Brexit Britain is still a tinderbox

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

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

The Brexit stasis

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

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

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

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

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

Well-worn delusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why nothing is changing

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

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

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

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

Summer at the seaside

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

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

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

The Arday case and the culture war

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

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

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

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

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

The political tinderbox

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

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

 

Notes

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

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

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

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

Despair

I’ve written almost five hundred posts on this blog, which equates to well over a million words, and done so in various moods. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same depth of weariness, bordering on despair, as I have whilst writing this one. And whilst I’m all too well aware of the possibility that this is a projection, and a narcissistic one at that, I can’t help thinking that this feeling is more widely shared, even to the extent of describing the national mood.

It is also one of those times when events are so complex as to require a very long post, and moving so quickly that parts of it may be superseded within hours.

British politics: stuck

At a relatively superficial level, the weariness, if not the despair, is partly because we remain in the ‘pregnant pause’ I identified several weeks ago, and discussed again in my previous post. Many aspects of domestic politics are on hold, awaiting the outcome of next week’s Makerfield by-election. But it’s not as if that is likely to dispel the weariness, which is more to do with the feeling of a polity, and a country, which is stuck. Stuck not just in the sense of being directionless but in the sense of being trapped.

After all, assuming that, as polls increasingly suggest is likely, Andy Burnham wins in Makerfield that seems likely to herald several weeks of a Labour leadership contest ending, potentially, with yet another new Prime Minister. That seems all the more possible with the resignation of the Defence Secretary yesterday, followed by that of the Armed Forces Minister, adding to the existing sense that Keir Starmer’s leadership is in crisis and its days are numbered. Perhaps a Burnham premiership would bring some fresh momentum to politics [1], and some impression of direction, but it’s hard to be optimistic about that, if only because not only are Britain’s problems deeper than its leader but they also tend to militate against any leader being effective.

A sense of stuckness also describes the state of UK-EU relations, and the government’s promised reset. That isn’t a new sense. Despite starting with an urgency of purpose [2] there has been little concrete progress. In my previous post, I noted that the date of the next UK-EU summit had been postponed again, this time to 13 July. That may still happen, but reports are now calling that into question, with the sticking point apparently being the terms of a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS).

Clearly the closer it comes to the 13 July the less likely it is that the summit will happen then and, if it does not, then the political calendar might well mean it could not occur before Autumn (this might be especially so if this summer sees a leadership contest in Britain). Either way, and assuming it happens at all, the government will have taken almost half of its electoral term to reach a substantive reset agreement and, of course, the implementation of all of its provisions is likely to take much longer.

That is frankly pitiful given that the reset was Labour’s central policy on what has been the defining political issue of the last decade, and that David Lammy, the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, said in 2023 that it would be Labour’s “number one” foreign policy priority if they came to power. It is all the more pitiful given the profound changes and dangers in international relations since then. And if it is true (which seems highly plausible) that it is agreeing a YMS which is holding things up then that is not just pitiful but shameful, in two ways. First because it shows a lack of realism, given that this was always the key EU requirement if there was to be a deal on the UK’s priorities. And secondly because it shows another of the ways that the government has chosen to be driven by the anti-immigration agenda of Reform.

The Henry Nowak murder

The latter connects with the much deeper reason why the present moment is not just wearisome but one of despair and, even, fear. It is apparently now inevitable that every time there is a serious crime which has any connection with immigration it will be followed by street violence accompanied by a vicious, frenzied ‘debate’ conducted in terms framed by Nigel Farage and others on the far right, not least because major broadcasters, most importantly the BBC, are prone to adopt that framing. This is not simply an opinion on my part, or an evidence-free jibe: it flows directly from the plans the BBC drew up last year to win over Reform voters, who it feared were losing trust in its output, by changing both its news “story selection” and drama offerings so as to appeal to them.

The latest sequence of events began with the trial of Henry Nowak’s murderer, and to say that this had a connection with immigration is itself to illustrate a discernible shift, since the murderer was a British-born British national. But it is increasingly common within far-right circles to regard Britishness, and especially Englishness, as conditional upon skin colour, a view that has disappeared amongst the majority of the population. The racial aspect is undeniable. No one raised any doubt (nor, of course, should they have) that the white victim, who was born in Britain of Polish descent, and held dual British and Polish nationalities, was British [3].

On this view, any crime committed by someone whose skin is not white is linked to immigration. Indeed the disgraceful remarks [warning: link is to X] made by the US Vice-President J.D. Vance about the crime linked it not just to immigration but to the now prevalent ideology amongst the American right that Europe, including the UK, has undergone “a mass invasion of migrants” and faces civilizational collapse as a result. That same theme appeared last week in Pete Hegseth’s revolting comments during, of all things, his D-Day commemoration speech and it has also been repeatedly restated by Elon Musk.

These interventions from the US are the latest examples of the way that the American right now routinely interferes in the domestic politics of European countries, and always in favour of the far right. The blatant, undisguised racism of those interventions, whilst widespread amongst British rank-and-file social media posters, is not generally made absolutely explicit by Nigel Farage (though, notably, he re-posted without comment Vance’s remarks), and, as regards the Henry Nowak murder, his main line of attack, also made by his American allies, has been the poisonous claim that it illustrated ‘two-tier policing’. The specific accusation is that the police routinely side with ethnic minorities and against white people.

The two-tier policing claim

I don’t imagine that anyone would deny that the police’s treatment of Henry Nowak was awful, and that a truly terrible misjudgment was made by the police officers at the scene. As the trial judge made clear, the main blame for that lies with the murderer and his brother, who repeatedly lied to the police in claiming to have been victims of racial abuse and assault, although a further review is to be held into the police’s conduct. And, as the trial judge also made clear, the blame for Henry Nowak’s death lies entirely with the murderer. The subsequent police investigation seems to have been effective, and the murderer was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. So, to mention two false comparisons repeatedly made – including by Kemi Badenoch – this case bears no resemblance to the George Floyd murder, where the perpetrator was a police officer, or to Stephen Lawrence’s murder, where the police and criminal justice system utterly failed.

In short, this case does not demonstrate the “two-tier policing” or the “anti-white prejudice” Farage claimed, in a preposterously self-important “emergency address” to the nation. Yet such claims had the unsurprising consequence of significant public disorder in Southampton, just as the furore after the Southport murders did (and, as in that case, the treatment of the rioters was treated as further evidence of two-tier policing). Equally unsurprisingly, it turned out that, far from being ‘ordinary decent people’ expressing their ‘legitimate concerns’, many of the Southampton ‘protestors’ were neo-Nazi activists, whilst one of the first to appear in court was a thug with a string of previous convictions for violence.

