Brexit Britain is still a tinderbox

It is now almost exactly ten years since my first post on this blog, and this latest post comes after a long, hot summer break in which there have been virtually no developments as regards Brexit, in the delimited sense of Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU.

That isn’t a surprise, given that it is usually the political holiday season, at least for routine parliamentary and inter-governmental politics. Yet, starting this eleventh year of blogging, there is a sense of a more pervasive Brexit stasis. That stasis is not a sign that Brexit has ceased to be important but, rather, that the British polity has still not faced up to its consequences and shows no signs of being able to do so.

The Brexit stasis

The stasis has two aspects. From an EU perspective, relations with the UK have not been a matter of pressing concern since the completion of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on broadly satisfactory terms, and perhaps not since the completion of the Withdrawal Agreement. Not only are there now more important issues on the EU agenda, but it is also obvious that very little of substance can change unless there is a decisive change within the UK polity. And this is the second aspect of the stasis: there has been no such change.

For it is now abundantly clear that Andy Burnham’s EU policy is going to be virtually identical to that of Keir Starmer. That is most obvious in Burnham’s re-iteration over the summer of his commitment to the manifesto ‘red lines’ (no single market membership, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people, if a reminder is necessary). There should be no surprise in that, either. Politically, it would be very difficult to justify so major a departure from the manifesto without stoking demands for another general election. But in any case, as for Starmer before him, there would be little point in spending political capital on seeking from the EU something which it would be unlikely to grant until it is clear that it has strong and durable support in the UK, and will not be reversed by the next government.

There is also a time factor here: the government is already approaching the likely mid-point of its parliamentary term and, as yet, it still hasn’t delivered even the very limited reset promised by Starrmer. Indeed, there isn’t even yet an agreed date for the (much delayed) next UK-EU summit at which the reset agreement is supposed to be announced, although the current rumour is that it will be in November. It’s astonishingly feeble given the supposed priority Labour accorded it when they came to power.

So, even if Burnham dropped the red lines tomorrow, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that an entirely new deal with the EU could be struck by the next election. Thus not only would he have taken the political pain of dropping a central manifesto commitment, he would have nothing to show for it. The real question for Burnham’s Labour will be whether it abandons or modifies its red lines in the next election manifesto, with the subsidiary question being whether in the interim Burnham lays the ground for doing so.

Many pro-Europeans will find this intensely irritating, but it does at least have a discernible political rationale (it’s not necessary to agree with that rationale to discern it). What is far less forgivable is that Burnham has also taken over from Starmer the stupid and dishonest pretence that, despite the red lines, he is going to seek a “bolder” and “more ambitious” relationship with the EU, something also re-stated over the summer by Hamish Falconer, the new ‘Europe Minister’ (in effect, if not in title). Thus, Burnham talks (£) of putting closer ties with the EU at the heart of his economic strategy in order to “add percentage points” to UK growth by, something precluded by his own red lines. The absurdity of these claims is made all the clearer by the way that, at the same time, the British government is engaged in sour wrangling over university tuition fees for EU students as part of the existing reset negotiations, which hardly bespeaks of either boldness or ambition.

Well-worn delusions

If all this were not depressing enough, this summer has shown that the absurdity goes beyond simply spouting pieties and making dishonest claims. Rather, as an intervention from former Tory Minister Nick Boles, now advising Burnham on European policy, shows, all the familiar Brexit delusions are still in place.

In an essay for the thinktank Demos, Boles makes two key arguments. One is for the creation of a ‘European Confederation’ of the EU and non-EU countries (including the UK) allowing a single market for goods (widely misreported as ‘rejoining the single market) but with no freedom of movement of people. The other is that this would be associated with a comprehensive defence pact which would include the UK providing nuclear deterrence capability to its members.

The first of these arguments is as well-worn as a treadless tyre, and yet another iteration of the refusal to understand what a single market means as a concept, a refusal to understand what it means to the EU, and, ultimately, just the latest home-grown proposal to be ‘out and yet in’ of the sort that has been made since the very beginning of the Brexit process.

The second argument has, ostensibly, a more contemporary flavour. At least it recognizes the changed security landscape created by Trump, and shifting US priorities even without Trump, and what that means for NATO and European defence. It is clear that for Boles these two arguments go together, in that the offer of a UK (nuclear) contribution to an enhanced European defence pact will be the ‘carrot’ (£) to unpick the EU’s commitment to the ‘four freedoms’ of the single market.

In fact, and this I why I said it was only ‘ostensibly’ a new argument, the attempt to barter security for trade was attempted several times during the Brexit negotiations, starting with Theresa May’s Article 50 notification letter in 2017, an attempt much resented by EU leaders, some of whom regarded it as blackmail (it is fair to say that the use of this tactic ebbed and flowed over the years). Boles appears to think that, precisely because of the new security landscape, the attempt can be made again though perhaps – to be charitable – not in the negative sense of a threat to reduce cooperation, but in the positive sense of an offer to enhance it.

However, this rests on what is obviously a false premise. There is a perfectly good, if not indeed overwhelming, argument that it is in the mutual interest of the UK and the EU to radically increase defence cooperation because the US is no longer a reliable security partner. It’s an argument Burnham has recently endorsed. But the key point is that it is a mutual interest: both could benefit.  Yet what Boles envisages is that, as well as its share of this benefit, the UK would receive an additional benefit in the form of joining a single market for goods with no freedom of movement of people. So the equation clearly doesn’t balance. [1]

Why nothing is changing

In short, we can see Brexit stasis at multiple levels in the UK: nothing new is happening, the Labour government’s policy is unchanged and so is the mendacity of its rhetoric, and thinking about post-Brexit policy continues to go round what in the past I have called the same old Mobius Strip of ‘solutions’ to the problems caused by Brexit whilst retaining the supposed ‘benefits’ of Brexit.

As time has gone on, those benefits have proved so illusory that only the most recalcitrant continue to claim them. No one seriously believes that having an independent trade policy is a net benefit, even though the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds continues to suggest it is of value (£). And the limitations of regulatory independence were illustrated yet again over the summer in an analysis by Vilija Vėlyvytė of UKICE of the regulation of medicines testing and authorization (once touted by Brexiters as a key example of how post-Brexit sovereignty would Britain a ‘world leader’).

But, despite the government’s continuing attempts to suggest that trade and regulatory independence provide some sort of justification for it European policy, it is perfectly obvious that what drives that policy is, overwhelmingly, Labour’s neuralgia about immigration. That explains both the broad contours of the policy, in terms of the ‘red lines’, but also the micro-details, such as resistance to an extensive Youth Mobility Scheme. It explains the contortions and delusions of the Boles’ proposals, and all the other attempts over the years to detach freedom of movement of people from single market membership. It also explains why the government is willing to sacrifice the economic growth it would so dearly love to have, to sacrifice the universities which should be central to its regional and innovation policies, and even to sacrifice the house-building programme it is committed to delivering.

Hostility to immigration supersedes everything and anything else. And whilst Labour can be blamed for its cowardice and lack of leadership in this respect, that is, itself, a manifestation of the deeper and more widespread way that the UK – and especially England – are gripped by anti-immigration fervour which persists even now that a collapse in net migration levels is underway. It is this, more than anything else, which means that post-Brexit relations with the EU are stuck in their present form.

