Brexit reminders

Compared with a few years ago, Brexit no longer dominates the headlines, not least because those who once so loudly advocated it are now too embarrassed to mention it. However, it lies behind many of the news stories, like – take your pick of metaphors – dry rot in the basement, a predator lurking in the bushes, or a chronic, debilitating illness.

In the last fortnight, major examples include the latest report of the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, the sentencing of a former Reform official and UKIP/ Brexit Party MEP for taking Russian bribes, and, of course, the budget, as well as the latest net migration figures.

Brexit and Covid

The publication of the second module of the Hallett Inquiry, which focusses on decision-making and political governance, reveals a woeful picture. As has been widely reported it shows that a “toxic and chaotic” culture pervaded the Johnson-Cummings government. Whilst this had significant implications for the handling of the pandemic, which of course is the focus of the report, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it also has implications for Brexit.

I must admit that I haven’t read the full report, which runs to 800 pages, so I’m not sure what, if anything, it says about Brexit (the summary document makes no mention of it at all). However, as I wrote in some detail at the time, the evidence heard by the Inquiry showed several significant connections. That post also contains links to several posts I wrote during the pandemic which identified some of those connections and I won’t repeat all the points I’ve made previously but, in brief, they include:

·         The damage Brexit had done to the machinery and processes of government, and especially to the civil service;

·         The extent to which Brexit was prioritized over Covid in the early days of the pandemic;

·         The refusal to extend the Transition Period, despite the impact of Covid throughout almost its entirety, with consequences both for the negotiations and the businesses which had to adapt, virtually overnight, to the eventual agreement;

·         The ideational and institutional connections between Brexit and the response to Covid;

·         The simplism and nostalgia evident in both Brexit and the pandemic.

At the most basic level, if, as the Inquiry shows, the government was “toxic and chaotic” in its handling of Covid, then it would be absurd to imagine that it was not equally so in its handling of Brexit. The same people, at the same time, could hardly have been governing in exemplary fashion in one domain whilst being so incompetent in the other. Moreover, the Johnson-Cummings government was itself a legacy of Brexit and, ultimately, of the Vote Leave campaign. In that sense, having so shambolic an administration when Covid struck was itself one of the adverse consequences of Brexit.

I don’t think the publication of the latest Hallett Report tells us anything new about this since it was, indeed, clear from the evidence the Inquiry heard, and from what could be surmised before. However, it is a moment worth recording that it is now a matter of official record just how incompetent that ‘get Brexit done’ government was. What is new, although entirely unsurprising, is the reaction it has provoked from Johnson and Cummings in particular, but also from the serried ranks for their supporters who, of course, are almost invariably Brexiters.

Thus, referring to Hallett as “some judge”, Johnson, who set up the Inquiry and set its terms of reference in the first place, dismissed the report (£) as “hopelessly incoherent” and “totally muddled”. Cummings, predictably, was even more vitriolic, accusing Hallett and the Inquiry’s lead lawyer of spreading lies and calling for both to “be stripped of all official jobs, all gongs, and legally barred from working in the law for the rest of their lives”. And David Frost called it a “disgrace”, complaining, amongst other things, that it “scoffs at the alternative strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration”, as if it had not been endlessly debunked, including by the government’s own Chief Medical Officer (similar complaints have been spewed out across the scientifically-illiterate ‘libertarian’ right).

Anyone with an ounce of self-awareness or humility might show just an iota of contrition, perhaps even some shame, when shown their failings in such forensic detail. But Johnson and Cummings, the one girdled by his sense of entitlement, the other by his misplaced intellectual vanity, are incapable of humility or shame. As for Frost, he shows the self-awareness of a toilet seat. One might as well expect Liz Truss to refrain from pontificating about “sensible economic policy”. 

But the more important point is not their all-too-obvious personal inadequacies, it is that these mesh seamlessly with the doctrinaire refusal to accept responsibility which permeates their entire world-view. As with Nigel Farage, nothing is ever their fault. Thus, if there were ever to be a public inquiry into Brexit, it can be said, not speculatively but with certainty, that Johnson, Cummings, Frost, Farage, and all those who had leading roles within it, would never, ever accept the truth of the damage they did.

This matters, even though such a public inquiry is not in prospect, because it helps to explain why Brexitism persists in British politics, and why, as regards Brexit specifically, Britain is stuck in an impasse. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be so. There’s really no longer any room for doubt about the damage Brexit has done, most obviously economically, and no serious analyst claims otherwise. And public opinion has firmly turned against it. This leads some to suggest that it should be (relatively) easy to at least begin the process of ‘rejoining’. But there is no realistic route to that whilst a powerful phalanx of politicians and, perhaps as important, media owners and commentators remain as an obdurate, shameless, unrepentant blockage to it.

Brexit and Russia

There is also little sign of shame or penitence within Reform over the Gill scandal. As I mentioned in a recent post, in September Nathan Gill (formerly Reform’s leader in a Wales, UKIP’s leader in Wales, and a UKIP and Brexit Part MEP) pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery from pro-Russian sources to act in their interests whilst he was serving as an MEP. Now, he has been sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison for these offences.

The length of that sentence serves to underscore just how serious his crimes were. This was not some minor lobbying scandal, but sustained corruption by an elected representative in the service, in effect, of a foreign, and none-too-friendly, power. After all, the offences for which he has been sentenced began in December 2018 and ran through to July 2019, whilst in March 2018 Russian agents committed the Novichok attacks in Salisbury. At all events, the police investigation of Gill was undertaken by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terror team because, according to Commander Dominic Murphy, he had done “potential damage to national security”. 

As I noted in that earlier post, Farage and other Reform leaders have been keen to distance themselves from Gill, and this week Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, tried to dismiss Gill and his offences as “ancient history”. It won’t wash, not least as it was really not so long ago that he held a senior position in Reform. The full details of Gill’s offences are complex, but their timeline, and how they sit within the wider context of the Reform Party and its predecessors, as well as events in Russia and Ukraine, is painstakingly set out by The Nerve, a new independent media outlet [1]. As that report makes clear, there is no suggestion that Farage or other MEPs of his various parties took bribes, but some of those MEPs did say similar things to those which Gill was paid to say. My point is not that this implies any corruption on their part but that Gill was not saying things that ran contrary to views that were shared by his colleagues.

The police are now investigating other British former MEPs, who have (rightly) not been named, nor have the parties they represented, but, whilst these investigations may come to nothing, the political questions for Reform remain. Speaking to Sky News, Keir Starmer said that Farage “needs to launch an investigation into his party to understand how that [Gill’s offences] happened” and that this investigation should look into “what other links are there between Reform and Russia”. LibDem leader Ed Davey has been more forthright:

“A traitor was at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary. Nigel Farage and his party are a danger to national security. Nigel Farage himself was previously paid to be on Putin's TV channel, Russia Today, and said he was the world leader he admires the most. We must all ask – where do his loyalties really lie? We need a full investigation into Russian interference in our politics.”

At one level, all this is a reminder of the still unresolved question of what role Russia played in the 2016 Referendum – a question unresolved primarily because, according to the 2020 ‘Russia report’ by the Intelligence and Security Committee, the government did not investigate it. That report does show, though, that there was Russian interference in both the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2019 General Election, and, in general terms, that “the UK is clearly a target for Russian disinformation”. And, whatever Moscow’s role in the 2016 referendum, it has always been obvious that, at the very least, Brexit was advantageous to Russian interests in terms of destabilizing both the UK and the EU: “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”, as a former US Ambassador to Russia put it.

