One of the more ‘highbrow’ arguments for Brexit – these things are, of course, relative – was that, having left, politicians would no longer be able to blame the EU and would have to take responsibility themselves. Needless to say, this has proved as illusory in practice as it was improbable in theory. Even leaving aside all those they blame for the failures of Brexit itself, the politicians who brought us Brexit have never ceased to blame others for all the country’s woes.
That has been glaringly obvious in the last week. Ever since the her disastrous mini-budget, Liz Truss and her allies have been blaming her downfall on everything from the Establishment to ‘left-wing’ bond traders. Now, in Washington to promote her peculiar-sounding forthcoming book and to court the pro-Trump, QAnon weirdos, she let rip at globalism, wokeism, socialism, and liberalism. Then came the much more high profile row of the week, starting with Suella Braverman’s claim that “Islamists are in charge of Britain” (£), which was followed by Lee Anderson’s more pointed attacks on Sadiq Khan and London as being “under the control” of Islamists, for which he lost the Tory whip. Since then he has renewed those attacks, whilst Braverman has gone on to talk in almost apocalyptic terms about Britain becoming “unrecognizable” (£).
Clearly this is about more than the utterances of a few Tory MPs, although even if that was all it was it would not be insignificant, given that they comprise a former Prime Minister, former Home Secretary, and former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. But, in fact, some version of this analysis is now commonplace across numerous groups of Tory MPs and, very likely, the majority of the Tory Party membership, as well as the Reform Party, carrying all the way through to the street-fighting hard right of ‘Tommy Robinson’ and the English Defence League. Actually, we can be more precise: some version of this analysis is now commonplace across many, if not most, of the leading advocates of ‘hard Brexit’ including even harder forms of Brexit than we actually have.
As an analysis, even leaving aside its conspiracy theory nonsense, it is totally incoherent. Many of its proponents are in favour of global free trade, but opposed to ‘globalism’; liberal but opposed to ‘liberalism’; ‘libertarian’ but in favour of state clampdowns on those protests they dislike; hugely privileged, yet ‘anti-elite’. There’s not even the tiniest attempt to explain how globalists and socialists and Islamists can all be running Britain. The only coherence is the idea that whoever is running things, and whoever is responsible, it isn’t the Conservative Brexiters. And this idea is impervious to the observation that Conservative Brexiters have been running the country for years, since its proponents insist that those in charge were not ‘true’ Conservatives and Brexit was not ‘real’ Brexit. This is now a standard belief of ‘Brexitists’ and is promulgated across the right-wing media, including, and in particular, their own propaganda channel, GB News.
The deeper failure
So, at one level, this is yet another example of Brexit having failed to live up to its promises. Far from ushering in a new era of political accountability it has seen an intense denial of responsibility, not least for Brexit itself. However, this reflects a much deeper level at which Brexit has failed: it was supposed to have resolved all the things that Truss, Braverman, Anderson et al. are still complaining about.
For, whilst Brexit had multiple meanings and motivations, many of them are captured by the idea of it being a great ‘re-set’, a return to ‘the time before’. It’s true that even contained within that single idea there are also a wide variety of apprehensions of when that time was, and what it consisted of, but they all entail some notion of a supposedly simpler, more comprehensible world (or, perhaps, country). As the word ‘supposedly’ implies, this entails gross simplification, if not downright fantasy, about the past, and it is easily mocked as being about silly symbols like blue passports or imperial measures. But it does have some real, empirical basis in referencing a world which was less economically and culturally globalized (though there’s plenty of room for debate about the nature and meaning of that, too).
It’s a notion that finds all sorts of expressions in relation to Brexit, though perhaps lurking in the margins rather than in the headline slogans. It’s most obvious in the many invocations of the Second World War. It’s present, in a more subtle way, in the many varieties of the idea ‘that we managed perfectly well before’ EU membership. It’s also present, though not necessarily explicitly linked to Brexit, in all those sly little social media memes where English street scenes are circulated with expressions of regret about ‘how different things are nowadays’, which might refer to the fact that such scenes show men wearing hats, high street shops that are flourishing, towns that are not choked by traffic, or even roads that are free of potholes - but more likely refers to there not being a non-white face in sight.
As that last example suggests, issues of race and racism are integral to this idea of a return to the past, often coded by the lament ‘I just want my country back’, and they are clearly also integral to the idea of an Islamist takeover. But they are only one element of something which is more subtle and nebulous. The Vote Leave slogan ‘take back control’ was certainly in part a message about controlling immigration, and perhaps about political accountability, but it also had the wider resonance of ‘regaining’ all manner of losses, and in that sense is best understood in terms of nostalgia.
The politicization of nostalgia
Nostalgia isn’t the only reason why Brexit had, and still has, far more support amongst the old than the young, but it is surely one of them. These older voters may have had some overlap with those ‘left behind’ economically but, more obviously, they were those who were left behind psychologically and culturally. That is not a sneering disparagement. It’s just a recognition that it is quite normal, perhaps natural, for older people to tend to see the world they grew up in as being the normal and proper order of things (just as the reason why younger people tend to be relaxed about multi-culturalism and social liberalism is not because they have some special virtue but because it is what they have grown up with). It’s equally normal to overlay nostalgia for that world with the different kind of nostalgia for youth and vitality; perhaps, even, to conflate the two so as to feel, if only unconsciously, that if the proper order of things could be restored then so could that lost vitality.
There’s nothing particularly objectionable about nostalgia as a psychological phenomenon, but it is dangerous as a political philosophy and doomed as a policy programme. Yet, at the same time, it is also profoundly powerful as a political motivator, especially when combined with the politics of grievance and with nationalism. What that three-part combination creates is not just a neuralgic sense of loss, but the anger of having been cheated, and the chauvinism of having been cheated by external and internal enemies. It means that the passing of time is not something to be accepted, if regretted, but is the theft of a birthright by alien forces and something to be outraged by.
Prior to Brexit, EU membership could act as a symbol of that theft and be ascribed as the cause of all that had changed in the world in previous decades. That wasn’t entirely implausible, if only because the EU is a part and parcel of those changes, but leaving the EU could never deliver a return to the past. That’s partly because the EU was only one aspect of what had changed, but primarily for the obvious reason that time only goes in one direction. The world prior to 1973 could not be regained by a vote to return to it, but one dishonesty of Brexit was to allow people to think that it could be. Far worse, because voting for Brexit was ‘democratic’ then when the past failed to re-appear ‘the will of the people’ had been thwarted. In this way, the original theft has been compounded by a second, more blatant, offence.
‘Ordinary’ people, the Brexit Delusion, and the culture wars
The consequence is that the pre-existing boil of nostalgic grievance has not been lanced by Brexit, but has become infected and inflamed by Brexit. Would we be having current debates about Islamists running the country, or about multi-culturalism, or about woke social liberalism, if Brexit had not happened? Of course we would. Despite the idea, yet another piece of grievance politics, that these are things ‘we’re not allowed to talk about’, they have been talked about, endlessly, for decades. To take just one example, the term ‘Londonistan’ emerged in the late 1990s, and Melanie Phillips’ book of that title, published in 2006, claimed the Islamification of Britain to have begun twenty years before that. But we wouldn’t be having them in quite the same way.
In the days when, according to Phillips, Islamification was getting started, Lee Anderson worked, as he never ceases to remind people, in the coal mines, before emerging to become first a Labour and then a Conservative politician. An ardent campaigner for Brexit, he became a Tory MP in 2019 and is taken, not least by himself, to be emblematic of ‘Red Wall’ leave voters (£). And whilst there’s always been a political market for his kind of plain-speaking man-of-the-people, professional Northerner schtick, it’s hard to imagine him having come to prominence in anything other than the post-Brexit Tory Party.
Whilst also not entirely new, Brexit has given focus to the idea of regional, ageing, working-class Englishness as being the template for ’ordinary people’, from which any divergence is a sign of elitism and the privilege of ‘luxury beliefs’. More even than Nigel Farage, who can’t quite shake off the taint of being Southern and middle-class, Anderson represents a voice which is almost as angered by the thought of London itself as it is by ‘Londonistan’. Ever since 2016, such voices, which have always represented themselves as ‘the silent majority’, have been able to persuade themselves and others that they are the actual majority – a phenomenon which Week in Brexitland author Nick Tyrone recently described as “the Brexit Delusion”:
“This is the idea that because 52% of the country voted to leave the EU in 2016, that means that 52% of the country agree with all of the ideas held by the hard right Brexiters who roam SW1A. 2016 made them become convinced that they have a god given right to govern the country their way because, hey, when finally given a “real” vote (which in their minds, the 2016 referendum was the only example of, really) they plumped for their politics, supposedly.”
To give just one example of this delusion, Tory MP Jonathan Gullis claimed that deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda was what people wanted when they voted for Brexit, precisely as if the referendum had been a mandate for an entire policy agenda rather than a vote on whether or not to leave the EU. Ironically, it is a delusion which relies as much upon the liberal middle-class guilt of remainers bending over backwards to try to understand Brexit as it does upon the aggressive working-class machismo embodied by Anderson. At all events, it is this idea of an ordinary people, girded by their referendum victory, who have been cheated by history, that gives a new inflection to cultural debates, to the extent that, now, we call them culture wars.
It’s in this context that Anderson matters, not just as the supposed tribune of the common man, but for his self-declared commitment to fighting these culture wars. That is why Sunak made him Deputy Chairman of the Tory Party, but, if anything, he matters more to the Labour Party. That is because he is also seen as representative of a certain kind of traditional Labour voter, who may not be quite as numerically important as party strategists think, but who symbolizes what within Labour political psychology still seems to be the archetype of the ‘real working class’; the male, unionized, manual industrial worker.
It is a ludicrous and offensive archetype, if not stereotype, of such workers as Gerhard Schnyder has eloquently explained, but it exerts a powerful hold on Labour for reasons of its own version of the politics of nostalgia. It’s as if Labour accept the proposition made endlessly by populist Conservatives like Matthew Goodwin, that they have betrayed the ordinary working-class people of Britain to become the party of ‘the new elite’ of woke, urban graduates.
One of the many things missing from that proposition is the implication of the line, so striking when it was first said by Neil Kinnock in 1987, but now so common as to be almost a cliché, of someone explaining their working-class credentials by saying they were ‘the first in their family to go to university’. Missing, too, is any sense of justifiable pride from Labour that this transformation in access to higher education was in good part due to the Wilson and Blair governments. Perhaps most importantly, what’s missing is a recognition that, if only because of the changing nature of the British economy, millions of ordinary working people don’t fit this narrow template of the ‘real working class’, and yet are by no means the elite, ‘new’ or otherwise.
From Brexit to Radical Brexitism
The overall effect of all this has been that post-Brexit political debates in general, and those about multi-culturalism and social liberalism in particular, have become more rather than less toxic. Rather than accept that liberal multi-culturalism is not only a reality, but, actually, in Britain, has been rather successful – not perfect or unproblematic, but that’s true of all societies, most certainly including illiberal monocultures – it is invariably framed as if it were an affront to ‘ordinary, decent people’, as Farage called those who had voted for Brexit.
Thus a new ‘knot’ of grievance has been created: these ‘ordinary decent people’ have not only been denied ‘real Brexit’ but they have been denied the more amorphous great re-set they were at least implicitly promised. The clock hasn’t been turned back, the past hasn’t been regained, and the politicians who promised to ‘take back control’ have not been able to deliver on any of the senses of that slogan. From which one obvious conclusion that can be drawn, and which brings us back to where this post began, is that ‘someone else’ – the globalists, the Establishment, the Islamists, perhaps all of them! – Them! Them! The Others! – must be in control.
In this way Brexitism has become radicalized by the very failure of Brexit so as to seek new targets, other than the EU, to blame, and to pursue ever more extreme projects than leaving the EU in order to regain the lost past. Whether, given the demography of support for it is actually quite limited, that agenda can be realized is another matter, certainly at the moment, when it looks as if that support will be split between parties at the next election.
However that split may not last forever, and it is perfectly possible that this more radical Brexitism will attract new recruits, even amongst the young, at the same time as disillusionment with a future Labour government reduces faith in alternatives to Brexitism and reduces voter turnout. In those circumstances, and assuming the First Past the Post system remains in place, it’s not that difficult to envisage a government imbued with the kinds of ideas that Truss, Braverman and Anderson have been advancing this week. The ‘silent majority’ is not an actual majority, but it does not need to be to gain power.
If put into practice, the irony is that whilst animated by a conservative desire to return to the past, these ideas are predicated on the distinctly unconservative desire to ‘smash the system’. In this, and other ways, they, like Brexit, contain the seeds of their own failure. The more they succeed in their mission of destruction, the less they will deliver on their promise of restitution. But this is hardly a cause for comfort since, along with all the damage that would do, such a failure would, like that of Brexit, generate a clamour for even more extreme policies.
An elusive target
I’m aware that this post is slightly different to my normal ones, and perhaps (even) less satisfactory. That may partly be because I have had a stinking head cold all week, which doesn’t aid clarity of thought or expression. That aside, it’s also because the issue addressed is far harder to pin down than those of, say, trade and regulation, or politics. It could be called populism, of course, but that is a blunt and generic term, which doesn’t capture the specificities of this case, if only because doing so is impossible without reference to Brexit. It’s certainly not identical with, say, Trumpism or Orbanism, even though it has some resemblances to those and other manifestations of populism. It’s not fascism, and it would be glib to call it that, although it has some elements of Ur-fascism. It’s not even an ideology in the normal senses of the term because, although there are elements of that, it’s more about a certain kind of cultural mood, or ethos, or feeling.
