Friday, 20 December 2024

Beware the Brexit reset backlash

In a post at the beginning of September, when I compared ‘reset means reset’ with the days of ‘Brexit means Brexit’, I pointed out that there is at least one important difference. The Brexit negotiations took place within a process and timescale which was at least semi-defined by Article 50. Any reset process will be more nebulous, and shouldn’t really be thought of as a process, in the singular. At the same time, a virulent backlash against the reset is now beginning and, with it, a new phase in the battle for post-Brexit politics.

The Brexit reset

The reset can be understood in terms of two kinds of process. The first kind consists of the things which the UK can do unilaterally, meaning without any agreement from the EU, such as maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU, both by eschewing active divergence and by avoiding passive divergence. There are many signs that this kind of reset is underway. This is beneficial, as it means that businesses do not have to produce to two different standards, but doesn’t in itself improve terms of trade with the EU. Moreover, as occurred last week with the introduction of the EU General Product Safety Regulation, there are some forms of EU regulatory change which cannot simply be ‘shadowed’ by the UK (or, in this case, and others relating to goods trade, Great Britain), but have to be accepted as new barriers to trade.

The second kind of process consists of things involving negotiation with the EU. Most obviously that means agreeing measures which go beyond the existing Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), perhaps including a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS) agreement, and a Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications agreement. It could also include a security and defence pact. However, it also includes negotiations within the various mechanisms built into the existing agreements because there are some things potentially within their scope (such as linking carbon pricing systems) which, if pursued, would contribute to a reset.

Equally, there are other things, including the full implementation of the Windsor Framework, the resolution of ongoing problems in implementing the settled status scheme for EU citizens in the UK, and the full introduction of UK import controls, which are likely to be seen by the EU as a prerequisite for any substantive new agreement(s). This was brought into sharp focus this week with the news that the EU is taking the UK to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over its failures, going back to 2020, to uphold all the citizens’ rights provisions agreed in the Withdrawal Agreement and some other matters (all of which, be it noted, go back to the Tory government’s alleged failure to do what it, itself, had agreed; note also that it agreed to the ECJ’s role in these matters).

Resolving such issues is part of the reset because it would help to rebuild trust with the EU and to improve the ‘tone’ of the relationship, something which has been underway since the election, and which saw further developments in the last fortnight. These included Rachel Reeves attending the EU finance ministers' meeting and Keir Starmer meeting the President of the European Council. It’s wrong to scoff at such things as mere symbolism: symbolism matters, not least because of the way it relates to trust.

As for substance, there have been further signs that the UK will end up agreeing some form of YMS. Doing so, along with extending the agreement on fishing rights beyond its expiry in June 2026, looks to be the basic requirement of agreeing any wider reset with the EU. How the substance of the reset develops from now on will define Labour’s post-Brexit policy and, indeed, the UK’s post-Brexit polity, and negotiations with the EU look set to be the Brexit story of 2025 and perhaps beyond.  

The reset backlash

Although these two reset processes have barely begun, it is already clear that what the economics commentator Simon Nixon calls “the Brexit reset backlash” is now underway, and it has gathered force just in the last two weeks. Thus last weekend saw the reset being denounced in the Mail on Sunday as what David Frost called, with his trademark dreary predictability, the work of a “Surrender Squad” which is set on “betraying” Brexit. An accompanying editorial warned that Starmer’s plans will make Britain “a rule taker” rather than “a rule maker”.

The next day, again in the Mail, Boris Johnson fulminated about the need to “fight, fight and fight again for the freedoms people voted for in 2016”. Meanwhile, in the Express, Johnson again appeared, this time to warn that the UK’s accession to the CPTPP, which occurred last Sunday, was in danger of being sacrificed by Starmer (a particularly disingenuous comment, as there is nothing in the reset which is anticipated to preclude CPTPP membership, including an SPS deal). And in this week’s PMQs Kemi Badenoch accused Starmer of being “about to give away our hard-won Brexit benefits” whilst the Sun launched a “campaign to stop Brexit betrayal”.

