Despair

I’ve written almost five hundred posts on this blog, which equates to well over a million words, and done so in various moods. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same depth of weariness, bordering on despair, as I have whilst writing this one. And whilst I’m all too well aware of the possibility that this is a projection, and a narcissistic one at that, I can’t help thinking that this feeling is more widely shared, even to the extent of describing the national mood.

It is also one of those times when events are so complex as to require a very long post, and moving so quickly that parts of it may be superseded within hours.

British politics: stuck

At a relatively superficial level, the weariness, if not the despair, is partly because we remain in the ‘pregnant pause’ I identified several weeks ago, and discussed again in my previous post. Many aspects of domestic politics are on hold, awaiting the outcome of next week’s Makerfield by-election. But it’s not as if that is likely to dispel the weariness, which is more to do with the feeling of a polity, and a country, which is stuck. Stuck not just in the sense of being directionless but in the sense of being trapped.

After all, assuming that, as polls increasingly suggest is likely, Andy Burnham wins in Makerfield that seems likely to herald several weeks of a Labour leadership contest ending, potentially, with yet another new Prime Minister. That seems all the more possible with the resignation of the Defence Secretary yesterday, followed by that of the Armed Forces Minister, adding to the existing sense that Keir Starmer’s leadership is in crisis and its days are numbered. Perhaps a Burnham premiership would bring some fresh momentum to politics [1], and some impression of direction, but it’s hard to be optimistic about that, if only because not only are Britain’s problems deeper than its leader but they also tend to militate against any leader being effective.

A sense of stuckness also describes the state of UK-EU relations, and the government’s promised reset. That isn’t a new sense. Despite starting with an urgency of purpose [2] there has been little concrete progress. In my previous post, I noted that the date of the next UK-EU summit had been postponed again, this time to 13 July. That may still happen, but reports are now calling that into question, with the sticking point apparently being the terms of a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS).

Clearly the closer it comes to the 13 July the less likely it is that the summit will happen then and, if it does not, then the political calendar might well mean it could not occur before Autumn (this might be especially so if this summer sees a leadership contest in Britain). Either way, and assuming it happens at all, the government will have taken almost half of its electoral term to reach a substantive reset agreement and, of course, the implementation of all of its provisions is likely to take much longer.

That is frankly pitiful given that the reset was Labour’s central policy on what has been the defining political issue of the last decade, and that David Lammy, the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, said in 2023 that it would be Labour’s “number one” foreign policy priority if they came to power. It is all the more pitiful given the profound changes and dangers in international relations since then. And if it is true (which seems highly plausible) that it is agreeing a YMS which is holding things up then that is not just pitiful but shameful, in two ways. First because it shows a lack of realism, given that this was always the key EU requirement if there was to be a deal on the UK’s priorities. And secondly because it shows another of the ways that the government has chosen to be driven by the anti-immigration agenda of Reform.

The Henry Nowak murder

The latter connects with the much deeper reason why the present moment is not just wearisome but one of despair and, even, fear. It is apparently now inevitable that every time there is a serious crime which has any connection with immigration it will be followed by street violence accompanied by a vicious, frenzied ‘debate’ conducted in terms framed by Nigel Farage and others on the far right, not least because major broadcasters, most importantly the BBC, are prone to adopt that framing. This is not simply an opinion on my part, or an evidence-free jibe: it flows directly from the plans the BBC drew up last year to win over Reform voters, who it feared were losing trust in its output, by changing both its news “story selection” and drama offerings so as to appeal to them.

The latest sequence of events began with the trial of Henry Nowak’s murderer, and to say that this had a connection with immigration is itself to illustrate a discernible shift, since the murderer was a British-born British national. But it is increasingly common within far-right circles to regard Britishness, and especially Englishness, as conditional upon skin colour, a view that has disappeared amongst the majority of the population. The racial aspect is undeniable. No one raised any doubt (nor, of course, should they have) that the white victim, who was born in Britain of Polish descent, and held dual British and Polish nationalities, was British [3].

On this view, any crime committed by someone whose skin is not white is linked to immigration. Indeed the disgraceful remarks [warning: link is to X] made by the US Vice-President J.D. Vance about the crime linked it not just to immigration but to the now prevalent ideology amongst the American right that Europe, including the UK, has undergone “a mass invasion of migrants” and faces civilizational collapse as a result. That same theme appeared last week in Pete Hegseth’s revolting comments during, of all things, his D-Day commemoration speech and it has also been repeatedly restated by Elon Musk.

