In the ‘new global divide’, the last fortnight has not been a happy one for what can variously be called the anti-liberal, anti-rules, populist, authoritarian or radical right side of that divide. The decisive defeat of its figurehead, Victor Orban, in the Hungarian election last weekend is having ripple effects across the world. Meanwhile Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged presidency has become ever-more bogged down in the still unfolding consequences of his spectacularly ill-judged attack on Iran. Yet whilst the world continues to re-calibrate, post-Brexit Britain remains largely stuck in the same old debates.
The hope and the warning from Hungary
The significance of Orban’s defeat is undeniable - for Hungary, of course, but also for the EU and Ukraine. At the same time, it was also a defeat for his backers, Trump and Putin, and for his many friends and admirers in the ironically global network of populist nationalists, not least Nigel Farage. But Orban’s importance went well beyond these high-level connections. His ideology and, equally important, his money made Hungary a crucial node within that global network, insinuating his influence into every dank crevice of the radical right, perhaps especially those where ethno-nationalism and ‘cultural Christianity’ are to be found lurking.
Thus, as regards the UK, not just Farage but many of the more minor figures who crop up recurrently in this blog have connections of one sort or another with Orban. These include Matthew Goodwin and Frank Furedi (both mentioned, for example, in a post last month), many of those in the overlapping ‘History Reclaimed’, ‘Brains for Brexit’ and ‘Briefings for Britain’ activist groups (discussed, for example, in a post last November), and many of those in the ‘National Conservative’ movement (discussed, for example, in a post in 2023). The latter movement is notable for having enfolded numerous politicians associated with both Tory and Reform parties and many of the ‘intellectuals’ of Brexitism including James Orr, Reform’s recently appointed Head of Policy.
For many of these people Orban’s Hungary became not just a source of funding but an inspiring model. That is worth reflecting upon since, were there ever to be a Reform government, its template would be the authoritarianism and grotesque corruption of the Orban regime [1]. For whilst the end of that regime is certainly a defeat for its admirers, denting their confidence of being in the vanguard of an unstoppable arc of history, it would be quite wrong to imagine it will inspire any change of heart or mind amongst them. And whilst there is inspiration in seeing the Hungarian people defy domestic intimidation and external pressure by voting in droves to throw Orban out, the more important message is of the danger of getting into the situation of that being necessary. After all, not only has Hungary endured sixteen years of misrule but it will also be a long and complex task to undo the damage caused by those years.
Cautious praise for Starmer
Damaging as Orban has been to Hungary and malign as his influence has been upon the wider world, that is nothing compared with the damage being caused by Trump and his administration. Like a great many people, I was much impressed by Mark Carney’s Davos speech earlier this year, precisely because of its crisp articulation of the new global divide and how to respond to it. In brief, what quickly became called the ‘Carney Doctrine’ was a call for “middle powers” to operate and co-operate on the basis of “values-based realism” so as, at least by implication, to navigate around the increasing unpredictability and hostility of the United States.
The immediate context of that speech was the ‘Greenland crisis’ created by Trump’s unprecedented threat to take, possibly by force, the territory of another NATO member. That this seems longer ago than the three months which have actually passed only serves to underscore the validity of Carney’s analysis. Since then, of course, there has been the chaos and devastation caused by Trump’s attack on Iran, including his chilling threat to destroy its “whole civilization” and the now growing rift between the US and China over the US ‘counter-blockade’ of the Strait of Hormuz.
There are several signs that the British government is enacting something like the Carney Doctrine, some of which I outlined in a post in February. Since then, the Iran war has provided further examples of that, most obviously the decision not to join in with it and, most recently, the decision not to participate in the ‘counter-blockade’. For all the many legitimate criticisms of Keir Starmer, he has, as the commentator David Aaronovitch convincingly argues, “got the big one right”.
Along with that, there has been a notable hardening in Starmer’s approach to relations with the US more generally. This hasn’t taken the form of any dramatic statement, and certainly nothing as openly insulting as what Trump has continually said about Starmer and the UK, but at least by implication something has shifted. For example, Starmer recently spoke of being “fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy, businesses' bills go up and down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world”. It is really quite telling to have bracketed Putin and Trump together, and to have denied Trump the courtesy of the title ‘President’. It is certainly difficult to imagine Starmer, or any of his predecessors, speaking of an American President in this way.
