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.
Showing posts with label Leadership. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leadership. Show all posts
Friday, 15 May 2026
Friday, 20 February 2026
Starmer’s real leadership crisis
In my previous post I advocated ‘counting to a hundred’ as an antidote to the hyper-frenetic news cycle. That advice would have served the media well during the subsequent frenzy of speculation about the imminent demise of Keir Starmer’s premiership. As the economics (and politics) writer Simon Nixon described it, this episode was a “breathless media circus [ending] in an embarrassing anti-climax” which raised “some awkward questions about the nature of British political journalism”.
It is certainly true that the media are addicted to political drama and spectacle, gleefully recycling rumours and anonymous briefings, and calling it reporting. It’s an approach embodied by the giggling fatuity of the BBC’s Political Editor, Chris Mason, treating politics as a cross between a spectator sport and a game show. Mason isn’t the only offender, of course, but he is one of the worst and, because of the status of the BBC, probably the most balefully influential. At all events, the consequence of such an approach is negative in a double sense. It saturates the airwaves with silliness, and it denudes political discourse of serious analysis, in this case of the real leadership crisis faced by Starmer.
The truncation of the political leadership lifecycle
Nevertheless, the vacuity of political journalism is only one component of a wider shift in political culture, a shift within which the timescale of political leadership has become much more truncated even as, and perhaps because, British politics has become more ‘presidential’. A few decades ago, Harold Wilson remained leader of the Labour Party despite losing the 1970 election and went on to become Prime Minister again. As Labour’s Opposition leader, Neil Kinnock lost both the 1987 and 1992 elections before stepping down. Since those days, losing an election has become an automatic trigger for resignation of the leader of the governing or main opposition party [1].
Alongside that there has been an upsurge of resignations whilst in office. These, too, happened in the past, but were generally occasioned by ill-health (if sometimes only as a pretext), as in the cases of Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson. More recently, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair resigned between elections for (very different) political reasons, but in both cases after long periods in office. It is only since 2016 that there has been a rapid churn of serving Prime Ministers, with David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all resigning between elections, and it is undeniable that this was largely a direct consequence of Brexit. Part of Starmer’s pitch to the electorate in 2024 was to end that roiling instability, but perhaps it is now embedded that every political crisis now becomes a leadership crisis. If so, that is yet another piece of Brexit damage.
A Starmer ‘reset’?
Of course this is not, in itself, a sufficient explanation of the travails of Starmer’s leadership, a subject I will return to when, as seems highly probable, he does eventually have to resign. For now, one interpretation of last week’s leadership ‘crisis’, and the defenestration of Morgan McSweeney it led to, is that it will both require and allow Starmer and his administration to be ‘bolder’ in disowning Brexit and building closer relations with the EU. That interpretation is given some plausibility by Starmer’s statement at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years any more”. It may also explain why last week Rachel Reeves explicitly accepted that “economic gravity is reality” (i.e. that geographical proximity is a key driver of trade) and that this mandates closer relationships and regulatory alignment with the EU.
Both statements were, in their way, striking. However, it is far from clear that they mean anything of substance in terms of policy or, which is really the same point in a different way, that they mark any change from the existing Labour ‘reset’ policy. If they have any significance, it might be as waymarkers in the glacial progress towards a time when Brexit is unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly, in the way that happened with the once highly divisive issues of ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’.
However, it should not be assumed that this progression is automatic and there are many reasons to doubt that it will be. It has become commonplace to cite the figure that 56% of the British public think that leaving the EU was a mistake, but it is equally remarkable that 31% think that it was right (and that 13% don’t know). That is very far from Brexit being ‘unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly’. Moreover, in an excellent post on his Substack newsletter discussing Brexit as a “collective folly”, the author and journalist Matt Carr points out that “a credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.”
A new Lowe
Carr is referring, obviously, to Nigel Farage and the Reform party, which continues to lead in all recent opinion polls, with 24% to 32% of the public supporting it. As always, it bears saying that, in the British electoral system, and with a fragmented vote for the other parties, this means that a Reform or Reform-led government is a real possibility. But, even if this does not come to pass, the important point is that a really quite sizeable minority of the population are committed to what I call Brexitism. Not only that, but there are multiple signs that for some this is taking increasingly extreme forms.
This extremism was underscored by last weekend’s launch of the ‘Restore Britain’ party by the MP Rupert Lowe (initially elected for Reform but thrown out of the party after a row with Nigel Farage). Lowe created Restore Britain last year as a ‘political movement’, but its transformation into a party seems to be an attempt to draw together various other fringe parties and groups, including Ben Habib’s Advance UK, another splinter group from Reform, which is supported by Tommy Robinson (despite the report linked to, it is not entirely clear whether he has actually joined). Lowe’s new party has already been endorsed by Elon Musk.
This is an important development, since Restore Britain is, by any definition, a far-right party, and has already attracted enthusiastic support from those who are openly fascists. Lowe, despite his all too obvious lack of charisma, and despite his attempt to project a cuddly image, has become their figurehead because of the viciousness of his rhetoric. Indeed, his rallying call for the new party (warning: link to X) has a decidedly fascistic tang to it: “we will only accept those who share our values, and understand the painful decisions that will need to be taken. People know what we stand for. If you don't have the stomach for it, don't bother.”
The roots of the launch of this new party go back some time, and I wrote about them in detail about a year ago, also making the prediction that “the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years”. From that point of view, one consequence of Restore Britain may well be to siphon off small but potentially decisive numbers of Reform’s core vote, making a Farage election victory less likely. It has certainly already led to a vitriolic exchange between Lowe and Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, of which perhaps the most amusingly ironic feature is the ex-professor bemoaning (warning: X again) that Restore’s “ecosystem is riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists”, prompting the gamey response from Lowe than Goodwin is “full of turquoise s***” and that Reform’s “deportation policy is p***-weak” [2].
But, piquant as it may be for observers to see these two deeply unpleasant people, and their respective parties, squaring up to each other, that should not blind us to the fact that, whatever happens electorally, something profoundly dangerous is unfolding.
The far-right’s ‘cultural turn’
For what is at stake is not just the working out of the incipient splits in Reform that I referred to a year ago. The period since then has seen an ever-more overt ethno-nationalism, along with literal street violence outside asylum hotels and symbolic street violence of the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign (discussed in more detail in a previous post). At the same time, the far-right has become increasingly vociferous not just about immigration but about the supposed cultural or civilizational ‘erasure’ of the English and/or British, flames which have been fanned from across the Atlantic by Trump and his administration as well as by Musk.
One reason this is a significant shift is because it moves the terrain away from immigration levels, which have been falling for some time, to the idea of cultural – for which read racial – ‘purification’ and, in policy terms, to mass deportations which, indeed, is Lowe’s principal policy offering. But this has not arisen in a vacuum. It is both the cause and consequence of the normalization of, inter alia, the claim that multi-culturalism has failed, the claim that there is or has been ‘uncontrolled immigration’, the conflation of immigration with asylum-seeking, and the idea that Britain is being ‘invaded’ by ‘young men of fighting age’.
It is within that context that supposedly respectable people like the Brexit-backing tax exile billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, feel able to come out with noxious comments about Britain “being colonised by immigrants”, notwithstanding his subsequent mealy-mouthed non-apology, and for others to insist that, even if the language used was ‘unfortunate’, he “has a point”.
Labour’s complicity
That context has not simply been created by far-right social media crusaders. It has been aided and abetted by the Labour government, most egregiously by Starmer himself, in his disgraceful ‘island of strangers’ speech, and by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s hard-line anti-immigration policies. One feature of the latter which is of particular importance is the proposal to change the rules governing current immigrants, in terms of the period before indefinite leave to remain can be sought, which, unlike measures to curtail new immigration, is at least the country cousin of deportation in the sense of having a retrospective effect (which, as I discussed in a post last October, crosses a very significant line).
Here, too, Starmer’s recent leadership crisis may herald a shift. He was quick to criticise Ratcliffe’s comments, which perhaps would not have happened had McSweeney still been in post. And it may well be that the crisis will give fresh impetus to internal Labour opposition to the Mahmood proposals. Even so, it is hard to envisage the present government decisively and wholeheartedly challenging the anti-immigration narrative. Yet, ironically and predictably, net migration looks on course to become negative this year (and, despite the claims of Farage and others, this is not because of an exodus of British people).
The effects are already being felt by businesses, public services, and universities. The latter are particularly affected by another damaging conflation, that of overseas students and immigrants, and, in another irony, the impact is already being felt in ‘left-behind’ areas like Southend, with the closure of a campus of Essex University which has experienced a 52% fall in international student enrollment. With that goes not just job losses in universities, but all the knock-on effects on local businesses. Britain is self-immolating one of its greatest economic, cultural and soft power assets, and its economy generally, in the name of controlling immigration and yet, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, two-thirds of the public believe that immigration is still rising.
The challenge for Starmer
From this perspective, it is simply wrong for Starmer to say that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”. Even if by that he meant only that Britain was open to international, and especially European, partnerships than it had been under the Tories, and especially in the security and defence domain, it still does not really make sense since, as I’ve pointed out many times before, Britain cannot be a reliable member of such partnerships whilst Brexitism flourishes domestically. And Brexitism will continue to flourish whilst what would otherwise be a very small minority of ethno-nationalists are able to frame the terms in which immigration is discussed and immigration policy is enacted, or at the very least to pull the framing of those terms towards their own.
This is the real crisis for Starmer’s leadership (or at least one aspect of it), rather than the superficial drivel trotted out by political journalists like Chris Mason. It is a challenge to him not simply personally but philosophically, in that it entails a shift from what we might call the ‘McSweeney’ approach of ‘responding to voters’ demands’ to the more profound sense of leadership as the task of shaping, and in the process sometimes challenging, those demands. With McSweeney gone, Starmer has a chance, perhaps his final chance, to rise to that challenge. Whether he has either the personal or philosophical capacity to do so is doubtful.