These interventions from the US are the latest examples of the way that the American right now routinely interferes in the domestic politics of European countries, and always in favour of the far right. The blatant, undisguised racism of those interventions, whilst widespread amongst British rank-and-file social media posters, is not generally made absolutely explicit by Nigel Farage (though, notably, he re-posted without comment Vance’s remarks), and, as regards the Henry Nowak murder, his main line of attack, also made by his American allies, has been the poisonous claim that it illustrated ‘two-tier policing’. The specific accusation is that the police routinely side with ethnic minorities and against white people.

The two-tier policing claim

I don’t imagine that anyone would deny that the police’s treatment of Henry Nowak was awful, and that a truly terrible misjudgment was made by the police officers at the scene. As the trial judge made clear, the main blame for that lies with the murderer and his brother, who repeatedly lied to the police in claiming to have been victims of racial abuse and assault, although a further review is to be held into the police’s conduct. And, as the trial judge also made clear, the blame for Henry Nowak’s death lies entirely with the murderer. The subsequent police investigation seems to have been effective, and the murderer was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. So, to mention two false comparisons repeatedly made – including by Kemi Badenoch – this case bears no resemblance to the George Floyd murder, where the perpetrator was a police officer, or to Stephen Lawrence’s murder, where the police and criminal justice system utterly failed.

In short, this case does not demonstrate the “two-tier policing” or the “anti-white prejudice” Farage claimed, in a preposterously self-important “emergency address” to the nation. Yet such claims had the unsurprising consequence of significant public disorder in Southampton, just as the furore after the Southport murders did (and, as in that case, the treatment of the rioters was treated as further evidence of two-tier policing). Equally unsurprisingly, it turned out that, far from being ‘ordinary decent people’ expressing their ‘legitimate concerns’, many of the Southampton ‘protestors’ were neo-Nazi activists, whilst one of the first to appear in court was a thug with a string of previous convictions for violence.

It has been suggested, not implausibly, that Farage was motivated to stir up, in his words, “pure, cold rage” partly as a distraction from the questions he has sought to avoid about his £5 million gift and partly to respond to the electoral threat from Rupert Lowe’s Restore party in the Makerfield by-election and the more general competition between the two men and their parties. Perhaps, but it is surely the case that, even without those incentives, he would have done the same thing since he routinely does so.

Whatever his motivation, it is just possible that he has miscalculated. There is some evidence (£) that his stance has alienated some of the more moderate voters Reform hopes to attract, whilst the more extreme potential supporters he wants to detach from Lowe’s party are sticking with Restore in Makerfield. Meanwhile, when he raised the issue in one of his rare appearances in the House of Commons, an unusually effective response from Keir Starmer, along with barracking from across the chamber for his refusal to condemn the Southampton violence, demonstrated his isolation and, for once, Farage even looked slightly ashamed of himself.

Northern Ireland

This highly febrile moment was the worst imaginable time for the news that a grotesque attempted murder had been allegedly committed by a Sudanese refugee in Belfast [4]. The case was very different in its details, but the familiar patterns of social media outrage quickly led to far more extreme violence in Belfast than had occurred in Southampton. In Belfast, gangs of masked men sought out individuals and families who were refugees, or simply ‘foreign’, to attack them and burn their homes, along with wider violence against the police and other targets. Evidence is now emerging that a ‘target list’ of immigrants’ addresses had been drawn up months ago, well before this week’s stabbing, suggesting that this was merely a pretext.

These were not, as the Telegraph described (£) them, “protests”. A more accurate term was that used by the Times (£): it was a “pogrom”. That term, more often associated with anti-Semitic violence, has a particular, and controversial, historical association in Northern Ireland, dating back to the 1920s and in that and other ways the meaning of this week’s violence in Northern Ireland is somewhat different to that in mainland Britain. In particular, the legacy of the ‘Troubles’ includes a reservoir of capacity for organized violence amongst terrorist groups, some of which have direct linkages with international neo-Nazi and white supremacist networks. It is also the case that, as Luqman Saeed of Ulster University explained in a London Review of Books essay, the history of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland has inflected contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment in particular ways [5].

As for Farage, if he had indeed felt any sense of shame the previous week there was no sign of it in his response to the Belfast violence as he gloatingly ‘warned’ that “things will continue to kick off” and will continue to do so “over the course of the summer”, whilst claiming that “the vast majority” involved in the disorder are not “bad actors” but (he implied but did not say) just ordinary decent people with legitimate concerns. He could hardly conceal his glee, any more than could those recycling the now-popular predictions of imminent civil war.

