Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad

I’ve written several times on this blog about the problems that Brexit has caused the Labour Party. More recently, it has become increasingly obvious that it has had far more profound and damaging consequences for the Tories, and I wrote in some detail last February about how ‘Brexitism’ is eating Conservatism. Now, although Labour continues to agonize about not alienating leave voters in the ‘Red Wall’ seats, it is beginning to craft some kind of post-Brexit stability for itself. Whereas Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad, as their party conference this week made abundantly clear.

The two things are not completely separate, as illustrated by the Tory Party’s thuggish Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson. A former coal miner and long-time Labour Party member, who also served as a Labour councillor, his early political heroes (£) were Arthur Scargill, Dennis Skinner and Tony Benn. Now a Tory MP and GB News presenter, he is not just ferociously pro-Brexit but a cartoonishly ‘prolier than thou’ populist, espousing the predictable litany of ‘things we’re not allowed to say’, from supporting the death penalty to telling asylum seekers to “f*** off back to France”.

So, to the extent he represents a certain segment of the traditional Labour core vote, he is indicative of part of the problem Brexit poses for Labour. But Anderson’s greater significance is that he fits perfectly into the post-Brexit Tory Party alongside those, from Jacob Rees-Mogg through to Suella Braverman, with whom he might otherwise have little in common. At the same time, there’s really no discernible difference between his beliefs and those of the Reform Party, as illustrated by his cringingly fawning ‘interview’ of Nigel Farage on his very first GB News show.

In one way, there’s nothing new about this. Populism has always brought together certain kinds of far-right and certain kinds of far-left people. What is new is what it has done to the Tory Party, and at the heart of that lies Brexit.

Farage and the ‘UKIPisation’ of the Tory Party

There are multiple dimensions to this, and they are interconnected and difficult to put into sequence. Perhaps the first of them is that, in using the referendum to outflank and marginalise UKIP, the outcome of the vote has ironically been to ‘UKIPise’ the Tory Party. That started to happen even before the 2017 election and has solidified since, so that by this week, as Lewis Goodall of the News Agents remarked, “you could have been at a UKIP or Brexit Party conference”.

That seems to apply not only to its grass-roots membership but to many, perhaps most, of its MPs, with almost all ‘remainers’ having been pushed out before the 2019 election. With them, the more socially liberal wing of the parliamentary party has also been very significantly eroded. That matters electorally, because those MPs, the David Gaukes and the Dominic Grieves, represented a certain kind of Tory voter the party is now liable to lose, potentially threatening its ‘Blue Wall’.

Yet, also ironically, the UKIPisation of the Tory Party has failed to reduce the fear its leadership has of the threat it faces from UKIP’s successor, the Reform Party, and especially the threat it would face if Farage returned to lead some version of that party. The Tories ‘getting Brexit done’ has by no means got rid of the Farage threat. That is partly because, inevitably, he spearheads the idea that Brexit has been betrayed by the Tories. It’s also because he and the people he represents will always depict Tory positions, especially on immigration and asylum seekers, no matter how extreme, as not going far enough.

But what is feared by the Tory leadership is loved by many, perhaps now most, within the party, including those jostling to take it over from Sunak, and the not unrelated seething mass of groupuscules advocating various versions of New and True Conservatism including National Conservatism, Common Sense Conservatism and Conservative Democracy. For them, Farage is not an external threat but a welcome friend. Hence the warm welcome he got at the conference, which apparently – no sniggering at the back, please - he attended in his capacity as a "journalist". Indeed, the Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie observed that “party members would choose him as leader if they could”.

That may be unlikely to happen, but Farage clearly, and correctly, sees himself as a significant player in influencing the party’s direction and its future leadership, which he opined was “the real debate this week”. That framing of the conference was in itself an act of hostility towards Sunak, as was his  enthusiastic endorsement (£) of Liz Truss’s approach to economic policy. Yes, it’s astonishing that anyone could think that, but Truss herself certainly continues to do so (£), as, presumably, do the “huge crowd”, which included Farage, who came to hear her speech to the conference fringe, given less than a year after her ignominious downfall.

Farage, whose political instincts are as acute as they are malign, was right about the central theme of the conference, and it wasn’t Sunak’s announcements about there being extra trains on the Dullchester to Snoreham line in ten years’ time, even though these dominated the reports of his less than visionary speech. It was, as Sam Coates of Sky News put it, “the existential questions about what the next iteration of the Conservative Party stands for”.

That Farage is now openly playing a role in these questions, inside the party he left in 1992 and has tormented ever since, may also seem astonishing. But to many in the current party he is not a torment but an inspiration. So is the GB News channel he fronts, as Priti Patel aggressively asserted at the Conservative Democratic Organization’s dinner before dancing with him, the would-be Princess to his irredeemably ugly frog. For that channel is now the mouthpiece for what the bulk of the Tory Party, quite as much as the Reform Party, believes in, and its studios are awash with Tory MPs interviewing each other.

The enemy at the top

To the New and True Conservative Jacobins, the enemy is neither Farage nor the Reform Party, it is Rishi Sunak and the remnants of moderate or even vaguely pragmatic conservatism. It is a curious fate for Sunak, a fiscally conservative Thatcherite, not to mention a supporter of Brexit. When he became an MP in 2015 that put him towards the right of the party. Just seven years later, the new Tories regard him as a ‘globalist’, even a ‘socialist’ and, of course, a ‘betrayer of Brexit’, if not a ‘closet remainer’. 

