This isn’t the place to analyze the state of the now three-week old war in the Middle East, except to say that it is clear that it has proved far more complex, and probably more protracted, than Donald Trump and his administration envisaged. His Director of the National Counterterrorism Center has resigned, saying that Iran “posed no imminent threat”. Formerly a Trump loyalist, the President responded to the resignation of his own nominated appointee by saying that “he was weak on security”. Lacking justified cause and defined outcome, the direct costs of the war to the US are already huge, whilst those to the global economy are incalculable. Already, it looks to be a case study of inept strategic and scenario planning, born of malignity and hubris, and perhaps not so very different in that respect from Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
One result of this ineptitude has been that, having embarked on this action without consulting any of America’s NATO allies, or those countries most impacted by its consequences, and having repeatedly insulted the UK in particular, Trump demanded that those same allies clear up the mess he is creating, quite falsely suggesting that NATO members have some obligation to do so. He then became enraged with them, and again with the UK in particular, for their understandable lack of enthusiasm to comply, as a prelude to petulantly declaring he didn’t need their help anyway. Even the US-Israel alliance is now under strain. So to inept planning we can add dire statecraft: Trump is, ahem, ‘no Churchill’.
At all events nobody, perhaps least of all Trump, has any idea when or where all this will end or, as Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times lays out, what its long-term repercussions (£) will be. Any thought that the outcome might at least be the overthrow of Iran’s repellent regime now seems unlikely and it is still less likely that, were that to eventuate, it would be replaced by a more palatable one. If anything, as Rachman gloomily concludes, the regime “may yet emerge in a stronger position internationally”. Whether or not that proves to be the case, the war will surely have many unintended and unexpected consequences, including for post-Brexit Britain.
The Home Front
Certainly the Iran war can already be seen to have profound implications for the UK, at least some of which relate more or less directly to Brexit and its aftermath. For one thing, it has sharply underlined the point I made at the time of the Greenland crisis: that, acknowledged or not, Keir Starmer cannot avoid the choice he has claimed not to exist between Europe and the US, if only because Trump keeps forcing that choice upon him. Thus, as with Greenland, but even more pointedly, Starmer has continued to rebuff the US by openly refusing to involve the UK in the attack on Iran.
On the other side of the equation, it is quite clear that the UK and the EU are in the same unenviable boat, enmeshed in a dependent relationship with an undependable partner. From that general situation flow such things as the UK and EU’s shared problem of how to deal, or cope, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the related problem of how to deal with the US decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil exports.
This unfolding situation has also had several impacts on domestic politics, of which the most obvious since my previous post has been that both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have had to abruptly discard (and disown) their initial position that the UK should have joined forces with the US. In Badenoch’s case, she now even has the nerve to counsel against giving the kind of unconditional support she originally urged, whilst still repeating her repellent claim (discussed in my previous post) that Starmer’s policy is based on “trying to appease a sectarian vote”. For both Badenoch and Farage, the change may be because they realized that the public are not generally supportive of the war, dislike and distrust Trump, and are very much concerned about its impact on fuel prices and the subsequent consequences of that.
Even so, it is worth recalling the nature of the initial criticisms they made of Starmer for not ‘joining in’ as well as some of the reasons they now give for keeping a distance from the conflict, for these are very similar. The initial criticism was widely couched in the language of humiliation, betrayal, and weakness, and several right-wing commentators, including Allison Pearson in the Telegraph (£), leapt gleefully on Trump’s negative comparison of Starmer with Winston Churchill as evidence of this humiliation. Then, when the line changed to one of non-involvement, this was accompanied by laments that this was because the UK was too weak in terms of military capacity to contribute to the war and that this, in Nigel Farage’s words, demonstrated the “humiliating state that we’ve sunk to today.”
It is certainly true that the UK’s military has been hollowed-out in recent years, and a great many people (myself included, for what very little that’s worth) have been warning about that, especially given the threat from Russia and the unreliability of Trump’s America, both things to which Farage, in particular, was entirely indifferent. It’s also true that this military weakness has been made evident by the current war. But that can hardly be laid at the door of the present government, since the problem long precedes its arrival, and in any case it is irrelevant to the decision not to join with the US in the sense that, as with every other country in the world except Israel, the UK thinks it would be ill-advised, even if we had the ability. However, the populist discussion of defence policy is not framed in terms of a rational assessment of threats and UK preparedness to respond to them. It is framed in terms of humiliation and betrayal.
This connects directly with the themes of this blog. For these were precisely the terms in which the Brexiters constantly talked about the Brexit process, week-in and week-out from almost as soon as the vote to leave was taken. That the same terms have now become embedded in political discourse, apart from in relation to Brexit itself, is one of the reasons why I have made Brexitism as well as Brexit the focus of the blog. It is also the case that throughout the Brexit process the imagery and mythologization of the Second World War have been a constant presence, and within that Churchill, of course, holds an iconic position. So there is a thread connecting, for example, Boris Johnson’s (mendacious) invocation of Churchill when campaigning for Brexit with the supposed humiliation of the draft-dodger Trump repeatedly taunting the British Prime Minister for his lack of Churchillian credentials.
Pound foolish
It may seem absurd to move from the weighty matter of war to writing about what pictures will appear on British banknotes. But exactly that topic has provoked an angry convulsion amongst the populist right and in doing so demonstrated just how deeply embedded is the mindset I have just outlined.
In brief, a couple of weeks ago the Bank of England announced that the next generation of banknotes will feature images of British wildlife. This followed a public consultation exercise conducted last year when a variety of possible themes were proposed, of which ‘nature’ proved to be the most popular. So far, so boring. But the announcement provoked a wave of angry reaction, primarily from the political right but also, rather more surprisingly, from LibDem leader Ed Davey, which centred on the fact that in the process this would mean that – yes – Winston Churchill will no longer feature on the £5 note. (It was variously claimed he would be replaced by a badger, a beaver, or a hedgehog: in fact, the exact images have yet to be decided.)
This, according to Nigel Farage [warning: link to X], was “the definition of woke” whilst Kemi Badenoch was even more alarmed, saying it was “erasing our history”. Then, the populist ‘intellectuals’ weighed in. Matt Goodwin stressed, both on GB News [warning: link to X] and his Substack newsletter [warning: link to Goodwin’s Substack newsletter] that this was not a trivial matter because it was “not about banknote design, but something much deeper, something more insidious” which turned out to be “the slow erosion of our national memory”. He went on to invoke sociologist Frank Furedi’s claim that there is “a war against the past” underway. Furedi, for those lucky enough not to know, is one of the peculiar and unpleasant group of former Revolutionary Communist Party members, including former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox, which morphed into the peculiar and unpleasant group of libertarian ‘contrarians’ who created Spiked Online.
Indeed, Spiked Online also joined the fray, with Gareth Roberts writing of how the Bank of England’s plans have “rightly riled up the nation”. Along the way, Roberts sneered at the very fact of there having been a public consultation, suggesting it would have been better for someone “in charge” to have made the decision, the implication presumably being that this was an example of wasteful state bureaucracy. Of course, had the decision been made in this way such commentators would undoubtedly have been outraged that ‘the elite’ had failed to consult ‘the people’. But Roberts’ main gripe, like Farage and most of the other complainers, was that this arose because of the Bank’s ‘woke’ desire to avoid the use of divisive images, and that Churchill was now regarded as divisive as a result of ‘wokeism’.
Plain foolish
This was, to be blunt, total gibberish. The claim arose because in the original consultation document one of the principles informing the themes offered to the public was that they should not be divisive (which is hardly unreasonable: who would want divisive images on the national currency anyway?) That is, it had nothing to do with Churchill, or indeed any other individual figure, and nor could it have done since these were, precisely, themes (i.e. not identifying the specific images to be used within those themes). One of those themes was ‘Notable Historical Figures’ but this came third, after both ‘Nature’ and ‘Architecture and Landmarks’. Had ‘historical figures’ been chosen, those pictured might or might not in the end have included Churchill. But this simply wasn’t what was at issue.
It was therefore an entirely manufactured outrage, but coalescing that outrage around the depiction of Churchill enabled the connection to be made with a wider set of claims about, in the first instance, Churchill generally. Thus Roberts linked to an earlier article in Spiked by – guess who? – Frank Furedi, fulminating about how Churchill “is a potent symbol of the civilisation culture warriors revile”. This then provided the gateway to the more general claims about history being erased and our national memory being eroded, a recurrent trope of Brexitism (see my post of November 2025 for more detail on the connections between Brexit, Brexitism, and the populist backlash against ‘woke’ history).
Actually, if anything, it showed historical ignorance and a failure of national memory. Churchill has only featured on banknotes since 2016, and historical figures of any sort only since 1970. This is hardly some ancient national tradition. For that matter, as a child one of my hobbies was collecting old farthing coins [1], which had been abolished in 1956 but which, since 1937, had carried the image of a wren. Prior to that, the image had been none other than Britannia herself, but would anyone seriously suggest that this change arose from some avant la lettre wokery bent on erasing the proud symbols of our national identity?
Plain mad
It is easy to mock all this, of course, but that would be a mistake. Even if one thinks that it just is the synthetic anger of people who are determined to get angry about anything then the very fact of that determination, and the reasons for it, are of interest. Goodwin said it was not trivial because in his eyes, and those of his fellow-ideologues, it is not. For him, it seems to connect with the ideas expressed in his latest book, published this week, entitled Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. That highly provocative, and surely rather mad, title in turn relates to the wider theme, currently influential within the populist right, of “suicidal empathy”. This term was coined by Canadian marketing academic Gad Saad and is to be developed in his own forthcoming book of that title, the book (and the concept) being enthusiastically endorsed by Elon Musk.
As with Goodwin and others with similar political commitments, Saad’s basic idea seems to be that through immigration, and especially Muslim immigration, ‘the elite’ is complicit in enacting the “suicide” of, variously, American, British or European culture (and thus carries at least echoes of the infamous racist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’). Effectively, it is the same idea as that propounded by Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and, just this week (£), the Conservative shadow justice secretary and hard Brexit architect Nick Timothy, but given a precarious patina of intellectualism. Or, to put it another way, it is the familiar ‘I just want my country back’ moan but using long words (in passing, note that many of the news stories upon which this worldview feeds are forensically dissected by Emma Monk’s excellent Monk Debunks Substack newsletter).
In this way, absurd as the row about banknotes may seem, it is actually a sliver within what, for some, is a war every bit as real, and perhaps more important, as that raging in the Middle East. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that for some, at least on the US right, most notably the morally broken and dangerously incompetent Secretary for War Pete Hesgeth, the two wars are actually part of a single religious war. For that matter, it’s not unreasonable to link, for example, Hesgeth’s determination to remove the scourge of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) in the US military with, for example, Goodwin’s attempt to connect the banknote non-issue to DEI activism (about 30 seconds into the clip).
Thus, coming back more directly to the main argument of this post, the row over the banknotes is a fresh illustration of the narrative of humiliation, betrayal and weakness. For it connects to the idea of a nation losing its identity, culture and history; its military prowess and its symbols of greatness and, most toxic of all, the idea that this is happening not by chance or the ineluctable passage of history but ‘suicidally’, due to the ‘treason of the clerks’.
The Churchillian challenge
Despite the increasingly hysterical and almost unhinged language being used by these populists, there is perhaps a sense that the steam behind their project is abating. Indeed, perhaps that is why the language they are using is becoming so uncontrolled. If so, one reason for that could well be that for many months now Trump’s administration, the most direct embodiment of that project, has itself become so obviously unhinged, and the chaotic mess he has created with his war on Iran makes that even more glaring.
Certainly in the UK there are now clear signs that Reform’s poll ratings have started to slip. There are also signs that Starmer is getting a little bolder, not just in standing up to Trump but also in condemning the populist right. The two are somewhat linked, as his judgements about the Iran War have been in line with public opinion and enabled him to expose the foolishness of both Badenoch and Farage. He was also notably quick to condemn Nick Timothy’s anti-Muslim remarks this week. Meanwhile, internal Labour opposition looks set to lead to at least some softening of the government’s draconian immigration plans.
On Europe, too, the government has now begun to speak much more openly about the case for closer regulatory alignment, including in a speech this week by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Whether she and the government have understood that alignment, in itself, doesn’t mean access, which also requires certification and legal oversight from the EU, remains to be seen. Perhaps they have, since, albeit quietly, the realities of ‘dynamic alignment’ are being accepted wholesale in the government’s attempts to complete an SPS deal with the EU.
More to the point, even at its most maximal an alignment policy does relatively little to reduce the costs of Brexit which, strikingly, Reeves referred to by using the 8% estimate from last year’s NBER report (and its higher end, at that) rather than the standard 4% OBR figure built into the official budget; striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. Certainly others within the Labour Party have begun to be increasingly vociferous in advocating such a response, with Sadiq Khan this week calling for the party to adopt a ‘rejoin’ policy at the next election. Notably, in making this argument Khan referenced not just the costs of Brexit but the changing world order created by Trump.
