A new conversation?

In my previous post, I suggested that by re-opening the question of Brexit, Andy Burnham’s party conference speech marked a significant moment in the Brexit saga. That has been borne out by the way that, since then, there has been the beginning of the ‘national conversation’ he called for, with an upsurge of discussion about whether and how the UK could join (or ‘rejoin’) the EU, whether that would be welcomed by the EU, and, if so, on what terms and in what timescale. All this and more also featured this week in an unusually well-attended Westminster Hall debate that had been prompted by a successful petition to parliament.

The details of this discussion are far less important than the fact of it happening [1]. The Burnham speech was, indeed, a ‘moment’. For it to become a turning point it will require a sustained process not just of national conversation but of national ‘mood-building’, somewhat akin to that which developed in the years before the 2016 referendum, to create a sense that a change of direction is possible and should be put to a vote. One way in which that might be achieved is by providing some structure to the otherwise nebulous notion of a national conversation, in the way suggested this week by Mike Galsworthy, strategy advisor to the European Movement.

How we got here

However it is conducted, what is happening now is actually not the first stage of a national conversation but the second. The first stage was the important one which began when the transition period ended and, as I put it in a post at the time, the post-Brexit narrative started to be shaped. That stage saw a battle over whether the consensus view was to be that Brexit had been a success or a failure. It was comprehensively lost by the Brexiters, as some of them seem to recognize, such as ‘Brexit brain’ Robert Tombs (£), even if they do not understand why. The ebbs and flows of that battle were charted in detail on this blog, but the headline outcome is obvious from opinion polls, which have shown the consistent, and slowly increasing, view of the public that it was wrong to leave the EU.

Currently, 57% think it was wrong to leave and 30% think it was right to leave. That 30% matters, because it shows there is still sizeable, and probably implacable, bedrock of support for Brexit, and it matters even more because it has disproportionate voice amongst the commentariat. Nevertheless, barring some dramatic development, it’s fair to say that the view that Brexit was a mistake is now embedded as a political fact. It is only because of that it is now possible to talk about entering a new stage in which, with that fact established, the battle is over whether anything should be done about it and, if so, what.

That is the stage which is now beginning. Whether and how it continues will depend upon many others, including pro-EU campaigners, but it will crucially require that Burnham continues to push the narrative forward. Already, there are signs that he has an appetite to do so, although whether he has the stamina to continue remains to be seen. At all events, in the last week he has re-iterated, but this time in the House of Commons, what he said at the conference and, in fact, edged slightly beyond it. Previously, he spoke of one outcome of the ‘national conversation’ being to “stay as we are”. Now, he is emphasizing that “the status quo is not good enough for Britain” and in that sense is leading, or at least steering, the outcome of the conversation.

Meanwhile, a date – 20 November – has been set for the next UK-EU Summit. That will be an important moment both for showing whether the provisions long-trailed for the ‘reset’ have been finalized and for signalling what further agreements might be envisaged.

The real significance of Russian interference

Andy Burnham also pushed the ‘national conversation’ further forward with his statement at the weekend and subsequently in the Commons, that it is “clear” that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum. This was based, implicitly, on intelligence briefings he has received since becoming Prime Minister, and in a major speech later in the week Sir Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5, confirmed that interference had occurred. Of course, this is hardly a news item as it is well-established, not least by the assiduous investigations of former Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr. But it is certainly a news item that, for the first time, a British Prime Minister has acknowledged the fact.

However, the significance of his having done so is not, in my view, what it is commonly taken to be [2]. Many opponents of Brexit have, since the referendum, claimed or implied that Russian interference invalidates the referendum result, just as many supporters of Brexit have treated such claims as an attempt to discredit it, and both of these positions have been rehearsed in response to Burnham’s comment [3]. My own view has consistently been that it is unknowable whether Russian interference influenced the result (and, by the same token, it is not clear on what basis McCallum would be able to know, as he claimed, that it had not done so). Moreover, even if it did influence the result, it was certainly not the only, or even the main, reason for it [4].

