The limits and limitations of post-Brexit choices

The very tiniest consequence of Trump’s election victory is that its timing falls messily for me now that this is a fortnightly blog. This post’s main topic, which is last week’s budget, suddenly seems like old news. Equally, writing about that leaves little space to write about the US election.

But that may be no bad thing. I often think that hot takes on big events are foolish, and the scale of this event, in particular, is going to take time to process. It is going to be different, bigger, and potentially far more dangerous than what flowed from his 2016 victory. The consequences go well beyond the focus of this blog, but even within that focus they will be profound. Profound for the UK, for the EU, for the continent of Europe and therefore, inevitably, for the entire Brexit project.

A preliminary list includes issues of defence, most pressingly as regards Ukraine, but also as regards the Baltic states, Eastern Europe both inside and outside the EU, and the Balkans. It also includes economics, and the possibility of substantial tariffs on trade with the US. Both of these things will shine a fresh and very searching spotlight on the economic and geo-political incoherence – an incoherence so great that it can properly be called a stupidity – of Brexit as a national strategy. That can only add weight to calls to join (or rejoin) the EU, though it's hard to see them being heeded. It certainly ought to bring more urgency and ambition to what already seemed the feebleness of the Labour government’s ‘reset’ of UK-EU relations, and which has now been rendered utterly inadequate in both scale and pace.

Yet, at the same time, Trump’s victory will embolden and re-energise the populists and the Brexiters. Earlier this year, when a second Trump presidency was already looking likely, I wrote at length about the relationships between Brexit, Brexitism, Trump and Putin. Most of that still stands, although some of the dynamics will be inflected differently under a Labour government. Thus Nigel Farage is gloatingly cock-a-hoop, directly comparing the result to Brexit, and the crackpot idea of him being the ‘unofficial Ambassador’ to the US is doing the rounds again.

Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, the new Tory leader, is already trying to exploit the difficulties that a Trump presidency would pose for any British government, and resurrecting the Brexiters’ favourite idea that he will agree a favourable trade deal with the UK. More generally, Brexiters, who have seen their 2016 ‘triumph’ become not just unpopular but a kind of byword for failure, will see in Trump’s reincarnation the hope that their fortunes, too, can be revived.

Labour’s first budget

All of this and much more will play out in the coming years. However, that doesn’t make last week’s budget an irrelevance and it, too, will have some long-term effects. It was a notable Brexit event, albeit in a peculiarly negative way. That has two aspects, one of them fairly widely remarked upon by commentators, the other, so far as I know, not mentioned by anyone.

The widely remarked-upon aspect was trailed in my previous post, where I wrote that “at one level, [the budget] will push discussion of Brexit even further to the margins, as commentators will find many others things in it to talk about. At another level, it will make the costs of Brexit even more relevant.” And so it proved.

Rachel Reeves’ budget speech lasted well over an hour, but mentioned Brexit only once, and only in passing, when she said that the Tory “Brexit deal harmed British businesses”. The subsequent debate focussed on everything from the rise in employer National Insurance contributions to the supposed impact on family farm inheritance, but only rarely on the Brexit silence.

On the other hand, buried in the accompanying Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) documents was a reminder that, taking into account what has already happened, its forecast for the impact of Brexit on trade intensity remains the same. This presumably also means that its forecast that the long-run impact will be that GDP will be 4% lower each year than it would otherwise have been also still holds (as last formally stated in May 2024). It is also implicit in the OBR figures, and confirmed explicitly by Treasury Minister Tulip Siddiq, that 60% of this damage is yet to come.

It bears repeating that, for all the tedious misleading graphs, cherry-picked data, and attempted rebuttals that still float around Brexiter-world, and get cited as ‘gotchas’ by keyboard warriors who wouldn’t know an x-axis from the X Factor or the X Files, something like this figure is given by all the major independent estimates. There’s a good discussion of this in relation to the budget by John Wilmslow in Sussex Bylines. 

The irrelevance of Brexit

All this is important, and provides a fresh example of the strange post-Brexit landscape in which the mounting economic damage is politically all but undiscussable. However, there is a sense in which the silence about Brexit in the budget was entirely justified. For the aspect which I have not seen mentioned is just how little difference Brexit has made to political debates and policy choices. Brexit was billed by its advocates as a great national liberation. This budget was a big event, setting the direction of travel for the next few years. Yet its basic parameters were indistinguishable from those of all the decades in which Britain was a member of the EU.

This is a demonstration of the fact that Brexit itself was based on an utterly false narrative of policy being substantially constrained by, or dictated by, the EU. Or, to put it another way, the false narrative that Brexit would give the UK greater ‘sovereignty’. In fact, policy remains within the familiar terrain of how much to tax, how much to borrow, and where to allocate funds.

Of course, the precise decisions made about that in this budget were distinctive, but the generic issues involved have not changed at all. It may be that in the weeds of specific measures there were some things, if so, very likely related to VAT, which would not have occurred as an EU member but, again if so, they were very marginal.

The constraints of reality

Brexiters would no doubt say this reflects the failure of the government to take advantage of ‘Brexit freedoms’ but, as the previous government found, these proved to be illusory in practice. And the reason for this is not, as Brexiters would have it, a lack of will. It is because the constraints on UK policy choices were never, in any significant sense, those arising from EU membership. In fact, as regards the budget, the principal constraints are, as was the case before Brexit and as was the case before membership of the EU, the currency and bond markets. As Labour politicians in the 1960s used to complain, it is the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’ who set the parameters of UK economic policy. That was before Britain joined the EEC, but it remained the case afterwards, as Denis Healey found in 1976.

It is still true after Brexit. That was amply demonstrated by the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget and - though to nothing like the extent that right-wing commentators claimed (£), and perhaps hoped - by Reeves’ budget. If the Reeves budget escaped the market mauling that Kwarteng’s endured it was partly because it was accepted, for example and in particular by the IMF, that the borrowing it involved provided the basis for sustainable growth and necessary public investment. It was also because Reeves explicitly eschewed the Brexitist anti-institutional frenzy which characterized the mini-budget, a frenzy which ended with the ludicrous assertions about ‘deep state’ interference and ‘socialist’ market traders.

But it’s not just fiscal policy which has shown the irrelevance of being outside the EU. The same goes for most parts of regulatory policy, something tacitly accepted by the last government, and slightly more openly accepted by the present government. The reasons, which I’ve rehearsed endlessly on this blog, boil down to the fact that, in or out of the EU, the UK largely has little choice but to accept transnational rules. Moreover, largely for reasons of geographical reality, these are very often those of the EU itself. Even immigration, the strongest candidate for the claim that Brexit has made a difference to policy choices, doesn’t bear out the Brexiters’ thesis. The detailed inner workings and mechanisms of policy have changed, but the basic parameters are framed by the same economic and political questions as they always were.  

The constraints of domestic politics

This points to a related issue. It is not just that there are the same external constraints on policy as there were before Brexit. It is that there are the same, or similar, domestic constraints as before. It’s undoubtedly the case that many Brexiters on the free-market right saw leaving the EU as a way to introduce radical ‘neo-liberal’ [1] policies to become 'Singapore-on-Thames' (£), to use the common, though misleading, term. But the assumption that it was only EU membership which stood in the way was false.

