Brexit ten years on: unsettled and unsettling

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

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

Starmer’s downfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Burnham, stage left – or stage right?

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

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

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

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

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

Ten years on: what is Brexit?

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

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

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

Analysing Brexit

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

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

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

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

Defending Brexit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reframing the anniversary

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

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

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

 

Note

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

Brexit reminders

Compared with a few years ago, Brexit no longer dominates the headlines, not least because those who once so loudly advocated it are now too embarrassed to mention it. However, it lies behind many of the news stories, like – take your pick of metaphors – dry rot in the basement, a predator lurking in the bushes, or a chronic, debilitating illness.

In the last fortnight, major examples include the latest report of the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, the sentencing of a former Reform official and UKIP/ Brexit Party MEP for taking Russian bribes, and, of course, the budget, as well as the latest net migration figures.

Brexit and Covid

The publication of the second module of the Hallett Inquiry, which focusses on decision-making and political governance, reveals a woeful picture. As has been widely reported it shows that a “toxic and chaotic” culture pervaded the Johnson-Cummings government. Whilst this had significant implications for the handling of the pandemic, which of course is the focus of the report, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it also has implications for Brexit.

I must admit that I haven’t read the full report, which runs to 800 pages, so I’m not sure what, if anything, it says about Brexit (the summary document makes no mention of it at all). However, as I wrote in some detail at the time, the evidence heard by the Inquiry showed several significant connections. That post also contains links to several posts I wrote during the pandemic which identified some of those connections and I won’t repeat all the points I’ve made previously but, in brief, they include:

·         The damage Brexit had done to the machinery and processes of government, and especially to the civil service;

·         The extent to which Brexit was prioritized over Covid in the early days of the pandemic;

·         The refusal to extend the Transition Period, despite the impact of Covid throughout almost its entirety, with consequences both for the negotiations and the businesses which had to adapt, virtually overnight, to the eventual agreement;

·         The ideational and institutional connections between Brexit and the response to Covid;

·         The simplism and nostalgia evident in both Brexit and the pandemic.

At the most basic level, if, as the Inquiry shows, the government was “toxic and chaotic” in its handling of Covid, then it would be absurd to imagine that it was not equally so in its handling of Brexit. The same people, at the same time, could hardly have been governing in exemplary fashion in one domain whilst being so incompetent in the other. Moreover, the Johnson-Cummings government was itself a legacy of Brexit and, ultimately, of the Vote Leave campaign. In that sense, having so shambolic an administration when Covid struck was itself one of the adverse consequences of Brexit.

I don’t think the publication of the latest Hallett Report tells us anything new about this since it was, indeed, clear from the evidence the Inquiry heard, and from what could be surmised before. However, it is a moment worth recording that it is now a matter of official record just how incompetent that ‘get Brexit done’ government was. What is new, although entirely unsurprising, is the reaction it has provoked from Johnson and Cummings in particular, but also from the serried ranks for their supporters who, of course, are almost invariably Brexiters.

Thus, referring to Hallett as “some judge”, Johnson, who set up the Inquiry and set its terms of reference in the first place, dismissed the report (£) as “hopelessly incoherent” and “totally muddled”. Cummings, predictably, was even more vitriolic, accusing Hallett and the Inquiry’s lead lawyer of spreading lies and calling for both to “be stripped of all official jobs, all gongs, and legally barred from working in the law for the rest of their lives”. And David Frost called it a “disgrace”, complaining, amongst other things, that it “scoffs at the alternative strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration”, as if it had not been endlessly debunked, including by the government’s own Chief Medical Officer (similar complaints have been spewed out across the scientifically-illiterate ‘libertarian’ right).

Anyone with an ounce of self-awareness or humility might show just an iota of contrition, perhaps even some shame, when shown their failings in such forensic detail. But Johnson and Cummings, the one girdled by his sense of entitlement, the other by his misplaced intellectual vanity, are incapable of humility or shame. As for Frost, he shows the self-awareness of a toilet seat. One might as well expect Liz Truss to refrain from pontificating about “sensible economic policy”. 

But the more important point is not their all-too-obvious personal inadequacies, it is that these mesh seamlessly with the doctrinaire refusal to accept responsibility which permeates their entire world-view. As with Nigel Farage, nothing is ever their fault. Thus, if there were ever to be a public inquiry into Brexit, it can be said, not speculatively but with certainty, that Johnson, Cummings, Frost, Farage, and all those who had leading roles within it, would never, ever accept the truth of the damage they did.

This matters, even though such a public inquiry is not in prospect, because it helps to explain why Brexitism persists in British politics, and why, as regards Brexit specifically, Britain is stuck in an impasse. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be so. There’s really no longer any room for doubt about the damage Brexit has done, most obviously economically, and no serious analyst claims otherwise. And public opinion has firmly turned against it. This leads some to suggest that it should be (relatively) easy to at least begin the process of ‘rejoining’. But there is no realistic route to that whilst a powerful phalanx of politicians and, perhaps as important, media owners and commentators remain as an obdurate, shameless, unrepentant blockage to it.

