Parsing Farage’s démarche farce

I had been intending to skip writing this fortnight’s post. There didn’t seem to be much happening, mainly because so much is on hold until Andy Burnham assumes the Prime Ministership. Of course, there are always news stories of relevance to the focus of his blog, but there only seemed to be two main, specifically Brexit-related developments.

One was the demolition of the border barriers between Spain and Gibraltar, in advance of the provisional application of the UK-EU treaty on 15 July which is expected to be formally signed on 13 July. There was also a UK parliamentary debate yesterday showing broad cross-party support for the treaty. This marks an important moment for Gibraltar but also for the Brexit process as a whole in that it resolves the last outstanding issue from the Article 50 negotiations. Those with long memories may recall how, in 2017, there was ridiculous talk from Brexiters, including former Tory leader Michael Howard, of Britain going to war with Spain over this issue. [1]

The other development was  a report that the ‘reset’ agreement is near to completion and the delayed UK-EU summit is likely to be held in mid-October. However, another report (£), in the Financial Times, suggested that there are still many unresolved issues and that the summit date remains uncertain. The latter report stated that a particular stumbling block is the UK demand to have a role in EU decision-making, a demand unsurprisingly rejected for the obvious reason that the UK chose to leave the EU.

But within the FT report was a particular sentence, to the effect that the UK demand “was a key part of British attempts to defend the deal from criticism from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party”. It is yet another reminder of the mess post-Brexit Britain is in: still making unrealistic demands of the EU, still allowing Farage to influence policy from outside government, and still caught in the absurd fantasy that doing so will somehow defuse the criticisms that he would make whatever the terms of any deal. That reminder is all the more stark given the miasma of scandal that has recently gathered over Farage.

So when that led to the extraordinary démarche of announcing on Tuesday his intention to resign from, but re-fight, his Clacton seat, I decided that a post this week was worthwhile after all (albeit, as it happens, a day earlier than my usual Friday morning slot). For, however events now play out, this episode is highly revealing about both post-Brexit politics and the politics of Brexitism.

Farage’s petulance and panic

The circumstances of Farage’s announcement are well-known. In brief, the swirl of questions about financial gifts he has received led to the instigation of a parliamentary standards investigation into, specifically, the £5 million he was given by cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne. His responses to questions about this have been contradictory, evasive and increasingly tetchy (and, preposterously, he referred to it in his announcement as being akin to a “lottery win”). Then, amid expectations that the standards investigation would rule that he had breached rules on declaration of the gift, a new scandal was uncovered last weekend when the Sunday Times reported (£) that he had been given substantial monetary gifts by convicted cryptocurrency fraudster George Cottrell, which had also not been declared, also potentially breaching disclosure rules.

This was the background to the ‘resign and re-stand’ announcement. In it, Farage elided numerous issues, most of which are irrelevant to the issue of whether he has or has not broken parliamentary rules on gift declaration. These included the nature and extent of his need for security, and who should pay for it, his right to undertake extra-parliamentary work, and his allegations of media harassment of his daughter. There was also another outing for his ridiculous claim to be a successful businessman rather than a career politician. These and other irrelevant talking points are also being endlessly re-hashed on social media.

As ever with Farage, the accent was on his supposed victimhood, refracted through the familiar mix of self-pity and aggression. Notably, though, as has been the case throughout the recent weeks in which his financial dealings have been in scrutiny (including not just gifts received, but payments for his various business activities including the £270,000 he has earned since becoming an MP as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm), he has lost much of his usual skill in presenting himself as humorous and unflappable. Rather, he seemed petulant and panicky. If so, that suggests that he, too, expects to be found to have breached parliamentary standards since, if not, he could confidently have waited for exoneration.

The populist subversion of democracy

Beyond all the faux-victimhood, Farage articulated a core theme of populism in general, and Brexitism in particular. The link to Brexit was explicit, and made by Farage himself in claiming ‘credit’ for the referendum and for Brexit itself. For all its failure and subsequent unpopularity, and for all that Farage generally says little about it these days, Brexit remains his signature dish. But more importantly, what Farage proposed was that it should be for “the people” of Clacton to decide. To decide what, though? Apparently, they (rather than the media) should judge his probity and they (rather than parliament) whether he had breached the rules on disclosure of gifts. Yet, manifestly, that would be impossible. Without media reports of his conduct, how would people be able to judge his probity? And, certainly, they could not judge whether he has breached disclosure rules until the parliamentary investigation of that has been completed.

So it was a nonsensical proposition, yet it was also a meaningful one. Its meaning is that the sole mechanism of democracy is voting (a principle which does not, by the way, apply to Reform UK’s governing board). This, too, is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. It is what lies behind all the jibes about unelected judges and unelected bureaucrats, jibes which entail that only being voted for brings democratic legitimacy. It ignores that democracy is much more complex than voting and that voting is only one, albeit necessary, condition for its existence. An independent judiciary, a free press, bureaucratic rules for the conduct of representatives, amongst other things, are also vital. Thus what purports to be an absolute commitment to democracy is in fact an attempt to subvert it by hollowing it out.

Here, again, there is a Brexit connection or, rather, an illustration of how Brexit has segued into Brexitism. The idea that the referendum, because it was a vote, gave rise not just to ‘the will of the people’ but rendered all further involvement by judges, civil servants or even parliament itself illegitimate, was one of the most pernicious features of the post-referendum period. Now, Farage is seeking to draw on the same well-spring, by declaring that his by-election will be about ‘the people versus the Establishment’. He even reprised one of the most irresponsible of the appeals to leave voters, to use the vote not to decide on the ostensible issue under consideration but simply to “stick two fingers up at the Establishment”.

