Brexit ten years on: unsettled and unsettling

It is fitting that virtually on the day of the tenth anniversary of the referendum yet another political crisis came to a head with the resignation of Keir Starmer. Within the next couple of weeks, or at most months, we are now set to have another Prime Minister, the seventh since the Brexit vote. With that have come three general elections, not to mention a massive churn of ministerial appointments. Taken together with the administrative bandwidth absorbed by Brexit, both before and since leaving the EU, it is fair to say that the British polity has been overwhelmed over the last decade.

It would be equally fair to say that the combination of current events has overwhelmed my ability to write about them concisely, so this is another inordinately long post.

Starmer’s downfall

Brexit is not the only reason for the shortening cycle of political leadership, and the UK is not the only European country (£) to have experienced it. But, for reasons I’ve discussed previously, there are multiple and complex links, both direct and indirect, between the referendum vote and the subsequent destabilization of British politics. In that sense, our political instability is one more piece of Brexit damage to be added to the long list which has accrued over the last ten years, and perhaps the one which was least predictable.

So far as Starmer, specifically, is concerned, the reasons for his downfall are various but Brexit was certainly part of the mix. In particular, ever since the referendum the Labour Party has been haunted by the possibility that the populists are right to claim to speak for ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’, a possibility which is deeply disconcerting to a party which regards doing so as its prerogative and foundational principle. In this way, Brexit exacerbated the longstanding difficulty Labour has had in facing up to the fact that its traditional electoral base in unionized manufacturing industry has been eroding for decades and, to the extent it does face up to that, still regards that eroding demographic as the template for the ‘real working class’. In its way, it is every bit as nostalgia-driven as Brexitism.

It is this which explains Starmer’s relentless focus on the sensibilities of leave voters in Labour’s erstwhile heartlands and his near disdain for the broader ‘progressive’ coalition characterizing most of the actual and potential support for Labour. This fed through most obviously into immigration policy and, closely associated, the ‘red lines’ on UK-EU relations. There was a logic to avoiding positioning Labour as a ‘rejoin’ party at the 2024 election, but Starmer went well beyond that in constantly seeking to appease Reform or Reform-curious voters’ hostility to immigration.

The result was always going to be that those voters would be unimpressed and, if anything, pandering to their ‘legitimate concerns’ made it more likely that they would support parties with more extreme ‘solutions’. Meanwhile, ‘progressive’ voters were alienated by this approach causing their support to leak away to other parties, especially the Greens.

That this is what has happened is borne out by academic research and further demonstrated by a YouGov poll this week, showing that 2024 Reform voters are most likely to feel that Labour are trying to appeal to them but least likely to say they will consider voting for Labour. The personal loathing which the public have for Starmer seems (to me, though not just to me) disproportionate, but the fact that it extends across the political spectrum to encompass both his ‘natural’ supporters and opponents is a reflection of the fundamental flaw of this approach.

All this, including of course the re-emergence of Nigel Farage from his post-referendum resignation to create the Reform party, refracts through Brexit and, along with other factors, created the context for Starmer’s demise. It meant that his party became convinced that he would fail the most basic and brutal test of a party leader: to win the next election. Worse, since the May elections, his MPs believed that he would lose it catastrophically  

Enter Burnham, stage left – or stage right?

There is much more that could to be written about all of this, but the immediate fact is that, once again, there is the instability of a change of Prime Minister, and that is not just an issue in terms of the disruption and uncertainty it entails. Prime Ministerial changes between elections also raise questions of legitimacy. Of course, everyone knows that in our political system the PM is not directly elected, and is the person who can command a majority in the House of Commons, so such changes are not constitutionally improper and have happened many times in the past. But for these changes to happen so frequently strains that constitutional convention, which in any case is strained if the incoming PM seeks to radically depart from manifesto commitments.

Already, there are contradictory reports about whether Andy Burnham has or has not ruled out an early election, and it’s worth recalling the potential traps this creates. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007, he initially refused to rule out an election and there was much speculation that he would call one. When he decided not to, he earned the nickname ‘Bottler Brown’. Conversely, when Theresa May took over from David Cameron in 2016, she was adamant there would be no election and the perceived opportunism of her sudden decision to hold one the next year was one reason for its disastrous outcome.

Regardless of whether there is an election, it is unclear at this point what Burnham’s policy agenda will be and to what extent it will differ from that of the last two years, especially as he will face many of the same constraints. His supporters’ main hope seems to be that he will change the political mood, if not the political programme, by being more communicatively and strategically adept than Keir Starmer. And it’s true that he has more ease of manner than his predecessor, although that does not place him in an especially exclusive club. It’s also true that he comfortably beat Reform in Makerfield, but it’s not clear how much can be extrapolated from the rather unique circumstances of that by-election.

For what little it’s worth, my personal view is that, probably within short order, he will become almost as unpopular as Starmer, will be as unwilling to make and stick to difficult choices, and will be seen as equally lacking in strategic coherence. The veteran political journalist Philip Stephens is of much the same opinion but, clearly, other views are available including from Ian Dunt, a commentator with whom I often agree, and I’ll be happy if I am proved wrong.

One reason for my pessimism is that so much of Burnham’s pitch, at least so far, seems to have its own version of Blue Labour nostalgia. There may be much to agree with in his analysis that “Britain has been on the wrong path for forty years” but it is hard to see how he can deliver on the promise of “re-industrialization” or whether it is a viable strategy for the British economy. And he has already indicated that, despite his previous criticism of them, he is now committed (£) to the immigration policies being pursued by Shabana Mahmood (or has he changed his mind again?), which is certainly not a viable strategy for the British economy. He has also said that he “agrees with what Farage is saying” about the need to go further in controlling immigration, and that he would make greater use of migrant detention centres. At first sight, then, his approach, at least on this key issue, looks set to replicate Starmer’s in trying to appease Reform voters whilst being careless of progressive voters.

Ten years on: what is Brexit?

Closely related to Burnham’s overall political strategy is the question of what his approach to the EU is going to be (and, more generally, his approach to foreign policy, about which he has said very little). Just before Starmer resigned, the date for the next UK-EU summit had, finally, been set for 22 July. In one scenario for how the leadership contest (or non-contest) plays out, Burnham might actually be Prime Minister by then, but in any case the President of the European Council has announced that the meeting will be postponed.

Already that is being spun by the pro-Brexit press (£) as a sign that the EU is expecting Burnham to be a “soft touch” who will make “more concessions”, which re-written in adult might mean Burnham pursuing the “more ambitious” agenda that Starmer recently promised. But the reality is that nobody knew what Starmer meant by that and, certainly, nobody knows what Burnham’s agenda will be. It seems highly unlikely he will not proceed with whatever has presumably now been agreed on SPS regulations, emissions trading, and youth mobility, but whether he might go further, and what that might consist of, is at this point opaque. It is a reminder that there is still no agreed meaning of Brexit, and ‘Burnham’s Brexit’ has yet to be defined.

The fact that UK-EU relations are still in flux and their direction uncertain, and even the framing of that by Brexiters in terms of the UK being forced into “concessions” by having a “soft” leader, is a microcosm of why the tenth anniversary of the referendum has a rather different meaning from that which features in most of the tidal wave of discussion about it. I will come back to what that meaning is but, for now, will focus on the broader discussion. Since almost every commentator has had their say (myself included, for example in Byline Times (£) and on the Oh God What Now? Podcast) it would be impossible to consider it all here, so I will provide just a very brief outline.

Analysing Brexit

Much of the discussion consists of analysis of the effects, especially the economic effects, Brexit has had, and a very good overview of these was provided by the BBC’s Economics Editor Faisal Islam. In terms of specific research studies, an excellent example is John Springford and Anton Spisak’s report for the Centre for European Reform, which is especially useful in disaggregating the (much larger) negative impact of leaving the single market from that of leaving the customs union. Also excellent is a new paper by Eleonora Alabresa and others about the variation in the regional effects of Brexit which, whilst assessing the overall negative impact at about 7-8% (which is consistent with some other studies), shows this to vary considerably by region.