Summer at the seaside

One obvious expression of, and barometer for, the extent of this anti-immigration fervour is the continuing level of support for Reform (and its rival offshoot Restore). Here, the event, or perhaps non-event, of the summer was the Clacton by-election. Unsurprisingly, this was won Nigel Farage, but there was little triumph in it and the Reform leader, who has not been seen much since, seems to be a much-diminished figure. Meanwhile, there are reports of increasing infighting within the party, and its finances, as well as those of Farage himself, continue to be a source of vulnerability and potential scandal.

It may well be that electoral support for Reform will never regain its peak levels of earlier this year, when some surveys had the party polling at over 30%. However, it continues to have a fairly stable 25% of the vote share, easily large enough to have a major electoral impact and perhaps an even greater political influence. This again implies that the chances of any British government pursuing a substantially closer relationship with the EU are small, and the chances of doing so in a way that is plausible to the EU are even smaller.

Support for Reform does not simply betoken the persistence of anti-immigration sentiment. It is also bound up with the persistence of Brexitism and its attendant culture war. This summer saw an especially intense skirmish within that war with the events leading up to and following from the death of Jason Arday.

The Arday case and the culture war

More than any other example I can think of, this showed one of the most obnoxious features of the culture war. I suspect (or at least hope) that I am not alone in thinking that the Arday case shows appalling racism and EDI over-reach and legitimate media scrutiny and media hounding and personal failings and institutional failings. These aren’t incompatible, and what is so obnoxious about culture war is its demand that everyone ‘picks a side’, or perhaps more accurately the seductiveness of that demand, and ignores or denies all complexity and ambiguity.

Yet complexity and ambiguity there was. As the journalist and commentator Helen Lewis put it in The Atlantic, “the Arday case is endlessly debatable because it contains so many double-edged elements”. In a similar way, another journalist and commentator, Lewis Goodall remarked that the case, and Arday himself, became a symbol in “the ceaseless, airless, brainless culture war.” This became obvious in the way that the case – which, surely, was a most unusual, even idiosyncratic, one – came to be used as a proxy to attack social science in general, academics in general, and universities in general. It also became obvious in the way it was taken as having a general meaning for diversity initiatives, press freedom, academic freedom etc. etc.

However, in terms of the focus of this blog, I’m not sure that the sides in the Arday furore map easily on to Brexitism. There is obviously some overlap – the racism, and the attack on academics and universities generally, no doubt has some correlation with support for Brexit and the wider social illiberalism with which that, in turn, correlates. But there are probably plenty of people (and for what it is worth I am one of them) who are neither socially illiberal nor pro-Brexit yet think that Arday’s appointment to a Cambridge professorship was questionable [2], even if hardly warranting such outrage.

More importantly, the way the ‘sides’ have lined up doesn’t map neatly on to Brexitism because it has brought into sharp focus some of the fissures amongst, especially, those who are opposed to Brexit and Brexitism. Those fissures are many (for example, liberal conservatives find commonality with social democrats, whilst social democrats are alienated from Lexiters) but the Arday case, in particular, illustrated how deeply the trans-rights issue has split the liberal-left. Thus several high-profile gender critical feminists, most notably J.K. Rowling, who were highly opposed to Brexit were also highly critical of Arday’s appointment.

As I understand it, the connection, even if not explicitly stated, is this: EDI in universities is seen by gender critical feminists as a bedrock of trans-activism; Arday’s appointment was seen as an expression of EDI in universities; and ‘therefore’ attacking Arday’s appointment was a way of attacking trans-activism. I’m not, here, making any comment on the trans-rights debate, or the sides within it, but rather trying to unpick how it cuts across the issue of Brexit and the concept of Brexitism and, in the process, trying to explain why the sides in the Arday case only partially overlap with those of Brexit and Brexitism. The example of gender critical feminists is not the only one but it is perhaps the most obvious [3].

The political tinderbox

Although the Arday case may only partially relate to Brexitism, the ferocity of the arguments it has engendered do disclose something about how intensely divided post-Brexit Britain is. I don’t mean that, had Britain not left the EU, there would not have been exactly the same argument. That would be nonsense. Nor am I suggesting that existing EU members are not, in many cases, as bitterly divided on culture war lines. What I mean is that these intense divisions have a particular significance for the prospect of re-opening, in any substantive way, the question of UK-EU relations, and especially any question of joining the EU. If even the slight spark of the Arday case can ignite such ferocity, how much more would that be true in the case of Brexit?

During this long, hot summer, Andy Burnham described the country as being a “tinderbox”, with numerous devastating wildfires and the danger of many more, and even instigated an emergency mobile phone alert to warn of this danger. With rain now starting to fall more widely, that danger is hopefully receding. But the metaphorical sense that Britain is a political tinderbox, with a culture war conflagration an ever-present danger, continues. It is for that reason that the Brexit stasis also continues. It remains too a hot a topic to address in any serious way, and there is no obvious sign that rain is imminent.

 

Notes

[1] I have a feeling that someone else made the argument I am making here, and that I am cribbing it, but unfortunately I can’t recall who did so or where I read it. I think it might have been Anand Menon. So apologies to him – or whoever it was – for not quoting/ linking to it in the way I normally would.

[2] This isn’t just a hunch on my part. I don’t want to sound as if I am waving my academic credentials but, when I was a Professor at Cambridge University, I was an external (i.e. external to the faculty, but internal to the university) member of the Board of the Faculty of Education, where Arday was employed, and sat on several of its professorial and non-professorial appointments’ panels, as well as those in my own and other faculties. I also chaired a committee for the DfES (as was), identifying criteria for quality in educational research, Arday’s field (though not my own). Admittedly, these experiences were almost 20 years ago, and I don’t want to over-claim for them but, still, it perhaps means my view isn’t entirely uninformed, and possibly less uninformed than many of those who have commented. And, in my view, whilst some of the criticisms levelled at Arday and his work were unfair, there are genuine reasons to doubt his suitability for his post.

[3] Another, perhaps less obvious or important example, is that I have noticed several people who I know to be highly critical of Brexit also strongly supported the ‘academic freedom’ of Nathan Cothnas, one of Arday’s principal accusers, following his suspension by the University of Ghent.

Regular (and attentive) readers will notice that this post comes a week earlier than the date I gave in my previous post for when I would resume, and also comes later in the day than usual.

The Burnham chapter begins

Of the many ways of expressing how British politics has changed in my lifetime, one is that during the first fifty or so years of it there were seven Prime Ministers and in the subsequent ten years there have been the same number. I also happen to be exactly the same age as Nigel Farage who, for about half our lives, since he became a founder-member of UKIP in 1993, has been a major figure in anti-EU and populist politics.

This week, the seventh of those more recent Prime Ministers was installed whilst Farage’s political career is facing perhaps its greatest threats. So this will be another very long post but, unless something particularly important or interesting happens, it will be my last until September.

Burnham’s government and Brexit

Andy Burnham’s political orientation is now becoming clearer and much has already been written about it, including good discussions of  his ‘politics of place’ by the Observer’s editor Ceri Thomas and of the idea of ‘Manchesterism’ by the BBC’s Economics editor Faisal Islam. Especially interesting, and less widely discussed, is Burnham’s commitment to the Cooperative Party and movement, as explained by Professor Colin Talbot in Civil Service World.

His first words and decisions as Prime Minister have also begun to give a sense of the nature of the government he will lead, although inevitably much remains unknown. One important signal is the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor which, amongst other things, implies that there will a serious commitment to increasing defence spending. The importance of that was underlined by the latest aggression in Russia’s undeclared war with Britain, with its Navy undertaking live-fire exercises a few miles off the British coast on the very day Burnham came to office. Now would be a good time for the government to investigate the many pressing questions about Russian interference in British politics raised by the recent Open Britain report.