His clumsy attempts to placate them – from his new-found scepticism about the Net Zero agenda, to his insane embrace of the ’15-minute City’ conspiracy theory – have no impact on that. And they will, correctly, see it only as a sign of his weakness that he accepted the possibility Farage might be allowed rejoin the Tory Party, and as a further humiliation that Farage immediately rebuffed the idea (though, interestingly, he hasn’t entirely ruled it out for the future).

As many of his predecessors as Tory leader found, the more Sunak tries to please the extremists, the more they demand. His situation differs from them in two ways, though. One is that the extremists are no longer a fringe group within the party but becoming its mainstream, and include members of the cabinet like Braverman. The other, which is all that is saving him for now, is that even the extremists, such as Rees-Mogg, reluctantly realise that it is impractical to depose him before the next election. 

Clearly these two things point in different directions, but they are both bad for Sunak. If and when he loses the election, of course he will be ousted. But if, by some chance, he wins it then they will continue to attack him, though I suppose if he won by a large majority they might hold off doing so for a few weeks. The True and New Conservatives aren’t going away.

Brexit sowed the wind

The present state of the Tory Party isn’t all about Brexit, but Brexit lies at its heart. It is what started the rampage of populism, with its imagination of a singular ‘will of the people’ and, with that, the hunt for heretics and traitors, the denunciations and the witch-burnings, the suspicion of any hint of a lack of true belief. Hence, to give just one example, former Chancellor Philip Hammond, who, like Sunak, was a hyper-wealthy, almost stereotypical Thatcherite Eurosceptic as well as a spreadsheet technocrat, ended up being accused of “betrayal” for not supporting ‘no-deal Brexit’, and even facing calls that he be “tried for treason”.

Yet alongside such ferocious dogmatism lies the constant disappointment with Brexit. That was always going to exist, but Sunak’s relative ‘pragmatism’ has provided a new excuse for the Brexiters. To them, the Windsor Framework, the climbdown over scrapping all EU Retained Law, the resumption of Horizon membership, and the various other ad hoc accommodations he has made, all feed the Brexiters’ sense, itself the flip-side of their revolutionary purism, that Brexit hasn’t worked because ‘it has never been tried properly’. To take just one recent, but spectacularly stupid, example, the Telegraph’s Tom Harris this week foot-stamped about how “this useless government is destroying the Brexit dream” (£)*.

It is also Brexit which has led the Tory Party to all but turn its back on the business interests that used to be at its core. Boris Johnson’s ‘f*** business’ comment may have been a throwaway remark, but it had a deep resonance. Most businesses, whether large or small, were opposed to Brexit, and many are now deeply concerned about its effects. So, with Brexit the primary test of purity of belief, business is now – not entirely, but to an extent which would have been unthinkable a few years ago – positioned as the enemy. And that is not just for lack of Brexit belief, but for the now associated sins of ‘wokeness’ and being part of the Establishment or ‘the Blob’.

Something similar applies to huge swathes of professionals, civil servants, and just about every established institution including the Bank of England, the judiciary, the Church of England, many charities, and perhaps even the King (£). Like the evisceration of social liberals from the Tory Party, and to some extent overlapping with it, this has electoral consequences because many of those written off so disparagingly were the kinds of people whose interests the Tory Party used to represent and upon whose votes they could usually rely.

The new ‘politics of envy’

Again, this is not just about Brexit but it started with Brexit. Being a remainer is invariably first on the list of features, usually followed by ‘wokeness’ and university education, defining the ‘new elite’. This is the term repetitively ground out by the Conservative populists’ academic cheerleader Matthew Goodwin, himself a speaker at this year’s London NatCon conference, who has made the astonishing social scientific discovery that there are quite a lot of middle-class people in economically advanced societies. Even more astonishing, and apparently deeply sinister, he has discovered that they “live in the most affluent and trendy districts” and  “marry and socialise” with each other (£).

It’s worth reflecting how remarkable it is that, as with the hostility to business and professionals, populist Tories now regard the educated and affluent middle-class in general as being amongst the enemies of the people rather than being part of their core vote. In a similar vein, Suella Braverman’s ugly and depraved conference diatribe against immigration linked opposition to her bigotry and incompetence not just to those who “are desperate to reverse Brexit” but to those rich enough to have “luxury beliefs”, to employ gardeners and cleaners, and to have second homes. It is again remarkable that what used to call itself ‘the party of aspiration’ should now have such disdain for the well-to-do, to the point of regarding them as ‘unpatriotic’. It is equally striking that it now practises the ‘politics of envy’ that it used to disparage.

But this is the true face of the populist Conservatism that is engulfing the Tory Party, with Braverman also having been one of the speakers at the NatCon conference, along with Anderson, Cates, Rees-Mogg, David Frost and other Tory politicians. And it isn’t just about calibrating to different kind of voters from those who have traditionally supported them. It goes right to the heart of how these populist Tories govern, or do when they get the chance.

