Brexit ten years on: unsettled and unsettling

It is fitting that virtually on the day of the tenth anniversary of the referendum yet another political crisis came to a head with the resignation of Keir Starmer. Within the next couple of weeks, or at most months, we are now set to have another Prime Minister, the seventh since the Brexit vote. With that have come three general elections, not to mention a massive churn of ministerial appointments. Taken together with the administrative bandwidth absorbed by Brexit, both before and since leaving the EU, it is fair to say that the British polity has been overwhelmed over the last decade.

It would be equally fair to say that the combination of current events has overwhelmed my ability to write about them concisely, so this is another inordinately long post.

Starmer’s downfall

Brexit is not the only reason for the shortening cycle of political leadership, and the UK is not the only European country (£) to have experienced it. But, for reasons I’ve discussed previously, there are multiple and complex links, both direct and indirect, between the referendum vote and the subsequent destabilization of British politics. In that sense, our political instability is one more piece of Brexit damage to be added to the long list which has accrued over the last ten years, and perhaps the one which was least predictable.

So far as Starmer, specifically, is concerned, the reasons for his downfall are various but Brexit was certainly part of the mix. In particular, ever since the referendum the Labour Party has been haunted by the possibility that the populists are right to claim to speak for ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’, a possibility which is deeply disconcerting to a party which regards doing so as its prerogative and foundational principle. In this way, Brexit exacerbated the longstanding difficulty Labour has had in facing up to the fact that its traditional electoral base in unionized manufacturing industry has been eroding for decades and, to the extent it does face up to that, still regards that eroding demographic as the template for the ‘real working class’. In its way, it is every bit as nostalgia-driven as Brexitism.

It is this which explains Starmer’s relentless focus on the sensibilities of leave voters in Labour’s erstwhile heartlands and his near disdain for the broader ‘progressive’ coalition characterizing most of the actual and potential support for Labour. This fed through most obviously into immigration policy and, closely associated, the ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations. There was a logic to avoiding positioning Labour as a ‘rejoin’ party at the 2024 election, but Starmer went well beyond that in constantly seeking to appease Reform or Reform-curious voters’ hostility to immigration.

The result was always going to be that those voters would be unimpressed and, if anything, pandering to their ‘legitimate concerns’ made it more likely that they would support parties with more extreme ‘solutions’. Meanwhile, ‘progressive’ voters were alienated by this approach causing their support to leak away to other parties, especially the Greens.

That this is what has happened is borne out by academic research and further demonstrated by a YouGov poll this week, showing that 2024 Reform voters are most likely to feel that Labour are trying to appeal to them but least likely to say they will consider voting for Labour. The personal loathing which the public have for Starmer seems (to me, though not just to me) disproportionate, but the fact that it extends across the political spectrum to encompass both his ‘natural’ supporters and opponents is a reflection of the fundamental flaw of this approach.

All this, including of course the re-emergence of Nigel Farage from his post-referendum resignation to create the Reform party, refracts through Brexit and, along with other factors, created the context for Starmer’s demise. It meant that his party became convinced that he would fail the most basic and brutal test of a party leader: to win the next election. Worse, since the May elections, his MPs believed that he would lose it catastrophically  

Enter Burnham, stage left – or stage right?

There is much more that could to be written about all of this, but the immediate fact is that, once again, there is the instability of a change of Prime Minister, and that is not just an issue in terms of the disruption and uncertainty it entails. Prime Ministerial changes between elections also raise questions of legitimacy. Of course, everyone knows that in our political system the PM is not directly elected, and is the person who can command a majority in the House of Commons, so such changes are not constitutionally improper and have happened many times in the past. But for these changes to happen so frequently strains that constitutional convention, which in any case is strained if the incoming PM seeks to radically depart from manifesto commitments.

Already, there are contradictory reports about whether Andy Burnham has or has not ruled out an early election, and it’s worth recalling the potential traps this creates. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007, he initially refused to rule out an election and there was much speculation that he would call one. When he decided not to, he earned the nickname ‘Bottler Brown’. Conversely, when Theresa May took over from David Cameron in 2016, she was adamant there would be no election and the perceived opportunism of her sudden decision to hold one the next year was one reason for its disastrous outcome.

Regardless of whether there is an election, it is unclear at this point what Burnham’s policy agenda will be and to what extent it will differ from that of the last two years, especially as he will face many of the same constraints. His supporters’ main hope seems to be that he will change the political mood, if not the political programme, by being more communicatively and strategically adept than Keir Starmer. And it’s true that he has more ease of manner than his predecessor, although that does not place him in an especially exclusive club. It’s also true that he comfortably beat Reform in Makerfield, but it’s not clear how much can be extrapolated from the rather unique circumstances of that by-election.

For what little it’s worth, my personal view is that, probably within short order, he will become almost as unpopular as Starmer, will be as unwilling to make and stick to difficult choices, and will be seen as equally lacking in strategic coherence. The veteran political journalist Philip Stephens is of much the same opinion but, clearly, other views are available including from Ian Dunt, a commentator with whom I often agree, and I’ll be happy if I am proved wrong.

One reason for my pessimism is that so much of Burnham’s pitch, at least so far, seems to have its own version of Blue Labour nostalgia. There may be much to agree with in his analysis that “Britain has been on the wrong path for forty years” but it is hard to see how he can deliver on the promise of “re-industrialization” or whether it is a viable strategy for the British economy. And he has already indicated that, despite his previous criticism of them, he is now committed (£) to the immigration policies being pursued by Shabana Mahmood (or has he changed his mind again?), which is certainly not a viable strategy for the British economy. He has also said that he “agrees with what Farage is saying” about the need to go further in controlling immigration, and that he would make greater use of migrant detention centres. At first sight, then, his approach, at least on this key issue, looks set to replicate Starmer’s in trying to appease Reform voters whilst being careless of progressive voters.

Ten years on: what is Brexit?

Closely related to Burnham’s overall political strategy is the question of what his approach to the EU is going to be (and, more generally, his approach to foreign policy, about which he has said very little). Just before Starmer resigned, the date for the next UK-EU summit had, finally, been set for 22 July. In one scenario for how the leadership contest (or non-contest) plays out, Burnham might actually be Prime Minister by then, but in any case the President of the European Council has announced that the meeting will be postponed.

