We're still processing the Brexit rupture

I wrote in last week’s post about the sense of the post-Brexit period having beeen characterized by a new kind of political ‘game’. That is something which seems to have only just occurred to many political commentators judging by the way that Andrew Neil has belatedly worked out “how Brexit broke the Tory Party” and Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times has started puzzling over why our leaders don’t want to talk about Brexit (£). And these are supposedly two of the leading political journalists in the country, at the cutting-edge of political analysis.

My point isn’t meant to be the tedious, self-important moan that I’ve been saying these kinds of things for years, and anyway I’m certainly not the only person to have done so. Others include plenty of high-profile columnists in established media outlets, so my criticism also isn’t a moan about ‘the mainstream media’, which is considerably more variegated than that over-used and rather lazy term recognizes. Rather, it’s a criticism of the dominant approach to political reporting, exemplified by people like Neil and Shipman, or, say, BBC Political Editor Chris Mason, within, but not co-extensive with, the mainstream media.

It’s an approach which is so mired in the weeds of politics as a series of moves on the chess board that the bigger picture of the board, let alone the very rules of the game, are left relatively unexamined. That failure derives not so much from the commonly made charge that such an approach over-focuses on personalities, but from the way that it over-focuses on ‘events’ to the detriment of patterns, whilst assuming that the underlying verities of political life are unchanging, almost eternal. It ignores, or at least is slow to recognize, what Rafael Behr eloquently called “the roiling churn under a still crust” in his analysis of the election.

Perhaps that is inevitable in political reporting, per se, but it is inadequate in terms of political analysis, and would be with or without Brexit. However, Brexit has brought its inadequacy into particularly sharp relief.

How Brexit ruptured British politics

The careless injection of a mechanism of direct democracy, the referendum, into a system that was otherwise one of representative, parliamentary, democracy constituted a core rupture in modern British politics. That would probably not have been the case had ‘remain’ won, to the extent that remaining would have meant ‘no change’ – that is, it would not have had to have been ‘enacted’ – in exactly the same way as every previous UK-wide referendum. It became such a rupture because ‘leave’ won, especially as it did so by only a slender majority (and only in two of the UK’s constituent parts), against the official policy of the governing party and most of its (then) MPs; against the policy of all of the opposition parties in the House of Commons; and, hence, against the desire of the vast majority of all MPs at the time.

That in itself marked a break with ‘normal’ politics, but to it was added the fact that the particular time of the referendum, the particular issue it concerned, and the way that issue came to be the subject of a referendum, were all bound up with a contestation between ‘normal’ politics and a populist politics defined by a rejection of political norms. That the populist cause won such a referendum, the design of which flowed largely from Cameron’s desire to kill off the challenge of populists from outside the governing party, and to both placate and marginalize those within it, created a wholly new political world, even though all the old, familiar trappings and rituals of politics have persisted.

Yet, even now, the dominant approach to political reporting seems not to understand this change. Of course, other important things have happened since 2016, some of which, most obviously the pandemic, would have been challenging to political normality in themselves. And, of course, had the UK stayed in the EU there would have been all sorts of crises and changes. But it is the rupture of Brexit which underlies how politics since then has, in fact, developed. It’s in that sense that, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we are in “the experimental laboratory of post-Brexit politics”.

The election: more than numbers

The current election is the latest expression of that (including the very fact of its near silence about Brexit). Post-referendum politics has seen unprecedented events, including the unlawful prorogation, as well as the extraordinary churn of Tory Prime Ministers. This election, too, looks set to deliver an extraordinary outcome. Even a narrow Labour victory would be remarkable, from its 2019 position, let alone the predicted landslide. Equally remarkable is the prospect of an historic fracturing of the coalition of Tory voters. But this rapid succession of unprecedented ‘events’ is not a coincidence. They form a pattern, and are explicable, albeit they were not necessarily predictable, in terms of the Brexit rupture, but puzzling to those who have not grasped it.

