It was always inevitable that once Britain had left the EU it would become more and more difficult to keep tabs on what Brexit means. The consequences are so diffuse, so varied and, often, so technically abstruse as to certainly be beyond the abilities of any one person to catalogue. Many of those consequences are economic, but perhaps the most difficult to chart are the ways Brexit is re-forming British politics [1].
It was also inevitable that Brexit would become bound up with ongoing international politics, as the UK sought a reformation of its relationships not just with the EU but within the international order generally. What couldn’t have been predicted, even until very recently, was how that international order was going to be so radically upended, making Brexit at once something rather minor and yet recasting it as a moving part within something so major.
Framing events
All of which is a rather longwinded way of saying that it is becoming increasingly difficult to write this blog, and that the ‘beyond’ parts of its ‘Brexit and Beyond’ title increasingly overweigh the narrowly ‘Brexit’ parts. Both nationally and internationally, the ‘beyond’ issues are now inextricably linked with Trump and the new global divide I wrote about in my previous post. There have been any number of news stories about this global divide in the last fortnight, most of which can be framed through four inter-related questions:
· To what extent will it lead to closer defence and security integration between the EU and the UK, including integration of military operations, equipment procurement, intelligence sharing etc., and under what terms would/ could these occur?
· If such EU-UK defence integration happens, will it be accompanied by, and perhaps make more extensive than might otherwise have been envisaged, deeper economic and regulatory integration?
· Would EU-UK integration in either or both of these senses be precluded by, or go alongside, a divergence in how each partner related to the US, for example and in particular as regards some form of UK-US ‘economic deal’ struck (including perhaps exemption from Trump tariffs) at the same time as the EU-US relationship becomes more hostile (including perhaps a prolonged trade war)?
· To what extent is the US going to detach itself so far from international norms and constitutional propriety as to make it impossible for the UK to sustain anything resembling a normal relationship with it (whether because US malfeasance becomes too gross for the UK to ignore, or because the US turns decisively and aggressively on the UK)?
At least some answers to these questions are likely to emerge over the next couple of months. Meanwhile, there is, arguably, little point in trying to read the runes of every report of every meeting and statement to try to anticipate what these answers will be.
Looking further ahead, new questions will emerge, some of which by definition cannot be predicted, not least because so many of the key actors, especially Trump, are unpredictable in their very nature. But perhaps the most predictable question (though not its answer) is what would happen, including, especially, how would Trump react, if Putin commits new acts of aggression, and in particular if these are committed against the personnel or territory of a NATO member?
An important sub-set of this question is what would happen if the UK (along with other countries) deploys some form of ‘peace-keeping’ force in Ukraine and it comes under direct Russian attack? At that point, certainly if the US fails to give military backing, then we will be in a dramatically new and dangerous situation, which will make Brexit, even in its most extensive meanings, a triviality.
The Reform fiasco
Meanwhile, and to some extent connected, the effects of Brexit on domestic politics continue to unfold. Of these, currently the most fascinating is the colossal mess that Reform UK has got into. That’s not say it is particularly surprising, for all the reasons which led me to write, immediately after last year’s general election result, that “it would not be absurdly risky to bet on Reform imploding before we get to the next election”. True, it hasn’t imploded yet, but, then again, we are less than a year into the electoral cycle.
The continuing presence of Nigel Farage and a Farageist party is, perhaps first and foremost, a reminder of David Cameron’s disastrously ill-judged attempt to see off the threat of UKIP by holding the referendum in 2016. It is arguable that this was not the sole reason the referendum was held, but it is unarguable that it was high on the list. The failure of that decision was, with bitter irony, a double one: not only did it unleash the disaster of Brexit, it also installed Farage and Farageism as a central part of the political landscape, and it did so to the detriment not just of the Tory Party but of British politics generally.
Farage’s continuing presence is also a reminder of his dishonesty and egotism. After all, he resigned UKIP’s leadership shortly after the referendum, his political ambitions supposedly achieved, only to go on to create the Brexit Party and then Reform. No doubt he would present that as ‘defending Brexit’ from ‘betrayal’, but his decision not to challenge Tory incumbents in the 2019 election opened the door for Boris Johnson to enact Brexit in a form which Farage regards as, precisely, a betrayal and a failure. Lacking even that avowed purpose, Reform exists as a rag-bag of populist complaints, most centrally about immigration, as well as being a fresh vehicle for his ego. British populism did not just bring Brexit about, it was also, itself, changed by Brexit since it lost what had been its defining cause.
There’s every reason to think that Farage’s ego, and more specifically his difficult and unpleasant character, is a big part of the current fiasco within Reform. After all, there is a very long list of people he has fallen out with during his political career. It’s true that, looking at some of the names on that list, it isn’t hard to imagine there were, to say the very least, faults on both sides. For that matter his current colleagues, including his fellow MPs, are not exactly the sort of people that anyone half-sane would want to go camping with. Even so, it is hard to deny, and easy to imagine, that Farage is an almost impossible person to work with. Yet, like it or not (and many of his present and former allies are clearly amongst those who do not), his character has a public appeal that no one else on the populist right of British politics enjoys.
Farage’s political strategy
However there has always been more to Farage’s capacity to mobilize significant numbers of voters than his character (or, perhaps more accurately, his persona). Whatever party he has led, he has had a clear strategic sense about the nature of those voters and what appeals to them. He accurately recognized that weirdos like Godfrey Bloom or Gerard Batten did not have that appeal, regardless of their beliefs, but he also recognizes that he himself would not have that appeal if he were openly to embrace far-right politics. Farage’s political skill, and it is a considerable one, is to appear ‘normal’, even genial, and ‘sensible’, even reasonable, in order to appeal to relatively mainstream voters, whilst being convincing to those on the far right who can hear his ‘dog whistles’ (I wish there was a less clichéd term than that).
