There is another country

In the two weeks since my last post, the speed and scale of events has been almost impossible to keep up with. The result is yet another very long post and I am considering reverting to posting weekly. It seems likely, especially given the slightly changed focus of the blog, that there is always going to be plenty to say.

In that previous post, after reviewing the summer’s confected crisis over asylum hotels, I wrote about the political terrain of the next few years being characterized by a battle over whether Brexit Britain is to become Brexitist Britain. Now, that doesn’t seem so much prescient as complacently languid, as if that battle were not already well under way.

Flagging dangers

This was brought home to me within a couple of days of writing the post. It wasn’t, primarily, because of that weekend’s Reform UK conference since its mixture of vileness, weirdness and madness was not exactly unexpected. Instead it was when, for the first time, I saw not just roundabouts but very long stretches of roads in my area with St. George’s flags (and occasional Union Jacks) hanging on every single lamp post for mile after mile [1]. Of course, I had read about this happening all over the country, but seeing it for myself was different. The effect was not celebratory or unifying, it was sinister, threatening, and – in its unmissable historical echoes – fascistic.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that this isn’t a word I use casually and, in any case, it is a documented fact that the origins of this spate of flag-flying lie with far-right activist groups. It is not about jolly yeomen putting out the bunting, but masked men bent on intimidation. So it was dishonest and dangerous for Labour politicians like Yvette Cooper to argue that it is in any sense a “symbol of Britain coming together” (£). It has clearly arisen on the back of this summer’s asylum hotel ‘protests’, and, as has been widely remarked, seems to symbolise division and exclusion rather than unity and inclusion.

What is actually worse, and more literally fascistic, is that it amounts to a demand for compulsory ‘unity’ through the sequestration of the public space. Criticize it, and you are deemed to have failed an imposed ‘loyalty test’.  Most obviously it is aimed at immigrants, but more generally at the ‘enemies within’ – the liberally-minded and tolerant.

Sanctimony and hypocrisy

Against this background, the news broke of the murder of Charlie Kirk in the US. Immediately that was used as a pretext to attack liberals in the most vicious of terms. Whereas, only a few days before, the right in the UK and the US had been screaming about the ‘injustice’ of punishing Lucy Connelly for her use of violently inflammatory language, suddenly all they could talk of was how the liberal-left was responsible for the killing because of the language used to attack Trump and his supporters. Yet, whilst admonishing those on the left for expressing their opinions, Kirk was presented as a free speech martyr, murdered simply for speaking his mind and inviting others – in the familiar tactic of every tedious internet troll – to ‘prove me wrong’.

With equal hypocrisy, these free speech absolutists started to demand, and procure, punishments for those, including the Global Opinions Editor of the Washington Post, who refused to join in with the sanctimonious beatification of Kirk by, for example, referring to his own hate-filled rhetoric. But this is not just a matter of illogic or hypocrisy. It is part of the way that the right weaponizes liberalism against itself in a kind of political jiu-jitsu. Thus the right demands, and largely receives, civility from its political opponents, whilst refusing to accord any civility whatsoever in return. It is an asymmetry dissected in Jonathan Freedland’s compelling analysis of the Kirk murder and its aftermath.

The United States was already in a very dark place, as charted by Professor Christina Pagel’s excellent Substack post, and it is now much darker. That isn’t so much because of the possibility of escalating acts of individual violence, although that is clearly a risk, but because of the possibility of escalating state violence against its actual or perceived internal enemies.

Kirk was hardly known in this country, but his killing also had immediate reverberations here. This is just one example of a point made in a BlueSky post in response to my attempt to define Brexitism. The poster said, rightly, that one of its weaknesses was a failure to discuss the many important linkages between the far-right in the US and the UK, linkages which are both ideological and financial. Actually, it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to write in terms of the far-right, since in both the US and the UK what used to be the respectable, centrist right of politics has been virtually eviscerated.

Thuggery

At all events, following Kirk’s murder, British Brexitists immediately began to recycle (£) the talking points of the American right in pursuit of the UK culture war. His death was then invoked during last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, which attracted possibly as many as 150,000 people to London and resulted in several violent clashes with the police. This was massively short of the three million persistently, and falsely, claimed on social media, but there is no doubt that it marked a significant show of strength, and was perhaps the largest rally of its kind in the UK in recent history.

Robinson seems to be allied with, and is perhaps a member of, Advance UK, the splinter group of Reform led by Ben Habib. But, again, it is increasingly meaningless to differentiate between far-right thugs and Reform, and in fact doing so panders to Nigel Farage’s pretensions to be ‘respectable’. For example, Reform Chairman David Bull was happy to endorse the rally as a gathering of “the silent majority”, whilst Farage opined that “the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people”. Moreover, there is now a steady flow of defectors from the Tories to Reform, the latest examples including former MPs Maria Caulfield and Nadine Dorries, an acquisition of perhaps rather dubious value, and, more significantly, Danny Kruger, the oleaginous MP who was once co-leader of the New Conservative group and is strongly associated with the (paradoxically international) National Conservatism movement. Meanwhile, the Tory Party itself continues to espouse positions almost identical to those of Reform.   

The American connection was most strikingly evident in Elon Musk’s extraordinarily inflammatory appearance at the rally, which included a call for the dissolution of parliament and threats that “violence is coming”. In fact, although those were the most widely quoted parts of it, what was more chilling was the way he, quite calmly, articulated or assumed an entire world view based on fantasies, distortions and lies. In a way, it was more unsettling than a spittle-flecked rant and, echoing all the invocations of ‘the silent majority’, his pitch was to the supposedly ordinary, apolitical, commonsense people of Britain.

As with the outbreak of flag-thuggery, any idea that the rally was about ‘uniting’ the country is transparently absurd. Equally, although hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers is undoubtedly the source of its core support, it is now abundantly clear that it has a more general, and very serious, intention to destroy the present government and, with that, to destroy the entire foundations of liberal democracy. It is not being hidden. Elon Musk said it, in terms. Others at the rally spoke openly of the need to assassinate Keir Starmer, even as ‘the left’ was being castigated for inciting the killing of Charlie Kirk (and, despite what some apologists say in the comments on the report linked to, this wasn’t just a ‘rogue individual’: social media is awash with similar calls).

This constitutes a dangerous moment for Britain. It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed. That has happened for many reasons, including the influence of the US right, and not just in Brexit Britain (France furnishes another example), but some of them are certainly related to Brexit and Brexitism. In particular, the relentless attacks on established institutions which Brexit gave rise to, and perhaps especially the prorogation of parliament, even though it ultimately failed, have enfeebled and de-legitimized those institutions.

