Against that background, it’s hardly surprising that the media have piled attention on to Nigel Farage ever since his belated and self-important “emergency announcement” that he would stand in the election, and take over formal leadership of Reform UK. That’s not to imply that this should not have been treated as a significant development but even if it hadn’t been, and even if Farage wasn’t so adept at media manipulation, it’s hard to criticize reporters for latching on to it given that the campaign as a whole is really quite boring. The only other outlet for their skills is filing stories on Rishi Sunak’s increasingly egregious errors of judgement.
That gives them plenty of work but, other than that, the journalistic pickings are slim. Focus group-tested slogans are repetitiously ground out on the basis, apparently, that because voters tune in so briefly and infrequently, politicians must ensure that, at any given moment, they can be heard giving their key messages. Even Farage’s supposedly anti-Establishment shtick is wearisomely familiar. A career politician parachuted in to a place of which he knows little and cares less, his shop-soiled iconoclasm is as tired and grubby as his raincoat. As for his key message, there’s no danger of missing that. Once he told us that all he wanted was to leave the EU, and to have an ‘Aussie-style’ immigration system. Now he has that, but here he still is, still going on about immigration. But actually that’s not his key message. His key message is: look at me, making the Conservatives and ‘the Establishment’ panic.
That transparent neediness may be repellent, but is at least recognizably human – even if its ‘make Daddy suffer/ remember me’ roots present little psychological mystery - compared with Sunak’s robotic insistence that he “has a plan” for “bold action”, which makes even the poor old MayBot seem like a better candidate for the Turing Test. Meanwhile, the strained, wooden earnestness with which Keir Starmer promises that “change” is coming resembles nothing so much as a man in the ‘before’ image of a laxative advert. It's true that the other party leaders are a bit more dynamic, and Ed Davey, in particular, is hitting some authentic notes of seriousness along with appearing to genuinely enjoy some amusing stunts. In some ways it is easier for them as they get less exposure, so the repetitions are less obvious, and, in any case, they don’t face quite the same pressure to ‘look Prime Ministerial’.
Beneath the boredom
Beyond all this lies a deeper issue. If this campaign is boring, then it is because the main parties are determined to avoid discussing the really serious problems this country faces, and the unpalatable choices that it has to make. Their refusal to talk honestly about economic policy has been made quite forcibly by Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, although it’s worth recalling that he said the same during the 2017 and the 2019 elections. Perhaps it’s not entirely their fault. It’s not clear that the media, still less the general public, have much appetite for political honesty, for all that they bemoan politicians not providing it.
The same may be true of the related refusal to talk much about Brexit, which has also been widely remarked upon, and which I’ve discussed previously*. This was on display this week in the Tory manifesto, which followed very much the lines I anticipated in that post, but even more strikingly in Labour’s which said even less than I'd expected about the subject (N.B. I have written a separate page discussing in detail what each of the party manifestos says about Brexit).
Beyond all this lies a deeper issue. If this campaign is boring, then it is because the main parties are determined to avoid discussing the really serious problems this country faces, and the unpalatable choices that it has to make. Their refusal to talk honestly about economic policy has been made quite forcibly by Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, although it’s worth recalling that he said the same during the 2017 and the 2019 elections. Perhaps it’s not entirely their fault. It’s not clear that the media, still less the general public, have much appetite for political honesty, for all that they bemoan politicians not providing it.
The same may be true of the related refusal to talk much about Brexit, which has also been widely remarked upon, and which I’ve discussed previously*. This was on display this week in the Tory manifesto, which followed very much the lines I anticipated in that post, but even more strikingly in Labour’s which said even less than I'd expected about the subject (N.B. I have written a separate page discussing in detail what each of the party manifestos says about Brexit).
However, in one way, this is in itself an illustration of one of the biggest flaws in Brexit. For what it shows is that, across huge swathes of policy, and especially those policies that electors most care about, EU membership was largely irrelevant. The policy issues being discussed now are very much the same as they were before we left the EU or would have been had we stayed in. The idea that our national politics and sovereignty had somehow been made irrelevant by Brussels was always nonsense. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the taboo about discussing the new problems that Brexit has added to those familiar policy issues has added a new layer of dishonesty to political discourse.
The dishonesty of Nigel Farage
This dishonesty most certainly extends to Farage and his Reform Party. He simply disowns Brexit as having been betrayed by the Tories, as if it happened despite him, and could have been done in some better way by him. But this ignores the fact that at the last election he gave his support to the Withdrawal Agreement that Boris Johnson had negotiated, as well as voting for it, as a Brexit Party MEP, in the European Parliament. It ignores the fact that the subsequent ‘Canada-style’ trade agreement was the outcome he favoured and, as I mentioned earlier, it ignores the fact that immigration is now subject to an ‘Aussie-style points system’ which he used to say he supported. He is as responsible as anyone not just for Brexit, but for Brexit in the precise form it took.
Moreover, whilst he now wants to make this an ‘election about immigration’, his ‘net zero’ immigration policy is utterly dishonest in refusing to accept what its economic consequences would be. The reason why the Tories have never come anywhere near meeting what used to be their immigration caps, and recently oversaw such an increase in net migration, isn’t because they lacked hostility to immigration. Quite the contrary. It’s because, in government, they were forced to recognize that the consequences of significantly reducing it would be impossibly damaging. The stock anti-immigration argument that labour shortages can be met from domestic unemployment founders on the reality that there are simply not enough unemployed people to do so, and that, even with better training, there are not enough people with, or able to acquire, the right skills, and this is going to get worse as the population ages.
