Immigration, indecency, and incompetence

As I and many others have noted, we are seeing the extraordinarily rapid development of extreme policies on immigration becoming mainstream. The failure of Brexit to ‘solve the problem of immigration’, with the consequent neutering of extremist politics that was meant to bring, can be chalked up to the long list of its unmet promises.

At the same time, as with Brexit, what is now being proposed about immigration also entails promises which cannot be kept, if only because those promises deny or ignore the damage, both economic and non-economic, these proposals would do. In this sense, along with the immorality of such proposals, we should beware of the utter incompetence of those making them.

An affront to decency

In the last fortnight, this new extremism came to fresh prominence with remarks by Tory ‘rising star’ Katie Lam, in which she spoke of deporting large numbers of people who have ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ (ILR) immigration status. As with last month’s Reform proposals, this crosses a very significant line in that it would entail retrospectively changing the rules.

Whilst Lam’s comments received much attention, she was articulating something which, to less attention, has been Tory policy since last May, when they promulgated a draft ‘Deportation Bill’ (although, post-Lam, this is reported to be under “internal  review”). Under this policy, the criteria for deportation would capture those who had, quite legitimately, received benefits at some time during their residence in the UK or who had earned less than £38,700 a year for an aggregate period of six months within their time of residence.

It would also include people with ILR, or their dependents, who had received any form of ‘social protection’, which would seem to include NHS treatment and pension payments, and perhaps even universal credit. Thus it has the potential to end up separating families, deport retirees after decades of living here to countries with which they have no substantive connection, or to make those with ILR fearful of seeking healthcare.

The enormity of these proposals can hardly be over-stated. Not only would they apply retrospectively but they would entail compulsory repatriations, something not even envisaged by Enoch Powell in the 1970s (who argued for a voluntary repatriation policy). And they would apply on a huge scale, affecting potentially 5% of the UK population (£).

Nothing like this has ever been undertaken in a modern democracy: even in Trump’s America, legal immigrants are not the target of deportation policy. It’s closest analogue in recent times is Idi Amin’s Uganda. If enacted, it would mean not only leaving the ECHR but would also, since as currently described it would apply to some people with EU Settled Status, undoubtedly mean an end to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU. So we would immediately be back to a ‘no deal Brexit’.

The pivot to values

As well as being unprecedently draconian in its scope, this proposal is noteworthy because it is not simply animated by an intention to reduce the number of immigrants, nor is it solely concerned with the supposed extent of immigrants’ financial ‘contributions’. At least in Lam’s telling, it is also intended to increase ‘cultural coherence’. Exactly what this means can only be guessed at, and none of those guesses paint Lam in an edifying light, but it shows that the proposal is also meant to remove those who don’t share some supposed sense of ‘British values’ (although many of us would think that the proposal itself is an affront to what we take those values to be).

This is important because it reflects how the anti-immigration case has largely ceased to present itself as being not an objection to immigrants, per se, but just a ‘concern about numbers’. The pivot to values (which of course long pre-dates Lam’s comments, but they are the latest exemplification) is part of what has enabled anti-immigration rhetoric to lump together everything from an asylum-seeker who commits a crime to a person speaking a foreign language in the street. It also enables racists to pretend that, far from objecting to immigrants’ skin colour, they are heroically standing up for women’s or gay rights, or for Christian or Enlightenment values, or any number of other hypocrisies.

Given the way these proposals target legal, not illegal, immigrants, and do so retrospectively, and taken in conjunction with the fact that they involve leaving the ECHR, then some even more sinister possibilities open up. Why confine the crackdown to those with ILR? Why not revoke the acquired citizenship of those who do not share ‘our values’? And, if that, then why not extend the same test to those born in this country? Even if they can’t be deported, they could at least be rounded up for ‘re-education’. This is where the logic of ‘cultural coherence’ leads. If that seems alarmist then so, too, would it have seemed alarmist even a few years, perhaps even a few months, ago to envisage a ‘mainstream’ political party advocating the compulsory deportation of legally settled immigrants.

Even in its own grotesque terms, the Tory ILR policy is an absurdity. The very idea that it would create ‘cultural coherence’ is nonsense because it would actually undermine that concept’s close cousin, ‘integration’. It would remove any sense that integration was desirable or even possible, by making ‘indefinite’ residence precarious, and making it clear that those with ILR were only present under sufferance: ‘we don’t really want you here and we’ll kick you out the moment we feel like it’ is hardly an incentive assimilation. In fact, even if these proposals are never implemented, the very fact that they have been made will almost certainly already have had the effect of undermining integration, signaling to millions of immigrants just how unwelcome they are, and that it would be rather foolish to make long-term plans to be part of this country.

Public opinion

Some commentators have taken comfort from the fact, which I also referred to when I discussed Reform’s ILR proposal, that opinion polls show the current ILR rules to be well-supported. Thus, it is suggested, both Tory and Reform parties are pursuing an extremely unpopular policy. I am not so sure that this can be relied upon. The opinion polls most often cited seem to date back to early in 2024, before the now two summers of far-right agitation and, crucially, before anyone started talking about ILR as a salient issue in the immigration debate, let alone as a problematic one. More recent polling, from September 2025, shows a more mixed picture. In particular, although retrospective withdrawal of ILR is still unpopular, it does have the support of 29% of the public.

It therefore seems quite likely that public opinion will continue to move on ILR the more it is targeted by Reform and Tory politicians. And, as I also pointed out in that previous discussion, this will be aided by the way that, whilst denouncing the Reform proposals, Keir Starmer’s government has its own plan to extend the ILR qualifying period from five to ten years, and to introduce new ‘contribution-based’ tests. This is less draconian, since at least it would not apply retrospectively, but it contributes to creating a sense amongst the public, which did not exist before, that ILR is a ‘problem’ in need of a solution.

What we can now call the Reform-Conservative solution, apart from being grossly immoral, is also unworkable, in multiple senses of the term. It would almost certainly encounter substantial legal challenges, and arouse huge popular opposition once its effects began to be felt. And even if a future government pushed all that aside, the economic damage would be enormous. Not only would it strip out desperately needed members of the workforce, it would deter the arrival of new immigrants – including the so-called ‘brightest and best’ we are always told the UK wants, and perhaps especially these, since they have many other possible destinations.

Indeed, what the anti-immigration lobby seems unaware of is that the UK is actually in an emerging global competition for immigrants (£), of all sorts, with other countries with ageing populations and low birth-rates. In fact, rather than constantly yammering on about the supposedly ‘undiscussable’ issue of immigration, the latter are the demographic issues politicians should really be addressing.

Their failure to do so, and instead to pander to and promote anti-immigration sentiment, is a massive failure of leadership. As analysis by James Bowes, published this week by UKICE, shows, “the coming collapse in immigration”, in response to ‘public concern’ is set to have damaging economic effects which the public will certainly not enjoy. Yet, even as net migration falls, a survey shows that frequent GB News viewers finds that 84% of them think it is rising, as do smaller, but still large, majorities of frequent viewers of ITV and BBC News.  

Unfit for office

It's this unworkability and lack of realism which links directly to Brexit, which in the UK is the foremost example of how populism and incompetence are so strongly linked (the Truss mini-budget is another example). We already know, if only from those two examples, that any claim to governmental competence the Tories may have had has long since gone. But voters expecting Reform to be an improvement are in for a disappointment.

I noted in the first post of the new title of this Blog that an important part of this period of post-Brexit politics would be that Reform’s success in local elections, giving it control of twelve councils, would bring with it mounting evidence of the party’s utter incompetence when it achieved power. We are now seeing that evidence emerge (as well as plenty from the ructions within Reform’s tiny cohort of MPs and the scandal of Farage’s grift).

Recent examples have included revelations of in-fighting at Kent County Council, Reform’s ‘flagship council’, which led to five councillors being expelled from the party this week. Other Reform-led councils, including Worcestershire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire, have experienced various degrees of chaos. Meanwhile, at Northumberland County Council, where it is the main opposition, Reform has expelled three councillors from the party, the most recent one having allegedly said he wanted to shoot Keir Starmer.

