A new conversation?

In my previous post, I suggested that by re-opening the question of Brexit, Andy Burnham’s party conference speech marked a significant moment in the Brexit saga. That has been borne out by the way that, since then, there has been the beginning of the ‘national conversation’ he called for, with an upsurge of discussion about whether and how the UK could join (or ‘rejoin’) the EU, whether that would be welcomed by the EU, and, if so, on what terms and in what timescale. All this and more also featured this week in an unusually well-attended Westminster Hall debate that had been prompted by a successful petition to parliament.

The details of this discussion are far less important than the fact of it happening [1]. The Burnham speech was, indeed, a ‘moment’. For it to become a turning point it will require a sustained process not just of national conversation but of national ‘mood-building’, somewhat akin to that which developed in the years before the 2016 referendum, to create a sense that a change of direction is possible and should be put to a vote. One way in which that might be achieved is by providing some structure to the otherwise nebulous notion of a national conversation, in the way suggested this week by Mike Galsworthy, strategy advisor to the European Movement.

How we got here

However it is conducted, what is happening now is actually not the first stage of a national conversation but the second. The first stage was the important one which began when the transition period ended and, as I put it in a post at the time, the post-Brexit narrative started to be shaped. That stage saw a battle over whether the consensus view was to be that Brexit had been a success or a failure. It was comprehensively lost by the Brexiters, as some of them seem to recognize, such as ‘Brexit brain’ Robert Tombs (£), even if they do not understand why. The ebbs and flows of that battle were charted in detail on this blog, but the headline outcome is obvious from opinion polls, which have shown the consistent, and slowly increasing, view of the public that it was wrong to leave the EU.

Currently, 57% think it was wrong to leave and 30% think it was right to leave. That 30% matters, because it shows there is still sizeable, and probably implacable, bedrock of support for Brexit, and it matters even more because it has disproportionate voice amongst the commentariat. Nevertheless, barring some dramatic development, it’s fair to say that the view that Brexit was a mistake is now embedded as a political fact. It is only because of that it is now possible to talk about entering a new stage in which, with that fact established, the battle is over whether anything should be done about it and, if so, what.

That is the stage which is now beginning. Whether and how it continues will depend upon many others, including pro-EU campaigners, but it will crucially require that Burnham continues to push the narrative forward. Already, there are signs that he has an appetite to do so, although whether he has the stamina to continue remains to be seen. At all events, in the last week he has re-iterated, but this time in the House of Commons, what he said at the conference and, in fact, edged slightly beyond it. Previously, he spoke of one outcome of the ‘national conversation’ being to “stay as we are”. Now, he is emphasizing that “the status quo is not good enough for Britain” and in that sense is leading, or at least steering, the outcome of the conversation.

Meanwhile, a date – 20 November – has been set for the next UK-EU Summit. That will be an important moment both for showing whether the provisions long-trailed for the ‘reset’ have been finalized and for signalling what further agreements might be envisaged.

The real significance of Russian interference

Andy Burnham also pushed the ‘national conversation’ further forward with his statement at the weekend and subsequently in the Commons, that it is “clear” that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum. This was based, implicitly, on intelligence briefings he has received since becoming Prime Minister, and in a major speech later in the week Sir Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5, confirmed that interference had occurred. Of course, this is hardly a news item as it is well-established, not least by the assiduous investigations of former Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr. But it is certainly a news item that, for the first time, a British Prime Minister has acknowledged the fact.

However, the significance of his having done so is not, in my view, what it is commonly taken to be [2]. Many opponents of Brexit have, since the referendum, claimed or implied that Russian interference invalidates the referendum result, just as many supporters of Brexit have treated such claims as an attempt to discredit it, and both of these positions have been rehearsed in response to Burnham’s comment [3]. My own view has consistently been that it is unknowable whether Russian interference influenced the result (and, by the same token, it is not clear on what basis McCallum would be able to know, as he claimed, that it had not done so). Moreover, even if it did influence the result, it was certainly not the only, or even the main, reason for it [4].

Rather, what is significant about the interference is that it provides tangible evidence for what might otherwise be only an assertion: that Brexit was and is in Russia’s interests, both by destabilizing Britain and by damaging the EU. As Rafael Behr put it almost ten years ago, Brexit wasn’t “a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind … made in a factory outside St Petersburg [but it was Putin’s] dream policy” and, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it, “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”. (It also bears saying that, although largely forgotten now, the only other major country delighted by Brexit was Iran.)

