The dust is now settling after last week’s elections whilst the fallout very much continues, especially in terms of the leadership crisis engulfing the Labour government which is developing rapidly as I write (so that there may well be new developments in even the next few hours). Both tell us much about post-Brexit politics.
The election results
The landscape revealed by the election results is a complex one, sufficiently so as to be open to almost any number of interpretations. If there is one fairly uncontentious observation it is that they confirmed the fragmentation of the party system, with at least five main parties in England and seven across Great Britain. In particular, this marks the moment when both Reform and the Greens have, beyond any doubt, gained a significant political presence. However, it is quite wrong to say, as Nigel Farage does, that this shows that politics is no longer about left and right, and it is dispiriting that so many political analysts, notably Professor Sir John Curtice, make similar claims.
In fact, despite occasional flirtations with economic protectionism, Reform UK’s policies about cutting immigration, rewarding entrepreneurs, cutting welfare, and finding miraculous public sector efficiency savings are boilerplate right-wing politics. Equally, many Green positions, for example on defence, employment rights, and taxation, are recognizably those of the traditional left. Neither defies analysis in terms of left and right, although that may not be all to be said about them. What is decomposing is the situation of there being one party of the right and one party of the left.
Last week’s results also show the clearest evidence yet of another kind of fragmentation, with Wales, for the first time, and Scotland, again, joining Northern Ireland in having devolved administrations led (in various senses) by parties committed (in various ways) to secession from the United Kingdom [1]. Yet even here neither Plaid Cymru nor the SNP achieved majorities, and Reform and the Greens made gains.
The corollary of this fragmentation is that the dominant position of the two ‘main’ Westminster parties looks to be in its death throes: we could be living at the end of the period where the government and the official opposition parties are Labour and Conservative, or vice-versa. It’s even possible that in the next parliament neither party with hold either role. It is certainly true that it would be a mistake to extrapolate from last week’s votes to the next general election, but those votes, taken together with the now well-established pattern of opinion polls, suggest that a first-past-the-post electoral system could yield just about any outcome. Thus we now have both a government in crisis and a political system in in crisis, a conjunction which, to the best of my knowledge, is unique in modern British history.
Post-Brexit politics
Stepping back from the immediate results, this can be seen as part of the roiling turbulence of politics since the 2016 Referendum, a turbulence which saw six Prime Ministers (and massive churn of ministers) and two premature elections as well as this fragmentation of parties. Of course, it is important not to mistake correlation for causality, or to ascribe single causes to complex developments. It's not all about Brexit. In particular, the fragmentation of political parties was already underway before the referendum, as were the many quite profound social and economic trends which were bound to have a fissiparous effect on the voting bases of the Tory and Labour parties. Labour’s virtual wipeout in Scotland at the hands of the SNP in the 2015 election is just one, but perhaps the most obvious, example.
Nevertheless, no one would deny that Brexit and its aftermath precipitated what political scientist Tim Bale calls “turmoil and transformation” in the Conservative Party. And much of Labour’s own present ‘turmoil’ has its roots in the doomed attempt to placate the leave voters within the party’s traditional electoral base whilst retaining the support of its ‘progressive’ and pro-remain voters. In my May 2018 post discussing the local elections held then, I wrote that “the Labour result shows the crippling limitations of their slippery and ambiguous stance on Brexit … they are too Brexity to pick up committed remainer votes and insufficiently Brexity to attract committed leavers.” It is depressing that this applies word-for-word eight years later [2].
Thus, the latest election results again demonstrate that in trying to please everyone Labour have managed to please no-one, alienating those on both the right and the left of its electoral coalition and, notably, both younger and older voters. Again, it bears saying that some of these tensions (of class, region, ideology etc.) have been present since the inception of the Labour Party, and rapidly intensified during the New Labour period, but Brexit added a significant new dimension to them.
Certainly the English council election results carried the fingerprints of Brexit, with Reform performing strongly where the leave vote was highest and, conversely, performing weakly where the remain vote was highest. This isn’t necessarily ‘because of Brexit’ so much as that both it and the Brexit vote arose from similar causes. The Brexit imprint is also evident in the Liberal Democrats’ support, in that their opposition to Brexit continues to make them congenial to liberal conservative voters repelled by the post-Brexit Tory Party. The latter probably explains, for example, their victories in East Surrey and West Surrey last week, although it can be argued that in appealing to such voters they, too, are being flanked on their ‘progressive’ side by the Greens.
Change, but what change?
If there is any unity, despite all of the fragmentation, it is to be found in the ubiquitous, angry demand that ‘things must change’, a demand made even by the Prime Minister himself. But, tragically, that very demand only goes to show the profundity of the fragmentation. Not only is there no agreement as to what changes are necessary, for many it is a demand with no content (e.g. ‘it’s time for a change’ or ‘why not give someone else a go’). Even worse, as Brexit shows only too clearly, when demands for change are met those demanding it are not necessarily satisfied or, as with the demand to cut net migration, do not necessarily know when they are met. And perhaps worst of all is the sense that for some voters it is not just that nothing will satisfy them but that they don’t want to be satisfied: what they want is to be angry, not to have that anger placated.
Whilst the latter applies especially to segments of the leave and Reform vote, what is evident within segments across the political spectrum is a refusal to accept trade-offs and constraints (an example on the left is the belief some, apparently including Green leader Zack Polanski, have in what Professor Jonathan Portes calls the “nonsense economics” of ‘Modern Monetary Theory’). In a sense, the ‘cakeism’ with which Boris Johnson approached Brexit has become embedded in political culture generally. But even if that were not so, it is a fact that Brexit itself, in an economic sense, has increased policy constraints in that we simply have less resources than we would otherwise have. In that way, even if unacknowledged, there is a trade-off between having Brexit and having other things, including tax revenues to devote to public services (estimated to be £65-£90 billion less in 2024-2025 than they otherwise would have been).
Inevitably the consequences of all this fall most heavily on the governing party since it, alone, is charged with delivering the ‘change’ that no one agrees on, and it, alone, is faced with the constraints that those outside government can ignore or deny. That is actually a fairly good description of the fate that befell the Tory governments in their delivery of Brexit. It certainly applies to the present Labour government, including to its ‘make Brexit work’ policy’. But, more generally, because politics is so fragmented, any and every policy initiative encounters substantial opposition and this government, mainly because of it lacks any coherent strategy or ideology, habitually responds by ‘u-turning’, which itself contributes to a sense of constant crisis.
That would be a problem for any government, but it is a particular problem for this one because of a nasty little paradox at the heart of the widespread demand that ‘things must change’. That paradox is best-captured by Labour’s 2024 electoral promise that ‘change is stability’. It was a promise which grew directly out of Brexit in that it proposed an alternative to all the political chaos of the years after the referendum. Now, that takes on a particular significance with the intense wave of demands for Keir Starmer to be replaced (of which more below). Perhaps, without the background of all the Tory leadership changes, that would have been an obvious way of dealing with the government’s crisis. As it is, if Starmer goes it will only mark a continuation of the last ten years of crisis. On the other hand, if he does not go, the palpable sense of a government in crisis and a Prime Minister besieged and lacking authority will persist. So, stay or go, the crisis remains.
The relaunch and the reset
Clearly Starmer’s preference is to stay on, and his immediate response to the traumatic election results was to attempt yet another ‘relaunch’ of his premiership. Even before the events which came later in the week this seemed like a doomed enterprise if only because, fairly or unfairly (and one does not have to be a fan to think that much of the bile about him seems excessive), he is loathed by almost all sections of the political spectrum. As the political journalist Samuel Earle put it prior to the relaunch speech, “It is too late for Starmer to learn from his mistakes: he is in a hate-loop from which he cannot escape.” But even if that was not so, there seems little sign that he is able to learn and, when it came, the ’relaunch’ speech on Monday illustrated this, being little more than a re-hash of similar speeches he has given in the past, and nowhere more so than in what he said about Brexit.
It’s true that, as has been the case recently, he highlighted Farage’s complicity in the failure of Brexit. But, as ever, his own policy was either vague or laughable (or, as when he claimed to be “putting Britain at the heart of Europe”, both). As always, he spoke of being “ambitious” for the relationship with Europe, but the actual policy is no more ambitious than before, except perhaps in sounding slightly more enthusiastic about a youth experience scheme – but this is something to which his government has had to be forced, kicking and screaming, to (probably) accept and even this week there are reports that agreement is foundering because of UK insistence on tightly capping numbers.
Within this, there are several strands to unpick. One is that it is true that, for all its limitations, even to talk in this way, and to pursue a cooperative strategy, does mark a difference to the Conservatives and Reform. However, that is not a new development (so was hardly going to help him to ‘relaunch’ his government) and suffers from the same deficiency of being too much for some voters and too little for others. Secondly, of course, the continuation of the ‘red lines’ (no single market, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people) means any ambitions are highly circumscribed.
Yet it does not follow that dropping those red lines now would be a workable policy. For one thing, given all Labour’s previous commitments, especially in the manifesto, there would be a substantial political price to pay for undertaking what would undoubtedly be presented as another U-turn, and a highly dishonest one. But more to the point, it is extremely unlikely that the EU would, at this time, entertain the kind of agreements this would allow because of the very real prospect that the next government would back-track on them, a prospect made all the more real by last week’s election results. I have made this argument ad nauseum on this blog, so will refer readers to Tom Hayes’ latest Substack post outlining how this seems from an EU perspective. Given this, dropping the red lines now would incur the political costs of dropping a major policy commitment without the corresponding benefits of delivering on the new policy [3].
This does not mean that Starmer’s approach to Brexit is the right one. He could do three things differently. Firstly, he could champion the ‘reset’, limited as it is, not just in terms of its instrumental benefits, limited as they are, but as an enthusiastic articulation of the beginning a long-term project to build a new, principled, pro-European consensus, and as an explicit stepping-stone to reversing the historical error of Brexit. Second, he could argue, now, that the future policy, for the next election, should be to drop the red lines. Third, he could spell out, in terms, that it is the possibility of a future Reform and/or Tory government which is the real block on progress. In short, rather than simply chunter about being ‘more ambitious’ he could provide a concrete explanation of how this could be achieved. It would be, at once, dramatic, realistic, honest, and – something Starmer badly needs to be – leaderly.
An ungovernable country?
However, whilst this might be a better approach to Brexit, it is difficult to see that there is anything Starmer can now do to survive for much longer. As the Financial Times’ columnist Robert Shrimsley put it (£), writing immediately following the relaunch speech, “Starmer’s premiership is ebbing away. The blow could fall today, tomorrow, next week or next month. MPs are just weighing the odds and timings they need to get their people in place. The decision is made. It is now only about logistics.”
That sentiment, hammered home over the next few days, culminating in Wes Streeting’s resignation yesterday, is now so widespread that it is effectively self-fulfilling: political authority, like confidence in a currency, ultimately resides in its general acceptance. Yet, with Starmer apparently unwilling to resign and with, at least for now, no formal leadership challenge having been made, it seems likely we are in for a potentially protracted period of instability and drift before he is replaced (including if, as some are urging, he ‘sets out a timetable for his departure’).
The bigger question is what happens afterwards. It is unlikely to be followed by a new era of calm. Whoever replaces Starmer as Prime Minister will face frenzied speculation about another election being needed to secure a mandate. It’s also perfectly possible, for example if a leadership contest is held without it being possible for Andy Burnham to stand (since it cannot be assumed that he will succeed in his bid to become an MP), that the new leader will immediately fall prey to fresh plotting. This becomes all the more likely if a change of leadership is unaccompanied by any new analysis or agenda. And these two possibilities make this another question with no good answer: if there is a new agenda the need to secure a fresh mandate is all the greater, but if there is not a new agenda the likelihood of yet more leadership plotting is all the greater.
The even bigger question is about the limits to leadership itself, regardless of who the leader is. For, increasingly, it seems as if the consequence of a polity, not just in the sense of parties and institutions but of a population, which is split into multiple, angry segments with contradictory demands and, even, contradictory views of reality, is ungovernability. That situation is compounded by the media addiction to politics as spectacle which, as I discussed in a recent post, has probably become all the greater for having been fed by the dramas of the Brexit process. And perhaps what the electorate and the media share is a sheer impatience with both the timescale and complexity of policymaking.
We may not quite have reached the point of ungovernability, but I think we are getting close to it, an observation now widely made by political commentators on both the left and the right (though others disagree (£) with this diagnosis). The beneficiaries of this are populists, for whom anger, contradiction, chaos, and the disorientating effect of hyperactive news churn are not just opportunities but preferences. That applies to populists of both the left and the right but, currently, most obviously to Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
Nevertheless, for Farage the election results are both a blessing and a curse. They enable him to present his fragment of the vote (which, don’t forget, is only a fragment, at about 25% in England in these elections) as the rise of a popular army, and himself as a Prime Minister in waiting. That also engenders more media coverage. On the other hand, such coverage will bring more scrutiny, especially of Farage’s financial dealings, and it is notable that the gurning grin and throaty chuckle which make him undeniably appealing (to some) give way to a tetchy anger when faced with such scrutiny. The range of things which are, or should be, major scandals for Farage is extraordinary, encompassing his recently-revealed undeclared ‘personal gift’ of £5 million from the Anglo-Thai cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, the purchase of his house in Clacton, and the scale and nature of his extra-parliamentary earnings.
Reform’s success will also bring more publicity for the utter ineptitude (£) with which it runs the growing number of local councils it controls, and for the many freaks, incompetents, rogues and racists amongst its councillors. Within hours of last week’s vote, newly elected Reform councillors began to resign amidst scandal. Many others will simply be out of their depth, finding it rather harder to engage with the complexities of local government than to fire off angry social media posts.
It’s true that for his hard-core supporters such scrutiny will make no difference. However, Reform-curious voters may be put off by what they see, whilst anti-Reform voters may be more minded to vote tactically the more likely a Farage premiership becomes. In other words, whatever he and his supporters may think, there is no inevitability in a Farage victory. However, a defeat for Farage, born of antipathy towards him and his policies, and cobbled together by the rickety means of tactical voting in a now broken electoral system (£), will hardly mark a resolution to political turmoil and incipient ungovernability.
Leadership for the unleadable
For such a resolution to happen, if indeed it can happen, it would require an extraordinary combination of political strategy and leadership. That would be needed to address multiple areas where policy has basically failed – social care, housing, and the criminal justice system are some obvious examples – and deep-seated problems such as chronic illness, an ageing population, and low productivity. At the same time, it would have to address the significant security threats which require an urgent increase in military capacity and the development of international alliances.
There is no sign at all, so far as I can see, that any existing political party is remotely capable of providing this strategy or the leadership to deliver it and, more to the point, any sign that the voting public would be amenable to it. Indeed, perhaps even to postulate a party coming up with a solution is part of the problem. In my former life as an organization studies academic one of the key topics of my discipline was leadership and, whereas traditional models focused on the person and conduct of ‘the leader’, it became increasingly widely understood that this had to be understood as a relationship between leaders and followers, with ‘followership’ as necessary as ‘leadership’.
