Morrissey's Brexit

There’s really only been one major Brexit development this week, the vote on the Statutory Instrument to create the Stormont Brake as part of the Windsor Framework. If that sounds convoluted that’s because it is. This wasn’t about passing primary legislation, and there was only a short debate, and no amendments were allowed. It was not even about the entirety of the Windsor Framework (WF), although it seems that the government will treat it as such. Nor was there any possibility of the government losing the vote, as the Labour Party was pledged to support it.

What difference does it make?

Nevertheless, it was important in terms of how many, and who, would vote against. In the event, just twenty-nine did, of whom a mere twenty-two were Conservatives, with the others being DUP MPs plus the whipless, and increasingly unhinged, former Spartan Andrew Bridgen. The list of Tory rebels, by the way, includes some of the most disreputable and despicable politicians of our, and perhaps any, age. So it was a fairly puny revolt, and though it was notable that both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss joined it, what was more notable was that neither have the pull to have made it a significant challenge to Rishi Sunak. Johnson himself had to interrupt his ill-conceived defence against charges of having misled parliament, of which more below, in order to cast his vote.

It has been known for some time that the ERG’s membership has fallen, and the group is much less organized than in its 2018-19 heyday. Its members, or ex-members, are also split, and some of those in government, especially Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker, were closely involved in, and became advocates of, the WF. Indeed, in Baker’s case, that led to the one-time ‘Brexit hard man’ being thrown out of the ERG’s WhatsApp group whilst being described as a “little weasel” by Nigel Farage. As Robert Shrimsley, Chief UK Political Commentator of the Financial Times, observed, “the revolution eats its own children”. Perhaps more to the point, it is the latest example of the difference between taking responsibility for the realities of delivering Brexit and the luxury of espousing Brexit purity from the sidelines.

Even so, there are plenty of Brexiters on the Tory benches who are not ERG members but who might have been galvanized to rebel in different circumstances. Had there been enough to mean that the vote would have been lost without Labour support that would have been a significant embarrassment for Sunak, and a sign that the Brexit Ultras are still a force to be reckoned with, but there were not. It’s true that several Tory MPs didn’t vote, but it is impossible to tell how many of these were meaningful abstentions and how many were simply absences. In any case, abstention hardly bespeaks of Cromwellian resolve.

The day before, the ERG’s ludicrously-named, if not downright ludicrous, ‘Star Chamber’ had found the WF, including the Stormont Brake, to be unacceptable. But the fatal political flaw in this, as with all the Brexiter objections to the WF, is that everything they object to about it was also contained within the Northern Ireland Protocol itself, which they voted for. Not only that, but it was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ the 2019 Tory Government was elected to deliver. Now that the reformed Protocol has, effectively, been accepted, there is little realistic prospect of these objections being resurrected. Equally, the persistent Brexiter lie that the Protocol was always intended to be temporary, wheeled out again by Priti Patel in a Telegraph article this week (£), must surely have died this week, even if any of them actually believed it. It is expected that the WF will now be formally adopted at today’s meeting of the Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee.

There is a light that never goes out

So it is plausible to say that the grip of the ERG has finally been broken, and that Sunak, unlike any of his predecessors since 1992, has successfully faced them down. Certainly, Wednesday’s vote is widely seen to have strengthened his political position, with Jessica Elgot of the Guardian writing of it “having been a moment of pure delight for the Prime Minister”. Against that, it’s not just plausible but likely that, if the Tories go on to lose the next election, there will be a backlash from the Brexit purists, saying that the problem was that Brexit was betrayed.

By that, they will mean betrayed not just by Sunak and the WF but also by the failure of both Sunak and Johnson to deliver the deregulatory nirvana that many of the Ultras crave, for it is worth recalling that Brexiter dissatisfaction about delivering these ‘benefits of Brexit’ long pre-dates Sunak’s arrival. Johnson, if he stays the course, might seek to lead that backlash, arguing no doubt that his own failures were the fault of others. But his political stock may never recover, even if he dodges the bullet of the Privileges Committee hearing, and, anyway, the true Brexiters have always known he was not of the faith.

More likely, it will be championed by one of the true believers, perhaps one of this week’s WF rebels. Truss is probably irredeemably tainted by failure, a failure for which the greatest evidence is her own inability to recognize it, so Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg are more obvious candidates. It is already possible to see the battle lines being drawn, with Sunday Telegraph Editor Allister Heath, in an article (£) ominously yet absurdly titled “The Brexit revolt against the Remain Establishment has only just begun”, hailing the twenty-two Tory rebels as “heroes” and insisting that, if Sunak loses the next election, “the next Tory leader will be chosen by the party membership and will be a Brexiteer, anti-ECHR and anti-woke”. In other words, neither the Tories, nor British politics, have yet seen the back of the ERG.

Ask

All that is for the future. More immediately, the Windsor Framework vote could be a sign that, as I put it in a recent post, Britain’s Brexit fever has broken. However, there are several questions to be asked about that. One is what now happens about the operation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which of course is in no way resolved by the vote, even though a new opinion poll shows not just strong support amongst the people of Northern Ireland for the WF (overall 45% support, 16.9% oppose), but that even within the unionist community only 15.7% (though 22.8% of DUP voters) are opposed to it (and 45.8% support it, though only 36% of DUP voters). Wrapped up in that is whether, regardless of whether the Assembly is restored, the Protocol will go on being not just a running sore for some unionist politicians, but also, in being so, will function as a rallying point for Brexiters generally.

