Almost fifty years ago, my school report recorded that “he has lost his way and what is worse he does not appear to care”. It was, I still think, a rather unfair assessment but it is one which could with some justice be applied to the current political situation, as events of the last fortnight illustrate.
Reform’s mega-donations
The news of two mega-donations, each of £36 million, from crypto-tycoons Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne to Reform UK caused shock primarily because of their unprecedented size. But it should be remembered that, in both cases, these come on top of massive previous donations which in Harborne’s case amount to at least £12 million as well as the £5 million gift he made to Farage personally. Shocking as they may be, the mega-donations should not come as a surprise.
I discussed the concerns the previous donations give rise to in a post in July, concerns which have been amplified by these latest developments. There’s obviously something peculiar, and perverse, about a political party being so beholden to just two individuals, whatever their background. But that becomes all the more perverse when their background is the highly murky world of cryptocurrencies, given its close association with organized crime and money-laundering [1]. One consequence of this association is that there is no real way that anyone, including the donors themselves, can know the underlying activities which have given rise to the money donated.
The crypto party
That aside, whilst it is not, of course, unusual for businesses and their owners to give donations to political parties, albeit not on this scale, it is highly unusual for any single business sector, let alone one as shady as crypto, to totally dominate in this way. We might still, in very general terms, think of the Conservative party as being, in its funding base, ‘the party of business’ just as Labour is, again in very general terms, the ‘party of organized labour’ to the extent that trades unions are its main source of funding. It is altogether different that we now have a ‘party of the crypto industry’.
Arguably, this may actually rebound on Reform, in that for at least some of their potential voters it will add to the existing sense of the sleaziness of the party. For others, as with the images, discussed in my previous post, of Reform’s fundraisers wining and dining potential donors, it may be what finally alerts them to the hollowness of the idea that this is the party of the ordinary British people, pluckily standing up to ‘the globalist elite’ (the more so as the driving force behind cryptocurrency is the distinct hostility to the nation-state of anarcho-capitalists).
Indeed, from that point of view, it is telling that Reform have tried to position reaction to the donations as an Establishment plot in which they – of course – are the ‘victims’. Their claim is that, if they fall foul of the legislation currently in process in the form of the Representation of the People Bill (ROPB), this will amount to ‘retrospective legislation’ and, as such, would be not just vindictive but improper.
The ‘retrospectivity’ claim
As ever with Reform’s claims there is a lot to unpack, as Jonathan Jones’ Institute for Government briefing explains [2]. The ROPB already contained provisions which are to be backdated to 25 March 2026 (because this is the date the Rycroft Review recommendations, which underpin the Bill, were published), and retrospectivity of this sort is not unusual in relation to financial matters (e.g. and especially taxation) in order to prevent pre-emptive avoidance. These provisions were well-known to Reform MPs and the donors involved. In this sense, the announcement of the gifts now was, precisely, an attempt at pre-emptive avoidance, something quite openly acknowledged by Nigel Farage.
This most obviously applies to the issue of the domicile of donors, which is specifically mentioned in the Bill, but could also apply to a cap on the amounts that can be donated by a UK resident because the legislation grants considerable discretionary powers to government ministers to amend regulations without additional primary legislation. The desirability of such ministerial powers can be debated, but the possibility of them being used in this way was well-known: indeed, Delo has explicitly stated that he made the donation in a lump sum rather than as a series of monthly payments in case such a cap was introduced.
For Reform, this is almost a win-win situation. If the donations are allowed to go ahead, they get the money (although they are already reports of infighting about how to spend it). If the donations are forbidden, they at least get to play the victim card, something given more credence by credulous remarks about retrospectivity by liberal-minded commentators such as Daniel Finkelstein of The Times (£). In this respect, the cynicism of Reform’s manoeuvre was obvious, a cynicism then exceeded by Robert Jenrick’s hypocritical threat to use the ECHR to challenge any attempt to ban the donations (a threat which, in any case, would almost certainly be ineffective).
No more ‘good chaps’
Beyond the specifics, these donations illustrate a wider issue, which was also touched on in my previous post. There, I referred to the analysis of the legal commentator David Allen Green, who warns of the need to create constitutional safeguards in advance of a potentially illiberal government. I’m not sure if, technically, party funding rules are a ‘constitutional’ matter, but they are surely adjacent and they reveal a similar problem. It has been abundantly obvious for years, if not decades, that the rules on party funding are inadequate, and frequently give rise to scandals, but (rather like electoral reform or House of Lords patronage), no party when in government is willing and able to address the problem, and there is little political reward for doing so.
In the absence of reform, the system limps along on the basis of a kind of ‘good chaps’ theory that no one will too egregiously exploit its weaknesses (for example by, as in this case, seeking to pre-emptively subvert the new funding legislation). But the ‘good chaps’ theory is dead, having been severely strained by Brexit before, according to Peter Hennessy, the historian most closely associated with articulating it, being killed off by Boris Johnson’s premiership. And if Johnson did not mark its death knell, the rise of Reform UK certainly does.
Yet this presents a conundrum. The more specific and immediate the threat, the more any government’s attempt to address it looks to be (and can certainly be presented as) a partisan act against a particular political party, rather than a principled protection of good governance. That is exactly where we are with party funding. Having dithered and delayed for so long, the issue is now only being tackled reactively because of the mounting scandals created by Farage and Reform. That does not imply that the planned measures should not be introduced or, indeed, be made even more stringent, since doing so will become even more difficult the longer that delay goes on. But it does carry the lesson that it is urgent to address the many measures needed to safeguard the constitution, as set out by University College London’s Constitution Unit.
The Reform mega-donations illustrate another point made in my previous post. In that post, I discussed the way that the increasing violence and intimidation from the far-right – which has continued since then with the enforced closure of the Portsmouth lifeboat station and ‘protests’ in Gosport, amongst other things – should be regarded as a national security issue because of the way that it connects with both US and Russian state strategies to destabilize the UK (and Europe generally). In a similar way, cryptocurrencies connect directly with the US, and more specifically with Donald Trump. Having once dismissed cryptocurrency as a scam, he has since embraced it, seeking to make the US “the crypto capital of the world” and netting a staggering $1.4 billion from his own crypto ventures in the first year of his second term of office. Equally, cryptocurrency is central to Russia’s wartime economy and its attempt to circumvent sanctions.
Piddington: a microcosm
To be clear, the issue is not that these are two parallel, but disconnected, cases, one to do with street-level violence and one to do with cryptocurrencies. It is that they are both variants of the same thing, with both being what in my previous post I called “multiple vectors pulling in similar, or related, directions”. This is really crucial to understand the current political situation, right down to micro-events such as, in the last fortnight, the ‘independence referendum’ in the Oxfordshire village of Piddington (something itself redolent of the Brexit referendum, with some reports even referring to ‘Piddexit’, not least because it seems that no-one had thought about what would happen next).
What we saw in Piddington was the confluence of the toxic politics around asylum policy, a toxicity evidenced by the Piddington camp proposal itself, which as Zoe Gardner, a staunch advocate of asylum seekers’ rights, put it is a “ridiculous” plan [warning: link to X], but one which arises because of public hostility to, and far-right violence towards, hotels and community housing for asylum seekers. We saw, too, that the toxicity engendered by the vote led to vile online and physical intimidation of a Piddington resident who criticised the 'referendum' and some of the motivations behind it, something no doubt encouraged by Farage’s jeering response as she broke down in tears.
We also saw the exploitation of the situation across the ‘respectability spectrum’ of the political right, from Kemi Badenoch to Nigel Farage to Rupert Lowe through to ‘Danny Tommo’ (who, subsequently, has been charged with criminal offences allegedly committed in the English Channel). Additionally, underscoring that this is not simply a domestic matter, we saw that all of this was overtly supported by Elon Musk, whilst some villagers attempted to garner the support of Donald Trump for their cause. And, whilst there are no reports of a direct connection between Putin and Piddington, the involvement of the Kremlin in fermenting anti-immigrant hatred in the UK is well-established and, significantly, was recognized in Andy Burnham’s speech to the United Nations this week.
That recognition is important, and it is telling that Burnham’s proposal to address the problem with a new ‘anti-disinformation unit’ attracted cross-party support, with the exception of Farage’s Reform. But, that initiative aside, there is little sense of governmental urgency in challenging the rising temperature of this anti-immigration hatred. It’s true that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood made a critical statement about ‘Tommo’, but at the same time she continued to peddle the line about “legitimate concerns”. Since she doesn’t propose to respond to those concerns by changing policy, but persists in describing them as legitimate, the cumulative message is that the only way to get the government to listen is through the very far-right activism she criticises.
Reset inertia
This sense of governmental inertia is even greater when it comes to the broader geo-political context. That is most obvious in the lethargy of the government’s approach to relations with the EU. Hardly dynamic under Keir Starmer, the ‘reset’ talks seem to be going nowhere and there are reports that the date for the next UK-EU summit, already much-delayed, has now been pushed back to at least the end of November and probably even later. This is apparently because the UK now has a new priority for the talks, namely that it be included in the EU’s emergent ‘Made in Europe’ rules (£). This itself illustrates the problems of the lethargy of the reset, in the sense that it has already been overtaken by ongoing events.
Another consequence of this lethargy is that it means that the widely-expected SPS deal, which hitherto was the Labour government’s top priority, will not be announced in time for the Autumn Budget in October, whereas the assumption that it would be in place has been built into government growth projections. That has a further consequence, now almost never discussed, which is that every month which goes by without an SPS deal with the EU is also another month when the UK has very limited SPS border controls on imports from the EU, with concomitant risks to food safety.
At all events, it is extraordinary that we are now probably more than half-way through the Labour government’s term of office and virtually nothing concrete has been achieved in terms of the EU reset it promised to deliver. That becomes even more extraordinary given that, in his speech to the United Nations, Burnham began by referring to the “disruption” Brexit had caused the country whilst making only a very vague reference to the need to “deepen” ties with the EU.
The lesson from Canada
This lethargy has been thrown into sharp relief by developments in the EU-Canada relationship over the last fortnight. These have included talk of “Associate Membership” from Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, and of a “unique alliance” from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney [3]. It is actually by no means clear what associate membership would mean, and whether it is possible. Nor is it clear, despite much media discussion in the UK, what, if anything, its implications would be for Britain. (There are good summaries of all this by Joël Reland on the UKICE blog and by Alexandra Hall Hall in Byline Times.)
What is clear, however, is that, whatever form the EU-Canada relationship takes in the future, the attention being given to it by both parties is driven by a recognition of the new geo-politics (as well as their economic implications). Carney’s speech to the European Parliament was especially overt in this respect, and it was also notable for referring to the mutual benefits of sovereignty-pooling and differentiating this from a diminution of sovereignty. Perhaps most importantly, whilst rehearsing mutual benefits, the underlying theme was not one of instrumental calculation but of shared interests and shared values.
This is a fundamentally different approach to that taken by the UK, and so it’s surprising to see well-informed commentators, such as Jill Rutter, writing for the Institute for Government, positioning what is happening in terms of the EU “at last showing a bit of institutional imagination” in contrast to what had been the case during the Brexit negotiations. The reality is that the nature and outcome of those negotiations was shaped by the UK government’s red lines, which no amount of EU ‘imagination’ could transcend, as continues to be true of the post-Brexit reset negotiations.
In any case, it is probably not very fruitful to consider whatever may be agreed between the EU and Canada as a ‘model’ for the UK. Not only are the two cases very different economically, but also such an approach would have the same flaws as that adopted by the British government in May 2020, under Boris Johnson, when various supposed ‘precedents’ from other EU relationships with third countries were treated a ‘menu of options’ that should automatically be available, as of right, to the UK. The lesson of what is now underway between Canada and the EU should be not so much about institutional arrangements as about embracing the strategic logic articulated in Carney’s speech, and the spirit of respect and reciprocity that logic leads to in engaging with the EU.
Can Britain learn that lesson?
Nothing remotely like this is being said by the British Prime Minister, and I’m not sure it has ever been said by any of his predecessors except, perhaps, Ted Heath [4]. More to the point, it is almost inconceivable that Andy Burnham would make such a speech. That is partly because he, as an individual, seems to have neither much interest in, nor much vision of, geo-politics, or even much interest in international relations in its most general sense (something reflected in his largely anodyne UN speech).
Far more importantly, it is because, if a Carney-like speech was unlikely from any British PM before Brexit, in the post-Brexit landscape it would undoubtedly create a furore of massive proportions, with condemnation from the Tories, Reform, and much of the media commentariat [5]. Of course, it could be argued that Burnham shouldn’t be deterred by this and should proceed anyway. But, even if he were minded to do so, that wouldn’t affect the core problem that, in the absence of a plausible national consensus around a new ‘Carney-like’ strategy for relations with the EU, there could be no confidence in its durability on the part of the EU.
In short, the world has changed dramatically since the Brexit referendum, and it has done so in ways which comprehensively discredit even the threadbare strategic case of the advocates of Brexit, which was founded, if anything, on the reliability of the US as a defence partner and the continuing, largely US-driven, process of global economic liberalization. But any attempt by a British government, even if it had the vision to do so, which the present government does not, to respond to these changes in a realistic way is rendered impossible by a domestic political discourse stuck in the terms established by the Brexiters, with ‘sovereignty’ its guiding theme and an increasingly vicious ethno-nationalist panic about immigration its central preoccupation.
Drift and decay
It is this situation which links together most of what is in this post, and much that is not. We, in some collective sense (by which I mean not just the government, but, equally, I obviously don’t mean every single person), are stuck. We can’t excise populist, far-right politics, which have become more extreme since Brexit, partly as a result of Brexit. Which means we can’t adapt to the new geo-political order. Which makes us less secure, both politically and economically. Which feeds populist, far-right politics.