The British electorate was and remains a major obstacle. If neo-liberals sought to achieve electoral consent for their vision via the backdoor of Brexit, it was because they had no confidence they could do so through the front door of a general election. That was actually underscored by the coalition of voters brought together by Vote Leave and, later, by Boris Johnson in the 2019 election. Many, if not most, of them wanted no such thing as the ‘Singapore Brexit’ agenda.

Hence, even after leaving the EU and after the pandemic, neither Johnson nor Sunak followed that agenda (£), much to the chagrin of its advocates. Liz Truss undoubtedly wanted (£) to go down something like that route but had not secured electoral support for doing so and, even if the bond markets hadn’t imploded her premiership, it’s far from clear she could have delivered on it politically even within her own party.

All this inflects another way. Just as many right-wing Brexiters saw the EU as a barrier to neo-liberalism, many on the left came to see it as a bulwark against such policies. This at least partly accounts for the shift from Labour’s 1983 ‘Brexit’ policy to its later, largely pro-EU, position. Of course this did not apply to some on the Labour left, who became what we now call Lexiters, but in the process that revealed another aspect of the incoherence of the Brexit coalition. For the Lexiters see the EU as neither a barrier to, nor a bulwark against, neo-liberalism, but as an incarnation of it.

The consequences of this are still playing out. At the time of the referendum, many left-wing remainers believed (and some still do) that because many neo-liberals supported Brexit then ‘therefore’ this was ‘the real purpose’ of Brexit. Ironically, this validates the neo-liberal Brexiters’ own complaint that what has been delivered is ‘not real Brexit’. For, manifestly, Brexit has not ushered in anything remotely like what they wanted.

The Freeports red herring

That ought to be seen as their problem, and as a demonstration that the neo-liberal Brexiters were as deluded and incompetent as every other brand of Brexiter. However, the insistence that this was what Brexit was ‘really all about’ lives on in the ridiculous claims about Freeports, which continue to do the rounds on social media, depicting these as being, or in the process of becoming, deregulated neo-liberal ‘zones of exception’ (there’s an irony in that, too, as it validates Brexiters’ own false claims about Freeports being, in their terms, a ‘Brexit benefit’).

In fact, they are no such thing, and the two pieces of ‘evidence’ cited to suggest otherwise are both flawed, as I discussed in more detail in a previous post. One is that these Freeports would violate ‘EU state aid rules’. It’s questionable whether this is true, but even if it is then it is an odd way to demonstrate their ‘neo-liberalism’. For, as the Lexiters insist, it is the EU’s state aid rules which are one of the principal reasons for regarding it as a neo-liberal institution. (Freeports aside, the Lexiter position on this is another example of the wider Brexiter falsity that it was EU rules, rather than the UK’s own political choices, which were the barrier to the use of state aid: whilst still in the EU the UK gave much less state aid in per capita terms than most other members.)

The other piece of ‘evidence’ given for deregulated Freeports is that the Retained EU Law (REUL) Act 2023 supposedly unleashed massive deregulation by scrapping 600 EU laws. But, apart from the fact that this applies across the country, not just in Freeports (so it is irrelevant to the claims about them), anyone with even a cursory understanding of this issue knows that REUL was a major disappointment to the neo-liberal Brexiters. They had wanted to scrap or automatically sunset all the estimated 4,000 EU laws by the end of 2023, and were infuriated that not only was the number scrapped so small, but that they generally related to trivialities. That decision, taken by Kemi Badenoch when she was Trade and Business Secretary, actually marked a defeat for them. That isn’t to say they may not revive in the future, and no doubt Trump’s victory will embolden their hopes of a similar resurrection, but the idea that REUL was a triumph for their version of Brexit is simply false.

The Freeports issue is an illustration of my wider point here, that the parameters of policy have not been changed by Brexit. It’s something demonstrated, if inadvertently and in a misleading way, when the Freeport alarmists talk about ‘the 86 Freeports and SEZs’ (Special Economic Zones). It’s misleading because Freeports are SEZs (so ‘Freeports and SEZs’ is a misnomer) and doing so enables them to talk of these being ‘rolled out’, when almost all of them have existed for years, and pre-date Brexit. And it’s that which illustrates the point that, both before and after Brexit, policy choices haven’t really changed. In this case, that is because SEZs were and still are predominantly areas with various business tax breaks, most if not all of which did not require Brexit. That doesn’t mean they are good, or that they are effective. It just means that they are pretty much what they have always been.

Back to the budget

This brings us back to the budget. It does so in one trivial way. Before the budget there was a report that it would announce five new Freeports. This report turned out to be mistaken, but not before much gnashing of teeth about how it ‘proved’ Labour had embraced post-Brexit neo-liberalism. Far more importantly, the budget marks a distinct break with recent economic policy, perhaps going as far back as 1979. That isn’t so much because of its taxation decisions as the role it envisages for state investment.

As such, it marks a decisive rejection of the neo-liberal ‘crowding out’ thesis – the idea that public investment crowds out private investment [2]. That was a key part of the intellectual undergirding of what became Thatcherism, and it persisted under George Osborne’s Chancellorship. Arguably, it also lay behind the Blair-Brown governments' embrace of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). This doesn’t mean that it was the ‘socialist’ budget or the “Marxist nightmare” (£) described by the ludicrous rantings of right-wing commentators. But nor does it warrant the lazy claim that there’s no difference between Labour and the Tories. It was, as Martin Kettle of the Guardian described it, “a budget in the identifiably social democratic Labour tradition”.

Whether it succeeds in delivering the economic growth it promises, and to what extent, is another question, and one made all the more difficult to answer by Trump’s election. But, along with other Labour policies, from industrial policy to workers’ rights – even if none of these go as far as some would want – it puts paid to the idea, at least for now, that Brexit was the harbinger of a new wave of neo-liberalism. In some ways, it could even be described as bringing the UK closer to a ‘European’ economic model.

The limits and consequences of choice

That might seem ironic, but to a certain sort of Brexiter, arguably the most principled sort, it would be no such thing. Such people would say that the point of Brexit was not to usher in any particular policies, but simply to ensure that the policies in place are those chosen by British voters [3]. It is the same argument they make when saying that Brexit did not mean lower immigration, just that immigration levels would be determined solely by the elected government.

It may be a fine sentiment, but it is a naïve one, ignoring the many constraints on the choices available to voters, constraints over which their elected governments have far less control than they used to over EU laws and regulations. Like it or not, voting never has been, and never could be, the sole source of policy. On the other hand, it ignores the fact that, despite those constraints, the same kind of budget as that of last week could have been delivered with or without Brexit. That doesn’t mean that Brexit has made no difference to this and other post-Brexit budgets. It has. But the only real difference it has made is that there is less money.

In a similar way, no British voter chose Trump as American President, and most of them are unhappy about his election and concerned about its implications for Britain, but they will all have to cope with the consequences of it. That would have been true with or without Brexit, but Brexit limits the choices for how to do so.

 

Notes

[1] I’m aware that some people find ‘neo-liberal’ an imprecise, irritating, or even meaningless term. I use it here as shorthand for the broad proposition that markets are the best way of allocating resources, that they do so best when minimally regulated, and the State should be confined to relatively limited functions.

[2] I’m thinking in particular of the influence of the ‘Bacon-Eltis’ version of the crowding out thesis. Crowding out as an idea has a longer history, but in their telling it was enrolled into the wider neo-liberal narrative of ‘private good, public bad’.

