Brexit ten years on: unsettled and unsettling

It is fitting that virtually on the day of the tenth anniversary of the referendum yet another political crisis came to a head with the resignation of Keir Starmer. Within the next couple of weeks, or at most months, we are now set to have another Prime Minister, the seventh since the Brexit vote. With that have come three general elections, not to mention a massive churn of ministerial appointments. Taken together with the administrative bandwidth absorbed by Brexit, both before and since leaving the EU, it is fair to say that the British polity has been overwhelmed over the last decade.

It would be equally fair to say that the combination of current events has overwhelmed my ability to write about them concisely, so this is another inordinately long post.

Starmer’s downfall

Brexit is not the only reason for the shortening cycle of political leadership, and the UK is not the only European country (£) to have experienced it. But, for reasons I’ve discussed previously, there are multiple and complex links, both direct and indirect, between the referendum vote and the subsequent destabilization of British politics. In that sense, our political instability is one more piece of Brexit damage to be added to the long list which has accrued over the last ten years, and perhaps the one which was least predictable.

So far as Starmer, specifically, is concerned, the reasons for his downfall are various but Brexit was certainly part of the mix. In particular, ever since the referendum the Labour Party has been haunted by the possibility that the populists are right to claim to speak for ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’, a possibility which is deeply disconcerting to a party which regards doing so as its prerogative and foundational principle. In this way, Brexit exacerbated the longstanding difficulty Labour has had in facing up to the fact that its traditional electoral base in unionized manufacturing industry has been eroding for decades and, to the extent it does face up to that, still regards that eroding demographic as the template for the ‘real working class’. In its way, it is every bit as nostalgia-driven as Brexitism.

It is this which explains Starmer’s relentless focus on the sensibilities of leave voters in Labour’s erstwhile heartlands and his near disdain for the broader ‘progressive’ coalition characterizing most of the actual and potential support for Labour. This fed through most obviously into immigration policy and, closely associated, the ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations. There was a logic to avoiding positioning Labour as a ‘rejoin’ party at the 2024 election, but Starmer went well beyond that in constantly seeking to appease Reform or Reform-curious voters’ hostility to immigration.

The result was always going to be that those voters would be unimpressed and, if anything, pandering to their ‘legitimate concerns’ made it more likely that they would support parties with more extreme ‘solutions’. Meanwhile, ‘progressive’ voters were alienated by this approach causing their support to leak away to other parties, especially the Greens.

That this is what has happened is borne out by academic research and further demonstrated by a YouGov poll this week, showing that 2024 Reform voters are most likely to feel that Labour are trying to appeal to them but least likely to say they will consider voting for Labour. The personal loathing which the public have for Starmer seems (to me, though not just to me) disproportionate, but the fact that it extends across the political spectrum to encompass both his ‘natural’ supporters and opponents is a reflection of the fundamental flaw of this approach.

All this, including of course the re-emergence of Nigel Farage from his post-referendum resignation to create the Reform party, refracts through Brexit and, along with other factors, created the context for Starmer’s demise. It meant that his party became convinced that he would fail the most basic and brutal test of a party leader: to win the next election. Worse, since the May elections, his MPs believed that he would lose it catastrophically  

Enter Burnham, stage left – or stage right?

There is much more that could to be written about all of this, but the immediate fact is that, once again, there is the instability of a change of Prime Minister, and that is not just an issue in terms of the disruption and uncertainty it entails. Prime Ministerial changes between elections also raise questions of legitimacy. Of course, everyone knows that in our political system the PM is not directly elected, and is the person who can command a majority in the House of Commons, so such changes are not constitutionally improper and have happened many times in the past. But for these changes to happen so frequently strains that constitutional convention, which in any case is strained if the incoming PM seeks to radically depart from manifesto commitments.

Already, there are contradictory reports about whether Andy Burnham has or has not ruled out an early election, and it’s worth recalling the potential traps this creates. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007, he initially refused to rule out an election and there was much speculation that he would call one. When he decided not to, he earned the nickname ‘Bottler Brown’. Conversely, when Theresa May took over from David Cameron in 2016, she was adamant there would be no election and the perceived opportunism of her sudden decision to hold one the next year was one reason for its disastrous outcome.

Regardless of whether there is an election, it is unclear at this point what Burnham’s policy agenda will be and to what extent it will differ from that of the last two years, especially as he will face many of the same constraints. His supporters’ main hope seems to be that he will change the political mood, if not the political programme, by being more communicatively and strategically adept than Keir Starmer. And it’s true that he has more ease of manner than his predecessor, although that does not place him in an especially exclusive club. It’s also true that he comfortably beat Reform in Makerfield, but it’s not clear how much can be extrapolated from the rather unique circumstances of that by-election.

For what little it’s worth, my personal view is that, probably within short order, he will become almost as unpopular as Starmer, will be as unwilling to make and stick to difficult choices, and will be seen as equally lacking in strategic coherence. The veteran political journalist Philip Stephens is of much the same opinion but, clearly, other views are available including from Ian Dunt, a commentator with whom I often agree, and I’ll be happy if I am proved wrong.

One reason for my pessimism is that so much of Burnham’s pitch, at least so far, seems to have its own version of Blue Labour nostalgia. There may be much to agree with in his analysis that “Britain has been on the wrong path for forty years” but it is hard to see how he can deliver on the promise of “re-industrialization” or whether it is a viable strategy for the British economy. And he has already indicated that, despite his previous criticism of them, he is now committed (£) to the immigration policies being pursued by Shabana Mahmood (or has he changed his mind again?), which is certainly not a viable strategy for the British economy. He has also said that he “agrees with what Farage is saying” about the need to go further in controlling immigration, and that he would make greater use of migrant detention centres. At first sight, then, his approach, at least on this key issue, looks set to replicate Starmer’s in trying to appease Reform voters whilst being careless of progressive voters.

Ten years on: what is Brexit?

Closely related to Burnham’s overall political strategy is the question of what his approach to the EU is going to be (and, more generally, his approach to foreign policy, about which he has said very little). Just before Starmer resigned, the date for the next UK-EU summit had, finally, been set for 22 July. In one scenario for how the leadership contest (or non-contest) plays out, Burnham might actually be Prime Minister by then, but in any case the President of the European Council has announced that the meeting will be postponed.

Already that is being spun by the pro-Brexit press (£) as a sign that the EU is expecting Burnham to be a “soft touch” who will make “more concessions”, which re-written in adult might mean Burnham pursuing the “more ambitious” agenda that Starmer recently promised. But the reality is that nobody knew what Starmer meant by that and, certainly, nobody knows what Burnham’s agenda will be. It seems highly unlikely he will not proceed with whatever has presumably now been agreed on SPS regulations, emissions trading, and youth mobility, but whether he might go further, and what that might consist of, is at this point opaque. It is a reminder that there is still no agreed meaning of Brexit, and ‘Burnham’s Brexit’ has yet to be defined.

The fact that UK-EU relations are still in flux and their direction uncertain, and even the framing of that by Brexiters in terms of the UK being forced into “concessions” by having a “soft” leader, is a microcosm of why the tenth anniversary of the referendum has a rather different meaning from that which features in most of the tidal wave of discussion about it. I will come back to what that meaning is but, for now, will focus on the broader discussion. Since almost every commentator has had their say (myself included, for example in Byline Times (£) and on the Oh God What Now? Podcast) it would be impossible to consider it all here, so I will provide just a very brief outline.

Analysing Brexit

Much of the discussion consists of analysis of the effects, especially the economic effects, Brexit has had, and a very good overview of these was provided by the BBC’s Economics Editor Faisal Islam. In terms of specific research studies, an excellent example is John Springford and Anton Spisak’s report for the Centre for European Reform, which is especially useful in disaggregating the (much larger) negative impact of leaving the single market from that of leaving the customs union. Also excellent is a new paper by Eleonora Alabresa and others about the variation in the regional effects of Brexit which, whilst assessing the overall negative impact at about 7-8% (which is consistent with some other studies), shows this to vary considerably by region.

These two studies can also be considered together in that the Alabresa paper shows that Northern Ireland is exceptional in having had little or no economic damage, reflecting it being effectively still part of the single market for goods. A long time ago, I wrote that Northern Ireland would provide a kind of natural experiment to understand the economic effects of Brexit (I can’t now find it to link to, and I’m sure others have made the same point). And so it has proved but, in fact, the outcome was already implied in the perhaps inadvertently revealing remark made by Michael Gove in 2020 when he said Northern Ireland would “get the best of both worlds”. Then as now that prompts the question: why not the rest of the UK?

