The month since my previous post has seen some small steps towards a UK-EU ‘reset’ but, far from being a period of relative quiet, the Christmas and New Year holiday has seen no let-up in populist hatred domestically and a dramatic worsening of the international scene.
In that previous post I wrote that the glacial pace of the reset was too slow to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK. With Trump’s attack on Venezuela, that urgency is now even greater. As 2026 starts, the isolation and division which characterises post-Brexit Britain is clearer than ever and, although some criticisms of it are unfair, the government’s weakness and unpopularity make it inadequate to the task of dealing with the scale of the dangers the country faces.
The lessons of Erasmus
As foreshadowed in my last post, it was announced just before Christmas that the UK will participate in the Erasmus+ study scheme from 2027. This represents perhaps the most significant, or at least most high-profile, ‘softening’ of Brexit since the terms of leaving were agreed by Boris Johnson, and the most tangible fruit of the Labour government’s ‘reset’. So it shouldn’t be dismissed as trivial. On the other hand, even leaving aside the wider issues discussed later in this post, it shouldn’t be forgotten that alongside any closening of relations there are, as Politico reported this week, myriad ways in which changing EU regulations are creating ‘passive divergence’. And whilst there are reports of new government measures to facilitate extensive UK ‘alignment’ with single market regulations, the usual questions about what the EU will agree to remain. In many ways, the domestic discussion of Brexit is one of endless repetition.
That repetitiveness was evident in the predictable cries of ‘Brexit betrayal’ which greeted the Erasmus announcement, although admittedly they seemed rather half-hearted and ritualistic. That’s partly because it is now a hopelessly dated concept, which only has traction with a few obsessives: public opinion is now firmly of the view that Brexit was a mistake, and in favour of closer relations with the EU. It’s also because, in the case of Erasmus, it’s obviously nonsense even within the Brexiters’ own terms. In January 2020 Johnson assured the House of Commons that the UK would continue to participate in the scheme, and, indeed, provision was made for that, in principle, in the subsequent Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
Perhaps for that reason, the Brexiters preferred to focus on the price tag, estimated to be £570 million in the first year, and possibly more in future years. As usual, their discussion contained a swirl of nonsense, such as comparing present costs with previous costs without allowing for inflation, ignoring the differences between Erasmus and Erasmus+, ignoring the savings from winding down the inferior post-Brexit Turing scheme, and dismissing the benefits of Erasmus+ membership. None of that is worth taking the time to unpick.
The more salient point is that the cost actually illustrates just how good a deal, just from a narrow budgetary perspective, the UK used to have as an EU member, paying £12.6 billion (net) in 2020. It is simply far less economical to negotiate selective participation in a range of (relatively) minor schemes, such as Erasmus + or the Horizon Europe research programme. We’ll see that again if, as Keir Starmer intimated last weekend is imminent, there are agreements on SPS and ETS/CBAM linkage. But, far from complaining about it, this is just another reason why the Brexiters should hang their heads in shame. So, too, should shame attach to the other attack line they ran against joining Erasmus+ which, with wearying familiarity, was that it means “opening the door to a wave of arrivals from Turkey and North Africa”.
Brexit ironies
Familiar as such xenophobia is, it has recently taken a peculiarly ironic twist. And this twist relates to the point about how Erasmus illustrates the unfolding costs of Brexit, yet is decried by Brexiters not in those terms, but as showing Labour to be economically incompetent. That twist is the flurry of stories bemoaning the ‘great exodus’ of Poles and the ‘great retreat’ of Romanians from the UK, both stories carried by the Mail. In the latter case, although it was subsequently amended, the original headline referred to Romanians as having “propped up the UK economy”. It hardly needs to be pointed out that the relentlessly hostile coverage of immigration from Eastern Europe – especially viciously directed at Romanians – from the Mail and similar papers was a, and perhaps the, key reason for Brexit.
It is not, of course, that the Mail has repented of its ways. These stories are being run not from any regret for Brexit, nor from any new-found recognition of the value of immigration, but with the particular angle that they show that under the Labour government the UK is becoming an economic failure with crumbling public services and spiralling crime, and that those who can escape are doing so. That some of this might, both in general, and in relation to the departure of EU nationals in particular, be due to Brexit is ignored and, instead, is ascribed entirely to the failures of the government since July 2024. In a similar vein, the post-Brexit trade deal with Australia, which the Brexiters once lauded as a great Brexit benefit, is now being positioned by them (£) as an example of Labour ‘betraying’ British farmers. It will be one of the great political ironies if Labour end up being blamed both for the consequences of Brexit and for its betrayal.
