Today’s post is the latest in a series of occasional book reviews, but it is a new departure in that it is the first time on this blog that I have reviewed a work of fiction. So I should say upfront that I have no particular expertise in judging literary merit. Nevertheless, it seems in keeping with the purpose of this blog, with its focus on the ongoing effects of Brexit, to discuss at least some of the fiction to which it is giving rise, as well as non-fiction treatments.
For, as we might expect from so seismic an event, Brexit has already spawned a wide array of novels and ‘the Brexit novel’ has become almost a genre in its own right, with at least one postgraduate research thesis having been written on it, and no doubt more than one. And, whilst I certainly have no pretensions to be a literary critic, I have long been interested in ‘Brexit novels’ both as manifestations of Brexit and as ways of understanding it, having, for example, been delighted to have been one of the speakers at the launch of my former colleague Bob Eaglestone’s edited book, Brexit and Literature.
From that perspective, the finest of the ‘Brexit novels’ I’ve read, and which I’ve mentioned before on this blog, is Jonathan Coe’s Middle England, published in 2018 (I also reviewed it for a now defunct website, so I cannot link to it). Another excellent, though very different, example, also mentioned on this blog in the past, is Sam Byers’ Perfidious Albion (also 2018). Obviously those are both written by established, professional novelists, in Coe’s case one with a major international reputation, whereas the book reviewed here appears to be the author’s first novel. As such, it probably isn’t as accomplished as theirs, and it would be unreasonable to expect it to be, but, to my mind, it is nevertheless a subtle and erudite book, and one which discloses much about some aspects of Brexit.
Review
Winter, Julia (2023) The Brexit House. Market Harborough: Troubador Books. ISBN 978-1-803137-421 (Paperback). 340 pages. £10.99
Set at the end of August 2019, at the time when Boris Johnson was about to initiate what was eventually ruled to be the unlawful prorogation of parliament, two sisters, Cecily and Victoria, their husbands, and their children meet for a few days’ holiday. They are joined by Cecily’s friend, Diana, and her daughter. The holiday is spent at the large, ramshackle house that used to belong to the grandparents of Cecily and Victoria, and which they have inherited from their parents.
The house itself, with its extensive garden, adjacent to the cliffs and beaches of Dover, is, partly by virtue of that location, a proxy for something about Brexit. It is certainly emblematic of certain kind of middle-class, perhaps upper middle-class, Englishness, replete with photos of family members who had lived in and served the British Empire, and filled with a mish-mash of furniture, crockery, even cutlery, which are typical of families of that class. It is also, again typically, full of books. At the same time, it is in dire need of upkeep, is dirty, smelly, and, it emerges, inhabited by rats. The careful and caring depiction of the house is one of the great strengths of this book, to the extent that it is almost a character in its own right, and, of course, gives the novel its title.
The assembled party relate to this house in different ways, just as they do to Brexit. Cecily, the central character, clearly loves it, but is ashamed of some of its connotations of privilege and Empire. She and, especially, her German-Togolese husband, Florian, are also mindful of the many costly repairs it needs. These are costs they can ill-afford because, despite being highly-educated and having, in different ways, privileged backgrounds, they are not rich; they have social and cultural capital, but no financial capital. But neither of them experiences the house, for all its Englishness, as contradicting their adamant, and, in Cecily’s case, consuming and impassioned, opposition to Brexit. Indeed, for Cecily, in particular, its Englishness isn’t antithetical to the European identity Brexit has ripped from her, but an integral part of it.
Her friend Diana, visiting for the first time, also responds to the house and the history it embodies as, in some almost indefinable way, expressing English identity but, for her, it does so in a way which resonates with what led her to vote for Brexit. Yet its middle-class signifiers are wholly alien to her. She lives, it seems, a comfortable, even affluent, London life, but her origins are working class and she carries strong memories of her now-dead mother, who had bemoaned the loss of the traditional white working-class community she grew up in.
Victoria and her husband Dan are also fond of the house, and want to buy Cecily’s share of it which, being much better-off, they could afford to do. As for Brexit, they appear to have some concerns about what its effects may be on them, but seem uninterested in it one way or the other, and it’s not clear whether they voted for it or not, or even if they voted at all. They are mildly amused and mildly exasperated by Cecily’s pre-occupation with Brexit and the impending prorogation, and they do not seem to appreciate the practical and emotional implications for Florian of having to apply for ‘settled status’. That disengagement and complacency about Brexit are evidently bones of contention between the sisters, but it’s plain that this is only the latest episode in a much deeper and longer-lasting tension and rivalry between them, going back to their childhoods.
So, out of this, two main axes of conflict emerge. One, between Cecily and Diana, is mainly about Brexit, but has elements of class and education. The other, between Cecily and Victoria, is mainly about sibling rivalry, but has elements of Brexit. These two lines also intersect in Victoria’s attempts to befriend Diana at Cecily’s expense, whilst at the same time disparaging her as a suitable friend for either of them because of her lack of education. It is these conflicts which give the book its narrative power. These three characters and their relationships are not ciphers or caricatures espousing different positions about Brexit (as, I must admit, I had half-feared would be the case when I started reading the book). Rather, Brexit is interweaved with those characters and relationships, perhaps exacerbating their conflicts but not defining them.
Diana is especially well-handled in this respect. Whilst being overtly pro-Brexit, it is made scrupulously clear that she is neither a racist, nor stupid, nor ignorant, nor insensitive, nor unreflective. If anything, she comes across as having a kind of sentimental and delicate sense of England and its history. She is arguably more sympathetically drawn than the other main characters, with Cecily sometimes coming across as somewhat priggish and hectoring and Victoria as rather shallow, snobbish and materialistic. In what is clearly an anti-Brexit book by an anti-Brexit author, that is an achievement.
The book depicts the relationships and conflicts between these characters unfolding over the days they spend together in the house and surrounding area, with Dover and its cliffs again having quite different resonances for the various characters, especially Cecily and Diana. Alongside that depiction there are the ‘interior monologues’ of Cecily, Diana, and Victoria. Of these, Victoria’s is the most straightforward and contains her reflections on, especially, Cecily and their shared childhood, as well as on the other characters in the book and on her former boyfriend.
Cecily’s interior monologue has much more work to do. It mainly takes the form of her reading and reflections on that reading, mainly during sleepless nights. Much of this is concerned with the web of relationships between the English Reformation and Brexit, and it sparkles with insights – presumably, in fact, Winter’s – on these relationships, which she also links to the haphazard Protestant legacy of her childhood. Such comparisons aren’t new, of course. Even before the referendum they were made by Giles Fraser, the pro-Brexit cleric and commentator, and have been made ever since the result, both by critics of Brexit and its advocates, including Iain Duncan Smith (£). The latter was derided by the historian Simon Schama as an example of “dunces abus[ing] history in the name of their simple-minded prejudices”, and extensively critiqued by others.
However, there is a serious case discussed amongst historians (in overview by, for example, Rosamund Oates and Harry Cocks, and in their scholarly literature by, for example, Peter Marshall and Charlotte Methuen). Although using the medium of a novel rather than a scholarly article, Winter – or Cecily – certainly makes the comparison in a sophisticated way, finding the chimes and rhymes of history, rather than crude repetitions or bogus causalities, and, in the process, displays an impressive depth and breadth of reading. This encompasses John Locke, R.H. Tawney and E.P. Thompson, amongst many others, and the book finishes with a list of references to all the works mentioned.
Diana’s interior monologue consists mainly of reminiscences about her mother’s life and the erosion of the working-class community in Greenwich during her lifetime, and her forays into amateur history, which fill out our understanding of Diana’s own commitment to Brexit. It also quite nicely depicts how, whilst having learnt, as she left her working-class background behind, that some of her mother’s views are unacceptable and should not be expressed, she retains at least some sympathy for those views. At least some of that sympathy can be read as being not so much about politics as an emotional regret for having distanced herself from her mother’s life and concerns. In this way, again, Brexit is interweaved with, other, pre-existing and wider, themes in the character’s life.
There is also a subtle account, provided both by the monologues and the interactions, of the tensions within Cecily and Diana’s relationship in which both, even leaving Brexit aside, feel insecurities. For example, Cecily worries that the scruffy and dilapidated state of the old house will appall Diana, whose home is spotless and well-ordered. In fact, Diana finds it romantic and mysterious, but she worries that her ignorance about everything from the books on the shelves to the provenance of the crockery will expose her lack of education and, by extension, her social origins. At the same time, as the days progress, each becomes increasingly irritated with the other, again not just because of Brexit but because their differences begin to grate when, apparently for the first time, they have intensive contact with each other. Still, at various times they continue to see in each other qualities they admire or appreciate.
I enjoyed this book hugely, and read it at one sitting, but it has some flaws. Cecily, Diana and Victoria aside, the characters are not very well-drawn. Florian has a bit of back story, and some sense of his political views, but Dan has almost nothing. Amongst the children, Victoria’s son, Zac, with his public-school confidence and glibness, but occasional bouts of intellectual curiosity, is the most developed, although mainly only serves as a springboard for Cecily’s history lectures. Cecily’s daughter, Julia, and Diana’s, Olivia, are scarcely developed at all, and really seem to have little purpose other than to explain the friendship between their mothers which arises from the children being at school together.
The ‘interior monologues’, whilst interesting in themselves, felt contrived at times. Cecily’s just about works, by giving her the props of all the books in the house, and by virtue of her background as a PhD educated historian. Diana’s is weaker, seeming to use her mother as a mouth-piece for all kinds of ideas and arguments that the odd reference to her having been ‘an amateur historian’ was too flimsy to bear. Given the sense that Cecily’s thoughts about Brexit and the Reformation are, apparently, essentially the author’s own, they have a corresponding authenticity and coherence, whereas Diana’s thoughts about her mother are an act of invention, and feel less plausible. Tellingly, a note at the end of the book says that both the mother and, to an extent, Diana are themselves characters inspired by another fictional treatment of Brexit, David Abbott’s Dark Albion. A Requiem for the English, which perhaps explains why Diana’s inner thoughts seem, somehow, second-hand compared with those of Cecily. Victoria’s is the most successful of the three, perhaps reflecting the way that it has less narrative complexity, but, at the same time, this also makes it less significant.
Those criticisms aside, this is a skillfully-written and interesting book. It develops a thought-provoking thesis about Brexit, via the discussions of how it can be seen as at least echoing themes in the English Reformation, or perhaps folk memories of them, and it gives a humane and thoughtful account of some of the subtle social class divisions behind the Brexit vote. Its scope is confined to various gradations of middle-class Southern Englander, but that’s a very important part of the Brexit story, as Danny Dorling’s research on the geography and demography of the referendum vote shows.
Ultimately, though, the reason I think The Brexit House works as a novel is because it is not simply about Brexit but about friendship, family, and, especially, sibling relationships. Many of us with siblings will be able to recognize the way that, as depicted here, decades after childhood, such relationships can be heavily freighted, with even the smallest phrases having a power, including the power to wound, which they would not conceivably have in the mouth of anyone else. Likewise, the very different interpretations the sisters have of their shared history is a recognizable feature of many families. The implication is that, for those of us who must now perforce live together in ‘the Brexit house’, that is the Brexit story, and in that way the novel is an extended metaphor, but, in the process, it discloses much about family relationships more generally. Or, perhaps, it shows why, for so many of us, Brexit means so much more than Brexit.
Showing posts with label Book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book reviews. Show all posts
Friday, 3 November 2023
Thursday, 19 October 2023
Book review: Realism or optimism?
This week’s post, which is a day earlier than usual, is the latest in a series of occasional reviews of Brexit-related books, which can be found via the ‘Book reviews’ tag.
Foster, Peter (2023) What Went Wrong with Brexit and What We Can Do About It. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-80530-125-7 (Hardback). 178 pages. £14.99
I don’t think that, in general, Brexit has been very well-served by British journalists. Political journalists, especially, struggled to capture the way that Brexit grew out of, and brought with it, a very different kind of politics from the traditional Westminster ‘game’. Perhaps even more, they struggled with the politics of the UK-EU negotiations, reflecting the pre-existing lack of British interest in the politics of the EU which was arguably a contributory factor, if minor, to why Brexit happened at all. Beyond that, very few journalists seemed able to engage with the deep technical complexities of Brexit, something which contributed to enabling Brexiter politicians to escape media scrutiny.
Indeed, at the height of the Brexit process, between, say, the triggering of Article 50 and the UK’s formal departure from the EU in 2020, I often found non-UK journalists more helpful in understanding what was going on. Tony Connelly, RTE’s Europe Editor, was undoubtedly the foremost of these, but there were others, including Annette Dittert of Germany’s ARD. Of course, there were also some fantastic UK journalists. Faisal Islam, when Political Editor of Sky News (though less so since he became the BBC’s Economics Editor); Ian Dunt, then the Editor of politics.co.uk; and Lisa O’Carroll, at that time the Guardian’s Brexit correspondent, all come to mind, but again there are others.
Peter Foster was and is undoubtedly one them, and I’ve referred to his work countless times on this blog (to the extent that he even has his own tag, though it by no means captures all the references). What he shares with all of those just mentioned is a capacity to understand the ‘big picture’ of Brexit whilst also engaging with the often arcane, technical details. It’s a quality he showed as the Telegraph’s Europe Editor, when, if I recall correctly, his focus was mainly on the Brexit negotiations, and, since then, as Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times. In fact, especially since taking on the latter role, I would say he is the foremost journalist, whether in the UK or elsewhere, in covering the detail of what Brexit means for, especially, businesses, supply chains, and regulation.
Readable, forensic, and realistic analysis
It is these things which are the main focus of the book (which of course means that there are other components of Brexit which aren’t within its ambit), and it provides a superb and authoritative account of them, made accessible by examples and vignettes. This readability of what might otherwise be rather dry material is also aided by a writing style which, and I imagine this is no easy task, transfers well from newspaper columns to the rather different demands of a book-length treatment.
