A new national conversation, or just the same old one?

Anyone foolish enough to write publicly about politics knows, unless they suffer from an even greater degree of foolishness, the danger of making predictions. That is perhaps especially true in recent years, when politics has thrown up so much that would previously have been almost unthinkable. Still, that makes the odd occasions when predictions come true all the more pleasing.

At the beginning of this month, I wrote a post anticipating “the coming conversation” about Brexit, suggesting that it would emerge from the then yet-to-be-held May elections, the next UK-EU summit, and the tenth anniversary of the referendum. And whilst this may well have been an obvious prediction, so far as I know this particular conjunction of circumstances wasn't generally noticed. At all events, that conversation has now begun.

The Labour leadership crisis

It has been precipitated, as I anticipated, by the election results and the Labour leadership crisis they provoked. That crisis has not, as yet, become a formal leadership challenge because of the unusual situation in which the favourite candidate, Andy Burnham, is not currently an MP.  Thus the first act of this leadership drama is to be the contest to see if he can retain the seat of Makerfield for Labour in the coming by-election to be held on 18 June, just a few days before the referendum anniversary.

That contest itself encapsulates many of the dynamics of post-Brexit politics, showing how Brexit continues, more or less overtly, to be imprinted on the political scene. Hence Burnham must win a northern England, leave-voting constituency where Labour’s main challenger is now Reform, but where Reform itself is in a bitter conflict with Rupert Lowe’s neo-Nazi infested Restore Britain party which, helped by Elon Musk’s backing, could siphon off crucial numbers of Farage’s core votes in what currently looks to be a very tight election. A particularly piquant twist has emerged with revelations that Reform’s candidate did not vote for Brexit and considered it to have been based on “nationalistic pish”.

However, the Makerfield hiatus does not alter the fact that, informally, the Labour leadership battle has begun. In my earlier post, my point was that this battle would undoubtedly see Brexit figuring prominently and, more particularly, see an argument about whether Labour should pursue a more ambitious reset in UK-EU relations, up to and potentially including seeking to rejoin. That argument has already surfaced, with leadership hopeful Wes Streeting saying, in punchy terms, that Brexit had been a “catastrophic mistake” and gesturing, in vague terms, towards rejoining the EU at some point in the future.

As was perhaps the intention [1], this immediately led to Burnham being asked to clarify his stance which turned out to be, more mildly, that Brexit had been “damaging” but that “the last thing we should do right now is re-run those arguments”. Moreover, he said that rejoining was not on his agenda, adding that: “I respect the decision that was made at the referendum and it is going to undermine everything I have said about strengthening democracy if we don't respect that vote.”

This is pretty much the standard Starmer position on Brexit so, for all Burnham’s talk of being ‘the change candidate’, there’s no change there. Relatedly, Burnham has already indicated his support for Shabana Mahmood’s Brexitist anti-immigration policies and, like Starmer, stated that net migration “needs to fall further” despite recent huge reductions in its level, and this at exactly the time when a new approach is needed to avoid what immigration expert Professor Jonathan Portes calls the “migration doom loop” [2].

This is not the only way in which Burnham is as committed as Starmer to what is recognizably Blue Labour analysis. His talk of reindustrialization speaks directly to the nostalgic sensibility of that analysis, a sensibility which also played its part in attracting leave voters in 2016, some of whom appeared to believe that EU membership had been responsible for deindustrialization and that Brexit would herald the restoration of the mills, potteries and factories of the much-mythologized past and their associated communities.

Some may imagine that Burnham is adopting these positions as a tactic to appeal to Makerfield voters, and that on European policy, specifically, he will pivot to a more anti-Brexit position to appeal to the voters in the Labour leadership contest. If so, he will immediately face the charge of hypocrisy. But it’s far more likely that if he wins the Makerfield seat on this basis it will cement the existing Labour view under Starmer that this is the only way to see off the challenge of Reform. For that matter, if he loses then at least some in Labour will argue that it was because, partly as a result of Streeting’s intervention, the party was perceived as being too pro-EU.

Assuming Burnham does win Makerfield and does immediately mount a leadership challenge, and also assuming it is not a ‘coronation’, this sets the stage for a contest with Streeting as the more anti-Brexit candidate (and, of course, there may also be other candidates). So in this sense Brexit will, indeed, feature in the contest. But, despite Streeting’s somewhat stronger language, it is not really clear that he will advocate anything more than Starmer’s recently expressed desire for a “more ambitious” partnership with the EU, or that, despite his more restrained language, Burnham will advocate anything much less. As UKICE Director Professor Anand Menon puts it, “an open and honest debate is not what we are likely to get”.

In the longer term, it is possible that the outcome of the leadership contest will have an important effect on what Labour’s policy on the EU, and especially on its current ‘red lines’, will be at the next election (with a Burnham victory, which currently seems likely, almost certainly meaning their retention). But in the immediate term of this parliament it is unlikely, as things stand, to make any difference to the ‘reset’ which, as trade experts Sam Lowe and Kathryn Watson observe, still faces the familiar, fundamental “trade-off between market access and autonomy”.

The reset and the summit

So this brings us to the second leg of the emergent resumption of the Brexit conversation, namely the reset and more specifically the next UK-EU summit, the date of which has still not been announced. That in itself has a significance. For a long time it had been assumed it would be held in May, a year after the first such summit, and then June was talked about. Most recently, it has been reported that it is “tentatively pencilled in for 13 July”. There has been no public explanation for this delay, but I assume it reflects unresolved issues within the negotiations (£) over final terms for agreements on the key areas highlighted at last year’s summit since, presumably, both sides will wish to have something concrete to announce this time round.

In his excellent recent overview of these negotiations, Professor Hussein Kassim of Warwick University points to some of the technical complexities of the issues, but also draws attention to their all too familiar political dynamics. In brief, the UK continues to see the EU as “inflexible” whilst pursuing what the EU regards as a “hypertransactionalist approach” which also demands what would be special treatment for a third country [3].

Whilst Kassim does not put it in these terms, this can partly be explained by the present government’s awareness that anything it agrees will be picked over by the anti-EU British media and probably more by the entrenched attitude of the British State towards the EU going back long before Brexit. Moreover, it is perhaps still not recognized by the UK that the broad contours of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU so, whilst some further refinements might be seen as desirable in Brussels, it is London which is the demandeur in these negotiations.

Indeed, the government has already invested considerable political capital in obtaining at least the agreements already mooted, and has long talked as if, especially as regards a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, they are certain to be made and legislation has been introduced on that basis. Earlier this week, it was reported that negotiations had stalled (£), but in the last twenty-four hours, some details of what has been agreed have emerged and government guidance to businesses updated accordingly. So it is still unclear whether and when a full agreement will be announced.

Assuming there is an agreement then, apart from the non-negligible economic benefits for the agri-food sector, that will have a particular political significance for Northern Ireland. The Brexit situation there has been much less widely discussed, at least outside Northern Ireland itself, since the agreement of the Windsor Framework under Rishi Sunak in 2023 (although Kassim notes the EU’s dissatisfaction with the UK’s implementation of its provisions). Nevertheless, recent research by Professors David Phinnemore and Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast shows weakening support for it amongst the public in Northern Ireland. An SPS agreement would go at least some way to simplifying the operation of the Irish Sea border, and might be especially welcomed by the unionist community, as well as reducing agri-food trade barriers between the UK and the EU. In this sense, Northern Ireland continues to be at the epicentre of the Brexit process.

Meanwhile, as I’ve noted previously, Keir Starmer has talked in vague terms of seeking a more ambitious partnership with the EU than that envisaged at last year’s summit. In the last fortnight there has been an indication of what that ambition might be, with the leaked report of a UK proposal to be within a single market with the EU for goods trade. This, too, had an all too familiar ring to it. The Guardian report, which broke the story, compared it to Theresa May’s 2018 Chequers Proposal (which I discussed in detail at the time) and it also has some similarities to the ‘Jersey model’ that was touted at around the same time (in both cases, partly to solve the Northern Ireland conundrum, as well as for its economic advantages). This never seemed likely to be agreed by the EU at the time and is even less likely to be agreed now, so, unsurprisingly, it was also reported that this latest British proposal had been rebuffed [4].

Inevitably, the whole issue of the reset and the next summit have now become inseparable from that of the Labour leadership. It is difficult to see how Starmer can negotiate authoritatively when his future is in doubt, or even how the summit date can be finalised until it is known whether and when there is to be an active leadership contest. Assuming that happens then, for the umpteenth time since the referendum, the EU will stand waiting whilst the UK embarks on a change of Prime Minister with Brexit again at least part of what that change is about, and with at least the possibility that yet another general election will quickly follow (£).

