The month since my previous post has seen some small steps towards a UK-EU ‘reset’ but, far from being a period of relative quiet, the Christmas and New Year holiday has seen no let-up in populist hatred domestically and a dramatic worsening of the international scene.
In that previous post I wrote that the glacial pace of the reset was too slow to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK. With Trump’s attack on Venezuela, that urgency is now even greater. As 2026 starts, the isolation and division which characterises post-Brexit Britain is clearer than ever and, although some criticisms of it are unfair, the government’s weakness and unpopularity make it inadequate to the task of dealing with the scale of the dangers the country faces.
The lessons of Erasmus
As foreshadowed in my last post, it was announced just before Christmas that the UK will participate in the Erasmus+ study scheme from 2027. This represents perhaps the most significant, or at least most high-profile, ‘softening’ of Brexit since the terms of leaving were agreed by Boris Johnson, and the most tangible fruit of the Labour government’s ‘reset’. So it shouldn’t be dismissed as trivial. On the other hand, even leaving aside the wider issues discussed later in this post, it shouldn’t be forgotten that alongside any closening of relations there are, as Politico reported this week, myriad ways in which changing EU regulations are creating ‘passive divergence’. And whilst there are reports of new government measures to facilitate extensive UK ‘alignment’ with single market regulations, the usual questions about what the EU will agree to remain. In many ways, the domestic discussion of Brexit is one of endless repetition.
That repetitiveness was evident in the predictable cries of ‘Brexit betrayal’ which greeted the Erasmus announcement, although admittedly they seemed rather half-hearted and ritualistic. That’s partly because it is now a hopelessly dated concept, which only has traction with a few obsessives: public opinion is now firmly of the view that Brexit was a mistake, and in favour of closer relations with the EU. It’s also because, in the case of Erasmus, it’s obviously nonsense even within the Brexiters’ own terms. In January 2020 Johnson assured the House of Commons that the UK would continue to participate in the scheme, and, indeed, provision was made for that, in principle, in the subsequent Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
Perhaps for that reason, the Brexiters preferred to focus on the price tag, estimated to be £570 million in the first year, and possibly more in future years. As usual, their discussion contained a swirl of nonsense, such as comparing present costs with previous costs without allowing for inflation, ignoring the differences between Erasmus and Erasmus+, ignoring the savings from winding down the inferior post-Brexit Turing scheme, and dismissing the benefits of Erasmus+ membership. None of that is worth taking the time to unpick.
The more salient point is that the cost actually illustrates just how good a deal, just from a narrow budgetary perspective, the UK used to have as an EU member, paying £12.6 billion (net) in 2020. It is simply far less economical to negotiate selective participation in a range of (relatively) minor schemes, such as Erasmus + or the Horizon Europe research programme. We’ll see that again if, as Keir Starmer intimated last weekend is imminent, there are agreements on SPS and ETS/CBAM linkage. But, far from complaining about it, this is just another reason why the Brexiters should hang their heads in shame. So, too, should shame attach to the other attack line they ran against joining Erasmus+ which, with wearying familiarity, was that it means “opening the door to a wave of arrivals from Turkey and North Africa”.
Brexit ironies
Familiar as such xenophobia is, it has recently taken a peculiarly ironic twist. And this twist relates to the point about how Erasmus illustrates the unfolding costs of Brexit, yet is decried by Brexiters not in those terms, but as showing Labour to be economically incompetent. That twist is the flurry of stories bemoaning the ‘great exodus’ of Poles and the ‘great retreat’ of Romanians from the UK, both stories carried by the Mail. In the latter case, although it was subsequently amended, the original headline referred to Romanians as having “propped up the UK economy”. It hardly needs to be pointed out that the relentlessly hostile coverage of immigration from Eastern Europe – especially viciously directed at Romanians – from the Mail and similar papers was a, and perhaps the, key reason for Brexit.
It is not, of course, that the Mail has repented of its ways. These stories are being run not from any regret for Brexit, nor from any new-found recognition of the value of immigration, but with the particular angle that they show that under the Labour government the UK is becoming an economic failure with crumbling public services and spiralling crime, and that those who can escape are doing so. That some of this might, both in general, and in relation to the departure of EU nationals in particular, be due to Brexit is ignored and, instead, is ascribed entirely to the failures of the government since July 2024. In a similar vein, the post-Brexit trade deal with Australia, which the Brexiters once lauded as a great Brexit benefit, is now being positioned by them (£) as an example of Labour ‘betraying’ British farmers. It will be one of the great political ironies if Labour end up being blamed both for the consequences of Brexit and for its betrayal.
The great hate
These stories are in turn part of a ferocious and increasingly unhinged attack upon the Labour government and, more fundamentally, upon the nature of contemporary Britain. It’s not unusual for Labour governments to face hostility from the right-wing media and, goodness knows, this government has done plenty of things which warrant criticism, but I don’t think that it has ever been on this scale before. What is certainly distinctive is the way that it is now taking the form of an almost psychotic frenzy of hatred directed at almost everything about Britain. That has been developing for a while, but has been especially striking over the holiday period, including an outpouring of social media fury about the King’s Speech having been ‘traitorous’ (specifically for referring to diversity as a strength, but his supposed treachery is a recurring far-right claim), and about London’s New Year firework display showing the stars of the EU flag at one stage.
The latter is just one part of what has become a tidal wave of ‘anti-London’ diatribes, depicting Britain’s capital city as a lawless dystopia, which is apparently to be the theme of Reform’s campaign for the Mayoralty. These diatribes, as Robert Shrimsley recently discussed in the Financial Times (£), have as their guiding thread the linkage of this supposed dystopia to London’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and are almost invariably accompanied by viciously racist comments about Mayor Sadiq Khan, comments echoed and amplified by Donald Trump’s obsessive verbal bullying of Khan.
There can certainly be no mistaking the viciousness and racism of the way that not just London but the whole of Britain is being portrayed as in the grip of an explosion of crime. Numerous high-profile media and social media influencers routinely highlight in lurid detail every crime, especially every sexual crime, committed by anyone with a dark skin and a foreign-sounding name, especially a Muslim-sounding name. That they never mention the much larger number of crimes committed by white Britons reveals something worse than hypocrisy. It reveals that they don’t actually care about the crimes, or the victims of crimes, but regard them solely as an opportunity to pursue their vendetta. And from that it is not a huge step to surmise that at least some of them actually welcome such crimes being committed, so as to provide yet another weapon in this campaign of hate and fearmongering. Increasingly, these same people are talking openly about the possibility, and even the need, for civil unrest or even civil war.
Readers may notice that I have neither named nor linked to any of these influencers, and that is because, despite invariably bleating about free speech, and the tyranny of cancel culture, these people would certainly seek to arraign me before the court of social media, and perhaps the court of libel, were it to come to their attention that I had done so. That is just one part of the climate of fear they have already created. We are now truly in the situation – the exact obverse of what they claim to be the case for critics of multi-culturalism – that we all know what is going on but we aren’t allowed to say it.
Of course, it can be objected that these media commentators, and the legions of their followers who share their comments, are only a relatively small, extremist, bubble who have always been with us in one form or another. It’s all too easy to scroll though ‘X’ and get a distorted picture of where public opinion lies. But it’s my impression – that’s all it is, and I can’t prove it – that the scale and the ferocity of it have increased substantially in recent months, and that it is gaining increasing traction with the general public. That need not, and probably does not, mean that all the wild claims and spittle-flecked hatred achieve public endorsement, but it does mean that they seep, slightly diluted, into every-day ‘common sense’.
Starmer’s woes
This is one plausible explanation for a highly revealing opinion poll published just before Christmas which showed a huge gulf between perceptions of whether 2025 had been a good year for respondents, personally, and whether it had been a good year for the country (and their expectations for 2026). For example, 36% thought 2025 had been good for them personally, and 27% thought it had been bad, whereas 6% thought it had been a good year for the country and 66% thought it had been bad. Other polls have shown similar disjunctures in relation to crime, the NHS, the impact of asylum seekers and so on.
My suggestion is that this reflects the malign influence of a commentariat determined to depict a country in crisis (and since the purpose of influencers is, by definition, to have influence, this is not an unreasonable suggestion). And whilst their agenda is transparently one based not just on racism but on hostility to all manifestations of social liberalism, it is unintentionally aided by those on the liberal-left who, angered and disappointed by the inadequacy of the Labour government, have their own reasons to join in. As with the hostility of the right-wing press, that is the fate of all Labour governments, even those considerably less inept than the present one, but the current version is different, for two reasons.
One is, indeed, the sheer ferocity of the onslaught. The extent of the loathing of Labour (£), and especially of Starmer and Reeves, seems totally out of proportion to any offences they may have committed. The other difference is the nature of the end-game. Unlike in the past, this is not all leading to the installation of a Conservative government. It is leading to a Reform, or some kind of Reform-Tory, government of a sort we have never seen before. Its agenda will be one bent on the destruction of established institutions – it tells you something when even the King is depicted as an enemy of the people – and the rule of law, whilst also being dangerously incompetent (as Reform’s record in local government abundantly demonstrates).
There’s no concealment of what is in prospect. Farage’s ‘New Year message’ spelt it out. When a politician starts talking about the government “making sure the young are taught correctly about our history”, you can be certain that authoritarianism is in the offing; when he starts talking about making “the UK the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency” you can be certain that this authoritarianism will be accompanied by economic chaos. There’s plenty more to be alarmed about in Farage’s vision of the future, but for present purposes note that its opening framing is that Britain is “gloomier” than it has ever been, with people “frightened to walk down the street”. It is precisely the picture painted by the far-right influencers on social media, rendered in slightly sanitized form for a public softened-up by their influence to be receptive to Farage’s message.
There is little reason to have any confidence in the Labour government’s ability to blunt this message. That is partly for the widely-discussed reasons of its communicative failures, lack of a coherent policy or ideological agenda, and Starmer’s constipated, uninspiring leadership. But it is also because of the implications of the opinion poll just mentioned. Starmer’s New Year message was one rooted in the standard centre-left position, not unreasonable in itself, that voters want to see concrete change in their lives, and especially improvements in their living standards and public services. Yet, as that opinion poll shows, even if voters’ personal experiences are positive, they can still regard the country as a whole as being in a parlous position.
It is very hard to tackle that political mentality through any policy agenda, in the normal sense of the term. If it can be tackled, it is through a convincing counter-narrative to that of Farage et al. Since his narrative is primarily based on blaming immigration and multi-culturalism for everything, the counter to it must be to provide positive advocacy of those things. And it is probably already too late for Starmer’s Labour to do that since they have so frequently deployed, in both rhetoric and policy, precisely the same narrative as Farage, apparently in the misguided belief that doing so will reduce his support.
I don’t mean by this the stupidity that ‘there’s no difference’ between Starmer and Farage or Labour and Reform, the line being pushed by Green party leader Zack Polanski (and, yes, I do know how many readers of this blog are going to take umbrage at my comment). Anyone who thinks that is in for a nasty shock if we get a Farage-led government. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there is now a sense that public opinion about Starmer has crossed a threshold whereby almost anything he says or does is derided from almost all points of the political spectrum.
The Venezuela crisis
This was evident in reactions to his response to the biggest event since my last post, Trump’s attack on Venezuela. It was a highly diplomatic response, in the literal sense of the term, avoiding open criticism of Trump’s actions but also avoiding endorsement of them. Critics on the right immediately denounced it for that lack of endorsement, which they attributed to “the long love affair the Left has enjoyed with the basket-case communist country” and “his party's veneration of Nicolas Maduro's failed regime”. This was self-evidently ludicrous, since the statement said that the UK “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime”.
Meanwhile, critics on the liberal-left falsely claimed that Starmer had explicitly supported what Trump had done, whereas in fact he has been studiedly silent about that, a silence leading many, including LibDem leader Ed Davey, to demand that he condemn it as illegal. But giddy moral rectitude is an easy indulgence for those who have no responsibility for its consequences. The reality is that open condemnation from Starmer would be both foolhardy and pointless, and the statements from Emmanuel Macron and Friederich Merz, as well as from Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, were similarly cautious for the same reason.
That reason is so obvious it should hardly need stating: the UK and the EU are far too dependent on US defence and intelligence capabilities to risk being subjected to Trump’s thin-skinned vengeful bullying. It is apparently not just Brexiters who need to understand that the UK is no longer a world power. Equally, it is not just Brexiters who need to lose their infatuation with WW2 comparisons: in particular, comparisons with pre-war appeasement of Hitler are entirely bogus because, unlike then, the situation we face is one where a longstanding major ally has gone rogue whilst we are still trapped in very high dependence upon them. This is an astonishingly dangerous situation and navigating it requires a far more serious response than most of Starmer’s critics seem to understand but also, I fear, than he, himself, understands.
Starmer’s options
Were Starmer to denounce Trump it would have zero effect on what the US does. And, precisely because it would have no effect on the US, it would also do nothing to constrain Russia and China. Certainly, any idea that issuing a robust communiqué about Venezuela would inhibit Trump’s increasingly vocal threats to take control of Greenland is utterly ludicrous. But it would be highly likely to prompt US retaliation. And suppose that, for example, that retaliation was to cut the UK out of counter-terrorism intelligence-sharing, and the result was a successful terrorist attack. Who, then, would applaud Starmer’s ‘courage’? Instead, he would be pilloried, including by the very people who now condemn him, for his failure to manage relations with the US, no matter who the President was. Even without such drastic retaliation, the prospects for holding Trump to any kind of support for Ukraine would be even further reduced.