This was exemplified by the Truss mini-budget which, as I discussed at the time, was not just a ‘Brexit budget’ because it was hailed as one which would deliver Brexit, but because it was constructed in explicit rejection of the institutions and advice of ‘the Establishment’. They had opposed Brexit with their ‘Project Fear’ warnings, but Brexit had been voted for and done anyway. So Brexit morphed into ‘Brexitism’ where almost all institutions and most expertise are suspect. The market reaction to the mini-budget showed the recklessness of that, and very briefly shocked the Brexitists into relative silence. But they have quickly forgotten all that.

Brexitism: a different kind of ideology

It's something of a myth that the Tory Party used to be pragmatic rather than ideological. Thatcherism was nakedly ideological, and even before 1979 there were plenty of Tories who held her beliefs. Nor was Thatcher averse to populism, especially in relation to immigration. For example, her infamous remark about British people fearing they might be “swamped by people of a different culture” was similar to the kinds of things Braverman said this week.

But Brexitism is ideological in a different way, by being detached from almost any commitment to reality or truthfulness. Thatcherites had ideological positions, for example on the privatisation of nationalised industries, but there was nothing fantastical about them. Those industries existed and, rightly or wrongly, it was possible to privatise them, as the Tories did. The claims Tories made for what that would do for their efficiency, or cost-effectiveness, or investment may have been flawed, and the flaws may have flowed from their ideological assumptions about markets and the state. But they were not delusions or lies in the way that characterised Brexit, for example in the denial that it had any implications for a Northern Ireland border, or the assertion that post-Brexit trade with the EU could be frictionless. In this sense, Brexitism, unlike Thatcherism, is a distinctively post-truth ideology.

Likewise, every single budget under Thatcher – every budget under any Prime Minister of any party, for that matter – was ideological, but Truss’s ‘true Brexit’ mini-budget was ideological in a different way in its refusal to accept the realities of what it meant. That was demonstrated not simply, or not so much, in its formulation as in the response to its consequences, which Truss and her supporters still ascribe to Establishment plotting rather than market sentiment. And this detachment from reality now goes right down to such things as the ridiculous claims from the Environment Secretary Claire Coutinho that she has put a stop to a ‘meat tax’ that never existed.

Even Sunak engages in a degree of this post-truth Brexitist ideology, including the ‘no meat tax’ calumny. More importantly, in his conference speech extolling the pragmatism and honesty he claims to bring to politics, Sunak quite brazenly lied about the benefits of Brexit, including making the absurd suggestion that it has boosted UK economic growth, for which there is not a shred of evidence. There’s no surprise in that, as no Tory leader can speak the truth about Brexit, but it shows that Sunak has little interest in addressing the concerns even of Tory voters, of whom a not negligible 29% think leaving the EU was a mistake, 38% think it has been more of a failure than a success, and just 22% think has been more of a success than a failure. The ‘Brexitists’ certainly don’t have any interest at all in doing so.

Is populism popular?

Indeed, at one level, it seems as if the Brexitists no longer care about winning elections, and all that matters to them is ideological purity. But, though there may be an element of this, I think the truth is more that their ideological purity leads them to believe that it offers a route to winning elections. They see the Conservatives’ current weak position in the opinion polls and refuse to recognize that it derives from voters’ gradual disenchantment with Johnson and sudden disenchantment with Truss. So they conclude, according to taste, that if Johnson had stayed or if Truss had toughed it out then their poll ratings would have risen. And, now, they urge Sunak towards ‘true Conservatism’, certain that it will be popular and, if the election proves it not to be, waiting to ascribe that to him not going far enough and not being a true believer. At that point, they will install a Braverman, or some other New and True Conservative, in the expectation that this will bring them to power again in 2029.

In short, I think they have mistaken populist policies for popular policies, especially given the changing demography of the electorate. The core reason, again, is Brexit. It was the moment when the longstanding populist belief that they speak for ‘the silent majority’ seemed to be vindicated, and they saw further vindication in the 2019 ‘get Brexit done’ election. Indeed the Tory MP Miriam Cates, who is one of the NatCon’s rising stars, explicitly locates British National Conservatism as emerging from these two events. It is a massive over-reading, and over-simplification, of those votes, and especially of the narrow referendum victory, but it gave them licence to claim ownership of the ‘will of the people’ and to depict their opponents as ‘enemies of the people’. It made politics toxic and, in the process, they poisoned themselves.

Of course, perhaps their analysis is right, and when they get their New and True Conservative Party it will prove wildly popular, or at least popular enough to deliver an election victory in 2029. That could be especially likely if they face a Labour government which has been lacklustre or worse. Certainly there is no cause for complacency, and still less for amusement, about what is happening to the Tory Party. In his weekly Guardian column, Rafael Behr, touching on many of the themes I’ve written about in this post, rightly concludes that “there is something disturbing about a regime that is too ridiculous to trust with power yet too powerful to be written off with ridicule”. That will continue to be true even if, as looks increasingly likely, they lose the next election and become completely taken over by Brexitist populism, if only because, even out of office, they will have much media backing.

