As Sunak announced it, there was a swirl of rumours that his backbenchers were about to call a vote of no confidence in his leadership, and his entire party, including the cabinet, were apparently totally unprepared for what he was to say. And the announcement itself was almost comically maladroit, as the rain soaked him and his words were almost drowned out by the sound of the ‘Things can only get better’ anthem of Labour in 1997 (apparently played by the indefatigable ‘Stop Brexit’ demonstrator Steve Bray).
It will also be the first election since the UK left the European Union, but it seems highly likely that Brexit will hardly be discussed. However, that very lack of discussion will be of significance. For it will betoken the continuing destabilization and dishonesty Brexit has brought to British politics, with the two being linked: to talk honestly about Brexit would destabilize both the main parties.
Nevertheless, Brexit will lurk in the shadows, and will continue to haunt politics whatever the election outcome. In this sense, regardless of whether Brexit features explicitly in the campaign, this election is part-and-parcel of the still-unfolding Brexit process. As the campaign develops over the next six weeks, I will discuss it in those terms.
The Brexit silence
In last week’s post, I talked about the near-silence of the Tory leadership about Brexit, arguing that this is because:
“It can’t claim Brexit to be a success, because those who do not have a foundational belief in its rightness can clearly see it has failed, whilst those for whom its rightness is a foundational belief also believe that it has been betrayed. But it can’t denounce Brexit as a failure or a betrayal, since it is the Brexit the Tory leadership actually delivered … It can neither boast of Brexit nor disown it.”
That silence, and that of the Labour Party, is already being commented on, for example by Daniel Finkelstein, who also discussed it in his Times column this week (£), but what is less discussed is that the Tories have been trapped partly as a result of just how successfully the Labour Party have neutralised Brexit as an electoral issue. They have done so partly through their own reticence about it, and partly by the extremely limited, though not entirely trivial, commitments they have made to softening the form of Brexit created by the Conservatives.
I’m very well aware that many Labour supporters, remainers, and Labour-supporting remainers are deeply unhappy with this strategy – and indeed that this is true of many readers of the blog. However, it’s not necessary to be happy about it to consider the effect it has had, possibly unintentionally, on the election and on the Brexit saga more generally.
A brief review of Labour’s Brexit strategy
As is well-known, the origins of Labour’s approach lay in the desire to regain the support of those leave voters who had traditionally voted Labour, especially in the ‘Red Wall’ seats (in the more expanded meaning that term has come to have). Arguably, the recent local election results demonstrate that this approach has been successful, but that is, indeed, much-debated, especially in the light of Professor Sir John Curtice’s influential analysis. His work suggests a much more complicated picture resulting from the interplay between voters’ positions on the question of ‘re-joining’ versus ‘staying out’ and their perceptions, mis-perceptions, and lack of knowledge of Labour’s position on that question.
However, even within Curtice’s analysis there is some support for the Labour strategy, in that it finds that:
“Among those who would vote to stay out, support for the party is twice as high among those who think Labour shares their view as it is among those who think Labour has no clear policy, and four times as high as it is among those who would re-join. … [whereas] re-joiners seem inclined to back the party in substantial numbers irrespective of where they think the party stands on the issue.”
In other words, even though most Labour voters are anti-Brexit, the party can hang on to their votes without taking an anti-Brexit stance, and in the process make it more likely that they can hang on to, or regain, pro-Brexit voters. There are also more micro-level considerations here about ‘vote efficiency’ (£), in that Labour’s positioning on Brexit (along with some other issues) may lose the party some anti-Brexit voters in urban constituencies where it has large numbers of voters and can expect to win anyway, whilst gaining the support of pro-Brexit voters in marginal and target seats.
The impact on the Tories
Whatever the validity of this approach as regards the Labour vote, discussing it solely in those terms ignores what it means for the Tory vote. I’ve made this point before, last December, in a detailed appraisal of Curtice’s earlier analysis of the Labour vote, when he suggested that they could still win the election even if they had a far more anti-Brexit policy. That policy would, if it were to be in any meaningful way more anti-Brexit than at present, have to mean at the least seeking to re-join the single market, and at most seeking to re-join the EU.
Both then and now, I think that what’s missing from the analysis is that a shift to such a policy would have enabled the Tories not just to break their silence but to become very vocal about Brexit. Freed from the trap defined in my previous post, and repeated at the top of this one, they would have been able to talk about Brexit not in terms of its success, and not in the face of Brexiter criticisms that it hasn’t been done ‘properly’, but solely in terms of it having been done at all.
In this way, they would be able to reprise a version of the ‘get Brexit done’ line of the 2019 election, by depicting Labour as wanting to re-open all the battles of Brexit with which many voters – regardless of whether they are in favour of Brexit or not – had become so bemused and bored. What better terrain, indeed, to deploy to great effect their current, and currently rather feeble, slogan that a Labour government would mean “going back to square one”?
More than that, the Tories would have been able to regress to deploying the powerful “will of the people” line which, flawed as it was, acted as a battering ram in the period between the referendum and the 2019 election. Every single media interview with a Labour politician during the campaign would have become focused on the one question of Labour’s plans to reverse Brexit. Literally no other part of Labour policy would be mentioned. Meanwhile, every part of the Tory campaign, and every interview with a Tory politician, would have focussed solely on Labour’s Brexit policy, in the process absolving Tories from scrutiny of their government’s record and enabling them to unite their currently fractious party in way which is otherwise totally inconceivable.
More even than that, the chances of a deal between the Tories and Reform UK would have massively increased, under a ‘defend Brexit’ campaign banner. Instead, despite the attempts by Tories such as David Frost (£), such a message has no credibility. The most the Tories can credibly claim is that Labour would keep the UK ‘within Brussels’ regulatory orbit’. But since, to the chagrin of the Brexiters, the government has broadly speaking realised that there is no realistic alternative to this, that has little traction. However, if Labour had any kind of rejoin policy, a ‘defend Brexit’ message would become highly credible and, as happened with Farage and the Brexit Party in 2019 for the same reason, it is easy to envisage that Reform would only run candidates in constituencies where it would hurt Labour (instead, the important question now is whether and to what extent Reform will be able to hurt the Tories, especially as Nigel Farage has opted not to stand in the election).
