[Proto] 2026, Brexit, Sovereignty and all that.
Less identity, more sovereignty please.
I am pro Brexit for a simple reason. Sovereignty matters.
Not the theatrical version of sovereignty, and not the fantasy version where choices come without consequences. The practical, legal and operational kind. Who decides? Who has authority? Who can change direction when circumstances change?
The European Union is not just a market but a political project whose institutional design embeds a direction of travel towards deeper integration, even as that trajectory remains contested within it. Ever closer union is not a side effect, it is the structural tendency embedded in the treaties. Membership means shared rule making and legal supremacy whether you agree with the direction or not. Leaving the EU treaties mattered because it restored something fundamental. Parliamentary sovereignty as a matter of law with domestic courts as the final authority. This means the ability to align when it makes sense and diverge when it does not. The freedom to choose, and to live with the consequences of that choice. That is what sovereignty actually looks like.
This is why EEA via EFTA was, for me, the acceptable end state. Not a trick, not a staging post and not a fudge. It was the better compromise because under that model the UK would be outside the EU treaties and institutions. EU law would not have supremacy and nothing would apply automatically. Every rule would require domestic implementation with alignment happening because we chose it. And when we chose not to align, the consequences would be economic rather than constitutional. Loss of access, not loss of authority. That distinction matters.
This is not a claim that EEA/EFTA (known commonly as the Norway model) abolishes hierarchy. It does not. It replaces constitutional subordination with economic constraint. The difference is that constitutional binds regardless of consent, whilst economic preserves the ability to refuse and accept the cost. This matters because sovereignty is not freedom from constraint, it is the ability to choose your constraints knowingly.
There is another position I hold almost as strongly as sovereignty, and it sits alongside EEA/EFTA without contradiction. I am in favour of free movement of people. The UK has a long history of immigration and mobility. We are a trading and maritime nation that has been shaped by successive waves of people arriving, settling, contributing and becoming part of the whole. Movement is not an aberration in our history, it is the norm.
Labour mobility brings skills, ideas, adaptability and resilience. It strengthens systems when handled through institutions rather than fear. Treating people as something to be controlled rather than participants in a shared society is insecurity pretending to be policy. I do have a concern over freedom but it has never been about people moving. It has always been about capital moving without counterbalance.
Capital is not neutral. Unconstrained capital accumulates power, distorts incentives, inflates assets and captures regulation. In the UK this has been visible in housing, where capital mobility and asset protection have driven prices far beyond wages, turning shelter into speculative instruments at the same time that labour security has been hollowed out. This is not theory, it is the lived outcome of decades of neoliberal policy in which markets discipline governments rather than the other way around. So yes, I am sceptical of free movement of capital. Not because I want isolation, but because capital without constraint becomes political power without accountability.
But here is the uncomfortable reality. If you want a European market, you get the European bundle. Labour mobility and capital mobility come together because the system is designed that way. You do not get to surgically remove one without destabilising the whole. Labour mobility without capital mobility leads to exploitation. Capital mobility without labour mobility leads to rent extraction. The four freedoms (goods, services, capital and people) are bundled because the system itself is bundled.
However, reality is always why I am willing to compromise. EEA/EFTA did not lie about this. It said this is the structure, these are the trade-offs, choose. I might not like capital mobility, but pretending you could retain market access while discarding it was fantasy.
So, why did EEA/EFTA fail as an option?
Opposition from hard Brexit advocates was inevitable. That was never surprising. For them Brexit became about visible rupture with sovereignty redefined as divergence rather than choice ... "we're not them" rather than "what is best for us". Any ongoing alignment was framed as betrayal regardless of legal reality. EEA/EFTA offered sovereignty without theatre but that was always going to be rejected by those who needed Brexit to look like separation rather than governance.
What was more striking was the intensity of opposition from Remain. Not disagreement, but actual opposition. That was a real shock.
I would have thought that EEA/EFTA passed every test that many Remainers claimed to care about. It preserved cooperation, it reduced economic shock, it maintained regulatory alignment and even avoided a race to the bottom. It kept the UK closely integrated with Europe whilst preserving free movement of people, which many said was a red line. And yet it was treated not as an acceptable settlement, but as something to be actively resisted.
