In the last fortnight we have had several scenes, different and yet related, of politics in post-Brexit Britain. Each of them is unpleasant in itself, but taken together, as pieces in a jigsaw, they reveal a very ugly picture. More than that, they reveal a picture of the profound dangers our country faces.
A walking stick and some oysters
Exhibit one is the scene of how hecklers were treated at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham. These hecklers infiltrated and disrupted the conference, and as such deserved, and no doubt expected, to be ejected. But what happened was not simply an orderly removal by professional security guards. Instead, a crowd of mainly elderly Reform members, of both sexes, punched and slapped them, with at least one young woman being pulled around by her hair and struck with a walking stick (the latter link is to a discussion with the woman, the actual images are, be warned, repulsive). Meanwhile, other delegates cheered the attackers on whilst, on the podium, Nigel Farage laughed.
This may not, in the scheme of things, have been a massively violent assault, although it was certainly vicious and it did cause injuries. Yet it was, in its way, remarkable. I’m sure that the attackers regard themselves as ‘ordinary, decent, respectable people’, but the contorted hatred on their faces as they rounded on the disruptors showed them in an altogether different light. There was also, somehow, a symbolism of the generational political divide in it: old people spitefully lashing out in a self-righteous frenzy at youngsters for having the temerity to disrupt their leader. Old people who, on other days, no doubt congratulate themselves on their staunch advocacy of free speech.
It’s worth recalling (as Suzanne Moore in The Telegraph did) the outrage when, in 2005, a heckler was forcibly removed from Labour’s conference by security guards. That outrage came not least from the political right with, for example, David Cameron denouncing what had happened as “Orwellian”. It’s also worth recalling that, on that occasion, the then Labour leader Tony Blair, and other senior figures in the party, subsequently apologized profusely. By contrast, after this latest event, reactions from Reform MPs included the thuggishly prolier-than-thou Lee Anderson proposing a whip-round to buy a new walking stick for the most violent of the assailants and Robert Jenrick saying “he should be given a medal for what he did”.
The second scene of the fortnight was altogether more urbane, but also provided a glimpse of the Reform party. This was the meeting over oysters and champagne of Farage and senior Reform officials with a supposed potential donor, one of several meetings filmed as part of an undercover ‘sting’ operation and broadcast on Channel Four on the eve of the party’s conference [1]. It was the latest in a long list of ongoing scandals (£) about the funding of both the party and Farage himself, and it is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police. But, that aside, what this piece of the jigsaw shows is the gulf, and the relationship, between Reform (and Farage’s) carefully cultivated image as representing ‘ordinary people’ against the ‘global elite’ and the way that behind it lies a world of dodgy ‘globalist’ financiers and meetings in exclusive restaurants and clubs which few such people penetrate.
A Cambridge compound
It also provided and insight into another of Reform’s worlds where polyester-clad, spittle-flecked old men with walking sticks are notable by their absence, the intellectual salons of the radical right. For one of the senior Reform officials at those meetings was James Orr, the party’s Head of Policy (a post from which he has now stepped down). Orr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and a major figure in the paradoxically international ‘National Conservatism’ movement and the nexus of thinktanks around it in the UK, US and, at least until Victor Orban’s demise, Hungary (as mentioned, with more details and links, in my post of last April).
Orr, whose conservatism is nationalist but more specifically Christian, was a controversial figure even before the ‘sting’ and on the morning before the Channel Four broadcast had been the subject of a detailed, and at least implicitly critical, profile in the Financial Times (£). An indication of what we might, with suitably Christian charity, call his political philosophy is that, according to that profile, Orr believes in “faith, family and flag”, “opposes abortion including in cases of rape”, and “calls immigration ‘the most existential threat facing our nation since the Norman invasion’” (which suggests he is a less accomplished historian than he is a theologian). It bears saying that much of what the FT profile revealed had already been reported by Byline Times, and some aspects of it have been examined in more detail by the 21 Group, an organization which monitors and campaigns against bullying in universities.
Leaving aside the explicitly political aspects of what these various reports show or allege, collectively they reveal, amongst other things, that Orr and his wife have created what he calls “a compound” and she calls “an alternative Cambridge College” in the (presumably substantial) back garden of their Cambridge home. There, several postgraduates and post-docs, apparently all of a Christian Conservative bent, live as a community. This might be regarded as, at best, an unorthodox arrangement, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envisage how the media would report an analogous arrangement whereby, as it might be, an Associate Professor in the Education Faculty created such a community based not on Christian Conservatism but Critical Race Theory.
A fascist militia
It might be comforting to think that the contemporary far right in Britain is captured by these images, distasteful as they are, of nasty old men lashing out with their walking sticks, dodgy deals done in expensive restaurants, and creepy academics alternately gladhanding at peculiar conferences and lording it over impressionable students. But the next piece of the jigsaw we have seen in this last fortnight is far more alarming.
Last Saturday, as many as five hundred men, and they were all men, who were generally described in the media as anti-immigration ‘protestors’, blockaded the roads around the Dover ferry terminal, bringing the town centre to a standstill for several hours. But these were not ‘protestors’ in any normal or reasonable sense of the term. These men appeared, to coin a phrase, to be ‘of fighting age’. They had donned black uniforms, very much in the manner of Mosley’s Blackshirts, and balaclava masks, very much in the manner of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.
It was a profoundly chilling sight, the more so as for much of their action they maintained total silence. Subsequently, there were some chants of ‘stop the boats’, ‘England for the English’ and other anti-immigration slogans, and another of ‘Christ is King’, but there were no placards or flags waved. In fact the only symbol in evidence was, in several but not all cases, the Christian crucifix. Apparently, it is not only Cambridge theologians who have a perverse interpretation of Jesus’s injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.
Absurdly, Kent Police described this as a “spontaneous” gathering, perhaps to avoid admitting that neither they nor the security services seem to have had any inkling that it was going to happen (though there may be other interpretations of this, including claims that the police ignored warnings of what was in prospect and informed speculation that a high-level security operation may, for good reasons, have allowed the action to proceed). At all events, it was abundantly obvious that it had been carefully planned and it was executed with a certain amount of skill and discipline. That discipline included the absence of literal violence, and no arrests were made. However it was certainly violent in the more symbolic sense of being highly intimidating, pregnant with aggression and threat.
I don’t think we have seen anything quite like this, at least on the British mainland, in my lifetime. Unlike the asylum hotel riots, it did not have a particular trigger or target, and the level of organization means the participants could not be described as a mob. Nor was there even any attempt to pretend that these were just ‘ordinary people’ or ‘concerned local citizens’.
On the contrary, ‘Patriot Platform’, the all-male grouping behind it, openly describes itself as being “an army of patriots” and its aim is to “take control of the United Kingdom”. It functions as a covert coordinator of a network of groups and was launched in June by a former soldier and convicted criminal calling himself ‘Danny Tommo’, who is an associate of ‘Tommy Robinson’ and is connected with the ‘Raise the Flags’ campaign. He also helped to organize a ‘Brexit Betrayal’ rally in 2018. ‘Tommo’ aggressively parades his supposed Christianity and Patriot Platform regards itself as a Christian organization. In this and other ways, whilst its core motivation is extreme hostility to immigration, this is wrapped into a broader ideology expressed by its slogan of “Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland”. In short, and regular readers will know I do not use this term casually, they are fascists, and they have now formed a militia [2].
This militia reappeared in Portsmouth the following night, along with a larger mob, attempting to prevent the transfer of cross-channel migrants being transported to an arrival centre. Again, roads were blockaded and this time there was physical violence against police and property. There was also a direct, aggressive confrontation with RNLI crews which has subsequently developed into a campaign of online intimidation and harassment against its volunteers. Subsequently, a nearby hotel was targeted in the belief that migrants were being housed there, when in fact it was the Under-19 cricket team on tour something which, contrary to some of the reaction from both Reform and Labour politicians, was an outrage in and of itself rather than because it was mistargeted.
Whilst this militia, and the manner in which it conducts itself, is new, its beliefs and its aims grow directly out of those which have been swirling around the far-right ecosphere for a few years and the Dover action was openly supported by Rupert Lowe [warning: link to X]. That endorsement at least had the benefit of honesty. More disingenuous was the condemnation which came from Nigel Farage and others in Reform. For them, perhaps, there is some advantage in being able to claim to be the ‘responsible right’, but their own relentless scaremongering about the supposed small boats crisis and their ghoulish equation of asylum seekers with murders and sexual crimes has done a great deal to promote the beliefs espoused by Patriot Platform.
However, responsibility for that is not confined to far-right politicians. It is shared with the political and media class generally, very much including those within the governing Labour party who have dignified such beliefs as being an expression of ‘legitimate concerns’. Notably, government condemnation of the Dover action was rather muted, with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds implying that it fell within the category of “peaceful protest” and trivializing its most striking aspect as merely “dressing up in costumes”. The response to Portsmouth was more robust, with, for example, Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, calling the action “thuggish”. But the overall tenor of the government’s reaction, in relation to both events, was wishy-washy and, astoundingly, Andy Burnham made no direct comment at all, so far as I know.
A vulnerable State
If uniformed, masked men taking control, albeit temporarily, of the streets with impunity is a frightening prospect, it is at least one for which, in principle, there are legal remedies. So in some ways what is more frightening is the prospect of the law, and the State itself, falling under the control of extremists. The recent Reform UK conference was so overshadowed by the new financial scandal that it was easy to miss just how extreme the supposedly reasonable face of the far-right has become. Yet anyone with a sense of history should be alarmed that Farage has pledged to declare an immediate ‘national emergency’ if Reform came to power, with threats to reconfigure the judiciary, civil service, and parliament itself under the guise of this emergency [3]. Similarly, whilst less dramatic, Suella Braverman announced that Reform would make it compulsory for schools to fly the national flag and sing the national anthem, whilst delivering a “patriotic curriculum”.
These are not anodyne proposals, even if Braverman couched hers in the cosy nostalgia-porn of Britain being “a collection of little streets, building little hamlets and villages that fold into towns and cities.” They are, at least incipiently, totalitarian in nature and, as the noted legal commentator David Allen Green has argued, our political system is one in which “there is little which could be ultimately done to prevent the damage which a radical illiberal majority could do.”
One implication of that, Green suggests, is that the present government should create stronger constitutional guard-rails to reduce these systemic vulnerabilities. I agree, but I think a second implication is the need to tackle the core underlying beliefs which inform this illiberalism, especially the idea that there is an immigration crisis, an asylum crisis, and a cultural crisis which somehow constitute a national emergency.
An absence of political leadership
At issue here is far more than simply condemning violence and intimidation, and more, even, than yesterday’s commitment from the Home Secretary to robustly police that violence, necessary as that is given the threat of further disorder this weekend. And it certainly requires abandoning the government’s continuing insistence (£) that meeting the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the public by curtailing immigration and reducing or even stopping ‘the boats’ will make the beliefs underpinning such violence disappear. That is nonsense, and it is shown to be nonsense by the fact that those beliefs are becoming more entrenched even as the levels of immigration, asylum applications, and boat crossings are all falling. It didn’t work for Starmer and it won’t work for Burnham, and his premiership may well be the last chance for a different, and more honest, approach.
