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.
Showing posts with label Opinion polls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Opinion polls. Show all posts
Friday, 28 June 2024
Friday, 1 December 2023
Should Labour be bolder about Brexit?
One of the benefits of having re-enabled comments on this blog, to me at least, is to be able to see what issues get flagged up by readers as interesting or debatable. Last week’s post was mainly about the government’s Autumn Statement, but many of the comments focused on my far briefer observations about Labour’s post-Brexit policy. I have written about that at length in the past, but it is clearly an issue which is becoming more pressing as the next election gets closer, with some recent well-informed speculation (though that is all it is) that it could be as early as May 2024. And, of course, recent and current opinion polls suggest that Labour will win, which also adds salience to the question of how they would approach the UK-EU relationship in government.
Curtice’s analysis of the Labour vote
This issue has also been getting fresh attention because of recent remarks by the eminent polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice about the structure of current voter support for Labour. He suggests, in quite forceful terms, that “Labour’s presumption that they couldn’t get into an election winning position without fundamentally changing the character of their support vis à vis Brexit has been demonstrated to be false”. He makes three key points to explain and justify that. First, that those 2016 leave voters whose support Labour have gained since the 2019 election are atypical leave voters in that they tend to be those who now support re-joining the EU. Second, in line with general shifts against support for Brexit, those people who did vote Labour in 2019 are even more likely to be opposed to Brexit now than they were then. And, third, new voters, who were too young to vote in 2016 and/or 2019 are overwhelming pro-Labour and anti-Brexit.
The implication of this might be (I am not sure that Curtice has said this in terms, but it is certainly the conclusion that many are drawing from what he said) that Labour could have adopted, and could still adopt, a more strongly anti-Brexit position without threatening its chances of winning the election. That would, presumably, mean adopting a policy of seeking to re-join the EU or, at least, the single market (and/or entering into a comprehensive customs union with the EU). On Curtice’s analysis, such a policy would go with the grain of most of those intending to vote Labour. It would also (this is my view, not what Curtice said) be a far more credible economic policy because of the now strong evidence, discussed in my previous post, of the damage Brexit has done, and will continue to do, to growth and investment.
Economics and honesty
The economic argument appears to me to be unassailable, and as I observed last week it is quite dishonest for Labour to suggest that any changes that could realistically be made to the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) would make much economic difference. Labour’s proposals shouldn’t be entirely dismissed, though, as they will smooth some of the roughest edges of what Frost and Johnson agreed. There is also some validity in Labour’s argument that, from the perspective of investment, there is a value simply in providing stability and consistency. That was the message from business (£) at this week’s ‘global investment summit’, and Labour’s commitment to maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU speaks to that. There is also value in possible improvement to security cooperation, and in a general improvement in the tone of relations with the EU. But the benefits of what can be done within the TCA framework shouldn’t be over-stated.
That doesn’t mean getting het up about Labour’s ‘make Brexit work’ slogan which, vapid and irritating as it is, is no more than slogan. Nor is it to make the common criticism that Starmer is indulging in ‘cakeism’ with his proposals. That is off-beam, in that things like a Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) or Veterinary deal, a TCA mobility chapter, and a security pact have been on offer from the EU in that past, and if Starmer pursues them it will be on a something-for-something basis, not the something-for-nothing which defines cakeism. But, as someone commenting on last week’s post under the name ‘El Fred’ put it, it could be regarded as a kind of ‘shrinkflated cupcakeism’ if that means that Starmer is at least implying that it would be possible to yield significantly larger benefits without changing the fundamental structure of the TCA.
One issue here, economics aside, is simply that it would be a refreshing antidote to the years of political dishonesty about Brexit if Labour were to tell the truth. After all, it is dishonesty which got us into this Brexit mess and, whether in relation to Brexit or anything else, it is honesty which the public say is what they most want from politicians. At the least, honesty would mean Labour being open about the fact that their post-Brexit proposals will make very little economic difference. But, refreshing as that might be, it would not be a viable policy position in itself, since it would invite the obvious demand for them to develop proposals which would make such a difference. That takes us back, then, to some version of ‘rejoining’, with the implication of the Curtice analysis being that this would not preclude Labour being in an election-winning position.
Could Labour change policy?
I don’t question for a moment that Curtice is right in his account of the structure of the Labour vote. But I’m not convinced that it carries the implication that Labour could adopt some version of a re-join policy without suffering electorally. One problem is just that there may be a difference between the overall structure of the Labour vote, as outlined by Curtice, and its structure within particular Labour marginal seats and Labour target seats. I don’t know, and it would only be possible to know through constituency-level polling. But I assume Labour conduct such polling and, if so, perhaps it is this which explains their stance but, of course, the results of these polls are not in the public domain.
Leaving that speculation aside, for Labour to espouse any version of re-joining would not just be one policy amongst others, an uncontroversial addition to their existing proposals. It would inevitably become the major focus of the campaign, overwhelming every other debate. That would carry huge dangers for Labour because, despite what Curtice says about the structure of their vote, it doesn’t follow that voters who support re-join see this as the central political issue, or that they would support another referendum, which would certainly be a necessary prelude to re-joining the EU or even the single market [1].
On the first point, of course some Labour voters do see Brexit as the major issue, but there will be many shades of strength of feeling about that, even amongst some who would vote to re-join. Remainers and re-joiners are not a homogenous group, and most readers (as well as the writer!) of this blog are hardly likely to be representative of them. So the danger for Labour is that they are seen as ‘banging on about Brexit’ when it is not the priority issue for the voters. The LibDems (although for them the electoral calculations will be different) also seem alert to this danger. For, indeed, current polls show that only 15% of the electorate think ‘leaving the EU’ is amongst the top three issues facing the country, and just 13% of the 18-24 age group do so. Even amongst 2016 remain voters the figure is only 22%, amongst LibDem voters it is 23% and amongst Labour voters it is 20%. It’s true that the issue that does most concern voters, ‘the economy’, is inextricably bound up with Brexit, as are some of the others, but it doesn’t follow that voters see it in those terms or, if they do, that they see it as the main factor.
On the second point, recent polling evidence suggests that only 39% of the population support another referendum being held in the next five years. That rises sharply to 63% amongst those who intend to vote Labour but, also amongst Labour-intending voters, 25% are opposed to such a referendum (the split amongst 2016 remain voters is almost identical). Even looking two terms ahead, to a referendum within the next ten years, the figures remain similar at 69% and 17% [2]. Again, it’s not clear what strength of feeling attaches to these views, but there must be at least some who are opposed to another referendum so strongly that the prospect of one would dissuade them from voting Labour, and at least some, perhaps many, who are in favour but whose support for it is fairly lukewarm, at least to the extent of not regarding it as a priority for the next Labour government.
How would changing Labour’s policy affect the Tory vote?
There’s another important campaign issue in this which Curtice’s analysis ignores (or, at least, it does in the clip I am discussing). Labour’s Brexit position is not just about the structure of the Labour vote, it also affects the structure of the opposition vote. If Labour put forward a re-join policy, that would enable the Tories to re-group and rally around a ‘defend Brexit’ campaign, galvanizing its core vote and, in particular, making it much easier for them to hoover up Reform Party voters who, as the opinion polls stand, look set to split the right-wing, Brexit-supporting vote. For these are voters to whom Brexit really is a defining issue.