If Farage’s gambit succeeds (a question I’ll come back to) then, even if he is subsequently found to have breached parliamentary standards, he will use the result to delegitimize that finding. He has already denounced the process as “political” in order to discredit it as being a motivated attack upon him, but doing so also has the effect of positioning it within the same arena as the overt politics of the voting process. Thus, it becomes possible to say that its findings are irrelevant because ‘the people have spoken’.

The wider issues

However, whilst the outcome of the standards investigation is an important one, both for Farage himself and for the principles it embodies, it’s important to keep in mind that, in itself, it is not the most important issue. The rules on disclosure of gifts are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That is, they exist to provide transparency about the interests and, perhaps, the obligations of MPs. From that point of view, even if Farage had correctly declared his gifts in line with the rules and, actually, even if it turns out to be true (as he claims) that it was not necessary to declare them, the fact of those gifts is highly significant.

They raise the question of why Farage is so enmeshed with, specifically, cryptocurrency magnates and what that betokens. This question goes beyond the personal gifts he has received to encompass the donations made to Reform UK itself, not least because some of the magnates involved, primarily Harborne, are one and the same. The connection of these issues would arise in relation to any party leader and party but is especially salient in this case because of the peculiar structure of Reform UK and the unique relationship between Farage and the party he created. For, even though he renounced ownership last year, he still has an unusually strong grip on it.

Reform’s reliance on cryptocurrency, both as a source of the wealth of its biggest donors and as the actual currency used for some donations, is unusual and striking. Harborne has given £9 million to the party (the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party) in addition to earlier donations of at least £3 million, along with the £5 million to Farage personally. Another cryptocurrency billionaire, Ben Delo, has donated £4 million to the party. Meanwhile, last year Reform became the only major political party in the UK to accept donations in cryptocurrency (although this is to be prohibited, at least temporarily, under recently announced government regulations).

Reform has other major donors, of course, such as venture capitalist and art collector Sasan Ghandehari who has recently pledged unspecified millions of pounds (£). More modestly, £200,000 was given by Anthony Bamford’s firm JCB, whose products, no doubt coincidentally, have recently been promoted and extravagantly praised by Farage and Reform MPs Lee Anderson and Robert Jenrick. But the scale and centrality of cryptocurrency to the finances of both the party and its leader is remarkable. Farage also has his own personal interest in the sector as a substantial investor in, and promoter of, the bitcoin firm Stack BTC.

This does not, as Farage would have it, denote that he and Reform are tech-savvy innovators, geared up for the financial system of the future. Cryptocurrencies are inextricably intertwined with organized crime, money laundering, terrorism and hostile state actors, as the Royal United Services Institute’s research, amongst that of others, has explored. They are also central to Putin’s wartime economy and his attempt to circumvent sanctions, as the RAND organization, amongst others, has shown.

This makes it unsurprising that Farage’s £5 million gift was reported by bankers to the National Crime Agency. It is very difficult to trace the provenance of funds moved through crypto accounts, so banks frequently seek advice from crime agencies when large sums are involved, especially when paid to “politically exposed people”. This latter concept, by the way, was central to the dramatic row that broke out in 2023 when Farage was ‘de-banked’ by Coutts, something which might appear in a fresh light given the more recent revelations.

Nor should the Trump connection be forgotten. Having once dismissed cryptocurrency as a scam, he has since embraced it, seeking to make the US “the crypto capital of the world” and netting a staggering $1.4 billion from his own crypto ventures in the first year of his second term of office. Trump also granted a pardon to Reform donor Ben Delo for his offences relating to anti-money laundering compliance (George Cottrell is reportedly seeking such a pardon for his fraud conviction).

So it is because of, to say the very least, the murky nature of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency speculation that the question of whether Farage did or did not break parliamentary disclosure rules is not the only issue of importance. His longstanding commitment to cryptocurrency deregulation was given tangible form with the publication of Reform’s so-called ‘Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill’ in May 2025. This (which intriguingly has now disappeared from Reform’s website) claimed to set out a “post-Brexit roadmap to make the United Kingdom the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation”. It might not be unduly cynical to wonder what motivates Reform’s commitment to such legislation and, perhaps even more importantly, to be concerned about the calamitous effects it would have on the British economy were anything like it ever to be enacted.

Back to Clacton

One might certainly wonder exactly how Farage and Reform’s enmeshment with cryptocurrencies squares with their anti-globalist and anti-elitist pretensions (this is probably one reason, along with Rupert Lowe’s even more extreme anti-immigration policies, why Restore Britain is siphoning off some of Reform’s core supporters, although Lowe, himself, can hardly be regarded as a horny-handed son of toil). This in itself makes Farage’s framing of the Clacton by-election rather a farce. But, as things are turning out, it will be a farce anyway, as all the other major parties have very wisely decided not to field candidates. Nor will Restore, providing Lowe’s Musk-backed ethno-nationalist party with a rare opportunity to inhabit the moral high ground.

This creates the prospect of a Farage victory, probably on a very low turn-out, over the joke candidate Count Binface (it seems that actor-turned-fruitcake Laurence Fox will also stand). Or, even more humiliatingly, a defeat by Count Binface. Indeed it is a delicious, and perhaps not entirely unlikely possibility, that Farage’s injunction to voters to ‘stick two fingers up at the Establishment’ might actually yield this outcome. It would be reminiscent of the ‘Boaty McBoatface’ episode or, perhaps more pertinently, H’Angus the Monkey’s election as Mayor of Hartlepool in 2002, but with incalculably greater political consequences.