Such an approach would mean saying something like: flows of refugees and asylum seekers are a global phenomenon, and aren’t going to disappear. The UK is one of the countries least affected, but has legal and humanitarian commitments to fulfil. In doing so, we should and will process asylum claims as quickly and accurately as possible, and seek to discourage life-endangering crossings. But there is no crisis, and there is most definitely no ‘invasion’. Adopting this approach would not just be a matter of a single speech. It would require a concerted communications campaign perhaps including highlighting success stories of asylum claimants and other immigrants who have made positive contributions to society, and emphasising the many senses in which Britain has been a successful example of multi-cultural integration.
In the absence of political leadership along these lines, the dominant narrative, by default, will be, as it already largely is, one in which Britain is depicted as being invaded by a dangerous horde of sexual predators who are living lives of taxpayer-funded luxury. Allowing that to be the default inevitably has the effect of provoking fear and outrage even amongst people who would not, in other circumstances, align with the far right. Conversely, the current approach of treating this fear and outrage as justifiable means that, even whilst condemning violence and intimidation, government ministers are conceding that those responsible are, in some way, representing widespread public concern.
It is, of course, highly unlikely that the government will adopt this approach, and that is, at least in part, because there is a strong strand in Labour thinking – most overtly the Blue Labour strand, but not confined to it – that the fear and outrage are justified; that this is what ‘ordinary people’ believe and the ‘people’s party’ should represent it. As I’ve argued repeatedly in the past, this is, again, at least in part, related to Brexit and the way in which Labour accepted the populist right’s claim that the referendum showed it spoke for ‘the silent majority’. In this way, chiding vocal and violent thugs for ‘crossing the line’ amounts to little more than asserting that Labour ministers are the ‘voice of the people’ whilst leaving entirely unchallenged the thugs’ beliefs. Unsurprisingly, this only entrenches those beliefs and the thuggery continues, or even escalates.
A matter of national security
At stake in all this is, most obviously, whether uniformed fascists are to be allowed to take control of the streets as and when they choose. But what the various developments described in this post should suggest is that the Patriot Platform militia is only one strand within an interwoven braid. The angry pensioners beating youthful hecklers, the Cambridge don and his cultish camp-followers, the intimate meetings in expensive restaurants, the strident politicians of Reform and Restore, the increasingly aggressive invocation of ‘cultural Christianity’, the daily vitriol on social media, amongst many other things, are all part of a related process.
But something much deeper is at stake, which could properly be called a matter of national security. There is no doubt that what is happening domestically in the UK has parallels with what is happening in other countries, with the AfD’s recent success in the Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany being an obvious example. And the way that this success was cheered in both the US and Russia (£) was the latest, and clearest, illustration of how the transformation of geo-politics matters not just for international relations but for domestic politics. It is now a matter of US state policy, enshrined in its 2025 National Security Strategy, to support the far right in Europe, and that includes the UK. Relatedly, Elon Musk openly supports Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, calling civil war in Britain “inevitable” because of immigration, and there are multiple connections between MAGA and the British far right in both its street-level and intellectual guises.
Meanwhile, Russia’s links to the British far right are well-established, including its encouragement of attacks on mosques and Muslims generally. As with Brexit, Russia seeks to encourage anything which will destabilize Britain. That is only partly to do with seeking to punish us for supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperialism. More generally it is part of Russia’s attempt to destroy the remnants of the liberal West (liberal in the broadest sense of the commitment to rights and rationality established by the European Enlightenment), something enshrined in successive iterations of its own National Security Strategy. That, in itself, represents a profound national security threat to the UK. It is all the more profound since the US has, for now, and perhaps for ever, changed sides.
This is the bigger context within which the increasingly ugly politics of the British far right should be understood [4]. It is, historically, a new experience for Britain to find itself no longer the great power it was until, say, 1945, and no longer shielded from its decline by being a kind of junior partner to the US during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Now, it is just another ‘medium power’ and, as a result of Brexit, one in self-chosen isolation from its regional moorings. As a result, it is ready prey. It is deeply ironic that those fulminating about the ‘migrant invasion’, and the need to ‘secure our borders’ are not just missing the real threats to national security but are aiding abetting them.
A cause for alarm
This isn’t to posit some huge global conspiracy against Britain, orchestrating its domestic politics. It’s rather that there are multiple vectors pulling in similar, or related, directions in Britain, as in other European countries (although Britain is uniquely isolated because of Brexit). Recognizing that is important because it is what makes disparate events such as those discussed in this post understandable as being related to each other rather than, as might otherwise be thought, just ‘yet another’ piece of unpleasantness. As pieces of a jigsaw, when put together they make a picture.
If all this sounds alarmist, consider some of those pieces side by side: ‘Faith, Flag and Family’; a woman savagely beaten for heckling the Leader at a political rally; black-shirted men in balaclavas blockading the streets; RNLI volunteers denounced as traitors; ‘Freedom, Family, Faith, and Homeland’; ‘patriotic curriculum’; ‘National Emergency’. It’s not, I think, alarmist to be alarmed.
Notes
[1] Inevitably, the ‘sting’ provoked complaints of ‘entrapment’ from Farage and Reform, along with the familiar claim that it was an example of the Establishment trying to discredit the ‘insurgents’. But such undercover journalism has a long history, and the way that Farage was caught is remarkably similar to the way that in 2010 Channel Four and The Times ‘entrapped’ Labour MP Steve “cab for hire” Byers, which Farage, then leading UKIP, regarded as exposing the corruption of … the Establishment.
[2] The word ‘militia’ is justified, even though the group is not armed, a point made at the time of the debate leading to the 1936 Public Order Act at the time of the Blackshirts (hat tip to the historian Robert Saunders for this information). That legislation prohibited the wearing of political uniforms, although it is not clear whether Patriot Platform’s clothing constitutes a uniform within the meaning of the law.
[3] Restore’s leader Rupert Lowe this week made the even more pernicious suggestion that, if in government, he would retrospectively prosecute civil servants for enacting the present government’s policies.
[4] The examples discussed in this post are all from England, and there is no doubt that it is here where far-right activity is most pronounced. But other nations within the UK are not exempt. For example, this week a tenement building in Glasgow was set ablaze, apparently because of rumours that it was going to be used to house asylum seekers.
Showing posts with label Tommy Robinson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tommy Robinson. Show all posts
Friday, 11 September 2026
Friday, 6 February 2026
Count to one hundred
It’s indicative of the Trumpian world, as well as the hyper-frenetic nature of the contemporary media, that the ‘Greenland crisis’ which dominated the news when I wrote my previous post has all but disappeared from view. Its replacement this week by the Epstein files scandal is, in one very particular way, an illustration of how the two are linked in that the disclosures, which have convulsed British politics, only arose because of the persistent questions in the US about the Trump-Epstein relationship. That freneticism is disorientating, intentionally so in Trump's case, so it's worth slowing down and 'counting to one hundred' rather than responding to each twist and turn. In any case, a fortnightly blog imposes that discipline.
In fact, even before the latest Epstein story broke the Greenland crisis had become old news and the standard analysis of this seems to be that ‘Trump always chickens out’ (TACO) or, alternatively, that, like a market stall haggler, Trump starts with maximalist demands, always intending to settle for less. I’m not so sure. As Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland points out, Trump’s more common pattern is to briefly retreat then return for more. Thus on Greenland, within a few days of his apparent climbdown, Trump’s envoy was once again demanding (£) “total, unfettered access” to the territory.
The truth is, we don’t know what Trump was offered by NATO’s Mark Rutte that led to the sudden withdrawal of the ‘Greenland tariffs’ threat, and we don’t know what will happen next. And that is just one example of the bigger truth about Trump: no one knows what he will do next across the board. Another example is his sudden turnaround yesterday on his previous turnaround on the ‘Chagos deal’, which, incidentally, leaves those like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who used Trump’s previous statement as a stick with which to beat the government looking rather stupid (it’s also a good example of why ‘counting to a hundred’ in the current political climate is sensible).
The truth is, we don’t know what Trump was offered by NATO’s Mark Rutte that led to the sudden withdrawal of the ‘Greenland tariffs’ threat, and we don’t know what will happen next. And that is just one example of the bigger truth about Trump: no one knows what he will do next across the board. Another example is his sudden turnaround yesterday on his previous turnaround on the ‘Chagos deal’, which, incidentally, leaves those like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who used Trump’s previous statement as a stick with which to beat the government looking rather stupid (it’s also a good example of why ‘counting to a hundred’ in the current political climate is sensible).
It’s this unpredictability, as much as anything else, which presents the UK, like every other country, with so many dilemmas. It is also what is gradually draining away US power and prestige. Far from ’making America great again’ Trump is actually diminishing his country, burning away its ‘soft power’ and, increasingly, making it an undesirable trade and defence partner (£).
The Carney Doctrine in practice
So it’s not just that the Greenland crisis, when the US made both military and economic threats against its closest allies, won’t be forgotten. It’s that many countries, including the UK, are following the ‘Carney doctrine’ discussed in my previous post, finding new ways to navigate around the malevolent and unpredictable superpower that America has become. Examples from the last fortnight include Keir Starmer’s visit to China, to promote economic ties and to smooth diplomatic relations (just as have Mark Carney and President Orsi of Uruguay), followed by a slightly less high-profile stop in Japan to discuss economic and defence links. Another example is the completion of an EU-India Free Trade Agreement, which also included significant steps towards security cooperation [1].
Obviously, these events were in train before the Greenland Crisis and before Carney’s Davos speech. That speech was merely a sharp articulation of an existing trend, and the Carney Doctrine has now become a useful way of framing the continuation of that trend. The point is that these, and similar, events have to be understood in relation to Trump. Thus Reuters reported Starmer’s China visit as the latest example of countries “seeking an economic and geopolitical hedge against Trump's unpredictability” whilst Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College London, argued that it “reflects the realities of a new global order that has upended traditional alliances”.
Similarly, the EU-India deal, which has been long-delayed, was undoubtedly accelerated by Trump’s erratic and punitive tariff policies, and was described in very Carney-like terms by trade expert Amitendu Palit, of the National University of Singapore, as being “a strong signal for global middle powers committed to rules-based trade”. Another analyst spelled out that “this is not simply a trade deal. It is an act of geopolitical statecraft; one that reveals how major democratic economies are adapting to a more fractured and volatile global order.”
The rapprochement between the UK and China is not without risks. Just as Carney’s visit to Beijing attracted Trump’s ire, so too, though in slightly milder terms, did Starmer’s. Meanwhile, domestically, the potential security problems as well as the human rights implications, of closer relations with China attracted criticism. But this just underlines that there are no good options, and that, whatever else China may be, it, unlike the US, is at least relatively predictable and if Trump doesn’t like that then he has only himself to blame. This also means that, for the foreseeable future, there is going to be no easy way of describing the UK’s international relations posture in the way that, at least to some extent, was possible during the Cold War. It’s going to be a hodge-podge of uncomfortable accommodations.
