Britain's Brexitism test

The most significant Brexit-related development of the last fortnight was Keir Starmer’s first visit to Brussels since becoming Prime Minister. Media attention focused on his meeting with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, but, notably, he also met with Charles Michel, Chair of the European Council, and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.

Significant it may have been, but dramatic it certainly wasn’t, and no one should have expected otherwise. This was never likely to be the moment for some great announcement and, in fact, the joint statement of the Starmer-van der Leyen meeting, whilst positive in tone, was fairly anodyne in content. Nevertheless, it did contain some points of interest.

The Starmer-von der Leyen statement

The reaffirmation of a shared commitment to the Withdrawal Agreement, Windsor Framework, and Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) could be taken as a reminder of the EU’s desire to see all of the provisions of these fully implemented, and perhaps as a pre-condition of any ‘reset’. It was certainly a reminder of the Labour government’s acceptance of the basic architecture of what was agreed by its Tory predecessors, and thus the limitations of such a reset. Yet the reference to “the unique relationship” between the EU and the UK, whilst at one level a truism, could betoken a recognition by the EU that not all its relationships with third countries are of the same order, and by the UK that the brief and hubristic days of post-Brexit ‘global Britain’, in which the EU hardly counted, are long gone.

At all events, the statement identified the desire to develop an agenda of strengthened cooperation “at pace” and, interestingly, included within that agenda were references to both climate change and energy. These had been identified by Joël Reland of the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) research centre in advance of the meeting as being something to watch for as neglected, but highly viable areas, for greater cooperation within the existing agreement architecture, and of potentially mutual interest to both sides.

But ‘pace’ will indeed matter. For example, the ongoing development of both UK and EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and associated Emission Trading Systems (ETS) means that decisions about their possible linkage, a perfectly realistic possibility within the TCA framework, will soon become pressing. More generally, as economics commentator Simon Nixon argued in a recent post on his Wealth of Nations substack, emerging EU plans to revive EU competitiveness are likely to have major implications for the UK. In short, any reset of relations with the EU will not occur against a static background.

The main substantive announcement in the joint statement was of agreement to begin holding regular EU-UK summits, starting early next year. Anton Spisak of the Centre for European Reform, and a seasoned analyst of Brexit, pointed out that the significance of this should not be downplayed, given the unwillingness of both parties to entertain the idea in the past. Small as it may be, it is a sign of progress, and was welcomed as such by the European Movement UK.*

Testing questions for the ‘reset’

How far that progress goes, and what it consists of, remains to be seen, not least because, as I discussed in a recent post, it’s unclear what the government means by ‘the reset’. But, whatever its intentions, many commentaries on the Brussels’ meeting focused on UKICE Director Professor Anand Menon’s remark that to pursue them the UK needs to show the EU “a token of good faith” by agreeing to a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS). Yet, beyond the obvious fact that this would do much to enhance the credibility of the UK’s commitment to a genuine reset, what I have not seen discussed is exactly why such a gesture is needed and what it would betoken.

I think the answer to that is bound up with the entire post-Brexit question. To what extent has the UK, not just in its government but in its wider political culture, banished or at least decisively marginalized ‘Brexitism’? I’ve argued in the past that it is this which will be the key test for the viability of any idea of ultimately joining the EU or the single market. It isn’t enough for there to be majority support for doing so in the opinion polls. The credibility question, for the EU, is whether or not there is any danger that a move to join would subsequently be reversed, and the trauma of Brexit repeated. If there is such a danger, there is no attraction for the EU in entertaining UK accession.

That is not in prospect, but the same argument applies, though arguably to a lesser extent, to the far more limited aspirations for rapprochement envisaged by the current government. To what extent can they be taken as a reliable, permanent, feature of UK-EU relations? Or will this ‘reset’ be followed, a few years down the line, by another reset, back in the direction of the Brexit Ultras’ desire for separation, antagonism, maximum distance, and ‘sovereignty’ above all else? Is the UK now, in fact, a reliable interlocutor again, or is the Brexit virus liable to break out again, as shingles may for anyone who has had a bout of chicken pox?

In this sense, complaints that the EU’s original proposal for a YMS deal were made at a time that was unhelpful (£) to the then Labour opposition missed the point: these questions aren’t (just) about any particular party or government, but about the British polity. If the EU still has to tip-toe around the Brexit eggshells of UK politics, then that in itself answers the question of whether or not Brexitism has been marginalized.

There is also a deeper, or, anyway, different version of this same question, which is also highly germane to the viability of a substantive reset in relations. Brexit aside, the UK’s attitude to the EU during the years in which it was a member was very much characterized by grudging transactionalism, rather than by any commitment to European ideals. Brussels was the place the UK went to bang the table with a handbag, and extract the most it could whilst giving the least possible in return. Now that the UK is outside, is that still the approach, rather than, as a reset might imply, one of genuine partnership?

Oddly, and perhaps unintentionally, the comments of some ‘post-Brexit realists’, who, whilst understanding very well the folly of Brexit, discuss Labour’s reset in terms of negotiating strategies and ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ objectives, reinforce the impression that this transactionalism persists. At all events, a genuine reset needs to entail more than regret about the way in which May, Davis, Johnson, and Frost went about divorce proceedings. If the marriage is to be replaced by friendship, it is also necessary for there to be a genuine desire to avoid repeating the behaviour which preceded the divorce.

The YMS test

On these questions, YMS is quite a good test to set, relating as it does to the neuralgic issue of immigration which played such a central role in the vote for Brexit. YMS manifestly doesn’t cross the Labour red line on the restoration of freedom of movement of people, so if the government still sees it as too politically toxic to pursue that suggests two, related, things. One is that within the British polity, generally, the experience of Brexit has still not lanced the populist boil about immigration. The other is that the Labour government is not minded to challenge, but to accept, the orthodoxy of anti-immigration sentiment.