In terms of the focus of this blog, the key issue is what Burnham’s government means for Brexit and Brexitism. This can be considered in the narrow sense of how Burnham’s administration will approach UK-EU relations. On that, Joël Reland of UKICE has provided a good summary of how things look at present. In essence, he argues that Burnham will be less interested than was Starmer in closer trade relations with the EU, but also less interested in regulatory competition (e.g. as regards AI and technology generally), whilst being at least as interested as Starmer in closer security links. Reland also suggests that, if this is so, in many ways it will make the Burnham’s Britain a more congenial interlocutor to the EU.

It is significant that Ed Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, has already publicly committed to deepening and strengthening the UK-EU relationship (his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, showed little interest in doing so, although her own predecessor, David Lammy, had been vocally pro-European). As ever, though, the question is what this means in practice. Specific Ministerial responsibility for relations with the EU moves from Nick Thomas-Symonds to Hamish Falconer who, like his predecessor, will attend, though not be a member of, the Cabinet (but unlike his predecessor will partly be located in the Foreign Office). There has been some speculation that this appointment betokens a softening, or abandoning, of Labour’s ‘red lines’, but speculation is all it is.

Also highly relevant is the post of Northern Ireland Secretary and the Cabinet reshuffle saw the departure of Hilary Benn, who from all accounts had been highly accomplished both in navigating Northern Ireland’s complex politics and in improving relations with Dublin, so strained by Brexit. However, there’s no reason to think that his replacement by Chris Bryant implies any substantive change of approach, and both of them were strong opponents of Brexit. Indeed, more generally, the construction of the new cabinet seems more to do with removing those most closely associated with Keir Starmer than with redefining Starmer’s approach to Brexit. Nor, for that matter, is the EU’s approach to post-Brexit relations likely to change as a result of Burnham’s arrival.

Burnhamism, Brexit, and Brexitism

The wider question is where Brexit and Brexitism sit within what is already being called ‘Burnhamism’. One part of the answer is that, as I wrote briefly after he won the Makerfield by-election, there is a strong current of nostalgia in Burnham’s politics. It’s no coincidence that in his acceptance speech as Labour leader he spoke of heeding the call of voters “for a return of the Labour they once knew”. That vision of the party is inextricable from his analysis of politics as a whole. For in that speech (and on numerous other occasions) his argument is that deindustrialization and the “four decades of … neoliberalism that began in the 1980s” are at the core of Britain’s economic and political problems, and he links this directly to the history of the Labour Party, in a passage which I will quote at length:

“And let us never forget: these are the very same places that built this Labour movement, this trade union movement, where we are today… Those are the places, but they were the places that were done down. This Labour movement, the trade union movement, was forged in the steelworks and iron works of Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Port Talbot, and Teesside, in the coal fields of South Wales, Central Scotland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, in the mills across the Pennines, west and east, in the shipyards on the Clyde and on the Tyne, and in the dockyards of Liverpool, and here in London, the people of these proud places made Labour.”

In itself, none of this is necessarily connected with Brexit, but in a crucial phrase in that same acceptance speech Burnham suggested that it is:

“The right used the phrase ‘take back control’, but they are the ones who gave it away in the first place. If we want an economy and a country that works for all people and places, which to me should always be at the very core of Labourism, then it requires a new path to the one we’ve been on for the last 40 years.”

The invocation of the Vote Leave slogan in this way makes it clear what Burnham’s view of Brexit is, and it is a view which has been a common one amongst many on the left since the referendum result. In essence, it sees Brexit as having been a response, albeit a misguided response, by the working class, especially in the north of England, to the damaging consequences of neo-liberalism and (although it is hardly the same thing) London-centrism. On this view, the instinct to ‘take back control’ was right, but Brexit was the wrong way to go about it. Nor is such a view confined to the left. A version of it is what informed Theresa May’s argument that the Brexit referendum had revealed that too many people had been “left behind” by economic liberalism and globalization, and, subsequently, Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda.

There may be an element of truth in this view, although it has always had limitations, as any mono-causal explanation of Brexit is bound to have. In particular, Professor Danny Dorling’s influential analysis has shown the importance of middle-class and southern English support for ‘leave’ in delivering the referendum result. There are difficulties with that analysis, too, but my point here is not to re-hash debates about the causes of the vote to leave, it is that Burnham adheres to a particular view of it, which is imprinted on his Prime Ministership. Specifically, it means that his position is that Brexit was a symptom of a deeper malaise and, therefore, tackling that deeper malaise, rather than tackling Brexit, is the primary task.

This explains why, whilst there is no doubt that Burnham was opposed to Brexit and campaigned against it, and he has said as recently as last September that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU in his lifetime, his position now is that he does not intend to “re-run Brexit arguments” or to propose rejoining. In short, he wants to treat the illness, not the symptom. In this sense, Burnhamism represents the latest iteration of Labour’s attempt to respond to the challenges which Brexit created for the party.

The nostalgia problem

One obvious difficulty with his response is that, if his policy agenda is to revive manufacturing industry, then the barriers to trade created by Brexit are a major obstacle. But, with or without Brexit, Burnham invokes a world which no longer exists. The industries he cited in the speech quoted above – coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding, docking – have largely disappeared and will not come back. And the places where they existed developed because of the presence of things like coal, water, humidity, or, in other cases, clay or minerals, which were necessary for them (or, in the case of docking, because of pre-containerization technology). Those reasons have also gone.

It obviously bears saying that the speech I’ve quoted was to the party faithful, on the occasion of becoming party leader, so some nods to Labour’s history were inevitable and to some extent ritualistic. Even so, it is significant that he chose not to use an important opportunity to frame his leadership of Labour in a future-oriented way. That points to him being wedded to a political psychology within which the Labour Party is inseparable from heavy manufacturing industries of the past or, at the very least, within which workers in those industries are the template of what the ‘real working-class’ looks like. This is the Labour Party voters “once knew” and which he has vowed to revive. Yet, leaving aside for a moment the economics of this, it is at odds with the political realities of a party whose membership and voting base are now much more fragmented and with the demographic realities of a class structure which is far more complex than in the past.

As for the economics, I don’t suppose for one moment that Burnham is proposing that the traditional industries he referenced will return. It must surely be the case that his vision for re-industrialisation is based on the kinds of modern manufacturing which do still exist and could be developed much further, such as aerospace, biotechnology or pharmaceuticals. He may well also include service industries within this vision.

But, assuming this is so, it is again notable that he is choosing not to frame his narrative in this forward-looking direction. Equally, if the geography of re-industrialisation is to be mapped on to the communities created by old industries then the key drivers of it will need to be infrastructure connecting those places and the education and training available within them. That may well be within the ambit of his policy agenda but, if so, it means creating new kinds of communities, not fetishising those of the past.

The significance of Burnham’s nostalgic framing of both the meaning of the Labour Party and the meaning of industry is, I think, that it replicates at least some of the politicised nostalgia of Brexitism. As with Brexitism, the ideas that the country has lost its way, that globalization has eroded traditional communities, and that centralized policymaking has caused the decline of the local high street, all speak to the inchoate resentment of something having been not just lost by, but taken from, ‘ordinary people’. Moreover, whilst there may be good arguments for Burnham’s strong commitment to devolution from London, there is within it more than a whiff of the Brexitist resentment of the metropolitan elite or just of those who live within the circumference of the M25.

