Uncharted waters

The new government continued the process it began in its first week of defining, or redefining, relations with the EU. There’s not much to add to what I said about that in last week’s post. The de facto Europe Minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, had a “constructive meeting” with Maros Sefcovic, and Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds spoke of “seeking a closer, more mature, more level-headed” relationship with the EU at a G7 meeting in Italy. There is now tentative talk of the first-ever UK-EU summit (£), which would be at least symbolically significant.

Much more high profile was the UK’s hosting of the European Political Community (EPC) summit. That represented a key moment, acknowledged as such by Charles Michel, President of the European Council, in beginning “a new phase in the EU-UK relationship”, but it potentially matters for a wider reason than that. Although as yet not much more than a talking shop, the still nascent EPC may develop into an important forum for European cooperation at a time of uncharted waters for the entire continent (not just the EU) especially as regards defence.

If nothing else, the sight of a British Prime Minister emphasising the importance of his country’s relationship with Europe, and the importance of the European Convention on Human Rights, represented a clear break with the Brexitism of his recent predecessors. This, and the entire way that the UK government approached hosting the EPC, is one, still small, but real, sign that the new government is minded to address what I’ve long argued to be the core strategic error of Brexit, namely its failure to understand the centrality of regionalism to contemporary economics and geo-politics.

Of course, all of this is still only at the (necessary) stage of improving the tone rather than shaping the substance of Britain’s relationship with its regional neighbours. It may be many months, perhaps even years, before it is possible to evaluate its success in practical terms. However, there was a substantive development this week in something which does not require EU agreement, in that the King’s Speech contained planned legislation to make it easier for the UK as a whole (i.e. not just Northern Ireland) to track changes in EU product standards and safety regulations. This is significant in that it partially damps down ‘passive’ regulatory divergence which, since Brexit, has been the main driver of regulatory divergence from the EU, and would have become more so, given various upcoming EU regulatory changes.

It is also significant as it marks a formal recognition of what the Tories had anyway been forced to acknowledge in practice, namely the ‘Brussels effect’, and its particular gravitational pull on the UK for reasons of geographical proximity and economic integration. However, this particular measure doesn’t stop the accumulation of Brexit effects in other regulatory areas and, although the UK will be the main (temporary) beneficiary of a new delay to the introduction of the EU Entry Exit System (EES), that, whilst no doubt a relief to the government, is in no sense the fruit of  any improvements there may have been in the UK-EU relationship, it’s just another technical overrun.

As so often, Rafael Behr sums up the current situation well, writing that “the era of Brexit as a faith-based system of government, setting precise theological parameters for acceptable policy, is over. But that means a new era of Brexit as a different cluster of economic and diplomatic headaches is just beginning.” In that respect, the Brexit process may be entering calmer waters but they are still, inevitably, uncharted ones.

Tories: stick or twist?

Brexiters will, no doubt, be infuriated by these developments but they have other things to occupy them. For the Tory Party and its conjoined twin, Reform, are entering uncharted waters of their own. It’s easy to dismiss what they are up to as irrelevant. It’s satisfying to do so, too, after all the years where every piece of gormlessness or nastiness from every pipsqueak on the Tory backbenches had to be taken seriously since it did, in fact, often have serious consequences. However, it does still matter, in that what happens now to the political right will eventually shape politics, including the politics of the UK’s relationship with the EU. Ultimately, it will determine whether Brexit was a prelude to Brexitism being a permanent presence in British politics, or an aberration that could eventually be corrected.

As the dust of the election has settled, it has become clear that the scale of the Tory defeat was both too small and too large to be easily processed by the party. By any normal standard, it was an historically catastrophic defeat. But compared with some of the most dramatic predictions, which conjured up the possibility of a near complete wipe-out, the Tories did reasonably well. The consequence is that they have enough seats for some kind of ‘business as usual’ approach to be just about possible, and yet too few for it really to be credible.

What ‘business as usual’ would mean is the idea that this was just the normal turn of the cycle of electoral fortunes, perhaps bigger in scale, but no different in kind, to those which have periodically happened before. Combined with the widespread idea that Labour has enjoyed only a ‘loveless landslide’, this could suggest that, whilst noises about ‘learning lessons’ will be made, there will be no ‘root and branch’ re-appraisal of the party or its fundamental purpose and identity. In leadership terms, this would probably be signaled by the choice of James Cleverly, Jeremy Hunt or even Kemi Badenoch, currently the front-runner amongst the Conservative membership according to both  a Conservative Home poll, where she scores 26%, and a YouGov poll, which has her at 31% (Cleverly is at 9% and 10% in the respective surveys, Hunt at 7% and 12%).

It may seem odd to identify Badenoch, who is clearly on the right of the party, as a kind of continuity candidate, but it is correct in the terms I mean it. Yes, she is a Brexiter and a culture warrior. Yes, some of the Ultras have praised her for being one of the few members of Sunak’s cabinet willing to make a public case for the ‘success’ of Brexit. But she enraged them when, alongside Sunak, she put a stop to their crazy idea of scrapping the entirety of Retained EU Law, defiantly declaring that she was doing so as she is a conservative rather than an anarchist. It was a telling phrase, as it captured and critiqued the frenzied destructiveness of the Brexit Ultras. She has also been highly critical of Suella Braverman since the election. So she isn’t someone who is fully aligned with the Brexitists. Equally, whilst she has been highly critical of Sunak’s “election blunders” (£), what this suggests is quite a shallow reading of the defeat, as if it were tactical rather than epochal. So in these ways she is a ‘business as usual’ rather than a ‘root and branch’ candidate.

But it seems obvious that ‘business as usual’, whilst a possible approach, is not, indeed, a credible one. It doesn’t address the evident creaking of the party machine or the demographic challenge it faces. The headline figure of 121 MPs conceals the fact that 80% of Tory seats, far more than the other parties, are held with only small pluralities of the vote, and that the party is heavily reliant on older voters. More fundamentally, such an approach does not address the gaping ideological fissures within the party or the manifest desire of many within it to have a showdown over the very meaning of conservatism. It’s conceivable that ‘One-Nation’ Conservatives might nod along with some attempt at business as usual under any of those three leaders. It’s not as if they have exactly shown Cromwellian resolve to stand their ground over the last few years. But it is surely inconceivable that the Brexitist National Conservatives (NatCons) will do so.

The coming showdown

The NatCons just about contained their loathing of Sunak whilst in government, but only just about. There is no chance of them buckling down for a similar attempt in opposition. For this is not about left and right in the familiar sense. Badenoch, Cleverly, and Hunt are right-wing by any normal standard, as is Sunak, and yet he is a socialist and a globalist in the eyes of the NatCons. The latter are a different breed altogether, and for them the very notion of ‘business as usual’ is a sell-out. A report by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian about attitudes amongst those who attended a Bruges Group event after the election provides a good illustration. In a similar vein, Liz Truss may no longer be an MP, but the oxymoronic ‘disruptor Conservatism’ (cf Badenoch’s ‘anarchism’ comment) she represents is still very much alive amongst the kind of people who hailed her mini-budget as a triumph and still regard it, as she does, as having been defeated by a malign, remainer, ‘Establishment’.

So if the NatCons get saddled with a leader who follows any version of a ‘business as usual’ strategy then they will immediately start sniping (and if it is Badenoch, then her conduct to date suggests that conciliation will not be her forte). A few lost by-elections and some poor local election results later, and the new leader will be toppled. This is easy to predict with near certainty because it is exactly how these people, or their political forebears, have conducted themselves going right back to the emergence of Tory Euroscepticism in the early 1990s, whilst the vote for Brexit has added to that ungovernability the implacable conviction that they speak for the silent majority.

