A conversation about the future?

In my previous post, I suggested that since proposing a new ‘national conversation’ about Brexit in his party conference speech Andy Burnham had nudged that conversation forwards in two ways. One was by indicating that accepting the status quo of UK-EU relations would not be an acceptable outcome of the new conversation, and the other was by acknowledging the reality of Russian attempted interference in the 2016 referendum and, by implication, the fact of Russia’s strategic interest in Brexit.

Since then, he has made a further intervention, and perhaps the most significant so far, in proposing an “honest conversation” about freedom of movement (of people) and implying that he, and a future Labour government, would be “open to the idea” subject to it being approved in a referendum (although, subsequently, it was suggested by ‘Downing Street sources’ that a referendum might not be required).

This is an important development because, more than probably anything else, freedom of movement (FOM) was central to the outcome of the Brexit referendum and has also been the most neuralgic aspect of Brexit for the Labour Party. So, whereas the Tory ‘red line’ on a role for the ECJ was effectively, albeit quietly, erased by Keir Starmer, that of ‘no FOM’ persisted and, with it, the red line on single market membership (let alone EU membership). That is apparently now in the process of changing.

Predictable reactions

The reaction to this development was predictable. Brexiters denounced it as betrayal, though why people who constantly complain that they are ‘not allowed to talk about immigration’ should regard a ‘conversation’ about FOM with such horror is not clear. Nor is it clear why people who constantly complain that we have ‘Brexit in name only’ regard it as possible to betray Brexit. These denunciations included the inevitable stupidity of Nigel Farage and Reform railing that FOM could result in all 450 million citizens of the EU moving to the UK. This is obviously ludicrous, especially as, if anything, the increasing prosperity of EU member states in, especially, eastern and south-eastern Europe means that it is highly unlikely that future FOM would see a repeat of the arrivals level of the early 2000s.

Predictable as this reaction was, it served as a salutary reminder that there will be ferocious resistance to every step towards joining the EU or its institutions, even as small a one as ‘having a conversation’ about doing so. Actually, Brexiter resistance to this conversation is, itself, an index of the abject failure of Brexit. After all, if it had been even half as successful as its leading advocates promised it would be by now, such a conversation would result in massive public support for staying out of the EU, rather than the opposite sentiment shown by opinion polls. Brexiters don’t want the issue re-opened not because, as they claim, it was ‘settled’ by the 2016 vote but because they know it remains unsettled and unpopular.

Partly related to that, there are some reasons to think that the familiar terms of this resistance have declining purchase. For one thing, the salience of FOM as a Brexit issue has diminished. An IPPR report last week showed that it featured well below issues such as Euro membership, fishing rights, and losing independent trade deals in reducing support for joining the EU (figure 6, p.11 in link). The probable reasons for this are not altogether happy ones. Amongst those whose hostility to immigration is primarily racist, it seems as if the experience of post-Brexit immigration has made the prospect of what they see as more likely to be ‘white Christian’ immigrants from Europe relatively palatable. The far-right focus is now far more on Muslim asylum seekers arriving in small boats than Polish plumbers arriving on EasyJet. Within that, the claim that Brexit is responsible for ‘the small boats crisis’, which Burnham has made several times (although, for reasons given in a recent post, it is somewhat misleading), along with the persistent conflation of asylum-seeking with immigration, seems to have reduced the enthusiasm for Brexit amongst those most ideologically exercised about immigration.

Burnham also appeared to speak to the post-Brexit experience of immigration by suggesting that FOM is more likely to be associated with shorter, work-related, stays in the UK rather than permanent settlement. The way that was expressed was not exactly a challenge to anti-immigration xenophobia, and it is far from clear that Burnham is open to a ‘new conversation’ about that, even in relation to the EU, given reports that the UK is still resisting the agreement of a ‘youth mobility scheme’. But, more charitably, his comments about FOM did gesture towards the reason why it is not regarded, in most EU countries, as immigration per se (as Sir Ivan Rogers pointed out in his evidence to the House of Commons ‘Brexit Committee’ in 2017). That reason was better captured by Mike Galsworthy of the European Movement this week, when he stressed that FOM is “a fluid two-way exchange”.

The case for gradualism

However, criticism of Burnham’s latest statement was not confined to Brexiters. Some ‘joiners’ saw it as far too timid: why not drop the FOM red line immediately? What about membership of the Euro and of the Schengen agreement, which Burnham still regards as out of scope? But there is a good argument that such reactions ignore, or underestimate, just how long and difficult the process of building a durable consensus for joining the EU (or even the single market) will be. At the moment, there is even some opposition within the Labour Party, with Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood reported to be “furious” about Burnham having opened the question of FOM and Melanie Onn, the Labour MP for  Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes, writing that doing so “risks undermining voter trust”.

And securing support within the Labour Party is only the first, and easiest, part of this process. It’s not a matter of the government simply announcing a new policy, but of securing robust support for it, whether or not it is put to a future referendum, and this requires concerted input from a wide range of political, market and civil society actors. Crucially, it will be necessary to maintain that support through what are likely to be long, complex and politically controversial negotiations. If there is one lesson, above all, which joiners should have learnt from Brexit it is that, like leaving, joining (in whatever meaning) is a process not an event.

For those who are serious about wanting this process to be successful, rather than simply to enjoy a cathartic moment of pleasure, there is therefore a strong case that it is good tactics to try to gradually build the durable consensus needed for it to be sustainable domestically and to be credible to the EU. On this argument, going faster or more boldly would be worse in terms of securing that outcome. In any case, if Burnham’s intention is (as it appears to be) to have some kind of new proposal in Labour’s next election manifesto then he has actually been reasonably quick in starting to move away from Starmer’s position.