However, it is not necessary to disinter the referendum result to see the salience of Gill’s crimes for the politics of post-Brexit Britain. Except to those on the far-right and far-left of politics, the threat to the UK from Russia is clear and, if anything, escalating, as underlined by several incidents just in the last fortnight, including the incursion of the spy ship Yantar, which used lasers to disrupt the RAF planes tracking its movements, the interception of two Russian vessels in the Channel, and the discovery of a Russian submarine-spying device off the Welsh coast. And these events are just one manifestation of a much wider programme of physical and cyber-incursions amounting to what the former Head of MI5, the former Head of NATO, and the former Head of the Navy and Security Minister all regard an undeclared war.

The wider context of this, of course, is Ukraine, and the possibility that it will be forced into a humiliating ‘peace’ by Trump. With that, Putin would free up the resources, and feel emboldened, to step up the pressure against Europe - which very much includes the UK for, as the Brexiters used to remind us, ‘we are leaving the EU, we’re not leaving Europe’. This was perhaps the only true thing they ever said, and, as is now all too plain to see, Brexit has created an artificial and dangerous separation of the UK from its continent, made all the more dangerous because of Trump and what Trump means for NATO. As I’ve discussed in in the past, there is an obvious and disturbing axis between Putin, Trump, and Brexitism.

It is this context which makes the entire question of Farage’s foreign policy sympathies and allegiances, both as regards Putin and Trump, and his antipathies, as regards the EU, so important. He is, after all, presenting himself as the next Prime Minister and, as we are constantly reminded, his party is leading in the opinion polls. So these sympathies and allegiances, and those of all those within his party, as Gill recently was, are an absolutely legitimate matter for the most intense scrutiny, despite Reform’s attempts to shout down such scrutiny or to depict Gill as a ‘bad apple’ whose behaviour had nothing to do with the party.

Farage has said he will not investigate any Russian links within his party and dismissed the Gill case as “a minor embarrassment”. But no other British politician has been convicted of such offences in modern times (there have been some imprisonments for false accounting over expenses, but that isn’t remotely the same). Perhaps the central claim made by Brexiters was that leaving the EU would mean that voters would be free to hire and fire those who made the laws that governed them. To do that, we need to know the allegiances of those who would make our laws.

Brexit and the Budget

If the run-up to this week’s budget is anything to go by, then the allegiance of our current governing lawmakers is to being as politically maladroit as possible. I certainly can’t remember anything like it. Budget ‘purdah’ has been more honoured in the breach than the observance for some time but, even leaving aside the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) inadvertent revelation of its measures a few minutes before the Chancellor’s speech, the last few months of semi-statement have gone well beyond the now-familiar leaks and hints.

During that apparently almost interminable period, it has been notable that both Rachel Reeves and other government ministers have been increasingly open in identifying Brexit as a cause of Britain’s economic woes. This is a marked change to the far more muted references to it at the time of last year’s budget. But it is still being framed as a problem in the way Brexit was done rather than one of Brexit itself. As Rafael Behr puts it, “the problem is couched as negligent negotiation, not strategic miscalculation”.

That framing was evident in Reeves’ budget speech, which rather shamelessly implied that a new trade deal had been struck with the EU (presumably referring to the ‘reset’, the terms of which remain under negotiation). She also implied an endorsement of the Brexiters’ claim that it is of benefit to have an independent trade policy by speaking referring to deals with the US (which, unless I’ve missed something, has still only been partially implemented, and is in any case only a partial mitigation of Trump’s new tariffs, not a Free Trade Agreement) and with India (which has an estimated value of 0.13% of GDP after 15 years).

It certainly can’t be claimed that any trade policy independence Brexit has brought comes close to compensating for the fact that, as Reeves mentioned, Brexit continues to be identified by the OBR as a drag on UK productivity. Indeed, the OBR itself refers to our great act of national liberation as being one of the “successive shocks” that are responsible for the country’s lack of productivity growth. This latest report also renews the OBR’s “assessment that Brexit will reduce the level of UK productivity by around 4 per cent after 15 years” compared with what it would otherwise have been [2]. As always, it’s worth remembering that this figure (which also implies, as widely quoted, that GDP will be 4% less than otherwise) has a cumulative effect. That is, for each of the 15 years productivity will be lower than it would have been by some figure, reaching 4% in the fifteenth year.

It's true that the OBR did not change its assessment of the Brexit damage for the worse (as had been rumoured prior to the budget, although it did downgrade its overall productivity growth assessment), but the fact that it remains unchanged is significant. It suggests that even as it moves from being entirely a forecast of damage that will be done to being, in part, an estimate of damage that has been done, that forecast seems to the OBR to be holding true. If so, that is not a surprise, as most analysts expect the bulk of the damage will have occurred early in the 15-year period.

Indeed, as summarized in my last post, a recent report from the National Bureau for Economic Research provides a headline estimate suggesting that by 2025 (i.e. already), UK GDP is 6%-8% less than it would otherwise have been. In the run-up to the budget, the LibDem Party requested the House of Commons Library to provide an analysis the implications of that estimate, including for tax revenues. The results were that it would mean that, had it not been for Brexit, in 2024-25 tax revenues would have been between £65 billion and £90 billion higher than they actually were.

If the upper figure were correct, it would be equivalent to the entirety of government spending in that year on education (£89.2 billion). But suppose the true figure were only half of the upper estimate, that would still more than cover the entire defence budget (£37.5 billion). Now suppose the true figure were only a quarter of the lower estimate: then, it would cover the entire 2024-25 budget for both day-to-day spending and capital investment for prisons, the probation service and the criminal justice system (£14.7 billion).

Brexit and immigration

All that is another reminder of the high price we are paying for the stupidity of Brexit, to which should be added the negative impact on tax revenues which can be expected as a result of the large fall in net migration announced yesterday. That announcement, in itself, means that the OBR’s budget forecasts for growth and tax revenue, published just the day before, are likely to be over-optimistic, since it had assumed a less steep fall.

Calculating the impact on tax revenues of falling net migration is extremely complex, because it depends on a large number of variables, but last year the OBR estimated that a fall of 100,000 would increase the deficit by £7 billion. Given the complexity, I’m not sure whether it would be justified to extrapolate from that to say that yesterday’s fall of almost 450,000 in the last 12 months might represent something in the order of a £30 billion reduction in tax revenue, but the impact will certainly be considerable and negative.

And yet, responding to these latest net migration figures, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government would be “going further” to clamp down on immigration, because of the “immense pressure” it supposedly puts on local communities, whilst Keir Starmer said the figures were (only) “a step in the right direction”. Presumably, Mahmood and Starmer believe they will get some political credit for responding to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public, whatever the economic (and human) cost. If so, they are likely to be disappointed: this latest fall continues from that of last year yet, in post-Brexit Britain’s immigration panic, the majority of the public believe that net migration rose in that year, even as they bemoan the tax rises in this year’s budget.

As the broadcaster and author James O’Brien put it when discussing this issue, “we have become a ludicrous country”. And Brexit, which, remember, was supposed to ‘solve’ these ‘legitimate concerns’, has made us even more ludicrous.

Still on the Brexit rack

Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a post discussing the chaotic mess we were in (of which there is plenty more in the posts from that time). Amidst Covid, with the transition period almost over, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement had yet to be finalised and there was every possibility there would be no agreement at all. There’s much in that post which is no longer of great relevance, but it does capture the disarray of the time, which the Hallett report reminds us of. For example, I referred to a leaked letter from the Road Haulage Association, describing the process of working with the government on border issues as “a complete shambles”.

