Brexit ten years on: unsettled and unsettling

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

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

Starmer’s downfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Burnham, stage left – or stage right?

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

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

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

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

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

Ten years on: what is Brexit?

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

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

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

Analysing Brexit

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

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

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

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

Defending Brexit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reframing the anniversary

Thus, rather as I anticipated in a recent post, this latest ‘national conversation’ about Brexit is in many ways the same as that which we have had for ten years and more. And, in another recent post, I quoted the second edition of my book about Brexit pointing out that according to its advocates and supporters Brexit “certainly wasn’t proposed as, or supposed to be, the prelude to a country permanently divided on the wisdom of Brexit, still less to an interminable debate about whether it had been the right thing to do ….” (p.285) and I went on to quote David Frost saying (in 2022) that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.” 

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

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

 

Note

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

Bad vibes

In my last post I briefly mentioned that the government, and Rachel Reeves in particular, have begun to speak increasingly openly about the damage Brexit is continuing to do to the British economy. This, I said, was striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. The converse also applies, of course. Such admissions, if unaccompanied by any stronger response, serve to underline the inadequacy of the reset.

This is the hook upon which the government’s approach to Brexit is currently caught, and what underlies it is the continuing failure of the British polity as a whole to be honest about Brexit and much else besides. That, and the reasons for it, have been amply illustrated over the last fortnight.

A “Brexit row”?

During that period, it has been reported (£) that the government is preparing legislation to enable the UK to align with all of the EU regulations needed to enact the long-trailed, though still not finalized, UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) or ‘veterinary’ agreement. Moreover, this legislation is expected to contain provision to enable similar moves in other sectors in the future, subject only to statutory instruments meaning, in effect, Ministerial decree.

The idea behind the latter provision, apparently, is that it could pave the way for ‘sector-by-sector’ deals with the EU. In the report of these plans, it is also suggested that at least some within the Labour Party “are hoping that the bill will provoke a Brexit row with the Conservatives and Reform UK, reminding voters that their opponents supported Leave in the EU referendum”.

In just this one small news item there is quite a lot to unpick. One thing to say is that it isn’t surprising, in that it was inherent in what was known about the desire for an SPS deal that there would be such legislation. What is perhaps more interesting is the idea that Labour might now be willing to have “a Brexit row” with Conservatives and Reform, something they have fought shy of in the past.

Evidently, this is a continuation of the shift to greater openness about the damage of Brexit. The political reasons for that shift are fairly obvious and have recently been set out in detail by the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice: in brief, Labour’s (belated) realization that its approach to Brexit is one of the things causing the collapse of its core vote, as happened in the Gorton & Denton by-election.

As this legislation proceeds, Labour will get their row in that, inevitably, indeed already, the Brexiters are screaming ‘betrayal’. However, what that row will really show is that, even now, the ways in which Brexit is discussed are almost entirely dishonest or deluded, or both.

On the Tory side (and that of the Brexiters more generally) there is the dishonesty of the fact that de facto alignment with almost all EU regulations is unavoidable, except at huge economic cost, which is exactly what the Conservatives came to accept when in office. Nor can they reasonably complain about the lack of democratic oversight associated with the use of statutory instruments, since it was they who made such extensive use of so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers throughout the Brexit process. Indeed, it would be reasonable to say that one of the many failed promises of Brexit was that it would return decision-making to parliament.

On the Labour side, there is the dishonesty, shared at various times by various Conservative Brexiters, that whole swathes of the British economy could de facto remain ‘within’ the single market on a sector-by-sector basis. This is effectively a reprise of the “ambitious managed divergence” model floated by Theresa May’s government in February 2018 (and discussed on this blog at that time) although it has gone under different names at different times.

If, as is reported, Keir Starmer believes that the reset process so far has shown that EU objections to ‘cherry-picking’ have disappeared, then that is a profound misreading. For reasons I discussed last year, things like a possible deal on SPS (or on the internal electricity market or Erasmus+) should not be regarded as cherry-picking. I meant that as a rebuke to those who mistakenly use that term to dismiss as doomed any and every attempt to supplement the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). But it would be equally mistaken if Starmer believes that the EU’s willingness to make some adjustments, when they are in its interests, means that any and every attempt to supplement the TCA is viable.

Brexit pragmatism?

Perhaps the most striking dishonesty is what underpins Labour’s approach, namely the claim, articulated most explicitly by Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (£), that what the government is delivering with the reset is “what a proper Brexit looks like”. By this he means that the UK is making “sovereign’ choices” guided by “ruthless pragmatism”. In its way, this is a clever debating society argument, in that it takes the Brexiters’ core demand, that what matters is not this-or-that regulation or law but that regulations and laws are decided by the UK, and uses it against them. This is actually exactly the same structure of argument that ‘liberal Brexiters’ use when they say that what Brexit means for immigration is not necessarily to reduce it but to set it at a level determined by a sovereign parliament.

However, the Thomas-Symonds line is self-defeating as a defence of Labour’s reset policy, precisely because that policy is so inadequate a response to what his government now admits to be the costs of Brexit. For example, to be more specific, on ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ grounds it is impossible to defend the value of the UK having an independent trade policy.

That has been illustrated in two ways in the last fortnight by the announcement of the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement. On the one hand, that agreement shows that, as a collective, the EU was able to get a better deal, especially for its farmers, than the UK got in its own deal with Australia. On the other hand, and given also the recent EU-India deal, it means that the only countries with which Brexit Britain currently has trade agreements that it would not have as an EU member are Malaysia and Brunei (via CPTPP). Meanwhile, were the UK still in the EU it would be part of its trade agreement with Mercosur bloc.

Of course there are legitimate arguments about how important trade agreements really are to the economy, and also about the desirability of their effects on domestic industries, supply-chain resilience and so on. But those are not the government’s arguments. This being so, then it could get more, and better, trade agreements if it successfully pursued a customs union agreement with the EU, which would also improve terms of trade with the EU itself. So, on the basis of ‘ruthless pragmatism’, why not make the ‘sovereign choice’ to seek such an agreement with the EU?