The reason was not technical as the model works. The reason seemed more political. In practice, EEA/EFTA reframed Brexit from a moral failure into a settlement, a shift many Remainers found politically unacceptable. A Brexit that functioned quietly undermined the argument that leaving was inherently reckless whereas a Brexit that failed loudly kept the argument alive.
So EEA/EFTA ended up in a political dead zone. Too much alignment for those who wanted rupture. Too much stability for those who wanted reversal. If you look at the indicative results in the House of Commons, then EEA/EFTA got a mighty 64 votes for it (the vast majority of which were Conservative) and 377 against. It ranked as the least favoured option, and you don't get much more dead than that. For those of us on the brexit side who supported EEA/EFTA, it was the nail in the coffin for what many of us considered to be the better compromise.
Of course, Labour's position had became critically important, and Labour had been deeply confused. Corbyn (leader at that time) was "Wary of single market membership", McDonnell (shadow chancellor) "Did not definitely rule out staying in the single market, if it could be reformed" and Starmer (shadow Brexit secretary) stated that "Labour's policy is that Britain should remain in the single market and the customs union for a transitional period of two to four years". Three people, three different positions and one party.
However, this should not have been surprising. Labour has never been instinctively pro European integration. As Hugh Gaitskell warned in the early 1960s, joining the European project risked subsuming democratic control within a larger political structure. Tony Benn later argued that European institutions could be used to lock in market discipline beyond the reach of domestic voters. These tensions were never resolved within the party, they were merely parked.
By the time of Brexit, that unresolved history collided with a coalition built on ideas of liberal internationalism. When the space to compromise collapsed, Labour was forced to decide what Brexit actually was. A structural question about governance and power, or an identity question about belonging and values? This shows up most clearly in the difference between Corbyn and Starmer.
Corbyn treated Brexit as a structural problem. He understood that the Single Market embeds an economic order that privileges capital mobility, competition law and limits on state aid which hence constrain democratic intervention. His objection was not to Europe as such, but to where power sat. His instincts were right, they often are. The difficulty was that he never landed on a viable European architecture that could constrain capital while retaining access. This was a common theme with Corbyn, a history of exceptional instincts and being on the right side combined with an inability to deliver.
On the other hand, Starmer appears to treat Brexit as an identity problem to be managed. This is not because he is blind to the structural issues, but because he is operating in an environment shaped by aggressive identity politics on the right. Farage (and more lately Reform UK) have framed Brexit as a permanent cultural struggle, where any accommodation with Europe is betrayal and any movement on migration is surrender. Farage has always cast the identity card, summoning the spectre of nationalism. In such an environment, free movement of people becomes the most potent political weapon, regardless of its economic or historical reality.
Seen through that lens, Starmer's red lines are understandable. By ruling out free movement of people while quietly accepting capital mobility and regulatory alignment, he attempts to neutralise the identity attack surface while stabilising the economy. It is a defensive strategy (a sort of Norway-lite) that is designed to survive a political landscape where nuance is punished.
But understandable is not the same as correct.
What results is still a distributional settlement. Capital remains fluid with finance protected and asset values defended. But people are managed. It's the market that benefits and not society. The costs of this adjustment falls on people and communities, while the benefits accrue upwards. EEA/EFTA did not pretend to magically solve this tension but instead exposed it. Under EEA/EFTA, everyone compromised. People moved. Capital moved. Sovereignty was explicit but there was a price. The choice to reject alignment was real.
Some argued (and still do) that EEA/EFTA was intellectually honest but politically hollow. That it clarified trade-offs, but at the cost of permanent marginalisation that offered neither the agency of membership nor the rupture demanded by identity politics. Whilst I understand such objections they rest on a different definition of agency to mine.
Agency is not a claim that sovereignty means you can always say no without cost. That has never been true. Sovereignty is not the absence of consequence but instead the ability to say no at all. The moment refusal disappears, choice becomes procedural rather than real. Being able to shape a decision you cannot refuse is not the same as being able to refuse a decision you did not shape. Influence without refusal is not power, it is conditional participation.