Brexit: a hodge-podge of its own
Of course, those accommodations are made all the more uncomfortable by Brexit. Indeed, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the US, and the very profound discomfort it has caused the government this week, arose at least in part because, as the Financial Times trade commentator Alan Beattie has pointed out, it was believed that he would be able to deliver the supposed prize of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US (or non-deal, as it has so far largely turned out to be). It also seems pretty obvious that he was appointed because of rather than despite his friendship with Epstein, in the sense that it was such connections that made Mandelson the kind of credible Trump-whisperer that post-Brexit Britain needed: all three men swam in the same fetid cesspool of wealth and depravity.
That aside, the more general point is that, given the situation Trump has created, what the UK most needs is a close, predictable relationship with a major geo-political entity with which it is closely aligned in terms of trade, interests, and values. Thus it is more obvious than ever that Brexit was supremely stupid. EU membership would not remove the challenges of navigating relations with the US and China, but it would provide a stable anchor-point for that navigation (I’m aware that this metaphor is mangled). Now, given that Brexit has happened, the obvious logic of the global situation for the UK is to move closer to the EU.
In fact, what we see in that respect is also a hodge-podge. Last week, Starmer stated that the UK should look to “go further” at the next summit with the EU. This is to be held in May, with what was in effect a pre-meeting having taken place this week, resulting in a rather bland joint statement. One implication of that statement, at least on my reading (the wording is slightly ambiguous), is that the once eagerly anticipated 2026 review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is now redundant, with everything folded into the ongoing process of the summits. Yet, despite the talk of ‘going further’, the reality is that almost none of the things agreed in principle at last year’s summit have been finalised, and this week’s statement gives only vague aspirations for when they will be [2]. And one of last year’s proposals, UK participation in the EU SAFE fund for defence procurement, has actually already failed, although, partly because of the Greenland crisis, it seems that there could be a new attempt at an agreement.
There is also a very mixed picture in the regulatory sphere. The latest iteration of the invaluable UKICE regulatory divergence tracker shows a variety of passive and active divergences between the UK and the EU, alongside some cases of active alignment. In his analysis of the overall position, Joël Reland, the compiler of the tracker, argues that there has been greater divergence under the Labour government than under its Conservative predecessor. This is because, whilst broadly pursuing ‘alignment’ in relation to trade in goods, there has been targeted divergence in relation to some (not all) services, especially financial services, and technology regulation. In this respect, Reland suggests, the Labour approach is more precise than that of the last government in identifying priorities and, in a certain sense, more effective in actually making concrete changes within those priority areas.
There’s a lot to unpack in that analysis. A preliminary point is just a reiteration of what I’ve already said: the decisions the UK is taking do not point in a single direction. Secondly, as Reland points out, the actual economic impact of these regulatory divergences is likely to be very slim. In other words, they show one of the many basic flaws in the entire Brexit prospectus: it is simply wrong to claim that freedom to diverge from EU regulations constitutes an economic benefit (and, certainly, to claim that it could remotely compensate for the costs of having that freedom). Indeed, the reason why the Tories did not greatly diverge from EU regulations when they were in power was not through any lack of zeal. For example, no one could accuse Jacob Rees-Mogg as deficient in such zeal yet, when he was Minister for Brexit Opportunities, he was notably reduced to asking Sun readers to identify what these benefits might be.
Perhaps the more important point is a political one, and it is one replete with ironies. For whilst the government may be diverging more from some EU regulations than its predecessor and is certainly disappointing many of its anti-Brexit supporters in doing so, its opponents are insisting that it is doing the opposite. Indeed, there has been a rash of anniversary commentary (marking six years since the UK formally left the EU and, more imprecisely, ten years since the referendum) bemoaning Labour’s – yes, of course – ‘betrayal’ of Brexit. I’m not sure, by the way, when it was first claimed that Brexit had been betrayed, but I suspect that it is approximately the tenth anniversary of that, too.
A necessary betrayal
More specifically, the Express has launched a “crusade” to “Give us a Proper Brexit”, a campaign backed, inevitably, by Nigel Farage and, even more shamelessly, by Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch. Since Johnson actually negotiated the terms of Brexit and Badenoch had key ministerial roles associated with delivering post-Brexit ‘opportunities’ it's questionable exactly what their credentials as ‘crusaders’ for ‘a proper Brexit’ might be. The obvious conclusion should be that ‘proper Brexit’ is a mirage, but it is one which eludes arch-Brexiters such as serial idiot Daniel Hannan (£), for whom the “cowardice” of Britain’s leaders explains why Brexit is “not more popular” (even that formulation is slyly dishonest, as if it is ‘popular’, but could be more so).
All of this is dismally familiar, since the claim that Brexit would all have been wonderful if only it had been done ‘properly’ has, like the claim that it has been betrayed, been endlessly repeated since 2016. Equally dismal is that, even after all these years, Brexiters either can’t describe what this ‘proper Brexit’ would consist of or, if they can, are unable to agree with each other’s descriptions. Even more dismal is that what most of them do now agree about is that true Brexit means leaving the ECHR, which was never entailed by Brexit.
However, the ‘proper Brexit’ theme has a new and particular salience in the current political context. That context is, of course, the rise of Reform UK, and the increasingly urgent need for its opponents to expose its vulnerabilities. These are multiple, including the many failures and scandals which have attended even the short time it has controlled local councils, and several of them centre on Farage, on whom Reform is almost totally reliant. His vulnerabilities include his close relationship with Trump, his admiration for Putin, his financial dealings, and, at least potentially, Brexit. After all, this is the defining policy of his political career.
If it was remotely possible to make the case that Brexit had been a success, then Farage would certainly be taking credit for it. The fact that he does not, and has even called it a failure, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence why there is simply no plausible basis for the continuing attempts of some Brexiters to claim otherwise. Unlike those diehards, Farage, who if nothing else is an accomplished political operator, knows that that argument has been lost. Yet he can hardly disavow Brexit as an ‘idea’ given both his own support for it and the deep emotional commitment to it amongst his core voters. Thus the narrative of Brexit betrayal is absolutely central to his political credibility and prospects, and, in turn, to those of Reform [3].
This is one reason why the steady stream of Tory defections to Reform, Suella Braverman being the latest, is potentially damaging to his party. Along with the general point that this makes it harder to sustain Reform’s image as an insurgent alternative to ‘the Establishment’, and the Conservative Party in particular, it prompts the specific question: who betrayed Brexit, if not these former Tory MPs and government ministers? Naturally, they would have their own answers (the civil service, the judges, the metropolitan elite etc.), but, for many committed or potential Reform voters, the answer will be Tory politicians, especially senior Cabinet ministers like Braverman.
The angry man
The next test for Reform’s prospects will be the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. It will be an unusually complex contest, for the reasons set out with great clarity by the political scientist Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University. Some of that complexity is specific to the seat, and to this particular point in the electoral cycle (and now, very likely, the impact of the Epstein scandal), but some of it is a harbinger of what probably awaits us at the next general election when the splintering of party loyalties combined with the first-past-the-post electoral system will produce unpredictable and possibly bizarre results.
One thing which is specific to this by-election is Reform’s choice of Matt Goodwin as its candidate. Much has been written about Goodwin’s journey from being a reasonably successful academic specialising in the study of right-wing populism to a strident populist ideologue (the profile by James Ball in The New World last year and Ian Dunt’s assessment a couple of weeks’ ago will tell those who aren’t familiar with this story most of what they need to know). In some ways, he is just an identikit of such ideologues, notable, if at all, for a degree of pomposity and a whiff of megalomania (at one stage, he sought to found his own party and adopted a vaguely sinister avatar, now alas deleted, depicting himself in black and white, with jutting jaw, rather like a latter-day Roderick Spode). However, he also, far more than Farage, has become a more-or-less open champion for English ethno-nationalism, reflected in the fact that his candidature has now been endorsed by Tommy Robinson. Reform has repudiated that endorsement but, so far as I am aware, Goodwin has not.
If he is elected, then, it will betoken more than a win for Farage. Farage, whatever his true beliefs may be, has always been very careful, and fairly adept, at distancing himself from overt extremism, including repeatedly distancing himself from Robinson. He projects, fairly successfully, the image of a jovial, common-sense fellow, superficial as that image may be. Goodwin cuts a very different figure, and if he wins it will be an electoral endorsement of ideas which had been confined to the extreme fringes of the far right for decades, especially the idea that being born in Britain doesn’t make people British. His prolific, even hyperactive, social media postings have for some time now obsessively documented the actual or alleged crimes of immigrants, especially refugees, and predicted civilizational collapse. And, unlike Farage, who occasionally displays flashes of humour, Goodwin is relentlessly, splenetically, angry.
The angry brigade
In that respect, whatever the outcome of this by-election, Goodwin is representative of a group of voters who are highly active online, expressing their anger and in the process inciting their own and others' increasingly radical positions. Whereas much attention has been given to the online radicalization of the young and, especially, of young Muslims, this group are old (usually meaning the ‘baby boomers’ born before 1965) or middle-aged (usually meaning ‘Gen-X’ born between 1965 and 1980). They are also predominantly white, and generally but not always male. Apart from being slightly younger, having been born in 1981, Goodwin and his escalating online anger and growing radicalism perfectly fits the profile as, no doubt, do many of his followers.
Crucially, these people’s activities are not confined to the online world (the online and real-world distinction anyway being increasingly blurred). For one thing, as with older people generally, they are more likely to vote than younger cohorts. But they also take part in street politics, including the violent unrest and rioting associated with the asylum hotels ‘protests’. Recently, a few extreme cases have gone even further. One example is the ‘Ulez bomber’ convicted last week, who had not only apparently been radicalised by online far-right discussion forums but, in those forums, is regarded as a hero. In his case, he was arrested before he hurt anyone, unlike the far worse case of the ex-soldier who, in a fit of uncontrollable anger, rammed his car through a crowd of Liverpool fans, injuring 134 people. The background to his crimes is complex, but includes following a small number of social media accounts of whom most were associated with the far-right.
I’m obviously not suggesting that the online anger of right-wing populists necessarily causes people to commit crimes, or that most of those who post or are exposed to that anger engage in violence, or that crimes such as those mentioned would not occur anyway. But it is not unreasonable to assume that the online expression of anger amongst older people informs their political decisions (indeed, it is hard to imagine that it would not), and that it matches the age and gender profiles of electoral support for Reform. The same is probably true of support for the various small far-right parties such as Advance UK (which last week recruited two Devon County councillors who were originally elected as Reform candidates). And although this anger isn’t unique to Britain, it is hardly outlandish to say that in the British context it is connected to the anger which drove at least some of the vote for Brexit, and which continues to inform the anger about Brexit having been betrayed.
Political anger has been stoked this week by the Epstein scandal, and of course anger about that is by no means confined to the populist right. However, for the populist right specifically, it adds new ballast to its familiar critique of the ‘corrupt globalist elite’ and its general rejection of ‘mainstream politicians’ as all being as bad as each other. It does bear saying, though, that the scandal could backfire on them because it is already clear that there are multiple connections between Epstein and the British and American populist right, and that Epstein, like others in his circle of anarchistic oligarchs, was an enthusiast for Brexit. For that matter, it is revealing Farage’s brazen opportunism and hypocrisy, as he castigates Starmer for appointing Mandelson whilst praising the appointment at the time.
