Britain's Brexitism test

The most significant Brexit-related development of the last fortnight was Keir Starmer’s first visit to Brussels since becoming Prime Minister. Media attention focused on his meeting with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, but, notably, he also met with Charles Michel, Chair of the European Council, and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.

Significant it may have been, but dramatic it certainly wasn’t, and no one should have expected otherwise. This was never likely to be the moment for some great announcement and, in fact, the joint statement of the Starmer-van der Leyen meeting, whilst positive in tone, was fairly anodyne in content. Nevertheless, it did contain some points of interest.

The Starmer-von der Leyen statement

The reaffirmation of a shared commitment to the Withdrawal Agreement, Windsor Framework, and Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) could be taken as a reminder of the EU’s desire to see all of the provisions of these fully implemented, and perhaps as a pre-condition of any ‘reset’. It was certainly a reminder of the Labour government’s acceptance of the basic architecture of what was agreed by its Tory predecessors, and thus the limitations of such a reset. Yet the reference to “the unique relationship” between the EU and the UK, whilst at one level a truism, could betoken a recognition by the EU that not all its relationships with third countries are of the same order, and by the UK that the brief and hubristic days of post-Brexit ‘global Britain’, in which the EU hardly counted, are long gone.

At all events, the statement identified the desire to develop an agenda of strengthened cooperation “at pace” and, interestingly, included within that agenda were references to both climate change and energy. These had been identified by Joël Reland of the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) research centre in advance of the meeting as being something to watch for as neglected, but highly viable areas, for greater cooperation within the existing agreement architecture, and of potentially mutual interest to both sides.

But ‘pace’ will indeed matter. For example, the ongoing development of both UK and EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and associated Emission Trading Systems (ETS) means that decisions about their possible linkage, a perfectly realistic possibility within the TCA framework, will soon become pressing. More generally, as economics commentator Simon Nixon argued in a recent post on his Wealth of Nations substack, emerging EU plans to revive EU competitiveness are likely to have major implications for the UK. In short, any reset of relations with the EU will not occur against a static background.

The main substantive announcement in the joint statement was of agreement to begin holding regular EU-UK summits, starting early next year. Anton Spisak of the Centre for European Reform, and a seasoned analyst of Brexit, pointed out that the significance of this should not be downplayed, given the unwillingness of both parties to entertain the idea in the past. Small as it may be, it is a sign of progress, and was welcomed as such by the European Movement UK.*

Testing questions for the ‘reset’

How far that progress goes, and what it consists of, remains to be seen, not least because, as I discussed in a recent post, it’s unclear what the government means by ‘the reset’. But, whatever its intentions, many commentaries on the Brussels’ meeting focused on UKICE Director Professor Anand Menon’s remark that to pursue them the UK needs to show the EU “a token of good faith” by agreeing to a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS). Yet, beyond the obvious fact that this would do much to enhance the credibility of the UK’s commitment to a genuine reset, what I have not seen discussed is exactly why such a gesture is needed and what it would betoken.

I think the answer to that is bound up with the entire post-Brexit question. To what extent has the UK, not just in its government but in its wider political culture, banished or at least decisively marginalized ‘Brexitism’? I’ve argued in the past that it is this which will be the key test for the viability of any idea of ultimately joining the EU or the single market. It isn’t enough for there to be majority support for doing so in the opinion polls. The credibility question, for the EU, is whether or not there is any danger that a move to join would subsequently be reversed, and the trauma of Brexit repeated. If there is such a danger, there is no attraction for the EU in entertaining UK accession.

That is not in prospect, but the same argument applies, though arguably to a lesser extent, to the far more limited aspirations for rapprochement envisaged by the current government. To what extent can they be taken as a reliable, permanent, feature of UK-EU relations? Or will this ‘reset’ be followed, a few years down the line, by another reset, back in the direction of the Brexit Ultras’ desire for separation, antagonism, maximum distance, and ‘sovereignty’ above all else? Is the UK now, in fact, a reliable interlocutor again, or is the Brexit virus liable to break out again, as shingles may for anyone who has had a bout of chicken pox?

In this sense, complaints that the EU’s original proposal for a YMS deal were made at a time that was unhelpful (£) to the then Labour opposition missed the point: these questions aren’t (just) about any particular party or government, but about the British polity. If the EU still has to tip-toe around the Brexit eggshells of UK politics, then that in itself answers the question of whether or not Brexitism has been marginalized.

There is also a deeper, or, anyway, different version of this same question, which is also highly germane to the viability of a substantive reset in relations. Brexit aside, the UK’s attitude to the EU during the years in which it was a member was very much characterized by grudging transactionalism, rather than by any commitment to European ideals. Brussels was the place the UK went to bang the table with a handbag, and extract the most it could whilst giving the least possible in return. Now that the UK is outside, is that still the approach, rather than, as a reset might imply, one of genuine partnership?

Oddly, and perhaps unintentionally, the comments of some ‘post-Brexit realists’, who, whilst understanding very well the folly of Brexit, discuss Labour’s reset in terms of negotiating strategies and ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ objectives, reinforce the impression that this transactionalism persists. At all events, a genuine reset needs to entail more than regret about the way in which May, Davis, Johnson, and Frost went about divorce proceedings. If the marriage is to be replaced by friendship, it is also necessary for there to be a genuine desire to avoid repeating the behaviour which preceded the divorce.

The YMS test

On these questions, YMS is quite a good test to set, relating as it does to the neuralgic issue of immigration which played such a central role in the vote for Brexit. YMS manifestly doesn’t cross the Labour red line on the restoration of freedom of movement of people, so if the government still sees it as too politically toxic to pursue that suggests two, related, things. One is that within the British polity, generally, the experience of Brexit has still not lanced the populist boil about immigration. The other is that the Labour government is not minded to challenge, but to accept, the orthodoxy of anti-immigration sentiment.

It would seem as if that test has already been failed. Unsurprisingly, anti-immigration politics still suffuses Farage’s Reform Party as, hardly any more unsurprisingly, it does the Tory Party, whoever its new leader turns out to be. The Tories did have the possibility of saying that, with Brexit, they had delivered the ‘points-based’ system which Brexiters like Farage used to say was all they wanted. They could then have initiated the ‘honest conversation’ everyone says they want to have about immigration, for example by decoupling it from asylum-seeking, and by challenging the voters about their view that immigration in general should be significantly reduced whilst those same voters, including Conservative voters, do not support reductions in almost every specific category of immigration. But, whether from fear of Reform, their own preferences, or some combination of the two, the Tories have not chosen to take this opportunity.

Nor is there any sign that the Labour government will do so. That clearly extends even to YMS, with reports that the cabinet is split over whether to agree to it, and identifying Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as the main opponent. Cooper played a pivotal and praiseworthy role in preventing Boris Johnson’s government enacting a ‘no deal Brexit’, and a courageous one, too, given the horrendous abuse and threats she faced. So it might be tempting to see her stance on YMS as the latest example of the Home Office capturing its Secretary of State. After all, Theresa May went from challenging her party to stop being ‘nasty’ to being a distinctly nasty Home Secretary, and the department seems to have had similarly radicalizing effect on one-time Immigration Minister, then Tory leadership candidate, Robert Jenrick.

In fact, Cooper has been arguing against freedom of movement since at least December 2016. And although she must know very well that YMS would not mean anything like its restoration she insists that the EU “see this in the context of free movement”, whatever that is supposed to mean, or why it even affects the issue. But it isn’t just Cooper. Starmer, too, despite being enthusiastic about the case for freedom of movement as recently as January 2020, is reported to fear the reaction from the pro-Brexit press to a YMS deal. So even on this quite limited measure it seems Labour have no appetite to take on Brexitism, thus failing first part of the YMS test, namely, whether has Brexitism been marginalized.

