Despair

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

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of those times when events are so complex as to require a very long post, and moving so quickly that parts of it may be superseded within hours.

British politics: stuck

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

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

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

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

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

The Henry Nowak murder

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

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

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

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

The two-tier policing claim

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

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

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

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

Northern Ireland

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

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

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

The ‘first lie wins’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking back at how we got here

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

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

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

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

The broken cordon sanitaire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The riots represent a moment of choice for post-Brexit Britain

It’s hopefully not premature to say the literal, if not the metaphorical, dust has settled on last week’s riots. I’ve waited to write about them as I’m not a fan of ‘hot takes’ on big events, which are often foolish, and prefer to let a little time to pass before commenting. At the same time, I’m breaking my planned August break from posting because I think that it’s important to record the riots as a part of the Brexit saga. That doesn’t mean that Brexit caused the riots, but there are some connections between them. Equally, the fact of the riots having happened could pave the way for a new and better conversation about immigration in post-Brexit Britain.

The riots

Keir Starmer correctly called the riots “far-right thuggery” which had “no justification”, and it was refreshing to have a Prime Minister unequivocally doing so, and not back-tracking in the face of criticism. Some of that criticism was dishonest, denying that any of the culprits were of the far-right. Some of it was obtuse, in interpreting Starmer’s comments as a claim that all those who took to the streets were of the far-right. It’s true, of course, that some of them were anti-immigration without necessarily being doctrinaire fascists; that some were just thugs; that some were opportunistic looters and vandals; that some were inadequates and idiots. Still, at the hard centre of the riots were far-right activists and their sinister online allies. The far-right didn’t tag along with the crowd, the crowd tagged along with them. So Starmer’s description was correct. Indeed in some ways it was an understatement: some of the far-right thugs would better be described as lynch mobs.

Given that other elements were present, Starmer was also correct to talk about the riots in terms of mindless criminality, but this was manifestly a different truth to describing them as far-right. For, to the extent the violence was politically motivated, it was not ‘mindless’ and nor was it simply ‘criminality’. The use of violence for political ends is usually called terrorism, even if calls to treat the riots as such have not been heeded, at least so far. And this does not just apply to the doctrinaire fascists. Any of the rioters whose motivation was to change immigration policy, far-right or not, were attempting to change policy by means of violence. If people wanted a severe reduction of immigration, then, just a few weeks ago, they had an election when they could have voted for a party, Reform UK, pledging just that. Only 14% of voters did so.

That choice was also available to the rioters if they are understood in terms of the softer interpretation of their political motivation, which has been deployed very widely by people who range from disingenuous apologists to some well-meaning liberals. On this interpretation these were not so much riots as political ‘protests’ which arose because the country has failed to have an ‘honest conversation’ about immigration, or failed to discuss it at all, with the result that immigration levels are far higher than ‘most people’ or ‘ordinary people’ want. On such accounts, the riots, even if not justified in their violence, reflect a legitimate and respectable grievance that ‘uncontrolled immigration’ has been forced on the public without their support or consent.

And this is where Brexit comes in, because of course we’ve heard all this before. In fact we’ve heard it for decades, but never more so than during the referendum campaign, though the honesty of that conversation can certainly be questioned.

Back to Brexit

There’s no doubt that hostility to immigration was one of the main drivers of the vote to leave, but, rather as in some of the commentary about the riots, there was a studied delineation of the ‘respectable’ and the ‘unrespectable’ approaches to this. Vote Leave, the official campaign, was at pains to distance itself from the much harsher anti-immigrant message of Farage and Leave.EU. This enabled the overall vote for Brexit to be boosted by providing different ‘channels’ to corral voters to the ‘leave’ box. For all their subsequent protestations, the ‘liberal Brexiters’ knew that they could only win by enrolling many distinctly illiberal voters. Even more disingenuously, whilst happily harvesting such votes, some of them claimed that Brexit would spike the far-right, by removing the ‘grievance’ of ‘uncontrolled immigration’.

Thus many who voted Brexit believed they had been promised that immigration would not just be made subject to national control but would be reduced and, for at least some of them, the belief was that there would be fewer Muslims and less black and brown people entering the country. The campaign also cynically, and quite deliberately, conflated the issue of freedom of movement for EU citizens with refugee flows from outside the EU, especially Syria, and exploited Islamphobia in multiple ways, including the lie that Turkey was about to join the EU.

Actually, all that had been explicitly promised, even by Farage, was an ‘Aussie-style’ points system for immigration from anywhere, including the EU. This was even sold to ethnic minority voters with non-European, especially Commonwealth, roots as a way not of clamping down on immigration but of creating parity between people from their countries of origin and those from EU countries. Indeed some Brexiters even suggested that EU freedom of movement was inherently racist, implying to some voters that Brexit should be understood as an anti-racist, anti-discrimination project at the very moment it was being implied to other voters that it was anything but that.

As I discussed at length in a post last year, the inconsistency of the appeals to voters set up a massive problem as regards immigration, just as it did in every other aspect of Brexit, after the Leave campaign’s unexpected and unplanned for victory. Of course, we know what happened. In brief, having decided, initially under Theresa May, that, more than anything, Brexit meant ending freedom of movement in order to control immigration, Brexit was enacted as hard Brexit, with all the damage that entailed. But when EU freedom of movement was ended, immigration from the rest of the world soared, precisely because, under a ‘points-based system’, it was mandated.

This wasn’t because of some ‘globalist’ plot, or the wokeish multi-culturalism of the ‘liberal elite’, let alone evidence of the obscene ‘race replacement’ conspiracy theory. It was because businesses and public services would have literally collapsed otherwise. But it also meant, in very broad terms, that it became more likely that immigrants had black and brown skins and more likely they would be of non-Christian faith. As for irregular migration, if anything Brexit exacerbated it by removing the UK from the Dublin Regulations.

So, to the extent that those who voted for Brexit wanted lower immigration, including those who did so for straightforwardly racist reasons, it left them completely unsatisfied. Rather than spike the far-right, Brexit has given them a new grievance.

Whose country?

