Count to one hundred

It’s indicative of the Trumpian world, as well as the hyper-frenetic nature of the contemporary media, that the ‘Greenland crisis’ which dominated the news when I wrote my previous post has all but disappeared from view. Its replacement this week by the Epstein files scandal is, in one very particular way, an illustration of how the two are linked in that the disclosures, which have convulsed British politics, only arose because of the persistent questions in the US about the Trump-Epstein relationship. That freneticism is disorientating, intentionally so in Trump's case, so it's worth slowing down and 'counting to one hundred' rather than responding to each twist and turn. In any case, a fortnightly blog imposes that discipline. 

In fact, even before the latest Epstein story broke the Greenland crisis had become old news and the standard analysis of this seems to be that ‘Trump always chickens out’ (TACO) or, alternatively, that, like a market stall haggler, Trump starts with maximalist demands, always intending to settle for less. I’m not so sure. As Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland points out, Trump’s more common pattern is to briefly retreat then return for more. Thus on Greenland, within a few days of his apparent climbdown, Trump’s envoy was once again demanding (£) “total, unfettered access” to the territory.

The truth is, we don’t know what Trump was offered by NATO’s Mark Rutte that led to the sudden withdrawal of the ‘Greenland tariffs’ threat, and we don’t know what will happen next. And that is just one example of the bigger truth about Trump: no one knows what he will do next across the board. Another example is his sudden turnaround yesterday on his previous turnaround on the ‘Chagos deal’, which, incidentally, leaves those like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who used Trump’s previous statement as a stick with which to beat the government looking rather stupid (it’s also a good example of why ‘counting to a hundred’ in the current political climate is sensible).

It’s this unpredictability, as much as anything else, which presents the UK, like every other country, with so many dilemmas. It is also what is gradually draining away US power and prestige. Far from ’making America great again’ Trump is actually diminishing his country, burning away its ‘soft power’ and, increasingly, making it an undesirable trade and defence partner (£).

The Carney Doctrine in practice

So it’s not just that the Greenland crisis, when the US made both military and economic threats against its closest allies, won’t be forgotten. It’s that many countries, including the UK, are following the ‘Carney doctrine’ discussed in my previous post, finding new ways to navigate around the malevolent and unpredictable superpower that America has become. Examples from the last fortnight include Keir Starmer’s visit to China, to promote economic ties and to smooth diplomatic relations (just as have Mark Carney and President Orsi of Uruguay), followed by a slightly less high-profile stop in Japan to discuss economic and defence links. Another example is the completion of an EU-India Free Trade Agreement, which also included significant steps towards security cooperation [1].

Obviously, these events were in train before the Greenland Crisis and before Carney’s Davos speech. That speech was merely a sharp articulation of an existing trend, and the Carney Doctrine has now become a useful way of framing the continuation of that trend. The point is that these, and similar, events have to be understood in relation to Trump. Thus Reuters reported Starmer’s China visit as the latest example of countries “seeking an economic and geopolitical hedge against Trump's unpredictability” whilst Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College London, argued that it “reflects the realities of a new global order that has upended traditional alliances”.

Similarly, the EU-India deal, which has been long-delayed, was undoubtedly accelerated by Trump’s erratic and punitive tariff policies, and was described in very Carney-like terms by trade expert Amitendu Palit, of the National University of Singapore, as being “a strong signal for global middle powers committed to rules-based trade”. Another analyst spelled out that “this is not simply a trade deal. It is an act of geopolitical statecraft; one that reveals how major democratic economies are adapting to a more fractured and volatile global order.”

The rapprochement between the UK and China is not without risks. Just as Carney’s visit to Beijing attracted Trump’s ire, so too, though in slightly milder terms, did Starmer’s. Meanwhile, domestically, the potential security problems as well as the human rights implications, of closer relations with China attracted criticism. But this just underlines that there are no good options, and that, whatever else China may be, it, unlike the US, is at least relatively predictable and if Trump doesn’t like that then he has only himself to blame. This also means that, for the foreseeable future, there is going to be no easy way of describing the UK’s international relations posture in the way that, at least to some extent, was possible during the Cold War. It’s going to be a hodge-podge of uncomfortable accommodations.

Brexit: a hodge-podge of its own

Of course, those accommodations are made all the more uncomfortable by Brexit. Indeed, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the US, and the very profound discomfort it has caused the government this week, arose at least in part because, as the Financial Times trade commentator Alan Beattie has pointed out, it was believed that he would be able to deliver the supposed prize of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US (or non-deal, as it has so far largely turned out to be). It also seems pretty obvious that he was appointed because of rather than despite his friendship with Epstein, in the sense that it was such connections that made Mandelson the kind of credible Trump-whisperer that post-Brexit Britain needed: all three men swam in the same fetid cesspool of wealth and depravity.

That aside, the more general point is that, given the situation Trump has created, what the UK most needs is a close, predictable relationship with a major geo-political entity with which it is closely aligned in terms of trade, interests, and values. Thus it is more obvious than ever that Brexit was supremely stupid. EU membership would not remove the challenges of navigating relations with the US and China, but it would provide a stable anchor-point for that navigation (I’m aware that this metaphor is mangled). Now, given that Brexit has happened, the obvious logic of the global situation for the UK is to move closer to the EU.

In fact, what we see in that respect is also a hodge-podge. Last week, Starmer stated that the UK should look to “go further” at the next summit with the EU. This is to be held in May, with what was in effect a pre-meeting having taken place this week, resulting in a rather bland joint statement. One implication of that statement, at least on my reading (the wording is slightly ambiguous), is that the once eagerly anticipated 2026 review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is now redundant, with everything folded into the ongoing process of the summits. Yet, despite the talk of ‘going further’, the reality is that almost none of the things agreed in principle at last year’s summit have been finalised, and this week’s statement gives only vague aspirations for when they will be [2]. And one of last year’s proposals, UK participation in the EU SAFE fund for defence procurement, has actually already failed, although, partly because of the Greenland crisis, it seems that there could be a new attempt at an agreement.

There is also a very mixed picture in the regulatory sphere. The latest iteration of the invaluable UKICE regulatory divergence tracker shows a variety of passive and active divergences between the UK and the EU, alongside some cases of active alignment. In his analysis of the overall position, Joël Reland, the compiler of the tracker, argues that there has been greater divergence under the Labour government than under its Conservative predecessor. This is because, whilst broadly pursuing ‘alignment’ in relation to trade in goods, there has been targeted divergence in relation to some (not all) services, especially financial services, and technology regulation. In this respect, Reland suggests, the Labour approach is more precise than that of the last government in identifying priorities and, in a certain sense, more effective in actually making concrete changes within those priority areas.

There’s a lot to unpack in that analysis. A preliminary point is just a reiteration of what I’ve already said: the decisions the UK is taking do not point in a single direction. Secondly, as Reland points out, the actual economic impact of these regulatory divergences is likely to be very slim. In other words, they show one of the many basic flaws in the entire Brexit prospectus: it is simply wrong to claim that freedom to diverge from EU regulations constitutes an economic benefit (and, certainly, to claim that it could remotely compensate for the costs of having that freedom). Indeed, the reason why the Tories did not greatly diverge from EU regulations when they were in power was not through any lack of zeal. For example, no one could accuse Jacob Rees-Mogg as deficient in such zeal yet, when he was Minister for Brexit Opportunities, he was notably reduced to asking Sun readers to identify what these benefits might be.

Perhaps the more important point is a political one, and it is one replete with ironies. For whilst the government may be diverging more from some EU regulations than its predecessor and is certainly disappointing many of its anti-Brexit supporters in doing so, its opponents are insisting that it is doing the opposite. Indeed, there has been a rash of anniversary commentary (marking six years since the UK formally left the EU and, more imprecisely, ten years since the referendum) bemoaning Labour’s – yes, of course – ‘betrayal’ of Brexit. I’m not sure, by the way, when it was first claimed that Brexit had been betrayed, but I suspect that it is approximately the tenth anniversary of that, too.

A necessary betrayal

More specifically, the Express has launched a “crusade” to “Give us a Proper Brexit”, a campaign backed, inevitably, by Nigel Farage and, even more shamelessly, by Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch. Since Johnson actually negotiated the terms of Brexit and Badenoch had key ministerial roles associated with delivering post-Brexit ‘opportunities’ it's questionable exactly what their credentials as ‘crusaders’ for ‘a proper Brexit’ might be. The obvious conclusion should be that ‘proper Brexit’ is a mirage, but it is one which eludes arch-Brexiters such as serial idiot Daniel Hannan (£),  for whom the “cowardice” of Britain’s leaders explains why Brexit is “not more popular” (even that formulation is slyly dishonest, as if it is ‘popular’, but could be more so).