This does not mean that YMS will not be agreed in the end. Many people (including me, for what it is worth) expect that it will be. However, the consequence of having failed the first test is that, if and when YMS is agreed, the UK will also fail the second test. For if it is agreed as, or is presented as having been agreed as, part of some quid pro quo deal to obtain some softening of the economic damage of Brexit, such as an SPS deal, then it will be clear that the UK’s relationship with the EU remains within the same transactionalist frame as it has always been. That needn’t preclude a ‘reset’ but places limits upon it, and defines the future ‘partnership’ in relatively shallow terms.

The ECHR test

Whilst the YMS is a good test of the question of whether the UK has left Brexitism behind, there is a different test, which is whether the UK is likely to go even further down the path it took with Brexit by embracing a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its associated Court. That, too, is largely bound up with immigration, to the extent that ECHR derogation is almost invariably presented as being a means of ‘stopping the small boats’ (in this sense, it is also bound up with the failure to differentiate immigration from asylum-seeking).

Here the text of the Starmer-von der Leyen statement was revealing in “re-affirming” the parties’ mutual commitment to the Convention. It’s not clear that Rishi Sunak could have done the same thing, given his repeated pandering to the possibility of derogation over the ‘Rwanda plan’. By contrast, on this, Starmer’s resolve is unequivocal: a government under his leadership will never leave the ECHR. Given all his priors, it is unthinkable that he will renege on this.

However, it is very far from obvious that this is the settled view of the British polity. Again, it is unsurprising that Farage and Reform UK are adamantly opposed to ECHR membership, whilst support for it within the Tory Party is fragile. Of the remaining leadership candidates, Robert Jenrick has unreservedly advocated leaving and, despite having initially rejected the idea, Kemi Badenoch now says that she would consider doing so.

Whichever of them wins will undoubtedly find much support for making leaving the ECHR official party policy, since doing so is now an article of faith to those on the right. At the same time, former candidate Tom Tugendhat’s foolish attempt to court the right by contingently supporting leaving indicates that even on the more ‘centrist’ wing of the party it is no longer seen as unthinkable. At the very least, his having done so will have weakened what remains of the One Nation Tories’ ability to oppose it. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, with his usual opportunism, this week called for a referendum on membership.

So it certainly can’t be said, despite all the miseries that Brexit has caused, and despite its unpopularity with the public, that Brexit 2.0 can be ruled out, or that demands for it will be confined to the margins of politics. That seems all the more the case given the faltering first 100 days of the Labour administration. Of course, it is too early to judge, but the possibility of a two-term hegemony, in which Labour might re-write British politics, looks less likely now than it did in the immediate aftermath of the election, whilst the possibility of a disillusioned electorate turning to nationalist populism has become more feasible.

The Gibraltar test

Whatever the truth of that turns out to be, it is abundantly clear that the populist and pro-Brexit media has not been cowed by the new government, and continues to exert a very considerable influence upon it. Many believed that a huge Labour majority would somewhat tame that media, for the general reason that the centre of political gravity would have shifted, and the specific one that journalists would become somewhat beholden to the new regime.

That hasn’t really happened, and certainly not to the extent that it did in 1997, with the result that Starmer’s government has immediately become embroiled in controversies, leaks and scandals (some of them highly confected), and has already been forced to engage in a domestic re-set. That has multiple implications, including for the prospects of a ‘reset’ of relations with the EU.

A clear example was the furore over the announcement that the UK has agreed to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This is itself, in part, a Brexit story because, as the BBC report of it mentioned, Brexit meant that many EU nations were no longer prepared to back the UK’s case for retaining control of the territory. It’s a point that Brexiters should heed, since it a reminder of how Brexit has weakened the UK geo-politically as well as economically.

However, more to the present point is the way that the agreement was represented by Brexiters and the right-wing press as showing “weakness” and even “treason”, ignoring the fact that the negotiations which led to the agreement had been started by the previous Tory government. This was then linked to ridiculous claims (ridiculous as there is zero connection) that it would be followed by similar deals to cede sovereignty of the Falklands and Gibraltar (£).

It’s the latter claim which relates most directly to Brexit, since the post-Brexit situation of Gibraltar remains unresolved and under negotiation, and resolving it is, in itself, now a test of Starmer’s desire for a reset with the EU. In principle this is becoming urgent, with the new Entry/Exit System (EES) Schengen border controls due to begin in early November although, as I write, reports are confirming the recent rumours that these will be postponed again. But the new controls will, eventually, happen and this matters, since a key issue is maintaining an open border between Gibraltar and Spain, and the associated question of the management of border controls at Gibraltar’s port and airport (which is also an RAF base).

The last time I discussed Gibraltar in detail on this blog was in April, when it seemed that a deal was imminent. A deal, that is, brokered by the Tory government. Since then, reports of the negotiations have been sparse, although last weekend it emerged (£) that the government was about to make formal complaints to Spain about its military overflights of the territory, which doesn’t augur well. But if, and I would think when, a deal is done it will almost certainly involve ‘concessions’ to the EU and Spain, reportedly already made by the previous government, on who undertakes border controls.

This will be the cue for Brexiters to cry ‘betrayal’, as they would have done under the Tories but now, no doubt, with the support of the Tory leadership. Such protest may be marginal, and easily batted away by the government. But the reaction to the Chagos agreement suggests the possibility of a Gibraltar deal being woven into a wider narrative of Starmer being ‘weak’ and ‘not standing up for’ Britain, both generally and in relation to the EU. If that narrative gains ground it will be another indication that Brexitism exerts a profound hold on the UK, whatever its government may be.

Still not done

The question of how Brexit will continue to unfold is a crucial one for our country, so it was with considerable regret that I learned that Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downsides Dossier is to be discontinued. It has been a huge, and I think unique, resource for collating media reports about the practical consequences of Brexit, and I’ve referred to it many times.

That isn’t the only loss. At the high-profile end of things, the decision to end the European Scrutiny Committee, for all its problems, without any replacement is a big setback for scrutiny and accountability of the government’s post-Brexit policies, as Jill Rutter and Hannah White of the Institute for Government explain. I’m particularly saddened by the decision to stop funding UKICE from April 2025. UKICE has been a consistently outstanding source of reliable data, incisive analysis, and intelligent comment about Brexit, and an invaluable public resource, not least for this blog where I have cited its work in, very possibly, the majority of posts.

At, if they will forgive me, the lower-profile end of the spectrum, Nick Tyrone has now ended his ‘Week in Brexitland’ newsletter, and Gerhard Schnyder has ended regular posts of his Brexit Impact Tracker blog. Again, I have often cited these sources on this blog and it is a shame that they are gone.

These losses contribute to a growing sense that Brexit (somewhat like Covid) is regarded if not as over, then as something that just has to be put up with, like the British, or more accurately English, weather. It’s a sense I tried to capture in more detail about a year ago in my post entitled “mustn’t grumble”. So continuing with this blog, even on its new fortnightly basis, feels like ploughing an increasingly lonely furrow, but I think it is still a worthwhile one. And this week, just over eight years since I launched it, the blog received its ten millionth visit, and the readership via email sign-ups continues to hold up, so hopefully I am not the only one to think so.

After all, as this post shows, Brexit is very far from ‘being done’, and that was without even mentioning the latest postponement to an aspect of import controls, this time that of digital product safety declarations. And as this post also shows, we are also far from done with Brexitism.   

 

*Another small step of note was the this week announcement of a new agreement between the UK’s Office of National Statistics and EU’s Eurostat, severed since Brexit. It’s not really an example of ‘the reset’, since it was anticipated by the TCA and has been under discussion for a while, but it has a significance beyond itself in that it facilitates UK participation in EU programmes such as Horizon Europe. At the same time, it’s yet another reminder of the extent to which Brexit has caused so many utterly pointless, yet damaging, ruptures, large and small.