I can’t help thinking, though I suppose it might have happened anyway, that this is the reason for the apparently endless volume of polling, and the proliferation of ever more sophisticated methods of conducting polls, and of data visualization to report the results, which has characterized this election. I certainly don’t recall it featuring to such an extent at previous elections, even as recently as that of 2019. This has generated a whole sub-industry of comment about the polls, whether they can really be right, and what they mean if they are. It is as if there is an almost desperate attempt to ‘get a hold’ on what is happening, and that ‘the numbers’ will give the answer, to the point of overkill.

Even as a junkie for that kind of stuff, I now find myself skipping over yet another attempt to cut the data in some new and jazzy way. In any case, even without this explosion of polling data analysis, and without denying that some of it can be helpful to understanding politics, I don’t think that, in and of itself, it constitutes political analysis, especially analysis of the big picture shift which we’ve been living through. A couple of examples from this week illustrate this.

Analyzing the Tory collapse

One is an article in the Financial Times about how voters in prosperous parts of southern England who would previously have voted Tory are turning away from the party, including what might once have been called ‘the professional classes’, whether affluent or not. There’s nothing wrong with the article in itself. It makes plenty of excellent points. But whilst it and similar articles (such as Andrew Neil’s) are appearing now in response to election polling data about the demise of the Tories, the underlying issues they discuss have been evident since pretty much the day after the Brexit referendum, the eighth anniversary of which fell this week.

Most obvious was the way that so much of support for Brexit was bound up with a sneering disdain for, indeed, ‘the professional classes’ and, more generally, for all forms of expertise and education (except, ironically, when manifested in the cartoon-patrician Latinisms of Rees-Mogg and Johnson). That extended beyond the traditional Tory scorn for ‘politically correct’ academics and social workers to encompass lawyers, judges, civil servants, business people, and even, eventually, bond market traders. All were cast, first, as enemies of Brexit and, then, as exemplars of the woke elite, the more so if they lived in or near London. Unsurprisingly, if a political party keeps telling people that it loathes them, those people begin to become disinclined to vote for that party.

However, the peculiar political rupture of Brexit inflected this in a very particular way. Back in September 2017, I wrote about “a new Brexit political correctness” in which it had become virtually unsayable that those who most supported Brexit had no idea how to undertake it, and it fell mainly to those who had opposed it to deliver it. That is, the Brexiters were dependent upon the very people they despised as the educated, professional elite, and at the very moment they were most vociferously denouncing them as such, to deliver the thing they most wanted. That applied most obviously to civil servants, but it has also been the case for leaders and managers in business, as well as those in civil society, including universities. And perhaps no profession has been needed to enact Brexit as much as the legal profession.

So, in very broad terms, the Brexit Tories were saying to whole swathes of the middle-class, many of whom were amongst its habitual voters, not only that they were loathsome, and not only that they had to ‘suck up’ Brexit, but that they had to make it work. And then, on top of that, because so much of what the Brexiters had promised was undeliverable, and couldn’t be ‘made to work’, they were pilloried all over again for ‘sabotaging’ Brexit, if only through lack of ‘true belief’.

Along with that, whereas Tories had traditionally abjured what they called ‘the politics of envy’ they heavily invested in it when it came to Brexit. This was a slightly different, though sometimes overlapping, attack on the ‘remainer elite’ (which, of course, numbered half the country, and far more than half of its younger inhabitants) for being not just woke, liberal-minded, and unpatriotic but also for being economically privileged.

Thus remainers’ opposition to Brexit was often explained by their desire to be able to employ Bulgarian nannies, to have holiday homes in Europe, or even just for ease of travel when holidaying in Europe. In this, they took aim not just at middle-class professionals but also at the kind of ‘aspirational’ working class voters who had been an important part of the Tory voting coalition, especially under Thatcher, ignoring that child care, foreign travel, and even foreign holiday homes were not just the purview of a tiny metropolitan elite.

Such a politics might work for the purposes of mobilizing voters in the referendum, as the Vote Leave campaign showed. It might also work for mobilizing populist grievance against the government, as the UKIP vote had showed. But for a Conservative party to do so, and moreover to do so whilst in government, was always likely to end in disaster. The populist grievance would, in its nature, be disposed to turn on the governing party, all the more so in the context of its inevitable failure to deliver ‘true Brexit’, and all the more so again with so many Conservative MPs denouncing their party as ‘not really Conservative’. Meanwhile, those parts of what had once been the Tory voting base which had been so bitterly reviled by post-Brexit Conservative populism were likely to desert them.

