This week saw, according to respected economics commentator Simon Nixon, “the end of the economic world as we knew it”, and he is not alone in that view in the aftermath of Trump’s tariff announcement. But this is a blog about Brexit and actually, from that perspective, much of what I wrote in the first section of last fortnight’s post about the framing of current events still applies [1]. So, too, do many of the questions posed within that framing.
This in turn reflects the fact that what has effectively happened in the last couple of months is that the Brexit ‘reset’ policy with which the Labour government came to power, and which in some rather ill-defined sense it has been pursuing since then, has become inextricably entangled with the changed geo-political and economic landscape created with such speed by the new Trump administration.
So whereas what used to be called ‘the reset’ denoted simply a UK-EU process, framed by what had happened since 2016, it now has a new meaning as both the UK and the EU, and the UK-EU relationship, seek recalibrations framed by what has been happening in the US since January, including the latest dramatic, but not unexpected, developments (which I will return to). As a result, it has become far more complicated.
The changed meaning of ‘the reset’
To see the significance of that change, consider the idea of creating a deeper UK-EU defence and security pact. This was always central to Labour’s original reset plans, going back well before the last election. And it was not an especially radical idea, since it was effectively a revival of the non-binding Political Declaration signed, though subsequently ignored, by Boris Johnson in 2019. As such, it was actually a good example of what Labour could legitimately call ‘the Tories’ botched Brexit’, in that the absence of such a pact wasn’t inherent even in Johnson and May’s Brexit and, again as such, was a prime candidate for the reset in its original meaning.
However, there is now much more at stake in that such a pact is not only more urgent but has become bound up with massive changes in defence posture and policy under way within the EU and many of its member states, especially Germany. At their most basic level, these changes are about Europe, as a continent, taking responsibility for its own collective security now that the US can no longer be relied upon. In parallel, that is now conceptually bound up with, even though it is formally distinct from, Anglo-French attempts to mobilize a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ to support a ‘reassurance force’ for Ukraine in the event of any kind of peace deal.
There are already quite a few moving parts within that, even before adding in the potential economic and regulatory aspects of any reset. And the nature of that addition has also changed. In the original reset, these aspects might have been seen as relatively discrete from that of defence. Now, with possibilities for integrated defence manufacturing and procurement having come to the fore, they are much more closely connected.
From this, some of the political questions which already arose have become more complicated. In particular, to what extent do, or will, EU and/or UK negotiators treat all the different components as being inter-related and therefore, potentially, susceptible to being traded against each other? To give one important example of what that means in practice, to what extent might a defence and security pact be contingent on a deal on fishing rights, or on the still unresolved matter of Gibraltar? There is also a swathe of issues which are due to come up within the next year under the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement, for example energy security, to add to the mix.
All of this brings new meaning and importance to the UK-EU Summit to be hosted in Britain on 19 May. If it doesn’t lead to the announcement of a substantive agreement, it will, given the wider context of crisis, mark a major failure of, and for, both the UK and the EU. A wise article by former EU Commissioner for Security Sir Julian King makes the point that the best way of averting such a failure is to avoid seeking to create a single ‘grand package’. That is, it is vital to reach agreement on the most pressing issues, whilst creating future processes to address those which cannot be resolved.
On my reading, King’s deeper message is that, primarily because of Trump, the nature of the UK-EU relationship needs to be thought of in different ways from those which have obtained since 2016 or even 2020. In other words, to repeat the point with which I began, a global reset is already under way, and the reset of post-Brexit UK-EU relations is now bound up with adapting to that new reality.
More accurately, it is bound up with adapting to a new reality which is still in the process of emerging. Because as well as all the moving parts within the UK-EU relationship, those within the US’s relationships with the UK, the EU, and the wider world also continue to be in flux. This flux has two broad aspects but, in terms of how they impact on resetting the UK-EU relationship, they point in potentially different directions.
The moral collapse of the United States
The first aspect is the rapidity of the US’s ongoing descent into authoritarianism and, which makes it hard to document and make sense of, the chaotic manner in which this is happening. Much is being written about this, by people much better-qualified than me, so this is just a brief summary.
There is now a multi-fronted war against universities, with overseas students being pulled off the streets by masked agents, detained in legal limbo, and deported. Entire universities are being battered into submitting to government demands, extending to what can be taught and how. What may in the long run become most damaging are attempts to censor or outlaw scientific research which is deemed ideologically unacceptable.
Some of this overlaps with a ferocious onslaught on alleged illegal immigrants, including deportations to a hellish prison in El Salvador in defiance of court orders. It also overlaps with the attempt to erase all traces of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) in public and private organizations and even amongst foreign firms supplying the US government. Lest anyone think that is no more than a re-balancing of some of the wilder shores of ‘wokery’, it has extended to removing the names of black, Hispanic and female military veterans from the Arlington National Cemetery website, the list of those names including General Colin Powell, Secretary of State to George W. Bush. This isn’t a corrective to ‘political correctness gone mad’, it is simply mad.
The intimidation of universities is accompanied by growing intimidation of journalists, authors, lawyers, judges (£). The latter, in particular, but all of these developments, in general, are bound up with what is now widely acknowledged to be a wholesale undermining of the rule of law. This of course extends to the rule of international law, including renewed threats against Greenland made, in the stock manner of every aggressor since time immemorial, in the name of the intended victim’s security’. Indeed all the developments I have mentioned are sickeningly familiar from all the other cases of countries sliding into authoritarianism or even totalitarianism.
Hovering above all of this is the spectre of radical violations of the US Constitution, with the most egregious threat being Trump’s recent talk of finding a way to serve a third term in office. And lurking underneath all this is something which is perhaps the least consequential but, to me, somehow seems the most revealing: the throat-clenched anger revealed by the savage rudeness, casual cruelty (the ‘fun videos’ referred to in the link include those of shackled deportees being frog-marched to detention camps), and sheer depravity of so many of the regime’s functionaries and cheerleaders. What we are seeing is not just a maverick government but something far more profound and far more dangerous. Hatred has been unleashed and made legitimate.
So far as this first aspect of what is happening in the US is concerned, its potential impact on UK-EU relations is to make them closer and deeper. It underscores the point I made in a recent post that, in this new global divide Trump has initiated, both the UK and the EU are on ‘the same side’. Both have shared values in being broadly committed to liberalism and the rule of domestic and international law. In this sense, as I suggested in that post, Brexit is an anomaly and an incongruity.
The United States’ declaration of economic war
The second aspect of what is happening in the US and its relations to the wider world is the economic warfare it has unleashed with ‘Trump Tariffs’. As flagged at the start of this post, this has been the big story of this week, with the long-trailed announcement on Wednesday of the details of a blanket 10% tariff on all goods imported to the US, including from the UK, with effect from tomorrow. The EU faces a 20% blanket tariff, and several countries an even higher levy, up to the 54% imposed on China. Moreover, there was confirmation that imports to the US of steel, aluminium and motor vehicles from all countries, including the UK, have had a new 25% tariff imposed.
By any standard, this marks the beginning of an enormous economic shock. The full effects are difficult to predict partly because, as was seen earlier this year, Trump’s capriciousness means the policy might be altered in any direction, at any time. That capriciousness is itself partly because it isn’t simply an economic policy, as was underscored by the rambling speech about supposed American victimhood with which the new tariffs were announced, and the bizarre nature of the way they were calculated (£). As I noted shortly after his election, “trade policy for Trump is about beating his enemies … so there’s no point in thumbing through Ricardian theory on comparative advantage to try to understand [it]. But the corollary is that there’s no point in trying to frame responses in these terms.”
In particular, much of Trump’s trade policy apparently aims, and certainly has the potential, to provoke division, including between the UK and the EU. That is because of the different ways different countries have been treated, and also because of the possibility, and therefore the temptation, for individual countries to cut their own deals or make their own responses in the face of US aggression. So whilst those threatened may have shared values, they do not necessarily have (or perceive themselves to have) shared economic interests. Thus this second aspect of what is happening in the US could work against UK-EU relations becoming closer and deeper.
Back to Brexit
Specifically, the UK government, mired as it is in economic difficulties, may believe that Brexit is a lifeline rather than ‘an anomaly and incongruity’. Certainly the Brexiters are already crowing that Trump imposing a lower rate on the UK than on the EU represents a vindication of Brexit (they would do better to reflect on the mockery it makes of their former faith in ‘WTO rules’). They also believe that there is an even bigger potential ‘prize’ in the form of an exemption deal with the US.
Plainly the government does so too, having been seeking exactly that in recent weeks and, although it has not been successful, it claims that the effort is continuing, even hinting that a deal may be near to completion. Meanwhile, Starmer is insistent that there will be no immediate retaliatory action but that “all options remain on the table”, implying retaliatory tariffs if there is no deal, and has launched a consultation exercise with businesses about what these might consist of.
It’s worth saying that there is nothing inherently shameful about trying to negotiate a deal with the US, despite what some commentators and politicians seem to believe [1]. After all, the UK is not the only country which has tried and is continuing to try to do so, with examples including Canada, Mexico, India, and Japan. The EU, too, “would prefer to negotiate”.
The issue is, more, what happens if those attempts continue to fail. Does the UK then pursue a policy of being a non-combatant in the trade war? If it did so then, again, it would not be alone. It seems that this will be how Australia and New Zealand, both of which have ‘only’ suffered the 10% baseline tariff, will respond. The UK’s situation is different to those countries, though, in terms of its economic enmeshment with the EU. On the other hand, what happened if the UK’s attempts succeed? That would make it not so much a non-combatant as a defector.
The economic temptations for the UK to continue to seek an exemption deal, or to eschew retaliation without one are obvious. The political risks are equally obvious. Domestically, it is out of line with opinion polls, which would prefer closer links with the EU (but public opinion might be fickle if and when Trump Tariffs bite on UK jobs). Internationally, it may undermine or even destroy the developing unity with the EU and other countries, including those of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ to support Ukraine (an illustration of the complexity of the moving parts in the new reset).
Bluntly, why would other countries want to get closer to, let alone ‘stand shoulder to shoulder with’, a Britain making weaselly deals with Trump even as Trump punishes their economies and even threatens their territory? In the process, any political kudos Starmer has garnered, both domestically and internationally, for his post-Trump leadership on defending Ukraine from Russian military warfare may quickly be lost if he is unwilling to defend the UK and its allies from US economic warfare.
Perhaps some would understand and accept it as a matter of UK realpolitik. For example, it is reported that “João Vale de Almeida, former EU ambassador to the US and the UK, said he did not expect the UK to retaliate in the way the EU was bound to”, although he added that “it was important that Starmer hit back in some way by criticising the way the US president used tariffs as a tool of policy.” But perhaps (and perhaps more likely) other countries will see it as one more example of Perfidious Albion and one more example of the British preference, come what may, to cosy up to the Americans. An interesting sub-question is whether, if the UK continues to fail to make a deal with the US until eventually and belatedly joining the EU and others in retaliations, that would be seen as scarcely any less perfidious.
Starmer’s choices
These considerations, amongst others, lead Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland to make the case that Starmer should publicly admit and denounce the threat that Trump poses, rather in the manner that Mark Carney, the new Canadian Prime Minister, has done. Former UK Ambassador to the US Sir Kim Darroch has made a similar argument. Freedland suggests that, apart from anything else, doing so might also enable Starmer to escape some of the economic policy constraints the government faces, by presenting this situation as a national emergency. Another kind of reset, so to speak.
Of course Freedland and, undoubtedly, Darroch are well aware that the extensiveness of the UK’s defence, intelligence and economic ties with the US makes such a course highly risky [2]. That is also true of Canada, but Carney is in a rather different situation, firstly because he is about to fight an election, and secondly because the US attacks on Canada have been so extreme and so public that they can hardly be finessed away. So even if Freedland is right that, sooner or later, open confrontation will become unavoidable, there is every reason to think that Starmer will opt for it to be left until later rather than done sooner, and, meanwhile, try to walk the tightrope so as to avoid alienating anyone.
But that, too, has its risks, above and beyond those to relations with the EU, Canada etc. For, whilst failing to unequivocally oppose him in the manner of Carney, it is not clear that Starmer’s stance is enough to satisfy Trump anyway. For example, whilst it seemed as if the invitation for another State visit temporarily appealed to Trump’s grotesque ego, it was reported that the subsequent sight of King Charles meeting President Zelensky negated that appeal and fed a new resentment. The wider point is that Trump’s character isn’t such as to appreciate a tightrope act, he wants unequivocal fealty. In other words, it’s perfectly possible that Starmer, and therefore the UK, will end up alienating everyone.
I don’t think anyone, or at least anyone with an iota of political insight, imagines that Starmer’s choices are easy, or that any of the options are good. But choices have to be made, if only by default, and time is not on his side. In the absence of the quick completion of a deal with the US, the policy of not responding to Trump’s tariffs will soon come under pressure from industry and voters, as well as from opposition parties and some Labour MPS and ministers. Equally, depending on what is given away in return, a deal with Trump is likely to be controversial. Moreover, depending on exactly how things play out, there will potentially be some complex, and specifically Brexit-created, problems for Northern Ireland.
Most urgently of all, the reset with the EU cannot be allowed to drift, now that it has taken on its new meaning, and it is going to have to be substantively advanced by the Summit, which is just six weeks away. If it’s not now or never, then it’s very close to it. And although it would be naïve to expect moral outrage to play much part in realpolitik and statecraft, the immoral spectacle unfolding in the United States can surely not be ignored for much longer. Or, to put it differently, and perhaps better, realpolitik and statecraft ought to alert us to the fact that the immorality of what is unfolding in the United States, quite as much as the imposition of tariffs, represents a clear and present danger to our national interests and our way of life.
Notes
[1] As I explained in detail in a previous post, a ‘deal’ in this context means some kind of agreement for the UK to be exempted from these new US tariffs, not a comprehensive UK-US Free Trade Agreement (this is presumably why Starmer always uses the term ‘an economic deal’ rather than ‘trade deal’). It’s worth stressing, because I was struck that when this was discussed in parliament yesterday some MPs, including some Tories urging a deal and some LibDems urging caution about a deal, appeared to be utterly confused about the difference.