Foster’s explanation of what Brexit has meant for businesses is forensic, if not brutal. Over and over again, he dissects how Brexiters misled themselves and others in what they were doing. Examples include David Frost’s disastrous, “never seriously substantiated” dismissal of the significance of non-tariff barriers to trade (p. 17), the resurrection of freeports which in economic terms “were destined to be empty vessels” (p. 48), the Brexiters’ “red tape fallacy” (pp. 29-38) that amongst other things led to the UKCA debacle (p. 71), and the “magical construct” of an invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland (p. 104).
The book also contains a calmly withering overview of post-Brexit independent trade policy (pp. 54-64) and a careful account of what Brexit has meant for immigration (pp. 81-89). Unsurprisingly, at least to those who have read his FT columns, there are also superbly clear explanations of what Brexit has meant for particular sectors, such as chemicals (pp. 73-75), auto (pp. 75-79) and the travel industry (pp. 94-97).
Underneath all these individual issues lies the “magical thinking and dogma” (p. 41) which has consumed the British political and policy-making process since 2016. The story of how that happened is concisely but crisply narrated in chapter three (pp. 39-53).
All of this forms part one of the book, ‘What went wrong with Brexit’, which accounts for about two-thirds of the text. The briefer second part is concerned with ‘What to do about it’. Here, the discussion is equally assured and well-informed, and, in my opinion, realistic in focusing mainly on what can be done to improve the tone of UK-EU relations and the terms of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. He also suggests that, especially if a better tone is achieved, the UK could re-apply to rejoin the Lugano Convention, having previously been refused, facilitating the resolution of international legal disputes for businesses. Other ideas include seeking to join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention to harmonize Rules of Origin.
Many of these proposals have been made by bodies such as the UK Trade and Business Commission and the Tony Blair Institute, but are helpfully brought together and clearly set out here. What Foster advocates also looks likely to be (the maximalist version of) Labour policy if they get into power, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, and he spells it out in far more detail and with far more clarity than they do.
Again, in my view, rightly, Foster suggests that, taken as a whole, the value of such an approach is a bit greater than some critics, both pro- and anti-Brexit, allow. But he isn’t starry-eyed about it, being far more honest than Labour politicians are (at least openly) about the “limited overall economic impact” (p. 168) these measures would have. Beyond them, he also advocates (pp. 168-175) more sustained and strategic policy-making, rather than the post-Brexit frenzy of half-delivered and often half-baked ideas, especially about how to re-energize business investment.
Misplaced optimism?
Clear-sighted as all this is, and constructive as its suggestions are, there’s a degree of optimism about it that may be misplaced. Foster’s guiding theme is that “it’s time to think again about Brexit by taking an approach based on facts, not fantasy and fallacy” (p.8). That leads to his overall conclusion that “post-Brexit Britain, quite literally, cannot afford more of the wishful thinking that has blighted UK policy-making since the 2016 referendum” (p.168) and “what is now needed is a realistic, sober vision for what Britain should look like in 2050 – allied to fact-based strategies for how to get there” (p. 175).
Again, I think Foster is completely right, but I fear he underestimates the extent to which Brexit has made that all but impossible. As I said in my own Brexit book, it has created a situation of it often seeming as if there are ‘Brexiter truths’ and ‘Remainer truths’. Ultimately this may, and hopefully will, change, but for now it means that “an approach based on facts” – which Foster’s certainly is – will too readily be dismissed, for all his attempts at even-handedness, as the work of a ‘remainer’, or perhaps even as being typical of the ‘globalist’ Financial Times. How can such an approach succeed when even the most basic of facts is so bitterly contested?
That is well-illustrated by Daniel Hannan’s spiteful and dismissive review in the Telegraph (£), which I refer to, reluctantly, simply because it is illustrative; it has no other value. This describes the book as “myopic”, “pro EU”, and an example of “Brexit Derangement Syndrome” that will only interest remainers. In a related way, Foster rightly calls for “ending the politics of betrayal” (pp. 121-127) as part of the way forward but, as I’ve often argued on this blog, though it is far more eloquently discussed by the Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole, that politics is inseparable from Brexit.
Within the context of such tribalism and its associated betrayalism, not only are facts disputed they also get distorted. For example, on one of the few occasions Hannan touches on the substance of Foster’s book, it is to criticize him for not seeing that the UK’s continued use of the CE mark (rather than insisting it be replaced by the UKCA mark) should be regarded as a welcome possible “step towards mutual recognition”. But, for all that it may seem as if there are Brexiter truths and Remainer truths, on these kinds of issues some things are true and some are false. And Hannan’s claim is simply false, for the obvious reason that there is no prospect, and not even any proposal or suggestion, that the EU will start to recognize the UKCA mark reciprocally with the UK’s recognition of the EU mark.
This is only a tiny example, but it is misunderstanding, misrepresenting or ignoring the kinds of ‘nuts and bolts’ issues that Foster specializes in which allows Brexiters to continue to resist – indeed, to viciously disparage – a “realistic, sober vision … allied to fact-based strategies”. That is, it enables them both to ignore reality and to construct an alternative reality.
Catching or contributing to the tide of pragmatism?
Now perhaps the tide is turning, and the influence of Brexiter ideologues like Hannan is diminishing. That seems possible given Sunak’s at least sporadically more pragmatic approach to the EU compared to his predecessors (though as one was a pathological liar and the other plain bonkers, that’s not a high bar), and even more likely if Starmer’s Labour come to power.
Foster clearly believes that this, and growing public disaffection with Brexit, means “that space is now emerging for a re-think” (p. 4). If so, his book may have caught the tide of the times. I hope so. But, as he frequently and strongly emphasizes, “time is of the essence” (p. 8), and it must be an open question whether, especially with the pro-Brexit media denouncing every step towards sense as betrayal, any UK government can move fast and far enough to deliver even the still relatively cautious prospectus the book advocates.
On the other hand, one danger which a Labour government looks likely to face is that, along with Brexiter denunciations, it will also be attacked by remainers and rejoiners as being insufficient to the magnitude of the task. The positive reading of that is it will push Labour towards Foster’s more maximalist version of its presently disclosed policy. The negative reading is that, squeezed between those who say it is too much and those who say it is too little, the space for pragmatism will remain vanishingly small.
None of these observations detracts from that fact that this is an excellent book which should be read by anyone who wants to understand the intricacies – and idiocies - of what Brexit has meant for trade, businesses, supply chains and regulation, and what could be done to address some of them. Indeed, although some of its prescriptions have been made by various think-tanks and committees, this is perhaps the only book providing a serious and sustained analysis of what Britain might now, realistically, do about Brexit. So, even if the tide has not yet turned in a more pragmatic direction, it could help it to do so.
As such, I hope it is widely read, not least by policy-makers and by commentators who, if they shared Foster’s depth of knowledge and acuity of analysis, could do so much to re-shape the tone and content of the debate about Britain’s post-Brexit future.
My only gripe, but it is quite a big one, is with the publisher rather than the author (as I assume it is an issue of house style): the book gives no sources or references and, even more surprisingly, and very irritatingly, does not even have an index.
Foster, Peter (2023) What Went Wrong with Brexit and What We Can Do About It. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-80530-125-7 (Hardback). 178 pages. £14.99
I don’t think that, in general, Brexit has been very well-served by British journalists. Political journalists, especially, struggled to capture the way that Brexit grew out of, and brought with it, a very different kind of politics from the traditional Westminster ‘game’. Perhaps even more, they struggled with the politics of the UK-EU negotiations, reflecting the pre-existing lack of British interest in the politics of the EU which was arguably a contributory factor, if minor, to why Brexit happened at all. Beyond that, very few journalists seemed able to engage with the deep technical complexities of Brexit, something which contributed to enabling Brexiter politicians to escape media scrutiny.
Indeed, at the height of the Brexit process, between, say, the triggering of Article 50 and the UK’s formal departure from the EU in 2020, I often found non-UK journalists more helpful in understanding what was going on. Tony Connelly, RTE’s Europe Editor, was undoubtedly the foremost of these, but there were others, including Annette Dittert of Germany’s ARD. Of course, there were also some fantastic UK journalists. Faisal Islam, when Political Editor of Sky News (though less so since he became the BBC’s Economics Editor); Ian Dunt, then the Editor of politics.co.uk; and Lisa O’Carroll, at that time the Guardian’s Brexit correspondent, all come to mind, but again there are others.
Peter Foster was and is undoubtedly one them, and I’ve referred to his work countless times on this blog (to the extent that he even has his own tag, though it by no means captures all the references). What he shares with all of those just mentioned is a capacity to understand the ‘big picture’ of Brexit whilst also engaging with the often arcane, technical details. It’s a quality he showed as the Telegraph’s Europe Editor, when, if I recall correctly, his focus was mainly on the Brexit negotiations, and, since then, as Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times. In fact, especially since taking on the latter role, I would say he is the foremost journalist, whether in the UK or elsewhere, in covering the detail of what Brexit means for, especially, businesses, supply chains, and regulation.
Readable, forensic, and realistic analysis
It is these things which are the main focus of the book (which of course means that there are other components of Brexit which aren’t within its ambit), and it provides a superb and authoritative account of them, made accessible by examples and vignettes. This readability of what might otherwise be rather dry material is also aided by a writing style which, and I imagine this is no easy task, transfers well from newspaper columns to the rather different demands of a book-length treatment.
Foster’s explanation of what Brexit has meant for businesses is forensic, if not brutal. Over and over again, he dissects how Brexiters misled themselves and others in what they were doing. Examples include David Frost’s disastrous, “never seriously substantiated” dismissal of the significance of non-tariff barriers to trade (p. 17), the resurrection of freeports which in economic terms “were destined to be empty vessels” (p. 48), the Brexiters’ “red tape fallacy” (pp. 29-38) that amongst other things led to the UKCA debacle (p. 71), and the “magical construct” of an invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland (p. 104).
The book also contains a calmly withering overview of post-Brexit independent trade policy (pp. 54-64) and a careful account of what Brexit has meant for immigration (pp. 81-89). Unsurprisingly, at least to those who have read his FT columns, there are also superbly clear explanations of what Brexit has meant for particular sectors, such as chemicals (pp. 73-75), auto (pp. 75-79) and the travel industry (pp. 94-97).
Underneath all these individual issues lies the “magical thinking and dogma” (p. 41) which has consumed the British political and policy-making process since 2016. The story of how that happened is concisely but crisply narrated in chapter three (pp. 39-53).
All of this forms part one of the book, ‘What went wrong with Brexit’, which accounts for about two-thirds of the text. The briefer second part is concerned with ‘What to do about it’. Here, the discussion is equally assured and well-informed, and, in my opinion, realistic in focusing mainly on what can be done to improve the tone of UK-EU relations and the terms of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. He also suggests that, especially if a better tone is achieved, the UK could re-apply to rejoin the Lugano Convention, having previously been refused, facilitating the resolution of international legal disputes for businesses. Other ideas include seeking to join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention to harmonize Rules of Origin.
Many of these proposals have been made by bodies such as the UK Trade and Business Commission and the Tony Blair Institute, but are helpfully brought together and clearly set out here. What Foster advocates also looks likely to be (the maximalist version of) Labour policy if they get into power, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, and he spells it out in far more detail and with far more clarity than they do.
Again, in my view, rightly, Foster suggests that, taken as a whole, the value of such an approach is a bit greater than some critics, both pro- and anti-Brexit, allow. But he isn’t starry-eyed about it, being far more honest than Labour politicians are (at least openly) about the “limited overall economic impact” (p. 168) these measures would have. Beyond them, he also advocates (pp. 168-175) more sustained and strategic policy-making, rather than the post-Brexit frenzy of half-delivered and often half-baked ideas, especially about how to re-energize business investment.
Misplaced optimism?
Clear-sighted as all this is, and constructive as its suggestions are, there’s a degree of optimism about it that may be misplaced. Foster’s guiding theme is that “it’s time to think again about Brexit by taking an approach based on facts, not fantasy and fallacy” (p.8). That leads to his overall conclusion that “post-Brexit Britain, quite literally, cannot afford more of the wishful thinking that has blighted UK policy-making since the 2016 referendum” (p.168) and “what is now needed is a realistic, sober vision for what Britain should look like in 2050 – allied to fact-based strategies for how to get there” (p. 175).
Again, I think Foster is completely right, but I fear he underestimates the extent to which Brexit has made that all but impossible. As I said in my own Brexit book, it has created a situation of it often seeming as if there are ‘Brexiter truths’ and ‘Remainer truths’. Ultimately this may, and hopefully will, change, but for now it means that “an approach based on facts” – which Foster’s certainly is – will too readily be dismissed, for all his attempts at even-handedness, as the work of a ‘remainer’, or perhaps even as being typical of the ‘globalist’ Financial Times. How can such an approach succeed when even the most basic of facts is so bitterly contested?
That is well-illustrated by Daniel Hannan’s spiteful and dismissive review in the Telegraph (£), which I refer to, reluctantly, simply because it is illustrative; it has no other value. This describes the book as “myopic”, “pro EU”, and an example of “Brexit Derangement Syndrome” that will only interest remainers. In a related way, Foster rightly calls for “ending the politics of betrayal” (pp. 121-127) as part of the way forward but, as I’ve often argued on this blog, though it is far more eloquently discussed by the Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole, that politics is inseparable from Brexit.
Within the context of such tribalism and its associated betrayalism, not only are facts disputed they also get distorted. For example, on one of the few occasions Hannan touches on the substance of Foster’s book, it is to criticize him for not seeing that the UK’s continued use of the CE mark (rather than insisting it be replaced by the UKCA mark) should be regarded as a welcome possible “step towards mutual recognition”. But, for all that it may seem as if there are Brexiter truths and Remainer truths, on these kinds of issues some things are true and some are false. And Hannan’s claim is simply false, for the obvious reason that there is no prospect, and not even any proposal or suggestion, that the EU will start to recognize the UKCA mark reciprocally with the UK’s recognition of the EU mark.