There has also been much discussion of the domestic political effects of Brexit, some of which I’ve already touched on in this post. A particularly revealing analysis was provided by Jonathan Vincent in the Financial Times (£), which includes some illuminating infographics showing how voters’ behaviour is still significantly structured by how they voted in the referendum, underscoring the persistence of ‘remainer’ and ‘leaver’ as political identities. Meanwhile, the experiences of EU citizens living in the UK, some of the people most traumatically affected by Brexit, are recorded in the Brexit Lived Experience Archive (BLEA) created by Professor Tanja Bueltmann and publicly launched to coincide with the referendum anniversary.

Possibly the most comprehensive overall analysis, not just of the last ten years but of the future possibilities for UK-EU relations, is the report produced by multiple authors from the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) centre. UKICE, which throughout the whole process has been, and remains, the single best source of analysis of Brexit, has also produced a variety of themed reports marking the tenth anniversary, notable examples including Joël Reland’s on regulation (showing how little regulatory divergence there has been) and Jannike Wachowiak’s on how the EU has changed during the period (providing an important antidote to what has been, as so often, a largely parochial discussion).

Defending Brexit

None of these analytical reports and commentaries suggest that Brexit has been a success and, as most contributions to the anniversary discussion acknowledge, the polling evidence that a consistent and increasingly large majority of the population view it as having been a failure and a mistake is clear. But, of course, there have been numerous pro-Brexit comment pieces which continue to defend the project. They are all fairly similar in nature, since the arguments are now well-rehearsed, so I will only focus on three, but that should not be taken to imply that these pro-Brexit views are in any way rare.

Strikingly, they almost all share one common feature, which is that they are defensive. That is, they are framed as a defence against what they recognize to be the established narrative that Brexit has not been a success. That in itself is important. In January 2021, as the transition period ended, I wrote that what happened then would “shape the post-Brexit narrative”. It did, and what was established was a narrative that it had been a failure. So, whilst Brexiters do not accept this to be true, they do accept that it is the narrative. Had the battle for that narrative gone the other way, the terms of this tenth anniversary discussion would be entirely, unrecognizably, different.

As has long been the case, one of the major defences of Brexit by its advocates is that ‘it was not done properly’. Tellingly, the banner front-page headline in the Express on the day of the anniversary was a plaintive demand to “Give Us Proper Brexit”. Equally telling was a Financial Times report about how the various leading Brexiters all blame each other (as well, of course, as remainers) for this failure to deliver ‘proper Brexit’.

Those mounting such arguments have never been able to explain a realistic way in which Brexit could have been done successfully, or even to agree about what proper Brexit means. But it is an argument that can always be made, since it is, strictly speaking, irrefutable (which is makes it a weak, not a strong, argument in that it is not susceptible to any meaningful test). As many people have observed, it is an argument with the same structure as that made by those who insist that ‘real Communism’ has yet to be tried.

One of the slightly better articles making this kind of argument is that by Matthew Jeffrey at Conservative Home, but it shows no understanding of why the regulatory divergence it proposes has not happened, and relies on a wholly unrealistic claim about what ‘mutual recognition agreements’ could make possible for international trade. Most glaringly, it advocates using post-Brexit freedoms to follow “aggressive tax competitiveness” citing as an example the strategy followed by, er, Ireland – an EU member state. The conclusion, inevitably, is that (like real communism) “the real Brexit is still to come”.

The problems of defending Brexit whilst claiming it has been betrayed, or not done properly, are all too obvious, which is perhaps why Michael Gove’s article in the Spectator mainly takes a different tack. Asking the question ‘The Brexit decade: was it worth it?’ (to which his unsurprising answer is ‘yes’), Gove attempts to itemise how Britain has benefitted from Brexit. As with any such list, there are questions about the veracity and desirability of each claimed benefit, but the fact that he includes the demonstrably false ones that Brexit enabled a faster vaccine roll-out (a lie which Boris Johnson has also repeated this week), allowed the UK to support Ukraine, and provided “much more than £350 million a week extra for the NHS” makes it hard to take any of them very seriously.

Moreover, as is again typical of such lists of benefits, it is meaningless because there is little or no recognition of the costs of Brexit. In particular, Gove, with presumably knowing outrageousness, reprises his infamous line from the campaign in deriding “experts from organisations with acronyms who have got things consistently wrong in the past”. In fact, the Treasury’s pre-referendum long-term analysis of the impact of Brexit, giving as its central estimate of the scenario of a negotiated bilateral trade agreement – as happened – that GDP would be 6.2% lower after 15 years (see p.7 of the document), is remarkably similar to most of the credible estimates of what is actually happening which mainly lie in the range of 4% to 8% [1].

In the end, though, Gove simply falls back on the standard get-out that, whether the effects have been positive or negative, Brexit is definitively justified on the abstract grounds of ‘sovereignty’, with national politicians making national laws and being held accountable for them (though not, it seems, being accountable for advocating Brexit). As ever, there is no recognition that sovereignty-sharing is an act of, rather than a negation of, sovereignty; nor of the many ways in which EU members exert sovereignty and hold national politicians accountable; nor of the many ways that all sorts of international regulatory systems (including but not limited to those of the EU) continue, necessarily, to impinge on the UK; nor of any of the many other ways that the ‘taking back control’ thesis is flawed.

Effectively the same argument, though from a different part of the political spectrum, is made by Larry Elliott, the ‘Lexiter’ economics commentator at the Guardian. He, too, takes issue with the economic consensus about the damage of Brexit, in particular questioning the OBR’s estimate of 4% less GDP after 15 years. He does so on what, for an economist, is the rather innumerate basis that, if true, it would mean the economy would be “4% bigger today” [emphasis added]. Otherwise, he opines that “Brexit showed that class still matters in politics” (who knew?) and, like Jeffrey and Gove, that Brexit “creates an opportunity for change” though, in his case, that change should be to ‘reverse forty years of neo-liberalism’ which, he hopes, is what Burnham intends to do. In this, once again, we see the capacity of Brexit to have multiple, incompatible meanings amongst its adherents but also, more specifically, how already a Burnham premiership is being anticipated in the Telegraph as a ‘soft touch’ which will take the UK closer to the EU and by Elliott as the saviour of the Lexit project.

Reframing the anniversary

Thus, rather as I anticipated in a recent post, this latest ‘national conversation’ about Brexit is in many ways the same as that which we have had for ten years and more. And, in another recent post, I quoted the second edition of my book about Brexit pointing out that according to its advocates and supporters Brexit “certainly wasn’t proposed as, or supposed to be, the prelude to a country permanently divided on the wisdom of Brexit, still less to an interminable debate about whether it had been the right thing to do ….” (p.285) and I went on to quote David Frost saying (in 2022) that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.” 

In those terms Brexit has failed. It has not settled. This week there have been no great public celebrations of ‘national independence’, whilst the prospect, whether positive or negative, of rejoining (or joining) the EU has been very much part of the anniversary discussion. But, more than that, Brexit continues to be profoundly unsettling.

It is this which, I think, gives this tenth anniversary discussion a rather different meaning than most contributions to it suggest. It is not really a stock-taking exercise, still less a planning one. Nor is it a commemoration, or even a retrospection. Rather, just as the current political crisis is the latest episode within the continuing process of instability bequeathed by Brexit, this tenth anniversary is itself the latest episode within the continuing process of contestation to which Brexit has consigned the nation.

 

Note

[1] Gove made implicit reference to the Treasury short-term forecast, which is admittedly harder to defend, especially given the way it was used by George Osborne. But it is worth recalling that the value of sterling has never fully recovered since its very sharp fall immediately after the referendum result, and also that the forecast model did not assume any action by the Bank of England which, in fact, under the then Governor Mark Carney, immediately announced a programme to stabilize the financial system, which may well have averted some of the economic turmoil of the short-term forecast.

Britain’s post-Brexit ungovernability

The dust is now settling after last week’s elections whilst the fallout very much continues, especially in terms of the leadership crisis engulfing the Labour government which is developing rapidly as I write (so that there may well be new developments in even the next few hours). Both tell us much about post-Brexit politics.