Similarly, the reason the Tories didn’t simply follow Reform’s policy of dumping the small boat arrivals ‘back in France’ wasn’t because of any lack of desire to do so but because, when they embarked on such a policy, they found that it simply isn’t possible. Yet it remains Reform’s policy, and their website even states that the UK is “legally allowed to do this under international treaties”, which is essentially untrue. It is a position that can only be advocated by those who do not have to take responsibility for practical delivery. In this, Farage and Reform are every bit as dishonest with the electorate as the ‘Establishment politicians’ they affect to despise.
Worse than that, over immigration in particular, the Tories and the various parties Farage has fronted over the years have co-conspired to stoke grievances. One of the most incisive Conservative commentators, John Oxley, recently wrote that “for twenty years or so the Tory Party has been trying and failing to find an answer to Farage”. That attempt has included repeatedly making undeliverable promises about immigration to head off the Farage challenge, with the invariable result of feeding that challenge when the promises are not kept. Brexit is the same story, writ large.
This is a large part of the reason for this week’s reports that public trust in government and politicians is at an all-time low, and whilst the Tory-Farage death dance is central to that, Labour can scarcely be exonerated. At least and since Gordon Brown’s ‘Mrs Duffy moment’ of 2010, which has haunted them ever since, they too have basically accepted the analysis that immigration is at best a necessary evil to be avoided so far as possible by increasing the domestic labour supply. The potential difference, at this election, is that they at least seem to grasp that there is an alternative strategy, based on increasing investment and productivity, as Rachel Reeves’ recent Mais Lecture, amongst other things, makes clear. Whether they can deliver this in government, especially given the growth constraints entailed by their Brexit policy, remains to be seen. The kinds of measures they envisage, such as planning reform and a very diluted form of Bidenomics, don’t look to me to have enough firepower, but they might get lucky if global factors fall in their favour.
At all events, what is crucial is that it will now be Labour which faces the realities being in government imposes. That won’t be the case for the Tories, who are set to enter the world of Brexitist fantasy.
The Conservative implosion
What is now emerging as the key sub-plot of this election – given that the broad overall outcome seems almost assured – is the battle for the post-election meaning of British conservatism. I anticipated, back in February 2023, that this would occur, assuming the Tory Party lost the election. What I hadn’t anticipated was the extent to which the party would so visibly fall apart prior to the election (this also means that whereas in my previous post I wrote about the election being “quietly” about Brexitism, it is now much more noisily so). As both a cause and a consequence, this has emboldened Farage to launch what he now admits is an attempt to take it over, with the first step being to ensure that an almost certain defeat becomes an electoral wipe-out.
Whether or not he, himself, becomes the leader of what emerges from the fall out, then it will be a Brexitist party. That is, in brief summary: it will have commitment to Brexit as its bedrock value; will espouse ‘Brexit 2.0’ policies, most notably ECHR derogation and of course anti-immigration and anti-refugee measures; will prize ‘true belief’ over evidence and rationality in policymaking; and will embrace the vicious nostalgia, which I’ve written about before, of a return to an imagined, sanitized past of social order and mono-culturalism, in which there is no climate crisis and no ‘wokery’.
It is important to understand that this means not just expunging the last remnants of ‘one nation’, ‘pragmatic’ or ‘liberal’ Toryism, but also a rejection of Sunak’s brand of pro-Brexit but fiscally orthodox and ‘globalist’ Conservatism. Notably, one of the few things the Tories have done since 2019 which Farage approved of was Truss’s ‘anti-Establishment’, ‘true Brexit’ mini-budget. The Brexitists want Sunak to lose, and to lose big.
Farage is able to be quite open about this, to the dismay of Tory Brexitists like Andrea Jenkyns, who has been squealing this week about the unfairness of Reform standing a candidate against ‘true Conservatives’ such as her, with the aim of ‘destroying the Conservative Party’. It seems to escape her that for years, and even in the actual statement she made, she and her fellow ‘true Conservatives’, in their various factions, have laid the ground for this with their endless denunciations of their own party. As the internet meme has it, she evidently didn’t expect the leopard to eat her face.
Meanwhile, other Brexitists think, to use a different ‘big cat’ analogy, that they can ride the tiger, with Jacob Rees-Mogg proposing (£), not for the first time, an electoral pact between the two parties. Suella Braverman has gone even further in calling for the Tories to “embrace Nigel Farage” to “unite the right”, to the extent of seemingly suggesting a formal merger. That’s unlikely to happen before the election, but it can’t be ruled out that Farage will do some kind of deal whereby Reform stands down its candidates in seats held by Tory Brexitists, with or without reciprocation, in the hope of then taking over a compliant party.
But there are other actors at work. Astonishingly, four Tory MPs, including Jenkyns, have accepted £5000 donations from the backer of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party in exchange for signing up to its key pledges, including a commitment to leave the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). What is astonishing isn’t so much that they have done so in defiance of the Tory Party HQ. That is just a further sign of the collapse of the party, and it may be that other MPs will do the same thing. Rather, it is astonishing because Fox, of all people, is being spoken of by Jenkyns as taking “a grown-up approach” in contrast to Reform’s divisive ‘sabotage’. Equally bizarrely, at the same time Jenkyns is using images of her with Nigel Farage on her campaign literature, violating her own party’s code of conduct as well as aligning her with the party whose conduct she condemns. Her spokesperson sought to explain it by saying that “Andrea is above all, a patriot”, but more obvious nouns are all too readily available.