From this follows the more fundamental point, which lies right at the heart of the fallacy of Brexit and which was most strikingly articulated in the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. As I discussed at the time, this contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” Thus even as Britain embarked on the process of leaving it did so knowing that the central plank of the leave argument – that the UK had lost its sovereignty – was completely untrue. It was just ‘a feeling’. And the point still holds, so, on the Thomas-Symonds argument for the reset, there is an even stronger argument for seeking to join the EU, as a sovereign choice made on pragmatic grounds.

A path forward?

In short, the more the government now acknowledges the costs of Brexit, and the more overtly it justifies its reset in terms of the pragmatic response of a sovereign nation to those costs, the more it undermines both the philosophical and economic case for Brexit – and yet at the same time describes its position as delivering ‘proper Brexit’. Similarly, although this week Starmer gave his strongest statement yet that the international ‘volatility’ engendered by Trump’s regime, as well as the economic damage of Brexit, justifies an “ambitious” partnership with the EU, doing so only serves to highlight the constraints he has placed on those ambitions.

It presumably goes without saying that, going back to the electoral politics, this means that if it is true that the Labour Party is now willing to have a “row” about the false promises of Brexit it is unlikely to reap much, if any, reward from anti-Brexit voters. For it remains wedded to a policy which is not just lily-livered but self-contradictory

That doesn’t mean that it is realistic for Labour to adopt a ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’) position, let alone likely that it will do so. But in my view, as I’ve argued before, it should mean adopting the position that seeking to join would be desirable but is not feasible until such time as all the other main parties either accept this or, at least, undertake not to reverse such a process were it begun. This would at least bring some clarity to the “row”, forcing Tory and Reform Brexiters to discuss and defend Brexit, as they nowadays seem unwilling to do.

With that clarity might come some honesty, in the sense of the recognition that Brexit has not had majority support for a very long time but also by the recognition that, for so long as there is a distinct possibility that an incoming government would backtrack on it, any process towards joining is impossible (most obviously for the EU). That in turn could be part of a more general recognition, which has been largely absent throughout the Brexit process, that the future of UK-EU relations is not just about what Britain wants but what the EU and its member states want.

Taking all these things together might be the beginning of a recognition that, in the concluding words of an excellent analysis this week by Kirsty Hughes on her ScotEU Substack, “the path back needs strategic, honest, courageous political leaders and renewed, inclusive political debate.”

Deeply embedded dishonesty

However, it is difficult to be optimistic that any of this is about to happen, not least because although dishonesty certainly didn’t begin with Brexit, Brexit has rammed dishonesty so deeply into the body politic that it seems impossible to dislodge. A case in point is another aspect of the fallout from the Gorton & Denton by-election, namely the allegations of ‘family voting’ and voter coercion (with the implication that this had been amongst, specifically, Muslim voters). Last weekend, in what seemed to be an unusually detailed statement, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) announced that their investigation had found “no evidence” that this had occurred.

As I noted in my blog post at the time of the by-election, operators like Nigel Farage trade on the fact that such allegations stick in the public mind whereas even if subsequent investigations show them to be false that is barely noticed. No doubt that is true in this case, not least because whereas the original allegations were given very prominent coverage both in the right-wing press and by broadcasters including the BBC, the GMP’s statement was given far less attention.

But it’s actually worse than that, because the statement was immediately denounced by Farage as an “Establishment whitewash” and “another brushed-under-the-carpet report from the usual suspects”. Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate, also called it a “whitewash” and insisted that “sectarianism is taking over our democracy”, later strongly implying that he didn’t believe the police’s findings.

I’ve noted many times before that this kind of ‘non-falsifiable’ illogic permeated the entirety of the Brexit process and, by extension, now characterises Brexitism. Thus, in this case, had the police found evidence of family voting then, of course, it would be taken as proof that it had occurred. But, when the police found no evidence, this is taken as proof that it not only occurred but is being ‘covered up’.

What is far worse than that (or, rather, is enabled by it, showing why such illogic is dangerous and not just stupid) is how utterly corrosive and corrupting it is: as with depicting judges as ‘enemies of the people’ and civil servants as ‘saboteurs’, the Brexitists are determined to destroy every last vestige of trust in public institutions. Perhaps worst of all is that, whilst attacking the police investigation assists this agenda, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Farage et al. were secretly hoping that wrongdoing had taken place, yielding what would been a prominently reported and easily exploitable scandal.

The travails of MattGPT

Matt Goodwin has also been in the news for another reason. I referred in my previous post to his new book, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which has since been published and widely criticised, including in a debate on GB News during which Goodwin became visibly angry, even at one stage rounding on his ideological soul-mate Miriam Cates, who was chairing.

Indeed, tellingly, even those sympathetic to what might charitably be called Goodwin’s thesis were unimpressed, with one describing the book as the work of a “slopagandist”, another entitling his review “suicide of an author’s credibility”, and a third opining that the nickname ‘MattGPT’ would follow the former academic “to his grave”. By comparison, those less sympathetic were rather gentle in simply calling it “trash”. In fairness, it should be said that Goodwin had his defenders, but fairness also requires saying that the most prominent of these was the swivel-eyed Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson (£).

As the ‘MattGPT’ tag implies, much of the criticism has focussed on what appear to be bogus quotations generated by AI-hallucination (£), to which Goodwin’s rather piquant defence in the debate was that he had put the entire text through an AI checker which had exonerated it from the accusation of the book being AI-generated (though that had not, in fact, been the accusation). But perhaps the more damning criticism is of the misinterpretation of statistics about schoolchildren who have English as an Additional Language (EAL). This sounds rather geeky but is actually important, both in itself and because it creates the suspicion that the way Goodwin represented the EAL statistics was not the only way in which data had been manipulated in pursuit of the book’s claims.

In official statistics, “a pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English. This measure is not a measure of English language proficiency or a good proxy for recent immigration” (p.4 of link). On this basis, between 20% and 25% of pupils have EAL. From this, Goodwin seems to infer that they have either no, or at least impaired or deficient, proficiency in English.