It has been suggested, not implausibly, that Farage was motivated to stir up, in his words, “pure, cold rage” partly as a distraction from the questions he has sought to avoid about his £5 million gift and partly to respond to the electoral threat from Rupert Lowe’s Restore party in the Makerfield by-election and the more general competition between the two men and their parties. Perhaps, but it is surely the case that, even without those incentives, he would have done the same thing since he routinely does so.

Whatever his motivation, it is just possible that he has miscalculated. There is some evidence (£) that his stance has alienated some of the more moderate voters Reform hopes to attract, whilst the more extreme potential supporters he wants to detach from Lowe’s party are sticking with Restore in Makerfield. Meanwhile, when he raised the issue in one of his rare appearances in the House of Commons, an unusually effective response from Keir Starmer, along with barracking from across the chamber for his refusal to condemn the Southampton violence, demonstrated his isolation and, for once, Farage even looked slightly ashamed of himself.

Northern Ireland

This highly febrile moment was the worst imaginable time for the news that a grotesque attempted murder had been allegedly committed by a Sudanese refugee in Belfast [4]. The case was very different in its details, but the familiar patterns of social media outrage quickly led to far more extreme violence in Belfast than had occurred in Southampton. In Belfast, gangs of masked men sought out individuals and families who were refugees, or simply ‘foreign’, to attack them and burn their homes, along with wider violence against the police and other targets. Evidence is now emerging that a ‘target list’ of immigrants’ addresses had been drawn up months ago, well before this week’s stabbing, suggesting that this was merely a pretext.

These were not, as the Telegraph described (£) them, “protests”. A more accurate term was that used by the Times (£): it was a “pogrom”. That term, more often associated with anti-Semitic violence, has a particular, and controversial, historical association in Northern Ireland, dating back to the 1920s and in that and other ways the meaning of this week’s violence in Northern Ireland is somewhat different to that in mainland Britain. In particular, the legacy of the ‘Troubles’ includes a reservoir of capacity for organized violence amongst terrorist groups, some of which have direct linkages with international neo-Nazi and white supremacist networks. It is also the case that, as Luqman Saeed of Ulster University explained in a London Review of Books essay, the history of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland has inflected contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment in particular ways [5].

As for Farage, if he had indeed felt any sense of shame the previous week there was no sign of it in his response to the Belfast violence as he gloatingly ‘warned’ that “things will continue to kick off” and will continue to do so “over the course of the summer”, whilst claiming that “the vast majority” involved in the disorder are not “bad actors” but (he implied but did not say) just ordinary decent people with legitimate concerns. He could hardly conceal his glee, any more than could those recycling the now-popular predictions of imminent civil war.

The ‘first lie wins’

One of the most thoughtful pieces I’ve read about the police’s conduct in the Henry Nowak case, in the law enforcement journal Police Professional, suggests that it can be explained by “anchoring bias”, the psychological phenomenon whereby the first piece of information received in a particular situation creates a mental reference point through which subsequent information is filtered and interpreted. On this analysis the “first lie wins”, and in this case it was the lie told by the murderer’s brother when he called the police.

Whether or not that analysis explains how the police behaved in this case, it provides a good way of understanding the political discourse around it. Thus within hours of the ‘two-tier policing’ accusation being made, the Policing minister Sarah James at least implicitly accepted it by supporting a review of police anti-racism guidelines. And subsequently, unveiling her proposals to revoke parts of the Equality Act, Kemi Badenoch invoked the case as if it were beyond all question that the police had been motivated by ‘reverse racism’.

But anchoring bias is just one aspect of the more generic, and perhaps more familiar, phenomenon of confirmation bias; the selection and retention of information in line with pre-existing beliefs. This is one way of understanding how the Belfast stabbing, the Southampton and Southport murders, and other cases have become knitted together. In the far-right narrative, there is a wave of uncontrolled crime committed by ‘coloured foreigners’ – whether they be immigrants, descendants of immigrants, or asylum seekers – and, by extension, all such people are suspect and dangerous.

For that narrative to develop and, more especially, to become seen as plausible to those who may not be ideologically pre-disposed to racism or xenophobia requires that only the crimes with some kind of ‘coloured foreigner’ dimension are ‘selected’ for prominence. And whilst confirmation bias may not be a conscious process in many cases, there can be little doubt that for certain political actors and influencers, both within and outside the UK, the selection process is conscious and deliberate. Then, especially if the media follows that selection (and note that this is the exact word used by the BBC to describe its recalibration of “story selection” to gain the trust of Reform voters), a narrative is created which, to the general public, presents a picture where it is not unreasonable to conclude that crime is overwhelmingly of this sort.

That such a dynamic is in play was illustrated by the way that, at around the same time that Nowak’s murderer was sentenced, a white woman who had murdered her neighbour in a frenzied knife attack was sentenced at a court in Maidstone. There was no public outrage. A few weeks before, a neo-Nazi woman was sentenced in Bristol for an axe attack on a Kurdish man, in a case which revealed police failings in the identification of terrorism suspects. There was no public outrage. Similarly, at around the same time as the Belfast stabbing, there was a multiple stabbing at a school in Manchester. For a few hours social media buzzed with speculation that this was ‘yet another immigrant crime’, sometimes explicitly linking it to the Belfast crime. Yet when a suspect was arrested and charged in Manchester, and (so far as has been reported) it became clear that there was no immigration dimension, almost nothing more was made of it.

These are just a few of the examples which could be given, but the point is obvious. None of the latter cases ‘fitted the narrative’ and, whilst all were reported, they were neither given much media prominence nor treated as forming part of any wider pattern. That is not because there is no pattern that could be identified. Actually, every single one of the cases mentioned so far in this post shares the common feature of involving the use of a bladed weapon. But that pattern was not highlighted as relevant and, instead, the cases brought to public prominence were selected so as to construct the ‘immigrant crime wave’ narrative.

It should hardly need saying that this is not to suggest that the Southport murder, Southampton murder, and Belfast attempted murder are anything other than horrific. It is to suggest that there are numerous equally horrific crimes and public opinion is being manipulated into focusing on only some of them in support of a wider ideological agenda.

Looking back at how we got here

The manner in which these kinds of narrative constructions operate is well understood and skillfully exploited by populist politicians in ways which are notoriously difficult to counter. Myth-busting and fact checking are laudable and important activities, but are limited in their impact. The entire Brexit debacle illustrated that all too clearly. We’re now approaching the tenth anniversary of the referendum which, as trailed in recent posts, is shaping up to be an occasion for major reflection and renewed debate, some of which has already started, including a good overview of the economic consequences of Brexit from Professor Jonathan Portes of UKICE.

