The fortnight since my last post seems to have been packed with important news, not least the resounding defeat suffered by Trump in the US mid-term elections and the continuing, even intensifying, discussion within the UK about its relationship with the EU. Within that there are many reminders not so much of why the question of Brexit is back but of why it can never really go away.
Mr Brexit’s mid-terms
In terms of the focus of this blog, the result of the mid-terms is important for two reasons. One is just the general sense in which Trump and Brexit have been linked, going right back to 2016 when he hailed the referendum result and frequently compared his own campaign for the presidency with that to leave the EU, dubbing himself “Mr Brexit”. In turn, Brexiters, and especially Nigel Farage, regarded Trump’s first presidential election as indicative that there was a transatlantic populist tide which both had caught. In a similar way, Farage was cock-a-hoop when his hero won a second term in 2024.
Farage downplays his admiration nowadays, presumably well aware that it is not shared by the vast majority of British voters (or even most Reform voters), whilst Trump publicly snubbed his erstwhile friend earlier this year. Yet Farage remained invested, to the extent of anticipating that the experts would be confounded by a Republican success in the mid-terms, a prediction which, like so many he made for Brexit, did not survive contact with reality.
Beyond this ideological linkage, it was always a key part of the Brexiter prospectus that leaving the EU would yield the (supposedly wonderful) prize of a free trade deal with the United States, especially under Trump. As ever, this was highly contradictory since, at the time of the referendum, another part of that prospectus was that Brexit would allow Britain to avoid the (supposedly awful) consequences of being part of TTIP, the then anticipated EU free trade deal with … the United States. At all events, even Brexiters have now grasped that Trump has little interest in free trade and zero capacity to make any kind of ‘deal’ worthy of the name about trade or anything else, so it has become another part of their dream which has quietly died.
The second reason why Trump’s mid-term defeat is important lies in what it means for the geo-political landscape faced by post-Brexit Britain. To some extent that remains to be seen, but most commentators agree that it would be a mistake to think that it heralds a return to what we used to think of as normality. Trump may be politically wounded, but he will still be in power for the next two years and his initial response to the mid-term results gives a strong suggestion of how he will use that power. In particular, the appointment of the deeply loathsome Stephen Miller (£) as his Chief of Staff implies a foreign policy even more closely aligned in favour of Russia and against Ukraine as well as hostile to Europe more generally.
Looking further ahead, there is no reason to assume that subsequent US Presidents will be significantly different, at least in the substance of their foreign policies. It’s not just that the American electorate has chosen Trump twice, and may well choose someone similar again. More pertinently, it’s that even a far less malicious, corrupt and capricious American administration is unlikely to be willing to act as a permanent guarantor of European security. A more benign administration would not support far-right nationalist movements in Europe, and might manage its withdrawal from European security in a more responsible way. But that withdrawal pre-dates Trump and will post-date him. And, after all, the US role in Europe’s security was an artefact of the Second World War and its Cold War aftermath. There’s no reason to expect that it will, or even should, continue in perpetuity.
The fact of the EU
That fundamental historic shift directly relates to Brexit. It inevitably means that Europe as a continent is going to have to collectively manage its own security and defence to a far greater extent than in the past. If the EU did not exist then that might perhaps imply the creation of a security and defence alliance between European nations – a kind of European NATO. But the EU does exist, and this means that it is also inevitable that it will be the central actor within continental security, not least because security and defence cannot readily be decoupled from economics generally and from specific areas such as industrial policy, technology policy, public procurement, and trade. This being so, a discrete security and defence partnership between the UK and the EU will always be sub-optimal (for both parties, but especially the UK because it means it will be peripheral to decision-making) compared with EU membership.
This point has a wider import. It is increasingly being said, even by British pro-Europeans, that EU membership is becoming less attractive, and riskier, because of the possibility of far-right electoral success in France, especially, but also Germany, Spain or other member states. The implication seems to be that the UK would do well to steer clear of such possibilities. But, again, this is to ignore the fact that the EU exists, and will continue to exist, and the UK will be affected by it, and by what happens within its member states, anyway. Being out of the EU does not prevent that, but it does prevent having any influence at all on what happens to the EU as a result. The saying ‘you have to be in the room’ may be a political truism, but only because it is true.
That in turn has an even more fundamental significance. Brexiters often said, or at least implied, that by leaving the EU the UK would return to the situation which existed before joining what was the EEC in 1973. That was nonsense in general (time doesn’t go backwards), but it was also nonsense in a specific way. Before 1973 the EEC comprised only a handful of West European countries. Ireland, which figured so significantly within Brexit, was not a member. Spain and Portugal were still dictatorships. Germany was divided. Much of eastern and central Europe was within the Warsaw Pact and under de facto Soviet control. Yugoslavia not only existed but was still ruled by Tito. There was no single market. Indeed there was no EU.