This is only a tiny example, but it is misunderstanding, misrepresenting or ignoring the kinds of ‘nuts and bolts’ issues that Foster specializes in which allows Brexiters to continue to resist – indeed, to viciously disparage – a “realistic, sober vision … allied to fact-based strategies”. That is, it enables them both to ignore reality and to construct an alternative reality.
Catching or contributing to the tide of pragmatism?
Now perhaps the tide is turning, and the influence of Brexiter ideologues like Hannan is diminishing. That seems possible given Sunak’s at least sporadically more pragmatic approach to the EU compared to his predecessors (though as one was a pathological liar and the other plain bonkers, that’s not a high bar), and even more likely if Starmer’s Labour come to power.
Foster clearly believes that this, and growing public disaffection with Brexit, means “that space is now emerging for a re-think” (p. 4). If so, his book may have caught the tide of the times. I hope so. But, as he frequently and strongly emphasizes, “time is of the essence” (p. 8), and it must be an open question whether, especially with the pro-Brexit media denouncing every step towards sense as betrayal, any UK government can move fast and far enough to deliver even the still relatively cautious prospectus the book advocates.
On the other hand, one danger which a Labour government looks likely to face is that, along with Brexiter denunciations, it will also be attacked by remainers and rejoiners as being insufficient to the magnitude of the task. The positive reading of that is it will push Labour towards Foster’s more maximalist version of its presently disclosed policy. The negative reading is that, squeezed between those who say it is too much and those who say it is too little, the space for pragmatism will remain vanishingly small.
None of these observations detracts from that fact that this is an excellent book which should be read by anyone who wants to understand the intricacies – and idiocies - of what Brexit has meant for trade, businesses, supply chains and regulation, and what could be done to address some of them. Indeed, although some of its prescriptions have been made by various think-tanks and committees, this is perhaps the only book providing a serious and sustained analysis of what Britain might now, realistically, do about Brexit. So, even if the tide has not yet turned in a more pragmatic direction, it could help it to do so.
As such, I hope it is widely read, not least by policy-makers and by commentators who, if they shared Foster’s depth of knowledge and acuity of analysis, could do so much to re-shape the tone and content of the debate about Britain’s post-Brexit future.
My only gripe, but it is quite a big one, is with the publisher rather than the author (as I assume it is an issue of house style): the book gives no sources or references and, even more surprisingly, and very irritatingly, does not even have an index.
Friday, 11 August 2023
Book review: Plus ça change?
Bale, Tim (2023) The Conservative Party After Brexit. Turmoil and Transformation. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-1-5095-4061-5 (Hardback). 368pp. £25
(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’.)
By any reckoning, the last seven years of British politics have been tumultuous, and at least one measure of that is the extraordinary churn of Prime Ministers – five, counting Cameron, since 2016 – and with that four Tory Party leadership contests and two General Elections. The Brexit referendum was the trigger which began this period, and the Brexit process that followed provided much of the content and context that ran through it.
Charting what happened during those years is a daunting and serious task, and in Tim Bale it has a serious and impressive analyst. Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, he has longstanding research expertise in, amongst other things, the Conservative Party. It is this party, and especially its leadership, which is the focus of this superb book. In it, Bale presents an assured, detailed account of the exceptionally complex story of the premierships of May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, with the emphasis on the first two, reflecting the brevity of Truss’s tenure and, at the time of the book’s writing, the newness of Sunak’s.
Yet, whilst being a serious and detailed book, written with the academic rigour that would be expected of the author, it is highly readable. Some Amazon reviews disagree about its readability, so perhaps it depends on what you are used to, but in my view Bale writes crisply and with brio, and for all the command of detail displayed it is never stodgy. There is also a certain amount of wry humour. To give just one example, recording that Truss did not offer David Frost a role in her administration, Bale adds the laconic observation “or at least not one he felt was commensurate with what he regarded anyway as his considerable talents” (p. 271). The ‘anyway’ adds a particular sting.
It is, very much, the story of the premierships both in the sense that these provide the structuring frame of the book and that the focus is largely on individuals. Most obviously that means the leaders themselves, but also what might be called the ‘high politics’ of their tenures. Thus the analysis includes the composition of different cabinets, the coalitions of support in leadership elections and parliamentary votes, the role of advisors, the tactical calculations of party political advantage, the opinion polls and their interpretation, the electoral manoeuvres, and the role of the media.
This is a deliberate choice, flagged up in the introduction, to capture the way that “individuals, and therefore parties as a whole, are as much tactical and reactive as they are strategic and proactive” (p.3). The consequence is, perhaps, to downplay the role of ideology, but it is an approach which is helpful in revealing how much of the Brexit process was haphazard and, certainly, ‘unstrategic’. Anyone who still thinks there was any kind of ‘a plan’ for Brexit will be firmly disabused of that idea by reading this book.
Distance and engagement
That last comment reflects the way that, given the focus of this blog, which in turn reflects my own preoccupations, I approached the book primarily through the lens of Brexit. But, as I read it, I began to see that this is not, actually, a very sensible approach. Of course, as the title suggests, Brexit is a more than major presence, but this is first and foremost a book about the Conservative Party, and that observation, which may seem trite, is an important one. It is not just about delineating the empirical scope of the book but about the way that Bale brings an impressive, and to me usefully disconcerting, perspective, that is at once distant and engaged.
It is distant, in the sense that he manages to stand back a bit from the tumult of the events he describes so that, whilst they are in some sense extraordinary, they can also be seen as ‘business as usual’. So Brexit, rather than being some huge disjuncture in political life, can be read in the context of, and having some of the characteristics of, “the really big splits in the Conservative Party’s long history” (p.3). That point isn’t heavily emphasized in the text, but it is an implicit ‘viewing point’ throughout, and re-reappears right at the end when the possibility of an impending heavy electoral defeat is discussed alongside reminders of defeats in the mid-1940s, mid-1960s, and mid-1990s (p. 294).
So whereas all of us who have lived through the last few years may feel – as perhaps people at any period do – that there is something special and unprecedented about these ‘Brexit years’, Bale gives us a glimpse, at least, of how political historians may well come to write about it. It is the slight jolt that this gives (at least to me) which explains why I referred to it being a ‘usefully disconcerting’ perspective. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Bale provides, perhaps earlier than any other academic, the second draft of the history of Brexit (or, at least, those aspects of it with which the book is concerned).
Yet it is also an engaged approach, in that by delving into the weeds of political tactics and the ad hoc responses to the pressure of immediate events and headlines, Brexit is also re-positioned, but this time as being continuous with the mundane realities of politics and so, in that different sense, again understandable as ‘business as usual’. For example, although this may reflect my own naivety, I was struck by the way that, throughout this account, Tory politicians are shown to have approached Brexit not – or not simply, or even primarily – as a massive upheaval of national geo-political strategy but as an opportunity to gain party political advantage.
So, to give an example within that, whereas I had probably assumed that May would have spent her early days immersing herself in the technical complexities of Brexit, Bale suggests that “the new Prime Minister and her advisers seemed to be seizing opportunistically … on the way Brexit had ripped apart Labour’s already fraying electoral coalition.” (p. 23). Of course, it might have been better all round had my assumption had been right, but Bale’s account is all too plausible.
Similarly, I tend to see events like the resignations of leading Brexiters (e.g., David Davis, Dominic Raab, p.63 and p.72 respectively) as being about their perennial preference for fantasy over reality; or the crucial parliamentary votes over Brexit as being, centrally, about the implacability of the Ultras’ ideology. But, here, although the “near religious” (p.73) fervour of some of the Brexiters features, such events are configured as being at least as much about the perennial issues of party management, careerism, whipping operations, and ‘counting heads’.
A corrective to Brexit-obsessives?
The wider issue these examples point to is that Bale’s analysis is a useful corrective for those who, like me, tend to write, at least implicitly, as if Brexit was pretty much the only political issue of the last seven years. That is just about defensible for the period up to January 2020, when the UK left the EU, but it is simply not true after that. That’s not exactly a news item, even for Brexit obsessives, but I suppose I still had a residual sense that Brexit ‘ought’ to have been central, because it is so important, with other events being seen as a distraction. But Bale’s account suggests to me that, for the political actors themselves, in the press of events, Brexit was not experienced in that way. This may well also be true of voters, and perhaps explains why, to my puzzlement at the time, the details of Brexit were actually rather little discussed during the general elections (or indeed the leadership elections) of this period.
None of this is to imply that Bale downplays Brexit. It is, rather, that he contextualises it, showing how it became imbricated with multiple other strands of politics. To take just a couple of numerous possible examples, Johnson’s initial, and as it turned out short-lived and ill-fated attempt, to protect Owen Paterson from the effects of the lobbying scandal that ended his career was bound up with the latter’s longstanding place amongst ‘Eurosceptics’ (p.215). Likewise, the overlap between ‘lockdown sceptics’ and the Brexit Ultras illustrates how ostensibly different issues were intertwined with Brexit (p. 173). Conversely, no one reading Bale’s account of Johnson’s downfall as Prime Minister (pp. 258-260) could possibly be taken in by Johnson’s own subsequent claims that he had been the victim of vengeful remainers.
So, in all of these ways, Bale’s book is a valuable challenge to Brexit-obsessives - including me and, very likely, many readers of this blog - by providing an account which has an implicit historical distance alongside an explicit focus on the everyday practicalities of politics. It certainly made me think differently. Equally, it could be seen as a challenge to the most ideologically-committed of Brexiters in that, for all they may have believed themselves to be engaged in a revolution, the outcome has been far less dramatic than they thought. Indeed, there’s already a discernible disappointment amongst such Brexiters not just with Brexit but with its failure to usher in a ‘new way of doing politics’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?
It is worth saying that in this respect my reading of the book differs from most, if not all, of the other reviews of it I have seen (e.g. Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian), which makes me wonder if mine is fallacious – though evidently not to the extent of revising it. Most reviews put great weight on Bale’s undoubtedly well-founded suggestion that the Conservatives have “slipped their moorings as mainstream centre-right party” (p.291). Nevertheless, what I found more striking was how, despite everything that has happened, the political process itself, and the terms of political debate, have not dramatically changed. Yes, the norms and conventions of political conduct have been strained and frayed and, yes, political discourse has substantially coarsened and polarised, but the basic contours of both remain recognizable. In terms of the book’s subtitle, then, the ‘turmoil’ is undoubted, but the ‘transformation’ is less clear-cut.
Whether that was Bale’s intention I am not sure but, at all events, he leaves open the question of what is going to happen to the Conservative Party now. That’s wise, because it isn’t yet possible to have a genuine historical distance and so it remains unknowable whether the ‘final draft of history’ (if there could ever be such a thing) will conclude that Brexit marks a fundamental shift for British politics in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, or whether it is only an episode, possibly important or conceivably only ephemeral. My own expectation, for what very little it is worth, is that, assuming defeat at the next election, the Tories will spin off into the weird world of the emergent ‘National Conservatism’ before electoral defeats, and the realities of electoral demographics, pull them back to something more recognizably normal. The only rider to that is that things would change dramatically if the ‘first past the post’ system were reformed in the meanwhile, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Encore!
Overall, this is an excellent book and a hugely important addition to the emergent literature on the politics of Brexit. It is also an exemplar of how academics can and should write for general audiences, something still rarer than it should be.
If I have a criticism, then it is that I would like to have seen more fine-grained analysis of the party membership, and also of party funding. Of course, the huge significance of the membership as a ‘selectorate’ of the leadership is made abundantly clear, as is the way it has all but driven out the relative liberalism of the Cameron period (e.g., pp. 126-127). Even so, there’s still something puzzling to me about just how radicalized the membership seems to have become in recent years, and in the extent to which both its members and its funders seem to have become so out of tune with the mainstream of, especially, business interests.
Moreover, it is curious that they seem to have done so in different ways, with the membership so obsessed with social traditionalism and the funders (I suspect) increasingly reflecting highly untraditional ‘disruptor’ or even ‘disaster’ capitalism. Might this be the long-term unwinding for the always fragile coalition of social traditionalism and economic liberalism that Thatcher’s Conservative Party managed to sustain? Might it reflect the changing nature of British capitalism?
These are questions of political sociology and political economy which perhaps can’t be answered within what I’ve called the ‘high politics’ focus of this book, for all the virtues of that focus. For that matter, perhaps they are questions that would need another book and, if so, then undoubtedly Bale would be its ideal author. Equally, it would be fascinating to read, as a companion volume to this one, his analysis of the Labour Party after Brexit. But, just as the finest performances are greeted with multiple cries of ‘encore’, it is hardly a criticism to conclude, after having read a book, that I’d like to read two more books by the same author.
(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’.)
By any reckoning, the last seven years of British politics have been tumultuous, and at least one measure of that is the extraordinary churn of Prime Ministers – five, counting Cameron, since 2016 – and with that four Tory Party leadership contests and two General Elections. The Brexit referendum was the trigger which began this period, and the Brexit process that followed provided much of the content and context that ran through it.
Charting what happened during those years is a daunting and serious task, and in Tim Bale it has a serious and impressive analyst. Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, he has longstanding research expertise in, amongst other things, the Conservative Party. It is this party, and especially its leadership, which is the focus of this superb book. In it, Bale presents an assured, detailed account of the exceptionally complex story of the premierships of May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, with the emphasis on the first two, reflecting the brevity of Truss’s tenure and, at the time of the book’s writing, the newness of Sunak’s.
Yet, whilst being a serious and detailed book, written with the academic rigour that would be expected of the author, it is highly readable. Some Amazon reviews disagree about its readability, so perhaps it depends on what you are used to, but in my view Bale writes crisply and with brio, and for all the command of detail displayed it is never stodgy. There is also a certain amount of wry humour. To give just one example, recording that Truss did not offer David Frost a role in her administration, Bale adds the laconic observation “or at least not one he felt was commensurate with what he regarded anyway as his considerable talents” (p. 271). The ‘anyway’ adds a particular sting.
It is, very much, the story of the premierships both in the sense that these provide the structuring frame of the book and that the focus is largely on individuals. Most obviously that means the leaders themselves, but also what might be called the ‘high politics’ of their tenures. Thus the analysis includes the composition of different cabinets, the coalitions of support in leadership elections and parliamentary votes, the role of advisors, the tactical calculations of party political advantage, the opinion polls and their interpretation, the electoral manoeuvres, and the role of the media.