[3] This was the position of the late Tony Benn, who of course was a Lexiter avant la lettre, and, certainly in his version of it, it was not the same as either ‘nationalist’ or ‘sovereigntist’ positions.

Brexit has failed, but there’s no solution in prospect

It’s not at all surprising that so many leading Brexiters, especially those not in government office, now pronounce, as Nigel Farage did this week, that “Brexit has failed” (though it is possible he was interrupted and intended to qualify that bald statement along the usual lines of ‘because it hasn’t been done properly’). It was always embedded in Brexit that this would happen, through a combination of the impossible promises made for it and the addiction to betrayalism and victimhood of so many of its advocates. Indeed, that has been a recurring theme of this blog, and of my book about Brexit.

The rumblings that Brexit has been betrayed, or is Brexit in Name Only, started even before the UK left the EU. But they began to grow more clamorous afterwards and there came a point, which seemed to occur around the time of Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson’s Telegraph column in November 2021 (£), after which it became a common complaint. Now, amongst Brexiters, it’s not even so much a complaint as an uncontentious statement of fact. Farage’s comment wasn’t shocking. Something similar is said day in and day out by Brexiters. For example, also this week, Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs wrote (£), not as the argument of her article but as the taken-for-granted first sentence of it, that “Brexit is dead in all but name.” There are any number of other examples.

Labour can now say the B-word but still not the F-word

No, none of that is surprising. What is surprising is that those who opposed Brexit, especially in the Labour Party, are so shy of saying the same thing. Keir Starmer’s policy of ‘Making Brexit Work’ implicitly acknowledges that Brexit has not been a success, but it is surely bizarre that it is taboo for him or any other Labour frontbencher to say in terms what to so many Brexiters is no more than self-evidently true. Brexit has failed.

Of course, what Brexiters like Farage mean by Brexit having failed is quite different to what Starmer means when he says it needs to be made to work. Starmer’s idea, which now seems little different to Rishi Sunak’s, is to rub some of the harder edges off the Brexit that Boris Johnson and David Frost negotiated, but without changing the fundamental nature of it. For Farage and others, by contrast, the issues are the continuing high level of net migration and the absence of significant regulatory divergence from the EU.

Labour’s policy was re-iterated by Starmer this week, when he committed to “improving” the Brexit trade deal whilst ruling out seeking to re-join either the single market or the EU, and there seems almost no chance of it changing before the next election. Their continuing lead in opinion polls and the results of the recent local elections will be taken to vindicate it, and, anyway, arguably it is the only realistic policy open to them in their first term of office.

Clearly Labour are also wary of allowing the Tories once more to weaponize Brexit against them, as happened this week when they floated the proposal to extend the right to vote in general elections to EU citizens living in the UK. Immediately, Tories started thundering that this was a plot to hold a vote to reverse Brexit. The fear of such attacks is understandable, although given that even the cautious policy of improving the TCA, which is due for review in 2026 anyway, was also represented as reneging on Brexit, arguably Starmer is taking the hit without getting much credit in return.

I still think that this approach could be augmented by the one I set out in my post last December, in brief, by stating that re-joining would be economically desirable but cannot be pursued responsibly or practically until embraced on a cross-party basis by the Tories. In this way, Labour could openly acknowledge the failure of Brexit whilst keeping the Tories responsible for owning it, and still limit the credibility of the accusation of seeking to undemocratically reverse Brexit.

As for the Brexiters’ diagnosis of their project having failed, this was given new impetus this week by two things.

Brexit delivers (one version of) one of its promises

The first is the expectation that figures are about to be released showing a record high level of net migration, exceeding the record already set by last November’s data. As Jonathan Portes, the leading economist in this area, has repeatedly pointed out, this is a policy area where Brexit has actually delivered what it promised, in the sense that freedom of movement of people has ended, and the UK sets its own immigration criteria and levels. That is also Grant Shapps’ defence of government policy. If Brexiters now feel betrayed, it is because of the dishonesty of a referendum campaign that certainly dog whistled to leave voters that immigration levels would fall.

As it happens, the public seem relatively relaxed about this not having happened, perhaps because of a recognition of post-pandemic labour shortages, but it still has salience amongst politicians on the political right, most notably Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Yet, again reflecting the dishonesty and incoherence of Brexit, her and others’ attempts to claim low immigration levels as a promise of Brexit are at odds with the prominent Brexiter business people like Tim Martin, Rocco Forte and Simon Wolfson who have called for a still more liberal regime.

At all events, Braverman is certainly at odds with the UK’s post-Brexit economic needs, as shown by Rishi Sunak’s announcement this week that more visas will be made available for agricultural workers. It is also the case that overseas students, who are rather stupidly included in migration figures, are vital, both economically and intellectually, to UK universities, one of the country’s few genuinely ‘world leading’ sectors.

Thin REUL

The other salt added to Brexiter wounds this week came with the fallout from the scaling back of the Retained EU Law (REUL) Bill, as pre-figured in my recent post, including the listing of the 600 pieces of law to be considered for cutting. This was presented as, and to an extent is, a pragmatic approach by Trade and Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, although she also managed to imply it resulted from civil service failings (£). But pragmatism is a dirty word to Tory Brexiters, with the likes of John Redwood and the ubiquitous Jacob Rees-Mogg denouncing it, and the creaking great-grandfather of Brexit, Bill Cash, ponderously deriding the triviality of the laws included in the listing.

It may be the case that axing these laws will have little or no effect, since many of them are defunct anyway – although there remain uncertainties and concerns (£) about whether this is so – but if Cash is right it doesn’t seem to occur to him or his fellows that this is one reason why their perpetual complaints about being under the yoke of EU law are so absurd. It certainly won’t occur to them that there are good reasons why their Brexit dream of de-regulation has foundered. One is just that, whatever they may have said since, neither this nor any other form of Brexit was specified at, and therefore mandated by, the referendum. Nor has it ever been put to the electorate by the Tory Party. So if they thought they could smuggle it in by stealth, under cover of Brexit, they have only their own dishonesty and incompetence to blame.

The other is the sheer impracticality of most ideas for significant regulatory divergence, discussed in detail in numerous previous posts, including the recent one on REUL. I won’t repeat that here, but an illustration of the basic point came in a different form this week with the government’s announcement that British food products sold throughout the UK will have to carry a ‘not for sale in the EU’ label. This arises because the Windsor Framework requires food sold in Northern Ireland to be marked in this way, but it is to apply across the UK “for practical and philosophical” reasons.

Not for sale in the EU

The ‘philosophical’ reason is as a sop to unionists and Brexiters: Northern Ireland will not be treated differently, even though the labeling only conceals the basic truth that there is no longer a single Great Britain (GB) and Northern Ireland (NI) goods market. The ‘practical’ reason is so that businesses do not have to use different labelling according to whether the food is sold in GB or NI, and can avoid almost all checks on GB-produced food being transported for sale to NI.

Cue outrage from Brexiters (£), such as Iain Duncan Smith, who declared “this is not why we left the EU. We were meant to be leaving the EU to deregulate, not to over-regulate.” Clearly the penny still hasn’t dropped that acquiring the right to diverge on regulations, even if that right isn’t exercised, automatically increases red tape. That, along with the bureaucratic burdens of being outside the customs unions, is what Brexit has done to businesses, and greater divergence, as envisaged by those who want to scrap the entirety of REUL, ultimately leads, in effect, to the literal or metaphorical marking of all goods and services as ‘not for sale outside the UK’. Meanwhile, it requires those firms which do export to meet the standards of the EU or other destination markets: double regulation, exactly what the single market avoids for trade amongst its members, and, to an extent, with those countries that follow its regulations.

