What Went Wrong With Brexit: And What We Can Do About It

"(This book is also a vailable on the Bookstory website here .) It’s weird. Brexit is very much an elephant in the room. None of the politicians want to talk about it, for different reasons, yet it is the single biggest political change in many of our lifetimes and certainly one that has had great influence over a lot of the forces at play—the sluggish economic growth, the polarisation of our political discourse… The Brexit referendum has a lot to answer for. Peter Foster’s book is almost a kind of antidote to Ben Judah’s. Where Judah’s is all about ordinary people, fascinating characters, Peter Foster has produced a kind of ultimate insider’s guide to how Brexit worked, how it has gone wrong, and—in some ways—why it was always destined to go wrong. He lived and breathed Brexit, as Europe editor of the Telegraph in the immediate aftermath of the referendum; he had the unenviable daily task of explaining to people who voted for Brexit why it was working out so disastrously. Then for the last few years he has been public policy editor at the Financial Times . So he’s an incredibly well connected journalist and he’s written a primer on Brexit and what it’s consequences have been on both the macro level and the micro, on the difficulties faced by small businesses. What makes it so interesting to read right now is that we are, most likely, about to have a new government in Britain with a large majority, which could make bold decisions, but which so far has not necessarily promised all that much in the way of radical change. One of the ways it could do that is by realigning with the European Union to some extinct. Peter Foster spells out ways in which that could work, short of rejoining the EU. Ways in which Brexit could be made to work better, if you like. This is definitely interesting reading for everyone, but required reading for Keir Starmer and his foreign secretary as they try to make the best of a bad hand that’s been dealt to them."