As Anand Menon notes, in the piece referred to earlier, “having watched consecutive Conservative administrations argue with themselves over Brexit, they’re now getting to see Labour do the same thing. And, like the Conservatives, Labour are doing so with precious little attention paid to what the EU might or might not be willing to give us.” And, beyond that, as many of the commentators cited in this post mention, lurks the real possibility of a Reform government being imminent making anything agreed now potentially irrelevant.

(Almost) ten years on

As for the tenth anniversary of the referendum, well, we are not quite there yet so, although it is already being widely mentioned, the intense debate it will occasion is still to come. Yet it is hard to feel much enthusiasm, let alone optimism, about it. As this post has already repeatedly illustrated, so much of what is happening and being said goes around exactly the same circles of the last ten years.

A further small illustration is the Daily Telegraph ‘Big Debate’ (£) on ‘How to make Brexit a success?’, scheduled for 29 June. It’s not just that even the need to pose a question that ought to have been addressed years ago and, were it susceptible to a meaningful answer, would have received one by now, shows the pointlessness of the endeavour. It’s that the participants in this ‘debate’ – Dan Hannan, David Frost, Allison Pearson, and James Frayne [5] – not to mention its chair, Allister Heath, are all basically on the same side and that it is entirely predictable what they will, and will not, say. It is equally predictable that it will be totally unrealistic, and a racing certainty that it will not even attempt to consider, let alone ‘debate’, the reasons it is unrealistic.

Yet a new Brexit conversation need not be futile. One of the best things that Keir Starmer, or any other Prime Minister, could do would be to create a process for it to be fruitful. Last week, the European Policy Centre in association with Bertelsmann Stiftung published a report entitled “Reframing the Reset: From Post-Brexit Stabilisation to Strategic Partnership” which illustrates how such a conversation could occur, within both the UK and the EU. As regards the UK, a key recommendation is that it “should launch a systematic, evidence-based review about the future of its relationship with the EU, including the long-term sustainability of its current red lines and the options for deeper integration over time, including that of rejoining.”

No doubt that framing would, in itself, infuriate Brexiters. But it is not necessary to view everything though the lens of the ‘rejoin’ question and my own sense is that this isn’t a question which the UK, as a polity, is ready to address [6]. Rather, a highly significant first step in a new Brexit conversation would simply be the first part of the recommendation, for a systematic evidence-based review, and it is that to which any Prime Minister ought to be willing and able to commit. It is simply absurd for a country to undertake a major and ongoing shift in national strategy and yet to fail to undertake such a review, and ten years after the initial decision seems like a good, even overdue, moment. That is all the more true given the scale of events during those ten years, above and beyond Brexit.

I’ve argued for such a review in the past, whilst Andrew Duff (also of the European Policy Centre) has advocated a Royal Commission. I’m more convinced than ever that, whatever its institutional form, something like this is the only way to address a situation in which, to put it in very broad terms, we have a country which ‘knows’ it has made a mistake and regrets it, and yet has a politics which can barely acknowledge that and certainly can’t address it.

A moment ago, I said that I didn’t think that the country was ready to address the rejoin question and I can readily imagine that some, perhaps many, regular readers of this blog will have bridled at that. Yet the truth is that even the idea of a systematic review of Brexit is very unlikely to happen, and would encounter strong resistance. If joining the EU is ever to come on the agenda, and to have a realistic prospect not just of happening but being durable, then it will be a gradual process.

The coming conversation: not ‘if’ but ‘how’

Last weekend, in a significant intervention, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband argued that rejoining would require a “national consensus”. That doesn’t, of course, entail unanimity, which will never exist, but it does mean that the UK cannot realistically rejoin the EU on the narrowly-supported and highly divided basis on which it left. Building that consensus will be incremental, though that does not necessarily mean slow.

What made Miliband’s intervention significant was not simply that he was a major political figure in previous Labour governments. It was because of the confluence of events set out in this post, which has made a renewed conversation about Brexit inevitable. This is also why, within a wider assessment of current events, Tony Blair made his own intervention this week, noting that “Britain has lost from Brexit” and advocating some form of “structured, formal, relationship” with the EU at some point in the future. On my reading, this doesn’t mean Blair is advocating eventually rejoining the EU, even though some reports have implied that, but rather some version (yet again) of ‘multi-speed Europe’.

There’s a lot to unpick, and to criticize, in what he said about Europe, which I don’t have space to do it here. But for present purposes, the point is that Blair positioned himself against the background of there being “a developing sense that as … British opinion moves against Brexit, then at some point it is ripe to enter a debate about ‘going back’.” In other words, he recognized that Brexit is on the political agenda again, even if in ways he regards as strategically inadequate. Indeed it is now highly likely that there will, in a literal sense, be a parliamentary debate about Brexit because this week a petition to “apply to rejoin the EU as soon as possible” received 100,000 signatures, something already denounced as heralding “Brexit betrayal”.

In short, the question now is not whether this renewed conversation will intensify over the next few months: it will. It is whether it will be a genuinely new conversation, or yet another reprise of those which have occurred over the last ten years.

 

Notes

[1] I have written at greater length on the manoeuverings in the Makerfield by-election and their relationship to Brexit in a recent piece in Byline Times. For more analysis, see Matt Carr’s recent Substack post.

[2] Portes’ analysis is borne out by research published by British Future last week, showing that despite the recent massive falls in net migration the public generally believe that it is rising (and also hugely over-estimate the proportion of immigrants who are asylum seekers). For more discussion of how “net migration collapsed, the right got what it wanted, and somehow they became even angrier” see a recent post on the Bearly Politics Substack. Meanwhile, Britain is immolating one of its few truly world-class assets (£), its universities, on the altar of addressing ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.

[3] In that respect, it’s worth noting that in his recent ‘anti-Brexit’ speech, Streeting also couched his ambitions in terms of a “special relationship with the EU”.

[4] On the other hand, there are reports (£) that the EU may be ready to allow the UK car industry to participate in the ‘Made in Europe’ scheme which, if it happens, would be an important development for that industry.

[5] Admittedly Frayne is, at least to me, less of a known quantity, but his role and profile as a member of the Centre for Policy Studies and his extant writing about Brexit make it unlikely that he will be a heterodox voice amongst his high-profile fellow panelists.

[6] It is worth saying that the report itself also advocates many detailed forms of integration which are well in excess of the current reset plans but, themselves, fall short of rejoining.

[7] I'm pleased to say that this week saw the 12 millionth visit to this blog. Many thanks to all who have visited, or read via other channels, and especially to those who have publicized it to a wider audience, and those who have encouraged me to continue writing it over the least (nearly) ten years.

Britain’s post-Brexit ungovernability

The dust is now settling after last week’s elections whilst the fallout very much continues, especially in terms of the leadership crisis engulfing the Labour government which is developing rapidly as I write (so that there may well be new developments in even the next few hours). Both tell us much about post-Brexit politics.

The election results

The landscape revealed by the election results is a complex one, sufficiently so as to be open to almost any number of interpretations. If there is one fairly uncontentious observation it is that they confirmed the fragmentation of the party system, with at least five main parties in England and seven across Great Britain. In particular, this marks the moment when both Reform and the Greens have, beyond any doubt, gained a significant political presence. However, it is quite wrong to say, as Nigel Farage does, that this shows that politics is no longer about left and right, and it is dispiriting that so many political analysts, notably Professor Sir John Curtice, make similar claims.

In fact, despite occasional flirtations with economic protectionism, Reform UK’s policies about cutting immigration, rewarding entrepreneurs, cutting welfare, and finding miraculous public sector efficiency savings are boilerplate right-wing politics. Equally, many Green positions, for example on defence, employment rights, and taxation, are recognizably those of the traditional left. Neither defies analysis in terms of left and right, although that may not be all to be said about them. What is decomposing is the situation of there being one party of the right and one party of the left.

Last week’s results also show the clearest evidence yet of another kind of fragmentation, with Wales, for the first time, and Scotland, again, joining Northern Ireland in having devolved administrations led (in various senses) by parties committed (in various ways) to secession from the United Kingdom [1]. Yet even here neither Plaid Cymru nor the SNP achieved majorities, and Reform and the Greens made gains.

