Real war and culture war

Much of the news of the last fortnight has been pushed into the background by last weekend’s US-Israel attack on Iran and the regional conflict it has engendered. Where this will end is unclear, not least since it has no coherent aims. That is mainly well beyond the scope of this blog, but there are plenty of connections with Brexit and Brexitism.

Post-Brexit geo-politics

One is just that, as with Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine, not to mention climate change and tariff wars, it is yet another example of an international crisis where the UK’s position and interests are far closer to those of countries like France and Germany, and the EU generally, than to the US. Indeed, as regards Iran, specifically, that has been obvious since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. Now, however the conflict proceeds, it is almost inevitable that the EU and the UK will face common challenges in living with its aftermath which, if only for geographical reasons, will impinge far more on the European continent than on the US. As such, the crisis is a reminder of the fundamental strategic incongruity of Brexit.

It also, again as with other crises, provides a further illustration of the additional pressures Brexit places on the UK in its attempt to navigate around Trump’s capriciousness, spite, and bullying. As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr argued, there are no good options for Keir Starmer in this situation. Nor would there be for any other Prime Minister. I don’t, however, entirely agree with Behr that Starmer’s response pleases nobody. Personally, I think he has handled it as well as anyone could and many commentators, including Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (£), have said something similar.

Rather, the point is that Starmer is now so beleaguered that his many opponents are unwilling to give him any credit at all, or even to acknowledge that there are any difficulties or dilemmas for the UK. And even amongst those who are willing to acknowledge those difficulties, his position means he has very little goodwill or political capital to draw upon. Thus there are at least hints in the opinion polls so far that the public support the way the war is being handled whilst thinking that Starmer is handling it badly.

The Brexit imprint

The particular way that the domestic discussion has played out so far also bears the imprint of Brexit and Brexitism. There are many nuances to this, but in very broad terms public opinion polls show that the supporters of Reform and the Conservatives are considerably more likely to favour allowing the US to use UK bases to attack Iran than those of Labour, the Greens and the LibDems. Certainly the leaders of the former two parties castigated Starmer for not initially agreeing to such usage, as well as for being supposedly deficient, or at least dilatory, in protecting British military installations and assets in the conflict region.

Amongst the nuances, one of the more interesting is that, unlike Farage and Reform, Rupert Lowe and his new Restore Britain party are opposed to all UK involvement in the conflict (warning: links to the X cesspit where Lowe has found his natural home). This reflects a longstanding tension within the nationalist right between jingoistic bellicosity and isolationism, and in the past Farage, too, has been sceptical about UK military interventionism. Now this has become a new front in the growing schism, discussed in my previous post, between Reform and the even more extreme, or at least more openly extreme, far-right groups such as Lowe’s.

Of course, exactly the same tension exists in the US right, with Trump and the MAGA movement having in the past abjured such entanglements, especially in the Middle East. Trump’s new-found willingness for military adventurism has many explanations, including, I suspect, egotistical pleasure. But perhaps the key point is that what he and MAGA most objected to was the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’, which even in its least defensible manifestations had, or at least attempted to create, the façade of moral justification.

Trump’s doctrine, chillingly articulated by Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth this week, is an almost Nietzschean paean to a “warrior ethos” which disdains not just any residue of concern for international law but even “stupid rules of engagement”. As with any bully, the ultimate justification is the simple one: ‘because I can’. No doubt this has its own appeal to Farage, the one-time Flashman of Dulwich College, even were he not minded to support any initiative of Mr. Brexit, his hero in the White House, regardless of its merits. That support does not, of course, lead him to think Britain should accept any of the refugees the conflict will inevitably create and on this, at least, he and Lowe are agreed.

The intensifying culture war 

There is also a more direct connection between Brexitism and the political reaction to the Iran crisis, articulated most clearly, and most disgracefully, by Kemi Badenoch when she alleged that Starmer’s initial decision to deny the US use of UK airbases was due to his desire to pander to Muslim voters. She explicitly spliced this together with the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election (discussed in more detail below) adding to what has been a deeply unpleasant upsurge in the culture war demonization of British Muslims.

Yet, as is shown not just by Lowe’s anti-war stance but that of some Tory MPs, including the most senior and one of the most right-wing of them, Sir Edward Leigh, as well as many MPs of all parties, opposition to or concern about UK involvement spans all political positions, ethnicities and faiths (even assuming, which is surely unwarranted, that ‘Muslims’ en masse have a particular view of it). For that matter, the majority of the general public (excluding ‘don’t knows’) are opposed to UK airbases being used by the US [1], something which only the exceptionally dull-minded need to be told does not imply support for Iran’s despicable theocratic regime. Why, then, ascribe Starmer’s decision to Muslims? And if this was its reason, then how does Badenoch explain the subsequent decision to allow the use of bases for ‘defensive’ operations?

Inevitably, Badenoch’s accusation was subsequently echoed by Trump, allowing him to return to his habitual attacks on Britain’s supposed ‘unrecognizability’ (which is code for Muslim immigration) and on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as to repeat his criticism of Starmer’s lack of support for the war against Iran. This in turn allowed Badenoch, Farage, and others to criticize Starmer for damaging UK-US relations, and so the whole crazy, cross-pollinating stupidity rolls on and on. It is a grim irony that the Brexiters, who set such store by sovereignty, demand total fealty to a foreign president. And a grim reminder of their bogus patriotism that they encourage and amplify the verbal attacks of that president upon their own country. 

Badenoch’s accusation was also a manifestation of an explosion of quite vile, as well as dishonest, claims on social media that the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, had joined Muslims for a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and another making the same claim about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud. These and similar claims were based on photographs that were self-evidently taken well before Khamanei was killed and had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his death. Yet they were circulated by numerous high-profile right-wing figures, as influential as they are unhinged, ranging from Allison Pearson to John Cleese, and shared thousands, if not millions, of times. (I’m not going to link to this sewage, so readers will have to take my word for it.)

In this way, all of the now familiar skein of interconnections between the US and UK populist right, Brexiters, Brexitists, and the post-Brexit rise of ethnonationalism have been in evidence in the domestic response to the Iran crisis [2]. No doubt that would have been true in any event, but, as Badenoch’s intervention illustrates, it took on a particular hue because of the previous week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton.

The Gorton and Denton result

The first thing to say about that is that Reform, and their peculiar and obnoxious candidate Matt Goodwin, failed to win. Of course, it would have been remarkable had they done so, as this was not an obvious target seat for them, but it bears saying because there had been a sense, purveyed not just by the party but the drama-hungry media, that victory was within grasp. And that did not seem impossible given opinion polls showing an almost even three-way split in support between Reform, Greens, and Labour. Had it gone Reform’s way, that would undoubtedly have generated a rash of commentary about Reform being on an unstoppable journey to government.

So it matters that Reform failed, and failed by a significant margin. It also matters that, as happened at Caerphilly, when there was a route to defeat Reform and to reject Labour, voters took it. Thus in Gorton and Denton the Green vote (presumably) comprised those who straightforwardly support the Greens, those who voted Green to stop Reform, and those who voted Green as a rejection of Labour. By the day of the election, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were just slightly more likely to defeat Reform than Labour, making the choice for those to whom this was the top priority just slightly easier. Whether, had that not been the case, anti-Reform voters would have been willing to vote Labour is unknowable, but is something which will have an important bearing on the next general election.

Family voting?

What we can be sure of is that, had Reform won, by even a handful of votes, they would have hailed it as a democratic triumph in which the ‘silent majority’ of ‘ordinary, decent people’ had decisively spoken. As it was, they latched on to reports made by an organization called ‘Democracy Volunteers’, that there had been unusual volumes of ‘family voting’. This term, which refers to a practice outlawed by the 2023 Secret Ballots Act, seemed to be code for the claim that Muslim men had accompanied their female relatives into the polling booths and coerced them into voting for – presumably – the Greens. (Though, who knows, perhaps the implication was that white Christian Conservative patriarchs were reasserting ‘traditional family values’ by forcing their womenfolk to vote for Goodwin.)