Right now, though, we have not reached the anniversary of the referendum but are in the anniversary of the campaign and that, too, is being discussed, most notably in a two-part BBC documentary this week (which, disappointingly, chose to adopt a larky, gossipy tone, though that perhaps accurately reflects (£) how the leading players approached it). Because I didn’t start this blog until after the referendum there are no posts here recording that campaign in detail [6] but, recalling it now, I’m struck again by its appalling dishonesty. The most familiar example is the '£350 million week for the NHS’ slogan, and what is so striking about that was not its simple dishonesty but the more knowing, now admitted, dishonesty that it was designed to provoke the refutations which would keep it circulating and lodge it in the public mind: a good example of how the ‘first lie wins’.

It is true that many, perhaps now most, of those who voted to leave now recognize that it was a lie. For that matter, the majority of people now realise that Brexit was a mistake. Yet here we are, ten years on, mired in very similar, although even more dangerous, lies, half-truths, and distortions. As Jonathan Freedland argues in his excellent recent Guardian column, the two are related: we got to this “swamp of lies and disinformation” on “the Brexit bus”.

Very often, as with Farage, the lies are peddled by the same people. Indeed there can hardly be a better than example than Farage, then as now ‘warning’ of “violence on the streets” if “concerns about immigration” are not addressed. Of course the referendum did see violence on the streets: the murder of the MP Jo Cox, shot and stabbed multiple times by a far-right white supremacist, ten years ago almost to the day of this post. At the time, apart from dismissing it as the work of a disturbed individual, with no political significance, Farage worried that it might damage the “momentum” of the campaign to leave the EU and, as ever, portrayed himself as the victim.

The broken cordon sanitaire

It’s this, more than anything else, which explains why the weariness that I, and perhaps others, feel, is close to despair. A generation ago, Enoch Powell occupied a similar political space to that of Farage and even now, no doubt, many of Farage’s supporters consider, in the infamous phrase, that ‘Enoch was right’, referring to his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. That speech saw Powell ejected from the Conservative shadow cabinet but it shouldn’t be forgotten that he became a popular figure amongst the public. It’s also worth recalling that he attracted support from within the traditional Labour movement, became an Ulster Unionist Party MP, and was also one of the leading opponents of membership of what was then the EEC. Nevertheless, Powell became a marginal figure within British politics. There was a kind of cordon sanitaire which inoculated the mainstream from the extreme.

That cordon has now all but disappeared. Not all of that can be attributed to Brexit, but Brexit was the major breach allowing extremism, especially about immigration, to become increasingly respectable whilst stigmatizing attempts to challenge it as being elitist disdain for ‘the will of the people’ and the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the people. This isn’t just a matter of people like Farage and Lowe gaining a presence within mainstream politics, it is mainstream politicians adopting, accepting or pandering to the politics such people espouse.

Starmer has been quite robust, ever since the asylum hostel riots shortly after he first came to power, in condemning far-right violence. Yet he and his government have done nothing to counter the general proposition that immigration and asylum seekers are a ‘problem’ requiring draconian restrictions. Indeed, as regards Brexit, specifically, there can be no doubt that the main reason for the ‘red lines’ is to forestall the return of freedom of movement of people. The most charitable reading of Labour’s approach to immigration is that it is a tactic to de-fang the far right: if so, it is abundantly clear that it has failed.

That has been obvious for a while, from the symbolic violence of ‘raising the flags’ to the literal violence which reached new heights this week. The end-game for those promoting it, whether in the UK or from the US and Russia, is one all too well-known from history. It is for the violence to become so extensive, the whipped-up anger driving it so great, and the public fear it engenders so profound, that an authoritarian regime will be welcomed as the ‘only way to restore order’. Such a regime would then enact a reign of persecution of anyone deemed to be ‘foreign’ and of the ‘enemy within’ who dared to oppose it.

That outcome is by no means inevitable but, this week especially, it feels as it is becoming more likely.
 
Notes

[1] Some readers have, rightly I think, queried the assessment in my previous post that, if Burnham becomes Prime Minister, it will “almost certainly” mean the retention of the Labour red lines at the next general election. On reflection, my assertion, based on inferences from remarks he has made about Brexit generally, rather than any specific comment about the red lines, was too strong. But, given those remarks, at the very least it is fair to say that it can’t be assumed that Burnham will drop the red lines. On the same topic, Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds recently said that government may “reconsider” the red lines, by implication at, rather than before, the next election. We will see.

[2] Some of the post linked to, about the return of governmental competence, reads very badly now! But the account of the initial ‘reset’ activity remains an accurate one.

[3] On the other hand, amongst the social media posts deploring his killing by an ‘immigrant’ some denounced the ‘race treachery’ of the fact that Henry Nowak had a mixed-race nephew (I am not going to link to an example, they are all too disgusting).

[4] There was also an explicitly Brexit-related dimension in that the alleged perpetrator had arrived in Northern Ireland via Ireland. This could have happened before Brexit, of course, but it has re-opened discussion about the border by the DUP and David Frost (warning: link to X), most of it nonsensical, although there could be connections between this issue and the provisions of the Windsor Framework. I will return to this in a future post if the discussion gains traction.

[5] This is a very complicated issue and, despite some comment this week, not as straightforward as seeing the violence as solely coming from the ‘loyalist’ side. I know enough about the complexities of Northern Ireland’s politics to recognize this, but not enough to provide an analysis.

[6] I did, however, post about it at the time on another blog, and looking back I found two posts, in particular, which charted the campaign’s mendacity; one about some of the economic arguments and the other about the grotesque ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ lie.

Please also note my policy on X. Personally, I have not posted there since last December. However, unpleasant as the experience is, I do still read posts on it to try to understand what is discussed there and, on this blog, I link to X-posts when it is the only source of important statements (e.g., in the present post, by JD Vance). I don’t think it is conducive to good analysis simply to ignore such statements because of the platform where they appear, and I don’t think it is right to quote or paraphrase without providing a source. However, because I know that some people want to avoid seeing it and/or providing clicks for it, I now provide a warning whenever a link is to an X-post.

Real war and culture war

Much of the news of the last fortnight has been pushed into the background by last weekend’s US-Israel attack on Iran and the regional conflict it has engendered. Where this will end is unclear, not least since it has no coherent aims. That is mainly well beyond the scope of this blog, but there are plenty of connections with Brexit and Brexitism.

Post-Brexit geo-politics

One is just that, as with Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine, not to mention climate change and tariff wars, it is yet another example of an international crisis where the UK’s position and interests are far closer to those of countries like France and Germany, and the EU generally, than to the US. Indeed, as regards Iran, specifically, that has been obvious since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018. Now, however the conflict proceeds, it is almost inevitable that the EU and the UK will face common challenges in living with its aftermath which, if only for geographical reasons, will impinge far more on the European continent than on the US. As such, the crisis is a reminder of the fundamental strategic incongruity of Brexit.