At the moment, attempts to give a ‘vote Farage, get Starmer’ message to such voters have little chance of success. They don’t loathe Starmer as they did Corbyn, and they think Labour are probably going to win in any case. So they have a free-hit protest vote against Rishi Sunak, who they don’t regard as ‘real Conservative’ anyway. But the moment Labour adopted a re-join policy all that would change, and with current opinion polls giving Reform as much as 10% of the vote that could have a big effect. Perhaps that effect would be enough to keep Labour out of power but, even if not, then it would certainly be enough to reduce its majority, and enough to stave off a possible Tory wipe-out.
This point, just on its own, makes Labour’s stance explicable, and might also carry weight with those rejoin voters tempted to ‘punish’ Labour for the insufficiency of its Brexit policy. There is a real, epochal chance for the Tory Party to be not just defeated but annihilated in the election. It’s a chance that actually arises from Brexit itself, in that it is this which has created a schism in the electoral coalition between ideologues and pragmatists that normally holds the British right together. Small wonder that Labour don’t want to squander the possibility of such a prize by gifting the Tories a way of preventing such a schism.
What would changing policy mean for a Labour government?
This reasoning becomes all the stronger by considering what would it mean for Labour in government, even assuming it could win an election on a re-join platform. That could only mean re-joining becoming the dominant political issue for its entire first term, and an issue where success could by no means be guaranteed. It would mean holding another referendum with all that, by now, we surely know that entails for marginalizing every other issue. And it would mean winning it, which is far from certain especially if, as would surely be vital to settle the matter, it was this time held on the basis of a super-majority being needed.
Then, if all that was achieved, it would just be the beginning of a prolonged process of application to join, an application which might well fail. For, as has so often been pointed out, the EU, and its individual members, are likely to have grave reservations about UK membership. Those reservations would be all the greater if the referendum were again held as a simple majority vote, and that vote was only narrowly to re-join. But even a super-majority would not in itself eradicate the fear that, in a few years, with a new government, the UK would change its mind again. And even if that hurdle were overcome, the accession process would take time, and might not be completed by the end of Labour’s term of office. So it would go into the following election without having delivered its flagship policy.
A better approach?
Taken together, these arguments provide a strong case for the approach Labour have adopted. Where I think they have made a serious mistake is in being so dogmatic in opposing any form of re-joining, ever. It is easy to understand why, because the Tories would have exploited any ambivalence in order to claim that Labour has a ‘secret plan’ to re-join. They have tried that anyway (£), but it has had little traction precisely because it is so clear that there is no such plan. And, by the way, the Tories’ attempts in this regard give further weight to the point that, from their point of view, a Labour re-join policy would be an electoral boon, and perhaps the only thing that can save them.
However, understandable as the dogmatism of permanently ruling out re-joining may be, it has created a nasty straitjacket for the future. As I argued exactly a year ago, I think a better policy would have been to say that re-joining would have to await a strong popular and cross-party consensus, putting the responsibility with the Tories, where it properly lies, and, in the meantime, to propose improving the TCA, if possible, without over-claiming for its economic effects. This would have the virtue of honesty, an honesty which would also provide the political justification for the limitations of Labour’s policy.
Facing up to reality
With all this said, whatever I think, or whatever anyone may think of the arguments in this post, what seems unarguable is that Labour are not going to change their current Brexit position, and that becomes all the more so the closer the election gets. Even if it isn’t until the end of next year, there just isn’t time to make, communicate, and consolidate support for such a change. So, even if it is true that Starmer could or should have had a bolder position from the outset, it isn’t going to happen now.
Thus, like it or not, for voters dissatisfied with, or even disgusted by, the current position the choice will be whether to use their vote to make a Labour government or a Conservative government more likely (I phrase it that way as, in different constituencies, the voting implication of that will be different). Of course, that choice isn’t just about Brexit, but, on Brexit, even given the limitations of Labour’s policy it would be wrong to think that there is no difference between them and the Conservatives, so it’s a choice that matters and, anyway, it’s the only choice that is going to be on offer.
In a sense, the choice facing the most committed re-joiners is the mirror-image of that facing the most committed leavers. The latter have the choice of voting for what, in their terms, would be the Brexit purism of the Reform Party or the hopelessly compromised and deeply suspect Conservative Party. At the moment, it looks as if enough will choose ‘purity’ to keep the Conservatives from power. The choice on the other side, for ‘purist re-joiners’, is whether they want to do the same to Labour.
Notes
[1] There is a view sometimes expressed amongst advocates of single market (SM) membership that re-joining that, rather than the EU, would not require a referendum. There are three variants of that view. One is that, unlike EU membership, SM membership would not be a constitutional change. The second is that SM membership would have been compatible with the 2016 referendum result, and so would not require another referendum. The third is that, if Labour won an election on a rejoin SM policy, that would provide all the mandate needed.
All three versions, even if legally correct (which is arguable), are hopelessly naïve politically (in ways reminiscent of the LibDems’ ‘revoke Article 50’ policy in 2019 which, as I argued at the time, was deeply flawed both in principle and as a political tactic and strategy). For one thing, they all imply that it would be legitimate for a future Tory government to reverse policy, which also makes it an unappealing prospect for the EU/ EFTA. But that is part of a bigger issue: whatever we now do, it surely has to be permanent, and needs to be unequivocally seen as legitimate, rather than achieved by what is, or could easily be represented as, some sleight-of-hand or trickery. The Brexiters failed to achieve that, even with a referendum. If they had succeeded, we wouldn’t even be debating these matters any more. So if we have learnt nothing else from them, and from the Brexit saga generally, it is that such a mistake can never be repeated.
[2] This poll also shows that support for an immediate referendum is much weaker, with only 42% in favour and 48% against amongst Labour-intending voters (and almost exactly the same amongst 2016 remain voters). But it’s not clear what weight to put on that as the question was about a referendum “in 2023”, a pretty absurd one given that it was asked in August 2023. So I think the five- and ten-year questions I’ve referred to are the more important ones. Even so, the answer to the ‘in 2023’ question does underscore the point that support for re-join if there were to be another referendum is the not the same as support for attempting to re-join by holding another referendum.
Curtice’s analysis of the Labour vote
This issue has also been getting fresh attention because of recent remarks by the eminent polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice about the structure of current voter support for Labour. He suggests, in quite forceful terms, that “Labour’s presumption that they couldn’t get into an election winning position without fundamentally changing the character of their support vis à vis Brexit has been demonstrated to be false”. He makes three key points to explain and justify that. First, that those 2016 leave voters whose support Labour have gained since the 2019 election are atypical leave voters in that they tend to be those who now support re-joining the EU. Second, in line with general shifts against support for Brexit, those people who did vote Labour in 2019 are even more likely to be opposed to Brexit now than they were then. And, third, new voters, who were too young to vote in 2016 and/or 2019 are overwhelming pro-Labour and anti-Brexit.