All this suggests that later, if not sooner, there will be a face-off between the NatCons and the One-Cons. If it is not later, but comes now, rather than by the circuitous route I’ve just sketched, then, in leadership terms, it will most likely be between Suella Braverman or Robert Jenrick, for the former camp, and Tom Tugendhat, for the latter. In the two current polls mentioned above these candidates score respectively 16%, 7%, and 15% in one survey and 10%, 13%, and 13% in the other.

If chosen as leader, each of these candidates would, in different ways, represent a significant departure from ‘business as usual’. Each might be expected to dig deeper into what had happened throughout the 2010-2024 period, rather than just the Sunak years, though none, even Tugendhat I imagine, would raise the fundamental question of what Brexit did to the Party. Whichever side won – and it is because of this that the party may, in the first instance, seek to avoid this showdown – a good chunk of the party membership, its MPs and, with them, its voters, would defect. That is, the NatCons would defect to Reform if a One-Con wins, and the One-Cons would defect to Labour or the LibDems (or conceivably, in some cases, even to the Greens) if a NatCon wins.

When two tribes go to war

So, now, all this can be turned around to think about the relationship between the Tories and the various versions of Farage’s party (i.e. UKIP, the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK). I referred to them earlier as ‘conjoined twins’ because they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw – distinct in themselves, yet having a unique, overlapping connectivity.

This is obvious in the movement of voters and party members between them, in both directions, over many years. It is obvious in the ease with which Lee Anderson moved from Tory to Reform, and in the plausibility of current rumours that Braverman may defect to Reform, just as Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected to UKIP in 2014 or, just before the recent election, two Reform candidates defected to the Conservatives. It is obvious, too, in the rapturous welcome that Farage received at last year’s Tory conference, and the fact that Nigel Farage would be as popular a choice amongst Tory members for the leadership as all the main eligible candidates, bar Badenoch (13% and 10% in the surveys quoted above).

These are, effectively, one party which has split, initially over the priority given to leaving the EU. Indeed, it’s worth recalling that Farage left the Tory Party in 1992 in protest at John Major signing the Maastricht Treaty, exactly the root of Euroscepticism within the Tory Party itself, before becoming a founding member of UKIP. In principle, the fact that the UK has left the EU has rendered that split redundant. In fact, it has morphed into a split between the Brexitism of Reform and the Tory NatCons, and something even less easily nameable. It’s not simply One-Nationism, though that’s the only obvious shorthand term for it, it’s a complex amalgam of pragmatism, economic and social liberalism, opportunism and respectability, decency and laziness, the remnants of Tory Europhilia and of patrician dutifulness, and a kind of ideology of non-ideology. Interestingly, both sides lay claim to being heirs of Thatcher, much as Leninists and Trotskyites laid claim to Marx.

The way that the Tory vote just about held up at the election so as to yield 100+ seats, whilst the Reform vote was so dispersed that they managed only five seats, makes Farage’s pre-election talk of taking over the Tories redundant. But it is evident that the fate of the two parties remains linked. If the Tories attempt a ‘business as usual’ approach they will continue to leak votes and possibly MPs to Reform, especially if, as is likely, Farage’s party starts to win some by-elections, local elections, and even seats in the Welsh Senedd. If the Tories flip to One-Nationism, there will be a major exodus to Reform. If the Tories flip to National Conservatism, then it’s not obvious that they can survive without merging with Reform, and little reason why they shouldn’t do so, or at least make some sort of pact. That is what Braverman already favours, as do almost half of Tory Party members according to current polling. And, whether they merge or not, in this scenario there will be a major exodus of One-Nationers. There just doesn’t seem to be any viable strategy for the Conservative Party.

Unreformable?

That doesn’t however, exhaust the travails of the political right, because if the Tory internal coalition is now highly combustible, it is by no means the case that Reform is a stable entity, or that it is well-equipped for the uncharted waters of its new role and aspirations as a Westminster political party. For one thing, it is heavily dependent on one individual, Farage, and, astute as he is at cultivating his media persona, he has vulnerabilities. His Putinophilia is the most obvious, but so too is the vanity that, as can already be seen, makes him more interested in posturing in the US and his GB News show than in the daily grind of being MP for Clacton or of party management.

Relatedly, Reform has almost nothing in terms of grass-roots organization or local government presence (of the sort that makes the LibDems so resilient, whatever happens to their Westminster vote). In that respect, it isn’t even as well-developed as UKIP had been. Many of its candidates at the last election have already generated scandal, and there may well be more to come. And it is also already under challenge over its governance, or lack of it, from ousted Deputy Leader Ben Habib.

Habib is a ludicrous and unpleasant character, but the governance issue is real and won’t go away. The episode also revealed other uncomfortable truths about the party. For Habib’s summary sacking was part of the changes that saw party donor Zia Yusuf installed as chairman, provoking some Reform supporters to racist outrage about a Muslim holding this role. Indeed, part of Farage’s problem is that were he to allow the party to democratize he would also open the floodgates of influence to people who would undermine his attempt to make the party appear respectable and electorally viable.

In short, it would not be absurdly risky to bet on Reform imploding before we get to the next election. Equally, were the Tories to merge or even just form a pact with them, that would entail taking a share of the fallout from such an implosion.

The looming danger of Donald Trump

Looming beyond all of the issues discussed in this post is the uncharted water of a possible second Trump presidency, something that seems more likely, and certainly came to renewed prominence, with the failed attempt to assassinate him last weekend. His victory in November – and it is important to recognize just how imminent this possibility is – would pose profound problems for any British government, exacerbating the sense that Brexit has left the UK floundering alone, outside any major political or economic bloc, despite the very tentative developments mentioned above.

The consequences are set out in detail in a recent briefing by Luigi Scazzieri of the Centre for European Reform, but, in broad terms, it would put a fresh premium on better relations and greater integration with the EU, especially as regards defence, but also trade. That would clearly be consistent with, and would provide further justification for, Labour’s general approach (as would a Biden victory, though for different reasons). To that extent, the Labour government is better positioned to deal with the consequences of Trump 2.0 than the Tories would have been.

But as regards the relationship with the US itself, whilst it is indeed true that any UK government would struggle with Trump, Labour will find it especially difficult. The personal and ideological differences between Starmer and Trump are huge, notwithstanding reports this week of a positive conversation. That will become all the more evident since it’s clear that another Trump administration would be even more extreme than the first one. Already Trump’s freshly-announced running mate, JD Vance, has showed his contempt for the Labour government, specifically. It’s not clear how easily normal diplomacy will be able to smooth UK-US relations this time round. Equally, whereas last time, as always, a lot of the nuts and bolts of the relationship were maintained at the level of official bureaucracies, it’s not clear how those on the US side will fare under what seems likely to be a relentless assault from Trump.

At the same time, if Trump wins it will represent a new phase in the long and complicated story of his relationship with Brexiters, or Brexitists. His first election gave them a particular fillip, persuading them that they were part of a populist tide of history, whilst he, himself, laid claim to being ‘Mr Brexit’. Since then, there has been far more open intellectual and ideological traffic between Brexitists and the US radical right, exemplified by the explicit links between the National Conservatism movement and the British NatCons, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Frost, Miriam Cates, and Liz Truss (who this week openly endorsed Trump’s campaign). Trump 2.0 will put momentum into their parallel desire for Brexit 2.0.

And that is before we even come to Farage, who will undoubtedly seek to make much of his own ‘special relationship’ to act as if he were Britain’s de facto Ambassador. Trump will encourage that, both as a way of cocking a snook at Starmer’s government as well as for fairly obvious psychological reasons. For Trump, like a school bully or a gangland boss, thrives on the kind of cringingly undignified fanboydom that Farage all too happily provides (and, presumably, thinks earns him the esteem rather than the contempt of his hero).