This is a deliberate choice, flagged up in the introduction, to capture the way that “individuals, and therefore parties as a whole, are as much tactical and reactive as they are strategic and proactive” (p.3). The consequence is, perhaps, to downplay the role of ideology, but it is an approach which is helpful in revealing how much of the Brexit process was haphazard and, certainly, ‘unstrategic’. Anyone who still thinks there was any kind of ‘a plan’ for Brexit will be firmly disabused of that idea by reading this book.
Distance and engagement
That last comment reflects the way that, given the focus of this blog, which in turn reflects my own preoccupations, I approached the book primarily through the lens of Brexit. But, as I read it, I began to see that this is not, actually, a very sensible approach. Of course, as the title suggests, Brexit is a more than major presence, but this is first and foremost a book about the Conservative Party, and that observation, which may seem trite, is an important one. It is not just about delineating the empirical scope of the book but about the way that Bale brings an impressive, and to me usefully disconcerting, perspective, that is at once distant and engaged.
It is distant, in the sense that he manages to stand back a bit from the tumult of the events he describes so that, whilst they are in some sense extraordinary, they can also be seen as ‘business as usual’. So Brexit, rather than being some huge disjuncture in political life, can be read in the context of, and having some of the characteristics of, “the really big splits in the Conservative Party’s long history” (p.3). That point isn’t heavily emphasized in the text, but it is an implicit ‘viewing point’ throughout, and re-reappears right at the end when the possibility of an impending heavy electoral defeat is discussed alongside reminders of defeats in the mid-1940s, mid-1960s, and mid-1990s (p. 294).
So whereas all of us who have lived through the last few years may feel – as perhaps people at any period do – that there is something special and unprecedented about these ‘Brexit years’, Bale gives us a glimpse, at least, of how political historians may well come to write about it. It is the slight jolt that this gives (at least to me) which explains why I referred to it being a ‘usefully disconcerting’ perspective. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Bale provides, perhaps earlier than any other academic, the second draft of the history of Brexit (or, at least, those aspects of it with which the book is concerned).
Yet it is also an engaged approach, in that by delving into the weeds of political tactics and the ad hoc responses to the pressure of immediate events and headlines, Brexit is also re-positioned, but this time as being continuous with the mundane realities of politics and so, in that different sense, again understandable as ‘business as usual’. For example, although this may reflect my own naivety, I was struck by the way that, throughout this account, Tory politicians are shown to have approached Brexit not – or not simply, or even primarily – as a massive upheaval of national geo-political strategy but as an opportunity to gain party political advantage.
So, to give an example within that, whereas I had probably assumed that May would have spent her early days immersing herself in the technical complexities of Brexit, Bale suggests that “the new Prime Minister and her advisers seemed to be seizing opportunistically … on the way Brexit had ripped apart Labour’s already fraying electoral coalition.” (p. 23). Of course, it might have been better all round had my assumption had been right, but Bale’s account is all too plausible.
Similarly, I tend to see events like the resignations of leading Brexiters (e.g., David Davis, Dominic Raab, p.63 and p.72 respectively) as being about their perennial preference for fantasy over reality; or the crucial parliamentary votes over Brexit as being, centrally, about the implacability of the Ultras’ ideology. But, here, although the “near religious” (p.73) fervour of some of the Brexiters features, such events are configured as being at least as much about the perennial issues of party management, careerism, whipping operations, and ‘counting heads’.
A corrective to Brexit-obsessives?
The wider issue these examples point to is that Bale’s analysis is a useful corrective for those who, like me, tend to write, at least implicitly, as if Brexit was pretty much the only political issue of the last seven years. That is just about defensible for the period up to January 2020, when the UK left the EU, but it is simply not true after that. That’s not exactly a news item, even for Brexit obsessives, but I suppose I still had a residual sense that Brexit ‘ought’ to have been central, because it is so important, with other events being seen as a distraction. But Bale’s account suggests to me that, for the political actors themselves, in the press of events, Brexit was not experienced in that way. This may well also be true of voters, and perhaps explains why, to my puzzlement at the time, the details of Brexit were actually rather little discussed during the general elections (or indeed the leadership elections) of this period.
None of this is to imply that Bale downplays Brexit. It is, rather, that he contextualises it, showing how it became imbricated with multiple other strands of politics. To take just a couple of numerous possible examples, Johnson’s initial, and as it turned out short-lived and ill-fated attempt, to protect Owen Paterson from the effects of the lobbying scandal that ended his career was bound up with the latter’s longstanding place amongst ‘Eurosceptics’ (p.215). Likewise, the overlap between ‘lockdown sceptics’ and the Brexit Ultras illustrates how ostensibly different issues were intertwined with Brexit (p. 173). Conversely, no one reading Bale’s account of Johnson’s downfall as Prime Minister (pp. 258-260) could possibly be taken in by Johnson’s own subsequent claims that he had been the victim of vengeful remainers.
So, in all of these ways, Bale’s book is a valuable challenge to Brexit-obsessives - including me and, very likely, many readers of this blog - by providing an account which has an implicit historical distance alongside an explicit focus on the everyday practicalities of politics. It certainly made me think differently. Equally, it could be seen as a challenge to the most ideologically-committed of Brexiters in that, for all they may have believed themselves to be engaged in a revolution, the outcome has been far less dramatic than they thought. Indeed, there’s already a discernible disappointment amongst such Brexiters not just with Brexit but with its failure to usher in a ‘new way of doing politics’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?
It is worth saying that in this respect my reading of the book differs from most, if not all, of the other reviews of it I have seen (e.g. Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian), which makes me wonder if mine is fallacious – though evidently not to the extent of revising it. Most reviews put great weight on Bale’s undoubtedly well-founded suggestion that the Conservatives have “slipped their moorings as mainstream centre-right party” (p.291). Nevertheless, what I found more striking was how, despite everything that has happened, the political process itself, and the terms of political debate, have not dramatically changed. Yes, the norms and conventions of political conduct have been strained and frayed and, yes, political discourse has substantially coarsened and polarised, but the basic contours of both remain recognizable. In terms of the book’s subtitle, then, the ‘turmoil’ is undoubted, but the ‘transformation’ is less clear-cut.
Whether that was Bale’s intention I am not sure but, at all events, he leaves open the question of what is going to happen to the Conservative Party now. That’s wise, because it isn’t yet possible to have a genuine historical distance and so it remains unknowable whether the ‘final draft of history’ (if there could ever be such a thing) will conclude that Brexit marks a fundamental shift for British politics in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, or whether it is only an episode, possibly important or conceivably only ephemeral. My own expectation, for what very little it is worth, is that, assuming defeat at the next election, the Tories will spin off into the weird world of the emergent ‘National Conservatism’ before electoral defeats, and the realities of electoral demographics, pull them back to something more recognizably normal. The only rider to that is that things would change dramatically if the ‘first past the post’ system were reformed in the meanwhile, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Encore!
Overall, this is an excellent book and a hugely important addition to the emergent literature on the politics of Brexit. It is also an exemplar of how academics can and should write for general audiences, something still rarer than it should be.
If I have a criticism, then it is that I would like to have seen more fine-grained analysis of the party membership, and also of party funding. Of course, the huge significance of the membership as a ‘selectorate’ of the leadership is made abundantly clear, as is the way it has all but driven out the relative liberalism of the Cameron period (e.g., pp. 126-127). Even so, there’s still something puzzling to me about just how radicalized the membership seems to have become in recent years, and in the extent to which both its members and its funders seem to have become so out of tune with the mainstream of, especially, business interests.
Moreover, it is curious that they seem to have done so in different ways, with the membership so obsessed with social traditionalism and the funders (I suspect) increasingly reflecting highly untraditional ‘disruptor’ or even ‘disaster’ capitalism. Might this be the long-term unwinding for the always fragile coalition of social traditionalism and economic liberalism that Thatcher’s Conservative Party managed to sustain? Might it reflect the changing nature of British capitalism?
These are questions of political sociology and political economy which perhaps can’t be answered within what I’ve called the ‘high politics’ focus of this book, for all the virtues of that focus. For that matter, perhaps they are questions that would need another book and, if so, then undoubtedly Bale would be its ideal author. Equally, it would be fascinating to read, as a companion volume to this one, his analysis of the Labour Party after Brexit. But, just as the finest performances are greeted with multiple cries of ‘encore’, it is hardly a criticism to conclude, after having read a book, that I’d like to read two more books by the same author.
Friday, 12 May 2023
Book review: Pain, exile and progress
This week’s post is the latest of the series of book reviews I began in March and intend to continue as, no doubt, more and more books about Brexit are published. Generally, I’m doing them as additional posts to the normal weekly discussion of Brexit news but, this week, there’s not much of this that’s worth discussing.
One development has been the confirmation of what I discussed last week, namely that the government will only axe 600 pieces of retained EU law by the end of the year (not even the 800 floated). A sensible move, to the outrage of the Brexit Ultras, though there remains the important question about what exactly these laws are.
There were also the Local Election results which, amongst other things, gave rise to questions about what salience Brexit now has to voting patterns and about what the implications for Brexit policy would be if the results foreshadow a hung parliament. The latter question is discussed by Nick Tyrone in his latest Week in Brexitland, and I largely agree with his analysis.
Book review
Behr, Rafael (2023) Politics: A Survivor’s Guide. How to stay engaged without getting enraged. London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-83895-504-5 (Hardback). 404 pages. £20.
This isn’t, strictly speaking, a book about Brexit, but Brexit runs through it as a theme and a context, and because of the focus of this blog it is mainly this aspect I will discuss. I bought it because its author, Rafael Behr, is, to my mind, one of the best political columnists in the country, and not just in relation to Brexit although he has written a great deal about that. Almost all his columns are excellent, especially because he so often finds a distinctive angle or a fresh insight on whatever it is that he is discussing. Moreover, he has a superb writing style, at once elegant and punchy, acute and amusing.
I mention this because I’m not sure that I would have been drawn to it by its title, or more especially the sub-title, which, almost literally, makes it sound like a ‘self-help’ book. Thankfully, it isn’t really that and, towards the end, Behr makes it clear that there will be no “list of practical tips for a less infuriating democracy” (p.371).
Balance and perspective
Saying that I was drawn to it because of regard for Behr’s writings opens a difficult question which is partly what the book is about. Might the reason I think his writing so excellent be because I generally agree with it? Isn’t it a symptom of the enragement of politics that Behr’s book discusses that we all become partisans, seeing unquestionable virtue in our heroes and irredeemable iniquity in our foes?
Spending, as I do, much time trawling through the writings of Brexiters, I am struck by how often they will point people towards an ‘excellent’ article by one of their fellows which, when I read the recommended piece, I find to be vapid, disingenuous or worse. But, no doubt, they would think the same of writings that I admire about Brexit, or indeed of my own writing about it.
It may be simply impossible for any of us to know for sure whether we are open-minded, and perhaps that is most true for those who are open-minded enough to even consider the question. Anyway, as Behr says, “it is consoling to discover my perceptions of things reflected in another mind; not just reflected, but clarified, analyzed and organized. That is how I know I am not alone and not going mad” (p.371). Confirmation bias is always a possibility, but it would be absurd to dismiss all confirmations as being the result of it.
Agonizing and ambivalence is both a theme and a characteristic of Behr’s analysis, so that even ambivalence is subjected to agonizing questions about “the threshold where equivocation [becomes] complicity” (p.349). He records how, on the occasions he has been pre-interviewed for possible appearances on the BBC’s Question Time, his responses are measured, discursive and qualified: “On and on it goes like that, on the one hand, on the other, everything depends, until consensus is reached that I should not appear on Question Time.” (p.169)
It’s only an anecdote, but it gives a flavour of Behr’s intellectual curiosity and innately liberal sensibility, as well as his wry and often self-deprecating humour. It also illustrates the fact that “a recurrent theme of this book [is] the need for balance and perspective, which involves the more subtle art of keeping balance itself in perspective.” (p. 368)
At all events, I approached the book with at least enough open-mindedness to be prepared for disappointment, in that it is one thing to write fine columns but another to write fine books. They are very different forms and disciplines, and few can master both. I wasn’t disappointed, for it turns out that Behr is one of those who can.
The pain of politics and the politics of pain
This is a book by a political journalist about politics, but of a most unusual kind. It weaves together personal experiences, family stories, political theory, and particular political events within an over-arching narrative of some key aspects of modern history (especially in the UK and Russia, but also Lithuania, Europe generally, the US, Israel and South Africa). It’s not the kind of book most journalists (or academics) would or could write, precisely because it operates in so many different registers, and is all the better for that.
Much of it is a meditation on the nature of democracy and threats to it, the polarisation and toxicity of contemporary political discourse, the rise of the alt-right and, to an extent, the alt-left, cynicism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Anyone who has followed politics in recent years will find these familiar topics, but Behr brings a freshness to the discussion that is engaging and readable. But I think it is the interweaving of the personal and the political which is most arresting and, for me and I suspect others, most ‘relatable’. It is very much a book about the pain of politics, a pain that feels personal. By the same token, this review is to a degree about my personal responses to the book, rather than simply being a rehearsal and appraisal of its contents.
I used the word ‘arresting’ deliberately, because it was a massive cardiac arrest, with which the book starts and ends, which both stopped Behr in his tracks and then motivated him to write the book. That doesn’t make it self-indulgent: on the contrary, it is an analytical book which seeks to explore not simply the personal pain of politics but the political significance of that personal pain.
The pain of exile
Whilst Behr is careful not to ascribe his heart attack to politics or to Brexit (he explains it mainly in terms of genetic pre-disposition and lifestyle), he does connect it to the way that he and others he knows experienced the “furious mess of British politics” (p. 12) following the Brexit referendum. The pain of that wasn’t simply that of an observer: the political mess wasn’t experienced by people as something external to them but as something that, so to speak, messed them up, creating what Behr describes as a “state of emotional and psychological exile.” (p. 118)
The notion of ‘exile’ is, in various forms, a central motif of the book, along with the related idea of political disengagement being “internal emigration.” (p.344) Thus, the overall puzzle of the book is the political, psychological and emotional challenge of “treading the line between complacency and despair” (loc. cit.) or, in other words, between the temptations of internal emigration and the pain of exile.