What that new proposal will be is unclear. The way in which Burnham is talking at the moment sounds, as Niall Ó Conghaile has written this week, as if seeking some form of ‘Swiss-style’ relationship might be in prospect. If so, it’s important to understand that, as Ó Conghaile explains, that relationship is different to what was called the ‘Swiss model’ at the time of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, and which was widely understood to be an unappealing model from an EU perspective. Since then, the EU and Switzerland have completed a modernized agreement which was signed this year. One reason why this latter agreement might end up being Burnham’s preferred option is that it would not entail Euro membership which, as shown by the IPPR report I quoted above, is the issue most likely to sap public support for joining the EU [1]. It could also be an appealing model for the EU, Ó Conghaile argues, providing the potential benefits of closer economic and defence ties without the risks of the UK becoming a disruptive and possibly only temporary member of the EU.

Whether this, or something like it, or even seeking to join the EU, becomes Labour’s settled policy at the next election remains to be seen. But whatever the policy is, the important question is not so much about the current speed of travel, assuming the next election is at least two years away (though other views are available), but about how robustly Burnham will argue for it when it is made. It is one thing to push for a ‘new conversation’ (not to imply that doing so is altogether easy), but quite another to defend a new policy when the undoubtedly ferocious attacks on it begin. It is becoming a pervasive criticism of Burnham, across several policy areas (not just EU relations), that he seems more comfortable opening debates about future options than making and championing decisions.

The problems with gradualism

Strong as the argument for ‘gradualism’ may be, there are two obvious objections to it. One is just the continuing economic damage of Brexit. So far as I can see, the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report on this week’s budget did not make an explicit calculation of the foregone economic growth Brexit has caused, and so presumably adheres to its estimate of a long-term cost of 4% of GDP (itself lower than other credible estimates). However, the report did make reference (paragraph 1.5, p.10) to “rising barriers to trade after EU exit” as one of a series of “adverse shocks [which] have continued to hit the UK since the 2008 global financial crisis”, contributing to “structural trends” which have resulted in weak growth in GDP and personal disposable income. These shocks in turn “have resulted in elevated levels of government borrowing and debt in the UK” (paragraph 1.6). The key terms in all this are “structural” and “continued” as much as, or more than, “adverse shock”, posing the question: how long are we to continue to accept this damage?

The other, and perhaps even more urgent, objection to gradualism is the geo-political landscape, which was the main focus of my last post. Since then, the situation has worsened in terms of the growing clarity of Trump’s support for Putin (even if the failure of their client candidates in the elections in, respectively, Brazil and Serbia gives some relief to the general gloom). The possibility of Trump losing badly in the US mid-terms should not be regarded optimistically in terms of this landscape, since it is likely to lead him to focus on his foreign policy (if we can grace it with that name). Thus there is a significant danger that the pace of international events is simply too fast for the capacity of British politics to rectify the strategic error of Brexit.

Economics and geo-politics intertwined

Actually, whilst there is both an economic and a geo-political case for urgency, it’s perhaps under-appreciated just how closely they are linked. There are reams that could be written about that linkage, but I’ll just mention two current examples.

One is simply that were it not for the dire effect of Brexit on tax revenues then it would be relatively easy to fund the increases in defence spending needed to robustly challenge Russian aggression. As I discussed at the time of last year’s budget (and I don’t think there have been any updated figures) it is estimated that in 2024-2025 tax revenues were between £65 billion and £90 billion less than they would have been as a result of Brexit. If the true figure were only half of the lower end of that range, then it could fund a near doubling of the entire defence budget (£37.5 billion) for that year. Far less than that would be needed to reach the government’s target of spending 3.5% of GDP on defence, and to do so immediately rather than by 2035.

The second example is the ongoing issue of whether the UK will align with the EU in imposing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), in order to secure agreement from the EU to waive the increased tariffs on British EVs which are due to come into force next year under the terms of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Failure to secure that agreement would be a substantial blow to the UK’s car industry, which has already suffered considerably because of Brexit. Yet aligning with the EU’s EV tariffs would risk China acting on its recent threat to impose retaliatory tariffs on the UK. More widely, this relates to the UK’s attempt, which Burnham has made a priority, to participate in the EU’s ‘Made in Europe’ scheme because UK solidarity with the EU over China EV tariffs would boost the case for participation whilst, conversely, a lack of solidarity would weaken it. [2]

Trade expert David Henig argued this week that Burnham’s desire to join ‘Made in Europe’ as an important part of his wider ‘re-industrialization’ ambitions is a key driver of his move to open the FOM discussion. The technical details are complex but the general implication, as Henig puts it in the subtitle of his piece, is that “if you aren’t the US, EU, or China, you’re increasingly the victim of coercion”. Another trade expert, Sam Lowe of the Chatham House thinktank, made a similar point this week, arguing that ‘Made in Europe’ is likely to force the UK to choose between Brussels and Beijing. (I do recommend reading both pieces in full to gain an understanding of all this.)

From this perspective, the Brexiter idea of a ‘nimble’ Britain dancing lightly around the trade bloc behemoths – always a dubious proposition – has become an economic absurdity as the geo-political landscape moves increasingly to one of ‘great power politics’ carving out spheres of influence. In short, this new landscape doesn’t just have security and defence consequences, it also has economic consequences.