This bizarre situation has already forced Farage’s supporters into some curious postures. Many are drawing a bogus comparison with the Makerfield by-election (bogus for the obvious reason that the sitting MP did not re-stand for election). Some, such as tedious contrarian Brendan O’Neill, are complaining that the failure of the other parties to stand candidates shows they are insulting the working-class people of Clacton. Others are reduced to delving into the background [warning: link to X] of the comedian behind Count Binface to show that he is an anti-Brexit graduate and a prime example of the metropolitan liberal elite. The idea, it seems, is to suggest that he is, after all, a serious candidate representing the Establishment, which is surely a very perverse route to go down.

All of this is, in its way, highly amusing. Even so, the very farcicality of it is a depressing symbol, not least to the world beyond Britain, of the state of British politics. Of course it is also possible that Farage will wriggle out of things, reversing his resignation and no doubt claiming that he has supposedly won a victory by showing that the other parties are ‘too scared’ to fight him, rather than simply showing their disdain for his antics. It is also possible, whether or not this by-election happens now, that one will be triggered if he is found to have broken parliamentary rules. If so, that would presumably be contested by the other parties in the normal way and he would quite possibly win.

Whilst it is certainly too early to write Farage off, there is a palpable sense, which was growing even before his ‘resignation’, that his star is waning. That matters. It is obviously the case that Farage channels a deep vein of political sentiment that would exist without him, and will continue to exist if he were to depart the political scene. But the way in which he has dominated populist politics in Britain for so long, and the very personal hold he has over the Reform party, means that if and when his demise comes British politics in general, and Brexitism, in particular will be significantly re-inflected. His own conduct, especially this week, has probably brought that moment closer.

 

Note

[1] For detailed discussion of the treaty, see my post of June 2025. For discussion of the 2017 episode, and the background to it, see my post from April of that year.

Brexit: the next phase

The main Brexit news since my last post is the announcement of an agreement about Gibraltar made between the EU, UK, Spain, and Gibraltar. Although at this stage only a political agreement, which still needs to be put into legal text and ratified, this marks a certain kind of milestone in the Brexit process, for it is the last part of the negotiations which began under the aegis of Article 50. So, combined with the recent announcements at the ‘reset Summit’, it can be seen as the end of one phase and the beginning of another.

The Rock took ages

It’s worth pausing just to reflect on that, given that it is over eight years since Article 50 was triggered by Theresa May, five and a half years since the UK left the EU, and just a few days from now it will be the ninth anniversary of the referendum itself. I am not sure who first said it (possibly Rafael Behr), but the biggest lie about Brexit, a title for which there is much competition, was that it would be quick and easy.

It is somehow fitting that Gibraltar should be the last of the ‘withdrawal issues’ to be resolved since, at the very beginning for the Article 50 process, it gave rise to a strong candidate for another much-competed for title, the maddest moment of Brexit. I am referring to the time, in April 2017, when senior Tories, including Michael Howard, talked of the possibility of going to war with Spain. This followed the publication, immediately after the UK sent the Article 50 letter, of the EU Council’s draft negotiating guidelines. As I wrote at the time, and elaborated in more detail in April 2024, when it seemed as if a deal was in the offing, this episode contained within it many lessons which have run through the entirety of the Brexit saga, like words through a stick of rock (that is the last ‘rock’ pun).

I won’t repeat that discussion here. But it is relevant to say that the terms of what have been agreed are pretty much as trailed in 2024, and not very different to the ad hoc arrangements created in 2018 and semi-formalized at the end of the transition period. So it hardly needed to take so long to deal with, because the reality is that something like what has been agreed was the only credible option, and certainly the best option for the people who live and/or work in Gibraltar.

What has been agreed?

On the central issue of contention, there will be no passport or other checks on goods and people crossing the land border between Gibraltar and Spain, but there will be dual passport controls at Gibraltar’s airport and sea port (most arrivals at the latter are from cruise ships, with passengers pre-cleared for landing).

This means that the UK/Gibraltar authorities will operate one set of checks, and the Spanish authorities will operate another set, and these latter will also be checks for Schengen Area entry/ exit. It is a situation which has been compared with the kind of dual controls operated on Eurostar services between London and Paris/ Brussels (although the mechanics will be slightly different). This means in effect, although not, according to Foreign Secretary David Lammy, in formal terms, Gibraltar will be within the Schengen travel area.

One aspect of what has been agreed is that it will be Spanish, and not EU Frontex, border staff who will be policing the Schengen checks. This had been the subject of dispute during the negotiations, and appears to be a negotiating ‘victory’ for Spain, as, under the Tory government, the UK had apparently wanted Frontex to police the controls. It is hard to see why, though. It is no different to the way that the French authorities police Schengen for Eurostar travel, and one might have thought that Tory Brexiters would prefer a national agency to an EU agency, but it may be that, on this issue, their concern was more about any implication of Spanish sovereignty over Gibraltar. In practical terms, it seems irrelevant either way.

Much of the detail of this, and the rest of the agreement, including the precise arrangements for the UK RAF and military base on Gibraltar, has yet to be disclosed (although Lammy has said there will be “zero change” as regards the military base). There will also be a ‘level playing field’ agreement, encompassing state aid, taxation, labour, environment, trade and sustainable development, anti-money laundering, transport, the rights of frontier workers and social security coordination, presumably along the lines of what is in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

Those things aside, perhaps the most significant provision is that there will be an EU-Gibraltar customs union, with implications for the harmonization of duties, including on alcohol and tobacco. It is an interesting development, since, Gibraltar was not a part of the EU customs union when the UK was a member state (and therefore customs union member), so in this respect Gibraltar, uniquely amongst British territories, will become closer to the EU as a result of Brexit [1]. That is perhaps some recompense for having to endure, with Brexit, something which 96% of Gibraltarians voted against.

