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.

The Brexit battles never went away, and they’ve got a long way to go

A recurrent observation – made sometimes with surprise and sometimes with a kind of perverse nostalgia - about this week’s political and parliamentary events is that it is ‘as if the Brexit battles have returned’. And it is true that, like an ageing rock band, re-formed to reprise its well-worn hits despite the much-publicized hostilities of its members, there were some all too familiar sights and sounds. Thus, as the Rwanda Bill ‘crisis vote’ approached, there were fevered speculations, briefings and counter-briefings, and crisis talks with the almost endless number of factions that make up what can still just about be called the Conservative Party.

As with such a band, it came as a slight surprise to learn that some of its members had not long ago died of self-abuse, as when the raddled features of Mark Francois emerged to announce the findings of the self-important dolts of the ERG ‘Star Chamber’, chaired by the apparently indestructible Bill Cash. The show even began in the time-honoured way with a rendition of the classic ‘cave-in of the Tory moderates’, to set the toes tapping. Francois did, however, introduce one new number, ’the Five Families’ which, it seems, refers to a grouping of some the right-wing factions which, indeed, have much in common.

The Brexit battles never went away

But the observation is wrong. It is not ‘as if the Brexit battles have returned’. They are the same battles, and they never went away, and they are explicitly seen as such by people like ‘New Conservative’ Miriam Cates. There are multiple, interwoven strands to this. One is that, as I suggested in my book on Brexit, a possible post-Brexit scenario would be a push for a Brexit 2.0 of derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and, indeed, for months now, there have been growing calls from the Tory right for just that.

That scenario seemed possible not just because of the insatiability of Brexiters but because, as discussed in last week’s post, even before the referendum they conflated issues of EU membership with those of the ECHR. For that matter, it shouldn’t be forgotten that during that period, when Theresa May was still a remainer, she argued for withdrawal from the ECHR, whatever the outcome of the referendum, and that later, as Prime Minister, she vowed to fight the 2020 election (sic) on a platform of ECHR derogation (£).

It’s true that derogation isn’t what is at issue with the Rwanda Bill, which instead is an attempt to legislate to ‘disapply’ in domestic law some provisions within the ECHR, and certain other international agreements, in relation to the Rwanda policy (Dr Alice Donald and Dr Joelle Grogan of UK in a Changing Europe provide a detailed explanation of its provisions). However, some of the right-wing critics of the Bill would certainly prefer derogation, and all of them want it to go further in disapplying international law, especially in relation to whether individual appeals against trans-shipment to Rwanda would be allowable. In this sense, they are indeed pushing for a Brexit 2.0 scenario.

Closely inter-twined with that is the issue of whether the current Bill itself threatens to break international law. The government claims that it is framed in a way which stays just short of that, and this is the basis on which the ‘moderates’ of the One Nation group backed it. However, the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights issued a statement this week arguing that, even as drafted, it already breaches international law, a view endorsed by Professor Mark Elliot of Cambridge University, a leading authority in this area. In flirting with violating international law, or even actually doing so, the Rwanda Bill again represents a continuation, rather than a re-appearance, of something that began with Brexit. For it was not until the Internal Market Bill (IMB) of September 2020, which threatened to break some provisions in the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), that any British Minister had proposed legislation which would self-avowedly break international law.

The two aspects of Brexit nihilism

That threat arose again, with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in 2022, and although, in both cases, it did not actually happen, it shows how Brexit, specifically, has proved the catalyst for an almost nihilistic frenzy on the political right. One aspect of that is a kind of Jacobinism in which no measure is too extreme if it delivers Brexit, whether the price be the economic one of ‘no deal Brexit’ or the reputational one of reneging on international agreements. From quite early in the Brexit process, and especially once Boris Johnson came to power, international pariahdom seemed to matter not at all to the Brexiters. It is now abundantly clear that he signed the NIP without intending to honour it, and that many Brexiters who voted for it in parliament did so in the expectation that it would not be honoured.

A second aspect of this nihilism, related but slightly different, is a doctrinaire and wholly absurd idea of parliamentary sovereignty, within which international law is not just something that can be ignored but something which is actually meaningless. On this argument, which has been foregrounded again in relation to the Rwanda Bill (£), because parliament is sovereign it cannot be bound or constrained by anything else. At the time of the IMB proposals, this ludicrous argument was actually endorsed by the then Attorney General Suella Braverman.

That it is ludicrous was explained at that time, again by Mark Elliott, and, now, he has written of the Rwanda Bill that:

“it proceeds on the basis of the sleight of hand that the UK Parliament, because it is sovereign, can somehow free the Government from its international legal obligations. But this is to conflate the sovereignty of the UK Parliament in domestic law with the UK’s sovereignty on the international plane as a State. It is precisely in exercise of its State sovereignty that the UK can enter, and has entered, into binding treaty obligations.”

At its extreme, this idea of parliamentary sovereignty leaves no constitutional place for domestic courts, let alone international ones (actually, at its most extreme, as noted in my last post and amplified by Ian Dunt’s Substack, it proposes that parliament is sovereign over reality itself).

It is important to understand that these are not arcane points of legal or political theory. They have a crucial practical importance. For one thing, the UK is hardly in a position to call on other states, be it China, Russia or Israel, to act within international law and to respect human rights if its position is that sovereignty allows every country to do whatever it wants. For another, the UK is hardly an attractive partner for other countries to strike deals with, whether about trade or, even, asylum processing, if it reserves the right to violate those deals. And, for a third, which should matter to everyone, this doctrine makes it possible that parliament might act to remove any and every right from any or all of us, with no recourse to any court. It is precisely to constrain that possibility that we need the principle that there are some laws and rights that transcend the power of nation states.

It may seem as if these two aspects of Brexitist nihilism – the ‘Jacobin’ ruthlessness that the end justifies the means, and the ‘sovereigntist’ idea that parliament is unconstrained – are the same. But the reason I said they are ‘slightly different’ is because at times they contradict each other, even though they are often espoused by the same people.