Brexit and Russia

There is also little sign of shame or penitence within Reform over the Gill scandal. As I mentioned in a recent post, in September Nathan Gill (formerly Reform’s leader in a Wales, UKIP’s leader in Wales, and a UKIP and Brexit Part MEP) pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery from pro-Russian sources to act in their interests whilst he was serving as an MEP. Now, he has been sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison for these offences.

The length of that sentence serves to underscore just how serious his crimes were. This was not some minor lobbying scandal, but sustained corruption by an elected representative in the service, in effect, of a foreign, and none-too-friendly, power. After all, the offences for which he has been sentenced began in December 2018 and ran through to July 2019, whilst in March 2018 Russian agents committed the Novichok attacks in Salisbury. At all events, the police investigation of Gill was undertaken by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror team because, according to Commander Dominic Murphy, he had done “potential damage to national security”. 

As I noted in that earlier post, Farage and other Reform leaders have been keen to distance themselves from Gill, and this week Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, tried to dismiss Gill and his offences as “ancient history”. It won’t wash, not least as it was really not so long ago that he held a senior position in Reform. The full details of Gill’s offences are complex, but their timeline, and how they sit within the wider context of the Reform Party and its predecessors, as well as events in Russia and Ukraine, is painstakingly set out by The Nerve, a new independent media outlet [1]. As that report makes clear, there is no suggestion that Farage or other MEPs of his various parties took bribes, but some of those MEPs did say similar things to those which Gill was paid to say. My point is not that this implies any corruption on their part but that Gill was not saying things that ran contrary to views that were shared by his colleagues.

The police are now investigating other British former MEPs, who have (rightly) not been named, nor have the parties they represented, but, whilst these investigations may come to nothing, the political questions for Reform remain. Speaking to Sky News, Keir Starmer said that Farage “needs to launch an investigation into his party to understand how that [Gill’s offences] happened” and that this investigation should look into “what other links are there between Reform and Russia”. LibDem leader Ed Davey has been more forthright:

“A traitor was at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary. Nigel Farage and his party are a danger to national security. Nigel Farage himself was previously paid to be on Putin's TV channel, Russia Today, and said he was the world leader he admires the most. We must all ask – where do his loyalties really lie? We need a full investigation into Russian interference in our politics.”

At one level, all this is a reminder of the still unresolved question of what role Russia played in the 2016 Referendum – a question unresolved primarily because, according to the 2020 ‘Russia report’ by the Intelligence and Security Committee, the government did not investigate it. That report does show, though, that there was Russian interference in both the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2019 General Election, and, in general terms, that “the UK is clearly a target for Russian disinformation”. And, whatever Moscow’s role in the 2016 referendum, it has always been obvious that, at the very least, Brexit was advantageous to Russian interests in terms of destabilizing both the UK and the EU: “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it.

However, it is not necessary to disinter the referendum result to see the salience of Gill’s crimes for the politics of post-Brexit Britain. Except to those on the far-right and far-left of politics, the threat to the UK from Russia is clear and, if anything, escalating, as underlined by several incidents just in the last fortnight, including the incursion of the spy ship Yantar, which used lasers to disrupt the RAF planes tracking its movements, the interception of two Russian vessels in the Channel, and the discovery of a Russian submarine-spying device off the Welsh coast. And these events are just one manifestation of a much wider programme of physical and cyber-incursions amounting to what the former Head of MI5, the former Head of NATO, and the former Head of the Navy and Security Minister all regard an undeclared war.

The wider context of this, of course, is Ukraine, and the possibility that it will be forced into a humiliating ‘peace’ by Trump. With that, Putin would free up the resources, and feel emboldened, to step up the pressure against Europe - which very much includes the UK for, as the Brexiters used to remind us, ‘we are leaving the EU, we’re not leaving Europe’. This was perhaps the only true thing they ever said, and, as is now all too plain to see, Brexit has created an artificial and dangerous separation of the UK from its continent, made all the more dangerous because of Trump and what Trump means for NATO. As I’ve discussed in in the past, there is an obvious and disturbing axis between Putin, Trump, and Brexitism.

It is this context which makes the entire question of Farage’s foreign policy sympathies and allegiances, both as regards Putin and Trump, and his antipathies, as regards the EU, so important. He is, after all, presenting himself as the next Prime Minister and, as we are constantly reminded, his party is leading in the opinion polls. So these sympathies and allegiances, and those of all those within his party, as Gill recently was, are an absolutely legitimate matter for the most intense scrutiny, despite Reform’s attempts to shout down such scrutiny or to depict Gill as a ‘bad apple’ whose behaviour had nothing to do with the party.

