How can Brexit Britain navigate Trump’s World?

I apologise for the fact that this is going to be a very long post. But events since the previous one have served not just to illustrate the analysis there of a new global divide, but to show this divide to be deepening very rapidly. As numerous detailed commentaries have explained, the Munich security conference and its aftermath have “laid bare the collapse of the transatlantic alliance”, showing that “the American security shield has gone forever” with the result that “it has been without question the darkest week for Europe since the 1940s”. Phillips P. O’Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at St Andrew’s University, wrote last weekend that “this is arguably the most important week in European history since 1991 or even 1945”. Unlike those dates, what is happening in 2025 carries little in the way of hope, and, with Trump’s announcements and actions becoming more unhinged by the day, any hope there may be is fading very, very fast.

The analysts I’ve just quoted are not excitable catastrophists, but seasoned, respected experts in politics and international relations. I would like to think I share at least some of those qualities, to at least some degree, and, personally, having for nine years been dismayed by what Brexit has done to Britain, I now actually feel frightened by what may happen here. An obvious response to that would be that there are many places, most especially Ukraine, which have far more to fear. That is most certainly true (and it is also true of the US itself where state-induced political intimidation and fear are flourishing, to the horror of decent Americans). Equally, it may be objected that what is happening has little to do with Brexit. However, that is not true.

What’s it got to do with Brexit?

As all those analysts, and many others, make plain, these ongoing developments are not just about ripping up security alliances and global norms, and not just about the empowerment of nationalist ‘strong men’ to carve up the world according to their whims, crucially important as those things are. Rather, as well as what they mean for relations between states, the pronouncements coming from Washington, most recently in Vice-President J.D. Vance’s Munich speech, are proselytizing for far-right and ‘alt-right’ populism within states. Hence Vance’s praise for Brexit and his comments about the German and Romanian elections, which of course come on the heels of Elon Musk’s repeated interventions in British (£) and German politics.

The two aspects are linked. The Trump regime’s loathing for ‘Europe’ is multi-dimensional, seeing it as a parasite in security terms and the ideological homeland of elitism, woke liberalism, and globalism. The EU, specifically, is despised, and resented, as an economic and regulatory power and, perhaps more diffusely, as an exercise in rules-based international cooperation and pooled sovereignty. Indeed, hatred of Europe and of the EU is one of many strands binding together Trump, Putin and the Brexiters.

Since the UK is geographically, historically, economically and, in many respects, ideologically a European country, this necessarily poses profound questions for this country. But Brexit greatly complicates those questions, not simply because it means the UK is detached from the EU, but because Trumpist approval of that makes it quite likely that the US will attempt to exacerbate that detachment at precisely the moment when its folly is most obvious. That might take the form of offering the UK exemptions from new tariffs (about which much is still unclear) or other, including non-material, favours. Far from the present moment being one where, as Keir Starmer seems to think, the UK can once again be a ‘transatlantic bridge’, the reality is that it has the potential to rupture the country, ripping it further from its ideological and geographical allies in Europe but with no prospect of being anything other than the plaything of Trump’s increasingly vicious and unpredictable whims.

However, it is not just a matter of Trump seeking to meddle in Britain’s international relations and internal politics. Nor is it just that, in doing so, he will be joining Putin’s own longstanding attempts to do the same. If it were only that it would be obnoxious and dangerous. What makes it, also, frightening, is that both Trump and Putin have so many willing and powerful accomplices within the British polity*. That means, most obviously, Nigel Farage, the now dominant alt-right and NatCon elements of the Tory Party, the weird ex-RCP coterie and the Tufton Street mafia – both groupings which enjoy disproportionate media influence – and, it is increasingly clear, the ‘Blue Labour’ movement. And they would be neither so numerous nor so powerful had it not been for Brexit.

It was an apposite coincidence that, on the very same day that Starmer went to Paris to meet other European leaders this week to discuss Trump’s Ukraine démarche, the ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC) met for a major conference in London. This was a gathering of the assorted world-wide clans of populism and neo-fascism, with British representatives including Kemi Badenoch, Farage, and the ARC Advisory Board member Maurice Glasman of Blue Labour. For want of a better name, the UK contingent can be called ‘Brexitists’ since their bedrock belief is support for Brexit, denial of its failure, and commitment to some or all of its flawed logics.

There are many things at stake in all these unfolding developments, but for the UK, specifically, their immediate manifestation is the question of this country’s relationships with the EU and the US. The Brexitists are quite clear that this is the latest front in their battle, exemplified by Daniel Hannan (who else?) declaring (£) that “we can’t let Labour drag us back into the shrinking orbit of the anti-Trump Eurosphere”. He was right to identify Vance’s Munich speech as making it undeniable that there is a very fundamental choice to be made but, as usual, entirely wrong about what the response should be.

A new proposal for UK-EU relations

Nevertheless, a response will have to be found, and one proposal was made in a report commissioned by Best for Britain (BfB), which was published at the beginning of last week, and which received a lot of media attention (£). It is a timely, important, and serious piece of work, and warrants serious attention, as a constructive proposal to move beyond the current Brexit impasse and to engage with some of the emerging realities of Trump’s new world order.

The report models the economic effects of ‘strong regulatory alignment’ between the UK and EU as regards goods, and also as regards both goods and services, and then models each of these in the scenario of Trump imposing trade tariffs on all goods imported by the US (at an assumed rate of 20% for those from the UK and the EU). Importantly, pursuing strong regulatory alignment in the meaning of the report would not require the Labour government breaching its ‘red lines’ of not rejoining the EU, the single market, or the customs union, and of not agreeing freedom of movement of people. In that sense, it is intended to be a politically viable proposal from a UK perspective.

The ‘headline’ results are quite striking. With strong regulatory alignment in both goods and services, and if there were no Trump-tariffs, UK GDP could be up to 2.2% higher per annum in the long-run than it would otherwise have been, and, even in the event of Trump-tariffs, up to 1.5% higher. This would make a substantial dent in the standard (OBR) estimate of Brexit making UK GDP 4% lower than it otherwise would have been in the long run, and considerably more effective than the more basic ‘reset’, consisting simply of those things the UK and EU have specified they will seek, which John Springford of CER recently estimated to be worth 0.3% to 0.7% of UK GDP. Moreover, both for many individual EU member states and for the EU as a whole the result would be positive or, in the event of Trump-tariffs, would make their impact less negative than it would otherwise have been. So agreeing deep regulatory alignment is presented as a ‘win-win’ for the UK and the EU.

