There’s a huge, Brexit-shaped hole in this election

The disconnect between promises and the material lives of voters that opened up in the referendum has not been repaired

Remember Brexit? For a topic that dominated several years of British political life after 2016, and the last general election, its near-total absence from this one is remarkable. Brexit did not come up once in the BBC leaders’ debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. It did once in the seven-way debate on Friday, raised by the SNP’s Stephen Flynn, who described it as an unmitigated disaster. The silence is beginning to feel less like omission than an act of collective repression.

Between the Tories and Labour there is a silent agreement, perfectly observed in the English tradition of avoiding uncomfortable conversations. It is increasingly jarring. Brexit’s consequences are now part and parcel of our layered crises. It features in the cost of living crisis – it has driven up inflation, accounting for a third of food-price inflation since 2019, according to an LSE paper. It lurks in the labour market, where higher immigration from outside the EU has not plugged a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of EU workers. It holds back growth, clobbering small businesses and choking bigger ones desperate for labour. As was the conclusion of a report this year summarised by London mayor Sadiq Khan: “The hardline version of Brexit we’ve ended up with is dragging our economy down.”