Already that is being spun by the pro-Brexit press (£) as a sign that the EU is expecting Burnham to be a “soft touch” who will make “more concessions”, which re-written in adult might mean Burnham pursuing the “more ambitious” agenda that Starmer recently promised. But the reality is that nobody knew what Starmer meant by that and, certainly, nobody knows what Burnham’s agenda will be. It seems highly unlikely he will not proceed with whatever has presumably now been agreed on SPS regulations, emissions trading, and youth mobility, but whether he might go further, and what that might consist of, is at this point opaque. It is a reminder that there is still no agreed meaning of Brexit, and ‘Burnham’s Brexit’ has yet to be defined.

The fact that UK-EU relations are still in flux and their direction uncertain, and even the framing of that by Brexiters in terms of the UK being forced into “concessions” by having a “soft” leader, is a microcosm of why the tenth anniversary of the referendum has a rather different meaning from that which features in most of the tidal wave of discussion about it. I will come back to what that meaning is but, for now, will focus on the broader discussion. Since almost every commentator has had their say (myself included, for example in Byline Times (£) and on the Oh God What Now? Podcast) it would be impossible to consider it all here, so I will provide just a very brief outline.

Analysing Brexit

Much of the discussion consists of analysis of the effects, especially the economic effects, Brexit has had, and a very good overview of these was provided by the BBC’s Economics Editor Faisal Islam. In terms of specific research studies, an excellent example is John Springford and Anton Spisak’s report for the Centre for European Reform, which is especially useful in disaggregating the (much larger) negative impact of leaving the single market from that of leaving the customs union. Also excellent is a new paper by Eleonora Alabresa and others about the variation in the regional effects of Brexit which, whilst assessing the overall negative impact at about 7-8% (which is consistent with some other studies), shows this to vary considerably by region.

These two studies can also be considered together in that the Alabresa paper shows that Northern Ireland is exceptional in having had little or no economic damage, reflecting it being effectively still part of the single market for goods. A long time ago, I wrote that Northern Ireland would provide a kind of natural experiment to understand the economic effects of Brexit (I can’t now find it to link to, and I’m sure others have made the same point). And so it has proved but, in fact, the outcome was already implied in the perhaps inadvertently revealing remark made by Michael Gove in 2020 when he said Northern Ireland would “get the best of both worlds”. Then as now that prompts the question: why not the rest of the UK?

There has also been much discussion of the domestic political effects of Brexit, some of which I’ve already touched on in this post. A particularly revealing analysis was provided by Jonathan Vincent in the Financial Times (£), which includes some illuminating infographics showing how voters’ behaviour is still significantly structured by how they voted in the referendum, underscoring the persistence of ‘remainer’ and ‘leaver’ as political identities. Meanwhile, the experiences of EU citizens living in the UK, some of the people most traumatically affected by Brexit, are recorded in the Brexit Lived Experience Archive (BLEA) created by Professor Tanja Bueltmann and publicly launched to coincide with the referendum anniversary.

Possibly the most comprehensive overall analysis, not just of the last ten years but of the future possibilities for UK-EU relations, is the report produced by multiple authors from the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) centre. UKICE, which throughout the whole process has been, and remains, the single best source of analysis of Brexit has also produced a variety of themed reports marking the tenth anniversary, notable examples including Joël Reland’s on regulation (showing how little regulatory divergence there has been) and Jannike Wachowiak’s on how the EU has changed during the period (providing an important antidote to what has been, as so often, a largely parochial discussion).

Defending Brexit

None of these analytical reports and commentaries suggest that Brexit has been a success and, as most contributions to the anniversary discussion acknowledge, the polling evidence that a consistent and increasingly large majority of the population view it as having been a failure and a mistake is clear. But, of course, there have been numerous pro-Brexit comment pieces which continue to defend the project. They are all fairly similar in nature, since the arguments are now well-rehearsed, so I will only focus on a three, but that should not be taken to imply that these pro-Brexit views are in any way rare.

Strikingly, they almost all share one common feature, which is that they are defensive. That is, they are framed as a defence against what they recognize to be the established narrative that Brexit has not been a success. That in itself is important. In January 2021, as the transition period ended, I wrote that what happened then would “shape the post-Brexit narrative”. It did, and what was established was a narrative that it had been a failure. So, whilst Brexiters do not accept this to be true, they do accept that it is the narrative. Had the battle for that narrative gone the other way, the terms of this tenth anniversary discussion would be entirely, unrecognizably, different.

As has long been the case, one of the major defences of Brexit by its advocates is that ‘it was not done properly’. Tellingly, the banner front-page headline in the Express on the day of the anniversary was a plaintive demand to “Give Us Proper Brexit”. Equally telling was a Financial Times report about how the various leading Brexiters all blame each other (as well, of course, as remainers) for this failure to deliver ‘proper Brexit’.

Those mounting such arguments have never been able to explain a realistic way in which Brexit could have been done successfully, or even to agree about what proper Brexit means. But it is an argument that can always be made, since it is, strictly speaking, irrefutable (which is makes it a weak, not a strong, argument in that it is not susceptible to any meaningful test). As many people have observed, it is an argument with the same structure as that made by those who insist that ‘real Communism’ has yet to be tried.

One of the slightly better articles making this kind of argument is that by Matthew Jeffrey at Conservative Home, but it shows no understanding of why the regulatory divergence it proposes has not happened, and relies on a wholly unrealistic claim about what ‘mutual recognition agreements’ could make possible for international trade. Most glaringly, it advocates using post-Brexit freedoms to follow “aggressive tax competitiveness” citing as an example the strategy followed by, er, Ireland – an EU member state. The conclusion, inevitably, is that (like real communism) “the real Brexit is still to come”.

The problems of defending Brexit whilst claiming it has been betrayed, or not done properly, are all too obvious, which is perhaps why Michael Gove’s article in the Spectator mainly takes a different tack. Asking the question ‘The Brexit decade: was it worth it?’ (to which his unsurprising answer is ‘yes’), Gove attempts to itemise how Britain has benefitted from Brexit. As with any such list, there are questions about the veracity and desirability of each claimed benefit, but the fact that he includes the demonstrably false ones that Brexit enabled a faster vaccine roll-out (a lie which Boris Johnson has also repeated this week), allowed the UK to support Ukraine, and provided “much more than £350 million a week extra for the NHS” makes it hard to take any of them very seriously.