As such, it is hard to articulate – hard even to give supporting evidential links to – and all too easy to dismiss as stupidity or absurdity. But it’s important to try to understand it. After all, it’s not that long ago that the idea of Brexit was dismissed as stupid and absurd, the purview of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. It would be rash to dismiss what, for want of any better label, I’m calling ‘Radical Brexitism’ in the same way.
Showing posts with label Liz Truss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liz Truss. Show all posts
Friday, 1 March 2024
Friday, 24 November 2023
An Autumn Statement of Britain's foregone future
The staggering success of Brexit in transforming Britain’s economic prospects has been such that in his Autumn Statement speech the Chancellor mentioned it, well, just once, and that to refer to the fatuous “Brexit Pubs Guarantee”. This is the policy, first trailed in Rishi Sunak’s 2021 budget, and which came into force last August, whereby duty on a pint of beer bought in a pub is guaranteed to be less than when bought in a shop. As Brexit benefits go, this might be thought rather meagre but, in fact, it’s not even a Brexit benefit, as it could have been done whilst being a member in the EU.
The reticence was scarcely surprising, though. In making a statement putting heavy emphasis on the need to boost business investment, Jeremy Hunt could hardly mention that, just the day before, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England had told the Commons Treasury Select Committee that the decision to leave the EU had “chilled business investment” ever since the referendum. Nor, in putting heavy emphasis on the need for economic growth, was he likely to refer to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) forecast from April 2023 that Brexit will cause UK GDP to be 4% a year lower than it would otherwise have been by 2035, even though that forecast was explicitly left unchanged in its analysis accompanying this Autumn Statement.
Hunt certainly wasn’t likely to challenge the OBR’s estimate, as Trade Secretary Kami Badenoch did the other week, since one of the big lessons learnt from Truss’s mini-budget catastrophe, which brought him to the Treasury, is that the OBR’s forecasts are crucial to gain market legitimacy. So trying to pick holes in one of those forecasts would open a can of worms that every Chancellor who follows the hapless Kwasi Kwarteng will want to remain tightly closed.
The long hand of Trussonomics
That is a reminder that, although it seems a long time ago, it is only a year since Truss’s ‘true Brexit budget’ (£) meltdown and the first Sunak-Hunt Autumn Statement that followed. At that time, I wrote that the effect of those events was to begin to break the silence about the economic damage of Brexit. That was true, so far as it went, although it hasn’t persisted to the same degree, perhaps in part because Brexit has been subsumed into the long list of things about which, as I wrote more recently, we ‘mustn’t grumble’.
It’s not just that, though. Opinion polls show that in October 2022, following the Truss debacle, 57% thought that Brexit has made the UK economy weaker than it would have been, and 11% that Brexit has made the economy stronger than it would have been, a lead for 46 percentage points for ‘weaker’, which was the highest recorded since the question was first asked in February 2022. However, in the most recent iteration of this poll, in October 2023, 49% thought ‘weaker’ and 21% thought stronger. At 28 percentage points that is still a considerable lead, but it has not only declined since its high point in October 2022 it is also the smallest lead recorded in any of the polls since the question was first asked. (The numbers responding ‘similar’ or ‘don’t know’ have remained stable throughout, at around 20% and 12% respectively).
So it looks as if the Truss mini-budget did indeed have an impact on public debate and public views about the economics of Brexit, but that this has since diminished. One reason is probably just the passage of time since the mini-budget crisis, and declining media interest in Brexit. But another may be because of the extent to which, in Conservative circles, the belief that Truss was essentially right has endured or even grown. It may not be surprising that this belief was expressed just this week by Patrick Minford (£), the ever-deluded chief economic cheerleader for Brexit and prime intellectual architect of the Truss budget. Nor is it precisely a shock that Truss herself, whose qualities do not self-evidently include that of deep introspection, should not just regard herself as blameless but in recent months have appointed herself as the standard-bearer for a ‘true Conservative’ economic policy of tax cuts and small government. But it is more surprising, given the damage she did not just to the economy but to their chances of re-election, that “so many Tories still love the failed leader”, to quote part of the headline of an insightful recent article by the Guardian’s Zoe Williams which seeks to explain Truss’s “astounding return”.
Part of Williams’ explanation relates to Brexit. She suggests that Truss and her supporters have mobilized its recurrent victimhood motif to present her as not having failed but as having been destroyed by the forces of the Blob, the Establishment – that amorphous conglomerate which, to explain Truss’s demise, has to extend even to bond market traders. This is all part of the increasingly dangerous contemporary British version of the ‘stab-in-the-back myth’ that played such an odious part in German politics after the First World War. It was on display again last week in the aftermath of Suella Braverman’s resignation.
At all events, it won’t have been lost upon Rishi Sunak that Truss’s ‘Great British Growth Rally’ upstaged him at the Tory Party’s conference, and that tax cuts are one way that he might throw some red meat to his many critics. Indeed, he even had the gall to suggest (£) that the lesson of Truss’s budget chaos lay not for the Tories but for Labour’s “dangerous” green investment plans. In any case, one of the few things known about Sunak is that he wants to be seen as an ‘instinctive tax-cutter’ and his political hero is Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s Chancellor in the 1980s
In this way, there is now a peculiar alignment within which tax cuts are seen as symbolic both of defiance of Establishment orthodoxy and of fealty to Thatcherite orthodoxy. So it’s not surprising that Sunak and Hunt conjured some up, even if they relied on a smoke and mirrors trickery that was concisely exposed by Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and were based less on any serious economic analysis and more on a desire to lay political traps for Labour at the coming election.
Certainly the right-wing press was quick to latch on to this alignment, with both the Mail and the Telegraph carrying the identical front-page headline “Biggest tax cuts since the 1980s”. The Telegraph front page also prominently featured five pundits who it promised would provide “the best comment and analysis”. Of these, one was Allister Heath, who last year lauded Kwarteng (£) for “delivering the best budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver, by a massive margin”, whilst another was none other than Kwarteng himself. Truly, the best comment and analysis anyone could imagine.
The scale of the economic damage of Brexit
Nevertheless, unlike the architects of the mini-budget, neither Sunak nor Hunt could even begin to try to pretend that the Autumn Statement was about ‘delivering Brexit’, any more than they could admit how constrained it was by the ongoing damage of Brexit, the leaden divers’ boots dragging down Britain’s economy.
Further evidence of this was provided by last week’s report from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), entitled Revisiting the Effects of Brexit. The first line of its conclusion is that “overall, it is certain that Brexit has had a significant effect on the British economy” [my emphasis added], and the ‘headline’ summary of that effect is that, coming up to three years after the end of the transition period, UK real GDP is between 2% and 3% lower than it would have been compared with if Brexit had not occurred, and that it is forecast to be between 5% and 6% lower than it would have been by 2035 (thus, even worse than the OBR forecast of 4%). This equates to £850 per capita and £2,300 per capita respectively. The main reasons for this are the impacts on investment, productivity, and UK-EU trade.
There are several things to say about these findings. First, they are based on modelling different scenarios and, in doing so, the impact attributed to Brexit is stripped out from the impact of other shocks, primarily those of Covid and of the Ukraine War. This also means they are based on a form of ‘counterfactual modelling’ (i.e. comparing what has actually happened so far and what is forecast to happen with what might, in other scenarios, have happened or have been forecast to happen). As such, they are, of necessity, estimates but – unlike the constant attempts by pro-Brexit economists to assess the impact of Brexit by comparing actual UK performance with actual EU, Eurozone, or individual member state performance – they do address the central relevant question: is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU? By definition, this question can only be answered in counterfactual terms, and of course it is the same question as that asked in the opinion polls I referred to earlier.
The NIESR model is, however, a different to another kind of counterfactual model, the widely-quoted ‘doppelgänger’ produced by John Springford of the Centre for European Reform (CER) and, in fact, it suggests that Brexit has not been as damaging as the CER model estimates. Thus the last iteration of the CER doppelgänger showed UK GDP to be 5.5% lower than it would have been by June 2022, whereas NIESR shows it to be 2.5% lower by 2023.* It should go without saying that either figure may be right, or that the true figure may be even higher than the highest estimate, or lower than the lowest estimate, but for the time being, at least, these are the best estimates available. It should also go without saying that, on any of these estimates, it represents a huge economic hit. To get a sense of its magnitude, consider that in 2019-2020 (i.e. before the pandemic created big distortions in public finances), the UK spent 1.9% of GDP on defence, 4.2% on education and 5.8% on pensioner benefits.
It's important to understand two things about the NIESR, CER and OBR estimates. One is that people sometimes wrongly think – and, when that happens, Brexiters suddenly become sticklers for analytical rigour – that these are estimates of absolute falls in GDP. They are not, they are estimates of lost growth in GDP that would otherwise have occurred. In that sense they are about a kind of invisible immiseration, the loss of what might have been. The second is that people sometimes think – and Brexiters collude in this when they talk about the Brexit impact as being one of ‘temporary adjustment’ – that what is being estimated is a one-off event. It is not. Rather, each year, every year, actual GDP is lower than it would otherwise be, with the gap between what is and what might have been gradually increasing. In that sense they are about a kind of compound invisible immiseration.
It's also important to repeat that all these studies do seek to strip out Brexit from other effects, and in doing so they recognize that the UK economy – including the specific issues of trade performance and productivity – faces many challenges other than Brexit, including some that pre-dated Brexit. This matters when reading, for example, another recent report, this time from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) about UK trade performance and policy. For this report, whilst making many good points about the non-Brexit challenges, still finds it necessary to repeatedly make the strawman claim that “most commentary” ascribes the challenges facing UK trade to the single factor of Brexit. In fact, it is hard to think of a single serious commentator on trade or economics who does this, and, manifestly, the NIESR, OBR and CER do not.
The issue about the economic studies is simply that, as the BCG report itself states in relation to trade, although without attempting to quantify it, “Brexit has undoubtedly had a significant impact”. Quantification is useful in estimating the extent of that impact but, fundamentally, the point is that whatever other factors are in play, in a world where economic growth is hard to find, Britain, uniquely, has chosen to make it significantly harder by the addition of Brexit to these other factors. For another way to contextualize the magnitude of estimates of lost GDP growth, such as the NIESR figure of 2.5% for 2023, is to compare them with the latest OBR forecasts of what GDP growth will be: 0.6% (2023), 0.7% (2024), 1.4% (2025).
The bitter legacy of Brexit for SMEs
The BCG report also rightly highlights that the impact of Brexit has varied between sectors, identifying pharmaceutical and automotive industries as amongst those where Brexit “is likely to have been a major factor in reducing trade”. Perhaps the most important distinction to be drawn is between large and very large businesses, on the one hand, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on the other. The reasons are fairly obvious. Larger firms had the resources to plan for and implement the changes that Brexit brought, and were often more likely to already be familiar with procedures for trading outside the single market.
There has been ample survey evidence of how hard SMEs have been hit by Brexit, and the negative impact on specific sectors and businesses has been assiduously chronicled by Peter Foster of the Financial Times, most recently in his report on the cosmetics and beauty sector (£), itself partly based on a study conducted by Oxford Economics for the British Beauty Council. Amongst other things, Foster’s report spells out that the impact of Brexit is an ongoing one, not simply a ‘shock’ to which firms ‘adjust’ – although, in some cases, it has been just that, with the adjustment being to cease trading with the EU or to cease business altogether. Yet Hunt, despite emphasizing the need to support small businesses, had nothing to say about this.
The particular impact on SMEs is sometimes acknowledged by Brexiters, such as in the recent Institute of Economic Affairs report by pro-Brexit economist Catherine McBride (aptly described by Professor Gerhard Schnyder as “a truly fascinating piece of post-truth economics”, this is what Badenoch based her critique of the OBR forecast on). But they typically downplay its significance on the basis that, precisely because they are small, the aggregate economic effect of that impact is small.
This is misguided in two ways. One is that although big firms may be better placed to deal with Brexit this doesn’t mean, as McBride blithely puts it, that they “can easily absorb any additional costs”. It is rather that, as Allianz Trade’s Head of Economic Research recently said, Brexit has “become a structural hurdle for UK exports” (the same is true of imports, and will become even more so if the latest promise to introduce UK-EU import controls next January is kept). Many big firms may indeed ‘absorb’ these costs, but they are still real, impacting on competitiveness, prices, employment, tax base or any number of other things. But it is also misguided because of the particular economic, social, communal and, indeed, emotional and psychological costs of Brexit’s impact on SMEs.
Those costs are well-illustrated in Foster’s reports, including the one on the beauty industry, which also illustrates the micro-level equivalent of the counterfactual issue in the aggregate modelling. For, as he says of Apothecary 17, a small Doncaster-based maker of male personal grooming products, the issue is not so much that it has adjusted to now being a domestically focused business, it is the ‘counterfactual’ that it might otherwise have continued to expand as an international business. That in turn has implications for the people it might have employed, the foreign currency it might have earned, the taxes it might have paid, and its resilience in the event of a domestic downturn.
There are numerous similar examples highlighted in Brexit and Businesses: In their own words, a recent European Movement (EM) report in which, along with survey results, individual SME owners and managers explain what Brexit has meant for them. Issues include not just the new complexities of trade and regulatory change, but labour shortages. Here, too, it is important to understand how SMEs often struggle more than large businesses because, although net migration figures remain at similar levels to before Brexit, the costs and bureaucracy of hiring workers from overseas are far greater than was the case under freedom of movement of people within the EU. Moreover, sectors like hospitality which are more likely to need workers who don’t qualify for visas are also more likely to have large numbers of small firms within them.