It is such an obvious point to make that it may seem almost banal. But it is also crucial. It doesn’t matter whether, as some Brexit supporters often say, ‘we managed perfectly well before’ even if that were true (which it isn’t). It doesn’t even matter whether one thinks the EU is ‘a good thing’ or not. And it certainly doesn’t matter that the EU is imperfect and has many problems. It is simply a fact that the EU exists and, as such, it affects a huge amount of what happens in the UK irrespective of whether the UK is a member or not. That would be true anyway, but it is a truth thrown into even clearer relief by the new geo-politics being created by the US, China and Russia.
Inescapable strategic questions
I am stressing this obvious point now because it is what ultimately lies behind the renewed ‘conversation’ about Brexit which Andy Burnham has initiated and which I have been discussing in the last few posts on this blog. It isn’t just that Brexit has lost such public support as it had in 2016. It isn’t just that the economic damage of Brexit is biting especially hard in the context of pervasive low growth rates. It is that the strategic reality of being detached from the dominant political structure of the continent where the UK is geographically, economically, and philosophically located is impossible to ignore.
On 31 January 2020, the day that the UK formally left the EU, the historian Robert Saunders wrote a prescient essay arguing that the big strategic questions faced by Britain since at least the end of the Second World War created the conditions in which it became settled policy to seek to join what became the EU, and eventually to do so. He also argued that, albeit in different conditions, those questions would not disappear with Brexit and would be re-posed as a consequence of Brexit.
And so it has proved. For all the attempts to imagine a strategy based on ‘Global Britain’, or a transatlantic partnership, or an Asia-Pacific pivot, or the Anglosphere, or CANZUK, or an enhanced Commonwealth, and for all the insistence that Brexit has been ‘done’ and is yesterday’s news, the ‘European question’ persists. Its most obvious consequence is that even the rather limited UK-EU relationship established by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the Northern Ireland Protocol/Windsor Framework entails permanent, ongoing dialogue and negotiation. The relationship is inescapable: the only question is about its terms, scope and nature. It may be a while since Brexit featured so prominently in the news but the reality is that it never went away, it just dropped out of the headlines.
The Brussels Effect revisited
Its re-emergence in the headlines now is partly because the ‘reset’ initiated by Keir Starmer is finally coming to fruition, with reports that a series of draft agreements have been circulated to EU member states. As well as the long-anticipated agreements on Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) regulations, Youth Mobility, and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) linkages, it is now reported that there will be a health security agreement relating to supplies of medicines. The expectation is that the final version of these will be announced at the UK-EU summit in Brussels next Friday (although there are have been reports of a possible delay if the UK does not agree terms on university fee levels for EU students).
No doubt these agreements will be discussed in future posts but already there has been an inevitable Brexiter backlash against them (as prefigured by my post of December 2024). Most of it is predictable, ranging from the usual squeals about betraying the referendum result (it doesn’t; Britain left the EU and this doesn’t change that) and ceding ‘sovereignty’ (it doesn’t; it is a use of sovereignty) through to drivel about smoky bacon crisps being banned (untrue, although there might be changes to what they can be called and what flavouring additives can be used).
It is obviously true that, in relation to SPS and some other areas, Britain is going to become a ‘rule-taker’ (as, in Northern Ireland, it already is), but that itself is an indictment of Brexit: we gave up having a say. It is also true as a corollary that this means foregoing the right to enact different regulations in these areas (for example, even if not immediately, gene editing of crops seems likely to be forbidden). As a result, the usual stale arguments about the supposed benefits of regulatory independence have been rolled out by the usual suspects, such as David Frost. But as always this ignores that in practice those benefits have proved as nugatory as many of us warned. Thus the general post-Brexit pattern has been of very limited active divergence from EU rules.
This is not, as Brexiters would have it, due to political timidity or remainer resistance. It is for the simple reason that very few desirable opportunities exist [1]. And even if it can be argued that this or that divergence is desirable, the issue is the overall cost and benefit (in both economic and non-economic meanings) of alignment and, from that, whether sovereignty is better used by choosing to align or by not doing so.