The ‘first lie wins’

One of the most thoughtful pieces I’ve read about the police’s conduct in the Henry Nowak case, in the law enforcement journal Police Professional, suggests that it can be explained by “anchoring bias”, the psychological phenomenon whereby the first piece of information received in a particular situation creates a mental reference point through which subsequent information is filtered and interpreted. On this analysis the “first lie wins”, and in this case it was the lie told by the murderer’s brother when he called the police.

Whether or not that analysis explains how the police behaved in this case, it provides a good way of understanding the political discourse around it. Thus within hours of the ‘two-tier policing’ accusation being made, the Policing minister Sarah James at least implicitly accepted it by supporting a review of police anti-racism guidelines. And subsequently, unveiling her proposals to revoke parts of the Equality Act, Kemi Badenoch invoked the case as if it were beyond all question that the police had been motivated by ‘reverse racism’.

But anchoring bias is just one aspect of the more generic, and perhaps more familiar, phenomenon of confirmation bias; the selection and retention of information in line with pre-existing beliefs. This is one way of understanding how the Belfast stabbing, the Southampton and Southport murders, and other cases have become knitted together. In the far-right narrative, there is a wave of uncontrolled crime committed by ‘coloured foreigners’ – whether they be immigrants, descendants of immigrants, or asylum seekers – and, by extension, all such people are suspect and dangerous.

For that narrative to develop and, more especially, to become seen as plausible to those who may not be ideologically pre-disposed to racism or xenophobia requires that only the crimes with some kind of ‘coloured foreigner’ dimension are ‘selected’ for prominence. And whilst confirmation bias may not be a conscious process in many cases, there can be little doubt that for certain political actors and influencers, both within and outside the UK, the selection process is conscious and deliberate. Then, especially if the media follows that selection (and note that this is the exact word used by the BBC to describe its recalibration of “story selection” to gain the trust of Reform voters), a narrative is created which, to the general public, presents a picture where it is not unreasonable to conclude that crime is overwhelmingly of this sort.

That such a dynamic is in play was illustrated by the way that, at around the same time that Nowak’s murderer was sentenced, a white woman who had murdered her neighbour in a frenzied knife attack was sentenced at a court in Maidstone. There was no public outrage. A few weeks before, a neo-Nazi woman was sentenced in Bristol for an axe attack on a Kurdish man, in a case which revealed police failings in the identification of terrorism suspects. There was no public outrage. Similarly, at around the same time as the Belfast stabbing, there was a multiple stabbing at a school in Manchester. For a few hours social media buzzed with speculation that this was ‘yet another immigrant crime’, sometimes explicitly linking it to the Belfast crime. Yet when a suspect was arrested and charged in Manchester, and (so far as has been reported) it became clear that there was no immigration dimension, almost nothing more was made of it.

These are just a few of the examples which could be given, but the point is obvious. None of the latter cases ‘fitted the narrative’ and, whilst all were reported, they were neither given much media prominence nor treated as forming part of any wider pattern. That is not because there is no pattern that could be identified. Actually, every single one of the cases mentioned so far in this post shares the common feature of involving the use of a bladed weapon. But that pattern was not highlighted as relevant and, instead, the cases brought to public prominence were selected so as to construct the ‘immigrant crime wave’ narrative.

It should hardly need saying that this is not to suggest that the Southport murder, Southampton murder, and Belfast attempted murder are anything other than horrific. It is to suggest that there are numerous equally horrific crimes and public opinion is being manipulated into focusing on only some of them in support of a wider ideological agenda.

Looking back at how we got here

The manner in which these kinds of narrative constructions operate is well understood and skillfully exploited by populist politicians in ways which are notoriously difficult to counter. Myth-busting and fact checking are laudable and important activities, but are limited in their impact. The entire Brexit debacle illustrated that all too clearly. We’re now approaching the tenth anniversary of the referendum which, as trailed in recent posts, is shaping up to be an occasion for major reflection and renewed debate, some of which has already started, including a good overview of the economic consequences of Brexit from Professor Jonathan Portes of UKICE.

