Brexit reminders

Compared with a few years ago, Brexit no longer dominates the headlines, not least because those who once so loudly advocated it are now too embarrassed to mention it. However, it lies behind many of the news stories, like – take your pick of metaphors – dry rot in the basement, a predator lurking in the bushes, or a chronic, debilitating illness.

In the last fortnight, major examples include the latest report of the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, the sentencing of a former Reform official and UKIP/ Brexit Party MEP for taking Russian bribes, and, of course, the budget, as well as the latest net migration figures.

Brexit and Covid

The publication of the second module of the Hallett Inquiry, which focusses on decision-making and political governance, reveals a woeful picture. As has been widely reported it shows that a “toxic and chaotic” culture pervaded the Johnson-Cummings government. Whilst this had significant implications for the handling of the pandemic, which of course is the focus of the report, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it also has implications for Brexit.

I must admit that I haven’t read the full report, which runs to 800 pages, so I’m not sure what, if anything, it says about Brexit (the summary document makes no mention of it at all). However, as I wrote in some detail at the time, the evidence heard by the Inquiry showed several significant connections. That post also contains links to several posts I wrote during the pandemic which identified some of those connections and I won’t repeat all the points I’ve made previously but, in brief, they include:

·         The damage Brexit had done to the machinery and processes of government, and especially to the civil service;

·         The extent to which Brexit was prioritized over Covid in the early days of the pandemic;

·         The refusal to extend the Transition Period, despite the impact of Covid throughout almost its entirety, with consequences both for the negotiations and the businesses which had to adapt, virtually overnight, to the eventual agreement;

·         The ideational and institutional connections between Brexit and the response to Covid;

·         The simplism and nostalgia evident in both Brexit and the pandemic.

At the most basic level, if, as the Inquiry shows, the government was “toxic and chaotic” in its handling of Covid, then it would be absurd to imagine that it was not equally so in its handling of Brexit. The same people, at the same time, could hardly have been governing in exemplary fashion in one domain whilst being so incompetent in the other. Moreover, the Johnson-Cummings government was itself a legacy of Brexit and, ultimately, of the Vote Leave campaign. In that sense, having so shambolic an administration when Covid struck was itself one of the adverse consequences of Brexit.

I don’t think the publication of the latest Hallett Report tells us anything new about this since it was, indeed, clear from the evidence the Inquiry heard, and from what could be surmised before. However, it is a moment worth recording that it is now a matter of official record just how incompetent that ‘get Brexit done’ government was. What is new, although entirely unsurprising, is the reaction it has provoked from Johnson and Cummings in particular, but also from the serried ranks for their supporters who, of course, are almost invariably Brexiters.

Thus, referring to Hallett as “some judge”, Johnson, who set up the Inquiry and set its terms of reference in the first place, dismissed the report (£) as “hopelessly incoherent” and “totally muddled”. Cummings, predictably, was even more vitriolic, accusing Hallett and the Inquiry’s lead lawyer of spreading lies and calling for both to “be stripped of all official jobs, all gongs, and legally barred from working in the law for the rest of their lives”. And David Frost called it a “disgrace”, complaining, amongst other things, that it “scoffs at the alternative strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration”, as if it had not been endlessly debunked, including by the government’s own Chief Medical Officer (similar complaints have been spewed out across the scientifically-illiterate ‘libertarian’ right).

Anyone with an ounce of self-awareness or humility might show just an iota of contrition, perhaps even some shame, when shown their failings in such forensic detail. But Johnson and Cummings, the one girdled by his sense of entitlement, the other by his misplaced intellectual vanity, are incapable of humility or shame. As for Frost, he shows the self-awareness of a toilet seat. One might as well expect Liz Truss to refrain from pontificating about “sensible economic policy”. 

But the more important point is not their all-too-obvious personal inadequacies, it is that these mesh seamlessly with the doctrinaire refusal to accept responsibility which permeates their entire world-view. As with Nigel Farage, nothing is ever their fault. Thus, if there were ever to be a public inquiry into Brexit, it can be said, not speculatively but with certainty, that Johnson, Cummings, Frost, Farage, and all those who had leading roles within it, would never, ever accept the truth of the damage they did.

This matters, even though such a public inquiry is not in prospect, because it helps to explain why Brexitism persists in British politics, and why, as regards Brexit specifically, Britain is stuck in an impasse. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be so. There’s really no longer any room for doubt about the damage Brexit has done, most obviously economically, and no serious analyst claims otherwise. And public opinion has firmly turned against it. This leads some to suggest that it should be (relatively) easy to at least begin the process of ‘rejoining’. But there is no realistic route to that whilst a powerful phalanx of politicians and, perhaps as important, media owners and commentators remain as an obdurate, shameless, unrepentant blockage to it.

Brexit and Russia

There is also little sign of shame or penitence within Reform over the Gill scandal. As I mentioned in a recent post, in September Nathan Gill (formerly Reform’s leader in a Wales, UKIP’s leader in Wales, and a UKIP and Brexit Part MEP) pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery from pro-Russian sources to act in their interests whilst he was serving as an MEP. Now, he has been sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison for these offences.

The length of that sentence serves to underscore just how serious his crimes were. This was not some minor lobbying scandal, but sustained corruption by an elected representative in the service, in effect, of a foreign, and none-too-friendly, power. After all, the offences for which he has been sentenced began in December 2018 and ran through to July 2019, whilst in March 2018 Russian agents committed the Novichok attacks in Salisbury. At all events, the police investigation of Gill was undertaken by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror team because, according to Commander Dominic Murphy, he had done “potential damage to national security”. 

As I noted in that earlier post, Farage and other Reform leaders have been keen to distance themselves from Gill, and this week Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, tried to dismiss Gill and his offences as “ancient history”. It won’t wash, not least as it was really not so long ago that he held a senior position in Reform. The full details of Gill’s offences are complex, but their timeline, and how they sit within the wider context of the Reform Party and its predecessors, as well as events in Russia and Ukraine, is painstakingly set out by The Nerve, a new independent media outlet [1]. As that report makes clear, there is no suggestion that Farage or other MEPs of his various parties took bribes, but some of those MEPs did say similar things to those which Gill was paid to say. My point is not that this implies any corruption on their part but that Gill was not saying things that ran contrary to views that were shared by his colleagues.

