The press of events in the fortnight since my last post has been dizzying and disorientating. Even at the height of the ‘Brexit battles’ it was not so difficult to keep abreast of what is happening, let alone to acquire some degree of analytic distance so as to make sense of it. Indeed, it is perfectly possible that within minutes of publishing today’s post it will be made obsolete or irrelevant by some new shock.
I’m obviously referring to what can be called the ‘Greenland Crisis’, and its scale means that it will be the subject of the whole of this post. So I won’t be able to discuss the latest rash of Tory defections to Reform, important as they are to the politics of Brexitism, except to say that they show the growing difficulty of Reform’s attempts to depict themselves as outsiders and insurgents. Nor will I discuss the reports that the EU is seeking a ‘Farage Clause’ in any ‘reset’ agreement with the UK as insurance against a future government reneging on any such agreement. However, I have done so in a recent article in Byline Times.
In my previous post I argued that Trump’s demand to take over Greenland, rather than his attack on Venezuela, was going to be the crucial tipping point for relations between the US, the EU, and the UK. In particular, I suggested that it gave new urgency to the need to massively deepen UK-EU defence and security cooperation. Subsequently, a slew of articles by rather more heavyweight political commentators made versions of the same point (examples include Gideon Rachman (£), Martin Sandbu (£), and Philip Stephens). It also featured within the much wider tour d’horizon of the current geo-political scene provided by Bronwen Maddox in her annual lecture as Director of the Chatham House think-tank. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that anyone expected the Greenland Crisis to escalate as rapidly as it did, or to at least apparently subside with equal rapidity.
The Greenland crisis
The first key event was last week’s decision by several European NATO countries, including the UK, to send military forces to Greenland to undertake or prepare for training exercises. The numbers were very limited, in the UK’s case reportedly only a single soldier, but the deployment was highly symbolic. One important aspect of that symbolism was that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK aligned with those EU countries taking part.
However, the wider symbolic meaning of the deployment had a degree of ambiguity. Some declared it to be a warning to the US that any attempt to take Greenland by force would be resisted, and it is worth re-iterating that the very possibility of this being its meaning shows the extraordinary situation we are now in. Others presented it as a sign that, just as Trump had demanded, Europeans were stepping up to contribute to NATO’s security rather than just leaving it to America.
The next key event showed that Trump, at least, interpreted it as having the first meaning and took it as an affront, prompting him last weekend to threaten to levy tariffs on goods from the UK and the EU, or at least those EU countries which had sent forces [1]. Yet this response was itself open to two interpretations. One was that Trump was showing he would attack those who defied him, and in that sense was a show of strength. The other was that, by making it an economic rather than a military attack, it showed the limits to his strength because he was signalling that he did not intend to take control of Greenland militarily in the face of the resolve shown by Europeans (if only because he would not have domestic political support for doing so). That he does not now intend to do so was stated explicitly in his subsequent, rambling Davos speech on Wednesday, during which he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the fear that he would do so arose from his own previous statements. He created the crisis.
Then, abruptly, later on Wednesday, Trump announced that he had struck the “framework of a deal” with Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, and that the threat of ‘Greenland tariffs’ had been withdrawn. The nature of this framework remains unclear, and its details have not been finalized, but it seems sure to fall short of what had been the demand for Greenland to become unequivocally part of the United States. It may even be scarcely different to the existing situation. Many analysts attribute Trump’s about-turn to the stock market falls his tariff threats had caused earlier in the week, just as bond market reaction led him to retreat from many of his ‘liberation day’ tariff threats last year.
Of course, trying to explain or make sense of Trump’s words and actions is difficult since he has always been capricious and now appears to be going senile. It is certainly impossible to predict what he may do in the future. He may decide ‘the deal’ he has done with Rutte is not good enough. He may change his mind about the Greenland tariffs again. Or he may revert to his threats to take Greenland by force. What is clear is that his motivations are bound up with his monstrously rapacious ego, as shown by the insane letter he sent to the Norwegian Prime Minister in which he linked his designs on Greenland to his pique at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Even so, it would be a mistake to ignore that, Trump’s baroque psychology and mafia boss persona aside, Washington’s conduct is also driven by the hard-eyed men who have re-drawn the entire shape of US foreign policy. For them, US ‘hemispheric hegemony’ is not about placating ‘a King gone mad’ but a deadly serious ideological project which, amongst other things, dispenses with the idea of NATO as a vehicle for collective security. Trump may like that idea for egotistical reasons, but his henchmen have their own motivations and, even if the attempt to annex Greenland founders, those motivations remain intact. At all events, as Bronwen Maddox argues, it cannot be assumed that the US is going to “snap back” to its traditional post-WW2 posture, even once Trump has gone. Nor has the apparent resolution of the immediate crisis over Greenland ended the wider crisis faced by NATO and multi-lateral institutions more generally.
The unavoidability of choice
For the UK, this means that Keir Starmer’s continuing insistence that there is no choice to be made between its relations with the US and the EU is becoming ever-more implausible. The decision to be included in both statements and military deployments with Denmark, France, Germany etc. was a decision to side with Europe against the US, if only because that is how Trump interpreted it. And Starmer’s insistence on Greenland’s sovereignty and criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, an insistence which has always been unambiguous and became more robust as the week went on, is also a choice to side with the EU and against the US, and has also been interpreted by Trump in that way. On the other hand, his implication during this week that, unlike the EU, he was not prepared to retaliate against the tariff threats could be interpreted, if not as siding with the US, then at least as not showing solidarity with the EU.
I don’t mean by this that there’s any real prospect that Starmer will ever openly acknowledge that there is a choice to be made, nor that he needs to. I mean that, acknowledged or not, there is no decision the UK can take, and no statement it can make, including taking no decisions or making no statements, which avoids that choice. The choice, or at least the sub-choices within it, have to be made because they cannot not be made.
This situation would pose acute problems for the UK even if it were still a member of the EU (just as it does for the EU, itself, its individual members, and for other countries around the world), but Brexit undoubtedly makes it far worse. To take the most obvious example, were there to be a trade war with the US, over Greenland or anything else, then the UK would be far better placed if it were an EU member, both in terms of its offensive capacity (against the US) and its defensive capacity (integrated trade within the single market).
However, it is the wider, strategic issues which are even more important. The Brexiter insistence that the EU was irrelevant to UK security, which they claimed was entirely catered for by a US-led NATO, which was always ill-informed, is now exposed as the greatest strategic miscalculation in modern British history. And, not coincidentally, those who still support that miscalculation are the very same people – Farage, Hannan, Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc. – who hailed Trump as the great ally of Britain. In this sense Britain faces a double problem in addressing the US-EU choice: first, the damage of Brexit itself and, second, the continuing influence of Brexitism.
A second chance for Starmer
This being so, Keir Starmer has the possibility both to address the strategic failure of Brexit and to gain domestic political advantage over Reform and marginalize Brexitism, as I've been arguing for at least a year when I wrote that:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies.”
That opportunity has not, to date, been taken, although, recently, Starmer has been slightly more willing to mention at least the economic damage of Brexit and to draw attention to Farage’s pro-Russian affinities. The opportunity re-presents itself, now, because the way in which Trump has bullied and belittled the UK this week, including his dismissive remarks about NATO, and therefore British troops, in Afghanistan, will have been offensive to the majority of British voters. This makes it a good time to remind them of Farage’s adoration of the American President and, more generally, to justify the case for recalibrating towards the EU.
Farage is evidently well aware of his vulnerability on this score, hence his criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, and he also stated his support for Greenland’s right to self-determination, but he cannot completely protect himself from it since – perhaps from his own fear of Trump publicly attacking him – in the same breath he argued that it would be desirable if the US owned Greenland. Whilst Starmer did not say the latter, he is unable fully to capitalise on Farage’s vulnerability because his own response had a degree of similarity in that both men criticised the Greenland tariff threat, but both highlighted the UK’s ability to negotiate with the US over trade terms as being advantageous.
For Farage, that is taken to be a vindication of Brexit, for Starmer it is taken to be a vindication of his attempts to manage Trump. But, on either account, it is a specious argument: the reality is that the so-called US-UK trade deal, supposedly agreed last year, was limited in scope, has still not been fully implemented, and seems to be subject to ongoing negotiation. In any case, it is always liable to fall victim to Trump’s caprice since, for him, ‘the art of the deal’ is that a deal is never done and can always be reneged upon or made subject to new demands (the same may well apply to the supposed ‘deal’ over Greenland).
Indeed, the latest reports are that the US is still pushing hard to get the UK to adopt US standards in various areas, including food and agriculture, and, more complex but also important, for the UK to recognize US conformity assessment bodies [2]. If that were to happen, then even the modest reset with the EU would become impossible, especially as regards an SPS agreement. So here, again, the UK faces a choice between the US and the EU.
Fine lines and hot takes
One thing which the last week’s events have made abundantly clear is just how difficult it is to navigate that choice. Having been fairly robust in his support for Greenland’s sovereignty and in his criticism of the tariff threat in a speech on Monday morning, the following night Starmer was subjected to Trump’s vicious verbal assault on the “stupidity” of the UK’s Chagos Islands deal, citing it as one of the reasons for his claims on Greenland. He had never made that linkage before, and it is significant that over the day or two prior to that, numerous figures on the British right, including Farage, had been doing so, though in a different way to Trump, by claiming that there was an inconsistency between Starmer’s defence of Greenland’s sovereignty with his supposed betrayal of Britain’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. It’s a ridiculous argument, on multiple levels (not least because the Chagos deal has a legal basis), as is Trump’s argument that the Chagos deal, which he previously supported, damages US security interests (since the UK-US base there is protected).
I can’t be bothered to unpick all that, but my point is that it seems clear that it only occurred to Trump to link Chagos and Greenland because his ideological soulmates in Britain were doing so. Indeed, it has since emerged that it may have come about because of remarks made by Kemi Badenoch to the US Speaker on Monday evening. At all events, whereas there was a brief moment early on Monday when all UK political parties, including Reform, were united in objecting to Trump’s Greenland tariffs, by Tuesday both Reform and the Tories were attacking Labour over Chagos and saying that about that, at least, Trump was right. Tellingly, that great patriot Farage was delighted at the prospect of ‘sovereign Britain’ being told what to do by a foreign leader (equally tellingly, it looks as if he was wrong). Thus, whether by accident or design, Trump’s outburst had the effect of splintering the nascent consensus against him within the UK polity and, as Starmer rightly said during Prime Minister’s Questions, by endorsing Trump’s criticism of the Chagos deal Kemi Badenoch (and others) were supporting his attempt to punish the UK for standing up to his demands for Greenland.
Moreover, many news outlets, including the BBC, started to report Trump’s attack on the UK as demonstrating that Starmer’s approach to handling Trump through flattery and sycophancy had failed. That reporting was deeply wrong-headed. In fact, Trump’s attack showed two things. One is just the sheer impossibility of dealing with a President who is unpredictable, dishonest, and very possibly mentally ill. The other, which those criticising Starmer for not being bolder should ponder, is that by departing only slightly from the ‘flattery and sycophancy’ approach, with a politely-worded criticism of the Greenland policy and tariff threat, Starmer immediately faced a thuggish response from Trump and, with it, accusations from the Conservatives that he was failing to maintain ‘the special relationship’. In any case, these events also showed that it is unwise to provide ‘hot takes’, especially in relation to Trump, because by the end of the week the BBC and others were at least implying that Starmer had handled the crisis effectively.
The Carney doctrine
Whatever now happens with respect to Greenland, which is very far from clear, there can be little doubt that the events of the last fortnight have crystallised the situation which has been developing since at least the re-election of Trump. The UK’s choice between the US and the EU is only one manifestation of the wider choices this situation poses. For, as the Bronwen Maddox lecture I linked to earlier suggests, the Greenland crisis is only one instance of a much bigger transformation in the global order, a point also made this week by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Previously, I’ve written about this transformation in terms of a ‘new global divide’, as profound as that of the Cold War, between a broadly, if imperfectly, liberal, rational-legal framework for international relations, and an international order based solely on power-plays and gangsterism (and, as the use of increasingly unconstrained paramilitary violence and the erosion of the rule of law by Trump’s regime shows, this applies to the domestic order as well). A naked illustration of this gangsterism is Trump’s latest plan to create a ‘Board of Peace’ to oversee Gaza and, potentially, other conflict zones. This body will be chaired by Trump during his lifetime, with power to hire and fire its members and to name his successor, and with permanent members reportedly required to pay $1 billion into a fund personally controlled by Trump.
The nature and implications of this new global divide were articulated with great cogency in a widely-admired speech given by the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos this week. It was a speech which may well come to be seen as being as epoch-defining as Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech in Missouri almost exactly eighty years ago. Carney spoke of the concept of “values-based realism”, a combination of principle and pragmatism, whereby “middle powers” could and should respond to a world in which multilateral institutions have been diminished and “great powers” seek to act as regional or even global hegemons. Note that this does not imply ‘having nothing to do’ with those hegemons, or publicly vilifying them. Certainly as regards the US, that is a luxury that Canada, like the UK and most other countries, does not have. The issue is how to navigate relations with them.
