From Brexit to Brexitism

This is the ninth anniversary, almost to the day, since I began this blog (that first post, some details aside, still reads quite presciently I think). It began under the title ‘The Brexit Blog’, which was startlingly unoriginal and chosen without much thought, simply to differentiate it from another blog I wrote at the time. I renamed it ‘Brexit & Beyond’ starting from the first post of January 2021, much of which I think also still stands the test of time, to reflect the fact that Britain had left the EU and the transition period had ended.

Resuming for what will be the tenth year, I have renamed it again, this time as ‘Brexit & Brexitism’. The reason was pre-figured in my previous post, before I stopped posting for the summer. There, I argued that the Brexit process had entered a new phase, even if less clearly defined than when the UK left the EU. On this basis, I said I suspected that the focus of this blog would increasingly become not so much Brexit – the UK leaving the EU – as the Brexitism which has developed from it.

Over the summer, that suspicion has crystallised into a certainty and in this very lengthy post I will explain what this means, and its implications for the future direction of the blog. To prevent the post becoming even longer, and also in order to have it available for future reference, I have created a separate page setting out in detail what I mean by ‘Brexitism’. To give a very brief summary, Brexitism denotes an approach to politics that derives from Brexit, but goes beyond the UK simply leaving the EU to the extent that it constitutes a distinctive ideology.

The current politics of Brexit

In terms of UK politics, the parameters of what the present Labour government is going to do, or try to do, as regards UK-EU relations are now abundantly clear. There will be some ongoing ‘reset’ negotiations with the EU to try to achieve some relatively minor, but not entirely negligible, improvements in those relations, without dropping the ‘red lines’ of no single market, no customs union, and no freedom of movement. I’ve outlined the kinds of things which might be in scope in many previous posts, and over this summer, the European Commission produced draft negotiating guidelines for some of the areas where such improvements might be agreed.

That there is scope for improvements is because, without any formal announcement, the Labour government has dropped the previous Tory red line of ‘no role for the ECJ’, and also because it faces fewer internal constraints than its predecessor in seeking the maximum cooperation possible within the framework of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (e.g. possibly joining Erasmus+). But of course any improvements require the agreement of the EU, and there are clear limits to that. For example, it has emerged this summer that, at least for now, the EU will not consider UK participation in the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention.

At the same time, Labour will quietly continue to make alignment with most EU regulations the default position, as is evidenced by the latest UKICE regulatory divergence tracker which was published over the summer. This doesn’t mean there will be no divergence, both active (i.e. choosing to enact different UK or GB regulations) and passive (i.e. omitting, by choice or by oversight, to follow changes in EU regulations), and this summer a report by the Institute for European Environmental Policy UK (IEEP) identified some examples of both in the environmental field. But, as a generality, Labour’s policy is one of “alignment by stealth”.

Alignment will be facilitated in some areas by the passing of the Product Regulation and Metrology Act in July. Such alignment does not, of course, require agreement with the EU but, equally, since ‘alignment does not mean access’, it doesn’t improve the terms of trade either. It simply avoids the additional costs of British businesses having to produce to different standards for EU and UK/GB markets.

A policy of alignment by stealth actually isn’t very different, in practice, from the approach taken by the Tories under Rishi Sunak although, again, Keir Starmer faces less opposition to it from within his own party. The fact is that the Brexiters’ claims about the possibility and desirability of substantial regulatory divergence were either untrue or unworkable. Similarly, closer security and defence relations with the EU had begun under Boris Johnson, spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The subsequent re-election of Trump, and his impact on NATO and global and European security, means that this will continue to be the direction of travel.

So, whilst for opposing reasons both Brexiters and anti-Brexiters may be unhappy about it, there is really no sign at all of Labour’s approach changing before the next election. It’s conceivable, depending on the outcome of that election, that they might be forced to form a coalition with other parties which could push them towards dropping their red lines, but, if so, that is years away.

The realignment of the political right

Meanwhile, the political right, meaning the poll-leading Reform Party and the crisis-ridden Tory Party, is in a frenzied flux of realignment. But, barring the highly unlikely resurgence of what we might call liberal, centrist or sensible Conservatism, it seems that Brexitism, whilst certainly not confined to the political right, has already become the right’s defining ideology.

This means that if the right wins the next election – whether as Reform, Conservative, or as Reform-Conservative coalition or alliance – UK-EU relations would go in a radically different direction. Certainly even the limited rapprochement of the Labour reset would be abandoned, and very probably there would be an attempt, impractical and disastrous as it would be, at substantial divergence from EU regulations. Those who hold anti-Brexit views and who also say that Labour is ‘no different’ to Brexiters, or has itself fully embraced Brexitism, should reflect on that.

But the Brexitism of the political right also matters now, in several ways. It continues, partly because of its dominance of the media, to make Labour extremely cautious and defensive, even about its limited reset ambitions, to the extent of barely mentioning them or its ‘alignment’ policy. Crucially, it means that the EU will be cautious about making agreements with the UK, since these might be rescinded after the next election. It certainly means there is no realistic possibility of a fresh referendum, on whether to join the EU.

It’s vital to understand that Brexitism is flourishing quite independently of the fact that a clear majority of the public think it was wrong to leave the EU. Indeed, this is one of the key reasons why understanding the politics of Brexit now means understanding how what was once about the process and effects of leaving the EU has now morphed into something related to that, but different: Brexitism. Charting and explaining that will be the central focus of this re-titled blog.

Beyond the Brexit battles

One consequence of this partial shift of focus is that I will give less attention to discussing whether this or that development is a ‘benefit of Brexit’ or not. In economic terms, there is really no room for any serious doubt that Brexit has been, and will continue to be, highly damaging. A report this summer by the economist John Springford, for the Constitution Society and Federal Trust, reviewed the evidence for this, and it is compelling for anyone who isn’t wedded, for doctrinaire reasons, to denying it. The geo-political costs can’t be quantified in the same way, or the evidence assembled in the same way, but there’s really no credible political analyst who denies that they have been considerable.

It’s true that as time goes on it becomes more difficult to disentangle the effects of Brexit from other factors (and even regulatory divergences may only be temporary), but this makes poring over the details of individual developments all the more pointless. That is especially well-illustrated by the utterly fatuous debate over the summer about whether Brexit has been advantageous to the UK in terms of avoiding some of Trump’s Tariffs.

The reality is that it’s an unanswerable question. The ‘deals’ Trump is striking are highly complex, though often very vague in their terms, and their effects are almost impossible to compare. The ‘headline’ tariffs that each country faces don’t tell the full story of the impact on particular sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, or particular supply chains. And, even if the headline rates suggest the UK has got a ‘better deal’ than the EU (which is debatable), to the extent that Trump’s tariffs adversely affect the EU (and the UK’s other trading partners) that is not good news for UK exports. In any case, different EU members are differently affected by the US-EU deal whilst in non-EU Switzerland, very badly hit by the new tariffs, there is fresh debate about how this shows the disadvantages of not being a member.