This partly reflects the collection of oddballs and dodgy characters who have suddenly found themselves in positions of responsibility. But, at Kent and elsewhere, it also reflects the impracticality of all the airy talk of cutting huge swathes of waste and reducing council tax bills. As at national level, the easiest thing to promise when in opposition is ‘cutting red tape’, but the hardest thing to achieve when in power is to do so without cutting services.

Thus, on contact with reality, all the nonsense about millions being wasted on ‘diversity officers’ or ‘health and safety’ is exposed as such. On the other hand, Reform-led Nottinghamshire have managed to find £75,000 to buy 150 union jack flags, whilst Reform’s Greater Lincolnshire Mayor, the charmless former Tory MP and Education Minister Andrea Jenkyns, has requested an extra £147,000 for office staff to answer her emails.

Against this background, last week Zia Yusuf became the second head of Reform’s ‘DOGE’ to resign within less than a year of its creation. This was the body, modelled on Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, supposed to identify efficiency savings in Reform councils, although it has failed to undertake any audits to date (£), and is reported to have only visited three of the twelve councils.

Reform’s experience of the realities of local government also sheds light on the impracticality of its, and the Tories’, national immigration policies. Back in July, Kent, again, complained about the Labour government’s new restrictions on visas for social care workers because of the damage it would do to the provision of social care within the county. There are other reasons to think that some within Reform are becoming wary of its racism and anti-immigration agenda. Yusuf himself resigned as Party Chairman last June, apparently because of Reform MP Sarah Pochin calling for a ‘Burqa ban’ (although it subsequently became unclear where he stood on this issue). More recently, Neville Watson, a prominent Reform activist and its only Black branch chair, resigned from Reform over its hardline and divisive anti-immigration stance.

Pressing the FU button

The latter led to some social media ribaldry along the lines of ‘I never thought the leopards eating people’s faces party would eat my face’, but this is a glib and politically maladroit response. In this period, when Reform is not, but could become, a party of national government, such recantations or realizations should be praised, not mocked. Things are very finely balanced. A few percentage-points difference in voting at the next general election could, under first past the post, be the difference between near-total defeat for Reform, or Farage becoming Prime Minister. So in the next few years anything which makes voters reflect on what a Reform government would mean is going to be important.

There is, of course, a bedrock of support for Reform which will always be there, deriving from those who genuinely support its policies or just its actual or perceived values. But what could bring it to power would be if, as with the Brexit vote, enough voters decide, as Guardian columnist Marina Hyde pungently put it, to “press the F*** You button” [1]. Amongst the reasons to do so might be the idea that ‘they can’t be any worse than the main parties’ (but they can: that’s why tracking their chaos and incompetence in local government matters) or ‘they ought to be given a chance’ (but they are being, and we can see what it leads to).

Another reason to press the ‘FU button’ is the idea that ‘we’ve got nothing to lose’ and the closely associated one ‘it won’t affect me’. Though these are slightly different from each other (as the second kind of voter might acknowledge having something to lose, but just assume that it won’t be them), they are both versions of thinking that ‘the leopard won’t eat my face’. So it is important that now, before it is too late, some of those who currently think this begin to reflect that they might be wrong. Otherwise, it will be like ‘Brexit morning’ all over again.

This becomes particularly important because, again as with Brexit, plenty of Reform’s support does not come from those with ‘nothing to lose’. It became fashionable in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, amongst those who were opposed to Brexit as much as amongst those who advocated it, to talk as if this had been some uprising for the dispossessed (especially the working class of Northern England) against ‘the elite’. But this was, at the least, highly simplistic, as analysis of the leave vote by Benjamin Hennig and Danny Dorling showed, given the levels of support for Brexit amongst middle-class and Southern voters.

Relatedly, the original concept of ‘Red Wall voters’, which subsequently became much misunderstood, was to do with those within traditional Labour seats (not always in Northern England) who traditionally voted Labour but who, in demographic terms, ‘ought to’ be likely to vote Conservative and, subsequently, increasingly did so (though now, increasingly, Reform). One way of looking at these voters is that their economic interests and political choices had become misaligned. If their parents and grandparents had voted Labour, it was as a way of furthering industrial workers’ interests, and doing so had been inherited as a cultural belief even if they, themselves, might well be self-employed or retired homeowners. Another way of looking at them is as being in the process of re-aligning cultural values, in particular from class identity to regional, national, or ethnic identity. Better, in fact, to see it as both.

The politics of self-indulgence

At all events, these voters are not, for the most part, economically dispossessed. These are not young, unemployed, propertyless people, nor are the reacting to mass unemployment and economic depression. They are most likely homeowners, with some savings, but who feel themselves to be culturally dispossessed [2]. As such, I increasingly think that the best way to describe them is ‘self-indulgent’ or even perhaps, in a certain sense, ‘decadent’. That is, they can indulge their carefully-guarded cultural grievances by voting Reform because they do not believe that it will damage them to do so.

But, in fact, they are highly vulnerable, in at least two main ways. One is that, although Reform’s economic policies remain unclear and confused (and, like its local government promises, rely greatly on mythical ‘waste saving’ and false claims about the effect of scrapping Net Zero policies), Farage’s championship of the Truss budget, and of Javier Milei’s economic programme, suggests that a Reform government would mean economic chaos, of a sort which would most damage not the very poor (who may really have nothing to lose) or the very rich (who are well-cushioned against any loss), but these modestly well-off voters.

The second is that such voters are very likely to be dependent on the disability benefits Reform pledged, just this week, to take an axe to, and on the health and care services which are kept afloat by immigration. So just as when, after the Brexit vote, leave voters kept telling the EU citizens who they knew personally that they ‘didn’t mean you’ when they voted against immigration from the EU, they are likely to say the same to, as it might be, their Ghanaian care worker when a Reform or Reform-Con government starts the mass deportations. And, as with Brexit, by then it will be too late. Too late for those voters, and too late for the rest of us. Which is why the most urgent task in politics now is to persuade enough of those who are minded to vote for Reform that, for them personally, and their families, the consequences will be disastrous.

Rejecting the repellent

There are at least signs that this urgency is now being felt by voters, judging by the result of the Caerphilly by-election. Whilst a number of factors were in play, at least one important one seems to be that ‘progressive voters’ voted tactically for Plaid Cymru and against Reform. Thus, against opinion polls and, evidently, Nigel Farage’s expectations, Reform were soundly defeated. That is just one election, held in specific circumstances, and it would be foolish to extrapolate much from that, just as it would be from general surveys of voting intentions, especially in relation to what might happen in a general election that will probably not be held until 2029.

On the other hand, with Reform and the Tories now openly holding out the prospect of mass deportations, with all that would mean, the case for tactical voting is becoming ever stronger. After all, such voting is most in evidence when voters feel repellence, and that becomes more likely when parties advocate repellent policies. It becomes less easy to press the ‘FU button’ when you know what it will do, and neither Reform nor the Tories are doing much to hide that. The challenge for Labour, in particular, is not to chase those parties into equally repellent policies, and thus becoming repellent itself.

 

Notes

[1] I’m not using asterisks because of any prudishness on my part, but because the use of certain words causes posts to be blocked by some distribution networks.

[2] This is the background to the row this week over Pochin’s remarks about being ‘driven mad’ by adverts featuring too many black and Asian people. This was not an idiosyncrasy on her part, but repeated what has been a persistent whine on social media for some years, given as evidence that ‘it’s not our country any more’ and that white people are somehow victims of oppression. It’s a sign of the times that this fringe preoccupation is now the subject of national debate. The focus of that debate has been about whether Pochin’s remarks were racist, although ‘debate’ is too generous a word for the tortured apologetics that tried to show they were not, but they raise other issues. One is the incoherence of that racism. Sometimes, as with Robert Jenrick’s recent remarks, right-wingers complain about there being ‘no white faces’ on British streets. Yet, if this is supposedly the reality of modern Britain, then why are they also complaining that adverts are an unrealistic depiction of British society because they show too few white faces? The other relates to the incoherence of economic policy. Reform and the Tories constantly say that businesses face too much red tape, and that there is too much emphasis on ‘DEI’ initiatives seeking representativeness in hiring and promotion decisions. Yet, if it is true that adverts over-represent non-white people, they surely do so for commercial reasons. Or does Pochin propose that advertisers be subject to quotas to ensure they are representative in their imagery?