There are other things in that post which are still very much relevant, ranging from the narrowly technical (e.g. my observation that “there will be a myriad of things left in the air even if there is a deal [such as] carbon trading”) to the broadly political (e.g. Keir Starmer’s “near silence” about Brexit and the rumours – which turned out to be true – that he would want Labour MPs to vote for any deal which might be done). At all events, I finished the post by saying:

“Perhaps we need to look instead to Classical mythology to describe our situation, maybe to Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up the hill or, as seems more appropriate to the painfulness of it all, poor old Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle day after day. Prometheus of course was being punished for having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Sisyphus was an all-round bad egg (murdering, cheating, and generally getting above himself). It is not clear what crime we have committed to have to endure the endless torture of Brexit.” 

The current news is a reminder that these words still apply.

 

Notes

[1] There are so many such outlets now that it is always important to look carefully at their credibility, but The Nerve certainly has a good pedigree, having been created by a collective of five former Guardian and Observer journalists. In any case, as regards the report referred to, it collates verifiable information from within the public domain.

[2] For a detailed discussion of the OBR estimate, and assessments of the costs of Brexit generally, see John Springford’s June 2025 report for the Constitution Society/ Federal Trust.

After the Brexit reset, how about a Brexit review?

Very much as anticipated in my previous post, the ‘reset Summit’ has come and gone as if it were simply a passing event. There has certainly been little political or media follow-up to what was announced, once the flurry of Brexiter fury had died down. Perhaps that is in part because, as John Elledge points out in the New Statesman, that fury, and the screaming headlines it gave rise to in the pro-Brexit press, simply isn’t matched by public opinion. The same seems to be true of attempts to whip up fears of Brexit ‘sabotage’ over the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, which passed its third reading this week.

That’s partly because, as Elledge says, in general terms the public tends to support closer ties with the EU, but I suspect it’s also because the public don’t really care that much either way. It is striking that every poll on the reset, whether conducted before the Summit or afterwards, shows high numbers of ‘don’t knows’, usually about 30% of respondents. Moreover, the YouGov post-summit poll shows that as well as 30% who ‘don’t know’, another 16% think that ‘the deal’ agreed is neither good nor bad. I also suspect that even those who oppose it struggle to muster the angry energy of the headline writers.

Actually, in this case at least, a ‘don’t know’ response is not necessarily a reflection of the public’s disinclination to be acquainted with the facts. It would be a perfectly reasonable response from even the most assiduous and well-informed voter. For, as I highlighted in that previous post, all that has really been announced of ‘the deal’ is a whole series of discrete potential agreements between the UK and the EU, but without almost any announced processes or timetables for their negotiation, let alone for their completion.

An SPS agreement?

The most important of the possible economic agreements, at least from the perspective of the Labour government’s explicitly stated reset aims, is a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. On that, my assumption that the government would take the possibility of its completion to justify the further postponement of full import controls on goods coming from the EU has been proved correct. Thus it was announced this week that the next phase of controls, which after several delays was meant to be implemented in July, has been paused, in effect indefinitely although the government press release stated they are deferred until January 2027 [1].

It's worth standing back from this latest announcement to recall just how ridiculous the situation is. Successive British governments, having embarked on Brexit with a referendum held almost nine years ago, and having fairly soon decided that this meant ‘hard Brexit’, went on to delude themselves and to mislead the public about the fact that this was going to entail import controls. Indeed it was not until February 2020 that any Cabinet Minister, specifically Michael Gove, formally and publicly stated that import controls would have to be introduced. By that time, Britain had already left the EU and was in the transition period, a transition period which the government had previously resisted and which it refused, despite the pandemic, to extend.

Since Gove’s announcement, there have been years of preparations, with huge costs for both government and businesses, and so many delays and multiple phasings, with different delays to the different phasings, that it is all but impossible to catalogue them in their entirety (see my post of April 2024 and the links within it for some of the detail). Meanwhile, the EU was ready to introduce controls on imports from Great Britain on the day after the transition period ended (to complaints from Gove about EU ‘over-rigidity’).

SPS controls, or even import controls generally, are not, in themselves, amongst the biggest costs or consequences of Brexit (an SPS deal is estimated to be worth less than 0.1% of UK GDP per annum) although they have proved to be one of the costs the UK has been most unwilling to pay. But the whole saga, and the fact that it is still playing out with this new supposed deadline being set for well into the next parliament, is a potent symbol of the utter ignorance, incompetence and dishonesty that has characterised Brexit as a whole. It certainly, in various ways, makes a mockery of the slogan about ‘taking back control of our money, our borders, and our laws’ if, indeed, anything more than the slogan itself were needed to induce mockery.

Risks and reactions

Coming back to the specific issue of the latest postponement, a few points stand out. One is the now familiar one that the lack of full import controls constitutes a risk which will now continue for even longer. As I noted in my last post, it will certainly be months, and very possibly years, before an SPS deal is both agreed and implemented and, meanwhile, Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland) risks importing shoddy or dangerous goods. For reasons I’ve discussed before, that isn’t because EU products have ‘ceased to be safe’. It is because the UK no longer has full access to the ‘eco-system’ relevant databases, and as a result is more vulnerable to accidental or criminal introductions of, for example, animal diseases, African Swine Fever being the most high-profile example.

From this point of view, reported food industry concerns that an SPS deal would increase those risks, because it would ultimately enable the UK to remove those phases of the post-Brexit import controls which have been introduced, are wide of the mark. If and when any such deal is done, it would, according to paragraph 31 of the statement released after the reset Summit, include full database access and thereby return risks to pre-Brexit levels (or to the same level as for member states of the EU which, of course, can never be zero). The real concern is that, meanwhile, the remainder of the necessary import controls will remain unimplemented.

If some have misunderstood the implications of an SPS deal, others have been wrong-footed by it. A particularly delicious example is an article in the rabidly pro-Brexit Express. Those who only read the headline, “‘Brexit reset deal’ to hit grocery bills next month – how it affects your pockets”, could be forgiven for thinking that Starmer’s craven betrayal of the Brexit dream was about to hit hard-pressed consumers in their wallets. But - what’s this? – the report goes on to explain that it will reduce business costs by £200 million a year, which will “gradually work its way down to consumers” who will see lower prices and greater availability of produce. Some “hit” [2].

All this aside, there was something decidedly odd about the announcement. The fact that the government is not going to continue to develop full border controls, and may even start selling off some of the ‘white elephant’ border facilities, seems to suggest either that it is completely confident of reaching an SPS agreement with the EU (which is exactly how the press release reads) and/or that it is determined to do whatever is necessary to reach such an agreement. Much of the media discussion certainly talks as if the deal already exists or is at least a fait accompli.

In fact, as things stand there is no agreement and, although I think it is very highly likely that there will be, it is impossible to be certain or to know how long it will take. If there is no agreement, and in the meantime there has been no further development of import controls, then there will be an even longer period until full controls are operational. They certainly aren’t going to spring into action in January 2027, the supposed new deadline. But even if there is an agreement, the longer it takes to be made and implemented the greater the chance that the risks involved will eventuate and that, in turn, carries a political risk for the government [3].