Another question is whether, how, and to what extent, Sunak follows up his success with the WF by moving in more pragmatic directions on Brexit policy generally. As I suggested last week, there are already signs that he will do so in relation to defence and international relations. But what about domestic policy and, crucially, the Retained EU Law Bill? If he continues with the latter, Brexitism can hardly be said to be in abeyance. If he doesn’t, will that provide a new rallying point for the Brexiters? It is of note that both this Bill and the Bill of Rights Bill are on the agenda for today’s meeting of the Partnership Council of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Barbarism begins at home

Even if passing the Windsor Framework has broken the Brexit fever as regards government policy, it will also serve to re-enforce and perhaps grow the poisonous reservoir of Brexit betrayalism within British Conservatism in its wider sense. That matters not so much in terms of Brexit policy but the rag-bag of populist causes with which Brexit has become bound up. Those causes have their adherents amongst the Tories, of course, with Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg being obvious examples, but also within the Reform Party and the very powerful media and social media nexus that promotes Conservative populism.

Although the political parties in this space, not just Reform but the rump of UKIP, and Reclaim, which has never been more than a rump, remain angrily disunited, there is a sense of this ‘movement’ coming together, an example being the way GB News employs as hosts Tories like, again, Rees-Mogg and Anderson, as well as Nigel Farage and oddballs like Laurence Fox, alongside its wider cast of viciously aggressive presenters and freakish commentators. Similarly, an offshoot of Fox’s Reclaim was recently revealed to have funded Andrew Bridgen, whilst Bridgen himself co-hosted a lavish dinner for anti-vaxxers at the Carlton Club last month. In some ways, such loose-knit communities of interest are more effective than a political party, creating the impression of a disorganized ‘general consensus’ rather than an orchestrated agenda.

GB News is also becoming unusually favoured in being granted interviews by Tory Ministers, who sometimes are even interviewed by Tory MPs moonlighting as presenters, with the approval of Ofcom, whilst on other programmes these same Tory MPs – Rees-Mogg again is an example – feature as interviewees. And, of course, GB News is only part of the wider and more established media phalanx pushing similar agendas, especially still influential print titles including the Telegraph, Mail and Express.

Meanwhile, the increasingly cowed and compromised BBC, though certainly a very far cry from GB News, routinely hosts spokespeople of the ‘Tufton Street’ thinktanks, and bends over backwards to placate its implacable populist critics. Thus, with or without parliamentary representation, or even creating a single party, this populist movement will continue to exert a significant and malign influence on the British polity. Perhaps most alarming is how difficult it is to distinguish between some of the apparently ‘respectable’ populists and far-right street groups like Britain First.

Much of this Conservative populism has nothing to do with Brexit directly, and many of its causes and tropes long pre-date Brexit. However, Brexit is now its touchstone, being both an article of faith and the one occasion when one of its causes was voted on and won. That strengthens the longstanding populist idea of speaking for ‘the silent majority’, and by a kind of osmosis the narrow vote to leave the EU became configured as ‘the will of the people’ and then ‘the will of the people’ for Brexit got repurposed to present many other populist causes as if they, too, bore the imprimatur of having been subject to ‘the biggest exercise in democracy our country has ever seen’ (sic).

This charming man

That elision is evident not just in the rough and tumble of anonymous social media slanging matches and newspaper columns like that of Allister Heath, mentioned earlier, but in the writings of populist intellectuals. For example, in last week’s Mail, politics Professor Matthew Goodwin managed to run together issues as diverse, yet predictable, as Brexit, the paucity of further and technical education, the ‘over-representation’ of ethnic minorities in TV shows and adverts, and, of course, “’woke’ policies in our schools [and] universities” to propose that “there is a yawning gap between the values of the New Elite and the majority”.

Tellingly, Goodwin sometimes slips between referring to the majority and to “ordinary people”, something reminiscent of the Farage formulation of the Brexit vote as being “a victory for ordinary decent people” and its implication that very close to half the country is, in some way, neither ordinary nor decent. The difference is that, after that brief moment of triumphalism, Conservative populism has now reverted to its habitual sullen victimhood, a kind of hybrid of the bedsit self-pity of Morrissey’s early lyrics and the aggressive martyrdom of his more recent political stances (yes, it took a while, but now the title and sub-titles of this post make sense).

None of this is new – Goodwin talks of the ‘New Elite’, but most of what he says about it was already hackneyed when I was young, and he himself rather paradoxically asserts that “The New Elite has been on manoeuvres for decades”, leaving one to wonder how far back we have to go for the Old Elite, or even quite what it was. Certainly historians will be puzzled to learn that “in days gone by the governing classes had much more in common with the millions of ordinary people who shared their nation”, though they would probably spot it as an example of populist nostalgia in which even the elite ain’t what it used to be. And all of us might be puzzled as to why, if this ‘New Elite’ is so powerful, it is having to endure Brexit.

But, that aside, my point is that, for all that the vote on the Windsor Framework may betoken that we have passed the high-water mark of Brexiter extremism in parliament and government policy, it has metastasized into something wider or more general, but which retains Brexit as its primary point of reference. For that reason, rather than call it Conservative populism or even, taking a tip from Goodwin, the ‘new populism’, it is most apt to call it Brexitism.

That joke isn’t funny any more

For particular example, the biggest political news story this week has been Boris Johnson’s appearance before the Privileges Committee to assess whether he knowingly misled the House of Commons over infringements of the Covid rules. This has nothing to do with Brexit, except in the indirect sense that both relate to Johnson’s pathological dishonesty, and that Johnson might well never have become Prime Minister but for Brexit (and certainly only supported it in the hope that would be the consequence).