However, the difference between my analysis and that of the populists isn’t just about the content of the prediction. It is also about a difference that goes to the heart of the irrationality of Brexitism. That difference is that if they prove to be right then I would accept that my analysis was proved wrong. But if I prove to be right then, without a shadow of a doubt, they will deny that their analysis has been proved wrong. They will say it just means that it wasn’t true ‘True Conservatism’ and insist that the answer is to do it again, but this time properly. Exactly as they do of Brexit, the ultimate source of the madness that now afflicts them.

 

*This headline was later amended to the less punchy one of “The Government risks destroying the Brexit dream”, but the original lives on in the URL.

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.

 

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!

Brexit discredited

This week saw the publication of an update of one of the major studies of the impact of Brexit on UK trade, conducted by John Springford of the Centre for European Reform. It uses a method which compares the actual UK economy with the ‘doppelganger’ UK that didn’t leave the EU single market and customs union. The doppelganger is calculated on the basis of a basket of other countries that closely mirrored UK performance prior to the pandemic and thus provide a good comparison with what has happened to the UK as a result of Brexit. This latest version shows that UK worldwide trade in goods in September 2021 was 11.2% lower than it would have been but for Brexit (and this is still before the UK has introduced full controls on imports of EU goods).

This is consistent with the findings of other studies and, for that matter, with most pre-referendum and post-referendum but pre-Brexit predictions. There is also the beginning of an evidence base about the impact on services trade. Data on what has happened since Brexit are unclear and particularly difficult to disentangle from the pandemic, but a new study by Jun Du and Oleksandr Shepotylo of Aston University suggests that even in the period after the referendum and before Brexit or the pandemic (2016-2019) UK services exports declined by 5.7% a year on average as a causal impact of the vote to leave.

That’s your GDP!

Springford points out that it is not easy to translate the effect on trade into the effect on GDP, but, overall, and consistent with other estimates, he suggests that it looks as if UK annual GDP will be 4%-5% smaller by 2030 than it would have been had Brexit not happened. These are not ‘teething problems’, but long-term damage to national prosperity.

There’s a well-known story about Professor Anand Menon, head of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank, giving a pre-referendum talk in Newcastle. When he spoke of the likely impact of Brexit on GDP, a heckler called out ‘that’s your bloody GDP, not ours’. It’s a story that has come to stand for the disconnect between ‘experts’ and ‘ordinary people’. But although there are longstanding and good arguments against the use of GDP as an economic measure, it’s wrong to dismiss it as an abstraction that is irrelevant to everyday life. Ian Mulheirn of the Tony Blair Institute calculated that the entirety of the tax rises in the March 2021 budget were attributable to the negative economic effect of Brexit and, hence, tax revenues.

So it may not be ‘our’ GDP, but it is our taxes or our public services. And, despite revisionist claims that Brexit was about ‘freedom at any price’, this is emphatically not how it was presented to the electorate. On the contrary, every warning of its costs was dismissed as Project Fear. Yet as I argued in a recent post, Brexiters seem to have largely given up claiming that Brexit is economically beneficial or denying that it is economically damaging. On the other hand, some, especially on the free market Right, who supported Brexit – notably Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson – are beginning to question its economic rationale.

The strange case of Thatcherite Brexiters

Such questioning opens up the conundrum of why a project which erected barriers with the UK’s largest trade partner should have been so dear to those who regard themselves as free traders. A version of the same contradiction is that so many who are ardent Thatcherites are so opposed to membership of the single market of which she was an enthusiastic architect. In a recent speech to the Centre for Policy Studies – a free market, small state thinktank which Margaret Thatcher co-founded - Boris Johnson went so far as to describe this enthusiasm as having been her “blind spot”.

The apparent contradiction is in many cases explained by the Brexiters’ naïve idea that free trade means tariff-free trade, and hence not to realise (or care) that the single market is about eroding non-tariff barriers (NTBs) as well as removing tariffs, or at least to underestimate the significance of its doing so. Thus in a major speech in February 2020 David Frost – without presenting a shred of evidence – opined that the impact of NTBs and of customs costs was exaggerated by unnamed studies “in some cases by an order of magnitude”, and this clearly informed his approach to the trade negotiations with the EU which were then beginning. Given what has since happened to British trade, it is a line which deserves to go down in history in the same way as, say, that of the record label executive who supposedly rejected the Beatles on the grounds that guitar music was on the way out.

No doubt this is in part ignorance, but I think that it grows from a deeper soil which is the way that many Thatcherite free traders hold a quasi-philosophical belief that markets are a ‘natural’ phenomenon which exist prior to, and function better without, regulation. It is a view of markets, including international trading markets, which is wholly naïve at a conceptual level and unworkable at a practical level. Conceptually, it ignores all those things – from contract law to weights and measures regulations – which are prior conditions for effective markets. Practically, it ignores how creating shared, supra-national regulatory frameworks enables rather than restrains international trade, and in particular services trade. Hence they don’t understand markets in general, or the single market in particular. As regards Brexit, this has had two calamitous effects.

Trade, regulation, and sovereignty

Firstly, it explains why – as is beginning to be more widely discussed than perhaps it was at the time – the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was so thin, and effectively little more than mainly tariff-free trade in goods. It’s very important to be careful about this, though. It certainly doesn’t mean that the TCA is worthless, as some Brexiters will undoubtedly argue when it comes up for review and they revive their ‘trading on WTO terms’ fantasy. Without the TCA many industries, notably auto, would massively shrink or even disappear entirely. The real issue is that by opting for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) rather than single market membership there was inevitably considerably less liberalisation of NTBs and of services trade. As I’ve argued endlessly on this blog, one of the fatal flaws in the entire hard Brexit case was the idea that any FTA, even one more extensive than the TCA, could replicate or even come close to single market membership.