There was a certain amount of social media ribaldry about the idea that the socially liberal female candidate of a party led by a gay Jewish man might have been the candidate of choice amongst traditionalist Muslim men. But, whilst that isn’t an unreasonable observation to make, it perhaps misses the nature of the accusation being made, which was two-fold: that the Green Party had concealed its social liberalism from some Muslim voters in election leaflets written in Urdu, and that the appeal it had for such voters was in its critique of Israel and support for Palestinians.

However, equally, even if these accusations were true, those making them never explained what is so wrong with emphasizing the party’s positions on these issues to voters who might support them, regardless of its position on other issues. All (successful) political parties build coalitions of voters with disparate, and often contradictory, priorities. We might also recall how, during the referendum, the Leave campaign deliberately and skillfully targeted different voter groups, including different ethnic groups, with messages tailored to their perceived concerns.

Whether or not the charge of ‘family voting’ was true, which is contested and is (rightly) under investigation, and despite that fact that, even if true, it is arithmetically implausible to think it could have been a clinching factor given the size of the Green majority, it quickly became linked to the claim that the Greens had won on the basis of “sectarianism”. This again seemed to be code for making an appeal to Muslims, or perhaps just anyone with dark skin. From this exploded a whole series of accusations about rigged postal voting and “foreign-born voters” having “stolen” the election.

These were not just social media talking points but, for example, were splashed on the front page of the Mail. This culminated in Farage announcing that Reform’s policy is now that foreigners will be banned from voting in elections, a reference to the longstanding right of nationals from qualifying Commonwealth countries, lawfully resident in the UK, to vote. One might now question the diligence with which Goodwin, if elected, would have worked for all his constituents and, for that matter, that of the existing Reform MPs in this respect.

Hypocrisy and ethno-nationalist sectarianism

It would be quite some task to unpick all the layers of hypocrisy in all this, so I’ll just make a few points. One is that Farage has constantly made complaints about electoral fraud, going back to at least 2014 which have rarely, if ever, been proven. But of course for operators like Farage that doesn’t matter: the accusation lodges in the public mind whereas the subsequent investigation showing it to be false is barely noticed. Another is to recall his own sanctimonious finger-wagging at ‘remainers’, when he insisted that "for a civilised democracy to work you need the losers' consent”. A third is how he, and other Brexiters, sought to galvanize Commonwealth immigrant voters to support Brexit. Indeed, many Brexiters argued that EU Freedom of Movement was effectively racist in discriminating against Commonwealth, especially South Asian, immigration.

Hypocrisy aside, these highly racialized allegations of electoral fraud have a particular salience because of the recent surge of ethno-nationalism, which now calls into question whether British nationals are ‘really’ British and/or English if they, or perhaps even their parents and grandparents, were not born here, at least if they are not white. It is actually this, if anything, which deserves the label of ‘sectarianism’ and, moreover, rather than sectarianism explaining the Green’s victory, it was the sectarianism of pitching almost entirely to ‘white working class’ voters which explains Reform’s failure to win.

What Reform’s reaction to this failure shows is that it will not be enough to defeat them (and similar parties) at the ballot box in order to expunge their influence. Indeed, there seems every prospect, and some indication, that if Reform fail to win the next general election then, Trump-like, they will cry foul. It may even be that, just as it often seemed as if the Brexiters would have preferred to have lost the referendum, the Brexitists would prefer to lose the next election, but to destabilize the country even further by positioning the victors as illegitimate and the entire democratic system as corrupted.

Questions for Labour

Against this background, the Gorton and Denton result also posed some serious questions for the Labour Party. At one level, these can be thought about in terms of electoral strategy and, as such, their answer is pretty obvious and has been very widely identified. That answer can be expressed in various ways, but was summed up by Sadiq Khan’s argument that Labour have to “stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives”. In effect, this is “the real leadership crisis” facing Keir Starmer which I discussed in my previous post.

However, the issues go much deeper than Starmer and much longer ago, after the 2021 Hartlepool by election, I set out some of these. Not all of that post has stood the test of time [3], but the central point holds: in very brief, the need to calibrate to representing Labour’s actual (potential) electoral coalition rather than that which historically existed. In that post, and elsewhere (£), I pointed out that part of the barrier to this is one of political psychology, whereby the party is heavily invested in the idea that male manual workers in manufacturing industry are the template for working-class authenticity. Since then, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is actually a manifestation of precisely the same nostalgia which is now so evident as a driver for the political right and Brexitism.

Labour’s terrible answers

As mentioned in my most recent post, there seemed to be a possibility that the ‘defenestration’ of Morgan McSweeney might mark an end to this kind of ‘Blue Labourism’ (though its grip on Labour goes deeper than McSweeney or his mentor Maurice Glasman). I finished that post by saying it was doubtful whether Starmer could rise to the challenge. There is now really no longer any room for doubt.

Starmer responded to the Greens’ by-election victory by making precisely the same accusation of “sectarianism” that Farage had levelled and, by linking this to the endorsement given to the Greens by the odious George Galloway, implicitly mirrored Reform’s claims about Islamification having played a decisive role. It was repellent in itself and, like so much else that Starmer does, politically maladroit, not least in ignoring what no doubt will have been the agonizing choice for some habitual Labour voters to support the Greens as the best chance of defeating Reform. That, as with his infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, he later distanced himself from what he has said only underscores the maladroitness

At the same time, Shabana Mahmood announced that she intends to press ahead with her hard-line anti-immigration reforms. These include, most shamefully, retrospectively increasing the amount of time before existing immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and making asylum awards temporary. Again, this is politically maladroit, just at the basic level of garnering electoral support: it won’t satisfy those minded to vote Reform and it will repel those minded to desert Labour to vote Green etc. And if, as may well happen, internal Labour opposition leads to it being abandoned then it will be chalked up not as a return to principle but yet another U-turn.  

It is also maladroit in a more general sense. Labour’s most compelling pitch at the last election was that it would offer competence, but this policy is woefully incompetent in the context of now rapidly declining immigration and the economic need for more, and not less, immigration. It thus directly contradicts the government’s central policy of boosting economic growth as well as exacerbating its fiscal constraints.  It is even incompetent in terms of any policy aim of integration, since making it harder to qualify for permanent residence makes it less likely that immigrants will integrate.

The competence issue matters because what is at stake here is not, as many commentators claim and, no doubt, some political activists and voters hope, that Labour need to respond to the by-election defeat with a ‘lurch to the left’. Setting an immigration policy which is fair, rational, and consonant with economic and demographic needs is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Operating an efficient and humane asylum process is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Making a clear distinction between immigration and asylum policies is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. To think otherwise is to cede the idea that these are somehow ‘extreme’ propositions and that the policies of virtually zero immigration, mass deportation, and the near-total rejection of asylum seekers advocated by Reform and others are the ‘norm’ or ‘moderate’.

Yet this is what the Labour government has accepted, and it is the most glaring way in which it has accepted Brexitism. Of course it is also this which has always lain at the heart of the timidity of the Brexit ‘reset’ with the EU, a reset which even in its own limited terms was denounced this week (£) by the Commons foreign affairs committee as “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If there was not so much other news, I would have more to say about that, including about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ claim that she wants to go further in breaking down trade barriers with the EU. Since there is no evidence, and surely no possibility, that this presages a break with Labour’s ‘red lines’, for now all that needs to be said is that the dishonesty and delusions of Brexit and Brexitism continue unabated.

Small comforts

It’s hard to feel anything other than pessimism at the moment. However this war develops, as always with war it will be ordinary, blameless people who simply want to lead ordinary, peaceful lives who suffer most. Something similar could be said of those being relentlessly attacked in the domestic culture wars.