And this shift is not just about rhetoric: it is reported (£) that US officials seconded to UK government departments are increasingly being asked to leave meetings when sensitive information is discussed. This is at least conceivably a sign that the government is beginning what would be the long, slow (and expensive) process of following the recent advice of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to reduce its reliance on the US as a security and defence partner. At the very least, it is a sign of how Trump has banjaxed the UK’s trust in the US as, indeed, he has with almost all America’s major allies (£).
Starmer’s approach to Trump and the Iran war is made politically easier because, for once, he is broadly in line with public opinion. Disapproval of the US military strikes on Iran increased as the war went on, rising to 65% (and approval falling to 16%) prior to the ceasefire (if such it be). Meanwhile, support for the government’s handling of the conflict has risen sharply, albeit only from the low base of 20% in March to 31% at the beginning of April, and albeit still lower than the 35% who think the government is handling it badly [2]. It is difficult to separate out opinion on this issue from the general unpopularity of Starmer and his government, but I think there is fair case that Labour’s policy in this area is close to public opinion or, at least, that the alternative of acting with the US would have been very substantially divergent from public opinion.
Discarding Trump, retaining hubris
The unpopularity of Trump and the war have also had the interesting effect of causing his allies and disciples in other countries to distance themselves from his increasingly deranged conduct. In the UK this has a particular significance because of Brexit, since it was central to the Brexiters’ case that the US in general, and Trump specifically, would provide a solid and supportive geo-political and economic anchor for post-Brexit Britain. That became increasingly indefensible in the face of the Trump Tariffs, the Greenland crisis, and his disparaging remarks about the British military, but has been almost entirely abandoned since the short-lived attempt to argue that the UK should have joined in the attack on Iran.
Thus, in the last few weeks (£), Kemi Badenoch, David Frost, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and other prominent Brexiters have started to criticise Trump and the Iran war. Farage’s apostasy has been particularly piquant given his previous boasts of his close friendship with ‘Mr. Brexit’ and his interest, expressed as recently as last September, in being appointed as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington. Now, he says merely that “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by”, and professes to be “shocked” by the threat to destroy Iran’s civilization. Perhaps, apart from electoral calculations, Farage also feels slighted, given the recent snub he endured when he attempted to have dinner with Trump in Florida.
However, there is absolutely no reason to think that this volte face on the pro-Brexit right betokens anything remotely like the pragmatism envisaged by the Carney Doctrine. It certainly doesn’t betoken any recognition of the folly of Brexit, in the sense of recognizing that the UK’s strategic interests align with those of the EU and would be better served by being a member of the EU. On the contrary, it betokens a continuation, even an intensification, of the familiar bellicosity, at once hubristic and self-pitying, that lay behind Brexit. For, as I pointed out in a recent post, the accent is always on national humiliation and betrayal.
So, for example, a recent Daily Mail editorial thundered/whined that:
“Even a few short years ago, the prospect of Britain appearing irrelevant on the global stage would have been unthinkable … our great nation is now little more than a bit player in the geopolitical arena. The war on Iran has put a sharp focus on Sir Keir's inglorious role in consigning Britain to the margins.”
It is an almost unbelievably foolish analysis in its assumption that Britain could, or even should, still be a global power and, certainly, an analysis which is entirely ignorant of British history since Suez, if not since 1945. And, in the process, it is redolent of all the delusions about ‘Global Britain’ that permeated the case for Brexit, both as a reason why the UK could ‘go it alone’ and a promise of the glories which would result from doing so.
Going back to the Carney Doctrine, then, such a posture entails a refusal even to accept the basic reality of ‘middle-powerdom’, since to do so would itself be a betrayal of what “our great nation” should be. From that it follows the kinds of cooperation Carney advocates are deemed shameful. Hence, the editorial asked rhetorically, “would a PM with even a smidgen of respect for either the office he holds or the nation have allowed a situation where the Navy was reduced to asking Germany for the loan of a warship?” And hence, elsewhere in the Mail, a report about the “humiliation” our “once-mighty Navy faces begging French fleet for help to patrol our OWN waters” [emphasis in original].