Focusing on the future

That Brexit is fundamentally out of kilter with the realities of contemporary international relations is at the heart of another new IPPR report, authored by Mihir Sharma and Laura Chappell, as indicated by its title: New World, New Relationship. It is well worth reading in full, but the crux of it is: “that Britain needs the countries of Europe as its primary political, economic and geopolitical partners. A relationship focused solely on trade does not speak to the needs we identify, and the hard truth is that no alternative – a US-focused special relationship, or an unmoored ‘global Britain’ – works for us in an age of geoeconomic blocs.” (p. 36)

Many of the arguments given in support of that claim will be familiar to readers of this blog, but perhaps the most important feature of the report is that it is, from beginning to end, focussed on the present and the future. This matters because, regardless of whether approached gradually or with more urgency, there is a danger that Burnham’s new ‘national conversation’ will fall back in to exactly the same terms as that which was had at the time of the referendum.

That would be inadequate in itself, precisely because it would fail to recognize all that has changed since then, including the many ways in which the EU, itself, has changed. But it would also give unwarranted credence to the probably widespread sentiment that ‘we can’t go through all that again’ (which is exactly the line Kemi Badenoch is already taking). Moreover, it would give credence to the Brexiter claim that the 2016 vote expressed an inviolable ‘will of the people’, that ‘revisiting’ what it led to constitutes a ‘betrayal’, and, with that, would lend support to Dominic Cummings’ idea that a future ‘stay out’ campaign could successfully rally under the slogan ‘tell them again’.

In recognizing that what is at stake is not ‘revisiting 2016’ but is a whole new conversation, which arises from new circumstances, it will also be important that this is not based simply on fear. It is true that the new geo-political landscape is a profoundly dangerous one, made more so by the isolation of Brexit. But the flipside of that is a positive effect which might not have been so apparent but for Brexit. As Ian Dunt argues in a recent article (the title of which, ‘Europe is the Future Now’, also emphasises a forward-looking orientation), that effect is to have clarified that Britain, and British people, have a European identity: “We are bonded together not just through our shared history and geography but through our values, our ideals and our joint vision of the future. We want collective solidarity, the rule of law and democratic institutions rather than despotism and war.”

A bigger conversation?

Whilst all of this relates to the new conversation about the UK and the EU, it could be an opportunity for a deeper and more extensive national conversation. So much of Brexit and Brexitism is connected with an aggrieved nostalgia encapsulated in the phrase ‘I want my country back’. It is a sentiment which preceded Brexit and which has become, if anything, more pervasive since Brexit. Often it is associated with hostility to immigration but always, axiomatically, it is past-orientated, whether in referencing cosy village tearooms or wartime heroism, in harking back to ‘the good old days’. Along with that, almost inevitably, goes disdain for the present and despair for the future.

Perhaps, then, the still nascent conversation about the UK and the EU could become something else, an occasion to articulate something so absent from contemporary politics that it seems almost absurd to imagine it: optimism.

 

Notes

[1] The biggest question mark about whether the ‘new Switzerland’ model could be a template for UK-EU relations is the Schengen agreement, to which Switzerland is party but Burnham has implied would not be part of Labour’s new policy. But the basic point holds that, as things stand (and it can’t be emphasized strongly enough that we are only at the very beginning of this ‘Burnham phase’ of the Brexit saga), it looks as if Burnham sees the landing zone for Labour’s new policy to be something short of joining the EU and in that sense some form of what we used to call ‘soft Brexit’. In principle (although, as ever, there is a lot of complexity about the practice) that has always been negotiable with the EU. See also the ‘UKICE staircase’.

[2] There is a bigger point here, which is that the EU, as a union of states, the single market, as a regulatory union, and the customs union as a common tariff entity have developed over time to create an interlocking eco-system. That fact has become somewhat lost in the Brexit debates, which have often concentrated on the ways that, in principle, the different elements can be disaggregated (EU, single market, customs union). The EV tariffs issue, and ‘Made in Europe’ more generally, also shows that alongside the well-known Brussels Effect on regulation (i.e. the regulatory pull of the EU) there can also be a kind of Brussels Effect on trade tariff policy.

A new conversation?

In my previous post, I suggested that by re-opening the question of Brexit, Andy Burnham’s party conference speech marked a significant moment in the Brexit saga. That has been borne out by the way that, since then, there has been the beginning of the ‘national conversation’ he called for, with an upsurge of discussion about whether and how the UK could join (or ‘rejoin’) the EU, whether that would be welcomed by the EU, and, if so, on what terms and in what timescale. All this and more also featured this week in an unusually well-attended Westminster Hall debate that had been prompted by a successful petition to parliament.

The details of this discussion are far less important than the fact of it happening [1]. The Burnham speech was, indeed, a ‘moment’. For it to become a turning point it will require a sustained process not just of national conversation but of national ‘mood-building’, somewhat akin to that which developed in the years before the 2016 referendum, to create a sense that a change of direction is possible and should be put to a vote. One way in which that might be achieved is by providing some structure to the otherwise nebulous notion of a national conversation, in the way suggested this week by Mike Galsworthy, strategy advisor to the European Movement.

How we got here

However it is conducted, what is happening now is actually not the first stage of a national conversation but the second. The first stage was the important one which began when the transition period ended and, as I put it in a post at the time, the post-Brexit narrative started to be shaped. That stage saw a battle over whether the consensus view was to be that Brexit had been a success or a failure. It was comprehensively lost by the Brexiters, as some of them seem to recognize, such as ‘Brexit brain’ Robert Tombs (£), even if they do not understand why. The ebbs and flows of that battle were charted in detail on this blog, but the headline outcome is obvious from opinion polls, which have shown the consistent, and slowly increasing, view of the public that it was wrong to leave the EU.