It would seem as if that test has already been failed. Unsurprisingly, anti-immigration politics still suffuses Farage’s Reform Party as, hardly any more unsurprisingly, it does the Tory Party, whoever its new leader turns out to be. The Tories did have the possibility of saying that, with Brexit, they had delivered the ‘points-based’ system which Brexiters like Farage used to say was all they wanted. They could then have initiated the ‘honest conversation’ everyone says they want to have about immigration, for example by decoupling it from asylum-seeking, and by challenging the voters about their view that immigration in general should be significantly reduced whilst those same voters, including Conservative voters, do not support reductions in almost every specific category of immigration. But, whether from fear of Reform, their own preferences, or some combination of the two, the Tories have not chosen to take this opportunity.

Nor is there any sign that the Labour government will do so. That clearly extends even to YMS, with reports that the cabinet is split over whether to agree to it, and identifying Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as the main opponent. Cooper played a pivotal and praiseworthy role in preventing Boris Johnson’s government enacting a ‘no deal Brexit’, and a courageous one, too, given the horrendous abuse and threats she faced. So it might be tempting to see her stance on YMS as the latest example of the Home Office capturing its Secretary of State. After all, Theresa May went from challenging her party to stop being ‘nasty’ to being a distinctly nasty Home Secretary, and the department seems to have had similarly radicalizing effect on one-time Immigration Minister, then Tory leadership candidate, Robert Jenrick.

In fact, Cooper has been arguing against freedom of movement since at least December 2016. And although she must know very well that YMS would not mean anything like its restoration she insists that the EU “see this in the context of free movement”, whatever that is supposed to mean, or why it even affects the issue. But it isn’t just Cooper. Starmer, too, despite being enthusiastic about the case for freedom of movement as recently as January 2020, is reported to fear the reaction from the pro-Brexit press to a YMS deal. So even on this quite limited measure it seems Labour have no appetite to take on Brexitism, thus failing first part of the YMS test, namely, whether has Brexitism been marginalized.

This does not mean that YMS will not be agreed in the end. Many people (including me, for what it is worth) expect that it will be. However, the consequence of having failed the first test is that, if and when YMS is agreed, the UK will also fail the second test. For if it is agreed as, or is presented as having been agreed as, part of some quid pro quo deal to obtain some softening of the economic damage of Brexit, such as an SPS deal, then it will be clear that the UK’s relationship with the EU remains within the same transactionalist frame as it has always been. That needn’t preclude a ‘reset’ but places limits upon it, and defines the future ‘partnership’ in relatively shallow terms.

The ECHR test

Whilst the YMS is a good test of the question of whether the UK has left Brexitism behind, there is a different test, which is whether the UK is likely to go even further down the path it took with Brexit by embracing a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its associated Court. That, too, is largely bound up with immigration, to the extent that ECHR derogation is almost invariably presented as being a means of ‘stopping the small boats’ (in this sense, it is also bound up with the failure to differentiate immigration from asylum-seeking).

Here the text of the Starmer-von der Leyen statement was revealing in “re-affirming” the parties’ mutual commitment to the Convention. It’s not clear that Rishi Sunak could have done the same thing, given his repeated pandering to the possibility of derogation over the ‘Rwanda plan’. By contrast, on this, Starmer’s resolve is unequivocal: a government under his leadership will never leave the ECHR. Given all his priors, it is unthinkable that he will renege on this.

However, it is very far from obvious that this is the settled view of the British polity. Again, it is unsurprising that Farage and Reform UK are adamantly opposed to ECHR membership, whilst support for it within the Tory Party is fragile. Of the remaining leadership candidates, Robert Jenrick has unreservedly advocated leaving and, despite having initially rejected the idea, Kemi Badenoch now says that she would consider doing so.

Whichever of them wins will undoubtedly find much support for making leaving the ECHR official party policy, since doing so is now an article of faith to those on the right. At the same time, former candidate Tom Tugendhat’s foolish attempt to court the right by contingently supporting leaving indicates that even on the more ‘centrist’ wing of the party it is no longer seen as unthinkable. At the very least, his having done so will have weakened what remains of the One Nation Tories’ ability to oppose it. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, with his usual opportunism, this week called for a referendum on membership.

So it certainly can’t be said, despite all the miseries that Brexit has caused, and despite its unpopularity with the public, that Brexit 2.0 can be ruled out, or that demands for it will be confined to the margins of politics. That seems all the more the case given the faltering first 100 days of the Labour administration. Of course, it is too early to judge, but the possibility of a two-term hegemony, in which Labour might re-write British politics, looks less likely now than it did in the immediate aftermath of the election, whilst the possibility of a disillusioned electorate turning to nationalist populism has become more feasible.

The Gibraltar test

Whatever the truth of that turns out to be, it is abundantly clear that the populist and pro-Brexit media has not been cowed by the new government, and continues to exert a very considerable influence upon it. Many believed that a huge Labour majority would somewhat tame that media, for the general reason that the centre of political gravity would have shifted, and the specific one that journalists would become somewhat beholden to the new regime.

That hasn’t really happened, and certainly not to the extent that it did in 1997, with the result that Starmer’s government has immediately become embroiled in controversies, leaks and scandals (some of them highly confected), and has already been forced to engage in a domestic re-set. That has multiple implications, including for the prospects of a ‘reset’ of relations with the EU.

A clear example was the furore over the announcement that the UK has agreed to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This is itself, in part, a Brexit story because, as the BBC report of it mentioned, Brexit meant that many EU nations were no longer prepared to back the UK’s case for retaining control of the territory. It’s a point that Brexiters should heed, since it a reminder of how Brexit has weakened the UK geo-politically as well as economically.

However, more to the present point is the way that the agreement was represented by Brexiters and the right-wing press as showing “weakness” and even “treason”, ignoring the fact that the negotiations which led to the agreement had been started by the previous Tory government. This was then linked to ridiculous claims (ridiculous as there is zero connection) that it would be followed by similar deals to cede sovereignty of the Falklands and Gibraltar (£).

It’s the latter claim which relates most directly to Brexit, since the post-Brexit situation of Gibraltar remains unresolved and under negotiation, and resolving it is, in itself, now a test of Starmer’s desire for a reset with the EU. In principle this is becoming urgent, with the new Entry/Exit System (EES) Schengen border controls due to begin in early November although, as I write, reports are confirming the recent rumours that these will be postponed again. But the new controls will, eventually, happen and this matters, since a key issue is maintaining an open border between Gibraltar and Spain, and the associated question of the management of border controls at Gibraltar’s port and airport (which is also an RAF base).