The riots represent a moment of choice for post-Brexit Britain

It’s hopefully not premature to say the literal, if not the metaphorical, dust has settled on last week’s riots. I’ve waited to write about them as I’m not a fan of ‘hot takes’ on big events, which are often foolish, and prefer to let a little time to pass before commenting. At the same time, I’m breaking my planned August break from posting because I think that it’s important to record the riots as a part of the Brexit saga. That doesn’t mean that Brexit caused the riots, but there are some connections between them. Equally, the fact of the riots having happened could pave the way for a new and better conversation about immigration in post-Brexit Britain.

The riots

Keir Starmer correctly called the riots “far-right thuggery” which had “no justification”, and it was refreshing to have a Prime Minister unequivocally doing so, and not back-tracking in the face of criticism. Some of that criticism was dishonest, denying that any of the culprits were of the far-right. Some of it was obtuse, in interpreting Starmer’s comments as a claim that all those who took to the streets were of the far-right. It’s true, of course, that some of them were anti-immigration without necessarily being doctrinaire fascists; that some were just thugs; that some were opportunistic looters and vandals; that some were inadequates and idiots. Still, at the hard centre of the riots were far-right activists and their sinister online allies. The far-right didn’t tag along with the crowd, the crowd tagged along with them. So Starmer’s description was correct. Indeed in some ways it was an understatement: some of the far-right thugs would better be described as lynch mobs.

Given that other elements were present, Starmer was also correct to talk about the riots in terms of mindless criminality, but this was manifestly a different truth to describing them as far-right. For, to the extent the violence was politically motivated, it was not ‘mindless’ and nor was it simply ‘criminality’. The use of violence for political ends is usually called terrorism, even if calls to treat the riots as such have not been heeded, at least so far. And this does not just apply to the doctrinaire fascists. Any of the rioters whose motivation was to change immigration policy, far-right or not, were attempting to change policy by means of violence. If people wanted a severe reduction of immigration, then, just a few weeks ago, they had an election when they could have voted for a party, Reform UK, pledging just that. Only 14% of voters did so.

That choice was also available to the rioters if they are understood in terms of the softer interpretation of their political motivation, which has been deployed very widely by people who range from disingenuous apologists to some well-meaning liberals. On this interpretation these were not so much riots as political ‘protests’ which arose because the country has failed to have an ‘honest conversation’ about immigration, or failed to discuss it at all, with the result that immigration levels are far higher than ‘most people’ or ‘ordinary people’ want. On such accounts, the riots, even if not justified in their violence, reflect a legitimate and respectable grievance that ‘uncontrolled immigration’ has been forced on the public without their support or consent.

And this is where Brexit comes in, because of course we’ve heard all this before. In fact we’ve heard it for decades, but never more so than during the referendum campaign, though the honesty of that conversation can certainly be questioned.

Back to Brexit

There’s no doubt that hostility to immigration was one of the main drivers of the vote to leave, but, rather as in some of the commentary about the riots, there was a studied delineation of the ‘respectable’ and the ‘unrespectable’ approaches to this. Vote Leave, the official campaign, was at pains to distance itself from the much harsher anti-immigrant message of Farage and Leave.EU. This enabled the overall vote for Brexit to be boosted by providing different ‘channels’ to corral voters to the ‘leave’ box. For all their subsequent protestations, the ‘liberal Brexiters’ knew that they could only win by enrolling many distinctly illiberal voters. Even more disingenuously, whilst happily harvesting such votes, some of them claimed that Brexit would spike the far-right, by removing the ‘grievance’ of ‘uncontrolled immigration’.

Thus many who voted Brexit believed they had been promised that immigration would not just be made subject to national control but would be reduced and, for at least some of them, the belief was that there would be fewer Muslims and less black and brown people entering the country. The campaign also cynically, and quite deliberately, conflated the issue of freedom of movement for EU citizens with refugee flows from outside the EU, especially Syria, and exploited Islamphobia in multiple ways, including the lie that Turkey was about to join the EU.

Actually, all that had been explicitly promised, even by Farage, was an ‘Aussie-style’ points system for immigration from anywhere, including the EU. This was even sold to ethnic minority voters with non-European, especially Commonwealth, roots as a way not of clamping down on immigration but of creating parity between people from their countries of origin and those from EU countries. Indeed some Brexiters even suggested that EU freedom of movement was inherently racist, implying to some voters that Brexit should be understood as an anti-racist, anti-discrimination project at the very moment it was being implied to other voters that it was anything but that.

As I discussed at length in a post last year, the inconsistency of the appeals to voters set up a massive problem as regards immigration, just as it did in every other aspect of Brexit, after the Leave campaign’s unexpected and unplanned for victory. Of course, we know what happened. In brief, having decided, initially under Theresa May, that, more than anything, Brexit meant ending freedom of movement in order to control immigration, Brexit was enacted as hard Brexit, with all the damage that entailed. But when EU freedom of movement was ended, immigration from the rest of the world soared, precisely because, under a ‘points-based system’, it was mandated.

This wasn’t because of some ‘globalist’ plot, or the wokeish multi-culturalism of the ‘liberal elite’, let alone evidence of the obscene ‘race replacement’ conspiracy theory. It was because businesses and public services would have literally collapsed otherwise. But it also meant, in very broad terms, that it became more likely that immigrants had black and brown skins and more likely they would be of non-Christian faith. As for irregular migration, if anything Brexit exacerbated it by removing the UK from the Dublin Regulations.

So, to the extent that those who voted for Brexit wanted lower immigration, including those who did so for straightforwardly racist reasons, it left them completely unsatisfied. Rather than spike the far-right, Brexit has given them a new grievance.

Whose country?

Thus in 2016 Farage declared “it’s been a hell of a journey but we have got our country back”, in what he called “a victory for ordinary, decent people”, yet in 2024 we still have people like Lee Anderson, now a Reform MP, whining bellicosely that "he wants his country back"*. It is no coincidence that the same phrase was chanted at the recent ‘Tommy Robinson’ rally, showing the continuities between the would-be respectable Brexiter politicians and those who, by any reasonable definition, are of the far-right.

For Farage, Anderson, Robinson, and those they represent, this is because Brexit has been betrayed, but the reality is that their demands could no more be satisfied after Brexit than before Brexit. For the deeper truth is not just that those demands couldn’t be satisfied without doing massive damage, including to the public services upon which those making those demands rely, it is that even if that damage was done it still wouldn’t be enough to satisfy them. They would shift to demanding not just an end to immigration, but the repatriation of immigrants, and then of the descendants of immigrants who are not ‘really British’ (a recurring theme within far-right ideology).

We can either go on trying to appease these unappeasable demands or have the honesty and courage to say that they are unrealistic and do not constitute ‘legitimate concerns’. Or, to put that in a more positive way, to have the honesty and courage to say that most people accept, and many are more than happy, that our country is multi-cultural, multi-race, multi-faith. This isn’t just a pious or unevidenced claim. Polling this week from More in Common shows that 48% of people are proud “that Britain is a multi-ethnic society”, 45% are neither proud nor ashamed of it, and only 7% are ashamed of it. In that sense, the Anderson-type desire to ‘have my country back’ is not an innocent demand for restitution made by the many, it’s an authoritarian demand by the few for the imposition of their narrow version of what the country should be.

To accept or welcome multi-culturalism isn’t to make some Pollyannaish claim that all immigrants are good people. Why should they be? They will include the vicious and the depraved, and the saints and the saviors, just as the ’indigenous’ population does. Nor is it simply about an abstract principle of diversity, though that is a principle which plenty of people would support. It’s also about economic realism, with which comes the need to be realistic about the families of immigrant workers and students, and geo-political realism about what drives refugees and asylum seekers. The latter actually affects the UK less than many countries, but it isn’t going to disappear and, yes, it does create moral obligations on all countries, including this one.

