In the last fortnight we have had several scenes, different and yet related, of politics in post-Brexit Britain. Each of them is unpleasant in itself, but taken together, as pieces in a jigsaw, they reveal a very ugly picture. More than that, they reveal a picture of the profound dangers our country faces.
A walking sticks and some oysters
Exhibit one is the scene of how hecklers were treated at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham. These hecklers infiltrated and disrupted the conference, and as such deserved, and no doubt expected, to be ejected. But what happened was not simply an orderly removal by professional security guards. Instead, a crowd of mainly elderly Reform members, of both sexes, punched and slapped them, with at least one young woman being pulled around by her hair and struck with a walking stick (the latter link is to a discussion with the woman, the actual images are, be warned, repulsive). Meanwhile, other delegates cheered the attackers on whilst, on the podium, Nigel Farage laughed.
This may not, in the scheme of things, have been a massively violent assault, although it was certainly vicious and it did cause injuries. Yet it was, in its way, remarkable. I’m sure that the attackers regard themselves as ‘ordinary, decent, respectable people’, but the contorted hatred on their faces as they rounded on the disruptors showed them in an altogether different light. There was also, somehow, a symbolism of the generational political divide in it: old people spitefully lashing out in a self-righteous frenzy at youngsters for having the temerity to disrupt their leader. Old people who, on other days, no doubt congratulate themselves on their staunch advocacy of free speech.
It’s worth recalling (as Suzanne Moore in The Telegraph did) the outrage when, in 2005, a heckler was forcibly removed from Labour’s conference by security guards. That outrage came not least from the political right with, for example, David Cameron denouncing what had happened as “Orwellian”. It’s also worth recalling that, on that occasion, the then Labour leader Tony Blair, and other senior figures in the party, subsequently apologized profusely. By contrast, after this latest event, reactions from Reform MPs included the thuggishly prolier-than-thou Lee Anderson proposing a whip-round to buy a new walking stick for the most violent of the assailants and Robert Jenrick saying “he should be given a medal for what he did”.
The second scene of the fortnight was altogether more urbane, but also provided a glimpse of the Reform party. This was the meeting over oysters and champagne of Farage and senior Reform officials with a supposed potential donor, one of several meetings filmed as part of an undercover ‘sting’ operation and broadcast on Channel Four on the eve of the party’s conference [1]. It was the latest in a long list of ongoing scandals (£) about the funding of both the party and Farage himself, and it is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police. But, that aside, what this piece of the jigsaw shows is the gulf, and the relationship, between Reform (and Farage’s) carefully cultivated image as representing ‘ordinary people’ against the ‘global elite’ and the way that behind it lies a world of dodgy ‘globalist’ financiers and meetings in exclusive restaurants and clubs which few such people penetrate.
A Cambridge compound
It also provided and insight into another of Reform’s worlds where polyester-clad, spittle-flecked old men with walking sticks are notable by their absence, the intellectual salons of the radical right. For one of the senior Reform officials at those meetings was James Orr, the party’s Head of Policy (a post from which he has now stepped down). Orr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and a major figure in the paradoxically international ‘National Conservatism’ movement and the nexus of thinktanks around it in the UK, US and, at least until Victor Orban’s demise, Hungary (as mentioned, with more details and links, in my post of last April).
Orr, whose conservatism is nationalist but more specifically Christian, was a controversial figure even before the ‘sting’ and on the morning before the Channel Four broadcast had been the subject of a detailed, and at least implicitly critical, profile in the Financial Times (£). An indication of what we might, with suitably Christian charity, call his political philosophy is that, according to that profile, Orr believes in “faith, family and flag”, “opposes abortion including in cases of rape”, and “calls immigration ‘the most existential threat facing our nation since the Norman invasion’” (which suggests he is a less accomplished historian than he is a theologian). It bears saying that much of what the FT profile revealed had already been reported by Byline Times, and some aspects of it have been examined in more detail by the 21 Group, an organization which monitors and campaigns against bullying in universities.
Leaving aside the explicitly political aspects of what these various reports show or allege, collectively they reveal, amongst other things, that Orr and his wife have created what he calls “a compound” and she calls “an alternative Cambridge College” in the (presumably substantial) back garden of their Cambridge home. There, several postgraduates and post-docs, apparently all of a Christian Conservative bent, live as a community. This might be regarded as, at best, an unorthodox arrangement, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envisage how the media would report an analogous arrangement whereby, as it might be, an Associate Professor in the Education Faculty created such a community based not on Christian Conservatism but Critical Race Theory.
A fascist militia
It might be comforting to think that the contemporary far right in Britain is captured by these images, distasteful as they are, of nasty old men lashing out with their walking sticks, dodgy deals done in expensive restaurants, and creepy academics alternately gladhanding at peculiar conferences and lording it over impressionable students. But the next piece of the jigsaw we have seen in this last fortnight is far more alarming.
Last Saturday, as many as five hundred men, and they were all men, who were generally described in the media as anti-immigration ‘protestors’, blockaded the roads around the Dover ferry terminal, bringing the town centre to a standstill for several hours. But these were not ‘protestors’ in any normal or reasonable sense of the term. These men appeared, to coin a phrase, to be ‘of fighting age’. They had donned black uniforms, very much in the manner of Moseley’s Blackshirts, and balaclava masks, very much in the manner of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.
It was a profoundly chilling sight, the more so as for much of their action they maintained total silence. Subsequently, there were some chants of ‘stop the boats’, ‘England for the English’ and other anti-immigration slogans, and another of ‘Christ is King’, but there were no placards or flags waved. In fact the only symbol in evidence was, in several but not all cases, the Christian crucifix. Apparently, it is not only Cambridge theologians who have a perverse interpretation of Jesus’s injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.
Absurdly, Kent Police described this as a “spontaneous” gathering, perhaps to avoid admitting that neither they nor the security services seem to have had any inkling that it was going to happen (though there may be other interpretations of this, including claims that the police ignored warnings of what was in prospect and informed speculation that a high-level security operation may, for good reasons, have allowed the action to proceed). At all events, it was abundantly obvious that it had been carefully planned and it was executed with a certain amount of skill and discipline. That discipline included the absence of literal violence, and no arrests were made. However it was certainly violent in the more symbolic sense of being highly intimidating, pregnant with aggression and threat.
I don’t think we have seen anything quite like this, at least on the British mainland, in my lifetime. Unlike the asylum hotel riots, it did not have a particular trigger or target, and the level of organization means the participants could not be described as a mob. Nor was there even any attempt to pretend that these were just ‘ordinary people’ or ‘concerned local citizens’.
On the contrary, ‘Patriot Platform’, the all-male grouping behind it, openly describes itself as being “an army of patriots” and its aim is to “take control of the United Kingdom”. It functions as a covert coordinator of a network of groups and was launched in June by a former soldier and convicted criminal calling himself ‘Danny Tommo’, who is an associate of ‘Tommy Robinson’ and is connected with the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign. He also helped to organize a ‘Brexit Betrayal’ rally in 2018. ‘Tommo’ aggressively parades his supposed Christianity and Patriot Platform regards itself as a Christian organization. In this and other ways, whilst its core motivation is extreme hostility to immigration, this is wrapped into a broader ideology expressed by its slogan of “Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland”. In short, and regular readers will know I do not use this term casually, they are fascists, and they have now formed a militia [2].
This militia reappeared in Portsmouth the following night, along with a larger mob, attempting to prevent the transfer of cross-channel migrants being transported to an arrival centre. Again, roads were blockaded and this time there was physical violence against police and property. There was also a direct, aggressive confrontation with RNLI crews which has subsequently developed into a campaign of online intimidation and harassment against its volunteers. Subsequently, a nearby hotel was targeted in the belief that migrants were being housed there, when in fact it was the Under-19 cricket team on tour something which, contrary to some of the reaction from both Reform and Labour politicians, was an outrage in and of itself rather than because it was mistargeted.
Whilst this militia, and the manner in which it conducts itself, is new, its beliefs and its aims grow directly out of those which have been swirling around the far-right ecosphere for a few years and the Dover action was openly supported by Rupert Lowe [warning: link to X]. That endorsement at least had the benefit of honesty. More disingenuous was the condemnation which came from Nigel Farage and others in Reform. For them, perhaps, there is some advantage in being able to claim to be the ‘responsible right’, but their own relentless scaremongering about the supposed small boats crisis and their ghoulish equation of asylum seekers with murders and sexual crimes has done a great deal to promote the beliefs espoused by Patriot Platform.
However, responsibility for that is not confined to far-right politicians. It is shared with the political and media class generally, very much including those within the governing Labour party who have dignified such beliefs as being an expression of ‘legitimate concerns’. Notably, government condemnation of the Dover action was rather muted, with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds implying that it fell within the category of “peaceful protest” and trivializing its most striking aspect as merely “dressing up in costumes”. The response to Portsmouth was more robust, with, for example, Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, calling the action “thuggish”. But the overall tenor of the government’s reaction, in relation to both events, was wishy-washy and, astoundingly, Andy Burnham made no direct comment at all, so far as I know.
A vulnerable State
If uniformed, masked men taking control, albeit temporarily, of the streets with impunity is a frightening prospect, it is at least one for which, in principle, there are legal remedies. So in some ways what is more frightening is the prospect of the law, and the State itself, falling under the control of extremists. The recent Reform UK conference was so overshadowed by the new financial scandal that it was easy to miss just how extreme the supposedly reasonable face of the far-right has become. Yet anyone with a sense of history should be alarmed that Farage has pledged to declare an immediate ‘national emergency’ if Reform came to power, with threats to reconfigure the judiciary, civil service, and parliament itself under the guise of this emergency [3]. Similarly, whilst less dramatic, Suella Braverman announced that Reform would make it compulsory for schools to fly the national flag and sing the national anthem, whilst delivering a “patriotic curriculum”.
These are not anodyne proposals, even if Braverman couched hers in the cosy nostalgia-porn of Britain being “a collection of little streets, building little hamlets and villages that fold into towns and cities.” They are, at least incipiently, totalitarian in nature and, as the noted legal commentator David Allen Green has argued, our political system is one in which “there is little which could be ultimately done to prevent the damage which a radical illiberal majority could do.”
One implication of that, Green suggests, is that the present government should create stronger constitutional guard-rails to reduce these systemic vulnerabilities. I agree, but I think a second implication is the need to tackle the core underlying beliefs which inform this illiberalism, especially the idea that there is an immigration crisis, an asylum crisis, and a cultural crisis which somehow constitute a national emergency.
An absence of political leadership
At issue here is far more than simply condemning violence and intimidation, and more, even, than yesterday’s commitment from the Home Secretary to robustly police that violence, necessary as that is given the threat of further disorder this weekend. And it certainly requires abandoning the government’s continuing insistence (£) that meeting the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public by curtailing immigration and reducing or even stopping ‘the boats’ will make the beliefs underpinning such violence disappear. That is nonsense, and it is shown to be nonsense by the fact that those beliefs are becoming more entrenched even as the levels of immigration, asylum applications, and boat crossings are all falling. It didn’t work for Starmer and it won’t work for Burnham, and his premiership may well be the last chance for a different, and more honest, approach.
Such an approach would mean saying something like: flows of refugees and asylum seekers are a global phenomenon, and aren’t going to disappear. The UK is one of the countries least affected, but has legal and humanitarian commitments to fulfil. In doing so, we should and will process asylum claims as quickly and accurately as possible, and seek to discourage life-endangering crossings. But there is no crisis, and there is most definitely no ‘invasion’. Adopting this approach would not just be a matter of a single speech. It would require a concerted communications campaign perhaps including highlighting success stories of asylum claimants and other immigrants who have made positive contributions to society, and emphasising the many senses in which Britain has been a successful example of multi-cultural integration.
In the absence of political leadership along these lines, the dominant narrative, by default, will be, as it already largely is, one in which Britain is depicted as being invaded by a dangerous horde of sexual predators who are living lives of taxpayer-funded luxury. Allowing that to be the default inevitably has the effect of provoking fear and outrage even amongst people who would not, in other circumstances, align with the far right. Conversely, the current approach of treating this fear and outrage as justifiable means that, even whilst condemning violence and intimidation, government ministers are conceding that those responsible are, in some way, representing widespread public concern.
It is, of course, highly unlikely that the government will adopt this approach, and that is, at least in part, because there is a strong strand in Labour thinking – most overtly the Blue Labour strand, but not confined to it – that the fear and outrage are justified; that this is what ‘ordinary people’ believe and the ‘people’s party’ should represent it. As I’ve argued repeatedly in the past, this is, again, at least in part, related to Brexit and the way in which Labour accepted the populist right’s claim that the referendum showed it spoke for ‘the silent majority’. In this way, chiding vocal and violent thugs for ‘crossing the line’ amounts to little more than asserting that Labour ministers are the ‘voice of the people’ whilst leaving entirely unchallenged the thugs’ beliefs. Unsurprisingly, this only entrenches those beliefs and the thuggery continues, or even escalates.