Beyond all that, Trump keeps changing his mind about the rates, or the dates they will be enforced, and rips up deals he has supposedly made with impunity. He is also constantly using tariffs in order to exert political leverage (e.g. Brazil), and his whims about those non-economic purposes are as febrile as his ostensibly economic goals. Meanwhile, the US Court of Appeals has ruled many of the Trump Tariffs illegal (the final outcome of this remains to be seen). For all of the reasons these ‘deals’ are hardly worthy of the name. All that can really be said is that Trump has dropped a dirty bomb into the world trading system, and trying to extract an argument for (or against) Brexit from the mess and chaos he has created is totally absurd.

The new battleground of Brexitism

Yet if Brexiters have taken Trump’s unhinged and increasingly sinister conduct as some sort of vindication of Brexit, it seems that they are considerably less enthusiastic about the state of post-Brexit Britain. Having droned on for years about the nirvana of leaving the ‘totalitarian’ EU, they have decided that, having become ‘self-governing’, Britain is on the point of civil war or, rather inconsistently, though equally ludicrously, that it is the new North Korea.

This is one illustration of how Brexit has morphed into Brexitism. Where once leave campaigners confected fears about the EU being at “breaking point” as a justification for Brexit, the central theme of this summer, as regards domestic politics, has been a vicious demonization of asylum seekers, with a particularly vile attempt to portray them as sexual predators, accompanied by a constant drumbeat of bogus statistics and false anecdotes.

What used to be ‘the silly season’ this year became the seditious season, though both were combined in the sick joke of Lucy Connelly’s claim that she had been “Keir Starmer’s political prisoner” which was widely, and generally uncritically, reported. That case was invoked in an even plainer example of sedition when Nigel Farage travelled to Washington to publicly denounce his own country for its supposed authoritarianism, including a thinly-veiled call (Section VI: 1) for the US to punish the UK diplomatically and economically.

The recurring cliché within this attempt to depict Britain as being in the grip of a social and political crisis has been that the country is a “tinderbox” about to explode with anger. In a tsunami of opinion pieces, Brexitist politicians and commentators, usually under the threadbare disguise of issuing ‘warnings’, and sometimes adopting a fake-feminism of concern about women’s rights, have in effect sought to whip up violent protests outside the hotels where many asylum seekers are temporarily housed.

Thus, throughout the summer there were hyperbolic reports of ‘waves’ of ‘mass’ protests, ‘erupting’ across the country, which repeatedly turned out to be false, not just in terms of scale (which in fact ranged from tiny to small, though no doubt terrifying for their targets) but in terms of the suggestion that these were spontaneous uprisings of ‘ordinary decent families’. In fact they were organized, and often attended, by known far-right activist groups, and data from last year’s riots shows that many of those involved had previous convictions for domestic abuse.

This wasn’t simply media catastrophism. The glee with which catastrophe was envisaged betrayed the desire of these ‘patriots’ to see our country collapse into violent disorder. But it can’t just be dismissed as hyperbolic rhetoric. The effect, and in some cases no doubt the intention, is potentially self-fulfilling since, if people are told of widespread anger, then it is quite reasonable for them to conclude that there is something to be angry about. Hence there is some evidence, admittedly from the summer of 2024, of a huge gap between the 32% of the public who think immigration is the most important issue facing Britain and the 4% who think it is the most important issue facing them personally.

I don’t have more recent figures for the ‘personal’ question, which doesn’t seem to be consistently polled, but the YouGov tracker of the public view of the most pressing issues facing the country shows that 'immigration and asylum' (it's unhelpful, and problematic in itself, that pollsters and politicians conflate these) rose from 43% in March 2025 to 56% in September 2025. It is very hard not to conclude that this is solely because of the media reporting of, especially, asylum-seeking during that period rather than any genuine increase in its salience for individual experience. In short, public anger and concern have been procured by politicians and commentators.

In any case, if some protestors are, indeed, genuinely angry then, as Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian, few seem willing “to ask whether the rage is justified” or how it is likely inform a better or more practical approach to the asylum system. That unwillingness is understandable since, as with Brexit, to deny the gut feeling of ‘ordinary people’ (invariably meaning the protestors, not the often larger numbers of counter-demonstrators, or those in groups giving support to asylum seekers) is deemed ‘elitist’ by Brexitists.

So too is an insistence on rationality and evidence. Yet the existence of some 32,000 asylum seekers in just over 200 hotels, dispersed around the country, is, if not a non-issue (not least because of the reasons why it has arisen), surely not something objectively to warrant pole position in public concern and the domestic news agenda. Bluntly, Britain has many, far greater, problems. Moreover, within the global context of the 8.4 million people seeking asylum in 2024, the UK is barely touched. That context certainly makes it absurd to represent the approximately 110,000 who sought asylum here in that year as constituting an ‘invasion’, as does the fact that, adjusted for population, in 2024 the UK had less asylum applicants than sixteen other European countries. The ‘crisis’ is a manufactured one which, to coin a phrase, we might call 'Project Fear'.

The complicity of the media and the government

However, whatever the facts, the Brexitist framing of asylum-seeking, which has spilled over to dominate the framing of immigration, has become an accomplished political reality. It is not, now, confined to Reform, let alone to hard-right street politics. Many Tories, most enthusiastically their would-be leader Robert Jenrick, have also embraced it, using language and rhetoric identical to that of the hard right in a way that not long ago would have been unthinkable from a mainstream politician. Perhaps the real yardstick of how things have shifted is not so much that this rather grubby little mediocrity says such things as that he is able to extract an apology from the BBC for broadcasting a theologian saying, in an opinion slot, that they are “xenophobic”.

That apology was only part of the wider way in which the Brexitists have successfully framed discussion of this issue. The endless wave of hyperbolic comment and ‘reporting’ has not been confined to the tabloids or the Telegraph (which has long been in thrall to ‘the end is nigh’ teeth-gnashing) but has also captured the previously more sober Times. More importantly, it has been aided and abetted by the BBC (which, as British Future Director Sunder Katwala has assiduously chronicled over the summer, has persistently hyped-up the scale of the protests), as well as other broadcasters such as Sky which has taken to tagging its reports on this topic with a large banner saying ‘Migration Crisis’. Meanwhile, apparently beyond any meaningful control from Ofcom, GB News continues to pump out Brexitist propaganda to the faithful.

Most significantly of all, having been fairly robust in challenging the Brexitist narrative during the 2024 post-Southport violence (and garnering a fair degree of public approval for this), Labour politicians now seem to have become too cowardly to do so, or perhaps have simply accepted that narrative. This isn’t the first time a Labour government has gone in this direction, by any means, but Brexit has made a difference, and this is also part of how Brexit has morphed into Brexitism, as it persuaded many in the Labour movement that the populists really do speak for ‘ordinary people’, including many in the traditional Labour electoral base.

Even leaving aside the morality of this, it is just dumb politics as it alienates so many more previous or potential Labour voters than it is every going to attract (see, for example, recent polling on views about the location of asylum seekers). Labour is losing its 2024 voters primarily to the left, or to indecision, rather than to Reform, and they aren’t picking up 2024 Reform voters.