Appendix
It doesn’t fit into the focus of this post, but I do want to record yet another tombstone in the graveyard of Brexit hubris. This week the Financial Times reported (£) that the government has “quietly shelved” the programme to build a high-tech frictionless border following years of delays and spiralling costs. This was the project announced in December 2020, in the final days of the transition period, which was to create (of course) “the most effective border in the world by 2025” and was explicitly claimed as a Brexit benefit giving a “once in a lifetime opportunity to transform our borders” (Michael Gove) now that Britain was “free to seize the opportunities that come with being a sovereign nation once again” (Priti Patel). I’ve discussed this project several times in the past, for example in May 2022 when I expressed pessimism about its costs, delivery time and functionality. That pessimism turned out to be optimistic in assuming that it would, eventually, be implemented.
It’s worth recalling this not just as yet another Brexit failure but also because for years during the Article 50 negotiations Brexiters insisted that it would be perfectly possible, even easy, to create ‘alternative arrangements’ for a high-tech frictionless border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This, they claimed, made the Northern Ireland Protocol unnecessary, and a ruse designed by Dublin and Brussels to thwart Brexit. The quiet death of “the most effective border in the world” is a fresh reminder of just how dishonest and ignorant all these claims were.
Notes
[1] Theresa May isn’t really an exception in that, whilst she did not win the 2017 election outright, she did not lose it per se and was still able to form a government with DUP support.
[2] As ever, my suppression of ‘rude’ words isn’t due to any prissiness on my part, but because including them can lead to problems in sharing/ linking to this blog.
It is certainly true that the media are addicted to political drama and spectacle, gleefully recycling rumours and anonymous briefings, and calling it reporting. It’s an approach embodied by the giggling fatuity of the BBC’s Political Editor, Chris Mason, treating politics as a cross between a spectator sport and a game show. Mason isn’t the only offender, of course, but he is one of the worst and, because of the status of the BBC, probably the most balefully influential. At all events, the consequence of such an approach is negative in a double sense. It saturates the airwaves with silliness, and it denudes political discourse of serious analysis, in this case of the real leadership crisis faced by Starmer.
The truncation of the political leadership lifecycle
Nevertheless, the vacuity of political journalism is only one component of a wider shift in political culture, a shift within which the timescale of political leadership has become much more truncated even as, and perhaps because, British politics has become more ‘presidential’. A few decades ago, Harold Wilson remained leader of the Labour Party despite losing the 1970 election and went on to become Prime Minister again. As Labour’s Opposition leader, Neil Kinnock lost both the 1987 and 1992 elections before stepping down. Since those days, losing an election has become an automatic trigger for resignation of the leader of the governing or main opposition party [1].
Alongside that there has been an upsurge of resignations whilst in office. These, too, happened in the past, but were generally occasioned by ill-health (if sometimes only as a pretext), as in the cases of Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson. More recently, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair resigned between elections for (very different) political reasons, but in both cases after long periods in office. It is only since 2016 that there has been a rapid churn of serving Prime Ministers, with David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all resigning between elections, and it is undeniable that this was largely a direct consequence of Brexit. Part of Starmer’s pitch to the electorate in 2024 was to end that roiling instability, but perhaps it is now embedded that every political crisis now becomes a leadership crisis. If so, that is yet another piece of Brexit damage.
A Starmer ‘reset’?
Of course this is not, in itself, a sufficient explanation of the travails of Starmer’s leadership, a subject I will return to when, as seems highly probable, he does eventually have to resign. For now, one interpretation of last week’s leadership ‘crisis’, and the defenestration of Morgan McSweeney it led to, is that it will both require and allow Starmer and his administration to be ‘bolder’ in disowning Brexit and building closer relations with the EU. That interpretation is given some plausibility by Starmer’s statement at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years any more”. It may also explain why last week Rachel Reeves explicitly accepted that “economic gravity is reality” (i.e. that geographical proximity is a key driver of trade) and that this mandates closer relationships and regulatory alignment with the EU.
Both statements were, in their way, striking. However, it is far from clear that they mean anything of substance in terms of policy or, which is really the same point in a different way, that they mark any change from the existing Labour ‘reset’ policy. If they have any significance, it might be as waymarkers in the glacial progress towards a time when Brexit is unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly, in the way that happened with the once highly divisive issues of ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’.
However, it should not be assumed that this progression is automatic and there are many reasons to doubt that it will be. It has become commonplace to cite the figure that 56% of the British public think that leaving the EU was a mistake, but it is equally remarkable that 31% think that it was right (and that 13% don’t know). That is very far from Brexit being ‘unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly’. Moreover, in an excellent post on his Substack newsletter discussing Brexit as a “collective folly”, the author and journalist Matt Carr points out that “a credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.”
A new Lowe
Carr is referring, obviously, to Nigel Farage and the Reform party, which continues to lead in all recent opinion polls, with 24% to 32% of the public supporting it. As always, it bears saying that, in the British electoral system, and with a fragmented vote for the other parties, this means that a Reform or Reform-led government is a real possibility. But, even if this does not come to pass, the important point is that a really quite sizeable minority of the population are committed to what I call Brexitism. Not only that, but there are multiple signs that for some this is taking increasingly extreme forms.
This extremism was underscored by last weekend’s launch of the ‘Restore Britain’ party by the MP Rupert Lowe (initially elected for Reform but thrown out of the party after a row with Nigel Farage). Lowe created Restore Britain last year as a ‘political movement’, but its transformation into a party seems to be an attempt to draw together various other fringe parties and groups, including Ben Habib’s Advance UK, another splinter group from Reform, which is supported by Tommy Robinson (despite the report linked to, it is not entirely clear whether he has actually joined). Lowe’s new party has already been endorsed by Elon Musk.
This is an important development, since Restore Britain is, by any definition, a far-right party, and has already attracted enthusiastic support from those who are openly fascists. Lowe, despite his all too obvious lack of charisma, and despite his attempt to project a cuddly image, has become their figurehead because of the viciousness of his rhetoric. Indeed, his rallying call for the new party (warning: link to X) has a decidedly fascistic tang to it: “we will only accept those who share our values, and understand the painful decisions that will need to be taken. People know what we stand for. If you don't have the stomach for it, don't bother.”
The roots of the launch of this new party go back some time, and I wrote about them in detail about a year ago, also making the prediction that “the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years”. From that point of view, one consequence of Restore Britain may well be to siphon off small but potentially decisive numbers of Reform’s core vote, making a Farage election victory less likely. It has certainly already led to a vitriolic exchange between Lowe and Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, of which perhaps the most amusingly ironic feature is the ex-professor bemoaning (warning: X again) that Restore’s “ecosystem is riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists”, prompting the gamey response from Lowe than Goodwin is “full of turquoise s***” and that Reform’s “deportation policy is p***-weak” [2].
But, piquant as it may be for observers to see these two deeply unpleasant people, and their respective parties, squaring up to each other, that should not blind us to the fact that, whatever happens electorally, something profoundly dangerous is unfolding.
The far-right’s ‘cultural turn’
For what is at stake is not just the working out of the incipient splits in Reform that I referred to a year ago. The period since then has seen an ever-more overt ethno-nationalism, along with literal street violence outside asylum hotels and symbolic street violence of the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign (discussed in more detail in a previous post). At the same time, the far-right has become increasingly vociferous not just about immigration but about the supposed cultural or civilizational ‘erasure’ of the English and/or British, flames which have been fanned from across the Atlantic by Trump and his administration as well as by Musk.
One reason this is a significant shift is because it moves the terrain away from immigration levels, which have been falling for some time, to the idea of cultural – for which read racial – ‘purification’ and, in policy terms, to mass deportations which, indeed, is Lowe’s principal policy offering. But this has not arisen in a vacuum. It is both the cause and consequence of the normalization of, inter alia, the claim that multi-culturalism has failed, the claim that there is or has been ‘uncontrolled immigration’, the conflation of immigration with asylum-seeking, and the idea that Britain is being ‘invaded’ by ‘young men of fighting age’.
It is within that context that supposedly respectable people like the Brexit-backing tax exile billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, feel able to come out with noxious comments about Britain “being colonised by immigrants”, notwithstanding his subsequent mealy-mouthed non-apology, and for others to insist that, even if the language used was ‘unfortunate’, he “has a point”.
Labour’s complicity
That context has not simply been created by far-right social media crusaders. It has been aided and abetted by the Labour government, most egregiously by Starmer himself, in his disgraceful ‘island of strangers’ speech, and by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s hard-line anti-immigration policies. One feature of the latter which is of particular importance is the proposal to change the rules governing current immigrants, in terms of the period before indefinite leave to remain can be sought, which, unlike measures to curtail new immigration, is at least the country cousin of deportation in the sense of having a retrospective effect (which, as I discussed in a post last October, crosses a very significant line).
Here, too, Starmer’s recent leadership crisis may herald a shift. He was quick to criticise Ratcliffe’s comments, which perhaps would not have happened had McSweeney still been in post. And it may well be that the crisis will give fresh impetus to internal Labour opposition to the Mahmood proposals. Even so, it is hard to envisage the present government decisively and wholeheartedly challenging the anti-immigration narrative. Yet, ironically and predictably, net migration looks on course to become negative this year (and, despite the claims of Farage and others, this is not because of an exodus of British people).
The effects are already being felt by businesses, public services, and universities. The latter are particularly affected by another damaging conflation, that of overseas students and immigrants, and, in another irony, the impact is already being felt in ‘left-behind’ areas like Southend, with the closure of a campus of Essex University which has experienced a 52% fall in international student enrollment. With that goes not just job losses in universities, but all the knock-on effects on local businesses. Britain is self-immolating one of its greatest economic, cultural and soft power assets, and its economy generally, in the name of controlling immigration and yet, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, two-thirds of the public believe that immigration is still rising.
The challenge for Starmer
From this perspective, it is simply wrong for Starmer to say that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”. Even if by that he meant only that Britain was open to international, and especially European, partnerships than it had been under the Tories, and especially in the security and defence domain, it still does not really make sense since, as I’ve pointed out many times before, Britain cannot be a reliable member of such partnerships whilst Brexitism flourishes domestically. And Brexitism will continue to flourish whilst what would otherwise be a very small minority of ethno-nationalists are able to frame the terms in which immigration is discussed and immigration policy is enacted, or at the very least to pull the framing of those terms towards their own.