[2] This isn’t negated by growing concerns about the security risks of sharing intelligence with the US, which were brought into sharp relief by the SIGNAL Yemen raid scandal, because that doesn’t affect UK reliance on receiving intelligence from the US.
Friday, 4 April 2025
Friday, 21 March 2025
The Brexit reformation
It was always inevitable that once Britain had left the EU it would become more and more difficult to keep tabs on what Brexit means. The consequences are so diffuse, so varied and, often, so technically abstruse as to certainly be beyond the abilities of any one person to catalogue. Many of those consequences are economic, but perhaps the most difficult to chart are the ways Brexit is re-forming British politics [1].
It was also inevitable that Brexit would become bound up with ongoing international politics, as the UK sought a reformation of its relationships not just with the EU but within the international order generally. What couldn’t have been predicted, even until very recently, was how that international order was going to be so radically upended, making Brexit at once something rather minor and yet recasting it as a moving part within something so major.
Framing events
All of which is a rather longwinded way of saying that it is becoming increasingly difficult to write this blog, and that the ‘beyond’ parts of its ‘Brexit and Beyond’ title increasingly overweigh the narrowly ‘Brexit’ parts. Both nationally and internationally, the ‘beyond’ issues are now inextricably linked with Trump and the new global divide I wrote about in my previous post. There have been any number of news stories about this global divide in the last fortnight, most of which can be framed through four inter-related questions:
· To what extent will it lead to closer defence and security integration between the EU and the UK, including integration of military operations, equipment procurement, intelligence sharing etc., and under what terms would/ could these occur?
· If such EU-UK defence integration happens, will it be accompanied by, and perhaps make more extensive than might otherwise have been envisaged, deeper economic and regulatory integration?
· Would EU-UK integration in either or both of these senses be precluded by, or go alongside, a divergence in how each partner related to the US, for example and in particular as regards some form of UK-US ‘economic deal’ struck (including perhaps exemption from Trump tariffs) at the same time as the EU-US relationship becomes more hostile (including perhaps a prolonged trade war)?
· To what extent is the US going to detach itself so far from international norms and constitutional propriety as to make it impossible for the UK to sustain anything resembling a normal relationship with it (whether because US malfeasance becomes too gross for the UK to ignore, or because the US turns decisively and aggressively on the UK)?
At least some answers to these questions are likely to emerge over the next couple of months. Meanwhile, there is, arguably, little point in trying to read the runes of every report of every meeting and statement to try to anticipate what these answers will be.
Looking further ahead, new questions will emerge, some of which by definition cannot be predicted, not least because so many of the key actors, especially Trump, are unpredictable in their very nature. But perhaps the most predictable question (though not its answer) is what would happen, including, especially, how would Trump react, if Putin commits new acts of aggression, and in particular if these are committed against the personnel or territory of a NATO member?
An important sub-set of this question is what would happen if the UK (along with other countries) deploys some form of ‘peace-keeping’ force in Ukraine and it comes under direct Russian attack? At that point, certainly if the US fails to give military backing, then we will be in a dramatically new and dangerous situation, which will make Brexit, even in its most extensive meanings, a triviality.
The Reform fiasco
Meanwhile, and to some extent connected, the effects of Brexit on domestic politics continue to unfold. Of these, currently the most fascinating is the colossal mess that Reform UK has got into. That’s not say it is particularly surprising, for all the reasons which led me to write, immediately after last year’s general election result, that “it would not be absurdly risky to bet on Reform imploding before we get to the next election”. True, it hasn’t imploded yet, but, then again, we are less than a year into the electoral cycle.
The continuing presence of Nigel Farage and a Farageist party is, perhaps first and foremost, a reminder of David Cameron’s disastrously ill-judged attempt to see off the threat of UKIP by holding the referendum in 2016. It is arguable that this was not the sole reason the referendum was held, but it is unarguable that it was high on the list. The failure of that decision was, with bitter irony, a double one: not only did it unleash the disaster of Brexit, it also installed Farage and Farageism as a central part of the political landscape, and it did so to the detriment not just of the Tory Party but of British politics generally.
Farage’s continuing presence is also a reminder of his dishonesty and egotism. After all, he resigned UKIP’s leadership shortly after the referendum, his political ambitions supposedly achieved, only to go on to create the Brexit Party and then Reform. No doubt he would present that as ‘defending Brexit’ from ‘betrayal’, but his decision not to challenge Tory incumbents in the 2019 election opened the door for Boris Johnson to enact Brexit in a form which Farage regards as, precisely, a betrayal and a failure. Lacking even that avowed purpose, Reform exists as a rag-bag of populist complaints, most centrally about immigration, as well as being a fresh vehicle for his ego. British populism did not just bring Brexit about, it was also, itself, changed by Brexit since it lost what had been its defining cause.
There’s every reason to think that Farage’s ego, and more specifically his difficult and unpleasant character, is a big part of the current fiasco within Reform. After all, there is a very long list of people he has fallen out with during his political career. It’s true that, looking at some of the names on that list, it isn’t hard to imagine there were, to say the very least, faults on both sides. For that matter his current colleagues, including his fellow MPs, are not exactly the sort of people that anyone half-sane would want to go camping with. Even so, it is hard to deny, and easy to imagine, that Farage is an almost impossible person to work with. Yet, like it or not (and many of his present and former allies are clearly amongst those who do not), his character has a public appeal that no one else on the populist right of British politics enjoys.
Farage’s political strategy
However there has always been more to Farage’s capacity to mobilize significant numbers of voters than his character (or, perhaps more accurately, his persona). Whatever party he has led, he has had a clear strategic sense about the nature of those voters and what appeals to them. He accurately recognized that weirdos like Godfrey Bloom or Gerard Batten did not have that appeal, regardless of their beliefs, but he also recognizes that he himself would not have that appeal if he were openly to embrace far-right politics. Farage’s political skill, and it is a considerable one, is to appear ‘normal’, even genial, and ‘sensible’, even reasonable, in order to appeal to relatively mainstream voters, whilst being convincing to those on the far right who can hear his ‘dog whistles’ (I wish there was a less clichéd term than that).
In this sense, the current blow up should be understood as being about much more than personalities, for all that they are relevant. It is actually about two, related, matters of substance which derive from Farage’s political strategy. One is the autocratic and undemocratic way in which he runs Reform. Whilst this, too, no doubt reflects his character, it also reflects his experience, particularly in UKIP, of a party of what David Cameron in 2006 called “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists”. It was a jibe which was all too obviously true and, although that didn’t matter in terms of UKIP’s core support, it did put a ceiling on what it could achieve electorally. The hastily created Brexit Party had similar problems. Hence, when creating Reform, Farage wanted to be able to exert much more control over his party and that, too, was partly a consequence of Brexit since, unlike UKIP, Reform can’t make use of proportionally representative European elections to build a power base.
The related issue of substance is his determination to ensure that his party’s ‘dog whistles’ to the far right remain just that. This means, firstly, trying to exclude those who do not have his consummate skill in judging how to pitch messages so that only the dogs hear them (or, at least, that they are deniable when anyone else hears them). Even more importantly, it means excluding those who do not even attempt such subterfuge, and are openly on the far right. That certainly doesn’t mean, as Farage likes to claim, that he is somehow engaged in marginalizing the far right: rather, he has sought to harness the far right without frightening off other, less extreme, voters. It is therefore no coincidence that, just as Farage left UKIP in 2018 (having already stood down as leader) over its links with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and the far right, so too are those links central to current events within Reform.
The far-right riots
The immediate roots of these events go back to last summer’s far-right riots and, crucially, to Keir Starmer’s robustness in correctly insisting that they were, indeed, “far-right thuggery”. This caused much outrage on the political right which, whilst largely confected, brought to the fore the relationship between the ‘respectable right’ and far-right extremism. The effect was to expose the two-faced nature of Farage’s entire ‘dog whistle’ strategy of stoking division by, supposedly, ‘just asking questions’ about the causes of the riots whilst insisting that he had never had anything to do with “the Tommy Robinsons and those who genuinely do stir up hatred”.
Shortly afterwards, Robinson was jailed, not in relation to the riots, but for contempt of court and breaking an injunction in relation to his hounding of a Syrian refugee, prompting a far-right rally in his support. Like Farage, Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice disavowed Robinson, but others, most notably Ben Habib, argued, no doubt correctly, that many of those demonstrating were Reform’s ‘own people’. Habib, already bitter about having been ousted as Co-Deputy Leader (hardly, one would have thought, a job title to excite strong feelings) left Reform in November 2024, citing Farage’s autocracy as his main reason but clearly, as I just suggested, this autocracy and the position on Robinson are linked. At all events, Habib has subsequently been vocal in describing Robinson as “a political prisoner”.
By early January, at Reform’s East Midlands Conference, Lee Anderson, the thuggish former Tory MP who is now his new party’s Whip, was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Robinson hecklers. As I wrote on social media at the time, “… the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years (see also Habib's recent resignation). There's a very tricky tightrope between being 'respectable' and being more 'radical' than the Tories.”
Immediately afterwards, and just a day after Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk, who for months had been displaying sympathy for the rioters, and, like Habib, forthright in supporting Robinson as a ‘victim’ and a ‘political prisoner’, denounced Farage as unfit to lead Reform, and went on to suggest, at least, that Rupert Lowe would be a preferable leader. This made Lowe a potential personal threat to Farage whilst also establishing him as a standard bearer for the right of the Reform Party, symbolized not just by his praise for Robinson but by his open advocacy of “mass deportations”.
This, Lowe assured people, would apply ‘only’ to ‘illegal immigrants’, but for Farage such a policy is “politically impossible” and such language is politically unwise, precisely because of its connotations of the ‘send them all home’ repatriation policies of the far right. From this has flowed Lowe’s suspension from the party amid allegations of bullying, which have been reported to the police, and an increasingly sour war of words from leading figures in Reform, as well as a running social media battle between its different factions. At the same time, Farage’s pro-Russian, pro-Trump, and anti-Ukraine positions are, as mentioned in my last post, making him increasingly vulnerable to criticism from both within and outside his party.
Farage exposed
Whilst many of these issues are not new, what is new is that, for the first time, Farage is being pulled apart simultaneously along all of the contradictory fault lines which define his politics. To recapitulate these fault lines: first, there is contradiction between his ‘hail fellow, well met’ public shtick and the ruthlessness with which he pursues his personal ambitions. Second, there is the contradiction between his attempt to pitch to the political ‘mainstream’ whilst dog-whistling to the far right. Third, there is the contradiction between his pretensions to patriotism and his apologism for Putin. Fourth, and most recent, there is the contradiction between his admiration for Trump and Musk and the now open contempt in which he is held by, at least, the latter.
The last of these has a significance which goes beyond Farage and Reform. Although Musk is alone amongst the US radical right in his (ongoing) open criticism of Farage, he is very far from alone in his associated criticisms of the UK. In particular, the idea that last summer’s riots represented the righteous grievance of those forced to live in a multi-cultural society, along with the myth that those who received jail sentences for their actions were being penalized simply for exercising the right to free speech, is now standard in Trumpist circles, and it enfolds the UK into their wider critique of Europe (regardless of Brexit). It was even alluded to by JD Vance when Starmer visited the White House, although the Prime Minister pushed back against it. It is a certainly a standard belief amongst the UK far right, and Reform supporters more generally, including in their endless jibes about ‘two-tier Keir’.
Farage, of course, is happy to join in with much of that, but is now exposed, more than ever before, in the ‘no man’s land’ he has always wanted avoid, whereby he is neither respectable enough nor radical enough. The result is that his ability to hold together a coalition of voters is diminished. Reform voters now split almost exactly three equal ways between those who think the party would do better, worse, or no differently (or don’t know) without Farage as leader, and the percentage of those voters with a favourable view of Farage has fallen from 91% to 73% over just the last month. Yet being able to create, sustain, and grow an electoral coalition matters more than it ever has, because it is only since Brexit that Farage finally managed to become an MP and to lead a Westminster party which, implausibly but not quite ludicrously, has pretensions to government.
Wider implications
The issue here isn’t so much whether Reform, with or without Farage as a leader, loses electoral support. In fact, for all the battles going on within the party, there is no sign yet of a fall in its support in the opinion polls, and, as political scientist Professor Tim Bale has pointed out, that is very likely because it is only a very vocal minority who are engaged in, or by, those battles. The more significant issue is whether it puts a hard cap on the level of support Reform can ever expect to achieve. If so, that probably puts an end to the idea of a Reform electoral breakthrough. That would be consistent with the suggestion of another leading political scientist, Professor Ben Ansell, that, largely because of Trump, populism generally, and Reform’s populism in particular, has reached a peak. It is an analysis cautiously endorsed by political commentator Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times (£).
However, if the party continues to poll even close to the mid-twenties it will continue to exert unpredictable effects within our electoral system, including potentially significant gains in by-elections, local elections, and the Welsh Senedd and Scottish parliament elections. That will mean a continuing temptation for both Tory and Labour parties to pander to the sensibilities of actual or potential Reform voters, anchoring mainstream political debate around their agenda. Moreover, the fact that Reform has, in effect, its own TV channel in GB News, and the puniness of its regulation, gives the party an influence well beyond that of formal political representation. Certainly my suggestion at the time of the riots that they could pave the way for a new and better conversation about immigration has proved hopelessly optimistic.
So none of this makes for a neat picture of the shape of post-Brexit politics, and still less is it the basis for a prediction of the shape of things to come. It doesn’t even tell us much about what Farage’s personal fate will be. But the recent buffeting he has received does show the vulnerabilities of post-Brexit populism in Britain and that Trump’s re-election is proving to pose significant problems for it, rather than, as might have been expected, providing a new confidence. And that isn’t just affecting Farage and Reform. Brexiter Atlanticists like Daniel Hannan are suddenly having to recalibrate to a world in which the US is no longer a trustworthy ally (£) although, of course, being Hannan, he draws the fatuous conclusion that the solution is to revive his CANZUK fantasy.
