A new national conversation, or just the same old one?

Anyone foolish enough to write publicly about politics knows, unless they suffer from an even greater degree of foolishness, the danger of making predictions. That is perhaps especially true in recent years, when politics has thrown up so much that would previously have been almost unthinkable. Still, that makes the odd occasions when predictions come true all the more pleasing.

At the beginning of this month, I wrote a post anticipating “the coming conversation” about Brexit, suggesting that it would emerge from the then yet-to-be-held May elections, the next UK-EU summit, and the tenth anniversary of the referendum. And whilst this may well have been an obvious prediction, so far as I know this particular conjunction of circumstances wasn't generally noticed. At all events, that conversation has now begun.

The Labour leadership crisis

It has been precipitated, as I anticipated, by the election results and the Labour leadership crisis they provoked. That crisis has not, as yet, become a formal leadership challenge because of the unusual situation in which the favourite candidate, Andy Burnham, is not currently an MP.  Thus the first act of this leadership drama is to be the contest to see if he can retain the seat of Makerfield for Labour in the coming by-election to be held on 18 June, just a few days before the referendum anniversary.

That contest itself encapsulates many of the dynamics of post-Brexit politics, showing how Brexit continues, more or less overtly, to be imprinted on the political scene. Hence Burnham must win a northern England, leave-voting constituency where Labour’s main challenger is now Reform, but where Reform itself is in a bitter conflict with Rupert Lowe’s neo-Nazi infested Restore Britain party which, helped by Elon Musk’s backing, could siphon off crucial numbers of Farage’s core votes in what currently looks to be a very tight election. A particularly piquant twist has emerged with revelations that Reform’s candidate did not vote for Brexit and considered it to have been based on “nationalistic pish”.

However, the Makerfield hiatus does not alter the fact that, informally, the Labour leadership battle has begun. In my earlier post, my point was that this battle would undoubtedly see Brexit figuring prominently and, more particularly, see an argument about whether Labour should pursue a more ambitious reset in UK-EU relations, up to and potentially including seeking to rejoin. That argument has already surfaced, with leadership hopeful Wes Streeting saying, in punchy terms, that Brexit had been a “catastrophic mistake” and gesturing, in vague terms, towards rejoining the EU at some point in the future.

As was perhaps the intention [1], this immediately led to Burnham being asked to clarify his stance which turned out to be, more mildly, that Brexit had been “damaging” but that “the last thing we should do right now is re-run those arguments”. Moreover, he said that rejoining was not on his agenda, adding that: “I respect the decision that was made at the referendum and it is going to undermine everything I have said about strengthening democracy if we don't respect that vote.”

This is pretty much the standard Starmer position on Brexit so, for all Burnham’s talk of being ‘the change candidate’, there’s no change there. Relatedly, Burnham has already indicated his support for Shabana Mahmood’s Brexitist anti-immigration policies and, like Starmer, stated that net migration “needs to fall further” despite recent huge reductions in its level, and this at exactly the time when a new approach is needed to avoid what immigration expert Professor Jonathan Portes calls the “migration doom loop” [2].

This is not the only way in which Burnham is as committed as Starmer to what is recognizably Blue Labour analysis. His talk of reindustrialization speaks directly to the nostalgic sensibility of that analysis, a sensibility which also played its part in attracting leave voters in 2016, some of whom appeared to believe that EU membership had been responsible for deindustrialization and that Brexit would herald the restoration of the mills, potteries and factories of the much-mythologized past and their associated communities.

Some may imagine that Burnham is adopting these positions as a tactic to appeal to Makerfield voters, and that on European policy, specifically, he will pivot to a more anti-Brexit position to appeal to the voters in the Labour leadership contest. If so, he will immediately face the charge of hypocrisy. But it’s far more likely that if he wins the Makerfield seat on this basis it will cement the existing Labour view under Starmer that this is the only way to see off the challenge of Reform. For that matter, if he loses then at least some in Labour will argue that it was because, partly as a result of Streeting’s intervention, the party was perceived as being too pro-EU.

Assuming Burnham does win Makerfield and does immediately mount a leadership challenge, and also assuming it is not a ‘coronation’, this sets the stage for a contest with Streeting as the more anti-Brexit candidate (and, of course, there may also be other candidates). So in this sense Brexit will, indeed, feature in the contest. But, despite Streeting’s somewhat stronger language, it is not really clear that he will advocate anything more than Starmer’s recently expressed desire for a “more ambitious” partnership with the EU, or that, despite his more restrained language, Burnham will advocate anything much less. As UKICE Director Professor Anand Menon puts it, “an open and honest debate is not what we are likely to get”.

In the longer term, it is possible that the outcome of the leadership contest will have an important effect on what Labour’s policy on the EU, and especially on its current ‘red lines’, will be at the next election (with a Burnham victory, which currently seems likely, almost certainly meaning their retention). But in the immediate term of this parliament it is unlikely, as things stand, to make any difference to the ‘reset’ which, as trade experts Sam Lowe and Kathryn Watson observe, still faces the familiar, fundamental “trade-off between market access and autonomy”.

The reset and the summit

So this brings us to the second leg of the emergent resumption of the Brexit conversation, namely the reset and more specifically the next UK-EU summit, the date of which has still not been announced. That in itself has a significance. For a long time it had been assumed it would be held in May, a year after the first such summit, and then June was talked about. Most recently, it has been reported that it is “tentatively pencilled in for 13 July”. There has been no public explanation for this delay, but I assume it reflects unresolved issues within the negotiations (£) over final terms for agreements on the key areas highlighted at last year’s summit since, presumably, both sides will wish to have something concrete to announce this time round.