The election results

The landscape revealed by the election results is a complex one, sufficiently so as to be open to almost any number of interpretations. If there is one fairly uncontentious observation it is that they confirmed the fragmentation of the party system, with at least five main parties in England and seven across Great Britain. In particular, this marks the moment when both Reform and the Greens have, beyond any doubt, gained a significant political presence. However, it is quite wrong to say, as Nigel Farage does, that this shows that politics is no longer about left and right, and it is dispiriting that so many political analysts, notably Professor Sir John Curtice, make similar claims.

In fact, despite occasional flirtations with economic protectionism, Reform UK’s policies about cutting immigration, rewarding entrepreneurs, cutting welfare, and finding miraculous public sector efficiency savings are boilerplate right-wing politics. Equally, many Green positions, for example on defence, employment rights, and taxation, are recognizably those of the traditional left. Neither defies analysis in terms of left and right, although that may not be all to be said about them. What is decomposing is the situation of there being one party of the right and one party of the left.

Last week’s results also show the clearest evidence yet of another kind of fragmentation, with Wales, for the first time, and Scotland, again, joining Northern Ireland in having devolved administrations led (in various senses) by parties committed (in various ways) to secession from the United Kingdom [1]. Yet even here neither Plaid Cymru nor the SNP achieved majorities, and Reform and the Greens made gains.

The corollary of this fragmentation is that the dominant position of the two ‘main’ Westminster parties looks to be in its death throes: we could be living at the end of the period where the government and the official opposition parties are Labour and Conservative, or vice versa. It’s even possible that in the next parliament neither party with hold either role. It is certainly true that it would be a mistake to extrapolate from last week’s votes to the next general election, but those votes, taken together with the now well-established pattern of opinion polls, suggest that a first-past-the-post electoral system could yield just about any outcome. Thus we now have both a government in crisis and a political system in in crisis, a conjunction which, to the best of my knowledge, is unique in modern British history.

Post-Brexit politics

Stepping back from the immediate results, this can be seen as part of the roiling turbulence of politics since the 2016 Referendum, a turbulence which saw six Prime Ministers (and massive churn of ministers) and two premature elections as well as this fragmentation of parties. Of course, it is important not to mistake correlation for causality, or to ascribe single causes to complex developments. It's not all about Brexit. In particular, the fragmentation of political parties was already underway before the referendum, as were the many quite profound social and economic trends which were bound to have a fissiparous effect on the voting bases of the Tory and Labour parties. Labour’s virtual wipeout in Scotland at the hands of the SNP in the 2015 election is just one, but perhaps the most obvious, example.

Nevertheless, no one would deny that Brexit and its aftermath precipitated what political scientist Tim Bale calls “turmoil and transformation” in the Conservative Party. And much of Labour’s own present ‘turmoil’ has its roots in the doomed attempt to placate the leave voters within the party’s traditional electoral base whilst retaining the support of its ‘progressive’ and pro-remain voters. In my May 2018 post discussing the local elections held then, I wrote that “the Labour result shows the crippling limitations of their slippery and ambiguous stance on Brexit … they are too Brexity to pick up committed remainer votes and insufficiently Brexity to attract committed leavers.” It is depressing that this applies word-for-word eight years later [2].

Thus, the latest election results again demonstrate that in trying to please everyone Labour have managed to please no-one, alienating those on both the right and the left of its electoral coalition and, notably, both younger and older voters. Again, it bears saying that some of these tensions (of class, region, ideology etc.) have been present since the inception of the Labour Party, and rapidly intensified during the New Labour period, but Brexit added a significant new dimension to them.

Certainly the English council election results carried the fingerprints of Brexit, with Reform performing strongly where the leave vote was highest and, conversely, performing weakly where the remain vote was highest. This isn’t necessarily ‘because of Brexit’ so much as that both it and the Brexit vote arose from similar causes. The Brexit imprint is also evident in the Liberal Democrats’ support, in that their opposition to Brexit continues to make them congenial to liberal conservative voters repelled by the post-Brexit Tory Party. The latter probably explains, for example, their victories in East Surrey and West Surrey last week, although it can be argued that in appealing to such voters they, too, are being flanked on their ‘progressive’ side by the Greens.

Change, but what change?

If there is any unity, despite all of the fragmentation, it is to be found in the ubiquitous, angry demand that ‘things must change’, a demand made even by the Prime Minister himself. But, tragically, that very demand only goes to show the profundity of the fragmentation. Not only is there no agreement as to what changes are necessary, for many it is a demand with no content (e.g. ‘it’s time for a change’ or ‘why not give someone else a go’). Even worse, as Brexit shows only too clearly, when demands for change are met those demanding it are not necessarily satisfied or, as with the demand to cut net migration, do not necessarily know when they are met. And perhaps worst of all is the sense that for some voters it is not just that nothing will satisfy them but that they don’t want to be satisfied: what they want is to be angry, not to have that anger placated.

Whilst the latter applies especially to segments of the leave and Reform vote, what is evident within segments across the political spectrum is a refusal to accept trade-offs and constraints (an example on the left is the belief some, apparently including Green leader Zack Polanski, have in what Professor Jonathan Portes calls the “nonsense economics” of ‘Modern Monetary Theory’). In a sense, the ‘cakeism’ with which Boris Johnson approached Brexit has become embedded in political culture generally. But even if that were not so, it is a fact that Brexit itself, in an economic sense, has increased policy constraints in that we simply have less resources than we would otherwise have. In that way, even if unacknowledged, there is a trade-off between having Brexit and having other things, including tax revenues to devote to public services (estimated to be £65-£90 billion less in 2024-2025 than they otherwise would have been).

Inevitably the consequences of all this fall most heavily on the governing party since it, alone, is charged with delivering the ‘change’ that no one agrees on, and it, alone, is faced with the constraints that those outside government can ignore or deny. That is actually a fairly good description of the fate that befell the Tory governments in their delivery of Brexit. It certainly applies to the present Labour government, including to its ‘make Brexit work’ policy’. But, more generally, because politics is so fragmented, any and every policy initiative encounters substantial opposition and this government, mainly because of it lacks any coherent strategy or ideology, habitually responds by ‘u-turning’, which itself contributes to a sense of constant crisis.

That would be a problem for any government, but it is a particular problem for this one because of a nasty little paradox at the heart of the widespread demand that ‘things must change’. That paradox is best-captured by Labour’s 2024 electoral promise that ‘change is stability’. It was a promise which grew directly out of Brexit in that it proposed an alternative to all the political chaos of the years after the referendum. Now, that takes on a particular significance with the intense wave of demands for Keir Starmer to be replaced (of which more below). Perhaps, without the background of all the Tory leadership changes, that would have been an obvious way of dealing with the government’s crisis. As it is, if Starmer goes it will only mark a continuation of the last ten years of crisis. On the other hand, if he does not go, the palpable sense of a government in crisis and a Prime Minister besieged and lacking authority will persist. So, stay or go, the crisis remains.

The relaunch and the reset

Clearly Starmer’s preference is to stay on, and his immediate response to the traumatic election results was to attempt yet another ‘relaunch’ of his premiership. Even before the events which came later in the week this seemed like a doomed enterprise if only because, fairly or unfairly (and one does not have to be a fan to think that much of the bile about him seems excessive), he is loathed by almost all sections of the political spectrum. As the political journalist Samuel Earle put it prior to the relaunch speech, “It is too late for Starmer to learn from his mistakes: he is in a hate-loop from which he cannot escape.” But even if that was not so, there seems little sign that he is able to learn and, when it came, the ’relaunch’ speech on Monday illustrated this, being little more than a re-hash of similar speeches he has given in the past, and nowhere more so than in what he said about Brexit.

It’s true that, as has been the case recently, he highlighted Farage’s complicity in the failure of Brexit. But, as ever, his own policy was either vague or laughable (or, as when he claimed to be “putting Britain at the heart of Europe”, both). As always, he spoke of being “ambitious” for the relationship with Europe, but the actual policy is no more ambitious than before, except perhaps in sounding slightly more enthusiastic about a youth experience scheme – but this is something to which his government has had to be forced, kicking and screaming, to (probably) accept and even this week there are reports that agreement is foundering because of UK insistence on tightly capping numbers.

