In my previous post I advocated ‘counting to a hundred’ as an antidote to the hyper-frenetic news cycle. That advice would have served the media well during the subsequent frenzy of speculation about the imminent demise of Keir Starmer’s premiership. As the economics (and politics) writer Simon Nixon described it, this episode was a “breathless media circus [ending] in an embarrassing anti-climax” which raised “some awkward questions about the nature of British political journalism”.
It is certainly true that the media are addicted to political drama and spectacle, gleefully recycling rumours and anonymous briefings, and calling it reporting. It’s an approach embodied by the giggling fatuity of the BBC’s Political Editor, Chris Mason, treating politics as a cross between a spectator sport and a game show. Mason isn’t the only offender, of course, but he is one of the worst and, because of the status of the BBC, probably the most balefully influential. At all events, the consequence of such an approach is negative in a double sense. It saturates the airwaves with silliness, and it denudes political discourse of serious analysis, in this case of the real leadership crisis faced by Starmer.
The truncation of the political leadership lifecycle
Nevertheless, the vacuity of political journalism is only one component of a wider shift in political culture, a shift within which the timescale of political leadership has become much more truncated even as, and perhaps because, British politics has become more ‘presidential’. A few decades ago, Harold Wilson remained leader of the Labour Party despite losing the 1970 election and went on to become Prime Minister again. As Labour’s Opposition leader, Neil Kinnock lost both the 1987 and 1992 elections before stepping down. Since those days, losing an election has become an automatic trigger for resignation of the leader of the governing or main opposition party [1].
Alongside that there has been an upsurge of resignations whilst in office. These, too, happened in the past, but were generally occasioned by ill-health (if sometimes only as a pretext), as in the cases of Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson. More recently, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair resigned between elections for (very different) political reasons, but in both cases after long periods in office. It is only since 2016 that there has been a rapid churn of serving Prime Ministers, with David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all resigning between elections, and it is undeniable that this was largely a direct consequence of Brexit. Part of Starmer’s pitch to the electorate in 2024 was to end that roiling instability, but perhaps it is now embedded that every political crisis now becomes a leadership crisis. If so, that is yet another piece of Brexit damage.
A Starmer ‘reset’?
Of course this is not, in itself, a sufficient explanation of the travails of Starmer’s leadership, a subject I will return to when, as seems highly probable, he does eventually have to resign. For now, one interpretation of last week’s leadership ‘crisis’, and the defenestration of Morgan McSweeney it led to, is that it will both require and allow Starmer and his administration to be ‘bolder’ in disowning Brexit and building closer relations with the EU. That interpretation is given some plausibility by Starmer’s statement at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years any more”. It may also explain why last week Rachel Reeves explicitly accepted that “economic gravity is reality” (i.e. that geographical proximity is a key driver of trade) and that this mandates closer relationships and regulatory alignment with the EU.
Both statements were, in their way, striking. However, it is far from clear that they mean anything of substance in terms of policy or, which is really the same point in a different way, that they mark any change from the existing Labour ‘reset’ policy. If they have any significance, it might be as waymarkers in the glacial progress towards a time when Brexit is unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly, in the way that happened with the once highly divisive issues of ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’.
However, it should not be assumed that this progression is automatic and there are many reasons to doubt that it will be. It has become commonplace to cite the figure that 56% of the British public think that leaving the EU was a mistake, but it is equally remarkable that 31% think that it was right (and that 13% don’t know). That is very far from Brexit being ‘unequivocally and uncontentiously seen as a synonym for national folly’. Moreover, in an excellent post on his Substack newsletter discussing Brexit as a “collective folly”, the author and journalist Matt Carr points out that “a credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.”
A new Lowe
Carr is referring, obviously, to Nigel Farage and the Reform party, which continues to lead in all recent opinion polls, with 24% to 32% of the public supporting it. As always, it bears saying that, in the British electoral system, and with a fragmented vote for the other parties, this means that a Reform or Reform-led government is a real possibility. But, even if this does not come to pass, the important point is that a really quite sizeable minority of the population are committed to what I call Brexitism. Not only that, but there are multiple signs that for some this is taking increasingly extreme forms.
This extremism was underscored by last weekend’s launch of the ‘Restore Britain’ party by the MP Rupert Lowe (initially elected for Reform but thrown out of the party after a row with Nigel Farage). Lowe created Restore Britain last year as a ‘political movement’, but its transformation into a party seems to be an attempt to draw together various other fringe parties and groups, including Ben Habib’s Advance UK, another splinter group from Reform, which is supported by Tommy Robinson (despite the report linked to, it is not entirely clear whether he has actually joined). Lowe’s new party has already been endorsed by Elon Musk.
This is an important development, since Restore Britain is, by any definition, a far-right party, and has already attracted enthusiastic support from those who are openly fascists. Lowe, despite his all too obvious lack of charisma, and despite his attempt to project a cuddly image, has become their figurehead because of the viciousness of his rhetoric. Indeed, his rallying call for the new party (warning: link to X) has a decidedly fascistic tang to it: “we will only accept those who share our values, and understand the painful decisions that will need to be taken. People know what we stand for. If you don't have the stomach for it, don't bother.”
The roots of the launch of this new party go back some time, and I wrote about them in detail about a year ago, also making the prediction that “the incipient splits within Reform are a big underpriced story of the next few years”. From that point of view, one consequence of Restore Britain may well be to siphon off small but potentially decisive numbers of Reform’s core vote, making a Farage election victory less likely. It has certainly already led to a vitriolic exchange between Lowe and Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, of which perhaps the most amusingly ironic feature is the ex-professor bemoaning (warning: X again) that Restore’s “ecosystem is riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists”, prompting the gamey response from Lowe than Goodwin is “full of turquoise s***” and that Reform’s “deportation policy is p***-weak” [2].
But, piquant as it may be for observers to see these two deeply unpleasant people, and their respective parties, squaring up to each other, that should not blind us to the fact that, whatever happens electorally, something profoundly dangerous is unfolding.
The far-right’s ‘cultural turn’
For what is at stake is not just the working out of the incipient splits in Reform that I referred to a year ago. The period since then has seen an ever-more overt ethno-nationalism, along with literal street violence outside asylum hotels and symbolic street violence of the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign (discussed in more detail in a previous post). At the same time, the far-right has become increasingly vociferous not just about immigration but about the supposed cultural or civilizational ‘erasure’ of the English and/or British, flames which have been fanned from across the Atlantic by Trump and his administration as well as by Musk.
One reason this is a significant shift is because it moves the terrain away from immigration levels, which have been falling for some time, to the idea of cultural – for which read racial – ‘purification’ and, in policy terms, to mass deportations which, indeed, is Lowe’s principal policy offering. But this has not arisen in a vacuum. It is both the cause and consequence of the normalization of, inter alia, the claim that multi-culturalism has failed, the claim that there is or has been ‘uncontrolled immigration’, the conflation of immigration with asylum-seeking, and the idea that Britain is being ‘invaded’ by ‘young men of fighting age’.
It is within that context that supposedly respectable people like the Brexit-backing tax exile billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, feel able to come out with noxious comments about Britain “being colonised by immigrants”, notwithstanding his subsequent mealy-mouthed non-apology, and for others to insist that, even if the language used was ‘unfortunate’, he “has a point”.
Labour’s complicity
That context has not simply been created by far-right social media crusaders. It has been aided and abetted by the Labour government, most egregiously by Starmer himself, in his disgraceful ‘island of strangers’ speech, and by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s hard-line anti-immigration policies. One feature of the latter which is of particular importance is the proposal to change the rules governing current immigrants, in terms of the period before indefinite leave to remain can be sought, which, unlike measures to curtail new immigration, is at least the country cousin of deportation in the sense of having a retrospective effect (which, as I discussed in a post last October, crosses a very significant line).
Here, too, Starmer’s recent leadership crisis may herald a shift. He was quick to criticise Ratcliffe’s comments, which perhaps would not have happened had McSweeney still been in post. And it may well be that the crisis will give fresh impetus to internal Labour opposition to the Mahmood proposals. Even so, it is hard to envisage the present government decisively and wholeheartedly challenging the anti-immigration narrative. Yet, ironically and predictably, net migration looks on course to become negative this year (and, despite the claims of Farage and others, this is not because of an exodus of British people).
The effects are already being felt by businesses, public services, and universities. The latter are particularly affected by another damaging conflation, that of overseas students and immigrants, and, in another irony, the impact is already being felt in ‘left-behind’ areas like Southend, with the closure of a campus of Essex University which has experienced a 52% fall in international student enrollment. With that goes not just job losses in universities, but all the knock-on effects on local businesses. Britain is self-immolating one of its greatest economic, cultural and soft power assets, and its economy generally, in the name of controlling immigration and yet, in perhaps the greatest irony of all, two-thirds of the public believe that immigration is still rising.
The challenge for Starmer
From this perspective, it is simply wrong for Starmer to say that “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”. Even if by that he meant only that Britain was open to international, and especially European, partnerships than it had been under the Tories, and especially in the security and defence domain, it still does not really make sense since, as I’ve pointed out many times before, Britain cannot be a reliable member of such partnerships whilst Brexitism flourishes domestically. And Brexitism will continue to flourish whilst what would otherwise be a very small minority of ethno-nationalists are able to frame the terms in which immigration is discussed and immigration policy is enacted, or at the very least to pull the framing of those terms towards their own.
This is the real crisis for Starmer’s leadership (or at least one aspect of it), rather than the superficial drivel trotted out by political journalists like Chris Mason. It is a challenge to him not simply personally but philosophically, in that it entails a shift from what we might call the ‘McSweeney’ approach of ‘responding to voters’ demands’ to the more profound sense of leadership as the task of shaping, and in the process sometimes challenging, those demands. With McSweeney gone, Starmer has a chance, perhaps his final chance, to rise to that challenge. Whether he has either the personal or philosophical capacity to do so is doubtful.
Appendix
It doesn’t fit into the focus of this post, but I do want to record yet another tombstone in the graveyard of Brexit hubris. This week the Financial Times reported (£) that the government has “quietly shelved” the programme to build a high-tech frictionless border following years of delays and spiralling costs. This was the project announced in December 2020, in the final days of the transition period, which was to create (of course) “the most effective border in the world by 2025” and was explicitly claimed as a Brexit benefit giving a “once in a lifetime opportunity to transform our borders” (Michael Gove) now that Britain was “free to seize the opportunities that come with being a sovereign nation once again” (Priti Patel). I’ve discussed this project several times in the past, for example in May 2022 when I expressed pessimism about its costs, delivery time and functionality. That pessimism turned out to be optimistic in assuming that it would, eventually, be implemented.
It’s worth recalling this not just as yet another Brexit failure but also because for years during the Article 50 negotiations Brexiters insisted that it would be perfectly possible, even easy, to create ‘alternative arrangements’ for a high-tech frictionless border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This, they claimed, made the Northern Ireland Protocol unnecessary, and a ruse designed by Dublin and Brussels to thwart Brexit. The quiet death of “the most effective border in the world” is a fresh reminder of just how dishonest and ignorant all these claims were.
Notes
[1] Theresa May isn’t really an exception in that, whilst she did not win the 2017 election outright, she did not lose it per se and was still able to form a government with DUP support.
[2] As ever, my suppression of ‘rude’ words isn’t due to any prissiness on my part, but because including them can lead to problems in sharing/ linking to this blog.
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Friday, 20 February 2026
Friday, 11 October 2024
Britain's Brexitism test
The most significant Brexit-related development of the last fortnight was Keir Starmer’s first visit to Brussels since becoming Prime Minister. Media attention focused on his meeting with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, but, notably, he also met with Charles Michel, Chair of the European Council, and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.
Significant it may have been, but dramatic it certainly wasn’t, and no one should have expected otherwise. This was never likely to be the moment for some great announcement and, in fact, the joint statement of the Starmer-van der Leyen meeting, whilst positive in tone, was fairly anodyne in content. Nevertheless, it did contain some points of interest.
The Starmer-von der Leyen statement
The reaffirmation of a shared commitment to the Withdrawal Agreement, Windsor Framework, and Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) could be taken as a reminder of the EU’s desire to see all of the provisions of these fully implemented, and perhaps as a pre-condition of any ‘reset’. It was certainly a reminder of the Labour government’s acceptance of the basic architecture of what was agreed by its Tory predecessors, and thus the limitations of such a reset. Yet the reference to “the unique relationship” between the EU and the UK, whilst at one level a truism, could betoken a recognition by the EU that not all its relationships with third countries are of the same order, and by the UK that the brief and hubristic days of post-Brexit ‘global Britain’, in which the EU hardly counted, are long gone.
At all events, the statement identified the desire to develop an agenda of strengthened cooperation “at pace” and, interestingly, included within that agenda were references to both climate change and energy. These had been identified by Joël Reland of the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) research centre in advance of the meeting as being something to watch for as neglected, but highly viable areas, for greater cooperation within the existing agreement architecture, and of potentially mutual interest to both sides.
But ‘pace’ will indeed matter. For example, the ongoing development of both UK and EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and associated Emission Trading Systems (ETS) means that decisions about their possible linkage, a perfectly realistic possibility within the TCA framework, will soon become pressing. More generally, as economics commentator Simon Nixon argued in a recent post on his Wealth of Nations substack, emerging EU plans to revive EU competitiveness are likely to have major implications for the UK. In short, any reset of relations with the EU will not occur against a static background.