The corollary of this fragmentation is that the dominant position of the two ‘main’ Westminster parties looks to be in its death throes: we could be living at the end of the period where the government and the official opposition parties are Labour and Conservative, or vice versa. It’s even possible that in the next parliament neither party with hold either role. It is certainly true that it would be a mistake to extrapolate from last week’s votes to the next general election, but those votes, taken together with the now well-established pattern of opinion polls, suggest that a first-past-the-post electoral system could yield just about any outcome. Thus we now have both a government in crisis and a political system in in crisis, a conjunction which, to the best of my knowledge, is unique in modern British history.

Post-Brexit politics

Stepping back from the immediate results, this can be seen as part of the roiling turbulence of politics since the 2016 Referendum, a turbulence which saw six Prime Ministers (and massive churn of ministers) and two premature elections as well as this fragmentation of parties. Of course, it is important not to mistake correlation for causality, or to ascribe single causes to complex developments. It's not all about Brexit. In particular, the fragmentation of political parties was already underway before the referendum, as were the many quite profound social and economic trends which were bound to have a fissiparous effect on the voting bases of the Tory and Labour parties. Labour’s virtual wipeout in Scotland at the hands of the SNP in the 2015 election is just one, but perhaps the most obvious, example.

Nevertheless, no one would deny that Brexit and its aftermath precipitated what political scientist Tim Bale calls “turmoil and transformation” in the Conservative Party. And much of Labour’s own present ‘turmoil’ has its roots in the doomed attempt to placate the leave voters within the party’s traditional electoral base whilst retaining the support of its ‘progressive’ and pro-remain voters. In my May 2018 post discussing the local elections held then, I wrote that “the Labour result shows the crippling limitations of their slippery and ambiguous stance on Brexit … they are too Brexity to pick up committed remainer votes and insufficiently Brexity to attract committed leavers.” It is depressing that this applies word-for-word eight years later [2].

Thus, the latest election results again demonstrate that in trying to please everyone Labour have managed to please no-one, alienating those on both the right and the left of its electoral coalition and, notably, both younger and older voters. Again, it bears saying that some of these tensions (of class, region, ideology etc.) have been present since the inception of the Labour Party, and rapidly intensified during the New Labour period, but Brexit added a significant new dimension to them.

Certainly the English council election results carried the fingerprints of Brexit, with Reform performing strongly where the leave vote was highest and, conversely, performing weakly where the remain vote was highest. This isn’t necessarily ‘because of Brexit’ so much as that both it and the Brexit vote arose from similar causes. The Brexit imprint is also evident in the Liberal Democrats’ support, in that their opposition to Brexit continues to make them congenial to liberal conservative voters repelled by the post-Brexit Tory Party. The latter probably explains, for example, their victories in East Surrey and West Surrey last week, although it can be argued that in appealing to such voters they, too, are being flanked on their ‘progressive’ side by the Greens.

Change, but what change?

If there is any unity, despite all of the fragmentation, it is to be found in the ubiquitous, angry demand that ‘things must change’, a demand made even by the Prime Minister himself. But, tragically, that very demand only goes to show the profundity of the fragmentation. Not only is there no agreement as to what changes are necessary, for many it is a demand with no content (e.g. ‘it’s time for a change’ or ‘why not give someone else a go’). Even worse, as Brexit shows only too clearly, when demands for change are met those demanding it are not necessarily satisfied or, as with the demand to cut net migration, do not necessarily know when they are met. And perhaps worst of all is the sense that for some voters it is not just that nothing will satisfy them but that they don’t want to be satisfied: what they want is to be angry, not to have that anger placated.

Whilst the latter applies especially to segments of the leave and Reform vote, what is evident within segments across the political spectrum is a refusal to accept trade-offs and constraints (an example on the left is the belief some, apparently including Green leader Zack Polanski, have in what Professor Jonathan Portes calls the “nonsense economics” of ‘Modern Monetary Theory’). In a sense, the ‘cakeism’ with which Boris Johnson approached Brexit has become embedded in political culture generally. But even if that were not so, it is a fact that Brexit itself, in an economic sense, has increased policy constraints in that we simply have less resources than we would otherwise have. In that way, even if unacknowledged, there is a trade-off between having Brexit and having other things, including tax revenues to devote to public services (estimated to be £65-£90 billion less in 2024-2025 than they otherwise would have been).

Inevitably the consequences of all this fall most heavily on the governing party since it, alone, is charged with delivering the ‘change’ that no one agrees on, and it, alone, is faced with the constraints that those outside government can ignore or deny. That is actually a fairly good description of the fate that befell the Tory governments in their delivery of Brexit. It certainly applies to the present Labour government, including to its ‘make Brexit work’ policy’. But, more generally, because politics is so fragmented, any and every policy initiative encounters substantial opposition and this government, mainly because of it lacks any coherent strategy or ideology, habitually responds by ‘u-turning’, which itself contributes to a sense of constant crisis.

That would be a problem for any government, but it is a particular problem for this one because of a nasty little paradox at the heart of the widespread demand that ‘things must change’. That paradox is best-captured by Labour’s 2024 electoral promise that ‘change is stability’. It was a promise which grew directly out of Brexit in that it proposed an alternative to all the political chaos of the years after the referendum. Now, that takes on a particular significance with the intense wave of demands for Keir Starmer to be replaced (of which more below). Perhaps, without the background of all the Tory leadership changes, that would have been an obvious way of dealing with the government’s crisis. As it is, if Starmer goes it will only mark a continuation of the last ten years of crisis. On the other hand, if he does not go, the palpable sense of a government in crisis and a Prime Minister besieged and lacking authority will persist. So, stay or go, the crisis remains.

The relaunch and the reset

Clearly Starmer’s preference is to stay on, and his immediate response to the traumatic election results was to attempt yet another ‘relaunch’ of his premiership. Even before the events which came later in the week this seemed like a doomed enterprise if only because, fairly or unfairly (and one does not have to be a fan to think that much of the bile about him seems excessive), he is loathed by almost all sections of the political spectrum. As the political journalist Samuel Earle put it prior to the relaunch speech, “It is too late for Starmer to learn from his mistakes: he is in a hate-loop from which he cannot escape.” But even if that was not so, there seems little sign that he is able to learn and, when it came, the ’relaunch’ speech on Monday illustrated this, being little more than a re-hash of similar speeches he has given in the past, and nowhere more so than in what he said about Brexit.

It’s true that, as has been the case recently, he highlighted Farage’s complicity in the failure of Brexit. But, as ever, his own policy was either vague or laughable (or, as when he claimed to be “putting Britain at the heart of Europe”, both). As always, he spoke of being “ambitious” for the relationship with Europe, but the actual policy is no more ambitious than before, except perhaps in sounding slightly more enthusiastic about a youth experience scheme – but this is something to which his government has had to be forced, kicking and screaming, to (probably) accept and even this week there are reports that agreement is foundering because of UK insistence on tightly capping numbers.

Within this, there are several strands to unpick. One is that it is true that, for all its limitations, even to talk in this way, and to pursue a cooperative strategy, does mark a difference to the Conservatives and Reform. However, that is not a new development (so was hardly going to help him to ‘relaunch’ his government) and suffers from the same deficiency of being too much for some voters and too little for others. Secondly, of course, the continuation of the ‘red lines’ (no single market, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people) means any ambitions are highly circumscribed.

Yet it does not follow that dropping those red lines now would be a workable policy. For one thing, given all Labour’s previous commitments, especially in the manifesto, there would be a substantial political price to pay for undertaking what would undoubtedly be presented as another U-turn, and a highly dishonest one. But more to the point, it is extremely unlikely that the EU would, at this time, entertain the kind of agreements this would allow because of the very real prospect that the next government would back-track on them, a prospect made all the more real by last week’s election results. I have made this argument ad nauseum on this blog, so will refer readers to Tom Hayes’ latest Substack post outlining how this seems from an EU perspective. Given this, dropping the red lines now would incur the political costs of dropping a major policy commitment without the corresponding benefits of delivering on the new policy [3].

This does not mean that Starmer’s approach to Brexit is the right one. He could do three things differently. Firstly, he could champion the ‘reset’, limited as it is, not just in terms of its instrumental benefits, limited as they are, but as an enthusiastic articulation of the beginning of a long-term project to build a new, principled, pro-European consensus, and as an explicit stepping-stone to reversing the historical error of Brexit. Second, he could argue, now, that the future policy, for the next election, should be to drop the red lines. Third, he could spell out, in terms, that it is the possibility of a future Reform and/or Tory government which is the real block on progress. In short, rather than simply chunter about being ‘more ambitious’ he could provide a concrete explanation of how this could be achieved. It would be, at once, dramatic, realistic, honest, and – something Starmer badly needs to be – leaderly.

An ungovernable country?