Brexit eruptions

Recently, a rash of molehills has appeared in my garden, the visible eruptions of a vast subterranean network of tunnels and burrows. Brexit lurks in a similar way beneath the surface of British politics, a constant presence which, however much it is ignored – perhaps the more that it is ignored – continues to break out here, there, and everywhere.

That, surely the most tortuous and tortured of the many metaphors that have been applied to Brexit, is intended to introduce the fact that this post doesn’t have any particular unifying theme other than the latest ways in which Brexit has been in view over the last fortnight.

Robert Jenrick and the Tory madness

We don’t yet know how the story is going to end, but it is looking increasingly likely that, when history is written, Brexit is going to figure as the central cause of the decline and perhaps demise of the Tory Party. For all that numerous political commentators, most recently Andrew Rawnsley, urge the party to re-discover its more moderate and pragmatic traditions, for now it seems stuck in the spiral of madness of which Brexit is the proximate cause. Thus possibly the least surprising development of the last fortnight was that their party conference showed the Conservatives to be firmly in the grip of Brexitism.

At the conference, the most obvious manifestation, or even exemplification, of this was the latest stage in Robert Jenrick’s long journey from “bland centrist solicitor” to gurning ideologue. It’s a journey made stranger because he has somehow retained his blandness along with the way, managing to be, as Ian Dunt puts it “at once banal and monstrous”. Much attention focused, rightly, on his complaint about the lack of white faces in Handsworth, a complaint made not less but more objectionable by his absurd suggestion that this remark “was not about the colour of your skin”. Less discussed, but objectionable and absurd in a different way, were his remarks about the judiciary.

Jenrick’s thesis, if we can grace it with that term, is that when judges ‘don the wig’ – a point he sought to make dramatic by flourishing such a wig – they at the same time put aside personal interests and identity so as to apply the law impartially. So far, so good. But he also claimed that, having, like every internet troll, ‘doNe he’s Own ResEArch’, he had made a shocking discovery. Apparently, there are “dozens of judges” who have used social media to “broadcast their open borders views” (whatever that means; does anyone advocate ‘open borders’?), or have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country” (which seems to mean, based on his other remarks, that Jenrick imagines barristers to be invariably sympathetic to their clients’ causes, and retain a lifelong commitment to them).

Jenrick is either too dense or too dishonest to see that his first observation made his second claim irrelevant. To make his thesis stick, he would need evidence that the judges he identified had also given judgments which, in legal terms, were demonstrably wrong, and wrong in ways biased in the direction he claimed. Moreover, he would need to show that they had done so to a greater extent than judges who he had not identified as having this alleged bias. But of course, and this is part of what makes this an example of Brexitism, reliable evidence is irrelevant to Jenrick. What is relevant, and what makes it definitively Brexitist, is the attempt to undermine the judiciary as an institution and, with that, the rule of law. It is ‘enemies of the people’ territory again. And it hardly needs to be said that Jenrick’s supposed solution, the political control of judicial appointments, would make the supposed problem he supposedly wants to solve worse.

Whether Jenrick has become a convinced Brexitist ideologue or is just opportunistically seeking to burnish his leadership credential hardly matters. Either way, it shows that Brexitism is an obligatory posture for those who aspire to lead the current Tory Party. That fact was underlined by Kemi Badenoch’s long-expected adoption of leaving the ECHR as official party policy, a policy which is the central prescription of ‘Brexit 2.0’.

It is also, as I noted in my previous post, a policy being ‘sold’ in exactly the same way that Brexit itself was sold, even though recent polling shows that 46% of those planning to vote Tory at the next election think Brexit has been a failure (and only 22% think it has been a success). Perhaps that is why Badenoch made only a couple of passing references to Brexit in her conference speech, in itself a telling fact: far from boasting of it, the very party that delivered Brexit feels too ashamed to talk about it.

Farage’s culpability and Labour’s problem

So much for the Tories. In my previous post I also noted that Keir Starmer had begun to attack Nigel Farage on the grounds of the damage done by Brexit. That attack has escalated, with Labour now starting to argue (£) that Farage will be to blame for anticipated tax rises in the forthcoming budget because, having used “easy sloganeering” to persuade the public to vote for Brexit, he then walked away and took no responsibility for it, leaving the economic consequences which ultimately explain the need tax raises.

Farage and his supporters, and no doubt others, object that he had no control over the delivery of Brexit, so the accusation is unfounded. But that is simplistic. Farage was not in power, it is true, but he exercised considerable power, always ready to denounce as ‘betrayal’ whatever form of Brexit was proposed and never once putting forward realistic proposals for delivering it in ways that were less economically damaging than what was enacted. Moreover, at the 2019 election, he backed Boris Johnson’s ‘oven-ready Brexit’ even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats.

So, yes, Farage is very much amongst those responsible for Brexit and, in any case, it is more than reasonable to point out that the main cause of his political life has proved to be a failure. It’s certainly clear that this line of attack is being made increasingly often by Labour politicians or sympathetic commentators, an example this week being an opinion piece by Kevin Maguire, Associate Editor of the Mirror.

Where the Labour government is on much trickier ground is that, to the extent it acknowledges the economic damage of Brexit it opens the question of why it has no plans to seek more than marginal limitations to this damage. Perhaps that is why Starmer’s conference speech, like Badenoch’s, had a telling lacuna, in his case avoiding any mention of his ‘reset’ policy. For if Brexit is a sufficiently serious problem to make attacking Farage’s culpability for it worthwhile, what is the government’s solution?

That is the question which Starmer has, until now, avoided and to which he cannot give a credible answer without abandoning his cast iron ‘red line’ manifesto promises, as well as ensuring that the entirety of British politics during this parliament, and probably the next election, is dominated by Brexit again. He isn’t going to do that, and that is one exemplification of the Brexit impasse that Britain as a whole is in: its entire national strategy is admitted, even by many of its advocates, to have failed, and public opinion firmly and consistently endorses the view that it was wrong to leave, but there is no presently viable political route to its rectification.

I’ve been arguing consistently, since December 2022, that there is a better approach for Labour, which would be to honestly admit that Brexit is damaging and has failed, and ought to be reversed, but to be equally honest in saying that this isn’t a political possibility until there is cross-party consensus (at least amongst parties that might credibly come to power) to make an application to rejoin. That means, in the present context, identifying Reform and the Conservatives as the barrier, making them responsible not just for the original problem but for the continuing absence of a solution. I still think that would be Labour’s best option, and with the latest line of blaming Farage for Brexit it becomes the logical next step.

A Royal Commission?

If there is ever to be a solution, one part of the route to it could be an interesting proposal made over the summer (although I have only just come across it) by former MEP Andrew Duff. Noting the “deadlock” in British post-Brexit politics, he proposes the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the position and future of the UK in Europe. It’s not often that a new idea about Brexit surfaces, and it’s a reasonable one in all sorts of ways, the most minimal, but not unimportant, being that, as I argued in June, it is surely right to review, given the time that has passed and the experience we have had, what Brexit has actually meant for the UK.

If nothing else, it would be a way of drawing together the now massive, but highly dispersed and fragmentary, body of evidence about Brexit, and providing some accountability for decisions made. For example, at this week’s Tory Party conference, Michael Gove admitted that the trade deals his government did with Australia and New Zealand were poorly negotiated and damaging to farmers, going on to say “we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working.” Yet these highly revealing remarks were barely reported, even though they confirm exactly what so many of us said at the time, what civil servants warned ministers of at the time, and what the government denied at the time.

Assembling an authoritative single review of what happened with Brexit would, in itself, be a contrast with the evidence-free, faith-based, reality-denying politics of Brexitism. However Duff’s proposal is primarily intended as a future-oriented exercise, which could begin a process to create, to the extent it is possible, the basis for a future national consensus.

