From Brexit to Brexitism

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

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

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

The current politics of Brexit

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

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

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

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

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

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

The realignment of the political right

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

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

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

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

Beyond the Brexit battles

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

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

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

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

The new battleground of Brexitism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The complicity of the media and the government

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Brexit politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is at stake?

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

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

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