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 is 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 the 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.

After the Brexit reset, how about a Brexit review?

Very much as anticipated in my previous post, the ‘reset Summit’ has come and gone as if it were simply a passing event. There has certainly been little political or media follow-up to what was announced, once the flurry of Brexiter fury had died down. Perhaps that is in part because, as John Elledge points out in the New Statesman, that fury, and the screaming headlines it gave rise to in the pro-Brexit press, simply isn’t matched by public opinion. The same seems to be true of attempts to whip up fears of Brexit ‘sabotage’ over the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, which passed its third reading this week.

That’s partly because, as Elledge says, in general terms the public tends to support closer ties with the EU, but I suspect it’s also because the public don’t really care that much either way. It is striking that every poll on the reset, whether conducted before the Summit or afterwards, shows high numbers of ‘don’t knows’, usually about 30% of respondents. Moreover, the YouGov post-summit poll shows that as well as 30% who ‘don’t know’, another 16% think that ‘the deal’ agreed is neither good nor bad. I also suspect that even those who oppose it struggle to muster the angry energy of the headline writers.

Actually, in this case at least, a ‘don’t know’ response is not necessarily a reflection of the public’s disinclination to be acquainted with the facts. It would be a perfectly reasonable response from even the most assiduous and well-informed voter. For, as I highlighted in that previous post, all that has really been announced of ‘the deal’ is a whole series of discrete potential agreements between the UK and the EU, but without almost any announced processes or timetables for their negotiation, let alone for their completion.

An SPS agreement?

The most important of the possible economic agreements, at least from the perspective of the Labour government’s explicitly stated reset aims, is a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. On that, my assumption that the government would take the possibility of its completion to justify the further postponement of full import controls on goods coming from the EU has been proved correct. Thus it was announced this week that the next phase of controls, which after several delays was meant to be implemented in July, has been paused, in effect indefinitely although the government press release stated they are deferred until January 2027 [1].

It's worth standing back from this latest announcement to recall just how ridiculous the situation is. Successive British governments, having embarked on Brexit with a referendum held almost nine years ago, and having fairly soon decided that this meant ‘hard Brexit’, went on to delude themselves and to mislead the public about the fact that this was going to entail import controls. Indeed it was not until February 2020 that any Cabinet Minister, specifically Michael Gove, formally and publicly stated that import controls would have to be introduced. By that time, Britain had already left the EU and was in the transition period, a transition period which the government had previously resisted and which it refused, despite the pandemic, to extend.

Since Gove’s announcement, there have been years of preparations, with huge costs for both government and businesses, and so many delays and multiple phasings, with different delays to the different phasings, that it is all but impossible to catalogue them in their entirety (see my post of April 2024 and the links within it for some of the detail). Meanwhile, the EU was ready to introduce controls on imports from Great Britain on the day after the transition period ended (to complaints from Gove about EU ‘over-rigidity’).

SPS controls, or even import controls generally, are not, in themselves, amongst the biggest costs or consequences of Brexit (an SPS deal is estimated to be worth less than 0.1% of UK GDP per annum) although they have proved to be one of the costs the UK has been most unwilling to pay. But the whole saga, and the fact that it is still playing out with this new supposed deadline being set for well into the next parliament, is a potent symbol of the utter ignorance, incompetence and dishonesty that has characterised Brexit as a whole. It certainly, in various ways, makes a mockery of the slogan about ‘taking back control of our money, our borders, and our laws’ if, indeed, anything more than the slogan itself were needed to induce mockery.

Risks and reactions

Coming back to the specific issue of the latest postponement, a few points stand out. One is the now familiar one that the lack of full import controls constitutes a risk which will now continue for even longer. As I noted in my last post, it will certainly be months, and very possibly years, before an SPS deal is both agreed and implemented and, meanwhile, Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland) risks importing shoddy or dangerous goods. For reasons I’ve discussed before, that isn’t because EU products have ‘ceased to be safe’. It is because the UK no longer has full access to the ‘eco-system’ relevant databases, and as a result is more vulnerable to accidental or criminal introductions of, for example, animal diseases, African Swine Fever being the most high-profile example.

From this point of view, reported food industry concerns that an SPS deal would increase those risks, because it would ultimately enable the UK to remove those phases of the post-Brexit import controls which have been introduced, are wide of the mark. If and when any such deal is done, it would, according to paragraph 31 of the statement released after the reset Summit, include full database access and thereby return risks to pre-Brexit levels (or to the same level as for member states of the EU which, of course, can never be zero). The real concern is that, meanwhile, the remainder of the necessary import controls will remain unimplemented.