Within this, there are several strands to unpick. One is that it is true that, for all its limitations, even to talk in this way, and to pursue a cooperative strategy, does mark a difference to the Conservatives and Reform. However, that is not a new development (so was hardly going to help him to ‘relaunch’ his government) and suffers from the same deficiency of being too much for some voters and too little for others. Secondly, of course, the continuation of the ‘red lines’ (no single market, no customs union, no freedom of movement of people) means any ambitions are highly circumscribed.

Yet it does not follow that dropping those red lines now would be a workable policy. For one thing, given all Labour’s previous commitments, especially in the manifesto, there would be a substantial political price to pay for undertaking what would undoubtedly be presented as another U-turn, and a highly dishonest one. But more to the point, it is extremely unlikely that the EU would, at this time, entertain the kind of agreements this would allow because of the very real prospect that the next government would back-track on them, a prospect made all the more real by last week’s election results. I have made this argument ad nauseum on this blog, so will refer readers to Tom Hayes’ latest Substack post outlining how this seems from an EU perspective. Given this, dropping the red lines now would incur the political costs of dropping a major policy commitment without the corresponding benefits of delivering on the new policy [3].

This does not mean that Starmer’s approach to Brexit is the right one. He could do three things differently. Firstly, he could champion the ‘reset’, limited as it is, not just in terms of its instrumental benefits, limited as they are, but as an enthusiastic articulation of the beginning of a long-term project to build a new, principled, pro-European consensus, and as an explicit stepping-stone to reversing the historical error of Brexit. Second, he could argue, now, that the future policy, for the next election, should be to drop the red lines. Third, he could spell out, in terms, that it is the possibility of a future Reform and/or Tory government which is the real block on progress. In short, rather than simply chunter about being ‘more ambitious’ he could provide a concrete explanation of how this could be achieved. It would be, at once, dramatic, realistic, honest, and – something Starmer badly needs to be – leaderly.

An ungovernable country?

However, whilst this might be a better approach to Brexit, it is difficult to see that there is anything Starmer can now do to survive for much longer. As the Financial Times’ columnist Robert Shrimsley put it (£), writing immediately following the relaunch speech, “Starmer’s premiership is ebbing away. The blow could fall today, tomorrow, next week or next month. MPs are just weighing the odds and timings they need to get their people in place. The decision is made. It is now only about logistics.”

That sentiment, hammered home over the next few days, culminating in Wes Streeting’s resignation yesterday, is now so widespread that it is effectively self-fulfilling: political authority, like confidence in a currency, ultimately resides in its general acceptance. Yet, with Starmer apparently unwilling to resign and with, at least for now, no formal leadership challenge having been made, it seems likely we are in for a potentially protracted period of instability and drift before he is replaced (including if, as some are urging, he ‘sets out a timetable for his departure’).

The bigger question is what happens afterwards. It is unlikely to be followed by a new era of calm. Whoever replaces Starmer as Prime Minister will face frenzied speculation about another election being needed to secure a mandate. It’s also perfectly possible, for example if a leadership contest is held without it being possible for Andy Burnham to stand (since it cannot be assumed that he will succeed in his bid to become an MP), that the new leader will immediately fall prey to fresh plotting. This becomes all the more likely if a change of leadership is unaccompanied by any new analysis or agenda. And these two possibilities make this another question with no good answer: if there is a new agenda the need to secure a fresh mandate is all the greater, but if there is not a new agenda the likelihood of yet more leadership plotting is all the greater.

The even bigger question is about the limits to leadership itself, regardless of who the leader is. For, increasingly, it seems as if the consequence of a polity, not just in the sense of parties and institutions but of a population, which is split into multiple, angry segments with contradictory demands and, even, contradictory views of reality, is ungovernability. That situation is compounded by the media addiction to politics as spectacle which, as I discussed in a recent post, has probably become all the greater for having been fed by the dramas of the Brexit process. And perhaps what the electorate and the media share is a sheer impatience with both the timescale and complexity of policymaking.

We may not quite have reached the point of ungovernability, but I think we are getting close to it, an observation now widely made by political commentators on both the left and the right (though others disagree (£) with this diagnosis). The beneficiaries of this are populists, for whom anger, contradiction, chaos, and the disorientating effect of hyperactive news churn are not just opportunities but preferences. That applies to populists of both the left and the right but, currently, most obviously to Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Nevertheless, for Farage the election results are both a blessing and a curse. They enable him to present his fragment of the vote (which, don’t forget, is only a fragment, at about 25% in England in these elections) as the rise of a popular army, and himself as a Prime Minister in waiting. That also engenders more media coverage. On the other hand, such coverage will bring more scrutiny, especially of Farage’s financial dealings, and it is notable that the gurning grin and throaty chuckle which make him undeniably appealing (to some) give way to a tetchy anger when faced with such scrutiny. The range of things which are, or should be, major scandals for Farage is extraordinary, encompassing his recently-revealed undeclared ‘personal gift’ of £5 million from the Anglo-Thai cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, the purchase of his house in Clacton, and the scale and nature of his extra-parliamentary earnings.

Reform’s success will also bring more publicity for the utter ineptitude (£) with which it runs the growing number of local councils it controls, and for the many freaks, incompetents, rogues and racists amongst its councillors. Within hours of last week’s vote, newly elected Reform councillors began to resign amidst scandal. Many others will simply be out of their depth, finding it rather harder to engage with the complexities of local government than to fire off angry social media posts.

It’s true that for his hard-core supporters such scrutiny will make no difference. However, Reform-curious voters may be put off by what they see, whilst anti-Reform voters may be more minded to vote tactically the more likely a Farage premiership becomes. In other words, whatever he and his supporters may think, there is no inevitability in a Farage victory. However, a defeat for Farage, born of antipathy towards him and his policies, and cobbled together by the rickety means of tactical voting in a now broken electoral system (£), will hardly mark a resolution to political turmoil and incipient ungovernability.

Leadership for the unleadable

For such a resolution to happen, if indeed it can happen, it would require an extraordinary combination of political strategy and leadership. That would be needed to address multiple areas where policy has basically failed – social care, housing, and the criminal justice system are some obvious examples – and deep-seated problems such as chronic illness, an ageing population, and low productivity. At the same time, it would have to address the significant security threats which require an urgent increase in military capacity and the development of international alliances.

There is no sign at all, so far as I can see, that any existing political party is remotely capable of providing this strategy or the leadership to deliver it and, more to the point, any sign that the voting public would be amenable to it. Indeed, perhaps even to postulate a party coming up with a solution is part of the problem. In my former life as an organization studies academic one of the key topics of my discipline was leadership and, whereas traditional models focused on the person and conduct of ‘the leader’, it became increasingly widely understood that this had to be understood as a relationship between leaders and followers, with ‘followership’ as necessary as ‘leadership’.

From that perspective, the commentator Zoe Williams, in her own discussion of ungovernability, says something which is rather obvious but is politically almost unsayable: that voters need to ask themselves if it is they, rather than politicians who are to blame. That is most clearly the case for those voters (£) willing to be serially tricked by Farage, willing to ignore all the financial skullduggery and regard him as a man of the people, willing to ignore the scandals and incompetence of Reform councils, or, just, willing to vapidly bleat of supporting him as ‘it is time for a change’. But it does not just apply to them. It seems as if sooner rather than later we will get a new Prime Minister. If so, it is all too likely that, sooner rather than later, they too will be savaged by an angry and divided electorate and a drama-addicted media.

 

Notes

[1] In this post I am not focusing on the technical intricacies of Brexit but it bears mentioning that the government’s reset plans, and especially the plan for an SPS deal, will create considerable complexities for the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales (Northern Ireland is different because it aligns with EU SPS regulations in any case). A key component of this is the European Partnership Bill announced in the King’s Speech this week, as expected (see, for example, my post of 3 April 2026).

[2] Other aspects of that May 2018 post make for curious reading, especially my observation that the results showed that Cameron’s plan to use the referendum to destroy the electoral threat to the Conservatives posed by UKIP had, at least, had that effect. Well, it was true at the time, and in a way, but …

[3] For an analysis of how ‘rejoining’ could become a reality for both the EU and the UK, see the recently published Discussion Paper by Andrew Duff of the European Policy Centre.

Not dealing with Brexitism

It’s hard to keep up with what is happening in the world of trade, even just considering those aspects which have a direct or indirect Brexit connection. Since my last post, there has been a flurry of activity, including a deal, of sorts, between the US and China which, for now at least, seems to mark a truce in their trade war. That, along with some other developments, suggests that Trump is now desperate to row back on the chaos that his ‘Liberation Day tariffs’ unleashed. On the other hand, there are signs that he proposes to double down on his hostility to the EU.