The core concept of the report is that of ‘strong regulatory alignment’:

“Regulatory alignment in goods in this scenario is based on the principle of mutual recognition by the UK and the EU of each other’s regulations. We envision an expansive approach to mutual recognition, in which the UK and the EU take active steps to minimise regulatory divergence and commit to recognising the equivalence of each other’s regulations.” (p.12, followed by a similar definition for services).

This will be very familiar to readers of this blog, and to Brexit-watchers generally, and perhaps will be ringing some alarm bells, because ‘mutual recognition’ has for years been seen by many Brexiters as the silver bullet to reduce the economic costs of Brexit. BfB, of course, are very far from being Brexiters, but whoever proposes it, it has the same problems. I’ve written about these numerous times before, most recently on the last occasion the idea surfaced.

What is ‘Mutual Recognition’?

This is a very complex issue to unpack in full. In broad terms, mutual recognition (MR) means that goods and services which meet the regulations within one market are deemed to meet those which obtain in another, and vice versa. Within that, one crucial distinction is between MR based on ‘equivalence’ and that based on ‘dynamic alignment’ (and/or other forms, such as MR of conformity assessment testing, which I won’t discuss here, though could also become relevant).

Under ‘equivalence’ agreements, the EU and the UK would recognize that, whilst different in some details, their regulations were broadly compatible, and each party would take responsibility of legally enforcing their own regulations. Under ‘dynamic alignment’ (DA) agreements, one party – and in practice it would almost always be the UK – agrees to completely track EU regulations, and as a result the UK’s regulations would be ‘recognized’ by the EU. This is really only ‘mutual recognition’ by courtesy, as the alignment is all one way, even though the ‘recognition’ goes in both directions, and both the source and the enforcement of regulations would ultimately lie with EU law and EU courts.

So, much depends on what form of MR is envisaged, and in that respect the use of the term ‘equivalence’ in the BfB report is either an unfortunate mistake or a problem. We already know that the EU is very reluctant to enter into equivalence agreements with the UK. They aren’t impossible (there are some in relation to aspects of financial services and, in effect, in the EU recognition of the ‘adequacy’ of the UK data protection regime), but as regards Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulations an ‘equivalence’ agreement (sometimes called a ‘New Zealand-style’ agreement) has already been proposed by the UK and rejected by the EU. By contrast, a ‘dynamic alignment’ (or ‘Swiss-style’) SPS agreement has been offered by the EU but rejected by the UK.

It isn’t just on SPS regulations that we’ve already been round this loop. MR based on equivalence in a number of areas featured heavily in the UK government’s February 2020 document on its approach to the negotiations undertaken by David Frost, under Boris Johnson, which ultimately led to the TCA. Almost all those proposals foundered, as they were bound to. In large part that was because what makes equivalence appealing to Brexiters (most especially lack of ECJ jurisdiction) is what makes it unacceptable to the EU. As Michel Barnier put it in 2018: “In the absence of a common discipline, in the absence of EU law that can override national law, in the absence of common supervision and a common court, there can be no mutual recognition of standards.”

What about expansive use of Dynamic Alignment?

However, although regulatory equivalence as the basis of expansive MR is a non-starter, what about ‘dynamic alignment’ (DA)? Since the EU does appear to be willing to use that form of MR for SPS regulation, could it perhaps be used expansively? It’s true that this would overcome the problem that lack of ECJ involvement poses for the EU. It also seems to be true that the presence of ECJ involvement is no longer a red line for the UK under the Labour government. Nevertheless, other issues would still remain.

In particular, even under DA each side has to monitor (and/or trust the other side to monitor) that both sets of regulations are aligned. This is a much more complex matter when DA is being used over a wide range of sectors, as envisaged by the report, partly because there is so much more to monitor and partly because there will often be difficulties in knowing where MR applies and where it doesn’t. This arises because crucially, even under the most ‘expansive’ use of DA, but unlike within the single market, the UK would retain the right to diverge in areas not covered by DA.

To take one increasingly important example, assume, as seems extremely likely at the moment, that the UK retains (and perhaps even exercises) the right to diverge in AI regulation. Given the extent to which AI looks set to be imbricated, in some way or another, within so many different business sectors across both goods and services, imagine how difficult it is going to be to determine whether, in relation to any particular product or sector, DA does, or does not, apply. I don’t say that it would be impossible, and certainly the AI example, specifically, is largely uncharted water, but it would involve huge technical complexity, at least if attempted not for one or two areas but at scale.

Indeed the problem isn’t DA agreements as such, it is scaling them up so as to meet the ‘expansive’ MR regime required to yield the headline economic benefits of the BfB report. Ultimately, that isn’t just about technical complexity, it is because the expansive use of DA is effectively an attempt to reproduce selective aspects of the single market but outside of the ‘ecosystem’ of single market agencies and institutions. As such, the more it is used, the more of a threat it would represent to the integrity of the EU single market meaning, at its most generic, the way in which membership confers distinctive advantages over non-membership. That notion, which some Brexiters tend to treat as meaningless or, alternatively, as some kind of EU ‘theological’ dogma, is actually of fundamental importance (hence, amongst other things, many of the issues that have arisen for Northern Ireland).

So (why) would the EU agree to it?

To that, there are several answers. One is that, unlike proposals for equivalence agreements, MR hasn’t been proposed before on a DA basis. Actually, that isn’t quite true, as arguably it was proposed, at least for goods trade, under Theresa May’s 2018 Chequers Proposal for a ‘common rule book’, but as that caused her government to implode it never really got to the point of being negotiated in detail with the EU in the form of a TCA, and would undoubtedly have encountered much resistance from the EU (I’m skipping over a lot of detail on this point). Still, something like it might eventually have been agreed and, anyway, we are now in different times, not least because EU concerns that Brexit might lead to a bigger exodus of members have now largely disappeared. Even so, the EU continues to face the possibility that an expansive DA deal with the UK might set a precedent, with member states seeking to ‘mix and match’ areas for alignment/ divergence.