In short, it is hard to see how a different Labour policy on Brexit could do anything other than reduce its chances of winning the election, or at least reduce the majority it might otherwise expect. Whether or not it is accepted that this is the best strategy for Labour to win, it remains the case that it is one of the major reasons why the Tories seem likely to be largely silent about Brexit during the campaign. Deprived of the opportunity to ‘defend Brexit’ simply because it is Brexit, they now only have reason to talk about it if there were positive things to say. But what might these be?
Brexit boasting à la Badenoch?
If the Tories do say anything substantive about Brexit during the campaign, they are likely to follow the kind of line taken in recent months by Kemi Badenoch, possibly the only government minister to attempt to make positive claims for it. As Business and Trade Secretary, she has been able, as Liz Truss did when she had the Trade portfolio, to truthfully point to something major which the UK can now do which it couldn’t as an EU member, namely run an independent trade policy. Moreover, it is propitious ground for Brexiters because it is an area where the supposed benefits can be presented in a way which is simple to understand and yields ongoing results.
The simplicity is akin to that of the independent Covid vaccine policy, but that was a one-off and relatively quickly forgotten (of course it also wasn’t even remotely true that it was down to Brexit, but many believed it to be). Trade policy also chimes with the core ideology of many members and traditional supporters of the Tory Party. For most of them, except, perhaps, those who are farmers, the details don’t really matter: what they think of as ‘free trade’ – typically, some dated notion of it being all about tariff-free trade – is simply ‘a good thing’ (on which topic, a new report from the UK Trade Policy Observatory this week underscores the significance of non-tariff barriers to UK-EU trade).
So Sunak could try, as Badenoch has done, to woo the gullible with things like the pointless statistic that (largely because of the rollovers of previous EU deals) the UK has ‘more trade agreements’ than any other country, or with talking up the one-sided and economically rather trivial deals with Australia and New Zealand, locations which make a certain kind of voter get moist-eyed about ‘old friends in the Dominions’. No doubt it is also their memories of ‘old Eastern hands’ in the family which give CPTPP accession some of its lustre, along with the apparently hard-headed, but actually utterly stupid*, suggestion that the fast growth rates of some of the countries involved makes it a great prize for Buccaneering Britain.
Appealing, too, though most facile of all, is the claim that Brexit has enabled the UK to achieve ‘the best trade deal the EU has ever given a third country’, as if that did not entail a downgrade from the previous terms of trade. Though, actually, that isn’t quite the most facile claim about Brexit’s trade opportunities. That title surely belongs to the virtually worthless Memorandums of Understanding signed with individual states within the US, which, except possibly for some very minor provisions, didn’t require Brexit anyway. Throw in some bogus graphs produced by the handful of economists who maintain that Brexit is good for trade and the UK economy generally, and the transposition of the truth of having an independent trade policy into the falsity that it is a net economic benefit of Brexit is easy to sell to some voters, though mainly to those who would vote for the Tories anyway (but perhaps also some who are tempted by Reform).
However, it would be much more difficult to persuade the wider public, who have already come to a different view, with only 12% thinking Brexit has had a positive effect on the current state of the UK economy (70% think the effect is negative), and only 21% thinking it will have a positive effect on the prospects of future economic growth (55% think it will be negative). Other polls show that on trade, specifically, 49% think that Brexit has had a negative impact on the ability to import goods from outside the EU, and 57% think that is so for importing goods from the EU. And on what might be the public’s biggest economic concern, 63% think Brexit has had a bad impact on prices in shops, and just 7% that it has had a good impact.
So, although trade policy may be an area where the Tories try to campaign on Brexit, if they do so it will be in the teeth of the public image of Brexit as one of practical failure, and therefore much more difficult than if Labour had given them the opportunity to re-mobilize around ‘defending Brexit’ in the abstract.
Red tape in the open air
Trade aside, the other Brexit-related campaign line the Tory Party might attempt to run is that of having ‘freed Britain from Brussels’ red tape’. This has been Badenoch’s most recent focus, with her twin announcements of the progress of the Smarter Regulation Programme, which has been running for the last year, and a new White Paper, also on Smarter Regulation. The press release covering the two was, indeed, entitled ‘Brexit freedoms used to slash red tape for business’, a typically disingenuous claim which backfired, as it led to media reports that one such freedom was going to be allowing al fresco dining. This caused much mockery since such dining is, to say the least, hardly forbidden within EU countries.
In fact, the story related to one of the items in the announcement, about possible simplifications of regulations in serving alcohol for outdoor consumption, and it wasn’t actually claimed to be anything to do with Brexit. In that sense, the mockery was misguided because the reporting was misleading. But the government had only itself to blame for choosing to badge the whole exercise in terms of ‘Brexit freedoms’, just as it previously made itself ridiculous with the consultation on imperial units of measurement.
Actually, looking down the Badenoch list, many of the other items had nothing to do with Brexit. Of those that did, one was a re-announcement of reforms to the reporting requirements relating to the Working Time Directive, which have been known about since last November (and came into force this year). These changes notably fall very short of the dreams of the deregulatory Brexiters to abolish the provisions of the Directive altogether, as it was rumoured the Truss government planned to do.
Another Brexit-related item in the announcement was a consultation on “an alternative model for UK REACH”, the post-Brexit chemicals regulatory system which is due to be phased in over the period 2026-2030. Long-term readers of this blog will know, as I’ve been discussing it since March 2020, when Michael Gove first confirmed the government’s intention to diverge from EU REACH, that this has been one of the longest-running post-Brexit regulatory sagas. Anyone working in the industries affected will be even more familiar with it and, whilst insiders have welcomed the new consultation, to posit this as some new Brexit freedom, rather than the latest stage in an utter fiasco, takes quite some brass neck.
Indeed, almost all of the announcements Badenoch made were for ‘consultations’ and ‘proposals’ on various regulatory issues. In itself, that isn’t to be disparaged, since far too many of the government’s post-Brexit initiatives have foundered on lack of consultation or due consideration – UKCA markings being an obvious example – but it is hardly evidence of the supposed ‘nimbleness’ of regulatory decision-making outside the EU that so little has been achieved so slowly. Crucially, this, along with the dull technical nature of so many regulatory issues, also shows why the Tories can’t make much of it as an electoral campaign issue. Few voters will care that, at some unspecified time in the future, some EU law on widgets may be changed.