Specifically, throughout the Brexit process, the idea of the ‘will of the people’ was often claimed by Brexiters to mean that sovereignty lay, indeed, with ‘the people’, and the constant accusation was that parliament was improperly ‘thwarting’ this will. But, if parliament is sovereign, how could there be anything improper in this (even assuming that was what parliament was doing)?  Moreover, the most extreme example of the Jacobin aspect was when Boris Johnson and his minions unlawfully prorogued parliament showing, in fact, utter contempt for parliamentary sovereignty. For, remember, their specific objection was to the way that parliament itself was passing legislation like the Benn Act (to prevent no-deal Brexit) in defiance of the Executive.

More generally, Brexit has been used as a pretext to sideline parliament, for example through the burgeoning use of ‘Henry VIII powers’ and, of course, but for the first Gina Miller case, parliament would not have had a vote on triggering Article 50. As with prorogation, it was only the courts which acted to constrain political power and, in these cases, to constrain the power not of parliament but of the Executive.

Rwanda Bill: Brexitism won the day without winning the vote    

In short Brexit nihilism is ludicrous in theory, dangerous in practice, and incoherent in both theory and practice. But it hasn’t just re-emerged for an encore with the Rwanda Bill. It is embedded in British politics. That is most obviously the case with the Tory Party which, as I wrote a couple of months ago, has been driven mad by Brexit. Even longer ago, in August 2022 when the Tories were engaged in choosing their new leader, who subsequently turned out to be Liz Truss, I made the point, which has become almost a cliché since then, that the Tory Party had become ‘unleadable’.

That had been only temporarily masked by Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory. It gave the government a substantial majority – albeit one now whittled away to 56 by by-election losses and expulsions – but, actually, apart from the very early vote to pass the Withdrawal Agreement that ‘got Brexit done’ (sic), it was always a fragile majority, and factionalism and infighting were never far from the surface. Then, following the Truss implosion, Rishi Sunak briefly had enough control over the Brexit Ultras to squash the rebellion over his Windsor Framework, which at one stage threatened to muster more than 100 rebels but in the end fizzled out. At that time, I, like others, wondered if Britain’s Brexit fever had finally broken.

That has proved not to be the case. Although Sunak also won this week’s Rwanda Bill vote, with many of the ‘five families’ abstaining rather than voting against, the circumstances are very different to the Windsor Framework vote. For one thing, this is only the beginning of a legislative process which, assuming House of Lords opposition, has no realistic chance of being completed before the next election. There are plenty more votes on possible amendments to come which the rebels may win.

For another, even though the Brexitists want to make the legislation even ‘harder’, its existence even in its current form shows the extent to which their ideology has captured “the soul of the Conservative Party”. A rather naïve column from Iain Martin in the Times (£) suggested that what happened this week was that the “moderate MPs” who form “the bulk of the parliamentary party” had shown how marginal the “fundamentalist Brexiteers” have become. What that misses is just how immoderate the entire party has become, so that what would once have been an extreme position is now mainstream.

Because this wasn’t Sunak ‘the pragmatist’ of the Windsor Framework, temporarily putting the Ultras back in their box. It was Sunak, with the support of the ‘moderates’, making as one of his central priorities an unworkable, immoral, and probably illegal populist policy, that began with Johnson, and finding that, as always, the Ultras want more. It doesn’t even matter if they don’t get that from Sunak now since, as Robert Shrimsley astutely pointed out this week, it will just be grist to their post-election mill that his government failed by not being ‘pure’ enough in its Conservatism.

Where is the Tory Party heading?

But the Tory Party is really no longer discussable without reference to Reform and Nigel Farage. Clearly that has been true for a while, going right back to UKIP and the roots of the referendum. It was certainly obvious at the last election, when Farage stood down from fighting most Tory-held seats. Now, the two are inseparable, both at the level of electoral fortunes and, perhaps more importantly, because there is no discernible ideological difference between Reform and most of – if we must call them so – the ‘five families’.

That’s especially so for the New Conservatives and National Conservatives, and there’s almost a sense – or am I imagining it? – that the ERG now seems slightly dated and quaintly respectable by comparison with this new breed of Tory rightwingers. Bill Cash may be many things, but he isn’t a Jonathan Gullis or a Lee Anderson. Even Francois is more ludicrous than sinister. It’s a bit like the way that ‘old school’ gangland bosses like the Krays were displaced by even more ruthlessly violent psychopaths. Say what you like about the ERG, but at least they looked after their own and loved their dear old mum, so to speak.

At all events, there’s no doubt the direction the Tories are heading in, at least in the short-term, assuming they lose the next election (and it’s telling that an ambitious one-time ‘moderate’ like Robert Jenrick is now re-positioning himself in anticipation of this direction). Even if Martin was right that there are still ‘moderates’ in the parliamentary party, it is undeniable that the membership, which will choose its next leader, is far from moderate. The Johnson-Farage dream ticket may just be a dream (or, perhaps, a nightmare), but the fact that anyone would even float such an idea, or that others pine for a Liz Truss comeback, shows the madness that is in the air. We may even see a complete re-alignment of the British Right, drawing in Reform but excluding what has previously been understood as Conservative traditionalism (for all that such an alignment would claim to be one towards ‘true Conservatism’), with it becoming the Brexitist Party in all but name.

Such a party, perhaps more likely led by one of the NewCons like Cates rather than one of the more familiar throwbacks like Braverman, and endorsed if not joined by Farage, would campaign not just on draconian anti-immigration policies but also on derogating from the ECHR and, very likely, reneging on the NIP.  This might doom the right to electoral irrelevance, but that certainly can’t be assumed, especially after the Brexit vote, even if the 2024 election sees a virtual Tory wipe-out. There is probably bedrock support of around 25%-30% of the electorate for such a Brexitist or NatCon party, augmented by some who habitually don’t vote and others who, after a few years of a Labour government, come to think that any kind of change, and any kind of ‘kick to the Establishment’ is justified.

