some of the charts in the command paper which pointed out how much friction Ireland was going to suffer vis-à-vis Northern Ireland traders. OK, I get that that reassures Northern Ireland DUP and Unionists about unfettered access. But we've come to a funny old place when a British government is somehow celebrating border frictions with Ireland as some kind of Brexit win. And so I think under Starmer, he will look to do a veterinary deal. He will look to, I think, link our carbon markets. Some of those problems, some of those frictions will be diminished and massaged away. And that I don't know where that road leads, but I think it leads to a better place than we've been in the last nearly 10 years since we voted to leave.