It is the motif of exile which I am going to focus on in this review. Indeed, one reason why I find the book relatable is because the first thing I wrote after the referendum finished with these words:
“As for me, I feel distraught and physically sick. As the Brexiters crow of having ‘got their country back’, I feel that I have lost my home and now live in exile.”
That was on another blog, but the feeling was the impetus for this blog, and all that I have written about Brexit which, in its own way, has been an attempt to bring an analytical perspective to bear upon what was, and to an extent still is, a visceral sense of pain; to engage as a way to make enragement productive or perhaps to assuage or displace enragement.
For Behr, that sense of exile is refracted through the lens of his family’s migration from Lithuania to South Africa to Britain, and freighted by his Jewishness, which gives particular weight not just to the experience of Brexit but of the anti-Semitic strain within Corbyn’s Labour. Thus, he writes:
“Even in twenty-first-century Britain, safe by any historical measure, the hearts of the survivors’ grandchildren beat with a trace of inherited dread. It is the cautionary tale about the worst-case scenario that was handed down: it is the emotional baggage and the passport kept ready for sudden flight. It is the inescapable suspicion that no matter how rooted Jews feel in a country and its culture, one day there will come a mob armed with the rusty old prejudice to let us know that we don’t belong.” (p.72)
I’ve quoted this at some length, because it captures powerfully and eloquently something which is immediately intelligible, even to those of us who are not Jewish. I’ve heard or read similar sentiments, but rarely, if ever, expressed with such clarity.
I also know, not from first-hand experience but from family members, the somewhat adjacent and sometimes overlapping fear of being found not to have one’s paperwork in order, and to be passport-less, a fear that also gets transmitted down generations. It was a fear suddenly experienced, after the referendum, by those millions of EU-27 nationals in the UK and, often, the British people with whom their lives were deeply intertwined. It was no comfort – in fact, a source of intense anger and upset – when leave-voting friends and neighbours, explaining that immigration had got ‘out of control’, told them, rather as Behr was told by his anti-Semitic landlady in Russia (p.215), that ‘we don’t mean you, of course’.
And then, somewhat adjacent to and sometimes overlapping with this, there is that experience that I, and many others, felt on the morning after the referendum of having becomes exiles in our own country, newly revealed as alien to us and alienated by us. That wouldn’t have been felt by all remain voters, of course, but the volume and visceral nature of the response of many, and the way that it has endured over the years since, shows how widespread and profound it was. Equally, though more quietly, alongside that enragement I’ve witnessed the gradual disengagement of many erstwhile remainers who, rather than shout impotently at the news, have retreated into the “internal emigration” of the personal and the local or even a literal, external emigration to other countries.
A lost past and a lost country
Behr’s other point of reference for the feeling of exile engendered by Brexit and post-Brexit politics is the comparison with the apparent stability and prosperity of the ‘Great Moderation’ of the 1990s, and especially the second half of that decade, when he was in his early twenties: “What I have more recently found intolerable about British politics can only be properly diagnosed with reference to that glorious fin de siècle. To know the present feeling of exile means revisiting the country as it was when I felt most at home in it.” (p.74)
I don’t doubt the authenticity of the sentiment, but I think it is slightly off-target analytically. I am ten years older than Behr, and have a similar feeling about my ‘salad days’ a decade earlier, at a much less politically auspicious time. But I also recognize the contrast he draws between the late 1990s and the recent period. My point, then, is that the two issues of youthful hope and political hope shouldn’t be conflated just because, for Behr, they happened to coincide.
For certainly, at the time, and still in retrospect, the late 1990s did indeed seem to be a time of hope and possibility in Britain. That is not rose-tinted – even then, and more clearly now, it had some obvious limitations. But the morning after the 1997 election, as I got the train to work having been up all night, and people of, presumably, many different backgrounds, were spontaneously smiling at each other, was unforgettable. It was an experience repeated across the country. As Behr writes, “it had some of the character of a cultural revolution: a moment, like the Brexit referendum 19 years later, when the democratic process seemed to express a metamorphosis in national identity.” (p.80)
However, whereas in 1997 there were, no doubt, some bitterly upset Tories, that election had a sense of bringing people together that was wholly lacking in 2016, when even the victorious leaders looked shocked and frightened, and whilst some were cheering in the streets, many others were behind closed doors contemplating what seemed like tragedy.
I’m attracted to Behr’s point – which is very much in keeping with his disposition to ‘balance and perspective’ – that “the other side” had also felt a sense of exile of ‘having lost my country’, which drove the nationalist desire to ‘get my country back’: “it is possible, and I think necessary, to acknowledge that symmetry.” (p.118) It’s a wise and charitable observation, as well as having some truth. But the difficulties of acknowledging such a symmetry go beyond being “hard when the losing side sees most of its arguments from the referendum vindicated by subsequent events” (loc. cit.). For I think there is an important asymmetry in the political psychology of these two exiles, and considering it may also reveal some of the limits to where ‘balance and perspective’ can take us.
Asymmetries of exile
The leave sense of exile was a grumble, perhaps much more than that, which had built over many years. The exile of remainers was an instant trauma, an overnight ripping up of the old order, and not just that of EU membership. That was made worse by the fact that, even then, it was known that plenty of leave voters weren’t motivated by their own exiled hurt but by more frivolous motives of ‘wanting a change’ or ‘giving Cameron a kicking’, or simply ‘assumed remain would win anyway’.
Behr anticipates this point in noting that the collapse of the centre (meaning Brexit, but not only that) “felt sudden … because we hadn’t been paying attention to the shifting ground beneath our feet” (p.245), and it’s true that, like many things in life which come as a shock, there now seems a kind of inevitability about Brexit. But if the narrow margin of victory had gone the other way, we would be writing with equal assurance something like ‘when it came to the point, a traditional pragmatism, allied to fear of adding more economic damage to that of the financial crisis, unsurprisingly carried the day’.
The small numerical difference between the outcomes was, of course, epochal in its effects, but an identical electorate, with exactly the same groundswell of discontents and grievances, might on another day have yielded a different result. It’s only because there was, in fact, an earthquake that we now say the tectonic plates beneath our feet had already shifted.
Initial shock aside, the aftershocks of the earthquake were profound for remainers because of the way that Brexit was then prosecuted in a form which was so ‘hard’, and without any attempt to build consensus. Notably, it wasn’t until after that became clear that the People’s Vote campaign got underway and gained ground. At the same time, a kind of ‘Brexit McCarthyism’ emerged in which remainers (whether actual or alleged), especially in the civil service, academia and judiciary were talked of, and even to some extent treated, not just as exiles within their own country but as its internal enemies. Increasingly, that seems to have extended to treating anyone who is educated as part of an alien ‘new elite’ judged against populist loyalty tests that include but are far more extensive than Brexit.
Although he doesn’t mention the McCarthyism comparison, drawing it might be an example of Behr’s highly incisive discussion of “the paradox of vigilance” (the title of chapter 14) and his contradictory “dread at how bad things might get” and “irritation at the casual invocation of worst-case scenarios” (p.349). He means, primarily, Stalinism and Fascism, but McCarthyism could fit as well. Arguably the McCarthyism comparison is a more legitimate one, in that it refers to a scapegoating that happened within a society which was, nevertheless, essentially a democracy, but it is still a form of catastrophising and one which can be too glibly made.
For what it is worth, I don’t think that in that respect things have turned out as badly as I and others feared but there, again, is the paradox: perhaps, with less vigilance, things would have gone worse? At all events, my point is that, to whatever extent the fear was justified, it was a fear felt only by one side (it’s true that the ‘other side’ invokes its mirror image of a ‘woke thought police’ set to ‘cancel’ those who speak out, but such a situation would arise despite rather than because of, or out of, Brexit).
It's also worth pointing out that both the ‘aftershocks’ of how Brexit was done in such a hard way, and with no process of consensus-building, and the incipient McCarthyism (if that’s what it was) of 2017-2019 happened under Theresa May. Behr’s book isn’t, and doesn’t purport to be, a history of Brexit, but the account of Brexit it gives is perhaps surprisingly muted on May’s role, certainly by comparison with the extensive, and extremely acute, analysis of Johnson. Yet May set many of the directions for how Brexit turned out, and in many ways her character and motivations are more difficult to decode than his.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the idea of a symmetry of exile is that, almost from the outset, and certainly now, the most committed Brexiters and many leave voters have insisted that Brexit has been betrayed, and that ‘this wasn’t the Brexit I voted for’. Many of us thought that was inevitable, and it’s the central theme of my own book about Brexit (a revised and updated edition of which will be published in September, by the way). But, inevitable or not, it is the case that Brexit hasn’t restored the homeland of previously-exiled leavers at the expense of newly-exiled remainers; it has aggrieved just about everyone, albeit for different reasons.
Behr is well aware of this, of course, and it surfaces several times, especially in Part 3 of the book (‘Revolution’) which is one of the best analyses of Brexit I’ve read (again, perhaps reflecting the fact that it is one I very much agree with, and have advanced on this blog, including many times referencing Behr’s newspaper columns). For example, he points out that “a revolution that has achieved its defining purpose while meeting none of its higher goals condemns its leaders to a cycle of endless grievance-mining.” (p.294) Just so, and by the same token not just the leaders but the followers were left trapped in grievance. But that is doubly galling for the other ‘tribe’ who, in addition to their own grievances about Brexit having happened must listen to the victors still complaining, perpetually dissatisfied.
Building a new home
I don’t want to give the impression that Behr projects a kind of flabby relativism about Brexit, or anything else. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, whilst he understands the frustrations that drove people to vote leave, “it boiled my blood when the impeccably-credentialled professional politicians who led that revolution excused themselves from belonging to the Establishment so they might claim to be overthrowing it” (p.268), using what he calls the “Brexit ju-jitsu ... that defined the losing side as the authors of their own defeat” (loc. cit.). And notwithstanding his post-cardiac avoidance of enragement there’s plenty of anger on display, and an acceptance that “when politics degrades the country you call home there is a responsibility to stay angry in defiance of those who seek to gain from disengagement.” (p.381) The trick, Behr suggests, is to discharge that responsibility without getting stuck in a cycle of personal anger that leads to nowhere but more anger.
There’s so much in this book that I haven’t touched on, even in what is quite a long review. Much more about Brexit, and much more about much more than Brexit. Almost every page has a fresh insight or a thought-provoking argument, usually accompanied by a compelling story from his family or professional life and always informed by a deep knowledge of modern history and politics. The last book on politics I can recall reading with such attention and pleasure was Tony Judt’s (2011) Ill Fares the Land.
If, at the end, it’s not quite clear how to be engaged without being enraged – and the route that Behr involuntarily took to do so isn’t one anyone would want to have to follow – well, this isn’t, after all, a self-help book. The main tools it advocates are also those of the balance and perspective it deploys, to be applied to oneself, but also to history and politics where it reveals that “the balance sheet, read across a long enough timeline, is net positive for progress.” (p.364). That enables an engagement which can’t reconstruct the home from which we have been exiled, but can build a new home in the new land where we find ourselves. In that sense, it is an optimistic book, and if Behr has become less enraged by politics, he doesn’t seem to have lost a passion for its possibilities.
One development has been the confirmation of what I discussed last week, namely that the government will only axe 600 pieces of retained EU law by the end of the year (not even the 800 floated). A sensible move, to the outrage of the Brexit Ultras, though there remains the important question about what exactly these laws are.
There were also the Local Election results which, amongst other things, gave rise to questions about what salience Brexit now has to voting patterns and about what the implications for Brexit policy would be if the results foreshadow a hung parliament. The latter question is discussed by Nick Tyrone in his latest Week in Brexitland, and I largely agree with his analysis.
Book review
Behr, Rafael (2023) Politics: A Survivor’s Guide. How to stay engaged without getting enraged. London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-83895-504-5 (Hardback). 404 pages. £20.
This isn’t, strictly speaking, a book about Brexit, but Brexit runs through it as a theme and a context, and because of the focus of this blog it is mainly this aspect I will discuss. I bought it because its author, Rafael Behr, is, to my mind, one of the best political columnists in the country, and not just in relation to Brexit although he has written a great deal about that. Almost all his columns are excellent, especially because he so often finds a distinctive angle or a fresh insight on whatever it is that he is discussing. Moreover, he has a superb writing style, at once elegant and punchy, acute and amusing.
I mention this because I’m not sure that I would have been drawn to it by its title, or more especially the sub-title, which, almost literally, makes it sound like a ‘self-help’ book. Thankfully, it isn’t really that and, towards the end, Behr makes it clear that there will be no “list of practical tips for a less infuriating democracy” (p.371).
Balance and perspective
Saying that I was drawn to it because of regard for Behr’s writings opens a difficult question which is partly what the book is about. Might the reason I think his writing so excellent be because I generally agree with it? Isn’t it a symptom of the enragement of politics that Behr’s book discusses that we all become partisans, seeing unquestionable virtue in our heroes and irredeemable iniquity in our foes?
Spending, as I do, much time trawling through the writings of Brexiters, I am struck by how often they will point people towards an ‘excellent’ article by one of their fellows which, when I read the recommended piece, I find to be vapid, disingenuous or worse. But, no doubt, they would think the same of writings that I admire about Brexit, or indeed of my own writing about it.
It may be simply impossible for any of us to know for sure whether we are open-minded, and perhaps that is most true for those who are open-minded enough to even consider the question. Anyway, as Behr says, “it is consoling to discover my perceptions of things reflected in another mind; not just reflected, but clarified, analyzed and organized. That is how I know I am not alone and not going mad” (p.371). Confirmation bias is always a possibility, but it would be absurd to dismiss all confirmations as being the result of it.