Right now, though, we have not reached the anniversary of the referendum but are in the anniversary of the campaign and that, too, is being discussed, most notably in a two-part BBC documentary this week (which, disappointingly, chose to adopt a larky, gossipy tone, though that perhaps accurately reflects (£) how the leading players approached it). Because I didn’t start this blog until after the referendum there are no posts here recording that campaign in detail [6] but, recalling it now, I’m struck again by its appalling dishonesty. The most familiar example is the '£350 million week for the NHS’ slogan, and what is so striking about that was not its simple dishonesty but the more knowing, now admitted, dishonesty that it was designed to provoke the refutations which would keep it circulating and lodge it in the public mind: a good example of how the ‘first lie wins’.

It is true that many, perhaps now most, of those who voted to leave now recognize that it was a lie. For that matter, the majority of people now realise that Brexit was a mistake. Yet here we are, ten years on, mired in very similar, although even more dangerous, lies, half-truths, and distortions. As Jonathan Freedland argues in his excellent recent Guardian column, the two are related: we got to this “swamp of lies and disinformation” on “the Brexit bus”.

Very often, as with Farage, the lies are peddled by the same people. Indeed there can hardly be a better than example than Farage, then as now ‘warning’ of “violence on the streets” if “concerns about immigration” are not addressed. Of course the referendum did see violence on the streets: the murder of the MP Jo Cox, shot and stabbed multiple times by a far-right white supremacist, ten years ago almost to the day of this post. At the time, apart from dismissing it as the work of a disturbed individual, with no political significance, Farage worried that it might damage the “momentum” of the campaign to leave the EU and, as ever, portrayed himself as the victim.

The broken cordon sanitaire

It’s this, more than anything else, which explains why the weariness that I, and perhaps others, feel, is close to despair. A generation ago, Enoch Powell occupied a similar political space to that of Farage and even now, no doubt, many of Farage’s supporters consider, in the infamous phrase, that ‘Enoch was right’, referring to his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. That speech saw Powell ejected from the Conservative shadow cabinet but it shouldn’t be forgotten that he became a popular figure amongst the public. It’s also worth recalling that he attracted support from within the traditional Labour movement, became an Ulster Unionist Party MP, and was also one of the leading opponents of membership of what was then the EEC. Nevertheless, Powell became a marginal figure within British politics. There was a kind of cordon sanitaire which inoculated the mainstream from the extreme.

That cordon has now all but disappeared. Not all of that can be attributed to Brexit, but Brexit was the major breach allowing extremism, especially about immigration, to become increasingly respectable whilst stigmatizing attempts to challenge it as being elitist disdain for ‘the will of the people’ and the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the people. This isn’t just a matter of people like Farage and Lowe gaining a presence within mainstream politics, it is mainstream politicians adopting, accepting or pandering to the politics such people espouse.

Starmer has been quite robust, ever since the asylum hostel riots shortly after he first came to power, in condemning far-right violence. Yet he and his government have done nothing to counter the general proposition that immigration and asylum seekers are a ‘problem’ requiring draconian restrictions. Indeed, as regards Brexit, specifically, there can be no doubt that the main reason for the ‘red lines’ is to forestall the return of freedom of movement of people. The most charitable reading of Labour’s approach to immigration is that it is a tactic to de-fang the far right: if so, it is abundantly clear that it has failed.

That has been obvious for a while, from the symbolic violence of ‘raising the flags’ to the literal violence which reached new heights this week. The end-game for those promoting it, whether in the UK or from the US and Russia, is one all too well-known from history. It is for the violence to become so extensive, the whipped-up anger driving it so great, and the public fear it engenders so profound, that an authoritarian regime will be welcomed as the ‘only way to restore order’. Such a regime would then enact a reign of persecution of anyone deemed to be ‘foreign’ and of the ‘enemy within’ who dared to oppose it.

That outcome is by no means inevitable but, this week especially, it feels as it is becoming more likely.
 
Notes

[1] Some readers have, rightly I think, queried the assessment in my previous post that, if Burnham becomes Prime Minister, it will “almost certainly” mean the retention of the Labour red lines at the next general election. On reflection, my assertion, based on inferences from remarks he has made about Brexit generally, rather than any specific comment about the red lines, was too strong. But, given those remarks, at the very least it is fair to say that it can’t be assumed that Burnham will drop the red lines. On the same topic, Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds recently said that government may “reconsider” the red lines, by implication at, rather than before, the next election. We will see.

[2] Some of the post linked to, about the return of governmental competence, reads very badly now! But the account of the initial ‘reset’ activity remains an accurate one.

[3] On the other hand, amongst the social media posts deploring his killing by an ‘immigrant’ some denounced the ‘race treachery’ of the fact that Henry Nowak had a mixed-race nephew (I am not going to link to an example, they are all too disgusting).