Sometimes, the profiles in the EM report are painful to read, as with that of Carol, who ran a niche bridal lingerie business in Devon. The last line is “Brexit was the final nail in the coffin of the business” (p. 12). Or that of Darren, who ran a specialist motorsport vehicle engineering firm in Cornwall and Essex. His profile concludes “our business is finished” (p. 17). These are affecting, personal stories of individual dreams shattered, whilst at the same time implicitly telling of damage to whole families and to local communities, often in ‘left-behind areas’.
It is ironic to think how fervently Tory politicians used to, and still sometimes do, declaim themselves to be the party of entrepreneurs, and to insist that small businesses were the bedrock of the British economy, and yet they presided over Brexit. Ironic, too, how so many Brexiters claimed that it was only ‘big Business’ that felt threatened by Brexit, and what mattered were the true, British, salt of the earth, small businesses, and yet now dismiss the effects on SMEs as all but irrelevant because big Business has been more able to weather the Brexit storm.
Britain limps on
Back, then, to this week’s Autumn Statement, when it was clear, though again not surprising, that the Labour Party are as taciturn as the government about the damage of Brexit. Thus Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ response speech made no mention of it at all. As if it were the seedy uncle who has to be tolerated at family get-togethers, everyone is too embarrassed to comment on the dubiously-stained mac, the off-colour jokes and the whisky-fumed breath that Brexit brings to the parties.
For the Tories, the embarrassment is the result of having been the architects of Brexit. For Labour, it is because, otherwise, they would be forced to explain why they don’t propose to seek to reverse it, even to the extent of seeking single market membership. The political reasons for that, both domestic and as regards the EU, are understandable and, in my view, justifiable. But, whether justifiable or not, they don’t change the basic fact that the country is accepting – or being forced to accept – that, year after year, it is going to get poorer and poorer than it would otherwise have been.
I’ve argued before that, even so, Labour’s post-Brexit policy is a real, if limited, alternative to that of the Tories. But no-one should think, and Labour shouldn’t pretend, that the accommodations that are possible within the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) framework will make much economic difference. Equally, as Michel Barnier has said in a recent interview (£), there’s no prospect of the EU re-visiting the basic architecture of the TCA. Yet, although Reeves made no mention of it, other Labour politicians, such as Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds [approximately 10 minutes in], are including changes to the TCA as one of the ways a Labour government would boost growth.
And so Britain is set to limp on, if not the sick man of Europe then, at least, the only one who has shot himself in the foot. Sunak talks of making tough “long-term decisions for a brighter future”, and in his recent conference speech Keir Starmer said that under Labour “Britain will get its future back”, but the truth is that by far the biggest long-term decision of recent times was made in 2016. It wasn’t a ‘tough’ decision: it was made glibly, carelessly, almost casually. But its consequences are certainly tough, and not at all bright. What that bland and, to some, obscure little word ‘counterfactual’ in the economic estimates means is that each year those consequences will get tougher as Britain pays the growing price of a foregone future.
*The basic difference between the models, as I (a non-economist) understand it, is that the NIESR model compares UK actual and forecasted performance since Brexit with a UK counterfactual scenario in which Brexit had not happened, whereas Springford’s CER doppelgänger compares UK actual and forecasted performance since Brexit with the actual and forecasted performance of a weighted basket of economies which pre-Brexit were comparable to the UK and so is taken to be the counterfactual scenario for the UK had Brexit not happened. Springford has commented on Bluesky on how the NIESR model differs from his, and on some of the advantages and disadvantages of each. Springford’s model has been criticised by some pro-Brexit economists, and he has responded to, and rejected, their critique. Separately, Professor Jonathan Portes of King’s College London has argued that not only is their critique theoretically flawed but that their preferred model actually yields similar results to Springford’s doppelgänger.
The reticence was scarcely surprising, though. In making a statement putting heavy emphasis on the need to boost business investment, Jeremy Hunt could hardly mention that, just the day before, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England had told the Commons Treasury Select Committee that the decision to leave the EU had “chilled business investment” ever since the referendum. Nor, in putting heavy emphasis on the need for economic growth, was he likely to refer to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) forecast from April 2023 that Brexit will cause UK GDP to be 4% a year lower than it would otherwise have been by 2035, even though that forecast was explicitly left unchanged in its analysis accompanying this Autumn Statement.
Hunt certainly wasn’t likely to challenge the OBR’s estimate, as Trade Secretary Kami Badenoch did the other week, since one of the big lessons learnt from Truss’s mini-budget catastrophe, which brought him to the Treasury, is that the OBR’s forecasts are crucial to gain market legitimacy. So trying to pick holes in one of those forecasts would open a can of worms that every Chancellor who follows the hapless Kwasi Kwarteng will want to remain tightly closed.
The long hand of Trussonomics
That is a reminder that, although it seems a long time ago, it is only a year since Truss’s ‘true Brexit budget’ (£) meltdown and the first Sunak-Hunt Autumn Statement that followed. At that time, I wrote that the effect of those events was to begin to break the silence about the economic damage of Brexit. That was true, so far as it went, although it hasn’t persisted to the same degree, perhaps in part because Brexit has been subsumed into the long list of things about which, as I wrote more recently, we ‘mustn’t grumble’.
It’s not just that, though. Opinion polls show that in October 2022, following the Truss debacle, 57% thought that Brexit has made the UK economy weaker than it would have been, and 11% that Brexit has made the economy stronger than it would have been, a lead for 46 percentage points for ‘weaker’, which was the highest recorded since the question was first asked in February 2022. However, in the most recent iteration of this poll, in October 2023, 49% thought ‘weaker’ and 21% thought stronger. At 28 percentage points that is still a considerable lead, but it has not only declined since its high point in October 2022 it is also the smallest lead recorded in any of the polls since the question was first asked. (The numbers responding ‘similar’ or ‘don’t know’ have remained stable throughout, at around 20% and 12% respectively).
So it looks as if the Truss mini-budget did indeed have an impact on public debate and public views about the economics of Brexit, but that this has since diminished. One reason is probably just the passage of time since the mini-budget crisis, and declining media interest in Brexit. But another may be because of the extent to which, in Conservative circles, the belief that Truss was essentially right has endured or even grown. It may not be surprising that this belief was expressed just this week by Patrick Minford (£), the ever-deluded chief economic cheerleader for Brexit and prime intellectual architect of the Truss budget. Nor is it precisely a shock that Truss herself, whose qualities do not self-evidently include that of deep introspection, should not just regard herself as blameless but in recent months have appointed herself as the standard-bearer for a ‘true Conservative’ economic policy of tax cuts and small government. But it is more surprising, given the damage she did not just to the economy but to their chances of re-election, that “so many Tories still love the failed leader”, to quote part of the headline of an insightful recent article by the Guardian’s Zoe Williams which seeks to explain Truss’s “astounding return”.
Part of Williams’ explanation relates to Brexit. She suggests that Truss and her supporters have mobilized its recurrent victimhood motif to present her as not having failed but as having been destroyed by the forces of the Blob, the Establishment – that amorphous conglomerate which, to explain Truss’s demise, has to extend even to bond market traders. This is all part of the increasingly dangerous contemporary British version of the ‘stab-in-the-back myth’ that played such an odious part in German politics after the First World War. It was on display again last week in the aftermath of Suella Braverman’s resignation.
At all events, it won’t have been lost upon Rishi Sunak that Truss’s ‘Great British Growth Rally’ upstaged him at the Tory Party’s conference, and that tax cuts are one way that he might throw some red meat to his many critics. Indeed, he even had the gall to suggest (£) that the lesson of Truss’s budget chaos lay not for the Tories but for Labour’s “dangerous” green investment plans. In any case, one of the few things known about Sunak is that he wants to be seen as an ‘instinctive tax-cutter’ and his political hero is Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s Chancellor in the 1980s
In this way, there is now a peculiar alignment within which tax cuts are seen as symbolic both of defiance of Establishment orthodoxy and of fealty to Thatcherite orthodoxy. So it’s not surprising that Sunak and Hunt conjured some up, even if they relied on a smoke and mirrors trickery that was concisely exposed by Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and were based less on any serious economic analysis and more on a desire to lay political traps for Labour at the coming election.
Certainly the right-wing press was quick to latch on to this alignment, with both the Mail and the Telegraph carrying the identical front-page headline “Biggest tax cuts since the 1980s”. The Telegraph front page also prominently featured five pundits who it promised would provide “the best comment and analysis”. Of these, one was Allister Heath, who last year lauded Kwarteng (£) for “delivering the best budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver, by a massive margin”, whilst another was none other than Kwarteng himself. Truly, the best comment and analysis anyone could imagine.
The scale of the economic damage of Brexit
Nevertheless, unlike the architects of the mini-budget, neither Sunak nor Hunt could even begin to try to pretend that the Autumn Statement was about ‘delivering Brexit’, any more than they could admit how constrained it was by the ongoing damage of Brexit, the leaden divers’ boots dragging down Britain’s economy.
Further evidence of this was provided by last week’s report from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), entitled Revisiting the Effects of Brexit. The first line of its conclusion is that “overall, it is certain that Brexit has had a significant effect on the British economy” [my emphasis added], and the ‘headline’ summary of that effect is that, coming up to three years after the end of the transition period, UK real GDP is between 2% and 3% lower than it would have been compared with if Brexit had not occurred, and that it is forecast to be between 5% and 6% lower than it would have been by 2035 (thus, even worse than the OBR forecast of 4%). This equates to £850 per capita and £2,300 per capita respectively. The main reasons for this are the impacts on investment, productivity, and UK-EU trade.
There are several things to say about these findings. First, they are based on modelling different scenarios and, in doing so, the impact attributed to Brexit is stripped out from the impact of other shocks, primarily those of Covid and of the Ukraine War. This also means they are based on a form of ‘counterfactual modelling’ (i.e. comparing what has actually happened so far and what is forecast to happen with what might, in other scenarios, have happened or have been forecast to happen). As such, they are, of necessity, estimates but – unlike the constant attempts by pro-Brexit economists to assess the impact of Brexit by comparing actual UK performance with actual EU, Eurozone, or individual member state performance – they do address the central relevant question: is the UK economically better off or worse off outside the EU than it would have been within the EU? By definition, this question can only be answered in counterfactual terms, and of course it is the same question as that asked in the opinion polls I referred to earlier.
The NIESR model is, however, a different to another kind of counterfactual model, the widely-quoted ‘doppelgänger’ produced by John Springford of the Centre for European Reform (CER) and, in fact, it suggests that Brexit has not been as damaging as the CER model estimates. Thus the last iteration of the CER doppelgänger showed UK GDP to be 5.5% lower than it would have been by June 2022, whereas NIESR shows it to be 2.5% lower by 2023.* It should go without saying that either figure may be right, or that the true figure may be even higher than the highest estimate, or lower than the lowest estimate, but for the time being, at least, these are the best estimates available. It should also go without saying that, on any of these estimates, it represents a huge economic hit. To get a sense of its magnitude, consider that in 2019-2020 (i.e. before the pandemic created big distortions in public finances), the UK spent 1.9% of GDP on defence, 4.2% on education and 5.8% on pensioner benefits.
It's important to understand two things about the NIESR, CER and OBR estimates. One is that people sometimes wrongly think – and, when that happens, Brexiters suddenly become sticklers for analytical rigour – that these are estimates of absolute falls in GDP. They are not, they are estimates of lost growth in GDP that would otherwise have occurred. In that sense they are about a kind of invisible immiseration, the loss of what might have been. The second is that people sometimes think – and Brexiters collude in this when they talk about the Brexit impact as being one of ‘temporary adjustment’ – that what is being estimated is a one-off event. It is not. Rather, each year, every year, actual GDP is lower than it would otherwise be, with the gap between what is and what might have been gradually increasing. In that sense they are about a kind of compound invisible immiseration.
It's also important to repeat that all these studies do seek to strip out Brexit from other effects, and in doing so they recognize that the UK economy – including the specific issues of trade performance and productivity – faces many challenges other than Brexit, including some that pre-dated Brexit. This matters when reading, for example, another recent report, this time from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) about UK trade performance and policy. For this report, whilst making many good points about the non-Brexit challenges, still finds it necessary to repeatedly make the strawman claim that “most commentary” ascribes the challenges facing UK trade to the single factor of Brexit. In fact, it is hard to think of a single serious commentator on trade or economics who does this, and, manifestly, the NIESR, OBR and CER do not.
The issue about the economic studies is simply that, as the BCG report itself states in relation to trade, although without attempting to quantify it, “Brexit has undoubtedly had a significant impact”. Quantification is useful in estimating the extent of that impact but, fundamentally, the point is that whatever other factors are in play, in a world where economic growth is hard to find, Britain, uniquely, has chosen to make it significantly harder by the addition of Brexit to these other factors. For another way to contextualize the magnitude of estimates of lost GDP growth, such as the NIESR figure of 2.5% for 2023, is to compare them with the latest OBR forecasts of what GDP growth will be: 0.6% (2023), 0.7% (2024), 1.4% (2025).
The bitter legacy of Brexit for SMEs
The BCG report also rightly highlights that the impact of Brexit has varied between sectors, identifying pharmaceutical and automotive industries as amongst those where Brexit “is likely to have been a major factor in reducing trade”. Perhaps the most important distinction to be drawn is between large and very large businesses, on the one hand, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on the other. The reasons are fairly obvious. Larger firms had the resources to plan for and implement the changes that Brexit brought, and were often more likely to already be familiar with procedures for trading outside the single market.