All of this is dismally familiar, since the claim that Brexit would all have been wonderful if only it had been done ‘properly’ has, like the claim that it has been betrayed, been endlessly repeated since 2016. Equally dismal is that, even after all these years, Brexiters either can’t describe what this ‘proper Brexit’ would consist of or, if they can, are unable to agree with each other’s descriptions. Even more dismal is that what most of them do now agree about is that true Brexit means leaving the ECHR, which was never entailed by Brexit.

However, the ‘proper Brexit’ theme has a new and particular salience in the current political context. That context is, of course, the rise of Reform UK, and the increasingly urgent need for its opponents to expose its vulnerabilities. These are multiple, including the many failures and scandals which have attended even the short time it has controlled local councils, and several of them centre on Farage, on whom Reform is almost totally reliant. His vulnerabilities include his close relationship with Trump, his admiration for Putin, his financial dealings, and, at least potentially, Brexit. After all, this is the defining policy of his political career.

If it was remotely possible to make the case that Brexit had been a success, then Farage would certainly be taking credit for it. The fact that he does not, and has even called it a failure, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence why there is simply no plausible basis for the continuing attempts of some Brexiters to claim otherwise. Unlike those diehards, Farage, who if nothing else is an accomplished political operator, knows that that argument has been lost. Yet he can hardly disavow Brexit as an ‘idea’ given both his own support for it and the deep emotional commitment to it amongst his core voters. Thus the narrative of Brexit betrayal is absolutely central to his political credibility and prospects, and, in turn, to those of Reform [3].

This is one reason why the steady stream of Tory defections to Reform, Suella Braverman being the latest, is potentially damaging to his party. Along with the general point that this makes it harder to sustain Reform’s image as an insurgent alternative to ‘the Establishment’, and the Conservative Party in particular, it prompts the specific question: who betrayed Brexit, if not these former Tory MPs and government ministers? Naturally, they would have their own answers (the civil service, the judges, the metropolitan elite etc.), but, for many committed or potential Reform voters, the answer will be Tory politicians, especially senior Cabinet ministers like Braverman.

The angry man

The next test for Reform’s prospects will be the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. It will be an unusually complex contest, for the reasons set out with great clarity by the political scientist Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University. Some of that complexity is specific to the seat, and to this particular point in the electoral cycle (and now, very likely, the impact of the Epstein scandal), but some of it is a harbinger of what probably awaits us at the next general election when the splintering of party loyalties combined with the first-past-the-post electoral system will produce unpredictable and possibly bizarre results.

One thing which is specific to this by-election is Reform’s choice of Matt Goodwin as its candidate. Much has been written about Goodwin’s journey from being a reasonably successful academic specialising in the study of right-wing populism to a strident populist ideologue (the profile by James Ball in The New World last year and Ian Dunt’s assessment a couple of weeks’ ago will tell those who aren’t familiar with this story most of what they need to know). In some ways, he is just an identikit of such ideologues, notable, if at all, for a degree of pomposity and a whiff of megalomania (at one stage, he sought to found his own party and adopted a vaguely sinister avatar, now alas deleted, depicting himself in black and white, with jutting jaw, rather like a latter-day Roderick Spode). However, he also, far more than Farage, has become a more-or-less open champion for English ethno-nationalism, reflected in the fact that his candidature has now been endorsed by Tommy Robinson. Reform has repudiated that endorsement but, so far as I am aware, Goodwin has not.

If he is elected, then, it will betoken more than a win for Farage. Farage, whatever his true beliefs may be, has always been very careful, and fairly adept, at distancing himself from overt extremism, including repeatedly distancing himself from Robinson. He projects, fairly successfully, the image of a jovial, common-sense fellow, superficial as that image may be. Goodwin cuts a very different figure, and if he wins it will be an electoral endorsement of ideas which had been confined to the extreme fringes of the far right for decades, especially the idea that being born in Britain doesn’t make people British. His prolific, even hyperactive, social media postings have for some time now obsessively documented the actual or alleged crimes of immigrants, especially refugees, and predicted civilizational collapse. And, unlike Farage, who occasionally displays flashes of humour, Goodwin is relentlessly, splenetically, angry.

The angry brigade

In that respect, whatever the outcome of this by-election, Goodwin is representative of a group of voters who are highly active online, expressing their anger and in the process inciting their own and others' increasingly radical positions. Whereas much attention has been given to the online radicalization of the young and, especially, of young Muslims, this group are old (usually meaning the ‘baby boomers’ born before 1965) or middle-aged (usually meaning ‘Gen-X’ born between 1965 and 1980). They are also predominantly white, and generally but not always male. Apart from being slightly younger, having been born in 1981, Goodwin and his escalating online anger and growing radicalism perfectly fits the profile as, no doubt, do many of his followers.

Crucially, these people’s activities are not confined to the online world (the online and real-world distinction anyway being increasingly blurred). For one thing, as with older people generally, they are more likely to vote than younger cohorts. But they also take part in street politics, including the violent unrest and rioting associated with the asylum hotels ‘protests’. Recently, a few extreme cases have gone even further. One example is the ‘Ulez bomber’ convicted last week, who had not only apparently been radicalised by online far-right discussion forums but, in those forums, is regarded as a hero. In his case, he was arrested before he hurt anyone, unlike the far worse case of the ex-soldier who, in a fit of uncontrollable anger, rammed his car through a crowd of Liverpool fans, injuring 134 people. The background to his crimes is complex, but includes following a small number of social media accounts of whom most were associated with the far-right.

I’m obviously not suggesting that the online anger of right-wing populists necessarily causes people to commit crimes, or that most of those who post or are exposed to that anger engage in violence, or that crimes such as those mentioned would not occur anyway. But it is not unreasonable to assume that the online expression of anger amongst older people informs their political decisions (indeed, it is hard to imagine that it would not), and that it matches the age and gender profiles of electoral support for Reform. The same is probably true of support for the various small far-right parties such as Advance UK (which last week recruited two Devon County councillors who were originally elected as Reform candidates). And although this anger isn’t unique to Britain, it is hardly outlandish to say that in the British context it is connected to the anger which drove at least some of the vote for Brexit, and which continues to inform the anger about Brexit having been betrayed.

Political anger has been stoked this week by the Epstein scandal, and of course anger about that is by no means confined to the populist right. However, for the populist right specifically, it adds new ballast to its familiar critique of the ‘corrupt globalist elite’ and its general rejection of ‘mainstream politicians’ as all being as bad as each other. It does bear saying, though, that the scandal could backfire on them because it is already clear that there are multiple connections between Epstein and the British and American populist right, and that Epstein, like others in his circle of anarchistic oligarchs, was an enthusiast for Brexit. For that matter, it is revealing Farage’s brazen opportunism and hypocrisy, as he castigates Starmer for appointing Mandelson whilst praising the appointment at the time.

Nursery politics

But, in a sense, it’s all irrelevant. There will always be some new story or scandal to feed the anger, and the details get forgotten immediately, because, fundamentally, it’s not about this or that event, it’s about anger as a permanent political condition. I’m not sure that this condition of anger can be assuaged, not least because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, much of it stems from an impossible desire to reclaim an imaginary past or, more profoundly, not from a desire for grievances to be redressed but to luxuriate in the feeling of aggrievement. On either account, this explains why, for such voters, having been given Brexit, they are now even angrier because it isn’t the right sort of Brexit.

Strangely, whilst this anger is most evident amongst older voters, there is something childish about it. One of my earliest memories (and one my family reminded me of for years) is of a day when I was, perhaps, five years old and for some reason I pestered and pleaded for my mother to buy some honey. She eventually gave in, but when I saw it, I fell into a raging, uncontrollable tantrum because, I shrieked, she had bought the wrong sort of honey.

And this brings us back to the beginning of this post. For all that he has far more power than them, Donald Trump is not so different to the on-line army of angry old white British men radicalizing themselves and each other. There is at least a rhyme between the two. Trump’s rapacious and capricious ego, driving his unpredictable demands and vindictive assaults on anyone who crosses or slights him, is also child-like in its nature. Perhaps that is also why living through the current political period is so neuralgically wearisome, like being trapped in a nursery not just full of, but run by, angry screaming toddlers. It also brings us back to 'counting to a hundred' which, apart from being a useful antidote to the frenetic news cycle, was what a wiser American President, Thomas Jefferson, advised the very angry to do before speaking.
 