Moreover, as is again typical of such lists of benefits, it is meaningless because there is little or no recognition of the costs of Brexit. In particular, Gove, with presumably knowing outrageousness, reprises his infamous line from the campaign in deriding “experts from organisations with acronyms who have got things consistently wrong in the past”. In fact, the Treasury’s pre-referendum long-term analysis of the impact of Brexit, giving as its central estimate of the scenario of a negotiated bilateral trade agreement – as happened – that GDP would be 6.2% lower after 15 years (see p.7 of the document), is remarkably similar to most of the credible estimates of what is actually happening which mainly lie in the range of 4% to 8% [1].

In the end, though, Gove simply falls back on the standard get-out that, whether the effects have been positive or negative, Brexit is definitively justified on the abstract grounds of ‘sovereignty’, with national politicians making national laws and being held accountable for them (though not, it seems, being accountable for advocating Brexit). As ever, there is no recognition that sovereignty-sharing is an act of, rather than a negation of, sovereignty; nor of the many ways in which EU members exert sovereignty and hold national politicians accountable; nor of the many ways that all sorts of international regulatory systems (including but not limited to those of the EU) continue, necessarily, to impinge on the UK; nor of any of the many other ways that the ‘taking back control’ thesis is flawed.

Effectively the same argument, though from a different part of the political spectrum, is made by Larry Elliott, the ‘Lexiter’ economics commentator at the Guardian. He, too, takes issue with the economic consensus about the damage of Brexit, in particular questioning the OBR’s estimate of 4% less GDP after 15 years. He does so on what, for an economist, is the rather innumerate basis that, if true, it would mean the economy would be “4% bigger today” [emphasis added]. Otherwise, he opines that “Brexit showed that class still matters in politics” (who knew?) and, like Jeffrey and Gove, that Brexit “creates an opportunity for change” though, in his case, that change should be to ‘reverse forty years of neo-liberalism’ which, he hopes, is what Burnham intends to do. In this, once again, we see the capacity of Brexit to have multiple, incompatible meanings amongst its adherents but also, more specifically, how already a Burnham premiership is being anticipated in the Telegraph as a ‘soft touch’ which will take the UK closer to the EU and by Elliott as the saviour of the Lexit project.

Reframing the anniversary

Thus, rather as I anticipated in a recent post, this latest ‘national conversation’ about Brexit is in many ways the same as that which we have had for ten years and more. And, in another recent post, I quoted the second edition of my book about Brexit pointing out that according to its advocates and supporters Brexit “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 (in 2022) 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.” 

In those terms Brexit has failed. It has not settled. This week there have been no great public celebrations of ‘national independence’, whilst the prospect, whether positive or negative, of rejoining (or joining) the EU has been very much part of the anniversary discussion. But, more than that, Brexit continues to be profoundly unsettling.

It is this which, I think, gives this tenth anniversary discussion a rather different meaning than most contributions to it suggest. It is not really a stock-taking exercise, still less a planning one. Nor is it a commemoration, or even a retrospection. Rather, just as the current political crisis is the latest episode within the continuing process of instability bequeathed by Brexit, this tenth anniversary is itself the latest episode within the continuing process of contestation to which Brexit has consigned the nation.

 

Note

[1] Gove made implicit reference to the Treasury short-term forecast, which is admittedly harder to defend, especially given the way it was used by George Osborne. But it is worth recalling that the value of sterling has never fully recovered since its very sharp fall immediately after the referendum result, and also that the forecast model did not assume any action by the Bank of England which, in fact, under the then Governor Mark Carney, immediately announced a programme to stabilize the financial system, which may well have averted some of the economic turmoil of the short-term forecast.

Despair

I’ve written almost five hundred posts on this blog, which equates to well over a million words, and done so in various moods. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same depth of weariness, bordering on despair, as I have whilst writing this one. And whilst I’m all too well aware of the possibility that this is a projection, and a narcissistic one at that, I can’t help thinking that this feeling is more widely shared, even to the extent of describing the national mood.

It is also one of those times when events are so complex as to require a very long post, and moving so quickly that parts of it may be superseded within hours.

British politics: stuck

At a relatively superficial level, the weariness, if not the despair, is partly because we remain in the ‘pregnant pause’ I identified several weeks ago, and discussed again in my previous post. Many aspects of domestic politics are on hold, awaiting the outcome of next week’s Makerfield by-election. But it’s not as if that is likely to dispel the weariness, which is more to do with the feeling of a polity, and a country, which is stuck. Stuck not just in the sense of being directionless but in the sense of being trapped.

After all, assuming that, as polls increasingly suggest is likely, Andy Burnham wins in Makerfield that seems likely to herald several weeks of a Labour leadership contest ending, potentially, with yet another new Prime Minister. That seems all the more possible with the resignation of the Defence Secretary yesterday, followed by that of the Armed Forces Minister, adding to the existing sense that Keir Starmer’s leadership is in crisis and its days are numbered. Perhaps a Burnham premiership would bring some fresh momentum to politics [1], and some impression of direction, but it’s hard to be optimistic about that, if only because not only are Britain’s problems deeper than its leader but they also tend to militate against any leader being effective.

A sense of stuckness also describes the state of UK-EU relations, and the government’s promised reset. That isn’t a new sense. Despite starting with an urgency of purpose [2] there has been little concrete progress. In my previous post, I noted that the date of the next UK-EU summit had been postponed again, this time to 13 July. That may still happen, but reports are now calling that into question, with the sticking point apparently being the terms of a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS).

Clearly the closer it comes to the 13 July the less likely it is that the summit will happen then and, if it does not, then the political calendar might well mean it could not occur before Autumn (this might be especially so if this summer sees a leadership contest in Britain). Either way, and assuming it happens at all, the government will have taken almost half of its electoral term to reach a substantive reset agreement and, of course, the implementation of all of its provisions is likely to take much longer.

That is frankly pitiful given that the reset was Labour’s central policy on what has been the defining political issue of the last decade, and that David Lammy, the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, said in 2023 that it would be Labour’s “number one” foreign policy priority if they came to power. It is all the more pitiful given the profound changes and dangers in international relations since then. And if it is true (which seems highly plausible) that it is agreeing a YMS which is holding things up then that is not just pitiful but shameful, in two ways. First because it shows a lack of realism, given that this was always the key EU requirement if there was to be a deal on the UK’s priorities. And secondly because it shows another of the ways that the government has chosen to be driven by the anti-immigration agenda of Reform.