There has been ample survey evidence of how hard SMEs have been hit by Brexit, and the negative impact on specific sectors and businesses has been assiduously chronicled by Peter Foster of the Financial Times, most recently in his report on the cosmetics and beauty sector (£), itself partly based on a study conducted by Oxford Economics for the British Beauty Council. Amongst other things, Foster’s report spells out that the impact of Brexit is an ongoing one, not simply a ‘shock’ to which firms ‘adjust’ – although, in some cases, it has been just that, with the adjustment being to cease trading with the EU or to cease business altogether. Yet Hunt, despite emphasizing the need to support small businesses, had nothing to say about this.
The particular impact on SMEs is sometimes acknowledged by Brexiters, such as in the recent Institute of Economic Affairs report by pro-Brexit economist Catherine McBride (aptly described by Professor Gerhard Schnyder as “a truly fascinating piece of post-truth economics”, this is what Badenoch based her critique of the OBR forecast on). But they typically downplay its significance on the basis that, precisely because they are small, the aggregate economic effect of that impact is small.
This is misguided in two ways. One is that although big firms may be better placed to deal with Brexit this doesn’t mean, as McBride blithely puts it, that they “can easily absorb any additional costs”. It is rather that, as Allianz Trade’s Head of Economic Research recently said, Brexit has “become a structural hurdle for UK exports” (the same is true of imports, and will become even more so if the latest promise to introduce UK-EU import controls next January is kept). Many big firms may indeed ‘absorb’ these costs, but they are still real, impacting on competitiveness, prices, employment, tax base or any number of other things. But it is also misguided because of the particular economic, social, communal and, indeed, emotional and psychological costs of Brexit’s impact on SMEs.
Those costs are well-illustrated in Foster’s reports, including the one on the beauty industry, which also illustrates the micro-level equivalent of the counterfactual issue in the aggregate modelling. For, as he says of Apothecary 17, a small Doncaster-based maker of male personal grooming products, the issue is not so much that it has adjusted to now being a domestically focused business, it is the ‘counterfactual’ that it might otherwise have continued to expand as an international business. That in turn has implications for the people it might have employed, the foreign currency it might have earned, the taxes it might have paid, and its resilience in the event of a domestic downturn.
There are numerous similar examples highlighted in Brexit and Businesses: In their own words, a recent European Movement (EM) report in which, along with survey results, individual SME owners and managers explain what Brexit has meant for them. Issues include not just the new complexities of trade and regulatory change, but labour shortages. Here, too, it is important to understand how SMEs often struggle more than large businesses because, although net migration figures remain at similar levels to before Brexit, the costs and bureaucracy of hiring workers from overseas are far greater than was the case under freedom of movement of people within the EU. Moreover, sectors like hospitality which are more likely to need workers who don’t qualify for visas are also more likely to have large numbers of small firms within them.
Sometimes, the profiles in the EM report are painful to read, as with that of Carol, who ran a niche bridal lingerie business in Devon. The last line is “Brexit was the final nail in the coffin of the business” (p. 12). Or that of Darren, who ran a specialist motorsport vehicle engineering firm in Cornwall and Essex. His profile concludes “our business is finished” (p. 17). These are affecting, personal stories of individual dreams shattered, whilst at the same time implicitly telling of damage to whole families and to local communities, often in ‘left-behind areas’.
It is ironic to think how fervently Tory politicians used to, and still sometimes do, declaim themselves to be the party of entrepreneurs, and to insist that small businesses were the bedrock of the British economy, and yet they presided over Brexit. Ironic, too, how so many Brexiters claimed that it was only ‘big Business’ that felt threatened by Brexit, and what mattered were the true, British, salt of the earth, small businesses, and yet now dismiss the effects on SMEs as all but irrelevant because big Business has been more able to weather the Brexit storm.
Britain limps on
Back, then, to this week’s Autumn Statement, when it was clear, though again not surprising, that the Labour Party are as taciturn as the government about the damage of Brexit. Thus Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ response speech made no mention of it at all. As if it were the seedy uncle who has to be tolerated at family get-togethers, everyone is too embarrassed to comment on the dubiously-stained mac, the off-colour jokes and the whisky-fumed breath that Brexit brings to the parties.
For the Tories, the embarrassment is the result of having been the architects of Brexit. For Labour, it is because, otherwise, they would be forced to explain why they don’t propose to seek to reverse it, even to the extent of seeking single market membership. The political reasons for that, both domestic and as regards the EU, are understandable and, in my view, justifiable. But, whether justifiable or not, they don’t change the basic fact that the country is accepting – or being forced to accept – that, year after year, it is going to get poorer and poorer than it would otherwise have been.
I’ve argued before that, even so, Labour’s post-Brexit policy is a real, if limited, alternative to that of the Tories. But no-one should think, and Labour shouldn’t pretend, that the accommodations that are possible within the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) framework will make much economic difference. Equally, as Michel Barnier has said in a recent interview (£), there’s no prospect of the EU re-visiting the basic architecture of the TCA. Yet, although Reeves made no mention of it, other Labour politicians, such as Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds [approximately 10 minutes in], are including changes to the TCA as one of the ways a Labour government would boost growth.
And so Britain is set to limp on, if not the sick man of Europe then, at least, the only one who has shot himself in the foot. Sunak talks of making tough “long-term decisions for a brighter future”, and in his recent conference speech Keir Starmer said that under Labour “Britain will get its future back”, but the truth is that by far the biggest long-term decision of recent times was made in 2016. It wasn’t a ‘tough’ decision: it was made glibly, carelessly, almost casually. But its consequences are certainly tough, and not at all bright. What that bland and, to some, obscure little word ‘counterfactual’ in the economic estimates means is that each year those consequences will get tougher as Britain pays the growing price of a foregone future.
*The basic difference between the models, as I (a non-economist) understand it, is that the NIESR model compares UK actual and forecasted performance since Brexit with a UK counterfactual scenario in which Brexit had not happened, whereas Springford’s CER doppelgänger compares UK actual and forecasted performance since Brexit with the actual and forecasted performance of a weighted basket of economies which pre-Brexit were comparable to the UK and so is taken to be the counterfactual scenario for the UK had Brexit not happened. Springford has commented on Bluesky on how the NIESR model differs from his, and on some of the advantages and disadvantages of each. Springford’s model has been criticised by some pro-Brexit economists, and he has responded to, and rejected, their critique. Separately, Professor Jonathan Portes of King’s College London has argued that not only is their critique theoretically flawed but that their preferred model actually yields similar results to Springford’s doppelgänger.
Friday, 10 February 2023
How Brexitism is eating Conservatism
It’s almost impossible to over-state the extent to which Brexit is bound up with the peculiarities, schisms, crises and in some parts almost madness of modern British Conservativism. In the 1970s and early 1980s opposition to British membership of what became the EU was the province of Bennites on the left and Powellite nationalists on the right. The inclusion of leaving the EEC in the Labour Party’s 1983 manifesto was seen as a key part of the wider political foolishness of what became called ‘the longest suicide note in history’. By the 1990s the mainstream Labour movement had entirely abandoned this Euroscepticism and it lived on only amongst a fairly small group of what we now call Lexiters.
But Conservatism embraced ever more virulent versions of it. Within the Tory Party, that grew from the 1992 Maastricht rebels, and became incubated as a ‘party within a party’ by the European Research Group (ERG) founded in 1993. Meanwhile, the Referendum Party and UKIP emerged, with the latter enduring to become a significant electoral force in votes and in European Parliamentary seats, if not in Westminster. David Cameron sought in vain to stop his party ‘banging on about Europe’, whilst describing UKIP as “a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”.
A tale of two parties
However, what is now far clearer than perhaps it was at the time is that UKIP developed not so much as a separate party but as a kind of pressure group within Conservatism as a whole. Thus Nigel Farage had started out as a Conservative Party member, leaving in protest at Maastricht but, ideologically, there was, and still is, little if any difference between him and the ERG. Indeed the ERG had multiple links with UKIP and other anti-EU groups and parties. There has also always been a lot of interchange at the level of grass roots party membership between the Conservatives and UKIP, and a certain amount between its MPs and MEPs.
As a pressure group, Farage and UKIP (and, later, the Brexit Party and, now, the Reform Party) were critical in getting Cameron’s Conservative Party to hold the 2016 referendum. In a similar way, during the Referendum, the official Vote Leave campaign and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign were, whilst at loggerheads in terms of personalities, effectively complementary. Thus Vote Leave was able to make the ‘respectable’ leave case whilst Leave.EU could run a more stridently populist and anti-immigration campaign. All the votes garnered counted equally, after all.
Then, in the 2019 General Election, Farage’s decision not to run candidates in Conservative-held seats, reversing his previous stance, helped to give Boris Johnson his majority to ‘get Brexit done’, and certainly ensured that his majority was as large as it was. That election also saw the purging of many Tory MPs who were, or were seen as, anti-Brexit, or were just of a more moderate bent than the Brexiters. Thus, all the way through the process that led to Brexit, there has been a kind of on-and-off alliance, albeit wearing the paradoxical clothes of rivalry, between chunks of the Tory Party and the Farage parties.
Why does any of this matter now? The answer is because it is not ancient history, and it’s not even just recent history: it continues to be a key dynamic in the politics of post-Brexit Britain and in particular in the battle within British Conservatism about what ‘true Conservatism’ is.
Brexitists and Traditionalists
Thus Conservatism now consists of a dominant group which is pro-Brexit, pro-low tax, pro-deregulation, lockdown-sceptic, net-zero-sceptic, anti-woke etc. It is tempting to call them libertarians, but they are only selectively that (e.g. they are lockdown sceptics but authoritarian about public protests and human rights generally). This group spans much of the Tory Party and all of the Reform Party, as well as their media cheerleaders. They might be called populists, Brexit Ultras (or perhaps just Ultras, which captures their extremism) or Brexitists, which captures their mind-set. They, of course, would describe themselves as ‘true Conservatives’ or simply ‘Conservatives’, but in doing so they deliberately ignore another kind of Conservative.
These other Conservatives are, whatever the Brexitists may think, certainly on the political right. They are not necessarily anti-Brexit and, even if some were remainers, few are now re-joiners. But they aren’t fanatical about Brexit, don’t position themselves as ‘anti-Establishment’, are pro-business, fiscally ‘orthodox’, rationalists, and support the rule of law, including international law. They might be called Traditionalists or Pragmatists. Their natural, but increasingly precarious, home is the Tory Party and they probably don’t exist at all in the Reform Party.
It's this context, rather than the personal idiosyncrasies that she certainly possesses, which explains Liz Truss’s attempt this week to re-habilitate herself: she is the aspirant leader of the Brexitists. And it is this which explains the divisions which Rishi Sunak faces over Brexit policy and other issues, because he doesn’t really belong to, and therefore isn’t really trusted by, either group. More generally, these things show post-Brexit politics is already changing the political right, and may create an even more profound transformation.
What Truss has learned: nothing
In his recent excellent essay on Liz Truss’s premiership, the historian Robert Saunders emphasises that she “did not fall into No. 10 from a spaceship, like some twin-set Mr Bean. She won the leadership because she best expressed what Conservatism has become”. It’s true that she had the taint of having supported remaining in the EU, but she readily shrugged off that skin.
Theresa May had done that too, but always seemed to have embraced Brexit only as a dutiful reality. That was genuine, and Brexiters were quite wrong to doubt it, but it was not enthusiastic. In that sense, for all that she employed many of the Brexitists’ tropes when Prime Minister, and certainly shared the Brexiter hostility to freedom of movement of people, she remained a Traditionalist. Truss, by contrast, already a fervent free-market, deregulatory ideologue, became a true convert, a “born-again Ultra” as I first described her when she was Foreign Secretary. And, in my discussion of her leadership bid, I suggested she was all the more zealous precisely because of the recency of her conversion.
That zealotry was the hallmark of the defining – and in effect only – act of her short administration, the infamous ‘mini-budget’. It was, in all but name, the Brexit budget, hailed as such by Brexiter commentators and politicians. Crucially this enthusiastic greeting came not just from within the Conservative Party but from across the Brexitists, including, notably, Nigel Farage. When the whole thing fell apart so spectacularly, that same alliance was united in ascribing its failure to the Establishment, remainers and, even, ‘left-wing’ market traders, and united in urging her not to change course.
Five months later, Truss’s Sunday Telegraph ‘essay’ (£) reprises these explanations. As an account of a political downfall, it must count as one of the least self-reflective and most complacent imaginable. It might be summed up as an assertion that if she had a flaw it was that she was right all along (Louis Ashworth of the Financial Times has provided a damning line-by-line analysis of the article). In this way it actually, if unintentionally, did explain what went wrong with her premiership, which was, indeed, her certainty of her rectitude against all reason and evidence.
Why learning nothing cements Truss’s Brexitist credentials
That lack of self-insight was widely, and rightly, mocked. However, even if her flaws are psychological their consequences, and the conclusions they lead her to, are distinctively political. Moreover, they are distinctively Brexitist, and from that perspective her refusal to recant her beliefs in the face of the evidence of what they led to is a strength rather than a flaw. As with Brexit itself, true belief is all. Hence her insistence that she was brought down by “the economic Establishment” and, with that, what Marina Hyde calls “the sheer nonsense victimhood” of Truss’s account. That victimhood is, as I’ve stressed so often on the blog, most recently last week, one of the central and defining threads of Brexitism.
A particularly revealing aspect of this ‘sheer nonsense’ is Truss’s complaint that she hadn’t been warned by officials of the risks of the mini-budget. That’s in part just another version of blaming the Establishment and of victimhood as well, but it inflects them in a particular way. It seems to suggest not just obstructionism from the civil service but also incompetence. In this way it is rather contradictory, positioning officialdom as at once all-powerful and at the same time totally ineffectual (the same contradiction is manifest in the way that the EU is depicted as both a powerful bully and a corpse on the point of collapse – such contradictions being one of characteristics of Ur-fascism identified by Umberto Eco).
