(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’. My normal fortnightly post will appear next Friday.)
Hobolt, Sara & Tilley, James (2026) Tribal Politics. How Brexit Divided Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198911715 (Hardback). 243 pp. £30
This excellent new book is a major addition to the academic literature on Brexit, as well as being accessible and fascinating for non-academic readers interested in Brexit or contemporary British politics generally. Indeed, one implication of the book is that it isn’t really possible to understand contemporary British politics without understanding Brexit because of the endurance of the identities of ‘leaver’ and ‘remainer’.
It is these identities which are the subject of the book. That is to say, this is not a book about the referendum, the parliamentary politics which followed, the negotiations with the EU, or the impact of Brexit on economics or international relations. Whilst all of these are touched upon, the specific focus is describing and explaining Brexit identities amongst the public/ voters and how and why, as the title suggests, these have proved sufficiently divisive to take on a ‘tribal’ character.
The idea that such Brexit identities exist is not, of course, a new one. Apart from being familiar from everyday experience, it has previously been recognized by academics (e.g. Sobolewska & Ford, 2020) and the authors of this book, two eminent political scientists based at LSE and Oxford respectively, rigorously reference and discuss the extant literature. However, Hobolt & Tilley provide the first comprehensive study of how and why, despite EU membership having been an issue of low salience for most voters prior to the referendum, these identities came to exist and have persisted for so long after Britain actually left the EU and after Brexit ceased to feature prominently in the news.
Summary of book
The basic fact of that persistence is most clearly summarized in a chart (p. 88) showing the percentage of people thinking of themselves as remainers or leavers over the period 2017-2026. In essence, the chart shows that those identifying as one or the other, whilst falling from 75% in 2017, was still 60% in 2025. At the outset of the period, each group had about the same level of identification, at about 37%. That figure persists for remainer identification but, after 2020, the figure for leaver identification falls to about 23% by 2025. The authors explain the various reasons for this disparity, some of which are more obvious than others, but, overall, they argue that its significance should not be exaggerated and that “the difference in the trajectory of the two groups is … much less interesting than the similarity between them” (p. 96).
The explanation of why an issue (in this case Brexit) can give rise to issue-based identities is given in terms of the existence of three conditions (pp. 3-4, and more extensively pp. 19-22). These are “issue contestation” (there is strong conflict between groups around a salient, meaning essentially non-trivial, issue); “issue expression” (expressing, in word or deed, commitment to that issue cements identification with the group); and “issue alignment” (the issue doesn’t align with existing identifications, such as political parties, so can become the basis for an identity in its own right). Brexit, the authors suggest, “provided the Goldilocks mixture” (p. 1) of these conditions.
This explanatory framework derives from Social Identification Theory, which is elaborated in chapter two of the book (pp. 10-27) as an alternative (or perhaps a supplement) to rational choice theories of political behavior (p. 11), and the next three chapters explain how and why the issue of Brexit was able to become the basis for such social identification. An important argument within that is Hobolt & Tilley’s demonstration that Brexit identities can’t be reduced to pre-existing characteristics such as educational level but “were ultimately the product of the vote and the political context of the vote” (p.74). So, contrary to what is often believed, Brexit marked a distinctive rupture and not simply a reprise or rebadging of established patterns of political sociology.
Equally important are the chapters thereafter, which explain how these identities have persisted and, in some respects, intensified over time through processes of “affective polarization” (pp. 96-119). Some of this is explained in terms of personality traits (pp. 153-159), but perhaps more interestingly by the ways in which Brexit identities, once in place, tended to create “a set of incentives to adjust one’s views accordingly” (p. 145). That is, to avoid “cognitive dissonance” (pp. 121-124) people tend to take on all of the views of their ‘tribe’ and to interpret developments through that lens. In this and other ways “confirmation bias” (p. 122, and pp. 120-146 generally) has tended to solidify leaver and remainer identities
Such solidification evidently connects with the familiar idea that social media has led us to exist within ‘echo chambers’, re-enforcing our pre-existing views and even making them more extreme. However, the authors provide strong evidence to support their claim that “the real echo chamber” (p. 169) is not social media nearly so much as it is real life family and friendship networks. At all events, leaver and remainer identities have proved sufficiently durable to at least contribute to realignments in voting patterns, which are the subject of the final chapter (pp. 176-188).
There is obviously much more in the book than I have summarized here, and indeed it would be impossible to do justice to the formidable amount of data, analysis and scholarship within it. To my delight, given my great interest in the novels of C.P. Snow as a source of political insights, it even includes reference to one of his novels (p. 153).
Limitations and criticisms
The book does, however, have some limitations (as all books do). One is that the data presented are almost entirely quantitative (mainly large-scale longitudinal surveys). That has many strengths in terms of charting attitudes over time, and can capture things like emotional attachment to identities (see pp. 101-105), but does not provide the kind of insights into the meaning of Brexit identities for those who hold them which could be disclosed by including qualitative data. To put that another way, despite the focus on ‘tribes’ there is little anthropological sensibility in the analysis.
Another limitation is that the deployment of Social Identification Theory, and especially the work of Henri Tajfel, is not accompanied by any real discussion of the criticisms made of it (e.g. Dashtipour, 2012: Schnur, 2024). Personally, I don’t mind that too much, perhaps reflecting the fact that I am now an ex-academic, but having worked in a field where identity theories (in the plural) are of central importance (e.g. Kenny et al., 2011) I can imagine some of my former colleagues bridling a little.
What I would be slightly more critical of is where this theoretical framing leads. The things which are presented as conditions for the formation of Brexit identities are arguably rather circular. That is most obviously so as regards the condition of ‘issue contestation’, since the existence of strong conflict between groups about a salient issue presupposes that which it seeks to explain: if there are already groups in strong conflict about an issue, those groups will already have members, and membership implies at the very least proto-identification (and almost certainly some degree of ‘issue expression’).
Relatedly, what makes an issue ‘salient’, in the sense it is used here, is that something important is at stake apart from, and at least to some extent prior to, the identities which coalesce around it, but this is somewhat occluded by the theoretical framing of this book. The original work of Tajfel was, as the authors explain (pp. 11-12), based on experiments in which participants were found to embrace tribe-like identities even when the issues dividing them were arbitrarily assigned and had no objective, non-trivial basis. On such an account it is the psychological need for identification, not the issue, which is primary.
Whilst Hobolt & Tilley recognize that the “lab-based experimental paradigm” (p. 19) is neglectful of the social and political context of issue-based identities, the trace of this psychologistic, ‘Tajfelian’ account persists. The result is that remainer and leaver identities are treated as equivalent, differing in political content but not in psychological process. That makes the analysis non-partisan, which is in many ways admirable both for its academic detachment and because it is no doubt true that the psychological processes constituting remainer and leaver identities (affective polarization, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias etc.) are very similar.
However, political actors – voters – people – don’t develop identities irrespective of the substance of what makes issues contestable. Thus, contestation over salient issues is both a condition and a consequence of political identities, and political identities are both a condition and a consequence of contestation over salient issues. This isn’t to deny the authors’ point (e.g. p.135) that policy opinions can be, and often are, substantially shaped by political identities, but nor does that point negate mine: it’s not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.
Moreover, connecting to my earlier comment about the absence of qualitative data about meaning, whilst it is highly plausible that the processes through which remainer and leaver identities develop are very similar, it doesn’t follow, and probably isn’t the case, that what it means to remainers to be remainers is the same as what it means to leavers to be leavers. And it is also quite likely that, in both cases, this meaning has changed over time even though the identity-labels have persisted. This in turn may well mean that what the ‘issue’ is understood to be, and the reasons for its ‘salience’, have changed over time, which is another way of saying that there is a recursive interaction between ‘issue’ and ‘identity’.
There’s certainly much about Brexit which can be analyzed in political-psychological terms, and I sometimes do so myself on this blog and elsewhere. But there's a limit to the traction of viewing it in terms of tribal identities, as if it were akin to the dispute between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Swift’s (1726) political satire Gulliver’s Travels, unless political conflicts are to be detached from political rationality and subsumed within psychological rationales. If, as this book amply demonstrates, Brexit identities have become strongly embedded then it is at least in part for reasons which lie beyond identity, in the same way as is true for other political identities (such as those based on political parties). In what is a broadly ‘rationalistic’ (albeit not a ‘rational choice’) analysis it is perhaps slightly surprising that the focus is so resolutely on the arguers and so relatively little on what they are arguing about.
Conclusion
These criticisms (or, perhaps, they are just variants of a single criticism) do not affect my opening assessment that, overall, this is an excellent book providing compelling analysis of an important topic. It is packed with highly informative data and acute interpretation, and is written with admirable lucidity, especially given the complexity of some of the material. It is, indeed, strange to think that, only ten years ago, the identities of leaver and remainer simply didn’t exist and yet are now a familiar part of political life and the political lexicon. As with all the best social science, this book interrogates the familiar whilst making the strange explicable.
Friday, 24 April 2026
Friday, 17 April 2026
New times, same old arguments
In the ‘new global divide’, the last fortnight has not been a happy one for what can variously be called the anti-liberal, anti-rules, populist, authoritarian or radical right side of that divide. The decisive defeat of its figurehead, Victor Orban, in the Hungarian election last weekend is having ripple effects across the world. Meanwhile Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged presidency has become ever-more bogged down in the still unfolding consequences of his spectacularly ill-judged attack on Iran. Yet whilst the world continues to re-calibrate, post-Brexit Britain remains largely stuck in the same old debates.
The hope and the warning from Hungary
The significance of Orban’s defeat is undeniable - for Hungary, of course, but also for the EU and Ukraine. At the same time, it was also a defeat for his backers, Trump and Putin, and for his many friends and admirers in the ironically global network of populist nationalists, not least Nigel Farage. But Orban’s importance went well beyond these high-level connections. His ideology and, equally important, his money made Hungary a crucial node within that global network, insinuating his influence into every dank crevice of the radical right, perhaps especially those where ethno-nationalism and ‘cultural Christianity’ are to be found lurking.
Thus, as regards the UK, not just Farage but many of the more minor figures who crop up recurrently in this blog have connections of one sort or another with Orban. These include Matthew Goodwin and Frank Furedi (both mentioned, for example, in a post last month), many of those in the overlapping ‘History Reclaimed’, ‘Brains for Brexit’ and ‘Briefings for Britain’ activist groups (discussed, for example, in a post last November), and many of those in the ‘National Conservative’ movement (discussed, for example, in a post in 2023). The latter movement is notable for having enfolded numerous politicians associated with both Tory and Reform parties and many of the ‘intellectuals’ of Brexitism including James Orr, Reform’s recently appointed Head of Policy.
For many of these people Orban’s Hungary became not just a source of funding but an inspiring model. That is worth reflecting upon since, were there ever to be a Reform government, its template would be the authoritarianism and grotesque corruption of the Orban regime [1]. For whilst the end of that regime is certainly a defeat for its admirers, denting their confidence of being in the vanguard of an unstoppable arc of history, it would be quite wrong to imagine it will inspire any change of heart or mind amongst them. And whilst there is inspiration in seeing the Hungarian people defy domestic intimidation and external pressure by voting in droves to throw Orban out, the more important message is of the danger of getting into the situation of that being necessary. After all, not only has Hungary endured sixteen years of misrule but it will also be a long and complex task to undo the damage caused by those years.
Cautious praise for Starmer
Damaging as Orban has been to Hungary and malign as his influence has been upon the wider world, that is nothing compared with the damage being caused by Trump and his administration. Like a great many people, I was much impressed by Mark Carney’s Davos speech earlier this year, precisely because of its crisp articulation of the new global divide and how to respond to it. In brief, what quickly became called the ‘Carney Doctrine’ was a call for “middle powers” to operate and co-operate on the basis of “values-based realism” so as, at least by implication, to navigate around the increasing unpredictability and hostility of the United States.
The immediate context of that speech was the ‘Greenland crisis’ created by Trump’s unprecedented threat to take, possibly by force, the territory of another NATO member. That this seems longer ago than the three months which have actually passed only serves to underscore the validity of Carney’s analysis. Since then, of course, there has been the chaos and devastation caused by Trump’s attack on Iran, including his chilling threat to destroy its “whole civilization” and the now growing rift between the US and China over the US ‘counter-blockade’ of the Strait of Hormuz.
There are several signs that the British government is enacting something like the Carney Doctrine, some of which I outlined in a post in February. Since then, the Iran war has provided further examples of that, most obviously the decision not to join in with it and, most recently, the decision not to participate in the ‘counter-blockade’. For all the many legitimate criticisms of Keir Starmer, he has, as the commentator David Aaronovitch convincingly argues, “got the big one right”.
Along with that, there has been a notable hardening in Starmer’s approach to relations with the US more generally. This hasn’t taken the form of any dramatic statement, and certainly nothing as openly insulting as what Trump has continually said about Starmer and the UK, but at least by implication something has shifted. For example, Starmer recently spoke of being “fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy, businesses' bills go up and down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world”. It is really quite telling to have bracketed Putin and Trump together, and to have denied Trump the courtesy of the title ‘President’. It is certainly difficult to imagine Starmer, or any of his predecessors, speaking of an American President in this way.