Nursery politics
But, in a sense, it’s all irrelevant. There will always be some new story or scandal to feed the anger, and the details get forgotten immediately, because, fundamentally, it’s not about this or that event, it’s about anger as a permanent political condition. I’m not sure that this condition of anger can be assuaged, not least because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, much of it stems from an impossible desire to reclaim an imaginary past or, more profoundly, not from a desire for grievances to be redressed but to luxuriate in the feeling of aggrievement. On either account, this explains why, for such voters, having been given Brexit, they are now even angrier because it isn’t the right sort of Brexit.
Strangely, whilst this anger is most evident amongst older voters, there is something childish about it. One of my earliest memories (and one my family reminded me of for years) is of a day when I was, perhaps, five years old and for some reason I pestered and pleaded for my mother to buy some honey. She eventually gave in, but when I saw it, I fell into a raging, uncontrollable tantrum because, I shrieked, she had bought the wrong sort of honey.
And this brings us back to the beginning of this post. For all that he has far more power than them, Donald Trump is not so different to the on-line army of angry old white British men radicalizing themselves and each other. There is at least a rhyme between the two. Trump’s rapacious and capricious ego, driving his unpredictable demands and vindictive assaults on anyone who crosses or slights him, is also child-like in its nature. Perhaps that is also why living through the current political period is so neuralgically wearisome, like being trapped in a nursery not just full of, but run by, angry screaming toddlers. It also brings us back to 'counting to a hundred' which, apart from being a useful antidote to the frenetic news cycle, was what a wiser American President, Thomas Jefferson, advised the very angry to do before speaking.
Notes
[1] The EU-India trade agreement underscores the fragility of claims about Brexit benefits, of which the UK-India trade deal is supposedly an example. The slight difference in timing hardly warrants that supposition (there are also some signs of closer EU-CPTPP integration). The same potentially applies to the regulatory choices exercised by the UK (e.g. in relation to gene-editing or financial services).
[2} For a detailed update on the reset and its future prospects, see this week’s policy briefing from Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform.
[3] This means that Starmer’s attempts to attack Farage on Brexit aren’t very effective, and might even serve to endorse Farage’s own position, because in doing so Starmer insists on referring to “botched Brexit”. The reason, of course, is that he wants to imply to Labour leave voters that he is not opposed to Brexit and isn’t going to reverse it but ‘improve’ it. But even if that line made some kind of sense as an attack on the Tories, it effectively validates Farage’s claim that Brexit wasn’t done ‘properly’, even if he has a different view on how it should have been done.
The Carney Doctrine in practice
So it’s not just that the Greenland crisis, when the US made both military and economic threats against its closest allies, won’t be forgotten. It’s that many countries, including the UK, are following the ‘Carney doctrine’ discussed in my previous post, finding new ways to navigate around the malevolent and unpredictable superpower that America has become. Examples from the last fortnight include Keir Starmer’s visit to China, to promote economic ties and to smooth diplomatic relations (just as have Mark Carney and President Orsi of Uruguay), followed by a slightly less high-profile stop in Japan to discuss economic and defence links. Another example is the completion of an EU-India Free Trade Agreement, which also included significant steps towards security cooperation [1].
Obviously, these events were in train before the Greenland Crisis and before Carney’s Davos speech. That speech was merely a sharp articulation of an existing trend, and the Carney Doctrine has now become a useful way of framing the continuation of that trend. The point is that these, and similar, events have to be understood in relation to Trump. Thus Reuters reported Starmer’s China visit as the latest example of countries “seeking an economic and geopolitical hedge against Trump's unpredictability” whilst Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College London, argued that it “reflects the realities of a new global order that has upended traditional alliances”.
Similarly, the EU-India deal, which has been long-delayed, was undoubtedly accelerated by Trump’s erratic and punitive tariff policies, and was described in very Carney-like terms by trade expert Amitendu Palit, of the National University of Singapore, as being “a strong signal for global middle powers committed to rules-based trade”. Another analyst spelled out that “this is not simply a trade deal. It is an act of geopolitical statecraft; one that reveals how major democratic economies are adapting to a more fractured and volatile global order.”
The rapprochement between the UK and China is not without risks. Just as Carney’s visit to Beijing attracted Trump’s ire, so too, though in slightly milder terms, did Starmer’s. Meanwhile, domestically, the potential security problems as well as the human rights implications, of closer relations with China attracted criticism. But this just underlines that there are no good options, and that, whatever else China may be, it, unlike the US, is at least relatively predictable and if Trump doesn’t like that then he has only himself to blame. This also means that, for the foreseeable future, there is going to be no easy way of describing the UK’s international relations posture in the way that, at least to some extent, was possible during the Cold War. It’s going to be a hodge-podge of uncomfortable accommodations.
Brexit: a hodge-podge of its own
Of course, those accommodations are made all the more uncomfortable by Brexit. Indeed, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the US, and the very profound discomfort it has caused the government this week, arose at least in part because, as the Financial Times trade commentator Alan Beattie has pointed out, it was believed that he would be able to deliver the supposed prize of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US (or non-deal, as it has so far largely turned out to be). It also seems pretty obvious that he was appointed because of rather than despite his friendship with Epstein, in the sense that it was such connections that made Mandelson the kind of credible Trump-whisperer that post-Brexit Britain needed: all three men swam in the same fetid cesspool of wealth and depravity.
That aside, the more general point is that, given the situation Trump has created, what the UK most needs is a close, predictable relationship with a major geo-political entity with which it is closely aligned in terms of trade, interests, and values. Thus it is more obvious than ever that Brexit was supremely stupid. EU membership would not remove the challenges of navigating relations with the US and China, but it would provide a stable anchor-point for that navigation (I’m aware that this metaphor is mangled). Now, given that Brexit has happened, the obvious logic of the global situation for the UK is to move closer to the EU.
In fact, what we see in that respect is also a hodge-podge. Last week, Starmer stated that the UK should look to “go further” at the next summit with the EU. This is to be held in May, with what was in effect a pre-meeting having taken place this week, resulting in a rather bland joint statement. One implication of that statement, at least on my reading (the wording is slightly ambiguous), is that the once eagerly anticipated 2026 review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is now redundant, with everything folded into the ongoing process of the summits. Yet, despite the talk of ‘going further’, the reality is that almost none of the things agreed in principle at last year’s summit have been finalised, and this week’s statement gives only vague aspirations for when they will be [2]. And one of last year’s proposals, UK participation in the EU SAFE fund for defence procurement, has actually already failed, although, partly because of the Greenland crisis, it seems that there could be a new attempt at an agreement.
There is also a very mixed picture in the regulatory sphere. The latest iteration of the invaluable UKICE regulatory divergence tracker shows a variety of passive and active divergences between the UK and the EU, alongside some cases of active alignment. In his analysis of the overall position, Joël Reland, the compiler of the tracker, argues that there has been greater divergence under the Labour government than under its Conservative predecessor. This is because, whilst broadly pursuing ‘alignment’ in relation to trade in goods, there has been targeted divergence in relation to some (not all) services, especially financial services, and technology regulation. In this respect, Reland suggests, the Labour approach is more precise than that of the last government in identifying priorities and, in a certain sense, more effective in actually making concrete changes within those priority areas.
There’s a lot to unpack in that analysis. A preliminary point is just a reiteration of what I’ve already said: the decisions the UK is taking do not point in a single direction. Secondly, as Reland points out, the actual economic impact of these regulatory divergences is likely to be very slim. In other words, they show one of the many basic flaws in the entire Brexit prospectus: it is simply wrong to claim that freedom to diverge from EU regulations constitutes an economic benefit (and, certainly, to claim that it could remotely compensate for the costs of having that freedom). Indeed, the reason why the Tories did not greatly diverge from EU regulations when they were in power was not through any lack of zeal. For example, no one could accuse Jacob Rees-Mogg as deficient in such zeal yet, when he was Minister for Brexit Opportunities, he was notably reduced to asking Sun readers to identify what these benefits might be.
Perhaps the more important point is a political one, and it is one replete with ironies. For whilst the government may be diverging more from some EU regulations than its predecessor and is certainly disappointing many of its anti-Brexit supporters in doing so, its opponents are insisting that it is doing the opposite. Indeed, there has been a rash of anniversary commentary (marking six years since the UK formally left the EU and, more imprecisely, ten years since the referendum) bemoaning Labour’s – yes, of course – ‘betrayal’ of Brexit. I’m not sure, by the way, when it was first claimed that Brexit had been betrayed, but I suspect that it is approximately the tenth anniversary of that, too.
A necessary betrayal
More specifically, the Express has launched a “crusade” to “Give us a Proper Brexit”, a campaign backed, inevitably, by Nigel Farage and, even more shamelessly, by Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch. Since Johnson actually negotiated the terms of Brexit and Badenoch had key ministerial roles associated with delivering post-Brexit ‘opportunities’ it's questionable exactly what their credentials as ‘crusaders’ for ‘a proper Brexit’ might be. The obvious conclusion should be that ‘proper Brexit’ is a mirage, but it is one which eludes arch-Brexiters such as serial idiot Daniel Hannan (£), for whom the “cowardice” of Britain’s leaders explains why Brexit is “not more popular” (even that formulation is slyly dishonest, as if it is ‘popular’, but could be more so).
All of this is dismally familiar, since the claim that Brexit would all have been wonderful if only it had been done ‘properly’ has, like the claim that it has been betrayed, been endlessly repeated since 2016. Equally dismal is that, even after all these years, Brexiters either can’t describe what this ‘proper Brexit’ would consist of or, if they can, are unable to agree with each other’s descriptions. Even more dismal is that what most of them do now agree about is that true Brexit means leaving the ECHR, which was never entailed by Brexit.
However, the ‘proper Brexit’ theme has a new and particular salience in the current political context. That context is, of course, the rise of Reform UK, and the increasingly urgent need for its opponents to expose its vulnerabilities. These are multiple, including the many failures and scandals which have attended even the short time it has controlled local councils, and several of them centre on Farage, on whom Reform is almost totally reliant. His vulnerabilities include his close relationship with Trump, his admiration for Putin, his financial dealings, and, at least potentially, Brexit. After all, this is the defining policy of his political career.
If it was remotely possible to make the case that Brexit had been a success, then Farage would certainly be taking credit for it. The fact that he does not, and has even called it a failure, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence why there is simply no plausible basis for the continuing attempts of some Brexiters to claim otherwise. Unlike those diehards, Farage, who if nothing else is an accomplished political operator, knows that that argument has been lost. Yet he can hardly disavow Brexit as an ‘idea’ given both his own support for it and the deep emotional commitment to it amongst his core voters. Thus the narrative of Brexit betrayal is absolutely central to his political credibility and prospects, and, in turn, to those of Reform [3].