However, whilst this might be a better approach to Brexit, it is difficult to see that there is anything Starmer can now do to survive for much longer. As the Financial Times’ columnist Robert Shrimsley put it (£), writing immediately following the relaunch speech, “Starmer’s premiership is ebbing away. The blow could fall today, tomorrow, next week or next month. MPs are just weighing the odds and timings they need to get their people in place. The decision is made. It is now only about logistics.”

That sentiment, hammered home over the next few days, culminating in Wes Streeting’s resignation yesterday, is now so widespread that it is effectively self-fulfilling: political authority, like confidence in a currency, ultimately resides in its general acceptance. Yet, with Starmer apparently unwilling to resign and with, at least for now, no formal leadership challenge having been made, it seems likely we are in for a potentially protracted period of instability and drift before he is replaced (including if, as some are urging, he ‘sets out a timetable for his departure’).

The bigger question is what happens afterwards. It is unlikely to be followed by a new era of calm. Whoever replaces Starmer as Prime Minister will face frenzied speculation about another election being needed to secure a mandate. It’s also perfectly possible, for example if a leadership contest is held without it being possible for Andy Burnham to stand (since it cannot be assumed that he will succeed in his bid to become an MP), that the new leader will immediately fall prey to fresh plotting. This becomes all the more likely if a change of leadership is unaccompanied by any new analysis or agenda. And these two possibilities make this another question with no good answer: if there is a new agenda the need to secure a fresh mandate is all the greater, but if there is not a new agenda the likelihood of yet more leadership plotting is all the greater.

The even bigger question is about the limits to leadership itself, regardless of who the leader is. For, increasingly, it seems as if the consequence of a polity, not just in the sense of parties and institutions but of a population, which is split into multiple, angry segments with contradictory demands and, even, contradictory views of reality, is ungovernability. That situation is compounded by the media addiction to politics as spectacle which, as I discussed in a recent post, has probably become all the greater for having been fed by the dramas of the Brexit process. And perhaps what the electorate and the media share is a sheer impatience with both the timescale and complexity of policymaking.

We may not quite have reached the point of ungovernability, but I think we are getting close to it, an observation now widely made by political commentators on both the left and the right (though others disagree (£) with this diagnosis). The beneficiaries of this are populists, for whom anger, contradiction, chaos, and the disorientating effect of hyperactive news churn are not just opportunities but preferences. That applies to populists of both the left and the right but, currently, most obviously to Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Nevertheless, for Farage the election results are both a blessing and a curse. They enable him to present his fragment of the vote (which, don’t forget, is only a fragment, at about 25% in England in these elections) as the rise of a popular army, and himself as a Prime Minister in waiting. That also engenders more media coverage. On the other hand, such coverage will bring more scrutiny, especially of Farage’s financial dealings, and it is notable that the gurning grin and throaty chuckle which make him undeniably appealing (to some) give way to a tetchy anger when faced with such scrutiny. The range of things which are, or should be, major scandals for Farage is extraordinary, encompassing his recently-revealed undeclared ‘personal gift’ of £5 million from the Anglo-Thai cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, the purchase of his house in Clacton, and the scale and nature of his extra-parliamentary earnings.

Reform’s success will also bring more publicity for the utter ineptitude (£) with which it runs the growing number of local councils it controls, and for the many freaks, incompetents, rogues and racists amongst its councillors. Within hours of last week’s vote, newly elected Reform councillors began to resign amidst scandal. Many others will simply be out of their depth, finding it rather harder to engage with the complexities of local government than to fire off angry social media posts.

It’s true that for his hard-core supporters such scrutiny will make no difference. However, Reform-curious voters may be put off by what they see, whilst anti-Reform voters may be more minded to vote tactically the more likely a Farage premiership becomes. In other words, whatever he and his supporters may think, there is no inevitability in a Farage victory. However, a defeat for Farage, born of antipathy towards him and his policies, and cobbled together by the rickety means of tactical voting in a now broken electoral system (£), will hardly mark a resolution to political turmoil and incipient ungovernability.

Leadership for the unleadable

For such a resolution to happen, if indeed it can happen, it would require an extraordinary combination of political strategy and leadership. That would be needed to address multiple areas where policy has basically failed – social care, housing, and the criminal justice system are some obvious examples – and deep-seated problems such as chronic illness, an ageing population, and low productivity. At the same time, it would have to address the significant security threats which require an urgent increase in military capacity and the development of international alliances.

There is no sign at all, so far as I can see, that any existing political party is remotely capable of providing this strategy or the leadership to deliver it and, more to the point, any sign that the voting public would be amenable to it. Indeed, perhaps even to postulate a party coming up with a solution is part of the problem. In my former life as an organization studies academic one of the key topics of my discipline was leadership and, whereas traditional models focused on the person and conduct of ‘the leader’, it became increasingly widely understood that this had to be understood as a relationship between leaders and followers, with ‘followership’ as necessary as ‘leadership’.

From that perspective, the commentator Zoe Williams, in her own discussion of ungovernability, says something which is rather obvious but is politically almost unsayable: that voters need to ask themselves if it is they, rather than politicians who are to blame. That is most clearly the case for those voters (£) willing to be serially tricked by Farage, willing to ignore all the financial skullduggery and regard him as a man of the people, willing to ignore the scandals and incompetence of Reform councils, or, just, willing to vapidly bleat of supporting him as ‘it is time for a change’. But it does not just apply to them. It seems as if sooner rather than later we will get a new Prime Minister. If so, it is all too likely that, sooner rather than later, they too will be savaged by an angry and divided electorate and a drama-addicted media.

 

Notes

[1] In this post I am not focusing on the technical intricacies of Brexit but it bears mentioning that the government’s reset plans, and especially the plan for an SPS deal, will create considerable complexities for the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales (Northern Ireland is different because it aligns with EU SPS regulations in any case). A key component of this is the European Partnership Bill announced in the King’s Speech this week, as expected (see, for example, my post of 3 April 2026).

[2] Other aspects of that May 2018 post make for curious reading, especially my observation that the results showed that Cameron’s plan to use the referendum to destroy the electoral threat to the Conservatives posed by UKIP had, at least, had that effect. Well, it was true at the time, and in a way, but …

[3] For an analysis of how ‘rejoining’ could become a reality for both the EU and the UK, see the recently published Discussion Paper by Andrew Duff of the European Policy Centre.

A pregnant pause

This post is slightly shorter than usual because the last fortnight has been a fairly quiet period for Brexit-related news, with the dominant domestic story having been the continuing fall-out from Keir Starmer’s ill-judged appointment of Peter Mandelson. Even that does have some Brexit angles, though. Certainly Morgan McSweeney claimed this week that the choice of Mandelson was animated by the post-Brexit need to have a good trade relationship with the US. Actually, I suspect that, even if it’s true that Mandelson was appointed for his supposed ‘Trump-whispering’ credentials, something which is contested [1], this rationale would have applied regardless of Brexit because of the non-trade issues at stake in the UK-US relationship (i.e. defence and security).

Perhaps the more important Brexit angle is that one of the things Starmer’s government was expected to achieve was a substantial improvement in the relationship between politicians and civil servants following the huge damage done to it during the Brexit process. Yet the summary ejection of Sir Olly Robbins from the Foreign Office brought that relationship to what is probably a new low, made all the more noteworthy by the fact that Robbins at one time led the UK Brexit negotiations and, in that role, became almost a hate-figure to Brexiters.

However, in general terms there a sense of Brexit being on pause, but it is an unusually expectant pause, awaiting three imminent events.

The coming elections

The first of these is the English local council, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections which will be held next week. The results of these will have numerous consequences but one of them is that, assuming Labour do as badly as is expected, Starmer will face enormous pressure to reinvent or to resign his premiership. If the outcome is ‘reinvention’, then one very possible aspect of that will be to move from Labour’s “crabwise” approach to UK-EU relations to something quicker and deeper. If the outcome is ‘resignation’ (whether willing or forced) then it is highly likely that discussion of such a move will feature strongly in the race to succeed him, and that his successor, whoever it is, will embrace a reinvented policy.

In some ways, this would only be the continuation of the existing direction of travel. It is not so long since Labour had a virtual omerta on even mentioning Brexit. Starmer very reluctantly broke that silence in July 2022, although only to insist on his ‘red lines’, and for most of the period since then has relied on formulaic repetitions of the reset policy. It is really only in the last couple of months that he, Rachel Reeves, and other ministers have openly spoken of the damage Brexit has caused. But that openness has had the inevitable corollary of exposing the limitations of their plans to repair the damage, and increases the pressure for a far more ambitious policy.