The only conceivable defence of the government’s approach is that if it does not ‘acknowledge the grievance’, then Reform will exploit it. But it is a hopeless defence, on the one hand accepting as legitimate what is actually a massive exaggeration and distortion and, on the other hand, imagining that the threat of Reform can be neutralized in this way. The reality is that, whatever the Labour government does, Reform will say it is not enough. The government’s response isn’t a way of stopping Reform exploiting the asylum issue, it is one of the ways in which Reform is succeeding in doing so.

Post-Brexit politics

More fundamentally, what has been vividly illustrated this summer is the clash between what we (perhaps) used to think of as ‘normal’ politics and the anti-institutionalism and anti-politics of Brexitism. That included a revival of the kind of ‘enemies of the people’ attacks on judges we saw in relation to Brexit, this time when judges in the ‘Epping asylum hotel case’ were vilified, and their judgement presented as ‘taking the side of migrants over Britons’.

A particular feature of Brexitist anti-politics, because of its central focus on grievance, is that it gives credence to imaginary simple solutions, dismissed as impractical only by despised ‘experts’. Such solutions are especially effective when propounded by those who do not have responsibility for governing, as they are deemed free of the taint of ‘the Establishment’. Hence the wave of hyperbole about ‘the migration crisis’ was followed by Farage unveiling his radical supposed solution of “mass deportation”.

It doesn’t matter that he almost immediately backtracked on the idea that this mass deportation would include women and children, prompting Kemi Badenoch to insist (£) that a Tory government would ensure that it did. For, effortlessly, the terrain of debate was shifted from something which in the very recent past would have been seen as unthinkable (only last year Farage himself dismissed it as a “political impossibility”) on to the details of just how draconian the mass deportation ‘solution’ would be. It isn’t even necessary for the solution to be persuasive: if the mainstream parties are perceived to have failed, there is an insidious appeal in the idea of ‘giving a chance’ to the ‘insurgents’ or just that it’s ‘time for a change’. To that extent, to adapt a phrase from the New Labour era, ‘what works doesn’t matter’.

However it does not follow that ‘normal’ politics has ceased to matter. Although insufficient in itself, one of the ways of countering the Brexitism of Reform, especially, is to point to its utter incompetence. That certainly includes the ongoing failure of the flagship policy of Brexit, and people like Farage ought constantly to be reminded that their foundational belief yielded none of what they claimed for it. There may indeed be many voters who are minded to ‘roll the dice’ again, as they did with Brexit, but there are surely others, including those who voted for Brexit, who would be receptive to a clear message reminding them what happened last time they placed their faith in Farage.

This also entails pointing out Reform’s failure (£), now that they control several local councils, to govern in an even vaguely competent manner. Already Farage has started whining that these councils are facing “obstructionism”, laying the ground for the usual evasion of any responsibility, exactly as he did with Brexit. In particular, the public need to be constantly reminded that this is what is in store for the country as a whole if Reform ever come to form, or be part of, a national government with few meaningful constitutional restraints upon it.

In this respect, the government’s approach to the asylum issue is not wholly wrong. It is right (including for asylum seekers themselves, let’s not forget) to improve and speed up the process for assessing and deciding on asylum applications. It is also right to seek, or to improve, international agreements for managing the asylum process within Europe and beyond. The mistake is that, even if the government succeeds in delivering these things, it will not receive the credit whilst it leaves intact, and even endorses, the Brexitist framing of why they are being done. 

It’s simply not enough to say, in effect, that the government accepts all that Reform say about the ‘crisis’ but will be more competent in ‘solving’ it (a point developed at length by the Conservative commentator John Oxley). Nor is it enough to dismiss the Brexitists as trading on emotion, and to counterpose that with ‘delivery’: effective politics needs to speak in both registers. In other words, whilst competence does still matter, it doesn’t exist independently of a wider framing of why it matters, not just in order to ‘communicate more effectively’ but to enthuse and inspire.

What is at stake?

I will write much more about the latter point in future posts because it looks set to be the terrain of politics for the next few years. I don’t mean that it will all be about asylum and immigration, though no doubt that issue will continue to feature prominently, along with many others. I mean something deeper, about the content and conduct of the politics of post-Brexit Britain, pre-dating Brexit in some ways, but very significantly inflected and inflamed by Brexit.

At stake is whether Brexit Britain is also to be Brexitist Britain. The outcome is neither predictable nor inevitable, and one consequence of it will be whether or not it becomes feasible for the UK to apply to join the EU, although that will be very far from being the only, or even the most important, consequence. We have only to look at what is happening in Trump’s US to see what some of those consequences might be.

Nine years since the vote to leave the EU, and all that has followed from it, Brexit and Brexitism are now completely intertwined, explaining the new title of this blog and the slightly different focus the posts are likely to have as it enters its tenth year. What will not change is the attempt to analyse what is happening with the use of reliable evidence, logical argument, and, I hope, a degree of interpretive insight.

Welcome to 2025

In one way, it has been a quiet period for Brexit news since my previous, pre-Christmas, post. That is hardly surprising, given the season. But it is only true if Brexit is understood in its narrow and literal sense. Understood in the wider sense of the unfolding of populist politics, 2025 has started with a noisy tumult, of a volume and variety which make it hard to analyze. For personal reasons (my mother died this week), this is a much shorter post than usual, but there is already no doubt that this is going to be an eventful Brexit year.

Brexit costs, again

Starting with the narrower and more literal issues, there has been another outbreak of claim and counter-claim about the costs of Brexit, largely sparked by a report in The Independent trying to summarize these costs. It referred to many of the studies and estimates which I’ve discussed previously on the blog, and provoked the usual criticisms of those estimates from the usual Brexiters (£).

Some of those criticisms have a spark of validity. In particular, as I’ve pointed out before, it is correct to say it is misleading to describe the ‘divorce bill’ as a cost of Brexit because they are payments for liabilities the UK had incurred as an EU member so, in that sense, would have been paid one way or another regardless of Brexit. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many Brexiters insisted, amongst them Nigel Farage, that there would be no ‘divorce settlement’ to pay or, even, that the EU would owe money to the UK. Even when installed as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson said the EU could “go whistle” for a financial settlement.

The only research mentioned by The Independent which I haven’t previously covered, because it came after I’d written my previous post, was a recent study by the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. As was widely reported, this estimated that in the in the first two years since the transition period ended the UK had “only” lost £27 billion in trade, and that although this had been a “disaster” for small businesses, this is less, so far, than would have been expected from the long-term (15 year) OBR prediction. This caused much back-slapping in Brexiter circles (where the usual objections of it being too early to tell, impossible to estimate, and academics all being remainer stooges were suddenly forgotten). Yet it is hard to see why they should be so gleeful, since Brexit was sold on the basis that it was going to be of positive benefit.

So this, coming up to five years since the day we formally left the EU, is the level to which the grand promises of Brexit have brought us: arguing over just how bad the damage has been. Not a single leading advocate for Brexit has ever apologized for the promises they made. At best, they shrug them off as having been thwarted by remainers and the EU.