Notes

[1] The EU-India trade agreement underscores the fragility of claims about Brexit benefits, of which the UK-India trade deal is supposedly an example. The slight difference in timing hardly warrants that supposition (there are also some signs of closer EU-CPTPP integration). The same potentially applies to the regulatory choices exercised by the UK (e.g. in relation to gene-editing or financial services).

[2} For a detailed update on the reset and its future prospects, see this week’s policy briefing from Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform.

[3] This means that Starmer’s attempts to attack Farage on Brexit aren’t very effective, and might even serve to endorse Farage’s own position, because in doing so Starmer insists on referring to “botched Brexit”. The reason, of course, is that he wants to imply to Labour leave voters that he is not opposed to Brexit and isn’t going to reverse it but ‘improve’ it. But even if that line made some kind of sense as an attack on the Tories, it effectively validates Farage’s claim that Brexit wasn’t done ‘properly’, even if he has a different view on how it should have been done.

Making sense of the madness

The press of events in the fortnight since my last post has been dizzying and disorientating. Even at the height of the ‘Brexit battles’ it was not so difficult to keep abreast of what is happening, let alone to acquire some degree of analytic distance so as to make sense of it. Indeed, it is perfectly possible that within minutes of publishing today’s post it will be made obsolete or irrelevant by some new shock.

I’m obviously referring to what can be called the ‘Greenland Crisis’, and its scale means that it will be the subject of the whole of this post. So I won’t be able to discuss the latest rash of Tory defections to Reform, important as they are to the politics of Brexitism, except to say that they show the growing difficulty of Reform’s attempts to depict themselves as outsiders and insurgents. Nor will I discuss the reports that the EU is seeking a ‘Farage Clause’ in any ‘reset’ agreement with the UK as insurance against a future government reneging on any such agreement. However, I have done so in a recent article in Byline Times.

In my previous post I argued that Trump’s demand to take over Greenland, rather than his attack on Venezuela, was going to be the crucial tipping point for relations between the US, the EU, and the UK. In particular, I suggested that it gave new urgency to the need to massively deepen UK-EU defence and security cooperation. Subsequently, a slew of articles by rather more heavyweight political commentators made versions of the same point (examples include Gideon Rachman (£), Martin Sandbu (£), and Philip Stephens). It also featured within the much wider tour d’horizon of the current geo-political scene provided by Bronwen Maddox in her annual lecture as Director of the Chatham House think-tank. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that anyone expected the Greenland Crisis to escalate as rapidly as it did, or to at least apparently subside with equal rapidity.

The Greenland crisis

The first key event was last week’s decision by several European NATO countries, including the UK, to send military forces to Greenland to undertake or prepare for training exercises. The numbers were very limited, in the UK’s case reportedly only a single soldier, but the deployment was highly symbolic. One important aspect of that symbolism was that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK aligned with those EU countries taking part.

However, the wider symbolic meaning of the deployment had a degree of ambiguity. Some declared it to be a warning to the US that any attempt to take Greenland by force would be resisted, and it is worth re-iterating that the very possibility of this being its meaning shows the extraordinary situation we are now in. Others presented it as a sign that, just as Trump had demanded, Europeans were stepping up to contribute to NATO’s security rather than just leaving it to America.

The next key event showed that Trump, at least, interpreted it as having the first meaning and took it as an affront, prompting him last weekend to threaten to levy tariffs on goods from the UK and the EU, or at least those EU countries which had sent forces [1]. Yet this response was itself open to two interpretations. One was that Trump was showing he would attack those who defied him, and in that sense was a show of strength. The other was that, by making it an economic rather than a military attack, it showed the limits to his strength because he was signalling that he did not intend to take control of Greenland militarily in the face of the resolve shown by Europeans (if only because he would not have domestic political support for doing so). That he does not now intend to do so was stated explicitly in his subsequent, rambling Davos speech on Wednesday, during which he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the fear that he would do so arose from his own previous statements. He created the crisis.

Then, abruptly, later on Wednesday, Trump announced that he had struck the “framework of a deal” with Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, and that the threat of ‘Greenland tariffs’ had been withdrawn. The nature of this framework remains unclear, and its details have not been finalized, but it seems sure to fall short of what had been the demand for Greenland to become unequivocally part of the United States. It may even be scarcely different to the existing situation. Many analysts attribute Trump’s about-turn to the stock market falls his tariff threats had caused earlier in the week, just as bond market reaction led him to retreat from many of his ‘liberation day’ tariff threats last year.

Of course, trying to explain or make sense of Trump’s words and actions is difficult since he has always been capricious and now appears to be going senile. It is certainly impossible to predict what he may do in the future. He may decide ‘the deal’ he has done with Rutte is not good enough. He may change his mind about the Greenland tariffs again. Or he may revert to his threats to take Greenland by force. What is clear is that his motivations are bound up with his monstrously rapacious ego, as shown by the insane letter he sent to the Norwegian Prime Minister in which he linked his designs on Greenland to his pique at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Even so, it would be a mistake to ignore that, Trump’s baroque psychology and mafia boss persona aside, Washington’s conduct is also driven by the hard-eyed men who have re-drawn the entire shape of US foreign policy. For them, US ‘hemispheric hegemony’ is not about placating ‘a King gone mad’ but a deadly serious ideological project which, amongst other things, dispenses with the idea of NATO as a vehicle for collective security. Trump may like that idea for egotistical reasons, but his henchmen have their own motivations and, even if the attempt to annex Greenland founders, those motivations remain intact. At all events, as Bronwen Maddox argues, it cannot be assumed that the US is going to “snap back” to its traditional post-WW2 posture, even once Trump has gone. Nor has the apparent resolution of the immediate crisis over Greenland ended the wider crisis faced by NATO and multi-lateral institutions more generally.

The unavoidability of choice

For the UK, this means that Keir Starmer’s continuing insistence that there is no choice to be made between its relations with the US and the EU is becoming ever-more implausible. The decision to be included in both statements and military deployments with Denmark, France, Germany etc. was a decision to side with Europe against the US, if only because that is how Trump interpreted it. And Starmer’s insistence on Greenland’s sovereignty and criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, an insistence which has always been unambiguous and became more robust as the week went on, is also a choice to side with the EU and against the US, and has also been interpreted by Trump in that way. On the other hand, his implication during this week that, unlike the EU, he was not prepared to retaliate against the tariff threats could be interpreted, if not as siding with the US, then at least as not showing solidarity with the EU.

I don’t mean by this that there’s any real prospect that Starmer will ever openly acknowledge that there is a choice to be made, nor that he needs to. I mean that, acknowledged or not, there is no decision the UK can take, and no statement it can make, including taking no decisions or making no statements, which avoids that choice. The choice, or at least the sub-choices within it, have to be made because they cannot not be made.

This situation would pose acute problems for the UK even if it were still a member of the EU (just as it does for the EU, itself, its individual members, and for other countries around the world), but Brexit undoubtedly makes it far worse. To take the most obvious example, were there to be a trade war with the US, over Greenland or anything else, then the UK would be far better placed if it were an EU member, both in terms of its offensive capacity (against the US) and its defensive capacity (integrated trade within the single market).

However, it is the wider, strategic issues which are even more important. The Brexiter insistence that the EU was irrelevant to UK security, which they claimed was entirely catered for by a US-led NATO, which was always ill-informed, is now exposed as the greatest strategic miscalculation in modern British history. And, not coincidentally, those who still support that miscalculation are the very same people – Farage, Hannan, Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc. – who hailed Trump as the great ally of Britain. In this sense Britain faces a double problem in addressing the US-EU choice: first, the damage of Brexit itself and, second, the continuing influence of Brexitism.

A second chance for Starmer

This being so, Keir Starmer has the possibility both to address the strategic failure of Brexit and to gain domestic political advantage over Reform and marginalize Brexitism, as I've been arguing for at least a year when I wrote that:

“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies.”

That opportunity has not, to date, been taken, although, recently, Starmer has been slightly more willing to mention at least the economic damage of Brexit and to draw attention to Farage’s pro-Russian affinities. The opportunity re-presents itself, now, because the way in which Trump has bullied and belittled the UK this week, including his dismissive remarks about NATO, and therefore British troops, in Afghanistan, will have been offensive to the majority of British voters. This makes it a good time to remind them of Farage’s adoration of the American President and, more generally, to justify the case for recalibrating towards the EU.