A move in that direction would also be a continuation of Labour’s emergent realization, especially since losing to the Greens in Gorton & Denton, of the electoral need to offer its anti-Brexit members and voters a reason for loyalty. In particular, a shift to a full-throated project to ‘rejoin’ (probably articulated in terms of a future manifesto commitment rather than an immediate policy) might be seen as a way to out-flank the rather cautious ‘customs union for now’ position of both the Green Party and the Lib Dems. Whether such calculations, especially if transparently designed to save Starmer’s job, constitute the kind of principled commitment which could yield a genuine partnership with, let alone eventual membership of, the EU is another matter.

The coming UK-EU Summit

The second imminent event is the next UK-EU Summit. Unless I have missed it, the date of this has still not been agreed but in a speech at the beginning of April Starmer said that it would be announced “in the coming weeks”. This summit will really be the point at which the ‘reset’ has to have tangible outcomes, turning the rather vague aspirations of last May’s meeting into definite agreements. In particular, but also at the very least, the SPS or ‘veterinary’ agreement, which the government constantly talks of as if it were a done deal, will have to be delivered if there is to be a chance of getting it to the point of implementation by the next general election.

However, the reality is that the May 2025 Summit, which even at the time was rather insipid, now seems woefully inadequate given the scale of events since, most obviously the endless raging storm of Trump’s tariff policy and the successive international crises he has provoked, most damagingly in the Middle East. For example, the impact of an SPS deal on UK food prices, which was never going to be that great, now looks like very small beer in the face of the inflation of food and many other prices which is coming down the track as the result of the Iran War. So delivering on the 2025 Summit will not be enough and Starmer’s April speech said as much:

“I can tell you, at [the next] summit, the UK will not just ratify existing commitments made at last year’s summit. We want to be more ambitious. Closer economic cooperation. Closer security cooperation. A partnership that recognises our shared values, our shared interests, and our shared future. A partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.”

What this means in practice is, as usual, very vague. But it is hard to see how Starmer can go on and on making such vague promises without delivering and, in conjunction with the issue of how he responds to the May election results, this means that the next Summit is going to be a crucial moment in post-Brexit relations. It will show whether there is any momentum to the reset, any momentum to go beyond the reset, or whether we are stuck in the sludge, muddling along with nothing really changing since, effectively, the point at which, with Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework agreement in February 2023, a kind of post-Brexit status quo was achieved, more through exhaustion than anyone being especially satisfied with it.

At the time, I wrote of that perhaps being the moment when Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ broke (in the sense of ending the period of open hostility towards the EU, with British threats to renege on the agreements made etc.) and would be followed by a long, slow process of convalescence. Arguably, that is what we have seen since then and, if so, the question is whether we are still in that process or whether there will be a new phase of more rapid recuperation.

The coming anniversary

The third imminent event is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, on 23 June. At that point, there will be a rash of re-evaluations of Brexit, and already the anniversary is being invoked as a moment to initiate a renewed debate. That would be occurring anyway, just because ‘ten’ is a round number, but it has an added salience because of the context of international crisis and domestic disarray and, with that, the pervasive sense of a country adrift. As the economics and politics commentator Simon Nixon put it this week, with remarkable rapidity Brexit has ceased to be a taboo subject in British politics.

Thus, in the last fortnight there have been several high-profile interventions, including that of Sir Philip Rycroft, the former Permanent Secretary of the erstwhile Department for Exiting the European Union. Writing in The Times (£), he argued that the promises made for Brexit had not materialized, and that changes in public opinion and the international situation meant that it was time to make the argument for ‘rejoining’. Meanwhile, last weekend’s Observer made the call to rejoin its front page and carried an article by Neil Kinnock (£) arguing the case for doing so, as well as a report by the paper’s political and economic editors (£) (quoting Kinnock, Rycroft, Sadiq Khan, and a former President of the CBI, amongst others) of there being pressure on Starmer to at least begin a conversation about rejoining.

Notably, all of the interventions I’ve mentioned refer to a report entitled “Is it time to talk about EU membership?’ just published by Best for Britain which presents and analyses new public opinion survey data showing support/opposition for rejoining at 53%-32% and suggesting that, ultimately, this would be a more politically sustainable policy than, for example, seeking single market membership. What’s notable is not so much the figures, which are in line with other recent opinion polls, but my impression, at least, that campaign groups like Best for Britain (which not long ago was proposing what in my view was a variant of the flawed ‘mutual recognition solution’) and the European Movement are now more vocal, or more confident, in talking about ‘rejoining’. That is only an impression, but it will be interesting to see, for example, the level of support for the next National Rejoin March, which will be held on 20 June, and perhaps even more interesting to see the extent and the nature of the media coverage it receives.

The coming conversation

Obviously these three imminent events link together, with the idea of a ten-year anniversary ‘national conversation’ being part of the attempts from outside and within the Labour Party to push for a new policy in preparation for the expected election results and in anticipation of the summit. And, to the extent that this new policy is envisaged as being more ambitious than the reset, that pretty much implies the abandonment of Labour’s ‘red lines’, as was argued this week by Labour MP Marsha de Cordova [2]. Whether that will happen any time soon I doubt, not least because I doubt whether the opinion poll support for joining the EU is yet large enough or reliable enough for Starmer or any other Labour leader to depend upon it.

Nevertheless, it is already clear that the coming months are going to see a revival of debate about Brexit and that will include, as indeed reactions to these recent interventions have already shown, a ferocious reaction from leading Brexiters. In that sense it will show that, in line with the book I reviewed in an ‘extra’ post on this blog last week, the “tribal divisions” of the 2016 referendum have persisted. For that matter, whilst the May election results may well push Labour to a more anti-Brexit position, the expected gains of Reform UK will be a fillip to the confidence of Brexiters. That is another reason why beginning the process of joining the EU is not an imminent possibility, but this certainly doesn’t mean that a revived debate about doing so will be unimportant or meaningless.

No doubt I will write more about that when we get to the tenth anniversary, but, for now, an important point to make is that the continuing Brexit divisions show just how comprehensively Brexit has failed, in at least two ways.

Firstly, whilst those divisions have persisted, and much of the debate about Brexit is extremely repetitious, the underlying dynamics have shifted and will likely continue to do so. In 2016, the Brexiters’ case was primarily about how good the effects of leaving the EU would be. Now, their argument is just that it hasn’t been as bad as was warned or as is claimed. That is, it has become a fundamentally defensive case, and, moreover, that case is necessarily undermined by their constant claim that Brexit has been ‘betrayed’. It is hard to mount a convincing defence of something whilst also disdaining it.

The ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’ – but in the end this term will have to be dropped) case has also altered, in that it is now possible to demonstrate the damage of not being a member and also possible for joining the EU to be presented, as leaving once was, as a radical disavowal of the status quo in favour of a new and desirable future. Indeed, ultimately, the viability of the ‘join’ case, not least in the eyes of the EU, will depend on it being articulated in positive terms and not just as an escape from the hardship of a failed experiment.  

The second point about the ongoing debate is, simply, the fact that it is ongoing. In the second edition of my book about Brexit I wrote that according to its advocates and supporters “… Brexit was intended to be the start of a confident national renewal, a reinvigoration of national purpose, prosperity and standing. It certainly wasn’t proposed as, or supposed to be, the prelude to a country permanently divided on the wisdom of Brexit, still less to an interminable debate about whether it had been the right thing to do ….” (p.285) and I went on to quote David Frost saying 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.”

He said that in June 2022, so we haven’t quite reached the point he specified, but there’s absolutely no sign that his test will be met. As the writer and journalist Matt Carr puts it in his recent, excellent Substack post:

“Ten years after Brexit, the UK is yet to find either peace or acceptance. Roiled by angry, vicious dreams and fed on a diet of toxic delusions, it recognises the folly of the decision that it took in 2016, but does not know how to change it, or simply does not dare.”

Yet, depressing as that is, it would be even more depressing if Frost’s test had been met, we had ceased to debate Brexit and it had settled in the British polity.

Notes

[1] I express this conditionally because, although that has always been my understanding, and one shared by, amongst others, the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr, another eminent political commentator, Stephen Bush of the Financial Times, is adamant that the sequence of events shows that the government’s desire to appoint Mandelson preceded Trump’s re-election. Whatever the truth of this, it doesn’t affect my point that the idea it had a Brexit rationale is questionable.