However, Farage may find, as he briefly tasted during the election campaign over his remarks about Ukraine and NATO, that lining up with Trump in the coming years will, finally, break the largely easy time he has been given by the media and, even, break his hold over some of his supporters. For clearly the biggest danger from Trump 2.0 is what it would mean for Ukraine, which is likely to be tragic, and for emboldening Russia, which would be profoundly dangerous for peace in Europe, with the nightmare scenario being open conflict in the Baltic states. Even without that nightmare, the consequences of these uncharted waters for the UK and its politics are difficult to predict, but will be profound. They may well be even more profound than those of Brexit but, in any case, they will certainly make the folly of Brexit even clearer.

Correction, 20/07/2024: In the post I wrongly say that Kemi Badenoch explained her approach to REUL by saying she was a conservative not an anarchist. In fact, she said 'arsonist' not 'anarchist'. I don't think it affects the substance of my point, though

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.

The hard Brexit addiction

Two weeks ago, when I wrote my previous post, Brexit Ultras were cock-a-hoop because they believed that the EU and Ireland were being forced to ‘pay the price’ for having refused to countenance an Irish land border during the Brexit negotiations. As a result, asylum seekers within the UK were now entering Ireland via Northern Ireland so as to escape the possibility of being removed to Rwanda (or supposedly: see the post itself for discussion).

That ebullience has turned to dismay with this week’s ruling by Northern Ireland’s High Court that parts of the Illegal Migration Act do not apply in Northern Ireland (NI) because they breach human rights law and, thereby, breach the Windsor Framework. This is likely to mean that asylum seekers in NI cannot be deported to Rwanda, although the government will appeal against the ruling. Meanwhile, to the ire of Brexiters generally, and NI unionist Brexiters in particular, a potential incentive for asylum seekers to locate in NI, rather than the rest of the UK, has been created. Suddenly we are back to the old familiar lament that "Britain is paying the price for surrender to the EU" (£).

The roots of this lie deeper than the Windsor Framework, extending to both the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and the original Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). Although much of the discussion of these has been to do with trade and economic borders, central to the EU’s position in the Brexit negotiations was that there should be no dilution of the GFA, and included within that was that there be no diminution of the human rights provisions contained within the GFA (matters of no small concern to the US, as well).

The UK government agreed to this, and it is worth stressing that it did so quite willingly for, at the time, apart from perhaps a few on the fringe, Brexiters, and certainly the Brexit government, were adamant that Britain had no intention at all of threatening such rights, or the GFA in any respect, and all talk to the contrary was just more ‘Project Fear’. That the EU nevertheless sought legal commitment to this intention was, as can now be seen, a sensible and necessary precaution.

Not my Brexit (as always)

Thus when former Home Secretary Suella Braverman railed this week that the Windsor Framework has “failed upon its first contact with reality”, and is operating contrary to the “assurances given” to her at the time, that is pure nonsense. In fact, on its first contact with reality (as regards human rights), the Windsor Framework has done exactly what was intended from the outset. It is not clear what ‘assurances’ she was given, or who gave them, but if she believed otherwise then she is incompetent. However, this isn’t really the point she’s making. What she actually is trying to do is to disavow the fact that she was a member of the government which agreed the Windsor Framework (and, further back, one of the Tory MPs who voted unanimously for the NIP).

In this, Braverman is following a now familiar pattern as regards the Brexit arrangements for NI (and Brexit more generally). Over and over again Brexiter MPs who voted for them claim that they were misled, for example into believing the NIP to be temporary, or into believing that there would be no sea border, and, now, over the human rights provisions it entailed. There may be some truth in these claims to the extent that Boris Johnson repeatedly misrepresented the Protocol. However, that is no excuse for such MPs not to have grasped this central part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, the more so given that one of their leading figures, Iain Duncan Smith, insisted that no more time need be spent debating it. The same goes for the Windsor Framework, and especially for a government minister like Braverman.

But all of this is a smokescreen. The reality is that, from the outset, Brexiters didn’t understand or care what their project meant for Northern Ireland and many of them still do not, or affect not to believe it. Only when, as individuals, they are in government, are they forced to confront it, as they are other Brexit realities. That happened to Theresa May and, for all his huffing and puffing, to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister, though he left a political crisis over the NIP the resolution of which, via the Windsor Framework, was one of Rishi Sunak’s few achievements, and one of the few times he faced down the Brexit Ultras. The same thing happened to Braverman, whilst she was in office, including when, in her second stint as Home Secretary she voted for the Windsor Framework.

But some Tory Brexiters either never held government positions or, as happened with numerous Brexit Secretaries and Brexit Ministers, resigned those positions rather than accept the realities of Brexit. They could then join the Farageist extra-parliamentary chorus of how Brexit has been betrayed and could have been done ‘properly’ if only the government had ‘stood up to’ the EU. So Braverman’s reference to ‘assurances’ that have proven false is simply her alibi for what the government she was part of did, and a brandishing of her credentials to join the ranks of the betrayed.

The Tory Brexit failure

All this in turn is part of the wider picture of what Brexit has done to the Tory Party. For the most basic and most brutal truth is that what has been their flagship policy since 2016, and defining purpose since 2017, has manifestly failed. That failure was well-captured by Rafael Behr’s pithy formulation in his Guardian column this week: “Brexit was a huge bet against the idea that geography mattered to economic and security policy in the 21st century. Geography won.” Week-in and week-out the evidence of that grows, with the latest examples including its role in the delays to the opening of the Co-Op Live Arena, its role in medicine shortages, and the border delays for perishable goods imports. Conversely, the realities of geography have continued quietly to play out, for example in shadowing new EU regulations (such as those relating to plastic bottle caps) and in re-joining the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking. 

But we need hardly rehearse once again all the economic and geo-political damage and pointlessness of Brexit, still less to trudge through all the wearisome attempts by Brexit ideologues to disprove it, or to grab hold of some tiny shred, usually misrepresented anyway, of supposed justification. The clinching evidence of its failure is that if Brexit had been anything even remotely like the success that was promised then, as we approach the first election since leaving the EU, the Tories would undoubtedly be trumpeting that success, and making their record of delivering it the central plank of their electoral platform. Instead, they barely mention Brexit any more, preferring to grub around with endless ‘re-sets’, gimmicks about banning civil service ‘woke lanyards’, and, of course, the more serious, but still gimmicky, Rwanda policy.

The nature of those gimmicks reflects how Brexit has been a failure in a different way; a failure not just for the country but for the Tory Party itself. For whilst the causes of Brexit are multiple, there can be no doubt that a significant one was the attempt by David Cameron and others to destroy the electoral threat of the UKIP ‘revolt on the right’. In that respect, its failure has been not just abject but total. Not only has that threat regathered (or perhaps we should say re-formed), as Reform UK, requiring the Tories to continue to seek ways to negate it, but the Tory Party itself has been substantially ‘UKIPified’. In particular, a substantial part of the right, both within and outside the party, regards Brexit as a foundational belief, but believes equally strongly that it has been betrayed.

The silence of the Tory leadership

So the Tory leadership, meaning not just Sunak but the party as a governing party, is now in an impossible situation (of its own making, so weep no tears). It can’t claim Brexit to be a success, because those who do not have a foundational belief in its rightness can clearly see it has failed, whilst those for whom its rightness is a foundational belief also believe that it has been betrayed. But it can’t denounce Brexit as a failure or a betrayal, since it is the Brexit the Tory leadership actually delivered.

This situation grows directly out of the wider political climate which Brexiters, meaning not just politicians but commentators and activists, have created since 2016. They showed no interest in trying to persuade their opponents that, despite their doubts, it could be successfully delivered – remainers were just told to ‘suck it up’, which they declined to do. Yet Brexiters themselves have been the most adamant that Brexit hasn’t been successfully delivered.

So the Tory leadership now has nowhere to stand: it can neither boast of Brexit nor disown it. It has to insist both that Brexit was the right thing to do, which only a minority of voters now believe, and that it was done in the right way, something which only a minority of that minority now believe, which isn’t electorally viable. Hence the near-silence (matched only, though for quite different reasons, by the Labour opposition).