Ultimately, then, there is less of a disconnect between ‘Brexit’ and ‘Beyond’ than I suggested at the beginning of this post. Brexit was always going to leave a long trail of effects on the British polity, including on advocates like Farage, and on the UK’s relations with the wider world. But that was never going to happen in a vacuum; the world was not going to remain static. As it has turned out, not only has the world changed, but it has done so in ways which have shown Brexit and its advocates to be even more adrift and riven by contradictions than they were in 2016.
Note
[1] Vital as these ‘beyond Brexit’ political consequences are, I do think it is also important to keep at least trying to record the ways in which the dull empirical thud of Brexit, in its most basic meaning, keeps punching the bruises it has already created (especially as Brexit apologists continue to trot out bogus arguments to try to downplay its damage). That, too, is more difficult than it used to be as media reporting of the basics has become much sparser. It just isn’t newsworthy any more, unless there is some major anniversary. Nevertheless, some stories make it through, including the report from the Food and Drink Federation that British exports of food and drink to the EU have fallen by a whopping 34.1% since 2019. Circuitously related is the growing awareness of the possibility of food shortages when ‘Phase 3’ labelling rules come into force in Northern Ireland in July under the Windsor Framework (with a concomitant extension of ‘Not for Sale in the EU’ labelling in Great Britain). And circuitously related to that are concerns about impending shortages of animal medicines in Northern Ireland. This is a particularly arcane issue, reaching deep back into the Brexit process, and relating to the way that parts of the original Northern Ireland Protocol were made subject to ‘grace periods’ for implementation. Animal medicines were one product area where implementation was deferred but, unlike human medicines, they were not included in the subsequent Windsor Framework agreement. Now, the already extended grace period is due to expire at the end of the year and, as yet, there is no agreement in place. It is yet another reminder of the consequences of the rush to ‘get Brexit done’, and the many loose ends which are still hanging as a result. As I mentioned in last week’s post, the situation of Gibraltar is another, even bigger, example of that.
It was also inevitable that Brexit would become bound up with ongoing international politics, as the UK sought a reformation of its relationships not just with the EU but within the international order generally. What couldn’t have been predicted, even until very recently, was how that international order was going to be so radically upended, making Brexit at once something rather minor and yet recasting it as a moving part within something so major.
Framing events
All of which is a rather longwinded way of saying that it is becoming increasingly difficult to write this blog, and that the ‘beyond’ parts of its ‘Brexit and Beyond’ title increasingly overweigh the narrowly ‘Brexit’ parts. Both nationally and internationally, the ‘beyond’ issues are now inextricably linked with Trump and the new global divide I wrote about in my previous post. There have been any number of news stories about this global divide in the last fortnight, most of which can be framed through four inter-related questions:
· To what extent will it lead to closer defence and security integration between the EU and the UK, including integration of military operations, equipment procurement, intelligence sharing etc., and under what terms would/ could these occur?
· If such EU-UK defence integration happens, will it be accompanied by, and perhaps make more extensive than might otherwise have been envisaged, deeper economic and regulatory integration?
· Would EU-UK integration in either or both of these senses be precluded by, or go alongside, a divergence in how each partner related to the US, for example and in particular as regards some form of UK-US ‘economic deal’ struck (including perhaps exemption from Trump tariffs) at the same time as the EU-US relationship becomes more hostile (including perhaps a prolonged trade war)?
· To what extent is the US going to detach itself so far from international norms and constitutional propriety as to make it impossible for the UK to sustain anything resembling a normal relationship with it (whether because US malfeasance becomes too gross for the UK to ignore, or because the US turns decisively and aggressively on the UK)?
At least some answers to these questions are likely to emerge over the next couple of months. Meanwhile, there is, arguably, little point in trying to read the runes of every report of every meeting and statement to try to anticipate what these answers will be.
Looking further ahead, new questions will emerge, some of which by definition cannot be predicted, not least because so many of the key actors, especially Trump, are unpredictable in their very nature. But perhaps the most predictable question (though not its answer) is what would happen, including, especially, how would Trump react, if Putin commits new acts of aggression, and in particular if these are committed against the personnel or territory of a NATO member?
An important sub-set of this question is what would happen if the UK (along with other countries) deploys some form of ‘peace-keeping’ force in Ukraine and it comes under direct Russian attack? At that point, certainly if the US fails to give military backing, then we will be in a dramatically new and dangerous situation, which will make Brexit, even in its most extensive meanings, a triviality.
The Reform fiasco
Meanwhile, and to some extent connected, the effects of Brexit on domestic politics continue to unfold. Of these, currently the most fascinating is the colossal mess that Reform UK has got into. That’s not say it is particularly surprising, for all the reasons which led me to write, immediately after last year’s general election result, that “it would not be absurdly risky to bet on Reform imploding before we get to the next election”. True, it hasn’t imploded yet, but, then again, we are less than a year into the electoral cycle.
The continuing presence of Nigel Farage and a Farageist party is, perhaps first and foremost, a reminder of David Cameron’s disastrously ill-judged attempt to see off the threat of UKIP by holding the referendum in 2016. It is arguable that this was not the sole reason the referendum was held, but it is unarguable that it was high on the list. The failure of that decision was, with bitter irony, a double one: not only did it unleash the disaster of Brexit, it also installed Farage and Farageism as a central part of the political landscape, and it did so to the detriment not just of the Tory Party but of British politics generally.
Farage’s continuing presence is also a reminder of his dishonesty and egotism. After all, he resigned UKIP’s leadership shortly after the referendum, his political ambitions supposedly achieved, only to go on to create the Brexit Party and then Reform. No doubt he would present that as ‘defending Brexit’ from ‘betrayal’, but his decision not to challenge Tory incumbents in the 2019 election opened the door for Boris Johnson to enact Brexit in a form which Farage regards as, precisely, a betrayal and a failure. Lacking even that avowed purpose, Reform exists as a rag-bag of populist complaints, most centrally about immigration, as well as being a fresh vehicle for his ego. British populism did not just bring Brexit about, it was also, itself, changed by Brexit since it lost what had been its defining cause.
There’s every reason to think that Farage’s ego, and more specifically his difficult and unpleasant character, is a big part of the current fiasco within Reform. After all, there is a very long list of people he has fallen out with during his political career. It’s true that, looking at some of the names on that list, it isn’t hard to imagine there were, to say the very least, faults on both sides. For that matter his current colleagues, including his fellow MPs, are not exactly the sort of people that anyone half-sane would want to go camping with. Even so, it is hard to deny, and easy to imagine, that Farage is an almost impossible person to work with. Yet, like it or not (and many of his present and former allies are clearly amongst those who do not), his character has a public appeal that no one else on the populist right of British politics enjoys.
Farage’s political strategy
However there has always been more to Farage’s capacity to mobilize significant numbers of voters than his character (or, perhaps more accurately, his persona). Whatever party he has led, he has had a clear strategic sense about the nature of those voters and what appeals to them. He accurately recognized that weirdos like Godfrey Bloom or Gerard Batten did not have that appeal, regardless of their beliefs, but he also recognizes that he himself would not have that appeal if he were openly to embrace far-right politics. Farage’s political skill, and it is a considerable one, is to appear ‘normal’, even genial, and ‘sensible’, even reasonable, in order to appeal to relatively mainstream voters, whilst being convincing to those on the far right who can hear his ‘dog whistles’ (I wish there was a less clichéd term than that).
In this sense, the current blow up should be understood as being about much more than personalities, for all that they are relevant. It is actually about two, related, matters of substance which derive from Farage’s political strategy. One is the autocratic and undemocratic way in which he runs Reform. Whilst this, too, no doubt reflects his character, it also reflects his experience, particularly in UKIP, of a party of what David Cameron in 2006 called “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists”. It was a jibe which was all too obviously true and, although that didn’t matter in terms of UKIP’s core support, it did put a ceiling on what it could achieve electorally. The hastily created Brexit Party had similar problems. Hence, when creating Reform, Farage wanted to be able to exert much more control over his party and that, too, was partly a consequence of Brexit since, unlike UKIP, Reform can’t make use of proportionally representative European elections to build a power base.
The related issue of substance is his determination to ensure that his party’s ‘dog whistles’ to the far right remain just that. This means, firstly, trying to exclude those who do not have his consummate skill in judging how to pitch messages so that only the dogs hear them (or, at least, that they are deniable when anyone else hears them). Even more importantly, it means excluding those who do not even attempt such subterfuge, and are openly on the far right. That certainly doesn’t mean, as Farage likes to claim, that he is somehow engaged in marginalizing the far right: rather, he has sought to harness the far right without frightening off other, less extreme, voters. It is therefore no coincidence that, just as Farage left UKIP in 2018 (having already stood down as leader) over its links with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and the far right, so too are those links central to current events within Reform.
The far-right riots
The immediate roots of these events go back to last summer’s far-right riots and, crucially, to Keir Starmer’s robustness in correctly insisting that they were, indeed, “far-right thuggery”. This caused much outrage on the political right which, whilst largely confected, brought to the fore the relationship between the ‘respectable right’ and far-right extremism. The effect was to expose the two-faced nature of Farage’s entire ‘dog whistle’ strategy of stoking division by, supposedly, ‘just asking questions’ about the causes of the riots whilst insisting that he had never had anything to do with “the Tommy Robinsons and those who genuinely do stir up hatred”.
Shortly afterwards, Robinson was jailed, not in relation to the riots, but for contempt of court and breaking an injunction in relation to his hounding of a Syrian refugee, prompting a far-right rally in his support. Like Farage, Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice disavowed Robinson, but others, most notably Ben Habib, argued, no doubt correctly, that many of those demonstrating were Reform’s ‘own people’. Habib, already bitter about having been ousted as Co-Deputy Leader (hardly, one would have thought, a job title to excite strong feelings) left Reform in November 2024, citing Farage’s autocracy as his main reason but clearly, as I just suggested, this autocracy and the position on Robinson are linked. At all events, Habib has subsequently been vocal in describing Robinson as “a political prisoner”.
By early January, at Reform’s East Midlands Conference, Lee Anderson, the thuggish former Tory MP who is now his new party’s Whip, was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Robinson hecklers. As I wrote on social media at the time, “… the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years (see also Habib's recent resignation). There's a very tricky tightrope between being 'respectable' and being more 'radical' than the Tories.”
Immediately afterwards, and just a day after Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk, who for months had been displaying sympathy for the rioters, and, like Habib, forthright in supporting Robinson as a ‘victim’ and a ‘political prisoner’, denounced Farage as unfit to lead Reform, and went on to suggest, at least, that Rupert Lowe would be a preferable leader. This made Lowe a potential personal threat to Farage whilst also establishing him as a standard bearer for the right of the Reform Party, symbolized not just by his praise for Robinson but by his open advocacy of “mass deportations”.
This, Lowe assured people, would apply ‘only’ to ‘illegal immigrants’, but for Farage such a policy is “politically impossible” and such language is politically unwise, precisely because of its connotations of the ‘send them all home’ repatriation policies of the far right. From this has flowed Lowe’s suspension from the party amid allegations of bullying, which have been reported to the police, and an increasingly sour war of words from leading figures in Reform, as well as a running social media battle between its different factions. At the same time, Farage’s pro-Russian, pro-Trump, and anti-Ukraine positions are, as mentioned in my last post, making him increasingly vulnerable to criticism from both within and outside his party.
Farage exposed
Whilst many of these issues are not new, what is new is that, for the first time, Farage is being pulled apart simultaneously along all of the contradictory fault lines which define his politics. To recapitulate these fault lines: first, there is contradiction between his ‘hail fellow, well met’ public shtick and the ruthlessness with which he pursues his personal ambitions. Second, there is the contradiction between his attempt to pitch to the political ‘mainstream’ whilst dog-whistling to the far right. Third, there is the contradiction between his pretensions to patriotism and his apologism for Putin. Fourth, and most recent, there is the contradiction between his admiration for Trump and Musk and the now open contempt in which he is held by, at least, the latter.
The last of these has a significance which goes beyond Farage and Reform. Although Musk is alone amongst the US radical right in his (ongoing) open criticism of Farage, he is very far from alone in his associated criticisms of the UK. In particular, the idea that last summer’s riots represented the righteous grievance of those forced to live in a multi-cultural society, along with the myth that those who received jail sentences for their actions were being penalized simply for exercising the right to free speech, is now standard in Trumpist circles, and it enfolds the UK into their wider critique of Europe (regardless of Brexit). It was even alluded to by JD Vance when Starmer visited the White House, although the Prime Minister pushed back against it. It is a certainly a standard belief amongst the UK far right, and Reform supporters more generally, including in their endless jibes about ‘two-tier Keir’.
Farage, of course, is happy to join in with much of that, but is now exposed, more than ever before, in the ‘no man’s land’ he has always wanted avoid, whereby he is neither respectable enough nor radical enough. The result is that his ability to hold together a coalition of voters is diminished. Reform voters now split almost exactly three equal ways between those who think the party would do better, worse, or no differently (or don’t know) without Farage as leader, and the percentage of those voters with a favourable view of Farage has fallen from 91% to 73% over just the last month. Yet being able to create, sustain, and grow an electoral coalition matters more than it ever has, because it is only since Brexit that Farage finally managed to become an MP and to lead a Westminster party which, implausibly but not quite ludicrously, has pretensions to government.
Wider implications
The issue here isn’t so much whether Reform, with or without Farage as a leader, loses electoral support. In fact, for all the battles going on within the party, there is no sign yet of a fall in its support in the opinion polls, and, as political scientist Professor Tim Bale has pointed out, that is very likely because it is only a very vocal minority who are engaged in, or by, those battles. The more significant issue is whether it puts a hard cap on the level of support Reform can ever expect to achieve. If so, that probably puts an end to the idea of a Reform electoral breakthrough. That would be consistent with the suggestion of another leading political scientist, Professor Ben Ansell, that, largely because of Trump, populism generally, and Reform’s populism in particular, has reached a peak. It is an analysis cautiously endorsed by political commentator Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times (£).