In his excellent recent overview of these negotiations, Professor Hussein Kassim of Warwick University points to some of the technical complexities of the issues, but also draws attention to their all too familiar political dynamics. In brief, the UK continues to see the EU as “inflexible” whilst pursuing what the EU regards as a “hypertransactionalist approach” which also demands what would be special treatment for a third country [3].

Whilst Kassim does not put it in these terms, this can partly be explained by the present government’s awareness that anything it agrees will be picked over by the anti-EU British media and probably more by the entrenched attitude of the British State towards the EU going back long before Brexit. Moreover, it is perhaps still not recognized by the UK that the broad contours of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU so, whilst some further refinements might be seen as desirable in Brussels, it is London which is the demandeur in these negotiations.

Indeed, the government has already invested considerable political capital in obtaining at least the agreements already mooted, and has long talked as if, especially as regards a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, they are certain to be made and legislation has been introduced on that basis. Earlier this week, it was reported that negotiations had stalled (£), but in the last twenty-four hours, some details of what has been agreed have emerged and government guidance to businesses updated accordingly. So it is still unclear whether and when a full agreement will be announced.

Assuming there is an agreement then, apart from the non-negligible economic benefits for the agri-food sector, that will have a particular political significance for Northern Ireland. The Brexit situation there has been much less widely discussed, at least outside Northern Ireland itself, since the agreement of the Windsor Framework under Rishi Sunak in 2023 (although Kassim notes the EU’s dissatisfaction with the UK’s implementation of its provisions). Nevertheless, recent research by Professors David Phinnemore and Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast shows weakening support for it amongst the public in Northern Ireland. An SPS agreement would go at least some way to simplifying the operation of the Irish Sea border, and might be especially welcomed by the unionist community, as well as reducing agri-food trade barriers between the UK and the EU. In this sense, Northern Ireland continues to be at the epicentre of the Brexit process.

Meanwhile, as I’ve noted previously, Keir Starmer has talked in vague terms of seeking a more ambitious partnership with the EU than that envisaged at last year’s summit. In the last fortnight there has been an indication of what that ambition might be, with the leaked report of a UK proposal to be within a single market with the EU for goods trade. This, too, had an all too familiar ring to it. The Guardian report, which broke the story, compared it to Theresa May’s 2018 Chequers Proposal (which I discussed in detail at the time) and it also has some similarities to the ‘Jersey model’ that was touted at around the same time (in both cases, partly to solve the Northern Ireland conundrum, as well as for its economic advantages). This never seemed likely to be agreed by the EU at the time and is even less likely to be agreed now, so, unsurprisingly, it was also reported that this latest British proposal had been rebuffed [4].

Inevitably, the whole issue of the reset and the next summit have now become inseparable from that of the Labour leadership. It is difficult to see how Starmer can negotiate authoritatively when his future is in doubt, or even how the summit date can be finalised until it is known whether and when there is to be an active leadership contest. Assuming that happens then, for the umpteenth time since the referendum, the EU will stand waiting whilst the UK embarks on a change of Prime Minister with Brexit again at least part of what that change is about, and with at least the possibility that yet another general election will quickly follow (£).

As Anand Menon notes, in the piece referred to earlier, “having watched consecutive Conservative administrations argue with themselves over Brexit, they’re now getting to see Labour do the same thing. And, like the Conservatives, Labour are doing so with precious little attention paid to what the EU might or might not be willing to give us.” And, beyond that, as many of the commentators cited in this post mention, lurks the real possibility of a Reform government being imminent making anything agreed now potentially irrelevant.

(Almost) ten years on

As for the tenth anniversary of the referendum, well, we are not quite there yet so, although it is already being widely mentioned, the intense debate it will occasion is still to come. Yet it is hard to feel much enthusiasm, let alone optimism, about it. As this post has already repeatedly illustrated, so much of what is happening and being said goes around exactly the same circles of the last ten years.

A further small illustration is the Daily Telegraph ‘Big Debate’ (£) on ‘How to make Brexit a success’, scheduled for 29 June. It’s not just that even the need to pose a question that ought to have been addressed years ago and, were it susceptible to a meaningful answer, would have received one by now, shows the pointlessness of the endeavour. It’s that the participants in this ‘debate’ – Dan Hannan, David Frost, Allison Pearson, and James Frayne [5] – not to mention its chair, Allister Heath, are all basically on the same side and that it is entirely predictable what they will, and will not, say. It is equally predictable that it will be totally unrealistic, and a racing certainty that it will not even attempt to consider, let alone ‘debate’, the reasons it is unrealistic.

Yet a new Brexit conversation need not be futile. One of the best things that Keir Starmer, or any other Prime Minister, could do would be to create a process for it to be fruitful. Last week, the European Policy Centre in association with Bertelsmann Stiftung published a report entitled “Reframing the Reset: From Post-Brexit Stabilisation to Strategic Partnership” which illustrates how such a conversation could occur, within both the UK and the EU. As regards the UK, a key recommendation is that it “should launch a systematic, evidence-based review about the future of its relationship with the EU, including the long-term sustainability of its current red lines and the options for deeper integration over time, including that of rejoining.”