A matter of national security
At stake in all this is, most obviously, whether uniformed fascists are to be allowed to take control of the streets as and when they choose. But what the various developments described in this post should suggest is that the Patriot Platform militia is only one strand within an interwoven braid. The angry pensioners beating youthful hecklers, the Cambridge don and his cultish camp-followers, the intimate meetings in expensive restaurants, the strident politicians of Reform and Restore, the increasingly aggressive invocation of ‘cultural Christianity’, the daily vitriol on social media, amongst many other things, are all part of a related process.
But something much deeper is at stake, which could properly be called a matter of national security. There is no doubt that what is happening domestically in the UK has parallels with what is happening in other countries, with the AfD’s recent success in the Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany being an obvious example. And the way that this success was cheered in both the US and Russia (£) was the latest, and clearest, illustration of how the transformation of geo-politics matters not just for international relations but for domestic politics. It is now a matter of US state policy, enshrined in its 2025 National Security Strategy, to support the far right in Europe, and that includes the UK. Relatedly, Elon Musk openly supports Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, calling civil war in Britain “inevitable” because of immigration, and there are multiple connections between MAGA and the British far right in both its street-level and intellectual guises.
Meanwhile, Russia’s links to the British far right are well-established, including its encouragement of attacks on mosques and Muslims generally. As with Brexit, Russia seeks to encourage anything which will destabilize Britain. That is only partly to do with seeking to punish us for supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperialism. More generally it is part of Russia’s attempt to destroy the remnants of the liberal West (liberal in the broadest sense of the commitment to rights and rationality established by the European Enlightenment), something enshrined in successive iterations of its own National Security Strategy. That, in itself, represents a profound national security threat to the UK. It is all the more profound since the US has, for now, and perhaps for ever, changed sides.
This is the bigger context within which the increasingly ugly politics of the British far right should be understood [4]. It is, historically, a new experience for Britain to find itself no longer the great power it was until, say, 1945, and no longer shielded from its decline by being a kind of junior partner to the US during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Now, it is just another ‘medium power’ and, as a result of Brexit, one in self-chosen isolation from its regional moorings. As a result, it is ready prey. It is deeply ironic that those fulminating about the ‘migrant invasion’, and the need to ‘secure our borders’ are not just missing the real threats to national security but are aiding abetting them.
A cause for alarm
This isn’t to posit some huge global conspiracy against Britain, orchestrating its domestic politics. It’s rather that there are multiple vectors pulling in similar, or related, directions in Britain, as in other European countries (although Britain is uniquely isolated because of Brexit). Recognizing that is important because it is what makes disparate events such as those discussed in this post understandable as being related to each other rather than, as might otherwise be thought, just ‘yet another’ piece of unpleasantness. As pieces of a jigsaw, when put together they make a picture.
If all this sounds alarmist, consider some of those pieces side by side: ‘Faith, Flag and Family’; a woman savagely beaten for heckling the Leader at a political rally; black-shirted men in balaclavas blockading the streets; RNLI volunteers denounced as traitors; ‘Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland’; ‘patriotic curriculum’; ‘National Emergency’. It’s not, I think, alarmist to be alarmed.
Notes
[1] Inevitably, the ‘sting’ provoked complaints of ‘entrapment’ from Farage and Reform, along with the familiar claim that it was an example of the Establishment trying to discredit the ‘insurgents’. But such undercover journalism has a long history, and the way that Farage was caught is remarkably similar to the way that in 2010 Channel Four and The Times ‘entrapped’ Labour MP Steve “cab for hire” Byers, which Farage, then leading UKIP, regarded as exposing the corruption of … the Establishment.
[2] The word ‘militia’ is justified, even though the group is not armed, a point made at the time of the debate leading to the 1936 Public Order Act at the time of the Blackshirts (hat tip to the historian Robert Saunders for this information). That legislation prohibited the wearing of political uniforms, although it is not clear whether Patriot Platform’s clothing constitutes a uniform within the meaning of the law.
[3] Restore’s leader Rupert Lowe this week made the even more pernicious suggestion that, if in government, he would retrospectively prosecute civil servants for enacting the present government’s policies.
[4] The examples discussed in this post are all from England, and there is no doubt that it is here where far-right activity is most pronounced. But other nations within the UK are not exempt. For example, this week a tenement building in Glasgow was set ablaze, apparently because of rumours that it was going to be used to house asylum seekers.
Friday, 11 September 2026
Friday, 28 August 2026
Brexit Britain is still a tinderbox
It is now almost exactly ten years since my first post on this blog, and this latest post comes after a long, hot summer break in which there have been virtually no developments as regards Brexit, in the delimited sense of Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU.
That isn’t a surprise, given that it is usually the political holiday season, at least for routine parliamentary and inter-governmental politics. Yet, starting this eleventh year of blogging, there is a sense of a more pervasive Brexit stasis. That stasis is not a sign that Brexit has ceased to be important but, rather, that the British polity has still not faced up to its consequences and shows no signs of being able to do so.
The Brexit stasis
The stasis has two aspects. From an EU perspective, relations with the UK have not been a matter of pressing concern since the completion of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on broadly satisfactory terms, and perhaps not since the completion of the Withdrawal Agreement. Not only are there now more important issues on the EU agenda, but it is also obvious that very little of substance can change unless there is a decisive change within the UK polity. And this is the second aspect of the stasis: there has been no such change.
For it is now abundantly clear that Andy Burnham’s EU policy is going to be virtually identical to that of Keir Starmer. That is most obvious in Burnham’s re-iteration over the summer of his commitment to the manifesto ‘red lines’ (no single market membership, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people, if a reminder is necessary). There should be no surprise in that, either. Politically, it would be very difficult to justify so major a departure from the manifesto without stoking demands for another general election. But in any case, as for Starmer before him, there would be little point in spending political capital on seeking from the EU something which it would be unlikely to grant until it is clear that it has strong and durable support in the UK, and will not be reversed by the next government.
There is also a time factor here: the government is already approaching the likely mid-point of its parliamentary term and, as yet, it still hasn’t delivered even the very limited reset promised by Starmer. Indeed, there isn’t even yet an agreed date for the (much delayed) next UK-EU summit at which the reset agreement is supposed to be announced, although the current rumour is that it will be in November. It’s astonishingly feeble given the supposed priority Labour accorded it when they came to power.
So, even if Burnham dropped the red lines tomorrow, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that an entirely new deal with the EU could be struck by the next election. Thus not only would he have taken the political pain of dropping a central manifesto commitment, he would have nothing to show for it. The real question for Burnham’s Labour will be whether it abandons or modifies its red lines in the next election manifesto, with the subsidiary question being whether in the interim Burnham lays the ground for doing so.
Many pro-Europeans will find this intensely irritating, but it does at least have a discernible political rationale (it’s not necessary to agree with that rationale to discern it). What is far less forgivable is that Burnham has also taken over from Starmer the stupid and dishonest pretence that, despite the red lines, he is going to seek a “bolder” and “more ambitious” relationship with the EU, something also re-stated over the summer by Hamish Falconer, the new ‘Europe Minister’ (in effect, if not in title). Thus, Burnham talks (£) of putting closer ties with the EU at the heart of his economic strategy in order to “add percentage points” to UK growth, something precluded by his own red lines. The absurdity of these claims is made all the clearer by the way that, at the same time, the British government is engaged in sour wrangling over university tuition fees for EU students as part of the existing reset negotiations, which hardly bespeaks of either boldness or ambition.
Well-worn delusions
If all this were not depressing enough, this summer has shown that the absurdity goes beyond simply spouting pieties and making dishonest claims. Rather, as an intervention from former Tory Minister Nick Boles, now advising Burnham on European policy, shows, all the familiar Brexit delusions are still in place.
In an essay for the thinktank Demos, Boles makes two key arguments. One is for the creation of a ‘European Confederation’ of the EU and non-EU countries (including the UK) allowing a single market for goods (widely misreported as ‘rejoining the single market) but with no freedom of movement of people. The other is that this would be associated with a comprehensive defence pact which would include the UK providing nuclear deterrence capability to its members.
The first of these arguments is as well-worn as a treadless tyre, and yet another iteration of the refusal to understand what a single market means as a concept, a refusal to understand what it means to the EU, and, ultimately, just the latest home-grown proposal to be ‘out and yet in’ of the sort that has been made since the very beginning of the Brexit process.
The second argument has, ostensibly, a more contemporary flavour. At least it recognizes the changed security landscape created by Trump, and shifting US priorities even without Trump, and what that means for NATO and European defence. It is clear that for Boles these two arguments go together, in that the offer of a UK (nuclear) contribution to an enhanced European defence pact will be the ‘carrot’ (£) to unpick the EU’s commitment to the ‘four freedoms’ of the single market.
In fact, and this I why I said it was only ‘ostensibly’ a new argument, the attempt to barter security for trade was attempted several times during the Brexit negotiations, starting with Theresa May’s Article 50 notification letter in 2017, an attempt much resented by EU leaders, some of whom regarded it as blackmail (it is fair to say that the use of this tactic ebbed and flowed over the years). Boles appears to think that, precisely because of the new security landscape, the attempt can be made again though perhaps – to be charitable – not in the negative sense of a threat to reduce cooperation, but in the positive sense of an offer to enhance it.
However, this rests on what is obviously a false premise. There is a perfectly good, if not indeed overwhelming, argument that it is in the mutual interest of the UK and the EU to radically increase defence cooperation because the US is no longer a reliable security partner. It’s an argument Burnham has recently endorsed. But the key point is that it is a mutual interest: both could benefit. Yet what Boles envisages is that, as well as its share of this benefit, the UK would receive an additional benefit in the form of joining a single market for goods with no freedom of movement of people. So the equation clearly doesn’t balance. [1]
Why nothing is changing
In short, we can see Brexit stasis at multiple levels in the UK: nothing new is happening, the Labour government’s policy is unchanged and so is the mendacity of its rhetoric, and thinking about post-Brexit policy continues to go round what in the past I have called the same old Mobius Strip of ‘solutions’ to the problems caused by Brexit whilst retaining the supposed ‘benefits’ of Brexit.
As time has gone on, those benefits have proved so illusory that only the most recalcitrant continue to claim them. No one seriously believes that having an independent trade policy is a net benefit, even though the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds continues to suggest it is of value (£). And the limitations of regulatory independence were illustrated yet again over the summer in an analysis by Vilija Vėlyvytė of UKICE of the regulation of medicines testing and authorization (once touted by Brexiters as a key example of how post-Brexit sovereignty would make Britain a ‘world leader’).
But, despite the government’s continuing attempts to suggest that trade and regulatory independence provide some sort of justification for it European policy, it is perfectly obvious that what drives that policy is, overwhelmingly, Labour’s neuralgia about immigration. That explains both the broad contours of the policy, in terms of the ‘red lines’, but also the micro-details, such as resistance to an extensive Youth Mobility Scheme. It explains the contortions and delusions of the Boles’ proposals, and all the other attempts over the years to detach freedom of movement of people from single market membership. It also explains why the government is willing to sacrifice the economic growth it would so dearly love to have, to sacrifice the universities which should be central to its regional and innovation policies, and even to sacrifice the house-building programme it is committed to delivering.
Hostility to immigration supersedes everything and anything else. And whilst Labour can be blamed for its cowardice and lack of leadership in this respect, that is, itself, a manifestation of the deeper and more widespread way that the UK – and especially England – are gripped by anti-immigration fervour which persists even now that a collapse in net migration levels is under way. It is this, more than anything else, which means that post-Brexit relations with the EU are stuck in their present form.
Summer at the seaside
One obvious expression of, and barometer for, the extent of this anti-immigration fervour is the continuing level of support for Reform (and its rival offshoot Restore). Here, the event, or perhaps non-event, of the summer was the Clacton by-election. Unsurprisingly, this was won by Nigel Farage, but there was little triumph in it and the Reform leader, who has not been seen much since, seems to be a much-diminished figure. Meanwhile, there are reports of increasing infighting within the party, and its finances, as well as those of Farage himself, continue to be a source of vulnerability and potential scandal.
It may well be that electoral support for Reform will never regain its peak levels of earlier this year, when some surveys had the party polling at over 30%. However, it continues to have a fairly stable 25% of the vote share, easily large enough to have a major electoral impact and perhaps an even greater political influence. This again implies that the chances of any British government pursuing a substantially closer relationship with the EU are small, and the chances of doing so in a way that is plausible to the EU are even smaller.
Support for Reform does not simply betoken the persistence of anti-immigration sentiment. It is also bound up with the persistence of Brexitism and its attendant culture war. This summer saw an especially intense skirmish within that war with the events leading up to and following from the death of Jason Arday.
