In some ways these are golden weeks for Labour. The Johnson government is collapsing amid scandal, and the leadership contest has revealed how limited the talent within the Tory Party is and how riven it is by political divisions and personal animosities. Once the new Prime Minister is in place, that will pose new challenges and possibilities for Labour, not least as regards Brexit policy and positioning. In one way that may become easier. Johnson was the embodiment of the Vote Leave campaign which gave him a particular ability to jibe at Labour for being ‘anti-Brexit’. Such jibes will be much less potent coming from either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak.
But the issue isn’t simply one of how to position the Labour opposition to the new Prime Minister’s administration. Just as important, if Labour are serious about winning, is how they would deal with the damage of Brexit if they come to power. For it is certain that, whoever leads it, a Tory government is not capable of doing anything remotely sensible about that damage in the meantime – if anything, it’s likely to make it worse – not least because neither candidate is able to even admit that it exists. So Labour need to be ready to address Brexit damage if they win, and they have the opportunity to make it an advantage that they, unlike the Tories, are able to do so.
Labour’s current Brexit policy
In a recent post, I gave a limited, unenthusiastic and partial welcome to Sir Keir Starmer’s silence-breaking speech on Brexit in which he outlined Labour’s five steps to ‘Make Brexit Work’. Even that attracted some ire on Twitter, especially my statement that a referendum on re-joining the EU is not a realistic prospect for many years.
Of course, I know that view is anathema to many supportive and longstanding readers of this blog, and I obviously don’t like offending such readers. But I don’t write things according to whether I think readers will like or agree with them (whether those readers be Brexiters, leave voters, remain voters, or re-joiners), only according to what I think to be true, or probable, based on my interpretation of the available evidence. Needless to say, I am not always right in what I think, but I am always honest in saying what I think. Hopefully most readers, even when they believe I am wrong, or when I am subsequently proved to be wrong, appreciate that honesty.
Anyway, although I think his definitive, permanent, rejection of the single market and a customs union is a big mistake, I continue to think that Starmer’s Brexit stance does provide the basis of being better than that of either of Johnson’s successors because at least it acknowledges the need to seek to negotiate better terms than those of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Both Sunak and Truss are pretending that the TCA was fine and that there are illusory new opportunities that flow from it. So Starmer has a basis to critique their policy and to provide an alternative.
Additionally, of course, he is opposed to the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill (NIPB) and Labour, including the then Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Louise Haigh, deserve credit for having been robust in their critique of the Bill. Here too, as well as having a critique, Labour have at least the basis of a viable alternative policy in the form of a veterinary agreement, although the details need to be clarified. The Protocol is going to be a central issue in the politics of Brexit in the next few months, with the EU having launched four infringement proceedings against the UK last Friday, and the NIPB set to be, in some form or other, the first Brexit crisis for the new Prime Minister.
The limitations of Labour’s policy
However, accepting it has some virtues, Starmer’s policy has several problems, even leaving aside its stance on the single market and customs union. The most fundamental is that it fails to address Labour’s own role in the way Brexit has corrupted politics. I discussed this corruption recently in terms of Johnson and the Conservatives (and, outside parliament, the Faragists). But Labour played a part too.
That goes right back to the decision to vote to trigger Article 50, a total abdication of responsibility and principle, and encompasses Jeremy Corbyn’s decision in May 2018 to whip Labour MPs to oppose an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill which would have kept Britain in the single market. It is impossible to be certain but, given the very tight parliamentary arithmetic at the time, it is highly likely that this would have averted hard Brexit.
More generally, the endless ambiguities and contortions of Labour’s Brexit position since 2016 – including the failure under Starmer to challenge the government’s refusal to extend the transition period when that was possible, voting for the TCA, and then going mute for eighteen months – all made a contribution to the systemic dishonesty of Brexit politics. Starmer’s breaking of the silence was only a small first step, welcome but not sufficient, to redressing that.
Clearly the capacity of an opposition party to change a corrupted political culture is limited, but it can contribute by honesty in its own positioning, which includes a reckoning of its past errors. My sense is that whereas Starmer has, rightly, made considerable efforts to overtly address the rows over antisemitism during the Corbyn period, those about Brexit have largely been papered over.
This isn’t ‘just’ a moral point about the conduct of politics. It also has a direct practical impact. For although Starmer did break the silence, the way that Brexit still festers as an unresolved issue for Labour impacts upon both general electoral strategy and specific political tactics.
At the strategic level, there’s obviously much more at stake than Brexit, but I would suggest that Brexit is both an aspect of and a proxy for the wider re-alignment of politics in which the places and people that Labour should regard as its heartlands are changing, as is the nature of the electoral coalition it now needs to bring together. From that perspective, the continuing Labour pre-occupation with the ‘red Wall’ as being its ‘true’ heartland, and with placating leave voters in those areas, suggests an unwillingness to face up to this re-alignment and, within that, to face up to Brexit.
That aside, the continuing sensitivity about Brexit presumably explains why, at a tactical level, the follow-through on Starmer’s Brexit speech has been so limited. For example, in his speech this week on economic growth Brexit warranted only a single, vague sentence. Yet it is clear from all reputable economic forecasts, and is incorporated into official government figures, that Brexit is likely to be a major drag on economic growth in the coming years. That can’t be ignored or, worse, as Truss seems to suggest (£), be addressed by ‘reforming’ the Treasury so as avoid hearing about it. That suggestion isn’t confined to her but arises directly from the Brexiters’ longstanding, deeply-held but preposterous belief that, as Jacob Rees-Mogg has said, the Treasury ‘fiddles the figures’ because it is staffed by remainers. It’s not just denying reality but demanding a different reality that suits Brexiters. That is doomed to failure. No growth strategy, whether under Truss, Sunak or Starmer, can be credible if it doesn’t address the effects of Brexit.
Equally striking, in terms of immediate tactics for political opposition, is how muted Labour have been about the Dover holiday queues. As I noted in my last post, when these were at their height last weekend, the only public comment came from Anneliese Dodds, urging the government to ‘get a grip’ but without saying anything else about the causes and solutions to what was happening. Subsequently, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves – who in the past has been quite robust in her willingness to call out Brexit damage – avoided the question when asked about the role of Brexit in the delays. If that happens even in a case where the damage of Brexit is highly visible and beyond reasonable doubt it means that the taboo has not really been lifted.
Wanted: a less constipated, more confident approach
To be absolutely clear, I am most emphatically not expecting or suggesting that – either in relation to future policy on growth or immediate Brexit problems like the Dover queues – Labour should be crowing ‘we told you so’ or ‘you asked for it’, or even framing such issues in terms of whether it was right to have left the EU. That would be unnecessary, and impolitic both in the sense of needlessly alienating some voters and in the sense of not befitting a mature government in waiting. Rather, the Labour approach should be one of pragmatic realism: ‘no matter how or why these problems arose, unlike the Tories we don’t have to pretend they don’t exist and we know how to fix them’.
That, as Labour are beginning to argue, means creating a friendly partnership with the EU and with France, which in turn allows a closer trading and regulatory relationship and the development of a better border infrastructure with an agreement on staffing. Of course the latter will take a while because of the government’s failure to act when it should have done. So the proposal could also include some temporary measures, perhaps in the form of incentives for holidaymakers at the next few peak periods to use other crossings. I’m just guessing here – this may not be a viable policy, but my point is to try to identify specific easements for this particular situation. The same logic could apply to other particular Brexit-related problems, such as NHS staff shortages, where part of the answer might be to create specific schemes to make it easier and more attractive for EU nationals to work in Britain. Again, that may not be the right policy, but, again, the point is that, whatever it might consist of, policies need to exist that openly acknowledge the specific effects of Brexit and propose specific solutions.