These may be straws in the wind, or perhaps to think so is just clutching at straws, and long-term readers of this blog will know that I am more inclined to be Cassandra-like than Pollyannaish. But there is at least the possibility that one of the many unintended consequences of the Iran war may be to change the course of the politics of Brexit and Brexitism. Who knows, perhaps in the end we will have reason, as Hesgeth yesterday urged us, to “thank President Trump”. However, for that to happen will also require what we might reasonably call a more Churchillian politics, in two senses.
On the one hand, whilst there were many contradictions and ambiguities of Churchill’s views about what became the EU there was at least one strong strand within them which recognized its strategic necessity. That necessity would now be described in different terms to those used by Churchill, since the world, Europe, and Britain are now very different, but its basic contours still hold good. On the other hand, whilst again there were many facets to Churchill’s long political career, many of them less than edifying, to say the least, his primary historical legacy will always be that of providing the national leadership needed in a world at war [2].
It is just such a combination of strategy and leadership which Britain needs if it is to take the opportunity to renew itself in the world being created by Trump’s war.
Notes
[1] The aim being to amass as many different years as possible. Those thinking this suggests I was a strange child will have their suspicions confirmed by the fact that at the same sort of time I collected empty crisp packets, the aim in that case being to find as many different makes and flavours as possible – which was not as easy as it sounds when Golden Wonder ‘Ready Salted’ was so ubiquitous. In mitigation, this was in the 1970s, when we had to make our own entertainment, although my attempts to interest visitors and relatives in my crisp packet collection suggested that, even in those days, greater excitement was available.
[2] The populist idea that recognizing the flaws and well as the qualities of Churchill is some kind of disrespectful, woke revisionism is utterly dimwitted (as it is when applied to the more general recognition that British history as a whole is a mixture of the great and the terrible). It was a point well-made by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin this week when he defended Keir Starmer against Trump’s criticisms during a meeting at the White House which, itself, could be read as an example of how Trump has clarified the commonality of interests between the UK and EU members.
Friday, 20 March 2026
Friday, 6 March 2026
Real war and culture war
Much of the news of the last fortnight has been pushed into the background by last weekend’s US-Israel attack on Iran and the regional conflict it has engendered. Where this will end is unclear, not least since it has no coherent aims. That is mainly well beyond the scope of this blog, but there are plenty of connections with Brexit and Brexitism.
Post-Brexit geo-politics
One is just that, as with Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine, not to mention climate change and tariff wars, it is yet another example of an international crisis where the UK’s position and interests are far closer to those of countries like France and Germany, and the EU generally, than to the US. Indeed, as regards Iran, specifically, that has been obvious since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. Now, however the conflict proceeds, it is almost inevitable that the EU and the UK will face common challenges in living with its aftermath which, if only for geographical reasons, will impinge far more on the European continent than on the US. As such, the crisis is a reminder of the fundamental strategic incongruity of Brexit.
It also, again as with other crises, provides a further illustration of the additional pressures Brexit places on the UK in its attempt to navigate around Trump’s capriciousness, spite, and bullying. As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr argued, there are no good options for Keir Starmer in this situation. Nor would there be for any other Prime Minister. I don’t, however, entirely agree with Behr that Starmer’s response pleases nobody. Personally, I think he has handled it as well as anyone could and many commentators, including Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (£), have said something similar.
Rather, the point is that Starmer is now so beleaguered that his many opponents are unwilling to give him any credit at all, or even to acknowledge that there are any difficulties or dilemmas for the UK. And even amongst those who are willing to acknowledge those difficulties, his position means he has very little goodwill or political capital to draw upon. Thus there are at least hints in the opinion polls so far that the public support the way the war is being handled whilst thinking that Starmer is handling it badly.
The Brexit imprint
The particular way that the domestic discussion has played out so far also bears the imprint of Brexit and Brexitism. There are many nuances to this, but in very broad terms public opinion polls show that the supporters of Reform and the Conservatives are considerably more likely to favour allowing the US to use UK bases to attack Iran than those of Labour, the Greens and the LibDems. Certainly the leaders of the former two parties castigated Starmer for not initially agreeing to such usage, as well as for being supposedly deficient, or at least dilatory, in protecting British military installations and assets in the conflict region.
Amongst the nuances, one of the more interesting is that, unlike Farage and Reform, Rupert Lowe and his new Restore Britain party are opposed to all UK involvement in the conflict (warning: links to the X cesspit where Lowe has found his natural home). This reflects a longstanding tension within the nationalist right between jingoistic bellicosity and isolationism, and in the past Farage, too, has been sceptical about UK military interventionism. Now this has become a new front in the growing schism, discussed in my previous post, between Reform and the even more extreme, or at least more openly extreme, far-right groups such as Lowe’s.
Of course, exactly the same tension exists in the US right, with Trump and the MAGA movement having in the past abjured such entanglements, especially in the Middle East. Trump’s new-found willingness for military adventurism has many explanations, including, I suspect, egotistical pleasure. But perhaps the key point is that what he and MAGA most objected to was the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’, which even in its least defensible manifestations had, or at least attempted to create, the façade of moral justification.
Trump’s doctrine, chillingly articulated by Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth this week, is an almost Nietzschean paean to a “warrior ethos” which disdains not just any residue of concern for international law but even “stupid rules of engagement”. As with any bully, the ultimate justification is the simple one: ‘because I can’. No doubt this has its own appeal to Farage, the one-time Flashman of Dulwich College, even were he not minded to support any initiative of Mr. Brexit, his hero in the White House, regardless of its merits. That support does not, of course, lead him to think Britain should accept any of the refugees the conflict will inevitably create and on this, at least, he and Lowe are agreed.
The intensifying culture war
There is also a more direct connection between Brexitism and the political reaction to the Iran crisis, articulated most clearly, and most disgracefully, by Kemi Badenoch when she alleged that Starmer’s initial decision to deny the US use of UK airbases was due to his desire to pander to Muslim voters. She explicitly spliced this together with the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election (discussed in more detail below) adding to what has been a deeply unpleasant upsurge in the culture war demonization of British Muslims.
Yet, as is shown not just by Lowe’s anti-war stance but that of some Tory MPs, including the most senior and one of the most right-wing of them, Sir Edward Leigh, as well as many MPs of all parties, opposition to or concern about UK involvement spans all political positions, ethnicities and faiths (even assuming, which is surely unwarranted, that ‘Muslims’ en masse have a particular view of it). For that matter, the majority of the general public (excluding ‘don’t knows’) are opposed to UK airbases being used by the US [1], something which only the exceptionally dull-minded need to be told does not imply support for Iran’s despicable theocratic regime. Why, then, ascribe Starmer’s decision to Muslims? And if this was its reason, then how does Badenoch explain the subsequent decision to allow the use of bases for ‘defensive’ operations?
Inevitably, Badenoch’s accusation was subsequently echoed by Trump, allowing him to return to his habitual attacks on Britain’s supposed ‘unrecognizability’ (which is code for Muslim immigration) and on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as to repeat his criticism of Starmer’s lack of support for the war against Iran. This in turn allowed Badenoch, Farage, and others to criticize Starmer for damaging UK-US relations, and so the whole crazy, cross-pollinating stupidity rolls on and on. It is a grim irony that the Brexiters, who set such store by sovereignty, demand total fealty to a foreign president. And a grim reminder of their bogus patriotism that they encourage and amplify the verbal attacks of that president upon their own country.
Badenoch’s accusation was also a manifestation of an explosion of quite vile, as well as dishonest, claims on social media that the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, had joined Muslims for a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and another making the same claim about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud. These and similar claims were based on photographs that were self-evidently taken well before Khamanei was killed and had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his death. Yet they were circulated by numerous high-profile right-wing figures, as influential as they are unhinged, ranging from Allison Pearson to John Cleese, and shared thousands, if not millions, of times. (I’m not going to link to this sewage, so readers will have to take my word for it.)
In this way, all of the now familiar skein of interconnections between the US and UK populist right, Brexiters, Brexitists, and the post-Brexit rise of ethnonationalism have been in evidence in the domestic response to the Iran crisis [2]. No doubt that would have been true in any event, but, as Badenoch’s intervention illustrates, it took on a particular hue because of the previous week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton.
The Gorton and Denton result
The first thing to say about that is that Reform, and their peculiar and obnoxious candidate Matt Goodwin, failed to win. Of course, it would have been remarkable had they done so, as this was not an obvious target seat for them, but it bears saying because there had been a sense, purveyed not just by the party but the drama-hungry media, that victory was within grasp. And that did not seem impossible given opinion polls showing an almost even three-way split in support between Reform, Greens, and Labour. Had it gone Reform’s way, that would undoubtedly have generated a rash of commentary about Reform being on an unstoppable journey to government.
So it matters that Reform failed, and failed by a significant margin. It also matters that, as happened at Caerphilly, when there was a route to defeat Reform and to reject Labour, voters took it. Thus in Gorton and Denton the Green vote (presumably) comprised those who straightforwardly support the Greens, those who voted Green to stop Reform, and those who voted Green as a rejection of Labour. By the day of the election, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were just slightly more likely to defeat Reform than Labour, making the choice for those to whom this was the top priority just slightly easier. Whether, had that not been the case, anti-Reform voters would have been willing to vote Labour is unknowable, but is something which will have an important bearing on the next general election.
Family voting?
What we can be sure of is that, had Reform won, by even a handful of votes, they would have hailed it as a democratic triumph in which the ‘silent majority’ of ‘ordinary, decent people’ had decisively spoken. As it was, they latched on to reports made by an organization called ‘Democracy Volunteers’, that there had been unusual volumes of ‘family voting’. This term, which refers to a practice outlawed by the 2023 Secret Ballots Act, seemed to be code for the claim that Muslim men had accompanied their female relatives into the polling booths and coerced them into voting for – presumably – the Greens. (Though, who knows, perhaps the implication was that white Christian Conservative patriarchs were reasserting ‘traditional family values’ by forcing their womenfolk to vote for Goodwin.)
There was a certain amount of social media ribaldry about the idea that the socially liberal female candidate of a party led by a gay Jewish man might have been the candidate of choice amongst traditionalist Muslim men. But, whilst that isn’t an unreasonable observation to make, it perhaps misses the nature of the accusation being made, which was two-fold: that the Green Party had concealed its social liberalism from some Muslim voters in election leaflets written in Urdu, and that the appeal it had for such voters was in its critique of Israel and support for Palestinians.
However, equally, even if these accusations were true, those making them never explained what is so wrong with emphasizing the party’s positions on these issues to voters who might support them, regardless of its position on other issues. All (successful) political parties build coalitions of voters with disparate, and often contradictory, priorities. We might also recall how, during the referendum, the Leave campaign deliberately and skillfully targeted different voter groups, including different ethnic groups, with messages tailored to their perceived concerns.
Whether or not the charge of ‘family voting’ was true, which is contested and is (rightly) under investigation, and despite that fact that, even if true, it is arithmetically implausible to think it could have been a clinching factor given the size of the Green majority, it quickly became linked to the claim that the Greens had won on the basis of “sectarianism”. This again seemed to be code for making an appeal to Muslims, or perhaps just anyone with dark skin. From this exploded a whole series of accusations about rigged postal voting and “foreign-born voters” having “stolen” the election.
These were not just social media talking points but, for example, were splashed on the front page of the Mail. This culminated in Farage announcing that Reform’s policy is now that foreigners will be banned from voting in elections, a reference to the longstanding right of nationals from qualifying Commonwealth countries, lawfully resident in the UK, to vote. One might now question the diligence with which Goodwin, if elected, would have worked for all his constituents and, for that matter, that of the existing Reform MPs in this respect.
Hypocrisy and ethno-nationalist sectarianism
It would be quite some task to unpick all the layers of hypocrisy in all this, so I’ll just make a few points. One is that Farage has constantly made complaints about electoral fraud, going back to at least 2014 which have rarely, if ever, been proven. But of course for operators like Farage that doesn’t matter: the accusation lodges in the public mind whereas the subsequent investigation showing it to be false is barely noticed. Another is to recall his own sanctimonious finger-wagging at ‘remainers’, when he insisted that "for a civilised democracy to work you need the losers' consent”. A third is how he, and other Brexiters, sought to galvanize Commonwealth immigrant voters to support Brexit. Indeed, many Brexiters argued that EU Freedom of Movement was effectively racist in discriminating against Commonwealth, especially South Asian, immigration.
Hypocrisy aside, these highly racialized allegations of electoral fraud have a particular salience because of the recent surge of ethno-nationalism, which now calls into question whether British nationals are ‘really’ British and/or English if they, or perhaps even their parents and grandparents, were not born here, at least if they are not white. It is actually this, if anything, which deserves the label of ‘sectarianism’ and, moreover, rather than sectarianism explaining the Green’s victory, it was the sectarianism of pitching almost entirely to ‘white working class’ voters which explains Reform’s failure to win.
What Reform’s reaction to this failure shows is that it will not be enough to defeat them (and similar parties) at the ballot box in order to expunge their influence. Indeed, there seems every prospect, and some indication, that if Reform fail to win the next general election then, Trump-like, they will cry foul. It may even be that, just as it often seemed as if the Brexiters would have preferred to have lost the referendum, the Brexitists would prefer to lose the next election, but to destabilize the country even further by positioning the victors as illegitimate and the entire democratic system as corrupted.