The Henry Nowak murder

The latter connects with the much deeper reason why the present moment is not just wearisome but one of despair and, even, fear. It is apparently now inevitable that every time there is a serious crime which has any connection with immigration it will be followed by street violence accompanied by a vicious, frenzied ‘debate’ conducted in terms framed by Nigel Farage and others on the far right, not least because major broadcasters, most importantly the BBC, are prone to adopt that framing. This is not simply an opinion on my part, or an evidence-free jibe: it flows directly from the plans the BBC drew up last year to win over Reform voters, who it feared were losing trust in its output, by changing both its news “story selection” and drama offerings so as to appeal to them.

The latest sequence of events began with the trial of Henry Nowak’s murderer, and to say that this had a connection with immigration is itself to illustrate a discernible shift, since the murderer was a British-born British national. But it is increasingly common within far-right circles to regard Britishness, and especially Englishness, as conditional upon skin colour, a view that has disappeared amongst the majority of the population. The racial aspect is undeniable. No one raised any doubt (nor, of course, should they have) that the white victim, who was born in Britain of Polish descent, and held dual British and Polish nationalities, was British [3].

On this view, any crime committed by someone whose skin is not white is linked to immigration. Indeed the disgraceful remarks [warning: link is to X] made by the US Vice-President J.D. Vance about the crime linked it not just to immigration but to the now prevalent ideology amongst the American right that Europe, including the UK, has undergone “a mass invasion of migrants” and faces civilizational collapse as a result. That same theme appeared last week in Pete Hegseth’s revolting comments during, of all things, his D-Day commemoration speech and it has also been repeatedly restated by Elon Musk.

These interventions from the US are the latest examples of the way that the American right now routinely interferes in the domestic politics of European countries, and always in favour of the far right. The blatant, undisguised racism of those interventions, whilst widespread amongst British rank-and-file social media posters, is not generally made absolutely explicit by Nigel Farage (though, notably, he re-posted without comment Vance’s remarks), and, as regards the Henry Nowak murder, his main line of attack, also made by his American allies, has been the poisonous claim that it illustrated ‘two-tier policing’. The specific accusation is that the police routinely side with ethnic minorities and against white people.

The two-tier policing claim

I don’t imagine that anyone would deny that the police’s treatment of Henry Nowak was awful, and that a truly terrible misjudgment was made by the police officers at the scene. As the trial judge made clear, the main blame for that lies with the murderer and his brother, who repeatedly lied to the police in claiming to have been victims of racial abuse and assault, although a further review is to be held into the police’s conduct. And, as the trial judge also made clear, the blame for Henry Nowak’s death lies entirely with the murderer. The subsequent police investigation seems to have been effective, and the murderer was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. So, to mention two false comparisons repeatedly made – including by Kemi Badenoch – this case bears no resemblance to the George Floyd murder, where the perpetrator was a police officer, or to Stephen Lawrence’s murder, where the police and criminal justice system utterly failed.

In short, this case does not demonstrate the “two-tier policing” or the “anti-white prejudice” Farage claimed, in a preposterously self-important “emergency address” to the nation. Yet such claims had the unsurprising consequence of significant public disorder in Southampton, just as the furore after the Southport murders did (and, as in that case, the treatment of the rioters was treated as further evidence of two-tier policing). Equally unsurprisingly, it turned out that, far from being ‘ordinary decent people’ expressing their ‘legitimate concerns’, many of the Southampton ‘protestors’ were neo-Nazi activists, whilst one of the first to appear in court was a thug with a string of previous convictions for violence.

It has been suggested, not implausibly, that Farage was motivated to stir up, in his words, “pure, cold rage” partly as a distraction from the questions he has sought to avoid about his £5 million gift and partly to respond to the electoral threat from Rupert Lowe’s Restore party in the Makerfield by-election and the more general competition between the two men and their parties. Perhaps, but it is surely the case that, even without those incentives, he would have done the same thing since he routinely does so.

Whatever his motivation, it is just possible that he has miscalculated. There is some evidence (£) that his stance has alienated some of the more moderate voters Reform hopes to attract, whilst the more extreme potential supporters he wants to detach from Lowe’s party are sticking with Restore in Makerfield. Meanwhile, when he raised the issue in one of his rare appearances in the House of Commons, an unusually effective response from Keir Starmer, along with barracking from across the chamber for his refusal to condemn the Southampton violence, demonstrated his isolation and, for once, Farage even looked slightly ashamed of himself.

Northern Ireland

This highly febrile moment was the worst imaginable time for the news that a grotesque attempted murder had been allegedly committed by a Sudanese refugee in Belfast [4]. The case was very different in its details, but the familiar patterns of social media outrage quickly led to far more extreme violence in Belfast than had occurred in Southampton. In Belfast, gangs of masked men sought out individuals and families who were refugees, or simply ‘foreign’, to attack them and burn their homes, along with wider violence against the police and other targets. Evidence is now emerging that a ‘target list’ of immigrants’ addresses had been drawn up months ago, well before this week’s stabbing, suggesting that this was merely a pretext.

These were not, as the Telegraph described (£) them, “protests”. A more accurate term was that used by the Times (£): it was a “pogrom”. That term, more often associated with anti-Semitic violence, has a particular, and controversial, historical association in Northern Ireland, dating back to the 1920s and in that and other ways the meaning of this week’s violence in Northern Ireland is somewhat different to that in mainland Britain. In particular, the legacy of the ‘Troubles’ includes a reservoir of capacity for organized violence amongst terrorist groups, some of which have direct linkages with international neo-Nazi and white supremacist networks. It is also the case that, as Luqman Saeed of Ulster University explained in a London Review of Books essay, the history of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland has inflected contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment in particular ways [5].

As for Farage, if he had indeed felt any sense of shame the previous week there was no sign of it in his response to the Belfast violence as he gloatingly ‘warned’ that “things will continue to kick off” and will continue to do so “over the course of the summer”, whilst claiming that “the vast majority” involved in the disorder are not “bad actors” but (he implied but did not say) just ordinary decent people with legitimate concerns. He could hardly conceal his glee, any more than could those recycling the now-popular predictions of imminent civil war.