No doubt that framing would, in itself, infuriate Brexiters. But it is not necessary to view everything though the lens of the ‘rejoin’ question and my own sense is that this isn’t a question which the UK, as a polity, is ready to address [6]. Rather, a highly significant first step in a new Brexit conversation would simply be the first part of the recommendation, for a systematic evidence-based review, and it is that to which any Prime Minister ought to be willing and able to commit. It is simply absurd for a country to undertake a major and ongoing shift in national strategy and yet to fail to undertake such a review, and ten years after the initial decision seems like a good, even overdue, moment. That is all the more true given the scale of events during those ten years, above and beyond Brexit.

I’ve argued for such a review in the past, whilst Andrew Duff (also of the European Policy Centre) has advocated a Royal Commission. I’m more convinced than ever that, whatever its institutional form, something like this is the only way to address a situation in which, to put it in very broad terms, we have a country which ‘knows’ it has made a mistake and regrets it, and yet has a politics which can barely acknowledge that and certainly can’t address it.

A moment ago, I said that I didn’t think that the country was ready to address the rejoin question and I can readily imagine that some, perhaps many, regular readers of this blog will have bridled at that. Yet the truth is that even the idea of a systematic review of Brexit is very unlikely to happen, and would encounter strong resistance. If joining the EU is ever to come on the agenda, and to have a realistic prospect not just of happening but being durable, then it will be a gradual process.

The coming conversation: not ‘if’ but ‘how’

Last weekend, in a significant intervention, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband argued that rejoining would require a “national consensus”. That doesn’t, of course, entail unanimity, which will never exist, but it does mean that the UK cannot realistically rejoin the EU on the narrowly-supported and highly divided basis on which it left. Building that consensus will be incremental, though that does not necessarily mean slow.

What made Miliband’s intervention significant was not simply that he was a major political figure in previous Labour governments. It was because of the confluence of events set out in this post, which has made a renewed conversation about Brexit inevitable. This is also why, within a wider assessment of current events, Tony Blair made his own intervention this week, noting that “Britain has lost from Brexit” and advocating some form of “structured, formal, relationship” with the EU at some point in the future. On my reading, this doesn’t mean Blair is advocating eventually rejoining the EU, even though some reports have implied that, but rather some version (yet again) of ‘multi-speed Europe’.

There’s a lot to unpick, and to criticize, in what he said about Europe, which I don’t have space to do it here. But for present purposes, the point is that Blair positioned himself against the background of there being “a developing sense that as … British opinion moves against Brexit, then at some point it is ripe to enter a debate about ‘going back’.” In other words, he recognized that Brexit is on the political agenda again, even if in ways he regards as strategically inadequate. Indeed it is now highly likely that there will, in a literal sense, be a parliamentary debate about Brexit because this week a petition to “apply to rejoin the EU as soon as possible” received 100,000 signatures, something already denounced as heralding “Brexit betrayal”.

In short, the question now is not whether this renewed conversation will intensify over the next few months: it will. It is whether it will be a genuinely new conversation, or yet another reprise of those which have occurred over the last ten years.

 

Notes

[1] I have written at greater length on the manoeuverings in the Makerfield by-election and their relationship to Brexit in a recent piece in Byline Times. For more analysis, see Matt Carr’s recent Substack post.

[2] Portes’ analysis is borne out by research published by British Future last week, showing that despite the recent massive falls in net migration the public generally believe that it is rising (and also hugely over-estimate the proportion of immigrants who are asylum seekers). For more discussion of how “net migration collapsed, the right got what it wanted, and somehow they became even angrier” see a recent post on the Bearly Politics Substack. Meanwhile, Britain is immolating one of its few truly world-class assets (£), its universities, on the altar of addressing ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.

[3] In that respect, it’s worth noting that in his recent ‘anti-Brexit’ speech, Streeting also couched his ambitions in terms of a “special relationship with the EU”.

[4] On the other hand, there are reports (£) that the EU may be ready to allow the UK car industry to participate in the ‘Made in Europe’ scheme which, if it happens, would be an important development for that industry.

[5] Admittedly Frayne is, at least to me, less of a known quantity, but his role and profile as a member of the Centre for Policy Studies and his extant writing about Brexit make it unlikely that he will be a heterodox voice amongst his high-profile fellow panelists.

[6] It is worth saying that the report itself also advocates many detailed forms of integration which are well in excess of the current reset plans but, themselves, fall short of rejoining.

[7] I'm pleased to say that this week saw the 12 millionth visit to this blog. Many thanks to all who have visited, or read via other channels, and especially to those who have publicized it to a wider audience, and those who have encouraged me to continue writing it over the least (nearly) ten years.

Britain’s post-Brexit ungovernability

The dust is now settling after last week’s elections whilst the fallout very much continues, especially in terms of the leadership crisis engulfing the Labour government which is developing rapidly as I write (so that there may well be new developments in even the next few hours). Both tell us much about post-Brexit politics.

The election results

The landscape revealed by the election results is a complex one, sufficiently so as to be open to almost any number of interpretations. If there is one fairly uncontentious observation it is that they confirmed the fragmentation of the party system, with at least five main parties in England and seven across Great Britain. In particular, this marks the moment when both Reform and the Greens have, beyond any doubt, gained a significant political presence. However, it is quite wrong to say, as Nigel Farage does, that this shows that politics is no longer about left and right, and it is dispiriting that so many political analysts, notably Professor Sir John Curtice, make similar claims.