The police are now investigating other British former MEPs, who have (rightly) not been named, nor have the parties they represented, but, whilst these investigations may come to nothing, the political questions for Reform remain. Speaking to Sky News, Keir Starmer said that Farage “needs to launch an investigation into his party to understand how that [Gill’s offences] happened” and that this investigation should look into “what other links are there between Reform and Russia”. LibDem leader Ed Davey has been more forthright:

“A traitor was at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary. Nigel Farage and his party are a danger to national security. Nigel Farage himself was previously paid to be on Putin's TV channel, Russia Today, and said he was the world leader he admires the most. We must all ask – where do his loyalties really lie? We need a full investigation into Russian interference in our politics.”

At one level, all this is a reminder of the still unresolved question of what role Russia played in the 2016 Referendum – a question unresolved primarily because, according to the 2020 ‘Russia report’ by the Intelligence and Security Committee, the government did not investigate it. That report does show, though, that there was Russian interference in both the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2019 General Election, and, in general terms, that “the UK is clearly a target for Russian disinformation”. And, whatever Moscow’s role in the 2016 referendum, it has always been obvious that, at the very least, Brexit was advantageous to Russian interests in terms of destabilizing both the UK and the EU: “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it.

However, it is not necessary to disinter the referendum result to see the salience of Gill’s crimes for the politics of post-Brexit Britain. Except to those on the far-right and far-left of politics, the threat to the UK from Russia is clear and, if anything, escalating, as underlined by several incidents just in the last fortnight, including the incursion of the spy ship Yantar, which used lasers to disrupt the RAF planes tracking its movements, the interception of two Russian vessels in the Channel, and the discovery of a Russian submarine-spying device off the Welsh coast. And these events are just one manifestation of a much wider programme of physical and cyber-incursions amounting to what the former Head of MI5, the former Head of NATO, and the former Head of the Navy and Security Minister all regard an undeclared war.

The wider context of this, of course, is Ukraine, and the possibility that it will be forced into a humiliating ‘peace’ by Trump. With that, Putin would free up the resources, and feel emboldened, to step up the pressure against Europe - which very much includes the UK for, as the Brexiters used to remind us, ‘we are leaving the EU, we’re not leaving Europe’. This was perhaps the only true thing they ever said, and, as is now all too plain to see, Brexit has created an artificial and dangerous separation of the UK from its continent, made all the more dangerous because of Trump and what Trump means for NATO. As I’ve discussed in in the past, there is an obvious and disturbing axis between Putin, Trump, and Brexitism.

It is this context which makes the entire question of Farage’s foreign policy sympathies and allegiances, both as regards Putin and Trump, and his antipathies, as regards the EU, so important. He is, after all, presenting himself as the next Prime Minister and, as we are constantly reminded, his party is leading in the opinion polls. So these sympathies and allegiances, and those of all those within his party, as Gill recently was, are an absolutely legitimate matter for the most intense scrutiny, despite Reform’s attempts to shout down such scrutiny or to depict Gill as a ‘bad apple’ whose behaviour had nothing to do with the party.

Farage has said he will not investigate any Russian links within his party and dismissed the Gill case as “a minor embarrassment”. But no other British politician has been convicted of such offences in modern times (there have been some imprisonments for false accounting over expenses, but that isn’t remotely the same). Perhaps the central claim made by Brexiters was that leaving the EU would mean that voters would be free to hire and fire those who made the laws that governed them. To do that, we need to know the allegiances of those who would make our laws.

Brexit and the Budget

If the run-up to this week’s budget is anything to go by, then the allegiance of our current governing lawmakers is to being as politically maladroit as possible. I certainly can’t remember anything like it. Budget ‘purdah’ has been more honoured in the breach than the observance for some time but, even leaving aside the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) inadvertent revelation of its measures a few minutes before the Chancellor’s speech, the last few months of semi-statement have gone well beyond the now-familiar leaks and hints.

During that apparently almost interminable period, it has been notable that both Rachel Reeves and other government ministers have been increasingly open in identifying Brexit as a cause of Britain’s economic woes. This is a marked change to the far more muted references to it at the time of last year’s budget. But it is still being framed as a problem in the way Brexit was done rather than one of Brexit itself. As Rafael Behr puts it, “the problem is couched as negligent negotiation, not strategic miscalculation”.

That framing was evident in Reeves’ budget speech, which rather shamelessly implied that a new trade deal had been struck with the EU (presumably referring to the ‘reset’, the terms of which remain under negotiation). She also implied an endorsement of the Brexiters’ claim that it is of benefit to have an independent trade policy by speaking referring to deals with the US (which, unless I’ve missed something, has still only been partially implemented, and is in any case only a partial mitigation of Trump’s new tariffs, not a Free Trade Agreement) and with India (which has an estimated value of 0.13% of GDP after 15 years).

It certainly can’t be claimed that any trade policy independence Brexit has brought comes close to compensating for the fact that, as Reeves mentioned, Brexit continues to be identified by the OBR as a drag on UK productivity. Indeed, the OBR itself refers to our great act of national liberation as being one of the “successive shocks” that are responsible for the country’s lack of productivity growth. This latest report also renews the OBR’s “assessment that Brexit will reduce the level of UK productivity by around 4 per cent after 15 years” compared with what it would otherwise have been [2]. As always, it’s worth remembering that this figure (which also implies, as widely quoted, that GDP will be 4% less than otherwise) has a cumulative effect. That is, for each of the 15 years productivity will be lower than it would have been by some figure, reaching 4% in the fifteenth year.