Rather, what is significant about the interference is that it provides tangible evidence for what might otherwise be only an assertion: that Brexit was and is in Russia’s interests, both by destabilizing Britain and by damaging the EU. As Rafael Behr put it almost ten years ago, Brexit wasn’t “a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind … made in a factory outside St Petersburg [but it was Putin’s] dream policy” and, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it, “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”. (It also bears saying that, although largely forgotten now, the only other major country delighted by Brexit was Iran.)

Likewise, what is important about Burnham confirming Russian interference is not whether it means that the 2016 referendum result was a mistake for, as noted above, that has already been established in the public mind. In fact, what is important about it is almost nothing to do with 2016 and almost everything to do with the situation in which the UK and the EU find themselves now, in 2026. Indeed, the immediate context of Burnham’s comments was what the lessons of Russia’s interference in British politics (including, but not limited to, the referendum) might be for forthcoming elections in Germany and France.

The wider context

Of course the overall context is far wider. It is, firstly, that of the entire situation, as recently outlined by the historian Timothy Garton Ash, of the escalation of Putin’s attacks on Ukraine and the escalating hybrid warfare his regime is conducting against the UK, and others, with Russia being described in the MI5 chief's speech as "aggressor number one" in threats the security service faces.

The two are inter-connected, with Ukraine being the ‘hot war’ front line of the larger attempt by Putin to undermine and damage, if not destroy, the ‘liberal West’. That inter-connection is the reason why one part of Russia’s hybrid war campaign is an information war in which social media accounts and channels are used on a massive scale to spread false narratives within countries, including the UK, which seek to justify the illegal war on Ukraine and to undermine the legitimacy of Ukraine’s self-defence.

Equally relevant to this bigger context is Donald Trump. At the most general level he, quite as much as Putin, is an implacable enemy of the ‘liberal West’, one meaning of which might be those countries, including the UK, which last week issued a joint statement of support of the International Criminal Court in the aftermath of Trump’s latest and most severe attack upon it. At a more specific level, Trump has long been supportive, albeit in sometimes inconsistent ways, of Russia’s claims on Ukraine and, again just in the last week, that has been even more overt with the announcement of his ‘diesel deal’ with Putin.

There are multiple meanings of that deal, not least Trump’s attempts to blame the domestically unpopular cost of rising fuel prices in the US on Ukraine rather than his own disastrously incompetent war on Iran. But, as strategy expert Professor Phllips P. O’Brien has explained, its core meaning is that it is the clearest of signals that the US is now on Russia’s side. Conversely, for Putin, as CNN reports from Moscow, “the real benefit isn’t the billions of dollars in fresh revenue. It is the wedge this deal, and the rhetoric around it, drives right through the heart of the Western alliance.”

There’s no doubt that the ‘diesel deal’ is in part animated by the financial benefits Trump sees for his family and friends, as outlined by David Frum in The Atlantic. However, it would be a mistake to draw a sharp distinction between Trump’s venality and his anti-liberal ideology: part and parcel of his hostility to the rule of law and the rules-based international order is his desire to be unconstrained from such rule. Indeed the core reason Trump is not just dangerous for the world at large but is also such an incompetent leader for the United States is that he recognizes no distinction between his private desires and interests and his public office and duties. It is no coincidence that in the classical sociology of Max Weber that distinction was at the heart of the rational-legal authority upon which the modern State is predicated. Nor is it a coincidence that many leading Brexiters are as hostile as Trump to that conception of authority.