The recently announced UK-US ‘trade deal’ is one, relatively minor, aspect of these developments. It, too, is evidence of Trump’s backtracking, and it could be read as part of an attempt by him to increase divisions between the UK and the EU. At all events, along with the UK-India deal, it forms the background to next week’s UK-EU Summit. The outcome of that may, whether in what it does or what it does not achieve, mark a new phase in the Brexit saga, but there is little sign of Britain dealing with 'Brexitism'.

The UK-US ‘trade deal’

As always with anything Brexit-related, it’s a big task just to strip away the lies, half-truths and misunderstandings, and that becomes even more difficult when Donald Trump is involved. When the deal was announced, both Trump and Keir Starmer talked as if it was a historic breakthrough, and suggested that it was the long-touted post-Brexit Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It was nothing of the sort, and nor was it ever going to be. As I explained in a post last November, when Trump’s tariffs had not been announced but were in prospect, if it was going to be anything it would be an ‘exemption deal’, meaning that it would exempt the UK from some, if not all, of Trump’s new tariffs.

The difference is significant, not least because it means that the best it could achieve would be a return to the status quo ante. That is, it might avoid Trump’s new tariffs but not improve the terms of trade that had already existed. To an extent, at least, that is what has happened. In headline terms, the new blanket 10% ‘reciprocal tariff’ remains on all goods, but the 25% tariff on cars has been removed up to a quota of 100,000 vehicles sold per year (but these will still be liable to the 10% tariff). The 25% tariff on steel and aluminium has also been scrapped, but it seems there will also be some quota limit on that (the details are not clear). In return, the UK has agreed to scrap tariffs on an increased quota of US beef (with some reciprocal increase in access to the US beef market), and to scrap tariffs on US ethanol within a high quota.

So, a very limited deal. But, as quickly emerged when the text was published, it is not even a deal, in the sense that it is (explicitly) not a legally binding agreement and that many details are still to be agreed, most glaringly, perhaps, in relation to pharmaceuticals trade. As Alison Morrow of CNN Business put it, it is not so much as deal as “a concept of a deal”. That isn’t to say that none of it will come into effect, because there is evidently some political commitment to it. So at least some of it very probably will. But given Trump’s proven unreliability to stick to the terms even of legally binding deals, it is even harder to be confident that he will honour, or even continue to recognize, any political commitments.

That it happened at all reflects the weakness and neediness of both sides. Unlike the EU or China, the UK is simply not strong enough to take on the US in a trade war. The UK also has a pressing political and economic need to shield its car and steel industries from Trump’s tariffs. But the US is weak too. Trump’s tariff policy has backfired on him very badly, and, as I suggested recently, that has made him keen to start ‘doing deals’ with his victims so as to give the impression that this had been his strategy all along, and to reverse some of the damage he has inflicted on himself and the US economy. Thus, as many commentators noted once it had been announced, Trump needed a deal, and quickly.  

The timing may also have reflected a desire to make an announcement on VE Day so as to get in some sanctimonious references to the wartime alliance and the ‘special relationship’ or at least, since Trump’s ego is considerably greater than his grasp of detail, to ‘historic’ events. Timing aside, the terms of this trade non-deal also reflected the neediness of both parties. The UK has not had to make any of the concessions that had been speculated about on tech firm regulation and taxation, or on food standards (there will be cheaper US beef, but it will not be ‘hormone-treated’), a point I’ll come back to. The UK also resisted demands to reduce pork tariffs. To that extent, the reported jubilation in the Starmer government is understandable. The UK gave surprisingly little for what, at least in political terms, was quite helpful to the government.  

Nevertheless, to repeat, the overall effect is to leave the UK worse off than it was before Trump launched his tariff offensive. Starmer shouldn’t be blamed for that, as it’s highly unlikely any other outcome could have been agreed on remotely viable terms, and what was achieved is worthwhile for the car and steel industries, but in a normal world it wouldn’t be seen as a triumph. There is also a more complex issue, identified by the UK Trade Policy Observatory’s (UCTPO) analysis of the deal. Referring to an aspect which I have not mentioned so far, namely what the agreement says about supply chain security, UKTPO warn that, depending on exactly what it comes to mean in practice, it may well push the UK towards provisions which will be unpopular with China, with retaliation possible. It’s a specific illustration of another point I made in an earlier post, about how post-Brexit Britain is obliged to duck and dive between not just the US and the EU but, also, China.

Brexit dimensions

What of Brexit more generally in all this? It’s true by definition that the UK could not have agreed such a deal had it still been a member of the EU, or even if simply in a customs union with the EU. Whether it proves ‘better’ than whatever the EU agrees or doesn’t agree with the US remains to be seen. What is certainly striking is that it has wrong-footed the Brexiters (as shown, rather deliciously, by a disagreement between the Tice-Oakeshott Reform power couple). Some, at least initially, hailed it, in the way Trump did, as the post-Brexit trade deal he had always promised, although they quickly latched on to the implicit criticism of the Tories contained in that, as well as the explicit lie it entailed.

Very soon, Kemi Badenoch was complaining that the deal had “shafted” the UK (£), bemoaning that it was, indeed, not a comprehensive FTA. In short, we had the unedifying spectacle of Labour at least implying that it had delivered the key trade promise of the Brexiters, and Conservative Brexiters criticizing the government for not delivering what is simply not available for agreement with Trump, any more than it was with Biden, but pretending otherwise. It was yet another small illustration of the fundamental dishonesty Brexit has brought to British politics.

Beyond domestic politics, there’s a deeper issue in play with this deal. Again, I’ve gestured towards it in a previous post (I’m sorry to keep doing this self-referencing, but the various discussions obviously connect together, and linking to where points were previously made means I don’t have to repeat explanations or background). That issue is what all this means for ‘WTO rules’.

It’s not just that the Brexiters used to sloganize ‘Let’s Go WTO’ as a supposed alternative to any trade deal at all with the EU, or that ‘regaining our seat at the WTO’ was supposed to be some great prize, it is that their whole economic vision of post-Brexit Britain was predicated on the existence of a global trade order. Trump is now ripping that up, and both Alan Beattie, the Financial Times’ trade expert (£), and the UKTPO analysis suggest that the UK-US deal, specifically, flouts WTO principles and undermines the multi-lateral trading system.

The UK-India deal

All this came in the wake of the announcement of a UK-India trade deal. The two stories are, as BBC Economics Editor Faisal Islam argues, very likely to be related. That is, the general mayhem Trump is causing to international trade may have provided an incentive to complete what has hitherto been regarded as an “elusive” deal. However, the two deals are very different. For the UK-India deal is a trade deal, both in the sense of being a genuine FTA and of being (or at least being the basis of) a legally binding agreement. Moreover, it sits within, and does not undermine, the WTO framework. Indeed, the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy suggests that “may be one of the biggest achievements of this agreement”.

Although the full details have yet to be published, reports based on the government’s summary of what has been agreed suggest there will be a fairly comprehensive removal of tariffs, with whisky and cars two of the UK sectors most likely to benefit, and garments and footwear amongst the benefitting Indian sectors. There’s less sign of liberalization of services trade, which some, especially in the financial services sector, had hoped for, although that is not surprising (lack of services coverage is one of the reasons why FTAs are so different to the EU single market). However, of potential importance to some UK firms, and potential controversy in India, UK access to the public procurement market should increase.

It was always anticipated that the block to this FTA would be an Indian requirement for a relaxation of UK immigration policy – something even less likely to be agreed by the present government, which is, if possible, even more obsessed with reducing immigration at whatever the economic cost than its Tory predecessors, something I will return to. That turned out not to be the case (although perhaps, had it been agreed, it might have enabled a deeper deal), and the only tangentially immigration-related issue was an agreement to exempt Indian workers on short-term visas from National Insurance Contributions (NICs).

Once again Brexiters were wrong-footed. This was a deal they had long-advocated as a Brexit prize, and Jacob Rees-Mogg greeted it as “exactly what Brexit promised”. But Kemi Badenoch latched onto the NIC provision (as, more unexpectedly, did the LibDems), either unaware of or ignoring the fact that such arrangements (which are reciprocal for UK workers) have been agreed with numerous countries in the past. Nigel Farage also weighed in, denouncing the deal as “truly appalling”, and as selling out British workers and farmers.