Farage has said he will not investigate any Russian links within his party and dismissed the Gill case as “a minor embarrassment”. But no other British politician has been convicted of such offences in modern times (there have been some imprisonments for false accounting over expenses, but that isn’t remotely the same). Perhaps the central claim made by Brexiters was that leaving the EU would mean that voters would be free to hire and fire those who made the laws that governed them. To do that, we need to know the allegiances of those who would make our laws.

Brexit and the Budget

If the run-up to this week’s budget is anything to go by, then the allegiance of our current governing lawmakers is to being as politically maladroit as possible. I certainly can’t remember anything like it. Budget ‘purdah’ has been more honoured in the breach than the observance for some time but, even leaving aside the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) inadvertent revelation of its measures a few minutes before the Chancellor’s speech, the last few months of semi-statement have gone well beyond the now-familiar leaks and hints.

During that apparently almost interminable period, it has been notable that both Rachel Reeves and other government ministers have been increasingly open in identifying Brexit as a cause of Britain’s economic woes. This is a marked change to the far more muted references to it at the time of last year’s budget. But it is still being framed as a problem in the way Brexit was done rather than one of Brexit itself. As Rafael Behr puts it, “the problem is couched as negligent negotiation, not strategic miscalculation”.

That framing was evident in Reeves’ budget speech, which rather shamelessly implied that a new trade deal had been struck with the EU (presumably referring to the ‘reset’, the terms of which remain under negotiation). She also implied an endorsement of the Brexiters’ claim that it is of benefit to have an independent trade policy by speaking referring to deals with the US (which, unless I’ve missed something, has still only been partially implemented, and is in any case only a partial mitigation of Trump’s new tariffs, not a Free Trade Agreement) and with India (which has an estimated value of 0.13% of GDP after 15 years).

It certainly can’t be claimed that any trade policy independence Brexit has brought comes close to compensating for the fact that, as Reeves mentioned, Brexit continues to be identified by the OBR as a drag on UK productivity. Indeed, the OBR itself refers to our great act of national liberation as being one of the “successive shocks” that are responsible for the country’s lack of productivity growth. This latest report also renews the OBR’s “assessment that Brexit will reduce the level of UK productivity by around 4 per cent after 15 years” compared with what it would otherwise have been [2]. As always, it’s worth remembering that this figure (which also implies, as widely quoted, that GDP will be 4% less than otherwise) has a cumulative effect. That is, for each of the 15 years productivity will be lower than it would have been by some figure, reaching 4% in the fifteenth year.

It's true that the OBR did not change its assessment of the Brexit damage for the worse (as had been rumoured prior to the budget, although it did downgrade its overall productivity growth assessment), but the fact that it remains unchanged is significant. It suggests that even as it moves from being entirely a forecast of damage that will be done to being, in part, an estimate of damage that has been done, that forecast seems to the OBR to be holding true. If so, that is not a surprise, as most analysts expect the bulk of the damage will have occurred early in the 15-year period.

Indeed, as summarized in my last post, a recent report from the National Bureau for Economic Research provides a headline estimate suggesting that by 2025 (i.e. already), UK GDP is 6%-8% less than it would otherwise have been. In the run-up to the budget, the LibDem Party requested the House of Commons Library to provide an analysis the implications of that estimate, including for tax revenues. The results were that it would mean that, had it not been for Brexit, in 2024-25 tax revenues would have been between £65 billion and £90 billion higher than they actually were.

If the upper figure were correct, it would be equivalent to the entirety of government spending in that year on education (£89.2 billion). But suppose the true figure were only half of the upper estimate, that would still more than cover the entire defence budget (£37.5 billion). Now suppose the true figure were only a quarter of the lower estimate: then, it would cover the entire 2024-25 budget for both day-to-day spending and capital investment for prisons, the probation service and the criminal justice system (£14.7 billion).

Brexit and immigration

All that is another reminder of the high price we are paying for the stupidity of Brexit, to which should be added the negative impact on tax revenues which can be expected as a result of the large fall in net migration announced yesterday. That announcement, in itself, means that the OBR’s budget forecasts for growth and tax revenue, published just the day before, are likely to be over-optimistic, since it had assumed a less steep fall.

Calculating the impact on tax revenues of falling net migration is extremely complex, because it depends on a large number of variables, but last year the OBR estimated that a fall of 100,000 would increase the deficit by £7 billion. Given the complexity, I’m not sure whether it would be justified to extrapolate from that to say that yesterday’s fall of almost 450,000 in the last 12 months might represent something in the order of a £30 billion reduction in tax revenue, but the impact will certainly be considerable and negative.

And yet, responding to these latest net migration figures, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government would be “going further” to clamp down on immigration, because of the “immense pressure” it supposedly puts on local communities, whilst Keir Starmer said the figures were (only) “a step in the right direction”. Presumably, Mahmood and Starmer believe they will get some political credit for responding to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public, whatever the economic (and human) cost. If so, they are likely to be disappointed: this latest fall continues from that of last year yet, in post-Brexit Britain’s immigration panic, the majority of the public believe that net migration rose in that year, even as they bemoan the tax rises in this year’s budget.

