Events of the last fortnight are a good illustration of why I recently re-focused and re-titled this blog to Brexit and Brexitism. For the Brexit news, in a narrow sense, is meagre, whereas there is such a profusion of reports of the battle for and against Brexitism that it is hardly possible to discuss them all in a single post.
Brexit: damage and a damaging stasis
On Brexit itself, there has been a new estimate of the economic damage it has wrought, with the publication of a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it is even worse than previous estimates suggested. The authors’ findings, in summary, are that: “We estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12% to 18%, employment by 3% to 4%, and productivity by 3% to 4%.”
As with similar studies, these reductions do not refer to absolute falls in GDP etc., but to the difference between what actually happened to these various measures and estimates of what would have happened otherwise. As such, it is a ‘counterfactual’ study and will undoubtedly be criticised by Brexiters for this, but, as I’ve argued in more detail previously, such studies are the only way of answering what is, by definition, a counterfactual question: is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU?
The scale of the damage, now acknowledged by the government, will only be minimally offset by even the most ambitious version of its reset plans. These plans, which started with such a flurry of optimism and energy in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, were reported to have stalled in a sour stand-off over budget contributions between the UK and, not so much the EU as different views amongst EU member states. However, yesterday, the EU agreed a negotiating mandate, opening the path to formal negotiations.
How long these negotiations will take remains unclear. But reaching an agreement, and the sooner the better, matters, especially to UK businesses who stand to benefit most from the reset but perhaps more importantly to both the UK and the EU in terms of the symbolism of creating a more harmonious partnership in the face of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s madness. Also still unresolved, though scarcely ever mentioned in the UK press, is the UK-EU agreement over Gibraltar.
So the Brexit process continues to rumble on, but there is only so much that can be said about something where, at least in terms of publicly available information, not very much is changing.
The many faces of Farage
On the wider terrain of Brexitism, by contrast, there is plenty to be said. One important development has been Nigel Farage’s attempt to articulate Reform’s economic policy, at a news conference held in the City of London. The venue was itself revealing of an underlying tension. Why hold it in the heart of the globalist elite, the wicked metropolis, not Sunderland or Lowestoft? The answer, of course, is that Farage feels the need to show he would be ‘economically responsible’. For this was the day that he ‘bowed to the bond market’ meaning, for one thing, abandoning as mere “aspirations” the huge tax cuts which, only last year, were supposedly part of Reform’s “contract” with the British people. As with every dodgy business, it pays to read the small print of any contract offered by Reform 2025 Ltd and its predecessors.
In abandoning his former commitments, Farage also implicitly abandoned his erstwhile enthusiasm for the Trussonomics of the mini-budget. It says something that a politician who constantly claims to be straight-talking chooses to conceal his core economic beliefs because they are too toxic for public consumption. Farage and his party are equally mealy-mouthed in floating, but not advocating outright, the ideas of reducing the youth minimum wage and ending the triple-lock on state pensions. It’s an old political trick, designed to entice those voters who find policies attractive with the hope they will be delivered, whilst retaining voters who find them unattractive by allowing them to hope these policies will never be put into practice.
The tension also derives from electoral calculation. Farage is desperate to present Reform as a government in waiting, but his core vote isn’t quite enough to assure that outcome, so he needs to broaden his support to take in (in both senses of the term) more mainstream voters. Yet at the same time, his central pitch is to be outside the mainstream of politics and to mobilize an insurgency. Anyone excited by the prospect of that will surely have been sent into a deep and disappointed sleep by the stale ideas of ‘responsible Farage’: vague platitudes about welfare cuts, tax breaks for wealth-creating entrepreneurs, slashing red-tape, bringing business people in to government.
This has been the set menu offered by just about every front-line Tory or Labour politician of the last three or four decades, and even Farage sounded quite bored by it. In fact, he sounded exactly like what he claims not to be, but transparently has been for most of his life: a ‘career politician’. It’s possible that, at some point, ‘responsible Farage’ will spatchcock himself by being insufficiently plausible to those wanting reassurance of his economic orthodoxy whilst alienating those who yearn for political heterodoxy.
Stale, predictable and contradictory
Equally stale, and even more predictable, were his assertions that Brexit hadn’t been done properly and that Reform would take advantage of the, as always unspecified, deregulatory opportunities it presented. He has chosen to forget how Jacob Rees-Mogg – who, whatever else one might say about him, can hardly be accused of ‘not believing in Brexit’ – had, when Minister for Brexit Opportunities, utterly failed to identify any of value. Indeed, Rees-Mogg even came to realise that, far from cutting red tape, the UKCA mark, that symbol of the fallacy of Brexit regulatory independence, actually increased it.
Farage’s only fresh idea was the spectacularly stupid and dangerous one of making the UK a cryptocurrency hub. This has been a Farage hobby-horse for a while, and one of the few areas where he publicly advocates Trumpian economic policies, which he generally avoided at the press conference (though he is becoming increasingly open in advocating the sexual and reproductive rights agenda of the American Christian right). But quite how it is supposed to represent the interests of the ‘ordinary people’ who ‘just want their country back’ is a mystery [1].
It’s a mystery, moreover, which shows the utter hypocrisy of the man who cos-plays at being a man of the people, the champion of the ‘somewheres’ rather than the ‘anywheres’, whilst trousering £40,000 for ten hours work for Nomad Capitalist (admittedly small beer given the approximately £1.2 million he has earned from second jobs since becoming an MP). As its name implies, Nomad is a “company, which heralds a ‘borderless world’, [and] says it helps people ‘obtain a second residency and second citizenship to enhance your freedom and options’, including second residencies, dual citizenship, and tax residency.”
This recurring tension runs, in various forms, throughout Farage’s ideological and electoral positioning, and throughout Brexitism: seeking political power yet being anti-politics; claiming to be pro-worker and anti-elite whilst courting and supporting the super-rich; espousing both nationalism and globalism, protectionism and free trade, economic growth and reduced immigration; supporting left-behind communities but cutting their public services; bemoaning de-industrialization whilst fetishizing the Thatcher era; parading patriotism whilst endlessly decrying the state of Britain and lauding Trump and Putin. Perhaps these tensions will mean the party implodes rather than comes to power. We must hope so, for what makes Reform incoherent now will make it unconscionable in government.
The anti-BBC axis
If Farage and other Brexitists dislike talking about the details of practical policies, nothing makes them more comfortable than getting stuck in to the culture war. Here, neither positivity nor practicality are necessary, just innuendos, smears and synthetic outrage. Ideal, then, for a politics which thrives on grievance and complaint, rather than responsibility or solutions. With the ‘anti-woke’ ‘Restore Trust’ activists having last weekend failed yet again in their longstanding attempt to take over the National Trust council, the Brexitists suddenly found an altogether more satisfying victim to torment as the BBC experienced the latest, and most vociferous, populist assault upon it.
The attacks on the National Trust and the BBC are connected in more than just a general ideological sense. For example, one of the leaked complaints about the BBC is based on criticism of it by the ‘History Reclaimed’ group, which has also been at the forefront of criticising the National Trust for its representations of history. And this is also an illustration of why Brexitism is a useful concept, for several of the members of History Reclaimed were members of the 2018 ‘Brains for Brexit’ group. Moreover, one of these, Robert Tombs, is not only the Founder Editor of History Reclaimed but the Co-Editor of ‘Briefings for Britain’ (formerly ‘Briefings for Brexit’), and there are several other overlaps in the writers/ members of these three groupings.
Of course the loathing of the BBC felt by many on the right is longstanding, going back well before Brexit, and is partly animated by fury that a public service broadcaster can be an international byword for excellence and probity, falsifying free market dogma that private is always best. But, for populists, that very fact of the BBC being a public service broadcaster opens the attack line that it does not reflect ‘the people’s values’ but instead those of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. That accusation of ‘institutional bias’ is at the heart of this latest crisis, arising from the presumably not-at-all accidental leak to the Daily Telegraph of a memo (£) written by Michael Prescott, a former independent (though by no means ideologically neutral) editorial adviser, which recycles many of the familiar populist critiques of the Corporation.
Hobbling, or better still breaking, the BBC would be a massive prize for the Brexitists and, because of its international standing, for the entire global populist network. The active involvement of Trump in the current row gives them their best chance ever, even if his threat of a $1 billion lawsuit comes to nothing. It would also be a prize for Vladimir Putin, hence Russia has enthusiastically joined the attack. It’s telling that, in attacking the BBC, the Brexitists, Trump, and Putin are openly aligned, illustrating the axis between them which I’ve written about previously. The reason is that the BBC is indeed ‘liberal’, not in the fatuous sense of being ‘woke’ or biased towards liberal causes but in the deeper sense that it embodies, or seeks to embody, something like the Liberal Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, and pluralism.
The BBC’s liberalism
There’s plenty that could be discussed about those values, which have been criticized as much by the postmodern left as the populist right, but it’s not clear to me, at least, that there is preferable set of values for a public service broadcaster and it’s certainly easy to envisage far worse ones. Nor is it necessary to claim that the BBC always lives up to those values in every part of its huge output in order to sustain the view that they are desirable as principles. It’s certainly grotesque that so much sanctimony is being spouted about what was, undoubtedly, an editorial mistake in relation to the Trump clip by those, including Trump himself, who daily ‘flood the zone’ with dis- and mis-information. Cant rather than Kant, so to speak. But, as Lewis Goodall wrote this week, “we all know it isn’t really about the Panorama edit.”
In their very nature, its values make the BBC liable to endless critique, especially in relation to the complex issue of ‘impartiality’ of political reporting, because such impartiality is itself irredeemably contestable. This leads the BBC into essentially insoluble conundrums, shown by its often misguided attempts to give equal weight to ‘both sides’ of arguments even when they do not warrant such equal treatment, which can be infuriating to people of all kinds of political persuasions, including liberals. But that infuriation is different to the fundamental incompatibility between populism and liberal pluralism [2], which exists because the defining feature of populism is its assertion of the existence of a unitary ‘people’ with a unitary set of ‘common sense’ values: the antithesis of pluralism.
A BBC news and current affairs operation (and, in the present context, it is this, rather than its entertainment operation, which is at stake) run on these lines would look rather like GB News. As such, it could not possibly function as a public service broadcaster precisely because, as a matter of fact, the public are not a single people with a single set of values. The word ‘fact’ is germane in a wider sense, too, since the Liberal Enlightenment commitment to the primacy of rationality and evidence is fundamentally at odds with populism’s valorization of emotion and belief.
Meanwhile, the nihilistic, anti-institutional strand of populism, which makes it different to traditional Conservatism, finds the very existence of the BBC an affront. In fact, to understand what has happened to British Conservatism in recent years, it is instructive to compare the responses to the current BBC row of, respectively, former Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten and former Tory PM Liz Truss, especially as regards the way they talk about institutions and independence. The former speaks pragmatically of their necessary imperfection and the complexities of independence, whilst the latter angrily dismisses them “captured”.
Of course it is a paradox of liberal pluralism generally, and one long understood and exploited by illiberal politicians [3], that it gives succour and sustenance to its most implacable enemies. The BBC exemplifies this since, for all their constant complaints about its bias against them, populist politicians and ideologues are afforded ample, even extravagant, amounts of its air time. The generosity with which the BBC has hosted Nigel Farage, not just now he heads a poll-leading party but for decades, is only the most obvious example. Beyond that are things like the ubiquitous presence of Tufton Street think-tankers or contrarian commentators on every discussion programme from, say, BBC One’s Question Time to Radio Four’s Moral Maze (surely the most flatulently self-important and uninformative show in the entire history of broadcasting, but that’s by the way).
The current crisis further illustrates this paradox. On the one hand, as with every such crisis, it is the BBC itself which provides the most extensive coverage of its own problems, in an orgy of self-flagellation born of a determination not to be seen as aloof and unresponsive and, precisely, a commitment to ‘impartiality’. On the other hand, the very existence of the ‘independent’ editorial adviser at the heart of the row derives from previous attempts by the BBC to show its openness to criticism and to tackle the biases of which it is accused. Indeed, in recent years the BBC has bent over backwards to appease its right-wing critics, to the extent of allowing them a power base of political appointees on its board, and these are the very people who have precipitated this latest crisis.
In short, the BBC has sought to assuage its populist critics by deploying precisely the kind of liberal pluralism which those critics despise and yet upon which they thrive.
The unappeasable
This in turn illustrates something else. Whatever the BBC does it will not satisfy its populist critics, who will always demand more. No resignations, no apologies, no reforms will ever be enough. It can never, as it was advocated to do this week by Tory Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston, “grovel” sufficiently, and the use of this distasteful term was itself revealing. It remains to be seen whether the BBC now realizes this, or whether it will once again try to appease its unappeasable critics.
In this respect, the situation of the BBC is just one, albeit important, example of the bigger problem for liberal pluralism in responding to populism. As we saw with Brexit, every attempt to satisfy Brexiters just led to them demanding an even harder version of Brexit. Similarly, as the Labour government still has not grasped, no matter how hard an anti-immigration policy it enacts, Brexitists will never say that it is hard enough, and will always demand something even more extreme. The liberal pluralist instinct to recognize ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration and to meet them half-way, or more than half-way, is never met with reciprocation by populists who, if anything, simply see it as a sign of weakness.
