In my last post I briefly mentioned that the government, and Rachel Reeves in particular, have begun to speak increasingly openly about the damage Brexit is continuing to do to the British economy. This, I said, was striking because the higher the costs are admitted to be, the more they mandate a stronger response than that of the reset. The converse also applies, of course. Such admissions, if unaccompanied by any stronger response, serve to underline the inadequacy of the reset.
This is the hook upon which the government’s approach to Brexit is currently caught, and what underlies it is the continuing failure of the British polity as a whole to be honest about Brexit and much else besides. That, and the reasons for it, have been amply illustrated over the last fortnight.
A “Brexit row”?
During that period, it has been reported (£) that the government is preparing legislation to enable the UK to align with all of the EU regulations needed to enact the long-trailed, though still not finalized, UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) or ‘veterinary’ agreement. Moreover, this legislation is expected to contain provision to enable similar moves in other sectors in the future, subject only to statutory instruments meaning, in effect, Ministerial decree.
The idea behind the latter provision, apparently, is that it could pave the way for ‘sector-by-sector’ deals with the EU. In the report of these plans, it is also suggested that at least some within the Labour Party “are hoping that the bill will provoke a Brexit row with the Conservatives and Reform UK, reminding voters that their opponents supported Leave in the EU referendum”.
In just this one small news item there is quite a lot to unpick. One thing to say is that it isn’t surprising, in that it was inherent in what was known about the desire for an SPS deal that there would be such legislation. What is perhaps more interesting is the idea that Labour might now be willing to have “a Brexit row” with Conservatives and Reform, something they have fought shy of in the past.
Evidently, this is a continuation of the shift to greater openness about the damage of Brexit. The political reasons for that shift are fairly obvious and have recently been set out in detail by the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice: in brief, Labour’s (belated) realization that its approach to Brexit is one of the things causing the collapse of its core vote, as happened in the Gorton & Denton by-election.
As this legislation proceeds, Labour will get their row in that, inevitably, indeed already, the Brexiters are screaming ‘betrayal’. However, what that row will really show is that, even now, the ways in which Brexit is discussed are almost entirely dishonest or deluded, or both.
On the Tory side (and that of the Brexiters more generally) there is the dishonesty of the fact that de facto alignment with almost all EU regulations is unavoidable, except at huge economic cost, which is exactly what the Conservatives came to accept when in office. Nor can they reasonably complain about the lack of democratic oversight associated with the use of statutory instruments, since it was they who made such extensive use of so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers throughout the Brexit process. Indeed, it would be reasonable to say that one of the many failed promises of Brexit was that it would return decision-making to parliament.
On the Labour side, there is the dishonesty, shared at various times by various Conservative Brexiters, that whole swathes of the British economy could de facto remain ‘within’ the single market on a sector-by-sector basis. This is effectively a reprise of the “ambitious managed divergence” model floated by Theresa May’s government in February 2018 (and discussed on this blog at that time) although it has gone under different names at different times.
If, as is reported, Keir Starmer believes that the reset process so far has shown that EU objections to ‘cherry-picking’ have disappeared, then that is a profound misreading. For reasons I discussed last year, things like a possible deal on SPS (or on the internal electricity market or Erasmus+) should not be regarded as cherry-picking. I meant that as a rebuke to those who mistakenly use that term to dismiss as doomed any and every attempt to supplement the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). But it would be equally mistaken if Starmer believes that the EU’s willingness to make some adjustments, when they are in its interests, means that any and every attempt to supplement the TCA is viable.
Brexit pragmatism?
Perhaps the most striking dishonesty is what underpins Labour’s approach, namely the claim, articulated most explicitly by Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (£), that what the government is delivering with the reset is “what a proper Brexit looks like”. By this he means that the UK is making “sovereign’ choices” guided by “ruthless pragmatism”. In its way, this is a clever debating society argument, in that it takes the Brexiters’ core demand, that what matters is not this-or-that regulation or law but that regulations and laws are decided by the UK, and uses it against them. This is actually exactly the same structure of argument that ‘liberal Brexiters’ use when they say that what Brexit means for immigration is not necessarily to reduce it but to set it at a level determined by a sovereign parliament.
However, the Thomas-Symonds line is self-defeating as a defence of Labour’s reset policy, precisely because that policy is so inadequate a response to what his government now admits to be the costs of Brexit. For example, to be more specific, on ‘ruthlessly pragmatic’ grounds it is impossible to defend the value of the UK having an independent trade policy.
That has been illustrated in two ways in the last fortnight by the announcement of the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement. On the one hand, that agreement shows that, as a collective, the EU was able to get a better deal, especially for its farmers, than the UK got in its own deal with Australia. On the other hand, and given also the recent EU-India deal, it means that the only countries with which Brexit Britain currently has trade agreements that it would not have as an EU member are Malaysia and Brunei (via CPTPP). Meanwhile, were the UK still in the EU it would be part of its trade agreement with Mercosur bloc.
Of course there are legitimate arguments about how important trade agreements really are to the economy, and also about the desirability of their effects on domestic industries, supply-chain resilience and so on. But those are not the government’s arguments. This being so, then it could get more, and better, trade agreements if it successfully pursued a customs union agreement with the EU, which would also improve terms of trade with the EU itself. So, on the basis of ‘ruthless pragmatism’, why not make the ‘sovereign choice’ to seek such an agreement with the EU?
From this follows the more fundamental point, which lies right at the heart of the fallacy of Brexit and which was most strikingly articulated in the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. As I discussed at the time, this contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” Thus even as Britain embarked on the process of leaving it did so knowing that the central plank of the leave argument – that the UK had lost its sovereignty – was completely untrue. It was just ‘a feeling’. And the point still holds, so, on the Thomas-Symonds argument for the reset, there is an even stronger argument for seeking to join the EU, as a sovereign choice made on pragmatic grounds.
A path forward?
In short, the more the government now acknowledges the costs of Brexit, and the more overtly it justifies its reset in terms of the pragmatic response of a sovereign nation to those costs, the more it undermines both the philosophical and economic case for Brexit – and yet at the same time describes its position as delivering ‘proper Brexit’. Similarly, although this week Starmer gave his strongest statement yet that the international ‘volatility’ engendered by Trump’s regime, as well as the economic damage of Brexit, justifies an “ambitious” partnership with the EU, doing so only serves to highlight the constraints he has placed on those ambitions.
It presumably goes without saying that, going back to the electoral politics, this means that if it is true that the Labour Party is now willing to have a “row” about the false promises of Brexit it is unlikely to reap much, if any, reward from anti-Brexit voters. For it remains wedded to a policy which is not just lily-livered but self-contradictory
That doesn’t mean that it is realistic for Labour to adopt a ‘join’ (or ‘rejoin’) position, let alone likely that it will do so. But in my view, as I’ve argued before, it should mean adopting the position that seeking to join would be desirable but is not feasible until such time as all the other main parties either accept this or, at least, undertake not to reverse such a process were it begun. This would at least bring some clarity to the “row”, forcing Tory and Reform Brexiters to discuss and defend Brexit, as they nowadays seem unwilling to do.
With that clarity might come some honesty, in the sense of the recognition that Brexit has not had majority support for a very long time but also by the recognition that, for so long as there is a distinct possibility that an incoming government would backtrack on it, any process towards joining is impossible (most obviously for the EU). That in turn could be part of a more general recognition, which has been largely absent throughout the Brexit process, that the future of UK-EU relations is not just about what Britain wants but what the EU and its member states want.
Taking all these things together might be the beginning of a recognition that, in the concluding words of an excellent analysis this week by Kirsty Hughes on her ScotEU Substack, “the path back needs strategic, honest, courageous political leaders and renewed, inclusive political debate.”
Deeply embedded dishonesty
However, it is difficult to be optimistic that any of this is about to happen, not least because although dishonesty certainly didn’t begin with Brexit, Brexit has rammed dishonesty so deeply into the body politic that it seems impossible to dislodge. A case in point is another aspect of the fallout from the Gorton & Denton by-election, namely the allegations of ‘family voting’ and voter coercion (with the implication that this had been amongst, specifically, Muslim voters). Last weekend, in what seemed to be an unusually detailed statement, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) announced that their investigation had found “no evidence” that this had occurred.
As I noted in my blog post at the time of the by-election, operators like Nigel Farage trade on the fact that such allegations stick in the public mind whereas even if subsequent investigations show them to be false that is barely noticed. No doubt that is true in this case, not least because whereas the original allegations were given very prominent coverage both in the right-wing press and by broadcasters including the BBC, the GMP’s statement was given far less attention.
But it’s actually worse than that, because the statement was immediately denounced by Farage as an “Establishment whitewash” and “another brushed-under-the-carpet report from the usual suspects”. Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate, also called it a “whitewash” and insisted that “sectarianism is taking over our democracy”, later strongly implying that he didn’t believe the police’s findings.
I’ve noted many times before that this kind of ‘non-falsifiable’ illogic permeated the entirety of the Brexit process and, by extension, now characterises Brexitism. Thus, in this case, had the police found evidence of family voting then, of course, it would be taken as proof that it had occurred. But, when the police found no evidence, this is taken as proof that it not only occurred but is being ‘covered up’.
What is far worse than that (or, rather, is enabled by it, showing why such illogic is dangerous and not just stupid) is how utterly corrosive and corrupting it is: as with depicting judges as ‘enemies of the people’ and civil servants as ‘saboteurs’, the Brexitists are determined to destroy every last vestige of trust in public institutions. Perhaps worst of all is that, whilst attacking the police investigation assists this agenda, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Farage et al. were secretly hoping that wrongdoing had taken place, yielding what would been a prominently reported and easily exploitable scandal.
The travails of MattGPT
Matt Goodwin has also been in the news for another reason. I referred in my previous post to his new book, Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which has since been published and widely criticised, including in a debate on GB News during which Goodwin became visibly angry, even at one stage rounding on his ideological soul-mate Miriam Cates, who was chairing.
Indeed, tellingly, even those sympathetic to what might charitably be called Goodwin’s thesis were unimpressed, with one describing the book as the work of a “slopagandist”, another entitling his review “suicide of an author’s credibility”, and a third opining that the nickname ‘MattGPT’ would follow the former academic “to his grave”. By comparison, those less sympathetic were rather gentle in simply calling it “trash”. In fairness, it should be said that Goodwin had his defenders, but fairness also requires saying that the most prominent of these was the swivel-eyed Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson (£).
As the ‘MattGPT’ tag implies, much of the criticism has focussed on what appear to be bogus quotations generated by AI-hallucination (£), to which Goodwin’s rather piquant defence in the debate was that he had put the entire text through an AI checker which had exonerated it from the accusation of the book being AI-generated (though that had not, in fact, been the accusation). But perhaps the more damning criticism is of the misinterpretation of statistics about schoolchildren who have English as an Additional Language (EAL). This sounds rather geeky but is actually important, both in itself and because it creates the suspicion that the way Goodwin represented the EAL statistics was not the only way in which data had been manipulated in pursuit of the book’s claims.
In official statistics, “a pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English. This measure is not a measure of English language proficiency or a good proxy for recent immigration” (p.4 of link). On this basis, between 20% and 25% of pupils have EAL. From this, Goodwin seems to infer that they have either no, or at least impaired or deficient, proficiency in English.
However, according to Steve Strand, Professor of Education at Oxford University, Goodwin “is totally misunderstanding what this measure of EAL is. He keeps talking about English not being young people’s first language, but you could be recorded as EAL and still be totally fluent in English. So he’s not understanding the question that underlies the data.” Strand’s argument is borne out by the fact that, according to Department for Education’s 2020 report, in Spring 2018 some 61% of EAL schoolchildren were either fluent or competent in English [1].
Moreover, Goodwin claims that in schools in areas where EAL rates are high “English is no longer the main language” which carries at least the implication that some other language is, whereas, of course, in such situations English is, so to speak, the lingua franca. In that sense, what the EAL statistics actually show is exactly what would be expected from assimilating immigrants. At home, their children are exposed to and use another language, but in the public sphere, at school (and subsequently, no doubt, at work), they are additionally exposed to and use English. But in Goodwin’s telling it is sinister evidence that a process of ‘cultural erasure’ is underway.