From that perspective, the commentator Zoe Williams, in her own discussion of ungovernability, says something which is rather obvious but is politically almost unsayable: that voters need to ask themselves if it is they, rather than politicians who are to blame. That is most clearly the case for those voters (£) willing to be serially tricked by Farage, willing to ignore all the financial skullduggery and regard him as a man of the people, willing to ignore the scandals and incompetence of Reform councils, or, just, willing to vapidly bleat of supporting him as ‘it is time for a change’. But it does not just apply to them. It seems as if sooner rather than later we will get a new Prime Minister. If so, it is all too likely that, sooner rather than later, they too will be savaged by an angry and divided electorate and a drama-addicted media.
Notes
[1] In this post I am not focusing on the technical intricacies of Brexit but it bears mentioning that the government’s reset plans, and especially the plan for an SPS deal, will create considerable complexities for the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales (Northern Ireland is different because it aligns with EU SPS regulations in any case). A key component of this is the European Partnership Bill announced in the King’s Speech this week, as expected (see, for example, my post of 3 April 2026).
[2] Other aspects of that May 2018 post make for curious reading, especially my observation that the results showed that Cameron’s plan to use the referendum to destroy the electoral threat to the Conservatives posed by UKIP had, at least, had that effect. Well, it was true at the time, and in a way, but …
[3] For an analysis of how ‘rejoining’ could become a reality for both the EU and the UK, see the recently published Discussion Paper by Andrew Duff of the European Policy Centre.
Friday, 15 May 2026
Friday, 1 May 2026
A pregnant pause
This post is slightly shorter than usual because the last fortnight has been a fairly quiet period for Brexit-related news, with the dominant domestic story having been the continuing fall-out from Keir Starmer’s ill-judged appointment of Peter Mandelson. Even that does have some Brexit angles, though. Certainly Morgan McSweeney claimed this week that the choice of Mandelson was animated by the post-Brexit need to have a good trade relationship with the US. Actually, I suspect that, even if it’s true that Mandelson was appointed for his supposed ‘Trump-whispering’ credentials, something which is contested [1], this rationale would have applied regardless of Brexit because of the non-trade issues at stake in the UK-US relationship (i.e. defence and security).
Perhaps the more important Brexit angle is that one of the things Starmer’s government was expected to achieve was a substantial improvement in the relationship between politicians and civil servants following the huge damage done to it during the Brexit process. Yet the summary ejection of Sir Olly Robbins from the Foreign Office brought that relationship to what is probably a new low, made all the more noteworthy by the fact that Robbins at one time led the UK Brexit negotiations and, in that role, became almost a hate-figure to Brexiters.
However, in general terms there a sense of Brexit being on pause, but it is an unusually expectant pause, awaiting three imminent events.
The coming elections
The first of these is the English local council, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections which will be held next week. The results of these will have numerous consequences but one of them is that, assuming Labour do as badly as is expected, Starmer will face enormous pressure to reinvent or to resign his premiership. If the outcome is ‘reinvention’, then one very possible aspect of that will be to move from Labour’s “crabwise” approach to UK-EU relations to something quicker and deeper. If the outcome is ‘resignation’ (whether willing or forced) then it is highly likely that discussion of such a move will feature strongly in the race to succeed him, and that his successor, whoever it is, will embrace a reinvented policy.
In some ways, this would only be the continuation of the existing direction of travel. It is not so long since Labour had a virtual omerta on even mentioning Brexit. Starmer very reluctantly broke that silence in July 2022, although only to insist on his ‘red lines’, and for most of the period since then has relied on formulaic repetitions of the reset policy. It is really only in the last couple of months that he, Rachel Reeves, and other ministers have openly spoken of the damage Brexit has caused. But that openness has had the inevitable corollary of exposing the limitations of their plans to repair the damage, and increases the pressure for a far more ambitious policy.
A move in that direction would also be a continuation of Labour’s emergent realization, especially since losing to the Greens in Gorton & Denton, of the electoral need to offer its anti-Brexit members and voters a reason for loyalty. In particular, a shift to a full-throated project to ‘rejoin’ (probably articulated in terms of a future manifesto commitment rather than an immediate policy) might be seen as a way to out-flank the rather cautious ‘customs union for now’ position of both the Green Party and the Lib Dems. Whether such calculations, especially if transparently designed to save Starmer’s job, constitute the kind of principled commitment which could yield a genuine partnership with, let alone eventual membership of, the EU is another matter.
The coming UK-EU Summit
The second imminent event is the next UK-EU Summit. Unless I have missed it, the date of this has still not been agreed but in a speech at the beginning of April Starmer said that it would be announced “in the coming weeks”. This summit will really be the point at which the ‘reset’ has to have tangible outcomes, turning the rather vague aspirations of last May’s meeting into definite agreements. In particular, but also at the very least, the SPS or ‘veterinary’ agreement, which the government constantly talks of as if it were a done deal, will have to be delivered if there is to be a chance of getting it to the point of implementation by the next general election.
However, the reality is that the May 2025 Summit, which even at the time was rather insipid, now seems woefully inadequate given the scale of events since, most obviously the endless raging storm of Trump’s tariff policy and the successive international crises he has provoked, most damagingly in the Middle East. For example, the impact of an SPS deal on UK food prices, which was never going to be that great, now looks like very small beer in the face of the inflation of food and many other prices which is coming down the track as the result of the Iran War. So delivering on the 2025 Summit will not be enough and Starmer’s April speech said as much:
“I can tell you, at [the next] summit, the UK will not just ratify existing commitments made at last year’s summit. We want to be more ambitious. Closer economic cooperation. Closer security cooperation. A partnership that recognises our shared values, our shared interests, and our shared future. A partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.”
What this means in practice is, as usual, very vague. But it is hard to see how Starmer can go on and on making such vague promises without delivering and, in conjunction with the issue of how he responds to the May election results, this means that the next Summit is going to be a crucial moment in post-Brexit relations. It will show whether there is any momentum to the reset, any momentum to go beyond the reset, or whether we are stuck in the sludge, muddling along with nothing really changing since, effectively, the point at which, with Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework agreement in February 2023, a kind of post-Brexit status quo was achieved, more through exhaustion than anyone being especially satisfied with it.
At the time, I wrote of that perhaps being the moment when Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ broke (in the sense of ending the period of open hostility towards the EU, with British threats to renege on the agreements made etc.) and would be followed by a long, slow process of convalescence. Arguably, that is what we have seen since then and, if so, the question is whether we are still in that process or whether there will be a new phase of more rapid recuperation.
The coming anniversary
The third imminent event is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, on 23 June. At that point, there will be a rash of re-evaluations of Brexit, and already the anniversary is being invoked as a moment to initiate a renewed debate. That would be occurring anyway, just because ‘ten’ is a round number, but it has an added salience because of the context of international crisis and domestic disarray and, with that, the pervasive sense of a country adrift. As the economics and politics commentator Simon Nixon put it this week, with remarkable rapidity Brexit has ceased to be a taboo subject in British politics.
Thus, in the last fortnight there have been several high-profile interventions, including that of Sir Philip Rycroft, the former Permanent Secretary of the erstwhile Department for Exiting the European Union. Writing in The Times (£), he argued that the promises made for Brexit had not materialized, and that changes in public opinion and the international situation meant that it was time to make the argument for ‘rejoining’. Meanwhile, last weekend’s Observer made the call to rejoin its front page and carried an article by Neil Kinnock (£) arguing the case for doing so, as well as a report by the paper’s political and economic editors (£) (quoting Kinnock, Rycroft, Sadiq Khan, and a former President of the CBI, amongst others) of there being pressure on Starmer to at least begin a conversation about rejoining.
Notably, all of the interventions I’ve mentioned refer to a report entitled “Is it time to talk about EU membership?’ just published by Best for Britain which presents and analyses new public opinion survey data showing support/opposition for rejoining at 53%-32% and suggesting that, ultimately, this would be a more politically sustainable policy than, for example, seeking single market membership. What’s notable is not so much the figures, which are in line with other recent opinion polls, but my impression, at least, that campaign groups like Best for Britain (which not long ago was proposing what in my view was a variant of the flawed ‘mutual recognition solution’) and the European Movement are now more vocal, or more confident, in talking about ‘rejoining’. That is only an impression, but it will be interesting to see, for example, the level of support for the next National Rejoin March, which will be held on 20 June, and perhaps even more interesting to see the extent and the nature of the media coverage it receives.
The coming conversation
Obviously these three imminent events link together, with the idea of a ten-year anniversary ‘national conversation’ being part of the attempts from outside and within the Labour Party to push for a new policy in preparation for the expected election results and in anticipation of the summit. And, to the extent that this new policy is envisaged as being more ambitious than the reset, that pretty much implies the abandonment of Labour’s ‘red lines’, as was argued this week by Labour MP Marsha de Cordova [2]. Whether that will happen any time soon I doubt, not least because I doubt whether the opinion poll support for joining the EU is yet large enough or reliable enough for Starmer or any other Labour leader to depend upon it.
Nevertheless, it is already clear that the coming months are going to see a revival of debate about Brexit and that will include, as indeed reactions to these recent interventions have already shown, a ferocious reaction from leading Brexiters. In that sense it will show that, in line with the book I reviewed in an ‘extra’ post on this blog last week, the “tribal divisions” of the 2016 referendum have persisted. For that matter, whilst the May election results may well push Labour to a more anti-Brexit position, the expected gains of Reform UK will be a fillip to the confidence of Brexiters. That is another reason why beginning the process of joining the EU is not an imminent possibility, but this certainly doesn’t mean that a revived debate about doing so will be unimportant or meaningless.
No doubt I will write more about that when we get to the tenth anniversary, but, for now, an important point to make is that the continuing Brexit divisions show just how comprehensively Brexit has failed, in at least two ways.
Firstly, whilst those divisions have persisted, and much of the debate about Brexit is extremely repetitious, the underlying dynamics have shifted and will likely continue to do so. In 2016, the Brexiters’ case was primarily about how good the effects of leaving the EU would be. Now, their argument is just that it hasn’t been as bad as was warned or as is claimed. That is, it has become a fundamentally defensive case, and, moreover, that case is necessarily undermined by their constant claim that Brexit has been ‘betrayed’. It is hard to mount a convincing defence of something whilst also disdaining it.
The ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’ – but in the end this term will have to be dropped) case has also altered, in that it is now possible to demonstrate the damage of not being a member and also possible for joining the EU to be presented, as leaving once was, as a radical disavowal of the status quo in favour of a new and desirable future. Indeed, ultimately, the viability of the ‘join’ case, not least in the eyes of the EU, will depend on it being articulated in positive terms and not just as an escape from the hardship of a failed experiment.
The second point about the ongoing debate is, simply, the fact that it is ongoing. In the second edition of my book about Brexit I wrote that according to its advocates and supporters “… Brexit was intended to be the start of a confident national renewal, a reinvigoration of national purpose, prosperity and standing. It certainly wasn’t proposed as, or supposed to be, the prelude to a country permanently divided on the wisdom of Brexit, still less to an interminable debate about whether it had been the right thing to do ….” (p.285) and I went on to quote David Frost saying that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.”
He said that in June 2022, so we haven’t quite reached the point he specified, but there’s absolutely no sign that his test will be met. As the writer and journalist Matt Carr puts it in his recent, excellent Substack post:
“Ten years after Brexit, the UK is yet to find either peace or acceptance. Roiled by angry, vicious dreams and fed on a diet of toxic delusions, it recognises the folly of the decision that it took in 2016, but does not know how to change it, or simply does not dare.”
Yet, depressing as that is, it would be even more depressing if Frost’s test had been met, we had ceased to debate Brexit and it had settled in the British polity.
Notes
[1] I express this conditionally because, although that has always been my understanding, and one shared by, amongst others, the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr, another eminent political commentator, Stephen Bush of the Financial Times, is adamant that the sequence of events shows that the government’s desire to appoint Mandelson preceded Trump’s re-election. Whatever the truth of this, it doesn’t affect my point that the idea it had a Brexit rationale is questionable.
[2] It should not, however, be thought that all the pressure within the Labour Party points towards erasing the government’s red lines, or even towards a more ambitious reset within those red lines. For example, it was reported this week (£) that (unnamed) ministers are concerned that Labour’s increasing commitment to alignment with EU regulations, above and beyond that entailed by the reset, of will impair the UK’s ability to set its own regulatory regime for AI. And the regulatory alignment envisaged by the existing reset policy also has critics, some of whom may well be Labour voters and members, who are opposed to the fact that an SPS deal will prevent Britain adopting its own animal welfare protections.
Perhaps the more important Brexit angle is that one of the things Starmer’s government was expected to achieve was a substantial improvement in the relationship between politicians and civil servants following the huge damage done to it during the Brexit process. Yet the summary ejection of Sir Olly Robbins from the Foreign Office brought that relationship to what is probably a new low, made all the more noteworthy by the fact that Robbins at one time led the UK Brexit negotiations and, in that role, became almost a hate-figure to Brexiters.
However, in general terms there a sense of Brexit being on pause, but it is an unusually expectant pause, awaiting three imminent events.
The coming elections
The first of these is the English local council, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections which will be held next week. The results of these will have numerous consequences but one of them is that, assuming Labour do as badly as is expected, Starmer will face enormous pressure to reinvent or to resign his premiership. If the outcome is ‘reinvention’, then one very possible aspect of that will be to move from Labour’s “crabwise” approach to UK-EU relations to something quicker and deeper. If the outcome is ‘resignation’ (whether willing or forced) then it is highly likely that discussion of such a move will feature strongly in the race to succeed him, and that his successor, whoever it is, will embrace a reinvented policy.
In some ways, this would only be the continuation of the existing direction of travel. It is not so long since Labour had a virtual omerta on even mentioning Brexit. Starmer very reluctantly broke that silence in July 2022, although only to insist on his ‘red lines’, and for most of the period since then has relied on formulaic repetitions of the reset policy. It is really only in the last couple of months that he, Rachel Reeves, and other ministers have openly spoken of the damage Brexit has caused. But that openness has had the inevitable corollary of exposing the limitations of their plans to repair the damage, and increases the pressure for a far more ambitious policy.
A move in that direction would also be a continuation of Labour’s emergent realization, especially since losing to the Greens in Gorton & Denton, of the electoral need to offer its anti-Brexit members and voters a reason for loyalty. In particular, a shift to a full-throated project to ‘rejoin’ (probably articulated in terms of a future manifesto commitment rather than an immediate policy) might be seen as a way to out-flank the rather cautious ‘customs union for now’ position of both the Green Party and the Lib Dems. Whether such calculations, especially if transparently designed to save Starmer’s job, constitute the kind of principled commitment which could yield a genuine partnership with, let alone eventual membership of, the EU is another matter.
The coming UK-EU Summit
The second imminent event is the next UK-EU Summit. Unless I have missed it, the date of this has still not been agreed but in a speech at the beginning of April Starmer said that it would be announced “in the coming weeks”. This summit will really be the point at which the ‘reset’ has to have tangible outcomes, turning the rather vague aspirations of last May’s meeting into definite agreements. In particular, but also at the very least, the SPS or ‘veterinary’ agreement, which the government constantly talks of as if it were a done deal, will have to be delivered if there is to be a chance of getting it to the point of implementation by the next general election.
