Stasis, sanctimony, and the liberal paradox

Events of the last fortnight are a good illustration of why I recently re-focused and re-titled this blog to Brexit and Brexitism. For the Brexit news, in a narrow sense, is meagre, whereas there is such a profusion of reports of the battle for and against Brexitism that it is hardly possible to discuss them all in a single post.

Brexit: damage and a damaging stasis

On Brexit itself, there has been a new estimate of the economic damage it has wrought, with the publication of a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it is even worse than previous estimates suggested. The authors’ findings, in summary, are that: “We estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12% to 18%, employment by 3% to 4%, and productivity by 3% to 4%.”

As with similar studies, these reductions do not refer to absolute falls in GDP etc., but to the difference between what actually happened to these various measures and estimates of what would have happened otherwise. As such, it is a ‘counterfactual’ study and will undoubtedly be criticised by Brexiters for this, but, as I’ve argued in more detail previously, such studies are the only way of answering what is, by definition, a counterfactual question:  is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU? 

The scale of the damage, now acknowledged by the government, will only be minimally offset by even the most ambitious version of its reset plans. These plans, which started with such a flurry of optimism and energy in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, were reported to have stalled in a sour stand-off over budget contributions between the UK and, not so much the EU as different views amongst EU member states. However, yesterday, the EU agreed a negotiating mandate, opening the path to formal negotiations.

How long these negotiations will take remains unclear. But reaching an agreement, and the sooner the better, matters, especially to UK businesses who stand to benefit most from the reset but perhaps more importantly to both the UK and the EU in terms of the symbolism of creating a more harmonious partnership in the face of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s madness. Also still unresolved, though scarcely ever mentioned in the UK press, is the UK-EU agreement over Gibraltar.

So the Brexit process continues to rumble on, but there is only so much that can be said about something where, at least in terms of publicly available information, not very much is changing.

The many faces of Farage

On the wider terrain of Brexitism, by contrast, there is plenty to be said. One important development has been Nigel Farage’s attempt to articulate Reform’s economic policy, at a news conference held in the City of London. The venue was itself revealing of an underlying tension. Why hold it in the heart of the globalist elite, the wicked metropolis, not Sunderland or Lowestoft? The answer, of course, is that Farage feels the need to show he would be ‘economically responsible’. For this was the day that he ‘bowed to the bond market’ meaning, for one thing, abandoning as mere “aspirations” the huge tax cuts which, only last year, were supposedly part of Reform’s “contract” with the British people. As with every dodgy business, it pays to read the small print of any contract offered by Reform 2025 Ltd and its predecessors.

In abandoning his former commitments, Farage also implicitly abandoned his erstwhile enthusiasm for the Trussonomics of the mini-budget. It says something that a politician who constantly claims to be straight-talking chooses to conceal his core economic beliefs because they are too toxic for public consumption. Farage and his party are equally mealy-mouthed in floating, but not advocating outright, the ideas of reducing the youth minimum wage and ending the triple-lock on state pensions. It’s an old political trick, designed to entice those voters who find policies attractive with the hope they will be delivered, whilst retaining voters who find them unattractive by allowing them to hope these policies will never be put into practice.

The tension also derives from electoral calculation. Farage is desperate to present Reform as a government in waiting, but his core vote isn’t quite enough to assure that outcome, so he needs to broaden his support to take in (in both senses of the term) more mainstream voters. Yet at the same time, his central pitch is to be outside the mainstream of politics and to mobilize an insurgency. Anyone excited by the prospect of that will surely have been sent into a deep and disappointed sleep by the stale ideas of ‘responsible Farage’: vague platitudes about welfare cuts, tax breaks for wealth-creating entrepreneurs, slashing red-tape, bringing business people in to government.