Above all, and this is largely the responsibility of the government, there seems to be no sense of urgency about anything: about tackling the far right, about protecting liberal norms of governance, about challenging the immigration panic, about improving relations with the EU, or about recalibrating geo-political strategy. It feels as if we are not so much drifting as decaying.
We have lost our way, and what is worse we do not appear to care.
Notes
[1] It should not be forgotten that George Cottrell, who is at the heart of several of Reform’s funding scandals, also emerged from the cryptocurrency swamp.
[2] Keen Brexitologists will recognize the name Jonathan Jones as that of the former head of the Government Legal Department who resigned in protest when Boris Johnson’s government announced its intention to break international law in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol in September 2020 (for full details, see my post at the time). This, by the way, is one example of what I will mention later in this post, namely the ways that Brexit in general, and Johnson in particular, put paid to the ‘good chaps’ theory of government.
[3] There is already more to this than talk, in that Canada (unlike the UK) has reached an agreement to participate in the EU SAFE (Security Agreement for Europe) instrument, providing low-interest loans for common defence procurement.
[4] Tony Blair (who this week called for a ten-year plan to join the EU) was probably the most pro-European of post-Heath Prime Ministers, and certainly supported British membership of the Euro, unlike Gordon Brown, but he almost invariably pandered to anti-EU sentiment in his speeches. I think it is arguable that Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Bruges Speech’ of 1988 was, at least in some passages, the most pro-EU made by a PM apart from Heath (and, at the least, one of the few enunciating a strategic vision of Britain in Europe). If so, it is deeply ironic that it became a touchstone for Conservative ‘Eurosceptics’.
[5] This isn’t to ignore that, within Canada, there was some hostile reaction to Carney’s speech, but a close relationship with the EU has far, far less political charge there than it does in Britain.
Friday, 25 September 2026
Friday, 11 September 2026
A picture of post-Brexit Britain
In the last fortnight we have had several scenes, different and yet related, of politics in post-Brexit Britain. Each of them is unpleasant in itself, but taken together, as pieces in a jigsaw, they reveal a very ugly picture. More than that, they reveal a picture of the profound dangers our country faces.
A walking stick and some oysters
Exhibit one is the scene of how hecklers were treated at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham. These hecklers infiltrated and disrupted the conference, and as such deserved, and no doubt expected, to be ejected. But what happened was not simply an orderly removal by professional security guards. Instead, a crowd of mainly elderly Reform members, of both sexes, punched and slapped them, with at least one young woman being pulled around by her hair and struck with a walking stick (the latter link is to a discussion with the woman, the actual images are, be warned, repulsive). Meanwhile, other delegates cheered the attackers on whilst, on the podium, Nigel Farage laughed.
This may not, in the scheme of things, have been a massively violent assault, although it was certainly vicious and it did cause injuries. Yet it was, in its way, remarkable. I’m sure that the attackers regard themselves as ‘ordinary, decent, respectable people’, but the contorted hatred on their faces as they rounded on the disruptors showed them in an altogether different light. There was also, somehow, a symbolism of the generational political divide in it: old people spitefully lashing out in a self-righteous frenzy at youngsters for having the temerity to disrupt their leader. Old people who, on other days, no doubt congratulate themselves on their staunch advocacy of free speech.
It’s worth recalling (as Suzanne Moore in The Telegraph did) the outrage when, in 2005, a heckler was forcibly removed from Labour’s conference by security guards. That outrage came not least from the political right with, for example, David Cameron denouncing what had happened as “Orwellian”. It’s also worth recalling that, on that occasion, the then Labour leader Tony Blair, and other senior figures in the party, subsequently apologized profusely. By contrast, after this latest event, reactions from Reform MPs included the thuggishly prolier-than-thou Lee Anderson proposing a whip-round to buy a new walking stick for the most violent of the assailants and Robert Jenrick saying “he should be given a medal for what he did”.
The second scene of the fortnight was altogether more urbane, but also provided a glimpse of the Reform party. This was the meeting over oysters and champagne of Farage and senior Reform officials with a supposed potential donor, one of several meetings filmed as part of an undercover ‘sting’ operation and broadcast on Channel Four on the eve of the party’s conference [1]. It was the latest in a long list of ongoing scandals (£) about the funding of both the party and Farage himself, and it is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police. But, that aside, what this piece of the jigsaw shows is the gulf, and the relationship, between Reform (and Farage’s) carefully cultivated image as representing ‘ordinary people’ against the ‘global elite’ and the way that behind it lies a world of dodgy ‘globalist’ financiers and meetings in exclusive restaurants and clubs which few such people penetrate.
A Cambridge compound
It also provided and insight into another of Reform’s worlds where polyester-clad, spittle-flecked old men with walking sticks are notable by their absence, the intellectual salons of the radical right. For one of the senior Reform officials at those meetings was James Orr, the party’s Head of Policy (a post from which he has now stepped down). Orr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and a major figure in the paradoxically international ‘National Conservatism’ movement and the nexus of thinktanks around it in the UK, US and, at least until Victor Orban’s demise, Hungary (as mentioned, with more details and links, in my post of last April).
Orr, whose conservatism is nationalist but more specifically Christian, was a controversial figure even before the ‘sting’ and on the morning before the Channel Four broadcast had been the subject of a detailed, and at least implicitly critical, profile in the Financial Times (£). An indication of what we might, with suitably Christian charity, call his political philosophy is that, according to that profile, Orr believes in “faith, family and flag”, “opposes abortion including in cases of rape”, and “calls immigration ‘the most existential threat facing our nation since the Norman invasion’” (which suggests he is a less accomplished historian than he is a theologian). It bears saying that much of what the FT profile revealed had already been reported by Byline Times, and some aspects of it have been examined in more detail by the 21 Group, an organization which monitors and campaigns against bullying in universities.
Leaving aside the explicitly political aspects of what these various reports show or allege, collectively they reveal, amongst other things, that Orr and his wife have created what he calls “a compound” and she calls “an alternative Cambridge College” in the (presumably substantial) back garden of their Cambridge home. There, several postgraduates and post-docs, apparently all of a Christian Conservative bent, live as a community. This might be regarded as, at best, an unorthodox arrangement, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envisage how the media would report an analogous arrangement whereby, as it might be, an Associate Professor in the Education Faculty created such a community based not on Christian Conservatism but Critical Race Theory.
A fascist militia
It might be comforting to think that the contemporary far right in Britain is captured by these images, distasteful as they are, of nasty old men lashing out with their walking sticks, dodgy deals done in expensive restaurants, and creepy academics alternately gladhanding at peculiar conferences and lording it over impressionable students. But the next piece of the jigsaw we have seen in this last fortnight is far more alarming.
Last Saturday, as many as five hundred men, and they were all men, who were generally described in the media as anti-immigration ‘protestors’, blockaded the roads around the Dover ferry terminal, bringing the town centre to a standstill for several hours. But these were not ‘protestors’ in any normal or reasonable sense of the term. These men appeared, to coin a phrase, to be ‘of fighting age’. They had donned black uniforms, very much in the manner of Mosley’s Blackshirts, and balaclava masks, very much in the manner of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.
It was a profoundly chilling sight, the more so as for much of their action they maintained total silence. Subsequently, there were some chants of ‘stop the boats’, ‘England for the English’ and other anti-immigration slogans, and another of ‘Christ is King’, but there were no placards or flags waved. In fact the only symbol in evidence was, in several but not all cases, the Christian crucifix. Apparently, it is not only Cambridge theologians who have a perverse interpretation of Jesus’s injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.
Absurdly, Kent Police described this as a “spontaneous” gathering, perhaps to avoid admitting that neither they nor the security services seem to have had any inkling that it was going to happen (though there may be other interpretations of this, including claims that the police ignored warnings of what was in prospect and informed speculation that a high-level security operation may, for good reasons, have allowed the action to proceed). At all events, it was abundantly obvious that it had been carefully planned and it was executed with a certain amount of skill and discipline. That discipline included the absence of literal violence, and no arrests were made. However it was certainly violent in the more symbolic sense of being highly intimidating, pregnant with aggression and threat.
I don’t think we have seen anything quite like this, at least on the British mainland, in my lifetime. Unlike the asylum hotel riots, it did not have a particular trigger or target, and the level of organization means the participants could not be described as a mob. Nor was there even any attempt to pretend that these were just ‘ordinary people’ or ‘concerned local citizens’.
On the contrary, ‘Patriot Platform’, the all-male grouping behind it, openly describes itself as being “an army of patriots” and its aim is to “take control of the United Kingdom”. It functions as a covert coordinator of a network of groups and was launched in June by a former soldier and convicted criminal calling himself ‘Danny Tommo’, who is an associate of ‘Tommy Robinson’ and is connected with the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign. He also helped to organize a ‘Brexit Betrayal’ rally in 2018. ‘Tommo’ aggressively parades his supposed Christianity and Patriot Platform regards itself as a Christian organization. In this and other ways, whilst its core motivation is extreme hostility to immigration, this is wrapped into a broader ideology expressed by its slogan of “Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland”. In short, and regular readers will know I do not use this term casually, they are fascists, and they have now formed a militia [2].
This militia reappeared in Portsmouth the following night, along with a larger mob, attempting to prevent the transfer of cross-channel migrants being transported to an arrival centre. Again, roads were blockaded and this time there was physical violence against police and property. There was also a direct, aggressive confrontation with RNLI crews which has subsequently developed into a campaign of online intimidation and harassment against its volunteers. Subsequently, a nearby hotel was targeted in the belief that migrants were being housed there, when in fact it was the Under-19 cricket team on tour something which, contrary to some of the reaction from both Reform and Labour politicians, was an outrage in and of itself rather than because it was mistargeted.
Whilst this militia, and the manner in which it conducts itself, is new, its beliefs and its aims grow directly out of those which have been swirling around the far-right ecosphere for a few years and the Dover action was openly supported by Rupert Lowe [warning: link to X]. That endorsement at least had the benefit of honesty. More disingenuous was the condemnation which came from Nigel Farage and others in Reform. For them, perhaps, there is some advantage in being able to claim to be the ‘responsible right’, but their own relentless scaremongering about the supposed small boats crisis and their ghoulish equation of asylum seekers with murders and sexual crimes has done a great deal to promote the beliefs espoused by Patriot Platform.
However, responsibility for that is not confined to far-right politicians. It is shared with the political and media class generally, very much including those within the governing Labour party who have dignified such beliefs as being an expression of ‘legitimate concerns’. Notably, government condemnation of the Dover action was rather muted, with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds implying that it fell within the category of “peaceful protest” and trivializing its most striking aspect as merely “dressing up in costumes”. The response to Portsmouth was more robust, with, for example, Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, calling the action “thuggish”. But the overall tenor of the government’s reaction, in relation to both events, was wishy-washy and, astoundingly, Andy Burnham made no direct comment at all, so far as I know.
A vulnerable State
If uniformed, masked men taking control, albeit temporarily, of the streets with impunity is a frightening prospect, it is at least one for which, in principle, there are legal remedies. So in some ways what is more frightening is the prospect of the law, and the State itself, falling under the control of extremists. The recent Reform UK conference was so overshadowed by the new financial scandal that it was easy to miss just how extreme the supposedly reasonable face of the far-right has become. Yet anyone with a sense of history should be alarmed that Farage has pledged to declare an immediate ‘national emergency’ if Reform came to power, with threats to reconfigure the judiciary, civil service, and parliament itself under the guise of this emergency [3]. Similarly, whilst less dramatic, Suella Braverman announced that Reform would make it compulsory for schools to fly the national flag and sing the national anthem, whilst delivering a “patriotic curriculum”.
These are not anodyne proposals, even if Braverman couched hers in the cosy nostalgia-porn of Britain being “a collection of little streets, building little hamlets and villages that fold into towns and cities.” They are, at least incipiently, totalitarian in nature and, as the noted legal commentator David Allen Green has argued, our political system is one in which “there is little which could be ultimately done to prevent the damage which a radical illiberal majority could do.”
One implication of that, Green suggests, is that the present government should create stronger constitutional guard-rails to reduce these systemic vulnerabilities. I agree, but I think a second implication is the need to tackle the core underlying beliefs which inform this illiberalism, especially the idea that there is an immigration crisis, an asylum crisis, and a cultural crisis which somehow constitute a national emergency.
An absence of political leadership
At issue here is far more than simply condemning violence and intimidation, and more, even, than yesterday’s commitment from the Home Secretary to robustly police that violence, necessary as that is given the threat of further disorder this weekend. And it certainly requires abandoning the government’s continuing insistence (£) that meeting the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public by curtailing immigration and reducing or even stopping ‘the boats’ will make the beliefs underpinning such violence disappear. That is nonsense, and it is shown to be nonsense by the fact that those beliefs are becoming more entrenched even as the levels of immigration, asylum applications, and boat crossings are all falling. It didn’t work for Starmer and it won’t work for Burnham, and his premiership may well be the last chance for a different, and more honest, approach.
Such an approach would mean saying something like: flows of refugees and asylum seekers are a global phenomenon, and aren’t going to disappear. The UK is one of the countries least affected, but has legal and humanitarian commitments to fulfil. In doing so, we should and will process asylum claims as quickly and accurately as possible, and seek to discourage life-endangering crossings. But there is no crisis, and there is most definitely no ‘invasion’. Adopting this approach would not just be a matter of a single speech. It would require a concerted communications campaign perhaps including highlighting success stories of asylum claimants and other immigrants who have made positive contributions to society, and emphasising the many senses in which Britain has been a successful example of multi-cultural integration.
In the absence of political leadership along these lines, the dominant narrative, by default, will be, as it already largely is, one in which Britain is depicted as being invaded by a dangerous horde of sexual predators who are living lives of taxpayer-funded luxury. Allowing that to be the default inevitably has the effect of provoking fear and outrage even amongst people who would not, in other circumstances, align with the far right. Conversely, the current approach of treating this fear and outrage as justifiable means that, even whilst condemning violence and intimidation, government ministers are conceding that those responsible are, in some way, representing widespread public concern.
