The hard Brexit addiction

Two weeks ago, when I wrote my previous post, Brexit Ultras were cock-a-hoop because they believed that the EU and Ireland were being forced to ‘pay the price’ for having refused to countenance an Irish land border during the Brexit negotiations. As a result, asylum seekers within the UK were now entering Ireland via Northern Ireland so as to escape the possibility of being removed to Rwanda (or supposedly: see the post itself for discussion).

That ebullience has turned to dismay with this week’s ruling by Northern Ireland’s High Court that parts of the Illegal Migration Act do not apply in Northern Ireland (NI) because they breach human rights law and, thereby, breach the Windsor Framework. This is likely to mean that asylum seekers in NI cannot be deported to Rwanda, although the government will appeal against the ruling. Meanwhile, to the ire of Brexiters generally, and NI unionist Brexiters in particular, a potential incentive for asylum seekers to locate in NI, rather than the rest of the UK, has been created. Suddenly we are back to the old familiar lament that "Britain is paying the price for surrender to the EU" (£).

The roots of this lie deeper than the Windsor Framework, extending to both the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and the original Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). Although much of the discussion of these has been to do with trade and economic borders, central to the EU’s position in the Brexit negotiations was that there should be no dilution of the GFA, and included within that was that there be no diminution of the human rights provisions contained within the GFA (matters of no small concern to the US, as well).

The UK government agreed to this, and it is worth stressing that it did so quite willingly for, at the time, apart from perhaps a few on the fringe, Brexiters, and certainly the Brexit government, were adamant that Britain had no intention at all of threatening such rights, or the GFA in any respect, and all talk to the contrary was just more ‘Project Fear’. That the EU nevertheless sought legal commitment to this intention was, as can now be seen, a sensible and necessary precaution.

Not my Brexit (as always)

Thus when former Home Secretary Suella Braverman railed this week that the Windsor Framework has “failed upon its first contact with reality”, and is operating contrary to the “assurances given” to her at the time, that is pure nonsense. In fact, on its first contact with reality (as regards human rights), the Windsor Framework has done exactly what was intended from the outset. It is not clear what ‘assurances’ she was given, or who gave them, but if she believed otherwise then she is incompetent. However, this isn’t really the point she’s making. What she actually is trying to do is to disavow the fact that she was a member of the government which agreed the Windsor Framework (and, further back, one of the Tory MPs who voted unanimously for the NIP).

In this, Braverman is following a now familiar pattern as regards the Brexit arrangements for NI (and Brexit more generally). Over and over again Brexiter MPs who voted for them claim that they were misled, for example into believing the NIP to be temporary, or into believing that there would be no sea border, and, now, over the human rights provisions it entailed. There may be some truth in these claims to the extent that Boris Johnson repeatedly misrepresented the Protocol. However, that is no excuse for such MPs not to have grasped this central part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, the more so given that one of their leading figures, Iain Duncan Smith, insisted that no more time need be spent debating it. The same goes for the Windsor Framework, and especially for a government minister like Braverman.

But all of this is a smokescreen. The reality is that, from the outset, Brexiters didn’t understand or care what their project meant for Northern Ireland and many of them still do not, or affect not to believe it. Only when, as individuals, they are in government, are they forced to confront it, as they are other Brexit realities. That happened to Theresa May and, for all his huffing and puffing, to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister, though he left a political crisis over the NIP the resolution of which, via the Windsor Framework, was one of Rishi Sunak’s few achievements, and one of the few times he faced down the Brexit Ultras. The same thing happened to Braverman, whilst she was in office, including when, in her second stint as Home Secretary she voted for the Windsor Framework.

But some Tory Brexiters either never held government positions or, as happened with numerous Brexit Secretaries and Brexit Ministers, resigned those positions rather than accept the realities of Brexit. They could then join the Farageist extra-parliamentary chorus of how Brexit has been betrayed and could have been done ‘properly’ if only the government had ‘stood up to’ the EU. So Braverman’s reference to ‘assurances’ that have proven false is simply her alibi for what the government she was part of did, and a brandishing of her credentials to join the ranks of the betrayed.

The Tory Brexit failure

All this in turn is part of the wider picture of what Brexit has done to the Tory Party. For the most basic and most brutal truth is that what has been their flagship policy since 2016, and defining purpose since 2017, has manifestly failed. That failure was well-captured by Rafael Behr’s pithy formulation in his Guardian column this week: “Brexit was a huge bet against the idea that geography mattered to economic and security policy in the 21st century. Geography won.” Week-in and week-out the evidence of that grows, with the latest examples including its role in the delays to the opening of the Co-Op Live Arena, its role in medicine shortages, and the border delays for perishable goods imports. Conversely, the realities of geography have continued quietly to play out, for example in shadowing new EU regulations (such as those relating to plastic bottle caps) and in re-joining the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking. 

But we need hardly rehearse once again all the economic and geo-political damage and pointlessness of Brexit, still less to trudge through all the wearisome attempts by Brexit ideologues to disprove it, or to grab hold of some tiny shred, usually misrepresented anyway, of supposed justification. The clinching evidence of its failure is that if Brexit had been anything even remotely like the success that was promised then, as we approach the first election since leaving the EU, the Tories would undoubtedly be trumpeting that success, and making their record of delivering it the central plank of their electoral platform. Instead, they barely mention Brexit any more, preferring to grub around with endless ‘re-sets’, gimmicks about banning civil service ‘woke lanyards’, and, of course, the more serious, but still gimmicky, Rwanda policy.