Questions for Labour
Against this background, the Gorton and Denton result also posed some serious questions for the Labour Party. At one level, these can be thought about in terms of electoral strategy and, as such, their answer is pretty obvious and has been very widely identified. That answer can be expressed in various ways, but was summed up by Sadiq Khan’s argument that Labour have to “stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives”. In effect, this is “the real leadership crisis” facing Keir Starmer which I discussed in my previous post.
However, the issues go much deeper than Starmer and much longer ago, after the 2021 Hartlepool by election, I set out some of these. Not all of that post has stood the test of time [3], but the central point holds: in very brief, the need to calibrate to representing Labour’s actual (potential) electoral coalition rather than that which historically existed. In that post, and elsewhere (£), I pointed out that part of the barrier to this is one of political psychology, whereby the party is heavily invested in the idea that male manual workers in manufacturing industry are the template for working-class authenticity. Since then, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is actually a manifestation of precisely the same nostalgia which is now so evident as a driver for the political right and Brexitism.
Labour’s terrible answers
As mentioned in my most recent post, there seemed to be a possibility that the ‘defenestration’ of Morgan McSweeney might mark an end to this kind of ‘Blue Labourism’ (though its grip on Labour goes deeper than McSweeney or his mentor Maurice Glasman). I finished that post by saying it was doubtful whether Starmer could rise to the challenge. There is now really no longer any room for doubt.
Starmer responded to the Greens’ by-election victory by making precisely the same accusation of “sectarianism” that Farage had levelled and, by linking this to the endorsement given to the Greens by the odious George Galloway, implicitly mirrored Reform’s claims about Islamification having played a decisive role. It was repellent in itself and, like so much else that Starmer does, politically maladroit, not least in ignoring what no doubt will have been the agonizing choice for some habitual Labour voters to support the Greens as the best chance of defeating Reform. That, as with his infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, he later distanced himself from what he has said only underscores the maladroitness
At the same time, Shabana Mahmood announced that she intends to press ahead with her hard-line anti-immigration reforms. These include, most shamefully, retrospectively increasing the amount of time before existing immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and making asylum awards temporary. Again, this is politically maladroit, just at the basic level of garnering electoral support: it won’t satisfy those minded to vote Reform and it will repel those minded to desert Labour to vote Green etc. And if, as may well happen, internal Labour opposition leads to it being abandoned then it will be chalked up not as a return to principle but yet another U-turn.
It is also maladroit in a more general sense. Labour’s most compelling pitch at the last election was that it would offer competence, but this policy is woefully incompetent in the context of now rapidly declining immigration and the economic need for more, and not less, immigration. It thus directly contradicts the government’s central policy of boosting economic growth as well as exacerbating its fiscal constraints. It is even incompetent in terms of any policy aim of integration, since making it harder to qualify for permanent residence makes it less likely that immigrants will integrate.
The competence issue matters because what is at stake here is not, as many commentators claim and, no doubt, some political activists and voters hope, that Labour need to respond to the by-election defeat with a ‘lurch to the left’. Setting an immigration policy which is fair, rational, and consonant with economic and demographic needs is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Operating an efficient and humane asylum process is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Making a clear distinction between immigration and asylum policies is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. To think otherwise is to cede the idea that these are somehow ‘extreme’ propositions and that the policies of virtually zero immigration, mass deportation, and the near-total rejection of asylum seekers advocated by Reform and others are the ‘norm’ or ‘moderate’.
Yet this is what the Labour government has accepted, and it is the most glaring way in which it has accepted Brexitism. Of course it is also this which has always lain at the heart of the timidity of the Brexit ‘reset’ with the EU, a reset which even in its own limited terms was denounced this week (£) by the Commons foreign affairs committee as “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If there was not so much other news, I would have more to say about that, including about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ claim that she wants to go further in breaking down trade barriers with the EU. Since there is no evidence, and surely no possibility, that this presages a break with Labour’s ‘red lines’, for now all that needs to be said is that the dishonesty and delusions of Brexit and Brexitism continue unabated.
Small comforts
It’s hard to feel anything other than pessimism at the moment. However this war develops, as always with war it will be ordinary, blameless people who simply want to lead ordinary, peaceful lives who suffer most. Something similar could be said of those being relentlessly attacked in the domestic culture wars.
There is only a small, though not entirely negligible, comfort in being spared the spectacle of Matt Goodwin pontificating on these matters in the House of Commons. But perhaps a slightly greater one in what that may betoken about the British electorate.
Notes
[1] The way this question was asked in the survey linked to does not really disclose what the public think about the subtle but important distinction between the use of UK bases for the attack on Iran (which the government did not grant) and their use to launch defensive operations against Iranian counter-attacks which may imperil British subjects and assets (which the government approved). If it did, I suspect that the public would support the government’s decisions in both respects. That seems to be borne out by other survey data about what the UK’s military response to the war should be.
[2] There’s a whole post that could be written about that fact that somewhere in that skein is Dubai. Lauded by Richard Tice as an exemplar of safety, it has become a magnet for right-wing Britishimmigrants expats, most prominently Tice’s partner, the reliably graceless ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott (£). There, such proud patriots gloat, one can escape the roving gangs, ‘two-tier’ justice, and Orwellian suppressions of the right to incite murder – not to mention, of course, the taxes – of ‘Broken Britain’. As a view of what some have called the “gangsters’ paradise” of Dubai, it was always as hopelessly one-sided as the depiction of Britain. Now, with a certain piquancy (£), our intrepid correspondent reports that “expats brace of what tomorrow may bring” (£) as the British State organizes a rather different repatriation to that envisaged by some of her co-ideologues. Equally piquant is the news (£) of those desperately trying to get back to Dubai so as to avoid falling foul of rules to qualify for tax residency.
[3] The most egregious failing is that I assumed, not unreasonably, but as it has out turned mistakenly, that Boris Johnson had re-made the Conservatives as an electorally successful populist party and seen off the challenge of Farage.
Post-Brexit geo-politics
One is just that, as with Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine, not to mention climate change and tariff wars, it is yet another example of an international crisis where the UK’s position and interests are far closer to those of countries like France and Germany, and the EU generally, than to the US. Indeed, as regards Iran, specifically, that has been obvious since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. Now, however the conflict proceeds, it is almost inevitable that the EU and the UK will face common challenges in living with its aftermath which, if only for geographical reasons, will impinge far more on the European continent than on the US. As such, the crisis is a reminder of the fundamental strategic incongruity of Brexit.
It also, again as with other crises, provides a further illustration of the additional pressures Brexit places on the UK in its attempt to navigate around Trump’s capriciousness, spite, and bullying. As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr argued, there are no good options for Keir Starmer in this situation. Nor would there be for any other Prime Minister. I don’t, however, entirely agree with Behr that Starmer’s response pleases nobody. Personally, I think he has handled it as well as anyone could and many commentators, including Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (£), have said something similar.
Rather, the point is that Starmer is now so beleaguered that his many opponents are unwilling to give him any credit at all, or even to acknowledge that there are any difficulties or dilemmas for the UK. And even amongst those who are willing to acknowledge those difficulties, his position means he has very little goodwill or political capital to draw upon. Thus there are at least hints in the opinion polls so far that the public support the way the war is being handled whilst thinking that Starmer is handling it badly.
The Brexit imprint
The particular way that the domestic discussion has played out so far also bears the imprint of Brexit and Brexitism. There are many nuances to this, but in very broad terms public opinion polls show that the supporters of Reform and the Conservatives are considerably more likely to favour allowing the US to use UK bases to attack Iran than those of Labour, the Greens and the LibDems. Certainly the leaders of the former two parties castigated Starmer for not initially agreeing to such usage, as well as for being supposedly deficient, or at least dilatory, in protecting British military installations and assets in the conflict region.
Amongst the nuances, one of the more interesting is that, unlike Farage and Reform, Rupert Lowe and his new Restore Britain party are opposed to all UK involvement in the conflict (warning: links to the X cesspit where Lowe has found his natural home). This reflects a longstanding tension within the nationalist right between jingoistic bellicosity and isolationism, and in the past Farage, too, has been sceptical about UK military interventionism. Now this has become a new front in the growing schism, discussed in my previous post, between Reform and the even more extreme, or at least more openly extreme, far-right groups such as Lowe’s.
Of course, exactly the same tension exists in the US right, with Trump and the MAGA movement having in the past abjured such entanglements, especially in the Middle East. Trump’s new-found willingness for military adventurism has many explanations, including, I suspect, egotistical pleasure. But perhaps the key point is that what he and MAGA most objected to was the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’, which even in its least defensible manifestations had, or at least attempted to create, the façade of moral justification.
Trump’s doctrine, chillingly articulated by Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth this week, is an almost Nietzschean paean to a “warrior ethos” which disdains not just any residue of concern for international law but even “stupid rules of engagement”. As with any bully, the ultimate justification is the simple one: ‘because I can’. No doubt this has its own appeal to Farage, the one-time Flashman of Dulwich College, even were he not minded to support any initiative of Mr. Brexit, his hero in the White House, regardless of its merits. That support does not, of course, lead him to think Britain should accept any of the refugees the conflict will inevitably create and on this, at least, he and Lowe are agreed.
The intensifying culture war
There is also a more direct connection between Brexitism and the political reaction to the Iran crisis, articulated most clearly, and most disgracefully, by Kemi Badenoch when she alleged that Starmer’s initial decision to deny the US use of UK airbases was due to his desire to pander to Muslim voters. She explicitly spliced this together with the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election (discussed in more detail below) adding to what has been a deeply unpleasant upsurge in the culture war demonization of British Muslims.
Yet, as is shown not just by Lowe’s anti-war stance but that of some Tory MPs, including the most senior and one of the most right-wing of them, Sir Edward Leigh, as well as many MPs of all parties, opposition to or concern about UK involvement spans all political positions, ethnicities and faiths (even assuming, which is surely unwarranted, that ‘Muslims’ en masse have a particular view of it). For that matter, the majority of the general public (excluding ‘don’t knows’) are opposed to UK airbases being used by the US [1], something which only the exceptionally dull-minded need to be told does not imply support for Iran’s despicable theocratic regime. Why, then, ascribe Starmer’s decision to Muslims? And if this was its reason, then how does Badenoch explain the subsequent decision to allow the use of bases for ‘defensive’ operations?
Inevitably, Badenoch’s accusation was subsequently echoed by Trump, allowing him to return to his habitual attacks on Britain’s supposed ‘unrecognizability’ (which is code for Muslim immigration) and on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as to repeat his criticism of Starmer’s lack of support for the war against Iran. This in turn allowed Badenoch, Farage, and others to criticize Starmer for damaging UK-US relations, and so the whole crazy, cross-pollinating stupidity rolls on and on. It is a grim irony that the Brexiters, who set such store by sovereignty, demand total fealty to a foreign president. And a grim reminder of their bogus patriotism that they encourage and amplify the verbal attacks of that president upon their own country.
Badenoch’s accusation was also a manifestation of an explosion of quite vile, as well as dishonest, claims on social media that the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, had joined Muslims for a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and another making the same claim about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud. These and similar claims were based on photographs that were self-evidently taken well before Khamanei was killed and had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his death. Yet they were circulated by numerous high-profile right-wing figures, as influential as they are unhinged, ranging from Allison Pearson to John Cleese, and shared thousands, if not millions, of times. (I’m not going to link to this sewage, so readers will have to take my word for it.)
In this way, all of the now familiar skein of interconnections between the US and UK populist right, Brexiters, Brexitists, and the post-Brexit rise of ethnonationalism have been in evidence in the domestic response to the Iran crisis [2]. No doubt that would have been true in any event, but, as Badenoch’s intervention illustrates, it took on a particular hue because of the previous week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton.
The Gorton and Denton result
The first thing to say about that is that Reform, and their peculiar and obnoxious candidate Matt Goodwin, failed to win. Of course, it would have been remarkable had they done so, as this was not an obvious target seat for them, but it bears saying because there had been a sense, purveyed not just by the party but the drama-hungry media, that victory was within grasp. And that did not seem impossible given opinion polls showing an almost even three-way split in support between Reform, Greens, and Labour. Had it gone Reform’s way, that would undoubtedly have generated a rash of commentary about Reform being on an unstoppable journey to government.
So it matters that Reform failed, and failed by a significant margin. It also matters that, as happened at Caerphilly, when there was a route to defeat Reform and to reject Labour, voters took it. Thus in Gorton and Denton the Green vote (presumably) comprised those who straightforwardly support the Greens, those who voted Green to stop Reform, and those who voted Green as a rejection of Labour. By the day of the election, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were just slightly more likely to defeat Reform than Labour, making the choice for those to whom this was the top priority just slightly easier. Whether, had that not been the case, anti-Reform voters would have been willing to vote Labour is unknowable, but is something which will have an important bearing on the next general election.
Family voting?