The noisy minority

By contrast, Brexiters who insist Brexit was the right thing, but was not done in the right way, have a much easier time of it, so long as they can avoid the taint of responsibility for how it was done. This is the seam of grievance that is being assiduously and very loudly mined by Reform and by many Tories. For them, things like the Belfast court ruling offer the opportunity to keep punching on the bruise that the Tory government bungled Brexit, and did so through lack of true belief in real Conservatism.

Moreover, they can propound a Brexit 2.0 agenda of leaving the ECHR, as well as even more draconian anti-immigration and anti-asylum policies, far more easily than can the Tory leadership. For, in government, the practical consequences of this agenda would be all too clear. Sunak can make noises about the ECHR, but any government actually derogating from it would encounter massive problems, not least in relation to the GFA and the NIP. Outside government, these problems can be denied, or discounted simply by proposing to violate those agreements as well.

On immigration generally, whilst the government is willing to countenance considerable damage to universities and to businesses with its recent clampdowns, it is less clear that it would be able to weather the storm caused by the kinds of restrictions its even more right-wing critics want. It is one thing for voters to demand much lower immigration, quite another if they are forced to face the reality of the consequences. Even surveys showing majority support for reducing immigration also show majority support for making immigration easier for many key occupations, especially the NHS and social care. Certainly any government actually implementing a very low immigration policy of the sort advocated by Reform UK would immediately run into huge practical difficulties and, crucially, would still be denounced by those outside government as not going far enough.

For practical difficulties do not matter outside government, and, as with Brexit itself, they can be dismissed as ‘Project Fear’, generated by a self-interested globalist elite. That is why, in these dog days of Tory government, those within the party who aspire to its future leadership, perhaps including Braverman or Robert Jenrick, can develop ever-more impractical ideas, just as Reform can.

The same goes for those, like Liz Truss, canvassing for the PopCons, or for Jacob Rees-Mogg, who this week proposed an electoral pact (£), not far short of an effective merger, between the Conservatives and Reform, albeit that Farage immediately rejected that, at least for now. Meanwhile there is talk of self-styled ‘media personality’ Matt Goodwin and self-proclaimed ‘disruptor’ Dominic Cummings each launching new, populist, anti-immigration parties of their own. If so, there will be multiple parties fishing in the same murky, but electorally fairly limited, water, leaving all of them frustrated in their pursuit of power, not least because, in the process, they will abandon many of the centre-right voters upon whom the the Tories used to rely.

Chasing the dragon

Brexit and its aftermath are the key to all of these developments, and, although it is impossible to know how they will play out, there is a good chance that they will yield a long-term fracturing of the political right. That’s something which used to be thought more likely on the left. To an extent, it is what happened when the SDP split from Labour in the 1980s, and it might have been expected in the form of an ‘Old Labour’ split from ‘New Labour’ during the Blair years, or a Blairite split from Corbyn’s Labour, or the Corbynite left setting up a new party in opposition to Starmer. Arguably, the effect, and ultimate fate, of the SDP may have inoculated the Labour Party against such subsequent splits. But the post-Brexit right, high on dreams of purity and addicted to the dramas of betrayal and purges has, perhaps appropriately, not had the benefit of the vaccine.

It's against this background that many current events should be understood, including the perhaps not very important or enduring one of the Belfast High Court ruling. That ruling is, at one level, a reminder of the mess that Brexit has created as regards Northern Ireland and of the impracticality of separating the UK from all of the international obligations that Brexiter ideas of sovereignty entail. At another level, it is one more piece of ammunition for the Brexiters to propose making an even greater mess in Northern Ireland, since their ultimate aim is to renege on the NIP and the Windsor Framework (and in some cases probably the GFA, as well), and to redouble on their fantasy of sovereignty by reneging on the ECHR (£). The more general application of that logic is, perhaps, the ultimate trap that Brexit has created: anything and everything that shows the folly of Brexit is, for Brexiters, the justification to commit even worse follies.

If that seems like political madness given the electoral system, and public opinion, it is sustained by the memory of the high of 2016 when, very briefly, the Brexiters could lay claim to embodying the ‘will of the people’ and could believe that they really were the silent majority, not the noisy minority. It was a heady moment. The hit proved short-lived and ultimately disappointing, but, for Britain’s political right, it proved to be a gateway drug, and there is not much they will not do in search of another fix.

Book review: Pain, exile and progress

This week’s post is the latest of the series of book reviews I began in March and intend to continue as, no doubt, more and more books about Brexit are published. Generally, I’m doing them as additional posts to the normal weekly discussion of Brexit news but, this week, there’s not much of this that’s worth discussing.

One development has been the confirmation of what I discussed last week, namely that the government will only axe 600 pieces of retained EU law by the end of the year (not even the 800 floated). A sensible move, to the outrage of the Brexit Ultras, though there remains the important question about what exactly these laws are.

There were also the Local Election results which, amongst other things, gave rise to questions about what salience Brexit now has to voting patterns and about what the implications for Brexit policy would be if the results foreshadow a hung parliament. The latter question is discussed by Nick Tyrone in his latest Week in Brexitland, and I largely agree with his analysis.

Book review

Behr, Rafael (2023) Politics: A Survivor’s Guide. How to stay engaged without getting enraged. London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-83895-504-5 (Hardback). 404 pages. £20.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, a book about Brexit, but Brexit runs through it as a theme and a context, and because of the focus of this blog it is mainly this aspect I will discuss. I bought it because its author, Rafael Behr, is, to my mind, one of the best political columnists in the country, and not just in relation to Brexit although he has written a great deal about that. Almost all his columns are excellent, especially because he so often finds a distinctive angle or a fresh insight on whatever it is that he is discussing. Moreover, he has a superb writing style, at once elegant and punchy, acute and amusing.

I mention this because I’m not sure that I would have been drawn to it by its title, or more especially the sub-title, which, almost literally, makes it sound like a ‘self-help’ book. Thankfully, it isn’t really that and, towards the end, Behr makes it clear that there will be no “list of practical tips for a less infuriating democracy” (p.371).

Balance and perspective

Saying that I was drawn to it because of regard for Behr’s writings opens a difficult question which is partly what the book is about. Might the reason I think his writing so excellent be because I generally agree with it? Isn’t it a symptom of the enragement of politics that Behr’s book discusses that we all become partisans, seeing unquestionable virtue in our heroes and irredeemable iniquity in our foes?

Spending, as I do, much time trawling through the writings of Brexiters, I am struck by how often they will point people towards an ‘excellent’ article by one of their fellows which, when I read the recommended piece, I find to be vapid, disingenuous or worse. But, no doubt, they would think the same of writings that I admire about Brexit, or indeed of my own writing about it.

It may be simply impossible for any of us to know for sure whether we are open-minded, and perhaps that is most true for those who are open-minded enough to even consider the question. Anyway, as Behr says, “it is consoling to discover my perceptions of things reflected in another mind; not just reflected, but clarified, analyzed and organized. That is how I know I am not alone and not going mad” (p.371). Confirmation bias is always a possibility, but it would be absurd to dismiss all confirmations as being the result of it.

Agonizing and ambivalence is both a theme and a characteristic of Behr’s analysis, so that even ambivalence is subjected to agonizing questions about “the threshold where equivocation [becomes] complicity” (p.349). He records how, on the occasions he has been pre-interviewed for possible appearances on the BBC’s Question Time, his responses are measured, discursive and qualified: “On and on it goes like that, on the one hand, on the other, everything depends, until consensus is reached that I should not appear on Question Time.” (p.169)

It’s only an anecdote, but it gives a flavour of Behr’s intellectual curiosity and innately liberal sensibility, as well as his wry and often self-deprecating humour. It also illustrates the fact that “a recurrent theme of this book [is] the need for balance and perspective, which involves the more subtle art of keeping balance itself in perspective.” (p. 368)

At all events, I approached the book with at least enough open-mindedness to be prepared for disappointment, in that it is one thing to write fine columns but another to write fine books. They are very different forms and disciplines, and few can master both. I wasn’t disappointed, for it turns out that Behr is one of those who can.