That could create an electoral coalition similar to that which Vote Leave constructed, and, unlike then, it might only need, say, 40% of the vote rather than 50% to win an election, and it would have vociferous support from many sections of the media. Even if it only came close to winning, that might cement a NatCon takeover of the party for another electoral cycle, and for so long as it wasn’t in power then the many internal contradictions of its likely economic programme, which Times columnist Danny Finkelstein identified this week, could be glossed over. Indeed, as with UKIP and Brexiters in general, such a party could be far more effective and influential as a campaigning protest movement than as a government.

The Brexit battle to come

This is just speculation. But, assuming it has any plausibility at all, it is highly relevant speculation at least in relation to what will undoubtedly be continuing debate about re-joining the EU or the single market. That was given new impetus this week by a widely-discussed article by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times suggesting re-joining is highly unlikely any time soon, if ever. Other views are available, of course. But my point here, and of course I and many others have made it many times, is that for as long as there is a feasible scenario in which an incoming British government would seek to overturn any version of re-joining which might have occurred, such re-joining would never be countenanced by the EU. In this sense, the political battle for ‘anti-Brexiters’ for the time being is not to re-join, or even to try to persuade Labour to have a re-join policy, but to expunge Brexitism from British politics, or at least confine it to the margins.

Clearly things may play out differently. Even Wolf acknowledges the possibility that, say, a re-elected Trump pulling the US out of NATO would create such a geo-political shock that all bets would be off. So, too, might something as yet completely unforeseen, and perhaps (even) worse. But it would seem foolhardy, and even more pessimistic than Wolf himself, to work on that assumption when the scenario I have described is, for the time being, the more likely one.

On that cheery note, I’m signing off for Christmas and the New Year (unless something big happens). Many thanks to all who have read and publicized the blog this year and, in more recent months, left comments. I nearly decided to give up on it when I reached the seven-year mark, but here we still are. I’ll re-start early in 2024.

 

If you are stuck for a Christmas present for someone, why not buy them a copy of the updated edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to), published by Biteback in September 2023?

A country on the rack of Tory Brexitism

It has become increasingly difficult to separate out Brexit as a topic from British politics generally, and the politics of the Conservative Party in particular. That has been true for a while, but brought home with force this week with yet another outbreak of the Tories’ long-running civil war. It is a war in which Brexit features as both cause and consequence and, whilst it may have begun with a relatively genteel skirmish between ‘Eurosceptics’ and ‘Europhiles’ in the Tory Party, it has now become a full-blown culture war which has spread way beyond the party, or even Westminster politics.

This has not happened suddenly. It began to emerge early in the Brexit process, and by October 2017 I was writing that Brexit was “becoming a battle for Britain’s political soul”. At that time, that may have seemed like hyperbole, or at least pessimism. Seven years later, it seems almost a truism.

Enter Cameron

It’s a cliché that a week is a long time in politics, but Monday’s announcement of the bizarre resurrection to political office of David Cameron already seems like a distant memory. But it’s still worth dwelling on for a moment. Just from a Brexit point of view, his is a name to conjure with in that, almost uniquely, he is likely to be despised by those holding almost any position on Brexit. Even those not much interested or exercised about it may well resent him for creating this enormous and de-stabilizing storm and then washing his hands of it, with a seemingly insouciant song on his lips as he resigned. For remainers, he is the man who with total irresponsibility gambled and lost the country’s well-being in a miscalculated act of party management. Meanwhile, for leavers, any lingering gratitude they may have to him for having gifted them the referendum is superseded by the fact that he campaigned for remain.

But for hard core Tory Brexiters, the loathing of Cameron goes far deeper than that. Even before the referendum, many of them regarded him as ‘not being a real Conservative’, meaning too socially liberal, too green, too metropolitan, too globalist. Before Brexit, that was still perhaps a relatively marginal view, but the Conservative Party now is very different even to that of 2015 or even 2017. Brexit saw most of the more centrist and socially liberal Tory MPs expunged or marginalized, and Brexit itself has now morphed from just being about leaving the EU into Brexitism or Brexitist populism.*

That is not simply about moving from Brexit to a wider right-wing agenda. As their pet political scientist Matt Goodwin illustrated this week, the Brexitists want to claim that the referendum was not just a vote to leave the EU but a vote to permanently end what he calls ‘Liberal Centrist Dad politics’. Absurd as this claim is – that wasn’t the question asked, so it can’t be claimed to be what the answer meant – it is important to understand how widespread it is. Thus similar claims this week were made by populist commentator Isabel Oakeshott and by Miriam Cates, co-Chair of the ‘New Conservatives’ group of Tory MPs. It enables Brexitists to dishonestly pretend that the referendum gave them a democratic licence for far more than leaving the EU. So they use it as if it were a permanent majority for their entire ideology, even though, as the last seven years have made clear, it was not even a permanent majority for Brexit, and was never a majority for any particular form of Brexit.

Exit Braverman

Precisely the same ‘logic’ was on display in Suella Braverman’s letter to Rishi Sunak, following her sacking. Amidst her wider diatribe, she too claimed that a whole swathe of policies she has advocated “are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum”. In this, as in much else, Braverman, former ERG Chair and a leading light amongst the National Conservative (NatCon) group, epitomizes Brexitism. She does so with such crudity, venom and extremism that, eventually and belatedly, Sunak could no longer ignore it.

There’s a danger of becoming inured to the shocking growth of extremism in mainstream Conservative politics since 2016, an extremism ranging from the denunciation of judges as ‘enemies of the people’, through the unlawful prorogation of parliament, to a British cabinet minister openly stating in the House of Commons that he proposed to break international law, something which, as Attorney General, Braverman endorsed. So it is worth recording just how extreme her conduct became last week.