On the latter topic, the increasingly beleaguered government’s dismal and self-defeating descent continues. Even as it desperately seeks economic growth, it pursues policies to lower immigration which are to the detriment of economic growth, in the hope of political advantage. But does Keir Starmer – or perhaps more pertinently Morgan McSweeney – really think that doing so will ever cause Reform or the Tories to say that they have gone far enough? Or that they, and more importantly voters, will accept the damage of lower economic growth as a price worth paying?
The latest wheeze takes us right back to Brexit, and brings an irony so glaring that it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In January 1973 the UK and Denmark joined what was then the EEC. In 2020 the UK left the EU, in large part in order to ‘take back control’ of immigration by gaining the freedom to implement an ‘Aussie-style points-based system’. Now, in 2025, the British government proposes to emulate the tough approach of … Denmark.
Notes
[1] What may be less of a mystery is how it serves Farage’s interests. Private Eye (‘Fair Tether Friend’ #1661, p.7, no link available) recently reported that in an interview on LBC, Farage’s advocacy for London becoming a global hub for cryptocurrency went alongside his boosterish comments about Tether, “a cryptocurrency described as a money-launderer’s dream”. After mentioning that Reform has just begun accepting crypto donations (see also Reuters’ report), the Eye goes on to note that a significant shareholder in Tether is “the Thailand-based British Tech investor Christopher Harborne”, who has “previously handed the [Reform] party a whopping £10 million” and “shelled out more than £60,000 to cover the travel and accommodation costs for two trips Farage has made to the US since being elected an MP …” By the way, just this week there are signs that Farage will get his way about UK cryptocurrency regulation or, more accurately, that the pressure from Trump is moving things in that direction (£), once again exposing the nonsense of the Brexiters’ naïve ideas about sovereignty.
[2] Which is why, at the present juncture, those who are infuriated with the BBC for those kinds of reasons need to be careful what they wish for. For all its flaws, its defence is now one of the front lines in the battle to save Britain from Brexitism.
[3] The starkest illustration of this is the infamous line in Joseph Goebbels’ 1928 essay: “We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us.”
Friday, 14 November 2025
Friday, 31 October 2025
Immigration, indecency, and incompetence
As I and many others have noted, we are seeing the extraordinarily rapid development of extreme policies on immigration becoming mainstream. The failure of Brexit to ‘solve the problem of immigration’, with the consequent neutering of extremist politics that was meant to bring, can be chalked up to the long list of its unmet promises.
At the same time, as with Brexit, what is now being proposed about immigration also entails promises which cannot be kept, if only because those promises deny or ignore the damage, both economic and non-economic, these proposals would do. In this sense, along with the immorality of such proposals, we should beware of the utter incompetence of those making them.
An affront to decency
In the last fortnight, this new extremism came to fresh prominence with remarks by Tory ‘rising star’ Katie Lam, in which she spoke of deporting large numbers of people who have ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ (ILR) immigration status. As with last month’s Reform proposals, this crosses a very significant line in that it would entail retrospectively changing the rules.
Whilst Lam’s comments received much attention, she was articulating something which, to less attention, has been Tory policy since last May, when they promulgated a draft ‘Deportation Bill’ (although, post-Lam, this is reported to be under “internal review”). Under this policy, the criteria for deportation would capture those who had, quite legitimately, received benefits at some time during their residence in the UK or who had earned less than £38,700 a year for an aggregate period of six months within their time of residence.
It would also include people with ILR, or their dependents, who had received any form of ‘social protection’, which would seem to include NHS treatment and pension payments, and perhaps even universal credit. Thus it has the potential to end up separating families, deport retirees after decades of living here to countries with which they have no substantive connection, or to make those with ILR fearful of seeking healthcare.
The enormity of these proposals can hardly be over-stated. Not only would they apply retrospectively but they would entail compulsory repatriations, something not even envisaged by Enoch Powell in the 1970s (who argued for a voluntary repatriation policy). And they would apply on a huge scale, affecting potentially 5% of the UK population (£).
Nothing like this has ever been undertaken in a modern democracy: even in Trump’s America, legal immigrants are not the target of deportation policy. Its closest analogue in recent times is Idi Amin’s Uganda. If enacted, it would mean not only leaving the ECHR but would also, since as currently described it would apply to some people with EU Settled Status, undoubtedly mean an end to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU. So we would immediately be back to a ‘no deal Brexit’.
The pivot to values
As well as being unprecedently draconian in its scope, this proposal is noteworthy because it is not simply animated by an intention to reduce the number of immigrants, nor is it solely concerned with the supposed extent of immigrants’ financial ‘contributions’. At least in Lam’s telling, it is also intended to increase ‘cultural coherence’. Exactly what this means can only be guessed at, and none of those guesses paint Lam in an edifying light, but it shows that the proposal is also meant to remove those who don’t share some supposed sense of ‘British values’ (although many of us would think that the proposal itself is an affront to what we take those values to be).
This is important because it reflects how the anti-immigration case has largely ceased to present itself as being not an objection to immigrants, per se, but just a ‘concern about numbers’. The pivot to values (which of course long pre-dates Lam’s comments, but they are the latest exemplification) is part of what has enabled anti-immigration rhetoric to lump together everything from an asylum-seeker who commits a crime to a person speaking a foreign language in the street. It also enables racists to pretend that, far from objecting to immigrants’ skin colour, they are heroically standing up for women’s or gay rights, or for Christian or Enlightenment values, or any number of other hypocrisies.
Given the way these proposals target legal, not illegal, immigrants, and do so retrospectively, and taken in conjunction with the fact that they involve leaving the ECHR, then some even more sinister possibilities open up. Why confine the crackdown to those with ILR? Why not revoke the acquired citizenship of those who do not share ‘our values’? And, if that, then why not extend the same test to those born in this country? Even if they can’t be deported, they could at least be rounded up for ‘re-education’. This is where the logic of ‘cultural coherence’ leads. If that seems alarmist then so, too, would it have seemed alarmist even a few years, perhaps even a few months, ago to envisage a ‘mainstream’ political party advocating the compulsory deportation of legally settled immigrants.
Even in its own grotesque terms, the Tory ILR policy is an absurdity. The very idea that it would create ‘cultural coherence’ is nonsense because it would actually undermine that concept’s close cousin, ‘integration’. It would remove any sense that integration was desirable or even possible, by making ‘indefinite’ residence precarious, and making it clear that those with ILR were only present under sufferance: ‘we don’t really want you here and we’ll kick you out the moment we feel like it’ is hardly an incentive assimilation. In fact, even if these proposals are never implemented, the very fact that they have been made will almost certainly already have had the effect of undermining integration, signalling to millions of immigrants just how unwelcome they are, and that it would be rather foolish to make long-term plans to be part of this country.
Public opinion
Some commentators have taken comfort from the fact, which I also referred to when I discussed Reform’s ILR proposal, that opinion polls show the current ILR rules to be well-supported. Thus, it is suggested, both Tory and Reform parties are pursuing an extremely unpopular policy. I am not so sure that this can be relied upon. The opinion polls most often cited seem to date back to early in 2024, before the now two summers of far-right agitation and, crucially, before anyone started talking about ILR as a salient issue in the immigration debate, let alone as a problematic one. More recent polling, from September 2025, shows a more mixed picture. In particular, although retrospective withdrawal of ILR is still unpopular, it does have the support of 29% of the public.
It therefore seems quite likely that public opinion will continue to move on ILR the more it is targeted by Reform and Tory politicians. And, as I also pointed out in that previous discussion, this will be aided by the way that, whilst denouncing the Reform proposals, Keir Starmer’s government has its own plan to extend the ILR qualifying period from five to ten years, and to introduce new ‘contribution-based’ tests. This is less draconian, since at least it would not apply retrospectively, but it contributes to creating a sense amongst the public, which did not exist before, that ILR is a ‘problem’ in need of a solution.
What we can now call the Reform-Conservative solution, apart from being grossly immoral, is also unworkable, in multiple senses of the term. It would almost certainly encounter substantial legal challenges, and arouse huge popular opposition once its effects began to be felt. And even if a future government pushed all that aside, the economic damage would be enormous. Not only would it strip out desperately needed members of the workforce, it would deter the arrival of new immigrants – including the so-called ‘brightest and best’ we are always told the UK wants, and perhaps especially these, since they have many other possible destinations.
Indeed, what the anti-immigration lobby seems unaware of is that the UK is actually in an emerging global competition for immigrants (£), of all sorts, with other countries with ageing populations and low birth-rates. In fact, rather than constantly yammering on about the supposedly ‘undiscussable’ issue of immigration, the latter are the demographic issues politicians should really be addressing.
Their failure to do so, and instead to pander to and promote anti-immigration sentiment, is a massive failure of leadership. As analysis by James Bowes, published this week by UKICE, shows, “the coming collapse in immigration”, in response to ‘public concern’ is set to have damaging economic effects which the public will certainly not enjoy. Yet, even as net migration falls, a survey shows that frequent GB News viewers finds that 84% of them think it is rising, as do smaller, but still large, majorities of frequent viewers of ITV and BBC News.
Unfit for office
It's this unworkability and lack of realism which links directly to Brexit, which in the UK is the foremost example of how populism and incompetence are so strongly linked (the Truss mini-budget is another example). We already know, if only from those two examples, that any claim to governmental competence the Tories may have had has long since gone. But voters expecting Reform to be an improvement are in for a disappointment.
I noted in the first post of the new title of this Blog that an important part of this period of post-Brexit politics would be that Reform’s success in local elections, giving it control of twelve councils, would bring with it mounting evidence of the party’s utter incompetence when it achieved power. We are now seeing that evidence emerge (as well as plenty from the ructions within Reform’s tiny cohort of MPs and the scandal of Farage’s grift).
Recent examples have included revelations of in-fighting at Kent County Council, Reform’s ‘flagship council’, which led to five councillors being expelled from the party this week. Other Reform-led councils, including Worcestershire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire, have experienced various degrees of chaos. Meanwhile, at Northumberland County Council, where it is the main opposition, Reform has expelled three councillors from the party, the most recent one having allegedly said he wanted to shoot Keir Starmer.
This partly reflects the collection of oddballs and dodgy characters who have suddenly found themselves in positions of responsibility. But, at Kent and elsewhere, it also reflects the impracticality of all the airy talk of cutting huge swathes of waste and reducing council tax bills. As at national level, the easiest thing to promise when in opposition is ‘cutting red tape’, but the hardest thing to achieve when in power is to do so without cutting services.
Thus, on contact with reality, all the nonsense about millions being wasted on ‘diversity officers’ or ‘health and safety’ is exposed as such. On the other hand, Reform-led Nottinghamshire have managed to find £75,000 to buy 150 union jack flags, whilst Reform’s Greater Lincolnshire Mayor, the charmless former Tory MP and Education Minister Andrea Jenkyns, has requested an extra £147,000 for office staff to answer her emails.
Against this background, last week Zia Yusuf became the second head of Reform’s ‘DOGE’ to resign within less than a year of its creation. This was the body, modelled on Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, supposed to identify efficiency savings in Reform councils, although it has failed to undertake any audits to date (£), and is reported to have only visited three of the twelve councils.
Reform’s experience of the realities of local government also sheds light on the impracticality of its, and the Tories’, national immigration policies. Back in July, Kent, again, complained about the Labour government’s new restrictions on visas for social care workers because of the damage it would do to the provision of social care within the county. There are other reasons to think that some within Reform are becoming wary of its racism and anti-immigration agenda. Yusuf himself resigned as Party Chairman last June, apparently because of Reform MP Sarah Pochin calling for a ‘Burqa ban’ (although it subsequently became unclear where he stood on this issue). More recently, Neville Watson, a prominent Reform activist and its only Black branch chair, resigned from Reform over its hardline and divisive anti-immigration stance.
Pressing the FU button
The latter led to some social media ribaldry along the lines of ‘I never thought the leopards eating people’s faces party would eat my face’, but this is a glib and politically maladroit response. In this period, when Reform is not, but could become, a party of national government, such recantations or realizations should be praised, not mocked. Things are very finely balanced. A few percentage-points difference in voting at the next general election could, under first past the post, be the difference between near-total defeat for Reform, or Farage becoming Prime Minister. So in the next few years anything which makes voters reflect on what a Reform government would mean is going to be important.
There is, of course, a bedrock of support for Reform which will always be there, deriving from those who genuinely support its policies or just its actual or perceived values. But what could bring it to power would be if, as with the Brexit vote, enough voters decide, as Guardian columnist Marina Hyde pungently put it, to “press the F*** You button” [1]. Amongst the reasons to do so might be the idea that ‘they can’t be any worse than the main parties’ (but they can: that’s why tracking their chaos and incompetence in local government matters) or ‘they ought to be given a chance’ (but they are being, and we can see what it leads to).
Another reason to press the ‘FU button’ is the idea that ‘we’ve got nothing to lose’ and the closely associated one ‘it won’t affect me’. Though these are slightly different from each other (as the second kind of voter might acknowledge having something to lose, but just assume that it won’t be them), they are both versions of thinking that ‘the leopard won’t eat my face’. So it is important that now, before it is too late, some of those who currently think this begin to reflect that they might be wrong. Otherwise, it will be like ‘Brexit morning’ all over again.
This becomes particularly important because, again as with Brexit, plenty of Reform’s support does not come from those with ‘nothing to lose’. It became fashionable in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, amongst those who were opposed to Brexit as much as amongst those who advocated it, to talk as if this had been some uprising for the dispossessed (especially the working class of Northern England) against ‘the elite’. But this was, at the least, highly simplistic, as analysis of the leave vote by Benjamin Hennig and Danny Dorling showed, given the levels of support for Brexit amongst middle-class and Southern voters.