[2] It should not, however, be thought that all the pressure within the Labour Party points towards erasing the government’s red lines, or even towards a more ambitious reset within those red lines. For example, it was reported this week (£) that (unnamed) ministers are concerned that Labour’s increasing commitment to alignment with EU regulations, above and beyond that entailed by the reset, of will impair the UK’s ability to set its own regulatory regime for AI. And the regulatory alignment envisaged by the existing reset policy also has critics, some of whom may well be Labour voters and members, who are opposed to the fact that an SPS deal will prevent Britain adopting its own animal welfare protections.

Book review: When two tribes go to war …

(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’. My normal fortnightly post will appear next Friday.) 

Hobolt, Sara & Tilley, James (2026) Tribal Politics. How Brexit Divided Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198911715 (Hardback). 243 pp. £30

This excellent new book is a major addition to the academic literature on Brexit, as well as being accessible and fascinating for non-academic readers interested in Brexit or contemporary British politics generally. Indeed, one implication of the book is that it isn’t really possible to understand contemporary British politics without understanding Brexit because of the endurance of the identities of ‘leaver’ and ‘remainer’.

It is these identities which are the subject of the book. That is to say, this is not a book about the referendum, the parliamentary politics which followed, the negotiations with the EU, or the impact of Brexit on economics or international relations. Whilst all of these are touched upon, the specific focus is describing and explaining Brexit identities amongst the public/ voters and how and why, as the title suggests, these have proved sufficiently divisive to take on a ‘tribal’ character.

The idea that such Brexit identities exist is not, of course, a new one. Apart from being familiar from everyday experience, it has previously been recognized by academics (e.g. Sobolewska & Ford, 2020) and the authors of this book, two eminent political scientists based at LSE and Oxford respectively, rigorously reference and discuss the extant literature. However, Hobolt & Tilley provide the first comprehensive study of how and why, despite EU membership having been an issue of low salience for most voters prior to the referendum, these identities came to exist and have persisted for so long after Britain actually left the EU and after Brexit ceased to feature prominently in the news.

Summary of book

The basic fact of that persistence is most clearly summarized in a chart (p. 88) showing the percentage of people thinking of themselves as remainers or leavers over the period 2017-2026. In essence, the chart shows that those identifying as one or the other, whilst falling from 75% in 2017, was still 60% in 2025. At the outset of the period, each group had about the same level of identification, at about 37%. That figure persists for remainer identification but, after 2020, the figure for leaver identification falls to about 23% by 2025. The authors explain the various reasons for this disparity, some of which are more obvious than others, but, overall, they argue that its significance should not be exaggerated and that “the difference in the trajectory of the two groups is … much less interesting than the similarity between them” (p. 96).

The explanation of why an issue (in this case Brexit) can give rise to issue-based identities is given in terms of the existence of three conditions (pp. 3-4, and more extensively pp. 19-22). These are “issue contestation” (there is strong conflict between groups around a salient, meaning essentially non-trivial, issue); “issue expression” (expressing, in word or deed, commitment to that issue cements identification with the group); and “issue alignment” (the issue doesn’t align with existing identifications, such as political parties, so can become the basis for an identity in its own right). Brexit, the authors suggest, “provided the Goldilocks mixture” (p. 1) of these conditions.

This explanatory framework derives from Social Identification Theory, which is elaborated in chapter two of the book (pp. 10-27) as an alternative (or perhaps a supplement) to rational choice theories of political behavior (p. 11), and the next three chapters explain how and why the issue of Brexit was able to become the basis for such social identification. An important argument within that is Hobolt & Tilley’s demonstration that Brexit identities can’t be reduced to pre-existing characteristics such as educational level but “were ultimately the product of the vote and the political context of the vote” (p.74). So, contrary to what is often believed, Brexit marked a distinctive rupture and not simply a reprise or rebadging of established patterns of political sociology.

Equally important are the chapters thereafter, which explain how these identities have persisted and, in some respects, intensified over time through processes of “affective polarization” (pp. 96-119). Some of this is explained in terms of personality traits (pp. 153-159), but perhaps more interestingly by the ways in which Brexit identities, once in place, tended to create “a set of incentives to adjust one’s views accordingly” (p. 145). That is, to avoid “cognitive dissonance” (pp. 121-124) people tend to take on all of the views of their ‘tribe’ and to interpret developments through that lens. In this and other ways “confirmation bias” (p. 122, and pp. 120-146 generally) has tended to solidify leaver and remainer identities

Such solidification evidently connects with the familiar idea that social media has led us to exist within ‘echo chambers’, re-enforcing our pre-existing views and even making them more extreme. However, the authors provide strong evidence to support their claim that “the real echo chamber” (p. 169) is not social media nearly so much as it is real life family and friendship networks. At all events, leaver and remainer identities have proved sufficiently durable to at least contribute to realignments in voting patterns, which are the subject of the final chapter (pp. 176-188).

There is obviously much more in the book than I have summarized here, and indeed it would be impossible to do justice to the formidable amount of data, analysis and scholarship within it. To my delight, given my great interest in the novels of C.P. Snow as a source of political insights, it even includes reference to one of his novels (p. 153).

Limitations and criticisms

The book does, however, have some limitations (as all books do). One is that the data presented are almost entirely quantitative (mainly large-scale longitudinal surveys). That has many strengths in terms of charting attitudes over time, and can capture things like emotional attachment to identities (see pp. 101-105), but does not provide the kind of insights into the meaning of Brexit identities for those who hold them which could be disclosed by including qualitative data. To put that another way, despite the focus on ‘tribes’ there is little anthropological sensibility in the analysis.

Another limitation is that the deployment of Social Identification Theory, and especially the work of Henri Tajfel, is not accompanied by any real discussion of the criticisms made of it (e.g. Dashtipour, 2012: Schnur, 2024). Personally, I don’t mind that too much, perhaps reflecting the fact that I am now an ex-academic, but having worked in a field where identity theories (in the plural) are of central importance (e.g. Kenny et al., 2011) I can imagine some of my former colleagues bridling a little.

What I would be slightly more critical of is where this theoretical framing leads. The things which are presented as conditions for the formation of Brexit identities are arguably rather circular. That is most obviously so as regards the condition of ‘issue contestation’, since the existence of strong conflict between groups about a salient issue presupposes that which it seeks to explain: if there are already groups in strong conflict about an issue, those groups will already have members, and membership implies at the very least proto-identification (and almost certainly some degree of ‘issue expression’).

Relatedly, what makes an issue ‘salient’, in the sense it is used here, is that something important is at stake apart from, and at least to some extent prior to, the identities which coalesce around it, but this is somewhat occluded by the theoretical framing of this book. The original work of Tajfel was, as the authors explain (pp. 11-12), based on experiments in which participants were found to embrace tribe-like identities even when the issues dividing them were arbitrarily assigned and had no objective, non-trivial basis. On such an account it is the psychological need for identification, not the issue, which is primary.

Whilst Hobolt & Tilley recognize that the “lab-based experimental paradigm” (p. 19) is neglectful of the social and political context of issue-based identities, the trace of this psychologistic, ‘Tajfelian’ account persists. The result is that remainer and leaver identities are treated as equivalent, differing in political content but not in psychological process. That makes the analysis non-partisan, which is in many ways admirable both for its academic detachment and because it is no doubt true that the psychological processes constituting remainer and leaver identities (affective polarization, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias etc.) are very similar.

However, political actors – voters – people – don’t develop identities irrespective of the substance of what makes issues contestable. Thus, contestation over salient issues is both a condition and a consequence of political identities, and political identities are both a condition and a consequence of contestation over salient issues. This isn’t to deny the authors’ point (e.g. p.135) that policy opinions can be, and often are, substantially shaped by political identities, but nor does that point negate mine: it’s not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.

Moreover, connecting to my earlier comment about the absence of qualitative data about meaning, whilst it is highly plausible that the processes through which remainer and leaver identities develop are very similar, it doesn’t follow, and probably isn’t the case, that what it means to remainers to be remainers is the same as what it means to leavers to be leavers. And it is also quite likely that, in both cases, this meaning has changed over time even though the identity-labels have persisted. This in turn may well mean that what the ‘issue’ is understood to be, and the reasons for its ‘salience’, have changed over time, which is another way of saying that there is a recursive interaction between ‘issue’ and ‘identity’.

There’s certainly much about Brexit which can be analyzed in political-psychological terms, and I sometimes do so myself on this blog and elsewhere. But there's a limit to the traction of viewing it in terms of tribal identities, as if it were akin to the dispute between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Swift’s (1726) political satire Gulliver’s Travels, unless political conflicts are to be detached from political rationality and subsumed within psychological rationales. If, as this book amply demonstrates, Brexit identities have become strongly embedded then it is at least in part for reasons which lie beyond identity, in the same way as is true for other political identities (such as those based on political parties). In what is a broadly ‘rationalistic’ (albeit not a ‘rational choice’) analysis it is perhaps slightly surprising that the focus is so resolutely on the arguers and so relatively little on what they are arguing about.