In brief, what we saw was a Home Secretary smearing Pro-Palestine demonstrations in their entirety as ‘hate marches’; attempting, against constitutional convention, to pressurize the police into banning their demonstration; suggesting that the police were unfairly biased against far-right demonstrators; and giving rise to at least the suspicion she might want the march to be violent in order to show that she had been right about it and right about her more general thesis that ‘multi-culturalism has failed. At the same time, she at least dog-whistled to far-right demonstrators to take to the streets.

It was a dog-whistle which was heard, with the consequence that far-right thugs despoiled the Armistice Day events that Braverman had falsely claimed the Pro-Palestine march threatened, unleashing what the Metropolitan Police called “extreme violence” against them. As the former Tory MP Dominic Grieve said, “it's impossible to escape the conclusion that some of that [violence] was fuelled by the rhetoric and the incitement of the Home Secretary Suella Braverman.” Grieve, also a lawyer and a former Attorney General, albeit of a very different stamp to Braverman, is hardly a man given to injudicious remarks. So for him to have used the word ‘incitement’ in this context is little short of remarkable.

It is true that, although most of the violence came from the far-right, some of the Pro-Palestine marchers were also violent. It should also be said that some of the marchers used antisemitic slogans and chants that are utterly indefensible. It simply isn’t enough to say that these are being ‘misinterpreted’ when everyone must now know that (to take the main, specific, case) ‘from the river, to the sea’ is open to multiple interpretations. It is a fact that to many Jewish people, including some who are our fellow-citizens, it inspires genuine fear. So to continue to use that chant is to choose to stoke that fear.

Yet neither of these things remotely justifies Braverman’s words and conduct, and in an atmosphere already so highly charged they were all the more disgraceful. It was certainly, so far as I know, unprecedented for a Home Secretary but, and this is a key point, what Braverman said was not a rogue or maverick opinion amongst NatCons. On the contrary, for many of them and their sympathisers what she said was no more than common sense and, at worst, her only fault was, in the words of David Frost (£), to “occasionally express herself imperfectly”.

Thuggish populists and populist thugs

Most crucially, and most dangerously of all, there is now effectively no difference between the kind of things the Brexitist populists say and those that the far-right ‘counter-protestors’ at the Cenotaph say. Indeed, there is even some evidence that that they share sources of funding. They are on the same side at very least to the extent that the English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson saying [offensive content warning] this week that Braverman had been “fired for telling the TRUTH”. Compare and, if possible, contrast with “Suella Braverman was sacked for being right”, the headline of a Telegraph article (£) by GB News presenter and one-time Brexit Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It’s not just the same sentiment, but there is even a certain similarity between Rees-Mogg’s accusation that Sunak is too “effete” to care enough about immigration and Robinson’s cruder description of the Conservatives as “spineless cucks”. It’s not a coincidence. That same theme of affronted masculinity can be seen in former ERG Vice-Chair Andrea Jenkyns’ semi-literate letter of no confidence in Sunak, sent in response to Braverman’s sacking. In it, the MP who sits very much on the Brexitist or populist wing of the party, declared that Braverman had been “the only person in the cabinet with the balls to speak the truth”.

The populist politicians and the thugs certainly share the all too familiar anti-immigration and anti-liberal tropes, and at least versions of the ‘race replacement’ conspiracy theory. At this particular moment, they also share the opportunism of those who, in Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland’s words, “look at the war between Israel and Hamas, and the grief and fear it prompts in the hearts of Jews and Muslims, especially, and see not tragedy but opportunity – a chance to advance their own interests”. At least part of what, I assume, Freedland means is that we should hardly take it at face value when far-right bully boys and their allies claim to be shocked and appalled by antisemitic language and violence. Nor, for that matter, should we even begin to take seriously the idea that they were defending the ‘sacred monuments’ [offensive content warning] of the war dead, whose memory they in fact befoul.

Perhaps we should be relieved that, even gifted this moment of opportunity, the capacity of the far right to put much of a presence on the street proved quite limited. It seems they could only muster a few hundred yobs, and many of those were, apparently, addled by drink and drugs. They are frightening and intimidating, without question, but we are not – not yet, anyway – at the point of having uncontainable political street-violence.

What is more frightening is the possibility that they no longer need to exert such violence when their views, even if perhaps expressed more smoothly, and by men and women in smart clothes, are becoming so widely prevalent in the mainstream of politics and the media. Indeed sometimes, as with Tory Party Deputy Chairman and GB News presenter Lee Anderson’s “f*** off back to France” remark, even the expression is not notably different.

Reading Rishi Sunak

Given how high the stakes have now become, it is more important than ever to know where, exactly, Rishi Sunak stands. I’ve written at great length in the past about how Brexitism is eating Conservatism, including a post last February about the schism between Brexitists and Traditionalists and, more recently, after the Party’s October conference, about how Brexit has driven the Tories mad. Most of that analysis still stands, and is the context for these latest developments. In that context, a widely-expressed interpretation of Sunak appointing Cameron and sacking Braverman was that he was throwing his weight behind traditionalism, or ‘centrism,’ and against Brexitist populism. That is how many commentators saw it (£) and, perhaps more significantly, how the Brexitists in the Tory Party and in the Reform Party continue to understand it.

Even before the week’s later events, I felt that this was a questionable reading. Sunak came to power on the basis of being competent and offering stability after the Truss meltdown, and he has sometimes kept to that script. That’s especially so as regards Brexit, where agreeing the Windsor Framework and effectively dropping the scrapping of Retained EU Law were pragmatic, sensible steps which, of course, infuriated the Brexiters. The same goes for re-joining Horizon, effectively scrapping UKCA marking, and other decisions. However, he has consistently been inconsistent, if that is not a contradiction in terms, in that in other ways, especially in his prioritization of ‘stopping the boats’ and his de-prioritization of net-zero policies, he has embraced Brexitist populism.