It also, again as with other crises, provides a further illustration of the additional pressures Brexit places on the UK in its attempt to navigate around Trump’s capriciousness, spite, and bullying. As Guardian columnist Rafael Behr argued, there are no good options for Keir Starmer in this situation. Nor would there be for any other Prime Minister. I don’t, however, entirely agree with Behr that Starmer’s response pleases nobody. Personally, I think he has handled it as well as anyone could and many commentators, including Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (£), have said something similar.

Rather, the point is that Starmer is now so beleaguered that his many opponents are unwilling to give him any credit at all, or even to acknowledge that there are any difficulties or dilemmas for the UK. And even amongst those who are willing to acknowledge those difficulties, his position means he has very little goodwill or political capital to draw upon. Thus there are at least hints in the opinion polls so far that the public support the way the war is being handled whilst thinking that Starmer is handling it badly.

The Brexit imprint

The particular way that the domestic discussion has played out so far also bears the imprint of Brexit and Brexitism. There are many nuances to this, but in very broad terms public opinion polls show that the supporters of Reform and the Conservatives are considerably more likely to favour allowing the US to use UK bases to attack Iran than those of Labour, the Greens and the LibDems. Certainly the leaders of the former two parties castigated Starmer for not initially agreeing to such usage, as well as for being supposedly deficient, or at least dilatory, in protecting British military installations and assets in the conflict region.

Amongst the nuances, one of the more interesting is that, unlike Farage and Reform, Rupert Lowe and his new Restore Britain party are opposed to all UK involvement in the conflict (warning: links to the X cesspit where Lowe has found his natural home). This reflects a longstanding tension within the nationalist right between jingoistic bellicosity and isolationism, and in the past Farage, too, has been sceptical about UK military interventionism. Now this has become a new front in the growing schism, discussed in my previous post, between Reform and the even more extreme, or at least more openly extreme, far-right groups such as Lowe’s.

Of course, exactly the same tension exists in the US right, with Trump and the MAGA movement having in the past abjured such entanglements, especially in the Middle East. Trump’s new-found willingness for military adventurism has many explanations, including, I suspect, egotistical pleasure. But perhaps the key point is that what he and MAGA most objected to was the doctrine of ‘liberal interventionism’, which even in its least defensible manifestations had, or at least attempted to create, the façade of moral justification.

Trump’s doctrine, chillingly articulated by Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth this week, is an almost Nietzschean paean to a “warrior ethos” which disdains not just any residue of concern for international law but even “stupid rules of engagement”. As with any bully, the ultimate justification is the simple one: ‘because I can’. No doubt this has its own appeal to Farage, the one-time Flashman of Dulwich College, even were he not minded to support any initiative of Mr. Brexit, his hero in the White House, regardless of its merits. That support does not, of course, lead him to think Britain should accept any of the refugees the conflict will inevitably create and on this, at least, he and Lowe are agreed.

The intensifying culture war 

There is also a more direct connection between Brexitism and the political reaction to the Iran crisis, articulated most clearly, and most disgracefully, by Kemi Badenoch when she alleged that Starmer’s initial decision to deny the US use of UK airbases was due to his desire to pander to Muslim voters. She explicitly spliced this together with the outcome of the Gorton and Denton by-election (discussed in more detail below) adding to what has been a deeply unpleasant upsurge in the culture war demonization of British Muslims.

Yet, as is shown not just by Lowe’s anti-war stance but that of some Tory MPs, including the most senior and one of the most right-wing of them, Sir Edward Leigh, as well as many MPs of all parties, opposition to or concern about UK involvement spans all political positions, ethnicities and faiths (even assuming, which is surely unwarranted, that ‘Muslims’ en masse have a particular view of it). For that matter, the majority of the general public (excluding ‘don’t knows’) are opposed to UK airbases being used by the US [1], something which only the exceptionally dull-minded need to be told does not imply support for Iran’s despicable theocratic regime. Why, then, ascribe Starmer’s decision to Muslims? And if this was its reason, then how does Badenoch explain the subsequent decision to allow the use of bases for ‘defensive’ operations?

Inevitably, Badenoch’s accusation was subsequently echoed by Trump, allowing him to return to his habitual attacks on Britain’s supposed ‘unrecognizability’ (which is code for Muslim immigration) and on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as to repeat his criticism of Starmer’s lack of support for the war against Iran. This in turn allowed Badenoch, Farage, and others to criticize Starmer for damaging UK-US relations, and so the whole crazy, cross-pollinating stupidity rolls on and on. It is a grim irony that the Brexiters, who set such store by sovereignty, demand total fealty to a foreign president. And a grim reminder of their bogus patriotism that they encourage and amplify the verbal attacks of that president upon their own country. 

Badenoch’s accusation was also a manifestation of an explosion of quite vile, as well as dishonest, claims on social media that the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer, had joined Muslims for a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and another making the same claim about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud. These and similar claims were based on photographs that were self-evidently taken well before Khamanei was killed and had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his death. Yet they were circulated by numerous high-profile right-wing figures, as influential as they are unhinged, ranging from Allison Pearson to John Cleese, and shared thousands, if not millions, of times. (I’m not going to link to this sewage, so readers will have to take my word for it.)

In this way, all of the now familiar skein of interconnections between the US and UK populist right, Brexiters, Brexitists, and the post-Brexit rise of ethnonationalism have been in evidence in the domestic response to the Iran crisis [2]. No doubt that would have been true in any event, but, as Badenoch’s intervention illustrates, it took on a particular hue because of the previous week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton.

The Gorton and Denton result

The first thing to say about that is that Reform, and their peculiar and obnoxious candidate Matt Goodwin, failed to win. Of course, it would have been remarkable had they done so, as this was not an obvious target seat for them, but it bears saying because there had been a sense, purveyed not just by the party but the drama-hungry media, that victory was within grasp. And that did not seem impossible given opinion polls showing an almost even three-way split in support between Reform, Greens, and Labour. Had it gone Reform’s way, that would undoubtedly have generated a rash of commentary about Reform being on an unstoppable journey to government.

So it matters that Reform failed, and failed by a significant margin. It also matters that, as happened at Caerphilly, when there was a route to defeat Reform and to reject Labour, voters took it. Thus in Gorton and Denton the Green vote (presumably) comprised those who straightforwardly support the Greens, those who voted Green to stop Reform, and those who voted Green as a rejection of Labour. By the day of the election, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were just slightly more likely to defeat Reform than Labour, making the choice for those to whom this was the top priority just slightly easier. Whether, had that not been the case, anti-Reform voters would have been willing to vote Labour is unknowable, but is something which will have an important bearing on the next general election.