As the broadcaster and author James O’Brien put it when discussing this issue, “we have become a ludicrous country”. And Brexit, which, remember, was supposed to ‘solve’ these ‘legitimate concerns’, has made us even more ludicrous.

Still on the Brexit rack

Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a post discussing the chaotic mess we were in (of which there is plenty more in the posts from that time). Amidst Covid, with the transition period almost over, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement had yet to be finalised and there was every possibility there would be no agreement at all. There’s much in that post which is no longer of great relevance, but it does capture the disarray of the time, which the Hallett report reminds us of. For example, I referred to a leaked letter from the Road Haulage Association, describing the process of working with the government on border issues as “a complete shambles”.

There are other things in that post which are still very much relevant, ranging from the narrowly technical (e.g. my observation that “there will be a myriad of things left in the air even if there is a deal [such as] carbon trading”) to the broadly political (e.g. Keir Starmer’s “near silence” about Brexit and the rumours – which turned out to be true – that he would want Labour MPs to vote for any deal which might be done). At all events, I finished the post by saying:

“Perhaps we need to look instead to Classical mythology to describe our situation, maybe to Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up the hill or, as seems more appropriate to the painfulness of it all, poor old Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle day after day. Prometheus of course was being punished for having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Sisyphus was an all-round bad egg (murdering, cheating, and generally getting above himself). It is not clear what crime we have committed to have to endure the endless torture of Brexit.” 

The current news is a reminder that these words still apply.

 

Notes

[1] There are so many such outlets now that it is always important to look carefully at their credibility, but The Nerve certainly has a good pedigree, having been created by a collective of five former Guardian and Observer journalists. In any case, as regards the report referred to, it collates verifiable information from within the public domain.

[2] For a detailed discussion of the OBR estimate, and assessments of the costs of Brexit generally, see John Springford’s June 2025 report for the Constitution Society/ Federal Trust.

Stasis, sanctimony, and the liberal paradox

Events of the last fortnight are a good illustration of why I recently re-focused and re-titled this blog to Brexit and Brexitism. For the Brexit news, in a narrow sense, is meagre, whereas there is such a profusion of reports of the battle for and against Brexitism that it is hardly possible to discuss them all in a single post.

Brexit: damage and a damaging stasis

On Brexit itself, there has been a new estimate of the economic damage it has wrought, with the publication of a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it is even worse than previous estimates suggested. The authors’ findings, in summary, are that: “We estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12% to 18%, employment by 3% to 4%, and productivity by 3% to 4%.”

As with similar studies, these reductions do not refer to absolute falls in GDP etc., but to the difference between what actually happened to these various measures and estimates of what would have happened otherwise. As such, it is a ‘counterfactual’ study and will undoubtedly be criticised by Brexiters for this, but, as I’ve argued in more detail previously, such studies are the only way of answering what is, by definition, a counterfactual question:  is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU? 

The scale of the damage, now acknowledged by the government, will only be minimally offset by even the most ambitious version of its reset plans. These plans, which started with such a flurry of optimism and energy in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, were reported to have stalled in a sour stand-off over budget contributions between the UK and, not so much the EU as different views amongst EU member states. However, yesterday, the EU agreed a negotiating mandate, opening the path to formal negotiations.

How long these negotiations will take remains unclear. But reaching an agreement, and the sooner the better, matters, especially to UK businesses who stand to benefit most from the reset but perhaps more importantly to both the UK and the EU in terms of the symbolism of creating a more harmonious partnership in the face of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s madness. Also still unresolved, though scarcely ever mentioned in the UK press, is the UK-EU agreement over Gibraltar.

So the Brexit process continues to rumble on, but there is only so much that can be said about something where, at least in terms of publicly available information, not very much is changing.

The many faces of Farage

On the wider terrain of Brexitism, by contrast, there is plenty to be said. One important development has been Nigel Farage’s attempt to articulate Reform’s economic policy, at a news conference held in the City of London. The venue was itself revealing of an underlying tension. Why hold it in the heart of the globalist elite, the wicked metropolis, not Sunderland or Lowestoft? The answer, of course, is that Farage feels the need to show he would be ‘economically responsible’. For this was the day that he ‘bowed to the bond market’ meaning, for one thing, abandoning as mere “aspirations” the huge tax cuts which, only last year, were supposedly part of Reform’s “contract” with the British people. As with every dodgy business, it pays to read the small print of any contract offered by Reform 2025 Ltd and its predecessors.