It's true that the OBR did not change its assessment of the Brexit damage for the worse (as had been rumoured prior to the budget, although it did downgrade its overall productivity growth assessment), but the fact that it remains unchanged is significant. It suggests that even as it moves from being entirely a forecast of damage that will be done to being, in part, an estimate of damage that has been done, that forecast seems to the OBR to be holding true. If so, that is not a surprise, as most analysts expect the bulk of the damage will have occurred early in the 15-year period.

Indeed, as summarized in my last post, a recent report from the National Bureau for Economic Research provides a headline estimate suggesting that by 2025 (i.e. already), UK GDP is 6%-8% less than it would otherwise have been. In the run-up to the budget, the LibDem Party requested the House of Commons Library to provide an analysis the implications of that estimate, including for tax revenues. The results were that it would mean that, had it not been for Brexit, in 2024-25 tax revenues would have been between £65 billion and £90 billion higher than they actually were.

If the upper figure were correct, it would be equivalent to the entirety of government spending in that year on education (£89.2 billion). But suppose the true figure were only half of the upper estimate, that would still more than cover the entire defence budget (£37.5 billion). Now suppose the true figure were only a quarter of the lower estimate: then, it would cover the entire 2024-25 budget for both day-to-day spending and capital investment for prisons, the probation service and the criminal justice system (£14.7 billion).

Brexit and immigration

All that is another reminder of the high price we are paying for the stupidity of Brexit, to which should be added the negative impact on tax revenues which can be expected as a result of the large fall in net migration announced yesterday. That announcement, in itself, means that the OBR’s budget forecasts for growth and tax revenue, published just the day before, are likely to be over-optimistic, since it had assumed a less steep fall.

Calculating the impact on tax revenues of falling net migration is extremely complex, because it depends on a large number of variables, but last year the OBR estimated that a fall of 100,000 would increase the deficit by £7 billion. Given the complexity, I’m not sure whether it would be justified to extrapolate from that to say that yesterday’s fall of almost 450,000 in the last 12 months might represent something in the order of a £30 billion reduction in tax revenue, but the impact will certainly be considerable and negative.

And yet, responding to these latest net migration figures, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government would be “going further” to clamp down on immigration, because of the “immense pressure” it supposedly puts on local communities, whilst Keir Starmer said the figures were (only) “a step in the right direction”. Presumably, Mahmood and Starmer believe they will get some political credit for responding to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public, whatever the economic (and human) cost. If so, they are likely to be disappointed: this latest fall continues from that of last year yet, in post-Brexit Britain’s immigration panic, the majority of the public believe that net migration rose in that year, even as they bemoan the tax rises in this year’s budget.

As the broadcaster and author James O’Brien put it when discussing this issue, “we have become a ludicrous country”. And Brexit, which, remember, was supposed to ‘solve’ these ‘legitimate concerns’, has made us even more ludicrous.

Still on the Brexit rack

Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a post discussing the chaotic mess we were in (of which there is plenty more in the posts from that time). Amidst Covid, with the transition period almost over, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement had yet to be finalised and there was every possibility there would be no agreement at all. There’s much in that post which is no longer of great relevance, but it does capture the disarray of the time, which the Hallett report reminds us of. For example, I referred to a leaked letter from the Road Haulage Association, describing the process of working with the government on border issues as “a complete shambles”.

There are other things in that post which are still very much relevant, ranging from the narrowly technical (e.g. my observation that “there will be a myriad of things left in the air even if there is a deal [such as] carbon trading”) to the broadly political (e.g. Keir Starmer’s “near silence” about Brexit and the rumours – which turned out to be true – that he would want Labour MPs to vote for any deal which might be done). At all events, I finished the post by saying:

“Perhaps we need to look instead to Classical mythology to describe our situation, maybe to Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up the hill or, as seems more appropriate to the painfulness of it all, poor old Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle day after day. Prometheus of course was being punished for having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Sisyphus was an all-round bad egg (murdering, cheating, and generally getting above himself). It is not clear what crime we have committed to have to endure the endless torture of Brexit.” 

The current news is a reminder that these words still apply.

 

Notes

[1] There are so many such outlets now that it is always important to look carefully at their credibility, but The Nerve certainly has a good pedigree, having been created by a collective of five former Guardian and Observer journalists. In any case, as regards the report referred to, it collates verifiable information from within the public domain.

[2] For a detailed discussion of the OBR estimate, and assessments of the costs of Brexit generally, see John Springford’s June 2025 report for the Constitution Society/ Federal Trust.

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.”

Immigration, indecency, and incompetence

As I and many others have noted, we are seeing the extraordinarily rapid development of extreme policies on immigration becoming mainstream. The failure of Brexit to ‘solve the problem of immigration’, with the consequent neutering of extremist politics that was meant to bring, can be chalked up to the long list of its unmet promises.

At the same time, as with Brexit, what is now being proposed about immigration also entails promises which cannot be kept, if only because those promises deny or ignore the damage, both economic and non-economic, these proposals would do. In this sense, along with the immorality of such proposals, we should beware of the utter incompetence of those making them.

An affront to decency

In the last fortnight, this new extremism came to fresh prominence with remarks by Tory ‘rising star’ Katie Lam, in which she spoke of deporting large numbers of people who have ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ (ILR) immigration status. As with last month’s Reform proposals, this crosses a very significant line in that it would entail retrospectively changing the rules.

Whilst Lam’s comments received much attention, she was articulating something which, to less attention, has been Tory policy since last May, when they promulgated a draft ‘Deportation Bill’ (although, post-Lam, this is reported to be under “internal  review”). Under this policy, the criteria for deportation would capture those who had, quite legitimately, received benefits at some time during their residence in the UK or who had earned less than £38,700 a year for an aggregate period of six months within their time of residence.

It would also include people with ILR, or their dependents, who had received any form of ‘social protection’, which would seem to include NHS treatment and pension payments, and perhaps even universal credit. Thus it has the potential to end up separating families, deport retirees after decades of living here to countries with which they have no substantive connection, or to make those with ILR fearful of seeking healthcare.