From that point of view, he is surely right to say that “the most likely outcome of such a Royal Commission will be a report that furnishes the Prime Minister with a cast-iron case for reversing Brexit.” I’m not so sure Duff is right that “it will prepare the ground for the referendum campaign that must inevitably follow”, since it wouldn’t in itself create the kind of cross-party agreement needed to make rejoining a viable possibility for the EU. But it would be a step away from the current absurdity of a nation which effectively knows it has made a mistake but can’t find a route to rectify it. At the very least it offers a practical suggestion to create such a route, in a way that eludes those who simply demand a ‘rejoin now’ policy. [1]

Still Brexiting

Whatever the wider issues in play (or which ought to be in play), it shouldn’t be forgotten that, as a matter of fact, the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship continues to limp along, largely undiscussed in public. One facet of that, which has had some media discussion, is that since the beginning of this week the EU Entry-Exit System (EES) has begun to be enforced. I should clarify that wording, perhaps, in that, whatever the pro-Brexit press may imagine (£), the EES isn’t something particular to the UK-EU relationship, as if it were a ‘punishment’ for Brexit, but, rather, applies to the EU’s relationship with third countries generally. However, in that sense, for the UK it is a consequence of Brexit and one which will introduce new complexities and, potentially, delays and queues for travelers (although in the last few hours it has been reported that, to avoid this, it is only being partly implemented for now). Sloganizing about ‘securing our borders’ suddenly looks less attractive when we are its target.

In an analogous way, whilst the Brexiters have long used the feeble pun of a ‘protectionist racket’ to describe the EU, that suddenly looks even less funny with the prospect of a massive increase in its tariffs and reduction in its tariff-free quotas for steel imports. That would be a very serious blow, perhaps even an “existential threat”, for the already beleaguered British steel industry, since almost 80% of UK steel exports go to the EU. Again, this is a consequence of being a third country although, again, with wearying predictability, the pro-Brexit press reported it as if it were aimed specifically at Britain (£).

It may or may not be that the British government manages to negotiate an exemption but, taken in conjunction with the now indefinitely stalled negotiations with the US over steel tariffs, it is a stark reminder of Britain’s post-Brexit isolation. That reminder has several dimensions, including the fact of the relative importance of the EU market as compared with the US (which, for steel, takes less than 10% of UK exports). More generally, for all the Brexiter rhetoric about Brexit enabling the UK to have a ‘nimble’ independent trade policy, it is a reminder that size matters more than agility in a world dominated by regional blocs. That is especially so when these lumbering trade monsters go to war, the wider context of the EU’s announcement being, in large part, the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the Chinese steel industry. [2]

The same ‘better in than out’ lesson applies to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which is due to come into force in January 2026, and which also has implications for steel, amongst other products. This is an issue which has been lurking in the Brexit undergrowth for years (I think the first time I discussed it on this blog was in September 2023, and that post includes several links explaining some of the complexities involved), but now it has been reported that a temporary deal to exempt the UK is in prospect. [3] The longer-term likelihood is that the EU CBAM will be linked to the UK CBAM (due to come in to force in 2027), along with an associated linkage of UK and EU Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS), a possibility within the scope of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

A permanent agreement on CBAM and ETS linkages sits alongside other elements of the still to be agreed details of the ‘reset’, including potential deals on a Youth Mobility Scheme, UK participation in Erasmus +, and a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. The latter has a particular urgency in the context of food price inflation, as Naomi Smith of Best for Britain pointed out this week, and might be agreed and implemented “within a year”, according to a recent statement from Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s Trade Commissioner.

That may be optimistic, and it is worth remembering that, price issues aside, until there is an SPS deal in place, the UK (or more accurately Great Britain) will continue with the risky policy of partial border security, having never fully implemented import controls and having now given up even the process of doing so, in the expectation of this still-to-be agreed deal. Sometimes, apparently, ‘securing our borders’ isn’t a priority.

Also sitting within the reset basket is the question of possible partial UK involvement in the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative for defence procurement. It’s an issue of particular and growing salience in the context of the ever-growing threat from Russia and the declining reliability (to put it mildly) of the US as a security partner. Whilst, as Jannike Wachowiak of UKICE explains, the UK would not, as a third country, be eligible for loans from SAFE defence funds, it could, potentially, have access to joint procurements.

The growing charge list

All of these, and other, issues are a reminder not just of the ongoing negotiation of the UK-EU relationship, but of the cumbersome nature of that process, the uncertainties of its outcomes, and the limited scope of those outcomes even if the most favourable of them were to result. One consequence of that, although it is probably impossible to quantify, or even to find much information about, must be to deter investment and, therefore, economic growth. In all kinds of sectors, for all kinds of reasons, the terms of the UK-EU relationship are in flux which, necessarily, creates an unpropitious environment for investment.

Domestic political uncertainty is also a factor since Farage is already threatening to tear up any new agreements the present government makes with the EU. Even if that doesn’t make the EU wary of such agreements, it will prey on the minds of investors and indeed others trying to plan for the future. That, too, is something to be added to the growing charge list against the Reform leader and the other ‘guilty men’ of Brexit. Ultimately, there will need to be not so much a Royal Commission as a Public Inquiry if they are to be held accountable. Only by excavating the subterranean maze of Brexit will its eruptions be quelled.

 

Notes

[1] Duff’s proposal attracted several social media comments denouncing it as ‘British exceptionalism’ (in line with my usual policy, I only link to social media posts if they come from public figures). This is nonsense and reflects a wider problem. It is nonsense because there’s nothing ‘exceptionalist’ about a domestic political debate and, in this case, the idea that Britain needs a process of honest self-reflection about what has done to itself is almost the opposite. It is for the UK to face up to the consequences of its collective decisions, and to do otherwise, for example by blaming the EU for those consequences, or expecting the EU to provide solutions to them, is what might be exceptionalist.

The wider problem is that, whilst it is absolutely true that throughout the Brexit process British exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, greatly in evidence, sometimes amongst ‘remainers’ as well as Brexiters, there is a cadre of social media posters that simply parrots the word in any and every discussion of any and every aspect of Brexit (very often the same posters who ignorantly trot out ‘cherry-picking’ to describe any and every aspect of post-Brexit UK-EU relations).

Some (or more accurately one person, a rather creepy stalker who continually creates multiple pseudonymous social media accounts to harass me and various other people, including Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, on the basis of entirely false accusations of anti-Irish racism) also object that my use of the word ‘Brexitism’ is ‘British exceptionalism’, since it denotes a British form of populism (I explain why that is warranted in my definition of Brexitism), which is as transparently stupid as saying that the word ‘Brexit’ is ‘exceptionalist’. Brexit happened here; Brexitism is happening here. Specific doesn’t mean exceptional.

[2] There is of course a much wider point here than trade or, rather, trade is imbricated within the wider point of the multiple areas – economy, security, defence - in which the UK is horribly caught between the US, China, and the EU. But that would need another post.

[3] Reading that September 2023 post again, I was reminded of the sad, sorry, stupid saga of the UKCA mark, the long, lingering death of which quietly continued over the summer, with the announcement that it will not be required for medical devices.

Has Labour woken up?

Within a couple of days of my previous post, the goal posts of the ‘debate’ about immigration (this being the thing ‘we aren’t allowed to talk about’ yet constantly discuss) were moved in an even harder direction by Nigel Farage. At a press conference, he announced that Reform’s policy is now to abolish ‘indefinite leave to remain’ and, even more radically, to do so retrospectively, so that the rights of existing immigrants, and not just future ones, would be changed.

Whether that announcement was the trigger or, more likely, the intention was already there, this set the stage for a discernible, albeit ambiguous, shift in Labour’s approach to Reform and, with that, to the wider politics of Brexitism.

Farage’s shape-shifting

It doesn’t really matter to Farage that his latest policy proposal gave rise to a range of criticisms of its practicality, its legality, its economic impact, and the false financial claim of the £234 billion saving it would deliver. As Vote Leave showed with the infamous ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ claim during the referendum, rebuttals can serve only to lodge falsities in the public mind, or at least to seem like quibbles about detail.

Nor does it matter much that Farage almost immediately resiled from applying this policy to those with EU Settled Status. That doesn’t affect what he wants to achieve in making indefinite leave to remain a talking point, and in promoting the general principle of retrospective changes to immigration status, with all the misery of insecurity that creates for millions of people. Thus, having only a couple of weeks ago raised the prospect of ‘mass deportations’, which he used to oppose, he has shifted the dial again, and it is notable that the speed with which he is moving is now increasing. How long before a full-on ‘repatriation’ policy becomes the locus of debate?