In abandoning his former commitments, Farage also implicitly abandoned his erstwhile enthusiasm for the Trussonomics of the mini-budget. It says something that a politician who constantly claims to be straight-talking chooses to conceal his core economic beliefs because they are too toxic for public consumption. Farage and his party are equally mealy-mouthed in floating, but not advocating outright, the ideas of reducing the youth minimum wage and ending the triple-lock on state pensions. It’s an old political trick, designed to entice those voters who find policies attractive with the hope they will be delivered, whilst retaining voters who find them unattractive by allowing them to hope these policies will never be put into practice.

The tension also derives from electoral calculation. Farage is desperate to present Reform as a government in waiting, but his core vote isn’t quite enough to assure that outcome, so he needs to broaden his support to take in (in both senses of the term) more mainstream voters. Yet at the same time, his central pitch is to be outside the mainstream of politics and to mobilize an insurgency. Anyone excited by the prospect of that will surely have been sent into a deep and disappointed sleep by the stale ideas of ‘responsible Farage’: vague platitudes about welfare cuts, tax breaks for wealth-creating entrepreneurs, slashing red-tape, bringing business people in to government.

This has been the set menu offered by just about every front-line Tory or Labour politician of the last three or four decades, and even Farage sounded quite bored by it. In fact, he sounded exactly like what he claims not to be, but transparently has been for most of his life: a ‘career politician’. It’s possible that, at some point, ‘responsible Farage’ will spatchcock himself by being insufficiently plausible to those wanting reassurance of his economic orthodoxy whilst alienating those who yearn for political heterodoxy. 

Stale, predictable and contradictory

Equally stale, and even more predictable, were his assertions that Brexit hadn’t been done properly and that Reform would take advantage of the, as always unspecified, deregulatory opportunities it presented. He has chosen to forget how Jacob Rees-Mogg – who, whatever else one might say about him, can hardly be accused of ‘not believing in Brexit’ – had, when Minister for Brexit Opportunities, utterly failed to identify any of value. Indeed, Rees-Mogg even came to realise that, far from cutting red tape, the UKCA mark, that symbol of the fallacy of Brexit regulatory independence, actually increased it.

Farage’s only fresh idea was the spectacularly stupid and dangerous one of making the UK a cryptocurrency hub. This has been a Farage hobby-horse for a while, and one of the few areas where he publicly advocates Trumpian economic policies, which he generally avoided at the press conference (though he is becoming increasingly open in advocating the sexual and reproductive rights agenda of the American Christian right). But quite how it is supposed to represent the interests of the ‘ordinary people’ who ‘just want their country back’ is a mystery [1].

It’s a mystery, moreover, which shows the utter hypocrisy of the man who cos-plays at being a man of the people, the champion of the ‘somewheres’ rather than the ‘anywheres’, whilst trousering £40,000 for ten hours work for Nomad Capitalist (admittedly small beer given the approximately £1.2 million he has earned from second jobs since becoming an MP). As its name implies, Nomad is a “company, which heralds a ‘borderless world’, [and] says it helps people ‘obtain a second residency and second citizenship to enhance your freedom and options’, including second residencies, dual citizenship, and tax residency.”

This recurring tension runs, in various forms, throughout Farage’s ideological and electoral positioning, and throughout Brexitism: seeking political power yet being anti-politics; claiming to be pro-worker and anti-elite whilst courting and supporting the super-rich; espousing both nationalism and globalism, protectionism and free trade, economic growth and reduced immigration; supporting left-behind communities but cutting their public services; bemoaning de-industrialization whilst fetishizing the Thatcher era; parading patriotism whilst endlessly decrying the state of Britain and lauding Trump and Putin. Perhaps these tensions will mean the party implodes rather than comes to power. We must hope so, for what makes Reform incoherent now will make it unconscionable in government.

The anti-BBC axis

If Farage and other Brexitists dislike talking about the details of practical policies, nothing makes them more comfortable than getting stuck in to the culture war. Here, neither positivity nor practicality are necessary, just innuendos, smears and synthetic outrage. Ideal, then, for a politics which thrives on grievance and complaint, rather than responsibility or solutions. With the ‘anti-woke’ ‘Restore Trust’ activists  having last weekend failed yet again in their longstanding attempt to take over the National Trust council, the Brexitists suddenly found an altogether more satisfying victim to torment as the BBC experienced the latest, and most vociferous, populist assault upon it.

The attacks on the National Trust and the BBC are connected in more than just a general ideological sense. For example, one of the leaked complaints about the BBC is based on criticism of it by the ‘History Reclaimed’ group, which has also been at the forefront of criticising the National Trust for its representations of history. And this is also an illustration of why Brexitism is a useful concept, for several of the members of History Reclaimed were members of the 2018 ‘Brains for Brexit’ group. Moreover, one of these, Robert Tombs, is not only the Founder Editor of History Reclaimed but the Co-Editor of ‘Briefings for Britain’ (formerly ‘Briefings for Brexit’), and there are several other overlaps in the writers/ members of these three groupings.