The peculiar circumstances of 2019, including Farage’s decision not to oppose the Tories, and their voters’ fear of Corbynism, covered this over. But just because it didn’t show up in the electoral numbers, the underlying analysis of what Brexit had done to Tory politics still held good. That is now apparent in the polling numbers because the circumstances of 2019 have changed and, having failed to do the underlying analysis, political reporters are suddenly shocked by the pincer movement on the Tory vote.

Some of that would have happened anyway, with or without Brexit (for example because of demographic and educational trends). But the current prospect of meltdown, or even annihilation, for all that it may only be showing up in opinion polls now, grew organically from Brexit and, although never inevitable, was always probable. Hinc illae lacrimae, as Rees-Mogg might put it.

Analyzing Farage’s blunder

Quite how many and how salty Rees-Mogg’s tears will be remains to be seen, and will depend on factors including whether the Labour vote holds up, turnout, the extent of tactical voting, and may well be decisively affected by really quite small numbers of voters in quite a large number of seats. It also, of course, depends on how Farage and Reform fare.

The media focus on the re-emergence of Farage and the rise in support for his party, as if these were shock developments, adding piquancy to an otherwise predictable election, is another example of the over-focus on ‘events’ and of polling-driven reporting. Having failed to grasp the rupture of the referendum, the dominant media assumption was that Farage was an old story, and Reform a lingering irrelevance. In fact, they’ve been an ongoing thread in the pattern of post-Brexit politics.

There’s much that could be said about that, but here I will just focus on the second of this week’s stories I want to discuss in this post, the row provoked by his comments about Ukraine, Putin, the EU and NATO. It was unusual, because Farage doesn’t make many mis-steps, and this was a mis-step rather than yet another example of a populist politician deliberately generating outrage. It emboldened the Tories finally to criticize him, sometimes quite caustically, and it’s worth understanding why they felt able to do so. It wasn’t as if, as he himself reminded us, he hadn’t said similar things before, and this, again, is an example of how post-Brexit political reporting has not kept pace with the political landscape: Farage has been an open apologist for Putin for years, but that has been only sporadically noticed within the dominant approach to political reporting.  

I’ll come back to that, but as to why the Tories, including Boris Johnson, felt able to attack him, that is largely because of his criticism of NATO. Such criticism is very common within alt-right, populist circles in the US within which Farage moves, but it doesn’t play nearly so well in the UK, even amongst Reform voters and Brexiters. For many of them, NATO is bound up with their sense of patriotism, partly because it is seen as the lineal descendent of the Second World War alliance (that with Russia having largely been erased from memory by the Cold War), and especially of the D-Day landings (giving Farage’s blunder a resonance with Sunak’s own recent one). It was also very much central to the Brexiters’ case that the UK could safely leave the EU since its primary security alliance lay in NATO.

Had Farage criticized only the EU’s eastwards expansion for ‘provoking’ Putin to invade Ukraine, grotesque as that would have been, it perhaps wouldn’t have caused him quite so many problems. Apart from anything else, that is a view shared by many Brexiters and is what Johnson said at the time of the annexation of Crimea. In an angry reaction to Johnson’s criticism of his comments, Farage reminded his supporters of this. But that may have been a mis-step too, to the extent that some Reform voters are even more besotted with Johnson than they are with Farage. In any case, Johnson’s focus had been the EU, not NATO, and it was notable that, subsequent to his original comments, Farage, too, chose to focus on that aspect.

However, even that is much less safe ground than it was at the time of the annexation of Crimea. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine and Zelensky enjoy a level of support in the UK, including on the populist right, which also makes the context different to the US. Headlines, such as the Mail’s “Zelensky: Farage is infected with the ‘virus of Putin’”, clearly rattled Farage. For once, he had misjudged his audience, even to the extent of earning a reprimand from the former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, also published in the Mail, and criticism in the Spectator and the Telegraph.