However, the reality is that the May 2025 Summit, which even at the time was rather insipid, now seems woefully inadequate given the scale of events since, most obviously the endless raging storm of Trump’s tariff policy and the successive international crises he has provoked, most damagingly in the Middle East. For example, the impact of an SPS deal on UK food prices, which was never going to be that great, now looks like very small beer in the face of the inflation of food and many other prices which is coming down the track as the result of the Iran War. So delivering on the 2025 Summit will not be enough and Starmer’s April speech said as much:
“I can tell you, at [the next] summit, the UK will not just ratify existing commitments made at last year’s summit. We want to be more ambitious. Closer economic cooperation. Closer security cooperation. A partnership that recognises our shared values, our shared interests, and our shared future. A partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.”
What this means in practice is, as usual, very vague. But it is hard to see how Starmer can go on and on making such vague promises without delivering and, in conjunction with the issue of how he responds to the May election results, this means that the next Summit is going to be a crucial moment in post-Brexit relations. It will show whether there is any momentum to the reset, any momentum to go beyond the reset, or whether we are stuck in the sludge, muddling along with nothing really changing since, effectively, the point at which, with Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework agreement in February 2023, a kind of post-Brexit status quo was achieved, more through exhaustion than anyone being especially satisfied with it.
At the time, I wrote of that perhaps being the moment when Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ broke (in the sense of ending the period of open hostility towards the EU, with British threats to renege on the agreements made etc.) and would be followed by a long, slow process of convalescence. Arguably, that is what we have seen since then and, if so, the question is whether we are still in that process or whether there will be a new phase of more rapid recuperation.
The coming anniversary
The third imminent event is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, on 23 June. At that point, there will be a rash of re-evaluations of Brexit, and already the anniversary is being invoked as a moment to initiate a renewed debate. That would be occurring anyway, just because ‘ten’ is a round number, but it has an added salience because of the context of international crisis and domestic disarray and, with that, the pervasive sense of a country adrift. As the economics and politics commentator Simon Nixon put it this week, with remarkable rapidity Brexit has ceased to be a taboo subject in British politics.
Thus, in the last fortnight there have been several high-profile interventions, including that of Sir Philip Rycroft, the former Permanent Secretary of the erstwhile Department for Exiting the European Union. Writing in The Times (£), he argued that the promises made for Brexit had not materialized, and that changes in public opinion and the international situation meant that it was time to make the argument for ‘rejoining’. Meanwhile, last weekend’s Observer made the call to rejoin its front page and carried an article by Neil Kinnock (£) arguing the case for doing so, as well as a report by the paper’s political and economic editors (£) (quoting Kinnock, Rycroft, Sadiq Khan, and a former President of the CBI, amongst others) of there being pressure on Starmer to at least begin a conversation about rejoining.
Notably, all of the interventions I’ve mentioned refer to a report entitled “Is it time to talk about EU membership?’ just published by Best for Britain which presents and analyses new public opinion survey data showing support/opposition for rejoining at 53%-32% and suggesting that, ultimately, this would be a more politically sustainable policy than, for example, seeking single market membership. What’s notable is not so much the figures, which are in line with other recent opinion polls, but my impression, at least, that campaign groups like Best for Britain (which not long ago was proposing what in my view was a variant of the flawed ‘mutual recognition solution’) and the European Movement are now more vocal, or more confident, in talking about ‘rejoining’. That is only an impression, but it will be interesting to see, for example, the level of support for the next National Rejoin March, which will be held on 20 June, and perhaps even more interesting to see the extent and the nature of the media coverage it receives.
The coming conversation
Obviously these three imminent events link together, with the idea of a ten-year anniversary ‘national conversation’ being part of the attempts from outside and within the Labour Party to push for a new policy in preparation for the expected election results and in anticipation of the summit. And, to the extent that this new policy is envisaged as being more ambitious than the reset, that pretty much implies the abandonment of Labour’s ‘red lines’, as was argued this week by Labour MP Marsha de Cordova [2]. Whether that will happen any time soon I doubt, not least because I doubt whether the opinion poll support for joining the EU is yet large enough or reliable enough for Starmer or any other Labour leader to depend upon it.
Nevertheless, it is already clear that the coming months are going to see a revival of debate about Brexit and that will include, as indeed reactions to these recent interventions have already shown, a ferocious reaction from leading Brexiters. In that sense it will show that, in line with the book I reviewed in an ‘extra’ post on this blog last week, the “tribal divisions” of the 2016 referendum have persisted. For that matter, whilst the May election results may well push Labour to a more anti-Brexit position, the expected gains of Reform UK will be a fillip to the confidence of Brexiters. That is another reason why beginning the process of joining the EU is not an imminent possibility, but this certainly doesn’t mean that a revived debate about doing so will be unimportant or meaningless.
No doubt I will write more about that when we get to the tenth anniversary, but, for now, an important point to make is that the continuing Brexit divisions show just how comprehensively Brexit has failed, in at least two ways.
Firstly, whilst those divisions have persisted, and much of the debate about Brexit is extremely repetitious, the underlying dynamics have shifted and will likely continue to do so. In 2016, the Brexiters’ case was primarily about how good the effects of leaving the EU would be. Now, their argument is just that it hasn’t been as bad as was warned or as is claimed. That is, it has become a fundamentally defensive case, and, moreover, that case is necessarily undermined by their constant claim that Brexit has been ‘betrayed’. It is hard to mount a convincing defence of something whilst also disdaining it.
The ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’ – but in the end this term will have to be dropped) case has also altered, in that it is now possible to demonstrate the damage of not being a member and also possible for joining the EU to be presented, as leaving once was, as a radical disavowal of the status quo in favour of a new and desirable future. Indeed, ultimately, the viability of the ‘join’ case, not least in the eyes of the EU, will depend on it being articulated in positive terms and not just as an escape from the hardship of a failed experiment.
The second point about the ongoing debate is, simply, the fact that it is ongoing. In the second edition of my book about Brexit I wrote that according to its advocates and supporters “… Brexit was intended to be the start of a confident national renewal, a reinvigoration of national purpose, prosperity and standing. It certainly wasn’t proposed as, or supposed to be, the prelude to a country permanently divided on the wisdom of Brexit, still less to an interminable debate about whether it had been the right thing to do ….” (p.285) and I went on to quote David Frost saying that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.”
He said that in June 2022, so we haven’t quite reached the point he specified, but there’s absolutely no sign that his test will be met. As the writer and journalist Matt Carr puts it in his recent, excellent Substack post:
“Ten years after Brexit, the UK is yet to find either peace or acceptance. Roiled by angry, vicious dreams and fed on a diet of toxic delusions, it recognises the folly of the decision that it took in 2016, but does not know how to change it, or simply does not dare.”
Yet, depressing as that is, it would be even more depressing if Frost’s test had been met, we had ceased to debate Brexit and it had settled in the British polity.
Notes
[1] I express this conditionally because, although that has always been my understanding, and one shared by, amongst others, the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr, another eminent political commentator, Stephen Bush of the Financial Times, is adamant that the sequence of events shows that the government’s desire to appoint Mandelson preceded Trump’s re-election. Whatever the truth of this, it doesn’t affect my point that the idea it had a Brexit rationale is questionable.
[2] It should not, however, be thought that all the pressure within the Labour Party points towards erasing the government’s red lines, or even towards a more ambitious reset within those red lines. For example, it was reported this week (£) that (unnamed) ministers are concerned that Labour’s increasing commitment to alignment with EU regulations, above and beyond that entailed by the reset, of will impair the UK’s ability to set its own regulatory regime for AI. And the regulatory alignment envisaged by the existing reset policy also has critics, some of whom may well be Labour voters and members, who are opposed to the fact that an SPS deal will prevent Britain adopting its own animal welfare protections.
Friday, 24 April 2026
Book review: When two tribes go to war …
(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’. My normal fortnightly post will appear next Friday.)
Hobolt, Sara & Tilley, James (2026) Tribal Politics. How Brexit Divided Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198911715 (Hardback). 243 pp. £30
This excellent new book is a major addition to the academic literature on Brexit, as well as being accessible and fascinating for non-academic readers interested in Brexit or contemporary British politics generally. Indeed, one implication of the book is that it isn’t really possible to understand contemporary British politics without understanding Brexit because of the endurance of the identities of ‘leaver’ and ‘remainer’.
It is these identities which are the subject of the book. That is to say, this is not a book about the referendum, the parliamentary politics which followed, the negotiations with the EU, or the impact of Brexit on economics or international relations. Whilst all of these are touched upon, the specific focus is describing and explaining Brexit identities amongst the public/ voters and how and why, as the title suggests, these have proved sufficiently divisive to take on a ‘tribal’ character.
The idea that such Brexit identities exist is not, of course, a new one. Apart from being familiar from everyday experience, it has previously been recognized by academics (e.g. Sobolewska & Ford, 2020) and the authors of this book, two eminent political scientists based at LSE and Oxford respectively, rigorously reference and discuss the extant literature. However, Hobolt & Tilley provide the first comprehensive study of how and why, despite EU membership having been an issue of low salience for most voters prior to the referendum, these identities came to exist and have persisted for so long after Britain actually left the EU and after Brexit ceased to feature prominently in the news.
Summary of book
The basic fact of that persistence is most clearly summarized in a chart (p. 88) showing the percentage of people thinking of themselves as remainers or leavers over the period 2017-2026. In essence, the chart shows that those identifying as one or the other, whilst falling from 75% in 2017, was still 60% in 2025. At the outset of the period, each group had about the same level of identification, at about 37%. That figure persists for remainer identification but, after 2020, the figure for leaver identification falls to about 23% by 2025. The authors explain the various reasons for this disparity, some of which are more obvious than others, but, overall, they argue that its significance should not be exaggerated and that “the difference in the trajectory of the two groups is … much less interesting than the similarity between them” (p. 96).
The explanation of why an issue (in this case Brexit) can give rise to issue-based identities is given in terms of the existence of three conditions (pp. 3-4, and more extensively pp. 19-22). These are “issue contestation” (there is strong conflict between groups around a salient, meaning essentially non-trivial, issue); “issue expression” (expressing, in word or deed, commitment to that issue cements identification with the group); and “issue alignment” (the issue doesn’t align with existing identifications, such as political parties, so can become the basis for an identity in its own right). Brexit, the authors suggest, “provided the Goldilocks mixture” (p. 1) of these conditions.
This explanatory framework derives from Social Identification Theory, which is elaborated in chapter two of the book (pp. 10-27) as an alternative (or perhaps a supplement) to rational choice theories of political behavior (p. 11), and the next three chapters explain how and why the issue of Brexit was able to become the basis for such social identification. An important argument within that is Hobolt & Tilley’s demonstration that Brexit identities can’t be reduced to pre-existing characteristics such as educational level but “were ultimately the product of the vote and the political context of the vote” (p.74). So, contrary to what is often believed, Brexit marked a distinctive rupture and not simply a reprise or rebadging of established patterns of political sociology.
Equally important are the chapters thereafter, which explain how these identities have persisted and, in some respects, intensified over time through processes of “affective polarization” (pp. 96-119). Some of this is explained in terms of personality traits (pp. 153-159), but perhaps more interestingly by the ways in which Brexit identities, once in place, tended to create “a set of incentives to adjust one’s views accordingly” (p. 145). That is, to avoid “cognitive dissonance” (pp. 121-124) people tend to take on all of the views of their ‘tribe’ and to interpret developments through that lens. In this and other ways “confirmation bias” (p. 122, and pp. 120-146 generally) has tended to solidify leaver and remainer identities
Such solidification evidently connects with the familiar idea that social media has led us to exist within ‘echo chambers’, re-enforcing our pre-existing views and even making them more extreme. However, the authors provide strong evidence to support their claim that “the real echo chamber” (p. 169) is not social media nearly so much as it is real life family and friendship networks. At all events, leaver and remainer identities have proved sufficiently durable to at least contribute to realignments in voting patterns, which are the subject of the final chapter (pp. 176-188).
There is obviously much more in the book than I have summarized here, and indeed it would be impossible to do justice to the formidable amount of data, analysis and scholarship within it. To my delight, given my great interest in the novels of C.P. Snow as a source of political insights, it even includes reference to one of his novels (p. 153).
Limitations and criticisms
The book does, however, have some limitations (as all books do). One is that the data presented are almost entirely quantitative (mainly large-scale longitudinal surveys). That has many strengths in terms of charting attitudes over time, and can capture things like emotional attachment to identities (see pp. 101-105), but does not provide the kind of insights into the meaning of Brexit identities for those who hold them which could be disclosed by including qualitative data. To put that another way, despite the focus on ‘tribes’ there is little anthropological sensibility in the analysis.
Another limitation is that the deployment of Social Identification Theory, and especially the work of Henri Tajfel, is not accompanied by any real discussion of the criticisms made of it (e.g. Dashtipour, 2012: Schnur, 2024). Personally, I don’t mind that too much, perhaps reflecting the fact that I am now an ex-academic, but having worked in a field where identity theories (in the plural) are of central importance (e.g. Kenny et al., 2011) I can imagine some of my former colleagues bridling a little.
What I would be slightly more critical of is where this theoretical framing leads. The things which are presented as conditions for the formation of Brexit identities are arguably rather circular. That is most obviously so as regards the condition of ‘issue contestation’, since the existence of strong conflict between groups about a salient issue presupposes that which it seeks to explain: if there are already groups in strong conflict about an issue, those groups will already have members, and membership implies at the very least proto-identification (and almost certainly some degree of ‘issue expression’).
Relatedly, what makes an issue ‘salient’, in the sense it is used here, is that something important is at stake apart from, and at least to some extent prior to, the identities which coalesce around it, but this is somewhat occluded by the theoretical framing of this book. The original work of Tajfel was, as the authors explain (pp. 11-12), based on experiments in which participants were found to embrace tribe-like identities even when the issues dividing them were arbitrarily assigned and had no objective, non-trivial basis. On such an account it is the psychological need for identification, not the issue, which is primary.
Whilst Hobolt & Tilley recognize that the “lab-based experimental paradigm” (p. 19) is neglectful of the social and political context of issue-based identities, the trace of this psychologistic, ‘Tajfelian’ account persists. The result is that remainer and leaver identities are treated as equivalent, differing in political content but not in psychological process. That makes the analysis non-partisan, which is in many ways admirable both for its academic detachment and because it is no doubt true that the psychological processes constituting remainer and leaver identities (affective polarization, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias etc.) are very similar.
However, political actors – voters – people – don’t develop identities irrespective of the substance of what makes issues contestable. Thus, contestation over salient issues is both a condition and a consequence of political identities, and political identities are both a condition and a consequence of contestation over salient issues. This isn’t to deny the authors’ point (e.g. p.135) that policy opinions can be, and often are, substantially shaped by political identities, but nor does that point negate mine: it’s not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.