Labour’s failure to lead

Worse than that, or perhaps it is simply one aspect of it, the Labour government now appears both unwilling and unable to stand up to what is happening or even to acknowledge its gravity. It has condoned rather than condemned the flagging movement and initially refused to condemn the things which were said at the Robinson rally, only the violence that accompanied it. Some condemnation did come, later, but it seemed to have been forced out under pressure, rather than being visceral, and didn’t carry any sense of the urgency of the situation. It is as if Starmer, and other government ministers, have internalized the accusations coming from Trump, Musk, and J.D. Vance, as well as from the British right, about being opposed to ‘free speech’. But no one is asking Starmer to ban such rallies, merely to use his own free speech, and his position, to lead the challenge to the things which are being said at them.

More generally, the government seems dazed by the events unfolding around it, and to have lost control of the events unfolding within it. The Angela Rayner resignation, and its aftermath, shortly followed by the Peter Mandelson fiasco, and then the resignation of Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, don’t just exemplify that loss of internal control, they exacerbate the external events. For they serve to promote one of the core drivers of Brexitism, namely that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is nothing to lose, and perhaps everything to gain, by rejecting the entirety of mainstream politics.

The reasons why the government has fallen into such disarray have been widely discussed, many of them circling around the supposed migration crisis. But that issue is only part of the government’s wider malaise which, although there are a range of diagnoses, almost all commentators ascribe to its failure to communicate its fundamental purpose and guiding values. Even more damningly, many suspect that the failure is not one of communication but of a terrible dark hole such that there is no fundamental purpose, nor any guiding values, to be communicated.

What makes this all the more damaging is that to the extent that the government has ever made its purpose and values clear it was in the election campaign to present Labour as the calm, competent antidote to the chaotic politics of the post-referendum years. In other words, whilst any government would wish to avoid being in chaos, it is far more dangerous for one built specifically, and almost solely, on the promise of stability. This, by the way, makes talk of the Labour party jettisoning Starmer and installing a new leader, especially when there is no obviously outstanding successor, utterly bizarre.

Navigating between complacency and alarmism

However, I think there is another issue here, and it also grows in large part out of Brexit. Whilst many voters may have hoped for a less chaotic politics than the period after 2016, which saw five Prime Ministers in almost as many years, the media and commentariat became addicted to it. There has always been an element of that in political reporting, since drama and chaos make good copy, but to my mind (and I accept that this is purely impressionistic) it has intensified. No doubt that is about more than Brexit, as much of it is bound up with the changing nature of the news cycle, and the impact of social media. But Brexit supplied an addictive rush of political drama and, like all addictions, users have to keep chasing the high. Current speculation about an early election, as well about the idea of a leadership challenge to Starmer, are examples.

From this point of view, as the veteran political commentator Philip Stephens argues, it is important not to get carried away by the current media narrative of a government in crisis. Yet there is clearly a very difficult line to tread here. On the one hand, there are serious and dangerous events unfolding, and ignoring them would be irresponsibly complacent. On the other hand, part of what is driving those events is the promulgation by the political right of a narrative of crisis which it seeks to exploit, and accepting or even amplifying that narrative would be irresponsibly alarmist.

If there is a way of navigating through this tricky territory then it entails offering a compelling counter-narrative. That means matching the undeniably old and new media-savviness of the populists, providing a positive alternative to, rather than just a rebuttal of, what they are pumping out, and in the process defusing the pervasive sense of crisis. The responsibility for providing it rests with anyone with any kind of public voice but, inevitably, it must rest primarily with politicians, and especially with the government.

And the government has a particular incentive to do so, partly to meet the pressing demand for an articulation of the government’s fundamental purpose and guiding values, and partly as a matter of electoral calculation. Its present strategy of aping Reform advantages Farage whilst alienating many who might otherwise support Labour, and academic research suggests that it will be an electorally costly strategy. The consequence could well be a Reform government or, less discussed but probably more likely, a hung parliament with an uncertain outcome for the formation of a government. This isn’t just future political danger for Labour, it is a present political and economic danger because, as the economics commentator Simon Nixon recently pointed out, in relation to current bond market jitters, “the biggest risk to UK financial stability is not this government, but the justified fear of what might follow if it fails”.

We want our country back

Central to such a counter-narrative is the need to displace the far-right’s pretensions to speak for ‘decent ordinary people’ or the ‘silent majority’. Doing that means discarding one of the central features of Brexitism, the idea that when it came to a single-issue vote – the referendum on EU membership – it was revealed that the populist claim to represent that silent majority was true.

That, and the subsequent associated rhetoric of ‘the will of the people’ versus ‘the elite’, cowed mainstream politicians and was particularly disconcerting for those on the left who regarded themselves as the voice of the people and as the challengers to the elitism. It also fed a kind of liberal guilt amongst, especially, middle-class progressives, suggesting they were ‘out of touch’ with ‘real people’, particularly as regards immigration. All of this has enabled Brexitists, including Farage and Robinson, to trade with increasing success on their version of Britain and ‘British values’, including, as the widespread use of the St. George’s flag shows, conflating Britain with England.

So, in concrete terms, offering a counter-narrative means providing a different version of Britain. It has become almost a cliché to remark on the contrast between the image of Britain projected in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and that of the Brexit referendum just four years later. The first was optimistic, inclusive and tolerant, paying ample reference to the past but confident about the present and future, and tinged with an ironic, playful humour. The second was sour, insular, intolerant, fearful, unhealthily obsessed with past glories, and utterly lacking in any humour or pleasure.

There is an opportunity here for the non-Brexitist mainstream to develop its own political jiu-jitsu, appropriating the constant Brexitist demand that ‘we want our country back’. Doing so would not be a nostalgic lament for an unrecoverable past. That first Britain is still available, including for England, as was more recently suggested in discussions of ‘progressive patriotism’ at the time of the Euro 2020 football tournament. 

Articulating it as the real Britain, and the true expression of British values would not go against the grain of public opinion but with it. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the veteran political scientist Professor Sir John Curtice provided a fascinating overview of the current political scene which included discussion of the latest British Social Attitudes Survey. This showed the disparities between the views and values of the public in general and those of 2024 Reform voters. These include that 31% of the public believe that migrants have undermined rather than enriched the country's culture compared with 81% of Reform voters; 32% think migrants have been bad for the country's economy (73% of Reform voters); and 18% think attempts to give equal opportunities for black and Asian people have gone too far (49% of Reform voters).

This, and much other data, gives quantitative support to the claim that Reform does not speak for ‘the people’ in a general sense, or for some mythical ‘silent majority’. Britain really is a more tolerant country than the one Farage, Robinson or the Tories claim it to be. Indeed, if anything, it is this tolerance which characterizes ‘the silent majority’, or at least one which is silenced in the sense that none of what used to be called the ‘main Westminster parties’, including the governing Labour Party, speak for it. Instead, the tolerant majority are constantly told that they are the ‘out of touch elite’.

