In the last fortnight we have had several scenes, different and yet related, of politics in post-Brexit Britain. Each of them is unpleasant in itself, but taken together, as pieces in a jigsaw, they reveal a very ugly picture. More than that, they reveal a picture of the profound dangers our country faces.
A walking stick and some oysters
Exhibit one is the scene of how hecklers were treated at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham. These hecklers infiltrated and disrupted the conference, and as such deserved, and no doubt expected, to be ejected. But what happened was not simply an orderly removal by professional security guards. Instead, a crowd of mainly elderly Reform members, of both sexes, punched and slapped them, with at least one young woman being pulled around by her hair and struck with a walking stick (the latter link is to a discussion with the woman, the actual images are, be warned, repulsive). Meanwhile, other delegates cheered the attackers on whilst, on the podium, Nigel Farage laughed.
This may not, in the scheme of things, have been a massively violent assault, although it was certainly vicious and it did cause injuries. Yet it was, in its way, remarkable. I’m sure that the attackers regard themselves as ‘ordinary, decent, respectable people’, but the contorted hatred on their faces as they rounded on the disruptors showed them in an altogether different light. There was also, somehow, a symbolism of the generational political divide in it: old people spitefully lashing out in a self-righteous frenzy at youngsters for having the temerity to disrupt their leader. Old people who, on other days, no doubt congratulate themselves on their staunch advocacy of free speech.
It’s worth recalling (as Suzanne Moore in The Telegraph did) the outrage when, in 2005, a heckler was forcibly removed from Labour’s conference by security guards. That outrage came not least from the political right with, for example, David Cameron denouncing what had happened as “Orwellian”. It’s also worth recalling that, on that occasion, the then Labour leader Tony Blair, and other senior figures in the party, subsequently apologized profusely. By contrast, after this latest event, reactions from Reform MPs included the thuggishly prolier-than-thou Lee Anderson proposing a whip-round to buy a new walking stick for the most violent of the assailants and Robert Jenrick saying “he should be given a medal for what he did”.
The second scene of the fortnight was altogether more urbane, but also provided a glimpse of the Reform party. This was the meeting over oysters and champagne of Farage and senior Reform officials with a supposed potential donor, one of several meetings filmed as part of an undercover ‘sting’ operation and broadcast on Channel Four on the eve of the party’s conference [1]. It was the latest in a long list of ongoing scandals (£) about the funding of both the party and Farage himself, and it is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police. But, that aside, what this piece of the jigsaw shows is the gulf, and the relationship, between Reform (and Farage’s) carefully cultivated image as representing ‘ordinary people’ against the ‘global elite’ and the way that behind it lies a world of dodgy ‘globalist’ financiers and meetings in exclusive restaurants and clubs which few such people penetrate.
A Cambridge compound
It also provided and insight into another of Reform’s worlds where polyester-clad, spittle-flecked old men with walking sticks are notable by their absence, the intellectual salons of the radical right. For one of the senior Reform officials at those meetings was James Orr, the party’s Head of Policy (a post from which he has now stepped down). Orr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and a major figure in the paradoxically international ‘National Conservatism’ movement and the nexus of thinktanks around it in the UK, US and, at least until Victor Orban’s demise, Hungary (as mentioned, with more details and links, in my post of last April).
Orr, whose conservatism is nationalist but more specifically Christian, was a controversial figure even before the ‘sting’ and on the morning before the Channel Four broadcast had been the subject of a detailed, and at least implicitly critical, profile in the Financial Times (£). An indication of what we might, with suitably Christian charity, call his political philosophy is that, according to that profile, Orr believes in “faith, family and flag”, “opposes abortion including in cases of rape”, and “calls immigration ‘the most existential threat facing our nation since the Norman invasion’” (which suggests he is a less accomplished historian than he is a theologian). It bears saying that much of what the FT profile revealed had already been reported by Byline Times, and some aspects of it have been examined in more detail by the 21 Group, an organization which monitors and campaigns against bullying in universities.
Leaving aside the explicitly political aspects of what these various reports show or allege, collectively they reveal, amongst other things, that Orr and his wife have created what he calls “a compound” and she calls “an alternative Cambridge College” in the (presumably substantial) back garden of their Cambridge home. There, several postgraduates and post-docs, apparently all of a Christian Conservative bent, live as a community. This might be regarded as, at best, an unorthodox arrangement, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envisage how the media would report an analogous arrangement whereby, as it might be, an Associate Professor in the Education Faculty created such a community based not on Christian Conservatism but Critical Race Theory.
A fascist militia
It might be comforting to think that the contemporary far right in Britain is captured by these images, distasteful as they are, of nasty old men lashing out with their walking sticks, dodgy deals done in expensive restaurants, and creepy academics alternately gladhanding at peculiar conferences and lording it over impressionable students. But the next piece of the jigsaw we have seen in this last fortnight is far more alarming.
Last Saturday, as many as five hundred men, and they were all men, who were generally described in the media as anti-immigration ‘protestors’, blockaded the roads around the Dover ferry terminal, bringing the town centre to a standstill for several hours. But these were not ‘protestors’ in any normal or reasonable sense of the term. These men appeared, to coin a phrase, to be ‘of fighting age’. They had donned black uniforms, very much in the manner of Mosley’s Blackshirts, and balaclava masks, very much in the manner of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.
It was a profoundly chilling sight, the more so as for much of their action they maintained total silence. Subsequently, there were some chants of ‘stop the boats’, ‘England for the English’ and other anti-immigration slogans, and another of ‘Christ is King’, but there were no placards or flags waved. In fact the only symbol in evidence was, in several but not all cases, the Christian crucifix. Apparently, it is not only Cambridge theologians who have a perverse interpretation of Jesus’s injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.
Absurdly, Kent Police described this as a “spontaneous” gathering, perhaps to avoid admitting that neither they nor the security services seem to have had any inkling that it was going to happen (though there may be other interpretations of this, including claims that the police ignored warnings of what was in prospect and informed speculation that a high-level security operation may, for good reasons, have allowed the action to proceed). At all events, it was abundantly obvious that it had been carefully planned and it was executed with a certain amount of skill and discipline. That discipline included the absence of literal violence, and no arrests were made. However it was certainly violent in the more symbolic sense of being highly intimidating, pregnant with aggression and threat.
I don’t think we have seen anything quite like this, at least on the British mainland, in my lifetime. Unlike the asylum hotel riots, it did not have a particular trigger or target, and the level of organization means the participants could not be described as a mob. Nor was there even any attempt to pretend that these were just ‘ordinary people’ or ‘concerned local citizens’.
On the contrary, ‘Patriot Platform’, the all-male grouping behind it, openly describes itself as being “an army of patriots” and its aim is to “take control of the United Kingdom”. It functions as a covert coordinator of a network of groups and was launched in June by a former soldier and convicted criminal calling himself ‘Danny Tommo’, who is an associate of ‘Tommy Robinson’ and is connected with the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign. He also helped to organize a ‘Brexit Betrayal’ rally in 2018. ‘Tommo’ aggressively parades his supposed Christianity and Patriot Platform regards itself as a Christian organization. In this and other ways, whilst its core motivation is extreme hostility to immigration, this is wrapped into a broader ideology expressed by its slogan of “Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland”. In short, and regular readers will know I do not use this term casually, they are fascists, and they have now formed a militia [2].
This militia reappeared in Portsmouth the following night, along with a larger mob, attempting to prevent the transfer of cross-channel migrants being transported to an arrival centre. Again, roads were blockaded and this time there was physical violence against police and property. There was also a direct, aggressive confrontation with RNLI crews which has subsequently developed into a campaign of online intimidation and harassment against its volunteers. Subsequently, a nearby hotel was targeted in the belief that migrants were being housed there, when in fact it was the Under-19 cricket team on tour something which, contrary to some of the reaction from both Reform and Labour politicians, was an outrage in and of itself rather than because it was mistargeted.
Whilst this militia, and the manner in which it conducts itself, is new, its beliefs and its aims grow directly out of those which have been swirling around the far-right ecosphere for a few years and the Dover action was openly supported by Rupert Lowe [warning: link to X]. That endorsement at least had the benefit of honesty. More disingenuous was the condemnation which came from Nigel Farage and others in Reform. For them, perhaps, there is some advantage in being able to claim to be the ‘responsible right’, but their own relentless scaremongering about the supposed small boats crisis and their ghoulish equation of asylum seekers with murders and sexual crimes has done a great deal to promote the beliefs espoused by Patriot Platform.
However, responsibility for that is not confined to far-right politicians. It is shared with the political and media class generally, very much including those within the governing Labour party who have dignified such beliefs as being an expression of ‘legitimate concerns’. Notably, government condemnation of the Dover action was rather muted, with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds implying that it fell within the category of “peaceful protest” and trivializing its most striking aspect as merely “dressing up in costumes”. The response to Portsmouth was more robust, with, for example, Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, calling the action “thuggish”. But the overall tenor of the government’s reaction, in relation to both events, was wishy-washy and, astoundingly, Andy Burnham made no direct comment at all, so far as I know.
A vulnerable State
If uniformed, masked men taking control, albeit temporarily, of the streets with impunity is a frightening prospect, it is at least one for which, in principle, there are legal remedies. So in some ways what is more frightening is the prospect of the law, and the State itself, falling under the control of extremists. The recent Reform UK conference was so overshadowed by the new financial scandal that it was easy to miss just how extreme the supposedly reasonable face of the far-right has become. Yet anyone with a sense of history should be alarmed that Farage has pledged to declare an immediate ‘national emergency’ if Reform came to power, with threats to reconfigure the judiciary, civil service, and parliament itself under the guise of this emergency [3]. Similarly, whilst less dramatic, Suella Braverman announced that Reform would make it compulsory for schools to fly the national flag and sing the national anthem, whilst delivering a “patriotic curriculum”.
These are not anodyne proposals, even if Braverman couched hers in the cosy nostalgia-porn of Britain being “a collection of little streets, building little hamlets and villages that fold into towns and cities.” They are, at least incipiently, totalitarian in nature and, as the noted legal commentator David Allen Green has argued, our political system is one in which “there is little which could be ultimately done to prevent the damage which a radical illiberal majority could do.”
One implication of that, Green suggests, is that the present government should create stronger constitutional guard-rails to reduce these systemic vulnerabilities. I agree, but I think a second implication is the need to tackle the core underlying beliefs which inform this illiberalism, especially the idea that there is an immigration crisis, an asylum crisis, and a cultural crisis which somehow constitute a national emergency.
An absence of political leadership
At issue here is far more than simply condemning violence and intimidation, and more, even, than yesterday’s commitment from the Home Secretary to robustly police that violence, necessary as that is given the threat of further disorder this weekend. And it certainly requires abandoning the government’s continuing insistence (£) that meeting the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public by curtailing immigration and reducing or even stopping ‘the boats’ will make the beliefs underpinning such violence disappear. That is nonsense, and it is shown to be nonsense by the fact that those beliefs are becoming more entrenched even as the levels of immigration, asylum applications, and boat crossings are all falling. It didn’t work for Starmer and it won’t work for Burnham, and his premiership may well be the last chance for a different, and more honest, approach.
Such an approach would mean saying something like: flows of refugees and asylum seekers are a global phenomenon, and aren’t going to disappear. The UK is one of the countries least affected, but has legal and humanitarian commitments to fulfil. In doing so, we should and will process asylum claims as quickly and accurately as possible, and seek to discourage life-endangering crossings. But there is no crisis, and there is most definitely no ‘invasion’. Adopting this approach would not just be a matter of a single speech. It would require a concerted communications campaign perhaps including highlighting success stories of asylum claimants and other immigrants who have made positive contributions to society, and emphasising the many senses in which Britain has been a successful example of multi-cultural integration.
In the absence of political leadership along these lines, the dominant narrative, by default, will be, as it already largely is, one in which Britain is depicted as being invaded by a dangerous horde of sexual predators who are living lives of taxpayer-funded luxury. Allowing that to be the default inevitably has the effect of provoking fear and outrage even amongst people who would not, in other circumstances, align with the far right. Conversely, the current approach of treating this fear and outrage as justifiable means that, even whilst condemning violence and intimidation, government ministers are conceding that those responsible are, in some way, representing widespread public concern.
It is, of course, highly unlikely that the government will adopt this approach, and that is, at least in part, because there is a strong strand in Labour thinking – most overtly the Blue Labour strand, but not confined to it – that the fear and outrage are justified; that this is what ‘ordinary people’ believe and the ‘people’s party’ should represent it. As I’ve argued repeatedly in the past, this is, again, at least in part, related to Brexit and the way in which Labour accepted the populist right’s claim that the referendum showed it spoke for ‘the silent majority’. In this way, chiding vocal and violent thugs for ‘crossing the line’ amounts to little more than asserting that Labour ministers are the ‘voice of the people’ whilst leaving entirely unchallenged the thugs’ beliefs. Unsurprisingly, this only entrenches those beliefs and the thuggery continues, or even escalates.
A matter of national security
At stake in all this is, most obviously, whether uniformed fascists are to be allowed to take control of the streets as and when they choose. But what the various developments described in this post should suggest is that the Patriot Platform militia is only one strand within an interwoven braid. The angry pensioners beating youthful hecklers, the Cambridge don and his cultish camp-followers, the intimate meetings in expensive restaurants, the strident politicians of Reform and Restore, the increasingly aggressive invocation of ‘cultural Christianity’, the daily vitriol on social media, amongst many other things, are all part of a related process.
But something much deeper is at stake, which could properly be called a matter of national security. There is no doubt that what is happening domestically in the UK has parallels with what is happening in other countries, with the AfD’s recent success in the Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany being an obvious example. And the way that this success was cheered in both the US and Russia (£) was the latest, and clearest, illustration of how the transformation of geo-politics matters not just for international relations but for domestic politics. It is now a matter of US state policy, enshrined in its 2025 National Security Strategy, to support the far right in Europe, and that includes the UK. Relatedly, Elon Musk openly supports Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, calling civil war in Britain “inevitable” because of immigration, and there are multiple connections between MAGA and the British far right in both its street-level and intellectual guises.