[4] There was also an explicitly Brexit-related dimension in that the alleged perpetrator had arrived in Northern Ireland via Ireland. This could have happened before Brexit, of course, but it has re-opened discussion about the border by the DUP and David Frost (warning: link to X), most of it nonsensical, although there could be connections between this issue and the provisions of the Windsor Framework. I will return to this in a future post if the discussion gains traction.

[5] This is a very complicated issue and, despite some comment this week, not as straightforward as seeing the violence as solely coming from the ‘loyalist’ side. I know enough about the complexities of Northern Ireland’s politics to recognize this, but not enough to provide an analysis.

[6] I did, however, post about it at the time on another blog, and looking back I found two posts, in particular, which charted the campaign’s mendacity; one about some of the economic arguments and the other about the grotesque ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ lie.

Please also note my policy on X. Personally, I have not posted there since last December. However, unpleasant as the experience is, I do still read posts on it to try to understand what is discussed there and, on this blog, I link to X-posts when it is the only source of important statements (e.g., in the present post, by JD Vance). I don’t think it is conducive to good analysis simply to ignore such statements because of the platform where they appear, and I don’t think it is right to quote or paraphrase without providing a source. However, because I know that some people want to avoid seeing it and/or providing clicks for it, I now provide a warning whenever a link is to an X-post.

The Brexiter elite are lining up their excuses, but it may backfire on them

Boris Johnson’s much-trailed speech – discussed in more detail in my previous post and witheringly dissected by John Crace – seems already to have sunk without trace. It certainly hasn’t injected the optimism and positivity which he believes is lacking in the government’s approach (and one can, at least, agree that Theresa May hardly exudes or inspires enthusiasm). The reason is something I touched on in that previous post: it was a speech campaigning for Brexit, not a speech about delivering it; a speech for 2016, not 2018.

That is partly about Johnson’s own manifest limitations as a politician, but it is also indicative of the much wider mess that the Brexiters have got themselves – and thereby our country – into. It is by now obvious to all but the most unreflectively doctrinaire amongst them that the process of leaving the EU is going to be far, far more complicated, risky and damaging than the Leave Campaign told voters would be the case. During the campaign every warning was contemptuously dismissed, and yet every one of them has proved to be correct – from the implications for the Irish border, to those for business (see here for the latest damage), to the time constraints on negotiating a deal, to the economic and cultural benefit of freedom of movement to Britain and to Britons, to the impossibility of cut and pasting EU agreements with third countries, right through to the absurdity of the overarching claim that Britain could retain all of the features of EU membership it wanted without having those that it (or at least that Brexiters) disliked.

For that matter, many issues have surfaced which were scarcely, if at all, discussed before the vote. Things like Euratom membership, chemicals and medicine regulation, and all the arcana of international trade such as Rules of Origin, Most Favoured Nation status, or Mutual Recognition Agreements. Almost every day some new aspect or consequence arises, even as the time until Brexit happens drains remorselessly away. On the other hand, no one suddenly discovers some previously unexpected benefit of Brexit. Indeed about the only concrete benefit Brexiters now routinely try to claim is that of having an independent trade policy, the economic value of which will be, at best, nugatory and more than offset by the costs of leaving.

The profound difficulty this poses for Brexiters is that they now have responsibility for what happens. Their policy is the government’s policy, and many of their leading figures – for example Johnson, Fox, Davis, Fernandes, Baker, Raab, Mordaunt, Gove, Leadsom – hold government positions and in some cases have direct responsibility for implementing Brexit. There is no longer any escape from dealing with all of these complex practicalities and they can’t bear it. The absurdity of that is well-illustrated by the way that these Brexiters in government dismiss their own economic forecasts as worthless, if not deliberately biased. But that trick won’t work anymore. Outside of the hardcore, most people, including probably most leave voters, have wised up to the fact that, whatever the exact figures turn out to be, they are only going in one direction.

Johnson’s response, of trying to pretend he is still campaigning, rather than being responsible, for Brexit is ludicrous but relatively urbanely expressed (albeit, not benign). Far more widespread is the vicious aggression exemplified by Digby Jones this week, accusing “remoaners” of “undermining our country” and saying they will be “to blame” for Britain getting a “lousy deal”. This Brexit McCarthyism has been on display since the day after the Referendum – the day, in fact, that, according to this same Digby Jones, “Germany would immediately want a free trade deal” - but will only grow as things get worse for the Brexiters. Anything rather than take responsibility for their failed promises, their ignorance of basic realities, and their lies. Anything to sustain their sense of betrayal and victimhood.