The alternative, then, is to speak for this sense of Britain and Britishness, stressing rather than denying the success of multi-culturalism and, perhaps even more importantly, replacing sullen or alternatively vainglorious nostalgia with an optimistic vision for the future as a framing for concrete policies to achieve it, including on asylum-seeking. I’m not suggesting this would be easy. But it is almost a truism that parties which don’t seem to like their country are not likely to appeal to its voters, and it is striking the extent to which both Reform and the Tories trade on dismay for ‘what this country has become’.

Denying scoundrels the refuge of patriotism

Articulating Britishness in this way would serve to position Farage, Reform, and other Brexitists as un-British. It isn’t effective simply to ‘call them out’ as ‘racists’ or ‘fascists’ which, whilst it may give a self-congratulatory sense of ‘No pasaran’ steadfastness, is easily laughed off by their supporters and potential supporters, and cements their sense of being hectored by prissy middle-class liberals. But questioning their Britishness is another matter, as is the counterpart of attacking Farage on one of his weakest flanks, his lack of patriotism.

Keir Starmer has not been scared to embrace patriotism, rightly in my view. Doing so has often been taboo for the British left, as George Orwell long ago pointed out, and as was vividly illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s adolescent refusal to sing the National Anthem in 2015. It may be that there are still some on the liberal-left who feel queasy about anything that smacks of nationalism, but, frankly, we don’t have the luxury of such scruples. Without a positive articulation of patriotism the field is left to aggressive and authoritarian nationalists. So Starmer is right to talk about patriotism, but he needs to do so in a way which articulates Britishness in a radically different way to the far-right version and to the equally Brexitist ‘Blue Labour’ version.

Doing so would make the sharp attacks on Farage’s patriotism which Starmer has previously made more effective. It would enable a linkage to be made between the extreme illiberal authoritarianism of Farage’s call for mass deportations and his open admiration for Putin, his (at best) equivocation about Ukraine, and his sycophantic association with Trump. Farage’s vulnerability to those charges, including amongst his own supporters, has been shown before, for example in the reaction to his comments about Putin, Ukraine and NATO in 2024. Nor is Farage alone in this vulnerability. It is shared by Robinson, with his support from Musk and his documented ties to Russia.

Moreover, exposing the right in this way would create a coherence with the government’s foreign and defence policies. Amongst all the other developments in the last fortnight, we have seen fresh evidence of Putin’s aggressive intent, with drone flights into Polish and Romanian airspaces. This is not incidental to what is happening domestically. In both cases aggressive nationalism is in the ascendant, and in both cases it is emboldened by Trump, a testament to both his power and his weakness.

Which brings me finally to Trump’s visit to the UK this week. But what, really, is there to say? We all know that for ‘reasons of State’ the British government, like every government around the world, has to try to deal with this vile, sociopathic bully, and feeding his grotesque ego with some pageantry is one obvious way to do so. But the America he is creating is already another country from that which we have known and, in the current battle for our own future, that country is on the side of darkness. Ultimately, and the sooner the better, winning that battle will entail weaning ourselves from our dependence upon it.

Prospects

No doubt others would articulate this battle in different ways, but I think there is now a widespread understanding that this country is in a period of fundamental conflict not just in its politics but about its polity; a battle for its identity and, if it is not too overblown to say, for its soul. The radical right certainly knows what is stake. So should the rest of us. The way I articulate it is in terms of a conflict between ‘Brexitism’ and ‘Anti-Brexitism’, and it has been evident since the very early days of the Brexit process. I don’t, obviously, mean that history started in 2016 but there’s plenty of evidence, including some of the other data in the John Curtice analysis that I referred to earlier, that Brexit is an enduring political inflexion point.

From that point of view, what I have discussed in this post could be part of a viable strategy to marginalize Brexitism and, conversely, to mobilise ‘anti-Brexitism’. It could also, not coincidentally, be part of a viable strategy to revitalize Labour’s electoral fortunes by doing several things at once: provide a novel line for a drama-addicted media, break with one of the central deformations of Brexitist politics, meet the demand for a coherent statement of its purpose and values, marginalize Reform, and re-galvanize its liberal-left support. But this is not a cynical statement of tactics. It would be a more moral politics and, crucially, a more truthful politics, at least partly reversing out of the cul-de-sac of Brexit and Brexitism.

To my mind, the conflict over Brexitism and the fate of the Labour government are linked, at least for the time being, in that it seems very difficult to envisage a way of marginalizing Brexitism which does not involve the main party of organized labour and, more or less, of social democracy, especially given that it is the governing party. In the longer term that may change, but I’m not sure we have the luxury of thinking in the longer term. For that reason, too, this post has been more prescriptive than usual and, whilst accepting that the prescriptions may be flawed, incomplete, and undoubtedly unpalatable to some readers of this blog, I believe something like them is vital [2]. As to the prospect of the Labour government enacting anything remotely like them, well, that seems unlikely.

 

Notes

[1] See the report starting about 18 seconds into this link, which will only be viewable in the UK to BBC licence holders. It turns out that all these flags were put up by one man. That, too, gives the lie to the idea of some huge groundswell driven by ‘the silent majority’, but it also emphasizes how small numbers of people are being allowed to dominate what are public spaces.

[2] Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of similar prescriptions from James O’Malley in a Substack post and especially encouraging is the video clip embedded within it where Labour MP Lizzi Collinge articulates very much the kind of counter-narrative of patriotism I have in mind.

From Brexit to Brexitism

This is the ninth anniversary, almost to the day, since I began this blog (that first post, some details aside, still reads quite presciently I think). It began under the title ‘The Brexit Blog’, which was startlingly unoriginal and chosen without much thought, simply to differentiate it from another blog I wrote at the time. I renamed it ‘Brexit & Beyond’ starting from the first post of January 2021, much of which I think also still stands the test of time, to reflect the fact that Britain had left the EU and the transition period had ended.

Resuming for what will be the tenth year, I have renamed it again, this time as ‘Brexit & Brexitism’. The reason was pre-figured in my previous post, before I stopped posting for the summer. There, I argued that the Brexit process had entered a new phase, even if less clearly defined than when the UK left the EU. On this basis, I said I suspected that the focus of this blog would increasingly become not so much Brexit – the UK leaving the EU – as the Brexitism which has developed from it.

Over the summer, that suspicion has crystallised into a certainty and in this very lengthy post I will explain what this means, and its implications for the future direction of the blog. To prevent the post becoming even longer, and also in order to have it available for future reference, I have created a separate page setting out in detail what I mean by ‘Brexitism’. To give a very brief summary, Brexitism denotes an approach to politics that derives from Brexit, but goes beyond the UK simply leaving the EU to the extent that it constitutes a distinctive ideology.

The current politics of Brexit

In terms of UK politics, the parameters of what the present Labour government is going to do, or try to do, as regards UK-EU relations are now abundantly clear. There will be some ongoing ‘reset’ negotiations with the EU to try to achieve some relatively minor, but not entirely negligible, improvements in those relations, without dropping the ‘red lines’ of no single market, no customs union, and no freedom of movement. I’ve outlined the kinds of things which might be in scope in many previous posts, and over this summer, the European Commission produced draft negotiating guidelines for some of the areas where such improvements might be agreed.