It's worth recalling that the background to this is, indeed, Brexit. There was a time when Farage, and his erstwhile vehicle of UKIP, campaigned to leave the EU whilst invoking Norway as an ideal. That is, escaping from Freedom of Movement didn’t figure. It’s true that Farage and UKIP had abandoned that position by the time of the Referendum, but many other Brexiters continued to espouse it. As for Farage, his position became that all he wanted was an ‘Aussie-style points system’ of state-managed immigration policy and, at least at one stage, ruled out an immigration cap.

Other Brexiters were more explicit about what this implied, arguing that the issue about Brexit was not to do with levels of immigration per se but simply that those levels should be determined by the ‘sovereign British parliament’, on the basis of an assessment about what level and type of immigration was wanted. And this is exactly what happened once the UK left the EU. So when Farage now presents what he calls the ‘Boriswave’ of increased post-Brexit immigration from, predominantly, non-EU countries as being a terrible betrayal of Brexit and those who voted to leave, he is denouncing the consequences of a policy he supported, even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory held seats in the 2019 election.

Appeasing the unappeasable

Of course, it is true that many leave voters did believe that what they had voted for was a reduction of immigration levels, and plenty of them seem to have thought that this would apply to all immigration, and not just to immigration from the EU. But that is part of the overall story of how Brexit was sold with multiple, conflicting promises, and multiple, conflicting models. These included the now even more established conflation of immigration and asylum-seeking, and even the message to existing immigrants from, especially, the Commonwealth, that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring family members to Britain. So it is important to understand that the current situation grows out of Brexit, and out of the political dishonesty of Brexit, and especially out of the political dishonesty of Farage and the various incarnation of his parties.

But it is also important to understand what this shows. Underneath all the dishonesty there is a single direction of travel. The anti-immigration lobby, with Farage its most high-profile voice, is never satisfied. Whenever its demands are accepted as ‘legitimate concerns’, and policies devised to meet them, a harder set of demands is made. As Ian Dunt discussed in a recent post on his ‘Striking 13’ Substack, Brexit was supposed to assuage complaints of “uncontrolled immigration” yet, despite all the chaos and damage of Brexit, the same complaints persist. If anything, they have become increasingly vociferous, and increasingly framed in terms of English ethnonationalism.

The question, now, is just how much more this country is going to sacrifice on the altar of ‘controlling immigration’ in order to appease the unappeasable?

A line in the sand?

It’s just possible that with his latest proposals on indefinite leave to remain (ILR) Farage may have crossed a line which enough people will defend. For one thing, it is an unpopular policy: the most recent polling shows that 90% of people support the current ILR rules, and only 3% support Reform’s proposals. For another, the evident impact on the economy in general, and upon particular sectors including construction, the NHS, and universities may be even less palatable now, with the economy flatlining and so many of those sectors in permacrisis. For a third, the removal of ILR runs counter to the ‘legitimate concern’ about ‘integration’ espoused by at least some parts of the anti-immigration lobby.

However, what is perhaps more important is that Farage’s proposal has for once galvanized a discussion about immigration which is not solely about economic impacts but about morality, especially because the idea of retrospectively changing the rules under which people already live here is so transparently unfair (the same, of course, could be said about Brexit, which is why many leave campaigners pretended that it would not have that effect).

At all events, suddenly there was talk of how the Farage proposal would not just do transactional damage but would “change the soul of Britain”. Most importantly, before, during and after this week’s Labour Party conference, Keir Starmer talked in that register, calling Farage’s ILR policy “immoral” and “racist”, and saying it would “rip this country apart”. He also spoke of being in “a battle for the soul of Britain” with Reform, of the need for a “patriotic renewal” which challenges Farage’s plastic patriotism, criticized Farage for his dislike of modern Britain, and attacked the politics of grievance. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves spoke bluntly in her Conference speech about the Reform Party being “in bed with Vladimir Putin”, whilst Ed Miliband attacked Farage for his connections with the global network of ethnonationalist populists epitomized by Elon Musk [1].

Two steps forward, one step back?

It may be churlish to criticize these developments, especially for me since, in my previous post, these were exactly the kind of positions I was urging Labour politicians to take, whilst implying pessimism that they would do so. It’s true, as many have remarked, that Starmer can be criticized for being too late, although that’s no reason not to applaud him now. But I certainly don’t want to fall into the ‘purism’ trap of dismissing anything that is imperfect as being worthless, a trap that has long snared many on the left and even more dramatically, in recent years, on the right.

Even so, there is a sense that the Labour government, whilst taking two steps forward, is taking one step back (or, less optimistically, the other way around). Thus, at the same time as Starmer was denouncing Farage’s ILR proposals, the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was announcing plans to ‘reform’ ILR by setting out “tougher” conditions, including increasing the time before it can be applied for from five years to ten. It’s true that these plans were already being developed by her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, so they weren’t directly a reaction to Farage’s latest intervention. But they were conceived within the same strategy of trying to meet, rather than challenge, ‘legitimate concerns’.

It’s also true, as the government claims, that this is different to Farage’s policy, and Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff made as good a case as there is that Mahmood is mounting a genuine challenge to “the shocking rise of ethnonationalism”. Yet Labour politicians still don’t seem to grasp that by constantly accepting that there are ‘legitimate concerns’ about “uncontrolled immigration” and “open borders” (when the reality is that immigration is not, and has never been, ‘uncontrolled’ any more than borders have been ‘open’) in general, or, in this case, about existing ILR rules (which, as the polls linked to earlier show, are supported by the overwhelming majority), they cede ground to Farage and invite his inevitable denunciation of their reforms as inadequate.

For all that Labour’s latest discussions of immigration policy are an improvement, this basic problem remains, and was also illustrated by the government’s latest proposal to deny family reunion rights to individuals who are granted asylum. There also remains a constant slippage in government messaging between discussions of legal immigration, illegal immigration, and asylum-seeking.

The Digital ID distraction

As for Starmer himself, he chose to wrap his denunciation of Reform up with the announcement of a new Digital ID card, framed entirely in terms of cracking down on immigrants working illegally in the UK and controlling borders. Whatever the merits of an ID card scheme in general (I’m agnostic, but not really qualified to discuss it), this was an absurd framing.

For one thing, it was politically inept. For such a major policy announcement to come out of nowhere, with no preparation of public opinion and little explanation of the technical details, seemed more panicky than principled. It is highly probable that it will result in a long and protracted political battle over an unpopular policy, diverting energy and political capital from the government’s main priorities, and, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, ending up never actually being delivered.

In any case, even if it is delivered, it seems unlikely that it will have much impact on illegal working since those working illegally and those employing them are, by definition, willing to break the law. And any impact it does have will be unmeasurable since, again by definition, the number of people working illegally is, and will remain, unknown. It also provided, yet again, an illustration of the impossibility of appeasing the anti-immigration lobby which, for years, has been insisting, falsely, that ID cards are needed to counter illegal immigration, but have now suddenly swung to denouncing them as ineffective, authoritarian, and ‘Un-British’.

All that aside, by tying his critique of Reform’s immorality together with the announcement of his ID card scheme, Starmer is still framing his position in terms of taking the wind from Farage’s sails by appealing to potential Reform voters. That blunts his moral critique, but it also makes little sense electorally. As a new study from the Nuffield Politics Research Centre at Oxford University shows, Labour is not losing many votes to Reform, it is losing them to the LibDems, Greens and ‘don’t knows’.  It is this which will determine the next election. The most likely route to Reform forming a government is if it crosses the inflexion point where the First Past the Post system (unfairly) under-rewards it with seats to one where FPTP (unfairly) over-rewards it. That will happen if the Reform vote share holds up at around 30%, or perhaps just the high-twenties, and Labour fails to hold together the anti-Reform vote [2].

A new boldness?

Even so, if, as I wrote a fortnight ago, there is a battle underway for the “soul of Britain” then at least there are now signs that Starmer and his government realise this, and are willing to engage in it. There are plenty of weapons to deploy against, as I call it, Brexitism. They include constantly reminding voters that all the promises made for Brexit have proved false. Interestingly, for, I think, the first time, Starmer this week made this point on more than one occasion, including mentioning how Brexit had actually exacerbated the flow of irregular asylum-seeking by referring to the ‘Farage boats’ (his implicit point being that the UK being outside the Dublin regulations has created a new ‘pull-factor’ for asylum seekers). At the same time, the government is being slightly less reticent about the ongoing ‘reset’ with the EU including, now, embracing the idea of a Youth Mobility Scheme, which it had previously resisted [3].