Yet the omnipresent Rees-Mogg was at pains to represent the hearing as the work of “the haters of Brexit”, despite the Committee containing four Tory MPs of whom at least one, Bernard Jenkin, is one of the most Ultra of Brexit Ultras. Indeed it turned out, as Martin Kettle noted, that “the unexpected star turn here was Sir Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative MP whose Brexit credentials are unchallengeable, who quietly carved Johnson’s evidence into pieces, leaving him spluttering and humiliated”. Perhaps Jenkin will now join Baker in the ranks of ‘crypto-remainers’, Jacobins turned Girondins.

Rees-Mogg’s attempt to discredit the process reveals his grating hypocrisy, seen also in his role in the illegal 2019 prorogation, since he so often affects to represent himself as the voice, an unctuous and preposterous voice admittedly, of parliamentary traditionalism. For, as Hannah White of the Institute for Government explains, the significance of the hearing is far less about Johnson’s future than it is about protecting the vital constitutional importance of ministerial accountability. But it also shows how Brexit continues to be the cornerstone of British populism, for all that it has ceased to have majority support. It is the talisman of Brexitism.

And, in fact, the hypocrisy and the role of Brexit in populism are linked. For the Brexit Ultras, no perversion of parliamentary rules and norms was too great if it delivered ‘the will of the people’. In that context, Johnson’s ‘anti-ruleism’ made him their ideal leader. But as I argued at length at the time, ‘Partygate’ exposed the risks and fragility of populism by opening a chasm between ‘ordinary people’ and their supposedly anti-elitist leaders. So it will be fitting if it is his lies over this, rather than all his other lies, which finally end Johnson’s political career. And it will be a fitting irony if, as argued by (£) the ferociously pro-Brexit Associate Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Camilla Tominey, the ‘implosion’ of “the cult of Boris” is taken by association to mean the implosion of “his Brexit dream”.

Still ill

For the reality, of course, is that the “dream” has imploded quite independently of Johnson. It collapsed under the weight of its repeated encounters with reality. For that matter, even if, under Sunak, government policy is becoming more pragmatic about Brexit, that does nothing at all to stop the continuing damage Brexit is causing, damage still being assiduously charted by Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downside Dossier. At best, it means ceasing to add new damages on top of the existing ones.

Discussing those damages is still largely taboo for both the Tory and Labour parties but, to coin a phrase, the people have spoken, at least to the extent of successfully petitioning parliament to debate a call for the government to hold a public inquiry into the impact of Brexit. The debate will be held on 24 April, and whilst little can be expected as a result it is at least something that Brexit will actually be discussed and not treated as an embarrassing medical condition that shouldn’t be mentioned in public. The Brexit fever may have broken, but the nation is still ill.

 

Afterword

In case you missed it, I wrote an extra post this week, reviewing two recent Brexit books – The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit by Meg Russell and Lisa James, and Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done by Stefaan De Rynck.

Enter Sunak, the fifth Brexit Prime Minister

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

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

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

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

Sunak, Brexitism and Brexit

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

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

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

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

The post-Brexit political constraints on Sunak

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

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

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

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

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

Sunak and deregulation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Northern Ireland Protocol: the first crisis for Sunak?

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

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

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

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

The unfolding legacy of Brexit lies

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

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

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

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

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

TL;DR

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

Is Brexit being 'cancelled'?

It’s hardly surprising that the Ukraine war continues to command media and public attention, displacing most other news, including Brexit news. But perhaps there is more to it than that. In a recent post I speculated that there was an emerging sense that the war had made Brexit seem strangely pointless and outdated, linking to a couple of other people (Rafael Behr and Robert Shrimsley (£)) who were already making a similar point. It’s still too early to know, but three weeks on it looks more rather than less plausible.

On the one hand, the need for friendly cooperation between the UK and the EU is so overwhelmingly obvious that the creation of the barrier of Brexit seems more foolish than ever. Not only does it get in the way of shared practical measures, such as sanctions, it also dilutes the institutional expression of a shared ideological commitment to liberal democracy. On the other hand, the sight of what a real violation of sovereignty, and resistance to it, looks like throws a sharp light on the asinine idea that EU membership entailed a loss of sovereignty in any serious sense or that Brexit regained it. To that one could add that, despite the government’s woefully inadequate initial approach to taking refugees, the generosity of the public response seems to nullify, or at least contradict, the nativist spasm of 2016. Perhaps we are not really the people we seemed to be then, and which the government still believes us to be. Perhaps we never were.

The analysis that the war fundamentally recasts Brexit is being increasingly widely made. The London correspondent of Le Monde, Cecile Decourtieux, suggests that “in a context of dramatic rise in geo-political risks, Brexit appears to be a handicap, even a historical error”. In a similar vein, writing in the New Statesman Paul Mason argues that “Brexit, in its original form, is dead: killed by the new geo-political realities created by the war in Ukraine”. And the issue isn’t ‘just’ geo-politics: on any account the war is going to compound pre-existing economic pressures deriving from energy prices rises and the long-run impacts of Covid, not to mention the challenges of climate change. These, as the Brexiters always say, are global issues. What they omit to say is that only Britain has to face them at the same time as the economic drag-weight of Brexit, as its ‘clear contribution’ to this week’s sackings of P & O employees brutally illustrates.