However, if the party continues to poll even close to the mid-twenties it will continue to exert unpredictable effects within our electoral system, including potentially significant gains in by-elections, local elections, and the Welsh Senedd and Scottish parliament elections. That will mean a continuing temptation for both Tory and Labour parties to pander to the sensibilities of actual or potential Reform voters, anchoring mainstream political debate around their agenda. Moreover, the fact that Reform has, in effect, its own TV channel in GB News, and the puniness of its regulation, gives the party an influence well beyond that of formal political representation. Certainly my suggestion at the time of the riots that they could pave the way for a new and better conversation about immigration has proved hopelessly optimistic.
So none of this makes for a neat picture of the shape of post-Brexit politics, and still less is it the basis for a prediction of the shape of things to come. It doesn’t even tell us much about what Farage’s personal fate will be. But the recent buffeting he has received does show the vulnerabilities of post-Brexit populism in Britain and that Trump’s re-election is proving to pose significant problems for it, rather than, as might have been expected, providing a new confidence. And that isn’t just affecting Farage and Reform. Brexiter Atlanticists like Daniel Hannan are suddenly having to recalibrate to a world in which the US is no longer a trustworthy ally (£) although, of course, being Hannan, he draws the fatuous conclusion that the solution is to revive his CANZUK fantasy.
Ultimately, then, there is less of a disconnect between ‘Brexit’ and ‘Beyond’ than I suggested at the beginning of this post. Brexit was always going to leave a long trail of effects on the British polity, including on advocates like Farage, and on the UK’s relations with the wider world. But that was never going to happen in a vacuum; the world was not going to remain static. As it has turned out, not only has the world changed, but it has done so in ways which have shown Brexit and its advocates to be even more adrift and riven by contradictions than they were in 2016.
Note
[1] Vital as these ‘beyond Brexit’ political consequences are, I do think it is also important to keep at least trying to record the ways in which the dull empirical thud of Brexit, in its most basic meaning, keeps punching the bruises it has already created (especially as Brexit apologists continue to trot out bogus arguments to try to downplay its damage). That, too, is more difficult than it used to be as media reporting of the basics has become much sparser. It just isn’t newsworthy any more, unless there is some major anniversary. Nevertheless, some stories make it through, including the report from the Food and Drink Federation that British exports of food and drink to the EU have fallen by a whopping 34.1% since 2019. Circuitously related is the growing awareness of the possibility of food shortages when ‘Phase 3’ labelling rules come into force in Northern Ireland in July under the Windsor Framework (with a concomitant extension of ‘Not for Sale in the EU’ labelling in Great Britain). And circuitously related to that are concerns about impending shortages of animal medicines in Northern Ireland. This is a particularly arcane issue, reaching deep back into the Brexit process, and relating to the way that parts of the original Northern Ireland Protocol were made subject to ‘grace periods’ for implementation. Animal medicines were one product area where implementation was deferred but, unlike human medicines, they were not included in the subsequent Windsor Framework agreement. Now, the already extended grace period is due to expire at the end of the year and, as yet, there is no agreement in place. It is yet another reminder of the consequences of the rush to ‘get Brexit done’, and the many loose ends which are still hanging as a result. As I mentioned in last week’s post, the situation of Gibraltar is another, even bigger, example of that.
Friday, 7 March 2025
The new global divide makes Brexit an anomaly
The new global divide I’ve been talking about in recent posts has deepened very sharply again since my most recent one. It is a divide that is likely to become as profound as that of the Cold War and, although it doesn’t yet have a snappy name, its existence has been recognized by just about every political commentator. Something very basic has shifted, summed up by the headline to Martin Wolf’s recent Financial Times article (£): “The US is now the enemy of the West”. As a result, according to former Ambassador Sir David Manning, there is a “seismic change” underway in the UK’s relationship with the US.
That has happened quickly, and in ways which are unfolding daily, if not hourly, around the world. In the UK, with almost equal rapidity, it is beginning to shift the tectonic plates of politics, and in particular the shape of post-Brexit politics, in line with this new global divide. However, although the global consequences are alarming and potentially horrific, the impact on British politics may in some ways be positive.
The new global divide
At stake, as recently discussed on Professor Ben Ansell’s Radio 4 strand, Rethink, may be the survival of liberalism itself. That is a useful way to frame things, because it is not just ‘liberal’ journalists and writers in the ‘Establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ media who do so. It is equally explicit amongst ‘radical right’ populists and their Putinist allies that their project is to fight and destroy the liberal order in domestic and international politics. In an era when, often, it seems as if the competing sides cannot even agree on the most basic of facts, or the most basic rules of logic, on this one, overarching, issue they are at one.
I’ve pointed in recent posts to some of the ways that Brexit relates to this new divide, but it is worth spelling out how it sits squarely within the ‘anti-liberal’ camp. At the most basic level, support for Brexit is one of the many things Trump and Putin share. Beyond that, Brexit and the anti-liberal axis share the same hubristic nationalism, the same quasi-mystical invocation of ‘the people’, the same vicious anger against ‘the liberal elite’ and the ‘globalist establishment’, the same xenophobia, the same nostalgia for an imagined past, the same self-pitying victimhood, and, of course, the same loathing of the EU. They also share many of the same rhetorical strategies, especially that of promulgating false, often convoluted, claims as truth and then, when they are challenged, using that very challenge to ‘prove’ that there is at least ‘something to be debated’ in those falsities.
But if this consonance were all there were to it, then the current situation would look very different. Post-Brexit Britain would be neatly dovetailing into the Trump-Putin side of the new divide. It would, to take an important recent illustration of that divide, have voted with the US, Russia, Belarus, and North Korea in their opposition to the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Or at the very least, it would have abstained, like China. Of course, in that situation, many British people would be horrified by what their country had become, just as many Americans are horrified by what the US has become, but, with Brexit, as with Trump’s re-election, the die would have been cast.
Britain agrees its position
That isn’t the situation, though, and in fact the UK voted with all the other liberal countries, including Japan, Canada, Australia etc. as well as those in Europe. And this is because, although Brexit has happened – the UK has left the EU – it does not entirely define Britain, certainly not in the way that Brexiters had hoped and expected. The reasons for that are complex, but obviously include the fact that Brexit was so narrowly supported in the first place, and that for almost the entire period since it happened it has been supported by only a dwindling minority. As I’ve remarked before, having won the referendum, the Brexiters went on to lose the battle for the post-Brexit narrative.
Allied to this is the fact that most of the tenets of liberalism, both in international relations and domestic politics, whilst taking a battering from Brexit, have survived, sometimes precariously, in the UK. Most particularly, British support for Ukraine, both as a matter of principle and because geography makes it vital to national security, is strong and popular. That, in turn, is reflected in the way that most Brexiters, especially within the Tory Party, unlike Trump and the US radical right, are supportive of Ukraine, hostile to Putin, and pro-NATO.
For this reason, politicians of almost all parties, including populist Conservatives, condemned the literally stomach-turning bullying to which Voldymyr Zelensky was subjected by Trump and JD Vance. It’s too early to be sure, but I have a strong sense that this was a turning point for the British public, and it certainly united the British press in revulsion. That revulsion came even closer to home when Vance made dismissive comments about, apparently, the British military (although he later denied they were the target), something which caused genuine anger cutting across political divisions, including that of remainers and leavers. Probably nothing could have done so much to cement the view that the US under Trump has become a nasty, rude, and hostile power.
At all events there is now a new political consensus emerging in response to the choices Trump has forced upon us. For example, even if we had a Conservative government, it would all but certainly have voted the same way as the Labour administration did in the UN vote. More generally, the Conservatives have both supported and praised Starmer’s general handling of what the eminent War Studies Professor Lawrence Freedman has called “the great crisis”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, with his open admiration of Putin and Trump, his apologism for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and his support for the bullying of Zelensky has become an outlier, even amongst most of his own supporters, never mind the country as a whole [1].
The limits of choice
All of this means that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK remains in its values, interests, and allegiances a ‘liberal European’ country. However, the UK, under any government, and with or without Brexit, is not able simply to align ‘against’ the US. Trump may have made his country the enemy of the West, but many countries in the West, not just the UK, cannot make themselves the enemy of America. That is one reason why the last few weeks have been so profoundly shocking. For the UK, specifically, the scale of its trade and investment relationship with the US, and the scope of its defence and security relationship, make it impossible to undertake such a re-alignment, certainly in any short timescale.
Those relationships reach deep into the central, and the most secret, parts of the British state, including its nuclear capacity (although the common claim that the UK does not have operational independence in the use of is nuclear weapons, or requires ‘codes’ from the US to do so, would seem to be a myth) and, perhaps most profoundly of all, its intelligence capacity. Regarding the latter, former diplomat Arthur Snell has argued that, especially with respect to signals intelligence (sigint), there is almost no way of effectively detaching the UK capability from that of the US. If there is, it will take time. The US is by far the senior partner of the ‘Five Eyes’ partnership (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which shares both facilities and yields of sigint operations and, as such, is vital to the UK for military, counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and others purposes.
This makes it all the more concerning that at least some in the US administration are pushing to exclude Canada from the Five Eyes (£), in the context of the wider economic and political aggression Trump is directing at Ottawa. The threat may well come to nothing, but it is a reminder, not least to the UK, of the hazards of being dependent on the caprice of a partner that is no longer a friend. It is also one of many indications that Trump’s America is vindictive and bullying to those it perceives negatively, whether for being enemies, or parasites, or competitors, or weak, or just for having in some way offended against Trump’s pathologically colossal vanity. (This link, to a free-to-view piece by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is well worth reading for a sense of the horror of what Trump is doing, and why.)
That is why Keir Starmer will go on publicly insisting – as any British Prime Minister would, with or without Brexit – that there is ‘no choice’ to be made between the UK’s relations with the US and those with Europe, and that the US remains a reliable ally. They are necessary diplomatic fictions. It is why anyone expecting to see a dramatic big gesture from Starmer, denouncing Trump for the disgrace he is, will be disappointed. It is why we witnessed the sphincter-tightening spectacle of Starmer having to subject himself to stiltedly lavishing praise on Trump, in return for some tepid compliments delivered with barely concealed contempt. It is why he invited Trump for a State Visit which, for all the growing opposition to it, will almost certainly go ahead. And it is why, when it does, King Charles will grit his teeth and smile. The rest of us should just be grateful we don’t have to do the same.
The realities of sovereignty
What we are actually seeing is a hard lesson in the reality of what sovereignty and the limits to sovereignty mean. The Brexiters were and are entirely deluded to think that this reality has anything to do with the ‘imposition’ of Brussels regulations on widgets – regulations made, when we were an EU member, with the UK having a prominent and respected voice. A far better illustration is the way that the British Prime Minister literally dares not speak anything close to the truth to or about the US President for fear of being publicly humiliated and the nation punished. Similarly, whereas leading British politicians were able to liken the EU to Nazis or the Soviet Union with impunity, no such politician, and certainly no serving government minister, would dare say the same of Trump’s America.
Of course, there is nothing new in the disparity between US and UK power, and there have been previous occasions, most obviously the Suez crisis, where that has been humiliatingly revealed. The US has the power to coerce us and to hurt us. The difference under Trump is that he would be quite willing to do so on the flimsiest of pretexts, in the most brutal of ways, and would enjoy it. What was once a power imbalance within a broadly reliable alliance has now become a power play within something more like a mediaeval court in which Britain is a minor, ageing aristocrat. And there’s not much we can do about it. It is no good reaching for the historical analogy of 1930s appeasement here. When Imperial Britain faced the threat of Nazi Germany, it did not face an adversary with which the bulk of its military and intelligence capacity was intertwined, or one which dwarfed it in resources.
Similarly, the answer to the question posed by George Monbiot in the Guardian last week – what if Britain had to defend itself militarily against the US? – is depressingly obvious: we couldn’t. However, we aren’t in this situation, but in a different and perhaps more complex one [2]. Crazy as this US administration is, it is not bent on going to war with the UK or Europe. The military threat comes from Russia, and from the withdrawal of reliable US security guarantees to deter that threat. Here the appeasement analogy does apply, in that if, with US complicity, Ukraine is dismembered and subjugated, Russia will be emboldened to go after other European countries, both directly and indirectly, including the UK. (Indeed, the Brexit sovereigntists seem remarkably sanguine about Russia’s many incursions into UK territory as if it were metric measurements, rather than these acts of territorial aggression, which were the most real and pressing threats to British sovereignty.)
Minor powers
Equally, for all the real constraints on what the UK can say or do to the US, it is not completely powerless and, as a matter of fact, Starmer is being far from supine. There are several illustrations of that, including the way the UK voted at the UN. Related to that, Starmer has been insistent, despite Trump’s brazen lies to the contrary, that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine. Another example is the way that, during his Washington visit, he pushed back against Vance’s barbed comment about lack of freedom of speech in the UK (this is one of the many alt-right canards about both Starmer and Britain, heavily promulgated by Elon Musk). Then, at this week’s PMQs, he unfussily but pointedly issued an implicit reprimand to Vance for his own implicit dismissiveness of the British military.
Most prominent of all, the warmth with which Starmer welcomed Zelensky to the UK just a few hours after the Ukrainian leader’s appalling treatment in America, and the immediate arrangement of a meeting with King Charles, were clear rebukes to Trump, even if not vocalized as such. Moreover, no one could miss the contrast of the genuine regard between Starmer and Zelensky with the precarious brittleness of the Starmer-Trump meeting. These things are probably as far as the UK can do without attracting Trump’s ire; it may even be that they go beyond it.
Starmer and the UK also have some cards to play with the US which, though they shouldn’t be over-stated, are not entirely negligible. For all that it is very much the junior partner, the UK does contribute some things the US needs, with sigint capacity being one. And whilst Trump is undoubtedly too self-involved and too ignorant to do so, there are still some US Republicans who recall with gratitude the UK’s support after 9/11 and even, for those with longer memories, the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. (I make no comment on those things in themselves, just the point that they still carry some meaning for some in the US.) Even the ghost of Churchill still has some residual currency, as the (re-) placement of his bust in the Oval Office attests.
