From Brexit to Brexitism

This is the ninth anniversary, almost to the day, since I began this blog (that first post, some details aside, still reads quite presciently I think). It began under the title ‘The Brexit Blog’, which was startlingly unoriginal and chosen without much thought, simply to differentiate it from another blog I wrote at the time. I renamed it ‘Brexit & Beyond’ starting from the first post of January 2021, much of which I think also still stands the test of time, to reflect the fact that Britain had left the EU and the transition period had ended.

Resuming for what will be the tenth year, I have renamed it again, this time as ‘Brexit & Brexitism’. The reason was pre-figured in my previous post, before I stopped posting for the summer. There, I argued that the Brexit process had entered a new phase, even if less clearly defined than when the UK left the EU. On this basis, I said I suspected that the focus of this blog would increasingly become not so much Brexit – the UK leaving the EU – as the Brexitism which has developed from it.

Over the summer, that suspicion has crystallised into a certainty and in this very lengthy post I will explain what this means, and its implications for the future direction of the blog. To prevent the post becoming even longer, and also in order to have it available for future reference, I have created a separate page setting out in detail what I mean by ‘Brexitism’. To give a very brief summary, Brexitism denotes an approach to politics that derives from Brexit, but goes beyond the UK simply leaving the EU to the extent that it constitutes a distinctive ideology.

The current politics of Brexit

In terms of UK politics, the parameters of what the present Labour government is going to do, or try to do, as regards UK-EU relations are now abundantly clear. There will be some ongoing ‘reset’ negotiations with the EU to try to achieve some relatively minor, but not entirely negligible, improvements in those relations, without dropping the ‘red lines’ of no single market, no customs union, and no freedom of movement. I’ve outlined the kinds of things which might be in scope in many previous posts, and over this summer, the European Commission produced draft negotiating guidelines for some of the areas where such improvements might be agreed.

That there is scope for improvements is because, without any formal announcement, the Labour government has dropped the previous Tory red line of ‘no role for the ECJ’, and also because it faces fewer internal constraints than its predecessor in seeking the maximum cooperation possible within the framework of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (e.g. possibly joining Erasmus+). But of course any improvements require the agreement of the EU, and there are clear limits to that. For example, it has emerged this summer that, at least for now, the EU will not consider UK participation in the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention.

At the same time, Labour will quietly continue to make alignment with most EU regulations the default position, as is evidenced by the latest UKICE regulatory divergence tracker which was published over the summer. This doesn’t mean there will be no divergence, both active (i.e. choosing to enact different UK or GB regulations) and passive (i.e. omitting, by choice or by oversight, to follow changes in EU regulations), and this summer a report by the Institute for European Environmental Policy UK (IEEP) identified some examples of both in the environmental field. But, as a generality, Labour’s policy is one of “alignment by stealth”.

Alignment will be facilitated in some areas by the passing of the Product Regulation and Metrology Act in July. Such alignment does not, of course, require agreement with the EU but, equally, since ‘alignment does not mean access’, it doesn’t improve the terms of trade either. It simply avoids the additional costs of British businesses having to produce to different standards for EU and UK/GB markets.

A policy of alignment by stealth actually isn’t very different, in practice, from the approach taken by the Tories under Rishi Sunak although, again, Keir Starmer faces less opposition to it from within his own party. The fact is that the Brexiters’ claims about the possibility and desirability of substantial regulatory divergence were either untrue or unworkable. Similarly, closer security and defence relations with the EU had begun under Boris Johnson, spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The subsequent re-election of Trump, and his impact on NATO and global and European security, means that this will continue to be the direction of travel.

So, whilst for opposing reasons both Brexiters and anti-Brexiters may be unhappy about it, there is really no sign at all of Labour’s approach changing before the next election. It’s conceivable, depending on the outcome of that election, that they might be forced to form a coalition with other parties which could push them towards dropping their red lines, but, if so, that is years away.

The realignment of the political right

Meanwhile, the political right, meaning the poll-leading Reform Party and the crisis-ridden Tory Party, is in a frenzied flux of realignment. But, barring the highly unlikely resurgence of what we might call liberal, centrist or sensible Conservatism, it seems that Brexitism, whilst certainly not confined to the political right, has already become the right’s defining ideology.

This means that if the right wins the next election – whether as Reform, Conservative, or as Reform-Conservative coalition or alliance – UK-EU relations would go in a radically different direction. Certainly even the limited rapprochement of the Labour reset would be abandoned, and very probably there would be an attempt, impractical and disastrous as it would be, at substantial divergence from EU regulations. Those who hold anti-Brexit views and who also say that Labour is ‘no different’ to Brexiters, or has itself fully embraced Brexitism, should reflect on that.

But the Brexitism of the political right also matters now, in several ways. It continues, partly because of its dominance of the media, to make Labour extremely cautious and defensive, even about its limited reset ambitions, to the extent of barely mentioning them or its ‘alignment’ policy. Crucially, it means that the EU will be cautious about making agreements with the UK, since these might be rescinded after the next election. It certainly means there is no realistic possibility of a fresh referendum, on whether to join the EU.

It’s vital to understand that Brexitism is flourishing quite independently of the fact that a clear majority of the public think it was wrong to leave the EU. Indeed, this is one of the key reasons why understanding the politics of Brexit now means understanding how what was once about the process and effects of leaving the EU has now morphed into something related to that, but different: Brexitism. Charting and explaining that will be the central focus of this re-titled blog.

Beyond the Brexit battles

One consequence of this partial shift of focus is that I will give less attention to discussing whether this or that development is a ‘benefit of Brexit’ or not. In economic terms, there is really no room for any serious doubt that Brexit has been, and will continue to be, highly damaging. A report this summer by the economist John Springford, for the Constitution Society and Federal Trust, reviewed the evidence for this, and it is compelling for anyone who isn’t wedded, for doctrinaire reasons, to denying it. The geo-political costs can’t be quantified in the same way, or the evidence assembled in the same way, but there’s really no credible political analyst who denies that they have been considerable.

It’s true that as time goes on it becomes more difficult to disentangle the effects of Brexit from other factors (and even regulatory divergences may only be temporary), but this makes poring over the details of individual developments all the more pointless. That is especially well-illustrated by the utterly fatuous debate over the summer about whether Brexit has been advantageous to the UK in terms of avoiding some of Trump’s Tariffs.

The reality is that it’s an unanswerable question. The ‘deals’ Trump is striking are highly complex, though often very vague in their terms, and their effects are almost impossible to compare. The ‘headline’ tariffs that each country faces don’t tell the full story of the impact on particular sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, or particular supply chains. And, even if the headline rates suggest the UK has got a ‘better deal’ than the EU (which is debatable), to the extent that Trump’s tariffs adversely affect the EU (and the UK’s other trading partners) that is not good news for UK exports. In any case, different EU members are differently affected by the US-EU deal whilst in non-EU Switzerland, very badly hit by the new tariffs, there is fresh debate about how this shows the disadvantages of not being a member.

Beyond all that, Trump keeps changing his mind about the rates, or the dates they will be enforced, and rips up deals he has supposedly made with impunity. He is also constantly using tariffs in order to exert political leverage (e.g. Brazil), and his whims about those non-economic purposes are as febrile as his ostensibly economic goals. Meanwhile, the US Court of Appeals has ruled many of the Trump Tariffs illegal (the final outcome of this remains to be seen). For all of the reasons these ‘deals’ are hardly worthy of the name. All that can really be said is that Trump has dropped a dirty bomb into the world trading system, and trying to extract an argument for (or against) Brexit from the mess and chaos he has created is totally absurd.

The new battleground of Brexitism

Yet if Brexiters have taken Trump’s unhinged and increasingly sinister conduct as some sort of vindication of Brexit, it seems that they are considerably less enthusiastic about the state of post-Brexit Britain. Having droned on for years about the nirvana of leaving the ‘totalitarian’ EU, they have decided that, having become ‘self-governing’, Britain is on the point of civil war or, rather inconsistently, though equally ludicrously, that it is the new North Korea.

This is one illustration of how Brexit has morphed into Brexitism. Where once leave campaigners confected fears about the EU being at “breaking point” as a justification for Brexit, the central theme of this summer, as regards domestic politics, has been a vicious demonization of asylum seekers, with a particularly vile attempt to portray them as sexual predators, accompanied by a constant drumbeat of bogus statistics and false anecdotes.