So, again, Labour have spiked the Tories’ guns by closing off the possibility of them returning to the generalities of defending Brexit ‘sovereignty’. No doubt they will frequently mention having ‘taken advantage of Brexit freedoms’, as Sunak did in his launch speech on Wednesday, but when it comes to specifics all they have is a patchy and limited record of, frankly, rather dull initiatives which few voters will care about. If anything about Brexit and red tape has lodged in voters’ minds it will be the delays for travellers and goods that Brexit has caused.
Picardo rocks
Beyond the regulatory sphere, that same gap between the abstraction of sovereignty and its practical consequences continued to unfold in this week’s story about the negotiations over Gibraltar. I wrote about this issue in detail a few weeks ago, and the latest reports confirm, as suggested in that post, that part of the likely deal David Cameron is negotiating will involve EU Frontex officials checking passports at the Rock’s airport and ports. This would enable Gibraltar to be in the Schengen area, thus removing border controls with Spain, but could have the consequence of British citizens arriving at the airport being refused entry to the territory. This was the inevitable cue for the Brexit Ultras who dominate the European Scrutiny Committee (ESC), chaired by superannuated dullard Bill Cash, to start chuntering on about ‘sovereignty’.
Interestingly, this provoked an unusually sharp response from Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister. In it, he not only endorsed and praised Cameron’s approach, he also pointedly observed that “the ESC need to understand they are not decision makers in relation to Gibraltar”. Even more brutally, he criticised the ESC for their failure to understand the issues Brexit has created for Gibraltar and for their predilection for “asking provocative questions” rather than seeking “deliverable outcomes”, and for seeming to want “to believe everything they read in the newspapers over the evidence they are given”. Subsequently, he issued an even more dismissive rebuke to a predictably snide and silly comment from Jacob Rees-Mogg. Already Cash, Rees-Mogg et al., are beginning to look like yesterday’s men, and their fixation with ‘sovereignty’ to be, as it always was, and should have remained, the niche obsession of a few cartoonish freaks.
It's conceivable that Gibraltar will play a part in the election, since it seems that the negotiations are set to continue throughout the campaign, reflecting the fact that the Tory and Labour parties have a bipartisan approach to this issue. I don’t know how likely it is that a deal will be done in that period but, if it is, then it is easy to imagine that Ultras will erupt in fury, revealing how riven the Tories continue to be over Brexit, and how much the Brexiters loathe Sunak and are consumed by Brexit purism. Starmer, by contrast, will be able to welcome such a deal, with no dissent in his party, and have another illustration of the ‘Tory chaos’ that is set to be a central theme of Labour’s campaign.
The road back
There is certainly nothing to celebrate in the fact that we face an election in which the biggest political event since the last vote, and the biggest in recent history, looks likely to be virtually undiscussable. On the contrary, it is deeply depressing and, of all the adverse consequences of Brexit, it is perhaps the worst. As Michael Heseltine said this week, it is set to be the most dishonest election campaign he can remember, although actually the 2017 and 2019 elections were also almost entirely bereft of detailed discussion of the issue.
It is also the case that whilst Labour’s approach has had the effect of depriving the Tories of what would most aid them, the ability credibly to rally around a ‘defend Brexit’ message, it has also deprived Labour of what, in a rational polity, would be their most potent attack line. For the Tories’ flagship policy since 2016 has been an abject failure, not just in practice but in principle, yet, at best, Labour will only be in a position to attack the way that it was delivered, and that only in relatively marginal ways.
But, as the cliché has it, we are where we are, and perhaps the political silence reflects the fact that ‘as a country’ the wounds of Brexit are still insufficiently healed for it to be discussed. That will take time, but be hastened if this election sees the maximum damage inflicted on the party which brought us to this wretched point. The road back is a long one, and its route unpredictable, but it certainly passes through a crushing defeat of the Tory Party. Labour’s Brexit stance may disappoint re-joiners, but its ruthless determination to inflict such a defeat is more than evident. That defeat is by no means assured but, this week, it has come into sight.
Note
*It’s stupid because even if countries have fast growth rates, it doesn’t necessarily follow that their international trade grows at the same rate and, even if it does, and does so with the UK specifically, then if the existing amount of trade with the UK is low then even a large percentage increase in it will not be large in absolute terms. The converse proposition, that UK trade with the EU matters less as the EU has relatively slow growth, is stupid for the converse reason: it is still a large amount of trade in absolute terms. And even that is less stupid than the idea that the trade with the EU is of declining importance because, over time, the EU is becoming a smaller part of the global economy (which, of course, is the inevitable consequence of global economic development), as if that meant it was becoming smaller in absolute terms.
Nevertheless, Brexit will lurk in the shadows, and will continue to haunt politics whatever the election outcome. In this sense, regardless of whether Brexit features explicitly in the campaign, this election is part-and-parcel of the still-unfolding Brexit process. As the campaign develops over the next six weeks, I will discuss it in those terms.
The Brexit silence
In last week’s post, I talked about the near-silence of the Tory leadership about Brexit, arguing that this is because:
“It can’t claim Brexit to be a success, because those who do not have a foundational belief in its rightness can clearly see it has failed, whilst those for whom its rightness is a foundational belief also believe that it has been betrayed. But it can’t denounce Brexit as a failure or a betrayal, since it is the Brexit the Tory leadership actually delivered … It can neither boast of Brexit nor disown it.”
That silence, and that of the Labour Party, is already being commented on, for example by Daniel Finkelstein, who also discussed it in his Times column this week (£), but what is less discussed is that the Tories have been trapped partly as a result of just how successfully the Labour Party have neutralised Brexit as an electoral issue. They have done so partly through their own reticence about it, and partly by the extremely limited, though not entirely trivial, commitments they have made to softening the form of Brexit created by the Conservatives.
I’m very well aware that many Labour supporters, remainers, and Labour-supporting remainers are deeply unhappy with this strategy – and indeed that this is true of many readers of the blog. However, it’s not necessary to be happy about it to consider the effect it has had, possibly unintentionally, on the election and on the Brexit saga more generally.
A brief review of Labour’s Brexit strategy
As is well-known, the origins of Labour’s approach lay in the desire to regain the support of those leave voters who had traditionally voted Labour, especially in the ‘Red Wall’ seats (in the more expanded meaning that term has come to have). Arguably, the recent local election results demonstrate that this approach has been successful, but that is, indeed, much-debated, especially in the light of Professor Sir John Curtice’s influential analysis. His work suggests a much more complicated picture resulting from the interplay between voters’ positions on the question of ‘re-joining’ versus ‘staying out’ and their perceptions, mis-perceptions, and lack of knowledge of Labour’s position on that question.
