In my last post I briefly mentioned that the government, and Rachel Reeves in particular, have begun to speak increasingly openly about the damage Brexit is continuing to do to the British economy. This, I said, was striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. The converse also applies, of course. Such admissions, if unaccompanied by any stronger response, serve to underline the inadequacy of the reset.
This is the hook upon which the government’s approach to Brexit is currently caught, and what underlies it is the continuing failure of the British polity as a whole to be honest about Brexit and much else besides. That, and the reasons for it, have been amply illustrated over the last fortnight.
A “Brexit row”?
During that period, it has been reported (£) that the government is preparing legislation to enable the UK to align with all of the EU regulations needed to enact the long-trailed, though still not finalized, UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) or ‘veterinary’ agreement. Moreover, this legislation is expected to contain provision to enable similar moves in other sectors in the future, subject only to statutory instruments meaning, in effect, Ministerial decree.
The idea behind the latter provision, apparently, is that it could pave the way for ‘sector-by-sector’ deals with the EU. In the report of these plans, it is also suggested that at least some within the Labour Party “are hoping that the bill will provoke a Brexit row with the Conservatives and Reform UK, reminding voters that their opponents supported Leave in the EU referendum”.
In just this one small news item there is quite a lot to unpick. One thing to say is that it isn’t surprising, in that it was inherent in what was known about the desire for an SPS deal that there would be such legislation. What is perhaps more interesting is the idea that Labour might now be willing to have “a Brexit row” with Conservatives and Reform, something they have fought shy of in the past.
Evidently, this is a continuation of the shift to greater openness about the damage of Brexit. The political reasons for that shift are fairly obvious and have recently been set out in detail by the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice: in brief, Labour’s (belated) realization that its approach to Brexit is one of the things causing the collapse of its core vote, as happened in the Gorton & Denton by-election.
As this legislation proceeds, Labour will get their row in that, inevitably, indeed already, the Brexiters are screaming ‘betrayal’. However, what that row will really show is that, even now, the ways in which Brexit is discussed are almost entirely dishonest or deluded, or both.
On the Tory side (and that of the Brexiters more generally) there is the dishonesty of the fact that de facto alignment with almost all EU regulations is unavoidable, except at huge economic cost, which is exactly what the Conservatives came to accept when in office. Nor can they reasonably complain about the lack of democratic oversight associated with the use of statutory instruments, since it was they who made such extensive use of so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers throughout the Brexit process. Indeed, it would be reasonable to say that one of the many failed promises of Brexit was that it would return decision-making to parliament.
On the Labour side, there is the dishonesty, shared at various times by various Conservative Brexiters, that whole swathes of the British economy could de facto remain ‘within’ the single market on a sector-by-sector basis. This is effectively a reprise of the “ambitious managed divergence” model floated by Theresa May’s government in February 2018 (and discussed on this blog at that time) although it has gone under different names at different times.
If, as is reported, Keir Starmer believes that the reset process so far has shown that EU objections to ‘cherry-picking’ have disappeared, then that is a profound misreading. For reasons I discussed last year, things like a possible deal on SPS (or on the internal electricity market or Erasmus+) should not be regarded as cherry-picking. I meant that as a rebuke to those who mistakenly use that term to dismiss as doomed any and every attempt to supplement the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). But it would be equally mistaken if Starmer believes that the EU’s willingness to make some adjustments, when they are in its interests, means that any and every attempt to supplement the TCA is viable.
Brexit pragmatism?
Perhaps the most striking dishonesty is what underpins Labour’s approach, namely the claim, articulated most explicitly by Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (£), that what the government is delivering with the reset is “what a proper Brexit looks like”. By this he means that the UK is making “sovereign’ choices” guided by “ruthless pragmatism”. In its way, this is a clever debating society argument, in that it takes the Brexiters’ core demand, that what matters is not this-or-that regulation or law but that regulations and laws are decided by the UK, and uses it against them. This is actually exactly the same structure of argument that ‘liberal Brexiters’ use when they say that what Brexit means for immigration is not necessarily to reduce it but to set it at a level determined by a sovereign parliament.
However, the Thomas-Symonds line is self-defeating as a defence of Labour’s reset policy, precisely because that policy is so inadequate a response to what his government now admits to be the costs of Brexit. For example, to be more specific, on ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ grounds it is impossible to defend the value of the UK having an independent trade policy.
That has been illustrated in two ways in the last fortnight by the announcement of the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement. On the one hand, that agreement shows that, as a collective, the EU was able to get a better deal, especially for its farmers, than the UK got in its own deal with Australia. On the other hand, and given also the recent EU-India deal, it means that the only countries with which Brexit Britain currently has trade agreements that it would not have as an EU member are Malaysia and Brunei (via CPTPP). Meanwhile, were the UK still in the EU it would be part of its trade agreement with Mercosur bloc.
Of course there are legitimate arguments about how important trade agreements really are to the economy, and also about the desirability of their effects on domestic industries, supply-chain resilience and so on. But those are not the government’s arguments. This being so, then it could get more, and better, trade agreements if it successfully pursued a customs union agreement with the EU, which would also improve terms of trade with the EU itself. So, on the basis of ‘ruthless pragmatism’, why not make the ‘sovereign choice’ to seek such an agreement with the EU?
From this follows the more fundamental point, which lies right at the heart of the fallacy of Brexit and which was most strikingly articulated in the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. As I discussed at the time, this contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” Thus even as Britain embarked on the process of leaving it did so knowing that the central plank of the leave argument – that the UK had lost its sovereignty – was completely untrue. It was just ‘a feeling’. And the point still holds, so, on the Thomas-Symonds argument for the reset, there is an even stronger argument for seeking to join the EU, as a sovereign choice made on pragmatic grounds.
A path forward?
In short, the more the government now acknowledges the costs of Brexit, and the more overtly it justifies its reset in terms of the pragmatic response of a sovereign nation to those costs, the more it undermines both the philosophical and economic case for Brexit – and yet at the same time describes its position as delivering ‘proper Brexit’. Similarly, although this week Starmer gave his strongest statement yet that the international ‘volatility’ engendered by Trump’s regime, as well as the economic damage of Brexit, justifies an “ambitious” partnership with the EU, doing so only serves to highlight the constraints he has placed on those ambitions.
It presumably goes without saying that, going back to the electoral politics, this means that if it is true that the Labour Party is now willing to have a “row” about the false promises of Brexit it is unlikely to reap much, if any, reward from anti-Brexit voters. For it remains wedded to a policy which is not just lily-livered but self-contradictory
That doesn’t mean that it is realistic for Labour to adopt a ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’) position, let alone likely that it will do so. But in my view, as I’ve argued before, it should mean adopting the position that seeking to join would be desirable but is not feasible until such time as all the other main parties either accept this or, at least, undertake not to reverse such a process were it begun. This would at least bring some clarity to the “row”, forcing Tory and Reform Brexiters to discuss and defend Brexit, as they nowadays seem unwilling to do.
With that clarity might come some honesty, in the sense of the recognition that Brexit has not had majority support for a very long time but also by the recognition that, for so long as there is a distinct possibility that an incoming government would backtrack on it, any process towards joining is impossible (most obviously for the EU). That in turn could be part of a more general recognition, which has been largely absent throughout the Brexit process, that the future of UK-EU relations is not just about what Britain wants but what the EU and its member states want.
Taking all these things together might be the beginning of a recognition that, in the concluding words of an excellent analysis this week by Kirsty Hughes on her ScotEU Substack, “the path back needs strategic, honest, courageous political leaders and renewed, inclusive political debate.”
Deeply embedded dishonesty
However, it is difficult to be optimistic that any of this is about to happen, not least because although dishonesty certainly didn’t begin with Brexit, Brexit has rammed dishonesty so deeply into the body politic that it seems impossible to dislodge. A case in point is another aspect of the fallout from the Gorton & Denton by-election, namely the allegations of ‘family voting’ and voter coercion (with the implication that this had been amongst, specifically, Muslim voters). Last weekend, in what seemed to be an unusually detailed statement, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) announced that their investigation had found “no evidence” that this had occurred.
As I noted in my blog post at the time of the by-election, operators like Nigel Farage trade on the fact that such allegations stick in the public mind whereas even if subsequent investigations show them to be false that is barely noticed. No doubt that is true in this case, not least because whereas the original allegations were given very prominent coverage both in the right-wing press and by broadcasters including the BBC, the GMP’s statement was given far less attention.
But it’s actually worse than that, because the statement was immediately denounced by Farage as an “Establishment whitewash” and “another brushed-under-the-carpet report from the usual suspects”. Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate, also called it a “whitewash” and insisted that “sectarianism is taking over our democracy”, later strongly implying that he didn’t believe the police’s findings.
I’ve noted many times before that this kind of ‘non-falsifiable’ illogic permeated the entirety of the Brexit process and, by extension, now characterises Brexitism. Thus, in this case, had the police found evidence of family voting then, of course, it would be taken as proof that it had occurred. But, when the police found no evidence, this is taken as proof that it not only occurred but is being ‘covered up’.
What is far worse than that (or, rather, is enabled by it, showing why such illogic is dangerous and not just stupid) is how utterly corrosive and corrupting it is: as with depicting judges as ‘enemies of the people’ and civil servants as ‘saboteurs’, the Brexitists are determined to destroy every last vestige of trust in public institutions. Perhaps worst of all is that, whilst attacking the police investigation assists this agenda, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Farage et al. were secretly hoping that wrongdoing had taken place, yielding what would been a prominently reported and easily exploitable scandal.
The travails of MattGPT
Matt Goodwin has also been in the news for another reason. I referred in my previous post to his new book, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which has since been published and widely criticised, including in a debate on GB News during which Goodwin became visibly angry, even at one stage rounding on his ideological soul-mate Miriam Cates, who was chairing.
Indeed, tellingly, even those sympathetic to what might charitably be called Goodwin’s thesis were unimpressed, with one describing the book as the work of a “slopagandist”, another entitling his review “suicide of an author’s credibility”, and a third opining that the nickname ‘MattGPT’ would follow the former academic “to his grave”. By comparison, those less sympathetic were rather gentle in simply calling it “trash”. In fairness, it should be said that Goodwin had his defenders, but fairness also requires saying that the most prominent of these was the swivel-eyed Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson (£).
As the ‘MattGPT’ tag implies, much of the criticism has focussed on what appear to be bogus quotations generated by AI-hallucination (£), to which Goodwin’s rather piquant defence in the debate was that he had put the entire text through an AI checker which had exonerated it from the accusation of the book being AI-generated (though that had not, in fact, been the accusation). But perhaps the more damning criticism is of the misinterpretation of statistics about schoolchildren who have English as an Additional Language (EAL). This sounds rather geeky but is actually important, both in itself and because it creates the suspicion that the way Goodwin represented the EAL statistics was not the only way in which data had been manipulated in pursuit of the book’s claims.
In official statistics, “a pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English. This measure is not a measure of English language proficiency or a good proxy for recent immigration” (p.4 of link). On this basis, between 20% and 25% of pupils have EAL. From this, Goodwin seems to infer that they have either no, or at least impaired or deficient, proficiency in English.
However, according to Steve Strand, Professor of Education at Oxford University, Goodwin “is totally misunderstanding what this measure of EAL is. He keeps talking about English not being young people’s first language, but you could be recorded as EAL and still be totally fluent in English. So he’s not understanding the question that underlies the data.” Strand’s argument is borne out by the fact that, according to Department for Education’s 2020 report, in Spring 2018 some 61% of EAL schoolchildren were either fluent or competent in English [1].
Moreover, Goodwin claims that in schools in areas where EAL rates are high “English is no longer the main language” which carries at least the implication that some other language is, whereas, of course, in such situations English is, so to speak, the lingua franca. In that sense, what the EAL statistics actually show is exactly what would be expected from assimilating immigrants. At home, their children are exposed to and use another language, but in the public sphere, at school (and subsequently, no doubt, at work), they are additionally exposed to and use English. But in Goodwin’s telling it is sinister evidence that a process of ‘cultural erasure’ is underway.
Plastic patriots become counterfeit Christians
That same proposition is evident in the latest seasonal panic that Easter eggs are no longer called by that name, every aspect of which has been discredited by Emma Monks on her Monk Debunks Substack. But whilst, like the similar panics that Christmas has been replaced by ‘Winterval’, this is tediously familiar, it has a new salience because of the notable recent shift in the rhetoric of populist leaders towards stressing Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.
Admittedly, theologians might question the sacramental status of the chocolate Easter Egg, just as they might wonder if Tommy Robinson’s conversion is any more genuine than his name, be puzzled by Reform MP Robert Jenrick’s reference to “Psalm Sunday” (sic), and ponder the sacerdotal credentials of ‘Bishop’ Ceirion Dewar of Ceirion H. Dewar Ministries Ltd. But there is no doubt that there has been a profound change in the language being used by the populist right.
Nor is it just matter of language. It is also evident in what is emerging as Reform’s “family friendly” policy agenda – an agenda set out with great clarity by Lisa Burton in Yorkshire Bylines – with all it implies for abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights generally. One reason for these developments is the influence of US populists on their UK counterparts. It may also be relevant that Paul Marshall, so pivotal to British populists especially through his co-ownership of GB News, moves in those circles and is himself an evangelical Christian with a reportedly “spiritual mission” to fight ‘progressivism’ (which appears actually to mean post-Enlightenment rationality).
There is an obvious connection between these three stories – the discredited allegations of ‘family voting’, Goodwin’s discredited account of EAL statistics, and the discredited stories about the cancellation of Easter: they all circle around the same theme of ‘cultural erasure’ at the hands of Muslims, aided and abetted by the liberal ‘woke’ elite. And it is a message pouring in torrents across social media, and much of the print and broadcast media, every day, in the coverage of hundreds of different stories.