Thus in 2016 Farage declared “it’s been a hell of a journey but we have got our country back”, in what he called “a victory for ordinary, decent people”, yet in 2024 we still have people like Lee Anderson, now a Reform MP, whining bellicosely that "he wants his country back"*. It is no coincidence that the same phrase was chanted at the recent ‘Tommy Robinson’ rally, showing the continuities between the would-be respectable Brexiter politicians and those who, by any reasonable definition, are of the far-right.

For Farage, Anderson, Robinson, and those they represent, this is because Brexit has been betrayed, but the reality is that their demands could no more be satisfied after Brexit than before Brexit. For the deeper truth is not just that those demands couldn’t be satisfied without doing massive damage, including to the public services upon which those making those demands rely, it is that even if that damage was done it still wouldn’t be enough to satisfy them. They would shift to demanding not just an end to immigration, but the repatriation of immigrants, and then of the descendants of immigrants who are not ‘really British’ (a recurring theme within far-right ideology).

We can either go on trying to appease these unappeasable demands or have the honesty and courage to say that they are unrealistic and do not constitute ‘legitimate concerns’. Or, to put that in a more positive way, to have the honesty and courage to say that most people accept, and many are more than happy, that our country is multi-cultural, multi-race, multi-faith. This isn’t just a pious or unevidenced claim. Polling this week from More in Common shows that 48% of people are proud “that Britain is a multi-ethnic society”, 45% are neither proud nor ashamed of it, and only 7% are ashamed of it. In that sense, the Anderson-type desire to ‘have my country back’ is not an innocent demand for restitution made by the many, it’s an authoritarian demand by the few for the imposition of their narrow version of what the country should be.

To accept or welcome multi-culturalism isn’t to make some Pollyannaish claim that all immigrants are good people. Why should they be? They will include the vicious and the depraved, and the saints and the saviors, just as the ’indigenous’ population does. Nor is it simply about an abstract principle of diversity, though that is a principle which plenty of people would support. It’s also about economic realism, with which comes the need to be realistic about the families of immigrant workers and students, and geo-political realism about what drives refugees and asylum seekers. The latter actually affects the UK less than many countries, but it isn’t going to disappear and, yes, it does create moral obligations on all countries, including this one.

From this perspective, the riots do show that Britain has an integration problem. But it isn’t the integration of immigrants, who mostly do so (probably rather more than most British ‘expats’, if truth be told), at least within a generation. The problem is the integration of a small percentage of stubbornly monocultural, and sometimes violent, white, mainly English men. They’ve had Brexit, with all the damage it has done. They’ve had the ‘hostile environment policy’, with all the misery it has caused. They’ve had an immigration system which, far from being uncontrolled, is tightly regulated, expensive, has left many sectors with endemic staff shortages and has banjaxed universities. But they’re still not satisfied. The issue isn’t that mainstream politics has not given enough attention to them, it’s that it has bent over backwards to do so.

I know only too well what the nationalist populists would say to all this: typical condescending globalist elitism from an out-of-touch academic. The irony is that the real condescension is the populist promise of something which is impossible to deliver in practice, as happened with Brexit and, for that matter, with successive Tory manifesto pledges of immigration caps. Equally condescending are those well-meaning liberals who insist that we must strive to ‘understand’ the concerns of the rioters, or to insist that their racism is actually just the cri de coeur of the disadvantaged. But we already understand them, and we’ve already tried to meet their concerns. It hasn’t worked, and it will never work. Whatever we do, they will still be angry, and still claim ‘their country’ has been stolen from them, just as they always have, irrespective of immigration levels, and irrespective of EU membership, decade after decade, including at those periods which, currently, they revere as the lost past of true England that they wish to reclaim.

After the riots

The riots have seemingly been quelled, partly as a result of robust policing and the rapid disposition of firm legal justice for the rioters and their on-line provocateurs. That has led to squeals from far-right apologists, with entirely bogus claims about ‘two-tier justice’ and ‘thoughtcrime’ prosecutions. In fact, it was liberal democracy in action: on the one hand, political arguments should not be advanced through violence, on the other hand, free speech is not a licence for incitement to violence. What’s more, the police response was not seen as excessive by the public, with only 7% thinking it was ‘too harsh’ whilst 42% thought it was ‘too soft’.

The riots were also partly quelled by the thousands of counter-demonstrators and by the evident disdain of the thousands who turned out to repair the damage the rioters had caused. These are the ‘ordinary, decent people’ of our country, not the neo-Nazis and their tag-along mobs. Again that claim isn’t simply rhetoric but is supported by the polling evidence from More in Common which shows, amongst other things, that only 13% think the rioters represent ‘the real Britain’ but 87% think that those engaged in the clean-up do so. Meanwhile, only 23% think the riots stem from ‘legitimate concerns’ and a mere 17% think those involved in them are ‘standing up for Britain’.

So this was not some popular uprising, and that is a crucial point. One of the things which distinguishes populism in the UK from that in other countries is, precisely, Brexit. The referendum put a single populist policy to the electorate and the majority voted for it (let’s please leave aside the cretinous point that it was ‘only’ a majority of those who voted – that’s how democracy works). That emboldened the populists to claim (and perhaps to believe) not just, as they always have done, that they spoke for the ‘silent majority’, but that they represented an actual, permanent majority for all populist policies, especially as regards immigration.

It was always nonsense, and they are still peddling it by claiming the riots represent a popular revolt against ‘uncontrolled immigration’. Indeed, it’s hard to resist the sense that for the far right and some of its apologists there was a salivating hope that the riots marked the moment when ‘the people’ finally rose up against ‘the elite’ (it reminds me of how, when I was student, my left-wing friends and I were always predicting that some moment of crisis heralded the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions). If so, small wonder that they are so angry about the way that Starmer’s new government, rather calmly and undramatically, but highly effectively, restored order.