That there is scope for improvements is because, without any formal announcement, the Labour government has dropped the previous Tory red line of ‘no role for the ECJ’, and also because it faces fewer internal constraints than its predecessor in seeking the maximum cooperation possible within the framework of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (e.g. possibly joining Erasmus+). But of course any improvements require the agreement of the EU, and there are clear limits to that. For example, it has emerged this summer that, at least for now, the EU will not consider UK participation in the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention.

At the same time, Labour will quietly continue to make alignment with most EU regulations the default position, as is evidenced by the latest UKICE regulatory divergence tracker which was published over the summer. This doesn’t mean there will be no divergence, both active (i.e. choosing to enact different UK or GB regulations) and passive (i.e. omitting, by choice or by oversight, to follow changes in EU regulations), and this summer a report by the Institute for European Environmental Policy UK (IEEP) identified some examples of both in the environmental field. But, as a generality, Labour’s policy is one of “alignment by stealth”.

Alignment will be facilitated in some areas by the passing of the Product Regulation and Metrology Act in July. Such alignment does not, of course, require agreement with the EU but, equally, since ‘alignment does not mean access’, it doesn’t improve the terms of trade either. It simply avoids the additional costs of British businesses having to produce to different standards for EU and UK/GB markets.

A policy of alignment by stealth actually isn’t very different, in practice, from the approach taken by the Tories under Rishi Sunak although, again, Keir Starmer faces less opposition to it from within his own party. The fact is that the Brexiters’ claims about the possibility and desirability of substantial regulatory divergence were either untrue or unworkable. Similarly, closer security and defence relations with the EU had begun under Boris Johnson, spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The subsequent re-election of Trump, and his impact on NATO and global and European security, means that this will continue to be the direction of travel.

So, whilst for opposing reasons both Brexiters and anti-Brexiters may be unhappy about it, there is really no sign at all of Labour’s approach changing before the next election. It’s conceivable, depending on the outcome of that election, that they might be forced to form a coalition with other parties which could push them towards dropping their red lines, but, if so, that is years away.

The realignment of the political right

Meanwhile, the political right, meaning the poll-leading Reform Party and the crisis-ridden Tory Party, is in a frenzied flux of realignment. But, barring the highly unlikely resurgence of what we might call liberal, centrist or sensible Conservatism, it seems that Brexitism, whilst certainly not confined to the political right, has already become the right’s defining ideology.

This means that if the right wins the next election – whether as Reform, Conservative, or as Reform-Conservative coalition or alliance – UK-EU relations would go in a radically different direction. Certainly even the limited rapprochement of the Labour reset would be abandoned, and very probably there would be an attempt, impractical and disastrous as it would be, at substantial divergence from EU regulations. Those who hold anti-Brexit views and who also say that Labour is ‘no different’ to Brexiters, or has itself fully embraced Brexitism, should reflect on that.

But the Brexitism of the political right also matters now, in several ways. It continues, partly because of its dominance of the media, to make Labour extremely cautious and defensive, even about its limited reset ambitions, to the extent of barely mentioning them or its ‘alignment’ policy. Crucially, it means that the EU will be cautious about making agreements with the UK, since these might be rescinded after the next election. It certainly means there is no realistic possibility of a fresh referendum, on whether to join the EU.

It’s vital to understand that Brexitism is flourishing quite independently of the fact that a clear majority of the public think it was wrong to leave the EU. Indeed, this is one of the key reasons why understanding the politics of Brexit now means understanding how what was once about the process and effects of leaving the EU has now morphed into something related to that, but different: Brexitism. Charting and explaining that will be the central focus of this re-titled blog.

Beyond the Brexit battles

One consequence of this partial shift of focus is that I will give less attention to discussing whether this or that development is a ‘benefit of Brexit’ or not. In economic terms, there is really no room for any serious doubt that Brexit has been, and will continue to be, highly damaging. A report this summer by the economist John Springford, for the Constitution Society and Federal Trust, reviewed the evidence for this, and it is compelling for anyone who isn’t wedded, for doctrinaire reasons, to denying it. The geo-political costs can’t be quantified in the same way, or the evidence assembled in the same way, but there’s really no credible political analyst who denies that they have been considerable.

It’s true that as time goes on it becomes more difficult to disentangle the effects of Brexit from other factors (and even regulatory divergences may only be temporary), but this makes poring over the details of individual developments all the more pointless. That is especially well-illustrated by the utterly fatuous debate over the summer about whether Brexit has been advantageous to the UK in terms of avoiding some of Trump’s Tariffs.

The reality is that it’s an unanswerable question. The ‘deals’ Trump is striking are highly complex, though often very vague in their terms, and their effects are almost impossible to compare. The ‘headline’ tariffs that each country faces don’t tell the full story of the impact on particular sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, or particular supply chains. And, even if the headline rates suggest the UK has got a ‘better deal’ than the EU (which is debatable), to the extent that Trump’s tariffs adversely affect the EU (and the UK’s other trading partners) that is not good news for UK exports. In any case, different EU members are differently affected by the US-EU deal whilst in non-EU Switzerland, very badly hit by the new tariffs, there is fresh debate about how this shows the disadvantages of not being a member.

Beyond all that, Trump keeps changing his mind about the rates, or the dates they will be enforced, and rips up deals he has supposedly made with impunity. He is also constantly using tariffs in order to exert political leverage (e.g. Brazil), and his whims about those non-economic purposes are as febrile as his ostensibly economic goals. Meanwhile, the US Court of Appeals has ruled many of the Trump Tariffs illegal (the final outcome of this remains to be seen). For all of the reasons these ‘deals’ are hardly worthy of the name. All that can really be said is that Trump has dropped a dirty bomb into the world trading system, and trying to extract an argument for (or against) Brexit from the mess and chaos he has created is totally absurd.

The new battleground of Brexitism

Yet if Brexiters have taken Trump’s unhinged and increasingly sinister conduct as some sort of vindication of Brexit, it seems that they are considerably less enthusiastic about the state of post-Brexit Britain. Having droned on for years about the nirvana of leaving the ‘totalitarian’ EU, they have decided that, having become ‘self-governing’, Britain is on the point of civil war or, rather inconsistently, though equally ludicrously, that it is the new North Korea.

This is one illustration of how Brexit has morphed into Brexitism. Where once leave campaigners confected fears about the EU being at “breaking point” as a justification for Brexit, the central theme of this summer, as regards domestic politics, has been a vicious demonization of asylum seekers, with a particularly vile attempt to portray them as sexual predators, accompanied by a constant drumbeat of bogus statistics and false anecdotes.