And this shift is not just about rhetoric: it is reported (£) that US officials seconded to UK government departments are increasingly being asked to leave meetings when sensitive information is discussed. This is at least conceivably a sign that the government is beginning what would be the long, slow (and expensive) process of following the recent advice of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to reduce its reliance on the US as a security and defence partner. At the very least, it is a sign of how Trump has banjaxed the UK’s trust in the US as, indeed, he has with almost all America’s major allies (£).
Starmer’s approach to Trump and the Iran war is made politically easier because, for once, he is broadly in line with public opinion. Disapproval of the US military strikes on Iran increased as the war went on, rising to 65% (and approval falling to 16%) prior to the ceasefire (if such it be). Meanwhile, support for the government’s handling of the conflict has risen sharply, albeit only from the low base of 20% in March to 31% at the beginning of April, and albeit still lower than the 35% who think the government is handling it badly [2]. It is difficult to separate out opinion on this issue from the general unpopularity of Starmer and his government, but I think there is fair case that Labour’s policy in this area is close to public opinion or, at least, that the alternative of acting with the US would have been very substantially divergent from public opinion.
Discarding Trump, retaining hubris
The unpopularity of Trump and the war have also had the interesting effect of causing his allies and disciples in other countries to distance themselves from his increasingly deranged conduct. In the UK this has a particular significance because of Brexit, since it was central to the Brexiters’ case that the US in general, and Trump specifically, would provide a solid and supportive geo-political and economic anchor for post-Brexit Britain. That became increasingly indefensible in the face of the Trump Tariffs, the Greenland crisis, and his disparaging remarks about the British military, but has been almost entirely abandoned since the short-lived attempt to argue that the UK should have joined in the attack on Iran.
Thus, in the last few weeks (£), Kemi Badenoch, David Frost, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and other prominent Brexiters have started to criticise Trump and the Iran war. Farage’s apostasy has been particularly piquant given his previous boasts of his close friendship with ‘Mr. Brexit’ and his interest, expressed as recently as last September, in being appointed as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington. Now, he says merely that “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by”, and professes to be “shocked” by the threat to destroy Iran’s civilization. Perhaps, apart from electoral calculations, Farage also feels slighted, given the recent snub he endured when he attempted to have dinner with Trump in Florida.
However, there is absolutely no reason to think that this volte face on the pro-Brexit right betokens anything remotely like the pragmatism envisaged by the Carney Doctrine. It certainly doesn’t betoken any recognition of the folly of Brexit, in the sense of recognizing that the UK’s strategic interests align with those of the EU and would be better served by being a member of the EU. On the contrary, it betokens a continuation, even an intensification, of the familiar bellicosity, at once hubristic and self-pitying, that lay behind Brexit. For, as I pointed out in a recent post, the accent is always on national humiliation and betrayal.
So, for example, a recent Daily Mail editorial thundered/whined that:
“Even a few short years ago, the prospect of Britain appearing irrelevant on the global stage would have been unthinkable … our great nation is now little more than a bit player in the geopolitical arena. The war on Iran has put a sharp focus on Sir Keir's inglorious role in consigning Britain to the margins.”
It is an almost unbelievably foolish analysis in its assumption that Britain could, or even should, still be a global power and, certainly, an analysis which is entirely ignorant of British history since Suez, if not since 1945. And, in the process, it is redolent of all the delusions about ‘Global Britain’ that permeated the case for Brexit, both as a reason why the UK could ‘go it alone’ and a promise of the glories which would result from doing so.
Going back to the Carney Doctrine, then, such a posture entails a refusal even to accept the basic reality of ‘middle-powerdom’, since to do so would itself be a betrayal of what “our great nation” should be. From that it follows the kinds of cooperation Carney advocates are deemed shameful. Hence, the editorial asked rhetorically, “would a PM with even a smidgen of respect for either the office he holds or the nation have allowed a situation where the Navy was reduced to asking Germany for the loan of a warship?” And hence, elsewhere in the Mail, a report about the “humiliation” our “once-mighty Navy faces begging French fleet for help to patrol our OWN waters” [emphasis in original].
The Brexit blockage
It is certainly true that the erosion of UK defence capacity is a serious problem, as was forcibly spelt out this week by former NATO boss and Labour Party grandee Lord Roberston. It’s also true, by the way, that for several years now UK defence procurement has been scandalously incompetent, rendering what defence spending there has been less effective than it should have been. What is emphatically untrue is that there is anything inherently shameful in working with allied countries so as to share each other’s resources and assets.
Indeed, it is precisely the implication of the Carney Doctrine, and the lesson to be drawn from America’s now at best questionable commitment to NATO, that such cooperation intensifies. For the UK, whilst that cooperation isn’t confined to its European allies, that must principally mean cooperation with them since, as last week’s revelations about Putin’s offensive activity against underwater cables re-emphasised, Russia is the most direct threat to our national security and it is a threat we share with the rest of Europe.
It is therefore hardly surprising that there is renewed discussion of the case to create an EU army, the most recent example being a speech by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. A rather different, and perhaps more likely, scenario would be to create a European defence capability within the structures of NATO but without reliance on the US, something reported this week in the Wall Street Journal (£) to be under active discussion. Such a capability would not, in itself, be confined to EU members and it seems to be envisaged that the UK could be involved as well as other non-members like Norway and Turkey.
However, at least as reported, the discussions to date are being driven by thinking in Germany and France in particular, and it is difficult to see how such a development could be separated from EU initiatives to boost the capacity of its defence industries. More generally, it is hard to doubt that the centre of gravity of influence and decision-making of a ‘European NATO’ would be the EU simply because the bulk of the countries involved would be members of both. Almost inevitably that would fall foul of the kind of sentiments expressed in the Mail editorial and, indeed, the idea is already being reported in The Sun as “Europe’s secret plan” – not, admittedly outright Brussels-bashing, but certainly there is no suggestion in the report that this plan is something the UK is, could, or should be involved in.
At all events, the prospect of a British government making a whole-hearted commitment to this, or any other version of a regional security alliance, seems remote for so long as the belief that the UK still is, or could be, a global power in its own right remains so entrenched [3]. That belief is part of what brought us Brexit, and it continues to dog post-Brexit Britain. Equally, the Brexit pre-occupation with sovereignty intrudes not as a matter of principle (such an alliance would have no more, and no less, implication for sovereignty than NATO itself) but because of the irrational loathing of, specifically, European sovereignty-sharing.
Marmalade and markets
A clear sign of just how far the UK is from even entertaining something as profound as a Europe-wide integration of defence capabilities can be seen in the hysterical row that broke out this fortnight over – yes – marmalade. In brief, there was a sudden rash of reports that the effect of the government’s plans to align with EU food regulations as part of the (still not agreed) SPS deal would mean that marmalade would have to be called ‘citrus marmalade’. The story was not just confined to the usual tabloids but appeared on the BBC and elsewhere.
Everything about it was stupid. To take the most obvious thing, it isn’t true, because the regulation will allow jars to be marked orange marmalade (or lemon, or grapefruit etc.). For another thing, it will have little practical impact since most marmalades are already labelled in this way (follow this link for more on the whole ‘controversy’, and its relationship to Brexit). However, it would be wrong to add to the list of stupidities the criticism that the issue is a trivial one or, rather, whilst trivial in itself it illustrates two important things.
Firstly, it is actually a downstream ripple of the jingoistic rants about “our great nation” that characterise the discussions of defence, with the issue presented in the Express as an attack on “the nation’s iconic marmalade”, something which according to the BBC has “long been a quintessential British preserve”. In this way, it is an illustration of how deeply embedded this nationalistic hubris is embedded, and how readily it provokes affronted anger. Secondly, the story was presented as an example of Brussels bureaucracy getting in the way of business, and this shows that the meaning of a single market is still not understood. For the point of all these ‘trivial’ regulations is to enable business through harmonization: that is, it removes the barriers of national regulations by creating a single set of trans-national regulations. Just as there could not be an effective national market if each county had its own product regulations, so there cannot be an effective European single market without a shared set of product regulations.
The row quickly morphed into a wider one about the entirety of the dynamic alignment of SPS regulations of which the labelling of marmalade in just one example. This wider row seemed to begin with what the Guardian last weekend rather cheekily called its ‘exclusive’ story about planned government legislation to facilitate such dynamic alignment, which then got picked up by other media outlets including the BBC. Actually, far from being an ‘exclusive’, I discussed this planned legislation in my post two weeks ago and that discussion was itself based upon a report in the Financial Times (£) over a week before that!
At all events, there has been a fresh outburst of screams about ‘Brexit betrayal’ (we might wonder, and wonder at, just how many times it is possible to ‘betray’ something which has so often been betrayed), and beneath that, again, the same inability to understand the meaning of a single market. With tragic inevitability, Daniel Hannan provided one of the best examples of this, showing himself to be still unteachably ignorant about the difference between a free trade agreement and a single market, still hopelessly confused about what ‘mutual recognition’ means, and still pitifully convinced that EU “spite” is the only obstacle to his fantasises.
I’m skipping rather lightly over this as, frankly, I don’t have the strength to unpick all this junk yet again and I suspect most readers of this blog will not need me to do so (although those wanting more detail on the possibly less-well understood rabbit hole of ‘mutual recognition’ will find it in a post from February 2025).
A dangerous obsolescence
The distance between the issues discussed at the beginning of this post and those with which it has finished discloses much about the condition of post-Brexit Britain. The wider world is in a profound state of flux and crisis. Like every other country, Britain is caught up in that. Starmer, to his credit, is at least inching towards a Carney-type recalibration, although he probably lacks the vision, and certainly lacks the political capital, to do much more than that. But the dominant terms of political and media discourse are woefully inadequate for the strategic challenges it poses.
That would no doubt have been true even if Brexit had never happened. But Brexit means that those terms of discourse are inadequate in a particular way, stuck in the lexicon of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, anchored in a world which is already disappearing from view. That is depressing in itself but, given the nature of the world that is emerging, it is also deeply dangerous.
Notes
[1] For an indication of what would be in store, consider Farage’s financial interest in the cryptocurrency firm Stack BTC (led by that renowned financial mastermind Kwasi Kwarteng) in the context of his policy to deregulate cryptocurrencies and his avowedly anti-globalist, anti-elite party’s reliance upon cryptocurrency donors, most notably Thai-based, McKinsey alumnus, Cambridge graduate Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit), and Hong Kong-based, J.P. Morgan alumnus, Oxford graduate Ben Delo. Compare also with the way Trump has used his presidency to enrich himself and his family, not least through his cryptocurrency ventures. Fun fact: in March 2025, Trump granted a pardon to Ben Delo and his two co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX following their conviction for money-laundering offences.
[2] The 35% disapproval figure probably has to be treated with considerable care. It presumably includes some who, whilst agreeing with the decision not to join in war, are critical of other aspects of how the conflict is being handled (e.g. preparedness to deploy ships to protect UK bases in Cyprus), and it surely includes some who would want the UK to have distanced itself even further from the conflict than Starmer has done (e.g. by refusing any use at all of UK airbases or airspace).
[3] In this context, a re-emerging Brexit-related issue is that of the UK’s bases in Cyprus. As with the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands, the Cyprus facilities are one of the ways Britain retains the vestiges of a global role and, in both cases, their existence, use and role have been brought to prominence during the Iran crisis. Early on in the Brexit negotiations, the future of the Cyprus bases was a matter of considerable complexity and uncertainty but, in the event, proved to be less intractable than the somewhat comparable issue of Gibraltar (the agreement on which, by the way, will come into force this July). Now, partly because of the Iranian drone attacks but also in the light of the (now-suspended) Chagos deal, there are renewed calls in Cyprus for their status to be re-negotiated, and indications that the EU is supportive of those calls. Yet it seems plausible that if the UK were to commit to the development of a regional security alliance along the lines of a ‘European NATO’ these bases could become part of its pooled assets.
The hope and the warning from Hungary
The significance of Orban’s defeat is undeniable - for Hungary, of course, but also for the EU and Ukraine. At the same time, it was also a defeat for his backers, Trump and Putin, and for his many friends and admirers in the ironically global network of populist nationalists, not least Nigel Farage. But Orban’s importance went well beyond these high-level connections. His ideology and, equally important, his money made Hungary a crucial node within that global network, insinuating his influence into every dank crevice of the radical right, perhaps especially those where ethno-nationalism and ‘cultural Christianity’ are to be found lurking.