In this sense, the current blow up should be understood as being about much more than personalities, for all that they are relevant. It is actually about two, related, matters of substance which derive from Farage’s political strategy. One is the autocratic and undemocratic way in which he runs Reform. Whilst this, too, no doubt reflects his character, it also reflects his experience, particularly in UKIP, of a party of what David Cameron in 2006 called “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists”. It was a jibe which was all too obviously true and, although that didn’t matter in terms of UKIP’s core support, it did put a ceiling on what it could achieve electorally. The hastily created Brexit Party had similar problems. Hence, when creating Reform, Farage wanted to be able to exert much more control over his party and that, too, was partly a consequence of Brexit since, unlike UKIP, Reform can’t make use of proportionally representative European elections to build a power base.
The related issue of substance is his determination to ensure that his party’s ‘dog whistles’ to the far right remain just that. This means, firstly, trying to exclude those who do not have his consummate skill in judging how to pitch messages so that only the dogs hear them (or, at least, that they are deniable when anyone else hears them). Even more importantly, it means excluding those who do not even attempt such subterfuge, and are openly on the far right. That certainly doesn’t mean, as Farage likes to claim, that he is somehow engaged in marginalizing the far right: rather, he has sought to harness the far right without frightening off other, less extreme, voters. It is therefore no coincidence that, just as Farage left UKIP in 2018 (having already stood down as leader) over its links with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and the far right, so too are those links central to current events within Reform.
The far-right riots
The immediate roots of these events go back to last summer’s far-right riots and, crucially, to Keir Starmer’s robustness in correctly insisting that they were, indeed, “far-right thuggery”. This caused much outrage on the political right which, whilst largely confected, brought to the fore the relationship between the ‘respectable right’ and far-right extremism. The effect was to expose the two-faced nature of Farage’s entire ‘dog whistle’ strategy of stoking division by, supposedly, ‘just asking questions’ about the causes of the riots whilst insisting that he had never had anything to do with “the Tommy Robinsons and those who genuinely do stir up hatred”.
Shortly afterwards, Robinson was jailed, not in relation to the riots, but for contempt of court and breaking an injunction in relation to his hounding of a Syrian refugee, prompting a far-right rally in his support. Like Farage, Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice disavowed Robinson, but others, most notably Ben Habib, argued, no doubt correctly, that many of those demonstrating were Reform’s ‘own people’. Habib, already bitter about having been ousted as Co-Deputy Leader (hardly, one would have thought, a job title to excite strong feelings) left Reform in November 2024, citing Farage’s autocracy as his main reason but clearly, as I just suggested, this autocracy and the position on Robinson are linked. At all events, Habib has subsequently been vocal in describing Robinson as “a political prisoner”.
By early January, at Reform’s East Midlands Conference, Lee Anderson, the thuggish former Tory MP who is now his new party’s Whip, was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Robinson hecklers. As I wrote on social media at the time, “… the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years (see also Habib's recent resignation). There's a very tricky tightrope between being 'respectable' and being more 'radical' than the Tories.”
Immediately afterwards, and just a day after Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk, who for months had been displaying sympathy for the rioters, and, like Habib, forthright in supporting Robinson as a ‘victim’ and a ‘political prisoner’, denounced Farage as unfit to lead Reform, and went on to suggest, at least, that Rupert Lowe would be a preferable leader. This made Lowe a potential personal threat to Farage whilst also establishing him as a standard bearer for the right of the Reform Party, symbolized not just by his praise for Robinson but by his open advocacy of “mass deportations”.
This, Lowe assured people, would apply ‘only’ to ‘illegal immigrants’, but for Farage such a policy is “politically impossible” and such language is politically unwise, precisely because of its connotations of the ‘send them all home’ repatriation policies of the far right. From this has flowed Lowe’s suspension from the party amid allegations of bullying, which have been reported to the police, and an increasingly sour war of words from leading figures in Reform, as well as a running social media battle between its different factions. At the same time, Farage’s pro-Russian, pro-Trump, and anti-Ukraine positions are, as mentioned in my last post, making him increasingly vulnerable to criticism from both within and outside his party.
Farage exposed
Whilst many of these issues are not new, what is new is that, for the first time, Farage is being pulled apart simultaneously along all of the contradictory fault lines which define his politics. To recapitulate these fault lines: first, there is contradiction between his ‘hail fellow, well met’ public shtick and the ruthlessness with which he pursues his personal ambitions. Second, there is the contradiction between his attempt to pitch to the political ‘mainstream’ whilst dog-whistling to the far right. Third, there is the contradiction between his pretensions to patriotism and his apologism for Putin. Fourth, and most recent, there is the contradiction between his admiration for Trump and Musk and the now open contempt in which he is held by, at least, the latter.
The last of these has a significance which goes beyond Farage and Reform. Although Musk is alone amongst the US radical right in his (ongoing) open criticism of Farage, he is very far from alone in his associated criticisms of the UK. In particular, the idea that last summer’s riots represented the righteous grievance of those forced to live in a multi-cultural society, along with the myth that those who received jail sentences for their actions were being penalized simply for exercising the right to free speech, is now standard in Trumpist circles, and it enfolds the UK into their wider critique of Europe (regardless of Brexit). It was even alluded to by JD Vance when Starmer visited the White House, although the Prime Minister pushed back against it. It is a certainly a standard belief amongst the UK far right, and Reform supporters more generally, including in their endless jibes about ‘two-tier Keir’.
Farage, of course, is happy to join in with much of that, but is now exposed, more than ever before, in the ‘no man’s land’ he has always wanted avoid, whereby he is neither respectable enough nor radical enough. The result is that his ability to hold together a coalition of voters is diminished. Reform voters now split almost exactly three equal ways between those who think the party would do better, worse, or no differently (or don’t know) without Farage as leader, and the percentage of those voters with a favourable view of Farage has fallen from 91% to 73% over just the last month. Yet being able to create, sustain, and grow an electoral coalition matters more than it ever has, because it is only since Brexit that Farage finally managed to become an MP and to lead a Westminster party which, implausibly but not quite ludicrously, has pretensions to government.