In that respect, it is perhaps telling that Vance felt obliged to deny that he had been referring to the UK (or France) in those scornful comments about the militaries of ‘random countries’. He can hardly have done so because he had been misunderstood, since no other countries have yet proposed to deploy troops to Ukraine. And there is nothing in his character to suggest he did so out of personal graciousness, still less from any sense of shame. So the implication is that there is still some vestigial realization in the White House that it cannot be totally disrespectful to its notional allies, at least in public.
The way ahead
Be all that as it may, what is certainly the case is that over time, without publicly admitting there is a choice being made, the UK is going to increase its contributions to, and deepen its relations with, a massively re-vamped EU and European defence capacity and, in the process, reduce its dependence on the US. Indeed, Trump can hardly object to that, since it is what he has asked for and, in doing so, differs from previous US administrations only in the brutality and crudity of his demands.
It is now becoming clear to many commentators that, as I wrote exactly a month ago:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel.”
It is far too early to know where this will lead, but last weekend’s convenorship of a meeting involving the EU, most of its members states, Turkey, Canada, and Ukraine was a clear example that Starmer is trying to grasp this opportunity. And already he and Britain are attracting appreciative comments from other European leaders, something that hasn’t happened for long enough.
But none of this is going to be easy, and it certainly isn’t going to be pretty. Those who are squeamish about realpolitik and who like their politics to be morally-elevated had better look away for the next few years. That doesn’t just apply to the UK, but here it will include the fact that, like it or not, Starmer is going to make use of not being in the EU in various ways. That will include using the symbolism of that as a way of getting heard in a White House that loathes the EU, something which has already enabled Farage to claim, predictably but misleadingly, that we are seeing some kind of benefit of Brexit [3]. It may include some kind of substantive agreement to avoid new tariffs and, perhaps, to develop an AI regime in conjunction with the US, rather than with the EU. Personally, I’m not convinced these things will happen, but they will certainly continue to be talked about.
The trick for the UK will be to combine this not just with getting closer to the EU on defence, but with effecting the most maximalist version of the 'reset' (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, fully implementing the existing agreements with the EU, including the Windsor Framework, as well as completing the still unresolved, and apparently stalled, negotiations over Gibraltar). This in turn means the careful curation of relationships with other countries, within and beyond Europe, to defuse any sense that the UK is selling them out by making some agreements with the US. As such it will call for extremely astute diplomacy, but it is not an impossible task, since other national leaders understand perfectly well the difficulties of navigating relations with Trump.
Moreover, none of this is going to be cheap. The recent announcement of increased defence spending is only the beginning of what needs to come and the fraught political choices this will entail have yet to be faced up to.
Back to Brexit
In these ways, our country is going to have to simultaneously placate a dangerously unpredictable US whilst acting on the consequences of it now being undeniable that Europe is where the UK belongs. The great fantasy of Brexit, and its central strategic folly, of thinking otherwise has now been exposed, far more dramatically and suddenly than by Brexit itself. That is now becoming accepted, at least according to the commentator Janan Ganesh, even by British Conservatives. Indeed, for at least some of them, the new situation creates a welcome way out of the cul-de-sac which Brexit has taken them, not least as regards electoral strategy.
As the veteran international politics sage Philip Stephens puts it, “Trump’s America has made its choice”. In doing so, it has imposed one on the UK which, though ragged, in that it can’t be made through a single decision at a single moment, could through a series of decisions gradually re-integrate us with the EU. For within this new global divide, it is crystal clear that Brexit is an anomaly, a policy which belongs on one side of that divide yet is being pursued by a country located on the other side. At the very least, the Brexiters’ claim, which was always flawed, that the EU is irrelevant to the UK’s security needs and that these were fully catered for by NATO, has now been exposed as disastrously false.
This doesn’t, in itself, mean that rejoining the EU is on the political agenda, but it does make the timescale for that being a realistic possibility shorter than seemed likely even a fortnight ago. It already cements the pre-existing public sense that Brexit was a terrible error. So, frightening and disorientating as the last few weeks have been, I think there are at least some grounds for hope. Trump feels like a disaster, and in general terms that feeling is well-founded. But for post-Brexit Britain he might just be a reprieve.
Notes
[1] This could turn out to be one of the most important, and most positive, domestic consequences of the new global situation, sidelining Farage for the first time for decades. Subscribers to Byline Times can read some of my initial thoughts about this in the next issue (April 2025), and I am sure I will write much more about it, here, in the future.
[2] Thus those who, in comments on one of my recent posts, thought I was anticipating, or even advocating, the UK ‘standing up to’ the US militarily entirely misunderstood me. It may well be true, though, that there are inconsistencies in the content and tone of my recent posts but, if so, I think that is understandable – even inevitable - given the rapidity with which events are unfolding.
[3] It is misleading because although it is possible that the UK being out of the EU helps to get a hearing from Trump a) it is wrong to claim that this is because the UK now has an independent foreign policy, because it always did; b) any gain from that is offset by the very much reduced influence the UK has within the EU; c) it is only because Trump is so bent out of shape about the EU rather than being because Brexit has, in general terms, given the UK any benefits in its relationship with the US; and d) precisely because Trump is Trump it doesn’t count for much anyway. He’s perfectly likely, if he takes umbrage at something, to turn on the UK, Brexit or no Brexit. Hence the need to tip-toe around his freakshow vanities.
That has happened quickly, and in ways which are unfolding daily, if not hourly, around the world. In the UK, with almost equal rapidity, it is beginning to shift the tectonic plates of politics, and in particular the shape of post-Brexit politics, in line with this new global divide. However, although the global consequences are alarming and potentially horrific, the impact on British politics may in some ways be positive.
The new global divide
At stake, as recently discussed on Professor Ben Ansell’s Radio 4 strand, Rethink, may be the survival of liberalism itself. That is a useful way to frame things, because it is not just ‘liberal’ journalists and writers in the ‘Establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ media who do so. It is equally explicit amongst ‘radical right’ populists and their Putinist allies that their project is to fight and destroy the liberal order in domestic and international politics. In an era when, often, it seems as if the competing sides cannot even agree on the most basic of facts, or the most basic rules of logic, on this one, overarching, issue they are at one.
I’ve pointed in recent posts to some of the ways that Brexit relates to this new divide, but it is worth spelling out how it sits squarely within the ‘anti-liberal’ camp. At the most basic level, support for Brexit is one of the many things Trump and Putin share. Beyond that, Brexit and the anti-liberal axis share the same hubristic nationalism, the same quasi-mystical invocation of ‘the people’, the same vicious anger against ‘the liberal elite’ and the ‘globalist establishment’, the same xenophobia, the same nostalgia for an imagined past, the same self-pitying victimhood, and, of course, the same loathing of the EU. They also share many of the same rhetorical strategies, especially that of promulgating false, often convoluted, claims as truth and then, when they are challenged, using that very challenge to ‘prove’ that there is at least ‘something to be debated’ in those falsities.
But if this consonance were all there were to it, then the current situation would look very different. Post-Brexit Britain would be neatly dovetailing into the Trump-Putin side of the new divide. It would, to take an important recent illustration of that divide, have voted with the US, Russia, Belarus, and North Korea in their opposition to the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Or at the very least, it would have abstained, like China. Of course, in that situation, many British people would be horrified by what their country had become, just as many Americans are horrified by what the US has become, but, with Brexit, as with Trump’s re-election, the die would have been cast.
Britain agrees its position
That isn’t the situation, though, and in fact the UK voted with all the other liberal countries, including Japan, Canada, Australia etc. as well as those in Europe. And this is because, although Brexit has happened – the UK has left the EU – it does not entirely define Britain, certainly not in the way that Brexiters had hoped and expected. The reasons for that are complex, but obviously include the fact that Brexit was so narrowly supported in the first place, and that for almost the entire period since it happened it has been supported by only a dwindling minority. As I’ve remarked before, having won the referendum, the Brexiters went on to lose the battle for the post-Brexit narrative.
Allied to this is the fact that most of the tenets of liberalism, both in international relations and domestic politics, whilst taking a battering from Brexit, have survived, sometimes precariously, in the UK. Most particularly, British support for Ukraine, both as a matter of principle and because geography makes it vital to national security, is strong and popular. That, in turn, is reflected in the way that most Brexiters, especially within the Tory Party, unlike Trump and the US radical right, are supportive of Ukraine, hostile to Putin, and pro-NATO.
For this reason, politicians of almost all parties, including populist Conservatives, condemned the literally stomach-turning bullying to which Voldymyr Zelensky was subjected by Trump and JD Vance. It’s too early to be sure, but I have a strong sense that this was a turning point for the British public, and it certainly united the British press in revulsion. That revulsion came even closer to home when Vance made dismissive comments about, apparently, the British military (although he later denied they were the target), something which caused genuine anger cutting across political divisions, including that of remainers and leavers. Probably nothing could have done so much to cement the view that the US under Trump has become a nasty, rude, and hostile power.
At all events there is now a new political consensus emerging in response to the choices Trump has forced upon us. For example, even if we had a Conservative government, it would all but certainly have voted the same way as the Labour administration did in the UN vote. More generally, the Conservatives have both supported and praised Starmer’s general handling of what the eminent War Studies Professor Lawrence Freedman has called “the great crisis”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, with his open admiration of Putin and Trump, his apologism for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and his support for the bullying of Zelensky has become an outlier, even amongst most of his own supporters, never mind the country as a whole [1].
The limits of choice
All of this means that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK remains in its values, interests, and allegiances a ‘liberal European’ country. However, the UK, under any government, and with or without Brexit, is not able simply to align ‘against’ the US. Trump may have made his country the enemy of the West, but many countries in the West, not just the UK, cannot make themselves the enemy of America. That is one reason why the last few weeks have been so profoundly shocking. For the UK, specifically, the scale of its trade and investment relationship with the US, and the scope of its defence and security relationship, make it impossible to undertake such a re-alignment, certainly in any short timescale.
Those relationships reach deep into the central, and the most secret, parts of the British state, including its nuclear capacity (although the common claim that the UK does not have operational independence in the use of is nuclear weapons, or requires ‘codes’ from the US to do so, would seem to be a myth) and, perhaps most profoundly of all, its intelligence capacity. Regarding the latter, former diplomat Arthur Snell has argued that, especially with respect to signals intelligence (sigint), there is almost no way of effectively detaching the UK capability from that of the US. If there is, it will take time. The US is by far the senior partner of the ‘Five Eyes’ partnership (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which shares both facilities and yields of sigint operations and, as such, is vital to the UK for military, counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and others purposes.
This makes it all the more concerning that at least some in the US administration are pushing to exclude Canada from the Five Eyes (£), in the context of the wider economic and political aggression Trump is directing at Ottawa. The threat may well come to nothing, but it is a reminder, not least to the UK, of the hazards of being dependent on the caprice of a partner that is no longer a friend. It is also one of many indications that Trump’s America is vindictive and bullying to those it perceives negatively, whether for being enemies, or parasites, or competitors, or weak, or just for having in some way offended against Trump’s pathologically colossal vanity. (This link, to a free-to-view piece by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is well worth reading for a sense of the horror of what Trump is doing, and why.)
That is why Keir Starmer will go on publicly insisting – as any British Prime Minister would, with or without Brexit – that there is ‘no choice’ to be made between the UK’s relations with the US and those with Europe, and that the US remains a reliable ally. They are necessary diplomatic fictions. It is why anyone expecting to see a dramatic big gesture from Starmer, denouncing Trump for the disgrace he is, will be disappointed. It is why we witnessed the sphincter-tightening spectacle of Starmer having to subject himself to stiltedly lavishing praise on Trump, in return for some tepid compliments delivered with barely concealed contempt. It is why he invited Trump for a State Visit which, for all the growing opposition to it, will almost certainly go ahead. And it is why, when it does, King Charles will grit his teeth and smile. The rest of us should just be grateful we don’t have to do the same.
The realities of sovereignty
What we are actually seeing is a hard lesson in the reality of what sovereignty and the limits to sovereignty mean. The Brexiters were and are entirely deluded to think that this reality has anything to do with the ‘imposition’ of Brussels regulations on widgets – regulations made, when we were an EU member, with the UK having a prominent and respected voice. A far better illustration is the way that the British Prime Minister literally dares not speak anything close to the truth to or about the US President for fear of being publicly humiliated and the nation punished. Similarly, whereas leading British politicians were able to liken the EU to Nazis or the Soviet Union with impunity, no such politician, and certainly no serving government minister, would dare say the same of Trump’s America.
Of course, there is nothing new in the disparity between US and UK power, and there have been previous occasions, most obviously the Suez crisis, where that has been humiliatingly revealed. The US has the power to coerce us and to hurt us. The difference under Trump is that he would be quite willing to do so on the flimsiest of pretexts, in the most brutal of ways, and would enjoy it. What was once a power imbalance within a broadly reliable alliance has now become a power play within something more like a mediaeval court in which Britain is a minor, ageing aristocrat. And there’s not much we can do about it. It is no good reaching for the historical analogy of 1930s appeasement here. When Imperial Britain faced the threat of Nazi Germany, it did not face an adversary with which the bulk of its military and intelligence capacity was intertwined, or one which dwarfed it in resources.
Similarly, the answer to the question posed by George Monbiot in the Guardian last week – what if Britain had to defend itself militarily against the US? – is depressingly obvious: we couldn’t. However, we aren’t in this situation, but in a different and perhaps more complex one [2]. Crazy as this US administration is, it is not bent on going to war with the UK or Europe. The military threat comes from Russia, and from the withdrawal of reliable US security guarantees to deter that threat. Here the appeasement analogy does apply, in that if, with US complicity, Ukraine is dismembered and subjugated, Russia will be emboldened to go after other European countries, both directly and indirectly, including the UK. (Indeed, the Brexit sovereigntists seem remarkably sanguine about Russia’s many incursions into UK territory as if it were metric measurements, rather than these acts of territorial aggression, which were the most real and pressing threats to British sovereignty.)