Likewise, what is important about Burnham confirming Russian interference is not whether it means that the 2016 referendum result was a mistake for, as noted above, that has already been established in the public mind. In fact, what is important about it is almost nothing to do with 2016 and almost everything to do with the situation in which the UK and the EU find themselves now, in 2026. Indeed, the immediate context of Burnham’s comments was what the lessons of Russia’s interference in British politics (including, but not limited to, the referendum) might be for forthcoming elections in Germany and France.

The wider context

Of course the overall context is far wider. It is, firstly, that of the entire situation, as recently outlined by the historian Timothy Garton Ash, of the escalation of Putin’s attacks on Ukraine and the escalating hybrid warfare his regime is conducting against the UK, and others, with Russia being described in the MI5 chief's speech as "aggressor number one" in threats the security service faces.

The two are inter-connected, with Ukraine being the ‘hot war’ front line of the larger attempt by Putin to undermine and damage, if not destroy, the ‘liberal West’. That inter-connection is the reason why one part of Russia’s hybrid war campaign is an information war in which social media accounts and channels are used on a massive scale to spread false narratives within countries, including the UK, which seek to justify the illegal war on Ukraine and to undermine the legitimacy of Ukraine’s self-defence.

Equally relevant to this bigger context is Donald Trump. At the most general level he, quite as much as Putin, is an implacable enemy of the ‘liberal West’, one meaning of which might be those countries, including the UK, which last week issued a joint statement of support of the International Criminal Court in the aftermath of Trump’s latest and most severe attack upon it. At a more specific level, Trump has long been supportive, albeit in sometimes inconsistent ways, of Russia’s claims on Ukraine and, again just in the last week, that has been even more overt with the announcement of his ‘diesel deal’ with Putin.

There are multiple meanings of that deal, not least Trump’s attempts to blame the domestically unpopular cost of rising fuel prices in the US on Ukraine rather than his own disastrously incompetent war on Iran. But, as strategy expert Professor Phllips P. O’Brien has explained, its core meaning is that it is the clearest of signals that the US is now on Russia’s side. Conversely, for Putin, as CNN reports from Moscow, “the real benefit isn’t the billions of dollars in fresh revenue. It is the wedge this deal, and the rhetoric around it, drives right through the heart of the Western alliance.”

There’s no doubt that the ‘diesel deal’ is in part animated by the financial benefits Trump sees for his family and friends, as outlined by David Frum in The Atlantic. However, it would be a mistake to draw a sharp distinction between Trump’s venality and his anti-liberal ideology: part and parcel of his hostility to the rule of law and the rules-based international order is his desire to be unconstrained from such rule. Indeed the core reason Trump is not just dangerous for the world at large but is also such an incompetent leader for the United States is that he recognizes no distinction between his private desires and interests and his public office and duties. It is no coincidence that in the classical sociology of Max Weber that distinction was at the heart of the rational-legal authority upon which the modern State is predicated. Nor is it a coincidence that many leading Brexiters are as hostile as Trump to that conception of authority.

So, to re-iterate the point, it is within this context that the issue of Russian interference in 2016 becomes important; not as a re-litigation of the referendum result, but for what it means about the world now. At the time of the referendum we had not even had the first Trump presidency, let alone his dramatically more extreme second term. Nor, at that time, had Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But whilst those things could not have been predicted, it was obvious, as I wrote in detail in January 2019 – before Trump 2.0 and Ukraine – that Brexit constituted a fundamental strategic mistake primarily because, in both its nationalist and globalist versions, it failed to understand the centrality of regionalism, not just in terms of trade and regulation but also in terms of geo-politics. That is even more important now, in 2026 when, in an unfamiliar but genuine sense, those geo-politics have given rise to war.

The current war

If that statement sounds contentious or over-blown it is because the current geo-political situation does not fit neatly with our traditional understanding of wars and alliances. For one thing, the meaning of alliance, and most specifically the meaning of the UK-US alliance, has become extremely confusing. It wouldn’t be true to say that this alliance no longer exists, but it certainly doesn’t exist in the way that might once have been thought. The US is now an unreliable ally, but also one on which we still have a dependence and to which we are still obliged to make a contribution. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, and the MAGA movement more generally, is at least as active in pumping misinformation into the UK as the Putin administration and its bot farms.