Brexiter desperation

That Brexit has been exposed as a failure by the war is obvious not least from the desperate tone of those few who are still noisily defending it in those terms. The angry hyperbole of Telegraph Associate Editor Camilla Tominey’s recent article, declaiming that “the Ukraine crisis has humiliated the EU”, is so far from anything resembling a rational account of what is happening that it can’t be taken seriously by anyone except the most spittle-flecked of Brexiter ideologues. Crucially, as with the similar piece by Daniel Hannan that I discussed last week, it does not provide a single example of anything the UK has done in the crisis that it could not have done, or that it has done better than it could have done, as an EU member.

That always has to be the test for Brexit, as it was sold as a project which would have advantages; simply lambasting the EU, even if it were justified, does not pass that test. Indeed Tominey herself self-defeatingly argues that what the crisis shows is the “extraordinary power and value of nation states”, giving the examples of Britain, which has indeed left the EU, Ukraine, which wants to join, and Poland, which of course is a member. 

A much more minor example of Brexiter desperation is that of a widely-mocked tweet by Paul Embery, the Lexiter trade unionist and writer. In it, he derided the EU’s sanctioning of 160 individuals in one day (compared with seven by the UK the same day), by saying that the EU’s total only “works out to six individuals per EU member state”. I disagree with most of what Embery writes, but it would be absurd and insulting to suggest he isn’t intelligent enough to realise that when the EU sanctions individuals they are sanctioned by every member state, so dividing them up in this way makes no sense at all. Doing so can only mean that no rational arguments are available.

Brexiter silence

For the most part, though, the Brexiters have simply fallen silent. For example, another Lexiter, the Guardian’s Economics Editor Larry Elliott, wrote an insightful article about the UK’s reliance on Russian money being inseparable from its wider need for “the kindness of strangers” to fund its perennial trade deficit. Yet what he did not even mention was the now clear evidence that Brexit is making this trade deficit worse, and is likely to continue to do so as the structural adjustment to having worse terms of trade with the EU continues, including the consequences of the UK running a laxer imports control regime than the EU, even if/ when full import controls are introduced, making it harder to export than to import.

That laxity was extolled as the pragmatic flexibility of Britain’s “risk-based” post-Brexit approach by Jacob Rees-Mogg (£) during the media blitz of his first days as Brexit Opportunities Minister. Since then, he, too, has gone much quieter. However, given that in an interview on Andrew Marr’s LBC show this week he was still peddling the lie that the vaccines roll-out was a triumph for Brexit, it seems fair to say that he has found the ‘opportunities’ are more elusive than promised.

The other new silence concerns the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). It’s true that, because the legal system proceeds regardless of political events, this week the Court of Appeal in Belfast has rejected the challenge to an earlier High Court ruling in a case where some unionists and Brexiters tried to have the NIP ruled illegal. They will be taking it to the Supreme Court but, on my non-lawyer’s reckoning, to keep flogging that dead horse is more a case for the RSPCA than for a court of law. But, politically, it seems clear that precisely because of the need to cooperate with the EU over Ukraine, much of the heat for a confrontation over the NIP, including the use of Article 16, has dissipated.

Certainly there are reports that Liz Truss favours dropping the Article 16 threat and, generally, seeking an accommodation with the EU, and although there are also some reports to the contrary it seems likely that the present state of quiet semi-implementation will be allowed to persist by both sides for some time yet. Considering how noisy and acrimonious UK-EU relations have been over the NIP for at least a year now, this is a remarkable development.

It’s possible that this de-escalation would have happened anyway, with David Frost’s departure at least removing his unskilled pugnacity from the equation, but the war has given both cover and impetus for it. There was even a sliver of recognition of this in a speech given by Frost himself in Zurich this week, although it was smothered by his usual self-serving – yet entirely unself-reflective - and delusional account of the Brexit process and deeply irresponsible comments about Northern Ireland.

Brexiter moans

However, that doesn’t mean that the Brexit Ultras will let it pass, and indeed despite his call to “move on” from past bitterness Frost continues to twist the knife of the Article 16 threat as well as to disown the NIP he negotiated. Truss’s approach is already being described as a “Brexit U-turn” by the Express, even though nothing formally has changed, and this week also saw an obscure but telling moment. It concerned the “Customs (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2022” (be still my beating heart) wherein the government attempted to amend the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979 by, amongst other things, replacing references to “the United Kingdom” with “Great Britain”. This doesn’t necessarily imply the government giving up on re-negotiating the NIP but, at least symbolically, it suggests an acceptance of the Irish Sea border.

At all events, it was reported by Sky News’ Deputy Political Editor Sam Coates to be causing a “big row” between the government and some Tory MPs, leading to it being at least temporarily paused. One of those objecting most strongly was former ERG chair Steve Baker, calling yet again for the immediate invocation of Article 16 as he also did last week (a sign, I suggested in my previous post, of the Brexiters’ frustration with the apparent rapprochement post-Ukraine). But his comments this week reveal two other things, which go to the heart of what has happened with Brexit and have fundamental implications going way beyond this little episode.

Firstly, Baker claims that he and other ‘Eurosceptics’ (he presumably means the Brexit Ultras) only supported Boris Johnson to become Prime Minister because he promised that “the Withdrawal Agreement is dead”, and that this explicitly meant not merely replacing the backstop with something else. But, says Baker, Johnson “then went on and did just what he told us he would not do”. Now it has long been known, not least because he said it in May 2020, that Baker and others voted for Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement (WA) because Dominic Cummings and Michal Gove assured them it could be changed later. That in itself is a totally ludicrous notion, given that it was the basis of both the General Election campaign and the signing of the treaty with the EU. However, what Baker is now saying is that, even before Johnson became PM, there was a promise that Johnson broke after he came to office – and yet Baker actually voted for what he came up with.