Conclusion

These criticisms (or, perhaps, they are just variants of a single criticism) do not affect my opening assessment that, overall, this is an excellent book providing compelling analysis of an important topic. It is packed with highly informative data and acute interpretation, and is written with admirable lucidity, especially given the complexity of some of the material. It is, indeed, strange to think that, only ten years ago, the identities of leaver and remainer simply didn’t exist and yet are now a familiar part of political life and the political lexicon. As with all the best social science, this book interrogates the familiar whilst making the strange explicable.

New times, same old arguments

In the ‘new global divide’, the last fortnight has not been a happy one for what can variously be called the anti-liberal, anti-rules, populist, authoritarian or radical right side of that divide. The decisive defeat of its figurehead, Victor Orban, in the Hungarian election last weekend is having ripple effects across the world. Meanwhile Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged presidency has become ever-more bogged down in the still unfolding consequences of his spectacularly ill-judged attack on Iran. Yet whilst the world continues to re-calibrate, post-Brexit Britain remains largely stuck in the same old debates.

The hope and the warning from Hungary

The significance of Orban’s defeat is undeniable - for Hungary, of course, but also for the EU and Ukraine. At the same time, it was also a defeat for his backers, Trump and Putin, and for his many friends and admirers in the ironically global network of populist nationalists, not least Nigel Farage. But Orban’s importance went well beyond these high-level connections. His ideology and, equally important, his money made Hungary a crucial node within that global network, insinuating his influence into every dank crevice of the radical right, perhaps especially those where ethno-nationalism and ‘cultural Christianity’ are to be found lurking.

Thus, as regards the UK, not just Farage but many of the more minor figures who crop up recurrently in this blog have connections of one sort or another with Orban. These include Matthew Goodwin and Frank Furedi (both mentioned, for example, in a post last month), many of those in the overlapping ‘History Reclaimed’, ‘Brains for Brexit’ and ‘Briefings for Britain’ activist groups (discussed, for example, in a post last November), and many of those in the ‘National Conservative’ movement (discussed, for example, in a post in 2023). The latter movement is notable for having enfolded numerous politicians associated with both Tory and Reform parties and many of the ‘intellectuals’ of Brexitism including James Orr, Reform’s recently appointed Head of Policy.

For many of these people Orban’s Hungary became not just a source of funding but an inspiring model. That is worth reflecting upon since, were there ever to be a Reform government, its template would be the authoritarianism and grotesque corruption of the Orban regime [1]. For whilst the end of that regime is certainly a defeat for its admirers, denting their confidence of being in the vanguard of an unstoppable arc of history, it would be quite wrong to imagine it will inspire any change of heart or mind amongst them. And whilst there is inspiration in seeing the Hungarian people defy domestic intimidation and external pressure by voting in droves to throw Orban out, the more important message is of the danger of getting into the situation of that being necessary. After all, not only has Hungary endured sixteen years of misrule but it will also be a long and complex task to undo the damage caused by those years.

Cautious praise for Starmer

Damaging as Orban has been to Hungary and malign as his influence has been upon the wider world, that is nothing compared with the damage being caused by Trump and his administration. Like a great many people, I was much impressed by Mark Carney’s Davos speech earlier this year, precisely because of its crisp articulation of the new global divide and how to respond to it. In brief, what quickly became called the ‘Carney Doctrine’ was a call for “middle powers” to operate and co-operate on the basis of “values-based realism” so as, at least by implication, to navigate around the increasing unpredictability and hostility of the United States.

The immediate context of that speech was the ‘Greenland crisis’ created by Trump’s unprecedented threat to take, possibly by force, the territory of another NATO member. That this seems longer ago than the three months which have actually passed only serves to underscore the validity of Carney’s analysis. Since then, of course, there has been the chaos and devastation caused by Trump’s attack on Iran, including his chilling threat to destroy its “whole civilization” and the now growing rift between the US and China over the US ‘counter-blockade’ of the Strait of Hormuz.

There are several signs that the British government is enacting something like the Carney Doctrine, some of which I outlined in a post in February. Since then, the Iran war has provided further examples of that, most obviously the decision not to join in with it and, most recently, the decision not to participate in the ‘counter-blockade’. For all the many legitimate criticisms of Keir Starmer, he has, as the commentator David Aaronovitch convincingly argues, “got the big one right”.

Along with that, there has been a notable hardening in Starmer’s approach to relations with the US more generally. This hasn’t taken the form of any dramatic statement, and certainly nothing as openly insulting as what Trump has continually said about Starmer and the UK, but at least by implication something has shifted. For example, Starmer recently spoke of being “fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy, businesses' bills go up and down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world”. It is really quite telling to have bracketed Putin and Trump together, and to have denied Trump the courtesy of the title ‘President’. It is certainly difficult to imagine Starmer, or any of his predecessors, speaking of an American President in this way.

And this shift is not just about rhetoric: it is reported (£) that US officials seconded to UK government departments are increasingly being asked to leave meetings when sensitive information is discussed. This is at least conceivably a sign that the government is beginning what would be the long, slow (and expensive) process of following the recent advice of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to reduce its reliance on the US as a security and defence partner. At the very least, it is a sign of how Trump has banjaxed the UK’s trust in the US as, indeed, he has with almost all America’s major allies (£).

Starmer’s approach to Trump and the Iran war is made politically easier because, for once, he is broadly in line with public opinion. Disapproval of the US military strikes on Iran increased as the war went on, rising to 65% (and approval falling to 16%) prior to the ceasefire (if such it be). Meanwhile, support for the government’s handling of the conflict has risen sharply, albeit only from the low base of 20% in March to 31% at the beginning of April, and albeit still lower than the 35% who think the government is handling it badly [2]. It is difficult to separate out opinion on this issue from the general unpopularity of Starmer and his government, but I think there is fair case that Labour’s policy in this area is close to public opinion or, at least, that the alternative of acting with the US would have been very substantially divergent from public opinion.

Discarding Trump, retaining hubris

The unpopularity of Trump and the war have also had the interesting effect of causing his allies and disciples in other countries to distance themselves from his increasingly deranged conduct. In the UK this has a particular significance because of Brexit, since it was central to the Brexiters’ case that the US in general, and Trump specifically, would provide a solid and supportive geo-political and economic anchor for post-Brexit Britain. That became increasingly indefensible in the face of the Trump Tariffs, the Greenland crisis, and his disparaging remarks about the British military, but has been almost entirely abandoned since the short-lived attempt to argue that the UK should have joined in the attack on Iran.

Thus, in the last few weeks (£), Kemi Badenoch, David Frost, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and other prominent Brexiters have started to criticise Trump and the Iran war. Farage’s apostasy has been particularly piquant given his previous boasts of his close friendship with ‘Mr. Brexit’ and his interest, expressed as recently as last September, in being appointed as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington. Now, he says merely that “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by”, and professes to be “shocked” by the threat to destroy Iran’s civilization. Perhaps, apart from electoral calculations, Farage also feels slighted, given the recent snub he endured when he attempted to have dinner with Trump in Florida.

However, there is absolutely no reason to think that this volte face on the pro-Brexit right betokens anything remotely like the pragmatism envisaged by the Carney Doctrine. It certainly doesn’t betoken any recognition of the folly of Brexit, in the sense of recognizing that the UK’s strategic interests align with those of the EU and would be better served by being a member of the EU. On the contrary, it betokens a continuation, even an intensification, of the familiar bellicosity, at once hubristic and self-pitying, that lay behind Brexit. For, as I pointed out in a recent post, the accent is always on national humiliation and betrayal.

So, for example, a recent Daily Mail editorial thundered/whined that:

“Even a few short years ago, the prospect of Britain appearing irrelevant on the global stage would have been unthinkable … our great nation is now little more than a bit player in the geopolitical arena. The war on Iran has put a sharp focus on Sir Keir's inglorious role in consigning Britain to the margins.”

It is an almost unbelievably foolish analysis in its assumption that Britain could, or even should, still be a global power and, certainly, an analysis which is entirely ignorant of British history since Suez, if not since 1945. And, in the process, it is redolent of all the delusions about ‘Global Britain’ that permeated the case for Brexit, both as a reason why the UK could ‘go it alone’ and a promise of the glories which would result from doing so.