Similarly, a mature and pragmatic approach to regulation would be to acknowledge, for example, the spiralling cost of national regulation of the chemicals sector (£), and to seek, perhaps as part of the TCA review, re-accession to the EU systems and databases that Johnson and David Frost eschewed on the principle that ‘sovereignty’ meant eschewing ECJ involvement. Starmer has already implied that Labour would breach that principle in relation to security databases, so why not chemicals?
With the chemicals sector, and many other sectors, there is a strong business case to avoid the regulatory duplication that Johnson’s Brexit is creating, and which the Tories are set to continue. Or, again, with Rees-Mogg already having recognized the folly of a UK specific conformity assessment regime, and postponed it again, it would hardly need much daring from Labour to suggest an even longer, if not permanent, deferral. That, too, would be widely supported by business and in line with a proposal by none other than the Institute for Economic Affairs!
As with what he implied about the ECJ’s role, there are hints in what Starmer has said about ‘mutual recognition’ that this is what he has in mind for regulatory issues, but he must know that ‘mutual recognition’ in itself won’t fly with the EU, any more than it did when Theresa May tried to go down that path in 2018 or on the periodic occasions it has been aired since. Labour need to spell out, with more honesty and greater detail, what they mean, and will certainly have to do so eventually if the ‘Make Brexit Work’ slogan is to have any practical meaning at all.
What all this adds up to, then, is not an explicit wholesale denunciation of Brexit, but an acceptance that leaving the EU is having specific damaging consequences and taking responsibility for addressing them. Of course such an approach would alienate some voters, and be attacked by the Tories. Equally, it would not satisfy many erstwhile remainers and would yield, at best, only partial reductions to the damage of Brexit. But the same is true of the current Labour approach and of just about any conceivable Labour approach. This one would at least allow Labour to talk realistically not so much about Brexit in general as about the consequences of Brexit in any and every policy area where they are part of what is relevant.
The key point is that the nature and tone of Labour’s approach needs to shift from one of constipated embarrassment, and reluctance to go near Brexit except in the most marginal ways, to a free-and-easy comfort which unapologetically – indeed proudly and confidently – acknowledges problems and propounds solutions. That would be a clear contrast to the Tory approach and, I believe, one which would have considerable electoral appeal given opinion poll evidence about how many people now think that Brexit was a mistake (53%, compared with 25% who think it was right) and/or that it hasn’t been handled well (54% think it has been handled poorly, with 31% saying ‘very poorly’; 29% think it has been handled well, with just 5% saying ‘very well’). This is an open door for Labour, and it requires little courage to push.
Unwanted: pointless, damaging tribalism
However, even if all that came about, there is another problem with the Labour position in that, since his Brexit speech, Starmer has come out unequivocally against any post-electoral deal of any sort whatsoever with the LibDems (perhaps less surprisingly he had already done the same as regards the SNP). In my view this is foolish, unnecessary, and by far the most indefensible decision he has taken as Labour’s leader. At a general level, it continues the historic error that has split the liberal-left majority for over a century ensuring that, because of the first past the post system, that majority has so often been ruled by the Tory minority. It’s a fresh iteration of that pointless, damaging tribalism.
At the specific level of Brexit, and the next election, it makes the timidity of his policy (even in the more expansive version just discussed) all but untenable for remainers, who are once again treated with contempt. In my earlier post on Starmer’s Brexit speech, I argued that it gave a justification for remainers - who are a majority of Labour voters, a large majority of LibDem voters and a not insignificant minority of Tory voters - to vote tactically for Labour or the LibDems according to constituency, in the hope of a Lib-Lab partnership (of some sort) that would substantially soften Brexit. That argument has clearly been damaged by the rejection of post-electoral cooperation.
It means that whereas in 2019 many LibDem and Tory remainers were reluctant to vote tactically for fear of a Corbyn-led minority administration, those same voters will now have less incentive to do so in the hope of a Starmer-led minority administration. On the other hand, it means that Labour remain voters in seats the LibDems could take from Tories have less incentive to vote tactically for that outcome, at the very moment that their reluctance to do so because of memories of the Tory-LibDem Coalition is beginning to fade.
Obviously it’s conceivable, perhaps more than conceivable, that, if it came to it, Starmer would back-track after the election if the outcome demanded it, but if so then his government would already start under a shadow of dishonesty. Just as conceivable, because of what he has said, he simply won’t get the chance to backtrack because voters will cling to their party allegiances and, yet again, there will be a Tory government based on a minority of the vote share.
If that happens then, along with many other consequences, there will be no softening of Brexit. So as a result of the combination of an abstruse political system and a failure of political leadership, we’ll be in an even worse situation than we are now. It will be one in which, if present poll trends continue, a clear and confirmed majority think Brexit is a mistake whilst being stuck with it being embedded in its hardest form until, perhaps, 2030. By then it will be extremely difficult to unwind.
This may not happen; long-term political predictions are always a fool’s game, and there are lots of things that could happen to derail the scenario I have described. But if it does then Starmer’s foolishness about this will have been an error of historic proportions.
A coalition of competence?
There is still time for Labour to re-calibrate before the next election, both by deepening their post-Brexit policy and softening or reversing that on post-electoral co-operation with other parties, including not just the LibDems but the SNP. The arrival of the new Prime Minister could provide the rationale to do so (‘we had hoped that this would bring a new sense of responsibility from the government but, alas, we see the same old lies as from Boris Johnson, so in the national interest …’).
Naturally the Tories would attack this approach as subverting ‘the will of the people’, but given how clearly Starmer has indicated there will not be a re-join policy, and with the LibDems having deferred such a policy to an unspecified future date, that will only have traction amongst those for whom it would work against any Labour approach. The political mood is very different to 2016-2019. It would also be attacked for threatening a ‘coalition of chaos’ (presumably the attack Starmer is seeking to neuter) but, again, the political mood is very different to 2015. Even the composition of the electorate is different. It's easy to understand the desire to do so but, as Neal Lawson of Compass has argued this week, it’s just not enough for Starmer’s Labour simply to try, hedgehog-like, to block off every potential Tory attack line without offering any positive offer to voters.
Rather than look back fearfully to those old attacks, if Starmer is serious in his constantly repeated desire to ‘look forward’ it’s necessary to face the realities of the situation which, if Labour win the election, they will inherit. That unavoidably means dealing with the ongoing process of Brexit and with the legacy of what has already happened as a result of Brexit, which in turn means honesty and realism. At the same time, if Starmer is serious in his other refrain of wanting to end the divisions of Brexit that can’t be done by pretending that they don’t exist, or by acting as if the only way to do so is by asking erstwhile remainers to make all the compromises.
It would be better in every way – morally, practically, and even electorally – to be truthful about realities. That’s why I would think Labour should soften their line on single market and customs union membership, to at least keep them open as possibilities for the future. That would certainly be far more realistic in terms of the economic facts about Brexit. But part of what being truthful about realities means is to accept what is politically feasible at a particular time. Admittedly, that’s a judgement call but my judgement is that Labour under Starmer are not going to soften on the single market in terms of their own policy going into the next election.
If I’m wrong, good. If I’m right, the point, as I’ve argued before, is that Labour’s interests and anti-Brexit interests aren’t the same. From an anti-Brexit point of view, the best realistically available outcome is still a Labour-LibDem, or perhaps Labour-LibDem-SNP, government. A coalition of competence, so to speak (whether or not configured as a formal coalition). With the LibDems already having the basis for an incomparably more detailed and ambitious policy on a far closer UK-EU relationship than Labour, culminating in single market membership, and perhaps with SNP support*, such a government could be expected to at least go further in that direction than a purely Labour administration. Starmer’s current disavowal of such cooperation has made that more unlikely but it remains the only glimmer of hope.