These and many other examples of the backlash reprise all the rancid arguments of the last eight years with the ever-present accusations of betrayal along with those of ‘submission’ to the EU and lack of patriotism. There’s something particularly fatuous about calling the reset a ‘betrayal’ when it comes, as it often does, from those who have spent those eight years calling every single aspect of Brexit a betrayal. Just how many times can Brexit be betrayed? However, the backlash is also distinctive, or at any rate specific, in being aimed at particular possibilities envisaged within the reset such as a carbon emissions agreement and an SPS agreement. In particular, the backlash has, rather belatedly, honed in on Labour’s longstanding omission of ECJ jurisdiction from its ‘red lines’.

A new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative

Thus this reset backlash can be understood as a new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative. The first phase of that battle began in earnest after the transition period ended in January 2021, and it was decisively lost by the Brexiters. That is evidenced by the now well-established negative public view of Brexit. For example, according to the Statista data series, since June 2021 the view that it was ‘wrong to leave’ has always been greater than the view that it was ‘right to leave’, with the gap between those rising steadily. In June 2021 44% said ‘wrong’ and 43% said right, but by May 2024 (the latest date in this data set) those figures were 55% and 31%. Many other polls and similar polling questions show the same pattern. At the same time, Brexiters became increasingly unwilling to defend Brexit and increasingly convoluted in such defences as they offered

The arrival of the new government has provided Brexiters with an opportunity to regroup. In addition to opposing the reset itself, this regroup has two main axes.

The first axis consists of trying to give the impression that all the false claims made for Brexit were, in fact, being delivered on by the Tory government and are only now being squandered, or failing to materialise, because the Labour government has turned its back on them. Thus the fact that the Tories found that substantial regulatory divergence was impractical, and regulatory freedoms were largely an illusion, is being glossed over, and the failure to deliver them blamed on Labour. In a similar way, Badenoch and others are pretending that it is only Labour’s lack of commitment (£) which stands in the way of a supposedly (though actually fictitious) “oven ready” UK-US trade deal, especially once Trump returns to power.

The second axis is to re-write the ongoing damage of Brexit as being, in fact, the failure of the Labour government. Though minor in itself, a strikingly brazen example was an article in the Telegraph (£) last week bemoaning that “London’s stock market is in danger of sliding into irrelevance under Labour”. Yet, last January, an article in the same paper (£) reported that Brexit was “the prime suspect in the death of the stock market”. Not only were they in the same paper, but both articles were co-authored by the very same journalist, Chief City Correspondent Michael Bow.

This is only a small foretaste of what is likely to come. In particular, sooner or later (and sooner, if a reset with the EU is going to happen), the government is going to have to introduce full import controls. These are a direct consequence of Brexit, but one the Tories postponed multiple times, as did the Labour government this autumn. Undoubtedly when it happens it will be blamed on Labour mismanagement and, very likely, twisted round to be blamed on the reset itself (i.e. as a ‘concession’ in order to get the reset).

Labour’s culpability

In a sense, Labour have only themselves to blame. Promising to ‘make Brexit work’ was always likely to lumber the government with responsibility for all the ways in which Brexit does not, and will never, work. Nor has the government helped itself since coming to power. For example, treating, and initially rejecting, YMS as an ‘unacceptable EU demand’ simply plays into the hands of Brexiters, enabling them to present it, if (and almost certainly when) accepted, as a ‘capitulation’. It would have been much better to treat it as a great prize, and evidence of the potential value of the reset.

Another example is the UK’s accession to CPTPP. Of course the Trade Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was bound to speak positively about this, but he was not obliged to do so in terms almost identical to those which would have been used by his Tory predecessors, saying it showed that “Britain is uniquely placed to take advantage of exciting new markets” etc. Here, again, the government is too willing to accept the Brexiters’ framing.

In the same way, the Brexiter attack line that the reset will make Britain a ‘rule taker’ ought to be challenged head-on by emphasising that Brexit created a situation where Britain is, in practice, a rule-taker (think tethered plastic bottle caps). The reset is partly designed to deal with this reality in a more efficient way, by facilitating alignment through, for example, the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, and perhaps in due course by agreeing to, for example, dynamic alignment of SPS regulations. So, far from being the cause of rule taking, the reset is a consequence of it and, in turn, a consequence of the delusions of Brexit.

In short, if the reset is to be successfully defended against the backlash, it will be necessary to challenge, and to not to reproduce, the underlying framing Brexit of itself. Just talking of the Tories’ “botched Brexit deal” isn’t enough. What is needed is a positive justification of the reset.