Plastic patriots become counterfeit Christians
That same proposition is evident in the latest seasonal panic that Easter eggs are no longer called by that name, every aspect of which has been discredited by Emma Monks on her Monk Debunks Substack. But whilst, like the similar panics that Christmas has been replaced by ‘Winterval’, this is tediously familiar, it has a new salience because of the notable recent shift in the rhetoric of populist leaders towards stressing Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.
Admittedly, theologians might question the sacramental status of the chocolate Easter Egg, just as they might wonder if Tommy Robinson’s conversion is any more genuine than his name, be puzzled by Reform MP Robert Jenrick’s reference to “Psalm Sunday” (sic), and ponder the sacerdotal credentials of ‘Bishop’ Ceirion Dewar of Ceirion H. Dewar Ministries Ltd. But there is no doubt that there has been a profound change in the language being used by the populist right.
Nor is it just matter of language. It is also evident in what is emerging as Reform’s “family friendly” policy agenda – an agenda set out with great clarity by Lisa Burton in Yorkshire Bylines – with all it implies for abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights generally. One reason for these developments is the influence of US populists on their UK counterparts. It may also be relevant that Paul Marshall, so pivotal to British populists especially through his co-ownership of GB News, moves in those circles and is himself an evangelical Christian with a reportedly “spiritual mission” to fight ‘progressivism’ (which appears actually to mean post-Enlightenment rationality).
There is an obvious connection between these three stories – the discredited allegations of ‘family voting’, Goodwin’s discredited account of EAL statistics, and the discredited stories about the cancellation of Easter: they all circle around the same theme of ‘cultural erasure’ at the hands of Muslims, aided and abetted by the liberal ‘woke’ elite. And it is a message pouring in torrents across social media, and much of the print and broadcast media, every day, in the coverage of hundreds of different stories.
Another recent example is the spate of images of schoolchildren exercising on yoga mats carrying the false claim that they are being forced to participate in Muslim prayers. Yet another is the frenzied reaction to a BBC discussion about whether there are too many ‘dog-friendly’ spaces, representing it as a woke attempt to impose Muslim sensibilities upon the nation (it was actually about people who are scared of dogs). These, and innumerable other examples, are small-scale in themselves but it is that which makes them potent as tessellations of the same basic message.
But there is another connection between all these stories, and it is one which links directly back to Brexit.
Vibe politics
As these various stories have unfolded over the last fortnight, I have been looking at the social media responses not just from the big names of the culture wars but from the rank-and-file posters. What that reveals is not so much that the rebuttals of them are ignored as that they are discounted. That is, it may be accepted that such-and-such a detail is wrong, but, nevertheless, ‘we all know’ that the bigger truth holds good. This is the significance of the cumulative effect of similar stories. It creates a politics of ‘vibes’ just as with Brexit the effect of years of media stories made it “feel” as if we had lost sovereignty.
Of course, vibe politics is nothing new. Think of Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Think, for that matter, of the 1950s Macmillanite message that we “have never had it so good”. What is distinctive about populism is that it trades on ‘feel-bad’ rather than ‘feel-good’ vibes: on grievance, resentment, and fear. That, too, is evident in the stories I have just discussed and is absolutely central to the claims of ‘cultural erasure’.
I haven’t talked about the war in this post, since its deepening spiral only serves to re-enforce points which I’ve previously made. But Nigel Farage has been speaking about the war. Not, needless to say, the war the US has unleashed in the Middle East, about which, after his original Trump-crawl, he has been remarkably coy. No, as usual it was the Second World War or, more particularly, a single moment within it.
Thus, launching Reform’s London local government election campaign in Croydon, under its current and perhaps ill-advised slogan of ‘Reform will fix it’, he spluttered that: “This is, this is, this is 1940 all over again. The very existence of our nation, its culture, its identity is under threat.” It is the same message of a ‘nation in existential peril’ that Goodwin peddles; the same message as that of the ‘family voting’ accusations; the same message as is contained in the stories about Easter eggs, yoga mats, dogs, and all the rest of it.
Farage is right, though, to say that history is repeating itself. Not in the sense that it is 1940 all over again, but because it is 2015 all over again. Then, too, he was bloviating about 1940 but at that time it was to tell us it was the EU referendum which was “our modern day Battle of Britain”. Once again, Brexit has morphed into Brexitism.
It’s this repetition, this stuckness in the same myths and vibe-based messages, and the fact that, like it or not, they continue to resonate for perhaps a quarter or even a third of the adult population, and to be amplified by a phalanx of media commentors, which makes British politics so irredeemably dishonest, and the possibility of honesty about Brexit, specifically, so elusive.
With that happy thought I leave you to enjoy, to use the term cruelly stolen when the nasty Normans erased our culture and language, Ēostre.
Note
[1] The report notes that it is not possible to provide comparable figures for children for whom English is their first/ sole language, but it should not be assumed that all such children are fluent or competent.
Showing posts with label Sovereignty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sovereignty. Show all posts
Friday, 3 April 2026
Friday, 7 March 2025
The new global divide makes Brexit an anomaly
The new global divide I’ve been talking about in recent posts has deepened very sharply again since my most recent one. It is a divide that is likely to become as profound as that of the Cold War and, although it doesn’t yet have a snappy name, its existence has been recognized by just about every political commentator. Something very basic has shifted, summed up by the headline to Martin Wolf’s recent Financial Times article (£): “The US is now the enemy of the West”. As a result, according to former Ambassador Sir David Manning, there is a “seismic change” underway in the UK’s relationship with the US.
That has happened quickly, and in ways which are unfolding daily, if not hourly, around the world. In the UK, with almost equal rapidity, it is beginning to shift the tectonic plates of politics, and in particular the shape of post-Brexit politics, in line with this new global divide. However, although the global consequences are alarming and potentially horrific, the impact on British politics may in some ways be positive.
The new global divide
At stake, as recently discussed on Professor Ben Ansell’s Radio 4 strand, Rethink, may be the survival of liberalism itself. That is a useful way to frame things, because it is not just ‘liberal’ journalists and writers in the ‘Establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ media who do so. It is equally explicit amongst ‘radical right’ populists and their Putinist allies that their project is to fight and destroy the liberal order in domestic and international politics. In an era when, often, it seems as if the competing sides cannot even agree on the most basic of facts, or the most basic rules of logic, on this one, overarching, issue they are at one.
I’ve pointed in recent posts to some of the ways that Brexit relates to this new divide, but it is worth spelling out how it sits squarely within the ‘anti-liberal’ camp. At the most basic level, support for Brexit is one of the many things Trump and Putin share. Beyond that, Brexit and the anti-liberal axis share the same hubristic nationalism, the same quasi-mystical invocation of ‘the people’, the same vicious anger against ‘the liberal elite’ and the ‘globalist establishment’, the same xenophobia, the same nostalgia for an imagined past, the same self-pitying victimhood, and, of course, the same loathing of the EU. They also share many of the same rhetorical strategies, especially that of promulgating false, often convoluted, claims as truth and then, when they are challenged, using that very challenge to ‘prove’ that there is at least ‘something to be debated’ in those falsities.
But if this consonance were all there were to it, then the current situation would look very different. Post-Brexit Britain would be neatly dovetailing into the Trump-Putin side of the new divide. It would, to take an important recent illustration of that divide, have voted with the US, Russia, Belarus, and North Korea in their opposition to the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Or at the very least, it would have abstained, like China. Of course, in that situation, many British people would be horrified by what their country had become, just as many Americans are horrified by what the US has become, but, with Brexit, as with Trump’s re-election, the die would have been cast.
Britain agrees its position
That isn’t the situation, though, and in fact the UK voted with all the other liberal countries, including Japan, Canada, Australia etc. as well as those in Europe. And this is because, although Brexit has happened – the UK has left the EU – it does not entirely define Britain, certainly not in the way that Brexiters had hoped and expected. The reasons for that are complex, but obviously include the fact that Brexit was so narrowly supported in the first place, and that for almost the entire period since it happened it has been supported by only a dwindling minority. As I’ve remarked before, having won the referendum, the Brexiters went on to lose the battle for the post-Brexit narrative.
Allied to this is the fact that most of the tenets of liberalism, both in international relations and domestic politics, whilst taking a battering from Brexit, have survived, sometimes precariously, in the UK. Most particularly, British support for Ukraine, both as a matter of principle and because geography makes it vital to national security, is strong and popular. That, in turn, is reflected in the way that most Brexiters, especially within the Tory Party, unlike Trump and the US radical right, are supportive of Ukraine, hostile to Putin, and pro-NATO.
For this reason, politicians of almost all parties, including populist Conservatives, condemned the literally stomach-turning bullying to which Voldymyr Zelensky was subjected by Trump and JD Vance. It’s too early to be sure, but I have a strong sense that this was a turning point for the British public, and it certainly united the British press in revulsion. That revulsion came even closer to home when Vance made dismissive comments about, apparently, the British military (although he later denied they were the target), something which caused genuine anger cutting across political divisions, including that of remainers and leavers. Probably nothing could have done so much to cement the view that the US under Trump has become a nasty, rude, and hostile power.
At all events there is now a new political consensus emerging in response to the choices Trump has forced upon us. For example, even if we had a Conservative government, it would all but certainly have voted the same way as the Labour administration did in the UN vote. More generally, the Conservatives have both supported and praised Starmer’s general handling of what the eminent War Studies Professor Lawrence Freedman has called “the great crisis”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, with his open admiration of Putin and Trump, his apologism for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and his support for the bullying of Zelensky has become an outlier, even amongst most of his own supporters, never mind the country as a whole [1].
The limits of choice
All of this means that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK remains in its values, interests, and allegiances a ‘liberal European’ country. However, the UK, under any government, and with or without Brexit, is not able simply to align ‘against’ the US. Trump may have made his country the enemy of the West, but many countries in the West, not just the UK, cannot make themselves the enemy of America. That is one reason why the last few weeks have been so profoundly shocking. For the UK, specifically, the scale of its trade and investment relationship with the US, and the scope of its defence and security relationship, make it impossible to undertake such a re-alignment, certainly in any short timescale.
Those relationships reach deep into the central, and the most secret, parts of the British state, including its nuclear capacity (although the common claim that the UK does not have operational independence in the use of is nuclear weapons, or requires ‘codes’ from the US to do so, would seem to be a myth) and, perhaps most profoundly of all, its intelligence capacity. Regarding the latter, former diplomat Arthur Snell has argued that, especially with respect to signals intelligence (sigint), there is almost no way of effectively detaching the UK capability from that of the US. If there is, it will take time. The US is by far the senior partner of the ‘Five Eyes’ partnership (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which shares both facilities and yields of sigint operations and, as such, is vital to the UK for military, counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and others purposes.
This makes it all the more concerning that at least some in the US administration are pushing to exclude Canada from the Five Eyes (£), in the context of the wider economic and political aggression Trump is directing at Ottawa. The threat may well come to nothing, but it is a reminder, not least to the UK, of the hazards of being dependent on the caprice of a partner that is no longer a friend. It is also one of many indications that Trump’s America is vindictive and bullying to those it perceives negatively, whether for being enemies, or parasites, or competitors, or weak, or just for having in some way offended against Trump’s pathologically colossal vanity. (This link, to a free-to-view piece by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is well worth reading for a sense of the horror of what Trump is doing, and why.)
That is why Keir Starmer will go on publicly insisting – as any British Prime Minister would, with or without Brexit – that there is ‘no choice’ to be made between the UK’s relations with the US and those with Europe, and that the US remains a reliable ally. They are necessary diplomatic fictions. It is why anyone expecting to see a dramatic big gesture from Starmer, denouncing Trump for the disgrace he is, will be disappointed. It is why we witnessed the sphincter-tightening spectacle of Starmer having to subject himself to stiltedly lavishing praise on Trump, in return for some tepid compliments delivered with barely concealed contempt. It is why he invited Trump for a State Visit which, for all the growing opposition to it, will almost certainly go ahead. And it is why, when it does, King Charles will grit his teeth and smile. The rest of us should just be grateful we don’t have to do the same.