What used to be ‘the silly season’ this year became the seditious season, though both were combined in the sick joke of Lucy Connelly’s claim that she had been “Keir Starmer’s political prisoner” which was widely, and generally uncritically, reported. That case was invoked in an even plainer example of sedition when Nigel Farage travelled to Washington to publicly denounce his own country for its supposed authoritarianism, including a thinly-veiled call (Section VI: 1) for the US to punish the UK diplomatically and economically.

The recurring cliché within this attempt to depict Britain as being in the grip of a social and political crisis has been that the country is a “tinderbox” about to explode with anger. In a tsunami of opinion pieces, Brexitist politicians and commentators, usually under the threadbare disguise of issuing ‘warnings’, and sometimes adopting a fake-feminism of concern about women’s rights, have in effect sought to whip up violent protests outside the hotels where many asylum seekers are temporarily housed.

Thus, throughout the summer there were hyperbolic reports of ‘waves’ of ‘mass’ protests, ‘erupting’ across the country, which repeatedly turned out to be false, not just in terms of scale (which in fact ranged from tiny to small, though no doubt terrifying for their targets) but in terms of the suggestion that these were spontaneous uprisings of ‘ordinary decent families’. In fact they were organized, and often attended, by known far-right activist groups, and data from last year’s riots shows that many of those involved had previous convictions for domestic abuse.

This wasn’t simply media catastrophism. The glee with which catastrophe was envisaged betrayed the desire of these ‘patriots’ to see our country collapse into violent disorder. But it can’t just be dismissed as hyperbolic rhetoric. The effect, and in some cases no doubt the intention, is potentially self-fulfilling since, if people are told of widespread anger, then it is quite reasonable for them to conclude that there is something to be angry about. Hence there is some evidence, admittedly from the summer of 2024, of a huge gap between the 32% of the public who think immigration is the most important issue facing Britain and the 4% who think it is the most important issue facing them personally.

I don’t have more recent figures for the ‘personal’ question, which doesn’t seem to be consistently polled, but the YouGov tracker of the public view of the most pressing issues facing the country shows that 'immigration and asylum' (it's unhelpful, and problematic in itself, that pollsters and politicians conflate these) rose from 43% in March 2025 to 56% in September 2025. It is very hard not to conclude that this is solely because of the media reporting of, especially, asylum-seeking during that period rather than any genuine increase in its salience for individual experience. In short, public anger and concern have been procured by politicians and commentators.

In any case, if some protestors are, indeed, genuinely angry then, as Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian, few seem willing “to ask whether the rage is justified” or how it is likely inform a better or more practical approach to the asylum system. That unwillingness is understandable since, as with Brexit, to deny the gut feeling of ‘ordinary people’ (invariably meaning the protestors, not the often larger numbers of counter-demonstrators, or those in groups giving support to asylum seekers) is deemed ‘elitist’ by Brexitists.

So too is an insistence on rationality and evidence. Yet the existence of some 32,000 asylum seekers in just over 200 hotels, dispersed around the country, is, if not a non-issue (not least because of the reasons why it has arisen), surely not something objectively to warrant pole position in public concern and the domestic news agenda. Bluntly, Britain has many, far greater, problems. Moreover, within the global context of the 8.4 million people seeking asylum in 2024, the UK is barely touched. That context certainly makes it absurd to represent the approximately 110,000 who sought asylum here in that year as constituting an ‘invasion’, as does the fact that, adjusted for population, in 2024 the UK had less asylum applicants than sixteen other European countries. The ‘crisis’ is a manufactured one which, to coin a phrase, we might call 'Project Fear'.

The complicity of the media and the government

However, whatever the facts, the Brexitist framing of asylum-seeking, which has spilled over to dominate the framing of immigration, has become an accomplished political reality. It is not, now, confined to Reform, let alone to hard-right street politics. Many Tories, most enthusiastically their would-be leader Robert Jenrick, have also embraced it, using language and rhetoric identical to that of the hard right in a way that not long ago would have been unthinkable from a mainstream politician. Perhaps the real yardstick of how things have shifted is not so much that this rather grubby little mediocrity says such things as that he is able to extract an apology from the BBC for broadcasting a theologian saying, in an opinion slot, that they are “xenophobic”.

That apology was only part of the wider way in which the Brexitists have successfully framed discussion of this issue. The endless wave of hyperbolic comment and ‘reporting’ has not been confined to the tabloids or the Telegraph (which has long been in thrall to ‘the end is nigh’ teeth-gnashing) but has also captured the previously more sober Times. More importantly, it has been aided and abetted by the BBC (which, as British Future Director Sunder Katwala has assiduously chronicled over the summer, has persistently hyped-up the scale of the protests), as well as other broadcasters such as Sky which has taken to tagging its reports on this topic with a large banner saying ‘Migration Crisis’. Meanwhile, apparently beyond any meaningful control from Ofcom, GB News continues to pump out Brexitist propaganda to the faithful.

Most significantly of all, having been fairly robust in challenging the Brexitist narrative during the 2024 post-Southport violence (and garnering a fair degree of public approval for this), Labour politicians now seem to have become too cowardly to do so, or perhaps have simply accepted that narrative. This isn’t the first time a Labour government has gone in this direction, by any means, but Brexit has made a difference, and this is also part of how Brexit has morphed into Brexitism, as it persuaded many in the Labour movement that the populists really do speak for ‘ordinary people’, including many in the traditional Labour electoral base.

Even leaving aside the morality of this, it is just dumb politics as it alienates so many more previous or potential Labour voters than it is every going to attract (see, for example, recent polling on views about the location of asylum seekers). Labour is losing its 2024 voters primarily to the left, or to indecision, rather than to Reform, and they aren’t picking up 2024 Reform voters.

The only conceivable defence of the government’s approach is that if it does not ‘acknowledge the grievance’, then Reform will exploit it. But it is a hopeless defence, on the one hand accepting as legitimate what is actually a massive exaggeration and distortion and, on the other hand, imagining that the threat of Reform can be neutralized in this way. The reality is that, whatever the Labour government does, Reform will say it is not enough. The government’s response isn’t a way of stopping Reform exploiting the asylum issue, it is one of the ways in which Reform is succeeding in doing so.

Post-Brexit politics

More fundamentally, what has been vividly illustrated this summer is the clash between what we (perhaps) used to think of as ‘normal’ politics and the anti-institutionalism and anti-politics of Brexitism. That included a revival of the kind of ‘enemies of the people’ attacks on judges we saw in relation to Brexit, this time when judges in the ‘Epping asylum hotel case’ were vilified, and their judgement presented as ‘taking the side of migrants over Britons’.

A particular feature of Brexitist anti-politics, because of its central focus on grievance, is that it gives credence to imaginary simple solutions, dismissed as impractical only by despised ‘experts’. Such solutions are especially effective when propounded by those who do not have responsibility for governing, as they are deemed free of the taint of ‘the Establishment’. Hence the wave of hyperbole about ‘the migration crisis’ was followed by Farage unveiling his radical supposed solution of “mass deportation”.