Agonizing and ambivalence is both a theme and a characteristic of Behr’s analysis, so that even ambivalence is subjected to agonizing questions about “the threshold where equivocation [becomes] complicity” (p.349). He records how, on the occasions he has been pre-interviewed for possible appearances on the BBC’s Question Time, his responses are measured, discursive and qualified: “On and on it goes like that, on the one hand, on the other, everything depends, until consensus is reached that I should not appear on Question Time.” (p.169)
It’s only an anecdote, but it gives a flavour of Behr’s intellectual curiosity and innately liberal sensibility, as well as his wry and often self-deprecating humour. It also illustrates the fact that “a recurrent theme of this book [is] the need for balance and perspective, which involves the more subtle art of keeping balance itself in perspective.” (p. 368)
At all events, I approached the book with at least enough open-mindedness to be prepared for disappointment, in that it is one thing to write fine columns but another to write fine books. They are very different forms and disciplines, and few can master both. I wasn’t disappointed, for it turns out that Behr is one of those who can.
The pain of politics and the politics of pain
This is a book by a political journalist about politics, but of a most unusual kind. It weaves together personal experiences, family stories, political theory, and particular political events within an over-arching narrative of some key aspects of modern history (especially in the UK and Russia, but also Lithuania, Europe generally, the US, Israel and South Africa). It’s not the kind of book most journalists (or academics) would or could write, precisely because it operates in so many different registers, and is all the better for that.
Much of it is a meditation on the nature of democracy and threats to it, the polarisation and toxicity of contemporary political discourse, the rise of the alt-right and, to an extent, the alt-left, cynicism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Anyone who has followed politics in recent years will find these familiar topics, but Behr brings a freshness to the discussion that is engaging and readable. But I think it is the interweaving of the personal and the political which is most arresting and, for me and I suspect others, most ‘relatable’. It is very much a book about the pain of politics, a pain that feels personal. By the same token, this review is to a degree about my personal responses to the book, rather than simply being a rehearsal and appraisal of its contents.
I used the word ‘arresting’ deliberately, because it was a massive cardiac arrest, with which the book starts and ends, which both stopped Behr in his tracks and then motivated him to write the book. That doesn’t make it self-indulgent: on the contrary, it is an analytical book which seeks to explore not simply the personal pain of politics but the political significance of that personal pain.
The pain of exile
Whilst Behr is careful not to ascribe his heart attack to politics or to Brexit (he explains it mainly in terms of genetic pre-disposition and lifestyle), he does connect it to the way that he and others he knows experienced the “furious mess of British politics” (p. 12) following the Brexit referendum. The pain of that wasn’t simply that of an observer: the political mess wasn’t experienced by people as something external to them but as something that, so to speak, messed them up, creating what Behr describes as a “state of emotional and psychological exile.” (p. 118)
The notion of ‘exile’ is, in various forms, a central motif of the book, along with the related idea of political disengagement being “internal emigration.” (p.344) Thus, the overall puzzle of the book is the political, psychological and emotional challenge of “treading the line between complacency and despair” (loc. cit.) or, in other words, between the temptations of internal emigration and the pain of exile.
It is the motif of exile which I am going to focus on in this review. Indeed, one reason why I find the book relatable is because the first thing I wrote after the referendum finished with these words:
“As for me, I feel distraught and physically sick. As the Brexiters crow of having ‘got their country back’, I feel that I have lost my home and now live in exile.”
That was on another blog, but the feeling was the impetus for this blog, and all that I have written about Brexit which, in its own way, has been an attempt to bring an analytical perspective to bear upon what was, and to an extent still is, a visceral sense of pain; to engage as a way to make enragement productive or perhaps to assuage or displace enragement.
For Behr, that sense of exile is refracted through the lens of his family’s migration from Lithuania to South Africa to Britain, and freighted by his Jewishness, which gives particular weight not just to the experience of Brexit but of the anti-Semitic strain within Corbyn’s Labour. Thus, he writes:
“Even in twenty-first-century Britain, safe by any historical measure, the hearts of the survivors’ grandchildren beat with a trace of inherited dread. It is the cautionary tale about the worst-case scenario that was handed down: it is the emotional baggage and the passport kept ready for sudden flight. It is the inescapable suspicion that no matter how rooted Jews feel in a country and its culture, one day there will come a mob armed with the rusty old prejudice to let us know that we don’t belong.” (p.72)
I’ve quoted this at some length, because it captures powerfully and eloquently something which is immediately intelligible, even to those of us who are not Jewish. I’ve heard or read similar sentiments, but rarely, if ever, expressed with such clarity.
I also know, not from first-hand experience but from family members, the somewhat adjacent and sometimes overlapping fear of being found not to have one’s paperwork in order, and to be passport-less, a fear that also gets transmitted down generations. It was a fear suddenly experienced, after the referendum, by those millions of EU-27 nationals in the UK and, often, the British people with whom their lives were deeply intertwined. It was no comfort – in fact, a source of intense anger and upset – when leave-voting friends and neighbours, explaining that immigration had got ‘out of control’, told them, rather as Behr was told by his anti-Semitic landlady in Russia (p.215), that ‘we don’t mean you, of course’.
And then, somewhat adjacent to and sometimes overlapping with this, there is that experience that I, and many others, felt on the morning after the referendum of having becomes exiles in our own country, newly revealed as alien to us and alienated by us. That wouldn’t have been felt by all remain voters, of course, but the volume and visceral nature of the response of many, and the way that it has endured over the years since, shows how widespread and profound it was. Equally, though more quietly, alongside that enragement I’ve witnessed the gradual disengagement of many erstwhile remainers who, rather than shout impotently at the news, have retreated into the “internal emigration” of the personal and the local or even a literal, external emigration to other countries.
A lost past and a lost country
Behr’s other point of reference for the feeling of exile engendered by Brexit and post-Brexit politics is the comparison with the apparent stability and prosperity of the ‘Great Moderation’ of the 1990s, and especially the second half of that decade, when he was in his early twenties: “What I have more recently found intolerable about British politics can only be properly diagnosed with reference to that glorious fin de siècle. To know the present feeling of exile means revisiting the country as it was when I felt most at home in it.” (p.74)
I don’t doubt the authenticity of the sentiment, but I think it is slightly off-target analytically. I am ten years older than Behr, and have a similar feeling about my ‘salad days’ a decade earlier, at a much less politically auspicious time. But I also recognize the contrast he draws between the late 1990s and the recent period. My point, then, is that the two issues of youthful hope and political hope shouldn’t be conflated just because, for Behr, they happened to coincide.
For certainly, at the time, and still in retrospect, the late 1990s did indeed seem to be a time of hope and possibility in Britain. That is not rose-tinted – even then, and more clearly now, it had some obvious limitations. But the morning after the 1997 election, as I got the train to work having been up all night, and people of, presumably, many different backgrounds, were spontaneously smiling at each other, was unforgettable. It was an experience repeated across the country. As Behr writes, “it had some of the character of a cultural revolution: a moment, like the Brexit referendum 19 years later, when the democratic process seemed to express a metamorphosis in national identity.” (p.80)
However, whereas in 1997 there were, no doubt, some bitterly upset Tories, that election had a sense of bringing people together that was wholly lacking in 2016, when even the victorious leaders looked shocked and frightened, and whilst some were cheering in the streets, many others were behind closed doors contemplating what seemed like tragedy.
I’m attracted to Behr’s point – which is very much in keeping with his disposition to ‘balance and perspective’ – that “the other side” had also felt a sense of exile of ‘having lost my country’, which drove the nationalist desire to ‘get my country back’: “it is possible, and I think necessary, to acknowledge that symmetry.” (p.118) It’s a wise and charitable observation, as well as having some truth. But the difficulties of acknowledging such a symmetry go beyond being “hard when the losing side sees most of its arguments from the referendum vindicated by subsequent events” (loc. cit.). For I think there is an important asymmetry in the political psychology of these two exiles, and considering it may also reveal some of the limits to where ‘balance and perspective’ can take us.
Asymmetries of exile
The leave sense of exile was a grumble, perhaps much more than that, which had built over many years. The exile of remainers was an instant trauma, an overnight ripping up of the old order, and not just that of EU membership. That was made worse by the fact that, even then, it was known that plenty of leave voters weren’t motivated by their own exiled hurt but by more frivolous motives of ‘wanting a change’ or ‘giving Cameron a kicking’, or simply ‘assumed remain would win anyway’.
Behr anticipates this point in noting that the collapse of the centre (meaning Brexit, but not only that) “felt sudden … because we hadn’t been paying attention to the shifting ground beneath our feet” (p.245), and it’s true that, like many things in life which come as a shock, there now seems a kind of inevitability about Brexit. But if the narrow margin of victory had gone the other way, we would be writing with equal assurance something like ‘when it came to the point, a traditional pragmatism, allied to fear of adding more economic damage to that of the financial crisis, unsurprisingly carried the day’.
The small numerical difference between the outcomes was, of course, epochal in its effects, but an identical electorate, with exactly the same groundswell of discontents and grievances, might on another day have yielded a different result. It’s only because there was, in fact, an earthquake that we now say the tectonic plates beneath our feet had already shifted.
Initial shock aside, the aftershocks of the earthquake were profound for remainers because of the way that Brexit was then prosecuted in a form which was so ‘hard’, and without any attempt to build consensus. Notably, it wasn’t until after that became clear that the People’s Vote campaign got underway and gained ground. At the same time, a kind of ‘Brexit McCarthyism’ emerged in which remainers (whether actual or alleged), especially in the civil service, academia and judiciary were talked of, and even to some extent treated, not just as exiles within their own country but as its internal enemies. Increasingly, that seems to have extended to treating anyone who is educated as part of an alien ‘new elite’ judged against populist loyalty tests that include but are far more extensive than Brexit.
Although he doesn’t mention the McCarthyism comparison, drawing it might be an example of Behr’s highly incisive discussion of “the paradox of vigilance” (the title of chapter 14) and his contradictory “dread at how bad things might get” and “irritation at the casual invocation of worst-case scenarios” (p.349). He means, primarily, Stalinism and Fascism, but McCarthyism could fit as well. Arguably the McCarthyism comparison is a more legitimate one, in that it refers to a scapegoating that happened within a society which was, nevertheless, essentially a democracy, but it is still a form of catastrophising and one which can be too glibly made.
For what it is worth, I don’t think that in that respect things have turned out as badly as I and others feared but there, again, is the paradox: perhaps, with less vigilance, things would have gone worse? At all events, my point is that, to whatever extent the fear was justified, it was a fear felt only by one side (it’s true that the ‘other side’ invokes its mirror image of a ‘woke thought police’ set to ‘cancel’ those who speak out, but such a situation would arise despite rather than because of, or out of, Brexit).
It's also worth pointing out that both the ‘aftershocks’ of how Brexit was done in such a hard way, and with no process of consensus-building, and the incipient McCarthyism (if that’s what it was) of 2017-2019 happened under Theresa May. Behr’s book isn’t, and doesn’t purport to be, a history of Brexit, but the account of Brexit it gives is perhaps surprisingly muted on May’s role, certainly by comparison with the extensive, and extremely acute, analysis of Johnson. Yet May set many of the directions for how Brexit turned out, and in many ways her character and motivations are more difficult to decode than his.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the idea of a symmetry of exile is that, almost from the outset, and certainly now, the most committed Brexiters and many leave voters have insisted that Brexit has been betrayed, and that ‘this wasn’t the Brexit I voted for’. Many of us thought that was inevitable, and it’s the central theme of my own book about Brexit (a revised and updated edition of which will be published in September, by the way). But, inevitable or not, it is the case that Brexit hasn’t restored the homeland of previously-exiled leavers at the expense of newly-exiled remainers; it has aggrieved just about everyone, albeit for different reasons.
Behr is well aware of this, of course, and it surfaces several times, especially in Part 3 of the book (‘Revolution’) which is one of the best analyses of Brexit I’ve read (again, perhaps reflecting the fact that it is one I very much agree with, and have advanced on this blog, including many times referencing Behr’s newspaper columns). For example, he points out that “a revolution that has achieved its defining purpose while meeting none of its higher goals condemns its leaders to a cycle of endless grievance-mining.” (p.294) Just so, and by the same token not just the leaders but the followers were left trapped in grievance. But that is doubly galling for the other ‘tribe’ who, in addition to their own grievances about Brexit having happened must listen to the victors still complaining, perpetually dissatisfied.
Building a new home
I don’t want to give the impression that Behr projects a kind of flabby relativism about Brexit, or anything else. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, whilst he understands the frustrations that drove people to vote leave, “it boiled my blood when the impeccably-credentialled professional politicians who led that revolution excused themselves from belonging to the Establishment so they might claim to be overthrowing it” (p.268), using what he calls the “Brexit ju-jitsu ... that defined the losing side as the authors of their own defeat” (loc. cit.). And notwithstanding his post-cardiac avoidance of enragement there’s plenty of anger on display, and an acceptance that “when politics degrades the country you call home there is a responsibility to stay angry in defiance of those who seek to gain from disengagement.” (p.381) The trick, Behr suggests, is to discharge that responsibility without getting stuck in a cycle of personal anger that leads to nowhere but more anger.
There’s so much in this book that I haven’t touched on, even in what is quite a long review. Much more about Brexit, and much more about much more than Brexit. Almost every page has a fresh insight or a thought-provoking argument, usually accompanied by a compelling story from his family or professional life and always informed by a deep knowledge of modern history and politics. The last book on politics I can recall reading with such attention and pleasure was Tony Judt’s (2011) Ill Fares the Land.
If, at the end, it’s not quite clear how to be engaged without being enraged – and the route that Behr involuntarily took to do so isn’t one anyone would want to have to follow – well, this isn’t, after all, a self-help book. The main tools it advocates are also those of the balance and perspective it deploys, to be applied to oneself, but also to history and politics where it reveals that “the balance sheet, read across a long enough timeline, is net positive for progress.” (p.364). That enables an engagement which can’t reconstruct the home from which we have been exiled, but can build a new home in the new land where we find ourselves. In that sense, it is an optimistic book, and if Behr has become less enraged by politics, he doesn’t seem to have lost a passion for its possibilities.