To that extent, Starmer’s conduct this week has been well-judged. But the real point about the Venezuela attack is that it is the latest and starkest reminder, to both the UK and the EU, that they need to reduce and ultimately end reliance upon the US with maximum urgency. And the horrible suspicion is that Starmer, and at least some EU leaders, hold the delusion that they just have to ‘wait it out’ and Trump will disappear and ‘normality’ will return. If so, apart from it being highly questionable that there will be such a return, it ignores that much can happen meanwhile. That includes Trump acting on his latest threats to Colombia and Cuba, though if and when that happens the UK and EU responses are likely to be similar to those which have followed the Venezuela attack, and for the same reason. The hard truth is that it is in the interests of neither the UK nor the EU to die on the hill of an unwinnable war of words about Latin American sovereignty: the crucial line for transatlantic relations is Greenland.
The Trump administration’s words could not be clearer: it is explicit policy that Greenland is to become part of the US. If acted upon, that will be the point at which what remains of the entire post-WW2 international order collapses, more even than any outcome in Ukraine, because Denmark is a member of NATO. There are signs that this is the line which the UK and the EU are gearing up to defend. Starmer’s language this week in defending Greenland’s sovereignty has been far less ambiguous than what he said about Venezuela, and the joint statement he signed with several EU/NATO leaders on Tuesday was even more robust. In this case, unlike protesting about Venezuela, there is a possibility that words could make a difference: it’s just possible that even Trump will baulk at the enormity of what an annexation of Greenland would mean.
However, it is equally, if not more, likely that it will have no effect (the Tuesday statement certainly had no immediate impact on US demands), and that likelihood increases if words are all there are. So, either way, words are emphatically not enough. They must be backed by actions and, as the very fact of there being a joint statement implies, those actions must involve both the UK and the EU. What is needed, not at some vague future date but right now, is the rapid development of intense and close UK-EU cooperation on every facet of defence, security, and intelligence capability. The demand on Starmer should not be for him to make pointless and counter-productive rhetorical gestures about Venezuela, but to pursue this course of action as an overriding national priority.
Surrounded and divided
That, inevitably, brings us back to Brexit, which has made such a course of action far more difficult for both the UK and the EU. The Venezuela attack is the sharpest reminder yet of the geo-political folly of Brexit, which I discussed in detail most recently in my last post of 2025. In particular, it underscores that we are now in an era where great powers carve out spheres of influence based on brute force rather than any system of rules and rights. Hence there could hardly have been a more inane response than Farage’s suggestion that the attack might “make China and Russia think twice”, since it will self-evidently embolden them to grab control in their own spheres. That inanity was also a reminder of the utter disaster that would ensue were Farage ever to become Prime Minister.
Some compare this new era to the international relations of the Nineteenth Century: if so, one difference is that the UK is no longer amongst the great powers. Others suggest that the post-war rules-based international order never amounted to much, and the brute force of great powers persisted: if so, one difference is that the UK can no longer look to be within the protective umbrella of the US and instead, like the EU, is regarded as itself being a target for political interference, as the US National Security Strategy makes clear. Brexit was always a strategic error for the UK but, as things have turned out, it also came at exactly the moment to make that error catastrophic.
In this context, the government’s baby-steps, such as joining Erasmus+ and speaking in increasingly positive terms about “closer ties” with the EU, whilst welcome in themselves, are wholly inadequate to the situation of being squashed between two predatory super-powers. Meanwhile, the Brexitist opposition to even those steps, and the pro-Trump and pro-Putin populist and far-right campaign to destabilize Britain from within, are ever-more obviously the activities of a Fifth Column.
Friday, 9 January 2026
Friday, 12 December 2025
Is the tide turning?
Is it the case, as many are suggesting, that the Brexit wind is starting to change or, in a different metaphor, that the tide has turned? It’s tempting to think so when seeing Ryan Bourne, one of the original ‘Economists for Brexit’, argue that the economic costs of Brexit are now undeniable (£). Admittedly, the piece is caveated and, admittedly, Bourne was hardly the most high-profile even of the rather exclusive club of economists who believed Brexit was a good idea. Still, such honesty from the advocates of Brexit is sufficiently rare to make it noteworthy. Meanwhile, Jeremy Warner, has recently written that “Brexit has been an unmitigated economic failure” (£). I may be wrong, but I don’t think Warner was ever an advocate of Brexit but, even so, it’s quite something for a senior business and economics commentator of the Telegraph, of all papers, to say such a thing.
Perhaps more striking was Kemi Badenoch’s quiet inclusion of Brexit in a list of recent economic “shocks”, with the implication that it had been a “foolish” policy. It was said almost in passing and it’s perfectly possible she didn’t understand the implications. Or perhaps, rather as happened with the Suez crisis, it is now seen as self-evident that Brexit is a mistake. But, if so, it is simply not enough to pass over it as if it had been some unfortunate accident upon which it is better not to dwell. It needs to be openly acknowledged and its consequences addressed. Moreover, even if the Brexit tide is turning then, to mangle several metaphors, it is doing so at too glacial a pace to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK.
Customary confusions
One piece of evidence cited for the ‘turning tide’ thesis is the rash of speculation that the government is considering ‘rejoining the customs union’. Seasoned Brexit-watchers will appreciate the weight of exhaustion and depression carried in the scare quotes I put around those words. For as I and many others have been trying to explain ever since 2016, Britain cannot join, rejoin (or, as used to be discussed, stay in) the customs union without being a member of the EU. What might be possible would be to agree to be in a customs union with the EU, in the way, though not necessarily on the same terms, that Turkey has agreed with the EU. This distinction and its implications have recently been re-explained by Joel Reland of UKICE.
This isn’t just a matter of being pedantic about terminology. I understand why some people might use ‘rejoining the customs union’ as a shorthand term. But the way that it is still being used by senior politicians and journalists is indicative of the way that, almost ten years since the referendum, too many of them still don’t really understand what Brexit means. Yet even that doesn’t fully explain the exhaustion and depression, because what goes with the lack of understanding is a sense that we’re still casting around for ways to ‘leave the EU without really leaving the EU’. In relation to customs, I’ve lost count of the number of possible arrangements that have been floated over the years but my post of May 2018 captures some of that dismal story. So it may be not so much a matter of the ‘tide turning’ as yet another iteration of its ebb and flow.
Either way, a Guardian report last weekend suggested that a customs union is being actively, albeit informally, discussed within government, and that the elevation of Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds to the Cabinet might give added impetus to this discussion (yet, a few days later, he poured scorn on the idea). Meanwhile, the Mail angrily reported that Justice Secretary David Lammy “refused seven times to rule out” rejoining the customs union (which, typically of the paper, it not only misdescribes as such, but also misdescribes as “reversing Brexit”), as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting and, according to an angrily-headlined non-story in the Express, Rachel Reeves. There’s certainly some evidence that voters, especially Labour voters, would welcome it, but Keir Starmer has said he is not “planning” any such move, and most Labour MPs abstained on a LibDem-initiated parliamentary vote this week.
Customary questions
That this vote was held reflected the fact that a customs union has long been advocated by the LibDems, whilst Labour MPs’ abstentions reflected that it would cross one of their party’s high-profile manifesto ‘red lines’ (although if that ever comes to be breached then, ironically, the very inaccuracy of the term provides a sliver of wriggle room, since the government could, truthfully if tricksily, say that it was seeking a ‘bespoke customs treaty’ with the EU). If breaching that red line is now under internal discussion within the Labour Party, the reasons are obvious. In a general way, the government is desperate to boost economic growth. In a more specific way, I’ve several times made the obvious point that Labour’s long silence on the damage of Brexit was because they could hardly break it without also proposing a viable solution to it. So the government’s recent overt references to the costs of Brexit are inevitably forcing it now to consider such solutions.
However, whether a customs union would be much of a solution is questionable. Whilst the broadly negative economic effect of Brexit is indeed, as Bourne accepts, undeniable, the specific costs attributable to being outside the customs union have, so far as I know, never been disaggregated [1]. Moreover, the benefits of a customs treaty with the EU would depend on its terms and extensiveness. The Guardian report refers to unspecified House of Commons analysis estimating that “rejoining the customs union” could increase GDP by 2.2%. However, I think this is highly unlikely, if we take as accurate the OBR figure of GDP being 4% lower in the long run than it would otherwise be (admittedly, as I discussed recently, other estimates put the figure higher). For it is implausible that the costs of being outside the customs union, compared with the other main component of the costs, which come from being outside the single market, are half, or even close to half, of the total.
In fact, as trade expert Sam Lowe points out, the only real benefit of a customs union is to remove the rule of origin requirements for tariff-free trade in goods with the EU which exist within the existing UK-EU trade agreement (i.e. because, potentially, the entirety of goods trade with the EU would be tariff-free rather than being, as at present, conditional upon meeting rules of origin requirements). That would be very welcome for some products and industries, but the overall economic benefit would be relatively modest. On the other hand, it is surely the case that the costs of being outside the customs union exceed the benefits, which Starmer suggested at PMQs this week to be those coming from having an independent trade policy, since those benefits are nugatory (see Table 8, page 20, in link).
Customary disarray
In any case, it is by no means obvious how seriously we should take these latest rumours and counter-rumours, which are typical of a government in considerable disarray. Admittedly, some of the recent criticisms it has faced have been unfair, as shown by the way that the accusations that Rachel Reeves “lied” (£) ahead of the budget have unwound under scrutiny and calls for her to be investigated for breaking the ministerial code have been rejected by the independent ethics advisor. Likewise, the furious accusations made a few weeks ago that the government, and ‘Number 10’ in particular, blocked the prosecution of the ‘China spy case’ have been shown to be false by the report of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. And some of the attacks are simply ludicrous, such as the manufactured outrage about Reeves having ‘only’ been the winner of the 1993 ‘under-14 title for the British Women’s Chess Association Girls Championship’ rather than the ‘British girls’ under-14 champion’.
These and other stories are undoubtedly contributing to the impression that the government is useless and dishonest, and its failure to counter that impression effectively could itself be held against it. But it’s not necessary to indulge in false or unfair accusations to sustain the claim of governmental disarray and, in particular, the claim that it lacks any sense of coherent strategy or purpose.
It’s not just the chaotic leaks and hints about the budget. It’s the way that policies and initiatives appear or disappear at random. Examples include refusing to lift the ‘two child benefit’ cap and then embracing it as a central part of the government’s “moral mission”. Or suddenly floating the Digital ID Card scheme as a “priority”, without any details of how it would work, and then delaying even the consultation about it. Or, most recently, and again out of the blue, announcing a major policy to restrict trial by jury but, again, with no apparent idea about how or when this will be implemented. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits or demerits of any of these policies: my point is simply that they come from nowhere and, very often, go nowhere, or get reversed.
Customary absence of strategy
So within this context it’s reasonable to be sceptical about whether the latest ‘customs union’ rumours will amount to anything (personally, I don’t think they will), and that’s all the more so because within the specific policy area of relations with the EU the government is also woefully lacking in strategic coherence or consistency. This absence of strategy has been evident from the outset, and I wrote a detailed post in August 2024 about why it is a problem. That problem has become even more obvious since. For example, we have seen the government’s refusal to countenance a Youth Mobility Scheme, then to embrace an “ambitious” version of it, and currently to be mired in reportedly sour negotiations with the EU about how extensive it will be (£).
That sourness would appear to be replicated across the wider ‘reset’ negotiations, and these have now failed as regards the UK’s possible participation in SAFE, the EU defence loan fund, apparently because the price of doing so was deemed too high by the government (and, it seems, set so high because of France’s protectionism of its defence industry). Strangely, Thomas-Symonds commented that the UK “will still be able to participate in projects through SAFE on third-country terms”, as if this represented some kind of partial success rather than being the definition of what failure meant. Meanwhile, the January 2026 deadlines for agreeing linkages on Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) are looming and for all the talk from both the UK and the EU of wanting to move “swiftly” on this and other reset issues, there has been little sign of urgency (though there is, admittedly not for the first time, a report that agreement on UK participation in Erasmus+ is imminent).
That is understandable from an EU perspective. The issue of post-Brexit relations with the UK is no longer the priority it was during the Article 50 negotiations, and the broad contours of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU. It may be that the latest statements from the Trump regime, discussed below, will create more urgency for both the UK and the EU as regards cooperation, if not trade. But, even if so, as I’ve pointed out many times before there is very little sense for the EU in agreeing to substantially deeper relations when there is every prospect of a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government backtracking in a very few years’ time.
However, that possibility (both of there being such a government, and of it being able to backtrack) is not something independent of the present government’s conduct. That’s obviously true in a general way, because if this government were to perform better and be more popular, it would have a better chance of re-election. But it is also true in the narrow sense of this government’s EU strategy. For one of the things which such a strategy could deliver would be to begin the process of changing the domestic political narrative about the EU, and to begin to embed that narrative in a way that would make it less vulnerable to being undermined by future governments. To be more specific, for all that there has been some improvement in the tone of the UK-EU relationship under Labour, the domestic narrative remains one of suspicious, sullen instrumentalism. This in turn is what has made the reset negotiations a sour battle over budget contributions.
Changing the narrative
In this sense, even if the present noises about seeking a customs union do translate into government policy it will do nothing to change that narrative. It still positions the relationship as one of instrumental calculation just as, looking back, was the case throughout the UK’s membership. If there is to be a ‘reset’ of that decades-long narrative then it needs to encompass much more than simply regarding Brexit as a ‘mistake’ because of its economic costs (although that is true) and become a positive affirmation of European identity.
I don’t by this mean some starry-eyed idealism. The EU has, since its very earliest origins, been about a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of cooperation, not least as a vehicle for preventing its members going to war. For the UK, now, that means a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of sovereignty-sharing and of the realities of regionalism (in fact, if an UK-EU customs union comes to pass then its main value could be to symbolise that recognition). For whilst it’s true that sovereignty-sharing can bring with it economic advantages, that is neither the sole nor the deepest motivation. The deepest motivation is that of national strategy.