A moment of choice

With the riots now, hopefully, over, their aftermath therefore presents a moment of choice for post-Brexit Britain. People of all types voted to leave the EU for all sorts of reasons. It would be absurd to deny that some who did so have a similar agenda to the rioters or their sympathisers, but equally absurd to claim that all or even most of them had that agenda. And, of course, many voted to remain. So post-Brexit Britain does not belong to the rioters and their sympathisers, any more than this country should be defined by the image of ‘their country’. If, as many Brexiters say, the purpose was solely to take back sovereignty and so, as regards immigration, to make our own choices about that, then we are now perfectly entitled to have whatever immigration policy we, collectively, want.

It is certainly reasonable to demand that this immigration policy be framed by honest discussion. The first place to start with that is for those who call for much lower, or even zero, immigration to be honest about what they propose the country would have to go without, including in terms of public services, if their policies were pursued. It’s easy enough to say ‘stop mass immigration’ until the effects start to bite. For example, when, as has happened in the last year, immigration applications to work in health and social care have fallen by 82%, it emerges that 64% of the public view this as a negative development and only 16% see it as a positive development. No responsible politician, in power, could come anywhere near stopping immigration, or in some periods stopping what critics call ‘mass immigration’, and so no responsible politician, out of power, can honestly advocate doing so. 

There’s also a need for a different kind of honesty, from those who are ‘pro-immigration’ as much as those who are against it, and that is to stop the conflation of at least three different things: immigration which is largely about the labour market, immigration which is about students, and immigration which is about asylum seekers and refugees. When these distinctions are put to the public in opinion polls, what is revealed is that, far from anti-immigration sentiment being dominant it is actually much more nuanced. So whereas when asked about immigration in the abstract, 54% think it should be reduced, the only types of immigration for which there is majority support for a reduction in present numbers (as at January 2024) are people crossing the channel in small boats (68% want to see a reduction) and dependents of students (54% want to see a reduction, and this is now happening, with disastrous consequences for the UK’s universities). In all other categories there is majority support for the current or higher levels of immigration. In some cases that support is very high indeed (e.g. 82% for doctors, nurses, and care workers, 77% for their dependents, and even 55% for asylum seekers).

Of course, to the out-and-out racists, such distinctions don’t matter. Foreigners are foreigners, and so are their children and grandchildren. So it actually suits them if the rest of the public are not encouraged to draw those distinctions. Indeed there can be little doubt that the relentless focus on ‘stopping the boats’ suits the far-right agenda, by conflating the most unpopular form of immigration with all immigration (just as, during the referendum, the ‘migrant crisis’ was conflated with freedom of movement). All the more reason, then, why mainstream discourse should disentangle different forms of immigration, and create policies for each of them on their own terms. And, above everything else, all the more reason to refuse to frame that discourse in terms of the false claim that the far-right speak for the ‘ordinary, decent people’.

A fresh start?

The riots, and perhaps even more some of the apologism for them, have been both depressing and alarming, and for their targets literally terrifying. It’s tempting to see them as a kind of continuation of the xenophobia which was partly responsible for Brexit and perhaps enabled by Brexit. But in a roundabout way that plays into the hands of the populists who claim Brexit as some kind of mandate for draconian immigration controls, and who enrol post-Brexit immigration into their grievance politics.

Brexit was Brexit, and it has happened. The post-Brexit politics of immigration do not belong to the Brexit Ultras – it’s notable that Farage has found himself on the wrong side of public opinion this last week or so – and it is just possible that the public disdain for the riots will turn out to be the moment when a new conversation emerges. How likely is that? Well, rather obviously, it depends on who chooses to participate in it, what they say, and how loud they say it. For too long it has been dominated by the voices of  a loud minority, which last week came to a crescendo with the raucous cries of the mob and the insidious dogwhistling of their ‘respectable’ apologists. For now they have been, if not silenced, then at least slightly subdued. What happens next is up to the rest of us.

 

*Risibly, but also disgracefully, Lee Anderson, usually so ‘tough’ on law and order, sought to defend the rioters as just “British working-class lads” who had “probably had one too many” and “got carried away”.

Note: my normal practice if I claim that certain things are being widely said is to link to evidence in the form of a study demonstrating that this is so, or at least to a high-profile example. However, doing so for some things in this post would require linking to the absolute dregs of online vileness, which I would prefer not to do.

On a separate matter, I’m hugely appreciative of all the kind comments on the previous post in response to my request for preferences about the future of this blog. I’m still considering how to proceed, but I am quite overwhelmed by the response. Thank you.

The leadership campaign is mired in Brexit dishonesty

As the dust begins to settle on Boris Johnson’s downfall, it’s worth emphasizing that it was inextricably bound up with Brexit even though Brexit wasn’t its direct cause. Unusually and fittingly, it was his character and conduct rather than any particular policy which ended his premiership. Not, I think, because the Tory Party had some collective outbreak of moral rectitude – they all knew what Johnson was like from the outset – but more because the thumping loss of two by-elections demonstrated that the voters were finally starting to see through him, in large part because of ‘partygate’.

In some ways that’s a good thing. It arguably shows that, eventually and creakingly, the British polity still has some kind of moral compass. But it also means that, even though it ought to be, this is not a moment of reckoning for the Brexit he did so much to promote and shape. From abroad, things look different. Writing in the Washington Post, Stryker McGuire observes that “viewed from afar, Johnson’s greatest failing is liable to be what he hoped would be his glorious legacy: Brexit”. I’m sure that will eventually be the generally accepted view here, too, but it isn’t yet remotely sayable amongst Tory politicians and commentators, who invariably chalk Brexit up to his credit, perhaps as his only credit, and set against the debits of his conduct in office.

Brexit and Johnson’s character are inseparable

Yet in truth, Johnson’s deficiencies of character are inseparable from Brexit. He was far from the only liar in 2016, but the casual and brazen dishonesty with which he fronted Vote Leave certainly embodied and perhaps swung its campaign. He even embodied many of the particular hues of that dishonesty, in his insistence not just that facts don’t matter but that belief matters more, in his endless sense of his own victimhood, still on display in his resignation announcement and mirroring that of the Brexiters generally, in his refusal to take responsibility for his choices even to the extent of denying choices have to be made, and in his constant bogus and half-baked invocations of the Second World War.