It was an optimistic speech in suggesting such navigation was possible, but by no means an idealistic one. Pragmatism demands some unpalatable choices such as, implicitly, Canada’s recent trade deal with China. It was also realistic in insisting that – as, in Britain, Brexit should have taught us – “nostalgia is not a strategy”, meaning that the old order, effectively that established since the time of Churchill’s Missouri speech, is not coming back. However, that does not mean that the future order must necessarily be dictated by hegemons and characterised by gangsterism.
Above all, Carney’s speech stressed the centrality of cooperation amongst middle powers:
“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
It is at least possible to interpret Trump’s apparent climbdown over Greenland as a vindication of this, in that it came when faced with the concerted opposition of numerous countries and other actors, including market actors (the two are linked, since a big reason for the stock market falls was the possibility of EU retaliation). But, even if so, the Carney doctrine calls for more than co-ordinated diplomacy; it requires the development of substantive co-operation amongst middle powers over defence, security, and trade.
Thus, although speaking primarily about Canada, Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism. Taking those two readings together, the Carney Doctrine could offer the UK a chance of moving forward from Brexit. It’s no longer a matter of revisiting the decision made in 2016. The Greenland crisis has been a stark reminder that, in 2026, the brutal realities of global politics impose their own imperatives on national strategy, and mandate a new and better decision about its direction.
Whether domestic politics will allow such a decision to be made is an open question. It is doubtful whether the present government is capable of rising to the challenge. But it is beyond doubt that a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government, still entirely committed to the logic of Brexit and Brexitism, would be totally incapable of doing so.
Notes
[1] Many commentators wondered if it is possible for the US to levy tariffs on individual EU members, given that the EU trades as a single tariff entity (i.e. the customs union). The trade expert Sam Lowe has explained that the short answer is that it is. However, because it is a single tariff entity, any retaliation against the US would have to be made by the EU and not its individual members.
[2] I don’t have space to discuss it here, but conformity assessment is, as an anonymous source in the Politico report aptly describes it, the “invisible infrastructure that no one really knows about but which keeps everyone safe”. It also has much salience to Brexit, including to the ‘reset’, because it is at the heart of why regulatory alignment does not in itself give market access, and amongst other things explains the strange situation whereby foodstuffs may meet EU standards but are nevertheless marked ‘Not for the EU’ when sold in British shops. And of course conformity assessment marking lies behind one of the most abject farces of the Brexit saga, namely the abandoned attempt to replace CE marks with UKCA marks.
Showing posts with label Patriotism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patriotism. Show all posts
Friday, 23 January 2026
Friday, 19 September 2025
There is another country
In the two weeks since my last post, the speed and scale of events has been almost impossible to keep up with. The result is yet another very long post and I am considering reverting to posting weekly. It seems likely, especially given the slightly changed focus of the blog, that there is always going to be plenty to say.
In that previous post, after reviewing the summer’s confected crisis over asylum hotels, I wrote about the political terrain of the next few years being characterized by a battle over whether Brexit Britain is to become Brexitist Britain. Now, that doesn’t seem so much prescient as complacently languid, as if that battle were not already well under way.
Flagging dangers
This was brought home to me within a couple of days of writing the post. It wasn’t, primarily, because of that weekend’s Reform UK conference since its mixture of vileness, weirdness and madness was not exactly unexpected. Instead it was when, for the first time, I saw not just roundabouts but very long stretches of roads in my area with St. George’s flags (and occasional Union Jacks) hanging on every single lamp post for mile after mile [1]. Of course, I had read about this happening all over the country, but seeing it for myself was different. The effect was not celebratory or unifying, it was sinister, threatening, and – in its unmissable historical echoes – fascistic.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that this isn’t a word I use casually and, in any case, it is a documented fact that the origins of this spate of flag-flying lie with far-right activist groups. It is not about jolly yeomen putting out the bunting, but masked men bent on intimidation. So it was dishonest and dangerous for Labour politicians like Yvette Cooper to argue that it is in any sense a “symbol of Britain coming together” (£). It has clearly arisen on the back of this summer’s asylum hotel ‘protests’, and, as has been widely remarked, seems to symbolise division and exclusion rather than unity and inclusion.
What is actually worse, and more literally fascistic, is that it amounts to a demand for compulsory ‘unity’ through the sequestration of the public space. Criticize it, and you are deemed to have failed an imposed ‘loyalty test’. Most obviously it is aimed at immigrants, but more generally at the ‘enemies within’ – the liberally-minded and tolerant.
Sanctimony and hypocrisy
Against this background, the news broke of the murder of Charlie Kirk in the US. Immediately that was used as a pretext to attack liberals in the most vicious of terms. Whereas, only a few days before, the right in the UK and the US had been screaming about the ‘injustice’ of punishing Lucy Connelly for her use of violently inflammatory language, suddenly all they could talk of was how the liberal-left was responsible for the killing because of the language used to attack Trump and his supporters. Yet, whilst admonishing those on the left for expressing their opinions, Kirk was presented as a free speech martyr, murdered simply for speaking his mind and inviting others – in the familiar tactic of every tedious internet troll – to ‘prove me wrong’.
With equal hypocrisy, these free speech absolutists started to demand, and procure, punishments for those, including the Global Opinions Editor of the Washington Post, who refused to join in with the sanctimonious beatification of Kirk by, for example, referring to his own hate-filled rhetoric. But this is not just a matter of illogic or hypocrisy. It is part of the way that the right weaponizes liberalism against itself in a kind of political jiu-jitsu. Thus the right demands, and largely receives, civility from its political opponents, whilst refusing to accord any civility whatsoever in return. It is an asymmetry dissected in Jonathan Freedland’s compelling analysis of the Kirk murder and its aftermath.
The United States was already in a very dark place, as charted by Professor Christina Pagel’s excellent Substack post, and it is now much darker. That isn’t so much because of the possibility of escalating acts of individual violence, although that is clearly a risk, but because of the possibility of escalating state violence against its actual or perceived internal enemies.
Kirk was hardly known in this country, but his killing also had immediate reverberations here. This is just one example of a point made in a BlueSky post in response to my attempt to define Brexitism. The poster said, rightly, that one of its weaknesses was a failure to discuss the many important linkages between the far-right in the US and the UK, linkages which are both ideological and financial. Actually, it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to write in terms of the far-right, since in both the US and the UK what used to be the respectable, centrist right of politics has been virtually eviscerated.
Thuggery
At all events, following Kirk’s murder, British Brexitists immediately began to recycle (£) the talking points of the American right in pursuit of the UK culture war. His death was then invoked during last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, which attracted possibly as many as 150,000 people to London and resulted in several violent clashes with the police. This was massively short of the three million persistently, and falsely, claimed on social media, but there is no doubt that it marked a significant show of strength, and was perhaps the largest rally of its kind in the UK in recent history.
Robinson seems to be allied with, and is perhaps a member of, Advance UK, the splinter group of Reform led by Ben Habib. But, again, it is increasingly meaningless to differentiate between far-right thugs and Reform, and in fact doing so panders to Nigel Farage’s pretensions to be ‘respectable’. For example, Reform Chairman David Bull was happy to endorse the rally as a gathering of “the silent majority”, whilst Farage opined that “the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people”. Moreover, there is now a steady flow of defectors from the Tories to Reform, the latest examples including former MPs Maria Caulfield and Nadine Dorries, an acquisition of perhaps rather dubious value, and, more significantly, Danny Kruger, the oleaginous MP who was once co-leader of the New Conservative group and is strongly associated with the (paradoxically international) National Conservatism movement. Meanwhile, the Tory Party itself continues to espouse positions almost identical to those of Reform.
The American connection was most strikingly evident in Elon Musk’s extraordinarily inflammatory appearance at the rally, which included a call for the dissolution of parliament and threats that “violence is coming”. In fact, although those were the most widely quoted parts of it, what was more chilling was the way he, quite calmly, articulated or assumed an entire world view based on fantasies, distortions and lies. In a way, it was more unsettling than a spittle-flecked rant and, echoing all the invocations of ‘the silent majority’, his pitch was to the supposedly ordinary, apolitical, commonsense people of Britain.
As with the outbreak of flag-thuggery, any idea that the rally was about ‘uniting’ the country is transparently absurd. Equally, although hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers is undoubtedly the source of its core support, it is now abundantly clear that it has a more general, and very serious, intention to destroy the present government and, with that, to destroy the entire foundations of liberal democracy. It is not being hidden. Elon Musk said it, in terms. Others at the rally spoke openly of the need to assassinate Keir Starmer, even as ‘the left’ was being castigated for inciting the killing of Charlie Kirk (and, despite what some apologists say in the comments on the report linked to, this wasn’t just a ‘rogue individual’: social media is awash with similar calls).
This constitutes a dangerous moment for Britain. It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed. That has happened for many reasons, including the influence of the US right, and not just in Brexit Britain (France furnishes another example), but some of them are certainly related to Brexit and Brexitism. In particular, the relentless attacks on established institutions which Brexit gave rise to, and perhaps especially the prorogation of parliament, even though it ultimately failed, have enfeebled and de-legitimized those institutions.
Labour’s failure to lead
Worse than that, or perhaps it is simply one aspect of it, the Labour government now appears both unwilling and unable to stand up to what is happening or even to acknowledge its gravity. It has condoned rather than condemned the flagging movement and initially refused to condemn the things which were said at the Robinson rally, only the violence that accompanied it. Some condemnation did come, later, but it seemed to have been forced out under pressure, rather than being visceral, and didn’t carry any sense of the urgency of the situation. It is as if Starmer, and other government ministers, have internalized the accusations coming from Trump, Musk, and J.D. Vance, as well as from the British right, about being opposed to ‘free speech’. But no one is asking Starmer to ban such rallies, merely to use his own free speech, and his position, to lead the challenge to the things which are being said at them.
More generally, the government seems dazed by the events unfolding around it, and to have lost control of the events unfolding within it. The Angela Rayner resignation, and its aftermath, shortly followed by the Peter Mandelson fiasco, and then the resignation of Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, don’t just exemplify that loss of internal control, they exacerbate the external events. For they serve to promote one of the core drivers of Brexitism, namely that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is nothing to lose, and perhaps everything to gain, by rejecting the entirety of mainstream politics.
The reasons why the government has fallen into such disarray have been widely discussed, many of them circling around the supposed migration crisis. But that issue is only part of the government’s wider malaise which, although there are a range of diagnoses, almost all commentators ascribe to its failure to communicate its fundamental purpose and guiding values. Even more damningly, many suspect that the failure is not one of communication but of a terrible dark hole such that there is no fundamental purpose, nor any guiding values, to be communicated.
What makes this all the more damaging is that to the extent that the government has ever made its purpose and values clear it was in the election campaign to present Labour as the calm, competent antidote to the chaotic politics of the post-referendum years. In other words, whilst any government would wish to avoid being in chaos, it is far more dangerous for one built specifically, and almost solely, on the promise of stability. This, by the way, makes talk of the Labour party jettisoning Starmer and installing a new leader, especially when there is no obviously outstanding successor, utterly bizarre.
Navigating between complacency and alarmism
However, I think there is another issue here, and it also grows in large part out of Brexit. Whilst many voters may have hoped for a less chaotic politics than the period after 2016, which saw five Prime Ministers in almost as many years, the media and commentariat became addicted to it. There has always been an element of that in political reporting, since drama and chaos make good copy, but to my mind (and I accept that this is purely impressionistic) it has intensified. No doubt that is about more than Brexit, as much of it is bound up with the changing nature of the news cycle, and the impact of social media. But Brexit supplied an addictive rush of political drama and, like all addictions, users have to keep chasing the high. Current speculation about an early election, as well about the idea of a leadership challenge to Starmer, are examples.
From this point of view, as the veteran political commentator Philip Stephens argues, it is important not to get carried away by the current media narrative of a government in crisis. Yet there is clearly a very difficult line to tread here. On the one hand, there are serious and dangerous events unfolding, and ignoring them would be irresponsibly complacent. On the other hand, part of what is driving those events is the promulgation by the political right of a narrative of crisis which it seeks to exploit, and accepting or even amplifying that narrative would be irresponsibly alarmist.
If there is a way of navigating through this tricky territory then it entails offering a compelling counter-narrative. That means matching the undeniably old and new media-savviness of the populists, providing a positive alternative to, rather than just a rebuttal of, what they are pumping out, and in the process defusing the pervasive sense of crisis. The responsibility for providing it rests with anyone with any kind of public voice but, inevitably, it must rest primarily with politicians, and especially with the government.
And the government has a particular incentive to do so, partly to meet the pressing demand for an articulation of the government’s fundamental purpose and guiding values, and partly as a matter of electoral calculation. Its present strategy of aping Reform advantages Farage whilst alienating many who might otherwise support Labour, and academic research suggests that it will be an electorally costly strategy. The consequence could well be a Reform government or, less discussed but probably more likely, a hung parliament with an uncertain outcome for the formation of a government. This isn’t just future political danger for Labour, it is a present political and economic danger because, as the economics commentator Simon Nixon recently pointed out, in relation to current bond market jitters, “the biggest risk to UK financial stability is not this government, but the justified fear of what might follow if it fails”.
We want our country back
Central to such a counter-narrative is the need to displace the far-right’s pretensions to speak for ‘decent ordinary people’ or the ‘silent majority’. Doing that means discarding one of the central features of Brexitism, the idea that when it came to a single-issue vote – the referendum on EU membership – it was revealed that the populist claim to represent that silent majority was true.