Currently, 57% think it was wrong to leave and 30% think it was right to leave. That 30% matters, because it shows there is still sizeable, and probably implacable, bedrock of support for Brexit, and it matters even more because it has disproportionate voice amongst the commentariat. Nevertheless, barring some dramatic development, it’s fair to say that the view that Brexit was a mistake is now embedded as a political fact. It is only because of that it is now possible to talk about entering a new stage in which, with that fact established, the battle is over whether anything should be done about it and, if so, what.

That is the stage which is now beginning. Whether and how it continues will depend upon many others, including pro-EU campaigners, but it will crucially require that Burnham continues to push the narrative forward. Already, there are signs that he has an appetite to do so, although whether he has the stamina to continue remains to be seen. At all events, in the last week he has re-iterated, but this time in the House of Commons, what he said at the conference and, in fact, edged slightly beyond it. Previously, he spoke of one outcome of the ‘national conversation’ being to “stay as we are”. Now, he is emphasizing that “the status quo is not good enough for Britain” and in that sense is leading, or at least steering, the outcome of the conversation.

Meanwhile, a date – 20 November – has been set for the next UK-EU Summit. That will be an important moment both for showing whether the provisions long-trailed for the ‘reset’ have been finalized and for signalling what further agreements might be envisaged.

The real significance of Russian interference

Andy Burnham also pushed the ‘national conversation’ further forward with his statement at the weekend and subsequently in the Commons, that it is “clear” that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum. This was based, implicitly, on intelligence briefings he has received since becoming Prime Minister, and in a major speech later in the week Sir Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5, confirmed that interference had occurred. Of course, this is hardly a news item as it is well-established, not least by the assiduous investigations of former Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr. But it is certainly a news item that, for the first time, a British Prime Minister has acknowledged the fact.

However, the significance of his having done so is not, in my view, what it is commonly taken to be [2]. Many opponents of Brexit have, since the referendum, claimed or implied that Russian interference invalidates the referendum result, just as many supporters of Brexit have treated such claims as an attempt to discredit it, and both of these positions have been rehearsed in response to Burnham’s comment [3]. My own view has consistently been that it is unknowable whether Russian interference influenced the result (and, by the same token, it is not clear on what basis McCallum would be able to know, as he claimed, that it had not done so). Moreover, even if it did influence the result, it was certainly not the only, or even the main, reason for it [4].

Rather, what is significant about the interference is that it provides tangible evidence for what might otherwise be only an assertion: that Brexit was and is in Russia’s interests, both by destabilizing Britain and by damaging the EU. As Rafael Behr put it almost ten years ago, Brexit wasn’t “a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind … made in a factory outside St Petersburg [but it was Putin’s] dream policy” and, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it, “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”. (It also bears saying that, although largely forgotten now, the only other major country delighted by Brexit was Iran.)

Likewise, what is important about Burnham confirming Russian interference is not whether it means that the 2016 referendum result was a mistake for, as noted above, that has already been established in the public mind. In fact, what is important about it is almost nothing to do with 2016 and almost everything to do with the situation in which the UK and the EU find themselves now, in 2026. Indeed, the immediate context of Burnham’s comments was what the lessons of Russia’s interference in British politics (including, but not limited to, the referendum) might be for forthcoming elections in Germany and France.

The wider context

Of course the overall context is far wider. It is, firstly, that of the entire situation, as recently outlined by the historian Timothy Garton Ash, of the escalation of Putin’s attacks on Ukraine and the escalating hybrid warfare his regime is conducting against the UK, and others, with Russia being described in the MI5 chief's speech as "aggressor number one" in threats the security service faces.

The two are inter-connected, with Ukraine being the ‘hot war’ front line of the larger attempt by Putin to undermine and damage, if not destroy, the ‘liberal West’. That inter-connection is the reason why one part of Russia’s hybrid war campaign is an information war in which social media accounts and channels are used on a massive scale to spread false narratives within countries, including the UK, which seek to justify the illegal war on Ukraine and to undermine the legitimacy of Ukraine’s self-defence.

Equally relevant to this bigger context is Donald Trump. At the most general level he, quite as much as Putin, is an implacable enemy of the ‘liberal West’, one meaning of which might be those countries, including the UK, which last week issued a joint statement of support of the International Criminal Court in the aftermath of Trump’s latest and most severe attack upon it. At a more specific level, Trump has long been supportive, albeit in sometimes inconsistent ways, of Russia’s claims on Ukraine and, again just in the last week, that has been even more overt with the announcement of his ‘diesel deal’ with Putin.

There are multiple meanings of that deal, not least Trump’s attempts to blame the domestically unpopular cost of rising fuel prices in the US on Ukraine rather than his own disastrously incompetent war on Iran. But, as strategy expert Professor Phllips P. O’Brien has explained, its core meaning is that it is the clearest of signals that the US is now on Russia’s side. Conversely, for Putin, as CNN reports from Moscow, “the real benefit isn’t the billions of dollars in fresh revenue. It is the wedge this deal, and the rhetoric around it, drives right through the heart of the Western alliance.”