In a post in January 2019, I argued that Brexit was a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represented an unprecedented failure of British statecraft. It was not simply a bad strategy, but was the abandonment of any strategy at all. I still think that is the best post on this blog, or at least the one which best-articulates why I was, and still am, convinced that Brexit was a national catastrophe. In summary, the argument was that Brexit was based on a failure to understand the regionalization of economics and the multi-polar nature of international relations.
I obviously couldn’t predict the events that have happened since, but they have amply justified that analysis. I mean, in particular, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the second Trump presidency, and the continuing rise of autocratic China, as well as some of the effects of the pandemic on international supply chains. Over and over again in the course of these events it has been clear that the UK’s interests and values are substantially aligned with the EU’s, on all sorts of international issues apart from Ukraine, such as climate change, even as Brexit has severed the institutional connection between them. And, just in the last week, this has been forcefully re-emphasised by the publication of the US National Security Strategy.
Trump’s "declaration of political war"
This extraordinary and alarming document is, as Bill Emmott, the Chair of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, puts it “a declaration of [political] war against European democracy and the European way of life”. Brexit notwithstanding, the document makes no clear distinction between the UK and the EU [2] in terms of its endorsement of all the now-standard critiques of European countries that spew out daily from the American ethno-nationalist right. These include echoing the ‘great replacement theory’, the racist conspiracy theory that there is a concerted attempt to ‘replace indigenous Europeans’ (implicitly meaning white people) with ‘non-European immigrants’ (implicitly meaning non-whites, and especially Muslims), such that Europe faces imminent “civilizational erasure”, whilst offering active support to populist ethno-nationalist parties in European countries.
As readers of this blog probably know, Britain in general, and London and other large cities in particular, are now routinely depicted in America as crime-ridden hell-holes, subject to Sharia Law, where anyone who has the temerity to complain is immediately imprisoned on the personal diktat of Keir Starmer. It is insane but, aided and abetted by similarly insane diatribes from British populists, it is not just believed by many Americans but, with this strategy document, has now effectively been endorsed by the American state. It’s true that, when reading it, one should be aware that Trump is notoriously inconsistent, but most of the document echoes his and his allies’ longstanding views and commitments. That includes the way that the report is relentlessly pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, making it unsurprising that it was hailed by Moscow as largely aligned with Putin’s own strategic vision.
Thus, if it was not obvious before, there is now an open set of alliances and affinities between Trump, Putin and European, including British, populists. Equally obvious, and underscored by this week’s meeting between Farage and the Rassemblement National leader Jordan Bardella, are the alliances and affinities between Reform and other European populists.
Alarming as this is, it could also be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government. It’s becoming extremely unlikely that the US polity, or the ‘global order’, will ever return to the pre-Trump era even when Trump himself departs. That world has passed. This means that the already-apparent strategic mistake of Brexit has now become an imminent crisis. Any fantasy of ‘nimble’ Britain using its post-Brexit sovereignty to thread its way around the big power blocs, making selective accommodations with each of them, is now utterly redundant.
This doesn’t mean that rejoining – or more accurately joining – the EU is suddenly going to come on the agenda for either the UK or the EU. The road to that is long and unclear. But it could mean something like the course advocated this week by Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who chairs the Labour Movement for Europe. She proposes a thorough official investigation of the impact of Brexit; a more urgent and extensive, but less instrumental, approach to the UK-EU reset; and open parliamentary debates on the entire issue. Within this, she calls for the government to “forget red lines” but also for pro-Europeans to recognize that “rejoin is, right now, an impossibility”. In short, she is calling for openness, honesty and realism about Brexit and, without endorsing every word of the article, it is hard to disagree that this is precisely what has been lacking since 2016 (if not earlier).
Picking sides
Creasy is another of the voices who, like those with which I began this post, see the present moment as one where, as she puts it, “a window of opportunity to change course may be opening”, partly for the reasons of national strategy just alluded to: “not just because we want better trade but because, in a world shaped by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Britain and Europe need each other more than ever.” I’ve written in that past about this new global divide, and how it has rendered Brexit an even more obvious strategic mistake, but the new US National Security Strategy clarifies what is at stake.
As Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times explains, it:
“… makes clear that there is now a battle under way between two different versions of the west — which pits the US and Europe against each other. The Trump administration view of “western civilisation” is based on race, Christianity and nationalism. The European version is a liberal view founded on democracy, human rights and the rule of law, including international law.”
But this moment is not just one that clarifies international relations, it also clarifies the nature of UK domestic political choices. More than ever before it is obvious that Reform and much of the Conservative Party are completely aligned with the Trump view of ‘western civilization’, which makes the next general election crucial. For the real test of whether the Brexit ‘tide has turned’ will be whether the electorate – now, as Peter Kellner argues, a very different one to that of 2016 – has learned the lesson of referendum or whether it repeats its folly by endorsing Brexitism in 2029.
That is still some way off but here, too, the increasing scrutiny that Farage and his party, to his fury and consternation, are facing might suggest that the tide is turning. What is less in evidence is much sign that Starmer’s Labour understand the epochal choice which is underway and that it is going to have to pick a side, and quickly. Or, more alarmingly, the apparently growing influence of ‘Blue Labour’ in Number 10 means it will understand that there is such a choice – and will pick the wrong side.
Notes
[1] There was a government estimate in 2018 that being out of the customs union would reduce GDP by 1%, but this was a forecast based on broad, generic models. What I haven’t seen is a post-Brexit estimate of the costs of being outside the customs union in the light of the actually-agreed Trade and Cooperation Agreement and its subsequent impact.
[2] The strategy document does talk of “Britain and Ireland” as distinct from “continental Europe”, but as Ireland is an EU member this seems to be a geographical rather than a political distinction. It is also clear from Trump’s subsequent diatribe about both Paris and London (and especially London’s Mayor) that when he talks of ‘Europe’ he does not differentiate between the EU and the UK. So much for being "Mr Brexit". So much for Brexit, for that matter.
As the scheduled date of the next post would be Boxing Day, this will be the last post of this year. I will resume on Friday 9 January 2026.
Perhaps more striking was Kemi Badenoch’s quiet inclusion of Brexit in a list of recent economic “shocks”, with the implication that it had been a “foolish” policy. It was said almost in passing and it’s perfectly possible she didn’t understand the implications. Or perhaps, rather as happened with the Suez crisis, it is now seen as self-evident that Brexit is a mistake. But, if so, it is simply not enough to pass over it as if it had been some unfortunate accident upon which it is better not to dwell. It needs to be openly acknowledged and its consequences addressed. Moreover, even if the Brexit tide is turning then, to mangle several metaphors, it is doing so at too glacial a pace to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK.
Customary confusions
One piece of evidence cited for the ‘turning tide’ thesis is the rash of speculation that the government is considering ‘rejoining the customs union’. Seasoned Brexit-watchers will appreciate the weight of exhaustion and depression carried in the scare quotes I put around those words. For as I and many others have been trying to explain ever since 2016, Britain cannot join, rejoin (or, as used to be discussed, stay in) the customs union without being a member of the EU. What might be possible would be to agree to be in a customs union with the EU, in the way, though not necessarily on the same terms, that Turkey has agreed with the EU. This distinction and its implications have recently been re-explained by Joel Reland of UKICE.
This isn’t just a matter of being pedantic about terminology. I understand why some people might use ‘rejoining the customs union’ as a shorthand term. But the way that it is still being used by senior politicians and journalists is indicative of the way that, almost ten years since the referendum, too many of them still don’t really understand what Brexit means. Yet even that doesn’t fully explain the exhaustion and depression, because what goes with the lack of understanding is a sense that we’re still casting around for ways to ‘leave the EU without really leaving the EU’. In relation to customs, I’ve lost count of the number of possible arrangements that have been floated over the years but my post of May 2018 captures some of that dismal story. So it may be not so much a matter of the ‘tide turning’ as yet another iteration of its ebb and flow.
Either way, a Guardian report last weekend suggested that a customs union is being actively, albeit informally, discussed within government, and that the elevation of Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds to the Cabinet might give added impetus to this discussion (yet, a few days later, he poured scorn on the idea). Meanwhile, the Mail angrily reported that Justice Secretary David Lammy “refused seven times to rule out” rejoining the customs union (which, typically of the paper, it not only misdescribes as such, but also misdescribes as “reversing Brexit”), as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting and, according to an angrily-headlined non-story in the Express, Rachel Reeves. There’s certainly some evidence that voters, especially Labour voters, would welcome it, but Keir Starmer has said he is not “planning” any such move, and most Labour MPs abstained on a LibDem-initiated parliamentary vote this week.
Customary questions
That this vote was held reflected the fact that a customs union has long been advocated by the LibDems, whilst Labour MPs’ abstentions reflected that it would cross one of their party’s high-profile manifesto ‘red lines’ (although if that ever comes to be breached then, ironically, the very inaccuracy of the term provides a sliver of wriggle room, since the government could, truthfully if tricksily, say that it was seeking a ‘bespoke customs treaty’ with the EU). If breaching that red line is now under internal discussion within the Labour Party, the reasons are obvious. In a general way, the government is desperate to boost economic growth. In a more specific way, I’ve several times made the obvious point that Labour’s long silence on the damage of Brexit was because they could hardly break it without also proposing a viable solution to it. So the government’s recent overt references to the costs of Brexit are inevitably forcing it now to consider such solutions.
However, whether a customs union would be much of a solution is questionable. Whilst the broadly negative economic effect of Brexit is indeed, as Bourne accepts, undeniable, the specific costs attributable to being outside the customs union have, so far as I know, never been disaggregated [1]. Moreover, the benefits of a customs treaty with the EU would depend on its terms and extensiveness. The Guardian report refers to unspecified House of Commons analysis estimating that “rejoining the customs union” could increase GDP by 2.2%. However, I think this is highly unlikely, if we take as accurate the OBR figure of GDP being 4% lower in the long run than it would otherwise be (admittedly, as I discussed recently, other estimates put the figure higher). For it is implausible that the costs of being outside the customs union, compared with the other main component of the costs, which come from being outside the single market, are half, or even close to half, of the total.
In fact, as trade expert Sam Lowe points out, the only real benefit of a customs union is to remove the rule of origin requirements for tariff-free trade in goods with the EU which exist within the existing UK-EU trade agreement (i.e. because, potentially, the entirety of goods trade with the EU would be tariff-free rather than being, as at present, conditional upon meeting rules of origin requirements). That would be very welcome for some products and industries, but the overall economic benefit would be relatively modest. On the other hand, it is surely the case that the costs of being outside the customs union exceed the benefits, which Starmer suggested at PMQs this week to be those coming from having an independent trade policy, since those benefits are nugatory (see Table 8, page 20, in link).
Customary disarray
In any case, it is by no means obvious how seriously we should take these latest rumours and counter-rumours, which are typical of a government in considerable disarray. Admittedly, some of the recent criticisms it has faced have been unfair, as shown by the way that the accusations that Rachel Reeves “lied” (£) ahead of the budget have unwound under scrutiny and calls for her to be investigated for breaking the ministerial code have been rejected by the independent ethics advisor. Likewise, the furious accusations made a few weeks ago that the government, and ‘Number 10’ in particular, blocked the prosecution of the ‘China spy case’ have been shown to be false by the report of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. And some of the attacks are simply ludicrous, such as the manufactured outrage about Reeves having ‘only’ been the winner of the 1993 ‘under-14 title for the British Women’s Chess Association Girls Championship’ rather than the ‘British girls’ under-14 champion’.
These and other stories are undoubtedly contributing to the impression that the government is useless and dishonest, and its failure to counter that impression effectively could itself be held against it. But it’s not necessary to indulge in false or unfair accusations to sustain the claim of governmental disarray and, in particular, the claim that it lacks any sense of coherent strategy or purpose.
It’s not just the chaotic leaks and hints about the budget. It’s the way that policies and initiatives appear or disappear at random. Examples include refusing to lift the ‘two child benefit’ cap and then embracing it as a central part of the government’s “moral mission”. Or suddenly floating the Digital ID Card scheme as a “priority”, without any details of how it would work, and then delaying even the consultation about it. Or, most recently, and again out of the blue, announcing a major policy to restrict trial by jury but, again, with no apparent idea about how or when this will be implemented. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits or demerits of any of these policies: my point is simply that they come from nowhere and, very often, go nowhere, or get reversed.
Customary absence of strategy
So within this context it’s reasonable to be sceptical about whether the latest ‘customs union’ rumours will amount to anything (personally, I don’t think they will), and that’s all the more so because within the specific policy area of relations with the EU the government is also woefully lacking in strategic coherence or consistency. This absence of strategy has been evident from the outset, and I wrote a detailed post in August 2024 about why it is a problem. That problem has become even more obvious since. For example, we have seen the government’s refusal to countenance a Youth Mobility Scheme, then to embrace an “ambitious” version of it, and currently to be mired in reportedly sour negotiations with the EU about how extensive it will be (£).
That sourness would appear to be replicated across the wider ‘reset’ negotiations, and these have now failed as regards the UK’s possible participation in SAFE, the EU defence loan fund, apparently because the price of doing so was deemed too high by the government (and, it seems, set so high because of France’s protectionism of its defence industry). Strangely, Thomas-Symonds commented that the UK “will still be able to participate in projects through SAFE on third-country terms”, as if this represented some kind of partial success rather than being the definition of what failure meant. Meanwhile, the January 2026 deadlines for agreeing linkages on Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) are looming and for all the talk from both the UK and the EU of wanting to move “swiftly” on this and other reset issues, there has been little sign of urgency (though there is, admittedly not for the first time, a report that agreement on UK participation in Erasmus+ is imminent).
That is understandable from an EU perspective. The issue of post-Brexit relations with the UK is no longer the priority it was during the Article 50 negotiations, and the broad contours of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU. It may be that the latest statements from the Trump regime, discussed below, will create more urgency for both the UK and the EU as regards cooperation, if not trade. But, even if so, as I’ve pointed out many times before there is very little sense for the EU in agreeing to substantially deeper relations when there is every prospect of a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government backtracking in a very few years’ time.