Moreover, connecting to my earlier comment about the absence of qualitative data about meaning, whilst it is highly plausible that the processes through which remainer and leaver identities develop are very similar, it doesn’t follow, and probably isn’t the case, that what it means to remainers to be remainers is the same as what it means to leavers to be leavers. And it is also quite likely that, in both cases, this meaning has changed over time even though the identity-labels have persisted. This in turn may well mean that what the ‘issue’ is understood to be, and the reasons for its ‘salience’, have changed over time, which is another way of saying that there is a recursive interaction between ‘issue’ and ‘identity’.
There’s certainly much about Brexit which can be analyzed in political-psychological terms, and I sometimes do so myself on this blog and elsewhere. But there's a limit to the traction of viewing it in terms of tribal identities, as if it were akin to the dispute between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Swift’s (1726) political satire Gulliver’s Travels, unless political conflicts are to be detached from political rationality and subsumed within psychological rationales. If, as this book amply demonstrates, Brexit identities have become strongly embedded then it is at least in part for reasons which lie beyond identity, in the same way as is true for other political identities (such as those based on political parties). In what is a broadly ‘rationalistic’ (albeit not a ‘rational choice’) analysis it is perhaps slightly surprising that the focus is so resolutely on the arguers and so relatively little on what they are arguing about.
Conclusion
These criticisms (or, perhaps, they are just variants of a single criticism) do not affect my opening assessment that, overall, this is an excellent book providing compelling analysis of an important topic. It is packed with highly informative data and acute interpretation, and is written with admirable lucidity, especially given the complexity of some of the material. It is, indeed, strange to think that, only ten years ago, the identities of leaver and remainer simply didn’t exist and yet are now a familiar part of political life and the political lexicon. As with all the best social science, this book interrogates the familiar whilst making the strange explicable.
Hobolt, Sara & Tilley, James (2026) Tribal Politics. How Brexit Divided Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198911715 (Hardback). 243 pp. £30
This excellent new book is a major addition to the academic literature on Brexit, as well as being accessible and fascinating for non-academic readers interested in Brexit or contemporary British politics generally. Indeed, one implication of the book is that it isn’t really possible to understand contemporary British politics without understanding Brexit because of the endurance of the identities of ‘leaver’ and ‘remainer’.
It is these identities which are the subject of the book. That is to say, this is not a book about the referendum, the parliamentary politics which followed, the negotiations with the EU, or the impact of Brexit on economics or international relations. Whilst all of these are touched upon, the specific focus is describing and explaining Brexit identities amongst the public/ voters and how and why, as the title suggests, these have proved sufficiently divisive to take on a ‘tribal’ character.
The idea that such Brexit identities exist is not, of course, a new one. Apart from being familiar from everyday experience, it has previously been recognized by academics (e.g. Sobolewska & Ford, 2020) and the authors of this book, two eminent political scientists based at LSE and Oxford respectively, rigorously reference and discuss the extant literature. However, Hobolt & Tilley provide the first comprehensive study of how and why, despite EU membership having been an issue of low salience for most voters prior to the referendum, these identities came to exist and have persisted for so long after Britain actually left the EU and after Brexit ceased to feature prominently in the news.
Summary of book
The basic fact of that persistence is most clearly summarized in a chart (p. 88) showing the percentage of people thinking of themselves as remainers or leavers over the period 2017-2026. In essence, the chart shows that those identifying as one or the other, whilst falling from 75% in 2017, was still 60% in 2025. At the outset of the period, each group had about the same level of identification, at about 37%. That figure persists for remainer identification but, after 2020, the figure for leaver identification falls to about 23% by 2025. The authors explain the various reasons for this disparity, some of which are more obvious than others, but, overall, they argue that its significance should not be exaggerated and that “the difference in the trajectory of the two groups is … much less interesting than the similarity between them” (p. 96).
The explanation of why an issue (in this case Brexit) can give rise to issue-based identities is given in terms of the existence of three conditions (pp. 3-4, and more extensively pp. 19-22). These are “issue contestation” (there is strong conflict between groups around a salient, meaning essentially non-trivial, issue); “issue expression” (expressing, in word or deed, commitment to that issue cements identification with the group); and “issue alignment” (the issue doesn’t align with existing identifications, such as political parties, so can become the basis for an identity in its own right). Brexit, the authors suggest, “provided the Goldilocks mixture” (p. 1) of these conditions.
This explanatory framework derives from Social Identification Theory, which is elaborated in chapter two of the book (pp. 10-27) as an alternative (or perhaps a supplement) to rational choice theories of political behavior (p. 11), and the next three chapters explain how and why the issue of Brexit was able to become the basis for such social identification. An important argument within that is Hobolt & Tilley’s demonstration that Brexit identities can’t be reduced to pre-existing characteristics such as educational level but “were ultimately the product of the vote and the political context of the vote” (p.74). So, contrary to what is often believed, Brexit marked a distinctive rupture and not simply a reprise or rebadging of established patterns of political sociology.
Equally important are the chapters thereafter, which explain how these identities have persisted and, in some respects, intensified over time through processes of “affective polarization” (pp. 96-119). Some of this is explained in terms of personality traits (pp. 153-159), but perhaps more interestingly by the ways in which Brexit identities, once in place, tended to create “a set of incentives to adjust one’s views accordingly” (p. 145). That is, to avoid “cognitive dissonance” (pp. 121-124) people tend to take on all of the views of their ‘tribe’ and to interpret developments through that lens. In this and other ways “confirmation bias” (p. 122, and pp. 120-146 generally) has tended to solidify leaver and remainer identities
Such solidification evidently connects with the familiar idea that social media has led us to exist within ‘echo chambers’, re-enforcing our pre-existing views and even making them more extreme. However, the authors provide strong evidence to support their claim that “the real echo chamber” (p. 169) is not social media nearly so much as it is real life family and friendship networks. At all events, leaver and remainer identities have proved sufficiently durable to at least contribute to realignments in voting patterns, which are the subject of the final chapter (pp. 176-188).
There is obviously much more in the book than I have summarized here, and indeed it would be impossible to do justice to the formidable amount of data, analysis and scholarship within it. To my delight, given my great interest in the novels of C.P. Snow as a source of political insights, it even includes reference to one of his novels (p. 153).
Limitations and criticisms
The book does, however, have some limitations (as all books do). One is that the data presented are almost entirely quantitative (mainly large-scale longitudinal surveys). That has many strengths in terms of charting attitudes over time, and can capture things like emotional attachment to identities (see pp. 101-105), but does not provide the kind of insights into the meaning of Brexit identities for those who hold them which could be disclosed by including qualitative data. To put that another way, despite the focus on ‘tribes’ there is little anthropological sensibility in the analysis.
Another limitation is that the deployment of Social Identification Theory, and especially the work of Henri Tajfel, is not accompanied by any real discussion of the criticisms made of it (e.g. Dashtipour, 2012: Schnur, 2024). Personally, I don’t mind that too much, perhaps reflecting the fact that I am now an ex-academic, but having worked in a field where identity theories (in the plural) are of central importance (e.g. Kenny et al., 2011) I can imagine some of my former colleagues bridling a little.
What I would be slightly more critical of is where this theoretical framing leads. The things which are presented as conditions for the formation of Brexit identities are arguably rather circular. That is most obviously so as regards the condition of ‘issue contestation’, since the existence of strong conflict between groups about a salient issue presupposes that which it seeks to explain: if there are already groups in strong conflict about an issue, those groups will already have members, and membership implies at the very least proto-identification (and almost certainly some degree of ‘issue expression’).
Relatedly, what makes an issue ‘salient’, in the sense it is used here, is that something important is at stake apart from, and at least to some extent prior to, the identities which coalesce around it, but this is somewhat occluded by the theoretical framing of this book. The original work of Tajfel was, as the authors explain (pp. 11-12), based on experiments in which participants were found to embrace tribe-like identities even when the issues dividing them were arbitrarily assigned and had no objective, non-trivial basis. On such an account it is the psychological need for identification, not the issue, which is primary.
Whilst Hobolt & Tilley recognize that the “lab-based experimental paradigm” (p. 19) is neglectful of the social and political context of issue-based identities, the trace of this psychologistic, ‘Tajfelian’ account persists. The result is that remainer and leaver identities are treated as equivalent, differing in political content but not in psychological process. That makes the analysis non-partisan, which is in many ways admirable both for its academic detachment and because it is no doubt true that the psychological processes constituting remainer and leaver identities (affective polarization, avoidance of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias etc.) are very similar.
However, political actors – voters – people – don’t develop identities irrespective of the substance of what makes issues contestable. Thus, contestation over salient issues is both a condition and a consequence of political identities, and political identities are both a condition and a consequence of contestation over salient issues. This isn’t to deny the authors’ point (e.g. p.135) that policy opinions can be, and often are, substantially shaped by political identities, but nor does that point negate mine: it’s not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.
Moreover, connecting to my earlier comment about the absence of qualitative data about meaning, whilst it is highly plausible that the processes through which remainer and leaver identities develop are very similar, it doesn’t follow, and probably isn’t the case, that what it means to remainers to be remainers is the same as what it means to leavers to be leavers. And it is also quite likely that, in both cases, this meaning has changed over time even though the identity-labels have persisted. This in turn may well mean that what the ‘issue’ is understood to be, and the reasons for its ‘salience’, have changed over time, which is another way of saying that there is a recursive interaction between ‘issue’ and ‘identity’.
There’s certainly much about Brexit which can be analyzed in political-psychological terms, and I sometimes do so myself on this blog and elsewhere. But there's a limit to the traction of viewing it in terms of tribal identities, as if it were akin to the dispute between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Swift’s (1726) political satire Gulliver’s Travels, unless political conflicts are to be detached from political rationality and subsumed within psychological rationales. If, as this book amply demonstrates, Brexit identities have become strongly embedded then it is at least in part for reasons which lie beyond identity, in the same way as is true for other political identities (such as those based on political parties). In what is a broadly ‘rationalistic’ (albeit not a ‘rational choice’) analysis it is perhaps slightly surprising that the focus is so resolutely on the arguers and so relatively little on what they are arguing about.
Conclusion
These criticisms (or, perhaps, they are just variants of a single criticism) do not affect my opening assessment that, overall, this is an excellent book providing compelling analysis of an important topic. It is packed with highly informative data and acute interpretation, and is written with admirable lucidity, especially given the complexity of some of the material. It is, indeed, strange to think that, only ten years ago, the identities of leaver and remainer simply didn’t exist and yet are now a familiar part of political life and the political lexicon. As with all the best social science, this book interrogates the familiar whilst making the strange explicable.
Friday, 17 April 2026
New times, same old arguments
In the ‘new global divide’, the last fortnight has not been a happy one for what can variously be called the anti-liberal, anti-rules, populist, authoritarian or radical right side of that divide. The decisive defeat of its figurehead, Victor Orban, in the Hungarian election last weekend is having ripple effects across the world. Meanwhile Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged presidency has become ever-more bogged down in the still unfolding consequences of his spectacularly ill-judged attack on Iran. Yet whilst the world continues to re-calibrate, post-Brexit Britain remains largely stuck in the same old debates.
The hope and the warning from Hungary
The significance of Orban’s defeat is undeniable - for Hungary, of course, but also for the EU and Ukraine. At the same time, it was also a defeat for his backers, Trump and Putin, and for his many friends and admirers in the ironically global network of populist nationalists, not least Nigel Farage. But Orban’s importance went well beyond these high-level connections. His ideology and, equally important, his money made Hungary a crucial node within that global network, insinuating his influence into every dank crevice of the radical right, perhaps especially those where ethno-nationalism and ‘cultural Christianity’ are to be found lurking.
Thus, as regards the UK, not just Farage but many of the more minor figures who crop up recurrently in this blog have connections of one sort or another with Orban. These include Matthew Goodwin and Frank Furedi (both mentioned, for example, in a post last month), many of those in the overlapping ‘History Reclaimed’, ‘Brains for Brexit’ and ‘Briefings for Britain’ activist groups (discussed, for example, in a post last November), and many of those in the ‘National Conservative’ movement (discussed, for example, in a post in 2023). The latter movement is notable for having enfolded numerous politicians associated with both Tory and Reform parties and many of the ‘intellectuals’ of Brexitism including James Orr, Reform’s recently appointed Head of Policy.
For many of these people Orban’s Hungary became not just a source of funding but an inspiring model. That is worth reflecting upon since, were there ever to be a Reform government, its template would be the authoritarianism and grotesque corruption of the Orban regime [1]. For whilst the end of that regime is certainly a defeat for its admirers, denting their confidence of being in the vanguard of an unstoppable arc of history, it would be quite wrong to imagine it will inspire any change of heart or mind amongst them. And whilst there is inspiration in seeing the Hungarian people defy domestic intimidation and external pressure by voting in droves to throw Orban out, the more important message is of the danger of getting into the situation of that being necessary. After all, not only has Hungary endured sixteen years of misrule but it will also be a long and complex task to undo the damage caused by those years.
Cautious praise for Starmer
Damaging as Orban has been to Hungary and malign as his influence has been upon the wider world, that is nothing compared with the damage being caused by Trump and his administration. Like a great many people, I was much impressed by Mark Carney’s Davos speech earlier this year, precisely because of its crisp articulation of the new global divide and how to respond to it. In brief, what quickly became called the ‘Carney Doctrine’ was a call for “middle powers” to operate and co-operate on the basis of “values-based realism” so as, at least by implication, to navigate around the increasing unpredictability and hostility of the United States.
The immediate context of that speech was the ‘Greenland crisis’ created by Trump’s unprecedented threat to take, possibly by force, the territory of another NATO member. That this seems longer ago than the three months which have actually passed only serves to underscore the validity of Carney’s analysis. Since then, of course, there has been the chaos and devastation caused by Trump’s attack on Iran, including his chilling threat to destroy its “whole civilization” and the now growing rift between the US and China over the US ‘counter-blockade’ of the Strait of Hormuz.
There are several signs that the British government is enacting something like the Carney Doctrine, some of which I outlined in a post in February. Since then, the Iran war has provided further examples of that, most obviously the decision not to join in with it and, most recently, the decision not to participate in the ‘counter-blockade’. For all the many legitimate criticisms of Keir Starmer, he has, as the commentator David Aaronovitch convincingly argues, “got the big one right”.
Along with that, there has been a notable hardening in Starmer’s approach to relations with the US more generally. This hasn’t taken the form of any dramatic statement, and certainly nothing as openly insulting as what Trump has continually said about Starmer and the UK, but at least by implication something has shifted. For example, Starmer recently spoke of being “fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy, businesses' bills go up and down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world”. It is really quite telling to have bracketed Putin and Trump together, and to have denied Trump the courtesy of the title ‘President’. It is certainly difficult to imagine Starmer, or any of his predecessors, speaking of an American President in this way.
And this shift is not just about rhetoric: it is reported (£) that US officials seconded to UK government departments are increasingly being asked to leave meetings when sensitive information is discussed. This is at least conceivably a sign that the government is beginning what would be the long, slow (and expensive) process of following the recent advice of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to reduce its reliance on the US as a security and defence partner. At the very least, it is a sign of how Trump has banjaxed the UK’s trust in the US as, indeed, he has with almost all America’s major allies (£).