What we can be sure of is that, had Reform won, by even a handful of votes, they would have hailed it as a democratic triumph in which the ‘silent majority’ of ‘ordinary, decent people’ had decisively spoken. As it was, they latched on to reports made by an organization called ‘Democracy Volunteers’, that there had been unusual volumes of ‘family voting’. This term, which refers to a practice outlawed by the 2023 Secret Ballots Act, seemed to be code for the claim that Muslim men had accompanied their female relatives into the polling booths and coerced them into voting for – presumably – the Greens. (Though, who knows, perhaps the implication was that white Christian Conservative patriarchs were reasserting ‘traditional family values’ by forcing their womenfolk to vote for Goodwin.)
There was a certain amount of social media ribaldry about the idea that the socially liberal female candidate of a party led by a gay Jewish man might have been the candidate of choice amongst traditionalist Muslim men. But, whilst that isn’t an unreasonable observation to make, it perhaps misses the nature of the accusation being made, which was two-fold: that the Green Party had concealed its social liberalism from some Muslim voters in election leaflets written in Urdu, and that the appeal it had for such voters was in its critique of Israel and support for Palestinians.
However, equally, even if these accusations were true, those making them never explained what is so wrong with emphasizing the party’s positions on these issues to voters who might support them, regardless of its position on other issues. All (successful) political parties build coalitions of voters with disparate, and often contradictory, priorities. We might also recall how, during the referendum, the Leave campaign deliberately and skillfully targeted different voter groups, including different ethnic groups, with messages tailored to their perceived concerns.
Whether or not the charge of ‘family voting’ was true, which is contested and is (rightly) under investigation, and despite that fact that, even if true, it is arithmetically implausible to think it could have been a clinching factor given the size of the Green majority, it quickly became linked to the claim that the Greens had won on the basis of “sectarianism”. This again seemed to be code for making an appeal to Muslims, or perhaps just anyone with dark skin. From this exploded a whole series of accusations about rigged postal voting and “foreign-born voters” having “stolen” the election.
These were not just social media talking points but, for example, were splashed on the front page of the Mail. This culminated in Farage announcing that Reform’s policy is now that foreigners will be banned from voting in elections, a reference to the longstanding right of nationals from qualifying Commonwealth countries, lawfully resident in the UK, to vote. One might now question the diligence with which Goodwin, if elected, would have worked for all his constituents and, for that matter, that of the existing Reform MPs in this respect.
Hypocrisy and ethno-nationalist sectarianism
It would be quite some task to unpick all the layers of hypocrisy in all this, so I’ll just make a few points. One is that Farage has constantly made complaints about electoral fraud, going back to at least 2014 which have rarely, if ever, been proven. But of course for operators like Farage that doesn’t matter: the accusation lodges in the public mind whereas the subsequent investigation showing it to be false is barely noticed. Another is to recall his own sanctimonious finger-wagging at ‘remainers’, when he insisted that "for a civilised democracy to work you need the losers' consent”. A third is how he, and other Brexiters, sought to galvanize Commonwealth immigrant voters to support Brexit. Indeed, many Brexiters argued that EU Freedom of Movement was effectively racist in discriminating against Commonwealth, especially South Asian, immigration.
Hypocrisy aside, these highly racialized allegations of electoral fraud have a particular salience because of the recent surge of ethno-nationalism, which now calls into question whether British nationals are ‘really’ British and/or English if they, or perhaps even their parents and grandparents, were not born here, at least if they are not white. It is actually this, if anything, which deserves the label of ‘sectarianism’ and, moreover, rather than sectarianism explaining the Green’s victory, it was the sectarianism of pitching almost entirely to ‘white working class’ voters which explains Reform’s failure to win.
What Reform’s reaction to this failure shows is that it will not be enough to defeat them (and similar parties) at the ballot box in order to expunge their influence. Indeed, there seems every prospect, and some indication, that if Reform fail to win the next general election then, Trump-like, they will cry foul. It may even be that, just as it often seemed as if the Brexiters would have preferred to have lost the referendum, the Brexitists would prefer to lose the next election, but to destabilize the country even further by positioning the victors as illegitimate and the entire democratic system as corrupted.
Questions for Labour
Against this background, the Gorton and Denton result also posed some serious questions for the Labour Party. At one level, these can be thought about in terms of electoral strategy and, as such, their answer is pretty obvious and has been very widely identified. That answer can be expressed in various ways, but was summed up by Sadiq Khan’s argument that Labour have to “stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives”. In effect, this is “the real leadership crisis” facing Keir Starmer which I discussed in my previous post.
However, the issues go much deeper than Starmer and much longer ago, after the 2021 Hartlepool by election, I set out some of these. Not all of that post has stood the test of time [3], but the central point holds: in very brief, the need to calibrate to representing Labour’s actual (potential) electoral coalition rather than that which historically existed. In that post, and elsewhere (£), I pointed out that part of the barrier to this is one of political psychology, whereby the party is heavily invested in the idea that male manual workers in manufacturing industry are the template for working-class authenticity. Since then, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is actually a manifestation of precisely the same nostalgia which is now so evident as a driver for the political right and Brexitism.
Labour’s terrible answers
As mentioned in my most recent post, there seemed to be a possibility that the ‘defenestration’ of Morgan McSweeney might mark an end to this kind of ‘Blue Labourism’ (though its grip on Labour goes deeper than McSweeney or his mentor Maurice Glasman). I finished that post by saying it was doubtful whether Starmer could rise to the challenge. There is now really no longer any room for doubt.
Starmer responded to the Greens’ by-election victory by making precisely the same accusation of “sectarianism” that Farage had levelled and, by linking this to the endorsement given to the Greens by the odious George Galloway, implicitly mirrored Reform’s claims about Islamification having played a decisive role. It was repellent in itself and, like so much else that Starmer does, politically maladroit, not least in ignoring what no doubt will have been the agonizing choice for some habitual Labour voters to support the Greens as the best chance of defeating Reform. That, as with his infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, he later distanced himself from what he has said only underscores the maladroitness
At the same time, Shabana Mahmood announced that she intends to press ahead with her hard-line anti-immigration reforms. These include, most shamefully, retrospectively increasing the amount of time before existing immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and making asylum awards temporary. Again, this is politically maladroit, just at the basic level of garnering electoral support: it won’t satisfy those minded to vote Reform and it will repel those minded to desert Labour to vote Green etc. And if, as may well happen, internal Labour opposition leads to it being abandoned then it will be chalked up not as a return to principle but yet another U-turn.
It is also maladroit in a more general sense. Labour’s most compelling pitch at the last election was that it would offer competence, but this policy is woefully incompetent in the context of now rapidly declining immigration and the economic need for more, and not less, immigration. It thus directly contradicts the government’s central policy of boosting economic growth as well as exacerbating its fiscal constraints. It is even incompetent in terms of any policy aim of integration, since making it harder to qualify for permanent residence makes it less likely that immigrants will integrate.
The competence issue matters because what is at stake here is not, as many commentators claim and, no doubt, some political activists and voters hope, that Labour need to respond to the by-election defeat with a ‘lurch to the left’. Setting an immigration policy which is fair, rational, and consonant with economic and demographic needs is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Operating an efficient and humane asylum process is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Making a clear distinction between immigration and asylum policies is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. To think otherwise is to cede the idea that these are somehow ‘extreme’ propositions and that the policies of virtually zero immigration, mass deportation, and the near-total rejection of asylum seekers advocated by Reform and others are the ‘norm’ or ‘moderate’.
Yet this is what the Labour government has accepted, and it is the most glaring way in which it has accepted Brexitism. Of course it is also this which has always lain at the heart of the timidity of the Brexit ‘reset’ with the EU, a reset which even in its own limited terms was denounced this week (£) by the Commons foreign affairs committee as “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If there was not so much other news, I would have more to say about that, including about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ claim that she wants to go further in breaking down trade barriers with the EU. Since there is no evidence, and surely no possibility, that this presages a break with Labour’s ‘red lines’, for now all that needs to be said is that the dishonesty and delusions of Brexit and Brexitism continue unabated.
Small comforts
It’s hard to feel anything other than pessimism at the moment. However this war develops, as always with war it will be ordinary, blameless people who simply want to lead ordinary, peaceful lives who suffer most. Something similar could be said of those being relentlessly attacked in the domestic culture wars.
There is only a small, though not entirely negligible, comfort in being spared the spectacle of Matt Goodwin pontificating on these matters in the House of Commons. But perhaps a slightly greater one in what that may betoken about the British electorate.
Notes
[1] The way this question was asked in the survey linked to does not really disclose what the public think about the subtle but important distinction between the use of UK bases for the attack on Iran (which the government did not grant) and their use to launch defensive operations against Iranian counter-attacks which may imperil British subjects and assets (which the government approved). If it did, I suspect that the public would support the government’s decisions in both respects. That seems to be borne out by other survey data about what the UK’s military response to the war should be.
[2] There’s a whole post that could be written about that fact that somewhere in that skein is Dubai. Lauded by Richard Tice as an exemplar of safety, it has become a magnet for right-wing British
[3] The most egregious failing is that I assumed, not unreasonably, but as it has out turned mistakenly, that Boris Johnson had re-made the Conservatives as an electorally successful populist party and seen off the challenge of Farage.
Friday, 20 February 2026
Starmer’s real leadership crisis
In my previous post I advocated ‘counting to a hundred’ as an antidote to the hyper-frenetic news cycle. That advice would have served the media well during the subsequent frenzy of speculation about the imminent demise of Keir Starmer’s premiership. As the economics (and politics) writer Simon Nixon described it, this episode was a “breathless media circus [ending] in an embarrassing anti-climax” which raised “some awkward questions about the nature of British political journalism”.
It is certainly true that the media are addicted to political drama and spectacle, gleefully recycling rumours and anonymous briefings, and calling it reporting. It’s an approach embodied by the giggling fatuity of the BBC’s Political Editor, Chris Mason, treating politics as a cross between a spectator sport and a game show. Mason isn’t the only offender, of course, but he is one of the worst and, because of the status of the BBC, probably the most balefully influential. At all events, the consequence of such an approach is negative in a double sense. It saturates the airwaves with silliness, and it denudes political discourse of serious analysis, in this case of the real leadership crisis faced by Starmer.
The truncation of the political leadership lifecycle
Nevertheless, the vacuity of political journalism is only one component of a wider shift in political culture, a shift within which the timescale of political leadership has become much more truncated even as, and perhaps because, British politics has become more ‘presidential’. A few decades ago, Harold Wilson remained leader of the Labour Party despite losing the 1970 election and went on to become Prime Minister again. As Labour’s Opposition leader, Neil Kinnock lost both the 1987 and 1992 elections before stepping down. Since those days, losing an election has become an automatic trigger for resignation of the leader of the governing or main opposition party [1].
Alongside that there has been an upsurge of resignations whilst in office. These, too, happened in the past, but were generally occasioned by ill-health (if sometimes only as a pretext), as in the cases of Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson. More recently, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair resigned between elections for (very different) political reasons, but in both cases after long periods in office. It is only since 2016 that there has been a rapid churn of serving Prime Ministers, with David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all resigning between elections, and it is undeniable that this was largely a direct consequence of Brexit. Part of Starmer’s pitch to the electorate in 2024 was to end that roiling instability, but perhaps it is now embedded that every political crisis now becomes a leadership crisis. If so, that is yet another piece of Brexit damage.
A Starmer ‘reset’?
Of course this is not, in itself, a sufficient explanation of the travails of Starmer’s leadership, a subject I will return to when, as seems highly probable, he does eventually have to resign. For now, one interpretation of last week’s leadership ‘crisis’, and the defenestration of Morgan McSweeney it led to, is that it will both require and allow Starmer and his administration to be ‘bolder’ in disowning Brexit and building closer relations with the EU. That interpretation is given some plausibility by Starmer’s statement at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years any more”. It may also explain why last week Rachel Reeves explicitly accepted that “economic gravity is reality” (i.e. that geographical proximity is a key driver of trade) and that this mandates closer relationships and regulatory alignment with the EU.
Both statements were, in their way, striking. However, it is far from clear that they mean anything of substance in terms of policy or, which is really the same point in a different way, that they mark any change from the existing Labour ‘reset’ policy. If they have any significance, it might be as waymarkers in the glacial progress towards a time when Brexit is unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly, in the way that happened with the once highly divisive issues of ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’.
However, it should not be assumed that this progression is automatic and there are many reasons to doubt that it will be. It has become commonplace to cite the figure that 56% of the British public think that leaving the EU was a mistake, but it is equally remarkable that 31% think that it was right (and that 13% don’t know). That is very far from Brexit being ‘unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly’. Moreover, in an excellent post on his Substack newsletter discussing Brexit as a “collective folly”, the author and journalist Matt Carr points out that “a credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.”
A new Lowe
Carr is referring, obviously, to Nigel Farage and the Reform party, which continues to lead in all recent opinion polls, with 24% to 32% of the public supporting it. As always, it bears saying that, in the British electoral system, and with a fragmented vote for the other parties, this means that a Reform or Reform-led government is a real possibility. But, even if this does not come to pass, the important point is that a really quite sizeable minority of the population are committed to what I call Brexitism. Not only that, but there are multiple signs that for some this is taking increasingly extreme forms.