Family voting?

What we can be sure of is that, had Reform won, by even a handful of votes, they would have hailed it as a democratic triumph in which the ‘silent majority’ of ‘ordinary, decent people’ had decisively spoken. As it was, they latched on to reports made by an organization called ‘Democracy Volunteers’, that there had been unusual volumes of ‘family voting’. This term, which refers to a practice outlawed by the 2023 Secret Ballots Act, seemed to be code for the claim that Muslim men had accompanied their female relatives into the polling booths and coerced them into voting for – presumably – the Greens. (Though, who knows, perhaps the implication was that white Christian Conservative patriarchs were reasserting ‘traditional family values’ by forcing their womenfolk to vote for Goodwin.)

There was a certain amount of social media ribaldry about the idea that the socially liberal female candidate of a party led by a gay Jewish man might have been the candidate of choice amongst traditionalist Muslim men. But, whilst that isn’t an unreasonable observation to make, it perhaps misses the nature of the accusation being made, which was two-fold: that the Green Party had concealed its social liberalism from some Muslim voters in election leaflets written in Urdu, and that the appeal it had for such voters was in its critique of Israel and support for Palestinians.

However, equally, even if these accusations were true, those making them never explained what is so wrong with emphasizing the party’s positions on these issues to voters who might support them, regardless of its position on other issues. All (successful) political parties build coalitions of voters with disparate, and often contradictory, priorities. We might also recall how, during the referendum, the Leave campaign deliberately and skillfully targeted different voter groups, including different ethnic groups, with messages tailored to their perceived concerns.

Whether or not the charge of ‘family voting’ was true, which is contested and is (rightly) under investigation, and despite that fact that, even if true, it is arithmetically implausible to think it could have been a clinching factor given the size of the Green majority, it quickly became linked to the claim that the Greens had won on the basis of “sectarianism”. This again seemed to be code for making an appeal to Muslims, or perhaps just anyone with dark skin. From this exploded a whole series of accusations about rigged postal voting and “foreign-born voters” having “stolen” the election.

These were not just social media talking points but, for example, were splashed on the front page of the Mail. This culminated in Farage announcing that Reform’s policy is now that foreigners will be banned from voting in elections, a reference to the longstanding right of nationals from qualifying Commonwealth countries, lawfully resident in the UK, to vote. One might now question the diligence with which Goodwin, if elected, would have worked for all his constituents and, for that matter, that of the existing Reform MPs in this respect.

Hypocrisy and ethno-nationalist sectarianism

It would be quite some task to unpick all the layers of hypocrisy in all this, so I’ll just make a few points. One is that Farage has constantly made complaints about electoral fraud, going back to at least 2014 which have rarely, if ever, been proven. But of course for operators like Farage that doesn’t matter: the accusation lodges in the public mind whereas the subsequent investigation showing it to be false is barely noticed. Another is to recall his own sanctimonious finger-wagging at ‘remainers’, when he insisted that "for a civilised democracy to work you need the losers' consent”. A third is how he, and other Brexiters, sought to galvanize Commonwealth immigrant voters to support Brexit. Indeed, many Brexiters argued that EU Freedom of Movement was effectively racist in discriminating against Commonwealth, especially South Asian, immigration.

Hypocrisy aside, these highly racialized allegations of electoral fraud have a particular salience because of the recent surge of ethno-nationalism, which now calls into question whether British nationals are ‘really’ British and/or English if they, or perhaps even their parents and grandparents, were not born here, at least if they are not white. It is actually this, if anything, which deserves the label of ‘sectarianism’ and, moreover, rather than sectarianism explaining the Green’s victory, it was the sectarianism of pitching almost entirely to ‘white working class’ voters which explains Reform’s failure to win.

What Reform’s reaction to this failure shows is that it will not be enough to defeat them (and similar parties) at the ballot box in order to expunge their influence. Indeed, there seems every prospect, and some indication, that if Reform fail to win the next general election then, Trump-like, they will cry foul. It may even be that, just as it often seemed as if the Brexiters would have preferred to have lost the referendum, the Brexitists would prefer to lose the next election, but to destabilize the country even further by positioning the victors as illegitimate and the entire democratic system as corrupted.

Questions for Labour

Against this background, the Gorton and Denton result also posed some serious questions for the Labour Party. At one level, these can be thought about in terms of electoral strategy and, as such, their answer is pretty obvious and has been very widely identified. That answer can be expressed in various ways, but was summed up by Sadiq Khan’s argument that Labour have to “stop channelling Reform and unite with progressives”. In effect, this is “the real leadership crisis” facing Keir Starmer which I discussed in my previous post.

However, the issues go much deeper than Starmer and much longer ago, after the 2021 Hartlepool by election, I set out some of these. Not all of that post has stood the test of time [3], but the central point holds: in very brief, the need to calibrate to representing Labour’s actual (potential) electoral coalition rather than that which historically existed. In that post, and elsewhere (£), I pointed out that part of the barrier to this is one of political psychology, whereby the party is heavily invested in the idea that male manual workers in manufacturing industry are the template for working-class authenticity. Since then, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is actually a manifestation of precisely the same nostalgia which is now so evident as a driver for the political right and Brexitism.

Labour’s terrible answers

As mentioned in my most recent post, there seemed to be a possibility that the ‘defenestration’ of Morgan McSweeney might mark an end to this kind of ‘Blue Labourism’ (though its grip on Labour goes deeper than McSweeney or his mentor Maurice Glasman). I finished that post by saying it was doubtful whether Starmer could rise to the challenge. There is now really no longer any room for doubt.

Starmer responded to the Greens’ by-election victory by making precisely the same accusation of “sectarianism” that Farage had levelled and, by linking this to the endorsement given to the Greens by the odious George Galloway, implicitly mirrored Reform’s claims about Islamification having played a decisive role. It was repellent in itself and, like so much else that Starmer does, politically maladroit, not least in ignoring what no doubt will have been the agonizing choice for some habitual Labour voters to support the Greens as the best chance of defeating Reform. That, as with his infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech, he later distanced himself from what he has said only underscores the maladroitness

At the same time, Shabana Mahmood announced that she intends to press ahead with her hard-line anti-immigration reforms. These include, most shamefully, retrospectively increasing the amount of time before existing immigrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and making asylum awards temporary. Again, this is politically maladroit, just at the basic level of garnering electoral support: it won’t satisfy those minded to vote Reform and it will repel those minded to desert Labour to vote Green etc. And if, as may well happen, internal Labour opposition leads to it being abandoned then it will be chalked up not as a return to principle but yet another U-turn.  

