Why we’re relaunching our guide to post-Brexit Britain
Good afternoon, and welcome, not to “Brexitland” but to the renewed, revamped and rejuvenated State of Britain: a newsletter that will range more widely than its predecessor, but also cover many related topics.
Why? Because it’s time to embark on the third leg of Britain’s post-2016 journey. A newsletter that began as the “Brexit Briefing”, then morphed into “Britain After Brexit” is now ready to report more widely on post-Brexit Britain.
As regular readers will know, Brexit is never “done”. Equally, however, the immediate big structural adjustments have now been made, the final big one being last month’s introduction of the post-Brexit border checks on EU imports.
Of course, it remains possible to trace many of the UK’s challenges back to Brexit. It’s also true, as I have consistently tried to show, that the frictions Brexit causes are enduring and will continue to play out over time, from carbon taxes to weaker goods exports.
But it’s also true that we are approaching an inflection point. If the opinion polls are anything like correct, the original authors are about to quit the political stage, or at least be relegated to its sidelines.
And as Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government will soon discover, slavishly harking back to Brexit isn’t going to pass muster as an excuse for what ails the UK.
Starmer’s red lines ruling out any return to the EU single market or a customs union tacitly admit as much. There are limits to what can be achieved by tinkering with the post-Brexit deal; the hunt for growth and stability will primarily take place at home.
It remains to be seen, of course, how far Labour turns back towards Europe. Even if it does, material changes that will make a tangible impact on the UK economy will be delivered over years, not weeks or months.
The impending election campaign (the phoney war has already begun) is therefore the natural moment to take stock of the “state of Britain” after 14 years during which austerity and Brexit, a global pandemic and the war in Ukraine, have combined to leave it in a state of decay.
Both physically — a shortage of houses and reservoirs; of intracity trains; and electricity grid connection points — and institutionally, from regulators that struggle to bring products to market, to a creaking justice system and a media landscape wracked by culture wars.
It’s not just that Britain is “in a state”, particularly if you live outside London and the prosperous south east, but the state itself is in poor nick too — from Whitehall and Westminster at the centre, to local authorities ravaged by budget cuts.
In a world where finding more money cannot be the whole solution, upgrading the state at both a national and local level, from changes in Whitehall, to reforms of the planning system, the NHS and new industrial and investment policies will be central to delivering Starmer’s ‘five missions’, or six “first steps” as they have now become.
This week I listened to Labour grandee Lord Peter Mandelson addressing the “Britain Renewed” conference, where he predicted that Starmer will need to drive a revolution in government if he wants to get close to achieving his goals. In his words:
I like the “missions” but I also happen to think they won’t be achieved by traditional cabinet committees and write-rounds of the [Whitehall] departments . . . It involves quite a convulsive and disruptive reorganisation of how the government operates in order to give that sense of direction.
That revolution will also take place at a local level, as city-region mayors grow in importance and “trailblazer” devolution deals hand more autonomy to the UK regions to shape spending plans and policies in areas such as transport and skills.
For us, it means both analysing Labour’s future policy prescriptions as they emerge but also anticipating the national political battles that will lie ahead if a Starmer-led government wants to drive sufficient change to retain the confidence of an expectant electorate.
To do that, State of Britain will draw on the broad expertise of the FT’s UK network of regional and policy journalists — Jen Williams in the Midlands and the North of England, Jude Webber in Dublin and Simeon Kerr in Scotland.
Our public policy correspondent Laura Hughes will look at the NHS, childcare and intergenerational unfairness, while William Wallis adds perspective on local government issues and Alistair Gray covers the UK’s legal and justice system which is so prized by international investors. Amy Borrett on our data visualisation team will also add insight from combing through government data releases.
And where the UK’s journey cuts back into Brexit-related matters, I’ll not hesitate to return to that discussion when it is material to the UK’s future.
Lastly, any newsletter relies on its readers. Your inputs, tips and advice on what we should be looking to cover are highly valued and appreciated. In fact, they’re our lifeblood. Please don’t be shy in coming forward. Do tell us what you think: stateofbritain@ft.com
Britain in numbers
This week’s chart comes from the Migration Advisory Committee report investigating whether the UK’s graduate visa system is being abused and — if so — whether it needs reforming.
Asked that question by Home Secretary James Cleverly, the MAC responded with a categorical “no”, the strength of which caught everyone by surprise, including the businesses and universities that had been lobbying against any further crimping of the route.
The core finding of the report was that overseas graduates found work at a salary level pretty much equivalent to domestic graduates, which exploded the myth that they were all working shifts in care homes or making lattes.
The (intra-Conservative Party) row over this subject has highlighted the growing contradiction between ambitions for ‘global Britain’ and the increasingly inward-looking, Farage-ist faction in the party.
The same government that says it wants to turn the UK into a science superpower (or the latest version, build a $1tn British microsoft) is also busy creating a hostile environment for overseas graduates.
As the MAC report set out (p40) other competitor countries including Australia, Canada, Germany and the US have schemes that allow overseas students to stay and look for work after they graduate. That was the point of the UK scheme. To enable the UK to compete.
As the chart shows, such routes do boost the number of graduates the UK attracts. When the UK closed off the old scheme in 2012, its share of the global market fell away, only to return to trend when the Graduate Visa Route came into force in 2021.
The decision to remove the right of foreign graduates to bring family members while increasing skilled worker visa salary thresholds from £26k to £38k, so that entry-level graduate jobs are now out of reach, is turning back the clock.
And it isn’t just the universities (which need the foreign grads for their financial wellbeing) complaining but the chief executives of major companies like Anglo American and Siemens UK who wrote to Rishi Sunak to stress that they need strong universities to recruit from.
And as the British Chambers of Commerce pointed out, smaller businesses also prosper, under the scheme, since foreign graduates can work for two years without needing to go through the Home Office bureaucracy of being a sponsor or hitting the (newly inflated) £38,700 target for a skilled worker visa.
There is one area, however, where the increased net migration does put a squeeze on national resources, according to the MAC, which is the housing and rental market.
But the answer to that problem is not to choke off skilled immigrants that come to the UK via the graduate visa route, but to reform the planning system and build more houses. That’s a subject to which ‘State of Britain’ will most definitely return.
The State of Britain is edited by Georgina Quach today. Read earlier editions of the newsletter here.
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