Going back to the Carney Doctrine, then, such a posture entails a refusal even to accept the basic reality of ‘middle-powerdom’, since to do so would itself be a betrayal of what “our great nation” should be. From that it follows the kinds of cooperation Carney advocates are deemed shameful. Hence, the editorial asked rhetorically, “would a PM with even a smidgen of respect for either the office he holds or the nation have allowed a situation where the Navy was reduced to asking Germany for the loan of a warship?” And hence, elsewhere in the Mail, a report about the “humiliation” our “once-mighty Navy faces begging French fleet for help to patrol our OWN waters” [emphasis in original].

The Brexit blockage

It is certainly true that the erosion of UK defence capacity is a serious problem, as was forcibly spelt out this week by former NATO boss and Labour Party grandee Lord Roberston. It’s also true, by the way, that for several years now UK defence procurement has been scandalously incompetent, rendering what defence spending there has been less effective than it should have been. What is emphatically untrue is that there is anything inherently shameful in working with allied countries so as to share each other’s resources and assets.

Indeed, it is precisely the implication of the Carney Doctrine, and the lesson to be drawn from America’s now at best questionable commitment to NATO, that such cooperation intensifies. For the UK, whilst that cooperation isn’t confined to its European allies, that must principally mean cooperation with them since, as last week’s revelations about Putin’s offensive activity against underwater cables re-emphasised, Russia is the most direct threat to our national security and it is a threat we share with the rest of Europe.

It is therefore hardly surprising that there is renewed discussion of the case to create an EU army, the most recent example being a speech by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. A rather different, and perhaps more likely, scenario would be to create a European defence capability within the structures of NATO but without reliance on the US, something reported this week in the Wall Street Journal (£) to be under active discussion. Such a capability would not, in itself, be confined to EU members and it seems to be envisaged that the UK could be involved as well as other non-members like Norway and Turkey.

However, at least as reported, the discussions to date are being driven by thinking in Germany and France in particular, and it is difficult to see how such a development could be separated from EU initiatives to boost the capacity of its defence industries. More generally, it is hard to doubt that the centre of gravity of influence and decision-making of a ‘European NATO’ would be the EU simply because the bulk of the countries involved would be members of both. Almost inevitably that would fall foul of the kind of sentiments expressed in the Mail editorial and, indeed, the idea is already being reported in The Sun as “Europe’s secret plan” – not, admittedly outright Brussels-bashing, but certainly there is no suggestion in the report that this plan is something the UK is, could, or should be involved in.

At all events, the prospect of a British government making a whole-hearted commitment to this, or any other version of a regional security alliance, seems remote for so long as the belief that the UK still is, or could be, a global power in its own right remains so entrenched [3]. That belief is part of what brought us Brexit, and it continues to dog post-Brexit Britain. Equally, the Brexit pre-occupation with sovereignty intrudes not as a matter of principle (such an alliance would have no more, and no less, implication for sovereignty than NATO itself) but because of the irrational loathing of, specifically, European sovereignty-sharing.

Marmalade and markets

A clear sign of just how far the UK is from even entertaining something as profound as a Europe-wide integration of defence capabilities can be seen in the hysterical row that broke out this fortnight over – yes – marmalade. In brief, there was a sudden rash of reports that the effect of the government’s plans to align with EU food regulations as part of the (still not agreed) SPS deal would mean that marmalade would have to be called ‘citrus marmalade’. The story was not just confined to the usual tabloids but appeared on the BBC and elsewhere.

Everything about it was stupid. To take the most obvious thing, it isn’t true, because the regulation will allow jars to be marked orange marmalade (or lemon, or grapefruit etc.). For another thing, it will have little practical impact since most marmalades are already labelled in this way (follow this link for more on the whole ‘controversy’, and its relationship to Brexit). However, it would be wrong to add to the list of stupidities the criticism that the issue is a trivial one or, rather, whilst trivial in itself it illustrates two important things.

Firstly, it is actually a downstream ripple of the jingoistic rants about “our great nation” that characterise the discussions of defence, with the issue presented in the Express as an attack on “the nation’s iconic marmalade”, something which according to the BBC has “long been a quintessential British preserve”. In this way, it is an illustration of how deeply embedded this nationalistic hubris is embedded, and how readily it provokes affronted anger. Secondly, the story was presented as an example of Brussels bureaucracy getting in the way of business, and this shows that the meaning of a single market is still not understood. For the point of all these ‘trivial’ regulations is to enable business through harmonization: that is, it removes the barriers of national regulations by creating a single set of trans-national regulations. Just as there could not be an effective national market if each county had its own product regulations, so there cannot be an effective European single market without a shared set of product regulations.

The row quickly morphed into a wider one about the entirety of the dynamic alignment of SPS regulations of which the labelling of marmalade in just one example. This wider row seemed to begin with what the Guardian last weekend rather cheekily called its ‘exclusive’ story about planned government legislation to facilitate such dynamic alignment, which then got picked up by other media outlets including the BBC. Actually, far from being an ‘exclusive’, I discussed this planned legislation in my post two weeks ago and that discussion was itself based upon a report in the Financial Times (£) over a week before that!

At all events, there has been a fresh outburst of screams about ‘Brexit betrayal’ (we might wonder, and wonder at, just how many times it is possible to ‘betray’ something which has so often been betrayed), and beneath that, again, the same inability to understand the meaning of a single market. With tragic inevitability, Daniel Hannan provided one of the best examples of this, showing himself to be still unteachably ignorant about the difference between a free trade agreement and a single market, still hopelessly confused about what ‘mutual recognition’ means, and still pitifully convinced that EU “spite” is the only obstacle to his fantasises.

I’m skipping rather lightly over this as, frankly, I don’t have the strength to unpick all this junk yet again and I suspect most readers of this blog will not need me to do so (although those wanting more detail on the possibly less-well understood rabbit hole of ‘mutual recognition’ will find it in a post from February 2025).

A dangerous obsolescence

The distance between the issues discussed at the beginning of this post and those with which it has finished discloses much about the condition of post-Brexit Britain. The wider world is in a profound state of flux and crisis. Like every other country, Britain is caught up in that. Starmer, to his credit, is at least inching towards a Carney-type recalibration, although he probably lacks the vision, and certainly lacks the political capital, to do much more than that. But the dominant terms of political and media discourse are woefully inadequate for the strategic challenges it poses.

That would no doubt have been true even if Brexit had never happened. But Brexit means that those terms of discourse are inadequate in a particular way, stuck in the lexicon of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, anchored in a world which is already disappearing from view. That is depressing in itself but, given the nature of the world that is emerging, it is also deeply dangerous.

 

Notes

[1] For an indication of what would be in store, consider Farage’s financial interest in the cryptocurrency firm Stack BTC (led by that renowned financial mastermind Kwasi Kwarteng) in the context of his policy to deregulate cryptocurrencies and his avowedly anti-globalist, anti-elite party’s reliance upon cryptocurrency donors, most notably Thai-based, McKinsey alumnus, Cambridge graduate Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit), and Hong Kong-based, J.P. Morgan alumnus, Oxford graduate Ben Delo. Compare also with the way Trump has used his presidency to enrich himself and his family, not least through his cryptocurrency ventures. Fun fact: in March 2025, Trump granted a pardon to Ben Delo and his two co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX following their conviction for money-laundering offences.

[2] The 35% disapproval figure probably has to be treated with considerable care. It presumably includes some who, whilst agreeing with the decision not to join in war, are critical of other aspects of how the conflict is being handled (e.g. preparedness to deploy ships to protect UK bases in Cyprus), and it surely includes some who would want the UK to have distanced itself even further from the conflict than Starmer has done (e.g. by refusing any use at all of UK airbases or airspace).

[3] In this context, a re-emerging Brexit-related issue is that of the UK’s bases in Cyprus. As with the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands, the Cyprus facilities are one of the ways Britain retains the vestiges of a global role and, in both cases, their existence, use and role have been brought to prominence during the Iran crisis. Early on in the Brexit negotiations, the future of the Cyprus bases was a matter of considerable complexity and uncertainty but, in the event, proved to be less intractable than the somewhat comparable issue of Gibraltar (the agreement on which, by the way, will come into force this July). Now, partly because of the Iranian drone attacks but also in the light of the (now-suspended) Chagos deal, there are renewed calls in Cyprus for their status to be re-negotiated, and indications that the EU is supportive of those calls. Yet it seems plausible that if the UK were to commit to the development of a regional security alliance along the lines of a ‘European NATO’ these bases could become part of its pooled assets.