The main substantive announcement in the joint statement was of agreement to begin holding regular EU-UK summits, starting early next year. Anton Spisak of the Centre for European Reform, and a seasoned analyst of Brexit, pointed out that the significance of this should not be downplayed, given the unwillingness of both parties to entertain the idea in the past. Small as it may be, it is a sign of progress, and was welcomed as such by the European Movement UK.*
Testing questions for the ‘reset’
How far that progress goes, and what it consists of, remains to be seen, not least because, as I discussed in a recent post, it’s unclear what the government means by ‘the reset’. But, whatever its intentions, many commentaries on the Brussels’ meeting focused on UKICE Director Professor Anand Menon’s remark that to pursue them the UK needs to show the EU “a token of good faith” by agreeing to a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS). Yet, beyond the obvious fact that this would do much to enhance the credibility of the UK’s commitment to a genuine reset, what I have not seen discussed is exactly why such a gesture is needed and what it would betoken.
I think the answer to that is bound up with the entire post-Brexit question. To what extent has the UK, not just in its government but in its wider political culture, banished or at least decisively marginalized ‘Brexitism’? I’ve argued in the past that it is this which will be the key test for the viability of any idea of ultimately joining the EU or the single market. It isn’t enough for there to be majority support for doing so in the opinion polls. The credibility question, for the EU, is whether or not there is any danger that a move to join would subsequently be reversed, and the trauma of Brexit repeated. If there is such a danger, there is no attraction for the EU in entertaining UK accession.
That is not in prospect, but the same argument applies, though arguably to a lesser extent, to the far more limited aspirations for rapprochement envisaged by the current government. To what extent can they be taken as a reliable, permanent, feature of UK-EU relations? Or will this ‘reset’ be followed, a few years down the line, by another reset, back in the direction of the Brexit Ultras’ desire for separation, antagonism, maximum distance, and ‘sovereignty’ above all else? Is the UK now, in fact, a reliable interlocutor again, or is the Brexit virus liable to break out again, as shingles may for anyone who has had a bout of chicken pox?
In this sense, complaints that the EU’s original proposal for a YMS deal were made at a time that was unhelpful (£) to the then Labour opposition missed the point: these questions aren’t (just) about any particular party or government, but about the British polity. If the EU still has to tip-toe around the Brexit eggshells of UK politics, then that in itself answers the question of whether or not Brexitism has been marginalized.
There is also a deeper, or, anyway, different version of this same question, which is also highly germane to the viability of a substantive reset in relations. Brexit aside, the UK’s attitude to the EU during the years in which it was a member was very much characterized by grudging transactionalism, rather than by any commitment to European ideals. Brussels was the place the UK went to bang the table with a handbag, and extract the most it could whilst giving the least possible in return. Now that the UK is outside, is that still the approach, rather than, as a reset might imply, one of genuine partnership?
Oddly, and perhaps unintentionally, the comments of some ‘post-Brexit realists’, who, whilst understanding very well the folly of Brexit, discuss Labour’s reset in terms of negotiating strategies and ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ objectives, reinforce the impression that this transactionalism persists. At all events, a genuine reset needs to entail more than regret about the way in which May, Davis, Johnson, and Frost went about divorce proceedings. If the marriage is to be replaced by friendship, it is also necessary for there to be a genuine desire to avoid repeating the behaviour which preceded the divorce.
The YMS test
On these questions, YMS is quite a good test to set, relating as it does to the neuralgic issue of immigration which played such a central role in the vote for Brexit. YMS manifestly doesn’t cross the Labour red line on the restoration of freedom of movement of people, so if the government still sees it as too politically toxic to pursue that suggests two, related, things. One is that within the British polity, generally, the experience of Brexit has still not lanced the populist boil about immigration. The other is that the Labour government is not minded to challenge, but to accept, the orthodoxy of anti-immigration sentiment.
It would seem as if that test has already been failed. Unsurprisingly, anti-immigration politics still suffuses Farage’s Reform Party as, hardly any more unsurprisingly, it does the Tory Party, whoever its new leader turns out to be. The Tories did have the possibility of saying that, with Brexit, they had delivered the ‘points-based’ system which Brexiters like Farage used to say was all they wanted. They could then have initiated the ‘honest conversation’ everyone says they want to have about immigration, for example by decoupling it from asylum-seeking, and by challenging the voters about their view that immigration in general should be significantly reduced whilst those same voters, including Conservative voters, do not support reductions in almost every specific category of immigration. But, whether from fear of Reform, their own preferences, or some combination of the two, the Tories have not chosen to take this opportunity.
Nor is there any sign that the Labour government will do so. That clearly extends even to YMS, with reports that the cabinet is split over whether to agree to it, and identifying Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as the main opponent. Cooper played a pivotal and praiseworthy role in preventing Boris Johnson’s government enacting a ‘no deal Brexit’, and a courageous one, too, given the horrendous abuse and threats she faced. So it might be tempting to see her stance on YMS as the latest example of the Home Office capturing its Secretary of State. After all, Theresa May went from challenging her party to stop being ‘nasty’ to being a distinctly nasty Home Secretary, and the department seems to have had similarly radicalizing effect on one-time Immigration Minister, then Tory leadership candidate, Robert Jenrick.
In fact, Cooper has been arguing against freedom of movement since at least December 2016. And although she must know very well that YMS would not mean anything like its restoration she insists that the EU “see this in the context of free movement”, whatever that is supposed to mean, or why it even affects the issue. But it isn’t just Cooper. Starmer, too, despite being enthusiastic about the case for freedom of movement as recently as January 2020, is reported to fear the reaction from the pro-Brexit press to a YMS deal. So even on this quite limited measure it seems Labour have no appetite to take on Brexitism, thus failing first part of the YMS test, namely, whether has Brexitism been marginalized.
This does not mean that YMS will not be agreed in the end. Many people (including me, for what it is worth) expect that it will be. However, the consequence of having failed the first test is that, if and when YMS is agreed, the UK will also fail the second test. For if it is agreed as, or is presented as having been agreed as, part of some quid pro quo deal to obtain some softening of the economic damage of Brexit, such as an SPS deal, then it will be clear that the UK’s relationship with the EU remains within the same transactionalist frame as it has always been. That needn’t preclude a ‘reset’ but places limits upon it, and defines the future ‘partnership’ in relatively shallow terms.
The ECHR test
Whilst the YMS is a good test of the question of whether the UK has left Brexitism behind, there is a different test, which is whether the UK is likely to go even further down the path it took with Brexit by embracing a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its associated Court. That, too, is largely bound up with immigration, to the extent that ECHR derogation is almost invariably presented as being a means of ‘stopping the small boats’ (in this sense, it is also bound up with the failure to differentiate immigration from asylum-seeking).
Here the text of the Starmer-von der Leyen statement was revealing in “re-affirming” the parties’ mutual commitment to the Convention. It’s not clear that Rishi Sunak could have done the same thing, given his repeated pandering to the possibility of derogation over the ‘Rwanda plan’. By contrast, on this, Starmer’s resolve is unequivocal: a government under his leadership will never leave the ECHR. Given all his priors, it is unthinkable that he will renege on this.
However, it is very far from obvious that this is the settled view of the British polity. Again, it is unsurprising that Farage and Reform UK are adamantly opposed to ECHR membership, whilst support for it within the Tory Party is fragile. Of the remaining leadership candidates, Robert Jenrick has unreservedly advocated leaving and, despite having initially rejected the idea, Kemi Badenoch now says that she would consider doing so.
Whichever of them wins will undoubtedly find much support for making leaving the ECHR official party policy, since doing so is now an article of faith to those on the right. At the same time, former candidate Tom Tugendhat’s foolish attempt to court the right by contingently supporting leaving indicates that even on the more ‘centrist’ wing of the party it is no longer seen as unthinkable. At the very least, his having done so will have weakened what remains of the One Nation Tories’ ability to oppose it. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, with his usual opportunism, this week called for a referendum on membership.
So it certainly can’t be said, despite all the miseries that Brexit has caused, and despite its unpopularity with the public, that Brexit 2.0 can be ruled out, or that demands for it will be confined to the margins of politics. That seems all the more the case given the faltering first 100 days of the Labour administration. Of course, it is too early to judge, but the possibility of a two-term hegemony, in which Labour might re-write British politics, looks less likely now than it did in the immediate aftermath of the election, whilst the possibility of a disillusioned electorate turning to nationalist populism has become more feasible.
The Gibraltar test
Whatever the truth of that turns out to be, it is abundantly clear that the populist and pro-Brexit media has not been cowed by the new government, and continues to exert a very considerable influence upon it. Many believed that a huge Labour majority would somewhat tame that media, for the general reason that the centre of political gravity would have shifted, and the specific one that journalists would become somewhat beholden to the new regime.
That hasn’t really happened, and certainly not to the extent that it did in 1997, with the result that Starmer’s government has immediately become embroiled in controversies, leaks and scandals (some of them highly confected), and has already been forced to engage in a domestic re-set. That has multiple implications, including for the prospects of a ‘reset’ of relations with the EU.
A clear example was the furore over the announcement that the UK has agreed to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This is itself, in part, a Brexit story because, as the BBC report of it mentioned, Brexit meant that many EU nations were no longer prepared to back the UK’s case for retaining control of the territory. It’s a point that Brexiters should heed, since it a reminder of how Brexit has weakened the UK geo-politically as well as economically.
However, more to the present point is the way that the agreement was represented by Brexiters and the right-wing press as showing “weakness” and even “treason”, ignoring the fact that the negotiations which led to the agreement had been started by the previous Tory government. This was then linked to ridiculous claims (ridiculous as there is zero connection) that it would be followed by similar deals to cede sovereignty of the Falklands and Gibraltar (£).
It’s the latter claim which relates most directly to Brexit, since the post-Brexit situation of Gibraltar remains unresolved and under negotiation, and resolving it is, in itself, now a test of Starmer’s desire for a reset with the EU. In principle this is becoming urgent, with the new Entry/Exit System (EES) Schengen border controls due to begin in early November although, as I write, reports are confirming the recent rumours that these will be postponed again. But the new controls will, eventually, happen and this matters, since a key issue is maintaining an open border between Gibraltar and Spain, and the associated question of the management of border controls at Gibraltar’s port and airport (which is also an RAF base).
The last time I discussed Gibraltar in detail on this blog was in April, when it seemed that a deal was imminent. A deal, that is, brokered by the Tory government. Since then, reports of the negotiations have been sparse, although last weekend it emerged (£) that the government was about to make formal complaints to Spain about its military overflights of the territory, which doesn’t augur well. But if, and I would think when, a deal is done it will almost certainly involve ‘concessions’ to the EU and Spain, reportedly already made by the previous government, on who undertakes border controls.
This will be the cue for Brexiters to cry ‘betrayal’, as they would have done under the Tories but now, no doubt, with the support of the Tory leadership. Such protest may be marginal, and easily batted away by the government. But the reaction to the Chagos agreement suggests the possibility of a Gibraltar deal being woven into a wider narrative of Starmer being ‘weak’ and ‘not standing up for’ Britain, both generally and in relation to the EU. If that narrative gains ground it will be another indication that Brexitism exerts a profound hold on the UK, whatever its government may be.
Still not done
The question of how Brexit will continue to unfold is a crucial one for our country, so it was with considerable regret that I learned that Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downsides Dossier is to be discontinued. It has been a huge, and I think unique, resource for collating media reports about the practical consequences of Brexit, and I’ve referred to it many times.
That isn’t the only loss. At the high-profile end of things, the decision to end the European Scrutiny Committee, for all its problems, without any replacement is a big setback for scrutiny and accountability of the government’s post-Brexit policies, as Jill Rutter and Hannah White of the Institute for Government explain. I’m particularly saddened by the decision to stop funding UKICE from April 2025. UKICE has been a consistently outstanding source of reliable data, incisive analysis, and intelligent comment about Brexit, and an invaluable public resource, not least for this blog where I have cited its work in, very possibly, the majority of posts.
At, if they will forgive me, the lower-profile end of the spectrum, Nick Tyrone has now ended his ‘Week in Brexitland’ newsletter, and Gerhard Schnyder has ended regular posts of his Brexit Impact Tracker blog. Again, I have often cited these sources on this blog and it is a shame that they are gone.
These losses contribute to a growing sense that Brexit (somewhat like Covid) is regarded if not as over, then as something that just has to be put up with, like the British, or more accurately English, weather. It’s a sense I tried to capture in more detail about a year ago in my post entitled “mustn’t grumble”. So continuing with this blog, even on its new fortnightly basis, feels like ploughing an increasingly lonely furrow, but I think it is still a worthwhile one. And this week, just over eight years since I launched it, the blog received its ten millionth visit, and the readership via email sign-ups continues to hold up, so hopefully I am not the only one to think so.
After all, as this post shows, Brexit is very far from ‘being done’, and that was without even mentioning the latest postponement to an aspect of import controls, this time that of digital product safety declarations. And as this post also shows, we are also far from done with Brexitism.
*Another small step of note was the this week announcement of a new agreement between the UK’s Office of National Statistics and EU’s Eurostat, severed since Brexit. It’s not really an example of ‘the reset’, since it was anticipated by the TCA and has been under discussion for a while, but it has a significance beyond itself in that it facilitates UK participation in EU programmes such as Horizon Europe. At the same time, it’s yet another reminder of the extent to which Brexit has caused so many utterly pointless, yet damaging, ruptures, large and small.
Significant it may have been, but dramatic it certainly wasn’t, and no one should have expected otherwise. This was never likely to be the moment for some great announcement and, in fact, the joint statement of the Starmer-van der Leyen meeting, whilst positive in tone, was fairly anodyne in content. Nevertheless, it did contain some points of interest.