Tuesday, 21 March 2023
Book reviews
Russell, Meg and James, Lisa (2023). The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-284971-7 (Hardback). 416 pages. £25
De Rynck, Stefaan (2023). Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78821-568-8 (Hardback). 288 pages. £25
As time passes since the Brexit referendum and the process of leaving the EU that followed, there is a growing literature describing and explaining what happened. The two excellent books reviewed here are amongst the most recent and, whilst very different in focus and approach, each fills in a crucial piece of the jigsaw of what will become the history of Brexit. Moreover, they are pieces that fit together so that they can profitably be read as a pair which, together, reveal two very significant chunks of the Brexit picture. In fact, it would be illuminating to chart the precise points they fit together by mapping specific moments in the UK-EU negotiations with specific events in the UK parliament, although I won’t attempt that here.
Russell & James: The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit
Meg Russell and Lisa James’ book is an academic text, whose authors work at University College London’s Constitution Unit and thus bring a very high degree of academic credibility and expertise, and it is based on a major research study of ‘Brexit, Parliament and the Constitution’. As such, it draws on the Hansard record of parliamentary proceedings and a whole swathe of other official documents, secondary sources including other studies of Brexit and media reports, and a wide variety of interviews with participants in the events conducted by the authors (and others). These are all assiduously cited and there is an extensive bibliography, a compendious index, as well as a useful glossary of parliamentary terms. In short, it is a scholarly account but, for all that, a readable one and certainly accessible for general readers.
One problem with writing about Brexit is where to begin the story and where to end it. For the start, some authors (e.g. O’Rourke, 2018) go back as far as the Nineteenth century, but here, apart from a short preamble, the narrative begins with the steps that led to the 2016 referendum. The bulk of the book is a chronological account of parliamentary events, including their constitutional and legal aspects, from the referendum onwards. That chronology ends when the UK left the EU in 2020, apart from some fairly brief comments in the concluding chapter, which also serves to bring together some of the main themes in a non-chronological way.
This framing does mean that neither the negotiation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement nor the Transition Period are covered, and nor are the subsequent arguments and negotiations about the Northern Ireland Protocol. However, that is perfectly reasonable since these did not give rise to a great deal, or certainly not to the same degree, as regards the specifically parliamentary focus of this book.
So far as that parliamentary focus is concerned, I doubt whether anyone will ever improve on Russell & James’s account. It is highly detailed, lucid, and painstakingly accurate. I suppose there may be future PhDs or other treatises which delve even more deeply into this or that aspect, but, if so, they will probably not be of huge interest to more general readers and, by definition, won’t be accounts of the parliamentary story as a whole. The authors effortlessly unpick the often extremely abstruse history of, amongst others things, Meaningful Votes, Indicative Votes, complex amendments and unusual procedures. This is all sure-footed and faultless.
For people who followed that story closely at the time, there probably won’t be any huge surprises in this book, although, even for them, there will certainly be many details which have since been forgotten. Moreover, as the authors rightly observe, “[e]ven those closely involved sometimes struggled to follow the intense and fast-moving developments” (p.6), so it is invaluable to have this meticulous record of events both as a reminder and also as a way of understanding, retrospectively, things which at the time were ignored or misunderstood or which have since been misrepresented.
Russell & James are assiduous in not offering a ‘point of view’ on Brexit itself, and I think that readers, regardless of their own views, will find this a fair and objective account. Where they do have a point of view is on the desirability and necessity of “respect[ing] parliament as the central democratic institution … upon which UK democracy depends” (p.6). Analytically, this is the main guiding theme of the book, and it leads to some acute observations, in particular about the problematic lack of clarity of the place of referendums in the UK constitution, and the risk of them creating a conflict between parliamentarians and the ‘will of the people’ (p.61).
This certainly happened in the case of the Brexit referendum, and was compounded by the fact that the campaign to leave the EU did not specify any kind of plan or model for how it was to be done. The authors show clearly throughout (but especially pp. 321-324) how different actors mobilised, sometimes inconsistently, contradictory views about popular, parliamentary and executive sovereignty, and they argue that there are significant lessons to be learned for the conduct of any future referendums, whatever the topic may be.
Closely allied with this, Russell & James make some acute points about the conduct of Theresa May. One is about her failure to involve a wide variety of stakeholders (in fact, to involve anyone, much) in the immediate post-referendum process of shaping Brexit. Others have made this point, but the authors’ distinctive insight is that this failure served to exacerbate the incipient gap between popular and parliamentary sovereignty: the ‘people had spoken’ but they only got to speak once, and it fell to parliament to give concrete form to what they had said. Secondly, they argue that May constantly talked as if ‘parliament’ were thwarting her Brexit plans, whereas, in fact, her staunchest opponents were the ‘Brexiteers’ within her own party (one minor criticism of the book is the consistent use of the term ‘Brexiteers’, their own self-preferred label, with its connotations of buccaneering freedom, rather than the more neutral ‘Brexiters’).
These points relate to what Brexiters wrongly claim, and many members of the public have come to believe, about this period, namely that it was one in which the 'remainer parliament’ tried to ‘thwart’ Brexit. So it is worth quoting Russell & James at some length:
“[The] central disagreement about what Brexit should mean was facilitated by the original lack of clarity in the referendum. But it took place between May’s government and Johnson’s supporters – not between the institution of government and the institution of parliament. The Conservative MPs who blocked May’s deal, including Johnson himself, believed that they were defending Brexit, rather than undermining it. This made it wholly misleading to blame parliament for ‘thwarting’ Brexit, when those involved had in fact used parliament to pursue an argument with May’s government.” (p. 313, emphases in original)
I agree with this analysis, but would add that it reveals something which is not so much about Brexit as about what is increasingly being called ‘Brexitism’. For whilst, as I suggested earlier, most readers would agree that Russell & James’ descriptions of the parliamentary events are fair and accurate, it is surely the case that at least some Brexiters will never accept their analysis of those events, including especially that just quoted. And that is because for a certain – perhaps small, but very influential – group of Brexiters none of the constitutional niceties or conventions really matter or, worse, they see them as the devices of ‘the elite’ and regard those who insist that they do matter as apologists for, if not indeed members of, that elite.
In that sense, for all that the book is neutral on Brexit itself, it cannot help but be partisan in relation to ‘Brexitism’. Indeed, the last sentences of the book imply as much:
[The] “restoration of constitutional norms is not an easy task, or a challenge in which they UK is alone. It is part of an international struggle, to defend democracy and institutions.” (p. 335)
This is not a criticism of the book, so much as to point to the way that Brexit, in its wider sense, does not admit of neutrality. For that reason, Russell & James do quite as great a public service in their concern to emphasise the importance of parliamentary democracy and constitutional propriety as they do in their forensic account of the events, sometimes arcane and often dramatic, that took place in the British parliament between 2016 and 2020.
De Rynck: Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done
For most British readers, at least, Russell & James’ parliamentary focus will be relatively familiar, as will the sense it brings of the negotiations with the EU being part of the background context of the political battles that were taking place in the UK. For such readers, including most of those who followed Brexit closely, the complete shift in the centring of the story provided by Stefaan De Rynck’s book is therefore fascinating and informative. Here, what he at one point calls “the shenanigans of British politics” (p. 246) are very much the background context to the EU’s negotiating process with the UK which is his focus.
De Rynck, an experienced EU civil servant who was a senior aide to Michel Barnier throughout the negotiations, provides an insider account of that process. In that sense, unlike Russell & James, he was an actor in, rather than an analyst of, the events described and, although he also has high academic credentials, this is not written as an academic book. It is nevertheless highly detailed and, in places, replete with technical detail, whilst retaining readability – to a greater extent, in my view, than Barnier’s (2022) own, diary-based, book about the negotiations.
Like Russell & James, the approach is chronological, in this case running essentially from the referendum in 2016 to the finalization of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement at the end of 2020. It is based on official papers and media reports, as well as discussions held by the author with other participants and, of course, his own personal experience. It does not provide citations or a bibliography, which is a shame, but there is a good index and also a useful chronology of events listed at the beginning.
Although the focus and the centring of this version of the Brexit story is different to that provided by most, if not all, British analysts, including Russell & James, it is, indeed, recognizably the same story, and, in any case, De Rynck is deeply knowledgeable about UK politics. In particular, the consequences of there having been no defined UK plan for how to leave also runs through it. However, whereas the EU was as shocked as the UK by the referendum result, it much more quickly came to a settled view on what Brexit could and could not mean, something which didn’t exist in the UK polity and, arguably, still doesn’t.
That the EU was able to come to such a position, and stick to it pretty much unchanged throughout, was partly, on De Rynck’s account (and that of others), because of the very considerable efforts of Barnier and others to construct and maintain a consensus view amongst member states and other key actors. That was the exact opposite of May’s failure to even attempt to create such a consensus within the UK, and also the exact opposite of what Brexiters, at least, expected the EU to achieve. It enabled what De Rynck plausibly, and I would think accurately, depicts as a largely technocratic, highly transparent, and certainly patient approach to the negotiations.
I wonder, though, whether it doesn’t also reflect the fact that – notwithstanding the initial shock and, no doubt, in many quarters upset and even anger – Brexit simply didn’t have the emotional and political-psychological charge in the EU that it had in Britain. For sure, it was a matter of deep concern, perhaps most especially in Ireland, and De Rynck explains at several points how important it was to the EU to maintain solidarity with Dublin, contrary to UK beliefs that it would be “thrown under a bus” (p. 118). But Brexit never had the political toxicity in any EU country, or within the EU collectively, that it had in the UK.
The idea that the EU would be divided, including the idea that it would sacrifice Ireland’s interests, is one of numerous examples that permeate the book of how the UK never really understood or cared sufficiently about EU perspectives on Brexit. That doesn’t just apply to Brexiters, but remainers, too. De Rynck points out a number of fallacies, including that of those “remainers who thought Barnier was on their side” (p.2). However, the more consequential fallacies were those taken over from Brexiters by the UK government, because these significantly inflected the negotiations.
These fallacies, which re-appear over-and-over again in various forms in the book, include all the different versions of ‘cherry-picking’. It is instructive to have it confirmed that, as many have speculated, Theresa May did indeed initially approach Brexit as she had done her negotiations within the EU as Home Secretary, which was to “first opt-out of all membership obligations and [then] back in to those elements in the UK’s interest” (p.12). But that was just an instance of the wider inability of the UK government to understand the difference between negotiating as, effectively, a third country (or a third country in waiting) rather than as a member. That also explains what De Rynck calls the fallacy of the belief that ‘the EU always budges at the last minute’, as if Brexit were like a summit of member states.
Indeed, although his tone is scrupulously polite throughout, it is impossible to read De Rynck’s book without detecting a degree of bemusement at how UK diplomacy became so crass following Brexit, especially in the automatic, and in his assessment counter-productive, adoption of an adversarial approach to the negotiations, and the persistent belief that threats of ‘no deal’ (whether over the Withdrawal Agreement or the Trade and Cooperation Agreement) would produce meaningful concessions from the EU. As he pithily puts it, “the UK government played a game of chicken, by itself” (p. 247). Many of us in the UK made similar observations, but it is interesting to learn that this was, indeed, how it appeared to the EU negotiators.
Interesting, though, is perhaps too weak a word. It is also, at least for a British reader, embarrassing or worse to see just how unrealistic, if not downright ignorant, the UK government’s conduct was. Again, De Rynck is diplomatic about this, but reading between the lines, David Frost comes out particularly badly. For example, following Frost’s new threat “to walk away” from the talks in September 2020, he coolly writes that “Barnier debriefed his officials that the UK’s negotiator barely seemed to believe his own threat” (p231).
There is also an implication, for example in his discussion of the photo taken at the start of the Article 50 negotiations of David Davis, with no papers, grinning across the table at the Barnier team with their bulging files, that De Rynck felt a degree of perhaps professional sympathy with the UK civil servants. As he notes, “in the UK, the political bickering deprived the civil service of a direction to use its knowledge productively. Preparatory work by a civil service cannot make up for political indecisiveness” (p.40).
However, ultimately, even greater political decisiveness from the UK could not have compensated for the lack of realism of its demands in the face of the power asymmetry of the negotiating partners, which is effectively the story of the book. Although pro-Brexit readers probably won’t like it much, it will be hard for them to disagree with its central contention that the outcome for the EU was “close to the best-case scenario imagined in October 2016” (p. 245), if only because they, themselves, so frequently bemoan that they have not had ‘the Brexit we were promised’.
De Rynck, Stefaan (2023). Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78821-568-8 (Hardback). 288 pages. £25
As time passes since the Brexit referendum and the process of leaving the EU that followed, there is a growing literature describing and explaining what happened. The two excellent books reviewed here are amongst the most recent and, whilst very different in focus and approach, each fills in a crucial piece of the jigsaw of what will become the history of Brexit. Moreover, they are pieces that fit together so that they can profitably be read as a pair which, together, reveal two very significant chunks of the Brexit picture. In fact, it would be illuminating to chart the precise points they fit together by mapping specific moments in the UK-EU negotiations with specific events in the UK parliament, although I won’t attempt that here.
Russell & James: The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit
Meg Russell and Lisa James’ book is an academic text, whose authors work at University College London’s Constitution Unit and thus bring a very high degree of academic credibility and expertise, and it is based on a major research study of ‘Brexit, Parliament and the Constitution’. As such, it draws on the Hansard record of parliamentary proceedings and a whole swathe of other official documents, secondary sources including other studies of Brexit and media reports, and a wide variety of interviews with participants in the events conducted by the authors (and others). These are all assiduously cited and there is an extensive bibliography, a compendious index, as well as a useful glossary of parliamentary terms. In short, it is a scholarly account but, for all that, a readable one and certainly accessible for general readers.