The more important answer is that we are in different times because the economic situation of the EU, and especially of its largest members, Germany and France, is now much worse than it was in 2018, and the most important answer of all is Donald Trump. Those two things are related, because the state of many EU economies makes the threat of Trump-tariffs all the more dangerous. It is this, clearly, which the BfB report highlights, showing how a strong alignment scenario between the UK and the EU could offset some of the damage of Trump-tariffs, and it is on this basis that it is presented as a win-win proposal.

That may well be true, but, although the context is different, it is still a rather familiar idea, and another one which we used to hear from Brexiters. Their claim from the outset was always that there would be a very expansive post-Brexit deal, even to the extent of offering “the exact same benefits” as membership, because that would be in the interests of both sides, and they repeatedly complained that the EU was allowing ‘politics’ to get in the way of economic interests. In particular, they repeatedly argued that ‘German car makers’ (as an emblem for other EU industries) would ensure such a deal and, when that proved false, again framed that as an EU failure to represent the economic interests of its members and instead to prioritise Brussels ‘dogma’.

But (apart from their other flaws) these claims were mistaken by not recognizing that, whatever the immediate economic interests of some businesses, or even some countries, the long-term economic interests of all EU members and businesses were absolutely dependent upon retaining the integrity of the single market, and the expansive use of MR, even in its DA form, necessarily risks that, extensively recreating selective aspects of the single market for non-members. Now perhaps it is true that the possible impact of Trump’s tariffs will change the balance of calculations of the risks and benefits of this. But personally, I feel suspicious of yet again going down the track of making proposals based upon assumptions about what the EU will, or ‘ought to’ recognize as being in its own interests.

Having said all this, it could still be argued that Trump’s return, in a dramatically more aggressive and virulent posture than before, has changed everything, not so much, or not simply, because of the economic threat of tariffs but because of having started to rip up the international security order, and all the issues with which I began this post. Is this true? To be honest, I simply don’t know. In some ways, the opposite could be argued. To the extent that the single market is the economic basis of such geo-political clout as the EU has, that might suggest there is all the more reason to maintain its integrity.

Nevertheless, I do think that, despite what some ‘die-hard remainers' think, the understandable unwillingness of the EU to make economic concessions to the UK in return for security and defence cooperation, a proposition which was first made by May when Article 50 was triggered in 2017, and looked like blackmail then, may have changed. Almost everyone now thinks that Europe, as a continent, needs to get itself together as a serious defence player, and that is not going to be easy. It will entail the EU and its members doing many things they find distasteful, and this could be one of them. It might also be that previous, and again understandable, reluctance to entertain a complex and tangled MR-based relationship between the EU and the UK might be reduced. In a world which has suddenly become extremely disordered that might now seem a relative trivial piece of messiness. It would certainly be lazy simply to dismiss that possibility out of hand as ‘cakeism’, or to dismiss the very real differences created by Trump’s return. This isn’t 2016-2020.

The real choice

For all these reasons, there may well be a good argument for the UK to explore the BfB report’s ‘strong alignment’ model and propose it to the EU, at least informally, and see what the reaction is. But I keep coming back to the problem that it is very difficult to see how the EU can embark on a major deepening of relations without a high degree of confidence that the UK is going to be a reliable partner, and there is no real prospect of that whilst Brexitism remains so influential. After all, it’s perfectly realistic to think we may be only three years away from having a nationalist and populist government with a doctrinal hatred of the EU.

For Brussels, that would mean dealing with a UK government which has scant regard for acting in a trustworthy manner about any MR agreements which may be in force and would very likely revoke them anyway. The answer to that concern cannot, realistically, be that, if it happens, the EU can just revert back to the current TCA terms after having put in all the effort of creating an expansive MR regime involving a complex patchwork of agreements.

Some deny any such risk exists, arguing that UK business lobbies would prevent any future government from revoking agreements made by Labour. But this is really just the ‘German car makers’ argument in reverse, and the history of Brexit hardly suggests that business is very effective in controlling a government – in this scenario perhaps a Reform-Tory coalition – animated by ideological loathing of the EU and populist conceptions of ‘sovereignty’. So the risk is real, and it would be a very considerable one for the EU to take.

Moreover, although this wouldn’t in itself remove that risk, it can hardly be encouraging to the EU that the Labour government has not, as yet, made an explicit commitment even to seeking a DA deal on SPS, let alone to any more ‘expansive’ use of DA. As long ago as May 2023 I wrote a post with a footnote pointing out that whenever Labour politicians talked about an SPS deal they invariably invoked New Zealand (i.e. equivalence, not DA) as a model, and that has continued to be the case, so even in this headline area for the reset, the government still remains ambiguous about specifics.

For what it is worth, I think the government will seek DA on SPS, and will agree it with the EU, but it certainly hasn’t been open or enthusiastic about what doing so means, apparently because it fears the Brexiters’ reaction, hence again demonstrating the unsettled nature of the UK polity. So if the BfB report encourages the government to boldly advocate the use of DA, and to take on and defeat its Brexiter critics, then it will have done a good job.

On the other hand, if Brexitism were to be marginalised in the UK, overcoming this problem, then there would be no need to fiddle around with endlessly complex and sub-optimal MR agreements and security pacts as we could move, as quickly as possible, to joining the EU, boosting the continent’s economy, and developing a proper, fully-integrated, European defence and security capacity. So, for all the talk of the UK facing a choice between the US and the EU, the deeper choice that codes is the domestic one of what kind of country we are. That seems no closer to resolution now than it has been since, in 2016, we embarked on the poorly-designed, divisive and poisonous Brexit experiment, an experiment which has now become the most horrific of political lab accidents.

 

Note

*On the other hand, the British, Brexitist, variant of this global right-wing movement faces particular challenges. The British public has generally negative views about Putin and Trump, and a generally positive view of Zelensky (and support for Ukraine). Even Reform voters are strongly anti-Putin. As has been shown before Farage’s views of Ukraine and Putin are his most vulnerable political spot, and this is now becoming very clear.

The limits and limitations of post-Brexit choices

The very tiniest consequence of Trump’s election victory is that its timing falls messily for me now that this is a fortnightly blog. This post’s main topic, which is last week’s budget, suddenly seems like old news. Equally, writing about that leaves little space to write about the US election.