That, and the subsequent associated rhetoric of ‘the will of the people’ versus ‘the elite’, cowed mainstream politicians and was particularly disconcerting for those on the left who regarded themselves as the voice of the people and as the challengers to the elitism. It also fed a kind of liberal guilt amongst, especially, middle-class progressives, suggesting they were ‘out of touch’ with ‘real people’, particularly as regards immigration. All of this has enabled Brexitists, including Farage and Robinson, to trade with increasing success on their version of Britain and ‘British values’, including, as the widespread use of the St. George’s flag shows, conflating Britain with England.
So, in concrete terms, offering a counter-narrative means providing a different version of Britain. It has become almost a cliché to remark on the contrast between the image of Britain projected in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and that of the Brexit referendum just four years later. The first was optimistic, inclusive and tolerant, paying ample reference to the past but confident about the present and future, and tinged with an ironic, playful humour. The second was sour, insular, intolerant, fearful, unhealthily obsessed with past glories, and utterly lacking in any humour or pleasure.
There is an opportunity here for the non-Brexitist mainstream to develop its own political jiu-jitsu, appropriating the constant Brexitist demand that ‘we want our country back’. Doing so would not be a nostalgic lament for an unrecoverable past. That first Britain is still available, including for England, as was more recently suggested in discussions of ‘progressive patriotism’ at the time of the Euro 2020 football tournament.
In that previous post, after reviewing the summer’s confected crisis over asylum hotels, I wrote about the political terrain of the next few years being characterized by a battle over whether Brexit Britain is to become Brexitist Britain. Now, that doesn’t seem so much prescient as complacently languid, as if that battle were not already well under way.
Flagging dangers
This was brought home to me within a couple of days of writing the post. It wasn’t, primarily, because of that weekend’s Reform UK conference since its mixture of vileness, weirdness and madness was not exactly unexpected. Instead it was when, for the first time, I saw not just roundabouts but very long stretches of roads in my area with St. George’s flags (and occasional Union Jacks) hanging on every single lamp post for mile after mile [1]. Of course, I had read about this happening all over the country, but seeing it for myself was different. The effect was not celebratory or unifying, it was sinister, threatening, and – in its unmissable historical echoes – fascistic.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that this isn’t a word I use casually and, in any case, it is a documented fact that the origins of this spate of flag-flying lie with far-right activist groups. It is not about jolly yeomen putting out the bunting, but masked men bent on intimidation. So it was dishonest and dangerous for Labour politicians like Yvette Cooper to argue that it is in any sense a “symbol of Britain coming together” (£). It has clearly arisen on the back of this summer’s asylum hotel ‘protests’, and, as has been widely remarked, seems to symbolise division and exclusion rather than unity and inclusion.
What is actually worse, and more literally fascistic, is that it amounts to a demand for compulsory ‘unity’ through the sequestration of the public space. Criticize it, and you are deemed to have failed an imposed ‘loyalty test’. Most obviously it is aimed at immigrants, but more generally at the ‘enemies within’ – the liberally-minded and tolerant.
Sanctimony and hypocrisy
Against this background, the news broke of the murder of Charlie Kirk in the US. Immediately that was used as a pretext to attack liberals in the most vicious of terms. Whereas, only a few days before, the right in the UK and the US had been screaming about the ‘injustice’ of punishing Lucy Connelly for her use of violently inflammatory language, suddenly all they could talk of was how the liberal-left was responsible for the killing because of the language used to attack Trump and his supporters. Yet, whilst admonishing those on the left for expressing their opinions, Kirk was presented as a free speech martyr, murdered simply for speaking his mind and inviting others – in the familiar tactic of every tedious internet troll – to ‘prove me wrong’.
With equal hypocrisy, these free speech absolutists started to demand, and procure, punishments for those, including the Global Opinions Editor of the Washington Post, who refused to join in with the sanctimonious beatification of Kirk by, for example, referring to his own hate-filled rhetoric. But this is not just a matter of illogic or hypocrisy. It is part of the way that the right weaponizes liberalism against itself in a kind of political jiu-jitsu. Thus the right demands, and largely receives, civility from its political opponents, whilst refusing to accord any civility whatsoever in return. It is an asymmetry dissected in Jonathan Freedland’s compelling analysis of the Kirk murder and its aftermath.
The United States was already in a very dark place, as charted by Professor Christina Pagel’s excellent Substack post, and it is now much darker. That isn’t so much because of the possibility of escalating acts of individual violence, although that is clearly a risk, but because of the possibility of escalating state violence against its actual or perceived internal enemies.
Kirk was hardly known in this country, but his killing also had immediate reverberations here. This is just one example of a point made in a BlueSky post in response to my attempt to define Brexitism. The poster said, rightly, that one of its weaknesses was a failure to discuss the many important linkages between the far-right in the US and the UK, linkages which are both ideological and financial. Actually, it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to write in terms of the far-right, since in both the US and the UK what used to be the respectable, centrist right of politics has been virtually eviscerated.
Thuggery
At all events, following Kirk’s murder, British Brexitists immediately began to recycle (£) the talking points of the American right in pursuit of the UK culture war. His death was then invoked during last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, which attracted possibly as many as 150,000 people to London and resulted in several violent clashes with the police. This was massively short of the three million persistently, and falsely, claimed on social media, but there is no doubt that it marked a significant show of strength, and was perhaps the largest rally of its kind in the UK in recent history.
Robinson seems to be allied with, and is perhaps a member of, Advance UK, the splinter group of Reform led by Ben Habib. But, again, it is increasingly meaningless to differentiate between far-right thugs and Reform, and in fact doing so panders to Nigel Farage’s pretensions to be ‘respectable’. For example, Reform Chairman David Bull was happy to endorse the rally as a gathering of “the silent majority”, whilst Farage opined that “the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people”. Moreover, there is now a steady flow of defectors from the Tories to Reform, the latest examples including former MPs Maria Caulfield and Nadine Dorries, an acquisition of perhaps rather dubious value, and, more significantly, Danny Kruger, the oleaginous MP who was once co-leader of the New Conservative group and is strongly associated with the (paradoxically international) National Conservatism movement. Meanwhile, the Tory Party itself continues to espouse positions almost identical to those of Reform.
The American connection was most strikingly evident in Elon Musk’s extraordinarily inflammatory appearance at the rally, which included a call for the dissolution of parliament and threats that “violence is coming”. In fact, although those were the most widely quoted parts of it, what was more chilling was the way he, quite calmly, articulated or assumed an entire world view based on fantasies, distortions and lies. In a way, it was more unsettling than a spittle-flecked rant and, echoing all the invocations of ‘the silent majority’, his pitch was to the supposedly ordinary, apolitical, commonsense people of Britain.
As with the outbreak of flag-thuggery, any idea that the rally was about ‘uniting’ the country is transparently absurd. Equally, although hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers is undoubtedly the source of its core support, it is now abundantly clear that it has a more general, and very serious, intention to destroy the present government and, with that, to destroy the entire foundations of liberal democracy. It is not being hidden. Elon Musk said it, in terms. Others at the rally spoke openly of the need to assassinate Keir Starmer, even as ‘the left’ was being castigated for inciting the killing of Charlie Kirk (and, despite what some apologists say in the comments on the report linked to, this wasn’t just a ‘rogue individual’: social media is awash with similar calls).
This constitutes a dangerous moment for Britain. It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed. That has happened for many reasons, including the influence of the US right, and not just in Brexit Britain (France furnishes another example), but some of them are certainly related to Brexit and Brexitism. In particular, the relentless attacks on established institutions which Brexit gave rise to, and perhaps especially the prorogation of parliament, even though it ultimately failed, have enfeebled and de-legitimized those institutions.
Labour’s failure to lead
Worse than that, or perhaps it is simply one aspect of it, the Labour government now appears both unwilling and unable to stand up to what is happening or even to acknowledge its gravity. It has condoned rather than condemned the flagging movement and initially refused to condemn the things which were said at the Robinson rally, only the violence that accompanied it. Some condemnation did come, later, but it seemed to have been forced out under pressure, rather than being visceral, and didn’t carry any sense of the urgency of the situation. It is as if Starmer, and other government ministers, have internalized the accusations coming from Trump, Musk, and J.D. Vance, as well as from the British right, about being opposed to ‘free speech’. But no one is asking Starmer to ban such rallies, merely to use his own free speech, and his position, to lead the challenge to the things which are being said at them.
More generally, the government seems dazed by the events unfolding around it, and to have lost control of the events unfolding within it. The Angela Rayner resignation, and its aftermath, shortly followed by the Peter Mandelson fiasco, and then the resignation of Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, don’t just exemplify that loss of internal control, they exacerbate the external events. For they serve to promote one of the core drivers of Brexitism, namely that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is nothing to lose, and perhaps everything to gain, by rejecting the entirety of mainstream politics.
The reasons why the government has fallen into such disarray have been widely discussed, many of them circling around the supposed migration crisis. But that issue is only part of the government’s wider malaise which, although there are a range of diagnoses, almost all commentators ascribe to its failure to communicate its fundamental purpose and guiding values. Even more damningly, many suspect that the failure is not one of communication but of a terrible dark hole such that there is no fundamental purpose, nor any guiding values, to be communicated.
What makes this all the more damaging is that to the extent that the government has ever made its purpose and values clear it was in the election campaign to present Labour as the calm, competent antidote to the chaotic politics of the post-referendum years. In other words, whilst any government would wish to avoid being in chaos, it is far more dangerous for one built specifically, and almost solely, on the promise of stability. This, by the way, makes talk of the Labour party jettisoning Starmer and installing a new leader, especially when there is no obviously outstanding successor, utterly bizarre.
Navigating between complacency and alarmism
However, I think there is another issue here, and it also grows in large part out of Brexit. Whilst many voters may have hoped for a less chaotic politics than the period after 2016, which saw five Prime Ministers in almost as many years, the media and commentariat became addicted to it. There has always been an element of that in political reporting, since drama and chaos make good copy, but to my mind (and I accept that this is purely impressionistic) it has intensified. No doubt that is about more than Brexit, as much of it is bound up with the changing nature of the news cycle, and the impact of social media. But Brexit supplied an addictive rush of political drama and, like all addictions, users have to keep chasing the high. Current speculation about an early election, as well about the idea of a leadership challenge to Starmer, are examples.
From this point of view, as the veteran political commentator Philip Stephens argues, it is important not to get carried away by the current media narrative of a government in crisis. Yet there is clearly a very difficult line to tread here. On the one hand, there are serious and dangerous events unfolding, and ignoring them would be irresponsibly complacent. On the other hand, part of what is driving those events is the promulgation by the political right of a narrative of crisis which it seeks to exploit, and accepting or even amplifying that narrative would be irresponsibly alarmist.
If there is a way of navigating through this tricky territory then it entails offering a compelling counter-narrative. That means matching the undeniably old and new media-savviness of the populists, providing a positive alternative to, rather than just a rebuttal of, what they are pumping out, and in the process defusing the pervasive sense of crisis. The responsibility for providing it rests with anyone with any kind of public voice but, inevitably, it must rest primarily with politicians, and especially with the government.
And the government has a particular incentive to do so, partly to meet the pressing demand for an articulation of the government’s fundamental purpose and guiding values, and partly as a matter of electoral calculation. Its present strategy of aping Reform advantages Farage whilst alienating many who might otherwise support Labour, and academic research suggests that it will be an electorally costly strategy. The consequence could well be a Reform government or, less discussed but probably more likely, a hung parliament with an uncertain outcome for the formation of a government. This isn’t just future political danger for Labour, it is a present political and economic danger because, as the economics commentator Simon Nixon recently pointed out, in relation to current bond market jitters, “the biggest risk to UK financial stability is not this government, but the justified fear of what might follow if it fails”.
We want our country back
Central to such a counter-narrative is the need to displace the far-right’s pretensions to speak for ‘decent ordinary people’ or the ‘silent majority’. Doing that means discarding one of the central features of Brexitism, the idea that when it came to a single-issue vote – the referendum on EU membership – it was revealed that the populist claim to represent that silent majority was true.
That, and the subsequent associated rhetoric of ‘the will of the people’ versus ‘the elite’, cowed mainstream politicians and was particularly disconcerting for those on the left who regarded themselves as the voice of the people and as the challengers to the elitism. It also fed a kind of liberal guilt amongst, especially, middle-class progressives, suggesting they were ‘out of touch’ with ‘real people’, particularly as regards immigration. All of this has enabled Brexitists, including Farage and Robinson, to trade with increasing success on their version of Britain and ‘British values’, including, as the widespread use of the St. George’s flag shows, conflating Britain with England.
So, in concrete terms, offering a counter-narrative means providing a different version of Britain. It has become almost a cliché to remark on the contrast between the image of Britain projected in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and that of the Brexit referendum just four years later. The first was optimistic, inclusive and tolerant, paying ample reference to the past but confident about the present and future, and tinged with an ironic, playful humour. The second was sour, insular, intolerant, fearful, unhealthily obsessed with past glories, and utterly lacking in any humour or pleasure.