Wider implications
The issue here isn’t so much whether Reform, with or without Farage as a leader, loses electoral support. In fact, for all the battles going on within the party, there is no sign yet of a fall in its support in the opinion polls, and, as political scientist Professor Tim Bale has pointed out, that is very likely because it is only a very vocal minority who are engaged in, or by, those battles. The more significant issue is whether it puts a hard cap on the level of support Reform can ever expect to achieve. If so, that probably puts an end to the idea of a Reform electoral breakthrough. That would be consistent with the suggestion of another leading political scientist, Professor Ben Ansell, that, largely because of Trump, populism generally, and Reform’s populism in particular, has reached a peak. It is an analysis cautiously endorsed by political commentator Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times (£).
However, if the party continues to poll even close to the mid-twenties it will continue to exert unpredictable effects within our electoral system, including potentially significant gains in by-elections, local elections, and the Welsh Senedd and Scottish parliament elections. That will mean a continuing temptation for both Tory and Labour parties to pander to the sensibilities of actual or potential Reform voters, anchoring mainstream political debate around their agenda. Moreover, the fact that Reform has, in effect, its own TV channel in GB News, and the puniness of its regulation, gives the party an influence well beyond that of formal political representation. Certainly my suggestion at the time of the riots that they could pave the way for a new and better conversation about immigration has proved hopelessly optimistic.
So none of this makes for a neat picture of the shape of post-Brexit politics, and still less is it the basis for a prediction of the shape of things to come. It doesn’t even tell us much about what Farage’s personal fate will be. But the recent buffeting he has received does show the vulnerabilities of post-Brexit populism in Britain and that Trump’s re-election is proving to pose significant problems for it, rather than, as might have been expected, providing a new confidence. And that isn’t just affecting Farage and Reform. Brexiter Atlanticists like Daniel Hannan are suddenly having to recalibrate to a world in which the US is no longer a trustworthy ally (£) although, of course, being Hannan, he draws the fatuous conclusion that the solution is to revive his CANZUK fantasy.
Ultimately, then, there is less of a disconnect between ‘Brexit’ and ‘Beyond’ than I suggested at the beginning of this post. Brexit was always going to leave a long trail of effects on the British polity, including on advocates like Farage, and on the UK’s relations with the wider world. But that was never going to happen in a vacuum; the world was not going to remain static. As it has turned out, not only has the world changed, but it has done so in ways which have shown Brexit and its advocates to be even more adrift and riven by contradictions than they were in 2016.
Note
[1] Vital as these ‘beyond Brexit’ political consequences are, I do think it is also important to keep at least trying to record the ways in which the dull empirical thud of Brexit, in its most basic meaning, keeps punching the bruises it has already created (especially as Brexit apologists continue to trot out bogus arguments to try to downplay its damage). That, too, is more difficult than it used to be as media reporting of the basics has become much sparser. It just isn’t newsworthy any more, unless there is some major anniversary. Nevertheless, some stories make it through, including the report from the Food and Drink Federation that British exports of food and drink to the EU have fallen by a whopping 34.1% since 2019. Circuitously related is the growing awareness of the possibility of food shortages when ‘Phase 3’ labelling rules come into force in Northern Ireland in July under the Windsor Framework (with a concomitant extension of ‘Not for Sale in the EU’ labelling in Great Britain). And circuitously related to that are concerns about impending shortages of animal medicines in Northern Ireland. This is a particularly arcane issue, reaching deep back into the Brexit process, and relating to the way that parts of the original Northern Ireland Protocol were made subject to ‘grace periods’ for implementation. Animal medicines were one product area where implementation was deferred but, unlike human medicines, they were not included in the subsequent Windsor Framework agreement. Now, the already extended grace period is due to expire at the end of the year and, as yet, there is no agreement in place. It is yet another reminder of the consequences of the rush to ‘get Brexit done’, and the many loose ends which are still hanging as a result. As I mentioned in last week’s post, the situation of Gibraltar is another, even bigger, example of that.
Friday, 21 March 2025
Friday, 7 March 2025
The new global divide makes Brexit an anomaly
The new global divide I’ve been talking about in recent posts has deepened very sharply again since my most recent one. It is a divide that is likely to become as profound as that of the Cold War and, although it doesn’t yet have a snappy name, its existence has been recognized by just about every political commentator. Something very basic has shifted, summed up by the headline to Martin Wolf’s recent Financial Times article (£): “The US is now the enemy of the West”. As a result, according to former Ambassador Sir David Manning, there is a “seismic change” underway in the UK’s relationship with the US.
That has happened quickly, and in ways which are unfolding daily, if not hourly, around the world. In the UK, with almost equal rapidity, it is beginning to shift the tectonic plates of politics, and in particular the shape of post-Brexit politics, in line with this new global divide. However, although the global consequences are alarming and potentially horrific, the impact on British politics may in some ways be positive.
The new global divide
At stake, as recently discussed on Professor Ben Ansell’s Radio 4 strand, Rethink, may be the survival of liberalism itself. That is a useful way to frame things, because it is not just ‘liberal’ journalists and writers in the ‘Establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ media who do so. It is equally explicit amongst ‘radical right’ populists and their Putinist allies that their project is to fight and destroy the liberal order in domestic and international politics. In an era when, often, it seems as if the competing sides cannot even agree on the most basic of facts, or the most basic rules of logic, on this one, overarching, issue they are at one.
I’ve pointed in recent posts to some of the ways that Brexit relates to this new divide, but it is worth spelling out how it sits squarely within the ‘anti-liberal’ camp. At the most basic level, support for Brexit is one of the many things Trump and Putin share. Beyond that, Brexit and the anti-liberal axis share the same hubristic nationalism, the same quasi-mystical invocation of ‘the people’, the same vicious anger against ‘the liberal elite’ and the ‘globalist establishment’, the same xenophobia, the same nostalgia for an imagined past, the same self-pitying victimhood, and, of course, the same loathing of the EU. They also share many of the same rhetorical strategies, especially that of promulgating false, often convoluted, claims as truth and then, when they are challenged, using that very challenge to ‘prove’ that there is at least ‘something to be debated’ in those falsities.