The Arday case and the culture war
More than any other example I can think of, this showed one of the most obnoxious features of the culture war. I suspect (or at least hope) that I am not alone in thinking that the Arday case shows appalling racism and EDI over-reach and legitimate media scrutiny and media hounding and personal failings and institutional failings. These aren’t incompatible, and what is so obnoxious about culture war is its demand that everyone ‘picks a side’, or perhaps more accurately the seductiveness of that demand, and ignores or denies all complexity and ambiguity.
Yet complexity and ambiguity there was. As the journalist and commentator Helen Lewis put it in The Atlantic, “the Arday case is endlessly debatable because it contains so many double-edged elements”. In a similar way, another journalist and commentator, Lewis Goodall, remarked that the case, and Arday himself, became a symbol in “the ceaseless, airless, brainless culture war.” This became obvious in the way that the case – which, surely, was a most unusual, even idiosyncratic, one – came to be used as a proxy to attack social science in general, academics in general, and universities in general. It also became obvious in the way it was taken as having a general meaning for diversity initiatives, press freedom, academic freedom etc. etc.
However, in terms of the focus of this blog, I’m not sure that the sides in the Arday furore map easily on to Brexitism. There is obviously some overlap – the racism, and the attack on academics and universities generally, no doubt has some correlation with support for Brexit and the wider social illiberalism with which that, in turn, correlates. But there are probably plenty of people (and for what it is worth I am one of them) who are neither socially illiberal nor pro-Brexit yet think that Arday’s appointment to a Cambridge professorship was questionable [2], even if hardly warranting such outrage.
More importantly, the way the ‘sides’ have lined up doesn’t map neatly on to Brexitism because it has brought into sharp focus some of the fissures amongst, especially, those who are opposed to Brexit and Brexitism. Those fissures are many (for example, liberal conservatives find commonality with social democrats, whilst social democrats are alienated from Lexiters) but the Arday case, in particular, illustrated how deeply the trans-rights issue has split the liberal-left. Thus several high-profile gender critical feminists, most notably J.K. Rowling, who were highly opposed to Brexit were also highly critical of Arday’s appointment.
As I understand it, the connection, even if not explicitly stated, is this: EDI in universities is seen by gender critical feminists as a bedrock of trans-activism; Arday’s appointment was seen as an expression of EDI in universities; and ‘therefore’ attacking Arday’s appointment was a way of attacking trans-activism. I’m not, here, making any comment on the trans-rights debate, or the sides within it, but rather trying to unpick how it cuts across the issue of Brexit and the concept of Brexitism and, in the process, trying to explain why the sides in the Arday case only partially overlap with those of Brexit and Brexitism. The example of gender critical feminists is not the only one but it is perhaps the most obvious [3].
The political tinderbox
Although the Arday case may only partially relate to Brexitism, the ferocity of the arguments it has engendered do disclose something about how intensely divided post-Brexit Britain is. I don’t mean that, had Britain not left the EU, there would not have been exactly the same argument. That would be nonsense. Nor am I suggesting that existing EU members are not, in many cases, as bitterly divided on culture war lines. What I mean is that these intense divisions have a particular significance for the prospect of re-opening, in any substantive way, the question of UK-EU relations, and especially any question of joining the EU. If even the slight spark of the Arday case can ignite such ferocity, how much more would that be true in the case of Brexit?
During this long, hot summer, Andy Burnham described the country as being a “tinderbox”, with numerous devastating wildfires and the danger of many more, and even instigated an emergency mobile phone alert to warn of this danger. With rain now starting to fall more widely, that danger is hopefully receding. But the metaphorical sense that Britain is a political tinderbox, with a culture war conflagration an ever-present danger, continues. It is for that reason that the Brexit stasis also continues. It remains too a hot a topic to address in any serious way, and there is no obvious sign that rain is imminent.
Notes
[1] I have a feeling that someone else made the argument I am making here, and that I am cribbing it, but unfortunately I can’t recall who did so or where I read it. I think it might have been Anand Menon. So apologies to him – or whoever it was – for not quoting/ linking to it in the way I normally would.
[2] This isn’t just a hunch on my part. I don’t want to sound as if I am waving my academic credentials but, when I was a Professor at Cambridge University, I was an external (i.e. external to the faculty, but internal to the university) member of the Board of the Faculty of Education, where Arday was employed, and sat on several of its professorial and non-professorial appointments’ panels, as well as those in my own and other faculties. I also chaired a committee for the DfES (as was), identifying criteria for quality in educational research, Arday’s field (though not my own). Admittedly, these experiences were almost 20 years ago, and I don’t want to over-claim for them but, still, it perhaps means my view isn’t entirely uninformed, and possibly less uninformed than many of those who have commented. And, in my view, whilst some of the criticisms levelled at Arday and his work were unfair, there are genuine reasons to doubt his suitability for his post.
[3] Another, perhaps less obvious or important example, is that I have noticed several people who I know to be highly critical of Brexit also strongly supported the ‘academic freedom’ of Nathan Cothnas, one of Arday’s principal accusers, following his suspension by the University of Ghent.
Regular (and attentive) readers will notice that this post comes a week earlier than the date I gave in my previous post for when I would resume, and also comes later in the day than usual.
That isn’t a surprise, given that it is usually the political holiday season, at least for routine parliamentary and inter-governmental politics. Yet, starting this eleventh year of blogging, there is a sense of a more pervasive Brexit stasis. That stasis is not a sign that Brexit has ceased to be important but, rather, that the British polity has still not faced up to its consequences and shows no signs of being able to do so.
The Brexit stasis
The stasis has two aspects. From an EU perspective, relations with the UK have not been a matter of pressing concern since the completion of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on broadly satisfactory terms, and perhaps not since the completion of the Withdrawal Agreement. Not only are there now more important issues on the EU agenda, but it is also obvious that very little of substance can change unless there is a decisive change within the UK polity. And this is the second aspect of the stasis: there has been no such change.
For it is now abundantly clear that Andy Burnham’s EU policy is going to be virtually identical to that of Keir Starmer. That is most obvious in Burnham’s re-iteration over the summer of his commitment to the manifesto ‘red lines’ (no single market membership, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people, if a reminder is necessary). There should be no surprise in that, either. Politically, it would be very difficult to justify so major a departure from the manifesto without stoking demands for another general election. But in any case, as for Starmer before him, there would be little point in spending political capital on seeking from the EU something which it would be unlikely to grant until it is clear that it has strong and durable support in the UK, and will not be reversed by the next government.
There is also a time factor here: the government is already approaching the likely mid-point of its parliamentary term and, as yet, it still hasn’t delivered even the very limited reset promised by Starmer. Indeed, there isn’t even yet an agreed date for the (much delayed) next UK-EU summit at which the reset agreement is supposed to be announced, although the current rumour is that it will be in November. It’s astonishingly feeble given the supposed priority Labour accorded it when they came to power.
So, even if Burnham dropped the red lines tomorrow, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that an entirely new deal with the EU could be struck by the next election. Thus not only would he have taken the political pain of dropping a central manifesto commitment, he would have nothing to show for it. The real question for Burnham’s Labour will be whether it abandons or modifies its red lines in the next election manifesto, with the subsidiary question being whether in the interim Burnham lays the ground for doing so.
Many pro-Europeans will find this intensely irritating, but it does at least have a discernible political rationale (it’s not necessary to agree with that rationale to discern it). What is far less forgivable is that Burnham has also taken over from Starmer the stupid and dishonest pretence that, despite the red lines, he is going to seek a “bolder” and “more ambitious” relationship with the EU, something also re-stated over the summer by Hamish Falconer, the new ‘Europe Minister’ (in effect, if not in title). Thus, Burnham talks (£) of putting closer ties with the EU at the heart of his economic strategy in order to “add percentage points” to UK growth, something precluded by his own red lines. The absurdity of these claims is made all the clearer by the way that, at the same time, the British government is engaged in sour wrangling over university tuition fees for EU students as part of the existing reset negotiations, which hardly bespeaks of either boldness or ambition.
Well-worn delusions
If all this were not depressing enough, this summer has shown that the absurdity goes beyond simply spouting pieties and making dishonest claims. Rather, as an intervention from former Tory Minister Nick Boles, now advising Burnham on European policy, shows, all the familiar Brexit delusions are still in place.
In an essay for the thinktank Demos, Boles makes two key arguments. One is for the creation of a ‘European Confederation’ of the EU and non-EU countries (including the UK) allowing a single market for goods (widely misreported as ‘rejoining the single market) but with no freedom of movement of people. The other is that this would be associated with a comprehensive defence pact which would include the UK providing nuclear deterrence capability to its members.
The first of these arguments is as well-worn as a treadless tyre, and yet another iteration of the refusal to understand what a single market means as a concept, a refusal to understand what it means to the EU, and, ultimately, just the latest home-grown proposal to be ‘out and yet in’ of the sort that has been made since the very beginning of the Brexit process.
The second argument has, ostensibly, a more contemporary flavour. At least it recognizes the changed security landscape created by Trump, and shifting US priorities even without Trump, and what that means for NATO and European defence. It is clear that for Boles these two arguments go together, in that the offer of a UK (nuclear) contribution to an enhanced European defence pact will be the ‘carrot’ (£) to unpick the EU’s commitment to the ‘four freedoms’ of the single market.
In fact, and this I why I said it was only ‘ostensibly’ a new argument, the attempt to barter security for trade was attempted several times during the Brexit negotiations, starting with Theresa May’s Article 50 notification letter in 2017, an attempt much resented by EU leaders, some of whom regarded it as blackmail (it is fair to say that the use of this tactic ebbed and flowed over the years). Boles appears to think that, precisely because of the new security landscape, the attempt can be made again though perhaps – to be charitable – not in the negative sense of a threat to reduce cooperation, but in the positive sense of an offer to enhance it.
However, this rests on what is obviously a false premise. There is a perfectly good, if not indeed overwhelming, argument that it is in the mutual interest of the UK and the EU to radically increase defence cooperation because the US is no longer a reliable security partner. It’s an argument Burnham has recently endorsed. But the key point is that it is a mutual interest: both could benefit. Yet what Boles envisages is that, as well as its share of this benefit, the UK would receive an additional benefit in the form of joining a single market for goods with no freedom of movement of people. So the equation clearly doesn’t balance. [1]
Why nothing is changing
In short, we can see Brexit stasis at multiple levels in the UK: nothing new is happening, the Labour government’s policy is unchanged and so is the mendacity of its rhetoric, and thinking about post-Brexit policy continues to go round what in the past I have called the same old Mobius Strip of ‘solutions’ to the problems caused by Brexit whilst retaining the supposed ‘benefits’ of Brexit.
As time has gone on, those benefits have proved so illusory that only the most recalcitrant continue to claim them. No one seriously believes that having an independent trade policy is a net benefit, even though the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds continues to suggest it is of value (£). And the limitations of regulatory independence were illustrated yet again over the summer in an analysis by Vilija Vėlyvytė of UKICE of the regulation of medicines testing and authorization (once touted by Brexiters as a key example of how post-Brexit sovereignty would make Britain a ‘world leader’).
But, despite the government’s continuing attempts to suggest that trade and regulatory independence provide some sort of justification for it European policy, it is perfectly obvious that what drives that policy is, overwhelmingly, Labour’s neuralgia about immigration. That explains both the broad contours of the policy, in terms of the ‘red lines’, but also the micro-details, such as resistance to an extensive Youth Mobility Scheme. It explains the contortions and delusions of the Boles’ proposals, and all the other attempts over the years to detach freedom of movement of people from single market membership. It also explains why the government is willing to sacrifice the economic growth it would so dearly love to have, to sacrifice the universities which should be central to its regional and innovation policies, and even to sacrifice the house-building programme it is committed to delivering.
Hostility to immigration supersedes everything and anything else. And whilst Labour can be blamed for its cowardice and lack of leadership in this respect, that is, itself, a manifestation of the deeper and more widespread way that the UK – and especially England – are gripped by anti-immigration fervour which persists even now that a collapse in net migration levels is under way. It is this, more than anything else, which means that post-Brexit relations with the EU are stuck in their present form.
Summer at the seaside
One obvious expression of, and barometer for, the extent of this anti-immigration fervour is the continuing level of support for Reform (and its rival offshoot Restore). Here, the event, or perhaps non-event, of the summer was the Clacton by-election. Unsurprisingly, this was won by Nigel Farage, but there was little triumph in it and the Reform leader, who has not been seen much since, seems to be a much-diminished figure. Meanwhile, there are reports of increasing infighting within the party, and its finances, as well as those of Farage himself, continue to be a source of vulnerability and potential scandal.
It may well be that electoral support for Reform will never regain its peak levels of earlier this year, when some surveys had the party polling at over 30%. However, it continues to have a fairly stable 25% of the vote share, easily large enough to have a major electoral impact and perhaps an even greater political influence. This again implies that the chances of any British government pursuing a substantially closer relationship with the EU are small, and the chances of doing so in a way that is plausible to the EU are even smaller.