How much of this will burst into an even more open conflict before the election remains to be seen. The Conservative manifesto launch on Tuesday promised to lower immigration, and made very vague reference to the European Court of Human Rights (not even the Convention), implying any future judgments it makes in relation to the Rwanda policy might be ignored. But this just underscored the trap the party is in. Such positions alienate more liberal conservatives, putting the ‘Blue wall’ seats under greater threat to, especially, the LibDem challenge, whilst being nowhere near enough to satisfy Brexitists. Even before it was published, they were threatening to produce a ‘rebel manifesto’ if the official one doesn’t shift the opinion polls (which seems unlikely). Yet the fact is that, even if Sunak were to commit to ECHR derogation, the Brexitists’ hallmark policy, they wouldn’t be satisfied, and would demand something else. This is part of what makes it Brexitism – it is exactly the same pattern of behaviour the Brexit Ultras showed as regards Brexit itself.
The laboratory of post-Brexit politics
All of this is just a small taste of the maelstrom that is going to engulf the Tories assuming they lose the election. It won’t involve most of us, except as spectators, but voters in the current election can shape it. Firstly, the greater the scale of the Tory defeat the more intense will be the crisis of the party. In this sense, it will be important whether or not voters conclude that since a Labour victory seems guaranteed, they need not bother to vote or, alternatively, that they vote Tory so as to deny Labour a ‘blank cheque’ (a line the Tories are starting to push hard). Secondly, although it would not deny him any post-election role, if Farage loses in Clacton that would be an important symbolic failure, and would, in some hard to predict ways, shape what then happens to the Tories.
As for that, there’s every chance that what will emerge will be a party with an appeal so narrow as to be unelectable, but it can’t be assumed that this will be so. I don’t see Farage as very likely to lead it to success, whatever happens in Clacton, not least because he is now such a familiar face, and one about whom most people have now made up their minds. But a fresh, younger leader might capture the public imagination and, as the EU parliament elections have shown, it also can’t be assumed that right-wing populism only appeals to older voters. If, by 2029, a stodgy Labour government has failed to make any real dent in not just the economic malaise but the wider sense of national distress, a victory by such a party can’t be ruled out. What may well be a huge Labour majority now could easily dissolve with disaffected voters deserting in multiple directions, and a ‘National Conservative’ government emerging from the wreckage without needing a huge share of the national vote.
Admittedly, it is quite absurdly speculative to be talking about the 2029 election when the present one has not yet even been held. But I have a strong sense that even though this election campaign is quite boring, it is also an extremely significant moment in British politics. Or, rather, that its boringness arises from its significance. Before the campaign is over, we will have the eighth anniversary of the referendum, and we are still living through what it has unleashed. Part of that is actually a desire for politics to be more boring, and Starmer’s ‘end the chaos’ message speaks effectively to that. Part of it is a fear, born of the trauma of Brexit, of going anywhere near a big idea. The country pressed the reset button in 2016, and far from solving any problems it has added to them. Most people have little appetite for turning the machine on and off again now.
Yet for others the opposite is true. For some of them, and Farage is certainly one, 2016 was a moment of high excitement, which nothing before or since has given them. They would love to press the button again, and have the thrill again. For others, Brexit has proved a horrible disappointment, and its supposed betrayal one more grievance to add to their list, leaving them ready to angrily jab the button - again and again and again.
So, stale and uninspiring as it may be, underneath that, this election campaign is an expression of post-Brexit politics and is setting up the shape of its next phase. Its underlying drivers are by no means unique to the UK, as shown by the European Parliament elections and, especially, the fall-out from them in France, where there is set to be an open conflict between nationalist populism and liberal centrism. But the dynamics of the conflict are distinctive in the UK, precisely because of Brexit, which is also the reason why Brexitism is a distinctive version of populism. Here, the 2016 referendum already openly enacted that conflict and, narrowly but inescapably, the populists won.
When populists win, their policies can’t deliver what they claimed for them, and that is what happened with Brexit (to the extent that the latest figures show that just 15% of people, and only 31% of those who voted to leave, think that the benefits of it outweigh the negatives). But, in this case, the populists won not simply an election, with the result reversible at the next one. Their policy was not a time-limited domestic one, but an open-ended international re-alignment. What happens when such a policy fails is largely uncharted water, and with this election the UK is starting to map it out. That makes it interesting, at least as an experiment in the laboratory of political science, though disconcerting for those of us who are the lab rats.
*In another previous post, I mentioned in passing that Brexit would play a role in the campaign in Northern Ireland, especially for the unionist parties. It’s not a topic I feel qualified to discuss, but there is a very informative expert analysis by Professor Jon Tonge of Liverpool University on the Comment is Freed Substack.
The dishonesty of Nigel Farage
This dishonesty most certainly extends to Farage and his Reform Party. He simply disowns Brexit as having been betrayed by the Tories, as if it happened despite him, and could have been done in some better way by him. But this ignores the fact that at the last election he gave his support to the Withdrawal Agreement that Boris Johnson had negotiated, as well as voting for it, as a Brexit Party MEP, in the European Parliament. It ignores the fact that the subsequent ‘Canada-style’ trade agreement was the outcome he favoured and, as I mentioned earlier, it ignores the fact that immigration is now subject to an ‘Aussie-style points system’ which he used to say he supported. He is as responsible as anyone not just for Brexit, but for Brexit in the precise form it took.
Moreover, whilst he now wants to make this an ‘election about immigration’, his ‘net zero’ immigration policy is utterly dishonest in refusing to accept what its economic consequences would be. The reason why the Tories have never come anywhere near meeting what used to be their immigration caps, and recently oversaw such an increase in net migration, isn’t because they lacked hostility to immigration. Quite the contrary. It’s because, in government, they were forced to recognize that the consequences of significantly reducing it would be impossibly damaging. The stock anti-immigration argument that labour shortages can be met from domestic unemployment founders on the reality that there are simply not enough unemployed people to do so, and that, even with better training, there are not enough people with, or able to acquire, the right skills, and this is going to get worse as the population ages.