Invoking the failure of Brexit is important, because support for it is one of the foundational beliefs of Brexitism, and because it is the principal example of the track record of Brexitism in practice (the constant chaos and incompetence of Reform local councils is another). This in turn means that there is every reason to be suspicious of the current promises coming from the very same people whose promises for Brexit have been discredited.

For particular example, it’s easy to see how those, including Farage and Robert Jenrick, now calling for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) do so in identical terms to those that were used to sell Brexit. Claiming that in one bound Britain will ‘take back control’ (ignoring other legal constraints, and reputational damage), dismissing warnings of what it would mean for Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement, blithely assuming easy agreements being made with other countries etc. Farage even cites Australia as a model for his mass deportation policy.

It’s equally easy to imagine how, if they get their way about the ECHR, and all the promises prove false, they will say it has ‘not been done properly’, or has been ‘betrayed’. It’s even easy to imagine some of the precise ways they will do so: ‘of course, we promised a British Bill of Rights, but we never dreamt that the activist lawyers and unelected Establishment politicians in the House of Lords would slip in provisions which sabotaged the will of the people’.

So there are obvious reasons to challenge those advocating ECHR derogation but, as with the immigration ‘debate’, that challenge can only be weakened by the way that Starmer (and Mahmood) are now talking about the need to reform how the Convention is applied within British courts. It’s possible there is a case for this (I don’t know, but I have heard some perfectly reasonable legal experts suggest this is so), but at the present moment it is highly impolitic to pursue it. Doing so immediately concedes to the Brexitists that there is a ‘problem’, and immediately sets up their ability to claim that only they have a sufficiently robust solution (somewhat akin to the way that David Cameron’s pre-referendum ‘re-negotiation’ with the EU rebounded on him).

Farage’s friends

Immigration aside, there is also much more mileage to be got from attacking the Brexitists for their overseas affiliations. The madness unfolding in Trump’s US offers a clear warning of what the Reform Party would mean if it came to power in Westminster, as can already be glimpsed in its misguided attempts to emulate Musk’s DOGE in its local councils. And the way that Farage, Badenoch, and Truss (as well as by Trump and Musk) lauded Javier Milei’s catastrophic economic policies in Argentina is an equally clear warning of what a Reform or Reform-Conservative government would do to the economy.

More than anything, the deep connections between Russia and Farage can only grow in salience as Putin’s aggressive incursions into European air space and cyber-space continue to intensify, leading the former head of MI5 to posit this week that, in a sense, Britain and Russia are already at war. Those connections, and with them Russia’s persistent attempts to interfere in British politics, have been freshly illustrated by the conviction of Reform’s former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, who has pleaded guilty to eight charges of taking bribes to make pro-Russia statements when he was an MEP.

It's clear that Farage and his allies have been rattled by these developments, making persistent, but flawed, attempts to disown or deny his connections with Gill. But it is Starmer’s accusation of racism which has really hit home, leading to utterly absurd claims that, in making it, he was “inciting violence” against Farage, exposing him to the risk of a ‘Charlie Kirk’ attack. Richard Tice even repeatedly cited a fabricated quote from Starmer's conference speech to suggest, ludicrously as well as mendaciously, that it was an invitation to "Antifa" (the non-existent US 'terrorist organization') to "come at Nigel Farage". It is a reminder of the backwash from the US to the UK of the Kirk killing, and, as I discussed last week, of the utterly hypocritical attempt by the far right to allow itself to use the most violent rhetoric imaginable against its opponents, in the name of ‘free speech’, whilst squealing that literally anything said of it (and, in this case, not said) by those opponents is dangerously inflammatory.

Clearly ambiguous

So, even in the space of a fortnight, something significant has happened, although the extent of that significance remains an open question. On the one hand, the battle lines are clearer, and the government has made them so. On other hand, whilst that has been widely acknowledged in most recent political commentary, that commentary also reveals the continuing ambiguity of Labour’s position.

At one level, that is an ambiguity about its position with respect to voters. Thus in the Economist, Bagehot (Duncan Robinson) argues (£) that Labour has stopped “punching its own voters”, meaning that it has moved to cement its socially-liberal, middle-class, educated flank. But in the Financial Times (£) it is suggested that Starmer has sought to secure “the party’s working-class base” and offered a “defiantly ‘Blue Labour’” message. It can’t be both of these things and, to the extent it is ambiguous, it might well end up being neither. Much will depend on whether recent messaging is followed-up, or whether it will prove to be just another temporary tactic which never develops into a fully-fledged strategy.

At a deeper level, the ambiguity is about Labour’s position about Brexitism, and that ambiguity carries the same dangers. If Starmer is now persuaded that the “soul of Britain” is at stake he will need to remove all ambiguity.

 

Notes

[1] Miliband’s basic point was correct, although it is worth recalling that Musk has pointedly criticized Farage whilst openly giving support to Tommy Robinson.

[2] It's worth saying, given the present atmosphere of premature speculation, that we are a long way from the next election, and current opinion polls may not be very relevant to it, especially as tactical voting (in particular against Reform) makes the link between national polls and constituency outcomes more uncertain. There is a fascinating discussion of the current political situation, digging deep into an issue I’ve touched in the past, the relationship between changing social class patterns and political parties, in Professor Ben Ansell’s latest Political Calculus Substack.

[3] It remains the case that nothing concrete has actually been ‘reset’ as yet. So there seems little basis for Rachel Reeves’ suggestion that the OBR should factor it into its growth forecasts (and, if and when the reset occurs then, on the current best estimate, provided by John Springford of CER, the impact would be small, perhaps, at most, 0.7% of GDP over ten years).

There is another country

In the two weeks since my last post, the speed and scale of events has been almost impossible to keep up with. The result is yet another very long post and I am considering reverting to posting weekly. It seems likely, especially given the slightly changed focus of the blog, that there is always going to be plenty to say.

In that previous post, after reviewing the summer’s confected crisis over asylum hotels, I wrote about the political terrain of the next few years being characterized by a battle over whether Brexit Britain is to become Brexitist Britain. Now, that doesn’t seem so much prescient as complacently languid, as if that battle were not already well under way.

Flagging dangers

This was brought home to me within a couple of days of writing the post. It wasn’t, primarily, because of that weekend’s Reform UK conference since its mixture of vileness, weirdness and madness was not exactly unexpected. Instead it was when, for the first time, I saw not just roundabouts but very long stretches of roads in my area with St. George’s flags (and occasional Union Jacks) hanging on every single lamp post for mile after mile [1]. Of course, I had read about this happening all over the country, but seeing it for myself was different. The effect was not celebratory or unifying, it was sinister, threatening, and – in its unmissable historical echoes – fascistic.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that this isn’t a word I use casually and, in any case, it is a documented fact that the origins of this spate of flag-flying lie with far-right activist groups. It is not about jolly yeomen putting out the bunting, but masked men bent on intimidation. So it was dishonest and dangerous for Labour politicians like Yvette Cooper to argue that it is in any sense a “symbol of Britain coming together” (£). It has clearly arisen on the back of this summer’s asylum hotel ‘protests’, and, as has been widely remarked, seems to symbolise division and exclusion rather than unity and inclusion.

What is actually worse, and more literally fascistic, is that it amounts to a demand for compulsory ‘unity’ through the sequestration of the public space. Criticize it, and you are deemed to have failed an imposed ‘loyalty test’.  Most obviously it is aimed at immigrants, but more generally at the ‘enemies within’ – the liberally-minded and tolerant.

Sanctimony and hypocrisy

Against this background, the news broke of the murder of Charlie Kirk in the US. Immediately that was used as a pretext to attack liberals in the most vicious of terms. Whereas, only a few days before, the right in the UK and the US had been screaming about the ‘injustice’ of punishing Lucy Connelly for her use of violently inflammatory language, suddenly all they could talk of was how the liberal-left was responsible for the killing because of the language used to attack Trump and his supporters. Yet, whilst admonishing those on the left for expressing their opinions, Kirk was presented as a free speech martyr, murdered simply for speaking his mind and inviting others – in the familiar tactic of every tedious internet troll – to ‘prove me wrong’.