What used to be ‘the silly season’ this year became the seditious season, though both were combined in the sick joke of Lucy Connelly’s claim that she had been “Keir Starmer’s political prisoner” which was widely, and generally uncritically, reported. That case was invoked in an even plainer example of sedition when Nigel Farage travelled to Washington to publicly denounce his own country for its supposed authoritarianism, including a thinly-veiled call (Section VI: 1) for the US to punish the UK diplomatically and economically.

The recurring cliché within this attempt to depict Britain as being in the grip of a social and political crisis has been that the country is a “tinderbox” about to explode with anger. In a tsunami of opinion pieces, Brexitist politicians and commentators, usually under the threadbare disguise of issuing ‘warnings’, and sometimes adopting a fake-feminism of concern about women’s rights, have in effect sought to whip up violent protests outside the hotels where many asylum seekers are temporarily housed.

Thus, throughout the summer there were hyperbolic reports of ‘waves’ of ‘mass’ protests, ‘erupting’ across the country, which repeatedly turned out to be false, not just in terms of scale (which in fact ranged from tiny to small, though no doubt terrifying for their targets) but in terms of the suggestion that these were spontaneous uprisings of ‘ordinary decent families’. In fact they were organized, and often attended, by known far-right activist groups, and data from last year’s riots shows that many of those involved had previous convictions for domestic abuse.

This wasn’t simply media catastrophism. The glee with which catastrophe was envisaged betrayed the desire of these ‘patriots’ to see our country collapse into violent disorder. But it can’t just be dismissed as hyperbolic rhetoric. The effect, and in some cases no doubt the intention, is potentially self-fulfilling since, if people are told of widespread anger, then it is quite reasonable for them to conclude that there is something to be angry about. Hence there is some evidence, admittedly from the summer of 2024, of a huge gap between the 32% of the public who think immigration is the most important issue facing Britain and the 4% who think it is the most important issue facing them personally.

I don’t have more recent figures for the ‘personal’ question, which doesn’t seem to be consistently polled, but the YouGov tracker of the public view of the most pressing issues facing the country shows that 'immigration and asylum' (it's unhelpful, and problematic in itself, that pollsters and politicians conflate these) rose from 43% in March 2025 to 56% in September 2025. It is very hard not to conclude that this is solely because of the media reporting of, especially, asylum-seeking during that period rather than any genuine increase in its salience for individual experience. In short, public anger and concern have been procured by politicians and commentators.

In any case, if some protestors are, indeed, genuinely angry then, as Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian, few seem willing “to ask whether the rage is justified” or how it is likely inform a better or more practical approach to the asylum system. That unwillingness is understandable since, as with Brexit, to deny the gut feeling of ‘ordinary people’ (invariably meaning the protestors, not the often larger numbers of counter-demonstrators, or those in groups giving support to asylum seekers) is deemed ‘elitist’ by Brexitists.

So too is an insistence on rationality and evidence. Yet the existence of some 32,000 asylum seekers in just over 200 hotels, dispersed around the country, is, if not a non-issue (not least because of the reasons why it has arisen), surely not something objectively to warrant pole position in public concern and the domestic news agenda. Bluntly, Britain has many, far greater, problems. Moreover, within the global context of the 8.4 million people seeking asylum in 2024, the UK is barely touched. That context certainly makes it absurd to represent the approximately 110,000 who sought asylum here in that year as constituting an ‘invasion’, as does the fact that, adjusted for population, in 2024 the UK had less asylum applicants than sixteen other European countries. The ‘crisis’ is a manufactured one which, to coin a phrase, we might call 'Project Fear'.

The complicity of the media and the government

However, whatever the facts, the Brexitist framing of asylum-seeking, which has spilled over to dominate the framing of immigration, has become an accomplished political reality. It is not, now, confined to Reform, let alone to hard-right street politics. Many Tories, most enthusiastically their would-be leader Robert Jenrick, have also embraced it, using language and rhetoric identical to that of the hard right in a way that not long ago would have been unthinkable from a mainstream politician. Perhaps the real yardstick of how things have shifted is not so much that this rather grubby little mediocrity says such things as that he is able to extract an apology from the BBC for broadcasting a theologian saying, in an opinion slot, that they are “xenophobic”.

That apology was only part of the wider way in which the Brexitists have successfully framed discussion of this issue. The endless wave of hyperbolic comment and ‘reporting’ has not been confined to the tabloids or the Telegraph (which has long been in thrall to ‘the end is nigh’ teeth-gnashing) but has also captured the previously more sober Times. More importantly, it has been aided and abetted by the BBC (which, as British Future Director Sunder Katwala has assiduously chronicled over the summer, has persistently hyped-up the scale of the protests), as well as other broadcasters such as Sky which has taken to tagging its reports on this topic with a large banner saying ‘Migration Crisis’. Meanwhile, apparently beyond any meaningful control from Ofcom, GB News continues to pump out Brexitist propaganda to the faithful.

Most significantly of all, having been fairly robust in challenging the Brexitist narrative during the 2024 post-Southport violence (and garnering a fair degree of public approval for this), Labour politicians now seem to have become too cowardly to do so, or perhaps have simply accepted that narrative. This isn’t the first time a Labour government has gone in this direction, by any means, but Brexit has made a difference, and this is also part of how Brexit has morphed into Brexitism, as it persuaded many in the Labour movement that the populists really do speak for ‘ordinary people’, including many in the traditional Labour electoral base.

Even leaving aside the morality of this, it is just dumb politics as it alienates so many more previous or potential Labour voters than it is every going to attract (see, for example, recent polling on views about the location of asylum seekers). Labour is losing its 2024 voters primarily to the left, or to indecision, rather than to Reform, and they aren’t picking up 2024 Reform voters.

The only conceivable defence of the government’s approach is that if it does not ‘acknowledge the grievance’, then Reform will exploit it. But it is a hopeless defence, on the one hand accepting as legitimate what is actually a massive exaggeration and distortion and, on the other hand, imagining that the threat of Reform can be neutralized in this way. The reality is that, whatever the Labour government does, Reform will say it is not enough. The government’s response isn’t a way of stopping Reform exploiting the asylum issue, it is one of the ways in which Reform is succeeding in doing so.

Post-Brexit politics

More fundamentally, what has been vividly illustrated this summer is the clash between what we (perhaps) used to think of as ‘normal’ politics and the anti-institutionalism and anti-politics of Brexitism. That included a revival of the kind of ‘enemies of the people’ attacks on judges we saw in relation to Brexit, this time when judges in the ‘Epping asylum hotel case’ were vilified, and their judgement presented as ‘taking the side of migrants over Britons’.

A particular feature of Brexitist anti-politics, because of its central focus on grievance, is that it gives credence to imaginary simple solutions, dismissed as impractical only by despised ‘experts’. Such solutions are especially effective when propounded by those who do not have responsibility for governing, as they are deemed free of the taint of ‘the Establishment’. Hence the wave of hyperbole about ‘the migration crisis’ was followed by Farage unveiling his radical supposed solution of “mass deportation”.

It doesn’t matter that he almost immediately backtracked on the idea that this mass deportation would include women and children, prompting Kemi Badenoch to insist (£) that a Tory government would ensure that it did. For, effortlessly, the terrain of debate was shifted from something which in the very recent past would have been seen as unthinkable (only last year Farage himself dismissed it as a “political impossibility”) on to the details of just how draconian the mass deportation ‘solution’ would be. It isn’t even necessary for the solution to be persuasive: if the mainstream parties are perceived to have failed, there is an insidious appeal in the idea of ‘giving a chance’ to the ‘insurgents’ or just that it’s ‘time for a change’. To that extent, to adapt a phrase from the New Labour era, ‘what works doesn’t matter’.

However it does not follow that ‘normal’ politics has ceased to matter. Although insufficient in itself, one of the ways of countering the Brexitism of Reform, especially, is to point to its utter incompetence. That certainly includes the ongoing failure of the flagship policy of Brexit, and people like Farage ought constantly to be reminded that their foundational belief yielded none of what they claimed for it. There may indeed be many voters who are minded to ‘roll the dice’ again, as they did with Brexit, but there are surely others, including those who voted for Brexit, who would be receptive to a clear message reminding them what happened last time they placed their faith in Farage.