From this perspective, the riots do show that Britain has an integration problem. But it isn’t the integration of immigrants, who mostly do so (probably rather more than most British ‘expats’, if truth be told), at least within a generation. The problem is the integration of a small percentage of stubbornly monocultural, and sometimes violent, white, mainly English men. They’ve had Brexit, with all the damage it has done. They’ve had the ‘hostile environment policy’, with all the misery it has caused. They’ve had an immigration system which, far from being uncontrolled, is tightly regulated, expensive, has left many sectors with endemic staff shortages and has banjaxed universities. But they’re still not satisfied. The issue isn’t that mainstream politics has not given enough attention to them, it’s that it has bent over backwards to do so.

I know only too well what the nationalist populists would say to all this: typical condescending globalist elitism from an out-of-touch academic. The irony is that the real condescension is the populist promise of something which is impossible to deliver in practice, as happened with Brexit and, for that matter, with successive Tory manifesto pledges of immigration caps. Equally condescending are those well-meaning liberals who insist that we must strive to ‘understand’ the concerns of the rioters, or to insist that their racism is actually just the cri de coeur of the disadvantaged. But we already understand them, and we’ve already tried to meet their concerns. It hasn’t worked, and it will never work. Whatever we do, they will still be angry, and still claim ‘their country’ has been stolen from them, just as they always have, irrespective of immigration levels, and irrespective of EU membership, decade after decade, including at those periods which, currently, they revere as the lost past of true England that they wish to reclaim.

After the riots

The riots have seemingly been quelled, partly as a result of robust policing and the rapid disposition of firm legal justice for the rioters and their on-line provocateurs. That has led to squeals from far-right apologists, with entirely bogus claims about ‘two-tier justice’ and ‘thoughtcrime’ prosecutions. In fact, it was liberal democracy in action: on the one hand, political arguments should not be advanced through violence, on the other hand, free speech is not a licence for incitement to violence. What’s more, the police response was not seen as excessive by the public, with only 7% thinking it was ‘too harsh’ whilst 42% thought it was ‘too soft’.

The riots were also partly quelled by the thousands of counter-demonstrators and by the evident disdain of the thousands who turned out to repair the damage the rioters had caused. These are the ‘ordinary, decent people’ of our country, not the neo-Nazis and their tag-along mobs. Again that claim isn’t simply rhetoric but is supported by the polling evidence from More in Common which shows, amongst other things, that only 13% think the rioters represent ‘the real Britain’ but 87% think that those engaged in the clean-up do so. Meanwhile, only 23% think the riots stem from ‘legitimate concerns’ and a mere 17% think those involved in them are ‘standing up for Britain’.

So this was not some popular uprising, and that is a crucial point. One of the things which distinguishes populism in the UK from that in other countries is, precisely, Brexit. The referendum put a single populist policy to the electorate and the majority voted for it (let’s please leave aside the cretinous point that it was ‘only’ a majority of those who voted – that’s how democracy works). That emboldened the populists to claim (and perhaps to believe) not just, as they always have done, that they spoke for the ‘silent majority’, but that they represented an actual, permanent majority for all populist policies, especially as regards immigration.

It was always nonsense, and they are still peddling it by claiming the riots represent a popular revolt against ‘uncontrolled immigration’. Indeed, it’s hard to resist the sense that for the far right and some of its apologists there was a salivating hope that the riots marked the moment when ‘the people’ finally rose up against ‘the elite’ (it reminds me of how, when I was student, my left-wing friends and I were always predicting that some moment of crisis heralded the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions). If so, small wonder that they are so angry about the way that Starmer’s new government, rather calmly and undramatically, but highly effectively, restored order.

A moment of choice

With the riots now, hopefully, over, their aftermath therefore presents a moment of choice for post-Brexit Britain. People of all types voted to leave the EU for all sorts of reasons. It would be absurd to deny that some who did so have a similar agenda to the rioters or their sympathisers, but equally absurd to claim that all or even most of them had that agenda. And, of course, many voted to remain. So post-Brexit Britain does not belong to the rioters and their sympathisers, any more than this country should be defined by the image of ‘their country’. If, as many Brexiters say, the purpose was solely to take back sovereignty and so, as regards immigration, to make our own choices about that, then we are now perfectly entitled to have whatever immigration policy we, collectively, want.

It is certainly reasonable to demand that this immigration policy be framed by honest discussion. The first place to start with that is for those who call for much lower, or even zero, immigration to be honest about what they propose the country would have to go without, including in terms of public services, if their policies were pursued. It’s easy enough to say ‘stop mass immigration’ until the effects start to bite. For example, when, as has happened in the last year, immigration applications to work in health and social care have fallen by 82%, it emerges that 64% of the public view this as a negative development and only 16% see it as a positive development. No responsible politician, in power, could come anywhere near stopping immigration, or in some periods stopping what critics call ‘mass immigration’, and so no responsible politician, out of power, can honestly advocate doing so. 

There’s also a need for a different kind of honesty, from those who are ‘pro-immigration’ as much as those who are against it, and that is to stop the conflation of at least three different things: immigration which is largely about the labour market, immigration which is about students, and immigration which is about asylum seekers and refugees. When these distinctions are put to the public in opinion polls, what is revealed is that, far from anti-immigration sentiment being dominant it is actually much more nuanced. So whereas when asked about immigration in the abstract, 54% think it should be reduced, the only types of immigration for which there is majority support for a reduction in present numbers (as at January 2024) are people crossing the channel in small boats (68% want to see a reduction) and dependents of students (54% want to see a reduction, and this is now happening, with disastrous consequences for the UK’s universities). In all other categories there is majority support for the current or higher levels of immigration. In some cases that support is very high indeed (e.g. 82% for doctors, nurses, and care workers, 77% for their dependents, and even 55% for asylum seekers).

Of course, to the out-and-out racists, such distinctions don’t matter. Foreigners are foreigners, and so are their children and grandchildren. So it actually suits them if the rest of the public are not encouraged to draw those distinctions. Indeed there can be little doubt that the relentless focus on ‘stopping the boats’ suits the far-right agenda, by conflating the most unpopular form of immigration with all immigration (just as, during the referendum, the ‘migrant crisis’ was conflated with freedom of movement). All the more reason, then, why mainstream discourse should disentangle different forms of immigration, and create policies for each of them on their own terms. And, above everything else, all the more reason to refuse to frame that discourse in terms of the false claim that the far-right speak for the ‘ordinary, decent people’.

A fresh start?

The riots, and perhaps even more some of the apologism for them, have been both depressing and alarming, and for their targets literally terrifying. It’s tempting to see them as a kind of continuation of the xenophobia which was partly responsible for Brexit and perhaps enabled by Brexit. But in a roundabout way that plays into the hands of the populists who claim Brexit as some kind of mandate for draconian immigration controls, and who enrol post-Brexit immigration into their grievance politics.

Brexit was Brexit, and it has happened. The post-Brexit politics of immigration do not belong to the Brexit Ultras – it’s notable that Farage has found himself on the wrong side of public opinion this last week or so – and it is just possible that the public disdain for the riots will turn out to be the moment when a new conversation emerges. How likely is that? Well, rather obviously, it depends on who chooses to participate in it, what they say, and how loud they say it. For too long it has been dominated by the voices of  a loud minority, which last week came to a crescendo with the raucous cries of the mob and the insidious dogwhistling of their ‘respectable’ apologists. For now they have been, if not silenced, then at least slightly subdued. What happens next is up to the rest of us.

 

*Risibly, but also disgracefully, Lee Anderson, usually so ‘tough’ on law and order, sought to defend the rioters as just “British working-class lads” who had “probably had one too many” and “got carried away”.