Relatedly, the original concept of ‘Red Wall voters’, which subsequently became much misunderstood, was to do with those within traditional Labour seats (not always in Northern England) who traditionally voted Labour but who, in demographic terms, ‘ought to’ be likely to vote Conservative and, subsequently, increasingly did so (though now, increasingly, Reform). One way of looking at these voters is that their economic interests and political choices had become misaligned. If their parents and grandparents had voted Labour, it was as a way of furthering industrial workers’ interests, and doing so had been inherited as a cultural belief even if they, themselves, might well be self-employed or retired homeowners. Another way of looking at them is as being in the process of re-aligning cultural values, in particular from class identity to regional, national, or ethnic identity. Better, in fact, to see it as both.
The politics of self-indulgence
At all events, these voters are not, for the most part, economically dispossessed. These are not young, unemployed, propertyless people, nor are the reacting to mass unemployment and economic depression. They are most likely homeowners, with some savings, but who feel themselves to be culturally dispossessed [2]. As such, I increasingly think that the best way to describe them is ‘self-indulgent’ or even perhaps, in a certain sense, ‘decadent’. That is, they can indulge their carefully-guarded cultural grievances by voting Reform because they do not believe that it will damage them to do so.
But, in fact, they are highly vulnerable, in at least two main ways. One is that, although Reform’s economic policies remain unclear and confused (and, like its local government promises, rely greatly on mythical ‘waste saving’ and false claims about the effect of scrapping Net Zero policies), Farage’s championship of the Truss budget, and of Javier Milei’s economic programme, suggests that a Reform government would mean economic chaos, of a sort which would most damage not the very poor (who may really have nothing to lose) or the very rich (who are well-cushioned against any loss), but these modestly well-off voters.
The second is that such voters are very likely to be dependent on the disability benefits Reform pledged, just this week, to take an axe to, and on the health and care services which are kept afloat by immigration. So just as when, after the Brexit vote, leave voters kept telling the EU citizens who they knew personally that they ‘didn’t mean you’ when they voted against immigration from the EU, they are likely to say the same to, as it might be, their Ghanaian care worker when a Reform or Reform-Con government starts the mass deportations. And, as with Brexit, by then it will be too late. Too late for those voters, and too late for the rest of us. Which is why the most urgent task in politics now is to persuade enough of those who are minded to vote for Reform that, for them personally, and their families, the consequences will be disastrous.
Rejecting the repellent
There are at least signs that this urgency is now being felt by voters, judging by the result of the Caerphilly by-election. Whilst a number of factors were in play, at least one important one seems to be that ‘progressive voters’ voted tactically for Plaid Cymru and against Reform. Thus, against opinion polls and, evidently, Nigel Farage’s expectations, Reform were soundly defeated. That is just one election, held in specific circumstances, and it would be foolish to extrapolate much from that, just as it would be from general surveys of voting intentions, especially in relation to what might happen in a general election that will probably not be held until 2029.
On the other hand, with Reform and the Tories now openly holding out the prospect of mass deportations, with all that would mean, the case for tactical voting is becoming ever stronger. After all, such voting is most in evidence when voters feel repellence, and that becomes more likely when parties advocate repellent policies. It becomes less easy to press the ‘FU button’ when you know what it will do, and neither Reform nor the Tories are doing much to hide that. The challenge for Labour, in particular, is not to chase those parties into equally repellent policies, and thus becoming repellent itself.
Notes
[1] I’m not using asterisks because of any prudishness on my part, but because the use of certain words causes posts to be blocked by some distribution networks.
[2] This is the background to the row this week over Pochin’s remarks about being ‘driven mad’ by adverts featuring too many black and Asian people. This was not an idiosyncrasy on her part, but repeated what has been a persistent whine on social media for some years, given as evidence that ‘it’s not our country any more’ and that white people are somehow victims of oppression. It’s a sign of the times that this fringe preoccupation is now the subject of national debate. The focus of that debate has been about whether Pochin’s remarks were racist, although ‘debate’ is too generous a word for the tortured apologetics that tried to show they were not, but they raise other issues. One is the incoherence of that racism. Sometimes, as with Robert Jenrick’s recent remarks, right-wingers complain about there being ‘no white faces’ on British streets. Yet, if this is supposedly the reality of modern Britain, then why are they also complaining that adverts are an unrealistic depiction of British society because they show too few white faces? The other relates to the incoherence of economic policy. Reform and the Tories constantly say that businesses face too much red tape, and that there is too much emphasis on ‘DEI’ initiatives seeking representativeness in hiring and promotion decisions. Yet, if it is true that adverts over-represent non-white people, they surely do so for commercial reasons. Or does Pochin propose that advertisers be subject to quotas to ensure they are representative in their imagery?
At the same time, as with Brexit, what is now being proposed about immigration also entails promises which cannot be kept, if only because those promises deny or ignore the damage, both economic and non-economic, these proposals would do. In this sense, along with the immorality of such proposals, we should beware of the utter incompetence of those making them.
An affront to decency
In the last fortnight, this new extremism came to fresh prominence with remarks by Tory ‘rising star’ Katie Lam, in which she spoke of deporting large numbers of people who have ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ (ILR) immigration status. As with last month’s Reform proposals, this crosses a very significant line in that it would entail retrospectively changing the rules.
Whilst Lam’s comments received much attention, she was articulating something which, to less attention, has been Tory policy since last May, when they promulgated a draft ‘Deportation Bill’ (although, post-Lam, this is reported to be under “internal review”). Under this policy, the criteria for deportation would capture those who had, quite legitimately, received benefits at some time during their residence in the UK or who had earned less than £38,700 a year for an aggregate period of six months within their time of residence.
It would also include people with ILR, or their dependents, who had received any form of ‘social protection’, which would seem to include NHS treatment and pension payments, and perhaps even universal credit. Thus it has the potential to end up separating families, deport retirees after decades of living here to countries with which they have no substantive connection, or to make those with ILR fearful of seeking healthcare.
The enormity of these proposals can hardly be over-stated. Not only would they apply retrospectively but they would entail compulsory repatriations, something not even envisaged by Enoch Powell in the 1970s (who argued for a voluntary repatriation policy). And they would apply on a huge scale, affecting potentially 5% of the UK population (£).
Nothing like this has ever been undertaken in a modern democracy: even in Trump’s America, legal immigrants are not the target of deportation policy. Its closest analogue in recent times is Idi Amin’s Uganda. If enacted, it would mean not only leaving the ECHR but would also, since as currently described it would apply to some people with EU Settled Status, undoubtedly mean an end to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU. So we would immediately be back to a ‘no deal Brexit’.
The pivot to values
As well as being unprecedently draconian in its scope, this proposal is noteworthy because it is not simply animated by an intention to reduce the number of immigrants, nor is it solely concerned with the supposed extent of immigrants’ financial ‘contributions’. At least in Lam’s telling, it is also intended to increase ‘cultural coherence’. Exactly what this means can only be guessed at, and none of those guesses paint Lam in an edifying light, but it shows that the proposal is also meant to remove those who don’t share some supposed sense of ‘British values’ (although many of us would think that the proposal itself is an affront to what we take those values to be).
This is important because it reflects how the anti-immigration case has largely ceased to present itself as being not an objection to immigrants, per se, but just a ‘concern about numbers’. The pivot to values (which of course long pre-dates Lam’s comments, but they are the latest exemplification) is part of what has enabled anti-immigration rhetoric to lump together everything from an asylum-seeker who commits a crime to a person speaking a foreign language in the street. It also enables racists to pretend that, far from objecting to immigrants’ skin colour, they are heroically standing up for women’s or gay rights, or for Christian or Enlightenment values, or any number of other hypocrisies.
Given the way these proposals target legal, not illegal, immigrants, and do so retrospectively, and taken in conjunction with the fact that they involve leaving the ECHR, then some even more sinister possibilities open up. Why confine the crackdown to those with ILR? Why not revoke the acquired citizenship of those who do not share ‘our values’? And, if that, then why not extend the same test to those born in this country? Even if they can’t be deported, they could at least be rounded up for ‘re-education’. This is where the logic of ‘cultural coherence’ leads. If that seems alarmist then so, too, would it have seemed alarmist even a few years, perhaps even a few months, ago to envisage a ‘mainstream’ political party advocating the compulsory deportation of legally settled immigrants.
Even in its own grotesque terms, the Tory ILR policy is an absurdity. The very idea that it would create ‘cultural coherence’ is nonsense because it would actually undermine that concept’s close cousin, ‘integration’. It would remove any sense that integration was desirable or even possible, by making ‘indefinite’ residence precarious, and making it clear that those with ILR were only present under sufferance: ‘we don’t really want you here and we’ll kick you out the moment we feel like it’ is hardly an incentive assimilation. In fact, even if these proposals are never implemented, the very fact that they have been made will almost certainly already have had the effect of undermining integration, signalling to millions of immigrants just how unwelcome they are, and that it would be rather foolish to make long-term plans to be part of this country.
Public opinion
Some commentators have taken comfort from the fact, which I also referred to when I discussed Reform’s ILR proposal, that opinion polls show the current ILR rules to be well-supported. Thus, it is suggested, both Tory and Reform parties are pursuing an extremely unpopular policy. I am not so sure that this can be relied upon. The opinion polls most often cited seem to date back to early in 2024, before the now two summers of far-right agitation and, crucially, before anyone started talking about ILR as a salient issue in the immigration debate, let alone as a problematic one. More recent polling, from September 2025, shows a more mixed picture. In particular, although retrospective withdrawal of ILR is still unpopular, it does have the support of 29% of the public.
It therefore seems quite likely that public opinion will continue to move on ILR the more it is targeted by Reform and Tory politicians. And, as I also pointed out in that previous discussion, this will be aided by the way that, whilst denouncing the Reform proposals, Keir Starmer’s government has its own plan to extend the ILR qualifying period from five to ten years, and to introduce new ‘contribution-based’ tests. This is less draconian, since at least it would not apply retrospectively, but it contributes to creating a sense amongst the public, which did not exist before, that ILR is a ‘problem’ in need of a solution.
What we can now call the Reform-Conservative solution, apart from being grossly immoral, is also unworkable, in multiple senses of the term. It would almost certainly encounter substantial legal challenges, and arouse huge popular opposition once its effects began to be felt. And even if a future government pushed all that aside, the economic damage would be enormous. Not only would it strip out desperately needed members of the workforce, it would deter the arrival of new immigrants – including the so-called ‘brightest and best’ we are always told the UK wants, and perhaps especially these, since they have many other possible destinations.
Indeed, what the anti-immigration lobby seems unaware of is that the UK is actually in an emerging global competition for immigrants (£), of all sorts, with other countries with ageing populations and low birth-rates. In fact, rather than constantly yammering on about the supposedly ‘undiscussable’ issue of immigration, the latter are the demographic issues politicians should really be addressing.
Their failure to do so, and instead to pander to and promote anti-immigration sentiment, is a massive failure of leadership. As analysis by James Bowes, published this week by UKICE, shows, “the coming collapse in immigration”, in response to ‘public concern’ is set to have damaging economic effects which the public will certainly not enjoy. Yet, even as net migration falls, a survey shows that frequent GB News viewers finds that 84% of them think it is rising, as do smaller, but still large, majorities of frequent viewers of ITV and BBC News.
Unfit for office
It's this unworkability and lack of realism which links directly to Brexit, which in the UK is the foremost example of how populism and incompetence are so strongly linked (the Truss mini-budget is another example). We already know, if only from those two examples, that any claim to governmental competence the Tories may have had has long since gone. But voters expecting Reform to be an improvement are in for a disappointment.
I noted in the first post of the new title of this Blog that an important part of this period of post-Brexit politics would be that Reform’s success in local elections, giving it control of twelve councils, would bring with it mounting evidence of the party’s utter incompetence when it achieved power. We are now seeing that evidence emerge (as well as plenty from the ructions within Reform’s tiny cohort of MPs and the scandal of Farage’s grift).
Recent examples have included revelations of in-fighting at Kent County Council, Reform’s ‘flagship council’, which led to five councillors being expelled from the party this week. Other Reform-led councils, including Worcestershire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire, have experienced various degrees of chaos. Meanwhile, at Northumberland County Council, where it is the main opposition, Reform has expelled three councillors from the party, the most recent one having allegedly said he wanted to shoot Keir Starmer.
This partly reflects the collection of oddballs and dodgy characters who have suddenly found themselves in positions of responsibility. But, at Kent and elsewhere, it also reflects the impracticality of all the airy talk of cutting huge swathes of waste and reducing council tax bills. As at national level, the easiest thing to promise when in opposition is ‘cutting red tape’, but the hardest thing to achieve when in power is to do so without cutting services.
Thus, on contact with reality, all the nonsense about millions being wasted on ‘diversity officers’ or ‘health and safety’ is exposed as such. On the other hand, Reform-led Nottinghamshire have managed to find £75,000 to buy 150 union jack flags, whilst Reform’s Greater Lincolnshire Mayor, the charmless former Tory MP and Education Minister Andrea Jenkyns, has requested an extra £147,000 for office staff to answer her emails.
Against this background, last week Zia Yusuf became the second head of Reform’s ‘DOGE’ to resign within less than a year of its creation. This was the body, modelled on Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, supposed to identify efficiency savings in Reform councils, although it has failed to undertake any audits to date (£), and is reported to have only visited three of the twelve councils.