Of course the loathing of the BBC felt by many on the right is longstanding, going back well before Brexit, and is partly animated by fury that a public service broadcaster can be an international byword for excellence and probity, falsifying free market dogma that private is always best. But, for populists, that very fact of the BBC being a public service broadcaster opens the attack line that it does not reflect ‘the people’s values’ but instead those of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. That accusation of ‘institutional bias’ is at the heart of this latest crisis, arising from the presumably not-at-all accidental leak to the Daily Telegraph of a memo (£) written by Michael Prescott, a former independent (though by no means ideologically neutral) editorial adviser, which recycles many of the familiar populist critiques of the Corporation.

Hobbling, or better still breaking, the BBC would be a massive prize for the Brexitists and, because of its international standing, for the entire global populist network. The active involvement of Trump in the current row gives them their best chance ever, even if his threat of a $1 billion lawsuit comes to nothing. It would also be a prize for Vladimir Putin, hence Russia has enthusiastically joined the attack. It’s telling that, in attacking the BBC, the Brexitists, Trump, and Putin are openly aligned, illustrating the axis between them which I’ve written about previously. The reason is that the BBC is indeed ‘liberal’, not in the fatuous sense of being ‘woke’ or biased towards liberal causes but in the deeper sense that it embodies, or seeks to embody, something like the Liberal Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, and pluralism.

The BBC’s liberalism

There’s plenty that could be discussed about those values, which have been criticized as much by the postmodern left as the populist right, but it’s not clear to me, at least, that there is preferable set of values for a public service broadcaster and it’s certainly easy to envisage far worse ones. Nor is it necessary to claim that the BBC always lives up to those values in every part of its huge output in order to sustain the view that they are desirable as principles. It’s certainly grotesque that so much sanctimony is being spouted about what was, undoubtedly, an editorial mistake in relation to the Trump clip by those, including Trump himself, who daily ‘flood the zone’ with dis- and mis-information. Cant rather than Kant, so to speak. But, as Lewis Goodall wrote this week, “we all know it isn’t really about the Panorama edit.”

In their very nature, its values make the BBC liable to endless critique, especially in relation to the complex issue of ‘impartiality’ of political reporting, because such impartiality is itself irredeemably contestable. This leads the BBC into essentially insoluble conundrums, shown by its often misguided attempts to give equal weight to ‘both sides’ of arguments even when they do not warrant such equal treatment, which can be infuriating to people of all kinds of political persuasions, including liberals. But that infuriation is different to the fundamental incompatibility between populism and liberal pluralism [2], which exists because the defining feature of populism is its assertion of the existence of a unitary ‘people’ with a unitary set of ‘common sense’ values: the antithesis of pluralism.

A BBC news and current affairs operation (and, in the present context, it is this, rather than its entertainment operation, which is at stake) run on these lines would look rather like GB News. As such, it could not possibly function as a public service broadcaster precisely because, as a matter of fact, the public are not a single people with a single set of values. The word ‘fact’ is germane in a wider sense, too, since the Liberal Enlightenment commitment to the primacy of rationality and evidence is fundamentally at odds with populism’s valorization of emotion and belief.

Meanwhile, the nihilistic, anti-institutional strand of populism, which makes it different to traditional Conservatism, finds the very existence of the BBC an affront. In fact, to understand what has happened to British Conservatism in recent years, it is instructive to compare the responses to the current BBC row of, respectively, former Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten and former Tory PM Liz Truss, especially as regards the way they talk about institutions and independence. The former speaks pragmatically of their necessary imperfection and the complexities of independence, whilst the latter angrily dismisses them “captured”.

Of course it is a paradox of liberal pluralism generally, and one long understood and exploited by illiberal politicians [3], that it gives succour and sustenance to its most implacable enemies. The BBC exemplifies this since, for all their constant complaints about its bias against them, populist politicians and ideologues are afforded ample, even extravagant, amounts of its air time. The generosity with which the BBC has hosted Nigel Farage, not just now he heads a poll-leading party but for decades, is only the most obvious example. Beyond that are things like the ubiquitous presence of Tufton Street think-tankers or contrarian commentators on every discussion programme from, say, BBC One’s Question Time to Radio Four’s Moral Maze (surely the most flatulently self-important and uninformative show in the entire history of broadcasting, but that’s by the way).

The current crisis further illustrates this paradox. On the one hand, as with every such crisis, it is the BBC itself which provides the most extensive coverage of its own problems, in an orgy of self-flagellation born of a determination not to be seen as aloof and unresponsive and, precisely, a commitment to ‘impartiality’. On the other hand, the very existence of the ‘independent’ editorial adviser at the heart of the row derives from previous attempts by the BBC to show its openness to criticism and to tackle the biases of which it is accused. Indeed, in recent years the BBC has bent over backwards to appease its right-wing critics, to the extent of allowing them a power base of political appointees on its board, and these are the very people who have precipitated this latest crisis.

In short, the BBC has sought to assuage its populist critics by deploying precisely the kind of liberal pluralism which those critics despise and yet upon which they thrive.