This has been the set menu offered by just about every front-line Tory or Labour politician of the last three or four decades, and even Farage sounded quite bored by it. In fact, he sounded exactly like what he claims not to be, but transparently has been for most of his life: a ‘career politician’. It’s possible that, at some point, ‘responsible Farage’ will spatchcock himself by being insufficiently plausible to those wanting reassurance of his economic orthodoxy whilst alienating those who yearn for political heterodoxy. 

Stale, predictable and contradictory

Equally stale, and even more predictable, were his assertions that Brexit hadn’t been done properly and that Reform would take advantage of the, as always unspecified, deregulatory opportunities it presented. He has chosen to forget how Jacob Rees-Mogg – who, whatever else one might say about him, can hardly be accused of ‘not believing in Brexit’ – had, when Minister for Brexit Opportunities, utterly failed to identify any of value. Indeed, Rees-Mogg even came to realise that, far from cutting red tape, the UKCA mark, that symbol of the fallacy of Brexit regulatory independence, actually increased it.

Farage’s only fresh idea was the spectacularly stupid and dangerous one of making the UK a cryptocurrency hub. This has been a Farage hobby-horse for a while, and one of the few areas where he publicly advocates Trumpian economic policies, which he generally avoided at the press conference (though he is becoming increasingly open in advocating the sexual and reproductive rights agenda of the American Christian right). But quite how it is supposed to represent the interests of the ‘ordinary people’ who ‘just want their country back’ is a mystery [1].

It’s a mystery, moreover, which shows the utter hypocrisy of the man who cos-plays at being a man of the people, the champion of the ‘somewheres’ rather than the ‘anywheres’, whilst trousering £40,000 for ten hours work for Nomad Capitalist (admittedly small beer given the approximately £1.2 million he has earned from second jobs since becoming an MP). As its name implies, Nomad is a “company, which heralds a ‘borderless world’, [and] says it helps people ‘obtain a second residency and second citizenship to enhance your freedom and options’, including second residencies, dual citizenship, and tax residency.”

This recurring tension runs, in various forms, throughout Farage’s ideological and electoral positioning, and throughout Brexitism: seeking political power yet being anti-politics; claiming to be pro-worker and anti-elite whilst courting and supporting the super-rich; espousing both nationalism and globalism, protectionism and free trade, economic growth and reduced immigration; supporting left-behind communities but cutting their public services; bemoaning de-industrialization whilst fetishizing the Thatcher era; parading patriotism whilst endlessly decrying the state of Britain and lauding Trump and Putin. Perhaps these tensions will mean the party implodes rather than comes to power. We must hope so, for what makes Reform incoherent now will make it unconscionable in government.

The anti-BBC axis

If Farage and other Brexitists dislike talking about the details of practical policies, nothing makes them more comfortable than getting stuck in to the culture war. Here, neither positivity nor practicality are necessary, just innuendos, smears and synthetic outrage. Ideal, then, for a politics which thrives on grievance and complaint, rather than responsibility or solutions. With the ‘anti-woke’ ‘Restore Trust’ activists  having last weekend failed yet again in their longstanding attempt to take over the National Trust council, the Brexitists suddenly found an altogether more satisfying victim to torment as the BBC experienced the latest, and most vociferous, populist assault upon it.

The attacks on the National Trust and the BBC are connected in more than just a general ideological sense. For example, one of the leaked complaints about the BBC is based on criticism of it by the ‘History Reclaimed’ group, which has also been at the forefront of criticising the National Trust for its representations of history. And this is also an illustration of why Brexitism is a useful concept, for several of the members of History Reclaimed were members of the 2018 ‘Brains for Brexit’ group. Moreover, one of these, Robert Tombs, is not only the Founder Editor of History Reclaimed but the Co-Editor of ‘Briefings for Britain’ (formerly ‘Briefings for Brexit’), and there are several other overlaps in the writers/ members of these three groupings.