All this was, as with the US deal, pure opportunism (one senior Indian official was even quoted as saying that Badenoch had agreed the NIC provision in principle when she was Trade Secretary). There’s no doubt whatsoever that the Tories would have done the same deal. But the Brexiter reactions, especially Farage’s, also point to one of the biggest of the many contradictions which have run throughout the entire Brexit project, that between nativist protectionism and globalist free trade. Hence the idiotic situation that Brexiters can now regard the UK-India deal as both a vindication and a betrayal of Brexit.

A Brexit benefit?

To the extent that the deal is being claimed as a ‘Brexit benefit’, the usual arguments apply. Yes, it could only be made because the UK has left the EU. But according to official calculations its economic value, an estimated 0.1% increase to GDP after 15 years, whilst slightly greater than the FTAs with Australia (0.08%) and New Zealand (0.03%), is nugatory compared with the costs of Brexit (minus 4%). Given that Brexit has happened, there’s a case for doing such deals, but the idea that they in any way justify Brexit is absurd. In any case, it is reported in the Indian media that the ongoing EU-India trade negotiations are likely to be accelerated, again precisely because of the impetus injected by Trump’s trade mayhem.

Of course, whenever the economic deficiencies of their project are pointed out to Brexiters, they invariably fall back on some version of their ideas about sovereignty and democracy. In relation to trade deals, they used to make much of the idea that, with Brexit, the people’s representatives in parliament would ‘regain control’ over ratification of FTAs. That was always based on a false premise, because as an EU member the UK could have held parliamentary votes on FTAs made by the EU, potentially even blocking them, but it waived that right. As for the present situation, whilst it might fairly be said that the UK-US deal is so flimsy and indefinite it hardly warrants a vote, that is not true of the UK-India deal. Yet the government has stated that, in line with post-Brexit legislation and practice, there will be no vote. So that’s another supposed ‘Brexit benefit’ that has quietly been discredited.

Where does all this leave the UK-EU reset?

The short answer to that is that it leaves it exactly where it was before, except that we are now only a couple of days away from the EU Summit at which (perhaps) the tangible details of what the ‘reset’ is going to mean will be unveiled [1]. As such, most of what I wrote in my previous post still applies, but it is worth spelling out one particularly important issue. The fact that the UK-US deal explicitly affirmed that US products sold in the UK must meet UK SPS standards (i.e. no hormone-treated beef, chlorinated chicken etc.) means that there is no (new) obstacle to a UK-EU SPS agreement. This is the issue many commentators have identified as the key indication of whether the UK is going to ‘choose’ between aligning with the US or the EU. It seems to have chosen the EU (which is consistent with what the latest UKICE report shows to be the general direction of regulatory policy).  

That should not be a surprise to readers of this blog, as I’ve repeatedly argued (in the face of some sceptical responses) that it was highly unlikely that the government would agree anything with the US, or anyone else, to prevent what has always been Labour’s central, most repeatedly stated, reset ambition. It obviously remains to be seen if there will be a UK-EU SPS agreement, but the possibility remains open. I don’t think that quite amounts to the UK-US deal being a “triumph for remainers”, as Adam Bienkov argues, but it does endorse their core economic proposition of the centrality of geography to trade. Certainly the deal doesn’t mean that (taken in conjunction with the India deal) “the Rejoiner dream [has] finally died”, as pro-Brexit commentator Ambrose Pritchard-Evans claims.

Assuming there will now be a UK-EU SPS deal (in principle, if not immediately in detail), the important question is what else, if anything, gets announced next week. Over and above the widely expected defence and security pact, there are several possibilities, as outlined in my previous post, and there’s not much point in reviewing the various rumours and speculations there have been since. We’ll know soon enough.

What resetting means

That previous post attracted a certain amount of negative comment on social media. In particular, one poster on Bluesky [2] repeatedly and aggressively criticized me for having said that Labour’s red lines are fixed which, they insisted, meant I was indulging in British ‘exceptionalism’ whereby the EU was expected to make all the compromises and to find the solutions for the problems Brexit has caused the UK. It was a slightly bizarre accusation given the number of times over the last nine years I have criticized such a position, which has indeed often been in evidence. More importantly, it was simply ignorant. It is a fact that the Labour red lines have not changed, and a fact that they necessarily put a massive restriction on what can be agreed by the EU. But that certainly does not mean that there is no space for agreeing anything beyond what was negotiated by Boris Johnson and David Frost (a view which, ironically, mirrors Frost’s own criticisms of the reset).

That is for two reasons. One is that the UK under Labour does seem to have dropped one of the Johnson-Frost (and May) red lines of doctrinaire objection to any role for the ECJ and European Law. Admittedly this has never been formally stated, but, for years now, it has been notably absent from Labour’s list of red lines. If that is indeed so, it potentially opens up new areas for agreement that had been closed down by the UK, including but not limited to an SPS agreement, without entailing any concession from the EU on the need for ECJ jurisdiction. The other is that, even within its red lines, the Johnson-Frost deal was in many respects minimalistic, because of their hang-up about sovereignty in a more diffuse sense (i.e. beyond even what those red lines of necessity betokened). This is one reason why the quite expansive possibilities – possibilities envisaged by the EU quite as much as the UK – in the (non-binding) Political Declaration, which accompanied the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement, were never brought to fruition. There is now at least the potential to revisit them.

Nor, to address another repeated, and related, criticism made of that post, does doing so automatically amount to UK attempts at ‘cherry-picking’ or ‘cakeism’. Those concepts, whilst certainly highly relevant at some stages of the Brexit process (and, again, I've exhaustively catalogued and criticized this) have been rendered largely redundant since the UK became a third country to the EU. There are no cherries to try to pick, because the UK has foregone the pie. Now, the only issue is whether both the UK and the EU see it as being in their own interests to make agreements over cooperation in specific areas or participation in specific programmes. Indeed, that began to happen under the Sunak government, with the UK-Frontex deal on tackling irregular migration and the admission of the UK to the Horizon Europe and Copernicus programmes.

Trust in Starmer’s Britain?

If cherry-picking is no longer of much, if any, relevance to understanding Brexit events, new considerations have emerged. One is whether, contrary to what I have said, the UK-US deal, whilst not in its provisions affecting what the EU and UK might agree, could do so by antagonizing EU leaders. As I said above, that could well have been part of Trump’s intentions in making the deal and, even if not, the agreement hardly showed the UK standing in solidarity with other targets of Trump’s aggression. Again, I discussed this in a recent post, pondering that, if such a deal happened, it might simply be regarded by other countries as understandable realpolitik. That remains an open question, but the positive reaction to the agreement from Germany’s new Chancellor Friederich Merz might at least suggest that this is possible.

The other issue is that of domestic politics. Here, Simon Nixon makes the interesting argument that the US and India deals have provided Starmer with political cover for a maximal reset, by presenting himself as having just delivered on the Brexiters’ key trade promises. That could be so, but what is quite clear is that the Brexiters’ attack on the reset is continuing to gather force, and Badenoch has already threatened (£) to reverse anything agreed that “betrays Brexit”. Such threats are now the most potent weapon in the Brexiters’ arsenal, and they (rather than previous concerns about cherry-picking) are the most obvious disincentive to the EU to agree to a substantive reset.

Equally, the sight of Keir Starmer not just rehashing Brexiter nonsense about trade deals but now invoking their ‘taking back control’ slogan when launching this week’s morally reprehensible, politically counter-productive, and economically illiterate anti-immigration crusade is hardly likely to inspire confidence and trust from the EU. It hardly matters whether Starmer really believes what he said, or whether it is dishonesty resulting from fear of the Reform Party. Either way, quite as much as Badenoch and Farage, he is showing that ‘Brexitism’ is entrenched and that he has no intention of trying to challenge it.

I’ve referred several times to my recent posts on this blog, including the last one, and sometimes mentioned occasions where my expectations have proved accurate, or defended what I’ve written against criticisms. However I will freely admit that one of the main arguments of the last post, to the effect that Starmer had the opportunity to challenge Farage head on, and ‘reset’ domestic politics away from Brexitism, has already been shown to be hopelessly naive. It is now clear that isn’t going to happen. Next week there should be a clearer sense of whether Labour’s approach to the reset with the EU is going to be another missed opportunity to start to deal with the damage of Brexit.