Justifying the reset

The most crucial justification is that the Labour election manifesto was quite clear about its intention to seek to reset relations with the EU. Conversely, the attempt the Brexiters are now making to depict the reset as undemocratic and a betrayal of the 2016 vote is, unequivocally, a lie. To the ire of many of its supporters, the Labour government is not reversing Brexit, and there is nothing at all in the referendum or what happened afterwards to say the UK-EU relations are bound to remain in the form Johnson and Frost negotiated (a form which, anyway, included provisions for future changes). Indeed, the crux of the Brexiters’ argument was that the British parliament should be free to pursue the policies which British electors had mandated. The reset has that mandate.

The second justification is that the reset also has popular support. The latest evidence for that came with a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) which includes a lot of crunchy survey data about public attitudes in the UK and in EU member states to UK-EU relations. I won’t even try to summarise it here but, as regards UK opinion, a couple of figures are worth flagging. One is that, overall, 55% favour closer relations with the EU, 22% favour relations as they are and 10% favour more distant relations. The other is that, amongst ‘Red Wall’ voters these figures are 44%, 14% and 18% respectively. Additionally, and prominently reported, the survey found majority support, even amongst leave voters (54%), for the return of freedom of movement in return for single market “access”.

These figures, especially the latter, attracted a certain amount of exuberant comment from ‘remainers’ or ‘rejoiners’ along the lines that the Labour government no longer need fear public opinion, not just as regards a reset but as regards reversing the entirety of, at least, ‘hard Brexit’ (i.e. no single market). I don’t think it is anything like as simple as that, whether viewed in terms of the narrow calculus of Labour electoral advantage or from the broader terms of the politics of Brexit.

On the first, it may well be the case (and, though I don’t have the data, I suspect it probably is) that a relatively small number of voters who don’t want closer relations and don’t want freedom of movement, and who feel strongly about both, could prevent Labour winning the next election. The wider issue is that opinion polls have many limitations, and can’t capture how voters would react if Labour followed where these ones point, given the backlash that would result. Most importantly of all, for Labour now to abandon its ‘red lines’ would immediately deprive the government of the democratic legitimacy which the election has given to its reset policy.

It may be tempting to think that, since that reset in itself attracts the ferocious and dishonest backlash we are seeing, the government might as well go the whole hog and pursue a reversal of Brexit, just as its Brexiter critics claim it to be doing. Actually, if anything, the backlash shows how limited Labour’s space for manoeuvre is. But the more important point is that there is a huge difference between defending against a false charge and against one which would be true. Moreover, if there is ever to be a durable rejoin policy it would have to be one which clearly had democratic legitimacy. So whilst the opinion polls give strong support for Labour’s reset, that is all they do.

The third justification for the reset is its substantive benefits. Just last week saw the publication, for the first time so far as I know, of a credible estimate of its economic impact. It came from John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, and, whilst necessarily rough and ready, suggests that the reset could deliver an annual uplift of 0.3% to 0.7% in the long-term, defined here as ten years.

Of course this is fairly trivial compared with the foregone GDP growth resulting from Brexit (and, actually this is Springford’s main point). However, in a generally low-growth economy, it is not nothing. For example, on present OECD predictions, UK growth in 2024 will be 0.9%. Moreover, on this estimate the reset is of considerably greater benefit than the long-term annual uplift of the CPTPP deal, estimated to be 0.04% to 0.08% of GDP. Even the Brexiters' much-vaunted UK-US trade deal would only be worth an estimated 0.07% to 0.16% of GDP. So, small as the value of a reset may be, those who dismiss it as worthless should be careful not to inadvertently give the backlashers a free pass on how it compares with such ‘Brexit benefits’.

In any case, the reset has more than an economic value. For one thing, if achieved, it would have a defence and security value, and that at a time of huge international turmoil. For another, it could act as a confidence-building measure to be built on subsequently. Indeed - and this, too, ought to concentrate the minds of those ‘rejoiners’ who dismiss the reset as trivial or even pointless - if there is ever to be a route to joining the EU again it seems all but certain it would need to pass through something like the reset along the way.

The bigger picture

It is in this latter respect that the Brexit reset backlash is most important, and most dangerous. At one level, it is just about domestic politics. It is a transparently opportunistic attempt by both Tory and Reform parties to re-kindle the populist anger of the referendum, and the ‘Brexit wars’ which followed, in order to boost their electoral fortunes.