Similarly, the reason the Tories didn’t simply follow Reform’s policy of dumping the small boat arrivals ‘back in France’ wasn’t because of any lack of desire to do so but because, when they embarked on such a policy, they found that it simply isn’t possible. Yet it remains Reform’s policy, and their website even states that the UK is “legally allowed to do this under international treaties”, which is essentially untrue. It is a position that can only be advocated by those who do not have to take responsibility for practical delivery. In this, Farage and Reform are every bit as dishonest with the electorate as the ‘Establishment politicians’ they affect to despise.
Worse than that, over immigration in particular, the Tories and the various parties Farage has fronted over the years have co-conspired to stoke grievances. One of the most incisive Conservative commentators, John Oxley, recently wrote that “for twenty years or so the Tory Party has been trying and failing to find an answer to Farage”. That attempt has included repeatedly making undeliverable promises about immigration to head off the Farage challenge, with the invariable result of feeding that challenge when the promises are not kept. Brexit is the same story, writ large.
This is a large part of the reason for this week’s reports that public trust in government and politicians is at an all-time low, and whilst the Tory-Farage death dance is central to that, Labour can scarcely be exonerated. At least and since Gordon Brown’s ‘Mrs Duffy moment’ of 2010, which has haunted them ever since, they too have basically accepted the analysis that immigration is at best a necessary evil to be avoided so far as possible by increasing the domestic labour supply. The potential difference, at this election, is that they at least seem to grasp that there is an alternative strategy, based on increasing investment and productivity, as Rachel Reeves’ recent Mais Lecture, amongst other things, makes clear. Whether they can deliver this in government, especially given the growth constraints entailed by their Brexit policy, remains to be seen. The kinds of measures they envisage, such as planning reform and a very diluted form of Bidenomics, don’t look to me to have enough firepower, but they might get lucky if global factors fall in their favour.
At all events, what is crucial is that it will now be Labour which faces the realities being in government imposes. That won’t be the case for the Tories, who are set to enter the world of Brexitist fantasy.
The Conservative implosion
What is now emerging as the key sub-plot of this election – given that the broad overall outcome seems almost assured – is the battle for the post-election meaning of British conservatism. I anticipated, back in February 2023, that this would occur, assuming the Tory Party lost the election. What I hadn’t anticipated was the extent to which the party would so visibly fall apart prior to the election (this also means that whereas in my previous post I wrote about the election being “quietly” about Brexitism, it is now much more noisily so). As both a cause and a consequence, this has emboldened Farage to launch what he now admits is an attempt to take it over, with the first step being to ensure that an almost certain defeat becomes an electoral wipe-out.
Whether or not he, himself, becomes the leader of what emerges from the fall out, then it will be a Brexitist party. That is, in brief summary: it will have commitment to Brexit as its bedrock value; will espouse ‘Brexit 2.0’ policies, most notably ECHR derogation and of course anti-immigration and anti-refugee measures; will prize ‘true belief’ over evidence and rationality in policymaking; and will embrace the vicious nostalgia, which I’ve written about before, of a return to an imagined, sanitized past of social order and mono-culturalism, in which there is no climate crisis and no ‘wokery’.
It is important to understand that this means not just expunging the last remnants of ‘one nation’, ‘pragmatic’ or ‘liberal’ Toryism, but also a rejection of Sunak’s brand of pro-Brexit but fiscally orthodox and ‘globalist’ Conservatism. Notably, one of the few things the Tories have done since 2019 which Farage approved of was Truss’s ‘anti-Establishment’, ‘true Brexit’ mini-budget. The Brexitists want Sunak to lose, and to lose big.
Farage is able to be quite open about this, to the dismay of Tory Brexitists like Andrea Jenkyns, who has been squealing this week about the unfairness of Reform standing a candidate against ‘true Conservatives’ such as her, with the aim of ‘destroying the Conservative Party’. It seems to escape her that for years, and even in the actual statement she made, she and her fellow ‘true Conservatives’, in their various factions, have laid the ground for this with their endless denunciations of their own party. As the internet meme has it, she evidently didn’t expect the leopard to eat her face.
Meanwhile, other Brexitists think, to use a different ‘big cat’ analogy, that they can ride the tiger, with Jacob Rees-Mogg proposing (£), not for the first time, an electoral pact between the two parties. Suella Braverman has gone even further in calling for the Tories to “embrace Nigel Farage” to “unite the right”, to the extent of seemingly suggesting a formal merger. That’s unlikely to happen before the election, but it can’t be ruled out that Farage will do some kind of deal whereby Reform stands down its candidates in seats held by Tory Brexitists, with or without reciprocation, in the hope of then taking over a compliant party.
But there are other actors at work. Astonishingly, four Tory MPs, including Jenkyns, have accepted £5000 donations from the backer of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party in exchange for signing up to its key pledges, including a commitment to leave the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). What is astonishing isn’t so much that they have done so in defiance of the Tory Party HQ. That is just a further sign of the collapse of the party, and it may be that other MPs will do the same thing. Rather, it is astonishing because Fox, of all people, is being spoken of by Jenkyns as taking “a grown-up approach” in contrast to Reform’s divisive ‘sabotage’. Equally bizarrely, at the same time Jenkyns is using images of her with Nigel Farage on her campaign literature, violating her own party’s code of conduct as well as aligning her with the party whose conduct she condemns. Her spokesperson sought to explain it by saying that “Andrea is above all, a patriot”, but more obvious nouns are all too readily available.