Farage is evidently well aware of his vulnerability on this score, hence his criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, and he also stated his support for Greenland’s right to self-determination, but he cannot completely protect himself from it since – perhaps from his own fear of Trump publicly attacking him – in the same breath he argued that it would be desirable if the US owned Greenland. Whilst Starmer did not say the latter, he is unable fully to capitalise on Farage’s vulnerability because his own response had a degree of similarity in that both men criticised the Greenland tariff threat, but both highlighted the UK’s ability to negotiate with the US over trade terms as being advantageous.

For Farage, that is taken to be a vindication of Brexit, for Starmer it is taken to be a vindication of his attempts to manage Trump. But, on either account, it is a specious argument: the reality is that the so-called US-UK trade deal, supposedly agreed last year, was limited in scope, has still not been fully implemented, and seems to be subject to ongoing negotiation. In any case, it is always liable to fall victim to Trump’s caprice since, for him, ‘the art of the deal’ is that a deal is never done and can always be reneged upon or made subject to new demands (the same may well apply to the supposed ‘deal’ over Greenland).

Indeed, the latest reports are that the US is still pushing hard to get the UK to adopt US standards in various areas, including food and agriculture, and, more complex but also important, for the UK to recognize US conformity assessment bodies [2]. If that were to happen, then even the modest reset with the EU would become impossible, especially as regards an SPS agreement. So here, again, the UK faces a choice between the US and the EU.

Fine lines and hot takes

One thing which the last week’s events have made abundantly clear is just how difficult it is to navigate that choice. Having been fairly robust in his support for Greenland’s sovereignty and in his criticism of the tariff threat in a speech on Monday morning, the following night Starmer was subjected to Trump’s vicious verbal assault on the “stupidity” of the UK’s Chagos Islands deal, citing it as one of the reasons for his claims on Greenland. He had never made that linkage before, and it is significant that over the day or two prior to that, numerous figures on the British right, including Farage, had been doing so, though in a different way to Trump, by claiming that there was an inconsistency between Starmer’s defence of Greenland’s sovereignty with his supposed betrayal of Britain’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. It’s a ridiculous argument, on multiple levels (not least because the Chagos deal has a legal basis), as is Trump’s argument that the Chagos deal, which he previously supported, damages US security interests (since the UK-US base there is protected).

I can’t be bothered to unpick all that, but my point is that it seems clear that it only occurred to Trump to link Chagos and Greenland because his ideological soulmates in Britain were doing so. Indeed, it has since emerged that it may have come about because of remarks made by Kemi Badenoch to the US Speaker on Monday evening. At all events, whereas there was a brief moment early on Monday when all UK political parties, including Reform, were united in objecting to Trump’s Greenland tariffs, by Tuesday both Reform and the Tories were attacking Labour over Chagos and saying that about that, at least, Trump was right. Tellingly, that great patriot Farage was delighted at the prospect of ‘sovereign Britain’ being told what to do by a foreign leader (equally tellingly, it looks as if he was wrong). Thus, whether by accident or design, Trump’s outburst had the effect of splintering the nascent consensus against him within the UK polity and, as Starmer rightly said during Prime Minister’s Questions, by endorsing Trump’s criticism of the Chagos deal Kemi Badenoch (and others) were supporting his attempt to punish the UK for standing up to his demands for Greenland.

Moreover, many news outlets, including the BBC, started to report Trump’s attack on the UK as demonstrating that Starmer’s approach to handling Trump through flattery and sycophancy had failed. That reporting was deeply wrong-headed. In fact, Trump’s attack showed two things. One is just the sheer impossibility of dealing with a President who is unpredictable, dishonest, and very possibly mentally ill. The other, which those criticising Starmer for not being bolder should ponder, is that by departing only slightly from the ‘flattery and sycophancy’ approach, with a politely-worded criticism of the Greenland policy and tariff threat, Starmer immediately faced a thuggish response from Trump and, with it, accusations from the Conservatives that he was failing to maintain ‘the special relationship’. In any case, these events also showed that it is unwise to provide ‘hot takes’, especially in relation to Trump, because by the end of the week the BBC and others were at least implying that Starmer had handled the crisis effectively.

The Carney doctrine

Whatever now happens with respect to Greenland, which is very far from clear, there can be little doubt that the events of the last fortnight have crystallised the situation which has been developing since at least the re-election of Trump. The UK’s choice between the US and the EU is only one manifestation of the wider choices this situation poses. For, as the Bronwen Maddox lecture I linked to earlier suggests, the Greenland crisis is only one instance of a much bigger transformation in the global order, a point also made this week by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Previously, I’ve written about this transformation in terms of a ‘new global divide’, as profound as that of the Cold War, between a broadly, if imperfectly, liberal, rational-legal framework for international relations, and an international order based solely on power-plays and gangsterism (and, as the use of increasingly unconstrained paramilitary violence and the erosion of the rule of law by Trump’s regime shows, this applies to the domestic order as well). A naked illustration of this gangsterism is Trump’s latest plan to create a ‘Board of Peace’ to oversee Gaza and, potentially, other conflict zones. This body will be chaired by Trump during his lifetime, with power to hire and fire its members and to name his successor, and with permanent members reportedly required to pay $1 billion into a fund personally controlled by Trump.

The nature and implications of this new global divide were articulated with great cogency in a widely-admired speech given by the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos this week. It was a speech which may well come to be seen as being as epoch-defining as Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech in Missouri almost exactly eighty years ago. Carney spoke of the concept of “values-based realism”, a combination of principle and pragmatism, whereby “middle powers” could and should respond to a world in which multilateral institutions have been diminished and “great powers” seek to act as regional or even global hegemons. Note that this does not imply ‘having nothing to do’ with those hegemons, or publicly vilifying them. Certainly as regards the US, that is a luxury that Canada, like the UK and most other countries, does not have. The issue is how to navigate relations with them.

It was an optimistic speech in suggesting such navigation was possible, but by no means an idealistic one. Pragmatism demands some unpalatable choices such as, implicitly, Canada’s recent trade deal with China. It was also realistic in insisting that – as, in Britain, Brexit should have taught us – “nostalgia is not a strategy”, meaning that the old order, effectively that established since the time of Churchill’s Missouri speech, is not coming back. However, that does not mean that the future order must necessarily be dictated by hegemons and characterised by gangsterism.

Above all, Carney’s speech stressed the centrality of cooperation amongst middle powers:

“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”

It is at least possible to interpret Trump’s apparent climbdown over Greenland as a vindication of this, in that it came when faced with the concerted opposition of numerous countries and other actors, including market actors (the two are linked, since a big reason for the stock market falls was the possibility of EU retaliation). But, even if so, the Carney doctrine calls for more than co-ordinated diplomacy; it requires the development of substantive co-operation amongst middle powers over defence, security, and trade.

Thus, although speaking primarily about Canada, Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism. Taking those two readings together, the Carney Doctrine could offer the UK a chance of moving forward from Brexit. It’s no longer a matter of revisiting the decision made in 2016. The Greenland crisis has been a stark reminder that, in 2026, the brutal realities of global politics impose their own imperatives on national strategy, and mandate a new and better decision about its direction.

Whether domestic politics will allow such a decision to be made is an open question. It is doubtful whether the present government is capable of rising to the challenge. But it is beyond doubt that a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government, still entirely committed to the logic of Brexit and Brexitism, would be totally incapable of doing so.

 

Notes

[1] Many commentators wondered if it is possible for the US to levy tariffs on individual EU members, given that the EU trades as a single tariff entity (i.e. the customs union). The trade expert Sam Lowe has explained that the short answer is that it is. However, because it is a single tariff entity, any retaliation against the US would have to be made by the EU and not its individual members.

[2] I don’t have space to discuss it here, but conformity assessment is, as an anonymous source in the Politico report aptly describes it, the “invisible infrastructure that no one really knows about but which keeps everyone safe”. It also has much salience to Brexit, including to the ‘reset’, because it is at the heart of why regulatory alignment does not in itself give market access, and amongst other things explains the strange situation whereby foodstuffs may meet EU standards but are nevertheless marked ‘Not for the EU’ when sold in British shops. And of course conformity assessment marking lies behind one of the most abject farces of the Brexit saga, namely the abandoned attempt to replace CE marks with UKCA marks.