But if this consonance were all there were to it, then the current situation would look very different. Post-Brexit Britain would be neatly dovetailing into the Trump-Putin side of the new divide. It would, to take an important recent illustration of that divide, have voted with the US, Russia, Belarus, and North Korea in their opposition to the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Or at the very least, it would have abstained, like China. Of course, in that situation, many British people would be horrified by what their country had become, just as many Americans are horrified by what the US has become, but, with Brexit, as with Trump’s re-election, the die would have been cast.
Britain agrees its position
That isn’t the situation, though, and in fact the UK voted with all the other liberal countries, including Japan, Canada, Australia etc. as well as those in Europe. And this is because, although Brexit has happened – the UK has left the EU – it does not entirely define Britain, certainly not in the way that Brexiters had hoped and expected. The reasons for that are complex, but obviously include the fact that Brexit was so narrowly supported in the first place, and that for almost the entire period since it happened it has been supported by only a dwindling minority. As I’ve remarked before, having won the referendum, the Brexiters went on to lose the battle for the post-Brexit narrative.
Allied to this is the fact that most of the tenets of liberalism, both in international relations and domestic politics, whilst taking a battering from Brexit, have survived, sometimes precariously, in the UK. Most particularly, British support for Ukraine, both as a matter of principle and because geography makes it vital to national security, is strong and popular. That, in turn, is reflected in the way that most Brexiters, especially within the Tory Party, unlike Trump and the US radical right, are supportive of Ukraine, hostile to Putin, and pro-NATO.
For this reason, politicians of almost all parties, including populist Conservatives, condemned the literally stomach-turning bullying to which Voldymyr Zelensky was subjected by Trump and JD Vance. It’s too early to be sure, but I have a strong sense that this was a turning point for the British public, and it certainly united the British press in revulsion. That revulsion came even closer to home when Vance made dismissive comments about, apparently, the British military (although he later denied they were the target), something which caused genuine anger cutting across political divisions, including that of remainers and leavers. Probably nothing could have done so much to cement the view that the US under Trump has become a nasty, rude, and hostile power.
At all events there is now a new political consensus emerging in response to the choices Trump has forced upon us. For example, even if we had a Conservative government, it would all but certainly have voted the same way as the Labour administration did in the UN vote. More generally, the Conservatives have both supported and praised Starmer’s general handling of what the eminent War Studies Professor Lawrence Freedman has called “the great crisis”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, with his open admiration of Putin and Trump, his apologism for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and his support for the bullying of Zelensky has become an outlier, even amongst most of his own supporters, never mind the country as a whole [1].
The limits of choice
All of this means that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK remains in its values, interests, and allegiances a ‘liberal European’ country. However, the UK, under any government, and with or without Brexit, is not able simply to align ‘against’ the US. Trump may have made his country the enemy of the West, but many countries in the West, not just the UK, cannot make themselves the enemy of America. That is one reason why the last few weeks have been so profoundly shocking. For the UK, specifically, the scale of its trade and investment relationship with the US, and the scope of its defence and security relationship, make it impossible to undertake such a re-alignment, certainly in any short timescale.
Those relationships reach deep into the central, and the most secret, parts of the British state, including its nuclear capacity (although the common claim that the UK does not have operational independence in the use of is nuclear weapons, or requires ‘codes’ from the US to do so, would seem to be a myth) and, perhaps most profoundly of all, its intelligence capacity. Regarding the latter, former diplomat Arthur Snell has argued that, especially with respect to signals intelligence (sigint), there is almost no way of effectively detaching the UK capability from that of the US. If there is, it will take time. The US is by far the senior partner of the ‘Five Eyes’ partnership (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which shares both facilities and yields of sigint operations and, as such, is vital to the UK for military, counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and others purposes.
This makes it all the more concerning that at least some in the US administration are pushing to exclude Canada from the Five Eyes (£), in the context of the wider economic and political aggression Trump is directing at Ottawa. The threat may well come to nothing, but it is a reminder, not least to the UK, of the hazards of being dependent on the caprice of a partner that is no longer a friend. It is also one of many indications that Trump’s America is vindictive and bullying to those it perceives negatively, whether for being enemies, or parasites, or competitors, or weak, or just for having in some way offended against Trump’s pathologically colossal vanity. (This link, to a free-to-view piece by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is well worth reading for a sense of the horror of what Trump is doing, and why.)
That is why Keir Starmer will go on publicly insisting – as any British Prime Minister would, with or without Brexit – that there is ‘no choice’ to be made between the UK’s relations with the US and those with Europe, and that the US remains a reliable ally. They are necessary diplomatic fictions. It is why anyone expecting to see a dramatic big gesture from Starmer, denouncing Trump for the disgrace he is, will be disappointed. It is why we witnessed the sphincter-tightening spectacle of Starmer having to subject himself to stiltedly lavishing praise on Trump, in return for some tepid compliments delivered with barely concealed contempt. It is why he invited Trump for a State Visit which, for all the growing opposition to it, will almost certainly go ahead. And it is why, when it does, King Charles will grit his teeth and smile. The rest of us should just be grateful we don’t have to do the same.
The realities of sovereignty
What we are actually seeing is a hard lesson in the reality of what sovereignty and the limits to sovereignty mean. The Brexiters were and are entirely deluded to think that this reality has anything to do with the ‘imposition’ of Brussels regulations on widgets – regulations made, when we were an EU member, with the UK having a prominent and respected voice. A far better illustration is the way that the British Prime Minister literally dares not speak anything close to the truth to or about the US President for fear of being publicly humiliated and the nation punished. Similarly, whereas leading British politicians were able to liken the EU to Nazis or the Soviet Union with impunity, no such politician, and certainly no serving government minister, would dare say the same of Trump’s America.