The great hate
These stories are in turn part of a ferocious and increasingly unhinged attack upon the Labour government and, more fundamentally, upon the nature of contemporary Britain. It’s not unusual for Labour governments to face hostility from the right-wing media and, goodness knows, this government has done plenty of things which warrant criticism, but I don’t think that it has ever been on this scale before. What is certainly distinctive is the way that it is now taking the form of an almost psychotic frenzy of hatred directed at almost everything about Britain. That has been developing for a while, but has been especially striking over the holiday period, including an outpouring of social media fury about the King’s Speech having been ‘traitorous’ (specifically for referring to diversity as a strength, but his supposed treachery is a recurring far-right claim), and about London’s New Year firework display showing the stars of the EU flag at one stage.
The latter is just one part of what has become a tidal wave of ‘anti-London’ diatribes, depicting Britain’s capital city as a lawless dystopia, which is apparently to be the theme of Reform’s campaign for the Mayoralty. These diatribes, as Robert Shrimsley recently discussed in the Financial Times (£), have as their guiding thread the linkage of this supposed dystopia to London’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and are almost invariably accompanied by viciously racist comments about Mayor Sadiq Khan, comments echoed and amplified by Donald Trump’s obsessive verbal bullying of Khan.
There can certainly be no mistaking the viciousness and racism of the way that not just London but the whole of Britain is being portrayed as in the grip of an explosion of crime. Numerous high-profile media and social media influencers routinely highlight in lurid detail every crime, especially every sexual crime, committed by anyone with a dark skin and a foreign-sounding name, especially a Muslim-sounding name. That they never mention the much larger number of crimes committed by white Britons reveals something worse than hypocrisy. It reveals that they don’t actually care about the crimes, or the victims of crimes, but regard them solely as an opportunity to pursue their vendetta. And from that it is not a huge step to surmise that at least some of them actually welcome such crimes being committed, so as to provide yet another weapon in this campaign of hate and fearmongering. Increasingly, these same people are talking openly about the possibility, and even the need, for civil unrest or even civil war.
Readers may notice that I have neither named nor linked to any of these influencers, and that is because, despite invariably bleating about free speech, and the tyranny of cancel culture, these people would certainly seek to arraign me before the court of social media, and perhaps the court of libel, were it to come to their attention that I had done so. That is just one part of the climate of fear they have already created. We are now truly in the situation – the exact obverse of what they claim to be the case for critics of multi-culturalism – that we all know what is going on but we aren’t allowed to say it.
Of course, it can be objected that these media commentators, and the legions of their followers who share their comments, are only a relatively small, extremist, bubble who have always been with us in one form or another. It’s all too easy to scroll though ‘X’ and get a distorted picture of where public opinion lies. But it’s my impression – that’s all it is, and I can’t prove it – that the scale and the ferocity of it have increased substantially in recent months, and that it is gaining increasing traction with the general public. That need not, and probably does not, mean that all the wild claims and spittle-flecked hatred achieve public endorsement, but it does mean that they seep, slightly diluted, into every-day ‘common sense’.
Starmer’s woes
This is one plausible explanation for a highly revealing opinion poll published just before Christmas which showed a huge gulf between perceptions of whether 2025 had been a good year for respondents, personally, and whether it had been a good year for the country (and their expectations for 2026). For example, 36% thought 2025 had been good for them personally, and 27% thought it had been bad, whereas 6% thought it had been a good year for the country and 66% thought it had been bad. Other polls have shown similar disjunctures in relation to crime, the NHS, the impact of asylum seekers and so on.
My suggestion is that this reflects the malign influence of a commentariat determined to depict a country in crisis (and since the purpose of influencers is, by definition, to have influence, this is not an unreasonable suggestion). And whilst their agenda is transparently one based not just on racism but on hostility to all manifestations of social liberalism, it is unintentionally aided by those on the liberal-left who, angered and disappointed by the inadequacy of the Labour government, have their own reasons to join in. As with the hostility of the right-wing press, that is the fate of all Labour governments, even those considerably less inept than the present one, but the current version is different, for two reasons.
One is, indeed, the sheer ferocity of the onslaught. The extent of the loathing of Labour (£), and especially of Starmer and Reeves, seems totally out of proportion to any offences they may have committed. The other difference is the nature of the end-game. Unlike in the past, this is not all leading to the installation of a Conservative government. It is leading to a Reform, or some kind of Reform-Tory, government of a sort we have never seen before. Its agenda will be one bent on the destruction of established institutions – it tells you something when even the King is depicted as an enemy of the people – and the rule of law, whilst also being dangerously incompetent (as Reform’s record in local government abundantly demonstrates).