One problem with writing about Brexit is where to begin the story and where to end it. For the start, some authors (e.g. O’Rourke, 2018) go back as far as the Nineteenth century, but here, apart from a short preamble, the narrative begins with the steps that led to the 2016 referendum. The bulk of the book is a chronological account of parliamentary events, including their constitutional and legal aspects, from the referendum onwards. That chronology ends when the UK left the EU in 2020, apart from some fairly brief comments in the concluding chapter, which also serves to bring together some of the main themes in a non-chronological way.
This framing does mean that neither the negotiation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement nor the Transition Period are covered, and nor are the subsequent arguments and negotiations about the Northern Ireland Protocol. However, that is perfectly reasonable since these did not give rise to a great deal, or certainly not to the same degree, as regards the specifically parliamentary focus of this book.
So far as that parliamentary focus is concerned, I doubt whether anyone will ever improve on Russell & James’s account. It is highly detailed, lucid, and painstakingly accurate. I suppose there may be future PhDs or other treatises which delve even more deeply into this or that aspect, but, if so, they will probably not be of huge interest to more general readers and, by definition, won’t be accounts of the parliamentary story as a whole. The authors effortlessly unpick the often extremely abstruse history of, amongst others things, Meaningful Votes, Indicative Votes, complex amendments and unusual procedures. This is all sure-footed and faultless.
For people who followed that story closely at the time, there probably won’t be any huge surprises in this book, although, even for them, there will certainly be many details which have since been forgotten. Moreover, as the authors rightly observe, “[e]ven those closely involved sometimes struggled to follow the intense and fast-moving developments” (p.6), so it is invaluable to have this meticulous record of events both as a reminder and also as a way of understanding, retrospectively, things which at the time were ignored or misunderstood or which have since been misrepresented.
Russell & James are assiduous in not offering a ‘point of view’ on Brexit itself, and I think that readers, regardless of their own views, will find this a fair and objective account. Where they do have a point of view is on the desirability and necessity of “respect[ing] parliament as the central democratic institution … upon which UK democracy depends” (p.6). Analytically, this is the main guiding theme of the book, and it leads to some acute observations, in particular about the problematic lack of clarity of the place of referendums in the UK constitution, and the risk of them creating a conflict between parliamentarians and the ‘will of the people’ (p.61).
This certainly happened in the case of the Brexit referendum, and was compounded by the fact that the campaign to leave the EU did not specify any kind of plan or model for how it was to be done. The authors show clearly throughout (but especially pp. 321-324) how different actors mobilised, sometimes inconsistently, contradictory views about popular, parliamentary and executive sovereignty, and they argue that there are significant lessons to be learned for the conduct of any future referendums, whatever the topic may be.
Closely allied with this, Russell & James make some acute points about the conduct of Theresa May. One is about her failure to involve a wide variety of stakeholders (in fact, to involve anyone, much) in the immediate post-referendum process of shaping Brexit. Others have made this point, but the authors’ distinctive insight is that this failure served to exacerbate the incipient gap between popular and parliamentary sovereignty: the ‘people had spoken’ but they only got to speak once, and it fell to parliament to give concrete form to what they had said. Secondly, they argue that May constantly talked as if ‘parliament’ were thwarting her Brexit plans, whereas, in fact, her staunchest opponents were the ‘Brexiteers’ within her own party (one minor criticism of the book is the consistent use of the term ‘Brexiteers’, their own self-preferred label, with its connotations of buccaneering freedom, rather than the more neutral ‘Brexiters’).
These points relate to what Brexiters wrongly claim, and many members of the public have come to believe, about this period, namely that it was one in which the 'remainer parliament’ tried to ‘thwart’ Brexit. So it is worth quoting Russell & James at some length:
“[The] central disagreement about what Brexit should mean was facilitated by the original lack of clarity in the referendum. But it took place between May’s government and Johnson’s supporters – not between the institution of government and the institution of parliament. The Conservative MPs who blocked May’s deal, including Johnson himself, believed that they were defending Brexit, rather than undermining it. This made it wholly misleading to blame parliament for ‘thwarting’ Brexit, when those involved had in fact used parliament to pursue an argument with May’s government.” (p. 313, emphases in original)
I agree with this analysis, but would add that it reveals something which is not so much about Brexit as about what is increasingly being called ‘Brexitism’. For whilst, as I suggested earlier, most readers would agree that Russell & James’ descriptions of the parliamentary events are fair and accurate, it is surely the case that at least some Brexiters will never accept their analysis of those events, including especially that just quoted. And that is because for a certain – perhaps small, but very influential – group of Brexiters none of the constitutional niceties or conventions really matter or, worse, they see them as the devices of ‘the elite’ and regard those who insist that they do matter as apologists for, if not indeed members of, that elite.
In that sense, for all that the book is neutral on Brexit itself, it cannot help but be partisan in relation to ‘Brexitism’. Indeed, the last sentences of the book imply as much:
[The] “restoration of constitutional norms is not an easy task, or a challenge in which they UK is alone. It is part of an international struggle, to defend democracy and institutions.” (p. 335)
This is not a criticism of the book, so much as to point to the way that Brexit, in its wider sense, does not admit of neutrality. For that reason, Russell & James do quite as great a public service in their concern to emphasise the importance of parliamentary democracy and constitutional propriety as they do in their forensic account of the events, sometimes arcane and often dramatic, that took place in the British parliament between 2016 and 2020.
De Rynck: Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done
For most British readers, at least, Russell & James’ parliamentary focus will be relatively familiar, as will the sense it brings of the negotiations with the EU being part of the background context of the political battles that were taking place in the UK. For such readers, including most of those who followed Brexit closely, the complete shift in the centring of the story provided by Stefaan De Rynck’s book is therefore fascinating and informative. Here, what he at one point calls “the shenanigans of British politics” (p. 246) are very much the background context to the EU’s negotiating process with the UK which is his focus.
De Rynck, an experienced EU civil servant who was a senior aide to Michel Barnier throughout the negotiations, provides an insider account of that process. In that sense, unlike Russell & James, he was an actor in, rather than an analyst of, the events described and, although he also has high academic credentials, this is not written as an academic book. It is nevertheless highly detailed and, in places, replete with technical detail, whilst retaining readability – to a greater extent, in my view, than Barnier’s (2022) own, diary-based, book about the negotiations.
Like Russell & James, the approach is chronological, in this case running essentially from the referendum in 2016 to the finalization of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement at the end of 2020. It is based on official papers and media reports, as well as discussions held by the author with other participants and, of course, his own personal experience. It does not provide citations or a bibliography, which is a shame, but there is a good index and also a useful chronology of events listed at the beginning.
Although the focus and the centring of this version of the Brexit story is different to that provided by most, if not all, British analysts, including Russell & James, it is, indeed, recognizably the same story, and, in any case, De Rynck is deeply knowledgeable about UK politics. In particular, the consequences of there having been no defined UK plan for how to leave also runs through it. However, whereas the EU was as shocked as the UK by the referendum result, it much more quickly came to a settled view on what Brexit could and could not mean, something which didn’t exist in the UK polity and, arguably, still doesn’t.
That the EU was able to come to such a position, and stick to it pretty much unchanged throughout, was partly, on De Rynck’s account (and that of others), because of the very considerable efforts of Barnier and others to construct and maintain a consensus view amongst member states and other key actors. That was the exact opposite of May’s failure to even attempt to create such a consensus within the UK, and also the exact opposite of what Brexiters, at least, expected the EU to achieve. It enabled what De Rynck plausibly, and I would think accurately, depicts as a largely technocratic, highly transparent, and certainly patient approach to the negotiations.
I wonder, though, whether it doesn’t also reflect the fact that – notwithstanding the initial shock and, no doubt, in many quarters upset and even anger – Brexit simply didn’t have the emotional and political-psychological charge in the EU that it had in Britain. For sure, it was a matter of deep concern, perhaps most especially in Ireland, and De Rynck explains at several points how important it was to the EU to maintain solidarity with Dublin, contrary to UK beliefs that it would be “thrown under a bus” (p. 118). But Brexit never had the political toxicity in any EU country, or within the EU collectively, that it had in the UK.
The idea that the EU would be divided, including the idea that it would sacrifice Ireland’s interests, is one of numerous examples that permeate the book of how the UK never really understood or cared sufficiently about EU perspectives on Brexit. That doesn’t just apply to Brexiters, but remainers, too. De Rynck points out a number of fallacies, including that of those “remainers who thought Barnier was on their side” (p.2). However, the more consequential fallacies were those taken over from Brexiters by the UK government, because these significantly inflected the negotiations.
These fallacies, which re-appear over-and-over again in various forms in the book, include all the different versions of ‘cherry-picking’. It is instructive to have it confirmed that, as many have speculated, Theresa May did indeed initially approach Brexit as she had done her negotiations within the EU as Home Secretary, which was to “first opt-out of all membership obligations and [then] back in to those elements in the UK’s interest” (p.12). But that was just an instance of the wider inability of the UK government to understand the difference between negotiating as, effectively, a third country (or a third country in waiting) rather than as a member. That also explains what De Rynck calls the fallacy of the belief that ‘the EU always budges at the last minute’, as if Brexit were like a summit of member states.
Indeed, although his tone is scrupulously polite throughout, it is impossible to read De Rynck’s book without detecting a degree of bemusement at how UK diplomacy became so crass following Brexit, especially in the automatic, and in his assessment counter-productive, adoption of an adversarial approach to the negotiations, and the persistent belief that threats of ‘no deal’ (whether over the Withdrawal Agreement or the Trade and Cooperation Agreement) would produce meaningful concessions from the EU. As he pithily puts it, “the UK government played a game of chicken, by itself” (p. 247). Many of us in the UK made similar observations, but it is interesting to learn that this was, indeed, how it appeared to the EU negotiators.
Interesting, though, is perhaps too weak a word. It is also, at least for a British reader, embarrassing or worse to see just how unrealistic, if not downright ignorant, the UK government’s conduct was. Again, De Rynck is diplomatic about this, but reading between the lines, David Frost comes out particularly badly. For example, following Frost’s new threat “to walk away” from the talks in September 2020, he coolly writes that “Barnier debriefed his officials that the UK’s negotiator barely seemed to believe his own threat” (p231).
There is also an implication, for example in his discussion of the photo taken at the start of the Article 50 negotiations of David Davis, with no papers, grinning across the table at the Barnier team with their bulging files, that De Rynck felt a degree of perhaps professional sympathy with the UK civil servants. As he notes, “in the UK, the political bickering deprived the civil service of a direction to use its knowledge productively. Preparatory work by a civil service cannot make up for political indecisiveness” (p.40).
However, ultimately, even greater political decisiveness from the UK could not have compensated for the lack of realism of its demands in the face of the power asymmetry of the negotiating partners, which is effectively the story of the book. Although pro-Brexit readers probably won’t like it much, it will be hard for them to disagree with its central contention that the outcome for the EU was “close to the best-case scenario imagined in October 2016” (p. 245), if only because they, themselves, so frequently bemoan that they have not had ‘the Brexit we were promised’.
Final thoughts
That outcome is hardly surprising. There is a quote, mentioned almost in passing by Russell & James, from a Conservative MP saying that “right up until the indicative votes themselves [in 2019], a very large number of my colleagues had actually no idea at all what the Single Market or the Customs Union was [sic]” (p. 241). That is all too believable and yet also astounding, all the more so given that some of those same MPs were insisting that leave voters had ‘known exactly what they were voting for’ in 2016.
It is also hardly surprising that my reading of both these books reflects the interpretation in my own book about Brexit (Grey, 2021), although I should make it clear that Russell & James’ book is far more detailed, and far more authoritative, on the parliamentary events than mine, and that I barely touch on the EU negotiating stance at all, and certainly not with any of the knowledge of De Rynck. Overall, from my perspective, Russell & James demonstrate that the referendum anointed as ‘the will of the people’ a series of promises that could never be delivered by parliament nor, as De Rynck shows, by the negotiations with the EU.
That was because the promises were contradictory, made on the basis of ignorance, if not downright lies, and could never be turned into reality. These two excellent books illuminate much of how and why this was so. No doubt we will see many more books about Brexit in the years to come that do the same. But perhaps the one we should wait and hope for will be written by one of the leading Brexiters, finally acknowledging these truths.
References
Barnier, Michel (2022). My Secret Brexit Diary. A Glorious Illusion. Cambridge: Polity (English translation).
Grey, Chris (2021). Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted (and Why They Were Never Going to). London: Biteback Publishing.
O’Rourke, Kevin (2018). A Short History of Brexit. From Brentry to Backstop. London: Pelican.
That outcome is hardly surprising. There is a quote, mentioned almost in passing by Russell & James, from a Conservative MP saying that “right up until the indicative votes themselves [in 2019], a very large number of my colleagues had actually no idea at all what the Single Market or the Customs Union was [sic]” (p. 241). That is all too believable and yet also astounding, all the more so given that some of those same MPs were insisting that leave voters had ‘known exactly what they were voting for’ in 2016.
It is also hardly surprising that my reading of both these books reflects the interpretation in my own book about Brexit (Grey, 2021), although I should make it clear that Russell & James’ book is far more detailed, and far more authoritative, on the parliamentary events than mine, and that I barely touch on the EU negotiating stance at all, and certainly not with any of the knowledge of De Rynck. Overall, from my perspective, Russell & James demonstrate that the referendum anointed as ‘the will of the people’ a series of promises that could never be delivered by parliament nor, as De Rynck shows, by the negotiations with the EU.
That was because the promises were contradictory, made on the basis of ignorance, if not downright lies, and could never be turned into reality. These two excellent books illuminate much of how and why this was so. No doubt we will see many more books about Brexit in the years to come that do the same. But perhaps the one we should wait and hope for will be written by one of the leading Brexiters, finally acknowledging these truths.
References
Barnier, Michel (2022). My Secret Brexit Diary. A Glorious Illusion. Cambridge: Polity (English translation).
Grey, Chris (2021). Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted (and Why They Were Never Going to). London: Biteback Publishing.
O’Rourke, Kevin (2018). A Short History of Brexit. From Brentry to Backstop. London: Pelican.
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