*I confess that I don’t fully understand how the SNP would approach this scenario. Might they judge that, if a UK government did come to embrace the single market, it would decrease support for Scottish independence?
Showing posts with label Liberal democrats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberal democrats. Show all posts
Friday, 29 July 2022
Friday, 28 August 2020
A preview of the blame games
No one knows if there is going to be a UK-EU trade and other future terms deal, and nothing has happened this week to make that clearer. The last two months’ talks, despite Johnson’s call to put some “oomph” into them, have shown that no more progress can be made at a ‘technical’ as opposed to a political level. Hence it was announced this week that Brexit will be taken off the agenda of next week’s EU Ambassadors’ summit due to a “completely wasted” summer. In this relatively quiet limbo-period we are seeing the outlines of a series of blame games and recriminations in the UK which are only likely to intensify in the coming months.
Brexit matters more to Britain than to the EU
Ending this limbo is primarily dependent on political decisions in the UK, in particular about disclosing what its post-Brexit state aid policy is to be. The EU has already shifted from seeking direct application of its state aid rules to accepting something like equivalence between the two regimes – which needs the UK spells out what its regime is to be. It seems very unlikely the EU could soften further on this key issue.
The reality is that Brexit simply doesn’t matter that much anymore for the EU - there’s clearly a preference for some sort of deal, but, as Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government wrote this week, a no deal scenario has long been planned for. It also seems increasingly to be expected. Nor does Brexit have anything like the same political saliency for any EU country – not even Ireland, which will be most affected but is not split over it – that it does for the UK where it is still potential political dynamite.
That dynamite is – obviously – because of the continuing deep divisions over Brexit, but also because of the very practical consequences of no deal for the UK. Without rehearsing all these again, a leaked report this week of government preparations was a reminder of what is potentially at stake, including troops on the streets to keep order, water rationing and major food shortages. This is not ‘Project Fear’, it is planning by a pro-Brexit government, and there is nothing remotely like it in prospect for any EU country.
That difference of priority is insufficiently appreciated in the British polity and media, which, because in general it sees the EU entirely through the lens of Brexit, assumes that Brexit is central to the EU. But although when the UK was a member state, including during the Article 50 negotiations, its internal politics were of interest to, and often accommodated by, the EU all that changed once the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was signed. At that point, the most crucial EU concerns about Brexit were dealt with, to be replaced with bewilderment and irritation that the UK seems to have decided that the Political Declaration that accompanied it is an irrelevance.
Who would get the blame for no deal?
This is the background to an interesting and widely-discussed report in the Sunday Times (£) by Tim Shipman, a journalist with strong sources in the government and the author of excellent books on the politics of Brexit. The thrust of the report is that the government thinks the EU is dangerously failing to understand that Johnson’s government, unlike – supposedly - May’s, is fully committed to Brexit and willing to entertain no deal. Yet such an analysis itself shows precisely a failure to understand that the whole show has moved on: no deal under May meant no WA, but the WA is now signed and Britain has already left the EU.
Beyond that, the government’s position as reported – I would think accurately – by Shipman remains hopelessly stuck in the same mire as May’s government, itself a result of the impossible promises made by Vote Leave. For although the report presents the UK as humbly seeking a ‘bare bones’ deal because it, unlike May’s administration, embraces and accepts Brexit as a change from membership to third country status that simply isn’t true at all. Instead, as Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent, pointed out, over a huge swathe of things the UK is still seeking continuity with what it enjoyed as a member state.
That, of course, does still matter to the EU. Not in order to ‘punish’ an ex-member but for the obvious reason that if non-members have the same things as members then membership becomes meaningless. In that respect, far from Johnson’s government having accepted that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and moved on to a new phase, it is still wedded to at least a version of his familiar ‘cakeist’ fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the EU continues to bat back attempts by the government to turn these fantasies into ‘legal texts’ without any agreement to them having been negotiated.
It obviously doesn’t take a genius to work out what is going on here, not least since it has been in prospect for months, indeed years: the ground is being prepared to blame the EU for no deal because it failed to understand that it was dealing with a British government fully prepared to go down that route if necessary. This was made explicit in a typically bullish editorial in the Sun this week.
That isn’t to say that no deal is inevitable, or that the government has decided on that course. In fact, I suspect the truth is as simple as that the government genuinely believes the dogma of the Brexit echo chamber it now entirely inhabits which insists that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’. So on the one hand we’re seeing that strategy repeated and, on the other, getting a taste of how the government and media will present things if no deal turns out to be the consequence: ‘we tried to warn the EU what would happen if it didn’t meet our perfectly reasonable requests but they wouldn’t believe us’.
The logic of this is circular in that the more the EU makes it clear that it will countenance no deal if necessary, the more it confirms the Brexiter view that nothing will change until the very last moment. At the same time, it’s a highly peculiar strategy given that the adverse effects of no deal will be felt much more heavily by the UK than the EU. In effect, it’s a game of chicken which has strapped every man, woman and child in the UK in the path of an oncoming train, and the closer a collision comes the more it justifies staying there. The fallback plan, apparently, is to tell the maimed victims that it was the train driver’s fault.
So that’s the first and, clearly, the foremost blame game on display, that between the UK and the EU. Again, it’s a purely domestic game, because the EU itself won’t be that interested in it, and the member states even less so.
Would the Brexiters be blamed for making false promises?
There are alternatives to blaming the EU. The most obvious – ongoing since the referendum, but which has new zest as the end of the transition approaches – is the disjuncture between what is happening and what was promised by Brexiters. That disjuncture will exist almost as much if there is a deal as if there isn’t, since it is clear that any deal will be far less commodious than was proposed to leave voters in 2016.
We had a small taste of this when former cabinet minister David Gauke pointed out this week (in response to the Shipman article) that Brexiters have long-promised that “the EU will give us whatever we want as long as they believe we’re prepared to walk away” and – in line with my analysis above - are lining up the excuse that “the EU underestimated our determination”. This engendered a huge and furious reaction and what was interesting about that was how precisely it exposed the central flaw of Brexit.
On the one hand, Iain Dale said that Gauke was talking “utter bollocks. Literally no one argued that the EU would give us all we wanted” and Julia Hartley-Brewer said simply “no it isn’t” (i.e. that what Gauke had said was the Brexiters’ position was not). But only a couple of days before during a (separate) discussion of the issue of what Brexiters had promised Hartley-Brewer had re-affirmed that “we do hold all the cards because we will do just fine with or without a deal and the EU knows it” (emphasis in original, but denoted with the symbol “*”).
Since some of the debate about Gauke’s tweet has descended into who has used the literal words “whatever we want”, let me spell out that if one side ‘holds all the cards’ it must follow that it could get whatever it wants since the other side would have no cards, and if those cards consist of being able to do fine without a deal then the leverage consists of being able to walk away. So in all substantive senses, Hartley-Brewer is still making the same claim that Gauke says Brexiters made all along but which both she and Iain Dale say was never made by Brexiters.
I’ve deliberately focused on this micro-fragment of what is in itself a relatively minor discussion because in the welter of all that has been said over the last four years it has become easier and easier for Brexiters to muddy, disown or misrepresent the claims they made. As it would now be an impossible task to subject the entirety of the Brexit debate to the same level of detailed reconstruction, it’s useful to give an illustration of how it works.
What’s especially difficult is that Brexiters often conveyed their message by means of an overall upbeat tone (e.g. that there would be a deal, and a good one) even if sometimes adding in, as it were, the small print some qualification to this message (e.g. but if not we can fall back on WTO terms and that will be fine too). Thus when, now, faced with the overall message, they are able to quote the small print as a ‘get out’ so as to deny they made any promises at all. It is a tactic familiar to dodgy salespeople the world over. Although in this case, in fact, the ‘we hold all the cards’ line was widely used, most famously by Michael Gove, and that is so well-documented as to be beyond reasonable dispute.