The implication of this might be (I am not sure that Curtice has said this in terms, but it is certainly the conclusion that many are drawing from what he said) that Labour could have adopted, and could still adopt, a more strongly anti-Brexit position without threatening its chances of winning the election. That would, presumably, mean adopting a policy of seeking to re-join the EU or, at least, the single market (and/or entering into a comprehensive customs union with the EU). On Curtice’s analysis, such a policy would go with the grain of most of those intending to vote Labour. It would also (this is my view, not what Curtice said) be a far more credible economic policy because of the now strong evidence, discussed in my previous post, of the damage Brexit has done, and will continue to do, to growth and investment.
Economics and honesty
The economic argument appears to me to be unassailable, and as I observed last week it is quite dishonest for Labour to suggest that any changes that could realistically be made to the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) would make much economic difference. Labour’s proposals shouldn’t be entirely dismissed, though, as they will smooth some of the roughest edges of what Frost and Johnson agreed. There is also some validity in Labour’s argument that, from the perspective of investment, there is a value simply in providing stability and consistency. That was the message from business (£) at this week’s ‘global investment summit’, and Labour’s commitment to maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU speaks to that. There is also value in possible improvement to security cooperation, and in a general improvement in the tone of relations with the EU. But the benefits of what can be done within the TCA framework shouldn’t be over-stated.
That doesn’t mean getting het up about Labour’s ‘make Brexit work’ slogan which, vapid and irritating as it is, is no more than slogan. Nor is it to make the common criticism that Starmer is indulging in ‘cakeism’ with his proposals. That is off-beam, in that things like a Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) or Veterinary deal, a TCA mobility chapter, and a security pact have been on offer from the EU in that past, and if Starmer pursues them it will be on a something-for-something basis, not the something-for-nothing which defines cakeism. But, as someone commenting on last week’s post under the name ‘El Fred’ put it, it could be regarded as a kind of ‘shrinkflated cupcakeism’ if that means that Starmer is at least implying that it would be possible to yield significantly larger benefits without changing the fundamental structure of the TCA.
One issue here, economics aside, is simply that it would be a refreshing antidote to the years of political dishonesty about Brexit if Labour were to tell the truth. After all, it is dishonesty which got us into this Brexit mess and, whether in relation to Brexit or anything else, it is honesty which the public say is what they most want from politicians. At the least, honesty would mean Labour being open about the fact that their post-Brexit proposals will make very little economic difference. But, refreshing as that might be, it would not be a viable policy position in itself, since it would invite the obvious demand for them to develop proposals which would make such a difference. That takes us back, then, to some version of ‘rejoining’, with the implication of the Curtice analysis being that this would not preclude Labour being in an election-winning position.
Could Labour change policy?
I don’t question for a moment that Curtice is right in his account of the structure of the Labour vote. But I’m not convinced that it carries the implication that Labour could adopt some version of a re-join policy without suffering electorally. One problem is just that there may be a difference between the overall structure of the Labour vote, as outlined by Curtice, and its structure within particular Labour marginal seats and Labour target seats. I don’t know, and it would only be possible to know through constituency-level polling. But I assume Labour conduct such polling and, if so, perhaps it is this which explains their stance but, of course, the results of these polls are not in the public domain.
Leaving that speculation aside, for Labour to espouse any version of re-joining would not just be one policy amongst others, an uncontroversial addition to their existing proposals. It would inevitably become the major focus of the campaign, overwhelming every other debate. That would carry huge dangers for Labour because, despite what Curtice says about the structure of their vote, it doesn’t follow that voters who support re-join see this as the central political issue, or that they would support another referendum, which would certainly be a necessary prelude to re-joining the EU or even the single market [1].
On the first point, of course some Labour voters do see Brexit as the major issue, but there will be many shades of strength of feeling about that, even amongst some who would vote to re-join. Remainers and re-joiners are not a homogenous group, and most readers (as well as the writer!) of this blog are hardly likely to be representative of them. So the danger for Labour is that they are seen as ‘banging on about Brexit’ when it is not the priority issue for the voters. The LibDems (although for them the electoral calculations will be different) also seem alert to this danger. For, indeed, current polls show that only 15% of the electorate think ‘leaving the EU’ is amongst the top three issues facing the country, and just 13% of the 18-24 age group do so. Even amongst 2016 remain voters the figure is only 22%, amongst LibDem voters it is 23% and amongst Labour voters it is 20%. It’s true that the issue that does most concern voters, ‘the economy’, is inextricably bound up with Brexit, as are some of the others, but it doesn’t follow that voters see it in those terms or, if they do, that they see it as the main factor.
On the second point, recent polling evidence suggests that only 39% of the population support another referendum being held in the next five years. That rises sharply to 63% amongst those who intend to vote Labour but, also amongst Labour-intending voters, 25% are opposed to such a referendum (the split amongst 2016 remain voters is almost identical). Even looking two terms ahead, to a referendum within the next ten years, the figures remain similar at 69% and 17% [2]. Again, it’s not clear what strength of feeling attaches to these views, but there must be at least some who are opposed to another referendum so strongly that the prospect of one would dissuade them from voting Labour, and at least some, perhaps many, who are in favour but whose support for it is fairly lukewarm, at least to the extent of not regarding it as a priority for the next Labour government.
How would changing Labour’s policy affect the Tory vote?
There’s another important campaign issue in this which Curtice’s analysis ignores (or, at least, it does in the clip I am discussing). Labour’s Brexit position is not just about the structure of the Labour vote, it also affects the structure of the opposition vote. If Labour put forward a re-join policy, that would enable the Tories to re-group and rally around a ‘defend Brexit’ campaign, galvanizing its core vote and, in particular, making it much easier for them to hoover up Reform Party voters who, as the opinion polls stand, look set to split the right-wing, Brexit-supporting vote. For these are voters to whom Brexit really is a defining issue.
At the moment, attempts to give a ‘vote Farage, get Starmer’ message to such voters have little chance of success. They don’t loathe Starmer as they did Corbyn, and they think Labour are probably going to win in any case. So they have a free-hit protest vote against Rishi Sunak, who they don’t regard as ‘real Conservative’ anyway. But the moment Labour adopted a re-join policy all that would change, and with current opinion polls giving Reform as much as 10% of the vote that could have a big effect. Perhaps that effect would be enough to keep Labour out of power but, even if not, then it would certainly be enough to reduce its majority, and enough to stave off a possible Tory wipe-out.
This point, just on its own, makes Labour’s stance explicable, and might also carry weight with those rejoin voters tempted to ‘punish’ Labour for the insufficiency of its Brexit policy. There is a real, epochal chance for the Tory Party to be not just defeated but annihilated in the election. It’s a chance that actually arises from Brexit itself, in that it is this which has created a schism in the electoral coalition between ideologues and pragmatists that normally holds the British right together. Small wonder that Labour don’t want to squander the possibility of such a prize by gifting the Tories a way of preventing such a schism.
What would changing policy mean for a Labour government?
