It has been repeatedly emphasized how Brexit has benefited Dublin, with the Irish capital attracting investment and skilled staff in tech, finance and education - and becoming an ever more international and multicultural city. Yet, if Dublin is the new London, is London the new Rome? With the non-enviable record of 67 governments in the 75 years of the Republic (from 1948 to today) Italy has long stood as an unparalleled case of governmental instability among advanced democracies. Yet, the resignation of UK prime minster Liz Truss on October 20th- less than six weeks after taking office - has caused as much consternation as Schadenfreude (at least from an Italian perspective).
Truss and Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng put forward an aggressive plan of tax reductions for high earners, with new unfunded public debt. As largely anticipated by analysts, this plan failed the reality test. With inflation surging and the Bank of England tightening its monetary policy, markets tumbled, sterling devalued and the yield on UK government bonds rose very sharply. There followed the sacking of Kwarteng and his replacement with mainstream Conservative Jeremy Hunt, who quickly performed a policy U-turn. By October 19th, Truss herself had resigned to be replaced by Rishi Sunak.
The Truss Government will go down in history as one of the shortest in UK constitutional history. It was the fourth executive in just over six years, with David Cameron Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss succeeding each other in short sequence. This is an incredible degree of instability for a country that traditionally praised itself for the solidity of its institutions. And the cause of this all can be blamed on Brexit - the decision of the UK to leave the European Union.
As it has been extensively pointed out in scholarly research, Brexit was an ideological project largely driven by the unproven assumption that, by leaving the EU, Britain could solve its structural problems and be “Great” again. As such, the Brexit rallying cry combined on the one hand anti-globalist euro skeptics, who blamed challenges like migration, unemployment, and the loss of identity, to Europe and its elites; and on the other hand pro-empire nostalgics, who dreamed of a Britannia unshackled from the EU corps ruling the waves 2.0. As it happened, these contradictory forces joined together were strong enough to prevail in the June 2016 referendum, but have been unable to coexist politically ever since.
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In fact, political parties - including Labour - have been internally torn on the matter of Brexit, with the Tories in particular -in government continuously since 2010 - unable to chart a clear course forward. Famously, Cameron was overthrown by the fateful referendum he called in the hope to quell right-wing backbenchers of his party. May struggled to govern her unruly parliamentary majority - which three times voted against her draft Withdrawal Agreement brokered with the EU. Johnson, despite securing a landslide in the early general elections of December 2019, had to go in 30 months, his administration (and personal life) mired in scandal. And Truss lasted only 6 weeks.
Ironies aside, however, the instability of the UK is not good news for the EU, Ireland and the rest of the liberal world. There are local problems which require British cooperation to be solved - including restoring power-sharing institutions in Northern Ireland, which still lack a functioning executive more than five months after the watershed May 2022 Legislative Assembly vote. But also the global security and energy challenges posed by the illegal Russian war of aggression in Ukraine have raised the stakes for the west. And this requires a reliable UK.
None of that will be attained until the British political and cultural elites reckon on with the leftovers of Brexit. The decision to leave the EU was largely driven by ideological fantasies which have very little bearing with reality. Whether the UK is inside the EU or not, it will have to maintain a sound budgetary framework; a comprehensive rulebook from finance to agriculture; and close alignment with the EU and its partners on matters such as sanctions and diplomacy. Boasts in favor of a bonfire of regulations, Singapore-on-the-Thames and Global Britain are slogans that can win you an election, but will not get you very far with the financial markets and the international community. It is now time for the UK to accept that even if it left the EU, it will have to go about with very EU-like ways of doing things. And that means also working closely with, rather than against, the EU to settle for good the controversies around the Northern Ireland Protocol.
While observers of Italian politics know that Rome is always a source of Machiavellian excitement, we now need London to return a more boring and predictable capital.
Federico Fabbrini is Professor of Law, Dublin City University; Founding Director, Brexit Institute; Visiting Professor, Princeton University