In other words, it isn’t, as before, that Baker is saying Johnson broke a promise to re-negotiate the NIP once it was done, and that this promise was why Baker voted for the WA; it is that Johnson had already broken the promise not to only minimally re-negotiate the WA by removing the backstop, but Baker voted for it anyway. That obviously reflects even more badly on Johnson’s honesty – though that is hardly a bombshell – but it makes the conduct of Baker (and like-minded MPs) even more indefensible. It is that conduct which has led directly to the continuing turmoil over the NIP, and if that is indeed defused by the Ukraine war and Baker doesn’t like it then, frankly, he should reflect on his own deplorable behaviour quite as much as he does on Johnson’s.

The second revealing aspect of Baker’s objections is perhaps less personally damning, but still an ironic comeuppance for the Brexiters. For throughout the Brexit process, under both Theresa May and Johnson, there has been a concerted side-lining of Parliament by the Executive, almost invariably cheered on by the Brexiters because it seemed to be a way of getting Brexit done during the 2017-19 Parliament. A particular feature of that Executive power grab has been the substantially extended use of Statutory Instruments – such as the Customs regulation amendments in this case – rather than primary legislation. As such, there is far less scope for MPs to scrutinise Executive decisions, and it has continued to be the case with pandemic regulations. On this occasion, the government seems to have been at least temporarily thwarted, but the general point is that the legacy of Brexit has been to make a mockery of the Brexiter promise that ‘British laws should be made by the British Parliament'. Baker should reflect on that, too.

Cancelling Brexit?

All of this – the way that Johnson’s Brexit got through Parliament, and the constitutional legacy of Brexit – remains as important as it ever was in terms of understanding the web of lies that have created this mess. However, it would obviously be ridiculous to suggest that committee room rows over customs regulations negate the wider political silence over Brexit. At most, they are a reminder to the government that the Brexit Ultras are watching like hawks to pounce on anything they perceive as backsliding on Brexit. Whereas what the government seems to want is to ‘cancel’ Brexit – not in the sense of annulling it, but of simply not talking about it; of ‘no-platforming’ it.

That has been the case for quite some time, of course, and Johnson, in particular, has long ceased to show any interest in Brexit at all, like a spoilt child who clamours for months for an expensive Christmas present then discards it as boring on Boxing Day. The more fundamental reason for cancelling Brexit continues to grow all the time, with the Ukraine war just the latest, if heftiest, example: it is obvious, even I suspect to most Brexiters, that it has utterly failed to deliver any of its promises. The P & O sackings this week provide a further example, showing that Brexit hasn’t delivered its promise to protect British workers’ employment security and rights (promises which ironically were made to seafarers, specifically, by their own union, the RMT, one of the few to support Brexit in the referendum).

So whilst, now and then, Johnson and other government ministers may make some general claim about it being a success, or float the vaccines roll-out lie, they really don’t want to go into any detail in the way that it is an absolute certainty they would be doing if there were any real, tangible benefits for them to boast of.

The Covid pandemic helped with that quietude but, interestingly, Covid itself is now being treated in the same way, as something the government wants to ignore and seems to think that, if ignored, will go away. So, just as it is being reported that ministers want “to get rid of data and move on” despite the new spike in Covid cases, we also learned this week that the government no longer keeps track of delays and queues at Dover (and, I assume, all ports) caused by post-Brexit regulations. Like babies playing peek-a-boo, ministers appear to imagine that if they can’t see something then it doesn’t exist.

More seriously, it would seem to be the flip-side of the post-truth politics discussed in last week’s post, in which reality can be denied with impunity. But, of course, neither viruses nor lorry queues disappear just because you ignore them – they exist regardless of any “wish psychosis”, to use the term in Gerhard Schnyder’s most recent excellent analysis on his Brexit Impact Tracker. Perhaps to that concept we could add that attempts to “cancel” both Brexit and Covid show not just the nature and limitations of post-truth politics but also those of the 'politics of the spectacle': we may be endlessly exhorted to ‘move on’, but that neither cures us of Covid nor clears us through customs.

Cancelling as a step to cancellation?

At all events, there are powerful reasons why Brexit, at least, is not just going to go away. For one thing, as a matter of institutional fact there will be ongoing discussions about the NIP (and a vote on it in the Northern Ireland Assembly scheduled) and also about the operation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), especially as its five-year review gets closer. So much of Brexit still remains undone, or in the process of being done, from farming support to criminal justice cooperation. Not only will the Brexit Ultras be watching what happens but so too will be plenty of remainers and just about anyone who recalls the promises that were made. For example, this week the still unresolved issue of replacing EU structural funding for, for example, Cornwall and Wales was in the news again (£) with reports of “a furious backlash” at the failure to honour the “promise of a post-Brexit bonanza”.

So the question is whether all this proceeds quietly, at the margins of political discourse, and is treated by the media and the public as a series of discrete events for the inside pages rather than as headline news. Or will the entirety of Brexit re-emerge as a central issue? The answer partly depends on whether the Conservative Party has another internal spasm over Europe. It also depends on whether the Labour Party will continue to give tacit support to the silence around Brexit, at least to the extent of being content for it to be a peripheral issue.