But that may be no bad thing. I often think that hot takes on big events are foolish, and the scale of this event, in particular, is going to take time to process. It is going to be different, bigger, and potentially far more dangerous than what flowed from his 2016 victory. The consequences go well beyond the focus of this blog, but even within that focus they will be profound. Profound for the UK, for the EU, for the continent of Europe and therefore, inevitably, for the entire Brexit project.

A preliminary list includes issues of defence, most pressingly as regards Ukraine, but also as regards the Baltic states, Eastern Europe both inside and outside the EU, and the Balkans. It also includes economics, and the possibility of substantial tariffs on trade with the US. Both of these things will shine a fresh and very searching spotlight on the economic and geo-political incoherence – an incoherence so great that it can properly be called a stupidity – of Brexit as a national strategy. That can only add weight to calls to join (or rejoin) the EU, though it's hard to see them being heeded. It certainly ought to bring more urgency and ambition to what already seemed the feebleness of the Labour government’s ‘reset’ of UK-EU relations, and which has now been rendered utterly inadequate in both scale and pace.

Yet, at the same time, Trump’s victory will embolden and re-energise the populists and the Brexiters. Earlier this year, when a second Trump presidency was already looking likely, I wrote at length about the relationships between Brexit, Brexitism, Trump and Putin. Most of that still stands, although some of the dynamics will be inflected differently under a Labour government. Thus Nigel Farage is gloatingly cock-a-hoop, directly comparing the result to Brexit, and the crackpot idea of him being the ‘unofficial Ambassador’ to the US is doing the rounds again.

Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, the new Tory leader, is already trying to exploit the difficulties that a Trump presidency would pose for any British government, and resurrecting the Brexiters’ favourite idea that he will agree a favourable trade deal with the UK. More generally, Brexiters, who have seen their 2016 ‘triumph’ become not just unpopular but a kind of byword for failure, will see in Trump’s reincarnation the hope that their fortunes, too, can be revived.

Labour’s first budget

All of this and much more will play out in the coming years. However, that doesn’t make last week’s budget an irrelevance and it, too, will have some long-term effects. It was a notable Brexit event, albeit in a peculiarly negative way. That has two aspects, one of them fairly widely remarked upon by commentators, the other, so far as I know, not mentioned by anyone.

The widely remarked-upon aspect was trailed in my previous post, where I wrote that “at one level, [the budget] will push discussion of Brexit even further to the margins, as commentators will find many others things in it to talk about. At another level, it will make the costs of Brexit even more relevant.” And so it proved.

Rachel Reeves’ budget speech lasted well over an hour, but mentioned Brexit only once, and only in passing, when she said that the Tory “Brexit deal harmed British businesses”. The subsequent debate focussed on everything from the rise in employer National Insurance contributions to the supposed impact on family farm inheritance, but only rarely on the Brexit silence.

On the other hand, buried in the accompanying Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) documents was a reminder that, taking into account what has already happened, its forecast for the impact of Brexit on trade intensity remains the same. This presumably also means that its forecast that the long-run impact will be that GDP will be 4% lower each year than it would otherwise have been also still holds (as last formally stated in May 2024). It is also implicit in the OBR figures, and confirmed explicitly by Treasury Minister Tulip Siddiq, that 60% of this damage is yet to come.

It bears repeating that, for all the tedious misleading graphs, cherry-picked data, and attempted rebuttals that still float around Brexiter-world, and get cited as ‘gotchas’ by keyboard warriors who wouldn’t know an x-axis from the X Factor or the X Files, something like this figure is given by all the major independent estimates. There’s a good discussion of this in relation to the budget by John Wilmslow in Sussex Bylines. 

The irrelevance of Brexit

All this is important, and provides a fresh example of the strange post-Brexit landscape in which the mounting economic damage is politically all but undiscussable. However, there is a sense in which the silence about Brexit in the budget was entirely justified. For the aspect which I have not seen mentioned is just how little difference Brexit has made to political debates and policy choices. Brexit was billed by its advocates as a great national liberation. This budget was a big event, setting the direction of travel for the next few years. Yet its basic parameters were indistinguishable from those of all the decades in which Britain was a member of the EU.

This is a demonstration of the fact that Brexit itself was based on an utterly false narrative of policy being substantially constrained by, or dictated by, the EU. Or, to put it another way, the false narrative that Brexit would give the UK greater ‘sovereignty’. In fact, policy remains within the familiar terrain of how much to tax, how much to borrow, and where to allocate funds.

Of course, the precise decisions made about that in this budget were distinctive, but the generic issues involved have not changed at all. It may be that in the weeds of specific measures there were some things, if so, very likely related to VAT, which would not have occurred as an EU member but, again if so, they were very marginal.

The constraints of reality

Brexiters would no doubt say this reflects the failure of the government to take advantage of ‘Brexit freedoms’ but, as the previous government found, these proved to be illusory in practice. And the reason for this is not, as Brexiters would have it, a lack of will. It is because the constraints on UK policy choices were never, in any significant sense, those arising from EU membership. In fact, as regards the budget, the principal constraints are, as was the case before Brexit and as was the case before membership of the EU, the currency and bond markets. As Labour politicians in the 1960s used to complain, it is the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’ who set the parameters of UK economic policy. That was before Britain joined the EEC, but it remained the case afterwards, as Denis Healey found in 1976.

It is still true after Brexit. That was amply demonstrated by the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget and - though to nothing like the extent that right-wing commentators claimed (£), and perhaps hoped - by Reeves’ budget. If the Reeves budget escaped the market mauling that Kwarteng’s endured it was partly because it was accepted, for example and in particular by the IMF, that the borrowing it involved provided the basis for sustainable growth and necessary public investment. It was also because Reeves explicitly eschewed the Brexitist anti-institutional frenzy which characterized the mini-budget, a frenzy which ended with the ludicrous assertions about ‘deep state’ interference and ‘socialist’ market traders.