It is, of course, highly unlikely that the government will adopt this approach, and that is, at least in part, because there is a strong strand in Labour thinking – most overtly the Blue Labour strand, but not confined to it – that the fear and outrage are justified; that this is what ‘ordinary people’ believe and the ‘people’s party’ should represent it. As I’ve argued repeatedly in the past, this is, again, at least in part, related to Brexit and the way in which Labour accepted the populist right’s claim that the referendum showed it spoke for ‘the silent majority’. In this way, chiding vocal and violent thugs for ‘crossing the line’ amounts to little more than asserting that Labour ministers are the ‘voice of the people’ whilst leaving entirely unchallenged the thugs’ beliefs. Unsurprisingly, this only entrenches those beliefs and the thuggery continues, or even escalates.
A matter of national security
At stake in all this is, most obviously, whether uniformed fascists are to be allowed to take control of the streets as and when they choose. But what the various developments described in this post should suggest is that the Patriot Platform militia is only one strand within an interwoven braid. The angry pensioners beating youthful hecklers, the Cambridge don and his cultish camp-followers, the intimate meetings in expensive restaurants, the strident politicians of Reform and Restore, the increasingly aggressive invocation of ‘cultural Christianity’, the daily vitriol on social media, amongst many other things, are all part of a related process.
But something much deeper is at stake, which could properly be called a matter of national security. There is no doubt that what is happening domestically in the UK has parallels with what is happening in other countries, with the AfD’s recent success in the Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany being an obvious example. And the way that this success was cheered in both the US and Russia (£) was the latest, and clearest, illustration of how the transformation of geo-politics matters not just for international relations but for domestic politics. It is now a matter of US state policy, enshrined in its 2025 National Security Strategy, to support the far right in Europe, and that includes the UK. Relatedly, Elon Musk openly supports Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, calling civil war in Britain “inevitable” because of immigration, and there are multiple connections between MAGA and the British far right in both its street-level and intellectual guises.
Meanwhile, Russia’s links to the British far right are well-established, including its encouragement of attacks on mosques and Muslims generally. As with Brexit, Russia seeks to encourage anything which will destabilize Britain. That is only partly to do with seeking to punish us for supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperialism. More generally it is part of Russia’s attempt to destroy the remnants of the liberal West (liberal in the broadest sense of the commitment to rights and rationality established by the European Enlightenment), something enshrined in successive iterations of its own National Security Strategy. That, in itself, represents a profound national security threat to the UK. It is all the more profound since the US has, for now, and perhaps for ever, changed sides.
This is the bigger context within which the increasingly ugly politics of the British far right should be understood [4]. It is, historically, a new experience for Britain to find itself no longer the great power it was until, say, 1945, and no longer shielded from its decline by being a kind of junior partner to the US during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Now, it is just another ‘medium power’ and, as a result of Brexit, one in self-chosen isolation from its regional moorings. As a result, it is ready prey. It is deeply ironic that those fulminating about the ‘migrant invasion’, and the need to ‘secure our borders’ are not just missing the real threats to national security but are aiding abetting them.
A cause for alarm
This isn’t to posit some huge global conspiracy against Britain, orchestrating its domestic politics. It’s rather that there are multiple vectors pulling in similar, or related, directions in Britain, as in other European countries (although Britain is uniquely isolated because of Brexit). Recognizing that is important because it is what makes disparate events such as those discussed in this post understandable as being related to each other rather than, as might otherwise be thought, just ‘yet another’ piece of unpleasantness. As pieces of a jigsaw, when put together they make a picture.
If all this sounds alarmist, consider some of those pieces side by side: ‘Faith, Flag and Family’; a woman savagely beaten for heckling the Leader at a political rally; black-shirted men in balaclavas blockading the streets; RNLI volunteers denounced as traitors; ‘Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland’; ‘patriotic curriculum’; ‘National Emergency’. It’s not, I think, alarmist to be alarmed.
Notes
[1] Inevitably, the ‘sting’ provoked complaints of ‘entrapment’ from Farage and Reform, along with the familiar claim that it was an example of the Establishment trying to discredit the ‘insurgents’. But such undercover journalism has a long history, and the way that Farage was caught is remarkably similar to the way that in 2010 Channel Four and The Times ‘entrapped’ Labour MP Steve “cab for hire” Byers, which Farage, then leading UKIP, regarded as exposing the corruption of … the Establishment.
[2] The word ‘militia’ is justified, even though the group is not armed, a point made at the time of the debate leading to the 1936 Public Order Act at the time of the Blackshirts (hat tip to the historian Robert Saunders for this information). That legislation prohibited the wearing of political uniforms, although it is not clear whether Patriot Platform’s clothing constitutes a uniform within the meaning of the law.
[3] Restore’s leader Rupert Lowe this week made the even more pernicious suggestion that, if in government, he would retrospectively prosecute civil servants for enacting the present government’s policies.
[4] The examples discussed in this post are all from England, and there is no doubt that it is here where far-right activity is most pronounced. But other nations within the UK are not exempt. For example, this week a tenement building in Glasgow was set ablaze, apparently because of rumours that it was going to be used to house asylum seekers.
A walking stick and some oysters
Exhibit one is the scene of how hecklers were treated at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham. These hecklers infiltrated and disrupted the conference, and as such deserved, and no doubt expected, to be ejected. But what happened was not simply an orderly removal by professional security guards. Instead, a crowd of mainly elderly Reform members, of both sexes, punched and slapped them, with at least one young woman being pulled around by her hair and struck with a walking stick (the latter link is to a discussion with the woman, the actual images are, be warned, repulsive). Meanwhile, other delegates cheered the attackers on whilst, on the podium, Nigel Farage laughed.
This may not, in the scheme of things, have been a massively violent assault, although it was certainly vicious and it did cause injuries. Yet it was, in its way, remarkable. I’m sure that the attackers regard themselves as ‘ordinary, decent, respectable people’, but the contorted hatred on their faces as they rounded on the disruptors showed them in an altogether different light. There was also, somehow, a symbolism of the generational political divide in it: old people spitefully lashing out in a self-righteous frenzy at youngsters for having the temerity to disrupt their leader. Old people who, on other days, no doubt congratulate themselves on their staunch advocacy of free speech.
It’s worth recalling (as Suzanne Moore in The Telegraph did) the outrage when, in 2005, a heckler was forcibly removed from Labour’s conference by security guards. That outrage came not least from the political right with, for example, David Cameron denouncing what had happened as “Orwellian”. It’s also worth recalling that, on that occasion, the then Labour leader Tony Blair, and other senior figures in the party, subsequently apologized profusely. By contrast, after this latest event, reactions from Reform MPs included the thuggishly prolier-than-thou Lee Anderson proposing a whip-round to buy a new walking stick for the most violent of the assailants and Robert Jenrick saying “he should be given a medal for what he did”.
The second scene of the fortnight was altogether more urbane, but also provided a glimpse of the Reform party. This was the meeting over oysters and champagne of Farage and senior Reform officials with a supposed potential donor, one of several meetings filmed as part of an undercover ‘sting’ operation and broadcast on Channel Four on the eve of the party’s conference [1]. It was the latest in a long list of ongoing scandals (£) about the funding of both the party and Farage himself, and it is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police. But, that aside, what this piece of the jigsaw shows is the gulf, and the relationship, between Reform (and Farage’s) carefully cultivated image as representing ‘ordinary people’ against the ‘global elite’ and the way that behind it lies a world of dodgy ‘globalist’ financiers and meetings in exclusive restaurants and clubs which few such people penetrate.
A Cambridge compound
It also provided and insight into another of Reform’s worlds where polyester-clad, spittle-flecked old men with walking sticks are notable by their absence, the intellectual salons of the radical right. For one of the senior Reform officials at those meetings was James Orr, the party’s Head of Policy (a post from which he has now stepped down). Orr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and a major figure in the paradoxically international ‘National Conservatism’ movement and the nexus of thinktanks around it in the UK, US and, at least until Victor Orban’s demise, Hungary (as mentioned, with more details and links, in my post of last April).
Orr, whose conservatism is nationalist but more specifically Christian, was a controversial figure even before the ‘sting’ and on the morning before the Channel Four broadcast had been the subject of a detailed, and at least implicitly critical, profile in the Financial Times (£). An indication of what we might, with suitably Christian charity, call his political philosophy is that, according to that profile, Orr believes in “faith, family and flag”, “opposes abortion including in cases of rape”, and “calls immigration ‘the most existential threat facing our nation since the Norman invasion’” (which suggests he is a less accomplished historian than he is a theologian). It bears saying that much of what the FT profile revealed had already been reported by Byline Times, and some aspects of it have been examined in more detail by the 21 Group, an organization which monitors and campaigns against bullying in universities.
Leaving aside the explicitly political aspects of what these various reports show or allege, collectively they reveal, amongst other things, that Orr and his wife have created what he calls “a compound” and she calls “an alternative Cambridge College” in the (presumably substantial) back garden of their Cambridge home. There, several postgraduates and post-docs, apparently all of a Christian Conservative bent, live as a community. This might be regarded as, at best, an unorthodox arrangement, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envisage how the media would report an analogous arrangement whereby, as it might be, an Associate Professor in the Education Faculty created such a community based not on Christian Conservatism but Critical Race Theory.
A fascist militia
It might be comforting to think that the contemporary far right in Britain is captured by these images, distasteful as they are, of nasty old men lashing out with their walking sticks, dodgy deals done in expensive restaurants, and creepy academics alternately gladhanding at peculiar conferences and lording it over impressionable students. But the next piece of the jigsaw we have seen in this last fortnight is far more alarming.
Last Saturday, as many as five hundred men, and they were all men, who were generally described in the media as anti-immigration ‘protestors’, blockaded the roads around the Dover ferry terminal, bringing the town centre to a standstill for several hours. But these were not ‘protestors’ in any normal or reasonable sense of the term. These men appeared, to coin a phrase, to be ‘of fighting age’. They had donned black uniforms, very much in the manner of Mosley’s Blackshirts, and balaclava masks, very much in the manner of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.
It was a profoundly chilling sight, the more so as for much of their action they maintained total silence. Subsequently, there were some chants of ‘stop the boats’, ‘England for the English’ and other anti-immigration slogans, and another of ‘Christ is King’, but there were no placards or flags waved. In fact the only symbol in evidence was, in several but not all cases, the Christian crucifix. Apparently, it is not only Cambridge theologians who have a perverse interpretation of Jesus’s injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.
Absurdly, Kent Police described this as a “spontaneous” gathering, perhaps to avoid admitting that neither they nor the security services seem to have had any inkling that it was going to happen (though there may be other interpretations of this, including claims that the police ignored warnings of what was in prospect and informed speculation that a high-level security operation may, for good reasons, have allowed the action to proceed). At all events, it was abundantly obvious that it had been carefully planned and it was executed with a certain amount of skill and discipline. That discipline included the absence of literal violence, and no arrests were made. However it was certainly violent in the more symbolic sense of being highly intimidating, pregnant with aggression and threat.
I don’t think we have seen anything quite like this, at least on the British mainland, in my lifetime. Unlike the asylum hotel riots, it did not have a particular trigger or target, and the level of organization means the participants could not be described as a mob. Nor was there even any attempt to pretend that these were just ‘ordinary people’ or ‘concerned local citizens’.
On the contrary, ‘Patriot Platform’, the all-male grouping behind it, openly describes itself as being “an army of patriots” and its aim is to “take control of the United Kingdom”. It functions as a covert coordinator of a network of groups and was launched in June by a former soldier and convicted criminal calling himself ‘Danny Tommo’, who is an associate of ‘Tommy Robinson’ and is connected with the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign. He also helped to organize a ‘Brexit Betrayal’ rally in 2018. ‘Tommo’ aggressively parades his supposed Christianity and Patriot Platform regards itself as a Christian organization. In this and other ways, whilst its core motivation is extreme hostility to immigration, this is wrapped into a broader ideology expressed by its slogan of “Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland”. In short, and regular readers will know I do not use this term casually, they are fascists, and they have now formed a militia [2].
This militia reappeared in Portsmouth the following night, along with a larger mob, attempting to prevent the transfer of cross-channel migrants being transported to an arrival centre. Again, roads were blockaded and this time there was physical violence against police and property. There was also a direct, aggressive confrontation with RNLI crews which has subsequently developed into a campaign of online intimidation and harassment against its volunteers. Subsequently, a nearby hotel was targeted in the belief that migrants were being housed there, when in fact it was the Under-19 cricket team on tour something which, contrary to some of the reaction from both Reform and Labour politicians, was an outrage in and of itself rather than because it was mistargeted.
Whilst this militia, and the manner in which it conducts itself, is new, its beliefs and its aims grow directly out of those which have been swirling around the far-right ecosphere for a few years and the Dover action was openly supported by Rupert Lowe [warning: link to X]. That endorsement at least had the benefit of honesty. More disingenuous was the condemnation which came from Nigel Farage and others in Reform. For them, perhaps, there is some advantage in being able to claim to be the ‘responsible right’, but their own relentless scaremongering about the supposed small boats crisis and their ghoulish equation of asylum seekers with murders and sexual crimes has done a great deal to promote the beliefs espoused by Patriot Platform.
However, responsibility for that is not confined to far-right politicians. It is shared with the political and media class generally, very much including those within the governing Labour party who have dignified such beliefs as being an expression of ‘legitimate concerns’. Notably, government condemnation of the Dover action was rather muted, with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds implying that it fell within the category of “peaceful protest” and trivializing its most striking aspect as merely “dressing up in costumes”. The response to Portsmouth was more robust, with, for example, Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, calling the action “thuggish”. But the overall tenor of the government’s reaction, in relation to both events, was wishy-washy and, astoundingly, Andy Burnham made no direct comment at all, so far as I know.