How we got here, again

That, too, isn’t a news item, but I am in the process of reading Tim Shipman’s Out, a massive tome which provides a lot of crunchy detail about the politics of the Brexit process, and it serves as reminder of what actually happened in those years. Admittedly, it is only a reminder of a certain sort, not because it is biased in any crass way but because it takes as its frame of reference the idea that this was a negotiation in which the outcomes were about the political power-plays between Johnson’s government, the domestic ‘Bresistance’, and the EU.

In those terms, it is highly informative. But what is missing (unless it comes further on than I have yet read) is an understanding of the real legal parameters in play. In particular, on the key issue of the Northern Ireland border, it proceeds as if a borderless hard Brexit was, in principle, a possibility, and what was at stake was simply whether or not it could be negotiated. In this sense, intentionally or not, it accepts the essentially unrealistic position of the Johnson-Frost-Cummings period of Brexit.

Good evidence that my assessment is an accurate one comes from the laudatory review of Shipman’s book by David Frost himself. Hailing it as the “definitive” account “at least until [his] own book is written” (an implausible boast, but one displaying all his habitual delusion and arrogance), he praises it as “objective and fair” which, from so partisan a figure, suggests the opposite might be the case. More specifically, Frost sees the book as vindicating all his well-rehearsed criticisms of the ‘remainer parliament’ (£), the Supreme Court and, especially the Benn Act. No doubt he would always have been liable to read it in this way, but the fact that he is able to find Shipman’s book susceptible to such a reading (whilst criticising other accounts as biased) is an indication of its fundamentally uncritical framing.

Even so, precisely because of that, Shipman’s book is valuable, partly because it confirms just how ignorant those enacting Brexit were about its realities, and partly because it confirms just how monocular their focus was on ‘getting Brexit done’, regardless of how it was done. This, in itself, gives the lie to the idea that Brexit was undertaken in a form that was foisted on them: Johnson and Frost chose it. That, in turn, also gives credence to Starmer’s claim that, even within the red lines of hard Brexit’ a somewhat different arrangement could be possible. 2025 will be the year when he needs to make good on that claim, if he is ever going to, but that is likely to mean a year of slow grind rather than great fireworks.

Donald Trump, again

The opposite applies to Brexit in its wider sense. This year is going to be an important one for transatlantic populism, and though the connections with Brexit are indirect, they are real. At the most general level, there has always been a connection, acknowledged on both sides, between Trump and Brexit. But there are two more specific connections.

One is to do with how the UK navigates its relationship with the US, and whilst Trump’s second presidency would always pose issues for that, it does so with particular force now that Britain has cut itself off from the EU. Just how poisonous that relationship may become has already been suggested by the berserk ferocity of Elon Musk’s attacks on the UK, and the Starmer government specifically (£), and the frenzy it has engendered in domestic politics. No doubt there is much more to come and, given Musk’s attacks on other European countries, the sense that the UK’s shared interests lie with the EU will be all the more obvious.

The other is the extent to which Trump’s return will be associated with the continued insurgence of Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. But this has the opposite implication for UK-EU relations, because the more it seems obvious that Farage’s populism is a strong and permanent feature of UK domestic politics, the less likely it is that the EU will regard the UK as a stable and trustworthy partner for any kind of new agreements, even those as limited in scope as Labour’s ‘reset’. Just this week, Brexiter fury about the appointment of Sir Olly Robbins as Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office was a reminder of the hold of Brexitism in the UK.

Stay cool, again

I haven’t had time this week to give much attention to these developments, which is regrettable given how extraordinary Musk’s accusations have been, and the vile manner in which they have been endorsed by some British politicians. But, in another way, it is not regrettable at all.

I pointed out in a recent post how narcissistic politicians like Trump exert power partly by generating a frenzy of comment around their each and every utterance. That’s also true of Farage. It is probably even more true of Musk, not least because he isn’t, in the normal sense of the word, a politician. It is no coincidence that his latest stuff tries to mobilize the natural revulsion most of us feel about the disgusting crimes of grooming gangs. Nor is it any coincidence that it does so in ways calculated to mobilize counter-revulsion at its opportunism and dishonesty. These people want us – need us – to be excitable, angry, confused, befuddled, and upset. They want us to be freaked out by their freakishness.

So our best response, and, actually, our best resistance, is cool, calm, considered analysis. Not only do they hate it, but it’s also the best way of keeping sane in the face of the mad psychodramas they try to create.

I have a strong feeling that this year, more than most, it is going to be important to remember that.

Playing the new political game

The first cricket test match I ever attended was England versus West Indies at the Oval in the baking hot summer of 1976. It was the final test of a series in which a truly magnificent West Indies side crushed England, to an even greater extent than the 3-0 scoreline suggests. It was also politically significant in terms of British race relations, having begun with the infamous pledge by England’s South African-born captain, Tony Greig, that his side would make the West Indies “grovel”. At the same time, the West Indies had enthusiastic support from Britons of West Indian descent, perhaps especially at the Oval, bringing steel drums and trumpets, much to the dismay of some English traditionalists. The racial and post-colonial politics of the series have been extensively discussed and are well-captured in the 2010 film Fire in Babylon.

I’m not sure to what extent I was aware of any of that at the time – I was only 11 – but what was apparent throughout the series, simply from a cricketing point of view, was that it wasn’t just that the West Indies were playing much better than England, but that they were playing an almost different, more modern, and certainly more thrilling game. That was most graphically visible at the Old Trafford test, when veteran English batsman Brian Close, who was 45 and had not played test cricket for nine years before being recalled that summer, was almost literally pulverized by the sublime fast bowling of Michael Holding.

Just as some English traditionalists abhorred the exuberance of the West Indies’ supporters, so too did they complain that such aggressive fast bowling ‘just wasn’t cricket’. But they were wrong. It was what cricket was becoming*. Inescapably, those complaints had more than a tinge of post-colonial angst and of racist outrage. Cricket, invented in England and exported to the colonies, was no longer that of the Bufton-Tuftons of the MCC and Lord’s, or, for that matter, of the working-class league cricket of northern England, where players like Close had their roots. And descendants of those who had once been slaves were the architects as well as the masters of this new cricket. At that Oval test I attended, Greig acknowledged that by going on all fours and ‘grovelling’ to the crowd.

Reactionary resentment

Well, I’ve been told before that cricketing analogies don’t have any resonance for many readers of this blog, so I’ll get to the point. I was reminded of all this by the publication this week of the Reform UK manifesto. I’ve already reviewed the specifically Brexit-related elements of this in a separate post which covers all the party manifestos, but it has a more general significance.

Part of that significance relates directly to the laments of the cricket traditionalists of my childhood. There is a lineal connection between the kind of ‘I want my country back’ nostalgia of the Reform party and that sense of not just English cricket, but England itself was being supplanted. There’s also a discernible connection between the post-colonial complaints of those traditionalists and the manifesto’s policy proposal that that “any teaching about a period or example of British or European imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-European occurrence of the same to ensure balance”.