Thus, as regards the UK, not just Farage but many of the more minor figures who crop up recurrently in this blog have connections of one sort or another with Orban. These include Matthew Goodwin and Frank Furedi (both mentioned, for example, in a post last month), many of those in the overlapping ‘History Reclaimed’, ‘Brains for Brexit’ and ‘Briefings for Britain’ activist groups (discussed, for example, in a post last November), and many of those in the ‘National Conservative’ movement (discussed, for example, in a post in 2023). The latter movement is notable for having enfolded numerous politicians associated with both Tory and Reform parties and many of the ‘intellectuals’ of Brexitism including James Orr, Reform’s recently appointed Head of Policy.
For many of these people Orban’s Hungary became not just a source of funding but an inspiring model. That is worth reflecting upon since, were there ever to be a Reform government, its template would be the authoritarianism and grotesque corruption of the Orban regime [1]. For whilst the end of that regime is certainly a defeat for its admirers, denting their confidence of being in the vanguard of an unstoppable arc of history, it would be quite wrong to imagine it will inspire any change of heart or mind amongst them. And whilst there is inspiration in seeing the Hungarian people defy domestic intimidation and external pressure by voting in droves to throw Orban out, the more important message is of the danger of getting into the situation of that being necessary. After all, not only has Hungary endured sixteen years of misrule but it will also be a long and complex task to undo the damage caused by those years.
Cautious praise for Starmer
Damaging as Orban has been to Hungary and malign as his influence has been upon the wider world, that is nothing compared with the damage being caused by Trump and his administration. Like a great many people, I was much impressed by Mark Carney’s Davos speech earlier this year, precisely because of its crisp articulation of the new global divide and how to respond to it. In brief, what quickly became called the ‘Carney Doctrine’ was a call for “middle powers” to operate and co-operate on the basis of “values-based realism” so as, at least by implication, to navigate around the increasing unpredictability and hostility of the United States.
The immediate context of that speech was the ‘Greenland crisis’ created by Trump’s unprecedented threat to take, possibly by force, the territory of another NATO member. That this seems longer ago than the three months which have actually passed only serves to underscore the validity of Carney’s analysis. Since then, of course, there has been the chaos and devastation caused by Trump’s attack on Iran, including his chilling threat to destroy its “whole civilization” and the now growing rift between the US and China over the US ‘counter-blockade’ of the Strait of Hormuz.
There are several signs that the British government is enacting something like the Carney Doctrine, some of which I outlined in a post in February. Since then, the Iran war has provided further examples of that, most obviously the decision not to join in with it and, most recently, the decision not to participate in the ‘counter-blockade’. For all the many legitimate criticisms of Keir Starmer, he has, as the commentator David Aaronovitch convincingly argues, “got the big one right”.
Along with that, there has been a notable hardening in Starmer’s approach to relations with the US more generally. This hasn’t taken the form of any dramatic statement, and certainly nothing as openly insulting as what Trump has continually said about Starmer and the UK, but at least by implication something has shifted. For example, Starmer recently spoke of being “fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy, businesses' bills go up and down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world”. It is really quite telling to have bracketed Putin and Trump together, and to have denied Trump the courtesy of the title ‘President’. It is certainly difficult to imagine Starmer, or any of his predecessors, speaking of an American President in this way.
And this shift is not just about rhetoric: it is reported (£) that US officials seconded to UK government departments are increasingly being asked to leave meetings when sensitive information is discussed. This is at least conceivably a sign that the government is beginning what would be the long, slow (and expensive) process of following the recent advice of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to reduce its reliance on the US as a security and defence partner. At the very least, it is a sign of how Trump has banjaxed the UK’s trust in the US as, indeed, he has with almost all America’s major allies (£).
Starmer’s approach to Trump and the Iran war is made politically easier because, for once, he is broadly in line with public opinion. Disapproval of the US military strikes on Iran increased as the war went on, rising to 65% (and approval falling to 16%) prior to the ceasefire (if such it be). Meanwhile, support for the government’s handling of the conflict has risen sharply, albeit only from the low base of 20% in March to 31% at the beginning of April, and albeit still lower than the 35% who think the government is handling it badly [2]. It is difficult to separate out opinion on this issue from the general unpopularity of Starmer and his government, but I think there is fair case that Labour’s policy in this area is close to public opinion or, at least, that the alternative of acting with the US would have been very substantially divergent from public opinion.
Discarding Trump, retaining hubris
The unpopularity of Trump and the war have also had the interesting effect of causing his allies and disciples in other countries to distance themselves from his increasingly deranged conduct. In the UK this has a particular significance because of Brexit, since it was central to the Brexiters’ case that the US in general, and Trump specifically, would provide a solid and supportive geo-political and economic anchor for post-Brexit Britain. That became increasingly indefensible in the face of the Trump Tariffs, the Greenland crisis, and his disparaging remarks about the British military, but has been almost entirely abandoned since the short-lived attempt to argue that the UK should have joined in the attack on Iran.
Thus, in the last few weeks (£), Kemi Badenoch, David Frost, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and other prominent Brexiters have started to criticise Trump and the Iran war. Farage’s apostasy has been particularly piquant given his previous boasts of his close friendship with ‘Mr. Brexit’ and his interest, expressed as recently as last September, in being appointed as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington. Now, he says merely that “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by”, and professes to be “shocked” by the threat to destroy Iran’s civilization. Perhaps, apart from electoral calculations, Farage also feels slighted, given the recent snub he endured when he attempted to have dinner with Trump in Florida.
However, there is absolutely no reason to think that this volte face on the pro-Brexit right betokens anything remotely like the pragmatism envisaged by the Carney Doctrine. It certainly doesn’t betoken any recognition of the folly of Brexit, in the sense of recognizing that the UK’s strategic interests align with those of the EU and would be better served by being a member of the EU. On the contrary, it betokens a continuation, even an intensification, of the familiar bellicosity, at once hubristic and self-pitying, that lay behind Brexit. For, as I pointed out in a recent post, the accent is always on national humiliation and betrayal.
So, for example, a recent Daily Mail editorial thundered/whined that:
“Even a few short years ago, the prospect of Britain appearing irrelevant on the global stage would have been unthinkable … our great nation is now little more than a bit player in the geopolitical arena. The war on Iran has put a sharp focus on Sir Keir's inglorious role in consigning Britain to the margins.”
It is an almost unbelievably foolish analysis in its assumption that Britain could, or even should, still be a global power and, certainly, an analysis which is entirely ignorant of British history since Suez, if not since 1945. And, in the process, it is redolent of all the delusions about ‘Global Britain’ that permeated the case for Brexit, both as a reason why the UK could ‘go it alone’ and a promise of the glories which would result from doing so.
Going back to the Carney Doctrine, then, such a posture entails a refusal even to accept the basic reality of ‘middle-powerdom’, since to do so would itself be a betrayal of what “our great nation” should be. From that it follows the kinds of cooperation Carney advocates are deemed shameful. Hence, the editorial asked rhetorically, “would a PM with even a smidgen of respect for either the office he holds or the nation have allowed a situation where the Navy was reduced to asking Germany for the loan of a warship?” And hence, elsewhere in the Mail, a report about the “humiliation” our “once-mighty Navy faces begging French fleet for help to patrol our OWN waters” [emphasis in original].
The Brexit blockage
It is certainly true that the erosion of UK defence capacity is a serious problem, as was forcibly spelt out this week by former NATO boss and Labour Party grandee Lord Roberston. It’s also true, by the way, that for several years now UK defence procurement has been scandalously incompetent, rendering what defence spending there has been less effective than it should have been. What is emphatically untrue is that there is anything inherently shameful in working with allied countries so as to share each other’s resources and assets.
Indeed, it is precisely the implication of the Carney Doctrine, and the lesson to be drawn from America’s now at best questionable commitment to NATO, that such cooperation intensifies. For the UK, whilst that cooperation isn’t confined to its European allies, that must principally mean cooperation with them since, as last week’s revelations about Putin’s offensive activity against underwater cables re-emphasised, Russia is the most direct threat to our national security and it is a threat we share with the rest of Europe.
It is therefore hardly surprising that there is renewed discussion of the case to create an EU army, the most recent example being a speech by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. A rather different, and perhaps more likely, scenario would be to create a European defence capability within the structures of NATO but without reliance on the US, something reported this week in the Wall Street Journal (£) to be under active discussion. Such a capability would not, in itself, be confined to EU members and it seems to be envisaged that the UK could be involved as well as other non-members like Norway and Turkey.
However, at least as reported, the discussions to date are being driven by thinking in Germany and France in particular, and it is difficult to see how such a development could be separated from EU initiatives to boost the capacity of its defence industries. More generally, it is hard to doubt that the centre of gravity of influence and decision-making of a ‘European NATO’ would be the EU simply because the bulk of the countries involved would be members of both. Almost inevitably that would fall foul of the kind of sentiments expressed in the Mail editorial and, indeed, the idea is already being reported in The Sun as “Europe’s secret plan” – not, admittedly outright Brussels-bashing, but certainly there is no suggestion in the report that this plan is something the UK is, could, or should be involved in.
At all events, the prospect of a British government making a whole-hearted commitment to this, or any other version of a regional security alliance, seems remote for so long as the belief that the UK still is, or could be, a global power in its own right remains so entrenched [3]. That belief is part of what brought us Brexit, and it continues to dog post-Brexit Britain. Equally, the Brexit pre-occupation with sovereignty intrudes not as a matter of principle (such an alliance would have no more, and no less, implication for sovereignty than NATO itself) but because of the irrational loathing of, specifically, European sovereignty-sharing.
Marmalade and markets
A clear sign of just how far the UK is from even entertaining something as profound as a Europe-wide integration of defence capabilities can be seen in the hysterical row that broke out this fortnight over – yes – marmalade. In brief, there was a sudden rash of reports that the effect of the government’s plans to align with EU food regulations as part of the (still not agreed) SPS deal would mean that marmalade would have to be called ‘citrus marmalade’. The story was not just confined to the usual tabloids but appeared on the BBC and elsewhere.
Everything about it was stupid. To take the most obvious thing, it isn’t true, because the regulation will allow jars to be marked orange marmalade (or lemon, or grapefruit etc.). For another thing, it will have little practical impact since most marmalades are already labelled in this way (follow this link for more on the whole ‘controversy’, and its relationship to Brexit). However, it would be wrong to add to the list of stupidities the criticism that the issue is a trivial one or, rather, whilst trivial in itself it illustrates two important things.
Firstly, it is actually a downstream ripple of the jingoistic rants about “our great nation” that characterise the discussions of defence, with the issue presented in the Express as an attack on “the nation’s iconic marmalade”, something which according to the BBC has “long been a quintessential British preserve”. In this way, it is an illustration of how deeply embedded this nationalistic hubris is embedded, and how readily it provokes affronted anger. Secondly, the story was presented as an example of Brussels bureaucracy getting in the way of business, and this shows that the meaning of a single market is still not understood. For the point of all these ‘trivial’ regulations is to enable business through harmonization: that is, it removes the barriers of national regulations by creating a single set of trans-national regulations. Just as there could not be an effective national market if each county had its own product regulations, so there cannot be an effective European single market without a shared set of product regulations.
The row quickly morphed into a wider one about the entirety of the dynamic alignment of SPS regulations of which the labelling of marmalade in just one example. This wider row seemed to begin with what the Guardian last weekend rather cheekily called its ‘exclusive’ story about planned government legislation to facilitate such dynamic alignment, which then got picked up by other media outlets including the BBC. Actually, far from being an ‘exclusive’, I discussed this planned legislation in my post two weeks ago and that discussion was itself based upon a report in the Financial Times (£) over a week before that!
At all events, there has been a fresh outburst of screams about ‘Brexit betrayal’ (we might wonder, and wonder at, just how many times it is possible to ‘betray’ something which has so often been betrayed), and beneath that, again, the same inability to understand the meaning of a single market. With tragic inevitability, Daniel Hannan provided one of the best examples of this, showing himself to be still unteachably ignorant about the difference between a free trade agreement and a single market, still hopelessly confused about what ‘mutual recognition’ means, and still pitifully convinced that EU “spite” is the only obstacle to his fantasises.
I’m skipping rather lightly over this as, frankly, I don’t have the strength to unpick all this junk yet again and I suspect most readers of this blog will not need me to do so (although those wanting more detail on the possibly less-well understood rabbit hole of ‘mutual recognition’ will find it in a post from February 2025).
A dangerous obsolescence
The distance between the issues discussed at the beginning of this post and those with which it has finished discloses much about the condition of post-Brexit Britain. The wider world is in a profound state of flux and crisis. Like every other country, Britain is caught up in that. Starmer, to his credit, is at least inching towards a Carney-type recalibration, although he probably lacks the vision, and certainly lacks the political capital, to do much more than that. But the dominant terms of political and media discourse are woefully inadequate for the strategic challenges it poses.
That would no doubt have been true even if Brexit had never happened. But Brexit means that those terms of discourse are inadequate in a particular way, stuck in the lexicon of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, anchored in a world which is already disappearing from view. That is depressing in itself but, given the nature of the world that is emerging, it is also deeply dangerous.
