Brexit a decade later: Why emotions still shape UK-EU relations

Anne-Marie Houde explores how emotional narratives associated with the Brexit years continue to shape how disagreements between the UK and the EU are interpreted.

Last month, the United Kingdom (UK) reached an important milestone in the controversial project of leaving the European Union (EU): it has been a decade since the Brexit referendum. Ten years on, the relationship between the UK and the EU looks calmer. Keir Starmer set out to negotiate a ‘reset’, while a warmer tone has been established. Brexit no longer dominates the headlines, yet the emotions of the Brexit years seem to resurface every time a potential issue arises in the wider relationship.

To illustrate this dynamic, our research examines the so-called ‘vaccine war’ between the UK and the EU during the COVID-19 pandemic. This conflict arose from the race to determine who had the most effective vaccine and who could roll it out the quickest to the widest part of their population. While the EU was pushing the German-developed BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, the UK was working on an alternative, the ‘Oxford vaccine’, created by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. The conflict escalated when the EU and UK fought over vaccine supplies, EU politicians and countries started to cast doubt over the AstraZeneca vaccine, and ultimately issued a warning to stop using the AstraZeneca vaccine on parts of its population due to safety concerns. Outrage followed from the UK media and politicians: the EU’s response to concerns over the vaccine was seen as retaliation for Brexit and became emotionally politicised.

Looking at what British media like the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail, as well as politicians like Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock, and Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and First Secretary of State Dominic Raab, had to say on the topic between January and April 2021, we observe two dynamics. First, pride in the UK’s collective success and the ‘Oxford vaccine’ was strongly encouraged, with newspaper articles and political speeches emphasising the UK’s national success and the collective achievement that ‘winning the vaccine war’ represented. These ‘triumphs’ were closely linked to Brexit and to the sense that British people could now feel vindicated in having left the EU, as it had enabled them to secure the best vaccine and the fastest rollout. These positive emotions were used to depoliticise the vaccine issue within the UK: criticising the government became a lot harder when it was seen as being a killjoy of British pride. Moreover, raising doubts about the vaccine’s efficacy or potential side effects was cast as endangering lives, reckless, and outright dangerous. This remained the case until the NHS itself acknowledged these issues, at which point, rather than addressing the political and media frenzy surrounding the vaccine “war”, public discourse largely dropped the topic and moved on.

At the same time, emotions about the EU were also running high, but in a much more negative direction. The vaccine issue was politicised at the European level as the EU was accused by both the media and politicians of being incompetent for allegedly moving more slowly and having worse contracts with AstraZeneca, driven by envy, which led them to question the superiority of the “British” jab, and bitterness about Brexit altogether. Consequently, the EU and European countries were described as looking to sabotage the UK’s efforts in the vaccine rollout as retaliation for leaving the Union. The EU was compared in several media pieces to dictatorships, making the UK seem much more desirable by comparison. In sum, next to an angry, vindictive, inefficient EU, the UK could feel proud and like it ‘got it right’ with Brexit. While the vaccine itself was depoliticised at the domestic level thanks to an insistence on positive emotions, the EU issue was emotionally negatively politicised. Throughout the ‘vaccine war’ episode, colourful language was used to foster these dynamics and shaped where responsibility lay. Domestic criticism became harder to mount because success was celebrated as a national achievement, while problems were increasingly blamed on Brussels.

Years after the pandemic and the ‘vaccine war’, the emotional (de)politicisation of the EU or of EU-related issues is still not a thing of the past. While the political context has changed, the emotional dynamics that characterised the Brexit years continue to shape how disagreements between the UK and the EU are interpreted. Technical disputes can quickly become symbols of something much bigger: whether Brexit is succeeding or failing. This matters because emotions help increase or decrease politicisation, as well as shift blame, shield from criticism, and narrow down discourses to make political choices acceptable or not. As a consequence, Brexit remains a tempting prism through which EU–UK relations can be framed by politicians and media alike, as it activates emotions and can be used both to politicise and depoliticise issues, to engage audiences with seemingly banal and otherwise unremarkable topics, and to deflect or shift blame onto others. As the UK and the EU seek to reset their relationship, it remains essential to pay attention to these emotional dynamics and how they influence (de)politicisation. Agreements can be negotiated, but if old emotional narratives continue to frame how these developments are understood, the politics of Brexit will continue to influence UK-EU relations long after Brexit itself has faded from the headlines.

Amid geopolitical upheaval and a cost-of-living crisis, the UK can hardly afford to remain captured by emotional narratives from a decade ago. Politicians and the media need to critically reflect on what vision of the country can offer a more hopeful future, rather than continuing to reproduce emotionally charged, decade-old ideological and partisan narratives.

By Anne-Marie Houde, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Public Policy, the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.