In any case, it is totally indefensible as an account of the mini-budget for two reasons. One is that it hardly needed official advice to know the dangers to sterling and the bond market. They were being written about by huge swathes of commentators at the time, even including this lowly blog. They may not have identified the particular issue of what that would mean for pension funds, which Truss refers to specifically, but even if it is true that it didn’t figure in official advice (a big if), the collapse of the bond market was calamitous enough in itself to be the cause of her downfall according to former Chancellor George Osborne.
The second reason that blaming lack of advice is an indefensible excuse is that it is abundantly obvious, and another prime example of her Brexitism, that she side-lined the advice from civil servants and others precisely because she regarded it as coming from the ‘economic Establishment’. That was evident in the sacking of Treasury boss, Tom Scholar, in advance of the mini-budget, ignoring IFS forecasts, excluding the OBR, and her hostility to the Bank of England. Conversely, it was evident in her reliance on, and total infatuation with, the advice of the small group of pro-Brexit, radical free market think-tankers and economists associated with the IEA and similar groups, and especially Patrick Minford.
In a way, this is the story of Brexit as a whole, albeit written on a smaller canvas, with the warnings of civil servants and others dismissed and derided as ‘Project Fear’, ‘declinism’ or obstructionism and then, when things go horribly wrong, blame it on the very people whose warnings were ignored. It was on display this week in David Davis’s assertion that the civil service had done a “really crap job” of negotiating Brexit. Again it’s an account that shows precisely zero self-awareness but, again, its political importance lies in the underlying failure to accept that Brexit, like the mini-budget, foundered on realities. For even If it were true that civil servants were anti-Brexit and wanted to obstruct it, and even if they had been replaced wholesale with ‘true believers’, those realities would not have changed. For particular example, no official could have enacted Davis’s own claim that there was a way to have “the exact same benefits” of the single market and customs union without belonging to either. It was impossible.
Sunak’s inheritance
So in these various ways, Truss showed in her ‘rehabilitation essay’, just as she did in her premiership, the Brexitism that unites the Farageists outside the party and the dominant Brexitist strand within her own. Her capacity to do so might not have lasted had she stayed in power because it is highly likely that, sooner or later, it was a unity that would have fallen apart on the familiar rocks of ‘betrayal’ and ‘purity’, and schisms would have emerged.
In particular, had she survived in office she would have faced exactly the same issues as Boris Johnson would have over the Northern Ireland Protocol. If she did a deal, she would have been turned on by the Brexit Ultras within and outside the Tory Party. If she did not, she would have faced both the practical consequences and also, possibly, rebellion within her party if the outcome were to break international law by unilaterally disapplying the Protocol.
That last point is an important one, reflecting my argument that whilst Brexitism is in the ascendant within British Conservatism, a rump of traditionalism or pragmatism endures within the Conservative Party. And, rump though it is, it remains large enough to defeat the government, despite the ostensible size of its majority in the House of Commons.
It is exactly this dynamic that Sunak now faces. Despite leading the Tory Party and despite being pro-Brexit, he is not regarded by the Brexitists as being a ‘true Brexiter’ or, by extension, a Brexitist. Instead, they regard him, much as they did Cameron, as a ‘socialist’ and a ‘globalist’. And, of course, he was not the choice of the party membership, largely for these reasons. Indeed, the main supposed quality that brought him to power was the ‘pragmatism’ which, to the Brexitists, is code for compromise and betrayal.
The most obvious flashpoint will, indeed, be over the Protocol. With rumours of an imminent deal growing, so too are the signs of a Brexiter rebellion (using, ironically given their constant denunciations of remainer parliamentary ‘chicanery’, the mechanism of a ‘prayer motion’ to force a debate on the construction of border posts). Reportedly as a means to head off such a rebellion, Sunak is floating the idea (£) of derogating from the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) as “red meat” to satisfy them. And, indeed, this is one of the various things the ‘true Conservative’ axis yearns for.
Yet if Sunak thinks that any amount of red meat will ever satisfy them he hasn’t been paying attention: nothing will ever satisfy them. Beyond that lies the absurdity that if this is a plan to distract from doing a pragmatic deal on the Protocol, easing relations with the EU and the US, it would immediately provoke a new crisis in those relations since derogating from the ECHR would very likely violate the Good Friday Agreement.
At the same time, it would also be very likely to trigger the opposition of the Traditionalists, who are already making noises to that effect (£). This perhaps explains why there are contradictory briefings about the government’s intentions, with some reports saying that there are ‘no plans” to derogate. Overall, the effect is both an illustration of Sunak’s dilemma but also adds to it, since to one side it gives the message that he is not really committed to this policy and to the other that he might just pursue it anyway, thus alienating both. So he is now caught in a vice: his supposed pragmatism is anathema to the Brexitists, whilst the concessions he makes to the Brexitists mean that the Traditionalists suspect him of lacking the pragmatism which is one of their defining values.
A very similar situation obtains with the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL). It began, of course, under Truss’s premiership, and Sunak’s reported enthusiasm for it, and especially for the time frame for sunsetting EU laws, has waxed and waned. Nevertheless it was passed unamended in the Commons and is currently being debated in the House of Lords. That debate again shows the clear split – clearer in the Lords than the Commons – between these different kinds of Conservatism.
It is a split which isn’t so much, despite what Brexiters try to claim, between Brexiters and remainers as between Brexitists and Traditionalists. That distinction is well-captured by a phrase used by Michael Heseltine – a remainer, most certainly, but, equally certainly, a Conservative – in the Lords’ debate, when he spoke of the “Robespierrian fanaticism” of Brexitists like Jacob Rees-Mogg, and invoked Margaret Thatcher’s role in creating the single market. It’s that Jacobin fanaticism that marks the divide in modern Conservatism, for all that both lay claim to the mantle of Thatcherism. And it is in evidence not just in relation to specifically Brexit-related issues but also in relation to net zero, say, or even the debates about current legislation of public protests.
Is a fundamental re-alignment in prospect?
Sunak is certainly too weak to resolve any of this. It goes beyond anything that can be resolved by the usual tricks of balancing political factions, such as he showed this week in appointing the tandem act of Greg Hands and Lee Anderson as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Party. Indeed the immediate rows about Anderson’s support for the death penalty and his views of food banks simply served to demonstrate the depth of the Brexitist-Traditionalist schism.
But even a less weak and more accomplished leader would fare no better because, fundamentally, it isn’t soluble without a complete re-structuring of the political parties. To a large extent because of Brexit, what has emerged is a situation where the Tory Party is no longer contiguous with the dominant ideology of British Conservatism and can no longer act as a broad coalition of different factions.
I say ‘no longer’ because this isn’t an entirely new situation. It has echoes of the way that Thatcher herself presided over a party split between ‘wets’ and ‘dries’, and which gradually, if not entirely, marginalised the ‘wets’. But the differences between Brexitists and Traditionalists inside the current Tory Party are more existential. They don’t just rest on different apprehensions of Conservatism but on entirely different approaches to the conduct of political life, perhaps even to the meaning of political life.
Even if that distinction with previous splits is overstated, the other difference is that, now, there is an artificial split between the Tory Brexitists and the Reform Party Brexitists which has no analogue in the Thatcher years. In those years Tories may have been internally split in the move from its one nation tradition to Thatcher’s far more ideological and market-orientated approach. But there was no powerful, lurking external grouping of Thatcherites claiming to be the voice of ‘true Thatcherism’, and able to mobilise perhaps 15% of the electorate, mainly at the Tories’ expense, as she wrought those changes on her party. Nor, of course, was there an equivalent external grouping of the old-style, one nation wets. Plus she was in government and winning elections as she changed the party – a very different prospect from being in opposition after, perhaps, a heavy election defeat and after having been in power for over a decade.
Taken together, this suggests there is a logical case for a fundamental re-grouping to occur on the right of British politics assuming such an electoral defeat. There will certainly be an almighty battle at that point and, if my analysis is right, that is very likely to lead to one of two scenarios. The Brexitists might combine into one ‘new Conservative’ party, making the Reform Party redundant and routing the last remnants of Traditionalism to the wilderness, or in some cases to the LibDems or even Labour. Or, though perhaps less likely, at least in the immediate aftermath of electoral defeat, the Traditionalists might win out within the Tory Party, shedding the Brexitists to a Farage-type outfit.
The strange death of Conservative England?
In either scenario, everything would then depend on how voters responded, especially in the context of changing political demography which is likely to prove unfavourable to any configuration of Conservatism. Would enough of them back whichever of those parties emerged, making it a viable future government? Or would there be a permanent or near-permanent split on the right which would keep them out of power forever (unless the first past the post system is changed)?
If that last situation is the outcome, we might just be witnessing the start of what will come to be called ‘the strange death of Conservative England’. Admittedly this is not the first time this has been predicted, and the prediction has proved wrong. Even so it is hard to resist the thought, voiced this week by David Gauke, the former Tory Minister who in my terms would be a Traditionalist, that “Brexit is slowly killing the Conservative Party”. Many will not mourn that, though they may be dismayed by what replaces it.
But Conservatism embraced ever more virulent versions of it. Within the Tory Party, that grew from the 1992 Maastricht rebels, and became incubated as a ‘party within a party’ by the European Research Group (ERG) founded in 1993. Meanwhile, the Referendum Party and UKIP emerged, with the latter enduring to become a significant electoral force in votes and in European Parliamentary seats, if not in Westminster. David Cameron sought in vain to stop his party ‘banging on about Europe’, whilst describing UKIP as “a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”.
A tale of two parties
However, what is now far clearer than perhaps it was at the time is that UKIP developed not so much as a separate party but as a kind of pressure group within Conservatism as a whole. Thus Nigel Farage had started out as a Conservative Party member, leaving in protest at Maastricht but, ideologically, there was, and still is, little if any difference between him and the ERG. Indeed the ERG had multiple links with UKIP and other anti-EU groups and parties. There has also always been a lot of interchange at the level of grass roots party membership between the Conservatives and UKIP, and a certain amount between its MPs and MEPs.
As a pressure group, Farage and UKIP (and, later, the Brexit Party and, now, the Reform Party) were critical in getting Cameron’s Conservative Party to hold the 2016 referendum. In a similar way, during the Referendum, the official Vote Leave campaign and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign were, whilst at loggerheads in terms of personalities, effectively complementary. Thus Vote Leave was able to make the ‘respectable’ leave case whilst Leave.EU could run a more stridently populist and anti-immigration campaign. All the votes garnered counted equally, after all.
Then, in the 2019 General Election, Farage’s decision not to run candidates in Conservative-held seats, reversing his previous stance, helped to give Boris Johnson his majority to ‘get Brexit done’, and certainly ensured that his majority was as large as it was. That election also saw the purging of many Tory MPs who were, or were seen as, anti-Brexit, or were just of a more moderate bent than the Brexiters. Thus, all the way through the process that led to Brexit, there has been a kind of on-and-off alliance, albeit wearing the paradoxical clothes of rivalry, between chunks of the Tory Party and the Farage parties.
Why does any of this matter now? The answer is because it is not ancient history, and it’s not even just recent history: it continues to be a key dynamic in the politics of post-Brexit Britain and in particular in the battle within British Conservatism about what ‘true Conservatism’ is.
Brexitists and Traditionalists
Thus Conservatism now consists of a dominant group which is pro-Brexit, pro-low tax, pro-deregulation, lockdown-sceptic, net-zero-sceptic, anti-woke etc. It is tempting to call them libertarians, but they are only selectively that (e.g. they are lockdown sceptics but authoritarian about public protests and human rights generally). This group spans much of the Tory Party and all of the Reform Party, as well as their media cheerleaders. They might be called populists, Brexit Ultras (or perhaps just Ultras, which captures their extremism) or Brexitists, which captures their mind-set. They, of course, would describe themselves as ‘true Conservatives’ or simply ‘Conservatives’, but in doing so they deliberately ignore another kind of Conservative.
These other Conservatives are, whatever the Brexitists may think, certainly on the political right. They are not necessarily anti-Brexit and, even if some were remainers, few are now re-joiners. But they aren’t fanatical about Brexit, don’t position themselves as ‘anti-Establishment’, are pro-business, fiscally ‘orthodox’, rationalists, and support the rule of law, including international law. They might be called Traditionalists or Pragmatists. Their natural, but increasingly precarious, home is the Tory Party and they probably don’t exist at all in the Reform Party.
It's this context, rather than the personal idiosyncrasies that she certainly possesses, which explains Liz Truss’s attempt this week to re-habilitate herself: she is the aspirant leader of the Brexitists. And it is this which explains the divisions which Rishi Sunak faces over Brexit policy and other issues, because he doesn’t really belong to, and therefore isn’t really trusted by, either group. More generally, these things show post-Brexit politics is already changing the political right, and may create an even more profound transformation.
What Truss has learned: nothing
In his recent excellent essay on Liz Truss’s premiership, the historian Robert Saunders emphasises that she “did not fall into No. 10 from a spaceship, like some twin-set Mr Bean. She won the leadership because she best expressed what Conservatism has become”. It’s true that she had the taint of having supported remaining in the EU, but she readily shrugged off that skin.