Of course, there is nothing new in the disparity between US and UK power, and there have been previous occasions, most obviously the Suez crisis, where that has been humiliatingly revealed. The US has the power to coerce us and to hurt us. The difference under Trump is that he would be quite willing to do so on the flimsiest of pretexts, in the most brutal of ways, and would enjoy it. What was once a power imbalance within a broadly reliable alliance has now become a power play within something more like a mediaeval court in which Britain is a minor, ageing aristocrat. And there’s not much we can do about it. It is no good reaching for the historical analogy of 1930s appeasement here. When Imperial Britain faced the threat of Nazi Germany, it did not face an adversary with which the bulk of its military and intelligence capacity was intertwined, or one which dwarfed it in resources.
Similarly, the answer to the question posed by George Monbiot in the Guardian last week – what if Britain had to defend itself militarily against the US? – is depressingly obvious: we couldn’t. However, we aren’t in this situation, but in a different and perhaps more complex one [2]. Crazy as this US administration is, it is not bent on going to war with the UK or Europe. The military threat comes from Russia, and from the withdrawal of reliable US security guarantees to deter that threat. Here the appeasement analogy does apply, in that if, with US complicity, Ukraine is dismembered and subjugated, Russia will be emboldened to go after other European countries, both directly and indirectly, including the UK. (Indeed, the Brexit sovereigntists seem remarkably sanguine about Russia’s many incursions into UK territory as if it were metric measurements, rather than these acts of territorial aggression, which were the most real and pressing threats to British sovereignty.)
Minor powers
Equally, for all the real constraints on what the UK can say or do to the US, it is not completely powerless and, as a matter of fact, Starmer is being far from supine. There are several illustrations of that, including the way the UK voted at the UN. Related to that, Starmer has been insistent, despite Trump’s brazen lies to the contrary, that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine. Another example is the way that, during his Washington visit, he pushed back against Vance’s barbed comment about lack of freedom of speech in the UK (this is one of the many alt-right canards about both Starmer and Britain, heavily promulgated by Elon Musk). Then, at this week’s PMQs, he unfussily but pointedly issued an implicit reprimand to Vance for his own implicit dismissiveness of the British military.
Most prominent of all, the warmth with which Starmer welcomed Zelensky to the UK just a few hours after the Ukrainian leader’s appalling treatment in America, and the immediate arrangement of a meeting with King Charles, were clear rebukes to Trump, even if not vocalized as such. Moreover, no one could miss the contrast of the genuine regard between Starmer and Zelensky with the precarious brittleness of the Starmer-Trump meeting. These things are probably as far as the UK can do without attracting Trump’s ire; it may even be that they go beyond it.
Starmer and the UK also have some cards to play with the US which, though they shouldn’t be over-stated, are not entirely negligible. For all that it is very much the junior partner, the UK does contribute some things the US needs, with sigint capacity being one. And whilst Trump is undoubtedly too self-involved and too ignorant to do so, there are still some US Republicans who recall with gratitude the UK’s support after 9/11 and even, for those with longer memories, the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. (I make no comment on those things in themselves, just the point that they still carry some meaning for some in the US.) Even the ghost of Churchill still has some residual currency, as the (re-) placement of his bust in the Oval Office attests.
In that respect, it is perhaps telling that Vance felt obliged to deny that he had been referring to the UK (or France) in those scornful comments about the militaries of ‘random countries’. He can hardly have done so because he had been misunderstood, since no other countries have yet proposed to deploy troops to Ukraine. And there is nothing in his character to suggest he did so out of personal graciousness, still less from any sense of shame. So the implication is that there is still some vestigial realization in the White House that it cannot be totally disrespectful to its notional allies, at least in public.
The way ahead
Be all that as it may, what is certainly the case is that over time, without publicly admitting there is a choice being made, the UK is going to increase its contributions to, and deepen its relations with, a massively re-vamped EU and European defence capacity and, in the process, reduce its dependence on the US. Indeed, Trump can hardly object to that, since it is what he has asked for and, in doing so, differs from previous US administrations only in the brutality and crudity of his demands.
It is now becoming clear to many commentators that, as I wrote exactly a month ago:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel.”
It is far too early to know where this will lead, but last weekend’s convenorship of a meeting involving the EU, most of its members states, Turkey, Canada, and Ukraine was a clear example that Starmer is trying to grasp this opportunity. And already he and Britain are attracting appreciative comments from other European leaders, something that hasn’t happened for long enough.
But none of this is going to be easy, and it certainly isn’t going to be pretty. Those who are squeamish about realpolitik and who like their politics to be morally-elevated had better look away for the next few years. That doesn’t just apply to the UK, but here it will include the fact that, like it or not, Starmer is going to make use of not being in the EU in various ways. That will include using the symbolism of that as a way of getting heard in a White House that loathes the EU, something which has already enabled Farage to claim, predictably but misleadingly, that we are seeing some kind of benefit of Brexit [3]. It may include some kind of substantive agreement to avoid new tariffs and, perhaps, to develop an AI regime in conjunction with the US, rather than with the EU. Personally, I’m not convinced these things will happen, but they will certainly continue to be talked about.
The trick for the UK will be to combine this not just with getting closer to the EU on defence, but with effecting the most maximalist version of the 'reset' (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, fully implementing the existing agreements with the EU, including the Windsor Framework, as well as completing the still unresolved, and apparently stalled, negotiations over Gibraltar). This in turn means the careful curation of relationships with other countries, within and beyond Europe, to defuse any sense that the UK is selling them out by making some agreements with the US. As such it will call for extremely astute diplomacy, but it is not an impossible task, since other national leaders understand perfectly well the difficulties of navigating relations with Trump.
Moreover, none of this is going to be cheap. The recent announcement of increased defence spending is only the beginning of what needs to come and the fraught political choices this will entail have yet to be faced up to.
Back to Brexit
In these ways, our country is going to have to simultaneously placate a dangerously unpredictable US whilst acting on the consequences of it now being undeniable that Europe is where the UK belongs. The great fantasy of Brexit, and its central strategic folly, of thinking otherwise has now been exposed, far more dramatically and suddenly than by Brexit itself. That is now becoming accepted, at least according to the commentator Janan Ganesh, even by British Conservatives. Indeed, for at least some of them, the new situation creates a welcome way out of the cul-de-sac which Brexit has taken them, not least as regards electoral strategy.