The last time I discussed Gibraltar in detail on this blog was in April, when it seemed that a deal was imminent. A deal, that is, brokered by the Tory government. Since then, reports of the negotiations have been sparse, although last weekend it emerged (£) that the government was about to make formal complaints to Spain about its military overflights of the territory, which doesn’t augur well. But if, and I would think when, a deal is done it will almost certainly involve ‘concessions’ to the EU and Spain, reportedly already made by the previous government, on who undertakes border controls.

This will be the cue for Brexiters to cry ‘betrayal’, as they would have done under the Tories but now, no doubt, with the support of the Tory leadership. Such protest may be marginal, and easily batted away by the government. But the reaction to the Chagos agreement suggests the possibility of a Gibraltar deal being woven into a wider narrative of Starmer being ‘weak’ and ‘not standing up for’ Britain, both generally and in relation to the EU. If that narrative gains ground it will be another indication that Brexitism exerts a profound hold on the UK, whatever its government may be.

Still not done

The question of how Brexit will continue to unfold is a crucial one for our country, so it was with considerable regret that I learned that Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downsides Dossier is to be discontinued. It has been a huge, and I think unique, resource for collating media reports about the practical consequences of Brexit, and I’ve referred to it many times.

That isn’t the only loss. At the high-profile end of things, the decision to end the European Scrutiny Committee, for all its problems, without any replacement is a big setback for scrutiny and accountability of the government’s post-Brexit policies, as Jill Rutter and Hannah White of the Institute for Government explain. I’m particularly saddened by the decision to stop funding UKICE from April 2025. UKICE has been a consistently outstanding source of reliable data, incisive analysis, and intelligent comment about Brexit, and an invaluable public resource, not least for this blog where I have cited its work in, very possibly, the majority of posts.

At, if they will forgive me, the lower-profile end of the spectrum, Nick Tyrone has now ended his ‘Week in Brexitland’ newsletter, and Gerhard Schnyder has ended regular posts of his Brexit Impact Tracker blog. Again, I have often cited these sources on this blog and it is a shame that they are gone.

These losses contribute to a growing sense that Brexit (somewhat like Covid) is regarded if not as over, then as something that just has to be put up with, like the British, or more accurately English, weather. It’s a sense I tried to capture in more detail about a year ago in my post entitled “mustn’t grumble”. So continuing with this blog, even on its new fortnightly basis, feels like ploughing an increasingly lonely furrow, but I think it is still a worthwhile one. And this week, just over eight years since I launched it, the blog received its ten millionth visit, and the readership via email sign-ups continues to hold up, so hopefully I am not the only one to think so.

After all, as this post shows, Brexit is very far from ‘being done’, and that was without even mentioning the latest postponement to an aspect of import controls, this time that of digital product safety declarations. And as this post also shows, we are also far from done with Brexitism.   

 

*Another small step of note was the this week announcement of a new agreement between the UK’s Office of National Statistics and EU’s Eurostat, severed since Brexit. It’s not really an example of ‘the reset’, since it was anticipated by the TCA and has been under discussion for a while, but it has a significance beyond itself in that it facilitates UK participation in EU programmes such as Horizon Europe. At the same time, it’s yet another reminder of the extent to which Brexit has caused so many utterly pointless, yet damaging, ruptures, large and small.

Uncharted waters

The new government continued the process it began in its first week of defining, or redefining, relations with the EU. There’s not much to add to what I said about that in last week’s post. The de facto Europe Minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, had a “constructive meeting” with Maros Sefcovic, and Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds spoke of “seeking a closer, more mature, more level-headed” relationship with the EU at a G7 meeting in Italy. There is now tentative talk of the first-ever UK-EU summit (£), which would be at least symbolically significant.

Much more high profile was the UK’s hosting of the European Political Community (EPC) summit. That represented a key moment, acknowledged as such by Charles Michel, President of the European Council, in beginning “a new phase in the EU-UK relationship”, but it potentially matters for a wider reason than that. Although as yet not much more than a talking shop, the still nascent EPC may develop into an important forum for European cooperation at a time of uncharted waters for the entire continent (not just the EU) especially as regards defence.

If nothing else, the sight of a British Prime Minister emphasising the importance of his country’s relationship with Europe, and the importance of the European Convention on Human Rights, represented a clear break with the Brexitism of his recent predecessors. This, and the entire way that the UK government approached hosting the EPC, is one, still small, but real, sign that the new government is minded to address what I’ve long argued to be the core strategic error of Brexit, namely its failure to understand the centrality of regionalism to contemporary economics and geo-politics.

Of course, all of this is still only at the (necessary) stage of improving the tone rather than shaping the substance of Britain’s relationship with its regional neighbours. It may be many months, perhaps even years, before it is possible to evaluate its success in practical terms. However, there was a substantive development this week in something which does not require EU agreement, in that the King’s Speech contained planned legislation to make it easier for the UK as a whole (i.e. not just Northern Ireland) to track changes in EU product standards and safety regulations. This is significant in that it partially damps down ‘passive’ regulatory divergence which, since Brexit, has been the main driver of regulatory divergence from the EU, and would have become more so, given various upcoming EU regulatory changes.

It is also significant as it marks a formal recognition of what the Tories had anyway been forced to acknowledge in practice, namely the ‘Brussels effect’, and its particular gravitational pull on the UK for reasons of geographical proximity and economic integration. However, this particular measure doesn’t stop the accumulation of Brexit effects in other regulatory areas and, although the UK will be the main (temporary) beneficiary of a new delay to the introduction of the EU Entry Exit System (EES), that, whilst no doubt a relief to the government, is in no sense the fruit of  any improvements there may have been in the UK-EU relationship, it’s just another technical overrun.

As so often, Rafael Behr sums up the current situation well, writing that “the era of Brexit as a faith-based system of government, setting precise theological parameters for acceptable policy, is over. But that means a new era of Brexit as a different cluster of economic and diplomatic headaches is just beginning.” In that respect, the Brexit process may be entering calmer waters but they are still, inevitably, uncharted ones.

Tories: stick or twist?