It is astonishing that this still isn’t understood, the more so as, at the same time as complaining that Britain has “squandered the opportunities of Brexit” by failing to deliver regulatory divergence, Brexiters like the Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn (£) are up in arms about the decision of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to block Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard, which the EU has now approved. And why is the CMA so foolish, according to Lynn? Because, he explains, “the UK simply does not matter that much. The EU was already looking increasingly ridiculous in its attempts to pose as the world’s regulator – the so-called ‘Brussels effect’, whereby its standards would be adopted globally … For the UK, accounting for only 2.3pc of global output, the idea is even more laughable.” The obligatory sideswipe against the EU aside, the point is both correct and obvious. Yet it seems to elude Brexiters in the wider context of regulatory divergence.  

Tories in turmoil

Although it’s not clear whether they will be able to do much about it when it returns from the mauling it is currently receiving in the House of Lords, the reaction from Tory Brexiters to the watering-down of the REUL Bill looks like being less muted than it was to the reversal they suffered with the Windsor Framework. There are various reasons for that.

Possibly they simply don’t care that much about the arrangements for Northern Ireland – after all, they agreed to the original Protocol which established the basic fact of the Irish Sea border – or reckon that most voters outside Northern Ireland don’t. By contrast, regulatory divergence matters to Brexiters a lot, and they may think that the idea of ‘still being subject to EU law’ will resonate with some leave voters. Moreover, whereas the Windsor Framework, once signed, became very difficult to re-open, and the government categorically confirmed this week that it will not do so (£), it will always be possible to push for the resuscitation of REUL or something like it.

But the biggest reason is, undoubtedly, the now tangible sense since the local election results that Sunak’s grip on power is fading, and that the Tory Party is in turmoil, effectively preparing for who will replace him after the next election is lost.

That was most evident this week with the appearance of Cabinet Ministers Michael Gove and Suella Braverman, as well as Tory MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Hayes, Lee Anderson and Danny Kruger, and aspiring MP Lord David Frost, at the ‘National Conservativism’ (NatCon) Conference, an ironically global gathering of extreme right-wing ideologues.

Meanwhile, at the weekend, there was a gathering of the ‘Conservative Democratic Organization’ (CDO), the pro-Johnson group of grassroots Tory Party members, founded by Peter Cruddas, the disgraced former Tory Party treasurer and Vote Leave and Tory Party donor, who now sits in the House of Lords courtesy of Johnson though against the advice of the Appointments Commission. Johnson himself didn’t bother to attend in person, but Priti Patel, Nadine Dorries and, yet again, Jacob Rees-Mogg did.

Part of what is going on here is simply some of the aspirant replacements for Sunak burnishing their leadership credentials. That almost certainly applies to Braverman, probably to Patel, possibly to Rees-Mogg, and conceivably even to Frost. In itself, that is indicative of Sunak’s faltering authority, as well as presenting a menu of options for his successor which might turn even the strongest stomach and dismay the unfussiest of eaters. More fundamentally, it is about the incipient ideological war within the Tory Party which is going to explode assuming they lose the next election.

I have written about the implications of the NatCon Conference for the Conservative Party in my ‘Brexit Britain’ in the latest edition of Byline Times, so won’t do so here. But the wider picture, as the Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff writes, is an attempt by “Tory populists” to capture “the ideological soul of the party” at the expense of “Tory realists”. It is a struggle inseparable from the entire story of Brexit and the Conservative Party, and the latest manifestation of the process I discussed at length in February, whereby ‘Brexitism’ threatens to completely displace ‘Traditionalism’ (in the same meaning as ‘realist’ rather than the NatCon sense of traditional Conservatism). Within that, as Rafael Behr wrote this week, Sunak “has not picked a side between reality and dogma, but stands awkwardly between them, in the churned-up bog of a political no man’s land, sinking.”

According to David Gauke, it is “perfectly plausible” that after the election the NatCon (or Populist or Brexitist) takeover of the Tory Party will succeed, and whilst that may do little for its electoral fortunes it will make it impossible for as long as it lasts to envisage a cross-party agreement on substantively closening the relationship with the EU, which would surely be a pre-condition of the EU considering such a change.

Damage and decline continue

As the Tories implode, the damage and decline caused by Brexit grows remorselessly. One issue which put Brexit in the headlines this week has been lurking ever since the TCA was agreed – I think I first mentioned it in January 2021, though, astonishingly, Kemi Badenoch says it “isn’t to do with Brexit” – namely the looming end-of-year deadline by which, in order for electric vehicles to be traded tariff-free between the EU and the UK, their batteries must be at least 60% (by value) sourced in the EU or the UK. Without urgent action, car makers, including Vauxhall, are likely to close factories in the UK.

There is a fairly straightforward, if temporary, solution which Sam Lowe, who has been flagging up this issue for years, explains is to extend the deadline for the application of this ‘rule of origin’ (the link given also explains in more detail the intricacies of this issue, which are greater than my summary of it). But the underlying problem is that the UK has failed to develop what was supposedly one of its post-Brexit industrial priorities, the development of a domestic electric battery industry, exemplified by the failure of BritishVolt gigafactory. And, lurking beneath that, is the UK’s lack of access to the critical minerals needed for such batteries and lack of capacity to process them.

This temporary solution requires, of course, EU agreement to amend the TCA: having ‘sovereignty’ doesn’t give untrammeled freedom of action. As it happens, the EU also faces these problems, making it quite feasible that an extension will be agreed. But the crucial issue will be what happens then. Both the US and the EU (£) are devoting huge resources to securing the minerals and processing capacity, and developing the battery manufacturing capacity, so as to be free of reliance on, especially, Chinese imports. This in turn is linked to the even wider issue, which I discussed in August 2021, about the EU drive for ‘technological autonomy’ and its active efforts to secure supplies of critical raw materials (it also arguably links to the even wider matter of what the growing protectionism of both the EU and the US means for the UK).

There’s little sign that the UK has the political will or resources to do the same. So, even assuming an extension is agreed, if by its expiry the EU has succeeded in making the necessary developments and the UK hasn’t then it will presumably mark the end, in effect, of the UK car industry. And, on the more general issue, that the UK will be squeezed between the US, EU and China in the race for secure and stable access to the materials needed for advanced manufacturing (it’s not just batteries they’re needed for) and, crucially, environmentally sustainable advanced manufacturing. As with regulation, the UK is too small to go it alone.

In a somewhat related way, it was also reported this week (£) that post-Brexit interim arrangements for energy trading make costs for British consumers £1.1 billion a year higher than they would otherwise be. It’s yet another example of the failure of Brexit, and – as with another Brexit development this week, an agreement about how to address the ‘small boats crisis’ (£) – the remedy is closer cooperation with the EU. Yet such remedies are seen by those most willing to admit in public that Brexit has failed as being the cause of, rather than the solution to, that failure.

The invariable cry of those Brexiters bemoaning all this failure is, like Rocco Forte this week (£), that post-Brexit Britain has lapsed into ‘declinism’, which is equally invariably blamed on the “declinist Remainer elite” (£). It’s the same analysis that lay behind Truss’s disastrous mini-budget. The irony is painful. For the reality is that the more Brexit is pursued in the manner they want the more sharply Britain declines.