However, according to Steve Strand, Professor of Education at Oxford University, Goodwin “is totally misunderstanding what this measure of EAL is. He keeps talking about English not being young people’s first language, but you could be recorded as EAL and still be totally fluent in English. So he’s not understanding the question that underlies the data.” Strand’s argument is borne out by the fact that, according to Department for Education’s 2020 report, in Spring 2018 some 61% of EAL schoolchildren were either fluent or competent in English [1].

Moreover, Goodwin claims that in schools in areas where EAL rates are high “English is no longer the main language” which carries at least the implication that some other language is, whereas, of course, in such situations English is, so to speak, the lingua franca. In that sense, what the EAL statistics actually show is exactly what would be expected from assimilating immigrants. At home, their children are exposed to and use another language, but in the public sphere, at school (and subsequently, no doubt, at work), they are additionally exposed to and use English. But in Goodwin’s telling it is sinister evidence that a process of ‘cultural erasure’ is underway.

Plastic patriots become counterfeit Christians

That same proposition is evident in the latest seasonal panic that Easter eggs are no longer called by that name, every aspect of which has been discredited by Emma Monks on her Monk Debunks Substack. But whilst, like the similar panics that Christmas has been replaced by ‘Winterval’, this is tediously familiar, it has a new salience because of the notable recent shift in the rhetoric of populist leaders towards stressing Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.

Admittedly, theologians might question the sacramental status of the chocolate Easter Egg, just as they might wonder if Tommy Robinson’s conversion is any more genuine than his name, be puzzled by Reform MP Robert Jenrick’s reference to “Psalm Sunday” (sic), and ponder the sacerdotal credentials of ‘Bishop’ Ceirion Dewar of Ceirion H. Dewar Ministries Ltd. But there is no doubt that there has been a profound change in the language being used by the populist right.

Nor is it just matter of language. It is also evident in what is emerging as Reform’s “family friendly” policy agenda – an agenda set out with great clarity by Lisa Burton in Yorkshire Bylines – with all it implies for abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights generally. One reason for these developments is the influence of US populists on their UK counterparts. It may also be relevant that Paul Marshall, so pivotal to British populists especially through his co-ownership of GB News, moves in those circles and is himself an evangelical Christian with a reportedly “spiritual mission” to fight ‘progressivism’ (which appears actually to mean post-Enlightenment rationality).

There is an obvious connection between these three stories – the discredited allegations of ‘family voting’, Goodwin’s discredited account of EAL statistics, and the discredited stories about the cancellation of Easter: they all circle around the same theme of ‘cultural erasure’ at the hands of Muslims, aided and abetted by the liberal ‘woke’ elite. And it is a message pouring in torrents across social media, and much of the print and broadcast media, every day, in the coverage of hundreds of different stories.

Another recent example is the spate of images of schoolchildren exercising on yoga mats carrying the false claim that they are being forced to participate in Muslim prayers. Yet another is the frenzied reaction to a BBC discussion about whether there are too many ‘dog-friendly’ spaces, representing it as a woke attempt to impose Muslim sensibilities upon the nation (it was actually about people who are scared of dogs). These, and innumerable other examples, are small-scale in themselves but it is that which makes them potent as tessellations of the same basic message.

But there is another connection between all these stories, and it is one which links directly back to Brexit.

Vibe politics

As these various stories have unfolded over the last fortnight, I have been looking at the social media responses not just from the big names of the culture wars but from the rank-and-file posters. What that reveals is not so much that the rebuttals of them are ignored as that they are discounted. That is, it may be accepted that such-and-such a detail is wrong, but, nevertheless, ‘we all know’ that the bigger truth holds good. This is the significance of the cumulative effect of similar stories. It creates a politics of ‘vibes’ just as with Brexit the effect of years of media stories made it “feel” as if we had lost sovereignty.

Of course, vibe politics is nothing new. Think of Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Think, for that matter, of the 1950s Macmillanite message that we “have never had it so good”. What is distinctive about populism is that it trades on ‘feel-bad’ rather than ‘feel-good’ vibes: on grievance, resentment, and fear. That, too, is evident in the stories I have just discussed and is absolutely central to the claims of ‘cultural erasure’.

I haven’t talked about the war in this post, since its deepening spiral only serves to re-enforce points which I’ve previously made. But Nigel Farage has been speaking about the war. Not, needless to say, the war the US has unleashed in the Middle East, about which, after his original Trump-crawl, he has been remarkably coy. No, as usual it was the Second World War or, more particularly, a single moment within it.

Thus, launching Reform’s London local government election campaign in Croydon, under its current and perhaps ill-advised slogan of ‘Reform will fix it’, he spluttered that: “This is, this is, this is 1940 all over again. The very existence of our nation, its culture, its identity is under threat.” It is the same message of a ‘nation in existential peril’ that Goodwin peddles; the same message as that of the ‘family voting’ accusations; the same message as is contained in the stories about Easter eggs, yoga mats, dogs, and all the rest of it.  

Farage is right, though, to say that history is repeating itself. Not in the sense that it is 1940 all over again, but because it is 2015 all over again. Then, too, he was bloviating about 1940 but at that time it was to tell us it was the EU referendum which was “our modern day Battle of Britain”. Once again, Brexit has morphed into Brexitism.

It’s this repetition, this stuckness in the same myths and vibe-based messages, and the fact that, like it or not, they continue to resonate for perhaps a quarter or even a third of the adult population, and to be amplified by a phalanx of media commentors, which makes British politics so irredeemably dishonest, and the possibility of honesty about Brexit, specifically, so elusive.

With that happy thought I leave you to enjoy, to use the term cruelly stolen when the nasty Normans erased our culture and language, Ēostre.

 

Note

[1] The report notes that it is not possible to provide comparable figures for children for whom English is their first/ sole language, but it should not be assumed that all such children are fluent or competent.

The hard Brexit addiction

Two weeks ago, when I wrote my previous post, Brexit Ultras were cock-a-hoop because they believed that the EU and Ireland were being forced to ‘pay the price’ for having refused to countenance an Irish land border during the Brexit negotiations. As a result, asylum seekers within the UK were now entering Ireland via Northern Ireland so as to escape the possibility of being removed to Rwanda (or supposedly: see the post itself for discussion).