In fact, despite occasional flirtations with economic protectionism, Reform UK’s policies about cutting immigration, rewarding entrepreneurs, cutting welfare, and finding miraculous public sector efficiency savings are boilerplate right-wing politics. Equally, many Green positions, for example on defence, employment rights, and taxation, are recognizably those of the traditional left. Neither defies analysis in terms of left and right, although that may not be all to be said about them. What is decomposing is the situation of there being one party of the right and one party of the left.

Last week’s results also show the clearest evidence yet of another kind of fragmentation, with Wales, for the first time, and Scotland, again, joining Northern Ireland in having devolved administrations led (in various senses) by parties committed (in various ways) to secession from the United Kingdom [1]. Yet even here neither Plaid Cymru nor the SNP achieved majorities, and Reform and the Greens made gains.

The corollary of this fragmentation is that the dominant position of the two ‘main’ Westminster parties looks to be in its death throes: we could be living at the end of the period where the government and the official opposition parties are Labour and Conservative, or vice versa. It’s even possible that in the next parliament neither party with hold either role. It is certainly true that it would be a mistake to extrapolate from last week’s votes to the next general election, but those votes, taken together with the now well-established pattern of opinion polls, suggest that a first-past-the-post electoral system could yield just about any outcome. Thus we now have both a government in crisis and a political system in in crisis, a conjunction which, to the best of my knowledge, is unique in modern British history.

Post-Brexit politics

Stepping back from the immediate results, this can be seen as part of the roiling turbulence of politics since the 2016 Referendum, a turbulence which saw six Prime Ministers (and massive churn of ministers) and two premature elections as well as this fragmentation of parties. Of course, it is important not to mistake correlation for causality, or to ascribe single causes to complex developments. It's not all about Brexit. In particular, the fragmentation of political parties was already underway before the referendum, as were the many quite profound social and economic trends which were bound to have a fissiparous effect on the voting bases of the Tory and Labour parties. Labour’s virtual wipeout in Scotland at the hands of the SNP in the 2015 election is just one, but perhaps the most obvious, example.

Nevertheless, no one would deny that Brexit and its aftermath precipitated what political scientist Tim Bale calls “turmoil and transformation” in the Conservative Party. And much of Labour’s own present ‘turmoil’ has its roots in the doomed attempt to placate the leave voters within the party’s traditional electoral base whilst retaining the support of its ‘progressive’ and pro-remain voters. In my May 2018 post discussing the local elections held then, I wrote that “the Labour result shows the crippling limitations of their slippery and ambiguous stance on Brexit … they are too Brexity to pick up committed remainer votes and insufficiently Brexity to attract committed leavers.” It is depressing that this applies word-for-word eight years later [2].

Thus, the latest election results again demonstrate that in trying to please everyone Labour have managed to please no-one, alienating those on both the right and the left of its electoral coalition and, notably, both younger and older voters. Again, it bears saying that some of these tensions (of class, region, ideology etc.) have been present since the inception of the Labour Party, and rapidly intensified during the New Labour period, but Brexit added a significant new dimension to them.

Certainly the English council election results carried the fingerprints of Brexit, with Reform performing strongly where the leave vote was highest and, conversely, performing weakly where the remain vote was highest. This isn’t necessarily ‘because of Brexit’ so much as that both it and the Brexit vote arose from similar causes. The Brexit imprint is also evident in the Liberal Democrats’ support, in that their opposition to Brexit continues to make them congenial to liberal conservative voters repelled by the post-Brexit Tory Party. The latter probably explains, for example, their victories in East Surrey and West Surrey last week, although it can be argued that in appealing to such voters they, too, are being flanked on their ‘progressive’ side by the Greens.

Change, but what change?

If there is any unity, despite all of the fragmentation, it is to be found in the ubiquitous, angry demand that ‘things must change’, a demand made even by the Prime Minister himself. But, tragically, that very demand only goes to show the profundity of the fragmentation. Not only is there no agreement as to what changes are necessary, for many it is a demand with no content (e.g. ‘it’s time for a change’ or ‘why not give someone else a go’). Even worse, as Brexit shows only too clearly, when demands for change are met those demanding it are not necessarily satisfied or, as with the demand to cut net migration, do not necessarily know when they are met. And perhaps worst of all is the sense that for some voters it is not just that nothing will satisfy them but that they don’t want to be satisfied: what they want is to be angry, not to have that anger placated.

Whilst the latter applies especially to segments of the leave and Reform vote, what is evident within segments across the political spectrum is a refusal to accept trade-offs and constraints (an example on the left is the belief some, apparently including Green leader Zack Polanski, have in what Professor Jonathan Portes calls the “nonsense economics” of ‘Modern Monetary Theory’). In a sense, the ‘cakeism’ with which Boris Johnson approached Brexit has become embedded in political culture generally. But even if that were not so, it is a fact that Brexit itself, in an economic sense, has increased policy constraints in that we simply have less resources than we would otherwise have. In that way, even if unacknowledged, there is a trade-off between having Brexit and having other things, including tax revenues to devote to public services (estimated to be £65-£90 billion less in 2024-2025 than they otherwise would have been).

Inevitably the consequences of all this fall most heavily on the governing party since it, alone, is charged with delivering the ‘change’ that no one agrees on, and it, alone, is faced with the constraints that those outside government can ignore or deny. That is actually a fairly good description of the fate that befell the Tory governments in their delivery of Brexit. It certainly applies to the present Labour government, including to its ‘make Brexit work’ policy’. But, more generally, because politics is so fragmented, any and every policy initiative encounters substantial opposition and this government, mainly because of it lacks any coherent strategy or ideology, habitually responds by ‘u-turning’, which itself contributes to a sense of constant crisis.