A vulnerable State
If uniformed, masked men taking control, albeit temporarily, of the streets with impunity is a frightening prospect, it is at least one for which, in principle, there are legal remedies. So in some ways what is more frightening is the prospect of the law, and the State itself, falling under the control of extremists. The recent Reform UK conference was so overshadowed by the new financial scandal that it was easy to miss just how extreme the supposedly reasonable face of the far-right has become. Yet anyone with a sense of history should be alarmed that Farage has pledged to declare an immediate ‘national emergency’ if Reform came to power, with threats to reconfigure the judiciary, civil service, and parliament itself under the guise of this emergency [3]. Similarly, whilst less dramatic, Suella Braverman announced that Reform would make it compulsory for schools to fly the national flag and sing the national anthem, whilst delivering a “patriotic curriculum”.
These are not anodyne proposals, even if Braverman couched hers in the cosy nostalgia-porn of Britain being “a collection of little streets, building little hamlets and villages that fold into towns and cities.” They are, at least incipiently, totalitarian in nature and, as the noted legal commentator David Allen Green has argued, our political system is one in which “there is little which could be ultimately done to prevent the damage which a radical illiberal majority could do.”
One implication of that, Green suggests, is that the present government should create stronger constitutional guard-rails to reduce these systemic vulnerabilities. I agree, but I think a second implication is the need to tackle the core underlying beliefs which inform this illiberalism, especially the idea that there is an immigration crisis, an asylum crisis, and a cultural crisis which somehow constitute a national emergency.
An absence of political leadership
At issue here is far more than simply condemning violence and intimidation, and more, even, than yesterday’s commitment from the Home Secretary to robustly police that violence, necessary as that is given the threat of further disorder this weekend. And it certainly requires abandoning the government’s continuing insistence (£) that meeting the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public by curtailing immigration and reducing or even stopping ‘the boats’ will make the beliefs underpinning such violence disappear. That is nonsense, and it is shown to be nonsense by the fact that those beliefs are becoming more entrenched even as the levels of immigration, asylum applications, and boat crossings are all falling. It didn’t work for Starmer and it won’t work for Burnham, and his premiership may well be the last chance for a different, and more honest, approach.
Such an approach would mean saying something like: flows of refugees and asylum seekers are a global phenomenon, and aren’t going to disappear. The UK is one of the countries least affected, but has legal and humanitarian commitments to fulfil. In doing so, we should and will process asylum claims as quickly and accurately as possible, and seek to discourage life-endangering crossings. But there is no crisis, and there is most definitely no ‘invasion’. Adopting this approach would not just be a matter of a single speech. It would require a concerted communications campaign perhaps including highlighting success stories of asylum claimants and other immigrants who have made positive contributions to society, and emphasising the many senses in which Britain has been a successful example of multi-cultural integration.
In the absence of political leadership along these lines, the dominant narrative, by default, will be, as it already largely is, one in which Britain is depicted as being invaded by a dangerous horde of sexual predators who are living lives of taxpayer-funded luxury. Allowing that to be the default inevitably has the effect of provoking fear and outrage even amongst people who would not, in other circumstances, align with the far right. Conversely, the current approach of treating this fear and outrage as justifiable means that, even whilst condemning violence and intimidation, government ministers are conceding that those responsible are, in some way, representing widespread public concern.
It is, of course, highly unlikely that the government will adopt this approach, and that is, at least in part, because there is a strong strand in Labour thinking – most overtly the Blue Labour strand, but not confined to it – that the fear and outrage are justified; that this is what ‘ordinary people’ believe and the ‘people’s party’ should represent it. As I’ve argued repeatedly in the past, this is, again, at least in part, related to Brexit and the way in which Labour accepted the populist right’s claim that the referendum showed it spoke for ‘the silent majority’. In this way, chiding vocal and violent thugs for ‘crossing the line’ amounts to little more than asserting that Labour ministers are the ‘voice of the people’ whilst leaving entirely unchallenged the thugs’ beliefs. Unsurprisingly, this only entrenches those beliefs and the thuggery continues, or even escalates.
A matter of national security
At stake in all this is, most obviously, whether uniformed fascists are to be allowed to take control of the streets as and when they choose. But what the various developments described in this post should suggest is that the Patriot Platform militia is only one strand within an interwoven braid. The angry pensioners beating youthful hecklers, the Cambridge don and his cultish camp-followers, the intimate meetings in expensive restaurants, the strident politicians of Reform and Restore, the increasingly aggressive invocation of ‘cultural Christianity’, the daily vitriol on social media, amongst many other things, are all part of a related process.
But something much deeper is at stake, which could properly be called a matter of national security. There is no doubt that what is happening domestically in the UK has parallels with what is happening in other countries, with the AfD’s recent success in the Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany being an obvious example. And the way that this success was cheered in both the US and Russia (£) was the latest, and clearest, illustration of how the transformation of geo-politics matters not just for international relations but for domestic politics. It is now a matter of US state policy, enshrined in its 2025 National Security Strategy, to support the far right in Europe, and that includes the UK. Relatedly, Elon Musk openly supports Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, calling civil war in Britain “inevitable” because of immigration, and there are multiple connections between MAGA and the British far right in both its street-level and intellectual guises.
Meanwhile, Russia’s links to the British far right are well-established, including its encouragement of attacks on mosques and Muslims generally. As with Brexit, Russia seeks to encourage anything which will destabilize Britain. That is only partly to do with seeking to punish us for supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperialism. More generally it is part of Russia’s attempt to destroy the remnants of the liberal West (liberal in the broadest sense of the commitment to rights and rationality established by the European Enlightenment), something enshrined in successive iterations of its own National Security Strategy. That, in itself, represents a profound national security threat to the UK. It is all the more profound since the US has, for now, and perhaps for ever, changed sides.
This is the bigger context within which the increasingly ugly politics of the British far right should be understood [4]. It is, historically, a new experience for Britain to find itself no longer the great power it was until, say, 1945, and no longer shielded from its decline by being a kind of junior partner to the US during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Now, it is just another ‘medium power’ and, as a result of Brexit, one in self-chosen isolation from its regional moorings. As a result, it is ready prey. It is deeply ironic that those fulminating about the ‘migrant invasion’, and the need to ‘secure our borders’ are not just missing the real threats to national security but are aiding abetting them.
A cause for alarm
This isn’t to posit some huge global conspiracy against Britain, orchestrating its domestic politics. It’s rather that there are multiple vectors pulling in similar, or related, directions in Britain, as in other European countries (although Britain is uniquely isolated because of Brexit). Recognizing that is important because it is what makes disparate events such as those discussed in this post understandable as being related to each other rather than, as might otherwise be thought, just ‘yet another’ piece of unpleasantness. As pieces of a jigsaw, when put together they make a picture.
If all this sounds alarmist, consider some of those pieces side by side: ‘Faith, Flag and Family’; a woman savagely beaten for heckling the Leader at a political rally; black-shirted men in balaclavas blockading the streets; RNLI volunteers denounced as traitors; ‘Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland’; ‘patriotic curriculum’; ‘National Emergency’. It’s not, I think, alarmist to be alarmed.
Notes
[1] Inevitably, the ‘sting’ provoked complaints of ‘entrapment’ from Farage and Reform, along with the familiar claim that it was an example of the Establishment trying to discredit the ‘insurgents’. But such undercover journalism has a long history, and the way that Farage was caught is remarkably similar to the way that in 2010 Channel Four and The Times ‘entrapped’ Labour MP Steve “cab for hire” Byers, which Farage, then leading UKIP, regarded as exposing the corruption of … the Establishment.
[2] The word ‘militia’ is justified, even though the group is not armed, a point made at the time of the debate leading to the 1936 Public Order Act at the time of the Blackshirts (hat tip to the historian Robert Saunders for this information). That legislation prohibited the wearing of political uniforms, although it is not clear whether Patriot Platform’s clothing constitutes a uniform within the meaning of the law.
[3] Restore’s leader Rupert Lowe this week made the even more pernicious suggestion that, if in government, he would retrospectively prosecute civil servants for enacting the present government’s policies.
[4] The examples discussed in this post are all from England, and there is no doubt that it is here where far-right activity is most pronounced. But other nations within the UK are not exempt. For example, this week a tenement building in Glasgow was set ablaze, apparently because of rumours that it was going to be used to house asylum seekers.
Friday, 28 August 2026
Brexit Britain is still a tinderbox
It is now almost exactly ten years since my first post on this blog, and this latest post comes after a long, hot summer break in which there have been virtually no developments as regards Brexit, in the delimited sense of Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU.
That isn’t a surprise, given that it is usually the political holiday season, at least for routine parliamentary and inter-governmental politics. Yet, starting this eleventh year of blogging, there is a sense of a more pervasive Brexit stasis. That stasis is not a sign that Brexit has ceased to be important but, rather, that the British polity has still not faced up to its consequences and shows no signs of being able to do so.
The Brexit stasis
The stasis has two aspects. From an EU perspective, relations with the UK have not been a matter of pressing concern since the completion of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on broadly satisfactory terms, and perhaps not since the completion of the Withdrawal Agreement. Not only are there now more important issues on the EU agenda, but it is also obvious that very little of substance can change unless there is a decisive change within the UK polity. And this is the second aspect of the stasis: there has been no such change.
For it is now abundantly clear that Andy Burnham’s EU policy is going to be virtually identical to that of Keir Starmer. That is most obvious in Burnham’s re-iteration over the summer of his commitment to the manifesto ‘red lines’ (no single market membership, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people, if a reminder is necessary). There should be no surprise in that, either. Politically, it would be very difficult to justify so major a departure from the manifesto without stoking demands for another general election. But in any case, as for Starmer before him, there would be little point in spending political capital on seeking from the EU something which it would be unlikely to grant until it is clear that it has strong and durable support in the UK, and will not be reversed by the next government.
There is also a time factor here: the government is already approaching the likely mid-point of its parliamentary term and, as yet, it still hasn’t delivered even the very limited reset promised by Starmer. Indeed, there isn’t even yet an agreed date for the (much delayed) next UK-EU summit at which the reset agreement is supposed to be announced, although the current rumour is that it will be in November. It’s astonishingly feeble given the supposed priority Labour accorded it when they came to power.
So, even if Burnham dropped the red lines tomorrow, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that an entirely new deal with the EU could be struck by the next election. Thus not only would he have taken the political pain of dropping a central manifesto commitment, he would have nothing to show for it. The real question for Burnham’s Labour will be whether it abandons or modifies its red lines in the next election manifesto, with the subsidiary question being whether in the interim Burnham lays the ground for doing so.
Many pro-Europeans will find this intensely irritating, but it does at least have a discernible political rationale (it’s not necessary to agree with that rationale to discern it). What is far less forgivable is that Burnham has also taken over from Starmer the stupid and dishonest pretence that, despite the red lines, he is going to seek a “bolder” and “more ambitious” relationship with the EU, something also re-stated over the summer by Hamish Falconer, the new ‘Europe Minister’ (in effect, if not in title). Thus, Burnham talks (£) of putting closer ties with the EU at the heart of his economic strategy in order to “add percentage points” to UK growth, something precluded by his own red lines. The absurdity of these claims is made all the clearer by the way that, at the same time, the British government is engaged in sour wrangling over university tuition fees for EU students as part of the existing reset negotiations, which hardly bespeaks of either boldness or ambition.
Well-worn delusions
If all this were not depressing enough, this summer has shown that the absurdity goes beyond simply spouting pieties and making dishonest claims. Rather, as an intervention from former Tory Minister Nick Boles, now advising Burnham on European policy, shows, all the familiar Brexit delusions are still in place.
In an essay for the thinktank Demos, Boles makes two key arguments. One is for the creation of a ‘European Confederation’ of the EU and non-EU countries (including the UK) allowing a single market for goods (widely misreported as ‘rejoining the single market) but with no freedom of movement of people. The other is that this would be associated with a comprehensive defence pact which would include the UK providing nuclear deterrence capability to its members.
The first of these arguments is as well-worn as a treadless tyre, and yet another iteration of the refusal to understand what a single market means as a concept, a refusal to understand what it means to the EU, and, ultimately, just the latest home-grown proposal to be ‘out and yet in’ of the sort that has been made since the very beginning of the Brexit process.
The second argument has, ostensibly, a more contemporary flavour. At least it recognizes the changed security landscape created by Trump, and shifting US priorities even without Trump, and what that means for NATO and European defence. It is clear that for Boles these two arguments go together, in that the offer of a UK (nuclear) contribution to an enhanced European defence pact will be the ‘carrot’ (£) to unpick the EU’s commitment to the ‘four freedoms’ of the single market.
In fact, and this I why I said it was only ‘ostensibly’ a new argument, the attempt to barter security for trade was attempted several times during the Brexit negotiations, starting with Theresa May’s Article 50 notification letter in 2017, an attempt much resented by EU leaders, some of whom regarded it as blackmail (it is fair to say that the use of this tactic ebbed and flowed over the years). Boles appears to think that, precisely because of the new security landscape, the attempt can be made again though perhaps – to be charitable – not in the negative sense of a threat to reduce cooperation, but in the positive sense of an offer to enhance it.
However, this rests on what is obviously a false premise. There is a perfectly good, if not indeed overwhelming, argument that it is in the mutual interest of the UK and the EU to radically increase defence cooperation because the US is no longer a reliable security partner. It’s an argument Burnham has recently endorsed. But the key point is that it is a mutual interest: both could benefit. Yet what Boles envisages is that, as well as its share of this benefit, the UK would receive an additional benefit in the form of joining a single market for goods with no freedom of movement of people. So the equation clearly doesn’t balance. [1]
Why nothing is changing
In short, we can see Brexit stasis at multiple levels in the UK: nothing new is happening, the Labour government’s policy is unchanged and so is the mendacity of its rhetoric, and thinking about post-Brexit policy continues to go round what in the past I have called the same old Mobius Strip of ‘solutions’ to the problems caused by Brexit whilst retaining the supposed ‘benefits’ of Brexit.