This reasoning becomes all the stronger by considering what would it mean for Labour in government, even assuming it could win an election on a re-join platform. That could only mean re-joining becoming the dominant political issue for its entire first term, and an issue where success could by no means be guaranteed. It would mean holding another referendum with all that, by now, we surely know that entails for marginalizing every other issue. And it would mean winning it, which is far from certain especially if, as would surely be vital to settle the matter, it was this time held on the basis of a super-majority being needed.
Then, if all that was achieved, it would just be the beginning of a prolonged process of application to join, an application which might well fail. For, as has so often been pointed out, the EU, and its individual members, are likely to have grave reservations about UK membership. Those reservations would be all the greater if the referendum were again held as a simple majority vote, and that vote was only narrowly to re-join. But even a super-majority would not in itself eradicate the fear that, in a few years, with a new government, the UK would change its mind again. And even if that hurdle were overcome, the accession process would take time, and might not be completed by the end of Labour’s term of office. So it would go into the following election without having delivered its flagship policy.
A better approach?
Taken together, these arguments provide a strong case for the approach Labour have adopted. Where I think they have made a serious mistake is in being so dogmatic in opposing any form of re-joining, ever. It is easy to understand why, because the Tories would have exploited any ambivalence in order to claim that Labour has a ‘secret plan’ to re-join. They have tried that anyway (£), but it has had little traction precisely because it is so clear that there is no such plan. And, by the way, the Tories’ attempts in this regard give further weight to the point that, from their point of view, a Labour re-join policy would be an electoral boon, and perhaps the only thing that can save them.
However, understandable as the dogmatism of permanently ruling out re-joining may be, it has created a nasty straitjacket for the future. As I argued exactly a year ago, I think a better policy would have been to say that re-joining would have to await a strong popular and cross-party consensus, putting the responsibility with the Tories, where it properly lies, and, in the meantime, to propose improving the TCA, if possible, without over-claiming for its economic effects. This would have the virtue of honesty, an honesty which would also provide the political justification for the limitations of Labour’s policy.
Facing up to reality
With all this said, whatever I think, or whatever anyone may think of the arguments in this post, what seems unarguable is that Labour are not going to change their current Brexit position, and that becomes all the more so the closer the election gets. Even if it isn’t until the end of next year, there just isn’t time to make, communicate, and consolidate support for such a change. So, even if it is true that Starmer could or should have had a bolder position from the outset, it isn’t going to happen now.
Thus, like it or not, for voters dissatisfied with, or even disgusted by, the current position the choice will be whether to use their vote to make a Labour government or a Conservative government more likely (I phrase it that way as, in different constituencies, the voting implication of that will be different). Of course, that choice isn’t just about Brexit, but, on Brexit, even given the limitations of Labour’s policy it would be wrong to think that there is no difference between them and the Conservatives, so it’s a choice that matters and, anyway, it’s the only choice that is going to be on offer.
In a sense, the choice facing the most committed re-joiners is the mirror-image of that facing the most committed leavers. The latter have the choice of voting for what, in their terms, would be the Brexit purism of the Reform Party or the hopelessly compromised and deeply suspect Conservative Party. At the moment, it looks as if enough will choose ‘purity’ to keep the Conservatives from power. The choice on the other side, for ‘purist re-joiners’, is whether they want to do the same to Labour.
Notes
[1] There is a view sometimes expressed amongst advocates of single market (SM) membership that re-joining that, rather than the EU, would not require a referendum. There are three variants of that view. One is that, unlike EU membership, SM membership would not be a constitutional change. The second is that SM membership would have been compatible with the 2016 referendum result, and so would not require another referendum. The third is that, if Labour won an election on a rejoin SM policy, that would provide all the mandate needed.
All three versions, even if legally correct (which is arguable), are hopelessly naïve politically (in ways reminiscent of the LibDems’ ‘revoke Article 50’ policy in 2019 which, as I argued at the time, was deeply flawed both in principle and as a political tactic and strategy). For one thing, they all imply that it would be legitimate for a future Tory government to reverse policy, which also makes it an unappealing prospect for the EU/ EFTA. But that is part of a bigger issue: whatever we now do, it surely has to be permanent, and needs to be unequivocally seen as legitimate, rather than achieved by what is, or could easily be represented as, some sleight-of-hand or trickery. The Brexiters failed to achieve that, even with a referendum. If they had succeeded, we wouldn’t even be debating these matters any more. So if we have learnt nothing else from them, and from the Brexit saga generally, it is that such a mistake can never be repeated.
[2] This poll also shows that support for an immediate referendum is much weaker, with only 42% in favour and 48% against amongst Labour-intending voters (and almost exactly the same amongst 2016 remain voters). But it’s not clear what weight to put on that as the question was about a referendum “in 2023”, a pretty absurd one given that it was asked in August 2023. So I think the five- and ten-year questions I’ve referred to are the more important ones. Even so, the answer to the ‘in 2023’ question does underscore the point that support for re-join if there were to be another referendum is the not the same as support for attempting to re-join by holding another referendum.
Friday, 6 May 2022
Brexiters are losing the post-Brexit narrative
A few weeks ago I wrote about what seemed to be an emergent ‘admission-yet-denial’ phenomenon amongst Brexiters. It was prompted by Rishi Sunak’s remark that the damage done by Brexit to trade with the EU was “inevitable”, whilst simultaneously brushing it aside as if unimportant. This phenomenon is also illustrated by recent statements from Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Frost, and, taken with other developments, it denotes an important stage in the failure of the Brexiters’ project.
Rees-Mogg’s banjaxed border
As regards Rees-Mogg, in my last post I mentioned without much discussion his confirmation that the introduction of import controls would, yet again, be delayed. It deserves more comment, because it marks not just a further postponement but the first clear indication that the government will never implement controls to the full extent that the EU has on imports from the UK. Like Sunak’s remark, this entails an admission of just how costly the terms of trade agreed under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) really are, yet without any corresponding acknowledgement that the TCA, and Brexit in general, are at fault.
This was made explicit by Rees-Mogg in talking about the costs of import controls to businesses and consumers. Whilst suggesting that because of the general economic situation now was the wrong time to introduce these new costs, the timing is irrelevant to the fact that the controls are indeed costly, to the extent of £1 billion annually. Similarly, his idea that it is a tribute to Brexit that the UK’s import controls need not be as extensive as the EU’s was an implicit admission of the costliness of EU import controls to British exporters. These and the many other costs of post-Brexit trade are quite as much “an act of self-harm” as the import controls that Rees-Mogg described in just those words.
It remains to be seen just how much it is going to cost to introduce the supposed new high-tech systems that are going to create what the government claims will be the UK’s world-leading border. It also remains to be seen whether this will be introduced on time – or, much more likely, for how long it will be delayed – and whether it will be functional. Rees-Mogg’s latest announcement specified the end of 2023 for the ‘Target Operating Model’, with 2025 already set for the implementation of the full Border strategy. The track record of such IT projects in general is hardly an encouraging one, and especially discouraging is the post-Brexit Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS) which has experienced repeated outages, including that which contributed to the huge Easter queues at Dover and other ports.
I’ve written several times before about the costs and risks of delaying import controls, and these will grow the longer it is before the Target Operating Model is in place. The dangers of this latest delay in terms of animal health and food safety are especially acute, as farming and veterinary groups have pointed out. Moreover, given that it now seems the government will never introduce all the physical controls originally envisaged, the money already spent by ports on preparations has been wasted, which may give rise to compensation claims (£).