That would be a problem for any government, but it is a particular problem for this one because of a nasty little paradox at the heart of the widespread demand that ‘things must change’. That paradox is best-captured by Labour’s 2024 electoral promise that ‘change is stability’. It was a promise which grew directly out of Brexit in that it proposed an alternative to all the political chaos of the years after the referendum. Now, that takes on a particular significance with the intense wave of demands for Keir Starmer to be replaced (of which more below). Perhaps, without the background of all the Tory leadership changes, that would have been an obvious way of dealing with the government’s crisis. As it is, if Starmer goes it will only mark a continuation of the last ten years of crisis. On the other hand, if he does not go, the palpable sense of a government in crisis and a Prime Minister besieged and lacking authority will persist. So, stay or go, the crisis remains.

The relaunch and the reset

Clearly Starmer’s preference is to stay on, and his immediate response to the traumatic election results was to attempt yet another ‘relaunch’ of his premiership. Even before the events which came later in the week this seemed like a doomed enterprise if only because, fairly or unfairly (and one does not have to be a fan to think that much of the bile about him seems excessive), he is loathed by almost all sections of the political spectrum. As the political journalist Samuel Earle put it prior to the relaunch speech, “It is too late for Starmer to learn from his mistakes: he is in a hate-loop from which he cannot escape.” But even if that was not so, there seems little sign that he is able to learn and, when it came, the ’relaunch’ speech on Monday illustrated this, being little more than a re-hash of similar speeches he has given in the past, and nowhere more so than in what he said about Brexit.

It’s true that, as has been the case recently, he highlighted Farage’s complicity in the failure of Brexit. But, as ever, his own policy was either vague or laughable (or, as when he claimed to be “putting Britain at the heart of Europe”, both). As always, he spoke of being “ambitious” for the relationship with Europe, but the actual policy is no more ambitious than before, except perhaps in sounding slightly more enthusiastic about a youth experience scheme – but this is something to which his government has had to be forced, kicking and screaming, to (probably) accept and even this week there are reports that agreement is foundering because of UK insistence on tightly capping numbers.

Within this, there are several strands to unpick. One is that it is true that, for all its limitations, even to talk in this way, and to pursue a cooperative strategy, does mark a difference to the Conservatives and Reform. However, that is not a new development (so was hardly going to help him to ‘relaunch’ his government) and suffers from the same deficiency of being too much for some voters and too little for others. Secondly, of course, the continuation of the ‘red lines’ (no single market, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people) means any ambitions are highly circumscribed.

Yet it does not follow that dropping those red lines now would be a workable policy. For one thing, given all Labour’s previous commitments, especially in the manifesto, there would be a substantial political price to pay for undertaking what would undoubtedly be presented as another U-turn, and a highly dishonest one. But more to the point, it is extremely unlikely that the EU would, at this time, entertain the kind of agreements this would allow because of the very real prospect that the next government would back-track on them, a prospect made all the more real by last week’s election results. I have made this argument ad nauseum on this blog, so will refer readers to Tom Hayes’ latest Substack post outlining how this seems from an EU perspective. Given this, dropping the red lines now would incur the political costs of dropping a major policy commitment without the corresponding benefits of delivering on the new policy [3].

This does not mean that Starmer’s approach to Brexit is the right one. He could do three things differently. Firstly, he could champion the ‘reset’, limited as it is, not just in terms of its instrumental benefits, limited as they are, but as an enthusiastic articulation of the beginning of a long-term project to build a new, principled, pro-European consensus, and as an explicit stepping-stone to reversing the historical error of Brexit. Second, he could argue, now, that the future policy, for the next election, should be to drop the red lines. Third, he could spell out, in terms, that it is the possibility of a future Reform and/or Tory government which is the real block on progress. In short, rather than simply chunter about being ‘more ambitious’ he could provide a concrete explanation of how this could be achieved. It would be, at once, dramatic, realistic, honest, and – something Starmer badly needs to be – leaderly.

An ungovernable country?

However, whilst this might be a better approach to Brexit, it is difficult to see that there is anything Starmer can now do to survive for much longer. As the Financial Times’ columnist Robert Shrimsley put it (£), writing immediately following the relaunch speech, “Starmer’s premiership is ebbing away. The blow could fall today, tomorrow, next week or next month. MPs are just weighing the odds and timings they need to get their people in place. The decision is made. It is now only about logistics.”

That sentiment, hammered home over the next few days, culminating in Wes Streeting’s resignation yesterday, is now so widespread that it is effectively self-fulfilling: political authority, like confidence in a currency, ultimately resides in its general acceptance. Yet, with Starmer apparently unwilling to resign and with, at least for now, no formal leadership challenge having been made, it seems likely we are in for a potentially protracted period of instability and drift before he is replaced (including if, as some are urging, he ‘sets out a timetable for his departure’).

The bigger question is what happens afterwards. It is unlikely to be followed by a new era of calm. Whoever replaces Starmer as Prime Minister will face frenzied speculation about another election being needed to secure a mandate. It’s also perfectly possible, for example if a leadership contest is held without it being possible for Andy Burnham to stand (since it cannot be assumed that he will succeed in his bid to become an MP), that the new leader will immediately fall prey to fresh plotting. This becomes all the more likely if a change of leadership is unaccompanied by any new analysis or agenda. And these two possibilities make this another question with no good answer: if there is a new agenda the need to secure a fresh mandate is all the greater, but if there is not a new agenda the likelihood of yet more leadership plotting is all the greater.