There’s no doubt that the ‘diesel deal’ is in part animated by the financial benefits Trump sees for his family and friends, as outlined by David Frum in The Atlantic. However, it would be a mistake to draw a sharp distinction between Trump’s venality and his anti-liberal ideology: part and parcel of his hostility to the rule of law and the rules-based international order is his desire to be unconstrained from such rule. Indeed the core reason Trump is not just dangerous for the world at large but is also such an incompetent leader for the United States is that he recognizes no distinction between his private desires and interests and his public office and duties. It is no coincidence that in the classical sociology of Max Weber that distinction was at the heart of the rational-legal authority upon which the modern State is predicated. Nor is it a coincidence that many leading Brexiters are as hostile as Trump to that conception of authority.

So, to re-iterate the point, it is within this context that the issue of Russian interference in 2016 becomes important; not as a re-litigation of the referendum result, but for what it means about the world now. At the time of the referendum we had not even had the first Trump presidency, let alone his dramatically more extreme second term. Nor, at that time, had Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But whilst those things could not have been predicted, it was obvious, as I wrote in detail in January 2019 – before Trump 2.0 and Ukraine – that Brexit constituted a fundamental strategic mistake primarily because, in both its nationalist and globalist versions, it failed to understand the centrality of regionalism, not just in terms of trade and regulation but also in terms of geo-politics. That is even more important now, in 2026 when, in an unfamiliar but genuine sense, those geo-politics have given rise to war.

The current war

If that statement sounds contentious or over-blown it is because the current geo-political situation does not fit neatly with our traditional understanding of wars and alliances. For one thing, the meaning of alliance, and most specifically the meaning of the UK-US alliance, has become extremely confusing. It wouldn’t be true to say that this alliance no longer exists, but it certainly doesn’t exist in the way that might once have been thought. The US is now an unreliable ally, but also one on which we still have a dependence and to which we are still obliged to make a contribution. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, and the MAGA movement more generally, is at least as active in pumping misinformation into the UK as the Putin administration and its bot farms.

Crucially, both are spreading similar types of misinformation (£), especially about civilizational erasure at the hands of Muslims and impending civil war. The litany is all-too familiar – London has disintegrated into anarchy, armed gangs of asylum seekers have invaded Britain and are raping women and children, Sharia Law has been imposed etc. etc. – as are the endless (increasingly AI-generated) fake videos and mendacious statistics used to ‘prove’ this to be so. At the same time, every established institution – the police, the church, the BBC, universities, schools, the judiciary, civil servants, the monarchy and, of course, ‘uniparty’ politicians – is depicted as being complicit in this. Some of it is literally insane but, even so, is persuasive to some people and, far more importantly, its cumulative effect is to persuade a larger number that ‘if even half of it is true’ then that is bad enough.

In short, an information war is under way in the UK (quite as much as in the EU) and it is conducted from both the US and Russia. But it is not simply an external attack: it is crucially reliant upon being amplified from within. Nigel Farage tends to downplay his connections with Trump and his admiration for Putin these days, knowing them to be unpopular, but he and associated figures, not to mention the GB News propaganda channel, repeat the messages coming from them [5].

Like Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain, Farage affects to be an affable English squire moved to righteous anger only by the betrayal of a decadent elite and motivated only by patriotic duty. In fact, both of them, and their numerous acolytes, are deeply enmeshed with Putinist and Trumpian interests. This is not a rhetorical slur. For example, it is a fact that the former leader of Reform in Wales is in prison for taking bribes to make pro-Russian speeches in the European Parliament, it is a fact that Elon Musk has publicly supported Restore, and it is a fact that Reform, Trump, Putin, and (though this is less widely known) Restore are all in various ways linked to cryptocurrencies.

Nor is this information war just about stoking division and anger on-line. Another growing threat highlighted this week by the head of MI5 is the far-right violence that this on-line activity provokes and promotes. According to McCallum, this transition from rhetorical to literal violence was “the most marked trend” in the threats dealt with by the agency over the last year. It also intersects with the recent growth of ‘gig economy terrorism’, whereby hostile states recruit unwitting or disaffected individuals to undertake attacks, rather than using their own agents in the traditional sense. This modus operandi has come to prominence in relation to the still obscure events at RAF Fairford. In that case, Iran stands accused as being the hostile state, but the same approach was used in the arson attacks against Keir Starmer’s property in 2025. In the latter case, there is very strong evidence that Russia orchestrated the attacks.

As the BBC report just linked to shows in great detail, these kinds of operations are highly complex and it is extremely difficult to uncover the full facts about them (this, indeed, is one reason why hostile states adopt this method). But the ‘Starmer arson attack’ case undoubtedly used an ostensibly far-right group, called Direct Action, apparently controlled by Russia, to recruit the ‘agents’.

Moreover, in both this case and the Fairford case, the tendency in gig economy terrorism to recruit foreign-born or ethnic minority agents contributes to promoting the far-right narrative of ‘invasion’. Notably, Farage has repeatedly, and mendaciously, used the Fairford case to claim that the small boats ‘crisis’ constitutes a “national emergency”. In this sense, even if an attack ‘fails’ it is still has a value in further stoking dissent. The Fairford case also created an opportunity for Trump and his associates to berate the UK for its supposed laxity in security matters, linking it directly to the narrative that Britain has been “invaded” by “fighting-age men”, an attack line immediately taken up Farage and others.

All of this – along with the other features of Russia’s hybrid war, such as repeated air and sea space violations, drone attacks and cyber-threats, and MAGA-supported and funded ideological warfare – adds up to a situation which is possibly hard for many British people to understand. It has so many interacting skeins, for one thing, and it is also quite different to our received images of war. It is nothing like the world wars, or the Falklands War, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not even much like earlier versions of ideological warfare, such as that of the Cold War. Nor is it much like IRA or even Islamist terrorism.