The Starmer-von der Leyen statement
The reaffirmation of a shared commitment to the Withdrawal Agreement, Windsor Framework, and Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) could be taken as a reminder of the EU’s desire to see all of the provisions of these fully implemented, and perhaps as a pre-condition of any ‘reset’. It was certainly a reminder of the Labour government’s acceptance of the basic architecture of what was agreed by its Tory predecessors, and thus the limitations of such a reset. Yet the reference to “the unique relationship” between the EU and the UK, whilst at one level a truism, could betoken a recognition by the EU that not all its relationships with third countries are of the same order, and by the UK that the brief and hubristic days of post-Brexit ‘global Britain’, in which the EU hardly counted, are long gone.
At all events, the statement identified the desire to develop an agenda of strengthened cooperation “at pace” and, interestingly, included within that agenda were references to both climate change and energy. These had been identified by Joël Reland of the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) research centre in advance of the meeting as being something to watch for as neglected, but highly viable areas, for greater cooperation within the existing agreement architecture, and of potentially mutual interest to both sides.
But ‘pace’ will indeed matter. For example, the ongoing development of both UK and EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and associated Emission Trading Systems (ETS) means that decisions about their possible linkage, a perfectly realistic possibility within the TCA framework, will soon become pressing. More generally, as economics commentator Simon Nixon argued in a recent post on his Wealth of Nations substack, emerging EU plans to revive EU competitiveness are likely to have major implications for the UK. In short, any reset of relations with the EU will not occur against a static background.
The main substantive announcement in the joint statement was of agreement to begin holding regular EU-UK summits, starting early next year. Anton Spisak of the Centre for European Reform, and a seasoned analyst of Brexit, pointed out that the significance of this should not be downplayed, given the unwillingness of both parties to entertain the idea in the past. Small as it may be, it is a sign of progress, and was welcomed as such by the European Movement UK.*
Testing questions for the ‘reset’
How far that progress goes, and what it consists of, remains to be seen, not least because, as I discussed in a recent post, it’s unclear what the government means by ‘the reset’. But, whatever its intentions, many commentaries on the Brussels’ meeting focused on UKICE Director Professor Anand Menon’s remark that to pursue them the UK needs to show the EU “a token of good faith” by agreeing to a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS). Yet, beyond the obvious fact that this would do much to enhance the credibility of the UK’s commitment to a genuine reset, what I have not seen discussed is exactly why such a gesture is needed and what it would betoken.
I think the answer to that is bound up with the entire post-Brexit question. To what extent has the UK, not just in its government but in its wider political culture, banished or at least decisively marginalized ‘Brexitism’? I’ve argued in the past that it is this which will be the key test for the viability of any idea of ultimately joining the EU or the single market. It isn’t enough for there to be majority support for doing so in the opinion polls. The credibility question, for the EU, is whether or not there is any danger that a move to join would subsequently be reversed, and the trauma of Brexit repeated. If there is such a danger, there is no attraction for the EU in entertaining UK accession.
That is not in prospect, but the same argument applies, though arguably to a lesser extent, to the far more limited aspirations for rapprochement envisaged by the current government. To what extent can they be taken as a reliable, permanent, feature of UK-EU relations? Or will this ‘reset’ be followed, a few years down the line, by another reset, back in the direction of the Brexit Ultras’ desire for separation, antagonism, maximum distance, and ‘sovereignty’ above all else? Is the UK now, in fact, a reliable interlocutor again, or is the Brexit virus liable to break out again, as shingles may for anyone who has had a bout of chicken pox?
In this sense, complaints that the EU’s original proposal for a YMS deal were made at a time that was unhelpful (£) to the then Labour opposition missed the point: these questions aren’t (just) about any particular party or government, but about the British polity. If the EU still has to tip-toe around the Brexit eggshells of UK politics, then that in itself answers the question of whether or not Brexitism has been marginalized.
There is also a deeper, or, anyway, different version of this same question, which is also highly germane to the viability of a substantive reset in relations. Brexit aside, the UK’s attitude to the EU during the years in which it was a member was very much characterized by grudging transactionalism, rather than by any commitment to European ideals. Brussels was the place the UK went to bang the table with a handbag, and extract the most it could whilst giving the least possible in return. Now that the UK is outside, is that still the approach, rather than, as a reset might imply, one of genuine partnership?
Oddly, and perhaps unintentionally, the comments of some ‘post-Brexit realists’, who, whilst understanding very well the folly of Brexit, discuss Labour’s reset in terms of negotiating strategies and ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ objectives, reinforce the impression that this transactionalism persists. At all events, a genuine reset needs to entail more than regret about the way in which May, Davis, Johnson, and Frost went about divorce proceedings. If the marriage is to be replaced by friendship, it is also necessary for there to be a genuine desire to avoid repeating the behaviour which preceded the divorce.
The YMS test
On these questions, YMS is quite a good test to set, relating as it does to the neuralgic issue of immigration which played such a central role in the vote for Brexit. YMS manifestly doesn’t cross the Labour red line on the restoration of freedom of movement of people, so if the government still sees it as too politically toxic to pursue that suggests two, related, things. One is that within the British polity, generally, the experience of Brexit has still not lanced the populist boil about immigration. The other is that the Labour government is not minded to challenge, but to accept, the orthodoxy of anti-immigration sentiment.
It would seem as if that test has already been failed. Unsurprisingly, anti-immigration politics still suffuses Farage’s Reform Party as, hardly any more unsurprisingly, it does the Tory Party, whoever its new leader turns out to be. The Tories did have the possibility of saying that, with Brexit, they had delivered the ‘points-based’ system which Brexiters like Farage used to say was all they wanted. They could then have initiated the ‘honest conversation’ everyone says they want to have about immigration, for example by decoupling it from asylum-seeking, and by challenging the voters about their view that immigration in general should be significantly reduced whilst those same voters, including Conservative voters, do not support reductions in almost every specific category of immigration. But, whether from fear of Reform, their own preferences, or some combination of the two, the Tories have not chosen to take this opportunity.
Nor is there any sign that the Labour government will do so. That clearly extends even to YMS, with reports that the cabinet is split over whether to agree to it, and identifying Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as the main opponent. Cooper played a pivotal and praiseworthy role in preventing Boris Johnson’s government enacting a ‘no deal Brexit’, and a courageous one, too, given the horrendous abuse and threats she faced. So it might be tempting to see her stance on YMS as the latest example of the Home Office capturing its Secretary of State. After all, Theresa May went from challenging her party to stop being ‘nasty’ to being a distinctly nasty Home Secretary, and the department seems to have had similarly radicalizing effect on one-time Immigration Minister, then Tory leadership candidate, Robert Jenrick.
In fact, Cooper has been arguing against freedom of movement since at least December 2016. And although she must know very well that YMS would not mean anything like its restoration she insists that the EU “see this in the context of free movement”, whatever that is supposed to mean, or why it even affects the issue. But it isn’t just Cooper. Starmer, too, despite being enthusiastic about the case for freedom of movement as recently as January 2020, is reported to fear the reaction from the pro-Brexit press to a YMS deal. So even on this quite limited measure it seems Labour have no appetite to take on Brexitism, thus failing first part of the YMS test, namely, whether has Brexitism been marginalized.
This does not mean that YMS will not be agreed in the end. Many people (including me, for what it is worth) expect that it will be. However, the consequence of having failed the first test is that, if and when YMS is agreed, the UK will also fail the second test. For if it is agreed as, or is presented as having been agreed as, part of some quid pro quo deal to obtain some softening of the economic damage of Brexit, such as an SPS deal, then it will be clear that the UK’s relationship with the EU remains within the same transactionalist frame as it has always been. That needn’t preclude a ‘reset’ but places limits upon it, and defines the future ‘partnership’ in relatively shallow terms.
The ECHR test
Whilst the YMS is a good test of the question of whether the UK has left Brexitism behind, there is a different test, which is whether the UK is likely to go even further down the path it took with Brexit by embracing a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its associated Court. That, too, is largely bound up with immigration, to the extent that ECHR derogation is almost invariably presented as being a means of ‘stopping the small boats’ (in this sense, it is also bound up with the failure to differentiate immigration from asylum-seeking).
Here the text of the Starmer-von der Leyen statement was revealing in “re-affirming” the parties’ mutual commitment to the Convention. It’s not clear that Rishi Sunak could have done the same thing, given his repeated pandering to the possibility of derogation over the ‘Rwanda plan’. By contrast, on this, Starmer’s resolve is unequivocal: a government under his leadership will never leave the ECHR. Given all his priors, it is unthinkable that he will renege on this.
However, it is very far from obvious that this is the settled view of the British polity. Again, it is unsurprising that Farage and Reform UK are adamantly opposed to ECHR membership, whilst support for it within the Tory Party is fragile. Of the remaining leadership candidates, Robert Jenrick has unreservedly advocated leaving and, despite having initially rejected the idea, Kemi Badenoch now says that she would consider doing so.
Whichever of them wins will undoubtedly find much support for making leaving the ECHR official party policy, since doing so is now an article of faith to those on the right. At the same time, former candidate Tom Tugendhat’s foolish attempt to court the right by contingently supporting leaving indicates that even on the more ‘centrist’ wing of the party it is no longer seen as unthinkable. At the very least, his having done so will have weakened what remains of the One Nation Tories’ ability to oppose it. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, with his usual opportunism, this week called for a referendum on membership.
So it certainly can’t be said, despite all the miseries that Brexit has caused, and despite its unpopularity with the public, that Brexit 2.0 can be ruled out, or that demands for it will be confined to the margins of politics. That seems all the more the case given the faltering first 100 days of the Labour administration. Of course, it is too early to judge, but the possibility of a two-term hegemony, in which Labour might re-write British politics, looks less likely now than it did in the immediate aftermath of the election, whilst the possibility of a disillusioned electorate turning to nationalist populism has become more feasible.
The Gibraltar test
Whatever the truth of that turns out to be, it is abundantly clear that the populist and pro-Brexit media has not been cowed by the new government, and continues to exert a very considerable influence upon it. Many believed that a huge Labour majority would somewhat tame that media, for the general reason that the centre of political gravity would have shifted, and the specific one that journalists would become somewhat beholden to the new regime.
That hasn’t really happened, and certainly not to the extent that it did in 1997, with the result that Starmer’s government has immediately become embroiled in controversies, leaks and scandals (some of them highly confected), and has already been forced to engage in a domestic re-set. That has multiple implications, including for the prospects of a ‘reset’ of relations with the EU.
A clear example was the furore over the announcement that the UK has agreed to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This is itself, in part, a Brexit story because, as the BBC report of it mentioned, Brexit meant that many EU nations were no longer prepared to back the UK’s case for retaining control of the territory. It’s a point that Brexiters should heed, since it a reminder of how Brexit has weakened the UK geo-politically as well as economically.
However, more to the present point is the way that the agreement was represented by Brexiters and the right-wing press as showing “weakness” and even “treason”, ignoring the fact that the negotiations which led to the agreement had been started by the previous Tory government. This was then linked to ridiculous claims (ridiculous as there is zero connection) that it would be followed by similar deals to cede sovereignty of the Falklands and Gibraltar (£).
It’s the latter claim which relates most directly to Brexit, since the post-Brexit situation of Gibraltar remains unresolved and under negotiation, and resolving it is, in itself, now a test of Starmer’s desire for a reset with the EU. In principle this is becoming urgent, with the new Entry/Exit System (EES) Schengen border controls due to begin in early November although, as I write, reports are confirming the recent rumours that these will be postponed again. But the new controls will, eventually, happen and this matters, since a key issue is maintaining an open border between Gibraltar and Spain, and the associated question of the management of border controls at Gibraltar’s port and airport (which is also an RAF base).
The last time I discussed Gibraltar in detail on this blog was in April, when it seemed that a deal was imminent. A deal, that is, brokered by the Tory government. Since then, reports of the negotiations have been sparse, although last weekend it emerged (£) that the government was about to make formal complaints to Spain about its military overflights of the territory, which doesn’t augur well. But if, and I would think when, a deal is done it will almost certainly involve ‘concessions’ to the EU and Spain, reportedly already made by the previous government, on who undertakes border controls.
This will be the cue for Brexiters to cry ‘betrayal’, as they would have done under the Tories but now, no doubt, with the support of the Tory leadership. Such protest may be marginal, and easily batted away by the government. But the reaction to the Chagos agreement suggests the possibility of a Gibraltar deal being woven into a wider narrative of Starmer being ‘weak’ and ‘not standing up for’ Britain, both generally and in relation to the EU. If that narrative gains ground it will be another indication that Brexitism exerts a profound hold on the UK, whatever its government may be.
Still not done
The question of how Brexit will continue to unfold is a crucial one for our country, so it was with considerable regret that I learned that Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downsides Dossier is to be discontinued. It has been a huge, and I think unique, resource for collating media reports about the practical consequences of Brexit, and I’ve referred to it many times.
That isn’t the only loss. At the high-profile end of things, the decision to end the European Scrutiny Committee, for all its problems, without any replacement is a big setback for scrutiny and accountability of the government’s post-Brexit policies, as Jill Rutter and Hannah White of the Institute for Government explain. I’m particularly saddened by the decision to stop funding UKICE from April 2025. UKICE has been a consistently outstanding source of reliable data, incisive analysis, and intelligent comment about Brexit, and an invaluable public resource, not least for this blog where I have cited its work in, very possibly, the majority of posts.