This is the serious stuff of high-level strategy. It isn’t remotely addressed by the government’s blithe assurances of its commitment to ‘finding solutions’, solutions that don’t exist within the parameters of the Brexit it has created. Nor is it addressed by Labour’s pledge to make Brexit work, since the solutions don’t exist within the modest tinkering with Brexit that Starmer has committed to. Not until the diagnosis that Brexit is a failure is accompanied by realism and honesty about the causes and solutions can it be addressed. There is little sign that the British polity is getting close to that point, and by the time it does the decline may have become irreversible.

Damage limitation

It has been a quiet week for Brexit news, but a revealing one too. The main story, if it is a story, is the latest though still not absolutely definitive report (£) that the government will pull back on the scope of scrapping Retained EU Law (REUL), so that it will ‘only’ remove 800 rather than all of the estimated 4000 pieces of legislation. That is still quite a lot of law that is going, and, crucially, there doesn’t as yet seem to be any confirmation of what these 800 laws are. Nor is it even clear whether the new plan is actually to ‘scrap’ all 800 or, as was originally proposed for the whole body of law, for this to be the default outcome but with provision to retain or amend in particular cases. So whilst this would be a sensible scaling back of the original plans, the damaging uncertainty about which parts of REUL will disappear, and when, remains.

As with all Brexit stories, this one has multiple dimensions and reveals much about the incoherence and inconsistency of the entire project.

A new pragmatism?

At one level, it is the latest sign, of which the Windsor Framework was the first, that Rishi Sunak’s government is more ‘pragmatic’ about Brexit than its predecessors. Notably, this decision seems to emanate from Kemi Badenoch, an enthusiastic Brexiter, in her newly expanded brief as Trade and Business Secretary which might suggest either that Sunak hopes that this will blunt the opposition of her fellow Brexiters or that, having to face the realities that they prefer to ignore, she, herself, has become a pragmatist.

Not that Sunak’s hands are clean. The Retained EU Law Bill started life under Boris Johnson as what was going to be the ‘Brexit Freedoms Bill’, and its legislative passage began, under the baleful stewardship of Jacob Rees-Mogg, during Liz Truss’s brief and disastrous premiership. But Sunak, in his ill-fated first bid to become Tory leader, was its enthusiastic champion, saying he would review or replace all REUL within the first 100 days of being Prime Minister. Then, as Prime Minister, he insisted it would go ahead in its original form as recently as this January even as a ‘senior government source’ was leaking that this was “impossible” (£).  

It may well be that in the first case this was purely to appeal to the Conservative membership voting in that leadership election, and in the second case was from fear of the ERG’s anger, something that their failure to derail the Windsor Framework now emboldens him to defy. If so, it serves to illustrate the wretched deformity that a relatively small number of Brexiter ideologues in the Tory Party have inflicted on politics. For without them, even given Brexit had happened, this self-evidently unworkable piece of legislation, which had even been ‘red-rated’ by the government’s independent Regulatory Policy Committee because of the inadequacy of its Impact Assessment process, would never have gone as far as it has. Nor would the retreat from it have had to be made inch-by-inch so as to avoid their tantrums, leaving things in this still indeterminate position.

The Brexiter reaction

Naturally it is all but impossible for Brexiters to recognize that what they had wanted was as impractical as it was undesirable. Ever the blameless victims, it had to be someone else’s fault. Thus, for some, Badenoch joined the list of those who, like Steve Baker, are deemed to have ‘sold out’ the true faith of Brexit purity. More commonly, in line with last week’s post, it was the lazy, incompetent and anti-Brexit civil service that got the blame.

Inevitably it was Rees-Mogg, in full spiteful schoolboy mode, who used his GB News bully pulpit to lead that line of attack, although it could be found across the Brexit bubble. Within that critique, the usual Brexiter simplism was also on display, with one pro-Brexit barrister claiming he could undertake all the work needed to scrap the full 4000 laws on his own in a year, or that a law firm could do so in a month.

Yet it's not entirely clear why this issue has become so totemic for Brexiters. Even in their own terms, to the extent that all these laws were carried over on to the UK statute book by vote of parliament, in the 2018 EU Withdrawal Act, they do not violate the principle of sovereignty. Indeed, if anything, it is the power the REUL Bill’s provisions give the Executive which does so (£).

In any case, when the 2018 legislation, described as the ‘Great Repeal Act’, was passed, let alone before the 2016 referendum, few if any Brexiters said, as Rees-Mogg does now, that passing the REUL Bill is “fundamental to the completion of Brexit”. So it seems to be yet another example of Brexiters making ever-harder demands for ‘true Brexit’ and, in the process, creating new tests to enable themselves to proclaim a “betrayal of Brexit”, in ways which even some Brexit supporters are beginning to see is ridiculous.

If there is no good Brexiter argument for the principle of the Bill, and especially for its original scope and speed, what is their case for its substance? Here, there is a remarkable coyness. There must be more than a suspicion that their desire is significant reduction in, in particular, employment rights, including the provisions of the EU Working Time Directive, although even Truss ruled out Rees-Mogg’s proposals for this as “half-baked”.

Certainly, now, Brexiters, including Rees-Mogg, are insistent that no diminution of employment rights or environmental protections is envisaged, instead talking airily of “pettifogging” product standards which supposedly make the UK less competitive and are “just annoying to people”, giving the example of vacuum cleaner power, apparently a reference to the EU rules introduced in 2017.

REUL and product standards

Reportedly (£), when Badenoch asked ERG members to identify examples of retained EU laws they wanted repealed, it was product standards that they, too, came up with. Although it’s not clear which product standards they were referring to, she rejected this suggestion “as Business Secretary and as a mother”.

That rather curious formulation doesn’t reveal what her specifically maternal concerns are, but perhaps she knows her Brexiter colleagues well enough to suspect they might not baulk at a good pinch of arsenic in baby food, just as they would perhaps regard sending small children up chimneys as a good way of boosting competitiveness, with the added benefit of giving woke and snowflake youths a short, sharp lesson in traditional British values.

However, the significance of Badenoch’s business brief is clear enough. Right across the business world there is substantial concern about the REUL Bill, with Roger Barker of the Institute of Directors criticising its entire approach and saying “ideally, we would like to see this Bill dropped”. Bluntly, those who know anything about product standards are quite happy to see the relevant retained EU law stay retained.

Of course, in the strange new world of Brexiter Conservatism, business and its representative bodies are seen as part of the whole ‘remainer Establishment blob’ but, that aside, this pre-occupation with diverging from EU product standards reveals one of the key ways that Brexiters don’t understand the single market, or the role of regulation in modern trade generally. Nor do they understand why, for both consumers and businesses, harmonized product standards are highly desirable.

For consumers, they offer a reliable guarantee without the need to delve into the technical minutiae of comparing UK and EU standards or worrying about compatibility issues. That guarantee may extend, as in the vacuum cleaner example, to the environmental impact of the product. As for people finding EU regulations annoying, in February last year Rees-Mogg, then the Brexit Opportunities Minister, called for the public to identify laws they wanted scrapped but, although the full results have never been reported, it seems to have yielded only trivial results. Certainly nothing has been heard of it since, rather like yet another absurd Rees-Mogg initiative, the government consultation on the supposedly burning public desire to remove the EU prohibition on selling goods using imperial measures only, which closed last August with the results still unpublished and probably quietly filed in the ‘Brexit stupidity archive’.