Meanwhile, Russia’s links to the British far right are well-established, including its encouragement of attacks on mosques and Muslims generally. As with Brexit, Russia seeks to encourage anything which will destabilize Britain. That is only partly to do with seeking to punish us for supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperialism. More generally it is part of Russia’s attempt to destroy the remnants of the liberal West (liberal in the broadest sense of the commitment to rights and rationality established by the European Enlightenment), something enshrined in successive iterations of its own National Security Strategy. That, in itself, represents a profound national security threat to the UK. It is all the more profound since the US has, for now, and perhaps for ever, changed sides.
This is the bigger context within which the increasingly ugly politics of the British far right should be understood [4]. It is, historically, a new experience for Britain to find itself no longer the great power it was until, say, 1945, and no longer shielded from its decline by being a kind of junior partner to the US during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Now, it is just another ‘medium power’ and, as a result of Brexit, one in self-chosen isolation from its regional moorings. As a result, it is ready prey. It is deeply ironic that those fulminating about the ‘migrant invasion’, and the need to ‘secure our borders’ are not just missing the real threats to national security but are aiding abetting them.
A cause for alarm
This isn’t to posit some huge global conspiracy against Britain, orchestrating its domestic politics. It’s rather that there are multiple vectors pulling in similar, or related, directions in Britain, as in other European countries (although Britain is uniquely isolated because of Brexit). Recognizing that is important because it is what makes disparate events such as those discussed in this post understandable as being related to each other rather than, as might otherwise be thought, just ‘yet another’ piece of unpleasantness. As pieces of a jigsaw, when put together they make a picture.
If all this sounds alarmist, consider some of those pieces side by side: ‘Faith, Flag and Family’; a woman savagely beaten for heckling the Leader at a political rally; black-shirted men in balaclavas blockading the streets; RNLI volunteers denounced as traitors; ‘Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland’; ‘patriotic curriculum’; ‘National Emergency’. It’s not, I think, alarmist to be alarmed.
Notes
[1] Inevitably, the ‘sting’ provoked complaints of ‘entrapment’ from Farage and Reform, along with the familiar claim that it was an example of the Establishment trying to discredit the ‘insurgents’. But such undercover journalism has a long history, and the way that Farage was caught is remarkably similar to the way that in 2010 Channel Four and The Times ‘entrapped’ Labour MP Steve “cab for hire” Byers, which Farage, then leading UKIP, regarded as exposing the corruption of … the Establishment.
[2] The word ‘militia’ is justified, even though the group is not armed, a point made at the time of the debate leading to the 1936 Public Order Act at the time of the Blackshirts (hat tip to the historian Robert Saunders for this information). That legislation prohibited the wearing of political uniforms, although it is not clear whether Patriot Platform’s clothing constitutes a uniform within the meaning of the law.
[3] Restore’s leader Rupert Lowe this week made the even more pernicious suggestion that, if in government, he would retrospectively prosecute civil servants for enacting the present government’s policies.
[4] The examples discussed in this post are all from England, and there is no doubt that it is here where far-right activity is most pronounced. But other nations within the UK are not exempt. For example, this week a tenement building in Glasgow was set ablaze, apparently because of rumours that it was going to be used to house asylum seekers.
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Friday, 11 September 2026
Friday, 20 March 2026
Churchill and the wars
This isn’t the place to analyze the state of the now three-week old war in the Middle East, except to say that it is clear that it has proved far more complex, and probably more protracted, than Donald Trump and his administration envisaged. His Director of the National Counterterrorism Center has resigned, saying that Iran “posed no imminent threat”. Formerly a Trump loyalist, the President responded to the resignation of his own nominated appointee by saying that “he was weak on security”. Lacking justified cause and defined outcome, the direct costs of the war to the US are already huge, whilst those to the global economy are incalculable. Already, it looks to be a case study of inept strategic and scenario planning, born of malignity and hubris, and perhaps not so very different in that respect from Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
One result of this ineptitude has been that, having embarked on this action without consulting any of America’s NATO allies, or those countries most impacted by its consequences, and having repeatedly insulted the UK in particular, Trump demanded that those same allies clear up the mess he is creating, quite falsely suggesting that NATO members have some obligation to do so. He then became enraged with them, and again with the UK in particular, for their understandable lack of enthusiasm to comply, as a prelude to petulantly declaring he didn’t need their help anyway. Even the US-Israel alliance is now under strain. So to inept planning we can add dire statecraft: Trump is, ahem, ‘no Churchill’.
At all events nobody, perhaps least of all Trump, has any idea when or where all this will end or, as Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times lays out, what its long-term repercussions (£) will be. Any thought that the outcome might at least be the overthrow of Iran’s repellent regime now seems unlikely and it is still less likely that, were that to eventuate, it would be replaced by a more palatable one. If anything, as Rachman gloomily concludes, the regime “may yet emerge in a stronger position internationally”. Whether or not that proves to be the case, the war will surely have many unintended and unexpected consequences, including for post-Brexit Britain.
The Home Front
Certainly the Iran war can already be seen to have profound implications for the UK, at least some of which relate more or less directly to Brexit and its aftermath. For one thing, it has sharply underlined the point I made at the time of the Greenland crisis: that, acknowledged or not, Keir Starmer cannot avoid the choice he has claimed not to exist between Europe and the US, if only because Trump keeps forcing that choice upon him. Thus, as with Greenland, but even more pointedly, Starmer has continued to rebuff the US by openly refusing to involve the UK in the attack on Iran.
On the other side of the equation, it is quite clear that the UK and the EU are in the same unenviable boat, enmeshed in a dependent relationship with an undependable partner. From that general situation flow such things as the UK and EU’s shared problem of how to deal, or cope, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the related problem of how to deal with the US decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil exports.
This unfolding situation has also had several impacts on domestic politics, of which the most obvious since my previous post has been that both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have had to abruptly discard (and disown) their initial position that the UK should have joined forces with the US. In Badenoch’s case, she now even has the nerve to counsel against giving the kind of unconditional support she originally urged, whilst still repeating her repellent claim (discussed in my previous post) that Starmer’s policy is based on “trying to appease a sectarian vote”. For both Badenoch and Farage, the change may be because they realized that the public are not generally supportive of the war, dislike and distrust Trump, and are very much concerned about its impact on fuel prices and the subsequent consequences of that.
Even so, it is worth recalling the nature of the initial criticisms they made of Starmer for not ‘joining in’ as well as some of the reasons they now give for keeping a distance from the conflict, for these are very similar. The initial criticism was widely couched in the language of humiliation, betrayal, and weakness, and several right-wing commentators, including Allison Pearson in the Telegraph (£), leapt gleefully on Trump’s negative comparison of Starmer with Winston Churchill as evidence of this humiliation. Then, when the line changed to one of non-involvement, this was accompanied by laments that this was because the UK was too weak in terms of military capacity to contribute to the war and that this, in Nigel Farage’s words, demonstrated the “humiliating state that we’ve sunk to today.”
It is certainly true that the UK’s military has been hollowed-out in recent years, and a great many people (myself included, for what very little that’s worth) have been warning about that, especially given the threat from Russia and the unreliability of Trump’s America, both things to which Farage, in particular, was entirely indifferent. It’s also true that this military weakness has been made evident by the current war. But that can hardly be laid at the door of the present government, since the problem long precedes its arrival, and in any case it is irrelevant to the decision not to join with the US in the sense that, as with every other country in the world except Israel, the UK thinks it would be ill-advised, even if we had the ability. However, the populist discussion of defence policy is not framed in terms of a rational assessment of threats and UK preparedness to respond to them. It is framed in terms of humiliation and betrayal.
This connects directly with the themes of this blog. For these were precisely the terms in which the Brexiters constantly talked about the Brexit process, week-in and week-out from almost as soon as the vote to leave was taken. That the same terms have now become embedded in political discourse, apart from in relation to Brexit itself, is one of the reasons why I have made Brexitism as well as Brexit the focus of the blog. It is also the case that throughout the Brexit process the imagery and mythologization of the Second World War have been a constant presence, and within that Churchill, of course, holds an iconic position. So there is a thread connecting, for example, Boris Johnson’s (mendacious) invocation of Churchill when campaigning for Brexit with the supposed humiliation of the draft-dodger Trump repeatedly taunting the British Prime Minister for his lack of Churchillian credentials.
Pound foolish
It may seem absurd to move from the weighty matter of war to writing about what pictures will appear on British banknotes. But exactly that topic has provoked an angry convulsion amongst the populist right and in doing so demonstrated just how deeply embedded is the mindset I have just outlined.
In brief, a couple of weeks ago the Bank of England announced that the next generation of banknotes will feature images of British wildlife. This followed a public consultation exercise conducted last year when a variety of possible themes were proposed, of which ‘nature’ proved to be the most popular. So far, so boring. But the announcement provoked a wave of angry reaction, primarily from the political right but also, rather more surprisingly, from LibDem leader Ed Davey, which centred on the fact that in the process this would mean that – yes – Winston Churchill will no longer feature on the £5 note. (It was variously claimed he would be replaced by a badger, a beaver, or a hedgehog: in fact, the exact images have yet to be decided.)
This, according to Nigel Farage [warning: link to X], was “the definition of woke” whilst Kemi Badenoch was even more alarmed, saying it was “erasing our history”. Then, the populist ‘intellectuals’ weighed in. Matt Goodwin stressed, both on GB News [warning: link to X] and his Substack newsletter [warning: link to Goodwin’s Substack newsletter] that this was not a trivial matter because it was “not about banknote design, but something much deeper, something more insidious” which turned out to be “the slow erosion of our national memory”. He went on to invoke sociologist Frank Furedi’s claim that there is “a war against the past” underway. Furedi, for those lucky enough not to know, is one of the peculiar and unpleasant group of former Revolutionary Communist Party members, including former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox, which morphed into the peculiar and unpleasant group of libertarian ‘contrarians’ who created Spiked Online.
Indeed, Spiked Online also joined the fray, with Gareth Roberts writing of how the Bank of England’s plans have “rightly riled up the nation”. Along the way, Roberts sneered at the very fact of there having been a public consultation, suggesting it would have been better for someone “in charge” to have made the decision, the implication presumably being that this was an example of wasteful state bureaucracy. Of course, had the decision been made in this way such commentators would undoubtedly have been outraged that ‘the elite’ had failed to consult ‘the people’. But Roberts’ main gripe, like Farage and most of the other complainers, was that this arose because of the Bank’s ‘woke’ desire to avoid the use of divisive images, and that Churchill was now regarded as divisive as a result of ‘wokeism’.
Plain foolish
This was, to be blunt, total gibberish. The claim arose because in the original consultation document one of the principles informing the themes offered to the public was that they should not be divisive (which is hardly unreasonable: who would want divisive images on the national currency anyway?) That is, it had nothing to do with Churchill, or indeed any other individual figure, and nor could it have done since these were, precisely, themes (i.e. not identifying the specific images to be used within those themes). One of those themes was ‘Notable Historical Figures’ but this came third, after both ‘Nature’ and ‘Architecture and Landmarks’. Had ‘historical figures’ been chosen, those pictured might or might not in the end have included Churchill. But this simply wasn’t what was at issue.
It was therefore an entirely manufactured outrage, but coalescing that outrage around the depiction of Churchill enabled the connection to be made with a wider set of claims about, in the first instance, Churchill generally. Thus Roberts linked to an earlier article in Spiked by – guess who? – Frank Furedi, fulminating about how Churchill “is a potent symbol of the civilisation culture warriors revile”. This then provided the gateway to the more general claims about history being erased and our national memory being eroded, a recurrent trope of Brexitism (see my post of November 2025 for more detail on the connections between Brexit, Brexitism, and the populist backlash against ‘woke’ history).
Actually, if anything, it showed historical ignorance and a failure of national memory. Churchill has only featured on banknotes since 2016, and historical figures of any sort only since 1970. This is hardly some ancient national tradition. For that matter, as a child one of my hobbies was collecting old farthing coins [1], which had been abolished in 1956 but which, since 1937, had carried the image of a wren. Prior to that, the image had been none other than Britannia herself, but would anyone seriously suggest that this change arose from some avant la lettre wokery bent on erasing the proud symbols of our national identity?
Plain mad
It is easy to mock all this, of course, but that would be a mistake. Even if one thinks that it just is the synthetic anger of people who are determined to get angry about anything then the very fact of that determination, and the reasons for it, are of interest. Goodwin said it was not trivial because in his eyes, and those of his fellow-ideologues, it is not. For him, it seems to connect with the ideas expressed in his latest book, published this week, entitled Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. That highly provocative, and surely rather mad, title in turn relates to the wider theme, currently influential within the populist right, of “suicidal empathy”. This term was coined by Canadian marketing academic Gad Saad and is to be developed in his own forthcoming book of that title, the book (and the concept) being enthusiastically endorsed by Elon Musk.
As with Goodwin and others with similar political commitments, Saad’s basic idea seems to be that through immigration, and especially Muslim immigration, ‘the elite’ is complicit in enacting the “suicide” of, variously, American, British or European culture (and thus carries at least echoes of the infamous racist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’). Effectively, it is the same idea as that propounded by Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and, just this week (£), the Conservative shadow justice secretary and hard Brexit architect Nick Timothy, but given a precarious patina of intellectualism. Or, to put it another way, it is the familiar ‘I just want my country back’ moan but using long words (in passing, note that many of the news stories upon which this worldview feeds are forensically dissected by Emma Monk’s excellent Monk Debunks Substack newsletter).
In this way, absurd as the row about banknotes may seem, it is actually a sliver within what, for some, is a war every bit as real, and perhaps more important, as that raging in the Middle East. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that for some, at least on the US right, most notably the morally broken and dangerously incompetent Secretary for War Pete Hegseth, the two wars are actually part of a single religious war. For that matter, it’s not unreasonable to link, for example, Hegseth’s determination to remove the scourge of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) in the US military with, for example, Goodwin’s attempt to connect the banknote non-issue to DEI activism (about 30 seconds into the clip).
Thus, coming back more directly to the main argument of this post, the row over the banknotes is a fresh illustration of the narrative of humiliation, betrayal and weakness. For it connects to the idea of a nation losing its identity, culture and history; its military prowess and its symbols of greatness and, most toxic of all, the idea that this is happening not by chance or the ineluctable passage of history but ‘suicidally’, due to the ‘treason of the clerks’.