As time has gone on, those benefits have proved so illusory that only the most recalcitrant continue to claim them. No one seriously believes that having an independent trade policy is a net benefit, even though the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds continues to suggest it is of value (£). And the limitations of regulatory independence were illustrated yet again over the summer in an analysis by Vilija Vėlyvytė of UKICE of the regulation of medicines testing and authorization (once touted by Brexiters as a key example of how post-Brexit sovereignty would make Britain a ‘world leader’).
But, despite the government’s continuing attempts to suggest that trade and regulatory independence provide some sort of justification for it European policy, it is perfectly obvious that what drives that policy is, overwhelmingly, Labour’s neuralgia about immigration. That explains both the broad contours of the policy, in terms of the ‘red lines’, but also the micro-details, such as resistance to an extensive Youth Mobility Scheme. It explains the contortions and delusions of the Boles’ proposals, and all the other attempts over the years to detach freedom of movement of people from single market membership. It also explains why the government is willing to sacrifice the economic growth it would so dearly love to have, to sacrifice the universities which should be central to its regional and innovation policies, and even to sacrifice the house-building programme it is committed to delivering.
Hostility to immigration supersedes everything and anything else. And whilst Labour can be blamed for its cowardice and lack of leadership in this respect, that is, itself, a manifestation of the deeper and more widespread way that the UK – and especially England – are gripped by anti-immigration fervour which persists even now that a collapse in net migration levels is under way. It is this, more than anything else, which means that post-Brexit relations with the EU are stuck in their present form.
Summer at the seaside
One obvious expression of, and barometer for, the extent of this anti-immigration fervour is the continuing level of support for Reform (and its rival offshoot Restore). Here, the event, or perhaps non-event, of the summer was the Clacton by-election. Unsurprisingly, this was won by Nigel Farage, but there was little triumph in it and the Reform leader, who has not been seen much since, seems to be a much-diminished figure. Meanwhile, there are reports of increasing infighting within the party, and its finances, as well as those of Farage himself, continue to be a source of vulnerability and potential scandal.
It may well be that electoral support for Reform will never regain its peak levels of earlier this year, when some surveys had the party polling at over 30%. However, it continues to have a fairly stable 25% of the vote share, easily large enough to have a major electoral impact and perhaps an even greater political influence. This again implies that the chances of any British government pursuing a substantially closer relationship with the EU are small, and the chances of doing so in a way that is plausible to the EU are even smaller.
Support for Reform does not simply betoken the persistence of anti-immigration sentiment. It is also bound up with the persistence of Brexitism and its attendant culture war. This summer saw an especially intense skirmish within that war with the events leading up to and following from the death of Jason Arday.
The Arday case and the culture war
More than any other example I can think of, this showed one of the most obnoxious features of the culture war. I suspect (or at least hope) that I am not alone in thinking that the Arday case shows appalling racism and EDI over-reach and legitimate media scrutiny and media hounding and personal failings and institutional failings. These aren’t incompatible, and what is so obnoxious about culture war is its demand that everyone ‘picks a side’, or perhaps more accurately the seductiveness of that demand, and ignores or denies all complexity and ambiguity.
Yet complexity and ambiguity there was. As the journalist and commentator Helen Lewis put it in The Atlantic, “the Arday case is endlessly debatable because it contains so many double-edged elements”. In a similar way, another journalist and commentator, Lewis Goodall, remarked that the case, and Arday himself, became a symbol in “the ceaseless, airless, brainless culture war.” This became obvious in the way that the case – which, surely, was a most unusual, even idiosyncratic, one – came to be used as a proxy to attack social science in general, academics in general, and universities in general. It also became obvious in the way it was taken as having a general meaning for diversity initiatives, press freedom, academic freedom etc. etc.
However, in terms of the focus of this blog, I’m not sure that the sides in the Arday furore map easily on to Brexitism. There is obviously some overlap – the racism, and the attack on academics and universities generally, no doubt has some correlation with support for Brexit and the wider social illiberalism with which that, in turn, correlates. But there are probably plenty of people (and for what it is worth I am one of them) who are neither socially illiberal nor pro-Brexit yet think that Arday’s appointment to a Cambridge professorship was questionable [2], even if hardly warranting such outrage.
More importantly, the way the ‘sides’ have lined up doesn’t map neatly on to Brexitism because it has brought into sharp focus some of the fissures amongst, especially, those who are opposed to Brexit and Brexitism. Those fissures are many (for example, liberal conservatives find commonality with social democrats, whilst social democrats are alienated from Lexiters) but the Arday case, in particular, illustrated how deeply the trans-rights issue has split the liberal-left. Thus several high-profile gender critical feminists, most notably J.K. Rowling, who were highly opposed to Brexit were also highly critical of Arday’s appointment.
As I understand it, the connection, even if not explicitly stated, is this: EDI in universities is seen by gender critical feminists as a bedrock of trans-activism; Arday’s appointment was seen as an expression of EDI in universities; and ‘therefore’ attacking Arday’s appointment was a way of attacking trans-activism. I’m not, here, making any comment on the trans-rights debate, or the sides within it, but rather trying to unpick how it cuts across the issue of Brexit and the concept of Brexitism and, in the process, trying to explain why the sides in the Arday case only partially overlap with those of Brexit and Brexitism. The example of gender critical feminists is not the only one but it is perhaps the most obvious [3].
The political tinderbox
Although the Arday case may only partially relate to Brexitism, the ferocity of the arguments it has engendered do disclose something about how intensely divided post-Brexit Britain is. I don’t mean that, had Britain not left the EU, there would not have been exactly the same argument. That would be nonsense. Nor am I suggesting that existing EU members are not, in many cases, as bitterly divided on culture war lines. What I mean is that these intense divisions have a particular significance for the prospect of re-opening, in any substantive way, the question of UK-EU relations, and especially any question of joining the EU. If even the slight spark of the Arday case can ignite such ferocity, how much more would that be true in the case of Brexit?
During this long, hot summer, Andy Burnham described the country as being a “tinderbox”, with numerous devastating wildfires and the danger of many more, and even instigated an emergency mobile phone alert to warn of this danger. With rain now starting to fall more widely, that danger is hopefully receding. But the metaphorical sense that Britain is a political tinderbox, with a culture war conflagration an ever-present danger, continues. It is for that reason that the Brexit stasis also continues. It remains too a hot a topic to address in any serious way, and there is no obvious sign that rain is imminent.
Notes
[1] I have a feeling that someone else made the argument I am making here, and that I am cribbing it, but unfortunately I can’t recall who did so or where I read it. I think it might have been Anand Menon. So apologies to him – or whoever it was – for not quoting/ linking to it in the way I normally would.
[2] This isn’t just a hunch on my part. I don’t want to sound as if I am waving my academic credentials but, when I was a Professor at Cambridge University, I was an external (i.e. external to the faculty, but internal to the university) member of the Board of the Faculty of Education, where Arday was employed, and sat on several of its professorial and non-professorial appointments’ panels, as well as those in my own and other faculties. I also chaired a committee for the DfES (as was), identifying criteria for quality in educational research, Arday’s field (though not my own). Admittedly, these experiences were almost 20 years ago, and I don’t want to over-claim for them but, still, it perhaps means my view isn’t entirely uninformed, and possibly less uninformed than many of those who have commented. And, in my view, whilst some of the criticisms levelled at Arday and his work were unfair, there are genuine reasons to doubt his suitability for his post.
[3] Another, perhaps less obvious or important example, is that I have noticed several people who I know to be highly critical of Brexit also strongly supported the ‘academic freedom’ of Nathan Cothnas, one of Arday’s principal accusers, following his suspension by the University of Ghent.
Regular (and attentive) readers will notice that this post comes a week earlier than the date I gave in my previous post for when I would resume, and also comes later in the day than usual.
That isn’t a surprise, given that it is usually the political holiday season, at least for routine parliamentary and inter-governmental politics. Yet, starting this eleventh year of blogging, there is a sense of a more pervasive Brexit stasis. That stasis is not a sign that Brexit has ceased to be important but, rather, that the British polity has still not faced up to its consequences and shows no signs of being able to do so.
The Brexit stasis
The stasis has two aspects. From an EU perspective, relations with the UK have not been a matter of pressing concern since the completion of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on broadly satisfactory terms, and perhaps not since the completion of the Withdrawal Agreement. Not only are there now more important issues on the EU agenda, but it is also obvious that very little of substance can change unless there is a decisive change within the UK polity. And this is the second aspect of the stasis: there has been no such change.
For it is now abundantly clear that Andy Burnham’s EU policy is going to be virtually identical to that of Keir Starmer. That is most obvious in Burnham’s re-iteration over the summer of his commitment to the manifesto ‘red lines’ (no single market membership, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people, if a reminder is necessary). There should be no surprise in that, either. Politically, it would be very difficult to justify so major a departure from the manifesto without stoking demands for another general election. But in any case, as for Starmer before him, there would be little point in spending political capital on seeking from the EU something which it would be unlikely to grant until it is clear that it has strong and durable support in the UK, and will not be reversed by the next government.
There is also a time factor here: the government is already approaching the likely mid-point of its parliamentary term and, as yet, it still hasn’t delivered even the very limited reset promised by Starmer. Indeed, there isn’t even yet an agreed date for the (much delayed) next UK-EU summit at which the reset agreement is supposed to be announced, although the current rumour is that it will be in November. It’s astonishingly feeble given the supposed priority Labour accorded it when they came to power.
So, even if Burnham dropped the red lines tomorrow, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that an entirely new deal with the EU could be struck by the next election. Thus not only would he have taken the political pain of dropping a central manifesto commitment, he would have nothing to show for it. The real question for Burnham’s Labour will be whether it abandons or modifies its red lines in the next election manifesto, with the subsidiary question being whether in the interim Burnham lays the ground for doing so.
Many pro-Europeans will find this intensely irritating, but it does at least have a discernible political rationale (it’s not necessary to agree with that rationale to discern it). What is far less forgivable is that Burnham has also taken over from Starmer the stupid and dishonest pretence that, despite the red lines, he is going to seek a “bolder” and “more ambitious” relationship with the EU, something also re-stated over the summer by Hamish Falconer, the new ‘Europe Minister’ (in effect, if not in title). Thus, Burnham talks (£) of putting closer ties with the EU at the heart of his economic strategy in order to “add percentage points” to UK growth, something precluded by his own red lines. The absurdity of these claims is made all the clearer by the way that, at the same time, the British government is engaged in sour wrangling over university tuition fees for EU students as part of the existing reset negotiations, which hardly bespeaks of either boldness or ambition.
Well-worn delusions
If all this were not depressing enough, this summer has shown that the absurdity goes beyond simply spouting pieties and making dishonest claims. Rather, as an intervention from former Tory Minister Nick Boles, now advising Burnham on European policy, shows, all the familiar Brexit delusions are still in place.
In an essay for the thinktank Demos, Boles makes two key arguments. One is for the creation of a ‘European Confederation’ of the EU and non-EU countries (including the UK) allowing a single market for goods (widely misreported as ‘rejoining the single market) but with no freedom of movement of people. The other is that this would be associated with a comprehensive defence pact which would include the UK providing nuclear deterrence capability to its members.
The first of these arguments is as well-worn as a treadless tyre, and yet another iteration of the refusal to understand what a single market means as a concept, a refusal to understand what it means to the EU, and, ultimately, just the latest home-grown proposal to be ‘out and yet in’ of the sort that has been made since the very beginning of the Brexit process.
The second argument has, ostensibly, a more contemporary flavour. At least it recognizes the changed security landscape created by Trump, and shifting US priorities even without Trump, and what that means for NATO and European defence. It is clear that for Boles these two arguments go together, in that the offer of a UK (nuclear) contribution to an enhanced European defence pact will be the ‘carrot’ (£) to unpick the EU’s commitment to the ‘four freedoms’ of the single market.
In fact, and this I why I said it was only ‘ostensibly’ a new argument, the attempt to barter security for trade was attempted several times during the Brexit negotiations, starting with Theresa May’s Article 50 notification letter in 2017, an attempt much resented by EU leaders, some of whom regarded it as blackmail (it is fair to say that the use of this tactic ebbed and flowed over the years). Boles appears to think that, precisely because of the new security landscape, the attempt can be made again though perhaps – to be charitable – not in the negative sense of a threat to reduce cooperation, but in the positive sense of an offer to enhance it.
However, this rests on what is obviously a false premise. There is a perfectly good, if not indeed overwhelming, argument that it is in the mutual interest of the UK and the EU to radically increase defence cooperation because the US is no longer a reliable security partner. It’s an argument Burnham has recently endorsed. But the key point is that it is a mutual interest: both could benefit. Yet what Boles envisages is that, as well as its share of this benefit, the UK would receive an additional benefit in the form of joining a single market for goods with no freedom of movement of people. So the equation clearly doesn’t balance. [1]
Why nothing is changing
In short, we can see Brexit stasis at multiple levels in the UK: nothing new is happening, the Labour government’s policy is unchanged and so is the mendacity of its rhetoric, and thinking about post-Brexit policy continues to go round what in the past I have called the same old Mobius Strip of ‘solutions’ to the problems caused by Brexit whilst retaining the supposed ‘benefits’ of Brexit.
As time has gone on, those benefits have proved so illusory that only the most recalcitrant continue to claim them. No one seriously believes that having an independent trade policy is a net benefit, even though the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds continues to suggest it is of value (£). And the limitations of regulatory independence were illustrated yet again over the summer in an analysis by Vilija Vėlyvytė of UKICE of the regulation of medicines testing and authorization (once touted by Brexiters as a key example of how post-Brexit sovereignty would make Britain a ‘world leader’).