Sovereignty betrayed, part 94

All of this led to predictable cries of betrayal and loss of sovereignty from Brexiters, although it’s worth saying that the Conservative frontbenchers, perhaps mindful that their party was gearing up to agree something very similar last year, have so far been fairly muted in opposing it. No such constraints exist for Tory backbenchers like Mark ‘D-Day’ Francois, or for the Reform blowhards who denounced the agreement as a “surrender”, but on this occasion their position is even more convoluted than usual since they seem unsure whether what is at issue is their usual bleat about ‘surrender’ to the EU or whether it is a ‘surrender’ to Spain.

There has been some of the former, mainly in relation to the tax harmonization and eventual customs union plan. However, the main focus of Brexiter complaint has been the fact that Spain will police the airport controls, with the possibility that British citizens could be refused entry by Spanish border guards (they would, of course, have been equally, or more, outraged had the deal put EU Frontex staff in charge: we know this, because they were outraged when it was under discussion).

Actually, one thing which the official statement of the agreement makes abundantly clear is that it exists “without prejudice to the respective legal positions of Spain and the United Kingdom with regard to sovereignty and jurisdiction”. But if the Brexiters believe otherwise, then they should acknowledge that it is yet another example of how they misled British voters before the referendum.

For in May 2016 the then Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said: “I genuinely believe that the threat of leaving the European Union is as big a threat to Gibraltar's future security and Gibraltar's future sovereignty as the more traditional threats that we routinely talk about.” The reaction from Brexiters was furious, with Liam Fox enraged that the possibility should even have been mentioned, saying: “I think there are limits to what you can and cannot say in any campaign that goes way beyond acceptable limits” [sic]. All this was reported in the Daily Express under an inevitable headline about ‘Project Fear’.

So now, in 2025, if the Brexiters are really saying that Gibraltar’s sovereignty has been undermined by Brexit, they should surely admit that Hammond was right and Fox was wrong. Alternatively, they might reflect on the way that their ideological counterparts in Spain have also reviled this week’s deal as an abject surrender of sovereignty, but on their telling it is the Spanish government which has made the surrender!

Brexitism and the Beeb

But this is to ask for consistency and self-awareness from those who can barely muster a coherent argument, or even basic knowledge of the facts. To take one example, David Bannerman, one of the most hardcore of Brexiters, fulminated that the deal violated the sovereign rights of British passport holders to live in Gibraltar all year round (since Schengen rules would not allow this). It fell to Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, to school the Tory ex-MEP that such rights had never existed. It was a reminder of the way that, even now, after all these years, some of those most committed to Brexit have so little understanding of the practicalities of what being in the EU meant.

Equally illuminating was the way that former Brexit Party MEP Lucy Harris [2] spluttered about the deal having “sold off” Gibraltar and being “anti-British” before eventually settling on it being “anti-democratic”. This, she argued, was because the people of Gibraltar hadn’t been consulted, and because it “insulted” them and also “Brexit voters, northern voters of this country” (the country she presumably meant, in a rather ‘anti-British’ usage, being England). That was a strange juxtaposition, since it is not obvious how something can insult both those who voted to remain and those who voted to leave, and of course the deal is very much what Gibraltarians have been wanting for years (and was negotiated, and will be subject to ratification, by their elected representatives).

Harris’s comments would hardly be worth dwelling on – and, like her fellow Brexiters, she does not have any practical alternatives to the agreement – except that they illustrate how, even as the last part of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU is laid to rest, the ‘Brexitism’ it spawned is more vibrant than ever. There is now an almost literally endless supply of Brexiters – low-grade, if you like, but, still, as in this example, appearing on flagship current affairs shows on the BBC and other major news outlets – who are able to do little more than spout slogans.

In the case of the BBC, especially, I suspect it is because they have been so cowed by populist attacks that they feel obliged to give representation to a position that has so few elected representatives that they have to fall back on people like Harris. This forces others (including BBC journalists themselves) to respond as if engaging with serious comment, and as a consequence political discourse as a whole becomes framed by Brexitist talking points. And whilst the BBC is not the only culprit, it is, by virtue of its position, undoubtedly the key media institution influencing that discursive framing.

A new phase in the Brexit process

Whilst the Gibraltar announcement can be seen as the last moment of the Article 50 process, it can also be understood as part of the beginning of the reset process. As I mentioned in a recent post, there had been reports that a deal over Gibraltar would be a precondition for any reset deal to be announced at the UK-EU Summit in May. As it turned out, the Summit produced an agreement (of sorts) in advance of the Gibraltar announcement, but it is hard to believe there was no linkage between the two. That is to say, the Gibraltar agreement was almost certainly anticipated at the time of the Summit and/or had it subsequently failed the materialize then the potential deals envisaged by the Summit would have been unlikely to progress.

Indeed there is a wider point here. The first substantive paragraph of the Joint Statement of the Summit affirmed that in announcing their new “strategic partnership” the UK and the EU “agreed this would build on the stable foundation for our relationship set by the Withdrawal Agreement, including the Windsor Framework, and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and reaffirmed our commitment to their full, timely and faithful implementation.” In other words, there is a clear sense, and a clear expectation, that the reset is contingent upon delivering the original withdrawal terms. That should now be taken to include the belated completion of those terms by the finalisation of the Gibraltar agreement.