Brexiters will, no doubt, be infuriated by these developments but they have other things to occupy them. For the Tory Party and its conjoined twin, Reform, are entering uncharted waters of their own. It’s easy to dismiss what they are up to as irrelevant. It’s satisfying to do so, too, after all the years where every piece of gormlessness or nastiness from every pipsqueak on the Tory backbenches had to be taken seriously since it did, in fact, often have serious consequences. However, it does still matter, in that what happens now to the political right will eventually shape politics, including the politics of the UK’s relationship with the EU. Ultimately, it will determine whether Brexit was a prelude to Brexitism being a permanent presence in British politics, or an aberration that could eventually be corrected.

As the dust of the election has settled, it has become clear that the scale of the Tory defeat was both too small and too large to be easily processed by the party. By any normal standard, it was an historically catastrophic defeat. But compared with some of the most dramatic predictions, which conjured up the possibility of a near complete wipe-out, the Tories did reasonably well. The consequence is that they have enough seats for some kind of ‘business as usual’ approach to be just about possible, and yet too few for it really to be credible.

What ‘business as usual’ would mean is the idea that this was just the normal turn of the cycle of electoral fortunes, perhaps bigger in scale, but no different in kind, to those which have periodically happened before. Combined with the widespread idea that Labour has enjoyed only a ‘loveless landslide’, this could suggest that, whilst noises about ‘learning lessons’ will be made, there will be no ‘root and branch’ re-appraisal of the party or its fundamental purpose and identity. In leadership terms, this would probably be signaled by the choice of James Cleverly, Jeremy Hunt or even Kemi Badenoch, currently the front-runner amongst the Conservative membership according to both  a Conservative Home poll, where she scores 26%, and a YouGov poll, which has her at 31% (Cleverly is at 9% and 10% in the respective surveys, Hunt at 7% and 12%).

It may seem odd to identify Badenoch, who is clearly on the right of the party, as a kind of continuity candidate, but it is correct in the terms I mean it. Yes, she is a Brexiter and a culture warrior. Yes, some of the Ultras have praised her for being one of the few members of Sunak’s cabinet willing to make a public case for the ‘success’ of Brexit. But she enraged them when, alongside Sunak, she put a stop to their crazy idea of scrapping the entirety of Retained EU Law, defiantly declaring that she was doing so as she is a conservative rather than an anarchist. It was a telling phrase, as it captured and critiqued the frenzied destructiveness of the Brexit Ultras. She has also been highly critical of Suella Braverman since the election. So she isn’t someone who is fully aligned with the Brexitists. Equally, whilst she has been highly critical of Sunak’s “election blunders” (£), what this suggests is quite a shallow reading of the defeat, as if it were tactical rather than epochal. So in these ways she is a ‘business as usual’ rather than a ‘root and branch’ candidate.

But it seems obvious that ‘business as usual’, whilst a possible approach, is not, indeed, a credible one. It doesn’t address the evident creaking of the party machine or the demographic challenge it faces. The headline figure of 121 MPs conceals the fact that 80% of Tory seats, far more than the other parties, are held with only small pluralities of the vote, and that the party is heavily reliant on older voters. More fundamentally, such an approach does not address the gaping ideological fissures within the party or the manifest desire of many within it to have a showdown over the very meaning of conservatism. It’s conceivable that ‘One-Nation’ Conservatives might nod along with some attempt at business as usual under any of those three leaders. It’s not as if they have exactly shown Cromwellian resolve to stand their ground over the last few years. But it is surely inconceivable that the Brexitist National Conservatives (NatCons) will do so.

The coming showdown

The NatCons just about contained their loathing of Sunak whilst in government, but only just about. There is no chance of them buckling down for a similar attempt in opposition. For this is not about left and right in the familiar sense. Badenoch, Cleverly, and Hunt are right-wing by any normal standard, as is Sunak, and yet he is a socialist and a globalist in the eyes of the NatCons. The latter are a different breed altogether, and for them the very notion of ‘business as usual’ is a sell-out. A report by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian about attitudes amongst those who attended a Bruges Group event after the election provides a good illustration. In a similar vein, Liz Truss may no longer be an MP, but the oxymoronic ‘disruptor Conservatism’ (cf Badenoch’s ‘anarchism’ comment) she represents is still very much alive amongst the kind of people who hailed her mini-budget as a triumph and still regard it, as she does, as having been defeated by a malign, remainer, ‘Establishment’.

So if the NatCons get saddled with a leader who follows any version of a ‘business as usual’ strategy then they will immediately start sniping (and if it is Badenoch, then her conduct to date suggests that conciliation will not be her forte). A few lost by-elections and some poor local election results later, and the new leader will be toppled. This is easy to predict with near certainty because it is exactly how these people, or their political forebears, have conducted themselves going right back to the emergence of Tory Euroscepticism in the early 1990s, whilst the vote for Brexit has added to that ungovernability the implacable conviction that they speak for the silent majority.

All this suggests that later, if not sooner, there will be a face-off between the NatCons and the One-Cons. If it is not later, but comes now, rather than by the circuitous route I’ve just sketched, then, in leadership terms, it will most likely be between Suella Braverman or Robert Jenrick, for the former camp, and Tom Tugendhat, for the latter. In the two current polls mentioned above these candidates score respectively 16%, 7%, and 15% in one survey and 10%, 13%, and 13% in the other.

If chosen as leader, each of these candidates would, in different ways, represent a significant departure from ‘business as usual’. Each might be expected to dig deeper into what had happened throughout the 2010-2024 period, rather than just the Sunak years, though none, even Tugendhat I imagine, would raise the fundamental question of what Brexit did to the Party. Whichever side won – and it is because of this that the party may, in the first instance, seek to avoid this showdown – a good chunk of the party membership, its MPs and, with them, its voters, would defect. That is, the NatCons would defect to Reform if a One-Con wins, and the One-Cons would defect to Labour or the LibDems (or conceivably, in some cases, even to the Greens) if a NatCon wins.

When two tribes go to war

So, now, all this can be turned around to think about the relationship between the Tories and the various versions of Farage’s party (i.e. UKIP, the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK). I referred to them earlier as ‘conjoined twins’ because they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw – distinct in themselves, yet having a unique, overlapping connectivity.