It doesn’t matter that he almost immediately backtracked on the idea that this mass deportation would include women and children, prompting Kemi Badenoch to insist (£) that a Tory government would ensure that it did. For, effortlessly, the terrain of debate was shifted from something which in the very recent past would have been seen as unthinkable (only last year Farage himself dismissed it as a “political impossibility”) on to the details of just how draconian the mass deportation ‘solution’ would be. It isn’t even necessary for the solution to be persuasive: if the mainstream parties are perceived to have failed, there is an insidious appeal in the idea of ‘giving a chance’ to the ‘insurgents’ or just that it’s ‘time for a change’. To that extent, to adapt a phrase from the New Labour era, ‘what works doesn’t matter’.

However it does not follow that ‘normal’ politics has ceased to matter. Although insufficient in itself, one of the ways of countering the Brexitism of Reform, especially, is to point to its utter incompetence. That certainly includes the ongoing failure of the flagship policy of Brexit, and people like Farage ought constantly to be reminded that their foundational belief yielded none of what they claimed for it. There may indeed be many voters who are minded to ‘roll the dice’ again, as they did with Brexit, but there are surely others, including those who voted for Brexit, who would be receptive to a clear message reminding them what happened last time they placed their faith in Farage.

This also entails pointing out Reform’s failure (£), now that they control several local councils, to govern in an even vaguely competent manner. Already Farage has started whining that these councils are facing “obstructionism”, laying the ground for the usual evasion of any responsibility, exactly as he did with Brexit. In particular, the public need to be constantly reminded that this is what is in store for the country as a whole if Reform ever come to form, or be part of, a national government with few meaningful constitutional restraints upon it.

In this respect, the government’s approach to the asylum issue is not wholly wrong. It is right (including for asylum seekers themselves, let’s not forget) to improve and speed up the process for assessing and deciding on asylum applications. It is also right to seek, or to improve, international agreements for managing the asylum process within Europe and beyond. The mistake is that, even if the government succeeds in delivering these things, it will not receive the credit whilst it leaves intact, and even endorses, the Brexitist framing of why they are being done. 

It’s simply not enough to say, in effect, that the government accepts all that Reform say about the ‘crisis’ but will be more competent in ‘solving’ it (a point developed at length by the Conservative commentator John Oxley). Nor is it enough to dismiss the Brexitists as trading on emotion, and to counterpose that with ‘delivery’: effective politics needs to speak in both registers. In other words, whilst competence does still matter, it doesn’t exist independently of a wider framing of why it matters, not just in order to ‘communicate more effectively’ but to enthuse and inspire.

What is at stake?

I will write much more about the latter point in future posts because it looks set to be the terrain of politics for the next few years. I don’t mean that it will all be about asylum and immigration, though no doubt that issue will continue to feature prominently, along with many others. I mean something deeper, about the content and conduct of the politics of post-Brexit Britain, pre-dating Brexit in some ways, but very significantly inflected and inflamed by Brexit.

At stake is whether Brexit Britain is also to be Brexitist Britain. The outcome is neither predictable nor inevitable, and one consequence of it will be whether or not it becomes feasible for the UK to apply to join the EU, although that will be very far from being the only, or even the most important, consequence. We have only to look at what is happening in Trump’s US to see what some of those consequences might be.

Nine years since the vote to leave the EU, and all that has followed from it, Brexit and Brexitism are now completely intertwined, explaining the new title of this blog and the slightly different focus the posts are likely to have as it enters its tenth year. What will not change is the attempt to analyse what is happening with the use of reliable evidence, logical argument, and, I hope, a degree of interpretive insight.

Brexit: the next phase

The main Brexit news since my last post is the announcement of an agreement about Gibraltar made between the EU, UK, Spain, and Gibraltar. Although at this stage only a political agreement, which still needs to be put into legal text and ratified, this marks a certain kind of milestone in the Brexit process, for it is the last part of the negotiations which began under the aegis of Article 50. So, combined with the recent announcements at the ‘reset Summit’, it can be seen as the end of one phase and the beginning of another.

The Rock took ages

It’s worth pausing just to reflect on that, given that it is over eight years since Article 50 was triggered by Theresa May, five and a half years since the UK left the EU, and just a few days from now it will be the ninth anniversary of the referendum itself. I am not sure who first said it (possibly Rafael Behr), but the biggest lie about Brexit, a title for which there is much competition, was that it would be quick and easy.

It is somehow fitting that Gibraltar should be the last of the ‘withdrawal issues’ to be resolved since, at the very beginning for the Article 50 process, it gave rise to a strong candidate for another much-competed for title, the maddest moment of Brexit. I am referring to the time, in April 2017, when senior Tories, including Michael Howard, talked of the possibility of going to war with Spain. This followed the publication, immediately after the UK sent the Article 50 letter, of the EU Council’s draft negotiating guidelines. As I wrote at the time, and elaborated in more detail in April 2024, when it seemed as if a deal was in the offing, this episode contained within it many lessons which have run through the entirety of the Brexit saga, like words through a stick of rock (that is the last ‘rock’ pun).

I won’t repeat that discussion here. But it is relevant to say that the terms of what have been agreed are pretty much as trailed in 2024, and not very different to the ad hoc arrangements created in 2018 and semi-formalized at the end of the transition period. So it hardly needed to take so long to deal with, because the reality is that something like what has been agreed was the only credible option, and certainly the best option for the people who live and/or work in Gibraltar.

What has been agreed?

On the central issue of contention, there will be no passport or other checks on goods and people crossing the land border between Gibraltar and Spain, but there will be dual passport controls at Gibraltar’s airport and sea port (most arrivals at the latter are from cruise ships, with passengers pre-cleared for landing).

This means that the UK/Gibraltar authorities will operate one set of checks, and the Spanish authorities will operate another set, and these latter will also be checks for Schengen Area entry/ exit. It is a situation which has been compared with the kind of dual controls operated on Eurostar services between London and Paris/ Brussels (although the mechanics will be slightly different). This means in effect, although not, according to Foreign Secretary David Lammy, in formal terms, Gibraltar will be within the Schengen travel area.

One aspect of what has been agreed is that it will be Spanish, and not EU Frontex, border staff who will be policing the Schengen checks. This had been the subject of dispute during the negotiations, and appears to be a negotiating ‘victory’ for Spain, as, under the Tory government, the UK had apparently wanted Frontex to police the controls. It is hard to see why, though. It is no different to the way that the French authorities police Schengen for Eurostar travel, and one might have thought that Tory Brexiters would prefer a national agency to an EU agency, but it may be that, on this issue, their concern was more about any implication of Spanish sovereignty over Gibraltar. In practical terms, it seems irrelevant either way.