The enormity of these proposals can hardly be over-stated. Not only would they apply retrospectively but they would entail compulsory repatriations, something not even envisaged by Enoch Powell in the 1970s (who argued for a voluntary repatriation policy). And they would apply on a huge scale, affecting potentially 5% of the UK population (£).

Nothing like this has ever been undertaken in a modern democracy: even in Trump’s America, legal immigrants are not the target of deportation policy. Its closest analogue in recent times is Idi Amin’s Uganda. If enacted, it would mean not only leaving the ECHR but would also, since as currently described it would apply to some people with EU Settled Status, undoubtedly mean an end to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU. So we would immediately be back to a ‘no deal Brexit’.

The pivot to values

As well as being unprecedently draconian in its scope, this proposal is noteworthy because it is not simply animated by an intention to reduce the number of immigrants, nor is it solely concerned with the supposed extent of immigrants’ financial ‘contributions’. At least in Lam’s telling, it is also intended to increase ‘cultural coherence’. Exactly what this means can only be guessed at, and none of those guesses paint Lam in an edifying light, but it shows that the proposal is also meant to remove those who don’t share some supposed sense of ‘British values’ (although many of us would think that the proposal itself is an affront to what we take those values to be).

This is important because it reflects how the anti-immigration case has largely ceased to present itself as being not an objection to immigrants, per se, but just a ‘concern about numbers’. The pivot to values (which of course long pre-dates Lam’s comments, but they are the latest exemplification) is part of what has enabled anti-immigration rhetoric to lump together everything from an asylum-seeker who commits a crime to a person speaking a foreign language in the street. It also enables racists to pretend that, far from objecting to immigrants’ skin colour, they are heroically standing up for women’s or gay rights, or for Christian or Enlightenment values, or any number of other hypocrisies.

Given the way these proposals target legal, not illegal, immigrants, and do so retrospectively, and taken in conjunction with the fact that they involve leaving the ECHR, then some even more sinister possibilities open up. Why confine the crackdown to those with ILR? Why not revoke the acquired citizenship of those who do not share ‘our values’? And, if that, then why not extend the same test to those born in this country? Even if they can’t be deported, they could at least be rounded up for ‘re-education’. This is where the logic of ‘cultural coherence’ leads. If that seems alarmist then so, too, would it have seemed alarmist even a few years, perhaps even a few months, ago to envisage a ‘mainstream’ political party advocating the compulsory deportation of legally settled immigrants.

Even in its own grotesque terms, the Tory ILR policy is an absurdity. The very idea that it would create ‘cultural coherence’ is nonsense because it would actually undermine that concept’s close cousin, ‘integration’. It would remove any sense that integration was desirable or even possible, by making ‘indefinite’ residence precarious, and making it clear that those with ILR were only present under sufferance: ‘we don’t really want you here and we’ll kick you out the moment we feel like it’ is hardly an incentive assimilation. In fact, even if these proposals are never implemented, the very fact that they have been made will almost certainly already have had the effect of undermining integration, signalling to millions of immigrants just how unwelcome they are, and that it would be rather foolish to make long-term plans to be part of this country.

Public opinion

Some commentators have taken comfort from the fact, which I also referred to when I discussed Reform’s ILR proposal, that opinion polls show the current ILR rules to be well-supported. Thus, it is suggested, both Tory and Reform parties are pursuing an extremely unpopular policy. I am not so sure that this can be relied upon. The opinion polls most often cited seem to date back to early in 2024, before the now two summers of far-right agitation and, crucially, before anyone started talking about ILR as a salient issue in the immigration debate, let alone as a problematic one. More recent polling, from September 2025, shows a more mixed picture. In particular, although retrospective withdrawal of ILR is still unpopular, it does have the support of 29% of the public.

It therefore seems quite likely that public opinion will continue to move on ILR the more it is targeted by Reform and Tory politicians. And, as I also pointed out in that previous discussion, this will be aided by the way that, whilst denouncing the Reform proposals, Keir Starmer’s government has its own plan to extend the ILR qualifying period from five to ten years, and to introduce new ‘contribution-based’ tests. This is less draconian, since at least it would not apply retrospectively, but it contributes to creating a sense amongst the public, which did not exist before, that ILR is a ‘problem’ in need of a solution.

What we can now call the Reform-Conservative solution, apart from being grossly immoral, is also unworkable, in multiple senses of the term. It would almost certainly encounter substantial legal challenges, and arouse huge popular opposition once its effects began to be felt. And even if a future government pushed all that aside, the economic damage would be enormous. Not only would it strip out desperately needed members of the workforce, it would deter the arrival of new immigrants – including the so-called ‘brightest and best’ we are always told the UK wants, and perhaps especially these, since they have many other possible destinations.

Indeed, what the anti-immigration lobby seems unaware of is that the UK is actually in an emerging global competition for immigrants (£), of all sorts, with other countries with ageing populations and low birth-rates. In fact, rather than constantly yammering on about the supposedly ‘undiscussable’ issue of immigration, the latter are the demographic issues politicians should really be addressing.

Their failure to do so, and instead to pander to and promote anti-immigration sentiment, is a massive failure of leadership. As analysis by James Bowes, published this week by UKICE, shows, “the coming collapse in immigration”, in response to ‘public concern’ is set to have damaging economic effects which the public will certainly not enjoy. Yet, even as net migration falls, a survey shows that frequent GB News viewers finds that 84% of them think it is rising, as do smaller, but still large, majorities of frequent viewers of ITV and BBC News.  

Unfit for office

It's this unworkability and lack of realism which links directly to Brexit, which in the UK is the foremost example of how populism and incompetence are so strongly linked (the Truss mini-budget is another example). We already know, if only from those two examples, that any claim to governmental competence the Tories may have had has long since gone. But voters expecting Reform to be an improvement are in for a disappointment.

I noted in the first post of the new title of this Blog that an important part of this period of post-Brexit politics would be that Reform’s success in local elections, giving it control of twelve councils, would bring with it mounting evidence of the party’s utter incompetence when it achieved power. We are now seeing that evidence emerge (as well as plenty from the ructions within Reform’s tiny cohort of MPs and the scandal of Farage’s grift).