Equally, the rank dishonesty of agreeing the Northern Ireland Protocol without intending to honour it, and of agreeing a limited trade agreement with the EU whilst pretending it lived up to his ‘cakeist’ promises, both contributed hugely to making the calamity of Brexit even worse than it was bound to be. And for all the pearl-clutching now amongst some Tory Brexiters about Johnson’s contempt for established rules and norms, they almost all supported his illegal Prorogation of parliament in 2019, as well as his threat of illegality in the Internal Market Bill (IMB) in 2020. So whilst Johnson’s immorality was built into his character, their support for him reflected their Jacobin-like frenzy whereby Brexit justified ripping up any law or convention that seemed to get in its way, including the very parliamentary sovereignty they claimed to be so central to their cause.

Small wonder, then, that the bludgeoning nonsense that they were enacting the ‘will of the people’ was squeakily echoed in Johnson’s last-ditch attempt to stay in post by invoking the constitutional gibberish that he had been bestowed a personal mandate by 14 million voters in the general election. Small wonder, too, that despite the fact that MPs on all wings of the party, including the ERG, turned him out, some pro-Brexit commentators are insisting he was the victim of a remainer, anti-Brexit plot. Brexit populism has been set back, but not destroyed, by Johnson’s demise.

It's now widely accepted, including, if only superficially, by most of the candidates to succeed him, that Johnson’s legacy is a constitution and political culture horribly damaged by dishonesty and immorality, with accompanying public distrust and cynicism. But simply laying this at the door of his own character, without recognizing its roots in Brexit, means it will not be addressed.

Why Brexit has never been discussed honestly

There’s actually an even wider point to be made. The referendum didn’t just result in leaving the EU. It also created a massive and ongoing destabilization of British politics. It is not coincidence that we have had two general elections and are about to have the fourth Prime Minister in the space of just six years. That is astonishing in itself, but what is far more astonishing is that at each of the pivotal moments – the general elections and the leadership elections – Brexit itself was only discussed in the most cursory of ways.

This may seem a strange thing to say given how dominant an issue Brexit has been since 2016, but my point is that it has rarely, if ever, been talked about in depth, spelling out its actual practical implications and the choices and trade-offs involved. Thus Theresa May was installed following a truncated campaign after which we still, famously or infamously, only knew that ‘Brexit meant Brexit’. That stasis lasted for months until she simply announced in early 2017 that it meant hard Brexit. Then, as I catalogued at the time of the 2017 election and again during that of 2019, the two main parties, at least, refused, in different ways and for different reasons, to set out in detailed ways what their Brexit plans would mean. In-between, the leadership campaign which brought Johnson to power was conducted as a virility test over who would most readily embrace ‘no-deal Brexit’ rather than accept ‘the hated backstop’, but with no substance whatsoever on what lay behind these slogans.

So neither at these decisive points nor in the periods between them has there ever been any sustained, honest, realistic political conversation about the practical realities of Brexit. Instead, throughout the May years there were suggestions of securing ‘frictionless trade’ and the ‘exact same benefits’ of membership and in the Johnson years the claim of cakeism and denial of the coming costs, with Labour all the while just talking vaguely of the ‘better deal’ they would achieve. Equally, throughout these years there was virtually no honesty about the actual choices and problems posed by and for Northern Ireland. Instead there was endless nonsense about non-existent ‘alternative arrangements’ and, ultimately, the creation of an Irish Sea border whilst denying that that was what had been agreed. Thereafter, since the end of the transition the political silence about the damaging effects of Brexit has been deafening, whilst all the denial and dishonesty about Northern Ireland has been re-activated.

The fundamental reason for this, I think, lies precisely with the deadening effect of the ‘will of the people’ bullying, and attendant obscenities about ‘enemies of the people’. Whilst this hasn’t stopped continuing, vociferous opposition to Brexit, it has meant that, especially in the governing Tory Party, realism and honesty about the practicalities, and not just the principle, of Brexit is deemed as betrayal. This is why the civil service, which is bound to be realistic and honest in the sense that it has to deliver Brexit as a policy, rather than simply sell it to voters as an idea, has been so traduced as sabotaging Brexit.

It’s this which marks Brexit out as different to any other political issue, at least in my lifetime. There are plenty of examples of divisive policies but they’ve always been deliverable even when they have been undesirable, and they’ve always been discussable in more or less rational ways. Brexit isn’t like this because it promised impossible or contradictory things, which by definition can’t be delivered. But since even saying this is (still) deemed offensive to the ‘will of the people’, no honest or realistic political conversation has ever been possible within or between the two main parties. That extends from the most general level of Brexit having been enacted as hard Brexit, right down to the multiple and complex trade-offs in decisions about regulatory alignment or divergence in particular sectors. This evisceration of honesty and realism is the “radioactive pollution” that has poisoned the political ground, as I expressed it in last week’s post, and until it is cleansed the instability of the last six years will continue.

Who is a true Brexiter now?

In principle, the Tories now have a chance to change that with their change of leader. Whilst Johnson isn’t the sole or even main cause of the dishonesty of Brexit, he is so entwined with it that replacing him offered the possibility of facing up to that dishonesty. I don’t mean that there was ever the remotest possibility that Johnson’s departure would herald the end of Brexit. It won’t. That fantasy is the province of paranoid Brexiters (£) and, to put it charitably, over-optimistic remainers.

On the contrary, and entirely predictably, only those fully committed to Brexit have even attempted to be candidates. Yet there are now curious contortions in this. Some Brexit Ultras have insisted that Johnson must be replaced by a Brexiter, but this category includes Liz Truss who voted remain but is now deemed by Jacob Rees-Mogg to be a full convert. Indeed David Campbell Bannerman, the Conservative ex-MEP who once called for British people with “extreme EU loyalty” to be tried for treason, insists “only Liz Truss can save Brexit now” (£).