Secondly it explains why far from reducing regulatory red tape Brexit has dumped truckloads of it on British businesses (and also private citizens, for example when travelling or when sending presents to friends and family in the EU). In particular, it has exposed, or may come to expose, firms which trade with the EU to double regulatory and certification requirements – as, for example with the chemicals industry - one for the UK and one for the EU. That’s hardly surprising, as it is exactly the kind of duplication that a single market avoids. Reintroducing it not only hampers British businesses but in some cases will mean EU firms no longer servicing the British market because it isn’t large enough to be worth meeting separate regulations. This is a disadvantage for British consumers.

This also means that Thatcherites are now finding that the scope for post-Brexit regulatory divergence is far less than they had imagined, and government efforts to find examples have not been very fruitful. The big exception is immigration policy with respect to EU countries, but the new restrictions this allows are not economically beneficial for businesses as current labour shortages show and – unlike for many leave voters – immigration control wasn’t a central concern for free market Brexiters. Boris Johnson, like the Lexiters, may now be (dubiously) asserting that it has led to wage increases for workers, but that is hardly a priority for Thatcherites, to say the least. State aid may conceivably come to become (£) an area where divergence is actually beneficial to the UK, but then Thatcherites aren’t very keen on that either.

There are other examples of divergence, ranging from banning live animal exports for slaughter to allowing market traders to use imperial units only, but, whilst these may be important for some, sweeping regulatory reforms are proving elusive (for a detailed listing of where there is and is not regulatory divergence, see the UK in a Changing Europe tracker). For example, there is much talk of creating a more flexible data protection regime than the EU’s GDPR, but doing so would be far more costly for British businesses (£) because for global purposes GDPR is the standard they have to reach. The UK is too small to become a global standard-setter, so exercising its sovereignty in this way just leads back to the problem of duplication. One quiet acknowledgement of that came to fruition this week (£) when it was confirmed that the UK will be able to continue its membership of the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) and its electrical engineering counterpart (CENELEC). They are not EU bodies, per se, but they do set a huge range of single market standards and these will apply to the UK as well.

In short, because they don’t understand markets and regulation, the rhetoric of Thatcherite Brexiters founders when it meets reality. For with a few exceptions regulatory divergence is uneconomic. Thus, in practice, having regulatory sovereignty is either damaging (when it is used) or pointless (because it isn’t used). Yet Frost, most notably, continues to trot out the line that regulatory divergence is the raison d’etre of Brexit, and a key test of its success. If that is so, he might as well admit that it is destined to be a failure.

Britannia Unchained?

Of course for many Thatcherite Brexiters, such as some of the authors of Britannia Unchained, the real prize was to be deregulation of labour and environmental standards. Indeed it is common to see some – both remainers and leavers - confidently announcing that ‘this was the whole point of Brexit’. That is wrong simply because the only ‘whole point’ of Brexit was that it didn’t have a whole point: it was an assembly of contradictory agendas of which such deregulation was only one, albeit an important one given the power of its adherents. But it turns out that, at least for now, their power is less than they hope and others fear.

For to the chagrin of such Thatcherite Brexiters, here, too, Brexit does not live up to their naïve model of sovereignty. The level playing field provisions of the TCA may not have been as extensive as originally envisaged in the Political Declaration with the Withdrawal Agreement, but nevertheless they exist and constrain the UK through non-regression clauses on labour, social and environmental standards. Indeed free trade agreements in general, including CPTPP membership if it happens, increasingly mandate labour, human rights and environmental standards. It can certainly be argued they do not yet go (nearly) far enough, but the point is that they exist and put constraints on sovereignty in the Brexiter sense of the term.

Moreover, there are domestic constraints. Thatcherite Brexiters like Professor Patrick Minford may be happy to see whole swathes of manufacturing industry and agriculture disappear, but that isn’t something that any government could readily countenance. Nor is there much public appetite for shredding labour and environmental standards. In fact, the government has been quite wary of using Brexit in ways which hard core Thatcherites would wish – not, for example, making use of the freedom to remove the cap on bankers’ bonuses, something bemoaned by Fraser Nelson and others. In part this is because of the peculiar nature of Johnson’s 2019 election victory and his reliance of the ‘red wall’ seats.  The pandemic has also had the effect of, if only temporarily, extending the scale of state activity and intervention.

From these constraints arise the now widely made criticism from the Tory Right that “this isn’t a Conservative government”. It’s certainly the case that Johnson is very different to Thatcher, and not just as regards the single market. She was moralistic where he is amoral, if not immoral. She adhered to a version of business rooted in the thrifty shopkeepers of her childhood. He says ‘f*** business’. But an irony of Thatcher’s legacy is that her image of capitalism was entirely different to the rootless, credit-fuelled ‘casino capitalism’ that her policies begat. If Johnson has any kind of business base it is with hedge funds and private equity firms on the wilder end of that footloose, global capitalism who increasingly fund the modern Tory Party.

