A country on the rack of Tory Brexitism

It has become increasingly difficult to separate out Brexit as a topic from British politics generally, and the politics of the Conservative Party in particular. That has been true for a while, but brought home with force this week with yet another outbreak of the Tories’ long-running civil war. It is a war in which Brexit features as both cause and consequence and, whilst it may have begun with a relatively genteel skirmish between ‘Eurosceptics’ and ‘Europhiles’ in the Tory Party, it has now become a full-blown culture war which has spread way beyond the party, or even Westminster politics.

This has not happened suddenly. It began to emerge early in the Brexit process, and by October 2017 I was writing that Brexit was “becoming a battle for Britain’s political soul”. At that time, that may have seemed like hyperbole, or at least pessimism. Seven years later, it seems almost a truism.

Enter Cameron

It’s a cliché that a week is a long time in politics, but Monday’s announcement of the bizarre resurrection to political office of David Cameron already seems like a distant memory. But it’s still worth dwelling on for a moment. Just from a Brexit point of view, his is a name to conjure with in that, almost uniquely, he is likely to be despised by those holding almost any position on Brexit. Even those not much interested or exercised about it may well resent him for creating this enormous and de-stabilizing storm and then washing his hands of it, with a seemingly insouciant song on his lips as he resigned. For remainers, he is the man who with total irresponsibility gambled and lost the country’s well-being in a miscalculated act of party management. Meanwhile, for leavers, any lingering gratitude they may have to him for having gifted them the referendum is superseded by the fact that he campaigned for remain.

But for hard core Tory Brexiters, the loathing of Cameron goes far deeper than that. Even before the referendum, many of them regarded him as ‘not being a real Conservative’, meaning too socially liberal, too green, too metropolitan, too globalist. Before Brexit, that was still perhaps a relatively marginal view, but the Conservative Party now is very different even to that of 2015 or even 2017. Brexit saw most of the more centrist and socially liberal Tory MPs expunged or marginalized, and Brexit itself has now morphed from just being about leaving the EU into Brexitism or Brexitist populism.*

That is not simply about moving from Brexit to a wider right-wing agenda. As their pet political scientist Matt Goodwin illustrated this week, the Brexitists want to claim that the referendum was not just a vote to leave the EU but a vote to permanently end what he calls ‘Liberal Centrist Dad politics’. Absurd as this claim is – that wasn’t the question asked, so it can’t be claimed to be what the answer meant – it is important to understand how widespread it is. Thus similar claims this week were made by populist commentator Isabel Oakeshott and by Miriam Cates, co-Chair of the ‘New Conservatives’ group of Tory MPs. It enables Brexitists to dishonestly pretend that the referendum gave them a democratic licence for far more than leaving the EU. So they use it as if it were a permanent majority for their entire ideology, even though, as the last seven years have made clear, it was not even a permanent majority for Brexit, and was never a majority for any particular form of Brexit.

Exit Braverman

Precisely the same ‘logic’ was on display in Suella Braverman’s letter to Rishi Sunak, following her sacking. Amidst her wider diatribe, she too claimed that a whole swathe of policies she has advocated “are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum”. In this, as in much else, Braverman, former ERG Chair and a leading light amongst the National Conservative (NatCon) group, epitomizes Brexitism. She does so with such crudity, venom and extremism that, eventually and belatedly, Sunak could no longer ignore it.

There’s a danger of becoming inured to the shocking growth of extremism in mainstream Conservative politics since 2016, an extremism ranging from the denunciation of judges as ‘enemies of the people’, through the unlawful prorogation of parliament, to a British cabinet minister openly stating in the House of Commons that he proposed to break international law, something which, as Attorney General, Braverman endorsed. So it is worth recording just how extreme her conduct became last week.

In brief, what we saw was a Home Secretary smearing Pro-Palestine demonstrations in their entirety as ‘hate marches’; attempting, against constitutional convention, to pressurize the police into banning their demonstration; suggesting that the police were unfairly biased against far-right demonstrators; and giving rise to at least the suspicion she might want the march to be violent in order to show that she had been right about it and right about her more general thesis that ‘multi-culturalism has failed. At the same time, she at least dog-whistled to far-right demonstrators to take to the streets.

It was a dog-whistle which was heard, with the consequence that far-right thugs despoiled the Armistice Day events that Braverman had falsely claimed the Pro-Palestine march threatened, unleashing what the Metropolitan Police called “extreme violence” against them. As the former Tory MP Dominic Grieve said, “it's impossible to escape the conclusion that some of that [violence] was fuelled by the rhetoric and the incitement of the Home Secretary Suella Braverman.” Grieve, also a lawyer and a former Attorney General, albeit of a very different stamp to Braverman, is hardly a man given to injudicious remarks. So for him to have used the word ‘incitement’ in this context is little short of remarkable.

It is true that, although most of the violence came from the far-right, some of the Pro-Palestine marchers were also violent. It should also be said that some of the marchers used antisemitic slogans and chants that are utterly indefensible. It simply isn’t enough to say that these are being ‘misinterpreted’ when everyone must now know that (to take the main, specific, case) ‘from the river, to the sea’ is open to multiple interpretations. It is a fact that to many Jewish people, including some who are our fellow-citizens, it inspires genuine fear. So to continue to use that chant is to choose to stoke that fear.

Yet neither of these things remotely justifies Braverman’s words and conduct, and in an atmosphere already so highly charged they were all the more disgraceful. It was certainly, so far as I know, unprecedented for a Home Secretary but, and this is a key point, what Braverman said was not a rogue or maverick opinion amongst NatCons. On the contrary, for many of them and their sympathisers what she said was no more than common sense and, at worst, her only fault was, in the words of David Frost (£), to “occasionally express herself imperfectly”.

Thuggish populists and populist thugs

Most crucially, and most dangerously of all, there is now effectively no difference between the kind of things the Brexitist populists say and those that the far-right ‘counter-protestors’ at the Cenotaph say. Indeed, there is even some evidence that that they share sources of funding. They are on the same side at very least to the extent that the English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson saying [offensive content warning] this week that Braverman had been “fired for telling the TRUTH”. Compare and, if possible, contrast with “Suella Braverman was sacked for being right”, the headline of a Telegraph article (£) by GB News presenter and one-time Brexit Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It’s not just the same sentiment, but there is even a certain similarity between Rees-Mogg’s accusation that Sunak is too “effete” to care enough about immigration and Robinson’s cruder description of the Conservatives as “spineless cucks”. It’s not a coincidence. That same theme of affronted masculinity can be seen in former ERG Vice-Chair Andrea Jenkyns’ semi-literate letter of no confidence in Sunak, sent in response to Braverman’s sacking. In it, the MP who sits very much on the Brexitist or populist wing of the party, declared that Braverman had been “the only person in the cabinet with the balls to speak the truth”.

The populist politicians and the thugs certainly share the all too familiar anti-immigration and anti-liberal tropes, and at least versions of the ‘race replacement’ conspiracy theory. At this particular moment, they also share the opportunism of those who, in Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland’s words, “look at the war between Israel and Hamas, and the grief and fear it prompts in the hearts of Jews and Muslims, especially, and see not tragedy but opportunity – a chance to advance their own interests”. At least part of what, I assume, Freedland means is that we should hardly take it at face value when far-right bully boys and their allies claim to be shocked and appalled by antisemitic language and violence. Nor, for that matter, should we even begin to take seriously the idea that they were defending the ‘sacred monuments’ [offensive content warning] of the war dead, whose memory they in fact befoul.

Perhaps we should be relieved that, even gifted this moment of opportunity, the capacity of the far right to put much of a presence on the street proved quite limited. It seems they could only muster a few hundred yobs, and many of those were, apparently, addled by drink and drugs. They are frightening and intimidating, without question, but we are not – not yet, anyway – at the point of having uncontainable political street-violence.

What is more frightening is the possibility that they no longer need to exert such violence when their views, even if perhaps expressed more smoothly, and by men and women in smart clothes, are becoming so widely prevalent in the mainstream of politics and the media. Indeed sometimes, as with Tory Party Deputy Chairman and GB News presenter Lee Anderson’s “f*** off back to France” remark, even the expression is not notably different.