There’s no concealment of what is in prospect. Farage’s ‘New Year message’ spelt it out. When a politician starts talking about the government “making sure the young are taught correctly about our history”, you can be certain that authoritarianism is in the offing; when he starts talking about making “the UK the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency” you can be certain that this authoritarianism will be accompanied by economic chaos. There’s plenty more to be alarmed about in Farage’s vision of the future, but for present purposes note that its opening framing is that Britain is “gloomier” than it has ever been, with people “frightened to walk down the street”. It is precisely the picture painted by the far-right influencers on social media, rendered in slightly sanitized form for a public softened-up by their influence to be receptive to Farage’s message.
There is little reason to have any confidence in the Labour government’s ability to blunt this message. That is partly for the widely-discussed reasons of its communicative failures, lack of a coherent policy or ideological agenda, and Starmer’s constipated, uninspiring leadership. But it is also because of the implications of the opinion poll just mentioned. Starmer’s New Year message was one rooted in the standard centre-left position, not unreasonable in itself, that voters want to see concrete change in their lives, and especially improvements in their living standards and public services. Yet, as that opinion poll shows, even if voters’ personal experiences are positive, they can still regard the country as a whole as being in a parlous position.
It is very hard to tackle that political mentality through any policy agenda, in the normal sense of the term. If it can be tackled, it is through a convincing counter-narrative to that of Farage et al. Since his narrative is primarily based on blaming immigration and multi-culturalism for everything, the counter to it must be to provide positive advocacy of those things. And it is probably already too late for Starmer’s Labour to do that since they have so frequently deployed, in both rhetoric and policy, precisely the same narrative as Farage, apparently in the misguided belief that doing so will reduce his support.
I don’t mean by this the stupidity that ‘there’s no difference’ between Starmer and Farage or Labour and Reform, the line being pushed by Green party leader Zack Polanski (and, yes, I do know how many readers of this blog are going to take umbrage at my comment). Anyone who thinks that is in for a nasty shock if we get a Farage-led government. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there is now a sense that public opinion about Starmer has crossed a threshold whereby almost anything he says or does is derided from almost all points of the political spectrum.
The Venezuela crisis
This was evident in reactions to his response to the biggest event since my last post, Trump’s attack on Venezuela. It was a highly diplomatic response, in the literal sense of the term, avoiding open criticism of Trump’s actions but also avoiding endorsement of them. Critics on the right immediately denounced it for that lack of endorsement, which they attributed to “the long love affair the Left has enjoyed with the basket-case communist country” and “his party's veneration of Nicolas Maduro's failed regime”. This was self-evidently ludicrous, since the statement said that the UK “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime”.
Meanwhile, critics on the liberal-left falsely claimed that Starmer had explicitly supported what Trump had done, whereas in fact he has been studiedly silent about that, a silence leading many, including LibDem leader Ed Davey, to demand that he condemn it as illegal. But giddy moral rectitude is an easy indulgence for those who have no responsibility for its consequences. The reality is that open condemnation from Starmer would be both foolhardy and pointless, and the statements from Emmanuel Macron and Friederich Merz, as well as from Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, were similarly cautious for the same reason.
That reason is so obvious it should hardly need stating: the UK and the EU are far too dependent on US defence and intelligence capabilities to risk being subjected to Trump’s thin-skinned vengeful bullying. It is apparently not just Brexiters who need to understand that the UK is no longer a world power. Equally, it is not just Brexiters who need to lose their infatuation with WW2 comparisons: in particular, comparisons with pre-war appeasement of Hitler are entirely bogus because, unlike then, the situation we face is one where a longstanding major ally has gone rogue whilst we are still trapped in very high dependence upon them. This is an astonishingly dangerous situation and navigating it requires a far more serious response than most of Starmer’s critics seem to understand but also, I fear, than he, himself, understands.
Starmer’s options
Were Starmer to denounce Trump it would have zero effect on what the US does. And, precisely because it would have no effect on the US, it would also do nothing to constrain Russia and China. Certainly, any idea that issuing a robust communiqué about Venezuela would inhibit Trump’s increasingly vocal threats to take control of Greenland is utterly ludicrous. But it would be highly likely to prompt US retaliation. And suppose that, for example, that retaliation was to cut the UK out of counter-terrorism intelligence-sharing, and the result was a successful terrorist attack. Who, then, would applaud Starmer’s ‘courage’? Instead, he would be pilloried, including by the very people who now condemn him, for his failure to manage relations with the US, no matter who the President was. Even without such drastic retaliation, the prospects for holding Trump to any kind of support for Ukraine would be even further reduced.