Reform’s experience of the realities of local government also sheds light on the impracticality of its, and the Tories’, national immigration policies. Back in July, Kent, again, complained about the Labour government’s new restrictions on visas for social care workers because of the damage it would do to the provision of social care within the county. There are other reasons to think that some within Reform are becoming wary of its racism and anti-immigration agenda. Yusuf himself resigned as Party Chairman last June, apparently because of Reform MP Sarah Pochin calling for a ‘Burqa ban’ (although it subsequently became unclear where he stood on this issue). More recently, Neville Watson, a prominent Reform activist and its only Black branch chair, resigned from Reform over its hardline and divisive anti-immigration stance.
Pressing the FU button
The latter led to some social media ribaldry along the lines of ‘I never thought the leopards eating people’s faces party would eat my face’, but this is a glib and politically maladroit response. In this period, when Reform is not, but could become, a party of national government, such recantations or realizations should be praised, not mocked. Things are very finely balanced. A few percentage-points difference in voting at the next general election could, under first past the post, be the difference between near-total defeat for Reform, or Farage becoming Prime Minister. So in the next few years anything which makes voters reflect on what a Reform government would mean is going to be important.
There is, of course, a bedrock of support for Reform which will always be there, deriving from those who genuinely support its policies or just its actual or perceived values. But what could bring it to power would be if, as with the Brexit vote, enough voters decide, as Guardian columnist Marina Hyde pungently put it, to “press the F*** You button” [1]. Amongst the reasons to do so might be the idea that ‘they can’t be any worse than the main parties’ (but they can: that’s why tracking their chaos and incompetence in local government matters) or ‘they ought to be given a chance’ (but they are being, and we can see what it leads to).
Another reason to press the ‘FU button’ is the idea that ‘we’ve got nothing to lose’ and the closely associated one ‘it won’t affect me’. Though these are slightly different from each other (as the second kind of voter might acknowledge having something to lose, but just assume that it won’t be them), they are both versions of thinking that ‘the leopard won’t eat my face’. So it is important that now, before it is too late, some of those who currently think this begin to reflect that they might be wrong. Otherwise, it will be like ‘Brexit morning’ all over again.
This becomes particularly important because, again as with Brexit, plenty of Reform’s support does not come from those with ‘nothing to lose’. It became fashionable in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, amongst those who were opposed to Brexit as much as amongst those who advocated it, to talk as if this had been some uprising for the dispossessed (especially the working class of Northern England) against ‘the elite’. But this was, at the least, highly simplistic, as analysis of the leave vote by Benjamin Hennig and Danny Dorling showed, given the levels of support for Brexit amongst middle-class and Southern voters.
Relatedly, the original concept of ‘Red Wall voters’, which subsequently became much misunderstood, was to do with those within traditional Labour seats (not always in Northern England) who traditionally voted Labour but who, in demographic terms, ‘ought to’ be likely to vote Conservative and, subsequently, increasingly did so (though now, increasingly, Reform). One way of looking at these voters is that their economic interests and political choices had become misaligned. If their parents and grandparents had voted Labour, it was as a way of furthering industrial workers’ interests, and doing so had been inherited as a cultural belief even if they, themselves, might well be self-employed or retired homeowners. Another way of looking at them is as being in the process of re-aligning cultural values, in particular from class identity to regional, national, or ethnic identity. Better, in fact, to see it as both.
The politics of self-indulgence
At all events, these voters are not, for the most part, economically dispossessed. These are not young, unemployed, propertyless people, nor are the reacting to mass unemployment and economic depression. They are most likely homeowners, with some savings, but who feel themselves to be culturally dispossessed [2]. As such, I increasingly think that the best way to describe them is ‘self-indulgent’ or even perhaps, in a certain sense, ‘decadent’. That is, they can indulge their carefully-guarded cultural grievances by voting Reform because they do not believe that it will damage them to do so.
But, in fact, they are highly vulnerable, in at least two main ways. One is that, although Reform’s economic policies remain unclear and confused (and, like its local government promises, rely greatly on mythical ‘waste saving’ and false claims about the effect of scrapping Net Zero policies), Farage’s championship of the Truss budget, and of Javier Milei’s economic programme, suggests that a Reform government would mean economic chaos, of a sort which would most damage not the very poor (who may really have nothing to lose) or the very rich (who are well-cushioned against any loss), but these modestly well-off voters.
The second is that such voters are very likely to be dependent on the disability benefits Reform pledged, just this week, to take an axe to, and on the health and care services which are kept afloat by immigration. So just as when, after the Brexit vote, leave voters kept telling the EU citizens who they knew personally that they ‘didn’t mean you’ when they voted against immigration from the EU, they are likely to say the same to, as it might be, their Ghanaian care worker when a Reform or Reform-Con government starts the mass deportations. And, as with Brexit, by then it will be too late. Too late for those voters, and too late for the rest of us. Which is why the most urgent task in politics now is to persuade enough of those who are minded to vote for Reform that, for them personally, and their families, the consequences will be disastrous.
Rejecting the repellent
There are at least signs that this urgency is now being felt by voters, judging by the result of the Caerphilly by-election. Whilst a number of factors were in play, at least one important one seems to be that ‘progressive voters’ voted tactically for Plaid Cymru and against Reform. Thus, against opinion polls and, evidently, Nigel Farage’s expectations, Reform were soundly defeated. That is just one election, held in specific circumstances, and it would be foolish to extrapolate much from that, just as it would be from general surveys of voting intentions, especially in relation to what might happen in a general election that will probably not be held until 2029.
On the other hand, with Reform and the Tories now openly holding out the prospect of mass deportations, with all that would mean, the case for tactical voting is becoming ever stronger. After all, such voting is most in evidence when voters feel repellence, and that becomes more likely when parties advocate repellent policies. It becomes less easy to press the ‘FU button’ when you know what it will do, and neither Reform nor the Tories are doing much to hide that. The challenge for Labour, in particular, is not to chase those parties into equally repellent policies, and thus becoming repellent itself.
Notes
[1] I’m not using asterisks because of any prudishness on my part, but because the use of certain words causes posts to be blocked by some distribution networks.
[2] This is the background to the row this week over Pochin’s remarks about being ‘driven mad’ by adverts featuring too many black and Asian people. This was not an idiosyncrasy on her part, but repeated what has been a persistent whine on social media for some years, given as evidence that ‘it’s not our country any more’ and that white people are somehow victims of oppression. It’s a sign of the times that this fringe preoccupation is now the subject of national debate. The focus of that debate has been about whether Pochin’s remarks were racist, although ‘debate’ is too generous a word for the tortured apologetics that tried to show they were not, but they raise other issues. One is the incoherence of that racism. Sometimes, as with Robert Jenrick’s recent remarks, right-wingers complain about there being ‘no white faces’ on British streets. Yet, if this is supposedly the reality of modern Britain, then why are they also complaining that adverts are an unrealistic depiction of British society because they show too few white faces? The other relates to the incoherence of economic policy. Reform and the Tories constantly say that businesses face too much red tape, and that there is too much emphasis on ‘DEI’ initiatives seeking representativeness in hiring and promotion decisions. Yet, if it is true that adverts over-represent non-white people, they surely do so for commercial reasons. Or does Pochin propose that advertisers be subject to quotas to ensure they are representative in their imagery?
Friday, 17 October 2025
Brexit eruptions
Recently, a rash of molehills has appeared in my garden, the visible eruptions of a vast subterranean network of tunnels and burrows. Brexit lurks in a similar way beneath the surface of British politics, a constant presence which, however much it is ignored – perhaps the more that it is ignored – continues to break out here, there, and everywhere.
That, surely the most tortuous and tortured of the many metaphors that have been applied to Brexit, is intended to introduce the fact that this post doesn’t have any particular unifying theme other than the latest ways in which Brexit has been in view over the last fortnight.
Robert Jenrick and the Tory madness
We don’t yet know how the story is going to end, but it is looking increasingly likely that, when history is written, Brexit is going to figure as the central cause of the decline and perhaps demise of the Tory Party. For all that numerous political commentators, most recently Andrew Rawnsley, urge the party to re-discover its more moderate and pragmatic traditions, for now it seems stuck in the spiral of madness of which Brexit is the proximate cause. Thus possibly the least surprising development of the last fortnight was that their party conference showed the Conservatives to be firmly in the grip of Brexitism.
At the conference, the most obvious manifestation, or even exemplification, of this was the latest stage in Robert Jenrick’s long journey from “bland centrist solicitor” to gurning ideologue. It’s a journey made stranger because he has somehow retained his blandness along with the way, managing to be, as Ian Dunt puts it “at once banal and monstrous”. Much attention focused, rightly, on his complaint about the lack of white faces in Handsworth, a complaint made not less but more objectionable by his absurd suggestion that this remark “was not about the colour of your skin”. Less discussed, but objectionable and absurd in a different way, were his remarks about the judiciary.
Jenrick’s thesis, if we can grace it with that term, is that when judges ‘don the wig’ – a point he sought to make dramatic by flourishing such a wig – they at the same time put aside personal interests and identity so as to apply the law impartially. So far, so good. But he also claimed that, having, like every internet troll, ‘doNe he’s Own ResEArch’, he had made a shocking discovery. Apparently, there are “dozens of judges” who have used social media to “broadcast their open borders views” (whatever that means; does anyone advocate ‘open borders’?), or have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country” (which seems to mean, based on his other remarks, that Jenrick imagines barristers to be invariably sympathetic to their clients’ causes, and retain a lifelong commitment to them).
Jenrick is either too dense or too dishonest to see that his first observation made his second claim irrelevant. To make his thesis stick, he would need evidence that the judges he identified had also given judgments which, in legal terms, were demonstrably wrong, and wrong in ways biased in the direction he claimed. Moreover, he would need to show that they had done so to a greater extent than judges who he had not identified as having this alleged bias. But of course, and this is part of what makes this an example of Brexitism, reliable evidence is irrelevant to Jenrick. What is relevant, and what makes it definitively Brexitist, is the attempt to undermine the judiciary as an institution and, with that, the rule of law. It is ‘enemies of the people’ territory again. And it hardly needs to be said that Jenrick’s supposed solution, the political control of judicial appointments, would make the supposed problem he supposedly wants to solve worse.
Whether Jenrick has become a convinced Brexitist ideologue or is just opportunistically seeking to burnish his leadership credential hardly matters. Either way, it shows that Brexitism is an obligatory posture for those who aspire to lead the current Tory Party. That fact was underlined by Kemi Badenoch’s long-expected adoption of leaving the ECHR as official party policy, a policy which is the central prescription of ‘Brexit 2.0’.
It is also, as I noted in my previous post, a policy being ‘sold’ in exactly the same way that Brexit itself was sold, even though recent polling shows that 46% of those planning to vote Tory at the next election think Brexit has been a failure (and only 22% think it has been a success). Perhaps that is why Badenoch made only a couple of passing references to Brexit in her conference speech, in itself a telling fact: far from boasting of it, the very party that delivered Brexit feels too ashamed to talk about it.
Farage’s culpability and Labour’s problem
So much for the Tories. In my previous post I also noted that Keir Starmer had begun to attack Nigel Farage on the grounds of the damage done by Brexit. That attack has escalated, with Labour now starting to argue (£) that Farage will be to blame for anticipated tax rises in the forthcoming budget because, having used “easy sloganeering” to persuade the public to vote for Brexit, he then walked away and took no responsibility for it, leaving the economic consequences which ultimately explain the need tax raises.
Farage and his supporters, and no doubt others, object that he had no control over the delivery of Brexit, so the accusation is unfounded. But that is simplistic. Farage was not in power, it is true, but he exercised considerable power, always ready to denounce as ‘betrayal’ whatever form of Brexit was proposed and never once putting forward realistic proposals for delivering it in ways that were less economically damaging than what was enacted. Moreover, at the 2019 election, he backed Boris Johnson’s ‘oven-ready Brexit’ even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats.
So, yes, Farage is very much amongst those responsible for Brexit and, in any case, it is more than reasonable to point out that the main cause of his political life has proved to be a failure. It’s certainly clear that this line of attack is being made increasingly often by Labour politicians or sympathetic commentators, an example this week being an opinion piece by Kevin Maguire, Associate Editor of the Mirror.
Where the Labour government is on much trickier ground is that, to the extent it acknowledges the economic damage of Brexit it opens the question of why it has no plans to seek more than marginal limitations to this damage. Perhaps that is why Starmer’s conference speech, like Badenoch’s, had a telling lacuna, in his case avoiding any mention of his ‘reset’ policy. For if Brexit is a sufficiently serious problem to make attacking Farage’s culpability for it worthwhile, what is the government’s solution?
That is the question which Starmer has, until now, avoided and to which he cannot give a credible answer without abandoning his cast iron ‘red line’ manifesto promises, as well as ensuring that the entirety of British politics during this parliament, and probably the next election, is dominated by Brexit again. He isn’t going to do that, and that is one exemplification of the Brexit impasse that Britain as a whole is in: its entire national strategy is admitted, even by many of its advocates, to have failed, and public opinion firmly and consistently endorses the view that it was wrong to leave, but there is no presently viable political route to its rectification.