Back to Brexit

The complexities of this situation are probably too great for any one person to analyse. But, in terms of the focus of this blog, what should be obvious is that Brexit and Brexitism intersect with each and every aspect of it. Support for Brexit is one of the things which links Farage, Lowe, Tommy Robinson, and the entire British far right, with Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America, and Iran. They also all share a desire to destabilize British society, demonize British multi-culturalism, and discredit British institutions. To be clear, I don’t mean that everyone who supports or voted for Brexit desires all those other things; I mean that those who desire all those other things invariably support Brexit.

The flip-side of this is that all those named also share a hostility to the EU and, of course, the EU and its members are being targeted in exactly the same way as the UK and for the same reasons. By the same token, membership of the EU would not spare Britain from this hostility. Nevertheless, it is this war situation which brings us back to the newly-revived discussion about Brexit, including the discussion of Russia’s role in it. For what is coming to the fore as a result is (or should be) an increasing recognition in the UK that Britain’s relationship with Europe isn’t an accounting exercise, or primarily concerned with the costs and benefits of trade or supply chains or regulation, but is about shared interests and values and the mutual defence of these.

I’ve never accepted the argument that the 2016 leave campaign was about values and emotions rather than economics (Brexiters repeatedly claimed that leaving would be economically beneficial), but it is true that the remain campaign was overly focused on economics and did little to articulate a more principled, even moral, case for EU membership. In that, it was all of a piece with the years during which the UK was a member state.

But with a new ‘national conversation’ about Brexit apparently under way, there is also now an opportunity for that conversation to be a different and better one. The daily accumulating evidence that the UK is not just geographically and economically, but geo-politically and ideologically, part of the European continent makes abundantly clear the strategic illogicality of not also being part of the institutional and legal structures of the European Union.

 

Notes

[1] For this reason, I don’t see any point in trawling through the details of what has been said, most of which is predictable and has been discussed in one way or another in previous posts. But I do just want to comment on the suggestion made by the senior Labour MP Dame Emily Thornberry that a referendum would not be needed to seek to join the EU if doing so was in the manifesto of a party (i.e. Labour) which won a general election. This would be an utter disaster, both in terms of the legitimacy of joining in this way and because it would make it entirely reasonable for a subsequent government, if elected on a ‘Brexit again’ manifesto, to leave again without a referendum (the same applies to any proposal to join the single market). In turn, this would also be likely to mean that the UK’s application to join would be rejected anyway, since it would be so obviously lacking in durability.

[2] Since writing this post, I have belatedly seen that Rafael Behr’s Guardian column this week made a somewhat similar analysis to that which I provide here.

[3] The most flagrantly stupid of these reactions include: a) that the claim is that all 17.2 million leave voters were conned by Russian interference (but no one claims this or even, necessarily, that any leave voter was so influenced); b) that, even if true, it is no different to Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ intervention (but this was an open statement not, as in Russia’s case, a covert operation); c) that, as per Farage, Burnham is a “liar” (but the evidence of interference is beyond dispute, the only thing which can legitimately be disputed is its effect). The latter is the pin head on which angels have been dancing all week with Burnham being (falsely) accused of having claimed that the Russian intervention had been successful.

[4] This point is not negated by the fact that the referendum result was close, leading some to claim that even a very small impact from Russian interference would have been ‘decisive’. First, we can’t know for sure that it had even a very small impact. Second, it was not the vote differential between leave and remain (i.e. the amount by which leave won) which ‘won it’ for leave, it was the totality of  the leave vote which gave rise to that differential. With apologies for the cricket analogy, if I score one run in my team’s winning score, and my team wins by one run, it does not mean that my contribution was the ‘decisive’ one, rather than the century scored by my team-mate. This also seems to be McCallum/ MI5’s view, although it is a mystery why he appears to think that discussing what he regards as its ineffective actions will in some way “delight” Russia. Equally, since it seems to be Burnham’s view as well, the charge that McCallum’s comment was, as claimed by the Conservatives, a ‘slap down’ for the Prime Minister made no sense.

[5] It shouldn’t be forgotten that, as recently as 2024, Farage also pushed the Kremlin line that the West had ‘provoked’ the invasion of Ukraine, a line which Boris Johnson also took (£) during the 2016 referendum in relation to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, for which he blamed the EU. (Subsequently, when he was Prime Minister and Russia had launched its full-scale invasion, Johnson, with his usual rancid dishonesty, argued that the West had made a “terrible mistake” in letting Putin “get away” with annexing Crimea.)

Brexit revisited

This is an unscheduled post because, for the first time in a long time, there has been an important development in the Brexit saga. In my most recent post I bemoaned the drift and decay which seemed to characterize British politics, not least in terms of UK-EU relations, and the lack of Mark Carney-like strategic leadership. Rather confounding that complaint, Andy Burnham has now given an unusually wide-ranging and effective speech to the Labour Party Conference.

I’m not sure I was as hugely impressed by it as, for example, Ian Dunt, partly because, as Rafael Behr noted in the Guardian, it was more rooted in a domestic vision than a geo-political analysis. In that sense, it didn’t have the strategic heft of Carney’s recent interventions. Nevertheless, it was very different from anything we have heard from any British Prime Minister for a long time and, as regards the specific focus of this blog, was genuinely significant in what it said about Brexit. That has been recognized by many commentators, not least Denis Staunton of the Irish Times, one of the most astute observers of Brexit.