 

Notes

[1] It is always worth recalling that, any reset aside, the UK has still not implemented all of the provisions of the original Withdrawal Agreement, nor some parts of the Windsor Framework. Moreover, there is still no deal on Gibraltar, although reports this week (£) suggested (not for the first time) that one is imminent. Indeed, the resolution of outstanding issues, perhaps especially Gibraltar, may well be part of the conditions for a reset of any significance.

[2] In line with my normal practice of not ‘punching down’ by linking to individual social media accounts, except when they are those of public figures, I will not identify the poster in question. In any case, some others were almost equally unpleasant.

The government needs a post-Brexit strategy

It would be unfair to expect the Labour government to have achieved much yet. The peculiar timing of the election, in combination with the parliamentary recess, meant that there has been even less ‘political time’ than the three months of calendar time since then. That was mainly absorbed by dealing with the riots, with a degree of effectiveness which stopped them spiraling into a crisis, and beginning the process, both real and theatrical, of ‘discovering’ that the previous government left an economic and social disaster to be dealt with. This was the message of Keir Starmer’s ‘Rose Garden’ speech this week, effectively heralding the start of the new political year.

It would also be unfair to deny that the government has already made some real progress with what it promised for the UK’s relationship with the EU. Although Starmer said nothing in the Rose Garden speech about the EU or Brexit, the next day he promised to “turn a corner on Brexit” prior to trips to Germany, to discuss a new bilateral treaty, and thence to France where he met Emmanuel Macron. That followed the pattern begun from his government’s first hours and days, when he and his ministers took a series of steps to improve the tone of the relationship. It’s worth stressing this, as it is all too easy to forget just what a departure it is from the previous government, and the last few years. Moreover, these are necessary steps to effect any and every improvement in the substance of the relationship, up to and including any possibility of ever joining the EU in the future. So what has happened already shouldn’t be dismissed or belittled.

However, it clearly isn’t anything like enough, for two obvious reasons. One is that despite the repeated references to a  ‘re-set’ in the tone of relations, doing so cannot be the one-off event that this word implies. It will be an ongoing process. The other is that improving tone isn’t an end in itself, but a prelude to improvements in the substance of the relationship. Actually, despite their obviousness, I think these are oversimplifications in that, in reality, the relationship between tone and substance is recursive rather than linear, with substance impacting on tone as much as tone impacts upon substance. In particular, trust will have to be rebuilt iteratively, through both actions and words.

What does the government want to do about Brexit?

Beyond these obvious points, there is a much deeper issue. The government has yet to articulate its overall desire, or hope, for the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU. Starmer talked this week of an “ambitious” re-set of relations – but ambitious for what, and why, and how, and when?

So far, before, during, and since the election, these questions have partly, and most vociferously, been answered negatively, in terms of the ‘red lines’ of not joining the single market, a customs union, or the EU itself. By definition, that does not provide a positive template for the future. The more positive answers have been, yes, to ‘re-set’ the tone and, on substance, to pursue a short list of discrete initiatives. The principal items on that list are a security and defence pact, a Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary (SPS) agreement, a mobility agreement for travelling artists, and mutual recognition of professional qualifications.

Even here, there is still remarkably little detail of what the government will seek, and in what time frame it hopes to reach these various agreements. An SPS agreement, in particular, seems to be the main improvement the government anticipates for border frictions, and yet it has remained resolutely ambiguous about what type of agreement it expects to reach. The important differences between types of agreement, both technically and in their political implications, have been discussed on this blog in the past and were recently excellently summarized by trade expert Sam Lowe, the principal one being between ‘equivalence’ agreements and ‘dynamic alignment’ agreements. Labour’s ambiguity cannot persist now it is in power, and it is hard to believe that those within government do not realise that there is actually only one choice.

For the reality is that if there is to be an agreement with the EU it will only be on the basis of some form of ‘dynamic alignment’ (since the EU long ago rejected an equivalence agreement as unworkable). If the UK doesn’t accept this, then there will be no SPS deal, but even if it does, with negotiations expected to begin in early 2025, it will take time. So, in either scenario, what happens to the much-delayed introduction of full import controls? What about the mounting costs of those controls which have been implemented, which businesses are now reporting to be even higher than the previous government had claimed? What about the bio-security risks being taken until such time as there is either an SPS agreement or import controls are fully introduced? Indeed, is the entire ‘2025 UK Border Strategy’ for “the world’s most effective border” still in place?

The absence of strategy

However, the real absence in the government’s approach isn’t the lack of detail on individual initiatives like an SPS agreement. Just as the government’s negative red lines do not offer a ‘template for the future’, neither does its list of wants. What is missing is any strategic framing.

Without such a framing, there is no logic guiding, or explaining, why it is these particular areas, and not others, which are the focus, or how the different initiatives are supposed to fit together. For example, as mentioned in a previous post, the government has already announced there will be legislation to keep the UK aligned with EU product safety rules. That’s an important decision. But why these rules and not others? The same question could be asked of reports that the government may seek to link UK and EU REACH systems for chemicals regulation.

The most likely reading of the government’s approach, and the safety rules policy supports it, is that it will seek, in all areas, the maximum closeness, cooperation and alignment with the EU short of breaking the Labour manifesto commitment to its negative red lines. All of its leading figures were opposed to Brexit, and whilst they no longer speak of it having been a massive mistake it is hard to believe that they do not still think so. At the very least, none of them is an ideological Brexiter, wanting divergence at any price as a matter of principle. Starmer has more or less said that in terms.

Even if this were not so, this government will be aware, just as the last one discovered, that basic practicalities mandate closeness (hence, whatever some of the Tory Brexiters wanted, there was so little divergence from the EU under the Tories). That may have been a distasteful necessity from a Tory point of view, but is likely to be seen as a virtue by Labour ministers and MPs. And the issue here isn’t just one of regulatory alignment, it is that over a whole swathe of economic and geo-political issues the UK’s proximity to the EU, both geographical and ideological, tends to mandate close cooperation. Hence the folly of Brexit, but even post-Brexit the same logic applies.

However, if this is the approach, then it hasn’t been announced as such, and doesn’t seem to be embedded in the government’s own inner workings. This was illustrated by the mess of this month’s mixed messages about whether the government would agree to an EU proposal, which first emerged in April, for a youth mobility scheme (YMS). As also happened at that time, YMS was immediately and falsely framed as being about ‘freedom of movement’, but whereas in April Labour (and the Conservatives) immediately rejected it, this month there was an initial report that the government was considering it. This was immediately contradicted by another unnamed government source, although with careful wording (‘no plans’ etc.) so it hasn’t been definitively ruled out. This week Starmer was similarly careful not to do so, although he did not endorse it either (also this week, exactly the same kind of wording was used in relation to rejoining the Erasmus+ programme).

Of course it is possible to read too much into this episode. It was summer, many politicians and officials were on holiday, and the status and credibility of the sources of the stories was unclear. But, apart from the confusion caused by these contradictory messages, the more significant issue to my mind is the way that the original story did not suggest that the government wanted a YMS, but that it might have to “give ground” on it to the EU in order to secure other agreements, for example on SPS. On that account, even if YMS is ever agreed, it would be grudging and transactional. On the subsequent account, it wasn’t being considered. So on neither account of the government’s position was there any suggestion that YMS would be actively welcomed, but nor, beyond the irrelevant mention of there being no return to freedom of movement, was there any explanation of why it shouldn’t be welcomed.

Joined-up government?

The YMS example is just one illustration of the absence of a coherent post-Brexit strategy. Last November, David Lammy, now the Foreign Secretary, said that relations with the EU would be Britain’s “number one” foreign policy priority. But if that is so, it cannot simply be a matter for the Foreign Office.

For example, whilst foreign policy and trade policy aren’t the same thing, they do overlap, so how does that square with Trade and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds’ threnody to the supposed value of global trade deals in an article last Sunday? It’s true that Reynolds also wrote of the importance of trade with the EU – referring to the usual standard list of measures I mentioned earlier – but such a twin-track approach self-evidently doesn’t imply prioritization.