Notes
[1] For an indication of what would be in store, consider Farage’s financial interest in the cryptocurrency firm Stack BTC (led by that renowned financial mastermind Kwasi Kwarteng) in the context of his policy to deregulate cryptocurrencies and his avowedly anti-globalist, anti-elite party’s reliance upon cryptocurrency donors, most notably Thai-based, McKinsey alumnus, Cambridge graduate Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit), and Hong Kong-based, J.P. Morgan alumnus, Oxford graduate Ben Delo. Compare also with the way Trump has used his presidency to enrich himself and his family, not least through his cryptocurrency ventures. Fun fact: in March 2025, Trump granted a pardon to Ben Delo and his two co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX following their conviction for money-laundering offences.
[2] The 35% disapproval figure probably has to be treated with considerable care. It presumably includes some who, whilst agreeing with the decision not to join in war, are critical of other aspects of how the conflict is being handled (e.g. preparedness to deploy ships to protect UK bases in Cyprus), and it surely includes some who would want the UK to have distanced itself even further from the conflict than Starmer has done (e.g. by refusing any use at all of UK airbases or airspace).
[3] In this context, a re-emerging Brexit-related issue is that of the UK’s bases in Cyprus. As with the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands, the Cyprus facilities are one of the ways Britain retains the vestiges of a global role and, in both cases, their existence, use and role have been brought to prominence during the Iran crisis. Early on in the Brexit negotiations, the future of the Cyprus bases was a matter of considerable complexity and uncertainty but, in the event, proved to be less intractable than the somewhat comparable issue of Gibraltar (the agreement on which, by the way, will come into force this July). Now, partly because of the Iranian drone attacks but also in the light of the (now-suspended) Chagos deal, there are renewed calls in Cyprus for their status to be re-negotiated, and indications that the EU is supportive of those calls. Yet it seems plausible that if the UK were to commit to the development of a regional security alliance along the lines of a ‘European NATO’ these bases could become part of its pooled assets.
Friday, 3 April 2026
Bad vibes
In my last post I briefly mentioned that the government, and Rachel Reeves in particular, have begun to speak increasingly openly about the damage Brexit is continuing to do to the British economy. This, I said, was striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. The converse also applies, of course. Such admissions, if unaccompanied by any stronger response, serve to underline the inadequacy of the reset.
This is the hook upon which the government’s approach to Brexit is currently caught, and what underlies it is the continuing failure of the British polity as a whole to be honest about Brexit and much else besides. That, and the reasons for it, have been amply illustrated over the last fortnight.
A “Brexit row”?
During that period, it has been reported (£) that the government is preparing legislation to enable the UK to align with all of the EU regulations needed to enact the long-trailed, though still not finalized, UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) or ‘veterinary’ agreement. Moreover, this legislation is expected to contain provision to enable similar moves in other sectors in the future, subject only to statutory instruments meaning, in effect, Ministerial decree.
The idea behind the latter provision, apparently, is that it could pave the way for ‘sector-by-sector’ deals with the EU. In the report of these plans, it is also suggested that at least some within the Labour Party “are hoping that the bill will provoke a Brexit row with the Conservatives and Reform UK, reminding voters that their opponents supported Leave in the EU referendum”.
In just this one small news item there is quite a lot to unpick. One thing to say is that it isn’t surprising, in that it was inherent in what was known about the desire for an SPS deal that there would be such legislation. What is perhaps more interesting is the idea that Labour might now be willing to have “a Brexit row” with Conservatives and Reform, something they have fought shy of in the past.
Evidently, this is a continuation of the shift to greater openness about the damage of Brexit. The political reasons for that shift are fairly obvious and have recently been set out in detail by the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice: in brief, Labour’s (belated) realization that its approach to Brexit is one of the things causing the collapse of its core vote, as happened in the Gorton & Denton by-election.
As this legislation proceeds, Labour will get their row in that, inevitably, indeed already, the Brexiters are screaming ‘betrayal’. However, what that row will really show is that, even now, the ways in which Brexit is discussed are almost entirely dishonest or deluded, or both.
On the Tory side (and that of the Brexiters more generally) there is the dishonesty of the fact that de facto alignment with almost all EU regulations is unavoidable, except at huge economic cost, which is exactly what the Conservatives came to accept when in office. Nor can they reasonably complain about the lack of democratic oversight associated with the use of statutory instruments, since it was they who made such extensive use of so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers throughout the Brexit process. Indeed, it would be reasonable to say that one of the many failed promises of Brexit was that it would return decision-making to parliament.
On the Labour side, there is the dishonesty, shared at various times by various Conservative Brexiters, that whole swathes of the British economy could de facto remain ‘within’ the single market on a sector-by-sector basis. This is effectively a reprise of the “ambitious managed divergence” model floated by Theresa May’s government in February 2018 (and discussed on this blog at that time) although it has gone under different names at different times.
If, as is reported, Keir Starmer believes that the reset process so far has shown that EU objections to ‘cherry-picking’ have disappeared, then that is a profound misreading. For reasons I discussed last year, things like a possible deal on SPS (or on the internal electricity market or Erasmus+) should not be regarded as cherry-picking. I meant that as a rebuke to those who mistakenly use that term to dismiss as doomed any and every attempt to supplement the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). But it would be equally mistaken if Starmer believes that the EU’s willingness to make some adjustments, when they are in its interests, means that any and every attempt to supplement the TCA is viable.
Brexit pragmatism?
Perhaps the most striking dishonesty is what underpins Labour’s approach, namely the claim, articulated most explicitly by Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (£), that what the government is delivering with the reset is “what a proper Brexit looks like”. By this he means that the UK is making “sovereign’ choices” guided by “ruthless pragmatism”. In its way, this is a clever debating society argument, in that it takes the Brexiters’ core demand, that what matters is not this-or-that regulation or law but that regulations and laws are decided by the UK, and uses it against them. This is actually exactly the same structure of argument that ‘liberal Brexiters’ use when they say that what Brexit means for immigration is not necessarily to reduce it but to set it at a level determined by a sovereign parliament.
However, the Thomas-Symonds line is self-defeating as a defence of Labour’s reset policy, precisely because that policy is so inadequate a response to what his government now admits to be the costs of Brexit. For example, to be more specific, on ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ grounds it is impossible to defend the value of the UK having an independent trade policy.
That has been illustrated in two ways in the last fortnight by the announcement of the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement. On the one hand, that agreement shows that, as a collective, the EU was able to get a better deal, especially for its farmers, than the UK got in its own deal with Australia. On the other hand, and given also the recent EU-India deal, it means that the only countries with which Brexit Britain currently has trade agreements that it would not have as an EU member are Malaysia and Brunei (via CPTPP). Meanwhile, were the UK still in the EU it would be part of its trade agreement with Mercosur bloc.
Of course there are legitimate arguments about how important trade agreements really are to the economy, and also about the desirability of their effects on domestic industries, supply-chain resilience and so on. But those are not the government’s arguments. This being so, then it could get more, and better, trade agreements if it successfully pursued a customs union agreement with the EU, which would also improve terms of trade with the EU itself. So, on the basis of ‘ruthless pragmatism’, why not make the ‘sovereign choice’ to seek such an agreement with the EU?
From this follows the more fundamental point, which lies right at the heart of the fallacy of Brexit and which was most strikingly articulated in the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. As I discussed at the time, this contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” Thus even as Britain embarked on the process of leaving it did so knowing that the central plank of the leave argument – that the UK had lost its sovereignty – was completely untrue. It was just ‘a feeling’. And the point still holds, so, on the Thomas-Symonds argument for the reset, there is an even stronger argument for seeking to join the EU, as a sovereign choice made on pragmatic grounds.
A path forward?
In short, the more the government now acknowledges the costs of Brexit, and the more overtly it justifies its reset in terms of the pragmatic response of a sovereign nation to those costs, the more it undermines both the philosophical and economic case for Brexit – and yet at the same time describes its position as delivering ‘proper Brexit’. Similarly, although this week Starmer gave his strongest statement yet that the international ‘volatility’ engendered by Trump’s regime, as well as the economic damage of Brexit, justifies an “ambitious” partnership with the EU, doing so only serves to highlight the constraints he has placed on those ambitions.
It presumably goes without saying that, going back to the electoral politics, this means that if it is true that the Labour Party is now willing to have a “row” about the false promises of Brexit it is unlikely to reap much, if any, reward from anti-Brexit voters. For it remains wedded to a policy which is not just lily-livered but self-contradictory
That doesn’t mean that it is realistic for Labour to adopt a ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’) position, let alone likely that it will do so. But in my view, as I’ve argued before, it should mean adopting the position that seeking to join would be desirable but is not feasible until such time as all the other main parties either accept this or, at least, undertake not to reverse such a process were it begun. This would at least bring some clarity to the “row”, forcing Tory and Reform Brexiters to discuss and defend Brexit, as they nowadays seem unwilling to do.
With that clarity might come some honesty, in the sense of the recognition that Brexit has not had majority support for a very long time but also by the recognition that, for so long as there is a distinct possibility that an incoming government would backtrack on it, any process towards joining is impossible (most obviously for the EU). That in turn could be part of a more general recognition, which has been largely absent throughout the Brexit process, that the future of UK-EU relations is not just about what Britain wants but what the EU and its member states want.
Taking all these things together might be the beginning of a recognition that, in the concluding words of an excellent analysis this week by Kirsty Hughes on her ScotEU Substack, “the path back needs strategic, honest, courageous political leaders and renewed, inclusive political debate.”
Deeply embedded dishonesty
However, it is difficult to be optimistic that any of this is about to happen, not least because although dishonesty certainly didn’t begin with Brexit, Brexit has rammed dishonesty so deeply into the body politic that it seems impossible to dislodge. A case in point is another aspect of the fallout from the Gorton & Denton by-election, namely the allegations of ‘family voting’ and voter coercion (with the implication that this had been amongst, specifically, Muslim voters). Last weekend, in what seemed to be an unusually detailed statement, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) announced that their investigation had found “no evidence” that this had occurred.
As I noted in my blog post at the time of the by-election, operators like Nigel Farage trade on the fact that such allegations stick in the public mind whereas even if subsequent investigations show them to be false that is barely noticed. No doubt that is true in this case, not least because whereas the original allegations were given very prominent coverage both in the right-wing press and by broadcasters including the BBC, the GMP’s statement was given far less attention.
But it’s actually worse than that, because the statement was immediately denounced by Farage as an “Establishment whitewash” and “another brushed-under-the-carpet report from the usual suspects”. Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate, also called it a “whitewash” and insisted that “sectarianism is taking over our democracy”, later strongly implying that he didn’t believe the police’s findings.
I’ve noted many times before that this kind of ‘non-falsifiable’ illogic permeated the entirety of the Brexit process and, by extension, now characterises Brexitism. Thus, in this case, had the police found evidence of family voting then, of course, it would be taken as proof that it had occurred. But, when the police found no evidence, this is taken as proof that it not only occurred but is being ‘covered up’.
What is far worse than that (or, rather, is enabled by it, showing why such illogic is dangerous and not just stupid) is how utterly corrosive and corrupting it is: as with depicting judges as ‘enemies of the people’ and civil servants as ‘saboteurs’, the Brexitists are determined to destroy every last vestige of trust in public institutions. Perhaps worst of all is that, whilst attacking the police investigation assists this agenda, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Farage et al. were secretly hoping that wrongdoing had taken place, yielding what would been a prominently reported and easily exploitable scandal.
The travails of MattGPT
Matt Goodwin has also been in the news for another reason. I referred in my previous post to his new book, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which has since been published and widely criticised, including in a debate on GB News during which Goodwin became visibly angry, even at one stage rounding on his ideological soul-mate Miriam Cates, who was chairing.
Indeed, tellingly, even those sympathetic to what might charitably be called Goodwin’s thesis were unimpressed, with one describing the book as the work of a “slopagandist”, another entitling his review “suicide of an author’s credibility”, and a third opining that the nickname ‘MattGPT’ would follow the former academic “to his grave”. By comparison, those less sympathetic were rather gentle in simply calling it “trash”. In fairness, it should be said that Goodwin had his defenders, but fairness also requires saying that the most prominent of these was the swivel-eyed Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson (£).
As the ‘MattGPT’ tag implies, much of the criticism has focussed on what appear to be bogus quotations generated by AI-hallucination (£), to which Goodwin’s rather piquant defence in the debate was that he had put the entire text through an AI checker which had exonerated it from the accusation of the book being AI-generated (though that had not, in fact, been the accusation). But perhaps the more damning criticism is of the misinterpretation of statistics about schoolchildren who have English as an Additional Language (EAL). This sounds rather geeky but is actually important, both in itself and because it creates the suspicion that the way Goodwin represented the EAL statistics was not the only way in which data had been manipulated in pursuit of the book’s claims.
In official statistics, “a pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English. This measure is not a measure of English language proficiency or a good proxy for recent immigration” (p.4 of link). On this basis, between 20% and 25% of pupils have EAL. From this, Goodwin seems to infer that they have either no, or at least impaired or deficient, proficiency in English.