This also entails pointing out Reform’s failure (£), now that they control several local councils, to govern in an even vaguely competent manner. Already Farage has started whining that these councils are facing “obstructionism”, laying the ground for the usual evasion of any responsibility, exactly as he did with Brexit. In particular, the public need to be constantly reminded that this is what is in store for the country as a whole if Reform ever come to form, or be part of, a national government with few meaningful constitutional restraints upon it.

In this respect, the government’s approach to the asylum issue is not wholly wrong. It is right (including for asylum seekers themselves, let’s not forget) to improve and speed up the process for assessing and deciding on asylum applications. It is also right to seek, or to improve, international agreements for managing the asylum process within Europe and beyond. The mistake is that, even if the government succeeds in delivering these things, it will not receive the credit whilst it leaves intact, and even endorses, the Brexitist framing of why they are being done. 

It’s simply not enough to say, in effect, that the government accepts all that Reform say about the ‘crisis’ but will be more competent in ‘solving’ it (a point developed at length by the Conservative commentator John Oxley). Nor is it enough to dismiss the Brexitists as trading on emotion, and to counterpose that with ‘delivery’: effective politics needs to speak in both registers. In other words, whilst competence does still matter, it doesn’t exist independently of a wider framing of why it matters, not just in order to ‘communicate more effectively’ but to enthuse and inspire.

What is at stake?

I will write much more about the latter point in future posts because it looks set to be the terrain of politics for the next few years. I don’t mean that it will all be about asylum and immigration, though no doubt that issue will continue to feature prominently, along with many others. I mean something deeper, about the content and conduct of the politics of post-Brexit Britain, pre-dating Brexit in some ways, but very significantly inflected and inflamed by Brexit.

At stake is whether Brexit Britain is also to be Brexitist Britain. The outcome is neither predictable nor inevitable, and one consequence of it will be whether or not it becomes feasible for the UK to apply to join the EU, although that will be very far from being the only, or even the most important, consequence. We have only to look at what is happening in Trump’s US to see what some of those consequences might be.

Nine years since the vote to leave the EU, and all that has followed from it, Brexit and Brexitism are now completely intertwined, explaining the new title of this blog and the slightly different focus the posts are likely to have as it enters its tenth year. What will not change is the attempt to analyse what is happening with the use of reliable evidence, logical argument, and, I hope, a degree of interpretive insight.

Not dealing with Brexitism

It’s hard to keep up with what is happening in the world of trade, even just considering those aspects which have a direct or indirect Brexit connection. Since my last post, there has been a flurry of activity, including a deal, of sorts, between the US and China which, for now at least, seems to mark a truce in their trade war. That, along with some other developments, suggests that Trump is now desperate to row back on the chaos that his ‘Liberation Day tariffs’ unleashed. On the other hand, there are signs that he proposes to double down on his hostility to the EU.

The recently announced UK-US ‘trade deal’ is one, relatively minor, aspect of these developments. It, too, is evidence of Trump’s backtracking, and it could be read as part of an attempt by him to increase divisions between the UK and the EU. At all events, along with the UK-India deal, it forms the background to next week’s UK-EU Summit. The outcome of that may, whether in what it does or what it does not achieve, mark a new phase in the Brexit saga, but there is little sign of Britain dealing with 'Brexitism'.

The UK-US ‘trade deal’

As always with anything Brexit-related, it’s a big task just to strip away the lies, half-truths and misunderstandings, and that becomes even more difficult when Donald Trump is involved. When the deal was announced, both Trump and Keir Starmer talked as if it was a historic breakthrough, and suggested that it was the long-touted post-Brexit Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It was nothing of the sort, and nor was it ever going to be. As I explained in a post last November, when Trump’s tariffs had not been announced but were in prospect, if it was going to be anything it would be an ‘exemption deal’, meaning that it would exempt the UK from some, if not all, of Trump’s new tariffs.

The difference is significant, not least because it means that the best it could achieve would be a return to the status quo ante. That is, it might avoid Trump’s new tariffs but not improve the terms of trade that had already existed. To an extent, at least, that is what has happened. In headline terms, the new blanket 10% ‘reciprocal tariff’ remains on all goods, but the 25% tariff on cars has been removed up to a quota of 100,000 vehicles sold per year (but these will still be liable to the 10% tariff). The 25% tariff on steel and aluminium has also been scrapped, but it seems there will also be some quota limit on that (the details are not clear). In return, the UK has agreed to scrap tariffs on an increased quota of US beef (with some reciprocal increase in access to the US beef market), and to scrap tariffs on US ethanol within a high quota.

So, a very limited deal. But, as quickly emerged when the text was published, it is not even a deal, in the sense that it is (explicitly) not a legally binding agreement and that many details are still to be agreed, most glaringly, perhaps, in relation to pharmaceuticals trade. As Alison Morrow of CNN Business put it, it is not so much as deal as “a concept of a deal”. That isn’t to say that none of it will come into effect, because there is evidently some political commitment to it. So at least some of it very probably will. But given Trump’s proven unreliability to stick to the terms even of legally binding deals, it is even harder to be confident that he will honour, or even continue to recognize, any political commitments.

That it happened at all reflects the weakness and neediness of both sides. Unlike the EU or China, the UK is simply not strong enough to take on the US in a trade war. The UK also has a pressing political and economic need to shield its car and steel industries from Trump’s tariffs. But the US is weak too. Trump’s tariff policy has backfired on him very badly, and, as I suggested recently, that has made him keen to start ‘doing deals’ with his victims so as to give the impression that this had been his strategy all along, and to reverse some of the damage he has inflicted on himself and the US economy. Thus, as many commentators noted once it had been announced, Trump needed a deal, and quickly.  

The timing may also have reflected a desire to make an announcement on VE Day so as to get in some sanctimonious references to the wartime alliance and the ‘special relationship’ or at least, since Trump’s ego is considerably greater than his grasp of detail, to ‘historic’ events. Timing aside, the terms of this trade non-deal also reflected the neediness of both parties. The UK has not had to make any of the concessions that had been speculated about on tech firm regulation and taxation, or on food standards (there will be cheaper US beef, but it will not be ‘hormone-treated’), a point I’ll come back to. The UK also resisted demands to reduce pork tariffs. To that extent, the reported jubilation in the Starmer government is understandable. The UK gave surprisingly little for what, at least in political terms, was quite helpful to the government.  

Nevertheless, to repeat, the overall effect is to leave the UK worse off than it was before Trump launched his tariff offensive. Starmer shouldn’t be blamed for that, as it’s highly unlikely any other outcome could have been agreed on remotely viable terms, and what was achieved is worthwhile for the car and steel industries, but in a normal world it wouldn’t be seen as a triumph. There is also a more complex issue, identified by the UK Trade Policy Observatory’s (UCTPO) analysis of the deal. Referring to an aspect which I have not mentioned so far, namely what the agreement says about supply chain security, UKTPO warn that, depending on exactly what it comes to mean in practice, it may well push the UK towards provisions which will be unpopular with China, with retaliation possible. It’s a specific illustration of another point I made in an earlier post, about how post-Brexit Britain is obliged to duck and dive between not just the US and the EU but, also, China.

Brexit dimensions

What of Brexit more generally in all this? It’s true by definition that the UK could not have agreed such a deal had it still been a member of the EU, or even if simply in a customs union with the EU. Whether it proves ‘better’ than whatever the EU agrees or doesn’t agree with the US remains to be seen. What is certainly striking is that it has wrong-footed the Brexiters (as shown, rather deliciously, by a disagreement between the Tice-Oakeshott Reform power couple). Some, at least initially, hailed it, in the way Trump did, as the post-Brexit trade deal he had always promised, although they quickly latched on to the implicit criticism of the Tories contained in that, as well as the explicit lie it entailed.

Very soon, Kemi Badenoch was complaining that the deal had “shafted” the UK (£), bemoaning that it was, indeed, not a comprehensive FTA. In short, we had the unedifying spectacle of Labour at least implying that it had delivered the key trade promise of the Brexiters, and Conservative Brexiters criticizing the government for not delivering what is simply not available for agreement with Trump, any more than it was with Biden, but pretending otherwise. It was yet another small illustration of the fundamental dishonesty Brexit has brought to British politics.

Beyond domestic politics, there’s a deeper issue in play with this deal. Again, I’ve gestured towards it in a previous post (I’m sorry to keep doing this self-referencing, but the various discussions obviously connect together, and linking to where points were previously made means I don’t have to repeat explanations or background). That issue is what all this means for ‘WTO rules’.