However, even within Curtice’s analysis there is some support for the Labour strategy, in that it finds that:
“Among those who would vote to stay out, support for the party is twice as high among those who think Labour shares their view as it is among those who think Labour has no clear policy, and four times as high as it is among those who would re-join. … [whereas] re-joiners seem inclined to back the party in substantial numbers irrespective of where they think the party stands on the issue.”
In other words, even though most Labour voters are anti-Brexit, the party can hang on to their votes without taking an anti-Brexit stance, and in the process make it more likely that they can hang on to, or regain, pro-Brexit voters. There are also more micro-level considerations here about ‘vote efficiency’ (£), in that Labour’s positioning on Brexit (along with some other issues) may lose the party some anti-Brexit voters in urban constituencies where it has large numbers of voters and can expect to win anyway, whilst gaining the support of pro-Brexit voters in marginal and target seats.
The impact on the Tories
Whatever the validity of this approach as regards the Labour vote, discussing it solely in those terms ignores what it means for the Tory vote. I’ve made this point before, last December, in a detailed appraisal of Curtice’s earlier analysis of the Labour vote, when he suggested that they could still win the election even if they had a far more anti-Brexit policy. That policy would, if it were to be in any meaningful way more anti-Brexit than at present, have to mean at the least seeking to re-join the single market, and at most seeking to re-join the EU.
Both then and now, I think that what’s missing from the analysis is that a shift to such a policy would have enabled the Tories not just to break their silence but to become very vocal about Brexit. Freed from the trap defined in my previous post, and repeated at the top of this one, they would have been able to talk about Brexit not in terms of its success, and not in the face of Brexiter criticisms that it hasn’t been done ‘properly’, but solely in terms of it having been done at all.
In this way, they would be able to reprise a version of the ‘get Brexit done’ line of the 2019 election, by depicting Labour as wanting to re-open all the battles of Brexit with which many voters – regardless of whether they are in favour of Brexit or not – had become so bemused and bored. What better terrain, indeed, to deploy to great effect their current, and currently rather feeble, slogan that a Labour government would mean “going back to square one”?
More than that, the Tories would have been able to regress to deploying the powerful “will of the people” line which, flawed as it was, acted as a battering ram in the period between the referendum and the 2019 election. Every single media interview with a Labour politician during the campaign would have become focused on the one question of Labour’s plans to reverse Brexit. Literally no other part of Labour policy would be mentioned. Meanwhile, every part of the Tory campaign, and every interview with a Tory politician, would have focussed solely on Labour’s Brexit policy, in the process absolving Tories from scrutiny of their government’s record and enabling them to unite their currently fractious party in way which is otherwise totally inconceivable.
More even than that, the chances of a deal between the Tories and Reform UK would have massively increased, under a ‘defend Brexit’ campaign banner. Instead, despite the attempts by Tories such as David Frost (£), such a message has no credibility. The most the Tories can credibly claim is that Labour would keep the UK ‘within Brussels’ regulatory orbit’. But since, to the chagrin of the Brexiters, the government has broadly speaking realised that there is no realistic alternative to this, that has little traction. However, if Labour had any kind of rejoin policy, a ‘defend Brexit’ message would become highly credible and, as happened with Farage and the Brexit Party in 2019 for the same reason, it is easy to envisage that Reform would only run candidates in constituencies where it would hurt Labour (instead, the important question now is whether and to what extent Reform will be able to hurt the Tories, especially as Nigel Farage has opted not to stand in the election).
In short, it is hard to see how a different Labour policy on Brexit could do anything other than reduce its chances of winning the election, or at least reduce the majority it might otherwise expect. Whether or not it is accepted that this is the best strategy for Labour to win, it remains the case that it is one of the major reasons why the Tories seem likely to be largely silent about Brexit during the campaign. Deprived of the opportunity to ‘defend Brexit’ simply because it is Brexit, they now only have reason to talk about it if there were positive things to say. But what might these be?
Brexit boasting à la Badenoch?
If the Tories do say anything substantive about Brexit during the campaign, they are likely to follow the kind of line taken in recent months by Kemi Badenoch, possibly the only government minister to attempt to make positive claims for it. As Business and Trade Secretary, she has been able, as Liz Truss did when she had the Trade portfolio, to truthfully point to something major which the UK can now do which it couldn’t as an EU member, namely run an independent trade policy. Moreover, it is propitious ground for Brexiters because it is an area where the supposed benefits can be presented in a way which is simple to understand and yields ongoing results.
The simplicity is akin to that of the independent Covid vaccine policy, but that was a one-off and relatively quickly forgotten (of course it also wasn’t even remotely true that it was down to Brexit, but many believed it to be). Trade policy also chimes with the core ideology of many members and traditional supporters of the Tory Party. For most of them, except, perhaps, those who are farmers, the details don’t really matter: what they think of as ‘free trade’ – typically, some dated notion of it being all about tariff-free trade – is simply ‘a good thing’ (on which topic, a new report from the UK Trade Policy Observatory this week underscores the significance of non-tariff barriers to UK-EU trade).
So Sunak could try, as Badenoch has done, to woo the gullible with things like the pointless statistic that (largely because of the rollovers of previous EU deals) the UK has ‘more trade agreements’ than any other country, or with talking up the one-sided and economically rather trivial deals with Australia and New Zealand, locations which make a certain kind of voter get moist-eyed about ‘old friends in the Dominions’. No doubt it is also their memories of ‘old Eastern hands’ in the family which give CPTPP accession some of its lustre, along with the apparently hard-headed, but actually utterly stupid*, suggestion that the fast growth rates of some of the countries involved makes it a great prize for Buccaneering Britain.
Appealing, too, though most facile of all, is the claim that Brexit has enabled the UK to achieve ‘the best trade deal the EU has ever given a third country’, as if that did not entail a downgrade from the previous terms of trade. Though, actually, that isn’t quite the most facile claim about Brexit’s trade opportunities. That title surely belongs to the virtually worthless Memorandums of Understanding signed with individual states within the US, which, except possibly for some very minor provisions, didn’t require Brexit anyway. Throw in some bogus graphs produced by the handful of economists who maintain that Brexit is good for trade and the UK economy generally, and the transposition of the truth of having an independent trade policy into the falsity that it is a net economic benefit of Brexit is easy to sell to some voters, though mainly to those who would vote for the Tories anyway (but perhaps also some who are tempted by Reform).