Support for Reform does not simply betoken the persistence of anti-immigration sentiment. It is also bound up with the persistence of Brexitism and its attendant culture war. This summer saw an especially intense skirmish within that war with the events leading up to and following from the death of Jason Arday.
The Arday case and the culture war
More than any other example I can think of, this showed one of the most obnoxious features of the culture war. I suspect (or at least hope) that I am not alone in thinking that the Arday case shows appalling racism and EDI over-reach and legitimate media scrutiny and media hounding and personal failings and institutional failings. These aren’t incompatible, and what is so obnoxious about culture war is its demand that everyone ‘picks a side’, or perhaps more accurately the seductiveness of that demand, and ignores or denies all complexity and ambiguity.
Yet complexity and ambiguity there was. As the journalist and commentator Helen Lewis put it in The Atlantic, “the Arday case is endlessly debatable because it contains so many double-edged elements”. In a similar way, another journalist and commentator, Lewis Goodall, remarked that the case, and Arday himself, became a symbol in “the ceaseless, airless, brainless culture war.” This became obvious in the way that the case – which, surely, was a most unusual, even idiosyncratic, one – came to be used as a proxy to attack social science in general, academics in general, and universities in general. It also became obvious in the way it was taken as having a general meaning for diversity initiatives, press freedom, academic freedom etc. etc.
However, in terms of the focus of this blog, I’m not sure that the sides in the Arday furore map easily on to Brexitism. There is obviously some overlap – the racism, and the attack on academics and universities generally, no doubt has some correlation with support for Brexit and the wider social illiberalism with which that, in turn, correlates. But there are probably plenty of people (and for what it is worth I am one of them) who are neither socially illiberal nor pro-Brexit yet think that Arday’s appointment to a Cambridge professorship was questionable [2], even if hardly warranting such outrage.
More importantly, the way the ‘sides’ have lined up doesn’t map neatly on to Brexitism because it has brought into sharp focus some of the fissures amongst, especially, those who are opposed to Brexit and Brexitism. Those fissures are many (for example, liberal conservatives find commonality with social democrats, whilst social democrats are alienated from Lexiters) but the Arday case, in particular, illustrated how deeply the trans-rights issue has split the liberal-left. Thus several high-profile gender critical feminists, most notably J.K. Rowling, who were highly opposed to Brexit were also highly critical of Arday’s appointment.
As I understand it, the connection, even if not explicitly stated, is this: EDI in universities is seen by gender critical feminists as a bedrock of trans-activism; Arday’s appointment was seen as an expression of EDI in universities; and ‘therefore’ attacking Arday’s appointment was a way of attacking trans-activism. I’m not, here, making any comment on the trans-rights debate, or the sides within it, but rather trying to unpick how it cuts across the issue of Brexit and the concept of Brexitism and, in the process, trying to explain why the sides in the Arday case only partially overlap with those of Brexit and Brexitism. The example of gender critical feminists is not the only one but it is perhaps the most obvious [3].
The political tinderbox
Although the Arday case may only partially relate to Brexitism, the ferocity of the arguments it has engendered do disclose something about how intensely divided post-Brexit Britain is. I don’t mean that, had Britain not left the EU, there would not have been exactly the same argument. That would be nonsense. Nor am I suggesting that existing EU members are not, in many cases, as bitterly divided on culture war lines. What I mean is that these intense divisions have a particular significance for the prospect of re-opening, in any substantive way, the question of UK-EU relations, and especially any question of joining the EU. If even the slight spark of the Arday case can ignite such ferocity, how much more would that be true in the case of Brexit?
During this long, hot summer, Andy Burnham described the country as being a “tinderbox”, with numerous devastating wildfires and the danger of many more, and even instigated an emergency mobile phone alert to warn of this danger. With rain now starting to fall more widely, that danger is hopefully receding. But the metaphorical sense that Britain is a political tinderbox, with a culture war conflagration an ever-present danger, continues. It is for that reason that the Brexit stasis also continues. It remains too a hot a topic to address in any serious way, and there is no obvious sign that rain is imminent.
Notes
[1] I have a feeling that someone else made the argument I am making here, and that I am cribbing it, but unfortunately I can’t recall who did so or where I read it. I think it might have been Anand Menon. So apologies to him – or whoever it was – for not quoting/ linking to it in the way I normally would.
[2] This isn’t just a hunch on my part. I don’t want to sound as if I am waving my academic credentials but, when I was a Professor at Cambridge University, I was an external (i.e. external to the faculty, but internal to the university) member of the Board of the Faculty of Education, where Arday was employed, and sat on several of its professorial and non-professorial appointments’ panels, as well as those in my own and other faculties. I also chaired a committee for the DfES (as was), identifying criteria for quality in educational research, Arday’s field (though not my own). Admittedly, these experiences were almost 20 years ago, and I don’t want to over-claim for them but, still, it perhaps means my view isn’t entirely uninformed, and possibly less uninformed than many of those who have commented. And, in my view, whilst some of the criticisms levelled at Arday and his work were unfair, there are genuine reasons to doubt his suitability for his post.
[3] Another, perhaps less obvious or important example, is that I have noticed several people who I know to be highly critical of Brexit also strongly supported the ‘academic freedom’ of Nathan Cothnas, one of Arday’s principal accusers, following his suspension by the University of Ghent.
Regular (and attentive) readers will notice that this post comes a week earlier than the date I gave in my previous post for when I would resume, and also comes later in the day than usual.
Friday, 24 July 2026
The Burnham chapter begins
Of the many ways of expressing how British politics has changed in my lifetime, one is that during the first fifty or so years of it there were seven Prime Ministers and in the subsequent ten years there have been the same number. I also happen to be exactly the same age as Nigel Farage who, for about half our lives, since he became a founder-member of UKIP in 1993, has been a major figure in anti-EU and populist politics.
This week, the seventh of those more recent Prime Ministers was installed whilst Farage’s political career is facing perhaps its greatest threats. So this will be another very long post but, unless something particularly important or interesting happens, it will be my last until September.
Burnham’s government and Brexit
Andy Burnham’s political orientation is now becoming clearer and much has already been written about it, including good discussions of his ‘politics of place’ by the Observer’s editor Ceri Thomas and of the idea of ‘Manchesterism’ by the BBC’s Economics editor Faisal Islam. Especially interesting, and less widely discussed, is Burnham’s commitment to the Cooperative Party and movement, as explained by Professor Colin Talbot in Civil Service World.
His first words and decisions as Prime Minister have also begun to give a sense of the nature of the government he will lead, although inevitably much remains unknown. One important signal is the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor which, amongst other things, implies that there will a serious commitment to increasing defence spending. The importance of that was underlined by the latest aggression in Russia’s undeclared war with Britain, with its Navy undertaking live-fire exercises a few miles off the British coast on the very day Burnham came to office. Now would be a good time for the government to investigate the many pressing questions about Russian interference in British politics raised by the recent Open Britain report.
In terms of the focus of this blog, the key issue is what Burnham’s government means for Brexit and Brexitism. This can be considered in the narrow sense of how Burnham’s administration will approach UK-EU relations. On that, Joël Reland of UKICE has provided a good summary of how things look at present. In essence, he argues that Burnham will be less interested than was Starmer in closer trade relations with the EU, but also less interested in regulatory competition (e.g. as regards AI and technology generally), whilst being at least as interested as Starmer in closer security links. Reland also suggests that, if this is so, in many ways it will make the Burnham’s Britain a more congenial interlocutor to the EU.
It is significant that Ed Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, has already publicly committed to deepening and strengthening the UK-EU relationship (his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, showed little interest in doing so, although her own predecessor, David Lammy, had been vocally pro-European). As ever, though, the question is what this means in practice. Specific Ministerial responsibility for relations with the EU moves from Nick Thomas-Symonds to Hamish Falconer who, like his predecessor, will attend, though not be a member of, the Cabinet (but unlike his predecessor will partly be located in the Foreign Office). There has been some speculation that this appointment betokens a softening, or abandoning, of Labour’s ‘red lines’, but speculation is all it is.
Also highly relevant is the post of Northern Ireland Secretary and the Cabinet reshuffle saw the departure of Hilary Benn, who from all accounts had been highly accomplished both in navigating Northern Ireland’s complex politics and in improving relations with Dublin, so strained by Brexit. However, there’s no reason to think that his replacement by Chris Bryant implies any substantive change of approach, and both of them were strong opponents of Brexit. Indeed, more generally, the construction of the new cabinet seems more to do with removing those most closely associated with Keir Starmer than with redefining Starmer’s approach to Brexit. Nor, for that matter, is the EU’s approach to post-Brexit relations likely to change as a result of Burnham’s arrival.
Burnhamism, Brexit, and Brexitism
The wider question is where Brexit and Brexitism sit within what is already being called ‘Burnhamism’. One part of the answer is that, as I wrote briefly after he won the Makerfield by-election, there is a strong current of nostalgia in Burnham’s politics. It’s no coincidence that in his acceptance speech as Labour leader he spoke of heeding the call of voters “for a return of the Labour they once knew”. That vision of the party is inextricable from his analysis of politics as a whole. For in that speech (and on numerous other occasions) his argument is that deindustrialization and the “four decades of … neoliberalism that began in the 1980s” are at the core of Britain’s economic and political problems, and he links this directly to the history of the Labour Party, in a passage which I will quote at length:
“And let us never forget: these are the very same places that built this Labour movement, this trade union movement, where we are today… Those are the places, but they were the places that were done down. This Labour movement, the trade union movement, was forged in the steelworks and iron works of Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, and Teesside, in the coal fields of South Wales, Central Scotland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, in the mills across the Pennines, west and east, in the shipyards on the Clyde and on the Tyne, and in the dockyards of Liverpool, and here in London, the people of these proud places made Labour.”
In itself, none of this is necessarily connected with Brexit, but in a crucial phrase in that same acceptance speech Burnham suggested that it is:
“The right used the phrase ‘take back control’, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place. If we want an economy and a country that works for all people and places, which to me should always be at the very core of Labourism, then it requires a new path to the one we’ve been on for the last 40 years.”
The invocation of the Vote Leave slogan in this way makes it clear what Burnham’s view of Brexit is, and it is a view which has been a common one amongst many on the left since the referendum result. In essence, it sees Brexit as having been a response, albeit a misguided response, by the working class, especially in the north of England, to the damaging consequences of neo-liberalism and (although it is hardly the same thing) London-centrism. On this view, the instinct to ‘take back control’ was right, but Brexit was the wrong way to go about it. Nor is such a view confined to the left. A version of it is what informed Theresa May’s argument that the Brexit referendum had revealed that too many people had been “left behind” by economic liberalism and globalization, and, subsequently, Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda.
There may be an element of truth in this view, although it has always had limitations, as any mono-causal explanation of Brexit is bound to have. In particular, Professor Danny Dorling’s influential analysis has shown the importance of middle-class and southern English support for ‘leave’ in delivering the referendum result. There are difficulties with that analysis, too, but my point here is not to re-hash debates about the causes of the vote to leave, it is that Burnham adheres to a particular view of it, which is imprinted on his Prime Ministership. Specifically, it means that his position is that Brexit was a symptom of a deeper malaise and, therefore, tackling that deeper malaise, rather than tackling Brexit, is the primary task.
This explains why, whilst there is no doubt that Burnham was opposed to Brexit and campaigned against it, and he has said as recently as last September that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU in his lifetime, his position now is that he does not intend to “re-run Brexit arguments” or to propose rejoining. In short, he wants to treat the illness, not the symptom. In this sense, Burnhamism represents the latest iteration of Labour’s attempt to respond to the challenges which Brexit created for the party.
The nostalgia problem
One obvious difficulty with his response is that, if his policy agenda is to revive manufacturing industry, then the barriers to trade created by Brexit are a major obstacle. But, with or without Brexit, Burnham invokes a world which no longer exists. The industries he cited in the speech quoted above – coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding, docking – have largely disappeared and will not come back. And the places where they existed developed because of the presence of things like coal, water, humidity, or, in other cases, clay or minerals, which were necessary for them (or, in the case of docking, because of pre-containerization technology). Those reasons have also gone.
It obviously bears saying that the speech I’ve quoted was to the party faithful, on the occasion of becoming party leader, so some nods to Labour’s history were inevitable and to some extent ritualistic. Even so, it is significant that he chose not to use an important opportunity to frame his leadership of Labour in a future-oriented way. That points to him being wedded to a political psychology within which the Labour Party is inseparable from heavy manufacturing industries of the past or, at the very least, within which workers in those industries are the template of what the ‘real working-class’ looks like. This is the Labour Party voters “once knew” and which he has vowed to revive. Yet, leaving aside for a moment the economics of this, it is at odds with the political realities of a party whose membership and voting base are now much more fragmented and with the demographic realities of a class structure which is far more complex than in the past.
As for the economics, I don’t suppose for one moment that Burnham is proposing that the traditional industries he referenced will return. It must surely be the case that his vision for re-industrialisation is based on the kinds of modern manufacturing which do still exist and could be developed much further, such as aerospace, biotechnology or pharmaceuticals. He may well also include service industries within this vision.