Theresa May had done that too, but always seemed to have embraced Brexit only as a dutiful reality. That was genuine, and Brexiters were quite wrong to doubt it, but it was not enthusiastic. In that sense, for all that she employed many of the Brexitists’ tropes when Prime Minister, and certainly shared the Brexiter hostility to freedom of movement of people, she remained a Traditionalist. Truss, by contrast, already a fervent free-market, deregulatory ideologue, became a true convert, a “born-again Ultra” as I first described her when she was Foreign Secretary. And, in my discussion of her leadership bid, I suggested she was all the more zealous precisely because of the recency of her conversion.
That zealotry was the hallmark of the defining – and in effect only – act of her short administration, the infamous ‘mini-budget’. It was, in all but name, the Brexit budget, hailed as such by Brexiter commentators and politicians. Crucially this enthusiastic greeting came not just from within the Conservative Party but from across the Brexitists, including, notably, Nigel Farage. When the whole thing fell apart so spectacularly, that same alliance was united in ascribing its failure to the Establishment, remainers and, even, ‘left-wing’ market traders, and united in urging her not to change course.
Five months later, Truss’s Sunday Telegraph ‘essay’ (£) reprises these explanations. As an account of a political downfall, it must count as one of the least self-reflective and most complacent imaginable. It might be summed up as an assertion that if she had a flaw it was that she was right all along (Louis Ashworth of the Financial Times has provided a damning line-by-line analysis of the article). In this way it actually, if unintentionally, did explain what went wrong with her premiership, which was, indeed, her certainty of her rectitude against all reason and evidence.
Why learning nothing cements Truss’s Brexitist credentials
That lack of self-insight was widely, and rightly, mocked. However, even if her flaws are psychological their consequences, and the conclusions they lead her to, are distinctively political. Moreover, they are distinctively Brexitist, and from that perspective her refusal to recant her beliefs in the face of the evidence of what they led to is a strength rather than a flaw. As with Brexit itself, true belief is all. Hence her insistence that she was brought down by “the economic Establishment” and, with that, what Marina Hyde calls “the sheer nonsense victimhood” of Truss’s account. That victimhood is, as I’ve stressed so often on the blog, most recently last week, one of the central and defining threads of Brexitism.
A particularly revealing aspect of this ‘sheer nonsense’ is Truss’s complaint that she hadn’t been warned by officials of the risks of the mini-budget. That’s in part just another version of blaming the Establishment and of victimhood as well, but it inflects them in a particular way. It seems to suggest not just obstructionism from the civil service but also incompetence. In this way it is rather contradictory, positioning officialdom as at once all-powerful and at the same time totally ineffectual (the same contradiction is manifest in the way that the EU is depicted as both a powerful bully and a corpse on the point of collapse – such contradictions being one of characteristics of Ur-fascism identified by Umberto Eco).
In any case, it is totally indefensible as an account of the mini-budget for two reasons. One is that it hardly needed official advice to know the dangers to sterling and the bond market. They were being written about by huge swathes of commentators at the time, even including this lowly blog. They may not have identified the particular issue of what that would mean for pension funds, which Truss refers to specifically, but even if it is true that it didn’t figure in official advice (a big if), the collapse of the bond market was calamitous enough in itself to be the cause of her downfall according to former Chancellor George Osborne.
The second reason that blaming lack of advice is an indefensible excuse is that it is abundantly obvious, and another prime example of her Brexitism, that she side-lined the advice from civil servants and others precisely because she regarded it as coming from the ‘economic Establishment’. That was evident in the sacking of Treasury boss, Tom Scholar, in advance of the mini-budget, ignoring IFS forecasts, excluding the OBR, and her hostility to the Bank of England. Conversely, it was evident in her reliance on, and total infatuation with, the advice of the small group of pro-Brexit, radical free market think-tankers and economists associated with the IEA and similar groups, and especially Patrick Minford.
In a way, this is the story of Brexit as a whole, albeit written on a smaller canvas, with the warnings of civil servants and others dismissed and derided as ‘Project Fear’, ‘declinism’ or obstructionism and then, when things go horribly wrong, blame it on the very people whose warnings were ignored. It was on display this week in David Davis’s assertion that the civil service had done a “really crap job” of negotiating Brexit. Again it’s an account that shows precisely zero self-awareness but, again, its political importance lies in the underlying failure to accept that Brexit, like the mini-budget, foundered on realities. For even If it were true that civil servants were anti-Brexit and wanted to obstruct it, and even if they had been replaced wholesale with ‘true believers’, those realities would not have changed. For particular example, no official could have enacted Davis’s own claim that there was a way to have “the exact same benefits” of the single market and customs union without belonging to either. It was impossible.
Sunak’s inheritance
So in these various ways, Truss showed in her ‘rehabilitation essay’, just as she did in her premiership, the Brexitism that unites the Farageists outside the party and the dominant Brexitist strand within her own. Her capacity to do so might not have lasted had she stayed in power because it is highly likely that, sooner or later, it was a unity that would have fallen apart on the familiar rocks of ‘betrayal’ and ‘purity’, and schisms would have emerged.
In particular, had she survived in office she would have faced exactly the same issues as Boris Johnson would have over the Northern Ireland Protocol. If she did a deal, she would have been turned on by the Brexit Ultras within and outside the Tory Party. If she did not, she would have faced both the practical consequences and also, possibly, rebellion within her party if the outcome were to break international law by unilaterally disapplying the Protocol.
That last point is an important one, reflecting my argument that whilst Brexitism is in the ascendant within British Conservatism, a rump of traditionalism or pragmatism endures within the Conservative Party. And, rump though it is, it remains large enough to defeat the government, despite the ostensible size of its majority in the House of Commons.
It is exactly this dynamic that Sunak now faces. Despite leading the Tory Party and despite being pro-Brexit, he is not regarded by the Brexitists as being a ‘true Brexiter’ or, by extension, a Brexitist. Instead, they regard him, much as they did Cameron, as a ‘socialist’ and a ‘globalist’. And, of course, he was not the choice of the party membership, largely for these reasons. Indeed, the main supposed quality that brought him to power was the ‘pragmatism’ which, to the Brexitists, is code for compromise and betrayal.
The most obvious flashpoint will, indeed, be over the Protocol. With rumours of an imminent deal growing, so too are the signs of a Brexiter rebellion (using, ironically given their constant denunciations of remainer parliamentary ‘chicanery’, the mechanism of a ‘prayer motion’ to force a debate on the construction of border posts). Reportedly as a means to head off such a rebellion, Sunak is floating the idea (£) of derogating from the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) as “red meat” to satisfy them. And, indeed, this is one of the various things the ‘true Conservative’ axis yearns for.
Yet if Sunak thinks that any amount of red meat will ever satisfy them he hasn’t been paying attention: nothing will ever satisfy them. Beyond that lies the absurdity that if this is a plan to distract from doing a pragmatic deal on the Protocol, easing relations with the EU and the US, it would immediately provoke a new crisis in those relations since derogating from the ECHR would very likely violate the Good Friday Agreement.
At the same time, it would also be very likely to trigger the opposition of the Traditionalists, who are already making noises to that effect (£). This perhaps explains why there are contradictory briefings about the government’s intentions, with some reports saying that there are ‘no plans” to derogate. Overall, the effect is both an illustration of Sunak’s dilemma but also adds to it, since to one side it gives the message that he is not really committed to this policy and to the other that he might just pursue it anyway, thus alienating both. So he is now caught in a vice: his supposed pragmatism is anathema to the Brexitists, whilst the concessions he makes to the Brexitists mean that the Traditionalists suspect him of lacking the pragmatism which is one of their defining values.
A very similar situation obtains with the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL). It began, of course, under Truss’s premiership, and Sunak’s reported enthusiasm for it, and especially for the time frame for sunsetting EU laws, has waxed and waned. Nevertheless it was passed unamended in the Commons and is currently being debated in the House of Lords. That debate again shows the clear split – clearer in the Lords than the Commons – between these different kinds of Conservatism.
It is a split which isn’t so much, despite what Brexiters try to claim, between Brexiters and remainers as between Brexitists and Traditionalists. That distinction is well-captured by a phrase used by Michael Heseltine – a remainer, most certainly, but, equally certainly, a Conservative – in the Lords’ debate, when he spoke of the “Robespierrian fanaticism” of Brexitists like Jacob Rees-Mogg, and invoked Margaret Thatcher’s role in creating the single market. It’s that Jacobin fanaticism that marks the divide in modern Conservatism, for all that both lay claim to the mantle of Thatcherism. And it is in evidence not just in relation to specifically Brexit-related issues but also in relation to net zero, say, or even the debates about current legislation of public protests.
Is a fundamental re-alignment in prospect?
Sunak is certainly too weak to resolve any of this. It goes beyond anything that can be resolved by the usual tricks of balancing political factions, such as he showed this week in appointing the tandem act of Greg Hands and Lee Anderson as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Party. Indeed the immediate rows about Anderson’s support for the death penalty and his views of food banks simply served to demonstrate the depth of the Brexitist-Traditionalist schism.
But even a less weak and more accomplished leader would fare no better because, fundamentally, it isn’t soluble without a complete re-structuring of the political parties. To a large extent because of Brexit, what has emerged is a situation where the Tory Party is no longer contiguous with the dominant ideology of British Conservatism and can no longer act as a broad coalition of different factions.
I say ‘no longer’ because this isn’t an entirely new situation. It has echoes of the way that Thatcher herself presided over a party split between ‘wets’ and ‘dries’, and which gradually, if not entirely, marginalised the ‘wets’. But the differences between Brexitists and Traditionalists inside the current Tory Party are more existential. They don’t just rest on different apprehensions of Conservatism but on entirely different approaches to the conduct of political life, perhaps even to the meaning of political life.
Even if that distinction with previous splits is overstated, the other difference is that, now, there is an artificial split between the Tory Brexitists and the Reform Party Brexitists which has no analogue in the Thatcher years. In those years Tories may have been internally split in the move from its one nation tradition to Thatcher’s far more ideological and market-orientated approach. But there was no powerful, lurking external grouping of Thatcherites claiming to be the voice of ‘true Thatcherism’, and able to mobilise perhaps 15% of the electorate, mainly at the Tories’ expense, as she wrought those changes on her party. Nor, of course, was there an equivalent external grouping of the old-style, one nation wets. Plus she was in government and winning elections as she changed the party – a very different prospect from being in opposition after, perhaps, a heavy election defeat and after having been in power for over a decade.
Taken together, this suggests there is a logical case for a fundamental re-grouping to occur on the right of British politics assuming such an electoral defeat. There will certainly be an almighty battle at that point and, if my analysis is right, that is very likely to lead to one of two scenarios. The Brexitists might combine into one ‘new Conservative’ party, making the Reform Party redundant and routing the last remnants of Traditionalism to the wilderness, or in some cases to the LibDems or even Labour. Or, though perhaps less likely, at least in the immediate aftermath of electoral defeat, the Traditionalists might win out within the Tory Party, shedding the Brexitists to a Farage-type outfit.
The strange death of Conservative England?
In either scenario, everything would then depend on how voters responded, especially in the context of changing political demography which is likely to prove unfavourable to any configuration of Conservatism. Would enough of them back whichever of those parties emerged, making it a viable future government? Or would there be a permanent or near-permanent split on the right which would keep them out of power forever (unless the first past the post system is changed)?
If that last situation is the outcome, we might just be witnessing the start of what will come to be called ‘the strange death of Conservative England’. Admittedly this is not the first time this has been predicted, and the prediction has proved wrong. Even so it is hard to resist the thought, voiced this week by David Gauke, the former Tory Minister who in my terms would be a Traditionalist, that “Brexit is slowly killing the Conservative Party”. Many will not mourn that, though they may be dismayed by what replaces it.
Footnote
I recognize the many difficulties with the Brexitist and Traditionalist framing of this post. For example, it might be said that a certain kind of ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ Tory traditionalist has much in common with, say, Lee Anderson who on my account is a Brexitist. Likewise those who fall within my use of ‘Traditionalist’ would include ‘Cameroonian’ Conservatives who sought a more diverse and less ‘nasty’ party, as well as old school grandees of an almost Macmillanite hue.
Nor does the Brexitist-Traditionalist distinction entirely map on to Brexit support. For example, Lord (Michael) Howard is certainly a Brexiter, but his opposition to the illegal clauses of the Internal Market Bill marks him out as a Traditionalist rather than a Brexitist. It would also, no doubt, be true that there are different factions within each of the categories of Brexitist and Traditionalist, as well as people (David Davis? Bill Cash?) who don’t sit very well within either, Sunak being a particularly important and interesting case, as discussed in this post to an extent. Even so, I think these terms, or something like them, capture the primary divide within current Conservatism.
There’s also a lot to be said about how Thatcherism relates to these categories and, perhaps, the way that she was able, for a while anyway, to yoke together a certain kind of populist and insurgent politics (somewhat akin to Brexitism) with a certain kind of pragmatism and respect for institutions (somewhat akin to Traditionalism). This partly explains why, as I mention in passing, both are able to iconise her, in the same way as both pro- and anti-Brexiters are able to invoke her.
But this is a blog post, not a PhD thesis!
I recognize the many difficulties with the Brexitist and Traditionalist framing of this post. For example, it might be said that a certain kind of ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ Tory traditionalist has much in common with, say, Lee Anderson who on my account is a Brexitist. Likewise those who fall within my use of ‘Traditionalist’ would include ‘Cameroonian’ Conservatives who sought a more diverse and less ‘nasty’ party, as well as old school grandees of an almost Macmillanite hue.