Minor powers
Equally, for all the real constraints on what the UK can say or do to the US, it is not completely powerless and, as a matter of fact, Starmer is being far from supine. There are several illustrations of that, including the way the UK voted at the UN. Related to that, Starmer has been insistent, despite Trump’s brazen lies to the contrary, that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine. Another example is the way that, during his Washington visit, he pushed back against Vance’s barbed comment about lack of freedom of speech in the UK (this is one of the many alt-right canards about both Starmer and Britain, heavily promulgated by Elon Musk). Then, at this week’s PMQs, he unfussily but pointedly issued an implicit reprimand to Vance for his own implicit dismissiveness of the British military.
Most prominent of all, the warmth with which Starmer welcomed Zelensky to the UK just a few hours after the Ukrainian leader’s appalling treatment in America, and the immediate arrangement of a meeting with King Charles, were clear rebukes to Trump, even if not vocalized as such. Moreover, no one could miss the contrast of the genuine regard between Starmer and Zelensky with the precarious brittleness of the Starmer-Trump meeting. These things are probably as far as the UK can do without attracting Trump’s ire; it may even be that they go beyond it.
Starmer and the UK also have some cards to play with the US which, though they shouldn’t be over-stated, are not entirely negligible. For all that it is very much the junior partner, the UK does contribute some things the US needs, with sigint capacity being one. And whilst Trump is undoubtedly too self-involved and too ignorant to do so, there are still some US Republicans who recall with gratitude the UK’s support after 9/11 and even, for those with longer memories, the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. (I make no comment on those things in themselves, just the point that they still carry some meaning for some in the US.) Even the ghost of Churchill still has some residual currency, as the (re-) placement of his bust in the Oval Office attests.
In that respect, it is perhaps telling that Vance felt obliged to deny that he had been referring to the UK (or France) in those scornful comments about the militaries of ‘random countries’. He can hardly have done so because he had been misunderstood, since no other countries have yet proposed to deploy troops to Ukraine. And there is nothing in his character to suggest he did so out of personal graciousness, still less from any sense of shame. So the implication is that there is still some vestigial realization in the White House that it cannot be totally disrespectful to its notional allies, at least in public.
The way ahead
Be all that as it may, what is certainly the case is that over time, without publicly admitting there is a choice being made, the UK is going to increase its contributions to, and deepen its relations with, a massively re-vamped EU and European defence capacity and, in the process, reduce its dependence on the US. Indeed, Trump can hardly object to that, since it is what he has asked for and, in doing so, differs from previous US administrations only in the brutality and crudity of his demands.
It is now becoming clear to many commentators that, as I wrote exactly a month ago:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel.”
It is far too early to know where this will lead, but last weekend’s convenorship of a meeting involving the EU, most of its members states, Turkey, Canada, and Ukraine was a clear example that Starmer is trying to grasp this opportunity. And already he and Britain are attracting appreciative comments from other European leaders, something that hasn’t happened for long enough.
But none of this is going to be easy, and it certainly isn’t going to be pretty. Those who are squeamish about realpolitik and who like their politics to be morally-elevated had better look away for the next few years. That doesn’t just apply to the UK, but here it will include the fact that, like it or not, Starmer is going to make use of not being in the EU in various ways. That will include using the symbolism of that as a way of getting heard in a White House that loathes the EU, something which has already enabled Farage to claim, predictably but misleadingly, that we are seeing some kind of benefit of Brexit [3]. It may include some kind of substantive agreement to avoid new tariffs and, perhaps, to develop an AI regime in conjunction with the US, rather than with the EU. Personally, I’m not convinced these things will happen, but they will certainly continue to be talked about.
The trick for the UK will be to combine this not just with getting closer to the EU on defence, but with effecting the most maximalist version of the 'reset' (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, fully implementing the existing agreements with the EU, including the Windsor Framework, as well as completing the still unresolved, and apparently stalled, negotiations over Gibraltar). This in turn means the careful curation of relationships with other countries, within and beyond Europe, to defuse any sense that the UK is selling them out by making some agreements with the US. As such it will call for extremely astute diplomacy, but it is not an impossible task, since other national leaders understand perfectly well the difficulties of navigating relations with Trump.
Moreover, none of this is going to be cheap. The recent announcement of increased defence spending is only the beginning of what needs to come and the fraught political choices this will entail have yet to be faced up to.
Back to Brexit
In these ways, our country is going to have to simultaneously placate a dangerously unpredictable US whilst acting on the consequences of it now being undeniable that Europe is where the UK belongs. The great fantasy of Brexit, and its central strategic folly, of thinking otherwise has now been exposed, far more dramatically and suddenly than by Brexit itself. That is now becoming accepted, at least according to the commentator Janan Ganesh, even by British Conservatives. Indeed, for at least some of them, the new situation creates a welcome way out of the cul-de-sac which Brexit has taken them, not least as regards electoral strategy.
As the veteran international politics sage Philip Stephens puts it, “Trump’s America has made its choice”. In doing so, it has imposed one on the UK which, though ragged, in that it can’t be made through a single decision at a single moment, could through a series of decisions gradually re-integrate us with the EU. For within this new global divide, it is crystal clear that Brexit is an anomaly, a policy which belongs on one side of that divide yet is being pursued by a country located on the other side. At the very least, the Brexiters’ claim, which was always flawed, that the EU is irrelevant to the UK’s security needs and that these were fully catered for by NATO, has now been exposed as disastrously false.
This doesn’t, in itself, mean that rejoining the EU is on the political agenda, but it does make the timescale for that being a realistic possibility shorter than seemed likely even a fortnight ago. It already cements the pre-existing public sense that Brexit was a terrible error. So, frightening and disorientating as the last few weeks have been, I think there are at least some grounds for hope. Trump feels like a disaster, and in general terms that feeling is well-founded. But for post-Brexit Britain he might just be a reprieve.
Notes
[1] This could turn out to be one of the most important, and most positive, domestic consequences of the new global situation, sidelining Farage for the first time for decades. Subscribers to Byline Times can read some of my initial thoughts about this in the next issue (April 2025), and I am sure I will write much more about it, here, in the future.
[2] Thus those who, in comments on one of my recent posts, thought I was anticipating, or even advocating, the UK ‘standing up to’ the US militarily entirely misunderstood me. It may well be true, though, that there are inconsistencies in the content and tone of my recent posts but, if so, I think that is understandable – even inevitable - given the rapidity with which events are unfolding.
[3] It is misleading because although it is possible that the UK being out of the EU helps to get a hearing from Trump a) it is wrong to claim that this is because the UK now has an independent foreign policy, because it always did; b) any gain from that is offset by the very much reduced influence the UK has within the EU; c) it is only because Trump is so bent out of shape about the EU rather than being because Brexit has, in general terms, given the UK any benefits in its relationship with the US; and d) precisely because Trump is Trump it doesn’t count for much anyway. He’s perfectly likely, if he takes umbrage at something, to turn on the UK, Brexit or no Brexit. Hence the need to tip-toe around his freakshow vanities.
Friday, 21 February 2025
How can Brexit Britain navigate Trump’s World?
I apologise for the fact that this is going to be a very long post. But events since the previous one have served not just to illustrate the analysis there of a new global divide, but to show this divide to be deepening very rapidly. As numerous detailed commentaries have explained, the Munich security conference and its aftermath have “laid bare the collapse of the transatlantic alliance”, showing that “the American security shield has gone forever” with the result that “it has been without question the darkest week for Europe since the 1940s”. Phillips P. O’Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at St Andrew’s University, wrote last weekend that “this is arguably the most important week in European history since 1991 or even 1945”. Unlike those dates, what is happening in 2025 carries little in the way of hope, and, with Trump’s announcements and actions becoming more unhinged by the day, any hope there may be is fading very, very fast.
The analysts I’ve just quoted are not excitable catastrophists, but seasoned, respected experts in politics and international relations. I would like to think I share at least some of those qualities, to at least some degree, and, personally, having for nine years been dismayed by what Brexit has done to Britain, I now actually feel frightened by what may happen here. An obvious response to that would be that there are many places, most especially Ukraine, which have far more to fear. That is most certainly true (and it is also true of the US itself where state-induced political intimidation and fear are flourishing, to the horror of decent Americans). Equally, it may be objected that what is happening has little to do with Brexit. However, that is not true.
What’s it got to do with Brexit?
As all those analysts, and many others, make plain, these ongoing developments are not just about ripping up security alliances and global norms, and not just about the empowerment of nationalist ‘strong men’ to carve up the world according to their whims, crucially important as those things are. Rather, as well as what they mean for relations between states, the pronouncements coming from Washington, most recently in Vice-President J.D. Vance’s Munich speech, are proselytizing for far-right and ‘alt-right’ populism within states. Hence Vance’s praise for Brexit and his comments about the German and Romanian elections, which of course come on the heels of Elon Musk’s repeated interventions in British (£) and German politics.
The two aspects are linked. The Trump regime’s loathing for ‘Europe’ is multi-dimensional, seeing it as a parasite in security terms and the ideological homeland of elitism, woke liberalism, and globalism. The EU, specifically, is despised, and resented, as an economic and regulatory power and, perhaps more diffusely, as an exercise in rules-based international cooperation and pooled sovereignty. Indeed, hatred of Europe and of the EU is one of many strands binding together Trump, Putin and the Brexiters.
Since the UK is geographically, historically, economically and, in many respects, ideologically a European country, this necessarily poses profound questions for this country. But Brexit greatly complicates those questions, not simply because it means the UK is detached from the EU, but because Trumpist approval of that makes it quite likely that the US will attempt to exacerbate that detachment at precisely the moment when its folly is most obvious. That might take the form of offering the UK exemptions from new tariffs (about which much is still unclear) or other, including non-material, favours. Far from the present moment being one where, as Keir Starmer seems to think, the UK can once again be a ‘transatlantic bridge’, the reality is that it has the potential to rupture the country, ripping it further from its ideological and geographical allies in Europe but with no prospect of being anything other than the plaything of Trump’s increasingly vicious and unpredictable whims.
However, it is not just a matter of Trump seeking to meddle in Britain’s international relations and internal politics. Nor is it just that, in doing so, he will be joining Putin’s own longstanding attempts to do the same. If it were only that it would be obnoxious and dangerous. What makes it, also, frightening, is that both Trump and Putin have so many willing and powerful accomplices within the British polity*. That means, most obviously, Nigel Farage, the now dominant alt-right and NatCon elements of the Tory Party, the weird ex-RCP coterie and the Tufton Street mafia – both groupings which enjoy disproportionate media influence – and, it is increasingly clear, the ‘Blue Labour’ movement. And they would be neither so numerous nor so powerful had it not been for Brexit.
It was an apposite coincidence that, on the very same day that Starmer went to Paris to meet other European leaders this week to discuss Trump’s Ukraine démarche, the ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC) met for a major conference in London. This was a gathering of the assorted world-wide clans of populism and neo-fascism, with British representatives including Kemi Badenoch, Farage, and the ARC Advisory Board member Maurice Glasman of Blue Labour. For want of a better name, the UK contingent can be called ‘Brexitists’ since their bedrock belief is support for Brexit, denial of its failure, and commitment to some or all of its flawed logics.
There are many things at stake in all these unfolding developments, but for the UK, specifically, their immediate manifestation is the question of this country’s relationships with the EU and the US. The Brexitists are quite clear that this is the latest front in their battle, exemplified by Daniel Hannan (who else?) declaring (£) that “we can’t let Labour drag us back into the shrinking orbit of the anti-Trump Eurosphere”. He was right to identify Vance’s Munich speech as making it undeniable that there is a very fundamental choice to be made but, as usual, entirely wrong about what the response should be.
A new proposal for UK-EU relations
Nevertheless, a response will have to be found, and one proposal was made in a report commissioned by Best for Britain (BfB), which was published at the beginning of last week, and which received a lot of media attention (£). It is a timely, important, and serious piece of work, and warrants serious attention, as a constructive proposal to move beyond the current Brexit impasse and to engage with some of the emerging realities of Trump’s new world order.
The report models the economic effects of ‘strong regulatory alignment’ between the UK and EU as regards goods, and also as regards both goods and services, and then models each of these in the scenario of Trump imposing trade tariffs on all goods imported by the US (at an assumed rate of 20% for those from the UK and the EU). Importantly, pursuing strong regulatory alignment in the meaning of the report would not require the Labour government breaching its ‘red lines’ of not rejoining the EU, the single market, or the customs union, and of not agreeing freedom of movement of people. In that sense, it is intended to be a politically viable proposal from a UK perspective.
The ‘headline’ results are quite striking. With strong regulatory alignment in both goods and services, and if there were no Trump-tariffs, UK GDP could be up to 2.2% higher per annum in the long-run than it would otherwise have been, and, even in the event of Trump-tariffs, up to 1.5% higher. This would make a substantial dent in the standard (OBR) estimate of Brexit making UK GDP 4% lower than it otherwise would have been in the long run, and considerably more effective than the more basic ‘reset’, consisting simply of those things the UK and EU have specified they will seek, which John Springford of CER recently estimated to be worth 0.3% to 0.7% of UK GDP. Moreover, both for many individual EU member states and for the EU as a whole the result would be positive or, in the event of Trump-tariffs, would make their impact less negative than it would otherwise have been. So agreeing deep regulatory alignment is presented as a ‘win-win’ for the UK and the EU.
The core concept of the report is that of ‘strong regulatory alignment’:
“Regulatory alignment in goods in this scenario is based on the principle of mutual recognition by the UK and the EU of each other’s regulations. We envision an expansive approach to mutual recognition, in which the UK and the EU take active steps to minimise regulatory divergence and commit to recognising the equivalence of each other’s regulations.” (p.12, followed by a similar definition for services).
This will be very familiar to readers of this blog, and to Brexit-watchers generally, and perhaps will be ringing some alarm bells, because ‘mutual recognition’ has for years been seen by many Brexiters as the silver bullet to reduce the economic costs of Brexit. BfB, of course, are very far from being Brexiters, but whoever proposes it, it has the same problems. I’ve written about these numerous times before, most recently on the last occasion the idea surfaced.
What is ‘Mutual Recognition’?
This is a very complex issue to unpack in full. In broad terms, mutual recognition (MR) means that goods and services which meet the regulations within one market are deemed to meet those which obtain in another, and vice versa. Within that, one crucial distinction is between MR based on ‘equivalence’ and that based on ‘dynamic alignment’ (and/or other forms, such as MR of conformity assessment testing, which I won’t discuss here, though could also become relevant).