These two studies can also be considered together in that the Alabresa paper shows that Northern Ireland is exceptional in having had little or no economic damage, reflecting it being effectively still part of the single market for goods. A long time ago, I wrote that Northern Ireland would provide a kind of natural experiment to understand the economic effects of Brexit (I can’t now find it to link to, and I’m sure others have made the same point). And so it has proved but, in fact, the outcome was already implied in the perhaps inadvertently revealing remark made by Michael Gove in 2020 when he said Northern Ireland would “get the best of both worlds”. Then as now that prompts the question: why not the rest of the UK?

There has also been much discussion of the domestic political effects of Brexit, some of which I’ve already touched on in this post. A particularly revealing analysis was provided by Jonathan Vincent in the Financial Times (£), which includes some illuminating infographics showing how voters’ behaviour is still significantly structured by how they voted in the referendum, underscoring the persistence of ‘remainer’ and ‘leaver’ as political identities. Meanwhile, the experiences of EU citizens living in the UK, some of the people most traumatically affected by Brexit, are recorded in the Brexit Lived Experience Archive (BLEA) created by Professor Tanja Bueltmann and publicly launched to coincide with the referendum anniversary.

Possibly the most comprehensive overall analysis, not just of the last ten years but of the future possibilities for UK-EU relations, is the report produced by multiple authors from the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) centre. UKICE, which throughout the whole process has been, and remains, the single best source of analysis of Brexit, has also produced a variety of themed reports marking the tenth anniversary, notable examples including Joël Reland’s on regulation (showing how little regulatory divergence there has been) and Jannike Wachowiak’s on how the EU has changed during the period (providing an important antidote to what has been, as so often, a largely parochial discussion).

Defending Brexit

None of these analytical reports and commentaries suggest that Brexit has been a success and, as most contributions to the anniversary discussion acknowledge, the polling evidence that a consistent and increasingly large majority of the population view it as having been a failure and a mistake is clear. But, of course, there have been numerous pro-Brexit comment pieces which continue to defend the project. They are all fairly similar in nature, since the arguments are now well-rehearsed, so I will only focus on three, but that should not be taken to imply that these pro-Brexit views are in any way rare.

Strikingly, they almost all share one common feature, which is that they are defensive. That is, they are framed as a defence against what they recognize to be the established narrative that Brexit has not been a success. That in itself is important. In January 2021, as the transition period ended, I wrote that what happened then would “shape the post-Brexit narrative”. It did, and what was established was a narrative that it had been a failure. So, whilst Brexiters do not accept this to be true, they do accept that it is the narrative. Had the battle for that narrative gone the other way, the terms of this tenth anniversary discussion would be entirely, unrecognizably, different.

As has long been the case, one of the major defences of Brexit by its advocates is that ‘it was not done properly’. Tellingly, the banner front-page headline in the Express on the day of the anniversary was a plaintive demand to “Give Us Proper Brexit”. Equally telling was a Financial Times report about how the various leading Brexiters all blame each other (as well, of course, as remainers) for this failure to deliver ‘proper Brexit’.

Those mounting such arguments have never been able to explain a realistic way in which Brexit could have been done successfully, or even to agree about what proper Brexit means. But it is an argument that can always be made, since it is, strictly speaking, irrefutable (which is makes it a weak, not a strong, argument in that it is not susceptible to any meaningful test). As many people have observed, it is an argument with the same structure as that made by those who insist that ‘real Communism’ has yet to be tried.

One of the slightly better articles making this kind of argument is that by Matthew Jeffrey at Conservative Home, but it shows no understanding of why the regulatory divergence it proposes has not happened, and relies on a wholly unrealistic claim about what ‘mutual recognition agreements’ could make possible for international trade. Most glaringly, it advocates using post-Brexit freedoms to follow “aggressive tax competitiveness” citing as an example the strategy followed by, er, Ireland – an EU member state. The conclusion, inevitably, is that (like real communism) “the real Brexit is still to come”.

The problems of defending Brexit whilst claiming it has been betrayed, or not done properly, are all too obvious, which is perhaps why Michael Gove’s article in the Spectator mainly takes a different tack. Asking the question ‘The Brexit decade: was it worth it?’ (to which his unsurprising answer is ‘yes’), Gove attempts to itemise how Britain has benefitted from Brexit. As with any such list, there are questions about the veracity and desirability of each claimed benefit, but the fact that he includes the demonstrably false ones that Brexit enabled a faster vaccine roll-out (a lie which Boris Johnson has also repeated this week), allowed the UK to support Ukraine, and provided “much more than £350 million a week extra for the NHS” makes it hard to take any of them very seriously.

Moreover, as is again typical of such lists of benefits, it is meaningless because there is little or no recognition of the costs of Brexit. In particular, Gove, with presumably knowing outrageousness, reprises his infamous line from the campaign in deriding “experts from organisations with acronyms who have got things consistently wrong in the past”. In fact, the Treasury’s pre-referendum long-term analysis of the impact of Brexit, giving as its central estimate of the scenario of a negotiated bilateral trade agreement – as happened – that GDP would be 6.2% lower after 15 years (see p.7 of the document), is remarkably similar to most of the credible estimates of what is actually happening which mainly lie in the range of 4% to 8% [1].

In the end, though, Gove simply falls back on the standard get-out that, whether the effects have been positive or negative, Brexit is definitively justified on the abstract grounds of ‘sovereignty’, with national politicians making national laws and being held accountable for them (though not, it seems, being accountable for advocating Brexit). As ever, there is no recognition that sovereignty-sharing is an act of, rather than a negation of, sovereignty; nor of the many ways in which EU members exert sovereignty and hold national politicians accountable; nor of the many ways that all sorts of international regulatory systems (including but not limited to those of the EU) continue, necessarily, to impinge on the UK; nor of any of the many other ways that the ‘taking back control’ thesis is flawed.

Effectively the same argument, though from a different part of the political spectrum, is made by Larry Elliott, the ‘Lexiter’ economics commentator at the Guardian. He, too, takes issue with the economic consensus about the damage of Brexit, in particular questioning the OBR’s estimate of 4% less GDP after 15 years. He does so on what, for an economist, is the rather innumerate basis that, if true, it would mean the economy would be “4% bigger today” [emphasis added]. Otherwise, he opines that “Brexit showed that class still matters in politics” (who knew?) and, like Jeffrey and Gove, that Brexit “creates an opportunity for change” though, in his case, that change should be to ‘reverse forty years of neo-liberalism’ which, he hopes, is what Burnham intends to do. In this, once again, we see the capacity of Brexit to have multiple, incompatible meanings amongst its adherents but also, more specifically, how already a Burnham premiership is being anticipated in the Telegraph as a ‘soft touch’ which will take the UK closer to the EU and by Elliott as the saviour of the Lexit project.

Reframing the anniversary

Thus, rather as I anticipated in a recent post, this latest ‘national conversation’ about Brexit is in many ways the same as that which we have had for ten years and more. And, in another recent post, I quoted the second edition of my book about Brexit pointing out that according to its advocates and supporters Brexit “certainly wasn’t proposed as, or supposed to be, the prelude to a country permanently divided on the wisdom of Brexit, still less to an interminable debate about whether it had been the right thing to do ….” (p.285) and I went on to quote David Frost saying (in 2022) that “one piece of evidence of failure [of Brexit] would be if we are still debating this in five- or six-years’ time in the same way. I think [if] it is to succeed it needs to settle in the British polity.” 

In those terms Brexit has failed. It has not settled. This week there have been no great public celebrations of ‘national independence’, whilst the prospect, whether positive or negative, of rejoining (or joining) the EU has been very much part of the anniversary discussion. But, more than that, Brexit continues to be profoundly unsettling.

It is this which, I think, gives this tenth anniversary discussion a rather different meaning than most contributions to it suggest. It is not really a stock-taking exercise, still less a planning one. Nor is it a commemoration, or even a retrospection. Rather, just as the current political crisis is the latest episode within the continuing process of instability bequeathed by Brexit, this tenth anniversary is itself the latest episode within the continuing process of contestation to which Brexit has consigned the nation.

 

Note

[1] Gove made implicit reference to the Treasury short-term forecast, which is admittedly harder to defend, especially given the way it was used by George Osborne. But it is worth recalling that the value of sterling has never fully recovered since its very sharp fall immediately after the referendum result, and also that the forecast model did not assume any action by the Bank of England which, in fact, under the then Governor Mark Carney, immediately announced a programme to stabilize the financial system, which may well have averted some of the economic turmoil of the short-term forecast.