This extremism was underscored by last weekend’s launch of the ‘Restore Britain’ party by the MP Rupert Lowe (initially elected for Reform but thrown out of the party after a row with Nigel Farage). Lowe created Restore Britain last year as a ‘political movement’, but its transformation into a party seems to be an attempt to draw together various other fringe parties and groups, including Ben Habib’s Advance UK, another splinter group from Reform, which is supported by Tommy Robinson (despite the report linked to, it is not entirely clear whether he has actually joined). Lowe’s new party has already been endorsed by Elon Musk.
This is an important development, since Restore Britain is, by any definition, a far-right party, and has already attracted enthusiastic support from those who are openly fascists. Lowe, despite his all too obvious lack of charisma, and despite his attempt to project a cuddly image, has become their figurehead because of the viciousness of his rhetoric. Indeed, his rallying call for the new party (warning: link to X) has a decidedly fascistic tang to it: “we will only accept those who share our values, and understand the painful decisions that will need to be taken. People know what we stand for. If you don't have the stomach for it, don't bother.”
The roots of the launch of this new party go back some time, and I wrote about them in detail about a year ago, also making the prediction that “the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years”. From that point of view, one consequence of Restore Britain may well be to siphon off small but potentially decisive numbers of Reform’s core vote, making a Farage election victory less likely. It has certainly already led to a vitriolic exchange between Lowe and Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, of which perhaps the most amusingly ironic feature is the ex-professor bemoaning (warning: X again) that Restore’s “ecosystem is riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists”, prompting the gamey response from Lowe than Goodwin is “full of turquoise s***” and that Reform’s “deportation policy is p***-weak” [2].
But, piquant as it may be for observers to see these two deeply unpleasant people, and their respective parties, squaring up to each other, that should not blind us to the fact that, whatever happens electorally, something profoundly dangerous is unfolding.
The far-right’s ‘cultural turn’
For what is at stake is not just the working out of the incipient splits in Reform that I referred to a year ago. The period since then has seen an ever-more overt ethno-nationalism, along with literal street violence outside asylum hotels and symbolic street violence of the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign (discussed in more detail in a previous post). At the same time, the far-right has become increasingly vociferous not just about immigration but about the supposed cultural or civilizational ‘erasure’ of the English and/or British, flames which have been fanned from across the Atlantic by Trump and his administration as well as by Musk.
One reason this is a significant shift is because it moves the terrain away from immigration levels, which have been falling for some time, to the idea of cultural – for which read racial – ‘purification’ and, in policy terms, to mass deportations which, indeed, is Lowe’s principal policy offering. But this has not arisen in a vacuum. It is both the cause and consequence of the normalization of, inter alia, the claim that multi-culturalism has failed, the claim that there is or has been ‘uncontrolled immigration’, the conflation of immigration with asylum-seeking, and the idea that Britain is being ‘invaded’ by ‘young men of fighting age’.
It is within that context that supposedly respectable people like the Brexit-backing tax exile billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, feel able to come out with noxious comments about Britain “being colonised by immigrants”, notwithstanding his subsequent mealy-mouthed non-apology, and for others to insist that, even if the language used was ‘unfortunate’, he “has a point”.
Labour’s complicity
That context has not simply been created by far-right social media crusaders. It has been aided and abetted by the Labour government, most egregiously by Starmer himself, in his disgraceful ‘island of strangers’ speech, and by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s hard-line anti-immigration policies. One feature of the latter which is of particular importance is the proposal to change the rules governing current immigrants, in terms of the period before indefinite leave to remain can be sought, which, unlike measures to curtail new immigration, is at least the country cousin of deportation in the sense of having a retrospective effect (which, as I discussed in a post last October, crosses a very significant line).
Here, too, Starmer’s recent leadership crisis may herald a shift. He was quick to criticise Ratcliffe’s comments, which perhaps would not have happened had McSweeney still been in post. And it may well be that the crisis will give fresh impetus to internal Labour opposition to the Mahmood proposals. Even so, it is hard to envisage the present government decisively and wholeheartedly challenging the anti-immigration narrative. Yet, ironically and predictably, net migration looks on course to become negative this year (and, despite the claims of Farage and others, this is not because of an exodus of British people).
The effects are already being felt by businesses, public services, and universities. The latter are particularly affected by another damaging conflation, that of overseas students and immigrants, and, in another irony, the impact is already being felt in ‘left-behind’ areas like Southend, with the closure of a campus of Essex University which has experienced a 52% fall in international student enrollment. With that goes not just job losses in universities, but all the knock-on effects on local businesses. Britain is self-immolating one of its greatest economic, cultural and soft power assets, and its economy generally, in the name of controlling immigration and yet, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, two-thirds of the public believe that immigration is still rising.
The challenge for Starmer
From this perspective, it is simply wrong for Starmer to say that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”. Even if by that he meant only that Britain was open to international, and especially European, partnerships than it had been under the Tories, and especially in the security and defence domain, it still does not really make sense since, as I’ve pointed out many times before, Britain cannot be a reliable member of such partnerships whilst Brexitism flourishes domestically. And Brexitism will continue to flourish whilst what would otherwise be a very small minority of ethno-nationalists are able to frame the terms in which immigration is discussed and immigration policy is enacted, or at the very least to pull the framing of those terms towards their own.
This is the real crisis for Starmer’s leadership (or at least one aspect of it), rather than the superficial drivel trotted out by political journalists like Chris Mason. It is a challenge to him not simply personally but philosophically, in that it entails a shift from what we might call the ‘McSweeney’ approach of ‘responding to voters’ demands’ to the more profound sense of leadership as the task of shaping, and in the process sometimes challenging, those demands. With McSweeney gone, Starmer has a chance, perhaps his final chance, to rise to that challenge. Whether he has either the personal or philosophical capacity to do so is doubtful.
Appendix
It doesn’t fit into the focus of this post, but I do want to record yet another tombstone in the graveyard of Brexit hubris. This week the Financial Times reported (£) that the government has “quietly shelved” the programme to build a high-tech frictionless border following years of delays and spiralling costs. This was the project announced in December 2020, in the final days of the transition period, which was to create (of course) “the most effective border in the world by 2025” and was explicitly claimed as a Brexit benefit giving a “once in a lifetime opportunity to transform our borders” (Michael Gove) now that Britain was “free to seize the opportunities that come with being a sovereign nation once again” (Priti Patel). I’ve discussed this project several times in the past, for example in May 2022 when I expressed pessimism about its costs, delivery time and functionality. That pessimism turned out to be optimistic in assuming that it would, eventually, be implemented.
It’s worth recalling this not just as yet another Brexit failure but also because for years during the Article 50 negotiations Brexiters insisted that it would be perfectly possible, even easy, to create ‘alternative arrangements’ for a high-tech frictionless border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This, they claimed, made the Northern Ireland Protocol unnecessary, and a ruse designed by Dublin and Brussels to thwart Brexit. The quiet death of “the most effective border in the world” is a fresh reminder of just how dishonest and ignorant all these claims were.
Notes
[1] Theresa May isn’t really an exception in that, whilst she did not win the 2017 election outright, she did not lose it per se and was still able to form a government with DUP support.
[2] As ever, my suppression of ‘rude’ words isn’t due to any prissiness on my part, but because including them can lead to problems in sharing/ linking to this blog.
It is certainly true that the media are addicted to political drama and spectacle, gleefully recycling rumours and anonymous briefings, and calling it reporting. It’s an approach embodied by the giggling fatuity of the BBC’s Political Editor, Chris Mason, treating politics as a cross between a spectator sport and a game show. Mason isn’t the only offender, of course, but he is one of the worst and, because of the status of the BBC, probably the most balefully influential. At all events, the consequence of such an approach is negative in a double sense. It saturates the airwaves with silliness, and it denudes political discourse of serious analysis, in this case of the real leadership crisis faced by Starmer.
The truncation of the political leadership lifecycle
Nevertheless, the vacuity of political journalism is only one component of a wider shift in political culture, a shift within which the timescale of political leadership has become much more truncated even as, and perhaps because, British politics has become more ‘presidential’. A few decades ago, Harold Wilson remained leader of the Labour Party despite losing the 1970 election and went on to become Prime Minister again. As Labour’s Opposition leader, Neil Kinnock lost both the 1987 and 1992 elections before stepping down. Since those days, losing an election has become an automatic trigger for resignation of the leader of the governing or main opposition party [1].
Alongside that there has been an upsurge of resignations whilst in office. These, too, happened in the past, but were generally occasioned by ill-health (if sometimes only as a pretext), as in the cases of Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson. More recently, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair resigned between elections for (very different) political reasons, but in both cases after long periods in office. It is only since 2016 that there has been a rapid churn of serving Prime Ministers, with David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all resigning between elections, and it is undeniable that this was largely a direct consequence of Brexit. Part of Starmer’s pitch to the electorate in 2024 was to end that roiling instability, but perhaps it is now embedded that every political crisis now becomes a leadership crisis. If so, that is yet another piece of Brexit damage.
A Starmer ‘reset’?
Of course this is not, in itself, a sufficient explanation of the travails of Starmer’s leadership, a subject I will return to when, as seems highly probable, he does eventually have to resign. For now, one interpretation of last week’s leadership ‘crisis’, and the defenestration of Morgan McSweeney it led to, is that it will both require and allow Starmer and his administration to be ‘bolder’ in disowning Brexit and building closer relations with the EU. That interpretation is given some plausibility by Starmer’s statement at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years any more”. It may also explain why last week Rachel Reeves explicitly accepted that “economic gravity is reality” (i.e. that geographical proximity is a key driver of trade) and that this mandates closer relationships and regulatory alignment with the EU.
Both statements were, in their way, striking. However, it is far from clear that they mean anything of substance in terms of policy or, which is really the same point in a different way, that they mark any change from the existing Labour ‘reset’ policy. If they have any significance, it might be as waymarkers in the glacial progress towards a time when Brexit is unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly, in the way that happened with the once highly divisive issues of ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’.
However, it should not be assumed that this progression is automatic and there are many reasons to doubt that it will be. It has become commonplace to cite the figure that 56% of the British public think that leaving the EU was a mistake, but it is equally remarkable that 31% think that it was right (and that 13% don’t know). That is very far from Brexit being ‘unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly’. Moreover, in an excellent post on his Substack newsletter discussing Brexit as a “collective folly”, the author and journalist Matt Carr points out that “a credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.”
A new Lowe
Carr is referring, obviously, to Nigel Farage and the Reform party, which continues to lead in all recent opinion polls, with 24% to 32% of the public supporting it. As always, it bears saying that, in the British electoral system, and with a fragmented vote for the other parties, this means that a Reform or Reform-led government is a real possibility. But, even if this does not come to pass, the important point is that a really quite sizeable minority of the population are committed to what I call Brexitism. Not only that, but there are multiple signs that for some this is taking increasingly extreme forms.
This extremism was underscored by last weekend’s launch of the ‘Restore Britain’ party by the MP Rupert Lowe (initially elected for Reform but thrown out of the party after a row with Nigel Farage). Lowe created Restore Britain last year as a ‘political movement’, but its transformation into a party seems to be an attempt to draw together various other fringe parties and groups, including Ben Habib’s Advance UK, another splinter group from Reform, which is supported by Tommy Robinson (despite the report linked to, it is not entirely clear whether he has actually joined). Lowe’s new party has already been endorsed by Elon Musk.
This is an important development, since Restore Britain is, by any definition, a far-right party, and has already attracted enthusiastic support from those who are openly fascists. Lowe, despite his all too obvious lack of charisma, and despite his attempt to project a cuddly image, has become their figurehead because of the viciousness of his rhetoric. Indeed, his rallying call for the new party (warning: link to X) has a decidedly fascistic tang to it: “we will only accept those who share our values, and understand the painful decisions that will need to be taken. People know what we stand for. If you don't have the stomach for it, don't bother.”
The roots of the launch of this new party go back some time, and I wrote about them in detail about a year ago, also making the prediction that “the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years”. From that point of view, one consequence of Restore Britain may well be to siphon off small but potentially decisive numbers of Reform’s core vote, making a Farage election victory less likely. It has certainly already led to a vitriolic exchange between Lowe and Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, of which perhaps the most amusingly ironic feature is the ex-professor bemoaning (warning: X again) that Restore’s “ecosystem is riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists”, prompting the gamey response from Lowe than Goodwin is “full of turquoise s***” and that Reform’s “deportation policy is p***-weak” [2].
But, piquant as it may be for observers to see these two deeply unpleasant people, and their respective parties, squaring up to each other, that should not blind us to the fact that, whatever happens electorally, something profoundly dangerous is unfolding.
The far-right’s ‘cultural turn’
For what is at stake is not just the working out of the incipient splits in Reform that I referred to a year ago. The period since then has seen an ever-more overt ethno-nationalism, along with literal street violence outside asylum hotels and symbolic street violence of the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign (discussed in more detail in a previous post). At the same time, the far-right has become increasingly vociferous not just about immigration but about the supposed cultural or civilizational ‘erasure’ of the English and/or British, flames which have been fanned from across the Atlantic by Trump and his administration as well as by Musk.