However, according to Steve Strand, Professor of Education at Oxford University, Goodwin “is totally misunderstanding what this measure of EAL is. He keeps talking about English not being young people’s first language, but you could be recorded as EAL and still be totally fluent in English. So he’s not understanding the question that underlies the data.” Strand’s argument is borne out by the fact that, according to Department for Education’s 2020 report, in Spring 2018 some 61% of EAL schoolchildren were either fluent or competent in English [1].
Moreover, Goodwin claims that in schools in areas where EAL rates are high “English is no longer the main language” which carries at least the implication that some other language is, whereas, of course, in such situations English is, so to speak, the lingua franca. In that sense, what the EAL statistics actually show is exactly what would be expected from assimilating immigrants. At home, their children are exposed to and use another language, but in the public sphere, at school (and subsequently, no doubt, at work), they are additionally exposed to and use English. But in Goodwin’s telling it is sinister evidence that a process of ‘cultural erasure’ is underway.
Plastic patriots become counterfeit Christians
That same proposition is evident in the latest seasonal panic that Easter eggs are no longer called by that name, every aspect of which has been discredited by Emma Monks on her Monk Debunks Substack. But whilst, like the similar panics that Christmas has been replaced by ‘Winterval’, this is tediously familiar, it has a new salience because of the notable recent shift in the rhetoric of populist leaders towards stressing Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.
Admittedly, theologians might question the sacramental status of the chocolate Easter Egg, just as they might wonder if Tommy Robinson’s conversion is any more genuine than his name, be puzzled by Reform MP Robert Jenrick’s reference to “Psalm Sunday” (sic), and ponder the sacerdotal credentials of ‘Bishop’ Ceirion Dewar of Ceirion H. Dewar Ministries Ltd. But there is no doubt that there has been a profound change in the language being used by the populist right.
Nor is it just matter of language. It is also evident in what is emerging as Reform’s “family friendly” policy agenda – an agenda set out with great clarity by Lisa Burton in Yorkshire Bylines – with all it implies for abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights generally. One reason for these developments is the influence of US populists on their UK counterparts. It may also be relevant that Paul Marshall, so pivotal to British populists especially through his co-ownership of GB News, moves in those circles and is himself an evangelical Christian with a reportedly “spiritual mission” to fight ‘progressivism’ (which appears actually to mean post-Enlightenment rationality).
There is an obvious connection between these three stories – the discredited allegations of ‘family voting’, Goodwin’s discredited account of EAL statistics, and the discredited stories about the cancellation of Easter: they all circle around the same theme of ‘cultural erasure’ at the hands of Muslims, aided and abetted by the liberal ‘woke’ elite. And it is a message pouring in torrents across social media, and much of the print and broadcast media, every day, in the coverage of hundreds of different stories.
Another recent example is the spate of images of schoolchildren exercising on yoga mats carrying the false claim that they are being forced to participate in Muslim prayers. Yet another is the frenzied reaction to a BBC discussion about whether there are too many ‘dog-friendly’ spaces, representing it as a woke attempt to impose Muslim sensibilities upon the nation (it was actually about people who are scared of dogs). These, and innumerable other examples, are small-scale in themselves but it is that which makes them potent as tessellations of the same basic message.
But there is another connection between all these stories, and it is one which links directly back to Brexit.
Vibe politics
As these various stories have unfolded over the last fortnight, I have been looking at the social media responses not just from the big names of the culture wars but from the rank-and-file posters. What that reveals is not so much that the rebuttals of them are ignored as that they are discounted. That is, it may be accepted that such-and-such a detail is wrong, but, nevertheless, ‘we all know’ that the bigger truth holds good. This is the significance of the cumulative effect of similar stories. It creates a politics of ‘vibes’ just as with Brexit the effect of years of media stories made it “feel” as if we had lost sovereignty.
Of course, vibe politics is nothing new. Think of Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Think, for that matter, of the 1950s Macmillanite message that we “have never had it so good”. What is distinctive about populism is that it trades on ‘feel-bad’ rather than ‘feel-good’ vibes: on grievance, resentment, and fear. That, too, is evident in the stories I have just discussed and is absolutely central to the claims of ‘cultural erasure’.
I haven’t talked about the war in this post, since its deepening spiral only serves to re-enforce points which I’ve previously made. But Nigel Farage has been speaking about the war. Not, needless to say, the war the US has unleashed in the Middle East, about which, after his original Trump-crawl, he has been remarkably coy. No, as usual it was the Second World War or, more particularly, a single moment within it.
Thus, launching Reform’s London local government election campaign in Croydon, under its current and perhaps ill-advised slogan of ‘Reform will fix it’, he spluttered that: “This is, this is, this is 1940 all over again. The very existence of our nation, its culture, its identity is under threat.” It is the same message of a ‘nation in existential peril’ that Goodwin peddles; the same message as that of the ‘family voting’ accusations; the same message as is contained in the stories about Easter eggs, yoga mats, dogs, and all the rest of it.
Farage is right, though, to say that history is repeating itself. Not in the sense that it is 1940 all over again, but because it is 2015 all over again. Then, too, he was bloviating about 1940 but at that time it was to tell us it was the EU referendum which was “our modern day Battle of Britain”. Once again, Brexit has morphed into Brexitism.
It’s this repetition, this stuckness in the same myths and vibe-based messages, and the fact that, like it or not, they continue to resonate for perhaps a quarter or even a third of the adult population, and to be amplified by a phalanx of media commentors, which makes British politics so irredeemably dishonest, and the possibility of honesty about Brexit, specifically, so elusive.
With that happy thought I leave you to enjoy, to use the term cruelly stolen when the nasty Normans erased our culture and language, Ēostre.
Note
[1] The report notes that it is not possible to provide comparable figures for children for whom English is their first/ sole language, but it should not be assumed that all such children are fluent or competent.
This is the hook upon which the government’s approach to Brexit is currently caught, and what underlies it is the continuing failure of the British polity as a whole to be honest about Brexit and much else besides. That, and the reasons for it, have been amply illustrated over the last fortnight.
A “Brexit row”?
During that period, it has been reported (£) that the government is preparing legislation to enable the UK to align with all of the EU regulations needed to enact the long-trailed, though still not finalized, UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) or ‘veterinary’ agreement. Moreover, this legislation is expected to contain provision to enable similar moves in other sectors in the future, subject only to statutory instruments meaning, in effect, Ministerial decree.
The idea behind the latter provision, apparently, is that it could pave the way for ‘sector-by-sector’ deals with the EU. In the report of these plans, it is also suggested that at least some within the Labour Party “are hoping that the bill will provoke a Brexit row with the Conservatives and Reform UK, reminding voters that their opponents supported Leave in the EU referendum”.
In just this one small news item there is quite a lot to unpick. One thing to say is that it isn’t surprising, in that it was inherent in what was known about the desire for an SPS deal that there would be such legislation. What is perhaps more interesting is the idea that Labour might now be willing to have “a Brexit row” with Conservatives and Reform, something they have fought shy of in the past.
Evidently, this is a continuation of the shift to greater openness about the damage of Brexit. The political reasons for that shift are fairly obvious and have recently been set out in detail by the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice: in brief, Labour’s (belated) realization that its approach to Brexit is one of the things causing the collapse of its core vote, as happened in the Gorton & Denton by-election.
As this legislation proceeds, Labour will get their row in that, inevitably, indeed already, the Brexiters are screaming ‘betrayal’. However, what that row will really show is that, even now, the ways in which Brexit is discussed are almost entirely dishonest or deluded, or both.
On the Tory side (and that of the Brexiters more generally) there is the dishonesty of the fact that de facto alignment with almost all EU regulations is unavoidable, except at huge economic cost, which is exactly what the Conservatives came to accept when in office. Nor can they reasonably complain about the lack of democratic oversight associated with the use of statutory instruments, since it was they who made such extensive use of so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers throughout the Brexit process. Indeed, it would be reasonable to say that one of the many failed promises of Brexit was that it would return decision-making to parliament.
On the Labour side, there is the dishonesty, shared at various times by various Conservative Brexiters, that whole swathes of the British economy could de facto remain ‘within’ the single market on a sector-by-sector basis. This is effectively a reprise of the “ambitious managed divergence” model floated by Theresa May’s government in February 2018 (and discussed on this blog at that time) although it has gone under different names at different times.
If, as is reported, Keir Starmer believes that the reset process so far has shown that EU objections to ‘cherry-picking’ have disappeared, then that is a profound misreading. For reasons I discussed last year, things like a possible deal on SPS (or on the internal electricity market or Erasmus+) should not be regarded as cherry-picking. I meant that as a rebuke to those who mistakenly use that term to dismiss as doomed any and every attempt to supplement the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). But it would be equally mistaken if Starmer believes that the EU’s willingness to make some adjustments, when they are in its interests, means that any and every attempt to supplement the TCA is viable.
Brexit pragmatism?
Perhaps the most striking dishonesty is what underpins Labour’s approach, namely the claim, articulated most explicitly by Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (£), that what the government is delivering with the reset is “what a proper Brexit looks like”. By this he means that the UK is making “sovereign’ choices” guided by “ruthless pragmatism”. In its way, this is a clever debating society argument, in that it takes the Brexiters’ core demand, that what matters is not this-or-that regulation or law but that regulations and laws are decided by the UK, and uses it against them. This is actually exactly the same structure of argument that ‘liberal Brexiters’ use when they say that what Brexit means for immigration is not necessarily to reduce it but to set it at a level determined by a sovereign parliament.
However, the Thomas-Symonds line is self-defeating as a defence of Labour’s reset policy, precisely because that policy is so inadequate a response to what his government now admits to be the costs of Brexit. For example, to be more specific, on ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ grounds it is impossible to defend the value of the UK having an independent trade policy.
That has been illustrated in two ways in the last fortnight by the announcement of the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement. On the one hand, that agreement shows that, as a collective, the EU was able to get a better deal, especially for its farmers, than the UK got in its own deal with Australia. On the other hand, and given also the recent EU-India deal, it means that the only countries with which Brexit Britain currently has trade agreements that it would not have as an EU member are Malaysia and Brunei (via CPTPP). Meanwhile, were the UK still in the EU it would be part of its trade agreement with Mercosur bloc.
Of course there are legitimate arguments about how important trade agreements really are to the economy, and also about the desirability of their effects on domestic industries, supply-chain resilience and so on. But those are not the government’s arguments. This being so, then it could get more, and better, trade agreements if it successfully pursued a customs union agreement with the EU, which would also improve terms of trade with the EU itself. So, on the basis of ‘ruthless pragmatism’, why not make the ‘sovereign choice’ to seek such an agreement with the EU?
From this follows the more fundamental point, which lies right at the heart of the fallacy of Brexit and which was most strikingly articulated in the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. As I discussed at the time, this contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” Thus even as Britain embarked on the process of leaving it did so knowing that the central plank of the leave argument – that the UK had lost its sovereignty – was completely untrue. It was just ‘a feeling’. And the point still holds, so, on the Thomas-Symonds argument for the reset, there is an even stronger argument for seeking to join the EU, as a sovereign choice made on pragmatic grounds.
A path forward?
In short, the more the government now acknowledges the costs of Brexit, and the more overtly it justifies its reset in terms of the pragmatic response of a sovereign nation to those costs, the more it undermines both the philosophical and economic case for Brexit – and yet at the same time describes its position as delivering ‘proper Brexit’. Similarly, although this week Starmer gave his strongest statement yet that the international ‘volatility’ engendered by Trump’s regime, as well as the economic damage of Brexit, justifies an “ambitious” partnership with the EU, doing so only serves to highlight the constraints he has placed on those ambitions.
It presumably goes without saying that, going back to the electoral politics, this means that if it is true that the Labour Party is now willing to have a “row” about the false promises of Brexit it is unlikely to reap much, if any, reward from anti-Brexit voters. For it remains wedded to a policy which is not just lily-livered but self-contradictory
That doesn’t mean that it is realistic for Labour to adopt a ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’) position, let alone likely that it will do so. But in my view, as I’ve argued before, it should mean adopting the position that seeking to join would be desirable but is not feasible until such time as all the other main parties either accept this or, at least, undertake not to reverse such a process were it begun. This would at least bring some clarity to the “row”, forcing Tory and Reform Brexiters to discuss and defend Brexit, as they nowadays seem unwilling to do.
With that clarity might come some honesty, in the sense of the recognition that Brexit has not had majority support for a very long time but also by the recognition that, for so long as there is a distinct possibility that an incoming government would backtrack on it, any process towards joining is impossible (most obviously for the EU). That in turn could be part of a more general recognition, which has been largely absent throughout the Brexit process, that the future of UK-EU relations is not just about what Britain wants but what the EU and its member states want.