At another level, those attempts are inseparable from UK-EU relations. The Brexiters’ visceral hatred of the EU makes them determined permanently to pollute those relations with their political faeces. They know that the more anti-reset opposition they can whip up, the less likely it is that the EU will have the confidence to entertain even minimally closer relations, let alone anything else. Already Jacob Rees-Mogg is urging “both the Tory and Reform leaders … to promise if elected to leave any new Labour deal”, and that is quite deliberately designed to wreck EU confidence in the reset. It is hideous and, if anything deserves the label, ‘unpatriotic’ in its attempt not just to derail the elected government’s reset policy but to engender perpetual hostility with Britain’s neighbours and allies. But it is happening and it can’t be wished away.

In that sense, this new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative is a crucial one for the government but, more widely and in the longer-term, for anyone who rejects the vicious and self-harming politics of Brexitism. Labour’s reset may be frustratingly timid, but the backlash against it is a reminder of the obstacles even to timidity. If it is defeated by that backlash, or even if it allows the Brexiters to regroup, the hold of that vicious and self-harming politics on our country will be strengthened. Conversely, if the Brexiters lose this second phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative, as they did the first, those politics will be weakened. At one level, the reset is about technocratic tinkering with the UK’s relations with the EU, but there is much more stake than that. Hence, indeed, the Brexiters’ desire to destroy it.

 

With that, another year of Brexit blogging ends. Many thanks to all who have read this year, taking the total visits to this site to well over the 10 million mark, and the number of posts to over 450. Your readership is always appreciated, and never taken for granted, especially with the huge volume of blogs, newsletters, vlogs, and I-don’t-know-whats that compete for attention. Thanks, too, for the (generally) urbane and (often) interesting comments made since I re-opened the facility a bit over a year ago. Best wishes to all readers for Christmas and the New Year. The next post will be on Friday 10 January 2025. I think I will continue in the new fortnightly pattern, but if (as seems possible) there is a lot of Brexit-related news next year then I might revert to the weekly format.

Friday, 6 December 2024

Where is post-Brexit Britain?

I always try, and am usually able, to create an overall theme to each post on this blog. There are times, though, and this is one of them, when there is no particular shape to the latest Brexit-related events. Instead, there has been a ragbag of news, but that in itself is revealing of a more general drift.

Brexit still not done

So where to start? Perhaps with that part of Brexit which is still not, in the most basic meaning of the term, ‘done’: Gibraltar. As long ago as April, under the previous government, it was being reported that a deal was finally ‘imminent’, but nothing came of it. Last time I wrote about this, in October, I suggested that completing the deal was a key test of Keir Starmer’s ‘reset’. That wasn’t an unreasonable claim given that, just a few days afterwards, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the EU Relations Minister, said that doing so was “at the heart of” the reset policy. Yet the territory remains in post-Brexit limbo, leading to a large protest against the delays at the end of October.

Some of the urgency has been removed by the latest postponement of the new EU Entry/exit System, but that still leaves an inherently fragile ad hoc arrangement in place. Their fragility is well-illustrated by a row that broke out two weeks ago. In brief, under the ad hoc arrangements, Gibraltarians may enter Spain without having their passports stamped, so long as they have their Gibraltar ID card. However, last Friday fortnight, the Spanish border police instigated a check and stamp regime. It only lasted for a couple of hours before being countermanded by a higher official, but seems to have arisen because the local border commander did not have clear orders about whether or both Schengen area controls should be applied or not.

This is the second time the same local commander has taken this action, apparently from concern that he and his officers may be in breach of EU law by not applying normal controls. That is now a matter for the courts to decide, but it illustrates the consequences of the lack of a clear, formal agreement. Of that, the latest reports suggest only that the barriers to a deal are of a “deeply technical nature”, but that was also said last April.

In the meantime, the entire saga of Brexit and Gibraltar is the subject of an excellent new House of Commons Library Research Briefing by Stefan Fella, which amongst other things serves as a reminder of the complex issues which were obvious from the outset, but which Brexiters denounced as ‘Project Fear’. There are also signs of the situation receiving more media coverage in the UK, with a BBC Radio Four documentary on ‘the Rock that Brexit forgot” airing this week.