How much of this will burst into an even more open conflict before the election remains to be seen. The Conservative manifesto launch on Tuesday promised to lower immigration, and made very vague reference to the European Court of Human Rights (not even the Convention), implying any future judgments it makes in relation to the Rwanda policy might be ignored. But this just underscored the trap the party is in. Such positions alienate more liberal conservatives, putting the ‘Blue wall’ seats under greater threat to, especially, the LibDem challenge, whilst being nowhere near enough to satisfy Brexitists. Even before it was published, they were threatening to produce a ‘rebel manifesto’ if the official one doesn’t shift the opinion polls (which seems unlikely). Yet the fact is that, even if Sunak were to commit to ECHR derogation, the Brexitists’ hallmark policy, they wouldn’t be satisfied, and would demand something else. This is part of what makes it Brexitism – it is exactly the same pattern of behaviour the Brexit Ultras showed as regards Brexit itself.
The laboratory of post-Brexit politics
All of this is just a small taste of the maelstrom that is going to engulf the Tories assuming they lose the election. It won’t involve most of us, except as spectators, but voters in the current election can shape it. Firstly, the greater the scale of the Tory defeat the more intense will be the crisis of the party. In this sense, it will be important whether or not voters conclude that since a Labour victory seems guaranteed, they need not bother to vote or, alternatively, that they vote Tory so as to deny Labour a ‘blank cheque’ (a line the Tories are starting to push hard). Secondly, although it would not deny him any post-election role, if Farage loses in Clacton that would be an important symbolic failure, and would, in some hard to predict ways, shape what then happens to the Tories.
As for that, there’s every chance that what will emerge will be a party with an appeal so narrow as to be unelectable, but it can’t be assumed that this will be so. I don’t see Farage as very likely to lead it to success, whatever happens in Clacton, not least because he is now such a familiar face, and one about whom most people have now made up their minds. But a fresh, younger leader might capture the public imagination and, as the EU parliament elections have shown, it also can’t be assumed that right-wing populism only appeals to older voters. If, by 2029, a stodgy Labour government has failed to make any real dent in not just the economic malaise but the wider sense of national distress, a victory by such a party can’t be ruled out. What may well be a huge Labour majority now could easily dissolve with disaffected voters deserting in multiple directions, and a ‘National Conservative’ government emerging from the wreckage without needing a huge share of the national vote.
Admittedly, it is quite absurdly speculative to be talking about the 2029 election when the present one has not yet even been held. But I have a strong sense that even though this election campaign is quite boring, it is also an extremely significant moment in British politics. Or, rather, that its boringness arises from its significance. Before the campaign is over, we will have the eighth anniversary of the referendum, and we are still living through what it has unleashed. Part of that is actually a desire for politics to be more boring, and Starmer’s ‘end the chaos’ message speaks effectively to that. Part of it is a fear, born of the trauma of Brexit, of going anywhere near a big idea. The country pressed the reset button in 2016, and far from solving any problems it has added to them. Most people have little appetite for turning the machine on and off again now.
Yet for others the opposite is true. For some of them, and Farage is certainly one, 2016 was a moment of high excitement, which nothing before or since has given them. They would love to press the button again, and have the thrill again. For others, Brexit has proved a horrible disappointment, and its supposed betrayal one more grievance to add to their list, leaving them ready to angrily jab the button - again and again and again.
So, stale and uninspiring as it may be, underneath that, this election campaign is an expression of post-Brexit politics and is setting up the shape of its next phase. Its underlying drivers are by no means unique to the UK, as shown by the European Parliament elections and, especially, the fall-out from them in France, where there is set to be an open conflict between nationalist populism and liberal centrism. But the dynamics of the conflict are distinctive in the UK, precisely because of Brexit, which is also the reason why Brexitism is a distinctive version of populism. Here, the 2016 referendum already openly enacted that conflict and, narrowly but inescapably, the populists won.
When populists win, their policies can’t deliver what they claimed for them, and that is what happened with Brexit (to the extent that the latest figures show that just 15% of people, and only 31% of those who voted to leave, think that the benefits of it outweigh the negatives). But, in this case, the populists won not simply an election, with the result reversible at the next one. Their policy was not a time-limited domestic one, but an open-ended international re-alignment. What happens when such a policy fails is largely uncharted water, and with this election the UK is starting to map it out. That makes it interesting, at least as an experiment in the laboratory of political science, though disconcerting for those of us who are the lab rats.
*In another previous post, I mentioned in passing that Brexit would play a role in the campaign in Northern Ireland, especially for the unionist parties. It’s not a topic I feel qualified to discuss, but there is a very informative expert analysis by Professor Jon Tonge of Liverpool University on the Comment is Freed Substack.
“ A career politician parachuted in to a place of which he knows little and cares less, his shop-soiled iconoclasm is as tired and grubby as his raincoat.” (On Farage). ….Is there a prize for this sort of thing? If there is, you get it for this.
ReplyDeleteFor some time, I have been looking for a metaphor to describe how I personally feel about the Brexit experiment.
ReplyDeleteThe image I usually have, is one in which there is a dishevelled drunken loud mouth I have studiously avoided in the airport terminal building. And then when I board the plane and the doors are locked, I hear over the intercom that same voice saying: ‘this is your captain speaking’.
But ‘lab rat’ also captures it.
"John Oxley, recently wrote that “for twenty years or so the Tory Party has been trying and failing to find an answer to Farage"."