Crucially, both are spreading similar types of misinformation (£), especially about civilizational erasure at the hands of Muslims and impending civil war. The litany is all-too familiar – London has disintegrated into anarchy, armed gangs of asylum seekers have invaded Britain and are raping women and children, Sharia Law has been imposed etc. etc. – as are the endless (increasingly AI-generated) fake videos and mendacious statistics used to ‘prove’ this to be so. At the same time, every established institution – the police, the church, the BBC, universities, schools, the judiciary, civil servants, the monarchy and, of course, ‘uniparty’ politicians – is depicted as being complicit in this. Some of it is literally insane but, even so, is persuasive to some people and, far more importantly, its cumulative effect is to persuade a larger number that ‘if even half of it is true’ then that is bad enough.

In short, an information war is under way in the UK (quite as much as in the EU) and it is conducted from both the US and Russia. But it is not simply an external attack: it is crucially reliant upon being amplified from within. Nigel Farage tends to downplay his connections with Trump and his admiration for Putin these days, knowing them to be unpopular, but he and associated figures, not to mention the GB News propaganda channel, repeat the messages coming from them [5].

Like Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain, Farage affects to be an affable English squire moved to righteous anger only by the betrayal of a decadent elite and motivated only by patriotic duty. In fact, both of them, and their numerous acolytes, are deeply enmeshed with Putinist and Trumpian interests. This is not a rhetorical slur. For example, it is a fact that the former leader of Reform in Wales is in prison for taking bribes to make pro-Russian speeches in the European Parliament, it is a fact that Elon Musk has publicly supported Restore, and it is a fact that Reform, Trump, Putin, and (though this is less widely known) Restore are all in various ways linked to cryptocurrencies.

Nor is this information war just about stoking division and anger on-line. Another growing threat highlighted this week by the head of MI5 is the far-right violence that this on-line activity provokes and promotes. According to McCallum, this transition from rhetorical to literal violence was “the most marked trend” in the threats dealt with by the agency over the last year. It also intersects with the recent growth of ‘gig economy terrorism’, whereby hostile states recruit unwitting or disaffected individuals to undertake attacks, rather than using their own agents in the traditional sense. This modus operandi has come to prominence in relation to the still obscure events at RAF Fairford. In that case, Iran stands accused as being the hostile state, but the same approach was used in the arson attacks against Keir Starmer’s property in 2025. In the latter case, there is very strong evidence that Russia orchestrated the attacks.

As the BBC report just linked to shows in great detail, these kinds of operations are highly complex and it is extremely difficult to uncover the full facts about them (this, indeed, is one reason why hostile states adopt this method). But the ‘Starmer arson attack’ case undoubtedly used an ostensibly far-right group, called Direct Action, apparently controlled by Russia, to recruit the ‘agents’.

Moreover, in both this case and the Fairford case, the tendency in gig economy terrorism to recruit foreign-born or ethnic minority agents contributes to promoting the far-right narrative of ‘invasion’. Notably, Farage has repeatedly, and mendaciously, used the Fairford case to claim that the small boats ‘crisis’ constitutes a “national emergency”. In this sense, even if an attack ‘fails’ it is still has a value in further stoking dissent. The Fairford case also created an opportunity for Trump and his associates to berate the UK for its supposed laxity in security matters, linking it directly to the narrative that Britain has been “invaded” by “fighting-age men”, an attack line immediately taken up Farage and others.

All of this – along with the other features of Russia’s hybrid war, such as repeated air and sea space violations, drone attacks and cyber-threats, and MAGA-supported and funded ideological warfare – adds up to a situation which is possibly hard for many British people to understand. It has so many interacting skeins, for one thing, and it is also quite different to our received images of war. It is nothing like the world wars, or the Falklands War, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not even much like earlier versions of ideological warfare, such as that of the Cold War. Nor is it much like IRA or even Islamist terrorism.