Long before anyone talked much, at least in relation to British politics, about populism, it was being incubated in a reactionary resentment, a kind of sullen victimhood. Even in those days, now fifty years ago, I heard that phrase, ‘it’s not my country any more’ and, which is perhaps less heard now, the half-baffled, half-aggrieved one that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’. That strand of cultural politics never went away, but became subsumed within the coalition of voters and ideologies which Thatcherism assembled. It was a coalition which gradually unwound, and UKIP was one expression of that. But what we are now witnessing is the dramatic, and possibly permanent, fracturing of the traditionalist and populist right.

So there is a literal connection between my cricket story, as a vignette within this strand of politics, and this week’s Reform manifesto. But there is also a metaphorical one, which works in the opposite direction. The literal connection posits populist politics as linked to reactionary horror at the new cricket of the 1970s. But the metaphorical connection posits populism as a new kind of way of doing politics which is making established norms of political arguing and campaigning seem outmoded and redundant, just as the 1976 West Indies’ team made England’s cricketers seem obsolete, almost to the extent of playing a different game altogether.

The anti-politics of Brexitism

The Reform manifesto is a good example, starting with its insistence that it is not a manifesto but a ‘contract’ with voters. For that very insistence is nonsense in suggesting that it entails some sort of binding commitment, given that what it proposes is undeliverable. That this is so as regards its costings was quickly pointed out by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), but it is equally true as regards many of its core pledges. For example, picking up migrants in the Channel and returning them to France is, in practical terms, impossible, as is the commitment to ending NHS waiting lists. It is certainly true of the core pledge to cut immigration to the bone. And the Brexit pledges, which I discussed separately, may not be literally impossible, but would come at an economic and political cost which is not mentioned, and no doubt would be denied. If this manifesto were put into practice, it would make the Truss regime look like a model of competence and stability.

However, crucially, and this is the sense in which the populists are playing a different game to ‘normal’ politics, simply demonstrating that the manifesto is nonsense, and the ‘contract’ is fraudulent, cuts little or no ice. For, as Farage’s response to being told just that shows, they themselves are happy to admit that it isn’t actually being put forward as a programme for government, as they have no expectation of winning the election.

So what is presented as a contract, because ‘manifestos’ are the supposedly discredited vehicle for politicians to make promises that they break when elected, consists of promises which are pre-broken by the anticipation of not being elected. This is politics as anti-politics. As for things like the IFS calculations, they can simply be dismissed as the usual Establishment nay-saying, from forecasters who ‘always get things wrong’. Yet even that is not the whole story, since the manifesto is shameless in referring to the FT, two former Governors of the Bank of England and, indeed, the IFS as having endorsed parts of its economic programme.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it is a version of what happened with the referendum, where the Vote Leave campaigners made impossible, and often contradictory, pledges. They, too, rubbished experts who painstakingly explained the impossibilities and contradictions simply for being experts (whilst happily relying on the authority of those experts who supported them, many of whom are the same people who are behind the Reform manifesto). They, too, gained strength from their lies being debunked, since the very debunking helped the lies to circulate more widely (the £350 million a week for the NHS being the prime example). They, too, when asked to produce a workable plan for Brexit, insisted that they were not going to form a government, so it was not for them, as campaigners, to do so, and one reason they were able to get away with that was the expectation on both sides that they would not win anyway. In this sense, there’s a continuity between pro-Brexit populist politics and post-Brexit populist politics, making Brexitism a useful term to connect the two.

The last chance for Tory traditionalists?

Of course, it’s true that Reform is not going to win this election. So we might just say that none of this really matters. But it isn’t as straightforward as that. This is not Screaming Lord Sutch and the Monster Raving Loony Party, standing for laughs, even if its proposals might as well come from them. As with UKIP before, Farage and Reform are deadly serious and they now know, because of what happened with UKIP before, that it is perfectly possible to have a big political impact without winning much, if any, formal political power. This time Farage says, and there’s no reason to doubt him, that his aim is to take over the Tory Party and to become Prime Minister in 2029 (£).

In response, Rishi Sunak might be expected to counter-attack. At the moment, his only message to Reform voters is that they will be responsible for increasing the size of the expected Labour majority. He could, instead, denounce Reform’s policies as unworkable and damaging, just as he does other political opponents, especially Labour, if only on grounds of fiscal orthodoxy. That, after all, was his pitch when opposing Truss in the Tory leadership election, and when he took over from her having been proved right about the consequences of her policies. But he is unlikely to challenge Farage in that way and everyone knows why: many of his MPs and most of his party members are themselves broadly supportive of Reform’s agenda.

There was a very interesting interview this week on Nick Cohen’s The Lowdown podcast with the journalist Rafael Behr in which he makes the point, amongst many others, that Sunak almost inexplicably flunked standing up to the populists in his party after he had easily defeated their attempts to derail the Windsor Framework and defied their desire to scrap the entirety of Retained EU Law (both of which, by the way, are now Reform policies). I, myself, had speculated at the time of the Windsor Framework that it marked a new chapter.

In fact, Sunak proceeded to pander to the populists, especially with the Rwanda policy. Or, perhaps, he was not pandering to them so much as showing his own beliefs. Either way, he could not satisfy them, and, as has been the story under all the recent Tory leaders, they simply demanded more. Now, there is another moment, perhaps the very final one, for a Tory leader to challenge the populist right, if only as the last act of his political career, but he is unlikely to make use of it.

The responsibility of voters

In any case, it’s probably too late. The genie of anti-politics will not easily be re-bottled. It thrives on attention and rebuttal (making even this blog a very small part of the problem), yet it also thrives when ignored or left unchallenged. So, what to do? No one has a satisfactory answer to that, but it surely has to be based upon facing down, rather than pandering to, populists, if only because pandering to them is self-defeating. Theresa May’s main argument, in itself a principled one, for delivering Brexit was that, were it to be abandoned, voters’ faith in democracy would be damaged. Yet, as was always inevitable, delivering Brexit did not satisfy its supporters and that also damaged their faith in democracy. And so those voters are now, once again, being mobilized by Farage.

Politicians obviously have a particular role in challenging Farage but, at the same time, I think it is insufficiently said, perhaps because it has become almost taboo to mention, that these voters themselves must take ultimate responsibility. They believed the impossible promises made for Brexit and yet, finding those promises not to have been delivered, are willing to accept still more impossible promises from the same people who made the previous ones. They revel in their worldly ability to see through the charlatanism of politicians who are ‘all the same’ and ‘just in it for themselves’, yet are entirely gullible in accepting obvious charlatans like Farage and Johnson as being ‘different’ and ignoring their obvious self-interest.

The numbers of voters involved aren’t small. On the basis of the latest opinion polls, Reform have 16% support and the Conservatives have 21%. Supposing that only a third of those Conservative voters have effectively the same views as Reform voters (and I think it is probably higher), that suggests a bedrock support for Farageist populism of 23%, or almost a quarter of voters. They will all have received years of free education, a lifetime of free health care, have or expect to have livable pensions, and have lived their entire lives without war or mass unemployment.