The Brexit blockage
It is certainly true that the erosion of UK defence capacity is a serious problem, as was forcibly spelt out this week by former NATO boss and Labour Party grandee Lord Roberston. It’s also true, by the way, that for several years now UK defence procurement has been scandalously incompetent, rendering what defence spending there has been less effective than it should have been. What is emphatically untrue is that there is anything inherently shameful in working with allied countries so as to share each other’s resources and assets.
Indeed, it is precisely the implication of the Carney Doctrine, and the lesson to be drawn from America’s now at best questionable commitment to NATO, that such cooperation intensifies. For the UK, whilst that cooperation isn’t confined to its European allies, that must principally mean cooperation with them since, as last week’s revelations about Putin’s offensive activity against underwater cables re-emphasised, Russia is the most direct threat to our national security and it is a threat we share with the rest of Europe.
It is therefore hardly surprising that there is renewed discussion of the case to create an EU army, the most recent example being a speech by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. A rather different, and perhaps more likely, scenario would be to create a European defence capability within the structures of NATO but without reliance on the US, something reported this week in the Wall Street Journal (£) to be under active discussion. Such a capability would not, in itself, be confined to EU members and it seems to be envisaged that the UK could be involved as well as other non-members like Norway and Turkey.
However, at least as reported, the discussions to date are being driven by thinking in Germany and France in particular, and it is difficult to see how such a development could be separated from EU initiatives to boost the capacity of its defence industries. More generally, it is hard to doubt that the centre of gravity of influence and decision-making of a ‘European NATO’ would be the EU simply because the bulk of the countries involved would be members of both. Almost inevitably that would fall foul of the kind of sentiments expressed in the Mail editorial and, indeed, the idea is already being reported in The Sun as “Europe’s secret plan” – not, admittedly outright Brussels-bashing, but certainly there is no suggestion in the report that this plan is something the UK is, could, or should be involved in.
At all events, the prospect of a British government making a whole-hearted commitment to this, or any other version of a regional security alliance, seems remote for so long as the belief that the UK still is, or could be, a global power in its own right remains so entrenched [3]. That belief is part of what brought us Brexit, and it continues to dog post-Brexit Britain. Equally, the Brexit pre-occupation with sovereignty intrudes not as a matter of principle (such an alliance would have no more, and no less, implication for sovereignty than NATO itself) but because of the irrational loathing of, specifically, European sovereignty-sharing.
Marmalade and markets
A clear sign of just how far the UK is from even entertaining something as profound as a Europe-wide integration of defence capabilities can be seen in the hysterical row that broke out this fortnight over – yes – marmalade. In brief, there was a sudden rash of reports that the effect of the government’s plans to align with EU food regulations as part of the (still not agreed) SPS deal would mean that marmalade would have to be called ‘citrus marmalade’. The story was not just confined to the usual tabloids but appeared on the BBC and elsewhere.
Everything about it was stupid. To take the most obvious thing, it isn’t true, because the regulation will allow jars to be marked orange marmalade (or lemon, or grapefruit etc.). For another thing, it will have little practical impact since most marmalades are already labelled in this way (follow this link for more on the whole ‘controversy’, and its relationship to Brexit). However, it would be wrong to add to the list of stupidities the criticism that the issue is a trivial one or, rather, whilst trivial in itself it illustrates two important things.
Firstly, it is actually a downstream ripple of the jingoistic rants about “our great nation” that characterise the discussions of defence, with the issue presented in the Express as an attack on “the nation’s iconic marmalade”, something which according to the BBC has “long been a quintessential British preserve”. In this way, it is an illustration of how deeply embedded this nationalistic hubris is embedded, and how readily it provokes affronted anger. Secondly, the story was presented as an example of Brussels bureaucracy getting in the way of business, and this shows that the meaning of a single market is still not understood. For the point of all these ‘trivial’ regulations is to enable business through harmonization: that is, it removes the barriers of national regulations by creating a single set of trans-national regulations. Just as there could not be an effective national market if each county had its own product regulations, so there cannot be an effective European single market without a shared set of product regulations.