The pain of politics and the politics of pain

This is a book by a political journalist about politics, but of a most unusual kind. It weaves together personal experiences, family stories, political theory, and particular political events within an over-arching narrative of some key aspects of modern history (especially in the UK and Russia, but also Lithuania, Europe generally, the US, Israel and South Africa). It’s not the kind of book most journalists (or academics) would or could write, precisely because it operates in so many different registers, and is all the better for that.

Much of it is a meditation on the nature of democracy and threats to it, the polarisation and toxicity of contemporary political discourse, the rise of the alt-right and, to an extent, the alt-left, cynicism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Anyone who has followed politics in recent years will find these familiar topics, but Behr brings a freshness to the discussion that is engaging and readable. But I think it is the interweaving of the personal and the political which is most arresting and, for me and I suspect others, most ‘relatable’. It is very much a book about the pain of politics, a pain that feels personal. By the same token, this review is to a degree about my personal responses to the book, rather than simply being a rehearsal and appraisal of its contents.

I used the word ‘arresting’ deliberately, because it was a massive cardiac arrest, with which the book starts and ends, which both stopped Behr in his tracks and then motivated him to write the book. That doesn’t make it self-indulgent: on the contrary, it is an analytical book which seeks to explore not simply the personal pain of politics but the political significance of that personal pain.

The pain of exile

Whilst Behr is careful not to ascribe his heart attack to politics or to Brexit (he explains it mainly in terms of genetic pre-disposition and lifestyle), he does connect it to the way that he and others he knows experienced the “furious mess of British politics” (p. 12) following the Brexit referendum. The pain of that wasn’t simply that of an observer: the political mess wasn’t experienced by people as something external to them but as something that, so to speak, messed them up, creating what Behr describes as a “state of emotional and psychological exile.” (p. 118)

The notion of ‘exile’ is, in various forms, a central motif of the book, along with the related idea of political disengagement being “internal emigration.” (p.344) Thus, the overall puzzle of the book is the political, psychological and emotional challenge of “treading the line between complacency and despair” (loc. cit.) or, in other words, between the temptations of internal emigration and the pain of exile.

It is the motif of exile which I am going to focus on in this review. Indeed, one reason why I find the book relatable is because the first thing I wrote after the referendum finished with these words:

“As for me, I feel distraught and physically sick. As the Brexiters crow of having ‘got their country back’, I feel that I have lost my home and now live in exile.”

That was on another blog, but the feeling was the impetus for this blog, and all that I have written about Brexit which, in its own way, has been an attempt to bring an analytical perspective to bear upon what was, and to an extent still is, a visceral sense of pain; to engage as a way to make enragement productive or perhaps to assuage or displace enragement.

For Behr, that sense of exile is refracted through the lens of his family’s migration from Lithuania to South Africa to Britain, and freighted by his Jewishness, which gives particular weight not just to the experience of Brexit but of the anti-Semitic strain within Corbyn’s Labour. Thus, he writes:

“Even in twenty-first-century Britain, safe by any historical measure, the hearts of the survivors’ grandchildren beat with a trace of inherited dread. It is the cautionary tale about the worst-case scenario that was handed down: it is the emotional baggage and the passport kept ready for sudden flight. It is the inescapable suspicion that no matter how rooted Jews feel in a country and its culture, one day there will come a mob armed with the rusty old prejudice to let us know that we don’t belong.” (p.72)

I’ve quoted this at some length, because it captures powerfully and eloquently something which is immediately intelligible, even to those of us who are not Jewish. I’ve heard or read similar sentiments, but rarely, if ever, expressed with such clarity.

I also know, not from first-hand experience but from family members, the somewhat adjacent and sometimes overlapping fear of being found not to have one’s paperwork in order, and to be passport-less, a fear that also gets transmitted down generations. It was a fear suddenly experienced, after the referendum, by those millions of EU-27 nationals in the UK and, often, the British people with whom their lives were deeply intertwined. It was no comfort – in fact, a source of intense anger and upset – when leave-voting friends and neighbours, explaining that immigration had got ‘out of control’, told them, rather as Behr was told by his anti-Semitic landlady in Russia (p.215), that ‘we don’t mean you, of course’.

And then, somewhat adjacent to and sometimes overlapping with this, there is that experience that I, and many others, felt on the morning after the referendum of having becomes exiles in our own country, newly revealed as alien to us and alienated by us. That wouldn’t have been felt by all remain voters, of course, but the volume and visceral nature of the response of many, and the way that it has endured over the years since, shows how widespread and profound it was. Equally, though more quietly, alongside that enragement I’ve witnessed the gradual disengagement of many erstwhile remainers who, rather than shout impotently at the news, have retreated into the “internal emigration” of the personal and the local or even a literal, external emigration to other countries.

A lost past and a lost country

Behr’s other point of reference for the feeling of exile engendered by Brexit and post-Brexit politics is the comparison with the apparent stability and prosperity of the ‘Great Moderation’ of the 1990s, and especially the second half of that decade, when he was in his early twenties: “What I have more recently found intolerable about British politics can only be properly diagnosed with reference to that glorious fin de siècle. To know the present feeling of exile means revisiting the country as it was when I felt most at home in it.” (p.74)

I don’t doubt the authenticity of the sentiment, but I think it is slightly off-target analytically. I am ten years older than Behr, and have a similar feeling about my ‘salad days’ a decade earlier, at a much less politically auspicious time. But I also recognize the contrast he draws between the late 1990s and the recent period. My point, then, is that the two issues of youthful hope and political hope shouldn’t be conflated just because, for Behr, they happened to coincide.

For certainly, at the time, and still in retrospect, the late 1990s did indeed seem to be a time of hope and possibility in Britain. That is not rose-tinted – even then, and more clearly now, it had some obvious limitations. But the morning after the 1997 election, as I got the train to work having been up all night, and people of, presumably, many different backgrounds, were spontaneously smiling at each other, was unforgettable. It was an experience repeated across the country.  As Behr writes, “it had some of the character of a cultural revolution: a moment, like the Brexit referendum 19 years later, when the democratic process seemed to express a metamorphosis in national identity.” (p.80)

However, whereas in 1997 there were, no doubt, some bitterly upset Tories, that election had a sense of bringing people together that was wholly lacking in 2016, when even the victorious leaders looked shocked and frightened, and whilst some were cheering in the streets, many others were behind closed doors contemplating what seemed like tragedy.

I’m attracted to Behr’s point – which is very much in keeping with his disposition to ‘balance and perspective’ – that “the other side” had also felt a sense of exile of ‘having lost my country’, which drove the nationalist desire to ‘get my country back’: “it is possible, and I think necessary, to acknowledge that symmetry.” (p.118) It’s a wise and charitable observation, as well as having some truth. But the difficulties of acknowledging such a symmetry go beyond being “hard when the losing side sees most of its arguments from the referendum vindicated by subsequent events” (loc. cit.). For I think there is an important asymmetry in the political psychology of these two exiles, and considering it may also reveal some of the limits to where ‘balance and perspective’ can take us.

Asymmetries of exile

The leave sense of exile was a grumble, perhaps much more than that, which had built over many years. The exile of remainers was an instant trauma, an overnight ripping up of the old order, and not just that of EU membership. That was made worse by the fact that, even then, it was known that plenty of leave voters weren’t motivated by their own exiled hurt but by more frivolous motives of ‘wanting a change’ or ‘giving Cameron a kicking’, or simply ‘assumed remain would win anyway’.