Brexit eruptions

Recently, a rash of molehills has appeared in my garden, the visible eruptions of a vast subterranean network of tunnels and burrows. Brexit lurks in a similar way beneath the surface of British politics, a constant presence which, however much it is ignored – perhaps the more that it is ignored – continues to break out here, there, and everywhere.

That, surely the most tortuous and tortured of the many metaphors that have been applied to Brexit, is intended to introduce the fact that this post doesn’t have any particular unifying theme other than the latest ways in which Brexit has been in view over the last fortnight.

Robert Jenrick and the Tory madness

We don’t yet know how the story is going to end, but it is looking increasingly likely that, when history is written, Brexit is going to figure as the central cause of the decline and perhaps demise of the Tory Party. For all that numerous political commentators, most recently Andrew Rawnsley, urge the party to re-discover its more moderate and pragmatic traditions, for now it seems stuck in the spiral of madness of which Brexit is the proximate cause. Thus possibly the least surprising development of the last fortnight was that their party conference showed the Conservatives to be firmly in the grip of Brexitism.

At the conference, the most obvious manifestation, or even exemplification, of this was the latest stage in Robert Jenrick’s long journey from “bland centrist solicitor” to gurning ideologue. It’s a journey made stranger because he has somehow retained his blandness along with the way, managing to be, as Ian Dunt puts it “at once banal and monstrous”. Much attention focused, rightly, on his complaint about the lack of white faces in Handsworth, a complaint made not less but more objectionable by his absurd suggestion that this remark “was not about the colour of your skin”. Less discussed, but objectionable and absurd in a different way, were his remarks about the judiciary.

Jenrick’s thesis, if we can grace it with that term, is that when judges ‘don the wig’ – a point he sought to make dramatic by flourishing such a wig – they at the same time put aside personal interests and identity so as to apply the law impartially. So far, so good. But he also claimed that, having, like every internet troll, ‘doNe he’s Own ResEArch’, he had made a shocking discovery. Apparently, there are “dozens of judges” who have used social media to “broadcast their open borders views” (whatever that means; does anyone advocate ‘open borders’?), or have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country” (which seems to mean, based on his other remarks, that Jenrick imagines barristers to be invariably sympathetic to their clients’ causes, and retain a lifelong commitment to them).

Jenrick is either too dense or too dishonest to see that his first observation made his second claim irrelevant. To make his thesis stick, he would need evidence that the judges he identified had also given judgments which, in legal terms, were demonstrably wrong, and wrong in ways biased in the direction he claimed. Moreover, he would need to show that they had done so to a greater extent than judges who he had not identified as having this alleged bias. But of course, and this is part of what makes this an example of Brexitism, reliable evidence is irrelevant to Jenrick. What is relevant, and what makes it definitively Brexitist, is the attempt to undermine the judiciary as an institution and, with that, the rule of law. It is ‘enemies of the people’ territory again. And it hardly needs to be said that Jenrick’s supposed solution, the political control of judicial appointments, would make the supposed problem he supposedly wants to solve worse.

Whether Jenrick has become a convinced Brexitist ideologue or is just opportunistically seeking to burnish his leadership credential hardly matters. Either way, it shows that Brexitism is an obligatory posture for those who aspire to lead the current Tory Party. That fact was underlined by Kemi Badenoch’s long-expected adoption of leaving the ECHR as official party policy, a policy which is the central prescription of ‘Brexit 2.0’.

It is also, as I noted in my previous post, a policy being ‘sold’ in exactly the same way that Brexit itself was sold, even though recent polling shows that 46% of those planning to vote Tory at the next election think Brexit has been a failure (and only 22% think it has been a success). Perhaps that is why Badenoch made only a couple of passing references to Brexit in her conference speech, in itself a telling fact: far from boasting of it, the very party that delivered Brexit feels too ashamed to talk about it.

Farage’s culpability and Labour’s problem

So much for the Tories. In my previous post I also noted that Keir Starmer had begun to attack Nigel Farage on the grounds of the damage done by Brexit. That attack has escalated, with Labour now starting to argue (£) that Farage will be to blame for anticipated tax rises in the forthcoming budget because, having used “easy sloganeering” to persuade the public to vote for Brexit, he then walked away and took no responsibility for it, leaving the economic consequences which ultimately explain the need tax raises.

Farage and his supporters, and no doubt others, object that he had no control over the delivery of Brexit, so the accusation is unfounded. But that is simplistic. Farage was not in power, it is true, but he exercised considerable power, always ready to denounce as ‘betrayal’ whatever form of Brexit was proposed and never once putting forward realistic proposals for delivering it in ways that were less economically damaging than what was enacted. Moreover, at the 2019 election, he backed Boris Johnson’s ‘oven-ready Brexit’ even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats.

So, yes, Farage is very much amongst those responsible for Brexit and, in any case, it is more than reasonable to point out that the main cause of his political life has proved to be a failure. It’s certainly clear that this line of attack is being made increasingly often by Labour politicians or sympathetic commentators, an example this week being an opinion piece by Kevin Maguire, Associate Editor of the Mirror.

Where the Labour government is on much trickier ground is that, to the extent it acknowledges the economic damage of Brexit it opens the question of why it has no plans to seek more than marginal limitations to this damage. Perhaps that is why Starmer’s conference speech, like Badenoch’s, had a telling lacuna, in his case avoiding any mention of his ‘reset’ policy. For if Brexit is a sufficiently serious problem to make attacking Farage’s culpability for it worthwhile, what is the government’s solution?

That is the question which Starmer has, until now, avoided and to which he cannot give a credible answer without abandoning his cast iron ‘red line’ manifesto promises, as well as ensuring that the entirety of British politics during this parliament, and probably the next election, is dominated by Brexit again. He isn’t going to do that, and that is one exemplification of the Brexit impasse that Britain as a whole is in: its entire national strategy is admitted, even by many of its advocates, to have failed, and public opinion firmly and consistently endorses the view that it was wrong to leave, but there is no presently viable political route to its rectification.

I’ve been arguing consistently, since December 2022, that there is a better approach for Labour, which would be to honestly admit that Brexit is damaging and has failed, and ought to be reversed, but to be equally honest in saying that this isn’t a political possibility until there is cross-party consensus (at least amongst parties that might credibly come to power) to make an application to rejoin. That means, in the present context, identifying Reform and the Conservatives as the barrier, making them responsible not just for the original problem but for the continuing absence of a solution. I still think that would be Labour’s best option, and with the latest line of blaming Farage for Brexit it becomes the logical next step.

A Royal Commission?

If there is ever to be a solution, one part of the route to it could be an interesting proposal made over the summer (although I have only just come across it) by former MEP Andrew Duff. Noting the “deadlock” in British post-Brexit politics, he proposes the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the position and future of the UK in Europe. It’s not often that a new idea about Brexit surfaces, and it’s a reasonable one in all sorts of ways, the most minimal, but not unimportant, being that, as I argued in June, it is surely right to review, given the time that has passed and the experience we have had, what Brexit has actually meant for the UK.

If nothing else, it would be a way of drawing together the now massive, but highly dispersed and fragmentary, body of evidence about Brexit, and providing some accountability for decisions made. For example, at this week’s Tory Party conference, Michael Gove admitted that the trade deals his government did with Australia and New Zealand were poorly negotiated and damaging to farmers, going on to say “we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working.” Yet these highly revealing remarks were barely reported, even though they confirm exactly what so many of us said at the time, what civil servants warned ministers of at the time, and what the government denied at the time.

Assembling an authoritative single review of what happened with Brexit would, in itself, be a contrast with the evidence-free, faith-based, reality-denying politics of Brexitism. However Duff’s proposal is primarily intended as a future-oriented exercise, which could begin a process to create, to the extent it is possible, the basis for a future national consensus.