But, assuming this is so, it is again notable that he is choosing not to frame his narrative in this forward-looking direction. Equally, if the geography of re-industrialisation is to be mapped on to the communities created by old industries then the key drivers of it will need to be infrastructure connecting those places and the education and training available within them. That may well be within the ambit of his policy agenda but, if so, it means creating new kinds of communities, not fetishising those of the past.
The significance of Burnham’s nostalgic framing of both the meaning of the Labour Party and the meaning of industry is, I think, that it replicates at least some of the politicised nostalgia of Brexitism. As with Brexitism, the ideas that the country has lost its way, that globalization has eroded traditional communities, and that centralized policymaking has caused the decline of the local high street, all speak to the inchoate resentment of something having been not just lost by, but taken from, ‘ordinary people’. Moreover, whilst there may be good arguments for Burnham’s strong commitment to devolution from London, there is within it more than a whiff of the Brexitist resentment of the metropolitan elite or just of those who live within the circumference of the M25.
One of the many difficulties of this kind of nostalgic resentment is that, by presenting contemporary Britain as having taken a form which has been inflicted on its population, it ignores how it also reflects the preferences of that population. It is true that globalization has removed many jobs and industries that used to exist here, but it is also true that British people have chosen to buy cheaper imported consumer goods and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that high streets have declined, but it is also true that people have chosen to buy cheaper goods online and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that people say they want decisions to be made locally rather than by ‘remote Whitehall bureaucrats’, with, as Burnham puts it “power returned to every postcode in the land”, but they also strongly object to ‘postcode lotteries’ in, for example, public service provision. And whilst ‘four decades of neo-liberalism’ may have been every bit as damaging as Burnham claims, voters gave Margaret Thatcher three big election wins and, subsequently, many accepted the proposition that any party advocating a major departure from what her governments bequeathed was ‘unelectable’. And many of those same people voted for Brexit.
The biggest question about ‘Burnhamist’ nostalgia is how far its overlap with Brexitism extends to immigration policy, and continues with the false proposition that it is possible to have economic prosperity and thriving public services as well as draconian immigration controls, and that this is necessary to see off the threat from Reform. The retention of Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary might suggest that this is just what is in prospect. If so, that is going to make Burnham’s (highly laudable) aspirations to reform the social care system undeliverable. It will also undermine his ideas of regional re-industrialisation since central to any realistic possibility of this are universities, which are currently being immolated on the altar of ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.
I’m aware that all this may sound too dour, or too sour, or both. I’m also aware of the fault to which many politically-minded people are prone, whether on the left or the right, of demanding purity of political leaders, or of making the perfect the enemy of the good. In some ways, Keir Starmer suffered from the reluctance of ‘progressives’ (broadly conceived) to accept his imperfections and the compromises that all political leaders have to make. Indeed, with tedious predictability (yes, that is a link to an article by Owen Jones in the Guardian), there are some on the liberal-left who have already written Burnham off.
So it’s worth noting that there is a case for optimism. Burnham has already shown an ability, which it was widely agreed that Starmer lacked, to articulate an optimistic narrative and a sense of purpose. He has an engaging manner and he’s politically savvy. He has provided some simple, understandable priorities around devolution and regeneration and if he sticks to them that will be a contrast not just to Starmer’s flip-flopping on policy decisions but his tendency to say on any given day that this, that, or the other was his government’s ‘number one’ focus.
Farage’s fortunes
It might also be argued that it is precisely the way that Burnham’s political philosophy speaks to the nostalgic resentment of Brexitism which provides the basis for him to see off the electoral challenge of Reform. And, given events of the last few weeks, that challenge may be ebbing anyway. I wrote about this in my previous post, discussing Nigel Farage’s ill-judged resignation in order to re-fight his Clacton seat but since then there have been some developments.
One is just that his contest with Count Binface is already being spoken of as a national joke, and social media rage about the failure of the main parties to contest it seems to have had little cut-through with the general public. Perhaps more importantly, the stream of stories about the source of Farage’s and Reform’s funding continues apace, including its relationship to the murky world of cryptocurrencies. On this, Sian Norris’s article for Open Democracy is particularly eye-opening but it is probably of greater political significance that it is now being extensively reported by the BBC, and that there has been a spate of revelations in the Times/ Sunday Times (£) leading to several public [warning: link to X] and, reportedly, private attacks from leading figures in Reform on the Murdoch-owned media group. Even more remarkable has been a surge of negative stories in the Mail, including coverage of Reform’s various actual or alleged financial links to Russia.
Much of this is not exactly news, of course, and has been exposed for many years, not least by the indefatigable work of Pulitzer Prize finalist and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, in the face of massive abuse and intimidation. But, as she herself has recently written, it has been largely unreported and the reason, she says, is “Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because ‘challenging’ Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it.”
Quite what has shifted in the media establishment, and why it has done so now, is unclear (to me), but it is an observable fact that it has happened, and that marks an important political change.
The alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe
Within this changed environment, the other recent development has been the alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe. Much about this is, for the moment at least, unknown, beyond the facts that the injuries sustained were horrific and that a man has been charged with her murder and has appeared in a Magistrates’ Court where he did not enter a plea to the charge. It should go without saying that any such killing is repugnant, and that politically-motivated killings, if that is what this was (which has yet to be established), have an added repugnance. Beyond that I’m not going to comment or speculate about the case itself, but what is a legitimate subject for comment is the way in which it has been discussed.
That said, I can hardly bring myself to write about that in any detail by giving quotes and links to people whose conduct is contemptible. But, in summary, from the moment the news broke, there has been a frenzy of social media activity. Some of that has been mawkish and prurient, some of it conspiratorial, some of it frankly insane. Almost all of it was rancid and some of it may have prejudiced the fair trial of the accused man.
A recurring theme was denunciation of the police for disclosing that an initial suspect (who was subsequently released without charge) and the man who was eventually charged with murder were white Britons. This was presented as being in some way suspicious or ‘woke’, ignoring the fact that such disclosures arise precisely because failure to do so in previous high-profile cases has led to accusations of cover-ups from some of the very same people now complaining, and sometimes to riots as a result.
In response to their demands, last year the police were issued with new guidance encouraging disclosure in such cases. That they did so this time was undoubtedly because so many social media posters were fairly obviously salivating at the prospect of the perpetrator being an immigrant or an asylum seeker, and the danger of public disorder that represented. Inevitably, once that prospect seemed to disappear the on-line mob switched to speculating, or simply claiming, that the perpetrator must have been a left-wing extremist.
More generally, there have been constant demands to be given immediate information, before the facts were known, with the nonsensical assertion that the public had the ‘right’ to be told everything about the case, and, even, ‘to debate’ it, whilst it was still being investigated and/or whilst the judicial process is underway. When this prompted the police to state that, in the early stages, they had found “nothing to suggest” that it was a politically-motivated or terrorist act this, itself, was denounced as a cover-up, just as it would have been had they said nothing. The level of stupidity and irresponsibility displayed, not just by pseudonymous social media posters but by some public figures, politicians and supposed journalists, was the latest example of the increasingly disgraceful nature of, especially, on-line public discourse.
Alongside all this, there were, as the Times (£) and other newspapers reported, several accusations that Farage and Reform, specifically, were exploiting the alleged murder for political purposes, accusations made by, amongst others, the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor who had been a close friend of Ann Widdecombe. This was furiously denied by those accused, but what is certainly true is that, without knowing anything about the facts of the case, Reform immediately used it to claim that its MPs, and Farage in particular, needed more security than they receive from official sources.
In particular, there seemed to be an attempt to suggest that the alleged murder in some way justified the idea that Farage needed the £5 million gift he received from Christopher Harborne in order to provide him with security (although, at other times, he has said that it was unconditional and could be used to “buy Ferraris” and, anyway, the issue in dispute is the declaration of the gift, rather than the gift per se). So all of this stank of hypocrisy, as did numerous accusations that ‘the left’ had created this atmosphere of political violence by its use of intemperate language even as many of the same people making these accusations continue to laud Lucy Connelly as a free speech “martyr”.
Much of this replicated the ways that the murder of Charlie Kirk was exploited, both in the US and the UK, last year. However, repellent as this attempt to make use of Ann Widdecombe’s killing in this way has been, it does not seem to have dented the sense that the Farage/ Reform bubble is bursting, and it is hard to see how, whatever its outcome, the Clacton by-election can do anything but add to that. There was a telling headline about Farage and the by-election recently, to the effect that ‘when voters start laughing at you it’s over’. Even more telling was that it appeared in the Mail.
A new chapter?
Changes in Prime Minister do not automatically portend new eras in politics. It is only with historical distance that their significance or otherwise becomes clear. This makes it foolhardy to anticipate what that significance will be, but I will risk the guess that Burnham’s tenure will come to be seen within the common frame of the post-Brexit period as much, or more, as having an identity in its own right, if only in the sense of being another attempt to ‘make Brexit work’.
Even in the more immediate term, it is difficult to know whether the opinion poll bounce Labour has recently enjoyed, and the decline in support for Reform, will continue. Within the fates of these two parties are nested other questions, which will have a direct effect on how Brexit now develops.
One is whether the Labour government finds that an industrial renaissance is incompatible with its existing ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations and comes to pursue some version of rejoining. The other is whether the prospect of a Reform government (or a Conservative one, given that party’s present positioning) remains realistic since, for so long as it does, that renders any version of rejoining impossible to negotiate with the EU. These are likely to be the main Brexit-related questions for the coming political period.
With that, I will now take a break from posting over the summer.
This week, the seventh of those more recent Prime Ministers was installed whilst Farage’s political career is facing perhaps its greatest threats. So this will be another very long post but, unless something particularly important or interesting happens, it will be my last until September.
Burnham’s government and Brexit
Andy Burnham’s political orientation is now becoming clearer and much has already been written about it, including good discussions of his ‘politics of place’ by the Observer’s editor Ceri Thomas and of the idea of ‘Manchesterism’ by the BBC’s Economics editor Faisal Islam. Especially interesting, and less widely discussed, is Burnham’s commitment to the Cooperative Party and movement, as explained by Professor Colin Talbot in Civil Service World.
His first words and decisions as Prime Minister have also begun to give a sense of the nature of the government he will lead, although inevitably much remains unknown. One important signal is the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor which, amongst other things, implies that there will a serious commitment to increasing defence spending. The importance of that was underlined by the latest aggression in Russia’s undeclared war with Britain, with its Navy undertaking live-fire exercises a few miles off the British coast on the very day Burnham came to office. Now would be a good time for the government to investigate the many pressing questions about Russian interference in British politics raised by the recent Open Britain report.
In terms of the focus of this blog, the key issue is what Burnham’s government means for Brexit and Brexitism. This can be considered in the narrow sense of how Burnham’s administration will approach UK-EU relations. On that, Joël Reland of UKICE has provided a good summary of how things look at present. In essence, he argues that Burnham will be less interested than was Starmer in closer trade relations with the EU, but also less interested in regulatory competition (e.g. as regards AI and technology generally), whilst being at least as interested as Starmer in closer security links. Reland also suggests that, if this is so, in many ways it will make the Burnham’s Britain a more congenial interlocutor to the EU.
It is significant that Ed Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, has already publicly committed to deepening and strengthening the UK-EU relationship (his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, showed little interest in doing so, although her own predecessor, David Lammy, had been vocally pro-European). As ever, though, the question is what this means in practice. Specific Ministerial responsibility for relations with the EU moves from Nick Thomas-Symonds to Hamish Falconer who, like his predecessor, will attend, though not be a member of, the Cabinet (but unlike his predecessor will partly be located in the Foreign Office). There has been some speculation that this appointment betokens a softening, or abandoning, of Labour’s ‘red lines’, but speculation is all it is.
Also highly relevant is the post of Northern Ireland Secretary and the Cabinet reshuffle saw the departure of Hilary Benn, who from all accounts had been highly accomplished both in navigating Northern Ireland’s complex politics and in improving relations with Dublin, so strained by Brexit. However, there’s no reason to think that his replacement by Chris Bryant implies any substantive change of approach, and both of them were strong opponents of Brexit. Indeed, more generally, the construction of the new cabinet seems more to do with removing those most closely associated with Keir Starmer than with redefining Starmer’s approach to Brexit. Nor, for that matter, is the EU’s approach to post-Brexit relations likely to change as a result of Burnham’s arrival.