Behr anticipates this point in noting that the collapse of the centre (meaning Brexit, but not only that) “felt sudden … because we hadn’t been paying attention to the shifting ground beneath our feet” (p.245), and it’s true that, like many things in life which come as a shock, there now seems a kind of inevitability about Brexit. But if the narrow margin of victory had gone the other way, we would be writing with equal assurance something like ‘when it came to the point, a traditional pragmatism, allied to fear of adding more economic damage to that of the financial crisis, unsurprisingly carried the day’.

The small numerical difference between the outcomes was, of course, epochal in its effects, but an identical electorate, with exactly the same groundswell of discontents and grievances, might on another day have yielded a different result. It’s only because there was, in fact, an earthquake that we now say the tectonic plates beneath our feet had already shifted.

Initial shock aside, the aftershocks of the earthquake were profound for remainers because of the way that Brexit was then prosecuted in a form which was so ‘hard’, and without any attempt to build consensus. Notably, it wasn’t until after that became clear that the People’s Vote campaign got underway and gained ground. At the same time, a kind of ‘Brexit McCarthyism’ emerged in which remainers (whether actual or alleged), especially in the civil service, academia and judiciary were talked of, and even to some extent treated, not just as exiles within their own country but as its internal enemies. Increasingly, that seems to have extended to treating anyone who is educated as part of an alien ‘new elite’ judged against populist loyalty tests that include but are far more extensive than Brexit.

Although he doesn’t mention the McCarthyism comparison, drawing it might be an example of Behr’s highly incisive discussion of “the paradox of vigilance” (the title of chapter 14) and his contradictory “dread at how bad things might get” and “irritation at the casual invocation of worst-case scenarios” (p.349). He means, primarily, Stalinism and Fascism, but McCarthyism could fit as well. Arguably the McCarthyism comparison is a more legitimate one, in that it refers to a scapegoating that happened within a society which was, nevertheless, essentially a democracy, but it is still a form of catastrophising and one which can be too glibly made.

For what it is worth, I don’t think that in that respect things have turned out as badly as I and others feared but there, again, is the paradox: perhaps, with less vigilance, things would have gone worse? At all events, my point is that, to whatever extent the fear was justified, it was a fear felt only by one side (it’s true that the ‘other side’ invokes its mirror image of a ‘woke thought police’ set to ‘cancel’ those who speak out, but such a situation would arise despite rather than because of, or out of, Brexit).

It's also worth pointing out that both the ‘aftershocks’ of how Brexit was done in such a hard way, and with no process of consensus-building, and the incipient McCarthyism (if that’s what it was) of 2017-2019 happened under Theresa May. Behr’s book isn’t, and doesn’t purport to be, a history of Brexit, but the account of Brexit it gives is perhaps surprisingly muted on May’s role, certainly by comparison with the extensive, and extremely acute, analysis of Johnson. Yet May set many of the directions for how Brexit turned out, and in many ways her character and motivations are more difficult to decode than his.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the idea of a symmetry of exile is that, almost from the outset, and certainly now, the most committed Brexiters and many leave voters have insisted that Brexit has been betrayed, and that ‘this wasn’t the Brexit I voted for’. Many of us thought that was inevitable, and it’s the central theme of my own book about Brexit (a revised and updated edition of which will be published in September, by the way). But, inevitable or not, it is the case that Brexit hasn’t restored the homeland of previously-exiled leavers at the expense of newly-exiled remainers; it has aggrieved just about everyone, albeit for different reasons.

Behr is well aware of this, of course, and it surfaces several times, especially in Part 3 of the book (‘Revolution’) which is one of the best analyses of Brexit I’ve read (again, perhaps reflecting the fact that it is one I very much agree with, and have advanced on this blog, including many times referencing Behr’s newspaper columns). For example, he points out that “a revolution that has achieved its defining purpose while meeting none of its higher goals condemns its leaders to a cycle of endless grievance-mining.” (p.294) Just so, and by the same token not just the leaders but the followers were left trapped in grievance. But that is doubly galling for the other ‘tribe’ who, in addition to their own grievances about Brexit having happened must listen to the victors still complaining, perpetually dissatisfied.

Building a new home

I don’t want to give the impression that Behr projects a kind of flabby relativism about Brexit, or anything else. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, whilst he understands the frustrations that drove people to vote leave, “it boiled my blood when the impeccably-credentialled professional politicians who led that revolution excused themselves from belonging to the Establishment so they might claim to be overthrowing it” (p.268), using what he calls the “Brexit ju-jitsu ... that defined the losing side as the authors of their own defeat” (loc. cit.). And notwithstanding his post-cardiac avoidance of enragement there’s plenty of anger on display, and an acceptance that “when politics degrades the country you call home there is a responsibility to stay angry in defiance of those who seek to gain from disengagement.” (p.381) The trick, Behr suggests, is to discharge that responsibility without getting stuck in a cycle of personal anger that leads to nowhere but more anger.

There’s so much in this book that I haven’t touched on, even in what is quite a long review. Much more about Brexit, and much more about much more than Brexit. Almost every page has a fresh insight or a thought-provoking argument, usually accompanied by a compelling story from his family or professional life and always informed by a deep knowledge of modern history and politics. The last book on politics I can recall reading with such attention and pleasure was Tony Judt’s (2011) Ill Fares the Land.

If, at the end, it’s not quite clear how to be engaged without being enraged – and the route that Behr involuntarily took to do so isn’t one anyone would want to have to follow – well, this isn’t, after all, a self-help book. The main tools it advocates are also those of the balance and perspective it deploys, to be applied to oneself, but also to history and politics where it reveals that “the balance sheet, read across a long enough timeline, is net positive for progress.” (p.364). That enables an engagement which can’t reconstruct the home from which we have been exiled, but can build a new home in the new land where we find ourselves. In that sense, it is an optimistic book, and if Behr has become less enraged by politics, he doesn’t seem to have lost a passion for its possibilities.

Limited realism and the limits to realism

In last week’s post I wrote about the strategic incoherence of post-Brexit politics, despite the more pragmatic approach embodied in the Windsor Framework. The fate of that agreement, specifically, remains somewhat unclear. The DUP continue to make noises that could mean rejecting it, but might not, whilst Brexiter MPs are restless (£) that they will get bounced into the deal, but if so there may not be much they can do.

As things stand, the Joint Committee overseeing the Withdrawal Agreement are due to sign off the Windsor deal by the end of next week, with a vote being held in the Commons on Wednesday. That vote will be, specifically, on the Statutory Instrument (SI) to create the ‘Stormont Brake’, but the government has said it will be treated as the promised vote on the Framework itself (there may be further debates on other related SIs, but it’s not clear there will be votes). That vote will be won, no doubt, but, in my view, the widespread assumption, or implicit assumption, that this issue is going to quietly disappear is not yet justified.

In the meantime, the theme of strategic incoherence can be thought of in a slightly different way, and one which shows why, even if Sunak is minded to create a more coherent and realistic approach, the very nature of Brexit continues to undermine it. Back in 2019, I wrote about the way that a core strategic problem of Brexit is that of a nation existing in a global context but which has eschewed a regional anchoring. If the three levels of national, regional and global are thought of as the legs of a stool, what Brexit has done is to cut off the regional leg, creating a fundamental imbalance.

That imbalance flows from the way that the case to leave the EU relied upon marrying together quite inconsistent ideas about Brexit as a project of national independence and Brexit as a project of global greatness. One way that inconsistency was temporarily glossed over was by ubiquitous references to the UK being ‘the world’s fifth largest economy’, as well as to its membership of various international bodies and organizations. The implication was that Britain was powerful enough to ‘go it alone’ and also to be a global leader. In such an imagination, regionality, in the form of the EU, was irrelevant.

But an imagination was all it was, and the consequences of it being false run through many of the latest Brexit-related events. Some of them show a growing realism, whilst others continue the delusions.

Geo-politics: a degree of realism

As foreshadowed in my previous post, the Franco-British summit and the AUKUS summit, along with the publication of the ‘refreshed’ Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (IR23), offered Rishi Sunak an opportunity to develop a more realistic and effective post-Brexit geo-political strategy. I think it is fair to say that he has had some success.