The even bigger question is about the limits to leadership itself, regardless of who the leader is. For, increasingly, it seems as if the consequence of a polity, not just in the sense of parties and institutions but of a population, which is split into multiple, angry segments with contradictory demands and, even, contradictory views of reality, is ungovernability. That situation is compounded by the media addiction to politics as spectacle which, as I discussed in a recent post, has probably become all the greater for having been fed by the dramas of the Brexit process. And perhaps what the electorate and the media share is a sheer impatience with both the timescale and complexity of policymaking.

We may not quite have reached the point of ungovernability, but I think we are getting close to it, an observation now widely made by political commentators on both the left and the right (though others disagree (£) with this diagnosis). The beneficiaries of this are populists, for whom anger, contradiction, chaos, and the disorientating effect of hyperactive news churn are not just opportunities but preferences. That applies to populists of both the left and the right but, currently, most obviously to Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Nevertheless, for Farage the election results are both a blessing and a curse. They enable him to present his fragment of the vote (which, don’t forget, is only a fragment, at about 25% in England in these elections) as the rise of a popular army, and himself as a Prime Minister in waiting. That also engenders more media coverage. On the other hand, such coverage will bring more scrutiny, especially of Farage’s financial dealings, and it is notable that the gurning grin and throaty chuckle which make him undeniably appealing (to some) give way to a tetchy anger when faced with such scrutiny. The range of things which are, or should be, major scandals for Farage is extraordinary, encompassing his recently-revealed undeclared ‘personal gift’ of £5 million from the Anglo-Thai cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, the purchase of his house in Clacton, and the scale and nature of his extra-parliamentary earnings.

Reform’s success will also bring more publicity for the utter ineptitude (£) with which it runs the growing number of local councils it controls, and for the many freaks, incompetents, rogues and racists amongst its councillors. Within hours of last week’s vote, newly elected Reform councillors began to resign amidst scandal. Many others will simply be out of their depth, finding it rather harder to engage with the complexities of local government than to fire off angry social media posts.

It’s true that for his hard-core supporters such scrutiny will make no difference. However, Reform-curious voters may be put off by what they see, whilst anti-Reform voters may be more minded to vote tactically the more likely a Farage premiership becomes. In other words, whatever he and his supporters may think, there is no inevitability in a Farage victory. However, a defeat for Farage, born of antipathy towards him and his policies, and cobbled together by the rickety means of tactical voting in a now broken electoral system (£), will hardly mark a resolution to political turmoil and incipient ungovernability.

Leadership for the unleadable

For such a resolution to happen, if indeed it can happen, it would require an extraordinary combination of political strategy and leadership. That would be needed to address multiple areas where policy has basically failed – social care, housing, and the criminal justice system are some obvious examples – and deep-seated problems such as chronic illness, an ageing population, and low productivity. At the same time, it would have to address the significant security threats which require an urgent increase in military capacity and the development of international alliances.

There is no sign at all, so far as I can see, that any existing political party is remotely capable of providing this strategy or the leadership to deliver it and, more to the point, any sign that the voting public would be amenable to it. Indeed, perhaps even to postulate a party coming up with a solution is part of the problem. In my former life as an organization studies academic one of the key topics of my discipline was leadership and, whereas traditional models focused on the person and conduct of ‘the leader’, it became increasingly widely understood that this had to be understood as a relationship between leaders and followers, with ‘followership’ as necessary as ‘leadership’.

From that perspective, the commentator Zoe Williams, in her own discussion of ungovernability, says something which is rather obvious but is politically almost unsayable: that voters need to ask themselves if it is they, rather than politicians who are to blame. That is most clearly the case for those voters (£) willing to be serially tricked by Farage, willing to ignore all the financial skullduggery and regard him as a man of the people, willing to ignore the scandals and incompetence of Reform councils, or, just, willing to vapidly bleat of supporting him as ‘it is time for a change’. But it does not just apply to them. It seems as if sooner rather than later we will get a new Prime Minister. If so, it is all too likely that, sooner rather than later, they too will be savaged by an angry and divided electorate and a drama-addicted media.

 

Notes

[1] In this post I am not focusing on the technical intricacies of Brexit but it bears mentioning that the government’s reset plans, and especially the plan for an SPS deal, will create considerable complexities for the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales (Northern Ireland is different because it aligns with EU SPS regulations in any case). A key component of this is the European Partnership Bill announced in the King’s Speech this week, as expected (see, for example, my post of 3 April 2026).

[2] Other aspects of that May 2018 post make for curious reading, especially my observation that the results showed that Cameron’s plan to use the referendum to destroy the electoral threat to the Conservatives posed by UKIP had, at least, had that effect. Well, it was true at the time, and in a way, but …

[3] For an analysis of how ‘rejoining’ could become a reality for both the EU and the UK, see the recently published Discussion Paper by Andrew Duff of the European Policy Centre.

A pregnant pause

This post is slightly shorter than usual because the last fortnight has been a fairly quiet period for Brexit-related news, with the dominant domestic story having been the continuing fall-out from Keir Starmer’s ill-judged appointment of Peter Mandelson. Even that does have some Brexit angles, though. Certainly Morgan McSweeney claimed this week that the choice of Mandelson was animated by the post-Brexit need to have a good trade relationship with the US. Actually, I suspect that, even if it’s true that Mandelson was appointed for his supposed ‘Trump-whispering’ credentials, something which is contested [1], this rationale would have applied regardless of Brexit because of the non-trade issues at stake in the UK-US relationship (i.e. defence and security).