One reason this is a significant shift is because it moves the terrain away from immigration levels, which have been falling for some time, to the idea of cultural – for which read racial – ‘purification’ and, in policy terms, to mass deportations which, indeed, is Lowe’s principal policy offering. But this has not arisen in a vacuum. It is both the cause and consequence of the normalization of, inter alia, the claim that multi-culturalism has failed, the claim that there is or has been ‘uncontrolled immigration’, the conflation of immigration with asylum-seeking, and the idea that Britain is being ‘invaded’ by ‘young men of fighting age’.
It is within that context that supposedly respectable people like the Brexit-backing tax exile billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, feel able to come out with noxious comments about Britain “being colonised by immigrants”, notwithstanding his subsequent mealy-mouthed non-apology, and for others to insist that, even if the language used was ‘unfortunate’, he “has a point”.
Labour’s complicity
That context has not simply been created by far-right social media crusaders. It has been aided and abetted by the Labour government, most egregiously by Starmer himself, in his disgraceful ‘island of strangers’ speech, and by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s hard-line anti-immigration policies. One feature of the latter which is of particular importance is the proposal to change the rules governing current immigrants, in terms of the period before indefinite leave to remain can be sought, which, unlike measures to curtail new immigration, is at least the country cousin of deportation in the sense of having a retrospective effect (which, as I discussed in a post last October, crosses a very significant line).
Here, too, Starmer’s recent leadership crisis may herald a shift. He was quick to criticise Ratcliffe’s comments, which perhaps would not have happened had McSweeney still been in post. And it may well be that the crisis will give fresh impetus to internal Labour opposition to the Mahmood proposals. Even so, it is hard to envisage the present government decisively and wholeheartedly challenging the anti-immigration narrative. Yet, ironically and predictably, net migration looks on course to become negative this year (and, despite the claims of Farage and others, this is not because of an exodus of British people).
The effects are already being felt by businesses, public services, and universities. The latter are particularly affected by another damaging conflation, that of overseas students and immigrants, and, in another irony, the impact is already being felt in ‘left-behind’ areas like Southend, with the closure of a campus of Essex University which has experienced a 52% fall in international student enrollment. With that goes not just job losses in universities, but all the knock-on effects on local businesses. Britain is self-immolating one of its greatest economic, cultural and soft power assets, and its economy generally, in the name of controlling immigration and yet, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, two-thirds of the public believe that immigration is still rising.
The challenge for Starmer
From this perspective, it is simply wrong for Starmer to say that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”. Even if by that he meant only that Britain was open to international, and especially European, partnerships than it had been under the Tories, and especially in the security and defence domain, it still does not really make sense since, as I’ve pointed out many times before, Britain cannot be a reliable member of such partnerships whilst Brexitism flourishes domestically. And Brexitism will continue to flourish whilst what would otherwise be a very small minority of ethno-nationalists are able to frame the terms in which immigration is discussed and immigration policy is enacted, or at the very least to pull the framing of those terms towards their own.
This is the real crisis for Starmer’s leadership (or at least one aspect of it), rather than the superficial drivel trotted out by political journalists like Chris Mason. It is a challenge to him not simply personally but philosophically, in that it entails a shift from what we might call the ‘McSweeney’ approach of ‘responding to voters’ demands’ to the more profound sense of leadership as the task of shaping, and in the process sometimes challenging, those demands. With McSweeney gone, Starmer has a chance, perhaps his final chance, to rise to that challenge. Whether he has either the personal or philosophical capacity to do so is doubtful.
Appendix
It doesn’t fit into the focus of this post, but I do want to record yet another tombstone in the graveyard of Brexit hubris. This week the Financial Times reported (£) that the government has “quietly shelved” the programme to build a high-tech frictionless border following years of delays and spiralling costs. This was the project announced in December 2020, in the final days of the transition period, which was to create (of course) “the most effective border in the world by 2025” and was explicitly claimed as a Brexit benefit giving a “once in a lifetime opportunity to transform our borders” (Michael Gove) now that Britain was “free to seize the opportunities that come with being a sovereign nation once again” (Priti Patel). I’ve discussed this project several times in the past, for example in May 2022 when I expressed pessimism about its costs, delivery time and functionality. That pessimism turned out to be optimistic in assuming that it would, eventually, be implemented.
It’s worth recalling this not just as yet another Brexit failure but also because for years during the Article 50 negotiations Brexiters insisted that it would be perfectly possible, even easy, to create ‘alternative arrangements’ for a high-tech frictionless border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This, they claimed, made the Northern Ireland Protocol unnecessary, and a ruse designed by Dublin and Brussels to thwart Brexit. The quiet death of “the most effective border in the world” is a fresh reminder of just how dishonest and ignorant all these claims were.
Notes
[1] Theresa May isn’t really an exception in that, whilst she did not win the 2017 election outright, she did not lose it per se and was still able to form a government with DUP support.
[2] As ever, my suppression of ‘rude’ words isn’t due to any prissiness on my part, but because including them can lead to problems in sharing/ linking to this blog.
Friday, 6 February 2026
Count to one hundred
It’s indicative of the Trumpian world, as well as the hyper-frenetic nature of the contemporary media, that the ‘Greenland crisis’ which dominated the news when I wrote my previous post has all but disappeared from view. Its replacement this week by the Epstein files scandal is, in one very particular way, an illustration of how the two are linked in that the disclosures, which have convulsed British politics, only arose because of the persistent questions in the US about the Trump-Epstein relationship. That freneticism is disorientating, intentionally so in Trump's case, so it's worth slowing down and 'counting to one hundred' rather than responding to each twist and turn. In any case, a fortnightly blog imposes that discipline.
In fact, even before the latest Epstein story broke the Greenland crisis had become old news and the standard analysis of this seems to be that ‘Trump always chickens out’ (TACO) or, alternatively, that, like a market stall haggler, Trump starts with maximalist demands, always intending to settle for less. I’m not so sure. As Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland points out, Trump’s more common pattern is to briefly retreat then return for more. Thus on Greenland, within a few days of his apparent climbdown, Trump’s envoy was once again demanding (£) “total, unfettered access” to the territory.
The truth is, we don’t know what Trump was offered by NATO’s Mark Rutte that led to the sudden withdrawal of the ‘Greenland tariffs’ threat, and we don’t know what will happen next. And that is just one example of the bigger truth about Trump: no one knows what he will do next across the board. Another example is his sudden turnaround yesterday on his previous turnaround on the ‘Chagos deal’, which, incidentally, leaves those like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who used Trump’s previous statement as a stick with which to beat the government looking rather stupid (it’s also a good example of why ‘counting to a hundred’ in the current political climate is sensible).
The truth is, we don’t know what Trump was offered by NATO’s Mark Rutte that led to the sudden withdrawal of the ‘Greenland tariffs’ threat, and we don’t know what will happen next. And that is just one example of the bigger truth about Trump: no one knows what he will do next across the board. Another example is his sudden turnaround yesterday on his previous turnaround on the ‘Chagos deal’, which, incidentally, leaves those like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who used Trump’s previous statement as a stick with which to beat the government looking rather stupid (it’s also a good example of why ‘counting to a hundred’ in the current political climate is sensible).
It’s this unpredictability, as much as anything else, which presents the UK, like every other country, with so many dilemmas. It is also what is gradually draining away US power and prestige. Far from ’making America great again’ Trump is actually diminishing his country, burning away its ‘soft power’ and, increasingly, making it an undesirable trade and defence partner (£).
The Carney Doctrine in practice
So it’s not just that the Greenland crisis, when the US made both military and economic threats against its closest allies, won’t be forgotten. It’s that many countries, including the UK, are following the ‘Carney doctrine’ discussed in my previous post, finding new ways to navigate around the malevolent and unpredictable superpower that America has become. Examples from the last fortnight include Keir Starmer’s visit to China, to promote economic ties and to smooth diplomatic relations (just as have Mark Carney and President Orsi of Uruguay), followed by a slightly less high-profile stop in Japan to discuss economic and defence links. Another example is the completion of an EU-India Free Trade Agreement, which also included significant steps towards security cooperation [1].
Obviously, these events were in train before the Greenland Crisis and before Carney’s Davos speech. That speech was merely a sharp articulation of an existing trend, and the Carney Doctrine has now become a useful way of framing the continuation of that trend. The point is that these, and similar, events have to be understood in relation to Trump. Thus Reuters reported Starmer’s China visit as the latest example of countries “seeking an economic and geopolitical hedge against Trump's unpredictability” whilst Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College London, argued that it “reflects the realities of a new global order that has upended traditional alliances”.
Similarly, the EU-India deal, which has been long-delayed, was undoubtedly accelerated by Trump’s erratic and punitive tariff policies, and was described in very Carney-like terms by trade expert Amitendu Palit, of the National University of Singapore, as being “a strong signal for global middle powers committed to rules-based trade”. Another analyst spelled out that “this is not simply a trade deal. It is an act of geopolitical statecraft; one that reveals how major democratic economies are adapting to a more fractured and volatile global order.”
The rapprochement between the UK and China is not without risks. Just as Carney’s visit to Beijing attracted Trump’s ire, so too, though in slightly milder terms, did Starmer’s. Meanwhile, domestically, the potential security problems as well as the human rights implications, of closer relations with China attracted criticism. But this just underlines that there are no good options, and that, whatever else China may be, it, unlike the US, is at least relatively predictable and if Trump doesn’t like that then he has only himself to blame. This also means that, for the foreseeable future, there is going to be no easy way of describing the UK’s international relations posture in the way that, at least to some extent, was possible during the Cold War. It’s going to be a hodge-podge of uncomfortable accommodations.
Brexit: a hodge-podge of its own
Of course, those accommodations are made all the more uncomfortable by Brexit. Indeed, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the US, and the very profound discomfort it has caused the government this week, arose at least in part because, as the Financial Times trade commentator Alan Beattie has pointed out, it was believed that he would be able to deliver the supposed prize of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US (or non-deal, as it has so far largely turned out to be). It also seems pretty obvious that he was appointed because of rather than despite his friendship with Epstein, in the sense that it was such connections that made Mandelson the kind of credible Trump-whisperer that post-Brexit Britain needed: all three men swam in the same fetid cesspool of wealth and depravity.
That aside, the more general point is that, given the situation Trump has created, what the UK most needs is a close, predictable relationship with a major geo-political entity with which it is closely aligned in terms of trade, interests, and values. Thus it is more obvious than ever that Brexit was supremely stupid. EU membership would not remove the challenges of navigating relations with the US and China, but it would provide a stable anchor-point for that navigation (I’m aware that this metaphor is mangled). Now, given that Brexit has happened, the obvious logic of the global situation for the UK is to move closer to the EU.
In fact, what we see in that respect is also a hodge-podge. Last week, Starmer stated that the UK should look to “go further” at the next summit with the EU. This is to be held in May, with what was in effect a pre-meeting having taken place this week, resulting in a rather bland joint statement. One implication of that statement, at least on my reading (the wording is slightly ambiguous), is that the once eagerly anticipated 2026 review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is now redundant, with everything folded into the ongoing process of the summits. Yet, despite the talk of ‘going further’, the reality is that almost none of the things agreed in principle at last year’s summit have been finalised, and this week’s statement gives only vague aspirations for when they will be [2]. And one of last year’s proposals, UK participation in the EU SAFE fund for defence procurement, has actually already failed, although, partly because of the Greenland crisis, it seems that there could be a new attempt at an agreement.
There is also a very mixed picture in the regulatory sphere. The latest iteration of the invaluable UKICE regulatory divergence tracker shows a variety of passive and active divergences between the UK and the EU, alongside some cases of active alignment. In his analysis of the overall position, Joël Reland, the compiler of the tracker, argues that there has been greater divergence under the Labour government than under its Conservative predecessor. This is because, whilst broadly pursuing ‘alignment’ in relation to trade in goods, there has been targeted divergence in relation to some (not all) services, especially financial services, and technology regulation. In this respect, Reland suggests, the Labour approach is more precise than that of the last government in identifying priorities and, in a certain sense, more effective in actually making concrete changes within those priority areas.
There’s a lot to unpack in that analysis. A preliminary point is just a reiteration of what I’ve already said: the decisions the UK is taking do not point in a single direction. Secondly, as Reland points out, the actual economic impact of these regulatory divergences is likely to be very slim. In other words, they show one of the many basic flaws in the entire Brexit prospectus: it is simply wrong to claim that freedom to diverge from EU regulations constitutes an economic benefit (and, certainly, to claim that it could remotely compensate for the costs of having that freedom). Indeed, the reason why the Tories did not greatly diverge from EU regulations when they were in power was not through any lack of zeal. For example, no one could accuse Jacob Rees-Mogg as deficient in such zeal yet, when he was Minister for Brexit Opportunities, he was notably reduced to asking Sun readers to identify what these benefits might be.