However, it would be much more difficult to persuade the wider public, who have already come to a different view, with only 12% thinking Brexit has had a positive effect on the current state of the UK economy (70% think the effect is negative), and only 21% thinking it will have a positive effect on the prospects of future economic growth (55% think it will be negative). Other polls show that on trade, specifically, 49% think that Brexit has had a negative impact on the ability to import goods from outside the EU, and 57% think that is so for importing goods from the EU. And on what might be the public’s biggest economic concern, 63% think Brexit has had a bad impact on prices in shops, and just 7% that it has had a good impact.
So, although trade policy may be an area where the Tories try to campaign on Brexit, if they do so it will be in the teeth of the public image of Brexit as one of practical failure, and therefore much more difficult than if Labour had given them the opportunity to re-mobilize around ‘defending Brexit’ in the abstract.
Red tape in the open air
Trade aside, the other Brexit-related campaign line the Tory Party might attempt to run is that of having ‘freed Britain from Brussels’ red tape’. This has been Badenoch’s most recent focus, with her twin announcements of the progress of the Smarter Regulation Programme, which has been running for the last year, and a new White Paper, also on Smarter Regulation. The press release covering the two was, indeed, entitled ‘Brexit freedoms used to slash red tape for business’, a typically disingenuous claim which backfired, as it led to media reports that one such freedom was going to be allowing al fresco dining. This caused much mockery since such dining is, to say the least, hardly forbidden within EU countries.
In fact, the story related to one of the items in the announcement, about possible simplifications of regulations in serving alcohol for outdoor consumption, and it wasn’t actually claimed to be anything to do with Brexit. In that sense, the mockery was misguided because the reporting was misleading. But the government had only itself to blame for choosing to badge the whole exercise in terms of ‘Brexit freedoms’, just as it previously made itself ridiculous with the consultation on imperial units of measurement.
Actually, looking down the Badenoch list, many of the other items had nothing to do with Brexit. Of those that did, one was a re-announcement of reforms to the reporting requirements relating to the Working Time Directive, which have been known about since last November (and came into force this year). These changes notably fall very short of the dreams of the deregulatory Brexiters to abolish the provisions of the Directive altogether, as it was rumoured the Truss government planned to do.
Another Brexit-related item in the announcement was a consultation on “an alternative model for UK REACH”, the post-Brexit chemicals regulatory system which is due to be phased in over the period 2026-2030. Long-term readers of this blog will know, as I’ve been discussing it since March 2020, when Michael Gove first confirmed the government’s intention to diverge from EU REACH, that this has been one of the longest-running post-Brexit regulatory sagas. Anyone working in the industries affected will be even more familiar with it and, whilst insiders have welcomed the new consultation, to posit this as some new Brexit freedom, rather than the latest stage in an utter fiasco, takes quite some brass neck.
Indeed, almost all of the announcements Badenoch made were for ‘consultations’ and ‘proposals’ on various regulatory issues. In itself, that isn’t to be disparaged, since far too many of the government’s post-Brexit initiatives have foundered on lack of consultation or due consideration – UKCA markings being an obvious example – but it is hardly evidence of the supposed ‘nimbleness’ of regulatory decision-making outside the EU that so little has been achieved so slowly. Crucially, this, along with the dull technical nature of so many regulatory issues, also shows why the Tories can’t make much of it as an electoral campaign issue. Few voters will care that, at some unspecified time in the future, some EU law on widgets may be changed.
So, again, Labour have spiked the Tories’ guns by closing off the possibility of them returning to the generalities of defending Brexit ‘sovereignty’. No doubt they will frequently mention having ‘taken advantage of Brexit freedoms’, as Sunak did in his launch speech on Wednesday, but when it comes to specifics all they have is a patchy and limited record of, frankly, rather dull initiatives which few voters will care about. If anything about Brexit and red tape has lodged in voters’ minds it will be the delays for travellers and goods that Brexit has caused.
Picardo rocks
Beyond the regulatory sphere, that same gap between the abstraction of sovereignty and its practical consequences continued to unfold in this week’s story about the negotiations over Gibraltar. I wrote about this issue in detail a few weeks ago, and the latest reports confirm, as suggested in that post, that part of the likely deal David Cameron is negotiating will involve EU Frontex officials checking passports at the Rock’s airport and ports. This would enable Gibraltar to be in the Schengen area, thus removing border controls with Spain, but could have the consequence of British citizens arriving at the airport being refused entry to the territory. This was the inevitable cue for the Brexit Ultras who dominate the European Scrutiny Committee (ESC), chaired by superannuated dullard Bill Cash, to start chuntering on about ‘sovereignty’.
Interestingly, this provoked an unusually sharp response from Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister. In it, he not only endorsed and praised Cameron’s approach, he also pointedly observed that “the ESC need to understand they are not decision makers in relation to Gibraltar”. Even more brutally, he criticised the ESC for their failure to understand the issues Brexit has created for Gibraltar and for their predilection for “asking provocative questions” rather than seeking “deliverable outcomes”, and for seeming to want “to believe everything they read in the newspapers over the evidence they are given”. Subsequently, he issued an even more dismissive rebuke to a predictably snide and silly comment from Jacob Rees-Mogg. Already Cash, Rees-Mogg et al., are beginning to look like yesterday’s men, and their fixation with ‘sovereignty’ to be, as it always was, and should have remained, the niche obsession of a few cartoonish freaks.
It's conceivable that Gibraltar will play a part in the election, since it seems that the negotiations are set to continue throughout the campaign, reflecting the fact that the Tory and Labour parties have a bipartisan approach to this issue. I don’t know how likely it is that a deal will be done in that period but, if it is, then it is easy to imagine that Ultras will erupt in fury, revealing how riven the Tories continue to be over Brexit, and how much the Brexiters loathe Sunak and are consumed by Brexit purism. Starmer, by contrast, will be able to welcome such a deal, with no dissent in his party, and have another illustration of the ‘Tory chaos’ that is set to be a central theme of Labour’s campaign.