What Burnham said

Its significance was partly because Burnham said, though not for the first time, that Brexit was one aspect of the way that Britain is “on the wrong path”. But when he has said this before, as when Keir Starmer began, rather belatedly in his premiership, to talk about the damage caused by Brexit, the obvious difficulty was that it made little sense to recognize the extent of the problem and yet to propose no commensurate solutions. So what was really significant about the speech was the promise to:

“… lay out to the country what I believe the different options are for Britain’s long-term relationship with our European partners. And there are different options. And I will see if we can find consensus around one which will give us clarity about our position, and the future of the continent we live in.”

These options are to be set out at the time of the next UK-EU Summit, for which there is still no date set but which should be before the end of the year.

It might perhaps be asked why these options cannot be laid out now. After all, we really should know by now the extent of the (realistic) options that might be agreed by the EU and, in fact, in a subsequent interview Burnham pretty much identified them: something like the status quo, some form of UK-EU customs union, some form of single market membership, an application to join the EU. It can also be questioned whether the Summit is the best place to launch this conversation, unless the intention is for some kind of joint announcement of what are mutually agreed to be the possibilities.

Why it matters

Those questions notwithstanding, it is important to record just why what Burnham has said is so significant. It is because it is the first time since the 2019 general election result that there has been any realistic possibility that the decision made by the referendum might be revisited. For as I wrote at the time of that result, “its consequence so far as Brexit is concerned is clear. It marks the end of any lingering hope that it might be avoided. Ever since the referendum that hope has waxed and waned. As of today it is stone cold dead.” Now, as of September 2026, revisiting the decision to leave the EU is, unequivocally, on the agenda of mainstream politics.

That, in turn, means that, quite apart from any other ways in which Brexit has failed, it has failed politically. On this blog, I have several times quoted David Frost’s criterion for the success or failure of Brexit because it is perhaps the only time a leading Brexiter has actually articulated any meaningful test. He said that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.” That was in June 2022, and although technically that means there are still six to eighteen months to go, it has been obvious for a while that Brexit would fail this test. With Burnham’s announcement, that is not just obvious: it is certain.

There was something else in Burnham’s speech which was almost equally significant for Brexit, and that was the announcement that electoral reform is also now on the political agenda. This matters, because one of the biggest blocks to pursuing any version of re/join (whether single market, or EU) is the possibility that it would in quick order be reversed by an incoming government, making it effectively certain that the EU would reject the UK. If (and it is a big if) electoral reform comes to pass then it is far less likely (though not impossible) that such a reversal would happen. So if (and it is another big if) the eventual outcome of what Burnham announced this week is a version of re/join then it is far more likely to be acceptable to the EU.

Questions

So this is a genuinely significant moment in the Brexit ‘story’. But there are some worms in the apple. One of these is that, at least so far, there is no indication what process Burnham envisages, and especially what the process would be to “find consensus”. Unlike the electoral reform announcement, there was no suggestion there will be a cross-party commission to explore options. Unlike the National Care Service or youth unemployment policies which have been announced, no equivalent of the Casey or Milburn reviews has, as yet anyway, been proposed.

With or without such a review, there are many questions left unanswered by Burnham’s speech. He didn’t say whether another referendum was envisaged, although has subsequently said it is possible. But on what terms? Majority or super-majority? With what requirements for consent in all four constituent parts of the UK? Would it offer all of the various “options”? Would there be a two-stage process, as many argue should have happened with Brexit itself, whereby, first, a vote to initiate negotiations with the EU would be held and, then, a vote on whether to accept the outcome?

It may be too early to ask these questions, but if, unlike the 2016 referendum, this process is to yield a durable answer to the UK-EU question it is vital that it is carefully designed so as to do so.

Concerns

The deeper concern about Burnham’s announcement relates to immigration and asylum. It is a concern with several dimensions. One is the specific way in which, in this speech and elsewhere, he suggests that Brexit meant that “control over immigration was weakened when we lost collaboration with our European partners.” He is obviously referring to asylum-seeking and the Dublin Regulations, and the fact that, like many other politicians, he conflates immigration and asylum is a problem in itself. But it is also a problem that he at least overstates the significance of Brexit in relation to asylum.

This is a complicated issue. It has become a widely made claim by those opposed to Brexit, including LibDem leader Ed Davey, that the increased numbers of ‘small boat’ crossings are a result of Brexit, and it is a claim which has found some resonance amongst those who support, or formerly supported, Brexit. From an anti-Brexit perspective, some might argue that there is little point in being finicky about the accuracy of claims, given the dishonesty of those made by Brexiters, but I have always been uneasy about that. Truth matters, whatever ‘side’ you’re on, both as a matter of principle but also because, just as dishonesty is one reason why Brexit has not, in Frost’s terms, ‘settled in the British polity’, so too will dishonesty undermine the durability of any future form the UK-EU relationship may take.

The truth of small boat crossings is that numbers began to rise in 2019 and 2020 (partly because it became almost impossible to stowaway on lorries), during which time Britain was still part of the Dublin III Regulations. It may well be true that, after that, when crossings rose much more sharply, Britain being outside those regulations provided an incentive to asylum-seekers to try to reach Britain, as Professor Thom Brooks suggests in his 2023 study, which is the main source for many of the claims about this. It is probably also true that being outside the various EU databases (e.g. EURODAC, the EU biometrics database) had hampered Britain’s ability to manage irregular migration, as Keir Starmer claimed last year when dubbing the small boats as “Farage boats”.