It’s not just that the Brexiters used to sloganize ‘Let’s Go WTO’ as a supposed alternative to any trade deal at all with the EU, or that ‘regaining our seat at the WTO’ was supposed to be some great prize, it is that their whole economic vision of post-Brexit Britain was predicated on the existence of a global trade order. Trump is now ripping that up, and both Alan Beattie, the Financial Times’ trade expert (£), and the UKTPO analysis suggest that the UK-US deal, specifically, flouts WTO principles and undermines the multi-lateral trading system.

The UK-India deal

All this came in the wake of the announcement of a UK-India trade deal. The two stories are, as BBC Economics Editor Faisal Islam argues, very likely to be related. That is, the general mayhem Trump is causing to international trade may have provided an incentive to complete what has hitherto been regarded as an “elusive” deal. However, the two deals are very different. For the UK-India deal is a trade deal, both in the sense of being a genuine FTA and of being (or at least being the basis of) a legally binding agreement. Moreover, it sits within, and does not undermine, the WTO framework. Indeed, the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy suggests that “may be one of the biggest achievements of this agreement”.

Although the full details have yet to be published, reports based on the government’s summary of what has been agreed suggest there will be a fairly comprehensive removal of tariffs, with whisky and cars two of the UK sectors most likely to benefit, and garments and footwear amongst the benefitting Indian sectors. There’s less sign of liberalization of services trade, which some, especially in the financial services sector, had hoped for, although that is not surprising (lack of services coverage is one of the reasons why FTAs are so different to the EU single market). However, of potential importance to some UK firms, and potential controversy in India, UK access to the public procurement market should increase.

It was always anticipated that the block to this FTA would be an Indian requirement for a relaxation of UK immigration policy – something even less likely to be agreed by the present government, which is, if possible, even more obsessed with reducing immigration at whatever the economic cost than its Tory predecessors, something I will return to. That turned out not to be the case (although perhaps, had it been agreed, it might have enabled a deeper deal), and the only tangentially immigration-related issue was an agreement to exempt Indian workers on short-term visas from National Insurance Contributions (NICs).

Once again Brexiters were wrong-footed. This was a deal they had long-advocated as a Brexit prize, and Jacob Rees-Mogg greeted it as “exactly what Brexit promised”. But Kemi Badenoch latched onto the NIC provision (as, more unexpectedly, did the LibDems), either unaware of or ignoring the fact that such arrangements (which are reciprocal for UK workers) have been agreed with numerous countries in the past. Nigel Farage also weighed in, denouncing the deal as “truly appalling”, and as selling out British workers and farmers.

All this was, as with the US deal, pure opportunism (one senior Indian official was even quoted as saying that Badenoch had agreed the NIC provision in principle when she was Trade Secretary). There’s no doubt whatsoever that the Tories would have done the same deal. But the Brexiter reactions, especially Farage’s, also point to one of the biggest of the many contradictions which have run throughout the entire Brexit project, that between nativist protectionism and globalist free trade. Hence the idiotic situation that Brexiters can now regard the UK-India deal as both a vindication and a betrayal of Brexit.

A Brexit benefit?

To the extent that the deal is being claimed as a ‘Brexit benefit’, the usual arguments apply. Yes, it could only be made because the UK has left the EU. But according to official calculations its economic value, an estimated 0.1% increase to GDP after 15 years, whilst slightly greater than the FTAs with Australia (0.08%) and New Zealand (0.03%), is nugatory compared with the costs of Brexit (minus 4%). Given that Brexit has happened, there’s a case for doing such deals, but the idea that they in any way justify Brexit is absurd. In any case, it is reported in the Indian media that the ongoing EU-India trade negotiations are likely to be accelerated, again precisely because of the impetus injected by Trump’s trade mayhem.

Of course, whenever the economic deficiencies of their project are pointed out to Brexiters, they invariably fall back on some version of their ideas about sovereignty and democracy. In relation to trade deals, they used to make much of the idea that, with Brexit, the people’s representatives in parliament would ‘regain control’ over ratification of FTAs. That was always based on a false premise, because as an EU member the UK could have held parliamentary votes on FTAs made by the EU, potentially even blocking them, but it waived that right. As for the present situation, whilst it might fairly be said that the UK-US deal is so flimsy and indefinite it hardly warrants a vote, that is not true of the UK-India deal. Yet the government has stated that, in line with post-Brexit legislation and practice, there will be no vote. So that’s another supposed ‘Brexit benefit’ that has quietly been discredited.

Where does all this leave the UK-EU reset?

The short answer to that is that it leaves it exactly where it was before, except that we are now only a couple of days away from the EU Summit at which (perhaps) the tangible details of what the ‘reset’ is going to mean will be unveiled [1]. As such, most of what I wrote in my previous post still applies, but it is worth spelling out one particularly important issue. The fact that the UK-US deal explicitly affirmed that US products sold in the UK must meet UK SPS standards (i.e. no hormone-treated beef, chlorinated chicken etc.) means that there is no (new) obstacle to a UK-EU SPS agreement. This is the issue many commentators have identified as the key indication of whether the UK is going to ‘choose’ between aligning with the US or the EU. It seems to have chosen the EU (which is consistent with what the latest UKICE report shows to be the general direction of regulatory policy).  

That should not be a surprise to readers of this blog, as I’ve repeatedly argued (in the face of some sceptical responses) that it was highly unlikely that the government would agree anything with the US, or anyone else, to prevent what has always been Labour’s central, most repeatedly stated, reset ambition. It obviously remains to be seen if there will be a UK-EU SPS agreement, but the possibility remains open. I don’t think that quite amounts to the UK-US deal being a “triumph for remainers”, as Adam Bienkov argues, but it does endorse their core economic proposition of the centrality of geography to trade. Certainly the deal doesn’t mean that (taken in conjunction with the India deal) “the Rejoiner dream [has] finally died”, as pro-Brexit commentator Ambrose Pritchard-Evans claims.

Assuming there will now be a UK-EU SPS deal (in principle, if not immediately in detail), the important question is what else, if anything, gets announced next week. Over and above the widely expected defence and security pact, there are several possibilities, as outlined in my previous post, and there’s not much point in reviewing the various rumours and speculations there have been since. We’ll know soon enough.

What resetting means

That previous post attracted a certain amount of negative comment on social media. In particular, one poster on Bluesky [2] repeatedly and aggressively criticized me for having said that Labour’s red lines are fixed which, they insisted, meant I was indulging in British ‘exceptionalism’ whereby the EU was expected to make all the compromises and to find the solutions for the problems Brexit has caused the UK. It was a slightly bizarre accusation given the number of times over the last nine years I have criticized such a position, which has indeed often been in evidence. More importantly, it was simply ignorant. It is a fact that the Labour red lines have not changed, and a fact that they necessarily put a massive restriction on what can be agreed by the EU. But that certainly does not mean that there is no space for agreeing anything beyond what was negotiated by Boris Johnson and David Frost (a view which, ironically, mirrors Frost’s own criticisms of the reset).

That is for two reasons. One is that the UK under Labour does seem to have dropped one of the Johnson-Frost (and May) red lines of doctrinaire objection to any role for the ECJ and European Law. Admittedly this has never been formally stated, but, for years now, it has been notably absent from Labour’s list of red lines. If that is indeed so, it potentially opens up new areas for agreement that had been closed down by the UK, including but not limited to an SPS agreement, without entailing any concession from the EU on the need for ECJ jurisdiction. The other is that, even within its red lines, the Johnson-Frost deal was in many respects minimalistic, because of their hang-up about sovereignty in a more diffuse sense (i.e. beyond even what those red lines of necessity betokened). This is one reason why the quite expansive possibilities – possibilities envisaged by the EU quite as much as the UK – in the (non-binding) Political Declaration, which accompanied the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement, were never brought to fruition. There is now at least the potential to revisit them.

Nor, to address another repeated, and related, criticism made of that post, does doing so automatically amount to UK attempts at ‘cherry-picking’ or ‘cakeism’. Those concepts, whilst certainly highly relevant at some stages of the Brexit process (and, again, I've exhaustively catalogued and criticized this) have been rendered largely redundant since the UK became a third country to the EU. There are no cherries to try to pick, because the UK has foregone the pie. Now, the only issue is whether both the UK and the EU see it as being in their own interests to make agreements over cooperation in specific areas or participation in specific programmes. Indeed, that began to happen under the Sunak government, with the UK-Frontex deal on tackling irregular migration and the admission of the UK to the Horizon Europe and Copernicus programmes.