I’ve been arguing consistently, since December 2022, that there is a better approach for Labour, which would be to honestly admit that Brexit is damaging and has failed, and ought to be reversed, but to be equally honest in saying that this isn’t a political possibility until there is cross-party consensus (at least amongst parties that might credibly come to power) to make an application to rejoin. That means, in the present context, identifying Reform and the Conservatives as the barrier, making them responsible not just for the original problem but for the continuing absence of a solution. I still think that would be Labour’s best option, and with the latest line of blaming Farage for Brexit it becomes the logical next step.
A Royal Commission?
If there is ever to be a solution, one part of the route to it could be an interesting proposal made over the summer (although I have only just come across it) by former MEP Andrew Duff. Noting the “deadlock” in British post-Brexit politics, he proposes the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the position and future of the UK in Europe. It’s not often that a new idea about Brexit surfaces, and it’s a reasonable one in all sorts of ways, the most minimal, but not unimportant, being that, as I argued in June, it is surely right to review, given the time that has passed and the experience we have had, what Brexit has actually meant for the UK.
If nothing else, it would be a way of drawing together the now massive, but highly dispersed and fragmentary, body of evidence about Brexit, and providing some accountability for decisions made. For example, at this week’s Tory Party conference, Michael Gove admitted that the trade deals his government did with Australia and New Zealand were poorly negotiated and damaging to farmers, going on to say “we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working.” Yet these highly revealing remarks were barely reported, even though they confirm exactly what so many of us said at the time, what civil servants warned ministers of at the time, and what the government denied at the time.
Assembling an authoritative single review of what happened with Brexit would, in itself, be a contrast with the evidence-free, faith-based, reality-denying politics of Brexitism. However Duff’s proposal is primarily intended as a future-oriented exercise, which could begin a process to create, to the extent it is possible, the basis for a future national consensus.
From that point of view, he is surely right to say that “the most likely outcome of such a Royal Commission will be a report that furnishes the Prime Minister with a cast-iron case for reversing Brexit.” I’m not so sure Duff is right that “it will prepare the ground for the referendum campaign that must inevitably follow”, since it wouldn’t in itself create the kind of cross-party agreement needed to make rejoining a viable possibility for the EU. But it would be a step away from the current absurdity of a nation which effectively knows it has made a mistake but can’t find a route to rectify it. At the very least it offers a practical suggestion to create such a route, in a way that eludes those who simply demand a ‘rejoin now’ policy. [1]
Still Brexiting
Whatever the wider issues in play (or which ought to be in play), it shouldn’t be forgotten that, as a matter of fact, the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship continues to limp along, largely undiscussed in public. One facet of that, which has had some media discussion, is that since the beginning of this week the EU Entry-Exit System (EES) has begun to be enforced. I should clarify that wording, perhaps, in that, whatever the pro-Brexit press may imagine (£), the EES isn’t something particular to the UK-EU relationship, as if it were a ‘punishment’ for Brexit, but, rather, applies to the EU’s relationship with third countries generally. However, in that sense, for the UK it is a consequence of Brexit and one which will introduce new complexities and, potentially, delays and queues for travelers (although in the last few hours it has been reported that, to avoid this, it is only being partly implemented for now). Sloganizing about ‘securing our borders’ suddenly looks less attractive when we are its target.
In an analogous way, whilst the Brexiters have long used the feeble pun of a ‘protectionist racket’ to describe the EU, that suddenly looks even less funny with the prospect of a massive increase in its tariffs and reduction in its tariff-free quotas for steel imports. That would be a very serious blow, perhaps even an “existential threat”, for the already beleaguered British steel industry, since almost 80% of UK steel exports go to the EU. Again, this is a consequence of being a third country although, again, with wearying predictability, the pro-Brexit press reported it as if it were aimed specifically at Britain (£).
It may or may not be that the British government manages to negotiate an exemption but, taken in conjunction with the now indefinitely stalled negotiations with the US over steel tariffs, it is a stark reminder of Britain’s post-Brexit isolation. That reminder has several dimensions, including the fact of the relative importance of the EU market as compared with the US (which, for steel, takes less than 10% of UK exports). More generally, for all the Brexiter rhetoric about Brexit enabling the UK to have a ‘nimble’ independent trade policy, it is a reminder that size matters more than agility in a world dominated by regional blocs. That is especially so when these lumbering trade monsters go to war, the wider context of the EU’s announcement being, in large part, the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the Chinese steel industry. [2]
The same ‘better in than out’ lesson applies to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which is due to come into force in January 2026, and which also has implications for steel, amongst other products. This is an issue which has been lurking in the Brexit undergrowth for years (I think the first time I discussed it on this blog was in September 2023, and that post includes several links explaining some of the complexities involved), but now it has been reported that a temporary deal to exempt the UK is in prospect. [3] The longer-term likelihood is that the EU CBAM will be linked to the UK CBAM (due to come in to force in 2027), along with an associated linkage of UK and EU Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS), a possibility within the scope of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
A permanent agreement on CBAM and ETS linkages sits alongside other elements of the still to be agreed details of the ‘reset’, including potential deals on a Youth Mobility Scheme, UK participation in Erasmus +, and a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. The latter has a particular urgency in the context of food price inflation, as Naomi Smith of Best for Britain pointed out this week, and might be agreed and implemented “within a year”, according to a recent statement from Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s Trade Commissioner.
That may be optimistic, and it is worth remembering that, price issues aside, until there is an SPS deal in place, the UK (or more accurately Great Britain) will continue with the risky policy of partial border security, having never fully implemented import controls and having now given up even the process of doing so, in the expectation of this still-to-be agreed deal. Sometimes, apparently, ‘securing our borders’ isn’t a priority.
Also sitting within the reset basket is the question of possible partial UK involvement in the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative for defence procurement. It’s an issue of particular and growing salience in the context of the ever-growing threat from Russia and the declining reliability (to put it mildly) of the US as a security partner. Whilst, as Jannike Wachowiak of UKICE explains, the UK would not, as a third country, be eligible for loans from SAFE defence funds, it could, potentially, have access to joint procurements.
The growing charge list
All of these, and other, issues are a reminder not just of the ongoing negotiation of the UK-EU relationship, but of the cumbersome nature of that process, the uncertainties of its outcomes, and the limited scope of those outcomes even if the most favourable of them were to result. One consequence of that, although it is probably impossible to quantify, or even to find much information about, must be to deter investment and, therefore, economic growth. In all kinds of sectors, for all kinds of reasons, the terms of the UK-EU relationship are in flux which, necessarily, creates an unpropitious environment for investment.
Domestic political uncertainty is also a factor since Farage is already threatening to tear up any new agreements the present government makes with the EU. Even if that doesn’t make the EU wary of such agreements, it will prey on the minds of investors and indeed others trying to plan for the future. That, too, is something to be added to the growing charge list against the Reform leader and the other ‘guilty men’ of Brexit. Ultimately, there will need to be not so much a Royal Commission as a Public Inquiry if they are to be held accountable. Only by excavating the subterranean maze of Brexit will its eruptions be quelled.
Notes
[1] Duff’s proposal attracted several social media comments denouncing it as ‘British exceptionalism’ (in line with my usual policy, I only link to social media posts if they come from public figures). This is nonsense and reflects a wider problem. It is nonsense because there’s nothing ‘exceptionalist’ about a domestic political debate and, in this case, the idea that Britain needs a process of honest self-reflection about what has done to itself is almost the opposite. It is for the UK to face up to the consequences of its collective decisions, and to do otherwise, for example by blaming the EU for those consequences, or expecting the EU to provide solutions to them, is what might be exceptionalist.
The wider problem is that, whilst it is absolutely true that throughout the Brexit process British exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, greatly in evidence, sometimes amongst ‘remainers’ as well as Brexiters, there is a cadre of social media posters that simply parrots the word in any and every discussion of any and every aspect of Brexit (very often the same posters who ignorantly trot out ‘cherry-picking’ to describe any and every aspect of post-Brexit UK-EU relations).
Some (or more accurately one person, a rather creepy stalker who continually creates multiple pseudonymous social media accounts to harass me and various other people, including Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, on the basis of entirely false accusations of anti-Irish racism) also object that my use of the word ‘Brexitism’ is ‘British exceptionalism’, since it denotes a British form of populism (I explain why that is warranted in my definition of Brexitism), which is as transparently stupid as saying that the word ‘Brexit’ is ‘exceptionalist’. Brexit happened here; Brexitism is happening here. Specific doesn’t mean exceptional.
[2] There is of course a much wider point here than trade or, rather, trade is imbricated within the wider point of the multiple areas – economy, security, defence - in which the UK is horribly caught between the US, China, and the EU. But that would need another post.
[3] Reading that September 2023 post again, I was reminded of the sad, sorry, stupid saga of the UKCA mark, the long, lingering death of which quietly continued over the summer, with the announcement that it will not be required for medical devices.
That, surely the most tortuous and tortured of the many metaphors that have been applied to Brexit, is intended to introduce the fact that this post doesn’t have any particular unifying theme other than the latest ways in which Brexit has been in view over the last fortnight.
Robert Jenrick and the Tory madness
We don’t yet know how the story is going to end, but it is looking increasingly likely that, when history is written, Brexit is going to figure as the central cause of the decline and perhaps demise of the Tory Party. For all that numerous political commentators, most recently Andrew Rawnsley, urge the party to re-discover its more moderate and pragmatic traditions, for now it seems stuck in the spiral of madness of which Brexit is the proximate cause. Thus possibly the least surprising development of the last fortnight was that their party conference showed the Conservatives to be firmly in the grip of Brexitism.
At the conference, the most obvious manifestation, or even exemplification, of this was the latest stage in Robert Jenrick’s long journey from “bland centrist solicitor” to gurning ideologue. It’s a journey made stranger because he has somehow retained his blandness along with the way, managing to be, as Ian Dunt puts it “at once banal and monstrous”. Much attention focused, rightly, on his complaint about the lack of white faces in Handsworth, a complaint made not less but more objectionable by his absurd suggestion that this remark “was not about the colour of your skin”. Less discussed, but objectionable and absurd in a different way, were his remarks about the judiciary.
Jenrick’s thesis, if we can grace it with that term, is that when judges ‘don the wig’ – a point he sought to make dramatic by flourishing such a wig – they at the same time put aside personal interests and identity so as to apply the law impartially. So far, so good. But he also claimed that, having, like every internet troll, ‘doNe he’s Own ResEArch’, he had made a shocking discovery. Apparently, there are “dozens of judges” who have used social media to “broadcast their open borders views” (whatever that means; does anyone advocate ‘open borders’?), or have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country” (which seems to mean, based on his other remarks, that Jenrick imagines barristers to be invariably sympathetic to their clients’ causes, and retain a lifelong commitment to them).
Jenrick is either too dense or too dishonest to see that his first observation made his second claim irrelevant. To make his thesis stick, he would need evidence that the judges he identified had also given judgments which, in legal terms, were demonstrably wrong, and wrong in ways biased in the direction he claimed. Moreover, he would need to show that they had done so to a greater extent than judges who he had not identified as having this alleged bias. But of course, and this is part of what makes this an example of Brexitism, reliable evidence is irrelevant to Jenrick. What is relevant, and what makes it definitively Brexitist, is the attempt to undermine the judiciary as an institution and, with that, the rule of law. It is ‘enemies of the people’ territory again. And it hardly needs to be said that Jenrick’s supposed solution, the political control of judicial appointments, would make the supposed problem he supposedly wants to solve worse.
Whether Jenrick has become a convinced Brexitist ideologue or is just opportunistically seeking to burnish his leadership credential hardly matters. Either way, it shows that Brexitism is an obligatory posture for those who aspire to lead the current Tory Party. That fact was underlined by Kemi Badenoch’s long-expected adoption of leaving the ECHR as official party policy, a policy which is the central prescription of ‘Brexit 2.0’.
It is also, as I noted in my previous post, a policy being ‘sold’ in exactly the same way that Brexit itself was sold, even though recent polling shows that 46% of those planning to vote Tory at the next election think Brexit has been a failure (and only 22% think it has been a success). Perhaps that is why Badenoch made only a couple of passing references to Brexit in her conference speech, in itself a telling fact: far from boasting of it, the very party that delivered Brexit feels too ashamed to talk about it.
Farage’s culpability and Labour’s problem
So much for the Tories. In my previous post I also noted that Keir Starmer had begun to attack Nigel Farage on the grounds of the damage done by Brexit. That attack has escalated, with Labour now starting to argue (£) that Farage will be to blame for anticipated tax rises in the forthcoming budget because, having used “easy sloganeering” to persuade the public to vote for Brexit, he then walked away and took no responsibility for it, leaving the economic consequences which ultimately explain the need tax raises.
Farage and his supporters, and no doubt others, object that he had no control over the delivery of Brexit, so the accusation is unfounded. But that is simplistic. Farage was not in power, it is true, but he exercised considerable power, always ready to denounce as ‘betrayal’ whatever form of Brexit was proposed and never once putting forward realistic proposals for delivering it in ways that were less economically damaging than what was enacted. Moreover, at the 2019 election, he backed Boris Johnson’s ‘oven-ready Brexit’ even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats.
So, yes, Farage is very much amongst those responsible for Brexit and, in any case, it is more than reasonable to point out that the main cause of his political life has proved to be a failure. It’s certainly clear that this line of attack is being made increasingly often by Labour politicians or sympathetic commentators, an example this week being an opinion piece by Kevin Maguire, Associate Editor of the Mirror.