From that point of view, he is surely right to say that “the most likely outcome of such a Royal Commission will be a report that furnishes the Prime Minister with a cast-iron case for reversing Brexit.” I’m not so sure Duff is right that “it will prepare the ground for the referendum campaign that must inevitably follow”, since it wouldn’t in itself create the kind of cross-party agreement needed to make rejoining a viable possibility for the EU. But it would be a step away from the current absurdity of a nation which effectively knows it has made a mistake but can’t find a route to rectify it. At the very least it offers a practical suggestion to create such a route, in a way that eludes those who simply demand a ‘rejoin now’ policy. [1]

Still Brexiting

Whatever the wider issues in play (or which ought to be in play), it shouldn’t be forgotten that, as a matter of fact, the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship continues to limp along, largely undiscussed in public. One facet of that, which has had some media discussion, is that since the beginning of this week the EU Entry-Exit System (EES) has begun to be enforced. I should clarify that wording, perhaps, in that, whatever the pro-Brexit press may imagine (£), the EES isn’t something particular to the UK-EU relationship, as if it were a ‘punishment’ for Brexit, but, rather, applies to the EU’s relationship with third countries generally. However, in that sense, for the UK it is a consequence of Brexit and one which will introduce new complexities and, potentially, delays and queues for travelers (although in the last few hours it has been reported that, to avoid this, it is only being partly implemented for now). Sloganizing about ‘securing our borders’ suddenly looks less attractive when we are its target.

In an analogous way, whilst the Brexiters have long used the feeble pun of a ‘protectionist racket’ to describe the EU, that suddenly looks even less funny with the prospect of a massive increase in its tariffs and reduction in its tariff-free quotas for steel imports. That would be a very serious blow, perhaps even an “existential threat”, for the already beleaguered British steel industry, since almost 80% of UK steel exports go to the EU. Again, this is a consequence of being a third country although, again, with wearying predictability, the pro-Brexit press reported it as if it were aimed specifically at Britain (£).

It may or may not be that the British government manages to negotiate an exemption but, taken in conjunction with the now indefinitely stalled negotiations with the US over steel tariffs, it is a stark reminder of Britain’s post-Brexit isolation. That reminder has several dimensions, including the fact of the relative importance of the EU market as compared with the US (which, for steel, takes less than 10% of UK exports). More generally, for all the Brexiter rhetoric about Brexit enabling the UK to have a ‘nimble’ independent trade policy, it is a reminder that size matters more than agility in a world dominated by regional blocs. That is especially so when these lumbering trade monsters go to war, the wider context of the EU’s announcement being, in large part, the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the Chinese steel industry. [2]

The same ‘better in than out’ lesson applies to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which is due to come into force in January 2026, and which also has implications for steel, amongst other products. This is an issue which has been lurking in the Brexit undergrowth for years (I think the first time I discussed it on this blog was in September 2023, and that post includes several links explaining some of the complexities involved), but now it has been reported that a temporary deal to exempt the UK is in prospect. [3] The longer-term likelihood is that the EU CBAM will be linked to the UK CBAM (due to come in to force in 2027), along with an associated linkage of UK and EU Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS), a possibility within the scope of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

A permanent agreement on CBAM and ETS linkages sits alongside other elements of the still to be agreed details of the ‘reset’, including potential deals on a Youth Mobility Scheme, UK participation in Erasmus +, and a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. The latter has a particular urgency in the context of food price inflation, as Naomi Smith of Best for Britain pointed out this week, and might be agreed and implemented “within a year”, according to a recent statement from Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s Trade Commissioner.

That may be optimistic, and it is worth remembering that, price issues aside, until there is an SPS deal in place, the UK (or more accurately Great Britain) will continue with the risky policy of partial border security, having never fully implemented import controls and having now given up even the process of doing so, in the expectation of this still-to-be agreed deal. Sometimes, apparently, ‘securing our borders’ isn’t a priority.

Also sitting within the reset basket is the question of possible partial UK involvement in the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative for defence procurement. It’s an issue of particular and growing salience in the context of the ever-growing threat from Russia and the declining reliability (to put it mildly) of the US as a security partner. Whilst, as Jannike Wachowiak of UKICE explains, the UK would not, as a third country, be eligible for loans from SAFE defence funds, it could, potentially, have access to joint procurements.

The growing charge list

All of these, and other, issues are a reminder not just of the ongoing negotiation of the UK-EU relationship, but of the cumbersome nature of that process, the uncertainties of its outcomes, and the limited scope of those outcomes even if the most favourable of them were to result. One consequence of that, although it is probably impossible to quantify, or even to find much information about, must be to deter investment and, therefore, economic growth. In all kinds of sectors, for all kinds of reasons, the terms of the UK-EU relationship are in flux which, necessarily, creates an unpropitious environment for investment.

Domestic political uncertainty is also a factor since Farage is already threatening to tear up any new agreements the present government makes with the EU. Even if that doesn’t make the EU wary of such agreements, it will prey on the minds of investors and indeed others trying to plan for the future. That, too, is something to be added to the growing charge list against the Reform leader and the other ‘guilty men’ of Brexit. Ultimately, there will need to be not so much a Royal Commission as a Public Inquiry if they are to be held accountable. Only by excavating the subterranean maze of Brexit will its eruptions be quelled.

 

Notes

[1] Duff’s proposal attracted several social media comments denouncing it as ‘British exceptionalism’ (in line with my usual policy, I only link to social media posts if they come from public figures). This is nonsense and reflects a wider problem. It is nonsense because there’s nothing ‘exceptionalist’ about a domestic political debate and, in this case, the idea that Britain needs a process of honest self-reflection about what has done to itself is almost the opposite. It is for the UK to face up to the consequences of its collective decisions, and to do otherwise, for example by blaming the EU for those consequences, or expecting the EU to provide solutions to them, is what might be exceptionalist.

The wider problem is that, whilst it is absolutely true that throughout the Brexit process British exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, greatly in evidence, sometimes amongst ‘remainers’ as well as Brexiters, there is a cadre of social media posters that simply parrots the word in any and every discussion of any and every aspect of Brexit (very often the same posters who ignorantly trot out ‘cherry-picking’ to describe any and every aspect of post-Brexit UK-EU relations).

Some (or more accurately one person, a rather creepy stalker who continually creates multiple pseudonymous social media accounts to harass me and various other people, including Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, on the basis of entirely false accusations of anti-Irish racism) also object that my use of the word ‘Brexitism’ is ‘British exceptionalism’, since it denotes a British form of populism (I explain why that is warranted in my definition of Brexitism), which is as transparently stupid as saying that the word ‘Brexit’ is ‘exceptionalist’. Brexit happened here; Brexitism is happening here. Specific doesn’t mean exceptional.

[2] There is of course a much wider point here than trade or, rather, trade is imbricated within the wider point of the multiple areas – economy, security, defence - in which the UK is horribly caught between the US, China, and the EU. But that would need another post.

[3] Reading that September 2023 post again, I was reminded of the sad, sorry, stupid saga of the UKCA mark, the long, lingering death of which quietly continued over the summer, with the announcement that it will not be required for medical devices.

‘I want my country back’: what’s in a phrase?

Lee Anderson’s decision this week to join the Reform Party, becoming its first, if unelected, MP brought into focus several of the Brexit themes I’ve been writing about in recent months. At the beginning of October, discussing the ways that Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad, I made specific reference to Anderson, then the Deputy Chairman, as illustrating how there are no discernible differences between many sections of the Tory Party and Reform. So, given the prompt of losing the Tory whip, it was an obvious move for him to make. It’s possible that other Tory MPs will follow him to Reform without that spur to action, but none have done so yet. And why should they? It is now obvious to all, as it should have been for a while, that, as I wrote in February 2023, Brexitism is eating Conservatism.

Thus the end-game for the Brexitist (or NatCon populists, or Five Families, or whatever label we might use for them) is to take complete control of the Tory Party after it loses the election, and then to bring Reform Party voters and politicians, perhaps including Nigel Farage, into an invigorated ‘true Conservative’ Party. Meanwhile, the job of Reform is to siphon off as much as possible of the vote, so as to inflict a catastrophic defeat upon Sunak, facilitating the Brexitist takeover and paving the way for an actual or effective merger. Who knows, Anderson himself may re-enter the Tory fold in the process. Or perhaps he will disappear into well-deserved oblivion, a footnote in dusty volumes of political history.