Reading Rishi Sunak

Given how high the stakes have now become, it is more important than ever to know where, exactly, Rishi Sunak stands. I’ve written at great length in the past about how Brexitism is eating Conservatism, including a post last February about the schism between Brexitists and Traditionalists and, more recently, after the Party’s October conference, about how Brexit has driven the Tories mad. Most of that analysis still stands, and is the context for these latest developments. In that context, a widely-expressed interpretation of Sunak appointing Cameron and sacking Braverman was that he was throwing his weight behind traditionalism, or ‘centrism,’ and against Brexitist populism. That is how many commentators saw it (£) and, perhaps more significantly, how the Brexitists in the Tory Party and in the Reform Party continue to understand it.

Even before the week’s later events, I felt that this was a questionable reading. Sunak came to power on the basis of being competent and offering stability after the Truss meltdown, and he has sometimes kept to that script. That’s especially so as regards Brexit, where agreeing the Windsor Framework and effectively dropping the scrapping of Retained EU Law were pragmatic, sensible steps which, of course, infuriated the Brexiters. The same goes for re-joining Horizon, effectively scrapping UKCA marking, and other decisions. However, he has consistently been inconsistent, if that is not a contradiction in terms, in that in other ways, especially in his prioritization of ‘stopping the boats’ and his de-prioritization of net-zero policies, he has embraced Brexitist populism.

He seems especially prone to doing so when under pressure, most obviously when, during his original, failed leadership campaign, he promised an even speedier shredding of Retained EU Law than Truss was proposing. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that, when Braverman was fulminating against the police last week, Sunak was, if more squeakily, singing a similar tune in his veiled threat to hold the Metropolitan Police Commissioner ‘accountable’ for any trouble if the Palestine march was allowed to go ahead. Not should it be forgotten that ‘Downing Street’ backed Anderson over his “f*** off back to France” comment.

So I never felt persuaded when, for a few hours this week, it seemed that Sunak had now made a definitive choice: to stop playing with populism and to make his pitch to the electorate as a competent centrist. Supposedly, the real Rishi Sunak had now stood up and was ready to be counted. One obvious problem with this reading is that there are surely only so many times that self-definition can be attempted. So it is hard to see how appointing Cameron is consistent with his Conference pitch – only a month ago – to present himself as someone offering a ‘new politics’ which would break with the ‘failed model of the last 30 years’. It’s not even clear that Cameron fits the ‘competent Sunak’ model given that his track record, including his role in Brexit, is hardly evidence of sagacious statesmanship or even of tactical nous.

Moreover, if it is meant to be an electoral gambit, to signal to Southern Blue Wall Tory voters that Sunak rejects Brexitist madness, it’s not obvious that it will be a clear enough signal for that purpose, whilst it is very obvious that it will be a negative signal in the newly acquired Northern Red Wall seats. And if that was the gambit, then why did he immediately undermine it by appointing Esther McVey, yet another GB News presenter and populist Tory MP, to attend Cabinet as ‘anti-Woke Tsar’, responsible for “leading the charge on the government’s anti-woke agenda”? That certainly won’t placate the populists, anyway, so whatever the motivation it just leaves a muddle.

All this is part of a wider mystery about Sunak and what motivates him. That is especially obvious in relation to Brexit. He has, apparently, always been in favour of it, although I don’t recall him taking any part in the referendum campaign, and he has never given any real explanation of what it is about Brexit that he supports. For that matter, as the Brexiters have observed, the impression he gives – his whole ‘vibe’ – is far more ‘remainerish’, if there is such a thing. And it’s the same with other things that he is supposedly motivated by, such as the possibilities of technology on which, for all that he is endlessly described as a ‘tech bro’, he never says anything except bland platitudes, such as that AI presents opportunities and dangers. This is not exactly evidence of a deep interest, still less of deep thinking.

I don’t think that it is possible any more, if it ever was, to regard Sunak as an enigma, or even as a very inexperienced politician still feeling his way. Instead, I think it is now beyond reasonable doubt that his plasticity is not the shiny cover for some deeper core of belief or purpose, it is just all there is to him. It’s not even a matter of the familiar attempt of many politicians to be all things to all people and who end up pleasing no one. It’s just that there is less to him than meets the eye. There are no hidden depths, just a well-concealed depthlessness. He is impossible to read not because of any inscrutability of purpose but because, quite simply, there is nothing to read.

My suspicion about the shallowness of any conversion to centrism Sunak may have had on Monday was amply justified within two days, following Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling that the government’s ‘Rwanda’ policy is unlawful. That created immediate political pressure for Sunak because, whilst it seems unlikely that Braverman, herself, has a great personal following amongst the Brexitists, her views do, and Rwanda is a policy issue for them to rally around.

The fact that the ruling made it clear (£) that violation of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) was only a minor factor in the court’s judgment did not stop the more bone-headed of them from immediately proposing their pet 'Brexit 2.0' project of leaving it. Moreover some of them, like Anderson, have already called for the government to simply ignore the judgment, some, like ‘New Conservative’ Jonathan Gullis, have called for the government to just dump asylum seekers back in France, and another ‘New Conservative’, Brendan Clarke-Smith, has resurrected the odious “enemies of the people” line.

Without endorsing the most egregiously nonsensical of these suggestions (though, yet again, refusing to condemn Anderson’s remarks), Sunak immediately buckled to the populist pressure by proposing ‘emergency legislation’ which in effect is a new version of the idea that international law can be set aside by domestic legislation, mentioned above. At the same time, despite its marginal role in the judgment, he again raised at least by implication the possibility of, if not leaving the ECHR, then at least ignoring potential rulings from its associated Court in the future. So, once again, competent technocratic Sunak – who could, after all, simply drop all this Rwanda nonsense and focus on creating a quick and fair domestic system for processing asylum claims – disappeared from view. Whether or not this is enough to contain the Brexitists, who, as ever, will want more, remains to be seen.

Tortured on the Tory rack

So it still an open question whether the Tory Party will blow up now, or not until after its expected loss of the next election. Meanwhile the country is in a kind of tortured hiatus with the electorate having apparently decided they want rid of this government, but have no choice other than to live through its last, decaying months.

That isn’t just maddening, it is also hugely damaging. We are beset by deep, structural social and economic problems, and also face massive international instability and environmental danger. And hovering over all that is the miasma of Brexit with its daily drag on the economy and the still unanswered questions it has created for what post-Brexit Britain is to be. None of this is being addressed. Instead, we have a zombie government with no policy agenda, which is bad enough, but it is also so riven by internal factionalism that there is the ever-present danger that it will do something utterly mad.

This is not just about the immediate situation. It is now more obvious than ever – and Cameron’s return serves as a reminder of it – just how profoundly the entire country has suffered on the rack created by the competing factions in the Tory Party’s civil war. That civil war has now lasted for over thirty years. Cameron papered over it, at least during the Coalition years, and despite, or even because of, the manifesto promise of a referendum, voters in 2015 might have thought that it had been consigned to the margins of politics. But, since then, it has engulfed us all.

It gave us the bitter referendum that was supposed to resolve matters. It gave us Brexit which, apart from everything else that could be said about it, manifestly intensified divisions within the Tory Party and smeared them to every corner of the polity. Yet, at the same time, which makes the whole thing an even bigger tragedy, it failed to satisfy the Brexiters. It has degraded our international reputation, permanently crippled our economy, toxified our entire political discourse – and, still, they want more. Still, they want the ever-elusive ‘true Brexit’. Still, they want the ever-elusive ‘true Conservatism’.

It is tempting to think that because we seem to be witnessing the death throes of this government, we are also seeing the death throes of this entire period of chaotic mis-rule and vicious division. It is certainly of some comfort that the Supreme Court showed this week, as it did over the original Miller case about Article 50 notification and the unlawful Prorogation, that some of the institutional guide-rails are still intact. That’s hugely important. And perhaps, post-election, the Brexitist populists will destroy each other and become so splintered between different parties as to keep them from power. But so much poison has been unleashed during recent years, and it has spread so far, even, now, extending to violence on the streets. Much will depend on whether the expected next Labour government, amidst all the other challenges it will face, will be able to reverse that spread. I am not hopeful, but it is the only hope there is.