Much of the detail of this, and the rest of the agreement, including the precise arrangements for the UK RAF and military base on Gibraltar, has yet to be disclosed (although Lammy has said there will be “zero change” as regards the military base). There will also be a ‘level playing field’ agreement, encompassing state aid, taxation, labour, environment, trade and sustainable development, anti-money laundering, transport, the rights of frontier workers and social security coordination, presumably along the lines of what is in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

Those things aside, perhaps the most significant provision is that there will be an EU-Gibraltar customs union, with implications for the harmonization of duties, including on alcohol and tobacco. It is an interesting development, since, Gibraltar was not a part of the EU customs union when the UK was a member state (and therefore customs union member), so in this respect Gibraltar, uniquely amongst British territories, will become closer to the EU as a result of Brexit [1]. That is perhaps some recompense for having to endure, with Brexit, something which 96% of Gibraltarians voted against.

Sovereignty betrayed, part 94

All of this led to predictable cries of betrayal and loss of sovereignty from Brexiters, although it’s worth saying that the Conservative frontbenchers, perhaps mindful that their party was gearing up to agree something very similar last year, have so far been fairly muted in opposing it. No such constraints exist for Tory backbenchers like Mark ‘D-Day’ Francois, or for the Reform blowhards who denounced the agreement as a “surrender”, but on this occasion their position is even more convoluted than usual since they seem unsure whether what is at issue is their usual bleat about ‘surrender’ to the EU or whether it is a ‘surrender’ to Spain.

There has been some of the former, mainly in relation to the tax harmonization and eventual customs union plan. However, the main focus of Brexiter complaint has been the fact that Spain will police the airport controls, with the possibility that British citizens could be refused entry by Spanish border guards (they would, of course, have been equally, or more, outraged had the deal put EU Frontex staff in charge: we know this, because they were outraged when it was under discussion).

Actually, one thing which the official statement of the agreement makes abundantly clear is that it exists “without prejudice to the respective legal positions of Spain and the United Kingdom with regard to sovereignty and jurisdiction”. But if the Brexiters believe otherwise, then they should acknowledge that it is yet another example of how they misled British voters before the referendum.

For in May 2016 the then Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said: “I genuinely believe that the threat of leaving the European Union is as big a threat to Gibraltar's future security and Gibraltar's future sovereignty as the more traditional threats that we routinely talk about.” The reaction from Brexiters was furious, with Liam Fox enraged that the possibility should even have been mentioned, saying: “I think there are limits to what you can and cannot say in any campaign that goes way beyond acceptable limits” [sic]. All this was reported in the Daily Express under an inevitable headline about ‘Project Fear’.

So now, in 2025, if the Brexiters are really saying that Gibraltar’s sovereignty has been undermined by Brexit, they should surely admit that Hammond was right and Fox was wrong. Alternatively, they might reflect on the way that their ideological counterparts in Spain have also reviled this week’s deal as an abject surrender of sovereignty, but on their telling it is the Spanish government which has made the surrender!

Brexitism and the Beeb

But this is to ask for consistency and self-awareness from those who can barely muster a coherent argument, or even basic knowledge of the facts. To take one example, David Bannerman, one of the most hardcore of Brexiters, fulminated that the deal violated the sovereign rights of British passport holders to live in Gibraltar all year round (since Schengen rules would not allow this). It fell to Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, to school the Tory ex-MEP that such rights had never existed. It was a reminder of the way that, even now, after all these years, some of those most committed to Brexit have so little understanding of the practicalities of what being in the EU meant.

Equally illuminating was the way that former Brexit Party MEP Lucy Harris [2] spluttered about the deal having “sold off” Gibraltar and being “anti-British” before eventually settling on it being “anti-democratic”. This, she argued, was because the people of Gibraltar hadn’t been consulted, and because it “insulted” them and also “Brexit voters, northern voters of this country” (the country she presumably meant, in a rather ‘anti-British’ usage, being England). That was a strange juxtaposition, since it is not obvious how something can insult both those who voted to remain and those who voted to leave, and of course the deal is very much what Gibraltarians have been wanting for years (and was negotiated, and will be subject to ratification, by their elected representatives).

Harris’s comments would hardly be worth dwelling on – and, like her fellow Brexiters, she does not have any practical alternatives to the agreement – except that they illustrate how, even as the last part of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU is laid to rest, the ‘Brexitism’ it spawned is more vibrant than ever. There is now an almost literally endless supply of Brexiters – low-grade, if you like, but, still, as in this example, appearing on flagship current affairs shows on the BBC and other major news outlets – who are able to do little more than spout slogans.

In the case of the BBC, especially, I suspect it is because they have been so cowed by populist attacks that they feel obliged to give representation to a position that has so few elected representatives that they have to fall back on people like Harris. This forces others (including BBC journalists themselves) to respond as if engaging with serious comment, and as a consequence political discourse as a whole becomes framed by Brexitist talking points. And whilst the BBC is not the only culprit, it is, by virtue of its position, undoubtedly the key media institution influencing that discursive framing.

A new phase in the Brexit process

Whilst the Gibraltar announcement can be seen as the last moment of the Article 50 process, it can also be understood as part of the beginning of the reset process. As I mentioned in a recent post, there had been reports that a deal over Gibraltar would be a precondition for any reset deal to be announced at the UK-EU Summit in May. As it turned out, the Summit produced an agreement (of sorts) in advance of the Gibraltar announcement, but it is hard to believe there was no linkage between the two. That is to say, the Gibraltar agreement was almost certainly anticipated at the time of the Summit and/or had it subsequently failed the materialize then the potential deals envisaged by the Summit would have been unlikely to progress.

Indeed there is a wider point here. The first substantive paragraph of the Joint Statement of the Summit affirmed that in announcing their new “strategic partnership” the UK and the EU “agreed this would build on the stable foundation for our relationship set by the Withdrawal Agreement, including the Windsor Framework, and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and reaffirmed our commitment to their full, timely and faithful implementation.” In other words, there is a clear sense, and a clear expectation, that the reset is contingent upon delivering the original withdrawal terms. That should now be taken to include the belated completion of those terms by the finalisation of the Gibraltar agreement.

This presumably has the potential to be at least a background feature of negotiations about the various potential reset deals, such as an SPS deal, in that they would be likely to be jeopardised by any actual or perceived failure of the UK to implement the existing agreements. That might include issues such as failing to honour the level playing field commitments of the TCA, for example over state aid, failing to fully implement the Windsor Framework version of the Northern Ireland Protocol, or failing to operate the EU Settled Status Scheme arising from the Withdrawal Agreement in an effective and equitable manner. In short, we may be moving to a new phase in UK-EU relations, but it is still anchored in the previous phases, and the new phase creates a negotiating ratchet (for both the UK and the EU, but most obviously for the EU, as the UK is the demandeur) to ensure compliance with the previous agreements [3].