Starmer’s approach to Trump and the Iran war is made politically easier because, for once, he is broadly in line with public opinion. Disapproval of the US military strikes on Iran increased as the war went on, rising to 65% (and approval falling to 16%) prior to the ceasefire (if such it be). Meanwhile, support for the government’s handling of the conflict has risen sharply, albeit only from the low base of 20% in March to 31% at the beginning of April, and albeit still lower than the 35% who think the government is handling it badly [2]. It is difficult to separate out opinion on this issue from the general unpopularity of Starmer and his government, but I think there is fair case that Labour’s policy in this area is close to public opinion or, at least, that the alternative of acting with the US would have been very substantially divergent from public opinion.
Discarding Trump, retaining hubris
The unpopularity of Trump and the war have also had the interesting effect of causing his allies and disciples in other countries to distance themselves from his increasingly deranged conduct. In the UK this has a particular significance because of Brexit, since it was central to the Brexiters’ case that the US in general, and Trump specifically, would provide a solid and supportive geo-political and economic anchor for post-Brexit Britain. That became increasingly indefensible in the face of the Trump Tariffs, the Greenland crisis, and his disparaging remarks about the British military, but has been almost entirely abandoned since the short-lived attempt to argue that the UK should have joined in the attack on Iran.
Thus, in the last few weeks (£), Kemi Badenoch, David Frost, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and other prominent Brexiters have started to criticise Trump and the Iran war. Farage’s apostasy has been particularly piquant given his previous boasts of his close friendship with ‘Mr. Brexit’ and his interest, expressed as recently as last September, in being appointed as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington. Now, he says merely that “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by”, and professes to be “shocked” by the threat to destroy Iran’s civilization. Perhaps, apart from electoral calculations, Farage also feels slighted, given the recent snub he endured when he attempted to have dinner with Trump in Florida.
However, there is absolutely no reason to think that this volte face on the pro-Brexit right betokens anything remotely like the pragmatism envisaged by the Carney Doctrine. It certainly doesn’t betoken any recognition of the folly of Brexit, in the sense of recognizing that the UK’s strategic interests align with those of the EU and would be better served by being a member of the EU. On the contrary, it betokens a continuation, even an intensification, of the familiar bellicosity, at once hubristic and self-pitying, that lay behind Brexit. For, as I pointed out in a recent post, the accent is always on national humiliation and betrayal.
So, for example, a recent Daily Mail editorial thundered/whined that:
“Even a few short years ago, the prospect of Britain appearing irrelevant on the global stage would have been unthinkable … our great nation is now little more than a bit player in the geopolitical arena. The war on Iran has put a sharp focus on Sir Keir's inglorious role in consigning Britain to the margins.”
It is an almost unbelievably foolish analysis in its assumption that Britain could, or even should, still be a global power and, certainly, an analysis which is entirely ignorant of British history since Suez, if not since 1945. And, in the process, it is redolent of all the delusions about ‘Global Britain’ that permeated the case for Brexit, both as a reason why the UK could ‘go it alone’ and a promise of the glories which would result from doing so.
Going back to the Carney Doctrine, then, such a posture entails a refusal even to accept the basic reality of ‘middle-powerdom’, since to do so would itself be a betrayal of what “our great nation” should be. From that it follows the kinds of cooperation Carney advocates are deemed shameful. Hence, the editorial asked rhetorically, “would a PM with even a smidgen of respect for either the office he holds or the nation have allowed a situation where the Navy was reduced to asking Germany for the loan of a warship?” And hence, elsewhere in the Mail, a report about the “humiliation” our “once-mighty Navy faces begging French fleet for help to patrol our OWN waters” [emphasis in original].
The Brexit blockage
It is certainly true that the erosion of UK defence capacity is a serious problem, as was forcibly spelt out this week by former NATO boss and Labour Party grandee Lord Roberston. It’s also true, by the way, that for several years now UK defence procurement has been scandalously incompetent, rendering what defence spending there has been less effective than it should have been. What is emphatically untrue is that there is anything inherently shameful in working with allied countries so as to share each other’s resources and assets.
Indeed, it is precisely the implication of the Carney Doctrine, and the lesson to be drawn from America’s now at best questionable commitment to NATO, that such cooperation intensifies. For the UK, whilst that cooperation isn’t confined to its European allies, that must principally mean cooperation with them since, as last week’s revelations about Putin’s offensive activity against underwater cables re-emphasised, Russia is the most direct threat to our national security and it is a threat we share with the rest of Europe.
It is therefore hardly surprising that there is renewed discussion of the case to create an EU army, the most recent example being a speech by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. A rather different, and perhaps more likely, scenario would be to create a European defence capability within the structures of NATO but without reliance on the US, something reported this week in the Wall Street Journal (£) to be under active discussion. Such a capability would not, in itself, be confined to EU members and it seems to be envisaged that the UK could be involved as well as other non-members like Norway and Turkey.
However, at least as reported, the discussions to date are being driven by thinking in Germany and France in particular, and it is difficult to see how such a development could be separated from EU initiatives to boost the capacity of its defence industries. More generally, it is hard to doubt that the centre of gravity of influence and decision-making of a ‘European NATO’ would be the EU simply because the bulk of the countries involved would be members of both. Almost inevitably that would fall foul of the kind of sentiments expressed in the Mail editorial and, indeed, the idea is already being reported in The Sun as “Europe’s secret plan” – not, admittedly outright Brussels-bashing, but certainly there is no suggestion in the report that this plan is something the UK is, could, or should be involved in.
At all events, the prospect of a British government making a whole-hearted commitment to this, or any other version of a regional security alliance, seems remote for so long as the belief that the UK still is, or could be, a global power in its own right remains so entrenched [3]. That belief is part of what brought us Brexit, and it continues to dog post-Brexit Britain. Equally, the Brexit pre-occupation with sovereignty intrudes not as a matter of principle (such an alliance would have no more, and no less, implication for sovereignty than NATO itself) but because of the irrational loathing of, specifically, European sovereignty-sharing.
Marmalade and markets
A clear sign of just how far the UK is from even entertaining something as profound as a Europe-wide integration of defence capabilities can be seen in the hysterical row that broke out this fortnight over – yes – marmalade. In brief, there was a sudden rash of reports that the effect of the government’s plans to align with EU food regulations as part of the (still not agreed) SPS deal would mean that marmalade would have to be called ‘citrus marmalade’. The story was not just confined to the usual tabloids but appeared on the BBC and elsewhere.
Everything about it was stupid. To take the most obvious thing, it isn’t true, because the regulation will allow jars to be marked orange marmalade (or lemon, or grapefruit etc.). For another thing, it will have little practical impact since most marmalades are already labelled in this way (follow this link for more on the whole ‘controversy’, and its relationship to Brexit). However, it would be wrong to add to the list of stupidities the criticism that the issue is a trivial one or, rather, whilst trivial in itself it illustrates two important things.
Firstly, it is actually a downstream ripple of the jingoistic rants about “our great nation” that characterise the discussions of defence, with the issue presented in the Express as an attack on “the nation’s iconic marmalade”, something which according to the BBC has “long been a quintessential British preserve”. In this way, it is an illustration of how deeply embedded this nationalistic hubris is embedded, and how readily it provokes affronted anger. Secondly, the story was presented as an example of Brussels bureaucracy getting in the way of business, and this shows that the meaning of a single market is still not understood. For the point of all these ‘trivial’ regulations is to enable business through harmonization: that is, it removes the barriers of national regulations by creating a single set of trans-national regulations. Just as there could not be an effective national market if each county had its own product regulations, so there cannot be an effective European single market without a shared set of product regulations.
The row quickly morphed into a wider one about the entirety of the dynamic alignment of SPS regulations of which the labelling of marmalade in just one example. This wider row seemed to begin with what the Guardian last weekend rather cheekily called its ‘exclusive’ story about planned government legislation to facilitate such dynamic alignment, which then got picked up by other media outlets including the BBC. Actually, far from being an ‘exclusive’, I discussed this planned legislation in my post two weeks ago and that discussion was itself based upon a report in the Financial Times (£) over a week before that!
At all events, there has been a fresh outburst of screams about ‘Brexit betrayal’ (we might wonder, and wonder at, just how many times it is possible to ‘betray’ something which has so often been betrayed), and beneath that, again, the same inability to understand the meaning of a single market. With tragic inevitability, Daniel Hannan provided one of the best examples of this, showing himself to be still unteachably ignorant about the difference between a free trade agreement and a single market, still hopelessly confused about what ‘mutual recognition’ means, and still pitifully convinced that EU “spite” is the only obstacle to his fantasises.
I’m skipping rather lightly over this as, frankly, I don’t have the strength to unpick all this junk yet again and I suspect most readers of this blog will not need me to do so (although those wanting more detail on the possibly less-well understood rabbit hole of ‘mutual recognition’ will find it in a post from February 2025).
A dangerous obsolescence
The distance between the issues discussed at the beginning of this post and those with which it has finished discloses much about the condition of post-Brexit Britain. The wider world is in a profound state of flux and crisis. Like every other country, Britain is caught up in that. Starmer, to his credit, is at least inching towards a Carney-type recalibration, although he probably lacks the vision, and certainly lacks the political capital, to do much more than that. But the dominant terms of political and media discourse are woefully inadequate for the strategic challenges it poses.
That would no doubt have been true even if Brexit had never happened. But Brexit means that those terms of discourse are inadequate in a particular way, stuck in the lexicon of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, anchored in a world which is already disappearing from view. That is depressing in itself but, given the nature of the world that is emerging, it is also deeply dangerous.
Notes
[1] For an indication of what would be in store, consider Farage’s financial interest in the cryptocurrency firm Stack BTC (led by that renowned financial mastermind Kwasi Kwarteng) in the context of his policy to deregulate cryptocurrencies and his avowedly anti-globalist, anti-elite party’s reliance upon cryptocurrency donors, most notably Thai-based, McKinsey alumnus, Cambridge graduate Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit), and Hong Kong-based, J.P. Morgan alumnus, Oxford graduate Ben Delo. Compare also with the way Trump has used his presidency to enrich himself and his family, not least through his cryptocurrency ventures. Fun fact: in March 2025, Trump granted a pardon to Ben Delo and his two co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX following their conviction for money-laundering offences.
[2] The 35% disapproval figure probably has to be treated with considerable care. It presumably includes some who, whilst agreeing with the decision not to join in war, are critical of other aspects of how the conflict is being handled (e.g. preparedness to deploy ships to protect UK bases in Cyprus), and it surely includes some who would want the UK to have distanced itself even further from the conflict than Starmer has done (e.g. by refusing any use at all of UK airbases or airspace).
[3] In this context, a re-emerging Brexit-related issue is that of the UK’s bases in Cyprus. As with the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands, the Cyprus facilities are one of the ways Britain retains the vestiges of a global role and, in both cases, their existence, use and role have been brought to prominence during the Iran crisis. Early on in the Brexit negotiations, the future of the Cyprus bases was a matter of considerable complexity and uncertainty but, in the event, proved to be less intractable than the somewhat comparable issue of Gibraltar (the agreement on which, by the way, will come into force this July). Now, partly because of the Iranian drone attacks but also in the light of the (now-suspended) Chagos deal, there are renewed calls in Cyprus for their status to be re-negotiated, and indications that the EU is supportive of those calls. Yet it seems plausible that if the UK were to commit to the development of a regional security alliance along the lines of a ‘European NATO’ these bases could become part of its pooled assets.
The hope and the warning from Hungary
The significance of Orban’s defeat is undeniable - for Hungary, of course, but also for the EU and Ukraine. At the same time, it was also a defeat for his backers, Trump and Putin, and for his many friends and admirers in the ironically global network of populist nationalists, not least Nigel Farage. But Orban’s importance went well beyond these high-level connections. His ideology and, equally important, his money made Hungary a crucial node within that global network, insinuating his influence into every dank crevice of the radical right, perhaps especially those where ethno-nationalism and ‘cultural Christianity’ are to be found lurking.
Thus, as regards the UK, not just Farage but many of the more minor figures who crop up recurrently in this blog have connections of one sort or another with Orban. These include Matthew Goodwin and Frank Furedi (both mentioned, for example, in a post last month), many of those in the overlapping ‘History Reclaimed’, ‘Brains for Brexit’ and ‘Briefings for Britain’ activist groups (discussed, for example, in a post last November), and many of those in the ‘National Conservative’ movement (discussed, for example, in a post in 2023). The latter movement is notable for having enfolded numerous politicians associated with both Tory and Reform parties and many of the ‘intellectuals’ of Brexitism including James Orr, Reform’s recently appointed Head of Policy.
For many of these people Orban’s Hungary became not just a source of funding but an inspiring model. That is worth reflecting upon since, were there ever to be a Reform government, its template would be the authoritarianism and grotesque corruption of the Orban regime [1]. For whilst the end of that regime is certainly a defeat for its admirers, denting their confidence of being in the vanguard of an unstoppable arc of history, it would be quite wrong to imagine it will inspire any change of heart or mind amongst them. And whilst there is inspiration in seeing the Hungarian people defy domestic intimidation and external pressure by voting in droves to throw Orban out, the more important message is of the danger of getting into the situation of that being necessary. After all, not only has Hungary endured sixteen years of misrule but it will also be a long and complex task to undo the damage caused by those years.
Cautious praise for Starmer
Damaging as Orban has been to Hungary and malign as his influence has been upon the wider world, that is nothing compared with the damage being caused by Trump and his administration. Like a great many people, I was much impressed by Mark Carney’s Davos speech earlier this year, precisely because of its crisp articulation of the new global divide and how to respond to it. In brief, what quickly became called the ‘Carney Doctrine’ was a call for “middle powers” to operate and co-operate on the basis of “values-based realism” so as, at least by implication, to navigate around the increasing unpredictability and hostility of the United States.
The immediate context of that speech was the ‘Greenland crisis’ created by Trump’s unprecedented threat to take, possibly by force, the territory of another NATO member. That this seems longer ago than the three months which have actually passed only serves to underscore the validity of Carney’s analysis. Since then, of course, there has been the chaos and devastation caused by Trump’s attack on Iran, including his chilling threat to destroy its “whole civilization” and the now growing rift between the US and China over the US ‘counter-blockade’ of the Strait of Hormuz.
There are several signs that the British government is enacting something like the Carney Doctrine, some of which I outlined in a post in February. Since then, the Iran war has provided further examples of that, most obviously the decision not to join in with it and, most recently, the decision not to participate in the ‘counter-blockade’. For all the many legitimate criticisms of Keir Starmer, he has, as the commentator David Aaronovitch convincingly argues, “got the big one right”.
Along with that, there has been a notable hardening in Starmer’s approach to relations with the US more generally. This hasn’t taken the form of any dramatic statement, and certainly nothing as openly insulting as what Trump has continually said about Starmer and the UK, but at least by implication something has shifted. For example, Starmer recently spoke of being “fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy, businesses' bills go up and down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world”. It is really quite telling to have bracketed Putin and Trump together, and to have denied Trump the courtesy of the title ‘President’. It is certainly difficult to imagine Starmer, or any of his predecessors, speaking of an American President in this way.