This is the real crisis for Starmer’s leadership (or at least one aspect of it), rather than the superficial drivel trotted out by political journalists like Chris Mason. It is a challenge to him not simply personally but philosophically, in that it entails a shift from what we might call the ‘McSweeney’ approach of ‘responding to voters’ demands’ to the more profound sense of leadership as the task of shaping, and in the process sometimes challenging, those demands. With McSweeney gone, Starmer has a chance, perhaps his final chance, to rise to that challenge. Whether he has either the personal or philosophical capacity to do so is doubtful.
Appendix
It doesn’t fit into the focus of this post, but I do want to record yet another tombstone in the graveyard of Brexit hubris. This week the Financial Times reported (£) that the government has “quietly shelved” the programme to build a high-tech frictionless border following years of delays and spiralling costs. This was the project announced in December 2020, in the final days of the transition period, which was to create (of course) “the most effective border in the world by 2025” and was explicitly claimed as a Brexit benefit giving a “once in a lifetime opportunity to transform our borders” (Michael Gove) now that Britain was “free to seize the opportunities that come with being a sovereign nation once again” (Priti Patel). I’ve discussed this project several times in the past, for example in May 2022 when I expressed pessimism about its costs, delivery time and functionality. That pessimism turned out to be optimistic in assuming that it would, eventually, be implemented.
It’s worth recalling this not just as yet another Brexit failure but also because for years during the Article 50 negotiations Brexiters insisted that it would be perfectly possible, even easy, to create ‘alternative arrangements’ for a high-tech frictionless border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This, they claimed, made the Northern Ireland Protocol unnecessary, and a ruse designed by Dublin and Brussels to thwart Brexit. The quiet death of “the most effective border in the world” is a fresh reminder of just how dishonest and ignorant all these claims were.
Notes
[1] Theresa May isn’t really an exception in that, whilst she did not win the 2017 election outright, she did not lose it per se and was still able to form a government with DUP support.
[2] As ever, my suppression of ‘rude’ words isn’t due to any prissiness on my part, but because including them can lead to problems in sharing/ linking to this blog.
Friday, 21 October 2022
Total disarray
It’s becoming hard to write this blog without being repetitious and, in being repetitious, introducing a distasteful ‘I told you so’ tone. But distasteful as it may be, the deepening chaos of the fortnight since I last posted, which saw Kwasi Kwarteng sacked, the government’s economic policy abandoned, Suella Braverman resign, and culminated in the resignation yesterday of Liz Truss herself, only underlines the comment I made in August. At that time, with Truss’s leadership victory expected but not yet announced, I wrote that:
“When this strange summer ends, it will not herald the end of the period of political instability any more than the events and crises of the summer are peculiar to the season. This isn’t a holiday that has gone horribly wrong, it’s the latest instalment of a reality there is no taking a break from. That political instability began with the 2016 referendum. Having a new Prime Minister is not going to finish, but is a part of, this post-2016 story”.
That’s not, however, to pretend that I predicted just how quickly things would unravel, to the extent that in my most recent post, following the ‘mini-budget’, I was writing that the wheels had come off the Brexit bus. It’s that last point that needs to be emphasised as forcefully as possible, in order to understand both the crisis happening now and the fact that the instability will continue when Truss is replaced next week. This is not just any old political and economic crisis, and it is not just the political and economic crisis of an unusually inept and extreme Prime Minister. It is centrally and unavoidably the latest instalment of the rolling political and economic crisis that started with the referendum.
This isn’t just a crisis, it’s a Brexit crisis
It's a point made with great clarity by Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, who wrote that “when the textbooks of the future come to the chapter we are living through, in the autumn of 2022, they will start with the summer of 2016: Brexit and the specific delusion that drove it”, and concluded (this was a week before she actually resigned) that Truss “is finished, a hollow husk of a prime minister. But this is bigger than that. The Brexit bubble has burst”. In a similar vein, writing in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis argued that Truss “has failed because she is a born-again Brexiter, and had already swallowed the lie that reality can be bent to ideology”. Nor is it just British commentators who can see it. “The roots of Truss’s budgetary bedlam lie deep in the soil of Brexit”, said Ireland’s former Ambassador to the UK, Bobby McDonagh, in the Irish Times and it is a view very widely shared in the foreign press.
It won’t fly for Brexiters such as Sherelle Jacobs of the Telegraph (£), to denounce as “bunkum” put about by “diehard proponents of Project Fear” the analysis that Truss’s “foolhardy mistakes trace back to the hubris that Brexit unleashed”. For, on the one hand, her fellow-columnist Jeremy Warner opines (£) that current events show that “Project Fear was right all along” whilst, on the other, Allister Heath, Editor of the Sunday version of her paper, urged Truss to “hold her nerve” (£) in pursuit of those very mistakes so as “to deliver a Brexit that actually works” (£) and, bizarrely, John Longworth insists that Truss was brought down by “anti-Brexiteers” (£) as part of their ongoing attempt to derail the Brexit ‘revolution’. Either way, then, Brexit and the mini-budget that ended Truss’s premiership are inseparable.
So, too, are they inseparable in the mind of another Telegraph columnist (£), Ross Clark, but in a different way. In his view Britain has “blown Brexit” by failing “to create a more dynamic, opportunity economy”. However, Truss and Kwarteng had “correctly diagnosed” the problems and their mistake was “unleashing a massive welfare programme” (meaning the energy support package, the one part of the mini-budget that markets were not concerned about), whilst Braverman’s frenzied preoccupation with immigration was misplaced as the real danger is a brain drain from the failed experiment of Brexit.
It must be strange indeed to inhabit the increasingly unhinged world of the Brexiters’ house journal. Another of its columnists, Tim Stanley (£), seems to think that the financial markets have exacted the “revenge of the remainers”, with Truss the “victim of a coup”, and that “hitherto the argument against Brexit was emotional, but watch as it becomes technocratic” with “the grey men” saying it is “unaffordable”. It’s a bizarre about-turn, given that for years we have been told that the genius of the leave campaign was to appeal to emotions, and that remainers have always been dull technocrats, preoccupied with affordability.
Equally contradictory is the way that, whilst Stanley and others are weeping about the Establishment victimizing poor little Truss, the paper also reports (£) that Nigel Farage and those on the right of the Tory Party have been fulminating that the real problem was with Truss herself for being in the process of betraying Brexit, and Braverman’s resignation letter, in its comments about failure to honour commitments to reduce net migration, gestures to the same critique, itself a derivative of the disjuncture between different threads of the Brexit coalition and their different priorities.
Counting the cost of Brexit’s fatal flaw
There’s not much point in trying to make sense of all this for the very good reason that none of it makes any sense, certainly not in combination. It is the last gasp nonsense of people who know their Brexit project has failed and are flailing around to make sense of why, and to decide who to blame (they, themselves, being invariably exempted). Perhaps the most striking example, trivial in itself and yet, somehow, also highly revealing, is a comment from Tim Stanley, not in his column but in a tweet. Bemoaning again the power of ‘the markets’ to make or break government policy he plaintively remarked that this ran counter to what Brexit was all about, namely: “Sovereignty. Democracy. Whatever the people want they get”.
For all that it is, indeed, just a tweet from a minor columnist, it perfectly captures the fatal flaw that runs all the way through Brexit, and through populism generally. It encapsulates the hopelessly naïve idea of sovereignty and all the myriad of ways that the ‘will of the people’ could supposedly trump any reality, whilst explaining how all those who pointed to reality could be reviled as ‘enemies of the people’. It is at once desperately sad and yet infuriatingly stupid. Like the realization that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, it would be poignant coming from a child and yet astonishing from a mature adult who writes for a national newspaper.
Sad and stupid as it may be, what is unforgiveable is the now indisputable damage that has resulted, with all of us paying the price for such delusions. The economic damage, especially, was clinically dissected in a truly excellent Financial Times video this week, laying bare impacts on trade, investment, inflation, growth, tax revenues, labour markets, regulatory duplication and more, and explaining that these can be separated from those of Covid and Ukraine. It also identifies many of the core issues, also discussed for years on this blog, of the dishonesty with which Brexit was sold and the incompetence with which it was executed, up to and including the mini-budget.
As the video explains, it’s this budget which can be seen as the point at which what many, including me, have called the ‘slow puncture’ of Brexit economic damage became something close to a tyre blow-out, albeit that doesn’t mean that the air has stopped leaking from the other tyres (for which, see some truly shocking recent additions to Yorkshire Bylines’ meticulously curated ‘Davis Downside Dossier’). And this is only to speak of the ongoing economic effects, without beginning to consider all the other harms. In any case, these harms are interlinked, for even if the mini-budget wasn’t an economic blow-out, it most certainly caused the political blow-out of Truss’s regime which in turn further exacerbated the damage to the UK’s global reputation as a politically stable country.
Overall, then, the current political chaos and economic turmoil have served to crystallize what has actually been under way for a while. Having won the 2016 vote for Brexit, the Brexiters have comprehensively lost the battle for the post-Brexit narrative which began at the end of the transition period, when the reality of being outside the EU began. There have been ebbs and flows in that battle but, although there will continue to be skirmishes, it is now effectively over. There is very little prospect that the majority public verdict that Brexit was a mistake will ever now change. If anything, that view is likely to solidify and grow. There is never going to be – indeed there never has been – any great national celebration of Brexit liberation. Hence all the weird contortions of so many pro-Brexit commentators and the embarrassed silence of others.
Breaking the silence?
Yet as the FT team – which has been consistently superb in its Brexit journalism since 2016 – also points out in its video, there remains a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about Brexit that extends beyond that of once garrulous commentators to encompass pretty much the whole of the Tory and Labour parties. Again, there have been countless posts on this blog about that ‘taboo’. The key question, then, is whether that will continue. Or, more likely, the key question is how and by whom it will be broken since it would seem absurd, and probably untenable, for the public narrative to have settled without the political discourse of the main parties responding to that.