Note: my normal practice if I claim that certain things are being widely said is to link to evidence in the form of a study demonstrating that this is so, or at least to a high-profile example. However, doing so for some things in this post would require linking to the absolute dregs of online vileness, which I would prefer not to do.

On a separate matter, I’m hugely appreciative of all the kind comments on the previous post in response to my request for preferences about the future of this blog. I’m still considering how to proceed, but I am quite overwhelmed by the response. Thank you.

(Still not) facing up to Brexit

During the more dramatic phases of the Brexit process, it was not unusual for some big development to occur just as I was finalizing my post for this blog. It happens less often now, but it did so last week, with two important announcements being made last Thursday, by which time I had largely written what became last Friday’s post, on Gibraltar and Brexit (since this was about a possible deal which hasn’t yet happened, it was a double fault on my part). The first announcement, which I only mentioned in passing in that post, was of further delay in the introduction of import controls on EU goods. The second, which I didn’t mention at all, was about the possibility of an EU-UK Youth Mobility Scheme.

Not taking back control

It’s actually not such a bad idea to have a gap between announcements and analysis, as ‘hot takes’ often miss important nuance. That applies to a degree to the Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS) issue, which I’ll come back to, but hardly at all to that of import controls. In the latter case, there is hardly a ‘hot take’ available, given that almost everything that could be said about it has been said on the five previous occasions controls have been postponed. Last time I discussed the issue, two weeks ago, when the common user charge was announced (about which, interesting new data and analysis of its likely costs was published this week by the UK Trade Policy Observatory), I said in a response to a comment on that post that the reason the checks were going ahead this time was that a further postponement “would be too ludicrous”. So that was yet another blunder on my part, and a particularly foolish one as I ought to know that nothing is too ludicrous when it comes to Brexit.

I don’t see much point in rehashing the reasons for this mess, which has its roots in the refusal by the government, and by Brexiters in general, to accept that such controls were the inevitable consequence of hard Brexit and, as such, have been in prospect since at least January 2017. Yet only in December 2020 did the government produce its policy paper on the ‘2025 UK Border Strategy’, having meanwhile refused to extend the transition period, thus creating a highly unrealistic timescale for a system that is heavily reliant on government IT procurement, as well as a new physical infrastructure (some of which has turned out to be unnecessary as government plans chopped and changed). There is, no doubt, a whole book to be written about the many mis-steps there have been along the way, and it is a reminder that the UK was not only totally unprepared for this very core aspect of Brexit, but is unable to afford it.  

The only nuance to be added about this latest delay is to note that the government has now created an almost dizzying array of partial introductions and phasing-in of measures. Part of that was in-built from the start. Whereas the EU introduced full controls the day after the transition period ended, the UK version was not just later but always included, for example, the phasing of dates by which, first, new paperwork requirements were introduced and, then, physical checks, as well as there being different dates according to the risk categorization of the product in question. But, on top of that, further layers of complexity have gradually been added. Examples include the announcements in March of a delay until 2025 on checks on goods coming from Ireland and, in January, that the risk categorizations of various fruits and vegetables had been changed so as to come within the ambit of checks, but, in these cases, not until October.

This has made it easier for the government to pass off this latest delay as if it were no more than a further ‘technical’ change to risk categorizations, so that only the highest risk goods will have physical checks “turned on” at the end of this month (though the common user charge will begin, regardless of that). As a result, this delay has passed off more quietly than the previous ones, for few people, unless directly affected, can begin to understand, still less to be much agitated by, changes to what has become so byzantine a story. However, those who are affected most certainly are agitated by a system which, in the words of the Chair of the Small Business Federation (£), “is in complete disarray”.

Labouring the point

From a policy, or public administration, perspective, what has happened is a farce, and one which, politically, could have a major impact if, as it risks, there were to be a major outbreak of animal or even human health disease as the result of contaminated products being imported. However, for the moment, the main political talking point is whether this latest delay amounts to a political trap for an incoming Labour government, forcing it to be the one to introduce controls which are likely to create long queues and supply disruptions, as well as price increases and reduced consumer choice.

My own view is that it is more likely that, fearing such effects, the Conservatives’ intention is more about avoiding that happening before the election than laying a trap for Labour afterwards. That is because one of the few Brexit-related commitments Labour seem clear about is to seek a Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) agreement with the EU which, if made, would obviate the need for most of these controls. That would, however, entail Labour accepting ‘dynamic alignment’ (about which they have been coy) and, even though it is likely the EU will be agreeable, it will take time to negotiate. So it can’t be ruled out that Labour would need to introduce some additional, interim checks beyond whatever is in place by the time of the election.

It is a mark of this strange political period we are living through that there is much attention to what an incoming Labour government would do. It’s not just that, as I wrote recently, we are a country on hold. It’s that this has been going on for so long, and the opinion polls suggesting a huge Labour victory have proved so durable, that political commentators have virtually lost interest in speculating about the next election and are already talking more about the government that will follow or, even, the election which will follow that. In some cases, that next Labour government is already being written off as a failure, doomed to win only a “hollow victory”, to become immediately unpopular with the public, and to be internally “ungovernable” into the bargain. All these things may prove true, but such predictions seem rather premature when we are probably six months from an election that has still to be fought, let alone won.

No mobility please, we’re British

Nevertheless, speculation about what a future Labour government would do is perhaps the key aspect of the other of last Thursday’s news stories. This was what was unhelpfully and misleadingly reported as an offer from the EU to the UK of “free movement for young people” (meaning 18-30 year-olds). It was misleading, firstly, because it was not an ‘offer’ to the UK. It was a proposal and recommendation from the European Commission to the Council which, if accepted, would empower the Commission to launch negotiations with the UK. Secondly, as the detailed text makes clear, the proposal is not for ‘free movement’, even for this age group, but would have severe constraints including on length of time (probably four years) and location (movement would be confined to one EU country, rather than to the EU bloc), and several other restrictions.

The idea behind the proposal is not novel, in the sense that something like it was envisaged in the non-binding Political Declaration that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement. That never got developed in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement talks because Johnson and Frost declined to do so, in line with their minimalist approach to the negotiations. That the EU should be making such a proposal at this particular moment is a matter of some speculation, but the Commission’s text includes under the heading ‘reasons for and objectives of the recommendation’ the words: “In the course of 2023, the United Kingdom approached several (but not all) Member States with the intention of negotiating arrangements on youth mobility, modelled upon the United Kingdom’s youth mobility visa scheme. This approach would result in differential treatment of Union nationals.”

Thus many well-informed commentators, including Anand Menon, have suggested, and I agree, that this suggests that a key motivation for the timing of the proposal was to fend off UK attempts to make bi-lateral agreements with EU member states, and, conversely, to preserve a union-wide approach to managing UK-EU post-Brexit relationships. This relates to a point I made in last week’s post, about how the UK has never really learned the lesson contained in the very first draft of the EU’s approach to the Brexit negotiations, namely that the bloc would act as a bloc. That failure doesn’t just show a continuing naivety about the EU. In the case of seeking bilateral youth mobility agreements, it also shows a maladroitness of diplomacy since those EU countries excluded from such approaches, and likely to resent that exclusion, are also likely to include some with which the UK is keen to have good relations for other purposes, such as defence or the control of irregular migration.

However that may be, the government immediately rejected the EU’s ‘proposal’ whilst repeating its preference for “country-by-country deals” with some EU members thereby displaying, at the least, a diplomatic tin ear and, at most, and in fact, its failure to learn that wider lesson. With equal alacrity, Labour stated that “it has ‘no plans for a youth mobility scheme’ if it wins the general election later this year” and that “it had already pledged ‘no return to the single market, customs union or free movement’ if it takes office.”