This is obvious in the movement of voters and party members between them, in both directions, over many years. It is obvious in the ease with which Lee Anderson moved from Tory to Reform, and in the plausibility of current rumours that Braverman may defect to Reform, just as Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected to UKIP in 2014 or, just before the recent election, two Reform candidates defected to the Conservatives. It is obvious, too, in the rapturous welcome that Farage received at last year’s Tory conference, and the fact that Nigel Farage would be as popular a choice amongst Tory members for the leadership as all the main eligible candidates, bar Badenoch (13% and 10% in the surveys quoted above).

These are, effectively, one party which has split, initially over the priority given to leaving the EU. Indeed, it’s worth recalling that Farage left the Tory Party in 1992 in protest at John Major signing the Maastricht Treaty, exactly the root of Euroscepticism within the Tory Party itself, before becoming a founding member of UKIP. In principle, the fact that the UK has left the EU has rendered that split redundant. In fact, it has morphed into a split between the Brexitism of Reform and the Tory NatCons, and something even less easily nameable. It’s not simply One-Nationism, though that’s the only obvious shorthand term for it, it’s a complex amalgam of pragmatism, economic and social liberalism, opportunism and respectability, decency and laziness, the remnants of Tory Europhilia and of patrician dutifulness, and a kind of ideology of non-ideology. Interestingly, both sides lay claim to being heirs of Thatcher, much as Leninists and Trotskyites laid claim to Marx.

The way that the Tory vote just about held up at the election so as to yield 100+ seats, whilst the Reform vote was so dispersed that they managed only five seats, makes Farage’s pre-election talk of taking over the Tories redundant. But it is evident that the fate of the two parties remains linked. If the Tories attempt a ‘business as usual’ approach they will continue to leak votes and possibly MPs to Reform, especially if, as is likely, Farage’s party starts to win some by-elections, local elections, and even seats in the Welsh Senedd. If the Tories flip to One-Nationism, there will be a major exodus to Reform. If the Tories flip to National Conservatism, then it’s not obvious that they can survive without merging with Reform, and little reason why they shouldn’t do so, or at least make some sort of pact. That is what Braverman already favours, as do almost half of Tory Party members according to current polling. And, whether they merge or not, in this scenario there will be a major exodus of One-Nationers. There just doesn’t seem to be any viable strategy for the Conservative Party.

Unreformable?

That doesn’t however, exhaust the travails of the political right, because if the Tory internal coalition is now highly combustible, it is by no means the case that Reform is a stable entity, or that it is well-equipped for the uncharted waters of its new role and aspirations as a Westminster political party. For one thing, it is heavily dependent on one individual, Farage, and, astute as he is at cultivating his media persona, he has vulnerabilities. His Putinophilia is the most obvious, but so too is the vanity that, as can already be seen, makes him more interested in posturing in the US and his GB News show than in the daily grind of being MP for Clacton or of party management.

Relatedly, Reform has almost nothing in terms of grass-roots organization or local government presence (of the sort that makes the LibDems so resilient, whatever happens to their Westminster vote). In that respect, it isn’t even as well-developed as UKIP had been. Many of its candidates at the last election have already generated scandal, and there may well be more to come. And it is also already under challenge over its governance, or lack of it, from ousted Deputy Leader Ben Habib.

Habib is a ludicrous and unpleasant character, but the governance issue is real and won’t go away. The episode also revealed other uncomfortable truths about the party. For Habib’s summary sacking was part of the changes that saw party donor Zia Yusuf installed as chairman, provoking some Reform supporters to racist outrage about a Muslim holding this role. Indeed, part of Farage’s problem is that were he to allow the party to democratize he would also open the floodgates of influence to people who would undermine his attempt to make the party appear respectable and electorally viable.

In short, it would not be absurdly risky to bet on Reform imploding before we get to the next election. Equally, were the Tories to merge or even just form a pact with them, that would entail taking a share of the fallout from such an implosion.

The looming danger of Donald Trump

Looming beyond all of the issues discussed in this post is the uncharted water of a possible second Trump presidency, something that seems more likely, and certainly came to renewed prominence, with the failed attempt to assassinate him last weekend. His victory in November – and it is important to recognize just how imminent this possibility is – would pose profound problems for any British government, exacerbating the sense that Brexit has left the UK floundering alone, outside any major political or economic bloc, despite the very tentative developments mentioned above.

The consequences are set out in detail in a recent briefing by Luigi Scazzieri of the Centre for European Reform, but, in broad terms, it would put a fresh premium on better relations and greater integration with the EU, especially as regards defence, but also trade. That would clearly be consistent with, and would provide further justification for, Labour’s general approach (as would a Biden victory, though for different reasons). To that extent, the Labour government is better positioned to deal with the consequences of Trump 2.0 than the Tories would have been.

But as regards the relationship with the US itself, whilst it is indeed true that any UK government would struggle with Trump, Labour will find it especially difficult. The personal and ideological differences between Starmer and Trump are huge, notwithstanding reports this week of a positive conversation. That will become all the more evident since it’s clear that another Trump administration would be even more extreme than the first one. Already Trump’s freshly-announced running mate, JD Vance, has showed his contempt for the Labour government, specifically. It’s not clear how easily normal diplomacy will be able to smooth UK-US relations this time round. Equally, whereas last time, as always, a lot of the nuts and bolts of the relationship were maintained at the level of official bureaucracies, it’s not clear how those on the US side will fare under what seems likely to be a relentless assault from Trump.

At the same time, if Trump wins it will represent a new phase in the long and complicated story of his relationship with Brexiters, or Brexitists. His first election gave them a particular fillip, persuading them that they were part of a populist tide of history, whilst he, himself, laid claim to being ‘Mr Brexit’. Since then, there has been far more open intellectual and ideological traffic between Brexitists and the US radical right, exemplified by the explicit links between the National Conservatism movement and the British NatCons, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Frost, Miriam Cates, and Liz Truss (who this week openly endorsed Trump’s campaign). Trump 2.0 will put momentum into their parallel desire for Brexit 2.0.