One of the many difficulties of this kind of nostalgic resentment is that, by presenting contemporary Britain as having taken a form which has been inflicted on its population, it ignores how it also reflects the preferences of that population. It is true that globalization has removed many jobs and industries that used to exist here, but it is also true that British people have chosen to buy cheaper imported consumer goods and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that high streets have declined, but it is also true that people have chosen to buy cheaper goods online and would be reluctant to stop. It’s true that people say they want decisions to be made locally rather than by ‘remote Whitehall bureaucrats’, with, as Burnham puts it “power returned to every postcode in the land”, but they also strongly object to ‘postcode lotteries’ in, for example, public service provision. And whilst ‘four decades of neo-liberalism’ may have been every bit as damaging as Burnham claims, voters gave Margaret Thatcher three big election wins and, subsequently, many accepted the proposition that any party advocating a major departure from what her governments bequeathed was ‘unelectable’. And many of those same people voted for Brexit.

The biggest question about ‘Burnhamist’ nostalgia is how far its overlap with Brexitism extends to immigration policy, and continues with the false proposition that it is possible to have economic prosperity and thriving public services as well as draconian immigration controls, and that this is necessary to see off the threat from Reform. The retention of Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary might suggest that this is just what is in prospect. If so, that is going to make Burnham’s (highly laudable) aspirations to reform the social care system undeliverable. It will also undermine his ideas of regional re-industrialisation since central to any realistic possibility of this are universities, which are currently being immolated on the altar of ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration.

I’m aware that all this may sound too dour, or too sour, or both. I’m also aware of the fault to which many politically-minded people are prone, whether on the left or the right, of demanding purity of political leaders, or of making the perfect the enemy of the good. In some ways, Keir Starmer suffered from the reluctance of ‘progressives’ (broadly conceived) to accept his imperfections and the compromises that all political leaders have to make. Indeed, with tedious predictability (yes, that is a link to an article by Owen Jones in the Guardian), there are some on the liberal-left who have already written Burnham off.

So it’s worth noting that there is a case for optimism. Burnham has already shown an ability, which it was widely agreed that Starmer lacked, to articulate an optimistic narrative and a sense of purpose. He has an engaging manner and he’s politically savvy. He has provided some simple, understandable priorities around devolution and regeneration and if he sticks to them that will be a contrast not just to Starmer’s flip-flopping on policy decisions but his tendency to say on any given day that this, that, or the other was his government’s ‘number one’ focus.

Farage’s fortunes

It might also be argued that it is precisely the way that Burnham’s political philosophy speaks to the nostalgic resentment of Brexitism which provides the basis for him to see off the electoral challenge of Reform. And, given events of the last few weeks, that challenge may be ebbing anyway. I wrote about this in my previous post, discussing Nigel Farage’s ill-judged resignation in order to re-fight his Clacton seat but since then there have been some developments.

One is just that his contest with Count Binface is already being spoken of as a national joke, and social media rage about the failure of the main parties to contest it seems to have had little cut-through with the general public. Perhaps more importantly, the stream of stories about the source of Farage’s and Reform’s funding continues apace, including its relationship to the murky world of cryptocurrencies. On this, Sian Norris’s article for Open Democracy is particularly eye-opening but it is probably of greater political significance that it is now being extensively reported by the BBC, and that there has been a spate of revelations in the Times/ Sunday Times (£) leading to several public [warning: link to X] and, reportedly, private attacks from leading figures in Reform on the Murdoch-owned media group. Even more remarkable has been a surge of negative stories in the Mail, including coverage of Reform’s various actual or alleged financial links to Russia.

Much of this is not exactly news, of course, and has been exposed for many years, not least by the indefatigable work of Pulitzer Prize finalist and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, in the face of massive abuse and intimidation. But, as she herself has recently written, it has been largely unreported and the reason, she says, is “Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because ‘challenging’ Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it.” 

Quite what has shifted in the media establishment, and why it has done so now, is unclear (to me), but it is an observable fact that it has happened, and that marks an important political change.

The alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe

Within this changed environment, the other recent development has been the alleged murder of Ann Widdecombe. Much about this is, for the moment at least, unknown, beyond the facts that the injuries sustained were horrific and that a man has been charged with her murder and has appeared in a Magistrates’ Court where he did not enter a plea to the charge. It should go without saying that any such killing is repugnant, and that politically-motivated killings, if that is what this was (which has yet to be established), have an added repugnance. Beyond that I’m not going to comment or speculate about the case itself, but what is a legitimate subject for comment is the way in which it has been discussed.

That said, I can hardly bring myself to write about that in any detail by giving quotes and links to people whose conduct is contemptible. But, in summary, from the moment the news broke, there has been a frenzy of social media activity. Some of that has been mawkish and prurient, some of it conspiratorial, some of it frankly insane. Almost all of it was rancid and some of it may have prejudiced the fair trial of the accused man.

A recurring theme was denunciation of the police for disclosing that an initial suspect (who was subsequently released without charge) and the man who was eventually charged with murder were white Britons. This was presented as being in some way suspicious or ‘woke’, ignoring the fact that such disclosures arise precisely because failure to do so in previous high-profile cases has led to accusations of cover-ups from some of the very same people now complaining, and sometimes to riots as a result.

In response to their demands, last year the police were issued with new guidance encouraging disclosure in such cases. That they did so this time was undoubtedly because so many social media posters were fairly obviously salivating at the prospect of the perpetrator being an immigrant or an asylum seeker, and the danger of public disorder that represented. Inevitably, once that prospect seemed to disappear the on-line mob switched to speculating, or simply claiming, that the perpetrator must have been a left-wing extremist.

More generally, there have been constant demands to be given immediate information, before the facts were known, with the nonsensical assertion that the public had the ‘right’ to be told everything about the case, and, even, ‘to debate’ it, whilst it was still being investigated and/or whilst the judicial process is underway. When this prompted the police to state that, in the early stages, they had found “nothing to suggest” that it was a politically-motivated or terrorist act this, itself, was denounced as a cover-up, just as it would have been had they said nothing. The level of stupidity and irresponsibility displayed, not just by pseudonymous social media posters but by some public figures, politicians and supposed journalists, was the latest example of the increasingly disgraceful nature of, especially, on-line public discourse.

Alongside all this, there were, as the Times (£) and other newspapers reported, several accusations that Farage and Reform, specifically, were exploiting the alleged murder for political purposes, accusations made by, amongst others, the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor who had been a close friend of Ann Widdecombe. This was furiously denied by those accused, but what is certainly true is that, without knowing anything about the facts of the case, Reform immediately used it to claim that its MPs, and Farage in particular, needed more security than they receive from official sources.

In particular, there seemed to be an attempt to suggest that the alleged murder in some way justified the idea that Farage needed the £5 million gift he received from Christopher Harborne in order to provide him with security (although, at other times, he has said that it was unconditional and could be used to “buy Ferraris” and, anyway, the issue in dispute is the declaration of the gift, rather than the gift per se). So all of this stank of hypocrisy, as did numerous accusations that ‘the left’ had created this atmosphere of political violence by its use of intemperate language even as many of the same people making these accusations continue to laud Lucy Connelly as a free speech “martyr”.

Much of this replicated the ways that the murder of Charlie Kirk was exploited, both in the US and the UK, last year. However, repellent as this attempt to make use of Ann Widdecombe’s killing in this way has been, it does not seem to have dented the sense that the Farage/ Reform bubble is bursting, and it is hard to see how, whatever its outcome, the Clacton by-election can do anything but add to that. There was a telling headline about Farage and the by-election recently, to the effect that ‘when voters start laughing at you it’s over’. Even more telling was that it appeared in the Mail.

A new chapter?