A different kind of evasion comes from those Brexiters who claim that leaving the EU was always going to be damaging, in particular economically, but that people had voted for cultural reasons or for sovereignty and both knew and were prepared to pay the economic price. That may have been true of some leave voters, but it certainly isn’t the way that Brexit was pitched to them. On the contrary, the constant rebuttal of ‘Project Fear’ was in the main an economic claim to the effect that Brexit would at the least have no adverse consequences if not, indeed, that it would have positive consequences.

Moreover, the infamous £350M a week for the NHS lie was nothing if not an economic argument for Brexit. Most Brexiters lightly dismiss this now, with word games or just the open admission that it was a lie. But it was believed by many voters, including some of the poorest (as, for example, this recent report shows). Even the argument about immigration was in part an economic one (the supposed negative effect on wages and public services). Whatever they say now, Brexiters ran a campaign that was every bit as economic-focussed as it was cultural, and that’s not surprising: had they argued for Brexit on purely cultural lines they would have lost the vote. That, indeed, has been admitted by Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings. The deeper point is that economics and culture are not separate things: I heard some leave voters explain their decision in terms of the de-industrialization of their towns. They were bemoaning loss of jobs and loss of community, not just one or the other.

We also now begin to hear another evasion, of a sort beloved by proponents of many political and religious ideologies and for that matter by many a management consultant, that nothing was wrong with the ‘idea’ of Brexit but that its ‘implementation’ was mishandled. So whatever mess we end up with is not ‘proper Brexit’. It’s true that the government have approached Brexit in an incredibly incompetent way – the premature triggering of Article 50 and the consequent election being the most egregious examples – and in this sense have made it even worse than it needed to be. But however it had been handled it would have been damaging, and most (though not all) peddlers of the ‘not a proper Brexit’ line are advocates of UKIP’s approach of unilateral withdrawal without Article 50 or, now, walking out of the talks. Incompetent as the government have been, a Brexit on UKIP lines would have been an order of magnitude worse.

From the moment the Referendum result was announced, when Johnson and Gove stood shocked and blinking like frightened rabbits at their press conference, Brexiters just haven’t been able to get over winning. As I’ve remarked elsewhere, there’s long been a sense that they would really have preferred to lose. Now there’s an increasingly tangible feeling that they see things going wrong and are getting their excuses ready: blame and betrayal being the key words.

Those words may boomerang on them. At the moment there are only small signs of ‘Bregret’ in the opinion polls but there does seem to be a growing realization that the promises made were false. Perhaps for now the sentiment amongst voters is that ‘we should get on with it’ and ‘hope for the best’ – showing the more endearing qualities of the British rather than some of those that have been on display since the vote. Plus, undoubtedly, many voters have tuned out the daily twists and turns of Brexit and will not take much interest until there is some decisive outcome or event. When they tune back in, they are not going to like what they see. Brexiters are preparing for that by lining up a list of culprits and excuses and they may succeed. But they have also ramped up hostility to the ‘out of touch London elite’. When the dust settles, voters may just decide that since it is the Brexiters who are now in charge it is they who now constitute that elite – and they who must shoulder the blame for betraying the unkeepable promises they made.

Why is there so little Bregret and what might change that?

Polling shows relatively little evidence of ‘Bregret’ (Brexit Regret). There has only been a small shift towards people thinking that in retrospect it was the wrong decision to vote to leave, and were there another in or out referendum today there is no real reason to think that the outcome would be different to what it was in 2016.

This might seem surprising in view of the mounting evidence of economic damage and the evident lack of progress in the exit negotiations, and whilst it is quite possible that opinions will change as that evidence continues to grow I suspect that they are unlikely do so to any great extent. That matters, because only sustained and significant polling evidence that a significant majority of people now want to remain will change the political dynamic of Brexit, and if that is going to have any effect there is not much time left for it to happen.

One reason explaining the lack of Bregret goes back to the Referendum itself, which showed that the political saw ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ is not a reliable guide and, hence, the almost entirely transactional case for EU membership put by the Remain campaign failed to win enough support. Hence David Davis’ comment to German business leaders on Friday that it is a mistake to put politics ahead of prosperity was so widely mocked, since that is precisely what Brexit does.