What is often described as effective power is, in practice, managed dependence where outcomes are negotiated, but consent is assumed. The disagreement on agency is about whether consent survives once refusal is removed from the system. I would argue that sovereignty grows not from the power to say "yes" but the power to say "no". Remove that and agency becomes contingent rather than sovereign, reduced to influence exercised within constraints you no longer have the right to refuse.
However, a common Remain position tended to privilege the "voice inside the system" argument. The EEA/EFTA position does the opposite and privileges exit from hierarchy and the right to say no, even when saying no is costly. From the Remain perspective, EEA/EFTA understandably looks like marginalisation and I do understand this. But from a Brexit perspective, it looks like bounded autonomy exercised honestly. These are not competing empirical claims but instead competing theories of agency in a world where absolute control does not exist.
Alas, the idea of EEA/EFTA failed. It did not do so because it misunderstood the trade-offs, it failed because it occupied a space that neither sides' preferred definition of agency could comfortably accept. One side wanted influence without exit. The other wanted exit without constraint. EEA/EFTA insisted on choice with consequence. That was not politically hollow but it was politically inconvenient.
For these reasons, I still believe EEA via EFTA was the more honest form of Brexit. Not perfect. Not pure. But sovereign in the only sense that mattered, and honest about what it asked of both people and markets. I do wish that we could explore this option once more. However, I am not naive about the political reality.
Brexit is no longer being treated as a constitutional design problem or an economic governance question. It is being managed as an identity settlement. In that mode of politics, symbols matter more than structures and optics matter more than outcomes. Any settlement that works quietly reduces conflict, and conflict is what sustains identity politics. In that respect, I am somewhat encouraged by Starmer's instinct to work quietly in the national interest rather than rehearse Brexit as a permanent culture war, even if I disagree with where he has chosen to draw his red lines in terms of freedom of movement.
However, this conflict over identity is why the space for honest compromise has become very narrow. Not because the compromise is flawed, but because it cannot be defended without breaking the rules of the game. It requires politicians to say this works, this has costs, and we accept them. In an identity driven settlement, that is read as weakness or betrayal. Expect endless GB News articles on how Starmer is selling out to Europe when he is not. But these days it seems like truthfulness is something that belongs to a bygone era. We even have neo nazi fantasies of UK entering civil war being brought in general discourse as though that was something normal. It's not.
Given this, am I still pro Brexit? Yes, for the same simple reason that I have always supported it. Sovereignty matters. In the UK, that sovereignty is enshrined in our political process of democracy and that's my red line.
As for Starmer, he continues to impress. I preferred the instincts of Corbyn but as much as I would like to think that there could have been a different path, Corbyn wasn't able to deliver. Starmer has the quiet fortitude through which he might. For labour, I would suggest not trying to re-open questions of customs union and allow Starmer to do his job.
As for Reform UK, they continue to bang the identity drum as loudly as possible when it comes to people. They point the finger at "others" even though its capital that accumulates power, captures regulation and deprives people of services. It's true that Reform UK's populism targets visible elites and cultural symbols but they consistently avoid sustained critique of capital power or asset ownership. I often wonder whether that is down to its funding base, drawn largely from wealthy individuals, which sits uneasily alongside this anti "elite" rhetoric. In practice, its economic platform reproduces familiar neoliberal patterns of selective spending, pressure for cuts, and political blame directed toward people rather than capital structures.
Early experience in Kent suggests this translates into cultural signalling (such as council decisions not to fly the pride flag in the future) rather than material improvement, a rather authoritarian stance of "f****** suck it up" to council meetings, the importation of a Musk style DOGE effort (and hasn't that gone so well) and what Bloomberg called "a total circus". We are not the better for it. However, I am encouraged that support for these "ideas" are finally showing signs of weakening.
As we enter 2026, a decade after that referendum, I would hope that we can rediscover a politics grounded less in identity and more in questions of sovereignty.
Originally published on blog.gardeviance.org and Medium.