What the new phase will look like

Whether or not that turns out to play a part in ongoing reset negotiations, what certainly will be an issue is the extent to which the UK has already passively or actively diverged from EU regulations. It is true that, in fact, there has been relatively little regulatory divergence since Brexit, and once the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill becomes law (as it is about to) it will be easier to avoid passive divergence. However, there have been some potentially significant active divergences already, most obviously those relevant to a future SPS agreement.

One important example is the divergence in gene-editing regulations. As I discussed in a post in February 2022, when the legislation was being developed, this is a regulatory area which, although not without its critics, could justifiably be thought of as a Brexit opportunity. That legislation, which only applies to England, has now been passed, as the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 and was welcomed as “game-changing” by the John Innes Centre, a leading research centre in the area (and, somewhat less enthusiastically, by Peter Mills of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics).

This legislation explicitly moves away from the EU’s approach to Genetically Modified Organisms regulation but an additional complexity is that the EU’s approach, too, is in flux. This means that it is not, at present, knowable exactly how the UK and EU approaches will differ at the point of any SPS deal which may be done. This situation does not present insurmountable obstacles to such a deal, and Jiyeong Go and Emily Lydgate of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy have recently set out a much more detailed explanation of the issues, including some possible resolutions. But it is illustrative of the kind of detailed, technical practicalities which will have to be thrashed out, presumably behind closed doors, in the coming months (or even years).

A second example is animal welfare where, again, Brexit has enabled what some see as positive developments, most notably the Animal Welfare (Livestock Exports) Act 2024, banning the export of live animals (although other promised post-Brexit legislation, such as the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill 2021, was shelved). Brexiters and some animal welfare campaigners have already begun to raise concerns that such divergences from EU regulations will not survive an SPS deal. Again, this need not be an insurmountable obstacle to an SPS deal, but it shows that the negotiations will take time, and may involve political difficulties within both the UK and the EU because of the powerful interest and lobby groups with a stake in the issues. It is not just about Brexiters blindly insisting that all divergence from the EU is good, it is also about interest groups who genuinely see particular divergences as desirable.

Whilst these examples both relate to a possible SPS agreement, the underlying issue of dealing with such divergence as has already occurred will feature in any area which entails dynamic alignment of UK and EU regulations. The Summit documents suggested that these might include linking Emissions Trading Systems, and UK participation in the EU internal energy market. Although not mentioned, another area which I understand to still be on the UK government’s agenda is a linkage of the UK and EU REACH systems for chemical regulation. That has always been a sensible idea, since in substantive terms they are very similar, but it would pose, amongst other things, issues of passive divergence, for example in terms of different approaches to ‘forever chemicals’. In an interesting assessment of how the reset might now progress, former senior civil servant Sir Martin Donnelly has identified other areas where dynamic alignment might open up new cooperation. These include medical devices and pharmaceuticals and even, in what would be a rather different vein, VAT harmonization.

Whatever the scope of what is pursued, the overall point is that this emerging Brexit ‘phase’ is going to be characterised by a whole series of highly technical negotiations in various, often discrete, policy areas. Of course that was also true in previous times, but the difference now is that they will not be held within a single, even if complex, process. No doubt there will be some overall political coordination, in both the UK and the EU, but it won’t be like the Article 50 process. Nor is there likely to be the same level of media interest, and there certainly won’t be the kind of parliamentary attention (one of the criticisms, even from those who welcome it in principle, of the Gibraltar agreement is that, like post-Brexit trade deals, it will be subject to almost no parliamentary scrutiny).

So I suspect that it is going to be quite difficult to keep track of developments. It will probably require paying attention to the specialist trade media in particular sectors, and perhaps to periodic howls of rage from Brexiters when they realize what is happening (such howls should be a reminder, to ‘remainers’, that there is a genuine, if limited, anti-Brexit agenda within Labour’s policy). There will also be some specific public moments, such as future summits, meetings of the various bodies set up by the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, and, as regards the TCA specifically, its own scheduled operational review in 2026.

Equally, there is now much less at stake than there was. That shouldn’t be misunderstood. Things like the Gibraltar agreement certainly matter for those affected, and the various reset deals will (or might) make a real difference to those within the relevant areas. But the basic architecture of Brexit is quite clearly not going to change under this government, which will presumably last until 2028 or 2029, and the EU has no particular interest in effecting more than marginal changes. As I argued in a recent post, there won’t be another ‘reset’, just some ongoing resetting of Brexit which may see (at best) a sanding off of some its rougher edges.

Nine years on

So, with that, I am going to sign off for the summer since I don’t anticipate there being much Brexit news of note. That may turn out to be one of those predictions that looks stupid in retrospect, in which case I will post. Otherwise, I plan to resume at the beginning of September. If I am right in what I have written here about the nature of the Brexit process in this ‘new phase’ then I suspect the focus of this blog is increasingly going to become not so much Brexit – the UK leaving the EU – as the Brexitism which is one of its most significant and, in some ways, most surprising legacies.

Meanwhile, one reasonably safe prediction is that next week, when, as mentioned above, the ninth anniversary of the Brexit referendum falls, there will be a spike of commentary. Most of it will be predictable, and some of it will also be intensely irritating. I would simply suggest reading Daniel Hannan’s risible essay, penned two days before the referendum, depicting what Brexit would seem like when we reached 24 June 2025.

That, if anything, exemplifies a prediction that has turned out to look stupid. But it’s more than that. It was a prediction which was never going to come true. So my other suggestion for the anniversary is to read, if you haven’t already done so, my book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to), the second, updated, edition of which was published in September 2023. It tells the story of what happened, starting the day after the 2016 referendum. I’m biased, of course, but I’m not entirely alone in thinking it is about the best book about Brexit.

Have a good summer, and many thanks to the many tens of thousands of you who continue to read this blog regularly. I appreciate it, especially now that there are so many other ‘content creators’ competing for your attention.

 

Notes

[1] For those who may be wondering, Gibraltar does not participate in any of the Free Trade Agreements made by the UK since Brexit, so it forming a customs union with the EU will not imply any revision to those Agreements.

[2] Harris was elected as a Brexit Party MEP in May 2019. She subsequently resigned the party Whip in December 2019 and, in January 2020, sat as a Conservative MEP until the UK left the EU at the end of that month. No doubt she has many qualities, but I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that she is not a major political figure.

[3] In case it is not obvious, I am not really suggesting that there have simply been two, neat, phases of Brexit. It would be possible to divide what has happened since 2016 into several phases, or none. But the combination of a) the Gibraltar agreement being the last of the original, Article 50, withdrawal issues; b) the near-contemporaneous announcements made at the reset Summit; and c) the way that the reset Summit formally marked how the Labour government’s approach to Brexit differs from its predecessors does constitute one way of periodizing the Brexit process to date, if only for heuristic purposes.