For businesses, far from divergence making them more competitive it makes them less so to the extent that it forces them to produce to different standards for the UK (or GB) and EU markets. Indeed, that’s well-illustrated by the fact that, to the relief of all British mothers, UK manufacturers will choose to follow the new EU standards on arsenic in baby foods, even if the British government doesn’t adopt them. It’s true that maintaining product standard alignment doesn’t in itself maintain all the benefits of single market membership, but it does reduce the costs of having given up membership. Clearly the same thing applies to conformity assessment marking, and it is to be hoped that the apparent turn to pragmatism over REUL will be followed by the final scrapping of the long-delayed UKCA mark* and that it, too, will be lodged in the Brexit stupidity archive where even Rees-Mogg seems to realise it belongs.

As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, this is not to deny that, Brexit having happened, there may be some areas where UK divergence makes sense. But that needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis, involving consultation with those who have relevant expertise or legitimate interests, undertaken in a sensible timescale, and with open public and political debate and parliamentary scrutiny. The REUL Bill process meets none of these criteria, even in its slimmed-down form (though the scale is more realistic). They are even more important if what is envisaged is indeed, despite the denials, the downgrading of employment rights or environmental protections.

The legacy of lies

All this would be true anyway, but it is made more true by the persistent dishonesty and bad faith with which Brexiters sold their project, and their long track-record of careless ignorance about what that project entails. This makes it all too easy to believe that the REUL Bill covers malign intent and/or that it will inadvertently create legislative and regulatory blackholes.

There is no better illustration of that mixture of the dishonesty, bad faith and careless ignorance than Boris Johnson. Whilst not exactly a news story, the full horror of Johnson’s premiership is freshly revealed with the publication yesterday of Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell’s book Johnson at 10. The Inside Story. I haven’t read it yet and I’m not sure I could bear to do so, but the extracts (£) that have already been published, the early reviews, and an interview with Seldon paint an almost unbelievable, but all too easily believable, picture. It’s not just one of incompetence, venality and vanity, but of a person so psychologically and morally empty as to be unfit for even the lowliest position of responsibility, let alone that of Prime Minister.

It's a terrible indictment of the Conservative Party, and perhaps of the whole political system, that he ever came to power. As regards Brexit, specifically, it may be over-reductive to say that it wouldn’t have happened without Johnson, but he must have made a difference and, in such a close vote, even a small difference may have been decisive. It would certainly be untrue to say that he was alone in bringing grotesque dishonesty to the Vote Leave campaign, and for that reason it is hard to feel much sympathy for those ‘principled’ Brexiters who always knew he was ‘not one of them’. For they were happy enough to have him as their front man, just as those ‘liberal Brexiters’ who affect to despise Nigel Farage were happy enough with the votes be brought.

Leaving aside his role in the referendum, Johnson’s impact on how Brexit subsequently played out was utterly malign. Of the many examples that could be given, perhaps the most disgusting was what he did with the Northern Ireland Protocol, about which he lied to the electorate and to his own MPs and as a result of which he deeply damaged the UK’s international reputation and caused long-term harm to UK-EU relations. At the same time, he showed not just carelessness about Northern Ireland and its fragile peace, but reckless contempt.

The politics of damage limitation

Like the Windsor Framework, the tentative retreat from the REUL Bill is an example of repairing the worst of Johnson’s damage, as is the recent news that Sunak is seeking a new deal over passport checks. A report this week from the House of Lords European Affairs Committee points to further ways in which the UK-EU relationship could be improved, and the new EU Envoy to the UK has recognized that, post-Windsor, this is now a possibility.

These are all welcome things, so far as they go, but they amount to no more than damage limitation. And even the damage they are very slowly limiting is that of the way Brexit was done by Johnson and others – amongst whom should certainly be numbered Theresa May, whose early ‘red lines’ so constrained the parameters of how it was done – rather than the damage inherent in Brexit itself.

It is tempting to demand something better than gradual damage limitation from a future Labour government, but the biggest constraint upon that is the massive row that, under that or any government, Brexiter politicians and journalists kick up even at damage limitation, let alone anything bolder. It is they, as the instigators and defenders of Brexit, who bear primary responsibility not just for it having happened but for the political difficulties of addressing its failure now.

It is too much to expect it of Johnson, but if just one of the high-profile advocates of Brexit in 2016 had the honesty and courage to admit they had made a mistake that would help. To the extent that it might lead to more of them doing so it could make a decisive difference. Not one has done so. Until that happens, we seem set to limp on, a nation that has shot itself in one foot and is now trying to compensate by slowly fashioning a rudimentary crutch, all the time shackled and heckled by those who insist that to do so is a betrayal of hopping.

 

 

 

*As always, it’s more complex than this. One possibility is that the UK government decides to continue to recognize CE marking as valid for goods placed on the UK market as a whole (GB and NI). That wouldn’t mean scrapping UKCA marking but in practice, as with the baby food example, businesses would probably choose to use the CE mark. Another possibility is that UKCA marking will be required, but could be used without additional testing/ certification for goods which have been tested/ certified for CE conformity. There are also issues about what the fate of the planned UKNI mark will be. And there are different issues for, specifically medical devices. For an overview (though note it predates the most recent extension) see the briefing from Lexology. Clearly there is an interaction between decisions about product standards made in relation to REUL, and also those about whether to mirror (i.e. align with) subsequent changes in EU law, and if so in which areas, and those about conformity assessment testing, certification and marking. This whole area is a minefield and goes to the heart of the practical complexity of slogans about ‘taking back control’ and ‘sovereignty’, especially given the extensiveness of UK-EU trade and supply chain integration.

Britain's Brexit purgatory

There was never any possibility that last week’s announcement of the Windsor Framework would be immediately transformative. Even so, it’s surprising that there’s been so little attempt by Rishi Sunak’s government to build on the momentum it seemed to offer to create the kind of new post-Brexit strategy discussed in my previous post. Instead, we have uncertainty, drift, and strategic incoherence.

The Windsor Framework on hold

One reason for this was the decision, which looks to have been a tactical error, not to set a timetable for the next steps, either in terms of a parliamentary vote or a decision from the DUP on whether to accept it as a basis to re-enter the power-sharing institutions. The rationale, presumably, was to avoid the charge of trying to ‘bounce’ people into accepting the agreement, hence Sunak emphasising that everyone would have ample time to study it.

The consequence is that the DUP have been able to announce the creation of their own scrutiny process, which may not yield an outcome until next month. That in turn gives the Tory Brexit Ultras a skirt to hide behind, since many of them have said they will defer judgement until the DUP have pronounced. As I suggested last week, this is all rather bogus since the issue isn’t really about the legal fine print of the agreement so much as the extent to which its opponents are politically willing and able to pursue their dogmatic purism. On that, the DUP, especially, are authoritatively reported by Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph to be split.

To the extent there is any time pressure, it comes from the fact that Joe Biden may be unwilling to visit the UK for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in April with matters still unresolved, especially the matter of the functioning of the Northern Ireland Assembly. But, if he doesn’t, that will be an embarrassment to the UK government which is certainly not something which will much bother the DUP or the ERG.