If some have misunderstood the implications of an SPS deal, others have been wrong-footed by it. A particularly delicious example is an article in the rabidly pro-Brexit Express. Those who only read the headline, “‘Brexit reset deal’ to hit grocery bills next month – how it affects your pockets”, could be forgiven for thinking that Starmer’s craven betrayal of the Brexit dream was about to hit hard-pressed consumers in their wallets. But - what’s this? – the report goes on to explain that it will reduce business costs by £200 million a year, which will “gradually work its way down to consumers” who will see lower prices and greater availability of produce. Some “hit” [2].

All this aside, there was something decidedly odd about the announcement. The fact that the government is not going to continue to develop full border controls, and may even start selling off some of the ‘white elephant’ border facilities, seems to suggest either that it is completely confident of reaching an SPS agreement with the EU (which is exactly how the press release reads) and/or that it is determined to do whatever is necessary to reach such an agreement. Much of the media discussion certainly talks as if the deal already exists or is at least a fait accompli.

In fact, as things stand there is no agreement and, although I think it is very highly likely that there will be, it is impossible to be certain or to know how long it will take. If there is no agreement, and in the meantime there has been no further development of import controls, then there will be an even longer period until full controls are operational. They certainly aren’t going to spring into action in January 2027, the supposed new deadline. But even if there is an agreement, the longer it takes to be made and implemented the greater the chance that the risks involved will eventuate and that, in turn, carries a political risk for the government [3].

A detour into Brexitology

One thing which can be said about an SPS agreement, if it happens, or any of the others identified at the reset Summit, is that neither it nor they will constitute ‘cherry-picking’. I’m returning to this point reluctantly since, as I said when I last discussed it, my original passing remark about it, in a footnote to an earlier post, led to much critical, and some hostile, comment on social media.

My basic argument is that this term has now ceased to have analytical value because, now that the UK is a third country to the EU, any agreements made will simply be between those two polities, in the light of their own interests. Some seemed to think this showed my supposed ‘UK-centrism’, and perhaps even my own hidden Brexity nature, or was just some inexplicable lapse from cogency on my part. All of which seems rather strange given that for almost ten years I’ve been writing about cherry-picking (and related concepts like ‘cakeism’), repeatedly using it as a concept to analyse Brexit and to criticise the UK’s conduct.

I only return to this now because last week no less a person than the EU Ambassador to the UK, Pedro Serrano, described the term as being “no longer helpful” and went on to say of the reset that “this is not about cherry-picking or not cherry-picking. We have identified a number of issues that are of mutual interest.” The report of these remarks, by Jon Stone in Politico, goes on to say that “in the Berlaymont, too, the [cherry-picking] line is seen as passé”, although gives no specific evidence of that and it’s not clear to me that, as the report claims, this term has been “officially retired” by the EU (or what form ‘official retirement’ would take). Nevertheless, it is clearly significant that someone of Serrano’s stature said what he did and, unless the suggestion is that his posting to London has made him fall prey to ‘UK-centrism’, it suggests that my own observation was an accurate one.

Moreover, the report goes on to quote Charles Grant, the widely-respected Director of the Centre for European Reform, saying that the cherry-picking line had been “a product of the strained relationship that followed the referendum, and the EU’s concern that other countries should not follow the UK’s example.” That is exactly my point, or part of it: not just the word, but the concept, relate to a time which legally and institutionally has ceased to exist, namely the period during which the Withdrawal Agreement and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement were being negotiated.

This isn’t (or isn’t simply) an ‘I told you so’ on my part (and, even if it were, there are plenty of things, often more important than this, which I’ve been wrong about over the years). Actually, it’s a fairly minor issue which I never expected to cause so much fuss. Nevertheless, it does have a wider significance which is worth mentioning.

It has become almost a truism of ‘Brexitology’ (for there is such a thing) that Brexit is a ‘process not an event’, an observation only ever necessary to make because of the bone-headed inability of most Brexiters to grasp that simple fact. But that doesn’t mean that the process ‘unfolds’ in the sense of going in a particular direction, like the unrolling of a carpet to reveal a recurring pattern. For whilst it is undoubtedly true that there are endless recurrences and repetitions – to a degree that is sometimes almost soul-destroying – it is also the case that the direction and content of the process modulates over time, and will continue to do so. As that happens, anyone who is serious about understanding Brexit needs to be attuned to both the continuities and the changes.