It is also maladroit in a more general sense. Labour’s most compelling pitch at the last election was that it would offer competence, but this policy is woefully incompetent in the context of now rapidly declining immigration and the economic need for more, and not less, immigration. It thus directly contradicts the government’s central policy of boosting economic growth as well as exacerbating its fiscal constraints.  It is even incompetent in terms of any policy aim of integration, since making it harder to qualify for permanent residence makes it less likely that immigrants will integrate.

The competence issue matters because what is at stake here is not, as many commentators claim and, no doubt, some political activists and voters hope, that Labour need to respond to the by-election defeat with a ‘lurch to the left’. Setting an immigration policy which is fair, rational, and consonant with economic and demographic needs is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Operating an efficient and humane asylum process is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. Making a clear distinction between immigration and asylum policies is not, in itself, ‘left-wing’. To think otherwise is to cede the idea that these are somehow ‘extreme’ propositions and that the policies of virtually zero immigration, mass deportation, and the near-total rejection of asylum seekers advocated by Reform and others are the ‘norm’ or ‘moderate’.

Yet this is what the Labour government has accepted, and it is the most glaring way in which it has accepted Brexitism. Of course it is also this which has always lain at the heart of the timidity of the Brexit ‘reset’ with the EU, a reset which even in its own limited terms was denounced this week (£) by the Commons foreign affairs committee as “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If there was not so much other news, I would have more to say about that, including about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ claim that she wants to go further in breaking down trade barriers with the EU. Since there is no evidence, and surely no possibility, that this presages a break with Labour’s ‘red lines’, for now all that needs to be said is that the dishonesty and delusions of Brexit and Brexitism continue unabated.

Small comforts

It’s hard to feel anything other than pessimism at the moment. However this war develops, as always with war it will be ordinary, blameless people who simply want to lead ordinary, peaceful lives who suffer most. Something similar could be said of those being relentlessly attacked in the domestic culture wars.

There is only a small, though not entirely negligible, comfort in being spared the spectacle of Matt Goodwin pontificating on these matters in the House of Commons. But perhaps a slightly greater one in what that may betoken about the British electorate.

 

Notes

[1] The way this question was asked in the survey linked to does not really disclose what the public think about the subtle but important distinction between the use of UK bases for the attack on Iran (which the government did not grant) and their use to launch defensive operations against Iranian counter-attacks which may imperil British subjects and assets (which the government approved). If it did, I suspect that the public would support the government’s decisions in both respects. That seems to be borne out by other survey data about what the UK’s military response to the war should be.

[2] There’s a whole post that could be written about that fact that somewhere in that skein is Dubai. Lauded by Richard Tice as an exemplar of safety, it has become a magnet for right-wing British immigrants expats, most prominently Tice’s partner, the reliably graceless ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott (£). There, such proud patriots gloat, one can escape the roving gangs, ‘two-tier’ justice, and Orwellian suppressions of the right to incite murder – not to mention, of course, the taxes – of ‘Broken Britain’. As a view of what some have called the “gangsters’ paradise” of Dubai, it was always as hopelessly one-sided as the depiction of Britain. Now, with a certain piquancy (£), our intrepid correspondent reports that “expats brace of what tomorrow may bring” (£) as the British State organizes a rather different repatriation to that envisaged by some of her co-ideologues. Equally piquant is the news (£) of those desperately trying to get back to Dubai so as to avoid falling foul of rules to qualify for tax residency.

[3] The most egregious failing is that I assumed, not unreasonably, but as it has out turned mistakenly, that Boris Johnson had re-made the Conservatives as an electorally successful populist party and seen off the challenge of Farage.

Brexit reminders

Compared with a few years ago, Brexit no longer dominates the headlines, not least because those who once so loudly advocated it are now too embarrassed to mention it. However, it lies behind many of the news stories, like – take your pick of metaphors – dry rot in the basement, a predator lurking in the bushes, or a chronic, debilitating illness.

In the last fortnight, major examples include the latest report of the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, the sentencing of a former Reform official and UKIP/ Brexit Party MEP for taking Russian bribes, and, of course, the budget, as well as the latest net migration figures.

Brexit and Covid

The publication of the second module of the Hallett Inquiry, which focusses on decision-making and political governance, reveals a woeful picture. As has been widely reported it shows that a “toxic and chaotic” culture pervaded the Johnson-Cummings government. Whilst this had significant implications for the handling of the pandemic, which of course is the focus of the report, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it also has implications for Brexit.

I must admit that I haven’t read the full report, which runs to 800 pages, so I’m not sure what, if anything, it says about Brexit (the summary document makes no mention of it at all). However, as I wrote in some detail at the time, the evidence heard by the Inquiry showed several significant connections. That post also contains links to several posts I wrote during the pandemic which identified some of those connections and I won’t repeat all the points I’ve made previously but, in brief, they include:

·         The damage Brexit had done to the machinery and processes of government, and especially to the civil service;

·         The extent to which Brexit was prioritized over Covid in the early days of the pandemic;

·         The refusal to extend the Transition Period, despite the impact of Covid throughout almost its entirety, with consequences both for the negotiations and the businesses which had to adapt, virtually overnight, to the eventual agreement;

·         The ideational and institutional connections between Brexit and the response to Covid;

·         The simplism and nostalgia evident in both Brexit and the pandemic.

At the most basic level, if, as the Inquiry shows, the government was “toxic and chaotic” in its handling of Covid, then it would be absurd to imagine that it was not equally so in its handling of Brexit. The same people, at the same time, could hardly have been governing in exemplary fashion in one domain whilst being so incompetent in the other. Moreover, the Johnson-Cummings government was itself a legacy of Brexit and, ultimately, of the Vote Leave campaign. In that sense, having so shambolic an administration when Covid struck was itself one of the adverse consequences of Brexit.

I don’t think the publication of the latest Hallett Report tells us anything new about this since it was, indeed, clear from the evidence the Inquiry heard, and from what could be surmised before. However, it is a moment worth recording that it is now a matter of official record just how incompetent that ‘get Brexit done’ government was. What is new, although entirely unsurprising, is the reaction it has provoked from Johnson and Cummings in particular, but also from the serried ranks for their supporters who, of course, are almost invariably Brexiters.