As the veteran international politics sage Philip Stephens puts it, “Trump’s America has made its choice”. In doing so, it has imposed one on the UK which, though ragged, in that it can’t be made through a single decision at a single moment, could through a series of decisions gradually re-integrate us with the EU. For within this new global divide, it is crystal clear that Brexit is an anomaly, a policy which belongs on one side of that divide yet is being pursued by a country located on the other side. At the very least, the Brexiters’ claim, which was always flawed, that the EU is irrelevant to the UK’s security needs and that these were fully catered for by NATO, has now been exposed as disastrously false.
This doesn’t, in itself, mean that rejoining the EU is on the political agenda, but it does make the timescale for that being a realistic possibility shorter than seemed likely even a fortnight ago. It already cements the pre-existing public sense that Brexit was a terrible error. So, frightening and disorientating as the last few weeks have been, I think there are at least some grounds for hope. Trump feels like a disaster, and in general terms that feeling is well-founded. But for post-Brexit Britain he might just be a reprieve.
Notes
[1] This could turn out to be one of the most important, and most positive, domestic consequences of the new global situation, sidelining Farage for the first time for decades. Subscribers to Byline Times can read some of my initial thoughts about this in the next issue (April 2025), and I am sure I will write much more about it, here, in the future.
[2] Thus those who, in comments on one of my recent posts, thought I was anticipating, or even advocating, the UK ‘standing up to’ the US militarily entirely misunderstood me. It may well be true, though, that there are inconsistencies in the content and tone of my recent posts but, if so, I think that is understandable – even inevitable - given the rapidity with which events are unfolding.
[3] It is misleading because although it is possible that the UK being out of the EU helps to get a hearing from Trump a) it is wrong to claim that this is because the UK now has an independent foreign policy, because it always did; b) any gain from that is offset by the very much reduced influence the UK has within the EU; c) it is only because Trump is so bent out of shape about the EU rather than being because Brexit has, in general terms, given the UK any benefits in its relationship with the US; and d) precisely because Trump is Trump it doesn’t count for much anyway. He’s perfectly likely, if he takes umbrage at something, to turn on the UK, Brexit or no Brexit. Hence the need to tip-toe around his freakshow vanities.
That has happened quickly, and in ways which are unfolding daily, if not hourly, around the world. In the UK, with almost equal rapidity, it is beginning to shift the tectonic plates of politics, and in particular the shape of post-Brexit politics, in line with this new global divide. However, although the global consequences are alarming and potentially horrific, the impact on British politics may in some ways be positive.
The new global divide
At stake, as recently discussed on Professor Ben Ansell’s Radio 4 strand, Rethink, may be the survival of liberalism itself. That is a useful way to frame things, because it is not just ‘liberal’ journalists and writers in the ‘Establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ media who do so. It is equally explicit amongst ‘radical right’ populists and their Putinist allies that their project is to fight and destroy the liberal order in domestic and international politics. In an era when, often, it seems as if the competing sides cannot even agree on the most basic of facts, or the most basic rules of logic, on this one, overarching, issue they are at one.
I’ve pointed in recent posts to some of the ways that Brexit relates to this new divide, but it is worth spelling out how it sits squarely within the ‘anti-liberal’ camp. At the most basic level, support for Brexit is one of the many things Trump and Putin share. Beyond that, Brexit and the anti-liberal axis share the same hubristic nationalism, the same quasi-mystical invocation of ‘the people’, the same vicious anger against ‘the liberal elite’ and the ‘globalist establishment’, the same xenophobia, the same nostalgia for an imagined past, the same self-pitying victimhood, and, of course, the same loathing of the EU. They also share many of the same rhetorical strategies, especially that of promulgating false, often convoluted, claims as truth and then, when they are challenged, using that very challenge to ‘prove’ that there is at least ‘something to be debated’ in those falsities.
But if this consonance were all there were to it, then the current situation would look very different. Post-Brexit Britain would be neatly dovetailing into the Trump-Putin side of the new divide. It would, to take an important recent illustration of that divide, have voted with the US, Russia, Belarus, and North Korea in their opposition to the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Or at the very least, it would have abstained, like China. Of course, in that situation, many British people would be horrified by what their country had become, just as many Americans are horrified by what the US has become, but, with Brexit, as with Trump’s re-election, the die would have been cast.
Britain agrees its position
That isn’t the situation, though, and in fact the UK voted with all the other liberal countries, including Japan, Canada, Australia etc. as well as those in Europe. And this is because, although Brexit has happened – the UK has left the EU – it does not entirely define Britain, certainly not in the way that Brexiters had hoped and expected. The reasons for that are complex, but obviously include the fact that Brexit was so narrowly supported in the first place, and that for almost the entire period since it happened it has been supported by only a dwindling minority. As I’ve remarked before, having won the referendum, the Brexiters went on to lose the battle for the post-Brexit narrative.
Allied to this is the fact that most of the tenets of liberalism, both in international relations and domestic politics, whilst taking a battering from Brexit, have survived, sometimes precariously, in the UK. Most particularly, British support for Ukraine, both as a matter of principle and because geography makes it vital to national security, is strong and popular. That, in turn, is reflected in the way that most Brexiters, especially within the Tory Party, unlike Trump and the US radical right, are supportive of Ukraine, hostile to Putin, and pro-NATO.
For this reason, politicians of almost all parties, including populist Conservatives, condemned the literally stomach-turning bullying to which Voldymyr Zelensky was subjected by Trump and JD Vance. It’s too early to be sure, but I have a strong sense that this was a turning point for the British public, and it certainly united the British press in revulsion. That revulsion came even closer to home when Vance made dismissive comments about, apparently, the British military (although he later denied they were the target), something which caused genuine anger cutting across political divisions, including that of remainers and leavers. Probably nothing could have done so much to cement the view that the US under Trump has become a nasty, rude, and hostile power.