That such claims and promise were made matters, and it is important not to allow history to be re-written. But the present point is that, even now, two leading pro-Brexit broadcasters, each with large audiences and presumably significant influence, are able to make diametrically opposite statements – I assume in good faith, and I am not casting aspersions on either of them - about the nature of the Brexit negotiations and what was promised for them. And Dale and Hartley-Brewer are just two examples – the same story could be told using any number of Brexiters in politics or the media. This is not, by the way, an example of the familiar theme of ‘history being written by the victors’, in that what it shows is that the victors give as varied an account of that history as, at the time, they made promises about the future.
This is central to how the Brexit vote was won, because quite contradictory claims and promises were made as a deliberate campaign technique. It is also why the process of actually delivering Brexit has been so fraught, because what those claims meant and how those promises would be delivered was not defined or agreed. This in turn sets up what will inevitably be years of recrimination, denial and counter-attack.
So that is the second of the main emerging blame games: what Brexiters said and promised versus what actually happened or will happen, and of course this goes well beyond the specific example given by Gauke this week.
Would it be blamed on those who didn’t back May’s deal?
Also rumbling away in the background are assessments of what happened during the convoluted and complex political events of 2019. These include, in particular, the idea that politicians (and others) who favoured remain, or at least a soft Brexit, are at fault for not having backed May’s Withdrawal Agreement. On this account, especially if there is no deal, but even if there is a hard Brexit deal, the blame lies with those who were too recalcitrant to back May.
This involves several highly dubious propositions and, again, a certain amount of re-writing of history. It forgets, or downplays, how the hard core of opposition to May’s deal came from the ERG and, especially, the self-styled Spartans amongst them. It forgets that throughout much of 2019 every Brexit outcome was conceivably possible (or, as it often seemed, impossible) and so all shades of opinion opposed to May’s deal had reason to hold out against it in the greater or lesser hope that their preferred outcome would triumph.
Crucially, it neglects the fact that May’s deal was itself ‘hard Brexit’ – out of the single market and customs union - pointing to the eventual Canada-style outcome that remains Johnson’s stated aim – the only real difference being the extent to which she seemed to accept the realities of what that would mean, especially as regards the Level Playing Field. It also neglects that May, too, was not averse to threatening no deal. So hers was by no means the ‘compromise’ approach it is now spoken of as being. And, related to that, it neglects the fact that as the Brexit Ultras now say, as quoted in the Shipman report for example, Johnson’s WA is “basically the same as May’s deal. It’s more than 99% the same”.
Given that the major difference between the two was the substitution of the Irish Sea border for the Irish backstop arrangements, about the only group who can really be criticized for not supporting May’s deal are the DUP – and of them a better critique would be that from the outset, long before the WA or even the triggering of Article 50, their entire support for Brexit was a massive mistake given their core political priority of preserving the union.
Would it be blamed on those who enabled the 2019 election?
A somewhat related revisionism is that those opposed to Brexit were guilty of a terrible error in enabling the 2019 General Election. This charge is aimed especially at the LibDems and also at remainers within the Labour Party. Perhaps it could apply to the SNP, too, but that is less likely to stick since it’s easy to argue that the SNP’s central goal of Scottish independence is well-served by Brexit and, for wider reasons, by a Johnson government – indeed developments since the election seem to bear that out.
This criticism of remainers neglects the fact that there was no prospect of a parliamentary majority for a referendum (and still less for a revocation of Article 50) in the 2019 parliament. Moreover, Johnson had already passed his (then) Withdrawal Agreement Bill at second reading by some 30 votes. So there was a strong argument – and I made it at the time, as did others including Ian Dunt – that, highly risky as it was, a general election was the best and possibly only way to head off the eventual passage of the Bill and to re-constitute parliament in ways more propitious to remain.
None of that is to defend the way that Labour and the LibDems fought the election as regards Brexit, and the LibDem Article 50 revocation policy was – as again I argued that at the time – a total fiasco both in principle and practice. But the fact that agreeing to an election turned out to put a definitive end to the remain cause does not mean that it was a mistake to take that risk, though it is obviously true that taking it did not pay off.
Nor is any of this to deny that the internal state of the People’s Vote movement was – as we now know in more detail (£) – shambolic or that remainers made plenty of mistakes in 2019, including a failure to work together with soft Brexiters (and vice versa). But the calculated risk of the election was not one of them, and can only be presented as such by ignoring what was actually happening in parliamentary votes at that time.
Why does any of this matter?
It may seem pointless to revisit the, often, arcane details of the last four years of Brexit. But doing so is not a scholastic exercise: it is still very much live politics. Brexit was never going to be – and surely everyone can now see this? – a single, quick, or simple event. It is a long, complex, ongoing process which we are still living through. In that context it is vital to retain an accurate record of what was said, by whom, and of who did what, when, and why. The purpose being not, in fact, to assign blame but, rather, responsibility and also, perhaps, to hold on to a sense of reality in the face of the Zersetzung-style techniques that increasingly characterize Brexit.
Much of what is now happening – and Johnson’s whole strategy, most obviously in his ban on the use of the word ‘Brexit’ – can be thought of as a battle between remembering and forgetting. The coming months are going to be crucial ones for defining what Brexit is going to mean for Britain and that is now certain to be very different to what those who voted leave were told it would be. So it’s going to be important to recall how we got to this juncture. After all, if, to reprise an earlier metaphor, a massive national train wreck is in prospect, it’s not unreasonable to ask what led to it - even if it’s small comfort to know the answers.
Brexit matters more to Britain than to the EU
Ending this limbo is primarily dependent on political decisions in the UK, in particular about disclosing what its post-Brexit state aid policy is to be. The EU has already shifted from seeking direct application of its state aid rules to accepting something like equivalence between the two regimes – which needs the UK spells out what its regime is to be. It seems very unlikely the EU could soften further on this key issue.
The reality is that Brexit simply doesn’t matter that much anymore for the EU - there’s clearly a preference for some sort of deal, but, as Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government wrote this week, a no deal scenario has long been planned for. It also seems increasingly to be expected. Nor does Brexit have anything like the same political saliency for any EU country – not even Ireland, which will be most affected but is not split over it – that it does for the UK where it is still potential political dynamite.
That dynamite is – obviously – because of the continuing deep divisions over Brexit, but also because of the very practical consequences of no deal for the UK. Without rehearsing all these again, a leaked report this week of government preparations was a reminder of what is potentially at stake, including troops on the streets to keep order, water rationing and major food shortages. This is not ‘Project Fear’, it is planning by a pro-Brexit government, and there is nothing remotely like it in prospect for any EU country.
That difference of priority is insufficiently appreciated in the British polity and media, which, because in general it sees the EU entirely through the lens of Brexit, assumes that Brexit is central to the EU. But although when the UK was a member state, including during the Article 50 negotiations, its internal politics were of interest to, and often accommodated by, the EU all that changed once the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was signed. At that point, the most crucial EU concerns about Brexit were dealt with, to be replaced with bewilderment and irritation that the UK seems to have decided that the Political Declaration that accompanied it is an irrelevance.
Who would get the blame for no deal?
This is the background to an interesting and widely-discussed report in the Sunday Times (£) by Tim Shipman, a journalist with strong sources in the government and the author of excellent books on the politics of Brexit. The thrust of the report is that the government thinks the EU is dangerously failing to understand that Johnson’s government, unlike – supposedly - May’s, is fully committed to Brexit and willing to entertain no deal. Yet such an analysis itself shows precisely a failure to understand that the whole show has moved on: no deal under May meant no WA, but the WA is now signed and Britain has already left the EU.