Recent examples have included revelations of in-fighting at Kent County Council, Reform’s ‘flagship council’, which led to five councillors being expelled from the party this week. Other Reform-led councils, including Worcestershire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire, have experienced various degrees of chaos. Meanwhile, at Northumberland County Council, where it is the main opposition, Reform has expelled three councillors from the party, the most recent one having allegedly said he wanted to shoot Keir Starmer.

This partly reflects the collection of oddballs and dodgy characters who have suddenly found themselves in positions of responsibility. But, at Kent and elsewhere, it also reflects the impracticality of all the airy talk of cutting huge swathes of waste and reducing council tax bills. As at national level, the easiest thing to promise when in opposition is ‘cutting red tape’, but the hardest thing to achieve when in power is to do so without cutting services.

Thus, on contact with reality, all the nonsense about millions being wasted on ‘diversity officers’ or ‘health and safety’ is exposed as such. On the other hand, Reform-led Nottinghamshire have managed to find £75,000 to buy 150 union jack flags, whilst Reform’s Greater Lincolnshire Mayor, the charmless former Tory MP and Education Minister Andrea Jenkyns, has requested an extra £147,000 for office staff to answer her emails.

Against this background, last week Zia Yusuf became the second head of Reform’s ‘DOGE’ to resign within less than a year of its creation. This was the body, modelled on Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, supposed to identify efficiency savings in Reform councils, although it has failed to undertake any audits to date (£), and is reported to have only visited three of the twelve councils.

Reform’s experience of the realities of local government also sheds light on the impracticality of its, and the Tories’, national immigration policies. Back in July, Kent, again, complained about the Labour government’s new restrictions on visas for social care workers because of the damage it would do to the provision of social care within the county. There are other reasons to think that some within Reform are becoming wary of its racism and anti-immigration agenda. Yusuf himself resigned as Party Chairman last June, apparently because of Reform MP Sarah Pochin calling for a ‘Burqa ban’ (although it subsequently became unclear where he stood on this issue). More recently, Neville Watson, a prominent Reform activist and its only Black branch chair, resigned from Reform over its hardline and divisive anti-immigration stance.

Pressing the FU button

The latter led to some social media ribaldry along the lines of ‘I never thought the leopards eating people’s faces party would eat my face’, but this is a glib and politically maladroit response. In this period, when Reform is not, but could become, a party of national government, such recantations or realizations should be praised, not mocked. Things are very finely balanced. A few percentage-points difference in voting at the next general election could, under first past the post, be the difference between near-total defeat for Reform, or Farage becoming Prime Minister. So in the next few years anything which makes voters reflect on what a Reform government would mean is going to be important.

There is, of course, a bedrock of support for Reform which will always be there, deriving from those who genuinely support its policies or just its actual or perceived values. But what could bring it to power would be if, as with the Brexit vote, enough voters decide, as Guardian columnist Marina Hyde pungently put it, to “press the F*** You button” [1]. Amongst the reasons to do so might be the idea that ‘they can’t be any worse than the main parties’ (but they can: that’s why tracking their chaos and incompetence in local government matters) or ‘they ought to be given a chance’ (but they are being, and we can see what it leads to).

Another reason to press the ‘FU button’ is the idea that ‘we’ve got nothing to lose’ and the closely associated one ‘it won’t affect me’. Though these are slightly different from each other (as the second kind of voter might acknowledge having something to lose, but just assume that it won’t be them), they are both versions of thinking that ‘the leopard won’t eat my face’. So it is important that now, before it is too late, some of those who currently think this begin to reflect that they might be wrong. Otherwise, it will be like ‘Brexit morning’ all over again.

This becomes particularly important because, again as with Brexit, plenty of Reform’s support does not come from those with ‘nothing to lose’. It became fashionable in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, amongst those who were opposed to Brexit as much as amongst those who advocated it, to talk as if this had been some uprising for the dispossessed (especially the working class of Northern England) against ‘the elite’. But this was, at the least, highly simplistic, as analysis of the leave vote by Benjamin Hennig and Danny Dorling showed, given the levels of support for Brexit amongst middle-class and Southern voters.

Relatedly, the original concept of ‘Red Wall voters’, which subsequently became much misunderstood, was to do with those within traditional Labour seats (not always in Northern England) who traditionally voted Labour but who, in demographic terms, ‘ought to’ be likely to vote Conservative and, subsequently, increasingly did so (though now, increasingly, Reform). One way of looking at these voters is that their economic interests and political choices had become misaligned. If their parents and grandparents had voted Labour, it was as a way of furthering industrial workers’ interests, and doing so had been inherited as a cultural belief even if they, themselves, might well be self-employed or retired homeowners. Another way of looking at them is as being in the process of re-aligning cultural values, in particular from class identity to regional, national, or ethnic identity. Better, in fact, to see it as both.

The politics of self-indulgence

At all events, these voters are not, for the most part, economically dispossessed. These are not young, unemployed, propertyless people, nor are the reacting to mass unemployment and economic depression. They are most likely homeowners, with some savings, but who feel themselves to be culturally dispossessed [2]. As such, I increasingly think that the best way to describe them is ‘self-indulgent’ or even perhaps, in a certain sense, ‘decadent’. That is, they can indulge their carefully-guarded cultural grievances by voting Reform because they do not believe that it will damage them to do so.

But, in fact, they are highly vulnerable, in at least two main ways. One is that, although Reform’s economic policies remain unclear and confused (and, like its local government promises, rely greatly on mythical ‘waste saving’ and false claims about the effect of scrapping Net Zero policies), Farage’s championship of the Truss budget, and of Javier Milei’s economic programme, suggests that a Reform government would mean economic chaos, of a sort which would most damage not the very poor (who may really have nothing to lose) or the very rich (who are well-cushioned against any loss), but these modestly well-off voters.