I think that most readers of this blog would have no difficulty agreeing with the suggestion that those Brexiters who are still, for example, droning on about ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border are simply stuck in a groove whereby not just the terminology but the entire situation it relates to have been superseded. What may be less palatable is that the same can apply to some of the idées fixes of those on the ‘remain’, ‘rejoin’, ‘FBPE’ (or whatever term we want to use for it) side.

The Strategic Defence Review

One important reason why the Brexit process does not have a single fixed direction, mandating a fixed repertoire of analytical terms, is that this process does not take place in isolation from the wider world. The most obvious example is the Ukraine War, which has had a profound impact on UK-EU post-Brexit relations ever since its outbreak in 2022. That impact continues to develop, and is itself one of the things impacted by the other most obvious example, Trump’s second presidency. The EU-UK Security and Defence Partnership, announced at the reset Summit, is the most tangible consequence of these two developments.

The Ukraine War had already prompted the 2023 ‘refreshed’ Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (IR23). As I discussed at the time, this represented something of a retreat from the hubris of the original Integrated Review of 2021 (IR21) with its puffed-up post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ framing, and put more emphasis on the centrality of European-Atlantic security. Now, just two years later, the government has published its Strategic Defence Review (SDR).

I’m not qualified to discuss the military details of the SDR, for which see Professor Lawrence Freedman’s expert analysis, but, on my reading of its geo-political framing, it does not really continue the direction of travel from IR21 to IR23. It is true that, as Freedman explains, the SDR is very much informed by the threat from Russia and by the military lessons of the Ukraine War. It is also true that it does not explicitly replicate the ‘Global Britain’ language of IR21. Nevertheless, it retains a strong emphasis on the UK as a global military power, centrally anchored in its relationship with the US and its membership of NATO.

Of course, that is not a surprise, any more than it is a surprise that it is only very gently hinted at that the reliability of the US as a defence partner has been compromised by Trump, and may well never recover. But it is, if not surprising then at least of note, that the partnership with the EU is given so little emphasis, and even that in rather muted tones (see especially p.75). In the process, what had seemed in IR23 to be the beginning of a recognition that the UK is primarily a regional power has been diluted. It’s difficult to be sure, precisely as so much is about tone and emphasis, and thus very much open to different interpretations, but, at the very least, I don’t think it is suggestive of the kind of Europe-first foreign policy which Foreign Secretary David Lammy talked about in Opposition.

A different review?

That rather tentative analysis aside, the SDR prompts the thought that, whatever it does or does not imply about the UK-EU defence partnership, there is literally nothing in it which could not, and probably would not, have been written had Brexit not happened. AUKUS, which features extensively in the review, is sometimes trumpeted by Brexiters as a ‘Brexit benefit’, but the fact that France, an EU member, was originally to have been the US and Australia’s partner gives the lie to that. But if Brexit has brought no defence and security benefits, what costs and disbenefits might it have brought?

In particular, whilst, like the other recent reviews, the SDR rightly identifies the threat Russia poses to the UK, and the very wide-ranging forms it takes, the entire question about how Brexit relates to this threat remains one of the major unventilated issues of recent history. I’ve never been one of those who ascribes the referendum result to Russian interference and, in some ways, I think doing so serves to deflect responsibility from those, including the voters, with whom it lies. But it is undeniable that Brexit was in line with Russian interests, and we know the pro-Putin views of many of its leading advocates, including Nigel Farage.

At issue here is not so much the failure to investigate what role Russia played in 2016, it is how, right now, in 2025, and in the future, Brexit continues to serve those interests. We are told that the SDR puts the UK on a “wartime footing” in the face of the “immediate and pressing threat” from Russia. A country which was really serious about that would be conducting a review not just of defence strategy but of why it is persisting with an entire national strategy which may not have been chosen for it by Russia but is exactly what Russia would have chosen for it. Whilst we are at it, we might also undertake a comprehensive official review of all the economic and political consequences of Brexit.

After all, if the dramatic changes in the world are such as to require three defence reviews in the five years since Britain formally left the EU, then it surely isn’t unreasonable to think that Brexit itself warrants at least one.