The unappeasable

This in turn illustrates something else. Whatever the BBC does it will not satisfy its populist critics, who will always demand more. No resignations, no apologies, no reforms will ever be enough. It can never, as it was advocated to do this week by Tory Shadow Culture Secretary Nigel Huddleston, “grovel” sufficiently, and the use of this distasteful term was itself revealing. It remains to be seen whether the BBC now realizes this, or whether it will once again try to appease its unappeasable critics.

In this respect, the situation of the BBC is just one, albeit important, example of the bigger problem for liberal pluralism in responding to populism. As we saw with Brexit, every attempt to satisfy Brexiters just led to them demanding an even harder version of Brexit. Similarly, as the Labour government still has not grasped, no matter how hard an anti-immigration policy it enacts, Brexitists will never say that it is hard enough, and will always demand something even more extreme. The liberal pluralist instinct to recognize ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration and to meet them half-way, or more than half-way, is never met with reciprocation by populists who, if anything, simply see it as a sign of weakness.

On the latter topic, the increasingly beleaguered government’s dismal and self-defeating descent continues. Even as it desperately seeks economic growth, it pursues policies to lower immigration which are to the detriment of economic growth, in the hope of political advantage. But does Keir Starmer – or perhaps more pertinently Morgan McSweeney – really think that doing so will ever cause Reform or the Tories to say that they have gone far enough? Or that they, and more importantly voters, will accept the damage of lower economic growth as a price worth paying?

The latest wheeze takes us right back to Brexit, and brings an irony so glaring that it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In January 1973 the UK and Denmark joined what was then the EEC. In 2020 the UK left the EU, in large part in order to ‘take back control’ of immigration by gaining the freedom to implement an ‘Aussie-style points-based system’. Now, in 2025, the British government proposes to emulate the tough approach of … Denmark.

 

Notes

[1] What may be less of a mystery is how it serves Farage’s interests. Private Eye (‘Fair Tether Friend’ #1661, p.7, no link available) recently reported that in an interview on LBC, Farage’s advocacy for London becoming a global hub for cryptocurrency went alongside his boosterish comments about Tether, “a cryptocurrency described as a money-launderer’s dream”. After mentioning that Reform has just begun accepting crypto donations (see also Reuters’ report), the Eye goes on to note that a significant shareholder in Tether is “the Thailand-based British Tech investor Christopher Harborne”, who has “previously handed the [Reform] party a whopping £10 million” and “shelled out more than £60,000 to cover the travel and accommodation costs for two trips Farage has made to the US since being elected an MP …” By the way, just this week there are signs that Farage will get his way about UK cryptocurrency regulation or, more accurately, that the pressure from Trump is moving things in that direction (£), once again exposing the nonsense of the Brexiters’ naïve ideas about sovereignty.

[2] Which is why, at the present juncture, those who are infuriated with the BBC for those kinds of reasons need to be careful what they wish for. For all its flaws, its defence is now one of the front lines in the battle to save Britain from Brexitism.

[3] The starkest illustration of this is the infamous line in Joseph Goebbels’ 1928 essay: “We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us.”

Welcome to 2025

In one way, it has been a quiet period for Brexit news since my previous, pre-Christmas, post. That is hardly surprising, given the season. But it is only true if Brexit is understood in its narrow and literal sense. Understood in the wider sense of the unfolding of populist politics, 2025 has started with a noisy tumult, of a volume and variety which make it hard to analyze. For personal reasons (my mother died this week), this is a much shorter post than usual, but there is already no doubt that this is going to be an eventful Brexit year.

Brexit costs, again

Starting with the narrower and more literal issues, there has been another outbreak of claim and counter-claim about the costs of Brexit, largely sparked by a report in The Independent trying to summarize these costs. It referred to many of the studies and estimates which I’ve discussed previously on the blog, and provoked the usual criticisms of those estimates from the usual Brexiters (£).

Some of those criticisms have a spark of validity. In particular, as I’ve pointed out before, it is correct to say it is misleading to describe the ‘divorce bill’ as a cost of Brexit because they are payments for liabilities the UK had incurred as an EU member so, in that sense, would have been paid one way or another regardless of Brexit. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many Brexiters insisted, amongst them Nigel Farage, that there would be no ‘divorce settlement’ to pay or, even, that the EU would owe money to the UK. Even when installed as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson said the EU could “go whistle” for a financial settlement.

The only research mentioned by The Independent which I haven’t previously covered, because it came after I’d written my previous post, was a recent study by the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. As was widely reported, this estimated that in the in the first two years since the transition period ended the UK had “only” lost £27 billion in trade, and that although this had been a “disaster” for small businesses, this is less, so far, than would have been expected from the long-term (15 year) OBR prediction. This caused much back-slapping in Brexiter circles (where the usual objections of it being too early to tell, impossible to estimate, and academics all being remainer stooges were suddenly forgotten). Yet it is hard to see why they should be so gleeful, since Brexit was sold on the basis that it was going to be of positive benefit.