At, if they will forgive me, the lower-profile end of the spectrum, Nick Tyrone has now ended his ‘Week in Brexitland’ newsletter, and Gerhard Schnyder has ended regular posts of his Brexit Impact Tracker blog. Again, I have often cited these sources on this blog and it is a shame that they are gone.
These losses contribute to a growing sense that Brexit (somewhat like Covid) is regarded if not as over, then as something that just has to be put up with, like the British, or more accurately English, weather. It’s a sense I tried to capture in more detail about a year ago in my post entitled “mustn’t grumble”. So continuing with this blog, even on its new fortnightly basis, feels like ploughing an increasingly lonely furrow, but I think it is still a worthwhile one. And this week, just over eight years since I launched it, the blog received its ten millionth visit, and the readership via email sign-ups continues to hold up, so hopefully I am not the only one to think so.
After all, as this post shows, Brexit is very far from ‘being done’, and that was without even mentioning the latest postponement to an aspect of import controls, this time that of digital product safety declarations. And as this post also shows, we are also far from done with Brexitism.
*Another small step of note was the this week announcement of a new agreement between the UK’s Office of National Statistics and EU’s Eurostat, severed since Brexit. It’s not really an example of ‘the reset’, since it was anticipated by the TCA and has been under discussion for a while, but it has a significance beyond itself in that it facilitates UK participation in EU programmes such as Horizon Europe. At the same time, it’s yet another reminder of the extent to which Brexit has caused so many utterly pointless, yet damaging, ruptures, large and small.
Friday, 28 June 2024
We're still processing the Brexit rupture
I wrote in last week’s post about the sense of the post-Brexit period having beeen characterized by a new kind of political ‘game’. That is something which seems to have only just occurred to many political commentators judging by the way that Andrew Neil has belatedly worked out “how Brexit broke the Tory Party” and Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times has started puzzling over why our leaders don’t want to talk about Brexit (£). And these are supposedly two of the leading political journalists in the country, at the cutting-edge of political analysis.
My point isn’t meant to be the tedious, self-important moan that I’ve been saying these kinds of things for years, and anyway I’m certainly not the only person to have done so. Others include plenty of high-profile columnists in established media outlets, so my criticism also isn’t a moan about ‘the mainstream media’, which is considerably more variegated than that over-used and rather lazy term recognizes. Rather, it’s a criticism of the dominant approach to political reporting, exemplified by people like Neil and Shipman, or, say, BBC Political Editor Chris Mason, within, but not co-extensive with, the mainstream media.
It’s an approach which is so mired in the weeds of politics as a series of moves on the chess board that the bigger picture of the board, let alone the very rules of the game, are left relatively unexamined. That failure derives not so much from the commonly made charge that such an approach over-focuses on personalities, but from the way that it over-focuses on ‘events’ to the detriment of patterns, whilst assuming that the underlying verities of political life are unchanging, almost eternal. It ignores, or at least is slow to recognize, what Rafael Behr eloquently called “the roiling churn under a still crust” in his analysis of the election.
Perhaps that is inevitable in political reporting, per se, but it is inadequate in terms of political analysis, and would be with or without Brexit. However, Brexit has brought its inadequacy into particularly sharp relief.
How Brexit ruptured British politics
The careless injection of a mechanism of direct democracy, the referendum, into a system that was otherwise one of representative, parliamentary, democracy constituted a core rupture in modern British politics. That would probably not have been the case had ‘remain’ won, to the extent that remaining would have meant ‘no change’ – that is, it would not have had to have been ‘enacted’ – in exactly the same way as every previous UK-wide referendum. It became such a rupture because ‘leave’ won, especially as it did so by only a slender majority (and only in two of the UK’s constituent parts), against the official policy of the governing party and most of its (then) MPs; against the policy of all of the opposition parties in the House of Commons; and, hence, against the desire of the vast majority of all MPs at the time.
That in itself marked a break with ‘normal’ politics, but to it was added the fact that the particular time of the referendum, the particular issue it concerned, and the way that issue came to be the subject of a referendum, were all bound up with a contestation between ‘normal’ politics and a populist politics defined by a rejection of political norms. That the populist cause won such a referendum, the design of which flowed largely from Cameron’s desire to kill off the challenge of populists from outside the governing party, and to both placate and marginalize those within it, created a wholly new political world, even though all the old, familiar trappings and rituals of politics have persisted.
Yet, even now, the dominant approach to political reporting seems not to understand this change. Of course, other important things have happened since 2016, some of which, most obviously the pandemic, would have been challenging to political normality in themselves. And, of course, had the UK stayed in the EU there would have been all sorts of crises and changes. But it is the rupture of Brexit which underlies how politics since then has, in fact, developed. It’s in that sense that, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we are in “the experimental laboratory of post-Brexit politics”.
The election: more than numbers
The current election is the latest expression of that (including the very fact of its near silence about Brexit). Post-referendum politics has seen unprecedented events, including the unlawful prorogation, as well as the extraordinary churn of Tory Prime Ministers. This election, too, looks set to deliver an extraordinary outcome. Even a narrow Labour victory would be remarkable, from its 2019 position, let alone the predicted landslide. Equally remarkable is the prospect of an historic fracturing of the coalition of Tory voters. But this rapid succession of unprecedented ‘events’ is not a coincidence. They form a pattern, and are explicable, albeit they were not necessarily predictable, in terms of the Brexit rupture, but puzzling to those who have not grasped it.
I can’t help thinking, though I suppose it might have happened anyway, that this is the reason for the apparently endless volume of polling, and the proliferation of ever more sophisticated methods of conducting polls, and of data visualization to report the results, which has characterized this election. I certainly don’t recall it featuring to such an extent at previous elections, even as recently as that of 2019. This has generated a whole sub-industry of comment about the polls, whether they can really be right, and what they mean if they are. It is as if there is an almost desperate attempt to ‘get a hold’ on what is happening, and that ‘the numbers’ will give the answer, to the point of overkill.
Even as a junkie for that kind of stuff, I now find myself skipping over yet another attempt to cut the data in some new and jazzy way. In any case, even without this explosion of polling data analysis, and without denying that some of it can be helpful to understanding politics, I don’t think that, in and of itself, it constitutes political analysis, especially analysis of the big picture shift which we’ve been living through. A couple of examples from this week illustrate this.
Analyzing the Tory collapse
One is an article in the Financial Times about how voters in prosperous parts of southern England who would previously have voted Tory are turning away from the party, including what might once have been called ‘the professional classes’, whether affluent or not. There’s nothing wrong with the article in itself. It makes plenty of excellent points. But whilst it and similar articles (such as Andrew Neil’s) are appearing now in response to election polling data about the demise of the Tories, the underlying issues they discuss have been evident since pretty much the day after the Brexit referendum, the eighth anniversary of which fell this week.
Most obvious was the way that so much of support for Brexit was bound up with a sneering disdain for, indeed, ‘the professional classes’ and, more generally, for all forms of expertise and education (except, ironically, when manifested in the cartoon-patrician Latinisms of Rees-Mogg and Johnson). That extended beyond the traditional Tory scorn for ‘politically correct’ academics and social workers to encompass lawyers, judges, civil servants, business people, and even, eventually, bond market traders. All were cast, first, as enemies of Brexit and, then, as exemplars of the woke elite, the more so if they lived in or near London. Unsurprisingly, if a political party keeps telling people that it loathes them, those people begin to become disinclined to vote for that party.
However, the peculiar political rupture of Brexit inflected this in a very particular way. Back in September 2017, I wrote about “a new Brexit political correctness” in which it had become virtually unsayable that those who most supported Brexit had no idea how to undertake it, and it fell mainly to those who had opposed it to deliver it. That is, the Brexiters were dependent upon the very people they despised as the educated, professional elite, and at the very moment they were most vociferously denouncing them as such, to deliver the thing they most wanted. That applied most obviously to civil servants, but it has also been the case for leaders and managers in business, as well as those in civil society, including universities. And perhaps no profession has been needed to enact Brexit as much as the legal profession.
So, in very broad terms, the Brexit Tories were saying to whole swathes of the middle-class, many of whom were amongst its habitual voters, not only that they were loathsome, and not only that they had to ‘suck up’ Brexit, but that they had to make it work. And then, on top of that, because so much of what the Brexiters had promised was undeliverable, and couldn’t be ‘made to work’, they were pilloried all over again for ‘sabotaging’ Brexit, if only through lack of ‘true belief’.
Along with that, whereas Tories had traditionally abjured what they called ‘the politics of envy’ they heavily invested in it when it came to Brexit. This was a slightly different, though sometimes overlapping, attack on the ‘remainer elite’ (which, of course, numbered half the country, and far more than half of its younger inhabitants) for being not just woke, liberal-minded, and unpatriotic but also for being economically privileged.
Thus remainers’ opposition to Brexit was often explained by their desire to be able to employ Bulgarian nannies, to have holiday homes in Europe, or even just for ease of travel when holidaying in Europe. In this, they took aim not just at middle-class professionals but also at the kind of ‘aspirational’ working class voters who had been an important part of the Tory voting coalition, especially under Thatcher, ignoring that child care, foreign travel, and even foreign holiday homes were not just the purview of a tiny metropolitan elite.
Such a politics might work for the purposes of mobilizing voters in the referendum, as the Vote Leave campaign showed. It might also work for mobilizing populist grievance against the government, as the UKIP vote had showed. But for a Conservative party to do so, and moreover to do so whilst in government, was always likely to end in disaster. The populist grievance would, in its nature, be disposed to turn on the governing party, all the more so in the context of its inevitable failure to deliver ‘true Brexit’, and all the more so again with so many Conservative MPs denouncing their party as ‘not really Conservative’. Meanwhile, those parts of what had once been the Tory voting base which had been so bitterly reviled by post-Brexit Conservative populism were likely to desert them.
The peculiar circumstances of 2019, including Farage’s decision not to oppose the Tories, and their voters’ fear of Corbynism, covered this over. But just because it didn’t show up in the electoral numbers, the underlying analysis of what Brexit had done to Tory politics still held good. That is now apparent in the polling numbers because the circumstances of 2019 have changed and, having failed to do the underlying analysis, political reporters are suddenly shocked by the pincer movement on the Tory vote.
Some of that would have happened anyway, with or without Brexit (for example because of demographic and educational trends). But the current prospect of meltdown, or even annihilation, for all that it may only be showing up in opinion polls now, grew organically from Brexit and, although never inevitable, was always probable. Hinc illae lacrimae, as Rees-Mogg might put it.
Analyzing Farage’s blunder
Quite how many and how salty Rees-Mogg’s tears will be remains to be seen, and will depend on factors including whether the Labour vote holds up, turnout, the extent of tactical voting, and may well be decisively affected by really quite small numbers of voters in quite a large number of seats. It also, of course, depends on how Farage and Reform fare.
The media focus on the re-emergence of Farage and the rise in support for his party, as if these were shock developments, adding piquancy to an otherwise predictable election, is another example of the over-focus on ‘events’ and of polling-driven reporting. Having failed to grasp the rupture of the referendum, the dominant media assumption was that Farage was an old story, and Reform a lingering irrelevance. In fact, they’ve been an ongoing thread in the pattern of post-Brexit politics.
There’s much that could be said about that, but here I will just focus on the second of this week’s stories I want to discuss in this post, the row provoked by his comments about Ukraine, Putin, the EU and NATO. It was unusual, because Farage doesn’t make many mis-steps, and this was a mis-step rather than yet another example of a populist politician deliberately generating outrage. It emboldened the Tories finally to criticize him, sometimes quite caustically, and it’s worth understanding why they felt able to do so. It wasn’t as if, as he himself reminded us, he hadn’t said similar things before, and this, again, is an example of how post-Brexit political reporting has not kept pace with the political landscape: Farage has been an open apologist for Putin for years, but that has been only sporadically noticed within the dominant approach to political reporting.
I’ll come back to that, but as to why the Tories, including Boris Johnson, felt able to attack him, that is largely because of his criticism of NATO. Such criticism is very common within alt-right, populist circles in the US within which Farage moves, but it doesn’t play nearly so well in the UK, even amongst Reform voters and Brexiters. For many of them, NATO is bound up with their sense of patriotism, partly because it is seen as the lineal descendent of the Second World War alliance (that with Russia having largely been erased from memory by the Cold War), and especially of the D-Day landings (giving Farage’s blunder a resonance with Sunak’s own recent one). It was also very much central to the Brexiters’ case that the UK could safely leave the EU since its primary security alliance lay in NATO.
Had Farage criticized only the EU’s eastwards expansion for ‘provoking’ Putin to invade Ukraine, grotesque as that would have been, it perhaps wouldn’t have caused him quite so many problems. Apart from anything else, that is a view shared by many Brexiters and is what Johnson said at the time of the annexation of Crimea. In an angry reaction to Johnson’s criticism of his comments, Farage reminded his supporters of this. But that may have been a mis-step too, to the extent that some Reform voters are even more besotted with Johnson than they are with Farage. In any case, Johnson’s focus had been the EU, not NATO, and it was notable that, subsequent to his original comments, Farage, too, chose to focus on that aspect.
However, even that is much less safe ground than it was at the time of the annexation of Crimea. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine and Zelensky enjoy a level of support in the UK, including on the populist right, which also makes the context different to the US. Headlines, such as the Mail’s “Zelensky: Farage is infected with the ‘virus of Putin’”, clearly rattled Farage. For once, he had misjudged his audience, even to the extent of earning a reprimand from the former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, also published in the Mail, and criticism in the Spectator and the Telegraph.