However, that does not mean accepting what is now often said, that the vote to leave was about cultural identity rather than economics. For one thing, the NHS £350M claim, which certainly had some effect on the result, was, for all its well-documented flaws, an economic argument. More generally, apart from the fact motivations to vote leave were variegated (as were those of remain voters) and all single factor explanations are facile, culture and economics are not separate realms but interact in all sorts of ways. For example, during the campaign I heard some leave voters talk about issues of deindustrialisation and its malign effects on community. Their mistake, in my view, was to believe that EU membership was the cause of this and that leaving the EU would redress it – but my point here is rather that these voters made an explicit link between economics and culture.

So instead of thinking about the vote – and any propensity now for Bregret – in terms of economics versus culture I think it is better to think in terms of the gap between Brexit as a symbolic act and Brexit as a series of concrete legal, economic and political arrangements. In a post last May, I wrote about how there is the strange sense from those who argue most vociferously for Brexit that, somehow, Brexit won’t change anything. For example, I’ve seen Brexiters ridicule the idea that leaving the EU could mean needing visas to travel to the EU or that it could mean restrictions on air travel within the EU. Or that security cooperation with EU countries would be diminished. Or that European fruit and vegetables might be less easily sourced. Or that British people would face restrictions on retiring in EU countries. Or, possibly the most ubiquitous (and for those on the receiving end, most hurtful and infuriating) since the referendum, leave voters saying to their friends and neighbours from EU countries: ‘oh, but we didn’t mean you when we said there were too many immigrants’.

I don’t think that these things are necessarily to do with the idea that Britain can ‘cherrypick’ some parts of the EU that they like. Rather, what underlies such sentiments is two related things. One is a taking for granted of the familiar accoutrements of modern life without realising that they are the product of extensive, albeit largely invisible, institutional arrangements. So of course ‘nowadays’ planes fly us to wherever we want without restrictions, as if this were not the outcome of complex agreements such as the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA), and of course we can travel visa-free in Europe, as if that were not the outcome of freedom of movement rights. In some ways, Brexiters, who despise technocrats and bureaucrats and rail against extra-national decision making, also treat it as an act of nature that there are Europe-wide regulatory systems. But they are not an act of nature – they are concrete legal arrangements from which, on Brexit, British citizens can be excluded. There is no ‘of course’ about it.

The related underlying issue is that for many Brexiters the vote to ‘take back control’, with all its emotional resonance, was not thought about in concrete legal or institutional terms but as a kind of symbolic, feel-good act. That, indeed, is the implication of the Brexit White Paper which affirms (para 2.1) that sovereignty was never lost by EU membership but that “it has not always felt like that”.

What this now means is well-illustrated by the Channel 4 News report this week about how Grimsby, where some 70% voted to leave, is now seeking special exemption from any new tariffs or barriers for its principal fish-based industries. There have been similar calls from leave voting areas like Cornwall and Wales for special protection from the loss of EU grants and subsidies. The Grimsby report was widely mocked by remainers for indicating stupidity or hypocrisy, but I think it is better understood as an expression of this disconnect between Brexit as a symbolic act and as something that entails non-symbolic consequences.

The same kind of disconnect can be seen across many aspects of the ongoing Brexit developments. In my previous post I mentioned the example of those Brexiters who are blaming the EU for suggesting that hard Brexit means a hard border in Ireland, rather than being an inevitable consequence of Britain’s choice to leave the single market and customs union. That argument is being heard more and more widely as the border issue rises in public consciousness – for example, it was made very vociferously by the Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley on the BBC’s Dateline London show today.

The underlying thought process seems to be – these are not the consequences that we wanted from the Brexit vote and ‘therefore’ they are either nothing to do with that vote (denial) or are being unnecessarily forced on us by the EU and/or obstructive remainers (blame). It is true that there are some pro-Brexit people who do neither of these things and who not only accept that Brexit brings certain adverse consequences but, even, think that this can be seen as positive in terms of restoring national resilience. I have heard some leave voters say something like this, and it seems to be the view of, for example, pro-Brexit blogger Pete North and, in a different way, one of the Leave campaign’s biggest donors, Peter Hargreaves, the latter arguing that the insecurity caused by Brexit will be fantastic.

This, explicitly in the case of Hargreaves, is the kind of ‘Dunkirk’ vision of Brexit but – whatever else one could say about it – it is not the platform that the Leave campaign fought on, and it certainly does not seem to be how most leave voters see things. The Grimsby voters, for example, appear not to be embracing their new-found insecurity but are seeking an exemption from it, just as those making the Janet Daley argument want there to be no border controls once we have taken back control of our borders. But nor is there any evidence that they regret voting to leave the EU. Writ large, this is significant for those expecting widespread Bregret to put a last minute halt to Brexit. If the consequences of Brexit are either denied or blamed upon the EU, and not attributed to or accepted as resulting from the vote to leave, then no such Bregret can be expected.