The realities of sovereignty
What we are actually seeing is a hard lesson in the reality of what sovereignty and the limits to sovereignty mean. The Brexiters were and are entirely deluded to think that this reality has anything to do with the ‘imposition’ of Brussels regulations on widgets – regulations made, when we were an EU member, with the UK having a prominent and respected voice. A far better illustration is the way that the British Prime Minister literally dares not speak anything close to the truth to or about the US President for fear of being publicly humiliated and the nation punished. Similarly, whereas leading British politicians were able to liken the EU to Nazis or the Soviet Union with impunity, no such politician, and certainly no serving government minister, would dare say the same of Trump’s America.
Of course, there is nothing new in the disparity between US and UK power, and there have been previous occasions, most obviously the Suez crisis, where that has been humiliatingly revealed. The US has the power to coerce us and to hurt us. The difference under Trump is that he would be quite willing to do so on the flimsiest of pretexts, in the most brutal of ways, and would enjoy it. What was once a power imbalance within a broadly reliable alliance has now become a power play within something more like a mediaeval court in which Britain is a minor, ageing aristocrat. And there’s not much we can do about it. It is no good reaching for the historical analogy of 1930s appeasement here. When Imperial Britain faced the threat of Nazi Germany, it did not face an adversary with which the bulk of its military and intelligence capacity was intertwined, or one which dwarfed it in resources.
Similarly, the answer to the question posed by George Monbiot in the Guardian last week – what if Britain had to defend itself militarily against the US? – is depressingly obvious: we couldn’t. However, we aren’t in this situation, but in a different and perhaps more complex one [2]. Crazy as this US administration is, it is not bent on going to war with the UK or Europe. The military threat comes from Russia, and from the withdrawal of reliable US security guarantees to deter that threat. Here the appeasement analogy does apply, in that if, with US complicity, Ukraine is dismembered and subjugated, Russia will be emboldened to go after other European countries, both directly and indirectly, including the UK. (Indeed, the Brexit sovereigntists seem remarkably sanguine about Russia’s many incursions into UK territory as if it were metric measurements, rather than these acts of territorial aggression, which were the most real and pressing threats to British sovereignty.)
Minor powers
Equally, for all the real constraints on what the UK can say or do to the US, it is not completely powerless and, as a matter of fact, Starmer is being far from supine. There are several illustrations of that, including the way the UK voted at the UN. Related to that, Starmer has been insistent, despite Trump’s brazen lies to the contrary, that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine. Another example is the way that, during his Washington visit, he pushed back against Vance’s barbed comment about lack of freedom of speech in the UK (this is one of the many alt-right canards about both Starmer and Britain, heavily promulgated by Elon Musk). Then, at this week’s PMQs, he unfussily but pointedly issued an implicit reprimand to Vance for his own implicit dismissiveness of the British military.
Most prominent of all, the warmth with which Starmer welcomed Zelensky to the UK just a few hours after the Ukrainian leader’s appalling treatment in America, and the immediate arrangement of a meeting with King Charles, were clear rebukes to Trump, even if not vocalized as such. Moreover, no one could miss the contrast of the genuine regard between Starmer and Zelensky with the precarious brittleness of the Starmer-Trump meeting. These things are probably as far as the UK can do without attracting Trump’s ire; it may even be that they go beyond it.
Starmer and the UK also have some cards to play with the US which, though they shouldn’t be over-stated, are not entirely negligible. For all that it is very much the junior partner, the UK does contribute some things the US needs, with sigint capacity being one. And whilst Trump is undoubtedly too self-involved and too ignorant to do so, there are still some US Republicans who recall with gratitude the UK’s support after 9/11 and even, for those with longer memories, the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. (I make no comment on those things in themselves, just the point that they still carry some meaning for some in the US.) Even the ghost of Churchill still has some residual currency, as the (re-) placement of his bust in the Oval Office attests.
In that respect, it is perhaps telling that Vance felt obliged to deny that he had been referring to the UK (or France) in those scornful comments about the militaries of ‘random countries’. He can hardly have done so because he had been misunderstood, since no other countries have yet proposed to deploy troops to Ukraine. And there is nothing in his character to suggest he did so out of personal graciousness, still less from any sense of shame. So the implication is that there is still some vestigial realization in the White House that it cannot be totally disrespectful to its notional allies, at least in public.
The way ahead
Be all that as it may, what is certainly the case is that over time, without publicly admitting there is a choice being made, the UK is going to increase its contributions to, and deepen its relations with, a massively re-vamped EU and European defence capacity and, in the process, reduce its dependence on the US. Indeed, Trump can hardly object to that, since it is what he has asked for and, in doing so, differs from previous US administrations only in the brutality and crudity of his demands.
It is now becoming clear to many commentators that, as I wrote exactly a month ago:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel.”
It is far too early to know where this will lead, but last weekend’s convenorship of a meeting involving the EU, most of its members states, Turkey, Canada, and Ukraine was a clear example that Starmer is trying to grasp this opportunity. And already he and Britain are attracting appreciative comments from other European leaders, something that hasn’t happened for long enough.
But none of this is going to be easy, and it certainly isn’t going to be pretty. Those who are squeamish about realpolitik and who like their politics to be morally-elevated had better look away for the next few years. That doesn’t just apply to the UK, but here it will include the fact that, like it or not, Starmer is going to make use of not being in the EU in various ways. That will include using the symbolism of that as a way of getting heard in a White House that loathes the EU, something which has already enabled Farage to claim, predictably but misleadingly, that we are seeing some kind of benefit of Brexit [3]. It may include some kind of substantive agreement to avoid new tariffs and, perhaps, to develop an AI regime in conjunction with the US, rather than with the EU. Personally, I’m not convinced these things will happen, but they will certainly continue to be talked about.
The trick for the UK will be to combine this not just with getting closer to the EU on defence, but with effecting the most maximalist version of the 'reset' (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, fully implementing the existing agreements with the EU, including the Windsor Framework, as well as completing the still unresolved, and apparently stalled, negotiations over Gibraltar). This in turn means the careful curation of relationships with other countries, within and beyond Europe, to defuse any sense that the UK is selling them out by making some agreements with the US. As such it will call for extremely astute diplomacy, but it is not an impossible task, since other national leaders understand perfectly well the difficulties of navigating relations with Trump.
Moreover, none of this is going to be cheap. The recent announcement of increased defence spending is only the beginning of what needs to come and the fraught political choices this will entail have yet to be faced up to.
Back to Brexit
In these ways, our country is going to have to simultaneously placate a dangerously unpredictable US whilst acting on the consequences of it now being undeniable that Europe is where the UK belongs. The great fantasy of Brexit, and its central strategic folly, of thinking otherwise has now been exposed, far more dramatically and suddenly than by Brexit itself. That is now becoming accepted, at least according to the commentator Janan Ganesh, even by British Conservatives. Indeed, for at least some of them, the new situation creates a welcome way out of the cul-de-sac which Brexit has taken them, not least as regards electoral strategy.
As the veteran international politics sage Philip Stephens puts it, “Trump’s America has made its choice”. In doing so, it has imposed one on the UK which, though ragged, in that it can’t be made through a single decision at a single moment, could through a series of decisions gradually re-integrate us with the EU. For within this new global divide, it is crystal clear that Brexit is an anomaly, a policy which belongs on one side of that divide yet is being pursued by a country located on the other side. At the very least, the Brexiters’ claim, which was always flawed, that the EU is irrelevant to the UK’s security needs and that these were fully catered for by NATO, has now been exposed as disastrously false.
This doesn’t, in itself, mean that rejoining the EU is on the political agenda, but it does make the timescale for that being a realistic possibility shorter than seemed likely even a fortnight ago. It already cements the pre-existing public sense that Brexit was a terrible error. So, frightening and disorientating as the last few weeks have been, I think there are at least some grounds for hope. Trump feels like a disaster, and in general terms that feeling is well-founded. But for post-Brexit Britain he might just be a reprieve.
Notes
[1] This could turn out to be one of the most important, and most positive, domestic consequences of the new global situation, sidelining Farage for the first time for decades. Subscribers to Byline Times can read some of my initial thoughts about this in the next issue (April 2025), and I am sure I will write much more about it, here, in the future.
[2] Thus those who, in comments on one of my recent posts, thought I was anticipating, or even advocating, the UK ‘standing up to’ the US militarily entirely misunderstood me. It may well be true, though, that there are inconsistencies in the content and tone of my recent posts but, if so, I think that is understandable – even inevitable - given the rapidity with which events are unfolding.
[3] It is misleading because although it is possible that the UK being out of the EU helps to get a hearing from Trump a) it is wrong to claim that this is because the UK now has an independent foreign policy, because it always did; b) any gain from that is offset by the very much reduced influence the UK has within the EU; c) it is only because Trump is so bent out of shape about the EU rather than being because Brexit has, in general terms, given the UK any benefits in its relationship with the US; and d) precisely because Trump is Trump it doesn’t count for much anyway. He’s perfectly likely, if he takes umbrage at something, to turn on the UK, Brexit or no Brexit. Hence the need to tip-toe around his freakshow vanities.
That has happened quickly, and in ways which are unfolding daily, if not hourly, around the world. In the UK, with almost equal rapidity, it is beginning to shift the tectonic plates of politics, and in particular the shape of post-Brexit politics, in line with this new global divide. However, although the global consequences are alarming and potentially horrific, the impact on British politics may in some ways be positive.
The new global divide
At stake, as recently discussed on Professor Ben Ansell’s Radio 4 strand, Rethink, may be the survival of liberalism itself. That is a useful way to frame things, because it is not just ‘liberal’ journalists and writers in the ‘Establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ media who do so. It is equally explicit amongst ‘radical right’ populists and their Putinist allies that their project is to fight and destroy the liberal order in domestic and international politics. In an era when, often, it seems as if the competing sides cannot even agree on the most basic of facts, or the most basic rules of logic, on this one, overarching, issue they are at one.
I’ve pointed in recent posts to some of the ways that Brexit relates to this new divide, but it is worth spelling out how it sits squarely within the ‘anti-liberal’ camp. At the most basic level, support for Brexit is one of the many things Trump and Putin share. Beyond that, Brexit and the anti-liberal axis share the same hubristic nationalism, the same quasi-mystical invocation of ‘the people’, the same vicious anger against ‘the liberal elite’ and the ‘globalist establishment’, the same xenophobia, the same nostalgia for an imagined past, the same self-pitying victimhood, and, of course, the same loathing of the EU. They also share many of the same rhetorical strategies, especially that of promulgating false, often convoluted, claims as truth and then, when they are challenged, using that very challenge to ‘prove’ that there is at least ‘something to be debated’ in those falsities.
But if this consonance were all there were to it, then the current situation would look very different. Post-Brexit Britain would be neatly dovetailing into the Trump-Putin side of the new divide. It would, to take an important recent illustration of that divide, have voted with the US, Russia, Belarus, and North Korea in their opposition to the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Or at the very least, it would have abstained, like China. Of course, in that situation, many British people would be horrified by what their country had become, just as many Americans are horrified by what the US has become, but, with Brexit, as with Trump’s re-election, the die would have been cast.
Britain agrees its position
That isn’t the situation, though, and in fact the UK voted with all the other liberal countries, including Japan, Canada, Australia etc. as well as those in Europe. And this is because, although Brexit has happened – the UK has left the EU – it does not entirely define Britain, certainly not in the way that Brexiters had hoped and expected. The reasons for that are complex, but obviously include the fact that Brexit was so narrowly supported in the first place, and that for almost the entire period since it happened it has been supported by only a dwindling minority. As I’ve remarked before, having won the referendum, the Brexiters went on to lose the battle for the post-Brexit narrative.