The Churchillian challenge
Despite the increasingly hysterical and almost unhinged language being used by these populists, there is perhaps a sense that the steam behind their project is abating. Indeed, perhaps that is why the language they are using is becoming so uncontrolled. If so, one reason for that could well be that for many months now Trump’s administration, the most direct embodiment of that project, has itself become so obviously unhinged, and the chaotic mess he has created with his war on Iran makes that even more glaring.
Certainly in the UK there are now clear signs that Reform’s poll ratings have started to slip. There are also signs that Starmer is getting a little bolder, not just in standing up to Trump but also in condemning the populist right. The two are somewhat linked, as his judgements about the Iran War have been in line with public opinion and enabled him to expose the foolishness of both Badenoch and Farage. He was also notably quick to condemn Nick Timothy’s anti-Muslim remarks this week. Meanwhile, internal Labour opposition looks set to lead to at least some softening of the government’s draconian immigration plans.
On Europe, too, the government has now begun to speak much more openly about the case for closer regulatory alignment, including in a speech this week by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Whether she and the government have understood that alignment, in itself, doesn’t mean access, which also requires certification and legal oversight from the EU, remains to be seen. Perhaps they have, since, albeit quietly, the realities of ‘dynamic alignment’ are being accepted wholesale in the government’s attempts to complete an SPS deal with the EU.
More to the point, even at its most maximal an alignment policy does relatively little to reduce the costs of Brexit which, strikingly, Reeves referred to by using the 8% estimate from last year’s NBER report (and its higher end, at that) rather than the standard 4% OBR figure built into the official budget; striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. Certainly others within the Labour Party have begun to be increasingly vociferous in advocating such a response, with Sadiq Khan this week calling for the party to adopt a ‘rejoin’ policy at the next election. Notably, in making this argument Khan referenced not just the costs of Brexit but the changing world order created by Trump.
These may be straws in the wind, or perhaps to think so is just clutching at straws, and long-term readers of this blog will know that I am more inclined to be Cassandra-like than Pollyannaish. But there is at least the possibility that one of the many unintended consequences of the Iran war may be to change the course of the politics of Brexit and Brexitism. Who knows, perhaps in the end we will have reason, as Hegseth yesterday urged us, to “thank President Trump”. However, for that to happen will also require what we might reasonably call a more Churchillian politics, in two senses.
On the one hand, whilst there were many contradictions and ambiguities of Churchill’s views about what became the EU there was at least one strong strand within them which recognized its strategic necessity. That necessity would now be described in different terms to those used by Churchill, since the world, Europe, and Britain are now very different, but its basic contours still hold good. On the other hand, whilst again there were many facets to Churchill’s long political career, many of them less than edifying, to say the least, his primary historical legacy will always be that of providing the national leadership needed in a world at war [2].
It is just such a combination of strategy and leadership which Britain needs if it is to take the opportunity to renew itself in the world being created by Trump’s war.
Notes
[1] The aim being to amass as many different years as possible. Those thinking this suggests I was a strange child will have their suspicions confirmed by the fact that at the same sort of time I collected empty crisp packets, the aim in that case being to find as many different makes and flavours as possible – which was not as easy as it sounds when Golden Wonder ‘Ready Salted’ was so ubiquitous. In mitigation, this was in the 1970s, when we had to make our own entertainment, although my attempts to interest visitors and relatives in my crisp packet collection suggested that, even in those days, greater excitement was available.
[2] The populist idea that recognizing the flaws and well as the qualities of Churchill is some kind of disrespectful, woke revisionism is utterly dimwitted (as it is when applied to the more general recognition that British history as a whole is a mixture of the great and the terrible). It was a point well-made by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin this week when he defended Keir Starmer against Trump’s criticisms during a meeting at the White House which, itself, could be read as an example of how Trump has clarified the commonality of interests between the UK and EU members.
One result of this ineptitude has been that, having embarked on this action without consulting any of America’s NATO allies, or those countries most impacted by its consequences, and having repeatedly insulted the UK in particular, Trump demanded that those same allies clear up the mess he is creating, quite falsely suggesting that NATO members have some obligation to do so. He then became enraged with them, and again with the UK in particular, for their understandable lack of enthusiasm to comply, as a prelude to petulantly declaring he didn’t need their help anyway. Even the US-Israel alliance is now under strain. So to inept planning we can add dire statecraft: Trump is, ahem, ‘no Churchill’.
At all events nobody, perhaps least of all Trump, has any idea when or where all this will end or, as Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times lays out, what its long-term repercussions (£) will be. Any thought that the outcome might at least be the overthrow of Iran’s repellent regime now seems unlikely and it is still less likely that, were that to eventuate, it would be replaced by a more palatable one. If anything, as Rachman gloomily concludes, the regime “may yet emerge in a stronger position internationally”. Whether or not that proves to be the case, the war will surely have many unintended and unexpected consequences, including for post-Brexit Britain.
The Home Front
Certainly the Iran war can already be seen to have profound implications for the UK, at least some of which relate more or less directly to Brexit and its aftermath. For one thing, it has sharply underlined the point I made at the time of the Greenland crisis: that, acknowledged or not, Keir Starmer cannot avoid the choice he has claimed not to exist between Europe and the US, if only because Trump keeps forcing that choice upon him. Thus, as with Greenland, but even more pointedly, Starmer has continued to rebuff the US by openly refusing to involve the UK in the attack on Iran.
On the other side of the equation, it is quite clear that the UK and the EU are in the same unenviable boat, enmeshed in a dependent relationship with an undependable partner. From that general situation flow such things as the UK and EU’s shared problem of how to deal, or cope, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the related problem of how to deal with the US decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil exports.
This unfolding situation has also had several impacts on domestic politics, of which the most obvious since my previous post has been that both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have had to abruptly discard (and disown) their initial position that the UK should have joined forces with the US. In Badenoch’s case, she now even has the nerve to counsel against giving the kind of unconditional support she originally urged, whilst still repeating her repellent claim (discussed in my previous post) that Starmer’s policy is based on “trying to appease a sectarian vote”. For both Badenoch and Farage, the change may be because they realized that the public are not generally supportive of the war, dislike and distrust Trump, and are very much concerned about its impact on fuel prices and the subsequent consequences of that.
Even so, it is worth recalling the nature of the initial criticisms they made of Starmer for not ‘joining in’ as well as some of the reasons they now give for keeping a distance from the conflict, for these are very similar. The initial criticism was widely couched in the language of humiliation, betrayal, and weakness, and several right-wing commentators, including Allison Pearson in the Telegraph (£), leapt gleefully on Trump’s negative comparison of Starmer with Winston Churchill as evidence of this humiliation. Then, when the line changed to one of non-involvement, this was accompanied by laments that this was because the UK was too weak in terms of military capacity to contribute to the war and that this, in Nigel Farage’s words, demonstrated the “humiliating state that we’ve sunk to today.”
It is certainly true that the UK’s military has been hollowed-out in recent years, and a great many people (myself included, for what very little that’s worth) have been warning about that, especially given the threat from Russia and the unreliability of Trump’s America, both things to which Farage, in particular, was entirely indifferent. It’s also true that this military weakness has been made evident by the current war. But that can hardly be laid at the door of the present government, since the problem long precedes its arrival, and in any case it is irrelevant to the decision not to join with the US in the sense that, as with every other country in the world except Israel, the UK thinks it would be ill-advised, even if we had the ability. However, the populist discussion of defence policy is not framed in terms of a rational assessment of threats and UK preparedness to respond to them. It is framed in terms of humiliation and betrayal.
This connects directly with the themes of this blog. For these were precisely the terms in which the Brexiters constantly talked about the Brexit process, week-in and week-out from almost as soon as the vote to leave was taken. That the same terms have now become embedded in political discourse, apart from in relation to Brexit itself, is one of the reasons why I have made Brexitism as well as Brexit the focus of the blog. It is also the case that throughout the Brexit process the imagery and mythologization of the Second World War have been a constant presence, and within that Churchill, of course, holds an iconic position. So there is a thread connecting, for example, Boris Johnson’s (mendacious) invocation of Churchill when campaigning for Brexit with the supposed humiliation of the draft-dodger Trump repeatedly taunting the British Prime Minister for his lack of Churchillian credentials.
Pound foolish
It may seem absurd to move from the weighty matter of war to writing about what pictures will appear on British banknotes. But exactly that topic has provoked an angry convulsion amongst the populist right and in doing so demonstrated just how deeply embedded is the mindset I have just outlined.
In brief, a couple of weeks ago the Bank of England announced that the next generation of banknotes will feature images of British wildlife. This followed a public consultation exercise conducted last year when a variety of possible themes were proposed, of which ‘nature’ proved to be the most popular. So far, so boring. But the announcement provoked a wave of angry reaction, primarily from the political right but also, rather more surprisingly, from LibDem leader Ed Davey, which centred on the fact that in the process this would mean that – yes – Winston Churchill will no longer feature on the £5 note. (It was variously claimed he would be replaced by a badger, a beaver, or a hedgehog: in fact, the exact images have yet to be decided.)
This, according to Nigel Farage [warning: link to X], was “the definition of woke” whilst Kemi Badenoch was even more alarmed, saying it was “erasing our history”. Then, the populist ‘intellectuals’ weighed in. Matt Goodwin stressed, both on GB News [warning: link to X] and his Substack newsletter [warning: link to Goodwin’s Substack newsletter] that this was not a trivial matter because it was “not about banknote design, but something much deeper, something more insidious” which turned out to be “the slow erosion of our national memory”. He went on to invoke sociologist Frank Furedi’s claim that there is “a war against the past” underway. Furedi, for those lucky enough not to know, is one of the peculiar and unpleasant group of former Revolutionary Communist Party members, including former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox, which morphed into the peculiar and unpleasant group of libertarian ‘contrarians’ who created Spiked Online.
Indeed, Spiked Online also joined the fray, with Gareth Roberts writing of how the Bank of England’s plans have “rightly riled up the nation”. Along the way, Roberts sneered at the very fact of there having been a public consultation, suggesting it would have been better for someone “in charge” to have made the decision, the implication presumably being that this was an example of wasteful state bureaucracy. Of course, had the decision been made in this way such commentators would undoubtedly have been outraged that ‘the elite’ had failed to consult ‘the people’. But Roberts’ main gripe, like Farage and most of the other complainers, was that this arose because of the Bank’s ‘woke’ desire to avoid the use of divisive images, and that Churchill was now regarded as divisive as a result of ‘wokeism’.
Plain foolish
This was, to be blunt, total gibberish. The claim arose because in the original consultation document one of the principles informing the themes offered to the public was that they should not be divisive (which is hardly unreasonable: who would want divisive images on the national currency anyway?) That is, it had nothing to do with Churchill, or indeed any other individual figure, and nor could it have done since these were, precisely, themes (i.e. not identifying the specific images to be used within those themes). One of those themes was ‘Notable Historical Figures’ but this came third, after both ‘Nature’ and ‘Architecture and Landmarks’. Had ‘historical figures’ been chosen, those pictured might or might not in the end have included Churchill. But this simply wasn’t what was at issue.
It was therefore an entirely manufactured outrage, but coalescing that outrage around the depiction of Churchill enabled the connection to be made with a wider set of claims about, in the first instance, Churchill generally. Thus Roberts linked to an earlier article in Spiked by – guess who? – Frank Furedi, fulminating about how Churchill “is a potent symbol of the civilisation culture warriors revile”. This then provided the gateway to the more general claims about history being erased and our national memory being eroded, a recurrent trope of Brexitism (see my post of November 2025 for more detail on the connections between Brexit, Brexitism, and the populist backlash against ‘woke’ history).
Actually, if anything, it showed historical ignorance and a failure of national memory. Churchill has only featured on banknotes since 2016, and historical figures of any sort only since 1970. This is hardly some ancient national tradition. For that matter, as a child one of my hobbies was collecting old farthing coins [1], which had been abolished in 1956 but which, since 1937, had carried the image of a wren. Prior to that, the image had been none other than Britannia herself, but would anyone seriously suggest that this change arose from some avant la lettre wokery bent on erasing the proud symbols of our national identity?
Plain mad
It is easy to mock all this, of course, but that would be a mistake. Even if one thinks that it just is the synthetic anger of people who are determined to get angry about anything then the very fact of that determination, and the reasons for it, are of interest. Goodwin said it was not trivial because in his eyes, and those of his fellow-ideologues, it is not. For him, it seems to connect with the ideas expressed in his latest book, published this week, entitled Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. That highly provocative, and surely rather mad, title in turn relates to the wider theme, currently influential within the populist right, of “suicidal empathy”. This term was coined by Canadian marketing academic Gad Saad and is to be developed in his own forthcoming book of that title, the book (and the concept) being enthusiastically endorsed by Elon Musk.
As with Goodwin and others with similar political commitments, Saad’s basic idea seems to be that through immigration, and especially Muslim immigration, ‘the elite’ is complicit in enacting the “suicide” of, variously, American, British or European culture (and thus carries at least echoes of the infamous racist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’). Effectively, it is the same idea as that propounded by Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and, just this week (£), the Conservative shadow justice secretary and hard Brexit architect Nick Timothy, but given a precarious patina of intellectualism. Or, to put it another way, it is the familiar ‘I just want my country back’ moan but using long words (in passing, note that many of the news stories upon which this worldview feeds are forensically dissected by Emma Monk’s excellent Monk Debunks Substack newsletter).
In this way, absurd as the row about banknotes may seem, it is actually a sliver within what, for some, is a war every bit as real, and perhaps more important, as that raging in the Middle East. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that for some, at least on the US right, most notably the morally broken and dangerously incompetent Secretary for War Pete Hegseth, the two wars are actually part of a single religious war. For that matter, it’s not unreasonable to link, for example, Hegseth’s determination to remove the scourge of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) in the US military with, for example, Goodwin’s attempt to connect the banknote non-issue to DEI activism (about 30 seconds into the clip).
Thus, coming back more directly to the main argument of this post, the row over the banknotes is a fresh illustration of the narrative of humiliation, betrayal and weakness. For it connects to the idea of a nation losing its identity, culture and history; its military prowess and its symbols of greatness and, most toxic of all, the idea that this is happening not by chance or the ineluctable passage of history but ‘suicidally’, due to the ‘treason of the clerks’.