Of course the loathing of the BBC felt by many on the right is longstanding, going back well before Brexit, and is partly animated by fury that a public service broadcaster can be an international byword for excellence and probity, falsifying free market dogma that private is always best. But, for populists, that very fact of the BBC being a public service broadcaster opens the attack line that it does not reflect ‘the people’s values’ but instead those of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. That accusation of ‘institutional bias’ is at the heart of this latest crisis, arising from the presumably not-at-all accidental leak to the Daily Telegraph of a memo (£) written by Michael Prescott, a former independent (though by no means ideologically neutral) editorial adviser, which recycles many of the familiar populist critiques of the Corporation.

Hobbling, or better still breaking, the BBC would be a massive prize for the Brexitists and, because of its international standing, for the entire global populist network. The active involvement of Trump in the current row gives them their best chance ever, even if his threat of a $1 billion lawsuit comes to nothing. It would also be a prize for Vladimir Putin, hence Russia has enthusiastically joined the attack. It’s telling that, in attacking the BBC, the Brexitists, Trump, and Putin are openly aligned, illustrating the axis between them which I’ve written about previously. The reason is that the BBC is indeed ‘liberal’, not in the fatuous sense of being ‘woke’ or biased towards liberal causes but in the deeper sense that it embodies, or seeks to embody, something like the Liberal Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, and pluralism.

The BBC’s liberalism

There’s plenty that could be discussed about those values, which have been criticized as much by the postmodern left as the populist right, but it’s not clear to me, at least, that there is preferable set of values for a public service broadcaster and it’s certainly easy to envisage far worse ones. Nor is it necessary to claim that the BBC always lives up to those values in every part of its huge output in order to sustain the view that they are desirable as principles. It’s certainly grotesque that so much sanctimony is being spouted about what was, undoubtedly, an editorial mistake in relation to the Trump clip by those, including Trump himself, who daily ‘flood the zone’ with dis- and mis-information. Cant rather than Kant, so to speak. But, as Lewis Goodall wrote this week, “we all know it isn’t really about the Panorama edit.”

In their very nature, its values make the BBC liable to endless critique, especially in relation to the complex issue of ‘impartiality’ of political reporting, because such impartiality is itself irredeemably contestable. This leads the BBC into essentially insoluble conundrums, shown by its often misguided attempts to give equal weight to ‘both sides’ of arguments even when they do not warrant such equal treatment, which can be infuriating to people of all kinds of political persuasions, including liberals. But that infuriation is different to the fundamental incompatibility between populism and liberal pluralism [2], which exists because the defining feature of populism is its assertion of the existence of a unitary ‘people’ with a unitary set of ‘common sense’ values: the antithesis of pluralism.

A BBC news and current affairs operation (and, in the present context, it is this, rather than its entertainment operation, which is at stake) run on these lines would look rather like GB News. As such, it could not possibly function as a public service broadcaster precisely because, as a matter of fact, the public are not a single people with a single set of values. The word ‘fact’ is germane in a wider sense, too, since the Liberal Enlightenment commitment to the primacy of rationality and evidence is fundamentally at odds with populism’s valorization of emotion and belief.

Meanwhile, the nihilistic, anti-institutional strand of populism, which makes it different to traditional Conservatism, finds the very existence of the BBC an affront. In fact, to understand what has happened to British Conservatism in recent years, it is instructive to compare the responses to the current BBC row of, respectively, former Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten and former Tory PM Liz Truss, especially as regards the way they talk about institutions and independence. The former speaks pragmatically of their necessary imperfection and the complexities of independence, whilst the latter angrily dismisses them “captured”.

Of course it is a paradox of liberal pluralism generally, and one long understood and exploited by illiberal politicians [3], that it gives succour and sustenance to its most implacable enemies. The BBC exemplifies this since, for all their constant complaints about its bias against them, populist politicians and ideologues are afforded ample, even extravagant, amounts of its air time. The generosity with which the BBC has hosted Nigel Farage, not just now he heads a poll-leading party but for decades, is only the most obvious example. Beyond that are things like the ubiquitous presence of Tufton Street think-tankers or contrarian commentators on every discussion programme from, say, BBC One’s Question Time to Radio Four’s Moral Maze (surely the most flatulently self-important and uninformative show in the entire history of broadcasting, but that’s by the way).