The ‘first lie wins’

One of the most thoughtful pieces I’ve read about the police’s conduct in the Henry Nowak case, in the law enforcement journal Police Professional, suggests that it can be explained by “anchoring bias”, the psychological phenomenon whereby the first piece of information received in a particular situation creates a mental reference point through which subsequent information is filtered and interpreted. On this analysis the “first lie wins”, and in this case it was the lie told by the murderer’s brother when he called the police.

Whether or not that analysis explains how the police behaved in this case, it provides a good way of understanding the political discourse around it. Thus within hours of the ‘two-tier policing’ accusation being made, the Policing minister Sarah James at least implicitly accepted it by supporting a review of police anti-racism guidelines. And subsequently, unveiling her proposals to revoke parts of the Equality Act, Kemi Badenoch invoked the case as if it were beyond all question that the police had been motivated by ‘reverse racism’.

But anchoring bias is just one aspect of the more generic, and perhaps more familiar, phenomenon of confirmation bias; the selection and retention of information in line with pre-existing beliefs. This is one way of understanding how the Belfast stabbing, the Southampton and Southport murders, and other cases have become knitted together. In the far-right narrative, there is a wave of uncontrolled crime committed by ‘coloured foreigners’ – whether they be immigrants, descendants of immigrants, or asylum seekers – and, by extension, all such people are suspect and dangerous.

For that narrative to develop and, more especially, to become seen as plausible to those who may not be ideologically pre-disposed to racism or xenophobia requires that only the crimes with some kind of ‘coloured foreigner’ dimension are ‘selected’ for prominence. And whilst confirmation bias may not be a conscious process in many cases, there can be little doubt that for certain political actors and influencers, both within and outside the UK, the selection process is conscious and deliberate. Then, especially if the media follows that selection (and note that this is the exact word used by the BBC to describe its recalibration of “story selection” to gain the trust of Reform voters), a narrative is created which, to the general public, presents a picture where it is not unreasonable to conclude that crime is overwhelmingly of this sort.

That such a dynamic is in play was illustrated by the way that, at around the same time that Nowak’s murderer was sentenced, a white woman who had murdered her neighbour in a frenzied knife attack was sentenced at a court in Maidstone. There was no public outrage. A few weeks before, a neo-Nazi woman was sentenced in Bristol for an axe attack on a Kurdish man, in a case which revealed police failings in the identification of terrorism suspects. There was no public outrage. Similarly, at around the same time as the Belfast stabbing, there was a multiple stabbing at a school in Manchester. For a few hours social media buzzed with speculation that this was ‘yet another immigrant crime’, sometimes explicitly linking it to the Belfast crime. Yet when a suspect was arrested and charged in Manchester, and (so far as has been reported) it became clear that there was no immigration dimension, almost nothing more was made of it.

These are just a few of the examples which could be given, but the point is obvious. None of the latter cases ‘fitted the narrative’ and, whilst all were reported, they were neither given much media prominence nor treated as forming part of any wider pattern. That is not because there is no pattern that could be identified. Actually, every single one of the cases mentioned so far in this post shares the common feature of involving the use of a bladed weapon. But that pattern was not highlighted as relevant and, instead, the cases brought to public prominence were selected so as to construct the ‘immigrant crime wave’ narrative.

It should hardly need saying that this is not to suggest that the Southport murder, Southampton murder, and Belfast attempted murder are anything other than horrific. It is to suggest that there are numerous equally horrific crimes and public opinion is being manipulated into focusing on only some of them in support of a wider ideological agenda.

Looking back at how we got here

The manner in which these kinds of narrative constructions operate is well understood and skillfully exploited by populist politicians in ways which are notoriously difficult to counter. Myth-busting and fact checking are laudable and important activities, but are limited in their impact. The entire Brexit debacle illustrated that all too clearly. We’re now approaching the tenth anniversary of the referendum which, as trailed in recent posts, is shaping up to be an occasion for major reflection and renewed debate, some of which has already started, including a good overview of the economic consequences of Brexit from Professor Jonathan Portes of UKICE.

Right now, though, we have not reached the anniversary of the referendum but are in the anniversary of the campaign and that, too, is being discussed, most notably in a two-part BBC documentary this week (which, disappointingly, chose to adopt a larky, gossipy tone, though that perhaps accurately reflects (£) how the leading players approached it). Because I didn’t start this blog until after the referendum there are no posts here recording that campaign in detail [6] but, recalling it now, I’m struck again by its appalling dishonesty. The most familiar example is the '£350 million week for the NHS’ slogan, and what is so striking about that was not its simple dishonesty but the more knowing, now admitted, dishonesty that it was designed to provoke the refutations which would keep it circulating and lodge it in the public mind: a good example of how the ‘first lie wins’.

It is true that many, perhaps now most, of those who voted to leave now recognize that it was a lie. For that matter, the majority of people now realise that Brexit was a mistake. Yet here we are, ten years on, mired in very similar, although even more dangerous, lies, half-truths, and distortions. As Jonathan Freedland argues in his excellent recent Guardian column, the two are related: we got to this “swamp of lies and disinformation” on “the Brexit bus”.

Very often, as with Farage, the lies are peddled by the same people. Indeed there can hardly be a better than example than Farage, then as now ‘warning’ of “violence on the streets” if “concerns about immigration” are not addressed. Of course the referendum did see violence on the streets: the murder of the MP Jo Cox, shot and stabbed multiple times by a far-right white supremacist, ten years ago almost to the day of this post. At the time, apart from dismissing it as the work of a disturbed individual, with no political significance, Farage worried that it might damage the “momentum” of the campaign to leave the EU and, as ever, portrayed himself as the victim.

The broken cordon sanitaire

It’s this, more than anything else, which explains why the weariness that I, and perhaps others, feel, is close to despair. A generation ago, Enoch Powell occupied a similar political space to that of Farage and even now, no doubt, many of Farage’s supporters consider, in the infamous phrase, that ‘Enoch was right’, referring to his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. That speech saw Powell ejected from the Conservative shadow cabinet but it shouldn’t be forgotten that he became a popular figure amongst the public. It’s also worth recalling that he attracted support from within the traditional Labour movement, became an Ulster Unionist Party MP, and was also one of the leading opponents of membership of what was then the EEC. Nevertheless, Powell became a marginal figure within British politics. There was a kind of cordon sanitaire which inoculated the mainstream from the extreme.