Perhaps the more important point is a political one, and it is one replete with ironies. For whilst the government may be diverging more from some EU regulations than its predecessor and is certainly disappointing many of its anti-Brexit supporters in doing so, its opponents are insisting that it is doing the opposite. Indeed, there has been a rash of anniversary commentary (marking six years since the UK formally left the EU and, more imprecisely, ten years since the referendum) bemoaning Labour’s – yes, of course – ‘betrayal’ of Brexit. I’m not sure, by the way, when it was first claimed that Brexit had been betrayed, but I suspect that it is approximately the tenth anniversary of that, too.
A necessary betrayal
More specifically, the Express has launched a “crusade” to “Give us a Proper Brexit”, a campaign backed, inevitably, by Nigel Farage and, even more shamelessly, by Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch. Since Johnson actually negotiated the terms of Brexit and Badenoch had key ministerial roles associated with delivering post-Brexit ‘opportunities’ it's questionable exactly what their credentials as ‘crusaders’ for ‘a proper Brexit’ might be. The obvious conclusion should be that ‘proper Brexit’ is a mirage, but it is one which eludes arch-Brexiters such as serial idiot Daniel Hannan (£), for whom the “cowardice” of Britain’s leaders explains why Brexit is “not more popular” (even that formulation is slyly dishonest, as if it is ‘popular’, but could be more so).
All of this is dismally familiar, since the claim that Brexit would all have been wonderful if only it had been done ‘properly’ has, like the claim that it has been betrayed, been endlessly repeated since 2016. Equally dismal is that, even after all these years, Brexiters either can’t describe what this ‘proper Brexit’ would consist of or, if they can, are unable to agree with each other’s descriptions. Even more dismal is that what most of them do now agree about is that true Brexit means leaving the ECHR, which was never entailed by Brexit.
However, the ‘proper Brexit’ theme has a new and particular salience in the current political context. That context is, of course, the rise of Reform UK, and the increasingly urgent need for its opponents to expose its vulnerabilities. These are multiple, including the many failures and scandals which have attended even the short time it has controlled local councils, and several of them centre on Farage, on whom Reform is almost totally reliant. His vulnerabilities include his close relationship with Trump, his admiration for Putin, his financial dealings, and, at least potentially, Brexit. After all, this is the defining policy of his political career.
If it was remotely possible to make the case that Brexit had been a success, then Farage would certainly be taking credit for it. The fact that he does not, and has even called it a failure, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence why there is simply no plausible basis for the continuing attempts of some Brexiters to claim otherwise. Unlike those diehards, Farage, who if nothing else is an accomplished political operator, knows that that argument has been lost. Yet he can hardly disavow Brexit as an ‘idea’ given both his own support for it and the deep emotional commitment to it amongst his core voters. Thus the narrative of Brexit betrayal is absolutely central to his political credibility and prospects, and, in turn, to those of Reform [3].
This is one reason why the steady stream of Tory defections to Reform, Suella Braverman being the latest, is potentially damaging to his party. Along with the general point that this makes it harder to sustain Reform’s image as an insurgent alternative to ‘the Establishment’, and the Conservative Party in particular, it prompts the specific question: who betrayed Brexit, if not these former Tory MPs and government ministers? Naturally, they would have their own answers (the civil service, the judges, the metropolitan elite etc.), but, for many committed or potential Reform voters, the answer will be Tory politicians, especially senior Cabinet ministers like Braverman.
The angry man
The next test for Reform’s prospects will be the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. It will be an unusually complex contest, for the reasons set out with great clarity by the political scientist Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University. Some of that complexity is specific to the seat, and to this particular point in the electoral cycle (and now, very likely, the impact of the Epstein scandal), but some of it is a harbinger of what probably awaits us at the next general election when the splintering of party loyalties combined with the first-past-the-post electoral system will produce unpredictable and possibly bizarre results.
One thing which is specific to this by-election is Reform’s choice of Matt Goodwin as its candidate. Much has been written about Goodwin’s journey from being a reasonably successful academic specialising in the study of right-wing populism to a strident populist ideologue (the profile by James Ball in The New World last year and Ian Dunt’s assessment a couple of weeks’ ago will tell those who aren’t familiar with this story most of what they need to know). In some ways, he is just an identikit of such ideologues, notable, if at all, for a degree of pomposity and a whiff of megalomania (at one stage, he sought to found his own party and adopted a vaguely sinister avatar, now alas deleted, depicting himself in black and white, with jutting jaw, rather like a latter-day Roderick Spode). However, he also, far more than Farage, has become a more-or-less open champion for English ethno-nationalism, reflected in the fact that his candidature has now been endorsed by Tommy Robinson. Reform has repudiated that endorsement but, so far as I am aware, Goodwin has not.
If he is elected, then, it will betoken more than a win for Farage. Farage, whatever his true beliefs may be, has always been very careful, and fairly adept, at distancing himself from overt extremism, including repeatedly distancing himself from Robinson. He projects, fairly successfully, the image of a jovial, common-sense fellow, superficial as that image may be. Goodwin cuts a very different figure, and if he wins it will be an electoral endorsement of ideas which had been confined to the extreme fringes of the far right for decades, especially the idea that being born in Britain doesn’t make people British. His prolific, even hyperactive, social media postings have for some time now obsessively documented the actual or alleged crimes of immigrants, especially refugees, and predicted civilizational collapse. And, unlike Farage, who occasionally displays flashes of humour, Goodwin is relentlessly, splenetically, angry.
The angry brigade
In that respect, whatever the outcome of this by-election, Goodwin is representative of a group of voters who are highly active online, expressing their anger and in the process inciting their own and others' increasingly radical positions. Whereas much attention has been given to the online radicalization of the young and, especially, of young Muslims, this group are old (usually meaning the ‘baby boomers’ born before 1965) or middle-aged (usually meaning ‘Gen-X’ born between 1965 and 1980). They are also predominantly white, and generally but not always male. Apart from being slightly younger, having been born in 1981, Goodwin and his escalating online anger and growing radicalism perfectly fits the profile as, no doubt, do many of his followers.
Crucially, these people’s activities are not confined to the online world (the online and real-world distinction anyway being increasingly blurred). For one thing, as with older people generally, they are more likely to vote than younger cohorts. But they also take part in street politics, including the violent unrest and rioting associated with the asylum hotels ‘protests’. Recently, a few extreme cases have gone even further. One example is the ‘Ulez bomber’ convicted last week, who had not only apparently been radicalised by online far-right discussion forums but, in those forums, is regarded as a hero. In his case, he was arrested before he hurt anyone, unlike the far worse case of the ex-soldier who, in a fit of uncontrollable anger, rammed his car through a crowd of Liverpool fans, injuring 134 people. The background to his crimes is complex, but includes following a small number of social media accounts of whom most were associated with the far-right.
I’m obviously not suggesting that the online anger of right-wing populists necessarily causes people to commit crimes, or that most of those who post or are exposed to that anger engage in violence, or that crimes such as those mentioned would not occur anyway. But it is not unreasonable to assume that the online expression of anger amongst older people informs their political decisions (indeed, it is hard to imagine that it would not), and that it matches the age and gender profiles of electoral support for Reform. The same is probably true of support for the various small far-right parties such as Advance UK (which last week recruited two Devon County councillors who were originally elected as Reform candidates). And although this anger isn’t unique to Britain, it is hardly outlandish to say that in the British context it is connected to the anger which drove at least some of the vote for Brexit, and which continues to inform the anger about Brexit having been betrayed.
Political anger has been stoked this week by the Epstein scandal, and of course anger about that is by no means confined to the populist right. However, for the populist right specifically, it adds new ballast to its familiar critique of the ‘corrupt globalist elite’ and its general rejection of ‘mainstream politicians’ as all being as bad as each other. It does bear saying, though, that the scandal could backfire on them because it is already clear that there are multiple connections between Epstein and the British and American populist right, and that Epstein, like others in his circle of anarchistic oligarchs, was an enthusiast for Brexit. For that matter, it is revealing Farage’s brazen opportunism and hypocrisy, as he castigates Starmer for appointing Mandelson whilst praising the appointment at the time.
Nursery politics
But, in a sense, it’s all irrelevant. There will always be some new story or scandal to feed the anger, and the details get forgotten immediately, because, fundamentally, it’s not about this or that event, it’s about anger as a permanent political condition. I’m not sure that this condition of anger can be assuaged, not least because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, much of it stems from an impossible desire to reclaim an imaginary past or, more profoundly, not from a desire for grievances to be redressed but to luxuriate in the feeling of aggrievement. On either account, this explains why, for such voters, having been given Brexit, they are now even angrier because it isn’t the right sort of Brexit.
Strangely, whilst this anger is most evident amongst older voters, there is something childish about it. One of my earliest memories (and one my family reminded me of for years) is of a day when I was, perhaps, five years old and for some reason I pestered and pleaded for my mother to buy some honey. She eventually gave in, but when I saw it, I fell into a raging, uncontrollable tantrum because, I shrieked, she had bought the wrong sort of honey.
And this brings us back to the beginning of this post. For all that he has far more power than them, Donald Trump is not so different to the on-line army of angry old white British men radicalizing themselves and each other. There is at least a rhyme between the two. Trump’s rapacious and capricious ego, driving his unpredictable demands and vindictive assaults on anyone who crosses or slights him, is also child-like in its nature. Perhaps that is also why living through the current political period is so neuralgically wearisome, like being trapped in a nursery not just full of, but run by, angry screaming toddlers. It also brings us back to 'counting to a hundred' which, apart from being a useful antidote to the frenetic news cycle, was what a wiser American President, Thomas Jefferson, advised the very angry to do before speaking.
Notes
[1] The EU-India trade agreement underscores the fragility of claims about Brexit benefits, of which the UK-India trade deal is supposedly an example. The slight difference in timing hardly warrants that supposition (there are also some signs of closer EU-CPTPP integration). The same potentially applies to the regulatory choices exercised by the UK (e.g. in relation to gene-editing or financial services).
[2} For a detailed update on the reset and its future prospects, see this week’s policy briefing from Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform.
[3] This means that Starmer’s attempts to attack Farage on Brexit aren’t very effective, and might even serve to endorse Farage’s own position, because in doing so Starmer insists on referring to “botched Brexit”. The reason, of course, is that he wants to imply to Labour leave voters that he is not opposed to Brexit and isn’t going to reverse it but ‘improve’ it. But even if that line made some kind of sense as an attack on the Tories, it effectively validates Farage’s claim that Brexit wasn’t done ‘properly’, even if he has a different view on how it should have been done.
The Carney Doctrine in practice
So it’s not just that the Greenland crisis, when the US made both military and economic threats against its closest allies, won’t be forgotten. It’s that many countries, including the UK, are following the ‘Carney doctrine’ discussed in my previous post, finding new ways to navigate around the malevolent and unpredictable superpower that America has become. Examples from the last fortnight include Keir Starmer’s visit to China, to promote economic ties and to smooth diplomatic relations (just as have Mark Carney and President Orsi of Uruguay), followed by a slightly less high-profile stop in Japan to discuss economic and defence links. Another example is the completion of an EU-India Free Trade Agreement, which also included significant steps towards security cooperation [1].
Obviously, these events were in train before the Greenland Crisis and before Carney’s Davos speech. That speech was merely a sharp articulation of an existing trend, and the Carney Doctrine has now become a useful way of framing the continuation of that trend. The point is that these, and similar, events have to be understood in relation to Trump. Thus Reuters reported Starmer’s China visit as the latest example of countries “seeking an economic and geopolitical hedge against Trump's unpredictability” whilst Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College London, argued that it “reflects the realities of a new global order that has upended traditional alliances”.
Similarly, the EU-India deal, which has been long-delayed, was undoubtedly accelerated by Trump’s erratic and punitive tariff policies, and was described in very Carney-like terms by trade expert Amitendu Palit, of the National University of Singapore, as being “a strong signal for global middle powers committed to rules-based trade”. Another analyst spelled out that “this is not simply a trade deal. It is an act of geopolitical statecraft; one that reveals how major democratic economies are adapting to a more fractured and volatile global order.”
The rapprochement between the UK and China is not without risks. Just as Carney’s visit to Beijing attracted Trump’s ire, so too, though in slightly milder terms, did Starmer’s. Meanwhile, domestically, the potential security problems as well as the human rights implications, of closer relations with China attracted criticism. But this just underlines that there are no good options, and that, whatever else China may be, it, unlike the US, is at least relatively predictable and if Trump doesn’t like that then he has only himself to blame. This also means that, for the foreseeable future, there is going to be no easy way of describing the UK’s international relations posture in the way that, at least to some extent, was possible during the Cold War. It’s going to be a hodge-podge of uncomfortable accommodations.
Brexit: a hodge-podge of its own
Of course, those accommodations are made all the more uncomfortable by Brexit. Indeed, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the US, and the very profound discomfort it has caused the government this week, arose at least in part because, as the Financial Times trade commentator Alan Beattie has pointed out, it was believed that he would be able to deliver the supposed prize of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US (or non-deal, as it has so far largely turned out to be). It also seems pretty obvious that he was appointed because of rather than despite his friendship with Epstein, in the sense that it was such connections that made Mandelson the kind of credible Trump-whisperer that post-Brexit Britain needed: all three men swam in the same fetid cesspool of wealth and depravity.