Beyond that, the government’s position as reported – I would think accurately – by Shipman remains hopelessly stuck in the same mire as May’s government, itself a result of the impossible promises made by Vote Leave. For although the report presents the UK as humbly seeking a ‘bare bones’ deal because it, unlike May’s administration, embraces and accepts Brexit as a change from membership to third country status that simply isn’t true at all. Instead, as Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent, pointed out, over a huge swathe of things the UK is still seeking continuity with what it enjoyed as a member state.
That, of course, does still matter to the EU. Not in order to ‘punish’ an ex-member but for the obvious reason that if non-members have the same things as members then membership becomes meaningless. In that respect, far from Johnson’s government having accepted that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and moved on to a new phase, it is still wedded to at least a version of his familiar ‘cakeist’ fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the EU continues to bat back attempts by the government to turn these fantasies into ‘legal texts’ without any agreement to them having been negotiated.
It obviously doesn’t take a genius to work out what is going on here, not least since it has been in prospect for months, indeed years: the ground is being prepared to blame the EU for no deal because it failed to understand that it was dealing with a British government fully prepared to go down that route if necessary. This was made explicit in a typically bullish editorial in the Sun this week.
That isn’t to say that no deal is inevitable, or that the government has decided on that course. In fact, I suspect the truth is as simple as that the government genuinely believes the dogma of the Brexit echo chamber it now entirely inhabits which insists that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’. So on the one hand we’re seeing that strategy repeated and, on the other, getting a taste of how the government and media will present things if no deal turns out to be the consequence: ‘we tried to warn the EU what would happen if it didn’t meet our perfectly reasonable requests but they wouldn’t believe us’.
The logic of this is circular in that the more the EU makes it clear that it will countenance no deal if necessary, the more it confirms the Brexiter view that nothing will change until the very last moment. At the same time, it’s a highly peculiar strategy given that the adverse effects of no deal will be felt much more heavily by the UK than the EU. In effect, it’s a game of chicken which has strapped every man, woman and child in the UK in the path of an oncoming train, and the closer a collision comes the more it justifies staying there. The fallback plan, apparently, is to tell the maimed victims that it was the train driver’s fault.
So that’s the first and, clearly, the foremost blame game on display, that between the UK and the EU. Again, it’s a purely domestic game, because the EU itself won’t be that interested in it, and the member states even less so.
Would the Brexiters be blamed for making false promises?
There are alternatives to blaming the EU. The most obvious – ongoing since the referendum, but which has new zest as the end of the transition approaches – is the disjuncture between what is happening and what was promised by Brexiters. That disjuncture will exist almost as much if there is a deal as if there isn’t, since it is clear that any deal will be far less commodious than was proposed to leave voters in 2016.
We had a small taste of this when former cabinet minister David Gauke pointed out this week (in response to the Shipman article) that Brexiters have long-promised that “the EU will give us whatever we want as long as they believe we’re prepared to walk away” and – in line with my analysis above - are lining up the excuse that “the EU underestimated our determination”. This engendered a huge and furious reaction and what was interesting about that was how precisely it exposed the central flaw of Brexit.
On the one hand, Iain Dale said that Gauke was talking “utter bollocks. Literally no one argued that the EU would give us all we wanted” and Julia Hartley-Brewer said simply “no it isn’t” (i.e. that what Gauke had said was the Brexiters’ position was not). But only a couple of days before during a (separate) discussion of the issue of what Brexiters had promised Hartley-Brewer had re-affirmed that “we do hold all the cards because we will do just fine with or without a deal and the EU knows it” (emphasis in original, but denoted with the symbol “*”).
Since some of the debate about Gauke’s tweet has descended into who has used the literal words “whatever we want”, let me spell out that if one side ‘holds all the cards’ it must follow that it could get whatever it wants since the other side would have no cards, and if those cards consist of being able to do fine without a deal then the leverage consists of being able to walk away. So in all substantive senses, Hartley-Brewer is still making the same claim that Gauke says Brexiters made all along but which both she and Iain Dale say was never made by Brexiters.
I’ve deliberately focused on this micro-fragment of what is in itself a relatively minor discussion because in the welter of all that has been said over the last four years it has become easier and easier for Brexiters to muddy, disown or misrepresent the claims they made. As it would now be an impossible task to subject the entirety of the Brexit debate to the same level of detailed reconstruction, it’s useful to give an illustration of how it works.
What’s especially difficult is that Brexiters often conveyed their message by means of an overall upbeat tone (e.g. that there would be a deal, and a good one) even if sometimes adding in, as it were, the small print some qualification to this message (e.g. but if not we can fall back on WTO terms and that will be fine too). Thus when, now, faced with the overall message, they are able to quote the small print as a ‘get out’ so as to deny they made any promises at all. It is a tactic familiar to dodgy salespeople the world over. Although in this case, in fact, the ‘we hold all the cards’ line was widely used, most famously by Michael Gove, and that is so well-documented as to be beyond reasonable dispute.
That such claims and promise were made matters, and it is important not to allow history to be re-written. But the present point is that, even now, two leading pro-Brexit broadcasters, each with large audiences and presumably significant influence, are able to make diametrically opposite statements – I assume in good faith, and I am not casting aspersions on either of them - about the nature of the Brexit negotiations and what was promised for them. And Dale and Hartley-Brewer are just two examples – the same story could be told using any number of Brexiters in politics or the media. This is not, by the way, an example of the familiar theme of ‘history being written by the victors’, in that what it shows is that the victors give as varied an account of that history as, at the time, they made promises about the future.
This is central to how the Brexit vote was won, because quite contradictory claims and promises were made as a deliberate campaign technique. It is also why the process of actually delivering Brexit has been so fraught, because what those claims meant and how those promises would be delivered was not defined or agreed. This in turn sets up what will inevitably be years of recrimination, denial and counter-attack.
So that is the second of the main emerging blame games: what Brexiters said and promised versus what actually happened or will happen, and of course this goes well beyond the specific example given by Gauke this week.
Would it be blamed on those who didn’t back May’s deal?
Also rumbling away in the background are assessments of what happened during the convoluted and complex political events of 2019. These include, in particular, the idea that politicians (and others) who favoured remain, or at least a soft Brexit, are at fault for not having backed May’s Withdrawal Agreement. On this account, especially if there is no deal, but even if there is a hard Brexit deal, the blame lies with those who were too recalcitrant to back May.
This involves several highly dubious propositions and, again, a certain amount of re-writing of history. It forgets, or downplays, how the hard core of opposition to May’s deal came from the ERG and, especially, the self-styled Spartans amongst them. It forgets that throughout much of 2019 every Brexit outcome was conceivably possible (or, as it often seemed, impossible) and so all shades of opinion opposed to May’s deal had reason to hold out against it in the greater or lesser hope that their preferred outcome would triumph.
Crucially, it neglects the fact that May’s deal was itself ‘hard Brexit’ – out of the single market and customs union - pointing to the eventual Canada-style outcome that remains Johnson’s stated aim – the only real difference being the extent to which she seemed to accept the realities of what that would mean, especially as regards the Level Playing Field. It also neglects that May, too, was not averse to threatening no deal. So hers was by no means the ‘compromise’ approach it is now spoken of as being. And, related to that, it neglects the fact that as the Brexit Ultras now say, as quoted in the Shipman report for example, Johnson’s WA is “basically the same as May’s deal. It’s more than 99% the same”.
Given that the major difference between the two was the substitution of the Irish Sea border for the Irish backstop arrangements, about the only group who can really be criticized for not supporting May’s deal are the DUP – and of them a better critique would be that from the outset, long before the WA or even the triggering of Article 50, their entire support for Brexit was a massive mistake given their core political priority of preserving the union.
Would it be blamed on those who enabled the 2019 election?