Allied to this is the fact that most of the tenets of liberalism, both in international relations and domestic politics, whilst taking a battering from Brexit, have survived, sometimes precariously, in the UK. Most particularly, British support for Ukraine, both as a matter of principle and because geography makes it vital to national security, is strong and popular. That, in turn, is reflected in the way that most Brexiters, especially within the Tory Party, unlike Trump and the US radical right, are supportive of Ukraine, hostile to Putin, and pro-NATO.
For this reason, politicians of almost all parties, including populist Conservatives, condemned the literally stomach-turning bullying to which Voldymyr Zelensky was subjected by Trump and JD Vance. It’s too early to be sure, but I have a strong sense that this was a turning point for the British public, and it certainly united the British press in revulsion. That revulsion came even closer to home when Vance made dismissive comments about, apparently, the British military (although he later denied they were the target), something which caused genuine anger cutting across political divisions, including that of remainers and leavers. Probably nothing could have done so much to cement the view that the US under Trump has become a nasty, rude, and hostile power.
At all events there is now a new political consensus emerging in response to the choices Trump has forced upon us. For example, even if we had a Conservative government, it would all but certainly have voted the same way as the Labour administration did in the UN vote. More generally, the Conservatives have both supported and praised Starmer’s general handling of what the eminent War Studies Professor Lawrence Freedman has called “the great crisis”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, with his open admiration of Putin and Trump, his apologism for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and his support for the bullying of Zelensky has become an outlier, even amongst most of his own supporters, never mind the country as a whole [1].
The limits of choice
All of this means that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK remains in its values, interests, and allegiances a ‘liberal European’ country. However, the UK, under any government, and with or without Brexit, is not able simply to align ‘against’ the US. Trump may have made his country the enemy of the West, but many countries in the West, not just the UK, cannot make themselves the enemy of America. That is one reason why the last few weeks have been so profoundly shocking. For the UK, specifically, the scale of its trade and investment relationship with the US, and the scope of its defence and security relationship, make it impossible to undertake such a re-alignment, certainly in any short timescale.
Those relationships reach deep into the central, and the most secret, parts of the British state, including its nuclear capacity (although the common claim that the UK does not have operational independence in the use of is nuclear weapons, or requires ‘codes’ from the US to do so, would seem to be a myth) and, perhaps most profoundly of all, its intelligence capacity. Regarding the latter, former diplomat Arthur Snell has argued that, especially with respect to signals intelligence (sigint), there is almost no way of effectively detaching the UK capability from that of the US. If there is, it will take time. The US is by far the senior partner of the ‘Five Eyes’ partnership (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which shares both facilities and yields of sigint operations and, as such, is vital to the UK for military, counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and others purposes.
This makes it all the more concerning that at least some in the US administration are pushing to exclude Canada from the Five Eyes (£), in the context of the wider economic and political aggression Trump is directing at Ottawa. The threat may well come to nothing, but it is a reminder, not least to the UK, of the hazards of being dependent on the caprice of a partner that is no longer a friend. It is also one of many indications that Trump’s America is vindictive and bullying to those it perceives negatively, whether for being enemies, or parasites, or competitors, or weak, or just for having in some way offended against Trump’s pathologically colossal vanity. (This link, to a free-to-view piece by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is well worth reading for a sense of the horror of what Trump is doing, and why.)
That is why Keir Starmer will go on publicly insisting – as any British Prime Minister would, with or without Brexit – that there is ‘no choice’ to be made between the UK’s relations with the US and those with Europe, and that the US remains a reliable ally. They are necessary diplomatic fictions. It is why anyone expecting to see a dramatic big gesture from Starmer, denouncing Trump for the disgrace he is, will be disappointed. It is why we witnessed the sphincter-tightening spectacle of Starmer having to subject himself to stiltedly lavishing praise on Trump, in return for some tepid compliments delivered with barely concealed contempt. It is why he invited Trump for a State Visit which, for all the growing opposition to it, will almost certainly go ahead. And it is why, when it does, King Charles will grit his teeth and smile. The rest of us should just be grateful we don’t have to do the same.
The realities of sovereignty
What we are actually seeing is a hard lesson in the reality of what sovereignty and the limits to sovereignty mean. The Brexiters were and are entirely deluded to think that this reality has anything to do with the ‘imposition’ of Brussels regulations on widgets – regulations made, when we were an EU member, with the UK having a prominent and respected voice. A far better illustration is the way that the British Prime Minister literally dares not speak anything close to the truth to or about the US President for fear of being publicly humiliated and the nation punished. Similarly, whereas leading British politicians were able to liken the EU to Nazis or the Soviet Union with impunity, no such politician, and certainly no serving government minister, would dare say the same of Trump’s America.
Of course, there is nothing new in the disparity between US and UK power, and there have been previous occasions, most obviously the Suez crisis, where that has been humiliatingly revealed. The US has the power to coerce us and to hurt us. The difference under Trump is that he would be quite willing to do so on the flimsiest of pretexts, in the most brutal of ways, and would enjoy it. What was once a power imbalance within a broadly reliable alliance has now become a power play within something more like a mediaeval court in which Britain is a minor, ageing aristocrat. And there’s not much we can do about it. It is no good reaching for the historical analogy of 1930s appeasement here. When Imperial Britain faced the threat of Nazi Germany, it did not face an adversary with which the bulk of its military and intelligence capacity was intertwined, or one which dwarfed it in resources.
Similarly, the answer to the question posed by George Monbiot in the Guardian last week – what if Britain had to defend itself militarily against the US? – is depressingly obvious: we couldn’t. However, we aren’t in this situation, but in a different and perhaps more complex one [2]. Crazy as this US administration is, it is not bent on going to war with the UK or Europe. The military threat comes from Russia, and from the withdrawal of reliable US security guarantees to deter that threat. Here the appeasement analogy does apply, in that if, with US complicity, Ukraine is dismembered and subjugated, Russia will be emboldened to go after other European countries, both directly and indirectly, including the UK. (Indeed, the Brexit sovereigntists seem remarkably sanguine about Russia’s many incursions into UK territory as if it were metric measurements, rather than these acts of territorial aggression, which were the most real and pressing threats to British sovereignty.)
Minor powers
Equally, for all the real constraints on what the UK can say or do to the US, it is not completely powerless and, as a matter of fact, Starmer is being far from supine. There are several illustrations of that, including the way the UK voted at the UN. Related to that, Starmer has been insistent, despite Trump’s brazen lies to the contrary, that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine. Another example is the way that, during his Washington visit, he pushed back against Vance’s barbed comment about lack of freedom of speech in the UK (this is one of the many alt-right canards about both Starmer and Britain, heavily promulgated by Elon Musk). Then, at this week’s PMQs, he unfussily but pointedly issued an implicit reprimand to Vance for his own implicit dismissiveness of the British military.
Most prominent of all, the warmth with which Starmer welcomed Zelensky to the UK just a few hours after the Ukrainian leader’s appalling treatment in America, and the immediate arrangement of a meeting with King Charles, were clear rebukes to Trump, even if not vocalized as such. Moreover, no one could miss the contrast of the genuine regard between Starmer and Zelensky with the precarious brittleness of the Starmer-Trump meeting. These things are probably as far as the UK can do without attracting Trump’s ire; it may even be that they go beyond it.
Starmer and the UK also have some cards to play with the US which, though they shouldn’t be over-stated, are not entirely negligible. For all that it is very much the junior partner, the UK does contribute some things the US needs, with sigint capacity being one. And whilst Trump is undoubtedly too self-involved and too ignorant to do so, there are still some US Republicans who recall with gratitude the UK’s support after 9/11 and even, for those with longer memories, the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. (I make no comment on those things in themselves, just the point that they still carry some meaning for some in the US.) Even the ghost of Churchill still has some residual currency, as the (re-) placement of his bust in the Oval Office attests.
In that respect, it is perhaps telling that Vance felt obliged to deny that he had been referring to the UK (or France) in those scornful comments about the militaries of ‘random countries’. He can hardly have done so because he had been misunderstood, since no other countries have yet proposed to deploy troops to Ukraine. And there is nothing in his character to suggest he did so out of personal graciousness, still less from any sense of shame. So the implication is that there is still some vestigial realization in the White House that it cannot be totally disrespectful to its notional allies, at least in public.
The way ahead
Be all that as it may, what is certainly the case is that over time, without publicly admitting there is a choice being made, the UK is going to increase its contributions to, and deepen its relations with, a massively re-vamped EU and European defence capacity and, in the process, reduce its dependence on the US. Indeed, Trump can hardly object to that, since it is what he has asked for and, in doing so, differs from previous US administrations only in the brutality and crudity of his demands.
It is now becoming clear to many commentators that, as I wrote exactly a month ago:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel.”
It is far too early to know where this will lead, but last weekend’s convenorship of a meeting involving the EU, most of its members states, Turkey, Canada, and Ukraine was a clear example that Starmer is trying to grasp this opportunity. And already he and Britain are attracting appreciative comments from other European leaders, something that hasn’t happened for long enough.
But none of this is going to be easy, and it certainly isn’t going to be pretty. Those who are squeamish about realpolitik and who like their politics to be morally-elevated had better look away for the next few years. That doesn’t just apply to the UK, but here it will include the fact that, like it or not, Starmer is going to make use of not being in the EU in various ways. That will include using the symbolism of that as a way of getting heard in a White House that loathes the EU, something which has already enabled Farage to claim, predictably but misleadingly, that we are seeing some kind of benefit of Brexit [3]. It may include some kind of substantive agreement to avoid new tariffs and, perhaps, to develop an AI regime in conjunction with the US, rather than with the EU. Personally, I’m not convinced these things will happen, but they will certainly continue to be talked about.
The trick for the UK will be to combine this not just with getting closer to the EU on defence, but with effecting the most maximalist version of the 'reset' (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, fully implementing the existing agreements with the EU, including the Windsor Framework, as well as completing the still unresolved, and apparently stalled, negotiations over Gibraltar). This in turn means the careful curation of relationships with other countries, within and beyond Europe, to defuse any sense that the UK is selling them out by making some agreements with the US. As such it will call for extremely astute diplomacy, but it is not an impossible task, since other national leaders understand perfectly well the difficulties of navigating relations with Trump.
Moreover, none of this is going to be cheap. The recent announcement of increased defence spending is only the beginning of what needs to come and the fraught political choices this will entail have yet to be faced up to.
Back to Brexit
In these ways, our country is going to have to simultaneously placate a dangerously unpredictable US whilst acting on the consequences of it now being undeniable that Europe is where the UK belongs. The great fantasy of Brexit, and its central strategic folly, of thinking otherwise has now been exposed, far more dramatically and suddenly than by Brexit itself. That is now becoming accepted, at least according to the commentator Janan Ganesh, even by British Conservatives. Indeed, for at least some of them, the new situation creates a welcome way out of the cul-de-sac which Brexit has taken them, not least as regards electoral strategy.
As the veteran international politics sage Philip Stephens puts it, “Trump’s America has made its choice”. In doing so, it has imposed one on the UK which, though ragged, in that it can’t be made through a single decision at a single moment, could through a series of decisions gradually re-integrate us with the EU. For within this new global divide, it is crystal clear that Brexit is an anomaly, a policy which belongs on one side of that divide yet is being pursued by a country located on the other side. At the very least, the Brexiters’ claim, which was always flawed, that the EU is irrelevant to the UK’s security needs and that these were fully catered for by NATO, has now been exposed as disastrously false.
This doesn’t, in itself, mean that rejoining the EU is on the political agenda, but it does make the timescale for that being a realistic possibility shorter than seemed likely even a fortnight ago. It already cements the pre-existing public sense that Brexit was a terrible error. So, frightening and disorientating as the last few weeks have been, I think there are at least some grounds for hope. Trump feels like a disaster, and in general terms that feeling is well-founded. But for post-Brexit Britain he might just be a reprieve.