That ebullience has turned to dismay with this week’s ruling by Northern Ireland’s High Court that parts of the Illegal Migration Act do not apply in Northern Ireland (NI) because they breach human rights law and, thereby, breach the Windsor Framework. This is likely to mean that asylum seekers in NI cannot be deported to Rwanda, although the government will appeal against the ruling. Meanwhile, to the ire of Brexiters generally, and NI unionist Brexiters in particular, a potential incentive for asylum seekers to locate in NI, rather than the rest of the UK, has been created. Suddenly we are back to the old familiar lament that "Britain is paying the price for surrender to the EU" (£).

The roots of this lie deeper than the Windsor Framework, extending to both the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and the original Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). Although much of the discussion of these has been to do with trade and economic borders, central to the EU’s position in the Brexit negotiations was that there should be no dilution of the GFA, and included within that was that there be no diminution of the human rights provisions contained within the GFA (matters of no small concern to the US, as well).

The UK government agreed to this, and it is worth stressing that it did so quite willingly for, at the time, apart from perhaps a few on the fringe, Brexiters, and certainly the Brexit government, were adamant that Britain had no intention at all of threatening such rights, or the GFA in any respect, and all talk to the contrary was just more ‘Project Fear’. That the EU nevertheless sought legal commitment to this intention was, as can now be seen, a sensible and necessary precaution.

Not my Brexit (as always)

Thus when former Home Secretary Suella Braverman railed this week that the Windsor Framework has “failed upon its first contact with reality”, and is operating contrary to the “assurances given” to her at the time, that is pure nonsense. In fact, on its first contact with reality (as regards human rights), the Windsor Framework has done exactly what was intended from the outset. It is not clear what ‘assurances’ she was given, or who gave them, but if she believed otherwise then she is incompetent. However, this isn’t really the point she’s making. What she actually is trying to do is to disavow the fact that she was a member of the government which agreed the Windsor Framework (and, further back, one of the Tory MPs who voted unanimously for the NIP).

In this, Braverman is following a now familiar pattern as regards the Brexit arrangements for NI (and Brexit more generally). Over and over again Brexiter MPs who voted for them claim that they were misled, for example into believing the NIP to be temporary, or into believing that there would be no sea border, and, now, over the human rights provisions it entailed. There may be some truth in these claims to the extent that Boris Johnson repeatedly misrepresented the Protocol. However, that is no excuse for such MPs not to have grasped this central part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, the more so given that one of their leading figures, Iain Duncan Smith, insisted that no more time need be spent debating it. The same goes for the Windsor Framework, and especially for a government minister like Braverman.

But all of this is a smokescreen. The reality is that, from the outset, Brexiters didn’t understand or care what their project meant for Northern Ireland and many of them still do not, or affect not to believe it. Only when, as individuals, they are in government, are they forced to confront it, as they are other Brexit realities. That happened to Theresa May and, for all his huffing and puffing, to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister, though he left a political crisis over the NIP the resolution of which, via the Windsor Framework, was one of Rishi Sunak’s few achievements, and one of the few times he faced down the Brexit Ultras. The same thing happened to Braverman, whilst she was in office, including when, in her second stint as Home Secretary she voted for the Windsor Framework.

But some Tory Brexiters either never held government positions or, as happened with numerous Brexit Secretaries and Brexit Ministers, resigned those positions rather than accept the realities of Brexit. They could then join the Farageist extra-parliamentary chorus of how Brexit has been betrayed and could have been done ‘properly’ if only the government had ‘stood up to’ the EU. So Braverman’s reference to ‘assurances’ that have proven false is simply her alibi for what the government she was part of did, and a brandishing of her credentials to join the ranks of the betrayed.

The Tory Brexit failure

All this in turn is part of the wider picture of what Brexit has done to the Tory Party. For the most basic and most brutal truth is that what has been their flagship policy since 2016, and defining purpose since 2017, has manifestly failed. That failure was well-captured by Rafael Behr’s pithy formulation in his Guardian column this week: “Brexit was a huge bet against the idea that geography mattered to economic and security policy in the 21st century. Geography won.” Week-in and week-out the evidence of that grows, with the latest examples including its role in the delays to the opening of the Co-Op Live Arena, its role in medicine shortages, and the border delays for perishable goods imports. Conversely, the realities of geography have continued quietly to play out, for example in shadowing new EU regulations (such as those relating to plastic bottle caps) and in re-joining the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking. 

But we need hardly rehearse once again all the economic and geo-political damage and pointlessness of Brexit, still less to trudge through all the wearisome attempts by Brexit ideologues to disprove it, or to grab hold of some tiny shred, usually misrepresented anyway, of supposed justification. The clinching evidence of its failure is that if Brexit had been anything even remotely like the success that was promised then, as we approach the first election since leaving the EU, the Tories would undoubtedly be trumpeting that success, and making their record of delivering it the central plank of their electoral platform. Instead, they barely mention Brexit any more, preferring to grub around with endless ‘re-sets’, gimmicks about banning civil service ‘woke lanyards’, and, of course, the more serious, but still gimmicky, Rwanda policy.

The nature of those gimmicks reflects how Brexit has been a failure in a different way; a failure not just for the country but for the Tory Party itself. For whilst the causes of Brexit are multiple, there can be no doubt that a significant one was the attempt by David Cameron and others to destroy the electoral threat of the UKIP ‘revolt on the right’. In that respect, its failure has been not just abject but total. Not only has that threat regathered (or perhaps we should say re-formed), as Reform UK, requiring the Tories to continue to seek ways to negate it, but the Tory Party itself has been substantially ‘UKIPified’. In particular, a substantial part of the right, both within and outside the party, regards Brexit as a foundational belief, but believes equally strongly that it has been betrayed.

The silence of the Tory leadership

So the Tory leadership, meaning not just Sunak but the party as a governing party, is now in an impossible situation (of its own making, so weep no tears). It can’t claim Brexit to be a success, because those who do not have a foundational belief in its rightness can clearly see it has failed, whilst those for whom its rightness is a foundational belief also believe that it has been betrayed. But it can’t denounce Brexit as a failure or a betrayal, since it is the Brexit the Tory leadership actually delivered.