Another recent example is the spate of images of schoolchildren exercising on yoga mats carrying the false claim that they are being forced to participate in Muslim prayers. Yet another is the frenzied reaction to a BBC discussion about whether there are too many ‘dog-friendly’ spaces, representing it as a woke attempt to impose Muslim sensibilities upon the nation (it was actually about people who are scared of dogs). These, and innumerable other examples, are small-scale in themselves but it is that which makes them potent as tessellations of the same basic message.
But there is another connection between all these stories, and it is one which links directly back to Brexit.
Vibe politics
As these various stories have unfolded over the last fortnight, I have been looking at the social media responses not just from the big names of the culture wars but from the rank-and-file posters. What that reveals is not so much that the rebuttals of them are ignored as that they are discounted. That is, it may be accepted that such-and-such a detail is wrong, but, nevertheless, ‘we all know’ that the bigger truth holds good. This is the significance of the cumulative effect of similar stories. It creates a politics of ‘vibes’ just as with Brexit the effect of years of media stories made it “feel” as if we had lost sovereignty.
Of course, vibe politics is nothing new. Think of Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Think, for that matter, of the 1950s Macmillanite message that we “have never had it so good”. What is distinctive about populism is that it trades on ‘feel-bad’ rather than ‘feel-good’ vibes: on grievance, resentment, and fear. That, too, is evident in the stories I have just discussed and is absolutely central to the claims of ‘cultural erasure’.
I haven’t talked about the war in this post, since its deepening spiral only serves to re-enforce points which I’ve previously made. But Nigel Farage has been speaking about the war. Not, needless to say, the war the US has unleashed in the Middle East, about which, after his original Trump-crawl, he has been remarkably coy. No, as usual it was the Second World War or, more particularly, a single moment within it.
Thus, launching Reform’s London local government election campaign in Croydon, under its current and perhaps ill-advised slogan of ‘Reform will fix it’, he spluttered that: “This is, this is, this is 1940 all over again. The very existence of our nation, its culture, its identity is under threat.” It is the same message of a ‘nation in existential peril’ that Goodwin peddles; the same message as that of the ‘family voting’ accusations; the same message as is contained in the stories about Easter eggs, yoga mats, dogs, and all the rest of it.
Farage is right, though, to say that history is repeating itself. Not in the sense that it is 1940 all over again, but because it is 2015 all over again. Then, too, he was bloviating about 1940 but at that time it was to tell us it was the EU referendum which was “our modern day Battle of Britain”. Once again, Brexit has morphed into Brexitism.
It’s this repetition, this stuckness in the same myths and vibe-based messages, and the fact that, like it or not, they continue to resonate for perhaps a quarter or even a third of the adult population, and to be amplified by a phalanx of media commentors, which makes British politics so irredeemably dishonest, and the possibility of honesty about Brexit, specifically, so elusive.
With that happy thought I leave you to enjoy, to use the term cruelly stolen when the nasty Normans erased our culture and language, Ēostre.
Note
[1] The report notes that it is not possible to provide comparable figures for children for whom English is their first/ sole language, but it should not be assumed that all such children are fluent or competent.
Showing posts with label Culture wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture wars. Show all posts
Friday, 3 April 2026
Friday, 6 March 2026
Real war and culture war
Much of the news of the last fortnight has been pushed into the background by last weekend’s US-Israel attack on Iran and the regional conflict it has engendered. Where this will end is unclear, not least since it has no coherent aims. That is mainly well beyond the scope of this blog, but there are plenty of connections with Brexit and Brexitism.
Post-Brexit geo-politics
One is just that, as with Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine, not to mention climate change and tariff wars, it is yet another example of an international crisis where the UK’s position and interests are far closer to those of countries like France and Germany, and the EU generally, than to the US. Indeed, as regards Iran, specifically, that has been obvious since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. Now, however the conflict proceeds, it is almost inevitable that the EU and the UK will face common challenges in living with its aftermath which, if only for geographical reasons, will impinge far more on the European continent than on the US. As such, the crisis is a reminder of the fundamental strategic incongruity of Brexit.
It also, again as with other crises, provides a further illustration of the additional pressures Brexit places on the UK in its attempt to navigate around Trump’s capriciousness, spite, and bullying. As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr argued, there are no good options for Keir Starmer in this situation. Nor would there be for any other Prime Minister. I don’t, however, entirely agree with Behr that Starmer’s response pleases nobody. Personally, I think he has handled it as well as anyone could and many commentators, including Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (£), have said something similar.
Rather, the point is that Starmer is now so beleaguered that his many opponents are unwilling to give him any credit at all, or even to acknowledge that there are any difficulties or dilemmas for the UK. And even amongst those who are willing to acknowledge those difficulties, his position means he has very little goodwill or political capital to draw upon. Thus there are at least hints in the opinion polls so far that the public support the way the war is being handled whilst thinking that Starmer is handling it badly.
The Brexit imprint
The particular way that the domestic discussion has played out so far also bears the imprint of Brexit and Brexitism. There are many nuances to this, but in very broad terms public opinion polls show that the supporters of Reform and the Conservatives are considerably more likely to favour allowing the US to use UK bases to attack Iran than those of Labour, the Greens and the LibDems. Certainly the leaders of the former two parties castigated Starmer for not initially agreeing to such usage, as well as for being supposedly deficient, or at least dilatory, in protecting British military installations and assets in the conflict region.
Amongst the nuances, one of the more interesting is that, unlike Farage and Reform, Rupert Lowe and his new Restore Britain party are opposed to all UK involvement in the conflict (warning: links to the X cesspit where Lowe has found his natural home). This reflects a longstanding tension within the nationalist right between jingoistic bellicosity and isolationism, and in the past Farage, too, has been sceptical about UK military interventionism. Now this has become a new front in the growing schism, discussed in my previous post, between Reform and the even more extreme, or at least more openly extreme, far-right groups such as Lowe’s.
Of course, exactly the same tension exists in the US right, with Trump and the MAGA movement having in the past abjured such entanglements, especially in the Middle East. Trump’s new-found willingness for military adventurism has many explanations, including, I suspect, egotistical pleasure. But perhaps the key point is that what he and MAGA most objected to was the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’, which even in its least defensible manifestations had, or at least attempted to create, the façade of moral justification.
Trump’s doctrine, chillingly articulated by Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth this week, is an almost Nietzschean paean to a “warrior ethos” which disdains not just any residue of concern for international law but even “stupid rules of engagement”. As with any bully, the ultimate justification is the simple one: ‘because I can’. No doubt this has its own appeal to Farage, the one-time Flashman of Dulwich College, even were he not minded to support any initiative of Mr. Brexit, his hero in the White House, regardless of its merits. That support does not, of course, lead him to think Britain should accept any of the refugees the conflict will inevitably create and on this, at least, he and Lowe are agreed.
The intensifying culture war
There is also a more direct connection between Brexitism and the political reaction to the Iran crisis, articulated most clearly, and most disgracefully, by Kemi Badenoch when she alleged that Starmer’s initial decision to deny the US use of UK airbases was due to his desire to pander to Muslim voters. She explicitly spliced this together with the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election (discussed in more detail below) adding to what has been a deeply unpleasant upsurge in the culture war demonization of British Muslims.
Yet, as is shown not just by Lowe’s anti-war stance but that of some Tory MPs, including the most senior and one of the most right-wing of them, Sir Edward Leigh, as well as many MPs of all parties, opposition to or concern about UK involvement spans all political positions, ethnicities and faiths (even assuming, which is surely unwarranted, that ‘Muslims’ en masse have a particular view of it). For that matter, the majority of the general public (excluding ‘don’t knows’) are opposed to UK airbases being used by the US [1], something which only the exceptionally dull-minded need to be told does not imply support for Iran’s despicable theocratic regime. Why, then, ascribe Starmer’s decision to Muslims? And if this was its reason, then how does Badenoch explain the subsequent decision to allow the use of bases for ‘defensive’ operations?
Inevitably, Badenoch’s accusation was subsequently echoed by Trump, allowing him to return to his habitual attacks on Britain’s supposed ‘unrecognizability’ (which is code for Muslim immigration) and on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as to repeat his criticism of Starmer’s lack of support for the war against Iran. This in turn allowed Badenoch, Farage, and others to criticize Starmer for damaging UK-US relations, and so the whole crazy, cross-pollinating stupidity rolls on and on. It is a grim irony that the Brexiters, who set such store by sovereignty, demand total fealty to a foreign president. And a grim reminder of their bogus patriotism that they encourage and amplify the verbal attacks of that president upon their own country.
Badenoch’s accusation was also a manifestation of an explosion of quite vile, as well as dishonest, claims on social media that the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, had joined Muslims for a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and another making the same claim about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud. These and similar claims were based on photographs that were self-evidently taken well before Khamanei was killed and had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his death. Yet they were circulated by numerous high-profile right-wing figures, as influential as they are unhinged, ranging from Allison Pearson to John Cleese, and shared thousands, if not millions, of times. (I’m not going to link to this sewage, so readers will have to take my word for it.)
In this way, all of the now familiar skein of interconnections between the US and UK populist right, Brexiters, Brexitists, and the post-Brexit rise of ethnonationalism have been in evidence in the domestic response to the Iran crisis [2]. No doubt that would have been true in any event, but, as Badenoch’s intervention illustrates, it took on a particular hue because of the previous week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton.
The Gorton and Denton result
The first thing to say about that is that Reform, and their peculiar and obnoxious candidate Matt Goodwin, failed to win. Of course, it would have been remarkable had they done so, as this was not an obvious target seat for them, but it bears saying because there had been a sense, purveyed not just by the party but the drama-hungry media, that victory was within grasp. And that did not seem impossible given opinion polls showing an almost even three-way split in support between Reform, Greens, and Labour. Had it gone Reform’s way, that would undoubtedly have generated a rash of commentary about Reform being on an unstoppable journey to government.
So it matters that Reform failed, and failed by a significant margin. It also matters that, as happened at Caerphilly, when there was a route to defeat Reform and to reject Labour, voters took it. Thus in Gorton and Denton the Green vote (presumably) comprised those who straightforwardly support the Greens, those who voted Green to stop Reform, and those who voted Green as a rejection of Labour. By the day of the election, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were just slightly more likely to defeat Reform than Labour, making the choice for those to whom this was the top priority just slightly easier. Whether, had that not been the case, anti-Reform voters would have been willing to vote Labour is unknowable, but is something which will have an important bearing on the next general election.
Family voting?
What we can be sure of is that, had Reform won, by even a handful of votes, they would have hailed it as a democratic triumph in which the ‘silent majority’ of ‘ordinary, decent people’ had decisively spoken. As it was, they latched on to reports made by an organization called ‘Democracy Volunteers’, that there had been unusual volumes of ‘family voting’. This term, which refers to a practice outlawed by the 2023 Secret Ballots Act, seemed to be code for the claim that Muslim men had accompanied their female relatives into the polling booths and coerced them into voting for – presumably – the Greens. (Though, who knows, perhaps the implication was that white Christian Conservative patriarchs were reasserting ‘traditional family values’ by forcing their womenfolk to vote for Goodwin.)
There was a certain amount of social media ribaldry about the idea that the socially liberal female candidate of a party led by a gay Jewish man might have been the candidate of choice amongst traditionalist Muslim men. But, whilst that isn’t an unreasonable observation to make, it perhaps misses the nature of the accusation being made, which was two-fold: that the Green Party had concealed its social liberalism from some Muslim voters in election leaflets written in Urdu, and that the appeal it had for such voters was in its critique of Israel and support for Palestinians.
However, equally, even if these accusations were true, those making them never explained what is so wrong with emphasizing the party’s positions on these issues to voters who might support them, regardless of its position on other issues. All (successful) political parties build coalitions of voters with disparate, and often contradictory, priorities. We might also recall how, during the referendum, the Leave campaign deliberately and skillfully targeted different voter groups, including different ethnic groups, with messages tailored to their perceived concerns.
Whether or not the charge of ‘family voting’ was true, which is contested and is (rightly) under investigation, and despite that fact that, even if true, it is arithmetically implausible to think it could have been a clinching factor given the size of the Green majority, it quickly became linked to the claim that the Greens had won on the basis of “sectarianism”. This again seemed to be code for making an appeal to Muslims, or perhaps just anyone with dark skin. From this exploded a whole series of accusations about rigged postal voting and “foreign-born voters” having “stolen” the election.
These were not just social media talking points but, for example, were splashed on the front page of the Mail. This culminated in Farage announcing that Reform’s policy is now that foreigners will be banned from voting in elections, a reference to the longstanding right of nationals from qualifying Commonwealth countries, lawfully resident in the UK, to vote. One might now question the diligence with which Goodwin, if elected, would have worked for all his constituents and, for that matter, that of the existing Reform MPs in this respect.
Hypocrisy and ethno-nationalist sectarianism
It would be quite some task to unpick all the layers of hypocrisy in all this, so I’ll just make a few points. One is that Farage has constantly made complaints about electoral fraud, going back to at least 2014 which have rarely, if ever, been proven. But of course for operators like Farage that doesn’t matter: the accusation lodges in the public mind whereas the subsequent investigation showing it to be false is barely noticed. Another is to recall his own sanctimonious finger-wagging at ‘remainers’, when he insisted that "for a civilised democracy to work you need the losers' consent”. A third is how he, and other Brexiters, sought to galvanize Commonwealth immigrant voters to support Brexit. Indeed, many Brexiters argued that EU Freedom of Movement was effectively racist in discriminating against Commonwealth, especially South Asian, immigration.