Changes in Prime Minister do not automatically portend new eras in politics. It is only with historical distance that their significance or otherwise becomes clear. This makes it foolhardy to anticipate what that significance will be, but I will risk the guess that Burnham’s tenure will come to be seen within the common frame of the post-Brexit period as much, or more, as having an identity in its own right, if only in the sense of being another attempt to ‘make Brexit work’.

Even in the more immediate term, it is difficult to know whether the opinion poll bounce Labour has recently enjoyed, and the decline in support for Reform, will continue. Within the fates of these two parties are nested other questions, which will have a direct effect on how Brexit now develops.

One is whether the Labour government finds that an industrial renaissance is incompatible with its existing ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations and comes to pursue some version of rejoining. The other is whether the prospect of a Reform government (or a Conservative one, given that party’s present positioning) remains realistic since, for so long as it does, that renders any version of rejoining impossible to negotiate with the EU. These are likely to be the main Brexit-related questions for the coming political period.

With that, I will now take a break from posting over the summer.

Parsing Farage’s démarche farce

I had been intending to skip writing this fortnight’s post. There didn’t seem to be much happening, mainly because so much is on hold until Andy Burnham assumes the Prime Ministership. Of course, there are always news stories of relevance to the focus of his blog, but there only seemed to be two main, specifically Brexit-related developments.

One was the demolition of the border barriers between Spain and Gibraltar, in advance of the provisional application of the UK-EU treaty on 15 July which is expected to be formally signed on 13 July. There was also a UK parliamentary debate yesterday showing broad cross-party support for the treaty. This marks an important moment for Gibraltar but also for the Brexit process as a whole in that it resolves the last outstanding issue from the Article 50 negotiations. Those with long memories may recall how, in 2017, there was ridiculous talk from Brexiters, including former Tory leader Michael Howard, of Britain going to war with Spain over this issue. [1]

The other development was  a report that the ‘reset’ agreement is near to completion and the delayed UK-EU summit is likely to be held in mid-October. However, another report (£), in the Financial Times, suggested that there are still many unresolved issues and that the summit date remains uncertain. The latter report stated that a particular stumbling block is the UK demand to have a role in EU decision-making, a demand unsurprisingly rejected for the obvious reason that the UK chose to leave the EU.

But within the FT report was a particular sentence, to the effect that the UK demand “was a key part of British attempts to defend the deal from criticism from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party”. It is yet another reminder of the mess post-Brexit Britain is in: still making unrealistic demands of the EU, still allowing Farage to influence policy from outside government, and still caught in the absurd fantasy that doing so will somehow defuse the criticisms that he would make whatever the terms of any deal. That reminder is all the more stark given the miasma of scandal that has recently gathered over Farage.

So when that led to the extraordinary démarche of announcing on Tuesday his intention to resign from, but re-fight, his Clacton seat, I decided that a post this week was worthwhile after all (albeit, as it happens, a day earlier than my usual Friday morning slot). For, however events now play out, this episode is highly revealing about both post-Brexit politics and the politics of Brexitism.

Farage’s petulance and panic

The circumstances of Farage’s announcement are well-known. In brief, the swirl of questions about financial gifts he has received led to the instigation of a parliamentary standards investigation into, specifically, the £5 million he was given by cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne. His responses to questions about this have been contradictory, evasive and increasingly tetchy (and, preposterously, he referred to it in his announcement as being akin to a “lottery win”). Then, amid expectations that the standards investigation would rule that he had breached rules on declaration of the gift, a new scandal was uncovered last weekend when the Sunday Times reported (£) that he had been given substantial monetary gifts by convicted cryptocurrency fraudster George Cottrell, which had also not been declared, also potentially breaching disclosure rules.

This was the background to the ‘resign and re-stand’ announcement. In it, Farage elided numerous issues, most of which are irrelevant to the issue of whether he has or has not broken parliamentary rules on gift declaration. These included the nature and extent of his need for security, and who should pay for it, his right to undertake extra-parliamentary work, and his allegations of media harassment of his daughter. There was also another outing for his ridiculous claim to be a successful businessman rather than a career politician. These and other irrelevant talking points are also being endlessly re-hashed on social media.

As ever with Farage, the accent was on his supposed victimhood, refracted through the familiar mix of self-pity and aggression. Notably, though, as has been the case throughout the recent weeks in which his financial dealings have been in scrutiny (including not just gifts received, but payments for his various business activities including the £270,000 he has earned since becoming an MP as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm), he has lost much of his usual skill in presenting himself as humorous and unflappable. Rather, he seemed petulant and panicky. If so, that suggests that he, too, expects to be found to have breached parliamentary standards since, if not, he could confidently have waited for exoneration.

The populist subversion of democracy

Beyond all the faux-victimhood, Farage articulated a core theme of populism in general, and Brexitism in particular. The link to Brexit was explicit, and made by Farage himself in claiming ‘credit’ for the referendum and for Brexit itself. For all its failure and subsequent unpopularity, and for all that Farage generally says little about it these days, Brexit remains his signature dish. But more importantly, what Farage proposed was that it should be for “the people” of Clacton to decide. To decide what, though? Apparently, they (rather than the media) should judge his probity and they (rather than parliament) whether he had breached the rules on disclosure of gifts. Yet, manifestly, that would be impossible. Without media reports of his conduct, how would people be able to judge his probity? And, certainly, they could not judge whether he has breached disclosure rules until the parliamentary investigation of that has been completed.

So it was a nonsensical proposition, yet it was also a meaningful one. Its meaning is that the sole mechanism of democracy is voting (a principle which does not, by the way, apply to Reform UK’s governing board). This, too, is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. It is what lies behind all the jibes about unelected judges and unelected bureaucrats, jibes which entail that only being voted for brings democratic legitimacy. It ignores that democracy is much more complex than voting and that voting is only one, albeit necessary, condition for its existence. An independent judiciary, a free press, bureaucratic rules for the conduct of representatives, amongst other things, are also vital. Thus what purports to be an absolute commitment to democracy is in fact an attempt to subvert it by hollowing it out.

Here, again, there is a Brexit connection or, rather, an illustration of how Brexit has segued into Brexitism. The idea that the referendum, because it was a vote, gave rise not just to ‘the will of the people’ but rendered all further involvement by judges, civil servants or even parliament itself illegitimate, was one of the most pernicious features of the post-referendum period. Now, Farage is seeking to draw on the same well-spring, by declaring that his by-election will be about ‘the people versus the Establishment’. He even reprised one of the most irresponsible of the appeals to leave voters, to use the vote not to decide on the ostensible issue under consideration but simply to “stick two fingers up at the Establishment”.

If Farage’s gambit succeeds (a question I’ll come back to) then, even if he is subsequently found to have breached parliamentary standards, he will use the result to delegitimize that finding. He has already denounced the process as “political” in order to discredit it as being a motivated attack upon him, but doing so also has the effect of positioning it within the same arena as the overt politics of the voting process. Thus, it becomes possible to say that its findings are irrelevant because ‘the people have spoken’.

The wider issues

However, whilst the outcome of the standards investigation is an important one, both for Farage himself and for the principles it embodies, it’s important to keep in mind that, in itself, it is not the most important issue. The rules on disclosure of gifts are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That is, they exist to provide transparency about the interests and, perhaps, the obligations of MPs. From that point of view, even if Farage had correctly declared his gifts in line with the rules and, actually, even if it turns out to be true (as he claims) that it was not necessary to declare them, the fact of those gifts is highly significant.