With equal hypocrisy, these free speech absolutists started to demand, and procure, punishments for those, including the Global Opinions Editor of the Washington Post, who refused to join in with the sanctimonious beatification of Kirk by, for example, referring to his own hate-filled rhetoric. But this is not just a matter of illogic or hypocrisy. It is part of the way that the right weaponizes liberalism against itself in a kind of political jiu-jitsu. Thus the right demands, and largely receives, civility from its political opponents, whilst refusing to accord any civility whatsoever in return. It is an asymmetry dissected in Jonathan Freedland’s compelling analysis of the Kirk murder and its aftermath.

The United States was already in a very dark place, as charted by Professor Christina Pagel’s excellent Substack post, and it is now much darker. That isn’t so much because of the possibility of escalating acts of individual violence, although that is clearly a risk, but because of the possibility of escalating state violence against its actual or perceived internal enemies.

Kirk was hardly known in this country, but his killing also had immediate reverberations here. This is just one example of a point made in a BlueSky post in response to my attempt to define Brexitism. The poster said, rightly, that one of its weaknesses was a failure to discuss the many important linkages between the far-right in the US and the UK, linkages which are both ideological and financial. Actually, it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to write in terms of the far-right, since in both the US and the UK what used to be the respectable, centrist right of politics has been virtually eviscerated.

Thuggery

At all events, following Kirk’s murder, British Brexitists immediately began to recycle (£) the talking points of the American right in pursuit of the UK culture war. His death was then invoked during last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, which attracted possibly as many as 150,000 people to London and resulted in several violent clashes with the police. This was massively short of the three million persistently, and falsely, claimed on social media, but there is no doubt that it marked a significant show of strength, and was perhaps the largest rally of its kind in the UK in recent history.

Robinson seems to be allied with, and is perhaps a member of, Advance UK, the splinter group of Reform led by Ben Habib. But, again, it is increasingly meaningless to differentiate between far-right thugs and Reform, and in fact doing so panders to Nigel Farage’s pretensions to be ‘respectable’. For example, Reform Chairman David Bull was happy to endorse the rally as a gathering of “the silent majority”, whilst Farage opined that “the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people”. Moreover, there is now a steady flow of defectors from the Tories to Reform, the latest examples including former MPs Maria Caulfield and Nadine Dorries, an acquisition of perhaps rather dubious value, and, more significantly, Danny Kruger, the oleaginous MP who was once co-leader of the New Conservative group and is strongly associated with the (paradoxically international) National Conservatism movement. Meanwhile, the Tory Party itself continues to espouse positions almost identical to those of Reform.   

The American connection was most strikingly evident in Elon Musk’s extraordinarily inflammatory appearance at the rally, which included a call for the dissolution of parliament and threats that “violence is coming”. In fact, although those were the most widely quoted parts of it, what was more chilling was the way he, quite calmly, articulated or assumed an entire world view based on fantasies, distortions and lies. In a way, it was more unsettling than a spittle-flecked rant and, echoing all the invocations of ‘the silent majority’, his pitch was to the supposedly ordinary, apolitical, commonsense people of Britain.

As with the outbreak of flag-thuggery, any idea that the rally was about ‘uniting’ the country is transparently absurd. Equally, although hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers is undoubtedly the source of its core support, it is now abundantly clear that it has a more general, and very serious, intention to destroy the present government and, with that, to destroy the entire foundations of liberal democracy. It is not being hidden. Elon Musk said it, in terms. Others at the rally spoke openly of the need to assassinate Keir Starmer, even as ‘the left’ was being castigated for inciting the killing of Charlie Kirk (and, despite what some apologists say in the comments on the report linked to, this wasn’t just a ‘rogue individual’: social media is awash with similar calls).

This constitutes a dangerous moment for Britain. It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed. That has happened for many reasons, including the influence of the US right, and not just in Brexit Britain (France furnishes another example), but some of them are certainly related to Brexit and Brexitism. In particular, the relentless attacks on established institutions which Brexit gave rise to, and perhaps especially the prorogation of parliament, even though it ultimately failed, have enfeebled and de-legitimized those institutions.

Labour’s failure to lead

Worse than that, or perhaps it is simply one aspect of it, the Labour government now appears both unwilling and unable to stand up to what is happening or even to acknowledge its gravity. It has condoned rather than condemned the flagging movement and initially refused to condemn the things which were said at the Robinson rally, only the violence that accompanied it. Some condemnation did come, later, but it seemed to have been forced out under pressure, rather than being visceral, and didn’t carry any sense of the urgency of the situation. It is as if Starmer, and other government ministers, have internalized the accusations coming from Trump, Musk, and J.D. Vance, as well as from the British right, about being opposed to ‘free speech’. But no one is asking Starmer to ban such rallies, merely to use his own free speech, and his position, to lead the challenge to the things which are being said at them.

More generally, the government seems dazed by the events unfolding around it, and to have lost control of the events unfolding within it. The Angela Rayner resignation, and its aftermath, shortly followed by the Peter Mandelson fiasco, and then the resignation of Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, don’t just exemplify that loss of internal control, they exacerbate the external events. For they serve to promote one of the core drivers of Brexitism, namely that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is nothing to lose, and perhaps everything to gain, by rejecting the entirety of mainstream politics.

The reasons why the government has fallen into such disarray have been widely discussed, many of them circling around the supposed migration crisis. But that issue is only part of the government’s wider malaise which, although there are a range of diagnoses, almost all commentators ascribe to its failure to communicate its fundamental purpose and guiding values. Even more damningly, many suspect that the failure is not one of communication but of a terrible dark hole such that there is no fundamental purpose, nor any guiding values, to be communicated.

What makes this all the more damaging is that to the extent that the government has ever made its purpose and values clear it was in the election campaign to present Labour as the calm, competent antidote to the chaotic politics of the post-referendum years. In other words, whilst any government would wish to avoid being in chaos, it is far more dangerous for one built specifically, and almost solely, on the promise of stability. This, by the way, makes talk of the Labour party jettisoning Starmer and installing a new leader, especially when there is no obviously outstanding successor, utterly bizarre.

Navigating between complacency and alarmism

However, I think there is another issue here, and it also grows in large part out of Brexit. Whilst many voters may have hoped for a less chaotic politics than the period after 2016, which saw five Prime Ministers in almost as many years, the media and commentariat became addicted to it. There has always been an element of that in political reporting, since drama and chaos make good copy, but to my mind (and I accept that this is purely impressionistic) it has intensified. No doubt that is about more than Brexit, as much of it is bound up with the changing nature of the news cycle, and the impact of social media. But Brexit supplied an addictive rush of political drama and, like all addictions, users have to keep chasing the high. Current speculation about an early election, as well about the idea of a leadership challenge to Starmer, are examples.

From this point of view, as the veteran political commentator Philip Stephens argues, it is important not to get carried away by the current media narrative of a government in crisis. Yet there is clearly a very difficult line to tread here. On the one hand, there are serious and dangerous events unfolding, and ignoring them would be irresponsibly complacent. On the other hand, part of what is driving those events is the promulgation by the political right of a narrative of crisis which it seeks to exploit, and accepting or even amplifying that narrative would be irresponsibly alarmist.

If there is a way of navigating through this tricky territory then it entails offering a compelling counter-narrative. That means matching the undeniably old and new media-savviness of the populists, providing a positive alternative to, rather than just a rebuttal of, what they are pumping out, and in the process defusing the pervasive sense of crisis. The responsibility for providing it rests with anyone with any kind of public voice but, inevitably, it must rest primarily with politicians, and especially with the government.

And the government has a particular incentive to do so, partly to meet the pressing demand for an articulation of the government’s fundamental purpose and guiding values, and partly as a matter of electoral calculation. Its present strategy of aping Reform advantages Farage whilst alienating many who might otherwise support Labour, and academic research suggests that it will be an electorally costly strategy. The consequence could well be a Reform government or, less discussed but probably more likely, a hung parliament with an uncertain outcome for the formation of a government. This isn’t just future political danger for Labour, it is a present political and economic danger because, as the economics commentator Simon Nixon recently pointed out, in relation to current bond market jitters, “the biggest risk to UK financial stability is not this government, but the justified fear of what might follow if it fails”.