Where the Labour government is on much trickier ground is that, to the extent it acknowledges the economic damage of Brexit it opens the question of why it has no plans to seek more than marginal limitations to this damage. Perhaps that is why Starmer’s conference speech, like Badenoch’s, had a telling lacuna, in his case avoiding any mention of his ‘reset’ policy. For if Brexit is a sufficiently serious problem to make attacking Farage’s culpability for it worthwhile, what is the government’s solution?
That is the question which Starmer has, until now, avoided and to which he cannot give a credible answer without abandoning his cast iron ‘red line’ manifesto promises, as well as ensuring that the entirety of British politics during this parliament, and probably the next election, is dominated by Brexit again. He isn’t going to do that, and that is one exemplification of the Brexit impasse that Britain as a whole is in: its entire national strategy is admitted, even by many of its advocates, to have failed, and public opinion firmly and consistently endorses the view that it was wrong to leave, but there is no presently viable political route to its rectification.
I’ve been arguing consistently, since December 2022, that there is a better approach for Labour, which would be to honestly admit that Brexit is damaging and has failed, and ought to be reversed, but to be equally honest in saying that this isn’t a political possibility until there is cross-party consensus (at least amongst parties that might credibly come to power) to make an application to rejoin. That means, in the present context, identifying Reform and the Conservatives as the barrier, making them responsible not just for the original problem but for the continuing absence of a solution. I still think that would be Labour’s best option, and with the latest line of blaming Farage for Brexit it becomes the logical next step.
A Royal Commission?
If there is ever to be a solution, one part of the route to it could be an interesting proposal made over the summer (although I have only just come across it) by former MEP Andrew Duff. Noting the “deadlock” in British post-Brexit politics, he proposes the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the position and future of the UK in Europe. It’s not often that a new idea about Brexit surfaces, and it’s a reasonable one in all sorts of ways, the most minimal, but not unimportant, being that, as I argued in June, it is surely right to review, given the time that has passed and the experience we have had, what Brexit has actually meant for the UK.
If nothing else, it would be a way of drawing together the now massive, but highly dispersed and fragmentary, body of evidence about Brexit, and providing some accountability for decisions made. For example, at this week’s Tory Party conference, Michael Gove admitted that the trade deals his government did with Australia and New Zealand were poorly negotiated and damaging to farmers, going on to say “we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working.” Yet these highly revealing remarks were barely reported, even though they confirm exactly what so many of us said at the time, what civil servants warned ministers of at the time, and what the government denied at the time.
Assembling an authoritative single review of what happened with Brexit would, in itself, be a contrast with the evidence-free, faith-based, reality-denying politics of Brexitism. However Duff’s proposal is primarily intended as a future-oriented exercise, which could begin a process to create, to the extent it is possible, the basis for a future national consensus.
From that point of view, he is surely right to say that “the most likely outcome of such a Royal Commission will be a report that furnishes the Prime Minister with a cast-iron case for reversing Brexit.” I’m not so sure Duff is right that “it will prepare the ground for the referendum campaign that must inevitably follow”, since it wouldn’t in itself create the kind of cross-party agreement needed to make rejoining a viable possibility for the EU. But it would be a step away from the current absurdity of a nation which effectively knows it has made a mistake but can’t find a route to rectify it. At the very least it offers a practical suggestion to create such a route, in a way that eludes those who simply demand a ‘rejoin now’ policy. [1]
Still Brexiting
Whatever the wider issues in play (or which ought to be in play), it shouldn’t be forgotten that, as a matter of fact, the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship continues to limp along, largely undiscussed in public. One facet of that, which has had some media discussion, is that since the beginning of this week the EU Entry-Exit System (EES) has begun to be enforced. I should clarify that wording, perhaps, in that, whatever the pro-Brexit press may imagine (£), the EES isn’t something particular to the UK-EU relationship, as if it were a ‘punishment’ for Brexit, but, rather, applies to the EU’s relationship with third countries generally. However, in that sense, for the UK it is a consequence of Brexit and one which will introduce new complexities and, potentially, delays and queues for travelers (although in the last few hours it has been reported that, to avoid this, it is only being partly implemented for now). Sloganizing about ‘securing our borders’ suddenly looks less attractive when we are its target.
In an analogous way, whilst the Brexiters have long used the feeble pun of a ‘protectionist racket’ to describe the EU, that suddenly looks even less funny with the prospect of a massive increase in its tariffs and reduction in its tariff-free quotas for steel imports. That would be a very serious blow, perhaps even an “existential threat”, for the already beleaguered British steel industry, since almost 80% of UK steel exports go to the EU. Again, this is a consequence of being a third country although, again, with wearying predictability, the pro-Brexit press reported it as if it were aimed specifically at Britain (£).
It may or may not be that the British government manages to negotiate an exemption but, taken in conjunction with the now indefinitely stalled negotiations with the US over steel tariffs, it is a stark reminder of Britain’s post-Brexit isolation. That reminder has several dimensions, including the fact of the relative importance of the EU market as compared with the US (which, for steel, takes less than 10% of UK exports). More generally, for all the Brexiter rhetoric about Brexit enabling the UK to have a ‘nimble’ independent trade policy, it is a reminder that size matters more than agility in a world dominated by regional blocs. That is especially so when these lumbering trade monsters go to war, the wider context of the EU’s announcement being, in large part, the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the Chinese steel industry. [2]
The same ‘better in than out’ lesson applies to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which is due to come into force in January 2026, and which also has implications for steel, amongst other products. This is an issue which has been lurking in the Brexit undergrowth for years (I think the first time I discussed it on this blog was in September 2023, and that post includes several links explaining some of the complexities involved), but now it has been reported that a temporary deal to exempt the UK is in prospect. [3] The longer-term likelihood is that the EU CBAM will be linked to the UK CBAM (due to come in to force in 2027), along with an associated linkage of UK and EU Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS), a possibility within the scope of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
A permanent agreement on CBAM and ETS linkages sits alongside other elements of the still to be agreed details of the ‘reset’, including potential deals on a Youth Mobility Scheme, UK participation in Erasmus +, and a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. The latter has a particular urgency in the context of food price inflation, as Naomi Smith of Best for Britain pointed out this week, and might be agreed and implemented “within a year”, according to a recent statement from Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s Trade Commissioner.
That may be optimistic, and it is worth remembering that, price issues aside, until there is an SPS deal in place, the UK (or more accurately Great Britain) will continue with the risky policy of partial border security, having never fully implemented import controls and having now given up even the process of doing so, in the expectation of this still-to-be agreed deal. Sometimes, apparently, ‘securing our borders’ isn’t a priority.
Also sitting within the reset basket is the question of possible partial UK involvement in the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative for defence procurement. It’s an issue of particular and growing salience in the context of the ever-growing threat from Russia and the declining reliability (to put it mildly) of the US as a security partner. Whilst, as Jannike Wachowiak of UKICE explains, the UK would not, as a third country, be eligible for loans from SAFE defence funds, it could, potentially, have access to joint procurements.
The growing charge list
All of these, and other, issues are a reminder not just of the ongoing negotiation of the UK-EU relationship, but of the cumbersome nature of that process, the uncertainties of its outcomes, and the limited scope of those outcomes even if the most favourable of them were to result. One consequence of that, although it is probably impossible to quantify, or even to find much information about, must be to deter investment and, therefore, economic growth. In all kinds of sectors, for all kinds of reasons, the terms of the UK-EU relationship are in flux which, necessarily, creates an unpropitious environment for investment.
Domestic political uncertainty is also a factor since Farage is already threatening to tear up any new agreements the present government makes with the EU. Even if that doesn’t make the EU wary of such agreements, it will prey on the minds of investors and indeed others trying to plan for the future. That, too, is something to be added to the growing charge list against the Reform leader and the other ‘guilty men’ of Brexit. Ultimately, there will need to be not so much a Royal Commission as a Public Inquiry if they are to be held accountable. Only by excavating the subterranean maze of Brexit will its eruptions be quelled.
Notes
[1] Duff’s proposal attracted several social media comments denouncing it as ‘British exceptionalism’ (in line with my usual policy, I only link to social media posts if they come from public figures). This is nonsense and reflects a wider problem. It is nonsense because there’s nothing ‘exceptionalist’ about a domestic political debate and, in this case, the idea that Britain needs a process of honest self-reflection about what has done to itself is almost the opposite. It is for the UK to face up to the consequences of its collective decisions, and to do otherwise, for example by blaming the EU for those consequences, or expecting the EU to provide solutions to them, is what might be exceptionalist.
The wider problem is that, whilst it is absolutely true that throughout the Brexit process British exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, greatly in evidence, sometimes amongst ‘remainers’ as well as Brexiters, there is a cadre of social media posters that simply parrots the word in any and every discussion of any and every aspect of Brexit (very often the same posters who ignorantly trot out ‘cherry-picking’ to describe any and every aspect of post-Brexit UK-EU relations).
Some (or more accurately one person, a rather creepy stalker who continually creates multiple pseudonymous social media accounts to harass me and various other people, including Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, on the basis of entirely false accusations of anti-Irish racism) also object that my use of the word ‘Brexitism’ is ‘British exceptionalism’, since it denotes a British form of populism (I explain why that is warranted in my definition of Brexitism), which is as transparently stupid as saying that the word ‘Brexit’ is ‘exceptionalist’. Brexit happened here; Brexitism is happening here. Specific doesn’t mean exceptional.
[2] There is of course a much wider point here than trade or, rather, trade is imbricated within the wider point of the multiple areas – economy, security, defence - in which the UK is horribly caught between the US, China, and the EU. But that would need another post.
[3] Reading that September 2023 post again, I was reminded of the sad, sorry, stupid saga of the UKCA mark, the long, lingering death of which quietly continued over the summer, with the announcement that it will not be required for medical devices.
Friday, 3 October 2025
Has Labour woken up?
Within a couple of days of my previous post, the goal posts of the ‘debate’ about immigration (this being the thing ‘we aren’t allowed to talk about’ yet constantly discuss) were moved in an even harder direction by Nigel Farage. At a press conference, he announced that Reform’s policy is now to abolish ‘indefinite leave to remain’ and, even more radically, to do so retrospectively, so that the rights of existing immigrants, and not just future ones, would be changed.
Whether that announcement was the trigger or, more likely, the intention was already there, this set the stage for a discernible, albeit ambiguous, shift in Labour’s approach to Reform and, with that, to the wider politics of Brexitism.
Farage’s shape-shifting
It doesn’t really matter to Farage that his latest policy proposal gave rise to a range of criticisms of its practicality, its legality, its economic impact, and the false financial claim of the £234 billion saving it would deliver. As Vote Leave showed with the infamous ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ claim during the referendum, rebuttals can serve only to lodge falsities in the public mind, or at least to seem like quibbles about detail.
Nor does it matter much that Farage almost immediately resiled from applying this policy to those with EU Settled Status. That doesn’t affect what he wants to achieve in making indefinite leave to remain a talking point, and in promoting the general principle of retrospective changes to immigration status, with all the misery of insecurity that creates for millions of people. Thus, having only a couple of weeks ago raised the prospect of ‘mass deportations’, which he used to oppose, he has shifted the dial again, and it is notable that the speed with which he is moving is now increasing. How long before a full-on ‘repatriation’ policy becomes the locus of debate?
It's worth recalling that the background to this is, indeed, Brexit. There was a time when Farage, and his erstwhile vehicle of UKIP, campaigned to leave the EU whilst invoking Norway as an ideal. That is, escaping from Freedom of Movement didn’t figure. It’s true that Farage and UKIP had abandoned that position by the time of the Referendum, but many other Brexiters continued to espouse it. As for Farage, his position became that all he wanted was an ‘Aussie-style points system’ of state-managed immigration policy and, at least at one stage, ruled out an immigration cap.
Other Brexiters were more explicit about what this implied, arguing that the issue about Brexit was not to do with levels of immigration per se but simply that those levels should be determined by the ‘sovereign British parliament’, on the basis of an assessment about what level and type of immigration was wanted. And this is exactly what happened once the UK left the EU. So when Farage now presents what he calls the ‘Boriswave’ of increased post-Brexit immigration from, predominantly, non-EU countries as being a terrible betrayal of Brexit and those who voted to leave, he is denouncing the consequences of a policy he supported, even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory held seats in the 2019 election.
Appeasing the unappeasable
Of course, it is true that many leave voters did believe that what they had voted for was a reduction of immigration levels, and plenty of them seem to have thought that this would apply to all immigration, and not just to immigration from the EU. But that is part of the overall story of how Brexit was sold with multiple, conflicting promises, and multiple, conflicting models. These included the now even more established conflation of immigration and asylum-seeking, and even the message to existing immigrants from, especially, the Commonwealth, that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring family members to Britain. So it is important to understand that the current situation grows out of Brexit, and out of the political dishonesty of Brexit, and especially out of the political dishonesty of Farage and the various incarnation of his parties.
But it is also important to understand what this shows. Underneath all the dishonesty there is a single direction of travel. The anti-immigration lobby, with Farage its most high-profile voice, is never satisfied. Whenever its demands are accepted as ‘legitimate concerns’, and policies devised to meet them, a harder set of demands is made. As Ian Dunt discussed in a recent post on his ‘Striking 13’ Substack, Brexit was supposed to assuage complaints of “uncontrolled immigration” yet, despite all the chaos and damage of Brexit, the same complaints persist. If anything, they have become increasingly vociferous, and increasingly framed in terms of English ethnonationalism.