Enemies within and without

The month since my previous post has seen some small steps towards a UK-EU ‘reset’ but, far from being a period of relative quiet, the Christmas and New Year holiday has seen no let-up in populist hatred domestically and a dramatic worsening of the international scene.

In that previous post I wrote that the glacial pace of the reset was too slow to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK. With Trump’s attack on Venezuela, that urgency is now even greater. As 2026 starts, the isolation and division which characterises post-Brexit Britain is clearer than ever and, although some criticisms of it are unfair, the government’s weakness and unpopularity make it inadequate to the task of dealing with the scale of the dangers the country faces.  

The lessons of Erasmus

As foreshadowed in my last post, it was announced just before Christmas that the UK will participate in the Erasmus+ study scheme from 2027. This represents perhaps the most significant, or at least most high-profile, ‘softening’ of Brexit since the terms of leaving were agreed by Boris Johnson, and the most tangible fruit of the Labour government’s ‘reset’. So it shouldn’t be dismissed as trivial. On the other hand, even leaving aside the wider issues discussed later in this post, it shouldn’t be forgotten that alongside any closening of relations there are, as Politico reported this week, myriad ways in which changing EU regulations are creating ‘passive divergence’. And whilst there are reports of new government measures to facilitate extensive UK ‘alignment’ with single market regulations, the usual questions about what the EU will agree to remain. In many ways, the domestic discussion of Brexit is one of endless repetition.

That repetitiveness was evident in the predictable cries of ‘Brexit betrayal’ which greeted the Erasmus announcement, although admittedly they seemed rather half-hearted and ritualistic. That’s partly because it is now a hopelessly dated concept, which only has traction with a few obsessives: public opinion is now firmly of the view that Brexit was a mistake, and in favour of closer relations with the EU. It’s also because, in the case of Erasmus, it’s obviously nonsense even within the Brexiters’ own terms. In January 2020 Johnson assured the House of Commons that the UK would continue to participate in the scheme, and, indeed, provision was made for that, in principle, in the subsequent Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Perhaps for that reason, the Brexiters preferred to focus on the price tag, estimated to be £570 million in the first year, and possibly more in future years. As usual, their discussion contained a swirl of nonsense, such as comparing present costs with previous costs without allowing for inflation, ignoring the differences between Erasmus and Erasmus+, ignoring the savings from winding down the inferior post-Brexit Turing scheme, and dismissing the benefits of Erasmus+ membership. None of that is worth taking the time to unpick.

The more salient point is that the cost actually illustrates just how good a deal, just from a narrow budgetary perspective, the UK used to have as an EU member, paying £12.6 billion (net) in 2020. It is simply far less economical to negotiate selective participation in a range of (relatively) minor schemes, such as Erasmus + or the Horizon Europe research programme. We’ll see that again if, as Keir Starmer intimated last weekend is imminent, there are agreements on SPS and ETS/CBAM linkage. But, far from complaining about it, this is just another reason why the Brexiters should hang their heads in shame. So, too, should shame attach to the other attack line they ran against joining Erasmus+ which, with wearying familiarity, was that it means “opening the door to a wave of arrivals from Turkey and North Africa”.

Brexit ironies

Familiar as such xenophobia is, it has recently taken a peculiarly ironic twist. And this twist relates to the point about how Erasmus illustrates the unfolding costs of Brexit, yet is decried by Brexiters not in those terms, but as showing Labour to be economically incompetent. That twist is the flurry of stories bemoaning the ‘great exodus’ of Poles and the ‘great retreat’ of Romanians from the UK, both stories carried by the Mail. In the latter case, although it was subsequently amended, the original headline referred to Romanians as having “propped up the UK economy”. It hardly needs to be pointed out that the relentlessly hostile coverage of immigration from Eastern Europe – especially viciously directed at Romanians – from the Mail and similar papers was a, and perhaps the, key reason for Brexit.

It is not, of course, that the Mail has repented of its ways. These stories are being run not from any regret for Brexit, nor from any new-found recognition of the value of immigration, but with the particular angle that they show that under the Labour government the UK is becoming an economic failure with crumbling public services and spiralling crime, and that those who can escape are doing so. That some of this might, both in general, and in relation to the departure of EU nationals in particular, be due to Brexit is ignored and, instead, is ascribed entirely to the failures of the government since July 2024. In a similar vein, the post-Brexit trade deal with Australia, which the Brexiters once lauded as a great Brexit benefit, is now being positioned by them (£) as an example of Labour ‘betraying’ British farmers. It will be one of the great political ironies if Labour end up being blamed both for the consequences of Brexit and for its betrayal.

The great hate

These stories are in turn part of a ferocious and increasingly unhinged attack upon the Labour government and, more fundamentally, upon the nature of contemporary Britain. It’s not unusual for Labour governments to face hostility from the right-wing media and, goodness knows, this government has done plenty of things which warrant criticism, but I don’t think that it has ever been on this scale before. What is certainly distinctive is the way that it is now taking the form of an almost psychotic frenzy of hatred directed at almost everything about Britain. That has been developing for a while, but has been especially striking over the holiday period, including an outpouring of social media fury about the King’s Speech having been ‘traitorous’ (specifically for referring to diversity as a strength, but his supposed treachery is a recurring far-right claim), and about London’s New Year firework display showing the stars of the EU flag at one stage.

The latter is just one part of what has become a tidal wave of ‘anti-London’ diatribes, depicting Britain’s capital city as a lawless dystopia, which is apparently to be the theme of Reform’s campaign for the Mayoralty. These diatribes, as Robert Shrimsley recently discussed in the Financial Times (£), have as their guiding thread the linkage of this supposed dystopia to London’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and are almost invariably accompanied by viciously racist comments about Mayor Sadiq Khan, comments echoed and amplified by Donald Trump’s obsessive verbal bullying of Khan.

There can certainly be no mistaking the viciousness and racism of the way that not just London but the whole of Britain is being portrayed as in the grip of an explosion of crime. Numerous high-profile media and social media influencers routinely highlight in lurid detail every crime, especially every sexual crime, committed by anyone with a dark skin and a foreign-sounding name, especially a Muslim-sounding name. That they never mention the much larger number of crimes committed by white Britons reveals something worse than hypocrisy. It reveals that they don’t actually care about the crimes, or the victims of crimes, but regard them solely as an opportunity to pursue their vendetta. And from that it is not a huge step to surmise that at least some of them actually welcome such crimes being committed, so as to provide yet another weapon in this campaign of hate and fearmongering. Increasingly, these same people are talking openly about the possibility, and even the need, for civil unrest or even civil war.

Readers may notice that I have neither named nor linked to any of these influencers, and that is because, despite invariably bleating about free speech, and the tyranny of cancel culture, these people would certainly seek to arraign me before the court of social media, and perhaps the court of libel, were it to come to their attention that I had done so. That is just one part of the climate of fear they have already created. We are now truly in the situation – the exact obverse of what they claim to be the case for critics of multi-culturalism – that we all know what is going on but we aren’t allowed to say it.

Of course, it can be objected that these media commentators, and the legions of their followers who share their comments, are only a relatively small, extremist, bubble who have always been with us in one form or another. It’s all too easy to scroll though ‘X’ and get a distorted picture of where public opinion lies. But it’s my impression – that’s all it is, and I can’t prove it – that the scale and the ferocity of it have increased substantially in recent months, and that it is gaining increasing traction with the general public. That need not, and probably does not, mean that all the wild claims and spittle-flecked hatred achieve public endorsement, but it does mean that they seep, slightly diluted, into every-day ‘common sense’.

Starmer’s woes

This is one plausible explanation for a highly revealing opinion poll published just before Christmas which showed a huge gulf between perceptions of whether 2025 had been a good year for respondents, personally, and whether it had been a good year for the country (and their expectations for 2026). For example, 36% thought 2025 had been good for them personally, and 27% thought it had been bad, whereas 6% thought it had been a good year for the country and 66% thought it had been bad. Other polls have shown similar disjunctures in relation to crime, the NHS, the impact of asylum seekers and so on.

My suggestion is that this reflects the malign influence of a commentariat determined to depict a country in crisis (and since the purpose of influencers is, by definition, to have influence, this is not an unreasonable suggestion). And whilst their agenda is transparently one based not just on racism but on hostility to all manifestations of social liberalism, it is unintentionally aided by those on the liberal-left who, angered and disappointed by the inadequacy of the Labour government, have their own reasons to join in. As with the hostility of the right-wing press, that is the fate of all Labour governments, even those considerably less inept than the present one, but the current version is different, for two reasons.