If all this is right, then there are only two ways that Bregret could occur. One would be for the narrative to change and for leave voters to link the consequences with their vote. But this is extremely unlikely for basic, psychological reasons - there is a technical term for this which I can’t recall, but it is essentially because people don’t find it easy to admit that they have made a mistake. And that’s likely to be especially so if this is pointed out to them by precisely the disdainful ‘elitists’ and ‘experts’ who proved so ineffective during the campaign.

The second possibility is far more conceivable. It is to redirect the narrative of blame on to the leading figures in the Leave campaign. On to all of those who repeatedly and in various ways claimed that leaving would be easy, and would lead to sunny uplands where cake would be both had and eaten. And on to all those who failed to mention, or denied, the consequences on things as diverse as nuclear medicine and the Irish border. In short, it is far more likely that leave voters will accept the proposition that they were fooled by politicians – as indeed they were – than that they fooled themselves. It is also likely to have far more traction than, for example, repeatedly insisting that the referendum was only advisory, or that only 37% of the electorate voted to leave. The idea that politicians lie is not, after all, an especially outlandish one nor is it an especially complex one. If leave voters – not all of them, but just, say, 20% of them – come to believe that they were lied to about Brexit then Bregret becomes a possibility.

 

Update (19/11/17): Thanks to various people on Twitter for reminding me that the psychological concept that eluded me in the penultimate paragraph was cognitive dissonance. This was, indeed, what I was thinking of. However, Dr Garrett M. Morris has helpfully suggested that a better psychological concept to capture what I was trying to express is one that I was not aware of, namely the backfire effect.

The irrelevance of Boris Johnson

A quick post on the row over Boris Johnson’s Daily Telegraph article (£)*. Most of the attention has been on the reprise of the £350M a week for the NHS claim, which has now led to a dispute between Johnson and the Head of the UK Statistics Authority. That’s important, but its importance resides in something bigger, which is that way that the article overall was no more than a re-run of the arguments made by the Leave campaign during the Referendum. There was nothing whatsoever on the real and pressing issues that Brexit is now giving rise to – the Irish border, the rights of EU citizens, the ‘exit bill’, the nature of any transition arrangements and that to which they would be a transition.

If – as is widely assumed - Johnson’s aspiration is to position himself as a contender to be Prime Minister then I suspect it will misfire badly. The tricks and deceptions that worked for him as de facto leader of the Leave campaign hardly work for a Foreign Secretary trying to become a PM (and may well find him in breach of the Ministerial Code of Conduct). In fact they only serve to re-enforce the damage he has done to himself whilst Foreign Secretary in demonstrating the lack of the statesmanlike qualities he wants to claim for himself. Re-opening the £350M absurdity was especially ill-judged since it has now passed into history as a notorious political lie, disowned even by ardent leavers. He can do himself no good by re-associating with it.

In fact, Johnson has not just done himself harm but has done the remain cause a favour by reviving this row. Our most potent line is to persuade leave voters that what they are going to get from Brexit is not what they were promised, whilst our weakest point is the argument that the decision has now been made and Britain has to get on with it. By going back to a campaign position, in general, and the £350M claim, in particular, that potent line becomes stronger, and that weak point becomes protected.

But all of this – and all of the media coverage of Johnson’s ambitions and Labour attacks on ‘splits within the government’ – is pretty much irrelevant. Political journalists like it because it is about the business-as-usual Westminster game. However, that is not the game which will determine the future of our country. That future is about the remorseless ticking of the Article 50 clock, bringing us ever closer to Britain being a third country, outside of the EU.

None of the complex, practical matters of that are affected by the internal wrangling in the Tory Party. It is relevant only to the extent that it is a reminder that it is impossible for the government to develop any half-way realistic Brexit policy – assuming that the government would, otherwise, be minded to have such a policy. It underscores that the government is now caught in an unsquareable circle: if it attempts to develop a pragmatic approach to Brexit it will rip apart the Tory Party; if it holds the Tory Party together, the country will be ripped apart by Brexit. That is the grim situation we are in, and it is hard to see a way out of it.

 

*See Jon Worth’s blogpost for a comprehensive analysis of the Johnson article.