Notes

[1] Apart from at least recognizing that an SPS deal may not be done, the reason a date is stated is very likely in order to forestall any action against the UK at the WTO. As things stand, the UK is discriminating against non-EU countries, whose imports face SPS controls. But for so long as the UK can claim to be in the process of introducing controls on the EU and negotiating a deal with the EU, it is unlikely that any other WTO member will bother to start raising a complaint.

[2] In another article, even the Express couldn’t find a negative spin to put on one aspect of the potential SPS deal, namely that it would make it easier to take pets to and from the EU by a “reversal to Brexit rules”. This possible return to the pet passport scheme shouldn’t be confused with another development this week, introducing the Pet Travel Document to simplify taking pets between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is nothing to do with the reset or any SPS agreement, but is part of the ongoing implementation of the Windsor Framework.

[3] Of course there are political risks either way. If the government continued to roll out import controls which, along with those already developed, were subsequently rendered redundant by an SPS agreement then it could be accused of wasting money. Even so, that would be considerably less damaging (both politically and economically) than if, prior to an agreement, the absence of full controls led to, say, foot and mouth disease being imported.

That was the reset that was

I’m not quite sure when ‘the reset’ became used as a noun to denote a definite moment within UK-EU relations. The notion of ‘resetting’ as a verb was certainly floating around before the election, but the first record I can find of it being as a noun was at the European Political Community Summit hosted in the UK last July. As for the reset being tied to a specific event, namely the UK-EU Summit that was held this week, that only began in February of this year, in the context of Keir Starmer’s attendance at a meeting with EU leaders at a defence and security summit, and the wider context of the dramatic re-arrival of Donald Trump in the White House.

I remarked at the time that it was unclear how realistic this timescale was, given the scope of things which would need to be agreed for the Summit to produce a reset worthy of the name. Now the UK-EU Summit has been held and, after all the speculation, we know the details of what has been agreed which are set out in the Joint Statement, the Renewed Agenda for Cooperation and the text of a political agreement for a Security and Defence Partnership, along with a Q&A document relating to these.

These have been widely reported, and there are several summaries, including from the BBC and Politico, as well as some excellent analyses including, from a legal perspective, that of Professor Steve Peers on his EU Law Analysis blog and, from a more political perspective, that of Anton Spisak of the Centre for European Reform on his personal Substack newsletter. Given that there is so much already written, I won’t provide another summary here. Instead, I will seek to evaluate what was agreed, taking in some but not all of the details, and how it relates to the wider Brexit saga.

Evaluating the reset Summit

In a recent post I set out some parameters which can be used for that evaluation:

“On one account, what will be announced will be a “new strategic partnership”, encompassing trade and security, and more or less explicitly configured as a response to Donald Trump. On another account, the accent will be on defence and security, with something more like a roadmap for discussion of economic issues, although some reports suggest an extension to the existing fisheries agreement will be announced. The first framing would suggest an explicit shift of geo-political strategy, the second a more ambiguous and less ambitious moment, defining future processes more than providing a statement of intent. Or, to put it another way, one would be a bold and dramatic event, the other a rather boring technocratic adjustment. The issue is not just a matter of symbolism, however. The detailed provisions will matter, not so much in terms of immediate agreements but in terms of the scale and scope of what is identified to be within the ambit of mutually desired agreements. Thus there is a matrix of possibilities according to whether the framing is dramatic and strategic, or dull and technocratic; and whether the scope of possible agreements is extensive or limited.”

Judged in these terms, the agreement falls somewhat between the two framings. The phrase “new strategic partnership” does feature centrally in the Joint Statement that followed the Summit. However, in content terms, what has been agreed is much more like the second framing. As expected, the central part of what was agreed was the Security and Defence Partnership (although there are many details to be worked out). That is important but not unexpected, and Anton Spisak points out that is not the bespoke “security package” Labour had originally sought but a fairly typical EU-third country partnership.

In the non-defence sphere, it was indeed true that there was an extension of the current fisheries agreement contained within the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), which was due to be re-negotiated in 2026, through until 2038. There was also an agreement to extend the TCA energy provisions, which were due to expire in 2026, until 2027 and to do so on an annual basis thereafter. Since these were both consolidations of the existing agreement, they cannot be described in terms of a new strategic framing; indeed, they scarcely warrant the term ‘reset’. Nothing else within the non-defence sphere was definitively agreed, but a long list of possibilities and aspirations was identified.