Notes
[1] This could turn out to be one of the most important, and most positive, domestic consequences of the new global situation, sidelining Farage for the first time for decades. Subscribers to Byline Times can read some of my initial thoughts about this in the next issue (April 2025), and I am sure I will write much more about it, here, in the future.
[2] Thus those who, in comments on one of my recent posts, thought I was anticipating, or even advocating, the UK ‘standing up to’ the US militarily entirely misunderstood me. It may well be true, though, that there are inconsistencies in the content and tone of my recent posts but, if so, I think that is understandable – even inevitable - given the rapidity with which events are unfolding.
[3] It is misleading because although it is possible that the UK being out of the EU helps to get a hearing from Trump a) it is wrong to claim that this is because the UK now has an independent foreign policy, because it always did; b) any gain from that is offset by the very much reduced influence the UK has within the EU; c) it is only because Trump is so bent out of shape about the EU rather than being because Brexit has, in general terms, given the UK any benefits in its relationship with the US; and d) precisely because Trump is Trump it doesn’t count for much anyway. He’s perfectly likely, if he takes umbrage at something, to turn on the UK, Brexit or no Brexit. Hence the need to tip-toe around his freakshow vanities.
Friday, 15 September 2023
The eighth summer of Brexit: pragmatism without honesty
The recurring word in most commentary on this summer’s Brexit events is ‘pragmatism’. It refers to the range of ways, some quieter than others, in which the government is trying to soften or avoid some aspects of the damage of Brexit. It’s a fair description, so far as it goes, and there is something to welcome in the damage limitation measures it is applied to, so far as they go. It may be further evidence that, as I suggested last March, Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ is finally breaking. However, it is very far from showing anything like honesty about Brexit, and it consists of ad hoc measures rather than a coherent post-Brexit strategy.
Nevertheless, there is an emerging pattern. For, although this summer’s Brexit news stories are quite disparate in nature and detail, they are all variations on the same theme in being attempts to deal with the consequences of the delusion that Brexit meant ‘taking back control’ without admitting that it was a delusion. It is this which means that such pragmatism as there is still lacks honesty about what Brexit actually means.
How independence brought dependence
This is evident in the only event that prompted me to post during this summer break, namely the decision to indefinitely postpone the introduction of the UKCA mark. I won’t write about it in detail again now, but it was always one of the most hubristic examples of the supposed ‘independence’ that Brexit would bring, and although it has long been on the cards that it would be dropped, much cost has been incurred in indulging that hubris. And whilst dropping it is, indeed, ‘pragmatic’ the government, and Brexiters generally, are reluctant to spell out that it means that Britain is now dependent upon CE marking, dependent upon EU approved bodies to test and certify conformity to the standards necessary for this marking, and effectively accepting the same product standards as the EU.
The UKCA announcement was swiftly followed by reports of yet another delay in the introduction of import controls although, incredibly, it was not until the end of August that the government formally confirmed this. This also creates a dependency in that, in effect, the UK is now dependent upon the EU to ensure that the goods it exports are safe and meet all requisite standards. But the EU has no responsibility and no system to do this for third countries. As I discussed at some length last time import controls were postponed, this creates increased risks because the UK is no longer part of the eco-system of single market institutions that reduce those risks. Hence the British Veterinary Association has warned that this latest postponement “is putting the UK’s biosecurity at serious risk of imported diseases”.
Those and other risks are real, but they are trumped by the fact that Britain simply can’t afford to implement Brexit import controls. This latest postponement was perhaps the first time the government overtly admitted that doing so would cause inflation, especially of food prices, although it wasn’t the first time that it had been admitted it would cause costs. Jacob Rees-Mogg had already conceded that at the time of the previous postponement. Such admissions also at least implicitly acknowledge the costs in the other direction of trade, in other words the EU controls on UK imports which have been in place since the end of the transition period.
There is perhaps some honesty in this, but even that is concealed by the government’s pretence that its border strategy involves “using Brexit freedoms” and the usual tedious, and again hubristic, rhetoric that when import controls are introduced they will be part of a high-tech “world-class border”. Mere competence, of course, is as disdained as it is elusive. It’s a boast which seems all the more vain given that this summer also saw the very quiet announcement of “a new phased approach” (meaning, again, delayed) to introducing the Customs Declaration Service (CDS), the system meant to replace the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) service. CDS is supposed to provide a much more streamlined service so as to mitigate some of the Brexit frictions but, as I noted in a post in January 2021, it has been subject to persistent delays, going back to at least February 2019.
Freedom to do … not much
The decisions about UKCA and import controls are similar in responding to the impracticality and costs of ‘taking back control’ by acting as if Brexit hadn’t happened. It turns out that the best way to use the wonderful freedoms of Brexit is not to make use of them at all. That is unsayable for the government, and on the same day as the UKCA decision was announced, with the timing perhaps designed to sweeten the pill for Brexiters, the UK’s new post-Brexit alcohol duties regime came into force, complete with the populist tag of the ‘Brexit Pubs Guarantee’.
Here, at least, is something that can be said to have been made possible by Brexit, although whether the specific issue of cheaper beer in pubs required Brexit is disputed by breweries, as are its benefits to the pub trade. More generally, most parts of the alcoholic beverages industry are unhappy about the new regime, and, far from cutting red tape, it introduces a far more complex structure of duties and looks set to create strange anomalies in, for example, the pricing of different strengths of wine.
But even if it is to be counted as a result of Brexit, there are only a very small number of these “micro-divergences” in tax policy, and it is unlikely that there will be many more to come, according to KPMG UK’s Head of Tax Policy. Indeed, in most respects Brexit ‘freedoms’ are unused, not just in relation to tax policy divergence but regulatory divergence, as the latest edition of the UK in a Changing Europe’s regulatory divergence tracker, released in July, shows.
This isn’t, as the Brexit Ultras moan, through lack of political will, but again because doing so is too impractical and costly. However, that doesn’t mean that continuing the pre-Brexit status quo of regulatory alignment in most areas is cost-free. Once outside the single market, it isn’t enough simply to be aligned, it has to be formally demonstrated by individual firms selling into the EU, just as it does by those of any third country. That entails both direct costs, and indirect costs in terms of delays – precisely the kinds of costs that single market membership gets rid of. In short, leaving the single market makes regulatory alignment expensive, but regulatory divergence is even more expensive. So we pay for the price of a freedom we cannot afford to exercise, and Brexiters call this sovereignty.
Freedom to … follow
But it’s actually worse than that. Not only can we not afford to diverge, we cannot afford not to follow. Even without the UK making any active choices to diverge from EU regulations, ‘passive’ divergence occurs whenever the EU itself changes regulations. Each time this happens it puts pressure on the UK to shadow the EU, partly because of the costs to British businesses and organizations of not doing so, and partly because in many cases a failure to do so increases divergence between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thus ‘thickening’ the Irish Sea border. As time goes by the significance of this “ratchet effect” becomes ever-clearer (£).
The imminent introduction of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a significant case in point, and we will hear much more about it when transitional implementation arrangements begin this October. As with most things Brexit, the technical details are ferociously complex, but in essence it means a tax on embedded carbon in EU imports of goods in many sectors, with an associated system of trading in carbon certificates, as well as systems of reporting and monitoring. British firms exporting to the EU will be immediately and directly affected (if they are to continue to export), imposing considerable new costs, although reports suggest that most of them are unaware of what is about to happen (£) with CBAM (and with several other major upcoming EU regulatory changes).
At the same time, the UK is planning to have its own CBAM system, although it is unlikely to be ready until at least 2026, and it is possible that in outline it will be very similar to the EU’s. However, unless there is an agreement linking the two systems then British firms will have to show compliance with both. This sounds rather like the ill-fated plan to have ‘our own’ UKCA mark, but UK CBAM is perhaps more akin to the still postponed UK REACH system for the chemicals industry in that both could only link to the EU’s equivalents by agreement with the EU. It is a subtle difference, but an important one. Whereas things like delaying UKCA and import controls, or passive regulatory alignment, can be done by the UK without any agreement from the EU, things like creating linkage or mutual recognition with EU systems overtly make the UK a supplicant to the EU.
Brexit Britain’s supplication
This is evident in a much more politically visible policy area, which has permeated this summer’s news, namely the frenzy over ‘stopping the boats’. Entirely unsurprisingly, the government has discovered that, here too, ‘taking back control’ does not actually have any substantive meaning, and that its policy requires agreements with others – not just the EU, but some of its members, such as France and Italy (£), and other countries, such as Turkey.
Of course, irregular migration is very much an issue across the EU, and were the UK still a member it would have a significant role in shaping EU policy, as well as benefitting from its shared arrangements, such as the Dublin 3 Regulations. That can include the right to return asylum seekers for claims processing in the first safe participating country they reached, and it is reported that Rishi Sunak (£) would like to replicate that right in a UK-EU agreement. Indeed, a returns agreement is something that was sought during the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations, but the EU turned it down. Reportedly, it has done so again.
It is not difficult to see why. The UK, because of its geographical position, is very unlikely to be the first safe country arrived at (unless arrival was by air) and, if it is, unlikely to then be used as a point of departure to an EU country. So a ‘returns policy’, in itself, would be almost entirely one-way, which is hardly in the interests of the EU or its members. Inevitably, Brexiters are incapable of understanding this, with bone-headed former MEP David Bannerman tweeting rancorously about “our so called friends in the EU showing their true colours again”, and an Express article trotting out the usual paranoid and self-pitying line about “Brexit punishment”.
By contrast, the Labour Party’s plan, which hit the headlines this week, is rather more honest and realistic in recognizing that any deal with the EU needs to offer something for both sides (though it can’t be assumed the EU will agree to it). It seems to include offering agreement to take some asylum seekers from the EU, via managed routes, in exchange for EU agreement to accept returns of those arriving in the UK by irregular routes. But the government reaction to this more, well, pragmatic proposal was to denounce it as surrendering control to Brussels and making Britain a “dumping ground” for “illegal migrants” (sic), whilst the Brexit Blob went into predictable hysteria.
This serves to illustrate the continuing dishonesty – as well as the stupidity – that surrounds Brexit, which precludes a realistic post-Brexit strategy. Rather than accept the reality of being a supplicant to the EU, the Brexiters either expect to be gifted what they want, and denounce the EU as malevolent for not doing so, or, if some deal is made or even proposed, they denounce it as ‘surrender’ and betrayal of Brexit. They certainly haven’t grasped that being outside the EU means less, not more, control, something which will be shown again in this policy area if, as a report this week suggests, the UK is about to sign a deal to access the EU Border Agency, Frontex. Such ‘opt-ins’, for all that they may be desirable to both the UK and the EU, are invariably different in character from full membership, and invariably shaped by the fact that it is the UK ‘joining in with’ an EU programme or initiative rather than vice versa.
Something similar applies to the last of this summer’s main Brexit stories, with the UK finally, and belatedly, agreeing terms to re-join the Horizon Europe programme. Again this is widely seen by sensible commentators as a sign of an emerging pragmatism. Yet, as with the other examples, there is little honesty from the government about what that pragmatism means. In particular, not only has the UK’s absence from the scheme in itself done significant damage to British science, but the new associate membership, which operates without freedom of movement of people which does so much to promote easy and flexible cooperation, is inferior to what we had before.
So this is a recurring theme. When particular instances of the damage of Brexit become undeniable, the government sometimes seeks to patch them with some kind of solution, be it a delay, quiet alignment, or cooperation, but there is no honesty about the fact that the ‘solution’ is rarely as good as what has been lost, or, even if it is, that the very need for ‘solutions’ demonstrates that Brexit is the cause of so many problems, and that all the effort used to create such solutions is itself a cost of Brexit.
At the same time, even these sub-optimal solutions come in the teeth of Brexiter opposition with, in the case of Horizon, the Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn (£) sneering at all the scientists and industrialists relieved that there has been at least a fix of sorts, on the grounds that they apparently don’t recognize that “Europe is finished” and is a “failing bloc”. But whatever Brexiters may want to think, the UK wanted and badly needed Horizon, and for all that they continue to rail against the implementation of the Windsor Framework they refuse to see that it was only that agreement that unlocked the possibility of being in the Horizon scheme. In this sense, the EU’s refusal to agree Horizon terms until the Northern Ireland Protocol row was settled was an effective negotiating lever.