These delays and changes of plan also tacitly admit another aspect of how badly the government has handled Brexit. For as well as involving an admission of the costs of the TCA, they show the incredible foolishness of not extending the transition period so as to allow time to put the new controls in place, as well as to enable businesses to prepare. For example, of the Border Control Posts required under the original Border Operating Model (now, apparently, abandoned), almost 90% were yet to be constructed and/or approved by the time Rees-Mogg made his announcement. It’s therefore worth recalling the history of the transition period both because it partly explains the current situation and because it illustrates how, like so many other things now happening, the roots lie deep in the entire Brexit process. To restrict the length of this post, I’ve written this history as a separate page. Of note within it is the role played by Rees-Mogg himself in strongly opposing having any transition period at all, not that he now takes any responsibility for the consequences.
Frost’s bizarre mental legerdemain
This brings us to another prime example of the admission-yet-denial phenomenon, as well as of refusal to take responsibility for failure, in the form of the increasingly bizarre outpourings of David Frost. Frost, placed in the House of Lords in order to be Brexit Secretary, renounced that role last December but still uses the platform it gave him in order to pontificate about how the job he no longer wants should be done.
Last weekend, in a strange attack on Peter Foster, the senior Financial Times and former Daily Telegraph journalist whose coverage of Brexit has been consistently excellent, suggesting that commentators had been consistently wrong in their predictions, Frost tweeted:
“'You will never get rid of the backstop': Done
'An FTA will take many years to do': Done in ten months.
'You'll never reach an FTA without the ECJ': we did.
'You can't leave the transition period at end-2020': we did.
'The French will retaliate over fishing': they didn't.”
Jumping to the fourth of these, as I’ve just mentioned, leaving the transition period at the end of 2020 created multiple problems. But no one said the UK “can’t” leave it then, just that it would be extremely foolish and damaging. So it has proved. On the fifth of them, Frost can surely not have missed the fact that relations with the France over fishing rights have hardly been smooth but, in any case, the fishing industry believes it has been betrayed by the deal to the benefit of the French.
Frost’s FTA boasts
Then there are the remarks about the Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It’s quite true that most commentators thought it would take much longer to complete. That was partly because it wasn’t clear until the last minute whether EU law would require it to be ratified as a ‘mixed agreement’ by each individual member state or, as it turned out, treated as an EU-only agreement – so it wasn’t some indication of Frost’s negotiating wizardry. It was also because few anticipated that the UK would, under Frost’s negotiation, only want such an unambitious deal. So unambitious, in fact, that trade experts say it could have been done even more quickly than it was. In effect, it amounts to a tariff-free deal on goods, subject to rules of origin, with little on services or the removal of non-tariff barriers (NTBs) such as conformity assessment.
That this thinnish deal is seen as a great achievement by Brexiters reflects their outmoded pre-occupation with tariffs and goods trade. More specifically, it is a reflection of Frost’s own completely arbitrary claim that existing studies “exaggerate the impact of non-tariff barriers [and] they exaggerate customs costs”. Since these studies are un-named, it’s not possible to evaluate that claim, but Frost’s propensity to downplay them helps explain why the deal he negotiated is proving to be so poor for businesses now experiencing precisely the impact of NTBs and of customs costs. To put it bluntly: he guessed, in defiance of the evidence and to justify his approach, and he guessed wrong.
This is also a reason why his comment about the FTA confounding predictions of ECJ involvement is off-beam. So far as I can recall about the only person making that prediction was Nigel Farage, and it was false. An FTA, as opposed to a Withdrawal Agreement, without any ECJ role was always perfectly possible. But what that would and did preclude was any substantial removal of NTBs or liberalisation of services trade, which generally require some form of trans-national regulatory and legal oversight, and for trade with the EU could only mean some ECJ involvement. That was the price of prioritising ‘sovereignty’. So, as with the speed of the deal, its avoidance of the ECJ is a sign of how much less extensive his FTA was compared with, especially, having the “exact same benefits” as the single market and customs union or even the ‘deep and special partnership’ that had once been mooted. Hence Frost’s boasts are both an admission and a denial of his own, and Brexit’s, failure.
Frost’s backstop boast
But the most extraordinary item on Frost’s list is the first. Again, it contains at least a half-truth. It was widely predicted that it would be impossible to get rid of the backstop, because the EU had said it would not re-negotiate the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) it had drafted with Theresa May’s government. But this didn’t preclude doing what Johnson and Frost did, which was to resurrect, effectively, a version of the old phase 1 agreement on an Irish Sea Border – rejected by May as “something no British Prime Minister could agree to” – and implanting it not as a backstop (i.e. a fall back), but as a frontstop (i.e. from the outset) in their WA. Doing so didn’t confound predictions that the backstop could be disposed of, it simply dropped the very concession that May had obtained from the EU.
More to the point, it is precisely what he and Johnson agreed to replace the backstop which Frost has, ever since and with ever-increasing volume, been denouncing as an unworkable agreement, made only because the “Surrender Act” – as, putridly, he still insists on calling the Benn Act – tied the government’s hands, and which he says must be replaced or reneged on. So it takes some feat of mental legerdemain for him to also claim the removal of the backstop as a triumph that confounds his critics. It is as if we are expected to forget Frost’s role in creating the present situation or, more accurately, to accept his bowdlerized and self-serving account of it.
A pattern of admission and denial
The pattern, then, is clear. Both Rees-Mogg and Frost implicitly or explicitly admit to the failures of the Brexit they agreed or supported, whilst denying or ignoring that the cause is the Brexit they agreed or supported. And of course the same is true for all those MPs in the Tory Party, from Johnson downwards, and those MEPs in the Brexit Party, who signed or voted for agreements the effects of which, whether as regards import controls, the Irish Sea border, or the fishing deal, they now disown or seek to circumvent.
As Jonathan Freedland, one of the few high-profile commentators to pick up on the full significance of Rees-Mogg’s import controls announcement put it, “in the long history of Britain’s needless, pointless departure from the EU, Rees-Mogg’s admission should count as a milestone”. Should, certainly, but probably won’t because both his and Frost’s admissions are accompanied by deceit and denial about the causes of what they bemoan. Like alcoholics hiding the empty bottles and gargling extra-strong mouthwash, they hope that no one will notice their shaking hands and vomit-flecked clothes, or remember last night’s maudlin promises, lecherous advances and aggressive diatribes.
Strawmen, sophistry and sneers
Meanwhile, a different but hardly more endearing tactic is increasingly in evidence. Again, it’s one I’ve remarked on before and it takes the form of claiming Brexit to have been a success compared with predictions – usually garbled, hyperbolic versions of predictions – of the damage it would cause. Currently this is attaching itself to the UK’s response to the Ukraine War, as in a recent article in The Times by pro-Brexit columnist Iain Martin and a boorish Tweet from Conservative self-styled “pundit” Tim Montgomerie. Both position their arguments against a caricature of remainer claims that “nothing can ever go right after Brexit” (Martin) or that “Brexit Britain would be a marginal, isolated, good-for nothing (and racist obviously) country” (Montgomerie) which they then propose to have been discredited by the Ukraine War.