And this shift is not just about rhetoric: it is reported (£) that US officials seconded to UK government departments are increasingly being asked to leave meetings when sensitive information is discussed. This is at least conceivably a sign that the government is beginning what would be the long, slow (and expensive) process of following the recent advice of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to reduce its reliance on the US as a security and defence partner. At the very least, it is a sign of how Trump has banjaxed the UK’s trust in the US as, indeed, he has with almost all America’s major allies (£).
Starmer’s approach to Trump and the Iran war is made politically easier because, for once, he is broadly in line with public opinion. Disapproval of the US military strikes on Iran increased as the war went on, rising to 65% (and approval falling to 16%) prior to the ceasefire (if such it be). Meanwhile, support for the government’s handling of the conflict has risen sharply, albeit only from the low base of 20% in March to 31% at the beginning of April, and albeit still lower than the 35% who think the government is handling it badly [2]. It is difficult to separate out opinion on this issue from the general unpopularity of Starmer and his government, but I think there is fair case that Labour’s policy in this area is close to public opinion or, at least, that the alternative of acting with the US would have been very substantially divergent from public opinion.
Discarding Trump, retaining hubris
The unpopularity of Trump and the war have also had the interesting effect of causing his allies and disciples in other countries to distance themselves from his increasingly deranged conduct. In the UK this has a particular significance because of Brexit, since it was central to the Brexiters’ case that the US in general, and Trump specifically, would provide a solid and supportive geo-political and economic anchor for post-Brexit Britain. That became increasingly indefensible in the face of the Trump Tariffs, the Greenland crisis, and his disparaging remarks about the British military, but has been almost entirely abandoned since the short-lived attempt to argue that the UK should have joined in the attack on Iran.
Thus, in the last few weeks (£), Kemi Badenoch, David Frost, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and other prominent Brexiters have started to criticise Trump and the Iran war. Farage’s apostasy has been particularly piquant given his previous boasts of his close friendship with ‘Mr. Brexit’ and his interest, expressed as recently as last September, in being appointed as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington. Now, he says merely that “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by”, and professes to be “shocked” by the threat to destroy Iran’s civilization. Perhaps, apart from electoral calculations, Farage also feels slighted, given the recent snub he endured when he attempted to have dinner with Trump in Florida.
However, there is absolutely no reason to think that this volte face on the pro-Brexit right betokens anything remotely like the pragmatism envisaged by the Carney Doctrine. It certainly doesn’t betoken any recognition of the folly of Brexit, in the sense of recognizing that the UK’s strategic interests align with those of the EU and would be better served by being a member of the EU. On the contrary, it betokens a continuation, even an intensification, of the familiar bellicosity, at once hubristic and self-pitying, that lay behind Brexit. For, as I pointed out in a recent post, the accent is always on national humiliation and betrayal.
So, for example, a recent Daily Mail editorial thundered/whined that:
“Even a few short years ago, the prospect of Britain appearing irrelevant on the global stage would have been unthinkable … our great nation is now little more than a bit player in the geopolitical arena. The war on Iran has put a sharp focus on Sir Keir's inglorious role in consigning Britain to the margins.”
It is an almost unbelievably foolish analysis in its assumption that Britain could, or even should, still be a global power and, certainly, an analysis which is entirely ignorant of British history since Suez, if not since 1945. And, in the process, it is redolent of all the delusions about ‘Global Britain’ that permeated the case for Brexit, both as a reason why the UK could ‘go it alone’ and a promise of the glories which would result from doing so.
Going back to the Carney Doctrine, then, such a posture entails a refusal even to accept the basic reality of ‘middle-powerdom’, since to do so would itself be a betrayal of what “our great nation” should be. From that it follows the kinds of cooperation Carney advocates are deemed shameful. Hence, the editorial asked rhetorically, “would a PM with even a smidgen of respect for either the office he holds or the nation have allowed a situation where the Navy was reduced to asking Germany for the loan of a warship?” And hence, elsewhere in the Mail, a report about the “humiliation” our “once-mighty Navy faces begging French fleet for help to patrol our OWN waters” [emphasis in original].
The Brexit blockage
It is certainly true that the erosion of UK defence capacity is a serious problem, as was forcibly spelt out this week by former NATO boss and Labour Party grandee Lord Roberston. It’s also true, by the way, that for several years now UK defence procurement has been scandalously incompetent, rendering what defence spending there has been less effective than it should have been. What is emphatically untrue is that there is anything inherently shameful in working with allied countries so as to share each other’s resources and assets.
Indeed, it is precisely the implication of the Carney Doctrine, and the lesson to be drawn from America’s now at best questionable commitment to NATO, that such cooperation intensifies. For the UK, whilst that cooperation isn’t confined to its European allies, that must principally mean cooperation with them since, as last week’s revelations about Putin’s offensive activity against underwater cables re-emphasised, Russia is the most direct threat to our national security and it is a threat we share with the rest of Europe.
It is therefore hardly surprising that there is renewed discussion of the case to create an EU army, the most recent example being a speech by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. A rather different, and perhaps more likely, scenario would be to create a European defence capability within the structures of NATO but without reliance on the US, something reported this week in the Wall Street Journal (£) to be under active discussion. Such a capability would not, in itself, be confined to EU members and it seems to be envisaged that the UK could be involved as well as other non-members like Norway and Turkey.
However, at least as reported, the discussions to date are being driven by thinking in Germany and France in particular, and it is difficult to see how such a development could be separated from EU initiatives to boost the capacity of its defence industries. More generally, it is hard to doubt that the centre of gravity of influence and decision-making of a ‘European NATO’ would be the EU simply because the bulk of the countries involved would be members of both. Almost inevitably that would fall foul of the kind of sentiments expressed in the Mail editorial and, indeed, the idea is already being reported in The Sun as “Europe’s secret plan” – not, admittedly outright Brussels-bashing, but certainly there is no suggestion in the report that this plan is something the UK is, could, or should be involved in.
At all events, the prospect of a British government making a whole-hearted commitment to this, or any other version of a regional security alliance, seems remote for so long as the belief that the UK still is, or could be, a global power in its own right remains so entrenched [3]. That belief is part of what brought us Brexit, and it continues to dog post-Brexit Britain. Equally, the Brexit pre-occupation with sovereignty intrudes not as a matter of principle (such an alliance would have no more, and no less, implication for sovereignty than NATO itself) but because of the irrational loathing of, specifically, European sovereignty-sharing.
Marmalade and markets
A clear sign of just how far the UK is from even entertaining something as profound as a Europe-wide integration of defence capabilities can be seen in the hysterical row that broke out this fortnight over – yes – marmalade. In brief, there was a sudden rash of reports that the effect of the government’s plans to align with EU food regulations as part of the (still not agreed) SPS deal would mean that marmalade would have to be called ‘citrus marmalade’. The story was not just confined to the usual tabloids but appeared on the BBC and elsewhere.
Everything about it was stupid. To take the most obvious thing, it isn’t true, because the regulation will allow jars to be marked orange marmalade (or lemon, or grapefruit etc.). For another thing, it will have little practical impact since most marmalades are already labelled in this way (follow this link for more on the whole ‘controversy’, and its relationship to Brexit). However, it would be wrong to add to the list of stupidities the criticism that the issue is a trivial one or, rather, whilst trivial in itself it illustrates two important things.
Firstly, it is actually a downstream ripple of the jingoistic rants about “our great nation” that characterise the discussions of defence, with the issue presented in the Express as an attack on “the nation’s iconic marmalade”, something which according to the BBC has “long been a quintessential British preserve”. In this way, it is an illustration of how deeply embedded this nationalistic hubris is embedded, and how readily it provokes affronted anger. Secondly, the story was presented as an example of Brussels bureaucracy getting in the way of business, and this shows that the meaning of a single market is still not understood. For the point of all these ‘trivial’ regulations is to enable business through harmonization: that is, it removes the barriers of national regulations by creating a single set of trans-national regulations. Just as there could not be an effective national market if each county had its own product regulations, so there cannot be an effective European single market without a shared set of product regulations.
The row quickly morphed into a wider one about the entirety of the dynamic alignment of SPS regulations of which the labelling of marmalade in just one example. This wider row seemed to begin with what the Guardian last weekend rather cheekily called its ‘exclusive’ story about planned government legislation to facilitate such dynamic alignment, which then got picked up by other media outlets including the BBC. Actually, far from being an ‘exclusive’, I discussed this planned legislation in my post two weeks ago and that discussion was itself based upon a report in the Financial Times (£) over a week before that!
At all events, there has been a fresh outburst of screams about ‘Brexit betrayal’ (we might wonder, and wonder at, just how many times it is possible to ‘betray’ something which has so often been betrayed), and beneath that, again, the same inability to understand the meaning of a single market. With tragic inevitability, Daniel Hannan provided one of the best examples of this, showing himself to be still unteachably ignorant about the difference between a free trade agreement and a single market, still hopelessly confused about what ‘mutual recognition’ means, and still pitifully convinced that EU “spite” is the only obstacle to his fantasises.
I’m skipping rather lightly over this as, frankly, I don’t have the strength to unpick all this junk yet again and I suspect most readers of this blog will not need me to do so (although those wanting more detail on the possibly less-well understood rabbit hole of ‘mutual recognition’ will find it in a post from February 2025).
A dangerous obsolescence
The distance between the issues discussed at the beginning of this post and those with which it has finished discloses much about the condition of post-Brexit Britain. The wider world is in a profound state of flux and crisis. Like every other country, Britain is caught up in that. Starmer, to his credit, is at least inching towards a Carney-type recalibration, although he probably lacks the vision, and certainly lacks the political capital, to do much more than that. But the dominant terms of political and media discourse are woefully inadequate for the strategic challenges it poses.
That would no doubt have been true even if Brexit had never happened. But Brexit means that those terms of discourse are inadequate in a particular way, stuck in the lexicon of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, anchored in a world which is already disappearing from view. That is depressing in itself but, given the nature of the world that is emerging, it is also deeply dangerous.
Notes
[1] For an indication of what would be in store, consider Farage’s financial interest in the cryptocurrency firm Stack BTC (led by that renowned financial mastermind Kwasi Kwarteng) in the context of his policy to deregulate cryptocurrencies and his avowedly anti-globalist, anti-elite party’s reliance upon cryptocurrency donors, most notably Thai-based, McKinsey alumnus, Cambridge graduate Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit), and Hong Kong-based, J.P. Morgan alumnus, Oxford graduate Ben Delo. Compare also with the way Trump has used his presidency to enrich himself and his family, not least through his cryptocurrency ventures. Fun fact: in March 2025, Trump granted a pardon to Ben Delo and his two co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX following their conviction for money-laundering offences.
[2] The 35% disapproval figure probably has to be treated with considerable care. It presumably includes some who, whilst agreeing with the decision not to join in war, are critical of other aspects of how the conflict is being handled (e.g. preparedness to deploy ships to protect UK bases in Cyprus), and it surely includes some who would want the UK to have distanced itself even further from the conflict than Starmer has done (e.g. by refusing any use at all of UK airbases or airspace).
[3] In this context, a re-emerging Brexit-related issue is that of the UK’s bases in Cyprus. As with the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands, the Cyprus facilities are one of the ways Britain retains the vestiges of a global role and, in both cases, their existence, use and role have been brought to prominence during the Iran crisis. Early on in the Brexit negotiations, the future of the Cyprus bases was a matter of considerable complexity and uncertainty but, in the event, proved to be less intractable than the somewhat comparable issue of Gibraltar (the agreement on which, by the way, will come into force this July). Now, partly because of the Iranian drone attacks but also in the light of the (now-suspended) Chagos deal, there are renewed calls in Cyprus for their status to be re-negotiated, and indications that the EU is supportive of those calls. Yet it seems plausible that if the UK were to commit to the development of a regional security alliance along the lines of a ‘European NATO’ these bases could become part of its pooled assets.
Friday, 3 April 2026
Bad vibes
In my last post I briefly mentioned that the government, and Rachel Reeves in particular, have begun to speak increasingly openly about the damage Brexit is continuing to do to the British economy. This, I said, was striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. The converse also applies, of course. Such admissions, if unaccompanied by any stronger response, serve to underline the inadequacy of the reset.
This is the hook upon which the government’s approach to Brexit is currently caught, and what underlies it is the continuing failure of the British polity as a whole to be honest about Brexit and much else besides. That, and the reasons for it, have been amply illustrated over the last fortnight.
A “Brexit row”?
During that period, it has been reported (£) that the government is preparing legislation to enable the UK to align with all of the EU regulations needed to enact the long-trailed, though still not finalized, UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) or ‘veterinary’ agreement. Moreover, this legislation is expected to contain provision to enable similar moves in other sectors in the future, subject only to statutory instruments meaning, in effect, Ministerial decree.
The idea behind the latter provision, apparently, is that it could pave the way for ‘sector-by-sector’ deals with the EU. In the report of these plans, it is also suggested that at least some within the Labour Party “are hoping that the bill will provoke a Brexit row with the Conservatives and Reform UK, reminding voters that their opponents supported Leave in the EU referendum”.
In just this one small news item there is quite a lot to unpick. One thing to say is that it isn’t surprising, in that it was inherent in what was known about the desire for an SPS deal that there would be such legislation. What is perhaps more interesting is the idea that Labour might now be willing to have “a Brexit row” with Conservatives and Reform, something they have fought shy of in the past.
Evidently, this is a continuation of the shift to greater openness about the damage of Brexit. The political reasons for that shift are fairly obvious and have recently been set out in detail by the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice: in brief, Labour’s (belated) realization that its approach to Brexit is one of the things causing the collapse of its core vote, as happened in the Gorton & Denton by-election.
As this legislation proceeds, Labour will get their row in that, inevitably, indeed already, the Brexiters are screaming ‘betrayal’. However, what that row will really show is that, even now, the ways in which Brexit is discussed are almost entirely dishonest or deluded, or both.
On the Tory side (and that of the Brexiters more generally) there is the dishonesty of the fact that de facto alignment with almost all EU regulations is unavoidable, except at huge economic cost, which is exactly what the Conservatives came to accept when in office. Nor can they reasonably complain about the lack of democratic oversight associated with the use of statutory instruments, since it was they who made such extensive use of so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers throughout the Brexit process. Indeed, it would be reasonable to say that one of the many failed promises of Brexit was that it would return decision-making to parliament.
On the Labour side, there is the dishonesty, shared at various times by various Conservative Brexiters, that whole swathes of the British economy could de facto remain ‘within’ the single market on a sector-by-sector basis. This is effectively a reprise of the “ambitious managed divergence” model floated by Theresa May’s government in February 2018 (and discussed on this blog at that time) although it has gone under different names at different times.
If, as is reported, Keir Starmer believes that the reset process so far has shown that EU objections to ‘cherry-picking’ have disappeared, then that is a profound misreading. For reasons I discussed last year, things like a possible deal on SPS (or on the internal electricity market or Erasmus+) should not be regarded as cherry-picking. I meant that as a rebuke to those who mistakenly use that term to dismiss as doomed any and every attempt to supplement the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). But it would be equally mistaken if Starmer believes that the EU’s willingness to make some adjustments, when they are in its interests, means that any and every attempt to supplement the TCA is viable.