We want our country back

Central to such a counter-narrative is the need to displace the far-right’s pretensions to speak for ‘decent ordinary people’ or the ‘silent majority’. Doing that means discarding one of the central features of Brexitism, the idea that when it came to a single-issue vote – the referendum on EU membership – it was revealed that the populist claim to represent that silent majority was true.

That, and the subsequent associated rhetoric of ‘the will of the people’ versus ‘the elite’, cowed mainstream politicians and was particularly disconcerting for those on the left who regarded themselves as the voice of the people and as the challengers to the elitism. It also fed a kind of liberal guilt amongst, especially, middle-class progressives, suggesting they were ‘out of touch’ with ‘real people’, particularly as regards immigration. All of this has enabled Brexitists, including Farage and Robinson, to trade with increasing success on their version of Britain and ‘British values’, including, as the widespread use of the St. George’s flag shows, conflating Britain with England.

So, in concrete terms, offering a counter-narrative means providing a different version of Britain. It has become almost a cliché to remark on the contrast between the image of Britain projected in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and that of the Brexit referendum just four years later. The first was optimistic, inclusive and tolerant, paying ample reference to the past but confident about the present and future, and tinged with an ironic, playful humour. The second was sour, insular, intolerant, fearful, unhealthily obsessed with past glories, and utterly lacking in any humour or pleasure.

There is an opportunity here for the non-Brexitist mainstream to develop its own political jiu-jitsu, appropriating the constant Brexitist demand that ‘we want our country back’. Doing so would not be a nostalgic lament for an unrecoverable past. That first Britain is still available, including for England, as was more recently suggested in discussions of ‘progressive patriotism’ at the time of the Euro 2020 football tournament. 

Articulating it as the real Britain, and the true expression of British values would not go against the grain of public opinion but with it. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the veteran political scientist Professor Sir John Curtice provided a fascinating overview of the current political scene which included discussion of the latest British Social Attitudes Survey. This showed the disparities between the views and values of the public in general and those of 2024 Reform voters. These include that 31% of the public believe that migrants have undermined rather than enriched the country's culture compared with 81% of Reform voters; 32% think migrants have been bad for the country's economy (73% of Reform voters); and 18% think attempts to give equal opportunities for black and Asian people have gone too far (49% of Reform voters).

This, and much other data, gives quantitative support to the claim that Reform does not speak for ‘the people’ in a general sense, or for some mythical ‘silent majority’. Britain really is a more tolerant country than the one Farage, Robinson or the Tories claim it to be. Indeed, if anything, it is this tolerance which characterizes ‘the silent majority’, or at least one which is silenced in the sense that none of what used to be called the ‘main Westminster parties’, including the governing Labour Party, speak for it. Instead, the tolerant majority are constantly told that they are the ‘out of touch elite’.

The alternative, then, is to speak for this sense of Britain and Britishness, stressing rather than denying the success of multi-culturalism and, perhaps even more importantly, replacing sullen or alternatively vainglorious nostalgia with an optimistic vision for the future as a framing for concrete policies to achieve it, including on asylum-seeking. I’m not suggesting this would be easy. But it is almost a truism that parties which don’t seem to like their country are not likely to appeal to its voters, and it is striking the extent to which both Reform and the Tories trade on dismay for ‘what this country has become’.

Denying scoundrels the refuge of patriotism

Articulating Britishness in this way would serve to position Farage, Reform, and other Brexitists as un-British. It isn’t effective simply to ‘call them out’ as ‘racists’ or ‘fascists’ which, whilst it may give a self-congratulatory sense of ‘No pasaran’ steadfastness, is easily laughed off by their supporters and potential supporters, and cements their sense of being hectored by prissy middle-class liberals. But questioning their Britishness is another matter, as is the counterpart of attacking Farage on one of his weakest flanks, his lack of patriotism.

Keir Starmer has not been scared to embrace patriotism, rightly in my view. Doing so has often been taboo for the British left, as George Orwell long ago pointed out, and as was vividly illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s adolescent refusal to sing the National Anthem in 2015. It may be that there are still some on the liberal-left who feel queasy about anything that smacks of nationalism, but, frankly, we don’t have the luxury of such scruples. Without a positive articulation of patriotism the field is left to aggressive and authoritarian nationalists. So Starmer is right to talk about patriotism, but he needs to do so in a way which articulates Britishness in a radically different way to the far-right version and to the equally Brexitist ‘Blue Labour’ version.

Doing so would make the sharp attacks on Farage’s patriotism which Starmer has previously made more effective. It would enable a linkage to be made between the extreme illiberal authoritarianism of Farage’s call for mass deportations and his open admiration for Putin, his (at best) equivocation about Ukraine, and his sycophantic association with Trump. Farage’s vulnerability to those charges, including amongst his own supporters, has been shown before, for example in the reaction to his comments about Putin, Ukraine and NATO in 2024. Nor is Farage alone in this vulnerability. It is shared by Robinson, with his support from Musk and his documented ties to Russia.

Moreover, exposing the right in this way would create a coherence with the government’s foreign and defence policies. Amongst all the other developments in the last fortnight, we have seen fresh evidence of Putin’s aggressive intent, with drone flights into Polish and Romanian airspaces. This is not incidental to what is happening domestically. In both cases aggressive nationalism is in the ascendant, and in both cases it is emboldened by Trump, a testament to both his power and his weakness.

Which brings me finally to Trump’s visit to the UK this week. But what, really, is there to say? We all know that for ‘reasons of State’ the British government, like every government around the world, has to try to deal with this vile, sociopathic bully, and feeding his grotesque ego with some pageantry is one obvious way to do so. But the America he is creating is already another country from that which we have known and, in the current battle for our own future, that country is on the side of darkness. Ultimately, and the sooner the better, winning that battle will entail weaning ourselves from our dependence upon it.

Prospects

No doubt others would articulate this battle in different ways, but I think there is now a widespread understanding that this country is in a period of fundamental conflict not just in its politics but about its polity; a battle for its identity and, if it is not too overblown to say, for its soul. The radical right certainly knows what is stake. So should the rest of us. The way I articulate it is in terms of a conflict between ‘Brexitism’ and ‘Anti-Brexitism’, and it has been evident since the very early days of the Brexit process. I don’t, obviously, mean that history started in 2016 but there’s plenty of evidence, including some of the other data in the John Curtice analysis that I referred to earlier, that Brexit is an enduring political inflexion point.

From that point of view, what I have discussed in this post could be part of a viable strategy to marginalize Brexitism and, conversely, to mobilise ‘anti-Brexitism’. It could also, not coincidentally, be part of a viable strategy to revitalize Labour’s electoral fortunes by doing several things at once: provide a novel line for a drama-addicted media, break with one of the central deformations of Brexitist politics, meet the demand for a coherent statement of its purpose and values, marginalize Reform, and re-galvanize its liberal-left support. But this is not a cynical statement of tactics. It would be a more moral politics and, crucially, a more truthful politics, at least partly reversing out of the cul-de-sac of Brexit and Brexitism.

To my mind, the conflict over Brexitism and the fate of the Labour government are linked, at least for the time being, in that it seems very difficult to envisage a way of marginalizing Brexitism which does not involve the main party of organized labour and, more or less, of social democracy, especially given that it is the governing party. In the longer term that may change, but I’m not sure we have the luxury of thinking in the longer term. For that reason, too, this post has been more prescriptive than usual and, whilst accepting that the prescriptions may be flawed, incomplete, and undoubtedly unpalatable to some readers of this blog, I believe something like them is vital [2]. As to the prospect of the Labour government enacting anything remotely like them, well, that seems unlikely.

 

Notes

[1] See the report starting about 18 seconds into this link, which will only be viewable in the UK to BBC licence holders. It turns out that all these flags were put up by one man. That, too, gives the lie to the idea of some huge groundswell driven by ‘the silent majority’, but it also emphasizes how small numbers of people are being allowed to dominate what are public spaces.

[2] Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of similar prescriptions from James O’Malley in a Substack post and especially encouraging is the video clip embedded within it where Labour MP Lizzi Collinge articulates very much the kind of counter-narrative of patriotism I have in mind.