It is highly unlikely that the current Tory Party will break the taboo as it enters yet another leadership contest. On past evidence, the realities of Brexit will scarcely be acknowledged and certainly it is almost impossible to imagine that any candidate doing so would have the remotest chance of winning. It would not only lose them the leadership, it would peel off swathes of the party’s electoral support to a rejuvenated Farageist outfit, such as is already being touted, and make its already bitter divisions even more sulphurous. The only real doubt now is whether Truss’s successor will be a madly extremist Brexiter or a semi-sane one.
So it is really a question of what the Labour Party will do. Of course the reasons for its near-silence are well-known. In some ways the current crisis encourages that silence to continue. For one thing, it makes it easy for Labour to avoid ‘rocking the boat’ by re-introducing the issue of Brexit to the fore of discussion: why do so when the Tories are imploding anyway? Might doing so actually give them a lifeline? For another – or perhaps it is a version of the same thing – it may be more effective to depict the crisis as a total failure of the Tory government, and not link that to Brexit specifically.
But there are several good counter-arguments, and they need to be thought about urgently because there must now be every possibility that there will be a General Election in short order. One such argument is precisely that a key part of the Brexit disaster is that of reality-denial. Until that denial is ended, there is no solution to Brexit or to the ‘Brexitification’ of politics. Another is, indeed, about the markets. Many commentators see in the collapse of the mini-budget a terrible trap for a future Labour government (in fact that was the point to which Tim Stanley made his sad little response): in rejecting growing government debt, it leaves ‘austerity’ as the only policy acceptable to markets. Thus if the Tory government falls then a Labour government would be forced to make massive spending cuts.
I am certain that this is to misunderstand what the market reaction to the mini-budget meant. That reaction was to the fact that Truss and Kwarteng’s plan was based on the total nonsense that reducing taxes would deliver growth and make government debt sustainable. It doesn’t mean that borrowing to fund public spending in ways that would plausibly promote growth would meet the same fate. Such spending would include infrastructure projects, environmentally sustainable and energy-saving projects, and significantly enhanced education spending. In particular, one of the most effective ways to boost economic growth, and to reduce regional inequalities, would be to create many new universities (it’s also a good way of growing the future Labour electoral base).
Even so, this alone would probably not be convincing enough without addressing Brexit. That is for two reasons. One is that, as I suggested in a recent post, the market reaction to the mini-budget was in part a reflection of the general reputational damage done to the UK since 2016. So Labour needs to break with Brexitism to restore that reputation with the markets, quite as much as with the general population. That involves being open and honest about the choices and trade-offs of Brexit. The other is that, more tangibly, addressing Brexit would be the quickest and most effective way of boosting growth, yielding fruit much earlier than, say, infrastructure spending.
A way forward?
A report from the Tony Blair Institute this week sets out the case, both political and economic, that Labour might adopt for a closer and more harmonious UK-EU relationship. It doesn’t go so far as advocating single market membership, which would certainly be a much stronger basis for economic growth than what it does propose, and that’s partly because polling doesn’t show enough public support for it. That could change, quickly, perhaps especially were Labour to provide leadership for it. But if there is an early election there may not be enough time now for that to happen.
So there’s a case to be cautious. One of the big prizes of – finally – talking about the realities and the choices of Brexit is, precisely, to be realistic, and that includes doing what has signally failed to be done before, namely to deliver a post-Brexit policy with some degree of consensus. Such a consensus is clearly going to be very different to what many remainers and leavers want, but what matters is for it to be something that enough of them are able to live with for now. And, related to that, part of the reputational prize is the creation of something that, by being relatively consensual, has the chance of being relatively stable.
To put it a different way, it would do no one any favours, including the EU or EFTA, for a Labour government to bring the UK into the single market only for the whole Brexit row to re-erupt and the possibility of leaving again to be immediately raised. So although the ‘Blair solution’ is much less than I, personally, would want, and certainly less than would be economically maximal, the slow and steady approach may just have to be accepted as part of the ongoing price of the madness and chaos Brexit unleashed: a long fall enforces a hard climb back. If it at least means the re-commencement of a more honest and more rational politics that would be a reward in itself, as well as contributing to a viable fiscal posture for a future Labour government. From that, campaigns for single market or even EU membership might be built in a less tortured and toxic environment. Anyway, regardless of what I want, I think the Blair route is the best that Labour is likely to go down, and, if so, it is certainly preferable to the present Labour policy.
A moment of hope?
If that analysis is right then, for all that it is hardly an exciting or enticing prospect, involving neither the arraignment of the charlatans and worse who caused the Brexit catastrophe, nor anything like a settlement of the grievances of those of us who tried to avoid it, there is at least something to be grateful for. Had the Brexiters had even an iota of skill or a scintilla of realism then they might have done even more damage than they have already done and are still doing.
In particular, perverse as it may seem, Truss has done us all a favour with her born-again Brexiter zealotry. For all its costs, having provoked a blow-out may prove to have been the quickest way of discrediting Brexitism and the libertarian, IEA version of Brexit. For Ian Dunt of the i the crisis marks “the end of the age of Brexit”, whilst in the FT Martin Wolf argues that, under Truss, “the Brexit Revolutionaries … over-reached” with the consequence that “maybe, the cold water of economic and political reality is at last breaking the UK’s Brexit fever”. Similarly, Annette Dittert, London Bureau Chief of Germany’s ARD TV, tentatively suggests that Truss’s failure could be the beginning of a turning point away from the “magical thinking” – whatever the people want they get, so to speak – about sovereignty which runs from the Brexit vote itself through the Johnson-Frost deal through to the mini-budget. She cautions, though, that the way back to pragmatism and realism will be via a long and painful process.
I would add that the next stage of that process is going to be one of continuing and deepening political crisis, because the current Tory Party is unleadable for all the reasons I wrote about during the summer leadership contest. To those will now be added the news and acrimonious scars of Truss’s implosion. It will take on a particular hue if, as is currently being floated, the Tories take the extraordinary and unconscionable step of resurrecting Boris Johnson.
That continuing crisis is going to be alarming to live through, especially if it is prolonged, rather than yielding an early election. But once an election comes, and if Labour win it convincingly on a prospectus that includes the breaking of the Brexit taboo, then there will be new possibilities which would not have existed had Truss’s version of post-Brexit Britain not crashed and burned in so dramatic a fashion.
Nothing is sure yet, of course, and this period of total disarray could take us in many directions, but one of them, uncertainly but not implausibly, is to a bridge away from Brexit and Brexitism. It is a slender and precarious bridge, lacking grandiosity of structure or much in the way of hand rails, and slippery underfoot, but it leads to a better future than seemed possible even a few weeks ago. For only the second time since June 2016 I feel slightly hopeful.
“When this strange summer ends, it will not herald the end of the period of political instability any more than the events and crises of the summer are peculiar to the season. This isn’t a holiday that has gone horribly wrong, it’s the latest instalment of a reality there is no taking a break from. That political instability began with the 2016 referendum. Having a new Prime Minister is not going to finish, but is a part of, this post-2016 story”.
That’s not, however, to pretend that I predicted just how quickly things would unravel, to the extent that in my most recent post, following the ‘mini-budget’, I was writing that the wheels had come off the Brexit bus. It’s that last point that needs to be emphasised as forcefully as possible, in order to understand both the crisis happening now and the fact that the instability will continue when Truss is replaced next week. This is not just any old political and economic crisis, and it is not just the political and economic crisis of an unusually inept and extreme Prime Minister. It is centrally and unavoidably the latest instalment of the rolling political and economic crisis that started with the referendum.
This isn’t just a crisis, it’s a Brexit crisis
It's a point made with great clarity by Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, who wrote that “when the textbooks of the future come to the chapter we are living through, in the autumn of 2022, they will start with the summer of 2016: Brexit and the specific delusion that drove it”, and concluded (this was a week before she actually resigned) that Truss “is finished, a hollow husk of a prime minister. But this is bigger than that. The Brexit bubble has burst”. In a similar vein, writing in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis argued that Truss “has failed because she is a born-again Brexiter, and had already swallowed the lie that reality can be bent to ideology”. Nor is it just British commentators who can see it. “The roots of Truss’s budgetary bedlam lie deep in the soil of Brexit”, said Ireland’s former Ambassador to the UK, Bobby McDonagh, in the Irish Times and it is a view very widely shared in the foreign press.
It won’t fly for Brexiters such as Sherelle Jacobs of the Telegraph (£), to denounce as “bunkum” put about by “diehard proponents of Project Fear” the analysis that Truss’s “foolhardy mistakes trace back to the hubris that Brexit unleashed”. For, on the one hand, her fellow-columnist Jeremy Warner opines (£) that current events show that “Project Fear was right all along” whilst, on the other, Allister Heath, Editor of the Sunday version of her paper, urged Truss to “hold her nerve” (£) in pursuit of those very mistakes so as “to deliver a Brexit that actually works” (£) and, bizarrely, John Longworth insists that Truss was brought down by “anti-Brexiteers” (£) as part of their ongoing attempt to derail the Brexit ‘revolution’. Either way, then, Brexit and the mini-budget that ended Truss’s premiership are inseparable.
So, too, are they inseparable in the mind of another Telegraph columnist (£), Ross Clark, but in a different way. In his view Britain has “blown Brexit” by failing “to create a more dynamic, opportunity economy”. However, Truss and Kwarteng had “correctly diagnosed” the problems and their mistake was “unleashing a massive welfare programme” (meaning the energy support package, the one part of the mini-budget that markets were not concerned about), whilst Braverman’s frenzied preoccupation with immigration was misplaced as the real danger is a brain drain from the failed experiment of Brexit.
It must be strange indeed to inhabit the increasingly unhinged world of the Brexiters’ house journal. Another of its columnists, Tim Stanley (£), seems to think that the financial markets have exacted the “revenge of the remainers”, with Truss the “victim of a coup”, and that “hitherto the argument against Brexit was emotional, but watch as it becomes technocratic” with “the grey men” saying it is “unaffordable”. It’s a bizarre about-turn, given that for years we have been told that the genius of the leave campaign was to appeal to emotions, and that remainers have always been dull technocrats, preoccupied with affordability.