Why Anderson matters

Whatever his personal fate, the more interesting thing about his defection (though, technically, it wasn’t quite that, given that he had already lost the Tory whip) was the way Anderson explained his motivation. It was, he announced, using the kind of grave tone that implied it was some deeply thought-out, startlingly original insight, because “I want my country back”. Fellow Brexitist Andrea Jenkyns was in agreement, though apparently miffed since she had been “saying this for months!”, as if she had the copyright. In fact, it was exactly the decades-old cliché which I referred to in my post only a couple of weeks ago when discussing the politics of nostalgia feeding what I called ‘radical Brexitism’ (though the precise words I used there were ‘I just want my country back’).

Anderson claims, probably rightly, that his is a desire shared by “millions of people up and down the country”, although whether, as populists believe, it amounts to a (‘silent’) majority is another question. Allison Pearson in the Telegraph (£) certainly thinks, using a formulation with a certain redolence, that “Lee Anderson was right.” And it is the extent to which his idea has support, rather than Anderson himself, that matters. It is at least part of what gave us Brexit, but in doing so, as I suggested in my post, that revealed how chimerical it is as a political goal. After all, immediately after the referendum, Nigel Farage declared that “We’ve got our country back” and yet now, eight years later, Anderson and his ‘millions of others’ are still complaining, still aggrieved, still making the same demand.

One thing I didn’t know when I wrote my own post about nostalgia, but learned about this week from a poster on X-Twitter, is that in 2016 the critic A.A. Gill wrote a highly incisive critique of the ‘I want my country back’ motif, and its role in the nostalgia that informed the case to leave the EU. It is far better-written, and far more amusing, than my own effort, but there’s one important thing which Gill doesn’t mention, and which I only briefly touched on, which is that, whilst the demand suggests that at some point in the past those making it had ‘had their country’, but lost it due to recent changes, that suggestion is invalidated by the way that the demand is an old and recurring one.

Nostalgia - or déjà vu?

I certainly recall it being an expression which was widely used by adults when I was growing up in the 1970s. It was a sentiment channeled by Margaret Thatcher who, as the distinguished sociologist Stuart Hall wrote: “has always spoken quite authentically on behalf of those people who felt they were left behind by permissiveness … challenged by the sexual revolution, who never wanted a libertarian society” [1].

That was most obviously connected with the then prevalent Mary Whitehouse crusade against moral decline, a backlash against the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, and as such may seem rather passé now. However, something similar continues to exercise the Conservative right, as shown this week (£) by Melanie Phillips’ equation of populism with social conservatism and traditional family values. That’s a view shared by the co-leaders of the New Conservatives, Tory MPs Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, and notably all three make the foundational Brexitist claim that the vote for Brexit was an indication that their socially conservative policies have majority support. Notably, too, all three of them, plus Anderson, were amongst the speakers at last year’s London NatCon Conference.

In other words, the conservative, and sometimes Christian conservative, critique of ‘the permissive society’ is by no means an historical curio from the 1970s. Certainly there is much contemporary resonance in the way that those who Hall described (using a term familiar from Brexit, though with an accent on its cultural rather than its economic meaning) as “left behind” were as alarmed about rising crime and disorder as they were by sexual licence.

That alarm was examined, at the same kind of time, by another sociologist, Geoffrey Pearson. His analysis showed how such fears in the 1970s and 1980s typically referenced an imagined past, vaguely referred to as ‘about 20 years ago’, before things got ‘out of control’. Yet, he demonstrated, going back about 20 years to the 1950s and 1960s revealed that exactly the same fears were being expressed, and also with reference to the period ‘about 20 years ago’ or ‘since the war’, and so on back into the even more distant past [2].

I was reminded of this when Reform leader Richard Tice expanded on Anderson’s reference to wanting his country back by talking about the way things have changed “over the last 25 years or so” (I can’t find the link, unfortunately, but elsewhere he waxed lyrical about the 1980s and 90s), showing the enduring relevance of the pattern of ever-refreshed, ahistorical grievance that Geoffrey Pearson identified. Even more pertinently, Pearson showed how the sense of crime and social breakdown, and the decline of traditional British or English (and he notes the frequent slippage between the two, also evident today) virtues, both in the 1980s and in previous periods, going back to the nineteenth century, was almost invariably linked to immigration and the arrival of ‘alien’ cultures.

This is also almost invariably what lies behind contemporary demands to ‘get my country back’, with Allison Pearson writing that “our nation is being abducted by aliens” (though also, inadvertently, demonstrating the endless recurrence of these claims by opening her article with a mournful lament for England written by Philip Larkin in 1946). It is plainly what Anderson meant, as suggested by his reference to his desire being to “speak my mind” (prompting some giggles from the assembled journalists), presumably a nod towards his remarks about Sadiq Khan which led to him losing the Tory whip. That was made explicit when he went on to use his new-found freedom by airing his “concerns” about legal and illegal migration and “hate marches”, concerns which he, just like his predecessors, ran seamlessly together with those about “street crime” and “the shoplifters” who go unpunished.

It’s not just immigration which is a recurring theme. The preoccupation Anderson and his fellows have with fighting culture wars against ‘wokery’ also reprises earlier anguish about ‘political correctness gone mad’ and, in Geoffrey Pearson’s telling, the persistent 1970s complaint about “the 'softy-softy, namby-pamby pussyfooting' of the 'so-called experts’” (p.4). That latter side-swipe at experts is another point of resonance with Brexit and Brexitism, as is the reference to social liberalism, which could effectively be expressed in the present-day terms of wokery, snowflakes, and safe spaces. Conversely, it’s not hard to imagine the next line being a quote from some preposterously-named, reactionary, over-privileged, 1970s warhorse of a Tory MP calling for the workshy to be conscripted for compulsory national service. But in fact that call was made just his week (£), by the fabulously wealthy, ferociously pro-Brexit Tory MP Richard Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, and descendent of pioneers of the sugar and slave trade.

In short, with some minor modifications of language and emphasis, there’s really no difference between the complaints made by people like Anderson, Tice, Cates, Kruger et al. now, and those made by their predecessors at the very time, whatever the time, they want to ‘get back’ to.

When nostalgia turns vicious

It's important to notice these recurrences and continuities partly because they help to explain why the demand to ‘have our country back’ is based upon an imagination of past stability and harmony – what might be called ‘simple nostalgia’ – which means that, even if the clock could be turned back, the recovered past would not be what people think they remember. But what is even more important is that it reveals the essential dishonesty of the pretension to moderation and reasonableness. That pretension is implicit in the word ‘just’ in the phrase ‘I just want my country back’, as if it were merely a humble demand. It also figures when that word is used in a different way, namely the claim commonly made by such populists that they ‘have nothing against immigration or immigrants, it’s just that the numbers have got too big’, or that they ‘have nothing against equality, it’s just that it has gone too far now’.

Yet the fact that such suggestions are recurrent, so that even when, say, immigration levels were much lower than they have been in recent years, exactly the same disclaimers were made, shows populists to have a highly immoderate agenda, which might be called ‘vicious nostalgia’. That is, they say that it is only now that immigration is too high that they are concerned, but in fact they said the same thing when immigration was lower. So were their demands ever to be satisfied, say by enforcing a low immigration cap, they would immediately demand even more extreme restrictions, all the way down to compulsory repatriation or even worse. For once the basic premise of ‘getting our country back’ is accepted, the list of who no longer belongs, of who is not ‘us’ but ‘them’, can only get longer. This is also an illustration of Brexitism, in that it is the wider application of the way that, with Brexit, as soon as one form of it was proposed, there was a demand that only an even harder form would be ‘true Brexit’.

This does not just apply to immigration. That is but one, albeit crucial, aspect of the more fundamental issue of who are the ‘we’ or ‘us’ in all this. Even leaving aside the obvious question of whether it refers to the English or the British, it is always implicit, and often explicit, that ‘getting our country back’ means, like Brexit, expunging ‘the enemies of the people’ and the ‘saboteurs’, and the ‘wokerati’ more generally. So what happens to all these people, numerous and powerful enough to have taken ‘our country’ from us? Public recantation? Imprisonment? Re-education? Deportation? And who are to be the arbiters of what is acceptable in ‘our country’? A Star Chamber of Lee Anderson and his pals?