Reset still barely started

It may be that an agreement about Gibraltar will emerge this month or, perhaps more likely, in the new year, and be a sign of, so to speak, a reset of the reset, which began with some energy but appears to have foundered since. That seems possible because there is a sense in which any real progress was always likely to be deferred until the new EU Commission, and the second presidency of Ursula von der Leyen, were confirmed. This has now happened and, relatedly (though not necessarily directly so), Starmer has been invited to meet with EU leaders next February, the first time a British Prime Minister has done so since the UK left the EU.

That meeting is billed as being focused on security and defence issues, but the already planned EU-UK summit, which will take place next year, is likely to have a wider remit, taking in trade and regulatory relationships. A good indication of what the EU agenda for this might be was provided recently in a Bruegel policy briefing written by Ignacio García Bercero, a significant figure in the world of EU trade policy. Many of the issues it covers will be familiar to readers of the blog, and without rehearsing them here the main point I would make about the document is that it is deeply pragmatic, in the sense of recognizing both the constraints of UK and EU red lines and the possibilities that remain despite them.

That’s important because there are people, on both sides of the Brexit divide, who persist in saying that there is no prospect at all of improvements, whether they ascribe this to EU ‘punishment’ or a kind of Brexit ‘hair-shirtism’. On the remain side, in particular, there is sometimes the impression given that, for so long as Starmer remains committed to the ‘hard Brexit’ negotiated by the Tories, nothing can change. But that ignores the way that, even within the Frost-Johnson agreements, there was scope for a closer relationship, illustrated by the non-binding Political Declaration which they signed, even though they chose not pursue it. In other words, even within hard Brexit there exists a range of hardness.

Obviously, the significance of that shouldn’t be overstated. There’s a big gulf between the softest of hard Brexits and the hardest of soft Brexits. But there is an agenda, that in the past I’ve called ‘maximalist’, which whilst still ‘hard Brexit’ is different to Johnson-Frost, of the sort articulated by Peter Foster in the UK and, now, by García Bercero. Of particular relevance is a point the latter makes early on, about the apparent dropping of the UK red line against ECJ involvement under the Labour government. More generally, his key point is that “a repetition of Brexit discussions can be avoided if there is political will to explore the margins of flexibility around the red lines.”

Political will (or won’t)?

That clearly begs the core question of whether there is such a political will. If voices like García Bercero’s hold sway within the EU then, from that side, the answer might be yes. But what about the UK? One sign of a new seriousness might be the announcement of a new post of a second Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, with a specific focus on the EU, and undertaking a ‘sherpa’ role there. The interview panel will, with depressing irony, be chaired by Gisela Stuart, who chaired the Vote Leave campaign, though not because of that but because she is now the First Civil Service Commissioner. It can only be wondered what attributes she will prioritise for the post, but the appointment will be made by Starmer.

At all events, the appointee is expected to be a heavyweight figure, and it is hard to see the point of creating this role unless it reflects real political commitment to the reset. That said, my general observation about this government is that it seems to place a premium on creating structures (delivery groups etc.) as if these, in themselves, solve problems. They don’t, although they may be a necessary precondition of doing so, and in particular they don’t, in and of themselves, create political will.

In this particular case, it remains to be seen what the political will is as regards a youth mobility scheme (YMS) which, even if under some different label, is evidently going to be a, if not the, key issue for the EU (a “threshold issue” as García Bercero calls it). We’ve repeatedly seen the Labour government dismiss this on the absurd grounds that it would somehow amount to ‘free movement of people’, but the question is how intransigent it will be.

As always, the problem is that Labour remains deeply neuralgic about anything relating to immigration. This was illustrated by Starmer’s response to the latest immigration figures, which he denounced as showing that “Brexit was used … to turn Britain into a one nation experiment in open borders”. It’s nonsense, and what’s worse is that it is the same nonsense that Farage is talking. What actually happened was that Brexit was used to create exactly what the Brexiters, including Farage, said they wanted, a wholly UK-determined immigration policy which used a points system set according to the needs of the UK economy.

For various reasons, not all economic, that led to an increase in the net migration figure, and a re-distribution of the countries of origin of immigrants away from the EU. That figure is now falling, also for various reasons, but these include new restrictions which are doing profound damage, especially to social care and to universities. What the Labour government needs, as Professor Jonathan Portes, the leading academic expert on this policy area, argues, is to be honest about immigration.