 

 

*It’s difficult to find a precise name for people who fall under this label. They include those within the Tory Party, Reform Party and elsewhere who are identified with the National Conservatism (NatCon) institute, such as many of those who spoke at its 2023 London Conference, and, within the Tory Party specifically, members of various small groups including the New Conservatives, the Conservative Democratic Organization and the Common Sense Conservatives.

In the doldrums

Brexit is in one of its periodic doldrums. That’s not to say that all the ongoing problems and miseries it has created have abated, or that the almost daily reminders of them have ceased. And of course the perennially unresolved Northern Ireland Protocol row continues.

More of the same

What also continues is the rather lame and repetitious attempt by Brexit ideologues, which I discussed last week, to refute the now irrefutable fact of Brexit’s economic failure. This week, the baton was passed to Larry Elliott, the Lexiter Economics Editor of the Guardian, and Telegraph columnist Roger Bootle (£), one of the members of Patrick Minford’s now disbanded Economists for Brexit group. I call it ‘baton passing’ because there is an inescapable sense of, if not actual coordination, then, at least, shared endeavour in what these people write. For example, Elliott, like Robert Tombs last week, invokes an IEA-dominated ‘Briefings for Britain’ report as his evidence for the lack of Brexit damage, showing, incidentally, the latest strange conjunction of left and right that Brexit has created.

The main line that all of them currently share is the deeply illogical one that, since the UK is experiencing severe economic problems, and since other countries are experiencing severe economic problems, then ‘therefore’ the UK’s economic problems cannot be due to Brexit. They also invariably anchor their dismissal of all negative economic assessments of Brexit in what they take to be the failure of the pre-referendum short-term economic forecasts of a vote to leave.

That is a tricky claim to unpick, because it’s true that remain campaigners were at fault in using it as if it were an unconditional prediction. In fact it was based, like all such forecasts, on numerous assumptions, some of which were not met (e.g. that David Cameron would, as he had promised, immediately trigger Article 50, or that the Bank Of England would not make any interventions to stabilize financial markets, which in the event it did). So although the worst warnings proved false, and perhaps would have done so even if all the assumptions had been met, that isn’t the slam-dunk the Brexiters imagine it to be. Anyway, whilst the remain campaign did use those forecasts in a highly simplified and therefore misleading way, that’s not something which those whose campaign included slogans like ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ and ‘Turkey’s joining the EU’ are in a good position to criticize, frankly.

In any case, why keep bringing all this up now? The answer is that it is in order to pursue another deeply illogical argument: that since a warning of possible damage was (supposedly) once proven false, then ‘therefore’ all warnings of damage are false, and ‘therefore’ all reports of damage are false. The same goes for another commonality in the current round of Brexiter denial, shared by both Elliott and Bootle, along with Dominic Lawson as discussed last week, which is to take Mark Carney’s recent, and highly questionable, claim that due to Brexit the UK economy has fallen from being 90% the size of Germany’s in 2016 to being 70% of its size now. But, even if that is bogus, to keep repeating it is again to suggest that since one statement of the damage of Brexit is false then ‘therefore’ all such statements are false.

Bootle, whose article is slightly more balanced than most of them, does concede that Brexit has adversely impacted trade and investment, something Elliott ignores or dismisses, but both of them continue to insist that the benefits of Brexit remain in the future. That’s something else they share with the other Brexiter apologists discussed last week, though the important issue is the ever-present one that they undoubtedly have totally different ideas of what those benefits would be.

We can expect all this to rumble tediously on at the abstract level of arguing over macro-economic indicators, even as just about every business affected by Brexit groans under its impact. Those complaining include Next’s Chief Executive Lord Wolfson, an advocate of Brexit but now one of the many saying “this is not the Brexit I wanted”. Yet again the issue is the multiple meanings of Brexit, and the original sin of the Vote Leave campaign’s deliberate refusal to specify any particular one. I won’t discuss Wolfson’s latest intervention here because I did so on the previous occasion when he said the same thing, along with some other pro-Brexit business leaders, almost a year ago, in a post entitled ‘Not my Brexit’, and, depressingly, most of it still applies, a sign of the glacial slowness of the entire Brexit debate.

Reality wins, but painfully slowly

Also rumbling on is the gradual death of all the hopes and promises of Brexiters. This week it was finally announced that the plan to replace the Royal Yacht Britannia has been shelved. It was one of those symbols, like restoring Imperial units of measurement (of which we have heard nothing since the pathetic ‘public consultation’), that used to swell Brexiter hearts and hopes (£). Those hopes have now been dashed on the prosaic, but revealing, fact that Brexit Britain is simply too poor to afford such fripperies, and with potential Russian attacks on undersea internet cables the Navy has better uses for £250 million than a Boris Johnson vanity project.

Rather more substantive are the new concerns that have been raised about the reckless plan to scrap EU retained law by the end of next year, the more reckless as it has emerged this week that there is an even greater volume of law affected than was previously realised. This plan is also symbolic, though in a particularly asinine sense since the symbolism of getting rid of ‘foreign law’ is negated by the fact that, as retained EU law, it was written in to UK law by parliament as part of Brexit. Not to mention the fact that much of it was heavily influenced by UK priorities when an EU member. But, unlike the yacht plan, it is something that has the potential to cause real chaos.

That possibility reveals the underlying reality that, far from being some horrible regulatory burden holding the UK back, most of it is the vital regulatory infrastructure than enables to the UK to function at all. To properly go through, check, adopt, amend or repeal all this might take decades, according to law and policy commentator David Allen Green. Originally conceived by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the legislation involved was strongly endorsed by Rishi Sunak during his original (failed) leadership campaign, but there have been rumours for weeks that, with Rees-Mogg out of the government, Sunak wants to delay or even abandon it.

Already Rees-Mogg is fighting back from the backbenches, with a ludicrous article in the Telegraph (£) that simply denies all the practicalities. It was robustly taken apart by legal expert George Peretz KC, but legal issues aside Rees-Mogg is on shaky political ground when he insists that those questioning – or, as he puts it, “squealing” about – the legislation do so out of opposition to Brexit itself. For what is significant about the latest reports is that the concerns come from a committed Brexiter, Theresa Villiers, on the grounds of their impracticality. Again, reality is gradually winning out against Brexiter fantasies, but only at a crawl. As Nick Tyrone put it this week “Brexit is melting - but slowly”.

Northern Ireland: stasis

It's worth recalling the most notable role Villiers played in the Brexit referendum. For it was she, then the Northern Ireland Secretary, who used the weight of that office to echo Boris Johnson in saying that Brexit would have no implications for the Irish border. It is of course that falsehood, or what has arisen from it, which is now the main reason why the present doldrums are likely to be only a temporary calm. Most of us are so inured to it that what is actually astonishing hardly registers now: a full three years since the Northern Ireland Protocol was agreed, almost two years since it supposedly came into operation, and some eighteen months since the UK first unilaterally extended the grace periods on some of its provisions, the fundamental nature of the Protocol is still not settled and is still under negotiation.

The process has itself effectively been in the doldrums for over a year, to some large degree because of the political chaos of having  had three Prime Ministers during that period. In public, at least, nothing much has changed in terms of UK demands since the July 2021 Command Paper, or in terms of the EU position since the October 2021 proposals for adjustments to the Protocol (apart from the EU unilaterally granting an assurance of the supply of medicines to Northern Ireland). Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) Bill continues to trundle through Parliament, whilst, formally, EU infringement proceedings against the UK for its failure to implement the original terms also continue.

The sense is that neither the UK nor the EU really know what to do. The EU position seems to be to wait and see how the politics plays out in the UK, whilst the UK government seems to just be hoping that something turns up. Both sides, of course, have many other things to occupy them. But this limbo can’t continue forever, not least because of where that leaves Northern Ireland and Northern Irish politics. By not, as he had promised – or threatened – immediately triggering Assembly elections, and this week continuing to postpone setting a date for them, the current Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris, has apparently acknowledged that the likely outcome would not change anything in the absence of a resolution to the negotiations with the EU.