The Franco-British summit was effective in soothing the very strained relationship of recent years, strains which aren’t entirely to do with Brexit, though it also served as a reminder that on the high-profile issue of migrant returns there is no bilateral substitute for an agreement with the EU, which is not going to be forthcoming. Nevertheless, the joint declaration that followed the meeting contained not just warm words but some substantive initiatives, including, for example, easing travel formalities for school trips, though again that’s a reminder that the problems were caused by Brexit in the first place, and an agreement with one EU member state is only a small reversal of those problems.

However, whilst recognizing the genuine value of the summit, Professor Richard Whitman of Kent University, an expert in this area, argues that the Paris-London relationship is somewhat less important than it was pre-Brexit and pre-Ukraine War. Still, within that context, the meeting was as effective as it could have been, and certainly an improvement on the legacy Sunak inherited from his predecessors. Certainly only a few of the Brexiter diehards complained about it, and that to little effect.

The refreshed Integrated Review was also an improvement. Whitman, again, notes that its tone was one of “sober realism”, with the hubris of the previous version now largely gone, along with its ‘Global Britain’ tagging. In line with defence analyst Joseph Huminski’s account of US expectations for the review, cited in last week’s post, it put far more emphasis than before on the centrality of European-Atlantic security, manifest in the extent of UK bilateral relationships with EU states, and reflecting, of course, the impact of the Ukraine War.

It’s true that the Indo-Pacific tilt of the 2021 review continued to feature strongly, but I read that as now more being bound up with falling into synch with US hawkishness about China – again in line with Huminski’s explanation of US expectations – rather than being, as it appeared before, a fantasy about the UK as a Pacific power in its own right. That is underscored by the new stress on the AUKUS pact which had not been created at the time of the previous review.

Overall, from a Brexit perspective, there are two observations to be made. One is that there is nothing the UK is doing in defence and foreign policy that required Brexit, unsurprisingly, since, as an EU member, the UK already pursued its own policies in these areas. On the other hand, what has been lost is insider influence over EU decisions in these areas. One immediate practical consequence is that UK firms look set to be locked out of bidding for contracts under the EU’s plans to massively increase arms spending for Ukraine. Moreover, conspicuously missing from an otherwise acute and thorough appraisal of the global scene (about which there is far more to be said than I have done here) is any recognition of the extent to which Brexit was a gift to Russia’s strategic interests.

The second observation is that, given Brexit has happened, post-Brexit defence and foreign policy does now seem to be in the process of being ‘normalized’, in the sense of losing at least some of its Brexity delusions of grandeur, reverting to a position of closely shadowing US definitions of western interests and trying to repair Britain’s regional standing with European neighbours. Of course, some may feel that this traditional posture is problematic, and indeed that the extent of UK ambitions is some way ahead of its ability to afford them. That raises questions which are beyond the scope of this blog, but to the extent that Sunak is engaged in such a normalization, it does undo some of the reputational damage of Brexit.

Trade and regulation: lessons in realism

The refreshed Integrated Review, like its predecessor, makes frequent reference to how defence, security, development and foreign policy are related to trade policy and to economic performance and stability generally. This is clearly true (for any country, not just the UK) and works in both directions, since, for example, the value of pledging to devote 2.5% of GDP to defence spending can’t be separated from the scale of total GDP.

From that point of view, the emphasis on the government is putting on the apparently imminent accession of the UK to the CPTPP, both in IR23 and more generally, is excessive. This was discussed at some length in Alan Beattie’s excellent Trade Secrets column (£) in the Financial Times, which, apart from pointing out that it will only be worth a “pitiful” 0.08% of GDP, identifies the “rough ride” the UK negotiators have had. This is because, in essence and to coin a phrase, ‘we need them more than they need us’ – not so much for economic reasons but for the political one created by “ministers desperate for deals to put in the post-Brexit trophy cupboard”. To that could be added precisely the geo-political emphasis the government is putting on CPTPP membership as an aspect of its Indo-Pacific tilt.

From the other side of the table, this means that individual CPTPP members have few reasons, either economic or political, not to take what advantage they could of this supplicant from the other side of the world, perversely determined to seek a regional place in another continent having discarded the place it had in its own. The consequences, it seems, from both Beattie’s report and other sources, are likely to include significant and potentially controversial concessions for example to Malaysia (by granting zero tariffs on UK palm oil imports) and to Canada (by granting generous tariff-free quotas for beef imports). The latter arises in part because Canada wants the same one-sided benefits already given to Australia and New Zealand by the UK in its ‘desperation for deals’. This is also a reminder of the naivety of those Brexiters who imagine there is a cosy familial bond within ‘the Anglosphere’, and a reminder more generally of the ruthlessness of international trade negotiations.

That ruthlessness is especially evident when a single country, like the UK, is negotiating for itself rather than as part of a regional bloc, and is doing so with a much larger regional bloc. Such asymmetries also apply to regulation, an instructive example this week being the case of regulations about the amount of arsenic allowed in baby foods (I may not be the only person who didn’t know that arsenic in baby food is a thing). New EU rules reduce the amount allowed, which initially raised questions about how, under the Windsor Framework, the difference between EU and UK rules would be managed in Northern Ireland. However, subsequently, the UK trade body for baby food manufacture announced that its members would follow the EU standard, even for products made and sold in Great Britain.

This may seem extremely abstruse or esoteric, but it goes to the heart of the entire question of post-Brexit regulatory independence and, with that, the Brexiter idea of sovereignty. For what it illustrates is that, regardless of what UK regulations may be, businesses will adopt the product standard that suits them. That will generally mean, as in this case, the standard that allows them to sell into both markets, which will be the higher standard, and especially the higher standard of the larger market, making the Brexiters’ idea of regulatory sovereignty facile (the so-called ‘Brussels effect’). In some cases, it may mean simply not serving the smaller market at all.

It’s true that there may be some sectors for which, either because of the size of the UK’s market (e.g. some financial services) or their scientific novelty (e.g. gene editing), the UK* could conceivably be a standard-setter, but as a generality that’s not the case. And even the examples given have much complexity, with many of the ideas for the ‘Edinburgh reforms’ of financial services being controversial, the more so in the wake of the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank this week, and both may be matched or overtaken by changes in EU regulations.

Science and technology: between hubris and realism

It’s worth looking at science and technology in more detail, because it’s clear from numerous statements, including the refreshed Integrated Review and this week’s Budget statement, that the Sunak government sees this as key to the UK’s post-Brexit strategy. That’s not unreasonable, and nor would it have been without Brexit, but there are problems with the government’s approach, and they are all connected with Brexit.

Firstly, it is very much bound up with the ‘global dominance’ version of Brexit, symbolised by the constant rhetoric of Britain being ‘world-leading’. In fact, as a major new independent review of UK R&D published this month shows, that rhetoric rests heavily on past achievements and on a few small research clusters. Overseen by the Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, the review depicts UK science as being good, but not that good, and as on a trajectory of gradual long-term decline (£). Perhaps that can be reversed by the new UK Science and Technology Framework but, at least in its headline aspirations to be a ‘Superpower’ in this domain, a term repeated in the Budget statement, there still seems to be the equivalent of the ‘Global Britain’ hubris of the original Integrated Review, rather than the ‘sober realism’ of IR23 (perhaps tellingly, the ‘Superpower’ theme goes back to Johnson’s time in office, although Sunak has used it assiduously).

Secondly, as the Nurse review clearly acknowledges, but the government is incapable of even mentioning, Brexit has already damaged UK science. A key issue here is participation in Horizon Europe, which, as I discussed in my previous post, the government is now, bizarrely, fighting shy of, despite the path to participation being cleared by the Windsor Framework agreement. The government’s alternative plan is described by Nurse as “utterly inadequate” and, along with the Royal Society, business groups have urged the government to join Horizon (£). Nor is Horizon the only issue – the end of freedom of movement has, for science as for business, made international collaborations more difficult. For whilst it is true that the post-Brexit immigration rules have seen a surge in skilled immigration (£), the costs and bureaucratic processes involved are a far cry from the free-and-easy interchanges within, at least, Europe that have been lost.