That matters for a party which sets such store by its support for the armed forces, and is also unused to criticism from the pro-Brexit press. One reason that has happened is that the whole episode laid bare the peculiar consonance between the pro-Putin, anti-NATO stance of much of the populist right, internationally, and that of the Corbynite left, which the British populist right abjures (apart from those in that weird little political space where neo-communism, neo-fascism and libertarianism meet, exemplified by Spiked Online, which came out in defence of Farage this week).
Whether this will be reflected in falling support for Farage or Reform in the opinion polls, or next week’s election, is not clear (I doubt any effect will be easy to separate from general noise/ variance, or other factors such as the growing evidence of extensive racism within the party). But, in line with my point that political analysis should be driven by more than polling, or even election, data, I want to come back to why his well-worn views caused the stir they did, and why this is not just of passing significance.
The answer is that they arose in the context of Farage being interviewed as a party leader, and a candidate to be an MP, by the BBC’s Nick Robinson. That may be related to the polls, of course, but he led UKIP when they were high in the polls, too, and he has stood as an MP before. Now, though, he does so whilst making the demand to be treated as the leader of the opposition, a demand extending to wanting to appear alongside Sunak, Starmer, and Davey in a leaders’ debate. He also does so whilst threatening, perhaps not entirely vainly, to be in a position to effect a takeover of the Tory Party (£) after the election. The hubris that drives him to insist on his own importance brings with it the possibility of nemesis through the scrutiny of being treated as important.
All this may fizzle out, depending on the election result, including in Clacton, and the scale of support for Reform. In that sense, the numbers matter. But, whatever the numbers next week, the analysis of the basic dynamic of populism in post-Brexit politics will still exist. So Farage’s difficulties this week are a harbinger of the future. In a similar way to how the Tories found that governing from an insurrectionist posture isn’t viable, so will Farage find, if he becomes a player in post-election opposition politics, that this is very different to what he has faced before.
Crucially, though, all this holds true even if Farage disappears from the scene, for it will apply in one form or another to any populist leader or movement that may emerge from the expected electoral wreckage of the Tory Party. We even know when we’ll see the very first installment of that: Tuesday 9 July, when a ‘PopCon’ post-election event has already been scheduled. We don’t know who the participants will be, but we do know it will happen whoever they are.
The post-Brexit political process
It’s now well-understood that Brexit was a process, not an event. What is perhaps less well-understood is that the same is true of post-Brexit politics. I’ve described 2016 as a political rupture, but that does not mean it was a single moment. Rather, it was like an earthquake with multiple aftershocks, by no means all of them predictable, heralding an on-going process, but also entailing a long ‘processing’, which is still underway, of what happened. That has been missed in the dominant narrative of political reporting, which treats Brexit as ‘over’ and seems to regard ‘going on about it’ as slightly lacking in sophistication, if not downright obsessive.
By the time of next week’s post (which, for this reason, is likely to be later in the day than usual) we will know the election result. A Labour victory seems certain and, although the scale of that victory is still hard to predict, it is likely to be extensive enough that we will hear much of it being a huge political ‘event’. That may well be true in terms of ‘the numbers’, but it would be better understood as a particular, albeit important, moment within the unfolding of post-Brexit politics; rooted in the complex story of what has happened since 2016 and laying the ground for the continuation of that story.
It shouldn’t be assumed that this is the prelude to greater political stability. Nick Tyrone, in his latest Week in Brexitland substack, makes an interesting direct comparison between the 2016 referendum vote and this election, suggesting that both show an angry, almost nihilistic, desire to smash political norms. Matthew d’Ancona made a very similar point in this week’s New European, and it is compatible with Behr’s identification of the “roiling churn” beneath the surface of this election.
I’m sure there’s an element of truth in it, which prompts the important question of where that anger will be focused next. However, it’s surely equally true that this election shows the appeal, which Labour has tried to tap in to, of putting ‘an end to the chaos’. My point is that in both these respects, and others, the election is part of the ongoing aftershocks of the Brexit rupture. The lab is still open and the experiment is far from being over.
My point isn’t meant to be the tedious, self-important moan that I’ve been saying these kinds of things for years, and anyway I’m certainly not the only person to have done so. Others include plenty of high-profile columnists in established media outlets, so my criticism also isn’t a moan about ‘the mainstream media’, which is considerably more variegated than that over-used and rather lazy term recognizes. Rather, it’s a criticism of the dominant approach to political reporting, exemplified by people like Neil and Shipman, or, say, BBC Political Editor Chris Mason, within, but not co-extensive with, the mainstream media.
It’s an approach which is so mired in the weeds of politics as a series of moves on the chess board that the bigger picture of the board, let alone the very rules of the game, are left relatively unexamined. That failure derives not so much from the commonly made charge that such an approach over-focuses on personalities, but from the way that it over-focuses on ‘events’ to the detriment of patterns, whilst assuming that the underlying verities of political life are unchanging, almost eternal. It ignores, or at least is slow to recognize, what Rafael Behr eloquently called “the roiling churn under a still crust” in his analysis of the election.
Perhaps that is inevitable in political reporting, per se, but it is inadequate in terms of political analysis, and would be with or without Brexit. However, Brexit has brought its inadequacy into particularly sharp relief.
How Brexit ruptured British politics
The careless injection of a mechanism of direct democracy, the referendum, into a system that was otherwise one of representative, parliamentary, democracy constituted a core rupture in modern British politics. That would probably not have been the case had ‘remain’ won, to the extent that remaining would have meant ‘no change’ – that is, it would not have had to have been ‘enacted’ – in exactly the same way as every previous UK-wide referendum. It became such a rupture because ‘leave’ won, especially as it did so by only a slender majority (and only in two of the UK’s constituent parts), against the official policy of the governing party and most of its (then) MPs; against the policy of all of the opposition parties in the House of Commons; and, hence, against the desire of the vast majority of all MPs at the time.
That in itself marked a break with ‘normal’ politics, but to it was added the fact that the particular time of the referendum, the particular issue it concerned, and the way that issue came to be the subject of a referendum, were all bound up with a contestation between ‘normal’ politics and a populist politics defined by a rejection of political norms. That the populist cause won such a referendum, the design of which flowed largely from Cameron’s desire to kill off the challenge of populists from outside the governing party, and to both placate and marginalize those within it, created a wholly new political world, even though all the old, familiar trappings and rituals of politics have persisted.
Yet, even now, the dominant approach to political reporting seems not to understand this change. Of course, other important things have happened since 2016, some of which, most obviously the pandemic, would have been challenging to political normality in themselves. And, of course, had the UK stayed in the EU there would have been all sorts of crises and changes. But it is the rupture of Brexit which underlies how politics since then has, in fact, developed. It’s in that sense that, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we are in “the experimental laboratory of post-Brexit politics”.
The election: more than numbers
The current election is the latest expression of that (including the very fact of its near silence about Brexit). Post-referendum politics has seen unprecedented events, including the unlawful prorogation, as well as the extraordinary churn of Tory Prime Ministers. This election, too, looks set to deliver an extraordinary outcome. Even a narrow Labour victory would be remarkable, from its 2019 position, let alone the predicted landslide. Equally remarkable is the prospect of an historic fracturing of the coalition of Tory voters. But this rapid succession of unprecedented ‘events’ is not a coincidence. They form a pattern, and are explicable, albeit they were not necessarily predictable, in terms of the Brexit rupture, but puzzling to those who have not grasped it.
I can’t help thinking, though I suppose it might have happened anyway, that this is the reason for the apparently endless volume of polling, and the proliferation of ever more sophisticated methods of conducting polls, and of data visualization to report the results, which has characterized this election. I certainly don’t recall it featuring to such an extent at previous elections, even as recently as that of 2019. This has generated a whole sub-industry of comment about the polls, whether they can really be right, and what they mean if they are. It is as if there is an almost desperate attempt to ‘get a hold’ on what is happening, and that ‘the numbers’ will give the answer, to the point of overkill.
Even as a junkie for that kind of stuff, I now find myself skipping over yet another attempt to cut the data in some new and jazzy way. In any case, even without this explosion of polling data analysis, and without denying that some of it can be helpful to understanding politics, I don’t think that, in and of itself, it constitutes political analysis, especially analysis of the big picture shift which we’ve been living through. A couple of examples from this week illustrate this.
Analyzing the Tory collapse
One is an article in the Financial Times about how voters in prosperous parts of southern England who would previously have voted Tory are turning away from the party, including what might once have been called ‘the professional classes’, whether affluent or not. There’s nothing wrong with the article in itself. It makes plenty of excellent points. But whilst it and similar articles (such as Andrew Neil’s) are appearing now in response to election polling data about the demise of the Tories, the underlying issues they discuss have been evident since pretty much the day after the Brexit referendum, the eighth anniversary of which fell this week.
Most obvious was the way that so much of support for Brexit was bound up with a sneering disdain for, indeed, ‘the professional classes’ and, more generally, for all forms of expertise and education (except, ironically, when manifested in the cartoon-patrician Latinisms of Rees-Mogg and Johnson). That extended beyond the traditional Tory scorn for ‘politically correct’ academics and social workers to encompass lawyers, judges, civil servants, business people, and even, eventually, bond market traders. All were cast, first, as enemies of Brexit and, then, as exemplars of the woke elite, the more so if they lived in or near London. Unsurprisingly, if a political party keeps telling people that it loathes them, those people begin to become disinclined to vote for that party.
However, the peculiar political rupture of Brexit inflected this in a very particular way. Back in September 2017, I wrote about “a new Brexit political correctness” in which it had become virtually unsayable that those who most supported Brexit had no idea how to undertake it, and it fell mainly to those who had opposed it to deliver it. That is, the Brexiters were dependent upon the very people they despised as the educated, professional elite, and at the very moment they were most vociferously denouncing them as such, to deliver the thing they most wanted. That applied most obviously to civil servants, but it has also been the case for leaders and managers in business, as well as those in civil society, including universities. And perhaps no profession has been needed to enact Brexit as much as the legal profession.
So, in very broad terms, the Brexit Tories were saying to whole swathes of the middle-class, many of whom were amongst its habitual voters, not only that they were loathsome, and not only that they had to ‘suck up’ Brexit, but that they had to make it work. And then, on top of that, because so much of what the Brexiters had promised was undeliverable, and couldn’t be ‘made to work’, they were pilloried all over again for ‘sabotaging’ Brexit, if only through lack of ‘true belief’.
Along with that, whereas Tories had traditionally abjured what they called ‘the politics of envy’ they heavily invested in it when it came to Brexit. This was a slightly different, though sometimes overlapping, attack on the ‘remainer elite’ (which, of course, numbered half the country, and far more than half of its younger inhabitants) for being not just woke, liberal-minded, and unpatriotic but also for being economically privileged.
Thus remainers’ opposition to Brexit was often explained by their desire to be able to employ Bulgarian nannies, to have holiday homes in Europe, or even just for ease of travel when holidaying in Europe. In this, they took aim not just at middle-class professionals but also at the kind of ‘aspirational’ working class voters who had been an important part of the Tory voting coalition, especially under Thatcher, ignoring that child care, foreign travel, and even foreign holiday homes were not just the purview of a tiny metropolitan elite.
Such a politics might work for the purposes of mobilizing voters in the referendum, as the Vote Leave campaign showed. It might also work for mobilizing populist grievance against the government, as the UKIP vote had showed. But for a Conservative party to do so, and moreover to do so whilst in government, was always likely to end in disaster. The populist grievance would, in its nature, be disposed to turn on the governing party, all the more so in the context of its inevitable failure to deliver ‘true Brexit’, and all the more so again with so many Conservative MPs denouncing their party as ‘not really Conservative’. Meanwhile, those parts of what had once been the Tory voting base which had been so bitterly reviled by post-Brexit Conservative populism were likely to desert them.
The peculiar circumstances of 2019, including Farage’s decision not to oppose the Tories, and their voters’ fear of Corbynism, covered this over. But just because it didn’t show up in the electoral numbers, the underlying analysis of what Brexit had done to Tory politics still held good. That is now apparent in the polling numbers because the circumstances of 2019 have changed and, having failed to do the underlying analysis, political reporters are suddenly shocked by the pincer movement on the Tory vote.
Some of that would have happened anyway, with or without Brexit (for example because of demographic and educational trends). But the current prospect of meltdown, or even annihilation, for all that it may only be showing up in opinion polls now, grew organically from Brexit and, although never inevitable, was always probable. Hinc illae lacrimae, as Rees-Mogg might put it.
Analyzing Farage’s blunder
Quite how many and how salty Rees-Mogg’s tears will be remains to be seen, and will depend on factors including whether the Labour vote holds up, turnout, the extent of tactical voting, and may well be decisively affected by really quite small numbers of voters in quite a large number of seats. It also, of course, depends on how Farage and Reform fare.
The media focus on the re-emergence of Farage and the rise in support for his party, as if these were shock developments, adding piquancy to an otherwise predictable election, is another example of the over-focus on ‘events’ and of polling-driven reporting. Having failed to grasp the rupture of the referendum, the dominant media assumption was that Farage was an old story, and Reform a lingering irrelevance. In fact, they’ve been an ongoing thread in the pattern of post-Brexit politics.
There’s much that could be said about that, but here I will just focus on the second of this week’s stories I want to discuss in this post, the row provoked by his comments about Ukraine, Putin, the EU and NATO. It was unusual, because Farage doesn’t make many mis-steps, and this was a mis-step rather than yet another example of a populist politician deliberately generating outrage. It emboldened the Tories finally to criticize him, sometimes quite caustically, and it’s worth understanding why they felt able to do so. It wasn’t as if, as he himself reminded us, he hadn’t said similar things before, and this, again, is an example of how post-Brexit political reporting has not kept pace with the political landscape: Farage has been an open apologist for Putin for years, but that has been only sporadically noticed within the dominant approach to political reporting.