A detour into Brexitology

One thing which can be said about an SPS agreement, if it happens, or any of the others identified at the reset Summit, is that neither it nor they will constitute ‘cherry-picking’. I’m returning to this point reluctantly since, as I said when I last discussed it, my original passing remark about it, in a footnote to an earlier post, led to much critical, and some hostile, comment on social media.

My basic argument is that this term has now ceased to have analytical value because, now that the UK is a third country to the EU, any agreements made will simply be between those two polities, in the light of their own interests. Some seemed to think this showed my supposed ‘UK-centrism’, and perhaps even my own hidden Brexity nature, or was just some inexplicable lapse from cogency on my part. All of which seems rather strange given that for almost ten years I’ve been writing about cherry-picking (and related concepts like ‘cakeism’), repeatedly using it as a concept to analyse Brexit and to criticise the UK’s conduct.

I only return to this now because last week no less a person than the EU Ambassador to the UK, Pedro Serrano, described the term as being “no longer helpful” and went on to say of the reset that “this is not about cherry-picking or not cherry-picking. We have identified a number of issues that are of mutual interest.” The report of these remarks, by Jon Stone in Politico, goes on to say that “in the Berlaymont, too, the [cherry-picking] line is seen as passé”, although gives no specific evidence of that and it’s not clear to me that, as the report claims, this term has been “officially retired” by the EU (or what form ‘official retirement’ would take). Nevertheless, it is clearly significant that someone of Serrano’s stature said what he did and, unless the suggestion is that his posting to London has made him fall prey to ‘UK-centrism’, it suggests that my own observation was an accurate one.

Moreover, the report goes on to quote Charles Grant, the widely-respected Director of the Centre for European Reform, saying that the cherry-picking line had been “a product of the strained relationship that followed the referendum, and the EU’s concern that other countries should not follow the UK’s example.” That is exactly my point, or part of it: not just the word, but the concept, relate to a time which legally and institutionally has ceased to exist, namely the period during which the Withdrawal Agreement and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement were being negotiated.

This isn’t (or isn’t simply) an ‘I told you so’ on my part (and, even if it were, there are plenty of things, often more important than this, which I’ve been wrong about over the years). Actually, it’s a fairly minor issue which I never expected to cause so much fuss. Nevertheless, it does have a wider significance which is worth mentioning.

It has become almost a truism of ‘Brexitology’ (for there is such a thing) that Brexit is a ‘process not an event’, an observation only ever necessary to make because of the bone-headed inability of most Brexiters to grasp that simple fact. But that doesn’t mean that the process ‘unfolds’ in the sense of going in a particular direction, like the unrolling of a carpet to reveal a recurring pattern. For whilst it is undoubtedly true that there are endless recurrences and repetitions – to a degree that is sometimes almost soul-destroying – it is also the case that the direction and content of the process modulates over time, and will continue to do so. As that happens, anyone who is serious about understanding Brexit needs to be attuned to both the continuities and the changes.

I think that most readers of this blog would have no difficulty agreeing with the suggestion that those Brexiters who are still, for example, droning on about ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border are simply stuck in a groove whereby not just the terminology but the entire situation it relates to have been superseded. What may be less palatable is that the same can apply to some of the idées fixes of those on the ‘remain’, ‘rejoin’, ‘FBPE’ (or whatever term we want to use for it) side.

The Strategic Defence Review

One important reason why the Brexit process does not have a single fixed direction, mandating a fixed repertoire of analytical terms, is that this process does not take place in isolation from the wider world. The most obvious example is the Ukraine War, which has had a profound impact on UK-EU post-Brexit relations ever since its outbreak in 2022. That impact continues to develop, and is itself one of the things impacted by the other most obvious example, Trump’s second presidency. The EU-UK Security and Defence Partnership, announced at the reset Summit, is the most tangible consequence of these two developments.

The Ukraine War had already prompted the 2023 ‘refreshed’ Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (IR23). As I discussed at the time, this represented something of a retreat from the hubris of the original Integrated Review of 2021 (IR21) with its puffed-up post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ framing, and put more emphasis on the centrality of European-Atlantic security. Now, just two years later, the government has published its Strategic Defence Review (SDR).

I’m not qualified to discuss the military details of the SDR, for which see Professor Lawrence Freedman’s expert analysis, but, on my reading of its geo-political framing, it does not really continue the direction of travel from IR21 to IR23. It is true that, as Freedman explains, the SDR is very much informed by the threat from Russia and by the military lessons of the Ukraine War. It is also true that it does not explicitly replicate the ‘Global Britain’ language of IR21. Nevertheless, it retains a strong emphasis on the UK as a global military power, centrally anchored in its relationship with the US and its membership of NATO.

Of course, that is not a surprise, any more than it is a surprise that it is only very gently hinted at that the reliability of the US as a defence partner has been compromised by Trump, and may well never recover. But it is, if not surprising then at least of note, that the partnership with the EU is given so little emphasis, and even that in rather muted tones (see especially p.75). In the process, what had seemed in IR23 to be the beginning of a recognition that the UK is primarily a regional power has been diluted. It’s difficult to be sure, precisely as so much is about tone and emphasis, and thus very much open to different interpretations, but, at the very least, I don’t think it is suggestive of the kind of Europe-first foreign policy which Foreign Secretary David Lammy talked about in Opposition.

A different review?

That rather tentative analysis aside, the SDR prompts the thought that, whatever it does or does not imply about the UK-EU defence partnership, there is literally nothing in it which could not, and probably would not, have been written had Brexit not happened. AUKUS, which features extensively in the review, is sometimes trumpeted by Brexiters as a ‘Brexit benefit’, but the fact that France, an EU member, was originally to have been the US and Australia’s partner gives the lie to that. But if Brexit has brought no defence and security benefits, what costs and disbenefits might it have brought?

In particular, whilst, like the other recent reviews, the SDR rightly identifies the threat Russia poses to the UK, and the very wide-ranging forms it takes, the entire question about how Brexit relates to this threat remains one of the major unventilated issues of recent history. I’ve never been one of those who ascribes the referendum result to Russian interference and, in some ways, I think doing so serves to deflect responsibility from those, including the voters, with whom it lies. But it is undeniable that Brexit was in line with Russian interests, and we know the pro-Putin views of many of its leading advocates, including Nigel Farage.

At issue here is not so much the failure to investigate what role Russia played in 2016, it is how, right now, in 2025, and in the future, Brexit continues to serve those interests. We are told that the SDR puts the UK on a “wartime footing” in the face of the “immediate and pressing threat” from Russia. A country which was really serious about that would be conducting a review not just of defence strategy but of why it is persisting with an entire national strategy which may not have been chosen for it by Russia but is exactly what Russia would have chosen for it. Whilst we are at it, we might also undertake a comprehensive official review of all the economic and political consequences of Brexit.

After all, if the dramatic changes in the world are such as to require three defence reviews in the five years since Britain formally left the EU, then it surely isn’t unreasonable to think that Brexit itself warrants at least one.

Notes

[1] Apart from at least recognizing that an SPS deal may not be done, the reason a date is stated is very likely in order to forestall any action against the UK at the WTO. As things stand, the UK is discriminating against non-EU countries, whose imports face SPS controls. But for so long as the UK can claim to be in the process of introducing controls on the EU and negotiating a deal with the EU, it is unlikely that any other WTO member will bother to start raising a complaint.

[2] In another article, even the Express couldn’t find a negative spin to put on one aspect of the potential SPS deal, namely that it would make it easier to take pets to and from the EU by a “reversal to Brexit rules”. This possible return to the pet passport scheme shouldn’t be confused with another development this week, introducing the Pet Travel Document to simplify taking pets between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is nothing to do with the reset or any SPS agreement, but is part of the ongoing implementation of the Windsor Framework.