The second is that such voters are very likely to be dependent on the disability benefits Reform pledged, just this week, to take an axe to, and on the health and care services which are kept afloat by immigration. So just as when, after the Brexit vote, leave voters kept telling the EU citizens who they knew personally that they ‘didn’t mean you’ when they voted against immigration from the EU, they are likely to say the same to, as it might be, their Ghanaian care worker when a Reform or Reform-Con government starts the mass deportations. And, as with Brexit, by then it will be too late. Too late for those voters, and too late for the rest of us. Which is why the most urgent task in politics now is to persuade enough of those who are minded to vote for Reform that, for them personally, and their families, the consequences will be disastrous.

Rejecting the repellent

There are at least signs that this urgency is now being felt by voters, judging by the result of the Caerphilly by-election. Whilst a number of factors were in play, at least one important one seems to be that ‘progressive voters’ voted tactically for Plaid Cymru and against Reform. Thus, against opinion polls and, evidently, Nigel Farage’s expectations, Reform were soundly defeated. That is just one election, held in specific circumstances, and it would be foolish to extrapolate much from that, just as it would be from general surveys of voting intentions, especially in relation to what might happen in a general election that will probably not be held until 2029.

On the other hand, with Reform and the Tories now openly holding out the prospect of mass deportations, with all that would mean, the case for tactical voting is becoming ever stronger. After all, such voting is most in evidence when voters feel repellence, and that becomes more likely when parties advocate repellent policies. It becomes less easy to press the ‘FU button’ when you know what it will do, and neither Reform nor the Tories are doing much to hide that. The challenge for Labour, in particular, is not to chase those parties into equally repellent policies, and thus becoming repellent itself.

 

Notes

[1] I’m not using asterisks because of any prudishness on my part, but because the use of certain words causes posts to be blocked by some distribution networks.

[2] This is the background to the row this week over Pochin’s remarks about being ‘driven mad’ by adverts featuring too many black and Asian people. This was not an idiosyncrasy on her part, but repeated what has been a persistent whine on social media for some years, given as evidence that ‘it’s not our country any more’ and that white people are somehow victims of oppression. It’s a sign of the times that this fringe preoccupation is now the subject of national debate. The focus of that debate has been about whether Pochin’s remarks were racist, although ‘debate’ is too generous a word for the tortured apologetics that tried to show they were not, but they raise other issues. One is the incoherence of that racism. Sometimes, as with Robert Jenrick’s recent remarks, right-wingers complain about there being ‘no white faces’ on British streets. Yet, if this is supposedly the reality of modern Britain, then why are they also complaining that adverts are an unrealistic depiction of British society because they show too few white faces? The other relates to the incoherence of economic policy. Reform and the Tories constantly say that businesses face too much red tape, and that there is too much emphasis on ‘DEI’ initiatives seeking representativeness in hiring and promotion decisions. Yet, if it is true that adverts over-represent non-white people, they surely do so for commercial reasons. Or does Pochin propose that advertisers be subject to quotas to ensure they are representative in their imagery?

Brexit eruptions

Recently, a rash of molehills has appeared in my garden, the visible eruptions of a vast subterranean network of tunnels and burrows. Brexit lurks in a similar way beneath the surface of British politics, a constant presence which, however much it is ignored – perhaps the more that it is ignored – continues to break out here, there, and everywhere.

That, surely the most tortuous and tortured of the many metaphors that have been applied to Brexit, is intended to introduce the fact that this post doesn’t have any particular unifying theme other than the latest ways in which Brexit has been in view over the last fortnight.

Robert Jenrick and the Tory madness

We don’t yet know how the story is going to end, but it is looking increasingly likely that, when history is written, Brexit is going to figure as the central cause of the decline and perhaps demise of the Tory Party. For all that numerous political commentators, most recently Andrew Rawnsley, urge the party to re-discover its more moderate and pragmatic traditions, for now it seems stuck in the spiral of madness of which Brexit is the proximate cause. Thus possibly the least surprising development of the last fortnight was that their party conference showed the Conservatives to be firmly in the grip of Brexitism.

At the conference, the most obvious manifestation, or even exemplification, of this was the latest stage in Robert Jenrick’s long journey from “bland centrist solicitor” to gurning ideologue. It’s a journey made stranger because he has somehow retained his blandness along with the way, managing to be, as Ian Dunt puts it “at once banal and monstrous”. Much attention focused, rightly, on his complaint about the lack of white faces in Handsworth, a complaint made not less but more objectionable by his absurd suggestion that this remark “was not about the colour of your skin”. Less discussed, but objectionable and absurd in a different way, were his remarks about the judiciary.

Jenrick’s thesis, if we can grace it with that term, is that when judges ‘don the wig’ – a point he sought to make dramatic by flourishing such a wig – they at the same time put aside personal interests and identity so as to apply the law impartially. So far, so good. But he also claimed that, having, like every internet troll, ‘doNe he’s Own ResEArch’, he had made a shocking discovery. Apparently, there are “dozens of judges” who have used social media to “broadcast their open borders views” (whatever that means; does anyone advocate ‘open borders’?), or have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country” (which seems to mean, based on his other remarks, that Jenrick imagines barristers to be invariably sympathetic to their clients’ causes, and retain a lifelong commitment to them).

Jenrick is either too dense or too dishonest to see that his first observation made his second claim irrelevant. To make his thesis stick, he would need evidence that the judges he identified had also given judgments which, in legal terms, were demonstrably wrong, and wrong in ways biased in the direction he claimed. Moreover, he would need to show that they had done so to a greater extent than judges who he had not identified as having this alleged bias. But of course, and this is part of what makes this an example of Brexitism, reliable evidence is irrelevant to Jenrick. What is relevant, and what makes it definitively Brexitist, is the attempt to undermine the judiciary as an institution and, with that, the rule of law. It is ‘enemies of the people’ territory again. And it hardly needs to be said that Jenrick’s supposed solution, the political control of judicial appointments, would make the supposed problem he supposedly wants to solve worse.