The Churchillian challenge
Despite the increasingly hysterical and almost unhinged language being used by these populists, there is perhaps a sense that the steam behind their project is abating. Indeed, perhaps that is why the language they are using is becoming so uncontrolled. If so, one reason for that could well be that for many months now Trump’s administration, the most direct embodiment of that project, has itself become so obviously unhinged, and the chaotic mess he has created with his war on Iran makes that even more glaring.
Certainly in the UK there are now clear signs that Reform’s poll ratings have started to slip. There are also signs that Starmer is getting a little bolder, not just in standing up to Trump but also in condemning the populist right. The two are somewhat linked, as his judgements about the Iran War have been in line with public opinion and enabled him to expose the foolishness of both Badenoch and Farage. He was also notably quick to condemn Nick Timothy’s anti-Muslim remarks this week. Meanwhile, internal Labour opposition looks set to lead to at least some softening of the government’s draconian immigration plans.
On Europe, too, the government has now begun to speak much more openly about the case for closer regulatory alignment, including in a speech this week by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Whether she and the government have understood that alignment, in itself, doesn’t mean access, which also requires certification and legal oversight from the EU, remains to be seen. Perhaps they have, since, albeit quietly, the realities of ‘dynamic alignment’ are being accepted wholesale in the government’s attempts to complete an SPS deal with the EU.
More to the point, even at its most maximal an alignment policy does relatively little to reduce the costs of Brexit which, strikingly, Reeves referred to by using the 8% estimate from last year’s NBER report (and its higher end, at that) rather than the standard 4% OBR figure built into the official budget; striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. Certainly others within the Labour Party have begun to be increasingly vociferous in advocating such a response, with Sadiq Khan this week calling for the party to adopt a ‘rejoin’ policy at the next election. Notably, in making this argument Khan referenced not just the costs of Brexit but the changing world order created by Trump.
These may be straws in the wind, or perhaps to think so is just clutching at straws, and long-term readers of this blog will know that I am more inclined to be Cassandra-like than Pollyannaish. But there is at least the possibility that one of the many unintended consequences of the Iran war may be to change the course of the politics of Brexit and Brexitism. Who knows, perhaps in the end we will have reason, as Hegseth yesterday urged us, to “thank President Trump”. However, for that to happen will also require what we might reasonably call a more Churchillian politics, in two senses.
On the one hand, whilst there were many contradictions and ambiguities of Churchill’s views about what became the EU there was at least one strong strand within them which recognized its strategic necessity. That necessity would now be described in different terms to those used by Churchill, since the world, Europe, and Britain are now very different, but its basic contours still hold good. On the other hand, whilst again there were many facets to Churchill’s long political career, many of them less than edifying, to say the least, his primary historical legacy will always be that of providing the national leadership needed in a world at war [2].
It is just such a combination of strategy and leadership which Britain needs if it is to take the opportunity to renew itself in the world being created by Trump’s war.
Notes
[1] The aim being to amass as many different years as possible. Those thinking this suggests I was a strange child will have their suspicions confirmed by the fact that at the same sort of time I collected empty crisp packets, the aim in that case being to find as many different makes and flavours as possible – which was not as easy as it sounds when Golden Wonder ‘Ready Salted’ was so ubiquitous. In mitigation, this was in the 1970s, when we had to make our own entertainment, although my attempts to interest visitors and relatives in my crisp packet collection suggested that, even in those days, greater excitement was available.
[2] The populist idea that recognizing the flaws and well as the qualities of Churchill is some kind of disrespectful, woke revisionism is utterly dimwitted (as it is when applied to the more general recognition that British history as a whole is a mixture of the great and the terrible). It was a point well-made by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin this week when he defended Keir Starmer against Trump’s criticisms during a meeting at the White House which, itself, could be read as an example of how Trump has clarified the commonality of interests between the UK and EU members.
Friday, 22 November 2024
Post-Brexit Britain’s Trump problem goes much deeper than trade tariffs
Brexit is back in the news again. That is partly the aftermath of the budget, discussed in my previous post, which was followed by speeches at the Mansion House by Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey. The latter highlighted the economic damage of Brexit and called for a re-building of relations with the EU “while respecting the decision of the British people”.
It's true that, as economics commentator Simon Nixon observed, this marked a notable break with official Brexit omerta. Still, it was not exactly dynamite stuff. The economics are well-known and the political message was identical to the government’s own stated policy. Indeed, Reeves’ own Mansion House speech said the same thing. In that sense, Bailey’s comments showed the limitations of government policy in that, as he must know, closer relations with the EU will only marginally reduce the ongoing costs of Brexit. So, despite being accused by Matthew Lynn in The Spectator of “reopening the Brexit debate”, Bailey hardly did that, unless even the barest mention of Brexit is now to be described that way.
If his comments attracted attention, it was mainly because of the wider context of now intense discussion about what the coming Trump presidency is going to mean for post-Brexit Britain. In my previous post I suggested that ‘hot takes’ on this were not wise, and to an extent I think that is still the case. Apart from the fact that he isn’t yet in office, he is by any standards a capricious politician. What he may actually do when he comes back to power is highly unpredictable.
Trump’s psychodrama
I don’t mean, of course, that it isn’t already abundantly obvious that it is going to be dire. The choices he is already making for key appointments demonstrate he is going to oversee a depraved, intellectually and morally bankrupt, regime. About the only thing which may save us from the worst is that it may well also be too incompetent and too prone to infighting to deliver what it threatens.
However, within that broad picture, it remains to be seen exactly what he does in terms of the two issues most obviously of concern the UK: defence posture as regards NATO generally and Ukraine specifically, and a blanket hike in trade tariffs. I’ll discuss the latter shortly, and whilst I won’t discuss the former in this post there is a good analysis by Benjamin Martell of Edinburgh University in The New European, building on his and others’ report for the Independent Commission on UK-EU Relations earlier this year.
Beyond the difficulty of predicting what he will do, I think there is an undesirability in doing so. One of the ways in which narcissistic bullies like Trump exert power – and it’s the same in playgrounds, prisons, and some businesses as it is in politics – is precisely to generate a psychodrama of fearful uncertainty around themselves: ‘what will he do? What will we do if he does that? What will he do then if we do that?’
In this way, those around the narcissist become unwittingly complicit in his way of exercising power. It is very difficult to find a way of resisting that kind of power, but one possibility might be to stand back a little from the frenzy. To play it long and cool, rather than short and hot. Admittedly, that is not a luxury open to the heroic defenders of Ukraine, but it might be good advice to the UK. However, as a matter of fact, political actors and commentators here are currently engaged in trying to work out what Trump means. So the frenzy can’t be ignored.
Trump’s tariff threats
In the UK, and very directly connected with Brexit, much of that frenzy has been to do with trade. Specifically, if Trump does impose a blanket 10% or even 20% on imports to the US it would mean, at the upper end of that range, an estimated 0.8% fall in annual UK economic output. That it is not even worse is because the bulk of UK exports to the US are services (which do not attract tariffs) rather than goods. But, in the context of already anaemic growth forecasts, and the very urgent political and economic need for improved growth, that would be quite bad enough. That seems to be the baseline assumption in most commentary, but of course if it turned out to be 10%, or if the uplift was only applied to certain sectors (and depending what these were) the impact would be less. But it still wouldn’t be good.
If any of these scenarios happens, then one response, and it may well be the EU’s response, could be to impose retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US. A trade war, in other words. The UK could do that on its own account, but it is far too small to be able to win a trade war with the US. So this exposes the weakness of post-Brexit Britain. For many of those opposed to Brexit, it re-presents a choice between the EU and the US, to which the answer must be the EU. According to Brexiters, though, the opposite is true (£), and being outside the EU means that the UK could strike a deal with the US on its own account.
Others, by no means confined to Brexiters, see a less stark choice. Peter Mandelson, tipped as the possible next Ambassador to the US, sees a third way, with the unfortunately worded suggestion (£) that the UK could “have its cake and eat it”. It’s a possibility endorsed (£) by the generally acute Financial Times commentator Robert Shrimsley. Similarly, Andrew Haldane, the former Chief Economist at the Bank of England, believes a deal is possible without prejudicing relations with the EU. One reason for making such a claim is that not only are most UK exports to the US made up of services, but it is services trade where the UK has a trade surplus. Given that Trump’s tariffs are aimed at those countries with surpluses in goods trade, the UK isn’t so much his target as potential collateral damage.
What does a ‘deal’ mean?
However, the discussion of all this has already become mired in confusion. That is principally because it has conflated two potentially very different things. One is the old Brexiter dream of a UK-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), meaning, at its most basic, an across-the-board removal or reduction of all or most tariffs, but potentially including the removal of some non-tariff barriers to trade. The other is a specific deal to be exempted from the blanket imposition of Trump’s new tariffs. An FTA would improve the current terms of trade. An ‘exemption deal’ would simply return terms of trade to the status quo ante.
They are also different in that FTAs typically take a long time to negotiate, whereas an exemption deal, at least in principle, need not. And that reflects the fact that the things required of the UK for an FTA would be likely to involve substantial concessions on regulatory issues (‘chlorinated chicken’ being the symbolic one), especially as regards agriculture and pharmaceuticals. What would be needed for an exemption deal is less easy to predict, but could be things like voluntary export quotas, restrictions on Chinese imports, or agreement to import large quantities of US military equipment – but not, necessarily, regulatory concessions. [1]
These two scenarios therefore have different implications for the other side of the coin, UK-EU relations. An FTA, to the extent it entailed regulatory change, would move the UK further from the EU regulatory orbit. That would derail the current direction of Labour’s ‘reset’ policy, which is primarily based on continuing alignment with the EU. It would certainly derail the centrepiece of that policy, a UK-EU SPS deal (which would entail regulatory alignment on agricultural standards, especially). It would also have implications for Northern Ireland, which would remain bound by EU goods regulations, and thus would ‘thicken’ the Irish Sea Border. A more limited exemption deal might well avoid these things, but would certainly do political damage to the reset in terms of trust, assuming that it left the EU fighting a trade war with the US which the UK had managed to slide out of.
A trade deal with Trump?
Some Brexiters would undoubtedly argue that the distinction I’ve drawn is irrelevant, in that an FTA would also be an exemption deal (even though an exemption deal wouldn’t be an FTA). That’s true, but it doesn’t affect the point that an FTA would take longer to agree, and in the meantime there would be no exemption from the blanket new tariffs. Nor does it recognize the profound political difficulties any UK government would face if it met likely US demands on regulations.
But there is a more fundamental issue. Brexiters, both in the Tory and Reform parties, are now talking as if a UK-US FTA was there for the taking under Trump’s first presidency, and will now be available again. Kemi Badenoch is even claiming (£) that there is an “oven ready agreement negotiated by the last Tory government”. This is nonsense. There was no such agreement [2]. In fact, Trump blew hot and cold about a deal first time round. That’s actually a specific example of my earlier point about how narcissistic bullies use uncertainty to exert power. And even if he ever did offer such a deal, it would be on one-sided terms (that would probably be true under any US administration, but certainly under Trump’s ‘winner takes all’ version of deal-making).
In any case, this latest upsurge of talk about trade talks is exhibiting some of the same deficiencies as the earlier version. One concerns the relative importance to the UK of trade with the US and the EU. Brexiters, including Badenoch, are already wheeling out the misleading claim that the US is the UK’s largest trade partner. That’s misleading because it treats each member of the EU as a separate trade partner. They aren’t, to the extent that all are part of a single market and customs union. Brexiters really can’t have it both ways, saying that EU membership prevented the UK from being independent, especially in trade policy, but then talking as if each EU member is a separate trading entity. Secondly, it resurrects the misleading idea that a UK-US FTA would be much of an economic prize anyway. The previous government’s figures suggest it would provide an additional 0.07% to 0.16% per annum to GDP over 15 years.
Nevertheless, what we are going to see, and are already beginning to see, is Brexiters pretending that there is an easy, perfect solution to the Trump tariffs, but one that the Labour government is refusing to take because it is anti-Trump and pro-EU. We will see, as is also already beginning, Nigel Farage claiming with smirking self-importance that he has his own special relationship with Trump, giving him a unique influence and insight, just as he did first time round. Along with that will be noises from Trump supporters, and again they are already beginning, suggesting a deal is possible if only the UK abandons ‘EU socialism’. Trump will undoubtedly throw fuel on to that fire (‘I offered them a great deal, it was a beautiful deal, but they didn’t want it. I d’know why, I hear they preferred the EU, I d’know, but it was a beautiful deal’).
Beneath this, there is a still more fundamental issue. Trade policy is never wholly about economics, or economic rationality. But this is unusually so for Trump. If it wasn’t he would hardly even be contemplating the blanket tariff, which will increase prices in the US (though, despite what some think, that probably won’t bother his supporters). Instead, trade policy for Trump is about beating his enemies, in this context meaning the EU and China (which may face 60% tariffs). So there’s no point in thumbing through Ricardian theory on comparative advantage to try to understand Trump’s policy. But the corollary is that there’s no point in trying to frame responses in these terms.
In concrete terms, this means that the UK government should not weigh its (distinctly limited) options simply in terms of economic effects. An exemption deal might reduce the immediate economic damage, but its longer-term costs to the UK, both economic and geo-political, would be considerable in terms of the EU and, very possibly, China. The potential Chinese dimension is worth stressing, because at issue for the UK is not a just a two-way tug between the EU and the US, but being stuck between all three blocs. That was brought into focus by Keir Starmer’s attempts this week to improve relations with China, which might well be jeopardized by any form of deal with the US. To put all this another way, the only deals Trump does are those that favour him.
The cleavage in 21st century politics
This brings us to the final, and deepest, level of what is at stake here, and it is far more important than tariffs on this or that, or small percentages of GDP. It is that what Trump represents, as Brexit does, is what I’ve elsewhere discussed as ‘anti-ruleism’. In the most basic way, his anticipated blanket tariff policy makes a mockery of WTO rules. But his entire approach to politics is one which rejects the rule of law, scientific rationality, and, ultimately, the concept of ‘rational-legal authority’. I try to avoid social science jargon on this blog, but I think it may be useful here.
The sociologist Max Weber developed the idea that modern, industrial societies were increasingly characterised by systemic, codified rules and laws, objectively formulated and applied. So we obey X because s/he is the legitimate holder of the office (of President, or CEO, or whatever), not because of the person holding it. Weber contrasted that with authority that was ‘traditional’ (e.g. monarchy, church) or ‘charismatic’ (derived from the persona of the leader).