It would undoubtedly be possible to find someone who had at some time made these predictions about Brexit, but they don’t constitute the standard or serious anti-Brexit argument which is that it reduces British standing and influence, rather than eliminates it. But even if they did, then all that has been demonstrated by Ukraine is that Brexit has not done Britain the harm predicted, whereas it was sold on the basis that it would be of some benefit.
Perhaps realizing this, such arguments perform a sophistic pivot to imply or claim that Brexit has allowed Britain to respond to Ukraine in a way it would not otherwise have been able to. But little or nothing Britain has done required Brexit (though the idea that it has attracts some support [36%] amongst voters, especially [54%] leave voters*). Certainly sending arms and providing training, which has made a real and important difference, didn’t require leaving the EU as shown by the fact that it preceded even the vote to leave. Britain cut tariffs on imports from Ukraine unilaterally, which it couldn’t have done as an EU member, but the EU, which does far more trade with Ukraine, announced the intention to do so two days later. The UK and EU have enacted different sanctions in different ways and at different times, but as an EU member the UK could always have set its own sanctions in addition to any it participated in with the EU. And the UK response on refugees has been feeble compared with the EU, as it probably would have been anyway.
Similarly, the associated sneering at EU countries for what they have not done – especially in relation to providing arms or cutting Russian energy imports – is irrelevant, even it is fair or true, which is highly debatable, as a justification for Brexit. It seems to be based on the false premise that EU membership would only be justifiable, and/or that it was justified by remainers, if everything the EU ever does, and everything its members ever do, is beyond reproach from a British perspective. But that is a nonsensical idea. What is plainly true is that Britain no longer has any of the substantial influence it used to exert over EU policy, including, as in this case, over policy towards Russia and Ukraine. That is the loss that Brexiters were warned of.
Losing the post-Brexit narrative
So there are several strings of Brexiter argument on display at the moment. The doublethink of admitting Brexit damage but denying its cause, or boasting of supposed triumphs whilst disowning or ignoring their consequences. The negative claim that it hasn’t been as bad as some, or a caricature of some, warnings. And false claims about benefits (Ukraine being the latest, the early vaccine rollout perhaps the earliest). There are also, of course, still the flat denials of all the damaging consequences of Brexit, as there always have been.
What is striking is how convoluted some of these arguments are, and how defensive. If Brexit had been even half as successful as it was claimed it was going to be then, by now, you’d expect that to be easily demonstrable and increasingly self-evident even to those who had formerly doubted, or at least to a growing number of them. You would also expect a growing self-confidence from Brexiters so that they would feel no need to jibe – as Montgomery does – at “remoaners”. The magnanimity of victory, even though it eluded them in 2016, would by now be theirs. There would be clear signs of Brexit at least moving towards meeting the test for its success set by Frost himself, namely that by 2031 “nobody is questioning Brexit. It was self-evidently the right thing to do.”
In fact, apart from a couple of times in mid-2021, probably attributable to the government’s promulgation of the false belief that Brexit had enabled faster vaccine rollout, opinion polls since Britain left the EU have shown a clear lead of those who think in hindsight this was wrong thing to do so over those who think it was right. Over the last six months that lead has been fairly stable at about 11%-13% (the latest figures are: right 38%, wrong 49%, don’t know 12%). On the top political issue of the moment, there’s also evidence that a clear majority of both leave (57%) and remain (78%) voters think that Brexit has made the cost of living higher. This has been happening during a time when, in England at least, few national politicians have been openly criticising Brexit and when media coverage of it has been quite muted (and, perhaps for those reasons, Brexit itself is seen as a less important issue than it has ever been in recent years, whilst still ranking higher than, for example, pensions, transport, crime or education).
At the end of January 2021 I wrote a post on this blog arguing that the months to come would be crucial in shaping the post-Brexit narrative. Fifteen months on, I think it is justifiable to say that the outcome has predominantly been to frame Brexit as having been a mistake and a failure. The evidence for that is the opinion polls and also the way that, as discussed in other posts, so many Brexiters themselves now say that it has not delivered its promises. The latter, admittedly, is not quite the same as saying it is a failure, but it is a long way from a ringing endorsement. All of this is a long way from what success would look like.
Of course, the narrative is not fixed and may change. It’s clear that Johnson is trying to use the Ukraine War for that purpose (as well as for more general political advantage). It’s very possible that the government will re-ignite the row with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol, perhaps as early as next week, although there are somewhat contradictory reports about that (see here and here). If so, that may shift the dial by stoking anti-EU sentiment. And, as noted in that January 2021 post, unforeseen events may change the narrative in either direction. Still, it’s reasonable to think that the narrative that settled first is likely to be hard to dislodge.
What’s more, I believe that many Brexiters realise this, and it explains the increasingly convoluted and defensive postures they are adopting. This makes it all the more important to keep reminding them, and more importantly everyone who will listen, what they did and what it has led to. Eventually, doing so will have prepared the ground to do something different and better or, at the very least, it is a necessary precondition for that.
*The question asked in this survey is slightly ambiguous, though: “With the UK outside the EU, has the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine been stronger, weaker, or similar to what it would otherwise have been?” Someone might very reasonably answer ‘stronger’, not meaning that Brexit had enabled this but that a desire to show its post-Brexit relevance had prompted the UK to respond more strongly than if it had still been a member.
Rees-Mogg’s banjaxed border
As regards Rees-Mogg, in my last post I mentioned without much discussion his confirmation that the introduction of import controls would, yet again, be delayed. It deserves more comment, because it marks not just a further postponement but the first clear indication that the government will never implement controls to the full extent that the EU has on imports from the UK. Like Sunak’s remark, this entails an admission of just how costly the terms of trade agreed under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) really are, yet without any corresponding acknowledgement that the TCA, and Brexit in general, are at fault.
This was made explicit by Rees-Mogg in talking about the costs of import controls to businesses and consumers. Whilst suggesting that because of the general economic situation now was the wrong time to introduce these new costs, the timing is irrelevant to the fact that the controls are indeed costly, to the extent of £1 billion annually. Similarly, his idea that it is a tribute to Brexit that the UK’s import controls need not be as extensive as the EU’s was an implicit admission of the costliness of EU import controls to British exporters. These and the many other costs of post-Brexit trade are quite as much “an act of self-harm” as the import controls that Rees-Mogg described in just those words.
It remains to be seen just how much it is going to cost to introduce the supposed new high-tech systems that are going to create what the government claims will be the UK’s world-leading border. It also remains to be seen whether this will be introduced on time – or, much more likely, for how long it will be delayed – and whether it will be functional. Rees-Mogg’s latest announcement specified the end of 2023 for the ‘Target Operating Model’, with 2025 already set for the implementation of the full Border strategy. The track record of such IT projects in general is hardly an encouraging one, and especially discouraging is the post-Brexit Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS) which has experienced repeated outages, including that which contributed to the huge Easter queues at Dover and other ports.