In so doing, the government has either deliberately or by default accepted that what exists is now what I have called a ‘quadrilemma’, in which restoring functioning devolved government is one of the moving parts along with the original ‘trilemma’ of hard Brexit/ no land border/ no sea border. One likely outcome of this quadrilemma is that no conceivable version of the NIP would be accepted by the DUP, unless it softens its demands, and if that is so then devolved government is in effect permanently suspended, with all that implies for the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (GFA), which will be 25 years old next year.

That anniversary is significant in all kinds of ways, including likely US displeasure with the UK if, by the time it falls, the Assembly is still not functioning. It is hard to feel sympathy with the DUP, given its support for hard Brexit, but it is certainly possible to do so for the unionist community. For the way things have developed was always one possible version of the way in which Brexit, unless in the very softest of forms, and perhaps even then, was bound to de-stabilise the fragile calibration of the GFA.

This is exactly what Tony Blair and John Major warned of in 2016 and exactly what Villiers, Johnson and other Brexiters denied. As for the consequences of the specific form the NIP took, for all that Heaton-Harris now says that these were not known when it was agreed, they were spelt out in detail in a civil service briefing at the time. In any case, the core objection of unionists is not to the details of its operation but to the basic principle of a trade border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. It’s simply absurd to pretend that this was an unforeseen consequence of the 2019 deal: it was the front and centre of that deal.

However, as everyone knows, the main barrier to Sunak agreeing a deal with the EU lies less in Belfast than in London, with his own fractured party. This week, Maros Sefovic has again been making very conciliatory statements about flexibility, and it’s clear that a deal is there for the doing (£). But that’s been true for a long time. Whether Sunak can and will do it remains unclear.

Sunak: no discernible agenda

In fact, Sunak’s entire agenda as Prime Minister, beyond that of clearing up the mess of the Truss mini-budget, is difficult to discern, and nowhere more so than as regards the NIP. So far as I know he has very little knowledge of, or prior interest in, Northern Ireland, although to his credit he attended the British-Irish Council summit this week, the first Prime Minister to do so since 2007. It’s known, or at least reported, that as Chancellor he opposed taking a ‘hard’ (i.e. illegal) line on the negotiations by pursuing the NIP Bill, apparently for fear of the economic consequences, but his overall position is ambiguous.

Similarly, it is unclear how he might approach the EU. There is some mood music that the tone of his interactions with EU leaders have been positive, with Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney making some especially optimistic comments, and he seems to have had harmonious meetings with Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen this week. Nevertheless, he is extremely inexperienced in foreign policy, and his blunder in only going to COP27 under pressure either indicates a maladroitness in international affairs, or a lack of interest in them compared with domestic issues or, worse, that he initially saw ignoring COP27 not just as having lower priority than those issues but as a way of signaling sympathy to the right of his party that he, like them, is sceptical about Net Zero.

Even if that wasn’t the case, it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if Sunak’s overwhelming priority is to prevent another outbreak of Tory civil war. And given that the ERG and like-minded Tory MPs are likely to oppose any deal with the EU over the NIP, it’s questionable whether he will be strong enough to over-ride them, even assuming he wanted to.

Same old Tory Party

That isn’t going to change however long the process drags on for, and it isn’t going to be resolved by the ongoing ‘technical talks’ because it is a political decision. In fact, by having gone on for so long, it is now very likely to intertwine with what happens over EU retained law. The ERG might conceivably swallow ‘backsliding’ on one of these, if only to avoid the sheer absurdity of potentially bringing down yet another leader, but not both. And with them and the Tory right generally - including someone I’d been happily unaware of before, Lee Anderson, but who even on first encounter seems worthy of a special award for his prolier than thou self-importance, nastiness and ignorance - frothing with spittle-flecked anger over asylum seekers, how long before their existing disdain for Sunak ‘the socialist’ turns into open revolt?

These three issues are linked not just in being pre-occupations of the Tory Right, but in showing the persistence of Brexity post-truth politics. For, as Professor Gerhard Schnyder sets out in his latest Brexit Impact Tracker, hopes that the collapse of the Truss mini-budget in the face of reality would be a turning point towards realism and pragmatism have proved over-optimistic, except in terms of the forthcoming budget and then only in a limited way, if at all. It’s notable, for example, that Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch seems still to be talking down the validity of OBR calculations.

Certainly as regards the scrapping of EU retained law, along with Rees-Mogg’s continuing denial of reality, David Jones of the ERG  is quoted as saying (£) he “absolutely believed” it could be completed by the end of 2023. Regarding asylum seekers, it is reported that “Ministers insist that the arrival of small boats must simply be stopped, but Home Office staff say the focus should now be on improving the dysfunctional asylum processing system”. And, of course, as regards the NIP, Brexit Ultras have simply never accepted the basic reality that hard Brexit entails a border. The one way in which the NIP issue is different is that, if Sunak does completely give in to the Tory right, which would put the UK on the path of breaking international law as well as a potential trade war, he might very well encounter a rebellion from the other wing of the party.

Politics on hold

For now, almost everything in UK politics is on hold until the Budget statement, but it is hard to see how the NIP can be left unresolved for very long after that. Perhaps it will be settled via some fudge that the DUP and ERG will accept. Perhaps, too, the scrapping of EU retained law will quietly be extended to the almost indefinite future. Perhaps, as happened under Johnson and looked set to continue under Truss, there will be a gradual loosening of immigration restrictions. Perhaps, even, and if only for the most disreputable of reasons, a fair, workable and legal asylum system will be established, including a sensible agreement with France.

Indeed perhaps Brexit itself will be permanently in the political doldrums, a constant drag on the British economy and on British international standing, yet scarcely discussed as if it were the habitual drunken lechery of an elderly uncle at family parties: unpleasant to contemplate and considered in bad taste to mention, until he finally dies at which point everyone says how much they loathed him.

Or perhaps this is just a hiatus until the next crisis, such as a massive rebellion from the Brexit Ultras over one or other, or all, of the NIP, retained law, and immigration. That would require the Ultras to be willing to place extreme dogma ahead of both practicality and political loyalty, but that is not exactly to put an outlandish strain on the imagination.

It’s not easy to say which scenario is the more likely, nor which is the more depressing.

Can’t pay? Won’t pay!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that, “the current political chaos and economic turmoil have served to crystallize what has actually been under way for a while. Having won the 2016 vote for Brexit, the Brexiters have comprehensively lost the battle for the post-Brexit narrative which began at the end of the transition period, when the reality of being outside the EU began. There have been ebbs and flows in that battle but, although there will continue to be skirmishes, it is now effectively over”.

It's the economy, stupid!

We can see the consequences of that playing out now, and they are doing so in a particular way and for particular reasons. Those reasons are the arrival of Sunak, and the nature of the implosion of the brief Truss premiership that led to it. For Truss did two things. Firstly, she tested almost to destruction the theocratic Brexiter idea that belief could trump reality and the nationalist Brexiter idea that the UK was strong enough to buck what they call ‘the global Establishment’. Secondly, she made the central pitch of her post-Brexit vision economic performance and, specifically, economic growth. When that pitch fell apart so disastrously that brought Sunak to power on the sole basis of being ‘realistic’ and ‘economically competent’.

All this happened against a broader background of growing public concern about the economy. Since February 2022 it has been seen as the most important issue facing the country, which hadn’t been the case since May 2014. Currently, a whopping 70% of the public think ‘the economy’ is the most important issue, way ahead of the next most important (health, 43%), something likely to be exacerbated by yesterday’s interest rate rise and Bank of England forecast of a long recession. And this isn’t just about ‘the economy’ in the abstract: for example, 34% of people are less confident than they were last year that they can feed themselves and their families. At the same time, the latest polls show that 53% of people think Brexit has had a negative effect on the economy, and only 12% that it has had a positive effect.

So Sunak’s central claim of realism and economic competence is important in terms of voters’ priorities and it also necessarily brings into focus the economic damage of Brexit. How can that realistically be denied, and how can any claim to economic competence be sustained for as long as it is denied? This in turn brings into focus not just Brexit but the way that Brexit morphed into the hard Brexit of leaving the single market and customs union. The Brexiters won that battle in the first six months of Theresa May’s premiership but, now, it is just beginning to be re-litigated. How could it not be, if growth and economic competence are central to politics?