Hypocrisy aside, these highly racialized allegations of electoral fraud have a particular salience because of the recent surge of ethno-nationalism, which now calls into question whether British nationals are ‘really’ British and/or English if they, or perhaps even their parents and grandparents, were not born here, at least if they are not white. It is actually this, if anything, which deserves the label of ‘sectarianism’ and, moreover, rather than sectarianism explaining the Green’s victory, it was the sectarianism of pitching almost entirely to ‘white working class’ voters which explains Reform’s failure to win.
What Reform’s reaction to this failure shows is that it will not be enough to defeat them (and similar parties) at the ballot box in order to expunge their influence. Indeed, there seems every prospect, and some indication, that if Reform fail to win the next general election then, Trump-like, they will cry foul. It may even be that, just as it often seemed as if the Brexiters would have preferred to have lost the referendum, the Brexitists would prefer to lose the next election, but to destabilize the country even further by positioning the victors as illegitimate and the entire democratic system as corrupted.
Questions for Labour
Against this background, the Gorton and Denton result also posed some serious questions for the Labour Party. At one level, these can be thought about in terms of electoral strategy and, as such, their answer is pretty obvious and has been very widely identified. That answer can be expressed in various ways, but was summed up by Sadiq Khan’s argument that Labour have to “stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives”. In effect, this is “the real leadership crisis” facing Keir Starmer which I discussed in my previous post.
However, the issues go much deeper than Starmer and much longer ago, after the 2021 Hartlepool by election, I set out some of these. Not all of that post has stood the test of time [3], but the central point holds: in very brief, the need to calibrate to representing Labour’s actual (potential) electoral coalition rather than that which historically existed. In that post, and elsewhere (£), I pointed out that part of the barrier to this is one of political psychology, whereby the party is heavily invested in the idea that male manual workers in manufacturing industry are the template for working-class authenticity. Since then, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is actually a manifestation of precisely the same nostalgia which is now so evident as a driver for the political right and Brexitism.
Labour’s terrible answers
As mentioned in my most recent post, there seemed to be a possibility that the ‘defenestration’ of Morgan McSweeney might mark an end to this kind of ‘Blue Labourism’ (though its grip on Labour goes deeper than McSweeney or his mentor Maurice Glasman). I finished that post by saying it was doubtful whether Starmer could rise to the challenge. There is now really no longer any room for doubt.
Starmer responded to the Greens’ by-election victory by making precisely the same accusation of “sectarianism” that Farage had levelled and, by linking this to the endorsement given to the Greens by the odious George Galloway, implicitly mirrored Reform’s claims about Islamification having played a decisive role. It was repellent in itself and, like so much else that Starmer does, politically maladroit, not least in ignoring what no doubt will have been the agonizing choice for some habitual Labour voters to support the Greens as the best chance of defeating Reform. That, as with his infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, he later distanced himself from what he has said only underscores the maladroitness
At the same time, Shabana Mahmood announced that she intends to press ahead with her hard-line anti-immigration reforms. These include, most shamefully, retrospectively increasing the amount of time before existing immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and making asylum awards temporary. Again, this is politically maladroit, just at the basic level of garnering electoral support: it won’t satisfy those minded to vote Reform and it will repel those minded to desert Labour to vote Green etc. And if, as may well happen, internal Labour opposition leads to it being abandoned then it will be chalked up not as a return to principle but yet another U-turn.
It is also maladroit in a more general sense. Labour’s most compelling pitch at the last election was that it would offer competence, but this policy is woefully incompetent in the context of now rapidly declining immigration and the economic need for more, and not less, immigration. It thus directly contradicts the government’s central policy of boosting economic growth as well as exacerbating its fiscal constraints. It is even incompetent in terms of any policy aim of integration, since making it harder to qualify for permanent residence makes it less likely that immigrants will integrate.
The competence issue matters because what is at stake here is not, as many commentators claim and, no doubt, some political activists and voters hope, that Labour need to respond to the by-election defeat with a ‘lurch to the left’. Setting an immigration policy which is fair, rational, and consonant with economic and demographic needs is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Operating an efficient and humane asylum process is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Making a clear distinction between immigration and asylum policies is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. To think otherwise is to cede the idea that these are somehow ‘extreme’ propositions and that the policies of virtually zero immigration, mass deportation, and the near-total rejection of asylum seekers advocated by Reform and others are the ‘norm’ or ‘moderate’.
Yet this is what the Labour government has accepted, and it is the most glaring way in which it has accepted Brexitism. Of course it is also this which has always lain at the heart of the timidity of the Brexit ‘reset’ with the EU, a reset which even in its own limited terms was denounced this week (£) by the Commons foreign affairs committee as “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If there was not so much other news, I would have more to say about that, including about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ claim that she wants to go further in breaking down trade barriers with the EU. Since there is no evidence, and surely no possibility, that this presages a break with Labour’s ‘red lines’, for now all that needs to be said is that the dishonesty and delusions of Brexit and Brexitism continue unabated.
Small comforts
It’s hard to feel anything other than pessimism at the moment. However this war develops, as always with war it will be ordinary, blameless people who simply want to lead ordinary, peaceful lives who suffer most. Something similar could be said of those being relentlessly attacked in the domestic culture wars.
There is only a small, though not entirely negligible, comfort in being spared the spectacle of Matt Goodwin pontificating on these matters in the House of Commons. But perhaps a slightly greater one in what that may betoken about the British electorate.
Notes
[1] The way this question was asked in the survey linked to does not really disclose what the public think about the subtle but important distinction between the use of UK bases for the attack on Iran (which the government did not grant) and their use to launch defensive operations against Iranian counter-attacks which may imperil British subjects and assets (which the government approved). If it did, I suspect that the public would support the government’s decisions in both respects. That seems to be borne out by other survey data about what the UK’s military response to the war should be.
[2] There’s a whole post that could be written about that fact that somewhere in that skein is Dubai. Lauded by Richard Tice as an exemplar of safety, it has become a magnet for right-wing Britishimmigrants expats, most prominently Tice’s partner, the reliably graceless ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott (£). There, such proud patriots gloat, one can escape the roving gangs, ‘two-tier’ justice, and Orwellian suppressions of the right to incite murder – not to mention, of course, the taxes – of ‘Broken Britain’. As a view of what some have called the “gangsters’ paradise” of Dubai, it was always as hopelessly one-sided as the depiction of Britain. Now, with a certain piquancy (£), our intrepid correspondent reports that “expats brace of what tomorrow may bring” (£) as the British State organizes a rather different repatriation to that envisaged by some of her co-ideologues. Equally piquant is the news (£) of those desperately trying to get back to Dubai so as to avoid falling foul of rules to qualify for tax residency.
[3] The most egregious failing is that I assumed, not unreasonably, but as it has out turned mistakenly, that Boris Johnson had re-made the Conservatives as an electorally successful populist party and seen off the challenge of Farage.
Post-Brexit geo-politics
One is just that, as with Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine, not to mention climate change and tariff wars, it is yet another example of an international crisis where the UK’s position and interests are far closer to those of countries like France and Germany, and the EU generally, than to the US. Indeed, as regards Iran, specifically, that has been obvious since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. Now, however the conflict proceeds, it is almost inevitable that the EU and the UK will face common challenges in living with its aftermath which, if only for geographical reasons, will impinge far more on the European continent than on the US. As such, the crisis is a reminder of the fundamental strategic incongruity of Brexit.
It also, again as with other crises, provides a further illustration of the additional pressures Brexit places on the UK in its attempt to navigate around Trump’s capriciousness, spite, and bullying. As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr argued, there are no good options for Keir Starmer in this situation. Nor would there be for any other Prime Minister. I don’t, however, entirely agree with Behr that Starmer’s response pleases nobody. Personally, I think he has handled it as well as anyone could and many commentators, including Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (£), have said something similar.
Rather, the point is that Starmer is now so beleaguered that his many opponents are unwilling to give him any credit at all, or even to acknowledge that there are any difficulties or dilemmas for the UK. And even amongst those who are willing to acknowledge those difficulties, his position means he has very little goodwill or political capital to draw upon. Thus there are at least hints in the opinion polls so far that the public support the way the war is being handled whilst thinking that Starmer is handling it badly.
The Brexit imprint
The particular way that the domestic discussion has played out so far also bears the imprint of Brexit and Brexitism. There are many nuances to this, but in very broad terms public opinion polls show that the supporters of Reform and the Conservatives are considerably more likely to favour allowing the US to use UK bases to attack Iran than those of Labour, the Greens and the LibDems. Certainly the leaders of the former two parties castigated Starmer for not initially agreeing to such usage, as well as for being supposedly deficient, or at least dilatory, in protecting British military installations and assets in the conflict region.
Amongst the nuances, one of the more interesting is that, unlike Farage and Reform, Rupert Lowe and his new Restore Britain party are opposed to all UK involvement in the conflict (warning: links to the X cesspit where Lowe has found his natural home). This reflects a longstanding tension within the nationalist right between jingoistic bellicosity and isolationism, and in the past Farage, too, has been sceptical about UK military interventionism. Now this has become a new front in the growing schism, discussed in my previous post, between Reform and the even more extreme, or at least more openly extreme, far-right groups such as Lowe’s.
Of course, exactly the same tension exists in the US right, with Trump and the MAGA movement having in the past abjured such entanglements, especially in the Middle East. Trump’s new-found willingness for military adventurism has many explanations, including, I suspect, egotistical pleasure. But perhaps the key point is that what he and MAGA most objected to was the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’, which even in its least defensible manifestations had, or at least attempted to create, the façade of moral justification.
Trump’s doctrine, chillingly articulated by Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth this week, is an almost Nietzschean paean to a “warrior ethos” which disdains not just any residue of concern for international law but even “stupid rules of engagement”. As with any bully, the ultimate justification is the simple one: ‘because I can’. No doubt this has its own appeal to Farage, the one-time Flashman of Dulwich College, even were he not minded to support any initiative of Mr. Brexit, his hero in the White House, regardless of its merits. That support does not, of course, lead him to think Britain should accept any of the refugees the conflict will inevitably create and on this, at least, he and Lowe are agreed.
The intensifying culture war
There is also a more direct connection between Brexitism and the political reaction to the Iran crisis, articulated most clearly, and most disgracefully, by Kemi Badenoch when she alleged that Starmer’s initial decision to deny the US use of UK airbases was due to his desire to pander to Muslim voters. She explicitly spliced this together with the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election (discussed in more detail below) adding to what has been a deeply unpleasant upsurge in the culture war demonization of British Muslims.
Yet, as is shown not just by Lowe’s anti-war stance but that of some Tory MPs, including the most senior and one of the most right-wing of them, Sir Edward Leigh, as well as many MPs of all parties, opposition to or concern about UK involvement spans all political positions, ethnicities and faiths (even assuming, which is surely unwarranted, that ‘Muslims’ en masse have a particular view of it). For that matter, the majority of the general public (excluding ‘don’t knows’) are opposed to UK airbases being used by the US [1], something which only the exceptionally dull-minded need to be told does not imply support for Iran’s despicable theocratic regime. Why, then, ascribe Starmer’s decision to Muslims? And if this was its reason, then how does Badenoch explain the subsequent decision to allow the use of bases for ‘defensive’ operations?
Inevitably, Badenoch’s accusation was subsequently echoed by Trump, allowing him to return to his habitual attacks on Britain’s supposed ‘unrecognizability’ (which is code for Muslim immigration) and on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as to repeat his criticism of Starmer’s lack of support for the war against Iran. This in turn allowed Badenoch, Farage, and others to criticize Starmer for damaging UK-US relations, and so the whole crazy, cross-pollinating stupidity rolls on and on. It is a grim irony that the Brexiters, who set such store by sovereignty, demand total fealty to a foreign president. And a grim reminder of their bogus patriotism that they encourage and amplify the verbal attacks of that president upon their own country.
Badenoch’s accusation was also a manifestation of an explosion of quite vile, as well as dishonest, claims on social media that the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, had joined Muslims for a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and another making the same claim about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud. These and similar claims were based on photographs that were self-evidently taken well before Khamanei was killed and had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his death. Yet they were circulated by numerous high-profile right-wing figures, as influential as they are unhinged, ranging from Allison Pearson to John Cleese, and shared thousands, if not millions, of times. (I’m not going to link to this sewage, so readers will have to take my word for it.)
In this way, all of the now familiar skein of interconnections between the US and UK populist right, Brexiters, Brexitists, and the post-Brexit rise of ethnonationalism have been in evidence in the domestic response to the Iran crisis [2]. No doubt that would have been true in any event, but, as Badenoch’s intervention illustrates, it took on a particular hue because of the previous week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton.
The Gorton and Denton result
The first thing to say about that is that Reform, and their peculiar and obnoxious candidate Matt Goodwin, failed to win. Of course, it would have been remarkable had they done so, as this was not an obvious target seat for them, but it bears saying because there had been a sense, purveyed not just by the party but the drama-hungry media, that victory was within grasp. And that did not seem impossible given opinion polls showing an almost even three-way split in support between Reform, Greens, and Labour. Had it gone Reform’s way, that would undoubtedly have generated a rash of commentary about Reform being on an unstoppable journey to government.
So it matters that Reform failed, and failed by a significant margin. It also matters that, as happened at Caerphilly, when there was a route to defeat Reform and to reject Labour, voters took it. Thus in Gorton and Denton the Green vote (presumably) comprised those who straightforwardly support the Greens, those who voted Green to stop Reform, and those who voted Green as a rejection of Labour. By the day of the election, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were just slightly more likely to defeat Reform than Labour, making the choice for those to whom this was the top priority just slightly easier. Whether, had that not been the case, anti-Reform voters would have been willing to vote Labour is unknowable, but is something which will have an important bearing on the next general election.