Yet a quite astonishingly ignorant Telegraph editorial (£) insisted that the delay over Horizon showed the EU to be irrational and self-harming and that, far from being a supplicant, the UK’s participation was needed to prevent the EU becoming a “scientific backwater”. Indeed, the article suggests, it was a clear case of ‘them needing us more than we need them’ whilst the Express reported it as the EU “backing down”. But even here there is no consistent logic, with still other Brexiters, such as David Frost, warning that the UK will be ‘held hostage’ by Horizon membership.
And this, too, is a recurring theme. Endless claims that the EU is failing, that it ‘needs us more than we need them’, but that, paradoxically, it is able to punish and hold hostage the UK are amongst many examples of how the Brexiters have learned literally nothing from the last seven years. Indeed, now they are making ever more strident calls for a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the ECHR. That may come to nothing, but the vociferousness of the demand, and its reach well into the higher ranks of the cabinet, is an important sign that the madness of Brexitism is alive and kicking, despite the failure of Brexit. This enduring madness sustains the tension, which has existed in various forms throughout the entire Brexit process, between the practical realities of what Brexit means and the implacable demands and fantasies of Brexiters within and outside government.
Brexiters’ continued denial
One sign of this is the way that, even now, the Brexit Ultras continue to claim that Brexit has had no adverse effects on trade and the economy generally, or even that its effects have been positive. This summer seems to have seen an upsurge in such attempts, in ways which are as brazenly dishonest as they are desperate. These attempts have shown all the now familiar tricks, including cherry-picking particular data points (especially relating to the pandemic), citing trade figures without adjustment for inflation, or making comparisons between the UK and the EU (or individual members) rather than between the UK when an EU member and when not.
The latter of these, something to which anti-Brexit commentators are also sometimes prone, is especially misleading because, of course, whether or not a member of the EU, the UK economy is often, if not always, better or worse performing than the EU average, or the Eurozone, or individual EU members (Germany being a currently popular comparator). To see how asinine such comparisons are, consider whether, when the UK was a member of the EU, Brexiters would have argued that the relative performance of the UK and the EU had any implications for the case for belonging to or leaving the EU. Undoubtedly, they would (and probably did) say that if the UK was performing better than the EU it ‘proved’ we did not need to be a member, and were held back by being ‘shackled’ to the EU; but if the EU was performing better than the UK it ‘proved’ we should not be a member as the EU was ‘rigged’ to our disadvantage.
But even comparing the UK during and after membership is not really sufficient. What is necessary is to estimate the ‘counterfactual’ of how the UK would have performed had it remained a member of the EU compared with how it has in fact performed since leaving, the OBR’s being the best-known and most authoritative example. Such estimates are difficult to make, and bound to be imperfect, but although the Brexiters are happy to dismiss all such estimates (£) they fail to provide a convincing one of their own. Instead, they frequently simply assert that Brexit has had a beneficial effect, effectively positing an implicit and indefensible counterfactual, especially by pointing to increases in the nominal value of trade (ignoring inflation, as well as things like unusual energy trade fluctuations, changes in statistical methodology etc.).
The endless and varied kinds of chicanery used to make these assertions has the effect, no doubt intended, of making it exhausting to debunk each individual example. But, even without doing so, it is easy to demonstrate their hollowness. For, crucially, no Brexiter is able to explain how Brexit could conceivably be responsible for increasing trade or economic growth, or how even sustaining their levels could be because of, rather than despite, Brexit. It has increased trade barriers with the EU, and, even if the much-vaunted new trade deals are going to have much value (they won’t), it is far too early for them to have had any impact, as those with Australia and New Zealand only came into force at the end of May, whilst CPTPP membership has yet to begin. Nor can any supposed Brexit boost have come from deregulation since, as noted above, and as Brexiters themselves constantly and vociferously complain, there has been almost no regulatory divergence.
So there is no reason in principle why Brexit could have a positive, or even neutral, effect on trade or the economy generally. Moreover, the claim that it does so flies in the face of what businesses themselves say. Even in the fanatical pages of the Express, an article headlining business backing for Brexit and hostility to any idea of re-joining was replete with examples of businesses saying the exact opposite, primarily because of the ‘red tape’ barriers to trade that Brexit has created. By contrast, there are no examples of businesses for whom trade with the EU has become easier as a result of Brexit. The latter is important, because Brexit was supposed to have a positive effect, not just ‘to not to be (too) negative’. This point is also relevant to the wholly bogus way that Brexiters treat any post-Brexit good news - such as this week’s announcement of BMW’s investment in the Mini plant – as if it were somehow attributable to Brexit. Again, the question is: what investments, if any, have been made that would not have happened without Brexit, and how do they compare with those investments which would have been made, but for Brexit?
So what happens now?
The consequence of the continuing power of this invincible stupidity is a kind of political drift. Where the economic or political costs are high enough, and those affected lobby strongly enough, we see the government seeking accommodations of various sorts to mitigate or minimise some of them, but in cases where the immediate costs are not too high, such as its dismissal this summer of the EU’s offer of formal ‘strategic dialogue’ (£), we see the government pandering to the Brexit Ultras.
This is why the government’s supposed ‘pragmatism’ over this summer only consists of ad hoc, sub-optimal fixes, which may slightly reduce the damage of Brexit in a few policy areas but are constrained by the ongoing ‘conspiracy of silence’ which prevents honesty about the reality even of those fixes, let alone about the abject failure of Brexit across every single policy area. That silence is shared by the Tory and Labour Parties, and it comes from the fear both have of the unquenchable and unreasoning fury of the Brexit Ultras, a fury so hair-triggered that it is provoked even by the waving of EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms. I don’t think we will see an end to the power of the Ultras at least until a few of the high-profile ones publicly admit that Brexit, in principle and not just in delivery, was a catastrophic error.
Even so, it is possible that a Labour government might be able to fashion ‘pragmatism’ into a more coherent strategy, to the extent that it might pursue closer ties with the EU across all policy areas (it will in any case inherit, perhaps by Tory design, some of the present government’s delayed or deferred implementations, such as import controls). At least such a government would not have the dead-weight of Brexit Ultra MPs that makes this impossible for the Tories, and although it would still face the massed ranks of the pro-Brexit media – a taste of which we saw with this week’s furore over its asylum plans - it might, when in power, be more able to resist or ignore their attacks. However, there is little sign that Labour will be any more honest about the costs and limitations of such an approach, since to do so would open up the obvious question of why that approach was not bolder.
Yesterday saw the publication of the revised edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted (and why they were never going to). When the first edition was published, in 2021, the sub-title was perhaps provocative. Now, it is almost a truism, whilst also being a taboo for the main parties. The new edition tells the story of what happened from the end of the transition period up to last June, and concludes that the situation is that “now they can’t agree what to do about it”, creating, at least for now, a political – and national – impasse.
So what happens now? Seven years ago, I returned from holiday and wrote the first post on this blog. It finished with the words “it is this strange new landscape that I will comment on in the months and years to come”, but I did not really anticipate that I would do so for so many years as I have, and certainly didn’t anticipate that the blog would receive the attention it has (for which, as always, I am grateful). The landscape now is just as strange, if not even stranger, although in some ways depressingly unchanged. Entering the eighth year of blogging, I will continue to try to record and analyse it.
Nevertheless, there is an emerging pattern. For, although this summer’s Brexit news stories are quite disparate in nature and detail, they are all variations on the same theme in being attempts to deal with the consequences of the delusion that Brexit meant ‘taking back control’ without admitting that it was a delusion. It is this which means that such pragmatism as there is still lacks honesty about what Brexit actually means.
How independence brought dependence
This is evident in the only event that prompted me to post during this summer break, namely the decision to indefinitely postpone the introduction of the UKCA mark. I won’t write about it in detail again now, but it was always one of the most hubristic examples of the supposed ‘independence’ that Brexit would bring, and although it has long been on the cards that it would be dropped, much cost has been incurred in indulging that hubris. And whilst dropping it is, indeed, ‘pragmatic’ the government, and Brexiters generally, are reluctant to spell out that it means that Britain is now dependent upon CE marking, dependent upon EU approved bodies to test and certify conformity to the standards necessary for this marking, and effectively accepting the same product standards as the EU.
The UKCA announcement was swiftly followed by reports of yet another delay in the introduction of import controls although, incredibly, it was not until the end of August that the government formally confirmed this. This also creates a dependency in that, in effect, the UK is now dependent upon the EU to ensure that the goods it exports are safe and meet all requisite standards. But the EU has no responsibility and no system to do this for third countries. As I discussed at some length last time import controls were postponed, this creates increased risks because the UK is no longer part of the eco-system of single market institutions that reduce those risks. Hence the British Veterinary Association has warned that this latest postponement “is putting the UK’s biosecurity at serious risk of imported diseases”.
Those and other risks are real, but they are trumped by the fact that Britain simply can’t afford to implement Brexit import controls. This latest postponement was perhaps the first time the government overtly admitted that doing so would cause inflation, especially of food prices, although it wasn’t the first time that it had been admitted it would cause costs. Jacob Rees-Mogg had already conceded that at the time of the previous postponement. Such admissions also at least implicitly acknowledge the costs in the other direction of trade, in other words the EU controls on UK imports which have been in place since the end of the transition period.
There is perhaps some honesty in this, but even that is concealed by the government’s pretence that its border strategy involves “using Brexit freedoms” and the usual tedious, and again hubristic, rhetoric that when import controls are introduced they will be part of a high-tech “world-class border”. Mere competence, of course, is as disdained as it is elusive. It’s a boast which seems all the more vain given that this summer also saw the very quiet announcement of “a new phased approach” (meaning, again, delayed) to introducing the Customs Declaration Service (CDS), the system meant to replace the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) service. CDS is supposed to provide a much more streamlined service so as to mitigate some of the Brexit frictions but, as I noted in a post in January 2021, it has been subject to persistent delays, going back to at least February 2019.
Freedom to do … not much
The decisions about UKCA and import controls are similar in responding to the impracticality and costs of ‘taking back control’ by acting as if Brexit hadn’t happened. It turns out that the best way to use the wonderful freedoms of Brexit is not to make use of them at all. That is unsayable for the government, and on the same day as the UKCA decision was announced, with the timing perhaps designed to sweeten the pill for Brexiters, the UK’s new post-Brexit alcohol duties regime came into force, complete with the populist tag of the ‘Brexit Pubs Guarantee’.
Here, at least, is something that can be said to have been made possible by Brexit, although whether the specific issue of cheaper beer in pubs required Brexit is disputed by breweries, as are its benefits to the pub trade. More generally, most parts of the alcoholic beverages industry are unhappy about the new regime, and, far from cutting red tape, it introduces a far more complex structure of duties and looks set to create strange anomalies in, for example, the pricing of different strengths of wine.
But even if it is to be counted as a result of Brexit, there are only a very small number of these “micro-divergences” in tax policy, and it is unlikely that there will be many more to come, according to KPMG UK’s Head of Tax Policy. Indeed, in most respects Brexit ‘freedoms’ are unused, not just in relation to tax policy divergence but regulatory divergence, as the latest edition of the UK in a Changing Europe’s regulatory divergence tracker, released in July, shows.
This isn’t, as the Brexit Ultras moan, through lack of political will, but again because doing so is too impractical and costly. However, that doesn’t mean that continuing the pre-Brexit status quo of regulatory alignment in most areas is cost-free. Once outside the single market, it isn’t enough simply to be aligned, it has to be formally demonstrated by individual firms selling into the EU, just as it does by those of any third country. That entails both direct costs, and indirect costs in terms of delays – precisely the kinds of costs that single market membership gets rid of. In short, leaving the single market makes regulatory alignment expensive, but regulatory divergence is even more expensive. So we pay for the price of a freedom we cannot afford to exercise, and Brexiters call this sovereignty.