ReplyDeleteIndeed, and that is why the Tory Party is in an existential crisis. The problem we now face is that the Labour Party may not have an answer to Farage. As I have pointed out before, the position of much of the Labour Party at the time of the referendum was "Remain but opt-out of FoM" and after the referendum was "Norway minus FoM", both of which were impossible scenarios. Saying things that resonate with people, even if they make little sense, isn't going to deal with the problem that is Farage.
Would 'Remain but opt out of FoM' have been a wholly impossible scenario? Orban manages to defy Brussels on many issues but remain within the EU.
DeleteRemaining part of the political structures of the EU but opting out of the single market (freedom of movement of goods, people, service and capital) would not just be an impossible scenario but also a highly unpopular one.
DeleteThe consequences of leaving the single market are already unpopular as they are, imagine having them while incurring the legal costs of being taken to court by the Commission and hundreds of traders on both sides of the channel.
Not even Orban is so bold or stupid to take Hungary out of the single market
In France the election fight is not between national populism and liberal centralism. Liberal centralism has already lost and will nearly be wiped out in the election, albeit still possessing the office of the President. The fight is between national populism and left-wing populism. The French want to work less and get more from government. The far right will presumably gut environmental rules and save some money there, but how much will that actually help the French financially? Don't know. Otherwise, cutting benefits to immigrants will be counterbalanced by higher labour costs should there actually be fewer immigrants. On the left the Popular Front II will target the rich.
ReplyDeleteThe English, for it is they who rule the UK roost, merely want to live beyond their means with a current a/c trade deficit that can’t be financed for long, for there is only so much family silver that remains saleable, and a strong disinclination to saving, such that they have neither the financial wherewithal nor the skills to renew their infrastructure, without which there will be no economic growth, which is pretty much the only way to improve outcomes, such as health, without heavy taxation.
DeleteThe UK management of Thames Water is no advertisement for foreign investors, the ‘kindness’ of which is a necessary part of this nation’s survival.
The French, on the other hand, can at least feed themselves. The UK, even after the Brexit its agricultural sector wanted, is losing productivity and exports.
I'm not sure that Macron would agree that "liberal centrism has already lost and will nearly be wiped out in the election". If he thought that, he would not have called an unnecessary election. My guess is that he is relying on a difference of voting pattern between EU parliament and national assembly elections, but of course I don't have a direct insight. That difference was very strong when UK was still in the EU, which is what got Farage elected. Now the pundits want to deny any difference, in the same way as they ramped up the movement of the 'gilets jaunes', although that movement in the end faded away into nothingness. We will see. Macron has been very canny politically in the past, notably in 2017, and I doubt if he's lost that, but he does give the impression of having had enough, not being able to be elected again.
Delete'On the left the Popular Front II will target the rich.'
DeleteThe way you refer to this makes it seem that you think it would be a bad thing. I don't myself know whether what you have written is true, but I do know that it would be a good thing. Taxing the rich makes things better.
Well, there's the theory that Macron is taking the risk that if people vote for RN now they'll have to form a government and thereby become sufficiently unpopular by the time the next presidential elections come around. In the meantime he as president can still manage foreign policy and the "important" things. Sound like a high stakes approach to me.
DeleteWe shall see. In the Netherlands Wilders in theory got to form a government, but it's not clear he can actually formulate any policy and have sufficient support to get it though. Sometimes it's seems he has trouble getting out of the opposition mindset. Dissing other party's policies doesn't really do much when you're the one in government.
I discovered after writing my previous comment that Macron did in fact say that his strategy corresponded to what I suggested; it was not only my imagination. It is a logical strategy. Most journalists are currently refusing to recognise a difference in voting habits between European and national elections, though they've accepted it in the past. it is because they are trying to raise a panic about the danger of the far right, and the exaggerate the position of Nigel Farage too, constantly invited for interviews, when the strength of his party doesn't justify it.
DeleteForgive me if I have this wrong, but I believe it's too late for Farage to form a pact with the Brexitist Conservatives by standing down Reform candidates. As I understand it, as happened in Rochdale by election with Azhar Ali, he could 'withdraw support' from one or more candidates but they would remain on the ballot paper, and under the Reform banner, as nominations have now closed.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Andy. You may well be right, and it could only be in some back door form as you suggest
DeleteI think the media and especially the BBC is complicit in thus failure to discuss Brexit.In Scotland I repeatedly hear the Snp or the Greens mentioning it but its quite obvious the BBC don't want to discuss it.They give plenty air time to Farage though without in the main any proper questioning of his views on Brexit ,Climate Change,Trump or Putin.
ReplyDeleteThe BBC's justification for giving air-time to Farage is that he is important because he is responsible for Brexit. I would have thought that that would be a good reason not to give him the oxygen of publicity.
DeleteAbsolutely right. BBC journalists are in awe of Farage. They think his brand of populist entertainment is amusing - but it isn’t. It’s lethal.
DeleteI have long been under the impression that the BBC top management have given an instruction to the staff that Brexit is not to be discussed.
DeleteIt will be interesting how the newspapers report on Conservatives and Reform. I mean the Sun Telegraph Mail and Express. The main Brexit fans. They seem to like Farage as headline but keep backing Conservatives in editorial. Few weeks to go. Any clues in next blog welcome. The Evening Standard backed Conservatives in local elections then fell over as a weekday print operation. Is there a limit to how long newspapers can back Conservatives against the polls and expect to be viable?