There is an opportunity here for the non-Brexitist mainstream to develop its own political jiu-jitsu, appropriating the constant Brexitist demand that ‘we want our country back’. Doing so would not be a nostalgic lament for an unrecoverable past. That first Britain is still available, including for England, as was more recently suggested in discussions of ‘progressive patriotism’ at the time of the Euro 2020 football tournament.
Articulating it as the real Britain, and the true expression of British values would not go against the grain of public opinion but with it. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the veteran political scientist Professor Sir John Curtice provided a fascinating overview of the current political scene which included discussion of the latest British Social Attitudes Survey. This showed the disparities between the views and values of the public in general and those of 2024 Reform voters. These include that 31% of the public believe that migrants have undermined rather than enriched the country's culture compared with 81% of Reform voters; 32% think migrants have been bad for the country's economy (73% of Reform voters); and 18% think attempts to give equal opportunities for black and Asian people have gone too far (49% of Reform voters).
This, and much other data, gives quantitative support to the claim that Reform does not speak for ‘the people’ in a general sense, or for some mythical ‘silent majority’. Britain really is a more tolerant country than the one Farage, Robinson or the Tories claim it to be. Indeed, if anything, it is this tolerance which characterizes ‘the silent majority’, or at least one which is silenced in the sense that none of what used to be called the ‘main Westminster parties’, including the governing Labour Party, speak for it. Instead, the tolerant majority are constantly told that they are the ‘out of touch elite’.
The alternative, then, is to speak for this sense of Britain and Britishness, stressing rather than denying the success of multi-culturalism and, perhaps even more importantly, replacing sullen or alternatively vainglorious nostalgia with an optimistic vision for the future as a framing for concrete policies to achieve it, including on asylum-seeking. I’m not suggesting this would be easy. But it is almost a truism that parties which don’t seem to like their country are not likely to appeal to its voters, and it is striking the extent to which both Reform and the Tories trade on dismay for ‘what this country has become’.
Denying scoundrels the refuge of patriotism
Articulating Britishness in this way would serve to position Farage, Reform, and other Brexitists as un-British. It isn’t effective simply to ‘call them out’ as ‘racists’ or ‘fascists’ which, whilst it may give a self-congratulatory sense of ‘No pasaran’ steadfastness, is easily laughed off by their supporters and potential supporters, and cements their sense of being hectored by prissy middle-class liberals. But questioning their Britishness is another matter, as is the counterpart of attacking Farage on one of his weakest flanks, his lack of patriotism.
Keir Starmer has not been scared to embrace patriotism, rightly in my view. Doing so has often been taboo for the British left, as George Orwell long ago pointed out, and as was vividly illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s adolescent refusal to sing the National Anthem in 2015. It may be that there are still some on the liberal-left who feel queasy about anything that smacks of nationalism, but, frankly, we don’t have the luxury of such scruples. Without a positive articulation of patriotism the field is left to aggressive and authoritarian nationalists. So Starmer is right to talk about patriotism, but he needs to do so in a way which articulates Britishness in a radically different way to the far-right version and to the equally Brexitist ‘Blue Labour’ version.
Doing so would make the sharp attacks on Farage’s patriotism which Starmer has previously made more effective. It would enable a linkage to be made between the extreme illiberal authoritarianism of Farage’s call for mass deportations and his open admiration for Putin, his (at best) equivocation about Ukraine, and his sycophantic association with Trump. Farage’s vulnerability to those charges, including amongst his own supporters, has been shown before, for example in the reaction to his comments about Putin, Ukraine and NATO in 2024. Nor is Farage alone in this vulnerability. It is shared by Robinson, with his support from Musk and his documented ties to Russia.
Moreover, exposing the right in this way would create a coherence with the government’s foreign and defence policies. Amongst all the other developments in the last fortnight, we have seen fresh evidence of Putin’s aggressive intent, with drone flights into Polish and Romanian airspaces. This is not incidental to what is happening domestically. In both cases aggressive nationalism is in the ascendant, and in both cases it is emboldened by Trump, a testament to both his power and his weakness.
Which brings me finally to Trump’s visit to the UK this week. But what, really, is there to say? We all know that for ‘reasons of State’ the British government, like every government around the world, has to try to deal with this vile, sociopathic bully, and feeding his grotesque ego with some pageantry is one obvious way to do so. But the America he is creating is already another country from that which we have known and, in the current battle for our own future, that country is on the side of darkness. Ultimately, and the sooner the better, winning that battle will entail weaning ourselves from our dependence upon it.
Prospects
No doubt others would articulate this battle in different ways, but I think there is now a widespread understanding that this country is in a period of fundamental conflict not just in its politics but about its polity; a battle for its identity and, if it is not too overblown to say, for its soul. The radical right certainly knows what is stake. So should the rest of us. The way I articulate it is in terms of a conflict between ‘Brexitism’ and ‘Anti-Brexitism’, and it has been evident since the very early days of the Brexit process. I don’t, obviously, mean that history started in 2016 but there’s plenty of evidence, including some of the other data in the John Curtice analysis that I referred to earlier, that Brexit is an enduring political inflexion point.
From that point of view, what I have discussed in this post could be part of a viable strategy to marginalize Brexitism and, conversely, to mobilise ‘anti-Brexitism’. It could also, not coincidentally, be part of a viable strategy to revitalize Labour’s electoral fortunes by doing several things at once: provide a novel line for a drama-addicted media, break with one of the central deformations of Brexitist politics, meet the demand for a coherent statement of its purpose and values, marginalize Reform, and re-galvanize its liberal-left support. But this is not a cynical statement of tactics. It would be a more moral politics and, crucially, a more truthful politics, at least partly reversing out of the cul-de-sac of Brexit and Brexitism.
To my mind, the conflict over Brexitism and the fate of the Labour government are linked, at least for the time being, in that it seems very difficult to envisage a way of marginalizing Brexitism which does not involve the main party of organized labour and, more or less, of social democracy, especially given that it is the governing party. In the longer term that may change, but I’m not sure we have the luxury of thinking in the longer term. For that reason, too, this post has been more prescriptive than usual and, whilst accepting that the prescriptions may be flawed, incomplete, and undoubtedly unpalatable to some readers of this blog, I believe something like them is vital [2]. As to the prospect of the Labour government enacting anything remotely like them, well, that seems unlikely.
Notes
[1] See the report starting about 18 seconds into this link, which will only be viewable in the UK to BBC licence holders. It turns out that all these flags were put up by one man. That, too, gives the lie to the idea of some huge groundswell driven by ‘the silent majority’, but it also emphasizes how small numbers of people are being allowed to dominate what are public spaces.
[2] Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of similar prescriptions from James O’Malley in a Substack post and especially encouraging is the video clip embedded within it where Labour MP Lizzi Collinge articulates very much the kind of counter-narrative of patriotism I have in mind.
This, and much other data, gives quantitative support to the claim that Reform does not speak for ‘the people’ in a general sense, or for some mythical ‘silent majority’. Britain really is a more tolerant country than the one Farage, Robinson or the Tories claim it to be. Indeed, if anything, it is this tolerance which characterizes ‘the silent majority’, or at least one which is silenced in the sense that none of what used to be called the ‘main Westminster parties’, including the governing Labour Party, speak for it. Instead, the tolerant majority are constantly told that they are the ‘out of touch elite’.
The alternative, then, is to speak for this sense of Britain and Britishness, stressing rather than denying the success of multi-culturalism and, perhaps even more importantly, replacing sullen or alternatively vainglorious nostalgia with an optimistic vision for the future as a framing for concrete policies to achieve it, including on asylum-seeking. I’m not suggesting this would be easy. But it is almost a truism that parties which don’t seem to like their country are not likely to appeal to its voters, and it is striking the extent to which both Reform and the Tories trade on dismay for ‘what this country has become’.
Denying scoundrels the refuge of patriotism
Articulating Britishness in this way would serve to position Farage, Reform, and other Brexitists as un-British. It isn’t effective simply to ‘call them out’ as ‘racists’ or ‘fascists’ which, whilst it may give a self-congratulatory sense of ‘No pasaran’ steadfastness, is easily laughed off by their supporters and potential supporters, and cements their sense of being hectored by prissy middle-class liberals. But questioning their Britishness is another matter, as is the counterpart of attacking Farage on one of his weakest flanks, his lack of patriotism.
Keir Starmer has not been scared to embrace patriotism, rightly in my view. Doing so has often been taboo for the British left, as George Orwell long ago pointed out, and as was vividly illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s adolescent refusal to sing the National Anthem in 2015. It may be that there are still some on the liberal-left who feel queasy about anything that smacks of nationalism, but, frankly, we don’t have the luxury of such scruples. Without a positive articulation of patriotism the field is left to aggressive and authoritarian nationalists. So Starmer is right to talk about patriotism, but he needs to do so in a way which articulates Britishness in a radically different way to the far-right version and to the equally Brexitist ‘Blue Labour’ version.
Doing so would make the sharp attacks on Farage’s patriotism which Starmer has previously made more effective. It would enable a linkage to be made between the extreme illiberal authoritarianism of Farage’s call for mass deportations and his open admiration for Putin, his (at best) equivocation about Ukraine, and his sycophantic association with Trump. Farage’s vulnerability to those charges, including amongst his own supporters, has been shown before, for example in the reaction to his comments about Putin, Ukraine and NATO in 2024. Nor is Farage alone in this vulnerability. It is shared by Robinson, with his support from Musk and his documented ties to Russia.
Moreover, exposing the right in this way would create a coherence with the government’s foreign and defence policies. Amongst all the other developments in the last fortnight, we have seen fresh evidence of Putin’s aggressive intent, with drone flights into Polish and Romanian airspaces. This is not incidental to what is happening domestically. In both cases aggressive nationalism is in the ascendant, and in both cases it is emboldened by Trump, a testament to both his power and his weakness.
Which brings me finally to Trump’s visit to the UK this week. But what, really, is there to say? We all know that for ‘reasons of State’ the British government, like every government around the world, has to try to deal with this vile, sociopathic bully, and feeding his grotesque ego with some pageantry is one obvious way to do so. But the America he is creating is already another country from that which we have known and, in the current battle for our own future, that country is on the side of darkness. Ultimately, and the sooner the better, winning that battle will entail weaning ourselves from our dependence upon it.
Prospects
No doubt others would articulate this battle in different ways, but I think there is now a widespread understanding that this country is in a period of fundamental conflict not just in its politics but about its polity; a battle for its identity and, if it is not too overblown to say, for its soul. The radical right certainly knows what is stake. So should the rest of us. The way I articulate it is in terms of a conflict between ‘Brexitism’ and ‘Anti-Brexitism’, and it has been evident since the very early days of the Brexit process. I don’t, obviously, mean that history started in 2016 but there’s plenty of evidence, including some of the other data in the John Curtice analysis that I referred to earlier, that Brexit is an enduring political inflexion point.
From that point of view, what I have discussed in this post could be part of a viable strategy to marginalize Brexitism and, conversely, to mobilise ‘anti-Brexitism’. It could also, not coincidentally, be part of a viable strategy to revitalize Labour’s electoral fortunes by doing several things at once: provide a novel line for a drama-addicted media, break with one of the central deformations of Brexitist politics, meet the demand for a coherent statement of its purpose and values, marginalize Reform, and re-galvanize its liberal-left support. But this is not a cynical statement of tactics. It would be a more moral politics and, crucially, a more truthful politics, at least partly reversing out of the cul-de-sac of Brexit and Brexitism.
To my mind, the conflict over Brexitism and the fate of the Labour government are linked, at least for the time being, in that it seems very difficult to envisage a way of marginalizing Brexitism which does not involve the main party of organized labour and, more or less, of social democracy, especially given that it is the governing party. In the longer term that may change, but I’m not sure we have the luxury of thinking in the longer term. For that reason, too, this post has been more prescriptive than usual and, whilst accepting that the prescriptions may be flawed, incomplete, and undoubtedly unpalatable to some readers of this blog, I believe something like them is vital [2]. As to the prospect of the Labour government enacting anything remotely like them, well, that seems unlikely.
Notes
[1] See the report starting about 18 seconds into this link, which will only be viewable in the UK to BBC licence holders. It turns out that all these flags were put up by one man. That, too, gives the lie to the idea of some huge groundswell driven by ‘the silent majority’, but it also emphasizes how small numbers of people are being allowed to dominate what are public spaces.
[2] Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of similar prescriptions from James O’Malley in a Substack post and especially encouraging is the video clip embedded within it where Labour MP Lizzi Collinge articulates very much the kind of counter-narrative of patriotism I have in mind.
Friday, 16 February 2024
Brexit, Brexitism, and the Trump and Russian threats
In the Brexit debate, discussion of its geo-political damage has often been the poor relation of that of its economic damage. It’s easy to understand why, as the economic damage is more tangible and, to a degree, more quantifiable. The latest evidence of that came this week in a new analysis by Goldman Sachs, the significance of which is that, for the first time, it drew together all of the different counterfactual models, with the headline finding being that that UK GDP is now 5% lower than it would have been without Brexit.
However, ultimately, the geo-political damage may be even more important and more likely to lead to a softening, or even reversal, of Brexit. That isn’t because Brexit is the cause of all Britain’s geo-political problems, any more than EU membership would resolve them, but because Brexit has created additional problems whilst doing nothing at all to help those which would exist anyway.