They are, in short, the beneficiaries of the post-war social democratic settlement and what still endures of it. That’s not to deny they may have all sorts of hardships and legitimate grievances, but by global and historical standards these are not the downtrodden and oppressed of the earth. I simply don’t buy the idea that many, if any, of these voters are so downtrodden and desperate that they can’t be blamed for latching on to any glimmer of hope, and are simply exploited by unscrupulous populists like Farage. It's an idea which is really just a misguided attempt at liberal understanding, or perhaps an expression of liberal guilt, and it plays straight into the hands of populists.

For to the extent that there is a near-taboo on saying such things it is, actually, just one of the many duplicities of such populists, who seize on it as ‘sneering elitism’. In fact, what could be more patronizing than to deny that voters are responsible for their choices? It’s true that criticizing such voters will do nothing to change their minds, and even, to the extent they hear the criticisms, it will probably cement their opinions, but it is still worth saying. Anyway, it’s not as if not criticizing them will make a difference either. And what certainly won’t make a difference is offering them undeliverable policies on the basis that to do otherwise would be disrespectful of their desire for such policies. On the contrary, as Brexit has shown, that just sets up a new cycle of resentment.

The coming political battle

There is a temptation to think that with a probably large, and possibly huge, Labour majority in prospect, it will be years before Conservatives or Reform matter again. I think that it would be a serious mistake to yield to that temptation. For one thing, Labour’s ability to win has to some considerable extent been achieved by Starmer ceding ground, in both tone and substance, to the populists, just as New Labour only won by ceding so much ground to the neo-liberals.

There’s an element of necessity to that in electoral systems where you can only win from the centre, given that the location of the centre changes over time. In one sense of politics, the centre is a reality that must be accommodated, and catered for, especially at elections. Starmer understands this, and It was Corbyn’s inability to do so which doomed him to oblivion. In another sense, which Corbyn understood and Starmer seems not to, the location of the centre is always a matter of political contestation, and that contest is continuous and not the same as, although it intersects with, electoral politics.

In that second sense, the battle with populism, as regards both its policy prescriptions and its anti-politics mode of conduct, will continue after the election. In fact, it will become especially important then because when, as will almost inevitably happen, and probably quite quickly, disillusion with the new government sets in, that will be a new moment of opportunity for the populists to say that the ‘mainstream’ political parties are ‘all the same’ and none of them will ever succeed. As they do so, there’s every possibility that Starmer’s government will try, just as Tory centrists did before, to accommodate and appease them, again pandering to rather than challenging their demands and, again, finding them implacable.

So, at best, the election will be a moment to briefly pause and take some pleasure in the end of what have been some long and truly ghastly years for anyone who is both politically sentient and committed to honesty, rationality or even just basic competence in politics. But it will only be a pause. Brexit won’t have gone away, and nor will the politics that brought it. On the contrary, unless there is a highly unlikely fightback from its more traditionalist wing, there must be every chance that the Tory Party will fully embrace a Farageist National Conservatism, whether led by him or not. The Reform manifesto looks like, and is, a ridiculous joke but, as Farage gloated in the European Parliament after the referendum: “when I came here 17 years ago and said I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me. Well, you’re not laughing now”.

It’s true that winning an election on anything like such a manifesto will be difficult. If my back-of-the envelope calculation of there being perhaps 25% bedrock support for it is correct, that leaves a fair way to climb to form a government, even under first-past-the post. But a ‘NatCon’ party espousing something like that manifesto would have a lot of influential and rich backing and a lot of media support, and, as I observed last week, unless Labour prove to be really effective in government, its large majority could easily crumble in a low-turnout election in 2029. In any case, even without winning that election, if a party on such a manifesto came even within contention it would have at least one very important consequence: it would kill, stone-dead, any prospect of the re-joining the EU for years, if only because it would make it too risky for the EU to accept Britain as a member.

Metaphors to live by

In that post last week, I finished with the image of us all being lab rats within the post-Brexit laboratory of political science, but in some ways that is misleading. I was mainly thinking of the fact that only quite a small number of people will directly influence the internal politics of the Tory Party. But as a metaphor in a more general sense, it fails to recognize the agency which we all have, to at least some degree.

One of my favourite cartoons concerns the famous Pavlovian experiment in which, after repeatedly ringing a bell at the same time as feeding them meat, dogs were conditioned to salivate merely at the sound of a bell. That is to say, they had no agency and their behaviour was a conditioned reflex. In the cartoon, there are two dogs salivating and a scientist in a white coat holding a bell. One dog says to the other: have you noticed how every time we dribble, that guy Pavlov rings a bell? It’s a nice subversion of assumptions about where agency lies.

Or, to put it another way, going back to cricket. I’m not the avid follower of the game I was as a child and a young man, and in fact the last test match I went to was in 2000. It was the last day of what again was the last test of a series between England and the West Indies, again played at the Oval. Since 1976, much had changed in cricket, including the way that English cricket was organized and the England team played it. Much, too, had changed in society.

The 2000 match was watched by a packed, multi-racial, crowd, with both sides having enthusiastic support, and I don’t think there were any of the racist or colonialist undercurrents there had been in 1976. There was certainly nothing resembling the ‘grovel’ comment. England won that game, and narrowly won the series, but the teams were well-matched. More to the point, they were both playing recognizably the same game. Things change.

But there is no inevitability in how they change. That’s down to agency; to the decisions which, collectively, we make, not just at elections but every day.

 

*One might argue that it was not new anyway, and English complaints about the West Indies’ fast bowling were hypocritical. It was England, after all, who had deployed ‘Bodyline bowling’ in the 1930s. But I think a new cricket was emerging in the 1970s, part of which was to do with faster bowling becoming routine, hence it was shortly afterwards that helmets began to be worn and became the norm. And cricket was changing in other ways, too, away from the still rather amateurish ethos that had prevailed (e.g. as regards fitness or squad-building) as well as in its financial and commercial structure, and in game formats, playing styles etc.

Brexit has embedded dishonesty in British politics

There has been relatively little Brexit news over the last week or so, and perhaps the most significant was Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s high-profile Mansion House speech, in which he said “it is now obvious that Brexit isn’t working”. Drawing on research undertaken by Cambridge Econometrics, Khan stated that the UK economy as a whole is £140 billion, or 6%, smaller than it would have been without Brexit, of which £30 billion was foregone growth in London. According to the same research, by 2035, the value of goods and services produced in London will be 7.5% lower than it would have been without Brexit, and 10.1% lower for the UK as a whole, whilst investment for the UK will be a staggering 32.4% lower than it would have been.

The speech was significant for two reasons. The first is political. Khan just about stayed within the parameters of current Labour policy by calling for a “closer relationship” with the EU, but in suggesting the need for a “more honest and mature discussion” about the negative impact, and about the benefits of rejoining the single market, he strayed further beyond it than any other senior Labour politician. That won’t have any immediate impact – the politics of remain-supporting London are different from those facing Labour nationally – and Starmer’s current stance is arguably (in my view) defensible and unarguably here to stay for the foreseeable future*. But it is slender candle in the wind, which might kindle a greater flame in the future.