So, to re-iterate the point, it is within this context that the issue of Russian interference in 2016 becomes important; not as a re-litigation of the referendum result, but for what it means about the world now. At the time of the referendum we had not even had the first Trump presidency, let alone his dramatically more extreme second term. Nor, at that time, had Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But whilst those things could not have been predicted, it was obvious, as I wrote in detail in January 2019 – before Trump 2.0 and Ukraine – that Brexit constituted a fundamental strategic mistake primarily because, in both its nationalist and globalist versions, it failed to understand the centrality of regionalism, not just in terms of trade and regulation but also in terms of geo-politics. That is even more important now, in 2026 when, in an unfamiliar but genuine sense, those geo-politics have given rise to war.

The current war

If that statement sounds contentious or over-blown it is because the current geo-political situation does not fit neatly with our traditional understanding of wars and alliances. For one thing, the meaning of alliance, and most specifically the meaning of the UK-US alliance, has become extremely confusing. It wouldn’t be true to say that this alliance no longer exists, but it certainly doesn’t exist in the way that might once have been thought. The US is now an unreliable ally, but also one on which we still have a dependence and to which we are still obliged to make a contribution. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, and the MAGA movement more generally, is at least as active in pumping misinformation into the UK as the Putin administration and its bot farms.

Crucially, both are spreading similar types of misinformation (£), especially about civilizational erasure at the hands of Muslims and impending civil war. The litany is all-too familiar – London has disintegrated into anarchy, armed gangs of asylum seekers have invaded Britain and are raping women and children, Sharia Law has been imposed etc. etc. – as are the endless (increasingly AI-generated) fake videos and mendacious statistics used to ‘prove’ this to be so. At the same time, every established institution – the police, the church, the BBC, universities, schools, the judiciary, civil servants, the monarchy and, of course, ‘uniparty’ politicians – is depicted as being complicit in this. Some of it is literally insane but, even so, is persuasive to some people and, far more importantly, its cumulative effect is to persuade a larger number that ‘if even half of it is true’ then that is bad enough.

In short, an information war is under way in the UK (quite as much as in the EU) and it is conducted from both the US and Russia. But it is not simply an external attack: it is crucially reliant upon being amplified from within. Nigel Farage tends to downplay his connections with Trump and his admiration for Putin these days, knowing them to be unpopular, but he and associated figures, not to mention the GB News propaganda channel, repeat the messages coming from them [5].

Like Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain, Farage affects to be an affable English squire moved to righteous anger only by the betrayal of a decadent elite and motivated only by patriotic duty. In fact, both of them, and their numerous acolytes, are deeply enmeshed with Putinist and Trumpian interests. This is not a rhetorical slur. For example, it is a fact that the former leader of Reform in Wales is in prison for taking bribes to make pro-Russian speeches in the European Parliament, it is a fact that Elon Musk has publicly supported Restore, and it is a fact that Reform, Trump, Putin, and (though this is less widely known) Restore are all in various ways linked to cryptocurrencies.

Nor is this information war just about stoking division and anger on-line. Another growing threat highlighted this week by the head of MI5 is the far-right violence that this on-line activity provokes and promotes. According to McCallum, this transition from rhetorical to literal violence was “the most marked trend” in the threats dealt with by the agency over the last year. It also intersects with the recent growth of ‘gig economy terrorism’, whereby hostile states recruit unwitting or disaffected individuals to undertake attacks, rather than using their own agents in the traditional sense. This modus operandi has come to prominence in relation to the still obscure events at RAF Fairford. In that case, Iran stands accused as being the hostile state, but the same approach was used in the arson attacks against Keir Starmer’s property in 2025. In the latter case, there is very strong evidence that Russia orchestrated the attacks.

As the BBC report just linked to shows in great detail, these kinds of operations are highly complex and it is extremely difficult to uncover the full facts about them (this, indeed, is one reason why hostile states adopt this method). But the ‘Starmer arson attack’ case undoubtedly used an ostensibly far-right group, called Direct Action, apparently controlled by Russia, to recruit the ‘agents’.