Family voting?
What we can be sure of is that, had Reform won, by even a handful of votes, they would have hailed it as a democratic triumph in which the ‘silent majority’ of ‘ordinary, decent people’ had decisively spoken. As it was, they latched on to reports made by an organization called ‘Democracy Volunteers’, that there had been unusual volumes of ‘family voting’. This term, which refers to a practice outlawed by the 2023 Secret Ballots Act, seemed to be code for the claim that Muslim men had accompanied their female relatives into the polling booths and coerced them into voting for – presumably – the Greens. (Though, who knows, perhaps the implication was that white Christian Conservative patriarchs were reasserting ‘traditional family values’ by forcing their womenfolk to vote for Goodwin.)
There was a certain amount of social media ribaldry about the idea that the socially liberal female candidate of a party led by a gay Jewish man might have been the candidate of choice amongst traditionalist Muslim men. But, whilst that isn’t an unreasonable observation to make, it perhaps misses the nature of the accusation being made, which was two-fold: that the Green Party had concealed its social liberalism from some Muslim voters in election leaflets written in Urdu, and that the appeal it had for such voters was in its critique of Israel and support for Palestinians.
However, equally, even if these accusations were true, those making them never explained what is so wrong with emphasizing the party’s positions on these issues to voters who might support them, regardless of its position on other issues. All (successful) political parties build coalitions of voters with disparate, and often contradictory, priorities. We might also recall how, during the referendum, the Leave campaign deliberately and skillfully targeted different voter groups, including different ethnic groups, with messages tailored to their perceived concerns.
Whether or not the charge of ‘family voting’ was true, which is contested and is (rightly) under investigation, and despite that fact that, even if true, it is arithmetically implausible to think it could have been a clinching factor given the size of the Green majority, it quickly became linked to the claim that the Greens had won on the basis of “sectarianism”. This again seemed to be code for making an appeal to Muslims, or perhaps just anyone with dark skin. From this exploded a whole series of accusations about rigged postal voting and “foreign-born voters” having “stolen” the election.
These were not just social media talking points but, for example, were splashed on the front page of the Mail. This culminated in Farage announcing that Reform’s policy is now that foreigners will be banned from voting in elections, a reference to the longstanding right of nationals from qualifying Commonwealth countries, lawfully resident in the UK, to vote. One might now question the diligence with which Goodwin, if elected, would have worked for all his constituents and, for that matter, that of the existing Reform MPs in this respect.
Hypocrisy and ethno-nationalist sectarianism
It would be quite some task to unpick all the layers of hypocrisy in all this, so I’ll just make a few points. One is that Farage has constantly made complaints about electoral fraud, going back to at least 2014 which have rarely, if ever, been proven. But of course for operators like Farage that doesn’t matter: the accusation lodges in the public mind whereas the subsequent investigation showing it to be false is barely noticed. Another is to recall his own sanctimonious finger-wagging at ‘remainers’, when he insisted that "for a civilised democracy to work you need the losers' consent”. A third is how he, and other Brexiters, sought to galvanize Commonwealth immigrant voters to support Brexit. Indeed, many Brexiters argued that EU Freedom of Movement was effectively racist in discriminating against Commonwealth, especially South Asian, immigration.
Hypocrisy aside, these highly racialized allegations of electoral fraud have a particular salience because of the recent surge of ethno-nationalism, which now calls into question whether British nationals are ‘really’ British and/or English if they, or perhaps even their parents and grandparents, were not born here, at least if they are not white. It is actually this, if anything, which deserves the label of ‘sectarianism’ and, moreover, rather than sectarianism explaining the Green’s victory, it was the sectarianism of pitching almost entirely to ‘white working class’ voters which explains Reform’s failure to win.
What Reform’s reaction to this failure shows is that it will not be enough to defeat them (and similar parties) at the ballot box in order to expunge their influence. Indeed, there seems every prospect, and some indication, that if Reform fail to win the next general election then, Trump-like, they will cry foul. It may even be that, just as it often seemed as if the Brexiters would have preferred to have lost the referendum, the Brexitists would prefer to lose the next election, but to destabilize the country even further by positioning the victors as illegitimate and the entire democratic system as corrupted.
Questions for Labour
Against this background, the Gorton and Denton result also posed some serious questions for the Labour Party. At one level, these can be thought about in terms of electoral strategy and, as such, their answer is pretty obvious and has been very widely identified. That answer can be expressed in various ways, but was summed up by Sadiq Khan’s argument that Labour have to “stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives”. In effect, this is “the real leadership crisis” facing Keir Starmer which I discussed in my previous post.
However, the issues go much deeper than Starmer and much longer ago, after the 2021 Hartlepool by election, I set out some of these. Not all of that post has stood the test of time [3], but the central point holds: in very brief, the need to calibrate to representing Labour’s actual (potential) electoral coalition rather than that which historically existed. In that post, and elsewhere (£), I pointed out that part of the barrier to this is one of political psychology, whereby the party is heavily invested in the idea that male manual workers in manufacturing industry are the template for working-class authenticity. Since then, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is actually a manifestation of precisely the same nostalgia which is now so evident as a driver for the political right and Brexitism.
Labour’s terrible answers
As mentioned in my most recent post, there seemed to be a possibility that the ‘defenestration’ of Morgan McSweeney might mark an end to this kind of ‘Blue Labourism’ (though its grip on Labour goes deeper than McSweeney or his mentor Maurice Glasman). I finished that post by saying it was doubtful whether Starmer could rise to the challenge. There is now really no longer any room for doubt.
Starmer responded to the Greens’ by-election victory by making precisely the same accusation of “sectarianism” that Farage had levelled and, by linking this to the endorsement given to the Greens by the odious George Galloway, implicitly mirrored Reform’s claims about Islamification having played a decisive role. It was repellent in itself and, like so much else that Starmer does, politically maladroit, not least in ignoring what no doubt will have been the agonizing choice for some habitual Labour voters to support the Greens as the best chance of defeating Reform. That, as with his infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, he later distanced himself from what he has said only underscores the maladroitness
At the same time, Shabana Mahmood announced that she intends to press ahead with her hard-line anti-immigration reforms. These include, most shamefully, retrospectively increasing the amount of time before existing immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and making asylum awards temporary. Again, this is politically maladroit, just at the basic level of garnering electoral support: it won’t satisfy those minded to vote Reform and it will repel those minded to desert Labour to vote Green etc. And if, as may well happen, internal Labour opposition leads to it being abandoned then it will be chalked up not as a return to principle but yet another U-turn.
It is also maladroit in a more general sense. Labour’s most compelling pitch at the last election was that it would offer competence, but this policy is woefully incompetent in the context of now rapidly declining immigration and the economic need for more, and not less, immigration. It thus directly contradicts the government’s central policy of boosting economic growth as well as exacerbating its fiscal constraints. It is even incompetent in terms of any policy aim of integration, since making it harder to qualify for permanent residence makes it less likely that immigrants will integrate.
The competence issue matters because what is at stake here is not, as many commentators claim and, no doubt, some political activists and voters hope, that Labour need to respond to the by-election defeat with a ‘lurch to the left’. Setting an immigration policy which is fair, rational, and consonant with economic and demographic needs is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Operating an efficient and humane asylum process is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Making a clear distinction between immigration and asylum policies is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. To think otherwise is to cede the idea that these are somehow ‘extreme’ propositions and that the policies of virtually zero immigration, mass deportation, and the near-total rejection of asylum seekers advocated by Reform and others are the ‘norm’ or ‘moderate’.
Yet this is what the Labour government has accepted, and it is the most glaring way in which it has accepted Brexitism. Of course it is also this which has always lain at the heart of the timidity of the Brexit ‘reset’ with the EU, a reset which even in its own limited terms was denounced this week (£) by the Commons foreign affairs committee as “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If there was not so much other news, I would have more to say about that, including about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ claim that she wants to go further in breaking down trade barriers with the EU. Since there is no evidence, and surely no possibility, that this presages a break with Labour’s ‘red lines’, for now all that needs to be said is that the dishonesty and delusions of Brexit and Brexitism continue unabated.
Small comforts
It’s hard to feel anything other than pessimism at the moment. However this war develops, as always with war it will be ordinary, blameless people who simply want to lead ordinary, peaceful lives who suffer most. Something similar could be said of those being relentlessly attacked in the domestic culture wars.
There is only a small, though not entirely negligible, comfort in being spared the spectacle of Matt Goodwin pontificating on these matters in the House of Commons. But perhaps a slightly greater one in what that may betoken about the British electorate.
Notes
[1] The way this question was asked in the survey linked to does not really disclose what the public think about the subtle but important distinction between the use of UK bases for the attack on Iran (which the government did not grant) and their use to launch defensive operations against Iranian counter-attacks which may imperil British subjects and assets (which the government approved). If it did, I suspect that the public would support the government’s decisions in both respects. That seems to be borne out by other survey data about what the UK’s military response to the war should be.
[2] There’s a whole post that could be written about that fact that somewhere in that skein is Dubai. Lauded by Richard Tice as an exemplar of safety, it has become a magnet for right-wing British
[3] The most egregious failing is that I assumed, not unreasonably, but as it has out turned mistakenly, that Boris Johnson had re-made the Conservatives as an electorally successful populist party and seen off the challenge of Farage.
Friday, 12 August 2022
What the leadership contest tells us about Brexit
Against the backdrop of a serious, growing, and multi-faceted economic crisis, the Tory leadership contest grinds on. The two contenders have little to say that matches the scale of this crisis and even less about Brexit, which is not only one of its components but the one most obviously unique to the UK. Nor do they speak of the immediate political problem Brexit will pose for whichever of them wins, namely the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill (NIPB). Yet, for all the silence, Brexit lurks beneath the contest; a ghost, a proxy, an indelible tattoo.
The leadership contest
One proxy is the candidates’ stoking of the anti-woke culture war. For the Brexit vote coded many things including the division between social liberals and social traditionalists and, in the mind of the Brexiters, those who ‘talk the country down’ and ‘those who love Britain’. Like much else about Brexit, this division wasn’t created in 2016 so much as given new zest and, despite existing in a different context, is a continuation of the decades-long whining about ‘political correctness’, the UK version of post-1960s backlash politics.
Indeed, there’s a dated feeling to the entire contest, especially in the constant invocations of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps reflecting the age and political reference points of the selectorate that will choose the next Prime Minister. It’s reminiscent of the way Conservatives still argue about whether Thatcher would or would not have supported Brexit, still vying for the imprimatur of the Iron Lady, or perhaps just for mummy’s approval. Equally, albeit again in a different context, the contest reveals the same contradiction of espousing free market, global free trade economics alongside social traditionalism and nationalism as that within Thatcherism. A similar contradiction, in fact, to that within the voting coalition of globalists and nativists that gave us Brexit.
Of course the many ways in which the context is different to the 1970s and 1980s only serve to reinforce the sense of a disconnect between this political discussion and current realities. The nature of the economic crisis is radically different. The geo-politics of the post-Cold War world are different. The politics of the Union are different. The now inescapable climate crisis is very different. Thoughtful Conservative commentators, such as Tim Pitt (£), warn that “cheap imitations of Thatcherism will not help the next prime minister tackle [these] formidable challenges”, but thoughtful Conservatism is long out of fashion, again in large part because of Brexit and its fallout.
It's not just that today’s issues are different to the 1970s and 80s. So too is political demography: in appealing to the ‘backlash generation’ the Tories have, apparently deliberately, chosen to set themselves against the young, the university-educated, and the urban. Yet, at the same time – and again it continues a trend that began under Thatcher but was spiced up by Brexit – contemporary Conservatives also despise the ‘traditional elites’ of the civil service, judiciary and business that used to form part of their heartlands.
All these groups, and more, are now disparaged in the new, omnipresent insult of ‘the Blob’ and its cognates ‘the remainer Blob’, ‘the Woke Blob’ (£) and ‘the Left Blob’, along with endless sub-variants like ‘the NHS Blob’ (£). It’s a terminology which, in the UK, is one of the many noxious legacies of Dominic Cummings who, when an advisor to the then Education Secretary Michael Gove, coined ‘the Education Blob’ as a term to disparage all those who actually knew anything about education. As such, it bears a family relationship to Gove’s notorious ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ line during the referendum campaign. It has now become a lazy catch-all term of abuse, as well as an excuse for governmental failures.
The (self-)importance of Frost
Woeful though they are, these terms of reference may well be adequate, and perhaps even unavoidable, in a contest pitched at the party membership, although it remains an open question whether they are a viable framing for the general election campaign that must come within two years. They certainly lack any discernible intellectual coherence or merit. But cometh the hour, cometh the man. A hero to many in the Tory Party, he is rumoured to be in line for a significant role if Liz Truss, the current favourite and his preferred candidate, wins. And he has stepped forward in a bid to provide just the coherence that is wanting.
Unfortunately, that man turns out to be David Frost who, with his habitual and limitless self-importance, this week published his Policy Exchange “essay” aspiring to exactly the big picture analysis that would enable the new leader to solve all the nation’s problems. Never one to understate anything, expect perhaps his own mediocrity, he boastfully presents this as an undertaking akin to the ‘Stepping Stones’ report that set a path for – yes, of course – the Thatcher administrations.