That aside, the more general point is that, given the situation Trump has created, what the UK most needs is a close, predictable relationship with a major geo-political entity with which it is closely aligned in terms of trade, interests, and values. Thus it is more obvious than ever that Brexit was supremely stupid. EU membership would not remove the challenges of navigating relations with the US and China, but it would provide a stable anchor-point for that navigation (I’m aware that this metaphor is mangled). Now, given that Brexit has happened, the obvious logic of the global situation for the UK is to move closer to the EU.
In fact, what we see in that respect is also a hodge-podge. Last week, Starmer stated that the UK should look to “go further” at the next summit with the EU. This is to be held in May, with what was in effect a pre-meeting having taken place this week, resulting in a rather bland joint statement. One implication of that statement, at least on my reading (the wording is slightly ambiguous), is that the once eagerly anticipated 2026 review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is now redundant, with everything folded into the ongoing process of the summits. Yet, despite the talk of ‘going further’, the reality is that almost none of the things agreed in principle at last year’s summit have been finalised, and this week’s statement gives only vague aspirations for when they will be [2]. And one of last year’s proposals, UK participation in the EU SAFE fund for defence procurement, has actually already failed, although, partly because of the Greenland crisis, it seems that there could be a new attempt at an agreement.
There is also a very mixed picture in the regulatory sphere. The latest iteration of the invaluable UKICE regulatory divergence tracker shows a variety of passive and active divergences between the UK and the EU, alongside some cases of active alignment. In his analysis of the overall position, Joël Reland, the compiler of the tracker, argues that there has been greater divergence under the Labour government than under its Conservative predecessor. This is because, whilst broadly pursuing ‘alignment’ in relation to trade in goods, there has been targeted divergence in relation to some (not all) services, especially financial services, and technology regulation. In this respect, Reland suggests, the Labour approach is more precise than that of the last government in identifying priorities and, in a certain sense, more effective in actually making concrete changes within those priority areas.
There’s a lot to unpack in that analysis. A preliminary point is just a reiteration of what I’ve already said: the decisions the UK is taking do not point in a single direction. Secondly, as Reland points out, the actual economic impact of these regulatory divergences is likely to be very slim. In other words, they show one of the many basic flaws in the entire Brexit prospectus: it is simply wrong to claim that freedom to diverge from EU regulations constitutes an economic benefit (and, certainly, to claim that it could remotely compensate for the costs of having that freedom). Indeed, the reason why the Tories did not greatly diverge from EU regulations when they were in power was not through any lack of zeal. For example, no one could accuse Jacob Rees-Mogg as deficient in such zeal yet, when he was Minister for Brexit Opportunities, he was notably reduced to asking Sun readers to identify what these benefits might be.
Perhaps the more important point is a political one, and it is one replete with ironies. For whilst the government may be diverging more from some EU regulations than its predecessor and is certainly disappointing many of its anti-Brexit supporters in doing so, its opponents are insisting that it is doing the opposite. Indeed, there has been a rash of anniversary commentary (marking six years since the UK formally left the EU and, more imprecisely, ten years since the referendum) bemoaning Labour’s – yes, of course – ‘betrayal’ of Brexit. I’m not sure, by the way, when it was first claimed that Brexit had been betrayed, but I suspect that it is approximately the tenth anniversary of that, too.
A necessary betrayal
More specifically, the Express has launched a “crusade” to “Give us a Proper Brexit”, a campaign backed, inevitably, by Nigel Farage and, even more shamelessly, by Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch. Since Johnson actually negotiated the terms of Brexit and Badenoch had key ministerial roles associated with delivering post-Brexit ‘opportunities’ it's questionable exactly what their credentials as ‘crusaders’ for ‘a proper Brexit’ might be. The obvious conclusion should be that ‘proper Brexit’ is a mirage, but it is one which eludes arch-Brexiters such as serial idiot Daniel Hannan (£), for whom the “cowardice” of Britain’s leaders explains why Brexit is “not more popular” (even that formulation is slyly dishonest, as if it is ‘popular’, but could be more so).
All of this is dismally familiar, since the claim that Brexit would all have been wonderful if only it had been done ‘properly’ has, like the claim that it has been betrayed, been endlessly repeated since 2016. Equally dismal is that, even after all these years, Brexiters either can’t describe what this ‘proper Brexit’ would consist of or, if they can, are unable to agree with each other’s descriptions. Even more dismal is that what most of them do now agree about is that true Brexit means leaving the ECHR, which was never entailed by Brexit.
However, the ‘proper Brexit’ theme has a new and particular salience in the current political context. That context is, of course, the rise of Reform UK, and the increasingly urgent need for its opponents to expose its vulnerabilities. These are multiple, including the many failures and scandals which have attended even the short time it has controlled local councils, and several of them centre on Farage, on whom Reform is almost totally reliant. His vulnerabilities include his close relationship with Trump, his admiration for Putin, his financial dealings, and, at least potentially, Brexit. After all, this is the defining policy of his political career.
If it was remotely possible to make the case that Brexit had been a success, then Farage would certainly be taking credit for it. The fact that he does not, and has even called it a failure, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence why there is simply no plausible basis for the continuing attempts of some Brexiters to claim otherwise. Unlike those diehards, Farage, who if nothing else is an accomplished political operator, knows that that argument has been lost. Yet he can hardly disavow Brexit as an ‘idea’ given both his own support for it and the deep emotional commitment to it amongst his core voters. Thus the narrative of Brexit betrayal is absolutely central to his political credibility and prospects, and, in turn, to those of Reform [3].
This is one reason why the steady stream of Tory defections to Reform, Suella Braverman being the latest, is potentially damaging to his party. Along with the general point that this makes it harder to sustain Reform’s image as an insurgent alternative to ‘the Establishment’, and the Conservative Party in particular, it prompts the specific question: who betrayed Brexit, if not these former Tory MPs and government ministers? Naturally, they would have their own answers (the civil service, the judges, the metropolitan elite etc.), but, for many committed or potential Reform voters, the answer will be Tory politicians, especially senior Cabinet ministers like Braverman.
The angry man
The next test for Reform’s prospects will be the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. It will be an unusually complex contest, for the reasons set out with great clarity by the political scientist Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University. Some of that complexity is specific to the seat, and to this particular point in the electoral cycle (and now, very likely, the impact of the Epstein scandal), but some of it is a harbinger of what probably awaits us at the next general election when the splintering of party loyalties combined with the first-past-the-post electoral system will produce unpredictable and possibly bizarre results.
One thing which is specific to this by-election is Reform’s choice of Matt Goodwin as its candidate. Much has been written about Goodwin’s journey from being a reasonably successful academic specialising in the study of right-wing populism to a strident populist ideologue (the profile by James Ball in The New World last year and Ian Dunt’s assessment a couple of weeks’ ago will tell those who aren’t familiar with this story most of what they need to know). In some ways, he is just an identikit of such ideologues, notable, if at all, for a degree of pomposity and a whiff of megalomania (at one stage, he sought to found his own party and adopted a vaguely sinister avatar, now alas deleted, depicting himself in black and white, with jutting jaw, rather like a latter-day Roderick Spode). However, he also, far more than Farage, has become a more-or-less open champion for English ethno-nationalism, reflected in the fact that his candidature has now been endorsed by Tommy Robinson. Reform has repudiated that endorsement but, so far as I am aware, Goodwin has not.
If he is elected, then, it will betoken more than a win for Farage. Farage, whatever his true beliefs may be, has always been very careful, and fairly adept, at distancing himself from overt extremism, including repeatedly distancing himself from Robinson. He projects, fairly successfully, the image of a jovial, common-sense fellow, superficial as that image may be. Goodwin cuts a very different figure, and if he wins it will be an electoral endorsement of ideas which had been confined to the extreme fringes of the far right for decades, especially the idea that being born in Britain doesn’t make people British. His prolific, even hyperactive, social media postings have for some time now obsessively documented the actual or alleged crimes of immigrants, especially refugees, and predicted civilizational collapse. And, unlike Farage, who occasionally displays flashes of humour, Goodwin is relentlessly, splenetically, angry.
The angry brigade
In that respect, whatever the outcome of this by-election, Goodwin is representative of a group of voters who are highly active online, expressing their anger and in the process inciting their own and others' increasingly radical positions. Whereas much attention has been given to the online radicalization of the young and, especially, of young Muslims, this group are old (usually meaning the ‘baby boomers’ born before 1965) or middle-aged (usually meaning ‘Gen-X’ born between 1965 and 1980). They are also predominantly white, and generally but not always male. Apart from being slightly younger, having been born in 1981, Goodwin and his escalating online anger and growing radicalism perfectly fits the profile as, no doubt, do many of his followers.
Crucially, these people’s activities are not confined to the online world (the online and real-world distinction anyway being increasingly blurred). For one thing, as with older people generally, they are more likely to vote than younger cohorts. But they also take part in street politics, including the violent unrest and rioting associated with the asylum hotels ‘protests’. Recently, a few extreme cases have gone even further. One example is the ‘Ulez bomber’ convicted last week, who had not only apparently been radicalised by online far-right discussion forums but, in those forums, is regarded as a hero. In his case, he was arrested before he hurt anyone, unlike the far worse case of the ex-soldier who, in a fit of uncontrollable anger, rammed his car through a crowd of Liverpool fans, injuring 134 people. The background to his crimes is complex, but includes following a small number of social media accounts of whom most were associated with the far-right.
I’m obviously not suggesting that the online anger of right-wing populists necessarily causes people to commit crimes, or that most of those who post or are exposed to that anger engage in violence, or that crimes such as those mentioned would not occur anyway. But it is not unreasonable to assume that the online expression of anger amongst older people informs their political decisions (indeed, it is hard to imagine that it would not), and that it matches the age and gender profiles of electoral support for Reform. The same is probably true of support for the various small far-right parties such as Advance UK (which last week recruited two Devon County councillors who were originally elected as Reform candidates). And although this anger isn’t unique to Britain, it is hardly outlandish to say that in the British context it is connected to the anger which drove at least some of the vote for Brexit, and which continues to inform the anger about Brexit having been betrayed.
Political anger has been stoked this week by the Epstein scandal, and of course anger about that is by no means confined to the populist right. However, for the populist right specifically, it adds new ballast to its familiar critique of the ‘corrupt globalist elite’ and its general rejection of ‘mainstream politicians’ as all being as bad as each other. It does bear saying, though, that the scandal could backfire on them because it is already clear that there are multiple connections between Epstein and the British and American populist right, and that Epstein, like others in his circle of anarchistic oligarchs, was an enthusiast for Brexit. For that matter, it is revealing Farage’s brazen opportunism and hypocrisy, as he castigates Starmer for appointing Mandelson whilst praising the appointment at the time.
Nursery politics
But, in a sense, it’s all irrelevant. There will always be some new story or scandal to feed the anger, and the details get forgotten immediately, because, fundamentally, it’s not about this or that event, it’s about anger as a permanent political condition. I’m not sure that this condition of anger can be assuaged, not least because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, much of it stems from an impossible desire to reclaim an imaginary past or, more profoundly, not from a desire for grievances to be redressed but to luxuriate in the feeling of aggrievement. On either account, this explains why, for such voters, having been given Brexit, they are now even angrier because it isn’t the right sort of Brexit.
Strangely, whilst this anger is most evident amongst older voters, there is something childish about it. One of my earliest memories (and one my family reminded me of for years) is of a day when I was, perhaps, five years old and for some reason I pestered and pleaded for my mother to buy some honey. She eventually gave in, but when I saw it, I fell into a raging, uncontrollable tantrum because, I shrieked, she had bought the wrong sort of honey.
And this brings us back to the beginning of this post. For all that he has far more power than them, Donald Trump is not so different to the on-line army of angry old white British men radicalizing themselves and each other. There is at least a rhyme between the two. Trump’s rapacious and capricious ego, driving his unpredictable demands and vindictive assaults on anyone who crosses or slights him, is also child-like in its nature. Perhaps that is also why living through the current political period is so neuralgically wearisome, like being trapped in a nursery not just full of, but run by, angry screaming toddlers. It also brings us back to 'counting to a hundred' which, apart from being a useful antidote to the frenetic news cycle, was what a wiser American President, Thomas Jefferson, advised the very angry to do before speaking.
Notes
[1] The EU-India trade agreement underscores the fragility of claims about Brexit benefits, of which the UK-India trade deal is supposedly an example. The slight difference in timing hardly warrants that supposition (there are also some signs of closer EU-CPTPP integration). The same potentially applies to the regulatory choices exercised by the UK (e.g. in relation to gene-editing or financial services).
[2} For a detailed update on the reset and its future prospects, see this week’s policy briefing from Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform.
[3] This means that Starmer’s attempts to attack Farage on Brexit aren’t very effective, and might even serve to endorse Farage’s own position, because in doing so Starmer insists on referring to “botched Brexit”. The reason, of course, is that he wants to imply to Labour leave voters that he is not opposed to Brexit and isn’t going to reverse it but ‘improve’ it. But even if that line made some kind of sense as an attack on the Tories, it effectively validates Farage’s claim that Brexit wasn’t done ‘properly’, even if he has a different view on how it should have been done.
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