The road back
There is certainly nothing to celebrate in the fact that we face an election in which the biggest political event since the last vote, and the biggest in recent history, looks likely to be virtually undiscussable. On the contrary, it is deeply depressing and, of all the adverse consequences of Brexit, it is perhaps the worst. As Michael Heseltine said this week, it is set to be the most dishonest election campaign he can remember, although actually the 2017 and 2019 elections were also almost entirely bereft of detailed discussion of the issue.
It is also the case that whilst Labour’s approach has had the effect of depriving the Tories of what would most aid them, the ability credibly to rally around a ‘defend Brexit’ message, it has also deprived Labour of what, in a rational polity, would be their most potent attack line. For the Tories’ flagship policy since 2016 has been an abject failure, not just in practice but in principle, yet, at best, Labour will only be in a position to attack the way that it was delivered, and that only in relatively marginal ways.
But, as the cliché has it, we are where we are, and perhaps the political silence reflects the fact that ‘as a country’ the wounds of Brexit are still insufficiently healed for it to be discussed. That will take time, but be hastened if this election sees the maximum damage inflicted on the party which brought us to this wretched point. The road back is a long one, and its route unpredictable, but it certainly passes through a crushing defeat of the Tory Party. Labour’s Brexit stance may disappoint re-joiners, but its ruthless determination to inflict such a defeat is more than evident. That defeat is by no means assured but, this week, it has come into sight.
Note
*It’s stupid because even if countries have fast growth rates, it doesn’t necessarily follow that their international trade grows at the same rate and, even if it does, and does so with the UK specifically, then if the existing amount of trade with the UK is low then even a large percentage increase in it will not be large in absolute terms. The converse proposition, that UK trade with the EU matters less as the EU has relatively slow growth, is stupid for the converse reason: it is still a large amount of trade in absolute terms. And even that is less stupid than the idea that the trade with the EU is of declining importance because, over time, the EU is becoming a smaller part of the global economy (which, of course, is the inevitable consequence of global economic development), as if that meant it was becoming smaller in absolute terms.
I am surprised you haven't mentioned the one major benefit of Brexit reported recently, our almost certain win in the Sand Eel "wars" and the safeguarding of the Puffin population!
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note there is a problem with Labour's proposal for a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the EU, they want the ECJ oversight. and dynamic alignment.
As you explain above, Labour probably best to say nothing during the election campaign?
Thanks. The issue of what and SPS deal would entail is something I've discussed many times in the past! But I expect that in one of the posts during this campaign I'll focus on what Labour are and are not saying about Brexit (this one was more focussed on the Tories)
DeleteSeriously I think that ECJ oversight was, and should have remained, the niche obsession of a few cartoonish freaks.
DeleteChris, thanks as ever. Many of your readers would be interested in your views on how to vote “tactically” in the sense of maximising the chances of a future, sensible policy on the EU emerging. Perhaps a subject for a future blog?
ReplyDeleteThanks Josh. Yes, very likely I will post on this question during the campaign.
DeleteHope you will be mentioning SwapMyVote.uk where people can 'pair up' with another voter - so I can vote tactically in my own constituency AND a vote for my preferred party will be cast elsewhere (at the very least to be counted in the national totals and possibly to help swing another marginal). What's not to like?
DeleteI’m intrigued whether we might have ended up with a less damaging brexit had opposition parties tactically adopted a less confrontational approach to early proposals. There will no doubt be groups that want to keep reversal of brexit on the agenda throughout this election campaign, at risk of turning it into a brexit culture war. Maybe their purpose might be better served by tactically keeping it off the agenda, to ensure the party that brought us the current mess is conclusively discredited, and then focus on fixing the situation once a new government is in place?
DeleteExcellent column as ever. I hope you will also soon consider political developments at EU level, with European Parliament elections in June, followed by appointment of new Commission and Council President. Europe is in flux of course, and the next few months will be crucial in determining its external stance, in particular vis a vis Ukraine (but also regarding migration, China, the US etc). And of course Britain will have no say in any of it…
ReplyDeleteThanks. No, I won't be discussing those things, or not in any detail, anyway. I don't have any the expertise to do so, and the focus of the this blog is Brexit and the UK. Of course it's true that if, at some future time, there were any plan for the UK to seek to rejoin, it would be very important to understand the nature of the EU at that point. But there are/will be better sources than this blog for that!
ReplyDeleteThe last general election wan't just about Brexit: it was about "getting Brexit done". It was based on the proposition that Johnson had found a way of getting Brexit done and that the previous parliament had no validity because it hadn't been able to find a way to get Brexit done. Johnson in fact chose to "solve" the issue of the border with Ireland by putting the border between Larne and Stranraer, and he then lied about the implications of that.
ReplyDeleteJohnson has been removed for parting during COVID and lying about it. There has been no acknowledgement of his more consequential lying, such as at the last general election. Brexit has been done by, eventually, coming to agreements with the EU that have implications that are unacknowledged (as Chris Grey has assiduously documented).
There are several layers of dishonesty in not talking about Brexit at this election.
On the subject of "Brexit Opportunities", (yes, I also winced at that point) we at least now know there will be no Indian trade deal before the GE, as there is barely a month between the two countries' Elections. (I would also contend there is also no practical likelihood of any deal thereafter.)
ReplyDeleteI have also been wondering if Labour might be having any private thoughts about revoking/rescinding the disastrous Johnson/Truss Australia and NZ Deals. It wouldn't cross any manifesto commitments, and would appear to have no political or economic downsides. On the plus side, there would be a big political credit with the farming regions - while also offering an olive branch to their mainly pro European voter base.
Yes, the whole question of what kind of trade policy Lab will pursue, given their stance that there will be no customs union, is a really interesting one, with the first point of interest being what, if anything, they say about it in their manifesto.
DeleteUn piccolo punto: gli italiani non dicono mai 'al fresco' per cenare nel giardino o sotto il cielo. 'Fresco' significa semplicemente 'fresh'. Il cibo fresco: fresh food, not out of a tin. Dopo 16 giugno 2016 ho deciso a studiare un altra lingua europeana e ho scelto la lingua bella italiana. Poi posso boicottare la lingua del paese di brexit.*
ReplyDelete*A small point: the Italians never say 'al fresco' to dine in the garden or in the open. 'Fresco' simply means 'fresh', as in 'fresh food'. After the infamous referendum I decided to study another European language so I could cock a snook at brexiters by addressing them in it. I may still have a long way to go, but I have learnt the above.