Trump fairly obviously seeks to elevate charisma over rules, but more to the point he embodies a hostility to ‘rules’ as a concept of social organization and politics. In this, he shares a common ideology with the ‘disruptor’ tech bosses, like Elon Musk, who now support him, and, in the UK, with their fanboy Dominic Cummings (£). He also shares it with Vladimir Putin, who relies on a peculiar admixture of charismatic and traditional authority, fused with nationalism, and is equally disdainful of the rules-based international order.
It is also shared by Boris Johnson, exhibited by the way that he (for perhaps idiosyncratic reasons) and the Brexit Jacobins (for reasons of fanaticism) believed it was acceptable to dispose of all conventions and institutions, including parliament itself, in order to ‘get Brexit done’. It is shared by Liz Truss, who still insists those institutions caused her downfall. Emblematic of this is the hostility of both Trump and the Brexiters to bureaucracy and, especially, the civil service, which, not coincidentally, was emblematic, for Weber, of rational-legal authority. That hostility is shared by Kemi Badenoch, in her aggressive diatribes against ‘the bureaucratic class’. Such anti-ruleism is obviously connected with populism, but it isn’t identical to it (there’s a book to be written there). The disjuncture is what did for Boris Johnson, when his disdain for the Covid rules fell foul of the populist idea that ‘rules should apply to all of us’.
There are many different ways of understanding these developments. One way might be to see them in terms of the latest phase in the unwinding of the politics of the Cold War (that would need another book). Another, even more epochal, would be to see them as a kind of Counter-Enlightenment, in which the eighteenth-century battles over rationality are being re-fought but in the other direction (that’s a third book). Of course, the Trump presidency will not last forever. But there is a sense that deep and profound changes are now established in the US and elsewhere. And why not? Despite the brief moment when some claimed ‘the end of history’, history never ends.
However they are framed, the key point is that these developments are about far more than international trade. That is not surprising, because Brexit itself was about far more than trade with the EU; more, even, than membership of the EU. Needless to say, these are not the terms in which most people are framing the current situation, although Rafael Behr of the Guardian comes close to doing so. If it were framed that way then, indeed, the whole question of Brexit would be re-litigated. It is clear that the government have no intention of doing that.
Will Starmer’s government rise to the challenge?
Nevertheless, in terms of the division I have presented here, Keir Starmer is very much on one side, being almost the epitome of rational-legal authority or, so to speak, ‘ruleism’. That is something to be grateful for, yet even framed in the narrower terms of trade and tariffs his government’s response so far is rather wishy-washy. Reeves has spoken of seeking to do a deal with the US “whether that's through a free trade agreement or through further improvements in our trade and investment flows”. But in the same interview she pledged that “we’re not going to allow British farmers to be undercut by different rules and regulations”, effectively ruling out an FTA. As for some exemption deal on new tariffs, she just says that “we'll make the case for free and open trade”. What does that mean in practice? Who knows.
Perhaps, when Trump’s intentions become clearer then so will those of the British government. But my hunch is that they won’t. I don’t think that the government is, as I put it earlier, playing it long and cool. I think it will simply try to muddle through, dodging or fudging the choices in the hope that they become irrelevant, if only through the decisions made by other countries. Arguably, in a situation in which the UK has so little leverage and so few good choices available, that has a certain pragmatism. But as a response to the bigger framing of those choices gestured towards in this post it is wholly inadequate.
Why are Labour in this situation? In some ways it is because, faced with Trump, any British government, like the governments of many other countries, has an almost impossible problem. But, just as, for Britain, Brexit adds to all the economic problems that other countries face, so too does it add to the Trump problem. For this government, in particular, that is compounded by its commitment to a Brexit policy which it does not believe in but is unwilling, and perhaps unable, to repudiate.
Notes
[1] This is my amateurish take on the question. For more detailed analysis (though I think it is pretty much compatible with mine) from trade experts, see Sam Lowe’s Substack newsletter, David Henig on the UK Trade Policy Observatory blog, and Dmitry Grozoubinski’s guest post on Ian Dunt’s Substack newsletter.
[2] It may be that Badenoch was referring to the previous government’s statement of the case for such an agreement (2020) Even if so, that was, emphatically, not an agreement with the US, still less one which is now ‘oven ready’ to be signed with Trump.
It's true that, as economics commentator Simon Nixon observed, this marked a notable break with official Brexit omerta. Still, it was not exactly dynamite stuff. The economics are well-known and the political message was identical to the government’s own stated policy. Indeed, Reeves’ own Mansion House speech said the same thing. In that sense, Bailey’s comments showed the limitations of government policy in that, as he must know, closer relations with the EU will only marginally reduce the ongoing costs of Brexit. So, despite being accused by Matthew Lynn in The Spectator of “reopening the Brexit debate”, Bailey hardly did that, unless even the barest mention of Brexit is now to be described that way.
If his comments attracted attention, it was mainly because of the wider context of now intense discussion about what the coming Trump presidency is going to mean for post-Brexit Britain. In my previous post I suggested that ‘hot takes’ on this were not wise, and to an extent I think that is still the case. Apart from the fact that he isn’t yet in office, he is by any standards a capricious politician. What he may actually do when he comes back to power is highly unpredictable.
Trump’s psychodrama
I don’t mean, of course, that it isn’t already abundantly obvious that it is going to be dire. The choices he is already making for key appointments demonstrate he is going to oversee a depraved, intellectually and morally bankrupt, regime. About the only thing which may save us from the worst is that it may well also be too incompetent and too prone to infighting to deliver what it threatens.
However, within that broad picture, it remains to be seen exactly what he does in terms of the two issues most obviously of concern the UK: defence posture as regards NATO generally and Ukraine specifically, and a blanket hike in trade tariffs. I’ll discuss the latter shortly, and whilst I won’t discuss the former in this post there is a good analysis by Benjamin Martell of Edinburgh University in The New European, building on his and others’ report for the Independent Commission on UK-EU Relations earlier this year.
Beyond the difficulty of predicting what he will do, I think there is an undesirability in doing so. One of the ways in which narcissistic bullies like Trump exert power – and it’s the same in playgrounds, prisons, and some businesses as it is in politics – is precisely to generate a psychodrama of fearful uncertainty around themselves: ‘what will he do? What will we do if he does that? What will he do then if we do that?’
In this way, those around the narcissist become unwittingly complicit in his way of exercising power. It is very difficult to find a way of resisting that kind of power, but one possibility might be to stand back a little from the frenzy. To play it long and cool, rather than short and hot. Admittedly, that is not a luxury open to the heroic defenders of Ukraine, but it might be good advice to the UK. However, as a matter of fact, political actors and commentators here are currently engaged in trying to work out what Trump means. So the frenzy can’t be ignored.
Trump’s tariff threats
In the UK, and very directly connected with Brexit, much of that frenzy has been to do with trade. Specifically, if Trump does impose a blanket 10% or even 20% on imports to the US it would mean, at the upper end of that range, an estimated 0.8% fall in annual UK economic output. That it is not even worse is because the bulk of UK exports to the US are services (which do not attract tariffs) rather than goods. But, in the context of already anaemic growth forecasts, and the very urgent political and economic need for improved growth, that would be quite bad enough. That seems to be the baseline assumption in most commentary, but of course if it turned out to be 10%, or if the uplift was only applied to certain sectors (and depending what these were) the impact would be less. But it still wouldn’t be good.
If any of these scenarios happens, then one response, and it may well be the EU’s response, could be to impose retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US. A trade war, in other words. The UK could do that on its own account, but it is far too small to be able to win a trade war with the US. So this exposes the weakness of post-Brexit Britain. For many of those opposed to Brexit, it re-presents a choice between the EU and the US, to which the answer must be the EU. According to Brexiters, though, the opposite is true (£), and being outside the EU means that the UK could strike a deal with the US on its own account.
Others, by no means confined to Brexiters, see a less stark choice. Peter Mandelson, tipped as the possible next Ambassador to the US, sees a third way, with the unfortunately worded suggestion (£) that the UK could “have its cake and eat it”. It’s a possibility endorsed (£) by the generally acute Financial Times commentator Robert Shrimsley. Similarly, Andrew Haldane, the former Chief Economist at the Bank of England, believes a deal is possible without prejudicing relations with the EU. One reason for making such a claim is that not only are most UK exports to the US made up of services, but it is services trade where the UK has a trade surplus. Given that Trump’s tariffs are aimed at those countries with surpluses in goods trade, the UK isn’t so much his target as potential collateral damage.
What does a ‘deal’ mean?
However, the discussion of all this has already become mired in confusion. That is principally because it has conflated two potentially very different things. One is the old Brexiter dream of a UK-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), meaning, at its most basic, an across-the-board removal or reduction of all or most tariffs, but potentially including the removal of some non-tariff barriers to trade. The other is a specific deal to be exempted from the blanket imposition of Trump’s new tariffs. An FTA would improve the current terms of trade. An ‘exemption deal’ would simply return terms of trade to the status quo ante.
They are also different in that FTAs typically take a long time to negotiate, whereas an exemption deal, at least in principle, need not. And that reflects the fact that the things required of the UK for an FTA would be likely to involve substantial concessions on regulatory issues (‘chlorinated chicken’ being the symbolic one), especially as regards agriculture and pharmaceuticals. What would be needed for an exemption deal is less easy to predict, but could be things like voluntary export quotas, restrictions on Chinese imports, or agreement to import large quantities of US military equipment – but not, necessarily, regulatory concessions. [1]
These two scenarios therefore have different implications for the other side of the coin, UK-EU relations. An FTA, to the extent it entailed regulatory change, would move the UK further from the EU regulatory orbit. That would derail the current direction of Labour’s ‘reset’ policy, which is primarily based on continuing alignment with the EU. It would certainly derail the centrepiece of that policy, a UK-EU SPS deal (which would entail regulatory alignment on agricultural standards, especially). It would also have implications for Northern Ireland, which would remain bound by EU goods regulations, and thus would ‘thicken’ the Irish Sea Border. A more limited exemption deal might well avoid these things, but would certainly do political damage to the reset in terms of trust, assuming that it left the EU fighting a trade war with the US which the UK had managed to slide out of.
A trade deal with Trump?
Some Brexiters would undoubtedly argue that the distinction I’ve drawn is irrelevant, in that an FTA would also be an exemption deal (even though an exemption deal wouldn’t be an FTA). That’s true, but it doesn’t affect the point that an FTA would take longer to agree, and in the meantime there would be no exemption from the blanket new tariffs. Nor does it recognize the profound political difficulties any UK government would face if it met likely US demands on regulations.
But there is a more fundamental issue. Brexiters, both in the Tory and Reform parties, are now talking as if a UK-US FTA was there for the taking under Trump’s first presidency, and will now be available again. Kemi Badenoch is even claiming (£) that there is an “oven ready agreement negotiated by the last Tory government”. This is nonsense. There was no such agreement [2]. In fact, Trump blew hot and cold about a deal first time round. That’s actually a specific example of my earlier point about how narcissistic bullies use uncertainty to exert power. And even if he ever did offer such a deal, it would be on one-sided terms (that would probably be true under any US administration, but certainly under Trump’s ‘winner takes all’ version of deal-making).
In any case, this latest upsurge of talk about trade talks is exhibiting some of the same deficiencies as the earlier version. One concerns the relative importance to the UK of trade with the US and the EU. Brexiters, including Badenoch, are already wheeling out the misleading claim that the US is the UK’s largest trade partner. That’s misleading because it treats each member of the EU as a separate trade partner. They aren’t, to the extent that all are part of a single market and customs union. Brexiters really can’t have it both ways, saying that EU membership prevented the UK from being independent, especially in trade policy, but then talking as if each EU member is a separate trading entity. Secondly, it resurrects the misleading idea that a UK-US FTA would be much of an economic prize anyway. The previous government’s figures suggest it would provide an additional 0.07% to 0.16% per annum to GDP over 15 years.
Nevertheless, what we are going to see, and are already beginning to see, is Brexiters pretending that there is an easy, perfect solution to the Trump tariffs, but one that the Labour government is refusing to take because it is anti-Trump and pro-EU. We will see, as is also already beginning, Nigel Farage claiming with smirking self-importance that he has his own special relationship with Trump, giving him a unique influence and insight, just as he did first time round. Along with that will be noises from Trump supporters, and again they are already beginning, suggesting a deal is possible if only the UK abandons ‘EU socialism’. Trump will undoubtedly throw fuel on to that fire (‘I offered them a great deal, it was a beautiful deal, but they didn’t want it. I d’know why, I hear they preferred the EU, I d’know, but it was a beautiful deal’).
Beneath this, there is a still more fundamental issue. Trade policy is never wholly about economics, or economic rationality. But this is unusually so for Trump. If it wasn’t he would hardly even be contemplating the blanket tariff, which will increase prices in the US (though, despite what some think, that probably won’t bother his supporters). Instead, trade policy for Trump is about beating his enemies, in this context meaning the EU and China (which may face 60% tariffs). So there’s no point in thumbing through Ricardian theory on comparative advantage to try to understand Trump’s policy. But the corollary is that there’s no point in trying to frame responses in these terms.
In concrete terms, this means that the UK government should not weigh its (distinctly limited) options simply in terms of economic effects. An exemption deal might reduce the immediate economic damage, but its longer-term costs to the UK, both economic and geo-political, would be considerable in terms of the EU and, very possibly, China. The potential Chinese dimension is worth stressing, because at issue for the UK is not a just a two-way tug between the EU and the US, but being stuck between all three blocs. That was brought into focus by Keir Starmer’s attempts this week to improve relations with China, which might well be jeopardized by any form of deal with the US. To put all this another way, the only deals Trump does are those that favour him.
The cleavage in 21st century politics
This brings us to the final, and deepest, level of what is at stake here, and it is far more important than tariffs on this or that, or small percentages of GDP. It is that what Trump represents, as Brexit does, is what I’ve elsewhere discussed as ‘anti-ruleism’. In the most basic way, his anticipated blanket tariff policy makes a mockery of WTO rules. But his entire approach to politics is one which rejects the rule of law, scientific rationality, and, ultimately, the concept of ‘rational-legal authority’. I try to avoid social science jargon on this blog, but I think it may be useful here.