Whether Jenrick has become a convinced Brexitist ideologue or is just opportunistically seeking to burnish his leadership credential hardly matters. Either way, it shows that Brexitism is an obligatory posture for those who aspire to lead the current Tory Party. That fact was underlined by Kemi Badenoch’s long-expected adoption of leaving the ECHR as official party policy, a policy which is the central prescription of ‘Brexit 2.0’.

It is also, as I noted in my previous post, a policy being ‘sold’ in exactly the same way that Brexit itself was sold, even though recent polling shows that 46% of those planning to vote Tory at the next election think Brexit has been a failure (and only 22% think it has been a success). Perhaps that is why Badenoch made only a couple of passing references to Brexit in her conference speech, in itself a telling fact: far from boasting of it, the very party that delivered Brexit feels too ashamed to talk about it.

Farage’s culpability and Labour’s problem

So much for the Tories. In my previous post I also noted that Keir Starmer had begun to attack Nigel Farage on the grounds of the damage done by Brexit. That attack has escalated, with Labour now starting to argue (£) that Farage will be to blame for anticipated tax rises in the forthcoming budget because, having used “easy sloganeering” to persuade the public to vote for Brexit, he then walked away and took no responsibility for it, leaving the economic consequences which ultimately explain the need tax raises.

Farage and his supporters, and no doubt others, object that he had no control over the delivery of Brexit, so the accusation is unfounded. But that is simplistic. Farage was not in power, it is true, but he exercised considerable power, always ready to denounce as ‘betrayal’ whatever form of Brexit was proposed and never once putting forward realistic proposals for delivering it in ways that were less economically damaging than what was enacted. Moreover, at the 2019 election, he backed Boris Johnson’s ‘oven-ready Brexit’ even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats.

So, yes, Farage is very much amongst those responsible for Brexit and, in any case, it is more than reasonable to point out that the main cause of his political life has proved to be a failure. It’s certainly clear that this line of attack is being made increasingly often by Labour politicians or sympathetic commentators, an example this week being an opinion piece by Kevin Maguire, Associate Editor of the Mirror.

Where the Labour government is on much trickier ground is that, to the extent it acknowledges the economic damage of Brexit it opens the question of why it has no plans to seek more than marginal limitations to this damage. Perhaps that is why Starmer’s conference speech, like Badenoch’s, had a telling lacuna, in his case avoiding any mention of his ‘reset’ policy. For if Brexit is a sufficiently serious problem to make attacking Farage’s culpability for it worthwhile, what is the government’s solution?

That is the question which Starmer has, until now, avoided and to which he cannot give a credible answer without abandoning his cast iron ‘red line’ manifesto promises, as well as ensuring that the entirety of British politics during this parliament, and probably the next election, is dominated by Brexit again. He isn’t going to do that, and that is one exemplification of the Brexit impasse that Britain as a whole is in: its entire national strategy is admitted, even by many of its advocates, to have failed, and public opinion firmly and consistently endorses the view that it was wrong to leave, but there is no presently viable political route to its rectification.

I’ve been arguing consistently, since December 2022, that there is a better approach for Labour, which would be to honestly admit that Brexit is damaging and has failed, and ought to be reversed, but to be equally honest in saying that this isn’t a political possibility until there is cross-party consensus (at least amongst parties that might credibly come to power) to make an application to rejoin. That means, in the present context, identifying Reform and the Conservatives as the barrier, making them responsible not just for the original problem but for the continuing absence of a solution. I still think that would be Labour’s best option, and with the latest line of blaming Farage for Brexit it becomes the logical next step.

A Royal Commission?

If there is ever to be a solution, one part of the route to it could be an interesting proposal made over the summer (although I have only just come across it) by former MEP Andrew Duff. Noting the “deadlock” in British post-Brexit politics, he proposes the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the position and future of the UK in Europe. It’s not often that a new idea about Brexit surfaces, and it’s a reasonable one in all sorts of ways, the most minimal, but not unimportant, being that, as I argued in June, it is surely right to review, given the time that has passed and the experience we have had, what Brexit has actually meant for the UK.

If nothing else, it would be a way of drawing together the now massive, but highly dispersed and fragmentary, body of evidence about Brexit, and providing some accountability for decisions made. For example, at this week’s Tory Party conference, Michael Gove admitted that the trade deals his government did with Australia and New Zealand were poorly negotiated and damaging to farmers, going on to say “we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working.” Yet these highly revealing remarks were barely reported, even though they confirm exactly what so many of us said at the time, what civil servants warned ministers of at the time, and what the government denied at the time.

Assembling an authoritative single review of what happened with Brexit would, in itself, be a contrast with the evidence-free, faith-based, reality-denying politics of Brexitism. However Duff’s proposal is primarily intended as a future-oriented exercise, which could begin a process to create, to the extent it is possible, the basis for a future national consensus.

From that point of view, he is surely right to say that “the most likely outcome of such a Royal Commission will be a report that furnishes the Prime Minister with a cast-iron case for reversing Brexit.” I’m not so sure Duff is right that “it will prepare the ground for the referendum campaign that must inevitably follow”, since it wouldn’t in itself create the kind of cross-party agreement needed to make rejoining a viable possibility for the EU. But it would be a step away from the current absurdity of a nation which effectively knows it has made a mistake but can’t find a route to rectify it. At the very least it offers a practical suggestion to create such a route, in a way that eludes those who simply demand a ‘rejoin now’ policy. [1]

Still Brexiting

Whatever the wider issues in play (or which ought to be in play), it shouldn’t be forgotten that, as a matter of fact, the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship continues to limp along, largely undiscussed in public. One facet of that, which has had some media discussion, is that since the beginning of this week the EU Entry-Exit System (EES) has begun to be enforced. I should clarify that wording, perhaps, in that, whatever the pro-Brexit press may imagine (£), the EES isn’t something particular to the UK-EU relationship, as if it were a ‘punishment’ for Brexit, but, rather, applies to the EU’s relationship with third countries generally. However, in that sense, for the UK it is a consequence of Brexit and one which will introduce new complexities and, potentially, delays and queues for travelers (although in the last few hours it has been reported that, to avoid this, it is only being partly implemented for now). Sloganizing about ‘securing our borders’ suddenly looks less attractive when we are its target.