He seems especially prone to doing so when under pressure, most obviously when, during his original, failed leadership campaign, he promised an even speedier shredding of Retained EU Law than Truss was proposing. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that, when Braverman was fulminating against the police last week, Sunak was, if more squeakily, singing a similar tune in his veiled threat to hold the Metropolitan Police Commissioner ‘accountable’ for any trouble if the Palestine march was allowed to go ahead. Not should it be forgotten that ‘Downing Street’ backed Anderson over his “f*** off back to France” comment.

So I never felt persuaded when, for a few hours this week, it seemed that Sunak had now made a definitive choice: to stop playing with populism and to make his pitch to the electorate as a competent centrist. Supposedly, the real Rishi Sunak had now stood up and was ready to be counted. One obvious problem with this reading is that there are surely only so many times that self-definition can be attempted. So it is hard to see how appointing Cameron is consistent with his Conference pitch – only a month ago – to present himself as someone offering a ‘new politics’ which would break with the ‘failed model of the last 30 years’. It’s not even clear that Cameron fits the ‘competent Sunak’ model given that his track record, including his role in Brexit, is hardly evidence of sagacious statesmanship or even of tactical nous.

Moreover, if it is meant to be an electoral gambit, to signal to Southern Blue Wall Tory voters that Sunak rejects Brexitist madness, it’s not obvious that it will be a clear enough signal for that purpose, whilst it is very obvious that it will be a negative signal in the newly acquired Northern Red Wall seats. And if that was the gambit, then why did he immediately undermine it by appointing Esther McVey, yet another GB News presenter and populist Tory MP, to attend Cabinet as ‘anti-Woke Tsar’, responsible for “leading the charge on the government’s anti-woke agenda”? That certainly won’t placate the populists, anyway, so whatever the motivation it just leaves a muddle.

All this is part of a wider mystery about Sunak and what motivates him. That is especially obvious in relation to Brexit. He has, apparently, always been in favour of it, although I don’t recall him taking any part in the referendum campaign, and he has never given any real explanation of what it is about Brexit that he supports. For that matter, as the Brexiters have observed, the impression he gives – his whole ‘vibe’ – is far more ‘remainerish’, if there is such a thing. And it’s the same with other things that he is supposedly motivated by, such as the possibilities of technology on which, for all that he is endlessly described as a ‘tech bro’, he never says anything except bland platitudes, such as that AI presents opportunities and dangers. This is not exactly evidence of a deep interest, still less of deep thinking.

I don’t think that it is possible any more, if it ever was, to regard Sunak as an enigma, or even as a very inexperienced politician still feeling his way. Instead, I think it is now beyond reasonable doubt that his plasticity is not the shiny cover for some deeper core of belief or purpose, it is just all there is to him. It’s not even a matter of the familiar attempt of many politicians to be all things to all people and who end up pleasing no one. It’s just that there is less to him than meets the eye. There are no hidden depths, just a well-concealed depthlessness. He is impossible to read not because of any inscrutability of purpose but because, quite simply, there is nothing to read.

My suspicion about the shallowness of any conversion to centrism Sunak may have had on Monday was amply justified within two days, following Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling that the government’s ‘Rwanda’ policy is unlawful. That created immediate political pressure for Sunak because, whilst it seems unlikely that Braverman, herself, has a great personal following amongst the Brexitists, her views do, and Rwanda is a policy issue for them to rally around.

The fact that the ruling made it clear (£) that violation of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) was only a minor factor in the court’s judgment did not stop the more bone-headed of them from immediately proposing their pet 'Brexit 2.0' project of leaving it. Moreover some of them, like Anderson, have already called for the government to simply ignore the judgment, some, like ‘New Conservative’ Jonathan Gullis, have called for the government to just dump asylum seekers back in France, and another ‘New Conservative’, Brendan Clarke-Smith, has resurrected the odious “enemies of the people” line.

Without endorsing the most egregiously nonsensical of these suggestions (though, yet again, refusing to condemn Anderson’s remarks), Sunak immediately buckled to the populist pressure by proposing ‘emergency legislation’ which in effect is a new version of the idea that international law can be set aside by domestic legislation, mentioned above. At the same time, despite its marginal role in the judgment, he again raised at least by implication the possibility of, if not leaving the ECHR, then at least ignoring potential rulings from its associated Court in the future. So, once again, competent technocratic Sunak – who could, after all, simply drop all this Rwanda nonsense and focus on creating a quick and fair domestic system for processing asylum claims – disappeared from view. Whether or not this is enough to contain the Brexitists, who, as ever, will want more, remains to be seen.

Tortured on the Tory rack

So it still an open question whether the Tory Party will blow up now, or not until after its expected loss of the next election. Meanwhile the country is in a kind of tortured hiatus with the electorate having apparently decided they want rid of this government, but have no choice other than to live through its last, decaying months.

That isn’t just maddening, it is also hugely damaging. We are beset by deep, structural social and economic problems, and also face massive international instability and environmental danger. And hovering over all that is the miasma of Brexit with its daily drag on the economy and the still unanswered questions it has created for what post-Brexit Britain is to be. None of this is being addressed. Instead, we have a zombie government with no policy agenda, which is bad enough, but it is also so riven by internal factionalism that there is the ever-present danger that it will do something utterly mad.

This is not just about the immediate situation. It is now more obvious than ever – and Cameron’s return serves as a reminder of it – just how profoundly the entire country has suffered on the rack created by the competing factions in the Tory Party’s civil war. That civil war has now lasted for over thirty years. Cameron papered over it, at least during the Coalition years, and despite, or even because of, the manifesto promise of a referendum, voters in 2015 might have thought that it had been consigned to the margins of politics. But, since then, it has engulfed us all.