However, that possibility (both of there being such a government, and of it being able to backtrack) is not something independent of the present government’s conduct. That’s obviously true in a general way, because if this government were to perform better and be more popular, it would have a better chance of re-election. But it is also true in the narrow sense of this government’s EU strategy. For one of the things which such a strategy could deliver would be to begin the process of changing the domestic political narrative about the EU, and to begin to embed that narrative in a way that would make it less vulnerable to being undermined by future governments. To be more specific, for all that there has been some improvement in the tone of the UK-EU relationship under Labour, the domestic narrative remains one of suspicious, sullen instrumentalism. This in turn is what has made the reset negotiations a sour battle over budget contributions.
Changing the narrative
In this sense, even if the present noises about seeking a customs union do translate into government policy it will do nothing to change that narrative. It still positions the relationship as one of instrumental calculation just as, looking back, was the case throughout the UK’s membership. If there is to be a ‘reset’ of that decades-long narrative then it needs to encompass much more than simply regarding Brexit as a ‘mistake’ because of its economic costs (although that is true) and become a positive affirmation of European identity.
I don’t by this mean some starry-eyed idealism. The EU has, since its very earliest origins, been about a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of cooperation, not least as a vehicle for preventing its members going to war. For the UK, now, that means a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of sovereignty-sharing and of the realities of regionalism (in fact, if an UK-EU customs union comes to pass then its main value could be to symbolise that recognition). For whilst it’s true that sovereignty-sharing can bring with it economic advantages, that is neither the sole nor the deepest motivation. The deepest motivation is that of national strategy.
In a post in January 2019, I argued that Brexit was a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represented an unprecedented failure of British statecraft. It was not simply a bad strategy, but was the abandonment of any strategy at all. I still think that is the best post on this blog, or at least the one which best-articulates why I was, and still am, convinced that Brexit was a national catastrophe. In summary, the argument was that Brexit was based on a failure to understand the regionalization of economics and the multi-polar nature of international relations.
I obviously couldn’t predict the events that have happened since, but they have amply justified that analysis. I mean, in particular, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the second Trump presidency, and the continuing rise of autocratic China, as well as some of the effects of the pandemic on international supply chains. Over and over again in the course of these events it has been clear that the UK’s interests and values are substantially aligned with the EU’s, on all sorts of international issues apart from Ukraine, such as climate change, even as Brexit has severed the institutional connection between them. And, just in the last week, this has been forcefully re-emphasised by the publication of the US National Security Strategy.
Trump’s "declaration of political war"
This extraordinary and alarming document is, as Bill Emmott, the Chair of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, puts it “a declaration of [political] war against European democracy and the European way of life”. Brexit notwithstanding, the document makes no clear distinction between the UK and the EU [2] in terms of its endorsement of all the now-standard critiques of European countries that spew out daily from the American ethno-nationalist right. These include echoing the ‘great replacement theory’, the racist conspiracy theory that there is a concerted attempt to ‘replace indigenous Europeans’ (implicitly meaning white people) with ‘non-European immigrants’ (implicitly meaning non-whites, and especially Muslims), such that Europe faces imminent “civilizational erasure”, whilst offering active support to populist ethno-nationalist parties in European countries.
As readers of this blog probably know, Britain in general, and London and other large cities in particular, are now routinely depicted in America as crime-ridden hell-holes, subject to Sharia Law, where anyone who has the temerity to complain is immediately imprisoned on the personal diktat of Keir Starmer. It is insane but, aided and abetted by similarly insane diatribes from British populists, it is not just believed by many Americans but, with this strategy document, has now effectively been endorsed by the American state. It’s true that, when reading it, one should be aware that Trump is notoriously inconsistent, but most of the document echoes his and his allies’ longstanding views and commitments. That includes the way that the report is relentlessly pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, making it unsurprising that it was hailed by Moscow as largely aligned with Putin’s own strategic vision.
Thus, if it was not obvious before, there is now an open set of alliances and affinities between Trump, Putin and European, including British, populists. Equally obvious, and underscored by this week’s meeting between Farage and the Rassemblement National leader Jordan Bardella, are the alliances and affinities between Reform and other European populists.
Alarming as this is, it could also be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government. It’s becoming extremely unlikely that the US polity, or the ‘global order’, will ever return to the pre-Trump era even when Trump himself departs. That world has passed. This means that the already-apparent strategic mistake of Brexit has now become an imminent crisis. Any fantasy of ‘nimble’ Britain using its post-Brexit sovereignty to thread its way around the big power blocs, making selective accommodations with each of them, is now utterly redundant.
This doesn’t mean that rejoining – or more accurately joining – the EU is suddenly going to come on the agenda for either the UK or the EU. The road to that is long and unclear. But it could mean something like the course advocated this week by Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who chairs the Labour Movement for Europe. She proposes a thorough official investigation of the impact of Brexit; a more urgent and extensive, but less instrumental, approach to the UK-EU reset; and open parliamentary debates on the entire issue. Within this, she calls for the government to “forget red lines” but also for pro-Europeans to recognize that “rejoin is, right now, an impossibility”. In short, she is calling for openness, honesty and realism about Brexit and, without endorsing every word of the article, it is hard to disagree that this is precisely what has been lacking since 2016 (if not earlier).
Picking sides
Creasy is another of the voices who, like those with which I began this post, see the present moment as one where, as she puts it, “a window of opportunity to change course may be opening”, partly for the reasons of national strategy just alluded to: “not just because we want better trade but because, in a world shaped by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Britain and Europe need each other more than ever.” I’ve written in that past about this new global divide, and how it has rendered Brexit an even more obvious strategic mistake, but the new US National Security Strategy clarifies what is at stake.
As Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times explains, it:
“… makes clear that there is now a battle under way between two different versions of the west — which pits the US and Europe against each other. The Trump administration view of “western civilisation” is based on race, Christianity and nationalism. The European version is a liberal view founded on democracy, human rights and the rule of law, including international law.”
But this moment is not just one that clarifies international relations, it also clarifies the nature of UK domestic political choices. More than ever before it is obvious that Reform and much of the Conservative Party are completely aligned with the Trump view of ‘western civilization’, which makes the next general election crucial. For the real test of whether the Brexit ‘tide has turned’ will be whether the electorate – now, as Peter Kellner argues, a very different one to that of 2016 – has learned the lesson of referendum or whether it repeats its folly by endorsing Brexitism in 2029.
That is still some way off but here, too, the increasing scrutiny that Farage and his party, to his fury and consternation, are facing might suggest that the tide is turning. What is less in evidence is much sign that Starmer’s Labour understand the epochal choice which is underway and that it is going to have to pick a side, and quickly. Or, more alarmingly, the apparently growing influence of ‘Blue Labour’ in Number 10 means it will understand that there is such a choice – and will pick the wrong side.
Notes
[1] There was a government estimate in 2018 that being out of the customs union would reduce GDP by 1%, but this was a forecast based on broad, generic models. What I haven’t seen is a post-Brexit estimate of the costs of being outside the customs union in the light of the actually-agreed Trade and Cooperation Agreement and its subsequent impact.
[2] The strategy document does talk of “Britain and Ireland” as distinct from “continental Europe”, but as Ireland is an EU member this seems to be a geographical rather than a political distinction. It is also clear from Trump’s subsequent diatribe about both Paris and London (and especially London’s Mayor) that when he talks of ‘Europe’ he does not differentiate between the EU and the UK. So much for being "Mr Brexit". So much for Brexit, for that matter.
As the scheduled date of the next post would be Boxing Day, this will be the last post of this year. I will resume on Friday 9 January 2026.
Friday, 28 November 2025
Brexit reminders
Compared with a few years ago, Brexit no longer dominates the headlines, not least because those who once so loudly advocated it are now too embarrassed to mention it. However, it lies behind many of the news stories, like – take your pick of metaphors – dry rot in the basement, a predator lurking in the bushes, or a chronic, debilitating illness.
In the last fortnight, major examples include the latest report of the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, the sentencing of a former Reform official and UKIP/ Brexit Party MEP for taking Russian bribes, and, of course, the budget, as well as the latest net migration figures.
Brexit and Covid
The publication of the second module of the Hallett Inquiry, which focusses on decision-making and political governance, reveals a woeful picture. As has been widely reported it shows that a “toxic and chaotic” culture pervaded the Johnson-Cummings government. Whilst this had significant implications for the handling of the pandemic, which of course is the focus of the report, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it also has implications for Brexit.
I must admit that I haven’t read the full report, which runs to 800 pages, so I’m not sure what, if anything, it says about Brexit (the summary document makes no mention of it at all). However, as I wrote in some detail at the time, the evidence heard by the Inquiry showed several significant connections. That post also contains links to several posts I wrote during the pandemic which identified some of those connections and I won’t repeat all the points I’ve made previously but, in brief, they include:
· The damage Brexit had done to the machinery and processes of government, and especially to the civil service;
· The extent to which Brexit was prioritized over Covid in the early days of the pandemic;
· The refusal to extend the Transition Period, despite the impact of Covid throughout almost its entirety, with consequences both for the negotiations and the businesses which had to adapt, virtually overnight, to the eventual agreement;
· The ideational and institutional connections between Brexit and the response to Covid;
· The simplism and nostalgia evident in both Brexit and the pandemic.
At the most basic level, if, as the Inquiry shows, the government was “toxic and chaotic” in its handling of Covid, then it would be absurd to imagine that it was not equally so in its handling of Brexit. The same people, at the same time, could hardly have been governing in exemplary fashion in one domain whilst being so incompetent in the other. Moreover, the Johnson-Cummings government was itself a legacy of Brexit and, ultimately, of the Vote Leave campaign. In that sense, having so shambolic an administration when Covid struck was itself one of the adverse consequences of Brexit.
I don’t think the publication of the latest Hallett Report tells us anything new about this since it was, indeed, clear from the evidence the Inquiry heard, and from what could be surmised before. However, it is a moment worth recording that it is now a matter of official record just how incompetent that ‘get Brexit done’ government was. What is new, although entirely unsurprising, is the reaction it has provoked from Johnson and Cummings in particular, but also from the serried ranks for their supporters who, of course, are almost invariably Brexiters.
Thus, referring to Hallett as “some judge”, Johnson, who set up the Inquiry and set its terms of reference in the first place, dismissed the report (£) as “hopelessly incoherent” and “totally muddled”. Cummings, predictably, was even more vitriolic, accusing Hallett and the Inquiry’s lead lawyer of spreading lies and calling for both to “be stripped of all official jobs, all gongs, and legally barred from working in the law for the rest of their lives”. And David Frost called it a “disgrace”, complaining, amongst other things, that it “scoffs at the alternative strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration”, as if it had not been endlessly debunked, including by the government’s own Chief Medical Officer (similar complaints have been spewed out across the scientifically-illiterate ‘libertarian’ right).
Anyone with an ounce of self-awareness or humility might show just an iota of contrition, perhaps even some shame, when shown their failings in such forensic detail. But Johnson and Cummings, the one girdled by his sense of entitlement, the other by his misplaced intellectual vanity, are incapable of humility or shame. As for Frost, he shows the self-awareness of a toilet seat. One might as well expect Liz Truss to refrain from pontificating about “sensible economic policy”.
In the last fortnight, major examples include the latest report of the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, the sentencing of a former Reform official and UKIP/ Brexit Party MEP for taking Russian bribes, and, of course, the budget, as well as the latest net migration figures.
Brexit and Covid
The publication of the second module of the Hallett Inquiry, which focusses on decision-making and political governance, reveals a woeful picture. As has been widely reported it shows that a “toxic and chaotic” culture pervaded the Johnson-Cummings government. Whilst this had significant implications for the handling of the pandemic, which of course is the focus of the report, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it also has implications for Brexit.
I must admit that I haven’t read the full report, which runs to 800 pages, so I’m not sure what, if anything, it says about Brexit (the summary document makes no mention of it at all). However, as I wrote in some detail at the time, the evidence heard by the Inquiry showed several significant connections. That post also contains links to several posts I wrote during the pandemic which identified some of those connections and I won’t repeat all the points I’ve made previously but, in brief, they include:
· The damage Brexit had done to the machinery and processes of government, and especially to the civil service;
· The extent to which Brexit was prioritized over Covid in the early days of the pandemic;
· The refusal to extend the Transition Period, despite the impact of Covid throughout almost its entirety, with consequences both for the negotiations and the businesses which had to adapt, virtually overnight, to the eventual agreement;
· The ideational and institutional connections between Brexit and the response to Covid;
· The simplism and nostalgia evident in both Brexit and the pandemic.
At the most basic level, if, as the Inquiry shows, the government was “toxic and chaotic” in its handling of Covid, then it would be absurd to imagine that it was not equally so in its handling of Brexit. The same people, at the same time, could hardly have been governing in exemplary fashion in one domain whilst being so incompetent in the other. Moreover, the Johnson-Cummings government was itself a legacy of Brexit and, ultimately, of the Vote Leave campaign. In that sense, having so shambolic an administration when Covid struck was itself one of the adverse consequences of Brexit.
I don’t think the publication of the latest Hallett Report tells us anything new about this since it was, indeed, clear from the evidence the Inquiry heard, and from what could be surmised before. However, it is a moment worth recording that it is now a matter of official record just how incompetent that ‘get Brexit done’ government was. What is new, although entirely unsurprising, is the reaction it has provoked from Johnson and Cummings in particular, but also from the serried ranks for their supporters who, of course, are almost invariably Brexiters.
Thus, referring to Hallett as “some judge”, Johnson, who set up the Inquiry and set its terms of reference in the first place, dismissed the report (£) as “hopelessly incoherent” and “totally muddled”. Cummings, predictably, was even more vitriolic, accusing Hallett and the Inquiry’s lead lawyer of spreading lies and calling for both to “be stripped of all official jobs, all gongs, and legally barred from working in the law for the rest of their lives”. And David Frost called it a “disgrace”, complaining, amongst other things, that it “scoffs at the alternative strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration”, as if it had not been endlessly debunked, including by the government’s own Chief Medical Officer (similar complaints have been spewed out across the scientifically-illiterate ‘libertarian’ right).