Drift and uncertainty: Horizon, REUL and GDPR

This leaves the Windsor Framework in limbo, which also means that some of the gains which could follow from it are on hold. The most obvious example is UK participation in Horizon Europe, with multiple reports suggesting that the government isn’t even committed to pursuing this. It is hard to decode this. One possibility is that, until the Windsor Framework is secured, the government does not want to stoke Brexiter opposition to it by emphasising that it is a path to a more general rapprochement with the EU. But many of the reports suggest another possibility, which is that Sunak genuinely doubts whether UK scientific research is best served by participation in Horizon, rather than spending the money in some other way – even though the scientific community is very clear (£) of the central importance of the programme.

The same uncertainty attends the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL), for reasons discussed acutely by Paul Waugh in the i. For now, it continues its passage – it is currently being mauled in the House of Lords – but again the reason isn’t clear. It could be to sweeten the Windsor pill for the Ultras. It could be because, despite the implications of Windsor, Sunak is still flirting with the divergence agenda implied by REUL. Either way, just as snubbing Horizon would go against what scientists want, pursuing REUL would be in total contradiction to what businesses, and multiple charities and environmental groups, want, as well as being a constitutional disgrace and administrative nightmare. It would also go against the grain of the Windsor Framework’s attempt to improve the tone of UK-EU relations and the UK’s international reputation generally.

Less widely reported is the latest stage in the ongoing saga of divergence from EU GDPR regulations, with the government this week introducing a new data protection Bill, replacing the previous one which it paused last October after Sunak came to power. It is too early to be sure, but the new version seems to somewhat backpedal on substantive divergence whilst continuing with the nonsensical idea of a UK only approach which will mean businesses that trade with the EU facing dual regulation or, just as likely, ignoring the UK system – exactly the same conundrum that faces all post-Brexit attempts at regulatory divergence. So the approach seems to be neither full divergence nor complete conformity, again showing strategic confusion, ultimately leading to the key unknown of whether the outcome will mean the EU withdrawing, as it is always free to, the UK’s GDPR adequacy recognition.

Incoherence and folly: the Illegal Migration Bill

Nothing illustrates this lack of strategic coherence better than the current Illegal Migration Bill which began its legislative passage this week. It’s not clear whether the government is unaware of the double meaning of its title or simply doesn’t care. It’s certainly striking to see the almost psychotic glee with which Suella Braverman talks about pushing “the boundaries of international law” and indeed, already, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that the plans are likely to breach the 1951 Refugee Convention. At root, this reflects the Brexiters’ absurd idea, endorsed by Braverman in relation to the Internal Market Bill when she was Attorney General, that ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ trumps international law.

Meanwhile, gravel-voiced thugs like Lee Anderson grind on about “pandering to the ECHR”. For, of course, it’s no secret that for a huge swathe of Brexiters, from Braverman herself, through Nigel Farage to Theresa May’s former advisor Nick Timothy, derogation from the ECHR is the end game. From their point of view, the very fact that, notwithstanding the cruelty it will inflict, the Bill will almost certainly not solve the overblown ‘small boats crisis’ doesn’t matter at all. It will just serve to justify their push for the sunny uplands of international pariahdom. In the meantime, there are fresh opportunities to attack the civil service and the BBC.

Sunak gurns along with all this, presumably seeing some electoral advantage in it, but more bystander than leader since none of it sits remotely easily with his Windsor Framework announcement. That was not simply about resolving the Northern Ireland Protocol row. It was also about doing so in ways which drew back from previous threats to break international law, first with the Internal Market Bill and later with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, as well as from the flouting of the original Protocol by unilaterally extending some of the grace periods within it. In this way, it was not just about having better relations with the EU but, more widely, repairing the huge damage done to Britain’s international reputation by its Brexit shenanigans.

The Illegal Migration Bill puts all of that in jeopardy, making a nonsense not just of the Windsor Framework’s aspirations in that respect but also of Britain’s post-Brexit international role more generally. For Brexiters have constantly claimed that this role will be one of global ambition, a pivotal player in upholding the rules-based international order. Much of that is overblown rhetoric, of course, but as support for Ukraine has shown it is not totally meaningless (which isn’t to say that, as Boris Johnson and others are still fraudulently claiming, it was Brexit that enabled that role to be played).

However, supporting Ukraine points up sharply the incoherence of Britain flouting international law with respect to refugees, since that hardly provides the moral high ground for opposing Russia’s attempts to annexe Ukraine. Of course, they’re not the same thing, but once a country starts picking and choosing which parts of the rules-based international order it will honour it inevitably loses the ability convincingly to criticise other countries for doing the same.

As always, it comes back to Brexit

If all this illustrates the incoherence of the post-Brexit strategy that the Windsor Framework agreement seems to presage that is for two reasons (or three, if we include Sunak’s political weakness) and, unsurprisingly, they relate to Brexit.

The first is that the Illegal Migration Bill is the clearest current example of how, to frame it in the terms of recent posts on this blog, Brexitism is still very much alive and kicking in UK politics. As Adam Bienkov argued in Byline Times this week, Braverman’s Bill mobilises the same dishonest tactics as Vote Leave (and, for that matter, Leave.EU) used during the Referendum campaign, especially the claims made that ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ and what that would mean. And beyond that direct comparison lies the miasma of a racism that (often) doesn’t quite dare speak its name, the bogus conflation of illiberalism with patriotism, and the invocation of external threats and internal saboteurs. But for these, the great British people would have ‘simple’ solutions to all that ails them.

If that reprises the tropes of the pre-Brexit arguments, the second reason is a distinctively post-Brexit one. For the Illegal Migration Bill is also about the way that Brexit has failed to deliver its promises to ‘control our borders’, a promise which itself was based on the utterly dishonest conflation of immigration in general, EU freedom of movement, and refugees and asylum seekers. More than that, as regards refugees and asylum seekers, who are the Bill’s targets, Brexit has actually made things worse. A recent report by Professor Thom Brooks of Durham University shows that Brexit is “the primary factor” in the sharp growth of small boat crossings since 2020.

The reason for this is that, with Brexit, the UK left the Dublin III regulations, deriding them as an example of EU bureaucracy, and failed to negotiate an alternative agreement, the suggestions the government made being rejected by the EU as an attempt at ‘cherry-picking’. In particular, this means the UK no longer participates in the part of the regulations that allows for asylum seekers to be returned to the ‘first safe country’ they reached in order for their claim to be assessed. It is deeply ironic that Brexiter politicians, including Braverman, constantly parrot the line that asylum seekers should make their claim in the first safe country they reach rather than travelling to the UK when it derives from an EU system they have chosen to leave (they garble this, anyway, as there is no such requirement on the asylum seekers themselves, rather, it is a requirement on the countries involved).

A common Brexiter objection is that, prior to 2020, relatively few asylum seekers arriving in the UK were returned to the first safe country, but the Brooks report (pp. 23-24) explains that this reasoning is fallacious. The point is that, now, people smugglers have an incentive to direct asylum seekers to the UK with the promise that, if they manage to arrive, they will no longer be subject to Dublin III return rules. Nor was this unexpected or unpredicted: as Brooks explains, the government was repeatedly warned that this would be the effect. Whether through indifference or incompetence this created an opportunity for Farage, especially, to whip up new fears, fears which now constitute both a political problem for the government as well as a political opportunity for it to exploit.