Nor does the Brexitist-Traditionalist distinction entirely map on to Brexit support. For example, Lord (Michael) Howard is certainly a Brexiter, but his opposition to the illegal clauses of the Internal Market Bill marks him out as a Traditionalist rather than a Brexitist. It would also, no doubt, be true that there are different factions within each of the categories of Brexitist and Traditionalist, as well as people (David Davis? Bill Cash?) who don’t sit very well within either, Sunak being a particularly important and interesting case, as discussed in this post to an extent. Even so, I think these terms, or something like them, capture the primary divide within current Conservatism.
There’s also a lot to be said about how Thatcherism relates to these categories and, perhaps, the way that she was able, for a while anyway, to yoke together a certain kind of populist and insurgent politics (somewhat akin to Brexitism) with a certain kind of pragmatism and respect for institutions (somewhat akin to Traditionalism). This partly explains why, as I mention in passing, both are able to iconise her, in the same way as both pro- and anti-Brexiters are able to invoke her.
But this is a blog post, not a PhD thesis!
Friday, 28 January 2022
All too predictable
I’ve noticed recently that I’ve started making cynical jokes on my Twitter account, which I set up to disseminate serious news about Brexit, as well as posts on this blog. They aren’t funny enough to be worth linking to (well maybe this one is), but I think my new-found levity reflects a certain grim despair about Brexit in general and the current political situation which, as I argued in last week’s post, grows out of it. Like this apparently endless January, we seem to be stuck in a recurring cloudscape of Brexit dullness, decay and depression to which mordant humour seems the only sane response.
Business as usual
So, of course, there are reports of delays and queues at cross-channel ports. Of course there are claims that they aren’t anything to do with Brexit. But of course they are at least compounded by and at most caused by Brexit. We’ve had this on and off for over a year, and of course it will continue to happen as the rest of the import controls get introduced in the course of this year. It’s one of the things which happens when new barriers to trade are introduced.
Equally, it’s not the only thing that happens, so even when there aren’t queues it doesn’t mean the barriers are having no effect, just that the costs of dealing with them are less visible, taking the form of individual companies introducing and using new systems or of simply not engaging in trade, which in aggregate slowly feeds into declining productivity, tax base, public spending, competitiveness, employment and consumer choice, and into increased prices and taxes.
It’s not even worth arguing about this anymore. We know the economic damage that was done between the referendum vote and actually leaving the EU. We know the damage that has happened to UK-EU trade since then. We know, and no one seriously contests, the predictions for what will happen to the economy as a result.
Similarly, it’s no surprise (but still scandalous and shameful) that the EU settled status scheme is still causing misery for untold numbers of British citizens, EU citizens and their families. It’s no surprise that the talks over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) ”stagger on” with no sign of resolution, or that, as ever, they are bound up with the apparently endless crisis of the scandal-ridden, inquiry-riven, ramshackle, Heath-Robinson excuse for a government that Boris Johnson presides over.
Nor is it a surprise – in fact, it’s almost a given – that the Brexit Ultras have lighted upon a new ‘article’ as their saviour, as they have so many times before. Step aside Lisbon Article 50, GATT Article 24 and NIP Article 16, the latest wheeze is NIP Article 13 (8) which according to Bernard Jenkin, amongst other nonsenses, puts the EU under some kind of obligation to drastically revise the Protocol. Jenkin was one of those identified by Dominic Cummings as part of the “narcissist-delusional” subset of the ERG who were “useful idiots”, a harsh judgement in that it is only half-true.
If Jenkin’s barrack room lawyering had any meaning, it was as a reminder to Johnson and Liz Truss that the ERG are watching the NIP negotiations and will jump on anything which to the addled brains of its members is a betrayal of Brexit or a diminution of sovereignty. In fact, the entire Conservative Party now seems to have dissolved into a series of groupuscules in a way that used to be more associated with the political Left. Apart from the ERG there’s (at least) the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), the Northern Research Group, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, the Blue Collar Conservatism group, and the Common Sense Group (for once, the clue isn’t in the name).
Still, the ERG remains important. And since on the wilder shores of Brexiter thought (yes, I’m referring to clergyman Dr Timothy Bradshaw) the NIP is regarded as an EU annexation of British territory akin to that of the Crimea by Russia in 2014, it’s no surprise that the Ultras aren’t likely to accept any conceivable resolution to the current talks. Which is unfortunate, since it is Russia’s current territorial ambitions which point to the urgent need for a rapprochement with the EU.
Ukraine crisis policy: not a Brexit bonus
For what is very much not business as usual is the Ukraine crisis, and the continuing threat of a Russian invasion. Though here, too, there is a predictable Brexit angle in attempts to suggest that post-Brexit Britain has somehow become “freed of the shackles of Brussels” so as to be the “leading” European power, as argued by Conservative foreign policy analyst Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph (£). It is an analysis shared by the Telegraph itself in its editorial comment (£) and, inevitably, by numerous articles in the Express, including boasts that Britain has been free to act without “endless EU waffle”.
The gaping hole in this analysis is that, even as a member of the EU, the UK operated an entirely independent foreign and defence policy. Moreover, when a member, it was one of the main blocks to the EU developing its own foreign and defence policies, and to the wider project of EU strategic autonomy’ favoured, in particular, by Macron and Merkel.
It’s true that the UK now has an independent sanctions policy but, since sanctions will always be more effective the more countries that apply them, that’s of limited benefit, whilst entailing a loss of influence over EU sanctions policy. Hence Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s “diplomatic blitz” around European capitals (£) this week to garner support for the UK’s plans for sanctions against Russia. This is the reality of the alternative to the “endless waffle” of EU membership – a similar process of consensus-building but undertaken as an outsider, with correspondingly less leverage.
So the idea that what a good discussion of the whole issue by Mark Landler in the New York Times calls the UK’s “more muscular role” in the Ukraine crisis is made possible by Brexit is an absurdity. Britain has long been relatively ‘hawkish’ with respect to Russia, albeit not to the extent of investigating its possible role in influencing elections, including the Brexit referendum or of doing very much about Russian money-laundering in Britain. For that matter, it seems extraordinary that Brexiters have chafed so much against the EU’s supposed infringement of British sovereignty when, for years, Russian planes have actually violated our airspace and waters, and have actually murdered British citizens on British soil.
Brexit Britain: not in the room?
Still, the point holds that the current British stance on the Ukraine crisis certainly could, and possibly would, have been pretty much the same even if we had still been in the EU. Equally, it is absurd to suggest that now, as an ex-member, the UK can emerge as a leader of European strategic autonomy. It’s certainly right to seek to work with the EU over the crisis, but that’s made more difficult by Brexit and certainly not easier. Indeed, the challenge the Ukraine crisis poses for the EU and the UK serves to show their common security interests and the way that Brexit is unhelpful to pursuing those interests. For whether or not Russia played a role in Brexit happening , it was Putin’s “dream policy” and both “diminishes the UK in Russia’s eyes” and contributes to the fracturing of Western solidarity that he is now exploiting.
That would be so however Brexit had been done, since at the very least it makes the structures for cooperation more complicated and cumbersome. But it is all the more the case because the way Brexit was done has engendered such profound distrust in the UK, especially over the Northern Ireland Protocol, with particular damage to relations with France (£), the only EU country with a genuinely significant defence capability. This isn’t a minor point. ‘National reputation’ is a fuzzy notion but a real one, and in the last five years Britain’s has plummeted, both because of its highly antagonistic approach to the EU and its carelessness with its relationship with Biden’s administration. That has profound consequences, especially when trying to urge EU nations to take a harder stance: even this week, as Wallace did the rounds trying to drum up support for sanctions against Russia, Johnson was denouncing the EU for its “insane” insistence that the Protocol be implemented to the letter.
One particular thing the Ukraine crisis shows is the, at best, naivety of the Brexiters’ constant claims that UK security was entirely about NATO membership and nothing to do with EU membership, ignoring the extensive and multi-layered relationship between the two. It is a folly now baked in to post-Brexit policy, with the Integrated Review of March 2020 barely acknowledging the EU’s existence, whilst Liz Truss’s first speech as Foreign Secretary pointedly did not mention the EU at all. Notably, she did not attend a major US-Germany-France meeting of her opposite numbers to discuss Ukraine (though a junior minister was sent). Instead, she was in Australia. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and it was a pre-arranged visit, but it’s indicative of priorities, and perhaps of misplaced priorities given the scathing attack from Australia's former Prime Minister (£) on Britain’s “delusions of grandeur” and on Truss herself, who he described as “demented”.
Truss did find time to meet with NATO’s Chief in Brussels, and affirmed NATO’s importance to European defence, and she will go to Ukraine next week. So she’s by no means inactive in the crisis, but seems keen to approach it in a way which downplays the EU dimension. Yet the EU has not disappeared just because the UK has left it, and pretending otherwise is silly. Thus, whilst the primary axis of the primary Western response is the US-EU discussion of economic sanctions, Truss was reduced to boasting about the UK “leading by example” without being an integral, central part of that discussion. A key rule of politics is that you need to ‘be in the room’ and Brexit Britain isn’t, at least metaphorically and sometimes literally. That doesn’t mean it has no role, or that its role is insignificant, it’s just that it’s a bit less significant than before and a bit less significant than it claims.
A post-Brexit performative policy?
Whilst EU membership would not have precluded the UK making a ‘muscular” response to Russia over Ukraine, it is absurd and potentially dangerous to think that the UK, with or without the EU, or the EU, with or without the UK, can do very much to face down the Kremlin. Regardless of Brexit, it is not even NATO but the US which plays the crucial role. The UK – and the EU – should in my view be strongly supportive of that, but neither economically nor, most certainly, militarily (including supplying equipment, training, and intelligence) can it lead the effort. It’s foolish to pretend or imply otherwise.
For if the UK gives the impression that it can do more than in it is able to there is a terrible danger that it will lead to the Ukrainian people being let down. It may be that ‘God Save the Queen’ was trending on Twitter in Ukraine on Monday, after the arrival of British anti-tank weapons and military trainers, but (as, to be fair, Wallace has acknowledged) there is little or no chance of the UK being able to do more than make very marginal contributions to Ukraine’s defence if Russia were to invade.
Again, that would be true regardless of Brexit. But there is a sense that a desire to assert its post-Brexit identity is leading the UK to take a particularly assertive posture, in order to demonstrate its self-professed status as ‘Global Britain’ (£). In Landler’s New York Times article, Lord Darroch, former UK Ambassador to the US and former National Security Advisor, is quoted as saying “I suspect this is part of showing we’re not bound up with the European Union”.
Seen in this way, UK policy on Ukraine might be as ‘performative’ as its independent trade policy – where trade deals are celebrated simply for being made independently, regardless of their economic value. If so, that would be deeply reprehensible. Performative trade policy is ludicrous; performative defence policy is reckless, and not only for the UK. For whilst no British politician is suggesting direct military involvement in Ukraine, expectations may be very different amongst ordinary members of the Ukrainian public, perhaps overly-impressed by Global Britain’s posturing.
I don’t suppose The Sun is that widely read in Kiev, but headlines such as “Ukraine needs our help. Being British means we stand up for FREEDOM” above an article by the Armed Forces Minister James Heappey, which starts with a reference to British soldiers’ lives lost in the Korean War, might suggest a promise of more than the UK can realistically deliver. Moreover, as a matter of fact, British public support for NATO to commit to defend Ukraine is, at 47%, the lowest of the six countries surveyed, slightly below Germany (49%) and well below France (57%). In any case, it’s at least arguable that the best approach to Russia is the combination of economic and military pressure and the kind of diplomatic efforts at de-escalation being pursued by France and Germany within the ‘Normandy format’ meetings.
Brexit point-scoring
Even if post-Brexit posturing isn’t what drives Britain’s Ukraine policy, it is impossible to read the press coverage of that policy without spotting how it is shot through with Brexit point-scoring. Most predictably, that is at the expense of the EU and especially Germany: “Europe shamed” as “Brexit Britain cares more than Germany”, as the Express renders it. On this showing, cocking a snook at the EU, rather than aiding Ukraine, is the important part of the story. Even more grotesque in this coverage is the jeering that the policy has somehow put one over on “bitter remainers” and the “American liberal elites” which “similarly sneered at Brexit”, in Gardiner’s words.
Less grotesque but even more fatuous is the suggestion, again in the Express, that the crisis discredits the “remainers’” claims “that the EU was the best hope for peace on the continent”. It’s fatuous for the same reason as it was when deployed during the referendum campaign in relation to the Bosnian War: the claim about the EU’s role in peace was only ever about it ensuring peace amongst its members, originally and most notably France and Germany.
That fact is neatly avoided in Heappey’s Sun article, which doesn’t mention the EU at all as part of the Western response to the Ukraine crisis, but trots out the standard line that it was NATO (alone) that “guaranteed peace in Europe for over 70 years”. Nor does he mention Brexit directly, but can’t resist a Brexity culture war jibe at “people who sneer at patriotism and the Union Jack”. Meanwhile, a Sun editorial explicitly repeats the strawman of what remainers supposedly claimed about the EU and peace (as well as explicitly trumpeting Britain’s Ukraine policy as some kind of justification of Brexit).
It has been familiar since the referendum that Brexiters’ main pleasure seems to come from discomfiting remainers but, even if there were grounds for discomfiture in this case which, as I’ve argued, there aren’t, it would be a terrible rationale for defence policy. About the only less defensible one would be to distract from the government’s ongoing domestic crises, as some commentators suggest is what Johnson is doing. Equally indefensible is the attempt to downplay the seriousness of those domestic crises by suggesting they are trivial compared with the Ukraine situation. The problem is rather that Johnson’s government is so pre-occupied with trying to scrabble out of its mire of scandal that it’s incapable of serious focus on Ukraine and other policies, including, indeed, the ongoing damage caused by Brexit.