[3] Of course there are political risks either way. If the government continued to roll out import controls which, along with those already developed, were subsequently rendered redundant by an SPS agreement then it could be accused of wasting money. Even so, that would be considerably less damaging (both politically and economically) than if, prior to an agreement, the absence of full controls led to, say, foot and mouth disease being imported.

Britain is slowly learning what Brexit means

Shortly after last week’s post about Brexit, Russia, and defence went up, the news of Alexei Navalny’s death was announced, and although its cause is still shrouded in secrecy it can hardly be regarded as an accident, if only because of the brutal regime obtaining at the ‘Polar Wolf’ penal colony where he was incarcerated. It was a further reminder of the nature of Putin’s regime, and the anniversary, tomorrow, of its unprovoked attack on Ukraine will provide another. That is even without considering the crazy threats last weekend from Russia’s former President and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev that Washington, London, Berlin, and Kyiv would be obliterated by nuclear missiles if his country was forced out of Ukraine.

As I argued in that post, the combination of the Putin threat and a possible Trump Presidency is provoking renewed debate about, and possible progress towards, closer defence and security integration between the UK and the EU. It is telling that, just as I was writing it, the German Finance Minister even floated the idea of closer Anglo-French nuclear weapons cooperation, with financial support from EU countries, so as to develop a European capability (not that this week’s events have been much of an advert for Britain’s nuclear prowess). Shortly afterwards, that idea was alluded to by a close ally of Emmanuel Macron, on a visit to London to discuss the UK’s possible role in European defence more generally.

Nuclear defence integration isn’t in prospect, but that it is even being discussed is an indication of the seriousness of the situation, and the integrative logic of that situation. That logic was certainly on display last weekend at the annual meeting of the annual Munich Security Conference, which brought perhaps the strongest statement yet from Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy that a Labour government would seek a deep security and defence pact with the EU. At the same time, Valérie Hayer, who leads the Renew Group, the third largest bloc within the European Parliament, indicated strong support for a new defence treaty with the UK.

School for scoundrels

If growing threats are once more teaching the perils of isolation, passing the test will not be easy. Even without Brexit, a defence agreement would have been difficult and Brexit has made it harder. Hayer referred to such an agreement as having been spoken of in Theresa May’s time. That’s true, but it has a convoluted history, which remains important. When May submitted the letter triggering Article 50 in March 2017, there was a strong implication, much resented within the EU, that the UK would use its security and military capabilities as a bargaining tool in the exit negotiations. It’s worth recalling this partly because there is a tendency as time has gone by to depict May as (according to taste) the reasonable and pragmatic face of Brexit or, as Brexit Ultras would have it, unwilling to play ‘hardball’ with the EU.

In fact, apart from security, it was May and the then Chancellor Philip Hammond who threatened the EU with an ‘alternative economic model’ of aggressive tax cuts and deregulation if the UK did not get the kind of trade deal it wanted. Recalling this isn’t just a matter of setting the domestic record straight. It is directly relevant to the present because, although UK-EU relations are now generally better than they have been, there is still a legacy of distrust to be overcome which is not solely connected to how Boris Johnson conducted himself. Having never exactly been an easy partner even before the referendum, Britain came very close to making itself a pariah state in the years after 2016 and the memory of that, along with the spectacle of so many Tory MPs and their allies still obsessively demanding a cleaner break with the EU, as well as derogation from the ECHR, means that creating a new relationship of deep trust will not be easy.

May became considerably less antagonistic in tone in her September 2017 Florence Speech, to the extent that ironically, as I observed at the time, it sounded more like an explanation of why the UK should be joining the EU rather than of why it was leaving. As regards security, specifically, she was also notably diplomatic in her own speech to the Munich Security Conference, in 2018, although as I discussed then it continued to have some ambiguities. (By contrast, Boris Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, had used his appearance at the conference, the year before, to raise hackles by gloating about Britain’s “liberation” from the EU.)

However it was the Russian nerve poison attacks on Salisbury, just a couple of weeks after May’s Munich speech, which really brought home – literally – the fact that the UK needed European allies. That provided the background to the possibility of a deep security and defence pact that Hayer referred to, which was envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied May’s Withdrawal Agreement. But once Johnson came to power, he and David Frost proceeded to question its parameters and once again it was suggested, including by Nick Timothy, May’s one-time adviser who had been a key architect of hard Brexit (and, reportedly, had had an input into the Article 50 letter ‘threats’), that security and defence could be used as “leverage” to gain concessions on trade.

It’s not clear that any such concessions were achieved and, at all events, what emerged in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement was, as regards security, a “dialled down” relationship and, as regards foreign and defence policy, no agreement at all. It was really only the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 which created an impetus to greater cooperation, but “the relationship remains unstructured”. As I argued last week, the continuing threat of Russia, plus the threat, and, if it happens, the fact, of a Trump Presidency – along with the advent of a Labour government – may well be a catalyst for a closer and more structured relationship. Certainly some Brexiters have become alive to that possibility, with the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (£) counselling that “if you want to keep Brexit, pray for a Biden victory” and a Spectator article warning (£) against attempts to ‘lock’ Britain into defence integration with the EU. It’s a reminder that however compelling the logic of cooperation, it will encounter opposition from the stubbornly unteachable, which in turn will undermine trust in the UK’s reliability.

Learning the facts of life  

Yet the logic is compelling, and exerts a remorseless pressure. The fundamental point concerns the interconnectedness of the UK and the EU, which didn’t cease to exist because of Brexit. It is an interconnectedness which takes numerous forms, certainly not just in relation to security and defence, but trade, supply chains, culture, education, science, and families. Some of that is to do with the simple fact of being in geographical proximity; some of it is because of the fact of the UK having been a member of the EU, or its predecessors, for almost fifty years, leaving a deep legacy of integration. Brexiters gave no thought to the implications of any of this, and seemed to imagine that many of the conveniences of membership would just carry on as before, despite leaving, whilst relationships with the rest of the world outside the EU, and perhaps even the social mores and values of life before the EEC, could just be picked up as if they had been pickled in aspic since 1973.

The consequence is that Britain is now a learner in the world that it created for itself with Brexit, and a very slow learner at that. The lessons of interconnected defence are being taught the most quickly because the Russian invasion of Ukraine was such a seismic event that even the dullest of pupils couldn’t ignore it. Similarly, galvanized by his self-imposed political imperative to ‘stop the boats’, Rishi Sunak is about to agree a deal, possibly to be signed today, to share information with Frontex, the EU’s border protection agency. It turns out that international irregular migration flows can’t be dealt with at national level, something underscored just yesterday by the news that Europol have dismantled a major gang involved in cross-channel people-smuggling. Who knew?

The same tutorials are being given in other domains. Reality just keeps intruding on Brexiter fantasies. Thus, despite some die-hard Brexiter bumptiousness, it has become obvious from impartial analysis that ‘doing our own trade deals’ is not just of virtually no economic value but is a lot more complicated than the early ‘sign up to anything’ approach that led to the agreements with Australia and New Zealand. At all events, UK trade remains strongly connected to the EU. The lessons about the interconnected nature of regulation are also gradually being learnt. Sometimes, as with the effective abandonment of the UKCA mark, it happens through the laborious process of trial and error. Sometimes, as with this week’s news that UK officials are lobbying the EU to tighten its financial services regulation, it happens through the belated realization that what the EU does actually has a huge effect on Britain and, in this particular case, that robust regulation serves a useful purpose. Once again, who knew?