The sociologist Max Weber developed the idea that modern, industrial societies were increasingly characterised by systemic, codified rules and laws, objectively formulated and applied. So we obey X because s/he is the legitimate holder of the office (of President, or CEO, or whatever), not because of the person holding it. Weber contrasted that with authority that was ‘traditional’ (e.g. monarchy, church) or ‘charismatic’ (derived from the persona of the leader).
Trump fairly obviously seeks to elevate charisma over rules, but more to the point he embodies a hostility to ‘rules’ as a concept of social organization and politics. In this, he shares a common ideology with the ‘disruptor’ tech bosses, like Elon Musk, who now support him, and, in the UK, with their fanboy Dominic Cummings (£). He also shares it with Vladimir Putin, who relies on a peculiar admixture of charismatic and traditional authority, fused with nationalism, and is equally disdainful of the rules-based international order.
It is also shared by Boris Johnson, exhibited by the way that he (for perhaps idiosyncratic reasons) and the Brexit Jacobins (for reasons of fanaticism) believed it was acceptable to dispose of all conventions and institutions, including parliament itself, in order to ‘get Brexit done’. It is shared by Liz Truss, who still insists those institutions caused her downfall. Emblematic of this is the hostility of both Trump and the Brexiters to bureaucracy and, especially, the civil service, which, not coincidentally, was emblematic, for Weber, of rational-legal authority. That hostility is shared by Kemi Badenoch, in her aggressive diatribes against ‘the bureaucratic class’. Such anti-ruleism is obviously connected with populism, but it isn’t identical to it (there’s a book to be written there). The disjuncture is what did for Boris Johnson, when his disdain for the Covid rules fell foul of the populist idea that ‘rules should apply to all of us’.
There are many different ways of understanding these developments. One way might be to see them in terms of the latest phase in the unwinding of the politics of the Cold War (that would need another book). Another, even more epochal, would be to see them as a kind of Counter-Enlightenment, in which the eighteenth-century battles over rationality are being re-fought but in the other direction (that’s a third book). Of course, the Trump presidency will not last forever. But there is a sense that deep and profound changes are now established in the US and elsewhere. And why not? Despite the brief moment when some claimed ‘the end of history’, history never ends.
However they are framed, the key point is that these developments are about far more than international trade. That is not surprising, because Brexit itself was about far more than trade with the EU; more, even, than membership of the EU. Needless to say, these are not the terms in which most people are framing the current situation, although Rafael Behr of the Guardian comes close to doing so. If it were framed that way then, indeed, the whole question of Brexit would be re-litigated. It is clear that the government have no intention of doing that.
Will Starmer’s government rise to the challenge?
Nevertheless, in terms of the division I have presented here, Keir Starmer is very much on one side, being almost the epitome of rational-legal authority or, so to speak, ‘ruleism’. That is something to be grateful for, yet even framed in the narrower terms of trade and tariffs his government’s response so far is rather wishy-washy. Reeves has spoken of seeking to do a deal with the US “whether that's through a free trade agreement or through further improvements in our trade and investment flows”. But in the same interview she pledged that “we’re not going to allow British farmers to be undercut by different rules and regulations”, effectively ruling out an FTA. As for some exemption deal on new tariffs, she just says that “we'll make the case for free and open trade”. What does that mean in practice? Who knows.
Perhaps, when Trump’s intentions become clearer then so will those of the British government. But my hunch is that they won’t. I don’t think that the government is, as I put it earlier, playing it long and cool. I think it will simply try to muddle through, dodging or fudging the choices in the hope that they become irrelevant, if only through the decisions made by other countries. Arguably, in a situation in which the UK has so little leverage and so few good choices available, that has a certain pragmatism. But as a response to the bigger framing of those choices gestured towards in this post it is wholly inadequate.
Why are Labour in this situation? In some ways it is because, faced with Trump, any British government, like the governments of many other countries, has an almost impossible problem. But, just as, for Britain, Brexit adds to all the economic problems that other countries face, so too does it add to the Trump problem. For this government, in particular, that is compounded by its commitment to a Brexit policy which it does not believe in but is unwilling, and perhaps unable, to repudiate.
Notes
[1] This is my amateurish take on the question. For more detailed analysis (though I think it is pretty much compatible with mine) from trade experts, see Sam Lowe’s Substack newsletter, David Henig on the UK Trade Policy Observatory blog, and Dmitry Grozoubinski’s guest post on Ian Dunt’s Substack newsletter.
[2] It may be that Badenoch was referring to the previous government’s statement of the case for such an agreement (2020) Even if so, that was, emphatically, not an agreement with the US, still less one which is now ‘oven ready’ to be signed with Trump.
Friday, 23 September 2022
Strange times
What a fortnight to have been on holiday from blogging! That Liz Truss would become Prime Minister was, of course, expected; that the Queen would die two days later was not. One consequence of this conjuncture was to virtually suspend normal politics until this week thus muffling Truss’s early decisions. But perhaps we will not see a return to normal. It’s possible that the end of the Queen’s long reign will provoke new questioning of our politics. And, with more certainty, there’s a good case that Truss’s government is going to be unlike any we have seen before.
Death of a Queen
The Queen’s death was plainly a major historical event, but it might prove to be more than an event by triggering a process of national reflection. Two years ago, I wrote an article in Byline Times anticipating that her death could have such an effect, initiating or intensifying a conversation about Britain’s modern history and contemporary place in the world. There are already signs of it, interesting examples including Lewis Goodall’s reflections on ‘The Queue’ and a debate between the twice Orwell Prize longlisted journalist Nesrine Malik and leading historian Professor David Edgerton, though if it becomes widespread it won’t happen simply by formalised discussion so much as by a gradual seepage into public discourse.
It will entail much more than Brexit but it would encompass Brexit, if only because the Queen’s death ends one of the last direct links to the Second World War, which looms so large in the historical reference points for Brexit. But that is only a symptom of the more general way that, without many people really recognizing it at the time, the 2016 referendum was a kind of unacknowledged conversation about, precisely, Britain’s modern history and contemporary place in the world. It wasn’t explicitly couched in those terms, or if so then rarely, perhaps because both sides expected ‘remain’ to win. Nevertheless, both as an economic proposition about trading relationships and a political proposition about national sovereignty – and about how those things related to the fifty years of EU membership – this is what was at stake.
So, unwittingly, we had a national conversation but botched it by not knowing that’s what it was and not understanding what we were talking about. Largely as a result of that botch, the actual consequences of Brexit are still only gradually being uncovered. Yet, already, the blithe assumptions about the ‘sunny uplands’ that awaited Britain have been brutally exposed as false. Just this week, Truss has publicly acknowledged that one of the key ‘prizes’ (though in fact always of very limited value) of Brexit, a UK-US trade deal, is not even remotely in prospect. Though almost casually made, it is in itself a huge admission of failure, whilst exemplifying the wider failure of all the Brexiters’ promises.
The failure of Brexit
For to everyone apart from the diehards, who are so invested in Brexit that nothing would persuade them otherwise, it is now plain that Brexit has been, and will continue to be, hugely damaging to the UK. It simply isn’t viable as a strategy within a world of regional economic and trade blocs, and of trans-national regulatory systems, and no amount of ‘Global Britain’ blather can make it so. Relatedly, the idea of a post-Brexit geo-political ‘pivot’ to the Indo-Pacific, always a fantasy, has been shredded by the Ukraine War. Whether at the level of political alliances or of energy co-dependence, as well as at the levels of trade and regulation, the UK’s divorce from the EU has been exposed as folly. Hence only 27% of the population now think that leaving the EU has had a positive effect on the country (48% negative, 18% no difference, 8% don’t know), and although, despite that, 38% still think that leaving was the right thing to do (51% wrong, 11% don’t know) this has now been consistently the minority view throughout almost the entire post-referendum period.
In the process of enacting Brexit, the UK – in an almost literal sense, since the Brexiter fantasy involves a denial of geographical reality – has been misplaced in the world, and therefore the UK’s place in the world – in a metaphorical, geo-political sense – has been mislaid. Moreover, the very existence of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been put under new strains. That is in no small part due to having treated the referendum result as binding on those parts of the Union that didn’t vote for it. And that in turn is an aspect of Brexit being pursued in the hardest of forms when, in any form, it only briefly had the narrowest margin of support even treating the whole of the UK as a single entity.
Imagine that Brexit was a success
So, in summary, whilst the Queen’s death, marking a fracture in, effectively, the entire post-war history of the nation, would always have had the possibility of opening profound questions about modern Britain, that possibility has been given a particular salience by Brexit. For her death has coincided with the pursuit of a new national strategy which is manifestly failing and which is clearly and consistently lacking majority support (and, as an interesting aside, it seems to have been inadvertently revealed this week that, contrary to reports at the time, the Queen was not in favour of Brexit).
Indeed, it’s highly revealing to consider just how different things would be if Brexit had been anything approaching the success its advocates promised. In those circumstances, the national mood (if there is really such a thing) would undoubtedly still be reflective about Queen Elizabeth’s death, but at the same time confident and united in being at the start of the exciting new journey of national renewal which Brexit was already beginning to deliver. Perhaps it would even be quietly muttered that, noble as the Queen had been, she had reigned over a nation that had given in to precisely the ‘declinism’ to which Brexit was the solution. Time, indeed, for a change to a new Carolean era of prosperity and optimism.
Instead this huge symbolic rupture with the past has overlapped with a profound disquiet about the present and the future because of Brexit. With this occurring at a time of severe and growing economic crisis, the possibility of serious national self-reflection becomes even more likely, although where it would lead is impossible to predict and not by any means assured to be either benign or unifying.
Enter Truss
The arrival of a new Prime Minister is not an unfortunate addition to this moment of historic instability. It is, as I wrote in my previous post, the latest episode in the political instability wrought by Brexit. It also marks a distinctive moment, in that it is the first time since the referendum that the free-market, deregulatory, libertarian right strand of Brexiters has been unequivocally in control of government, with advisors drawn from its numerous thinktanks.
Of course, that strand was important before and, in conjunction with the purely nationalist and anti-immigration strands, was hugely significant in pushing for Brexit in the first place and, subsequently, for insisting it meant hard Brexit. Even so, neither Theresa May nor even Boris Johnson was ever of their number, and Johnson’s 2019 majority, which Truss inherits, was predicated on the same shape-shifting about the meaning of Brexit that the Vote Leave campaign had used to secure the vote in 2016. It’s easy to forget now, but that Vote Leave team, headed by Dominic Cummings, which was also the power behind the throne for most of Johnson’s premiership, was deeply contemptuous of the ERG and most of the Brexit Ultra MPs who are now in the ascendant.
There is no doubt that they see this (£) as their first and perhaps last chance to get ‘true Brexit’, even though what they mean by that was never put to the electorate, either in 2016 or in 2019. No longer do they think it so crucial, as they once insisted when promoting Brexit, that the people choose their rulers. That means not only that the government has little democratic legitimacy but also that it will face significant constraints on implementing its agenda. The internal contradictions of the diverse voting coalition Johnson and Cummings created have not changed, whilst Truss’s popularity amongst Tory MPs is much more limited than Johnson’s in 2019 (or May’s, in the heady days preceding the 2017 election).
Moreover, whilst some people get understandably exercised by the role of ‘Tufton Street’ thinktanks, it’s worth recalling that Johnson’s government, probably no less than Truss’s, was heavily linked to such bodies. But governments are constrained in ways that thinktanks aren’t, and even the most ardently ideological libertarian SpAD quickly finds that political reality is very different to the world of position papers and whiteboards. For example, as Martin Wolf of the FT points out (£), it is hardly compatible with Hayekian doctrine for the government to be setting a national economic growth target.
Constrained Truss
More generally, the economic circumstances of the energy crisis, inflation, public service and especially NHS crises, flagging investment, and a currency in real danger of imploding – much of which has been made worse by Brexit, and all of which comes like punches on the numerous purple bruises caused by Brexit – are more severe than any British Prime Minister has faced for decades, and will place significant limits on Truss’s freedom of action. The most obvious consequence of this is that, “libertarian revolutionary” as she may be, Truss is about to preside over a huge expansion of government spending and debt to subsidise energy bills because of the unavoidable exigencies of the moment and in direct contradiction to the position she held against ‘handouts’ only a few weeks ago.
To the extent it has any coherence at all, ‘Trussonomics’ will repeatedly run up against these political constraints. Its guiding theme of ‘trickle-down’ economics, the discredited theory which informs tax cuts and the decision to lift the cap on bankers’ bonuses, is completely at odds with the politics of a country facing a profound cost-of-living crisis. Strangely, the chosen leitmotif of a relentless focus on GDP growth (£) ignores one of the populist lessons of the Brexit campaign – ‘that’s your GDP!’ – which informed the now abandoned rhetoric of the ‘levelling up agenda’.
Nor is the plan to review the restriction on working hours inherited from the EU Working Time Directive, for all that it is a longstanding cause celebre for Brexiters, one with obvious populist appeal (note, too, that it is only a ‘review’: like so many deregulatory reviews initiated since Brexit it may well come to nothing once the practical realities emerge). Indeed, as many have remarked, Truss’s early moves could hardly have given so many political hostages to the Labour Party. To that should be added the point that nor could they more clearly have fractured the already fragile coalition of support for Brexit.
Brexity Truss
In other ways, though, Truss’s approach is resolutely ‘Brexity’ and, whatever she may have thought in 2016, she must now be counted amongst the hardest of Brexiters. Apart from anything else, it is no coincidence that her economic guru is Patrick Minford, for decades an extreme and minority economic voice on Brexit and much else besides. It’s almost incredible that this Thatcherite fossil, already a schoolboy when Queen Elizabeth began her long reign, is now heavily influencing government economic policy. One thing which comes with Minford’s contrarian resentments is the familiar Brexiter hostility to the ‘economic Establishment’ and the civil service, of which the immediate decision to fire Sir Tom Scholar, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, was emblematic.
This attracted much criticism as an unfair and foolish treatment of the civil service, but also reflects a deeper and even more dangerous thread in Brexit, which is to treat expert consensus as an ideological conspiracy against Brexiter truth. This is difficult ground, since it would plainly be wrong to assert that expert consensus is necessarily right, or is the repository of some non-ideological truth, and, for that matter, critique of the ‘Treasury view’ as a small-c conservative constraint on government ambitions isn’t confined to Brexiters. But whilst it is always possible that the consensus view in economics may be wrong, of all the forecasts of Brexit’s economic effects by far the most inaccurate was that of Minford’s Economists for Brexit group.