They raise the question of why Farage is so enmeshed with, specifically, cryptocurrency magnates and what that betokens. This question goes beyond the personal gifts he has received to encompass the donations made to Reform UK itself, not least because some of the magnates involved, primarily Harborne, are one and the same. The connection of these issues would arise in relation to any party leader and party but is especially salient in this case because of the peculiar structure of Reform UK and the unique relationship between Farage and the party he created. For, even though he renounced ownership last year, he still has an unusually strong grip on it.

Reform’s reliance on cryptocurrency, both as a source of the wealth of its biggest donors and as the actual currency used for some donations, is unusual and striking. Harborne has given £9 million to the party (the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party) in addition to earlier donations of at least £3 million, along with the £5 million to Farage personally. Another cryptocurrency billionaire, Ben Delo, has donated £4 million to the party. Meanwhile, last year Reform became the only major political party in the UK to accept donations in cryptocurrency (although this is to be prohibited, at least temporarily, under recently announced government regulations).

Reform has other major donors, of course, such as venture capitalist and art collector Sasan Ghandehari who has recently pledged unspecified millions of pounds (£). More modestly, £200,000 was given by Anthony Bamford’s firm JCB, whose products, no doubt coincidentally, have recently been promoted and extravagantly praised by Farage and Reform MPs Lee Anderson and Robert Jenrick. But the scale and centrality of cryptocurrency to the finances of both the party and its leader is remarkable. Farage also has his own personal interest in the sector as a substantial investor in, and promoter of, the bitcoin firm Stack BTC.

This does not, as Farage would have it, denote that he and Reform are tech-savvy innovators, geared up for the financial system of the future. Cryptocurrencies are inextricably intertwined with organized crime, money laundering, terrorism and hostile state actors, as the Royal United Services Institute’s research, amongst that of others, has explored. They are also central to Putin’s wartime economy and his attempt to circumvent sanctions, as the RAND organization, amongst others, has shown.

This makes it unsurprising that Farage’s £5 million gift was reported by bankers to the National Crime Agency. It is very difficult to trace the provenance of funds moved through crypto accounts, so banks frequently seek advice from crime agencies when large sums are involved, especially when paid to “politically exposed people”. This latter concept, by the way, was central to the dramatic row that broke out in 2023 when Farage was ‘de-banked’ by Coutts, something which might appear in a fresh light given the more recent revelations.

Nor should the Trump connection be forgotten. Having once dismissed cryptocurrency as a scam, he has since embraced it, seeking to make the US “the crypto capital of the world” and netting a staggering $1.4 billion from his own crypto ventures in the first year of his second term of office. Trump also granted a pardon to Reform donor Ben Delo for his offences relating to anti-money laundering compliance (George Cottrell is reportedly seeking such a pardon for his fraud conviction).

So it is because of, to say the very least, the murky nature of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency speculation that the question of whether Farage did or did not break parliamentary disclosure rules is not the only issue of importance. His longstanding commitment to cryptocurrency deregulation was given tangible form with the publication of Reform’s so-called ‘Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill’ in May 2025. This (which intriguingly has now disappeared from Reform’s website) claimed to set out a “post-Brexit roadmap to make the United Kingdom the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation”. It might not be unduly cynical to wonder what motivates Reform’s commitment to such legislation and, perhaps even more importantly, to be concerned about the calamitous effects it would have on the British economy were anything like it ever to be enacted.

Back to Clacton

One might certainly wonder exactly how Farage and Reform’s enmeshment with cryptocurrencies squares with their anti-globalist and anti-elitist pretensions (this is probably one reason, along with Rupert Lowe’s even more extreme anti-immigration policies, why Restore Britain is siphoning off some of Reform’s core supporters, although Lowe, himself, can hardly be regarded as a horny-handed son of toil). This in itself makes Farage’s framing of the Clacton by-election rather a farce. But, as things are turning out, it will be a farce anyway, as all the other major parties have very wisely decided not to field candidates. Nor will Restore, providing Lowe’s Musk-backed ethno-nationalist party with a rare opportunity to inhabit the moral high ground.

This creates the prospect of a Farage victory, probably on a very low turn-out, over the joke candidate Count Binface (it seems that actor-turned-fruitcake Laurence Fox will also stand). Or, even more humiliatingly, a defeat by Count Binface. Indeed it is a delicious, and perhaps not entirely unlikely possibility, that Farage’s injunction to voters to ‘stick two fingers up at the Establishment’ might actually yield this outcome. It would be reminiscent of the ‘Boaty McBoatface’ episode or, perhaps more pertinently, H’Angus the Monkey’s election as Mayor of Hartlepool in 2002, but with incalculably greater political consequences.

This bizarre situation has already forced Farage’s supporters into some curious postures. Many are drawing a bogus comparison with the Makerfield by-election (bogus for the obvious reason that the sitting MP did not re-stand for election). Some, such as tedious contrarian Brendan O’Neill, are complaining that the failure of the other parties to stand candidates shows they are insulting the working-class people of Clacton. Others are reduced to delving into the background [warning: link to X] of the comedian behind Count Binface to show that he is an anti-Brexit graduate and a prime example of the metropolitan liberal elite. The idea, it seems, is to suggest that he is, after all, a serious candidate representing the Establishment, which is surely a very perverse route to go down.

All of this is, in its way, highly amusing. Even so, the very farcicality of it is a depressing symbol, not least to the world beyond Britain, of the state of British politics. Of course it is also possible that Farage will wriggle out of things, reversing his resignation and no doubt claiming that he has supposedly won a victory by showing that the other parties are ‘too scared’ to fight him, rather than simply showing their disdain for his antics. It is also possible, whether or not this by-election happens now, that one will be triggered if he is found to have broken parliamentary rules. If so, that would presumably be contested by the other parties in the normal way and he would quite possibly win.

Whilst it is certainly too early to write Farage off, there is a palpable sense, which was growing even before his ‘resignation’, that his star is waning. That matters. It is obviously the case that Farage channels a deep vein of political sentiment that would exist without him, and will continue to exist if he were to depart the political scene. But the way in which he has dominated populist politics in Britain for so long, and the very personal hold he has over the Reform party, means that if and when his demise comes British politics in general, and Brexitism, in particular will be significantly re-inflected. His own conduct, especially this week, has probably brought that moment closer.

 

Note

[1] For detailed discussion of the treaty, see my post of June 2025. For discussion of the 2017 episode, and the background to it, see my post from April of that year.

Brexit ten years on: unsettled and unsettling

It is fitting that virtually on the day of the tenth anniversary of the referendum yet another political crisis came to a head with the resignation of Keir Starmer. Within the next couple of weeks, or at most months, we are now set to have another Prime Minister, the seventh since the Brexit vote. With that have come three general elections, not to mention a massive churn of ministerial appointments. Taken together with the administrative bandwidth absorbed by Brexit, both before and since leaving the EU, it is fair to say that the British polity has been overwhelmed over the last decade.

It would be equally fair to say that the combination of current events has overwhelmed my ability to write about them concisely, so this is another inordinately long post.

Starmer’s downfall

Brexit is not the only reason for the shortening cycle of political leadership, and the UK is not the only European country (£) to have experienced it. But, for reasons I’ve discussed previously, there are multiple and complex links, both direct and indirect, between the referendum vote and the subsequent destabilization of British politics. In that sense, our political instability is one more piece of Brexit damage to be added to the long list which has accrued over the last ten years, and perhaps the one which was least predictable.