Moreover, in both this case and the Fairford case, the tendency in gig economy terrorism to recruit foreign-born or ethnic minority agents contributes to promoting the far-right narrative of ‘invasion’. Notably, Farage has repeatedly, and mendaciously, used the Fairford case to claim that the small boats ‘crisis’ constitutes a “national emergency”. In this sense, even if an attack ‘fails’ it is still has a value in further stoking dissent. The Fairford case also created an opportunity for Trump and his associates to berate the UK for its supposed laxity in security matters, linking it directly to the narrative that Britain has been “invaded” by “fighting-age men”, an attack line immediately taken up Farage and others.

All of this – along with the other features of Russia’s hybrid war, such as repeated air and sea space violations, drone attacks and cyber-threats, and MAGA-supported and funded ideological warfare – adds up to a situation which is possibly hard for many British people to understand. It has so many interacting skeins, for one thing, and it is also quite different to our received images of war. It is nothing like the world wars, or the Falklands War, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not even much like earlier versions of ideological warfare, such as that of the Cold War. Nor is it much like IRA or even Islamist terrorism.

Back to Brexit

The complexities of this situation are probably too great for any one person to analyse. But, in terms of the focus of this blog, what should be obvious is that Brexit and Brexitism intersect with each and every aspect of it. Support for Brexit is one of the things which links Farage, Lowe, Tommy Robinson, and the entire British far right, with Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America, and Iran. They also all share a desire to destabilize British society, demonize British multi-culturalism, and discredit British institutions. To be clear, I don’t mean that everyone who supports or voted for Brexit desires all those other things; I mean that those who desire all those other things invariably support Brexit.

The flip-side of this is that all those named also share a hostility to the EU and, of course, the EU and its members are being targeted in exactly the same way as the UK and for the same reasons. By the same token, membership of the EU would not spare Britain from this hostility. Nevertheless, it is this war situation which brings us back to the newly-revived discussion about Brexit, including the discussion of Russia’s role in it. For what is coming to the fore as a result is (or should be) an increasing recognition in the UK that Britain’s relationship with Europe isn’t an accounting exercise, or primarily concerned with the costs and benefits of trade or supply chains or regulation, but is about shared interests and values and the mutual defence of these.

I’ve never accepted the argument that the 2016 leave campaign was about values and emotions rather than economics (Brexiters repeatedly claimed that leaving would be economically beneficial), but it is true that the remain campaign was overly focused on economics and did little to articulate a more principled, even moral, case for EU membership. In that, it was all of a piece with the years during which the UK was a member state.

But with a new ‘national conversation’ about Brexit apparently under way, there is also now an opportunity for that conversation to be a different and better one. The daily accumulating evidence that the UK is not just geographically and economically, but geo-politically and ideologically, part of the European continent makes abundantly clear the strategic illogicality of not also being part of the institutional and legal structures of the European Union.

 

Notes

[1] For this reason, I don’t see any point in trawling through the details of what has been said, most of which is predictable and has been discussed in one way or another in previous posts. But I do just want to comment on the suggestion made by the senior Labour MP Dame Emily Thornberry that a referendum would not be needed to seek to join the EU if doing so was in the manifesto of a party (i.e. Labour) which won a general election. This would be an utter disaster, both in terms of the legitimacy of joining in this way and because it would make it entirely reasonable for a subsequent government, if elected on a ‘Brexit again’ manifesto, to leave again without a referendum (the same applies to any proposal to join the single market). In turn, this would also be likely to mean that the UK’s application to join would be rejected anyway, since it would be so obviously lacking in durability.

[2] Since writing this post, I have belatedly seen that Rafael Behr’s Guardian column this week made a somewhat similar analysis to that which I provide here.

[3] The most flagrantly stupid of these reactions include: a) that the claim is that all 17.2 million leave voters were conned by Russian interference (but no one claims this or even, necessarily, that any leave voter was so influenced); b) that, even if true, it is no different to Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ intervention (but this was an open statement not, as in Russia’s case, a covert operation); c) that, as per Farage, Burnham is a “liar” (but the evidence of interference is beyond dispute, the only thing which can legitimately be disputed is its effect). The latter is the pin head on which angels have been dancing all week with Burnham being (falsely) accused of having claimed that the Russian intervention had been successful.