I’ll come back to that, but as to why the Tories, including Boris Johnson, felt able to attack him, that is largely because of his criticism of NATO. Such criticism is very common within alt-right, populist circles in the US within which Farage moves, but it doesn’t play nearly so well in the UK, even amongst Reform voters and Brexiters. For many of them, NATO is bound up with their sense of patriotism, partly because it is seen as the lineal descendent of the Second World War alliance (that with Russia having largely been erased from memory by the Cold War), and especially of the D-Day landings (giving Farage’s blunder a resonance with Sunak’s own recent one). It was also very much central to the Brexiters’ case that the UK could safely leave the EU since its primary security alliance lay in NATO.
Had Farage criticized only the EU’s eastwards expansion for ‘provoking’ Putin to invade Ukraine, grotesque as that would have been, it perhaps wouldn’t have caused him quite so many problems. Apart from anything else, that is a view shared by many Brexiters and is what Johnson said at the time of the annexation of Crimea. In an angry reaction to Johnson’s criticism of his comments, Farage reminded his supporters of this. But that may have been a mis-step too, to the extent that some Reform voters are even more besotted with Johnson than they are with Farage. In any case, Johnson’s focus had been the EU, not NATO, and it was notable that, subsequent to his original comments, Farage, too, chose to focus on that aspect.
However, even that is much less safe ground than it was at the time of the annexation of Crimea. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine and Zelensky enjoy a level of support in the UK, including on the populist right, which also makes the context different to the US. Headlines, such as the Mail’s “Zelensky: Farage is infected with the ‘virus of Putin’”, clearly rattled Farage. For once, he had misjudged his audience, even to the extent of earning a reprimand from the former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, also published in the Mail, and criticism in the Spectator and the Telegraph.
That matters for a party which sets such store by its support for the armed forces, and is also unused to criticism from the pro-Brexit press. One reason that has happened is that the whole episode laid bare the peculiar consonance between the pro-Putin, anti-NATO stance of much of the populist right, internationally, and that of the Corbynite left, which the British populist right abjures (apart from those in that weird little political space where neo-communism, neo-fascism and libertarianism meet, exemplified by Spiked Online, which came out in defence of Farage this week).
Whether this will be reflected in falling support for Farage or Reform in the opinion polls, or next week’s election, is not clear (I doubt any effect will be easy to separate from general noise/ variance, or other factors such as the growing evidence of extensive racism within the party). But, in line with my point that political analysis should be driven by more than polling, or even election, data, I want to come back to why his well-worn views caused the stir they did, and why this is not just of passing significance.
The answer is that they arose in the context of Farage being interviewed as a party leader, and a candidate to be an MP, by the BBC’s Nick Robinson. That may be related to the polls, of course, but he led UKIP when they were high in the polls, too, and he has stood as an MP before. Now, though, he does so whilst making the demand to be treated as the leader of the opposition, a demand extending to wanting to appear alongside Sunak, Starmer, and Davey in a leaders’ debate. He also does so whilst threatening, perhaps not entirely vainly, to be in a position to effect a takeover of the Tory Party (£) after the election. The hubris that drives him to insist on his own importance brings with it the possibility of nemesis through the scrutiny of being treated as important.
All this may fizzle out, depending on the election result, including in Clacton, and the scale of support for Reform. In that sense, the numbers matter. But, whatever the numbers next week, the analysis of the basic dynamic of populism in post-Brexit politics will still exist. So Farage’s difficulties this week are a harbinger of the future. In a similar way to how the Tories found that governing from an insurrectionist posture isn’t viable, so will Farage find, if he becomes a player in post-election opposition politics, that this is very different to what he has faced before.
Crucially, though, all this holds true even if Farage disappears from the scene, for it will apply in one form or another to any populist leader or movement that may emerge from the expected electoral wreckage of the Tory Party. We even know when we’ll see the very first installment of that: Tuesday 9 July, when a ‘PopCon’ post-election event has already been scheduled. We don’t know who the participants will be, but we do know it will happen whoever they are.
The post-Brexit political process
It’s now well-understood that Brexit was a process, not an event. What is perhaps less well-understood is that the same is true of post-Brexit politics. I’ve described 2016 as a political rupture, but that does not mean it was a single moment. Rather, it was like an earthquake with multiple aftershocks, by no means all of them predictable, heralding an on-going process, but also entailing a long ‘processing’, which is still underway, of what happened. That has been missed in the dominant narrative of political reporting, which treats Brexit as ‘over’ and seems to regard ‘going on about it’ as slightly lacking in sophistication, if not downright obsessive.
By the time of next week’s post (which, for this reason, is likely to be later in the day than usual) we will know the election result. A Labour victory seems certain and, although the scale of that victory is still hard to predict, it is likely to be extensive enough that we will hear much of it being a huge political ‘event’. That may well be true in terms of ‘the numbers’, but it would be better understood as a particular, albeit important, moment within the unfolding of post-Brexit politics; rooted in the complex story of what has happened since 2016 and laying the ground for the continuation of that story.
It shouldn’t be assumed that this is the prelude to greater political stability. Nick Tyrone, in his latest Week in Brexitland substack, makes an interesting direct comparison between the 2016 referendum vote and this election, suggesting that both show an angry, almost nihilistic, desire to smash political norms. Matthew d’Ancona made a very similar point in this week’s New European, and it is compatible with Behr’s identification of the “roiling churn” beneath the surface of this election.
I’m sure there’s an element of truth in it, which prompts the important question of where that anger will be focused next. However, it’s surely equally true that this election shows the appeal, which Labour has tried to tap in to, of putting ‘an end to the chaos’. My point is that in both these respects, and others, the election is part of the ongoing aftershocks of the Brexit rupture. The lab is still open and the experiment is far from being over.
Friday, 24 March 2023
Morrissey's Brexit
There’s really only been one major Brexit development this week, the vote on the Statutory Instrument to create the Stormont Brake as part of the Windsor Framework. If that sounds convoluted that’s because it is. This wasn’t about passing primary legislation, and there was only a short debate, and no amendments were allowed. It was not even about the entirety of the Windsor Framework (WF), although it seems that the government will treat it as such. Nor was there any possibility of the government losing the vote, as the Labour Party was pledged to support it.
What difference does it make?
Nevertheless, it was important in terms of how many, and who, would vote against. In the event, just twenty-nine did, of whom a mere twenty-two were Conservatives, with the others being DUP MPs plus the whipless, and increasingly unhinged, former Spartan Andrew Bridgen. The list of Tory rebels, by the way, includes some of the most disreputable and despicable politicians of our, and perhaps any, age. So it was a fairly puny revolt, and though it was notable that both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss joined it, what was more notable was that neither have the pull to have made it a significant challenge to Rishi Sunak. Johnson himself had to interrupt his ill-conceived defence against charges of having misled parliament, of which more below, in order to cast his vote.
It has been known for some time that the ERG’s membership has fallen, and the group is much less organized than in its 2018-19 heyday. Its members, or ex-members, are also split, and some of those in government, especially Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker, were closely involved in, and became advocates of, the WF. Indeed, in Baker’s case, that led to the one-time ‘Brexit hard man’ being thrown out of the ERG’s WhatsApp group whilst being described as a “little weasel” by Nigel Farage. As Robert Shrimsley, Chief UK Political Commentator of the Financial Times, observed, “the revolution eats its own children”. Perhaps more to the point, it is the latest example of the difference between taking responsibility for the realities of delivering Brexit and the luxury of espousing Brexit purity from the sidelines.
Even so, there are plenty of Brexiters on the Tory benches who are not ERG members but who might have been galvanized to rebel in different circumstances. Had there been enough to mean that the vote would have been lost without Labour support that would have been a significant embarrassment for Sunak, and a sign that the Brexit Ultras are still a force to be reckoned with, but there were not. It’s true that several Tory MPs didn’t vote, but it is impossible to tell how many of these were meaningful abstentions and how many were simply absences. In any case, abstention hardly bespeaks of Cromwellian resolve.
The day before, the ERG’s ludicrously-named, if not downright ludicrous, ‘Star Chamber’ had found the WF, including the Stormont Brake, to be unacceptable. But the fatal political flaw in this, as with all the Brexiter objections to the WF, is that everything they object to about it was also contained within the Northern Ireland Protocol itself, which they voted for. Not only that, but it was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ the 2019 Tory Government was elected to deliver. Now that the reformed Protocol has, effectively, been accepted, there is little realistic prospect of these objections being resurrected. Equally, the persistent Brexiter lie that the Protocol was always intended to be temporary, wheeled out again by Priti Patel in a Telegraph article this week (£), must surely have died this week, even if any of them actually believed it. It is expected that the WF will now be formally adopted at today’s meeting of the Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee.
There is a light that never goes out
So it is plausible to say that the grip of the ERG has finally been broken, and that Sunak, unlike any of his predecessors since 1992, has successfully faced them down. Certainly, Wednesday’s vote is widely seen to have strengthened his political position, with Jessica Elgot of the Guardian writing of it “having been a moment of pure delight for the Prime Minister”. Against that, it’s not just plausible but likely that, if the Tories go on to lose the next election, there will be a backlash from the Brexit purists, saying that the problem was that Brexit was betrayed.
By that, they will mean betrayed not just by Sunak and the WF but also by the failure of both Sunak and Johnson to deliver the deregulatory nirvana that many of the Ultras crave, for it is worth recalling that Brexiter dissatisfaction about delivering these ‘benefits of Brexit’ long pre-dates Sunak’s arrival. Johnson, if he stays the course, might seek to lead that backlash, arguing no doubt that his own failures were the fault of others. But his political stock may never recover, even if he dodges the bullet of the Privileges Committee hearing, and, anyway, the true Brexiters have always known he was not of the faith.
More likely, it will be championed by one of the true believers, perhaps one of this week’s WF rebels. Truss is probably irredeemably tainted by failure, a failure for which the greatest evidence is her own inability to recognize it, so Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg are more obvious candidates. It is already possible to see the battle lines being drawn, with Sunday Telegraph Editor Allister Heath, in an article (£) ominously yet absurdly titled “The Brexit revolt against the Remain Establishment has only just begun”, hailing the twenty-two Tory rebels as “heroes” and insisting that, if Sunak loses the next election, “the next Tory leader will be chosen by the party membership and will be a Brexiteer, anti-ECHR and anti-woke”. In other words, neither the Tories, nor British politics, have yet seen the back of the ERG.
Ask
All that is for the future. More immediately, the Windsor Framework vote could be a sign that, as I put it in a recent post, Britain’s Brexit fever has broken. However, there are several questions to be asked about that. One is what now happens about the operation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which of course is in no way resolved by the vote, even though a new opinion poll shows not just strong support amongst the people of Northern Ireland for the WF (overall 45% support, 16.9% oppose), but that even within the unionist community only 15.7% (though 22.8% of DUP voters) are opposed to it (and 45.8% support it, though only 36% of DUP voters). Wrapped up in that is whether, regardless of whether the Assembly is restored, the Protocol will go on being not just a running sore for some unionist politicians, but also, in being so, will function as a rallying point for Brexiters generally.
Another question is whether, how, and to what extent, Sunak follows up his success with the WF by moving in more pragmatic directions on Brexit policy generally. As I suggested last week, there are already signs that he will do so in relation to defence and international relations. But what about domestic policy and, crucially, the Retained EU Law Bill? If he continues with the latter, Brexitism can hardly be said to be in abeyance. If he doesn’t, will that provide a new rallying point for the Brexiters? It is of note that both this Bill and the Bill of Rights Bill are on the agenda for today’s meeting of the Partnership Council of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
Barbarism begins at home
Even if passing the Windsor Framework has broken the Brexit fever as regards government policy, it will also serve to re-enforce and perhaps grow the poisonous reservoir of Brexit betrayalism within British Conservatism in its wider sense. That matters not so much in terms of Brexit policy but the rag-bag of populist causes with which Brexit has become bound up. Those causes have their adherents amongst the Tories, of course, with Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg being obvious examples, but also within the Reform Party and the very powerful media and social media nexus that promotes Conservative populism.
Although the political parties in this space, not just Reform but the rump of UKIP, and Reclaim, which has never been more than a rump, remain angrily disunited, there is a sense of this ‘movement’ coming together, an example being the way GB News employs as hosts Tories like, again, Rees-Mogg and Anderson, as well as Nigel Farage and oddballs like Laurence Fox, alongside its wider cast of viciously aggressive presenters and freakish commentators. Similarly, an offshoot of Fox’s Reclaim was recently revealed to have funded Andrew Bridgen, whilst Bridgen himself co-hosted a lavish dinner for anti-vaxxers at the Carlton Club last month. In some ways, such loose-knit communities of interest are more effective than a political party, creating the impression of a disorganized ‘general consensus’ rather than an orchestrated agenda.
GB News is also becoming unusually favoured in being granted interviews by Tory Ministers, who sometimes are even interviewed by Tory MPs moonlighting as presenters, with the approval of Ofcom, whilst on other programmes these same Tory MPs – Rees-Mogg again is an example – feature as interviewees. And, of course, GB News is only part of the wider and more established media phalanx pushing similar agendas, especially still influential print titles including the Telegraph, Mail and Express.