There was little to be surprised about in either reaction. The stranglehold the Brexiters have on the Tory Party needs no rehearsing, and the tedious assertion (£) of one commentator that this development meant that “the EU has finally admitted it needs Britain more than we need it” suggests that some parts of Brexitland still have the 2016 calendar on the wall. As for the Labour Party, as I noted recently, infuriating as many ‘remainers’ find it, there is simply no prospect of it making any fresh commitments about the EU before the election. However, the formulation of Labour having ‘no plans’ for a YMS is one which leaves a tiny amount of wriggle-room, whilst the reference to the freedom of movement ‘red line’ is, strictly speaking, irrelevant given that YMS is not freedom of movement. So it remains possible that they will become bolder on YMS and other EU matters after the election.

What is a certainty is that they won’t do so any earlier. Labour resemble a team in a three-legged egg and spoon race, with the egg being made by Faberge. They aren’t going to risk the tiniest spill by giving the Tories and the Brexit press an angle to attack them. That carries its own risks, even pre-election, as it might boost support for the LibDems, who favour a YMS. It also carries risks for post-election room for manoeuvre. But, like it or not, and agree with it or not, it is obvious that Labour have decided to take those risks.

Them and us

The political dynamics of the YMS proposal for Labour have led to much comment that the Commission’s timing was unhelpful to Starmer. Such comment is misguided, not just because, as discussed above, the timing had a different motivation, but because it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about Brexit. However, I don’t think that misunderstanding is quite as presented by Menon, when he says that “some in the UK need to rid themselves of the idea that the EU are falling over themselves to get down to business with a new Government”.

I take that point to an extent – the EU’s approach to the UK will be driven by its own interests, not vague sentiment – but I also take the points made in response to it by Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, another highly respected expert on UK-EU relations. Rahman thinks, rather as I do, that the geo-political context is now so different to that which obtained during the Brexit negotiations that quite significant developments in those relations are in both the EU’s and the UK’s interests, and are not just limited to security in its narrow sense.

Nevertheless, what continues to have definitively changed as a result of Brexit is that the EU no longer has any interest in tip-toeing around political sensibilities in the UK. There was a great deal of that when Britain was an EU member, just as there is for any member. Brexiters represent it as a weakness of the EU that it needs to accommodate the often-diverging priorities of its members (for example in trade negotiations), whilst simultaneously lambasting the EU for over-riding those priorities. But the reality is that the EU is a constant negotiation between these two poles.

In the UK’s case, its multiple opt-outs from core EU projects showed Brussels’ recognition of the constraints of British politics. That recognition continued even during the Brexit negotiations, but effectively ended once the Theresa May Withdrawal Agreement was finalised*, and the change was crystallised in one specific moment, in February 2019, when Donald Tusk made his ‘special circle of hell’ comment about those who had led the campaign for Brexit despite having no idea about how to deliver it. He did so knowing, but no longer caring, that, as Leo Varadkar warned, the British press would ‘have a field day’ with his remarks.

At all events, the point now is that, although Brexiters and the pro-Brexit media remain obsessed with the EU, the EU is no longer interested in them, and still less in placating them. That is not just a matter of indifference. Crucially, it is because, to the extent that there is indeed an EU interest in agreeing closer relations with the UK, that interest is only served by durable agreements with the UK state, rather than any that might be ‘slipped through’ by any particular UK government. In other words, if agreements were only possible through carefully-timed diplomacy that is sensitive to the domestic political constraints of such a government, then they would be inherently fragile.

 So it isn’t just that the EU isn’t interested in placating UK domestic political divisions, it’s that its interests aren’t served by agreements which rest on it placating such divisions. That applies to the YMS, but, writ large, it applies to any and every agreement that might be reached, up to and including the UK re-joining the EU. The consequence is that any progress that a future Labour government might make in repairing the damage of Brexit will require it to build a sustainable domestic political consensus for that repair quite as much as it will require negotiation with the EU.

Us and them

It is clear we are a long way from such a consensus. Indeed, the two stories discussed in this post are amongst many examples of the way that Britain is incapable of facing up to Brexit. In the case of import controls, we literally shy away from the damage of enacting Brexit. In the case of YMS, we can’t give careful consideration to, let alone accept, even a quite modest reversal of the damage which enacting Brexit has done.

I’m sometimes told that it is only ‘people like you’ who are still going on about Brexit, and that no one except a few ‘remainiacs’ cares about it anymore. If that were true, the path ahead would be easy and quick, leading at the very least to a very much closer relationship with the EU. But the reality is that there are plenty of voters, and a very large segment of the political class and commentariat, who continue to care very deeply about Brexit and who have scarcely moved on from positions they held years ago. David Frost, writing with Robert Jenrick in the Telegraph this week (£), is a prime example, still chuntering on about the need to “defend” Brexit rather than treat it as “an embarrassing secret”, still holding out the myth of wonderful Brexit benefits that can be unleashed, and still – incredibly – trotting out the line that the Northern Ireland Protocol was only “temporary” and that the Windsor Framework should either be re-negotiated or unilaterally dropped. Meanwhile, for all that ‘remainiacs’ bemoan Starmer’s rather constipated timidity, Frost insists that even that would be enough for Labour to “undo” Brexit.

It would be nice, and in a better polity it would be accurate, to regard Frost as no more than a fringe figure, promoted well beyond his competence, and seeking to defend his own indefensible legacy. But he speaks for the now rampant Brexitism of the Tory Party, as shamefully displayed with the passing of the Rwanda Bill this week. The Rwanda policy comes from the same ideological maw as Brexit, exhibits the same preference for belief over reality (‘Rwanda is a safe country’) and the same fantasy that ‘sovereignty’ can make it so, shows the same indifference to international reputation, and will share the same fate of simply not being able to do what it promises it will do. The only sense in which it is not the embodiment of Brexitism is that the hardline Brexitists think it doesn’t go far enough.

It is this implacable Brexitism which, without representing the majority of the population, is powerful enough to hold the rest of the country to ransom. It is a large part of what prevents us from undertaking the kind of honest national self-assessment provided by an excellent new book by Financial Times’ journalist Michael Peel, What Everyone Knows about Britain (except the British). Of course, such an assessment, when undertaken collectively, is never going to yield unanimity – in a pluralist society, that’s impossible by definition – but we do need a broadly shared understanding of some key policy issues, most notably immigration, and of Britain’s place in the world. If there is such a thing as national political psychology, then we are in dire need of an intense course of psychotherapy.

Some may bridle at my use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in all this. The fault, after all, lies with the Brexiters and Brexitists – with ‘them’, not ‘us’. It’s certainly highly tempting to think so, and I doubt I’m the only person to still have a “don’t blame me, I voted remain” mug lurking in the cupboard. But, as time goes by, I’m increasingly convinced that this is part of the problem that Brexit has bestowed, rather than part of any process of solution, and that conviction has been increased by reading Peel’s book. There’s a sense in which we have, collectively – through the kinds of political institutions and political discourse we have allowed to develop or persist – arrived at this point, whatever individual lack of culpability any one of us may, with some justice, feel we have.

I’m not sure where that thought leads (perhaps I’ll return to it in a future post). I don’t mean to absolve Brexiters for what they have done, and are still doing. But I suppose it implies the need for a greater recognition from those of us who oppose Brexit that what lies ahead is going to be a slow and arduous process of consensus-building as regards repairing the EU relationship, as well as of wider political reform. If Brexit teaches us anything, it is to be sceptical of quick, easy, and simple solutions to complex problems, and Brexit has bequeathed us a complex problem.

That said, the costs, both economic and non-economic, of Brexit are so high that we don’t have much time to play with. If consensus-building is the pre-condition of a solution, it won’t happen on its own but will require political leadership. Realistically, that can currently only come from a Labour government facing up to Brexit. So, whilst Labour’s extreme pre-election caution is clearly not going to change, the moment the election is won they must not delay in starting to provide such leadership. How likely is that? I don’t know, but it’s the best hope that we have.