One is, indeed, the sheer ferocity of the onslaught. The extent of the loathing of Labour (£), and especially of Starmer and Reeves, seems totally out of proportion to any offences they may have committed. The other difference is the nature of the end-game. Unlike in the past, this is not all leading to the installation of a Conservative government. It is leading to a Reform, or some kind of Reform-Tory, government of a sort we have never seen before. Its agenda will be one bent on the destruction of established institutions – it tells you something when even the King is depicted as an enemy of the people – and the rule of law, whilst also being dangerously incompetent (as Reform’s record in local government abundantly demonstrates).

There’s no concealment of what is in prospect. Farage’s ‘New Year message’ spelt it out. When a politician starts talking about the government “making sure the young are taught correctly about our history”, you can be certain that authoritarianism is in the offing; when he starts talking about making “the UK the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency” you can be certain that this authoritarianism will be accompanied by economic chaos. There’s plenty more to be alarmed about in Farage’s vision of the future, but for present purposes note that its opening framing is that Britain is “gloomier” than it has ever been, with people “frightened to walk down the street”. It is precisely the picture painted by the far-right influencers on social media, rendered in slightly sanitized form for a public softened-up by their influence to be receptive to Farage’s message.

There is little reason to have any confidence in the Labour government’s ability to blunt this message. That is partly for the widely-discussed reasons of its communicative failures, lack of a coherent policy or ideological agenda, and Starmer’s constipated, uninspiring leadership. But it is also because of the implications of the opinion poll just mentioned. Starmer’s New Year message was one rooted in the standard centre-left position, not unreasonable in itself, that voters want to see concrete change in their lives, and especially improvements in their living standards and public services. Yet, as that opinion poll shows, even if voters’ personal experiences are positive, they can still regard the country as a whole as being in a parlous position.

It is very hard to tackle that political mentality through any policy agenda, in the normal sense of the term. If it can be tackled, it is through a convincing counter-narrative to that of Farage et al. Since his narrative is primarily based on blaming immigration and multi-culturalism for everything, the counter to it must be to provide positive advocacy of those things. And it is probably already too late for Starmer’s Labour to do that since they have so frequently deployed, in both rhetoric and policy, precisely the same narrative as Farage, apparently in the misguided belief that doing so will reduce his support.

I don’t mean by this the stupidity that ‘there’s no difference’ between Starmer and Farage or Labour and Reform, the line being pushed by Green party leader Zack Polanski (and, yes, I do know how many readers of this blog are going to take umbrage at my comment). Anyone who thinks that is in for a nasty shock if we get a Farage-led government. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there is now a sense that public opinion about Starmer has crossed a threshold whereby almost anything he says or does is derided from almost all points of the political spectrum.

The Venezuela crisis

This was evident in reactions to his response to the biggest event since my last post, Trump’s attack on Venezuela. It was a highly diplomatic response, in the literal sense of the term, avoiding open criticism of Trump’s actions but also avoiding endorsement of them. Critics on the right immediately denounced it for that lack of endorsement, which they attributed to “the long love affair the Left has enjoyed with the basket-case communist country” and “his party's veneration of Nicolas Maduro's failed regime”. This was self-evidently ludicrous, since the statement said that the UK “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime”.

Meanwhile, critics on the liberal-left falsely claimed that Starmer had explicitly supported what Trump had done, whereas in fact he has been studiedly silent about that, a silence leading many, including LibDem leader Ed Davey, to demand that he condemn it as illegal. But giddy moral rectitude is an easy indulgence for those who have no responsibility for its consequences. The reality is that open condemnation from Starmer would be both foolhardy and pointless, and the statements from Emmanuel Macron and Friederich Merz, as well as from Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, were similarly cautious for the same reason.

That reason is so obvious it should hardly need stating: the UK and the EU are far too dependent on US defence and intelligence capabilities to risk being subjected to Trump’s thin-skinned vengeful bullying. It is apparently not just Brexiters who need to understand that the UK is no longer a world power. Equally, it is not just Brexiters who need to lose their infatuation with WW2 comparisons: in particular, comparisons with pre-war appeasement of Hitler are entirely bogus because, unlike then, the situation we face is one where a longstanding major ally has gone rogue whilst we are still trapped in very high dependence upon them. This is an astonishingly dangerous situation and navigating it requires a far more serious response than most of Starmer’s critics seem to understand but also, I fear, than he, himself, understands.

Starmer’s options

Were Starmer to denounce Trump it would have zero effect on what the US does. And, precisely because it would have no effect on the US, it would also do nothing to constrain Russia and China. Certainly, any idea that issuing a robust communiqué about Venezuela would inhibit Trump’s increasingly vocal threats to take control of Greenland is utterly ludicrous. But it would be highly likely to prompt US retaliation. And suppose that, for example, that retaliation was to cut the UK out of counter-terrorism intelligence-sharing, and the result was a successful terrorist attack. Who, then, would applaud Starmer’s ‘courage’? Instead, he would be pilloried, including by the very people who now condemn him, for his failure to manage relations with the US, no matter who the President was. Even without such drastic retaliation, the prospects for holding Trump to any kind of support for Ukraine would be even further reduced.

To that extent, Starmer’s conduct this week has been well-judged. But the real point about the Venezuela attack is that it is the latest and starkest reminder, to both the UK and the EU, that they need to reduce and ultimately end reliance upon the US with maximum urgency. And the horrible suspicion is that Starmer, and at least some EU leaders, hold the delusion that they just have to ‘wait it out’ and Trump will disappear and ‘normality’ will return. If so, apart from it being highly questionable that there will be such a return, it ignores that much can happen meanwhile. That includes Trump acting on his latest threats to Colombia and Cuba, though if and when that happens the UK and EU responses are likely to be similar to those which have followed the Venezuela attack, and for the same reason. The hard truth is that it is in the interests of neither the UK nor the EU to die on the hill of an unwinnable war of words about Latin American sovereignty: the crucial line for transatlantic relations is Greenland.

The Trump administration’s words could not be clearer: it is explicit policy that Greenland is to become part of the US. If acted upon, that will be the point at which what remains of the entire post-WW2 international order collapses, more even than any outcome in Ukraine, because Denmark is a member of NATO. There are signs that this is the line which the UK and the EU are gearing up to defend. Starmer’s language this week in defending Greenland’s sovereignty has been far less ambiguous than what he said about Venezuela, and the joint statement he signed with several EU/NATO leaders on Tuesday was even more robust. In this case, unlike protesting about Venezuela, there is a possibility that words could make a difference: it’s just possible that even Trump will baulk at the enormity of what an annexation of Greenland would mean.

However, it is equally, if not more, likely that it will have no effect (the Tuesday statement certainly had no immediate impact on US demands), and that likelihood increases if words are all there are. So, either way, words are emphatically not enough. They must be backed by actions and, as the very fact of there being a joint statement implies, those actions must involve both the UK and the EU. What is needed, not at some vague future date but right now, is the rapid development of intense and close UK-EU cooperation on every facet of defence, security, and intelligence capability. The demand on Starmer should not be for him to make pointless and counter-productive rhetorical gestures about Venezuela, but to pursue this course of action as an overriding national priority.

Surrounded and divided

That, inevitably, brings us back to Brexit, which has made such a course of action far more difficult for both the UK and the EU. The Venezuela attack is the sharpest reminder yet of the geo-political folly of Brexit, which I discussed in detail most recently in my last post of 2025. In particular, it underscores that we are now in an era where great powers carve out spheres of influence based on brute force rather than any system of rules and rights. Hence there could hardly have been a more inane response than Farage’s suggestion that the attack might “make China and Russia think twice”, since it will self-evidently embolden them to grab control in their own spheres. That inanity was also a reminder of the utter disaster that would ensue were Farage ever to become Prime Minister.

Some compare this new era to the international relations of the Nineteenth Century: if so, one difference is that the UK is no longer amongst the great powers. Others suggest that the post-war rules-based international order never amounted to much, and the brute force of great powers persisted: if so, one difference is that the UK can no longer look to be within the protective umbrella of the US and instead, like the EU, is regarded as itself being a target for political interference, as the US National Security Strategy makes clear. Brexit was always a strategic error for the UK but, as things have turned out, it also came at exactly the moment to make that error catastrophic.