Moreover, even without formal alignment, in many cases (most famously tethered plastic bottle caps) British businesses simply follow EU regulations as a matter of commercial choice. For the same reason, businesses have continued to use the CE conformity assessment mark and the plan to make UKCA marking mandatory was indefinitely postponed under the previous Tory government. Indeed, one of the most telling moments in the whole ‘regulatory independence’ strand of Brexit came in 2022, when the arch-Brexiter and then Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg finally twigged that UKCA marking represented a ‘pointless’ replication of ‘red tape’. (For a fuller account of the sorry, but highly instructive, saga of the UKCA mark, see my post of August 2023.)
Another argument which has recently been revived in response to the impending reset fails for somewhat similar reasons. That argument [warning: link to X] is that it is damaging or unnecessary that all British businesses will have to follow EU SPS regulations even if they are not exporting their goods to the EU. In fact, this is necessary precisely because, without it, border checks or certification would be required to prevent leakage of non-compliant goods between markets. But it is not damaging, because it is cheaper for businesses to produce to one standard and, in any case, it prevents what would otherwise be an ossification whereby industries are effectively segmented into ‘non-exporters’ and ‘exporters’. This would also have the effect of locking ‘non-exporters’ out of the supply chains of ‘exporters’ (i.e./ e.g. because a ‘non-exporting’ grower of, say, potatoes would not be able to supply a supermarket exporting, say, a shepherd’s pie ready meal to the EU).
Indeed it is striking that Brexiters never acknowledge that the businesses actually affected by the reset are keenly anticipating the new agreement. It’s the Brexit ideologues who object. It’s telling that on social media the most high-profile critique of the draft reset agreements over the last fortnight has been the report by Catherine McBride published by the Great British Business Council. The name of that organization might suggest to the unwary that it is some kind of representative body of British business. In fact, it is reported to be a lobby group created by Nigel Farage’s supporters, which according to its website is “funded by private donations from [unnamed] concerned citizens”. For long-term followers of the Brexiter eco-system, this may recall the similarly coy ‘Alliance of British Entrepreneurs’, another body which implied it had some representative function (see my post of December 2021, though note that the relevant links are now dead). It seems to have disappeared without trace apart from a boosterish post in 2018 from Brexit ‘hard man’ Steve Baker [warning: link to X].
As for the grandiose sounding ‘Great British Business Council’, its CEO is none other than, er, Catherine McBride herself (of ‘Briefings for Britain’, formerly Briefings for Brexit, and formerly of the Institute for Economic Affairs and of the Centre for Brexit Policy – which also appears to be defunct). Commenting on some of McBride’s claims about the reset agreement, trade expert David Henig remarked [warning: link to X]: “in short, the usual combination of misunderstandings and outright fabrications which ensured Brexit was such a failure because officials were ordered to listen to this kind of nonsense instead of reputable specialists.”
If the previous paragraphs seem rather cursory it is because, frankly, it is exhausting to keep going over all this old ground about the nature of regulation. But, also, it is because I think, or at least hope, that it is all becoming rather redundant. That is, Frost, McBride and their ilk will certainly rehearse the familiar lines come what may, and they will be believed by a hard core of Brexit-supporting voters, but the cut through with the general public is probably quite limited. Most people either don’t understand and don’t care, or they do understand and don’t mind.
And why should they? For most consumers, what matters about regulation is that products are safe and reliable, rather than the source of that regulation. At all events, polling suggests that 61% support closer relations with the EU (albeit without joining it, or the single market) whilst 18% are opposed and 21% don’t know. So it seems unlikely that the backlash against the reset agreements is going to have much impact.
Reframing the Brexit debate
However, the re-emergence of Brexit in the news headlines is not just because of the impending reset deal. It is because this has now become entwined with the Burnham ‘conversation’, which makes the stakes much higher. One indication of that is the report that Nigel Farage and Arron Banks are discussing reactivating the Leave.EU campaign group to oppose not just regulatory alignment but any attempt to join the EU. Another indication is an article by Chris Ward, the Labour MP who was closely involved in writing the ‘red lines’ into Labour’s 2024 manifesto, arguing that these should be dropped when the next manifesto comes to be written (a sentiment subsequently echoed by Nick Thomas-Symonds, formerly the ‘Europe Minister’ under Starmer).
Ward’s article is notable for two reasons. One, which was prefigured in my previous post, is that we are really only at the beginning of this latest phase – call it the ‘Burnham phase’ – of the Brexit saga. There is no switch that is going to be flicked to create some new resolution, but rather a grinding process within which the next staging post is going to be the general election in (most likely) 2028, at which point the Labour manifesto position will be crucial to whether such a resolution is even a possibility.