So in these and other ways the apparently humble, slightly self-pitying, lament that ‘I just want my country back’ leads, or at the very least points, to the darkest corridors and most degraded chambers of human history.

Inverted snobbery

This mock-humility finds another kind of expression, superficially benign but deeply malign, which again was illustrated by Anderson’s explanation of his defection - all this in a statement which lasted just under two minutes! Rehearsing his trademark ‘prolier than thou’ schtick, he simpered that “I might not know some of these long words that people use in parliament”.

At one level, it was a horrible, Uriah Heep-ish, attempt to ingratiate himself – horrible not least for trading on precisely the stereotype of the northern working class which populists like Anderson ascribe to ‘the sneering remoaner elite’. At another level, it was self-evidently an example of the passive-aggressive inverted snobbery which some Brexiters have made their own. For it’s quite obvious that Anderson is not inarticulate, and doesn’t regard himself as such, but wants to use the idea that he is as a way of depicting himself as a plucky, plain-speaking underdog, standing up against effete privilege. It evidently struck Cambridge graduate Allison Pearson that way, as she breathlessly recounted how he had spoken in his “no-nonsense, Nottinghamshire miner’s style”, for all the world like Constance Chatterley meeting Oliver Mellors for the first time.

Again this is worth commenting on because it has a much wider currency and significance than Anderson himself. It is a recurring conceit amongst Brexiters, on both the right and the left, that their opponents are cushioned, self-indulgent, and privileged. Examples include representing ‘remainers’ as only concerned to keep their cheap EU nannies or plumbers, or to preserve the ease with which they can take foreign holidays or own holiday homes. It was evident recently in some responses to the report that the introduction of import controls has, predictably, led to shortages of artisanal delicatessen products, responses which were reminiscent of the comment in Gill’s essay about the desire to go “back to gooseberries, not avocados”.

It’s cartoonish at multiple levels, as if working-class people never go abroad, never employ childminders or plumbers, and subsist solely on bread-and-dripping and pints of wallop. But it serves an important purpose, which is to ignore the significant levels of support for leaving the EU amongst affluent middle-class southerners as well as the significant support for remaining in the EU across the UK, but especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland, amongst poor and working-class people.

Indeed part of its dishonesty is not to differentiate between ‘poor’ and ‘working class’ at all, even though the notion of the Red Wall was originally bound up with Labour-held constituencies where there were large numbers of people with characteristics of home ownership and small-business ownership which associated with voting Tory in other parts of the country. It was these older, probably leave-voting, working class but relatively affluent voters who were central to turning the Red Wall blue in the 2019 election. They may not be rich, but they are not living precariously on the very fringes of society, unacquainted with avocados and confining their holidays to Bridlington. Ignoring this is again part of a rhetorical strategy to depict Brexit – and the more extensive agenda of Brexitism – as being the people’s crusade against the elite.

So just as ‘I want my country back’ codes a vicious agenda of exclusion, Anderson’s ‘man of the people’ act, and similar efforts by Farage and others, mobilize inverted snobbery in pursuit of that agenda.  

Who are the baddies?

We can obviously expect the Brexitists to go on mining this seam, and it will be much easier to do so in opposition than in government. That’s because, as with Brexit itself, it can’t translate its promises into deliverable policy. This is one of the reasons why Sunak’s government is in such a mess, as it constantly tries to assuage the unassuageable demands of the Brexitists within the party and the electorate, whilst maintaining at least a semblance of rationality and competence. Hence Sunak’s periodic forays into populism, such as last year’s embrace of the ’15 minute city’ conspiracy theory, which go nowhere in policy terms.

More recently, and to the present point, his strange, impromptu speech condemning extremism was evidently designed to speak to current concerns - about the safety of MPs, rising Islamophobic and antisemitic attacks, public disorder and ‘no go zones’ - some of which are genuine, but others exaggerated or deployed opportunistically by Brexitists. Indeed it spoke to precisely the issues and events which were the proximate cause of Anderson’s demise as a Tory MP, and promised “a new robust framework” to deal with extremism (the first step, it later emerged, being to get Michael Gove to define it).

This may have been intended to placate Brexitists, perhaps even to promise them that they were about to get their country back! Yet, far from being satisfied, they were infuriated because Sunak included far-right extremism in his condemnation. Yet he could hardly do otherwise without losing all credibility as a mainstream politician, given the widespread evidence of such extremism, including, for example, the fact that last year saw the highest ever number of those in prison for far-right terror offences.

So, suddenly, the Brexitists began to be concerned that the “robust framework” this speech was going to lead to might include them, with, most prominently, Miriam Cates fearing that “attempting to define such nebulous terms as ‘extremism’ and ‘British values’ will have a further chilling effect on those with lawful, conservative views”. Quite what existing ‘chilling effect’ there is on expressing ‘lawful, conservative views’ was not clear when Cates wrote those words, and has become even less so since, given Sunak’s equanimity about holding on to Frank Hester’s money, despite his remarks about Diane Abbott.

At all events, the Brexitists needn’t worry about facing their ‘are we the baddies?’ moment because, ironically, what is almost certainly going to unfold is a textbook illustration of why populism can’t give rise to workable policy. After all, it’s not as if we haven’t been round this loop before, sometimes even with Gove flying the plane, in the fruitless quest for a definition of British values which isn’t either so narrow as to exclude everything except Morris dancing and eating baked beans or so broad as to include everything but satanic rituals and cannibalism.  As it turned out, although he did produce a new definition of extremism yesterday, Gove seems to have avoided re-opening the issue of ‘British values’ directly. Perhaps he felt, as my father did when faced with the task of telling me ‘the facts of life’, that it was better to leave the details only vaguely hinted at (so that at the time, and for some years afterwards, I thought he had been explaining the basic skills I would need if I wanted to pursue a career in plumbing).

What will happen with Gove’s definition, which has already predictably been criticised for going too far and for not going far enough, remains to be seen. I suspect that in practical terms it will amount to nothing and will soon be forgotten. But what Cates’ initial reaction inadvertently demonstrated was the essential fatuity of the central Brexitist ideas of ‘the people’, ‘the will of the people’, and, with that, of their outgrowth in the slogan ‘I want my country back’. For all of these things falter on the same rock as attempting to define British values. There simply is no single ‘people’, with a single ‘will’, and a single set of values, and nor is there a single ‘country’ that belongs as of right to one segment of it. There’s almost certainly not even any agreement within the segment which ‘wants their country back’ about what that actually means, just as there was no agreement amongst those who wanted Brexit about what that meant.

A joke

The fundamental problem in all this is that attempts to define extremism in what is still a liberal democracy inevitably rely on some notion of the tolerance of diversity of beliefs, lifestyles, speech and so on. But, at the same time, the underlying implication of the desire to ‘have our country back’ is the politics of vicious exclusion which is at odds with such tolerance and, itself, a form of extremism. Of course liberal democracies can, should, and do have laws prohibiting many kinds of extremist behaviour, from terrorism to hate speech, as the UK does. Yet, evidently, that is not enough for Anderson and the millions who agree with him.

However, although what is, again, still a liberal democracy isn’t going to give those people what they want, most politicians, and certainly Sunak, continue to pander to them. That is a doomed enterprise, since they remain aggrieved, and it is unsatisfactory for everyone else because it constantly gets in the way of useful, productive and effective politics. It is the political equivalent of indulging a childish tantrum and, again, Brexit provides the template.

Perhaps the best response whenever someone shrieks ‘I want my country back’ would be to say: ‘Well you can’t. You’ve been given Brexit, and that’s more than enough. So suck it up’. It’s true that such treatment would provoke screaming populist rage about the insufferable arrogance of the liberal elite, but that reminds me of one of my favourite jokes, in which a man goes to the doctor, who prescribes a medicine but warns that its side-effects are depression, weight gain, impotence and hair loss. The patient replies that he already has the side-effects, so he might as well start taking the medicine.

 

References

[1] Quoted in Philip Whitehead, The Writing on the Wall. Britain in the 1970s. London: Michael Joseph, 1985.

[2] Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan. A History of Respectable Fears. London: Macmillan, 1983.