In this context, the government’s baby-steps, such as joining Erasmus+ and speaking in increasingly positive terms about “closer ties” with the EU, whilst welcome in themselves, are wholly inadequate to the situation of being squashed between two predatory super-powers. Meanwhile, the Brexitist opposition to even those steps, and the pro-Trump and pro-Putin populist and far-right campaign to destabilize Britain from within, are ever-more obviously the activities of a Fifth Column.

Is the tide turning?

Is it the case, as many are suggesting, that the Brexit wind is starting to change or, in a different metaphor, that the tide has turned? It’s tempting to think so when seeing Ryan Bourne, one of the original ‘Economists for Brexit’, argue that the economic costs of Brexit are now undeniable (£). Admittedly, the piece is caveated and, admittedly, Bourne was hardly the most high-profile even of the rather exclusive club of economists who believed Brexit was a good idea. Still, such honesty from the advocates of Brexit is sufficiently rare to make it noteworthy. Meanwhile, Jeremy Warner, has recently written that “Brexit has been an unmitigated economic failure” (£). I may be wrong, but I don’t think Warner was ever an advocate of Brexit but, even so, it’s quite something for a senior business and economics commentator of the Telegraph, of all papers, to say such a thing.

Perhaps more striking was Kemi Badenoch’s quiet inclusion of Brexit in a list of recent economic “shocks”, with the implication that it had been a “foolish” policy. It was said almost in passing and it’s perfectly possible she didn’t understand the implications. Or perhaps, rather as happened with the Suez crisis, it is now seen as self-evident that Brexit is a mistake. But, if so, it is simply not enough to pass over it as if it had been some unfortunate accident upon which it is better not to dwell. It needs to be openly acknowledged and its consequences addressed. Moreover, even if the Brexit tide is turning then, to mangle several metaphors, it is doing so at too glacial a pace to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK.

Customary confusions

One piece of evidence cited for the ‘turning tide’ thesis is the rash of speculation that the government is considering ‘rejoining the customs union’. Seasoned Brexit-watchers will appreciate the weight of exhaustion and depression carried in the scare quotes I put around those words. For as I and many others have been trying to explain ever since 2016, Britain cannot join, rejoin (or, as used to be discussed, stay in) the customs union without being a member of the EU. What might be possible would be to agree to be in a customs union with the EU, in the way, though not necessarily on the same terms, that Turkey has agreed with the EU. This distinction and its implications have recently been re-explained by Joel Reland of UKICE.

This isn’t just a matter of being pedantic about terminology. I understand why some people might use ‘rejoining the customs union’ as a shorthand term. But the way that it is still being used by senior politicians and journalists is indicative of the way that, almost ten years since the referendum, too many of them still don’t really understand what Brexit means. Yet even that doesn’t fully explain the exhaustion and depression, because what goes with the lack of understanding is a sense that we’re still casting around for ways to ‘leave the EU without really leaving the EU’. In relation to customs, I’ve lost count of the number of possible arrangements that have been floated over the years but my post of May 2018 captures some of that dismal story. So it may be not so much a matter of the ‘tide turning’ as yet another iteration of its ebb and flow.

Either way, a Guardian report last weekend suggested that a customs union is being actively, albeit informally, discussed within government, and that the elevation of Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds to the Cabinet might give added impetus to this discussion (yet, a few days later, he poured scorn on the idea). Meanwhile, the Mail angrily reported that Justice Secretary David Lammy “refused seven times to rule out” rejoining the customs union (which, typically of the paper, it not only misdescribes as such, but also misdescribes as “reversing Brexit”), as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting and, according to an angrily-headlined non-story in the Express, Rachel Reeves. There’s certainly some evidence that voters, especially Labour voters, would welcome it, but Keir Starmer has said he is not “planning” any such move, and most Labour MPs abstained on a LibDem-initiated parliamentary vote this week.

Customary questions

That this vote was held reflected the fact that a customs union has long been advocated by the LibDems, whilst Labour MPs’ abstentions reflected that it would cross one of their party’s high-profile manifesto ‘red lines’ (although if that ever comes to be breached then, ironically, the very inaccuracy of the term provides a sliver of wriggle room, since the government could, truthfully if tricksily, say that it was seeking a ‘bespoke customs treaty’ with the EU). If breaching that red line is now under internal discussion within the Labour Party, the reasons are obvious. In a general way, the government is desperate to boost economic growth. In a more specific way, I’ve several times made the obvious point that Labour’s long silence on the damage of Brexit was because they could hardly break it without also proposing a viable solution to it. So the government’s recent overt references to the costs of Brexit are inevitably forcing it now to consider such solutions.

However, whether a customs union would be much of a solution is questionable. Whilst the broadly negative economic effect of Brexit is indeed, as Bourne accepts, undeniable, the specific costs attributable to being outside the customs union have, so far as I know, never been disaggregated [1]. Moreover, the benefits of a customs treaty with the EU would depend on its terms and extensiveness. The Guardian report refers to unspecified House of Commons analysis estimating that “rejoining the customs union” could increase GDP by 2.2%. However, I think this is highly unlikely, if we take as accurate the OBR figure of GDP being 4% lower in the long run than it would otherwise be (admittedly, as I discussed recently, other estimates put the figure higher). For it is implausible that the costs of being outside the customs union, compared with the other main component of the costs, which come from being outside the single market, are half, or even close to half, of the total.

In fact, as trade expert Sam Lowe points out, the only real benefit of a customs union is to remove the rule of origin requirements for tariff-free trade in goods with the EU which exist within the existing UK-EU trade agreement (i.e. because, potentially, the entirety of goods trade with the EU would be tariff-free rather than being, as at present, conditional upon meeting rules of origin requirements). That would be very welcome for some products and industries, but the overall economic benefit would be relatively modest. On the other hand, it is surely the case that the costs of being outside the customs union exceed the benefits, which Starmer suggested at PMQs this week to be those coming from having an independent trade policy, since those benefits are nugatory (see Table 8, page 20, in link).

Customary disarray

In any case, it is by no means obvious how seriously we should take these latest rumours and counter-rumours, which are typical of a government in considerable disarray. Admittedly, some of the recent criticisms it has faced have been unfair, as shown by the way that the accusations that Rachel Reeves “lied” (£) ahead of the budget have unwound under scrutiny and calls for her to be investigated for breaking the ministerial code have been rejected by the independent ethics advisor. Likewise, the furious accusations made a few weeks ago that the government, and ‘Number 10’ in particular, blocked the prosecution of the ‘China spy case’ have been shown to be false by the report of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. And some of the attacks are simply ludicrous, such as the manufactured outrage about Reeves having ‘only’ been the winner of the 1993 ‘under-14 title for the British Women’s Chess Association Girls Championship’ rather than the ‘British girls’ under-14 champion’.

These and other stories are undoubtedly contributing to the impression that the government is useless and dishonest, and its failure to counter that impression effectively could itself be held against it. But it’s not necessary to indulge in false or unfair accusations to sustain the claim of governmental disarray and, in particular, the claim that it lacks any sense of coherent strategy or purpose.

It’s not just the chaotic leaks and hints about the budget. It’s the way that policies and initiatives appear or disappear at random. Examples include refusing to lift the ‘two child benefit’ cap and then embracing it as a central part of the government’s “moral mission”. Or suddenly floating the Digital ID Card scheme as a “priority”, without any details of how it would work, and then delaying even the consultation about it. Or, most recently, and again out of the blue, announcing a major policy to restrict trial by jury but, again, with no apparent idea about how or when this will be implemented. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits or demerits of any of these policies: my point is simply that they come from nowhere and, very often, go nowhere, or get reversed.

Customary absence of strategy

So within this context it’s reasonable to be sceptical about whether the latest ‘customs union’ rumours will amount to anything (personally, I don’t think they will), and that’s all the more so because within the specific policy area of relations with the EU the government is also woefully lacking in strategic coherence or consistency. This absence of strategy has been evident from the outset, and I wrote a detailed post in August 2024 about why it is a problem. That problem has become even more obvious since. For example, we have seen the government’s refusal to countenance a Youth Mobility Scheme, then to embrace an “ambitious” version of it, and currently to be mired in reportedly sour negotiations with the EU about how extensive it will be (£).

