The Booker prize winner described a dystopian Britain. But haven’t we been living in that since Brexit?

It didn’t need a novel: even Leave voters understand the damage that has been done, as does the PM. Now all he has to do is persuade his party

Earlier this week, some people on the radio were talking about a very British dystopia. The government had disintegrated, but everyone was carrying on pretty much as they had before. Britain was isolated on the world stage and people missed Europe like hell, but weren’t allowed to visit, let alone live there.

I thought the radio people were discussing Britain post-Brexit, circa 2022. In fact, they were talking about the plot of the Booker prize-winning novel The End of Everything. Its author, M John Harrison, is renowned now for being, at 81, the oldest winner of the award, as well as the first science fiction writer to win it. But let’s also carve out a space for him on the podium of dystopian fiction, as a writer who can describe an indeterminate future in terms that are both terrifying and sound like a couple of years ago.

The past 10 years of British politics have had the dreamlike quality of a novel – not because they are dense with allegory or challenging to interpret, but for a much more basic reason. The morning after the 2016 referendum, a new reality simply arrived. For the next four years, we would discuss nothing but Brexit, and the language of compromise and practicality was banished.

If any other decision forced itself upon the electorate – for instance, who the prime minister should be – it would be filtered through which candidate would do the best on Brexit, which itself became more and more of a magical concept.

Like a novel, this phase took on its own rhythms, put the spotlight on characters who worked within its arc but made no sense in real life (Mark Francois, anyone?). The period since 2020, when Britain officially left the EU, has been the sad, humbling process of watching this fiction try to impose its rules on reality, and reality always winning. It turns out you can’t destroy your relationship with your biggest trading partners and not take a hit to prosperity.

Ancillary, Brexit-related fantasies, such as “immigrants leech money”, have taken their own toll, and we’ve stood by and watched as a reduction in net migration bleeds yet more money out of the economy, and a crusade against foreign students has created chaos and desperation in our universities.

If 2016 was the beginning of the “we’ve all had enough of experts” universe, in 2026 we’ve all had enough of that fictive universe, the place where facts don’t matter. Remainers gonna remain and we will insist on pointing out that Brexit has had no upside until the end of time.

But leavers have had a sea change. It’s true that only 57% of Britons agree that Brexit was a bad idea; but only 30% think it was the right choice (we should file the remainder under “please make this conversation go away”, rather than the traditional “don’t know”). More striking is the fact that 73% of Tories, 59% of leave voters and even a majority of Reform voters now back a youth mobility scheme – that radical idea Keir Starmer ruled out as soon as he became prime minister for being far too remainey.

Many politicians, on both sides, will be wishing what I used to wish when every week saw new data on attitudes to immigration, showing them to be hardening: if only these pollsters would just stop asking. Apart from a handful of Tories who were frozen out of their party, even the staunchest opponents of this fandango have, for electoral expedience, obeyed its precepts: that we all care more about sovereignty than prosperity and that we all want to take back control and either believe, in some distant future, that control will come to pass, or are sick enough of the conversation that we’re prepared to pretend we already have it.

Andy Burnham’s first big statements as prime minister still, after an underwhelming budget, look like a radical improvement on the politics that came before. His framing of Brexit was deceptively mild – shall we just take another look at this? Ideology aside, we’re in the economic doldrums, and we’d do well to take another look at our relationship with the EU. While easy answers remain elusive, it was far closer to the electorate, which just wants this nightmare to end, than it was to the political establishment, which can only conceive of the discussion in terms of which old wounds can be tolerably reopened, rather than asking: were those wounds a rhetorical construct? What would happen if we turned the page?

Brexit differs from fiction or nightmare in so far as some of its effects will be permanent; we’ll never get back the wasted time or lost growth. It’s nevertheless possible to wake up from this fantasy world – ditch the red lines, the specious idea of a fixed, unified “red wall” and deal with the world as it is, where circumstances both here and in the EU have changed in a kaleidoscope of ways. Burnham catching up with the electorate has been heartening and necessary, but insufficient: his party needs to catch up with him.