Equally contradictory is the way that, whilst Stanley and others are weeping about the Establishment victimizing poor little Truss, the paper also reports (£) that Nigel Farage and those on the right of the Tory Party have been fulminating that the real problem was with Truss herself for being in the process of betraying Brexit, and Braverman’s resignation letter, in its comments about failure to honour commitments to reduce net migration, gestures to the same critique, itself a derivative of the disjuncture between different threads of the Brexit coalition and their different priorities.
Counting the cost of Brexit’s fatal flaw
There’s not much point in trying to make sense of all this for the very good reason that none of it makes any sense, certainly not in combination. It is the last gasp nonsense of people who know their Brexit project has failed and are flailing around to make sense of why, and to decide who to blame (they, themselves, being invariably exempted). Perhaps the most striking example, trivial in itself and yet, somehow, also highly revealing, is a comment from Tim Stanley, not in his column but in a tweet. Bemoaning again the power of ‘the markets’ to make or break government policy he plaintively remarked that this ran counter to what Brexit was all about, namely: “Sovereignty. Democracy. Whatever the people want they get”.
For all that it is, indeed, just a tweet from a minor columnist, it perfectly captures the fatal flaw that runs all the way through Brexit, and through populism generally. It encapsulates the hopelessly naïve idea of sovereignty and all the myriad of ways that the ‘will of the people’ could supposedly trump any reality, whilst explaining how all those who pointed to reality could be reviled as ‘enemies of the people’. It is at once desperately sad and yet infuriatingly stupid. Like the realization that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, it would be poignant coming from a child and yet astonishing from a mature adult who writes for a national newspaper.
Sad and stupid as it may be, what is unforgiveable is the now indisputable damage that has resulted, with all of us paying the price for such delusions. The economic damage, especially, was clinically dissected in a truly excellent Financial Times video this week, laying bare impacts on trade, investment, inflation, growth, tax revenues, labour markets, regulatory duplication and more, and explaining that these can be separated from those of Covid and Ukraine. It also identifies many of the core issues, also discussed for years on this blog, of the dishonesty with which Brexit was sold and the incompetence with which it was executed, up to and including the mini-budget.
As the video explains, it’s this budget which can be seen as the point at which what many, including me, have called the ‘slow puncture’ of Brexit economic damage became something close to a tyre blow-out, albeit that doesn’t mean that the air has stopped leaking from the other tyres (for which, see some truly shocking recent additions to Yorkshire Bylines’ meticulously curated ‘Davis Downside Dossier’). And this is only to speak of the ongoing economic effects, without beginning to consider all the other harms. In any case, these harms are interlinked, for even if the mini-budget wasn’t an economic blow-out, it most certainly caused the political blow-out of Truss’s regime which in turn further exacerbated the damage to the UK’s global reputation as a politically stable country.
Overall, then, the current political chaos and economic turmoil have served to crystallize what has actually been under way for a while. Having won the 2016 vote for Brexit, the Brexiters have comprehensively lost the battle for the post-Brexit narrative which began at the end of the transition period, when the reality of being outside the EU began. There have been ebbs and flows in that battle but, although there will continue to be skirmishes, it is now effectively over. There is very little prospect that the majority public verdict that Brexit was a mistake will ever now change. If anything, that view is likely to solidify and grow. There is never going to be – indeed there never has been – any great national celebration of Brexit liberation. Hence all the weird contortions of so many pro-Brexit commentators and the embarrassed silence of others.
Breaking the silence?
Yet as the FT team – which has been consistently superb in its Brexit journalism since 2016 – also points out in its video, there remains a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about Brexit that extends beyond that of once garrulous commentators to encompass pretty much the whole of the Tory and Labour parties. Again, there have been countless posts on this blog about that ‘taboo’. The key question, then, is whether that will continue. Or, more likely, the key question is how and by whom it will be broken since it would seem absurd, and probably untenable, for the public narrative to have settled without the political discourse of the main parties responding to that.
It is highly unlikely that the current Tory Party will break the taboo as it enters yet another leadership contest. On past evidence, the realities of Brexit will scarcely be acknowledged and certainly it is almost impossible to imagine that any candidate doing so would have the remotest chance of winning. It would not only lose them the leadership, it would peel off swathes of the party’s electoral support to a rejuvenated Farageist outfit, such as is already being touted, and make its already bitter divisions even more sulphurous. The only real doubt now is whether Truss’s successor will be a madly extremist Brexiter or a semi-sane one.
So it is really a question of what the Labour Party will do. Of course the reasons for its near-silence are well-known. In some ways the current crisis encourages that silence to continue. For one thing, it makes it easy for Labour to avoid ‘rocking the boat’ by re-introducing the issue of Brexit to the fore of discussion: why do so when the Tories are imploding anyway? Might doing so actually give them a lifeline? For another – or perhaps it is a version of the same thing – it may be more effective to depict the crisis as a total failure of the Tory government, and not link that to Brexit specifically.
But there are several good counter-arguments, and they need to be thought about urgently because there must now be every possibility that there will be a General Election in short order. One such argument is precisely that a key part of the Brexit disaster is that of reality-denial. Until that denial is ended, there is no solution to Brexit or to the ‘Brexitification’ of politics. Another is, indeed, about the markets. Many commentators see in the collapse of the mini-budget a terrible trap for a future Labour government (in fact that was the point to which Tim Stanley made his sad little response): in rejecting growing government debt, it leaves ‘austerity’ as the only policy acceptable to markets. Thus if the Tory government falls then a Labour government would be forced to make massive spending cuts.
I am certain that this is to misunderstand what the market reaction to the mini-budget meant. That reaction was to the fact that Truss and Kwarteng’s plan was based on the total nonsense that reducing taxes would deliver growth and make government debt sustainable. It doesn’t mean that borrowing to fund public spending in ways that would plausibly promote growth would meet the same fate. Such spending would include infrastructure projects, environmentally sustainable and energy-saving projects, and significantly enhanced education spending. In particular, one of the most effective ways to boost economic growth, and to reduce regional inequalities, would be to create many new universities (it’s also a good way of growing the future Labour electoral base).
Even so, this alone would probably not be convincing enough without addressing Brexit. That is for two reasons. One is that, as I suggested in a recent post, the market reaction to the mini-budget was in part a reflection of the general reputational damage done to the UK since 2016. So Labour needs to break with Brexitism to restore that reputation with the markets, quite as much as with the general population. That involves being open and honest about the choices and trade-offs of Brexit. The other is that, more tangibly, addressing Brexit would be the quickest and most effective way of boosting growth, yielding fruit much earlier than, say, infrastructure spending.
A way forward?
A report from the Tony Blair Institute this week sets out the case, both political and economic, that Labour might adopt for a closer and more harmonious UK-EU relationship. It doesn’t go so far as advocating single market membership, which would certainly be a much stronger basis for economic growth than what it does propose, and that’s partly because polling doesn’t show enough public support for it. That could change, quickly, perhaps especially were Labour to provide leadership for it. But if there is an early election there may not be enough time now for that to happen.
So there’s a case to be cautious. One of the big prizes of – finally – talking about the realities and the choices of Brexit is, precisely, to be realistic, and that includes doing what has signally failed to be done before, namely to deliver a post-Brexit policy with some degree of consensus. Such a consensus is clearly going to be very different to what many remainers and leavers want, but what matters is for it to be something that enough of them are able to live with for now. And, related to that, part of the reputational prize is the creation of something that, by being relatively consensual, has the chance of being relatively stable.
To put it a different way, it would do no one any favours, including the EU or EFTA, for a Labour government to bring the UK into the single market only for the whole Brexit row to re-erupt and the possibility of leaving again to be immediately raised. So although the ‘Blair solution’ is much less than I, personally, would want, and certainly less than would be economically maximal, the slow and steady approach may just have to be accepted as part of the ongoing price of the madness and chaos Brexit unleashed: a long fall enforces a hard climb back. If it at least means the re-commencement of a more honest and more rational politics that would be a reward in itself, as well as contributing to a viable fiscal posture for a future Labour government. From that, campaigns for single market or even EU membership might be built in a less tortured and toxic environment. Anyway, regardless of what I want, I think the Blair route is the best that Labour is likely to go down, and, if so, it is certainly preferable to the present Labour policy.
A moment of hope?
If that analysis is right then, for all that it is hardly an exciting or enticing prospect, involving neither the arraignment of the charlatans and worse who caused the Brexit catastrophe, nor anything like a settlement of the grievances of those of us who tried to avoid it, there is at least something to be grateful for. Had the Brexiters had even an iota of skill or a scintilla of realism then they might have done even more damage than they have already done and are still doing.
In particular, perverse as it may seem, Truss has done us all a favour with her born-again Brexiter zealotry. For all its costs, having provoked a blow-out may prove to have been the quickest way of discrediting Brexitism and the libertarian, IEA version of Brexit. For Ian Dunt of the i the crisis marks “the end of the age of Brexit”, whilst in the FT Martin Wolf argues that, under Truss, “the Brexit Revolutionaries … over-reached” with the consequence that “maybe, the cold water of economic and political reality is at last breaking the UK’s Brexit fever”. Similarly, Annette Dittert, London Bureau Chief of Germany’s ARD TV, tentatively suggests that Truss’s failure could be the beginning of a turning point away from the “magical thinking” – whatever the people want they get, so to speak – about sovereignty which runs from the Brexit vote itself through the Johnson-Frost deal through to the mini-budget. She cautions, though, that the way back to pragmatism and realism will be via a long and painful process.
I would add that the next stage of that process is going to be one of continuing and deepening political crisis, because the current Tory Party is unleadable for all the reasons I wrote about during the summer leadership contest. To those will now be added the news and acrimonious scars of Truss’s implosion. It will take on a particular hue if, as is currently being floated, the Tories take the extraordinary and unconscionable step of resurrecting Boris Johnson.