Anyone with an ounce of self-awareness or humility might show just an iota of contrition, perhaps even some shame, when shown their failings in such forensic detail. But Johnson and Cummings, the one girdled by his sense of entitlement, the other by his misplaced intellectual vanity, are incapable of humility or shame. As for Frost, he shows the self-awareness of a toilet seat. One might as well expect Liz Truss to refrain from pontificating about “sensible economic policy”.
But the more important point is not their all-too-obvious personal inadequacies, it is that these mesh seamlessly with the doctrinaire refusal to accept responsibility which permeates their entire world-view. As with Nigel Farage, nothing is ever their fault. Thus, if there were ever to be a public inquiry into Brexit, it can be said, not speculatively but with certainty, that Johnson, Cummings, Frost, Farage, and all those who had leading roles within it, would never, ever accept the truth of the damage they did.
This matters, even though such a public inquiry is not in prospect, because it helps to explain why Brexitism persists in British politics, and why, as regards Brexit specifically, Britain is stuck in an impasse. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be so. There’s really no longer any room for doubt about the damage Brexit has done, most obviously economically, and no serious analyst claims otherwise. And public opinion has firmly turned against it. This leads some to suggest that it should be (relatively) easy to at least begin the process of ‘rejoining’. But there is no realistic route to that whilst a powerful phalanx of politicians and, perhaps as important, media owners and commentators remain as an obdurate, shameless, unrepentant blockage to it.
Brexit and Russia
There is also little sign of shame or penitence within Reform over the Gill scandal. As I mentioned in a recent post, in September Nathan Gill (formerly Reform’s leader in a Wales, UKIP’s leader in Wales, and a UKIP and Brexit Part MEP) pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery from pro-Russian sources to act in their interests whilst he was serving as an MEP. Now, he has been sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison for these offences.
The length of that sentence serves to underscore just how serious his crimes were. This was not some minor lobbying scandal, but sustained corruption by an elected representative in the service, in effect, of a foreign, and none-too-friendly, power. After all, the offences for which he has been sentenced began in December 2018 and ran through to July 2019, whilst in March 2018 Russian agents committed the Novichok attacks in Salisbury. At all events, the police investigation of Gill was undertaken by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror team because, according to Commander Dominic Murphy, he had done “potential damage to national security”.
As I noted in that earlier post, Farage and other Reform leaders have been keen to distance themselves from Gill, and this week Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, tried to dismiss Gill and his offences as “ancient history”. It won’t wash, not least as it was really not so long ago that he held a senior position in Reform. The full details of Gill’s offences are complex, but their timeline, and how they sit within the wider context of the Reform Party and its predecessors, as well as events in Russia and Ukraine, is painstakingly set out by The Nerve, a new independent media outlet [1]. As that report makes clear, there is no suggestion that Farage or other MEPs of his various parties took bribes, but some of those MEPs did say similar things to those which Gill was paid to say. My point is not that this implies any corruption on their part but that Gill was not saying things that ran contrary to views that were shared by his colleagues.
The police are now investigating other British former MEPs, who have (rightly) not been named, nor have the parties they represented, but, whilst these investigations may come to nothing, the political questions for Reform remain. Speaking to Sky News, Keir Starmer said that Farage “needs to launch an investigation into his party to understand how that [Gill’s offences] happened” and that this investigation should look into “what other links are there between Reform and Russia”. LibDem leader Ed Davey has been more forthright:
“A traitor was at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary. Nigel Farage and his party are a danger to national security. Nigel Farage himself was previously paid to be on Putin's TV channel, Russia Today, and said he was the world leader he admires the most. We must all ask – where do his loyalties really lie? We need a full investigation into Russian interference in our politics.”
At one level, all this is a reminder of the still unresolved question of what role Russia played in the 2016 Referendum – a question unresolved primarily because, according to the 2020 ‘Russia report’ by the Intelligence and Security Committee, the government did not investigate it. That report does show, though, that there was Russian interference in both the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2019 General Election, and, in general terms, that “the UK is clearly a target for Russian disinformation”. And, whatever Moscow’s role in the 2016 referendum, it has always been obvious that, at the very least, Brexit was advantageous to Russian interests in terms of destabilizing both the UK and the EU: “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it.
However, it is not necessary to disinter the referendum result to see the salience of Gill’s crimes for the politics of post-Brexit Britain. Except to those on the far-right and far-left of politics, the threat to the UK from Russia is clear and, if anything, escalating, as underlined by several incidents just in the last fortnight, including the incursion of the spy ship Yantar, which used lasers to disrupt the RAF planes tracking its movements, the interception of two Russian vessels in the Channel, and the discovery of a Russian submarine-spying device off the Welsh coast. And these events are just one manifestation of a much wider programme of physical and cyber-incursions amounting to what the former Head of MI5, the former Head of NATO, and the former Head of the Navy and Security Minister all regard an undeclared war.
The wider context of this, of course, is Ukraine, and the possibility that it will be forced into a humiliating ‘peace’ by Trump. With that, Putin would free up the resources, and feel emboldened, to step up the pressure against Europe - which very much includes the UK for, as the Brexiters used to remind us, ‘we are leaving the EU, we’re not leaving Europe’. This was perhaps the only true thing they ever said, and, as is now all too plain to see, Brexit has created an artificial and dangerous separation of the UK from its continent, made all the more dangerous because of Trump and what Trump means for NATO. As I’ve discussed in in the past, there is an obvious and disturbing axis between Putin, Trump, and Brexitism.
It is this context which makes the entire question of Farage’s foreign policy sympathies and allegiances, both as regards Putin and Trump, and his antipathies, as regards the EU, so important. He is, after all, presenting himself as the next Prime Minister and, as we are constantly reminded, his party is leading in the opinion polls. So these sympathies and allegiances, and those of all those within his party, as Gill recently was, are an absolutely legitimate matter for the most intense scrutiny, despite Reform’s attempts to shout down such scrutiny or to depict Gill as a ‘bad apple’ whose behaviour had nothing to do with the party.
Farage has said he will not investigate any Russian links within his party and dismissed the Gill case as “a minor embarrassment”. But no other British politician has been convicted of such offences in modern times (there have been some imprisonments for false accounting over expenses, but that isn’t remotely the same). Perhaps the central claim made by Brexiters was that leaving the EU would mean that voters would be free to hire and fire those who made the laws that governed them. To do that, we need to know the allegiances of those who would make our laws.
Brexit and the Budget
If the run-up to this week’s budget is anything to go by, then the allegiance of our current governing lawmakers is to being as politically maladroit as possible. I certainly can’t remember anything like it. Budget ‘purdah’ has been more honoured in the breach than the observance for some time but, even leaving aside the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) inadvertent revelation of its measures a few minutes before the Chancellor’s speech, the last few months of semi-statement have gone well beyond the now-familiar leaks and hints.
During that apparently almost interminable period, it has been notable that both Rachel Reeves and other government ministers have been increasingly open in identifying Brexit as a cause of Britain’s economic woes. This is a marked change to the far more muted references to it at the time of last year’s budget. But it is still being framed as a problem in the way Brexit was done rather than one of Brexit itself. As Rafael Behr puts it, “the problem is couched as negligent negotiation, not strategic miscalculation”.
That framing was evident in Reeves’ budget speech, which rather shamelessly implied that a new trade deal had been struck with the EU (presumably referring to the ‘reset’, the terms of which remain under negotiation). She also implied an endorsement of the Brexiters’ claim that it is of benefit to have an independent trade policy by speaking referring to deals with the US (which, unless I’ve missed something, has still only been partially implemented, and is in any case only a partial mitigation of Trump’s new tariffs, not a Free Trade Agreement) and with India (which has an estimated value of 0.13% of GDP after 15 years).
It certainly can’t be claimed that any trade policy independence Brexit has brought comes close to compensating for the fact that, as Reeves mentioned, Brexit continues to be identified by the OBR as a drag on UK productivity. Indeed, the OBR itself refers to our great act of national liberation as being one of the “successive shocks” that are responsible for the country’s lack of productivity growth. This latest report also renews the OBR’s “assessment that Brexit will reduce the level of UK productivity by around 4 per cent after 15 years” compared with what it would otherwise have been [2]. As always, it’s worth remembering that this figure (which also implies, as widely quoted, that GDP will be 4% less than otherwise) has a cumulative effect. That is, for each of the 15 years productivity will be lower than it would have been by some figure, reaching 4% in the fifteenth year.
It's true that the OBR did not change its assessment of the Brexit damage for the worse (as had been rumoured prior to the budget, although it did downgrade its overall productivity growth assessment), but the fact that it remains unchanged is significant. It suggests that even as it moves from being entirely a forecast of damage that will be done to being, in part, an estimate of damage that has been done, that forecast seems to the OBR to be holding true. If so, that is not a surprise, as most analysts expect the bulk of the damage will have occurred early in the 15-year period.
Indeed, as summarized in my last post, a recent report from the National Bureau for Economic Research provides a headline estimate suggesting that by 2025 (i.e. already), UK GDP is 6%-8% less than it would otherwise have been. In the run-up to the budget, the LibDem Party requested the House of Commons Library to provide an analysis the implications of that estimate, including for tax revenues. The results were that it would mean that, had it not been for Brexit, in 2024-25 tax revenues would have been between £65 billion and £90 billion higher than they actually were.
If the upper figure were correct, it would be equivalent to the entirety of government spending in that year on education (£89.2 billion). But suppose the true figure were only half of the upper estimate, that would still more than cover the entire defence budget (£37.5 billion). Now suppose the true figure were only a quarter of the lower estimate: then, it would cover the entire 2024-25 budget for both day-to-day spending and capital investment for prisons, the probation service and the criminal justice system (£14.7 billion).
Brexit and immigration
All that is another reminder of the high price we are paying for the stupidity of Brexit, to which should be added the negative impact on tax revenues which can be expected as a result of the large fall in net migration announced yesterday. That announcement, in itself, means that the OBR’s budget forecasts for growth and tax revenue, published just the day before, are likely to be over-optimistic, since it had assumed a less steep fall.
Calculating the impact on tax revenues of falling net migration is extremely complex, because it depends on a large number of variables, but last year the OBR estimated that a fall of 100,000 would increase the deficit by £7 billion. Given the complexity, I’m not sure whether it would be justified to extrapolate from that to say that yesterday’s fall of almost 450,000 in the last 12 months might represent something in the order of a £30 billion reduction in tax revenue, but the impact will certainly be considerable and negative.
And yet, responding to these latest net migration figures, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government would be “going further” to clamp down on immigration, because of the “immense pressure” it supposedly puts on local communities, whilst Keir Starmer said the figures were (only) “a step in the right direction”. Presumably, Mahmood and Starmer believe they will get some political credit for responding to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public, whatever the economic (and human) cost. If so, they are likely to be disappointed: this latest fall continues from that of last year yet, in post-Brexit Britain’s immigration panic, the majority of the public believe that net migration rose in that year, even as they bemoan the tax rises in this year’s budget.
As the broadcaster and author James O’Brien put it when discussing this issue, “we have become a ludicrous country”. And Brexit, which, remember, was supposed to ‘solve’ these ‘legitimate concerns’, has made us even more ludicrous.
Still on the Brexit rack
Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a post discussing the chaotic mess we were in (of which there is plenty more in the posts from that time). Amidst Covid, with the transition period almost over, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement had yet to be finalised and there was every possibility there would be no agreement at all. There’s much in that post which is no longer of great relevance, but it does capture the disarray of the time, which the Hallett report reminds us of. For example, I referred to a leaked letter from the Road Haulage Association, describing the process of working with the government on border issues as “a complete shambles”.
There are other things in that post which are still very much relevant, ranging from the narrowly technical (e.g. my observation that “there will be a myriad of things left in the air even if there is a deal [such as] carbon trading”) to the broadly political (e.g. Keir Starmer’s “near silence” about Brexit and the rumours – which turned out to be true – that he would want Labour MPs to vote for any deal which might be done). At all events, I finished the post by saying:
“Perhaps we need to look instead to Classical mythology to describe our situation, maybe to Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up the hill or, as seems more appropriate to the painfulness of it all, poor old Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle day after day. Prometheus of course was being punished for having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Sisyphus was an all-round bad egg (murdering, cheating, and generally getting above himself). It is not clear what crime we have committed to have to endure the endless torture of Brexit.”
The current news is a reminder that these words still apply.
Notes
[1] There are so many such outlets now that it is always important to look carefully at their credibility, but The Nerve certainly has a good pedigree, having been created by a collective of five former Guardian and Observer journalists. In any case, as regards the report referred to, it collates verifiable information from within the public domain.
[2] For a detailed discussion of the OBR estimate, and assessments of the costs of Brexit generally, see John Springford’s June 2025 report for the Constitution Society/ Federal Trust.
This matters, even though such a public inquiry is not in prospect, because it helps to explain why Brexitism persists in British politics, and why, as regards Brexit specifically, Britain is stuck in an impasse. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be so. There’s really no longer any room for doubt about the damage Brexit has done, most obviously economically, and no serious analyst claims otherwise. And public opinion has firmly turned against it. This leads some to suggest that it should be (relatively) easy to at least begin the process of ‘rejoining’. But there is no realistic route to that whilst a powerful phalanx of politicians and, perhaps as important, media owners and commentators remain as an obdurate, shameless, unrepentant blockage to it.
Brexit and Russia
There is also little sign of shame or penitence within Reform over the Gill scandal. As I mentioned in a recent post, in September Nathan Gill (formerly Reform’s leader in a Wales, UKIP’s leader in Wales, and a UKIP and Brexit Part MEP) pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery from pro-Russian sources to act in their interests whilst he was serving as an MEP. Now, he has been sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison for these offences.