It may be reasonable enough, given the government’s red lines, to pursue global trade deals, but there’s no need to pretend, as the Brexiters did, that they can be of great importance. So if Labour’s trade policy is to be consistent with its foreign policy, and if it is to be consistent with a re-set from the Tories’ approach, Reynolds would, or should, be positioning improving trade with the EU, even within those red lines, as the priority rather than engaging in boosterism about how wonderful CPTPP accession will be.

Similarly, the government has promised that a coherent industrial strategy will be central to its purpose. That, too, needs to be consistent with post-Brexit policy, with the manufacturing body MakeUK already calling for it to include measures to address the damage Brexit has caused. These measures would go beyond the government’s list of priorities, to encompass, for example, addressing the effect of ‘rules of origin’ in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). So will the government seek a full and formal re-negotiation of the TCA, or at least (given that the EU is unlikely to agree to that for the foreseeable future) identify that as a long-term aspiration? A different, though somewhat related, question is whether the government will seek an expansive approach to the 2026 TCA review, and if so what incentives will it offer the EU to engage in that?

On the specific issue of rules of origin, might the government seek to join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention which, arguably, could help to address that problem? Or, in relation to a different issue, might it seek to re-open the UK’s failed application to re-join the Lugano Convention on cross-border commercial disputes? Or, in relation to yet another issue, with both economic and environmental policy implications, will the government seek to link the UK and EU Emissions Trading Schemes?

The point here is not, primarily, that the government needs to add to the short list of discrete measures or potential agreements, thus making it a long list. Rather, it needs to set out the overall framework and principles – the ‘vision’, to use a rather putrid term – through which the UK will seek to develop its post-Brexit relationship with the EU. That would also entail engaging extensively with all EU members, not just Germany and France, and not as a way of trying to circumvent Brussels, but as part of a coherent ‘neighbourhood’ policy. Equally, the government needs to connect this policy with its other intended reset with the devolved administration and regional Mayors.

Developing such a post-Brexit strategy would not, and could not, mean a huge, single, ‘Big Bang’ negotiation with the EU, or a quick process of delivery. The avenues for change will be the multiple ones of the different agreements and forums created by the complex architecture of Brexit. But it would mean that in each of those avenues the UK would be working towards an overall purpose, rather than piecemeal haggling and horse-trading.

The case for an explicit post-Brexit strategy

Crucially, such a strategy needs to be openly articulated. At the moment, whilst the implicit logic of the government’s approach is, at least arguably, one of maximalism, it certainly hasn’t been explicit about that. Its reticence presumably derives from its continuing fear of the pro-Brexit media and the possible effects on Labour leave voters, allied with the fear of being seen to be ‘banging on about Brexit’ and out of step with voters’ priorities.

It’s easy to understand those fears, when even Starmer’s trip to Germany this week led to accusations that he was reversing Brexit, as if leaving the EU had meant never talking to any of its member states ever again. Actually, a good response to such accusations would be to quote the Vote Leave campaign promise that Brexit would mean “we have better relations with our European friends”.

At all events, the government’s idea seems to be to pursue post-Brexit policy by stealth, through various boring technical adjustments, whilst in public talking about ‘tough negotiations’ with the EU over more high-profile issues. But if this is so it will create several major problems, as well as miss some major opportunities.

Firstly, it will make it much more difficult to maintain the attempt to improve the tone of the relationship, and to develop substantive improvements to it. This goes back to my point about the recursive relationship between tone and substance. An interesting post by Pascal Lth on the Europe Tomorrow substack argues that the defensiveness with which Labour responded to the YMS proposal was a “strategic mistake” not least because the UK will probably end up agreeing to it anyway, and therefore squandered “an ideal opportunity to rebuild trust through an agreement on a proposal of mutual interest”.

I think his more general point is, and if it isn’t then it’s the point I’m trying to make here, that a new and trusting tone in the relationship can only be effective if it is publicly acknowledged. Only that can shift the relationship from one of transactional negotiation aimed at reconciling divergent interests to one of shared partnership based on the recognition of mutual interests. That won’t happen if the government talks from one side of the mouth to the EU and from the other to the British public.

Secondly, if there is no publicly articulated strategy for a maximalist relationship, there will be little possibility of building a domestic political and public consensus for such an approach. Any cooperation that happens will have been achieved by stealth, and played out in public in terms of ‘winning battles’ or ‘making concessions’. That relates to the previous point, as if that is what happened then it will do little to build trust with the EU and, in particular, to build trust that whatever is agreed with the EU is durably rooted in public consent. That failure will in turn limit the depth and extent of what the EU is likely to agree.

To put this another way, a post-Brexit ‘re-set’ is needed not just in the tone of UK-EU relations but in the tone of domestic discussion of those relations. Of course, that will encounter the hostility of the Tories and much of the media. But if it is to be done, it would be better started whilst the Tories are distracted and in disarray, and when the government’s newness gives it the most power it will ever have to influence and defy the media. In any case, as is already happening, every move Labour make in this domain will be denounced by Brexiters as betrayal of Brexit, so the government might as well be clear about its strategy and try to build support for it. Moreover, beyond politics, such strategic clarity would enable businesses and other organizations to understand and anticipate developments since the broad direction of travel would be known.

Thirdly, there is a party management, and ultimately electoral, issue. Many within the parliamentary party, the party membership, and the Labour movement more widely, not to mention many Labour voters, are deeply disappointed by the timidity and limitations of the government’s approach. That would apply even if that approach really is the maximalist one I’ve discussed here because, of course, for many the fundamental objection is to the red lines which define the ceiling of its ambitions. Even so, if those ambitions were publicly and unashamedly proclaimed as the government’s strategy it would at least offer something to all those who want much more, and a reassurance that, indeed, the maximum within those red lines would be done.

Again, this can be illustrated by the YMS proposal. Just as Labour’s reaction to that squandered an opportunity with the EU over something that will quite probably be agreed anyway, so too did it squander an opportunity to give Labour’s pro-EU supporters some reason to have faith in the new government’s approach. Conversely, it gave them a reason to feel highly pessimistic. Whereas if, on this and other issues, the government openly pursued a maximalist strategy, building trust and cooperation with the EU and domestic public support for that, it would provide the necessary basis for their hopes eventually to be realised. In that sense Labour’s maximalism would meet the minimum threshold of rejoiners. There would always be a tension, but not an unmanageable one.

Silence is not a strategy

Brexit nerds may recognize this sub-title, as it was the title of a very early post on this blog, in September 2016, and was taken from the sub-title of an Institute for Government report written at that time, when we were still in the ‘Brexit means Brexit’ period. I’m stressing this because there has been a sense ever since the referendum, and perhaps even more since we left the EU, that Brexit is something best not talked about. Former diplomat Simon Pease, writing in East Anglia Bylines last week, made this exact point with great eloquence.

That has certainly been the case for the Labour Party under Starmer, with any kind of post-Brexit policy discussion having to be virtually prised out of him. That eventually happened in July 2022 and, remarkably, his proposals then were almost identical to Labour’s present policy, and, as I discussed at the time, contained exactly the same ambiguities. At that time, I gave a qualified welcome to it, but it’s depressing that there’s been literally no development of it at all, at least in public.

The general political silence continued during the recent election, though some party manifestos, most notably that of the SNP, broke it. The question now is how much longer can it persist? Brexit surely can’t be a permanently taboo topic. The new government has an opportunity and, more than that, a need to break it, by publicly articulating its post-Brexit strategy. It doesn’t even have to be called that. If the ‘B’ word is still so toxic, just call it a Continental or a Regional strategy.

Will it happen? Given the newness of the government it’s still possible, but Starmer had the perfect moment to do so in his Rose Garden speech this week. He could, with justification, have rolled dealing with the legacy of Brexit in with the other ‘tough choices’ which he talked about making in order to clear up what his government has inherited from the Tories, but chose not to. So for now, the country will continue to muddle along, despite all the damage, hoping that, somehow, if we don’t talk about it, Brexit will resolve itself or simply go away as an issue. It’s not a strategy, except in the perverse sense of a strategy of having no strategy.

Correction (made 31/8/24, 11.32): The 'calendar time' the government has been in power is of course (approximately) two months, not three as stated in the post! 

Many thanks once again for all the feedback, much of it extremely kind, in response to my question about the future format of this blog. I’ve decided to experiment with moving to a fortnightly post, still on a Friday morning. I will also write additional posts if anything important happens between the regular ones. Depending how that goes, I may change approach but for now it will be fortnightly. Thus the next post will be on Friday 13 September.