Apparently this is an effort that has been many years in the making but which his governmental duties had precluded writing. Now the truth can be told. Yet, for all the years of Frost’s tongue-between-teeth intellectual toil, it is, as the tagging of Thatcher prefigures, for the most part a reheat of her policies of lower taxes and a smaller state. If it differs from the intellectual pitch-rolling 1970s thinktanks undertook for Thatcher, it is mainly in lacking any kind of detailed prescriptions, relying instead on evergreen banalities such as calls to “reform our disgraceful prisons” or to “modernise the NHS”. On the newer challenge of climate change, the dangers of this constituting an ‘emergency’ are loftily dismissed as not being supported by the evidence.
What of Brexit?
One important implication of all this ‘back to Thatcher’ maundering is that almost nothing proposed here, or by the leadership candidates, actually requires Brexit. Indeed the first “pillar” of Frost’s proposals is that “the public must come to feel that we have taken a wrong path and to react against it”. But, hold on, isn’t that exactly what the public had been told, and responded to, in 2016? Wasn’t Brexit the new path? Must we now, just six years later and less than two years since the end of the transition period, embark on yet another new path?
The answer, it seems, is that “Brexit in itself creates neither huge economic advantage nor disadvantage”. Alas, this is not what leave voters were guaranteed in 2016. And puzzlingly, despite this apparent neutrality of Brexit, in the same paragraph Frost asserts that “leaving the EU has already hugely shaped our politics and political economy”. Indeed it is a “huge discontinuity” and yet, apparently, only the prelude to the next one, which will sustain the “Brexit Revolt”. The theme of revolt permeates the essay and presumably informs his grandiose choice of Lenin’s “What is to be done?” as the title of the prescriptive chapter, hard as it is to picture ‘the Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG’ chugging wheezily up the steps of the Winter Palace.
In reality, this call to a new path is a tacit admission that Brexit has failed. Not only are there none of the huge advantages that had been promised, but Frost is forced to concede it has come with “some costs” which he downplays as not “material” and not amounting to the “disasters” predicted. This is the now boilerplate Brexiter position that forgets the promises of ‘sunny uplands’ in favour of the rather more modest definition of success being the avoidance of total disaster. Thus ‘Project Fear’ is supposedly discredited since the effects of Brexit haven’t been as bad as some of the Brexiters’ own hyperbolic renderings of the most extreme warnings, and it is taken as read that all the ‘Establishment’ forecasts have been discredited.
In fact, the Treasury long-term forecast of 2016 for the scenario of Brexit with a UK-EU trade deal, whereby after 15 years GDP is in the range of 4.6%-7.8% lower than it would otherwise have been, now looks as if it will be fairly accurate, with the latest NIESR projection being for 5%-6% lower over 15 years. Those are still projections, but they are consistent with actual performance so far, with the latest CER calculation suggesting that at the last quarter of 2021 GDP was between 4.9% and 5.2% lower than it would have been. By any normal meaning of the term that is, indeed, a huge, and ongoing, economic disadvantage. As for all the reports of other damages of Brexit across just about every sphere of life that have accrued, these are airily dismissed by Frost as “rarely justified by reality”. The running sore of the Northern Ireland Protocol that he negotiated gets even shorter shrift, as no more than an “issue” that “must be resolved”.
Brexit’s coy revolutionaries
The grudging recognition that Brexit has been an economic failure has been growing amongst the Thatcherite Brexiters for a year or so, and I discussed it in detail in a post last December. The proposition it leads to is one re-iterated by Frost. His suggestion is that the problem is the “psychological hangover” of EU membership, which means “the EU is still a reference point for too many issues and policies”. He means, in particular, that this has hampered deregulation and “supply-side reforms”. Yet Frost is very coy about giving any details. The same is true of Sunak and Truss, as well as numerous others, like Mark Sedwill (£) who this week trotted out yet another of the interminable articles in the pro-Brexit press about cutting EU red tape without specifying which rules would go.
So what are the ‘supply-side reforms’ that Frost and the leadership candidates envisage? It’s a loose term, and to talk as they do of deregulation and supply-side reforms is unhelpful as the latter term usually includes the former, alongside free trade and tax cuts. As regards tax cuts, such reform is often associated with the largely discredited ‘Laffer Curve’, which, in brief, suggests that, at least to a certain point, cutting taxes will increase tax revenues and also promote growth. This seems now to the be the basis of both Sunak’s and Truss’s tax plans (itself based, again, on a selective reading of Thatcher-era policies). But since, whatever its dubious virtues, such a policy could be pursued with or without Brexit, and given the particular flagging of the term, it’s obvious that deregulation is a central issue.
The mirage of deregulation
The vagueness about what this deregulation is to consist of is because of a number of inter-related reasons, all of which in different ways relate to the incoherence of the Brexit project. It might refer to regulatory divergence from the EU on things like product standards or data protection. The problem here is that, as the government has already found, such deregulation is unpopular with businesses because it reduces rather than extends the scope of their markets. Indeed that is hardly surprising – these shared regulations are the essence of the single market, and one of the reasons Thatcher herself was a single market enthusiast.
Moreover, in the current global economy, they are very often adopted well beyond the EU single market or, just as often, the EU standards themselves derive from other global bodies. For any one country, especially one that does half its trade with the EU and which is bound, by virtue of proximity, to continue to do a high volume of its trade with the EU, setting its own standards just doesn’t make economic sense. Nor is it compatible with the ‘free trade’ aspect of supply-side reform.
What has happened is that the latter-day Thatcher imitators have mistaken different kinds of regulation and deregulation. Some regulation, including that of the single market, is market-making. In those cases, deregulation reduces rather than extends the market. More than that, in the case of leaving the rules of the single market (and the customs union), it re-instates the regulation that otherwise exists. Hence Brexit has massively increased the ‘red tape’ (or regulatory) burden on trade with the EU even without any regulatory divergence (a common Brexiter myth is that having the same standards ought to mean trading as before, but it doesn’t absent of being part of the regulatory and legal eco-system of the single market: this was the myth that underpinned Liam Fox’s ‘easiest deal in history’ foolishness). Adding regulatory divergence to this will further increase, not decrease, those barriers to trade.
By contrast, some of the Thatcher-era deregulation was market-making. For example, changes to financial services law in the 1980s removed the restrictions on services that Building Societies could offer (e.g. cheque accounts and unsecured loans) so that they could compete with banks. The desirability of that, and other parts of 1980s financial services deregulation, can be debated, of course, but the present point is that this deregulation did indeed extend rather than reduce the market (more precisely, it re-regulated to do so). Thatcher’s Brexiter imitators, including Frost, Rees-Mogg, Sunak and Truss, have wrongly concluded that removing EU regulations from the UK statute book is akin to this kind of deregulation, when in fact it is the opposite. It’s more like getting rid of the laws that enabled building societies and banks to compete, and reverting to the barriers that previously existed so as to segment their markets.
The other aspect of this, and the reason for the coyness about specifics, is that many kinds of deregulation are likely to be highly unpopular not just with businesses but with voters once the implications are known. That applies not just to product and environmental standards but, perhaps even more, to reductions of employment and other rights if, as seems likely, this is the agenda that remains unspoken. Many voters, including many who supported Brexit, will not support that and, depending exactly what is envisaged, it could again militate against free trade aspirations, especially if it violated the level playing field clauses of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
There’s obviously nothing new about these ideas in British politics, nor about the idea that one significant strand of Brexiter motivation was to enact them. But it was only one strand, and as a result Brexit doesn’t give enough cover for it, reflecting the perennial Brexit problem that the 2016 vote was not a vote for any particular meaning of Brexit. Many parts of the leave-voting coalition would bitterly oppose this deregulatory agenda – not just some ‘Red Wall’ nationalist traditionalists but also some ‘Blue Wall’ One Nation liberals. Since this is the same coalition that supported Johnson in 2019, a government under either contestant would struggle to deliver it just as he did. Certainly, it is, at the very least, unclear that they could retain that coalition in a general election fought explicitly upon such a manifesto.
Two faces of Brexit
All of this serves to illustrate the misnomer of the subtitle of Frost’s ‘essay’, “Reality-based politics and sustaining the Brexit Revolt”. For the ‘Brexit Revolt’ was never a singular movement, and it only briefly maintained a coalition of diverse discontents by the denial of reality; by insisting that it was possible to ‘have our cake and eat it’, a cost-free Brexit and one which could deliver all of the contradictory promises made for it. Those false promises have already been exposed, not least in relation to Frost’s own bugbear, the Northern Ireland Protocol.
This means that Frost’s ‘third pillar’ for the future, a reclaimed national identity “to bed in the view irreversibly that leaving the EU was the necessary precursor to achieving this” has already failed. Brexit has already further divided the union, and it has bitterly divided the population at large. There is absolutely no recognition from Frost, or from any other Brexiter, of this, still less any responsibility taken for it. There is not the tiniest suggestion that he and they are to any degree at fault for what has happened. Instead, the idea is to push on even harder in the same direction, once again treating the 2016 referendum as a mandate for things never put to the electorate and yet, in a grotesque political spoonerism, claimed as a triumph of democracy.
These ongoing divisions of Brexit actually permeate the leadership election, despite Brexit not being mentioned much, and not in itself constituting a dividing line between the candidates. For one way to think about the Truss-Sunak contest is as being between treating Brexit as a kind of Year Zero, instigating a permanent revolution against established realities of economics, geography, law or convention, and a more orthodox, pragmatic pre-Brexit though pro-Brexit, Conservatism.
Despite how they themselves voted in the referendum Truss is firmly the candidate for the former camp, being almost Johnsonian in her relationship to truth, and Sunak represents the latter. It’s not surprising, and doesn’t bode well for Sunak’s chances given their smaller numbers, that whereas opinion polls suggest he narrowly leads (53-47) amongst Tory Party members who were remain voters, Truss massively leads (81-19) amongst those who voted leave (figures exclude don’t knows/ won’t votes).
Both are equally committed to Brexit, so that isn’t the point at issue. What is at issue is the contradiction between Brexit as a ‘reality-based’ policy agenda to be delivered by government and ‘Brexitism’ as a campaigning, insurgent mood of permanent ‘revolt’. Truss embodies that mood, albeit less vividly than Johnson, whereas Sunak’s belated efforts to do so appear uncomfortable and he is already being attacked (£) for his technocratic caution having ‘frustrated’ Brexit.
It’s a contradiction we’ve seen before. Theresa May treated Brexit as a policy to be enacted, and was destroyed by those who wanted the mood and the campaign, and didn’t like the reality at all. Johnson provided the mood and the campaign, but couldn’t enact the policy to the satisfaction of Brexiters. This wasn’t just about their individual failings, considerable as those were, it was about the impossibility of doing both.
The unavoidable impossibility of post-Brexit politics
So Frost’s call for “Reality-based politics and sustaining the Brexit Revolt” misses the fact that there is actually a choice: reality-based politics or sustaining the Brexit Revolt. A ‘revolt’ can’t also be a government. It also misses the fact that whichever of the two is chosen, it will not satisfy Brexiters for long. The ultimate cakeism of Brexit is their refusal to make that choice, the ultimate tragedy for the country is that winning the referendum forced it upon them. It’s that impossible dynamic which is still ongoing, lies silently at the heart of the current leadership campaign, and will persist whoever wins.
So if Truss wins, it won’t be long before the complaints start that she is lightweight, prone to empty gestures and u-turning under pressure, talks the talk of Brexit but doesn’t walk the walk. She certainly doesn’t have a strong track record of policy delivery. And it’s notable that although the original basis of her popularity with the party membership was her flashy announcements of ‘getting trade deals done’, providing them with at least the illusion of Brexit being delivered, the hard-core free marketers see the deals she has agreed with Australia and New Zealand as far too timid, and as having given in to UK producer interests (of course UK producers don’t see it that way, nor, apparently, does Sunak). She’ll have a go at the deregulatory fantasy, but nothing much will come of it for the same reasons as nothing much has come of it under Johnson. No doubt her one-time support for remain will be recalled. As time goes on, sustaining the revolt won’t be enough without providing the reality of what the Brexiters think is possible. A salesperson with nothing to sell. Johnson 2.0.
If Sunak wins, he may well make a serious attempt to enact Brexit: to make it a reality. He too will find himself ensnared in the illusions of deregulation but perhaps he will push on anyway, in which case the economic crisis will get worse. Perhaps he won’t, and will be lambasted by Brexiters for that. He may well, as Truss also promises, plaster his beloved freeports all over the country (though, given a conspiracy theory which seems to currently be gaining traction, it’s worth mentioning that there are no plans to create Charter Cities in the UK and that these are radically different to freeports on any normal meaning of either term). But still the Brexiters will say he has not delivered real Brexit, either in terms of the general economy, for freeports are not an economic panacea, or in terms of what many leavers thought they were voting for as regards secure and well-paid jobs and improved public services. No doubt his background as a globalist, ‘citizen of nowhere’ investment banker will be recalled. As time goes on, the reality will collide with revolt. Tarnished goods offered by someone with no sales skills. May 2.0.
These categorisations are probably overly stark, and in practice each of them will mix ‘reality’ and ‘revolt’ (as did May and Johnson) but still skewed in one or the other direction. But either will have to decide which way to go quite quickly on one key issue, because of the choices they will face over the NIPB. Again there is no solution here which will satisfy both the desire for perpetual revolt and the reality-based politics of economic and governmental rationality. That circle can only be squared by insisting that ‘the Blob’, rather than the government, is in charge, so they are still insurgents who, if they win, can deliver the promises of Brexit. It’s unclear, though, for how long an electorate facing multiple crises will support a government whose central message is its inability to govern.