And that is before we even come to Farage, who will undoubtedly seek to make much of his own ‘special relationship’ to act as if he were Britain’s de facto Ambassador. Trump will encourage that, both as a way of cocking a snook at Starmer’s government as well as for fairly obvious psychological reasons. For Trump, like a school bully or a gangland boss, thrives on the kind of cringingly undignified fanboydom that Farage all too happily provides (and, presumably, thinks earns him the esteem rather than the contempt of his hero).

However, Farage may find, as he briefly tasted during the election campaign over his remarks about Ukraine and NATO, that lining up with Trump in the coming years will, finally, break the largely easy time he has been given by the media and, even, break his hold over some of his supporters. For clearly the biggest danger from Trump 2.0 is what it would mean for Ukraine, which is likely to be tragic, and for emboldening Russia, which would be profoundly dangerous for peace in Europe, with the nightmare scenario being open conflict in the Baltic states. Even without that nightmare, the consequences of these uncharted waters for the UK and its politics are difficult to predict, but will be profound. They may well be even more profound than those of Brexit but, in any case, they will certainly make the folly of Brexit even clearer.

Correction, 20/07/2024: In the post I wrongly say that Kemi Badenoch explained her approach to REUL by saying she was a conservative not an anarchist. In fact, she said 'arsonist' not 'anarchist'. I don't think it affects the substance of my point, though

Britain is slowly learning what Brexit means

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

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

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

School for scoundrels

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

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

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

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

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

Learning the facts of life  

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

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

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

Cookery lessons

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

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

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

Computer club

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

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

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

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

Messy work

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

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

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

A slow and unwilling pupil

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

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

 

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

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

Britain is being choked by the knotweed of Brexit lies

It is difficult to make sense of what Johnson’s Brexit government is doing, or trying to do, as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). I discussed the background in last week’s post, much of which remains relevant, but since then there have been daily, almost hourly, contradictory signals and reports.

What has been confirmed is the recently trailed shift from threatening to invoke Article 16 of the NIP to the much more confrontational threat to pass UK legislation to supposedly unilaterally and permanently override much of the Protocol. This, in itself, is an implicit admission of the failure of the Article 16 threat tactic that has dominated the UK’s approach for well over a year. In truth, it was never viable because, whatever some Brexiters persuaded themselves to believe, it couldn’t do what they thought it would. Another delusion bites the dust, though it continues to be mentioned.

On the ‘legislation’ plan, having failed to act on the rumoured intention to include it in last week’s Queen Speech, it was then set to be announced this week by Liz Truss. This duly happened, on Tuesday, marking the end of any possibility that Truss would ‘re-set’ relations with the EU. But, again contrary to some other previous rumours, the legislation was not tabled and may not be until the summer. So there’s been some slight softening of stance over just a few days. And talks will continue with the EU, although it has previously rejected the substance of Truss’s outline proposals, and the atmosphere will be even more sour as a result of this new threat.

As presaged in my last post, this is a significant escalation but not a decisive moment. Next October is now being spoken of as the deadline for a resolution, its significance being that that is when new elections would have to be held in Northern Ireland if no government has been formed there. But we have seen such deadlines come and go before.

Meanwhile, on Monday, to coincide with a visit to Belfast, Boris Johnson published an article that was more serious and somewhat more emollient than anything he has said before, and he has generally seemed to downplay the significance of the proposed legislation, for example by referring to it as being concerned only with “some relatively minor barriers to trade”. So this seems like a ‘softer’ approach than Truss’s.

The government's tactics are as unclear as ever

Thus, beyond continuing the game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground that has been dragging on for months, it remains unclear what the government’s tactics are. Is the idea of the new threat to satisfy the DUP sufficiently for them to join the power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland? If so, it seems already to have failed since their leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, has suggested that only with the passing of the legislation will that happen.

Is the idea, as discussed in my previous post, to try to garner US support by tying this new approach so closely to upholding the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (GFA)? Certainly Truss made this central to her announcement, although border expert Professor Katy Hayward, writing in this morning’s Irish Times, argues strongly that the government’s present approach is actually “giving succour to those who want to destroy" the GFA. Moreover, Suella Braverman, the “stooge” Attorney General, has apparently made the “primordial significance” of the GFA key to her advice that the legislation would be legal, although several leading experts say this term is legally meaningless and that there is no hierarchy of treaties whereby the GFA would 'trump' the NIP. 

This marks a shift in tactics from early attempts to justify the UK position primarily in terms of the economic effects on Northern Ireland (presumably in part because Northern Ireland is actually doing better than the rest of the post-Brexit UK as a result of the NIP). It is also a shift from framing the legal justification in terms of the supposed priority of parliamentary sovereignty over international law in the way that Braverman absurdly advised over the Internal Market Bill (IMB).

Another possible reason for this focus on the GFA, apart from the US dimension, is illustrated by the revealing comment in an otherwise predictably fatuous article by David Davis this week (£) that it gives the UK “the moral high ground”, which I suppose is an implicit acknowledgment of the evident moral low ground of seeking to renege on an agreement the UK negotiated and signed only a couple of years ago. It is hardly compelling, though, since, like the government, it signally fails to answer the question of why the NIP is a threat to the GFA now, whereas at the time of signature Johnson declared the two agreements to be fully compatible. Nor does it explain why a consent mechanism was created, despite the opposition of unionists already being known, that didn’t require cross-community agreement which is now deemed inadequate because of … unionist opposition.

Is the idea to play ‘mind games’ with the EU to try to get maximum concessions, the kind of ‘madman’ negotiating approach which was attempted throughout both the trade negotiations and last year’s NIP negotiations? If so, the EU may have noticed that, ultimately, the government backed down on ‘no (trade) deal’, on the illegal IMB clauses, and on Article 16. But, in the nature of that approach, this time might be different. Or is the idea to present impossible demands to the EU knowing they won’t be met but then enabling the UK to scrap the NIP blaming EU intransigence? To put it another way, is the UK using madman tactics, or is It actually mad?

Do the oscillations in the ‘hardness’ of tone reflect differences within the government between, especially, Johnson and Truss, as some reports have it (£)? Or is it Johnson’s own habitual dithering? Or does it (also) reflect blowing in the winds of, on the one hand, diplomatic pressure from the US and feared economic pressures from the EU, and, on the other, of contradictory political pressures from different groups of Tory MPs? Certainly, as so often throughout these Brexit years, negotiations with the EU seem almost secondary to internal negotiations within the Tory Party.