For so long as those things frame the terms of debate, rather than vague, boosterish stuff about ‘sunny uplands’, ‘Brexit freedoms’ and ‘sovereignty’, or populist slogans about ‘delivering the will of the people’, there can be only one outcome. To take just one recent example, in the words of Assistant Editor of the Daily Telegraph Jeremy Warner, “from an economic perspective there has been zero payback [for Brexit], and particularly in the area of international trade and reputation, considerable harm”. He continues by saying that those trying to “hide behind” the various global shocks that have served to conceal the impact of Brexit “delude themselves”.

An emerging consensus

This is now slowly emerging as the collective consensus, perhaps rather in the same way that the 1956 Suez Crisis, which at the time bitterly divided political opinion, gradually became established as a byword for national humiliation and disastrous folly. It has been many decades since anyone seriously disputed that. Admittedly we are not quite there with Brexit, yet, which in any case is a far bigger collective trauma than Suez. Writing in The Spectator, Matthew Parris expressed the current situation well:

“Where during these recent, turbulent years, can we identify any big wrong turning that … Britain took? The answer is lurking … but never quite surfacing. It is there in the collective unconscious of a nation but hardly acknowledged because its acknowledgement is just too painful, too ready to take us to war again – to war with each other and with ourselves. It is among the reasons the dream of an uptick in economic growth eludes us … Brexit isn’t working. We should never have left: and if we were implacably resolved to leave, we should have stayed in the single market.”

The Truss-Sunak handover is enabling this unacknowledged truth to be more widely and more loudly spoken. Shortly after its release a fortnight ago, I referred to the excellent Financial Times video cataloguing the economic damage of Brexit. Within a few days it had had three million views, and no doubt that figure is higher now. Then, last week, a shorter but equally excellent video by the BBC’s Ros Atkins, carrying essentially the same message, went viral. Tellingly, in terms of my point about the impact of Truss-Sunak, the FT film begins with the mini-budget and the BBC’s with Sunak’s promise to ‘build the economy’.

Round up the usual suspects

Unsurprisingly, with this heavy artillery pounding on the economics of Brexit, and the changing political mood, there has been an attempted counter-offensive. Because it came from the BBC, Atkins’ video, especially, had sufficient reach that Brexiters couldn’t ignore it and, of course, because it came from the BBC they subsumed it into their familiar critique of the Corporation’s supposed (though wrongly so, as Emily Maitlis recently argued) anti-Brexit bias.

Thus the ever-splenetic arch-Brexiter John Longworth, writing in the capital letter strewn style that, like the green ink letters of a former era, invariably denotes the author being a total loon, proposed that we look at “THE FACTS” instead of the Atkins video. With tragic inevitability, these were ‘the facts’ supplied by the Brexit Facts4EU website, a source whose credibility might unfairly be compared with Pravda, but perhaps not unreasonably with the Tooting Popular Front Gazette since, like Communism, Brexit has become the revolution that would have been perfect if only it had been properly tried. At all events, Brexit Facts4EU has in its own estimation produced a “demolition” of the Atkins video, using “official facts”, no less, even though such officialdom is usually seen by Brexiters as the mark of ‘the Establishment’. It also “demands” another programme, featuring – guess what? –  pro-Brexit economists “such as Julian Jessop, Andrew Lilico, Liam Halligan, Professor Patrick Minford, the IEA, and others”.

In a similar way, in the Daily Telegraph (£), Professor Robert Tombs, one of the 41 – yes, 41! – self-proclaimed ‘brains for Brexit’, was also busy denouncing the new ‘Project Fear’ (surely the most vacuous political slogan ever devised). Tombs, an eminent Professor of French History, makes no claim to credentials in economics or business, but, like the rookie art critic who may not know much about art, he knows what he likes. What he likes, and refers his readers to, is yet another of the interminable Brexiter websites, this time ‘Briefings for Britain’, for its, of course, completely unbiased assessment of the economic impacts from long-time pro-Brexit economists Graham Gudgin, Julian Jessop and Harry Western. And – again, guess what? – according to them it’s all going pretty well, and the only reason to doubt that comes from remainer economists producing “ideological” analysis.

Meanwhile, in the Daily Mail, Dominic Lawson was also outraged by the Atkins video, although much of his article was taken up with a ‘guilt by association’ critique of Mark Carney’s recent assertion that the UK economy has gone from being 90% of the size of Germany’s in 2016 to 70% now. As Lawson says, it’s an assertion that has been heavily criticised by Professor Jonathan Portes, whom he rightly refers to as both an eminent economist and as one not known as a particular fan of Brexit. But so what? For as Lawson acknowledges, the Carney claim didn’t feature in Atkins’ video.

That red herring aside, the Lawson article is an exercise in denial. Like Brexit Facts4EU and Briefings for Britain, he relies for his critique of Atkins on one of the tiny minority of pro-Brexit economists, once again the former IEA Chief Economist Julian Jessop, before finally falling back on the familiar but absurd defence that “for many millions who voted for Brexit, it was not just, or even at all, about GDP”. The absurdity is obvious. If this is the case, then why make such a song and dance about how Brexit isn’t bad for the economy? And why did the Vote Leave campaign in 2016 explicitly claim that it would be good for the economy, whilst vociferously denouncing suggestions to the contrary as Project Fear? And why, even now, is the government still pumping out ridiculous lies about the value of post-Brexit trade deals?

Crucially, it isn’t 2016 anymore, so how does the ‘not about GDP’ line now work as an argument in the context of Truss' and Sunak’s focus on the economy? Just as 70% of the public now think ‘the economy’ is the most important issue facing the country, only 18% think it is ‘Britain leaving the EU’ (perhaps reflecting that many see it as ‘done’). By contrast, at its highest, in December 2019, leaving the EU was seen as the most important issue by 71% and the economy by only 26%. In fact, throughout the period July 2016 to March 2020 more people thought the Brexit issue was the most important facing the country than thought it was the economy. (Of course these figures don’t say anything about whether or not people think that leaving the EU matters more than the economic effects of doing so, and they certainly don’t measure support for Brexit at different times. They just measure perceptions of what policy area is currently the most important. Source for all figures is the YouGov tracker.)

What makes a good expert?

Back, though, to the praise Lawson accords Jonathan Portes. He does so, fairly obviously, because on this occasion it was about a point that it suited him to do so, noting that “Portes still thinks that Brexit is not beneficial to the economy, but is prepared to reassess the extent of that as events develop”. Lawson is correct to take an openness to evidence and reason as an important quality and guarantor of reliability, but doesn’t follow through on its wider implications on where we should look for expertise. No doubt amongst the large majority of economists who think Brexit is economically damaging there are some whose opposition to Brexit is so doctrinaire that they would never reassess their position. But that doesn’t apply to most of them who, like Portes, would be guided by the available evidence, because that is central to their professional values which long precede and go far deeper than their views on Brexit.

The same is true of the vast majority of those who are not economists by profession or training, but who are economically literate and/or who have expert knowledge and/or experience of business, trade, regulation and all the other things which lie under the bonnet of the headline economics of Brexit. Speaking as someone in that category, I’m not opposed to Brexit despite evidence of it being an economic success, but because evidence and reason suggest it is, and is bound to be, an economic failure. And like, I imagine, most people in this category (in fact, like most of the general public), membership or otherwise of the EU wasn’t a burning issue before the referendum and only became so during or afterwards. It’s not the result of some lifetime of investment in the cause of EU membership.

But let’s turn that round. Does anyone seriously think that there is any conceivable evidence that would lead any of the small group of high-profile economists always invoked in support of Brexit – people who have been advocates of, and intellectually invested in, Brexit for, in some cases, decades before it happened - to change their minds? Have any of them ever even proposed such evidential tests?

In fact it’s this lack of ‘falsifiability’ in Brexiter economics (i.e. that, contrary to one well-known criterion for a good scientific theory, there is no piece of evidence which, if presented, could lead to the theory being proved false) which makes it so flawed. It’s not simply that pro-Brexit economists are in the minority because, after all, they could still be right. It’s that no evidence could conceivably make them admit to being wrong so – unlike the quality Lawson rightly ascribes to Portes – they will never reassess their view. It is also why, although any presentation of evidence will necessarily be selective, there are good reasons to expect that these economists will cherry-pick facts without even attempting to give due weight to context and counter-evidence.