That continuing crisis is going to be alarming to live through, especially if it is prolonged, rather than yielding an early election. But once an election comes, and if Labour win it convincingly on a prospectus that includes the breaking of the Brexit taboo, then there will be new possibilities which would not have existed had Truss’s version of post-Brexit Britain not crashed and burned in so dramatic a fashion.
Nothing is sure yet, of course, and this period of total disarray could take us in many directions, but one of them, uncertainly but not implausibly, is to a bridge away from Brexit and Brexitism. It is a slender and precarious bridge, lacking grandiosity of structure or much in the way of hand rails, and slippery underfoot, but it leads to a better future than seemed possible even a few weeks ago. For only the second time since June 2016 I feel slightly hopeful.
Friday, 26 August 2022
An unleadable Tory Party means post-Brexit political instability will continue
In a couple of weeks we will have a new Prime Minister, bringing an end to the strangest political summer of my lifetime. It has been a summer marked by excessive heat and drought which are themselves emblematic of perhaps the most important global political issue – if there are exceptions, they would be those of actual total war or possible nuclear war – of the lifetimes of anyone alive today. There is in any case an ongoing war in Europe, which many of us see as defining of a conflict between liberal democracy and nationalist authoritarianism. And that war has precipitated a global energy crisis and exacerbated a global economic crisis.
Multiple crises with no functioning government
Domestically, that means a rapidly worsening cost of living crisis. Inflation is at its highest since the early 1980s and still rising, with households facing their largest ever recorded fall in living standards, and the Bank of England predicts five continuous quarters of economic recession. There are multiple strikes in the rail network, the docks, the courts, the postal service and elsewhere, and more to come. With a growing ‘Don’t Pay’ campaign in the face of what for many will be impossible energy bills, talk of civil unrest and disobedience does not seem hyperbolic.
There are now chronic labour shortages in almost every occupation, so that even as food prices rise to a 40-year high there is food rotting in fields for lack of people to pick or harvest it. The NHS, and especially the ambulance service, is at breaking point, as, not unrelatedly, is the social care system. In fact it is hard to find any part of the public or private sector which is not, in some way or other, under alarming strain. The beaches are awash with sewage, like a metaphor. And, though you’d hardly know it, we are still living with the effects of a pandemic, including an estimated 1.6 million people in England alone living with Long Covid, and presumably the possibility of a new wave to come.
Throughout all this, the leadership contest means there has been, in effect, no functioning government. The notional Prime Minister, rather than acting as a responsible caretaker, has spent the summer alternating between sulking, holidaying and squeezing the last drop out of the perks of his office. Any chance Boris Johnson had of a final period of dignity to set against the depraved conduct that led to his ejection has been squandered. Most Prime Ministers end up being judged less harshly by history than they are at the time of their departure; I strongly suspect that Johnson will be assessed even more critically in the future than he is now.
Post-Brexit political instability set to continue
When this strange summer ends, it will not herald the end of the period of political instability any more than the events and crises of the summer are peculiar to the season. This isn’t a holiday that has gone horribly wrong, it’s the latest instalment of a reality there is no taking a break from. That political instability began with the 2016 referendum. Having a new Prime Minister is not going to finish, but is a part of, this post-2016 story. I don’t mean that there were no political problems before, but that since then there has been a particular sort of instability and for particular reasons.
It’s not a coincidence that the new Prime Minister will be the fourth in the six years since the referendum, the same number as held office in the thirty-one years between 1979 and 2010. Nor is it a coincidence that within those six years there have also been two general elections, massive churn in the holding of ministerial posts, an illegal prorogation of parliament, a unique judgment that the government was in contempt of parliament, numerous highly unusual constitutional events, a government openly threatening to break international law, massive stresses in the relationship between Westminster and the devolved administrations, significant pressures on the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, and perhaps the most significant rifts between ministers and the civil service in modern history. All these things reflect the way that Brexit has all but overwhelmed the capacity and norms of the UK state and political institutions.
The unleadable Tory Party
Centrally implicated in all this is the ongoing convulsion of the governing Tory Party, a convulsion now so long-lived, dating as it does to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty battles, that it should be considered chronic. This isn’t the place to discuss all of that, so here I’ll just talk about the present leadership contest. The most likely winner, Liz Truss, was not the first choice of MPs, whilst 55% of the party membership think that those MPs were wrong to have ousted Johnson, a view echoed by Conservative voters and floating voters (£). This means that Truss, assuming she wins, will not be starting with a groundswell of support even from within her own party ranks. Amongst the general public, she scores negatively in views of her ability to handle the major issues (as do Sunak and Johnson). It’s unlikely that she will experience more than short-lived political ‘honeymoon’, if that.
One of the features of Tory MPs, especially since the referendum, is how undisciplined they are. So, particularly as she isn’t their own choice, Truss will find her backbenchers prone to revolt and that will be all the more so if, as rumoured, she packs the cabinet with those from the hard Brexit right wing, very possibly including preposterous blowhard David Frost, to the exclusion of ‘Red Wallers’ and ‘One Nationers’. There are even rumours that the peculiar Thatcherite has-been John Redwood will be disinterred, a word which in this case would be almost literally true. A more broad-based administration would just bring the backbench schisms into the cabinet. Already there is speculation that the weakness of her position amongst MPs will force her to call an early election, risky as that would be.
The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill (NIPB) could be an early flashpoint, if she pushes ahead with it as she has promised. Apart from facing opposition from Tories in the Lords, it’s at least possible that some of the Tory MPs who understand the damage it will do will find the courage to vote against it. If she doesn’t push ahead then, almost certainly, the ERG will mount an immediate attack. The same is true if, as some commentators speculate, she ditches the generally hard right line she has taken during the leadership contest and once more re-invents herself as some sort of consensual centrist. As much as, if not more than, her predecessors she will be constantly vulnerable to ERG extremism, whether on Brexit or other issues.
Even without that ever-present pressure, Truss is extremely ill-equipped to deal with the multiple crises she will face. She shows little sign of having the intellectual or interpersonal skills needed, and her sub-Johnson boosterism is not going to carry her very far in the present context. Attacking doomsters, gloomsters and ‘declinists’ may have some appeal to party members. To a country feeling distinctly gloomy, if not doomed, and visibly declining, its appeal will be very limited indeed.
It may be that, as many expect, and as Rees-Mogg and David Frost amongst others are urging, she will launch into a libertarian, deregulatory frenzy, delighting the Tory right by ‘delivering’ on what they meant by Brexit. If so, that is very unlikely to appeal to a country – including many Tory voters – that sees an urgent need not for deregulation but for, at the least, stronger and better regulation of utilities, in particular, as well as for a bigger and more interventionist State. If energy prices continue to rise as predicted then the political pressure for the latter will be irresistible. It’s also much more difficult in practice to deliver deregulation than to talk airily about making a ‘bonfire of EU regulations’, for the reasons I outlined in my previous post, the more so in the absence of any explicit political mandate or much administrative bandwidth to do so. Yet some right-wing Brexiters, such as Allister Heath (£), writing in loose-sphinctered terror of “ultra remainers mobilising to cancel it”, are convinced that “Truss is Brexit’s last hope” and rely on her to show that it can “improve lives, bolster the economy and fix broken institutions”.
It's here that a central feature of the rolling post-referendum political instability becomes obvious. One aspect of this is that although not all of the current crises are attributable to Brexit, many of them, including the interlinked ones of inflation, lack of growth and labour shortages, are at least partly connected to it. Truss will not be able to admit that, but nor will she be able to show it ‘improving lives, bolstering the economy or mending institutions’. Heath and other diehard Brexiters still don’t grasp it, and probably never will, but there is simply no way that Brexit can do any of those things. The problems and costs it has entailed already are not, as he has it, “implementation failures”, they’re what Brexit means in reality. Truss can’t tell them that, either.
The more fundamental issue is that this detachment from reality has now infected Tory politics more generally. So what defines post-Brexit politics is not just that the government can’t tell the truth about Brexit but that it can’t tell the truth about anything. Instead, just as with Brexit, all the bad news and forecasts of worse to come are dismissed as a new kind of Project Fear, as pessimism spread by ‘experts’ and the media. So even as they berate ‘remainers’ for failing to differentiate between Brexit and non-Brexit causes of the UK’s multiple problems, they themselves adopt an undifferentiated approach to those problems.
The unleadable in pursuit of the impossible
These three features of post-referendum political instability – the overwhelming of the institutions of the State and politics, the unleadability of the Tory party, and the inability to tell the truth – are obviously linked. They are linked in the impossibility of putting into practice the false and contradictory promises of Brexit. More generally, they are linked in the way that the Tory Party has reached a point where the things most of its members and many of its voters want are impossible.
Fundamentally, what they want are not just the impossible illusions of Brexit but a string of impossible illusions that go with it. These are at once less facile and more unattainable than blue passports and Imperial measures. They want a country that resembles an imagined past of stability, homogeneity and greatness. For all that they talk of love of country, they profoundly dislike the country as it actually is and want the government to provide them with another one, preferably located a long way from Europe, but it’s one which never existed and can’t be created now. Worse, the very policies it draws them to – most obviously Brexit – actually reduce such stability, homogeneity and greatness as exists.
They’re not completely crazy, and know the Empire has gone for good, but they still think in unrealistic terms about ‘the Anglosphere’ and the Commonwealth. They are now primarily an English party and, though they remain notionally pro-Union, they still think in unrealistic terms of it being one in which the non-English parts ‘know their place’. They want to visit stately homes without hearing about the realities of where the money came from to build them, and to enjoy a spell of hot weather without hearing about the realities of climate change. They want to be ‘free to say what we think’ without accepting the reality that others have the freedom to criticise what they say. Above all, they want a country of common sense and simple solutions and, though they aren’t unique in wanting that, they want it in a particular way, wherein complex reality is not just an irritant to them but a plot against them.