However, Johnson is similar to Thatcher in relying, as does support for Brexit, on an uneasy and contradictory coalition of socially traditionalist and protectionist nativists with socially indifferent and free market globalists. In fact it’s quite likely that the electoral coalition that brought Thatcher to power and kept her there included many of the actual individuals, as well as the broad sociological groupings, who were to vote for Brexit in 2016. This (along with the specific ‘red wall’ inflection) means that Johnson is highly constrained in the extent to which he can give the free market, deregulatory Right its head.

Notions of the nation and of national sovereignty are at the fault line of this politics, as they were for Thatcher. Whilst basing much of her appeal on a flag-waving campaign to make Britain great again, the logic of her support for economic globalization undermined the nation state, and the idea of ‘British business’, in particular, became hopelessly antiquated. At the same time, and again as a result of policy decisions, the British economy became far more services based (and hence its international trade needs became far more bound up with removing NTBs than removing tariffs). In some respects, Brexit was a reaction against these changes, but conflating them with EU membership was a catastrophic error, and indeed the post-Brexit acceleration of the sell-off of British businesses illustrates this.

An incoherent and undeliverable strategy

The consequence of that error has been to try to square the circle of nativism and globalism by imagining post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ to be an independent nation state, trading tariff-free with the world*. Unfortunately for Johnson’s government, the world has moved on from such a model (if indeed it ever existed) to one of national inter-dependence, regionalized economics and increasingly globalised regulation. To the extent that Brexit Britain has a strategy at all, it is to adopt an Eighteenth-Century approach to the Twenty-First Century world, something underscored by Frost’s repeated references to Edmund Burke’s political philosophy as its guiding light.

Such a strategy is totally incoherent and undeliverable for both trade and international relations. At the level of trade it is what gives us a government crowing about trade deals of almost no economic value, simply because they were made by the UK, or endlessly talking about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ qualities whilst presiding over a country which is arguably actually ‘undeveloping’. At the level of international relations it is what yields continual antagonism (£) with the EU, and France in particular, as national sovereignty keeps bumping up against that of others, whilst leaving the UK if not isolated and friendless then at least the object of international ridicule and distrust.

This might at least be a formula for creating a certain kind of national solidarity. It would be a nasty, embittered and chauvinistic one, for sure, but it could be viable in a functional sense. However, the reality is that it fails to deliver even that. For as the Brexit vote, and the high levels of continuing opposition to it, show, at least half the country, if not more, are heavily invested in the world of national inter-dependence, regionalized economics and globalised regulation and are unimpressed, if not repelled, by that offered by Johnson and Brexit. That cleavage is most obvious between Scotland and the rest of the UK, but also significantly divides different parts of the English population. So as well as being externally incoherent Johnson’s Brexit cannot function as a nation-sustaining project either, and will very likely be a nation-ending one as well as initiating an unresolvable culture war within England.

Brexit discredited

It may seem we have come a long way from the trade figures with which I began but that is not so. Those figures are not just about the economic damage of Brexit, but are the most readily quantifiable barometer of the flawed political theory of sovereignty which underlies it. It has become a myth that the case for Brexit was a non-economic one – much of the Vote Leave campaign was explicitly economic – and only about regaining sovereignty or ‘taking back control’. The proposition was that by taking back control, good economic outcomes would become possible, as would good non-economic outcomes but at no economic cost.

Thus the economic case and the political case for Brexit were always inextricably intertwined, and as each becomes discredited so does the other.

 
 

*It’s true that there is another version of this Brexit strategy which puts particular weight on trading relations with the ‘Anglosphere’ and/or the Commonwealth. It is still trotted out by, for example, Dan Hannan who spoke recently of how EU membership had “artificially” (cf. my point above about markets being ‘natural’) diverted trade from Britain’s “cultural hinterland” (apparently referring to some, at least, of what used to be that entirely natural entity the British Empire). But although there are traces of that thinking in its policy, even this government isn’t quite so detached from reality as to explicitly frame a strategy in these delusional, neo-imperial preference, terms.

Forty years of failed political leadership

Political leadership since the Referendum has been weaker and more inept – even at the basic level of administrative competence – for a more sustained period than at any time in modern British history. This applies most obviously to David Cameron blithely walking away from the mess he created and of course to Theresa May. As catalogued on this blog, her numerous mis-steps include a complete failure to seek and develop an even vaguely consensual approach to Brexit, a refusal to be honest with the public and perhaps herself about the choices and consequences entailed by Brexit, and the botched General Election in which, amongst other things, she refused to discuss Brexit in any serious or detailed way. Most egregiously, as almost all sides of the Brexit debate agree, the manner and timing of her triggering of the Article 50 process was probably the worst political decision of any British Prime Minister since the Second World War.

Nor does the buck stop with the Prime Minister. Tory Cabinet Ministers and backbenchers have signally failed to provide the kind of collective leadership which the gravity of the situation demands, and many of them persist in pursuing fantastical and nonsensical ideas. Those most committed to Brexit, having been given by May the largest part of what they wanted, have done all they can to undermine her. That partly reflects her own failure to recognize that they could never be placated, but also their refusal to take responsibility for their own policy. The Labour Party has been just as poor, failing to define a clear position, riven by internal conflict and with a leader who seems barely interested in, and supremely uninformed about, Brexit and what it means. And if invoking Article 50 was a mistake of historic proportions, let’s not forget that Parliament – having been given the chance through the heroic efforts of Gina Miller – voted to do so.