The leadership contest
One proxy is the candidates’ stoking of the anti-woke culture war. For the Brexit vote coded many things including the division between social liberals and social traditionalists and, in the mind of the Brexiters, those who ‘talk the country down’ and ‘those who love Britain’. Like much else about Brexit, this division wasn’t created in 2016 so much as given new zest and, despite existing in a different context, is a continuation of the decades-long whining about ‘political correctness’, the UK version of post-1960s backlash politics.
Indeed, there’s a dated feeling to the entire contest, especially in the constant invocations of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps reflecting the age and political reference points of the selectorate that will choose the next Prime Minister. It’s reminiscent of the way Conservatives still argue about whether Thatcher would or would not have supported Brexit, still vying for the imprimatur of the Iron Lady, or perhaps just for mummy’s approval. Equally, albeit again in a different context, the contest reveals the same contradiction of espousing free market, global free trade economics alongside social traditionalism and nationalism as that within Thatcherism. A similar contradiction, in fact, to that within the voting coalition of globalists and nativists that gave us Brexit.
Of course the many ways in which the context is different to the 1970s and 1980s only serve to reinforce the sense of a disconnect between this political discussion and current realities. The nature of the economic crisis is radically different. The geo-politics of the post-Cold War world are different. The politics of the Union are different. The now inescapable climate crisis is very different. Thoughtful Conservative commentators, such as Tim Pitt (£), warn that “cheap imitations of Thatcherism will not help the next prime minister tackle [these] formidable challenges”, but thoughtful Conservatism is long out of fashion, again in large part because of Brexit and its fallout.
It's not just that today’s issues are different to the 1970s and 80s. So too is political demography: in appealing to the ‘backlash generation’ the Tories have, apparently deliberately, chosen to set themselves against the young, the university-educated, and the urban. Yet, at the same time – and again it continues a trend that began under Thatcher but was spiced up by Brexit – contemporary Conservatives also despise the ‘traditional elites’ of the civil service, judiciary and business that used to form part of their heartlands.
All these groups, and more, are now disparaged in the new, omnipresent insult of ‘the Blob’ and its cognates ‘the remainer Blob’, ‘the Woke Blob’ (£) and ‘the Left Blob’, along with endless sub-variants like ‘the NHS Blob’ (£). It’s a terminology which, in the UK, is one of the many noxious legacies of Dominic Cummings who, when an advisor to the then Education Secretary Michael Gove, coined ‘the Education Blob’ as a term to disparage all those who actually knew anything about education. As such, it bears a family relationship to Gove’s notorious ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ line during the referendum campaign. It has now become a lazy catch-all term of abuse, as well as an excuse for governmental failures.
The (self-)importance of Frost
Woeful though they are, these terms of reference may well be adequate, and perhaps even unavoidable, in a contest pitched at the party membership, although it remains an open question whether they are a viable framing for the general election campaign that must come within two years. They certainly lack any discernible intellectual coherence or merit. But cometh the hour, cometh the man. A hero to many in the Tory Party, he is rumoured to be in line for a significant role if Liz Truss, the current favourite and his preferred candidate, wins. And he has stepped forward in a bid to provide just the coherence that is wanting.
Unfortunately, that man turns out to be David Frost who, with his habitual and limitless self-importance, this week published his Policy Exchange “essay” aspiring to exactly the big picture analysis that would enable the new leader to solve all the nation’s problems. Never one to understate anything, expect perhaps his own mediocrity, he boastfully presents this as an undertaking akin to the ‘Stepping Stones’ report that set a path for – yes, of course – the Thatcher administrations.
Apparently this is an effort that has been many years in the making but which his governmental duties had precluded writing. Now the truth can be told. Yet, for all the years of Frost’s tongue-between-teeth intellectual toil, it is, as the tagging of Thatcher prefigures, for the most part a reheat of her policies of lower taxes and a smaller state. If it differs from the intellectual pitch-rolling 1970s thinktanks undertook for Thatcher, it is mainly in lacking any kind of detailed prescriptions, relying instead on evergreen banalities such as calls to “reform our disgraceful prisons” or to “modernise the NHS”. On the newer challenge of climate change, the dangers of this constituting an ‘emergency’ are loftily dismissed as not being supported by the evidence.
What of Brexit?
One important implication of all this ‘back to Thatcher’ maundering is that almost nothing proposed here, or by the leadership candidates, actually requires Brexit. Indeed the first “pillar” of Frost’s proposals is that “the public must come to feel that we have taken a wrong path and to react against it”. But, hold on, isn’t that exactly what the public had been told, and responded to, in 2016? Wasn’t Brexit the new path? Must we now, just six years later and less than two years since the end of the transition period, embark on yet another new path?
The answer, it seems, is that “Brexit in itself creates neither huge economic advantage nor disadvantage”. Alas, this is not what leave voters were guaranteed in 2016. And puzzlingly, despite this apparent neutrality of Brexit, in the same paragraph Frost asserts that “leaving the EU has already hugely shaped our politics and political economy”. Indeed it is a “huge discontinuity” and yet, apparently, only the prelude to the next one, which will sustain the “Brexit Revolt”. The theme of revolt permeates the essay and presumably informs his grandiose choice of Lenin’s “What is to be done?” as the title of the prescriptive chapter, hard as it is to picture ‘the Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG’ chugging wheezily up the steps of the Winter Palace.
In reality, this call to a new path is a tacit admission that Brexit has failed. Not only are there none of the huge advantages that had been promised, but Frost is forced to concede it has come with “some costs” which he downplays as not “material” and not amounting to the “disasters” predicted. This is the now boilerplate Brexiter position that forgets the promises of ‘sunny uplands’ in favour of the rather more modest definition of success being the avoidance of total disaster. Thus ‘Project Fear’ is supposedly discredited since the effects of Brexit haven’t been as bad as some of the Brexiters’ own hyperbolic renderings of the most extreme warnings, and it is taken as read that all the ‘Establishment’ forecasts have been discredited.
In fact, the Treasury long-term forecast of 2016 for the scenario of Brexit with a UK-EU trade deal, whereby after 15 years GDP is in the range of 4.6%-7.8% lower than it would otherwise have been, now looks as if it will be fairly accurate, with the latest NIESR projection being for 5%-6% lower over 15 years. Those are still projections, but they are consistent with actual performance so far, with the latest CER calculation suggesting that at the last quarter of 2021 GDP was between 4.9% and 5.2% lower than it would have been. By any normal meaning of the term that is, indeed, a huge, and ongoing, economic disadvantage. As for all the reports of other damages of Brexit across just about every sphere of life that have accrued, these are airily dismissed by Frost as “rarely justified by reality”. The running sore of the Northern Ireland Protocol that he negotiated gets even shorter shrift, as no more than an “issue” that “must be resolved”.
Brexit’s coy revolutionaries
The grudging recognition that Brexit has been an economic failure has been growing amongst the Thatcherite Brexiters for a year or so, and I discussed it in detail in a post last December. The proposition it leads to is one re-iterated by Frost. His suggestion is that the problem is the “psychological hangover” of EU membership, which means “the EU is still a reference point for too many issues and policies”. He means, in particular, that this has hampered deregulation and “supply-side reforms”. Yet Frost is very coy about giving any details. The same is true of Sunak and Truss, as well as numerous others, like Mark Sedwill (£) who this week trotted out yet another of the interminable articles in the pro-Brexit press about cutting EU red tape without specifying which rules would go.
So what are the ‘supply-side reforms’ that Frost and the leadership candidates envisage? It’s a loose term, and to talk as they do of deregulation and supply-side reforms is unhelpful as the latter term usually includes the former, alongside free trade and tax cuts. As regards tax cuts, such reform is often associated with the largely discredited ‘Laffer Curve’, which, in brief, suggests that, at least to a certain point, cutting taxes will increase tax revenues and also promote growth. This seems now to the be the basis of both Sunak’s and Truss’s tax plans (itself based, again, on a selective reading of Thatcher-era policies). But since, whatever its dubious virtues, such a policy could be pursued with or without Brexit, and given the particular flagging of the term, it’s obvious that deregulation is a central issue.
The mirage of deregulation
The vagueness about what this deregulation is to consist of is because of a number of inter-related reasons, all of which in different ways relate to the incoherence of the Brexit project. It might refer to regulatory divergence from the EU on things like product standards or data protection. The problem here is that, as the government has already found, such deregulation is unpopular with businesses because it reduces rather than extends the scope of their markets. Indeed that is hardly surprising – these shared regulations are the essence of the single market, and one of the reasons Thatcher herself was a single market enthusiast.
Moreover, in the current global economy, they are very often adopted well beyond the EU single market or, just as often, the EU standards themselves derive from other global bodies. For any one country, especially one that does half its trade with the EU and which is bound, by virtue of proximity, to continue to do a high volume of its trade with the EU, setting its own standards just doesn’t make economic sense. Nor is it compatible with the ‘free trade’ aspect of supply-side reform.
What has happened is that the latter-day Thatcher imitators have mistaken different kinds of regulation and deregulation. Some regulation, including that of the single market, is market-making. In those cases, deregulation reduces rather than extends the market. More than that, in the case of leaving the rules of the single market (and the customs union), it re-instates the regulation that otherwise exists. Hence Brexit has massively increased the ‘red tape’ (or regulatory) burden on trade with the EU even without any regulatory divergence (a common Brexiter myth is that having the same standards ought to mean trading as before, but it doesn’t absent of being part of the regulatory and legal eco-system of the single market: this was the myth that underpinned Liam Fox’s ‘easiest deal in history’ foolishness). Adding regulatory divergence to this will further increase, not decrease, those barriers to trade.
By contrast, some of the Thatcher-era deregulation was market-making. For example, changes to financial services law in the 1980s removed the restrictions on services that Building Societies could offer (e.g. cheque accounts and unsecured loans) so that they could compete with banks. The desirability of that, and other parts of 1980s financial services deregulation, can be debated, of course, but the present point is that this deregulation did indeed extend rather than reduce the market (more precisely, it re-regulated to do so). Thatcher’s Brexiter imitators, including Frost, Rees-Mogg, Sunak and Truss, have wrongly concluded that removing EU regulations from the UK statute book is akin to this kind of deregulation, when in fact it is the opposite. It’s more like getting rid of the laws that enabled building societies and banks to compete, and reverting to the barriers that previously existed so as to segment their markets.
The other aspect of this, and the reason for the coyness about specifics, is that many kinds of deregulation are likely to be highly unpopular not just with businesses but with voters once the implications are known. That applies not just to product and environmental standards but, perhaps even more, to reductions of employment and other rights if, as seems likely, this is the agenda that remains unspoken. Many voters, including many who supported Brexit, will not support that and, depending exactly what is envisaged, it could again militate against free trade aspirations, especially if it violated the level playing field clauses of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
There’s obviously nothing new about these ideas in British politics, nor about the idea that one significant strand of Brexiter motivation was to enact them. But it was only one strand, and as a result Brexit doesn’t give enough cover for it, reflecting the perennial Brexit problem that the 2016 vote was not a vote for any particular meaning of Brexit. Many parts of the leave-voting coalition would bitterly oppose this deregulatory agenda – not just some ‘Red Wall’ nationalist traditionalists but also some ‘Blue Wall’ One Nation liberals. Since this is the same coalition that supported Johnson in 2019, a government under either contestant would struggle to deliver it just as he did. Certainly, it is, at the very least, unclear that they could retain that coalition in a general election fought explicitly upon such a manifesto.
Two faces of Brexit
All of this serves to illustrate the misnomer of the subtitle of Frost’s ‘essay’, “Reality-based politics and sustaining the Brexit Revolt”. For the ‘Brexit Revolt’ was never a singular movement, and it only briefly maintained a coalition of diverse discontents by the denial of reality; by insisting that it was possible to ‘have our cake and eat it’, a cost-free Brexit and one which could deliver all of the contradictory promises made for it. Those false promises have already been exposed, not least in relation to Frost’s own bugbear, the Northern Ireland Protocol.
This means that Frost’s ‘third pillar’ for the future, a reclaimed national identity “to bed in the view irreversibly that leaving the EU was the necessary precursor to achieving this” has already failed. Brexit has already further divided the union, and it has bitterly divided the population at large. There is absolutely no recognition from Frost, or from any other Brexiter, of this, still less any responsibility taken for it. There is not the tiniest suggestion that he and they are to any degree at fault for what has happened. Instead, the idea is to push on even harder in the same direction, once again treating the 2016 referendum as a mandate for things never put to the electorate and yet, in a grotesque political spoonerism, claimed as a triumph of democracy.
These ongoing divisions of Brexit actually permeate the leadership election, despite Brexit not being mentioned much, and not in itself constituting a dividing line between the candidates. For one way to think about the Truss-Sunak contest is as being between treating Brexit as a kind of Year Zero, instigating a permanent revolution against established realities of economics, geography, law or convention, and a more orthodox, pragmatic pre-Brexit though pro-Brexit, Conservatism.
Despite how they themselves voted in the referendum Truss is firmly the candidate for the former camp, being almost Johnsonian in her relationship to truth, and Sunak represents the latter. It’s not surprising, and doesn’t bode well for Sunak’s chances given their smaller numbers, that whereas opinion polls suggest he narrowly leads (53-47) amongst Tory Party members who were remain voters, Truss massively leads (81-19) amongst those who voted leave (figures exclude don’t knows/ won’t votes).
Both are equally committed to Brexit, so that isn’t the point at issue. What is at issue is the contradiction between Brexit as a ‘reality-based’ policy agenda to be delivered by government and ‘Brexitism’ as a campaigning, insurgent mood of permanent ‘revolt’. Truss embodies that mood, albeit less vividly than Johnson, whereas Sunak’s belated efforts to do so appear uncomfortable and he is already being attacked (£) for his technocratic caution having ‘frustrated’ Brexit.