But it’s not just fiscal policy which has shown the irrelevance of being outside the EU. The same goes for most parts of regulatory policy, something tacitly accepted by the last government, and slightly more openly accepted by the present government. The reasons, which I’ve rehearsed endlessly on this blog, boil down to the fact that, in or out of the EU, the UK largely has little choice but to accept transnational rules. Moreover, largely for reasons of geographical reality, these are very often those of the EU itself. Even immigration, the strongest candidate for the claim that Brexit has made a difference to policy choices, doesn’t bear out the Brexiters’ thesis. The detailed inner workings and mechanisms of policy have changed, but the basic parameters are framed by the same economic and political questions as they always were.  

The constraints of domestic politics

This points to a related issue. It is not just that there are the same external constraints on policy as there were before Brexit. It is that there are the same, or similar, domestic constraints as before. It’s undoubtedly the case that many Brexiters on the free-market right saw leaving the EU as a way to introduce radical ‘neo-liberal’ [1] policies to become 'Singapore-on-Thames' (£), to use the common, though misleading, term. But the assumption that it was only EU membership which stood in the way was false.

The British electorate was and remains a major obstacle. If neo-liberals sought to achieve electoral consent for their vision via the backdoor of Brexit, it was because they had no confidence they could do so through the front door of a general election. That was actually underscored by the coalition of voters brought together by Vote Leave and, later, by Boris Johnson in the 2019 election. Many, if not most, of them wanted no such thing as the ‘Singapore Brexit’ agenda.

Hence, even after leaving the EU and after the pandemic, neither Johnson nor Sunak followed that agenda (£), much to the chagrin of its advocates. Liz Truss undoubtedly wanted (£) to go down something like that route but had not secured electoral support for doing so and, even if the bond markets hadn’t imploded her premiership, it’s far from clear she could have delivered on it politically even within her own party.

All this inflects another way. Just as many right-wing Brexiters saw the EU as a barrier to neo-liberalism, many on the left came to see it as a bulwark against such policies. This at least partly accounts for the shift from Labour’s 1983 ‘Brexit’ policy to its later, largely pro-EU, position. Of course this did not apply to some on the Labour left, who became what we now call Lexiters, but in the process that revealed another aspect of the incoherence of the Brexit coalition. For the Lexiters see the EU as neither a barrier to, nor a bulwark against, neo-liberalism, but as an incarnation of it.

The consequences of this are still playing out. At the time of the referendum, many left-wing remainers believed (and some still do) that because many neo-liberals supported Brexit then ‘therefore’ this was ‘the real purpose’ of Brexit. Ironically, this validates the neo-liberal Brexiters’ own complaint that what has been delivered is ‘not real Brexit’. For, manifestly, Brexit has not ushered in anything remotely like what they wanted.

The Freeports red herring

That ought to be seen as their problem, and as a demonstration that the neo-liberal Brexiters were as deluded and incompetent as every other brand of Brexiter. However, the insistence that this was what Brexit was ‘really all about’ lives on in the ridiculous claims about Freeports, which continue to do the rounds on social media, depicting these as being, or in the process of becoming, deregulated neo-liberal ‘zones of exception’ (there’s an irony in that, too, as it validates Brexiters’ own false claims about Freeports being, in their terms, a ‘Brexit benefit’).

In fact, they are no such thing, and the two pieces of ‘evidence’ cited to suggest otherwise are both flawed, as I discussed in more detail in a previous post. One is that these Freeports would violate ‘EU state aid rules’. It’s questionable whether this is true, but even if it is then it is an odd way to demonstrate their ‘neo-liberalism’. For, as the Lexiters insist, it is the EU’s state aid rules which are one of the principal reasons for regarding it as a neo-liberal institution. (Freeports aside, the Lexiter position on this is another example of the wider Brexiter falsity that it was EU rules, rather than the UK’s own political choices, which were the barrier to the use of state aid: whilst still in the EU the UK gave much less state aid in per capita terms than most other members.)

The other piece of ‘evidence’ given for deregulated Freeports is that the Retained EU Law (REUL) Act 2023 supposedly unleashed massive deregulation by scrapping 600 EU laws. But, apart from the fact that this applies across the country, not just in Freeports (so it is irrelevant to the claims about them), anyone with even a cursory understanding of this issue knows that REUL was a major disappointment to the neo-liberal Brexiters. They had wanted to scrap or automatically sunset all the estimated 4,000 EU laws by the end of 2023, and were infuriated that not only was the number scrapped so small, but that they generally related to trivialities. That decision, taken by Kemi Badenoch when she was Trade and Business Secretary, actually marked a defeat for them. That isn’t to say they may not revive in the future, and no doubt Trump’s victory will embolden their hopes of a similar resurrection, but the idea that REUL was a triumph for their version of Brexit is simply false.

The Freeports issue is an illustration of my wider point here, that the parameters of policy have not been changed by Brexit. It’s something demonstrated, if inadvertently and in a misleading way, when the Freeport alarmists talk about ‘the 86 Freeports and SEZs’ (Special Economic Zones). It’s misleading because Freeports are SEZs (so ‘Freeports and SEZs’ is a misnomer) and doing so enables them to talk of these being ‘rolled out’, when almost all of them have existed for years, and pre-date Brexit. And it’s that which illustrates the point that, both before and after Brexit, policy choices haven’t really changed. In this case, that is because SEZs were and still are predominantly areas with various business tax breaks, most if not all of which did not require Brexit. That doesn’t mean they are good, or that they are effective. It just means that they are pretty much what they have always been.

Back to the budget

This brings us back to the budget. It does so in one trivial way. Before the budget there was a report that it would announce five new Freeports. This report turned out to be mistaken, but not before much gnashing of teeth about how it ‘proved’ Labour had embraced post-Brexit neo-liberalism. Far more importantly, the budget marks a distinct break with recent economic policy, perhaps going as far back as 1979. That isn’t so much because of its taxation decisions as the role it envisages for state investment.

As such, it marks a decisive rejection of the neo-liberal ‘crowding out’ thesis – the idea that public investment crowds out private investment [2]. That was a key part of the intellectual undergirding of what became Thatcherism, and it persisted under George Osborne’s Chancellorship. Arguably, it also lay behind the Blair-Brown governments' embrace of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). This doesn’t mean that it was the ‘socialist’ budget or the “Marxist nightmare” (£) described by the ludicrous rantings of right-wing commentators. But nor does it warrant the lazy claim that there’s no difference between Labour and the Tories. It was, as Martin Kettle of the Guardian described it, “a budget in the identifiably social democratic Labour tradition”.