However, what has happened since 2016 should be understood as just the latest manifestation of decades of failed leadership in Britain with respect to its EU membership. That could probably be traced back as far as the 1950s, but certainly to the 1975 Referendum confirming Britain’s membership. That vote was overwhelming and as a 10 year old primary school pupil at the time I remember it being greeted with a kind of joy by our – in every conceivable meaning of the term – conservative head mistress. We wrote our ‘summer project’ on the wonders of the EEC*, and even sang a song about the ‘European dream’ at the end of year pageant devoted, that year, to Britain’s European membership. In what was, generally, a rather dismal political decade it was a rare moment of optimism.

It was certainly not the case, as Eurosceptics later claimed, that the British people had been deceived into joining a political project having been told it was only an economic one of ‘the common market’. That is easily confirmed by reference to documents and speeches from the time. Yet it is true that, almost from that time, virtually no attempt was made by British political leaders to build deep support for, or understanding of, what the EU meant in itself, or for Britain in particular.

The Labour Party at the time were deeply split on Europe – this, indeed, was why the 1975 Referendum was held – and so were hardly likely to engage in such an effort. At the 1983 General Election Labour’s policy was actually to leave the EU. By then, the Tory Party although far more united in favour of the EU – how strange, now, to write those words – was in full post-Falklands, Union Jack waving mode. So no narrative of Britain in Europe was going to be built by them, since what it would really have amounted to would have been a fundamental re-appraisal of Britain’s place in the world post-War and post-Empire.

Thus in those crucial years, there was a complete failure of leadership from pro-EU politicians to develop any kind of narrative of the sort that existed, and exists, in other member states which was positive, let alone enthusiastic, about membership. Instead, and especially after the botched joining of the ERM and the Black Wednesday fiasco, what developed was an entirely transactional, grudging and often sour approach to Europe. The British media, so enthusiastic for European membership in 1975, rarely reported on European politics and, when it did, the reporting was almost invariably negative. The Sun’s 1990 ‘Up yours Delors’ headline, if not typical, was archetypical.

From about that time, the Tory Party began to change in its approach to Europe. That can perhaps be dated from Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech in 1988 – although reading that text now one cannot fail to be struck by how far it is from the Euroscepticism of those who became Brexiters (e.g. “Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community”). At all events, the Maastricht turmoil of the 1990s began the long civil war within the party that continues to convulse it to this day and which, in very large part, explains the present, parlous situation of Brexit.

The Labour Party also changed, in the opposite direction, partly because of the fall of the Berlin Wall but mainly because British social democrats began to see that the EU offered protection from the excesses of Thatcherism. Tony Blair was undoubtedly the most pro-European Prime Minister since Heath but, even so, did not really use the 1997 moment to recast the British narrative about the EU. And whilst the Blair governments did successfully promote eastwards expansion of the EU they never really communicated what a triumph that was, both for Europe and for British strategic interests. Moreover, largely because of Gordon Brown’s opposition, Britain failed to join the Euro. Had we done so, Brexit would surely have become all but impossible.

Perhaps the most damaging effect of the failure to build and communicate a positive narrative about EU membership was in relation to freedom of movement. The reasons for that are complex, relating to the wider issue of immigration, which in turn relates to that of Britain’s changed place in the world and its confusion about its post-Empire role. At all events, immigration was invariably configured in, at best, economic terms, and freedom of movement was subsumed within immigration in ways quite different to how it is understood within the rest of the EU.

This was alluded to by Sir Ivan Rogers in his February 2017 evidence (p.10) to the House of Commons Exiting the EU Committee:

They [the rest of the EU] genuinely do not understand a UK debate in which the two are conflated at all. They do not understand why a Government would have a migration target covering migration from within the European Union, which for other people is not migration. They do not call it migration; they do not call it immigration. They call it free movement… [t]hey said, “But one is migration, which is external to the European Union, and the other is free movement of people, which is not at all the same thing”.

Indeed, within a single market it makes no more sense to talk about immigration between member countries than it does to do so between counties in Britain. And free movement embodies much more than the transactional economic cost-benefit analysis found on both sides of the Brexit debate, for all that ending it will, indeed, entail massive economic problems for Britain. Rather, it connotes a much broader set of cultural and social possibilities. Moreover, these possibilities also exist for British nationals, who also acquired and will now lose rights of free movement, something occluded when it is only thought of in terms of ‘immigration’.

The issue, then, is not the habitual cliché of the political Right that ‘we aren’t allowed to talk about immigration’. For as long as I can remember the British have talked constantly about it. The point is that the terms of that talk were always negative whether explicitly (it is undesirable) or implicitly (it is a necessary evil to be borne for economic reasons or, semi-jokingly, for culinary diversity). Absent was any appreciation of the possibilities, excitements and joys that freedom of movement brought, something now vividly and poignantly illustrated by the In Limbo testimonies of EU nationals in Brexit Britain**.