Trust in Starmer’s Britain?

If cherry-picking is no longer of much, if any, relevance to understanding Brexit events, new considerations have emerged. One is whether, contrary to what I have said, the UK-US deal, whilst not in its provisions affecting what the EU and UK might agree, could do so by antagonizing EU leaders. As I said above, that could well have been part of Trump’s intentions in making the deal and, even if not, the agreement hardly showed the UK standing in solidarity with other targets of Trump’s aggression. Again, I discussed this in a recent post, pondering that, if such a deal happened, it might simply be regarded by other countries as understandable realpolitik. That remains an open question, but the positive reaction to the agreement from Germany’s new Chancellor Friederich Merz might at least suggest that this is possible.

The other issue is that of domestic politics. Here, Simon Nixon makes the interesting argument that the US and India deals have provided Starmer with political cover for a maximal reset, by presenting himself as having just delivered on the Brexiters’ key trade promises. That could be so, but what is quite clear is that the Brexiters’ attack on the reset is continuing to gather force, and Badenoch has already threatened (£) to reverse anything agreed that “betrays Brexit”. Such threats are now the most potent weapon in the Brexiters’ arsenal, and they (rather than previous concerns about cherry-picking) are the most obvious disincentive to the EU to agree to a substantive reset.

Equally, the sight of Keir Starmer not just rehashing Brexiter nonsense about trade deals but now invoking their ‘taking back control’ slogan when launching this week’s morally reprehensible, politically counter-productive, and economically illiterate anti-immigration crusade is hardly likely to inspire confidence and trust from the EU. It hardly matters whether Starmer really believes what he said, or whether it is dishonesty resulting from fear of the Reform Party. Either way, quite as much as Badenoch and Farage, he is showing that ‘Brexitism’ is entrenched and that he has no intention of trying to challenge it.

I’ve referred several times to my recent posts on this blog, including the last one, and sometimes mentioned occasions where my expectations have proved accurate, or defended what I’ve written against criticisms. However I will freely admit that one of the main arguments of the last post, to the effect that Starmer had the opportunity to challenge Farage head on, and ‘reset’ domestic politics away from Brexitism, has already been shown to be hopelessly naive. It is now clear that isn’t going to happen. Next week there should be a clearer sense of whether Labour’s approach to the reset with the EU is going to be another missed opportunity to start to deal with the damage of Brexit.

 

Notes

[1] It is always worth recalling that, any reset aside, the UK has still not implemented all of the provisions of the original Withdrawal Agreement, nor some parts of the Windsor Framework. Moreover, there is still no deal on Gibraltar, although reports this week (£) suggested (not for the first time) that one is imminent. Indeed, the resolution of outstanding issues, perhaps especially Gibraltar, may well be part of the conditions for a reset of any significance.

[2] In line with my normal practice of not ‘punching down’ by linking to individual social media accounts, except when they are those of public figures, I will not identify the poster in question. In any case, some others were almost equally unpleasant.

Playing the new political game

The first cricket test match I ever attended was England versus West Indies at the Oval in the baking hot summer of 1976. It was the final test of a series in which a truly magnificent West Indies side crushed England, to an even greater extent than the 3-0 scoreline suggests. It was also politically significant in terms of British race relations, having begun with the infamous pledge by England’s South African-born captain, Tony Greig, that his side would make the West Indies “grovel”. At the same time, the West Indies had enthusiastic support from Britons of West Indian descent, perhaps especially at the Oval, bringing steel drums and trumpets, much to the dismay of some English traditionalists. The racial and post-colonial politics of the series have been extensively discussed and are well-captured in the 2010 film Fire in Babylon.

I’m not sure to what extent I was aware of any of that at the time – I was only 11 – but what was apparent throughout the series, simply from a cricketing point of view, was that it wasn’t just that the West Indies were playing much better than England, but that they were playing an almost different, more modern, and certainly more thrilling game. That was most graphically visible at the Old Trafford test, when veteran English batsman Brian Close, who was 45 and had not played test cricket for nine years before being recalled that summer, was almost literally pulverized by the sublime fast bowling of Michael Holding.

Just as some English traditionalists abhorred the exuberance of the West Indies’ supporters, so too did they complain that such aggressive fast bowling ‘just wasn’t cricket’. But they were wrong. It was what cricket was becoming*. Inescapably, those complaints had more than a tinge of post-colonial angst and of racist outrage. Cricket, invented in England and exported to the colonies, was no longer that of the Bufton-Tuftons of the MCC and Lord’s, or, for that matter, of the working-class league cricket of northern England, where players like Close had their roots. And descendants of those who had once been slaves were the architects as well as the masters of this new cricket. At that Oval test I attended, Greig acknowledged that by going on all fours and ‘grovelling’ to the crowd.

Reactionary resentment

Well, I’ve been told before that cricketing analogies don’t have any resonance for many readers of this blog, so I’ll get to the point. I was reminded of all this by the publication this week of the Reform UK manifesto. I’ve already reviewed the specifically Brexit-related elements of this in a separate post which covers all the party manifestos, but it has a more general significance.

Part of that significance relates directly to the laments of the cricket traditionalists of my childhood. There is a lineal connection between the kind of ‘I want my country back’ nostalgia of the Reform party and that sense of not just English cricket, but England itself was being supplanted. There’s also a discernible connection between the post-colonial complaints of those traditionalists and the manifesto’s policy proposal that that “any teaching about a period or example of British or European imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-European occurrence of the same to ensure balance”.

Long before anyone talked much, at least in relation to British politics, about populism, it was being incubated in a reactionary resentment, a kind of sullen victimhood. Even in those days, now fifty years ago, I heard that phrase, ‘it’s not my country any more’ and, which is perhaps less heard now, the half-baffled, half-aggrieved one that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’. That strand of cultural politics never went away, but became subsumed within the coalition of voters and ideologies which Thatcherism assembled. It was a coalition which gradually unwound, and UKIP was one expression of that. But what we are now witnessing is the dramatic, and possibly permanent, fracturing of the traditionalist and populist right.

So there is a literal connection between my cricket story, as a vignette within this strand of politics, and this week’s Reform manifesto. But there is also a metaphorical one, which works in the opposite direction. The literal connection posits populist politics as linked to reactionary horror at the new cricket of the 1970s. But the metaphorical connection posits populism as a new kind of way of doing politics which is making established norms of political arguing and campaigning seem outmoded and redundant, just as the 1976 West Indies’ team made England’s cricketers seem obsolete, almost to the extent of playing a different game altogether.

The anti-politics of Brexitism

The Reform manifesto is a good example, starting with its insistence that it is not a manifesto but a ‘contract’ with voters. For that very insistence is nonsense in suggesting that it entails some sort of binding commitment, given that what it proposes is undeliverable. That this is so as regards its costings was quickly pointed out by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), but it is equally true as regards many of its core pledges. For example, picking up migrants in the Channel and returning them to France is, in practical terms, impossible, as is the commitment to ending NHS waiting lists. It is certainly true of the core pledge to cut immigration to the bone. And the Brexit pledges, which I discussed separately, may not be literally impossible, but would come at an economic and political cost which is not mentioned, and no doubt would be denied. If this manifesto were put into practice, it would make the Truss regime look like a model of competence and stability.

However, crucially, and this is the sense in which the populists are playing a different game to ‘normal’ politics, simply demonstrating that the manifesto is nonsense, and the ‘contract’ is fraudulent, cuts little or no ice. For, as Farage’s response to being told just that shows, they themselves are happy to admit that it isn’t actually being put forward as a programme for government, as they have no expectation of winning the election.

So what is presented as a contract, because ‘manifestos’ are the supposedly discredited vehicle for politicians to make promises that they break when elected, consists of promises which are pre-broken by the anticipation of not being elected. This is politics as anti-politics. As for things like the IFS calculations, they can simply be dismissed as the usual Establishment nay-saying, from forecasters who ‘always get things wrong’. Yet even that is not the whole story, since the manifesto is shameless in referring to the FT, two former Governors of the Bank of England and, indeed, the IFS as having endorsed parts of its economic programme.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it is a version of what happened with the referendum, where the Vote Leave campaigners made impossible, and often contradictory, pledges. They, too, rubbished experts who painstakingly explained the impossibilities and contradictions simply for being experts (whilst happily relying on the authority of those experts who supported them, many of whom are the same people who are behind the Reform manifesto). They, too, gained strength from their lies being debunked, since the very debunking helped the lies to circulate more widely (the £350 million a week for the NHS being the prime example). They, too, when asked to produce a workable plan for Brexit, insisted that they were not going to form a government, so it was not for them, as campaigners, to do so, and one reason they were able to get away with that was the expectation on both sides that they would not win anyway. In this sense, there’s a continuity between pro-Brexit populist politics and post-Brexit populist politics, making Brexitism a useful term to connect the two.