This situation grows directly out of the wider political climate which Brexiters, meaning not just politicians but commentators and activists, have created since 2016. They showed no interest in trying to persuade their opponents that, despite their doubts, it could be successfully delivered – remainers were just told to ‘suck it up’, which they declined to do. Yet Brexiters themselves have been the most adamant that Brexit hasn’t been successfully delivered.

So the Tory leadership now has nowhere to stand: it can neither boast of Brexit nor disown it. It has to insist both that Brexit was the right thing to do, which only a minority of voters now believe, and that it was done in the right way, something which only a minority of that minority now believe, which isn’t electorally viable. Hence the near-silence (matched only, though for quite different reasons, by the Labour opposition).

The noisy minority

By contrast, Brexiters who insist Brexit was the right thing, but was not done in the right way, have a much easier time of it, so long as they can avoid the taint of responsibility for how it was done. This is the seam of grievance that is being assiduously and very loudly mined by Reform and by many Tories. For them, things like the Belfast court ruling offer the opportunity to keep punching on the bruise that the Tory government bungled Brexit, and did so through lack of true belief in real Conservatism.

Moreover, they can propound a Brexit 2.0 agenda of leaving the ECHR, as well as even more draconian anti-immigration and anti-asylum policies, far more easily than can the Tory leadership. For, in government, the practical consequences of this agenda would be all too clear. Sunak can make noises about the ECHR, but any government actually derogating from it would encounter massive problems, not least in relation to the GFA and the NIP. Outside government, these problems can be denied, or discounted simply by proposing to violate those agreements as well.

On immigration generally, whilst the government is willing to countenance considerable damage to universities and to businesses with its recent clampdowns, it is less clear that it would be able to weather the storm caused by the kinds of restrictions its even more right-wing critics want. It is one thing for voters to demand much lower immigration, quite another if they are forced to face the reality of the consequences. Even surveys showing majority support for reducing immigration also show majority support for making immigration easier for many key occupations, especially the NHS and social care. Certainly any government actually implementing a very low immigration policy of the sort advocated by Reform UK would immediately run into huge practical difficulties and, crucially, would still be denounced by those outside government as not going far enough.

For practical difficulties do not matter outside government, and, as with Brexit itself, they can be dismissed as ‘Project Fear’, generated by a self-interested globalist elite. That is why, in these dog days of Tory government, those within the party who aspire to its future leadership, perhaps including Braverman or Robert Jenrick, can develop ever-more impractical ideas, just as Reform can.

The same goes for those, like Liz Truss, canvassing for the PopCons, or for Jacob Rees-Mogg, who this week proposed an electoral pact (£), not far short of an effective merger, between the Conservatives and Reform, albeit that Farage immediately rejected that, at least for now. Meanwhile there is talk of self-styled ‘media personality’ Matt Goodwin and self-proclaimed ‘disruptor’ Dominic Cummings each launching new, populist, anti-immigration parties of their own. If so, there will be multiple parties fishing in the same murky, but electorally fairly limited, water, leaving all of them frustrated in their pursuit of power, not least because, in the process, they will abandon many of the centre-right voters upon whom the the Tories used to rely.

Chasing the dragon

Brexit and its aftermath are the key to all of these developments, and, although it is impossible to know how they will play out, there is a good chance that they will yield a long-term fracturing of the political right. That’s something which used to be thought more likely on the left. To an extent, it is what happened when the SDP split from Labour in the 1980s, and it might have been expected in the form of an ‘Old Labour’ split from ‘New Labour’ during the Blair years, or a Blairite split from Corbyn’s Labour, or the Corbynite left setting up a new party in opposition to Starmer. Arguably, the effect, and ultimate fate, of the SDP may have inoculated the Labour Party against such subsequent splits. But the post-Brexit right, high on dreams of purity and addicted to the dramas of betrayal and purges has, perhaps appropriately, not had the benefit of the vaccine.

It's against this background that many current events should be understood, including the perhaps not very important or enduring one of the Belfast High Court ruling. That ruling is, at one level, a reminder of the mess that Brexit has created as regards Northern Ireland and of the impracticality of separating the UK from all of the international obligations that Brexiter ideas of sovereignty entail. At another level, it is one more piece of ammunition for the Brexiters to propose making an even greater mess in Northern Ireland, since their ultimate aim is to renege on the NIP and the Windsor Framework (and in some cases probably the GFA, as well), and to redouble on their fantasy of sovereignty by reneging on the ECHR (£). The more general application of that logic is, perhaps, the ultimate trap that Brexit has created: anything and everything that shows the folly of Brexit is, for Brexiters, the justification to commit even worse follies.

If that seems like political madness given the electoral system, and public opinion, it is sustained by the memory of the high of 2016 when, very briefly, the Brexiters could lay claim to embodying the ‘will of the people’ and could believe that they really were the silent majority, not the noisy minority. It was a heady moment. The hit proved short-lived and ultimately disappointing, but, for Britain’s political right, it proved to be a gateway drug, and there is not much they will not do in search of another fix.

Unpicking the defences of Brexit

Bemused by the ‘mysterious silence’ of the government about the benefits of Brexit, last weekend former Trade Secretary Peter Lilley bemoaned (£) that “the consequence of that silence is that the narrative about Brexit is being written by its opponents”. The mystery is easily solved: the benefits of Brexit are effectively non-existent and the failure of its promises is self-evident. And the formidable attempts by Brexiters to proclaim a narrative of success have foundered not because its opponents’ voices are louder but because the public, without much leadership but seeing the evidence accumulating before them, have seen that failure.

But it’s true that, as a result, Brexiters have increasingly found themselves having to defend their project rather than get away with airy promises, or bullish assertions of it being ‘the will of the people’. These attempts have become ever-more desperate and convoluted, and their very variety is, in itself, one of their most important defensive weapons. In the hands of the more adroit, or perhaps just the more opportunistic, Brexiters it enables them to continually shift from one line of argument to another, deliberately creating a swirl of disorientation.