Geo-politics does not just mean defence, and certainly not just defence in its traditional military meanings, but includes those things along with the wider panoply of security, soft power, diplomacy, and international relations. Thus configured, it is climate change which presents the biggest set of geo-political challenges for Britain, as for every other country, but, for all the urgency of that, those relating to war in its various forms have a particular immediacy.
That immediacy has been ratcheted up several notches by Donald Trump’s latest comments about Russia and NATO, including that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to members not reaching the 2% of GDP defence spending target. That would be a direct violation of the basic principle of mutual defence, leading the NATO Secretary-General to say that the comments “undermine all of our security”.
This comes at a time when, of course, there is a real possibility of a second Trump Presidency and, if that comes about, there are now multiple signs that it would be (even) more extreme than the first one, and far less constrained. The liberal Conservative historian and journalist Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump would “abandon NATO”, even if not formally leaving it. Whether or not that proves true, there can be no doubt of the close affinities between Trump and Putin, something in plain sight last week when Tucker Carlson – who has been described as “perhaps the highest-profile proponent of ‘Trumpism’” – conducted a sycophantic interview with the Russian leader.
General background
I’ve written at length before about the nexus of geo-political issues around Brexit, Trump and Russia, initially when ‘previewing the geo-political costs of Brexit’ at the time of Putin’s poison attacks in Salisbury in March 2018, and then in March 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Much that is in those two posts still stands, and I will avoid repeating them save to briefly draw out three general points.
First, Brexit necessarily fractured the central tenet of UK geo-political strategy by destroying its role as a US-EU bridge. Burning one end of that bridge was bound to fray the other end, under any US Presidency, and the Northern Ireland aspects of Brexit were always potentially liable to cause further tensions in UK-US relations. Equally, whilst a Trump Presidency would have been difficult for the UK even without Brexit, and will be if it recurs, it is a particular delusion of Brexiters that Trump regards Brexit Britain with some kind of special affection. In fact, whilst he may be happy to heap praise on sycophants like Nigel Farage, the idea that he has any interest in what happens to the UK, or even any loyalty to such court jesters, is preposterous.
Secondly, Brexiters showed a crucial strategic ignorance in configuring NATO as the only international organization needed to meet Britain’s security and defence needs, and the EU as entirely irrelevant to these, when, in fact, the two have become increasingly intertwined. That has become even more obvious since the invasion of Ukraine, which also showed the absurdity of the Brexiters’ vision of ‘Global Britain’ and its associated ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’. As the revised Integrated Review of 2023 recognized, the European continent remains the UK’s primary defence theatre and, within that theatre, Russia its sole, but considerable, threat.
Thirdly, even without delving into the murky question of direct Russian interference in the Referendum (a question which could only really be answered by the intelligence services, who were not asked to do so for the 2021 ‘Russia Report’), Brexit was undoubtedly welcome to Putin, and fully consistent with his longstanding attempts to destabilize both the UK and the EU. It is a point insufficiently made to the plastic patriots of Brexit just how comprehensively they played into his hands, even if it cannot be proved that they were his puppets.
The Russian threat and responses to it
These general points provide the background to the current situation. It is one in which the threat of Russia is undeniable. Putin may not have had the swift victory he expected in Ukraine but may salvage something he will be able to claim as victory, especially if a Trump presidency withdraws US support to Kiev, or even without that, if Republican resistance to such support persists. Nor has prosecution of the war prevented continuing Russian aggression, both overt and covert, elsewhere in Europe.
For example, last year, NATO intercepted over 300 Russian planes threatening its airspace, mainly over the Baltic states, with the RAF responsible for at least 50 of these interceptions. Meanwhile, Russian interference and influence in Kosovo and Serbia, Moldova, Bosnia, and Montenegro continued. Just this week Moscow put the Estonian Prime Minister on a so-called ‘wanted list’, as part of its ongoing attempts to bully and intimidate its neighbours. And whilst the 2021 Russia Report may not have delved into the Brexit referendum, it gave no room to doubt the extent of Russian activity in political disinformation campaigns against the UK, whilst as recently as last December the intelligence authorities revealed the ongoing nature of Russian cyber-attacks.
All of this, and more, is what underlies the recent upsurge of concern about the possibility of a major conflict on European soil, including Grant Shapps’ reference to this now being a “pre-war generation” in his first speech as Defence Secretary. Personally, I don’t take Shapps seriously as Defence Secretary or in any other capacity, but I do take seriously the warnings of the Chief of the General Staff. Such warnings certainly should not be dismissed as coming from blimpish or self-interested military ‘brass hats’; for example, the left-wing journalist Paul Mason has been vocal in making the case for Britain to re-arm in the face of the threat from Putin’s Russia.
Moreover, the same warnings are being sounded in several other European countries, building upon pre-existing concerns about Russian aggression, concerns which led, amongst other things, to Sweden and Finland seeking NATO membership. The last barrier to Sweden’s application, approval by Hungary, looks close to being cleared, and the country is already participating in NATO exercises as well as preparing its citizens for the possibility of all-out war. Finland’s membership has already begun, and is being actively operated, with that country, too, being in an advanced stage of readiness for war. Meanwhile, Germany has embarked on a major rearmament programme whilst Poland has doubled the size of its armed forces (£) in recent years and looks set to continue to prioritize defence under its new government. Given these, and similar, developments, British political and military leaders have if anything been rather slow to prepare the public for the threat we face.
The Trumpist-Putinist-Brexitist axis
However, Britain’s capacity to prepare is hobbled, and not just by the fact that we are economically struggling, the more so because of Brexit. It is also because there is a very powerful, if contradictory, axis which undermines attempts to do so.
On the one hand, there are those on the populist right like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson (despite his professed support for Ukraine), and Nigel Farage who are openly supportive of Trump’s re-election, and, at least in the case of Farage, public admirers of Putin. They have been joined this week in their support of Trump by John Hayes, a less well-known but highly influential right-wing Tory MP, and it’s noteworthy, in itself, just how many Tories are lining up to offer such endorsements in what is, after all, a foreign election.
On the other hand, there is the unreconstructed old hard left, including Jeremy Corbyn and the Stop the War Coalition, elements of which are “among the worst disseminators of Kremlin propaganda in the UK”. These are not the words of a ‘Centrist’, still less a Conservative, but of the radical journalist George Monbiot, and the veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell has made similar points.
Spanning these two groups is the peculiar, and peculiarly influential and well-connected, one of the Revolutionary Communist Party turned Libertarians who coalesce around Spiked, which constantly mocks and undermines the warnings about Russia, including these most recent ones.
It is not a coincidence that all three of these groupings are also pro-Brexit and anti-EU. What links Brexitists, Trump, and Putin is a shared hatred of any notion of a liberal, rules-based international order. And whilst it would be fatuous to deny the many criticisms of that notion, and what it has meant in practice, most disgracefully as regards the Iraq War, it is far more fatuous, if not downright evil, to suggest that illiberal, lawless international disorder would be preferable. Yet, although they would never put it in those terms, that is precisely what all those groupings would prefer, albeit for wildly different reasons. Some dream of a global powerplay between Great Nations led by Strong Men, some of the chaos upon which disaster capitalists can thrive, some of the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions to usher in a socialist utopia.
Actually, they only differ wildly in what they ultimately want. They are identical in what they see as the route to getting it: if all the cards are thrown up in the air, then it becomes possible that they may be made to land at the desired outcome. What gets left out of that analysis is the fact that amongst those ‘cards’ are the lives of millions of people which will be disrupted, deformed, and destroyed in the process; the dead, the maimed, the tortured, the dispossessed, the damaged, the broken. And whilst historical parallels are never exact, we’ve seen all this before in Europe. The same utopian dreams, the same subjugation of means to ends, the same grand power-plays in which ordinary lives are just collateral damage in the service of great dreams and causes.
The logic of integration
In this context, Brexit is only a minor event, but with a European war now being widely discussed as a serious possibility it takes on a new importance. Of course, such a war is by no means inevitable, but it is the decisions taken in the period after possibility and before inevitability which are crucial. Those decisions are quite as acute for the EU as for the UK. It isn’t that staying in the EU would have made them go away, and the EU is deeply divided between countries (£), including the Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, Poland and some of the Balkan states, which are acutely aware of the Russian threat and preparing to meet it, and those, including Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia, which are in various ways allies or appeasers of the Putin regime.
Yet such divisions would exist, and probably to a greater extent, if the EU did not exist. And, either way, the UK would have to have a relationship with what is, after all, its own continent. Brexiters may wax lyrical about the days when Britain ‘stood alone’, but forget that this wasn’t its choice, and was its moment of maximum peril precisely because of its isolation. In fact, the EU does exist, so what is that relationship to be? At the very least, there is now a stronger case than ever for a deep UK-EU security and defence pact – something always envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement, but which got sacrificed by the Johnson-Frost antagonistic ‘sovereignty-first’ negotiations – and, unlike any proposals Britain might make to deepen trade and economic relationships, this is an area where the UK genuinely has something to offer the EU.
This is because, despite cuts in personnel numbers, especially army personnel, and despite some recent high-profile equipment failures, the UK still has profound defence capabilities – not in the sense of a capacity to be ‘Global Britain’, but in the context of a European conflict. It remains the world’s sixth military power, and the most powerful in Europe (not including Russia), with on some estimates the best special forces in the world, and has a substantial cyber-war and intelligence capacity, probably second only to the US as a regards signals intelligence. There is far too much self-congratulatory guff about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ capabilities in all kinds of sectors and, no doubt, much hyperbole about its military capacity, but that capacity is real and, importantly, provides a base that could rapidly be built upon, though the longer that is put off the harder it will become.
At the same time, the UK is never going to be strong enough to go it alone, and whilst it has much to offer the EU it has as much or more to gain from cooperation, perhaps even integration, with the EU. The idea of an EU army, for so long the imaginary bugbear of Eurosceptics, has recently been re-proposed by the Italian government, although the reactions from other EU members make it unlikely to gain traction for now, and the barriers to such an entity are technical as well as political. However, post-Ukraine there has been an intensification of integrative measures, and an exercise last October involving the forces of nine EU countries was for the first time conducted from an EU operational headquarters, as part of an attempt to enable the EU to act independently of NATO.
This seems set to be the direction of travel for the EU and, if so, the argument for UK involvement, and ever-deepening involvement at that, becomes stronger, the more so if Trump does come to power. That’s speculative, but it is justifiable given that we have already witnessed the way that the Ukraine war served to improve what at the time were very acrimonious UK-EU relations. In the event of actual hostilities breaking out the logic would surely become stronger still and if, in that scenario, the US failed to meet its NATO commitments it might become irresistible. For it is difficult to over-state just how profound the impact of such hostilities would be, not just in terms of military operations and alliances but for everyday life.
What would war mean for Britain?
During the Cold War it was generally assumed that if there was a conflict with Russia it would be a nuclear one. Einstein supposedly said that whilst he didn’t know what weapons would be used in World War Three, he knew that those used in World War Four would be sticks and stones. Within that climate of Armageddon, many if not most of us became fatalistic: if war happened, survival was highly unlikely and perhaps not to be desired anyway. The kind of advice offered by the infamous 1976 ‘Protect and Survive’ pamphlet, which included making a shelter from a large table surrounded by furniture and bags of earth, seemed, to say the least, hopelessly optimistic.
However, nuclear war isn’t the scenario we are facing. Rather, it is one of forms of more or less conventional warfare, probably conducted mainly on Eastern European soil, though in a wider airspace, and also cyber and information warfare. For the UK, according to security expert Professor Anthony Glees, the consequences would include food, fuel and medicine shortages, rationing, and curfews. Glees also envisages that “a British Quisling government would be established, probably under a well-known domestic politician known to be sympathetic to Putin”. One wonders who he might have had in mind.
Perhaps this is unduly grim, but, on his first prediction, we have already seen with Ukraine, the pandemic, and Brexit the fragility of supply chains, and have ample evidence of how quickly such fragility engenders panic-buying, hoarding, and de facto rationing. As for Glees’ even grimmer second prediction, it is certainly obvious that, at the very least, the strange but powerful pro-Trump, pro-Putin alliance I identified above would be vocal in demanding British disengagement from the conflict.
Indeed, it is all too easy to anticipate that they would cry that here, finally, was the great Brexit dividend: what has conflict between Russia and the EU got to do with us? Once again appeasers would talk of quarrels in faraway countries, between people of whom we know nothing. It is equally easy to anticipate how, just as Johnson dismisses those who are alarmed by Trump as the ‘wokerati’, these voices would be declaring, in their various accents, that it was only the liberal/imperialist/globalist/Europhile elite who want conflict with Putin. So, even if such a war did not produce the Quisling government Glees anticipates, it would be enmeshed within the Brexit or Brexitist culture war, with Brexiters acting as Putin’s fifth column. Just in itself, this is a good reason why Brexitism needs to be driven to the margins of British politics.
The European ideal
To re-emphasize, none of this is to suggest that Brexit is the cause of the threats and challenges posed by Putin and Trump, or that those threats and challenges fall less heavily on the EU and its members. It’s more subtle than that. Brexit doesn’t prevent British military and other cooperation with the EU, but it makes it less straightforward and certainly doesn’t help it. Brexit certainly removes UK influence on the EU’s response to Russia, and to other geo-political threats. And to the ways that geo-politics impinges on supply chains, Brexit adds additional frictions.