There is only a small, though not entirely negligible, comfort in being spared the spectacle of Matt Goodwin pontificating on these matters in the House of Commons. But perhaps a slightly greater one in what that may betoken about the British electorate.

 

Notes

[1] The way this question was asked in the survey linked to does not really disclose what the public think about the subtle but important distinction between the use of UK bases for the attack on Iran (which the government did not grant) and their use to launch defensive operations against Iranian counter-attacks which may imperil British subjects and assets (which the government approved). If it did, I suspect that the public would support the government’s decisions in both respects. That seems to be borne out by other survey data about what the UK’s military response to the war should be.

[2] There’s a whole post that could be written about that fact that somewhere in that skein is Dubai. Lauded by Richard Tice as an exemplar of safety, it has become a magnet for right-wing British immigrants expats, most prominently Tice’s partner, the reliably graceless ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott (£). There, such proud patriots gloat, one can escape the roving gangs, ‘two-tier’ justice, and Orwellian suppressions of the right to incite murder – not to mention, of course, the taxes – of ‘Broken Britain’. As a view of what some have called the “gangsters’ paradise” of Dubai, it was always as hopelessly one-sided as the depiction of Britain. Now, with a certain piquancy (£), our intrepid correspondent reports that “expats brace of what tomorrow may bring” (£) as the British State organizes a rather different repatriation to that envisaged by some of her co-ideologues. Equally piquant is the news (£) of those desperately trying to get back to Dubai so as to avoid falling foul of rules to qualify for tax residency.

[3] The most egregious failing is that I assumed, not unreasonably, but as it has out turned mistakenly, that Boris Johnson had re-made the Conservatives as an electorally successful populist party and seen off the challenge of Farage.

Starmer’s real leadership crisis

In my previous post I advocated ‘counting to a hundred’ as an antidote to the hyper-frenetic news cycle. That advice would have served the media well during the subsequent frenzy of speculation about the imminent demise of Keir Starmer’s premiership. As the economics (and politics) writer Simon Nixon described it, this episode was a “breathless media circus [ending] in an embarrassing anti-climax” which raised “some awkward questions about the nature of British political journalism”.

It is certainly true that the media are addicted to political drama and spectacle, gleefully recycling rumours and anonymous briefings, and calling it reporting. It’s an approach embodied by the giggling fatuity of the BBC’s Political Editor, Chris Mason, treating politics as a cross between a spectator sport and a game show. Mason isn’t the only offender, of course, but he is one of the worst and, because of the status of the BBC, probably the most balefully influential. At all events, the consequence of such an approach is negative in a double sense. It saturates the airwaves with silliness, and it denudes political discourse of serious analysis, in this case of the real leadership crisis faced by Starmer.

The truncation of the political leadership lifecycle

Nevertheless, the vacuity of political journalism is only one component of a wider shift in political culture, a shift within which the timescale of political leadership has become much more truncated even as, and perhaps because, British politics has become more ‘presidential’. A few decades ago, Harold Wilson remained leader of the Labour Party despite losing the 1970 election and went on to become Prime Minister again. As Labour’s Opposition leader, Neil Kinnock lost both the 1987 and 1992 elections before stepping down. Since those days, losing an election has become an automatic trigger for resignation of the leader of the governing or main opposition party [1].

Alongside that there has been an upsurge of resignations whilst in office. These, too, happened in the past, but were generally occasioned by ill-health (if sometimes only as a pretext), as in the cases of Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson. More recently, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair resigned between elections for (very different) political reasons, but in both cases after long periods in office. It is only since 2016 that there has been a rapid churn of serving Prime Ministers, with David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all resigning between elections, and it is undeniable that this was largely a direct consequence of Brexit. Part of Starmer’s pitch to the electorate in 2024 was to end that roiling instability, but perhaps it is now embedded that every political crisis now becomes a leadership crisis. If so, that is yet another piece of Brexit damage.

A Starmer ‘reset’?

Of course this is not, in itself, a sufficient explanation of the travails of Starmer’s leadership, a subject I will return to when, as seems highly probable, he does eventually have to resign. For now, one interpretation of last week’s leadership ‘crisis’, and the defenestration of Morgan McSweeney it led to, is that it will both require and allow Starmer and his administration to be ‘bolder’ in disowning Brexit and building closer relations with the EU. That interpretation is given some plausibility by Starmer’s statement at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years any more”. It may also explain why last week Rachel Reeves explicitly accepted that “economic gravity is reality” (i.e. that geographical proximity is a key driver of trade) and that this mandates closer relationships and regulatory alignment with the EU.

Both statements were, in their way, striking. However, it is far from clear that they mean anything of substance in terms of policy or, which is really the same point in a different way, that they mark any change from the existing Labour ‘reset’ policy. If they have any significance, it might be as waymarkers in the glacial progress towards a time when Brexit is unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly, in the way that happened with the once highly divisive issues of ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’.

However, it should not be assumed that this progression is automatic and there are many reasons to doubt that it will be. It has become commonplace to cite the figure that 56% of the British public think that leaving the EU was a mistake, but it is equally remarkable that 31% think that it was right (and that 13% don’t know). That is very far from Brexit being ‘unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly’. Moreover, in an excellent post on his Substack newsletter discussing Brexit as a “collective folly”, the author and journalist Matt Carr points out that “a credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.”

A new Lowe

Carr is referring, obviously, to Nigel Farage and the Reform party, which continues to lead in all recent opinion polls, with 24% to 32% of the public supporting it. As always, it bears saying that, in the British electoral system, and with a fragmented vote for the other parties, this means that a Reform or Reform-led government is a real possibility. But, even if this does not come to pass, the important point is that a really quite sizeable minority of the population are committed to what I call Brexitism. Not only that, but there are multiple signs that for some this is taking increasingly extreme forms.

This extremism was underscored by last weekend’s launch of the ‘Restore Britain’ party by the MP Rupert Lowe (initially elected for Reform but thrown out of the party after a row with Nigel Farage). Lowe created Restore Britain last year as a ‘political movement’, but its transformation into a party seems to be an attempt to draw together various other fringe parties and groups, including Ben Habib’s Advance UK, another splinter group from Reform, which is supported by Tommy Robinson (despite the report linked to, it is not entirely clear whether he has actually joined). Lowe’s new party has already been endorsed by Elon Musk.

This is an important development, since Restore Britain is, by any definition, a far-right party, and has already attracted enthusiastic support from those who are openly fascists. Lowe, despite his all too obvious lack of charisma, and despite his attempt to project a cuddly image, has become their figurehead because of the viciousness of his rhetoric. Indeed, his rallying call for the new party (warning: link to X) has a decidedly fascistic tang to it: “we will only accept those who share our values, and understand the painful decisions that will need to be taken. People know what we stand for. If you don't have the stomach for it, don't bother.”

The roots of the launch of this new party go back some time, and I wrote about them in detail about a year ago, also making the prediction that “the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years”. From that point of view, one consequence of Restore Britain may well be to siphon off small but potentially decisive numbers of Reform’s core vote, making a Farage election victory less likely. It has certainly already led to a vitriolic exchange between Lowe and Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, of which perhaps the most amusingly ironic feature is the ex-professor bemoaning (warning: X again) that Restore’s “ecosystem is riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists”, prompting the gamey response from Lowe than Goodwin is “full of turquoise s***” and that Reform’s “deportation policy is p***-weak” [2].

But, piquant as it may be for observers to see these two deeply unpleasant people, and their respective parties, squaring up to each other, that should not blind us to the fact that, whatever happens electorally, something profoundly dangerous is unfolding.