A recent example is the discussion on GB News between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nick Tyrone, which Tyrone described on his Week in Brexitland Substack. Tyrone did as good job as anyone could of responding to Rees-Mogg’s salvoes, the more so given the huge advantages his interlocutor had by virtue of being the host. But it is impossible to ‘win’ such encounters because they are intended to confuse rather than to clarify, and setting innumerable false hares running is one of the easiest ways of doing so. This doesn’t just apply to broadcast interviews. In any number of published comment pieces, Brexiters layer falsehoods upon half-truths upon questionable assumptions, in ways which can only be unpicked through line-by-line ‘fisking’, which is incredibly time-consuming, and not especially effective.

Nevertheless, it’s worth disaggregating and examining some of the commonest arguments currently used to defend Brexit, and especially those about sovereignty and democracy, which are the Brexiters’ last redoubts. Even so, despite being the longest ever post on this blog, it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis.

Stonewalling and denial

These are the now boilerplate defences of Brexit, so commonly made as to not need specific links. They include the claim that ‘it hasn’t been done properly’, which comes in variants ranging from ascribing this to governmental incompetence, to blaming it on EU punishment, right through to positing betrayal by various actors up to and including ‘the deep State’.

All of these were virtually baked into Brexit, partly because it made utopian promises that could never come true, and partly because it thrives on narratives of betrayal, treachery and victimhood. So, like apologists for communism, Brexiters say it has either ‘never really been tried’ or that it has fallen victim to counter-revolutionaries and to renegades from the true path of purity.

Slightly more optimistic versions of the same thing are that ‘it hasn’t been done properly yet’, or that it ‘hasn’t had enough time’ for the benefits to be obvious. These claims are, by definition, impossible to refute, placing the utopia of Brexit in sight but always out of reach, like a mirage oasis. But one obvious rejoinder is that it wasn’t suggested before the referendum that the benefits would be long in coming, let alone the 20, 50 or even 100 years that some Brexiters have since spoken of.

Still, perhaps it is reasonable to apply the ‘David Frost test’ for what would constitute failure for Brexit. He suggested one piece of evidence of failure would be “if we are still debating this in five or six years’ time in the same way”. That was in June 2022, so the jury is still out, but there is no sign at all so far that Brexit is not going to be a failure in these terms.

One thing which all the defences of Brexit in this category share, albeit to varying extents, is that they render nonsensical attempts to make claims about the benefits of Brexit. That’s most obvious if Brexit has been comprehensively betrayed and is ‘Brexit in name only’ for, if so, how could there be any benefits? Even the much weaker defence that Brexit will take time to deliver benefits has an obvious circularity, whereby any sign of success shows it was right, whilst any absence of signs of success doesn’t show it was wrong. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Bathos and deflection

This category includes what is emerging as a favourite Brexit defence, that which does not necessarily deny that Brexit has been damaging, but constantly invokes the most extreme forecasts of how damaging it would be (or, often, garbled versions of those forecasts) so as to defend it on the bathetic grounds that it ‘hasn’t been as bad as the warnings’. It’s a line which can be traced back at least as far as David Davis’s 2018 assurance that Britain would not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction” and its obvious flaw is that Brexit was meant to be something positive and desirable, rather than ‘not being cataclysmic’ or, even, ‘not being too bad’.

A related defence is to admit the evidence of (especially economic) damage that has occurred since Brexit, but to deflect blame for this away from Brexit to, typically, the pandemic, the Ukraine War or, more recently, conflict in the Middle East. This can readily be run alongside the ‘more time is needed’ line of argument, and has a similar circularity in enabling any supposed successes to be celebrated but any damage or lack of success discounted.

However, it differs from that line in that, whereas the promise of future success can never, strictly speaking, be disproved, the argument of damage being down to other factors can be, by reference to the specific effects of Brexit which have not been experienced by other countries. Thus, for all that Brexiters dismiss them, counterfactual economic models do, at least approximately, strip out Brexit effects from those of other factors.

Whataboutery

Such counterfactuals seek to answer the real question, which is how does Brexit Britain compare with Britain had Brexit not happened. That question is evaded by another defence, that of the ‘whataboutery’ which makes comparisons with other countries, especially other EU countries, or with the EU as a whole.

The narrow version of this is to compare, especially, GDP growth so as to show (especially if the ‘right’ time periods are cherry-picked), that the UK is doing no worse than some such comparators. Again, this doesn’t meet the objection that Brexit was promised to be a positive. Moreover, when these comparisons show, as they sometimes can, the UK outperforming its comparators it doesn’t address the real question. At particular times, even when an EU member, the UK performed better than other members. So if there are times, now, that it does so this tells us nothing about Brexit, at least in the absence of a plausible explanation of how Brexit is responsible for it.

The Brexiters do not have such an explanation, since the things they claim for what would be explanations – regulatory divergence and major new trade deals – have, as they constantly complain, scarcely happened. On the other hand, anti-Brexiters can plausibly explain why the UK performs less well than the counterfactual of Brexit not having happened, primarily in terms of the increased barriers to trade with the EU and the loss of freedom of movement of people.

The broader version of whataboutery is to point to events in the EU – not just in terms of economic performance, but actual or alleged crises over things like irregular migration, or Hungary, or, currently, the farmers’ protests – to say ‘look what a mess they are in’. This in turn links to the endless predictions, both before and since Brexit, that the EU is about to collapse entirely.

This kind of whataboutery is nonsense at multiple levels, as well as being incompatible with the idea that the EU is a powerful bully that is able to ‘punish’ us. Firstly, it’s nonsense because few of those who oppose Brexit have ever believed that the EU is some kind of nirvana. Secondly, even if the EU were in crisis, or collapsed, that doesn’t make Britain any better off. Indeed, given geographical proximity, and economic and political connections, any instability and suffering the EU endures are likely to have a profound negative impact on Britain, whilst Britain no longer has any influence upon what happens within and to the EU.