That raises bigger issues than that of a YMS with the EU, but honesty about that would, just in itself, be desirable. It’s an oversimplification, but not a huge one, to say that Britain left the single market, specifically, to appease public hostility to immigration. The country is paying a substantial economic price for that, yet without even assuaging the hostility. It is certainly freedom of movement of people, rather than a commitment to regulatory divergence, which explains why Starmer’s government will not even entertain the idea of single market membership, and is apparently willing to go on paying that price.

So the question now is whether that extends even to the YMS, with Starmer sacrificing things he undoubtedly wants, and the country undoubtedly needs – most obviously an SPS deal – on the altar of this immigration fetish. Just how high a price are we all meant to pay to pander to the sensibilities of a noisy minority who will never be satisfied anyway? It’s not even as if agreeing a YMS would take much political courage: opinion polls suggest 58% of the public think it is a good idea, and only 10% that it is a bad idea. Some reports in the last few days (£) suggest the government is coming round to agreeing some version of it, and my guess is that this will be true. If so, it would have been far better in terms of creating conditions for a maximalist reset to have accepted the idea wholeheartedly rather than being dragged to it reluctantly.

Meanwhile, things don’t stand still

With the new Commission in place, and Trump installed in the White House to concentrate minds, next year is probably going to be the crucial one in determining whether or not there is going to be any kind of substantive reset in UK-EU relations (though it would take longer than that to be brought to fruition). Even for that to happen needs some urgency of purpose to be brought to bear. For the reality is that any reset is not happening against a static background. That is most obvious in relation to the broad geo-political situation. But it’s also the case UK-EU relations are themselves changing, irrespective of any negotiations about them.

Two recent examples illustrate this (others can be found in the latest UKICE regulatory divergence tracker). One is the only now emerging realization that new EU product safety rules mean that British (in the sense of Great Britain) companies selling goods to the EU (including Northern Ireland) need a ‘responsible person’ within the single market to confirm compliance. As with so much of the Brexit-created red tape this will impact most heavily on small businesses, and it comes into force at the end of next week. At a stroke, this is a new non-tariff barrier to trade with the EU, and a thickening of the Irish Sea border. It won’t, to my understanding, be helped by the government’s Product Regulation and Metrology Bill because the issue isn’t alignment with EU standards, it is the certification of compliance (i.e. a version of the issue, discussed many times on this blog, that ‘alignment doesn’t mean access’).

A second example is that the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is now beginning to bite (£) on British exporters to the EU, again with small businesses worst affected. In some ways it is a similar issue to the product safety one, in that exporters now need to provide evidence of the embedded carbon content of their products. However ultimately it will also mean not just reporting but, if necessary, tax being levied on that content.

Both of these examples are potentially within the scope of a UK-EU reset, though the word ‘potentially’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The first of them might conceivably be dealt with through formal dynamic alignment (note the tentative formulation). Less tentatively, because it is within the scope of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the second of them could be addressed by linking both UK-EU Emissions Trading Systems (ETS) and CBAMs (the UK version has yet to be created). Linkages of these are two different, though potentially related things, as García Bercero says. That is, it might be possible to link either, both, or neither (it’s also worth noting, as trade expert Sam Lowe explains, that these different possibilities could have different implications for the UK’s relationship with Trump’s US).

Everything is connected

Although I’ve bracketed that last point, because in a sense it’s a technicality, it does indicate the deep inseparability of all of the issues facing post-Brexit UK. That is to say, the more-or-less economic questions of terms of trade, including regulatory barriers to trade, with the EU cannot ultimately be separated from geo-political issues of the UK’s relations with the rest of the world. This means that not only do discussions of UK-EU relations take place within a dynamic landscape (e.g. new EU regulations) but also they do so as part of the UK’s positioning in an international order which is itself rapidly changing, and not only because of Trump’s coming presidency.

There are many moving parts in this, but they mean that my argument in a post at the end of the summer that the government needs a post-Brexit strategy already looks inadequate. I talked there as if UK-EU relations are a discrete issue. I’m not sure I actually meant to imply that but, at all events, it is now quite obvious that such are relations are imbricated in the entirety of UK economic, industrial, foreign and defence policy. It is equally obvious that articulating what this means for the UK is an urgent task.