The length of that sentence serves to underscore just how serious his crimes were. This was not some minor lobbying scandal, but sustained corruption by an elected representative in the service, in effect, of a foreign, and none-too-friendly, power. After all, the offences for which he has been sentenced began in December 2018 and ran through to July 2019, whilst in March 2018 Russian agents committed the Novichok attacks in Salisbury. At all events, the police investigation of Gill was undertaken by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror team because, according to Commander Dominic Murphy, he had done “potential damage to national security”.
As I noted in that earlier post, Farage and other Reform leaders have been keen to distance themselves from Gill, and this week Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, tried to dismiss Gill and his offences as “ancient history”. It won’t wash, not least as it was really not so long ago that he held a senior position in Reform. The full details of Gill’s offences are complex, but their timeline, and how they sit within the wider context of the Reform Party and its predecessors, as well as events in Russia and Ukraine, is painstakingly set out by The Nerve, a new independent media outlet [1]. As that report makes clear, there is no suggestion that Farage or other MEPs of his various parties took bribes, but some of those MEPs did say similar things to those which Gill was paid to say. My point is not that this implies any corruption on their part but that Gill was not saying things that ran contrary to views that were shared by his colleagues.
The police are now investigating other British former MEPs, who have (rightly) not been named, nor have the parties they represented, but, whilst these investigations may come to nothing, the political questions for Reform remain. Speaking to Sky News, Keir Starmer said that Farage “needs to launch an investigation into his party to understand how that [Gill’s offences] happened” and that this investigation should look into “what other links are there between Reform and Russia”. LibDem leader Ed Davey has been more forthright:
“A traitor was at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary. Nigel Farage and his party are a danger to national security. Nigel Farage himself was previously paid to be on Putin's TV channel, Russia Today, and said he was the world leader he admires the most. We must all ask – where do his loyalties really lie? We need a full investigation into Russian interference in our politics.”
At one level, all this is a reminder of the still unresolved question of what role Russia played in the 2016 Referendum – a question unresolved primarily because, according to the 2020 ‘Russia report’ by the Intelligence and Security Committee, the government did not investigate it. That report does show, though, that there was Russian interference in both the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2019 General Election, and, in general terms, that “the UK is clearly a target for Russian disinformation”. And, whatever Moscow’s role in the 2016 referendum, it has always been obvious that, at the very least, Brexit was advantageous to Russian interests in terms of destabilizing both the UK and the EU: “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it.
However, it is not necessary to disinter the referendum result to see the salience of Gill’s crimes for the politics of post-Brexit Britain. Except to those on the far-right and far-left of politics, the threat to the UK from Russia is clear and, if anything, escalating, as underlined by several incidents just in the last fortnight, including the incursion of the spy ship Yantar, which used lasers to disrupt the RAF planes tracking its movements, the interception of two Russian vessels in the Channel, and the discovery of a Russian submarine-spying device off the Welsh coast. And these events are just one manifestation of a much wider programme of physical and cyber-incursions amounting to what the former Head of MI5, the former Head of NATO, and the former Head of the Navy and Security Minister all regard an undeclared war.
The wider context of this, of course, is Ukraine, and the possibility that it will be forced into a humiliating ‘peace’ by Trump. With that, Putin would free up the resources, and feel emboldened, to step up the pressure against Europe - which very much includes the UK for, as the Brexiters used to remind us, ‘we are leaving the EU, we’re not leaving Europe’. This was perhaps the only true thing they ever said, and, as is now all too plain to see, Brexit has created an artificial and dangerous separation of the UK from its continent, made all the more dangerous because of Trump and what Trump means for NATO. As I’ve discussed in in the past, there is an obvious and disturbing axis between Putin, Trump, and Brexitism.
It is this context which makes the entire question of Farage’s foreign policy sympathies and allegiances, both as regards Putin and Trump, and his antipathies, as regards the EU, so important. He is, after all, presenting himself as the next Prime Minister and, as we are constantly reminded, his party is leading in the opinion polls. So these sympathies and allegiances, and those of all those within his party, as Gill recently was, are an absolutely legitimate matter for the most intense scrutiny, despite Reform’s attempts to shout down such scrutiny or to depict Gill as a ‘bad apple’ whose behaviour had nothing to do with the party.
Farage has said he will not investigate any Russian links within his party and dismissed the Gill case as “a minor embarrassment”. But no other British politician has been convicted of such offences in modern times (there have been some imprisonments for false accounting over expenses, but that isn’t remotely the same). Perhaps the central claim made by Brexiters was that leaving the EU would mean that voters would be free to hire and fire those who made the laws that governed them. To do that, we need to know the allegiances of those who would make our laws.
Brexit and the Budget
If the run-up to this week’s budget is anything to go by, then the allegiance of our current governing lawmakers is to being as politically maladroit as possible. I certainly can’t remember anything like it. Budget ‘purdah’ has been more honoured in the breach than the observance for some time but, even leaving aside the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) inadvertent revelation of its measures a few minutes before the Chancellor’s speech, the last few months of semi-statement have gone well beyond the now-familiar leaks and hints.
During that apparently almost interminable period, it has been notable that both Rachel Reeves and other government ministers have been increasingly open in identifying Brexit as a cause of Britain’s economic woes. This is a marked change to the far more muted references to it at the time of last year’s budget. But it is still being framed as a problem in the way Brexit was done rather than one of Brexit itself. As Rafael Behr puts it, “the problem is couched as negligent negotiation, not strategic miscalculation”.
That framing was evident in Reeves’ budget speech, which rather shamelessly implied that a new trade deal had been struck with the EU (presumably referring to the ‘reset’, the terms of which remain under negotiation). She also implied an endorsement of the Brexiters’ claim that it is of benefit to have an independent trade policy by speaking referring to deals with the US (which, unless I’ve missed something, has still only been partially implemented, and is in any case only a partial mitigation of Trump’s new tariffs, not a Free Trade Agreement) and with India (which has an estimated value of 0.13% of GDP after 15 years).
It certainly can’t be claimed that any trade policy independence Brexit has brought comes close to compensating for the fact that, as Reeves mentioned, Brexit continues to be identified by the OBR as a drag on UK productivity. Indeed, the OBR itself refers to our great act of national liberation as being one of the “successive shocks” that are responsible for the country’s lack of productivity growth. This latest report also renews the OBR’s “assessment that Brexit will reduce the level of UK productivity by around 4 per cent after 15 years” compared with what it would otherwise have been [2]. As always, it’s worth remembering that this figure (which also implies, as widely quoted, that GDP will be 4% less than otherwise) has a cumulative effect. That is, for each of the 15 years productivity will be lower than it would have been by some figure, reaching 4% in the fifteenth year.
It's true that the OBR did not change its assessment of the Brexit damage for the worse (as had been rumoured prior to the budget, although it did downgrade its overall productivity growth assessment), but the fact that it remains unchanged is significant. It suggests that even as it moves from being entirely a forecast of damage that will be done to being, in part, an estimate of damage that has been done, that forecast seems to the OBR to be holding true. If so, that is not a surprise, as most analysts expect the bulk of the damage will have occurred early in the 15-year period.
Indeed, as summarized in my last post, a recent report from the National Bureau for Economic Research provides a headline estimate suggesting that by 2025 (i.e. already), UK GDP is 6%-8% less than it would otherwise have been. In the run-up to the budget, the LibDem Party requested the House of Commons Library to provide an analysis the implications of that estimate, including for tax revenues. The results were that it would mean that, had it not been for Brexit, in 2024-25 tax revenues would have been between £65 billion and £90 billion higher than they actually were.
If the upper figure were correct, it would be equivalent to the entirety of government spending in that year on education (£89.2 billion). But suppose the true figure were only half of the upper estimate, that would still more than cover the entire defence budget (£37.5 billion). Now suppose the true figure were only a quarter of the lower estimate: then, it would cover the entire 2024-25 budget for both day-to-day spending and capital investment for prisons, the probation service and the criminal justice system (£14.7 billion).
Brexit and immigration
All that is another reminder of the high price we are paying for the stupidity of Brexit, to which should be added the negative impact on tax revenues which can be expected as a result of the large fall in net migration announced yesterday. That announcement, in itself, means that the OBR’s budget forecasts for growth and tax revenue, published just the day before, are likely to be over-optimistic, since it had assumed a less steep fall.
Calculating the impact on tax revenues of falling net migration is extremely complex, because it depends on a large number of variables, but last year the OBR estimated that a fall of 100,000 would increase the deficit by £7 billion. Given the complexity, I’m not sure whether it would be justified to extrapolate from that to say that yesterday’s fall of almost 450,000 in the last 12 months might represent something in the order of a £30 billion reduction in tax revenue, but the impact will certainly be considerable and negative.
And yet, responding to these latest net migration figures, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government would be “going further” to clamp down on immigration, because of the “immense pressure” it supposedly puts on local communities, whilst Keir Starmer said the figures were (only) “a step in the right direction”. Presumably, Mahmood and Starmer believe they will get some political credit for responding to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public, whatever the economic (and human) cost. If so, they are likely to be disappointed: this latest fall continues from that of last year yet, in post-Brexit Britain’s immigration panic, the majority of the public believe that net migration rose in that year, even as they bemoan the tax rises in this year’s budget.
As the broadcaster and author James O’Brien put it when discussing this issue, “we have become a ludicrous country”. And Brexit, which, remember, was supposed to ‘solve’ these ‘legitimate concerns’, has made us even more ludicrous.
Still on the Brexit rack
Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a post discussing the chaotic mess we were in (of which there is plenty more in the posts from that time). Amidst Covid, with the transition period almost over, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement had yet to be finalised and there was every possibility there would be no agreement at all. There’s much in that post which is no longer of great relevance, but it does capture the disarray of the time, which the Hallett report reminds us of. For example, I referred to a leaked letter from the Road Haulage Association, describing the process of working with the government on border issues as “a complete shambles”.
There are other things in that post which are still very much relevant, ranging from the narrowly technical (e.g. my observation that “there will be a myriad of things left in the air even if there is a deal [such as] carbon trading”) to the broadly political (e.g. Keir Starmer’s “near silence” about Brexit and the rumours – which turned out to be true – that he would want Labour MPs to vote for any deal which might be done). At all events, I finished the post by saying:
“Perhaps we need to look instead to Classical mythology to describe our situation, maybe to Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up the hill or, as seems more appropriate to the painfulness of it all, poor old Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle day after day. Prometheus of course was being punished for having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Sisyphus was an all-round bad egg (murdering, cheating, and generally getting above himself). It is not clear what crime we have committed to have to endure the endless torture of Brexit.”
The current news is a reminder that these words still apply.
Notes
[1] There are so many such outlets now that it is always important to look carefully at their credibility, but The Nerve certainly has a good pedigree, having been created by a collective of five former Guardian and Observer journalists. In any case, as regards the report referred to, it collates verifiable information from within the public domain.
[2] For a detailed discussion of the OBR estimate, and assessments of the costs of Brexit generally, see John Springford’s June 2025 report for the Constitution Society/ Federal Trust.
Friday, 14 November 2025
Stasis, sanctimony, and the liberal paradox
Events of the last fortnight are a good illustration of why I recently re-focused and re-titled this blog to Brexit and Brexitism. For the Brexit news, in a narrow sense, is meagre, whereas there is such a profusion of reports of the battle for and against Brexitism that it is hardly possible to discuss them all in a single post.
Brexit: damage and a damaging stasis
On Brexit itself, there has been a new estimate of the economic damage it has wrought, with the publication of a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it is even worse than previous estimates suggested. The authors’ findings, in summary, are that: “We estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12% to 18%, employment by 3% to 4%, and productivity by 3% to 4%.”
As with similar studies, these reductions do not refer to absolute falls in GDP etc., but to the difference between what actually happened to these various measures and estimates of what would have happened otherwise. As such, it is a ‘counterfactual’ study and will undoubtedly be criticised by Brexiters for this, but, as I’ve argued in more detail previously, such studies are the only way of answering what is, by definition, a counterfactual question: is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU?
The scale of the damage, now acknowledged by the government, will only be minimally offset by even the most ambitious version of its reset plans. These plans, which started with such a flurry of optimism and energy in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, were reported to have stalled in a sour stand-off over budget contributions between the UK and, not so much the EU as different views amongst EU member states. However, yesterday, the EU agreed a negotiating mandate, opening the path to formal negotiations.
How long these negotiations will take remains unclear. But reaching an agreement, and the sooner the better, matters, especially to UK businesses who stand to benefit most from the reset but perhaps more importantly to both the UK and the EU in terms of the symbolism of creating a more harmonious partnership in the face of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s madness. Also still unresolved, though scarcely ever mentioned in the UK press, is the UK-EU agreement over Gibraltar.
So the Brexit process continues to rumble on, but there is only so much that can be said about something where, at least in terms of publicly available information, not very much is changing.
The many faces of Farage
On the wider terrain of Brexitism, by contrast, there is plenty to be said. One important development has been Nigel Farage’s attempt to articulate Reform’s economic policy, at a news conference held in the City of London. The venue was itself revealing of an underlying tension. Why hold it in the heart of the globalist elite, the wicked metropolis, not Sunderland or Lowestoft? The answer, of course, is that Farage feels the need to show he would be ‘economically responsible’. For this was the day that he ‘bowed to the bond market’ meaning, for one thing, abandoning as mere “aspirations” the huge tax cuts which, only last year, were supposedly part of Reform’s “contract” with the British people. As with every dodgy business, it pays to read the small print of any contract offered by Reform 2025 Ltd and its predecessors.