Whether it succeeds in delivering the economic growth it promises, and to what extent, is another question, and one made all the more difficult to answer by Trump’s election. But, along with other Labour policies, from industrial policy to workers’ rights – even if none of these go as far as some would want – it puts paid to the idea, at least for now, that Brexit was the harbinger of a new wave of neo-liberalism. In some ways, it could even be described as bringing the UK closer to a ‘European’ economic model.

The limits and consequences of choice

That might seem ironic, but to a certain sort of Brexiter, arguably the most principled sort, it would be no such thing. Such people would say that the point of Brexit was not to usher in any particular policies, but simply to ensure that the policies in place are those chosen by British voters [3]. It is the same argument they make when saying that Brexit did not mean lower immigration, just that immigration levels would be determined solely by the elected government.

It may be a fine sentiment, but it is a naïve one, ignoring the many constraints on the choices available to voters, constraints over which their elected governments have far less control than they used to over EU laws and regulations. Like it or not, voting never has been, and never could be, the sole source of policy. On the other hand, it ignores the fact that, despite those constraints, the same kind of budget as that of last week could have been delivered with or without Brexit. That doesn’t mean that Brexit has made no difference to this and other post-Brexit budgets. It has. But the only real difference it has made is that there is less money.

In a similar way, no British voter chose Trump as American President, and most of them are unhappy about his election and concerned about its implications for Britain, but they will all have to cope with the consequences of it. That would have been true with or without Brexit, but Brexit limits the choices for how to do so.

 

Notes

[1] I’m aware that some people find ‘neo-liberal’ an imprecise, irritating, or even meaningless term. I use it here as shorthand for the broad proposition that markets are the best way of allocating resources, that they do so best when minimally regulated, and the State should be confined to relatively limited functions.

[2] I’m thinking in particular of the influence of the ‘Bacon-Eltis’ version of the crowding out thesis. Crowding out as an idea has a longer history, but in their telling it was enrolled into the wider neo-liberal narrative of ‘private good, public bad’.

[3] This was the position of the late Tony Benn, who of course was a Lexiter avant la lettre, and, certainly in his version of it, it was not the same as either ‘nationalist’ or ‘sovereigntist’ positions.

Confusion abounds

The peril of writing a blog which is contemporaneous with events is that it can suddenly be overtaken by those events. Actually, in the years I’ve been writing this blog that has happened surprisingly rarely, but it certainly did with last week’s post. There, I wrote about how Brexit was seemingly in the process of being ‘cancelled’ – that is, denied a public profile - with reasons including the obviousness of the shared interests of the UK and the EU over Ukraine and the fact that “the sight of what a real violation of sovereignty, and resistance to it, looks like throws a sharp light on the asinine idea that EU membership entailed a loss of sovereignty in any serious sense or that Brexit regained it”.

Within hours, Boris Johnson had made a mockery of my tentative suggestion, when he directly compared Ukraine’s defensive war against Russian military invasion with Britain’s decision to leave the EU. It was a crass and widely criticised remark which he reportedly now regrets, although no formal retraction or apology has been issued. But whilst it falsified my blog post in one way, in another it affirmed the analysis that the war ought to have discredited such a comparison.

Johnson confuses party leadership and national leadership

That’s shown by the way that Johnson’s comments were heavily criticised by senior political figures – including, most damningly, the former President of Ukraine - and media commentators across Europe, and no doubt equally resented by EU leaders. At all events, it seems to explain why Johnson wasn’t – as he had apparently wanted to be – invited to Thursday’s EU leaders’ summit, which Joe Biden also attended.

Thus whereas the leaders of the US, Germany, France and Italy were in all three back-to-back meetings in Brussels yesterday (NATO, G7, EU), Johnson was only in the first two. The war is shifting the international order in fundamental ways, including the radical change to Germany’s defence posture, and the rapidly closening relationship between NATO and the EU. This presents particular challenges for post-Brexit UK, requiring skilled diplomacy and leadership.

Instead, not for the first time, Johnson’s words have had adverse consequences, damaging to the important need for post-Brexit UK to get back ‘into the rooms’ where international decisions are discussed and made, and damaging to the vital need for an indivisible international front against Putin’s aggression. It was yet another failure of international statesmanship on his part. It was also yet another failure of domestic leadership. For if Brexiters are in any way serious about healing the divisions of Brexit, or wanting erstwhile remainers to ‘move on’, that is hardly compatible with yet again implicitly depicting those who did not want to leave the EU as in some way unpatriotic or, even, traitorous.

What he said was no slip of the tongue. It was scripted, and must surely have been approved not just by Johnson but by his advisers. His motivation would seem to simply have been shoring up his waning support amongst leave voters. For it shouldn’t be forgotten that the absurd and offensive notion that Brexit was some sort of national liberation from an invader or an occupier is a pervasive belief amongst hard core Brexiters.

Moreover, it was obviously no coincidence that this was a party conference speech. As with Theresa May’s 2016 conference speech – when she virtually declared hard Brexit and indubitably set the date for triggering Article 50 – and Johnson’s opportunistic promises about rising real wages (now no longer mentioned) at last year’s conference, this illustrates a central issue. To a very large extent, the preferences and prejudices of the rather small and ageing membership of the Tory Party, which has become to all intents and purposes ‘UKIP-ified’, drive national politics, and especially everything Brexit-related. Almost as important as the party membership are those who lurk outside as members or supporters of whatever the Brexit Party is called now, under Farage or whoever its notional leader is.

Taken together, that is the audience that matters to Johnson because, given the nature of the UK electoral system, he need not care about further damaging the UK’s international reputation or its internal cohesion. Or, at least, he need not care about these things given that he has no sense of morality or responsibility. Whether that completely invalidates my ‘cancelling Brexit’ thesis I’m not sure, though. It may well be that Johnson finds that, as perhaps was the case on this occasion, there is sufficient backlash even from Brexiters, and insufficient take-up for his attempt to re-ignite the Brexit battles, to make it worth his while. But it will be that calculation, rather than any regard for principle, that shapes events. Watch this space.