Under ‘equivalence’ agreements, the EU and the UK would recognize that, whilst different in some details, their regulations were broadly compatible, and each party would take responsibility of legally enforcing their own regulations. Under ‘dynamic alignment’ (DA) agreements, one party – and in practice it would almost always be the UK – agrees to completely track EU regulations, and as a result the UK’s regulations would be ‘recognized’ by the EU. This is really only ‘mutual recognition’ by courtesy, as the alignment is all one way, even though the ‘recognition’ goes in both directions, and both the source and the enforcement of regulations would ultimately lie with EU law and EU courts.
So, much depends on what form of MR is envisaged, and in that respect the use of the term ‘equivalence’ in the BfB report is either an unfortunate mistake or a problem. We already know that the EU is very reluctant to enter into equivalence agreements with the UK. They aren’t impossible (there are some in relation to aspects of financial services and, in effect, in the EU recognition of the ‘adequacy’ of the UK data protection regime), but as regards Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulations an ‘equivalence’ agreement (sometimes called a ‘New Zealand-style’ agreement) has already been proposed by the UK and rejected by the EU. By contrast, a ‘dynamic alignment’ (or ‘Swiss-style’) SPS agreement has been offered by the EU but rejected by the UK.
It isn’t just on SPS regulations that we’ve already been round this loop. MR based on equivalence in a number of areas featured heavily in the UK government’s February 2020 document on its approach to the negotiations undertaken by David Frost, under Boris Johnson, which ultimately led to the TCA. Almost all those proposals foundered, as they were bound to. In large part that was because what makes equivalence appealing to Brexiters (most especially lack of ECJ jurisdiction) is what makes it unacceptable to the EU. As Michel Barnier put it in 2018: “In the absence of a common discipline, in the absence of EU law that can override national law, in the absence of common supervision and a common court, there can be no mutual recognition of standards.”
What about expansive use of Dynamic Alignment?
However, although regulatory equivalence as the basis of expansive MR is a non-starter, what about ‘dynamic alignment’ (DA)? Since the EU does appear to be willing to use that form of MR for SPS regulation, could it perhaps be used expansively? It’s true that this would overcome the problem that lack of ECJ involvement poses for the EU. It also seems to be true that the presence of ECJ involvement is no longer a red line for the UK under the Labour government. Nevertheless, other issues would still remain.
In particular, even under DA each side has to monitor (and/or trust the other side to monitor) that both sets of regulations are aligned. This is a much more complex matter when DA is being used over a wide range of sectors, as envisaged by the report, partly because there is so much more to monitor and partly because there will often be difficulties in knowing where MR applies and where it doesn’t. This arises because crucially, even under the most ‘expansive’ use of DA, but unlike within the single market, the UK would retain the right to diverge in areas not covered by DA.
To take one increasingly important example, assume, as seems extremely likely at the moment, that the UK retains (and perhaps even exercises) the right to diverge in AI regulation. Given the extent to which AI looks set to be imbricated, in some way or another, within so many different business sectors across both goods and services, imagine how difficult it is going to be to determine whether, in relation to any particular product or sector, DA does, or does not, apply. I don’t say that it would be impossible, and certainly the AI example, specifically, is largely uncharted water, but it would involve huge technical complexity, at least if attempted not for one or two areas but at scale.
Indeed the problem isn’t DA agreements as such, it is scaling them up so as to meet the ‘expansive’ MR regime required to yield the headline economic benefits of the BfB report. Ultimately, that isn’t just about technical complexity, it is because the expansive use of DA is effectively an attempt to reproduce selective aspects of the single market but outside of the ‘ecosystem’ of single market agencies and institutions. As such, the more it is used, the more of a threat it would represent to the integrity of the EU single market meaning, at its most generic, the way in which membership confers distinctive advantages over non-membership. That notion, which some Brexiters tend to treat as meaningless or, alternatively, as some kind of EU ‘theological’ dogma, is actually of fundamental importance (hence, amongst other things, many of the issues that have arisen for Northern Ireland).
So (why) would the EU agree to it?
To that, there are several answers. One is that, unlike proposals for equivalence agreements, MR hasn’t been proposed before on a DA basis. Actually, that isn’t quite true, as arguably it was proposed, at least for goods trade, under Theresa May’s 2018 Chequers Proposal for a ‘common rule book’, but as that caused her government to implode it never really got to the point of being negotiated in detail with the EU in the form of a TCA, and would undoubtedly have encountered much resistance from the EU (I’m skipping over a lot of detail on this point). Still, something like it might eventually have been agreed and, anyway, we are now in different times, not least because EU concerns that Brexit might lead to a bigger exodus of members have now largely disappeared. Even so, the EU continues to face the possibility that an expansive DA deal with the UK might set a precedent, with member states seeking to ‘mix and match’ areas for alignment/ divergence.
The more important answer is that we are in different times because the economic situation of the EU, and especially of its largest members, Germany and France, is now much worse than it was in 2018, and the most important answer of all is Donald Trump. Those two things are related, because the state of many EU economies makes the threat of Trump-tariffs all the more dangerous. It is this, clearly, which the BfB report highlights, showing how a strong alignment scenario between the UK and the EU could offset some of the damage of Trump-tariffs, and it is on this basis that it is presented as a win-win proposal.
That may well be true, but, although the context is different, it is still a rather familiar idea, and another one which we used to hear from Brexiters. Their claim from the outset was always that there would be a very expansive post-Brexit deal, even to the extent of offering “the exact same benefits” as membership, because that would be in the interests of both sides, and they repeatedly complained that the EU was allowing ‘politics’ to get in the way of economic interests. In particular, they repeatedly argued that ‘German car makers’ (as an emblem for other EU industries) would ensure such a deal and, when that proved false, again framed that as an EU failure to represent the economic interests of its members and instead to prioritise Brussels ‘dogma’.
But (apart from their other flaws) these claims were mistaken by not recognizing that, whatever the immediate economic interests of some businesses, or even some countries, the long-term economic interests of all EU members and businesses were absolutely dependent upon retaining the integrity of the single market, and the expansive use of MR, even in its DA form, necessarily risks that, extensively recreating selective aspects of the single market for non-members. Now perhaps it is true that the possible impact of Trump’s tariffs will change the balance of calculations of the risks and benefits of this. But personally, I feel suspicious of yet again going down the track of making proposals based upon assumptions about what the EU will, or ‘ought to’ recognize as being in its own interests.
Having said all this, it could still be argued that Trump’s return, in a dramatically more aggressive and virulent posture than before, has changed everything, not so much, or not simply, because of the economic threat of tariffs but because of having started to rip up the international security order, and all the issues with which I began this post. Is this true? To be honest, I simply don’t know. In some ways, the opposite could be argued. To the extent that the single market is the economic basis of such geo-political clout as the EU has, that might suggest there is all the more reason to maintain its integrity.
Nevertheless, I do think that, despite what some ‘die-hard remainers' think, the understandable unwillingness of the EU to make economic concessions to the UK in return for security and defence cooperation, a proposition which was first made by May when Article 50 was triggered in 2017, and looked like blackmail then, may have changed. Almost everyone now thinks that Europe, as a continent, needs to get itself together as a serious defence player, and that is not going to be easy. It will entail the EU and its members doing many things they find distasteful, and this could be one of them. It might also be that previous, and again understandable, reluctance to entertain a complex and tangled MR-based relationship between the EU and the UK might be reduced. In a world which has suddenly become extremely disordered that might now seem a relative trivial piece of messiness. It would certainly be lazy simply to dismiss that possibility out of hand as ‘cakeism’, or to dismiss the very real differences created by Trump’s return. This isn’t 2016-2020.
The real choice
For all these reasons, there may well be a good argument for the UK to explore the BfB report’s ‘strong alignment’ model and propose it to the EU, at least informally, and see what the reaction is. But I keep coming back to the problem that it is very difficult to see how the EU can embark on a major deepening of relations without a high degree of confidence that the UK is going to be a reliable partner, and there is no real prospect of that whilst Brexitism remains so influential. After all, it’s perfectly realistic to think we may be only three years away from having a nationalist and populist government with a doctrinal hatred of the EU.
For Brussels, that would mean dealing with a UK government which has scant regard for acting in a trustworthy manner about any MR agreements which may be in force and would very likely revoke them anyway. The answer to that concern cannot, realistically, be that, if it happens, the EU can just revert back to the current TCA terms after having put in all the effort of creating an expansive MR regime involving a complex patchwork of agreements.
Some deny any such risk exists, arguing that UK business lobbies would prevent any future government from revoking agreements made by Labour. But this is really just the ‘German car makers’ argument in reverse, and the history of Brexit hardly suggests that business is very effective in controlling a government – in this scenario perhaps a Reform-Tory coalition – animated by ideological loathing of the EU and populist conceptions of ‘sovereignty’. So the risk is real, and it would be a very considerable one for the EU to take.
Moreover, although this wouldn’t in itself remove that risk, it can hardly be encouraging to the EU that the Labour government has not, as yet, made an explicit commitment even to seeking a DA deal on SPS, let alone to any more ‘expansive’ use of DA. As long ago as May 2023 I wrote a post with a footnote pointing out that whenever Labour politicians talked about an SPS deal they invariably invoked New Zealand (i.e. equivalence, not DA) as a model, and that has continued to be the case, so even in this headline area for the reset, the government still remains ambiguous about specifics.
For what it is worth, I think the government will seek DA on SPS, and will agree it with the EU, but it certainly hasn’t been open or enthusiastic about what doing so means, apparently because it fears the Brexiters’ reaction, hence again demonstrating the unsettled nature of the UK polity. So if the BfB report encourages the government to boldly advocate the use of DA, and to take on and defeat its Brexiter critics, then it will have done a good job.
On the other hand, if Brexitism were to be marginalised in the UK, overcoming this problem, then there would be no need to fiddle around with endlessly complex and sub-optimal MR agreements and security pacts as we could move, as quickly as possible, to joining the EU, boosting the continent’s economy, and developing a proper, fully-integrated, European defence and security capacity. So, for all the talk of the UK facing a choice between the US and the EU, the deeper choice that codes is the domestic one of what kind of country we are. That seems no closer to resolution now than it has been since, in 2016, we embarked on the poorly-designed, divisive and poisonous Brexit experiment, an experiment which has now become the most horrific of political lab accidents.
Note
*On the other hand, the British, Brexitist, variant of this global right-wing movement faces particular challenges. The British public has generally negative views about Putin and Trump, and a generally positive view of Zelensky (and support for Ukraine). Even Reform voters are strongly anti-Putin. As has been shown before Farage’s views of Ukraine and Putin are his most vulnerable political spot, and this is now becoming very clear.
The analysts I’ve just quoted are not excitable catastrophists, but seasoned, respected experts in politics and international relations. I would like to think I share at least some of those qualities, to at least some degree, and, personally, having for nine years been dismayed by what Brexit has done to Britain, I now actually feel frightened by what may happen here. An obvious response to that would be that there are many places, most especially Ukraine, which have far more to fear. That is most certainly true (and it is also true of the US itself where state-induced political intimidation and fear are flourishing, to the horror of decent Americans). Equally, it may be objected that what is happening has little to do with Brexit. However, that is not true.
What’s it got to do with Brexit?
As all those analysts, and many others, make plain, these ongoing developments are not just about ripping up security alliances and global norms, and not just about the empowerment of nationalist ‘strong men’ to carve up the world according to their whims, crucially important as those things are. Rather, as well as what they mean for relations between states, the pronouncements coming from Washington, most recently in Vice-President J.D. Vance’s Munich speech, are proselytizing for far-right and ‘alt-right’ populism within states. Hence Vance’s praise for Brexit and his comments about the German and Romanian elections, which of course come on the heels of Elon Musk’s repeated interventions in British (£) and German politics.
The two aspects are linked. The Trump regime’s loathing for ‘Europe’ is multi-dimensional, seeing it as a parasite in security terms and the ideological homeland of elitism, woke liberalism, and globalism. The EU, specifically, is despised, and resented, as an economic and regulatory power and, perhaps more diffusely, as an exercise in rules-based international cooperation and pooled sovereignty. Indeed, hatred of Europe and of the EU is one of many strands binding together Trump, Putin and the Brexiters.
Since the UK is geographically, historically, economically and, in many respects, ideologically a European country, this necessarily poses profound questions for this country. But Brexit greatly complicates those questions, not simply because it means the UK is detached from the EU, but because Trumpist approval of that makes it quite likely that the US will attempt to exacerbate that detachment at precisely the moment when its folly is most obvious. That might take the form of offering the UK exemptions from new tariffs (about which much is still unclear) or other, including non-material, favours. Far from the present moment being one where, as Keir Starmer seems to think, the UK can once again be a ‘transatlantic bridge’, the reality is that it has the potential to rupture the country, ripping it further from its ideological and geographical allies in Europe but with no prospect of being anything other than the plaything of Trump’s increasingly vicious and unpredictable whims.
However, it is not just a matter of Trump seeking to meddle in Britain’s international relations and internal politics. Nor is it just that, in doing so, he will be joining Putin’s own longstanding attempts to do the same. If it were only that it would be obnoxious and dangerous. What makes it, also, frightening, is that both Trump and Putin have so many willing and powerful accomplices within the British polity*. That means, most obviously, Nigel Farage, the now dominant alt-right and NatCon elements of the Tory Party, the weird ex-RCP coterie and the Tufton Street mafia – both groupings which enjoy disproportionate media influence – and, it is increasingly clear, the ‘Blue Labour’ movement. And they would be neither so numerous nor so powerful had it not been for Brexit.
It was an apposite coincidence that, on the very same day that Starmer went to Paris to meet other European leaders this week to discuss Trump’s Ukraine démarche, the ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC) met for a major conference in London. This was a gathering of the assorted world-wide clans of populism and neo-fascism, with British representatives including Kemi Badenoch, Farage, and the ARC Advisory Board member Maurice Glasman of Blue Labour. For want of a better name, the UK contingent can be called ‘Brexitists’ since their bedrock belief is support for Brexit, denial of its failure, and commitment to some or all of its flawed logics.