That cordon has now all but disappeared. Not all of that can be attributed to Brexit, but Brexit was the major breach allowing extremism, especially about immigration, to become increasingly respectable whilst stigmatizing attempts to challenge it as being elitist disdain for ‘the will of the people’ and the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the people. This isn’t just a matter of people like Farage and Lowe gaining a presence within mainstream politics, it is mainstream politicians adopting, accepting or pandering to the politics such people espouse.

Starmer has been quite robust, ever since the asylum hostel riots shortly after he first came to power, in condemning far-right violence. Yet he and his government have done nothing to counter the general proposition that immigration and asylum seekers are a ‘problem’ requiring draconian restrictions. Indeed, as regards Brexit, specifically, there can be no doubt that the main reason for the ‘red lines’ is to forestall the return of freedom of movement of people. The most charitable reading of Labour’s approach to immigration is that it is a tactic to de-fang the far right: if so, it is abundantly clear that it has failed.

That has been obvious for a while, from the symbolic violence of ‘raising the flags’ to the literal violence which reached new heights this week. The end-game for those promoting it, whether in the UK or from the US and Russia, is one all too well-known from history. It is for the violence to become so extensive, the whipped-up anger driving it so great, and the public fear it engenders so profound, that an authoritarian regime will be welcomed as the ‘only way to restore order’. Such a regime would then enact a reign of persecution of anyone deemed to be ‘foreign’ and of the ‘enemy within’ who dared to oppose it.

That outcome is by no means inevitable but, this week especially, it feels as it is becoming more likely.
 
Notes

[1] Some readers have, rightly I think, queried the assessment in my previous post that, if Burnham becomes Prime Minister, it will “almost certainly” mean the retention of the Labour red lines at the next general election. On reflection, my assertion, based on inferences from remarks he has made about Brexit generally, rather than any specific comment about the red lines, was too strong. But, given those remarks, at the very least it is fair to say that it can’t be assumed that Burnham will drop the red lines. On the same topic, Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds recently said that government may “reconsider” the red lines, by implication at, rather than before, the next election. We will see.

[2] Some of the post linked to, about the return of governmental competence, reads very badly now! But the account of the initial ‘reset’ activity remains an accurate one.

[3] On the other hand, amongst the social media posts deploring his killing by an ‘immigrant’ some denounced the ‘race treachery’ of the fact that Henry Nowak had a mixed-race nephew (I am not going to link to an example, they are all too disgusting).

[4] There was also an explicitly Brexit-related dimension in that the alleged perpetrator had arrived in Northern Ireland via Ireland. This could have happened before Brexit, of course, but it has re-opened discussion about the border by the DUP and David Frost (warning: link to X), most of it nonsensical, although there could be connections between this issue and the provisions of the Windsor Framework. I will return to this in a future post if the discussion gains traction.

[5] This is a very complicated issue and, despite some comment this week, not as straightforward as seeing the violence as solely coming from the ‘loyalist’ side. I know enough about the complexities of Northern Ireland’s politics to recognize this, but not enough to provide an analysis.

[6] I did, however, post about it at the time on another blog, and looking back I found two posts, in particular, which charted the campaign’s mendacity; one about some of the economic arguments and the other about the grotesque ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ lie.

Please also note my policy on X. Personally, I have not posted there since last December. However, unpleasant as the experience is, I do still read posts on it to try to understand what is discussed there and, on this blog, I link to X-posts when it is the only source of important statements (e.g., in the present post, by JD Vance). I don’t think it is conducive to good analysis simply to ignore such statements because of the platform where they appear, and I don’t think it is right to quote or paraphrase without providing a source. However, because I know that some people want to avoid seeing it and/or providing clicks for it, I now provide a warning whenever a link is to an X-post.

A new national conversation, or just the same old one?

Anyone foolish enough to write publicly about politics knows, unless they suffer from an even greater degree of foolishness, the danger of making predictions. That is perhaps especially true in recent years, when politics has thrown up so much that would previously have been almost unthinkable. Still, that makes the odd occasions when predictions come true all the more pleasing.

At the beginning of this month, I wrote a post anticipating “the coming conversation” about Brexit, suggesting that it would emerge from the then yet-to-be-held May elections, the next UK-EU summit, and the tenth anniversary of the referendum. And whilst this may well have been an obvious prediction, so far as I know this particular conjunction of circumstances wasn't generally noticed. At all events, that conversation has now begun.

The Labour leadership crisis

It has been precipitated, as I anticipated, by the election results and the Labour leadership crisis they provoked. That crisis has not, as yet, become a formal leadership challenge because of the unusual situation in which the favourite candidate, Andy Burnham, is not currently an MP.  Thus the first act of this leadership drama is to be the contest to see if he can retain the seat of Makerfield for Labour in the coming by-election to be held on 18 June, just a few days before the referendum anniversary.

That contest itself encapsulates many of the dynamics of post-Brexit politics, showing how Brexit continues, more or less overtly, to be imprinted on the political scene. Hence Burnham must win a northern England, leave-voting constituency where Labour’s main challenger is now Reform, but where Reform itself is in a bitter conflict with Rupert Lowe’s neo-Nazi infested Restore Britain party which, helped by Elon Musk’s backing, could siphon off crucial numbers of Farage’s core votes in what currently looks to be a very tight election. A particularly piquant twist has emerged with revelations that Reform’s candidate did not vote for Brexit and considered it to have been based on “nationalistic pish”.

However, the Makerfield hiatus does not alter the fact that, informally, the Labour leadership battle has begun. In my earlier post, my point was that this battle would undoubtedly see Brexit figuring prominently and, more particularly, see an argument about whether Labour should pursue a more ambitious reset in UK-EU relations, up to and potentially including seeking to rejoin. That argument has already surfaced, with leadership hopeful Wes Streeting saying, in punchy terms, that Brexit had been a “catastrophic mistake” and gesturing, in vague terms, towards rejoining the EU at some point in the future.

As was perhaps the intention [1], this immediately led to Burnham being asked to clarify his stance which turned out to be, more mildly, that Brexit had been “damaging” but that “the last thing we should do right now is re-run those arguments”. Moreover, he said that rejoining was not on his agenda, adding that: “I respect the decision that was made at the referendum and it is going to undermine everything I have said about strengthening democracy if we don't respect that vote.”