Thus, referring to Hallett as “some judge”, Johnson, who set up the Inquiry and set its terms of reference in the first place, dismissed the report (£) as “hopelessly incoherent” and “totally muddled”. Cummings, predictably, was even more vitriolic, accusing Hallett and the Inquiry’s lead lawyer of spreading lies and calling for both to “be stripped of all official jobs, all gongs, and legally barred from working in the law for the rest of their lives”. And David Frost called it a “disgrace”, complaining, amongst other things, that it “scoffs at the alternative strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration”, as if it had not been endlessly debunked, including by the government’s own Chief Medical Officer (similar complaints have been spewed out across the scientifically-illiterate ‘libertarian’ right).

Anyone with an ounce of self-awareness or humility might show just an iota of contrition, perhaps even some shame, when shown their failings in such forensic detail. But Johnson and Cummings, the one girdled by his sense of entitlement, the other by his misplaced intellectual vanity, are incapable of humility or shame. As for Frost, he shows the self-awareness of a toilet seat. One might as well expect Liz Truss to refrain from pontificating about “sensible economic policy”. 

But the more important point is not their all-too-obvious personal inadequacies, it is that these mesh seamlessly with the doctrinaire refusal to accept responsibility which permeates their entire world-view. As with Nigel Farage, nothing is ever their fault. Thus, if there were ever to be a public inquiry into Brexit, it can be said, not speculatively but with certainty, that Johnson, Cummings, Frost, Farage, and all those who had leading roles within it, would never, ever accept the truth of the damage they did.

This matters, even though such a public inquiry is not in prospect, because it helps to explain why Brexitism persists in British politics, and why, as regards Brexit specifically, Britain is stuck in an impasse. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be so. There’s really no longer any room for doubt about the damage Brexit has done, most obviously economically, and no serious analyst claims otherwise. And public opinion has firmly turned against it. This leads some to suggest that it should be (relatively) easy to at least begin the process of ‘rejoining’. But there is no realistic route to that whilst a powerful phalanx of politicians and, perhaps as important, media owners and commentators remain as an obdurate, shameless, unrepentant blockage to it.

Brexit and Russia

There is also little sign of shame or penitence within Reform over the Gill scandal. As I mentioned in a recent post, in September Nathan Gill (formerly Reform’s leader in a Wales, UKIP’s leader in Wales, and a UKIP and Brexit Part MEP) pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery from pro-Russian sources to act in their interests whilst he was serving as an MEP. Now, he has been sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison for these offences.

The length of that sentence serves to underscore just how serious his crimes were. This was not some minor lobbying scandal, but sustained corruption by an elected representative in the service, in effect, of a foreign, and none-too-friendly, power. After all, the offences for which he has been sentenced began in December 2018 and ran through to July 2019, whilst in March 2018 Russian agents committed the Novichok attacks in Salisbury. At all events, the police investigation of Gill was undertaken by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror team because, according to Commander Dominic Murphy, he had done “potential damage to national security”. 

As I noted in that earlier post, Farage and other Reform leaders have been keen to distance themselves from Gill, and this week Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, tried to dismiss Gill and his offences as “ancient history”. It won’t wash, not least as it was really not so long ago that he held a senior position in Reform. The full details of Gill’s offences are complex, but their timeline, and how they sit within the wider context of the Reform Party and its predecessors, as well as events in Russia and Ukraine, is painstakingly set out by The Nerve, a new independent media outlet [1]. As that report makes clear, there is no suggestion that Farage or other MEPs of his various parties took bribes, but some of those MEPs did say similar things to those which Gill was paid to say. My point is not that this implies any corruption on their part but that Gill was not saying things that ran contrary to views that were shared by his colleagues.

The police are now investigating other British former MEPs, who have (rightly) not been named, nor have the parties they represented, but, whilst these investigations may come to nothing, the political questions for Reform remain. Speaking to Sky News, Keir Starmer said that Farage “needs to launch an investigation into his party to understand how that [Gill’s offences] happened” and that this investigation should look into “what other links are there between Reform and Russia”. LibDem leader Ed Davey has been more forthright:

“A traitor was at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary. Nigel Farage and his party are a danger to national security. Nigel Farage himself was previously paid to be on Putin's TV channel, Russia Today, and said he was the world leader he admires the most. We must all ask – where do his loyalties really lie? We need a full investigation into Russian interference in our politics.”

At one level, all this is a reminder of the still unresolved question of what role Russia played in the 2016 Referendum – a question unresolved primarily because, according to the 2020 ‘Russia report’ by the Intelligence and Security Committee, the government did not investigate it. That report does show, though, that there was Russian interference in both the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2019 General Election, and, in general terms, that “the UK is clearly a target for Russian disinformation”. And, whatever Moscow’s role in the 2016 referendum, it has always been obvious that, at the very least, Brexit was advantageous to Russian interests in terms of destabilizing both the UK and the EU: “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it.

However, it is not necessary to disinter the referendum result to see the salience of Gill’s crimes for the politics of post-Brexit Britain. Except to those on the far-right and far-left of politics, the threat to the UK from Russia is clear and, if anything, escalating, as underlined by several incidents just in the last fortnight, including the incursion of the spy ship Yantar, which used lasers to disrupt the RAF planes tracking its movements, the interception of two Russian vessels in the Channel, and the discovery of a Russian submarine-spying device off the Welsh coast. And these events are just one manifestation of a much wider programme of physical and cyber-incursions amounting to what the former Head of MI5, the former Head of NATO, and the former Head of the Navy and Security Minister all regard an undeclared war.

The wider context of this, of course, is Ukraine, and the possibility that it will be forced into a humiliating ‘peace’ by Trump. With that, Putin would free up the resources, and feel emboldened, to step up the pressure against Europe - which very much includes the UK for, as the Brexiters used to remind us, ‘we are leaving the EU, we’re not leaving Europe’. This was perhaps the only true thing they ever said, and, as is now all too plain to see, Brexit has created an artificial and dangerous separation of the UK from its continent, made all the more dangerous because of Trump and what Trump means for NATO. As I’ve discussed in in the past, there is an obvious and disturbing axis between Putin, Trump, and Brexitism.

It is this context which makes the entire question of Farage’s foreign policy sympathies and allegiances, both as regards Putin and Trump, and his antipathies, as regards the EU, so important. He is, after all, presenting himself as the next Prime Minister and, as we are constantly reminded, his party is leading in the opinion polls. So these sympathies and allegiances, and those of all those within his party, as Gill recently was, are an absolutely legitimate matter for the most intense scrutiny, despite Reform’s attempts to shout down such scrutiny or to depict Gill as a ‘bad apple’ whose behaviour had nothing to do with the party.

Farage has said he will not investigate any Russian links within his party and dismissed the Gill case as “a minor embarrassment”. But no other British politician has been convicted of such offences in modern times (there have been some imprisonments for false accounting over expenses, but that isn’t remotely the same). Perhaps the central claim made by Brexiters was that leaving the EU would mean that voters would be free to hire and fire those who made the laws that governed them. To do that, we need to know the allegiances of those who would make our laws.