Within that, what is the significance of David Frost’s now constant background chorus of bellicose, and often frankly silly, rhetoric both in the UK (£) and in the US? Of course it may well reflect his ambitions for new political office, despite the failures, abundantly obvious to all but himself, of his previous ministerial career. But is he, as a result, also now taking a similar role to that played over the years by Nigel Farage (now rather silent about Brexit though, tellingly, he and Frost are now cosying up), pressuring the government from the sidelines to stay true to ‘pure Brexit’?

The government’s strategy is as unclear as ever

Along with, and plainly related to, these tactical questions are the bigger, strategic questions of what the government actually wants. Sometimes, Johnson and other ministers have talked as if the entirety of the NIP, and certainly its core provision of an Irish Sea border, is unacceptable in principle, and many Brexiters have called for it to be entirely scrapped because they have never accepted the need for any border at all. Yet at other times they talk as if what is at stake is only operational reforms to the practical application of the agreed deal, albeit going beyond what the EU has offered so far. In Truss’s proposed changes, this question is fudged: she says she does not want to scrap the Protocol, whilst seeking to change the operations so drastically that, in effect, it would amount to doing so.

One problem with this lack of strategic clarity is that, if the real aim is to gain fresh concessions, it reduces the incentive for the EU to offer them: why do so, if it will just lead to the demand for even more, or if the UK isn’t really seeking concessions but an excuse to collapse the whole agreement? But if the real aim is to collapse the agreement, then for how long can it be credible to keep making threats without carrying them out?

Perhaps an even bigger problem is that, despite what Brexiters think, the EU really isn’t pre-occupied with Brexit in the way that, at times, it once was. So even if there is some cunning British negotiating strategy designed to wrongfoot Brussels, it’s more likely to irritate and exasperate than produce sleepless nights. There’s certainly no longer any great interest in accommodating UK domestic politics. That largely ended when the Withdrawal Agreement was signed. Ironically, having left the EU, Brexiters and the Brexit government spend far more time and energy thinking and talking about the EU than the EU spends on Brexit or Britain. That lack of interest, quite as much as border checks, is part and parcel of what it means to be ‘a third country’.

There can be no clarity because there is no honesty

These and related issues can be endlessly debated. But I think the key to making sense of all of them is to recognize that the government can’t be clear about what it is doing because it can’t be honest about how it got to where it is now, and can’t be honest about where it wants to get to in the future. As was always likely, the skein of contradictory lies told over the last six years is thickening and spreading so as to overwhelm the entire post-Brexit polity. So, like knotweed, it is now choking the very Brexit it created and, with that, British politics more generally. That Northern Ireland should be the most visible manifestation of this is not surprising because, certainly since the announcement of ‘hard Brexit’ by Theresa May in her January 2017 Lancaster House speech, it has been at the epicentre of these contradictory lies.

First and foremost are all the lies of the referendum campaign and since, lies about what Brexit would (or would not) mean for Northern Ireland but, more broadly, about how it would be possible to have hard Brexit and yet have frictionless trade, or have ‘the exact same benefits’ as the single market and customs union membership yet without belonging to either. Perhaps most fundamentally, the lie was the idea that the UK could leave the EU and yet, in some ways, still be treated as if it had not. The implication was that Brexit would be a fundamental change, and yet many things would remain exactly the same, or at least could do, if only the EU did not want to ‘punish’ Britain, or was not ‘sulking’ about Brexit, accusations that have become articles of faith to Brexiters (as much as, once, it was an article of faith that ‘we hold all the cards’).

Johnson was the front man for all this and his “cakeism” precisely encapsulated its central ‘out and yet keep the benefits’ dishonesty. But it’s important to understand that he was not the architect of the lies, nor by any means their sole spokesperson. These were the lies of Brexit itself, and they are why the entirety of Brexit, and not just Brexit in Northern Ireland, is failing.

Johnson’s serial dishonesty

That said, it would be politically astute, and not unfair, for the Labour Party in particular to denounce what has happened as Johnson’s Brexit. To do so would certainly be more realistic and reasonable than the present approach of barely talking about it all. For, indeed, much of the current situation does bear the imprint of Johnson’s trademark dishonesty. For it partly arises from his invariable attempts to avoid hard realities and difficult decisions by lying, which have now caught up with him, badly.

Thus the reason he can’t be clear if the strategic aim is to scrap the NIP as unacceptable in principle is because he lied to the electorate in 2019 when he told them he had negotiated a great oven-ready deal. As a result, this week, under robust questioning, he had to say that he had signed the deal but had not anticipated that the EU would implement it in the way it did. However, because he can’t be clear if his aim is to scrap the NIP, he is unable to satisfy the DUP (and other unionists parties) or the ERG because he lied to them in promising that he would do so and, at least as regards the ERG, secured their support for his deal on that basis. For them, in principle and not just in practice the NIP is unacceptable. So anything the EU might conceivably agree to will not satisfy the ERG, if only because they have become so extreme that the very fact of the EU agreeing it would be enough to damn it in their eyes. As Rafael Behr put it in a superb article this week, “there is no concession big enough, no deal good enough” for them.

Yet if Johnson could give these hardliners what they want, and somehow bamboozle voters into forgetting his electoral promises about his 2019 deal, he would face opposition from what’s left of the centrist or traditional right amongst Tory MPs. It’s clear that Theresa May – who no doubt also reflects on how Johnson’s disloyalty and dishonesty undermined her – and some other Tory MPs will oppose a move to break international law, as will many Tory Peers, just as they did the illegal clauses of the IMB. Some, it seems, may tolerate the threat (but not the passing) of legislation as a ‘negotiating ploy’ with the EU to obtain further flexibilities within the NIP, but that just brings back the same questions: is it such a ploy, or is there a real intention to unilaterally disapply the NIP? Johnson can’t tell them the truth of that, either.