The far-right’s ‘cultural turn’

For what is at stake is not just the working out of the incipient splits in Reform that I referred to a year ago. The period since then has seen an ever-more overt ethno-nationalism, along with literal street violence outside asylum hotels and symbolic street violence of the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign (discussed in more detail in a previous post). At the same time, the far-right has become increasingly vociferous not just about immigration but about the supposed cultural or civilizational ‘erasure’ of the English and/or British, flames which have been fanned from across the Atlantic by Trump and his administration as well as by Musk.

One reason this is a significant shift is because it moves the terrain away from immigration levels, which have been falling for some time, to the idea of cultural – for which read racial – ‘purification’ and, in policy terms, to mass deportations which, indeed, is Lowe’s principal policy offering. But this has not arisen in a vacuum. It is both the cause and consequence of the normalization of, inter alia, the claim that multi-culturalism has failed, the claim that there is or has been ‘uncontrolled immigration’, the conflation of immigration with asylum-seeking, and the idea that Britain is being ‘invaded’ by ‘young men of fighting age’.

It is within that context that supposedly respectable people like the Brexit-backing tax exile billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, feel able to come out with noxious comments about Britain “being colonised by immigrants”, notwithstanding his subsequent mealy-mouthed non-apology, and for others to insist that, even if the language used was ‘unfortunate’, he “has a point”.

Labour’s complicity

That context has not simply been created by far-right social media crusaders. It has been aided and abetted by the Labour government, most egregiously by Starmer himself, in his disgraceful ‘island of strangers’ speech, and by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s hard-line anti-immigration policies. One feature of the latter which is of particular importance is the proposal to change the rules governing current immigrants, in terms of the period before indefinite leave to remain can be sought, which, unlike measures to curtail new immigration, is at least the country cousin of deportation in the sense of having a retrospective effect (which, as I discussed in a post last October, crosses a very significant line).

Here, too, Starmer’s recent leadership crisis may herald a shift. He was quick to criticise Ratcliffe’s comments, which perhaps would not have happened had McSweeney still been in post. And it may well be that the crisis will give fresh impetus to internal Labour opposition to the Mahmood proposals. Even so, it is hard to envisage the present government decisively and wholeheartedly challenging the anti-immigration narrative. Yet, ironically and predictably, net migration looks on course to become negative this year (and, despite the claims of Farage and others, this is not because of an exodus of British people).

The effects are already being felt by businesses, public services, and universities. The latter are particularly affected by another damaging conflation, that of overseas students and immigrants, and, in another irony, the impact is already being felt in ‘left-behind’ areas like Southend, with the closure of a campus of Essex University which has experienced a 52% fall in international student enrollment. With that goes not just job losses in universities, but all the knock-on effects on local businesses. Britain is self-immolating one of its greatest economic, cultural and soft power assets, and its economy generally, in the name of controlling immigration and yet, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, two-thirds of the public believe that immigration is still rising.

The challenge for Starmer

From this perspective, it is simply wrong for Starmer to say that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”. Even if by that he meant only that Britain was open to international, and especially European, partnerships than it had been under the Tories, and especially in the security and defence domain, it still does not really make sense since, as I’ve pointed out many times before, Britain cannot be a reliable member of such partnerships whilst Brexitism flourishes domestically.  And Brexitism will continue to flourish whilst what would otherwise be a very small minority of ethno-nationalists are able to frame the terms in which immigration is discussed and immigration policy is enacted, or at the very least to pull the framing of those terms towards their own.

This is the real crisis for Starmer’s leadership (or at least one aspect of it), rather than the superficial drivel trotted out by political journalists like Chris Mason. It is a challenge to him not simply personally but philosophically, in that it entails a shift from what we might call the ‘McSweeney’ approach of ‘responding to voters’ demands’ to the more profound sense of leadership as the task of shaping, and in the process sometimes challenging, those demands. With McSweeney gone, Starmer has a chance, perhaps his final chance, to rise to that challenge. Whether he has either the personal or philosophical capacity to do so is doubtful.

 

Appendix

It doesn’t fit into the focus of this post, but I do want to record yet another tombstone in the graveyard of Brexit hubris. This week the Financial Times reported (£) that the government has “quietly shelved” the programme to build a high-tech frictionless border following years of delays and spiralling costs. This was the project announced in December 2020, in the final days of the transition period, which was to create (of course) “the most effective border in the world by 2025” and was explicitly claimed as a Brexit benefit giving a “once in a lifetime opportunity to transform our borders” (Michael Gove) now that Britain was “free to seize the opportunities that come with being a sovereign nation once again” (Priti Patel). I’ve discussed this project several times in the past, for example in May 2022 when I expressed pessimism about its costs, delivery time and functionality. That pessimism turned out to be optimistic in assuming that it would, eventually, be implemented.

It’s worth recalling this not just as yet another Brexit failure but also because for years during the Article 50 negotiations Brexiters insisted that it would be perfectly possible, even easy, to create ‘alternative arrangements’ for a high-tech frictionless border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This, they claimed, made the Northern Ireland Protocol unnecessary, and a ruse designed by Dublin and Brussels to thwart Brexit. The quiet death of “the most effective border in the world” is a fresh reminder of just how dishonest and ignorant all these claims were.

 

Notes

[1] Theresa May isn’t really an exception in that, whilst she did not win the 2017 election outright, she did not lose it per se and was still able to form a government with DUP support.

[2] As ever, my suppression of ‘rude’ words isn’t due to any prissiness on my part, but because including them can lead to problems in sharing/ linking to this blog.

Count to one hundred

It’s indicative of the Trumpian world, as well as the hyper-frenetic nature of the contemporary media, that the ‘Greenland crisis’ which dominated the news when I wrote my previous post has all but disappeared from view. Its replacement this week by the Epstein files scandal is, in one very particular way, an illustration of how the two are linked in that the disclosures, which have convulsed British politics, only arose because of the persistent questions in the US about the Trump-Epstein relationship. That freneticism is disorientating, intentionally so in Trump's case, so it's worth slowing down and 'counting to one hundred' rather than responding to each twist and turn. In any case, a fortnightly blog imposes that discipline. 

In fact, even before the latest Epstein story broke the Greenland crisis had become old news and the standard analysis of this seems to be that ‘Trump always chickens out’ (TACO) or, alternatively, that, like a market stall haggler, Trump starts with maximalist demands, always intending to settle for less. I’m not so sure. As Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland points out, Trump’s more common pattern is to briefly retreat then return for more. Thus on Greenland, within a few days of his apparent climbdown, Trump’s envoy was once again demanding (£) “total, unfettered access” to the territory.

The truth is, we don’t know what Trump was offered by NATO’s Mark Rutte that led to the sudden withdrawal of the ‘Greenland tariffs’ threat, and we don’t know what will happen next. And that is just one example of the bigger truth about Trump: no one knows what he will do next across the board. Another example is his sudden turnaround yesterday on his previous turnaround on the ‘Chagos deal’, which, incidentally, leaves those like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who used Trump’s previous statement as a stick with which to beat the government looking rather stupid (it’s also a good example of why ‘counting to a hundred’ in the current political climate is sensible).

It’s this unpredictability, as much as anything else, which presents the UK, like every other country, with so many dilemmas. It is also what is gradually draining away US power and prestige. Far from ’making America great again’ Trump is actually diminishing his country, burning away its ‘soft power’ and, increasingly, making it an undesirable trade and defence partner (£).

The Carney Doctrine in practice

So it’s not just that the Greenland crisis, when the US made both military and economic threats against its closest allies, won’t be forgotten. It’s that many countries, including the UK, are following the ‘Carney doctrine’ discussed in my previous post, finding new ways to navigate around the malevolent and unpredictable superpower that America has become. Examples from the last fortnight include Keir Starmer’s visit to China, to promote economic ties and to smooth diplomatic relations (just as have Mark Carney and President Orsi of Uruguay), followed by a slightly less high-profile stop in Japan to discuss economic and defence links. Another example is the completion of an EU-India Free Trade Agreement, which also included significant steps towards security cooperation [1].