There are limited signs that Starmer understands this, especially in the major speech he gave on foreign policy at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet this week. In it, he did at least attempt to do what Olivia O’Sullivan, Director of the UK in the World programme at Chatham House recently urged and “make an energetic case” to voters explaining the domestic importance of foreign policy and international relations. Whether it was as ‘energetic’ as needed is another question, but it was certainly an attempt to make the case. However, the content was anodyne, and didn’t give any real sense of the choices and trade-offs the UK faces.

By that, I don’t so much mean the headline reports that Starmer denied there was any need to choose between Trump’s US and the EU. That was entirely unsurprising, not least because, at this point, it’s not yet clear exactly what those choices may be (a situation which is unlikely to last, however). Rather, what was missing was an acknowledgment that Brexit has de-anchored the UK internationally, and created new constraints on its options. Instead, there were airy platitudes about Britain being “a strong, still point in a changing world.” Which, as politics professor Simon Usherwood of the Open University put it “leaves us... somewhere. With all the talk of a reset, there remains minimal evidence of a plan on Europe, in either abstract or concrete terms, which intrinsically weakens the ability to pursue whatever course is taken.”

Where is post-Brexit Britain?

It’s not enough. At the very least, there needs to be an explicit acknowledgment that the immediate post-Brexit strategy of ‘Global Britain’, already effectively abandoned by the previous government, does not provide a framework for the present government’s policy decisions. Which in turn requires specifying the framework which does. That could and should mean that where closer relations with the EU come into conflict with other demands it is the former which will be prioritised now. That wouldn’t be outrageous. Only the other day Foreign Secretary David Lammy said, as he has in the past, that a European reset is the UK’s “number one priority in foreign policy”.

Yet Starmer did not say or even imply that. Why not? Is this government policy or not? Without such consistency, Starmer’s promise that his country will be a reliable, dependable, and predictable international actor is virtually meaningless, since it gives no insight into where its priorities lie. How, then, can its actions be predicted? Conversely, unless relations with the EU are prioritised, how seriously should anyone, most notably the EU, take the reset?

That wouldn’t, in itself, entail an argument to ‘reverse Brexit’ by seeking to rejoin the EU in any form (which Starmer again ruled out in his speech). But it would entail publicly acknowledging that Brexit has created new problems, not new opportunities. Doing so would attract a flaying from the pro-Brexit commentariat, but would chime with public opinion by recognizing both that Brexit has not been a success and that there isn’t much public appetite to return to the Brexit battles in the immediate future*. In the longer run, admitting that lack of success would also be a necessary step to re-visiting Brexit itself, of course, but even those who want to rejoin at the earliest possible moment need to recognize that, whatever ‘earliest possible’ means, the UK needs, at least, an interim strategy.

However, I don’t really expect Starmer will do any of this. At best, he may put more energy into reset discussions with the EU in the coming year. At worst, he will drift along without much happening to show for the reset apart from warmish words. In that sense, the ragbag of this fortnight's Brexit events reflects more than my failure to find any shape to them. Rather, it captures the shapelessness of Labour’s post-Brexit policies and, more fundamentally, the shapelessness of the UK’s post-Brexit condition. It is a grim irony that on one edge of Europe there is war and civil unrest in countries which dearly wish to anchor their place in the world by joining the EU whilst here, on the other edge, we have given that prize away in order to drift into confusion.

The final words of Starmer’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech were that “Britain is back.” He didn’t say where.

 

 

*That is, support for holding another referendum doesn’t begin to approach a majority until posited as ten years hence. Interestingly, put at that time scale, Reform voters are the most supportive of it.  Admittedly the polling data I cited in the link is over a year old, so things may have changed but I haven’t found anything more recent on the specific question of timescales.

I can’t even bring myself to discuss the cretinous attempt to resurrect ‘Mutual Enforcement’ as an ‘alternative arrangement’ for Northern Ireland `(the Allister Bill) but may come back to it next time. It isn’t going to pass, but it does have a purpose in the context of the forthcoming ‘consent vote’ under the Windsor Framework in the Northern Ireland Assembly. For now, see the Best for Britain Blog on this, which notes, correctly but over-politely, that “the notion that such a process of mutual enforcement is remotely achievable is remarkably misguided.”