Rishi Sunak, on the other hand, who always supported Brexit, is now treated as not of the faith and even, bizarrely, denounced as a “socialist” by Rees-Mogg. Indeed according to arch-Brexiter Daniel Moylan, not only does Sunak not “care about” Brexit, but the other current front runner, Penny Mordaunt, who was an ERG member before becoming a minister, “doesn’t understand it”. Meanwhile, in a separate and stinging attack on Mordaunt (£), another of Johnson’s placemen in the House of Lords, the self-important would-be kingmaker David Frost, has questioned whether Brexit would be “safe” in her hands.

Yet Mordaunt’s credentials as a Brexiter seem real enough to the extent that, when challenged about her notorious referendum campaign lie that the UK did not have a veto on Turkish accession, opted to double-down on it (note her tone at the end of the clip, which has the muleish obstinacy of one who knows her argument has no logic, but takes perverse pride in clinging to it). Such unrepentant dishonesty is surely the hallmark of a true Brexiter, for all that ERG ‘hard man’ Steve Baker denies that this is what she is, whilst an article on the reliably peculiar Conservative Woman site goes further and denies she’s even a real Conservative.

Until she was knocked out of the contest, the ‘hard man’s’ preference, by the way, was for Suella Braverman, the scourge of ‘cultural marxism’ who wants to take the UK out of the ECHR and apparently believes that the vote for Brexit was also a vote against the expansion of university education and rights litigation (£). Kemi Badenoch, too, seems to think there’s a link between the ‘change’ people voted for in 2016 and her brand of small-state, war on woke conservatism. Perhaps it should be no surprise that it’s so hard to pin down who is a true Brexiter when so much of what has subsequently been claimed to flow the referendum result was unaccountably not written on the ballot paper.

The leadership contest continues to avoid the realities of Brexit

The most striking thing about the struggle between these latter-day Girondins and Montagnards for control of the Committee of Brexit Safety, at least to those who were assured that voting Tory in 2019 would ‘get Brexit done’, is how many are warning that it has not, after all, been done but is still a work in progress, and a fragile one at that. That being so, it might be thought that the candidates would at least have an honest conversation about how Brexit is going, if only because the recent by-election losses suggest that the voter coalition of the 2019 ‘get Brexit done’ election is fraying at both ends.

However, yet again, the chance for such honesty has been squandered. All the candidates have been setting out economic plans which barely, if at all, mention Brexit and certainly don’t acknowledge the chilling effects of Brexit on economic growth, trade, sterling and investment, which are now beyond sensible dispute, and are baked into official figures. For even to hint at any negative consequences of Brexit, economic or otherwise, is taboo in this election (the fact that Sunak has done so, even mildly, in the past may partly explain why the Brexiters have turned against him).

Similarly, all the candidates speak airily of capitalising on the ‘opportunities of Brexit’ without any meaningful or serious detail. Even the effects of Brexit and the new trade deals on farmers, a community that used to be close to the heart of Tories, go unmentioned. And even the Express has spotted the Brexit silence, though mistakenly thinking that it’s a failure to foreground Brexit benefits rather than a failure to acknowledge its damage. The consequence is that whoever leads the party will not have a viable plan to lead the country, for they will still be refusing the face the post-Brexit realities the country faces.

The most immediate acid test of whether a more honest and realistic approach to Brexit is in prospect is the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill (NIPB), which continues to work its way through parliament, with all attempts to amend it being rejected this week. For the NIPB arises from a tangle of dishonesties: dishonesty towards the EU with whom the Protocol was signed, towards the MPs who were told the Protocol was temporary, towards the voters who were told it was part of an oven-ready deal, and towards the Northern Ireland peace process which is at the sharp end of it all.

That test has so far been failed. None of the candidates has indicated opposition to the Bill, and the front runners have all said they will continue with it although Sunak apparently had reservations about it in Cabinet (and Braverman, astoundingly, wanted to pursue an even harder set of demands). Whether this commitment comes from conviction or from the realization that to say otherwise would torpedo their chances of winning is irrelevant; either way they are endorsing the dishonesties associated with it.

What isn’t clear is how far the next leader will take the NIPB once in power, and, so far as I know, none of them has been challenged to answer this. The reason it isn’t clear is partly because of the dishonesty of the proposed legislation itself, which has been presented to ‘one nation’ Tories as merely a negotiating tactic rather than something that would be used, and to ERG-types as a non-negotiable set of demands which, if not agreed to by the EU, will be unilaterally implemented. Therefore, the candidates simply saying they will pursue the Bill doesn’t tell us what doing so means.

However, since there’s no way the EU will agree to it in full, the new leader will in fairly short order have to end this ambiguity. This could herald an early crisis, though It’s possible that neither wing would dare rebel at the very start of a new leader’s tenure. But the wider point is what would it say for honesty in politics if the first act of the new leader were to reveal as a key policy – whether that be abandoning the NIPB, making a deal with the EU that fell short of the Bill’s demands, or disapplying the Protocol - something they had not explicitly mentioned in the campaign?

The Brexit cuckoos

It’s depressing that not a single candidate, for all the talk of integrity from all of them, has had the courage to point to any of the problems Brexit has created, even without necessarily disowning Brexit. That could have been the drum that Tom Tugendhat – who I gather used to be a soldier – might have marched to. But apparently there isn’t a single Tory MP who, even knowing they would have had no chance of winning, was willing to at least set down a marker for any kind of honesty or pragmatism about Brexit. That is shaming on those of them, and some still exist, who know the damage Brexit is doing.  But the fundamental responsibility lies fairly and squarely with the Brexiters inside and beyond the Tory Party. They have made honesty all but impossible.

Inside the party, the ERG’s journey from ginger group to virtual control – a partly taxpayer-funded cuckoo party within a party, but which has never stood for election as a party, on its own manifesto – is perhaps the biggest factor. An index of its strength is that in the current leadership contest at least three of the original candidates – Braverman, Javid and Mordaunt - have in the past been reported to be members. The group also insists on having its own one-to-one meetings with all candidates to assess their Brexit credentials (Sunak reportedly ‘stormed out’ of his). This strength, along with the UKIPification of the party membership (£), ensures that no even half-way ‘moderate’ candidate, by any standard but their own, has a chance and, in any case, most such moderate Tory MPs were purged by Johnson in 2019.

