Competing predictions about the scale of the Conservative Party’s defeat, injected what little excitement there was into the UK general election. The resulting lopsided parliament is set to last the full five-year term to 2029 and the relationship with the European Union will dominate, more than it did during the campaign.

Quitting the EU was the biggest strategic decision the UK has taken in modern times, for Britain itself and also for Ireland, but Labour has chosen not to outline any specific plan to mitigate the fallout.

The 2016 Leave decision was disruptive and unwelcome in the Republic, which chose to join the EU’s precursor, the Common Market, alongside the United Kingdom, its biggest trading partner, in 1973.

The special arrangements for Northern Ireland post-referendum were designed to make things easier than a hard border, but do little to defray the costs to business in the Republic. In Northern Ireland the details of that special deal, a concession by the EU, remain contentious.

Labour

Labour’s leader Keir Starmer was careful to avoid reopening the Leave/Remain issue through the election campaign, acknowledging that Brexit is not reversible for the foreseeable future.

Two weeks ago he ruled out rejoining the EU, including either the single market or customs union, and said reopening the Brexit debate would bring “turmoil”.

“We’re not rejoining the EU, we’re not rejoining the single market or the customs union,” he told reporters.

“That isn’t our plan. It never has been. I’ve never said that as leader of the Labour party, and it’s not in our manifesto. I voted to Remain. I campaigned to Remain,” the Labour leader said.

“But what that referendum did was to throw politics into turmoil for three years. Between 2016 and 2019, our parliament couldn’t get anything done. It caused huge uncertainty.”

He continued: “I will also add this, because I think it’s important, the problem with low growth, which has been at the heart of the economic problem in this country for 14 years, started well before Brexit.”

Starmer is correct to note that the UK’s disappointing performance goes back well before the 2016 referendum, but neglected to remind voters that Brexit made the situation worse, the outcome he feared and which led him to support the Remain option.

Every independent calculation of the economic consequences has concluded that Brexit has inflicted serious economic damage with more to come, as further cost-inducing measures are still to be implemented on the UK side.

Shift in public opinion

Public opinion has been shifting and recent opinion polls show a majority now regret the Brexit decision.

Starmer could safely have revealed a moderate programme, short of seeking to rejoin the EU, to move back towards an accommodation with the single market and customs union, but he chose not to do so.

In the next parliament, the surviving Tories will include very few Europe-friendly politicians, many of whom were discarded by Boris Johnson before the 2019 election in order to ‘Get Brexit Done’.

Every Labour accommodation with the EU will be denounced by Conservative survivors who will promise to reverse any de-Brexiting measures, enough in itself to limit any European willingness to be helpful.

It was Theresa May, after the instant departure of David Cameron the morning after his referendum loss, who committed to quitting both single market and customs union at the Tory conference in Birmingham in October 2016, to lusty cheers from a largely Brexiteer audience.

May had campaigned for Remain. Her speech at Birmingham will come to be seen as a decisive moment, the abandonment of the least damaging path available, while respecting the referendum decision to quit the political structures of the European Union.

Countries which are not EU members, including Norway, Switzerland and even Turkey, have fashioned practical deals including alignment with the single market and/or the customs union.

Labour will not seek such arrangements and the EU may not offer them anyway, since the UK’s main opposition party will cry treachery and commit to reversing whatever deals might be done.