It gave us the bitter referendum that was supposed to resolve matters. It gave us Brexit which, apart from everything else that could be said about it, manifestly intensified divisions within the Tory Party and smeared them to every corner of the polity. Yet, at the same time, which makes the whole thing an even bigger tragedy, it failed to satisfy the Brexiters. It has degraded our international reputation, permanently crippled our economy, toxified our entire political discourse – and, still, they want more. Still, they want the ever-elusive ‘true Brexit’. Still, they want the ever-elusive ‘true Conservatism’.

It is tempting to think that because we seem to be witnessing the death throes of this government, we are also seeing the death throes of this entire period of chaotic mis-rule and vicious division. It is certainly of some comfort that the Supreme Court showed this week, as it did over the original Miller case about Article 50 notification and the unlawful Prorogation, that some of the institutional guide-rails are still intact. That’s hugely important. And perhaps, post-election, the Brexitist populists will destroy each other and become so splintered between different parties as to keep them from power. But so much poison has been unleashed during recent years, and it has spread so far, even, now, extending to violence on the streets. Much will depend on whether the expected next Labour government, amidst all the other challenges it will face, will be able to reverse that spread. I am not hopeful, but it is the only hope there is.

 

 

*It’s difficult to find a precise name for people who fall under this label. They include those within the Tory Party, Reform Party and elsewhere who are identified with the National Conservatism (NatCon) institute, such as many of those who spoke at its 2023 London Conference, and, within the Tory Party specifically, members of various small groups including the New Conservatives, the Conservative Democratic Organization and the Common Sense Conservatives.

Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad

I’ve written several times on this blog about the problems that Brexit has caused the Labour Party. More recently, it has become increasingly obvious that it has had far more profound and damaging consequences for the Tories, and I wrote in some detail last February about how ‘Brexitism’ is eating Conservatism. Now, although Labour continues to agonize about not alienating leave voters in the ‘Red Wall’ seats, it is beginning to craft some kind of post-Brexit stability for itself. Whereas Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad, as their party conference this week made abundantly clear.

The two things are not completely separate, as illustrated by the Tory Party’s thuggish Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson. A former coal miner and long-time Labour Party member, who also served as a Labour councillor, his early political heroes (£) were Arthur Scargill, Dennis Skinner and Tony Benn. Now a Tory MP and GB News presenter, he is not just ferociously pro-Brexit but a cartoonishly ‘prolier than thou’ populist, espousing the predictable litany of ‘things we’re not allowed to say’, from supporting the death penalty to telling asylum seekers to “f*** off back to France”.

So, to the extent he represents a certain segment of the traditional Labour core vote, he is indicative of part of the problem Brexit poses for Labour. But Anderson’s greater significance is that he fits perfectly into the post-Brexit Tory Party alongside those, from Jacob Rees-Mogg through to Suella Braverman, with whom he might otherwise have little in common. At the same time, there’s really no discernible difference between his beliefs and those of the Reform Party, as illustrated by his cringingly fawning ‘interview’ of Nigel Farage on his very first GB News show.

In one way, there’s nothing new about this. Populism has always brought together certain kinds of far-right and certain kinds of far-left people. What is new is what it has done to the Tory Party, and at the heart of that lies Brexit.

Farage and the ‘UKIPisation’ of the Tory Party

There are multiple dimensions to this, and they are interconnected and difficult to put into sequence. Perhaps the first of them is that, in using the referendum to outflank and marginalise UKIP, the outcome of the vote has ironically been to ‘UKIPise’ the Tory Party. That started to happen even before the 2017 election and has solidified since, so that by this week, as Lewis Goodall of the News Agents remarked, “you could have been at a UKIP or Brexit Party conference”.

That seems to apply not only to its grass-roots membership but to many, perhaps most, of its MPs, with almost all ‘remainers’ having been pushed out before the 2019 election. With them, the more socially liberal wing of the parliamentary party has also been very significantly eroded. That matters electorally, because those MPs, the David Gaukes and the Dominic Grieves, represented a certain kind of Tory voter the party is now liable to lose, potentially threatening its ‘Blue Wall’.

Yet, also ironically, the UKIPisation of the Tory Party has failed to reduce the fear its leadership has of the threat it faces from UKIP’s successor, the Reform Party, and especially the threat it would face if Farage returned to lead some version of that party. The Tories ‘getting Brexit done’ has by no means got rid of the Farage threat. That is partly because, inevitably, he spearheads the idea that Brexit has been betrayed by the Tories. It’s also because he and the people he represents will always depict Tory positions, especially on immigration and asylum seekers, no matter how extreme, as not going far enough.

But what is feared by the Tory leadership is loved by many, perhaps now most, within the party, including those jostling to take it over from Sunak, and the not unrelated seething mass of groupuscules advocating various versions of New and True Conservatism including National Conservatism, Common Sense Conservatism and Conservative Democracy. For them, Farage is not an external threat but a welcome friend. Hence the warm welcome he got at the conference, which apparently – no sniggering at the back, please - he attended in his capacity as a "journalist". Indeed, the Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie observed that “party members would choose him as leader if they could”.

That may be unlikely to happen, but Farage clearly, and correctly, sees himself as a significant player in influencing the party’s direction and its future leadership, which he opined was “the real debate this week”. That framing of the conference was in itself an act of hostility towards Sunak, as was his  enthusiastic endorsement (£) of Liz Truss’s approach to economic policy. Yes, it’s astonishing that anyone could think that, but Truss herself certainly continues to do so (£), as, presumably, do the “huge crowd”, which included Farage, who came to hear her speech to the conference fringe, given less than a year after her ignominious downfall.

Farage, whose political instincts are as acute as they are malign, was right about the central theme of the conference, and it wasn’t Sunak’s announcements about there being extra trains on the Dullchester to Snoreham line in ten years’ time, even though these dominated the reports of his less than visionary speech. It was, as Sam Coates of Sky News put it, “the existential questions about what the next iteration of the Conservative Party stands for”.