The last chance for Tory traditionalists?

Of course, it’s true that Reform is not going to win this election. So we might just say that none of this really matters. But it isn’t as straightforward as that. This is not Screaming Lord Sutch and the Monster Raving Loony Party, standing for laughs, even if its proposals might as well come from them. As with UKIP before, Farage and Reform are deadly serious and they now know, because of what happened with UKIP before, that it is perfectly possible to have a big political impact without winning much, if any, formal political power. This time Farage says, and there’s no reason to doubt him, that his aim is to take over the Tory Party and to become Prime Minister in 2029 (£).

In response, Rishi Sunak might be expected to counter-attack. At the moment, his only message to Reform voters is that they will be responsible for increasing the size of the expected Labour majority. He could, instead, denounce Reform’s policies as unworkable and damaging, just as he does other political opponents, especially Labour, if only on grounds of fiscal orthodoxy. That, after all, was his pitch when opposing Truss in the Tory leadership election, and when he took over from her having been proved right about the consequences of her policies. But he is unlikely to challenge Farage in that way and everyone knows why: many of his MPs and most of his party members are themselves broadly supportive of Reform’s agenda.

There was a very interesting interview this week on Nick Cohen’s The Lowdown podcast with the journalist Rafael Behr in which he makes the point, amongst many others, that Sunak almost inexplicably flunked standing up to the populists in his party after he had easily defeated their attempts to derail the Windsor Framework and defied their desire to scrap the entirety of Retained EU Law (both of which, by the way, are now Reform policies). I, myself, had speculated at the time of the Windsor Framework that it marked a new chapter.

In fact, Sunak proceeded to pander to the populists, especially with the Rwanda policy. Or, perhaps, he was not pandering to them so much as showing his own beliefs. Either way, he could not satisfy them, and, as has been the story under all the recent Tory leaders, they simply demanded more. Now, there is another moment, perhaps the very final one, for a Tory leader to challenge the populist right, if only as the last act of his political career, but he is unlikely to make use of it.

The responsibility of voters

In any case, it’s probably too late. The genie of anti-politics will not easily be re-bottled. It thrives on attention and rebuttal (making even this blog a very small part of the problem), yet it also thrives when ignored or left unchallenged. So, what to do? No one has a satisfactory answer to that, but it surely has to be based upon facing down, rather than pandering to, populists, if only because pandering to them is self-defeating. Theresa May’s main argument, in itself a principled one, for delivering Brexit was that, were it to be abandoned, voters’ faith in democracy would be damaged. Yet, as was always inevitable, delivering Brexit did not satisfy its supporters and that also damaged their faith in democracy. And so those voters are now, once again, being mobilized by Farage.

Politicians obviously have a particular role in challenging Farage but, at the same time, I think it is insufficiently said, perhaps because it has become almost taboo to mention, that these voters themselves must take ultimate responsibility. They believed the impossible promises made for Brexit and yet, finding those promises not to have been delivered, are willing to accept still more impossible promises from the same people who made the previous ones. They revel in their worldly ability to see through the charlatanism of politicians who are ‘all the same’ and ‘just in it for themselves’, yet are entirely gullible in accepting obvious charlatans like Farage and Johnson as being ‘different’ and ignoring their obvious self-interest.

The numbers of voters involved aren’t small. On the basis of the latest opinion polls, Reform have 16% support and the Conservatives have 21%. Supposing that only a third of those Conservative voters have effectively the same views as Reform voters (and I think it is probably higher), that suggests a bedrock support for Farageist populism of 23%, or almost a quarter of voters. They will all have received years of free education, a lifetime of free health care, have or expect to have livable pensions, and have lived their entire lives without war or mass unemployment.

They are, in short, the beneficiaries of the post-war social democratic settlement and what still endures of it. That’s not to deny they may have all sorts of hardships and legitimate grievances, but by global and historical standards these are not the downtrodden and oppressed of the earth. I simply don’t buy the idea that many, if any, of these voters are so downtrodden and desperate that they can’t be blamed for latching on to any glimmer of hope, and are simply exploited by unscrupulous populists like Farage. It's an idea which is really just a misguided attempt at liberal understanding, or perhaps an expression of liberal guilt, and it plays straight into the hands of populists.

For to the extent that there is a near-taboo on saying such things it is, actually, just one of the many duplicities of such populists, who seize on it as ‘sneering elitism’. In fact, what could be more patronizing than to deny that voters are responsible for their choices? It’s true that criticizing such voters will do nothing to change their minds, and even, to the extent they hear the criticisms, it will probably cement their opinions, but it is still worth saying. Anyway, it’s not as if not criticizing them will make a difference either. And what certainly won’t make a difference is offering them undeliverable policies on the basis that to do otherwise would be disrespectful of their desire for such policies. On the contrary, as Brexit has shown, that just sets up a new cycle of resentment.

The coming political battle

There is a temptation to think that with a probably large, and possibly huge, Labour majority in prospect, it will be years before Conservatives or Reform matter again. I think that it would be a serious mistake to yield to that temptation. For one thing, Labour’s ability to win has to some considerable extent been achieved by Starmer ceding ground, in both tone and substance, to the populists, just as New Labour only won by ceding so much ground to the neo-liberals.

There’s an element of necessity to that in electoral systems where you can only win from the centre, given that the location of the centre changes over time. In one sense of politics, the centre is a reality that must be accommodated, and catered for, especially at elections. Starmer understands this, and It was Corbyn’s inability to do so which doomed him to oblivion. In another sense, which Corbyn understood and Starmer seems not to, the location of the centre is always a matter of political contestation, and that contest is continuous and not the same as, although it intersects with, electoral politics.

In that second sense, the battle with populism, as regards both its policy prescriptions and its anti-politics mode of conduct, will continue after the election. In fact, it will become especially important then because when, as will almost inevitably happen, and probably quite quickly, disillusion with the new government sets in, that will be a new moment of opportunity for the populists to say that the ‘mainstream’ political parties are ‘all the same’ and none of them will ever succeed. As they do so, there’s every possibility that Starmer’s government will try, just as Tory centrists did before, to accommodate and appease them, again pandering to rather than challenging their demands and, again, finding them implacable.

So, at best, the election will be a moment to briefly pause and take some pleasure in the end of what have been some long and truly ghastly years for anyone who is both politically sentient and committed to honesty, rationality or even just basic competence in politics. But it will only be a pause. Brexit won’t have gone away, and nor will the politics that brought it. On the contrary, unless there is a highly unlikely fightback from its more traditionalist wing, there must be every chance that the Tory Party will fully embrace a Farageist National Conservatism, whether led by him or not. The Reform manifesto looks like, and is, a ridiculous joke but, as Farage gloated in the European Parliament after the referendum: “when I came here 17 years ago and said I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me. Well, you’re not laughing now”.

It’s true that winning an election on anything like such a manifesto will be difficult. If my back-of-the envelope calculation of there being perhaps 25% bedrock support for it is correct, that leaves a fair way to climb to form a government, even under first-past-the post. But a ‘NatCon’ party espousing something like that manifesto would have a lot of influential and rich backing and a lot of media support, and, as I observed last week, unless Labour prove to be really effective in government, its large majority could easily crumble in a low-turnout election in 2029. In any case, even without winning that election, if a party on such a manifesto came even within contention it would have at least one very important consequence: it would kill, stone-dead, any prospect of the re-joining the EU for years, if only because it would make it too risky for the EU to accept Britain as a member.

Metaphors to live by

In that post last week, I finished with the image of us all being lab rats within the post-Brexit laboratory of political science, but in some ways that is misleading. I was mainly thinking of the fact that only quite a small number of people will directly influence the internal politics of the Tory Party. But as a metaphor in a more general sense, it fails to recognize the agency which we all have, to at least some degree.