Taking all these things together might be the beginning of a recognition that, in the concluding words of an excellent analysis this week by Kirsty Hughes on her ScotEU Substack, “the path back needs strategic, honest, courageous political leaders and renewed, inclusive political debate.”
Deeply embedded dishonesty
However, it is difficult to be optimistic that any of this is about to happen, not least because although dishonesty certainly didn’t begin with Brexit, Brexit has rammed dishonesty so deeply into the body politic that it seems impossible to dislodge. A case in point is another aspect of the fallout from the Gorton & Denton by-election, namely the allegations of ‘family voting’ and voter coercion (with the implication that this had been amongst, specifically, Muslim voters). Last weekend, in what seemed to be an unusually detailed statement, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) announced that their investigation had found “no evidence” that this had occurred.
As I noted in my blog post at the time of the by-election, operators like Nigel Farage trade on the fact that such allegations stick in the public mind whereas even if subsequent investigations show them to be false that is barely noticed. No doubt that is true in this case, not least because whereas the original allegations were given very prominent coverage both in the right-wing press and by broadcasters including the BBC, the GMP’s statement was given far less attention.
But it’s actually worse than that, because the statement was immediately denounced by Farage as an “Establishment whitewash” and “another brushed-under-the-carpet report from the usual suspects”. Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate, also called it a “whitewash” and insisted that “sectarianism is taking over our democracy”, later strongly implying that he didn’t believe the police’s findings.
I’ve noted many times before that this kind of ‘non-falsifiable’ illogic permeated the entirety of the Brexit process and, by extension, now characterises Brexitism. Thus, in this case, had the police found evidence of family voting then, of course, it would be taken as proof that it had occurred. But, when the police found no evidence, this is taken as proof that it not only occurred but is being ‘covered up’.
What is far worse than that (or, rather, is enabled by it, showing why such illogic is dangerous and not just stupid) is how utterly corrosive and corrupting it is: as with depicting judges as ‘enemies of the people’ and civil servants as ‘saboteurs’, the Brexitists are determined to destroy every last vestige of trust in public institutions. Perhaps worst of all is that, whilst attacking the police investigation assists this agenda, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Farage et al. were secretly hoping that wrongdoing had taken place, yielding what would been a prominently reported and easily exploitable scandal.
The travails of MattGPT
Matt Goodwin has also been in the news for another reason. I referred in my previous post to his new book, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which has since been published and widely criticised, including in a debate on GB News during which Goodwin became visibly angry, even at one stage rounding on his ideological soul-mate Miriam Cates, who was chairing.
Indeed, tellingly, even those sympathetic to what might charitably be called Goodwin’s thesis were unimpressed, with one describing the book as the work of a “slopagandist”, another entitling his review “suicide of an author’s credibility”, and a third opining that the nickname ‘MattGPT’ would follow the former academic “to his grave”. By comparison, those less sympathetic were rather gentle in simply calling it “trash”. In fairness, it should be said that Goodwin had his defenders, but fairness also requires saying that the most prominent of these was the swivel-eyed Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson (£).
As the ‘MattGPT’ tag implies, much of the criticism has focussed on what appear to be bogus quotations generated by AI-hallucination (£), to which Goodwin’s rather piquant defence in the debate was that he had put the entire text through an AI checker which had exonerated it from the accusation of the book being AI-generated (though that had not, in fact, been the accusation). But perhaps the more damning criticism is of the misinterpretation of statistics about schoolchildren who have English as an Additional Language (EAL). This sounds rather geeky but is actually important, both in itself and because it creates the suspicion that the way Goodwin represented the EAL statistics was not the only way in which data had been manipulated in pursuit of the book’s claims.
In official statistics, “a pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English. This measure is not a measure of English language proficiency or a good proxy for recent immigration” (p.4 of link). On this basis, between 20% and 25% of pupils have EAL. From this, Goodwin seems to infer that they have either no, or at least impaired or deficient, proficiency in English.
However, according to Steve Strand, Professor of Education at Oxford University, Goodwin “is totally misunderstanding what this measure of EAL is. He keeps talking about English not being young people’s first language, but you could be recorded as EAL and still be totally fluent in English. So he’s not understanding the question that underlies the data.” Strand’s argument is borne out by the fact that, according to Department for Education’s 2020 report, in Spring 2018 some 61% of EAL schoolchildren were either fluent or competent in English [1].
Moreover, Goodwin claims that in schools in areas where EAL rates are high “English is no longer the main language” which carries at least the implication that some other language is, whereas, of course, in such situations English is, so to speak, the lingua franca. In that sense, what the EAL statistics actually show is exactly what would be expected from assimilating immigrants. At home, their children are exposed to and use another language, but in the public sphere, at school (and subsequently, no doubt, at work), they are additionally exposed to and use English. But in Goodwin’s telling it is sinister evidence that a process of ‘cultural erasure’ is underway.
Plastic patriots become counterfeit Christians
That same proposition is evident in the latest seasonal panic that Easter eggs are no longer called by that name, every aspect of which has been discredited by Emma Monks on her Monk Debunks Substack. But whilst, like the similar panics that Christmas has been replaced by ‘Winterval’, this is tediously familiar, it has a new salience because of the notable recent shift in the rhetoric of populist leaders towards stressing Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.
Admittedly, theologians might question the sacramental status of the chocolate Easter Egg, just as they might wonder if Tommy Robinson’s conversion is any more genuine than his name, be puzzled by Reform MP Robert Jenrick’s reference to “Psalm Sunday” (sic), and ponder the sacerdotal credentials of ‘Bishop’ Ceirion Dewar of Ceirion H. Dewar Ministries Ltd. But there is no doubt that there has been a profound change in the language being used by the populist right.
Nor is it just matter of language. It is also evident in what is emerging as Reform’s “family friendly” policy agenda – an agenda set out with great clarity by Lisa Burton in Yorkshire Bylines – with all it implies for abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights generally. One reason for these developments is the influence of US populists on their UK counterparts. It may also be relevant that Paul Marshall, so pivotal to British populists especially through his co-ownership of GB News, moves in those circles and is himself an evangelical Christian with a reportedly “spiritual mission” to fight ‘progressivism’ (which appears actually to mean post-Enlightenment rationality).
There is an obvious connection between these three stories – the discredited allegations of ‘family voting’, Goodwin’s discredited account of EAL statistics, and the discredited stories about the cancellation of Easter: they all circle around the same theme of ‘cultural erasure’ at the hands of Muslims, aided and abetted by the liberal ‘woke’ elite. And it is a message pouring in torrents across social media, and much of the print and broadcast media, every day, in the coverage of hundreds of different stories.
Another recent example is the spate of images of schoolchildren exercising on yoga mats carrying the false claim that they are being forced to participate in Muslim prayers. Yet another is the frenzied reaction to a BBC discussion about whether there are too many ‘dog-friendly’ spaces, representing it as a woke attempt to impose Muslim sensibilities upon the nation (it was actually about people who are scared of dogs). These, and innumerable other examples, are small-scale in themselves but it is that which makes them potent as tessellations of the same basic message.
But there is another connection between all these stories, and it is one which links directly back to Brexit.
Vibe politics
As these various stories have unfolded over the last fortnight, I have been looking at the social media responses not just from the big names of the culture wars but from the rank-and-file posters. What that reveals is not so much that the rebuttals of them are ignored as that they are discounted. That is, it may be accepted that such-and-such a detail is wrong, but, nevertheless, ‘we all know’ that the bigger truth holds good. This is the significance of the cumulative effect of similar stories. It creates a politics of ‘vibes’ just as with Brexit the effect of years of media stories made it “feel” as if we had lost sovereignty.
Of course, vibe politics is nothing new. Think of Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Think, for that matter, of the 1950s Macmillanite message that we “have never had it so good”. What is distinctive about populism is that it trades on ‘feel-bad’ rather than ‘feel-good’ vibes: on grievance, resentment, and fear. That, too, is evident in the stories I have just discussed and is absolutely central to the claims of ‘cultural erasure’.
I haven’t talked about the war in this post, since its deepening spiral only serves to re-enforce points which I’ve previously made. But Nigel Farage has been speaking about the war. Not, needless to say, the war the US has unleashed in the Middle East, about which, after his original Trump-crawl, he has been remarkably coy. No, as usual it was the Second World War or, more particularly, a single moment within it.
Thus, launching Reform’s London local government election campaign in Croydon, under its current and perhaps ill-advised slogan of ‘Reform will fix it’, he spluttered that: “This is, this is, this is 1940 all over again. The very existence of our nation, its culture, its identity is under threat.” It is the same message of a ‘nation in existential peril’ that Goodwin peddles; the same message as that of the ‘family voting’ accusations; the same message as is contained in the stories about Easter eggs, yoga mats, dogs, and all the rest of it.
Farage is right, though, to say that history is repeating itself. Not in the sense that it is 1940 all over again, but because it is 2015 all over again. Then, too, he was bloviating about 1940 but at that time it was to tell us it was the EU referendum which was “our modern day Battle of Britain”. Once again, Brexit has morphed into Brexitism.
It’s this repetition, this stuckness in the same myths and vibe-based messages, and the fact that, like it or not, they continue to resonate for perhaps a quarter or even a third of the adult population, and to be amplified by a phalanx of media commentors, which makes British politics so irredeemably dishonest, and the possibility of honesty about Brexit, specifically, so elusive.
With that happy thought I leave you to enjoy, to use the term cruelly stolen when the nasty Normans erased our culture and language, Ēostre.
Note
[1] The report notes that it is not possible to provide comparable figures for children for whom English is their first/ sole language, but it should not be assumed that all such children are fluent or competent.
Friday, 20 March 2026
Churchill and the wars
This isn’t the place to analyze the state of the now three-week old war in the Middle East, except to say that it is clear that it has proved far more complex, and probably more protracted, than Donald Trump and his administration envisaged. His Director of the National Counterterrorism Center has resigned, saying that Iran “posed no imminent threat”. Formerly a Trump loyalist, the President responded to the resignation of his own nominated appointee by saying that “he was weak on security”. Lacking justified cause and defined outcome, the direct costs of the war to the US are already huge, whilst those to the global economy are incalculable. Already, it looks to be a case study of inept strategic and scenario planning, born of malignity and hubris, and perhaps not so very different in that respect from Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
One result of this ineptitude has been that, having embarked on this action without consulting any of America’s NATO allies, or those countries most impacted by its consequences, and having repeatedly insulted the UK in particular, Trump demanded that those same allies clear up the mess he is creating, quite falsely suggesting that NATO members have some obligation to do so. He then became enraged with them, and again with the UK in particular, for their understandable lack of enthusiasm to comply, as a prelude to petulantly declaring he didn’t need their help anyway. Even the US-Israel alliance is now under strain. So to inept planning we can add dire statecraft: Trump is, ahem, ‘no Churchill’.
At all events nobody, perhaps least of all Trump, has any idea when or where all this will end or, as Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times lays out, what its long-term repercussions (£) will be. Any thought that the outcome might at least be the overthrow of Iran’s repellent regime now seems unlikely and it is still less likely that, were that to eventuate, it would be replaced by a more palatable one. If anything, as Rachman gloomily concludes, the regime “may yet emerge in a stronger position internationally”. Whether or not that proves to be the case, the war will surely have many unintended and unexpected consequences, including for post-Brexit Britain.
The Home Front
Certainly the Iran war can already be seen to have profound implications for the UK, at least some of which relate more or less directly to Brexit and its aftermath. For one thing, it has sharply underlined the point I made at the time of the Greenland crisis: that, acknowledged or not, Keir Starmer cannot avoid the choice he has claimed not to exist between Europe and the US, if only because Trump keeps forcing that choice upon him. Thus, as with Greenland, but even more pointedly, Starmer has continued to rebuff the US by openly refusing to involve the UK in the attack on Iran.
On the other side of the equation, it is quite clear that the UK and the EU are in the same unenviable boat, enmeshed in a dependent relationship with an undependable partner. From that general situation flow such things as the UK and EU’s shared problem of how to deal, or cope, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the related problem of how to deal with the US decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil exports.
This unfolding situation has also had several impacts on domestic politics, of which the most obvious since my previous post has been that both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have had to abruptly discard (and disown) their initial position that the UK should have joined forces with the US. In Badenoch’s case, she now even has the nerve to counsel against giving the kind of unconditional support she originally urged, whilst still repeating her repellent claim (discussed in my previous post) that Starmer’s policy is based on “trying to appease a sectarian vote”. For both Badenoch and Farage, the change may be because they realized that the public are not generally supportive of the war, dislike and distrust Trump, and are very much concerned about its impact on fuel prices and the subsequent consequences of that.
Even so, it is worth recalling the nature of the initial criticisms they made of Starmer for not ‘joining in’ as well as some of the reasons they now give for keeping a distance from the conflict, for these are very similar. The initial criticism was widely couched in the language of humiliation, betrayal, and weakness, and several right-wing commentators, including Allison Pearson in the Telegraph (£), leapt gleefully on Trump’s negative comparison of Starmer with Winston Churchill as evidence of this humiliation. Then, when the line changed to one of non-involvement, this was accompanied by laments that this was because the UK was too weak in terms of military capacity to contribute to the war and that this, in Nigel Farage’s words, demonstrated the “humiliating state that we’ve sunk to today.”
