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.
Friday, 17 October 2025
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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