ReplyDeleteYou have to ask why our spineless politicians are so frightened of confronting the massive downsides of Brexit. The Tories because they invented the disaster and therefore can't admit it, Labour because it would undermine their attempts to take back red wall seats. Lib Dems I'm not so sure about. It is interesting that when Davey mentioned SM/CU membership the other day, they went up by 4 points in a poll. Given what the electorate feel about Brexit, I would hazard a guess that it would confer an electoral advantage for any party that favours rejoining.
ReplyDeleteI think the Lib Dems will certainly win over votes in the 'Blue Wall, with this policy.
DeleteBut the LDs are also positioning themselves as the high tax party - particularly CGT, which certainly hits the Blue Wall. They may view Reeves as a safer and more sensible pair of hands.
DeleteRight wing populism doesn't particularly concern me, but Brexit does : The point being that Brexit is neither right or left - though it's roots are in Bennite socialism. Brexit fundamentally affects practically every election issue : for example, if the basic Personal Allowance had been continually indexed-up since Farage's 2016 referendum punctured our economy, then we would by now be at least half way to Reform's random £20,000 figure.
ReplyDeleteGet Brexit Done formally invited us to frivolously accept/appease Brexit as a luxury add-on at best, or minor inconvenience at worst. We are now gradually understanding that the forces of economic history and geography are far more powerful than convenient or comforting political soundbites.
It is difficult to see how Brexit's roots lie in Bennite socialism. Its roots lie in Thatcher's Bruges speech, Johnson's columns in the Telegraph and the emergence of sniping at Europe in Murdoch's papers. These came after Labour had accepted EC/EU membership and everyone else thought it was a dead issue. After the UK's heavy industry was closed down, Benn's ideas of economic planning became irrelevant.
DeleteI am obviously taking a more historical perspective, but the unbroken thread is still there. Traditional Conservatives (like me) have been left high and dry in just a few short years, as our former pro EU and pro business party has been taken over by a once tiny ERG clique and shameless carpetbaggers like Johnson and Gove. Being critical of the EU - like Thatcher - is a very far cry from Brexit - which makes no economic or business sense for a free market economy.
DeleteMeanwhile, a consistent anti EU leftist thread always existed - from Benn - through to his proteje Corbyn and Brexit supporting Stalinist inner circle (Milne, Murphy, Fisher, Murray). Former RCP alumni at Spiked now produce more cogent Brexit propaganda than the rapidly declining ERG. And of course key Brexit figures like Cummings, Banks and Farage all have some form of Russian link.
Excellent analysis, thank you. I think the sudden insistence by Faragev to renegotiate the Brexit agreement next year is going to be the dominant political focus in 2025. This is, of course, a desperate attempt to re-edit Brexit as in 2016 and double down on the lies and idiocy of the Leave campaign. It is also the perfect camouflage for the Reform Party's absence of policies, other than cheap slogans. Labour must be ready to fight that ghost.
ReplyDeleteI’m currently quietly (and yes, childishly) entertained by our loss of sovereignty and becoming an EU rule-taker. Cap tops. Little plastic tops now tethered to plastic bottles and fruit juice cartons. Why? It’s an EU directive which came into force after we left but is now present in our country. Why are Brexiteers not screaming about this issue? Especially when the remedy is so obvious - and that’s to introduce new regulation banning this in the UK. And they so love new regulations too! Especially really petty-fogging ones as this would be.
ReplyDeleteThe obvious remedy is just to cut them off with a pair of scissors - and then recycle them along with the bottle when finished. But it is a symbolic daily reminder of the futility of Brexit.
DeleteFully agree, in many respects Farage and the RW brexitists greatest trick was to fool the average person in to thinking the BBC was unduly influenced by remainers and the left wing. But when you read the names of the political editors, presenters and their fellow travellers it’s obvious those with influence at the BBC (especially on politics/current affairs) were in favour of leave. Gibb, Neil, Timothy.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately it doesn’t end with Brexit. The BBC has done does the opposite of educate and inform as evidenced by its approach to climate change and its ability to treat flat earth beliefs as an equal to General Relativity.
Paramount that Labour remove all of the Tory stooges from the bbc and give ofcom some real teeth. Criminalise nefarious journalism. Would it be populism if they threaten to jail criminal politicians and journos?? Ultimately labour could ride anger of populism train while actually implementing policy. EG jailing Zahawi. As any of the readers on this blog would have been for his tax arrangements.
Baron Rix would be proud of you, although I think you probably found that this post nearly wrote itself...
ReplyDeleteThe evil genius of Brexit is that it is imposible to define.
ReplyDeleteBrexit is, in fact, Res nullius, something that belongs to nobody- politically something to latch onto, manipulate and then deny as the rhetoric meets reality.
Simultaneously, Brexit has also passed through, and continues to dwell in a stage of national facetiousness- the subject whose name mustn’t be mentioned, or else the truth be out…
Boris Johnson succeeded in being the King of Facetious Brexit Britain- he embodied it, and he’d be proud to read these words, or have them read to him.
Farage is carrying the torch of redefining Brexit (again) to suit his needs (again). ‘Who’s he working for?’, should be the question.
Simultaneously, Brexit is, can, will be seen as a form of apophasis- a rhetorical device of negation- again doing exactly what it says on the tin.
If all of this happening at once, (and much more as well) seems hard to unpack, congratulations to Dr Grey for being on the front line every week having a go! Bravo!
For those watching at a distance, we witness an island nation that cast itself adrift for no rational reason, condemned to argue amongst itself about Brexit in perpetuity.
This flip side of apophasis could be the starting point for schadenfreude.
Britain is now Brexit Britain, every election in the UK from now on will be about Brexit. As with all things Brexit, nearly everybody’s a loser. Red team, Blue Team, the Establishment always win.