Back to Brexit

The complexities of this situation are probably too great for any one person to analyse. But, in terms of the focus of this blog, what should be obvious is that Brexit and Brexitism intersect with each and every aspect of it. Support for Brexit is one of the things which links Farage, Lowe, Tommy Robinson, and the entire British far right, with Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America, and Iran. They also all share a desire to destabilize British society, demonize British multi-culturalism, and discredit British institutions. To be clear, I don’t mean that everyone who supports or voted for Brexit desires all those other things; I mean that those who desire all those other things invariably support Brexit.

The flip-side of this is that all those named also share a hostility to the EU and, of course, the EU and its members are being targeted in exactly the same way as the UK and for the same reasons. By the same token, membership of the EU would not spare Britain from this hostility. Nevertheless, it is this war situation which brings us back to the newly-revived discussion about Brexit, including the discussion of Russia’s role in it. For what is coming to the fore as a result is (or should be) an increasing recognition in the UK that Britain’s relationship with Europe isn’t an accounting exercise, or primarily concerned with the costs and benefits of trade or supply chains or regulation, but is about shared interests and values and the mutual defence of these.

I’ve never accepted the argument that the 2016 leave campaign was about values and emotions rather than economics (Brexiters repeatedly claimed that leaving would be economically beneficial), but it is true that the remain campaign was overly focused on economics and did little to articulate a more principled, even moral, case for EU membership. In that, it was all of a piece with the years during which the UK was a member state.

But with a new ‘national conversation’ about Brexit apparently under way, there is also now an opportunity for that conversation to be a different and better one. The daily accumulating evidence that the UK is not just geographically and economically, but geo-politically and ideologically, part of the European continent makes abundantly clear the strategic illogicality of not also being part of the institutional and legal structures of the European Union.

 

Notes

[1] For this reason, I don’t see any point in trawling through the details of what has been said, most of which is predictable and has been discussed in one way or another in previous posts. But I do just want to comment on the suggestion made by the senior Labour MP Dame Emily Thornberry that a referendum would not be needed to seek to join the EU if doing so was in the manifesto of a party (i.e. Labour) which won a general election. This would be an utter disaster, both in terms of the legitimacy of joining in this way and because it would make it entirely reasonable for a subsequent government, if elected on a ‘Brexit again’ manifesto, to leave again without a referendum (the same applies to any proposal to join the single market). In turn, this would also be likely to mean that the UK’s application to join would be rejected anyway, since it would be so obviously lacking in durability.

[2] Since writing this post, I have belatedly seen that Rafael Behr’s Guardian column this week made a somewhat similar analysis to that which I provide here.

[3] The most flagrantly stupid of these reactions include: a) that the claim is that all 17.2 million leave voters were conned by Russian interference (but no one claims this or even, necessarily, that any leave voter was so influenced); b) that, even if true, it is no different to Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ intervention (but this was an open statement not, as in Russia’s case, a covert operation); c) that, as per Farage, Burnham is a “liar” (but the evidence of interference is beyond dispute, the only thing which can legitimately be disputed is its effect). The latter is the pin head on which angels have been dancing all week with Burnham being (falsely) accused of having claimed that the Russian intervention had been successful.

[4] This point is not negated by the fact that the referendum result was close, leading some to claim that even a very small impact from Russian interference would have been ‘decisive’. First, we can’t know for sure that it had even a very small impact. Second, it was not the vote differential between leave and remain (i.e. the amount by which leave won) which ‘won it’ for leave, it was the totality of  the leave vote which gave rise to that differential. With apologies for the cricket analogy, if I score one run in my team’s winning score, and my team wins by one run, it does not mean that my contribution was the ‘decisive’ one, rather than the century scored by my team-mate. This also seems to be McCallum/ MI5’s view, although it is a mystery why he appears to think that discussing what he regards as its ineffective actions will in some way “delight” Russia. Equally, since it seems to be Burnham’s view as well, the charge that McCallum’s comment was, as claimed by the Conservatives, a ‘slap down’ for the Prime Minister made no sense.

[5] It shouldn’t be forgotten that, as recently as 2024, Farage also pushed the Kremlin line that the West had ‘provoked’ the invasion of Ukraine, a line which Boris Johnson also took (£) during the 2016 referendum in relation to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, for which he blamed the EU. (Subsequently, when he was Prime Minister and Russia had launched its full-scale invasion, Johnson, with his usual rancid dishonesty, argued that the West had made a “terrible mistake” in letting Putin “get away” with annexing Crimea.)