Brexit pragmatism?
Perhaps the most striking dishonesty is what underpins Labour’s approach, namely the claim, articulated most explicitly by Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (£), that what the government is delivering with the reset is “what a proper Brexit looks like”. By this he means that the UK is making “sovereign’ choices” guided by “ruthless pragmatism”. In its way, this is a clever debating society argument, in that it takes the Brexiters’ core demand, that what matters is not this-or-that regulation or law but that regulations and laws are decided by the UK, and uses it against them. This is actually exactly the same structure of argument that ‘liberal Brexiters’ use when they say that what Brexit means for immigration is not necessarily to reduce it but to set it at a level determined by a sovereign parliament.
However, the Thomas-Symonds line is self-defeating as a defence of Labour’s reset policy, precisely because that policy is so inadequate a response to what his government now admits to be the costs of Brexit. For example, to be more specific, on ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ grounds it is impossible to defend the value of the UK having an independent trade policy.
That has been illustrated in two ways in the last fortnight by the announcement of the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement. On the one hand, that agreement shows that, as a collective, the EU was able to get a better deal, especially for its farmers, than the UK got in its own deal with Australia. On the other hand, and given also the recent EU-India deal, it means that the only countries with which Brexit Britain currently has trade agreements that it would not have as an EU member are Malaysia and Brunei (via CPTPP). Meanwhile, were the UK still in the EU it would be part of its trade agreement with Mercosur bloc.
Of course there are legitimate arguments about how important trade agreements really are to the economy, and also about the desirability of their effects on domestic industries, supply-chain resilience and so on. But those are not the government’s arguments. This being so, then it could get more, and better, trade agreements if it successfully pursued a customs union agreement with the EU, which would also improve terms of trade with the EU itself. So, on the basis of ‘ruthless pragmatism’, why not make the ‘sovereign choice’ to seek such an agreement with the EU?
From this follows the more fundamental point, which lies right at the heart of the fallacy of Brexit and which was most strikingly articulated in the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. As I discussed at the time, this contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” Thus even as Britain embarked on the process of leaving it did so knowing that the central plank of the leave argument – that the UK had lost its sovereignty – was completely untrue. It was just ‘a feeling’. And the point still holds, so, on the Thomas-Symonds argument for the reset, there is an even stronger argument for seeking to join the EU, as a sovereign choice made on pragmatic grounds.
A path forward?
In short, the more the government now acknowledges the costs of Brexit, and the more overtly it justifies its reset in terms of the pragmatic response of a sovereign nation to those costs, the more it undermines both the philosophical and economic case for Brexit – and yet at the same time describes its position as delivering ‘proper Brexit’. Similarly, although this week Starmer gave his strongest statement yet that the international ‘volatility’ engendered by Trump’s regime, as well as the economic damage of Brexit, justifies an “ambitious” partnership with the EU, doing so only serves to highlight the constraints he has placed on those ambitions.
It presumably goes without saying that, going back to the electoral politics, this means that if it is true that the Labour Party is now willing to have a “row” about the false promises of Brexit it is unlikely to reap much, if any, reward from anti-Brexit voters. For it remains wedded to a policy which is not just lily-livered but self-contradictory
That doesn’t mean that it is realistic for Labour to adopt a ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’) position, let alone likely that it will do so. But in my view, as I’ve argued before, it should mean adopting the position that seeking to join would be desirable but is not feasible until such time as all the other main parties either accept this or, at least, undertake not to reverse such a process were it begun. This would at least bring some clarity to the “row”, forcing Tory and Reform Brexiters to discuss and defend Brexit, as they nowadays seem unwilling to do.
With that clarity might come some honesty, in the sense of the recognition that Brexit has not had majority support for a very long time but also by the recognition that, for so long as there is a distinct possibility that an incoming government would backtrack on it, any process towards joining is impossible (most obviously for the EU). That in turn could be part of a more general recognition, which has been largely absent throughout the Brexit process, that the future of UK-EU relations is not just about what Britain wants but what the EU and its member states want.
Taking all these things together might be the beginning of a recognition that, in the concluding words of an excellent analysis this week by Kirsty Hughes on her ScotEU Substack, “the path back needs strategic, honest, courageous political leaders and renewed, inclusive political debate.”
Deeply embedded dishonesty
However, it is difficult to be optimistic that any of this is about to happen, not least because although dishonesty certainly didn’t begin with Brexit, Brexit has rammed dishonesty so deeply into the body politic that it seems impossible to dislodge. A case in point is another aspect of the fallout from the Gorton & Denton by-election, namely the allegations of ‘family voting’ and voter coercion (with the implication that this had been amongst, specifically, Muslim voters). Last weekend, in what seemed to be an unusually detailed statement, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) announced that their investigation had found “no evidence” that this had occurred.
As I noted in my blog post at the time of the by-election, operators like Nigel Farage trade on the fact that such allegations stick in the public mind whereas even if subsequent investigations show them to be false that is barely noticed. No doubt that is true in this case, not least because whereas the original allegations were given very prominent coverage both in the right-wing press and by broadcasters including the BBC, the GMP’s statement was given far less attention.
But it’s actually worse than that, because the statement was immediately denounced by Farage as an “Establishment whitewash” and “another brushed-under-the-carpet report from the usual suspects”. Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate, also called it a “whitewash” and insisted that “sectarianism is taking over our democracy”, later strongly implying that he didn’t believe the police’s findings.
I’ve noted many times before that this kind of ‘non-falsifiable’ illogic permeated the entirety of the Brexit process and, by extension, now characterises Brexitism. Thus, in this case, had the police found evidence of family voting then, of course, it would be taken as proof that it had occurred. But, when the police found no evidence, this is taken as proof that it not only occurred but is being ‘covered up’.
What is far worse than that (or, rather, is enabled by it, showing why such illogic is dangerous and not just stupid) is how utterly corrosive and corrupting it is: as with depicting judges as ‘enemies of the people’ and civil servants as ‘saboteurs’, the Brexitists are determined to destroy every last vestige of trust in public institutions. Perhaps worst of all is that, whilst attacking the police investigation assists this agenda, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Farage et al. were secretly hoping that wrongdoing had taken place, yielding what would been a prominently reported and easily exploitable scandal.
The travails of MattGPT
Matt Goodwin has also been in the news for another reason. I referred in my previous post to his new book, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which has since been published and widely criticised, including in a debate on GB News during which Goodwin became visibly angry, even at one stage rounding on his ideological soul-mate Miriam Cates, who was chairing.
Indeed, tellingly, even those sympathetic to what might charitably be called Goodwin’s thesis were unimpressed, with one describing the book as the work of a “slopagandist”, another entitling his review “suicide of an author’s credibility”, and a third opining that the nickname ‘MattGPT’ would follow the former academic “to his grave”. By comparison, those less sympathetic were rather gentle in simply calling it “trash”. In fairness, it should be said that Goodwin had his defenders, but fairness also requires saying that the most prominent of these was the swivel-eyed Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson (£).
As the ‘MattGPT’ tag implies, much of the criticism has focussed on what appear to be bogus quotations generated by AI-hallucination (£), to which Goodwin’s rather piquant defence in the debate was that he had put the entire text through an AI checker which had exonerated it from the accusation of the book being AI-generated (though that had not, in fact, been the accusation). But perhaps the more damning criticism is of the misinterpretation of statistics about schoolchildren who have English as an Additional Language (EAL). This sounds rather geeky but is actually important, both in itself and because it creates the suspicion that the way Goodwin represented the EAL statistics was not the only way in which data had been manipulated in pursuit of the book’s claims.
In official statistics, “a pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English. This measure is not a measure of English language proficiency or a good proxy for recent immigration” (p.4 of link). On this basis, between 20% and 25% of pupils have EAL. From this, Goodwin seems to infer that they have either no, or at least impaired or deficient, proficiency in English.
However, according to Steve Strand, Professor of Education at Oxford University, Goodwin “is totally misunderstanding what this measure of EAL is. He keeps talking about English not being young people’s first language, but you could be recorded as EAL and still be totally fluent in English. So he’s not understanding the question that underlies the data.” Strand’s argument is borne out by the fact that, according to Department for Education’s 2020 report, in Spring 2018 some 61% of EAL schoolchildren were either fluent or competent in English [1].
Moreover, Goodwin claims that in schools in areas where EAL rates are high “English is no longer the main language” which carries at least the implication that some other language is, whereas, of course, in such situations English is, so to speak, the lingua franca. In that sense, what the EAL statistics actually show is exactly what would be expected from assimilating immigrants. At home, their children are exposed to and use another language, but in the public sphere, at school (and subsequently, no doubt, at work), they are additionally exposed to and use English. But in Goodwin’s telling it is sinister evidence that a process of ‘cultural erasure’ is underway.
Plastic patriots become counterfeit Christians
That same proposition is evident in the latest seasonal panic that Easter eggs are no longer called by that name, every aspect of which has been discredited by Emma Monks on her Monk Debunks Substack. But whilst, like the similar panics that Christmas has been replaced by ‘Winterval’, this is tediously familiar, it has a new salience because of the notable recent shift in the rhetoric of populist leaders towards stressing Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.
Admittedly, theologians might question the sacramental status of the chocolate Easter Egg, just as they might wonder if Tommy Robinson’s conversion is any more genuine than his name, be puzzled by Reform MP Robert Jenrick’s reference to “Psalm Sunday” (sic), and ponder the sacerdotal credentials of ‘Bishop’ Ceirion Dewar of Ceirion H. Dewar Ministries Ltd. But there is no doubt that there has been a profound change in the language being used by the populist right.
Nor is it just matter of language. It is also evident in what is emerging as Reform’s “family friendly” policy agenda – an agenda set out with great clarity by Lisa Burton in Yorkshire Bylines – with all it implies for abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights generally. One reason for these developments is the influence of US populists on their UK counterparts. It may also be relevant that Paul Marshall, so pivotal to British populists especially through his co-ownership of GB News, moves in those circles and is himself an evangelical Christian with a reportedly “spiritual mission” to fight ‘progressivism’ (which appears actually to mean post-Enlightenment rationality).
There is an obvious connection between these three stories – the discredited allegations of ‘family voting’, Goodwin’s discredited account of EAL statistics, and the discredited stories about the cancellation of Easter: they all circle around the same theme of ‘cultural erasure’ at the hands of Muslims, aided and abetted by the liberal ‘woke’ elite. And it is a message pouring in torrents across social media, and much of the print and broadcast media, every day, in the coverage of hundreds of different stories.
Another recent example is the spate of images of schoolchildren exercising on yoga mats carrying the false claim that they are being forced to participate in Muslim prayers. Yet another is the frenzied reaction to a BBC discussion about whether there are too many ‘dog-friendly’ spaces, representing it as a woke attempt to impose Muslim sensibilities upon the nation (it was actually about people who are scared of dogs). These, and innumerable other examples, are small-scale in themselves but it is that which makes them potent as tessellations of the same basic message.
But there is another connection between all these stories, and it is one which links directly back to Brexit.
Vibe politics
As these various stories have unfolded over the last fortnight, I have been looking at the social media responses not just from the big names of the culture wars but from the rank-and-file posters. What that reveals is not so much that the rebuttals of them are ignored as that they are discounted. That is, it may be accepted that such-and-such a detail is wrong, but, nevertheless, ‘we all know’ that the bigger truth holds good. This is the significance of the cumulative effect of similar stories. It creates a politics of ‘vibes’ just as with Brexit the effect of years of media stories made it “feel” as if we had lost sovereignty.
Of course, vibe politics is nothing new. Think of Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Think, for that matter, of the 1950s Macmillanite message that we “have never had it so good”. What is distinctive about populism is that it trades on ‘feel-bad’ rather than ‘feel-good’ vibes: on grievance, resentment, and fear. That, too, is evident in the stories I have just discussed and is absolutely central to the claims of ‘cultural erasure’.
I haven’t talked about the war in this post, since its deepening spiral only serves to re-enforce points which I’ve previously made. But Nigel Farage has been speaking about the war. Not, needless to say, the war the US has unleashed in the Middle East, about which, after his original Trump-crawl, he has been remarkably coy. No, as usual it was the Second World War or, more particularly, a single moment within it.
Thus, launching Reform’s London local government election campaign in Croydon, under its current and perhaps ill-advised slogan of ‘Reform will fix it’, he spluttered that: “This is, this is, this is 1940 all over again. The very existence of our nation, its culture, its identity is under threat.” It is the same message of a ‘nation in existential peril’ that Goodwin peddles; the same message as that of the ‘family voting’ accusations; the same message as is contained in the stories about Easter eggs, yoga mats, dogs, and all the rest of it.
Farage is right, though, to say that history is repeating itself. Not in the sense that it is 1940 all over again, but because it is 2015 all over again. Then, too, he was bloviating about 1940 but at that time it was to tell us it was the EU referendum which was “our modern day Battle of Britain”. Once again, Brexit has morphed into Brexitism.
It’s this repetition, this stuckness in the same myths and vibe-based messages, and the fact that, like it or not, they continue to resonate for perhaps a quarter or even a third of the adult population, and to be amplified by a phalanx of media commentors, which makes British politics so irredeemably dishonest, and the possibility of honesty about Brexit, specifically, so elusive.
With that happy thought I leave you to enjoy, to use the term cruelly stolen when the nasty Normans erased our culture and language, Ēostre.
Note
[1] The report notes that it is not possible to provide comparable figures for children for whom English is their first/ sole language, but it should not be assumed that all such children are fluent or competent.
This is the hook upon which the government’s approach to Brexit is currently caught, and what underlies it is the continuing failure of the British polity as a whole to be honest about Brexit and much else besides. That, and the reasons for it, have been amply illustrated over the last fortnight.
A “Brexit row”?
During that period, it has been reported (£) that the government is preparing legislation to enable the UK to align with all of the EU regulations needed to enact the long-trailed, though still not finalized, UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) or ‘veterinary’ agreement. Moreover, this legislation is expected to contain provision to enable similar moves in other sectors in the future, subject only to statutory instruments meaning, in effect, Ministerial decree.
The idea behind the latter provision, apparently, is that it could pave the way for ‘sector-by-sector’ deals with the EU. In the report of these plans, it is also suggested that at least some within the Labour Party “are hoping that the bill will provoke a Brexit row with the Conservatives and Reform UK, reminding voters that their opponents supported Leave in the EU referendum”.
In just this one small news item there is quite a lot to unpick. One thing to say is that it isn’t surprising, in that it was inherent in what was known about the desire for an SPS deal that there would be such legislation. What is perhaps more interesting is the idea that Labour might now be willing to have “a Brexit row” with Conservatives and Reform, something they have fought shy of in the past.
Evidently, this is a continuation of the shift to greater openness about the damage of Brexit. The political reasons for that shift are fairly obvious and have recently been set out in detail by the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice: in brief, Labour’s (belated) realization that its approach to Brexit is one of the things causing the collapse of its core vote, as happened in the Gorton & Denton by-election.