This presumably has the potential to be at least a background feature of negotiations about the various potential reset deals, such as an SPS deal, in that they would be likely to be jeopardised by any actual or perceived failure of the UK to implement the existing agreements. That might include issues such as failing to honour the level playing field commitments of the TCA, for example over state aid, failing to fully implement the Windsor Framework version of the Northern Ireland Protocol, or failing to operate the EU Settled Status Scheme arising from the Withdrawal Agreement in an effective and equitable manner. In short, we may be moving to a new phase in UK-EU relations, but it is still anchored in the previous phases, and the new phase creates a negotiating ratchet (for both the UK and the EU, but most obviously for the EU, as the UK is the demandeur) to ensure compliance with the previous agreements [3].

What the new phase will look like

Whether or not that turns out to play a part in ongoing reset negotiations, what certainly will be an issue is the extent to which the UK has already passively or actively diverged from EU regulations. It is true that, in fact, there has been relatively little regulatory divergence since Brexit, and once the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill becomes law (as it is about to) it will be easier to avoid passive divergence. However, there have been some potentially significant active divergences already, most obviously those relevant to a future SPS agreement.

One important example is the divergence in gene-editing regulations. As I discussed in a post in February 2022, when the legislation was being developed, this is a regulatory area which, although not without its critics, could justifiably be thought of as a Brexit opportunity. That legislation, which only applies to England, has now been passed, as the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 and was welcomed as “game-changing” by the John Innes Centre, a leading research centre in the area (and, somewhat less enthusiastically, by Peter Mills of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics).

This legislation explicitly moves away from the EU’s approach to Genetically Modified Organisms regulation but an additional complexity is that the EU’s approach, too, is in flux. This means that it is not, at present, knowable exactly how the UK and EU approaches will differ at the point of any SPS deal which may be done. This situation does not present insurmountable obstacles to such a deal, and Jiyeong Go and Emily Lydgate of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy have recently set out a much more detailed explanation of the issues, including some possible resolutions. But it is illustrative of the kind of detailed, technical practicalities which will have to be thrashed out, presumably behind closed doors, in the coming months (or even years).

A second example is animal welfare where, again, Brexit has enabled what some see as positive developments, most notably the Animal Welfare (Livestock Exports) Act 2024, banning the export of live animals (although other promised post-Brexit legislation, such as the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill 2021, was shelved). Brexiters and some animal welfare campaigners have already begun to raise concerns that such divergences from EU regulations will not survive an SPS deal. Again, this need not be an insurmountable obstacle to an SPS deal, but it shows that the negotiations will take time, and may involve political difficulties within both the UK and the EU because of the powerful interest and lobby groups with a stake in the issues. It is not just about Brexiters blindly insisting that all divergence from the EU is good, it is also about interest groups who genuinely see particular divergences as desirable.

Whilst these examples both relate to a possible SPS agreement, the underlying issue of dealing with such divergence as has already occurred will feature in any area which entails dynamic alignment of UK and EU regulations. The Summit documents suggested that these might include linking Emissions Trading Systems, and UK participation in the EU internal energy market. Although not mentioned, another area which I understand to still be on the UK government’s agenda is a linkage of the UK and EU REACH systems for chemical regulation. That has always been a sensible idea, since in substantive terms they are very similar, but it would pose, amongst other things, issues of passive divergence, for example in terms of different approaches to ‘forever chemicals’. In an interesting assessment of how the reset might now progress, former senior civil servant Sir Martin Donnelly has identified other areas where dynamic alignment might open up new cooperation. These include medical devices and pharmaceuticals and even, in what would be a rather different vein, VAT harmonization.

Whatever the scope of what is pursued, the overall point is that this emerging Brexit ‘phase’ is going to be characterised by a whole series of highly technical negotiations in various, often discrete, policy areas. Of course that was also true in previous times, but the difference now is that they will not be held within a single, even if complex, process. No doubt there will be some overall political coordination, in both the UK and the EU, but it won’t be like the Article 50 process. Nor is there likely to be the same level of media interest, and there certainly won’t be the kind of parliamentary attention (one of the criticisms, even from those who welcome it in principle, of the Gibraltar agreement is that, like post-Brexit trade deals, it will be subject to almost no parliamentary scrutiny).

So I suspect that it is going to be quite difficult to keep track of developments. It will probably require paying attention to the specialist trade media in particular sectors, and perhaps to periodic howls of rage from Brexiters when they realize what is happening (such howls should be a reminder, to ‘remainers’, that there is a genuine, if limited, anti-Brexit agenda within Labour’s policy). There will also be some specific public moments, such as future summits, meetings of the various bodies set up by the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, and, as regards the TCA specifically, its own scheduled operational review in 2026.

Equally, there is now much less at stake than there was. That shouldn’t be misunderstood. Things like the Gibraltar agreement certainly matter for those affected, and the various reset deals will (or might) make a real difference to those within the relevant areas. But the basic architecture of Brexit is quite clearly not going to change under this government, which will presumably last until 2028 or 2029, and the EU has no particular interest in effecting more than marginal changes. As I argued in a recent post, there won’t be another ‘reset’, just some ongoing resetting of Brexit which may see (at best) a sanding off of some its rougher edges.

Nine years on

So, with that, I am going to sign off for the summer since I don’t anticipate there being much Brexit news of note. That may turn out to be one of those predictions that looks stupid in retrospect, in which case I will post. Otherwise, I plan to resume at the beginning of September. If I am right in what I have written here about the nature of the Brexit process in this ‘new phase’ then I suspect the focus of this blog is increasingly going to become not so much Brexit – the UK leaving the EU – as the Brexitism which is one of its most significant and, in some ways, most surprising legacies.