The question, now, is just how much more this country is going to sacrifice on the altar of ‘controlling immigration’ in order to appease the unappeasable?
A line in the sand?
It’s just possible that with his latest proposals on indefinite leave to remain (ILR) Farage may have crossed a line which enough people will defend. For one thing, it is an unpopular policy: the most recent polling shows that 90% of people support the current ILR rules, and only 3% support Reform’s proposals. For another, the evident impact on the economy in general, and upon particular sectors including construction, the NHS, and universities may be even less palatable now, with the economy flatlining and so many of those sectors in permacrisis. For a third, the removal of ILR runs counter to the ‘legitimate concern’ about ‘integration’ espoused by at least some parts of the anti-immigration lobby.
However, what is perhaps more important is that Farage’s proposal has for once galvanized a discussion about immigration which is not solely about economic impacts but about morality, especially because the idea of retrospectively changing the rules under which people already live here is so transparently unfair (the same, of course, could be said about Brexit, which is why many leave campaigners pretended that it would not have that effect).
At all events, suddenly there was talk of how the Farage proposal would not just do transactional damage but would “change the soul of Britain”. Most importantly, before, during and after this week’s Labour Party conference, Keir Starmer talked in that register, calling Farage’s ILR policy “immoral” and “racist”, and saying it would “rip this country apart”. He also spoke of being in “a battle for the soul of Britain” with Reform, of the need for a “patriotic renewal” which challenges Farage’s plastic patriotism, criticized Farage for his dislike of modern Britain, and attacked the politics of grievance. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves spoke bluntly in her Conference speech about the Reform Party being “in bed with Vladimir Putin”, whilst Ed Miliband attacked Farage for his connections with the global network of ethnonationalist populists epitomized by Elon Musk [1].
Two steps forward, one step back?
It may be churlish to criticize these developments, especially for me since, in my previous post, these were exactly the kind of positions I was urging Labour politicians to take, whilst implying pessimism that they would do so. It’s true, as many have remarked, that Starmer can be criticized for being too late, although that’s no reason not to applaud him now. But I certainly don’t want to fall into the ‘purism’ trap of dismissing anything that is imperfect as being worthless, a trap that has long snared many on the left and even more dramatically, in recent years, on the right.
Even so, there is a sense that the Labour government, whilst taking two steps forward, is taking one step back (or, less optimistically, the other way around). Thus, at the same time as Starmer was denouncing Farage’s ILR proposals, the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was announcing plans to ‘reform’ ILR by setting out “tougher” conditions, including increasing the time before it can be applied for from five years to ten. It’s true that these plans were already being developed by her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, so they weren’t directly a reaction to Farage’s latest intervention. But they were conceived within the same strategy of trying to meet, rather than challenge, ‘legitimate concerns’.
It’s also true, as the government claims, that this is different to Farage’s policy, and Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff made as good a case as there is that Mahmood is mounting a genuine challenge to “the shocking rise of ethnonationalism”. Yet Labour politicians still don’t seem to grasp that by constantly accepting that there are ‘legitimate concerns’ about “uncontrolled immigration” and “open borders” (when the reality is that immigration is not, and has never been, ‘uncontrolled’ any more than borders have been ‘open’) in general, or, in this case, about existing ILR rules (which, as the polls linked to earlier show, are supported by the overwhelming majority), they cede ground to Farage and invite his inevitable denunciation of their reforms as inadequate.
For all that Labour’s latest discussions of immigration policy are an improvement, this basic problem remains, and was also illustrated by the government’s latest proposal to deny family reunion rights to individuals who are granted asylum. There also remains a constant slippage in government messaging between discussions of legal immigration, illegal immigration, and asylum-seeking.
The Digital ID distraction
As for Starmer himself, he chose to wrap his denunciation of Reform up with the announcement of a new Digital ID card, framed entirely in terms of cracking down on immigrants working illegally in the UK and controlling borders. Whatever the merits of an ID card scheme in general (I’m agnostic, but not really qualified to discuss it), this was an absurd framing.
For one thing, it was politically inept. For such a major policy announcement to come out of nowhere, with no preparation of public opinion and little explanation of the technical details, seemed more panicky than principled. It is highly probable that it will result in a long and protracted political battle over an unpopular policy, diverting energy and political capital from the government’s main priorities, and, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, ending up never actually being delivered.
In any case, even if it is delivered, it seems unlikely that it will have much impact on illegal working since those working illegally and those employing them are, by definition, willing to break the law. And any impact it does have will be unmeasurable since, again by definition, the number of people working illegally is, and will remain, unknown. It also provided, yet again, an illustration of the impossibility of appeasing the anti-immigration lobby which, for years, has been insisting, falsely, that ID cards are needed to counter illegal immigration, but have now suddenly swung to denouncing them as ineffective, authoritarian, and ‘Un-British’.
All that aside, by tying his critique of Reform’s immorality together with the announcement of his ID card scheme, Starmer is still framing his position in terms of taking the wind from Farage’s sails by appealing to potential Reform voters. That blunts his moral critique, but it also makes little sense electorally. As a new study from the Nuffield Politics Research Centre at Oxford University shows, Labour is not losing many votes to Reform, it is losing them to the LibDems, Greens and ‘don’t knows’. It is this which will determine the next election. The most likely route to Reform forming a government is if it crosses the inflexion point where the First Past the Post system (unfairly) under-rewards it with seats to one where FPTP (unfairly) over-rewards it. That will happen if the Reform vote share holds up at around 30%, or perhaps just the high-twenties, and Labour fails to hold together the anti-Reform vote [2].
A new boldness?
Even so, if, as I wrote a fortnight ago, there is a battle underway for the “soul of Britain” then at least there are now signs that Starmer and his government realise this, and are willing to engage in it. There are plenty of weapons to deploy against, as I call it, Brexitism. They include constantly reminding voters that all the promises made for Brexit have proved false. Interestingly, for, I think, the first time, Starmer this week made this point on more than one occasion, including mentioning how Brexit had actually exacerbated the flow of irregular asylum-seeking by referring to the ‘Farage boats’ (his implicit point being that the UK being outside the Dublin regulations has created a new ‘pull-factor’ for asylum seekers). At the same time, the government is being slightly less reticent about the ongoing ‘reset’ with the EU including, now, embracing the idea of a Youth Mobility Scheme, which it had previously resisted [3].
Invoking the failure of Brexit is important, because support for it is one of the foundational beliefs of Brexitism, and because it is the principal example of the track record of Brexitism in practice (the constant chaos and incompetence of Reform local councils is another). This in turn means that there is every reason to be suspicious of the current promises coming from the very same people whose promises for Brexit have been discredited.
For particular example, it’s easy to see how those, including Farage and Robert Jenrick, now calling for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) do so in identical terms to those that were used to sell Brexit. Claiming that in one bound Britain will ‘take back control’ (ignoring other legal constraints, and reputational damage), dismissing warnings of what it would mean for Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement, blithely assuming easy agreements being made with other countries etc. Farage even cites Australia as a model for his mass deportation policy.
It’s equally easy to imagine how, if they get their way about the ECHR, and all the promises prove false, they will say it has ‘not been done properly’, or has been ‘betrayed’. It’s even easy to imagine some of the precise ways they will do so: ‘of course, we promised a British Bill of Rights, but we never dreamt that the activist lawyers and unelected Establishment politicians in the House of Lords would slip in provisions which sabotaged the will of the people’.
So there are obvious reasons to challenge those advocating ECHR derogation but, as with the immigration ‘debate’, that challenge can only be weakened by the way that Starmer (and Mahmood) are now talking about the need to reform how the Convention is applied within British courts. It’s possible there is a case for this (I don’t know, but I have heard some perfectly reasonable legal experts suggest this is so), but at the present moment it is highly impolitic to pursue it. Doing so immediately concedes to the Brexitists that there is a ‘problem’, and immediately sets up their ability to claim that only they have a sufficiently robust solution (somewhat akin to the way that David Cameron’s pre-referendum ‘re-negotiation’ with the EU rebounded on him).
Farage’s friends
Immigration aside, there is also much more mileage to be got from attacking the Brexitists for their overseas affiliations. The madness unfolding in Trump’s US offers a clear warning of what the Reform Party would mean if it came to power in Westminster, as can already be glimpsed in its misguided attempts to emulate Musk’s DOGE in its local councils. And the way that Farage, Badenoch, and Truss (as well as by Trump and Musk) lauded Javier Milei’s catastrophic economic policies in Argentina is an equally clear warning of what a Reform or Reform-Conservative government would do to the economy.
More than anything, the deep connections between Russia and Farage can only grow in salience as Putin’s aggressive incursions into European air space and cyber-space continue to intensify, leading the former head of MI5 to posit this week that, in a sense, Britain and Russia are already at war. Those connections, and with them Russia’s persistent attempts to interfere in British politics, have been freshly illustrated by the conviction of Reform’s former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, who has pleaded guilty to eight charges of taking bribes to make pro-Russia statements when he was an MEP.
It's clear that Farage and his allies have been rattled by these developments, making persistent, but flawed, attempts to disown or deny his connections with Gill. But it is Starmer’s accusation of racism which has really hit home, leading to utterly absurd claims that, in making it, he was “inciting violence” against Farage, exposing him to the risk of a ‘Charlie Kirk’ attack. Richard Tice even repeatedly cited a fabricated quote from Starmer's conference speech to suggest, ludicrously as well as mendaciously, that it was an invitation to "Antifa" (the non-existent US 'terrorist organization') to "come at Nigel Farage". It is a reminder of the backwash from the US to the UK of the Kirk killing, and, as I discussed last week, of the utterly hypocritical attempt by the far right to allow itself to use the most violent rhetoric imaginable against its opponents, in the name of ‘free speech’, whilst squealing that literally anything said of it (and, in this case, not said) by those opponents is dangerously inflammatory.
Clearly ambiguous
So, even in the space of a fortnight, something significant has happened, although the extent of that significance remains an open question. On the one hand, the battle lines are clearer, and the government has made them so. On other hand, whilst that has been widely acknowledged in most recent political commentary, that commentary also reveals the continuing ambiguity of Labour’s position.
At one level, that is an ambiguity about its position with respect to voters. Thus in the Economist, Bagehot (Duncan Robinson) argues (£) that Labour has stopped “punching its own voters”, meaning that it has moved to cement its socially-liberal, middle-class, educated flank. But in the Financial Times (£) it is suggested that Starmer has sought to secure “the party’s working-class base” and offered a “defiantly ‘Blue Labour’” message. It can’t be both of these things and, to the extent it is ambiguous, it might well end up being neither. Much will depend on whether recent messaging is followed-up, or whether it will prove to be just another temporary tactic which never develops into a fully-fledged strategy.
At a deeper level, the ambiguity is about Labour’s position about Brexitism, and that ambiguity carries the same dangers. If Starmer is now persuaded that the “soul of Britain” is at stake he will need to remove all ambiguity.
Notes
[1] Miliband’s basic point was correct, although it is worth recalling that Musk has pointedly criticized Farage whilst openly giving support to Tommy Robinson.
[2] It's worth saying, given the present atmosphere of premature speculation, that we are a long way from the next election, and current opinion polls may not be very relevant to it, especially as tactical voting (in particular against Reform) makes the link between national polls and constituency outcomes more uncertain. There is a fascinating discussion of the current political situation, digging deep into an issue I’ve touched in the past, the relationship between changing social class patterns and political parties, in Professor Ben Ansell’s latest Political Calculus Substack.
[3] It remains the case that nothing concrete has actually been ‘reset’ as yet. So there seems little basis for Rachel Reeves’ suggestion that the OBR should factor it into its growth forecasts (and, if and when the reset occurs then, on the current best estimate, provided by John Springford of CER, the impact would be small, perhaps, at most, 0.7% of GDP over ten years).
Whether that announcement was the trigger or, more likely, the intention was already there, this set the stage for a discernible, albeit ambiguous, shift in Labour’s approach to Reform and, with that, to the wider politics of Brexitism.
Farage’s shape-shifting
It doesn’t really matter to Farage that his latest policy proposal gave rise to a range of criticisms of its practicality, its legality, its economic impact, and the false financial claim of the £234 billion saving it would deliver. As Vote Leave showed with the infamous ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ claim during the referendum, rebuttals can serve only to lodge falsities in the public mind, or at least to seem like quibbles about detail.
Nor does it matter much that Farage almost immediately resiled from applying this policy to those with EU Settled Status. That doesn’t affect what he wants to achieve in making indefinite leave to remain a talking point, and in promoting the general principle of retrospective changes to immigration status, with all the misery of insecurity that creates for millions of people. Thus, having only a couple of weeks ago raised the prospect of ‘mass deportations’, which he used to oppose, he has shifted the dial again, and it is notable that the speed with which he is moving is now increasing. How long before a full-on ‘repatriation’ policy becomes the locus of debate?
It's worth recalling that the background to this is, indeed, Brexit. There was a time when Farage, and his erstwhile vehicle of UKIP, campaigned to leave the EU whilst invoking Norway as an ideal. That is, escaping from Freedom of Movement didn’t figure. It’s true that Farage and UKIP had abandoned that position by the time of the Referendum, but many other Brexiters continued to espouse it. As for Farage, his position became that all he wanted was an ‘Aussie-style points system’ of state-managed immigration policy and, at least at one stage, ruled out an immigration cap.