Obviously, these events were in train before the Greenland Crisis and before Carney’s Davos speech. That speech was merely a sharp articulation of an existing trend, and the Carney Doctrine has now become a useful way of framing the continuation of that trend. The point is that these, and similar, events have to be understood in relation to Trump. Thus Reuters reported Starmer’s China visit as the latest example of countries “seeking an economic and geopolitical hedge against Trump's unpredictability” whilst Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College London, argued that it “reflects the realities of a new global order that has upended traditional alliances”.

Similarly, the EU-India deal, which has been long-delayed, was undoubtedly accelerated by Trump’s erratic and punitive tariff policies, and was described in very Carney-like terms by trade expert Amitendu Palit, of the National University of Singapore, as being “a strong signal for global middle powers committed to rules-based trade”. Another analyst spelled out that “this is not simply a trade deal. It is an act of geopolitical statecraft; one that reveals how major democratic economies are adapting to a more fractured and volatile global order.”

The rapprochement between the UK and China is not without risks. Just as Carney’s visit to Beijing attracted Trump’s ire, so too, though in slightly milder terms, did Starmer’s. Meanwhile, domestically, the potential security problems as well as the human rights implications, of closer relations with China attracted criticism. But this just underlines that there are no good options, and that, whatever else China may be, it, unlike the US, is at least relatively predictable and if Trump doesn’t like that then he has only himself to blame. This also means that, for the foreseeable future, there is going to be no easy way of describing the UK’s international relations posture in the way that, at least to some extent, was possible during the Cold War. It’s going to be a hodge-podge of uncomfortable accommodations.

Brexit: a hodge-podge of its own

Of course, those accommodations are made all the more uncomfortable by Brexit. Indeed, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the US, and the very profound discomfort it has caused the government this week, arose at least in part because, as the Financial Times trade commentator Alan Beattie has pointed out, it was believed that he would be able to deliver the supposed prize of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US (or non-deal, as it has so far largely turned out to be). It also seems pretty obvious that he was appointed because of rather than despite his friendship with Epstein, in the sense that it was such connections that made Mandelson the kind of credible Trump-whisperer that post-Brexit Britain needed: all three men swam in the same fetid cesspool of wealth and depravity.

That aside, the more general point is that, given the situation Trump has created, what the UK most needs is a close, predictable relationship with a major geo-political entity with which it is closely aligned in terms of trade, interests, and values. Thus it is more obvious than ever that Brexit was supremely stupid. EU membership would not remove the challenges of navigating relations with the US and China, but it would provide a stable anchor-point for that navigation (I’m aware that this metaphor is mangled). Now, given that Brexit has happened, the obvious logic of the global situation for the UK is to move closer to the EU.

In fact, what we see in that respect is also a hodge-podge. Last week, Starmer stated that the UK should look to “go further” at the next summit with the EU. This is to be held in May, with what was in effect a pre-meeting having taken place this week, resulting in a rather bland joint statement. One implication of that statement, at least on my reading (the wording is slightly ambiguous), is that the once eagerly anticipated 2026 review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is now redundant, with everything folded into the ongoing process of the summits. Yet, despite the talk of ‘going further’, the reality is that almost none of the things agreed in principle at last year’s summit have been finalised, and this week’s statement gives only vague aspirations for when they will be [2]. And one of last year’s proposals, UK participation in the EU SAFE fund for defence procurement, has actually already failed, although, partly because of the Greenland crisis, it seems that there could be a new attempt at an agreement.

There is also a very mixed picture in the regulatory sphere. The latest iteration of the invaluable UKICE regulatory divergence tracker shows a variety of passive and active divergences between the UK and the EU, alongside some cases of active alignment. In his analysis of the overall position, Joël Reland, the compiler of the tracker, argues that there has been greater divergence under the Labour government than under its Conservative predecessor. This is because, whilst broadly pursuing ‘alignment’ in relation to trade in goods, there has been targeted divergence in relation to some (not all) services, especially financial services, and technology regulation. In this respect, Reland suggests, the Labour approach is more precise than that of the last government in identifying priorities and, in a certain sense, more effective in actually making concrete changes within those priority areas.

There’s a lot to unpack in that analysis. A preliminary point is just a reiteration of what I’ve already said: the decisions the UK is taking do not point in a single direction. Secondly, as Reland points out, the actual economic impact of these regulatory divergences is likely to be very slim. In other words, they show one of the many basic flaws in the entire Brexit prospectus: it is simply wrong to claim that freedom to diverge from EU regulations constitutes an economic benefit (and, certainly, to claim that it could remotely compensate for the costs of having that freedom). Indeed, the reason why the Tories did not greatly diverge from EU regulations when they were in power was not through any lack of zeal. For example, no one could accuse Jacob Rees-Mogg as deficient in such zeal yet, when he was Minister for Brexit Opportunities, he was notably reduced to asking Sun readers to identify what these benefits might be.

Perhaps the more important point is a political one, and it is one replete with ironies. For whilst the government may be diverging more from some EU regulations than its predecessor and is certainly disappointing many of its anti-Brexit supporters in doing so, its opponents are insisting that it is doing the opposite. Indeed, there has been a rash of anniversary commentary (marking six years since the UK formally left the EU and, more imprecisely, ten years since the referendum) bemoaning Labour’s – yes, of course – ‘betrayal’ of Brexit. I’m not sure, by the way, when it was first claimed that Brexit had been betrayed, but I suspect that it is approximately the tenth anniversary of that, too.

A necessary betrayal

More specifically, the Express has launched a “crusade” to “Give us a Proper Brexit”, a campaign backed, inevitably, by Nigel Farage and, even more shamelessly, by Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch. Since Johnson actually negotiated the terms of Brexit and Badenoch had key ministerial roles associated with delivering post-Brexit ‘opportunities’ it's questionable exactly what their credentials as ‘crusaders’ for ‘a proper Brexit’ might be. The obvious conclusion should be that ‘proper Brexit’ is a mirage, but it is one which eludes arch-Brexiters such as serial idiot Daniel Hannan (£),  for whom the “cowardice” of Britain’s leaders explains why Brexit is “not more popular” (even that formulation is slyly dishonest, as if it is ‘popular’, but could be more so).

All of this is dismally familiar, since the claim that Brexit would all have been wonderful if only it had been done ‘properly’ has, like the claim that it has been betrayed, been endlessly repeated since 2016. Equally dismal is that, even after all these years, Brexiters either can’t describe what this ‘proper Brexit’ would consist of or, if they can, are unable to agree with each other’s descriptions. Even more dismal is that what most of them do now agree about is that true Brexit means leaving the ECHR, which was never entailed by Brexit.

However, the ‘proper Brexit’ theme has a new and particular salience in the current political context. That context is, of course, the rise of Reform UK, and the increasingly urgent need for its opponents to expose its vulnerabilities. These are multiple, including the many failures and scandals which have attended even the short time it has controlled local councils, and several of them centre on Farage, on whom Reform is almost totally reliant. His vulnerabilities include his close relationship with Trump, his admiration for Putin, his financial dealings, and, at least potentially, Brexit. After all, this is the defining policy of his political career.

If it was remotely possible to make the case that Brexit had been a success, then Farage would certainly be taking credit for it. The fact that he does not, and has even called it a failure, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence why there is simply no plausible basis for the continuing attempts of some Brexiters to claim otherwise. Unlike those diehards, Farage, who if nothing else is an accomplished political operator, knows that that argument has been lost. Yet he can hardly disavow Brexit as an ‘idea’ given both his own support for it and the deep emotional commitment to it amongst his core voters. Thus the narrative of Brexit betrayal is absolutely central to his political credibility and prospects, and, in turn, to those of Reform [3].