The second significance is the Cambridge Econometrics study itself. Inevitably, Brexiters were quick to try to rubbish it, such as in a ‘Briefings for Britain’ article (curiously, written in the first person but credited to Briefings for Britain collectively, so we’ll never be able to assess the author’s credentials). But the fact remains that there are now at least four major counterfactual estimates, from the CER, the NIESR, the OBR and, now, Cambridge Econometrics which all show that Brexit has been damaging, albeit with a range from GDP (or in the latter case GVA) being 4% lower than it would have been to 10% lower by 2035. Each comes from a credible source, each is independent, each uses a different modelling or calculating technique, and all show a negative impact. Yet, mysteriously, all of them are wrong according to the that small group of avowedly pro-Brexit economists who, as I’ve discussed before, persist in ignoring the counterfactual question in favour of various largely bogus comparisons with the EU, or the Eurozone, or individual EU countries.

Brexiter sophistry

It is especially hard to take this group seriously when one of its most active members tweets approvingly things like this week’s Express report of a “Brexit victory” because a West Midlands firm has won some new export orders. Good news, no doubt, but there’s nothing to suggest it has anything to do with Brexit. To the extent that such empty puff-pieces have any meaning at all, it is that they grow out of one of the most disingenuous rhetorical strategies of the Brexiters. One of the ways they dismissed warnings of the damage Brexit would do as ‘Project Fear’ was to create a flawed reductio ad absurdum, so that, say, warnings of reduced investment or reduced trade with the EU were rendered as claims that all investment or all trade with the EU would cease; or claims about the EU as a peace project were rendered as claims that leaving the EU would cause World War Three to break out.

Hence, now, as with the Express report of a new investment and export contract, any piece of good news can be misrepresented as discrediting the mispresented false claim that Brexit would mean no new investment or export contract. It is doubly dishonest since it also posits as the test of Brexit not whether it has had the positive effect that Brexiters promised, but whether it has not had a negative effect.

Similar sophistry greets the release of any and every report about Brexit. Thus, this week a report in the Telegraph (£), of all places, highlighted the impact of Brexit in eroding the global standing of the London stock market. Within it, quite reasonably and correctly, there was discussion of the way that Brexit is not the only factor. But, immediately, that got taken up by pro-Brexit social media accounts to show that claims it was all down to Brexit were false, even though no such claims had been made. And, again, all the Brexiter reaction was about attempts to downplay any Brexit damage rather than to argue that, in fact, Brexit had benefitted the stock market, as if the Brexiters had sold their project with the promise ‘it won’t be too bad’.

Brexiter failure to take responsibility

This failure to take responsibility for their failed project is now endemic. The latest trade figures show that the percentage of UK trade done with the EU is now higher than before the referendum, at about 53.3%. Cue for many to declare that this showed Project Fear disproven and Brexit justified once again (see, for example, many of the responses to this Tweet). But it means nothing of the sort. The explanation is that growth in trade with non-EU countries has been weaker than with the EU. This is the exact opposite of the central Brexiter proposition about trade, which is that the EU has a declining share of world economic growth and so, ‘unshackled from the corpse’ of the ‘EU protectionist racket’, the UK would re-orientate towards the fast-growing areas of the world.

That this has failed to materialize isn’t because the UK has not (or not yet) developed many major new free trade agreements, for example with the US or India. We shouldn’t by the way, let the Brexiters off the hook by saying ‘not yet’, given that David Davis, when Brexit Secretary, claimed “it will be possible to secure bilateral trade deals with the rest of the world that are larger than the value of the EU single market within two years”. But, timing aside, such deals just don’t, and can’t, make a massive difference: CPTPP membership is expected to lead to a 0.04% increase in GDP over 15 years, the Australia and New Zealand deals together 0.1%, and a deal with the US perhaps 0.16%.

In fact, the reason the Brexiter proposition has failed to materialize is because it was always a fallacy, for multiple reasons. Global economic development in previous decades has of course meant that in percentage terms the EU accounts for a declining share of world economic activity, but that doesn’t mean it is declining in absolute terms. Nor do fast growth rates in other countries mean that, even if their international trade grows at the same rate, the absolute value of increased trade with the UK necessarily grows very much (i.e. because it starts from a small base). And, in any case, whilst being in the EU assists trade with the rest of the EU, it does not preclude trading outside the EU.

Meanwhile, the basic observation of ‘trade gravity’ – that geographical proximity is a major weighting factor on where trade occurs, something denied by the Brexiter idea of ‘post-geography trading world’ – remains well-evidenced (this also makes Brexiter glee about the poor economic performance of e.g. Germany misplaced: whether in the EU or not it is bad news for the UK if its trading partners are in trouble). Indeed, that is borne out by these latest figures.

In fact, it looks likely that the impact of the pandemic, Ukraine and, now, attacks on shipping in the Red Sea are leading to a general trend to shorten supply chains and, therefore, to make regional economic relationships more important. The Brexiters can’t be blamed for not anticipating those events, but they can be blamed for making a major strategic error in not appreciating the economic and geo-political significance of regionalization. For that is not the wisdom of hindsight: it is exactly what I spelt out in detail in a post of January 2019 – before we left the EU, before the pandemic, before the Ukraine war, before the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. It’s not, as the Brexiters have it, that these kinds of events, rather than Brexit, are what have caused all our recent economic woes. It is that, on the one hand, unlike other countries, the UK has added Brexit to the list of negatives and, on the other hand, that such events illustrate the fundamental strategic flaw within Brexit.

It's worth saying that, assuming the UK starts to introduce full import controls on EU goods at the end of this month, we will see a new iteration of all these debates. Firstly, one consequence is likely to be that the figure of 53.3% for the share of UK trade done with the EU will fall a bit. That is because – to spell it out once again – increasing trade frictions will tend to make trade growth lower than it otherwise would have been. However, it won’t mean that the Brexiter ‘post-geography’ thesis is becoming vindicated. It will just mean that the relative gap between the rates of UK-EU and UK-ROW trade growth will have shifted. Secondly, using the same old trick as they did with Covid and Ukraine, we can expect the Brexiters to use the impact of the Houthi attacks to explain away the impact of import controls.

Brexiter lack of contrition

Of course, trade wasn’t the only way that Brexit was supposed to be beneficial. Domestically, it was supposed to see a re-balancing of the UK economy away from London, and away from financial services, both in itself and as the spur to the ‘levelling-up’ agenda. That was partly predicated on the anti-London sentiment that continues to define populist politics, but it was also a recognition of legitimate grievances about regional inequality and about the consequences of decisions, many taken by the Thatcher governments, to prioritise services, and especially financial services, as the key to future national prosperity. This re-balancing was supposed to mean that, whilst financial services would benefit from Brexit by being freed from EU bureaucracy, other sectors would benefit even more.

From that point of view, Brexit has also been an abject failure. The Cambridge Econometrics report was, understandably given its context, reported mainly in terms of what Brexit means for London. But, in the process, it revealed that, whilst damaged by Brexit, London is proportionately less damaged than the rest of the country, thus actually exacerbating capital-regional inequalities. That is mainly because, indeed, London has a more services-intensive economy, and international trade in services has been less affected than goods trade by Brexit.