To that extent, Starmer’s conduct this week has been well-judged. But the real point about the Venezuela attack is that it is the latest and starkest reminder, to both the UK and the EU, that they need to reduce and ultimately end reliance upon the US with maximum urgency. And the horrible suspicion is that Starmer, and at least some EU leaders, hold the delusion that they just have to ‘wait it out’ and Trump will disappear and ‘normality’ will return. If so, apart from it being highly questionable that there will be such a return, it ignores that much can happen meanwhile. That includes Trump acting on his latest threats to Colombia and Cuba, though if and when that happens the UK and EU responses are likely to be similar to those which have followed the Venezuela attack, and for the same reason. The hard truth is that it is in the interests of neither the UK nor the EU to die on the hill of an unwinnable war of words about Latin American sovereignty: the crucial line for transatlantic relations is Greenland.
The Trump administration’s words could not be clearer: it is explicit policy that Greenland is to become part of the US. If acted upon, that will be the point at which what remains of the entire post-WW2 international order collapses, more even than any outcome in Ukraine, because Denmark is a member of NATO. There are signs that this is the line which the UK and the EU are gearing up to defend. Starmer’s language this week in defending Greenland’s sovereignty has been far less ambiguous than what he said about Venezuela, and the joint statement he signed with several EU/NATO leaders on Tuesday was even more robust. In this case, unlike protesting about Venezuela, there is a possibility that words could make a difference: it’s just possible that even Trump will baulk at the enormity of what an annexation of Greenland would mean.
However, it is equally, if not more, likely that it will have no effect (the Tuesday statement certainly had no immediate impact on US demands), and that likelihood increases if words are all there are. So, either way, words are emphatically not enough. They must be backed by actions and, as the very fact of there being a joint statement implies, those actions must involve both the UK and the EU. What is needed, not at some vague future date but right now, is the rapid development of intense and close UK-EU cooperation on every facet of defence, security, and intelligence capability. The demand on Starmer should not be for him to make pointless and counter-productive rhetorical gestures about Venezuela, but to pursue this course of action as an overriding national priority.
Surrounded and divided
That, inevitably, brings us back to Brexit, which has made such a course of action far more difficult for both the UK and the EU. The Venezuela attack is the sharpest reminder yet of the geo-political folly of Brexit, which I discussed in detail most recently in my last post of 2025. In particular, it underscores that we are now in an era where great powers carve out spheres of influence based on brute force rather than any system of rules and rights. Hence there could hardly have been a more inane response than Farage’s suggestion that the attack might “make China and Russia think twice”, since it will self-evidently embolden them to grab control in their own spheres. That inanity was also a reminder of the utter disaster that would ensue were Farage ever to become Prime Minister.
Some compare this new era to the international relations of the Nineteenth Century: if so, one difference is that the UK is no longer amongst the great powers. Others suggest that the post-war rules-based international order never amounted to much, and the brute force of great powers persisted: if so, one difference is that the UK can no longer look to be within the protective umbrella of the US and instead, like the EU, is regarded as itself being a target for political interference, as the US National Security Strategy makes clear. Brexit was always a strategic error for the UK but, as things have turned out, it also came at exactly the moment to make that error catastrophic.
In this context, the government’s baby-steps, such as joining Erasmus+ and speaking in increasingly positive terms about “closer ties” with the EU, whilst welcome in themselves, are wholly inadequate to the situation of being squashed between two predatory super-powers. Meanwhile, the Brexitist opposition to even those steps, and the pro-Trump and pro-Putin populist and far-right campaign to destabilize Britain from within, are ever-more obviously the activities of a Fifth Column.
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Friday, 9 January 2026
Friday, 12 December 2025
Is the tide turning?
Is it the case, as many are suggesting, that the Brexit wind is starting to change or, in a different metaphor, that the tide has turned? It’s tempting to think so when seeing Ryan Bourne, one of the original ‘Economists for Brexit’, argue that the economic costs of Brexit are now undeniable (£). Admittedly, the piece is caveated and, admittedly, Bourne was hardly the most high-profile even of the rather exclusive club of economists who believed Brexit was a good idea. Still, such honesty from the advocates of Brexit is sufficiently rare to make it noteworthy. Meanwhile, Jeremy Warner, has recently written that “Brexit has been an unmitigated economic failure” (£). I may be wrong, but I don’t think Warner was ever an advocate of Brexit but, even so, it’s quite something for a senior business and economics commentator of the Telegraph, of all papers, to say such a thing.
Perhaps more striking was Kemi Badenoch’s quiet inclusion of Brexit in a list of recent economic “shocks”, with the implication that it had been a “foolish” policy. It was said almost in passing and it’s perfectly possible she didn’t understand the implications. Or perhaps, rather as happened with the Suez crisis, it is now seen as self-evident that Brexit is a mistake. But, if so, it is simply not enough to pass over it as if it had been some unfortunate accident upon which it is better not to dwell. It needs to be openly acknowledged and its consequences addressed. Moreover, even if the Brexit tide is turning then, to mangle several metaphors, it is doing so at too glacial a pace to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK.