There are many things at stake in all these unfolding developments, but for the UK, specifically, their immediate manifestation is the question of this country’s relationships with the EU and the US. The Brexitists are quite clear that this is the latest front in their battle, exemplified by Daniel Hannan (who else?) declaring (£) that “we can’t let Labour drag us back into the shrinking orbit of the anti-Trump Eurosphere”. He was right to identify Vance’s Munich speech as making it undeniable that there is a very fundamental choice to be made but, as usual, entirely wrong about what the response should be.
A new proposal for UK-EU relations
Nevertheless, a response will have to be found, and one proposal was made in a report commissioned by Best for Britain (BfB), which was published at the beginning of last week, and which received a lot of media attention (£). It is a timely, important, and serious piece of work, and warrants serious attention, as a constructive proposal to move beyond the current Brexit impasse and to engage with some of the emerging realities of Trump’s new world order.
The report models the economic effects of ‘strong regulatory alignment’ between the UK and EU as regards goods, and also as regards both goods and services, and then models each of these in the scenario of Trump imposing trade tariffs on all goods imported by the US (at an assumed rate of 20% for those from the UK and the EU). Importantly, pursuing strong regulatory alignment in the meaning of the report would not require the Labour government breaching its ‘red lines’ of not rejoining the EU, the single market, or the customs union, and of not agreeing freedom of movement of people. In that sense, it is intended to be a politically viable proposal from a UK perspective.
The ‘headline’ results are quite striking. With strong regulatory alignment in both goods and services, and if there were no Trump-tariffs, UK GDP could be up to 2.2% higher per annum in the long-run than it would otherwise have been, and, even in the event of Trump-tariffs, up to 1.5% higher. This would make a substantial dent in the standard (OBR) estimate of Brexit making UK GDP 4% lower than it otherwise would have been in the long run, and considerably more effective than the more basic ‘reset’, consisting simply of those things the UK and EU have specified they will seek, which John Springford of CER recently estimated to be worth 0.3% to 0.7% of UK GDP. Moreover, both for many individual EU member states and for the EU as a whole the result would be positive or, in the event of Trump-tariffs, would make their impact less negative than it would otherwise have been. So agreeing deep regulatory alignment is presented as a ‘win-win’ for the UK and the EU.
The core concept of the report is that of ‘strong regulatory alignment’:
“Regulatory alignment in goods in this scenario is based on the principle of mutual recognition by the UK and the EU of each other’s regulations. We envision an expansive approach to mutual recognition, in which the UK and the EU take active steps to minimise regulatory divergence and commit to recognising the equivalence of each other’s regulations.” (p.12, followed by a similar definition for services).
This will be very familiar to readers of this blog, and to Brexit-watchers generally, and perhaps will be ringing some alarm bells, because ‘mutual recognition’ has for years been seen by many Brexiters as the silver bullet to reduce the economic costs of Brexit. BfB, of course, are very far from being Brexiters, but whoever proposes it, it has the same problems. I’ve written about these numerous times before, most recently on the last occasion the idea surfaced.
What is ‘Mutual Recognition’?
This is a very complex issue to unpack in full. In broad terms, mutual recognition (MR) means that goods and services which meet the regulations within one market are deemed to meet those which obtain in another, and vice versa. Within that, one crucial distinction is between MR based on ‘equivalence’ and that based on ‘dynamic alignment’ (and/or other forms, such as MR of conformity assessment testing, which I won’t discuss here, though could also become relevant).
Under ‘equivalence’ agreements, the EU and the UK would recognize that, whilst different in some details, their regulations were broadly compatible, and each party would take responsibility of legally enforcing their own regulations. Under ‘dynamic alignment’ (DA) agreements, one party – and in practice it would almost always be the UK – agrees to completely track EU regulations, and as a result the UK’s regulations would be ‘recognized’ by the EU. This is really only ‘mutual recognition’ by courtesy, as the alignment is all one way, even though the ‘recognition’ goes in both directions, and both the source and the enforcement of regulations would ultimately lie with EU law and EU courts.
So, much depends on what form of MR is envisaged, and in that respect the use of the term ‘equivalence’ in the BfB report is either an unfortunate mistake or a problem. We already know that the EU is very reluctant to enter into equivalence agreements with the UK. They aren’t impossible (there are some in relation to aspects of financial services and, in effect, in the EU recognition of the ‘adequacy’ of the UK data protection regime), but as regards Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulations an ‘equivalence’ agreement (sometimes called a ‘New Zealand-style’ agreement) has already been proposed by the UK and rejected by the EU. By contrast, a ‘dynamic alignment’ (or ‘Swiss-style’) SPS agreement has been offered by the EU but rejected by the UK.
It isn’t just on SPS regulations that we’ve already been round this loop. MR based on equivalence in a number of areas featured heavily in the UK government’s February 2020 document on its approach to the negotiations undertaken by David Frost, under Boris Johnson, which ultimately led to the TCA. Almost all those proposals foundered, as they were bound to. In large part that was because what makes equivalence appealing to Brexiters (most especially lack of ECJ jurisdiction) is what makes it unacceptable to the EU. As Michel Barnier put it in 2018: “In the absence of a common discipline, in the absence of EU law that can override national law, in the absence of common supervision and a common court, there can be no mutual recognition of standards.”
What about expansive use of Dynamic Alignment?
However, although regulatory equivalence as the basis of expansive MR is a non-starter, what about ‘dynamic alignment’ (DA)? Since the EU does appear to be willing to use that form of MR for SPS regulation, could it perhaps be used expansively? It’s true that this would overcome the problem that lack of ECJ involvement poses for the EU. It also seems to be true that the presence of ECJ involvement is no longer a red line for the UK under the Labour government. Nevertheless, other issues would still remain.
In particular, even under DA each side has to monitor (and/or trust the other side to monitor) that both sets of regulations are aligned. This is a much more complex matter when DA is being used over a wide range of sectors, as envisaged by the report, partly because there is so much more to monitor and partly because there will often be difficulties in knowing where MR applies and where it doesn’t. This arises because crucially, even under the most ‘expansive’ use of DA, but unlike within the single market, the UK would retain the right to diverge in areas not covered by DA.
To take one increasingly important example, assume, as seems extremely likely at the moment, that the UK retains (and perhaps even exercises) the right to diverge in AI regulation. Given the extent to which AI looks set to be imbricated, in some way or another, within so many different business sectors across both goods and services, imagine how difficult it is going to be to determine whether, in relation to any particular product or sector, DA does, or does not, apply. I don’t say that it would be impossible, and certainly the AI example, specifically, is largely uncharted water, but it would involve huge technical complexity, at least if attempted not for one or two areas but at scale.
Indeed the problem isn’t DA agreements as such, it is scaling them up so as to meet the ‘expansive’ MR regime required to yield the headline economic benefits of the BfB report. Ultimately, that isn’t just about technical complexity, it is because the expansive use of DA is effectively an attempt to reproduce selective aspects of the single market but outside of the ‘ecosystem’ of single market agencies and institutions. As such, the more it is used, the more of a threat it would represent to the integrity of the EU single market meaning, at its most generic, the way in which membership confers distinctive advantages over non-membership. That notion, which some Brexiters tend to treat as meaningless or, alternatively, as some kind of EU ‘theological’ dogma, is actually of fundamental importance (hence, amongst other things, many of the issues that have arisen for Northern Ireland).
So (why) would the EU agree to it?
To that, there are several answers. One is that, unlike proposals for equivalence agreements, MR hasn’t been proposed before on a DA basis. Actually, that isn’t quite true, as arguably it was proposed, at least for goods trade, under Theresa May’s 2018 Chequers Proposal for a ‘common rule book’, but as that caused her government to implode it never really got to the point of being negotiated in detail with the EU in the form of a TCA, and would undoubtedly have encountered much resistance from the EU (I’m skipping over a lot of detail on this point). Still, something like it might eventually have been agreed and, anyway, we are now in different times, not least because EU concerns that Brexit might lead to a bigger exodus of members have now largely disappeared. Even so, the EU continues to face the possibility that an expansive DA deal with the UK might set a precedent, with member states seeking to ‘mix and match’ areas for alignment/ divergence.
The more important answer is that we are in different times because the economic situation of the EU, and especially of its largest members, Germany and France, is now much worse than it was in 2018, and the most important answer of all is Donald Trump. Those two things are related, because the state of many EU economies makes the threat of Trump-tariffs all the more dangerous. It is this, clearly, which the BfB report highlights, showing how a strong alignment scenario between the UK and the EU could offset some of the damage of Trump-tariffs, and it is on this basis that it is presented as a win-win proposal.
That may well be true, but, although the context is different, it is still a rather familiar idea, and another one which we used to hear from Brexiters. Their claim from the outset was always that there would be a very expansive post-Brexit deal, even to the extent of offering “the exact same benefits” as membership, because that would be in the interests of both sides, and they repeatedly complained that the EU was allowing ‘politics’ to get in the way of economic interests. In particular, they repeatedly argued that ‘German car makers’ (as an emblem for other EU industries) would ensure such a deal and, when that proved false, again framed that as an EU failure to represent the economic interests of its members and instead to prioritise Brussels ‘dogma’.
But (apart from their other flaws) these claims were mistaken by not recognizing that, whatever the immediate economic interests of some businesses, or even some countries, the long-term economic interests of all EU members and businesses were absolutely dependent upon retaining the integrity of the single market, and the expansive use of MR, even in its DA form, necessarily risks that, extensively recreating selective aspects of the single market for non-members. Now perhaps it is true that the possible impact of Trump’s tariffs will change the balance of calculations of the risks and benefits of this. But personally, I feel suspicious of yet again going down the track of making proposals based upon assumptions about what the EU will, or ‘ought to’ recognize as being in its own interests.
Having said all this, it could still be argued that Trump’s return, in a dramatically more aggressive and virulent posture than before, has changed everything, not so much, or not simply, because of the economic threat of tariffs but because of having started to rip up the international security order, and all the issues with which I began this post. Is this true? To be honest, I simply don’t know. In some ways, the opposite could be argued. To the extent that the single market is the economic basis of such geo-political clout as the EU has, that might suggest there is all the more reason to maintain its integrity.
Nevertheless, I do think that, despite what some ‘die-hard remainers' think, the understandable unwillingness of the EU to make economic concessions to the UK in return for security and defence cooperation, a proposition which was first made by May when Article 50 was triggered in 2017, and looked like blackmail then, may have changed. Almost everyone now thinks that Europe, as a continent, needs to get itself together as a serious defence player, and that is not going to be easy. It will entail the EU and its members doing many things they find distasteful, and this could be one of them. It might also be that previous, and again understandable, reluctance to entertain a complex and tangled MR-based relationship between the EU and the UK might be reduced. In a world which has suddenly become extremely disordered that might now seem a relative trivial piece of messiness. It would certainly be lazy simply to dismiss that possibility out of hand as ‘cakeism’, or to dismiss the very real differences created by Trump’s return. This isn’t 2016-2020.
The real choice
For all these reasons, there may well be a good argument for the UK to explore the BfB report’s ‘strong alignment’ model and propose it to the EU, at least informally, and see what the reaction is. But I keep coming back to the problem that it is very difficult to see how the EU can embark on a major deepening of relations without a high degree of confidence that the UK is going to be a reliable partner, and there is no real prospect of that whilst Brexitism remains so influential. After all, it’s perfectly realistic to think we may be only three years away from having a nationalist and populist government with a doctrinal hatred of the EU.
For Brussels, that would mean dealing with a UK government which has scant regard for acting in a trustworthy manner about any MR agreements which may be in force and would very likely revoke them anyway. The answer to that concern cannot, realistically, be that, if it happens, the EU can just revert back to the current TCA terms after having put in all the effort of creating an expansive MR regime involving a complex patchwork of agreements.
Some deny any such risk exists, arguing that UK business lobbies would prevent any future government from revoking agreements made by Labour. But this is really just the ‘German car makers’ argument in reverse, and the history of Brexit hardly suggests that business is very effective in controlling a government – in this scenario perhaps a Reform-Tory coalition – animated by ideological loathing of the EU and populist conceptions of ‘sovereignty’. So the risk is real, and it would be a very considerable one for the EU to take.
Moreover, although this wouldn’t in itself remove that risk, it can hardly be encouraging to the EU that the Labour government has not, as yet, made an explicit commitment even to seeking a DA deal on SPS, let alone to any more ‘expansive’ use of DA. As long ago as May 2023 I wrote a post with a footnote pointing out that whenever Labour politicians talked about an SPS deal they invariably invoked New Zealand (i.e. equivalence, not DA) as a model, and that has continued to be the case, so even in this headline area for the reset, the government still remains ambiguous about specifics.
For what it is worth, I think the government will seek DA on SPS, and will agree it with the EU, but it certainly hasn’t been open or enthusiastic about what doing so means, apparently because it fears the Brexiters’ reaction, hence again demonstrating the unsettled nature of the UK polity. So if the BfB report encourages the government to boldly advocate the use of DA, and to take on and defeat its Brexiter critics, then it will have done a good job.
On the other hand, if Brexitism were to be marginalised in the UK, overcoming this problem, then there would be no need to fiddle around with endlessly complex and sub-optimal MR agreements and security pacts as we could move, as quickly as possible, to joining the EU, boosting the continent’s economy, and developing a proper, fully-integrated, European defence and security capacity. So, for all the talk of the UK facing a choice between the US and the EU, the deeper choice that codes is the domestic one of what kind of country we are. That seems no closer to resolution now than it has been since, in 2016, we embarked on the poorly-designed, divisive and poisonous Brexit experiment, an experiment which has now become the most horrific of political lab accidents.
Note
*On the other hand, the British, Brexitist, variant of this global right-wing movement faces particular challenges. The British public has generally negative views about Putin and Trump, and a generally positive view of Zelensky (and support for Ukraine). Even Reform voters are strongly anti-Putin. As has been shown before Farage’s views of Ukraine and Putin are his most vulnerable political spot, and this is now becoming very clear.
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