The row quickly morphed into a wider one about the entirety of the dynamic alignment of SPS regulations of which the labelling of marmalade in just one example. This wider row seemed to begin with what the Guardian last weekend rather cheekily called its ‘exclusive’ story about planned government legislation to facilitate such dynamic alignment, which then got picked up by other media outlets including the BBC. Actually, far from being an ‘exclusive’, I discussed this planned legislation in my post two weeks ago and that discussion was itself based upon a report in the Financial Times (£) over a week before that!
At all events, there has been a fresh outburst of screams about ‘Brexit betrayal’ (we might wonder, and wonder at, just how many times it is possible to ‘betray’ something which has so often been betrayed), and beneath that, again, the same inability to understand the meaning of a single market. With tragic inevitability, Daniel Hannan provided one of the best examples of this, showing himself to be still unteachably ignorant about the difference between a free trade agreement and a single market, still hopelessly confused about what ‘mutual recognition’ means, and still pitifully convinced that EU “spite” is the only obstacle to his fantasises.
I’m skipping rather lightly over this as, frankly, I don’t have the strength to unpick all this junk yet again and I suspect most readers of this blog will not need me to do so (although those wanting more detail on the possibly less-well understood rabbit hole of ‘mutual recognition’ will find it in a post from February 2025).
A dangerous obsolescence
The distance between the issues discussed at the beginning of this post and those with which it has finished discloses much about the condition of post-Brexit Britain. The wider world is in a profound state of flux and crisis. Like every other country, Britain is caught up in that. Starmer, to his credit, is at least inching towards a Carney-type recalibration, although he probably lacks the vision, and certainly lacks the political capital, to do much more than that. But the dominant terms of political and media discourse are woefully inadequate for the strategic challenges it poses.
That would no doubt have been true even if Brexit had never happened. But Brexit means that those terms of discourse are inadequate in a particular way, stuck in the lexicon of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, anchored in a world which is already disappearing from view. That is depressing in itself but, given the nature of the world that is emerging, it is also deeply dangerous.
Notes
[1] For an indication of what would be in store, consider Farage’s financial interest in the cryptocurrency firm Stack BTC (led by that renowned financial mastermind Kwasi Kwarteng) in the context of his policy to deregulate cryptocurrencies and his avowedly anti-globalist, anti-elite party’s reliance upon cryptocurrency donors, most notably Thai-based, McKinsey alumnus, Cambridge graduate Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit), and Hong Kong-based, J.P. Morgan alumnus, Oxford graduate Ben Delo. Compare also with the way Trump has used his presidency to enrich himself and his family, not least through his cryptocurrency ventures. Fun fact: in March 2025, Trump granted a pardon to Ben Delo and his two co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX following their conviction for money-laundering offences.
[2] The 35% disapproval figure probably has to be treated with considerable care. It presumably includes some who, whilst agreeing with the decision not to join in war, are critical of other aspects of how the conflict is being handled (e.g. preparedness to deploy ships to protect UK bases in Cyprus), and it surely includes some who would want the UK to have distanced itself even further from the conflict than Starmer has done (e.g. by refusing any use at all of UK airbases or airspace).
[3] In this context, a re-emerging Brexit-related issue is that of the UK’s bases in Cyprus. As with the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands, the Cyprus facilities are one of the ways Britain retains the vestiges of a global role and, in both cases, their existence, use and role have been brought to prominence during the Iran crisis. Early on in the Brexit negotiations, the future of the Cyprus bases was a matter of considerable complexity and uncertainty but, in the event, proved to be less intractable than the somewhat comparable issue of Gibraltar (the agreement on which, by the way, will come into force this July). Now, partly because of the Iranian drone attacks but also in the light of the (now-suspended) Chagos deal, there are renewed calls in Cyprus for their status to be re-negotiated, and indications that the EU is supportive of those calls. Yet it seems plausible that if the UK were to commit to the development of a regional security alliance along the lines of a ‘European NATO’ these bases could become part of its pooled assets.
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Friday, 17 April 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.
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