P&O: clarifying confusions

What had already begun to emerge as I wrote the previous post was the brutal mass sacking of 800 employees of P&O Ferries. I was quite careful in wording my comments, in order to convey two points about how the sackings related to Brexit. To recap, these are, first, that the decline of UK-EU trade is certainly one reason, along with the pandemic, why P&O believed there was a business case for the sackings. The second is that the sackings give the lie to the claim by some Brexiters that leaving the EU would prevent such corporate behaviour. The RMT union has been remarkably silent about the fact that its leadership recommended that its members vote leave in 2016 with one reason being “to end attacks on seafarers and the offshore workers” (note how unequivocal the wording is). Those who heeded the advice on that basis may now wonder what it has achieved. Meanwhile, Farage’s whine that “Brexit was about putting our people first” ought – if he had a shred of integrity – to cause him to admit that he had misled British workers.

However, despite a veritable torrent of claims on social media, mainly from anti-Brexiters, the sackings do not show that British workers have less rights than they did before Brexit and nor is it the case (a different way of making the same claim) that these sackings would not have been possible but for Brexit. The reason is simple: UK employment law has not changed since Brexit and workers’ rights have not been reduced. Of course it is well-known that many free-market Brexiters would like to do so, have expressed dissatisfaction that the government hasn’t done so, and may well get their way in the future. But, for now, nothing (relevant) has changed.

Why, then, is it only British workers who are affected? The answer is two-fold. Firstly, it’s probably not only British workers (and certainly isn’t only British residents). It is, more precisely, workers on contracts governed by British employment law (some reports say, specifically, Jersey law) most of whom may be, but not all of whom necessarily are, British nationals. Secondly, this law gives less protection than, for example, that in France, Ireland or Netherlands, but this isn’t because of Brexit – it was the case before Brexit and it is still the case after Brexit, as a result of decisions by British governments. In fact, ‘remainers’ who don’t take this point are ironically replicating the Brexiter narrative which denies this and all the many other ways in which EU member states are not governed by a single, uniform, EU-wide, legal system.

There is another connection, which is subtle and indirect, between Brexit and the fact that P&O did not give the government a 45-day advance warning of the mass sacking. It was reported this week that in February 2018 the then Transport Secretary Chris Grayling amended the rules so that such warnings needed only to be given to the country where a vessel was registered. This was before Brexit, and nothing to do with Brexit – indeed it was to comply with an amendment to an EU Directive. What this report doesn’t mention is that, in January 2019, P&O announced it would re-flag all its UK-registered boats to Cyprus in advance of Brexit, to make its operations and accounting simpler. This was overtly a consequence of Brexit, but it also had the consequence (whether it was a motivation at the time is impossible to know, but P&O said it wasn’t) that mass sackings of UK contracted workers on those vessels did not have to be notified in advance to the UK authorities.

Of course, even if Brexit had not happened, P&O could have re-registered its boats if what it wanted had been (or became) to take advantage of the change in regulations. Equally, once Brexit had happened the UK could have reversed that change or, both before and after, could have ‘gold-plated’ it by, for example, requiring notification to both UK authorities and those where the vessel was registered. And in any case, even if notification had had to be given to the government, it would not have prevented the sackings, though it would have changed the political dynamics around them. So this isn’t a ‘smoking gun’ in which Brexit (or, as Johnson seemed to claim this week, the EU) is responsible for the sackings or the manner in which they were administered. Rather, it reveals several layers of complexity which, as with so much else about Brexit, make this a confusing issue.

Nor does any of the above have any bearing on the different question of whether the sackings, or the way they were undertaken, is itself legal. That remains to be seen (£), although P&O have already admitted they broke the law on trade union consultation. But its legality or otherwise has nothing to do with the fact that it happened after, rather than before, Brexit.

What this episode really points up is the way that economic nationalists and nativists were looking in the wrong direction when they focussed on foreign labour coming to the UK rather than foreign capital buying up UK assets, often via complex webs of ownership. So they spent years talking about exactly what they kept insisting the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ didn’t allow them to speak of, yet said virtually nothing about what the ‘neo-liberal global elite’ didn’t want them to speak of. (That may be linked, in turn, to the causes of Brexit – in ways that are thoroughly discussed in Gerhard Schnyder’s ever-excellent Brexit Impact Tracker – though, as he makes clear, that’s a different issue to that of Brexit ‘causing’ the sackings.)

If I sound slightly irritated, it’s because it has been depressing to see so much disinformation about this coming from the ‘remain’ side, and the virulence with which some have responded to corrections to the false claim that Brexit is what made it possible for the P&O workers to be sacked in the manner that they were. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of good reasons to criticise Brexit – and good reasons, other than that one, to link the sackings to Brexit. Indeed there are also plenty of good reasons to criticise the Brexiter reaction to the sackings.

P&O: compounding confusions

Take, for example, Camilla Tominey of the Telegraph (£). First, she suggests that P&O’s financial situation is solely due to the pandemic, as if the post-Brexit decline in trade had no role at all. Second, she rightly says that foreign-owned companies wanting to replace British workers with cheaper labour isn’t a consequence of Brexit – and then asserts that it was such behaviours that motivated millions to vote for it. But if the implication is that they thought Brexit would prevent such behaviour then, like Farage, she fails to acknowledge that it manifestly hasn’t delivered that promise.

Finally, she claims that Brexit is helpful in this situation as it enables the UK to have Freeports and, since DP World (P&O’s owner) has a contract for two of these, the government now has a way of penalising the company. Her punch line is that “you won’t hear many Remainers admitting to that”. Which is true, because it’s nonsense. Freeports were possible whilst an EU member, and whilst it is the case that the government envisages UK Freeports as operating differently to the way the EU would allow, that is irrelevant to Tominey’s ‘penalty’ argument which would apply equally whatever form Freeports took. In any case, it seems unlikely that the government has any intention of withdrawing the contracts from DP, judging by Johnson’s dismissal of the suggestion at PMQs this week (11.39-12.25 contains the relevant section).

Then, rather more piquantly, there is the reaction of Dover MP and ardent Brexiter Natalie Elphicke. Last month, she caused much mirth by saying that the lorry queues in her constituency were nothing to do with Brexit, but caused by Brussels’ bureaucracy. This week, she turned up at a demonstration in Dover to protest against the sackings and, deliciously, joined in the chants of “shame on you” before realising that the ‘you’ referred to Elphicke herself for voting against a recent Labour proposal to outlaw the ‘fire and re-hire’ tactic that P&O had employed. She has since been complaining about the “nasty militants” (aka the workers) who heckled her, whilst also purporting to be on the side of the workers (aka the nasty militants) against P&O and then, like all Tory MPs, abstaining on a fresh Labour attempt to end fire and re-hire. All in all, she seems … confused.