Freedom to … follow
But it’s actually worse than that. Not only can we not afford to diverge, we cannot afford not to follow. Even without the UK making any active choices to diverge from EU regulations, ‘passive’ divergence occurs whenever the EU itself changes regulations. Each time this happens it puts pressure on the UK to shadow the EU, partly because of the costs to British businesses and organizations of not doing so, and partly because in many cases a failure to do so increases divergence between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thus ‘thickening’ the Irish Sea border. As time goes by the significance of this “ratchet effect” becomes ever-clearer (£).
The imminent introduction of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a significant case in point, and we will hear much more about it when transitional implementation arrangements begin this October. As with most things Brexit, the technical details are ferociously complex, but in essence it means a tax on embedded carbon in EU imports of goods in many sectors, with an associated system of trading in carbon certificates, as well as systems of reporting and monitoring. British firms exporting to the EU will be immediately and directly affected (if they are to continue to export), imposing considerable new costs, although reports suggest that most of them are unaware of what is about to happen (£) with CBAM (and with several other major upcoming EU regulatory changes).
At the same time, the UK is planning to have its own CBAM system, although it is unlikely to be ready until at least 2026, and it is possible that in outline it will be very similar to the EU’s. However, unless there is an agreement linking the two systems then British firms will have to show compliance with both. This sounds rather like the ill-fated plan to have ‘our own’ UKCA mark, but UK CBAM is perhaps more akin to the still postponed UK REACH system for the chemicals industry in that both could only link to the EU’s equivalents by agreement with the EU. It is a subtle difference, but an important one. Whereas things like delaying UKCA and import controls, or passive regulatory alignment, can be done by the UK without any agreement from the EU, things like creating linkage or mutual recognition with EU systems overtly make the UK a supplicant to the EU.
Brexit Britain’s supplication
This is evident in a much more politically visible policy area, which has permeated this summer’s news, namely the frenzy over ‘stopping the boats’. Entirely unsurprisingly, the government has discovered that, here too, ‘taking back control’ does not actually have any substantive meaning, and that its policy requires agreements with others – not just the EU, but some of its members, such as France and Italy (£), and other countries, such as Turkey.
Of course, irregular migration is very much an issue across the EU, and were the UK still a member it would have a significant role in shaping EU policy, as well as benefitting from its shared arrangements, such as the Dublin 3 Regulations. That can include the right to return asylum seekers for claims processing in the first safe participating country they reached, and it is reported that Rishi Sunak (£) would like to replicate that right in a UK-EU agreement. Indeed, a returns agreement is something that was sought during the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations, but the EU turned it down. Reportedly, it has done so again.
It is not difficult to see why. The UK, because of its geographical position, is very unlikely to be the first safe country arrived at (unless arrival was by air) and, if it is, unlikely to then be used as a point of departure to an EU country. So a ‘returns policy’, in itself, would be almost entirely one-way, which is hardly in the interests of the EU or its members. Inevitably, Brexiters are incapable of understanding this, with bone-headed former MEP David Bannerman tweeting rancorously about “our so called friends in the EU showing their true colours again”, and an Express article trotting out the usual paranoid and self-pitying line about “Brexit punishment”.
By contrast, the Labour Party’s plan, which hit the headlines this week, is rather more honest and realistic in recognizing that any deal with the EU needs to offer something for both sides (though it can’t be assumed the EU will agree to it). It seems to include offering agreement to take some asylum seekers from the EU, via managed routes, in exchange for EU agreement to accept returns of those arriving in the UK by irregular routes. But the government reaction to this more, well, pragmatic proposal was to denounce it as surrendering control to Brussels and making Britain a “dumping ground” for “illegal migrants” (sic), whilst the Brexit Blob went into predictable hysteria.
This serves to illustrate the continuing dishonesty – as well as the stupidity – that surrounds Brexit, which precludes a realistic post-Brexit strategy. Rather than accept the reality of being a supplicant to the EU, the Brexiters either expect to be gifted what they want, and denounce the EU as malevolent for not doing so, or, if some deal is made or even proposed, they denounce it as ‘surrender’ and betrayal of Brexit. They certainly haven’t grasped that being outside the EU means less, not more, control, something which will be shown again in this policy area if, as a report this week suggests, the UK is about to sign a deal to access the EU Border Agency, Frontex. Such ‘opt-ins’, for all that they may be desirable to both the UK and the EU, are invariably different in character from full membership, and invariably shaped by the fact that it is the UK ‘joining in with’ an EU programme or initiative rather than vice versa.
Something similar applies to the last of this summer’s main Brexit stories, with the UK finally, and belatedly, agreeing terms to re-join the Horizon Europe programme. Again this is widely seen by sensible commentators as a sign of an emerging pragmatism. Yet, as with the other examples, there is little honesty from the government about what that pragmatism means. In particular, not only has the UK’s absence from the scheme in itself done significant damage to British science, but the new associate membership, which operates without freedom of movement of people which does so much to promote easy and flexible cooperation, is inferior to what we had before.
So this is a recurring theme. When particular instances of the damage of Brexit become undeniable, the government sometimes seeks to patch them with some kind of solution, be it a delay, quiet alignment, or cooperation, but there is no honesty about the fact that the ‘solution’ is rarely as good as what has been lost, or, even if it is, that the very need for ‘solutions’ demonstrates that Brexit is the cause of so many problems, and that all the effort used to create such solutions is itself a cost of Brexit.
At the same time, even these sub-optimal solutions come in the teeth of Brexiter opposition with, in the case of Horizon, the Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn (£) sneering at all the scientists and industrialists relieved that there has been at least a fix of sorts, on the grounds that they apparently don’t recognize that “Europe is finished” and is a “failing bloc”. But whatever Brexiters may want to think, the UK wanted and badly needed Horizon, and for all that they continue to rail against the implementation of the Windsor Framework they refuse to see that it was only that agreement that unlocked the possibility of being in the Horizon scheme. In this sense, the EU’s refusal to agree Horizon terms until the Northern Ireland Protocol row was settled was an effective negotiating lever.
Yet a quite astonishingly ignorant Telegraph editorial (£) insisted that the delay over Horizon showed the EU to be irrational and self-harming and that, far from being a supplicant, the UK’s participation was needed to prevent the EU becoming a “scientific backwater”. Indeed, the article suggests, it was a clear case of ‘them needing us more than we need them’ whilst the Express reported it as the EU “backing down”. But even here there is no consistent logic, with still other Brexiters, such as David Frost, warning that the UK will be ‘held hostage’ by Horizon membership.
And this, too, is a recurring theme. Endless claims that the EU is failing, that it ‘needs us more than we need them’, but that, paradoxically, it is able to punish and hold hostage the UK are amongst many examples of how the Brexiters have learned literally nothing from the last seven years. Indeed, now they are making ever more strident calls for a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the ECHR. That may come to nothing, but the vociferousness of the demand, and its reach well into the higher ranks of the cabinet, is an important sign that the madness of Brexitism is alive and kicking, despite the failure of Brexit. This enduring madness sustains the tension, which has existed in various forms throughout the entire Brexit process, between the practical realities of what Brexit means and the implacable demands and fantasies of Brexiters within and outside government.
Brexiters’ continued denial
One sign of this is the way that, even now, the Brexit Ultras continue to claim that Brexit has had no adverse effects on trade and the economy generally, or even that its effects have been positive. This summer seems to have seen an upsurge in such attempts, in ways which are as brazenly dishonest as they are desperate. These attempts have shown all the now familiar tricks, including cherry-picking particular data points (especially relating to the pandemic), citing trade figures without adjustment for inflation, or making comparisons between the UK and the EU (or individual members) rather than between the UK when an EU member and when not.
The latter of these, something to which anti-Brexit commentators are also sometimes prone, is especially misleading because, of course, whether or not a member of the EU, the UK economy is often, if not always, better or worse performing than the EU average, or the Eurozone, or individual EU members (Germany being a currently popular comparator). To see how asinine such comparisons are, consider whether, when the UK was a member of the EU, Brexiters would have argued that the relative performance of the UK and the EU had any implications for the case for belonging to or leaving the EU. Undoubtedly, they would (and probably did) say that if the UK was performing better than the EU it ‘proved’ we did not need to be a member, and were held back by being ‘shackled’ to the EU; but if the EU was performing better than the UK it ‘proved’ we should not be a member as the EU was ‘rigged’ to our disadvantage.
But even comparing the UK during and after membership is not really sufficient. What is necessary is to estimate the ‘counterfactual’ of how the UK would have performed had it remained a member of the EU compared with how it has in fact performed since leaving, the OBR’s being the best-known and most authoritative example. Such estimates are difficult to make, and bound to be imperfect, but although the Brexiters are happy to dismiss all such estimates (£) they fail to provide a convincing one of their own. Instead, they frequently simply assert that Brexit has had a beneficial effect, effectively positing an implicit and indefensible counterfactual, especially by pointing to increases in the nominal value of trade (ignoring inflation, as well as things like unusual energy trade fluctuations, changes in statistical methodology etc.).
The endless and varied kinds of chicanery used to make these assertions has the effect, no doubt intended, of making it exhausting to debunk each individual example. But, even without doing so, it is easy to demonstrate their hollowness. For, crucially, no Brexiter is able to explain how Brexit could conceivably be responsible for increasing trade or economic growth, or how even sustaining their levels could be because of, rather than despite, Brexit. It has increased trade barriers with the EU, and, even if the much-vaunted new trade deals are going to have much value (they won’t), it is far too early for them to have had any impact, as those with Australia and New Zealand only came into force at the end of May, whilst CPTPP membership has yet to begin. Nor can any supposed Brexit boost have come from deregulation since, as noted above, and as Brexiters themselves constantly and vociferously complain, there has been almost no regulatory divergence.
So there is no reason in principle why Brexit could have a positive, or even neutral, effect on trade or the economy generally. Moreover, the claim that it does so flies in the face of what businesses themselves say. Even in the fanatical pages of the Express, an article headlining business backing for Brexit and hostility to any idea of re-joining was replete with examples of businesses saying the exact opposite, primarily because of the ‘red tape’ barriers to trade that Brexit has created. By contrast, there are no examples of businesses for whom trade with the EU has become easier as a result of Brexit. The latter is important, because Brexit was supposed to have a positive effect, not just ‘to not to be (too) negative’. This point is also relevant to the wholly bogus way that Brexiters treat any post-Brexit good news - such as this week’s announcement of BMW’s investment in the Mini plant – as if it were somehow attributable to Brexit. Again, the question is: what investments, if any, have been made that would not have happened without Brexit, and how do they compare with those investments which would have been made, but for Brexit?
So what happens now?
The consequence of the continuing power of this invincible stupidity is a kind of political drift. Where the economic or political costs are high enough, and those affected lobby strongly enough, we see the government seeking accommodations of various sorts to mitigate or minimise some of them, but in cases where the immediate costs are not too high, such as its dismissal this summer of the EU’s offer of formal ‘strategic dialogue’ (£), we see the government pandering to the Brexit Ultras.
This is why the government’s supposed ‘pragmatism’ over this summer only consists of ad hoc, sub-optimal fixes, which may slightly reduce the damage of Brexit in a few policy areas but are constrained by the ongoing ‘conspiracy of silence’ which prevents honesty about the reality even of those fixes, let alone about the abject failure of Brexit across every single policy area. That silence is shared by the Tory and Labour Parties, and it comes from the fear both have of the unquenchable and unreasoning fury of the Brexit Ultras, a fury so hair-triggered that it is provoked even by the waving of EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms. I don’t think we will see an end to the power of the Ultras at least until a few of the high-profile ones publicly admit that Brexit, in principle and not just in delivery, was a catastrophic error.