[4] This point is not negated by the fact that the referendum result was close, leading some to claim that even a very small impact from Russian interference would have been ‘decisive’. First, we can’t know for sure that it had even a very small impact. Second, it was not the vote differential between leave and remain (i.e. the amount by which leave won) which ‘won it’ for leave, it was the totality of  the leave vote which gave rise to that differential. With apologies for the cricket analogy, if I score one run in my team’s winning score, and my team wins by one run, it does not mean that my contribution was the ‘decisive’ one, rather than the century scored by my team-mate. This also seems to be McCallum/ MI5’s view, although it is a mystery why he appears to think that discussing what he regards as its ineffective actions will in some way “delight” Russia. Equally, since it seems to be Burnham’s view as well, the charge that McCallum’s comment was, as claimed by the Conservatives, a ‘slap down’ for the Prime Minister made no sense.

[5] It shouldn’t be forgotten that, as recently as 2024, Farage also pushed the Kremlin line that the West had ‘provoked’ the invasion of Ukraine, a line which Boris Johnson also took (£) during the 2016 referendum in relation to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, for which he blamed the EU. (Subsequently, when he was Prime Minister and Russia had launched its full-scale invasion, Johnson, with his usual rancid dishonesty, argued that the West had made a “terrible mistake” in letting Putin “get away” with annexing Crimea.)

Brexit Britain is still a tinderbox

It is now almost exactly ten years since my first post on this blog, and this latest post comes after a long, hot summer break in which there have been virtually no developments as regards Brexit, in the delimited sense of Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU.

That isn’t a surprise, given that it is usually the political holiday season, at least for routine parliamentary and inter-governmental politics. Yet, starting this eleventh year of blogging, there is a sense of a more pervasive Brexit stasis. That stasis is not a sign that Brexit has ceased to be important but, rather, that the British polity has still not faced up to its consequences and shows no signs of being able to do so.

The Brexit stasis

The stasis has two aspects. From an EU perspective, relations with the UK have not been a matter of pressing concern since the completion of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on broadly satisfactory terms, and perhaps not since the completion of the Withdrawal Agreement. Not only are there now more important issues on the EU agenda, but it is also obvious that very little of substance can change unless there is a decisive change within the UK polity. And this is the second aspect of the stasis: there has been no such change.

For it is now abundantly clear that Andy Burnham’s EU policy is going to be virtually identical to that of Keir Starmer. That is most obvious in Burnham’s re-iteration over the summer of his commitment to the manifesto ‘red lines’ (no single market membership, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people, if a reminder is necessary). There should be no surprise in that, either. Politically, it would be very difficult to justify so major a departure from the manifesto without stoking demands for another general election. But in any case, as for Starmer before him, there would be little point in spending political capital on seeking from the EU something which it would be unlikely to grant until it is clear that it has strong and durable support in the UK, and will not be reversed by the next government.

There is also a time factor here: the government is already approaching the likely mid-point of its parliamentary term and, as yet, it still hasn’t delivered even the very limited reset promised by Starmer. Indeed, there isn’t even yet an agreed date for the (much delayed) next UK-EU summit at which the reset agreement is supposed to be announced, although the current rumour is that it will be in November. It’s astonishingly feeble given the supposed priority Labour accorded it when they came to power.

So, even if Burnham dropped the red lines tomorrow, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that an entirely new deal with the EU could be struck by the next election. Thus not only would he have taken the political pain of dropping a central manifesto commitment, he would have nothing to show for it. The real question for Burnham’s Labour will be whether it abandons or modifies its red lines in the next election manifesto, with the subsidiary question being whether in the interim Burnham lays the ground for doing so.