Lies, half-truths and exaggerations

This category could be expanded to fill a whole post, so here I will only give a few of the commonest or most egregious examples. Some are plainly ridiculous, such as Kemi Badenoch’s recent claim that “we have used our Brexit dividend to get the NHS more than a £1 billion more every single week than it had before Brexit” [emphasis in original tweet, where it was denoted by ‘*’ symbols]. Of course, there was no such dividend, and the NHS budget is, as it always was, purely a decision of the British government. The same applies to the similar, and more frequent, claim that the NHS has now received the £350 million a week proposed at the referendum, so Brexit has fulfilled that promise.

Equally untrue, although probably much more widely believed, are the claims that Brexit allowed the early roll out of vaccines (it didn’t: the UK was still operating under EU laws and regulations at the time) and that it allowed the UK to give support to Ukraine (it didn’t, and the UK had begun to do so ever since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, when still an EU member).

Other things in this category are more difficult to unpick, as they may contain some element of truth. Many of the Brexiter claims about trade deals are of this sort, because it’s true that neither CPTPP nor the Free Trade Agreements with Australia, New Zealand, and any which may follow, could have been done by the UK as an EU member. The half-truths and exaggeration relate to the benefits, which are paltry. In other cases, the claims are lies in all but name, most obviously the description of non-binding Memorandums of Understanding with individual US states as ‘trade agreements’, which they aren’t in the standard use of that term (plus they have little or no economic value, and could almost certainly have been made as an EU member anyway).

Likewise, most claims of regulatory independence are overblown, since they either aren’t practical to exercise, or make little difference, or are things which would be likely to have happened at some point as an EU member. I’ve written so much about these things before that I don’t have the strength to do so again and, for regular readers at least, probably don’t need to.

The last redoubts: sovereignty and democracy

What does warrant more attention is what have become the last redoubts of the Brexiter defence, and in some ways its strongest if only because they are the most intangible. Sovereignty and democracy are not, of course, the same thing, as sovereign states can be undemocratic. As regards sovereignty itself, Brexiters routinely deploy this as the central defence of Brexit, the more so given the evident lack of benefits and the mounting evidence of costs. For if sovereignty ‘has no price’, then these inconvenient truths can be ignored.

There is a particularly specious version of this defence, a recent example being furnished by Julia Hartley-Brewer, which argues or implies that people voted for Brexit knowing the damage it would cause, because the remain campaign told them (that this is the meaning of Hartley-Brewer’s tweet is borne out by her previous remarks). The obvious flaw is that the leave campaign thundered assurances to such voters that every single one of these warnings was part of ‘Project Fear’, and it defies belief that many voters believed the warnings but voted to leave anyway rather than doing so because they accepted the assurances that the warnings were false.

Indeed, more generally, it’s worth recalling how Brexit was sold. Yes, the slogan of ‘taking back control’, which may be taken as a proxy for ‘regaining sovereignty’, was central to the leave campaign, but it was proposed not as an abstract virtue but as a means of delivering concrete benefits, most obviously control of immigration to those who wanted that, but also benefits to the economy and, more expansively, to the totality of policy, which Brexiters said had been ceded to the EU. So it is dishonest now to propose ‘sovereignty’ as the justification of Brexit, detached from whether it has delivered these concrete benefits.

Flawed ideas of sovereignty

Alongside that dishonesty lies another, or, at least, an ignorance. Sovereignty has probably never meant untrammelled national freedom of action, and certainly doesn’t nowadays. This is why the regulatory independence of Brexit has proved so illusory. In practice, countries operate within a framework of international standards, whether they be derived from the EU or other trans-national bodies. More broadly, countries pool and/or cede sovereignty for purposes of defence, as with NATO, or for a whole variety of non-economic reasons which give rise to international treaties, conventions and, indeed, law.

Of course, Brexiters are constantly straining against those limits but, in doing so, are simply repeating the same flawed idea of sovereignty. The flaw isn’t just that countries can’t escape external constraints, it’s that to the extent they can do so it has negative consequences which they choose to avoid. That choice is, itself, an expression of sovereignty. Thus the idea that Spain, or Denmark, or Germany do not have sovereignty because they choose to be in the EU is as preposterous as the idea that the UK has gained sovereignty by leaving. Indeed, one of the most arresting moments in the entire Brexit process was when the government published the first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. For it contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” (para 2.1).

Interestingly, the hollowness of the sovereignty argument was again unwittingly revealed by Rees-Mogg just this week, when he was questioned by Lewis Goodall of the News Agents. He was asked about the PopCons’ ‘anti-institutional’ agenda for changing the structures and systems of government, and why, if this was so necessary, the Conservative government in which he had served had not done so. Rees-Mogg replied, “we had no ability to change the system until we left the European Union”, but went on to say that “they [structures and systems of government] were changed very effectively by Tony Blair”. To spell out the obvious: when Blair was Prime Minister, Britain was in the EU.

Flawed ideas of electoral democracy

It is here that the Brexiters very last line of defence comes in, emphasizing not just sovereignty but democratic sovereignty. It echoes the line that Tony Benn took to justify opposition to EEC membership in the 1970s in saying that ‘at least, now, you can vote out the politicians who make the laws that govern you’ (although it’s notable that Benn didn’t share the Brexiters’ naïve view of sovereignty). It was wheeled out by Rees-Mogg (in his interview with Tyrone) as if it were a sort of dialectical checkmate. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

To the extent it works at all, it rests on the premise that Britain is more democratic than the EU. How democratic Britain is can be debated, given, amongst other things, its arcane uncodified constitution, non-proportional voting system, unelected upper house, and extensive executive power underpinned by Royal Prerogative. So, too, can the democracy of the EU be debated. Perhaps it should indeed be constituted as a Federal State, with a constitution and an elected government, a United States of Europe, but such ideas were anathema to Brexiters, as they are to Eurosceptics in many EU states. There’s much more to be said about both debates than I have space for here but, at best, it’s a shaky premise.