It is certainly true that the UK’s military has been hollowed-out in recent years, and a great many people (myself included, for what very little that’s worth) have been warning about that, especially given the threat from Russia and the unreliability of Trump’s America, both things to which Farage, in particular, was entirely indifferent. It’s also true that this military weakness has been made evident by the current war. But that can hardly be laid at the door of the present government, since the problem long precedes its arrival, and in any case it is irrelevant to the decision not to join with the US in the sense that, as with every other country in the world except Israel, the UK thinks it would be ill-advised, even if we had the ability. However, the populist discussion of defence policy is not framed in terms of a rational assessment of threats and UK preparedness to respond to them. It is framed in terms of humiliation and betrayal.
This connects directly with the themes of this blog. For these were precisely the terms in which the Brexiters constantly talked about the Brexit process, week-in and week-out from almost as soon as the vote to leave was taken. That the same terms have now become embedded in political discourse, apart from in relation to Brexit itself, is one of the reasons why I have made Brexitism as well as Brexit the focus of the blog. It is also the case that throughout the Brexit process the imagery and mythologization of the Second World War have been a constant presence, and within that Churchill, of course, holds an iconic position. So there is a thread connecting, for example, Boris Johnson’s (mendacious) invocation of Churchill when campaigning for Brexit with the supposed humiliation of the draft-dodger Trump repeatedly taunting the British Prime Minister for his lack of Churchillian credentials.
Pound foolish
It may seem absurd to move from the weighty matter of war to writing about what pictures will appear on British banknotes. But exactly that topic has provoked an angry convulsion amongst the populist right and in doing so demonstrated just how deeply embedded is the mindset I have just outlined.
In brief, a couple of weeks ago the Bank of England announced that the next generation of banknotes will feature images of British wildlife. This followed a public consultation exercise conducted last year when a variety of possible themes were proposed, of which ‘nature’ proved to be the most popular. So far, so boring. But the announcement provoked a wave of angry reaction, primarily from the political right but also, rather more surprisingly, from LibDem leader Ed Davey, which centred on the fact that in the process this would mean that – yes – Winston Churchill will no longer feature on the £5 note. (It was variously claimed he would be replaced by a badger, a beaver, or a hedgehog: in fact, the exact images have yet to be decided.)
This, according to Nigel Farage [warning: link to X], was “the definition of woke” whilst Kemi Badenoch was even more alarmed, saying it was “erasing our history”. Then, the populist ‘intellectuals’ weighed in. Matt Goodwin stressed, both on GB News [warning: link to X] and his Substack newsletter [warning: link to Goodwin’s Substack newsletter] that this was not a trivial matter because it was “not about banknote design, but something much deeper, something more insidious” which turned out to be “the slow erosion of our national memory”. He went on to invoke sociologist Frank Furedi’s claim that there is “a war against the past” underway. Furedi, for those lucky enough not to know, is one of the peculiar and unpleasant group of former Revolutionary Communist Party members, including former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox, which morphed into the peculiar and unpleasant group of libertarian ‘contrarians’ who created Spiked Online.
Indeed, Spiked Online also joined the fray, with Gareth Roberts writing of how the Bank of England’s plans have “rightly riled up the nation”. Along the way, Roberts sneered at the very fact of there having been a public consultation, suggesting it would have been better for someone “in charge” to have made the decision, the implication presumably being that this was an example of wasteful state bureaucracy. Of course, had the decision been made in this way such commentators would undoubtedly have been outraged that ‘the elite’ had failed to consult ‘the people’. But Roberts’ main gripe, like Farage and most of the other complainers, was that this arose because of the Bank’s ‘woke’ desire to avoid the use of divisive images, and that Churchill was now regarded as divisive as a result of ‘wokeism’.
Plain foolish
This was, to be blunt, total gibberish. The claim arose because in the original consultation document one of the principles informing the themes offered to the public was that they should not be divisive (which is hardly unreasonable: who would want divisive images on the national currency anyway?) That is, it had nothing to do with Churchill, or indeed any other individual figure, and nor could it have done since these were, precisely, themes (i.e. not identifying the specific images to be used within those themes). One of those themes was ‘Notable Historical Figures’ but this came third, after both ‘Nature’ and ‘Architecture and Landmarks’. Had ‘historical figures’ been chosen, those pictured might or might not in the end have included Churchill. But this simply wasn’t what was at issue.
It was therefore an entirely manufactured outrage, but coalescing that outrage around the depiction of Churchill enabled the connection to be made with a wider set of claims about, in the first instance, Churchill generally. Thus Roberts linked to an earlier article in Spiked by – guess who? – Frank Furedi, fulminating about how Churchill “is a potent symbol of the civilisation culture warriors revile”. This then provided the gateway to the more general claims about history being erased and our national memory being eroded, a recurrent trope of Brexitism (see my post of November 2025 for more detail on the connections between Brexit, Brexitism, and the populist backlash against ‘woke’ history).
Actually, if anything, it showed historical ignorance and a failure of national memory. Churchill has only featured on banknotes since 2016, and historical figures of any sort only since 1970. This is hardly some ancient national tradition. For that matter, as a child one of my hobbies was collecting old farthing coins [1], which had been abolished in 1956 but which, since 1937, had carried the image of a wren. Prior to that, the image had been none other than Britannia herself, but would anyone seriously suggest that this change arose from some avant la lettre wokery bent on erasing the proud symbols of our national identity?
Plain mad
It is easy to mock all this, of course, but that would be a mistake. Even if one thinks that it just is the synthetic anger of people who are determined to get angry about anything then the very fact of that determination, and the reasons for it, are of interest. Goodwin said it was not trivial because in his eyes, and those of his fellow-ideologues, it is not. For him, it seems to connect with the ideas expressed in his latest book, published this week, entitled Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. That highly provocative, and surely rather mad, title in turn relates to the wider theme, currently influential within the populist right, of “suicidal empathy”. This term was coined by Canadian marketing academic Gad Saad and is to be developed in his own forthcoming book of that title, the book (and the concept) being enthusiastically endorsed by Elon Musk.
As with Goodwin and others with similar political commitments, Saad’s basic idea seems to be that through immigration, and especially Muslim immigration, ‘the elite’ is complicit in enacting the “suicide” of, variously, American, British or European culture (and thus carries at least echoes of the infamous racist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’). Effectively, it is the same idea as that propounded by Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and, just this week (£), the Conservative shadow justice secretary and hard Brexit architect Nick Timothy, but given a precarious patina of intellectualism. Or, to put it another way, it is the familiar ‘I just want my country back’ moan but using long words (in passing, note that many of the news stories upon which this worldview feeds are forensically dissected by Emma Monk’s excellent Monk Debunks Substack newsletter).
In this way, absurd as the row about banknotes may seem, it is actually a sliver within what, for some, is a war every bit as real, and perhaps more important, as that raging in the Middle East. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that for some, at least on the US right, most notably the morally broken and dangerously incompetent Secretary for War Pete Hegseth, the two wars are actually part of a single religious war. For that matter, it’s not unreasonable to link, for example, Hegseth’s determination to remove the scourge of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) in the US military with, for example, Goodwin’s attempt to connect the banknote non-issue to DEI activism (about 30 seconds into the clip).
Thus, coming back more directly to the main argument of this post, the row over the banknotes is a fresh illustration of the narrative of humiliation, betrayal and weakness. For it connects to the idea of a nation losing its identity, culture and history; its military prowess and its symbols of greatness and, most toxic of all, the idea that this is happening not by chance or the ineluctable passage of history but ‘suicidally’, due to the ‘treason of the clerks’.
The Churchillian challenge
Despite the increasingly hysterical and almost unhinged language being used by these populists, there is perhaps a sense that the steam behind their project is abating. Indeed, perhaps that is why the language they are using is becoming so uncontrolled. If so, one reason for that could well be that for many months now Trump’s administration, the most direct embodiment of that project, has itself become so obviously unhinged, and the chaotic mess he has created with his war on Iran makes that even more glaring.
Certainly in the UK there are now clear signs that Reform’s poll ratings have started to slip. There are also signs that Starmer is getting a little bolder, not just in standing up to Trump but also in condemning the populist right. The two are somewhat linked, as his judgements about the Iran War have been in line with public opinion and enabled him to expose the foolishness of both Badenoch and Farage. He was also notably quick to condemn Nick Timothy’s anti-Muslim remarks this week. Meanwhile, internal Labour opposition looks set to lead to at least some softening of the government’s draconian immigration plans.
On Europe, too, the government has now begun to speak much more openly about the case for closer regulatory alignment, including in a speech this week by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Whether she and the government have understood that alignment, in itself, doesn’t mean access, which also requires certification and legal oversight from the EU, remains to be seen. Perhaps they have, since, albeit quietly, the realities of ‘dynamic alignment’ are being accepted wholesale in the government’s attempts to complete an SPS deal with the EU.
More to the point, even at its most maximal an alignment policy does relatively little to reduce the costs of Brexit which, strikingly, Reeves referred to by using the 8% estimate from last year’s NBER report (and its higher end, at that) rather than the standard 4% OBR figure built into the official budget; striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. Certainly others within the Labour Party have begun to be increasingly vociferous in advocating such a response, with Sadiq Khan this week calling for the party to adopt a ‘rejoin’ policy at the next election. Notably, in making this argument Khan referenced not just the costs of Brexit but the changing world order created by Trump.
These may be straws in the wind, or perhaps to think so is just clutching at straws, and long-term readers of this blog will know that I am more inclined to be Cassandra-like than Pollyannaish. But there is at least the possibility that one of the many unintended consequences of the Iran war may be to change the course of the politics of Brexit and Brexitism. Who knows, perhaps in the end we will have reason, as Hegseth yesterday urged us, to “thank President Trump”. However, for that to happen will also require what we might reasonably call a more Churchillian politics, in two senses.
On the one hand, whilst there were many contradictions and ambiguities of Churchill’s views about what became the EU there was at least one strong strand within them which recognized its strategic necessity. That necessity would now be described in different terms to those used by Churchill, since the world, Europe, and Britain are now very different, but its basic contours still hold good. On the other hand, whilst again there were many facets to Churchill’s long political career, many of them less than edifying, to say the least, his primary historical legacy will always be that of providing the national leadership needed in a world at war [2].
It is just such a combination of strategy and leadership which Britain needs if it is to take the opportunity to renew itself in the world being created by Trump’s war.
Notes
[1] The aim being to amass as many different years as possible. Those thinking this suggests I was a strange child will have their suspicions confirmed by the fact that at the same sort of time I collected empty crisp packets, the aim in that case being to find as many different makes and flavours as possible – which was not as easy as it sounds when Golden Wonder ‘Ready Salted’ was so ubiquitous. In mitigation, this was in the 1970s, when we had to make our own entertainment, although my attempts to interest visitors and relatives in my crisp packet collection suggested that, even in those days, greater excitement was available.
[2] The populist idea that recognizing the flaws and well as the qualities of Churchill is some kind of disrespectful, woke revisionism is utterly dimwitted (as it is when applied to the more general recognition that British history as a whole is a mixture of the great and the terrible). It was a point well-made by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin this week when he defended Keir Starmer against Trump’s criticisms during a meeting at the White House which, itself, could be read as an example of how Trump has clarified the commonality of interests between the UK and EU members.
One result of this ineptitude has been that, having embarked on this action without consulting any of America’s NATO allies, or those countries most impacted by its consequences, and having repeatedly insulted the UK in particular, Trump demanded that those same allies clear up the mess he is creating, quite falsely suggesting that NATO members have some obligation to do so. He then became enraged with them, and again with the UK in particular, for their understandable lack of enthusiasm to comply, as a prelude to petulantly declaring he didn’t need their help anyway. Even the US-Israel alliance is now under strain. So to inept planning we can add dire statecraft: Trump is, ahem, ‘no Churchill’.
At all events nobody, perhaps least of all Trump, has any idea when or where all this will end or, as Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times lays out, what its long-term repercussions (£) will be. Any thought that the outcome might at least be the overthrow of Iran’s repellent regime now seems unlikely and it is still less likely that, were that to eventuate, it would be replaced by a more palatable one. If anything, as Rachman gloomily concludes, the regime “may yet emerge in a stronger position internationally”. Whether or not that proves to be the case, the war will surely have many unintended and unexpected consequences, including for post-Brexit Britain.
The Home Front
Certainly the Iran war can already be seen to have profound implications for the UK, at least some of which relate more or less directly to Brexit and its aftermath. For one thing, it has sharply underlined the point I made at the time of the Greenland crisis: that, acknowledged or not, Keir Starmer cannot avoid the choice he has claimed not to exist between Europe and the US, if only because Trump keeps forcing that choice upon him. Thus, as with Greenland, but even more pointedly, Starmer has continued to rebuff the US by openly refusing to involve the UK in the attack on Iran.