Meanwhile, one reasonably safe prediction is that next week, when, as mentioned above, the ninth anniversary of the Brexit referendum falls, there will be a spike of commentary. Most of it will be predictable, and some of it will also be intensely irritating. I would simply suggest reading Daniel Hannan’s risible essay, penned two days before the referendum, depicting what Brexit would seem like when we reached 24 June 2025.

That, if anything, exemplifies a prediction that has turned out to look stupid. But it’s more than that. It was a prediction which was never going to come true. So my other suggestion for the anniversary is to read, if you haven’t already done so, my book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to), the second, updated, edition of which was published in September 2023. It tells the story of what happened, starting the day after the 2016 referendum. I’m biased, of course, but I’m not entirely alone in thinking it is about the best book about Brexit.

Have a good summer, and many thanks to the many tens of thousands of you who continue to read this blog regularly. I appreciate it, especially now that there are so many other ‘content creators’ competing for your attention.

 

Notes

[1] For those who may be wondering, Gibraltar does not participate in any of the Free Trade Agreements made by the UK since Brexit, so it forming a customs union with the EU will not imply any revision to those Agreements.

[2] Harris was elected as a Brexit Party MEP in May 2019. She subsequently resigned the party Whip in December 2019 and, in January 2020, sat as a Conservative MEP until the UK left the EU at the end of that month. No doubt she has many qualities, but I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that she is not a major political figure.

[3] In case it is not obvious, I am not really suggesting that there have simply been two, neat, phases of Brexit. It would be possible to divide what has happened since 2016 into several phases, or none. But the combination of a) the Gibraltar agreement being the last of the original, Article 50, withdrawal issues; b) the near-contemporaneous announcements made at the reset Summit; and c) the way that the reset Summit formally marked how the Labour government’s approach to Brexit differs from its predecessors does constitute one way of periodizing the Brexit process to date, if only for heuristic purposes.

Where is post-Brexit Britain?

I always try, and am usually able, to create an overall theme to each post on this blog. There are times, though, and this is one of them, when there is no particular shape to the latest Brexit-related events. Instead, there has been a ragbag of news, but that in itself is revealing of a more general drift.

Brexit still not done

So where to start? Perhaps with that part of Brexit which is still not, in the most basic meaning of the term, ‘done’: Gibraltar. As long ago as April, under the previous government, it was being reported that a deal was finally ‘imminent’, but nothing came of it. Last time I wrote about this, in October, I suggested that completing the deal was a key test of Keir Starmer’s ‘reset’. That wasn’t an unreasonable claim given that, just a few days afterwards, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the EU Relations Minister, said that doing so was “at the heart of” the reset policy. Yet the territory remains in post-Brexit limbo, leading to a large protest against the delays at the end of October.

Some of the urgency has been removed by the latest postponement of the new EU Entry/exit System, but that still leaves an inherently fragile ad hoc arrangement in place. Their fragility is well-illustrated by a row that broke out two weeks ago. In brief, under the ad hoc arrangements, Gibraltarians may enter Spain without having their passports stamped, so long as they have their Gibraltar ID card. However, last Friday fortnight, the Spanish border police instigated a check and stamp regime. It only lasted for a couple of hours before being countermanded by a higher official, but seems to have arisen because the local border commander did not have clear orders about whether or both Schengen area controls should be applied or not.

This is the second time the same local commander has taken this action, apparently from concern that he and his officers may be in breach of EU law by not applying normal controls. That is now a matter for the courts to decide, but it illustrates the consequences of the lack of a clear, formal agreement. Of that, the latest reports suggest only that the barriers to a deal are of a “deeply technical nature”, but that was also said last April.

In the meantime, the entire saga of Brexit and Gibraltar is the subject of an excellent new House of Commons Library Research Briefing by Stefan Fella, which amongst other things serves as a reminder of the complex issues which were obvious from the outset, but which Brexiters denounced as ‘Project Fear’. There are also signs of the situation receiving more media coverage in the UK, with a BBC Radio Four documentary on ‘the Rock that Brexit forgot” airing this week.

Reset still barely started

It may be that an agreement about Gibraltar will emerge this month or, perhaps more likely, in the new year, and be a sign of, so to speak, a reset of the reset, which began with some energy but appears to have foundered since. That seems possible because there is a sense in which any real progress was always likely to be deferred until the new EU Commission, and the second presidency of Ursula von der Leyen, were confirmed. This has now happened and, relatedly (though not necessarily directly so), Starmer has been invited to meet with EU leaders next February, the first time a British Prime Minister has done so since the UK left the EU.

That meeting is billed as being focused on security and defence issues, but the already planned EU-UK summit, which will take place next year, is likely to have a wider remit, taking in trade and regulatory relationships. A good indication of what the EU agenda for this might be was provided recently in a Bruegel policy briefing written by Ignacio García Bercero, a significant figure in the world of EU trade policy. Many of the issues it covers will be familiar to readers of the blog, and without rehearsing them here the main point I would make about the document is that it is deeply pragmatic, in the sense of recognizing both the constraints of UK and EU red lines and the possibilities that remain despite them.

That’s important because there are people, on both sides of the Brexit divide, who persist in saying that there is no prospect at all of improvements, whether they ascribe this to EU ‘punishment’ or a kind of Brexit ‘hair-shirtism’. On the remain side, in particular, there is sometimes the impression given that, for so long as Starmer remains committed to the ‘hard Brexit’ negotiated by the Tories, nothing can change. But that ignores the way that, even within the Frost-Johnson agreements, there was scope for a closer relationship, illustrated by the non-binding Political Declaration which they signed, even though they chose not pursue it. In other words, even within hard Brexit there exists a range of hardness.