Well done. I stupidly decided to study Russian at the same time…
DeleteAs a European, I hope that the Tories will be swept away. A victory or a small defeat could lead to more extreme positions in a country that, seen from the outside, is fiercely racist (one of the pillars of Brexit is to send Europeans away), going so far as to call it quits the ECHR
ReplyDeleteExcellent analysis, as always. I agree Labour's strategy of sweeping Brexit under the carpet can work better than launching an all out war on the issue, but still seems utterly weird to keep ignoring it. It's like having a problem with alcohol and keep drinking to think you don't.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post as per usual. Starmer would do well to read it.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the limited and dim but unjustifiably pompous and smug Lord Betamax Frost, the gobshite blonde toddler and all the other mad Brexiteers should appear before the courts to explain why they've destroyed the country. They should not be allowed to get away with this with impunity given that it was based on lies and a fraudulent referendum, not to mention Russian interference.
It would also be to Starmer's electoral advantage to commit to SM/CU at the very least. That would apply to the Tories, but they are too 'proud' and stubborn to see it. Starmer should explain why he refuses to turn the economy around.
Quite right!
DeleteDuplicitous behaviour with serious ramifications is cause enough.
Quote from Frosty the no man from 2016:
Speaking to euronews, he said: “About 40% of what we export goes to Europe. If we leave the European Union then we are going to see administrative barriers brought up. If there is a Brexit we will lose access to the European Union Free Trade Agreements, that is clear.
“If the UK then will need to renegotiate its own agreements, clearly that is going to take time. Our interest is to be part of the biggest possible market with the fewest possible barriers.
And here comes the punchline: “The European single market gives us that. The European free trade agreements gives us that. Why would we want to depart from that?”
Grammar mistake in the last paragraph! It's its, not it's.
ReplyDeleteThanks, now corrected.
DeleteMy first thought on Sunak's election announcement was: He has jumped ship. After SPS checks on the Dover route have at last been introduced, and are to be introduced on goods from Dublin sometime in the not so far future: What will then sellers and traders prevent rerouting their stuff via Belfast, in order to evade those customs and SPS checks? How will then GB make sure that what reaches them via NI is really from NI and thus entitled to unfettered trade? To solve this conundrum, one would need to resuscitate something very much akin to Theresa May's WA, which ended with fourteen NOs in Parliament. No wonder Starmer keeps very quiet about his plans as regards the relationship with the EU.
ReplyDeleteThe EU's SPS regulations already apply to all of Ireland, N & S. Products moving from GB to NI must comply and that is why there is a border post in Larne. Cue outrage from the DUP until the Windsor Framework gave them a smokescreen to climb down off their high horse.
DeleteProducts from NI to GB are "unfettered", so no controls. Products exported from the EU do not have to comply with EU regs, that only applies to domestic consumption. Substandard stuff can be shipped to markets that are not as fussy. Whether it would be worth anyone's while to ship their junk via Larne is unlikely: IMO the "problem" is probably more theoretical than real.
If stuff from Ireland is to be checked when it enters GB - which it inevitably will have to, otherwise the UK would violate WTO rules - why would anyone NOT send their stuff via NI to avoid all the hassle and cost?
DeleteThanks again for your fascinating insights. I am trying to follow UK domestic politics, but am depressed that you seem to corroborate the "Let's not mention Brexit" dishonesty in this upcoming election. From across the Atlantic I was convinced that my impression that the current UK domestic discourse was sounding hollow surely must be a mistake. Apparently it isn't. While I understand (and personally on a purely technical level support) Labour's decision to neuter Brexit as an election issue after the last four years, I do _not_ understand how everything else that clearly should affect voters in the UK as pressing issues is not foremost on everyone's mind instead. Neither inflation and relative household income, NHS crisis, water quality or public transport misery, nor general decline of services or future economic challenges seem to register much. Instead public discourse seems to be stuck (similar to here in the US) on lightning-rod like "culture wars" that have almost zero impact on people's actual lives. And while the Tories are, similar to the Republican party here, attempting to weaponize quasi non-issues, this strategy - unlike in the US - does not seem to be working if I read the British polls correctly. So what do UK voters actually vote on if it's _not_ Brexit, all-gendered bathrooms, "wokeness", or conjured nightmares of immigration invasions? And what common-sense minded policy do the Tories even offer that have any appeal to a rational voter who has not bought into the culture war nonsense?
ReplyDeleteI grew up on the impression, if not certain belief, that the one main advantage of the UK being in Europe to the continent was that in the end it was a country of common sense, its political input therefore very welcome especially to the Nordic countries (and by extension, Germany). Given the current state of political discourse in the UK, common sense now seems almost entirely removed from it. (I do understand party agendas might not actually be so devoid of content, but there certainly do not seem to be many actual policy discussions). Please tell me I'm wrong.
You are not wrong
DeleteYou are definitely not wrong. However, regarding your comment about 'a country of common sense', I wonder if you know Sunak actually appointed a Minister without Portfolio - who was presented to the public as a Minister for Common Sense. I think the only thing that she - Esther MvVey MP - has actually done since taking on the role is to call for civil servants not to be allowed to wear 'rainbow coloured ID lanyards'. Yes, seriously!
DeleteThis is indeed sad.
DeleteOf course one might point out that there is plenty of material for comedians here in the fact that it is a) global political standard that a ministry gets named after its exclusive field of responsibility -- which would make Esther McVey the _only_ person now responsible for common sense in the entire cabinet --, and b) that this is also considered a ministry without portfolio.
Great post as usual! It is difficult to understand what Tory backbenchers thought they could achieve by another heave against Sunak. Don't mention Brexit is becoming a bit like "don't mention the war" in popular discourse.
ReplyDeleteBut the is one consequence of this election which appears to have escaped attention. Throughout Europe there has been a trend towards the decline of the major centre right and centre left parties and the proliferation of far right and other splinter parties. Proportional representation has of course facilitated this, but the UK's fptp system may also exacerbate it.
What happens if both the Tories and labour come to be regarded as largely remote from the the concerns of most people, if not in this election, then perhaps in the next? Labour may have the whip hand now, but if it doesn't deliver a turnaround in Britain's fortunes, the electorates pro and anti European factions may turn to the liberals and reform.