Perhaps the more important Brexit angle is that one of the things Starmer’s government was expected to achieve was a substantial improvement in the relationship between politicians and civil servants following the huge damage done to it during the Brexit process. Yet the summary ejection of Sir Olly Robbins from the Foreign Office brought that relationship to what is probably a new low, made all the more noteworthy by the fact that Robbins at one time led the UK Brexit negotiations and, in that role, became almost a hate-figure to Brexiters.

However, in general terms there a sense of Brexit being on pause, but it is an unusually expectant pause, awaiting three imminent events.

The coming elections

The first of these is the English local council, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections which will be held next week. The results of these will have numerous consequences but one of them is that, assuming Labour do as badly as is expected, Starmer will face enormous pressure to reinvent or to resign his premiership. If the outcome is ‘reinvention’, then one very possible aspect of that will be to move from Labour’s “crabwise” approach to UK-EU relations to something quicker and deeper. If the outcome is ‘resignation’ (whether willing or forced) then it is highly likely that discussion of such a move will feature strongly in the race to succeed him, and that his successor, whoever it is, will embrace a reinvented policy.

In some ways, this would only be the continuation of the existing direction of travel. It is not so long since Labour had a virtual omerta on even mentioning Brexit. Starmer very reluctantly broke that silence in July 2022, although only to insist on his ‘red lines’, and for most of the period since then has relied on formulaic repetitions of the reset policy. It is really only in the last couple of months that he, Rachel Reeves, and other ministers have openly spoken of the damage Brexit has caused. But that openness has had the inevitable corollary of exposing the limitations of their plans to repair the damage, and increases the pressure for a far more ambitious policy.

A move in that direction would also be a continuation of Labour’s emergent realization, especially since losing to the Greens in Gorton & Denton, of the electoral need to offer its anti-Brexit members and voters a reason for loyalty. In particular, a shift to a full-throated project to ‘rejoin’ (probably articulated in terms of a future manifesto commitment rather than an immediate policy) might be seen as a way to out-flank the rather cautious ‘customs union for now’ position of both the Green Party and the Lib Dems. Whether such calculations, especially if transparently designed to save Starmer’s job, constitute the kind of principled commitment which could yield a genuine partnership with, let alone eventual membership of, the EU is another matter.

The coming UK-EU Summit

The second imminent event is the next UK-EU Summit. Unless I have missed it, the date of this has still not been agreed but in a speech at the beginning of April Starmer said that it would be announced “in the coming weeks”. This summit will really be the point at which the ‘reset’ has to have tangible outcomes, turning the rather vague aspirations of last May’s meeting into definite agreements. In particular, but also at the very least, the SPS or ‘veterinary’ agreement, which the government constantly talks of as if it were a done deal, will have to be delivered if there is to be a chance of getting it to the point of implementation by the next general election.

However, the reality is that the May 2025 Summit, which even at the time was rather insipid, now seems woefully inadequate given the scale of events since, most obviously the endless raging storm of Trump’s tariff policy and the successive international crises he has provoked, most damagingly in the Middle East. For example, the impact of an SPS deal on UK food prices, which was never going to be that great, now looks like very small beer in the face of the inflation of food and many other prices which is coming down the track as the result of the Iran War. So delivering on the 2025 Summit will not be enough and Starmer’s April speech said as much:

“I can tell you, at [the next] summit, the UK will not just ratify existing commitments made at last year’s summit. We want to be more ambitious. Closer economic cooperation. Closer security cooperation. A partnership that recognises our shared values, our shared interests, and our shared future. A partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.”

What this means in practice is, as usual, very vague. But it is hard to see how Starmer can go on and on making such vague promises without delivering and, in conjunction with the issue of how he responds to the May election results, this means that the next Summit is going to be a crucial moment in post-Brexit relations. It will show whether there is any momentum to the reset, any momentum to go beyond the reset, or whether we are stuck in the sludge, muddling along with nothing really changing since, effectively, the point at which, with Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework agreement in February 2023, a kind of post-Brexit status quo was achieved, more through exhaustion than anyone being especially satisfied with it.

At the time, I wrote of that perhaps being the moment when Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ broke (in the sense of ending the period of open hostility towards the EU, with British threats to renege on the agreements made etc.) and would be followed by a long, slow process of convalescence. Arguably, that is what we have seen since then and, if so, the question is whether we are still in that process or whether there will be a new phase of more rapid recuperation.

The coming anniversary

The third imminent event is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, on 23 June. At that point, there will be a rash of re-evaluations of Brexit, and already the anniversary is being invoked as a moment to initiate a renewed debate. That would be occurring anyway, just because ‘ten’ is a round number, but it has an added salience because of the context of international crisis and domestic disarray and, with that, the pervasive sense of a country adrift. As the economics and politics commentator Simon Nixon put it this week, with remarkable rapidity Brexit has ceased to be a taboo subject in British politics.