Many pro-Europeans will find this intensely irritating, but it does at least have a discernible political rationale (it’s not necessary to agree with that rationale to discern it). What is far less forgivable is that Burnham has also taken over from Starmer the stupid and dishonest pretence that, despite the red lines, he is going to seek a “bolder” and “more ambitious” relationship with the EU, something also re-stated over the summer by Hamish Falconer, the new ‘Europe Minister’ (in effect, if not in title). Thus, Burnham talks (£) of putting closer ties with the EU at the heart of his economic strategy in order to “add percentage points” to UK growth, something precluded by his own red lines. The absurdity of these claims is made all the clearer by the way that, at the same time, the British government is engaged in sour wrangling over university tuition fees for EU students as part of the existing reset negotiations, which hardly bespeaks of either boldness or ambition.

Well-worn delusions

If all this were not depressing enough, this summer has shown that the absurdity goes beyond simply spouting pieties and making dishonest claims. Rather, as an intervention from former Tory Minister Nick Boles, now advising Burnham on European policy, shows, all the familiar Brexit delusions are still in place.

In an essay for the thinktank Demos, Boles makes two key arguments. One is for the creation of a ‘European Confederation’ of the EU and non-EU countries (including the UK) allowing a single market for goods (widely misreported as ‘rejoining the single market) but with no freedom of movement of people. The other is that this would be associated with a comprehensive defence pact which would include the UK providing nuclear deterrence capability to its members.

The first of these arguments is as well-worn as a treadless tyre, and yet another iteration of the refusal to understand what a single market means as a concept, a refusal to understand what it means to the EU, and, ultimately, just the latest home-grown proposal to be ‘out and yet in’ of the sort that has been made since the very beginning of the Brexit process.

The second argument has, ostensibly, a more contemporary flavour. At least it recognizes the changed security landscape created by Trump, and shifting US priorities even without Trump, and what that means for NATO and European defence. It is clear that for Boles these two arguments go together, in that the offer of a UK (nuclear) contribution to an enhanced European defence pact will be the ‘carrot’ (£) to unpick the EU’s commitment to the ‘four freedoms’ of the single market.

In fact, and this I why I said it was only ‘ostensibly’ a new argument, the attempt to barter security for trade was attempted several times during the Brexit negotiations, starting with Theresa May’s Article 50 notification letter in 2017, an attempt much resented by EU leaders, some of whom regarded it as blackmail (it is fair to say that the use of this tactic ebbed and flowed over the years). Boles appears to think that, precisely because of the new security landscape, the attempt can be made again though perhaps – to be charitable – not in the negative sense of a threat to reduce cooperation, but in the positive sense of an offer to enhance it.

However, this rests on what is obviously a false premise. There is a perfectly good, if not indeed overwhelming, argument that it is in the mutual interest of the UK and the EU to radically increase defence cooperation because the US is no longer a reliable security partner. It’s an argument Burnham has recently endorsed. But the key point is that it is a mutual interest: both could benefit.  Yet what Boles envisages is that, as well as its share of this benefit, the UK would receive an additional benefit in the form of joining a single market for goods with no freedom of movement of people. So the equation clearly doesn’t balance. [1]

Why nothing is changing

In short, we can see Brexit stasis at multiple levels in the UK: nothing new is happening, the Labour government’s policy is unchanged and so is the mendacity of its rhetoric, and thinking about post-Brexit policy continues to go round what in the past I have called the same old Mobius Strip of ‘solutions’ to the problems caused by Brexit whilst retaining the supposed ‘benefits’ of Brexit.

As time has gone on, those benefits have proved so illusory that only the most recalcitrant continue to claim them. No one seriously believes that having an independent trade policy is a net benefit, even though the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds continues to suggest it is of value (£). And the limitations of regulatory independence were illustrated yet again over the summer in an analysis by Vilija Vėlyvytė of UKICE of the regulation of medicines testing and authorization (once touted by Brexiters as a key example of how post-Brexit sovereignty would make Britain a ‘world leader’).