This is one reason why the steady stream of Tory defections to Reform, Suella Braverman being the latest, is potentially damaging to his party. Along with the general point that this makes it harder to sustain Reform’s image as an insurgent alternative to ‘the Establishment’, and the Conservative Party in particular, it prompts the specific question: who betrayed Brexit, if not these former Tory MPs and government ministers? Naturally, they would have their own answers (the civil service, the judges, the metropolitan elite etc.), but, for many committed or potential Reform voters, the answer will be Tory politicians, especially senior Cabinet ministers like Braverman.
The angry man
The next test for Reform’s prospects will be the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. It will be an unusually complex contest, for the reasons set out with great clarity by the political scientist Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University. Some of that complexity is specific to the seat, and to this particular point in the electoral cycle (and now, very likely, the impact of the Epstein scandal), but some of it is a harbinger of what probably awaits us at the next general election when the splintering of party loyalties combined with the first-past-the-post electoral system will produce unpredictable and possibly bizarre results.
One thing which is specific to this by-election is Reform’s choice of Matt Goodwin as its candidate. Much has been written about Goodwin’s journey from being a reasonably successful academic specialising in the study of right-wing populism to a strident populist ideologue (the profile by James Ball in The New World last year and Ian Dunt’s assessment a couple of weeks’ ago will tell those who aren’t familiar with this story most of what they need to know). In some ways, he is just an identikit of such ideologues, notable, if at all, for a degree of pomposity and a whiff of megalomania (at one stage, he sought to found his own party and adopted a vaguely sinister avatar, now alas deleted, depicting himself in black and white, with jutting jaw, rather like a latter-day Roderick Spode). However, he also, far more than Farage, has become a more-or-less open champion for English ethno-nationalism, reflected in the fact that his candidature has now been endorsed by Tommy Robinson. Reform has repudiated that endorsement but, so far as I am aware, Goodwin has not.
If he is elected, then, it will betoken more than a win for Farage. Farage, whatever his true beliefs may be, has always been very careful, and fairly adept, at distancing himself from overt extremism, including repeatedly distancing himself from Robinson. He projects, fairly successfully, the image of a jovial, common-sense fellow, superficial as that image may be. Goodwin cuts a very different figure, and if he wins it will be an electoral endorsement of ideas which had been confined to the extreme fringes of the far right for decades, especially the idea that being born in Britain doesn’t make people British. His prolific, even hyperactive, social media postings have for some time now obsessively documented the actual or alleged crimes of immigrants, especially refugees, and predicted civilizational collapse. And, unlike Farage, who occasionally displays flashes of humour, Goodwin is relentlessly, splenetically, angry.
The angry brigade
In that respect, whatever the outcome of this by-election, Goodwin is representative of a group of voters who are highly active online, expressing their anger and in the process inciting their own and others' increasingly radical positions. Whereas much attention has been given to the online radicalization of the young and, especially, of young Muslims, this group are old (usually meaning the ‘baby boomers’ born before 1965) or middle-aged (usually meaning ‘Gen-X’ born between 1965 and 1980). They are also predominantly white, and generally but not always male. Apart from being slightly younger, having been born in 1981, Goodwin and his escalating online anger and growing radicalism perfectly fits the profile as, no doubt, do many of his followers.
Crucially, these people’s activities are not confined to the online world (the online and real-world distinction anyway being increasingly blurred). For one thing, as with older people generally, they are more likely to vote than younger cohorts. But they also take part in street politics, including the violent unrest and rioting associated with the asylum hotels ‘protests’. Recently, a few extreme cases have gone even further. One example is the ‘Ulez bomber’ convicted last week, who had not only apparently been radicalised by online far-right discussion forums but, in those forums, is regarded as a hero. In his case, he was arrested before he hurt anyone, unlike the far worse case of the ex-soldier who, in a fit of uncontrollable anger, rammed his car through a crowd of Liverpool fans, injuring 134 people. The background to his crimes is complex, but includes following a small number of social media accounts of whom most were associated with the far-right.
I’m obviously not suggesting that the online anger of right-wing populists necessarily causes people to commit crimes, or that most of those who post or are exposed to that anger engage in violence, or that crimes such as those mentioned would not occur anyway. But it is not unreasonable to assume that the online expression of anger amongst older people informs their political decisions (indeed, it is hard to imagine that it would not), and that it matches the age and gender profiles of electoral support for Reform. The same is probably true of support for the various small far-right parties such as Advance UK (which last week recruited two Devon County councillors who were originally elected as Reform candidates). And although this anger isn’t unique to Britain, it is hardly outlandish to say that in the British context it is connected to the anger which drove at least some of the vote for Brexit, and which continues to inform the anger about Brexit having been betrayed.
Political anger has been stoked this week by the Epstein scandal, and of course anger about that is by no means confined to the populist right. However, for the populist right specifically, it adds new ballast to its familiar critique of the ‘corrupt globalist elite’ and its general rejection of ‘mainstream politicians’ as all being as bad as each other. It does bear saying, though, that the scandal could backfire on them because it is already clear that there are multiple connections between Epstein and the British and American populist right, and that Epstein, like others in his circle of anarchistic oligarchs, was an enthusiast for Brexit. For that matter, it is revealing Farage’s brazen opportunism and hypocrisy, as he castigates Starmer for appointing Mandelson whilst praising the appointment at the time.
Nursery politics
But, in a sense, it’s all irrelevant. There will always be some new story or scandal to feed the anger, and the details get forgotten immediately, because, fundamentally, it’s not about this or that event, it’s about anger as a permanent political condition. I’m not sure that this condition of anger can be assuaged, not least because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, much of it stems from an impossible desire to reclaim an imaginary past or, more profoundly, not from a desire for grievances to be redressed but to luxuriate in the feeling of aggrievement. On either account, this explains why, for such voters, having been given Brexit, they are now even angrier because it isn’t the right sort of Brexit.
Strangely, whilst this anger is most evident amongst older voters, there is something childish about it. One of my earliest memories (and one my family reminded me of for years) is of a day when I was, perhaps, five years old and for some reason I pestered and pleaded for my mother to buy some honey. She eventually gave in, but when I saw it, I fell into a raging, uncontrollable tantrum because, I shrieked, she had bought the wrong sort of honey.
And this brings us back to the beginning of this post. For all that he has far more power than them, Donald Trump is not so different to the on-line army of angry old white British men radicalizing themselves and each other. There is at least a rhyme between the two. Trump’s rapacious and capricious ego, driving his unpredictable demands and vindictive assaults on anyone who crosses or slights him, is also child-like in its nature. Perhaps that is also why living through the current political period is so neuralgically wearisome, like being trapped in a nursery not just full of, but run by, angry screaming toddlers. It also brings us back to 'counting to a hundred' which, apart from being a useful antidote to the frenetic news cycle, was what a wiser American President, Thomas Jefferson, advised the very angry to do before speaking.
Notes
[1] The EU-India trade agreement underscores the fragility of claims about Brexit benefits, of which the UK-India trade deal is supposedly an example. The slight difference in timing hardly warrants that supposition (there are also some signs of closer EU-CPTPP integration). The same potentially applies to the regulatory choices exercised by the UK (e.g. in relation to gene-editing or financial services).
[2} For a detailed update on the reset and its future prospects, see this week’s policy briefing from Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform.
[3] This means that Starmer’s attempts to attack Farage on Brexit aren’t very effective, and might even serve to endorse Farage’s own position, because in doing so Starmer insists on referring to “botched Brexit”. The reason, of course, is that he wants to imply to Labour leave voters that he is not opposed to Brexit and isn’t going to reverse it but ‘improve’ it. But even if that line made some kind of sense as an attack on the Tories, it effectively validates Farage’s claim that Brexit wasn’t done ‘properly’, even if he has a different view on how it should have been done.
Friday, 19 September 2025
There is another country
In the two weeks since my last post, the speed and scale of events has been almost impossible to keep up with. The result is yet another very long post and I am considering reverting to posting weekly. It seems likely, especially given the slightly changed focus of the blog, that there is always going to be plenty to say.
In that previous post, after reviewing the summer’s confected crisis over asylum hotels, I wrote about the political terrain of the next few years being characterized by a battle over whether Brexit Britain is to become Brexitist Britain. Now, that doesn’t seem so much prescient as complacently languid, as if that battle were not already well under way.
Flagging dangers
This was brought home to me within a couple of days of writing the post. It wasn’t, primarily, because of that weekend’s Reform UK conference since its mixture of vileness, weirdness and madness was not exactly unexpected. Instead it was when, for the first time, I saw not just roundabouts but very long stretches of roads in my area with St. George’s flags (and occasional Union Jacks) hanging on every single lamp post for mile after mile [1]. Of course, I had read about this happening all over the country, but seeing it for myself was different. The effect was not celebratory or unifying, it was sinister, threatening, and – in its unmissable historical echoes – fascistic.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that this isn’t a word I use casually and, in any case, it is a documented fact that the origins of this spate of flag-flying lie with far-right activist groups. It is not about jolly yeomen putting out the bunting, but masked men bent on intimidation. So it was dishonest and dangerous for Labour politicians like Yvette Cooper to argue that it is in any sense a “symbol of Britain coming together” (£). It has clearly arisen on the back of this summer’s asylum hotel ‘protests’, and, as has been widely remarked, seems to symbolise division and exclusion rather than unity and inclusion.
What is actually worse, and more literally fascistic, is that it amounts to a demand for compulsory ‘unity’ through the sequestration of the public space. Criticize it, and you are deemed to have failed an imposed ‘loyalty test’. Most obviously it is aimed at immigrants, but more generally at the ‘enemies within’ – the liberally-minded and tolerant.
Sanctimony and hypocrisy
Against this background, the news broke of the murder of Charlie Kirk in the US. Immediately that was used as a pretext to attack liberals in the most vicious of terms. Whereas, only a few days before, the right in the UK and the US had been screaming about the ‘injustice’ of punishing Lucy Connelly for her use of violently inflammatory language, suddenly all they could talk of was how the liberal-left was responsible for the killing because of the language used to attack Trump and his supporters. Yet, whilst admonishing those on the left for expressing their opinions, Kirk was presented as a free speech martyr, murdered simply for speaking his mind and inviting others – in the familiar tactic of every tedious internet troll – to ‘prove me wrong’.
With equal hypocrisy, these free speech absolutists started to demand, and procure, punishments for those, including the Global Opinions Editor of the Washington Post, who refused to join in with the sanctimonious beatification of Kirk by, for example, referring to his own hate-filled rhetoric. But this is not just a matter of illogic or hypocrisy. It is part of the way that the right weaponizes liberalism against itself in a kind of political jiu-jitsu. Thus the right demands, and largely receives, civility from its political opponents, whilst refusing to accord any civility whatsoever in return. It is an asymmetry dissected in Jonathan Freedland’s compelling analysis of the Kirk murder and its aftermath.
The United States was already in a very dark place, as charted by Professor Christina Pagel’s excellent Substack post, and it is now much darker. That isn’t so much because of the possibility of escalating acts of individual violence, although that is clearly a risk, but because of the possibility of escalating state violence against its actual or perceived internal enemies.
