On 23 June 2016, the UK electorate voted by a narrow majority in favour of the country withdrawing from the European Union (EU). The debate was often bitter and acrimonious; shortly before the vote one MP who campaigned for the country to remain in the EU was murdered by a right-wing extremist, an almost unprecedented event in British politics. The narrowness of the outcome—51.9% voted for leaving the EU, 48.1% for remaining—divided the country as perhaps never before. Scotland , Northern Ireland and most metropolitan centres voted to remain in the EU, as did the great majority of younger people. English rural areas, the old, the less well-educated and the poor voted to leave. British politicians who interpreted the outcome as a clear mandate to pursue a clean break from the EU as quickly as possible soon received a reality check. Just under one year later the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, called a snap general election confident she would receive a large majority in support of her clean break or ‘hard Brexit’ approach, only to suffer a damaging blow. Far from increasing her parliamentary majority she lost it, winning fewer seats than previously held and now governing only with the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists (DUP).
It was not meant to be like this. Referendums in the UK are rare: this was only the third such nationwide referendum ever and there was no constitutional or other compelling reason to hold it. David Cameron, the then British Prime Minister, had announced his intention of holding a referendum on the country’s membership of the EU in January 2013 if his Conservative Party, then governing in coalition with the pro-European Liberal Democrats , won an overall majority in the next general election. At the time, opinion polls suggested this was unlikely—indeed the opinion polls continued to suggest it was unlikely right up to election day itself in 2015, when the Conservatives actually won a small overall majority, the first time they had done so in a general election since 1992.
The issue of EU membership had divided the Conservative Party throughout that period. It was a major contributory factor in the party’s comprehensive defeat by Tony Blair’s re-energised and re-vamped Labour Party in 1997. Some members of then Prime Minister John Major’s Cabinet had both openly and privately worked to undermine his European policies, either oblivious to or contemptuous of the damage it was doing to the party domestically. Still officially known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, by the early years of this century it had become largely a party of English nationalism , having first distanced itself from the Unionists in Ulster as they fragmented and became more extreme in the 1970s and 1980s, then being all but wiped out electorally in Scotland , where for 20 years from 1997 to 2017 they held only one seat in the Westminster parliament.
By 2013, after three years back in office, albeit in coalition, the anti-EU faction within the Conservative Party was once again becoming vocal. And after three years of austerity measures brought in by Cameron’s Chancellor (Finance Minister), George Osborne, which had a disproportionate impact on the poorest in society, the far right -wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) was gaining in the opinion polls. Cameron’s announcement of the referendum was a tactical decision, aimed at cementing the support of his own right wing and undermining public support for UKIP . As such it was a major blunder, serving only to galvanise the anti-EU groups into mobilising support, a blunder further compounded by his insistence on going ahead with the referendum when he did. His fundamental errors of judgement have proved to be almost certainly the biggest political mistakes in recent British history.
The nature of the referendum debate was often surreal. Possibly anxious to avoid being labelled Little Englanders , some of the most passionate advocates within the Conservative Party for leaving the EU sought to portray it as an opportunity for the UK to adopt a more ‘global’ posture, as if EU membership was somehow constraining this. Indeed, this became the stated position of the British government, Prime Minister Theresa May declaring at the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2017 that henceforward the UK would be the strongest and most forceful advocate for business, free markets and free trade. In a perceptive analysis, Professor Linda Colley of Princeton has described this view as a persistent chimera haunting post-war British foreign policy: the inability of many in the UK’s governing classes, the Conservative Party in particular, to make the adjustment from world power to regional power status.1
There was little serious analysis of such visions and attempts by outsiders to warn of possible consequences or to urge continued membership of the EU were either ignored or dismissed as interference in domestic matters. An example of the former was Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s statement in a joint press conference with David Cameron in London in June 2014, that China all along supports the EU integration process, that it welcomed a strong and prosperous EU and that China hoped that its bilateral relationship with the UK would stay at the forefront of its relations with European countries.2 The clearest example of the latter was then US President Barack Obama’s warning that in the event of a vote for ‘Brexit’ the UK would be at the back of the queue in negotiating any replacement trade agreement with the USA, a position rejected by a ‘Brexit’ campaigner as a lame-duck American President doing an old British friend a political favour.3
But the consequences of the outcome of the referendum reverberate far beyond the UK itself. Immediate concerns focused on the likely reaction in the rest of Europe, where it inevitably emboldened other right-wing nationalist , populist and anti-EU parties, most immediately and obviously Marine le Pen’s Front National in France and Geert Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid—PVV or Freedom Party —in the Netherlands. But both did less well in subsequent national elections than they had hoped, or their opponents feared, and with centrist Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the 2017 French presidential election and the strong position of Angela Merkel in Germany, most of the rest of the EU breathed a sigh of relief.