Two years on
As we approach the second anniversary of Britain leaving the EU, things have settled into a drearily predictable and monotonous pattern, with this week a fairly typical example. The drag weight of Brexit to the economy in plain sight yet denied or ignored. The lingering scar of what was done to Northern Ireland, and the preposterous bluster of the Brexiters about it. The steady undertow of declining influence and damaged reputation. The bogus claims of Brexit benefits and the pumped-up posturing of post-Brexit Britain. The gimcrack government that created Brexit and was bequeathed by it.
In such circumstances cynical jokes are not just permissible but Inevitable, even if any laughter they give rise to is that of desperation.
Business as usual
So, of course, there are reports of delays and queues at cross-channel ports. Of course there are claims that they aren’t anything to do with Brexit. But of course they are at least compounded by and at most caused by Brexit. We’ve had this on and off for over a year, and of course it will continue to happen as the rest of the import controls get introduced in the course of this year. It’s one of the things which happens when new barriers to trade are introduced.
Equally, it’s not the only thing that happens, so even when there aren’t queues it doesn’t mean the barriers are having no effect, just that the costs of dealing with them are less visible, taking the form of individual companies introducing and using new systems or of simply not engaging in trade, which in aggregate slowly feeds into declining productivity, tax base, public spending, competitiveness, employment and consumer choice, and into increased prices and taxes.
It’s not even worth arguing about this anymore. We know the economic damage that was done between the referendum vote and actually leaving the EU. We know the damage that has happened to UK-EU trade since then. We know, and no one seriously contests, the predictions for what will happen to the economy as a result.
Similarly, it’s no surprise (but still scandalous and shameful) that the EU settled status scheme is still causing misery for untold numbers of British citizens, EU citizens and their families. It’s no surprise that the talks over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) ”stagger on” with no sign of resolution, or that, as ever, they are bound up with the apparently endless crisis of the scandal-ridden, inquiry-riven, ramshackle, Heath-Robinson excuse for a government that Boris Johnson presides over.
Nor is it a surprise – in fact, it’s almost a given – that the Brexit Ultras have lighted upon a new ‘article’ as their saviour, as they have so many times before. Step aside Lisbon Article 50, GATT Article 24 and NIP Article 16, the latest wheeze is NIP Article 13 (8) which according to Bernard Jenkin, amongst other nonsenses, puts the EU under some kind of obligation to drastically revise the Protocol. Jenkin was one of those identified by Dominic Cummings as part of the “narcissist-delusional” subset of the ERG who were “useful idiots”, a harsh judgement in that it is only half-true.
If Jenkin’s barrack room lawyering had any meaning, it was as a reminder to Johnson and Liz Truss that the ERG are watching the NIP negotiations and will jump on anything which to the addled brains of its members is a betrayal of Brexit or a diminution of sovereignty. In fact, the entire Conservative Party now seems to have dissolved into a series of groupuscules in a way that used to be more associated with the political Left. Apart from the ERG there’s (at least) the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), the Northern Research Group, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, the Blue Collar Conservatism group, and the Common Sense Group (for once, the clue isn’t in the name).
Still, the ERG remains important. And since on the wilder shores of Brexiter thought (yes, I’m referring to clergyman Dr Timothy Bradshaw) the NIP is regarded as an EU annexation of British territory akin to that of the Crimea by Russia in 2014, it’s no surprise that the Ultras aren’t likely to accept any conceivable resolution to the current talks. Which is unfortunate, since it is Russia’s current territorial ambitions which point to the urgent need for a rapprochement with the EU.
Ukraine crisis policy: not a Brexit bonus
For what is very much not business as usual is the Ukraine crisis, and the continuing threat of a Russian invasion. Though here, too, there is a predictable Brexit angle in attempts to suggest that post-Brexit Britain has somehow become “freed of the shackles of Brussels” so as to be the “leading” European power, as argued by Conservative foreign policy analyst Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph (£). It is an analysis shared by the Telegraph itself in its editorial comment (£) and, inevitably, by numerous articles in the Express, including boasts that Britain has been free to act without “endless EU waffle”.
The gaping hole in this analysis is that, even as a member of the EU, the UK operated an entirely independent foreign and defence policy. Moreover, when a member, it was one of the main blocks to the EU developing its own foreign and defence policies, and to the wider project of EU strategic autonomy’ favoured, in particular, by Macron and Merkel.
It’s true that the UK now has an independent sanctions policy but, since sanctions will always be more effective the more countries that apply them, that’s of limited benefit, whilst entailing a loss of influence over EU sanctions policy. Hence Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s “diplomatic blitz” around European capitals (£) this week to garner support for the UK’s plans for sanctions against Russia. This is the reality of the alternative to the “endless waffle” of EU membership – a similar process of consensus-building but undertaken as an outsider, with correspondingly less leverage.
So the idea that what a good discussion of the whole issue by Mark Landler in the New York Times calls the UK’s “more muscular role” in the Ukraine crisis is made possible by Brexit is an absurdity. Britain has long been relatively ‘hawkish’ with respect to Russia, albeit not to the extent of investigating its possible role in influencing elections, including the Brexit referendum or of doing very much about Russian money-laundering in Britain. For that matter, it seems extraordinary that Brexiters have chafed so much against the EU’s supposed infringement of British sovereignty when, for years, Russian planes have actually violated our airspace and waters, and have actually murdered British citizens on British soil.
Brexit Britain: not in the room?
Still, the point holds that the current British stance on the Ukraine crisis certainly could, and possibly would, have been pretty much the same even if we had still been in the EU. Equally, it is absurd to suggest that now, as an ex-member, the UK can emerge as a leader of European strategic autonomy. It’s certainly right to seek to work with the EU over the crisis, but that’s made more difficult by Brexit and certainly not easier. Indeed, the challenge the Ukraine crisis poses for the EU and the UK serves to show their common security interests and the way that Brexit is unhelpful to pursuing those interests. For whether or not Russia played a role in Brexit happening , it was Putin’s “dream policy” and both “diminishes the UK in Russia’s eyes” and contributes to the fracturing of Western solidarity that he is now exploiting.
That would be so however Brexit had been done, since at the very least it makes the structures for cooperation more complicated and cumbersome. But it is all the more the case because the way Brexit was done has engendered such profound distrust in the UK, especially over the Northern Ireland Protocol, with particular damage to relations with France (£), the only EU country with a genuinely significant defence capability. This isn’t a minor point. ‘National reputation’ is a fuzzy notion but a real one, and in the last five years Britain’s has plummeted, both because of its highly antagonistic approach to the EU and its carelessness with its relationship with Biden’s administration. That has profound consequences, especially when trying to urge EU nations to take a harder stance: even this week, as Wallace did the rounds trying to drum up support for sanctions against Russia, Johnson was denouncing the EU for its “insane” insistence that the Protocol be implemented to the letter.
One particular thing the Ukraine crisis shows is the, at best, naivety of the Brexiters’ constant claims that UK security was entirely about NATO membership and nothing to do with EU membership, ignoring the extensive and multi-layered relationship between the two. It is a folly now baked in to post-Brexit policy, with the Integrated Review of March 2020 barely acknowledging the EU’s existence, whilst Liz Truss’s first speech as Foreign Secretary pointedly did not mention the EU at all. Notably, she did not attend a major US-Germany-France meeting of her opposite numbers to discuss Ukraine (though a junior minister was sent). Instead, she was in Australia. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and it was a pre-arranged visit, but it’s indicative of priorities, and perhaps of misplaced priorities given the scathing attack from Australia's former Prime Minister (£) on Britain’s “delusions of grandeur” and on Truss herself, who he described as “demented”.
Truss did find time to meet with NATO’s Chief in Brussels, and affirmed NATO’s importance to European defence, and she will go to Ukraine next week. So she’s by no means inactive in the crisis, but seems keen to approach it in a way which downplays the EU dimension. Yet the EU has not disappeared just because the UK has left it, and pretending otherwise is silly. Thus, whilst the primary axis of the primary Western response is the US-EU discussion of economic sanctions, Truss was reduced to boasting about the UK “leading by example” without being an integral, central part of that discussion. A key rule of politics is that you need to ‘be in the room’ and Brexit Britain isn’t, at least metaphorically and sometimes literally. That doesn’t mean it has no role, or that its role is insignificant, it’s just that it’s a bit less significant than before and a bit less significant than it claims.
A post-Brexit performative policy?
Whilst EU membership would not have precluded the UK making a ‘muscular” response to Russia over Ukraine, it is absurd and potentially dangerous to think that the UK, with or without the EU, or the EU, with or without the UK, can do very much to face down the Kremlin. Regardless of Brexit, it is not even NATO but the US which plays the crucial role. The UK – and the EU – should in my view be strongly supportive of that, but neither economically nor, most certainly, militarily (including supplying equipment, training, and intelligence) can it lead the effort. It’s foolish to pretend or imply otherwise.
For if the UK gives the impression that it can do more than in it is able to there is a terrible danger that it will lead to the Ukrainian people being let down. It may be that ‘God Save the Queen’ was trending on Twitter in Ukraine on Monday, after the arrival of British anti-tank weapons and military trainers, but (as, to be fair, Wallace has acknowledged) there is little or no chance of the UK being able to do more than make very marginal contributions to Ukraine’s defence if Russia were to invade.
Again, that would be true regardless of Brexit. But there is a sense that a desire to assert its post-Brexit identity is leading the UK to take a particularly assertive posture, in order to demonstrate its self-professed status as ‘Global Britain’ (£). In Landler’s New York Times article, Lord Darroch, former UK Ambassador to the US and former National Security Advisor, is quoted as saying “I suspect this is part of showing we’re not bound up with the European Union”.
Seen in this way, UK policy on Ukraine might be as ‘performative’ as its independent trade policy – where trade deals are celebrated simply for being made independently, regardless of their economic value. If so, that would be deeply reprehensible. Performative trade policy is ludicrous; performative defence policy is reckless, and not only for the UK. For whilst no British politician is suggesting direct military involvement in Ukraine, expectations may be very different amongst ordinary members of the Ukrainian public, perhaps overly-impressed by Global Britain’s posturing.
I don’t suppose The Sun is that widely read in Kiev, but headlines such as “Ukraine needs our help. Being British means we stand up for FREEDOM” above an article by the Armed Forces Minister James Heappey, which starts with a reference to British soldiers’ lives lost in the Korean War, might suggest a promise of more than the UK can realistically deliver. Moreover, as a matter of fact, British public support for NATO to commit to defend Ukraine is, at 47%, the lowest of the six countries surveyed, slightly below Germany (49%) and well below France (57%). In any case, it’s at least arguable that the best approach to Russia is the combination of economic and military pressure and the kind of diplomatic efforts at de-escalation being pursued by France and Germany within the ‘Normandy format’ meetings.
Brexit point-scoring
Even if post-Brexit posturing isn’t what drives Britain’s Ukraine policy, it is impossible to read the press coverage of that policy without spotting how it is shot through with Brexit point-scoring. Most predictably, that is at the expense of the EU and especially Germany: “Europe shamed” as “Brexit Britain cares more than Germany”, as the Express renders it. On this showing, cocking a snook at the EU, rather than aiding Ukraine, is the important part of the story. Even more grotesque in this coverage is the jeering that the policy has somehow put one over on “bitter remainers” and the “American liberal elites” which “similarly sneered at Brexit”, in Gardiner’s words.
Less grotesque but even more fatuous is the suggestion, again in the Express, that the crisis discredits the “remainers’” claims “that the EU was the best hope for peace on the continent”. It’s fatuous for the same reason as it was when deployed during the referendum campaign in relation to the Bosnian War: the claim about the EU’s role in peace was only ever about it ensuring peace amongst its members, originally and most notably France and Germany.
That fact is neatly avoided in Heappey’s Sun article, which doesn’t mention the EU at all as part of the Western response to the Ukraine crisis, but trots out the standard line that it was NATO (alone) that “guaranteed peace in Europe for over 70 years”. Nor does he mention Brexit directly, but can’t resist a Brexity culture war jibe at “people who sneer at patriotism and the Union Jack”. Meanwhile, a Sun editorial explicitly repeats the strawman of what remainers supposedly claimed about the EU and peace (as well as explicitly trumpeting Britain’s Ukraine policy as some kind of justification of Brexit).
It has been familiar since the referendum that Brexiters’ main pleasure seems to come from discomfiting remainers but, even if there were grounds for discomfiture in this case which, as I’ve argued, there aren’t, it would be a terrible rationale for defence policy. About the only less defensible one would be to distract from the government’s ongoing domestic crises, as some commentators suggest is what Johnson is doing. Equally indefensible is the attempt to downplay the seriousness of those domestic crises by suggesting they are trivial compared with the Ukraine situation. The problem is rather that Johnson’s government is so pre-occupied with trying to scrabble out of its mire of scandal that it’s incapable of serious focus on Ukraine and other policies, including, indeed, the ongoing damage caused by Brexit.
Two years on
As we approach the second anniversary of Britain leaving the EU, things have settled into a drearily predictable and monotonous pattern, with this week a fairly typical example. The drag weight of Brexit to the economy in plain sight yet denied or ignored. The lingering scar of what was done to Northern Ireland, and the preposterous bluster of the Brexiters about it. The steady undertow of declining influence and damaged reputation. The bogus claims of Brexit benefits and the pumped-up posturing of post-Brexit Britain. The gimcrack government that created Brexit and was bequeathed by it.
In such circumstances cynical jokes are not just permissible but Inevitable, even if any laughter they give rise to is that of desperation.
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