Cookery lessons

A currently widely-reported example of these dawning realities is Rishi Sunak’s sudden attention to food security, and his newfound interest in farming generally. Much of that interest is no doubt motivated by widespread reports that Tory support in its rural English heartlands is imploding, many of the roots of which lie in Brexit, in (at least) four ways.

First, there is the issue of the increased barriers to trading with the EU, which have added substantial costs to UK food exports, with more costs to come with the introduction of full import controls this year. Second there is the adverse impact on farmers of the new post-Brexit trade deals. Third, there is the impact of freedom of movement of labour having ended. And, fourth, there is the continuing saga of the replacement for the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) system of payments and support. Clearly all of these are inter-related, as the problems faced by farmers reduce UK production, thus aggravating food insecurity (something also brought into focus by the Ukraine war), and, alongside the increased costs of trade with the EU, this contributes to food price inflation and supply disruptions for consumers.

The replacement of CAP is a particularly sorry story. Here is something which was the bête noire of British Eurosceptics since the 1970s and so the one area, above all, for which they should have been prepared for when they finally achieved Brexit. Instead, the introduction of the confusing Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) was botched and chaotic, leading to endless reviews and delays, changes, and much of the promised financial support has never materialized. Even by Brexit standards it is a convoluted story, but the basic fact is that there is still no fully-functioning replacement for the CAP, or even any strategic clarity about whether the aim is to incentivize food production or countryside stewardship.

Computer club

If farming and food security is a case study in post-Brexit Britain’s slow schooling in reality, it also provides illustrations of one of the most significant, if least discussed, aspects of the theme of interconnectedness. A recent article by TC Callis in Kent and Surrey Bylines, discussing the introduction of import controls, drew attention, amongst other things, to how Brexit deprived the UK of access to relevant EU databases. It is a point I have stressed repeatedly in the past, but one which rarely features in media coverage of the issue. Indeed, even now, reports of the dangers of food crime under plans to shift testing facilities from Dover to inland Sevington ignore this issue. But Callis explains how food crime and other risks have been exacerbated by loss of full access to the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and, as I’ve pointed out before (although I failed to mention RASFF), there is a whole ecosystem of databases in this sphere, including the EU’s Animal Disease Information System (ADIS) and Trade Control Expert System (TRACES), to which the UK no longer has full access.

Such issues of data-sharing are part of the crucial, if unglamorous, infrastructure which, along with much regulatory infrastructure, keeps daily life going. A litter of acronyms, they are like the hardware and software of the computers we all use but which few people know or care about so long as they work. In the economic sphere, it is lack of access to the EU REACH database that has meant the UK having to develop a separate system, increasing costs in the chemicals industry*, and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is set to be another (as discussed in previous posts). In both these cases, linkage of the UK and EU databases may well be the ultimate outcome, underlining both the pointlessness of duplication as well as the persistent logic of integration and interconnectedness  

In the policing and criminal justice sphere, as with food and diseases, there is a complex EU eco-system of which the UK is no longer a part even though, of course, crime and other security threats to the UK are not confined to national borders. So we remain connected to Europe as regards these threats, but at best semi-connected as regards the means of meeting them. Thus some cooperation, albeit on reduced terms, continues, for example with EUROPOL and EUROJUST, but the UK has lost access to the Schengen Information System II (SIS II) and the European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS), significantly undermining policing.

Notably, it is database access which is central to the deal, mentioned above, that Sunak is doing with the EU over cooperation with Frontex, notably the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR). However that has another implication, which also applies to those EU security databases - like DNA, criminal records, fingerprints and air passenger lists – to which the UK has already negotiated post-Brexit access: it makes it highly unlikely that the UK could abandon the data protection standards of GDPR**. So, in this sense, interconnectedness in one domain begets interconnectedness in others.

Messy work

What we are seeing across all these areas, and many others, is therefore a very complex and untidy picture, which is almost impossible to summarise, or to characterize in any one way. It consists of a series of ad hoc accommodations, sometimes entailing duplication (e.g. UK REACH), sometimes entailing piecemeal deals with the EU (e.g. EUROSUR), sometimes simply meaning loss of functionality or capacity (e.g. SIS II). It should not be forgotten that all of these accommodations come at a financial cost, fragmented in ways which make it impossible to quantify, all of which used to be rolled into the UK’s budgetary contribution to the EU, in return for which we used to have full access to everything rather than to a jumble of patches.

To add to the complexity, almost none of these issues are static, with new systems – whether they be data management systems, regulatory systems, or sector-specific systems like farming support – being rolled out, each with varying transition or implementation periods. Likewise, to the extent that these developments involve recalibrations and redefinitions in particular aspects of the UK-EU relationship, they are also evolutionary rather than static. It is obviously also the case that the pace and scale of change in any particular area varies according to economic or political exigency, which is why the case of defence has a particular momentum just now, but they are all in flux to some degree or another.

But for all that the overall picture is messy and hard to characterize, in almost all cases the direction of travel is the same in pointing to integration. The well-documented tendency to non-divergence in regulation is an aspect of that, but non-divergence really only codes continuation of existing integration. The wider picture is one of closening relationships with the EU, either in the sense of reversing some of the distances initially created by Brexit (e.g. the Frontex deal or, not discussed in this post, rejoining Horizon), even if in clumsy or sub-optimal ways, or in the sense of moving to a greater degree of integration than existed even as an EU member (defence being potentially by far the most important example). For Brexiters, all this betokens the failure to ‘do Brexit properly’, but what it really shows is the failure of Brexit as a concept, or at least as a realistic policy.

A slow and unwilling pupil

There have been many faces of Brexit over the years. The gurning anger of Farage. The blustering buffoonery of Johnson. The psychotic glitter of Braverman. The vapid pipsqueakery of Grimes. The blokeish thuggery of Banks. The creepy unctuousness of Gove. The mad narcissism of Cummings. The born-again zealotry of Truss. The porcine truculence of Frost. The smug spitefulness of Rees-Mogg.

They all still exist, but the dominant image, now, is that of a lumpen, sulky, schoolboy dullard. Kept in for an umpteenth detention, tongue-between-teeth, he ponderously repeats the basic textbook exercises that his juniors mastered long ago, and with painful slowness comes to realize that the things his teachers had been trying to drum in to him for years past are, indeed, true.

 

*Some of these costs have been reduced by recent government changes to the UK REACH system, although, as is typically the case with regulation, this involves trade-offs in terms of creating higher levels of risk.

**Were the UK to do so, the EU would almost certainly withdraw recognition of the UK data protection system, and that would have the effect of locking us out of those EU databases to which we still have full access, as well as having profoundly damaging consequences for the commercial use of data. It remains an open question whether the measures in the current UK Data Protection and Digital Information Bill will constitute sufficient divergence from EU GDPR to lead the EU to revoke its 2021 adequacy decision about the UK regime.

Brexit, Brexitism, and the Trump and Russian threats

In the Brexit debate, discussion of its geo-political damage has often been the poor relation of that of its economic damage. It’s easy to understand why, as the economic damage is more tangible and, to a degree, more quantifiable. The latest evidence of that came this week in a new analysis by Goldman Sachs, the significance of which is that, for the first time, it drew together all of the different counterfactual models, with the headline finding being that that UK GDP is now 5% lower than it would have been without Brexit.