Brexit and the Budget

If the run-up to this week’s budget is anything to go by, then the allegiance of our current governing lawmakers is to being as politically maladroit as possible. I certainly can’t remember anything like it. Budget ‘purdah’ has been more honoured in the breach than the observance for some time but, even leaving aside the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) inadvertent revelation of its measures a few minutes before the Chancellor’s speech, the last few months of semi-statement have gone well beyond the now-familiar leaks and hints.

During that apparently almost interminable period, it has been notable that both Rachel Reeves and other government ministers have been increasingly open in identifying Brexit as a cause of Britain’s economic woes. This is a marked change to the far more muted references to it at the time of last year’s budget. But it is still being framed as a problem in the way Brexit was done rather than one of Brexit itself. As Rafael Behr puts it, “the problem is couched as negligent negotiation, not strategic miscalculation”.

That framing was evident in Reeves’ budget speech, which rather shamelessly implied that a new trade deal had been struck with the EU (presumably referring to the ‘reset’, the terms of which remain under negotiation). She also implied an endorsement of the Brexiters’ claim that it is of benefit to have an independent trade policy by speaking referring to deals with the US (which, unless I’ve missed something, has still only been partially implemented, and is in any case only a partial mitigation of Trump’s new tariffs, not a Free Trade Agreement) and with India (which has an estimated value of 0.13% of GDP after 15 years).

It certainly can’t be claimed that any trade policy independence Brexit has brought comes close to compensating for the fact that, as Reeves mentioned, Brexit continues to be identified by the OBR as a drag on UK productivity. Indeed, the OBR itself refers to our great act of national liberation as being one of the “successive shocks” that are responsible for the country’s lack of productivity growth. This latest report also renews the OBR’s “assessment that Brexit will reduce the level of UK productivity by around 4 per cent after 15 years” compared with what it would otherwise have been [2]. As always, it’s worth remembering that this figure (which also implies, as widely quoted, that GDP will be 4% less than otherwise) has a cumulative effect. That is, for each of the 15 years productivity will be lower than it would have been by some figure, reaching 4% in the fifteenth year.

It's true that the OBR did not change its assessment of the Brexit damage for the worse (as had been rumoured prior to the budget, although it did downgrade its overall productivity growth assessment), but the fact that it remains unchanged is significant. It suggests that even as it moves from being entirely a forecast of damage that will be done to being, in part, an estimate of damage that has been done, that forecast seems to the OBR to be holding true. If so, that is not a surprise, as most analysts expect the bulk of the damage will have occurred early in the 15-year period.

Indeed, as summarized in my last post, a recent report from the National Bureau for Economic Research provides a headline estimate suggesting that by 2025 (i.e. already), UK GDP is 6%-8% less than it would otherwise have been. In the run-up to the budget, the LibDem Party requested the House of Commons Library to provide an analysis the implications of that estimate, including for tax revenues. The results were that it would mean that, had it not been for Brexit, in 2024-25 tax revenues would have been between £65 billion and £90 billion higher than they actually were.

If the upper figure were correct, it would be equivalent to the entirety of government spending in that year on education (£89.2 billion). But suppose the true figure were only half of the upper estimate, that would still more than cover the entire defence budget (£37.5 billion). Now suppose the true figure were only a quarter of the lower estimate: then, it would cover the entire 2024-25 budget for both day-to-day spending and capital investment for prisons, the probation service and the criminal justice system (£14.7 billion).

Brexit and immigration

All that is another reminder of the high price we are paying for the stupidity of Brexit, to which should be added the negative impact on tax revenues which can be expected as a result of the large fall in net migration announced yesterday. That announcement, in itself, means that the OBR’s budget forecasts for growth and tax revenue, published just the day before, are likely to be over-optimistic, since it had assumed a less steep fall.

Calculating the impact on tax revenues of falling net migration is extremely complex, because it depends on a large number of variables, but last year the OBR estimated that a fall of 100,000 would increase the deficit by £7 billion. Given the complexity, I’m not sure whether it would be justified to extrapolate from that to say that yesterday’s fall of almost 450,000 in the last 12 months might represent something in the order of a £30 billion reduction in tax revenue, but the impact will certainly be considerable and negative.

And yet, responding to these latest net migration figures, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government would be “going further” to clamp down on immigration, because of the “immense pressure” it supposedly puts on local communities, whilst Keir Starmer said the figures were (only) “a step in the right direction”. Presumably, Mahmood and Starmer believe they will get some political credit for responding to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public, whatever the economic (and human) cost. If so, they are likely to be disappointed: this latest fall continues from that of last year yet, in post-Brexit Britain’s immigration panic, the majority of the public believe that net migration rose in that year, even as they bemoan the tax rises in this year’s budget.

As the broadcaster and author James O’Brien put it when discussing this issue, “we have become a ludicrous country”. And Brexit, which, remember, was supposed to ‘solve’ these ‘legitimate concerns’, has made us even more ludicrous.

Still on the Brexit rack

Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a post discussing the chaotic mess we were in (of which there is plenty more in the posts from that time). Amidst Covid, with the transition period almost over, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement had yet to be finalised and there was every possibility there would be no agreement at all. There’s much in that post which is no longer of great relevance, but it does capture the disarray of the time, which the Hallett report reminds us of. For example, I referred to a leaked letter from the Road Haulage Association, describing the process of working with the government on border issues as “a complete shambles”.

There are other things in that post which are still very much relevant, ranging from the narrowly technical (e.g. my observation that “there will be a myriad of things left in the air even if there is a deal [such as] carbon trading”) to the broadly political (e.g. Keir Starmer’s “near silence” about Brexit and the rumours – which turned out to be true – that he would want Labour MPs to vote for any deal which might be done). At all events, I finished the post by saying:

“Perhaps we need to look instead to Classical mythology to describe our situation, maybe to Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up the hill or, as seems more appropriate to the painfulness of it all, poor old Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle day after day. Prometheus of course was being punished for having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Sisyphus was an all-round bad egg (murdering, cheating, and generally getting above himself). It is not clear what crime we have committed to have to endure the endless torture of Brexit.” 

The current news is a reminder that these words still apply.

 

Notes

[1] There are so many such outlets now that it is always important to look carefully at their credibility, but The Nerve certainly has a good pedigree, having been created by a collective of five former Guardian and Observer journalists. In any case, as regards the report referred to, it collates verifiable information from within the public domain.

[2] For a detailed discussion of the OBR estimate, and assessments of the costs of Brexit generally, see John Springford’s June 2025 report for the Constitution Society/ Federal Trust.