Of course Labour have been in an unenviable position (above and beyond issues about the extent to which some of its core vote supported Brexit), because Covid and Ukraine have both made it harder, even if they were minded, to seem to be ‘banging on about Brexit’. There were some signs of a more robust approach, from Rachel Reeves in particular, when Covid started to wane and before Ukraine had flared up again. The LibDems, more certainly, look set to go into the next election with a strong programme of integration with the EU including a “roadmap to join the single market” revealed this week. With the increasing possibility of at least an informal LibDem-Labour electoral pact (£) there’s at least a chance (the only chance) of at least some of it seeing the light of day.

Paradoxically, if there is a kind of ‘cancelling’ of Brexit underway – whether by virtue of the impact of the Ukraine war or government disinclination to discuss it – then that, along with the simple passage of time, could make a single market membership policy relatively (only relatively) uncontroversial. It is not as if there was ever deep public opposition to it – hard Brexit was entirely the confection of the hard Brexiters, not the electorate.

So I think that a hypothetical Lab-SNP-LibDem coalition, facing a Tory Party which in those circumstances would be in bitter disarray, might not encounter much public opposition to such a policy. In the end ‘cancelling’ Brexit could mean not so much fully reversing it – still, surely, most unlikely - as most people just not caring that much one way or another about what is done with Brexit. Very much, indeed, as they felt about EU membership before it got whipped up into a matter of frenzied concern by those who now mostly have nothing to say about it. Of course, even if this analysis is right, there is still much damage that will be done before we start on the slow road to some semblance of sense.

Performative politics is gaslighting post-Brexit Britain

This week, in one of his regular and excellent analyses of the Ukraine War, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, makes an interesting observation about Vladmir Putin. His background is that of a spy, rather than soldier, and as such he “has an instinct for the covert, the fabricated and the dishonest, for gaining advantage through manipulating perceptions, leaving his opponents disoriented …”. It leads him to construct fantastical world views, which are resistant to accepting any realities which contradict them. Soldiers, or at least “the best soldiers”, Freedman argues, are honest and realistic in their appraisals: “there is a harsh reality of war that cannot be gainsaid”.

Freedman’s point is that Putin’s addiction to the dishonesty of the spy may blind him to the many ways in which Russia’s attack on Ukraine is not going according to the plan which his fantasies anticipated. This leads to important questions about what prospects, if any, there may be for peace in Ukraine the central of which is “can a war launched on lies be stopped with the truth”? That is the subject of Freedman’s essay.

That Putin’s modus operandi is one of fabrication and manipulation has a relevance for Brexit. I have never accepted the proposition that Brexit was caused by Kremlin influence – that is far too reductionist an explanation of a complex and multi-faceted event. But it is undoubtedly the case that, as summarised by Peter Jukes this week, Putin was active in attempting to solicit Brexit and the fact that it happened was hugely to his advantage.

The much-delayed publication in July 2020 of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s ‘Russia Report’ does not shed much light on what Russia was doing during the referendum, principally because the intelligence services didn’t investigate it, but suggests it is “inconceivable” that such an investigation would not have shown Russian “intent” to interfere (paragraph 43). We can be sure that this wasn’t because Putin wished us well, what we can’t be sure of is whether and to what extent his activities affected how people voted. But the modus operandi of fabrication and manipulation has a second relevance for Brexit, which is quite separate to whatever Putin may or may not have been up to. 

The gaslighting of Britain 

Whilst I certainly don’t draw any direct comparison between Brexiters in general, or Boris Johnson in particular, and Putin and his regime, there is an oblique resemblance of mindset in the insistence on maintaining that fantasies must be true, even in the face of reality. Such a mindset has characterised the entire Brexit process. In a recent post I discussed the many ways in which Brexit “wasn’t just sold with lies, it actually consisted of lies” and, over two years ago, the way that ‘Zersetzung Brexit’ creates a disorienting swirl of misinformation and disinformation (that metaphor derives from the psy-ops of the Stasi in East Germany, which were well-known to ex-KGB officer Putin who was once based there). 

The particular comparison I drew was with “the way that it is becoming almost impossible to separate out what is true from what is false, what is intended from what is accidental, what is incompetent from what is malevolent”, or what is often called ‘gaslighting’. However, I also made the point that this was not necessarily to suggest some deliberate conspiracy of Brexiters or the government to mislead or confound the rest of us, but instead (or also) something that they did to themselves. In that sense it is both more complex and perhaps more dangerous than simple dishonesty or lack of realism.

It is through this frame that we can understand many of the current events in the UK.

Reality not allowed to intrude on fantasy

One characteristic of the most committed Brexiters is that they are able (and are obliged) to continually distort new events in order to fit them into their pre-existing narrative. This has long been evident in the way that their claims are ‘unfalsifiable’. Anything that happens is taken to ‘prove’ that Brexit was right, and nothing that happens can show it to be wrong.

So it is currently, with the Ukraine war. As so often, Daniel Hannan provides the most convoluted example of Brexiter sophistry. Writing in the Washington Examiner he proposes that the war has made nationalism “fashionable” again, against the supposed way that “sophisticated people” had derided it as “the ultimate low-status opinion, associated with Brexit …”. Here, he re-purposes the always absurd idea that freely-chosen EU membership was some kind of oppression from which Brexit was a ‘national liberation’ by lazily, even insultingly, implying that it bears comparison with resisting a military annexation. It is all the lazier and more absurd coming at a time when Ukraine is seeking immediate membership of the EU, whilst Georgia and Moldova have both applied to join.