A somewhat related revisionism is that those opposed to Brexit were guilty of a terrible error in enabling the 2019 General Election. This charge is aimed especially at the LibDems and also at remainers within the Labour Party. Perhaps it could apply to the SNP, too, but that is less likely to stick since it’s easy to argue that the SNP’s central goal of Scottish independence is well-served by Brexit and, for wider reasons, by a Johnson government – indeed developments since the election seem to bear that out.
This criticism of remainers neglects the fact that there was no prospect of a parliamentary majority for a referendum (and still less for a revocation of Article 50) in the 2019 parliament. Moreover, Johnson had already passed his (then) Withdrawal Agreement Bill at second reading by some 30 votes. So there was a strong argument – and I made it at the time, as did others including Ian Dunt – that, highly risky as it was, a general election was the best and possibly only way to head off the eventual passage of the Bill and to re-constitute parliament in ways more propitious to remain.
None of that is to defend the way that Labour and the LibDems fought the election as regards Brexit, and the LibDem Article 50 revocation policy was – as again I argued that at the time – a total fiasco both in principle and practice. But the fact that agreeing to an election turned out to put a definitive end to the remain cause does not mean that it was a mistake to take that risk, though it is obviously true that taking it did not pay off.
Nor is any of this to deny that the internal state of the People’s Vote movement was – as we now know in more detail (£) – shambolic or that remainers made plenty of mistakes in 2019, including a failure to work together with soft Brexiters (and vice versa). But the calculated risk of the election was not one of them, and can only be presented as such by ignoring what was actually happening in parliamentary votes at that time.
Why does any of this matter?
It may seem pointless to revisit the, often, arcane details of the last four years of Brexit. But doing so is not a scholastic exercise: it is still very much live politics. Brexit was never going to be – and surely everyone can now see this? – a single, quick, or simple event. It is a long, complex, ongoing process which we are still living through. In that context it is vital to retain an accurate record of what was said, by whom, and of who did what, when, and why. The purpose being not, in fact, to assign blame but, rather, responsibility and also, perhaps, to hold on to a sense of reality in the face of the Zersetzung-style techniques that increasingly characterize Brexit.
Much of what is now happening – and Johnson’s whole strategy, most obviously in his ban on the use of the word ‘Brexit’ – can be thought of as a battle between remembering and forgetting. The coming months are going to be crucial ones for defining what Brexit is going to mean for Britain and that is now certain to be very different to what those who voted leave were told it would be. So it’s going to be important to recall how we got to this juncture. After all, if, to reprise an earlier metaphor, a massive national train wreck is in prospect, it’s not unreasonable to ask what led to it - even if it’s small comfort to know the answers.
Sunday, 15 December 2019
General Election 2019: the aftermath
In my previous
post, the morning after the election, I discussed what the result is likely
to mean for what follows with Brexit. Even in the short time since then we have
seen the beginning of the contours of what was said there developing. In
particular, as Tony
Connelly’s assessment of the election implications spells out, the practicalities
for the construction of the Irish Sea border will now have to be worked out.
Agreed to by Boris Johnson in his almost indecent haste to get a deal done,
possibly without even understanding what he had agreed to, it now has to be
turned into a reality, with all the economic and political consequences that
will bring.
We also see the beginnings of the row over transition period extension, with reports that the EU (rather than the UK) may propose such an extension, perhaps via a sequencing process in which some sectors are dealt with first and others deferred to an extended period. On the other hand, Michael Gove has repeated the promise that all the future terms negotiations will be completed by the end of December 2020. The only way I can see that coming true would be if, first, the UK effectively accepted whatever terms the EU propose or, second, if the deal done was so limited in scope as to be highly damaging to the UK.
But these and other issues will be the stuff of the future. This post is going to finish off the series concerned with the analysis of the General Election itself, by considering some of the causes of the result. Clearly there is already a mass of commentary about that, but here the focus will be mainly on the Brexit-related aspects.
What just happened?
The first thing that happened is that the Tory Party made a good fist of Brexit, in an electoral sense. The ‘Get Brexit Done’ theme was, as pointed out elsewhere, deeply dishonest and will set up many problems for the future. But, as a slogan, it had undeniable political cut through. They were also lucky in that Farage lost his nerve and did not stand in Tory-held seats. Yet, in another way, by standing in Labour held seats he deprived the Tories of an even bigger win and saved several Labour seats where the BXP vote was larger than the Labour majority. One side-effect of the campaign is that it should now see the end of Farage as a political figure, if only because the Tories have now embraced ‘Faragism’.
Even in the face of this, it is surprising that the LibDems did not manage to make some gains, even allowing for their longstanding disadvantage in the first-past-the-post system. When, before the election, they announced their ‘revoke Article 50’ policy I received a lot of criticism from some for writing that this was a mistake of both principle and tactics that would dog them if and when an election came. But on that it is pretty clear that I was right. In particular, it made it far less likely that they would attract the votes of Conservative remainers, and its partial abandonment late in the campaign was, simply, too late.
On the other hand, the criticism of the LibDems and Labour, made by Anna Soubry and many others, for having facilitated the election in the first place is probably unfair. It’s a difficult judgment, and we’ll never know if it was the right one, but I thought then and still think that – once the Withdrawal Agreement Bill had passed its second reading - the alternative would have been that it would eventually have passed and Brexit would happen. And there was no sign of a parliamentary majority for another referendum. In those circumstances, an election was the last hope but, clearly, it proved a false one.
Labour's disaster
As for Labour, they deserve some though not all of the criticism they are receiving. It is nonsense to claim as many, such as Len McCluskey, are that they would have done better, still less won, had they embraced Brexit and not had a confirmatory referendum policy. That claim ignores the fact that had they done so they would have lost support amongst the majority of its 2017 voters, who were pro-remain.
It also wrongly assumes that it would have been appealing to Labour leave voters. For it is very clear that, irrespective of Brexit policy, those were exactly the kind of Labour voters who were repelled by Jeremy Corbyn – seeing him not necessarily as ‘too left-wing’, but as unpatriotic and just plain alien. It doesn’t matter whether that perception is fair or not, or whether it was trumped up by the media or not. Whatever its cause, it was the case, and it would have been the case whatever Labour’s Brexit policy had been. The polling evidence is clear that Corbyn rather than Brexit was the main problem amongst those who ceased to support Labour.
What is certainly the case – and has been highlighted on this blog many times over the last three years - is that Labour’s entire positioning on Brexit since 2016 has been a disaster of oscillation, ambiguity, and shifts that came too late or with too little clarity. From Corbyn’s early call for an immediate trigger to Article 50, through to his belated acceptance of a confirmatory referendum, to his dithering over what side he’d be on in such a referendum to his, in my view reasonable but far too belatedly adopted, ‘neutrality’ stance, it has always been grudging, shifty and unconvincing.
Moreover, Labour were wrong to vote to trigger Article 50 – thereby being forever open to the accusation of having supported Brexit in principle – wrong to eschew single market membership as a compromise form of Brexit, if Brexit was to be done, and wrong to wait so long before endorsing another referendum. By the time they got to this election, they were still talking in the meaningless terms of single market access (or variants of that) which had been so misleading during the Referendum itself. Their ultimate ‘renegotiate and then refer to the people’ position made the best of a bad job given what had gone before, but it was too late to atone for what had gone before.
Much of the blame for all this can be laid at Corbyn’s – or his inner team’s – door. He never showed much interest in or understanding of Brexit, which would be bad enough given that it is the dominant issue of the day. But, worse, he did not seem to understand that delivering on his preferred terrain of anti-austerity policies could not be separated from Brexit itself.
In fact, polling evidence suggests that the actual policy platform was not unpopular with those former Labour voters who abandoned Labour. Things like rail nationalisation, for example, are vote winners. In that sense, despite being widely mocked for it, Corbyn’s claim about having ‘won the argument’ is not entirely risible. And it should be of some comfort to the Left were it not for the diversion of the personality cult around Corbyn as the person to deliver it: singing ‘oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ was never a substitute for serious politics.