Customary confusions
One piece of evidence cited for the ‘turning tide’ thesis is the rash of speculation that the government is considering ‘rejoining the customs union’. Seasoned Brexit-watchers will appreciate the weight of exhaustion and depression carried in the scare quotes I put around those words. For as I and many others have been trying to explain ever since 2016, Britain cannot join, rejoin (or, as used to be discussed, stay in) the customs union without being a member of the EU. What might be possible would be to agree to be in a customs union with the EU, in the way, though not necessarily on the same terms, that Turkey has agreed with the EU. This distinction and its implications have recently been re-explained by Joel Reland of UKICE.
This isn’t just a matter of being pedantic about terminology. I understand why some people might use ‘rejoining the customs union’ as a shorthand term. But the way that it is still being used by senior politicians and journalists is indicative of the way that, almost ten years since the referendum, too many of them still don’t really understand what Brexit means. Yet even that doesn’t fully explain the exhaustion and depression, because what goes with the lack of understanding is a sense that we’re still casting around for ways to ‘leave the EU without really leaving the EU’. In relation to customs, I’ve lost count of the number of possible arrangements that have been floated over the years but my post of May 2018 captures some of that dismal story. So it may be not so much a matter of the ‘tide turning’ as yet another iteration of its ebb and flow.
Either way, a Guardian report last weekend suggested that a customs union is being actively, albeit informally, discussed within government, and that the elevation of Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds to the Cabinet might give added impetus to this discussion (yet, a few days later, he poured scorn on the idea). Meanwhile, the Mail angrily reported that Justice Secretary David Lammy “refused seven times to rule out” rejoining the customs union (which, typically of the paper, it not only misdescribes as such, but also misdescribes as “reversing Brexit”), as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting and, according to an angrily-headlined non-story in the Express, Rachel Reeves. There’s certainly some evidence that voters, especially Labour voters, would welcome it, but Keir Starmer has said he is not “planning” any such move, and most Labour MPs abstained on a LibDem-initiated parliamentary vote this week.
Customary questions
That this vote was held reflected the fact that a customs union has long been advocated by the LibDems, whilst Labour MPs’ abstentions reflected that it would cross one of their party’s high-profile manifesto ‘red lines’ (although if that ever comes to be breached then, ironically, the very inaccuracy of the term provides a sliver of wriggle room, since the government could, truthfully if tricksily, say that it was seeking a ‘bespoke customs treaty’ with the EU). If breaching that red line is now under internal discussion within the Labour Party, the reasons are obvious. In a general way, the government is desperate to boost economic growth. In a more specific way, I’ve several times made the obvious point that Labour’s long silence on the damage of Brexit was because they could hardly break it without also proposing a viable solution to it. So the government’s recent overt references to the costs of Brexit are inevitably forcing it now to consider such solutions.
However, whether a customs union would be much of a solution is questionable. Whilst the broadly negative economic effect of Brexit is indeed, as Bourne accepts, undeniable, the specific costs attributable to being outside the customs union have, so far as I know, never been disaggregated [1]. Moreover, the benefits of a customs treaty with the EU would depend on its terms and extensiveness. The Guardian report refers to unspecified House of Commons analysis estimating that “rejoining the customs union” could increase GDP by 2.2%. However, I think this is highly unlikely, if we take as accurate the OBR figure of GDP being 4% lower in the long run than it would otherwise be (admittedly, as I discussed recently, other estimates put the figure higher). For it is implausible that the costs of being outside the customs union, compared with the other main component of the costs, which come from being outside the single market, are half, or even close to half, of the total.
In fact, as trade expert Sam Lowe points out, the only real benefit of a customs union is to remove the rule of origin requirements for tariff-free trade in goods with the EU which exist within the existing UK-EU trade agreement (i.e. because, potentially, the entirety of goods trade with the EU would be tariff-free rather than being, as at present, conditional upon meeting rules of origin requirements). That would be very welcome for some products and industries, but the overall economic benefit would be relatively modest. On the other hand, it is surely the case that the costs of being outside the customs union exceed the benefits, which Starmer suggested at PMQs this week to be those coming from having an independent trade policy, since those benefits are nugatory (see Table 8, page 20, in link).