If Hannan’s comparison is grotesque, then that of former Brexit Party MEP, Ben Habib, is positively unhinged. In, naturally, the Express, he compares the invasion of Ukraine with “the annexation [sic] of Northern Ireland by the EU”. Whilst admitting that no use of military force is involved – which to any half-way sensible person invalidates the entire comparison – he insists that the EU’s “aim with respect to the United Kingdom is the same as Putin’s with Ukraine”. Clearly it is gibberish, since not only is there no armed force involved but the Northern Ireland Protocol is part of a negotiated agreement, hailed by Boris Johnson as a triumph, and freely signed by him as part of an international treaty. It’s all the more outlandish given that, when an MEP, Habib actually voted for the Withdrawal Agreement, including the Protocol – a good example, perhaps, of ‘self-gaslighting’.

Another person now apparently regretting his parliamentary vote for the Protocol is Steve Baker, the ERG ‘hard man of Brexit’, who this week called (£) for the immediate triggering of Article 16 of the Protocol, regardless of the war in Ukraine. This, at least, does not involve drawing a false comparison with what is happening in Ukraine, but instead acts as if nothing, or nothing of relevance, is happening there. In this sense, it seems more to be prompted by frustration that – as predicted in my previous post – the war is tending to improve UK-EU relations (£) or, at the very least, reducing the appetite for antagonism.

Even so, Johnson’s government is unable to resist constant claims to be “the global leader” of the international response to the war, and at least implying that the EU is marginal or under-contributing. It’s a theme that Hannan, again, articulates, as in another article last weekend (£) where he suggests that the war has discredited “Ultra-Remainers” who said that Brexit would mean the UK losing all influence – pointing out the various things that Johnson has done in response to the Russian invasion, whilst sneering at the EU’s reactions.

Hannan over-states the extent that this amounts to UK ‘leadership’ but the real problem with his argument is that it is based on the familiar Brexiter construction of strawmen. Just as they render warnings (which the latest data analysis continues to prove correct) of reduced trade with the EU as claims that ‘all trade will end’, so too do they pretend that warnings of reduced influence are predictions of ‘no influence at all’. There may have been the odd person saying this, but it wasn’t a generally made claim. However, that Brexit has reduced UK influence, and that the response to Russia has centred on the US-EU relationship, is plain, at least to international relations experts. And, even if that isn’t accepted, it is still, and crucially, the case that nothing the UK has done, or might conceivably do, required Brexit. So, at very most, Hannan’s argument is the now increasingly common one from Brexiters that the worst fears of some remainers proved false. But Brexit wasn’t sold on that modest basis – it was meant to have unequivocally beneficial results.

Fantasy is reality

In fact, a fair-minded assessment of the UK response to Russia’s latest aggression in Ukraine would say it has been mixed: strong on early and ongoing defensive military support, reasonable on economic sanctions in general but weak on rapid sanctioning of oligarchs, and woefully inadequate on refugees. And whilst none of this, in and of itself, is because of Brexit, the gap between what has been done and what is being claimed to have been done does have a strongly Brexit-related aspect. Both Brexit itself, and Johnson’s post-Brexit government, have the ‘spy-like’ quality of being not just dishonest but of smudging, even dissolving, the line between truth and lies.

No doubt that did not start with Brexit, but it has been much intensified by it, because the only way to sustain the fantasies of Brexit has been to insist that what Brexiters claim to be true is, in fact, true. Thus the hard core of them have never accepted that Brexit required a border – somewhere – with Ireland, and have never accepted that it required all the border checks that have arisen with the EU generally. Instead, these realities have been treated as unnecessary punishment by an EU intent on thwarting Brexit, aided and abetted by remainers within the UK and especially by the civil service. In a similar way, when faced with realities, the response has been to insist that there is an easy solution at hand (technological solutions for the Irish border, GATT Article XXIV for trade and, currently, Article 16 for the Protocol) if only the faint-hearted and the black-hearted would take it. The problem isn’t (ever) Brexit, it’s lack of ‘belief in Brexit’.

It’s this Brexity idea that reality must be as the fantasy or lies claim it to be which has shifted British politics from the normal practice of, probably, all governments to over-state their achievements to one where simply stating an achievement is deemed to have made it a reality. Johnson’s government has made that its hallmark, and no doubt that is in some measure because of his own personal mendacity, but it was immanent in the Brexiter mindset in any case. Now, not just in relation to Ukraine, but Covid and just about every policy area, his post-Brexit government is defined by making grand announcements but then doing nothing  (from e.g. the ‘dementia moon shot’ [£] to the Northern rail link), or making grand claims for what it has achieved which turn out to be false when investigated (from e.g. claims about the numbers of people in work to claims about crime falling).

In a way, it is a version of the theme that has characterised this Brexit administration all along, namely acting like a campaign rather than a government. And it has to be admitted that it has paid dividends, because enough people remember the grand announcements or claims but barely register the lack of follow-through or the subsequent revelations of falsity. In relation to Brexit, a prime example is the false claim that the UK was able to roll-out its vaccines early because of having left the EU, and the accompanying misleading claim that this has meant that the UK’s entire vaccine programme has been much more successful than that of other European countries. As a recent survey shows, a better vaccination programme is by far (at 49%) the most widely believed benefit of Brexit.