But, despite the government’s continuing attempts to suggest that trade and regulatory independence provide some sort of justification for it European policy, it is perfectly obvious that what drives that policy is, overwhelmingly, Labour’s neuralgia about immigration. That explains both the broad contours of the policy, in terms of the ‘red lines’, but also the micro-details, such as resistance to an extensive Youth Mobility Scheme. It explains the contortions and delusions of the Boles’ proposals, and all the other attempts over the years to detach freedom of movement of people from single market membership. It also explains why the government is willing to sacrifice the economic growth it would so dearly love to have, to sacrifice the universities which should be central to its regional and innovation policies, and even to sacrifice the house-building programme it is committed to delivering.
Hostility to immigration supersedes everything and anything else. And whilst Labour can be blamed for its cowardice and lack of leadership in this respect, that is, itself, a manifestation of the deeper and more widespread way that the UK – and especially England – are gripped by anti-immigration fervour which persists even now that a collapse in net migration levels is under way. It is this, more than anything else, which means that post-Brexit relations with the EU are stuck in their present form.
Summer at the seaside
One obvious expression of, and barometer for, the extent of this anti-immigration fervour is the continuing level of support for Reform (and its rival offshoot Restore). Here, the event, or perhaps non-event, of the summer was the Clacton by-election. Unsurprisingly, this was won by Nigel Farage, but there was little triumph in it and the Reform leader, who has not been seen much since, seems to be a much-diminished figure. Meanwhile, there are reports of increasing infighting within the party, and its finances, as well as those of Farage himself, continue to be a source of vulnerability and potential scandal.
It may well be that electoral support for Reform will never regain its peak levels of earlier this year, when some surveys had the party polling at over 30%. However, it continues to have a fairly stable 25% of the vote share, easily large enough to have a major electoral impact and perhaps an even greater political influence. This again implies that the chances of any British government pursuing a substantially closer relationship with the EU are small, and the chances of doing so in a way that is plausible to the EU are even smaller.
Support for Reform does not simply betoken the persistence of anti-immigration sentiment. It is also bound up with the persistence of Brexitism and its attendant culture war. This summer saw an especially intense skirmish within that war with the events leading up to and following from the death of Jason Arday.
The Arday case and the culture war
More than any other example I can think of, this showed one of the most obnoxious features of the culture war. I suspect (or at least hope) that I am not alone in thinking that the Arday case shows appalling racism and EDI over-reach and legitimate media scrutiny and media hounding and personal failings and institutional failings. These aren’t incompatible, and what is so obnoxious about culture war is its demand that everyone ‘picks a side’, or perhaps more accurately the seductiveness of that demand, and ignores or denies all complexity and ambiguity.
Yet complexity and ambiguity there was. As the journalist and commentator Helen Lewis put it in The Atlantic, “the Arday case is endlessly debatable because it contains so many double-edged elements”. In a similar way, another journalist and commentator, Lewis Goodall, remarked that the case, and Arday himself, became a symbol in “the ceaseless, airless, brainless culture war.” This became obvious in the way that the case – which, surely, was a most unusual, even idiosyncratic, one – came to be used as a proxy to attack social science in general, academics in general, and universities in general. It also became obvious in the way it was taken as having a general meaning for diversity initiatives, press freedom, academic freedom etc. etc.
However, in terms of the focus of this blog, I’m not sure that the sides in the Arday furore map easily on to Brexitism. There is obviously some overlap – the racism, and the attack on academics and universities generally, no doubt has some correlation with support for Brexit and the wider social illiberalism with which that, in turn, correlates. But there are probably plenty of people (and for what it is worth I am one of them) who are neither socially illiberal nor pro-Brexit yet think that Arday’s appointment to a Cambridge professorship was questionable [2], even if hardly warranting such outrage.
More importantly, the way the ‘sides’ have lined up doesn’t map neatly on to Brexitism because it has brought into sharp focus some of the fissures amongst, especially, those who are opposed to Brexit and Brexitism. Those fissures are many (for example, liberal conservatives find commonality with social democrats, whilst social democrats are alienated from Lexiters) but the Arday case, in particular, illustrated how deeply the trans-rights issue has split the liberal-left. Thus several high-profile gender critical feminists, most notably J.K. Rowling, who were highly opposed to Brexit were also highly critical of Arday’s appointment.
As I understand it, the connection, even if not explicitly stated, is this: EDI in universities is seen by gender critical feminists as a bedrock of trans-activism; Arday’s appointment was seen as an expression of EDI in universities; and ‘therefore’ attacking Arday’s appointment was a way of attacking trans-activism. I’m not, here, making any comment on the trans-rights debate, or the sides within it, but rather trying to unpick how it cuts across the issue of Brexit and the concept of Brexitism and, in the process, trying to explain why the sides in the Arday case only partially overlap with those of Brexit and Brexitism. The example of gender critical feminists is not the only one but it is perhaps the most obvious [3].
The political tinderbox
Although the Arday case may only partially relate to Brexitism, the ferocity of the arguments it has engendered do disclose something about how intensely divided post-Brexit Britain is. I don’t mean that, had Britain not left the EU, there would not have been exactly the same argument. That would be nonsense. Nor am I suggesting that existing EU members are not, in many cases, as bitterly divided on culture war lines. What I mean is that these intense divisions have a particular significance for the prospect of re-opening, in any substantive way, the question of UK-EU relations, and especially any question of joining the EU. If even the slight spark of the Arday case can ignite such ferocity, how much more would that be true in the case of Brexit?
During this long, hot summer, Andy Burnham described the country as being a “tinderbox”, with numerous devastating wildfires and the danger of many more, and even instigated an emergency mobile phone alert to warn of this danger. With rain now starting to fall more widely, that danger is hopefully receding. But the metaphorical sense that Britain is a political tinderbox, with a culture war conflagration an ever-present danger, continues. It is for that reason that the Brexit stasis also continues. It remains too a hot a topic to address in any serious way, and there is no obvious sign that rain is imminent.
Notes
[1] I have a feeling that someone else made the argument I am making here, and that I am cribbing it, but unfortunately I can’t recall who did so or where I read it. I think it might have been Anand Menon. So apologies to him – or whoever it was – for not quoting/ linking to it in the way I normally would.
[2] This isn’t just a hunch on my part. I don’t want to sound as if I am waving my academic credentials but, when I was a Professor at Cambridge University, I was an external (i.e. external to the faculty, but internal to the university) member of the Board of the Faculty of Education, where Arday was employed, and sat on several of its professorial and non-professorial appointments’ panels, as well as those in my own and other faculties. I also chaired a committee for the DfES (as was), identifying criteria for quality in educational research, Arday’s field (though not my own). Admittedly, these experiences were almost 20 years ago, and I don’t want to over-claim for them but, still, it perhaps means my view isn’t entirely uninformed, and possibly less uninformed than many of those who have commented. And, in my view, whilst some of the criticisms levelled at Arday and his work were unfair, there are genuine reasons to doubt his suitability for his post.
[3] Another, perhaps less obvious or important example, is that I have noticed several people who I know to be highly critical of Brexit also strongly supported the ‘academic freedom’ of Nathan Cothnas, one of Arday’s principal accusers, following his suspension by the University of Ghent.
Regular (and attentive) readers will notice that this post comes a week earlier than the date I gave in my previous post for when I would resume, and also comes later in the day than usual.
Friday, 24 July 2026
The Burnham chapter begins
Of the many ways of expressing how British politics has changed in my lifetime, one is that during the first fifty or so years of it there were seven Prime Ministers and in the subsequent ten years there have been the same number. I also happen to be exactly the same age as Nigel Farage who, for about half our lives, since he became a founder-member of UKIP in 1993, has been a major figure in anti-EU and populist politics.
This week, the seventh of those more recent Prime Ministers was installed whilst Farage’s political career is facing perhaps its greatest threats. So this will be another very long post but, unless something particularly important or interesting happens, it will be my last until September.
Burnham’s government and Brexit
Andy Burnham’s political orientation is now becoming clearer and much has already been written about it, including good discussions of his ‘politics of place’ by the Observer’s editor Ceri Thomas and of the idea of ‘Manchesterism’ by the BBC’s Economics editor Faisal Islam. Especially interesting, and less widely discussed, is Burnham’s commitment to the Cooperative Party and movement, as explained by Professor Colin Talbot in Civil Service World.
His first words and decisions as Prime Minister have also begun to give a sense of the nature of the government he will lead, although inevitably much remains unknown. One important signal is the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor which, amongst other things, implies that there will a serious commitment to increasing defence spending. The importance of that was underlined by the latest aggression in Russia’s undeclared war with Britain, with its Navy undertaking live-fire exercises a few miles off the British coast on the very day Burnham came to office. Now would be a good time for the government to investigate the many pressing questions about Russian interference in British politics raised by the recent Open Britain report.
In terms of the focus of this blog, the key issue is what Burnham’s government means for Brexit and Brexitism. This can be considered in the narrow sense of how Burnham’s administration will approach UK-EU relations. On that, Joël Reland of UKICE has provided a good summary of how things look at present. In essence, he argues that Burnham will be less interested than was Starmer in closer trade relations with the EU, but also less interested in regulatory competition (e.g. as regards AI and technology generally), whilst being at least as interested as Starmer in closer security links. Reland also suggests that, if this is so, in many ways it will make the Burnham’s Britain a more congenial interlocutor to the EU.
It is significant that Ed Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, has already publicly committed to deepening and strengthening the UK-EU relationship (his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, showed little interest in doing so, although her own predecessor, David Lammy, had been vocally pro-European). As ever, though, the question is what this means in practice. Specific Ministerial responsibility for relations with the EU moves from Nick Thomas-Symonds to Hamish Falconer who, like his predecessor, will attend, though not be a member of, the Cabinet (but unlike his predecessor will partly be located in the Foreign Office). There has been some speculation that this appointment betokens a softening, or abandoning, of Labour’s ‘red lines’, but speculation is all it is.
Also highly relevant is the post of Northern Ireland Secretary and the Cabinet reshuffle saw the departure of Hilary Benn, who from all accounts had been highly accomplished both in navigating Northern Ireland’s complex politics and in improving relations with Dublin, so strained by Brexit. However, there’s no reason to think that his replacement by Chris Bryant implies any substantive change of approach, and both of them were strong opponents of Brexit. Indeed, more generally, the construction of the new cabinet seems more to do with removing those most closely associated with Keir Starmer than with redefining Starmer’s approach to Brexit. Nor, for that matter, is the EU’s approach to post-Brexit relations likely to change as a result of Burnham’s arrival.
Burnhamism, Brexit, and Brexitism
The wider question is where Brexit and Brexitism sit within what is already being called ‘Burnhamism’. One part of the answer is that, as I wrote briefly after he won the Makerfield by-election, there is a strong current of nostalgia in Burnham’s politics. It’s no coincidence that in his acceptance speech as Labour leader he spoke of heeding the call of voters “for a return of the Labour they once knew”. That vision of the party is inextricable from his analysis of politics as a whole. For in that speech (and on numerous other occasions) his argument is that deindustrialization and the “four decades of … neoliberalism that began in the 1980s” are at the core of Britain’s economic and political problems, and he links this directly to the history of the Labour Party, in a passage which I will quote at length:
“And let us never forget: these are the very same places that built this Labour movement, this trade union movement, where we are today… Those are the places, but they were the places that were done down. This Labour movement, the trade union movement, was forged in the steelworks and iron works of Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, and Teesside, in the coal fields of South Wales, Central Scotland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, in the mills across the Pennines, west and east, in the shipyards on the Clyde and on the Tyne, and in the dockyards of Liverpool, and here in London, the people of these proud places made Labour.”
In itself, none of this is necessarily connected with Brexit, but in a crucial phrase in that same acceptance speech Burnham suggested that it is:
“The right used the phrase ‘take back control’, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place. If we want an economy and a country that works for all people and places, which to me should always be at the very core of Labourism, then it requires a new path to the one we’ve been on for the last 40 years.”
The invocation of the Vote Leave slogan in this way makes it clear what Burnham’s view of Brexit is, and it is a view which has been a common one amongst many on the left since the referendum result. In essence, it sees Brexit as having been a response, albeit a misguided response, by the working class, especially in the north of England, to the damaging consequences of neo-liberalism and (although it is hardly the same thing) London-centrism. On this view, the instinct to ‘take back control’ was right, but Brexit was the wrong way to go about it. Nor is such a view confined to the left. A version of it is what informed Theresa May’s argument that the Brexit referendum had revealed that too many people had been “left behind” by economic liberalism and globalization, and, subsequently, Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda.
There may be an element of truth in this view, although it has always had limitations, as any mono-causal explanation of Brexit is bound to have. In particular, Professor Danny Dorling’s influential analysis has shown the importance of middle-class and southern English support for ‘leave’ in delivering the referendum result. There are difficulties with that analysis, too, but my point here is not to re-hash debates about the causes of the vote to leave, it is that Burnham adheres to a particular view of it, which is imprinted on his Prime Ministership. Specifically, it means that his position is that Brexit was a symptom of a deeper malaise and, therefore, tackling that deeper malaise, rather than tackling Brexit, is the primary task.
This explains why, whilst there is no doubt that Burnham was opposed to Brexit and campaigned against it, and he has said as recently as last September that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU in his lifetime, his position now is that he does not intend to “re-run Brexit arguments” or to propose rejoining. In short, he wants to treat the illness, not the symptom. In this sense, Burnhamism represents the latest iteration of Labour’s attempt to respond to the challenges which Brexit created for the party.