That represents an intellectual failure but, in the currently emerging context, it also represents a political failure. There can be no doubt that the small group of doctrinaire pro-Brexit economists, and the nexus of thinktanks with which they are associated, have had, in their own terms, political success. Partly as a result of a compliant media that gave them huge exposure in the interests of supposed ‘balance’, and partly because they offered an economic ‘simplism’ that chimed with the simplism of the leave campaign generally, they certainly played an important role in securing the vote to leave. But, now, as well as being tarnished by their role in the mini-budget, the continued reliance on the same tiny cast of characters only serves to emphasise how comprehensively Brexit has failed.

For if it had been an even partially successful project of national liberation and renewal then, by now, there would be hordes of new devotees flocking to the cause. Instead it is still, as it always has been, Minford, Jessop, Gudgin, Lilico et al. The same old Brexit warriors, manning the now beleaguered Brexit ramparts.

The revolution has failed

It is another sign of failure that, along with the main defence of denial of the negative economic impacts of the Brexit, there is an auxiliary line of defence that it is ‘too early to judge’, and that the benefits of Brexit will only emerge in time. It’s a line which has been taken in the past by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Digby Jones, amongst others. In the latest skirmishes it is advanced by Andrew Lilico, another of the usual suspects, proposing a 40-year timescale for judgement. But as I’ve pointed out when this argument has been made before, it’s utterly without merit. Not only were no such timescales mentioned when Brexit was sold to voters but, if they were envisaged, then it makes it all the more reckless that the leaving process was undertaken at such breakneck speed, with the early triggering of Article 50 and the refusal to extend the transition period.

In any case, it’s transparently obvious as a means to avoid accountability, not just by deferring judgement for so long as to be politically meaningless but by ensuring that the already evident attempts to claim that Brexit effects can’t be separated out from the impact of other events become irresistible. Effectively, the Brexiters disallow predictions, on the basis that they rely on forecasting models, and then disallow retrospective evaluations, on the basis that they rely on counterfactual models, so Brexit can never be judged; or, more accurately, on the basis of these arguments they disallow all predictions and retrospective evaluations other than their own, so their judgment of Brexit is the only one they accept as valid.

Of course these rear-guard attempts to deny the failure of Brexit don’t all take the form of trying to rebut the evidence that it is so. Some, like Tory MP Tim Loughton, at least implicitly accept it but still flounder about with the idea that “the EU are not making it [trade] easier for us” because of being “sore” that the UK has left. Obviously that ignores that the UK chose to make trade more difficult for itself.

That familiar victimhood narrative, so central to Brexit, is also evident amongst Brexiters like Professor David Blake of Briefings for Britain, who believes that a “remainer coup” has taken place, and Tim Stanley in The Telegraph (£) who accepts that “the Brexit revolution has come to an end”, with both postulating that single market membership may return, and both couching what is happening in terms of ‘the elites’ taking back control. It might be wondered why, if these elites are so powerful, Brexit ever happened in the first place and, as so often, it’s possible to glimpse how much easier it would have been for the Brexiters to sustain their sense of victimhood had it not done so.

What can also be glimpsed in Stanley’s piece is the sheer adolescence of some Brexiters when he gripes that he misses “the hope-filled Sturm und Drang of early Brexit, of the sense of forces unleashed and institutions scaled. One could almost hear the glass shattering in Whitehall”. He is not alone. That same kind of ‘disruptor’ mentality has been a significant strand of Brexit, evident in the nihilism of Dominic Cummings quite as much as the recklessness of the Truss mini-budget. If there is now talk of the adults having to clear up the mess, that is not, as Robert Tombs has it, to patronize those who voted leave. It is to take at their own reckoning the adolescent silliness of so many of those who urged voters to do so, and not even daring to propose it in those terms but instead with promises of prosperity now cruelly broken.

Those broken promises are now all too evident, and not just in headline figures about trade and growth. Increasing attention is now being paid to the disaster – discussed many times on this blog – of double regulation, for example in the cases of the chemicals industry or of the rapidly approaching deadline to make the UKCA mark mandatory. Remember the referendum campaign when, to the extent such things were discussed at all, the ‘simplist’ demand was ‘why should all British businesses comply with the EU regulations when only 12% of them trade with the EU’? Now we see the answer: the alternative is to hamper those businesses which do trade with the EU or which, unknowingly, supply them, by forcing them to follow two sets of regulation.

The ‘Home Office crisis’

Finally, away from economics, but very much in the headlines, we see that far from fixing the ‘migrant crisis’ – a crisis which is in fact a crisis of the abject failure of the Home Office to create adequate processing facilities for the, by international standards, very small number of asylum seekers to the UK – Brexit has inflamed it. That’s partly because the UK is no longer part of Dublin III Regulation, one provision of which can in some cases allow asylum seekers to be returned to the first EU country they arrived in. At the time of the exit negotiations the government claimed that it would negotiate bilateral deals with EU member states to the same effect, but it was yet another Brexit pipe dream, with EU countries responding that Brexit Britain could no longer “count on European solidarity”.

Yet, unlike the economic consequences, there is little sign of political and public awareness that this crisis is in part another Brexit crisis. Instead, there is a literally inflammatory and proto-fascist response stoked by vile talk, including  from the Home Secretary, of an “invasion”. There is also revived suggestion of a ‘Brexit 2.0’, in which the UK leaves the European Convention on Human Rights rather than perform the straightforward administrative task of creating a rapid processing and humane housing scheme for asylum seekers who, even aside from the moral issues, could make a superb contribution to British life including, indeed, to economic prosperity.

All this is not just depressing but shameful and disgusting, as well as being an insufficiently recognized indictment of Brexit and, being an issue where opinion still divides along remainer-leaver lines, a reminder of one of the deep-seated roots of Brexit.

The won’t of the people

Nevertheless, that doesn’t negate the wider way in which Truss’s failure and the advent of the Sunak government is bringing a new public realization of, at least, the economic failure of Brexit. Apart from that being logically entailed for the reasons I gave above, there is also already some opinion poll evidence for it, although it is complex to decipher. Sir John Curtice's analysis does so, in particular by showing that, although the gradual growth of opinion that Brexit was a mistake hasn’t been much affected by the mini-budget, the mini-budget has deepened the negative view of Brexit, and especially amongst those who, whilst having voted leave in 2016, would now vote to rejoin.

So this is in line with my suggestion that the public view has gradually but very clearly shifted to Brexit having been a mistake since the end of the transition period, and is now solidifying as economic issues come to the fore. My expectation would be that, to the extent that these issues are set to dominate the coming political period, this new attention to its negative economic realities will also dominate discussion of Brexit, and that sentiment will turn more widely and more deeply against Brexit, although there must be an upper ceiling to that.

Related to this, for all that for some time to come we will go on hearing the squeals of the usual suspects in their last-ditch defence of the failed project of Brexit, we now very rarely hear what used to be the bullying battle cry of it being ‘the will of the people’. There is a good reason for this. There has barely been an opinion poll since August 2017 which doesn’t show a majority view that Brexit was a mistake. After that date, the split of opinion was often close but since June 2021 it has been inexorably growing so that now, excluding don’t knows (who have run steadily at about 12% throughout), only 39% think it was right whilst 61% think it was wrong to leave. So Brexit is certainly not the will of the people, and, with the central focus of politics now on the economy, politicians need to catch up. Increasingly, voters won’t be willing to pay the price this failed and unpopular project is exacting.

Enter Sunak, the fifth Brexit Prime Minister

So the brief interruption to his seemingly permanent holidays from the MP’s job he is paid for was all for nothing in the end, as Boris Johnson’s bid to return to the leadership failed. It was yet another testimony to his egotism and entitlement and even in making it added to the long list of damage he has done to the country, this time by making Britain’s political crisis an even greater source of international disrepute than it would otherwise have been. “A country in free fall” as an Austrian paper put it last Sunday.

Little will Johnson care about that, any more than do the media organizations that breathlessly hyped his every word and movement last weekend as if he were the Prince returning from over the water to free his people, rather than a disgraced grifter coming back from the seaside to stick his snout into the trough again. He may yet be back for another go, but his first complacent and then demeaning conduct this time may have made that less likely. If so, it is one blessing. Meanwhile, Liz Truss stomped off with a defiant final speech, suggesting she still doesn’t even begin to understand why it all went so wrong, so quickly, for her.