However, the current election also reveals that, as so often happens with extremist groups, the ERG is now riven by infighting over ‘purity’. That has been incipient since at least the split between ‘the Spartans’, who voted against Theresa May in all three of the ‘meaningful votes’ on her Withdrawal Agreement in 2018, and the rest of them. Now it has become manifest in the contortions, discussed above, about who is a ‘true Brexiter’, and just last night the group endorsed former remainer Truss as its preferred candidate (although it’s not clear that its members are obliged to vote en bloc). Even so it’s quite possible, because of those contortions, that the ERG will end up with a situation where neither of the final two is “a Brexit purist” (£). To spell it out, that is how some pro-Brexit commentators are describing the scenario if the last two are pro-Brexit Sunak and Mordaunt!

The endless Tory Brexit psycho-drama is set to continue

We are therefore in a potentially extraordinary situation. The dominance of the ERG means that this leadership contest to replace Johnson has continued with his dishonesty about Brexit. That in turn will ensure that for the immediate future British politics will continue to be corrupted by the dishonesty inherent within Brexit. Yet the outcome of that contest may very well leave the ERG still unhappy. And even if that is not true from the start of the new leader’s tenure, it soon will be.

The Times columnist Danny Finkelstein this week made a point (£) very much in keeping with an argument I’ve been making on this blog for years, namely that whoever is elected the Brexiters will end up saying that person has betrayed Brexit because reality always gets the better of their dishonest beliefs. Thus once they embraced May with, it’s easy now to forget, huge enthusiasm but ended up bitterly despising her as ‘Theresa the Remainer’. Johnson, who was never one of their own, they came to see as having lost interest in, and stomach for, ‘unleashing Brexit benefits’. The same will happen to his successor.

Since Finkelstein wrote his article things have already moved on. It has now become abundantly clear that if Sunak wins the Brexiters will disown him from the outset, and the same is very possibly true of Mordaunt. But whoever wins will go the same way, possibly quite soon, as I suggest above in relation to the NIPB, but if not later when, once again, the benefits of Brexit prove imaginary or unsatisfying. Nigel Farage has already said that unless Braverman, who is now out, won it would mean that Brexit would be betrayed. But the reality is that, if she had won, it would not have been long before Farage and other Brexit Ultras were denouncing her as well.

What I would add to Finkelstein’s analysis is that the reason for this isn’t just because the gap between reality and Brexiter fantasy means that Brexit always gets betrayed, it’s that deep in the psychology of Brexit is a desire to be betrayed so as to maintain the purity of insurgency and to preserve the comfort blanket of victimhood. Indeed, the ERG’s endorsement of Truss, given its view of what happened with May, seems almost masochistic. Of course the real victims are those of us who, in the present leadership campaign, are merely onlookers as the tragedy of this perverse political psychology continues to play out before our bruised and bleeding eyes.

 

 

I’ve had reports that some people signed up for email alerts to this blog are no longer receiving them. It doesn’t seem to be a systematic problem, so individual fixes are needed in each case. Anyone affected can email support@follow.it who should be able to easily resolve things.

Betamax Frost is an obstacle to a viable post-Brexit strategy

There’s something like an emerging consensus that the Afghanistan crisis has also created a crisis for Britain’s post-Brexit geo-political strategy and, in particular, shows both the emptiness of the ‘Global Britain’ slogan and the urgent need to increase co-operation with the EU. It’s a message that can be found in recent articles by former National Security Adviser Lord Ricketts, by the Observer’s Chief Political Commentator Andrew Rawnsley and, perhaps more surprisingly so therefore more significantly, by pro-Brexit Times columnist Iain Martin (£). Within the Conservative Party it can be seen in the comments of Tom Tugenhadt and Tobias Ellwood, amongst others.

Of course many people realized from the outset that Brexit was going to create such a crisis, not least because it was so clearly a victory for Putin’s anti-UK and anti-EU policies – the Afghanistan issue has just hastened it and made it more visible. That arises from one of the key flaws in the Brexit case, which always insisted that Britain’s security needs were entirely met by NATO (meaning, in effect, the US), whilst all attempts to develop an EU foreign and defence policy were treated as illegitimate and indeed as a reason to leave. More crudely, during the referendum, any discussion of the geo-political consequences of Brexit was shut down using the ‘so World War Three will break out if we leave?’ straw man.

Subsequently, the government’s attempt to articulate its Global Britain strategy in the ‘Integrated Review’ made only passing references to the EU, and Boris Johnson’s stated aim of “leaving the cramped horizons of a regional foreign policy” underscored that he wanted to act as if Britain’s strategic place in the world could be detached from its geographical place in the world. Exactly the same objective is apparent in relation Britain’s economic place in what Brexiters like to call the “post-geography trading world”.

The strategic logic for post-Brexit Britain

This was always foolish, if only because – as Brexiters themselves were wont to say – ‘we are leaving the EU, we’re not leaving Europe’. The implications of that truism are starting to be belatedly recognized in both geo-politics and economics. There’s a kind of Alice through the looking glass feeling in the words of the newly appointed Trade Commissioner for Europe, which speak of the huge importance of trade with the EU and of the need to work “with businesses and governments across the continent to remove barriers to trade”. It need hardly be said that … no, really, it need hardly be said. Still, it is a recognition, of sorts, of reality.

That recognition is also evident in some of the ‘quiet realism’ I’ve described in recent posts about the limited possibilities for regulatory divergence from the EU. For example, despite the current bluster about diverging from EU GDPR rules it seems almost certain that, when it comes to it, the government will realise that this would have few benefits but carry the massive costs (£) of losing EU approval of UK data protection rules as equivalent to GDPR. The pull of the EU regulatory orbit is too great for a country of Britain’s size and economic integration with the EU to resist. Divergence is simply too expensive, as has in fact been obvious since the 2017 Data Protection Bill was announced even as hard Brexit was being pursued.