So although, as the Telegraph report, and another this week, from recruiters Morgan McKinley estimating that there are 79% fewer newly open jobs in banking in London since the referendum, suggest that financial services have been damaged (and there’s plenty of other evidence to support this), this isn’t offset by any benefit for other sectors which, on the contrary, are as badly or even worse affected. Again it’s the opposite of what Brexiters promised. Again, the Brexiters were warned of this. And, again, it’s no defence for them to say that some of the warnings were for even worse outcomes than have so far transpired.

This also applies to non-economic issues and, of these, perhaps none more so than Northern Ireland and the politics of the peace process. Here, the warnings were clear, and made by senior politicians with direct and deep experience, most obviously John Major and Tony Blair, but they were shrugged off dismissively by Brexiters, including DUP Brexiters who called the warnings irresponsible scaremongering. Exactly how Brexit was going to play out for Northern Ireland couldn’t be said with certainty until the exact form Brexit took was known (and, to an extent, it still can’t be said with certainty). But that it would be de-stabilizing in some way or another was inevitable, if only because the fact that both Ireland and the UK were members of the EU enabled a crucial de-dramatization or blurring of issues of identity, identification, and allegiance.

As things have turned out, what it has meant in particular is the creation of an economic border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with all that means, at least symbolically, for the unionist community. That Brexit, and hard Brexit at that, was and is supported by unionist political leaders doesn’t negate that. And all communities of Northern Ireland are severely affected by the ongoing collapse of the power-sharing institutions and its consequences, of which this week’s mass public sector strike is one of the most serious examples.

For none of this is there the tiniest sign of contrition from any leading Brexiter, or even any admission of responsibility. On the contrary, their only response is to talk of Brexit having been ‘botched’, ‘betrayed’, or ‘not done properly’, even in those cases where they actually voted – as MPs or MEPs – for precisely the form of Brexit that we have.

The wreck of the Brexit government

Alongside all this lies the now hideous spectacle of the Tory government tearing itself apart, on clear display this week in its battle over whether to pass the disgusting and stupid Rwanda Bill in Rishi Sunak’s preferred form, or whether to add some even more disgusting and stupid clauses. At stake, here, is the bigger battle of the ‘Five Families’ or ‘Brexitists’ to slough off the last, moth-eaten, remnants of ‘traditional’ Conservatism. Or, to put it another way, the battle between those who would prefer to think, or at least prefer others to think, that they are not ‘the nasty party’ with those who are more than happy to be just that, and perhaps even think it a badge of honour.

That battle for the meaning of ‘real conservatism’ is, as I’ve argued many times before, inseparable from Brexit and, indeed, those castigating the party for not being ‘real conservatives’ are a perfect overlap with those who decry Brexit for not being ‘real Brexit’, just as there are parallels between Sunak’s plight now and Theresa May’s. I had thought that this battle would not be fully fought until after a general election loss, but it seems as if some within the ‘Five Families’ may be too impatient to wait, or perhaps that, as they pitched it this week (£), the impending loss of the election is what motivates them.

If so, it seems unlikely that they will be satisfied with anything Sunak may do in policy terms – fundamentally, they don’t think he is a real Conservative or a real Brexiter – and yet some, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg (£), seem to have recognized that ditching yet another leader before the election would be too ludicrous to contemplate. Certainly the tide went out on the Rwanda Bill rebellion, with only eleven Tory MPs – dubbed the ‘New Spartans’ by oddball ex-MEP David Bannerman – voting against the government. One rather amusing side-story was the beaching Lee ‘prolier than thou’ Anderson, who resigned as Deputy Chairman so as to be free to rebel, but then pulled out of voting against the government because some Labour MPs laughed at him (and perhaps because he could see how few were going to join him). The Brexitists aren’t yet ready, or able, to go in for the kill.

However, others, like Andrea ‘up yours’ Jenkyns, clearly think otherwise, and it can’t altogether be discounted that a new leader, calling a snap election, might not be able to snatch an unlikely victory. For one thing, there is a kind of febrile desperation in the air in Britain today, so that, faced with a choice between the uninspiringly cautious Keir Starmer and some novel, perhaps charismatic, Tory candidate, the electorate might just opt for the latter. For another thing, it wouldn’t be the first time such sudden surges in popularity have happened – remember Cleggmania? Quite who this charismatic Tory might be, I don’t know, but, after all, such things are in the eye of the beholder. Of course, it is equally possible that the Brexitists just don’t care about electability, and, as with political extremists of all sorts, ‘purity’ matters to them more than power. In a sense, we must hope that is true.

Crippled by dishonesty

If there is a guiding theme in this week’s post, it is how mired in dishonesty British politics has become. As with Britain’s economic problems, that dishonesty isn’t solely the result of Brexit but Brexit created a tipping point, embedding dishonesty to an extent from which it seems almost impossible to recover. Yesterday’s rebuke to the government from the UK Statistics Authority for its misleading use of asylum figures is just the latest example, along with the now almost routine ‘context additions’ (aka factual discredits) placed on posts on X from Sunak, or other government ministers, or government departments, or the Conservative Party. The lies and, at best, half-truths, just pour out daily.

This makes Sadiq Khan’s call for honesty both remarkable and marginal. We can’t, collectively, talk honestly about the most fundamental change made to our country’s entire economic and geo-political strategy. Indeed, we can scarcely talk about it at all. That can be blamed on the timidity of politicians, especially Labour politicians like Starmer who opposed Brexit, and surely know, quite as well as any of us, how damaging Brexit is yet are not able to say so openly. But, more fundamentally, it is the fault of the Brexiters, in both politics and the media, who have made honest discussion so difficult and toxic as to be impossible.

In doing that, they have ironically undermined Brexit itself. A habitual taunt aimed at ‘remainers’ is that they don’t trust their own country to run itself. But running our own affairs must mean, at a minimum, that the reality of those affairs can be openly and honestly discussed. Yet, with Britain having become, in their terms, an independent country, the Brexiters have created a situation where such discussion is impossible. I think the idea that EU membership means the EU running our country was and is utterly fatuous, but, looking at the terms under which the Brexiters have ensured we ‘run ourselves’ since leaving, it might be better if it did.

 

*I don’t think that point is affected by Rachel Reeves’ mention of the negative impact of Brexit this week which, although of note, seemed more aimed at the political chaos around the UK’s departure from the EU rather than at Brexit itself.

Update (23/01.24 at 10.54): Since writing this post, the article on the Briefings for Brexit website criticising Sadiq Khan and the Cambridge Econometrics study, which originally did not identify its author, has now done so. It is Robert Colville.

Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad

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

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

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

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

Farage and the ‘UKIPisation’ of the Tory Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The enemy at the top

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

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

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

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

Brexit sowed the wind

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

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

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

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

The new ‘politics of envy’

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

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

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

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

Brexitism: a different kind of ideology

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

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

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

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

Is populism popular?

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

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

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

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

 

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