In terms of the scale and scope of these, most of the things expected were mentioned. An extensive Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement seems to be the most definite, although (again as expected) details and timescale remain under negotiation. One thing which is now explicit is that the government will agree to dynamic alignment of SPS regulations, with a role for the ECJ. It’s true that everyone who knew anything about it knew that was going to happen (if there was to be an SPS agreement at all) but the government had never overtly recognized that. There is also a commitment to work towards a Youth Experience Scheme (meaning some version of a Youth Mobility Scheme), which was expected, but the mention of also working towards the UK participating in Erasmus+ was more surprising (given previous negative comments from the government).

Expected, but with less confidence, was a commitment to work towards linking Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and Emission Trading Schemes (ETS), which has been discussed by commentators for some years but hadn’t featured very explicitly in Labour’s plans. Perhaps less expected, although the idea has certainly been floating around, was a commitment to explore the possibility of the UK participating in the EU’s internal electricity market. In all these areas, as with SPS, if there are agreements then they will entail dynamic alignment of regulations and a role for the ECJ.

The presence of the latter possible agreements takes the reset above the minimal level of what might have been contained (although they also grow out of possibilities contained within the TCA). But there was no mention of participation in the REACH chemicals regulation system  (something once touted as a possibility by Rachel Reeves) nor of accession to the PEM Convention on rules of origin (something called for by Stella Creasy, chair of the Labour Movement for Europe). It is also of note that of the three specific goals for the reset which have been Labour’s stated aims since before the election, SPS is the only one which looks likely to come to fruition. The other two (mutual recognition of professional qualifications, and a mobility agreement for touring artists), which were always unlikely to be agreed, were mentioned but only in vague terms.

So, overall, in terms of the evaluative parameters I proposed, on the framing criterion, it was closer to the technocratic than the strategic, and was mostly a roadmap for discussion of possible agreements. In terms of the scale and scope of what that roadmap contained, it was towards the middle of what might reasonably have been expected, although it should again be stressed that it was minimal in terms of the announcement of actual agreements (as opposed to possible agreements). Moreover, there is a distinct lack of precise timescales or even defined processes for reaching these agreements and, as a result, very little sense of urgency. In that sense, whilst somewhere in the middle, it is closer to the minimal than the maximal end on the ‘scale and scope’ criterion.

A step forward?

If that seems rather underwhelming, it doesn’t mean that the reset was unimportant, for two reasons. One is that it does set in train ongoing negotiations, so that ‘resetting’ will continue. In a way, that was always going to happen, in the sense that the UK-EU relationship is bound to be the subject of ongoing negotiation, but what is distinctive about ‘resetting’ is that the direction of travel, even if very slow, is, for now, towards closer integration.

The other reason it matters is that a Tory government could never have hosted an event like this Summit. That is despite that fact that, at least under Sunak, the direction of travel was similar. That’s shown by the Windsor Framework, what ended up being the very limited scrapping of Retained EU Law, the agreement with Frontex, and the return to Horizon and Copernicus. But Sunak (or any other Tory leader) would have baulked at the concept of a reset and the symbolism and language of this Summit.

In this way, the reset is a step forward of sorts. Along with the different tone that has been evident since the election, it does mark a break with the highly antagonistic years since the referendum. It accepts, overtly, the reality that the EU is a regulatory hegemon, and in the process discards the Brexiters’ taboo against dynamic alignment. Similarly, it demonstrates a recognition of one of the basic flaws of Brexit, namely its failure to grasp the realities of geography. Assuming they happen, both the SPS agreement and the CBAM/ETS linkage will, in terms of the much-discussed choice between the EU and the US, be a choice for the EU.

But – and with Brexit there is always a ‘but’ – what is equally striking is that, as well as being relatively modest in framing and scope, the government has presented the reset in distinctly ‘Brexity’ terms. In particular, Starmer presented it, alongside the recent deals with the US and India, in terms of Britain being “an independent, sovereign nation” which “is back on the world stage”, whilst Reeves talked of the reset meaning that (again in conjunction with trade deals with other countries) Britain is in a better position on trade “than any other country in the world”.

No doubt, tactically, this is meant to spike the attacks on the reset made by Brexiters. In a similar way, the language of “ruthless pragmatism” that Nick Thomas-Symonds has been using for some time can be read as an attempt to position the Brexiter attacks as ‘ideological’ rather than practical. And, indeed, the other general way the reset has been presented by the government is in terms of the practical ways that it will make life better for British people.