Thus the strategic logic of post-Brexit Britain is getting clearer almost by the day. It’s not just that regulatory divergence is too expensive. It is also that continued de facto regulatory alignment makes it pointless to continue to refuse de jure alignment. That is because retaining the theoretical right to diverge (e.g. on Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary [SPS] regulations, which are also central to the Northern Ireland situation) whilst still in practice remaining mainly or entirely aligned makes no sense, or at least it only makes sense to theological Brexiters as an exercise in theoretical sovereignty. No doubt there will be a few exceptions, but that is the general logic of the situation.

Beyond regulatory issues, that logic suggests working in close and harmonious partnership with the EU across a wide range of security, diplomatic, environmental and possibly military endeavours. It’s not an ideal situation but, within the range of those currently politically viable for post-Brexit Britain, it is the best available. Anyone tempted to dismiss this as ‘remainer defeatism’ should recall that such harmony was precisely what many leave campaigners promised as a benefit of Brexit, replacing the antagonism arising from supposed ‘compulsion’ with a cooperation based upon making choices based on the UK’s own interests. It is only more recently that Brexiters have insisted on independence at all costs from anything European, regardless of UK interests.

To the extent that strategic logic points in the direction of a relationship with the EU that is both substantially harmonized and harmonious, it’s a reasonable expectation that at some point in the future a British government will take that path. But manifestly it is not inevitable that governments will act with strategic logic and, most certainly, it is unlikely that the present government will do so. For even as the force of that logic becomes clearer, Johnson’s approach to Brexit – as enacted by David Frost – remains one of antagonism which precludes acting on it.

Frost returns for autumn

That this approach is set to continue was made abundantly clear by Frost this week, both in a major speech and in a written statement to parliament. For all the mention in the speech of not wanting “a fractious or difficult relationship with the EU”, he was unable to resist multiple jibes suggesting just the opposite. Crucially, he made it clear that he does not accept the fundamental tenets of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP): “the difficulties come from the way the Protocol is constructed, not just the way it is being implemented”.

An obvious retort would be that he was the UK’s chief negotiator when it was agreed in 2019, but, as in the past, he made clear that he regards this as having happened because of the constraints inherited from May’s administration, constraints which wouldn’t have existed had “we” (meaning Johnson’s administration) been in charge at that time. For this reason, he evidently feels no shame, or even any sense of inconsistency, in reneging on what he agreed because he feels no genuine responsibility for having made the agreement.

This, as with other claims he makes, entails a ludicrous re-writing of history, but it’s important to understand that – in my view, although of course I am not inside their heads – both Johnson and Frost genuinely believe this stuff (for a longer discussion of Frost’s approach, see my post from last March). That matters, because it explains their present stance. In particular, they believe that May failed to negotiate properly because she didn’t believe in Brexit, that the removal of the backstop was a triumph of their ‘hardball’ negotiation, and that the subsequent threat to violate the NIP with the Internal Market Bill was what led to the TCA being agreed. Most fundamentally, they believe that the entire Northern Ireland border issue was fabricated by the EU in order to stymie Brexit and only gained prominence because May allowed it to. It’s significant that all of these beliefs have recently been affirmed by Dominic Cummings.

These may sound like outlandish statements to many readers of this blog, but they are entirely commonplace, and in no way controversial, in Brexiter circles. As such they are now baked in as articles of faith, certainly for Frost who has re-made himself by embracing them. Johnson seems to have lost interest in Brexit policy entirely, and has subcontracted it to Frost. It’s conceivable - given the general plasticity of his beliefs which, in a sense, mean that the term ‘articles of faith’ is a misnomer in his case - that he might change approach and dump Frost if he saw some advantage in it, of which more below, despite the furore it would provoke amongst Tory backbench Brexiters. But for now he too apparently shares this boilerplate Brexiter analysis of how the NIP came about.

The resumption of the Protocol row

What these beliefs about the past now lead to is the proposition that if the UK pushes hard enough then the EU will abandon the substance of the NIP, including abandoning its refusal to grant SPS regulatory equivalence rather than the UK agreeing regulatory alignment. In this way, both the substance and the tone of the NIP row are indeed blocks both to regulatory harmonization and to the creation of a harmonious relationship which strategic logic mandates.

Central to that approach is the threat to invoke Article 16. It is notable that Frost this week re-issued this threat, along with the unsubstantiated claim that the conditions needed to justify its invocation already exist.  Many sensible commentators rightly say that this would not resolve anything, but would merely exacerbate existing uncertainties and tensions. Such commentors also rightly point out that Frost’s words are at odds with his stated aim of creating the basis for negotiating and resolving problems.

However, we are not in the realm of the ‘sensible’ conduct of international relations. For Frost-Johnson the exacerbation of existing problems is not a failure but a desirable result because it is painful for those – in this case the EU – who persist in playing by the ‘normal’ rules, and seen as a route to total victory rather than to a compromise. Again it is an approach derived from Dominic Cummings’ time in Downing Street (and in the Vote Leave campaign), and embraced by Frost who was in Cummings’ inner circle at the time.

This is what they mean by playing hardball, and they genuinely believe it will lead the EU to re-negotiate the entire NIP. If nothing else, they think that the longer the negotiations go on, the more the unimplemented parts of the NIP will become normalized and EU claims about their necessity will be undermined. If in the process UK-EU relations are further soured then that is taken as a sign that their approach is ‘working’ – and in any case gives them a boost with pro-Brexit MPs and voters.

A looming crisis?

This isn’t going to explode immediately. As was widely expected, this week Frost announced that the UK will extend the various grace periods that were due to expire at the end of the month, and the EU has ‘taken note’ of this (i.e. accepted it). Significantly, unlike previous extensions, there was no date set. The UK position is to want a ‘standstill’ in the existing situation, whilst the EU was clear at the time of the previous extension that it was only a temporary solution. In the latest UK statement the word ‘extension’ is not used – the formulation is just that the UK will “continue to operate the Protocol on its current basis” – and the EU statement says nothing about timeframes.