And all the while the disintegration of the UK body politic will proceed with calls for Scottish independence and Irish re-unification. Labour may be being tactically astute for winning this election, but it is laying the groundwork for a continuing decline in the UK, both economically and politically.
Stormers legacy may end up not being much greater than Sunak's unless he can find unsuspected powers of leadership.
Thanks, Frank. And, yes, I agree there is a real danger that what you say will prove to be right.
DeleteAs a trained lawyer, and amateur historian, I appreciate the cast iron logic in your posts, and the absolute clarity around a subject that is a murky and subjective and confusing as anything I have ever experienced. I hope you realize that this blog is destined to be THE authoritative account of Brexit, in the years to come. Legal and political students will
ReplyDeleteAsk themselves “ have your read Grey on Brexit?”
Thanks, David, that is a really kind comment. I doubt it will reach that status, but it may be a useful record, of sorts.
DeleteThe title of your last section (The road back) is identical to Erich Maria Remarque's novel on German soldiers returning home at the end of the First World War. I hope that the (inevitable?) rejoining of the EU will not be as arduous!!
ReplyDeleteHaha that reference was not intentional (though it was in my mind that it was a phrase with a resonance which I couldn't place). Equally, I did not intend the road back to necessarily mean 're-joining the EU', though it might well mean that, so much as as a way back from "this wretched point" at which dishonesty, especially but not exclusively about Brexit, so saturates political life.
DeleteLabour are making coded references to Brexit with the talk about Tory chaos and claiming Labour puts country before party.
ReplyDelete"Superannuated dullard" evinced a chuckle here. Perfect.
ReplyDeleteThe ineptitude, ignorance and arrogance of the Tories never ceases to amaze, and above all the blithe lack of self-awareness that is so obvious from Gibraltar, NI and other Tory-free zones.
The flashbacks keep coming. The announcement by the trade ignoramus Andrea Leadsom, who made such a fool of herself on Newsnight debating Pascal Lamy, that she wouldn't stand in the next election triggered a recollection of the ludicrous march by her supporters for leadership of the party.
Led by Theresa Villiers they made a farcical spectacle in the street chanting "What do we want?" and "When do we want it?" (Leadsom! and Now! apparently). Villiers, the worst ever Secretary of State for NI, who had assured us all that Brexit had no implications at all for the British border on the island of Ireland.
Risible then and even more preposterous in hindsight. And yet there are people who think "Just bring back Boris and everything will be fine"!
Has there ever been such a catalogue of self-inflicted harmful events on a supposedly serious country by such an epic parade of charlatans?
Someday there will be a multi-part TV documentary on it all and children will marvel at the hermetic conceits of some of their ancestors.
I understand the point about Labour's strategy being useful to keep their opponents from making everything a culture war, and I see your own frustration with the fact that Brexit isn't even discussed. But we have to be clear about the broader implications:
ReplyDeleteFirst, specifically for the UK this means that after an election victory, Labour will have no mandate to do anything to improve the situation in any substantial manner. And this paves the way for electoral disaster five years later, and for the UK to potentially spiral down to right-wing authoritarianism quasi-dictatorship within ten years.
Second, more broadly across the 'western world', the picture is similar. We are generally faced with a large right-wing party that makes things worse whenever they are in power (deregulation, privatisation, tax cuts for the rich starving public finances, cuts to services, no investment in infrastructure, targeting minorities for abuse, ballooning inequality and ever less affordable houses, etc.) and are able to win elections despite becoming ever more radicalised, and a large nominally left-wing party that can only ever win an election when it promises not to undo any of the damage caused by the former but instead restricts itself to managing the mess slightly more competently. Their rare election victories produces short respites of stagnation before things get worse again. Since I became politically aware in the early 1990s, I have never seen economic policy or the inequality situation improve.
If that is where we are at, and nobody has a strategy for getting out of that situation, then our civilisation is at its equivalent of the late stage of the Roman Empire and thus on its way out within decades. Because even putting aside global warming, a society like that will fall apart at some point due to a combination of underinvestment into the future, elite corruption and infighting, and then some outside factor giving it the fatal push over the line.
Excellent analysis, as always, Chris. As deeply frustrating as I find Labour’s stance, your article acts as balm on my frustration. Though I do wonder, if and when in power, how Labour will handle the subject. The current stance may well work for electoral reasons, i question how credible it is when in power, especially if they need some magic wand to conjure up rapid economic growth. Reeves is being disingenuous, but I guess removing the Tories is the top priority.
ReplyDeleteThe Tories had no mandate for hard Brexit either, and they pushed through with the hardest version of it, fully aware that most people were horrified and disgusted. I think Labour will have a mandate to, at least, rectify the abuse of the past few years.
ReplyDeleteBritain is governed by the Press. It has been so since 1916, when the first Lord Northcliffe appointed a new Prime Minister, and the line from Northcliffe down (very, very far down) to Murdoch is direct. Keir Starmer knows that the Press can and will destroy him at any moment; his only thought is to appease them, which is not possible but which will prevent him from making the right decision on any topic that may arise.
ReplyDeleteI think the days when the Press had unlimited power and could put and remove prime ministers are behind. The scope of influence for the Press nowadays is just a piece of the pie.
ReplyDeleteNo mention of Scotland where SNP are very much anti brexit and pro rejoining.
ReplyDeleteThat's because the focus is on the two main parties, and that is because it is one of them which will form or at least lead the next government.
DeleteI understand that Chris but the results of Brexit are still a big issue here.I would also say that large parts of the media are complicit in the silence over the issue.
ReplyDeleteThis is off topic, but did you see the final "Britain After Brexit" article by Peter Foster on 9 May?
ReplyDeleteI was surprised that it seems to repeat the old Brexiter tropes of Germany being in charge of the EU, and that it's really all Angela Merkel's fault that the EU didn't give the UK the deal it wanted.
A lucid and comprehensive account as ever.
ReplyDeleteIt would useful to have an update on where you think the continuing fellow travellers of Lexit are functioning; their influence on the ‘Red Wall’, Starmer and the radicalised Tory right in general. Larry Elliot is the most egregious example, wilfully denying the effect of Brexit at all - a rather sinister silence labelled as “Brexomertà”, but all of a piece with both parties as described above. How genuine are the Corbynite left in holding to their belief? Or is it as cyclical and performative as their Tory/Reform equivalents?