But the biggest point is this. Brexit has put a fracture in the basic idea of ‘Europe’, expressed institutionally by the EU, as a defining bulwark of liberal democracy and freedom. The need for such a bulwark becomes more important if the US retreats further from what has been, warts and all, its global role in that respect (£). Any groans from Brexiters about democracy and sovereignty (as discussed in last week’s post) don’t negate the fact that EU membership entails commitment to the EU’s founding values of “human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”. Nor is that fact negated by any whataboutery relating to Hungary, currently, or Poland, recently: such anomalies as there are don’t detract from the enormity of having united a continent around such values, every word of which stands in stark contrast to Russia, not to mention many other parts of the world.
The word ‘united’ is the key one. Brexiters may say that Britain need not belong to the EU to share its values in these respects. But sharing is not the same as uniting. There is, to coin a phrase from a different context, power in a union. Having witnessed the break-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the rise of the European Union, including the alacrity with which the one-time Warsaw Pact countries signed up for it, there’s probably no one who understands that as well as Vladimir Putin.
However, ultimately, the geo-political damage may be even more important and more likely to lead to a softening, or even reversal, of Brexit. That isn’t because Brexit is the cause of all Britain’s geo-political problems, any more than EU membership would resolve them, but because Brexit has created additional problems whilst doing nothing at all to help those which would exist anyway.
Geo-politics does not just mean defence, and certainly not just defence in its traditional military meanings, but includes those things along with the wider panoply of security, soft power, diplomacy, and international relations. Thus configured, it is climate change which presents the biggest set of geo-political challenges for Britain, as for every other country, but, for all the urgency of that, those relating to war in its various forms have a particular immediacy.
That immediacy has been ratcheted up several notches by Donald Trump’s latest comments about Russia and NATO, including that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to members not reaching the 2% of GDP defence spending target. That would be a direct violation of the basic principle of mutual defence, leading the NATO Secretary-General to say that the comments “undermine all of our security”.
This comes at a time when, of course, there is a real possibility of a second Trump Presidency and, if that comes about, there are now multiple signs that it would be (even) more extreme than the first one, and far less constrained. The liberal Conservative historian and journalist Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump would “abandon NATO”, even if not formally leaving it. Whether or not that proves true, there can be no doubt of the close affinities between Trump and Putin, something in plain sight last week when Tucker Carlson – who has been described as “perhaps the highest-profile proponent of ‘Trumpism’” – conducted a sycophantic interview with the Russian leader.
General background
I’ve written at length before about the nexus of geo-political issues around Brexit, Trump and Russia, initially when ‘previewing the geo-political costs of Brexit’ at the time of Putin’s poison attacks in Salisbury in March 2018, and then in March 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Much that is in those two posts still stands, and I will avoid repeating them save to briefly draw out three general points.
First, Brexit necessarily fractured the central tenet of UK geo-political strategy by destroying its role as a US-EU bridge. Burning one end of that bridge was bound to fray the other end, under any US Presidency, and the Northern Ireland aspects of Brexit were always potentially liable to cause further tensions in UK-US relations. Equally, whilst a Trump Presidency would have been difficult for the UK even without Brexit, and will be if it recurs, it is a particular delusion of Brexiters that Trump regards Brexit Britain with some kind of special affection. In fact, whilst he may be happy to heap praise on sycophants like Nigel Farage, the idea that he has any interest in what happens to the UK, or even any loyalty to such court jesters, is preposterous.
Secondly, Brexiters showed a crucial strategic ignorance in configuring NATO as the only international organization needed to meet Britain’s security and defence needs, and the EU as entirely irrelevant to these, when, in fact, the two have become increasingly intertwined. That has become even more obvious since the invasion of Ukraine, which also showed the absurdity of the Brexiters’ vision of ‘Global Britain’ and its associated ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’. As the revised Integrated Review of 2023 recognized, the European continent remains the UK’s primary defence theatre and, within that theatre, Russia its sole, but considerable, threat.
Thirdly, even without delving into the murky question of direct Russian interference in the Referendum (a question which could only really be answered by the intelligence services, who were not asked to do so for the 2021 ‘Russia Report’), Brexit was undoubtedly welcome to Putin, and fully consistent with his longstanding attempts to destabilize both the UK and the EU. It is a point insufficiently made to the plastic patriots of Brexit just how comprehensively they played into his hands, even if it cannot be proved that they were his puppets.
The Russian threat and responses to it
These general points provide the background to the current situation. It is one in which the threat of Russia is undeniable. Putin may not have had the swift victory he expected in Ukraine but may salvage something he will be able to claim as victory, especially if a Trump presidency withdraws US support to Kiev, or even without that, if Republican resistance to such support persists. Nor has prosecution of the war prevented continuing Russian aggression, both overt and covert, elsewhere in Europe.
For example, last year, NATO intercepted over 300 Russian planes threatening its airspace, mainly over the Baltic states, with the RAF responsible for at least 50 of these interceptions. Meanwhile, Russian interference and influence in Kosovo and Serbia, Moldova, Bosnia, and Montenegro continued. Just this week Moscow put the Estonian Prime Minister on a so-called ‘wanted list’, as part of its ongoing attempts to bully and intimidate its neighbours. And whilst the 2021 Russia Report may not have delved into the Brexit referendum, it gave no room to doubt the extent of Russian activity in political disinformation campaigns against the UK, whilst as recently as last December the intelligence authorities revealed the ongoing nature of Russian cyber-attacks.
All of this, and more, is what underlies the recent upsurge of concern about the possibility of a major conflict on European soil, including Grant Shapps’ reference to this now being a “pre-war generation” in his first speech as Defence Secretary. Personally, I don’t take Shapps seriously as Defence Secretary or in any other capacity, but I do take seriously the warnings of the Chief of the General Staff. Such warnings certainly should not be dismissed as coming from blimpish or self-interested military ‘brass hats’; for example, the left-wing journalist Paul Mason has been vocal in making the case for Britain to re-arm in the face of the threat from Putin’s Russia.
Moreover, the same warnings are being sounded in several other European countries, building upon pre-existing concerns about Russian aggression, concerns which led, amongst other things, to Sweden and Finland seeking NATO membership. The last barrier to Sweden’s application, approval by Hungary, looks close to being cleared, and the country is already participating in NATO exercises as well as preparing its citizens for the possibility of all-out war. Finland’s membership has already begun, and is being actively operated, with that country, too, being in an advanced stage of readiness for war. Meanwhile, Germany has embarked on a major rearmament programme whilst Poland has doubled the size of its armed forces (£) in recent years and looks set to continue to prioritize defence under its new government. Given these, and similar, developments, British political and military leaders have if anything been rather slow to prepare the public for the threat we face.
The Trumpist-Putinist-Brexitist axis
However, Britain’s capacity to prepare is hobbled, and not just by the fact that we are economically struggling, the more so because of Brexit. It is also because there is a very powerful, if contradictory, axis which undermines attempts to do so.
On the one hand, there are those on the populist right like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson (despite his professed support for Ukraine), and Nigel Farage who are openly supportive of Trump’s re-election, and, at least in the case of Farage, public admirers of Putin. They have been joined this week in their support of Trump by John Hayes, a less well-known but highly influential right-wing Tory MP, and it’s noteworthy, in itself, just how many Tories are lining up to offer such endorsements in what is, after all, a foreign election.
On the other hand, there is the unreconstructed old hard left, including Jeremy Corbyn and the Stop the War Coalition, elements of which are “among the worst disseminators of Kremlin propaganda in the UK”. These are not the words of a ‘Centrist’, still less a Conservative, but of the radical journalist George Monbiot, and the veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell has made similar points.
Spanning these two groups is the peculiar, and peculiarly influential and well-connected, one of the Revolutionary Communist Party turned Libertarians who coalesce around Spiked, which constantly mocks and undermines the warnings about Russia, including these most recent ones.
It is not a coincidence that all three of these groupings are also pro-Brexit and anti-EU. What links Brexitists, Trump, and Putin is a shared hatred of any notion of a liberal, rules-based international order. And whilst it would be fatuous to deny the many criticisms of that notion, and what it has meant in practice, most disgracefully as regards the Iraq War, it is far more fatuous, if not downright evil, to suggest that illiberal, lawless international disorder would be preferable. Yet, although they would never put it in those terms, that is precisely what all those groupings would prefer, albeit for wildly different reasons. Some dream of a global powerplay between Great Nations led by Strong Men, some of the chaos upon which disaster capitalists can thrive, some of the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions to usher in a socialist utopia.
Actually, they only differ wildly in what they ultimately want. They are identical in what they see as the route to getting it: if all the cards are thrown up in the air, then it becomes possible that they may be made to land at the desired outcome. What gets left out of that analysis is the fact that amongst those ‘cards’ are the lives of millions of people which will be disrupted, deformed, and destroyed in the process; the dead, the maimed, the tortured, the dispossessed, the damaged, the broken. And whilst historical parallels are never exact, we’ve seen all this before in Europe. The same utopian dreams, the same subjugation of means to ends, the same grand power-plays in which ordinary lives are just collateral damage in the service of great dreams and causes.
The logic of integration
In this context, Brexit is only a minor event, but with a European war now being widely discussed as a serious possibility it takes on a new importance. Of course, such a war is by no means inevitable, but it is the decisions taken in the period after possibility and before inevitability which are crucial. Those decisions are quite as acute for the EU as for the UK. It isn’t that staying in the EU would have made them go away, and the EU is deeply divided between countries (£), including the Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, Poland and some of the Balkan states, which are acutely aware of the Russian threat and preparing to meet it, and those, including Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia, which are in various ways allies or appeasers of the Putin regime.
Yet such divisions would exist, and probably to a greater extent, if the EU did not exist. And, either way, the UK would have to have a relationship with what is, after all, its own continent. Brexiters may wax lyrical about the days when Britain ‘stood alone’, but forget that this wasn’t its choice, and was its moment of maximum peril precisely because of its isolation. In fact, the EU does exist, so what is that relationship to be? At the very least, there is now a stronger case than ever for a deep UK-EU security and defence pact – something always envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement, but which got sacrificed by the Johnson-Frost antagonistic ‘sovereignty-first’ negotiations – and, unlike any proposals Britain might make to deepen trade and economic relationships, this is an area where the UK genuinely has something to offer the EU.
This is because, despite cuts in personnel numbers, especially army personnel, and despite some recent high-profile equipment failures, the UK still has profound defence capabilities – not in the sense of a capacity to be ‘Global Britain’, but in the context of a European conflict. It remains the world’s sixth military power, and the most powerful in Europe (not including Russia), with on some estimates the best special forces in the world, and has a substantial cyber-war and intelligence capacity, probably second only to the US as a regards signals intelligence. There is far too much self-congratulatory guff about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ capabilities in all kinds of sectors and, no doubt, much hyperbole about its military capacity, but that capacity is real and, importantly, provides a base that could rapidly be built upon, though the longer that is put off the harder it will become.
At the same time, the UK is never going to be strong enough to go it alone, and whilst it has much to offer the EU it has as much or more to gain from cooperation, perhaps even integration, with the EU. The idea of an EU army, for so long the imaginary bugbear of Eurosceptics, has recently been re-proposed by the Italian government, although the reactions from other EU members make it unlikely to gain traction for now, and the barriers to such an entity are technical as well as political. However, post-Ukraine there has been an intensification of integrative measures, and an exercise last October involving the forces of nine EU countries was for the first time conducted from an EU operational headquarters, as part of an attempt to enable the EU to act independently of NATO.
This seems set to be the direction of travel for the EU and, if so, the argument for UK involvement, and ever-deepening involvement at that, becomes stronger, the more so if Trump does come to power. That’s speculative, but it is justifiable given that we have already witnessed the way that the Ukraine war served to improve what at the time were very acrimonious UK-EU relations. In the event of actual hostilities breaking out the logic would surely become stronger still and if, in that scenario, the US failed to meet its NATO commitments it might become irresistible. For it is difficult to over-state just how profound the impact of such hostilities would be, not just in terms of military operations and alliances but for everyday life.
What would war mean for Britain?
During the Cold War it was generally assumed that if there was a conflict with Russia it would be a nuclear one. Einstein supposedly said that whilst he didn’t know what weapons would be used in World War Three, he knew that those used in World War Four would be sticks and stones. Within that climate of Armageddon, many if not most of us became fatalistic: if war happened, survival was highly unlikely and perhaps not to be desired anyway. The kind of advice offered by the infamous 1976 ‘Protect and Survive’ pamphlet, which included making a shelter from a large table surrounded by furniture and bags of earth, seemed, to say the least, hopelessly optimistic.
However, nuclear war isn’t the scenario we are facing. Rather, it is one of forms of more or less conventional warfare, probably conducted mainly on Eastern European soil, though in a wider airspace, and also cyber and information warfare. For the UK, according to security expert Professor Anthony Glees, the consequences would include food, fuel and medicine shortages, rationing, and curfews. Glees also envisages that “a British Quisling government would be established, probably under a well-known domestic politician known to be sympathetic to Putin”. One wonders who he might have had in mind.