This is pretty much the standard Starmer position on Brexit so, for all Burnham’s talk of being ‘the change candidate’, there’s no change there. Relatedly, Burnham has already indicated his support for Shabana Mahmood’s Brexitist anti-immigration policies and, like Starmer, stated that net migration “needs to fall further” despite recent huge reductions in its level, and this at exactly the time when a new approach is needed to avoid what immigration expert Professor Jonathan Portes calls the “migration doom loop” [2].

This is not the only way in which Burnham is as committed as Starmer to what is recognizably Blue Labour analysis. His talk of reindustrialization speaks directly to the nostalgic sensibility of that analysis, a sensibility which also played its part in attracting leave voters in 2016, some of whom appeared to believe that EU membership had been responsible for deindustrialization and that Brexit would herald the restoration of the mills, potteries and factories of the much-mythologized past and their associated communities.

Some may imagine that Burnham is adopting these positions as a tactic to appeal to Makerfield voters, and that on European policy, specifically, he will pivot to a more anti-Brexit position to appeal to the voters in the Labour leadership contest. If so, he will immediately face the charge of hypocrisy. But it’s far more likely that if he wins the Makerfield seat on this basis it will cement the existing Labour view under Starmer that this is the only way to see off the challenge of Reform. For that matter, if he loses then at least some in Labour will argue that it was because, partly as a result of Streeting’s intervention, the party was perceived as being too pro-EU.

Assuming Burnham does win Makerfield and does immediately mount a leadership challenge, and also assuming it is not a ‘coronation’, this sets the stage for a contest with Streeting as the more anti-Brexit candidate (and, of course, there may also be other candidates). So in this sense Brexit will, indeed, feature in the contest. But, despite Streeting’s somewhat stronger language, it is not really clear that he will advocate anything more than Starmer’s recently expressed desire for a “more ambitious” partnership with the EU, or that, despite his more restrained language, Burnham will advocate anything much less. As UKICE Director Professor Anand Menon puts it, “an open and honest debate is not what we are likely to get”.

In the longer term, it is possible that the outcome of the leadership contest will have an important effect on what Labour’s policy on the EU, and especially on its current ‘red lines’, will be at the next election (with a Burnham victory, which currently seems likely, almost certainly meaning their retention). But in the immediate term of this parliament it is unlikely, as things stand, to make any difference to the ‘reset’ which, as trade experts Sam Lowe and Kathryn Watson observe, still faces the familiar, fundamental “trade-off between market access and autonomy”.

The reset and the summit

So this brings us to the second leg of the emergent resumption of the Brexit conversation, namely the reset and more specifically the next UK-EU summit, the date of which has still not been announced. That in itself has a significance. For a long time it had been assumed it would be held in May, a year after the first such summit, and then June was talked about. Most recently, it has been reported that it is “tentatively pencilled in for 13 July”. There has been no public explanation for this delay, but I assume it reflects unresolved issues within the negotiations (£) over final terms for agreements on the key areas highlighted at last year’s summit since, presumably, both sides will wish to have something concrete to announce this time round.

In his excellent recent overview of these negotiations, Professor Hussein Kassim of Warwick University points to some of the technical complexities of the issues, but also draws attention to their all too familiar political dynamics. In brief, the UK continues to see the EU as “inflexible” whilst pursuing what the EU regards as a “hypertransactionalist approach” which also demands what would be special treatment for a third country [3].

Whilst Kassim does not put it in these terms, this can partly be explained by the present government’s awareness that anything it agrees will be picked over by the anti-EU British media and probably more by the entrenched attitude of the British State towards the EU going back long before Brexit. Moreover, it is perhaps still not recognized by the UK that the broad contours of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU so, whilst some further refinements might be seen as desirable in Brussels, it is London which is the demandeur in these negotiations.

Indeed, the government has already invested considerable political capital in obtaining at least the agreements already mooted, and has long talked as if, especially as regards a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, they are certain to be made and legislation has been introduced on that basis. Earlier this week, it was reported that negotiations had stalled (£), but in the last twenty-four hours, some details of what has been agreed have emerged and government guidance to businesses updated accordingly. So it is still unclear whether and when a full agreement will be announced.

Assuming there is an agreement then, apart from the non-negligible economic benefits for the agri-food sector, that will have a particular political significance for Northern Ireland. The Brexit situation there has been much less widely discussed, at least outside Northern Ireland itself, since the agreement of the Windsor Framework under Rishi Sunak in 2023 (although Kassim notes the EU’s dissatisfaction with the UK’s implementation of its provisions). Nevertheless, recent research by Professors David Phinnemore and Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast shows weakening support for it amongst the public in Northern Ireland. An SPS agreement would go at least some way to simplifying the operation of the Irish Sea border, and might be especially welcomed by the unionist community, as well as reducing agri-food trade barriers between the UK and the EU. In this sense, Northern Ireland continues to be at the epicentre of the Brexit process.

Meanwhile, as I’ve noted previously, Keir Starmer has talked in vague terms of seeking a more ambitious partnership with the EU than that envisaged at last year’s summit. In the last fortnight there has been an indication of what that ambition might be, with the leaked report of a UK proposal to be within a single market with the EU for goods trade. This, too, had an all too familiar ring to it. The Guardian report, which broke the story, compared it to Theresa May’s 2018 Chequers Proposal (which I discussed in detail at the time) and it also has some similarities to the ‘Jersey model’ that was touted at around the same time (in both cases, partly to solve the Northern Ireland conundrum, as well as for its economic advantages). This never seemed likely to be agreed by the EU at the time and is even less likely to be agreed now, so, unsurprisingly, it was also reported that this latest British proposal had been rebuffed [4].

Inevitably, the whole issue of the reset and the next summit have now become inseparable from that of the Labour leadership. It is difficult to see how Starmer can negotiate authoritatively when his future is in doubt, or even how the summit date can be finalised until it is known whether and when there is to be an active leadership contest. Assuming that happens then, for the umpteenth time since the referendum, the EU will stand waiting whilst the UK embarks on a change of Prime Minister with Brexit again at least part of what that change is about, and with at least the possibility that yet another general election will quickly follow (£).

As Anand Menon notes, in the piece referred to earlier, “having watched consecutive Conservative administrations argue with themselves over Brexit, they’re now getting to see Labour do the same thing. And, like the Conservatives, Labour are doing so with precious little attention paid to what the EU might or might not be willing to give us.” And, beyond that, as many of the commentators cited in this post mention, lurks the real possibility of a Reform government being imminent making anything agreed now potentially irrelevant.