Kirk was hardly known in this country, but his killing also had immediate reverberations here. This is just one example of a point made in a BlueSky post in response to my attempt to define Brexitism. The poster said, rightly, that one of its weaknesses was a failure to discuss the many important linkages between the far-right in the US and the UK, linkages which are both ideological and financial. Actually, it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to write in terms of the far-right, since in both the US and the UK what used to be the respectable, centrist right of politics has been virtually eviscerated.
Thuggery
At all events, following Kirk’s murder, British Brexitists immediately began to recycle (£) the talking points of the American right in pursuit of the UK culture war. His death was then invoked during last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, which attracted possibly as many as 150,000 people to London and resulted in several violent clashes with the police. This was massively short of the three million persistently, and falsely, claimed on social media, but there is no doubt that it marked a significant show of strength, and was perhaps the largest rally of its kind in the UK in recent history.
Robinson seems to be allied with, and is perhaps a member of, Advance UK, the splinter group of Reform led by Ben Habib. But, again, it is increasingly meaningless to differentiate between far-right thugs and Reform, and in fact doing so panders to Nigel Farage’s pretensions to be ‘respectable’. For example, Reform Chairman David Bull was happy to endorse the rally as a gathering of “the silent majority”, whilst Farage opined that “the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people”. Moreover, there is now a steady flow of defectors from the Tories to Reform, the latest examples including former MPs Maria Caulfield and Nadine Dorries, an acquisition of perhaps rather dubious value, and, more significantly, Danny Kruger, the oleaginous MP who was once co-leader of the New Conservative group and is strongly associated with the (paradoxically international) National Conservatism movement. Meanwhile, the Tory Party itself continues to espouse positions almost identical to those of Reform.
The American connection was most strikingly evident in Elon Musk’s extraordinarily inflammatory appearance at the rally, which included a call for the dissolution of parliament and threats that “violence is coming”. In fact, although those were the most widely quoted parts of it, what was more chilling was the way he, quite calmly, articulated or assumed an entire world view based on fantasies, distortions and lies. In a way, it was more unsettling than a spittle-flecked rant and, echoing all the invocations of ‘the silent majority’, his pitch was to the supposedly ordinary, apolitical, commonsense people of Britain.
As with the outbreak of flag-thuggery, any idea that the rally was about ‘uniting’ the country is transparently absurd. Equally, although hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers is undoubtedly the source of its core support, it is now abundantly clear that it has a more general, and very serious, intention to destroy the present government and, with that, to destroy the entire foundations of liberal democracy. It is not being hidden. Elon Musk said it, in terms. Others at the rally spoke openly of the need to assassinate Keir Starmer, even as ‘the left’ was being castigated for inciting the killing of Charlie Kirk (and, despite what some apologists say in the comments on the report linked to, this wasn’t just a ‘rogue individual’: social media is awash with similar calls).
This constitutes a dangerous moment for Britain. It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed. That has happened for many reasons, including the influence of the US right, and not just in Brexit Britain (France furnishes another example), but some of them are certainly related to Brexit and Brexitism. In particular, the relentless attacks on established institutions which Brexit gave rise to, and perhaps especially the prorogation of parliament, even though it ultimately failed, have enfeebled and de-legitimized those institutions.
Labour’s failure to lead
Worse than that, or perhaps it is simply one aspect of it, the Labour government now appears both unwilling and unable to stand up to what is happening or even to acknowledge its gravity. It has condoned rather than condemned the flagging movement and initially refused to condemn the things which were said at the Robinson rally, only the violence that accompanied it. Some condemnation did come, later, but it seemed to have been forced out under pressure, rather than being visceral, and didn’t carry any sense of the urgency of the situation. It is as if Starmer, and other government ministers, have internalized the accusations coming from Trump, Musk, and J.D. Vance, as well as from the British right, about being opposed to ‘free speech’. But no one is asking Starmer to ban such rallies, merely to use his own free speech, and his position, to lead the challenge to the things which are being said at them.
More generally, the government seems dazed by the events unfolding around it, and to have lost control of the events unfolding within it. The Angela Rayner resignation, and its aftermath, shortly followed by the Peter Mandelson fiasco, and then the resignation of Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, don’t just exemplify that loss of internal control, they exacerbate the external events. For they serve to promote one of the core drivers of Brexitism, namely that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is nothing to lose, and perhaps everything to gain, by rejecting the entirety of mainstream politics.
The reasons why the government has fallen into such disarray have been widely discussed, many of them circling around the supposed migration crisis. But that issue is only part of the government’s wider malaise which, although there are a range of diagnoses, almost all commentators ascribe to its failure to communicate its fundamental purpose and guiding values. Even more damningly, many suspect that the failure is not one of communication but of a terrible dark hole such that there is no fundamental purpose, nor any guiding values, to be communicated.
What makes this all the more damaging is that to the extent that the government has ever made its purpose and values clear it was in the election campaign to present Labour as the calm, competent antidote to the chaotic politics of the post-referendum years. In other words, whilst any government would wish to avoid being in chaos, it is far more dangerous for one built specifically, and almost solely, on the promise of stability. This, by the way, makes talk of the Labour party jettisoning Starmer and installing a new leader, especially when there is no obviously outstanding successor, utterly bizarre.
Navigating between complacency and alarmism
However, I think there is another issue here, and it also grows in large part out of Brexit. Whilst many voters may have hoped for a less chaotic politics than the period after 2016, which saw five Prime Ministers in almost as many years, the media and commentariat became addicted to it. There has always been an element of that in political reporting, since drama and chaos make good copy, but to my mind (and I accept that this is purely impressionistic) it has intensified. No doubt that is about more than Brexit, as much of it is bound up with the changing nature of the news cycle, and the impact of social media. But Brexit supplied an addictive rush of political drama and, like all addictions, users have to keep chasing the high. Current speculation about an early election, as well about the idea of a leadership challenge to Starmer, are examples.
From this point of view, as the veteran political commentator Philip Stephens argues, it is important not to get carried away by the current media narrative of a government in crisis. Yet there is clearly a very difficult line to tread here. On the one hand, there are serious and dangerous events unfolding, and ignoring them would be irresponsibly complacent. On the other hand, part of what is driving those events is the promulgation by the political right of a narrative of crisis which it seeks to exploit, and accepting or even amplifying that narrative would be irresponsibly alarmist.
If there is a way of navigating through this tricky territory then it entails offering a compelling counter-narrative. That means matching the undeniably old and new media-savviness of the populists, providing a positive alternative to, rather than just a rebuttal of, what they are pumping out, and in the process defusing the pervasive sense of crisis. The responsibility for providing it rests with anyone with any kind of public voice but, inevitably, it must rest primarily with politicians, and especially with the government.
And the government has a particular incentive to do so, partly to meet the pressing demand for an articulation of the government’s fundamental purpose and guiding values, and partly as a matter of electoral calculation. Its present strategy of aping Reform advantages Farage whilst alienating many who might otherwise support Labour, and academic research suggests that it will be an electorally costly strategy. The consequence could well be a Reform government or, less discussed but probably more likely, a hung parliament with an uncertain outcome for the formation of a government. This isn’t just future political danger for Labour, it is a present political and economic danger because, as the economics commentator Simon Nixon recently pointed out, in relation to current bond market jitters, “the biggest risk to UK financial stability is not this government, but the justified fear of what might follow if it fails”.
We want our country back
Central to such a counter-narrative is the need to displace the far-right’s pretensions to speak for ‘decent ordinary people’ or the ‘silent majority’. Doing that means discarding one of the central features of Brexitism, the idea that when it came to a single-issue vote – the referendum on EU membership – it was revealed that the populist claim to represent that silent majority was true.
That, and the subsequent associated rhetoric of ‘the will of the people’ versus ‘the elite’, cowed mainstream politicians and was particularly disconcerting for those on the left who regarded themselves as the voice of the people and as the challengers to the elitism. It also fed a kind of liberal guilt amongst, especially, middle-class progressives, suggesting they were ‘out of touch’ with ‘real people’, particularly as regards immigration. All of this has enabled Brexitists, including Farage and Robinson, to trade with increasing success on their version of Britain and ‘British values’, including, as the widespread use of the St. George’s flag shows, conflating Britain with England.
So, in concrete terms, offering a counter-narrative means providing a different version of Britain. It has become almost a cliché to remark on the contrast between the image of Britain projected in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and that of the Brexit referendum just four years later. The first was optimistic, inclusive and tolerant, paying ample reference to the past but confident about the present and future, and tinged with an ironic, playful humour. The second was sour, insular, intolerant, fearful, unhealthily obsessed with past glories, and utterly lacking in any humour or pleasure.
There is an opportunity here for the non-Brexitist mainstream to develop its own political jiu-jitsu, appropriating the constant Brexitist demand that ‘we want our country back’. Doing so would not be a nostalgic lament for an unrecoverable past. That first Britain is still available, including for England, as was more recently suggested in discussions of ‘progressive patriotism’ at the time of the Euro 2020 football tournament.
In that previous post, after reviewing the summer’s confected crisis over asylum hotels, I wrote about the political terrain of the next few years being characterized by a battle over whether Brexit Britain is to become Brexitist Britain. Now, that doesn’t seem so much prescient as complacently languid, as if that battle were not already well under way.
Flagging dangers
This was brought home to me within a couple of days of writing the post. It wasn’t, primarily, because of that weekend’s Reform UK conference since its mixture of vileness, weirdness and madness was not exactly unexpected. Instead it was when, for the first time, I saw not just roundabouts but very long stretches of roads in my area with St. George’s flags (and occasional Union Jacks) hanging on every single lamp post for mile after mile [1]. Of course, I had read about this happening all over the country, but seeing it for myself was different. The effect was not celebratory or unifying, it was sinister, threatening, and – in its unmissable historical echoes – fascistic.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that this isn’t a word I use casually and, in any case, it is a documented fact that the origins of this spate of flag-flying lie with far-right activist groups. It is not about jolly yeomen putting out the bunting, but masked men bent on intimidation. So it was dishonest and dangerous for Labour politicians like Yvette Cooper to argue that it is in any sense a “symbol of Britain coming together” (£). It has clearly arisen on the back of this summer’s asylum hotel ‘protests’, and, as has been widely remarked, seems to symbolise division and exclusion rather than unity and inclusion.
What is actually worse, and more literally fascistic, is that it amounts to a demand for compulsory ‘unity’ through the sequestration of the public space. Criticize it, and you are deemed to have failed an imposed ‘loyalty test’. Most obviously it is aimed at immigrants, but more generally at the ‘enemies within’ – the liberally-minded and tolerant.
Sanctimony and hypocrisy
Against this background, the news broke of the murder of Charlie Kirk in the US. Immediately that was used as a pretext to attack liberals in the most vicious of terms. Whereas, only a few days before, the right in the UK and the US had been screaming about the ‘injustice’ of punishing Lucy Connelly for her use of violently inflammatory language, suddenly all they could talk of was how the liberal-left was responsible for the killing because of the language used to attack Trump and his supporters. Yet, whilst admonishing those on the left for expressing their opinions, Kirk was presented as a free speech martyr, murdered simply for speaking his mind and inviting others – in the familiar tactic of every tedious internet troll – to ‘prove me wrong’.