Perhaps this is unduly grim, but, on his first prediction, we have already seen with Ukraine, the pandemic, and Brexit the fragility of supply chains, and have ample evidence of how quickly such fragility engenders panic-buying, hoarding, and de facto rationing. As for Glees’ even grimmer second prediction, it is certainly obvious that, at the very least, the strange but powerful pro-Trump, pro-Putin alliance I identified above would be vocal in demanding British disengagement from the conflict.
Indeed, it is all too easy to anticipate that they would cry that here, finally, was the great Brexit dividend: what has conflict between Russia and the EU got to do with us? Once again appeasers would talk of quarrels in faraway countries, between people of whom we know nothing. It is equally easy to anticipate how, just as Johnson dismisses those who are alarmed by Trump as the ‘wokerati’, these voices would be declaring, in their various accents, that it was only the liberal/imperialist/globalist/Europhile elite who want conflict with Putin. So, even if such a war did not produce the Quisling government Glees anticipates, it would be enmeshed within the Brexit or Brexitist culture war, with Brexiters acting as Putin’s fifth column. Just in itself, this is a good reason why Brexitism needs to be driven to the margins of British politics.
The European ideal
To re-emphasize, none of this is to suggest that Brexit is the cause of the threats and challenges posed by Putin and Trump, or that those threats and challenges fall less heavily on the EU and its members. It’s more subtle than that. Brexit doesn’t prevent British military and other cooperation with the EU, but it makes it less straightforward and certainly doesn’t help it. Brexit certainly removes UK influence on the EU’s response to Russia, and to other geo-political threats. And to the ways that geo-politics impinges on supply chains, Brexit adds additional frictions.
But the biggest point is this. Brexit has put a fracture in the basic idea of ‘Europe’, expressed institutionally by the EU, as a defining bulwark of liberal democracy and freedom. The need for such a bulwark becomes more important if the US retreats further from what has been, warts and all, its global role in that respect (£). Any groans from Brexiters about democracy and sovereignty (as discussed in last week’s post) don’t negate the fact that EU membership entails commitment to the EU’s founding values of “human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”. Nor is that fact negated by any whataboutery relating to Hungary, currently, or Poland, recently: such anomalies as there are don’t detract from the enormity of having united a continent around such values, every word of which stands in stark contrast to Russia, not to mention many other parts of the world.
The word ‘united’ is the key one. Brexiters may say that Britain need not belong to the EU to share its values in these respects. But sharing is not the same as uniting. There is, to coin a phrase from a different context, power in a union. Having witnessed the break-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the rise of the European Union, including the alacrity with which the one-time Warsaw Pact countries signed up for it, there’s probably no one who understands that as well as Vladimir Putin.
Friday, 16 July 2021
Another country?
The big story of the week is football. Given the volume of comment there has been, it’s difficult to say anything which is interesting or original but, as mentioned in my previous post, it’s hard not to connect it with Brexit so I’ll try to say something about it even though I don’t know much about football (I support Crystal Palace, boom-boom).
For some, of course, the connection is of a negative sort in that the whole tournament could be seen as welcome for being nothing to do with Brexit or politics. Or, which may be a different version of the same thing, as showing how the divisions of Brexit could be healed. A few suggested that England’s success represented a triumph of Brexit. Others thought that Gareth Southgate, in particular, and his team in general, articulated and embodied a new progressive patriotism that was at odds with Brexit. Some in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may have wondered what a Number 10 decked out with St George’s flags had to do with them.
Then came the post-tournament fall-out over taking the knee, booing taking the knee (and the condemning or condoning of that), the thuggery of some supporters, the racist attacks on England’s black footballers, and their and others’ responses to it. Unavoidably, this is about politics. Unavoidably, too, it is an aspect of the culture wars that have been simmering over Brexit itself as well as over racism, the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ politics, and, at the most generic level, over the (different) questions of what it now means to be English and of what it now means to be British.
A nation not at ease with itself
There can never be a single answer to such questions. The idea of a ‘united’ country is necessarily a somewhat absurd one, all the more so when, as with the UK, it is made up of more than one country. National cultures are just too complex and heterogenous to be capturable in any one way, and attempts to make them so are likely to be unpleasantly totalitarian and, even then, not to be fully realized. For that matter, the received image that World War Two Britain saw ‘everyone pulling together for the common good’ is somewhat misleading, as can be seen from the many published Mass Observation diaries, as well as the work of historians like Angus Calder.
Even so, there has been a palpable sense during the Brexit years of Britain as a country more than usually riven, and more than usually divided over both its understanding of its own past and its present-day meaning, let alone its future direction. It has become a cliché that whereas the 2012 London Olympics seemed to present a country that had some comfort with itself, Brexit slammed into that like a wrecking ball. So whilst the notion of a ‘nation at ease with itself’ is a rather illusory one, it has been tangible since Brexit that Britain is a nation that isn’t at ease with itself.
Some of that is to do with race and ethnicity. Manifestly Britain isn’t the only country where that is so, so it would be lazy to ascribe everything to Brexit. It is also lazy to explain Brexit solely, or even necessarily mainly, in terms of anti-immigration sentiment - but it would be entirely dishonest to deny it having been a significant driver. For all that some Brexiters may have disowned it, they were content to profit from, for example, the UKIP “Breaking Point” poster.
Certainly the promise to end freedom of movement of people was a major factor in the vote to leave, and also a decisive one in the subsequent decision that that meant leaving the single market. And the post-Brexit culture war has been very much conducted on the terrain of ‘cracking down’ on asylum seekers and of controlling immigration (though both of these pre-date Brexit) as well as things like the battles over statues with associations with slavery and colonialism.
But that culture war has other fronts as well. Examples include ongoing skirmishes over ‘cancel culture’ and freedom of speech. In particular, there are remarkably strong connections and overlaps between Brexit and anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown and anti-mask positions. That may be less of a cleavage between leave and remain voters, but is fairly clear at the level of the high-profile Brexiter leaders in politics and the media – Farage being the most obvious example, and the links between the ERG and the ‘Covid Recovery Group’ of Tory MPs being another.
Johnson’s vulnerability
Within all this, Boris Johnson has clearly been an important figure but in a rather peculiar way. Despite fronting the Vote Leave campaign, his commitment to Brexit was never very deep or genuine and, as is well-known, he nearly backed remain. Covid forced him into backing restrictions which, undoubtedly, he would have opposed had he not been Prime Minister, and his antipathy to them explains why he was always late to adopt them and usually gives the impression that he doesn’t fully support them.
Crucially, it is clearly the case that fomenting the culture war has been part of a deliberate strategy developed by senior government advisers (£) who see it as central to holding together Johnson’s electoral coalition. It is this strategy which has now caught him out – especially in refusing to condemn the booing of knee-taking and then, with wearying inevitability, lying about it – in the same way as it has caught out Priti Patel.
It remains to be seen how this now plays out, but Johnson’s particular vulnerability is the naked opportunism of his desire for popularity, which makes charges of hypocrisy easy and, therefore, public conviction on those charges an ever-present possibility, especially now that it brings him into conflict with the likeable, gifted, articulate and extremely popular English football stars. If nothing else, it exposes the difference between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’, something which some Tories are now realizing and which the Labour Party has begun to explore.
2016: the national conversation we didn’t know we were having
Johnson’s fate isn’t, however, the main issue in the football rows. What is more important, I think, is that they show an appetite for a ‘national conversation’ (whatever that might actually mean) about ‘what kind of country’ – or, rather, countries - we are which challenges the apparent victory of the Brexiter narrative of ‘the people’. The latter didn’t happen as the result of such a national conversation but emerged, almost accidentally, as the result of a sort of smash and grab raid because, at the time of the referendum, few people quite understood what was going on (I certainly didn’t).
That was perhaps because the general assumption, on all sides, was that remain would win. So we didn’t really know that we weren’t just deciding whether or not to leave the EU but were engaged in something which was about to shape the entirety of what ‘we’ – the United Kingdom, England – meant, both for ourselves and for how we are seen abroad. (A recent example of the latter is German journalist Annette Dittert’s evisceration of Johnson’s regime.)
So, in a way which wouldn’t have been the case had remain won, literally overnight a radical alteration occurred in the terrain and texture of politics. Very soon it became clear that the Brexit process wasn’t going to be just one of ‘technical’ adjustments but would be a battle for Britain’s ‘political soul’. With that, it emerged, as I wrote a few weeks ago, that Brexit had, in effect, ‘cancelled’ half the population as being of no account and an idea that they are unpatriotic or, even, anti-patriotic. Perhaps now they are finding a voice again. At all events, as I suggested in that post, it’s not sustainable for a country to simply dismiss half its population, and the younger, more educated half at that, as an irrelevance.
Redefining patriotism
That’s not to say that the football rows line up leavers and remainers for, as it were, a cultural penalty shoot-out (for one thing, it won’t have such a decisive outcome). The lines are much less clearly drawn than that. But they do involve an adjacent set of distinctions between mono- and multi-culturalism, exclusivity and inclusivity, insularity and openness, and between simplistic and complex understandings of history, culture and nationhood. Football is a potent terrain for that because these rows are about the national team (of England), and so deny the fault-line as being between patriots and non-patriots, or between those who ‘love the country’ versus ‘those who would talk it down’. Rather, and quite starkly, the fault-line becomes between two competing versions of what the country is, of whose country it is, and of what patriotism means.
During the referendum (and, in fact, for years before) a common expression, or complaint, amongst pro-Brexit people was ‘I just want my country back’. That was often code for hostility to immigration, but it also referenced a wider set of actual or perceived lost stabilities. With Brexit, though it seems hardly to have diminished the complaint (since it is an essentially unsatisfiable desire), they have got their country back. But it was an expression which was predicated on other people losing their country as, with Brexit, many felt they did, and those people are still, for the most part, here. There was, literally, no possibility of reversing time so as to ‘get back’ something which, even if it had ever existed, no longer did so, and couldn’t be voted into being. In fact, to the extent it was a promise of Brexit, it was another of the false promises of Brexit.
Challenging inverted snobbery
As well as breaking through the false division of the patriotic and the unpatriotic, the football rows are significant in breaking the associated attempt of populist inverted snobbery to draw an essential divide between ‘ordinary’ working-class people and the supposedly sneering, university-educated middle-class.
That is an inadequate way of understanding the Brexit vote, as for example research on ‘comfortable leavers’ shows. It is also, ironically, a hugely patronizing and stereotypical view of class and of region, in which the ‘people up north’ are imagined as pigeon-fancying, leave-voting, terrace house dwellers who have never been to university and enjoy nothing more than a pint of wallop, whilst liberal metropolitan remain-voting southerners sit around sipping Sancerre and discussing Derrida with the au pair in their Tuscan holiday homes.
Needless to say, many of the most earnest of these heroic culture warriors are, in fact, well-heeled, London-based graduates but ‘will have you know’ that their grandfather on their mother’s side was a coal miner which, by some mysterious process of genetic and historical osmosis, makes them the voice of the people. It sometimes seems as if their politics is a decades-long reaction to the excitement of hearing Pulp’s Common People played at a JCR disco in 1995.
In any case, it manifestly falls apart when it involves positioning footballers like Marcus Rashford - who actively and effectively campaigned for free school meals drawing on his own childhood experiences of poverty in Manchester, and is an inspirational role model to people of all kinds of backgrounds and ages - as out of touch or engaged in ‘gesture politics’.
The role of masculinity?
There’s perhaps also something to be said about masculinity in all this, although it is hard to pin down. The Brexit vote was evenly split in terms of gender, but there’s an undercurrent of macho bravado about ‘going it alone’ and in the associated culture war attack on ‘remoaners’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘cry babies’, as well as a definite sense amongst some lockdown sceptics of ‘masks being for wimps’.
Even harder to pin down, but discernible I think, is an implicit idea of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ of whatever gender as being effete, and the ‘authentic working class’ of whatever gender as being rugged and earthy. Again, it’s hard to position professional footballers as effete wimps, so the polarizing dyads of the culture war work less effectively here as well.
Within this there is an interesting and subtle twist. Because in some ways these footballers are re-writing traditional machismo, including that associated with football, in the way they emphasise cooperation and solidarity. Apart from the conduct of the team during the tournament, that was evident in the support Rashford gave to another fine British sporting talent, the tennis player Emma Raducanu.
Radacunu, whose Canadian-Chinese-Romanian background itself bespeaks of a multi-cultural Britain, whilst making her a target for social media mutterings that she’s not ‘really’ British, had had to withdraw from Wimbledon suffering what appeared to be an anxiety attack. She should take advice on how to “toughen up”, opined Piers Morgan; “you should be proud of yourself”, said Rashford.
A new conversation?
So in just the same way as the referendum vote became, even if it was unexpected and unplanned that it should be so, an occasion for redefining national identity, there is a kind of pent-up desire for that process, having been started, to continue. For a while, under the bludgeon of ‘the will of the people’ it couldn’t quite happen, but it has kept trying to attach itself to suitable occasions – the ‘Harry and Meghan’ rows are perhaps an example – and football is the latest and most potent of them.
How long this episode lasts, and how significant it is, remains to be seen. But in some form or another I think the process is certain to continue as regards both England and Britain. That is because not only is the notion of a ‘unified culture’ a myth, but so too is that of a static one. Culture, in its anthropological meanings, isn’t a branch of the heritage industry. It is also – as studies of organizational culture show, but the same is perhaps even more true of national culture – remarkably resistant to ‘top-down’ management of the sort being attempted by the present government through, for example, its efforts to exert control universities, heritage organizations, and the BBC.