In abandoning his former commitments, Farage also implicitly abandoned his erstwhile enthusiasm for the Trussonomics of the mini-budget. It says something that a politician who constantly claims to be straight-talking chooses to conceal his core economic beliefs because they are too toxic for public consumption. Farage and his party are equally mealy-mouthed in floating, but not advocating outright, the ideas of reducing the youth minimum wage and ending the triple-lock on state pensions. It’s an old political trick, designed to entice those voters who find policies attractive with the hope they will be delivered, whilst retaining voters who find them unattractive by allowing them to hope these policies will never be put into practice.
The tension also derives from electoral calculation. Farage is desperate to present Reform as a government in waiting, but his core vote isn’t quite enough to assure that outcome, so he needs to broaden his support to take in (in both senses of the term) more mainstream voters. Yet at the same time, his central pitch is to be outside the mainstream of politics and to mobilize an insurgency. Anyone excited by the prospect of that will surely have been sent into a deep and disappointed sleep by the stale ideas of ‘responsible Farage’: vague platitudes about welfare cuts, tax breaks for wealth-creating entrepreneurs, slashing red-tape, bringing business people in to government.
This has been the set menu offered by just about every front-line Tory or Labour politician of the last three or four decades, and even Farage sounded quite bored by it. In fact, he sounded exactly like what he claims not to be, but transparently has been for most of his life: a ‘career politician’. It’s possible that, at some point, ‘responsible Farage’ will spatchcock himself by being insufficiently plausible to those wanting reassurance of his economic orthodoxy whilst alienating those who yearn for political heterodoxy.
Stale, predictable and contradictory
Equally stale, and even more predictable, were his assertions that Brexit hadn’t been done properly and that Reform would take advantage of the, as always unspecified, deregulatory opportunities it presented. He has chosen to forget how Jacob Rees-Mogg – who, whatever else one might say about him, can hardly be accused of ‘not believing in Brexit’ – had, when Minister for Brexit Opportunities, utterly failed to identify any of value. Indeed, Rees-Mogg even came to realise that, far from cutting red tape, the UKCA mark, that symbol of the fallacy of Brexit regulatory independence, actually increased it.
Farage’s only fresh idea was the spectacularly stupid and dangerous one of making the UK a cryptocurrency hub. This has been a Farage hobby-horse for a while, and one of the few areas where he publicly advocates Trumpian economic policies, which he generally avoided at the press conference (though he is becoming increasingly open in advocating the sexual and reproductive rights agenda of the American Christian right). But quite how it is supposed to represent the interests of the ‘ordinary people’ who ‘just want their country back’ is a mystery [1].
It’s a mystery, moreover, which shows the utter hypocrisy of the man who cos-plays at being a man of the people, the champion of the ‘somewheres’ rather than the ‘anywheres’, whilst trousering £40,000 for ten hours work for Nomad Capitalist (admittedly small beer given the approximately £1.2 million he has earned from second jobs since becoming an MP). As its name implies, Nomad is a “company, which heralds a ‘borderless world’, [and] says it helps people ‘obtain a second residency and second citizenship to enhance your freedom and options’, including second residencies, dual citizenship, and tax residency.”
This recurring tension runs, in various forms, throughout Farage’s ideological and electoral positioning, and throughout Brexitism: seeking political power yet being anti-politics; claiming to be pro-worker and anti-elite whilst courting and supporting the super-rich; espousing both nationalism and globalism, protectionism and free trade, economic growth and reduced immigration; supporting left-behind communities but cutting their public services; bemoaning de-industrialization whilst fetishizing the Thatcher era; parading patriotism whilst endlessly decrying the state of Britain and lauding Trump and Putin. Perhaps these tensions will mean the party implodes rather than comes to power. We must hope so, for what makes Reform incoherent now will make it unconscionable in government.
The anti-BBC axis
If Farage and other Brexitists dislike talking about the details of practical policies, nothing makes them more comfortable than getting stuck in to the culture war. Here, neither positivity nor practicality are necessary, just innuendos, smears and synthetic outrage. Ideal, then, for a politics which thrives on grievance and complaint, rather than responsibility or solutions. With the ‘anti-woke’ ‘Restore Trust’ activists having last weekend failed yet again in their longstanding attempt to take over the National Trust council, the Brexitists suddenly found an altogether more satisfying victim to torment as the BBC experienced the latest, and most vociferous, populist assault upon it.
The attacks on the National Trust and the BBC are connected in more than just a general ideological sense. For example, one of the leaked complaints about the BBC is based on criticism of it by the ‘History Reclaimed’ group, which has also been at the forefront of criticising the National Trust for its representations of history. And this is also an illustration of why Brexitism is a useful concept, for several of the members of History Reclaimed were members of the 2018 ‘Brains for Brexit’ group. Moreover, one of these, Robert Tombs, is not only the Founder Editor of History Reclaimed but the Co-Editor of ‘Briefings for Britain’ (formerly ‘Briefings for Brexit’), and there are several other overlaps in the writers/ members of these three groupings.
Of course the loathing of the BBC felt by many on the right is longstanding, going back well before Brexit, and is partly animated by fury that a public service broadcaster can be an international byword for excellence and probity, falsifying free market dogma that private is always best. But, for populists, that very fact of the BBC being a public service broadcaster opens the attack line that it does not reflect ‘the people’s values’ but instead those of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. That accusation of ‘institutional bias’ is at the heart of this latest crisis, arising from the presumably not-at-all accidental leak to the Daily Telegraph of a memo (£) written by Michael Prescott, a former independent (though by no means ideologically neutral) editorial adviser, which recycles many of the familiar populist critiques of the Corporation.
Hobbling, or better still breaking, the BBC would be a massive prize for the Brexitists and, because of its international standing, for the entire global populist network. The active involvement of Trump in the current row gives them their best chance ever, even if his threat of a $1 billion lawsuit comes to nothing. It would also be a prize for Vladimir Putin, hence Russia has enthusiastically joined the attack. It’s telling that, in attacking the BBC, the Brexitists, Trump, and Putin are openly aligned, illustrating the axis between them which I’ve written about previously. The reason is that the BBC is indeed ‘liberal’, not in the fatuous sense of being ‘woke’ or biased towards liberal causes but in the deeper sense that it embodies, or seeks to embody, something like the Liberal Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, and pluralism.
The BBC’s liberalism
There’s plenty that could be discussed about those values, which have been criticized as much by the postmodern left as the populist right, but it’s not clear to me, at least, that there is preferable set of values for a public service broadcaster and it’s certainly easy to envisage far worse ones. Nor is it necessary to claim that the BBC always lives up to those values in every part of its huge output in order to sustain the view that they are desirable as principles. It’s certainly grotesque that so much sanctimony is being spouted about what was, undoubtedly, an editorial mistake in relation to the Trump clip by those, including Trump himself, who daily ‘flood the zone’ with dis- and mis-information. Cant rather than Kant, so to speak. But, as Lewis Goodall wrote this week, “we all know it isn’t really about the Panorama edit.”
In their very nature, its values make the BBC liable to endless critique, especially in relation to the complex issue of ‘impartiality’ of political reporting, because such impartiality is itself irredeemably contestable. This leads the BBC into essentially insoluble conundrums, shown by its often misguided attempts to give equal weight to ‘both sides’ of arguments even when they do not warrant such equal treatment, which can be infuriating to people of all kinds of political persuasions, including liberals. But that infuriation is different to the fundamental incompatibility between populism and liberal pluralism [2], which exists because the defining feature of populism is its assertion of the existence of a unitary ‘people’ with a unitary set of ‘common sense’ values: the antithesis of pluralism.
A BBC news and current affairs operation (and, in the present context, it is this, rather than its entertainment operation, which is at stake) run on these lines would look rather like GB News. As such, it could not possibly function as a public service broadcaster precisely because, as a matter of fact, the public are not a single people with a single set of values. The word ‘fact’ is germane in a wider sense, too, since the Liberal Enlightenment commitment to the primacy of rationality and evidence is fundamentally at odds with populism’s valorization of emotion and belief.
Meanwhile, the nihilistic, anti-institutional strand of populism, which makes it different to traditional Conservatism, finds the very existence of the BBC an affront. In fact, to understand what has happened to British Conservatism in recent years, it is instructive to compare the responses to the current BBC row of, respectively, former Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten and former Tory PM Liz Truss, especially as regards the way they talk about institutions and independence. The former speaks pragmatically of their necessary imperfection and the complexities of independence, whilst the latter angrily dismisses them “captured”.
Of course it is a paradox of liberal pluralism generally, and one long understood and exploited by illiberal politicians [3], that it gives succour and sustenance to its most implacable enemies. The BBC exemplifies this since, for all their constant complaints about its bias against them, populist politicians and ideologues are afforded ample, even extravagant, amounts of its air time. The generosity with which the BBC has hosted Nigel Farage, not just now he heads a poll-leading party but for decades, is only the most obvious example. Beyond that are things like the ubiquitous presence of Tufton Street think-tankers or contrarian commentators on every discussion programme from, say, BBC One’s Question Time to Radio Four’s Moral Maze (surely the most flatulently self-important and uninformative show in the entire history of broadcasting, but that’s by the way).
The current crisis further illustrates this paradox. On the one hand, as with every such crisis, it is the BBC itself which provides the most extensive coverage of its own problems, in an orgy of self-flagellation born of a determination not to be seen as aloof and unresponsive and, precisely, a commitment to ‘impartiality’. On the other hand, the very existence of the ‘independent’ editorial adviser at the heart of the row derives from previous attempts by the BBC to show its openness to criticism and to tackle the biases of which it is accused. Indeed, in recent years the BBC has bent over backwards to appease its right-wing critics, to the extent of allowing them a power base of political appointees on its board, and these are the very people who have precipitated this latest crisis.
In short, the BBC has sought to assuage its populist critics by deploying precisely the kind of liberal pluralism which those critics despise and yet upon which they thrive.
The unappeasable
This in turn illustrates something else. Whatever the BBC does it will not satisfy its populist critics, who will always demand more. No resignations, no apologies, no reforms will ever be enough. It can never, as it was advocated to do this week by Tory Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston, “grovel” sufficiently, and the use of this distasteful term was itself revealing. It remains to be seen whether the BBC now realizes this, or whether it will once again try to appease its unappeasable critics.
In this respect, the situation of the BBC is just one, albeit important, example of the bigger problem for liberal pluralism in responding to populism. As we saw with Brexit, every attempt to satisfy Brexiters just led to them demanding an even harder version of Brexit. Similarly, as the Labour government still has not grasped, no matter how hard an anti-immigration policy it enacts, Brexitists will never say that it is hard enough, and will always demand something even more extreme. The liberal pluralist instinct to recognize ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration and to meet them half-way, or more than half-way, is never met with reciprocation by populists who, if anything, simply see it as a sign of weakness.
On the latter topic, the increasingly beleaguered government’s dismal and self-defeating descent continues. Even as it desperately seeks economic growth, it pursues policies to lower immigration which are to the detriment of economic growth, in the hope of political advantage. But does Keir Starmer – or perhaps more pertinently Morgan McSweeney – really think that doing so will ever cause Reform or the Tories to say that they have gone far enough? Or that they, and more importantly voters, will accept the damage of lower economic growth as a price worth paying?
The latest wheeze takes us right back to Brexit, and brings an irony so glaring that it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In January 1973 the UK and Denmark joined what was then the EEC. In 2020 the UK left the EU, in large part in order to ‘take back control’ of immigration by gaining the freedom to implement an ‘Aussie-style points-based system’. Now, in 2025, the British government proposes to emulate the tough approach of … Denmark.
Notes
[1] What may be less of a mystery is how it serves Farage’s interests. Private Eye (‘Fair Tether Friend’ #1661, p.7, no link available) recently reported that in an interview on LBC, Farage’s advocacy for London becoming a global hub for cryptocurrency went alongside his boosterish comments about Tether, “a cryptocurrency described as a money-launderer’s dream”. After mentioning that Reform has just begun accepting crypto donations (see also Reuters’ report), the Eye goes on to note that a significant shareholder in Tether is “the Thailand-based British Tech investor Christopher Harborne”, who has “previously handed the [Reform] party a whopping £10 million” and “shelled out more than £60,000 to cover the travel and accommodation costs for two trips Farage has made to the US since being elected an MP …” By the way, just this week there are signs that Farage will get his way about UK cryptocurrency regulation or, more accurately, that the pressure from Trump is moving things in that direction (£), once again exposing the nonsense of the Brexiters’ naïve ideas about sovereignty.
[2] Which is why, at the present juncture, those who are infuriated with the BBC for those kinds of reasons need to be careful what they wish for. For all its flaws, its defence is now one of the front lines in the battle to save Britain from Brexitism.
[3] The starkest illustration of this is the infamous line in Joseph Goebbels’ 1928 essay: “We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us.”
Brexit: damage and a damaging stasis
On Brexit itself, there has been a new estimate of the economic damage it has wrought, with the publication of a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it is even worse than previous estimates suggested. The authors’ findings, in summary, are that: “We estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12% to 18%, employment by 3% to 4%, and productivity by 3% to 4%.”
As with similar studies, these reductions do not refer to absolute falls in GDP etc., but to the difference between what actually happened to these various measures and estimates of what would have happened otherwise. As such, it is a ‘counterfactual’ study and will undoubtedly be criticised by Brexiters for this, but, as I’ve argued in more detail previously, such studies are the only way of answering what is, by definition, a counterfactual question: is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU?
The scale of the damage, now acknowledged by the government, will only be minimally offset by even the most ambitious version of its reset plans. These plans, which started with such a flurry of optimism and energy in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, were reported to have stalled in a sour stand-off over budget contributions between the UK and, not so much the EU as different views amongst EU member states. However, yesterday, the EU agreed a negotiating mandate, opening the path to formal negotiations.