 

Note 

*It could be argued that it re-appeared at the moment that Varadkar and Johnson had their ‘walk in the park’ that led to the revised Northern Ireland Protocol. However, I think that was much more about Varadkar’s and Ireland’s interest in the island of Ireland than it was about trying to accommodate English Brexiters.

The scandal of the settlement scheme for EU citizens

This week’s domestic news has been dominated by the Horizon Post Office scandal, following the screening of the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office. There are some Brexit aspects to that which I will write about in my column in next month’s print edition of Byline Times, so I won’t repeat them here. However, the massive public outrage that has followed the drama ought to alert us to the scandals going on right now. It is all well and good to feel shock and revulsion about what happened to the sub-postmasters, but, aside from their campaign group and a handful of journalists and politicians, who gave much thought to their plight over the twenty and more years that it was unfolding?

It’s not that what was happening during that period was completely unreported, but it was perhaps easy not to pay too much attention because it seemed too complicated, or someone else’s business, or something that would all be sorted out and need not concern us unduly. And perhaps there is a harsher diagnosis here: it’s easy enough to join in with the baying crowd of condemnation now that there is such a crowd, but rather more difficult to do so when the cause was unfashionable and the outcome had to be fought for.

The ITV Post Office drama was aired on the first four days of the new year. But it was book-ended by three reports by Lisa O’Carroll in the Guardian which received far less attention. They all concerned issues arising for EU citizens who had been living in the UK before Brexit, and the government’s EU settlement scheme (EUSS), and they point to another scandal emerging under our noses but with little of the public outcry that the Post Office scandal has now provoked.

The emerging EUSS scandal

One of these reports, on 26 December, highlighted the case of ‘Silvana’, an Italian who has lived in the UK for fourteen years and faces removal from the country because she had not realized that her ‘permanent residency’ card is now insufficient, and that she needs to apply to the EUSS. However, that scheme has now closed and although it still accepts late applications on ‘reasonable grounds’, a change of rules in August removed lack of awareness of the scheme from the list of such grounds. A couple of days before, O’Carroll had reported another case, that of Massimo, an Italian restaurant owner, and his British wife, Dee, have had their bank accounts frozen because he, too, had thought his permanent residence card was still valid.

Then, on 7 January, O’Carroll reported that ‘Maria’, a Spanish woman resident in the UK, had been forcibly returned to Spain when trying to re-enter Britain after a short visit to her home country. She had documents, specifically a Certificate of Application for the EUSS, which clearly stated her right to live and work in the UK, but had not yet had a final decision on her application, in that her case was still under review following an appeal against an initial rejection. The border officials said this document was not valid, detained her overnight at Luton airport and then sent her back to Spain.

The details of each of these cases is different, and each has its own complexities, but they are not isolated. According to the3million, the main campaign group for EU citizens living in the UK, at least 140,000 people are in Maria’s situation of having Certificates of Application, but awaiting the outcome. More generally, there are an unknown number of people who have, or may, have fallen foul of the post-Brexit settlement scheme, whether because of their own confusion about it, or because of erroneous advice from officials or lawyers. As with the Windrush scandal, it may be many years before the full impact of this comes to light.

Nor is the issue just one which affects those who have not applied for, or not yet been granted, ‘settled status’. Even those who have received it can experience difficulties when they have to prove it, for example in order to get work, rent a home, open a bank account, or access the NHS. This was the case for ‘Agnieszka’, a Polish woman who has lived in the UK for sixteen years and has settled status, who found that when she tried to change her job there were errors on the government’s online ‘View and Prove’ system, and as a result she lost the position. It took the Home Office three months to correct the error.

This case illustrates one of the biggest travesties of the EUSS, the government’s refusal, despite repeated requests and legal challenges, to create a paper version of proof of settled status. The digital-only system is not only complex even when it works as intended, but has also been subject to what appear to be numerous bugs and/or hacks in which crucial data has been lost or changed.

The origins of the scandal

It’s worth delving back into the origins of all this. Of all those whose lives have been damaged by Brexit, EU citizens who were living in the UK, most of whom were not even entitled to vote in the referendum, along with UK citizens living in the EU, some of whom could not vote, have surely been the worst and most directly affected. There are many dimensions to that, starting with the emotional hurt of a vote which was to so large an extent animated by hostility to freedom of movement and immigration generally. That hurt was especially profound because so many of those affected had such deep, longstanding, roots, both private and professional, in the UK.

Then there was the psychological and economic insecurity created as the Brexit negotiations proceeded, captured by the painful testimony of the In Limbo books edited by Elena Remigi and others. Now, even with settled status, there has been a definitive loss of previous full rights of freedom of movement, and all the ongoing practical problems attendant to that loss for families and relationships. So there is a sense in which all this is scandalous in itself, even before the various issues of human, administrative, legal, and technical error which, collectively, constitute the specific scandal of EUSS.

From the outset, the EU insisted that there were three main priority areas which had to be substantially resolved in phase one of the Article 50 negotiations. These were the financial settlement, the situation of Northern Ireland, and Citizens’ rights. Perhaps surprisingly, and despite the bluster of Brexiters, including Boris Johnson, the first of these proved relatively straightforward, to the extent that the ongoing payments being made to the EU, and which will continue until 2065, are barely remarked upon now. There was not even much attention to the way that one consequence of Truss’s disastrous mini-budget was to add £91 million to the bill.

The Northern Ireland issue, despite a different kind of Brexiter bluster, to the effect that it was a non-issue, turned out to be far more complex, vexed, and intractable. Indeed, the reality is that, although this was supposed to be resolved in phase 1, it never disappeared during phase 2 (the future terms discussion), and its supposed resolution with the Northern Ireland Protocol proved chimerical once the transition period ended. Hence the Windsor Framework, which is only now starting to be implemented. All that has been discussed many times on this blog, and I won’t say more here.

What, to my discredit, I’ve discussed less often is the third of the phase one issues, Citizens’ rights. In fact, the most extensive coverage of it here was in the sole guest-authored post, written by Monique Hawkins (now Interim Co-CEO of the3million) in December 2018. That post contains many points that are still relevant. These include the fiasco of the original ‘permanent residence’ scheme and highly prescient concerns about the then emergent EUSS scheme, concerns which relate to all of the individual cases mentioned above, including the problems of a digital-only certification system.

For all these reasons, Alexandra Bulat, another campaigner in this area, and who is now the first British-Romanian Labour County Councillor, argued in February 2018 that public perception that Citizens’ rights had effectively been dealt with during phase one was mistaken. Five years on, and with the EUSS in place and giving rise to cases including, but certainly not limited, to those recently reported in the Guardian, it is now becoming clear that this is not just a scandal in the making but a scandal in progress. That is not just a matter of the EUSS itself, but also the extremely heavy-handed policing of the borders. Thus, last year, the Immigration Advice Service, again partly as the result of Guardian reporting, highlighted the high rate of EU nationals being detained at the border, including cases such as a Spanish woman arriving for a job interview without a visa even though that is something perfectly permissible under the regulations.

Parallels between the Post Office and EUSS scandals

There are some clear and direct parallels between this scandal and the Post Office, most obviously in the role of technology, where the flaws in the Horizon system can be compared with those in the EUSS View and Prove system. They also share an inversion of normal justice, in the way that the onus falls on the victims to prove their innocence in the face of an assumption that they are guilty. In a less direct way, there are parallels in the way that individuals are confronted with a massive and powerful bureaucracy, and a bureaucracy which not only applies its rules with impersonal indifference but, sometimes, does not even apply its own rules correctly.