At all events there is now a new political consensus emerging in response to the choices Trump has forced upon us. For example, even if we had a Conservative government, it would all but certainly have voted the same way as the Labour administration did in the UN vote. More generally, the Conservatives have both supported and praised Starmer’s general handling of what the eminent War Studies Professor Lawrence Freedman has called “the great crisis”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, with his open admiration of Putin and Trump, his apologism for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and his support for the bullying of Zelensky has become an outlier, even amongst most of his own supporters, never mind the country as a whole [1].
The limits of choice
All of this means that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK remains in its values, interests, and allegiances a ‘liberal European’ country. However, the UK, under any government, and with or without Brexit, is not able simply to align ‘against’ the US. Trump may have made his country the enemy of the West, but many countries in the West, not just the UK, cannot make themselves the enemy of America. That is one reason why the last few weeks have been so profoundly shocking. For the UK, specifically, the scale of its trade and investment relationship with the US, and the scope of its defence and security relationship, make it impossible to undertake such a re-alignment, certainly in any short timescale.
Those relationships reach deep into the central, and the most secret, parts of the British state, including its nuclear capacity (although the common claim that the UK does not have operational independence in the use of is nuclear weapons, or requires ‘codes’ from the US to do so, would seem to be a myth) and, perhaps most profoundly of all, its intelligence capacity. Regarding the latter, former diplomat Arthur Snell has argued that, especially with respect to signals intelligence (sigint), there is almost no way of effectively detaching the UK capability from that of the US. If there is, it will take time. The US is by far the senior partner of the ‘Five Eyes’ partnership (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which shares both facilities and yields of sigint operations and, as such, is vital to the UK for military, counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and others purposes.
This makes it all the more concerning that at least some in the US administration are pushing to exclude Canada from the Five Eyes (£), in the context of the wider economic and political aggression Trump is directing at Ottawa. The threat may well come to nothing, but it is a reminder, not least to the UK, of the hazards of being dependent on the caprice of a partner that is no longer a friend. It is also one of many indications that Trump’s America is vindictive and bullying to those it perceives negatively, whether for being enemies, or parasites, or competitors, or weak, or just for having in some way offended against Trump’s pathologically colossal vanity. (This link, to a free-to-view piece by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is well worth reading for a sense of the horror of what Trump is doing, and why.)
That is why Keir Starmer will go on publicly insisting – as any British Prime Minister would, with or without Brexit – that there is ‘no choice’ to be made between the UK’s relations with the US and those with Europe, and that the US remains a reliable ally. They are necessary diplomatic fictions. It is why anyone expecting to see a dramatic big gesture from Starmer, denouncing Trump for the disgrace he is, will be disappointed. It is why we witnessed the sphincter-tightening spectacle of Starmer having to subject himself to stiltedly lavishing praise on Trump, in return for some tepid compliments delivered with barely concealed contempt. It is why he invited Trump for a State Visit which, for all the growing opposition to it, will almost certainly go ahead. And it is why, when it does, King Charles will grit his teeth and smile. The rest of us should just be grateful we don’t have to do the same.
The realities of sovereignty
What we are actually seeing is a hard lesson in the reality of what sovereignty and the limits to sovereignty mean. The Brexiters were and are entirely deluded to think that this reality has anything to do with the ‘imposition’ of Brussels regulations on widgets – regulations made, when we were an EU member, with the UK having a prominent and respected voice. A far better illustration is the way that the British Prime Minister literally dares not speak anything close to the truth to or about the US President for fear of being publicly humiliated and the nation punished. Similarly, whereas leading British politicians were able to liken the EU to Nazis or the Soviet Union with impunity, no such politician, and certainly no serving government minister, would dare say the same of Trump’s America.
Of course, there is nothing new in the disparity between US and UK power, and there have been previous occasions, most obviously the Suez crisis, where that has been humiliatingly revealed. The US has the power to coerce us and to hurt us. The difference under Trump is that he would be quite willing to do so on the flimsiest of pretexts, in the most brutal of ways, and would enjoy it. What was once a power imbalance within a broadly reliable alliance has now become a power play within something more like a mediaeval court in which Britain is a minor, ageing aristocrat. And there’s not much we can do about it. It is no good reaching for the historical analogy of 1930s appeasement here. When Imperial Britain faced the threat of Nazi Germany, it did not face an adversary with which the bulk of its military and intelligence capacity was intertwined, or one which dwarfed it in resources.
Similarly, the answer to the question posed by George Monbiot in the Guardian last week – what if Britain had to defend itself militarily against the US? – is depressingly obvious: we couldn’t. However, we aren’t in this situation, but in a different and perhaps more complex one [2]. Crazy as this US administration is, it is not bent on going to war with the UK or Europe. The military threat comes from Russia, and from the withdrawal of reliable US security guarantees to deter that threat. Here the appeasement analogy does apply, in that if, with US complicity, Ukraine is dismembered and subjugated, Russia will be emboldened to go after other European countries, both directly and indirectly, including the UK. (Indeed, the Brexit sovereigntists seem remarkably sanguine about Russia’s many incursions into UK territory as if it were metric measurements, rather than these acts of territorial aggression, which were the most real and pressing threats to British sovereignty.)
Minor powers
Equally, for all the real constraints on what the UK can say or do to the US, it is not completely powerless and, as a matter of fact, Starmer is being far from supine. There are several illustrations of that, including the way the UK voted at the UN. Related to that, Starmer has been insistent, despite Trump’s brazen lies to the contrary, that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine. Another example is the way that, during his Washington visit, he pushed back against Vance’s barbed comment about lack of freedom of speech in the UK (this is one of the many alt-right canards about both Starmer and Britain, heavily promulgated by Elon Musk). Then, at this week’s PMQs, he unfussily but pointedly issued an implicit reprimand to Vance for his own implicit dismissiveness of the British military.
Most prominent of all, the warmth with which Starmer welcomed Zelensky to the UK just a few hours after the Ukrainian leader’s appalling treatment in America, and the immediate arrangement of a meeting with King Charles, were clear rebukes to Trump, even if not vocalized as such. Moreover, no one could miss the contrast of the genuine regard between Starmer and Zelensky with the precarious brittleness of the Starmer-Trump meeting. These things are probably as far as the UK can do without attracting Trump’s ire; it may even be that they go beyond it.