Beyond that, the idea that, unlike before Brexit, British electors can now exert control over the policies and laws that govern them is fallacious. First, as with sovereignty, it ignores all those internationally derived regulations which, necessarily, continue to apply despite Brexit. Something similar could be said of the way that - as Liz Truss found, just as Harold Wilson did in the 1960s and James Callaghan in the 1970s - with or without Brexit ‘the markets’ put as much constraint on UK economic policy as, say, the EU did on that of Greece, and for much the same reasons. More generally, it massively overestimates the impact that EU membership had on Britain. We know, because of the extent of Retained EU Law (or what is now called Assimilated Law), that plenty of rules came from the EU, but these turn out to be rather dull and uncontentious things that few people care about or want to see scrapped. They aren’t the stuff of political controversy.

By contrast, the most controversial political issues of recent decades, from privatization and trade union restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s, to Iraq in the 2000s, to perennial battles over the extent of public spending, had little or nothing to do with EU membership (other, of course, than that of EU membership itself). Likewise, the big political issues of post-Brexit Britain remain similar to the big political issues of pre-Brexit Britain. So inflation, unemployment, tax rates, interest rates, the NHS, crime, education, defence, housing, immigration, and so on were and are what people vote about. But Brexit makes little difference to the policy options offered by political parties in these areas, and even if it may expand some options (certain taxes, perhaps) it reduces just as many (security data-sharing, say).

That’s even true for immigration policy because, although the UK has ended freedom of movement, the question of its overall total level was always subject to domestic choices as the government controlled non-EU immigration. Moreover, when an EU member, it was the UK’s choice not to use the controls on freedom of movement available to it, just as in 2004 it chose not to restrict free movement from newly acceded member states in Eastern Europe. On the Rees-Mogg argument, British voters could have changed both those things, so either they didn’t care enough or the idea of voter control of policy is flawed. On the other hand, as regards irregular migration, post-Brexit Britain no longer has the benefit of the Dublin regulations, and British voters can do nothing at all about that, even if they want to.

This also begins to show how the argument that Brexit gives electors control frequently rests on an entirely unrealistic idea of how electoral democracy work. Very occasionally, a single big issue may be defining, swaying large numbers of voters, but it has to be a very big issue. Even then, it doesn’t necessarily determine election results, or even change government policy (recall the Iraq War). For the most part, voters choose on the basis of the overall package of a party’s policy offer, their perceptions of its leadership and values, and similar ‘broad-brush’ considerations. Likewise, the record of an incumbent government is typically judged in the round, over many years and in relation to many issues. So when, to use the Rees-Mogg/ Tyrone clip again, Rees-Mogg says “if you didn’t like a tariff introduced by the EU, you had no means of stopping it” it is irrelevant. Elections aren’t fought or won at that level of specificity.

To be fair, presumably Rees-Mogg didn’t literally mean a single tariff, but trade policy generally. However, as an EU member, the UK could have held parliamentary votes on the ratification of EU trade deals, as other member states, or even regions, do (recall the Walloon vote against CETA), but it waived that right. On the other hand, parliamentary oversight of the UK’s post-Brexit trade deals is limited and lacks a statutory basis. Perhaps, if voters really cared about it, they could pressurise politicians, or even vote in elections, to make this oversight more rigorous. But, by the same token, they could have done the same to force pre-Brexit governments to hold votes on EU trade deals, and, indeed, to vote those deals down if they did not want them. In fact, voters were not interested in making this an electoral issue any more than, until the referendum, voters saw EU membership as a contentious or important issue. The underlying point is that a parliamentary democracy doesn’t give voters overarching control of policy any more than sovereignty bestows unconstrained freedom of action.

Flawed ideas of parliamentary democracy 

However, it's also doubtful to whether leading Brexiters understand, or are even committed to, parliamentary democracy at all. It was, after all, Johnson and Rees-Mogg who instigated the Prorogation of parliament in 2019. And just this week David Frost (£), recalling that period, wrote that “the problem there was Parliament deciding to act independently on Brexit, as if it were itself the government”, a reference, apparently, to the Benn Act, and perhaps to the Indicative Votes process.

So, apart from the irony of a placeman lawmaker, especially one of a distinction either nugatory or inordinately well-disguised, lecturing about democracy, it seems that Frost doesn’t understand the most basic fact of parliamentary democracy, which is that the government governs to the extent that it commands a majority. But it’s not actually a lack of understanding, it’s one of the dirty secrets at the heart of Brexit that, even as the Brexiters spout about democracy, what they have done is to substantially increase the power of the Executive at the expense of parliament, most obviously in the growth in the use of Statutory Instruments and ‘Henry VIII powers’.

There must also be more than a suspicion that when Brexiters rail against ‘unelected’ judges and civil servants they don’t grasp that whilst elections are central to democracy and its institutions they cannot and should not completely define them. Or, again, they do actually grasp this, and hate it, partly because of the constraints it places on the Executive and partly because what defines Brexiters, and populists generally, is not a commitment to parliamentary democracy but to a mythologised idea of ‘the will of the people’, mystically distilled and enacted by their leaders. 

For a brief period, the referendum result empowered them to use that slogan as a battle cry to bully and scarify their opponents. Now, with Brexit, in any form, so self-evidently unwanted by the majority of the people, and, in its actual form, so unloved by the minority who still want it, they are forced to ever-more contorted and untenable justifications.

Moving forward

At issue in all this is not a re-litigation of Brexit itself. Brexit has happened, so the real point is to set out and challenge at least some of the extraordinary array of arguments, some contradictory, some illogical, some dishonest, some just wrong, which Brexiters are still deploying.

With some exceptions, they have had to just about accept that Brexit has had many costs and no benefits, but they still seek to excuse that and still fall back on the more intangible claim to have restored sovereignty and democracy. But that too is flawed, not least because, apart from everything else I’ve written in this post, the very fact that Britain could and did vote to leave the EU shows that doing so was unnecessary on those grounds. Stripped of that final conceit, the Brexiters have nothing to protect them from the hard facts of their abject failure.

Exposing the many ways they try to conceal or deny that failure matters, not because of the past but because of the future. Having wreaked so much damage on our country, the Brexiters now want to do it one final disservice by preventing an honest appraisal of what they did, thus preventing us from finding any real solution to it.