However, predictive track record is not what is at issue here. Ever since 2016, the repeated attacks on not just the Treasury, but the Bank of England (and especially its former Governor Mark Carney), or any individual or institution that even questions Brexiters’ claims, go well beyond the parameters of normal political and economic debate into something resembling religious sectarianism. Again, though, Truss doesn’t operate without any constraints, even in these very early days, and the backlash against Scholar’s sacking seems already to have forced her to hold back from doing the same to Sir Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary.
Cakeist Truss
Truss also displays some of the ‘cakeism’ which did so much to transform Brexit from a political prospectus with which one might agree or disagree to a wholly dishonest project in which reality is denied in favour of quasi-religious faith. In particular, it can be seen in the ramping up of public debt to cover energy bills as well as massive tax cuts. As with the cakeism of Brexit, the issue isn’t the merits of the policy as such, which can be debated, it’s the refusal to accept that the policy comes with any costs or trade-offs. It’s as if the campaigning tactic of dismissing all Brexit costs as ‘Project Fear’ has morphed into a governmental principle that rejects any notion of risk in relation to any policy at all.
That seems especially bizarre in this case, when it has been an article of faith for the Thatcherite Right that ‘the books must balance’. There’s much to debate about that proposition, too, a debate in which context matters more than framing some general rule. In the current context, not least because of the damage Brexit has already done to sterling since the referendum, the principal risk is a full-scale run on the pound, which has already been foreshadowed in the currency markets since Truss took office on her tax-cutting platform.
It’s a risk that can only be enhanced if, as reported, the government is not going to issue an economic forecast with today’s major economic statement, as the suspicion can only be that it is dire. It’s pointless anyway as others can do the sums, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has already warned that the government’s debt plans are “unsustainable”, highlighting the particular impact of the scale of the anticipated tax cuts but also reflecting the government’s refusal to fund the energy support package through tax-raising measures.
Delusional Truss
This matters because even if Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were completely right to pour scorn on the Treasury view of the world that doesn’t affect the fact that currency traders hold very similar views, and act on them, and they can’t be sacked or ignored. As with Brexit dogma in general, reality can be denied and domestic critics derided as fearmongers or bullied into silence, but when that dogma meets the external world, whether that be currency markets or the negotiating power of the EU, reality always wins. Truss may put her faith in Patrick Minford but, to put it brutally and crudely, currency traders don’t give the tiniest f*** about Minford or his theories, and nor do investors or any other economic actor. Thus market analysts now say there’s a 25% chance that we will soon see pound-dollar parity for the first time ever.
The other big danger, given ballooning government debt, is that, as Mark Carney long ago warned, ‘the kindness of strangers’ could come to a ‘sudden stop’, with international investors refusing to go on funding government borrowing. For, of course, it is not ‘kindness’ that is at issue, but a cold-eyed assessment of risks and rewards. Although few commented on it at the time, I pointed out last April (see footnote) that the current account deficit was becoming alarmingly high and the forecasts were for it to get worse. Now (although we can’t be certain of the figures yet) it is set to increase dramatically.
In fact, as Paul Mason wrote this week “all six dials on the dashboard of the UK economy: inflation, investment, trade, debt, sterling and the current account [are] flashing red”. For Truss, to proclaim, as she did this week, that her “belief is that Britain’s economic fundamentals are strong” shows precisely the Brexiter logic that ‘belief’ equates with truth. Indeed it’s only last month that she was boosterishly proclaiming that recession was “not inevitable”, despite Bank of England forecasts: yesterday, as interest rates rose to their highest level since 2008, it became clear that even as she spoke the economy was already in recession.
Northern Irish uncertainties
That reality trumps faith and fantasy still isn’t a lesson that Brexiters seem able to learn, though. Nowhere is that more so than in relation to the still ongoing Northern Ireland Protocol debacle. There’s certainly a possibility of a ‘re-set’ now, especially since, as the government accepts there will be no trade deal with the US, the only barely credible reason for refusing SPS alignment has disappeared. And any half-way sensible government faced with as many serious problems as this one would certainly not add to them with the entirely self-imposed one of reneging on the Protocol. Doing so is not just profoundly damaging the UK’s international reputation and relations, it is also exacerbating the energy crisis and prolonging the damaging exclusion of the UK from EU science programmes as well as, down the line, risking the provocation of a trade war with the EU and a rupture with the US.
But, then, a half-way sensible government wouldn’t have appointed ERG Brexiter hardliners Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve ‘hard man’ Baker as, respectively, Northern Ireland Secretary and Minister, suggesting an intention for confrontation. Against that, Heaton-Harris has been making conciliatory statements, explicitly suggesting he shouldn’t be judged on his Brexiter background. In the last few hours there have also been signs of a more moderate approach from the government, with the threat of unilateral derogation from the Protocol apparently lifted (£).
If so, that’s welcome, though note that it would be a second early U-turn from Truss on her campaign promises. It’s too early to judge yet, and we’ve been round these loops of conciliation and aggression so many times, but if a deal is really going to be done expect at least rumblings of rebellion from the Ultras that, yet again, Brexit is being ‘betrayed’. Baker, in particular, who gave such strong support to Truss’s leadership bid might be expected to make that charge. The same old Brexit rows that May and Johnson faced lie in wait for Truss. Much more on all this in the coming days and weeks, no doubt.
A very peculiar government
As I write this analysis, and having read those of many others, it strikes me that it is almost impossible to articulate a coherent account of Truss’s government because it is one of the strangest this country has had. It does not even seem to know how to describe itself. It blends aspects of the economics that led to the 1976 IMF bailout – for context, just as the Queen was about to celebrate the mere Silver Jubilee of her reign – with aspects of the Thatcherism that subsequently grew out of that crisis. But whereas Thatcherites had the bedrock of realism to know that ‘you can’t buck the market’, Truss’s Brexiter Thatcherites think that true faith can trump reality.
The government’s avowed priority is economic growth, but it has an undiscussable commitment to hard Brexit, which is the most permanent drag on growth and which itself results in large part from a rejection of the Thatcher-inspired single market. It appears totally uninterested in the horrific impact of Brexit on small exporting firms, which were not only iconic for Thatcher but which are central to economic growth. In fact, it isn’t notably pro-business of any size – even banks aren’t hugely exercised about being able to pay bonuses – so much as in thrall to a ‘Janet and John’ ideological theory about capitalism that has no relationship to actual business needs and priorities.
It is a post-Brexit government, with Brexiters in every key position, but very little of its policy agenda seems to require Brexit. That is certainly true of the core tax-cutting policies, and also of the reported plans for new ‘investment zones’ with lower taxes and planning deregulation (these are different to Freeports but, as with Freeports, are nothing remotely like ‘Charter Cities’, despite the latest swell of social media excitement). Perhaps tellingly, the post of Minister for Brexit Opportunities has been axed, a tacit acknowledgment not just of its failure but of it being doomed to fail. As for the ‘Brexit Freedoms Bill’, wait for the arbitrary dates for dropping EU regulation to approach, and we’ll see what happens (much more on this in future posts, no doubt).
It is a government that presents itself as having a seriousness of purpose that Johnson’s administration lacked, but inherits his cakeism and vapid boosterism; as having a can-do pragmatism whilst asserting a populist preference for faith over evidence and expertise. It is small statist, whilst expanding the size of the state and rejecting ‘austerity’. It is deregulatory but largely coy about saying much about what this means in practice or how it would relate to the central task of creating growth. It acts as if it were a new government and has presented an entirely different manifesto to that of 2019, but it is reliant upon the voting coalition it inherited from 2019 (with consequences already emerging over Truss’s change in fracking policy) and has at best only a couple of years left of this parliament. It is an ideological government but without coherent ideology, and led by a dogmatist who is also an opportunist.
Perhaps more than anything else, and more dangerous than anything else, it seems like a government composed of chancers and mediocrities who are at the same time arrogantly certain of their beliefs. By an accident of circumstances, which in large part include Brexit, they have got hold of a power they have neither the competence nor the wisdom to be entrusted with, but to which they feel an unquestioning entitlement. This is the consequence of the winnowing out of any moderate or even half-way pragmatic figures in the Tory Party since the Brexit vote, to the extent that even someone like Rishi Sunak is now denounced as a ‘socialist’ and Brexit ‘compromiser’. About the best can be said for this government is that, despite earlier rumours, it seems it will not contain Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood or David Frost, so, apparently, there are at least some depths to which it will not yet sink.
The bleak reality
Even if the strange coincidence of this new Prime Minister arriving just as the old Queen departs doesn’t lead to extensive national self-reflection, it does present an opportunity for the government. As Lord Ricketts, the former senior civil servant, wrote this week, the swell of international attention and goodwill occasioned by the Queen’s funeral could be a chance to repair the damage that Brexit has brought to international relations. So, too, might the moment of considerable national unity it brought be built on to assuage the divisions of Brexit.
But what seems far more likely is that the world sees a country that for all its faultless pageantry, its sombre and dignified mourning, has lost its way and is now further destabilised by losing one of its deepest anchors. Adrift since Brexit, it is now governed by a motley crew of over-promoted ideologues like Suella Braverman and self-important pinheads like Jacob Rees-Mogg, led by a peculiar and delusional Prime Minister. As the grandeur and collective emotions of the last couple of weeks fade, we are left with the bleak reality of a government not just incapable of resolving the dislocations – economic, geo-political, cultural, reputational – of Brexit and all that has followed, but incapable of recognizing their existence or even of caring were they to do so.
Death of a Queen
The Queen’s death was plainly a major historical event, but it might prove to be more than an event by triggering a process of national reflection. Two years ago, I wrote an article in Byline Times anticipating that her death could have such an effect, initiating or intensifying a conversation about Britain’s modern history and contemporary place in the world. There are already signs of it, interesting examples including Lewis Goodall’s reflections on ‘The Queue’ and a debate between the twice Orwell Prize longlisted journalist Nesrine Malik and leading historian Professor David Edgerton, though if it becomes widespread it won’t happen simply by formalised discussion so much as by a gradual seepage into public discourse.
It will entail much more than Brexit but it would encompass Brexit, if only because the Queen’s death ends one of the last direct links to the Second World War, which looms so large in the historical reference points for Brexit. But that is only a symptom of the more general way that, without many people really recognizing it at the time, the 2016 referendum was a kind of unacknowledged conversation about, precisely, Britain’s modern history and contemporary place in the world. It wasn’t explicitly couched in those terms, or if so then rarely, perhaps because both sides expected ‘remain’ to win. Nevertheless, both as an economic proposition about trading relationships and a political proposition about national sovereignty – and about how those things related to the fifty years of EU membership – this is what was at stake.
So, unwittingly, we had a national conversation but botched it by not knowing that’s what it was and not understanding what we were talking about. Largely as a result of that botch, the actual consequences of Brexit are still only gradually being uncovered. Yet, already, the blithe assumptions about the ‘sunny uplands’ that awaited Britain have been brutally exposed as false. Just this week, Truss has publicly acknowledged that one of the key ‘prizes’ (though in fact always of very limited value) of Brexit, a UK-US trade deal, is not even remotely in prospect. Though almost casually made, it is in itself a huge admission of failure, whilst exemplifying the wider failure of all the Brexiters’ promises.
The failure of Brexit
For to everyone apart from the diehards, who are so invested in Brexit that nothing would persuade them otherwise, it is now plain that Brexit has been, and will continue to be, hugely damaging to the UK. It simply isn’t viable as a strategy within a world of regional economic and trade blocs, and of trans-national regulatory systems, and no amount of ‘Global Britain’ blather can make it so. Relatedly, the idea of a post-Brexit geo-political ‘pivot’ to the Indo-Pacific, always a fantasy, has been shredded by the Ukraine War. Whether at the level of political alliances or of energy co-dependence, as well as at the levels of trade and regulation, the UK’s divorce from the EU has been exposed as folly. Hence only 27% of the population now think that leaving the EU has had a positive effect on the country (48% negative, 18% no difference, 8% don’t know), and although, despite that, 38% still think that leaving was the right thing to do (51% wrong, 11% don’t know) this has now been consistently the minority view throughout almost the entire post-referendum period.
In the process of enacting Brexit, the UK – in an almost literal sense, since the Brexiter fantasy involves a denial of geographical reality – has been misplaced in the world, and therefore the UK’s place in the world – in a metaphorical, geo-political sense – has been mislaid. Moreover, the very existence of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been put under new strains. That is in no small part due to having treated the referendum result as binding on those parts of the Union that didn’t vote for it. And that in turn is an aspect of Brexit being pursued in the hardest of forms when, in any form, it only briefly had the narrowest margin of support even treating the whole of the UK as a single entity.
Imagine that Brexit was a success
So, in summary, whilst the Queen’s death, marking a fracture in, effectively, the entire post-war history of the nation, would always have had the possibility of opening profound questions about modern Britain, that possibility has been given a particular salience by Brexit. For her death has coincided with the pursuit of a new national strategy which is manifestly failing and which is clearly and consistently lacking majority support (and, as an interesting aside, it seems to have been inadvertently revealed this week that, contrary to reports at the time, the Queen was not in favour of Brexit).
Indeed, it’s highly revealing to consider just how different things would be if Brexit had been anything approaching the success its advocates promised. In those circumstances, the national mood (if there is really such a thing) would undoubtedly still be reflective about Queen Elizabeth’s death, but at the same time confident and united in being at the start of the exciting new journey of national renewal which Brexit was already beginning to deliver. Perhaps it would even be quietly muttered that, noble as the Queen had been, she had reigned over a nation that had given in to precisely the ‘declinism’ to which Brexit was the solution. Time, indeed, for a change to a new Carolean era of prosperity and optimism.
Instead this huge symbolic rupture with the past has overlapped with a profound disquiet about the present and the future because of Brexit. With this occurring at a time of severe and growing economic crisis, the possibility of serious national self-reflection becomes even more likely, although where it would lead is impossible to predict and not by any means assured to be either benign or unifying.