That matters for a party which sets such store by its support for the armed forces, and is also unused to criticism from the pro-Brexit press. One reason that has happened is that the whole episode laid bare the peculiar consonance between the pro-Putin, anti-NATO stance of much of the populist right, internationally, and that of the Corbynite left, which the British populist right abjures (apart from those in that weird little political space where neo-communism, neo-fascism and libertarianism meet, exemplified by Spiked Online, which came out in defence of Farage this week).

Whether this will be reflected in falling support for Farage or Reform in the opinion polls, or next week’s election, is not clear (I doubt any effect will be easy to separate from general noise/ variance, or other factors such as the growing evidence of extensive racism within the party). But, in line with my point that political analysis should be driven by more than polling, or even election, data, I want to come back to why his well-worn views caused the stir they did, and why this is not just of passing significance.

The answer is that they arose in the context of Farage being interviewed as a party leader, and a candidate to be an MP, by the BBC’s Nick Robinson. That may be related to the polls, of course, but he led UKIP when they were high in the polls, too, and he has stood as an MP before. Now, though, he does so whilst making the demand to be treated as the leader of the opposition, a demand extending to wanting to appear alongside Sunak, Starmer, and Davey in a leaders’ debate. He also does so whilst threatening, perhaps not entirely vainly, to be in a position to effect a takeover of the Tory Party (£) after the election. The hubris that drives him to insist on his own importance brings with it the possibility of nemesis through the scrutiny of being treated as important.

All this may fizzle out, depending on the election result, including in Clacton, and the scale of support for Reform. In that sense, the numbers matter. But, whatever the numbers next week, the analysis of the basic dynamic of populism in post-Brexit politics will still exist. So Farage’s difficulties this week are a harbinger of the future. In a similar way to how the Tories found that governing from an insurrectionist posture isn’t viable, so will Farage find, if he becomes a player in post-election opposition politics, that this is very different to what he has faced before.

Crucially, though, all this holds true even if Farage disappears from the scene, for it will apply in one form or another to any populist leader or movement that may emerge from the expected electoral wreckage of the Tory Party. We even know when we’ll see the very first installment of that: Tuesday 9 July, when a ‘PopCon’ post-election event has already been scheduled. We don’t know who the participants will be, but we do know it will happen whoever they are.

The post-Brexit political process

It’s now well-understood that Brexit was a process, not an event. What is perhaps less well-understood is that the same is true of post-Brexit politics. I’ve described 2016 as a political rupture, but that does not mean it was a single moment. Rather, it was like an earthquake with multiple aftershocks, by no means all of them predictable, heralding an on-going process, but also entailing a long ‘processing’, which is still underway, of what happened. That has been missed in the dominant narrative of political reporting, which treats Brexit as ‘over’ and seems to regard ‘going on about it’ as slightly lacking in sophistication, if not downright obsessive.

By the time of next week’s post (which, for this reason, is likely to be later in the day than usual) we will know the election result. A Labour victory seems certain and, although the scale of that victory is still hard to predict, it is likely to be extensive enough that we will hear much of it being a huge political ‘event’. That may well be true in terms of ‘the numbers’, but it would be better understood as a particular, albeit important, moment within the unfolding of post-Brexit politics; rooted in the complex story of what has happened since 2016 and laying the ground for the continuation of that story.

It shouldn’t be assumed that this is the prelude to greater political stability. Nick Tyrone, in his latest Week in Brexitland substack, makes an interesting direct comparison between the 2016 referendum vote and this election, suggesting that both show an angry, almost nihilistic, desire to smash political norms. Matthew d’Ancona made a very similar point in this week’s New European, and it is compatible with Behr’s identification of the “roiling churn” beneath the surface of this election.

I’m sure there’s an element of truth in it, which prompts the important question of where that anger will be focused next. However, it’s surely equally true that this election shows the appeal, which Labour has tried to tap in to, of putting ‘an end to the chaos’. My point is that in both these respects, and others, the election is part of the ongoing aftershocks of the Brexit rupture. The lab is still open and the experiment is far from being over.