The battle for Britain’s post-Brexit polity

In the book I wrote about Brexit I anticipated (pp. 275-278) two broad scenarios for how the immediate future would develop once the realities of Brexit began to be felt (the book itself ended with the end of the transition period). These scenarios weren’t about ‘staying out’ versus ‘re-joining’, though they might eventually have implications for that, but about different ways of ‘being out’.

Post-Brexit scenarios

In the first scenario, the bitter domestic debate and the corresponding antagonism towards the EU would gradually die down. The inescapable facts of geographical proximity and of economic and regulatory interdependence would normalize the UK-EU relationship, in that it would come to be viewed as a rather dull issue to be approached in pragmatic terms, and seen through the prism of UK strategic interests rather than Brexit per se. The first concrete outcome of that would come with making use of the provisions within the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) to deepen it as regards both trade and security.

In the second scenario, the UK would be stuck in a perpetual Brexit ‘Groundhog Day’. The approach to relations with the EU would be one of permanent hostility, resentment and suspicion. And there would be a similar hostility to attempts from the supposed ‘Establishment’ and ‘liberal elite’ to improve those relations. The economic damage of Brexit would be blamed on ‘EU punishment’ rather than Brexit itself, and the Referendum vote would continue to be used as a supposed mandate for ever-greater divergence from the EU and even as a mandate for a “Brexit 2.0” of leaving the ECHR.

‘Scenario one’ might be called one of ‘rapprochement’ or perhaps ‘amelioration’, and ‘scenario two’ might be called one of ‘repetition’ or even ‘intensification’.

Elements of both of them have been on display this week. That is because we are now witnessing, on a daily basis, a battle that will determine which, if either, of these scenarios will prevail as the consensus view of the UK polity, broadly conceived.

It is a battle played out in contestations over the nature and extent of Brexit damage, over specific post-Brexit policies including the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Retained EU Law Bill, in all the less visible interchanges between interest groups and the government over post-Brexit funding schemes or regulatory regimes, and in increasingly vociferous denunciations of the ECHR, especially in the context of ‘the small boats crisis’.

The current state of play

By the ‘UK polity, broadly conceived’, I mean the nexus of political parties and political actors, civil society organizations, the commentariat and media, including social media, and public opinion. I stress that, because it is not, as some seem to think, simply about what the opinion polls say, important as that is. Public opinion is certainly a necessary condition in settling which scenario emerges, but it is not a sufficient one.

It is indeed the case that public opinion is settling towards the first scenario. Some 47% (and 30% of leave voters) want a closer relationship with the EU, though what is meant by ‘closer’ is not homogenous, with just 14% (and 18% of leave voters) wanting it to be more distant than at present. That is still not a majority, but it is a very strong lead. It is likely that political actors, in the sense of business groups, trade unions and numerous lobbying groups, are even more united in favouring scenario one, as evidenced for example by the many signatories to a letter calling on the government to abandon the Retained EU Law Bill (£).

However, the commentariat and media remain as split as ever, and scenario two still has enthusiastic support in, for example, the pages of the Telegraph, Mail and Express. There has been some change in the way that is expressed, though, with the tone becoming notably more defensive as the evidence of Brexit damage has mounted (£) and as commentators realize they are losing the battle of the narrative and, with it, public support.

As for the government, in line with my post last week it is hopelessly stuck. It’s clear that there are elements, including Rishi Sunak himself, which see the need for something like the first scenario on grounds of economic and political pragmatism. That is evident in numerous reports that Sunak wants a resolution on the Northern Ireland Protocol, but the fix he is in is reflected by other reports saying he has been “sitting on” an agreed deal for the last week, presumably for fear of the Brexit Ultras’ reaction. That looks like the final gasp of what for a long time seems to have been a policy of hoping that ‘something will turn up’. It hasn’t, and it’s likely he’ll find out next week what that reaction will be: already their opposition is growing louder (£).

The same desire for rapprochement is also evident in the government’s decision not to continue to contest the legal challenge to its treatment of EU citizens with pre-settled status and, in a more general way, in the Bloomberg report this week that Sunak has asked senior ministers and officials to draw up plans for a less acrimonious relationship with the EU. But, again, the same report highlighted the risk of a backlash to any such plans from the Ultras. And it’s not even as if the government itself has a coherent approach to EU relations since, in other reports this week, there are plans to “snub” the EU Horizon science funding programme, itself delayed purely because of the Protocol row.

Overall, whilst there may be some impetus to scenario one under Sunak, and he may even make some headway, there is no possibility of it becoming the settled consensus under this government. On the other hand, all the other political parties, apart from the Reform Party and DUP, are supportive of, at the very least, scenario one and certainly opposed to scenario two. The Labour Party, in particular, has effectively made scenario one its policy. So it does seem likely that, assuming a Labour election win, the next government will seek to enact it.

However, it’s crucial to understand that this would be a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for it actually happening. The key point is the earlier point that what is at issue is a consensus across the UK polity. Such a consensus doesn’t mean total agreement, which is never going to happen anyway. Instead it means scenario one dominating, and support for scenario two becoming the province of marginal and fringe actors in politics and the media. In particular, creating a consensus around scenario one will need significant buy-in from at least some who supported Brexit as well as from those who opposed it.

The Ditchley Park meeting

From that point of view, reports of a “secret” meeting held at the end of last week at Ditchley Park to “discuss the failings of Brexit and how to remedy them in the national interest” was an interesting development. The meeting brought together Brexiters (including Tories Michael Gove, Michael Howard and Norman Lamont, and Labour’s Gisela Stuart who co-chaired Vote Leave) and erstwhile remainers (including Labour’s David Lammy and Peter Mandelson, and the Tory David Lidington), as well as several former civil servants and some business leaders.

I call it ‘interesting’ not because it is going to yield anything in the way of concrete consequences, but because it is a tiny example, and so far as I know the first of its kind, of what a wider and long-term process of consensus-building for scenario one would look like. It is also, as Martin Fletcher of the New Statesman observes, perhaps the first time that as prominent a Brexiter as Gove has come anywhere close to acknowledging the failures of Brexit. Not that it should be over-stated: Gove, unlike those Labour MPs who attended, did so without the knowledge or consent of his party leader.

Brexiter reactions

That such a consensus is very far from being in the offing is also shown by the “near-hysterical responses” to news of the meeting. The most predictable came from Nigel Farage, with his autonomic reflex moan that “the full sell-out of Brexit is underway”. The Brexiter press took the same approach (£). You have to wonder just how often something can be sold out before there ceases to be anything left to betray. Brexiters like Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph (£) perhaps recognize this, but she draws the equally ludicrous conclusion that “Brexit was finally condemned to death in the gilded splendour of Ditchley Park”!

The Mail was sufficiently infuriated to run three items about the meeting – a report, an editorial, and a comment article by Steven Glover. Inevitably, the main attacks were multiple versions of the line that this was “a cynical remainer plot to derail Brexit”, but it was a line which made little sense, precisely because of the presence of “apparently unapologetic leavers” (though note the implied question raised by the word ‘apparently’) like “sinuous” Michael Gove (again, note the language: no one can fault tabloid journalists on their capacity to insinuate meaning). Nor could it be squared with the fact that neither re-joining the EU nor re-joining the single market were on the agenda. Indeed, all that was on the agenda was precisely the kind of rapprochement that I have called ‘scenario one’.

The logic of some of the Mail’s secondary lines of attack was also rather hard to follow. Apparently the secret nature of the meeting was evidence of its sinister intent, but so too was the fact that the leak of it having been held had appeared in the “Europhile Observer”. So was the cunning plot to conceal the meeting’s existence or to reveal it? Equally, David Frost ponderously warning, like a lumpen schoolboy who has diligently memorized the textbook without understanding its meaning, that the “establishment want to unravel the deals we did in 2020” was at odds with his own perpetual insistence that the Protocol, which is a key part of those deals, is not sacrosanct and, indeed, should be ‘unravelled’.

Most splenetic of all was someone called Carol Malone on GB News, who delivered a diatribe about “the anti-democratic treacherous elites” who by meeting to discuss how to make Brexit work better had apparently “spat on democracy and spat on the British people”. Goodness knows how unhinged she would have been had the meeting been a discussion of how to abandon Brexit altogether.