Other Brexiters were more explicit about what this implied, arguing that the issue about Brexit was not to do with levels of immigration per se but simply that those levels should be determined by the ‘sovereign British parliament’, on the basis of an assessment about what level and type of immigration was wanted. And this is exactly what happened once the UK left the EU. So when Farage now presents what he calls the ‘Boriswave’ of increased post-Brexit immigration from, predominantly, non-EU countries as being a terrible betrayal of Brexit and those who voted to leave, he is denouncing the consequences of a policy he supported, even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory held seats in the 2019 election.
Appeasing the unappeasable
Of course, it is true that many leave voters did believe that what they had voted for was a reduction of immigration levels, and plenty of them seem to have thought that this would apply to all immigration, and not just to immigration from the EU. But that is part of the overall story of how Brexit was sold with multiple, conflicting promises, and multiple, conflicting models. These included the now even more established conflation of immigration and asylum-seeking, and even the message to existing immigrants from, especially, the Commonwealth, that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring family members to Britain. So it is important to understand that the current situation grows out of Brexit, and out of the political dishonesty of Brexit, and especially out of the political dishonesty of Farage and the various incarnation of his parties.
But it is also important to understand what this shows. Underneath all the dishonesty there is a single direction of travel. The anti-immigration lobby, with Farage its most high-profile voice, is never satisfied. Whenever its demands are accepted as ‘legitimate concerns’, and policies devised to meet them, a harder set of demands is made. As Ian Dunt discussed in a recent post on his ‘Striking 13’ Substack, Brexit was supposed to assuage complaints of “uncontrolled immigration” yet, despite all the chaos and damage of Brexit, the same complaints persist. If anything, they have become increasingly vociferous, and increasingly framed in terms of English ethnonationalism.
The question, now, is just how much more this country is going to sacrifice on the altar of ‘controlling immigration’ in order to appease the unappeasable?
A line in the sand?
It’s just possible that with his latest proposals on indefinite leave to remain (ILR) Farage may have crossed a line which enough people will defend. For one thing, it is an unpopular policy: the most recent polling shows that 90% of people support the current ILR rules, and only 3% support Reform’s proposals. For another, the evident impact on the economy in general, and upon particular sectors including construction, the NHS, and universities may be even less palatable now, with the economy flatlining and so many of those sectors in permacrisis. For a third, the removal of ILR runs counter to the ‘legitimate concern’ about ‘integration’ espoused by at least some parts of the anti-immigration lobby.
However, what is perhaps more important is that Farage’s proposal has for once galvanized a discussion about immigration which is not solely about economic impacts but about morality, especially because the idea of retrospectively changing the rules under which people already live here is so transparently unfair (the same, of course, could be said about Brexit, which is why many leave campaigners pretended that it would not have that effect).
At all events, suddenly there was talk of how the Farage proposal would not just do transactional damage but would “change the soul of Britain”. Most importantly, before, during and after this week’s Labour Party conference, Keir Starmer talked in that register, calling Farage’s ILR policy “immoral” and “racist”, and saying it would “rip this country apart”. He also spoke of being in “a battle for the soul of Britain” with Reform, of the need for a “patriotic renewal” which challenges Farage’s plastic patriotism, criticized Farage for his dislike of modern Britain, and attacked the politics of grievance. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves spoke bluntly in her Conference speech about the Reform Party being “in bed with Vladimir Putin”, whilst Ed Miliband attacked Farage for his connections with the global network of ethnonationalist populists epitomized by Elon Musk [1].
Two steps forward, one step back?
It may be churlish to criticize these developments, especially for me since, in my previous post, these were exactly the kind of positions I was urging Labour politicians to take, whilst implying pessimism that they would do so. It’s true, as many have remarked, that Starmer can be criticized for being too late, although that’s no reason not to applaud him now. But I certainly don’t want to fall into the ‘purism’ trap of dismissing anything that is imperfect as being worthless, a trap that has long snared many on the left and even more dramatically, in recent years, on the right.
Even so, there is a sense that the Labour government, whilst taking two steps forward, is taking one step back (or, less optimistically, the other way around). Thus, at the same time as Starmer was denouncing Farage’s ILR proposals, the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was announcing plans to ‘reform’ ILR by setting out “tougher” conditions, including increasing the time before it can be applied for from five years to ten. It’s true that these plans were already being developed by her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, so they weren’t directly a reaction to Farage’s latest intervention. But they were conceived within the same strategy of trying to meet, rather than challenge, ‘legitimate concerns’.
It’s also true, as the government claims, that this is different to Farage’s policy, and Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff made as good a case as there is that Mahmood is mounting a genuine challenge to “the shocking rise of ethnonationalism”. Yet Labour politicians still don’t seem to grasp that by constantly accepting that there are ‘legitimate concerns’ about “uncontrolled immigration” and “open borders” (when the reality is that immigration is not, and has never been, ‘uncontrolled’ any more than borders have been ‘open’) in general, or, in this case, about existing ILR rules (which, as the polls linked to earlier show, are supported by the overwhelming majority), they cede ground to Farage and invite his inevitable denunciation of their reforms as inadequate.
For all that Labour’s latest discussions of immigration policy are an improvement, this basic problem remains, and was also illustrated by the government’s latest proposal to deny family reunion rights to individuals who are granted asylum. There also remains a constant slippage in government messaging between discussions of legal immigration, illegal immigration, and asylum-seeking.
The Digital ID distraction
As for Starmer himself, he chose to wrap his denunciation of Reform up with the announcement of a new Digital ID card, framed entirely in terms of cracking down on immigrants working illegally in the UK and controlling borders. Whatever the merits of an ID card scheme in general (I’m agnostic, but not really qualified to discuss it), this was an absurd framing.
For one thing, it was politically inept. For such a major policy announcement to come out of nowhere, with no preparation of public opinion and little explanation of the technical details, seemed more panicky than principled. It is highly probable that it will result in a long and protracted political battle over an unpopular policy, diverting energy and political capital from the government’s main priorities, and, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, ending up never actually being delivered.
In any case, even if it is delivered, it seems unlikely that it will have much impact on illegal working since those working illegally and those employing them are, by definition, willing to break the law. And any impact it does have will be unmeasurable since, again by definition, the number of people working illegally is, and will remain, unknown. It also provided, yet again, an illustration of the impossibility of appeasing the anti-immigration lobby which, for years, has been insisting, falsely, that ID cards are needed to counter illegal immigration, but have now suddenly swung to denouncing them as ineffective, authoritarian, and ‘Un-British’.
All that aside, by tying his critique of Reform’s immorality together with the announcement of his ID card scheme, Starmer is still framing his position in terms of taking the wind from Farage’s sails by appealing to potential Reform voters. That blunts his moral critique, but it also makes little sense electorally. As a new study from the Nuffield Politics Research Centre at Oxford University shows, Labour is not losing many votes to Reform, it is losing them to the LibDems, Greens and ‘don’t knows’. It is this which will determine the next election. The most likely route to Reform forming a government is if it crosses the inflexion point where the First Past the Post system (unfairly) under-rewards it with seats to one where FPTP (unfairly) over-rewards it. That will happen if the Reform vote share holds up at around 30%, or perhaps just the high-twenties, and Labour fails to hold together the anti-Reform vote [2].
A new boldness?
Even so, if, as I wrote a fortnight ago, there is a battle underway for the “soul of Britain” then at least there are now signs that Starmer and his government realise this, and are willing to engage in it. There are plenty of weapons to deploy against, as I call it, Brexitism. They include constantly reminding voters that all the promises made for Brexit have proved false. Interestingly, for, I think, the first time, Starmer this week made this point on more than one occasion, including mentioning how Brexit had actually exacerbated the flow of irregular asylum-seeking by referring to the ‘Farage boats’ (his implicit point being that the UK being outside the Dublin regulations has created a new ‘pull-factor’ for asylum seekers). At the same time, the government is being slightly less reticent about the ongoing ‘reset’ with the EU including, now, embracing the idea of a Youth Mobility Scheme, which it had previously resisted [3].
Invoking the failure of Brexit is important, because support for it is one of the foundational beliefs of Brexitism, and because it is the principal example of the track record of Brexitism in practice (the constant chaos and incompetence of Reform local councils is another). This in turn means that there is every reason to be suspicious of the current promises coming from the very same people whose promises for Brexit have been discredited.
For particular example, it’s easy to see how those, including Farage and Robert Jenrick, now calling for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) do so in identical terms to those that were used to sell Brexit. Claiming that in one bound Britain will ‘take back control’ (ignoring other legal constraints, and reputational damage), dismissing warnings of what it would mean for Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement, blithely assuming easy agreements being made with other countries etc. Farage even cites Australia as a model for his mass deportation policy.
It’s equally easy to imagine how, if they get their way about the ECHR, and all the promises prove false, they will say it has ‘not been done properly’, or has been ‘betrayed’. It’s even easy to imagine some of the precise ways they will do so: ‘of course, we promised a British Bill of Rights, but we never dreamt that the activist lawyers and unelected Establishment politicians in the House of Lords would slip in provisions which sabotaged the will of the people’.
So there are obvious reasons to challenge those advocating ECHR derogation but, as with the immigration ‘debate’, that challenge can only be weakened by the way that Starmer (and Mahmood) are now talking about the need to reform how the Convention is applied within British courts. It’s possible there is a case for this (I don’t know, but I have heard some perfectly reasonable legal experts suggest this is so), but at the present moment it is highly impolitic to pursue it. Doing so immediately concedes to the Brexitists that there is a ‘problem’, and immediately sets up their ability to claim that only they have a sufficiently robust solution (somewhat akin to the way that David Cameron’s pre-referendum ‘re-negotiation’ with the EU rebounded on him).
Farage’s friends
Immigration aside, there is also much more mileage to be got from attacking the Brexitists for their overseas affiliations. The madness unfolding in Trump’s US offers a clear warning of what the Reform Party would mean if it came to power in Westminster, as can already be glimpsed in its misguided attempts to emulate Musk’s DOGE in its local councils. And the way that Farage, Badenoch, and Truss (as well as by Trump and Musk) lauded Javier Milei’s catastrophic economic policies in Argentina is an equally clear warning of what a Reform or Reform-Conservative government would do to the economy.
More than anything, the deep connections between Russia and Farage can only grow in salience as Putin’s aggressive incursions into European air space and cyber-space continue to intensify, leading the former head of MI5 to posit this week that, in a sense, Britain and Russia are already at war. Those connections, and with them Russia’s persistent attempts to interfere in British politics, have been freshly illustrated by the conviction of Reform’s former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, who has pleaded guilty to eight charges of taking bribes to make pro-Russia statements when he was an MEP.
It's clear that Farage and his allies have been rattled by these developments, making persistent, but flawed, attempts to disown or deny his connections with Gill. But it is Starmer’s accusation of racism which has really hit home, leading to utterly absurd claims that, in making it, he was “inciting violence” against Farage, exposing him to the risk of a ‘Charlie Kirk’ attack. Richard Tice even repeatedly cited a fabricated quote from Starmer's conference speech to suggest, ludicrously as well as mendaciously, that it was an invitation to "Antifa" (the non-existent US 'terrorist organization') to "come at Nigel Farage". It is a reminder of the backwash from the US to the UK of the Kirk killing, and, as I discussed last week, of the utterly hypocritical attempt by the far right to allow itself to use the most violent rhetoric imaginable against its opponents, in the name of ‘free speech’, whilst squealing that literally anything said of it (and, in this case, not said) by those opponents is dangerously inflammatory.
Clearly ambiguous
So, even in the space of a fortnight, something significant has happened, although the extent of that significance remains an open question. On the one hand, the battle lines are clearer, and the government has made them so. On other hand, whilst that has been widely acknowledged in most recent political commentary, that commentary also reveals the continuing ambiguity of Labour’s position.
At one level, that is an ambiguity about its position with respect to voters. Thus in the Economist, Bagehot (Duncan Robinson) argues (£) that Labour has stopped “punching its own voters”, meaning that it has moved to cement its socially-liberal, middle-class, educated flank. But in the Financial Times (£) it is suggested that Starmer has sought to secure “the party’s working-class base” and offered a “defiantly ‘Blue Labour’” message. It can’t be both of these things and, to the extent it is ambiguous, it might well end up being neither. Much will depend on whether recent messaging is followed-up, or whether it will prove to be just another temporary tactic which never develops into a fully-fledged strategy.
At a deeper level, the ambiguity is about Labour’s position about Brexitism, and that ambiguity carries the same dangers. If Starmer is now persuaded that the “soul of Britain” is at stake he will need to remove all ambiguity.
Notes
[1] Miliband’s basic point was correct, although it is worth recalling that Musk has pointedly criticized Farage whilst openly giving support to Tommy Robinson.
[2] It's worth saying, given the present atmosphere of premature speculation, that we are a long way from the next election, and current opinion polls may not be very relevant to it, especially as tactical voting (in particular against Reform) makes the link between national polls and constituency outcomes more uncertain. There is a fascinating discussion of the current political situation, digging deep into an issue I’ve touched in the past, the relationship between changing social class patterns and political parties, in Professor Ben Ansell’s latest Political Calculus Substack.
[3] It remains the case that nothing concrete has actually been ‘reset’ as yet. So there seems little basis for Rachel Reeves’ suggestion that the OBR should factor it into its growth forecasts (and, if and when the reset occurs then, on the current best estimate, provided by John Springford of CER, the impact would be small, perhaps, at most, 0.7% of GDP over ten years).
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