Moreover, although EU citizens’ rights are overseen by the Independent Monitoring Authority (IMA), which is formally an “executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice”, it would seem that, as with the Post Office case, the effectiveness of political and public accountability is limited. That’s not to dismiss some of the good work the IMA has done, including winning a court case against the Home Office in 2022 on one aspect of EUSS’s functioning. Yet, on another aspect, where it investigated the effectiveness of the issuing of Certificates of Application for EUSS, making three recommendations for improvement, the Home Office, in its response of September 2023, was able simply to dismiss two of the three, apparently with impunity.

In a sense, people like Hawkins and Bulat (and others associated with the3million and similar organizations) can be compared to the very early campaigners in the Post Office scandal, and O’Carroll with the journalists who first began to report it. Some politicians, too, including Green MP Caroline Lucas, have taken an active interest in it, just as a few did in the Post Office case. But what the Post Office scandal should tell us is that it is now, when the damage is being done, that public outrage and outcry is most needed, as it is only that which galvanizes effective political action.

Where are the Brexiters?

It's true that for most of us there may be little we can do other than, say, write letter to our MPs, or make a donation to a campaign group or a crowdfunded legal action. But what of those with a public platform who have now so opportunistically started singing the praises of Mr Bates and the other sub-postmasters? What about Nigel Farage? Now, he is quite ludicrously* castigating Keir Starmer for having been Director of Public Prosecutions when the postmasters were being prosecuted and, of course, he made much of his ‘victimization’ when de-banked by Coutts. Surely, then, he should be leading the outcry, if only for those like Massimo who have been de-banked by Brexit?

And what of David Maddox, Political Editor of the rabidly pro-Brexit Express, who this week penned possibly the most dotty commentary on the Post Office scandal so far, opining that: “the real big picture story here is that this was once again an example of the establishment circling in to protect and reward itself while dumping from a great height on the little ordinary people – aka the decent hard-working folk who keep this country ticking over. This is one of the main reasons why millions of Brits, some of whom had never voted before, rose up and voted Leave in 2016 to leave another pan-European, rigged establishment club”? We await Maddox’s fulminations on behalf of the “little ordinary people” and “decent hard-working folk” being ‘dumped on’ by the EUSS.

What of thuggish Lee Anderson, one of those intent on making Ed Davey the villain of the Post Office scandal (a proposal which, along with other aspects of the current situation, was eviscerated by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop in a blistering TV appearance)? What, for that matter, of those Vote Leave campaigners who insisted that little or nothing would change for EU citizens in the UK and for UK citizens in the EU (£), dismissing all concerns as part of Project Fear, and often – with the habitual Brexiter proclivity to cite legal factoids which they didn’t understand – erroneously invoking the Vienna Convention as proof of this?

Why it matters

The need to recognize and resolve the emerging scandal of the treatment of EU citizens in the UK is, first and foremost, a moral imperative. But it also has a pragmatic and political aspect, and one which should be as important to those who want to ‘make the best of Brexit’ as to those who want to reverse Brexit altogether. The reason why the EU insisted that Citizens’ rights must be dealt with in phase one was because protecting those rights was very high on its list of priorities – higher, perhaps, than protection of UK citizens’ rights was to the British government.

It remains the case that the EU and individual member states are very much concerned about this. For example, in February 2023 (£) the EU raised serious concerns about the Home Office’s sudden rejection of over 140,000 on-line applications for settled status, with an EU diplomat reported as re-iterating that “protection of EU citizens’ rights is a priority for us”. Similarly, as early as May 2021 the European Commission expressed “concern” in relation to unwarranted detentions of EU citizens at UK borders.

So if there is to be a return to good relations with the EU, let alone an atmosphere in which a UK application to re-join the EU or even the single market would be viewed positively, then a pre-requisite would surely be fair treatment of EU citizens. One of the many ways in which Brexiters failed to show generosity in their victory was to treat these EU citizens so carelessly, effectively exposing them to the whole panoply of the ‘hostile environment policy’ the Home Office has created. For that, and for Brexit itself, they bear responsibility and deserve blame. But, whilst acknowledging that, I think that the Post Office scandal provides more uncomfortable and perhaps unpalatable lessons.

Uncomfortable lessons

Following the ITV drama, public revulsion at what was done to the sub-postmasters has, understandably, focused especially on Paula Vennells, the former CEO of the Post Office. In the face of that revulsion, she has since capitulated to the widespread demand to return the CBE she was awarded, and now faces pressure to return bonuses she was paid. Few will feel much sympathy for her.

Yet it doesn’t necessarily require sympathy to notice that the way she has been pilloried, including extensive reference to the gap between her conduct as CEO and her position in the Anglican Church, is itself not so very different to the way that some of the sub-postmasters who were wrongly convicted were turned on by their communities at the time it was believed those convictions were warranted. That didn’t always happen, and in some cases their communities gave huge support to them, but sometimes they were insulted and even assaulted, as were their families. And, just as Vennells is depicted as a hypocrite because of her religious beliefs, so they were depicted as having betrayed community trust.

Vennells may well have been incompetent, dishonest, and, for all I know, malign, and I’m certainly not defending her. But making her the main scapegoat for the entire scandal, or at least the lightning rod for public anger, neglects the systemic nature of that scandal. To call it systemic means much more than just identifying a larger cast of scapegoats in the multiple actors in the Post Office, Fujitsu who created the Horizon system, and parts of the government. It also means recognizing the role of habitual practices around things including outsourcing, political oversight of ‘arm’s length’ agencies such as the Post Office, and the conduct of private prosecutions. Less comfortably, it includes the role of those who disdained the victims as criminals and those, comprising almost all of us, who didn’t give very much care or attention to what was happening, at least until we saw it depicted on TV.

How do these lessons apply to Brexit?

So what of the emerging EUSS scandal and of Brexit more generally? Just as I’ve argued in the past that it is useful to imagine how the UK would have regarded another country had it been leaving the EU, so is it instructive to think about how the UK looks from abroad. Whereas, internally, we may see a crucial distinction between leavers and remainers, from outside it is simply the case that the British people chose to leave. After all, few of us are familiar with the intricacies of other countries’ politics – mostly, we just notice the headline fact that, say, ‘the Italians’ have elected Meloni, or that ‘the Australians’ have voted against the indigenous voice change to their constitution. Brexit is seen a similar terms from outside as, no doubt, is Britain’s treatment of EU citizens.

At some point, especially if there is to be any serious possibility of re-joining, that has to be confronted. It’s not enough to indignantly say it was ‘Russian interference’, or an accident of Tory Party (mis)management, or dishonest campaigning using data analytics to malign ends, or manipulation by Tufton Street thinktanks, or, even, that it was all the fault of the Brexiters. Whether or not those things are true doesn’t adequately acknowledge that, as a collective entity, our country chose to leave, and so it’s like saying some version of ‘it was Vennells’ fault’ in relation to the Post Office scandal. In other words, it fails to acknowledge that, in ways that are far too numerous to discuss here, Brexit was a systemic decision born of the history of the UK’s membership of the EU, our public discourse, especially about immigration, and the nature of our political culture and institutions, all of which ultimately paved the way to the headline fact that Britain voted to leave.

If Brexit is ever to be reversed then it may well need at least some high-profile Brexiters to recant and, rather like Vennells returning her CBE, to give some acknowledgement of their misconduct and failure. But, more importantly, it will require a repudiation of the systemic factors that lay behind Brexit. That will take many years, if it happens at all, but in the meantime a small step in that direction would be to start making a noise right now about the unfolding EUSS scandal. It will not be enough to wait until when, in, say, 2044, there is a TV drama about all the lives ruined, and joining the angry crowd demanding justice becomes easy and even, in a perverse way, enjoyable.

 
*Ludicrously, as the vast majority of these 900+ prosecutions were private, not public, and of those which were not it seems only three occurred when Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions, and it seems unlikely he is culpable for them.