In an analogous way, whilst the Brexiters have long used the feeble pun of a ‘protectionist racket’ to describe the EU, that suddenly looks even less funny with the prospect of a massive increase in its tariffs and reduction in its tariff-free quotas for steel imports. That would be a very serious blow, perhaps even an “existential threat”, for the already beleaguered British steel industry, since almost 80% of UK steel exports go to the EU. Again, this is a consequence of being a third country although, again, with wearying predictability, the pro-Brexit press reported it as if it were aimed specifically at Britain (£).

It may or may not be that the British government manages to negotiate an exemption but, taken in conjunction with the now indefinitely stalled negotiations with the US over steel tariffs, it is a stark reminder of Britain’s post-Brexit isolation. That reminder has several dimensions, including the fact of the relative importance of the EU market as compared with the US (which, for steel, takes less than 10% of UK exports). More generally, for all the Brexiter rhetoric about Brexit enabling the UK to have a ‘nimble’ independent trade policy, it is a reminder that size matters more than agility in a world dominated by regional blocs. That is especially so when these lumbering trade monsters go to war, the wider context of the EU’s announcement being, in large part, the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the Chinese steel industry. [2]

The same ‘better in than out’ lesson applies to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which is due to come into force in January 2026, and which also has implications for steel, amongst other products. This is an issue which has been lurking in the Brexit undergrowth for years (I think the first time I discussed it on this blog was in September 2023, and that post includes several links explaining some of the complexities involved), but now it has been reported that a temporary deal to exempt the UK is in prospect. [3] The longer-term likelihood is that the EU CBAM will be linked to the UK CBAM (due to come in to force in 2027), along with an associated linkage of UK and EU Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS), a possibility within the scope of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

A permanent agreement on CBAM and ETS linkages sits alongside other elements of the still to be agreed details of the ‘reset’, including potential deals on a Youth Mobility Scheme, UK participation in Erasmus +, and a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. The latter has a particular urgency in the context of food price inflation, as Naomi Smith of Best for Britain pointed out this week, and might be agreed and implemented “within a year”, according to a recent statement from Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s Trade Commissioner.

That may be optimistic, and it is worth remembering that, price issues aside, until there is an SPS deal in place, the UK (or more accurately Great Britain) will continue with the risky policy of partial border security, having never fully implemented import controls and having now given up even the process of doing so, in the expectation of this still-to-be agreed deal. Sometimes, apparently, ‘securing our borders’ isn’t a priority.

Also sitting within the reset basket is the question of possible partial UK involvement in the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative for defence procurement. It’s an issue of particular and growing salience in the context of the ever-growing threat from Russia and the declining reliability (to put it mildly) of the US as a security partner. Whilst, as Jannike Wachowiak of UKICE explains, the UK would not, as a third country, be eligible for loans from SAFE defence funds, it could, potentially, have access to joint procurements.

The growing charge list

All of these, and other, issues are a reminder not just of the ongoing negotiation of the UK-EU relationship, but of the cumbersome nature of that process, the uncertainties of its outcomes, and the limited scope of those outcomes even if the most favourable of them were to result. One consequence of that, although it is probably impossible to quantify, or even to find much information about, must be to deter investment and, therefore, economic growth. In all kinds of sectors, for all kinds of reasons, the terms of the UK-EU relationship are in flux which, necessarily, creates an unpropitious environment for investment.

Domestic political uncertainty is also a factor since Farage is already threatening to tear up any new agreements the present government makes with the EU. Even if that doesn’t make the EU wary of such agreements, it will prey on the minds of investors and indeed others trying to plan for the future. That, too, is something to be added to the growing charge list against the Reform leader and the other ‘guilty men’ of Brexit. Ultimately, there will need to be not so much a Royal Commission as a Public Inquiry if they are to be held accountable. Only by excavating the subterranean maze of Brexit will its eruptions be quelled.

 

Notes

[1] Duff’s proposal attracted several social media comments denouncing it as ‘British exceptionalism’ (in line with my usual policy, I only link to social media posts if they come from public figures). This is nonsense and reflects a wider problem. It is nonsense because there’s nothing ‘exceptionalist’ about a domestic political debate and, in this case, the idea that Britain needs a process of honest self-reflection about what has done to itself is almost the opposite. It is for the UK to face up to the consequences of its collective decisions, and to do otherwise, for example by blaming the EU for those consequences, or expecting the EU to provide solutions to them, is what might be exceptionalist.

The wider problem is that, whilst it is absolutely true that throughout the Brexit process British exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, greatly in evidence, sometimes amongst ‘remainers’ as well as Brexiters, there is a cadre of social media posters that simply parrots the word in any and every discussion of any and every aspect of Brexit (very often the same posters who ignorantly trot out ‘cherry-picking’ to describe any and every aspect of post-Brexit UK-EU relations).

Some (or more accurately one person, a rather creepy stalker who continually creates multiple pseudonymous social media accounts to harass me and various other people, including Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, on the basis of entirely false accusations of anti-Irish racism) also object that my use of the word ‘Brexitism’ is ‘British exceptionalism’, since it denotes a British form of populism (I explain why that is warranted in my definition of Brexitism), which is as transparently stupid as saying that the word ‘Brexit’ is ‘exceptionalist’. Brexit happened here; Brexitism is happening here. Specific doesn’t mean exceptional.

[2] There is of course a much wider point here than trade or, rather, trade is imbricated within the wider point of the multiple areas – economy, security, defence - in which the UK is horribly caught between the US, China, and the EU. But that would need another post.

[3] Reading that September 2023 post again, I was reminded of the sad, sorry, stupid saga of the UKCA mark, the long, lingering death of which quietly continued over the summer, with the announcement that it will not be required for medical devices.