However, ultimately, the geo-political damage may be even more important and more likely to lead to a softening, or even reversal, of Brexit. That isn’t because Brexit is the cause of all Britain’s geo-political problems, any more than EU membership would resolve them, but because Brexit has created additional problems whilst doing nothing at all to help those which would exist anyway.

Geo-politics does not just mean defence, and certainly not just defence in its traditional military meanings, but includes those things along with the wider panoply of security, soft power, diplomacy, and international relations. Thus configured, it is climate change which presents the biggest set of geo-political challenges for Britain, as for every other country, but, for all the urgency of that, those relating to war in its various forms have a particular immediacy.

That immediacy has been ratcheted up several notches by Donald Trump’s latest comments about Russia and NATO, including that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to members not reaching the 2% of GDP defence spending target. That would be a direct violation of the basic principle of mutual defence, leading the NATO Secretary-General to say that the comments “undermine all of our security”.

This comes at a time when, of course, there is a real possibility of a second Trump Presidency and, if that comes about, there are now multiple signs that it would be (even) more extreme than the first one, and far less constrained. The liberal Conservative historian and journalist Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump would “abandon NATO”, even if not formally leaving it. Whether or not that proves true, there can be no doubt of the close affinities between Trump and Putin, something in plain sight last week when Tucker Carlson – who has been described as “perhaps the highest-profile proponent of ‘Trumpism’” – conducted a sycophantic interview with the Russian leader.

General background

I’ve written at length before about the nexus of geo-political issues around Brexit, Trump and Russia, initially when ‘previewing the geo-political costs of Brexit’ at the time of Putin’s poison attacks in Salisbury in March 2018, and then in March 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Much that is in those two posts still stands, and I will avoid repeating them save to briefly draw out three general points.

First, Brexit necessarily fractured the central tenet of UK geo-political strategy by destroying its role as a US-EU bridge. Burning one end of that bridge was bound to fray the other end, under any US Presidency, and the Northern Ireland aspects of Brexit were always potentially liable to cause further tensions in UK-US relations. Equally, whilst a Trump Presidency would have been difficult for the UK even without Brexit, and will be if it recurs, it is a particular delusion of Brexiters that Trump regards Brexit Britain with some kind of special affection. In fact, whilst he may be happy to heap praise on sycophants like Nigel Farage, the idea that he has any interest in what happens to the UK, or even any loyalty to such court jesters, is preposterous.

Secondly, Brexiters showed a crucial strategic ignorance in configuring NATO as the only international organization needed to meet Britain’s security and defence needs, and the EU as entirely irrelevant to these, when, in fact, the two have become increasingly intertwined. That has become even more obvious since the invasion of Ukraine, which also showed the absurdity of the Brexiters’ vision of ‘Global Britain’ and its associated ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’. As the revised Integrated Review of 2023 recognized, the European continent remains the UK’s primary defence theatre and, within that theatre, Russia its sole, but considerable, threat.

Thirdly, even without delving into the murky question of direct Russian interference in the Referendum (a question which could only really be answered by the intelligence services, who were not asked to do so for the 2021 ‘Russia Report’), Brexit was undoubtedly welcome to Putin, and fully consistent with his longstanding attempts to destabilize both the UK and the EU. It is a point insufficiently made to the plastic patriots of Brexit just how comprehensively they played into his hands, even if it cannot be proved that they were his puppets.

The Russian threat and responses to it

These general points provide the background to the current situation. It is one in which the threat of Russia is undeniable. Putin may not have had the swift victory he expected in Ukraine but may salvage something he will be able to claim as victory, especially if a Trump presidency withdraws US support to Kiev, or even without that, if Republican resistance to such support persists. Nor has prosecution of the war prevented continuing Russian aggression, both overt and covert, elsewhere in Europe.

For example, last year, NATO intercepted over 300 Russian planes threatening its airspace, mainly over the Baltic states, with the RAF responsible for at least 50 of these interceptions. Meanwhile, Russian interference and influence in Kosovo and Serbia, Moldova, Bosnia, and Montenegro continued. Just this week Moscow put the Estonian Prime Minister on a so-called ‘wanted list’, as part of its ongoing attempts to bully and intimidate its neighbours. And whilst the 2021 Russia Report may not have delved into the Brexit referendum, it gave no room to doubt the extent of Russian activity in political disinformation campaigns against the UK, whilst as recently as last December the intelligence authorities revealed the ongoing nature of Russian cyber-attacks.

All of this, and more, is what underlies the recent upsurge of concern about the possibility of a major conflict on European soil, including Grant Shapps’ reference to this now being a “pre-war generation” in his first speech as Defence Secretary. Personally, I don’t take Shapps seriously as Defence Secretary or in any other capacity, but I do take seriously the warnings of the Chief of the General Staff. Such warnings certainly should not be dismissed as coming from blimpish or self-interested military ‘brass hats’; for example, the left-wing journalist Paul Mason has been vocal in making the case for Britain to re-arm in the face of the threat from Putin’s Russia.

Moreover, the same warnings are being sounded in several other European countries, building upon pre-existing concerns about Russian aggression, concerns which led, amongst other things, to Sweden and Finland seeking NATO membership. The last barrier to Sweden’s application, approval by Hungary, looks close to being cleared, and the country is already participating in NATO exercises as well as preparing its citizens for the possibility of all-out war. Finland’s membership has already begun, and is being actively operated, with that country, too, being in an advanced stage of readiness for war. Meanwhile, Germany has embarked on a major rearmament programme whilst Poland has doubled the size of its armed forces (£) in recent years and looks set to continue to prioritize defence under its new government. Given these, and similar, developments, British political and military leaders have if anything been rather slow to prepare the public for the threat we face.

The Trumpist-Putinist-Brexitist axis

However, Britain’s capacity to prepare is hobbled, and not just by the fact that we are economically struggling, the more so because of Brexit. It is also because there is a very powerful, if contradictory, axis which undermines attempts to do so.

On the one hand, there are those on the populist right like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson (despite his professed support for Ukraine), and Nigel Farage who are openly supportive of Trump’s re-election, and, at least in the case of Farage, public admirers of Putin. They have been joined this week in their support of Trump by John Hayes, a less well-known but highly influential right-wing Tory MP, and it’s noteworthy, in itself, just how many Tories are lining up to offer such endorsements in what is, after all, a foreign election.

On the other hand, there is the unreconstructed old hard left, including Jeremy Corbyn and the Stop the War Coalition, elements of which are “among the worst disseminators of Kremlin propaganda in the UK”. These are not the words of a ‘Centrist’, still less a Conservative, but of the radical journalist George Monbiot, and the veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell has made similar points.

Spanning these two groups is the peculiar, and peculiarly influential and well-connected, one of the Revolutionary Communist Party turned Libertarians who coalesce around Spiked, which constantly mocks and undermines the warnings about Russia, including these most recent ones.  

It is not a coincidence that all three of these groupings are also pro-Brexit and anti-EU. What links Brexitists, Trump, and Putin is a shared hatred of any notion of a liberal, rules-based international order. And whilst it would be fatuous to deny the many criticisms of that notion, and what it has meant in practice, most disgracefully as regards the Iraq War, it is far more fatuous, if not downright evil, to suggest that illiberal, lawless international disorder would be preferable. Yet, although they would never put it in those terms, that is precisely what all those groupings would prefer, albeit for wildly different reasons. Some dream of a global powerplay between Great Nations led by Strong Men, some of the chaos upon which disaster capitalists can thrive, some of the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions to usher in a socialist utopia.