Political reaction

All that is fair enough, in a tactical sense, but it doesn’t fundamentally challenge the validity of the Brexiter attacks, which have indeed been ferocious as well as wholly predictable. So, whilst Starmer spoke of the deal “releasing us from the tired arguments of the past” it has done no such thing.

Instead, once again, the airwaves have been full of the obnoxious, clichéd language of “surrender”, “betrayal”, and violation of “the will of the people”. And, once again, any semblance of honesty has disappeared (examples include claims that 80 million people will come to the UK under the Youth Experience Scheme, or that the UK would have had complete control of its fishing waters in 2026 - both made by Boris Johnson, amongst others). It has come from all the usual people (including not just Johnson, but Nigel Farage, David Frost, and Kemi Badenoch) and in all the usual places (including the Telegraph, Express, Mail, and GB News). And, just as in the past, they have set the agenda for the ‘non-partisan media’ such as the BBC, Sky, and ITV (yes, of course I know the questions that begs but, still, they are not partisan in the way of the Brexiter outlets I just mentioned).

It's tempting to think that this is just the last gasp of the Brexit dinosaurs, and that, as Adam Bienkov puts it, their “screaming” is so loud because they know “the public has changed its mind”. After all, 66% of the public support a closer relationship with the EU without rejoining it (or the single market or customs union), which is exactly Labour’s policy, and business groups are very positive. I’m not so sure, if only because public responses to questions about ‘a closer relationship’ may be quite fluid when that is re-presented as ‘betrayal’ and ‘surrender’ [1]. At all events, whether or not that is the reason, polling since the Summit shows only 29% think it is a good deal, and 23% think it is a bad deal (the largest group, 30%, don’t know).

That is hardly a ringing endorsement of the policy, and one big problem is that, for all the government talk of the agreement making life better for ordinary people, it will be a long time before there is any tangible benefit. This, I think, has been an under-appreciated point in much of the media discussion this week, partly because the government focussed on having ‘done’ a deal and its opponents on it being a betrayal. But, to be ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’, the reality is that it will certainly be months, and very probably years, before it is both fully agreed and fully implemented.

For the SPS agreement, in particular, this means it will be a long time before businesses find trading easier (and for some it will be, or already is, too late) and before consumers see benefits in terms of price and choice. Meanwhile there will presumably be no further implementation of import controls (there are already reported plans to sell off border facilities), and so the heightened risks of dangerous or sub-standard goods entering Britain will continue. Moreover, SPS aside, even if all the possible agreements come to be made, they will each happen within their own timescales and come into operation piecemeal. Thus, in practical terms, the reset will not take place in a single moment, and will come long after public opinion of it as ‘an event’ has been established.

Brexiters are still shaping the debate

So, in that context, it really does matter how it is talked about now, and in the coming days, and the fact is that, so far, the Brexiters have shaped the main media ‘talking point’ of whether or not the reset was a ‘betrayal’. That has partly been facilitated by the fact that the only major definitive economic agreement of the Summit was the extension of the fisheries deal (negotiated by Frost and Johnson) for twelve years. This isn’t some terrible thing, not least because it gives fishers some certainty for planning and, anyway, they will benefit from an SPS agreement, when it comes. But whilst government ministers have tried to make those points, by having to do so they necessarily cede pivotal position to the ‘debate’ about betrayal, and have allowed the emotive and, for Brexiters, talismanic issue of fishing to be the pivotal policy area within that debate.

But even leaving aside the fisheries issue, the government’s approach has a more general problem. Responding to, or trying to pre-empt, the accusation of betrayal in terms of Britain’s world standing, or even its pragmatic interests, talks past the underlying meaning of that accusation. The first response accepts that betrayal of Brexit might, in principle, be possible, even if the reset is not, in fact, evidence of it. The second response implies that pragmatism can over-ride principles, leaving intact the possibility that a betrayal has occurred but justifying it on the grounds of practical exigencies.

Moreover, the way the Summit was talked about by the government remained primarily transactional and apprehended in terms of ‘tough negotiations’ which ‘went right down to the wire’. It is all very similar to the way the Brexit negotiations were presented and, for that matter, the way that relations with the EU were reported in the years when the UK was still a member state. And of course, as a result, it means that terms like ‘surrender’ continue to have currency, since they are the logically-entailed flip-side of the boasts of tough negotiations to ‘get the best deal for Britain’.