Obviously, the significance of that shouldn’t be overstated. There’s a big gulf between the softest of hard Brexits and the hardest of soft Brexits. But there is an agenda, that in the past I’ve called ‘maximalist’, which whilst still ‘hard Brexit’ is different to Johnson-Frost, of the sort articulated by Peter Foster in the UK and, now, by García Bercero. Of particular relevance is a point the latter makes early on, about the apparent dropping of the UK red line against ECJ involvement under the Labour government. More generally, his key point is that “a repetition of Brexit discussions can be avoided if there is political will to explore the margins of flexibility around the red lines.”

Political will (or won’t)?

That clearly begs the core question of whether there is such a political will. If voices like García Bercero’s hold sway within the EU then, from that side, the answer might be yes. But what about the UK? One sign of a new seriousness might be the announcement of a new post of a second Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, with a specific focus on the EU, and undertaking a ‘sherpa’ role there. The interview panel will, with depressing irony, be chaired by Gisela Stuart, who chaired the Vote Leave campaign, though not because of that but because she is now the First Civil Service Commissioner. It can only be wondered what attributes she will prioritise for the post, but the appointment will be made by Starmer.

At all events, the appointee is expected to be a heavyweight figure, and it is hard to see the point of creating this role unless it reflects real political commitment to the reset. That said, my general observation about this government is that it seems to place a premium on creating structures (delivery groups etc.) as if these, in themselves, solve problems. They don’t, although they may be a necessary precondition of doing so, and in particular they don’t, in and of themselves, create political will.

In this particular case, it remains to be seen what the political will is as regards a youth mobility scheme (YMS) which, even if under some different label, is evidently going to be a, if not the, key issue for the EU (a “threshold issue” as García Bercero calls it). We’ve repeatedly seen the Labour government dismiss this on the absurd grounds that it would somehow amount to ‘free movement of people’, but the question is how intransigent it will be.

As always, the problem is that Labour remains deeply neuralgic about anything relating to immigration. This was illustrated by Starmer’s response to the latest immigration figures, which he denounced as showing that “Brexit was used … to turn Britain into a one nation experiment in open borders”. It’s nonsense, and what’s worse is that it is the same nonsense that Farage is talking. What actually happened was that Brexit was used to create exactly what the Brexiters, including Farage, said they wanted, a wholly UK-determined immigration policy which used a points system set according to the needs of the UK economy.

For various reasons, not all economic, that led to an increase in the net migration figure, and a re-distribution of the countries of origin of immigrants away from the EU. That figure is now falling, also for various reasons, but these include new restrictions which are doing profound damage, especially to social care and to universities. What the Labour government needs, as Professor Jonathan Portes, the leading academic expert on this policy area, argues, is to be honest about immigration.

That raises bigger issues than that of a YMS with the EU, but honesty about that would, just in itself, be desirable. It’s an oversimplification, but not a huge one, to say that Britain left the single market, specifically, to appease public hostility to immigration. The country is paying a substantial economic price for that, yet without even assuaging the hostility. It is certainly freedom of movement of people, rather than a commitment to regulatory divergence, which explains why Starmer’s government will not even entertain the idea of single market membership, and is apparently willing to go on paying that price.

So the question now is whether that extends even to the YMS, with Starmer sacrificing things he undoubtedly wants, and the country undoubtedly needs – most obviously an SPS deal – on the altar of this immigration fetish. Just how high a price are we all meant to pay to pander to the sensibilities of a noisy minority who will never be satisfied anyway? It’s not even as if agreeing a YMS would take much political courage: opinion polls suggest 58% of the public think it is a good idea, and only 10% that it is a bad idea. Some reports in the last few days (£) suggest the government is coming round to agreeing some version of it, and my guess is that this will be true. If so, it would have been far better in terms of creating conditions for a maximalist reset to have accepted the idea wholeheartedly rather than being dragged to it reluctantly.

Meanwhile, things don’t stand still

With the new Commission in place, and Trump installed in the White House to concentrate minds, next year is probably going to be the crucial one in determining whether or not there is going to be any kind of substantive reset in UK-EU relations (though it would take longer than that to be brought to fruition). Even for that to happen needs some urgency of purpose to be brought to bear. For the reality is that any reset is not happening against a static background. That is most obvious in relation to the broad geo-political situation. But it’s also the case UK-EU relations are themselves changing, irrespective of any negotiations about them.

Two recent examples illustrate this (others can be found in the latest UKICE regulatory divergence tracker). One is the only now emerging realization that new EU product safety rules mean that British (in the sense of Great Britain) companies selling goods to the EU (including Northern Ireland) need a ‘responsible person’ within the single market to confirm compliance. As with so much of the Brexit-created red tape this will impact most heavily on small businesses, and it comes into force at the end of next week. At a stroke, this is a new non-tariff barrier to trade with the EU, and a thickening of the Irish Sea border. It won’t, to my understanding, be helped by the government’s Product Regulation and Metrology Bill because the issue isn’t alignment with EU standards, it is the certification of compliance (i.e. a version of the issue, discussed many times on this blog, that ‘alignment doesn’t mean access’).

A second example is that the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is now beginning to bite (£) on British exporters to the EU, again with small businesses worst affected. In some ways it is a similar issue to the product safety one, in that exporters now need to provide evidence of the embedded carbon content of their products. However ultimately it will also mean not just reporting but, if necessary, tax being levied on that content.