Thus, in the last fortnight there have been several high-profile interventions, including that of Sir Philip Rycroft, the former Permanent Secretary of the erstwhile Department for Exiting the European Union. Writing in The Times (£), he argued that the promises made for Brexit had not materialized, and that changes in public opinion and the international situation meant that it was time to make the argument for ‘rejoining’. Meanwhile, last weekend’s Observer made the call to rejoin its front page and carried an article by Neil Kinnock (£) arguing the case for doing so, as well as a report by the paper’s political and economic editors (£) (quoting Kinnock, Rycroft, Sadiq Khan, and a former President of the CBI, amongst others) of there being pressure on Starmer to at least begin a conversation about rejoining.

Notably, all of the interventions I’ve mentioned refer to a report entitled “Is it time to talk about EU membership?’ just published by Best for Britain which presents and analyses new public opinion survey data showing support/opposition for rejoining at 53%-32% and suggesting that, ultimately, this would be a more politically sustainable policy than, for example, seeking single market membership. What’s notable is not so much the figures, which are in line with other recent opinion polls, but my impression, at least, that campaign groups like Best for Britain (which not long ago was proposing what in my view was a variant of the flawed ‘mutual recognition solution’) and the European Movement are now more vocal, or more confident, in talking about ‘rejoining’. That is only an impression, but it will be interesting to see, for example, the level of support for the next National Rejoin March, which will be held on 20 June, and perhaps even more interesting to see the extent and the nature of the media coverage it receives.

The coming conversation

Obviously these three imminent events link together, with the idea of a ten-year anniversary ‘national conversation’ being part of the attempts from outside and within the Labour Party to push for a new policy in preparation for the expected election results and in anticipation of the summit. And, to the extent that this new policy is envisaged as being more ambitious than the reset, that pretty much implies the abandonment of Labour’s ‘red lines’, as was argued this week by Labour MP Marsha de Cordova [2]. Whether that will happen any time soon I doubt, not least because I doubt whether the opinion poll support for joining the EU is yet large enough or reliable enough for Starmer or any other Labour leader to depend upon it.

Nevertheless, it is already clear that the coming months are going to see a revival of debate about Brexit and that will include, as indeed reactions to these recent interventions have already shown, a ferocious reaction from leading Brexiters. In that sense it will show that, in line with the book I reviewed in an ‘extra’ post on this blog last week, the “tribal divisions” of the 2016 referendum have persisted. For that matter, whilst the May election results may well push Labour to a more anti-Brexit position, the expected gains of Reform UK will be a fillip to the confidence of Brexiters. That is another reason why beginning the process of joining the EU is not an imminent possibility, but this certainly doesn’t mean that a revived debate about doing so will be unimportant or meaningless.

No doubt I will write more about that when we get to the tenth anniversary, but, for now, an important point to make is that the continuing Brexit divisions show just how comprehensively Brexit has failed, in at least two ways.

Firstly, whilst those divisions have persisted, and much of the debate about Brexit is extremely repetitious, the underlying dynamics have shifted and will likely continue to do so. In 2016, the Brexiters’ case was primarily about how good the effects of leaving the EU would be. Now, their argument is just that it hasn’t been as bad as was warned or as is claimed. That is, it has become a fundamentally defensive case, and, moreover, that case is necessarily undermined by their constant claim that Brexit has been ‘betrayed’. It is hard to mount a convincing defence of something whilst also disdaining it.

The ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’ – but in the end this term will have to be dropped) case has also altered, in that it is now possible to demonstrate the damage of not being a member and also possible for joining the EU to be presented, as leaving once was, as a radical disavowal of the status quo in favour of a new and desirable future. Indeed, ultimately, the viability of the ‘join’ case, not least in the eyes of the EU, will depend on it being articulated in positive terms and not just as an escape from the hardship of a failed experiment.  

The second point about the ongoing debate is, simply, the fact that it is ongoing. In the second edition of my book about Brexit I wrote that according to its advocates and supporters “… Brexit was intended to be the start of a confident national renewal, a reinvigoration of national purpose, prosperity and standing. It certainly wasn’t proposed as, or supposed to be, the prelude to a country permanently divided on the wisdom of Brexit, still less to an interminable debate about whether it had been the right thing to do ….” (p.285) and I went on to quote David Frost saying that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.”

He said that in June 2022, so we haven’t quite reached the point he specified, but there’s absolutely no sign that his test will be met. As the writer and journalist Matt Carr puts it in his recent, excellent Substack post:

“Ten years after Brexit, the UK is yet to find either peace or acceptance. Roiled by angry, vicious dreams and fed on a diet of toxic delusions, it recognises the folly of the decision that it took in 2016, but does not know how to change it, or simply does not dare.”

Yet, depressing as that is, it would be even more depressing if Frost’s test had been met, we had ceased to debate Brexit and it had settled in the British polity.

Notes

[1] I express this conditionally because, although that has always been my understanding, and one shared by, amongst others, the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr, another eminent political commentator, Stephen Bush of the Financial Times, is adamant that the sequence of events shows that the government’s desire to appoint Mandelson preceded Trump’s re-election. Whatever the truth of this, it doesn’t affect my point that the idea it had a Brexit rationale is questionable.

[2] It should not, however, be thought that all the pressure within the Labour Party points towards erasing the government’s red lines, or even towards a more ambitious reset within those red lines. For example, it was reported this week (£) that (unnamed) ministers are concerned that Labour’s increasing commitment to alignment with EU regulations, above and beyond that entailed by the reset, of will impair the UK’s ability to set its own regulatory regime for AI. And the regulatory alignment envisaged by the existing reset policy also has critics, some of whom may well be Labour voters and members, who are opposed to the fact that an SPS deal will prevent Britain adopting its own animal welfare protections.