The economistic narrative about immigration and freedom of movement has as its counterpart a fundamental misunderstanding about the single market, ironically since Britain was in large part its architect. The core of that misunderstanding is to regard the single market as an economic entity or international trade area whereas, in fact, it is more precisely a regulatory entity and area. It is this which has enabled the EU to dismantle non-tariff barriers to trade, including trade in services, in a way that goes beyond anything that exists anywhere else in the world. But, inevitably, this entails a shared legal and political infrastructure. How else can market-wide rules and regulations be made and enforced? The failure to understand this basic definitional fact, allied with the ‘in 1975 we were told it was just a trade bloc’ myth, gave rise to all of the ‘bendy banana’ type stories that ended up with the ‘take back control’ slogan of 2016.

So in all of these ways, political leaders since 1975 failed to undertake perhaps the key task of leadership: the provision of a coherent and compelling story of what is being done and why. Overall, there was no attempt to develop an account of Britain’s changing place in the world and how EU membership facilitated and allowed it. Within that, there was no narrative about how Britain was, through the EU, facilitating a post-Soviet Europe; a pan-European regulatory space; and a new set of freedoms and rights for British people along with all other Europeans. Nor was there a narrative explaining how, both in shaping the EU and securing its numerous exemptions, Britain was getting exactly the kind of European Union and exactly the kind of membership that it wanted. Instead, a wholly negative view of Britain as put upon by the EU, and a wholly transactional view of its membership, was able to take root almost unchallenged.

Thus by the time of the 2016 Referendum it was far too late to offer anything other than a transactional argument for continued membership. It was an argument epitomised by the supposed (though who would have known it?) leader of the official Remain campaign, businessman Stuart Rose. Politicians like David Cameron and George Osborne, who for years had had little positive to say about the EU could hardly be expected to wax lyrical about it now. And Labour’s erstwhile commitment to the EU was blunted by having a leader whose views on Europe were forged in the heyday of 1970s Bennite Euroscepticism and who had joined the Maastricht rebels in the votes of the early 1990s.

As for the substance of the issues, the terms of debate had already been set in the ways described above. Immigration, the leitmotif of the Leave campaign, had only ever been defended as a distasteful economic necessity. The single market had never been explained as anything different to a trade area, and, as such, could supposedly easily be replaced by some kind of trade agreement and discussed almost entirely in terms of tariffs, which are almost entirely irrelevant. Britain’s place in the world had never been the subject of a proper public conversation, and so pre-industrial fantasies of Buccaneering Britain and post-imperial fantasies of Commonwealth links could be put forward as plausible futures.

More than anything else, it was firmly established in the public mind that the EU was in some way an external, antagonistic constraint upon Britain rather than an entity of which Britain was not only a member but a dominant member, and through that dominance had secured both the kind of membership and the kind of Europe that it wanted. Indeed, all of these same tropes have been evident since the Referendum, most obviously in the suspicious, paranoid and often hostile way that politicians – and the pro-Brexit media – have approached the negotiations. That has been apparent in everything from the early, ludicrous talk of how Britain could go to war with Spain over Gibraltar right through to the latest row about the EU supposedly ‘excluding’ Britain from the Galileo project.

Thus for forty years pro-EU politicians (whether ardent Europhiles or pragmatic Euro-realists) almost completely failed to provide the political leadership which would have cemented Britain’s EU membership in the aftermath of the 1975 Referendum. If only by default, they, along with the wider political class, allowed Eurosceptics to define what that membership meant. But those Eurosceptics – or, as we would now say, Brexiters – themselves conspicuously failed to provide any kind of leadership at all as to what Britain outside the EU would look like. Indeed, it is becoming ever-clearer that most of them preferred the comfort zone of complaint about the EU, and would be much happier had they lost the vote.

Like many things that come as a surprise, the vote to leave the EU now seems to have been almost inevitable. The longstanding failures of leadership from which it grew mean that even if Theresa May was the greatest political leader of all time – which she most certainly is not – she would face an almost impossible task in undertaking Brexit. But they also have huge importance for those who would seek to reverse Brexit. Leaving aside all of the procedural and political complexities of such a reversal, it would require, in very short order, the emergence of political leadership (meaning not just a person, but an entire movement) which could transform these decades of neglect and failure.

That is obviously the case just in terms of domestic politics; it is also the case, it seems to me, if there is to be any chance of the EU welcoming a reversal of Brexit. After all, suppose, for the sake of argument, there was another Referendum reversing that of 2016 by a narrow margin with a vociferous, resentful and revivified Brexiter movement sworn to seeking yet another vote. What kind of membership would that be for an EU which has, in large part, now moved on from the initial shock of 2016?

Perhaps a different way of putting this is that remainers should not have as their aim or expectation winding the clock back to 23 June 2016. At best, that would only be to recreate what happened on 24 June. Instead, unlikely as it presently seems, it will be necessary to recapture the mood in which, in the summer of 1975, my school mates and I wrote our projects on the bright, new European future before us. We could not know then that our political leaders were going to abdicate all responsibility for making that future secure.

 

*From hereon I will just refer to the EU rather than the EEC or the EC, even though in places this is inaccurate.

**Remigi, E. et al (eds) In Limbo. Brexit testimonies from EU Citizens in the UK. London: Byline Books, 2017.