So this, coming up to five years since the day we formally left the EU, is the level to which the grand promises of Brexit have brought us: arguing over just how bad the damage has been. Not a single leading advocate for Brexit has ever apologized for the promises they made. At best, they shrug them off as having been thwarted by remainers and the EU.

How we got here, again

That, too, isn’t a news item, but I am in the process of reading Tim Shipman’s Out, a massive tome which provides a lot of crunchy detail about the politics of the Brexit process, and it serves as reminder of what actually happened in those years. Admittedly, it is only a reminder of a certain sort, not because it is biased in any crass way but because it takes as its frame of reference the idea that this was a negotiation in which the outcomes were about the political power-plays between Johnson’s government, the domestic ‘Bresistance’, and the EU.

In those terms, it is highly informative. But what is missing (unless it comes further on than I have yet read) is an understanding of the real legal parameters in play. In particular, on the key issue of the Northern Ireland border, it proceeds as if a borderless hard Brexit was, in principle, a possibility, and what was at stake was simply whether or not it could be negotiated. In this sense, intentionally or not, it accepts the essentially unrealistic position of the Johnson-Frost-Cummings period of Brexit.

Good evidence that my assessment is an accurate one comes from the laudatory review of Shipman’s book by David Frost himself. Hailing it as the “definitive” account “at least until [his] own book is written” (an implausible boast, but one displaying all his habitual delusion and arrogance), he praises it as “objective and fair” which, from so partisan a figure, suggests the opposite might be the case. More specifically, Frost sees the book as vindicating all his well-rehearsed criticisms of the ‘remainer parliament’ (£), the Supreme Court and, especially the Benn Act. No doubt he would always have been liable to read it in this way, but the fact that he is able to find Shipman’s book susceptible to such a reading (whilst criticising other accounts as biased) is an indication of its fundamentally uncritical framing.

Even so, precisely because of that, Shipman’s book is valuable, partly because it confirms just how ignorant those enacting Brexit were about its realities, and partly because it confirms just how monocular their focus was on ‘getting Brexit done’, regardless of how it was done. This, in itself, gives the lie to the idea that Brexit was undertaken in a form that was foisted on them: Johnson and Frost chose it. That, in turn, also gives credence to Starmer’s claim that, even within the red lines of hard Brexit’ a somewhat different arrangement could be possible. 2025 will be the year when he needs to make good on that claim, if he is ever going to, but that is likely to mean a year of slow grind rather than great fireworks.

Donald Trump, again

The opposite applies to Brexit in its wider sense. This year is going to be an important one for transatlantic populism, and though the connections with Brexit are indirect, they are real. At the most general level, there has always been a connection, acknowledged on both sides, between Trump and Brexit. But there are two more specific connections.

One is to do with how the UK navigates its relationship with the US, and whilst Trump’s second presidency would always pose issues for that, it does so with particular force now that Britain has cut itself off from the EU. Just how poisonous that relationship may become has already been suggested by the berserk ferocity of Elon Musk’s attacks on the UK, and the Starmer government specifically (£), and the frenzy it has engendered in domestic politics. No doubt there is much more to come and, given Musk’s attacks on other European countries, the sense that the UK’s shared interests lie with the EU will be all the more obvious.

The other is the extent to which Trump’s return will be associated with the continued insurgence of Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. But this has the opposite implication for UK-EU relations, because the more it seems obvious that Farage’s populism is a strong and permanent feature of UK domestic politics, the less likely it is that the EU will regard the UK as a stable and trustworthy partner for any kind of new agreements, even those as limited in scope as Labour’s ‘reset’. Just this week, Brexiter fury about the appointment of Sir Olly Robbins as Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office was a reminder of the hold of Brexitism in the UK.

Stay cool, again

I haven’t had time this week to give much attention to these developments, which is regrettable given how extraordinary Musk’s accusations have been, and the vile manner in which they have been endorsed by some British politicians. But, in another way, it is not regrettable at all.

I pointed out in a recent post how narcissistic politicians like Trump exert power partly by generating a frenzy of comment around their each and every utterance. That’s also true of Farage. It is probably even more true of Musk, not least because he isn’t, in the normal sense of the word, a politician. It is no coincidence that his latest stuff tries to mobilize the natural revulsion most of us feel about the disgusting crimes of grooming gangs. Nor is it any coincidence that it does so in ways calculated to mobilize counter-revulsion at its opportunism and dishonesty. These people want us – need us – to be excitable, angry, confused, befuddled, and upset. They want us to be freaked out by their freakishness.

So our best response, and, actually, our best resistance, is cool, calm, considered analysis. Not only do they hate it, but it’s also the best way of keeping sane in the face of the mad psychodramas they try to create.

I have a strong feeling that this year, more than most, it is going to be important to remember that.