Even so, it is possible that a Labour government might be able to fashion ‘pragmatism’ into a more coherent strategy, to the extent that it might pursue closer ties with the EU across all policy areas (it will in any case inherit, perhaps by Tory design, some of the present government’s delayed or deferred implementations, such as import controls). At least such a government would not have the dead-weight of Brexit Ultra MPs that makes this impossible for the Tories, and although it would still face the massed ranks of the pro-Brexit media – a taste of which we saw with this week’s furore over its asylum plans - it might, when in power, be more able to resist or ignore their attacks. However, there is little sign that Labour will be any more honest about the costs and limitations of such an approach, since to do so would open up the obvious question of why that approach was not bolder.
Yesterday saw the publication of the revised edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted (and why they were never going to). When the first edition was published, in 2021, the sub-title was perhaps provocative. Now, it is almost a truism, whilst also being a taboo for the main parties. The new edition tells the story of what happened from the end of the transition period up to last June, and concludes that the situation is that “now they can’t agree what to do about it”, creating, at least for now, a political – and national – impasse.
So what happens now? Seven years ago, I returned from holiday and wrote the first post on this blog. It finished with the words “it is this strange new landscape that I will comment on in the months and years to come”, but I did not really anticipate that I would do so for so many years as I have, and certainly didn’t anticipate that the blog would receive the attention it has (for which, as always, I am grateful). The landscape now is just as strange, if not even stranger, although in some ways depressingly unchanged. Entering the eighth year of blogging, I will continue to try to record and analyse it.
Tuesday, 1 August 2023
UKCA: a symbol of the folly of Brexit
I said that I would break the ‘summer recess’ of this blog if a Brexit event of sufficient interest or importance occurred and it has, with the government’s announcement today of an “indefinite extension to the use of CE [Conformité Européenne] marking for British businesses”. It sounds dull enough to make you weep, but, actually, both in and of itself and as an illustrative case, it blows a huge hole in the entire case for Brexit. So it should be a cause for weeping, though not tears of boredom but, first, tears of laughter at the utter farce of what has happened and, then, tears of rage at what it means.
A brief history of UKCA
The origins of this saga go right
back to 2019 (£), when the government began to plan for a ‘no deal Brexit’
and realized that one consequence would be for the use of CE conformity
assessment marking of products. This is the system whereby many types of goods
offered for sale in the EU single market must bear a mark showing conformity to
EU safety, health and environmental standards. Crucially, this isn’t just about
placing a mark on the product or its packaging, but about registering, at a
cost, the evidence that the product actually does meet the relevant standards
via a ‘notified
body’ within an EU member state (although in some cases self-declaration is
possible).
In the face of a possible ‘no deal Brexit’, the
government announced that, were it to happen, the CE mark could and would go on
being used in the UK until, at some unspecified point, being replaced by a UK
system, of an unspecified nature. In the event, ‘no deal Brexit’ was averted,
both in the original sense of leaving without a Withdrawal Agreement and the
later sense of leaving without a trade agreement. However, in line with the
Johnson-Frost ‘sovereignty first’ Brexit, it was still intended that the UK
would have what by that time we knew would be called the United Kingdom Conformity
Assessed (UKCA) system. During the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) talks,
the UK sought a ‘mutual recognition agreement’ as between CE and UKCA systems,
but this proved impossible.
At the time the TCA was struck, so much attention was focused
on the issue of post-Brexit terms of trade, not to mention on the still-raging
pandemic, that what UKCA was going to mean was scarcely recognized outside
those businesses affected by it, and not always even by them. But once the
transition period ended, and the TCA dust settled, it became clear that
manufacturers were going to face dual systems of conformity assessment. I think
that this was the
first time I mentioned what I called this “especially absurd consequence of
Brexit” on this blog, and I have returned to it several times in the years
since.
The absurdity was that, at least initially, the actual
standards to which conformity would be assessed were in almost all cases
identical. So a firm selling identical goods in both Great Britain (GB) and the
EU would have to mark them differently, and register their conformity
assessment separately. For British exporters this represented costly
duplication, which was especially onerous for small firms but no less real for
big firms, and created a disincentive to serve both markets. Equally, overseas firms
(not only, but including, those of the EU) exporting goods to Britain faced the
new costs of UKCA, thus potentially increasing prices or, especially if their
UK market was quite small, simply not offering their goods for sale here, thus
potentially reducing consumer choice. The situation was even more nightmarish
in Northern Ireland where, as discussed in an
August 2021 post, the CE mark would continue to be used because it
effectively remains in the EU single market for goods, in some cases alongside a new UKNI
mark (but not if the good was bound for the EU), but goods made in Northern
Ireland that were bound for GB would need the UKCA mark.
Unsurprisingly, at least to anyone who understood it,
the introduction of compulsory UKCA marking has been repeatedly postponed from
what was initially going to be January 2022, reflecting both the time and
effort needed from businesses as well as persistent lack of governmental
clarity about how it would operate, and also the lack of registration capacity.
Meanwhile, in February 2022, even Jacob
Rees-Mogg seemed to have grasped the ludicrous burden of extra ‘red tape’
it required, although the government
continued to insist that it was on course for implementation, at that point
in January 2023. Subsequently, in
November 2022, that date was extended to January 2025.*
What does the new announcement mean?
It is that latter deadline which has now been
indefinitely postponed, with the CE mark now being indefinitely valid for firms
to place goods for sale on the UK market (including Northern Ireland), as well
as in the EU single market. This doesn’t mean the end of the UKCA mark.
Companies can still use it to place goods on the GB market (but not Northern
Ireland or the EU) if they are confident that they only sell in GB and are only
going to sell in GB. Some such firms, especially if they have already made the transition,
may well do so. However, even for these, there must now be a question mark as
to the extent to which consumers will recognize and be convinced by what will
surely be a minority usage. Moreover, these firms may find that their goods are
unacceptable when offered to other UK firms as components in finished goods
destined for the EU or Northern Ireland.
I suggested in
May 2023 that the writing might be on the wall for UKCA once the government
retreated
on its plans for the wholesale scrapping of Retained EU Law (REUL). For
what that seemed to presage was the abandonment of ideas for widespread divergence
from EU goods product standards. This latest UKCA announcement presumably
points even more strongly in the same direction since unless the UK continues
to adhere to the relevant EU standards then the CE mark will not be achievable.
Perhaps there will be some cases where UK standards do diverge and there, too,
there will be an ongoing role for UKCA, but it hardly makes sense to tell firms
that they can go on using CE marking in the UK if there is also an intention to depart extensively from EU standards.
True, that implies consistency in government policy
where there has been little so far. For example, in June 2021, almost unnoticed,
it
was agreed that UK would continue to participate in CEN (the European
Committee for Standardization) and CENELEC (the European Electrotechnical
Committee for Standardization), which seemed to imply an intention to remain
aligned with EU product standards even though the process for scrapping REUL,
which began in September 2022, might have (and, some Brexiters surely hoped,
did) implied otherwise.
However, although there was always a strong
possibility that CE marking would continue to be valid, it would have been a
brave firm which acted on this assumption, so although today’s announcement
is a sensible one, in and of itself, it doesn’t obviate the fact that many
firms have sent considerable amounts of money (how much will probably never be
known) on what has turned out to be unnecessary. It is perfectly possible that
some have even already gone out of business as a result. It is also possible
that some UK firms have already decided to cease trading with EU customers, or overseas
firms with UK customers, and they may or may not now seek, or be able, to revive
that trade. In other words, although now abandoned, the replacement of the CE
mark with the UKCA mark has already been highly costly.
In this sense, the government’s suggestion that this today’s
change of policy is part of its plans to “ease business burdens” and “cut red
tape” shows extraordinary chutzpah, if not downright shamelessness. Not
only has it already created costs, but to the extent it is now reducing them it
is only taking away costs its own Brexit policies have created. That it made a
similar suggestion when postponing introducing post-Brexit import controls,
currently set to
begin this October, gives cause to wonder if these, too, may once again be
postponed or
watered down.
The bigger picture
The bigger aspect of this fiasco is that it reveals
two central features of Brexit. One is just how much unnecessary aggravation
and cost has been caused by Brexit hubris and by the rush to get Brexit done. As
this today’s announcement shows, it was not a necessity of Brexit to ditch CE
marking and it only arose because of the hubristic desire for ‘sovereignty’ and
the almost frenzied desire to expunge all traces of EU membership. And even
having adopted that position, it was unnecessary and unrealistic to try to do
it so quickly, which itself was part of a wider refusal to create a long, or
even any meaningful, transition period.
Secondly, and more profoundly, the fact that the
government has finally been forced to change policy reveals the utter vacuity
of the ideas of sovereignty and regulatory divergence that inform so much of
Brexit. Akin to the ‘gravity’ effect of geographical proximity on trade, there is
what Professor Anu Bradford of Columbia Law School labelled the ‘Brussels Effect’ which exerts
a regulatory pull on nearby, smaller, economies. That applies not just to
conformity assessment but to regulation in a more general sense, and explains
why, for all the Brexiters’ bombast, there has so far been fairly
limited regulatory divergence and what, according
to Joël
Reland of the UKICE research centre, is a growing trend towards ‘managed
divergence’ via UK-EU agreement.
To the extent that the continuation of CE marking implies
continuing alignment on many kinds of goods standards it also shows the myth of
sovereignty in the Brexiter sense: it seems that in most cases goods sold by UK
firms in the UK will conform to many of the standards set by the EU, which also generally means changing as and when the EU changes those standards. Moreover, those
firms will in many, perhaps most, cases require assessment to be registered via
an EU-approved notified body within an EU member state.
So this is what ‘taking back control’ means in
practice: almost the opposite of what it promised. The Mail has
described the CE decision as a “another Brexit climbdown” by Rishi Sunak, and
it is not yet clear to what extent there will be a backlash from Brexiters. Will
the average leave voter care about, or even be aware of, this? Almost certainly
not, and there is no reason why they should. But, by the same token, the idea
that leave voters either had a burning desire for, or gave a mandate to, the
scorched earth theory of sovereignty that Brexiters claimed to flow from the
2016 referendum is also ludicrous.
As for the rest of us, UKCA now stands as a literal
symbol – if there is such a thing – of the waste, stupidity, hubris and sheer folly
of Brexit itself. In that context, several possibilities suggest themselves for
what the ‘C’ and the ‘A’ might stand for, few of which are suitable to be
spelled out for younger readers.
*Note that the various deadlines referred to had some exemptions/ variations, especially as regards conformity assessment marking of medical devices. Also note that, as ever with Brexit, there are all sorts of deeper complexities, qualifications and exceptions in relation to what goods, what standards, and what forms of registration are affected. I’ve tried to skip over these by the use of various qualifiers (‘most’, ‘many’, ‘often’ etc) so as to stick to the main contours of the issue.
Updates (3 August 2023):
1. The retention of CE marking does not quite mean, as some commentators suggest, that the UK is simply a 'rule-taker' of EU standards. This is because, as mentioned in the text, the UK participates in CEN and CENELEC (and also, though not mentioned, ETSI) as a non-EEA member. As such, it (via BSI) can participate in discussions and vote, and in some very specific circumstances not adopt standards which it didn't vote for. However, it is of course the case that the UK no longer has any say in the wider policy and legislative frameworks within which and from which particular standards may derive. In any case, the sovereignty point in this specific development isn't primarily about standards, it is that it shows the impracticality of a national system of conformity assessment marking and registration.
2. Subsequent to writing this post, it emerged that neither the construction industry nor the medical devices industry were included in the announcement of indefinite postponement. In both cases, unlike the general situation where CE validity in GB was due to end at the end of 2024, these already had later deadlines (June 2025 for construction and various dates in 2028 and 2030 for medical devices). It is not clear if this discrepancy will persist, or what its rationale could be. No doubt more in future blogs.
3. As briefly pre-figured in this post, a couple of days later the government announced a further delay in introducing import controls. Crucially, this was attributed to the potential inflationary effects of doing so, a tacit admission of the extra costs of post-Brexit trade. For discussion of the import control issue, including the risks posed by postponement, see my post of April 2022. Again, no doubt there will be more in future blogs.
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