Burnhamism, Brexit, and Brexitism
The wider question is where Brexit and Brexitism sit within what is already being called ‘Burnhamism’. One part of the answer is that, as I wrote briefly after he won the Makerfield by-election, there is a strong current of nostalgia in Burnham’s politics. It’s no coincidence that in his acceptance speech as Labour leader he spoke of heeding the call of voters “for a return of the Labour they once knew”. That vision of the party is inextricable from his analysis of politics as a whole. For in that speech (and on numerous other occasions) his argument is that deindustrialization and the “four decades of … neoliberalism that began in the 1980s” are at the core of Britain’s economic and political problems, and he links this directly to the history of the Labour Party, in a passage which I will quote at length:
“And let us never forget: these are the very same places that built this Labour movement, this trade union movement, where we are today… Those are the places, but they were the places that were done down. This Labour movement, the trade union movement, was forged in the steelworks and iron works of Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, and Teesside, in the coal fields of South Wales, Central Scotland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, in the mills across the Pennines, west and east, in the shipyards on the Clyde and on the Tyne, and in the dockyards of Liverpool, and here in London, the people of these proud places made Labour.”
In itself, none of this is necessarily connected with Brexit, but in a crucial phrase in that same acceptance speech Burnham suggested that it is:
“The right used the phrase ‘take back control’, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place. If we want an economy and a country that works for all people and places, which to me should always be at the very core of Labourism, then it requires a new path to the one we’ve been on for the last 40 years.”
The invocation of the Vote Leave slogan in this way makes it clear what Burnham’s view of Brexit is, and it is a view which has been a common one amongst many on the left since the referendum result. In essence, it sees Brexit as having been a response, albeit a misguided response, by the working class, especially in the north of England, to the damaging consequences of neo-liberalism and (although it is hardly the same thing) London-centrism. On this view, the instinct to ‘take back control’ was right, but Brexit was the wrong way to go about it. Nor is such a view confined to the left. A version of it is what informed Theresa May’s argument that the Brexit referendum had revealed that too many people had been “left behind” by economic liberalism and globalization, and, subsequently, Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda.
There may be an element of truth in this view, although it has always had limitations, as any mono-causal explanation of Brexit is bound to have. In particular, Professor Danny Dorling’s influential analysis has shown the importance of middle-class and southern English support for ‘leave’ in delivering the referendum result. There are difficulties with that analysis, too, but my point here is not to re-hash debates about the causes of the vote to leave, it is that Burnham adheres to a particular view of it, which is imprinted on his Prime Ministership. Specifically, it means that his position is that Brexit was a symptom of a deeper malaise and, therefore, tackling that deeper malaise, rather than tackling Brexit, is the primary task.
This explains why, whilst there is no doubt that Burnham was opposed to Brexit and campaigned against it, and he has said as recently as last September that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU in his lifetime, his position now is that he does not intend to “re-run Brexit arguments” or to propose rejoining. In short, he wants to treat the illness, not the symptom. In this sense, Burnhamism represents the latest iteration of Labour’s attempt to respond to the challenges which Brexit created for the party.
The nostalgia problem
One obvious difficulty with his response is that, if his policy agenda is to revive manufacturing industry, then the barriers to trade created by Brexit are a major obstacle. But, with or without Brexit, Burnham invokes a world which no longer exists. The industries he cited in the speech quoted above – coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding, docking – have largely disappeared and will not come back. And the places where they existed developed because of the presence of things like coal, water, humidity, or, in other cases, clay or minerals, which were necessary for them (or, in the case of docking, because of pre-containerization technology). Those reasons have also gone.
It obviously bears saying that the speech I’ve quoted was to the party faithful, on the occasion of becoming party leader, so some nods to Labour’s history were inevitable and to some extent ritualistic. Even so, it is significant that he chose not to use an important opportunity to frame his leadership of Labour in a future-oriented way. That points to him being wedded to a political psychology within which the Labour Party is inseparable from heavy manufacturing industries of the past or, at the very least, within which workers in those industries are the template of what the ‘real working-class’ looks like. This is the Labour Party voters “once knew” and which he has vowed to revive. Yet, leaving aside for a moment the economics of this, it is at odds with the political realities of a party whose membership and voting base are now much more fragmented and with the demographic realities of a class structure which is far more complex than in the past.
As for the economics, I don’t suppose for one moment that Burnham is proposing that the traditional industries he referenced will return. It must surely be the case that his vision for re-industrialisation is based on the kinds of modern manufacturing which do still exist and could be developed much further, such as aerospace, biotechnology or pharmaceuticals. He may well also include service industries within this vision.
But, assuming this is so, it is again notable that he is choosing not to frame his narrative in this forward-looking direction. Equally, if the geography of re-industrialisation is to be mapped on to the communities created by old industries then the key drivers of it will need to be infrastructure connecting those places and the education and training available within them. That may well be within the ambit of his policy agenda but, if so, it means creating new kinds of communities, not fetishising those of the past.
The significance of Burnham’s nostalgic framing of both the meaning of the Labour Party and the meaning of industry is, I think, that it replicates at least some of the politicised nostalgia of Brexitism. As with Brexitism, the ideas that the country has lost its way, that globalization has eroded traditional communities, and that centralized policymaking has caused the decline of the local high street, all speak to the inchoate resentment of something having been not just lost by, but taken from, ‘ordinary people’. Moreover, whilst there may be good arguments for Burnham’s strong commitment to devolution from London, there is within it more than a whiff of the Brexitist resentment of the metropolitan elite or just of those who live within the circumference of the M25.
One of the many difficulties of this kind of nostalgic resentment is that, by presenting contemporary Britain as having taken a form which has been inflicted on its population, it ignores how it also reflects the preferences of that population. It is true that globalization has removed many jobs and industries that used to exist here, but it is also true that British people have chosen to buy cheaper imported consumer goods and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that high streets have declined, but it is also true that people have chosen to buy cheaper goods online and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that people say they want decisions to be made locally rather than by ‘remote Whitehall bureaucrats’, with, as Burnham puts it “power returned to every postcode in the land”, but they also strongly object to ‘postcode lotteries’ in, for example, public service provision. And whilst ‘four decades of neo-liberalism’ may have been every bit as damaging as Burnham claims, voters gave Margaret Thatcher three big election wins and, subsequently, many accepted the proposition that any party advocating a major departure from what her governments bequeathed was ‘unelectable’. And many of those same people voted for Brexit.
The biggest question about ‘Burnhamist’ nostalgia is how far its overlap with Brexitism extends to immigration policy, and continues with the false proposition that it is possible to have economic prosperity and thriving public services as well as draconian immigration controls, and that this is necessary to see off the threat from Reform. The retention of Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary might suggest that this is just what is in prospect. If so, that is going to make Burnham’s (highly laudable) aspirations to reform the social care system undeliverable. It will also undermine his ideas of regional re-industrialisation since central to any realistic possibility of this are universities, which are currently being immolated on the altar of ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.
I’m aware that all this may sound too dour, or too sour, or both. I’m also aware of the fault to which many politically-minded people are prone, whether on the left or the right, of demanding purity of political leaders, or of making the perfect the enemy of the good. In some ways, Keir Starmer suffered from the reluctance of ‘progressives’ (broadly conceived) to accept his imperfections and the compromises that all political leaders have to make. Indeed, with tedious predictability (yes, that is a link to an article by Owen Jones in the Guardian), there are some on the liberal-left who have already written Burnham off.
So it’s worth noting that there is a case for optimism. Burnham has already shown an ability, which it was widely agreed that Starmer lacked, to articulate an optimistic narrative and a sense of purpose. He has an engaging manner and he’s politically savvy. He has provided some simple, understandable priorities around devolution and regeneration and if he sticks to them that will be a contrast not just to Starmer’s flip-flopping on policy decisions but his tendency to say on any given day that this, that, or the other was his government’s ‘number one’ focus.
Farage’s fortunes
It might also be argued that it is precisely the way that Burnham’s political philosophy speaks to the nostalgic resentment of Brexitism which provides the basis for him to see off the electoral challenge of Reform. And, given events of the last few weeks, that challenge may be ebbing anyway. I wrote about this in my previous post, discussing Nigel Farage’s ill-judged resignation in order to re-fight his Clacton seat but since then there have been some developments.
One is just that his contest with Count Binface is already being spoken of as a national joke, and social media rage about the failure of the main parties to contest it seems to have had little cut-through with the general public. Perhaps more importantly, the stream of stories about the source of Farage’s and Reform’s funding continues apace, including its relationship to the murky world of cryptocurrencies. On this, Sian Norris’s article for Open Democracy is particularly eye-opening but it is probably of greater political significance that it is now being extensively reported by the BBC, and that there has been a spate of revelations in the Times/ Sunday Times (£) leading to several public [warning: link to X] and, reportedly, private attacks from leading figures in Reform on the Murdoch-owned media group. Even more remarkable has been a surge of negative stories in the Mail, including coverage of Reform’s various actual or alleged financial links to Russia.
Much of this is not exactly news, of course, and has been exposed for many years, not least by the indefatigable work of Pulitzer Prize finalist and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, in the face of massive abuse and intimidation. But, as she herself has recently written, it has been largely unreported and the reason, she says, is “Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because ‘challenging’ Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it.”
Quite what has shifted in the media establishment, and why it has done so now, is unclear (to me), but it is an observable fact that it has happened, and that marks an important political change.
The alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe
Within this changed environment, the other recent development has been the alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe. Much about this is, for the moment at least, unknown, beyond the facts that the injuries sustained were horrific and that a man has been charged with her murder and has appeared in a Magistrates’ Court where he did not enter a plea to the charge. It should go without saying that any such killing is repugnant, and that politically-motivated killings, if that is what this was (which has yet to be established), have an added repugnance. Beyond that I’m not going to comment or speculate about the case itself, but what is a legitimate subject for comment is the way in which it has been discussed.
That said, I can hardly bring myself to write about that in any detail by giving quotes and links to people whose conduct is contemptible. But, in summary, from the moment the news broke, there has been a frenzy of social media activity. Some of that has been mawkish and prurient, some of it conspiratorial, some of it frankly insane. Almost all of it was rancid and some of it may have prejudiced the fair trial of the accused man.
A recurring theme was denunciation of the police for disclosing that an initial suspect (who was subsequently released without charge) and the man who was eventually charged with murder were white Britons. This was presented as being in some way suspicious or ‘woke’, ignoring the fact that such disclosures arise precisely because failure to do so in previous high-profile cases has led to accusations of cover-ups from some of the very same people now complaining, and sometimes to riots as a result.
In response to their demands, last year the police were issued with new guidance encouraging disclosure in such cases. That they did so this time was undoubtedly because so many social media posters were fairly obviously salivating at the prospect of the perpetrator being an immigrant or an asylum seeker, and the danger of public disorder that represented. Inevitably, once that prospect seemed to disappear the on-line mob switched to speculating, or simply claiming, that the perpetrator must have been a left-wing extremist.
More generally, there have been constant demands to be given immediate information, before the facts were known, with the nonsensical assertion that the public had the ‘right’ to be told everything about the case, and, even, ‘to debate’ it, whilst it was still being investigated and/or whilst the judicial process is underway. When this prompted the police to state that, in the early stages, they had found “nothing to suggest” that it was a politically-motivated or terrorist act this, itself, was denounced as a cover-up, just as it would have been had they said nothing. The level of stupidity and irresponsibility displayed, not just by pseudonymous social media posters but by some public figures, politicians and supposed journalists, was the latest example of the increasingly disgraceful nature of, especially, on-line public discourse.
Alongside all this, there were, as the Times (£) and other newspapers reported, several accusations that Farage and Reform, specifically, were exploiting the alleged murder for political purposes, accusations made by, amongst others, the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor who had been a close friend of Ann Widdecombe. This was furiously denied by those accused, but what is certainly true is that, without knowing anything about the facts of the case, Reform immediately used it to claim that its MPs, and Farage in particular, needed more security than they receive from official sources.
In particular, there seemed to be an attempt to suggest that the alleged murder in some way justified the idea that Farage needed the £5 million gift he received from Christopher Harborne in order to provide him with security (although, at other times, he has said that it was unconditional and could be used to “buy Ferraris” and, anyway, the issue in dispute is the declaration of the gift, rather than the gift per se). So all of this stank of hypocrisy, as did numerous accusations that ‘the left’ had created this atmosphere of political violence by its use of intemperate language even as many of the same people making these accusations continue to laud Lucy Connelly as a free speech “martyr”.
Much of this replicated the ways that the murder of Charlie Kirk was exploited, both in the US and the UK, last year. However, repellent as this attempt to make use of Ann Widdecombe’s killing in this way has been, it does not seem to have dented the sense that the Farage/ Reform bubble is bursting, and it is hard to see how, whatever its outcome, the Clacton by-election can do anything but add to that. There was a telling headline about Farage and the by-election recently, to the effect that ‘when voters start laughing at you it’s over’. Even more telling was that it appeared in the Mail.
A new chapter?
Changes in Prime Minister do not automatically portend new eras in politics. It is only with historical distance that their significance or otherwise becomes clear. This makes it foolhardy to anticipate what that significance will be, but I will risk the guess that Burnham’s tenure will come to be seen within the common frame of the post-Brexit period as much, or more, as having an identity in its own right, if only in the sense of being another attempt to ‘make Brexit work’.