‘Remainer’ reactions

Perhaps less predictable were the negative reactions* from some of those who are anti-Brexit, although Martin Fletcher, referred to earlier, gave a qualified positive response and others were willing to give it a very cautious welcome. But some were almost as suspicious of the secrecy as the Brexiters, though it’s surely obvious that this was precisely because of the sensitivity of holding such a meeting, a sensitivity amply demonstrated by the ferocious response to its disclosure. In any case, whilst it is true the meeting wasn’t publicized by Ditchley Park, it wasn’t quite the conspiratorial event some depict it to be. To my mind, the level of confidentiality was sensible rather than sinister although, of course, ultimately such conversations will have to be public if a consensus for scenario one is to be created.

Many comments were disdainful of the lack of representation from any party other than Tories and Labour, or from trade unions and lobby groups. That’s a reasonable criticism, and, again, ultimately consensus-building would need a broader base, but it’s not indefensible to have a narrow group for what was widely recognized to be an unprecedented meeting, and one which would seem to have been very exploratory in nature.

In particular, some of these comments about lack of inclusiveness seemed to assume that the meeting had some kind of official or semi-official status that would, or could, give rise to a new national ‘plan’. Perhaps that was encouraged by the misleading reporting of the meeting as being a ‘Summit’. At all events it is obviously nonsense: such a meeting has no power at all, and certainly isn’t the basis of some kind of cross-party government or policy initiative. For that reason, similar comments about the lack of EU involvement were wide of the mark. The entire significance of the meeting, such as it is, lies in it (conceivably) being a tiny first step towards, specifically, domestic consensus-building around a very modest agenda.

Other comments jeered at precisely that modesty, insisting that no discussion was worthwhile that did not have re-joining the EU, or at least the single market, on the agenda. This is almost the mirror-image of the Brexiters’ criticisms, in that whereas they falsely assert that this was the real agenda and it was an attempt to sell out leavers, the re-join critics dismiss it for not having this agenda and being an attempt to sell out remainers.

Re-joiners beware

Underlying this is what I am increasingly coming to see as almost as big a block to ‘scenario one’ as that of the Brexit Ultras – the insistence by some that re-joining is something that will be quickly and easily achieved. I don’t think that is so, for the reasons I discussed in a video this week as a guest of Federal Trust (again, the comments beneath are instructive). But, whether I am right or wrong, the key point is that if re-joining is going to happen in whatever timescale, a necessary condition for it will be the creation of scenario one rather than scenario two. If scenario two becomes dominant, then re-joining will most certainly not happen. If scenario one takes hold then re-joining is by no means assured, but it becomes possible.

The danger, then, is that if even the tiniest step taken towards scenario one is dismissed out-of-hand by re-joiners and dismissed out-of-hand by Brexiters, then it will never happen. By insisting that only their preferred perfect outcome is acceptable, re-joiners, unwittingly no doubt, aid Brexiters in their rejection of it. In turn this makes it easier for scenario two to emerge. I don’t mean by this that re-joiners should give up on campaigning for their preferred outcome, just that they make that outcome much harder to achieve if they insist that anything other than the near-immediate delivery of that outcome is pointless or even, in a kind of reversal of the standard Brexiter line, a ‘betrayal’.

Commenting on reactions to the Ditchley Park meeting from “annoyed Remainers and EU commentators”, Helene von Bismarck, an eminent German historian specializing in Britain’s international relations, wrote “Too little, too late, they say. I am impatient too, but seriously, where do you want to start? If nothing except a Time Machine transporting you back to 2015 will make you happy, the future is bleak”. She also, rightly, pointed out that the meeting doesn’t constitute any kind of a turning point but at least – or at best – part of a process of facing up to the realities of Brexit.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that the agenda of that meeting did, in itself, face those realities. Gerhard Schnyder, in his discussion of it on his latest Brexit Impact Tracker is also absolutely right to say that:

“… eventually, the country will have to come together and heal the deep wounds Brexit has inflicted on the British body politic. But not on any terms. The risk is that if ‘moving on’ happens without a proper analysis of why Brexit took place and why it was never going to work, the ideas that drove the Brexit fringe of the UK’s political sphere will continue to cast their long shadows over the inevitable process of softening hard Brexit.”

However, that is not going to happen in one moment of revelation. The ‘proper analysis’ already exists; the political issue is to establish it as a consensus, which means enrolling at least some committed and leading Brexiters through a repudiation of their entrenched beliefs. That will take time and patience.

One implication of this could just conceivably be imminent. Although it is unlikely, suppose that Sunak decided that the only way of securing the deal with the EU to revise the Protocol was to take up Keir Starmer’s offer of Labour support, or even just threaten to do so to bring his rebels into line? If so, re-joiners should resist the temptation to denounce Labour for ‘propping up’ Brexit and instead see it as a significant move towards creating scenario one through a cross-party agreement that marginalizes the Brexit Ultras and undermines their desire for scenario two.

A battle for high stakes

The stakes here are very high. Each of the scenarios I sketched has very different consequences. For scenario one, rapprochement and amelioration lead to ‘restoration’, by which I don’t, or don’t simply, mean eventual re-joining, but a thorough repudiation and marginalization of the entire populist or Brexitist project. For scenario two, repetition and intensification lead to ‘pariahdom’, meaning international isolation and domestic authoritarianism and immiseration. But it’s also possible that the current situation, in which the two scenarios are contested with neither becoming dominant, will become the permanent one. That scenario, which we could call ‘muddling along’, actually seems quite likely at the moment and if so would lead to permanent economic and geo-political decline, as well perpetual political and cultural strife.

How re-joiners decide to conduct themselves will be one, though clearly only one, of the factors in what now happens in terms of these post-Brexit scenarios. The extent of the damage of Brexit and how widely that damage is recognized is one of many others. So is the scale of the expected Tory defeat at the next election and how the Tory Party then responds. A Labour government will take us some way to scenario one, though won’t be enough to do so in itself, and will presumably improve the TCA (and, to pre-empt some objections, no, that doesn’t mean ‘cherry-picking’ and, no, it won’t come close to reversing the economic damage of Brexit).

Getting from that to any kind of re-joining (whether of EU or single market) will need a situation to develop where it is the settled ambition of both government and official opposition parties, rather as it was in the 1960s when (unsuccessful) applications to join the EU were made by both Conservative and Labour governments, though, post-Brexit, any such application would need to be preceded by a referendum. In other words, as then, and quite differently than was the case with Brexit, joining would become an established national strategy.

The British polity is currently nowhere near that point. And it may never get to that point (and that won’t be hastened but delayed if, as some think, it needs to be preceded by reforming the ‘first past the post system’, which would mean electing a government with such a policy and then holding, and winning, a referendum on that, before even getting to the question of re-joining).

The long road ahead

But if things are ever to get to that point it will start with baby steps like the Ditchley Park meeting (even to call that a baby step is to over-state the case), after which there could and would certainly need to be far more confident and significant strides. The Brexiters, even as their cause languishes in the opinion polls, will still have the power to keep trying to trip that process up. They can only be aided in that if re-joiners and erstwhile remainers jeer at and belittle every fledgling attempt to walk.

Of course it is absurd, infuriating, ludicrous that we should be in such a situation, and that it is not possible simply to say, as one might in everyday life, that a terrible mistake was made and that it should be put right as quickly as possible. But, politically, that isn’t possible because of the deep and toxic nature of Brexit and the bitter divisions that still exist over it, including over the very idea that it was a terrible mistake. For evidence of that, just look at the extraordinary anger even something as trivial as the Ditchley Park meeting provoked. The poison can’t just be sucked and spat out. The fever has to pass and, even then, a long recuperation will be needed.

In the time that takes, the costs of Brexit will rack up, higher and higher. That’s disastrous. But one of the many damages caused by Brexit is precisely the fact that even the process of reversing it entails huge costs.

 

 

*I am mainly referring here to reaction on social media. In line with my usual practice I don’t link to tweets unless they are from public figures, but if anyone doubts the veracity of my account of these reactions see, for example, some of the responses to my own tweet of the original report of the meeting.