Writing on his blog this week, David Allen Green points out that “those who start culture wars can also lose them”, whilst Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu in Byline Times suggest that the football rows may represent a point when the tide turns in Johnson et al.’s culture war. It certainly seems to have impaled GBNews on the inherent contradiction between positioning itself as ‘anti-woke’ yet proclaiming to stand for free speech. But I’m not sure that culture wars ever have a decisive outcome, and it’s worth noting that the usual self-styled ‘contrarians’ have been quick to fight back this week.
That said, to the extent that the current one has its proximate roots in the Brexit vote, it’s significant that, along with and closely linked to educational level, the best predictor of how people voted in 2016 was age. In that sense the electoral success of Johnson’s approach may be rather time-limited - something Conservative strategists are well aware of (£). Equally, that means there are opportunities, especially for the Labour Party, to catch the tide if not of history then of its close cousin, demography.
But, to reiterate, this is not just or mainly about political parties, although they affect and are affected by it. It is a wider matter, not created but exacerbated by Brexit, of identity and belonging. Football is only incidental to that, but primarily because it is popular it offers an arena – after years of talk of ‘the will of the people’ and of ‘enemies of the people’ – to ask what manner of people the English and, if indirectly, the British are.
For some, of course, the connection is of a negative sort in that the whole tournament could be seen as welcome for being nothing to do with Brexit or politics. Or, which may be a different version of the same thing, as showing how the divisions of Brexit could be healed. A few suggested that England’s success represented a triumph of Brexit. Others thought that Gareth Southgate, in particular, and his team in general, articulated and embodied a new progressive patriotism that was at odds with Brexit. Some in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may have wondered what a Number 10 decked out with St George’s flags had to do with them.
Then came the post-tournament fall-out over taking the knee, booing taking the knee (and the condemning or condoning of that), the thuggery of some supporters, the racist attacks on England’s black footballers, and their and others’ responses to it. Unavoidably, this is about politics. Unavoidably, too, it is an aspect of the culture wars that have been simmering over Brexit itself as well as over racism, the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ politics, and, at the most generic level, over the (different) questions of what it now means to be English and of what it now means to be British.
A nation not at ease with itself
There can never be a single answer to such questions. The idea of a ‘united’ country is necessarily a somewhat absurd one, all the more so when, as with the UK, it is made up of more than one country. National cultures are just too complex and heterogenous to be capturable in any one way, and attempts to make them so are likely to be unpleasantly totalitarian and, even then, not to be fully realized. For that matter, the received image that World War Two Britain saw ‘everyone pulling together for the common good’ is somewhat misleading, as can be seen from the many published Mass Observation diaries, as well as the work of historians like Angus Calder.
Even so, there has been a palpable sense during the Brexit years of Britain as a country more than usually riven, and more than usually divided over both its understanding of its own past and its present-day meaning, let alone its future direction. It has become a cliché that whereas the 2012 London Olympics seemed to present a country that had some comfort with itself, Brexit slammed into that like a wrecking ball. So whilst the notion of a ‘nation at ease with itself’ is a rather illusory one, it has been tangible since Brexit that Britain is a nation that isn’t at ease with itself.
Some of that is to do with race and ethnicity. Manifestly Britain isn’t the only country where that is so, so it would be lazy to ascribe everything to Brexit. It is also lazy to explain Brexit solely, or even necessarily mainly, in terms of anti-immigration sentiment - but it would be entirely dishonest to deny it having been a significant driver. For all that some Brexiters may have disowned it, they were content to profit from, for example, the UKIP “Breaking Point” poster.
Certainly the promise to end freedom of movement of people was a major factor in the vote to leave, and also a decisive one in the subsequent decision that that meant leaving the single market. And the post-Brexit culture war has been very much conducted on the terrain of ‘cracking down’ on asylum seekers and of controlling immigration (though both of these pre-date Brexit) as well as things like the battles over statues with associations with slavery and colonialism.
But that culture war has other fronts as well. Examples include ongoing skirmishes over ‘cancel culture’ and freedom of speech. In particular, there are remarkably strong connections and overlaps between Brexit and anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown and anti-mask positions. That may be less of a cleavage between leave and remain voters, but is fairly clear at the level of the high-profile Brexiter leaders in politics and the media – Farage being the most obvious example, and the links between the ERG and the ‘Covid Recovery Group’ of Tory MPs being another.
Johnson’s vulnerability
Within all this, Boris Johnson has clearly been an important figure but in a rather peculiar way. Despite fronting the Vote Leave campaign, his commitment to Brexit was never very deep or genuine and, as is well-known, he nearly backed remain. Covid forced him into backing restrictions which, undoubtedly, he would have opposed had he not been Prime Minister, and his antipathy to them explains why he was always late to adopt them and usually gives the impression that he doesn’t fully support them.
Crucially, it is clearly the case that fomenting the culture war has been part of a deliberate strategy developed by senior government advisers (£) who see it as central to holding together Johnson’s electoral coalition. It is this strategy which has now caught him out – especially in refusing to condemn the booing of knee-taking and then, with wearying inevitability, lying about it – in the same way as it has caught out Priti Patel.
It remains to be seen how this now plays out, but Johnson’s particular vulnerability is the naked opportunism of his desire for popularity, which makes charges of hypocrisy easy and, therefore, public conviction on those charges an ever-present possibility, especially now that it brings him into conflict with the likeable, gifted, articulate and extremely popular English football stars. If nothing else, it exposes the difference between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’, something which some Tories are now realizing and which the Labour Party has begun to explore.
2016: the national conversation we didn’t know we were having
Johnson’s fate isn’t, however, the main issue in the football rows. What is more important, I think, is that they show an appetite for a ‘national conversation’ (whatever that might actually mean) about ‘what kind of country’ – or, rather, countries - we are which challenges the apparent victory of the Brexiter narrative of ‘the people’. The latter didn’t happen as the result of such a national conversation but emerged, almost accidentally, as the result of a sort of smash and grab raid because, at the time of the referendum, few people quite understood what was going on (I certainly didn’t).
That was perhaps because the general assumption, on all sides, was that remain would win. So we didn’t really know that we weren’t just deciding whether or not to leave the EU but were engaged in something which was about to shape the entirety of what ‘we’ – the United Kingdom, England – meant, both for ourselves and for how we are seen abroad. (A recent example of the latter is German journalist Annette Dittert’s evisceration of Johnson’s regime.)
So, in a way which wouldn’t have been the case had remain won, literally overnight a radical alteration occurred in the terrain and texture of politics. Very soon it became clear that the Brexit process wasn’t going to be just one of ‘technical’ adjustments but would be a battle for Britain’s ‘political soul’. With that, it emerged, as I wrote a few weeks ago, that Brexit had, in effect, ‘cancelled’ half the population as being of no account and an idea that they are unpatriotic or, even, anti-patriotic. Perhaps now they are finding a voice again. At all events, as I suggested in that post, it’s not sustainable for a country to simply dismiss half its population, and the younger, more educated half at that, as an irrelevance.
Redefining patriotism
That’s not to say that the football rows line up leavers and remainers for, as it were, a cultural penalty shoot-out (for one thing, it won’t have such a decisive outcome). The lines are much less clearly drawn than that. But they do involve an adjacent set of distinctions between mono- and multi-culturalism, exclusivity and inclusivity, insularity and openness, and between simplistic and complex understandings of history, culture and nationhood. Football is a potent terrain for that because these rows are about the national team (of England), and so deny the fault-line as being between patriots and non-patriots, or between those who ‘love the country’ versus ‘those who would talk it down’. Rather, and quite starkly, the fault-line becomes between two competing versions of what the country is, of whose country it is, and of what patriotism means.
During the referendum (and, in fact, for years before) a common expression, or complaint, amongst pro-Brexit people was ‘I just want my country back’. That was often code for hostility to immigration, but it also referenced a wider set of actual or perceived lost stabilities. With Brexit, though it seems hardly to have diminished the complaint (since it is an essentially unsatisfiable desire), they have got their country back. But it was an expression which was predicated on other people losing their country as, with Brexit, many felt they did, and those people are still, for the most part, here. There was, literally, no possibility of reversing time so as to ‘get back’ something which, even if it had ever existed, no longer did so, and couldn’t be voted into being. In fact, to the extent it was a promise of Brexit, it was another of the false promises of Brexit.
Challenging inverted snobbery
As well as breaking through the false division of the patriotic and the unpatriotic, the football rows are significant in breaking the associated attempt of populist inverted snobbery to draw an essential divide between ‘ordinary’ working-class people and the supposedly sneering, university-educated middle-class.
That is an inadequate way of understanding the Brexit vote, as for example research on ‘comfortable leavers’ shows. It is also, ironically, a hugely patronizing and stereotypical view of class and of region, in which the ‘people up north’ are imagined as pigeon-fancying, leave-voting, terrace house dwellers who have never been to university and enjoy nothing more than a pint of wallop, whilst liberal metropolitan remain-voting southerners sit around sipping Sancerre and discussing Derrida with the au pair in their Tuscan holiday homes.
Needless to say, many of the most earnest of these heroic culture warriors are, in fact, well-heeled, London-based graduates but ‘will have you know’ that their grandfather on their mother’s side was a coal miner which, by some mysterious process of genetic and historical osmosis, makes them the voice of the people. It sometimes seems as if their politics is a decades-long reaction to the excitement of hearing Pulp’s Common People played at a JCR disco in 1995.
In any case, it manifestly falls apart when it involves positioning footballers like Marcus Rashford - who actively and effectively campaigned for free school meals drawing on his own childhood experiences of poverty in Manchester, and is an inspirational role model to people of all kinds of backgrounds and ages - as out of touch or engaged in ‘gesture politics’.
The role of masculinity?
There’s perhaps also something to be said about masculinity in all this, although it is hard to pin down. The Brexit vote was evenly split in terms of gender, but there’s an undercurrent of macho bravado about ‘going it alone’ and in the associated culture war attack on ‘remoaners’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘cry babies’, as well as a definite sense amongst some lockdown sceptics of ‘masks being for wimps’.
Even harder to pin down, but discernible I think, is an implicit idea of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ of whatever gender as being effete, and the ‘authentic working class’ of whatever gender as being rugged and earthy. Again, it’s hard to position professional footballers as effete wimps, so the polarizing dyads of the culture war work less effectively here as well.
Within this there is an interesting and subtle twist. Because in some ways these footballers are re-writing traditional machismo, including that associated with football, in the way they emphasise cooperation and solidarity. Apart from the conduct of the team during the tournament, that was evident in the support Rashford gave to another fine British sporting talent, the tennis player Emma Raducanu.
Radacunu, whose Canadian-Chinese-Romanian background itself bespeaks of a multi-cultural Britain, whilst making her a target for social media mutterings that she’s not ‘really’ British, had had to withdraw from Wimbledon suffering what appeared to be an anxiety attack. She should take advice on how to “toughen up”, opined Piers Morgan; “you should be proud of yourself”, said Rashford.
A new conversation?
So in just the same way as the referendum vote became, even if it was unexpected and unplanned that it should be so, an occasion for redefining national identity, there is a kind of pent-up desire for that process, having been started, to continue. For a while, under the bludgeon of ‘the will of the people’ it couldn’t quite happen, but it has kept trying to attach itself to suitable occasions – the ‘Harry and Meghan’ rows are perhaps an example – and football is the latest and most potent of them.
How long this episode lasts, and how significant it is, remains to be seen. But in some form or another I think the process is certain to continue as regards both England and Britain. That is because not only is the notion of a ‘unified culture’ a myth, but so too is that of a static one. Culture, in its anthropological meanings, isn’t a branch of the heritage industry. It is also – as studies of organizational culture show, but the same is perhaps even more true of national culture – remarkably resistant to ‘top-down’ management of the sort being attempted by the present government through, for example, its efforts to exert control universities, heritage organizations, and the BBC.
Writing on his blog this week, David Allen Green points out that “those who start culture wars can also lose them”, whilst Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu in Byline Times suggest that the football rows may represent a point when the tide turns in Johnson et al.’s culture war. It certainly seems to have impaled GBNews on the inherent contradiction between positioning itself as ‘anti-woke’ yet proclaiming to stand for free speech. But I’m not sure that culture wars ever have a decisive outcome, and it’s worth noting that the usual self-styled ‘contrarians’ have been quick to fight back this week.
That said, to the extent that the current one has its proximate roots in the Brexit vote, it’s significant that, along with and closely linked to educational level, the best predictor of how people voted in 2016 was age. In that sense the electoral success of Johnson’s approach may be rather time-limited - something Conservative strategists are well aware of (£). Equally, that means there are opportunities, especially for the Labour Party, to catch the tide if not of history then of its close cousin, demography.
But, to reiterate, this is not just or mainly about political parties, although they affect and are affected by it. It is a wider matter, not created but exacerbated by Brexit, of identity and belonging. Football is only incidental to that, but primarily because it is popular it offers an arena – after years of talk of ‘the will of the people’ and of ‘enemies of the people’ – to ask what manner of people the English and, if indirectly, the British are.
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