Customary disarray
In any case, it is by no means obvious how seriously we should take these latest rumours and counter-rumours, which are typical of a government in considerable disarray. Admittedly, some of the recent criticisms it has faced have been unfair, as shown by the way that the accusations that Rachel Reeves “lied” (£) ahead of the budget have unwound under scrutiny and calls for her to be investigated for breaking the ministerial code have been rejected by the independent ethics advisor. Likewise, the furious accusations made a few weeks ago that the government, and ‘Number 10’ in particular, blocked the prosecution of the ‘China spy case’ have been shown to be false by the report of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. And some of the attacks are simply ludicrous, such as the manufactured outrage about Reeves having ‘only’ been the winner of the 1993 ‘under-14 title for the British Women’s Chess Association Girls Championship’ rather than the ‘British girls’ under-14 champion’.
These and other stories are undoubtedly contributing to the impression that the government is useless and dishonest, and its failure to counter that impression effectively could itself be held against it. But it’s not necessary to indulge in false or unfair accusations to sustain the claim of governmental disarray and, in particular, the claim that it lacks any sense of coherent strategy or purpose.
It’s not just the chaotic leaks and hints about the budget. It’s the way that policies and initiatives appear or disappear at random. Examples include refusing to lift the ‘two child benefit’ cap and then embracing it as a central part of the government’s “moral mission”. Or suddenly floating the Digital ID Card scheme as a “priority”, without any details of how it would work, and then delaying even the consultation about it. Or, most recently, and again out of the blue, announcing a major policy to restrict trial by jury but, again, with no apparent idea about how or when this will be implemented. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits or demerits of any of these policies: my point is simply that they come from nowhere and, very often, go nowhere, or get reversed.
Customary absence of strategy
So within this context it’s reasonable to be sceptical about whether the latest ‘customs union’ rumours will amount to anything (personally, I don’t think they will), and that’s all the more so because within the specific policy area of relations with the EU the government is also woefully lacking in strategic coherence or consistency. This absence of strategy has been evident from the outset, and I wrote a detailed post in August 2024 about why it is a problem. That problem has become even more obvious since. For example, we have seen the government’s refusal to countenance a Youth Mobility Scheme, then to embrace an “ambitious” version of it, and currently to be mired in reportedly sour negotiations with the EU about how extensive it will be (£).
That sourness would appear to be replicated across the wider ‘reset’ negotiations, and these have now failed as regards the UK’s possible participation in SAFE, the EU defence loan fund, apparently because the price of doing so was deemed too high by the government (and, it seems, set so high because of France’s protectionism of its defence industry). Strangely, Thomas-Symonds commented that the UK “will still be able to participate in projects through SAFE on third-country terms”, as if this represented some kind of partial success rather than being the definition of what failure meant. Meanwhile, the January 2026 deadlines for agreeing linkages on Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) are looming and for all the talk from both the UK and the EU of wanting to move “swiftly” on this and other reset issues, there has been little sign of urgency (though there is, admittedly not for the first time, a report that agreement on UK participation in Erasmus+ is imminent).
That is understandable from an EU perspective. The issue of post-Brexit relations with the UK is no longer the priority it was during the Article 50 negotiations, and the broad contours of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU. It may be that the latest statements from the Trump regime, discussed below, will create more urgency for both the UK and the EU as regards cooperation, if not trade. But, even if so, as I’ve pointed out many times before there is very little sense for the EU in agreeing to substantially deeper relations when there is every prospect of a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government backtracking in a very few years’ time.
However, that possibility (both of there being such a government, and of it being able to backtrack) is not something independent of the present government’s conduct. That’s obviously true in a general way, because if this government were to perform better and be more popular, it would have a better chance of re-election. But it is also true in the narrow sense of this government’s EU strategy. For one of the things which such a strategy could deliver would be to begin the process of changing the domestic political narrative about the EU, and to begin to embed that narrative in a way that would make it less vulnerable to being undermined by future governments. To be more specific, for all that there has been some improvement in the tone of the UK-EU relationship under Labour, the domestic narrative remains one of suspicious, sullen instrumentalism. This in turn is what has made the reset negotiations a sour battle over budget contributions.
Changing the narrative
In this sense, even if the present noises about seeking a customs union do translate into government policy it will do nothing to change that narrative. It still positions the relationship as one of instrumental calculation just as, looking back, was the case throughout the UK’s membership. If there is to be a ‘reset’ of that decades-long narrative then it needs to encompass much more than simply regarding Brexit as a ‘mistake’ because of its economic costs (although that is true) and become a positive affirmation of European identity.
I don’t by this mean some starry-eyed idealism. The EU has, since its very earliest origins, been about a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of cooperation, not least as a vehicle for preventing its members going to war. For the UK, now, that means a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of sovereignty-sharing and of the realities of regionalism (in fact, if an UK-EU customs union comes to pass then its main value could be to symbolise that recognition). For whilst it’s true that sovereignty-sharing can bring with it economic advantages, that is neither the sole nor the deepest motivation. The deepest motivation is that of national strategy.