Even in the more immediate term, it is difficult to know whether the opinion poll bounce Labour has recently enjoyed, and the decline in support for Reform, will continue. Within the fates of these two parties are nested other questions, which will have a direct effect on how Brexit now develops.
One is whether the Labour government finds that an industrial renaissance is incompatible with its existing ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations and comes to pursue some version of rejoining. The other is whether the prospect of a Reform government (or a Conservative one, given that party’s present positioning) remains realistic since, for so long as it does, that renders any version of rejoining impossible to negotiate with the EU. These are likely to be the main Brexit-related questions for the coming political period.
With that, I will now take a break from posting over the summer.
Thursday, 9 July 2026
Parsing Farage’s démarche farce
I had been intending to skip writing this fortnight’s post. There didn’t seem to be much happening, mainly because so much is on hold until Andy Burnham assumes the Prime Ministership. Of course, there are always news stories of relevance to the focus of his blog, but there only seemed to be two main, specifically Brexit-related developments.
One was the demolition of the border barriers between Spain and Gibraltar, in advance of the provisional application of the UK-EU treaty on 15 July which is expected to be formally signed on 13 July. There was also a UK parliamentary debate yesterday showing broad cross-party support for the treaty. This marks an important moment for Gibraltar but also for the Brexit process as a whole in that it resolves the last outstanding issue from the Article 50 negotiations. Those with long memories may recall how, in 2017, there was ridiculous talk from Brexiters, including former Tory leader Michael Howard, of Britain going to war with Spain over this issue. [1]
The other development was a report that the ‘reset’ agreement is near to completion and the delayed UK-EU summit is likely to be held in mid-October. However, another report (£), in the Financial Times, suggested that there are still many unresolved issues and that the summit date remains uncertain. The latter report stated that a particular stumbling block is the UK demand to have a role in EU decision-making, a demand unsurprisingly rejected for the obvious reason that the UK chose to leave the EU.
But within the FT report was a particular sentence, to the effect that the UK demand “was a key part of British attempts to defend the deal from criticism from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party”. It is yet another reminder of the mess post-Brexit Britain is in: still making unrealistic demands of the EU, still allowing Farage to influence policy from outside government, and still caught in the absurd fantasy that doing so will somehow defuse the criticisms that he would make whatever the terms of any deal. That reminder is all the more stark given the miasma of scandal that has recently gathered over Farage.
So when that led to the extraordinary démarche of announcing on Tuesday his intention to resign from, but re-fight, his Clacton seat, I decided that a post this week was worthwhile after all (albeit, as it happens, a day earlier than my usual Friday morning slot). For, however events now play out, this episode is highly revealing about both post-Brexit politics and the politics of Brexitism.
Farage’s petulance and panic
The circumstances of Farage’s announcement are well-known. In brief, the swirl of questions about financial gifts he has received led to the instigation of a parliamentary standards investigation into, specifically, the £5 million he was given by cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne. His responses to questions about this have been contradictory, evasive and increasingly tetchy (and, preposterously, he referred to it in his announcement as being akin to a “lottery win”). Then, amid expectations that the standards investigation would rule that he had breached rules on declaration of the gift, a new scandal was uncovered last weekend when the Sunday Times reported (£) that he had been given substantial monetary gifts by convicted cryptocurrency fraudster George Cottrell, which had also not been declared, also potentially breaching disclosure rules.
This was the background to the ‘resign and re-stand’ announcement. In it, Farage elided numerous issues, most of which are irrelevant to the issue of whether he has or has not broken parliamentary rules on gift declaration. These included the nature and extent of his need for security, and who should pay for it, his right to undertake extra-parliamentary work, and his allegations of media harassment of his daughter. There was also another outing for his ridiculous claim to be a successful businessman rather than a career politician. These and other irrelevant talking points are also being endlessly re-hashed on social media.
As ever with Farage, the accent was on his supposed victimhood, refracted through the familiar mix of self-pity and aggression. Notably, though, as has been the case throughout the recent weeks in which his financial dealings have been in scrutiny (including not just gifts received, but payments for his various business activities including the £270,000 he has earned since becoming an MP as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm), he has lost much of his usual skill in presenting himself as humorous and unflappable. Rather, he seemed petulant and panicky. If so, that suggests that he, too, expects to be found to have breached parliamentary standards since, if not, he could confidently have waited for exoneration.
The populist subversion of democracy
Beyond all the faux-victimhood, Farage articulated a core theme of populism in general, and Brexitism in particular. The link to Brexit was explicit, and made by Farage himself in claiming ‘credit’ for the referendum and for Brexit itself. For all its failure and subsequent unpopularity, and for all that Farage generally says little about it these days, Brexit remains his signature dish. But more importantly, what Farage proposed was that it should be for “the people” of Clacton to decide. To decide what, though? Apparently, they (rather than the media) should judge his probity and they (rather than parliament) whether he had breached the rules on disclosure of gifts. Yet, manifestly, that would be impossible. Without media reports of his conduct, how would people be able to judge his probity? And, certainly, they could not judge whether he has breached disclosure rules until the parliamentary investigation of that has been completed.
So it was a nonsensical proposition, yet it was also a meaningful one. Its meaning is that the sole mechanism of democracy is voting (a principle which does not, by the way, apply to Reform UK’s governing board). This, too, is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. It is what lies behind all the jibes about unelected judges and unelected bureaucrats, jibes which entail that only being voted for brings democratic legitimacy. It ignores that democracy is much more complex than voting and that voting is only one, albeit necessary, condition for its existence. An independent judiciary, a free press, bureaucratic rules for the conduct of representatives, amongst other things, are also vital. Thus what purports to be an absolute commitment to democracy is in fact an attempt to subvert it by hollowing it out.
Here, again, there is a Brexit connection or, rather, an illustration of how Brexit has segued into Brexitism. The idea that the referendum, because it was a vote, gave rise not just to ‘the will of the people’ but rendered all further involvement by judges, civil servants or even parliament itself illegitimate, was one of the most pernicious features of the post-referendum period. Now, Farage is seeking to draw on the same well-spring, by declaring that his by-election will be about ‘the people versus the Establishment’. He even reprised one of the most irresponsible of the appeals to leave voters, to use the vote not to decide on the ostensible issue under consideration but simply to “stick two fingers up at the Establishment”.
If Farage’s gambit succeeds (a question I’ll come back to) then, even if he is subsequently found to have breached parliamentary standards, he will use the result to delegitimize that finding. He has already denounced the process as “political” in order to discredit it as being a motivated attack upon him, but doing so also has the effect of positioning it within the same arena as the overt politics of the voting process. Thus, it becomes possible to say that its findings are irrelevant because ‘the people have spoken’.
The wider issues
However, whilst the outcome of the standards investigation is an important one, both for Farage himself and for the principles it embodies, it’s important to keep in mind that, in itself, it is not the most important issue. The rules on disclosure of gifts are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That is, they exist to provide transparency about the interests and, perhaps, the obligations of MPs. From that point of view, even if Farage had correctly declared his gifts in line with the rules and, actually, even if it turns out to be true (as he claims) that it was not necessary to declare them, the fact of those gifts is highly significant.
They raise the question of why Farage is so enmeshed with, specifically, cryptocurrency magnates and what that betokens. This question goes beyond the personal gifts he has received to encompass the donations made to Reform UK itself, not least because some of the magnates involved, primarily Harborne, are one and the same. The connection of these issues would arise in relation to any party leader and party but is especially salient in this case because of the peculiar structure of Reform UK and the unique relationship between Farage and the party he created. For, even though he renounced ownership last year, he still has an unusually strong grip on it.
Reform’s reliance on cryptocurrency, both as a source of the wealth of its biggest donors and as the actual currency used for some donations, is unusual and striking. Harborne has given £9 million to the party (the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party) in addition to earlier donations of at least £3 million, along with the £5 million to Farage personally. Another cryptocurrency billionaire, Ben Delo, has donated £4 million to the party. Meanwhile, last year Reform became the only major political party in the UK to accept donations in cryptocurrency (although this is to be prohibited, at least temporarily, under recently announced government regulations).
Reform has other major donors, of course, such as venture capitalist and art collector Sasan Ghandehari who has recently pledged unspecified millions of pounds (£). More modestly, £200,000 was given by Anthony Bamford’s firm JCB, whose products, no doubt coincidentally, have recently been promoted and extravagantly praised by Farage and Reform MPs Lee Anderson and Robert Jenrick. But the scale and centrality of cryptocurrency to the finances of both the party and its leader is remarkable. Farage also has his own personal interest in the sector as a substantial investor in, and promoter of, the bitcoin firm Stack BTC.
This does not, as Farage would have it, denote that he and Reform are tech-savvy innovators, geared up for the financial system of the future. Cryptocurrencies are inextricably intertwined with organized crime, money laundering, terrorism and hostile state actors, as the Royal United Services Institute’s research, amongst that of others, has explored. They are also central to Putin’s wartime economy and his attempt to circumvent sanctions, as the RAND organization, amongst others, has shown.
This makes it unsurprising that Farage’s £5 million gift was reported by bankers to the National Crime Agency. It is very difficult to trace the provenance of funds moved through crypto accounts, so banks frequently seek advice from crime agencies when large sums are involved, especially when paid to “politically exposed people”. This latter concept, by the way, was central to the dramatic row that broke out in 2023 when Farage was ‘de-banked’ by Coutts, something which might appear in a fresh light given the more recent revelations.
Nor should the Trump connection be forgotten. Having once dismissed cryptocurrency as a scam, he has since embraced it, seeking to make the US “the crypto capital of the world” and netting a staggering $1.4 billion from his own crypto ventures in the first year of his second term of office. Trump also granted a pardon to Reform donor Ben Delo for his offences relating to anti-money laundering compliance (George Cottrell is reportedly seeking such a pardon for his fraud conviction).
So it is because of, to say the very least, the murky nature of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency speculation that the question of whether Farage did or did not break parliamentary disclosure rules is not the only issue of importance. His longstanding commitment to cryptocurrency deregulation was given tangible form with the publication of Reform’s so-called ‘Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill’ in May 2025. This (which intriguingly has now disappeared from Reform’s website) claimed to set out a “post-Brexit roadmap to make the United Kingdom the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation”. It might not be unduly cynical to wonder what motivates Reform’s commitment to such legislation and, perhaps even more importantly, to be concerned about the calamitous effects it would have on the British economy were anything like it ever to be enacted.
Back to Clacton
One might certainly wonder exactly how Farage and Reform’s enmeshment with cryptocurrencies squares with their anti-globalist and anti-elitist pretensions (this is probably one reason, along with Rupert Lowe’s even more extreme anti-immigration policies, why Restore Britain is siphoning off some of Reform’s core supporters, although Lowe, himself, can hardly be regarded as a horny-handed son of toil). This in itself makes Farage’s framing of the Clacton by-election rather a farce. But, as things are turning out, it will be a farce anyway, as all the other major parties have very wisely decided not to field candidates. Nor will Restore, providing Lowe’s Musk-backed ethno-nationalist party with a rare opportunity to inhabit the moral high ground.
This creates the prospect of a Farage victory, probably on a very low turn-out, over the joke candidate Count Binface (it seems that actor-turned-fruitcake Laurence Fox will also stand). Or, even more humiliatingly, a defeat by Count Binface. Indeed it is a delicious, and perhaps not entirely unlikely possibility, that Farage’s injunction to voters to ‘stick two fingers up at the Establishment’ might actually yield this outcome. It would be reminiscent of the ‘Boaty McBoatface’ episode or, perhaps more pertinently, H’Angus the Monkey’s election as Mayor of Hartlepool in 2002, but with incalculably greater political consequences.
This bizarre situation has already forced Farage’s supporters into some curious postures. Many are drawing a bogus comparison with the Makerfield by-election (bogus for the obvious reason that the sitting MP did not re-stand for election). Some, such as tedious contrarian Brendan O’Neill, are complaining that the failure of the other parties to stand candidates shows they are insulting the working-class people of Clacton. Others are reduced to delving into the background [warning: link to X] of the comedian behind Count Binface to show that he is an anti-Brexit graduate and a prime example of the metropolitan liberal elite. The idea, it seems, is to suggest that he is, after all, a serious candidate representing the Establishment, which is surely a very perverse route to go down.
All of this is, in its way, highly amusing. Even so, the very farcicality of it is a depressing symbol, not least to the world beyond Britain, of the state of British politics. Of course it is also possible that Farage will wriggle out of things, reversing his resignation and no doubt claiming that he has supposedly won a victory by showing that the other parties are ‘too scared’ to fight him, rather than simply showing their disdain for his antics. It is also possible, whether or not this by-election happens now, that one will be triggered if he is found to have broken parliamentary rules. If so, that would presumably be contested by the other parties in the normal way and he would quite possibly win.