Meanwhile, the increasingly cowed and compromised BBC, though certainly a very far cry from GB News, routinely hosts spokespeople of the ‘Tufton Street’ thinktanks, and bends over backwards to placate its implacable populist critics. Thus, with or without parliamentary representation, or even creating a single party, this populist movement will continue to exert a significant and malign influence on the British polity. Perhaps most alarming is how difficult it is to distinguish between some of the apparently ‘respectable’ populists and far-right street groups like Britain First.
Much of this Conservative populism has nothing to do with Brexit directly, and many of its causes and tropes long pre-date Brexit. However, Brexit is now its touchstone, being both an article of faith and the one occasion when one of its causes was voted on and won. That strengthens the longstanding populist idea of speaking for ‘the silent majority’, and by a kind of osmosis the narrow vote to leave the EU became configured as ‘the will of the people’ and then ‘the will of the people’ for Brexit got repurposed to present many other populist causes as if they, too, bore the imprimatur of having been subject to ‘the biggest exercise in democracy our country has ever seen’ (sic).
This charming man
That elision is evident not just in the rough and tumble of anonymous social media slanging matches and newspaper columns like that of Allister Heath, mentioned earlier, but in the writings of populist intellectuals. For example, in last week’s Mail, politics Professor Matthew Goodwin managed to run together issues as diverse, yet predictable, as Brexit, the paucity of further and technical education, the ‘over-representation’ of ethnic minorities in TV shows and adverts, and, of course, “’woke’ policies in our schools [and] universities” to propose that “there is a yawning gap between the values of the New Elite and the majority”.
Tellingly, Goodwin sometimes slips between referring to the majority and to “ordinary people”, something reminiscent of the Farage formulation of the Brexit vote as being “a victory for ordinary decent people” and its implication that very close to half the country is, in some way, neither ordinary nor decent. The difference is that, after that brief moment of triumphalism, Conservative populism has now reverted to its habitual sullen victimhood, a kind of hybrid of the bedsit self-pity of Morrissey’s early lyrics and the aggressive martyrdom of his more recent political stances (yes, it took a while, but now the title and sub-titles of this post make sense).
None of this is new – Goodwin talks of the ‘New Elite’, but most of what he says about it was already hackneyed when I was young, and he himself rather paradoxically asserts that “The New Elite has been on manoeuvres for decades”, leaving one to wonder how far back we have to go for the Old Elite, or even quite what it was. Certainly historians will be puzzled to learn that “in days gone by the governing classes had much more in common with the millions of ordinary people who shared their nation”, though they would probably spot it as an example of populist nostalgia in which even the elite ain’t what it used to be. And all of us might be puzzled as to why, if this ‘New Elite’ is so powerful, it is having to endure Brexit.
But, that aside, my point is that, for all that the vote on the Windsor Framework may betoken that we have passed the high-water mark of Brexiter extremism in parliament and government policy, it has metastasized into something wider or more general, but which retains Brexit as its primary point of reference. For that reason, rather than call it Conservative populism or even, taking a tip from Goodwin, the ‘new populism’, it is most apt to call it Brexitism.
That joke isn’t funny any more
For particular example, the biggest political news story this week has been Boris Johnson’s appearance before the Privileges Committee to assess whether he knowingly misled the House of Commons over infringements of the Covid rules. This has nothing to do with Brexit, except in the indirect sense that both relate to Johnson’s pathological dishonesty, and that Johnson might well never have become Prime Minister but for Brexit (and certainly only supported it in the hope that would be the consequence).
Yet the omnipresent Rees-Mogg was at pains to represent the hearing as the work of “the haters of Brexit”, despite the Committee containing four Tory MPs of whom at least one, Bernard Jenkin, is one of the most Ultra of Brexit Ultras. Indeed it turned out, as Martin Kettle noted, that “the unexpected star turn here was Sir Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative MP whose Brexit credentials are unchallengeable, who quietly carved Johnson’s evidence into pieces, leaving him spluttering and humiliated”. Perhaps Jenkin will now join Baker in the ranks of ‘crypto-remainers’, Jacobins turned Girondins.
Rees-Mogg’s attempt to discredit the process reveals his grating hypocrisy, seen also in his role in the illegal 2019 prorogation, since he so often affects to represent himself as the voice, an unctuous and preposterous voice admittedly, of parliamentary traditionalism. For, as Hannah White of the Institute for Government explains, the significance of the hearing is far less about Johnson’s future than it is about protecting the vital constitutional importance of ministerial accountability. But it also shows how Brexit continues to be the cornerstone of British populism, for all that it has ceased to have majority support. It is the talisman of Brexitism.
And, in fact, the hypocrisy and the role of Brexit in populism are linked. For the Brexit Ultras, no perversion of parliamentary rules and norms was too great if it delivered ‘the will of the people’. In that context, Johnson’s ‘anti-ruleism’ made him their ideal leader. But as I argued at length at the time, ‘Partygate’ exposed the risks and fragility of populism by opening a chasm between ‘ordinary people’ and their supposedly anti-elitist leaders. So it will be fitting if it is his lies over this, rather than all his other lies, which finally end Johnson’s political career. And it will be a fitting irony if, as argued by (£) the ferociously pro-Brexit Associate Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Camilla Tominey, the ‘implosion’ of “the cult of Boris” is taken by association to mean the implosion of “his Brexit dream”.
Still ill
For the reality, of course, is that the “dream” has imploded quite independently of Johnson. It collapsed under the weight of its repeated encounters with reality. For that matter, even if, under Sunak, government policy is becoming more pragmatic about Brexit, that does nothing at all to stop the continuing damage Brexit is causing, damage still being assiduously charted by Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downside Dossier. At best, it means ceasing to add new damages on top of the existing ones.
Discussing those damages is still largely taboo for both the Tory and Labour parties but, to coin a phrase, the people have spoken, at least to the extent of successfully petitioning parliament to debate a call for the government to hold a public inquiry into the impact of Brexit. The debate will be held on 24 April, and whilst little can be expected as a result it is at least something that Brexit will actually be discussed and not treated as an embarrassing medical condition that shouldn’t be mentioned in public. The Brexit fever may have broken, but the nation is still ill.
Afterword
In case you missed it, I wrote an extra post this week, reviewing two recent Brexit books – The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit by Meg Russell and Lisa James, and Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done by Stefaan De Rynck.
What difference does it make?
Nevertheless, it was important in terms of how many, and who, would vote against. In the event, just twenty-nine did, of whom a mere twenty-two were Conservatives, with the others being DUP MPs plus the whipless, and increasingly unhinged, former Spartan Andrew Bridgen. The list of Tory rebels, by the way, includes some of the most disreputable and despicable politicians of our, and perhaps any, age. So it was a fairly puny revolt, and though it was notable that both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss joined it, what was more notable was that neither have the pull to have made it a significant challenge to Rishi Sunak. Johnson himself had to interrupt his ill-conceived defence against charges of having misled parliament, of which more below, in order to cast his vote.
It has been known for some time that the ERG’s membership has fallen, and the group is much less organized than in its 2018-19 heyday. Its members, or ex-members, are also split, and some of those in government, especially Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker, were closely involved in, and became advocates of, the WF. Indeed, in Baker’s case, that led to the one-time ‘Brexit hard man’ being thrown out of the ERG’s WhatsApp group whilst being described as a “little weasel” by Nigel Farage. As Robert Shrimsley, Chief UK Political Commentator of the Financial Times, observed, “the revolution eats its own children”. Perhaps more to the point, it is the latest example of the difference between taking responsibility for the realities of delivering Brexit and the luxury of espousing Brexit purity from the sidelines.
Even so, there are plenty of Brexiters on the Tory benches who are not ERG members but who might have been galvanized to rebel in different circumstances. Had there been enough to mean that the vote would have been lost without Labour support that would have been a significant embarrassment for Sunak, and a sign that the Brexit Ultras are still a force to be reckoned with, but there were not. It’s true that several Tory MPs didn’t vote, but it is impossible to tell how many of these were meaningful abstentions and how many were simply absences. In any case, abstention hardly bespeaks of Cromwellian resolve.
The day before, the ERG’s ludicrously-named, if not downright ludicrous, ‘Star Chamber’ had found the WF, including the Stormont Brake, to be unacceptable. But the fatal political flaw in this, as with all the Brexiter objections to the WF, is that everything they object to about it was also contained within the Northern Ireland Protocol itself, which they voted for. Not only that, but it was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ the 2019 Tory Government was elected to deliver. Now that the reformed Protocol has, effectively, been accepted, there is little realistic prospect of these objections being resurrected. Equally, the persistent Brexiter lie that the Protocol was always intended to be temporary, wheeled out again by Priti Patel in a Telegraph article this week (£), must surely have died this week, even if any of them actually believed it. It is expected that the WF will now be formally adopted at today’s meeting of the Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee.
There is a light that never goes out
So it is plausible to say that the grip of the ERG has finally been broken, and that Sunak, unlike any of his predecessors since 1992, has successfully faced them down. Certainly, Wednesday’s vote is widely seen to have strengthened his political position, with Jessica Elgot of the Guardian writing of it “having been a moment of pure delight for the Prime Minister”. Against that, it’s not just plausible but likely that, if the Tories go on to lose the next election, there will be a backlash from the Brexit purists, saying that the problem was that Brexit was betrayed.
By that, they will mean betrayed not just by Sunak and the WF but also by the failure of both Sunak and Johnson to deliver the deregulatory nirvana that many of the Ultras crave, for it is worth recalling that Brexiter dissatisfaction about delivering these ‘benefits of Brexit’ long pre-dates Sunak’s arrival. Johnson, if he stays the course, might seek to lead that backlash, arguing no doubt that his own failures were the fault of others. But his political stock may never recover, even if he dodges the bullet of the Privileges Committee hearing, and, anyway, the true Brexiters have always known he was not of the faith.
More likely, it will be championed by one of the true believers, perhaps one of this week’s WF rebels. Truss is probably irredeemably tainted by failure, a failure for which the greatest evidence is her own inability to recognize it, so Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg are more obvious candidates. It is already possible to see the battle lines being drawn, with Sunday Telegraph Editor Allister Heath, in an article (£) ominously yet absurdly titled “The Brexit revolt against the Remain Establishment has only just begun”, hailing the twenty-two Tory rebels as “heroes” and insisting that, if Sunak loses the next election, “the next Tory leader will be chosen by the party membership and will be a Brexiteer, anti-ECHR and anti-woke”. In other words, neither the Tories, nor British politics, have yet seen the back of the ERG.
Ask
All that is for the future. More immediately, the Windsor Framework vote could be a sign that, as I put it in a recent post, Britain’s Brexit fever has broken. However, there are several questions to be asked about that. One is what now happens about the operation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which of course is in no way resolved by the vote, even though a new opinion poll shows not just strong support amongst the people of Northern Ireland for the WF (overall 45% support, 16.9% oppose), but that even within the unionist community only 15.7% (though 22.8% of DUP voters) are opposed to it (and 45.8% support it, though only 36% of DUP voters). Wrapped up in that is whether, regardless of whether the Assembly is restored, the Protocol will go on being not just a running sore for some unionist politicians, but also, in being so, will function as a rallying point for Brexiters generally.
Another question is whether, how, and to what extent, Sunak follows up his success with the WF by moving in more pragmatic directions on Brexit policy generally. As I suggested last week, there are already signs that he will do so in relation to defence and international relations. But what about domestic policy and, crucially, the Retained EU Law Bill? If he continues with the latter, Brexitism can hardly be said to be in abeyance. If he doesn’t, will that provide a new rallying point for the Brexiters? It is of note that both this Bill and the Bill of Rights Bill are on the agenda for today’s meeting of the Partnership Council of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
Barbarism begins at home
Even if passing the Windsor Framework has broken the Brexit fever as regards government policy, it will also serve to re-enforce and perhaps grow the poisonous reservoir of Brexit betrayalism within British Conservatism in its wider sense. That matters not so much in terms of Brexit policy but the rag-bag of populist causes with which Brexit has become bound up. Those causes have their adherents amongst the Tories, of course, with Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg being obvious examples, but also within the Reform Party and the very powerful media and social media nexus that promotes Conservative populism.
Although the political parties in this space, not just Reform but the rump of UKIP, and Reclaim, which has never been more than a rump, remain angrily disunited, there is a sense of this ‘movement’ coming together, an example being the way GB News employs as hosts Tories like, again, Rees-Mogg and Anderson, as well as Nigel Farage and oddballs like Laurence Fox, alongside its wider cast of viciously aggressive presenters and freakish commentators. Similarly, an offshoot of Fox’s Reclaim was recently revealed to have funded Andrew Bridgen, whilst Bridgen himself co-hosted a lavish dinner for anti-vaxxers at the Carlton Club last month. In some ways, such loose-knit communities of interest are more effective than a political party, creating the impression of a disorganized ‘general consensus’ rather than an orchestrated agenda.
GB News is also becoming unusually favoured in being granted interviews by Tory Ministers, who sometimes are even interviewed by Tory MPs moonlighting as presenters, with the approval of Ofcom, whilst on other programmes these same Tory MPs – Rees-Mogg again is an example – feature as interviewees. And, of course, GB News is only part of the wider and more established media phalanx pushing similar agendas, especially still influential print titles including the Telegraph, Mail and Express.
Meanwhile, the increasingly cowed and compromised BBC, though certainly a very far cry from GB News, routinely hosts spokespeople of the ‘Tufton Street’ thinktanks, and bends over backwards to placate its implacable populist critics. Thus, with or without parliamentary representation, or even creating a single party, this populist movement will continue to exert a significant and malign influence on the British polity. Perhaps most alarming is how difficult it is to distinguish between some of the apparently ‘respectable’ populists and far-right street groups like Britain First.