In a post in January 2019, I argued that Brexit was a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represented an unprecedented failure of British statecraft. It was not simply a bad strategy, but was the abandonment of any strategy at all. I still think that is the best post on this blog, or at least the one which best-articulates why I was, and still am, convinced that Brexit was a national catastrophe. In summary, the argument was that Brexit was based on a failure to understand the regionalization of economics and the multi-polar nature of international relations.
I obviously couldn’t predict the events that have happened since, but they have amply justified that analysis. I mean, in particular, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the second Trump presidency, and the continuing rise of autocratic China, as well as some of the effects of the pandemic on international supply chains. Over and over again in the course of these events it has been clear that the UK’s interests and values are substantially aligned with the EU’s, on all sorts of international issues apart from Ukraine, such as climate change, even as Brexit has severed the institutional connection between them. And, just in the last week, this has been forcefully re-emphasised by the publication of the US National Security Strategy.
Trump’s "declaration of political war"
This extraordinary and alarming document is, as Bill Emmott, the Chair of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, puts it “a declaration of [political] war against European democracy and the European way of life”. Brexit notwithstanding, the document makes no clear distinction between the UK and the EU [2] in terms of its endorsement of all the now-standard critiques of European countries that spew out daily from the American ethno-nationalist right. These include echoing the ‘great replacement theory’, the racist conspiracy theory that there is a concerted attempt to ‘replace indigenous Europeans’ (implicitly meaning white people) with ‘non-European immigrants’ (implicitly meaning non-whites, and especially Muslims), such that Europe faces imminent “civilizational erasure”, whilst offering active support to populist ethno-nationalist parties in European countries.
As readers of this blog probably know, Britain in general, and London and other large cities in particular, are now routinely depicted in America as crime-ridden hell-holes, subject to Sharia Law, where anyone who has the temerity to complain is immediately imprisoned on the personal diktat of Keir Starmer. It is insane but, aided and abetted by similarly insane diatribes from British populists, it is not just believed by many Americans but, with this strategy document, has now effectively been endorsed by the American state. It’s true that, when reading it, one should be aware that Trump is notoriously inconsistent, but most of the document echoes his and his allies’ longstanding views and commitments. That includes the way that the report is relentlessly pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, making it unsurprising that it was hailed by Moscow as largely aligned with Putin’s own strategic vision.
Thus, if it was not obvious before, there is now an open set of alliances and affinities between Trump, Putin and European, including British, populists. Equally obvious, and underscored by this week’s meeting between Farage and the Rassemblement National leader Jordan Bardella, are the alliances and affinities between Reform and other European populists.
Alarming as this is, it could also be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government. It’s becoming extremely unlikely that the US polity, or the ‘global order’, will ever return to the pre-Trump era even when Trump himself departs. That world has passed. This means that the already-apparent strategic mistake of Brexit has now become an imminent crisis. Any fantasy of ‘nimble’ Britain using its post-Brexit sovereignty to thread its way around the big power blocs, making selective accommodations with each of them, is now utterly redundant.
This doesn’t mean that rejoining – or more accurately joining – the EU is suddenly going to come on the agenda for either the UK or the EU. The road to that is long and unclear. But it could mean something like the course advocated this week by Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who chairs the Labour Movement for Europe. She proposes a thorough official investigation of the impact of Brexit; a more urgent and extensive, but less instrumental, approach to the UK-EU reset; and open parliamentary debates on the entire issue. Within this, she calls for the government to “forget red lines” but also for pro-Europeans to recognize that “rejoin is, right now, an impossibility”. In short, she is calling for openness, honesty and realism about Brexit and, without endorsing every word of the article, it is hard to disagree that this is precisely what has been lacking since 2016 (if not earlier).
Picking sides
Creasy is another of the voices who, like those with which I began this post, see the present moment as one where, as she puts it, “a window of opportunity to change course may be opening”, partly for the reasons of national strategy just alluded to: “not just because we want better trade but because, in a world shaped by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Britain and Europe need each other more than ever.” I’ve written in that past about this new global divide, and how it has rendered Brexit an even more obvious strategic mistake, but the new US National Security Strategy clarifies what is at stake.
As Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times explains, it:
“… makes clear that there is now a battle under way between two different versions of the west — which pits the US and Europe against each other. The Trump administration view of “western civilisation” is based on race, Christianity and nationalism. The European version is a liberal view founded on democracy, human rights and the rule of law, including international law.”