This is one reason why the steady stream of Tory defections to Reform, Suella Braverman being the latest, is potentially damaging to his party. Along with the general point that this makes it harder to sustain Reform’s image as an insurgent alternative to ‘the Establishment’, and the Conservative Party in particular, it prompts the specific question: who betrayed Brexit, if not these former Tory MPs and government ministers? Naturally, they would have their own answers (the civil service, the judges, the metropolitan elite etc.), but, for many committed or potential Reform voters, the answer will be Tory politicians, especially senior Cabinet ministers like Braverman.

The angry man

The next test for Reform’s prospects will be the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. It will be an unusually complex contest, for the reasons set out with great clarity by the political scientist Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University. Some of that complexity is specific to the seat, and to this particular point in the electoral cycle (and now, very likely, the impact of the Epstein scandal), but some of it is a harbinger of what probably awaits us at the next general election when the splintering of party loyalties combined with the first-past-the-post electoral system will produce unpredictable and possibly bizarre results.

One thing which is specific to this by-election is Reform’s choice of Matt Goodwin as its candidate. Much has been written about Goodwin’s journey from being a reasonably successful academic specialising in the study of right-wing populism to a strident populist ideologue (the profile by James Ball in The New World last year and Ian Dunt’s assessment a couple of weeks’ ago will tell those who aren’t familiar with this story most of what they need to know). In some ways, he is just an identikit of such ideologues, notable, if at all, for a degree of pomposity and a whiff of megalomania (at one stage, he sought to found his own party and adopted a vaguely sinister avatar, now alas deleted, depicting himself in black and white, with jutting jaw, rather like a latter-day Roderick Spode). However, he also, far more than Farage, has become a more-or-less open champion for English ethno-nationalism, reflected in the fact that his candidature has now been endorsed by Tommy Robinson. Reform has repudiated that endorsement but, so far as I am aware, Goodwin has not.

If he is elected, then, it will betoken more than a win for Farage. Farage, whatever his true beliefs may be, has always been very careful, and fairly adept, at distancing himself from overt extremism, including repeatedly distancing himself from Robinson. He projects, fairly successfully, the image of a jovial, common-sense fellow, superficial as that image may be. Goodwin cuts a very different figure, and if he wins it will be an electoral endorsement of ideas which had been confined to the extreme fringes of the far right for decades, especially the idea that being born in Britain doesn’t make people British. His prolific, even hyperactive, social media postings have for some time now obsessively documented the actual or alleged crimes of immigrants, especially refugees, and predicted civilizational collapse. And, unlike Farage, who occasionally displays flashes of humour, Goodwin is relentlessly, splenetically, angry.

The angry brigade

In that respect, whatever the outcome of this by-election, Goodwin is representative of a group of voters who are highly active online, expressing their anger and in the process inciting their own and others' increasingly radical positions. Whereas much attention has been given to the online radicalization of the young and, especially, of young Muslims, this group are old (usually meaning the ‘baby boomers’ born before 1965) or middle-aged (usually meaning ‘Gen-X’ born between 1965 and 1980). They are also predominantly white, and generally but not always male. Apart from being slightly younger, having been born in 1981, Goodwin and his escalating online anger and growing radicalism perfectly fits the profile as, no doubt, do many of his followers.

Crucially, these people’s activities are not confined to the online world (the online and real-world distinction anyway being increasingly blurred). For one thing, as with older people generally, they are more likely to vote than younger cohorts. But they also take part in street politics, including the violent unrest and rioting associated with the asylum hotels ‘protests’. Recently, a few extreme cases have gone even further. One example is the ‘Ulez bomber’ convicted last week, who had not only apparently been radicalised by online far-right discussion forums but, in those forums, is regarded as a hero. In his case, he was arrested before he hurt anyone, unlike the far worse case of the ex-soldier who, in a fit of uncontrollable anger, rammed his car through a crowd of Liverpool fans, injuring 134 people. The background to his crimes is complex, but includes following a small number of social media accounts of whom most were associated with the far-right.

I’m obviously not suggesting that the online anger of right-wing populists necessarily causes people to commit crimes, or that most of those who post or are exposed to that anger engage in violence, or that crimes such as those mentioned would not occur anyway. But it is not unreasonable to assume that the online expression of anger amongst older people informs their political decisions (indeed, it is hard to imagine that it would not), and that it matches the age and gender profiles of electoral support for Reform. The same is probably true of support for the various small far-right parties such as Advance UK (which last week recruited two Devon County councillors who were originally elected as Reform candidates). And although this anger isn’t unique to Britain, it is hardly outlandish to say that in the British context it is connected to the anger which drove at least some of the vote for Brexit, and which continues to inform the anger about Brexit having been betrayed.

Political anger has been stoked this week by the Epstein scandal, and of course anger about that is by no means confined to the populist right. However, for the populist right specifically, it adds new ballast to its familiar critique of the ‘corrupt globalist elite’ and its general rejection of ‘mainstream politicians’ as all being as bad as each other. It does bear saying, though, that the scandal could backfire on them because it is already clear that there are multiple connections between Epstein and the British and American populist right, and that Epstein, like others in his circle of anarchistic oligarchs, was an enthusiast for Brexit. For that matter, it is revealing Farage’s brazen opportunism and hypocrisy, as he castigates Starmer for appointing Mandelson whilst praising the appointment at the time.

Nursery politics

But, in a sense, it’s all irrelevant. There will always be some new story or scandal to feed the anger, and the details get forgotten immediately, because, fundamentally, it’s not about this or that event, it’s about anger as a permanent political condition. I’m not sure that this condition of anger can be assuaged, not least because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, much of it stems from an impossible desire to reclaim an imaginary past or, more profoundly, not from a desire for grievances to be redressed but to luxuriate in the feeling of aggrievement. On either account, this explains why, for such voters, having been given Brexit, they are now even angrier because it isn’t the right sort of Brexit.

Strangely, whilst this anger is most evident amongst older voters, there is something childish about it. One of my earliest memories (and one my family reminded me of for years) is of a day when I was, perhaps, five years old and for some reason I pestered and pleaded for my mother to buy some honey. She eventually gave in, but when I saw it, I fell into a raging, uncontrollable tantrum because, I shrieked, she had bought the wrong sort of honey.

And this brings us back to the beginning of this post. For all that he has far more power than them, Donald Trump is not so different to the on-line army of angry old white British men radicalizing themselves and each other. There is at least a rhyme between the two. Trump’s rapacious and capricious ego, driving his unpredictable demands and vindictive assaults on anyone who crosses or slights him, is also child-like in its nature. Perhaps that is also why living through the current political period is so neuralgically wearisome, like being trapped in a nursery not just full of, but run by, angry screaming toddlers. It also brings us back to 'counting to a hundred' which, apart from being a useful antidote to the frenetic news cycle, was what a wiser American President, Thomas Jefferson, advised the very angry to do before speaking.
 

Notes

[1] The EU-India trade agreement underscores the fragility of claims about Brexit benefits, of which the UK-India trade deal is supposedly an example. The slight difference in timing hardly warrants that supposition (there are also some signs of closer EU-CPTPP integration). The same potentially applies to the regulatory choices exercised by the UK (e.g. in relation to gene-editing or financial services).

[2} For a detailed update on the reset and its future prospects, see this week’s policy briefing from Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform.

[3] This means that Starmer’s attempts to attack Farage on Brexit aren’t very effective, and might even serve to endorse Farage’s own position, because in doing so Starmer insists on referring to “botched Brexit”. The reason, of course, is that he wants to imply to Labour leave voters that he is not opposed to Brexit and isn’t going to reverse it but ‘improve’ it. But even if that line made some kind of sense as an attack on the Tories, it effectively validates Farage’s claim that Brexit wasn’t done ‘properly’, even if he has a different view on how it should have been done.