So, for now, there is a fudge on that, but one which Frost will regard as very much in his favour and, tellingly, the pro-Brexit Telegraph immediately crowed that this was “a major concession” by the EU (£). What I think the EU has failed fully to appreciate is that in Frost’s Cummings-inspired negotiating approach any flexibility or conciliation is banked as a concession and chalked up as a sign that his intransigence works, not as cue for reciprocation.

The EU also continues to pause its legal action over the first, unilateral, extension the UK announced in March and Frost will see that, too, as a victory and vindication. It has yet to respond to the UK’s Command Paper of July setting out the government’s current approach. Once it does, which is expected to be at the end of this month, there will be a lot of sound and fury because what cannot be fudged forever is the fundamental difference between what the UK is now demanding and what was agreed in the NIP (for detail, see my discussion at the time of the Command Paper). At some point this will become a crisis, but how quickly is less clear than it would have been with a defined end date to the new extensions.

When and how the crisis comes will partly depend on the UK. Implicit in Frost’s parliamentary statement is that he might deem that there is no basis for further ‘constructive’ discussions. That is presumably code for an early invocation of Article 16. One counter-argument to doing so is the point made earlier – that the longer the grace periods remain in place with the NIP otherwise functioning, the greater the chance they might continue indefinitely. On that logic, Frost might drag the talks on for as long as possible rather than collapse them.

It will also depend on whether the EU is prepared to be robust in its responses, and if so then to what extent. Thus far, in its willingness to extend grace periods and to pause to legal action, the EU has seemed keen to dampen down and postpone conflict. If that continues it could play into the hands of Frost precisely because suspended implementation could become a permanent reality, and in any case would serve to confirm in his mind the efficacy of his approach.

According to RTE’s Tony Connelly – and he’s almost always right about such things - the EU is currently willing to offer some further flexibilities within the NIP framework but is also testing to see whether there is any flexibility in the UK position of effectively abandoning that framework. If so, that is still based on the misapprehension that Frost’s approach is one of the give-and-take of ‘normal’ negotiations. The problem for the EU remains, as I’ve discussed before, “how to react to a country that constantly behaves in a hostile manner, but hasn’t quite gone rogue”. Much will depend on how it answers that question in the coming weeks.

Domestic politics

However, there are potentially also domestic considerations in play for the government. Whilst an ongoing fight with the EU over the NIP would play well with its core supporters, it could go very badly indeed with wider public opinion if it comes at the same time as a worsening of the labour and supply chain crisis and especially if that crisis is widely attributed to Brexit (hence the importance of where that narrative settles, as discussed in last week’s post). With growing threats of shortages of toys and consumer electronics in the run up to Christmas (£) and of food shortages extending into the new year (£) it could be a bleak time.

In this context, it will be interesting and important to see whether the government introduces import controls, the first main phase being due to start on October 1, which, to spell it out, is only three weeks away, and the second on New Year’s Day. My hunch is that it will postpone again rather than risk the further disruptions that major retailers are warning of.

At all events, it’s not inconceivable that with all this going on the public, including plenty of Tory voters, may become sick and tired with the constant aggravation over the NIP. It’s even possible there will be a resumption of the Jersey fishing row. Yet Brexit, people were promised, would ‘get done’ with Johnson’s election victory. Interestingly, Frost has recently changed his Twitter profile to read “you don’t get something for nothing, you can’t have freedom for free”, but many leave voters might come to recall that no such trade-off was suggested to them when Johnson declared that they could have their cake and eat it. That could also get linked to criticisms of him having broken other manifesto pledges, such as those on national insurance and pensions.

Such a situation would be yet another opportunity for Keir Starmer’s Labour to capitalize on the post-Brexit mess. For, apart from the obvious open goal of the supply crisis, what is opening up, as a result of Afghanistan and (in the scenario I’ve just painted) public impatience with ongoing conflicts with the EU over the NIP, is a space for a distinctive and pragmatic post-Brexit foreign policy. It could even be presented, for the reason alluded to earlier, as the delivery of Brexit in the foreign policy arena. After all, it was the Vote Leave campaign that promised “better relations with our European friends” (p.15 of link).

Ditching Frost?

In this scenario, Johnson might seek to deprive Labour of the opportunity by taking it for himself. To do so, a necessary but not sufficient condition is ditching Frost. Few can doubt that if Johnson sees that as being in his interest – the only calculation that matters to him – he will do it. This could allow a recalibration towards a better relationship with the EU, especially if assisted by some face-saving concessions from Brussels over the NIP, which are arguably possible without jettisoning the entire framework (£). Accepting such concessions rather than demanding an all-out renegotiation would become possible with Frost out of the picture.

That in turn could be a prelude to the kind of strategic shift that logic suggests will eventually come, although it’s unlikely that Johnson could fully effect such a shift. That’s not because he is a committed Brexiter – he has never been that – so much as because of his general lack of ability to formulate and follow through on anything at all, and what even his most enthusiastic supporters would admit is a lack of anything resembling ‘statesmanship’. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that he has some interest in ‘performing’ statesmanship, but no aptitude for its delivery. So any serious and substantive re-set of UK-EU relations is unlikely under Johnson – who is understandably loathed and distrusted across the EU – and probably under any Conservative Prime Minister whilst the diehard Brexit Ultras remain a powerful force in parliament and the media.

In short, there is a place that UK-EU relations can settle, albeit one that will please neither the most committed Brexiters nor the most committed remainers, which has a strategic logic to it given that Brexit has happened. But there are several obstacles to that, the first being David Frost. Whilst his removal would not guarantee anything changing for the better, for so long as he is in post it can be guaranteed that nothing will change for the better. For as the realities of Brexit, both economically and geo-politically, emerge at pace his embrace of a Betamax theory of sovereignty and an adolescent apprehension of international negotiation is increasingly being exposed as not just fatuous but redundant.

 

I will be taking a break from blogging until October 1, and hope that the diagnosis, above, that there will be no immediate crisis proves correct. But if you haven’t done so, then in the meantime why not read my book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) recounting and analysing what happened from the referendum result to the end of the transition period, which was published by Biteback on 23 June 2021. It can be ordered from Biteback, or via other online platforms, as a paperback or e-book. For reviews, podcasts etc. see this page.