One of my favourite cartoons concerns the famous Pavlovian experiment in which, after repeatedly ringing a bell at the same time as feeding them meat, dogs were conditioned to salivate merely at the sound of a bell. That is to say, they had no agency and their behaviour was a conditioned reflex. In the cartoon, there are two dogs salivating and a scientist in a white coat holding a bell. One dog says to the other: have you noticed how every time we dribble, that guy Pavlov rings a bell? It’s a nice subversion of assumptions about where agency lies.

Or, to put it another way, going back to cricket. I’m not the avid follower of the game I was as a child and a young man, and in fact the last test match I went to was in 2000. It was the last day of what again was the last test of a series between England and the West Indies, again played at the Oval. Since 1976, much had changed in cricket, including the way that English cricket was organized and the England team played it. Much, too, had changed in society.

The 2000 match was watched by a packed, multi-racial, crowd, with both sides having enthusiastic support, and I don’t think there were any of the racist or colonialist undercurrents there had been in 1976. There was certainly nothing resembling the ‘grovel’ comment. England won that game, and narrowly won the series, but the teams were well-matched. More to the point, they were both playing recognizably the same game. Things change.

But there is no inevitability in how they change. That’s down to agency; to the decisions which, collectively, we make, not just at elections but every day.

 

*One might argue that it was not new anyway, and English complaints about the West Indies’ fast bowling were hypocritical. It was England, after all, who had deployed ‘Bodyline bowling’ in the 1930s. But I think a new cricket was emerging in the 1970s, part of which was to do with faster bowling becoming routine, hence it was shortly afterwards that helmets began to be worn and became the norm. And cricket was changing in other ways, too, away from the still rather amateurish ethos that had prevailed (e.g. as regards fitness or squad-building) as well as in its financial and commercial structure, and in game formats, playing styles etc.

The experimental laboratory of post-Brexit politics

When the election campaign began, I remarked that it had the strange quality of feeling both long overdue and prematurely announced. Now, just three weeks in, it feels as if it has been interminable, and it is still only half way through. Those things are linked, because the reality is that politics had been in campaign mode for many months before the election.

Against that background, it’s hardly surprising that the media have piled attention on to Nigel Farage ever since his belated and self-important “emergency announcement” that he would stand in the election, and take over formal leadership of Reform UK. That’s not to imply that this should not have been treated as a significant development but even if it hadn’t been, and even if Farage wasn’t so adept at media manipulation, it’s hard to criticize reporters for latching on to it given that the campaign as a whole is really quite boring. The only other outlet for their skills is filing stories on Rishi Sunak’s increasingly egregious errors of judgement.

That gives them plenty of work but, other than that, the journalistic pickings are slim. Focus group-tested slogans are repetitiously ground out on the basis, apparently, that because voters tune in so briefly and infrequently, politicians must ensure that, at any given moment, they can be heard giving their key messages. Even Farage’s supposedly anti-Establishment shtick is wearisomely familiar. A career politician parachuted in to a place of which he knows little and cares less, his shop-soiled iconoclasm is as tired and grubby as his raincoat. As for his key message, there’s no danger of missing that. Once he told us that all he wanted was to leave the EU, and to have an ‘Aussie-style’ immigration system. Now he has that, but here he still is, still going on about immigration. But actually that’s not his key message. His key message is: look at me, making the Conservatives and ‘the Establishment’ panic.

That transparent neediness may be repellent, but is at least recognizably human – even if its ‘make Daddy suffer/ remember me’ roots present little psychological mystery - compared with Sunak’s robotic insistence that he “has a plan” for “bold action”, which makes even the poor old MayBot seem like a better candidate for the Turing Test. Meanwhile, the strained, wooden earnestness with which Keir Starmer promises that “change” is coming resembles nothing so much as a man in the ‘before’ image of a laxative advert. It's true that the other party leaders are a bit more dynamic, and Ed Davey, in particular, is hitting some authentic notes of seriousness along with appearing to genuinely enjoy some amusing stunts. In some ways it is easier for them as they get less exposure, so the repetitions are less obvious, and, in any case, they don’t face quite the same pressure to ‘look Prime Ministerial’.

Beneath the boredom

Beyond all this lies a deeper issue. If this campaign is boring, then it is because the main parties are determined to avoid discussing the really serious problems this country faces, and the unpalatable choices that it has to make. Their refusal to talk honestly about economic policy has been made quite forcibly by Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, although it’s worth recalling that he said the same during the 2017 and the 2019 elections. Perhaps it’s not entirely their fault. It’s not clear that the media, still less the general public, have much appetite for political honesty, for all that they bemoan politicians not providing it.

The same may be true of the related refusal to talk much about Brexit, which has also been widely remarked upon, and which I’ve discussed previously*. This was on display this week in the Tory manifesto, which followed very much the lines I anticipated in that post, but even more strikingly in Labour’s which said even less than I'd expected about the subject (N.B. I have written a separate page discussing in detail what each of the party manifestos says about Brexit). 

However, in one way, this is in itself an illustration of one of the biggest flaws in Brexit. For what it shows is that, across huge swathes of policy, and especially those policies that electors most care about, EU membership was largely irrelevant. The policy issues being discussed now are very much the same as they were before we left the EU or would have been had we stayed in. The idea that our national politics and sovereignty had somehow been made irrelevant by Brussels was always nonsense. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the taboo about discussing the new problems that Brexit has added to those familiar policy issues has added a new layer of dishonesty to political discourse.

The dishonesty of Nigel Farage

This dishonesty most certainly extends to Farage and his Reform Party. He simply disowns Brexit as having been betrayed by the Tories, as if it happened despite him, and could have been done in some better way by him. But this ignores the fact that at the last election he gave his support to the Withdrawal Agreement that Boris Johnson had negotiated, as well as voting for it, as a Brexit Party MEP, in the European Parliament. It ignores the fact that the subsequent ‘Canada-style’ trade agreement was the outcome he favoured and, as I mentioned earlier, it ignores the fact that immigration is now subject to an ‘Aussie-style points system’ which he used to say he supported. He is as responsible as anyone not just for Brexit, but for Brexit in the precise form it took.

Moreover, whilst he now wants to make this an ‘election about immigration’, his ‘net zero’ immigration policy is utterly dishonest in refusing to accept what its economic consequences would be. The reason why the Tories have never come anywhere near meeting what used to be their immigration caps, and recently oversaw such an increase in net migration, isn’t because they lacked hostility to immigration. Quite the contrary. It’s because, in government, they were forced to recognize that the consequences of significantly reducing it would be impossibly damaging. The stock anti-immigration argument that labour shortages can be met from domestic unemployment founders on the reality that there are simply not enough unemployed people to do so, and that, even with better training, there are not enough people with, or able to acquire, the right skills, and this is going to get worse as the population ages.

Similarly, the reason the Tories didn’t simply follow Reform’s policy of dumping the small boat arrivals ‘back in France’ wasn’t because of any lack of desire to do so but because, when they embarked on such a policy, they found that it simply isn’t possible. Yet it remains Reform’s policy, and their website even states that the UK is “legally allowed to do this under international treaties”, which is essentially untrue. It is a position that can only be advocated by those who do not have to take responsibility for practical delivery. In this, Farage and Reform are every bit as dishonest with the electorate as the ‘Establishment politicians’ they affect to despise.

Worse than that, over immigration in particular, the Tories and the various parties Farage has fronted over the years have co-conspired to stoke grievances. One of the most incisive Conservative commentators, John Oxley, recently wrote that “for twenty years or so the Tory Party has been trying and failing to find an answer to Farage”. That attempt has included repeatedly making undeliverable promises about immigration to head off the Farage challenge, with the invariable result of feeding that challenge when the promises are not kept. Brexit is the same story, writ large.

This is a large part of the reason for this week’s reports that public trust in government and politicians is at an all-time low, and whilst the Tory-Farage death dance is central to that, Labour can scarcely be exonerated. At least and since Gordon Brown’s ‘Mrs Duffy moment’ of 2010, which has haunted them ever since, they too have  basically accepted the analysis that immigration is at best a necessary evil to be avoided so far as possible by increasing the domestic labour supply. The potential difference, at this election, is that they at least seem to grasp that there is an alternative strategy, based on increasing investment and productivity, as Rachel Reeves’ recent Mais Lecture, amongst other things, makes clear.  Whether they can deliver this in government, especially given the growth constraints entailed by their Brexit policy, remains to be seen. The kinds of measures they envisage, such as planning reform and a very diluted form of Bidenomics, don’t look to me to have enough firepower, but they might get lucky if global factors fall in their favour.