Brexit was a pivotal moment because it seemed to be a portal not just to leaving the EU, but to delivering all this and more. The ‘silent majority’ had finally spoken and been heard. But it has turned to ashes. Not only have none of the wider illusions been delivered (indeed many of them are further away than ever) but the reality of Brexit itself proved to be entirely different to what they thought it would be. That is why so few celebrate it, although they may still cling to the hope that the dream will eventually be realised. Meanwhile, they have simply added remainers and saboteurs to the long list of enemies within, along with ‘lefty lawyers’, the BBC, and the more amorphous ‘human rights brigade’, ‘metropolitan elite’, ‘Woke’ Establishment, and ‘the Blob’; and added Brexit betrayal to their long list of unassuageable grievances.
In that framing, Sunak is now depicted as ‘soft’ on Brexit, for apparently having urged some caution over the NIPB and extensive regulatory divergence when he was Chancellor. That’s linked to him being seen as captured by the ‘Treasury Blob’, and it’s notable that he has couched his (failing) message of ‘fiscal prudence’ in the terms that ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’. The first shows just how hard line the party members have become on Brexit itself, whilst their rejection of what, to them, used to be unquestionable fiscal orthodoxy shows how deeply they have embraced the Johnsonian cakeism that Brexit was sold on.
By contrast, Truss has convinced them that she might make Brexit a success, and offers the ‘simplist’ prescription of tax cuts as a cure-all, whilst gleefully lashing out at the ‘enemies within’. Above all, she has not challenged the impossibility of their illusions in even the mildest of ways. Hence they favour her as their leader, although neither candidate is the Thatcher-Johnson-Farage amalgam they crave.
Ironically, if the Tories could find someone with the genuine leadership qualities that both the country and their party actually need, that person’s first task would be to tell them that what they want is undeliverable. In the absence of that, they will eventually denounce any leader as being – as they said of David Cameron, as well as of May and even of Johnson – ‘not a real Conservative’. And, indeed, who could be, for as long as a real Conservative leader means someone who will make the impossible become real?
What happens now?
None of this is entirely new within the Tory Party (anyone remember ‘the Monday Club’? Or, more obscurely, ‘Selsdon Man’?), but what is new is that there is now almost nothing else within the Tory Party, which also opens up a schism between the party itself and some parts of its core vote. How its hapless condition will play out in the long-term is difficult to know.
One possibility, especially as the economic crisis gets worse, is that it gathers force and becomes more vicious, gaining new recruits, and perhaps even forging links, if only informal, with the street-fighting hard Right. It’s not a very long walk from that to Ur-Fascism. More optimistically, it reflects a mainly ageing demographic which in the not-too-distant future will become a political irrelevance. Or perhaps – more likely in opposition than in government, and certainly not under Truss or Sunak, neither of whom has the vision or character needed to do it – the Tory Party will remake itself in the somewhat more pragmatic mould that has arguably characterised most of its history.
But for the immediate future, we can only expect the post-Brexit instability to continue. None of the things being discussed in the leadership contest remotely speaks to the scale of the country’s problems, or to the deep causes that most of them have. Certainly there is no recognition of the realities of Brexit, how these intersect with the other problems, or of the damage Brexit is doing to just about every sector even without those other problems. Still less is there any glimmer of recognition of how diminished the UK’s standing in the world is as a result of Brexit and of the politics it has brought in its wake, or how widely Truss is distrusted by many of the UK’s key allies.
One particularly serious economic consequence of this continuing instability is that, as has been the case ever since the Brexit vote, vitally needed business investment and foreign direct investment will continue to be much weaker than it would have been. This, as well as pressure on sterling, will be exacerbated if the row with the EU over the NIPB continues and worsens: just as in the years since the referendum, why invest when uncertainty hangs over the future terms of around half of the UK’s trade? The EU reaction to such a row, I assume, would be to ‘play it long’, partly because the continued uncertainty hurts the UK more than the EU, partly in the hope that this government only has two years to run.
An era ending?
Of course if the Tories not only get through the next two years but also contrive to win the next election then all bets are off, for the EU as for all of us. But to me it feels – and a feeling is all it can be until it happens, when it becomes truism – that something fundamental is shifting. It seems rather like the tail-end of the Wilson-Callaghan government of 1974-1979 or of the Major government of 1992-1997. In both cases there was a sense of not just the government but a political era dying, and I think it’s there again now.
There’s already some polling evidence for that shift, but much depends on the Labour Party being able to capitalise on it, including the extent to which they are willing to get real about the damage of Brexit. That’s possible, if only because it would reflect the settled, indeed growing, view of the general public that Brexit was a mistake. It’s also reported (£) that both right and left wings of the party are now pressuring Keir Starmer to take a “softer” Brexit position. More broadly, Labour will need to develop a convincing policy on the economic crisis in whatever form it exists by the time of the next election. Again, there are already some signs of that. What is still missing compared with 1979 or 1997, and much harder to create, is a wider narrative of a desirable and deliverable future, rather than just a crisis management plan.
What links the Brexit policy and the wider policies that Labour need is the requirement to meet the challenge that the Tory Party manifestly can’t: to break with the culture of fantasy and lies, the denial of, and active hostility to, reality. That is the poison that Brexit exemplified and bequeathed which has to be sucked out of the body politic. It won’t be at all easy given how widely it has spread and how deep the wells from which it draws, not least the bottomless one of the pro-Brexit media.
As to what happens in the meantime, about the best that can be hoped for is that not too much more damage is done under Truss. It could be considerable. But, precisely because the only certainty is continuing instability, it is perfectly possible that events may quickly unfold, and in ways very different from those that anyone expects.
This is intended as the last post before the election of the next PM, so unless something unexpected happens I won’t blog next Friday. After that, I’ll be on holiday for two weeks so will unfortunately miss the start of the new regime, and the next post will be on Friday 23 September.
Multiple crises with no functioning government
Domestically, that means a rapidly worsening cost of living crisis. Inflation is at its highest since the early 1980s and still rising, with households facing their largest ever recorded fall in living standards, and the Bank of England predicts five continuous quarters of economic recession. There are multiple strikes in the rail network, the docks, the courts, the postal service and elsewhere, and more to come. With a growing ‘Don’t Pay’ campaign in the face of what for many will be impossible energy bills, talk of civil unrest and disobedience does not seem hyperbolic.
There are now chronic labour shortages in almost every occupation, so that even as food prices rise to a 40-year high there is food rotting in fields for lack of people to pick or harvest it. The NHS, and especially the ambulance service, is at breaking point, as, not unrelatedly, is the social care system. In fact it is hard to find any part of the public or private sector which is not, in some way or other, under alarming strain. The beaches are awash with sewage, like a metaphor. And, though you’d hardly know it, we are still living with the effects of a pandemic, including an estimated 1.6 million people in England alone living with Long Covid, and presumably the possibility of a new wave to come.
Throughout all this, the leadership contest means there has been, in effect, no functioning government. The notional Prime Minister, rather than acting as a responsible caretaker, has spent the summer alternating between sulking, holidaying and squeezing the last drop out of the perks of his office. Any chance Boris Johnson had of a final period of dignity to set against the depraved conduct that led to his ejection has been squandered. Most Prime Ministers end up being judged less harshly by history than they are at the time of their departure; I strongly suspect that Johnson will be assessed even more critically in the future than he is now.
Post-Brexit political instability set to continue
When this strange summer ends, it will not herald the end of the period of political instability any more than the events and crises of the summer are peculiar to the season. This isn’t a holiday that has gone horribly wrong, it’s the latest instalment of a reality there is no taking a break from. That political instability began with the 2016 referendum. Having a new Prime Minister is not going to finish, but is a part of, this post-2016 story. I don’t mean that there were no political problems before, but that since then there has been a particular sort of instability and for particular reasons.
It’s not a coincidence that the new Prime Minister will be the fourth in the six years since the referendum, the same number as held office in the thirty-one years between 1979 and 2010. Nor is it a coincidence that within those six years there have also been two general elections, massive churn in the holding of ministerial posts, an illegal prorogation of parliament, a unique judgment that the government was in contempt of parliament, numerous highly unusual constitutional events, a government openly threatening to break international law, massive stresses in the relationship between Westminster and the devolved administrations, significant pressures on the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, and perhaps the most significant rifts between ministers and the civil service in modern history. All these things reflect the way that Brexit has all but overwhelmed the capacity and norms of the UK state and political institutions.
The unleadable Tory Party
Centrally implicated in all this is the ongoing convulsion of the governing Tory Party, a convulsion now so long-lived, dating as it does to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty battles, that it should be considered chronic. This isn’t the place to discuss all of that, so here I’ll just talk about the present leadership contest. The most likely winner, Liz Truss, was not the first choice of MPs, whilst 55% of the party membership think that those MPs were wrong to have ousted Johnson, a view echoed by Conservative voters and floating voters (£). This means that Truss, assuming she wins, will not be starting with a groundswell of support even from within her own party ranks. Amongst the general public, she scores negatively in views of her ability to handle the major issues (as do Sunak and Johnson). It’s unlikely that she will experience more than short-lived political ‘honeymoon’, if that.
One of the features of Tory MPs, especially since the referendum, is how undisciplined they are. So, particularly as she isn’t their own choice, Truss will find her backbenchers prone to revolt and that will be all the more so if, as rumoured, she packs the cabinet with those from the hard Brexit right wing, very possibly including preposterous blowhard David Frost, to the exclusion of ‘Red Wallers’ and ‘One Nationers’. There are even rumours that the peculiar Thatcherite has-been John Redwood will be disinterred, a word which in this case would be almost literally true. A more broad-based administration would just bring the backbench schisms into the cabinet. Already there is speculation that the weakness of her position amongst MPs will force her to call an early election, risky as that would be.
The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill (NIPB) could be an early flashpoint, if she pushes ahead with it as she has promised. Apart from facing opposition from Tories in the Lords, it’s at least possible that some of the Tory MPs who understand the damage it will do will find the courage to vote against it. If she doesn’t push ahead then, almost certainly, the ERG will mount an immediate attack. The same is true if, as some commentators speculate, she ditches the generally hard right line she has taken during the leadership contest and once more re-invents herself as some sort of consensual centrist. As much as, if not more than, her predecessors she will be constantly vulnerable to ERG extremism, whether on Brexit or other issues.