That sourness would appear to be replicated across the wider ‘reset’ negotiations, and these have now failed as regards the UK’s possible participation in SAFE, the EU defence loan fund, apparently because the price of doing so was deemed too high by the government (and, it seems, set so high because of France’s protectionism of its defence industry). Strangely, Thomas-Symonds commented that the UK “will still be able to participate in projects through SAFE on third-country terms”, as if this represented some kind of partial success rather than being the definition of what failure meant. Meanwhile, the January 2026 deadlines for agreeing linkages on Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) are looming and for all the talk from both the UK and the EU of wanting to move “swiftly” on this and other reset issues, there has been little sign of urgency (though there is, admittedly not for the first time, a report that agreement on UK participation in Erasmus+ is imminent).

That is understandable from an EU perspective. The issue of post-Brexit relations with the UK is no longer the priority it was during the Article 50 negotiations, and the broad contours of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU. It may be that the latest statements from the Trump regime, discussed below, will create more urgency for both the UK and the EU as regards cooperation, if not trade. But, even if so, as I’ve pointed out many times before there is very little sense for the EU in agreeing to substantially deeper relations when there is every prospect of a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government backtracking in a very few years’ time.

However, that possibility (both of there being such a government, and of it being able to backtrack) is not something independent of the present government’s conduct. That’s obviously true in a general way, because if this government were to perform better and be more popular, it would have a better chance of re-election. But it is also true in the narrow sense of this government’s EU strategy. For one of the things which such a strategy could deliver would be to begin the process of changing the domestic political narrative about the EU, and to begin to embed that narrative in a way that would make it less vulnerable to being undermined by future governments. To be more specific, for all that there has been some improvement in the tone of the UK-EU relationship under Labour, the domestic narrative remains one of suspicious, sullen instrumentalism. This in turn is what has made the reset negotiations a sour battle over budget contributions.

Changing the narrative

In this sense, even if the present noises about seeking a customs union do translate into government policy it will do nothing to change that narrative. It still positions the relationship as one of instrumental calculation just as, looking back, was the case throughout the UK’s membership. If there is to be a ‘reset’ of that decades-long narrative then it needs to encompass much more than simply regarding Brexit as a ‘mistake’ because of its economic costs (although that is true) and become a positive affirmation of European identity.

I don’t by this mean some starry-eyed idealism. The EU has, since its very earliest origins, been about a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of cooperation, not least as a vehicle for preventing its members going to war. For the UK, now, that means a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of sovereignty-sharing and of the realities of regionalism (in fact, if an UK-EU customs union comes to pass then its main value could be to symbolise that recognition). For whilst it’s true that sovereignty-sharing can bring with it economic advantages, that is neither the sole nor the deepest motivation. The deepest motivation is that of national strategy.

In a post in January 2019, I argued that Brexit was a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represented an unprecedented failure of British statecraft. It was not simply a bad strategy, but was the abandonment of any strategy at all. I still think that is the best post on this blog, or at least the one which best-articulates why I was, and still am, convinced that Brexit was a national catastrophe. In summary, the argument was that Brexit was based on a failure to understand the regionalization of economics and the multi-polar nature of international relations.

I obviously couldn’t predict the events that have happened since, but they have amply justified that analysis. I mean, in particular, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the second Trump presidency, and the continuing rise of autocratic China, as well as some of the effects of the pandemic on international supply chains. Over and over again in the course of these events it has been clear that the UK’s interests and values are substantially aligned with the EU’s, on all sorts of international issues apart from Ukraine, such as climate change, even as Brexit has severed the institutional connection between them. And, just in the last week, this has been forcefully re-emphasised by the publication of the US National Security Strategy.

Trump’s "declaration of political war"

This extraordinary and alarming document is, as Bill Emmott, the Chair of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, puts it “a declaration of [political] war against European democracy and the European way of life”. Brexit notwithstanding, the document makes no clear distinction between the UK and the EU [2] in terms of its endorsement of all the now-standard critiques of European countries that spew out daily from the American ethno-nationalist right. These include echoing the ‘great replacement theory’, the racist conspiracy theory that there is a concerted attempt to ‘replace indigenous Europeans’ (implicitly meaning white people) with ‘non-European immigrants’ (implicitly meaning non-whites, and especially Muslims), such that Europe faces imminent “civilizational erasure”, whilst offering active support to populist ethno-nationalist parties in European countries.

As readers of this blog probably know, Britain in general, and London and other large cities in particular, are now routinely depicted in America as crime-ridden hell-holes, subject to Sharia Law, where anyone who has the temerity to complain is immediately imprisoned on the personal diktat of Keir Starmer. It is insane but, aided and abetted by similarly insane diatribes from British populists, it is not just believed by many Americans but, with this strategy document, has now effectively been endorsed by the American state. It’s true that, when reading it, one should be aware that Trump is notoriously inconsistent, but most of the document echoes his and his allies’ longstanding views and commitments. That includes the way that the report is relentlessly pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, making it unsurprising that it was hailed by Moscow as largely aligned with Putin’s own strategic vision.

Thus, if it was not obvious before, there is now an open set of alliances and affinities between Trump, Putin and European, including British, populists. Equally obvious, and underscored by this week’s meeting between Farage and the Rassemblement National leader Jordan Bardella, are the alliances and affinities between Reform and other European populists.

Alarming as this is, it could also be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government. It’s becoming extremely unlikely that the US polity, or the ‘global order’, will ever return to the pre-Trump era even when Trump himself departs. That world has passed. This means that the already-apparent strategic mistake of Brexit has now become an imminent crisis. Any fantasy of ‘nimble’ Britain using its post-Brexit sovereignty to thread its way around the big power blocs, making selective accommodations with each of them, is now utterly redundant.

This doesn’t mean that rejoining – or more accurately joining – the EU is suddenly going to come on the agenda for either the UK or the EU. The road to that is long and unclear. But it could mean something like the course advocated this week by Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who chairs the Labour Movement for Europe. She proposes a thorough official investigation of the impact of Brexit; a more urgent and extensive, but less instrumental, approach to the UK-EU reset; and open parliamentary debates on the entire issue. Within this, she calls for the government to “forget red lines” but also for pro-Europeans to recognize that “rejoin is, right now, an impossibility”. In short, she is calling for openness, honesty and realism about Brexit and, without endorsing every word of the article, it is hard to disagree that this is precisely what has been lacking since 2016 (if not earlier).

Picking sides

Creasy is another of the voices who, like those with which I began this post, see the present moment as one where, as she puts it, “a window of opportunity to change course may be opening”, partly for the reasons of national strategy just alluded to: “not just because we want better trade but because, in a world shaped by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Britain and Europe need each other more than ever.” I’ve written in that past about this new global divide, and how it has rendered Brexit an even more obvious strategic mistake, but the new US National Security Strategy clarifies what is at stake.

As Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times explains, it:

“… makes clear that there is now a battle under way between two different versions of the west — which pits the US and Europe against each other. The Trump administration view of “western civilisation” is based on race, Christianity and nationalism. The European version is a liberal view founded on democracy, human rights and the rule of law, including international law.”

But this moment is not just one that clarifies international relations, it also clarifies the nature of UK domestic political choices. More than ever before it is obvious that Reform and much of the Conservative Party are completely aligned with the Trump view of ‘western civilization’, which makes the next general election crucial. For the real test of whether the Brexit ‘tide has turned’ will be whether the electorate – now, as Peter Kellner argues, a very different one to that of 2016 – has learned the lesson of referendum or whether it repeats its folly by endorsing Brexitism in 2029.

That is still some way off but here, too, the increasing scrutiny that Farage and his party, to his fury and consternation, are facing might suggest that the tide is turning. What is less in evidence is much sign that Starmer’s Labour understand the epochal choice which is underway and that it is going to have to pick a side, and quickly. Or, more alarmingly, the apparently growing influence of ‘Blue Labour’ in Number 10 means it will understand that there is such a choice – and will pick the wrong side.

 

Notes

[1] There was a government estimate in 2018 that being out of the customs union would reduce GDP by 1%, but this was a forecast based on broad, generic models. What I haven’t seen is a post-Brexit estimate of the costs of being outside the customs union in the light of the actually-agreed Trade and Cooperation Agreement and its subsequent impact.

[2] The strategy document does talk of “Britain and Ireland” as distinct from “continental Europe”, but as Ireland is an EU member this seems to be a geographical rather than a political distinction. It is also clear from Trump’s subsequent diatribe about both Paris and London (and especially London’s Mayor) that when he talks of ‘Europe’ he does not differentiate between the EU and the UK. So much for being "Mr Brexit". So much for Brexit, for that matter.

 

As the scheduled date of the next post would be Boxing Day, this will be the last post of this year. I will resume on Friday 9 January 2026.