Whilst it is certainly too early to write Farage off, there is a palpable sense, which was growing even before his ‘resignation’, that his star is waning. That matters. It is obviously the case that Farage channels a deep vein of political sentiment that would exist without him, and will continue to exist if he were to depart the political scene. But the way in which he has dominated populist politics in Britain for so long, and the very personal hold he has over the Reform party, means that if and when his demise comes British politics in general, and Brexitism, in particular will be significantly re-inflected. His own conduct, especially this week, has probably brought that moment closer.
Note
[1] For detailed discussion of the treaty, see my post of June 2025. For discussion of the 2017 episode, and the background to it, see my post from April of that year.
One was the demolition of the border barriers between Spain and Gibraltar, in advance of the provisional application of the UK-EU treaty on 15 July which is expected to be formally signed on 13 July. There was also a UK parliamentary debate yesterday showing broad cross-party support for the treaty. This marks an important moment for Gibraltar but also for the Brexit process as a whole in that it resolves the last outstanding issue from the Article 50 negotiations. Those with long memories may recall how, in 2017, there was ridiculous talk from Brexiters, including former Tory leader Michael Howard, of Britain going to war with Spain over this issue. [1]
The other development was a report that the ‘reset’ agreement is near to completion and the delayed UK-EU summit is likely to be held in mid-October. However, another report (£), in the Financial Times, suggested that there are still many unresolved issues and that the summit date remains uncertain. The latter report stated that a particular stumbling block is the UK demand to have a role in EU decision-making, a demand unsurprisingly rejected for the obvious reason that the UK chose to leave the EU.
But within the FT report was a particular sentence, to the effect that the UK demand “was a key part of British attempts to defend the deal from criticism from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party”. It is yet another reminder of the mess post-Brexit Britain is in: still making unrealistic demands of the EU, still allowing Farage to influence policy from outside government, and still caught in the absurd fantasy that doing so will somehow defuse the criticisms that he would make whatever the terms of any deal. That reminder is all the more stark given the miasma of scandal that has recently gathered over Farage.
So when that led to the extraordinary démarche of announcing on Tuesday his intention to resign from, but re-fight, his Clacton seat, I decided that a post this week was worthwhile after all (albeit, as it happens, a day earlier than my usual Friday morning slot). For, however events now play out, this episode is highly revealing about both post-Brexit politics and the politics of Brexitism.
Farage’s petulance and panic
The circumstances of Farage’s announcement are well-known. In brief, the swirl of questions about financial gifts he has received led to the instigation of a parliamentary standards investigation into, specifically, the £5 million he was given by cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne. His responses to questions about this have been contradictory, evasive and increasingly tetchy (and, preposterously, he referred to it in his announcement as being akin to a “lottery win”). Then, amid expectations that the standards investigation would rule that he had breached rules on declaration of the gift, a new scandal was uncovered last weekend when the Sunday Times reported (£) that he had been given substantial monetary gifts by convicted cryptocurrency fraudster George Cottrell, which had also not been declared, also potentially breaching disclosure rules.
This was the background to the ‘resign and re-stand’ announcement. In it, Farage elided numerous issues, most of which are irrelevant to the issue of whether he has or has not broken parliamentary rules on gift declaration. These included the nature and extent of his need for security, and who should pay for it, his right to undertake extra-parliamentary work, and his allegations of media harassment of his daughter. There was also another outing for his ridiculous claim to be a successful businessman rather than a career politician. These and other irrelevant talking points are also being endlessly re-hashed on social media.
As ever with Farage, the accent was on his supposed victimhood, refracted through the familiar mix of self-pity and aggression. Notably, though, as has been the case throughout the recent weeks in which his financial dealings have been in scrutiny (including not just gifts received, but payments for his various business activities including the £270,000 he has earned since becoming an MP as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm), he has lost much of his usual skill in presenting himself as humorous and unflappable. Rather, he seemed petulant and panicky. If so, that suggests that he, too, expects to be found to have breached parliamentary standards since, if not, he could confidently have waited for exoneration.
The populist subversion of democracy
Beyond all the faux-victimhood, Farage articulated a core theme of populism in general, and Brexitism in particular. The link to Brexit was explicit, and made by Farage himself in claiming ‘credit’ for the referendum and for Brexit itself. For all its failure and subsequent unpopularity, and for all that Farage generally says little about it these days, Brexit remains his signature dish. But more importantly, what Farage proposed was that it should be for “the people” of Clacton to decide. To decide what, though? Apparently, they (rather than the media) should judge his probity and they (rather than parliament) whether he had breached the rules on disclosure of gifts. Yet, manifestly, that would be impossible. Without media reports of his conduct, how would people be able to judge his probity? And, certainly, they could not judge whether he has breached disclosure rules until the parliamentary investigation of that has been completed.
So it was a nonsensical proposition, yet it was also a meaningful one. Its meaning is that the sole mechanism of democracy is voting (a principle which does not, by the way, apply to Reform UK’s governing board). This, too, is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. It is what lies behind all the jibes about unelected judges and unelected bureaucrats, jibes which entail that only being voted for brings democratic legitimacy. It ignores that democracy is much more complex than voting and that voting is only one, albeit necessary, condition for its existence. An independent judiciary, a free press, bureaucratic rules for the conduct of representatives, amongst other things, are also vital. Thus what purports to be an absolute commitment to democracy is in fact an attempt to subvert it by hollowing it out.
Here, again, there is a Brexit connection or, rather, an illustration of how Brexit has segued into Brexitism. The idea that the referendum, because it was a vote, gave rise not just to ‘the will of the people’ but rendered all further involvement by judges, civil servants or even parliament itself illegitimate, was one of the most pernicious features of the post-referendum period. Now, Farage is seeking to draw on the same well-spring, by declaring that his by-election will be about ‘the people versus the Establishment’. He even reprised one of the most irresponsible of the appeals to leave voters, to use the vote not to decide on the ostensible issue under consideration but simply to “stick two fingers up at the Establishment”.
If Farage’s gambit succeeds (a question I’ll come back to) then, even if he is subsequently found to have breached parliamentary standards, he will use the result to delegitimize that finding. He has already denounced the process as “political” in order to discredit it as being a motivated attack upon him, but doing so also has the effect of positioning it within the same arena as the overt politics of the voting process. Thus, it becomes possible to say that its findings are irrelevant because ‘the people have spoken’.
The wider issues
However, whilst the outcome of the standards investigation is an important one, both for Farage himself and for the principles it embodies, it’s important to keep in mind that, in itself, it is not the most important issue. The rules on disclosure of gifts are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That is, they exist to provide transparency about the interests and, perhaps, the obligations of MPs. From that point of view, even if Farage had correctly declared his gifts in line with the rules and, actually, even if it turns out to be true (as he claims) that it was not necessary to declare them, the fact of those gifts is highly significant.
They raise the question of why Farage is so enmeshed with, specifically, cryptocurrency magnates and what that betokens. This question goes beyond the personal gifts he has received to encompass the donations made to Reform UK itself, not least because some of the magnates involved, primarily Harborne, are one and the same. The connection of these issues would arise in relation to any party leader and party but is especially salient in this case because of the peculiar structure of Reform UK and the unique relationship between Farage and the party he created. For, even though he renounced ownership last year, he still has an unusually strong grip on it.
Reform’s reliance on cryptocurrency, both as a source of the wealth of its biggest donors and as the actual currency used for some donations, is unusual and striking. Harborne has given £9 million to the party (the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party) in addition to earlier donations of at least £3 million, along with the £5 million to Farage personally. Another cryptocurrency billionaire, Ben Delo, has donated £4 million to the party. Meanwhile, last year Reform became the only major political party in the UK to accept donations in cryptocurrency (although this is to be prohibited, at least temporarily, under recently announced government regulations).
Reform has other major donors, of course, such as venture capitalist and art collector Sasan Ghandehari who has recently pledged unspecified millions of pounds (£). More modestly, £200,000 was given by Anthony Bamford’s firm JCB, whose products, no doubt coincidentally, have recently been promoted and extravagantly praised by Farage and Reform MPs Lee Anderson and Robert Jenrick. But the scale and centrality of cryptocurrency to the finances of both the party and its leader is remarkable. Farage also has his own personal interest in the sector as a substantial investor in, and promoter of, the bitcoin firm Stack BTC.
This does not, as Farage would have it, denote that he and Reform are tech-savvy innovators, geared up for the financial system of the future. Cryptocurrencies are inextricably intertwined with organized crime, money laundering, terrorism and hostile state actors, as the Royal United Services Institute’s research, amongst that of others, has explored. They are also central to Putin’s wartime economy and his attempt to circumvent sanctions, as the RAND organization, amongst others, has shown.
This makes it unsurprising that Farage’s £5 million gift was reported by bankers to the National Crime Agency. It is very difficult to trace the provenance of funds moved through crypto accounts, so banks frequently seek advice from crime agencies when large sums are involved, especially when paid to “politically exposed people”. This latter concept, by the way, was central to the dramatic row that broke out in 2023 when Farage was ‘de-banked’ by Coutts, something which might appear in a fresh light given the more recent revelations.
Nor should the Trump connection be forgotten. Having once dismissed cryptocurrency as a scam, he has since embraced it, seeking to make the US “the crypto capital of the world” and netting a staggering $1.4 billion from his own crypto ventures in the first year of his second term of office. Trump also granted a pardon to Reform donor Ben Delo for his offences relating to anti-money laundering compliance (George Cottrell is reportedly seeking such a pardon for his fraud conviction).
So it is because of, to say the very least, the murky nature of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency speculation that the question of whether Farage did or did not break parliamentary disclosure rules is not the only issue of importance. His longstanding commitment to cryptocurrency deregulation was given tangible form with the publication of Reform’s so-called ‘Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill’ in May 2025. This (which intriguingly has now disappeared from Reform’s website) claimed to set out a “post-Brexit roadmap to make the United Kingdom the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation”. It might not be unduly cynical to wonder what motivates Reform’s commitment to such legislation and, perhaps even more importantly, to be concerned about the calamitous effects it would have on the British economy were anything like it ever to be enacted.
Back to Clacton
One might certainly wonder exactly how Farage and Reform’s enmeshment with cryptocurrencies squares with their anti-globalist and anti-elitist pretensions (this is probably one reason, along with Rupert Lowe’s even more extreme anti-immigration policies, why Restore Britain is siphoning off some of Reform’s core supporters, although Lowe, himself, can hardly be regarded as a horny-handed son of toil). This in itself makes Farage’s framing of the Clacton by-election rather a farce. But, as things are turning out, it will be a farce anyway, as all the other major parties have very wisely decided not to field candidates. Nor will Restore, providing Lowe’s Musk-backed ethno-nationalist party with a rare opportunity to inhabit the moral high ground.
This creates the prospect of a Farage victory, probably on a very low turn-out, over the joke candidate Count Binface (it seems that actor-turned-fruitcake Laurence Fox will also stand). Or, even more humiliatingly, a defeat by Count Binface. Indeed it is a delicious, and perhaps not entirely unlikely possibility, that Farage’s injunction to voters to ‘stick two fingers up at the Establishment’ might actually yield this outcome. It would be reminiscent of the ‘Boaty McBoatface’ episode or, perhaps more pertinently, H’Angus the Monkey’s election as Mayor of Hartlepool in 2002, but with incalculably greater political consequences.
This bizarre situation has already forced Farage’s supporters into some curious postures. Many are drawing a bogus comparison with the Makerfield by-election (bogus for the obvious reason that the sitting MP did not re-stand for election). Some, such as tedious contrarian Brendan O’Neill, are complaining that the failure of the other parties to stand candidates shows they are insulting the working-class people of Clacton. Others are reduced to delving into the background [warning: link to X] of the comedian behind Count Binface to show that he is an anti-Brexit graduate and a prime example of the metropolitan liberal elite. The idea, it seems, is to suggest that he is, after all, a serious candidate representing the Establishment, which is surely a very perverse route to go down.
All of this is, in its way, highly amusing. Even so, the very farcicality of it is a depressing symbol, not least to the world beyond Britain, of the state of British politics. Of course it is also possible that Farage will wriggle out of things, reversing his resignation and no doubt claiming that he has supposedly won a victory by showing that the other parties are ‘too scared’ to fight him, rather than simply showing their disdain for his antics. It is also possible, whether or not this by-election happens now, that one will be triggered if he is found to have broken parliamentary rules. If so, that would presumably be contested by the other parties in the normal way and he would quite possibly win.
Whilst it is certainly too early to write Farage off, there is a palpable sense, which was growing even before his ‘resignation’, that his star is waning. That matters. It is obviously the case that Farage channels a deep vein of political sentiment that would exist without him, and will continue to exist if he were to depart the political scene. But the way in which he has dominated populist politics in Britain for so long, and the very personal hold he has over the Reform party, means that if and when his demise comes British politics in general, and Brexitism, in particular will be significantly re-inflected. His own conduct, especially this week, has probably brought that moment closer.
Note
[1] For detailed discussion of the treaty, see my post of June 2025. For discussion of the 2017 episode, and the background to it, see my post from April of that year.
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