As this legislation proceeds, Labour will get their row in that, inevitably, indeed already, the Brexiters are screaming ‘betrayal’. However, what that row will really show is that, even now, the ways in which Brexit is discussed are almost entirely dishonest or deluded, or both.
On the Tory side (and that of the Brexiters more generally) there is the dishonesty of the fact that de facto alignment with almost all EU regulations is unavoidable, except at huge economic cost, which is exactly what the Conservatives came to accept when in office. Nor can they reasonably complain about the lack of democratic oversight associated with the use of statutory instruments, since it was they who made such extensive use of so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers throughout the Brexit process. Indeed, it would be reasonable to say that one of the many failed promises of Brexit was that it would return decision-making to parliament.
On the Labour side, there is the dishonesty, shared at various times by various Conservative Brexiters, that whole swathes of the British economy could de facto remain ‘within’ the single market on a sector-by-sector basis. This is effectively a reprise of the “ambitious managed divergence” model floated by Theresa May’s government in February 2018 (and discussed on this blog at that time) although it has gone under different names at different times.
If, as is reported, Keir Starmer believes that the reset process so far has shown that EU objections to ‘cherry-picking’ have disappeared, then that is a profound misreading. For reasons I discussed last year, things like a possible deal on SPS (or on the internal electricity market or Erasmus+) should not be regarded as cherry-picking. I meant that as a rebuke to those who mistakenly use that term to dismiss as doomed any and every attempt to supplement the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). But it would be equally mistaken if Starmer believes that the EU’s willingness to make some adjustments, when they are in its interests, means that any and every attempt to supplement the TCA is viable.
Brexit pragmatism?
Perhaps the most striking dishonesty is what underpins Labour’s approach, namely the claim, articulated most explicitly by Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (£), that what the government is delivering with the reset is “what a proper Brexit looks like”. By this he means that the UK is making “sovereign’ choices” guided by “ruthless pragmatism”. In its way, this is a clever debating society argument, in that it takes the Brexiters’ core demand, that what matters is not this-or-that regulation or law but that regulations and laws are decided by the UK, and uses it against them. This is actually exactly the same structure of argument that ‘liberal Brexiters’ use when they say that what Brexit means for immigration is not necessarily to reduce it but to set it at a level determined by a sovereign parliament.
However, the Thomas-Symonds line is self-defeating as a defence of Labour’s reset policy, precisely because that policy is so inadequate a response to what his government now admits to be the costs of Brexit. For example, to be more specific, on ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ grounds it is impossible to defend the value of the UK having an independent trade policy.
That has been illustrated in two ways in the last fortnight by the announcement of the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement. On the one hand, that agreement shows that, as a collective, the EU was able to get a better deal, especially for its farmers, than the UK got in its own deal with Australia. On the other hand, and given also the recent EU-India deal, it means that the only countries with which Brexit Britain currently has trade agreements that it would not have as an EU member are Malaysia and Brunei (via CPTPP). Meanwhile, were the UK still in the EU it would be part of its trade agreement with Mercosur bloc.
Of course there are legitimate arguments about how important trade agreements really are to the economy, and also about the desirability of their effects on domestic industries, supply-chain resilience and so on. But those are not the government’s arguments. This being so, then it could get more, and better, trade agreements if it successfully pursued a customs union agreement with the EU, which would also improve terms of trade with the EU itself. So, on the basis of ‘ruthless pragmatism’, why not make the ‘sovereign choice’ to seek such an agreement with the EU?
From this follows the more fundamental point, which lies right at the heart of the fallacy of Brexit and which was most strikingly articulated in the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. As I discussed at the time, this contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” Thus even as Britain embarked on the process of leaving it did so knowing that the central plank of the leave argument – that the UK had lost its sovereignty – was completely untrue. It was just ‘a feeling’. And the point still holds, so, on the Thomas-Symonds argument for the reset, there is an even stronger argument for seeking to join the EU, as a sovereign choice made on pragmatic grounds.
A path forward?
In short, the more the government now acknowledges the costs of Brexit, and the more overtly it justifies its reset in terms of the pragmatic response of a sovereign nation to those costs, the more it undermines both the philosophical and economic case for Brexit – and yet at the same time describes its position as delivering ‘proper Brexit’. Similarly, although this week Starmer gave his strongest statement yet that the international ‘volatility’ engendered by Trump’s regime, as well as the economic damage of Brexit, justifies an “ambitious” partnership with the EU, doing so only serves to highlight the constraints he has placed on those ambitions.
It presumably goes without saying that, going back to the electoral politics, this means that if it is true that the Labour Party is now willing to have a “row” about the false promises of Brexit it is unlikely to reap much, if any, reward from anti-Brexit voters. For it remains wedded to a policy which is not just lily-livered but self-contradictory
That doesn’t mean that it is realistic for Labour to adopt a ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’) position, let alone likely that it will do so. But in my view, as I’ve argued before, it should mean adopting the position that seeking to join would be desirable but is not feasible until such time as all the other main parties either accept this or, at least, undertake not to reverse such a process were it begun. This would at least bring some clarity to the “row”, forcing Tory and Reform Brexiters to discuss and defend Brexit, as they nowadays seem unwilling to do.
With that clarity might come some honesty, in the sense of the recognition that Brexit has not had majority support for a very long time but also by the recognition that, for so long as there is a distinct possibility that an incoming government would backtrack on it, any process towards joining is impossible (most obviously for the EU). That in turn could be part of a more general recognition, which has been largely absent throughout the Brexit process, that the future of UK-EU relations is not just about what Britain wants but what the EU and its member states want.
Taking all these things together might be the beginning of a recognition that, in the concluding words of an excellent analysis this week by Kirsty Hughes on her ScotEU Substack, “the path back needs strategic, honest, courageous political leaders and renewed, inclusive political debate.”
Deeply embedded dishonesty
However, it is difficult to be optimistic that any of this is about to happen, not least because although dishonesty certainly didn’t begin with Brexit, Brexit has rammed dishonesty so deeply into the body politic that it seems impossible to dislodge. A case in point is another aspect of the fallout from the Gorton & Denton by-election, namely the allegations of ‘family voting’ and voter coercion (with the implication that this had been amongst, specifically, Muslim voters). Last weekend, in what seemed to be an unusually detailed statement, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) announced that their investigation had found “no evidence” that this had occurred.
As I noted in my blog post at the time of the by-election, operators like Nigel Farage trade on the fact that such allegations stick in the public mind whereas even if subsequent investigations show them to be false that is barely noticed. No doubt that is true in this case, not least because whereas the original allegations were given very prominent coverage both in the right-wing press and by broadcasters including the BBC, the GMP’s statement was given far less attention.
But it’s actually worse than that, because the statement was immediately denounced by Farage as an “Establishment whitewash” and “another brushed-under-the-carpet report from the usual suspects”. Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate, also called it a “whitewash” and insisted that “sectarianism is taking over our democracy”, later strongly implying that he didn’t believe the police’s findings.
I’ve noted many times before that this kind of ‘non-falsifiable’ illogic permeated the entirety of the Brexit process and, by extension, now characterises Brexitism. Thus, in this case, had the police found evidence of family voting then, of course, it would be taken as proof that it had occurred. But, when the police found no evidence, this is taken as proof that it not only occurred but is being ‘covered up’.
What is far worse than that (or, rather, is enabled by it, showing why such illogic is dangerous and not just stupid) is how utterly corrosive and corrupting it is: as with depicting judges as ‘enemies of the people’ and civil servants as ‘saboteurs’, the Brexitists are determined to destroy every last vestige of trust in public institutions. Perhaps worst of all is that, whilst attacking the police investigation assists this agenda, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Farage et al. were secretly hoping that wrongdoing had taken place, yielding what would been a prominently reported and easily exploitable scandal.
The travails of MattGPT
Matt Goodwin has also been in the news for another reason. I referred in my previous post to his new book, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which has since been published and widely criticised, including in a debate on GB News during which Goodwin became visibly angry, even at one stage rounding on his ideological soul-mate Miriam Cates, who was chairing.
Indeed, tellingly, even those sympathetic to what might charitably be called Goodwin’s thesis were unimpressed, with one describing the book as the work of a “slopagandist”, another entitling his review “suicide of an author’s credibility”, and a third opining that the nickname ‘MattGPT’ would follow the former academic “to his grave”. By comparison, those less sympathetic were rather gentle in simply calling it “trash”. In fairness, it should be said that Goodwin had his defenders, but fairness also requires saying that the most prominent of these was the swivel-eyed Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson (£).
As the ‘MattGPT’ tag implies, much of the criticism has focussed on what appear to be bogus quotations generated by AI-hallucination (£), to which Goodwin’s rather piquant defence in the debate was that he had put the entire text through an AI checker which had exonerated it from the accusation of the book being AI-generated (though that had not, in fact, been the accusation). But perhaps the more damning criticism is of the misinterpretation of statistics about schoolchildren who have English as an Additional Language (EAL). This sounds rather geeky but is actually important, both in itself and because it creates the suspicion that the way Goodwin represented the EAL statistics was not the only way in which data had been manipulated in pursuit of the book’s claims.
In official statistics, “a pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English. This measure is not a measure of English language proficiency or a good proxy for recent immigration” (p.4 of link). On this basis, between 20% and 25% of pupils have EAL. From this, Goodwin seems to infer that they have either no, or at least impaired or deficient, proficiency in English.
However, according to Steve Strand, Professor of Education at Oxford University, Goodwin “is totally misunderstanding what this measure of EAL is. He keeps talking about English not being young people’s first language, but you could be recorded as EAL and still be totally fluent in English. So he’s not understanding the question that underlies the data.” Strand’s argument is borne out by the fact that, according to Department for Education’s 2020 report, in Spring 2018 some 61% of EAL schoolchildren were either fluent or competent in English [1].
Moreover, Goodwin claims that in schools in areas where EAL rates are high “English is no longer the main language” which carries at least the implication that some other language is, whereas, of course, in such situations English is, so to speak, the lingua franca. In that sense, what the EAL statistics actually show is exactly what would be expected from assimilating immigrants. At home, their children are exposed to and use another language, but in the public sphere, at school (and subsequently, no doubt, at work), they are additionally exposed to and use English. But in Goodwin’s telling it is sinister evidence that a process of ‘cultural erasure’ is underway.
Plastic patriots become counterfeit Christians
That same proposition is evident in the latest seasonal panic that Easter eggs are no longer called by that name, every aspect of which has been discredited by Emma Monks on her Monk Debunks Substack. But whilst, like the similar panics that Christmas has been replaced by ‘Winterval’, this is tediously familiar, it has a new salience because of the notable recent shift in the rhetoric of populist leaders towards stressing Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.
Admittedly, theologians might question the sacramental status of the chocolate Easter Egg, just as they might wonder if Tommy Robinson’s conversion is any more genuine than his name, be puzzled by Reform MP Robert Jenrick’s reference to “Psalm Sunday” (sic), and ponder the sacerdotal credentials of ‘Bishop’ Ceirion Dewar of Ceirion H. Dewar Ministries Ltd. But there is no doubt that there has been a profound change in the language being used by the populist right.
Nor is it just matter of language. It is also evident in what is emerging as Reform’s “family friendly” policy agenda – an agenda set out with great clarity by Lisa Burton in Yorkshire Bylines – with all it implies for abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights generally. One reason for these developments is the influence of US populists on their UK counterparts. It may also be relevant that Paul Marshall, so pivotal to British populists especially through his co-ownership of GB News, moves in those circles and is himself an evangelical Christian with a reportedly “spiritual mission” to fight ‘progressivism’ (which appears actually to mean post-Enlightenment rationality).
There is an obvious connection between these three stories – the discredited allegations of ‘family voting’, Goodwin’s discredited account of EAL statistics, and the discredited stories about the cancellation of Easter: they all circle around the same theme of ‘cultural erasure’ at the hands of Muslims, aided and abetted by the liberal ‘woke’ elite. And it is a message pouring in torrents across social media, and much of the print and broadcast media, every day, in the coverage of hundreds of different stories.
Another recent example is the spate of images of schoolchildren exercising on yoga mats carrying the false claim that they are being forced to participate in Muslim prayers. Yet another is the frenzied reaction to a BBC discussion about whether there are too many ‘dog-friendly’ spaces, representing it as a woke attempt to impose Muslim sensibilities upon the nation (it was actually about people who are scared of dogs). These, and innumerable other examples, are small-scale in themselves but it is that which makes them potent as tessellations of the same basic message.
But there is another connection between all these stories, and it is one which links directly back to Brexit.
Vibe politics
As these various stories have unfolded over the last fortnight, I have been looking at the social media responses not just from the big names of the culture wars but from the rank-and-file posters. What that reveals is not so much that the rebuttals of them are ignored as that they are discounted. That is, it may be accepted that such-and-such a detail is wrong, but, nevertheless, ‘we all know’ that the bigger truth holds good. This is the significance of the cumulative effect of similar stories. It creates a politics of ‘vibes’ just as with Brexit the effect of years of media stories made it “feel” as if we had lost sovereignty.
Of course, vibe politics is nothing new. Think of Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Think, for that matter, of the 1950s Macmillanite message that we “have never had it so good”. What is distinctive about populism is that it trades on ‘feel-bad’ rather than ‘feel-good’ vibes: on grievance, resentment, and fear. That, too, is evident in the stories I have just discussed and is absolutely central to the claims of ‘cultural erasure’.
I haven’t talked about the war in this post, since its deepening spiral only serves to re-enforce points which I’ve previously made. But Nigel Farage has been speaking about the war. Not, needless to say, the war the US has unleashed in the Middle East, about which, after his original Trump-crawl, he has been remarkably coy. No, as usual it was the Second World War or, more particularly, a single moment within it.
Thus, launching Reform’s London local government election campaign in Croydon, under its current and perhaps ill-advised slogan of ‘Reform will fix it’, he spluttered that: “This is, this is, this is 1940 all over again. The very existence of our nation, its culture, its identity is under threat.” It is the same message of a ‘nation in existential peril’ that Goodwin peddles; the same message as that of the ‘family voting’ accusations; the same message as is contained in the stories about Easter eggs, yoga mats, dogs, and all the rest of it.
Farage is right, though, to say that history is repeating itself. Not in the sense that it is 1940 all over again, but because it is 2015 all over again. Then, too, he was bloviating about 1940 but at that time it was to tell us it was the EU referendum which was “our modern day Battle of Britain”. Once again, Brexit has morphed into Brexitism.
It’s this repetition, this stuckness in the same myths and vibe-based messages, and the fact that, like it or not, they continue to resonate for perhaps a quarter or even a third of the adult population, and to be amplified by a phalanx of media commentors, which makes British politics so irredeemably dishonest, and the possibility of honesty about Brexit, specifically, so elusive.
With that happy thought I leave you to enjoy, to use the term cruelly stolen when the nasty Normans erased our culture and language, Ēostre.
Note
[1] The report notes that it is not possible to provide comparable figures for children for whom English is their first/ sole language, but it should not be assumed that all such children are fluent or competent.
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