So far as Starmer, specifically, is concerned, the reasons for his downfall are various but Brexit was certainly part of the mix. In particular, ever since the referendum the Labour Party has been haunted by the possibility that the populists are right to claim to speak for ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’, a possibility which is deeply disconcerting to a party which regards doing so as its prerogative and foundational principle. In this way, Brexit exacerbated the longstanding difficulty Labour has had in facing up to the fact that its traditional electoral base in unionized manufacturing industry has been eroding for decades and, to the extent it does face up to that, still regards that eroding demographic as the template for the ‘real working class’. In its way, it is every bit as nostalgia-driven as Brexitism.

It is this which explains Starmer’s relentless focus on the sensibilities of leave voters in Labour’s erstwhile heartlands and his near disdain for the broader ‘progressive’ coalition characterizing most of the actual and potential support for Labour. This fed through most obviously into immigration policy and, closely associated, the ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations. There was a logic to avoiding positioning Labour as a ‘rejoin’ party at the 2024 election, but Starmer went well beyond that in constantly seeking to appease Reform or Reform-curious voters’ hostility to immigration.

The result was always going to be that those voters would be unimpressed and, if anything, pandering to their ‘legitimate concerns’ made it more likely that they would support parties with more extreme ‘solutions’. Meanwhile, ‘progressive’ voters were alienated by this approach causing their support to leak away to other parties, especially the Greens.

That this is what has happened is borne out by academic research and further demonstrated by a YouGov poll this week, showing that 2024 Reform voters are most likely to feel that Labour are trying to appeal to them but least likely to say they will consider voting for Labour. The personal loathing which the public have for Starmer seems (to me, though not just to me) disproportionate, but the fact that it extends across the political spectrum to encompass both his ‘natural’ supporters and opponents is a reflection of the fundamental flaw of this approach.

All this, including of course the re-emergence of Nigel Farage from his post-referendum resignation to create the Reform party, refracts through Brexit and, along with other factors, created the context for Starmer’s demise. It meant that his party became convinced that he would fail the most basic and brutal test of a party leader: to win the next election. Worse, since the May elections, his MPs believed that he would lose it catastrophically  

Enter Burnham, stage left – or stage right?

There is much more that could to be written about all of this, but the immediate fact is that, once again, there is the instability of a change of Prime Minister, and that is not just an issue in terms of the disruption and uncertainty it entails. Prime Ministerial changes between elections also raise questions of legitimacy. Of course, everyone knows that in our political system the PM is not directly elected, and is the person who can command a majority in the House of Commons, so such changes are not constitutionally improper and have happened many times in the past. But for these changes to happen so frequently strains that constitutional convention, which in any case is strained if the incoming PM seeks to radically depart from manifesto commitments.

Already, there are contradictory reports about whether Andy Burnham has or has not ruled out an early election, and it’s worth recalling the potential traps this creates. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007, he initially refused to rule out an election and there was much speculation that he would call one. When he decided not to, he earned the nickname ‘Bottler Brown’. Conversely, when Theresa May took over from David Cameron in 2016, she was adamant there would be no election and the perceived opportunism of her sudden decision to hold one the next year was one reason for its disastrous outcome.

Regardless of whether there is an election, it is unclear at this point what Burnham’s policy agenda will be and to what extent it will differ from that of the last two years, especially as he will face many of the same constraints. His supporters’ main hope seems to be that he will change the political mood, if not the political programme, by being more communicatively and strategically adept than Keir Starmer. And it’s true that he has more ease of manner than his predecessor, although that does not place him in an especially exclusive club. It’s also true that he comfortably beat Reform in Makerfield, but it’s not clear how much can be extrapolated from the rather unique circumstances of that by-election.

For what little it’s worth, my personal view is that, probably within short order, he will become almost as unpopular as Starmer, will be as unwilling to make and stick to difficult choices, and will be seen as equally lacking in strategic coherence. The veteran political journalist Philip Stephens is of much the same opinion but, clearly, other views are available including from Ian Dunt, a commentator with whom I often agree, and I’ll be happy if I am proved wrong.

One reason for my pessimism is that so much of Burnham’s pitch, at least so far, seems to have its own version of Blue Labour nostalgia. There may be much to agree with in his analysis that “Britain has been on the wrong path for forty years” but it is hard to see how he can deliver on the promise of “re-industrialization” or whether it is a viable strategy for the British economy. And he has already indicated that, despite his previous criticism of them, he is now committed (£) to the immigration policies being pursued by Shabana Mahmood (or has he changed his mind again?), which is certainly not a viable strategy for the British economy. He has also said that he “agrees with what Farage is saying” about the need to go further in controlling immigration, and that he would make greater use of migrant detention centres. At first sight, then, his approach, at least on this key issue, looks set to replicate Starmer’s in trying to appease Reform voters whilst being careless of progressive voters.

Ten years on: what is Brexit?

Closely related to Burnham’s overall political strategy is the question of what his approach to the EU is going to be (and, more generally, his approach to foreign policy, about which he has said very little). Just before Starmer resigned, the date for the next UK-EU summit had, finally, been set for 22 July. In one scenario for how the leadership contest (or non-contest) plays out, Burnham might actually be Prime Minister by then, but in any case the President of the European Council has announced that the meeting will be postponed.

Already that is being spun by the pro-Brexit press (£) as a sign that the EU is expecting Burnham to be a “soft touch” who will make “more concessions”, which re-written in adult might mean Burnham pursuing the “more ambitious” agenda that Starmer recently promised. But the reality is that nobody knew what Starmer meant by that and, certainly, nobody knows what Burnham’s agenda will be. It seems highly unlikely he will not proceed with whatever has presumably now been agreed on SPS regulations, emissions trading, and youth mobility, but whether he might go further, and what that might consist of, is at this point opaque. It is a reminder that there is still no agreed meaning of Brexit, and ‘Burnham’s Brexit’ has yet to be defined.

The fact that UK-EU relations are still in flux and their direction uncertain, and even the framing of that by Brexiters in terms of the UK being forced into “concessions” by having a “soft” leader, is a microcosm of why the tenth anniversary of the referendum has a rather different meaning from that which features in most of the tidal wave of discussion about it. I will come back to what that meaning is but, for now, will focus on the broader discussion. Since almost every commentator has had their say (myself included, for example in Byline Times (£) and on the Oh God What Now? Podcast) it would be impossible to consider it all here, so I will provide just a very brief outline.

Analysing Brexit

Much of the discussion consists of analysis of the effects, especially the economic effects, Brexit has had, and a very good overview of these was provided by the BBC’s Economics Editor Faisal Islam. In terms of specific research studies, an excellent example is John Springford and Anton Spisak’s report for the Centre for European Reform, which is especially useful in disaggregating the (much larger) negative impact of leaving the single market from that of leaving the customs union. Also excellent is a new paper by Eleonora Alabresa and others about the variation in the regional effects of Brexit which, whilst assessing the overall negative impact at about 7-8% (which is consistent with some other studies), shows this to vary considerably by region.

These two studies can also be considered together in that the Alabresa paper shows that Northern Ireland is exceptional in having had little or no economic damage, reflecting it being effectively still part of the single market for goods. A long time ago, I wrote that Northern Ireland would provide a kind of natural experiment to understand the economic effects of Brexit (I can’t now find it to link to, and I’m sure others have made the same point). And so it has proved but, in fact, the outcome was already implied in the perhaps inadvertently revealing remark made by Michael Gove in 2020 when he said Northern Ireland would “get the best of both worlds”. Then as now that prompts the question: why not the rest of the UK?