The nostalgia problem
One obvious difficulty with his response is that, if his policy agenda is to revive manufacturing industry, then the barriers to trade created by Brexit are a major obstacle. But, with or without Brexit, Burnham invokes a world which no longer exists. The industries he cited in the speech quoted above – coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding, docking – have largely disappeared and will not come back. And the places where they existed developed because of the presence of things like coal, water, humidity, or, in other cases, clay or minerals, which were necessary for them (or, in the case of docking, because of pre-containerization technology). Those reasons have also gone.
It obviously bears saying that the speech I’ve quoted was to the party faithful, on the occasion of becoming party leader, so some nods to Labour’s history were inevitable and to some extent ritualistic. Even so, it is significant that he chose not to use an important opportunity to frame his leadership of Labour in a future-oriented way. That points to him being wedded to a political psychology within which the Labour Party is inseparable from heavy manufacturing industries of the past or, at the very least, within which workers in those industries are the template of what the ‘real working-class’ looks like. This is the Labour Party voters “once knew” and which he has vowed to revive. Yet, leaving aside for a moment the economics of this, it is at odds with the political realities of a party whose membership and voting base are now much more fragmented and with the demographic realities of a class structure which is far more complex than in the past.
As for the economics, I don’t suppose for one moment that Burnham is proposing that the traditional industries he referenced will return. It must surely be the case that his vision for re-industrialisation is based on the kinds of modern manufacturing which do still exist and could be developed much further, such as aerospace, biotechnology or pharmaceuticals. He may well also include service industries within this vision.
But, assuming this is so, it is again notable that he is choosing not to frame his narrative in this forward-looking direction. Equally, if the geography of re-industrialisation is to be mapped on to the communities created by old industries then the key drivers of it will need to be infrastructure connecting those places and the education and training available within them. That may well be within the ambit of his policy agenda but, if so, it means creating new kinds of communities, not fetishising those of the past.
The significance of Burnham’s nostalgic framing of both the meaning of the Labour Party and the meaning of industry is, I think, that it replicates at least some of the politicised nostalgia of Brexitism. As with Brexitism, the ideas that the country has lost its way, that globalization has eroded traditional communities, and that centralized policymaking has caused the decline of the local high street, all speak to the inchoate resentment of something having been not just lost by, but taken from, ‘ordinary people’. Moreover, whilst there may be good arguments for Burnham’s strong commitment to devolution from London, there is within it more than a whiff of the Brexitist resentment of the metropolitan elite or just of those who live within the circumference of the M25.
One of the many difficulties of this kind of nostalgic resentment is that, by presenting contemporary Britain as having taken a form which has been inflicted on its population, it ignores how it also reflects the preferences of that population. It is true that globalization has removed many jobs and industries that used to exist here, but it is also true that British people have chosen to buy cheaper imported consumer goods and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that high streets have declined, but it is also true that people have chosen to buy cheaper goods online and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that people say they want decisions to be made locally rather than by ‘remote Whitehall bureaucrats’, with, as Burnham puts it “power returned to every postcode in the land”, but they also strongly object to ‘postcode lotteries’ in, for example, public service provision. And whilst ‘four decades of neo-liberalism’ may have been every bit as damaging as Burnham claims, voters gave Margaret Thatcher three big election wins and, subsequently, many accepted the proposition that any party advocating a major departure from what her governments bequeathed was ‘unelectable’. And many of those same people voted for Brexit.
The biggest question about ‘Burnhamist’ nostalgia is how far its overlap with Brexitism extends to immigration policy, and continues with the false proposition that it is possible to have economic prosperity and thriving public services as well as draconian immigration controls, and that this is necessary to see off the threat from Reform. The retention of Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary might suggest that this is just what is in prospect. If so, that is going to make Burnham’s (highly laudable) aspirations to reform the social care system undeliverable. It will also undermine his ideas of regional re-industrialisation since central to any realistic possibility of this are universities, which are currently being immolated on the altar of ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.
I’m aware that all this may sound too dour, or too sour, or both. I’m also aware of the fault to which many politically-minded people are prone, whether on the left or the right, of demanding purity of political leaders, or of making the perfect the enemy of the good. In some ways, Keir Starmer suffered from the reluctance of ‘progressives’ (broadly conceived) to accept his imperfections and the compromises that all political leaders have to make. Indeed, with tedious predictability (yes, that is a link to an article by Owen Jones in the Guardian), there are some on the liberal-left who have already written Burnham off.
So it’s worth noting that there is a case for optimism. Burnham has already shown an ability, which it was widely agreed that Starmer lacked, to articulate an optimistic narrative and a sense of purpose. He has an engaging manner and he’s politically savvy. He has provided some simple, understandable priorities around devolution and regeneration and if he sticks to them that will be a contrast not just to Starmer’s flip-flopping on policy decisions but his tendency to say on any given day that this, that, or the other was his government’s ‘number one’ focus.
Farage’s fortunes
It might also be argued that it is precisely the way that Burnham’s political philosophy speaks to the nostalgic resentment of Brexitism which provides the basis for him to see off the electoral challenge of Reform. And, given events of the last few weeks, that challenge may be ebbing anyway. I wrote about this in my previous post, discussing Nigel Farage’s ill-judged resignation in order to re-fight his Clacton seat but since then there have been some developments.
One is just that his contest with Count Binface is already being spoken of as a national joke, and social media rage about the failure of the main parties to contest it seems to have had little cut-through with the general public. Perhaps more importantly, the stream of stories about the source of Farage’s and Reform’s funding continues apace, including its relationship to the murky world of cryptocurrencies. On this, Sian Norris’s article for Open Democracy is particularly eye-opening but it is probably of greater political significance that it is now being extensively reported by the BBC, and that there has been a spate of revelations in the Times/ Sunday Times (£) leading to several public [warning: link to X] and, reportedly, private attacks from leading figures in Reform on the Murdoch-owned media group. Even more remarkable has been a surge of negative stories in the Mail, including coverage of Reform’s various actual or alleged financial links to Russia.
Much of this is not exactly news, of course, and has been exposed for many years, not least by the indefatigable work of Pulitzer Prize finalist and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, in the face of massive abuse and intimidation. But, as she herself has recently written, it has been largely unreported and the reason, she says, is “Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because ‘challenging’ Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it.”
Quite what has shifted in the media establishment, and why it has done so now, is unclear (to me), but it is an observable fact that it has happened, and that marks an important political change.
The alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe
Within this changed environment, the other recent development has been the alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe. Much about this is, for the moment at least, unknown, beyond the facts that the injuries sustained were horrific and that a man has been charged with her murder and has appeared in a Magistrates’ Court where he did not enter a plea to the charge. It should go without saying that any such killing is repugnant, and that politically-motivated killings, if that is what this was (which has yet to be established), have an added repugnance. Beyond that I’m not going to comment or speculate about the case itself, but what is a legitimate subject for comment is the way in which it has been discussed.
That said, I can hardly bring myself to write about that in any detail by giving quotes and links to people whose conduct is contemptible. But, in summary, from the moment the news broke, there has been a frenzy of social media activity. Some of that has been mawkish and prurient, some of it conspiratorial, some of it frankly insane. Almost all of it was rancid and some of it may have prejudiced the fair trial of the accused man.
A recurring theme was denunciation of the police for disclosing that an initial suspect (who was subsequently released without charge) and the man who was eventually charged with murder were white Britons. This was presented as being in some way suspicious or ‘woke’, ignoring the fact that such disclosures arise precisely because failure to do so in previous high-profile cases has led to accusations of cover-ups from some of the very same people now complaining, and sometimes to riots as a result.
In response to their demands, last year the police were issued with new guidance encouraging disclosure in such cases. That they did so this time was undoubtedly because so many social media posters were fairly obviously salivating at the prospect of the perpetrator being an immigrant or an asylum seeker, and the danger of public disorder that represented. Inevitably, once that prospect seemed to disappear the on-line mob switched to speculating, or simply claiming, that the perpetrator must have been a left-wing extremist.
More generally, there have been constant demands to be given immediate information, before the facts were known, with the nonsensical assertion that the public had the ‘right’ to be told everything about the case, and, even, ‘to debate’ it, whilst it was still being investigated and/or whilst the judicial process is underway. When this prompted the police to state that, in the early stages, they had found “nothing to suggest” that it was a politically-motivated or terrorist act this, itself, was denounced as a cover-up, just as it would have been had they said nothing. The level of stupidity and irresponsibility displayed, not just by pseudonymous social media posters but by some public figures, politicians and supposed journalists, was the latest example of the increasingly disgraceful nature of, especially, on-line public discourse.
Alongside all this, there were, as the Times (£) and other newspapers reported, several accusations that Farage and Reform, specifically, were exploiting the alleged murder for political purposes, accusations made by, amongst others, the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor who had been a close friend of Ann Widdecombe. This was furiously denied by those accused, but what is certainly true is that, without knowing anything about the facts of the case, Reform immediately used it to claim that its MPs, and Farage in particular, needed more security than they receive from official sources.
In particular, there seemed to be an attempt to suggest that the alleged murder in some way justified the idea that Farage needed the £5 million gift he received from Christopher Harborne in order to provide him with security (although, at other times, he has said that it was unconditional and could be used to “buy Ferraris” and, anyway, the issue in dispute is the declaration of the gift, rather than the gift per se). So all of this stank of hypocrisy, as did numerous accusations that ‘the left’ had created this atmosphere of political violence by its use of intemperate language even as many of the same people making these accusations continue to laud Lucy Connelly as a free speech “martyr”.
Much of this replicated the ways that the murder of Charlie Kirk was exploited, both in the US and the UK, last year. However, repellent as this attempt to make use of Ann Widdecombe’s killing in this way has been, it does not seem to have dented the sense that the Farage/ Reform bubble is bursting, and it is hard to see how, whatever its outcome, the Clacton by-election can do anything but add to that. There was a telling headline about Farage and the by-election recently, to the effect that ‘when voters start laughing at you it’s over’. Even more telling was that it appeared in the Mail.
A new chapter?
Changes in Prime Minister do not automatically portend new eras in politics. It is only with historical distance that their significance or otherwise becomes clear. This makes it foolhardy to anticipate what that significance will be, but I will risk the guess that Burnham’s tenure will come to be seen within the common frame of the post-Brexit period as much, or more, as having an identity in its own right, if only in the sense of being another attempt to ‘make Brexit work’.
Even in the more immediate term, it is difficult to know whether the opinion poll bounce Labour has recently enjoyed, and the decline in support for Reform, will continue. Within the fates of these two parties are nested other questions, which will have a direct effect on how Brexit now develops.
One is whether the Labour government finds that an industrial renaissance is incompatible with its existing ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations and comes to pursue some version of rejoining. The other is whether the prospect of a Reform government (or a Conservative one, given that party’s present positioning) remains realistic since, for so long as it does, that renders any version of rejoining impossible to negotiate with the EU. These are likely to be the main Brexit-related questions for the coming political period.
With that, I will now take a break from posting over the summer.
This week, the seventh of those more recent Prime Ministers was installed whilst Farage’s political career is facing perhaps its greatest threats. So this will be another very long post but, unless something particularly important or interesting happens, it will be my last until September.
Burnham’s government and Brexit
Andy Burnham’s political orientation is now becoming clearer and much has already been written about it, including good discussions of his ‘politics of place’ by the Observer’s editor Ceri Thomas and of the idea of ‘Manchesterism’ by the BBC’s Economics editor Faisal Islam. Especially interesting, and less widely discussed, is Burnham’s commitment to the Cooperative Party and movement, as explained by Professor Colin Talbot in Civil Service World.
His first words and decisions as Prime Minister have also begun to give a sense of the nature of the government he will lead, although inevitably much remains unknown. One important signal is the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor which, amongst other things, implies that there will a serious commitment to increasing defence spending. The importance of that was underlined by the latest aggression in Russia’s undeclared war with Britain, with its Navy undertaking live-fire exercises a few miles off the British coast on the very day Burnham came to office. Now would be a good time for the government to investigate the many pressing questions about Russian interference in British politics raised by the recent Open Britain report.
In terms of the focus of this blog, the key issue is what Burnham’s government means for Brexit and Brexitism. This can be considered in the narrow sense of how Burnham’s administration will approach UK-EU relations. On that, Joël Reland of UKICE has provided a good summary of how things look at present. In essence, he argues that Burnham will be less interested than was Starmer in closer trade relations with the EU, but also less interested in regulatory competition (e.g. as regards AI and technology generally), whilst being at least as interested as Starmer in closer security links. Reland also suggests that, if this is so, in many ways it will make the Burnham’s Britain a more congenial interlocutor to the EU.
It is significant that Ed Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, has already publicly committed to deepening and strengthening the UK-EU relationship (his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, showed little interest in doing so, although her own predecessor, David Lammy, had been vocally pro-European). As ever, though, the question is what this means in practice. Specific Ministerial responsibility for relations with the EU moves from Nick Thomas-Symonds to Hamish Falconer who, like his predecessor, will attend, though not be a member of, the Cabinet (but unlike his predecessor will partly be located in the Foreign Office). There has been some speculation that this appointment betokens a softening, or abandoning, of Labour’s ‘red lines’, but speculation is all it is.
Also highly relevant is the post of Northern Ireland Secretary and the Cabinet reshuffle saw the departure of Hilary Benn, who from all accounts had been highly accomplished both in navigating Northern Ireland’s complex politics and in improving relations with Dublin, so strained by Brexit. However, there’s no reason to think that his replacement by Chris Bryant implies any substantive change of approach, and both of them were strong opponents of Brexit. Indeed, more generally, the construction of the new cabinet seems more to do with removing those most closely associated with Keir Starmer than with redefining Starmer’s approach to Brexit. Nor, for that matter, is the EU’s approach to post-Brexit relations likely to change as a result of Burnham’s arrival.