But, despite the government’s continuing attempts to suggest that trade and regulatory independence provide some sort of justification for it European policy, it is perfectly obvious that what drives that policy is, overwhelmingly, Labour’s neuralgia about immigration. That explains both the broad contours of the policy, in terms of the ‘red lines’, but also the micro-details, such as resistance to an extensive Youth Mobility Scheme. It explains the contortions and delusions of the Boles’ proposals, and all the other attempts over the years to detach freedom of movement of people from single market membership. It also explains why the government is willing to sacrifice the economic growth it would so dearly love to have, to sacrifice the universities which should be central to its regional and innovation policies, and even to sacrifice the house-building programme it is committed to delivering.

Hostility to immigration supersedes everything and anything else. And whilst Labour can be blamed for its cowardice and lack of leadership in this respect, that is, itself, a manifestation of the deeper and more widespread way that the UK – and especially England – are gripped by anti-immigration fervour which persists even now that a collapse in net migration levels is under way. It is this, more than anything else, which means that post-Brexit relations with the EU are stuck in their present form.

Summer at the seaside

One obvious expression of, and barometer for, the extent of this anti-immigration fervour is the continuing level of support for Reform (and its rival offshoot Restore). Here, the event, or perhaps non-event, of the summer was the Clacton by-election. Unsurprisingly, this was won by Nigel Farage, but there was little triumph in it and the Reform leader, who has not been seen much since, seems to be a much-diminished figure. Meanwhile, there are reports of increasing infighting within the party, and its finances, as well as those of Farage himself, continue to be a source of vulnerability and potential scandal.

It may well be that electoral support for Reform will never regain its peak levels of earlier this year, when some surveys had the party polling at over 30%. However, it continues to have a fairly stable 25% of the vote share, easily large enough to have a major electoral impact and perhaps an even greater political influence. This again implies that the chances of any British government pursuing a substantially closer relationship with the EU are small, and the chances of doing so in a way that is plausible to the EU are even smaller.

Support for Reform does not simply betoken the persistence of anti-immigration sentiment. It is also bound up with the persistence of Brexitism and its attendant culture war. This summer saw an especially intense skirmish within that war with the events leading up to and following from the death of Jason Arday.

The Arday case and the culture war

More than any other example I can think of, this showed one of the most obnoxious features of the culture war. I suspect (or at least hope) that I am not alone in thinking that the Arday case shows appalling racism and EDI over-reach and legitimate media scrutiny and media hounding and personal failings and institutional failings. These aren’t incompatible, and what is so obnoxious about culture war is its demand that everyone ‘picks a side’, or perhaps more accurately the seductiveness of that demand, and ignores or denies all complexity and ambiguity.

Yet complexity and ambiguity there was. As the journalist and commentator Helen Lewis put it in The Atlantic, “the Arday case is endlessly debatable because it contains so many double-edged elements”. In a similar way, another journalist and commentator, Lewis Goodall, remarked that the case, and Arday himself, became a symbol in “the ceaseless, airless, brainless culture war.” This became obvious in the way that the case – which, surely, was a most unusual, even idiosyncratic, one – came to be used as a proxy to attack social science in general, academics in general, and universities in general. It also became obvious in the way it was taken as having a general meaning for diversity initiatives, press freedom, academic freedom etc. etc.

However, in terms of the focus of this blog, I’m not sure that the sides in the Arday furore map easily on to Brexitism. There is obviously some overlap – the racism, and the attack on academics and universities generally, no doubt has some correlation with support for Brexit and the wider social illiberalism with which that, in turn, correlates. But there are probably plenty of people (and for what it is worth I am one of them) who are neither socially illiberal nor pro-Brexit yet think that Arday’s appointment to a Cambridge professorship was questionable [2], even if hardly warranting such outrage.