With equal hypocrisy, these free speech absolutists started to demand, and procure, punishments for those, including the Global Opinions Editor of the Washington Post, who refused to join in with the sanctimonious beatification of Kirk by, for example, referring to his own hate-filled rhetoric. But this is not just a matter of illogic or hypocrisy. It is part of the way that the right weaponizes liberalism against itself in a kind of political jiu-jitsu. Thus the right demands, and largely receives, civility from its political opponents, whilst refusing to accord any civility whatsoever in return. It is an asymmetry dissected in Jonathan Freedland’s compelling analysis of the Kirk murder and its aftermath.
The United States was already in a very dark place, as charted by Professor Christina Pagel’s excellent Substack post, and it is now much darker. That isn’t so much because of the possibility of escalating acts of individual violence, although that is clearly a risk, but because of the possibility of escalating state violence against its actual or perceived internal enemies.
Kirk was hardly known in this country, but his killing also had immediate reverberations here. This is just one example of a point made in a BlueSky post in response to my attempt to define Brexitism. The poster said, rightly, that one of its weaknesses was a failure to discuss the many important linkages between the far-right in the US and the UK, linkages which are both ideological and financial. Actually, it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to write in terms of the far-right, since in both the US and the UK what used to be the respectable, centrist right of politics has been virtually eviscerated.
Thuggery
At all events, following Kirk’s murder, British Brexitists immediately began to recycle (£) the talking points of the American right in pursuit of the UK culture war. His death was then invoked during last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, which attracted possibly as many as 150,000 people to London and resulted in several violent clashes with the police. This was massively short of the three million persistently, and falsely, claimed on social media, but there is no doubt that it marked a significant show of strength, and was perhaps the largest rally of its kind in the UK in recent history.
Robinson seems to be allied with, and is perhaps a member of, Advance UK, the splinter group of Reform led by Ben Habib. But, again, it is increasingly meaningless to differentiate between far-right thugs and Reform, and in fact doing so panders to Nigel Farage’s pretensions to be ‘respectable’. For example, Reform Chairman David Bull was happy to endorse the rally as a gathering of “the silent majority”, whilst Farage opined that “the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people”. Moreover, there is now a steady flow of defectors from the Tories to Reform, the latest examples including former MPs Maria Caulfield and Nadine Dorries, an acquisition of perhaps rather dubious value, and, more significantly, Danny Kruger, the oleaginous MP who was once co-leader of the New Conservative group and is strongly associated with the (paradoxically international) National Conservatism movement. Meanwhile, the Tory Party itself continues to espouse positions almost identical to those of Reform.
The American connection was most strikingly evident in Elon Musk’s extraordinarily inflammatory appearance at the rally, which included a call for the dissolution of parliament and threats that “violence is coming”. In fact, although those were the most widely quoted parts of it, what was more chilling was the way he, quite calmly, articulated or assumed an entire world view based on fantasies, distortions and lies. In a way, it was more unsettling than a spittle-flecked rant and, echoing all the invocations of ‘the silent majority’, his pitch was to the supposedly ordinary, apolitical, commonsense people of Britain.
As with the outbreak of flag-thuggery, any idea that the rally was about ‘uniting’ the country is transparently absurd. Equally, although hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers is undoubtedly the source of its core support, it is now abundantly clear that it has a more general, and very serious, intention to destroy the present government and, with that, to destroy the entire foundations of liberal democracy. It is not being hidden. Elon Musk said it, in terms. Others at the rally spoke openly of the need to assassinate Keir Starmer, even as ‘the left’ was being castigated for inciting the killing of Charlie Kirk (and, despite what some apologists say in the comments on the report linked to, this wasn’t just a ‘rogue individual’: social media is awash with similar calls).
This constitutes a dangerous moment for Britain. It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed. That has happened for many reasons, including the influence of the US right, and not just in Brexit Britain (France furnishes another example), but some of them are certainly related to Brexit and Brexitism. In particular, the relentless attacks on established institutions which Brexit gave rise to, and perhaps especially the prorogation of parliament, even though it ultimately failed, have enfeebled and de-legitimized those institutions.
Labour’s failure to lead
Worse than that, or perhaps it is simply one aspect of it, the Labour government now appears both unwilling and unable to stand up to what is happening or even to acknowledge its gravity. It has condoned rather than condemned the flagging movement and initially refused to condemn the things which were said at the Robinson rally, only the violence that accompanied it. Some condemnation did come, later, but it seemed to have been forced out under pressure, rather than being visceral, and didn’t carry any sense of the urgency of the situation. It is as if Starmer, and other government ministers, have internalized the accusations coming from Trump, Musk, and J.D. Vance, as well as from the British right, about being opposed to ‘free speech’. But no one is asking Starmer to ban such rallies, merely to use his own free speech, and his position, to lead the challenge to the things which are being said at them.
More generally, the government seems dazed by the events unfolding around it, and to have lost control of the events unfolding within it. The Angela Rayner resignation, and its aftermath, shortly followed by the Peter Mandelson fiasco, and then the resignation of Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, don’t just exemplify that loss of internal control, they exacerbate the external events. For they serve to promote one of the core drivers of Brexitism, namely that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is nothing to lose, and perhaps everything to gain, by rejecting the entirety of mainstream politics.
The reasons why the government has fallen into such disarray have been widely discussed, many of them circling around the supposed migration crisis. But that issue is only part of the government’s wider malaise which, although there are a range of diagnoses, almost all commentators ascribe to its failure to communicate its fundamental purpose and guiding values. Even more damningly, many suspect that the failure is not one of communication but of a terrible dark hole such that there is no fundamental purpose, nor any guiding values, to be communicated.
What makes this all the more damaging is that to the extent that the government has ever made its purpose and values clear it was in the election campaign to present Labour as the calm, competent antidote to the chaotic politics of the post-referendum years. In other words, whilst any government would wish to avoid being in chaos, it is far more dangerous for one built specifically, and almost solely, on the promise of stability. This, by the way, makes talk of the Labour party jettisoning Starmer and installing a new leader, especially when there is no obviously outstanding successor, utterly bizarre.
Navigating between complacency and alarmism
However, I think there is another issue here, and it also grows in large part out of Brexit. Whilst many voters may have hoped for a less chaotic politics than the period after 2016, which saw five Prime Ministers in almost as many years, the media and commentariat became addicted to it. There has always been an element of that in political reporting, since drama and chaos make good copy, but to my mind (and I accept that this is purely impressionistic) it has intensified. No doubt that is about more than Brexit, as much of it is bound up with the changing nature of the news cycle, and the impact of social media. But Brexit supplied an addictive rush of political drama and, like all addictions, users have to keep chasing the high. Current speculation about an early election, as well about the idea of a leadership challenge to Starmer, are examples.
From this point of view, as the veteran political commentator Philip Stephens argues, it is important not to get carried away by the current media narrative of a government in crisis. Yet there is clearly a very difficult line to tread here. On the one hand, there are serious and dangerous events unfolding, and ignoring them would be irresponsibly complacent. On the other hand, part of what is driving those events is the promulgation by the political right of a narrative of crisis which it seeks to exploit, and accepting or even amplifying that narrative would be irresponsibly alarmist.
If there is a way of navigating through this tricky territory then it entails offering a compelling counter-narrative. That means matching the undeniably old and new media-savviness of the populists, providing a positive alternative to, rather than just a rebuttal of, what they are pumping out, and in the process defusing the pervasive sense of crisis. The responsibility for providing it rests with anyone with any kind of public voice but, inevitably, it must rest primarily with politicians, and especially with the government.
And the government has a particular incentive to do so, partly to meet the pressing demand for an articulation of the government’s fundamental purpose and guiding values, and partly as a matter of electoral calculation. Its present strategy of aping Reform advantages Farage whilst alienating many who might otherwise support Labour, and academic research suggests that it will be an electorally costly strategy. The consequence could well be a Reform government or, less discussed but probably more likely, a hung parliament with an uncertain outcome for the formation of a government. This isn’t just future political danger for Labour, it is a present political and economic danger because, as the economics commentator Simon Nixon recently pointed out, in relation to current bond market jitters, “the biggest risk to UK financial stability is not this government, but the justified fear of what might follow if it fails”.
We want our country back
Central to such a counter-narrative is the need to displace the far-right’s pretensions to speak for ‘decent ordinary people’ or the ‘silent majority’. Doing that means discarding one of the central features of Brexitism, the idea that when it came to a single-issue vote – the referendum on EU membership – it was revealed that the populist claim to represent that silent majority was true.
That, and the subsequent associated rhetoric of ‘the will of the people’ versus ‘the elite’, cowed mainstream politicians and was particularly disconcerting for those on the left who regarded themselves as the voice of the people and as the challengers to the elitism. It also fed a kind of liberal guilt amongst, especially, middle-class progressives, suggesting they were ‘out of touch’ with ‘real people’, particularly as regards immigration. All of this has enabled Brexitists, including Farage and Robinson, to trade with increasing success on their version of Britain and ‘British values’, including, as the widespread use of the St. George’s flag shows, conflating Britain with England.
So, in concrete terms, offering a counter-narrative means providing a different version of Britain. It has become almost a cliché to remark on the contrast between the image of Britain projected in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and that of the Brexit referendum just four years later. The first was optimistic, inclusive and tolerant, paying ample reference to the past but confident about the present and future, and tinged with an ironic, playful humour. The second was sour, insular, intolerant, fearful, unhealthily obsessed with past glories, and utterly lacking in any humour or pleasure.
There is an opportunity here for the non-Brexitist mainstream to develop its own political jiu-jitsu, appropriating the constant Brexitist demand that ‘we want our country back’. Doing so would not be a nostalgic lament for an unrecoverable past. That first Britain is still available, including for England, as was more recently suggested in discussions of ‘progressive patriotism’ at the time of the Euro 2020 football tournament.
Articulating it as the real Britain, and the true expression of British values would not go against the grain of public opinion but with it. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the veteran political scientist Professor Sir John Curtice provided a fascinating overview of the current political scene which included discussion of the latest British Social Attitudes Survey. This showed the disparities between the views and values of the public in general and those of 2024 Reform voters. These include that 31% of the public believe that migrants have undermined rather than enriched the country's culture compared with 81% of Reform voters; 32% think migrants have been bad for the country's economy (73% of Reform voters); and 18% think attempts to give equal opportunities for black and Asian people have gone too far (49% of Reform voters).
This, and much other data, gives quantitative support to the claim that Reform does not speak for ‘the people’ in a general sense, or for some mythical ‘silent majority’. Britain really is a more tolerant country than the one Farage, Robinson or the Tories claim it to be. Indeed, if anything, it is this tolerance which characterizes ‘the silent majority’, or at least one which is silenced in the sense that none of what used to be called the ‘main Westminster parties’, including the governing Labour Party, speak for it. Instead, the tolerant majority are constantly told that they are the ‘out of touch elite’.