I’ve written several times before about the costs and risks of delaying import controls, and these will grow the longer it is before the Target Operating Model is in place. The dangers of this latest delay in terms of animal health and food safety are especially acute, as farming and veterinary groups have pointed out. Moreover, given that it now seems the government will never introduce all the physical controls originally envisaged, the money already spent by ports on preparations has been wasted, which may give rise to compensation claims (£).
These delays and changes of plan also tacitly admit another aspect of how badly the government has handled Brexit. For as well as involving an admission of the costs of the TCA, they show the incredible foolishness of not extending the transition period so as to allow time to put the new controls in place, as well as to enable businesses to prepare. For example, of the Border Control Posts required under the original Border Operating Model (now, apparently, abandoned), almost 90% were yet to be constructed and/or approved by the time Rees-Mogg made his announcement. It’s therefore worth recalling the history of the transition period both because it partly explains the current situation and because it illustrates how, like so many other things now happening, the roots lie deep in the entire Brexit process. To restrict the length of this post, I’ve written this history as a separate page. Of note within it is the role played by Rees-Mogg himself in strongly opposing having any transition period at all, not that he now takes any responsibility for the consequences.
Frost’s bizarre mental legerdemain
This brings us to another prime example of the admission-yet-denial phenomenon, as well as of refusal to take responsibility for failure, in the form of the increasingly bizarre outpourings of David Frost. Frost, placed in the House of Lords in order to be Brexit Secretary, renounced that role last December but still uses the platform it gave him in order to pontificate about how the job he no longer wants should be done.
Last weekend, in a strange attack on Peter Foster, the senior Financial Times and former Daily Telegraph journalist whose coverage of Brexit has been consistently excellent, suggesting that commentators had been consistently wrong in their predictions, Frost tweeted:
“'You will never get rid of the backstop': Done
'An FTA will take many years to do': Done in ten months.
'You'll never reach an FTA without the ECJ': we did.
'You can't leave the transition period at end-2020': we did.
'The French will retaliate over fishing': they didn't.”
Jumping to the fourth of these, as I’ve just mentioned, leaving the transition period at the end of 2020 created multiple problems. But no one said the UK “can’t” leave it then, just that it would be extremely foolish and damaging. So it has proved. On the fifth of them, Frost can surely not have missed the fact that relations with the France over fishing rights have hardly been smooth but, in any case, the fishing industry believes it has been betrayed by the deal to the benefit of the French.
Frost’s FTA boasts
Then there are the remarks about the Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It’s quite true that most commentators thought it would take much longer to complete. That was partly because it wasn’t clear until the last minute whether EU law would require it to be ratified as a ‘mixed agreement’ by each individual member state or, as it turned out, treated as an EU-only agreement – so it wasn’t some indication of Frost’s negotiating wizardry. It was also because few anticipated that the UK would, under Frost’s negotiation, only want such an unambitious deal. So unambitious, in fact, that trade experts say it could have been done even more quickly than it was. In effect, it amounts to a tariff-free deal on goods, subject to rules of origin, with little on services or the removal of non-tariff barriers (NTBs) such as conformity assessment.
That this thinnish deal is seen as a great achievement by Brexiters reflects their outmoded pre-occupation with tariffs and goods trade. More specifically, it is a reflection of Frost’s own completely arbitrary claim that existing studies “exaggerate the impact of non-tariff barriers [and] they exaggerate customs costs”. Since these studies are un-named, it’s not possible to evaluate that claim, but Frost’s propensity to downplay them helps explain why the deal he negotiated is proving to be so poor for businesses now experiencing precisely the impact of NTBs and of customs costs. To put it bluntly: he guessed, in defiance of the evidence and to justify his approach, and he guessed wrong.
This is also a reason why his comment about the FTA confounding predictions of ECJ involvement is off-beam. So far as I can recall about the only person making that prediction was Nigel Farage, and it was false. An FTA, as opposed to a Withdrawal Agreement, without any ECJ role was always perfectly possible. But what that would and did preclude was any substantial removal of NTBs or liberalisation of services trade, which generally require some form of trans-national regulatory and legal oversight, and for trade with the EU could only mean some ECJ involvement. That was the price of prioritising ‘sovereignty’. So, as with the speed of the deal, its avoidance of the ECJ is a sign of how much less extensive his FTA was compared with, especially, having the “exact same benefits” as the single market and customs union or even the ‘deep and special partnership’ that had once been mooted. Hence Frost’s boasts are both an admission and a denial of his own, and Brexit’s, failure.
Frost’s backstop boast
But the most extraordinary item on Frost’s list is the first. Again, it contains at least a half-truth. It was widely predicted that it would be impossible to get rid of the backstop, because the EU had said it would not re-negotiate the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) it had drafted with Theresa May’s government. But this didn’t preclude doing what Johnson and Frost did, which was to resurrect, effectively, a version of the old phase 1 agreement on an Irish Sea Border – rejected by May as “something no British Prime Minister could agree to” – and implanting it not as a backstop (i.e. a fall back), but as a frontstop (i.e. from the outset) in their WA. Doing so didn’t confound predictions that the backstop could be disposed of, it simply dropped the very concession that May had obtained from the EU.
More to the point, it is precisely what he and Johnson agreed to replace the backstop which Frost has, ever since and with ever-increasing volume, been denouncing as an unworkable agreement, made only because the “Surrender Act” – as, putridly, he still insists on calling the Benn Act – tied the government’s hands, and which he says must be replaced or reneged on. So it takes some feat of mental legerdemain for him to also claim the removal of the backstop as a triumph that confounds his critics. It is as if we are expected to forget Frost’s role in creating the present situation or, more accurately, to accept his bowdlerized and self-serving account of it.
A pattern of admission and denial
The pattern, then, is clear. Both Rees-Mogg and Frost implicitly or explicitly admit to the failures of the Brexit they agreed or supported, whilst denying or ignoring that the cause is the Brexit they agreed or supported. And of course the same is true for all those MPs in the Tory Party, from Johnson downwards, and those MEPs in the Brexit Party, who signed or voted for agreements the effects of which, whether as regards import controls, the Irish Sea border, or the fishing deal, they now disown or seek to circumvent.
As Jonathan Freedland, one of the few high-profile commentators to pick up on the full significance of Rees-Mogg’s import controls announcement put it, “in the long history of Britain’s needless, pointless departure from the EU, Rees-Mogg’s admission should count as a milestone”. Should, certainly, but probably won’t because both his and Frost’s admissions are accompanied by deceit and denial about the causes of what they bemoan. Like alcoholics hiding the empty bottles and gargling extra-strong mouthwash, they hope that no one will notice their shaking hands and vomit-flecked clothes, or remember last night’s maudlin promises, lecherous advances and aggressive diatribes.
Strawmen, sophistry and sneers
Meanwhile, a different but hardly more endearing tactic is increasingly in evidence. Again, it’s one I’ve remarked on before and it takes the form of claiming Brexit to have been a success compared with predictions – usually garbled, hyperbolic versions of predictions – of the damage it would cause. Currently this is attaching itself to the UK’s response to the Ukraine War, as in a recent article in The Times by pro-Brexit columnist Iain Martin and a boorish Tweet from Conservative self-styled “pundit” Tim Montgomerie. Both position their arguments against a caricature of remainer claims that “nothing can ever go right after Brexit” (Martin) or that “Brexit Britain would be a marginal, isolated, good-for nothing (and racist obviously) country” (Montgomerie) which they then propose to have been discredited by the Ukraine War.