Deeper roots
However, asking what happened in this election is, in a way, the wrong question, in that some of what happened has been building for years, if not decades. There’s always been a tension between working-class and middle-class Labour, between nationalists and internationalists, and between class-based and identity-based politics. In particular, the decline of Labour’s traditional vote reflects the long-term decline of the regional, industrial, unionised working-class. Similarly, the tension between the remnants of that and the middle-class, public sector worker and London-centred parts of its base has been going since at least the New Labour years.
But Brexit and its aftermath have inflected, sharpened and perhaps finally cemented these divisions. Immediately after the Referendum I wrote an academic analysis in the Socio-Economic Review of how it had clarified a new politics of ‘cosmopolitans and locals’. Many others have made a similar diagnosis, even if using different terminology (e.g. ‘nativists and globalists’) to make essentially the same point. I speculated that in due course the two party structure of UK (or, at least, English) politics would come to reflect that.
Arguably, that has come half-true in this election, with the Tory Party having emerged as the ‘local’, or English nationalist, party. If so, and assuming that there will be no change to the first-past-the post-system, then what now needs to happen is the construction of the other, ‘cosmopolitan’ party – reflecting the cleavages of age, education, social liberalism that are already in play. Tactical voting is not, as we have just seen, going to be the answer. That implies not the reconstruction of the Labour Party but the wholesale merger of Labour and LibDems with, in the process, a redefinition of each of them.
A new party?
This would not be the ‘remain party’. Painful as it is for remainers to accept, remain is now a dead cause. Pointing to the fact that 52% of voters backed ‘remain parties’ in the election is as much of a dead end as the ‘only 37% of the electorate voted to leave’ rabbit hole. In the medium to long-run it might become a ‘rejoin party’, but for the time being it would be pushing for the least damaging Brexit deal, developing a wider policy programme within the confines of the fact of Brexit, and opposing what is already emerging as the populist agenda of the new government.
Nor would it be a ‘centrist party’, because the very notion of centrism is predicated on a politics that has now disappeared. It would be on one wing of this new local-cosmopolitan landscape. One reason to think it could emerge is that it is already clear that the ‘Local Party’, despite Johnson’s talk of “healing divisions”, is going to humiliatingly grind its victory into the faces of what that horny-handed son of the soil Dominic Cummings (Durham School and First Class degree from Oxford) sneeringly calls “educated remainer types”.
It’s a strange, Pol Pot-like, move for the Tories to turn on the educated in this way but it reflects the peculiar mix of Maoist and Silicon Valley disruptor thinking which has now captured that party. It's no longer the party of business and the professions. It's not even the party of 'grammar school aspiration' in the way it was under Heath or even Thatcher. Rather, it's a bizarre melange of public school entitlement and the resentment of those with no post-compulsory schooling. This new positioning can only have the effect of cementing the new divide, since the more it asserts a new ‘them’, the more it creates a new ‘us’.
However, calls for a Liberal-Labour rapprochement are almost as old as the Labour Party itself and so it’s probably unlikely to happen now. Even so if, as many now think, the break-up of the United Kingdom is not very far away, and if, as is at least possible, Labour suffer another crushing defeat in 2024 then it’s perhaps not impossible in the not too distant future. It would be a vehicle for, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote this weekend, a ‘European England’ that might still eventually emerge from the wreck of Brexit.
The future of this blog
Coming to the more immediate future, and to less weighty matters, several people have asked me if this blog will continue now that Brexit is a certainty (and been kind enough to suggest that they hope it will). The answer to that is ‘yes’, for two reasons.
One is just because, to repeat a point made ad nauseam, Brexit will not end with Britain’s departure from the EU at the end of next January. It will continue for many months, and very likely years, to come. Over that time, it may become (even) more difficult to separate out Brexit per se from British politics more generally. Still, the blog will continue to focus primarily on Brexit-related issues. Some of these may be highly technical, for example on trade and customs issues, but my approach will continue to be one of trying to place these within a wider political analysis.
The second reason is the original rationale for this blog. At the time of the first post in September 2016, when of course there were very few readers, I wrote that “the blog will not attempt to re-argue the case for remaining in the EU or for the reversal of the decision, as I do not think that this is in prospect. Instead, I will analyse the unfolding consequences”.
In the intervening years, there have been many times when I thought that the decision might, in fact, get reversed. This was partly because of the total incompetence with which Brexit has been pursued, but mainly because of the extraordinary resilience and ingenuity of the remain campaign. That campaign has made some mistakes but, overall, has done far more than could ever have been expected. It nearly won - and may yet be the springboard for a future movement.
So now that it is once again the case that there is no prospect of Brexit being reversed, the rationale for the blog remains as it was from the beginning. So too does my original sentiment in that first post that Brexit is a national catastrophe. But that does not take away the need to provide an ongoing analysis of it which, whilst clearly and avowedly partisan, aspires to be based on evidence, logic, and fair and rational argument.
If nothing else, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country, not least as a reminder that this is so very different to what, in 2016, Brexiters promised. So it can make its own very small contribution to holding them to account for what they have done.
Note: I am aware that in the last few days some people have been having problems reading the blog, with a large yellow box covering over most of the text. It seems to only affect Android devices. I’m sorry about this but I do not know the reason or the solution, though some people have reported that it also depends on what browser you use.
We also see the beginnings of the row over transition period extension, with reports that the EU (rather than the UK) may propose such an extension, perhaps via a sequencing process in which some sectors are dealt with first and others deferred to an extended period. On the other hand, Michael Gove has repeated the promise that all the future terms negotiations will be completed by the end of December 2020. The only way I can see that coming true would be if, first, the UK effectively accepted whatever terms the EU propose or, second, if the deal done was so limited in scope as to be highly damaging to the UK.
But these and other issues will be the stuff of the future. This post is going to finish off the series concerned with the analysis of the General Election itself, by considering some of the causes of the result. Clearly there is already a mass of commentary about that, but here the focus will be mainly on the Brexit-related aspects.
What just happened?
The first thing that happened is that the Tory Party made a good fist of Brexit, in an electoral sense. The ‘Get Brexit Done’ theme was, as pointed out elsewhere, deeply dishonest and will set up many problems for the future. But, as a slogan, it had undeniable political cut through. They were also lucky in that Farage lost his nerve and did not stand in Tory-held seats. Yet, in another way, by standing in Labour held seats he deprived the Tories of an even bigger win and saved several Labour seats where the BXP vote was larger than the Labour majority. One side-effect of the campaign is that it should now see the end of Farage as a political figure, if only because the Tories have now embraced ‘Faragism’.
Even in the face of this, it is surprising that the LibDems did not manage to make some gains, even allowing for their longstanding disadvantage in the first-past-the-post system. When, before the election, they announced their ‘revoke Article 50’ policy I received a lot of criticism from some for writing that this was a mistake of both principle and tactics that would dog them if and when an election came. But on that it is pretty clear that I was right. In particular, it made it far less likely that they would attract the votes of Conservative remainers, and its partial abandonment late in the campaign was, simply, too late.
On the other hand, the criticism of the LibDems and Labour, made by Anna Soubry and many others, for having facilitated the election in the first place is probably unfair. It’s a difficult judgment, and we’ll never know if it was the right one, but I thought then and still think that – once the Withdrawal Agreement Bill had passed its second reading - the alternative would have been that it would eventually have passed and Brexit would happen. And there was no sign of a parliamentary majority for another referendum. In those circumstances, an election was the last hope but, clearly, it proved a false one.