Enter Truss
The arrival of a new Prime Minister is not an unfortunate addition to this moment of historic instability. It is, as I wrote in my previous post, the latest episode in the political instability wrought by Brexit. It also marks a distinctive moment, in that it is the first time since the referendum that the free-market, deregulatory, libertarian right strand of Brexiters has been unequivocally in control of government, with advisors drawn from its numerous thinktanks.
Of course, that strand was important before and, in conjunction with the purely nationalist and anti-immigration strands, was hugely significant in pushing for Brexit in the first place and, subsequently, for insisting it meant hard Brexit. Even so, neither Theresa May nor even Boris Johnson was ever of their number, and Johnson’s 2019 majority, which Truss inherits, was predicated on the same shape-shifting about the meaning of Brexit that the Vote Leave campaign had used to secure the vote in 2016. It’s easy to forget now, but that Vote Leave team, headed by Dominic Cummings, which was also the power behind the throne for most of Johnson’s premiership, was deeply contemptuous of the ERG and most of the Brexit Ultra MPs who are now in the ascendant.
There is no doubt that they see this (£) as their first and perhaps last chance to get ‘true Brexit’, even though what they mean by that was never put to the electorate, either in 2016 or in 2019. No longer do they think it so crucial, as they once insisted when promoting Brexit, that the people choose their rulers. That means not only that the government has little democratic legitimacy but also that it will face significant constraints on implementing its agenda. The internal contradictions of the diverse voting coalition Johnson and Cummings created have not changed, whilst Truss’s popularity amongst Tory MPs is much more limited than Johnson’s in 2019 (or May’s, in the heady days preceding the 2017 election).
Moreover, whilst some people get understandably exercised by the role of ‘Tufton Street’ thinktanks, it’s worth recalling that Johnson’s government, probably no less than Truss’s, was heavily linked to such bodies. But governments are constrained in ways that thinktanks aren’t, and even the most ardently ideological libertarian SpAD quickly finds that political reality is very different to the world of position papers and whiteboards. For example, as Martin Wolf of the FT points out (£), it is hardly compatible with Hayekian doctrine for the government to be setting a national economic growth target.
Constrained Truss
More generally, the economic circumstances of the energy crisis, inflation, public service and especially NHS crises, flagging investment, and a currency in real danger of imploding – much of which has been made worse by Brexit, and all of which comes like punches on the numerous purple bruises caused by Brexit – are more severe than any British Prime Minister has faced for decades, and will place significant limits on Truss’s freedom of action. The most obvious consequence of this is that, “libertarian revolutionary” as she may be, Truss is about to preside over a huge expansion of government spending and debt to subsidise energy bills because of the unavoidable exigencies of the moment and in direct contradiction to the position she held against ‘handouts’ only a few weeks ago.
To the extent it has any coherence at all, ‘Trussonomics’ will repeatedly run up against these political constraints. Its guiding theme of ‘trickle-down’ economics, the discredited theory which informs tax cuts and the decision to lift the cap on bankers’ bonuses, is completely at odds with the politics of a country facing a profound cost-of-living crisis. Strangely, the chosen leitmotif of a relentless focus on GDP growth (£) ignores one of the populist lessons of the Brexit campaign – ‘that’s your GDP!’ – which informed the now abandoned rhetoric of the ‘levelling up agenda’.
Nor is the plan to review the restriction on working hours inherited from the EU Working Time Directive, for all that it is a longstanding cause celebre for Brexiters, one with obvious populist appeal (note, too, that it is only a ‘review’: like so many deregulatory reviews initiated since Brexit it may well come to nothing once the practical realities emerge). Indeed, as many have remarked, Truss’s early moves could hardly have given so many political hostages to the Labour Party. To that should be added the point that nor could they more clearly have fractured the already fragile coalition of support for Brexit.
Brexity Truss
In other ways, though, Truss’s approach is resolutely ‘Brexity’ and, whatever she may have thought in 2016, she must now be counted amongst the hardest of Brexiters. Apart from anything else, it is no coincidence that her economic guru is Patrick Minford, for decades an extreme and minority economic voice on Brexit and much else besides. It’s almost incredible that this Thatcherite fossil, already a schoolboy when Queen Elizabeth began her long reign, is now heavily influencing government economic policy. One thing which comes with Minford’s contrarian resentments is the familiar Brexiter hostility to the ‘economic Establishment’ and the civil service, of which the immediate decision to fire Sir Tom Scholar, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, was emblematic.
This attracted much criticism as an unfair and foolish treatment of the civil service, but also reflects a deeper and even more dangerous thread in Brexit, which is to treat expert consensus as an ideological conspiracy against Brexiter truth. This is difficult ground, since it would plainly be wrong to assert that expert consensus is necessarily right, or is the repository of some non-ideological truth, and, for that matter, critique of the ‘Treasury view’ as a small-c conservative constraint on government ambitions isn’t confined to Brexiters. But whilst it is always possible that the consensus view in economics may be wrong, of all the forecasts of Brexit’s economic effects by far the most inaccurate was that of Minford’s Economists for Brexit group.
However, predictive track record is not what is at issue here. Ever since 2016, the repeated attacks on not just the Treasury, but the Bank of England (and especially its former Governor Mark Carney), or any individual or institution that even questions Brexiters’ claims, go well beyond the parameters of normal political and economic debate into something resembling religious sectarianism. Again, though, Truss doesn’t operate without any constraints, even in these very early days, and the backlash against Scholar’s sacking seems already to have forced her to hold back from doing the same to Sir Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary.
Cakeist Truss
Truss also displays some of the ‘cakeism’ which did so much to transform Brexit from a political prospectus with which one might agree or disagree to a wholly dishonest project in which reality is denied in favour of quasi-religious faith. In particular, it can be seen in the ramping up of public debt to cover energy bills as well as massive tax cuts. As with the cakeism of Brexit, the issue isn’t the merits of the policy as such, which can be debated, it’s the refusal to accept that the policy comes with any costs or trade-offs. It’s as if the campaigning tactic of dismissing all Brexit costs as ‘Project Fear’ has morphed into a governmental principle that rejects any notion of risk in relation to any policy at all.
That seems especially bizarre in this case, when it has been an article of faith for the Thatcherite Right that ‘the books must balance’. There’s much to debate about that proposition, too, a debate in which context matters more than framing some general rule. In the current context, not least because of the damage Brexit has already done to sterling since the referendum, the principal risk is a full-scale run on the pound, which has already been foreshadowed in the currency markets since Truss took office on her tax-cutting platform.
It’s a risk that can only be enhanced if, as reported, the government is not going to issue an economic forecast with today’s major economic statement, as the suspicion can only be that it is dire. It’s pointless anyway as others can do the sums, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has already warned that the government’s debt plans are “unsustainable”, highlighting the particular impact of the scale of the anticipated tax cuts but also reflecting the government’s refusal to fund the energy support package through tax-raising measures.
Delusional Truss
This matters because even if Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were completely right to pour scorn on the Treasury view of the world that doesn’t affect the fact that currency traders hold very similar views, and act on them, and they can’t be sacked or ignored. As with Brexit dogma in general, reality can be denied and domestic critics derided as fearmongers or bullied into silence, but when that dogma meets the external world, whether that be currency markets or the negotiating power of the EU, reality always wins. Truss may put her faith in Patrick Minford but, to put it brutally and crudely, currency traders don’t give the tiniest f*** about Minford or his theories, and nor do investors or any other economic actor. Thus market analysts now say there’s a 25% chance that we will soon see pound-dollar parity for the first time ever.
The other big danger, given ballooning government debt, is that, as Mark Carney long ago warned, ‘the kindness of strangers’ could come to a ‘sudden stop’, with international investors refusing to go on funding government borrowing. For, of course, it is not ‘kindness’ that is at issue, but a cold-eyed assessment of risks and rewards. Although few commented on it at the time, I pointed out last April (see footnote) that the current account deficit was becoming alarmingly high and the forecasts were for it to get worse. Now (although we can’t be certain of the figures yet) it is set to increase dramatically.
In fact, as Paul Mason wrote this week “all six dials on the dashboard of the UK economy: inflation, investment, trade, debt, sterling and the current account [are] flashing red”. For Truss, to proclaim, as she did this week, that her “belief is that Britain’s economic fundamentals are strong” shows precisely the Brexiter logic that ‘belief’ equates with truth. Indeed it’s only last month that she was boosterishly proclaiming that recession was “not inevitable”, despite Bank of England forecasts: yesterday, as interest rates rose to their highest level since 2008, it became clear that even as she spoke the economy was already in recession.
Northern Irish uncertainties
That reality trumps faith and fantasy still isn’t a lesson that Brexiters seem able to learn, though. Nowhere is that more so than in relation to the still ongoing Northern Ireland Protocol debacle. There’s certainly a possibility of a ‘re-set’ now, especially since, as the government accepts there will be no trade deal with the US, the only barely credible reason for refusing SPS alignment has disappeared. And any half-way sensible government faced with as many serious problems as this one would certainly not add to them with the entirely self-imposed one of reneging on the Protocol. Doing so is not just profoundly damaging the UK’s international reputation and relations, it is also exacerbating the energy crisis and prolonging the damaging exclusion of the UK from EU science programmes as well as, down the line, risking the provocation of a trade war with the EU and a rupture with the US.
But, then, a half-way sensible government wouldn’t have appointed ERG Brexiter hardliners Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve ‘hard man’ Baker as, respectively, Northern Ireland Secretary and Minister, suggesting an intention for confrontation. Against that, Heaton-Harris has been making conciliatory statements, explicitly suggesting he shouldn’t be judged on his Brexiter background. In the last few hours there have also been signs of a more moderate approach from the government, with the threat of unilateral derogation from the Protocol apparently lifted (£).
If so, that’s welcome, though note that it would be a second early U-turn from Truss on her campaign promises. It’s too early to judge yet, and we’ve been round these loops of conciliation and aggression so many times, but if a deal is really going to be done expect at least rumblings of rebellion from the Ultras that, yet again, Brexit is being ‘betrayed’. Baker, in particular, who gave such strong support to Truss’s leadership bid might be expected to make that charge. The same old Brexit rows that May and Johnson faced lie in wait for Truss. Much more on all this in the coming days and weeks, no doubt.
A very peculiar government
As I write this analysis, and having read those of many others, it strikes me that it is almost impossible to articulate a coherent account of Truss’s government because it is one of the strangest this country has had. It does not even seem to know how to describe itself. It blends aspects of the economics that led to the 1976 IMF bailout – for context, just as the Queen was about to celebrate the mere Silver Jubilee of her reign – with aspects of the Thatcherism that subsequently grew out of that crisis. But whereas Thatcherites had the bedrock of realism to know that ‘you can’t buck the market’, Truss’s Brexiter Thatcherites think that true faith can trump reality.
The government’s avowed priority is economic growth, but it has an undiscussable commitment to hard Brexit, which is the most permanent drag on growth and which itself results in large part from a rejection of the Thatcher-inspired single market. It appears totally uninterested in the horrific impact of Brexit on small exporting firms, which were not only iconic for Thatcher but which are central to economic growth. In fact, it isn’t notably pro-business of any size – even banks aren’t hugely exercised about being able to pay bonuses – so much as in thrall to a ‘Janet and John’ ideological theory about capitalism that has no relationship to actual business needs and priorities.
It is a post-Brexit government, with Brexiters in every key position, but very little of its policy agenda seems to require Brexit. That is certainly true of the core tax-cutting policies, and also of the reported plans for new ‘investment zones’ with lower taxes and planning deregulation (these are different to Freeports but, as with Freeports, are nothing remotely like ‘Charter Cities’, despite the latest swell of social media excitement). Perhaps tellingly, the post of Minister for Brexit Opportunities has been axed, a tacit acknowledgment not just of its failure but of it being doomed to fail. As for the ‘Brexit Freedoms Bill’, wait for the arbitrary dates for dropping EU regulation to approach, and we’ll see what happens (much more on this in future posts, no doubt).
It is a government that presents itself as having a seriousness of purpose that Johnson’s administration lacked, but inherits his cakeism and vapid boosterism; as having a can-do pragmatism whilst asserting a populist preference for faith over evidence and expertise. It is small statist, whilst expanding the size of the state and rejecting ‘austerity’. It is deregulatory but largely coy about saying much about what this means in practice or how it would relate to the central task of creating growth. It acts as if it were a new government and has presented an entirely different manifesto to that of 2019, but it is reliant upon the voting coalition it inherited from 2019 (with consequences already emerging over Truss’s change in fracking policy) and has at best only a couple of years left of this parliament. It is an ideological government but without coherent ideology, and led by a dogmatist who is also an opportunist.
Perhaps more than anything else, and more dangerous than anything else, it seems like a government composed of chancers and mediocrities who are at the same time arrogantly certain of their beliefs. By an accident of circumstances, which in large part include Brexit, they have got hold of a power they have neither the competence nor the wisdom to be entrusted with, but to which they feel an unquestioning entitlement. This is the consequence of the winnowing out of any moderate or even half-way pragmatic figures in the Tory Party since the Brexit vote, to the extent that even someone like Rishi Sunak is now denounced as a ‘socialist’ and Brexit ‘compromiser’. About the best can be said for this government is that, despite earlier rumours, it seems it will not contain Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood or David Frost, so, apparently, there are at least some depths to which it will not yet sink.
The bleak reality
Even if the strange coincidence of this new Prime Minister arriving just as the old Queen departs doesn’t lead to extensive national self-reflection, it does present an opportunity for the government. As Lord Ricketts, the former senior civil servant, wrote this week, the swell of international attention and goodwill occasioned by the Queen’s funeral could be a chance to repair the damage that Brexit has brought to international relations. So, too, might the moment of considerable national unity it brought be built on to assuage the divisions of Brexit.
But what seems far more likely is that the world sees a country that for all its faultless pageantry, its sombre and dignified mourning, has lost its way and is now further destabilised by losing one of its deepest anchors. Adrift since Brexit, it is now governed by a motley crew of over-promoted ideologues like Suella Braverman and self-important pinheads like Jacob Rees-Mogg, led by a peculiar and delusional Prime Minister. As the grandeur and collective emotions of the last couple of weeks fade, we are left with the bleak reality of a government not just incapable of resolving the dislocations – economic, geo-political, cultural, reputational – of Brexit and all that has followed, but incapable of recognizing their existence or even of caring were they to do so.
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