The current crisis further illustrates this paradox. On the one hand, as with every such crisis, it is the BBC itself which provides the most extensive coverage of its own problems, in an orgy of self-flagellation born of a determination not to be seen as aloof and unresponsive and, precisely, a commitment to ‘impartiality’. On the other hand, the very existence of the ‘independent’ editorial adviser at the heart of the row derives from previous attempts by the BBC to show its openness to criticism and to tackle the biases of which it is accused. Indeed, in recent years the BBC has bent over backwards to appease its right-wing critics, to the extent of allowing them a power base of political appointees on its board, and these are the very people who have precipitated this latest crisis.

In short, the BBC has sought to assuage its populist critics by deploying precisely the kind of liberal pluralism which those critics despise and yet upon which they thrive.

The unappeasable

This in turn illustrates something else. Whatever the BBC does it will not satisfy its populist critics, who will always demand more. No resignations, no apologies, no reforms will ever be enough. It can never, as it was advocated to do this week by Tory Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston, “grovel” sufficiently, and the use of this distasteful term was itself revealing. It remains to be seen whether the BBC now realizes this, or whether it will once again try to appease its unappeasable critics.

In this respect, the situation of the BBC is just one, albeit important, example of the bigger problem for liberal pluralism in responding to populism. As we saw with Brexit, every attempt to satisfy Brexiters just led to them demanding an even harder version of Brexit. Similarly, as the Labour government still has not grasped, no matter how hard an anti-immigration policy it enacts, Brexitists will never say that it is hard enough, and will always demand something even more extreme. The liberal pluralist instinct to recognize ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration and to meet them half-way, or more than half-way, is never met with reciprocation by populists who, if anything, simply see it as a sign of weakness.

On the latter topic, the increasingly beleaguered government’s dismal and self-defeating descent continues. Even as it desperately seeks economic growth, it pursues policies to lower immigration which are to the detriment of economic growth, in the hope of political advantage. But does Keir Starmer – or perhaps more pertinently Morgan McSweeney – really think that doing so will ever cause Reform or the Tories to say that they have gone far enough? Or that they, and more importantly voters, will accept the damage of lower economic growth as a price worth paying?

The latest wheeze takes us right back to Brexit, and brings an irony so glaring that it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In January 1973 the UK and Denmark joined what was then the EEC. In 2020 the UK left the EU, in large part in order to ‘take back control’ of immigration by gaining the freedom to implement an ‘Aussie-style points-based system’. Now, in 2025, the British government proposes to emulate the tough approach of … Denmark.

 

Notes

[1] What may be less of a mystery is how it serves Farage’s interests. Private Eye (‘Fair Tether Friend’ #1661, p.7, no link available) recently reported that in an interview on LBC, Farage’s advocacy for London becoming a global hub for cryptocurrency went alongside his boosterish comments about Tether, “a cryptocurrency described as a money-launderer’s dream”. After mentioning that Reform has just begun accepting crypto donations (see also Reuters’ report), the Eye goes on to note that a significant shareholder in Tether is “the Thailand-based British Tech investor Christopher Harborne”, who has “previously handed the [Reform] party a whopping £10 million” and “shelled out more than £60,000 to cover the travel and accommodation costs for two trips Farage has made to the US since being elected an MP …” By the way, just this week there are signs that Farage will get his way about UK cryptocurrency regulation or, more accurately, that the pressure from Trump is moving things in that direction (£), once again exposing the nonsense of the Brexiters’ naïve ideas about sovereignty.

[2] Which is why, at the present juncture, those who are infuriated with the BBC for those kinds of reasons need to be careful what they wish for. For all its flaws, its defence is now one of the front lines in the battle to save Britain from Brexitism.

[3] The starkest illustration of this is the infamous line in Joseph Goebbels’ 1928 essay: “We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us.”