That Farage is now openly playing a role in these questions, inside the party he left in 1992 and has tormented ever since, may also seem astonishing. But to many in the current party he is not a torment but an inspiration. So is the GB News channel he fronts, as Priti Patel aggressively asserted at the Conservative Democratic Organization’s dinner before dancing with him, the would-be Princess to his irredeemably ugly frog. For that channel is now the mouthpiece for what the bulk of the Tory Party, quite as much as the Reform Party, believes in, and its studios are awash with Tory MPs interviewing each other.

The enemy at the top

To the New and True Conservative Jacobins, the enemy is neither Farage nor the Reform Party, it is Rishi Sunak and the remnants of moderate or even vaguely pragmatic conservatism. It is a curious fate for Sunak, a fiscally conservative Thatcherite, not to mention a supporter of Brexit. When he became an MP in 2015 that put him towards the right of the party. Just seven years later, the new Tories regard him as a ‘globalist’, even a ‘socialist’ and, of course, a ‘betrayer of Brexit’, if not a ‘closet remainer’. 

His clumsy attempts to placate them – from his new-found scepticism about the Net Zero agenda, to his insane embrace of the ’15-minute City’ conspiracy theory – have no impact on that. And they will, correctly, see it only as a sign of his weakness that he accepted the possibility Farage might be allowed rejoin the Tory Party, and as a further humiliation that Farage immediately rebuffed the idea (though, interestingly, he hasn’t entirely ruled it out for the future).

As many of his predecessors as Tory leader found, the more Sunak tries to please the extremists, the more they demand. His situation differs from them in two ways, though. One is that the extremists are no longer a fringe group within the party but becoming its mainstream, and include members of the cabinet like Braverman. The other, which is all that is saving him for now, is that even the extremists, such as Rees-Mogg, reluctantly realise that it is impractical to depose him before the next election. 

Clearly these two things point in different directions, but they are both bad for Sunak. If and when he loses the election, of course he will be ousted. But if, by some chance, he wins it then they will continue to attack him, though I suppose if he won by a large majority they might hold off doing so for a few weeks. The True and New Conservatives aren’t going away.

Brexit sowed the wind

The present state of the Tory Party isn’t all about Brexit, but Brexit lies at its heart. It is what started the rampage of populism, with its imagination of a singular ‘will of the people’ and, with that, the hunt for heretics and traitors, the denunciations and the witch-burnings, the suspicion of any hint of a lack of true belief. Hence, to give just one example, former Chancellor Philip Hammond, who, like Sunak, was a hyper-wealthy, almost stereotypical Thatcherite Eurosceptic as well as a spreadsheet technocrat, ended up being accused of “betrayal” for not supporting ‘no-deal Brexit’, and even facing calls that he be “tried for treason”.

Yet alongside such ferocious dogmatism lies the constant disappointment with Brexit. That was always going to exist, but Sunak’s relative ‘pragmatism’ has provided a new excuse for the Brexiters. To them, the Windsor Framework, the climbdown over scrapping all EU Retained Law, the resumption of Horizon membership, and the various other ad hoc accommodations he has made, all feed the Brexiters’ sense, itself the flip-side of their revolutionary purism, that Brexit hasn’t worked because ‘it has never been tried properly’. To take just one recent, but spectacularly stupid, example, the Telegraph’s Tom Harris this week foot-stamped about how “this useless government is destroying the Brexit dream” (£)*.

It is also Brexit which has led the Tory Party to all but turn its back on the business interests that used to be at its core. Boris Johnson’s ‘f*** business’ comment may have been a throwaway remark, but it had a deep resonance. Most businesses, whether large or small, were opposed to Brexit, and many are now deeply concerned about its effects. So, with Brexit the primary test of purity of belief, business is now – not entirely, but to an extent which would have been unthinkable a few years ago – positioned as the enemy. And that is not just for lack of Brexit belief, but for the now associated sins of ‘wokeness’ and being part of the Establishment or ‘the Blob’.

Something similar applies to huge swathes of professionals, civil servants, and just about every established institution including the Bank of England, the judiciary, the Church of England, many charities, and perhaps even the King (£). Like the evisceration of social liberals from the Tory Party, and to some extent overlapping with it, this has electoral consequences because many of those written off so disparagingly were the kinds of people whose interests the Tory Party used to represent and upon whose votes they could usually rely.

The new ‘politics of envy’

Again, this is not just about Brexit but it started with Brexit. Being a remainer is invariably first on the list of features, usually followed by ‘wokeness’ and university education, defining the ‘new elite’. This is the term repetitively ground out by the Conservative populists’ academic cheerleader Matthew Goodwin, himself a speaker at this year’s London NatCon conference, who has made the astonishing social scientific discovery that there are quite a lot of middle-class people in economically advanced societies. Even more astonishing, and apparently deeply sinister, he has discovered that they “live in the most affluent and trendy districts” and  “marry and socialise” with each other (£).

It’s worth reflecting how remarkable it is that, as with the hostility to business and professionals, populist Tories now regard the educated and affluent middle-class in general as being amongst the enemies of the people rather than being part of their core vote. In a similar vein, Suella Braverman’s ugly and depraved conference diatribe against immigration linked opposition to her bigotry and incompetence not just to those who “are desperate to reverse Brexit” but to those rich enough to have “luxury beliefs”, to employ gardeners and cleaners, and to have second homes. It is again remarkable that what used to call itself ‘the party of aspiration’ should now have such disdain for the well-to-do, to the point of regarding them as ‘unpatriotic’. It is equally striking that it now practises the ‘politics of envy’ that it used to disparage.