(Almost) ten years on

As for the tenth anniversary of the referendum, well, we are not quite there yet so, although it is already being widely mentioned, the intense debate it will occasion is still to come. Yet it is hard to feel much enthusiasm, let alone optimism, about it. As this post has already repeatedly illustrated, so much of what is happening and being said goes around exactly the same circles of the last ten years.

A further small illustration is the Daily Telegraph ‘Big Debate’ (£) on ‘How to make Brexit a success’, scheduled for 29 June. It’s not just that even the need to pose a question that ought to have been addressed years ago and, were it susceptible to a meaningful answer, would have received one by now, shows the pointlessness of the endeavour. It’s that the participants in this ‘debate’ – Dan Hannan, David Frost, Allison Pearson, and James Frayne [5] – not to mention its chair, Allister Heath, are all basically on the same side and that it is entirely predictable what they will, and will not, say. It is equally predictable that it will be totally unrealistic, and a racing certainty that it will not even attempt to consider, let alone ‘debate’, the reasons it is unrealistic.

Yet a new Brexit conversation need not be futile. One of the best things that Keir Starmer, or any other Prime Minister, could do would be to create a process for it to be fruitful. Last week, the European Policy Centre in association with Bertelsmann Stiftung published a report entitled “Reframing the Reset: From Post-Brexit Stabilisation to Strategic Partnership” which illustrates how such a conversation could occur, within both the UK and the EU. As regards the UK, a key recommendation is that it “should launch a systematic, evidence-based review about the future of its relationship with the EU, including the long-term sustainability of its current red lines and the options for deeper integration over time, including that of rejoining.”

No doubt that framing would, in itself, infuriate Brexiters. But it is not necessary to view everything though the lens of the ‘rejoin’ question and my own sense is that this isn’t a question which the UK, as a polity, is ready to address [6]. Rather, a highly significant first step in a new Brexit conversation would simply be the first part of the recommendation, for a systematic evidence-based review, and it is that to which any Prime Minister ought to be willing and able to commit. It is simply absurd for a country to undertake a major and ongoing shift in national strategy and yet to fail to undertake such a review, and ten years after the initial decision seems like a good, even overdue, moment. That is all the more true given the scale of events during those ten years, above and beyond Brexit.

I’ve argued for such a review in the past, whilst Andrew Duff (also of the European Policy Centre) has advocated a Royal Commission. I’m more convinced than ever that, whatever its institutional form, something like this is the only way to address a situation in which, to put it in very broad terms, we have a country which ‘knows’ it has made a mistake and regrets it, and yet has a politics which can barely acknowledge that and certainly can’t address it.

A moment ago, I said that I didn’t think that the country was ready to address the rejoin question and I can readily imagine that some, perhaps many, regular readers of this blog will have bridled at that. Yet the truth is that even the idea of a systematic review of Brexit is very unlikely to happen, and would encounter strong resistance. If joining the EU is ever to come on the agenda, and to have a realistic prospect not just of happening but being durable, then it will be a gradual process.

The coming conversation: not ‘if’ but ‘how’

Last weekend, in a significant intervention, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband argued that rejoining would require a “national consensus”. That doesn’t, of course, entail unanimity, which will never exist, but it does mean that the UK cannot realistically rejoin the EU on the narrowly-supported and highly divided basis on which it left. Building that consensus will be incremental, though that does not necessarily mean slow.

What made Miliband’s intervention significant was not simply that he was a major political figure in previous Labour governments. It was because of the confluence of events set out in this post, which has made a renewed conversation about Brexit inevitable. This is also why, within a wider assessment of current events, Tony Blair made his own intervention this week, noting that “Britain has lost from Brexit” and advocating some form of “structured, formal, relationship” with the EU at some point in the future. On my reading, this doesn’t mean Blair is advocating eventually rejoining the EU, even though some reports have implied that, but rather some version (yet again) of ‘multi-speed Europe’.

There’s a lot to unpick, and to criticize, in what he said about Europe, which I don’t have space to do it here. But for present purposes, the point is that Blair positioned himself against the background of there being “a developing sense that as … British opinion moves against Brexit, then at some point it is ripe to enter a debate about ‘going back’.” In other words, he recognized that Brexit is on the political agenda again, even if in ways he regards as strategically inadequate. Indeed it is now highly likely that there will, in a literal sense, be a parliamentary debate about Brexit because this week a petition to “apply to rejoin the EU as soon as possible” received 100,000 signatures, something already denounced as heralding “Brexit betrayal”.

In short, the question now is not whether this renewed conversation will intensify over the next few months: it will. It is whether it will be a genuinely new conversation, or yet another reprise of those which have occurred over the last ten years.

 

Notes

[1] I have written at greater length on the manoeuverings in the Makerfield by-election and their relationship to Brexit in a recent piece in Byline Times. For more analysis, see Matt Carr’s recent Substack post.

[2] Portes’ analysis is borne out by research published by British Future last week, showing that despite the recent massive falls in net migration the public generally believe that it is rising (and also hugely over-estimate the proportion of immigrants who are asylum seekers). For more discussion of how “net migration collapsed, the right got what it wanted, and somehow they became even angrier” see a recent post on the Bearly Politics Substack. Meanwhile, Britain is immolating one of its few truly world-class assets (£), its universities, on the altar of addressing ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.

[3] In that respect, it’s worth noting that in his recent ‘anti-Brexit’ speech, Streeting also couched his ambitions in terms of a “special relationship with the EU”.

[4] On the other hand, there are reports (£) that the EU may be ready to allow the UK car industry to participate in the ‘Made in Europe’ scheme which, if it happens, would be an important development for that industry.

[5] Admittedly Frayne is, at least to me, less of a known quantity, but his role and profile as a member of the Centre for Policy Studies and his extant writing about Brexit make it unlikely that he will be a heterodox voice amongst his high-profile fellow panelists.

[6] It is worth saying that the report itself also advocates many detailed forms of integration which are well in excess of the current reset plans but, themselves, fall short of rejoining.

[7] I'm pleased to say that this week saw the 12 millionth visit to this blog. Many thanks to all who have visited, or read via other channels, and especially to those who have publicized it to a wider audience, and those who have encouraged me to continue writing it over the least (nearly) ten years.

Britain’s post-Brexit ungovernability

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 of 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.