There has also been much discussion of the domestic political effects of Brexit, some of which I’ve already touched on in this post. A particularly revealing analysis was provided by Jonathan Vincent in the Financial Times (£), which includes some illuminating infographics showing how voters’ behaviour is still significantly structured by how they voted in the referendum, underscoring the persistence of ‘remainer’ and ‘leaver’ as political identities. Meanwhile, the experiences of EU citizens living in the UK, some of the people most traumatically affected by Brexit, are recorded in the Brexit Lived Experience Archive (BLEA) created by Professor Tanja Bueltmann and publicly launched to coincide with the referendum anniversary.

Possibly the most comprehensive overall analysis, not just of the last ten years but of the future possibilities for UK-EU relations, is the report produced by multiple authors from the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) centre. UKICE, which throughout the whole process has been, and remains, the single best source of analysis of Brexit, has also produced a variety of themed reports marking the tenth anniversary, notable examples including Joël Reland’s on regulation (showing how little regulatory divergence there has been) and Jannike Wachowiak’s on how the EU has changed during the period (providing an important antidote to what has been, as so often, a largely parochial discussion).

Defending Brexit

None of these analytical reports and commentaries suggest that Brexit has been a success and, as most contributions to the anniversary discussion acknowledge, the polling evidence that a consistent and increasingly large majority of the population view it as having been a failure and a mistake is clear. But, of course, there have been numerous pro-Brexit comment pieces which continue to defend the project. They are all fairly similar in nature, since the arguments are now well-rehearsed, so I will only focus on three, but that should not be taken to imply that these pro-Brexit views are in any way rare.

Strikingly, they almost all share one common feature, which is that they are defensive. That is, they are framed as a defence against what they recognize to be the established narrative that Brexit has not been a success. That in itself is important. In January 2021, as the transition period ended, I wrote that what happened then would “shape the post-Brexit narrative”. It did, and what was established was a narrative that it had been a failure. So, whilst Brexiters do not accept this to be true, they do accept that it is the narrative. Had the battle for that narrative gone the other way, the terms of this tenth anniversary discussion would be entirely, unrecognizably, different.

As has long been the case, one of the major defences of Brexit by its advocates is that ‘it was not done properly’. Tellingly, the banner front-page headline in the Express on the day of the anniversary was a plaintive demand to “Give Us Proper Brexit”. Equally telling was a Financial Times report about how the various leading Brexiters all blame each other (as well, of course, as remainers) for this failure to deliver ‘proper Brexit’.

Those mounting such arguments have never been able to explain a realistic way in which Brexit could have been done successfully, or even to agree about what proper Brexit means. But it is an argument that can always be made, since it is, strictly speaking, irrefutable (which is makes it a weak, not a strong, argument in that it is not susceptible to any meaningful test). As many people have observed, it is an argument with the same structure as that made by those who insist that ‘real Communism’ has yet to be tried.

One of the slightly better articles making this kind of argument is that by Matthew Jeffrey at Conservative Home, but it shows no understanding of why the regulatory divergence it proposes has not happened, and relies on a wholly unrealistic claim about what ‘mutual recognition agreements’ could make possible for international trade. Most glaringly, it advocates using post-Brexit freedoms to follow “aggressive tax competitiveness” citing as an example the strategy followed by, er, Ireland – an EU member state. The conclusion, inevitably, is that (like real communism) “the real Brexit is still to come”.

The problems of defending Brexit whilst claiming it has been betrayed, or not done properly, are all too obvious, which is perhaps why Michael Gove’s article in the Spectator mainly takes a different tack. Asking the question ‘The Brexit decade: was it worth it?’ (to which his unsurprising answer is ‘yes’), Gove attempts to itemise how Britain has benefitted from Brexit. As with any such list, there are questions about the veracity and desirability of each claimed benefit, but the fact that he includes the demonstrably false ones that Brexit enabled a faster vaccine roll-out (a lie which Boris Johnson has also repeated this week), allowed the UK to support Ukraine, and provided “much more than £350 million a week extra for the NHS” makes it hard to take any of them very seriously.

Moreover, as is again typical of such lists of benefits, it is meaningless because there is little or no recognition of the costs of Brexit. In particular, Gove, with presumably knowing outrageousness, reprises his infamous line from the campaign in deriding “experts from organisations with acronyms who have got things consistently wrong in the past”. In fact, the Treasury’s pre-referendum long-term analysis of the impact of Brexit, giving as its central estimate of the scenario of a negotiated bilateral trade agreement – as happened – that GDP would be 6.2% lower after 15 years (see p.7 of the document), is remarkably similar to most of the credible estimates of what is actually happening which mainly lie in the range of 4% to 8% [1].

In the end, though, Gove simply falls back on the standard get-out that, whether the effects have been positive or negative, Brexit is definitively justified on the abstract grounds of ‘sovereignty’, with national politicians making national laws and being held accountable for them (though not, it seems, being accountable for advocating Brexit). As ever, there is no recognition that sovereignty-sharing is an act of, rather than a negation of, sovereignty; nor of the many ways in which EU members exert sovereignty and hold national politicians accountable; nor of the many ways that all sorts of international regulatory systems (including but not limited to those of the EU) continue, necessarily, to impinge on the UK; nor of any of the many other ways that the ‘taking back control’ thesis is flawed.

Effectively the same argument, though from a different part of the political spectrum, is made by Larry Elliott, the ‘Lexiter’ economics commentator at the Guardian. He, too, takes issue with the economic consensus about the damage of Brexit, in particular questioning the OBR’s estimate of 4% less GDP after 15 years. He does so on what, for an economist, is the rather innumerate basis that, if true, it would mean the economy would be “4% bigger today” [emphasis added]. Otherwise, he opines that “Brexit showed that class still matters in politics” (who knew?) and, like Jeffrey and Gove, that Brexit “creates an opportunity for change” though, in his case, that change should be to ‘reverse forty years of neo-liberalism’ which, he hopes, is what Burnham intends to do. In this, once again, we see the capacity of Brexit to have multiple, incompatible meanings amongst its adherents but also, more specifically, how already a Burnham premiership is being anticipated in the Telegraph as a ‘soft touch’ which will take the UK closer to the EU and by Elliott as the saviour of the Lexit project.

Reframing the anniversary

Thus, rather as I anticipated in a recent post, this latest ‘national conversation’ about Brexit is in many ways the same as that which we have had for ten years and more. And, in another recent post, I quoted the second edition of my book about Brexit pointing out that according to its advocates and supporters Brexit “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 (in 2022) 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.” 

In those terms Brexit has failed. It has not settled. This week there have been no great public celebrations of ‘national independence’, whilst the prospect, whether positive or negative, of rejoining (or joining) the EU has been very much part of the anniversary discussion. But, more than that, Brexit continues to be profoundly unsettling.

It is this which, I think, gives this tenth anniversary discussion a rather different meaning than most contributions to it suggest. It is not really a stock-taking exercise, still less a planning one. Nor is it a commemoration, or even a retrospection. Rather, just as the current political crisis is the latest episode within the continuing process of instability bequeathed by Brexit, this tenth anniversary is itself the latest episode within the continuing process of contestation to which Brexit has consigned the nation.

 

Note

[1] Gove made implicit reference to the Treasury short-term forecast, which is admittedly harder to defend, especially given the way it was used by George Osborne. But it is worth recalling that the value of sterling has never fully recovered since its very sharp fall immediately after the referendum result, and also that the forecast model did not assume any action by the Bank of England which, in fact, under the then Governor Mark Carney, immediately announced a programme to stabilize the financial system, which may well have averted some of the economic turmoil of the short-term forecast.