Much of this Conservative populism has nothing to do with Brexit directly, and many of its causes and tropes long pre-date Brexit. However, Brexit is now its touchstone, being both an article of faith and the one occasion when one of its causes was voted on and won. That strengthens the longstanding populist idea of speaking for ‘the silent majority’, and by a kind of osmosis the narrow vote to leave the EU became configured as ‘the will of the people’ and then ‘the will of the people’ for Brexit got repurposed to present many other populist causes as if they, too, bore the imprimatur of having been subject to ‘the biggest exercise in democracy our country has ever seen’ (sic).
This charming man
That elision is evident not just in the rough and tumble of anonymous social media slanging matches and newspaper columns like that of Allister Heath, mentioned earlier, but in the writings of populist intellectuals. For example, in last week’s Mail, politics Professor Matthew Goodwin managed to run together issues as diverse, yet predictable, as Brexit, the paucity of further and technical education, the ‘over-representation’ of ethnic minorities in TV shows and adverts, and, of course, “’woke’ policies in our schools [and] universities” to propose that “there is a yawning gap between the values of the New Elite and the majority”.
Tellingly, Goodwin sometimes slips between referring to the majority and to “ordinary people”, something reminiscent of the Farage formulation of the Brexit vote as being “a victory for ordinary decent people” and its implication that very close to half the country is, in some way, neither ordinary nor decent. The difference is that, after that brief moment of triumphalism, Conservative populism has now reverted to its habitual sullen victimhood, a kind of hybrid of the bedsit self-pity of Morrissey’s early lyrics and the aggressive martyrdom of his more recent political stances (yes, it took a while, but now the title and sub-titles of this post make sense).
None of this is new – Goodwin talks of the ‘New Elite’, but most of what he says about it was already hackneyed when I was young, and he himself rather paradoxically asserts that “The New Elite has been on manoeuvres for decades”, leaving one to wonder how far back we have to go for the Old Elite, or even quite what it was. Certainly historians will be puzzled to learn that “in days gone by the governing classes had much more in common with the millions of ordinary people who shared their nation”, though they would probably spot it as an example of populist nostalgia in which even the elite ain’t what it used to be. And all of us might be puzzled as to why, if this ‘New Elite’ is so powerful, it is having to endure Brexit.
But, that aside, my point is that, for all that the vote on the Windsor Framework may betoken that we have passed the high-water mark of Brexiter extremism in parliament and government policy, it has metastasized into something wider or more general, but which retains Brexit as its primary point of reference. For that reason, rather than call it Conservative populism or even, taking a tip from Goodwin, the ‘new populism’, it is most apt to call it Brexitism.
That joke isn’t funny any more
For particular example, the biggest political news story this week has been Boris Johnson’s appearance before the Privileges Committee to assess whether he knowingly misled the House of Commons over infringements of the Covid rules. This has nothing to do with Brexit, except in the indirect sense that both relate to Johnson’s pathological dishonesty, and that Johnson might well never have become Prime Minister but for Brexit (and certainly only supported it in the hope that would be the consequence).
Yet the omnipresent Rees-Mogg was at pains to represent the hearing as the work of “the haters of Brexit”, despite the Committee containing four Tory MPs of whom at least one, Bernard Jenkin, is one of the most Ultra of Brexit Ultras. Indeed it turned out, as Martin Kettle noted, that “the unexpected star turn here was Sir Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative MP whose Brexit credentials are unchallengeable, who quietly carved Johnson’s evidence into pieces, leaving him spluttering and humiliated”. Perhaps Jenkin will now join Baker in the ranks of ‘crypto-remainers’, Jacobins turned Girondins.
Rees-Mogg’s attempt to discredit the process reveals his grating hypocrisy, seen also in his role in the illegal 2019 prorogation, since he so often affects to represent himself as the voice, an unctuous and preposterous voice admittedly, of parliamentary traditionalism. For, as Hannah White of the Institute for Government explains, the significance of the hearing is far less about Johnson’s future than it is about protecting the vital constitutional importance of ministerial accountability. But it also shows how Brexit continues to be the cornerstone of British populism, for all that it has ceased to have majority support. It is the talisman of Brexitism.
And, in fact, the hypocrisy and the role of Brexit in populism are linked. For the Brexit Ultras, no perversion of parliamentary rules and norms was too great if it delivered ‘the will of the people’. In that context, Johnson’s ‘anti-ruleism’ made him their ideal leader. But as I argued at length at the time, ‘Partygate’ exposed the risks and fragility of populism by opening a chasm between ‘ordinary people’ and their supposedly anti-elitist leaders. So it will be fitting if it is his lies over this, rather than all his other lies, which finally end Johnson’s political career. And it will be a fitting irony if, as argued by (£) the ferociously pro-Brexit Associate Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Camilla Tominey, the ‘implosion’ of “the cult of Boris” is taken by association to mean the implosion of “his Brexit dream”.
Still ill
For the reality, of course, is that the “dream” has imploded quite independently of Johnson. It collapsed under the weight of its repeated encounters with reality. For that matter, even if, under Sunak, government policy is becoming more pragmatic about Brexit, that does nothing at all to stop the continuing damage Brexit is causing, damage still being assiduously charted by Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downside Dossier. At best, it means ceasing to add new damages on top of the existing ones.
Discussing those damages is still largely taboo for both the Tory and Labour parties but, to coin a phrase, the people have spoken, at least to the extent of successfully petitioning parliament to debate a call for the government to hold a public inquiry into the impact of Brexit. The debate will be held on 24 April, and whilst little can be expected as a result it is at least something that Brexit will actually be discussed and not treated as an embarrassing medical condition that shouldn’t be mentioned in public. The Brexit fever may have broken, but the nation is still ill.
Afterword
In case you missed it, I wrote an extra post this week, reviewing two recent Brexit books – The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit by Meg Russell and Lisa James, and Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done by Stefaan De Rynck.
Wednesday, 16 November 2016
News round-up
With so much
happening – and not happening – around Brexit, it is hard to keep up with
developments and certainly beyond my ability to post about each and every one.
So in today’s post I will provide a round-up of some of the more interesting
and important articles, news items and opinion polls I have read in the last
few days.
Much attention is focussing on the emerging realities and complexities of undertaking Brexit, given added emphasis by the leaked memo from consulting firm Deloitte about the lack of an exit plan and the chaos within the civil service in seeking to develop one. Although dismissed by the government, the memo seems consistent with The House of Commons Library’s briefing on the “legal, constitutional and financial unknowns” of Brexit, published last week.
The theme of constitutional and civil service chaos is taken up by Anand Menon on KCL’s UK in a Changing Europe site. The LSE Brexit blog carries a good post on the “legal and political headaches” involved whilst on the New Europeans site Charles Freeman has an excellent essay on the Brexit emperor’s lack of clothes, a metaphor also deployed by Rafael Behr in an article in the Guardian to point out the government’s lack of a Brexit strategy. Bloomberg is also carrying a withering assessment of the chaos and an IPSOS/Mori poll for the Evening Standard shows that 48% of the public think that the government are handling Brexit badly (though presumably for various different reasons).
In a sign that the Labour Party are beginning to develop a potent line of attack against the government, Jeremy Corbyn used today’s PMQs to quiz the Prime Minister effectively on what its approach would be, a line also pursued by the SNP leader in Westminster. Teresa May’s response got no further than to say that she would “seek the best possible deal” for Britain. One reason why this is a difficult line (or non-line) to hold is that her ministers are far from shy in being more explicit than May is prepared to be. Most notable this week was Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s statement that the UK would “probably leave the customs union” (although, apparently, also staying in the single market and having restrictions on free movement of people).
Indeed, public and political debate is still going around in circles over the issue of trade versus immigration, partly because of the continuing lack of understanding of the difference between single market access and single market membership. Thus a poll today from NatCen Social Research shows that the public generally support “free trade” with the EU but also limits on EU migration, a combination that EU leaders, most recently Carlo Calenda, the Italian Economic Development Minister, have repeatedly said is impossible. Calenda also described as “insulting” Boris Johnson repeating to him (a version of) the evergreen Brexit meme that EU exports (in this case of Prosecco, rather than the more usual ‘German cars’) must mean that the UK will get a good deal. It seems almost unbelievable that the British Foreign Secretary is still parroting these kind of nonsenses despite, presumably, having received detailed briefings from his civil servants.
In this context a statement yesterday by Angela Merkel that free movement may be negotiable was seized on as a sign of a significant shift, but as this New Statesman piece makes clear this was not a proposal for a special deal for the UK, or an abandonment of the free movement principle; rather an indication of some possible EU-wide changes around benefits eligibility. It is not entirely insignificant, though. I continue to think that a soft Brexit on this kind of basis could be fudged and, with skilful political leadership, sold to the British people. Back on the KCL site, a version of this based on the kind of association agreement that Ukraine has with the EU is mooted in an interesting article by Andrew Duff.
Within all this uncertainty, one ray of hope for those of us who view with alarm the loss of our EU citizenship: a proposal has been made to the European Parliament that citizens of member states leaving the EU be eligible to apply for associate citizenship of the EU, allowing continued free movement. How likely it is to come to anything I don’t know, but it is interesting not least because I suspect that for many ‘remainers’ it would do much to sweeten the Brexit pill, and could therefore make it easier politically for the UK government to enact a hard Brexit. Interesting, too, but also depressing to see the furious reaction to this proposal from Brexiters who decided that it meant that only those who voted ‘remain’ would have access to this, were it to happen. Interesting, because why should those who want nothing to do with the EU complain about being excluded from the rights associated with being in the EU? Depressing because of course the proposal does not discriminate (and would have no way of discriminating) between leave and remain voters: even in their moment of supposed triumph, Brexiters continue to lie. Oxford Dictionaries have today announced their word of the year: it is “post-truth”.
Much attention is focussing on the emerging realities and complexities of undertaking Brexit, given added emphasis by the leaked memo from consulting firm Deloitte about the lack of an exit plan and the chaos within the civil service in seeking to develop one. Although dismissed by the government, the memo seems consistent with The House of Commons Library’s briefing on the “legal, constitutional and financial unknowns” of Brexit, published last week.
The theme of constitutional and civil service chaos is taken up by Anand Menon on KCL’s UK in a Changing Europe site. The LSE Brexit blog carries a good post on the “legal and political headaches” involved whilst on the New Europeans site Charles Freeman has an excellent essay on the Brexit emperor’s lack of clothes, a metaphor also deployed by Rafael Behr in an article in the Guardian to point out the government’s lack of a Brexit strategy. Bloomberg is also carrying a withering assessment of the chaos and an IPSOS/Mori poll for the Evening Standard shows that 48% of the public think that the government are handling Brexit badly (though presumably for various different reasons).
In a sign that the Labour Party are beginning to develop a potent line of attack against the government, Jeremy Corbyn used today’s PMQs to quiz the Prime Minister effectively on what its approach would be, a line also pursued by the SNP leader in Westminster. Teresa May’s response got no further than to say that she would “seek the best possible deal” for Britain. One reason why this is a difficult line (or non-line) to hold is that her ministers are far from shy in being more explicit than May is prepared to be. Most notable this week was Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s statement that the UK would “probably leave the customs union” (although, apparently, also staying in the single market and having restrictions on free movement of people).
Indeed, public and political debate is still going around in circles over the issue of trade versus immigration, partly because of the continuing lack of understanding of the difference between single market access and single market membership. Thus a poll today from NatCen Social Research shows that the public generally support “free trade” with the EU but also limits on EU migration, a combination that EU leaders, most recently Carlo Calenda, the Italian Economic Development Minister, have repeatedly said is impossible. Calenda also described as “insulting” Boris Johnson repeating to him (a version of) the evergreen Brexit meme that EU exports (in this case of Prosecco, rather than the more usual ‘German cars’) must mean that the UK will get a good deal. It seems almost unbelievable that the British Foreign Secretary is still parroting these kind of nonsenses despite, presumably, having received detailed briefings from his civil servants.
In this context a statement yesterday by Angela Merkel that free movement may be negotiable was seized on as a sign of a significant shift, but as this New Statesman piece makes clear this was not a proposal for a special deal for the UK, or an abandonment of the free movement principle; rather an indication of some possible EU-wide changes around benefits eligibility. It is not entirely insignificant, though. I continue to think that a soft Brexit on this kind of basis could be fudged and, with skilful political leadership, sold to the British people. Back on the KCL site, a version of this based on the kind of association agreement that Ukraine has with the EU is mooted in an interesting article by Andrew Duff.
Within all this uncertainty, one ray of hope for those of us who view with alarm the loss of our EU citizenship: a proposal has been made to the European Parliament that citizens of member states leaving the EU be eligible to apply for associate citizenship of the EU, allowing continued free movement. How likely it is to come to anything I don’t know, but it is interesting not least because I suspect that for many ‘remainers’ it would do much to sweeten the Brexit pill, and could therefore make it easier politically for the UK government to enact a hard Brexit. Interesting, too, but also depressing to see the furious reaction to this proposal from Brexiters who decided that it meant that only those who voted ‘remain’ would have access to this, were it to happen. Interesting, because why should those who want nothing to do with the EU complain about being excluded from the rights associated with being in the EU? Depressing because of course the proposal does not discriminate (and would have no way of discriminating) between leave and remain voters: even in their moment of supposed triumph, Brexiters continue to lie. Oxford Dictionaries have today announced their word of the year: it is “post-truth”.
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