I guess that’s what happens when you reduce a country’s politics to a downwardly spiralling mediocracy managed by third rate clowns to cover for the kleptocracy hiding in plain sight behind the word BREXIT.
Who is Farage working for? A good question. I understand he is on quite good terms with Rupert Murdoch.
Delete"Part of it is a fear, born of the trauma of Brexit..."
ReplyDeleteSay it loud and say it clear, this is indeed a trauma for the British nationstate and its people. Digging down another layer that trauma is brought about through "moral injury".
I have here a Reform flyer. It contains a web address for Reform - www.reformparty.co.uk. This website is for sale, has been for some time. Not a good look.
ReplyDelete"Her spokesperson sought to explain it by saying that “Andrea is above all, a patriot”, but more obvious nouns are all too readily available."
ReplyDeleteThank you for that.
I like the last sentence. It reminds me of the tagline that used to be on CNN. There is an old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times".
ReplyDeleteI can understand why politically Labour can't use Brexit as a cudgel, but why not the utter lack of preparedness?
ReplyDeleteThis election campaign is boring. The Tories are losing because Brexit is a failure but no one will talk about it. Those wounds are still raw. Most people have concluded that Labour will win. The press hates this. They need readers/viewers. At the moment there is an effort by the press to turn Farage into a UK Donald Trump who gets a response from both lovers and haters alike. This is very dangerous.
ReplyDeleteConsidering that Trump-as-political-phenomenon was created by the Murdoch media’s US wing, this may be very dangerous but it is also very British — a vulture coming home to roost.
DeleteThanks for the analysis Prof Grey. Will be worth looking at the other manifestos. The Tories should be judged on delivering (or not) their 2019 election manifesto, Covid and the Ukraine war not withstanding.
ReplyDeleteMadame Le Pen is now openly anti Euroatlantic policies will now be tested at the ballot box. We can expect Reform to back her, and her move to align with President Putin. British voters should bear this in mind and both the Conservatives and Reform should be asked about this development. Certainly fits with the 'experimental' part of current politics.
Note that hardline Brexiters ie Wm Cash would be happy to leave UN, Nato etc etc in pursuit of full sovereignty. This could get dangerous extremely fast. Foreign policy should be a feature of this election, not a sideshow. Along with the potential Trump presidency and Sino/Taiwan conflict it should be taken seriously. Too many have forgotten the lessons of WW2 in my opinion and the flirting with facism of the 1930s' in many western coutries including UK and US.
It's interesting to see how the Tory party has spent years trying to appease the ultras and has now discovered that its strategy has revealed a complete catastrophe. Labour should take note and create a social front against Reform & Co. That also means to finally start pointing at the Brexit failures with pride and honesty.
ReplyDeleteLabour is credited wth the belief that "...there is an alternative strategy, based on increasing investment and productivity, ...". I would somewhat cynically remark that these, in the brave new neo-liberal world that we have had for several decades now, are the responsibility of industry and business - not of HMG.
ReplyDeleteIf our political class are not careful, I see us becoming a small but densely populated offshore island akin to Eire in Eamonn De Valera's times. Too pessimistic?
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to read both the post and the comments and realise how both prof Grey and the commenters manage to miss some fundamental points:
ReplyDelete- British politics is obviously dysfunctional when both main parties refuse to talk about the fundamental issues that afflict the nation. Politics is where you do the business of the polis, the nation. If you you don't bring them up for debate as a political party, you fail at your main job. If you don't bring them up in an election campaign, then ... yeah.
I can see why the Tories wouldn't want to talk about the real issues, but Labour/Starmer's refusal to do so is a real failure and it will come to haunt them.
- Britain's problems are far deeper, far more profound and stem from much earlier times than prof Grey mentions here and in his previous blogs. Britain has been in relative decline since the early 20th century and has not adapted to its true position. The British public, its electorate, have not. There will be no real reversal of fortune for the UK as a state, nor for the people of Britain, until the lesson has fully sunk in: the UK is a medium-sized nation with a sub-par productivity due to decades of underinvestment and an underskilled labour force. Its international stature depends heavily on its membership of the EU and NATO, with the latter being seriously contingent on the benevolence of the current US administration.
On your first point - I've discussed that numerous times for years. On your second point - this blog is about Brexit and its effects, not the entirety of modern British history.
DeleteOn my second point: these things are interlocked. The UK's reduced stature in the world makes membership of the EU more or less imperative (well ... more, really) just as it does for all the other members. In the 1950s the UK's refusal to join the ECCS and the EEC was ill-advised. In 2016 Brexit was irresponsible folly. But it all stems from the same failure on the part of British politics, the British media and the British electorate to perceive reality. Somehow Britain must come to realise that this is 2024, not 1824.
DeleteOf course they are interlocked, and in my book on Brexit there's some discussion of that. But it's not the focus of this blog, so to say I "manage to miss some fundamental points" is unfair, and a bit patronizing if I may say so.
DeleteIn their latest — well, probably no longer their actual latest, I’m sure they’ve added something to the list since then — bid to lose the election despite the implosion of the Tories, Labour have dropped “the NHS is not for sale” from their manifesto.
ReplyDeleteChris - this is not the first time that politicians have promoted populist politics - we saw it with Enoch Powell, we also saw it with the fascists in Germany, Italy and the UK (Blackshirts) and doubtless elsewhere in the 30s. The difference this time may be the means of communication, but can we draw any comfort from the fact that our politics has dealt with this, or at least learn any lessons from that experience?
ReplyDelete