Burnhamism, Brexit, and Brexitism
The wider question is where Brexit and Brexitism sit within what is already being called ‘Burnhamism’. One part of the answer is that, as I wrote briefly after he won the Makerfield by-election, there is a strong current of nostalgia in Burnham’s politics. It’s no coincidence that in his acceptance speech as Labour leader he spoke of heeding the call of voters “for a return of the Labour they once knew”. That vision of the party is inextricable from his analysis of politics as a whole. For in that speech (and on numerous other occasions) his argument is that deindustrialization and the “four decades of … neoliberalism that began in the 1980s” are at the core of Britain’s economic and political problems, and he links this directly to the history of the Labour Party, in a passage which I will quote at length:
“And let us never forget: these are the very same places that built this Labour movement, this trade union movement, where we are today… Those are the places, but they were the places that were done down. This Labour movement, the trade union movement, was forged in the steelworks and iron works of Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, and Teesside, in the coal fields of South Wales, Central Scotland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, in the mills across the Pennines, west and east, in the shipyards on the Clyde and on the Tyne, and in the dockyards of Liverpool, and here in London, the people of these proud places made Labour.”
In itself, none of this is necessarily connected with Brexit, but in a crucial phrase in that same acceptance speech Burnham suggested that it is:
“The right used the phrase ‘take back control’, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place. If we want an economy and a country that works for all people and places, which to me should always be at the very core of Labourism, then it requires a new path to the one we’ve been on for the last 40 years.”
The invocation of the Vote Leave slogan in this way makes it clear what Burnham’s view of Brexit is, and it is a view which has been a common one amongst many on the left since the referendum result. In essence, it sees Brexit as having been a response, albeit a misguided response, by the working class, especially in the north of England, to the damaging consequences of neo-liberalism and (although it is hardly the same thing) London-centrism. On this view, the instinct to ‘take back control’ was right, but Brexit was the wrong way to go about it. Nor is such a view confined to the left. A version of it is what informed Theresa May’s argument that the Brexit referendum had revealed that too many people had been “left behind” by economic liberalism and globalization, and, subsequently, Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda.
There may be an element of truth in this view, although it has always had limitations, as any mono-causal explanation of Brexit is bound to have. In particular, Professor Danny Dorling’s influential analysis has shown the importance of middle-class and southern English support for ‘leave’ in delivering the referendum result. There are difficulties with that analysis, too, but my point here is not to re-hash debates about the causes of the vote to leave, it is that Burnham adheres to a particular view of it, which is imprinted on his Prime Ministership. Specifically, it means that his position is that Brexit was a symptom of a deeper malaise and, therefore, tackling that deeper malaise, rather than tackling Brexit, is the primary task.
This explains why, whilst there is no doubt that Burnham was opposed to Brexit and campaigned against it, and he has said as recently as last September that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU in his lifetime, his position now is that he does not intend to “re-run Brexit arguments” or to propose rejoining. In short, he wants to treat the illness, not the symptom. In this sense, Burnhamism represents the latest iteration of Labour’s attempt to respond to the challenges which Brexit created for the party.
The nostalgia problem
One obvious difficulty with his response is that, if his policy agenda is to revive manufacturing industry, then the barriers to trade created by Brexit are a major obstacle. But, with or without Brexit, Burnham invokes a world which no longer exists. The industries he cited in the speech quoted above – coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding, docking – have largely disappeared and will not come back. And the places where they existed developed because of the presence of things like coal, water, humidity, or, in other cases, clay or minerals, which were necessary for them (or, in the case of docking, because of pre-containerization technology). Those reasons have also gone.
It obviously bears saying that the speech I’ve quoted was to the party faithful, on the occasion of becoming party leader, so some nods to Labour’s history were inevitable and to some extent ritualistic. Even so, it is significant that he chose not to use an important opportunity to frame his leadership of Labour in a future-oriented way. That points to him being wedded to a political psychology within which the Labour Party is inseparable from heavy manufacturing industries of the past or, at the very least, within which workers in those industries are the template of what the ‘real working-class’ looks like. This is the Labour Party voters “once knew” and which he has vowed to revive. Yet, leaving aside for a moment the economics of this, it is at odds with the political realities of a party whose membership and voting base are now much more fragmented and with the demographic realities of a class structure which is far more complex than in the past.
As for the economics, I don’t suppose for one moment that Burnham is proposing that the traditional industries he referenced will return. It must surely be the case that his vision for re-industrialisation is based on the kinds of modern manufacturing which do still exist and could be developed much further, such as aerospace, biotechnology or pharmaceuticals. He may well also include service industries within this vision.
But, assuming this is so, it is again notable that he is choosing not to frame his narrative in this forward-looking direction. Equally, if the geography of re-industrialisation is to be mapped on to the communities created by old industries then the key drivers of it will need to be infrastructure connecting those places and the education and training available within them. That may well be within the ambit of his policy agenda but, if so, it means creating new kinds of communities, not fetishising those of the past.
The significance of Burnham’s nostalgic framing of both the meaning of the Labour Party and the meaning of industry is, I think, that it replicates at least some of the politicised nostalgia of Brexitism. As with Brexitism, the ideas that the country has lost its way, that globalization has eroded traditional communities, and that centralized policymaking has caused the decline of the local high street, all speak to the inchoate resentment of something having been not just lost by, but taken from, ‘ordinary people’. Moreover, whilst there may be good arguments for Burnham’s strong commitment to devolution from London, there is within it more than a whiff of the Brexitist resentment of the metropolitan elite or just of those who live within the circumference of the M25.
One of the many difficulties of this kind of nostalgic resentment is that, by presenting contemporary Britain as having taken a form which has been inflicted on its population, it ignores how it also reflects the preferences of that population. It is true that globalization has removed many jobs and industries that used to exist here, but it is also true that British people have chosen to buy cheaper imported consumer goods and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that high streets have declined, but it is also true that people have chosen to buy cheaper goods online and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that people say they want decisions to be made locally rather than by ‘remote Whitehall bureaucrats’, with, as Burnham puts it “power returned to every postcode in the land”, but they also strongly object to ‘postcode lotteries’ in, for example, public service provision. And whilst ‘four decades of neo-liberalism’ may have been every bit as damaging as Burnham claims, voters gave Margaret Thatcher three big election wins and, subsequently, many accepted the proposition that any party advocating a major departure from what her governments bequeathed was ‘unelectable’. And many of those same people voted for Brexit.
The biggest question about ‘Burnhamist’ nostalgia is how far its overlap with Brexitism extends to immigration policy, and continues with the false proposition that it is possible to have economic prosperity and thriving public services as well as draconian immigration controls, and that this is necessary to see off the threat from Reform. The retention of Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary might suggest that this is just what is in prospect. If so, that is going to make Burnham’s (highly laudable) aspirations to reform the social care system undeliverable. It will also undermine his ideas of regional re-industrialisation since central to any realistic possibility of this are universities, which are currently being immolated on the altar of ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.
I’m aware that all this may sound too dour, or too sour, or both. I’m also aware of the fault to which many politically-minded people are prone, whether on the left or the right, of demanding purity of political leaders, or of making the perfect the enemy of the good. In some ways, Keir Starmer suffered from the reluctance of ‘progressives’ (broadly conceived) to accept his imperfections and the compromises that all political leaders have to make. Indeed, with tedious predictability (yes, that is a link to an article by Owen Jones in the Guardian), there are some on the liberal-left who have already written Burnham off.
So it’s worth noting that there is a case for optimism. Burnham has already shown an ability, which it was widely agreed that Starmer lacked, to articulate an optimistic narrative and a sense of purpose. He has an engaging manner and he’s politically savvy. He has provided some simple, understandable priorities around devolution and regeneration and if he sticks to them that will be a contrast not just to Starmer’s flip-flopping on policy decisions but his tendency to say on any given day that this, that, or the other was his government’s ‘number one’ focus.
Farage’s fortunes
It might also be argued that it is precisely the way that Burnham’s political philosophy speaks to the nostalgic resentment of Brexitism which provides the basis for him to see off the electoral challenge of Reform. And, given events of the last few weeks, that challenge may be ebbing anyway. I wrote about this in my previous post, discussing Nigel Farage’s ill-judged resignation in order to re-fight his Clacton seat but since then there have been some developments.
One is just that his contest with Count Binface is already being spoken of as a national joke, and social media rage about the failure of the main parties to contest it seems to have had little cut-through with the general public. Perhaps more importantly, the stream of stories about the source of Farage’s and Reform’s funding continues apace, including its relationship to the murky world of cryptocurrencies. On this, Sian Norris’s article for Open Democracy is particularly eye-opening but it is probably of greater political significance that it is now being extensively reported by the BBC, and that there has been a spate of revelations in the Times/ Sunday Times (£) leading to several public [warning: link to X] and, reportedly, private attacks from leading figures in Reform on the Murdoch-owned media group. Even more remarkable has been a surge of negative stories in the Mail, including coverage of Reform’s various actual or alleged financial links to Russia.
Much of this is not exactly news, of course, and has been exposed for many years, not least by the indefatigable work of Pulitzer Prize finalist and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, in the face of massive abuse and intimidation. But, as she herself has recently written, it has been largely unreported and the reason, she says, is “Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because ‘challenging’ Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it.”
Quite what has shifted in the media establishment, and why it has done so now, is unclear (to me), but it is an observable fact that it has happened, and that marks an important political change.
The alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe
Within this changed environment, the other recent development has been the alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe. Much about this is, for the moment at least, unknown, beyond the facts that the injuries sustained were horrific and that a man has been charged with her murder and has appeared in a Magistrates’ Court where he did not enter a plea to the charge. It should go without saying that any such killing is repugnant, and that politically-motivated killings, if that is what this was (which has yet to be established), have an added repugnance. Beyond that I’m not going to comment or speculate about the case itself, but what is a legitimate subject for comment is the way in which it has been discussed.
That said, I can hardly bring myself to write about that in any detail by giving quotes and links to people whose conduct is contemptible. But, in summary, from the moment the news broke, there has been a frenzy of social media activity. Some of that has been mawkish and prurient, some of it conspiratorial, some of it frankly insane. Almost all of it was rancid and some of it may have prejudiced the fair trial of the accused man.
A recurring theme was denunciation of the police for disclosing that an initial suspect (who was subsequently released without charge) and the man who was eventually charged with murder were white Britons. This was presented as being in some way suspicious or ‘woke’, ignoring the fact that such disclosures arise precisely because failure to do so in previous high-profile cases has led to accusations of cover-ups from some of the very same people now complaining, and sometimes to riots as a result.
In response to their demands, last year the police were issued with new guidance encouraging disclosure in such cases. That they did so this time was undoubtedly because so many social media posters were fairly obviously salivating at the prospect of the perpetrator being an immigrant or an asylum seeker, and the danger of public disorder that represented. Inevitably, once that prospect seemed to disappear the on-line mob switched to speculating, or simply claiming, that the perpetrator must have been a left-wing extremist.
More generally, there have been constant demands to be given immediate information, before the facts were known, with the nonsensical assertion that the public had the ‘right’ to be told everything about the case, and, even, ‘to debate’ it, whilst it was still being investigated and/or whilst the judicial process is underway. When this prompted the police to state that, in the early stages, they had found “nothing to suggest” that it was a politically-motivated or terrorist act this, itself, was denounced as a cover-up, just as it would have been had they said nothing. The level of stupidity and irresponsibility displayed, not just by pseudonymous social media posters but by some public figures, politicians and supposed journalists, was the latest example of the increasingly disgraceful nature of, especially, on-line public discourse.
Alongside all this, there were, as the Times (£) and other newspapers reported, several accusations that Farage and Reform, specifically, were exploiting the alleged murder for political purposes, accusations made by, amongst others, the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor who had been a close friend of Ann Widdecombe. This was furiously denied by those accused, but what is certainly true is that, without knowing anything about the facts of the case, Reform immediately used it to claim that its MPs, and Farage in particular, needed more security than they receive from official sources.
In particular, there seemed to be an attempt to suggest that the alleged murder in some way justified the idea that Farage needed the £5 million gift he received from Christopher Harborne in order to provide him with security (although, at other times, he has said that it was unconditional and could be used to “buy Ferraris” and, anyway, the issue in dispute is the declaration of the gift, rather than the gift per se). So all of this stank of hypocrisy, as did numerous accusations that ‘the left’ had created this atmosphere of political violence by its use of intemperate language even as many of the same people making these accusations continue to laud Lucy Connelly as a free speech “martyr”.
Much of this replicated the ways that the murder of Charlie Kirk was exploited, both in the US and the UK, last year. However, repellent as this attempt to make use of Ann Widdecombe’s killing in this way has been, it does not seem to have dented the sense that the Farage/ Reform bubble is bursting, and it is hard to see how, whatever its outcome, the Clacton by-election can do anything but add to that. There was a telling headline about Farage and the by-election recently, to the effect that ‘when voters start laughing at you it’s over’. Even more telling was that it appeared in the Mail.
A new chapter?
Changes in Prime Minister do not automatically portend new eras in politics. It is only with historical distance that their significance or otherwise becomes clear. This makes it foolhardy to anticipate what that significance will be, but I will risk the guess that Burnham’s tenure will come to be seen within the common frame of the post-Brexit period as much, or more, as having an identity in its own right, if only in the sense of being another attempt to ‘make Brexit work’.
Even in the more immediate term, it is difficult to know whether the opinion poll bounce Labour has recently enjoyed, and the decline in support for Reform, will continue. Within the fates of these two parties are nested other questions, which will have a direct effect on how Brexit now develops.
One is whether the Labour government finds that an industrial renaissance is incompatible with its existing ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations and comes to pursue some version of rejoining. The other is whether the prospect of a Reform government (or a Conservative one, given that party’s present positioning) remains realistic since, for so long as it does, that renders any version of rejoining impossible to negotiate with the EU. These are likely to be the main Brexit-related questions for the coming political period.
With that, I will now take a break from posting over the summer.
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