The realities of power

Beyond these domestic considerations, if Johnson does satisfy the hardliners then he faces the formidable problem of EU economic power and US power full stop. Neither the old Brexit lie that ‘they need us more than we need them’, nor the wider Brexit fantasy of untrammelled national sovereignty, survive contact with the realities of those powers. As I said in my previous post, a full-on trade war is not in immediate prospect, not least as the whole process of passing, let alone using, legislation to disapply the NIP will take many months.

But there will be at least some EU retaliations if the hardline path continues, and ultimately it will become impossible to avoid the issues which in essence go right back to 2016-17 and the arguments about ‘sequencing’: the prior condition for a trade agreement with the EU was and is the Withdrawal Agreement, with its three planks of the financial settlement, citizens’ rights, and Northern Ireland. Hardline Brexiters conned themselves that there was no need to accept that, and still blame May for doing so. But the reality is that she did, and she did so because in reality she had to.

Thus, in the very final analysis, if the UK completely reneges on the NIP then the EU will, justifiably, regard the trade agreement as void, as already more than hinted at by Maros Sefcovic. Because all the Brexit lies of 2016 are still lies now. If anything, ‘German car makers’ are even less likely to care than they did in 2016, and the UK is even less well-placed to surviving ‘on WTO terms’ than it was when ‘no deal Brexit’ was in prospect. But, again, Johnson and his fellow Brexiters are not able to admit those truths, either to themselves or the electorate.

So although this will all drag on for a long time yet, what is happening is that Johnson’s reported psychological desire to be liked by everyone, his political modus operandi of telling different lies to please different audiences, his predilection to defer making decisions, and his basic ‘cakeist’ refusal to accept that decisions really need to be made are all, finally, catching up with him. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Now, no one believes him, and for this lack of trust, at least, Labour do seem willing to criticize Johnson’s Brexit policy. However, to re-iterate, Johnson’s dishonesty and untrustworthiness, whilst important, have exacerbated rather than created the dishonesty inherent in Brexit.

The most fundamental problem: Brexit itself

One fundamental part of that dishonesty is the avoidance of the paradoxical question: how can you have a border without having a border? That question is central to the running sore of the NIP, but is also implicated in the knots the government is tied in over EU-GB import controls over conformity assessment marking, and over regulatory duplication/ divergence (£)*. Of course one might say that resolving irreconcilable, or even just bitterly contested, issues is the stuff of politics. The peace process and GFA actually provides a good example. However, the politics of Brexit never even attempted the kind of process in which irreconcilabilities and bitter oppositions could be fudged into some kind of workable, durable consensus.

That would have entailed acknowledging the closeness of the vote, the variety of views amongst Brexiters about how it should be done, and the fact that two out of the four nations had voted to remain, as well as the implications for the GFA. This may seem like pointless jobbing back, but it’s crucial to understand that it lies at the heart of the rolling political crisis we have been in since 2016. And the reason is precisely because the realities and the various trade-offs were never honestly admitted, and, worse, that even to try to do so was dishonestly dismissed as undemocratic. That honesty still eludes the British polity, whilst the dishonesty still haunts it.

It has recently become fashionable to say that May’s deal did, if belatedly, face up to the realities and trade-offs but this isn’t really true, or at best it’s only partially true. It is the case that her backstop did so, but the deal was still dishonest because it pretended that this backstop might never need to be used if the subsequent trade agreement was sufficiently deep, or if ‘alternative arrangements’ that would enable a fully open border were to be developed. However, since leaving both the single market and customs union were already red lines, there was no prospect at all of the future trade agreement avoiding the backstop whilst – as realists always said, and has been seen subsequently to be true – there are no ‘alternative arrangements’ sufficient to have replaced the backstop.

If May’s deal is considered honest, it is only by comparison with the infinitely more dishonest deal that Johnson did. But both were dishonest to a degree. May’s by agreeing to what was ostensibly a temporary ‘backstop’ but was actually a permanent ‘frontstop’; Johnson’s by agreeing to what was actually a permanent ‘frontstop’ whilst intending to treat it as a temporary bridge to a much more minimal, or non-existent, border.

A polity choked by lies

The reality is that the only way Brexit could fully be squared with the Northern Ireland situation (and also the only way it could be done without huge economic costs) was through single market membership (perhaps via EFTA) along with a UK-EU customs treaty. Alternatively, within hard Brexit, a deeper trade agreement would – and still could – have allowed a thinner Irish Sea border (and a thinner GB-EU border generally), as would an agreement on dynamic alignment of Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary regulations. Instead of accepting these realities, Brexiters have spent six years lying that there can be a border without having a border and, unsurprisingly, failing to achieve that outcome. In the latest developments, the government is again trying to enact that lie, and it is still failing. And it will inevitably go on failing until reality is accepted (or, perhaps, until Northern Ireland leaves the UK).

The swirl of the current, sometimes confusing, events only postpones facing up to reality, and leaves the country in the limbo which, in one form or another, we have been in since 2016. And it is not cost-free. The general economic damage of hard Brexit is now self-evident except to those who will always deny it. This latest NIP row is also economically damaging, especially to investment (a country on course to a possible trade war with its biggest trade partner isn’t very attractive), as well as being damaging to the fabric of Northern Irish society. It is also damaging to the UK’s international reputation even to be making, yet again, these threats to international law and it is obviously damaging to the UK’s strategic interests in strong, harmonious relationships with the EU and US, especially given the Ukraine war.

But our politics is stuck. It can neither admit reality but nor can it entirely deny it. The consequences of Brexit, including for Northern Ireland, are undeniable. Yet their causes, namely the lies inherent in Brexit, are barely discussable, at least in England. The Tories are too invested in Brexit to be honest about it, and Labour are too scared by Brexit to be vocal about it. So we stagger on, choked by the same old lies, and daily adding new ones, a spreading knotweed first suffocating all other plants in the garden and then undermining the very foundations of the country that used to be our home.

  

*These are all ultimately border questions because hard Brexit has created both a regulatory and a customs border with the EU, so even if not necessarily about what happens ‘at the border’ they all relate to the territory over or within which something (e.g. regulation, conformity assessment, data sharing, tariffs, origin of goods components, recognition of qualifications, validity of passports) applies or happens.

Due to other commitments, I don’t expect to have time to post again until Friday 10 June.