However, the reasons for the routes and volumes of asylum-seeking are complex and multi-faceted, for countries within the EU as well as those outside, and it is difficult to disentangle causes and correlations between the different factors. This is the key criticism of Brooks’ analysis since, as Professor Madeleine Sumption, Director of Oxford University’s Migratory Observatory and perhaps the leading authority on migration to and from the UK, commented at the time [warning: link to X] of its publication: “the report presents no empirical evidence for this claim [that Brexit caused the small boats crisis] other than that they happened around the same time.”  

Moreover, it is very difficult, because, by definition, much of the activity is clandestine, to establish the motivations of the actors involved (specifically, in this case, whether knowledge that the UK was outside Dublin III acted as a motivation to seek asylum here). It is certainly true that Brexit has done nothing to help the management of asylum-seeking, but it is far from certain to what extent it is possible to ascribe asylum-seeking volumes in general, and the ‘small boat’ numbers specifically, to Brexit. Perhaps the most that can be said is, as a report from the Migration Policy Institute puts it, that Brexit is “one of several factors” in the mix.

This matters in the present context because, if one of the key drivers of the vote to leave the EU in 2016 was the wholly confected fear of the ‘migrant crisis’, so crudely propagated by Farage’s infamous ‘breaking point’ poster, then it would be a travesty if a similar sentiment was used as a basis for a case to join the EU. Moreover, it doesn’t even make sense in Burnham’s own terms since, in the speech, as elsewhere, he made much play of how the government is successfully reducing the number of crossings, Brexit notwithstanding.

The problem of Brexitism

This might also be put in a more general way. Using the ‘small boats crisis’ as an argument against Brexit leaves untouched, and indeed reinforces, Brexitism. For all that Burnham spoke of engaging in a “new politics” which is “honest” with the electorate, he persisted in boasting about the massive reduction in net migration. Yet honesty would require telling the truth about the realities of an ageing population, and the fact that this means that there is a need for immigration which is going to increase, not decrease, in the future.

Only this week it was reported (£) that falling net migration has reduced the ‘fiscal buffer’ available for next month’s budget by billions of pounds. How, then, does clamping down on immigration help the government deliver any of its projects, including funding a National Care Service? How, indeed, will such a service cope without high levels of immigration? But there is more at stake, even, than the pragmatic reasons for immigration. The bigger challenge, at least as regards the UK’s relation with the EU, is to entirely decouple ‘freedom of movement of people’ from immigration. (The biggest challenge of all is to entirely redefine the way that we think about immigration and British history, something discussed in a fascinating review article by Ferdinand Mount in the London Review of Books last week)

From this perspective, revisiting Brexit is only half the task. As I have consistently argued, and as is reflected in the title of this blog since renaming it in September 2025, Brexit has become inseparable from Brexitism. The hold which Brexitism still has over the British polity has been amply evidenced in the last few days by the near-insanity of the commentary about the RAF Fairford ‘events’, especially the immediate (and, it turned out, false) claims that these had involved ‘small boat’ migrants. But on Brexitism, if not Brexit, Burnham remains relatively muted if not, as regards immigration and asylum, somewhat complicit.

A historic moment?

With all that said, it remains the case that Burnham’s speech this week marked an important moment which may even, in time, come to be seen as an historic one. For Labour, it represents the effective end of the policy to ‘make Brexit work’ and it certainly represents the end of any pretence that the reset, as envisaged under Starmer, is a viable policy. It also certainly marks the moment when Burnham, at least, has decided that Brexit is not too toxic to be ‘reopened’.

I think it may also offer a ladder down which committed Brexiters may, if only implicitly, be able to climb. There must be many who advocated Brexit, and more who voted for it, who know in their hearts that it was a mistake or, at the very least, recognize that it can no longer be convincingly defended.

It is far too early to be sure yet, but the thing which has struck me almost as forcibly as the speech itself was how muted the reaction from leading Brexiters has been. Even as recently as the first UK-EU summit, and certainly the 2024 election, Starmer’s modest ‘reset’ was immediately depicted in the familiar, lurid terms of ‘betrayal’ and ‘treachery’. There seems to have been much less of that in response to Burnham’s speech.

To give a notable example, so far Farage has focussed almost entirely on the announcement to end the triple lock on pensions. That may not last, and it is reported that Farage will attack Burnham on Brexit in a speech tomorrow. But it wasn’t his first response and it’s certainly the case that in recent times he and other Brexiters seem to have lost enthusiasm for defending Brexit. If so, that is at least in part a consequence of having insisted, since almost the day after the 2016 referendum, that Brexit had been ‘betrayed’: it’s perverse, after all, to defend that which you have condemned.

Most importantly, Burnham has articulated something which has been obvious for some time and yet largely unsayable, at least by political leaders. In some collective sense, deeper although less tangible than opinion polls on the subject, Brexit has settled in the public consciousness as having been an historic mistake, rather in the way that Munich and Suez, both of which at the time were passionately contested, settled as bywords for failures not just of policy but of world-view.

In personal life, we rarely regard terrible decisions we have made as being unalterable, or at least not for long. We may, moralistically, tell ourselves that we have ‘made our bed and must lie in it’. We may, stoically, insist that we ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘have to make the best of it’. But few of us are so moralistic, or so stoic, as to deny ourselves the chance to revisit our bad decisions, if it is possible. With Brexit, that has not, in the sense of realistic politics, been possible until now. Burnham’s speech this week has made it so.

Whether that possibility will be realised, and what the outcome will be if it is, remains to be seen.

Lethargy in place of strategy

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 there 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.