The nature of those gimmicks reflects how Brexit has been a failure in a different way; a failure not just for the country but for the Tory Party itself. For whilst the causes of Brexit are multiple, there can be no doubt that a significant one was the attempt by David Cameron and others to destroy the electoral threat of the UKIP ‘revolt on the right’. In that respect, its failure has been not just abject but total. Not only has that threat regathered (or perhaps we should say re-formed), as Reform UK, requiring the Tories to continue to seek ways to negate it, but the Tory Party itself has been substantially ‘UKIPified’. In particular, a substantial part of the right, both within and outside the party, regards Brexit as a foundational belief, but believes equally strongly that it has been betrayed.

The silence of the Tory leadership

So the Tory leadership, meaning not just Sunak but the party as a governing party, is now in an impossible situation (of its own making, so weep no tears). 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.

This situation grows directly out of the wider political climate which Brexiters, meaning not just politicians but commentators and activists, have created since 2016. They showed no interest in trying to persuade their opponents that, despite their doubts, it could be successfully delivered – remainers were just told to ‘suck it up’, which they declined to do. Yet Brexiters themselves have been the most adamant that Brexit hasn’t been successfully delivered.

So the Tory leadership now has nowhere to stand: it can neither boast of Brexit nor disown it. It has to insist both that Brexit was the right thing to do, which only a minority of voters now believe, and that it was done in the right way, something which only a minority of that minority now believe, which isn’t electorally viable. Hence the near-silence (matched only, though for quite different reasons, by the Labour opposition).

The noisy minority

By contrast, Brexiters who insist Brexit was the right thing, but was not done in the right way, have a much easier time of it, so long as they can avoid the taint of responsibility for how it was done. This is the seam of grievance that is being assiduously and very loudly mined by Reform and by many Tories. For them, things like the Belfast court ruling offer the opportunity to keep punching on the bruise that the Tory government bungled Brexit, and did so through lack of true belief in real Conservatism.

Moreover, they can propound a Brexit 2.0 agenda of leaving the ECHR, as well as even more draconian anti-immigration and anti-asylum policies, far more easily than can the Tory leadership. For, in government, the practical consequences of this agenda would be all too clear. Sunak can make noises about the ECHR, but any government actually derogating from it would encounter massive problems, not least in relation to the GFA and the NIP. Outside government, these problems can be denied, or discounted simply by proposing to violate those agreements as well.

On immigration generally, whilst the government is willing to countenance considerable damage to universities and to businesses with its recent clampdowns, it is less clear that it would be able to weather the storm caused by the kinds of restrictions its even more right-wing critics want. It is one thing for voters to demand much lower immigration, quite another if they are forced to face the reality of the consequences. Even surveys showing majority support for reducing immigration also show majority support for making immigration easier for many key occupations, especially the NHS and social care. Certainly any government actually implementing a very low immigration policy of the sort advocated by Reform UK would immediately run into huge practical difficulties and, crucially, would still be denounced by those outside government as not going far enough.

For practical difficulties do not matter outside government, and, as with Brexit itself, they can be dismissed as ‘Project Fear’, generated by a self-interested globalist elite. That is why, in these dog days of Tory government, those within the party who aspire to its future leadership, perhaps including Braverman or Robert Jenrick, can develop ever-more impractical ideas, just as Reform can.

The same goes for those, like Liz Truss, canvassing for the PopCons, or for Jacob Rees-Mogg, who this week proposed an electoral pact (£), not far short of an effective merger, between the Conservatives and Reform, albeit that Farage immediately rejected that, at least for now. Meanwhile there is talk of self-styled ‘media personality’ Matt Goodwin and self-proclaimed ‘disruptor’ Dominic Cummings each launching new, populist, anti-immigration parties of their own. If so, there will be multiple parties fishing in the same murky, but electorally fairly limited, water, leaving all of them frustrated in their pursuit of power, not least because, in the process, they will abandon many of the centre-right voters upon whom the the Tories used to rely.

Chasing the dragon

Brexit and its aftermath are the key to all of these developments, and, although it is impossible to know how they will play out, there is a good chance that they will yield a long-term fracturing of the political right. That’s something which used to be thought more likely on the left. To an extent, it is what happened when the SDP split from Labour in the 1980s, and it might have been expected in the form of an ‘Old Labour’ split from ‘New Labour’ during the Blair years, or a Blairite split from Corbyn’s Labour, or the Corbynite left setting up a new party in opposition to Starmer. Arguably, the effect, and ultimate fate, of the SDP may have inoculated the Labour Party against such subsequent splits. But the post-Brexit right, high on dreams of purity and addicted to the dramas of betrayal and purges has, perhaps appropriately, not had the benefit of the vaccine.

It's against this background that many current events should be understood, including the perhaps not very important or enduring one of the Belfast High Court ruling. That ruling is, at one level, a reminder of the mess that Brexit has created as regards Northern Ireland and of the impracticality of separating the UK from all of the international obligations that Brexiter ideas of sovereignty entail. At another level, it is one more piece of ammunition for the Brexiters to propose making an even greater mess in Northern Ireland, since their ultimate aim is to renege on the NIP and the Windsor Framework (and in some cases probably the GFA, as well), and to redouble on their fantasy of sovereignty by reneging on the ECHR (£). The more general application of that logic is, perhaps, the ultimate trap that Brexit has created: anything and everything that shows the folly of Brexit is, for Brexiters, the justification to commit even worse follies.

If that seems like political madness given the electoral system, and public opinion, it is sustained by the memory of the high of 2016 when, very briefly, the Brexiters could lay claim to embodying the ‘will of the people’ and could believe that they really were the silent majority, not the noisy minority. It was a heady moment. The hit proved short-lived and ultimately disappointing, but, for Britain’s political right, it proved to be a gateway drug, and there is not much they will not do in search of another fix.