Confusions - or contradictions?

Confusion, it seems, is the order of the day. Sometimes, it comes from Northern Irish unionist Brexiters like DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson who, as the SDLP’s Matthew O’Toole pithily observes, has still, after six years, not worked out that Brexit and the destabilisation of the union are inseparable. And, astonishingly, David Frost still doesn’t grasp one of the key reasons why this is so. More understandable is the confusion of those who did not, and probably still do not, support Brexit but are obliged by circumstance to claim to have seen the light. It’s a manoeuvre that plenty of Tory MPs have made, with more or less conviction and convincingness, and this week it was the turn of the new leader of the CBI, Tony Danker (£).

Danker, for entirely defensible reasons, is trying to repair the breach between the CBI and the government over Brexit. It is understandable and defensible because no lobbying group is going to get far with this government if it’s perceived to be hostile to Brexit. In doing so, though, he – deliberately or not, I don’t know – underlines some of the obvious problems with Brexit. For example, he suggests that business people had been opposed because they had seen it as reducing free trade, whereas he now realises that the Brexiters had thought sovereignty more important, and that they were right. But of course many Brexiters, and certainly Johnson, have never admitted there is any contradiction.

He also says that he is ‘signed up to’ the part of Brexit which is to do with a high-growth, flourishing economy, but this is exactly what Brexit can’t deliver for exactly the reasons why so many businesses didn’t support it. He calls for the government to think of international trade in terms of services, but it is precisely services trade that is most undermined by Brexit, and least assisted by the ability to make independent trade deals. In a way, and again quite justifiably, the whole approach is one of challenging the Brexit government to do what has so far proved entirely impossible – to make good on the promises of Brexit. I doubt such a challenge will appeal to the Brexiters, though, especially as so many of them are now also hostile to the Net Zero goal, which Danker supports.

In all, Danker’s comments implied that there remains a considerable gap between Johnson’s populism and the pragmatic needs of businesses (and not just businesses, it could be added), even as he sought to articulate some overlap between the two. I imagine that some version of such intellectual contortions is performed daily by civil servants seeking to demonstrate fealty to Brexit whilst retaining membership of the reality-based community. Perhaps it is not fair to call this a confusion, though, so much as the irreducible contradiction of trying to make something work when, by its nature, it cannot work.

Not to be confused: different kinds of Brexit failure

From that perspective, it’s worth drawing a distinction between the ‘necessary’ and the ‘contingent’ (or 'unavoidable' and 'avoidable') failures of Brexit, which shouldn’t be confused. The most obvious ‘necessary’ failure of Brexit (or, at least, of hard Brexit) is economic. Creating barriers to trade and supply chains with Britain’s nearest and biggest economy is inevitably economically damaging. There’s really no point in arguing about this in terms of either theory or practice. If Brexiters want to say it’s a price worth paying, well, that’s a different matter and, notably, not how they presented things to voters. Another example of the necessary damage of hard Brexit is the political consequences for Northern Ireland, which, in one way or another, would exist however it was done although, again, Brexiters never presented this fact to voters.

The most obvious ‘contingent’ failure of Brexit is the relentlessly hostile, dishonest and derogatory way that the UK government has undertaken it, and the associated reputational damage. It’s true that to some extent that was inherent in a project supported by those who loathed the EU, but it was contingent in that skilled political leadership could have over-ridden or at least substantially dampened it. Instead, right from the outset, a hostile and antagonistic approach was adopted in which the EU was treated as a punitive aggressor and, sometimes, even as if it had somehow forced Brexit, or at least its consequences, on the UK.

Where does the P&O scandal fit in to this distinction? After Brexit, the UK could have reduced workers’ rights. Or, as it could have done without leaving the EU, it could have increased workers’ rights. In fact it has done nothing in either direction, primarily because Brexit promised both of these things, so doing either will split those who support it and who voted Tory in 2019. That flows from the necessity of making contradictory appeals to secure enough support for Brexit, which then hamstrung the contingent possibilities of what was done with it. So, as with a huge swathe of other regulatory issues, the result is the stasis of retained EU law.

Whilst he certainly isn’t the only person to blame, Johnson bears more responsibility than any other single individual for all of these failures. The economic damage, even of hard Brexit, could have been less but for his doctrinaire approach to ‘sovereignty’. He negotiated the Northern Ireland Protocol and pronounced it a triumph whilst lying about what it meant. He was the chief salesman of the contradictory prospectus of Brexit. And the reputational and relational damage has been positively stoked by Johnson, with his Ukraine war comparison just the latest example.

I had thought, and to an extent still think, that the war might at least dilute the contingent failures of Brexit. Perhaps my mistake – though, if so, not one I am normally guilty of - was to confuse Boris Johnson with a half-way competent leader. It’s a confusion exhibited by many people, not least Johnson himself.

Finally, whilst Johnson may have undermined the validity of my ‘cancelling Brexit’ thesis, it was well-illustrated by this week’s Spring Statement* from Chancellor Rishi Sunak, and the political discussion that has followed. For whilst the headline news reported that living standards are set to fall more sharply than at any time since the 1950s, almost no attention has been given to the role Brexit plays in this. It’s not the major role, but it is an important contributor to the economic woe – as the Office for Budget Responsibility report (pp. 62-65) made clear – and, unlike the various global factors, is both unique to, and self-inflicted upon, Britain. Yet whilst we are supposedly basking in our new-found liberation, confusingly, public mention of its consequences has, indeed, been cancelled.

 

*This statement included one mention of a supposed Brexit benefit – cutting VAT to zero on solar panels – but, as usual, it turned out to be a lie.

Performative politics is gaslighting post-Brexit Britain

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

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

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

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

The gaslighting of Britain 

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

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

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

Reality not allowed to intrude on fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasy is reality

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

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

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

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

Britain’s refugee shame

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

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

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

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

The perils of performative politics

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

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

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

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

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

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