At all events, what is crucial is that it will now be Labour which faces the realities being in government imposes. That won’t be the case for the Tories, who are set to enter the world of Brexitist fantasy.

The Conservative implosion

What is now emerging as the key sub-plot of this election – given that the broad overall outcome seems almost assured – is the battle for the post-election meaning of British conservatism. I anticipated, back in February 2023, that this would occur, assuming the Tory Party lost the election. What I hadn’t anticipated was the extent to which the party would so visibly fall apart prior to the election (this also means that whereas in my previous post I wrote about the election being “quietly” about Brexitism, it is now much more noisily so). As both a cause and a consequence, this has emboldened Farage to launch what he now admits is an attempt to take it over, with the first step being to ensure that an almost certain defeat becomes an electoral wipe-out.

Whether or not he, himself, becomes the leader of what emerges from the fall out, then it will be a Brexitist party. That is, in brief summary: it will have commitment to Brexit as its bedrock value; will espouse ‘Brexit 2.0’ policies, most notably ECHR derogation and of course anti-immigration and anti-refugee measures; will prize ‘true belief’ over evidence and rationality in policymaking; and will embrace the vicious nostalgia, which I’ve written about before, of a return to an imagined, sanitized past of social order and mono-culturalism, in which there is no climate crisis and no ‘wokery’.

It is important to understand that this means not just expunging the last remnants of ‘one nation’, ‘pragmatic’ or ‘liberal’ Toryism, but also a rejection of Sunak’s brand of pro-Brexit but fiscally orthodox and ‘globalist’ Conservatism. Notably, one of the few things the Tories have done since 2019 which Farage approved of was Truss’s ‘anti-Establishment’, ‘true Brexit’ mini-budget. The Brexitists want Sunak to lose, and to lose big.

Farage is able to be quite open about this, to the dismay of Tory Brexitists like Andrea Jenkyns, who has been squealing this week about the unfairness of Reform standing a candidate against ‘true Conservatives’ such as her, with the aim of ‘destroying the Conservative Party’. It seems to escape her that for years, and even in the actual statement she made, she and her fellow ‘true Conservatives’, in their various factions, have laid the ground for this with their endless denunciations of their own party. As the internet meme has it, she evidently didn’t expect the leopard to eat her face.

Meanwhile, other Brexitists think, to use a different ‘big cat’ analogy, that they can ride the tiger, with Jacob Rees-Mogg proposing (£), not for the first time, an electoral pact between the two parties. Suella Braverman has gone even further in calling for the Tories to “embrace Nigel Farage” to “unite the right”, to the extent of seemingly suggesting a formal merger. That’s unlikely to happen before the election, but it can’t be ruled out that Farage will do some kind of deal whereby Reform stands down its candidates in seats held by Tory Brexitists, with or without reciprocation, in the hope of then taking over a compliant party.

But there are other actors at work. Astonishingly, four Tory MPs, including Jenkyns, have accepted £5000 donations from the backer of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party in exchange for signing up to its key pledges, including a commitment to leave the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). What is astonishing isn’t so much that they have done so in defiance of the Tory Party HQ. That is just a further sign of the collapse of the party, and it may be that other MPs will do the same thing. Rather, it is astonishing because Fox, of all people, is being spoken of by Jenkyns as taking “a grown-up approach” in contrast to Reform’s divisive ‘sabotage’. Equally bizarrely, at the same time Jenkyns is using images of her with Nigel Farage on her campaign literature, violating her own party’s code of conduct as well as aligning her with the party whose conduct she condemns. Her spokesperson sought to explain it by saying that “Andrea is above all, a patriot”, but more obvious nouns are all too readily available.

How much of this will burst into an even more open conflict before the election remains to be seen. The Conservative manifesto launch on Tuesday promised to lower immigration, and made very vague reference to the European Court of Human Rights (not even the Convention), implying any future judgments it makes in relation to the Rwanda policy might be ignored. But this just underscored the trap the party is in. Such positions alienate more liberal conservatives, putting the ‘Blue wall’ seats under greater threat to, especially, the LibDem challenge, whilst being nowhere near enough to satisfy Brexitists. Even before it was published, they were threatening to produce a ‘rebel manifesto’ if the official one doesn’t shift the opinion polls (which seems unlikely). Yet the fact is that, even if Sunak were to commit to ECHR derogation, the Brexitists’ hallmark policy, they wouldn’t be satisfied, and would demand something else. This is part of what makes it Brexitism – it is exactly the same pattern of behaviour the Brexit Ultras showed as regards Brexit itself.

The laboratory of post-Brexit politics

All of this is just a small taste of the maelstrom that is going to engulf the Tories assuming they lose the election. It won’t involve most of us, except as spectators, but voters in the current election can shape it. Firstly, the greater the scale of the Tory defeat the more intense will be the crisis of the party. In this sense, it will be important whether or not voters conclude that since a Labour victory seems guaranteed, they need not bother to vote or, alternatively, that they vote Tory so as to deny Labour a ‘blank cheque’ (a line the Tories are starting to push hard). Secondly, although it would not deny him any post-election role, if Farage loses in Clacton that would be an important symbolic failure, and would, in some hard to predict ways, shape what then happens to the Tories.

As for that, there’s every chance that what will emerge will be a party with an appeal so narrow as to be unelectable, but it can’t be assumed that this will be so. I don’t see Farage as very likely to lead it to success, whatever happens in Clacton, not least because he is now such a familiar face, and one about whom most people have now made up their minds. But a fresh, younger leader might capture the public imagination and, as the EU parliament elections have shown, it also can’t be assumed that right-wing populism only appeals to older voters. If, by 2029, a stodgy Labour government has failed to make any real dent in not just the economic malaise but the wider sense of national distress, a victory by such a party can’t be ruled out. What may well be a huge Labour majority now could easily dissolve with disaffected voters deserting in multiple directions, and a ‘National Conservative’ government emerging from the wreckage without needing a huge share of the national vote.

Admittedly, it is quite absurdly speculative to be talking about the 2029 election when the present one has not yet even been held. But I have a strong sense that even though this election campaign is quite boring, it is also an extremely significant moment in British politics. Or, rather, that its boringness arises from its significance. Before the campaign is over, we will have the eighth anniversary of the referendum, and we are still living through what it has unleashed. Part of that is actually a desire for politics to be more boring, and Starmer’s ‘end the chaos’ message speaks effectively to that. Part of it is a fear, born of the trauma of Brexit, of going anywhere near a big idea. The country pressed the reset button in 2016, and far from solving any problems it has added to them. Most people have little appetite for turning the machine on and off again now.

Yet for others the opposite is true. For some of them, and Farage is certainly one, 2016 was a moment of high excitement, which nothing before or since has given them. They would love to press the button again, and have the thrill again. For others, Brexit has proved a horrible disappointment, and its supposed betrayal one more grievance to add to their list, leaving them ready to angrily jab the button - again and again and again.

So, stale and uninspiring as it may be, underneath that, this election campaign is an expression of post-Brexit politics and is setting up the shape of its next phase. Its underlying drivers are by no means unique to the UK, as shown by the European Parliament elections and, especially, the fall-out from them in France, where there is set to be an open conflict between nationalist populism and liberal centrism. But the dynamics of the conflict are distinctive in the UK, precisely because of Brexit, which is also the reason why Brexitism is a distinctive version of populism. Here, the 2016 referendum already openly enacted that conflict and, narrowly but inescapably, the populists won.

When populists win, their policies can’t deliver what they claimed for them, and that is what happened with Brexit (to the extent that the latest figures show that just 15% of people, and only 31% of those who voted to leave, think that the benefits of it outweigh the negatives). But, in this case, the populists won not simply an election, with the result reversible at the next one. Their policy was not a time-limited domestic one, but an open-ended international re-alignment. What happens when such a policy fails is largely uncharted water, and with this election the UK is starting to map it out. That makes it interesting, at least as an experiment in the laboratory of political science, though disconcerting for those of us who are the lab rats.

 

*In another previous post, I mentioned in passing that Brexit would play a role in the campaign in Northern Ireland, especially for the unionist parties. It’s not a topic I feel qualified to discuss, but there is a very informative expert analysis by Professor Jon Tonge of Liverpool University on the Comment is Freed Substack.