It would undoubtedly be possible to find someone who had at some time made these predictions about Brexit, but they don’t constitute the standard or serious anti-Brexit argument which is that it reduces British standing and influence, rather than eliminates it. But even if they did, then all that has been demonstrated by Ukraine is that Brexit has not done Britain the harm predicted, whereas it was sold on the basis that it would be of some benefit.
Perhaps realizing this, such arguments perform a sophistic pivot to imply or claim that Brexit has allowed Britain to respond to Ukraine in a way it would not otherwise have been able to. But little or nothing Britain has done required Brexit (though the idea that it has attracts some support [36%] amongst voters, especially [54%] leave voters*). Certainly sending arms and providing training, which has made a real and important difference, didn’t require leaving the EU as shown by the fact that it preceded even the vote to leave. Britain cut tariffs on imports from Ukraine unilaterally, which it couldn’t have done as an EU member, but the EU, which does far more trade with Ukraine, announced the intention to do so two days later. The UK and EU have enacted different sanctions in different ways and at different times, but as an EU member the UK could always have set its own sanctions in addition to any it participated in with the EU. And the UK response on refugees has been feeble compared with the EU, as it probably would have been anyway.
Similarly, the associated sneering at EU countries for what they have not done – especially in relation to providing arms or cutting Russian energy imports – is irrelevant, even it is fair or true, which is highly debatable, as a justification for Brexit. It seems to be based on the false premise that EU membership would only be justifiable, and/or that it was justified by remainers, if everything the EU ever does, and everything its members ever do, is beyond reproach from a British perspective. But that is a nonsensical idea. What is plainly true is that Britain no longer has any of the substantial influence it used to exert over EU policy, including, as in this case, over policy towards Russia and Ukraine. That is the loss that Brexiters were warned of.
Losing the post-Brexit narrative
So there are several strings of Brexiter argument on display at the moment. The doublethink of admitting Brexit damage but denying its cause, or boasting of supposed triumphs whilst disowning or ignoring their consequences. The negative claim that it hasn’t been as bad as some, or a caricature of some, warnings. And false claims about benefits (Ukraine being the latest, the early vaccine rollout perhaps the earliest). There are also, of course, still the flat denials of all the damaging consequences of Brexit, as there always have been.
What is striking is how convoluted some of these arguments are, and how defensive. If Brexit had been even half as successful as it was claimed it was going to be then, by now, you’d expect that to be easily demonstrable and increasingly self-evident even to those who had formerly doubted, or at least to a growing number of them. You would also expect a growing self-confidence from Brexiters so that they would feel no need to jibe – as Montgomery does – at “remoaners”. The magnanimity of victory, even though it eluded them in 2016, would by now be theirs. There would be clear signs of Brexit at least moving towards meeting the test for its success set by Frost himself, namely that by 2031 “nobody is questioning Brexit. It was self-evidently the right thing to do.”
In fact, apart from a couple of times in mid-2021, probably attributable to the government’s promulgation of the false belief that Brexit had enabled faster vaccine rollout, opinion polls since Britain left the EU have shown a clear lead of those who think in hindsight this was wrong thing to do so over those who think it was right. Over the last six months that lead has been fairly stable at about 11%-13% (the latest figures are: right 38%, wrong 49%, don’t know 12%). On the top political issue of the moment, there’s also evidence that a clear majority of both leave (57%) and remain (78%) voters think that Brexit has made the cost of living higher. This has been happening during a time when, in England at least, few national politicians have been openly criticising Brexit and when media coverage of it has been quite muted (and, perhaps for those reasons, Brexit itself is seen as a less important issue than it has ever been in recent years, whilst still ranking higher than, for example, pensions, transport, crime or education).
At the end of January 2021 I wrote a post on this blog arguing that the months to come would be crucial in shaping the post-Brexit narrative. Fifteen months on, I think it is justifiable to say that the outcome has predominantly been to frame Brexit as having been a mistake and a failure. The evidence for that is the opinion polls and also the way that, as discussed in other posts, so many Brexiters themselves now say that it has not delivered its promises. The latter, admittedly, is not quite the same as saying it is a failure, but it is a long way from a ringing endorsement. All of this is a long way from what success would look like.
Of course, the narrative is not fixed and may change. It’s clear that Johnson is trying to use the Ukraine War for that purpose (as well as for more general political advantage). It’s very possible that the government will re-ignite the row with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol, perhaps as early as next week, although there are somewhat contradictory reports about that (see here and here). If so, that may shift the dial by stoking anti-EU sentiment. And, as noted in that January 2021 post, unforeseen events may change the narrative in either direction. Still, it’s reasonable to think that the narrative that settled first is likely to be hard to dislodge.
What’s more, I believe that many Brexiters realise this, and it explains the increasingly convoluted and defensive postures they are adopting. This makes it all the more important to keep reminding them, and more importantly everyone who will listen, what they did and what it has led to. Eventually, doing so will have prepared the ground to do something different and better or, at the very least, it is a necessary precondition for that.
*The question asked in this survey is slightly ambiguous, though: “With the UK outside the EU, has the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine been stronger, weaker, or similar to what it would otherwise have been?” Someone might very reasonably answer ‘stronger’, not meaning that Brexit had enabled this but that a desire to show its post-Brexit relevance had prompted the UK to respond more strongly than if it had still been a member.
Friday, 31 January 2020
A day to mourn
So today it will happen. For some, it will be a day of joy and triumph and celebration. Yet, though those celebrations will be occurring, it seems likely that they will be relatively muted and confined to a relatively small number of the most committed leavers, led by a perhaps slightly underwhelming cast of speakers. There will also be some light displays and a new 50 pence coin.
Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.
But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.
Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.
And, yet, today it will happen.
As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.
Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.
Brexit has created a deeply divided country
Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.
There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.
That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.
That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.
There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.
I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.
Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.
Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost
For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.
I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.
Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.
So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.
Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver
This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.
For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.
That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.
For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.
Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country
More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.
The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.
I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.
In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.
Brexiters have refused to seek consensus
Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.
As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.
Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.
So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.
What can remainers do now?
Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.
This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.
Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.
Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.
As for me …
As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.
But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.
I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.
In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.
It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.
As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.
There may be worse days to come
That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.
At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.
At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.
It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.
So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.
*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….
Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.
But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.
Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.
And, yet, today it will happen.
As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.
Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.
Brexit has created a deeply divided country
Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.
There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.
That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.
That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.
There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.
I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.
Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.
Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost
For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.
I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.
Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.
So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.
Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver
This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.
For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.
That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.
For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.
Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country
More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.
The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.
I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.
In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.
Brexiters have refused to seek consensus
Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.
As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.
Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.
So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.
What can remainers do now?
Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.
This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.
Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.
Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.
As for me …
As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.
But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.
I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.
In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.
It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.
As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.
There may be worse days to come
That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.
At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.
At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.
It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.
So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.
*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….
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