Making sense of the madness

The press of events in the fortnight since my last post has been dizzying and disorientating. Even at the height of the ‘Brexit battles’ it was not so difficult to keep abreast of what is happening, let alone to acquire some degree of analytic distance so as to make sense of it. Indeed, it is perfectly possible that within minutes of publishing today’s post it will be made obsolete or irrelevant by some new shock.

I’m obviously referring to what can be called the ‘Greenland Crisis’, and its scale means that it will be the subject of the whole of this post. So I won’t be able to discuss the latest rash of Tory defections to Reform, important as they are to the politics of Brexitism, except to say that they show the growing difficulty of Reform’s attempts to depict themselves as outsiders and insurgents. Nor will I discuss the reports that the EU is seeking a ‘Farage Clause’ in any ‘reset’ agreement with the UK as insurance against a future government reneging on any such agreement. However, I have done so in a recent article in Byline Times.

In my previous post I argued that Trump’s demand to take over Greenland, rather than his attack on Venezuela, was going to be the crucial tipping point for relations between the US, the EU, and the UK. In particular, I suggested that it gave new urgency to the need to massively deepen UK-EU defence and security cooperation. Subsequently, a slew of articles by rather more heavyweight political commentators made versions of the same point (examples include Gideon Rachman (£), Martin Sandbu (£), and Philip Stephens). It also featured within the much wider tour d’horizon of the current geo-political scene provided by Bronwen Maddox in her annual lecture as Director of the Chatham House think-tank. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that anyone expected the Greenland Crisis to escalate as rapidly as it did, or to at least apparently subside with equal rapidity.

The Greenland crisis

The first key event was last week’s decision by several European NATO countries, including the UK, to send military forces to Greenland to undertake or prepare for training exercises. The numbers were very limited, in the UK’s case reportedly only a single soldier, but the deployment was highly symbolic. One important aspect of that symbolism was that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK aligned with those EU countries taking part.

However, the wider symbolic meaning of the deployment had a degree of ambiguity. Some declared it to be a warning to the US that any attempt to take Greenland by force would be resisted, and it is worth re-iterating that the very possibility of this being its meaning shows the extraordinary situation we are now in. Others presented it as a sign that, just as Trump had demanded, Europeans were stepping up to contribute to NATO’s security rather than just leaving it to America.

The next key event showed that Trump, at least, interpreted it as having the first meaning and took it as an affront, prompting him last weekend to threaten to levy tariffs on goods from the UK and the EU, or at least those EU countries which had sent forces [1]. Yet this response was itself open to two interpretations. One was that Trump was showing he would attack those who defied him, and in that sense was a show of strength. The other was that, by making it an economic rather than a military attack, it showed the limits to his strength because he was signalling that he did not intend to take control of Greenland militarily in the face of the resolve shown by Europeans (if only because he would not have domestic political support for doing so). That he does not now intend to do so was stated explicitly in his subsequent, rambling Davos speech on Wednesday, during which he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the fear that he would do so arose from his own previous statements. He created the crisis.

Then, abruptly, later on Wednesday, Trump announced that he had struck the “framework of a deal” with Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, and that the threat of ‘Greenland tariffs’ had been withdrawn. The nature of this framework remains unclear, and its details have not been finalized, but it seems sure to fall short of what had been the demand for Greenland to become unequivocally part of the United States. It may even be scarcely different to the existing situation. Many analysts attribute Trump’s about-turn to the stock market falls his tariff threats had caused earlier in the week, just as bond market reaction led him to retreat from many of his ‘liberation day’ tariff threats last year.

Of course, trying to explain or make sense of Trump’s words and actions is difficult since he has always been capricious and now appears to be going senile. It is certainly impossible to predict what he may do in the future. He may decide ‘the deal’ he has done with Rutte is not good enough. He may change his mind about the Greenland tariffs again. Or he may revert to his threats to take Greenland by force. What is clear is that his motivations are bound up with his monstrously rapacious ego, as shown by the insane letter he sent to the Norwegian Prime Minister in which he linked his designs on Greenland to his pique at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Even so, it would be a mistake to ignore that, Trump’s baroque psychology and mafia boss persona aside, Washington’s conduct is also driven by the hard-eyed men who have re-drawn the entire shape of US foreign policy. For them, US ‘hemispheric hegemony’ is not about placating ‘a King gone mad’ but a deadly serious ideological project which, amongst other things, dispenses with the idea of NATO as a vehicle for collective security. Trump may like that idea for egotistical reasons, but his henchmen have their own motivations and, even if the attempt to annex Greenland founders, those motivations remain intact. At all events, as Bronwen Maddox argues, it cannot be assumed that the US is going to “snap back” to its traditional post-WW2 posture, even once Trump has gone. Nor has the apparent resolution of the immediate crisis over Greenland ended the wider crisis faced by NATO and multi-lateral institutions more generally.

The unavoidability of choice

For the UK, this means that Keir Starmer’s continuing insistence that there is no choice to be made between its relations with the US and the EU is becoming ever-more implausible. The decision to be included in both statements and military deployments with Denmark, France, Germany etc. was a decision to side with Europe against the US, if only because that is how Trump interpreted it. And Starmer’s insistence on Greenland’s sovereignty and criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, an insistence which has always been unambiguous and became more robust as the week went on, is also a choice to side with the EU and against the US, and has also been interpreted by Trump in that way. On the other hand, his implication during this week that, unlike the EU, he was not prepared to retaliate against the tariff threats could be interpreted, if not as siding with the US, then at least as not showing solidarity with the EU.

I don’t mean by this that there’s any real prospect that Starmer will ever openly acknowledge that there is a choice to be made, nor that he needs to. I mean that, acknowledged or not, there is no decision the UK can take, and no statement it can make, including taking no decisions or making no statements, which avoids that choice. The choice, or at least the sub-choices within it, have to be made because they cannot not be made.

This situation would pose acute problems for the UK even if it were still a member of the EU (just as it does for the EU, itself, its individual members, and for other countries around the world), but Brexit undoubtedly makes it far worse. To take the most obvious example, were there to be a trade war with the US, over Greenland or anything else, then the UK would be far better placed if it were an EU member, both in terms of its offensive capacity (against the US) and its defensive capacity (integrated trade within the single market).

However, it is the wider, strategic issues which are even more important. The Brexiter insistence that the EU was irrelevant to UK security, which they claimed was entirely catered for by a US-led NATO, which was always ill-informed, is now exposed as the greatest strategic miscalculation in modern British history. And, not coincidentally, those who still support that miscalculation are the very same people – Farage, Hannan, Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc. – who hailed Trump as the great ally of Britain. In this sense Britain faces a double problem in addressing the US-EU choice: first, the damage of Brexit itself and, second, the continuing influence of Brexitism.

A second chance for Starmer

This being so, Keir Starmer has the possibility both to address the strategic failure of Brexit and to gain domestic political advantage over Reform and marginalize Brexitism, as I've been arguing for at least a year when I wrote that:

“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies.”

That opportunity has not, to date, been taken, although, recently, Starmer has been slightly more willing to mention at least the economic damage of Brexit and to draw attention to Farage’s pro-Russian affinities. The opportunity re-presents itself, now, because the way in which Trump has bullied and belittled the UK this week, including his dismissive remarks about NATO, and therefore British troops, in Afghanistan, will have been offensive to the majority of British voters. This makes it a good time to remind them of Farage’s adoration of the American President and, more generally, to justify the case for recalibrating towards the EU.

Farage is evidently well aware of his vulnerability on this score, hence his criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, and he also stated his support for Greenland’s right to self-determination, but he cannot completely protect himself from it since – perhaps from his own fear of Trump publicly attacking him – in the same breath he argued that it would be desirable if the US owned Greenland. Whilst Starmer did not say the latter, he is unable fully to capitalise on Farage’s vulnerability because his own response had a degree of similarity in that both men criticised the Greenland tariff threat, but both highlighted the UK’s ability to negotiate with the US over trade terms as being advantageous.