Starmer and the UK also have some cards to play with the US which, though they shouldn’t be over-stated, are not entirely negligible. For all that it is very much the junior partner, the UK does contribute some things the US needs, with sigint capacity being one. And whilst Trump is undoubtedly too self-involved and too ignorant to do so, there are still some US Republicans who recall with gratitude the UK’s support after 9/11 and even, for those with longer memories, the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. (I make no comment on those things in themselves, just the point that they still carry some meaning for some in the US.) Even the ghost of Churchill still has some residual currency, as the (re-) placement of his bust in the Oval Office attests.
In that respect, it is perhaps telling that Vance felt obliged to deny that he had been referring to the UK (or France) in those scornful comments about the militaries of ‘random countries’. He can hardly have done so because he had been misunderstood, since no other countries have yet proposed to deploy troops to Ukraine. And there is nothing in his character to suggest he did so out of personal graciousness, still less from any sense of shame. So the implication is that there is still some vestigial realization in the White House that it cannot be totally disrespectful to its notional allies, at least in public.
The way ahead
Be all that as it may, what is certainly the case is that over time, without publicly admitting there is a choice being made, the UK is going to increase its contributions to, and deepen its relations with, a massively re-vamped EU and European defence capacity and, in the process, reduce its dependence on the US. Indeed, Trump can hardly object to that, since it is what he has asked for and, in doing so, differs from previous US administrations only in the brutality and crudity of his demands.
It is now becoming clear to many commentators that, as I wrote exactly a month ago:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel.”
It is far too early to know where this will lead, but last weekend’s convenorship of a meeting involving the EU, most of its members states, Turkey, Canada, and Ukraine was a clear example that Starmer is trying to grasp this opportunity. And already he and Britain are attracting appreciative comments from other European leaders, something that hasn’t happened for long enough.
But none of this is going to be easy, and it certainly isn’t going to be pretty. Those who are squeamish about realpolitik and who like their politics to be morally-elevated had better look away for the next few years. That doesn’t just apply to the UK, but here it will include the fact that, like it or not, Starmer is going to make use of not being in the EU in various ways. That will include using the symbolism of that as a way of getting heard in a White House that loathes the EU, something which has already enabled Farage to claim, predictably but misleadingly, that we are seeing some kind of benefit of Brexit [3]. It may include some kind of substantive agreement to avoid new tariffs and, perhaps, to develop an AI regime in conjunction with the US, rather than with the EU. Personally, I’m not convinced these things will happen, but they will certainly continue to be talked about.
The trick for the UK will be to combine this not just with getting closer to the EU on defence, but with effecting the most maximalist version of the 'reset' (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, fully implementing the existing agreements with the EU, including the Windsor Framework, as well as completing the still unresolved, and apparently stalled, negotiations over Gibraltar). This in turn means the careful curation of relationships with other countries, within and beyond Europe, to defuse any sense that the UK is selling them out by making some agreements with the US. As such it will call for extremely astute diplomacy, but it is not an impossible task, since other national leaders understand perfectly well the difficulties of navigating relations with Trump.
Moreover, none of this is going to be cheap. The recent announcement of increased defence spending is only the beginning of what needs to come and the fraught political choices this will entail have yet to be faced up to.
Back to Brexit
In these ways, our country is going to have to simultaneously placate a dangerously unpredictable US whilst acting on the consequences of it now being undeniable that Europe is where the UK belongs. The great fantasy of Brexit, and its central strategic folly, of thinking otherwise has now been exposed, far more dramatically and suddenly than by Brexit itself. That is now becoming accepted, at least according to the commentator Janan Ganesh, even by British Conservatives. Indeed, for at least some of them, the new situation creates a welcome way out of the cul-de-sac which Brexit has taken them, not least as regards electoral strategy.
As the veteran international politics sage Philip Stephens puts it, “Trump’s America has made its choice”. In doing so, it has imposed one on the UK which, though ragged, in that it can’t be made through a single decision at a single moment, could through a series of decisions gradually re-integrate us with the EU. For within this new global divide, it is crystal clear that Brexit is an anomaly, a policy which belongs on one side of that divide yet is being pursued by a country located on the other side. At the very least, the Brexiters’ claim, which was always flawed, that the EU is irrelevant to the UK’s security needs and that these were fully catered for by NATO, has now been exposed as disastrously false.
This doesn’t, in itself, mean that rejoining the EU is on the political agenda, but it does make the timescale for that being a realistic possibility shorter than seemed likely even a fortnight ago. It already cements the pre-existing public sense that Brexit was a terrible error. So, frightening and disorientating as the last few weeks have been, I think there are at least some grounds for hope. Trump feels like a disaster, and in general terms that feeling is well-founded. But for post-Brexit Britain he might just be a reprieve.
Notes
[1] This could turn out to be one of the most important, and most positive, domestic consequences of the new global situation, sidelining Farage for the first time for decades. Subscribers to Byline Times can read some of my initial thoughts about this in the next issue (April 2025), and I am sure I will write much more about it, here, in the future.
[2] Thus those who, in comments on one of my recent posts, thought I was anticipating, or even advocating, the UK ‘standing up to’ the US militarily entirely misunderstood me. It may well be true, though, that there are inconsistencies in the content and tone of my recent posts but, if so, I think that is understandable – even inevitable - given the rapidity with which events are unfolding.
[3] It is misleading because although it is possible that the UK being out of the EU helps to get a hearing from Trump a) it is wrong to claim that this is because the UK now has an independent foreign policy, because it always did; b) any gain from that is offset by the very much reduced influence the UK has within the EU; c) it is only because Trump is so bent out of shape about the EU rather than being because Brexit has, in general terms, given the UK any benefits in its relationship with the US; and d) precisely because Trump is Trump it doesn’t count for much anyway. He’s perfectly likely, if he takes umbrage at something, to turn on the UK, Brexit or no Brexit. Hence the need to tip-toe around his freakshow vanities.
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