But this is the true face of the populist Conservatism that is engulfing the Tory Party, with Braverman also having been one of the speakers at the NatCon conference, along with Anderson, Cates, Rees-Mogg, David Frost and other Tory politicians. And it isn’t just about calibrating to different kind of voters from those who have traditionally supported them. It goes right to the heart of how these populist Tories govern, or do when they get the chance.

This was exemplified by the Truss mini-budget which, as I discussed at the time, was not just a ‘Brexit budget’ because it was hailed as one which would deliver Brexit, but because it was constructed in explicit rejection of the institutions and advice of ‘the Establishment’. They had opposed Brexit with their ‘Project Fear’ warnings, but Brexit had been voted for and done anyway. So Brexit morphed into ‘Brexitism’ where almost all institutions and most expertise are suspect. The market reaction to the mini-budget showed the recklessness of that, and very briefly shocked the Brexitists into relative silence. But they have quickly forgotten all that.

Brexitism: a different kind of ideology

It's something of a myth that the Tory Party used to be pragmatic rather than ideological. Thatcherism was nakedly ideological, and even before 1979 there were plenty of Tories who held her beliefs. Nor was Thatcher averse to populism, especially in relation to immigration. For example, her infamous remark about British people fearing they might be “swamped by people of a different culture” was similar to the kinds of things Braverman said this week.

But Brexitism is ideological in a different way, by being detached from almost any commitment to reality or truthfulness. Thatcherites had ideological positions, for example on the privatisation of nationalised industries, but there was nothing fantastical about them. Those industries existed and, rightly or wrongly, it was possible to privatise them, as the Tories did. The claims Tories made for what that would do for their efficiency, or cost-effectiveness, or investment may have been flawed, and the flaws may have flowed from their ideological assumptions about markets and the state. But they were not delusions or lies in the way that characterised Brexit, for example in the denial that it had any implications for a Northern Ireland border, or the assertion that post-Brexit trade with the EU could be frictionless. In this sense, Brexitism, unlike Thatcherism, is a distinctively post-truth ideology.

Likewise, every single budget under Thatcher – every budget under any Prime Minister of any party, for that matter – was ideological, but Truss’s ‘true Brexit’ mini-budget was ideological in a different way in its refusal to accept the realities of what it meant. That was demonstrated not simply, or not so much, in its formulation as in the response to its consequences, which Truss and her supporters still ascribe to Establishment plotting rather than market sentiment. And this detachment from reality now goes right down to such things as the ridiculous claims from the Environment Secretary Claire Coutinho that she has put a stop to a ‘meat tax’ that never existed.

Even Sunak engages in a degree of this post-truth Brexitist ideology, including the ‘no meat tax’ calumny. More importantly, in his conference speech extolling the pragmatism and honesty he claims to bring to politics, Sunak quite brazenly lied about the benefits of Brexit, including making the absurd suggestion that it has boosted UK economic growth, for which there is not a shred of evidence. There’s no surprise in that, as no Tory leader can speak the truth about Brexit, but it shows that Sunak has little interest in addressing the concerns even of Tory voters, of whom a not negligible 29% think leaving the EU was a mistake, 38% think it has been more of a failure than a success, and just 22% think has been more of a success than a failure. The ‘Brexitists’ certainly don’t have any interest at all in doing so.

Is populism popular?

Indeed, at one level, it seems as if the Brexitists no longer care about winning elections, and all that matters to them is ideological purity. But, though there may be an element of this, I think the truth is more that their ideological purity leads them to believe that it offers a route to winning elections. They see the Conservatives’ current weak position in the opinion polls and refuse to recognize that it derives from voters’ gradual disenchantment with Johnson and sudden disenchantment with Truss. So they conclude, according to taste, that if Johnson had stayed or if Truss had toughed it out then their poll ratings would have risen. And, now, they urge Sunak towards ‘true Conservatism’, certain that it will be popular and, if the election proves it not to be, waiting to ascribe that to him not going far enough and not being a true believer. At that point, they will install a Braverman, or some other New and True Conservative, in the expectation that this will bring them to power again in 2029.

In short, I think they have mistaken populist policies for popular policies, especially given the changing demography of the electorate. The core reason, again, is Brexit. It was the moment when the longstanding populist belief that they speak for ‘the silent majority’ seemed to be vindicated, and they saw further vindication in the 2019 ‘get Brexit done’ election. Indeed the Tory MP Miriam Cates, who is one of the NatCon’s rising stars, explicitly locates British National Conservatism as emerging from these two events. It is a massive over-reading, and over-simplification, of those votes, and especially of the narrow referendum victory, but it gave them licence to claim ownership of the ‘will of the people’ and to depict their opponents as ‘enemies of the people’. It made politics toxic and, in the process, they poisoned themselves.

Of course, perhaps their analysis is right, and when they get their New and True Conservative Party it will prove wildly popular, or at least popular enough to deliver an election victory in 2029. That could be especially likely if they face a Labour government which has been lacklustre or worse. Certainly there is no cause for complacency, and still less for amusement, about what is happening to the Tory Party. In his weekly Guardian column, Rafael Behr, touching on many of the themes I’ve written about in this post, rightly concludes that “there is something disturbing about a regime that is too ridiculous to trust with power yet too powerful to be written off with ridicule”. That will continue to be true even if, as looks increasingly likely, they lose the next election and become completely taken over by Brexitist populism, if only because, even out of office, they will have much media backing.

However, the difference between my analysis and that of the populists isn’t just about the content of the prediction. It is also about a difference that goes to the heart of the irrationality of Brexitism. That difference is that if they prove to be right then I would accept that my analysis was proved wrong. But if I prove to be right then, without a shadow of a doubt, they will deny that their analysis has been proved wrong. They will say it just means that it wasn’t true ‘True Conservatism’ and insist that the answer is to do it again, but this time properly. Exactly as they do of Brexit, the ultimate source of the madness that now afflicts them.

 

*This headline was later amended to the less punchy one of “The Government risks destroying the Brexit dream”, but the original lives on in the URL.