The other important point in Ward’s argument is his insistence that if there is to be a new debate about the UK and the EU it has to be conducted in new terms. And whilst I am not suggesting for one moment that he was inspired by, or even reads, this blog, Ward frames this in precisely the same terms as I have been doing in numerous recent posts, namely the dramatically changed geo-political landscape. It is this, rather than a sour re-hash of the economic costs of Brexit, which should be at the centre of attention.
Taking these two points together enables a third to be made. Whilst it is the case that the general election will be the next staging point in the process, the period until then matters in the sense of shifting debate towards this new focus. If not then, to take an example from the current backlash against the reset, the focus will be on such inanities as what regulatory alignment means for “the Great British breakfast”. One way to respond to a story like that is to unpack its various flaws or falsities (e.g. that sausages will be banned). But what is more important is its utter inadequacy to address the challenges and dangers Britain faces. It’s not just silly, or wrong: it’s irrelevant. If that isn’t established in the coming years then the chances of moving beyond the Brexit debate of 2016 are slim.
From that point of view, Michel Barnier’s recent comments were also rather unhelpful. This isn’t because he was wrong to say that the ‘four freedoms’ are indivisible and that Britain cannot rejoin the single market or the EU without adopting them, which is certainly true. It’s because this point, which he was obliged to reiterate whilst leading the Article 50 negotiations, is now well-established. So whilst it is true that in the immediate aftermath of the referendum some Brexiters either did not understand, or did not accept, this fact, it is now all but impossible to find anyone, of any shade of opinion, who argues otherwise.
Indeed, Professor Anand Menon, outgoing Director of UKICE and incoming Director of the Centre for European Reform [2], makes a wider point. Writing in the Financial Times (£), he urges caution in attaching huge significance to what any particular individual within, or associated with, the EU, however eminent, might say about the prospects for the future UK-EU relationship. He concludes, rightly I think, that it is best to “take whatever you hear about what will happen next with a huge dose of salt. We just don’t know how any UK accession process would play out. Member states are the ultimate arbiters and will make decisions based on their own interests.”
What is at stake?
That is an important point to make not just as a warning against attaching too much importance to the pronouncements of this-or-that individual. It is also, first, a reminder that the EU is, indeed, a union of nations each of which – Brexiter beliefs notwithstanding – retains sovereignty. Any debate about a new relationship must not fall back into the fantasy that only France and Germany matter, or that only Brussels matters. It is also a reminder that what is at stake is something quite stark, and almost cold. There are many idealistic reasons to support the European project but there is no need to be starry-eyed: fundamentally it exists, like any other form of union, because it is, on balance, in the interests of its members that it does so. Or, more accurately, because those interests are shared with others and best served collectively.
It is that which also explains why Brexit is the subject of a renewed debate within the UK. In my own post on 31 January 2020 I quoted an Irish Times editorial saying that “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”. It wasn’t just rhetoric. It is the reason why the government has sought the upcoming reset and it is the reason why Burnham has made it clear that this reset is insufficient. It is also the reason why, as the pillars of the post-1945 international order are crumbling, Britain is, once again, revisiting the question of its relationship with Europe which now means, ineluctably, the question of its relationship with the EU. All that is, or should be, obvious. What is not so obvious is whether or not the impetus for self-harm remains too strong to provide a sensible answer.
Notes
[1] This also links to the non-event of the anticipated UK-US trade deal which would likely have entailed substantial divergence from EU SPS regulations. Brexiters are not generally raising this as an objection anymore because it is so obvious there will be no such deal, but they have revived it to suggest that an SPS deal could be incompatible with the UK’s membership of CPTPP. The word ‘could’ is key here because, as Emily Lydgate and Achyuth Anil of the UK Trade Policy Observatory argue, it is far from clear whether this is so and whether any significant practical consequences would arise even if it is.
[2] This may be a good moment to mention the recent announcement that UKICE (the UK in a Changing Europe research centre/ thinktank, a network centred on King’s College London) is to close at the end of this year. It is sad news because, since its foundation in 2015, UKICE has been the preeminent source of reliable evidence and excellent analysis about Brexit in ways which exemplify the value of applied social science research. Speaking personally, its work has been an invaluable resource and I would guess that more than half of the posts on this blog have made reference that work and the many researchers who have been employed by, or affiliated with, the centre. It seems all the more regrettable that it is coming to an end just as Brexit is once more being widely discussed and when it is far from impossible that there will be another referendum in the not-too-distant future.
Friday, 13 November 2026
Friday, 30 October 2026
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.
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.
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.
Friday, 16 October 2026
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, 30 September 2026
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.
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.
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