Even without that ever-present pressure, Truss is extremely ill-equipped to deal with the multiple crises she will face. She shows little sign of having the intellectual or interpersonal skills needed, and her sub-Johnson boosterism is not going to carry her very far in the present context. Attacking doomsters, gloomsters and ‘declinists’ may have some appeal to party members. To a country feeling distinctly gloomy, if not doomed, and visibly declining, its appeal will be very limited indeed.
It may be that, as many expect, and as Rees-Mogg and David Frost amongst others are urging, she will launch into a libertarian, deregulatory frenzy, delighting the Tory right by ‘delivering’ on what they meant by Brexit. If so, that is very unlikely to appeal to a country – including many Tory voters – that sees an urgent need not for deregulation but for, at the least, stronger and better regulation of utilities, in particular, as well as for a bigger and more interventionist State. If energy prices continue to rise as predicted then the political pressure for the latter will be irresistible. It’s also much more difficult in practice to deliver deregulation than to talk airily about making a ‘bonfire of EU regulations’, for the reasons I outlined in my previous post, the more so in the absence of any explicit political mandate or much administrative bandwidth to do so. Yet some right-wing Brexiters, such as Allister Heath (£), writing in loose-sphinctered terror of “ultra remainers mobilising to cancel it”, are convinced that “Truss is Brexit’s last hope” and rely on her to show that it can “improve lives, bolster the economy and fix broken institutions”.
It's here that a central feature of the rolling post-referendum political instability becomes obvious. One aspect of this is that although not all of the current crises are attributable to Brexit, many of them, including the interlinked ones of inflation, lack of growth and labour shortages, are at least partly connected to it. Truss will not be able to admit that, but nor will she be able to show it ‘improving lives, bolstering the economy or mending institutions’. Heath and other diehard Brexiters still don’t grasp it, and probably never will, but there is simply no way that Brexit can do any of those things. The problems and costs it has entailed already are not, as he has it, “implementation failures”, they’re what Brexit means in reality. Truss can’t tell them that, either.
The more fundamental issue is that this detachment from reality has now infected Tory politics more generally. So what defines post-Brexit politics is not just that the government can’t tell the truth about Brexit but that it can’t tell the truth about anything. Instead, just as with Brexit, all the bad news and forecasts of worse to come are dismissed as a new kind of Project Fear, as pessimism spread by ‘experts’ and the media. So even as they berate ‘remainers’ for failing to differentiate between Brexit and non-Brexit causes of the UK’s multiple problems, they themselves adopt an undifferentiated approach to those problems.
The unleadable in pursuit of the impossible
These three features of post-referendum political instability – the overwhelming of the institutions of the State and politics, the unleadability of the Tory party, and the inability to tell the truth – are obviously linked. They are linked in the impossibility of putting into practice the false and contradictory promises of Brexit. More generally, they are linked in the way that the Tory Party has reached a point where the things most of its members and many of its voters want are impossible.
Fundamentally, what they want are not just the impossible illusions of Brexit but a string of impossible illusions that go with it. These are at once less facile and more unattainable than blue passports and Imperial measures. They want a country that resembles an imagined past of stability, homogeneity and greatness. For all that they talk of love of country, they profoundly dislike the country as it actually is and want the government to provide them with another one, preferably located a long way from Europe, but it’s one which never existed and can’t be created now. Worse, the very policies it draws them to – most obviously Brexit – actually reduce such stability, homogeneity and greatness as exists.
They’re not completely crazy, and know the Empire has gone for good, but they still think in unrealistic terms about ‘the Anglosphere’ and the Commonwealth. They are now primarily an English party and, though they remain notionally pro-Union, they still think in unrealistic terms of it being one in which the non-English parts ‘know their place’. They want to visit stately homes without hearing about the realities of where the money came from to build them, and to enjoy a spell of hot weather without hearing about the realities of climate change. They want to be ‘free to say what we think’ without accepting the reality that others have the freedom to criticise what they say. Above all, they want a country of common sense and simple solutions and, though they aren’t unique in wanting that, they want it in a particular way, wherein complex reality is not just an irritant to them but a plot against them.
Brexit was a pivotal moment because it seemed to be a portal not just to leaving the EU, but to delivering all this and more. The ‘silent majority’ had finally spoken and been heard. But it has turned to ashes. Not only have none of the wider illusions been delivered (indeed many of them are further away than ever) but the reality of Brexit itself proved to be entirely different to what they thought it would be. That is why so few celebrate it, although they may still cling to the hope that the dream will eventually be realised. Meanwhile, they have simply added remainers and saboteurs to the long list of enemies within, along with ‘lefty lawyers’, the BBC, and the more amorphous ‘human rights brigade’, ‘metropolitan elite’, ‘Woke’ Establishment, and ‘the Blob’; and added Brexit betrayal to their long list of unassuageable grievances.
In that framing, Sunak is now depicted as ‘soft’ on Brexit, for apparently having urged some caution over the NIPB and extensive regulatory divergence when he was Chancellor. That’s linked to him being seen as captured by the ‘Treasury Blob’, and it’s notable that he has couched his (failing) message of ‘fiscal prudence’ in the terms that ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’. The first shows just how hard line the party members have become on Brexit itself, whilst their rejection of what, to them, used to be unquestionable fiscal orthodoxy shows how deeply they have embraced the Johnsonian cakeism that Brexit was sold on.
By contrast, Truss has convinced them that she might make Brexit a success, and offers the ‘simplist’ prescription of tax cuts as a cure-all, whilst gleefully lashing out at the ‘enemies within’. Above all, she has not challenged the impossibility of their illusions in even the mildest of ways. Hence they favour her as their leader, although neither candidate is the Thatcher-Johnson-Farage amalgam they crave.
Ironically, if the Tories could find someone with the genuine leadership qualities that both the country and their party actually need, that person’s first task would be to tell them that what they want is undeliverable. In the absence of that, they will eventually denounce any leader as being – as they said of David Cameron, as well as of May and even of Johnson – ‘not a real Conservative’. And, indeed, who could be, for as long as a real Conservative leader means someone who will make the impossible become real?
What happens now?
None of this is entirely new within the Tory Party (anyone remember ‘the Monday Club’? Or, more obscurely, ‘Selsdon Man’?), but what is new is that there is now almost nothing else within the Tory Party, which also opens up a schism between the party itself and some parts of its core vote. How its hapless condition will play out in the long-term is difficult to know.
One possibility, especially as the economic crisis gets worse, is that it gathers force and becomes more vicious, gaining new recruits, and perhaps even forging links, if only informal, with the street-fighting hard Right. It’s not a very long walk from that to Ur-Fascism. More optimistically, it reflects a mainly ageing demographic which in the not-too-distant future will become a political irrelevance. Or perhaps – more likely in opposition than in government, and certainly not under Truss or Sunak, neither of whom has the vision or character needed to do it – the Tory Party will remake itself in the somewhat more pragmatic mould that has arguably characterised most of its history.
But for the immediate future, we can only expect the post-Brexit instability to continue. None of the things being discussed in the leadership contest remotely speaks to the scale of the country’s problems, or to the deep causes that most of them have. Certainly there is no recognition of the realities of Brexit, how these intersect with the other problems, or of the damage Brexit is doing to just about every sector even without those other problems. Still less is there any glimmer of recognition of how diminished the UK’s standing in the world is as a result of Brexit and of the politics it has brought in its wake, or how widely Truss is distrusted by many of the UK’s key allies.
One particularly serious economic consequence of this continuing instability is that, as has been the case ever since the Brexit vote, vitally needed business investment and foreign direct investment will continue to be much weaker than it would have been. This, as well as pressure on sterling, will be exacerbated if the row with the EU over the NIPB continues and worsens: just as in the years since the referendum, why invest when uncertainty hangs over the future terms of around half of the UK’s trade? The EU reaction to such a row, I assume, would be to ‘play it long’, partly because the continued uncertainty hurts the UK more than the EU, partly in the hope that this government only has two years to run.
An era ending?
Of course if the Tories not only get through the next two years but also contrive to win the next election then all bets are off, for the EU as for all of us. But to me it feels – and a feeling is all it can be until it happens, when it becomes truism – that something fundamental is shifting. It seems rather like the tail-end of the Wilson-Callaghan government of 1974-1979 or of the Major government of 1992-1997. In both cases there was a sense of not just the government but a political era dying, and I think it’s there again now.
There’s already some polling evidence for that shift, but much depends on the Labour Party being able to capitalise on it, including the extent to which they are willing to get real about the damage of Brexit. That’s possible, if only because it would reflect the settled, indeed growing, view of the general public that Brexit was a mistake. It’s also reported (£) that both right and left wings of the party are now pressuring Keir Starmer to take a “softer” Brexit position. More broadly, Labour will need to develop a convincing policy on the economic crisis in whatever form it exists by the time of the next election. Again, there are already some signs of that. What is still missing compared with 1979 or 1997, and much harder to create, is a wider narrative of a desirable and deliverable future, rather than just a crisis management plan.
What links the Brexit policy and the wider policies that Labour need is the requirement to meet the challenge that the Tory Party manifestly can’t: to break with the culture of fantasy and lies, the denial of, and active hostility to, reality. That is the poison that Brexit exemplified and bequeathed which has to be sucked out of the body politic. It won’t be at all easy given how widely it has spread and how deep the wells from which it draws, not least the bottomless one of the pro-Brexit media.
As to what happens in the meantime, about the best that can be hoped for is that not too much more damage is done under Truss. It could be considerable. But, precisely because the only certainty is continuing instability, it is perfectly possible that events may quickly unfold, and in ways very different from those that anyone expects.
This is intended as the last post before the election of the next PM, so unless something unexpected happens I won’t blog next Friday. After that, I’ll be on holiday for two weeks so will unfortunately miss the start of the new regime, and the next post will be on Friday 23 September.
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