Both of these examples are potentially within the scope of a UK-EU reset, though the word ‘potentially’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The first of them might conceivably be dealt with through formal dynamic alignment (note the tentative formulation). Less tentatively, because it is within the scope of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the second of them could be addressed by linking both UK-EU Emissions Trading Systems (ETS) and CBAMs (the UK version has yet to be created). Linkages of these are two different, though potentially related things, as García Bercero says. That is, it might be possible to link either, both, or neither (it’s also worth noting, as trade expert Sam Lowe explains, that these different possibilities could have different implications for the UK’s relationship with Trump’s US).

Everything is connected

Although I’ve bracketed that last point, because in a sense it’s a technicality, it does indicate the deep inseparability of all of the issues facing post-Brexit UK. That is to say, the more-or-less economic questions of terms of trade, including regulatory barriers to trade, with the EU cannot ultimately be separated from geo-political issues of the UK’s relations with the rest of the world. This means that not only do discussions of UK-EU relations take place within a dynamic landscape (e.g. new EU regulations) but also they do so as part of the UK’s positioning in an international order which is itself rapidly changing, and not only because of Trump’s coming presidency.

There are many moving parts in this, but they mean that my argument in a post at the end of the summer that the government needs a post-Brexit strategy already looks inadequate. I talked there as if UK-EU relations are a discrete issue. I’m not sure I actually meant to imply that but, at all events, it is now quite obvious that such are relations are imbricated in the entirety of UK economic, industrial, foreign and defence policy. It is equally obvious that articulating what this means for the UK is an urgent task.

There are limited signs that Starmer understands this, especially in the major speech he gave on foreign policy at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet this week. In it, he did at least attempt to do what Olivia O’Sullivan, Director of the UK in the World programme at Chatham House recently urged and “make an energetic case” to voters explaining the domestic importance of foreign policy and international relations. Whether it was as ‘energetic’ as needed is another question, but it was certainly an attempt to make the case. However, the content was anodyne, and didn’t give any real sense of the choices and trade-offs the UK faces.

By that, I don’t so much mean the headline reports that Starmer denied there was any need to choose between Trump’s US and the EU. That was entirely unsurprising, not least because, at this point, it’s not yet clear exactly what those choices may be (a situation which is unlikely to last, however). Rather, what was missing was an acknowledgment that Brexit has de-anchored the UK internationally, and created new constraints on its options. Instead, there were airy platitudes about Britain being “a strong, still point in a changing world.” Which, as politics professor Simon Usherwood of the Open University put it “leaves us... somewhere. With all the talk of a reset, there remains minimal evidence of a plan on Europe, in either abstract or concrete terms, which intrinsically weakens the ability to pursue whatever course is taken.”

Where is post-Brexit Britain?

It’s not enough. At the very least, there needs to be an explicit acknowledgment that the immediate post-Brexit strategy of ‘Global Britain’, already effectively abandoned by the previous government, does not provide a framework for the present government’s policy decisions. Which in turn requires specifying the framework which does. That could and should mean that where closer relations with the EU come into conflict with other demands it is the former which will be prioritised now. That wouldn’t be outrageous. Only the other day Foreign Secretary David Lammy said, as he has in the past, that a European reset is the UK’s “number one priority in foreign policy”.

Yet Starmer did not say or even imply that. Why not? Is this government policy or not? Without such consistency, Starmer’s promise that his country will be a reliable, dependable, and predictable international actor is virtually meaningless, since it gives no insight into where its priorities lie. How, then, can its actions be predicted? Conversely, unless relations with the EU are prioritised, how seriously should anyone, most notably the EU, take the reset?

That wouldn’t, in itself, entail an argument to ‘reverse Brexit’ by seeking to rejoin the EU in any form (which Starmer again ruled out in his speech). But it would entail publicly acknowledging that Brexit has created new problems, not new opportunities. Doing so would attract a flaying from the pro-Brexit commentariat, but would chime with public opinion by recognizing both that Brexit has not been a success and that there isn’t much public appetite to return to the Brexit battles in the immediate future*. In the longer run, admitting that lack of success would also be a necessary step to re-visiting Brexit itself, of course, but even those who want to rejoin at the earliest possible moment need to recognize that, whatever ‘earliest possible’ means, the UK needs, at least, an interim strategy.

However, I don’t really expect Starmer will do any of this. At best, he may put more energy into reset discussions with the EU in the coming year. At worst, he will drift along without much happening to show for the reset apart from warmish words. In that sense, the ragbag of this fortnight's Brexit events reflects more than my failure to find any shape to them. Rather, it captures the shapelessness of Labour’s post-Brexit policies and, more fundamentally, the shapelessness of the UK’s post-Brexit condition. It is a grim irony that on one edge of Europe there is war and civil unrest in countries which dearly wish to anchor their place in the world by joining the EU whilst here, on the other edge, we have given that prize away in order to drift into confusion.

The final words of Starmer’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech were that “Britain is back.” He didn’t say where.

 

 

*That is, support for holding another referendum doesn’t begin to approach a majority until posited as ten years hence. Interestingly, put at that time scale, Reform voters are the most supportive of it.  Admittedly the polling data I cited in the link is over a year old, so things may have changed but I haven’t found anything more recent on the specific question of timescales.

I can’t even bring myself to discuss the cretinous attempt to resurrect ‘Mutual Enforcement’ as an ‘alternative arrangement’ for Northern Ireland `(the Allister Bill) but may come back to it next time. It isn’t going to pass, but it does have a purpose in the context of the forthcoming ‘consent vote’ under the Windsor Framework in the Northern Ireland Assembly. For now, see the Best for Britain Blog on this, which notes, correctly but over-politely, that “the notion that such a process of mutual enforcement is remotely achievable is remarkably misguided.” 

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.