The alternative, then, is to speak for this sense of Britain and Britishness, stressing rather than denying the success of multi-culturalism and, perhaps even more importantly, replacing sullen or alternatively vainglorious nostalgia with an optimistic vision for the future as a framing for concrete policies to achieve it, including on asylum-seeking. I’m not suggesting this would be easy. But it is almost a truism that parties which don’t seem to like their country are not likely to appeal to its voters, and it is striking the extent to which both Reform and the Tories trade on dismay for ‘what this country has become’.
Denying scoundrels the refuge of patriotism
Articulating Britishness in this way would serve to position Farage, Reform, and other Brexitists as un-British. It isn’t effective simply to ‘call them out’ as ‘racists’ or ‘fascists’ which, whilst it may give a self-congratulatory sense of ‘No pasaran’ steadfastness, is easily laughed off by their supporters and potential supporters, and cements their sense of being hectored by prissy middle-class liberals. But questioning their Britishness is another matter, as is the counterpart of attacking Farage on one of his weakest flanks, his lack of patriotism.
Keir Starmer has not been scared to embrace patriotism, rightly in my view. Doing so has often been taboo for the British left, as George Orwell long ago pointed out, and as was vividly illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s adolescent refusal to sing the National Anthem in 2015. It may be that there are still some on the liberal-left who feel queasy about anything that smacks of nationalism, but, frankly, we don’t have the luxury of such scruples. Without a positive articulation of patriotism the field is left to aggressive and authoritarian nationalists. So Starmer is right to talk about patriotism, but he needs to do so in a way which articulates Britishness in a radically different way to the far-right version and to the equally Brexitist ‘Blue Labour’ version.
Doing so would make the sharp attacks on Farage’s patriotism which Starmer has previously made more effective. It would enable a linkage to be made between the extreme illiberal authoritarianism of Farage’s call for mass deportations and his open admiration for Putin, his (at best) equivocation about Ukraine, and his sycophantic association with Trump. Farage’s vulnerability to those charges, including amongst his own supporters, has been shown before, for example in the reaction to his comments about Putin, Ukraine and NATO in 2024. Nor is Farage alone in this vulnerability. It is shared by Robinson, with his support from Musk and his documented ties to Russia.
Moreover, exposing the right in this way would create a coherence with the government’s foreign and defence policies. Amongst all the other developments in the last fortnight, we have seen fresh evidence of Putin’s aggressive intent, with drone flights into Polish and Romanian airspaces. This is not incidental to what is happening domestically. In both cases aggressive nationalism is in the ascendant, and in both cases it is emboldened by Trump, a testament to both his power and his weakness.
Which brings me finally to Trump’s visit to the UK this week. But what, really, is there to say? We all know that for ‘reasons of State’ the British government, like every government around the world, has to try to deal with this vile, sociopathic bully, and feeding his grotesque ego with some pageantry is one obvious way to do so. But the America he is creating is already another country from that which we have known and, in the current battle for our own future, that country is on the side of darkness. Ultimately, and the sooner the better, winning that battle will entail weaning ourselves from our dependence upon it.
Prospects
No doubt others would articulate this battle in different ways, but I think there is now a widespread understanding that this country is in a period of fundamental conflict not just in its politics but about its polity; a battle for its identity and, if it is not too overblown to say, for its soul. The radical right certainly knows what is stake. So should the rest of us. The way I articulate it is in terms of a conflict between ‘Brexitism’ and ‘Anti-Brexitism’, and it has been evident since the very early days of the Brexit process. I don’t, obviously, mean that history started in 2016 but there’s plenty of evidence, including some of the other data in the John Curtice analysis that I referred to earlier, that Brexit is an enduring political inflexion point.
From that point of view, what I have discussed in this post could be part of a viable strategy to marginalize Brexitism and, conversely, to mobilise ‘anti-Brexitism’. It could also, not coincidentally, be part of a viable strategy to revitalize Labour’s electoral fortunes by doing several things at once: provide a novel line for a drama-addicted media, break with one of the central deformations of Brexitist politics, meet the demand for a coherent statement of its purpose and values, marginalize Reform, and re-galvanize its liberal-left support. But this is not a cynical statement of tactics. It would be a more moral politics and, crucially, a more truthful politics, at least partly reversing out of the cul-de-sac of Brexit and Brexitism.
To my mind, the conflict over Brexitism and the fate of the Labour government are linked, at least for the time being, in that it seems very difficult to envisage a way of marginalizing Brexitism which does not involve the main party of organized labour and, more or less, of social democracy, especially given that it is the governing party. In the longer term that may change, but I’m not sure we have the luxury of thinking in the longer term. For that reason, too, this post has been more prescriptive than usual and, whilst accepting that the prescriptions may be flawed, incomplete, and undoubtedly unpalatable to some readers of this blog, I believe something like them is vital [2]. As to the prospect of the Labour government enacting anything remotely like them, well, that seems unlikely.
Notes
[1] See the report starting about 18 seconds into this link, which will only be viewable in the UK to BBC licence holders. It turns out that all these flags were put up by one man. That, too, gives the lie to the idea of some huge groundswell driven by ‘the silent majority’, but it also emphasizes how small numbers of people are being allowed to dominate what are public spaces.
[2] Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of similar prescriptions from James O’Malley in a Substack post and especially encouraging is the video clip embedded within it where Labour MP Lizzi Collinge articulates very much the kind of counter-narrative of patriotism I have in mind.
This, and much other data, gives quantitative support to the claim that Reform does not speak for ‘the people’ in a general sense, or for some mythical ‘silent majority’. Britain really is a more tolerant country than the one Farage, Robinson or the Tories claim it to be. Indeed, if anything, it is this tolerance which characterizes ‘the silent majority’, or at least one which is silenced in the sense that none of what used to be called the ‘main Westminster parties’, including the governing Labour Party, speak for it. Instead, the tolerant majority are constantly told that they are the ‘out of touch elite’.
The alternative, then, is to speak for this sense of Britain and Britishness, stressing rather than denying the success of multi-culturalism and, perhaps even more importantly, replacing sullen or alternatively vainglorious nostalgia with an optimistic vision for the future as a framing for concrete policies to achieve it, including on asylum-seeking. I’m not suggesting this would be easy. But it is almost a truism that parties which don’t seem to like their country are not likely to appeal to its voters, and it is striking the extent to which both Reform and the Tories trade on dismay for ‘what this country has become’.
Denying scoundrels the refuge of patriotism
Articulating Britishness in this way would serve to position Farage, Reform, and other Brexitists as un-British. It isn’t effective simply to ‘call them out’ as ‘racists’ or ‘fascists’ which, whilst it may give a self-congratulatory sense of ‘No pasaran’ steadfastness, is easily laughed off by their supporters and potential supporters, and cements their sense of being hectored by prissy middle-class liberals. But questioning their Britishness is another matter, as is the counterpart of attacking Farage on one of his weakest flanks, his lack of patriotism.
Keir Starmer has not been scared to embrace patriotism, rightly in my view. Doing so has often been taboo for the British left, as George Orwell long ago pointed out, and as was vividly illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s adolescent refusal to sing the National Anthem in 2015. It may be that there are still some on the liberal-left who feel queasy about anything that smacks of nationalism, but, frankly, we don’t have the luxury of such scruples. Without a positive articulation of patriotism the field is left to aggressive and authoritarian nationalists. So Starmer is right to talk about patriotism, but he needs to do so in a way which articulates Britishness in a radically different way to the far-right version and to the equally Brexitist ‘Blue Labour’ version.
Doing so would make the sharp attacks on Farage’s patriotism which Starmer has previously made more effective. It would enable a linkage to be made between the extreme illiberal authoritarianism of Farage’s call for mass deportations and his open admiration for Putin, his (at best) equivocation about Ukraine, and his sycophantic association with Trump. Farage’s vulnerability to those charges, including amongst his own supporters, has been shown before, for example in the reaction to his comments about Putin, Ukraine and NATO in 2024. Nor is Farage alone in this vulnerability. It is shared by Robinson, with his support from Musk and his documented ties to Russia.
Moreover, exposing the right in this way would create a coherence with the government’s foreign and defence policies. Amongst all the other developments in the last fortnight, we have seen fresh evidence of Putin’s aggressive intent, with drone flights into Polish and Romanian airspaces. This is not incidental to what is happening domestically. In both cases aggressive nationalism is in the ascendant, and in both cases it is emboldened by Trump, a testament to both his power and his weakness.
Which brings me finally to Trump’s visit to the UK this week. But what, really, is there to say? We all know that for ‘reasons of State’ the British government, like every government around the world, has to try to deal with this vile, sociopathic bully, and feeding his grotesque ego with some pageantry is one obvious way to do so. But the America he is creating is already another country from that which we have known and, in the current battle for our own future, that country is on the side of darkness. Ultimately, and the sooner the better, winning that battle will entail weaning ourselves from our dependence upon it.
Prospects
No doubt others would articulate this battle in different ways, but I think there is now a widespread understanding that this country is in a period of fundamental conflict not just in its politics but about its polity; a battle for its identity and, if it is not too overblown to say, for its soul. The radical right certainly knows what is stake. So should the rest of us. The way I articulate it is in terms of a conflict between ‘Brexitism’ and ‘Anti-Brexitism’, and it has been evident since the very early days of the Brexit process. I don’t, obviously, mean that history started in 2016 but there’s plenty of evidence, including some of the other data in the John Curtice analysis that I referred to earlier, that Brexit is an enduring political inflexion point.
From that point of view, what I have discussed in this post could be part of a viable strategy to marginalize Brexitism and, conversely, to mobilise ‘anti-Brexitism’. It could also, not coincidentally, be part of a viable strategy to revitalize Labour’s electoral fortunes by doing several things at once: provide a novel line for a drama-addicted media, break with one of the central deformations of Brexitist politics, meet the demand for a coherent statement of its purpose and values, marginalize Reform, and re-galvanize its liberal-left support. But this is not a cynical statement of tactics. It would be a more moral politics and, crucially, a more truthful politics, at least partly reversing out of the cul-de-sac of Brexit and Brexitism.
To my mind, the conflict over Brexitism and the fate of the Labour government are linked, at least for the time being, in that it seems very difficult to envisage a way of marginalizing Brexitism which does not involve the main party of organized labour and, more or less, of social democracy, especially given that it is the governing party. In the longer term that may change, but I’m not sure we have the luxury of thinking in the longer term. For that reason, too, this post has been more prescriptive than usual and, whilst accepting that the prescriptions may be flawed, incomplete, and undoubtedly unpalatable to some readers of this blog, I believe something like them is vital [2]. As to the prospect of the Labour government enacting anything remotely like them, well, that seems unlikely.
Notes
[1] See the report starting about 18 seconds into this link, which will only be viewable in the UK to BBC licence holders. It turns out that all these flags were put up by one man. That, too, gives the lie to the idea of some huge groundswell driven by ‘the silent majority’, but it also emphasizes how small numbers of people are being allowed to dominate what are public spaces.
[2] Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of similar prescriptions from James O’Malley in a Substack post and especially encouraging is the video clip embedded within it where Labour MP Lizzi Collinge articulates very much the kind of counter-narrative of patriotism I have in mind.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)