Stale, failed arguments

Yet the Brexiters really do not have a leg to stand on. Invocations of the ‘will of the people’, referencing the 2016 referendum, were always grotesque but are now utterly redundant. If it ever had any substance, the will of the people was satisfied when the UK left the EU, and any mandate the referendum had was fully and finally discharged at that point. It is simply dishonest to pretend that it provides some democratic hold over the form of UK-EU relations now and forever more. By contrast, Labour won the last election on its very limited reset policy, and has a mandate for that.

Beyond that, all the talk of betrayal and surrender is fatuous. Coming from Reform and some of the Tory Ultras that fatuity is obvious not least because they had already denounced the Johnson-Frost Brexit as a betrayal and a surrender. Just how often can something be betrayed before the accusation ceases to have any meaning at all?

Coming from Tories, like Badenoch, who formed the last government it is fatuous because they know full well that, when in power, they barely diverged from EU regulations at all, including SPS regulations, and so in practice Britain was already a ‘rule-taker’ (and, to be fair, Starmer made this point very clearly in the Commons debate). They also know that, as mentioned above, their own government was set on its own slow path towards closer relations with the EU. Now, out of government, they are free to join Farage et al. in all the old delusions of an undeliverable ‘true’ or ‘pure’ Brexit, including, on fisheries specifically, the false promise of complete control of fishing waters.

There won’t be another reset

Of course, all of this nonsense would be trotted out by the usual suspects whatever the Labour government did or said. This could be seen as a justification for the timidity of the reset, since it shows just how much vitriol even the most minimal changes attract. Some may argue that, given this is so, Labour might just as well be much bolder. That’s a reasonable argument if it means seeking the most maximal reset compatible with the Labour ‘red lines’. But if it means abandoning those red lines, that would be politically naïve. For doing that would provide the Brexiters with ‘a leg to stand on’, given how clearly and repeatedly Labour pledged to hold to them. And, yes, the next response would be to say that Labour was foolish to do so – but the reasons at the time were well-known and widely-discussed and, now, we are where we are.

In setting Labour’s red lines, Starmer accepted the basic parameters of the Conservatives' Brexit, but that doesn’t mean the Brexiters have accepted that acceptance, and the reality is that they never will. The reason for that is because actually, as has been obvious since 2016, the Brexiters will never accept any version of Brexit. Nothing will ever satisfy them, partly because what they want is not practically possible but mainly because they don’t want to be satisfied, they want to be outraged; and Brexit will always be a betrayal for them because they want to be betrayed.

From this perspective, this reset Summit reveals that Starmer’s approach to Brexit, whatever tactical rationale it may have, is strategically incoherent. It recognizes the geographical, economic and regulatory realities which doom Brexit to failure, and yet it places major constraints on what can be done to address them. Equally, it seeks to neutralize the attacks of Brexiters by accepting their basic parameters, and yet by doing so allows the basis for those attacks to flourish unchallenged. In this way, as foreshadowed at the end of last week’s post, the (naïve) possibility I expressed in the post before that, of the reset with the EU being used to reset the domestic politics of Brexit, has evaporated.

Much of this was already obvious. But once resetting relations with the EU became configured as ‘the reset’, and then tied to this week’s Summit, it became a specific ‘moment’ which would tell us, definitively, what Labour’s European policy will be. What is on (and not on) the agenda for UK-EU relations for the next few years will not, now, change. There will be more summits, and ‘resetting’ will continue, but, at least for the present government, there can only be one ‘reset’ moment. And now it’s over.

 

Note

[1] I think this reflects an underlying problem with many opinion polls about Brexit. Even after all these years when it has been such a huge issue, almost no one in the public (and fewer than might be expected in the media) actually understand even the most basic things about what membership and non-membership of the EU mean, right down to what a single market, let alone a customs union, means. As a result, public opinion is very easily manipulated by, and vulnerable to, political dishonesty (e.g. ‘closer relations’ can readily be rearticulated as ‘subjugation’), making opinion poll results rather unreliable.

Because of the Summit being held this week, this post comes only one week after my last one. Unless something unexpected happens, I will now revert to the usual fortnightly timetable i.e. the next post will be on Friday 6 June.