For Farage, that is taken to be a vindication of Brexit, for Starmer it is taken to be a vindication of his attempts to manage Trump. But, on either account, it is a specious argument: the reality is that the so-called US-UK trade deal, supposedly agreed last year, was limited in scope, has still not been fully implemented, and seems to be subject to ongoing negotiation. In any case, it is always liable to fall victim to Trump’s caprice since, for him, ‘the art of the deal’ is that a deal is never done and can always be reneged upon or made subject to new demands (the same may well apply to the supposed ‘deal’ over Greenland).

Indeed, the latest reports are that the US is still pushing hard to get the UK to adopt US standards in various areas, including food and agriculture, and, more complex but also important, for the UK to recognize US conformity assessment bodies [2]. If that were to happen, then even the modest reset with the EU would become impossible, especially as regards an SPS agreement. So here, again, the UK faces a choice between the US and the EU.

Fine lines and hot takes

One thing which the last week’s events have made abundantly clear is just how difficult it is to navigate that choice. Having been fairly robust in his support for Greenland’s sovereignty and in his criticism of the tariff threat in a speech on Monday morning, the following night Starmer was subjected to Trump’s vicious verbal assault on the “stupidity” of the UK’s Chagos Islands deal, citing it as one of the reasons for his claims on Greenland. He had never made that linkage before, and it is significant that over the day or two prior to that, numerous figures on the British right, including Farage, had been doing so, though in a different way to Trump, by claiming that there was an inconsistency between Starmer’s defence of Greenland’s sovereignty with his supposed betrayal of Britain’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. It’s a ridiculous argument, on multiple levels (not least because the Chagos deal has a legal basis), as is Trump’s argument that the Chagos deal, which he previously supported, damages US security interests (since the UK-US base there is protected).

I can’t be bothered to unpick all that, but my point is that it seems clear that it only occurred to Trump to link Chagos and Greenland because his ideological soulmates in Britain were doing so. Indeed, it has since emerged that it may have come about because of remarks made by Kemi Badenoch to the US Speaker on Monday evening. At all events, whereas there was a brief moment early on Monday when all UK political parties, including Reform, were united in objecting to Trump’s Greenland tariffs, by Tuesday both Reform and the Tories were attacking Labour over Chagos and saying that about that, at least, Trump was right. Tellingly, that great patriot Farage was delighted at the prospect of ‘sovereign Britain’ being told what to do by a foreign leader (equally tellingly, it looks as if he was wrong). Thus, whether by accident or design, Trump’s outburst had the effect of splintering the nascent consensus against him within the UK polity and, as Starmer rightly said during Prime Minister’s Questions, by endorsing Trump’s criticism of the Chagos deal Kemi Badenoch (and others) were supporting his attempt to punish the UK for standing up to his demands for Greenland.

Moreover, many news outlets, including the BBC, started to report Trump’s attack on the UK as demonstrating that Starmer’s approach to handling Trump through flattery and sycophancy had failed. That reporting was deeply wrong-headed. In fact, Trump’s attack showed two things. One is just the sheer impossibility of dealing with a President who is unpredictable, dishonest, and very possibly mentally ill. The other, which those criticising Starmer for not being bolder should ponder, is that by departing only slightly from the ‘flattery and sycophancy’ approach, with a politely-worded criticism of the Greenland policy and tariff threat, Starmer immediately faced a thuggish response from Trump and, with it, accusations from the Conservatives that he was failing to maintain ‘the special relationship’. In any case, these events also showed that it is unwise to provide ‘hot takes’, especially in relation to Trump, because by the end of the week the BBC and others were at least implying that Starmer had handled the crisis effectively.

The Carney doctrine

Whatever now happens with respect to Greenland, which is very far from clear, there can be little doubt that the events of the last fortnight have crystallised the situation which has been developing since at least the re-election of Trump. The UK’s choice between the US and the EU is only one manifestation of the wider choices this situation poses. For, as the Bronwen Maddox lecture I linked to earlier suggests, the Greenland crisis is only one instance of a much bigger transformation in the global order, a point also made this week by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Previously, I’ve written about this transformation in terms of a ‘new global divide’, as profound as that of the Cold War, between a broadly, if imperfectly, liberal, rational-legal framework for international relations, and an international order based solely on power-plays and gangsterism (and, as the use of increasingly unconstrained paramilitary violence and the erosion of the rule of law by Trump’s regime shows, this applies to the domestic order as well). A naked illustration of this gangsterism is Trump’s latest plan to create a ‘Board of Peace’ to oversee Gaza and, potentially, other conflict zones. This body will be chaired by Trump during his lifetime, with power to hire and fire its members and to name his successor, and with permanent members reportedly required to pay $1 billion into a fund personally controlled by Trump.

The nature and implications of this new global divide were articulated with great cogency in a widely-admired speech given by the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos this week. It was a speech which may well come to be seen as being as epoch-defining as Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech in Missouri almost exactly eighty years ago. Carney spoke of the concept of “values-based realism”, a combination of principle and pragmatism, whereby “middle powers” could and should respond to a world in which multilateral institutions have been diminished and “great powers” seek to act as regional or even global hegemons. Note that this does not imply ‘having nothing to do’ with those hegemons, or publicly vilifying them. Certainly as regards the US, that is a luxury that Canada, like the UK and most other countries, does not have. The issue is how to navigate relations with them.

It was an optimistic speech in suggesting such navigation was possible, but by no means an idealistic one. Pragmatism demands some unpalatable choices such as, implicitly, Canada’s recent trade deal with China. It was also realistic in insisting that – as, in Britain, Brexit should have taught us – “nostalgia is not a strategy”, meaning that the old order, effectively that established since the time of Churchill’s Missouri speech, is not coming back. However, that does not mean that the future order must necessarily be dictated by hegemons and characterised by gangsterism.

Above all, Carney’s speech stressed the centrality of cooperation amongst middle powers:

“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”

It is at least possible to interpret Trump’s apparent climbdown over Greenland as a vindication of this, in that it came when faced with the concerted opposition of numerous countries and other actors, including market actors (the two are linked, since a big reason for the stock market falls was the possibility of EU retaliation). But, even if so, the Carney doctrine calls for more than co-ordinated diplomacy; it requires the development of substantive co-operation amongst middle powers over defence, security, and trade.

Thus, although speaking primarily about Canada, Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism. Taking those two readings together, the Carney Doctrine could offer the UK a chance of moving forward from Brexit. It’s no longer a matter of revisiting the decision made in 2016. The Greenland crisis has been a stark reminder that, in 2026, the brutal realities of global politics impose their own imperatives on national strategy, and mandate a new and better decision about its direction.

Whether domestic politics will allow such a decision to be made is an open question. It is doubtful whether the present government is capable of rising to the challenge. But it is beyond doubt that a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government, still entirely committed to the logic of Brexit and Brexitism, would be totally incapable of doing so.

 

Notes

[1] Many commentators wondered if it is possible for the US to levy tariffs on individual EU members, given that the EU trades as a single tariff entity (i.e. the customs union). The trade expert Sam Lowe has explained that the short answer is that it is. However, because it is a single tariff entity, any retaliation against the US would have to be made by the EU and not its individual members.

[2] I don’t have space to discuss it here, but conformity assessment is, as an anonymous source in the Politico report aptly describes it, the “invisible infrastructure that no one really knows about but which keeps everyone safe”. It also has much salience to Brexit, including to the ‘reset’, because it is at the heart of why regulatory alignment does not in itself give market access, and amongst other things explains the strange situation whereby foodstuffs may meet EU standards but are nevertheless marked ‘Not for the EU’ when sold in British shops. And of course conformity assessment marking lies behind one of the most abject farces of the Brexit saga, namely the abandoned attempt to replace CE marks with UKCA marks.