It’s a contradiction we’ve seen before. Theresa May treated Brexit as a policy to be enacted, and was destroyed by those who wanted the mood and the campaign, and didn’t like the reality at all. Johnson provided the mood and the campaign, but couldn’t enact the policy to the satisfaction of Brexiters. This wasn’t just about their individual failings, considerable as those were, it was about the impossibility of doing both.
The unavoidable impossibility of post-Brexit politics
So Frost’s call for “Reality-based politics and sustaining the Brexit Revolt” misses the fact that there is actually a choice: reality-based politics or sustaining the Brexit Revolt. A ‘revolt’ can’t also be a government. It also misses the fact that whichever of the two is chosen, it will not satisfy Brexiters for long. The ultimate cakeism of Brexit is their refusal to make that choice, the ultimate tragedy for the country is that winning the referendum forced it upon them. It’s that impossible dynamic which is still ongoing, lies silently at the heart of the current leadership campaign, and will persist whoever wins.
So if Truss wins, it won’t be long before the complaints start that she is lightweight, prone to empty gestures and u-turning under pressure, talks the talk of Brexit but doesn’t walk the walk. She certainly doesn’t have a strong track record of policy delivery. And it’s notable that although the original basis of her popularity with the party membership was her flashy announcements of ‘getting trade deals done’, providing them with at least the illusion of Brexit being delivered, the hard-core free marketers see the deals she has agreed with Australia and New Zealand as far too timid, and as having given in to UK producer interests (of course UK producers don’t see it that way, nor, apparently, does Sunak). She’ll have a go at the deregulatory fantasy, but nothing much will come of it for the same reasons as nothing much has come of it under Johnson. No doubt her one-time support for remain will be recalled. As time goes on, sustaining the revolt won’t be enough without providing the reality of what the Brexiters think is possible. A salesperson with nothing to sell. Johnson 2.0.
If Sunak wins, he may well make a serious attempt to enact Brexit: to make it a reality. He too will find himself ensnared in the illusions of deregulation but perhaps he will push on anyway, in which case the economic crisis will get worse. Perhaps he won’t, and will be lambasted by Brexiters for that. He may well, as Truss also promises, plaster his beloved freeports all over the country (though, given a conspiracy theory which seems to currently be gaining traction, it’s worth mentioning that there are no plans to create Charter Cities in the UK and that these are radically different to freeports on any normal meaning of either term). But still the Brexiters will say he has not delivered real Brexit, either in terms of the general economy, for freeports are not an economic panacea, or in terms of what many leavers thought they were voting for as regards secure and well-paid jobs and improved public services. No doubt his background as a globalist, ‘citizen of nowhere’ investment banker will be recalled. As time goes on, the reality will collide with revolt. Tarnished goods offered by someone with no sales skills. May 2.0.
These categorisations are probably overly stark, and in practice each of them will mix ‘reality’ and ‘revolt’ (as did May and Johnson) but still skewed in one or the other direction. But either will have to decide which way to go quite quickly on one key issue, because of the choices they will face over the NIPB. Again there is no solution here which will satisfy both the desire for perpetual revolt and the reality-based politics of economic and governmental rationality. That circle can only be squared by insisting that ‘the Blob’, rather than the government, is in charge, so they are still insurgents who, if they win, can deliver the promises of Brexit. It’s unclear, though, for how long an electorate facing multiple crises will support a government whose central message is its inability to govern.
Friday, 16 July 2021
Another country?
The big story of the week is football. Given the volume of comment there has been, it’s difficult to say anything which is interesting or original but, as mentioned in my previous post, it’s hard not to connect it with Brexit so I’ll try to say something about it even though I don’t know much about football (I support Crystal Palace, boom-boom).
For some, of course, the connection is of a negative sort in that the whole tournament could be seen as welcome for being nothing to do with Brexit or politics. Or, which may be a different version of the same thing, as showing how the divisions of Brexit could be healed. A few suggested that England’s success represented a triumph of Brexit. Others thought that Gareth Southgate, in particular, and his team in general, articulated and embodied a new progressive patriotism that was at odds with Brexit. Some in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may have wondered what a Number 10 decked out with St George’s flags had to do with them.
Then came the post-tournament fall-out over taking the knee, booing taking the knee (and the condemning or condoning of that), the thuggery of some supporters, the racist attacks on England’s black footballers, and their and others’ responses to it. Unavoidably, this is about politics. Unavoidably, too, it is an aspect of the culture wars that have been simmering over Brexit itself as well as over racism, the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ politics, and, at the most generic level, over the (different) questions of what it now means to be English and of what it now means to be British.
A nation not at ease with itself
There can never be a single answer to such questions. The idea of a ‘united’ country is necessarily a somewhat absurd one, all the more so when, as with the UK, it is made up of more than one country. National cultures are just too complex and heterogenous to be capturable in any one way, and attempts to make them so are likely to be unpleasantly totalitarian and, even then, not to be fully realized. For that matter, the received image that World War Two Britain saw ‘everyone pulling together for the common good’ is somewhat misleading, as can be seen from the many published Mass Observation diaries, as well as the work of historians like Angus Calder.
Even so, there has been a palpable sense during the Brexit years of Britain as a country more than usually riven, and more than usually divided over both its understanding of its own past and its present-day meaning, let alone its future direction. It has become a cliché that whereas the 2012 London Olympics seemed to present a country that had some comfort with itself, Brexit slammed into that like a wrecking ball. So whilst the notion of a ‘nation at ease with itself’ is a rather illusory one, it has been tangible since Brexit that Britain is a nation that isn’t at ease with itself.
Some of that is to do with race and ethnicity. Manifestly Britain isn’t the only country where that is so, so it would be lazy to ascribe everything to Brexit. It is also lazy to explain Brexit solely, or even necessarily mainly, in terms of anti-immigration sentiment - but it would be entirely dishonest to deny it having been a significant driver. For all that some Brexiters may have disowned it, they were content to profit from, for example, the UKIP “Breaking Point” poster.
Certainly the promise to end freedom of movement of people was a major factor in the vote to leave, and also a decisive one in the subsequent decision that that meant leaving the single market. And the post-Brexit culture war has been very much conducted on the terrain of ‘cracking down’ on asylum seekers and of controlling immigration (though both of these pre-date Brexit) as well as things like the battles over statues with associations with slavery and colonialism.
But that culture war has other fronts as well. Examples include ongoing skirmishes over ‘cancel culture’ and freedom of speech. In particular, there are remarkably strong connections and overlaps between Brexit and anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown and anti-mask positions. That may be less of a cleavage between leave and remain voters, but is fairly clear at the level of the high-profile Brexiter leaders in politics and the media – Farage being the most obvious example, and the links between the ERG and the ‘Covid Recovery Group’ of Tory MPs being another.
Johnson’s vulnerability
Within all this, Boris Johnson has clearly been an important figure but in a rather peculiar way. Despite fronting the Vote Leave campaign, his commitment to Brexit was never very deep or genuine and, as is well-known, he nearly backed remain. Covid forced him into backing restrictions which, undoubtedly, he would have opposed had he not been Prime Minister, and his antipathy to them explains why he was always late to adopt them and usually gives the impression that he doesn’t fully support them.
Crucially, it is clearly the case that fomenting the culture war has been part of a deliberate strategy developed by senior government advisers (£) who see it as central to holding together Johnson’s electoral coalition. It is this strategy which has now caught him out – especially in refusing to condemn the booing of knee-taking and then, with wearying inevitability, lying about it – in the same way as it has caught out Priti Patel.
It remains to be seen how this now plays out, but Johnson’s particular vulnerability is the naked opportunism of his desire for popularity, which makes charges of hypocrisy easy and, therefore, public conviction on those charges an ever-present possibility, especially now that it brings him into conflict with the likeable, gifted, articulate and extremely popular English football stars. If nothing else, it exposes the difference between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’, something which some Tories are now realizing and which the Labour Party has begun to explore.
2016: the national conversation we didn’t know we were having
Johnson’s fate isn’t, however, the main issue in the football rows. What is more important, I think, is that they show an appetite for a ‘national conversation’ (whatever that might actually mean) about ‘what kind of country’ – or, rather, countries - we are which challenges the apparent victory of the Brexiter narrative of ‘the people’. The latter didn’t happen as the result of such a national conversation but emerged, almost accidentally, as the result of a sort of smash and grab raid because, at the time of the referendum, few people quite understood what was going on (I certainly didn’t).
That was perhaps because the general assumption, on all sides, was that remain would win. So we didn’t really know that we weren’t just deciding whether or not to leave the EU but were engaged in something which was about to shape the entirety of what ‘we’ – the United Kingdom, England – meant, both for ourselves and for how we are seen abroad. (A recent example of the latter is German journalist Annette Dittert’s evisceration of Johnson’s regime.)
So, in a way which wouldn’t have been the case had remain won, literally overnight a radical alteration occurred in the terrain and texture of politics. Very soon it became clear that the Brexit process wasn’t going to be just one of ‘technical’ adjustments but would be a battle for Britain’s ‘political soul’. With that, it emerged, as I wrote a few weeks ago, that Brexit had, in effect, ‘cancelled’ half the population as being of no account and an idea that they are unpatriotic or, even, anti-patriotic. Perhaps now they are finding a voice again. At all events, as I suggested in that post, it’s not sustainable for a country to simply dismiss half its population, and the younger, more educated half at that, as an irrelevance.
Redefining patriotism
That’s not to say that the football rows line up leavers and remainers for, as it were, a cultural penalty shoot-out (for one thing, it won’t have such a decisive outcome). The lines are much less clearly drawn than that. But they do involve an adjacent set of distinctions between mono- and multi-culturalism, exclusivity and inclusivity, insularity and openness, and between simplistic and complex understandings of history, culture and nationhood. Football is a potent terrain for that because these rows are about the national team (of England), and so deny the fault-line as being between patriots and non-patriots, or between those who ‘love the country’ versus ‘those who would talk it down’. Rather, and quite starkly, the fault-line becomes between two competing versions of what the country is, of whose country it is, and of what patriotism means.
During the referendum (and, in fact, for years before) a common expression, or complaint, amongst pro-Brexit people was ‘I just want my country back’. That was often code for hostility to immigration, but it also referenced a wider set of actual or perceived lost stabilities. With Brexit, though it seems hardly to have diminished the complaint (since it is an essentially unsatisfiable desire), they have got their country back. But it was an expression which was predicated on other people losing their country as, with Brexit, many felt they did, and those people are still, for the most part, here. There was, literally, no possibility of reversing time so as to ‘get back’ something which, even if it had ever existed, no longer did so, and couldn’t be voted into being. In fact, to the extent it was a promise of Brexit, it was another of the false promises of Brexit.
Challenging inverted snobbery
As well as breaking through the false division of the patriotic and the unpatriotic, the football rows are significant in breaking the associated attempt of populist inverted snobbery to draw an essential divide between ‘ordinary’ working-class people and the supposedly sneering, university-educated middle-class.
That is an inadequate way of understanding the Brexit vote, as for example research on ‘comfortable leavers’ shows. It is also, ironically, a hugely patronizing and stereotypical view of class and of region, in which the ‘people up north’ are imagined as pigeon-fancying, leave-voting, terrace house dwellers who have never been to university and enjoy nothing more than a pint of wallop, whilst liberal metropolitan remain-voting southerners sit around sipping Sancerre and discussing Derrida with the au pair in their Tuscan holiday homes.
Needless to say, many of the most earnest of these heroic culture warriors are, in fact, well-heeled, London-based graduates but ‘will have you know’ that their grandfather on their mother’s side was a coal miner which, by some mysterious process of genetic and historical osmosis, makes them the voice of the people. It sometimes seems as if their politics is a decades-long reaction to the excitement of hearing Pulp’s Common People played at a JCR disco in 1995.
In any case, it manifestly falls apart when it involves positioning footballers like Marcus Rashford - who actively and effectively campaigned for free school meals drawing on his own childhood experiences of poverty in Manchester, and is an inspirational role model to people of all kinds of backgrounds and ages - as out of touch or engaged in ‘gesture politics’.
The role of masculinity?
There’s perhaps also something to be said about masculinity in all this, although it is hard to pin down. The Brexit vote was evenly split in terms of gender, but there’s an undercurrent of macho bravado about ‘going it alone’ and in the associated culture war attack on ‘remoaners’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘cry babies’, as well as a definite sense amongst some lockdown sceptics of ‘masks being for wimps’.
Even harder to pin down, but discernible I think, is an implicit idea of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ of whatever gender as being effete, and the ‘authentic working class’ of whatever gender as being rugged and earthy. Again, it’s hard to position professional footballers as effete wimps, so the polarizing dyads of the culture war work less effectively here as well.
Within this there is an interesting and subtle twist. Because in some ways these footballers are re-writing traditional machismo, including that associated with football, in the way they emphasise cooperation and solidarity. Apart from the conduct of the team during the tournament, that was evident in the support Rashford gave to another fine British sporting talent, the tennis player Emma Raducanu.
Radacunu, whose Canadian-Chinese-Romanian background itself bespeaks of a multi-cultural Britain, whilst making her a target for social media mutterings that she’s not ‘really’ British, had had to withdraw from Wimbledon suffering what appeared to be an anxiety attack. She should take advice on how to “toughen up”, opined Piers Morgan; “you should be proud of yourself”, said Rashford.
A new conversation?
So in just the same way as the referendum vote became, even if it was unexpected and unplanned that it should be so, an occasion for redefining national identity, there is a kind of pent-up desire for that process, having been started, to continue. For a while, under the bludgeon of ‘the will of the people’ it couldn’t quite happen, but it has kept trying to attach itself to suitable occasions – the ‘Harry and Meghan’ rows are perhaps an example – and football is the latest and most potent of them.