Had Johnson succeeded, the prospects of immediate political crisis and further economic damage would have been much greater than they are: tellingly, sterling rose and gilt yields (i.e. the cost of government borrowing) fell sharply on the news that Johnson had decided not to enter the contest. That continued as Rishi Sunak began to form his cabinet. He is also likely to enjoy at least as brief period of respite from internal attacks from his MPs, and perhaps a bounce in the opinion polls, although there is very little sign of that yet.

However, as the fifth Prime Minister since the Brexit referendum (and the third in the last seven weeks) takes office, continuing political crisis is assured for the reasons I discussed in last week’s post and several others over the summer. It may not quite be “inevitable that Sunak will be politically ripped apart by the same contradictions that plagued his predecessors”, as Nick Tyrone puts it in his latest Week in Brexitland newsletter, but it’s certainly highly likely, and what is inevitable is that Brexit will play a central role in his administration and its ultimate fate.

Sunak, Brexitism and Brexit

Sunak may well be more ‘realistic’ and more ‘competent’ than either Johnson or Truss, and, low as the bar is, he can hardly fail to be more ethical than the former or less maladroit than the latter. He may also, as Timothy Garton Ash and many others believe, be less prone to ‘Brexitism’ than either of them, with one index of that being his good relations with the civil service (£), in sharp contrast to his predecessors and most of the Brexit Ultras. Nor does he seem especially interested in fighting the Brexitist anti-woke, culture war, although some silly digs during his first PMQs about ‘North London’ and Labour’s supposed attempts to reverse the Brexit referendum suggested he’s not completely immune to it. He also seems fairly free of the vapid boosterism of the two previous incumbents and of their ‘magical thinking’ that true Brexit belief can trump reality. And he made an early, and apparently well-received, phone call to Ursula von der Leyen.

However, ultimately he won’t be exempt from the charge of Brexitism unless he is honest about the damage of Brexit itself, as suggested in a robust intervention this week from long-time Tory donor Guy Hands, and addresses how to reduce or even reverse it. As the leading businessman Juergen Maier also argued this week, that means seeking to rejoin the single market and a customs union. The economic logic is impeccable, especially for a country in desperate need of growth. The costs of being outside are high whilst the benefits are small, if not non-existent. On the customs union, in particular, trade expert Sam Lowe makes it clear that the UK’s ‘independent trade policy’ has faltered having hardly begun. And Maier’s proposal would also effectively solve the Northern Ireland Protocol issue.

The politics are an entirely different matter though. As Maier points out, his proposal involves a “brave shift” to face down the ERG in the way that no Tory leader since, to an extent, John Major has done. It’s true that if Sunak were going to do that then now is the time, since the Tories can hardly depose yet another leader, and he could threaten them with a General Election. But I suspect, and I expect Sunak does too, that there are sufficient ‘Spartans’ who are simply beyond caring about the consequences, and would prefer to crash the government and the Tory Party than accept a reversion to ‘soft Brexit’ (or even some milder easements of Brexit’s effects).

No doubt there will continue to be calls to do so, and Tory MP Tobias Ellwood has been making them for some time now, but it’s all but unthinkable that Sunak will heed them. Even so, in the past, unlike most Brexiters, Sunak has actually admitted to some of the damage to trade. And although in his first ‘address to the nation’ he briefly mentioned ‘embracing the opportunities of Brexit’ he said no more. Arguably, he could hardly have said less. Perhaps the very most that can be expected is that he might stop adding to the damage, for example through pointless and costly regulatory divergence.

The post-Brexit political constraints on Sunak

Of course if Sunak went even that far it would add to the roster of political opposition he faces within his own party. Even before his victory had been announced there were signs of it, with Christopher ‘upskirt’ Chope, conceivably the most odious MP not just of this Parliament but those of many decades, warning that he faced an “ungovernable party”. The reason, at least in the first instance, is that, like rainmakers forecasting the weather, MPs such as Chope will make it so. Indeed there is a sense that, quite apart from any disputes about personality, policy or ideology, there are some Tory MPs now addicted to the drama and chaos of rebellion, plots and coups. Within that, some, most obviously the ludicrous Mark Francois, appear to revel in the pompous self-importance that such drama allows, like a latter-day Captain Mainwaring but with less good scriptwriters.

However, the opposition Sunak will face goes much deeper than that, and the reasons all root back to Brexit. One is the fragile nature of the electoral coalition that delivered Johnson the 2019 ‘get Brexit done’ General Election majority which Sunak inherits, a fragility which feeds through into a highly factionalised body of Tory MPs. Now, those voters, and especially the fabled Red Wall voters, are leaching away from the Conservatives whilst the factions are more entrenched than ever. It is not the case that, just because Johnson assembled this coalition, he and only he could manage the factions it gave rise to. In fact, despite being, on paper, a comfortable majority, right from the outset of the 2019 parliament Johnson faced repeated actual or threatened rebellions, resulting in numerous policy U-turns. So Sunak will have a majority which is large, but is inherently unstable, with many factions able to mobilise the 40-odd votes needed to defeat any particular piece of legislation.

That instability will be all the greater for Sunak because the consequence of Truss’s disastrous mini-budget is to make significant public spending cuts his first priority, whereas part of Johnson’s 2019 pitch was to airily banish ‘austerity’ to the past. It remains to be seen whether the Red Wall MPs, especially, will condone its return. Equally, others will oppose any tax rises he may introduce. It’s even possible Sunak’s government may fall early on, if it cannot pass its finance measures, but that’s the one thing that may force rebel MPs to approve them: the potential rebels on fiscal policy, unlike ‘the Spartans’ on anything Brexit-related, are not immune to reason.

The other reason he will face opposition goes deeper still, and derives from the incoherent and now fissured support for Brexit itself. In particular, although Sunak was himself a Brexiter in 2016, albeit not a very high-profile one, for many of those who were high-profile he is the ‘wrong sort’ of Brexiter. Indeed that is the inevitable corollary of him being less ‘Brexitist’ than the last two Prime Ministers. Thus, already, his premiership, and the demise of Truss, are being represented by Nigel Farage and others on the populist right as being a victory for the ‘globalist Establishment’ and a ‘remainer coup’. Likewise, he is seen as having been too ‘conciliatory’ to the EU when he was Chancellor, especially as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol. Notably, his candidature was not endorsed by the ERG which, despite its pledge of loyalty to whoever became the leader, looks set to pounce on any deviation from what it takes to be Brexit orthodoxy. Yet at the same time as being denounced as an Establishment ‘globalist’, and despite being very much on the free market, deregulatory right, in the bizarre world of Brexiter politics Sunak is regarded as a ‘socialist’.

Everything about this is difficult to decode, since it comes from supporters of Johnson, who was neither a deeply committed Brexiter nor a small-stater, as well as from supporters of Truss and the Patrick Minford-IEA libertarians, from whom Sunak is not very ideological distant except to the extent that he didn’t endorse their ‘anti-Establishment’ idea that borrowing money to cut taxes would promote growth. Indeed he is likely to be closer to Truss’s version of Brexit with respect to being relaxed about immigration levels than to that of Suella Braverman, and this cuts directly across the Farage line that Truss et al were anti-Establishment insurgents and yet not genuine Brexiters on immigration in the way Braverman is. It’s yet another example of the total incoherence of the Brexit project.

Sunak and deregulation

That incoherence also wrongfoots some critics of Brexit, so that the fact that the Trussonomics libertarians despise Sunak and vice versa rather confounds those who, when he was Chancellor, insisted that he was in the vanguard of an extreme libertarian plan whereby Brexit would pave the way to the creation of ‘Charter Cities’ across the UK. Although that idea was always nonsense, it remains the case that Sunak is ideologically committed to deregulation, and that means that it would be wrong to assume that that part of Truss’s post-Brexit agenda has disappeared. In fact, she never even got round to unveiling the ‘supply-side reforms’ that were to be the counterpart of the tax cuts as part of the plan for growth. Sunak may very well do so, even though the tax-cutting part of the plan is dead, as is the idea of ripping up employment rights, which even Truss realised was too extreme (£).