On the other side of the equation, it is quite clear that the UK and the EU are in the same unenviable boat, enmeshed in a dependent relationship with an undependable partner. From that general situation flow such things as the UK and EU’s shared problem of how to deal, or cope, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the related problem of how to deal with the US decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil exports.
This unfolding situation has also had several impacts on domestic politics, of which the most obvious since my previous post has been that both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have had to abruptly discard (and disown) their initial position that the UK should have joined forces with the US. In Badenoch’s case, she now even has the nerve to counsel against giving the kind of unconditional support she originally urged, whilst still repeating her repellent claim (discussed in my previous post) that Starmer’s policy is based on “trying to appease a sectarian vote”. For both Badenoch and Farage, the change may be because they realized that the public are not generally supportive of the war, dislike and distrust Trump, and are very much concerned about its impact on fuel prices and the subsequent consequences of that.
Even so, it is worth recalling the nature of the initial criticisms they made of Starmer for not ‘joining in’ as well as some of the reasons they now give for keeping a distance from the conflict, for these are very similar. The initial criticism was widely couched in the language of humiliation, betrayal, and weakness, and several right-wing commentators, including Allison Pearson in the Telegraph (£), leapt gleefully on Trump’s negative comparison of Starmer with Winston Churchill as evidence of this humiliation. Then, when the line changed to one of non-involvement, this was accompanied by laments that this was because the UK was too weak in terms of military capacity to contribute to the war and that this, in Nigel Farage’s words, demonstrated the “humiliating state that we’ve sunk to today.”
It is certainly true that the UK’s military has been hollowed-out in recent years, and a great many people (myself included, for what very little that’s worth) have been warning about that, especially given the threat from Russia and the unreliability of Trump’s America, both things to which Farage, in particular, was entirely indifferent. It’s also true that this military weakness has been made evident by the current war. But that can hardly be laid at the door of the present government, since the problem long precedes its arrival, and in any case it is irrelevant to the decision not to join with the US in the sense that, as with every other country in the world except Israel, the UK thinks it would be ill-advised, even if we had the ability. However, the populist discussion of defence policy is not framed in terms of a rational assessment of threats and UK preparedness to respond to them. It is framed in terms of humiliation and betrayal.
This connects directly with the themes of this blog. For these were precisely the terms in which the Brexiters constantly talked about the Brexit process, week-in and week-out from almost as soon as the vote to leave was taken. That the same terms have now become embedded in political discourse, apart from in relation to Brexit itself, is one of the reasons why I have made Brexitism as well as Brexit the focus of the blog. It is also the case that throughout the Brexit process the imagery and mythologization of the Second World War have been a constant presence, and within that Churchill, of course, holds an iconic position. So there is a thread connecting, for example, Boris Johnson’s (mendacious) invocation of Churchill when campaigning for Brexit with the supposed humiliation of the draft-dodger Trump repeatedly taunting the British Prime Minister for his lack of Churchillian credentials.
Pound foolish
It may seem absurd to move from the weighty matter of war to writing about what pictures will appear on British banknotes. But exactly that topic has provoked an angry convulsion amongst the populist right and in doing so demonstrated just how deeply embedded is the mindset I have just outlined.
In brief, a couple of weeks ago the Bank of England announced that the next generation of banknotes will feature images of British wildlife. This followed a public consultation exercise conducted last year when a variety of possible themes were proposed, of which ‘nature’ proved to be the most popular. So far, so boring. But the announcement provoked a wave of angry reaction, primarily from the political right but also, rather more surprisingly, from LibDem leader Ed Davey, which centred on the fact that in the process this would mean that – yes – Winston Churchill will no longer feature on the £5 note. (It was variously claimed he would be replaced by a badger, a beaver, or a hedgehog: in fact, the exact images have yet to be decided.)
This, according to Nigel Farage [warning: link to X], was “the definition of woke” whilst Kemi Badenoch was even more alarmed, saying it was “erasing our history”. Then, the populist ‘intellectuals’ weighed in. Matt Goodwin stressed, both on GB News [warning: link to X] and his Substack newsletter [warning: link to Goodwin’s Substack newsletter] that this was not a trivial matter because it was “not about banknote design, but something much deeper, something more insidious” which turned out to be “the slow erosion of our national memory”. He went on to invoke sociologist Frank Furedi’s claim that there is “a war against the past” underway. Furedi, for those lucky enough not to know, is one of the peculiar and unpleasant group of former Revolutionary Communist Party members, including former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox, which morphed into the peculiar and unpleasant group of libertarian ‘contrarians’ who created Spiked Online.
Indeed, Spiked Online also joined the fray, with Gareth Roberts writing of how the Bank of England’s plans have “rightly riled up the nation”. Along the way, Roberts sneered at the very fact of there having been a public consultation, suggesting it would have been better for someone “in charge” to have made the decision, the implication presumably being that this was an example of wasteful state bureaucracy. Of course, had the decision been made in this way such commentators would undoubtedly have been outraged that ‘the elite’ had failed to consult ‘the people’. But Roberts’ main gripe, like Farage and most of the other complainers, was that this arose because of the Bank’s ‘woke’ desire to avoid the use of divisive images, and that Churchill was now regarded as divisive as a result of ‘wokeism’.
Plain foolish
This was, to be blunt, total gibberish. The claim arose because in the original consultation document one of the principles informing the themes offered to the public was that they should not be divisive (which is hardly unreasonable: who would want divisive images on the national currency anyway?) That is, it had nothing to do with Churchill, or indeed any other individual figure, and nor could it have done since these were, precisely, themes (i.e. not identifying the specific images to be used within those themes). One of those themes was ‘Notable Historical Figures’ but this came third, after both ‘Nature’ and ‘Architecture and Landmarks’. Had ‘historical figures’ been chosen, those pictured might or might not in the end have included Churchill. But this simply wasn’t what was at issue.
It was therefore an entirely manufactured outrage, but coalescing that outrage around the depiction of Churchill enabled the connection to be made with a wider set of claims about, in the first instance, Churchill generally. Thus Roberts linked to an earlier article in Spiked by – guess who? – Frank Furedi, fulminating about how Churchill “is a potent symbol of the civilisation culture warriors revile”. This then provided the gateway to the more general claims about history being erased and our national memory being eroded, a recurrent trope of Brexitism (see my post of November 2025 for more detail on the connections between Brexit, Brexitism, and the populist backlash against ‘woke’ history).
Actually, if anything, it showed historical ignorance and a failure of national memory. Churchill has only featured on banknotes since 2016, and historical figures of any sort only since 1970. This is hardly some ancient national tradition. For that matter, as a child one of my hobbies was collecting old farthing coins [1], which had been abolished in 1956 but which, since 1937, had carried the image of a wren. Prior to that, the image had been none other than Britannia herself, but would anyone seriously suggest that this change arose from some avant la lettre wokery bent on erasing the proud symbols of our national identity?
Plain mad
It is easy to mock all this, of course, but that would be a mistake. Even if one thinks that it just is the synthetic anger of people who are determined to get angry about anything then the very fact of that determination, and the reasons for it, are of interest. Goodwin said it was not trivial because in his eyes, and those of his fellow-ideologues, it is not. For him, it seems to connect with the ideas expressed in his latest book, published this week, entitled Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. That highly provocative, and surely rather mad, title in turn relates to the wider theme, currently influential within the populist right, of “suicidal empathy”. This term was coined by Canadian marketing academic Gad Saad and is to be developed in his own forthcoming book of that title, the book (and the concept) being enthusiastically endorsed by Elon Musk.
As with Goodwin and others with similar political commitments, Saad’s basic idea seems to be that through immigration, and especially Muslim immigration, ‘the elite’ is complicit in enacting the “suicide” of, variously, American, British or European culture (and thus carries at least echoes of the infamous racist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’). Effectively, it is the same idea as that propounded by Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and, just this week (£), the Conservative shadow justice secretary and hard Brexit architect Nick Timothy, but given a precarious patina of intellectualism. Or, to put it another way, it is the familiar ‘I just want my country back’ moan but using long words (in passing, note that many of the news stories upon which this worldview feeds are forensically dissected by Emma Monk’s excellent Monk Debunks Substack newsletter).
In this way, absurd as the row about banknotes may seem, it is actually a sliver within what, for some, is a war every bit as real, and perhaps more important, as that raging in the Middle East. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that for some, at least on the US right, most notably the morally broken and dangerously incompetent Secretary for War Pete Hegseth, the two wars are actually part of a single religious war. For that matter, it’s not unreasonable to link, for example, Hegseth’s determination to remove the scourge of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) in the US military with, for example, Goodwin’s attempt to connect the banknote non-issue to DEI activism (about 30 seconds into the clip).
Thus, coming back more directly to the main argument of this post, the row over the banknotes is a fresh illustration of the narrative of humiliation, betrayal and weakness. For it connects to the idea of a nation losing its identity, culture and history; its military prowess and its symbols of greatness and, most toxic of all, the idea that this is happening not by chance or the ineluctable passage of history but ‘suicidally’, due to the ‘treason of the clerks’.
The Churchillian challenge
Despite the increasingly hysterical and almost unhinged language being used by these populists, there is perhaps a sense that the steam behind their project is abating. Indeed, perhaps that is why the language they are using is becoming so uncontrolled. If so, one reason for that could well be that for many months now Trump’s administration, the most direct embodiment of that project, has itself become so obviously unhinged, and the chaotic mess he has created with his war on Iran makes that even more glaring.
Certainly in the UK there are now clear signs that Reform’s poll ratings have started to slip. There are also signs that Starmer is getting a little bolder, not just in standing up to Trump but also in condemning the populist right. The two are somewhat linked, as his judgements about the Iran War have been in line with public opinion and enabled him to expose the foolishness of both Badenoch and Farage. He was also notably quick to condemn Nick Timothy’s anti-Muslim remarks this week. Meanwhile, internal Labour opposition looks set to lead to at least some softening of the government’s draconian immigration plans.
On Europe, too, the government has now begun to speak much more openly about the case for closer regulatory alignment, including in a speech this week by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Whether she and the government have understood that alignment, in itself, doesn’t mean access, which also requires certification and legal oversight from the EU, remains to be seen. Perhaps they have, since, albeit quietly, the realities of ‘dynamic alignment’ are being accepted wholesale in the government’s attempts to complete an SPS deal with the EU.
More to the point, even at its most maximal an alignment policy does relatively little to reduce the costs of Brexit which, strikingly, Reeves referred to by using the 8% estimate from last year’s NBER report (and its higher end, at that) rather than the standard 4% OBR figure built into the official budget; striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. Certainly others within the Labour Party have begun to be increasingly vociferous in advocating such a response, with Sadiq Khan this week calling for the party to adopt a ‘rejoin’ policy at the next election. Notably, in making this argument Khan referenced not just the costs of Brexit but the changing world order created by Trump.
These may be straws in the wind, or perhaps to think so is just clutching at straws, and long-term readers of this blog will know that I am more inclined to be Cassandra-like than Pollyannaish. But there is at least the possibility that one of the many unintended consequences of the Iran war may be to change the course of the politics of Brexit and Brexitism. Who knows, perhaps in the end we will have reason, as Hegseth yesterday urged us, to “thank President Trump”. However, for that to happen will also require what we might reasonably call a more Churchillian politics, in two senses.
On the one hand, whilst there were many contradictions and ambiguities of Churchill’s views about what became the EU there was at least one strong strand within them which recognized its strategic necessity. That necessity would now be described in different terms to those used by Churchill, since the world, Europe, and Britain are now very different, but its basic contours still hold good. On the other hand, whilst again there were many facets to Churchill’s long political career, many of them less than edifying, to say the least, his primary historical legacy will always be that of providing the national leadership needed in a world at war [2].
It is just such a combination of strategy and leadership which Britain needs if it is to take the opportunity to renew itself in the world being created by Trump’s war.
Notes
[1] The aim being to amass as many different years as possible. Those thinking this suggests I was a strange child will have their suspicions confirmed by the fact that at the same sort of time I collected empty crisp packets, the aim in that case being to find as many different makes and flavours as possible – which was not as easy as it sounds when Golden Wonder ‘Ready Salted’ was so ubiquitous. In mitigation, this was in the 1970s, when we had to make our own entertainment, although my attempts to interest visitors and relatives in my crisp packet collection suggested that, even in those days, greater excitement was available.
[2] The populist idea that recognizing the flaws and well as the qualities of Churchill is some kind of disrespectful, woke revisionism is utterly dimwitted (as it is when applied to the more general recognition that British history as a whole is a mixture of the great and the terrible). It was a point well-made by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin this week when he defended Keir Starmer against Trump’s criticisms during a meeting at the White House which, itself, could be read as an example of how Trump has clarified the commonality of interests between the UK and EU members.
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