How long these negotiations will take remains unclear. But reaching an agreement, and the sooner the better, matters, especially to UK businesses who stand to benefit most from the reset but perhaps more importantly to both the UK and the EU in terms of the symbolism of creating a more harmonious partnership in the face of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s madness. Also still unresolved, though scarcely ever mentioned in the UK press, is the UK-EU agreement over Gibraltar.
So the Brexit process continues to rumble on, but there is only so much that can be said about something where, at least in terms of publicly available information, not very much is changing.
The many faces of Farage
On the wider terrain of Brexitism, by contrast, there is plenty to be said. One important development has been Nigel Farage’s attempt to articulate Reform’s economic policy, at a news conference held in the City of London. The venue was itself revealing of an underlying tension. Why hold it in the heart of the globalist elite, the wicked metropolis, not Sunderland or Lowestoft? The answer, of course, is that Farage feels the need to show he would be ‘economically responsible’. For this was the day that he ‘bowed to the bond market’ meaning, for one thing, abandoning as mere “aspirations” the huge tax cuts which, only last year, were supposedly part of Reform’s “contract” with the British people. As with every dodgy business, it pays to read the small print of any contract offered by Reform 2025 Ltd and its predecessors.
In abandoning his former commitments, Farage also implicitly abandoned his erstwhile enthusiasm for the Trussonomics of the mini-budget. It says something that a politician who constantly claims to be straight-talking chooses to conceal his core economic beliefs because they are too toxic for public consumption. Farage and his party are equally mealy-mouthed in floating, but not advocating outright, the ideas of reducing the youth minimum wage and ending the triple-lock on state pensions. It’s an old political trick, designed to entice those voters who find policies attractive with the hope they will be delivered, whilst retaining voters who find them unattractive by allowing them to hope these policies will never be put into practice.
The tension also derives from electoral calculation. Farage is desperate to present Reform as a government in waiting, but his core vote isn’t quite enough to assure that outcome, so he needs to broaden his support to take in (in both senses of the term) more mainstream voters. Yet at the same time, his central pitch is to be outside the mainstream of politics and to mobilize an insurgency. Anyone excited by the prospect of that will surely have been sent into a deep and disappointed sleep by the stale ideas of ‘responsible Farage’: vague platitudes about welfare cuts, tax breaks for wealth-creating entrepreneurs, slashing red-tape, bringing business people in to government.
This has been the set menu offered by just about every front-line Tory or Labour politician of the last three or four decades, and even Farage sounded quite bored by it. In fact, he sounded exactly like what he claims not to be, but transparently has been for most of his life: a ‘career politician’. It’s possible that, at some point, ‘responsible Farage’ will spatchcock himself by being insufficiently plausible to those wanting reassurance of his economic orthodoxy whilst alienating those who yearn for political heterodoxy.
Stale, predictable and contradictory
Equally stale, and even more predictable, were his assertions that Brexit hadn’t been done properly and that Reform would take advantage of the, as always unspecified, deregulatory opportunities it presented. He has chosen to forget how Jacob Rees-Mogg – who, whatever else one might say about him, can hardly be accused of ‘not believing in Brexit’ – had, when Minister for Brexit Opportunities, utterly failed to identify any of value. Indeed, Rees-Mogg even came to realise that, far from cutting red tape, the UKCA mark, that symbol of the fallacy of Brexit regulatory independence, actually increased it.
Farage’s only fresh idea was the spectacularly stupid and dangerous one of making the UK a cryptocurrency hub. This has been a Farage hobby-horse for a while, and one of the few areas where he publicly advocates Trumpian economic policies, which he generally avoided at the press conference (though he is becoming increasingly open in advocating the sexual and reproductive rights agenda of the American Christian right). But quite how it is supposed to represent the interests of the ‘ordinary people’ who ‘just want their country back’ is a mystery [1].
It’s a mystery, moreover, which shows the utter hypocrisy of the man who cos-plays at being a man of the people, the champion of the ‘somewheres’ rather than the ‘anywheres’, whilst trousering £40,000 for ten hours work for Nomad Capitalist (admittedly small beer given the approximately £1.2 million he has earned from second jobs since becoming an MP). As its name implies, Nomad is a “company, which heralds a ‘borderless world’, [and] says it helps people ‘obtain a second residency and second citizenship to enhance your freedom and options’, including second residencies, dual citizenship, and tax residency.”
This recurring tension runs, in various forms, throughout Farage’s ideological and electoral positioning, and throughout Brexitism: seeking political power yet being anti-politics; claiming to be pro-worker and anti-elite whilst courting and supporting the super-rich; espousing both nationalism and globalism, protectionism and free trade, economic growth and reduced immigration; supporting left-behind communities but cutting their public services; bemoaning de-industrialization whilst fetishizing the Thatcher era; parading patriotism whilst endlessly decrying the state of Britain and lauding Trump and Putin. Perhaps these tensions will mean the party implodes rather than comes to power. We must hope so, for what makes Reform incoherent now will make it unconscionable in government.
The anti-BBC axis
If Farage and other Brexitists dislike talking about the details of practical policies, nothing makes them more comfortable than getting stuck in to the culture war. Here, neither positivity nor practicality are necessary, just innuendos, smears and synthetic outrage. Ideal, then, for a politics which thrives on grievance and complaint, rather than responsibility or solutions. With the ‘anti-woke’ ‘Restore Trust’ activists having last weekend failed yet again in their longstanding attempt to take over the National Trust council, the Brexitists suddenly found an altogether more satisfying victim to torment as the BBC experienced the latest, and most vociferous, populist assault upon it.
The attacks on the National Trust and the BBC are connected in more than just a general ideological sense. For example, one of the leaked complaints about the BBC is based on criticism of it by the ‘History Reclaimed’ group, which has also been at the forefront of criticising the National Trust for its representations of history. And this is also an illustration of why Brexitism is a useful concept, for several of the members of History Reclaimed were members of the 2018 ‘Brains for Brexit’ group. Moreover, one of these, Robert Tombs, is not only the Founder Editor of History Reclaimed but the Co-Editor of ‘Briefings for Britain’ (formerly ‘Briefings for Brexit’), and there are several other overlaps in the writers/ members of these three groupings.
Of course the loathing of the BBC felt by many on the right is longstanding, going back well before Brexit, and is partly animated by fury that a public service broadcaster can be an international byword for excellence and probity, falsifying free market dogma that private is always best. But, for populists, that very fact of the BBC being a public service broadcaster opens the attack line that it does not reflect ‘the people’s values’ but instead those of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. That accusation of ‘institutional bias’ is at the heart of this latest crisis, arising from the presumably not-at-all accidental leak to the Daily Telegraph of a memo (£) written by Michael Prescott, a former independent (though by no means ideologically neutral) editorial adviser, which recycles many of the familiar populist critiques of the Corporation.
Hobbling, or better still breaking, the BBC would be a massive prize for the Brexitists and, because of its international standing, for the entire global populist network. The active involvement of Trump in the current row gives them their best chance ever, even if his threat of a $1 billion lawsuit comes to nothing. It would also be a prize for Vladimir Putin, hence Russia has enthusiastically joined the attack. It’s telling that, in attacking the BBC, the Brexitists, Trump, and Putin are openly aligned, illustrating the axis between them which I’ve written about previously. The reason is that the BBC is indeed ‘liberal’, not in the fatuous sense of being ‘woke’ or biased towards liberal causes but in the deeper sense that it embodies, or seeks to embody, something like the Liberal Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, and pluralism.
The BBC’s liberalism
There’s plenty that could be discussed about those values, which have been criticized as much by the postmodern left as the populist right, but it’s not clear to me, at least, that there is preferable set of values for a public service broadcaster and it’s certainly easy to envisage far worse ones. Nor is it necessary to claim that the BBC always lives up to those values in every part of its huge output in order to sustain the view that they are desirable as principles. It’s certainly grotesque that so much sanctimony is being spouted about what was, undoubtedly, an editorial mistake in relation to the Trump clip by those, including Trump himself, who daily ‘flood the zone’ with dis- and mis-information. Cant rather than Kant, so to speak. But, as Lewis Goodall wrote this week, “we all know it isn’t really about the Panorama edit.”
In their very nature, its values make the BBC liable to endless critique, especially in relation to the complex issue of ‘impartiality’ of political reporting, because such impartiality is itself irredeemably contestable. This leads the BBC into essentially insoluble conundrums, shown by its often misguided attempts to give equal weight to ‘both sides’ of arguments even when they do not warrant such equal treatment, which can be infuriating to people of all kinds of political persuasions, including liberals. But that infuriation is different to the fundamental incompatibility between populism and liberal pluralism [2], which exists because the defining feature of populism is its assertion of the existence of a unitary ‘people’ with a unitary set of ‘common sense’ values: the antithesis of pluralism.
A BBC news and current affairs operation (and, in the present context, it is this, rather than its entertainment operation, which is at stake) run on these lines would look rather like GB News. As such, it could not possibly function as a public service broadcaster precisely because, as a matter of fact, the public are not a single people with a single set of values. The word ‘fact’ is germane in a wider sense, too, since the Liberal Enlightenment commitment to the primacy of rationality and evidence is fundamentally at odds with populism’s valorization of emotion and belief.
Meanwhile, the nihilistic, anti-institutional strand of populism, which makes it different to traditional Conservatism, finds the very existence of the BBC an affront. In fact, to understand what has happened to British Conservatism in recent years, it is instructive to compare the responses to the current BBC row of, respectively, former Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten and former Tory PM Liz Truss, especially as regards the way they talk about institutions and independence. The former speaks pragmatically of their necessary imperfection and the complexities of independence, whilst the latter angrily dismisses them “captured”.
Of course it is a paradox of liberal pluralism generally, and one long understood and exploited by illiberal politicians [3], that it gives succour and sustenance to its most implacable enemies. The BBC exemplifies this since, for all their constant complaints about its bias against them, populist politicians and ideologues are afforded ample, even extravagant, amounts of its air time. The generosity with which the BBC has hosted Nigel Farage, not just now he heads a poll-leading party but for decades, is only the most obvious example. Beyond that are things like the ubiquitous presence of Tufton Street think-tankers or contrarian commentators on every discussion programme from, say, BBC One’s Question Time to Radio Four’s Moral Maze (surely the most flatulently self-important and uninformative show in the entire history of broadcasting, but that’s by the way).
The current crisis further illustrates this paradox. On the one hand, as with every such crisis, it is the BBC itself which provides the most extensive coverage of its own problems, in an orgy of self-flagellation born of a determination not to be seen as aloof and unresponsive and, precisely, a commitment to ‘impartiality’. On the other hand, the very existence of the ‘independent’ editorial adviser at the heart of the row derives from previous attempts by the BBC to show its openness to criticism and to tackle the biases of which it is accused. Indeed, in recent years the BBC has bent over backwards to appease its right-wing critics, to the extent of allowing them a power base of political appointees on its board, and these are the very people who have precipitated this latest crisis.
In short, the BBC has sought to assuage its populist critics by deploying precisely the kind of liberal pluralism which those critics despise and yet upon which they thrive.
The unappeasable
This in turn illustrates something else. Whatever the BBC does it will not satisfy its populist critics, who will always demand more. No resignations, no apologies, no reforms will ever be enough. It can never, as it was advocated to do this week by Tory Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston, “grovel” sufficiently, and the use of this distasteful term was itself revealing. It remains to be seen whether the BBC now realizes this, or whether it will once again try to appease its unappeasable critics.
In this respect, the situation of the BBC is just one, albeit important, example of the bigger problem for liberal pluralism in responding to populism. As we saw with Brexit, every attempt to satisfy Brexiters just led to them demanding an even harder version of Brexit. Similarly, as the Labour government still has not grasped, no matter how hard an anti-immigration policy it enacts, Brexitists will never say that it is hard enough, and will always demand something even more extreme. The liberal pluralist instinct to recognize ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration and to meet them half-way, or more than half-way, is never met with reciprocation by populists who, if anything, simply see it as a sign of weakness.
On the latter topic, the increasingly beleaguered government’s dismal and self-defeating descent continues. Even as it desperately seeks economic growth, it pursues policies to lower immigration which are to the detriment of economic growth, in the hope of political advantage. But does Keir Starmer – or perhaps more pertinently Morgan McSweeney – really think that doing so will ever cause Reform or the Tories to say that they have gone far enough? Or that they, and more importantly voters, will accept the damage of lower economic growth as a price worth paying?
The latest wheeze takes us right back to Brexit, and brings an irony so glaring that it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In January 1973 the UK and Denmark joined what was then the EEC. In 2020 the UK left the EU, in large part in order to ‘take back control’ of immigration by gaining the freedom to implement an ‘Aussie-style points-based system’. Now, in 2025, the British government proposes to emulate the tough approach of … Denmark.
Notes
[1] What may be less of a mystery is how it serves Farage’s interests. Private Eye (‘Fair Tether Friend’ #1661, p.7, no link available) recently reported that in an interview on LBC, Farage’s advocacy for London becoming a global hub for cryptocurrency went alongside his boosterish comments about Tether, “a cryptocurrency described as a money-launderer’s dream”. After mentioning that Reform has just begun accepting crypto donations (see also Reuters’ report), the Eye goes on to note that a significant shareholder in Tether is “the Thailand-based British Tech investor Christopher Harborne”, who has “previously handed the [Reform] party a whopping £10 million” and “shelled out more than £60,000 to cover the travel and accommodation costs for two trips Farage has made to the US since being elected an MP …” By the way, just this week there are signs that Farage will get his way about UK cryptocurrency regulation or, more accurately, that the pressure from Trump is moving things in that direction (£), once again exposing the nonsense of the Brexiters’ naïve ideas about sovereignty.
[2] Which is why, at the present juncture, those who are infuriated with the BBC for those kinds of reasons need to be careful what they wish for. For all its flaws, its defence is now one of the front lines in the battle to save Britain from Brexitism.
[3] The starkest illustration of this is the infamous line in Joseph Goebbels’ 1928 essay: “We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us.”
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