Britain’s refugee shame

With the Ukraine war, we see the same pattern. Tough-sounding claims about ‘world-leading’ sanctions on Russia turn out to be exaggerated or the reality to be milder or slower than those of the US and the EU (£), which, in passing, also gives the lie to the Brexiter claim that ‘independence’ would bring agility and nimbleness to the UK. Far more obnoxious have been the endless lies and distortions about provision for Ukrainian refugees, which has now become a matter of international censure and disgrace. It is hard to keep track of them all, but they include promises of ‘rapid processing’ of visa applications, and of a ‘surge team’ to deal with applications in Calais that was then to be in Lille until, yesterday, it turned out it would be 30 miles away in Arras. In these and other ways, desperate people have been pushed from pillar to post in confusing and undoubtedly frightening ways, with pitifully small numbers so far receiving the visas that the UK, unlike the EU, insists they must have.

Overall, this amounts to a shamefully feeble response, especially compared with the EU – so much, again, for the nimbleness that was supposed to come from escaping EU red tape – but perhaps almost as bad is the hypocrisy of continual claims that Britain’s approach is a “generous” one. Johnson, as ever, is the misleader-in-chief, quoting highly selective statistics to pretend that Britain has out-performed other European countries, leading Guardian columnist Zoe Williams to make the highly apposite observation that “when you stand up and deliberately mislead, call the worst the best, turn facts on their head, it all sounds a bit Putin-esque”. It also sounds remarkably like something else: the way that Johnson and others presented Brexit.

Johnson has now started to talk about taking hundreds of thousands of refugees and – with tedious predictability – there’s a promise that ‘the army will be drafted in’ to help, which has become this government’s standard way of showing that it is dealing robustly with issues (e.g. flooding, vaccination, ambulance driving, tanker driving, Nightingale hospital building). We’ll see what happens, but we’re well past the point where such promises constitute anything that his government is held accountable to. He and his ministers just say what they think will get them off the hook, and later obfuscate or set up some interminable inquiry and then say it’s time to move on.

It can be argued that pre-Brexit the government would have been just as unwelcoming to Ukrainian refugees, and it’s also true that the (post-Brexit) welcome for Hong Kong refugees has been remarkable. As regards the former, I still think part of the picture is the hangover of the Brexit panic about migration from Eastern Europe and Priti Patel’s post-Brexit frenzy, stoked by Nigel Farage’s vile campaign, about refugees and asylum seekers. But admittedly it is a strange picture. For if, as might be thought, the government wants to appeal to its Brexit base and Farage-vulnerable flank by strict control of Ukrainian numbers, then why keep saying that it will do more, which is likely to infuriate that base? Or if it recognizes that many Tory MPs and most Tory voters would support a liberal approach, then why keep failing to deliver its promises? The same could also be asked of the government’s failure to live up to promises made to Afghan refugees.

The perils of performative politics

Of course, one answer could just be incompetence and lack of resources, or the habitual disaster of sub-contracting. But I think another answer – or another part of the answer - does indeed lie with the ‘performative’ politics of Brexit in which saying something is true supposedly makes it true, if only you believe it enough. It is this which from the outset gave Johnson’s Brexit government its ‘cult-like’ quality, and it has leached into, or is part of, the wider environment of post-truth politics.

Hence the rhetoric (e.g. massive trade deals, Global Britain, our ‘proud history of giving shelter’, world-leading this that and the other) comes to be inseparable from reality – except, perhaps, to the ‘experts’ from whom ‘we’ve heard too much’. The other aspect of this performative rhetoric is performative silence. These are the things which are ignored, left unsaid, or rendered unsayable. Hence, also, Brexiters scarcely acknowledge any of the myriad of ways, from lost trade to lost influence, that Brexit is damaging Britain, even to the point of trying to ban the word ‘Brexit’ (a parallel, perhaps, with Putin’s refusal to call the war by that name).

It's important to understand that ‘performativity’ does not simply mean ‘performance’ – that is, it is not just about putting on an act or knowingly telling lies and leaving truths unspoken. It also ‘performs’ or ‘does’ things: specifically, it makes the rhetoric and lies real to at least some who speak them and to at least some who hear them. That is profoundly debilitating for the rest of us, who are not just sick of the lies but actually made sick by them, because it becomes ever harder to hold on to our own sense of reality.

Even as regards the Ukrainian refugee issue it’s already hard, after only a couple of weeks, to recall just exactly what was promised and when. It’s precisely that sense of disorientation that Zersetzung engenders. It’s far worse than that, of course, for the refugees themselves in adding misery and fear to all that they have already experienced. More widely, as I warned in a post in January, before the war had actually begun, there’s a danger of the UK performatively promising more than it can really deliver in support for Ukraine. In matters of life and death, rhetoric is not enough, nor is belief and nor is fantasy. Performativity and post-truth can only do so much and, as seems to be slowly happening over Ukrainian refugees, can with sufficient public and political pressure be discredited by truth and facticity.

So this brings us back to Freedman’s diagnosis of Putin as a dishonest fantasist, gaining advantage through manipulating perceptions and leaving his opponents disoriented, and the question of what he will do faced with the realities of a Ukraine which neither welcomes his invading army nor buckles to its assault. The answer to that matters far more to the world, and certainly to Ukrainians, than anything to do with Brexit, but a version of the same question applies to Brexit Britain.

We, too, enacted a policy based on manipulative fantasies that “the best soldiers” (for which, here, substitute those with experience and expertise in everything from trade to international relations) knew and know to be unrealistic. So do we push on, blundering ever more deeply into a self-delusional world where words substitute for actions and ‘true belief’ trumps reality? Or do we regain the pragmatism and realism for which, at least by reputation, we were once, to coin a phrase, ‘world-leading’?