How long this episode lasts, and how significant it is, remains to be seen. But in some form or another I think the process is certain to continue as regards both England and Britain. That is because not only is the notion of a ‘unified culture’ a myth, but so too is that of a static one. Culture, in its anthropological meanings, isn’t a branch of the heritage industry. It is also – as studies of organizational culture show, but the same is perhaps even more true of national culture – remarkably resistant to ‘top-down’ management of the sort being attempted by the present government through, for example, its efforts to exert control universities, heritage organizations, and the BBC.
Writing on his blog this week, David Allen Green points out that “those who start culture wars can also lose them”, whilst Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu in Byline Times suggest that the football rows may represent a point when the tide turns in Johnson et al.’s culture war. It certainly seems to have impaled GBNews on the inherent contradiction between positioning itself as ‘anti-woke’ yet proclaiming to stand for free speech. But I’m not sure that culture wars ever have a decisive outcome, and it’s worth noting that the usual self-styled ‘contrarians’ have been quick to fight back this week.
That said, to the extent that the current one has its proximate roots in the Brexit vote, it’s significant that, along with and closely linked to educational level, the best predictor of how people voted in 2016 was age. In that sense the electoral success of Johnson’s approach may be rather time-limited - something Conservative strategists are well aware of (£). Equally, that means there are opportunities, especially for the Labour Party, to catch the tide if not of history then of its close cousin, demography.
But, to reiterate, this is not just or mainly about political parties, although they affect and are affected by it. It is a wider matter, not created but exacerbated by Brexit, of identity and belonging. Football is only incidental to that, but primarily because it is popular it offers an arena – after years of talk of ‘the will of the people’ and of ‘enemies of the people’ – to ask what manner of people the English and, if indirectly, the British are.
For some, of course, the connection is of a negative sort in that the whole tournament could be seen as welcome for being nothing to do with Brexit or politics. Or, which may be a different version of the same thing, as showing how the divisions of Brexit could be healed. A few suggested that England’s success represented a triumph of Brexit. Others thought that Gareth Southgate, in particular, and his team in general, articulated and embodied a new progressive patriotism that was at odds with Brexit. Some in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may have wondered what a Number 10 decked out with St George’s flags had to do with them.
Then came the post-tournament fall-out over taking the knee, booing taking the knee (and the condemning or condoning of that), the thuggery of some supporters, the racist attacks on England’s black footballers, and their and others’ responses to it. Unavoidably, this is about politics. Unavoidably, too, it is an aspect of the culture wars that have been simmering over Brexit itself as well as over racism, the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ politics, and, at the most generic level, over the (different) questions of what it now means to be English and of what it now means to be British.
A nation not at ease with itself
There can never be a single answer to such questions. The idea of a ‘united’ country is necessarily a somewhat absurd one, all the more so when, as with the UK, it is made up of more than one country. National cultures are just too complex and heterogenous to be capturable in any one way, and attempts to make them so are likely to be unpleasantly totalitarian and, even then, not to be fully realized. For that matter, the received image that World War Two Britain saw ‘everyone pulling together for the common good’ is somewhat misleading, as can be seen from the many published Mass Observation diaries, as well as the work of historians like Angus Calder.
Even so, there has been a palpable sense during the Brexit years of Britain as a country more than usually riven, and more than usually divided over both its understanding of its own past and its present-day meaning, let alone its future direction. It has become a cliché that whereas the 2012 London Olympics seemed to present a country that had some comfort with itself, Brexit slammed into that like a wrecking ball. So whilst the notion of a ‘nation at ease with itself’ is a rather illusory one, it has been tangible since Brexit that Britain is a nation that isn’t at ease with itself.
Some of that is to do with race and ethnicity. Manifestly Britain isn’t the only country where that is so, so it would be lazy to ascribe everything to Brexit. It is also lazy to explain Brexit solely, or even necessarily mainly, in terms of anti-immigration sentiment - but it would be entirely dishonest to deny it having been a significant driver. For all that some Brexiters may have disowned it, they were content to profit from, for example, the UKIP “Breaking Point” poster.
Certainly the promise to end freedom of movement of people was a major factor in the vote to leave, and also a decisive one in the subsequent decision that that meant leaving the single market. And the post-Brexit culture war has been very much conducted on the terrain of ‘cracking down’ on asylum seekers and of controlling immigration (though both of these pre-date Brexit) as well as things like the battles over statues with associations with slavery and colonialism.
But that culture war has other fronts as well. Examples include ongoing skirmishes over ‘cancel culture’ and freedom of speech. In particular, there are remarkably strong connections and overlaps between Brexit and anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown and anti-mask positions. That may be less of a cleavage between leave and remain voters, but is fairly clear at the level of the high-profile Brexiter leaders in politics and the media – Farage being the most obvious example, and the links between the ERG and the ‘Covid Recovery Group’ of Tory MPs being another.
Johnson’s vulnerability
Within all this, Boris Johnson has clearly been an important figure but in a rather peculiar way. Despite fronting the Vote Leave campaign, his commitment to Brexit was never very deep or genuine and, as is well-known, he nearly backed remain. Covid forced him into backing restrictions which, undoubtedly, he would have opposed had he not been Prime Minister, and his antipathy to them explains why he was always late to adopt them and usually gives the impression that he doesn’t fully support them.
Crucially, it is clearly the case that fomenting the culture war has been part of a deliberate strategy developed by senior government advisers (£) who see it as central to holding together Johnson’s electoral coalition. It is this strategy which has now caught him out – especially in refusing to condemn the booing of knee-taking and then, with wearying inevitability, lying about it – in the same way as it has caught out Priti Patel.
It remains to be seen how this now plays out, but Johnson’s particular vulnerability is the naked opportunism of his desire for popularity, which makes charges of hypocrisy easy and, therefore, public conviction on those charges an ever-present possibility, especially now that it brings him into conflict with the likeable, gifted, articulate and extremely popular English football stars. If nothing else, it exposes the difference between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’, something which some Tories are now realizing and which the Labour Party has begun to explore.
2016: the national conversation we didn’t know we were having
Johnson’s fate isn’t, however, the main issue in the football rows. What is more important, I think, is that they show an appetite for a ‘national conversation’ (whatever that might actually mean) about ‘what kind of country’ – or, rather, countries - we are which challenges the apparent victory of the Brexiter narrative of ‘the people’. The latter didn’t happen as the result of such a national conversation but emerged, almost accidentally, as the result of a sort of smash and grab raid because, at the time of the referendum, few people quite understood what was going on (I certainly didn’t).
That was perhaps because the general assumption, on all sides, was that remain would win. So we didn’t really know that we weren’t just deciding whether or not to leave the EU but were engaged in something which was about to shape the entirety of what ‘we’ – the United Kingdom, England – meant, both for ourselves and for how we are seen abroad. (A recent example of the latter is German journalist Annette Dittert’s evisceration of Johnson’s regime.)
So, in a way which wouldn’t have been the case had remain won, literally overnight a radical alteration occurred in the terrain and texture of politics. Very soon it became clear that the Brexit process wasn’t going to be just one of ‘technical’ adjustments but would be a battle for Britain’s ‘political soul’. With that, it emerged, as I wrote a few weeks ago, that Brexit had, in effect, ‘cancelled’ half the population as being of no account and an idea that they are unpatriotic or, even, anti-patriotic. Perhaps now they are finding a voice again. At all events, as I suggested in that post, it’s not sustainable for a country to simply dismiss half its population, and the younger, more educated half at that, as an irrelevance.
Redefining patriotism
That’s not to say that the football rows line up leavers and remainers for, as it were, a cultural penalty shoot-out (for one thing, it won’t have such a decisive outcome). The lines are much less clearly drawn than that. But they do involve an adjacent set of distinctions between mono- and multi-culturalism, exclusivity and inclusivity, insularity and openness, and between simplistic and complex understandings of history, culture and nationhood. Football is a potent terrain for that because these rows are about the national team (of England), and so deny the fault-line as being between patriots and non-patriots, or between those who ‘love the country’ versus ‘those who would talk it down’. Rather, and quite starkly, the fault-line becomes between two competing versions of what the country is, of whose country it is, and of what patriotism means.
During the referendum (and, in fact, for years before) a common expression, or complaint, amongst pro-Brexit people was ‘I just want my country back’. That was often code for hostility to immigration, but it also referenced a wider set of actual or perceived lost stabilities. With Brexit, though it seems hardly to have diminished the complaint (since it is an essentially unsatisfiable desire), they have got their country back. But it was an expression which was predicated on other people losing their country as, with Brexit, many felt they did, and those people are still, for the most part, here. There was, literally, no possibility of reversing time so as to ‘get back’ something which, even if it had ever existed, no longer did so, and couldn’t be voted into being. In fact, to the extent it was a promise of Brexit, it was another of the false promises of Brexit.
Challenging inverted snobbery
As well as breaking through the false division of the patriotic and the unpatriotic, the football rows are significant in breaking the associated attempt of populist inverted snobbery to draw an essential divide between ‘ordinary’ working-class people and the supposedly sneering, university-educated middle-class.
That is an inadequate way of understanding the Brexit vote, as for example research on ‘comfortable leavers’ shows. It is also, ironically, a hugely patronizing and stereotypical view of class and of region, in which the ‘people up north’ are imagined as pigeon-fancying, leave-voting, terrace house dwellers who have never been to university and enjoy nothing more than a pint of wallop, whilst liberal metropolitan remain-voting southerners sit around sipping Sancerre and discussing Derrida with the au pair in their Tuscan holiday homes.
Needless to say, many of the most earnest of these heroic culture warriors are, in fact, well-heeled, London-based graduates but ‘will have you know’ that their grandfather on their mother’s side was a coal miner which, by some mysterious process of genetic and historical osmosis, makes them the voice of the people. It sometimes seems as if their politics is a decades-long reaction to the excitement of hearing Pulp’s Common People played at a JCR disco in 1995.
In any case, it manifestly falls apart when it involves positioning footballers like Marcus Rashford - who actively and effectively campaigned for free school meals drawing on his own childhood experiences of poverty in Manchester, and is an inspirational role model to people of all kinds of backgrounds and ages - as out of touch or engaged in ‘gesture politics’.
The role of masculinity?
There’s perhaps also something to be said about masculinity in all this, although it is hard to pin down. The Brexit vote was evenly split in terms of gender, but there’s an undercurrent of macho bravado about ‘going it alone’ and in the associated culture war attack on ‘remoaners’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘cry babies’, as well as a definite sense amongst some lockdown sceptics of ‘masks being for wimps’.
Even harder to pin down, but discernible I think, is an implicit idea of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ of whatever gender as being effete, and the ‘authentic working class’ of whatever gender as being rugged and earthy. Again, it’s hard to position professional footballers as effete wimps, so the polarizing dyads of the culture war work less effectively here as well.
Within this there is an interesting and subtle twist. Because in some ways these footballers are re-writing traditional machismo, including that associated with football, in the way they emphasise cooperation and solidarity. Apart from the conduct of the team during the tournament, that was evident in the support Rashford gave to another fine British sporting talent, the tennis player Emma Raducanu.
Radacunu, whose Canadian-Chinese-Romanian background itself bespeaks of a multi-cultural Britain, whilst making her a target for social media mutterings that she’s not ‘really’ British, had had to withdraw from Wimbledon suffering what appeared to be an anxiety attack. She should take advice on how to “toughen up”, opined Piers Morgan; “you should be proud of yourself”, said Rashford.
A new conversation?
So in just the same way as the referendum vote became, even if it was unexpected and unplanned that it should be so, an occasion for redefining national identity, there is a kind of pent-up desire for that process, having been started, to continue. For a while, under the bludgeon of ‘the will of the people’ it couldn’t quite happen, but it has kept trying to attach itself to suitable occasions – the ‘Harry and Meghan’ rows are perhaps an example – and football is the latest and most potent of them.
How long this episode lasts, and how significant it is, remains to be seen. But in some form or another I think the process is certain to continue as regards both England and Britain. That is because not only is the notion of a ‘unified culture’ a myth, but so too is that of a static one. Culture, in its anthropological meanings, isn’t a branch of the heritage industry. It is also – as studies of organizational culture show, but the same is perhaps even more true of national culture – remarkably resistant to ‘top-down’ management of the sort being attempted by the present government through, for example, its efforts to exert control universities, heritage organizations, and the BBC.
Writing on his blog this week, David Allen Green points out that “those who start culture wars can also lose them”, whilst Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu in Byline Times suggest that the football rows may represent a point when the tide turns in Johnson et al.’s culture war. It certainly seems to have impaled GBNews on the inherent contradiction between positioning itself as ‘anti-woke’ yet proclaiming to stand for free speech. But I’m not sure that culture wars ever have a decisive outcome, and it’s worth noting that the usual self-styled ‘contrarians’ have been quick to fight back this week.
That said, to the extent that the current one has its proximate roots in the Brexit vote, it’s significant that, along with and closely linked to educational level, the best predictor of how people voted in 2016 was age. In that sense the electoral success of Johnson’s approach may be rather time-limited - something Conservative strategists are well aware of (£). Equally, that means there are opportunities, especially for the Labour Party, to catch the tide if not of history then of its close cousin, demography.
But, to reiterate, this is not just or mainly about political parties, although they affect and are affected by it. It is a wider matter, not created but exacerbated by Brexit, of identity and belonging. Football is only incidental to that, but primarily because it is popular it offers an arena – after years of talk of ‘the will of the people’ and of ‘enemies of the people’ – to ask what manner of people the English and, if indirectly, the British are.
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