Labour's disaster
As for Labour, they deserve some though not all of the criticism they are receiving. It is nonsense to claim as many, such as Len McCluskey, are that they would have done better, still less won, had they embraced Brexit and not had a confirmatory referendum policy. That claim ignores the fact that had they done so they would have lost support amongst the majority of its 2017 voters, who were pro-remain.
It also wrongly assumes that it would have been appealing to Labour leave voters. For it is very clear that, irrespective of Brexit policy, those were exactly the kind of Labour voters who were repelled by Jeremy Corbyn – seeing him not necessarily as ‘too left-wing’, but as unpatriotic and just plain alien. It doesn’t matter whether that perception is fair or not, or whether it was trumped up by the media or not. Whatever its cause, it was the case, and it would have been the case whatever Labour’s Brexit policy had been. The polling evidence is clear that Corbyn rather than Brexit was the main problem amongst those who ceased to support Labour.
What is certainly the case – and has been highlighted on this blog many times over the last three years - is that Labour’s entire positioning on Brexit since 2016 has been a disaster of oscillation, ambiguity, and shifts that came too late or with too little clarity. From Corbyn’s early call for an immediate trigger to Article 50, through to his belated acceptance of a confirmatory referendum, to his dithering over what side he’d be on in such a referendum to his, in my view reasonable but far too belatedly adopted, ‘neutrality’ stance, it has always been grudging, shifty and unconvincing.
Moreover, Labour were wrong to vote to trigger Article 50 – thereby being forever open to the accusation of having supported Brexit in principle – wrong to eschew single market membership as a compromise form of Brexit, if Brexit was to be done, and wrong to wait so long before endorsing another referendum. By the time they got to this election, they were still talking in the meaningless terms of single market access (or variants of that) which had been so misleading during the Referendum itself. Their ultimate ‘renegotiate and then refer to the people’ position made the best of a bad job given what had gone before, but it was too late to atone for what had gone before.
Much of the blame for all this can be laid at Corbyn’s – or his inner team’s – door. He never showed much interest in or understanding of Brexit, which would be bad enough given that it is the dominant issue of the day. But, worse, he did not seem to understand that delivering on his preferred terrain of anti-austerity policies could not be separated from Brexit itself.
In fact, polling evidence suggests that the actual policy platform was not unpopular with those former Labour voters who abandoned Labour. Things like rail nationalisation, for example, are vote winners. In that sense, despite being widely mocked for it, Corbyn’s claim about having ‘won the argument’ is not entirely risible. And it should be of some comfort to the Left were it not for the diversion of the personality cult around Corbyn as the person to deliver it: singing ‘oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ was never a substitute for serious politics.
Deeper roots
However, asking what happened in this election is, in a way, the wrong question, in that some of what happened has been building for years, if not decades. There’s always been a tension between working-class and middle-class Labour, between nationalists and internationalists, and between class-based and identity-based politics. In particular, the decline of Labour’s traditional vote reflects the long-term decline of the regional, industrial, unionised working-class. Similarly, the tension between the remnants of that and the middle-class, public sector worker and London-centred parts of its base has been going since at least the New Labour years.
But Brexit and its aftermath have inflected, sharpened and perhaps finally cemented these divisions. Immediately after the Referendum I wrote an academic analysis in the Socio-Economic Review of how it had clarified a new politics of ‘cosmopolitans and locals’. Many others have made a similar diagnosis, even if using different terminology (e.g. ‘nativists and globalists’) to make essentially the same point. I speculated that in due course the two party structure of UK (or, at least, English) politics would come to reflect that.
Arguably, that has come half-true in this election, with the Tory Party having emerged as the ‘local’, or English nationalist, party. If so, and assuming that there will be no change to the first-past-the post-system, then what now needs to happen is the construction of the other, ‘cosmopolitan’ party – reflecting the cleavages of age, education, social liberalism that are already in play. Tactical voting is not, as we have just seen, going to be the answer. That implies not the reconstruction of the Labour Party but the wholesale merger of Labour and LibDems with, in the process, a redefinition of each of them.
A new party?
This would not be the ‘remain party’. Painful as it is for remainers to accept, remain is now a dead cause. Pointing to the fact that 52% of voters backed ‘remain parties’ in the election is as much of a dead end as the ‘only 37% of the electorate voted to leave’ rabbit hole. In the medium to long-run it might become a ‘rejoin party’, but for the time being it would be pushing for the least damaging Brexit deal, developing a wider policy programme within the confines of the fact of Brexit, and opposing what is already emerging as the populist agenda of the new government.
Nor would it be a ‘centrist party’, because the very notion of centrism is predicated on a politics that has now disappeared. It would be on one wing of this new local-cosmopolitan landscape. One reason to think it could emerge is that it is already clear that the ‘Local Party’, despite Johnson’s talk of “healing divisions”, is going to humiliatingly grind its victory into the faces of what that horny-handed son of the soil Dominic Cummings (Durham School and First Class degree from Oxford) sneeringly calls “educated remainer types”.
It’s a strange, Pol Pot-like, move for the Tories to turn on the educated in this way but it reflects the peculiar mix of Maoist and Silicon Valley disruptor thinking which has now captured that party. It's no longer the party of business and the professions. It's not even the party of 'grammar school aspiration' in the way it was under Heath or even Thatcher. Rather, it's a bizarre melange of public school entitlement and the resentment of those with no post-compulsory schooling. This new positioning can only have the effect of cementing the new divide, since the more it asserts a new ‘them’, the more it creates a new ‘us’.
However, calls for a Liberal-Labour rapprochement are almost as old as the Labour Party itself and so it’s probably unlikely to happen now. Even so if, as many now think, the break-up of the United Kingdom is not very far away, and if, as is at least possible, Labour suffer another crushing defeat in 2024 then it’s perhaps not impossible in the not too distant future. It would be a vehicle for, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote this weekend, a ‘European England’ that might still eventually emerge from the wreck of Brexit.
The future of this blog
Coming to the more immediate future, and to less weighty matters, several people have asked me if this blog will continue now that Brexit is a certainty (and been kind enough to suggest that they hope it will). The answer to that is ‘yes’, for two reasons.
One is just because, to repeat a point made ad nauseam, Brexit will not end with Britain’s departure from the EU at the end of next January. It will continue for many months, and very likely years, to come. Over that time, it may become (even) more difficult to separate out Brexit per se from British politics more generally. Still, the blog will continue to focus primarily on Brexit-related issues. Some of these may be highly technical, for example on trade and customs issues, but my approach will continue to be one of trying to place these within a wider political analysis.
The second reason is the original rationale for this blog. At the time of the first post in September 2016, when of course there were very few readers, I wrote that “the blog will not attempt to re-argue the case for remaining in the EU or for the reversal of the decision, as I do not think that this is in prospect. Instead, I will analyse the unfolding consequences”.
In the intervening years, there have been many times when I thought that the decision might, in fact, get reversed. This was partly because of the total incompetence with which Brexit has been pursued, but mainly because of the extraordinary resilience and ingenuity of the remain campaign. That campaign has made some mistakes but, overall, has done far more than could ever have been expected. It nearly won - and may yet be the springboard for a future movement.
So now that it is once again the case that there is no prospect of Brexit being reversed, the rationale for the blog remains as it was from the beginning. So too does my original sentiment in that first post that Brexit is a national catastrophe. But that does not take away the need to provide an ongoing analysis of it which, whilst clearly and avowedly partisan, aspires to be based on evidence, logic, and fair and rational argument.
If nothing else, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country, not least as a reminder that this is so very different to what, in 2016, Brexiters promised. So it can make its own very small contribution to holding them to account for what they have done.
Note: I am aware that in the last few days some people have been having problems reading the blog, with a large yellow box covering over most of the text. It seems to only affect Android devices. I’m sorry about this but I do not know the reason or the solution, though some people have reported that it also depends on what browser you use.
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