Thirdly, as regards regulation specifically, this aspect of the Framework, which is also the subject of the Vallance Review, is again predicated on the hubristic vision that by 2030 “the UK leverages post-Brexit freedoms and is at the frontier of setting technical standards and shaping international regulations”. There is in that some acknowledgement of the role of other countries and of international bodies, but, with it, the ambition to ‘lead’ and ‘convene’ the international standard-setting ecosystem. What’s lacking is recognition of the brutal truth that the rest of the world neither needs, nor desires, nor is likely to accept such a role for the UK. The hard lessons that the UK is slowly being taught about the realities of power asymmetry in trade negotiations have yet to be learned in the equally unforgiving sphere of international standard-setting.

With that said, there was one revealing feature of the Budget statement in the announcement that the government would use “our Brexit autonomy” in relation to regulating medicines to “move to a different model which will allow rapid, often near automatic sign-off for medicines and technologies already approved by trusted regulators in other parts of the world such as the United States, Europe or Japan”. That doesn’t mean the end to independent UK medical regulation, and the statement goes on to say that the MHRA will be able to approve some medicines in advance of those other regulators, but it does seem to be a realistic recognition of the ‘regulatory pull’ of larger jurisdictions. Whether it is sensible in terms of medical safety I am not competent to judge, but it is certainly piquant to think that, in the name of “Brexit autonomy”, EU-licensed medicines will be effectively rubber-stamped for use in the UK.

Overall, it would be wrong to be completely dismissive of the government’s post-Brexit science agenda. Within the documents referred to there are plenty of interesting ideas, and there are a lot of serious, highly competent, people who are going to be involved in delivering it. Yet, if they do so, it will surely be despite the overall framing of the approach. In other words, it may be successful if it acknowledges the realities of the UK is a medium-sized scientific power possessed, no doubt, of certain advantages, but needing to work co-operatively with others and mindful of its regional location adjacent to the EU and the particular relationships that entails.

It's also notable that the science strategy, including the revised Investment Zone plan, is heavily reliant upon and makes frequent reference to Britain’s – yes, of course – ‘world-leading’ universities. For that to work, the government might wish to consider the state of morale in UK Higher Education, riven for years by strikes over pay, pensions and casualisation, and to reconsider its complicity in endless attacks upon ‘woke’ academics as well as the Brexity disdain for ‘experts’. Indeed, there’s a certain irony in universities being so often decried for being bastions of ‘remainerism’, whilst also being charged with a central role in digging the country out of its Brexit hole. Equally, irrespective of Brexit but made harder by the impoverishment caused by Brexit, its success will require significant increases in government spending, without which any strategy, however realistically defined, will be mere rhetoric.

Small boats: scarcely a glimmer of realism

Rhetoric without substance is hardly a new feature of politics, but arguably it has become a particular problem in post-Brexit Britain. That is evident in the performative trade policy that prizes ‘doing trade deals’ above their value, but most grossly illustrated by the latest drive to ‘stop the boats’ with the Illegal Migration Bill, which has dominated recent news headlines recently and engulfed the BBC in a major row.

Rafael Behr identifies the Bill as prime example of this post-Brexit performativity, in the sense that, for all its cruelty, it will not ‘stop the boats’ and this is not its purpose. Rather, its purpose is the grimly populist one of enabling the government to declaim its commitment to ‘the people’s priorities’ whilst demonizing those who oppose it, including Labour and ‘lefty do-gooders’, as out of touch with ‘the people’. Yet, as Nick Tyrone points out in his latest Week in Brexitland substack, if this were genuinely the popular consensus then why make such exaggerated and vitriolic claims about the need for the policy?

Both the performativity and the populism of this are, indeed, hallmarks of Brexit, but there is something else here, too. It is the most extreme example of imagining Brexit as mandating untrammelled national independence. It does so by trying to detach the UK from the global flow of refugees: if all those who have passed through a safe country on their way to the UK are deemed automatically ‘illegal’, and with seeking asylum by direct travel being virtually impossible, then Britain has no responsibilities. That may be somewhat ameliorated by providing for refugees from favoured places, such as Hong Kong and Ukraine, but otherwise uses the accident of an island geography to pursue a policy of national isolationism.

So, suddenly, in this domain, there’s no talk of the UK ‘leading’ or ‘convening’ international standards or responses, still less of ‘Global Britain’. On the contrary, at least for the hardliners, there is outrage that such international standards should apply, most especially those of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and the ‘meddling foreign judges’ of its associated Court. For them, the Illegal Migration Bill is not, or not simply, performative politics because its anticipated failure is a gateway to the Brexit 2.0 of ECHR derogation. And if that brings with it the termination of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU, and puts the Good Friday Agreement into crisis, that would not bother many of them, and indeed might be welcomed by some of them.

Yet even in this area there is a glimmer of recognition, from the government if not the hardliners, shown in the discussions with France and, more widely, the ‘Calais Group’, that international cooperation is necessary. And, for all the noise of those who would derogate from the ECHR, it is still difficult to envisage the government actually doing this, or being able to do so in the face of what would undoubtedly be a huge backlash even from within the Tory Party, let alone from other domestic and international actors. Still, Sunak will allow ministers to dangle the prospect, as well as continue his ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric, despite the costs to international reputation, since whatever realism he shows in other respects is trumped by his apparent belief that it is a vote-winner.

The real consequences are clear

It’s easy to identify the many ways, including those discussed here, that Brexit has rendered the UK directionless, confused or destabilized across just about every policy area. And whilst there is no single measure to capture the consequences, one which is highly revealing is business investment, since it implies some degree of confidence in the current and future UK economy and polity. Moreover, it allows a degree of comparison with other countries.

On that metric, the verdict could hardly be more damning, as, for example, expressed this week by BYD, China’s largest electric car manufacturer, which is currently considering where to open its first European car plant. In the words of its European president, “as an investor we want a country to be stable … To open a factory is a decision for decades. Without Brexit, maybe. But after Brexit, we don’t understand what happened … Even on the long list we didn’t have the UK.” It’s an interesting formulation as although, no doubt, the economics of Britain being outside the single market are part of the calculation, issues of stability, presumably both political and regulatory, and, more intangibly, ‘reputation’ are foregrounded.

Overall, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s report that accompanied this week’s Budget statement not only confirmed the stagnation of business investment that started immediately after the referendum, but showed a larger and more long-lasting negative impact than it had initially expected**. A briefing published by the Economics Observatory this week shows that a similar picture emerges from a variety of different sources and models and, significantly, that it obtains across multiple business sectors (see Table 1). These sources show the UK’s investment levels since 2016 to be poor by international standards (see especially Figure 3).

It is hardly surprising. “Brexit has cracked Britain’s economic foundations” as CNN’s Hanna Ziady put it at the end of last year. But it has done more than that. It has fractured Britain’s relationship with the world across multiple domains, all of which show the strategic incoherence of Brexit. There are some signs, limited but welcome, that the government recognizes and is trying to repair some of these fractures. But these attempts are patchy, painfully slow and, in the final analysis, inevitably constrained by the ultimate reality that the multiple problems Brexit is causing are inherent in the lies and fantasies of Brexit itself.

 

Notes

*Note that as regards the specific example of gene editing, the proposed new regulatory framework will apply in England only.

**The second link in this sentence shows the investment chart. To put it in context, it is Chart F on p.48 in the overall report (the first link in the sentence) which itself sits inside Box 2.4 (pp. 46-49) which reviews the OBR’s previous and current assumptions and forecasts about Brexit more generally.