This isn’t the place to discuss all the iniquities and absurdities of the Illegal Migration Bill, or indeed the long and dismal story of Britain’s hostility to refugees and asylum seekers, a hostility wholly disproportionate to the relatively limited extent of its exposure, in global terms, to the pressures that refugee movements can bring. It’s certainly not obvious why, rather than simply face up to and rectify its failure to administer an effective system to check asylum applications, anyone thinks the only answer is the pariahdom of ECHR derogation.

Instead, the particular point to emphasise here is that the current migrant panic is bound up with the twin unsayables of the false promises made for the ‘control’ Brexit would deliver and the blunt fact that Brexit has actually exacerbated the problems. This inability to be honest about Brexit then leads to a policy which, if pursued, directly contradicts any strategy of rehabilitating Britain’s reputation as a stable and respected bulwark of global order and standards, a reputation damaged by Brexit in general and the antics of Johnson in particular.

Brexit: unsayable but omnipresent

This nexus of dishonesty about Brexit and the strategic drift which accompanies it goes well beyond the issue of refugees and asylum seekers. Seven years from the Brexit referendum the government still has no clear, articulated idea of what Brexit actually means or what it is for. In those circumstances, it’s inevitable that decisions become simply tactical ones about the politics of party management or news management. This strategic drift blights not just science and business but farming and the environment, regional policy, and just about every other area of British life, including some of the most basic, bread-and-butter issues.

For example, it makes it impossible to properly address the NHS crisis, because doing so would mean admitting the adverse impact of Brexit, especially but not only in terms of staff shortages, as outlined in a recent Nuffield Trust report. It can’t even be publicly acknowledged by government ministers that Brexit plays any role at all in current food shortages, despite expert analysis and even though the majority of the public themselves recognize that this is so (ironically, the lack of political honesty about this may actually lead the public to over-estimate how much of the problem is attributable to Brexit).

It's tempting, and to some degree right, to think that one reason for this lack of strategic coherence is because this is a tired, conflict-ridden government, almost serving out time until it is dispatched, and buffeted by constant scandals and crises. Yet, even in this respect, the long hand of Brexit plays its part. The revival this week of recriminations over the handling of coronavirus, fuelled by self-proclaimed “scoop getter” Isabel Oakeshott (scoop apparently no longer meaning the hard-won fruit of diligent journalistic investigation, but persuading some gullible sap that, prior history notwithstanding, you can be trusted not to break a confidence), is a reminder of the multiple connections between that and Brexit. Indeed, to the extent that Oakeshott is both an avid Brexiter and lockdown sceptic, as were many of those who rushed to defend her (£) as if she was a latter-day Nellie Bly, it was not just a reminder but a continuation.

Similarly, Partygate returned to the news and, with that, a reminder of its own relationships with Brexit and populism. That then became bound up with the role of Sue Gray, giving another opportunity to bash ‘remainer’ civil servants. And lest anyone think that I am reaching to find a Brexit connection, the link between Gray’s supposed ‘stitch-up’ of Johnson and civil service remainerism wasn’t made by me but by Tory MP and former Party Chairman Sir Jake Berry. In any case, as with last week’s squeaking about the constitutional proprieties of King Charles meeting the European Commission President, the supposed outrage about Gray came ill when from the mouths of those who have spent years trashing established norms of conduct in the name of ‘getting Brexit done’.

Re-visiting Brexit botches

In short, Brexit remains an inescapable feature of British politics, constantly present at the same time as being ignored or denied, and resistant to being corralled into any kind of coherent strategy. Whether that is because Sunak doesn’t have such a strategy, or because he is too weak to pursue it, or because it is inherently impossible isn’t clear. He has further chances coming, starting with today’s Franco-British summit, an opportunity to improve relations so strained by Brexit, but with the issue of returning refugees re-inflamed by the Illegal Migration Bill reports already suggest (£) there will be no progress on that, another indication of the perils of incoherence. Still, Sunak may well be able to repair the damage caused, amongst many other things, by Liz Truss’s ‘the jury’s out’ maladroitness and Johnson’s ‘punishment beatings’ calumny.

There will be another opportunity next week when the revised version of the Integrated Review is published, which is expected to coincide with his trip to the US to meet Joe Biden and Anthony Albanese for talks about the AUKUS agreement. At one level, such a review is mandated by the changed foreign and defence policy landscape created by the Ukraine War. At another, it reflects the lack of realism of the original March 2021 review, which, as I noted at the time, downplayed the UK’s European role whilst making grandiose claims about its ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’ with little sign of the resources to make good on it. Having made some similar observations, defence analyst Joshua Huminski notes that this did not impress the US, obviously Britain’s main and crucial security ally, and that what is needed this time round is “pragmatic realism”, meaning a “clear reprioritization of continental European security” that “reflects reality”. In other words, precisely what is needed for the wider re-set of national post-Brexit strategy that the Windsor Framework gestured towards.

Perhaps that will happen, but the longer it takes, the more the damage will mount up. So much of what needs to be done has been made worse by the rushed, hubristic decisions already made. The Integrated Review is one example as, though it is of a very different sort, is the absurd, now delayed, but still planned replacement of CE conformity assessment marking with the UKCA mark. So too is the revamp of data protection legislation mentioned earlier. For that matter, the REUL is the legacy of Liz Truss’s brief, ill-fated, premiership and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s ludicrously over-promoted role within it. Admittedly, the latter formulation suffers from the implication that there is any role for which Rees-Mogg might be considered suitably qualified other than that of understudy for one of Flashman’s less charismatic henchmen in an Amdram production of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

In other words, there have already been attempts, if piecemeal, to articulate a post-Brexit strategy but, for the most part, these already need to be undone because of Brexiter hubris and incompetence. There is perhaps some sign that the government has learned something from rushing through the largely pointless, if not downright damaging, trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, but if the anticipated accession to CPTPP is simply trumpeted as a Brexit benefit rather than a minor piece of damage limitation, and itself damaging to some sectors, it will suggest that the Brexiter delusions still hold sway.

Waiting for strategic coherence

What is crucial to grasp is that almost everything I have discussed in this post is interconnected, a series of moving parts which need to move in the same direction if there is to be strategic coherence. For example, it is widely understood that securing the Windsor Framework is central to securing CPTPP accession. It is also central to improving relations with the US, which will be further improved by a Europe-focused Integrated Review, and both will help to normalize UK-EU relations, which could lead to improvements in trade and security cooperation. None of these things will eliminate the damage of Brexit, but at least they won’t increase it and at best they might mitigate it. But, at the same time, the UK turning its back on Horizon, continuing with REUL, diverging from GDPR, and especially pursuing an internationally-despised and illegal policy on refugees will work in the opposite direction.

So for the time being it is not just the Windsor Framework that is in limbo, but Brexit Britain itself. The first may resolve one way or another fairly soon, and give an indication of the national direction of travel, but the second may last for months or years. Donald Tusk once remarked that there was a “special place in hell” for those who had advocated Brexit “without even a sketch of a plan” for how to deliver it. In fact, it is not they but the country that is suffering the consequences, if not in hell, then at least in purgatory. The first half of that word derives from the Latin for ‘to cleanse’, whilst it is fitting that the second half is Tory.

Purgatory isn’t an altogether pleasant place to be, clearly, and it brings with it the possibility of even worse to come, but, by the same token, there’s still at least some hope.