More importantly, the way the ‘sides’ have lined up doesn’t map neatly on to Brexitism because it has brought into sharp focus some of the fissures amongst, especially, those who are opposed to Brexit and Brexitism. Those fissures are many (for example, liberal conservatives find commonality with social democrats, whilst social democrats are alienated from Lexiters) but the Arday case, in particular, illustrated how deeply the trans-rights issue has split the liberal-left. Thus several high-profile gender critical feminists, most notably J.K. Rowling, who were highly opposed to Brexit were also highly critical of Arday’s appointment.

As I understand it, the connection, even if not explicitly stated, is this: EDI in universities is seen by gender critical feminists as a bedrock of trans-activism; Arday’s appointment was seen as an expression of EDI in universities; and ‘therefore’ attacking Arday’s appointment was a way of attacking trans-activism. I’m not, here, making any comment on the trans-rights debate, or the sides within it, but rather trying to unpick how it cuts across the issue of Brexit and the concept of Brexitism and, in the process, trying to explain why the sides in the Arday case only partially overlap with those of Brexit and Brexitism. The example of gender critical feminists is not the only one but it is perhaps the most obvious [3].

The political tinderbox

Although the Arday case may only partially relate to Brexitism, the ferocity of the arguments it has engendered do disclose something about how intensely divided post-Brexit Britain is. I don’t mean that, had Britain not left the EU, there would not have been exactly the same argument. That would be nonsense. Nor am I suggesting that existing EU members are not, in many cases, as bitterly divided on culture war lines. What I mean is that these intense divisions have a particular significance for the prospect of re-opening, in any substantive way, the question of UK-EU relations, and especially any question of joining the EU. If even the slight spark of the Arday case can ignite such ferocity, how much more would that be true in the case of Brexit?

During this long, hot summer, Andy Burnham described the country as being a “tinderbox”, with numerous devastating wildfires and the danger of many more, and even instigated an emergency mobile phone alert to warn of this danger. With rain now starting to fall more widely, that danger is hopefully receding. But the metaphorical sense that Britain is a political tinderbox, with a culture war conflagration an ever-present danger, continues. It is for that reason that the Brexit stasis also continues. It remains too a hot a topic to address in any serious way, and there is no obvious sign that rain is imminent.

 

Notes

[1] I have a feeling that someone else made the argument I am making here, and that I am cribbing it, but unfortunately I can’t recall who did so or where I read it. I think it might have been Anand Menon. So apologies to him – or whoever it was – for not quoting/ linking to it in the way I normally would.

[2] This isn’t just a hunch on my part. I don’t want to sound as if I am waving my academic credentials but, when I was a Professor at Cambridge University, I was an external (i.e. external to the faculty, but internal to the university) member of the Board of the Faculty of Education, where Arday was employed, and sat on several of its professorial and non-professorial appointments’ panels, as well as those in my own and other faculties. I also chaired a committee for the DfES (as was), identifying criteria for quality in educational research, Arday’s field (though not my own). Admittedly, these experiences were almost 20 years ago, and I don’t want to over-claim for them but, still, it perhaps means my view isn’t entirely uninformed, and possibly less uninformed than many of those who have commented. And, in my view, whilst some of the criticisms levelled at Arday and his work were unfair, there are genuine reasons to doubt his suitability for his post.

[3] Another, perhaps less obvious or important example, is that I have noticed several people who I know to be highly critical of Brexit also strongly supported the ‘academic freedom’ of Nathan Cothnas, one of Arday’s principal accusers, following his suspension by the University of Ghent.

Regular (and attentive) readers will notice that this post comes a week earlier than the date I gave in my previous post for when I would resume, and also comes later in the day than usual.

Bad vibes

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

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

A “Brexit row”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brexit pragmatism?

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

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

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

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

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

A path forward?

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

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

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

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

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

Deeply embedded dishonesty

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

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

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

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

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

The travails of MattGPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plastic patriots become counterfeit Christians

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vibe politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Note

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

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 British immigrants 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.