Actually, they only differ wildly in what they ultimately want. They are identical in what they see as the route to getting it: if all the cards are thrown up in the air, then it becomes possible that they may be made to land at the desired outcome. What gets left out of that analysis is the fact that amongst those ‘cards’ are the lives of millions of people which will be disrupted, deformed, and destroyed in the process; the dead, the maimed, the tortured, the dispossessed, the damaged, the broken. And whilst historical parallels are never exact, we’ve seen all this before in Europe. The same utopian dreams, the same subjugation of means to ends, the same grand power-plays in which ordinary lives are just collateral damage in the service of great dreams and causes.

The logic of integration

In this context, Brexit is only a minor event, but with a European war now being widely discussed as a serious possibility it takes on a new importance. Of course, such a war is by no means inevitable, but it is the decisions taken in the period after possibility and before inevitability which are crucial. Those decisions are quite as acute for the EU as for the UK. It isn’t that staying in the EU would have made them go away, and the EU is deeply divided between countries (£), including the Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, Poland and some of the Balkan states, which are acutely aware of the Russian threat and preparing to meet it, and those, including Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia, which are in various ways allies or appeasers of the Putin regime.

Yet such divisions would exist, and probably to a greater extent, if the EU did not exist. And, either way, the UK would have to have a relationship with what is, after all, its own continent. Brexiters may wax lyrical about the days when Britain ‘stood alone’, but forget that this wasn’t its choice, and was its moment of maximum peril precisely because of its isolation. In fact, the EU does exist, so what is that relationship to be? At the very least, there is now a stronger case than ever for a deep UK-EU security and defence pact – something always envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement, but which got sacrificed by the Johnson-Frost antagonistic ‘sovereignty-first’ negotiations  –  and, unlike any proposals Britain might make to deepen trade and economic relationships, this is an area where the UK genuinely has something to offer the EU.

This is because, despite cuts in personnel numbers, especially army personnel, and despite some recent high-profile equipment failures, the UK still has profound defence capabilities – not in the sense of a capacity to be ‘Global Britain’, but in the context of a European conflict. It remains the world’s sixth military power, and the most powerful in Europe (not including Russia), with on some estimates the best special forces in the world, and has a substantial cyber-war and intelligence capacity, probably second only to the US as a regards signals intelligence. There is far too much self-congratulatory guff about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ capabilities in all kinds of sectors and, no doubt, much hyperbole about its military capacity, but that capacity is real and, importantly, provides a base that could rapidly be built upon, though the longer that is put off the harder it will become.

At the same time, the UK is never going to be strong enough to go it alone, and whilst it has much to offer the EU it has as much or more to gain from cooperation, perhaps even integration, with the EU. The idea of an EU army, for so long the imaginary bugbear of Eurosceptics, has recently been re-proposed by the Italian government, although the reactions from other EU members make it unlikely to gain traction for now, and the barriers to such an entity are technical as well as political. However, post-Ukraine there has been an intensification of integrative measures, and an exercise last October involving the forces of nine EU countries was for the first time conducted from an EU operational headquarters, as part of an attempt to enable the EU to act independently of NATO.

This seems set to be the direction of travel for the EU and, if so, the argument for UK involvement, and ever-deepening involvement at that, becomes stronger, the more so if Trump does come to power. That’s speculative, but it is justifiable given that we have already witnessed the way that the Ukraine war served to improve what at the time were very acrimonious UK-EU relations. In the event of actual hostilities breaking out the logic would surely become stronger still and if, in that scenario, the US failed to meet its NATO commitments it might become irresistible. For it is difficult to over-state just how profound the impact of such hostilities would be, not just in terms of military operations and alliances but for everyday life.

What would war mean for Britain?

During the Cold War it was generally assumed that if there was a conflict with Russia it would be a nuclear one. Einstein supposedly said that whilst he didn’t know what weapons would be used in World War Three, he knew that those used in World War Four would be sticks and stones. Within that climate of Armageddon, many if not most of us became fatalistic: if war happened, survival was highly unlikely and perhaps not to be desired anyway. The kind of advice offered by the infamous 1976 ‘Protect and Survive’ pamphlet, which included making a shelter from a large table surrounded by furniture and bags of earth, seemed, to say the least, hopelessly optimistic.

However, nuclear war isn’t the scenario we are facing. Rather, it is one of forms of more or less conventional warfare, probably conducted mainly on Eastern European soil, though in a wider airspace, and also cyber and information warfare. For the UK, according to security expert Professor Anthony Glees, the consequences would include food, fuel and medicine shortages, rationing, and curfews. Glees also envisages that “a British Quisling government would be established, probably under a well-known domestic politician known to be sympathetic to Putin”. One wonders who he might have had in mind.

Perhaps this is unduly grim, but, on his first prediction, we have already seen with Ukraine, the pandemic, and Brexit the fragility of supply chains, and have ample evidence of how quickly such fragility engenders panic-buying, hoarding, and de facto rationing. As for Glees’ even grimmer second prediction, it is certainly obvious that, at the very least, the strange but powerful pro-Trump, pro-Putin alliance I identified above would be vocal in demanding British disengagement from the conflict.

Indeed, it is all too easy to anticipate that they would cry that here, finally, was the great Brexit dividend: what has conflict between Russia and the EU got to do with us? Once again appeasers would talk of quarrels in faraway countries, between people of whom we know nothing. It is equally easy to anticipate how, just as Johnson dismisses those who are alarmed by Trump as the ‘wokerati’, these voices would be declaring, in their various accents, that it was only the liberal/imperialist/globalist/Europhile elite who want conflict with Putin. So, even if such a war did not produce the Quisling government Glees anticipates, it would be enmeshed within the Brexit or Brexitist culture war, with Brexiters acting as Putin’s fifth column. Just in itself, this is a good reason why Brexitism needs to be driven to the margins of British politics.

The European ideal

To re-emphasize, none of this is to suggest that Brexit is the cause of the threats and challenges posed by Putin and Trump, or that those threats and challenges fall less heavily on the EU and its members. It’s more subtle than that. Brexit doesn’t prevent British military and other cooperation with the EU, but it makes it less straightforward and certainly doesn’t help it. Brexit certainly removes UK influence on the EU’s response to Russia, and to other geo-political threats. And to the ways that geo-politics impinges on supply chains, Brexit adds additional frictions.

But the biggest point is this. Brexit has put a fracture in the basic idea of ‘Europe’, expressed institutionally by the EU, as a defining bulwark of liberal democracy and freedom. The need for such a bulwark becomes more important if the US retreats further from what has been, warts and all, its global role in that respect (£). Any groans from Brexiters about democracy and sovereignty (as discussed in last week’s post) don’t negate the fact that EU membership entails commitment to the EU’s founding values of “human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”. Nor is that fact negated by any whataboutery relating to Hungary, currently, or Poland, recently: such anomalies as there are don’t detract from the enormity of having united a continent around such values, every word of which stands in stark contrast to Russia, not to mention many other parts of the world.

The word ‘united’ is the key one. Brexiters may say that Britain need not belong to the EU to share its values in these respects. But sharing is not the same as uniting. There is, to coin a phrase from a different context, power in a union. Having witnessed the break-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the rise of the European Union, including the alacrity with which the one-time Warsaw Pact countries signed up for it, there’s probably no one who understands that as well as Vladimir Putin.