However, as I’ve written about in detail before, those deregulatory reforms are also likely to encounter significant opposition from some groups of Tory MPs, especially as regards planning laws, whilst the ‘bonfire of EU regulations’ to be created by the EU Retained Law Bill will run into major practical problems and has already encountered opposition from business and other lobby groups. This legislation was initially sponsored by Jacob Rees-Mogg until his resignation – which itself provided another instance of his trademark pretentiousness, dated as it was ‘St Crispin’s Day’. It was a suitable end to a Ministerial career which he would never have had but for Brexit, and should never have had – not because of his Brexit views but because his Pooterish didacticism marked him out as the worst kind of middle-management drone, more concerned with exerting petty authority than providing effective leadership.

The Bill continued its passage this week, with Rees-Mogg now on the backbenches spitefully denouncing as anti-Brexit those Tories raising concerns about it. Yet already it is reported that Sunak is considering slowing or even abandoning this legislation, and also that it runs counter to what he promised the ERG. So this a very possible flashpoint for a Brexit-related rebellion.

Another Brexit fissure was re-opened by Sunak’s controversial re-appointment of the politically and morally grotesque Suella Braverman to the Home Office, itself apparently the price of getting her endorsement, as a high-profile ERG Brexiter, of his candidature rather than Johnson’s. This appointment can be seen as his ‘first mistake’ but is really just the first consequence of the necessity for Tory leaders to try to placate the unplacatable ERG. In turn, it will have the consequence either that relaxation of immigration controls to promote growth is off the agenda, or that there’s going to be a reprise of the almighty Truss-Braverman row about it (£) and a wider row with other anti-immigration Brexiters. Another possible flashpoint.

It’s not even clear whether the Sunak government will be able to afford the tax breaks (£) to make meaningful the plans for Investment Zones, assuming he continues with that proposal from the Truss-Kwarteng period. What is clear, from an answer he gave Green MP Caroline Lucas at PMQs on Wednesday, is that he will not continue Truss’s attempt to revive fracking, which had already prompted bitter division amongst Tory MPs.

At all events, despite being elected unopposed by a party under ‘existential threat’ if its dysfunctionality continues, Sunak’s political position is not strong. Indeed, amongst party members, who rejected him as leader during the summer leadership contest, and would prefer to still be led by Boris Johnson, it is decidedly weak. So too is it weak in the country generally, presented with yet another mid-term change of Prime Minister without a general election, raising questions about the legitimacy of his mandate. There may be little they can do, at least directly, but the various factions amongst the MPs certainly can, and there must be every chance that a vengeful Johnson will take every chance to stir the pot. So whether on spending cuts, deregulatory reforms, EU retained law or immigration he may well face significant opposition.

Northern Ireland Protocol: the first crisis for Sunak?

However, it could be the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) which creates the first real crisis for his premiership. The dynamics of the NIP situation have actually changed remarkably little since I wrote about them in detail in July, when Johnson was still Prime Minister and the NIP Bill was starting its passage through parliament, which is continuing now. If things are different to how they were then, one reason is just because the passage of time has brought the non-functioning of the Northern Ireland power-sharing institutions to a point of urgency, with fresh Assembly elections now in prospect as of today.

The situation has also changed as regards negotiations with the EU because Truss proved to take a relatively conciliatory approach, and seemed to have managed to get the two ERG hardliners she appointed as NI Secretary and Minister – Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker – on board with that approach. We will never know how that would have developed had she continued in office, and it remains to be seen what happens under Sunak. It is certainly important that he has kept Heaton-Harris and Baker in their posts, but what that importance is remains unclear, as it did under Truss. Does it betoken a refusal to make any compromises with the EU, as their hardliner credentials might imply? Or is it that those credentials are to be used to ‘sell’ a compromise deal to the Brexiters including, conceivably, the DUP?

For the fundamental question for Sunak, as it was for Johnson and Truss, persists: if he does any deal that the EU is remotely likely to accept, will the Brexiters also accept it? Despite Baker’s surprising and potentially game-changing recent apology over how the Brexit process as regards Ireland and Northern Ireland had been handled, last weekend he issued an uncompromising warning to Sunak that the ERG would not accept any role for EU law in Northern Ireland and would collapse the government rather than do so. Yet it seems inconceivable that the EU would, or even could, agree to such an arrangement.

So either there will be no deal, the NIP Bill will pass and be used, causing a crisis in relations with the EU, and with serious implications for relations with the US; or a deal will be done with the EU, the NIP Bill abandoned or its powers not used, and there will be a political crisis within the Tory Party. Moreover, both have economic consequences. A crisis with the EU could ultimately lead to trade sanctions or even a trade war. A fresh political crisis will indicate further instability which impacts on the price at which markets are willing to fund government debt. Plainly either will be damaging to Sunak’s core focus of restoring international credibility and financial stability.

The unfolding legacy of Brexit lies

The NIP situation is the most high-profile reminder that, along with any other problems the government and the country face, those of Brexit persist. Some of these are the now entrenched ones, like the higher costs of trade and disruption to holidays in the EU. Others, like the NIP, are issues still unresolved from the exit process, and reflect both the lies told during the referendum campaign and the dishonesty and incompetence of the agreement made by Boris Johnson and David Frost.

There are numerous examples of the latter sort. One, which has received remarkably little attention, can be seen to symbolise all of them: the UK’s continuing failure to impose post-Brexit import controls. I’ve written in detail before about why this matters, especially as regards animal and public health, primarily because the UK no longer has full access to all the relevant EU databases, but also due to lack of staff with the necessary skills, as highlighted by a recent report from the Public Accounts Committee. The consequences of that were revealed this week when, within a 24 hour period, 21 out of 22 lorries inspected coming in to Dover from the EU were found to be carrying illegal raw meat products.

The reason this example is symbolic is because, like the NIP, it shows the ongoing consequences of the lies and incompetence of the Brexiters since 2016. Repeatedly they denied that (hard) Brexit entailed borders. Repeatedly they declared versions of ‘if the EU want to erect borders, that’s up to them’, demonstrating a total failure to understand the consequences of what they were advocating, not just for Northern Ireland but for all borders with the EU. That in turn meant that preparations were not begun until far too late, and the chance to extend the Transition Period to give more time to prepare was rejected as ‘backsliding’ on Brexit. So here we are now, in 2022, with a whole swathe of persistent, unresolved, ongoing problems, ranging from fishing quotas, to agricultural subsidies, to participation in Horizon, to the introduction or otherwise of the UKCA mark, to, indeed, the introduction of full import controls.

It is important to emphasise this because, as time goes by, it becomes easy to treat Brexit as if it were a past event, at most something with consequences we must now live with. Or to see the NIP issue as the last hanging thread of the Brexit process. But that is not the situation at all. Rather, in all sorts of ways, we are still in the process of ‘doing’ Brexit even though, apart from, sometimes, Northern Ireland, that is no longer headline news. And, in that process, we are still uncovering the criminal irresponsibility of the ways the Brexiters lied.

It will be especially easy to forget this given that the immediate political focus of the Sunak government will be the economic crisis, with the full fiscal statement now scheduled for 17 November. That would be wrong because all these ongoing Brexit problems are also important. But it would be doubly wrong since Brexit is embedded at the centre of the economic crisis itself. Inflation is higher, the trade deficit is larger, the labour shortage is greater and growth is lower than they would have been but for Brexit. To the outside world it is so obvious. As leading French journalist Sylvie Kauffman, writing in the Financial Times (£), puts it “for many Europeans, the only surprise of the British political and economic mayhem of the last few weeks is the lack of debate about its real cause: no one involved seems to blame Brexit”.

TL;DR

For all that Sunak may be hailed as a ‘serious’ and ‘realistic’ Prime Minister, the fact that he cannot admit these obvious facts about Brexit without being destroyed by his own party means that he cannot seriously or realistically address the economic crisis. As I argued at length in last week’s post, the same goes for Starmer unless he does so. And for all that, as also discussed in that post, the ignominious collapse of Truss’s government may mark a turning point in the entire Brexit saga, the corner has not been turned by the arrival of Sunak. Nor will it be until the poison of Brexit lies has been drained from the body politic.