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.
Friday, 15 May 2026
Friday, 1 May 2026
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.
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.
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