Within the UK itself, there appears to have been something of an anti-populist swing in the aftermath of the referendum. UKIP , the loudest and most persistent advocate of leaving the EU, saw its share of the vote collapse in the 2017 election, while ironically Theresa May owes her continued position as Prime Minister to a surge of support for her party in Scotland , due largely to a reaction there against the continuing campaign for independence by the Scottish National Party. But for this, the outcome of the 2017 election would have been even worse for the Conservatives. In a further irony, the Conservatives were traditionally allied in Northern Ireland with the Ulster Unionists but now depend on support from the DUP, the more extreme and hard- line of the two Unionist parties. While the DUP campaigned to leave the EU, a position rejected by the majority of Northern Irish voters, it also recognises the importance of an open border with the Republic of Ireland. All this has only added to the challenges faced by the May government in agreeing a clear position for its future relations with the rest of the EU, which can only view the UK’s continued discombobulations with growing bemusement but also frustration.
But the impact of the referendum result was felt further afield too, including in East Asia. This should not have been a surprise, after all the UK is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, with a history of engagement in the region (some might see it as meddling) since at least the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century until the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997.
The security aspects of the relationship may now be consigned to history but East Asia remains of major—even critical—importance to the UK’s prosperity, arguably even more so in the ‘post-Brexit’ future. It contains the world’s second and third largest economies, some of the UK’s biggest bilateral trading partners and in Japan, South Korea and China, significant sources of foreign investment into the UK’s infrastructure, manufacturing and financial services . A neutral observer might therefore have reasonably expected the implications of the referendum outcome on the UK’s future relations with the region to feature prominently in the debate. In practice, they were barely mentioned. The limited attempts to warn of the potential consequences on foreign investment from the region were usually dismissed as ‘scaremongering’ for example.
But there will inevitably be an impact. How deep or how wide it is too early to tell, not least because at the time of writing the British government’s position on its future relationship with the EU remains unclear. Mrs. May’s original stated aim in January 2017 was to pursue a ‘hard Brexit,’ withdrawing the country not just from the Single Market but also from the Customs Union and even the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, which extends beyond specifically EU matters. Without a parliamentary majority, it is far from clear that she can get enough domestic support for this stance, let alone conclude an acceptable agreement with the EU. By August 2017 some recognition of the enormity of the challenges ahead was becoming apparent, the UK’s official position paper on the future relationship proposing a transition period ‘which would mean close association with the EU Customs Union for a time-limited period,’ of up to three years after the formal break expected in March 2019 (the two-year timeframe set out for doing so under Article 50, which Mrs. May invoked in March 2017). The government also set out three key objectives for negotiations over future trading arrangements: to ensure trade with the EU is as frictionless as possible, to avoid any form of hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and to establish an independent international trade policy (emphasis added).4
The third of these is key to the UK’s future relations with countries outside the EU, including those in East Asia. The paper explains that:
It remains to be seen whether the UK can achieve this and if so on what terms: it seems to assume that the EU will agree to the UK pursuing bilateral trade deals with third countries even before a final settlement has been agreed. This is far from certain. The paper also seems unclear as to the basis on which such deals would be pursued: on the one hand, it talks of ambitious new trade arrangements and comprehensive trade deals that play to the strengths of the UK economy of today and the future, on the other it states that: we will seek continuity in our existing trade and investment relationships.6The UK would intend to pursue new trade negotiations with others once we leave the EU, though it would not bring into effect any new arrangements with third countries which were not consistent with the terms of the interim agreement. 5
The upbeat official language carefully skirts the complexities of modern trade deals. The reality of these is that there is far from being a single model and the government makes no mention of its preferred approach, beyond continuity of current relationships. The paper does recognise the importance of services to the UK economy but makes no mention of the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) negotiations ongoing within the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The EU, Japan, Korea and Taiwan are all members of TiSA but not China (although it has applied to join) or Singapore. Would the UK seek to join in its own right after leaving the EU? As another example, the government’s paper highlights the importance of C...