But this moment is not just one that clarifies international relations, it also clarifies the nature of UK domestic political choices. More than ever before it is obvious that Reform and much of the Conservative Party are completely aligned with the Trump view of ‘western civilization’, which makes the next general election crucial. For the real test of whether the Brexit ‘tide has turned’ will be whether the electorate – now, as Peter Kellner argues, a very different one to that of 2016 – has learned the lesson of referendum or whether it repeats its folly by endorsing Brexitism in 2029.
That is still some way off but here, too, the increasing scrutiny that Farage and his party, to his fury and consternation, are facing might suggest that the tide is turning. What is less in evidence is much sign that Starmer’s Labour understand the epochal choice which is underway and that it is going to have to pick a side, and quickly. Or, more alarmingly, the apparently growing influence of ‘Blue Labour’ in Number 10 means it will understand that there is such a choice – and will pick the wrong side.
Notes
[1] There was a government estimate in 2018 that being out of the customs union would reduce GDP by 1%, but this was a forecast based on broad, generic models. What I haven’t seen is a post-Brexit estimate of the costs of being outside the customs union in the light of the actually-agreed Trade and Cooperation Agreement and its subsequent impact.
[2] The strategy document does talk of “Britain and Ireland” as distinct from “continental Europe”, but as Ireland is an EU member this seems to be a geographical rather than a political distinction. It is also clear from Trump’s subsequent diatribe about both Paris and London (and especially London’s Mayor) that when he talks of ‘Europe’ he does not differentiate between the EU and the UK. So much for being "Mr Brexit". So much for Brexit, for that matter.
As the scheduled date of the next post would be Boxing Day, this will be the last post of this year. I will resume on Friday 9 January 2026.
Perhaps more striking was Kemi Badenoch’s quiet inclusion of Brexit in a list of recent economic “shocks”, with the implication that it had been a “foolish” policy. It was said almost in passing and it’s perfectly possible she didn’t understand the implications. Or perhaps, rather as happened with the Suez crisis, it is now seen as self-evident that Brexit is a mistake. But, if so, it is simply not enough to pass over it as if it had been some unfortunate accident upon which it is better not to dwell. It needs to be openly acknowledged and its consequences addressed. Moreover, even if the Brexit tide is turning then, to mangle several metaphors, it is doing so at too glacial a pace to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK.
Customary confusions
One piece of evidence cited for the ‘turning tide’ thesis is the rash of speculation that the government is considering ‘rejoining the customs union’. Seasoned Brexit-watchers will appreciate the weight of exhaustion and depression carried in the scare quotes I put around those words. For as I and many others have been trying to explain ever since 2016, Britain cannot join, rejoin (or, as used to be discussed, stay in) the customs union without being a member of the EU. What might be possible would be to agree to be in a customs union with the EU, in the way, though not necessarily on the same terms, that Turkey has agreed with the EU. This distinction and its implications have recently been re-explained by Joel Reland of UKICE.
This isn’t just a matter of being pedantic about terminology. I understand why some people might use ‘rejoining the customs union’ as a shorthand term. But the way that it is still being used by senior politicians and journalists is indicative of the way that, almost ten years since the referendum, too many of them still don’t really understand what Brexit means. Yet even that doesn’t fully explain the exhaustion and depression, because what goes with the lack of understanding is a sense that we’re still casting around for ways to ‘leave the EU without really leaving the EU’. In relation to customs, I’ve lost count of the number of possible arrangements that have been floated over the years but my post of May 2018 captures some of that dismal story. So it may be not so much a matter of the ‘tide turning’ as yet another iteration of its ebb and flow.
Either way, a Guardian report last weekend suggested that a customs union is being actively, albeit informally, discussed within government, and that the elevation of Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds to the Cabinet might give added impetus to this discussion (yet, a few days later, he poured scorn on the idea). Meanwhile, the Mail angrily reported that Justice Secretary David Lammy “refused seven times to rule out” rejoining the customs union (which, typically of the paper, it not only misdescribes as such, but also misdescribes as “reversing Brexit”), as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting and, according to an angrily-headlined non-story in the Express, Rachel Reeves. There’s certainly some evidence that voters, especially Labour voters, would welcome it, but Keir Starmer has said he is not “planning” any such move, and most Labour MPs abstained on a LibDem-initiated parliamentary vote this week.
Customary questions
That this vote was held reflected the fact that a customs union has long been advocated by the LibDems, whilst Labour MPs’ abstentions reflected that it would cross one of their party’s high-profile manifesto ‘red lines’ (although if that ever comes to be breached then, ironically, the very inaccuracy of the term provides a sliver of wriggle room, since the government could, truthfully if tricksily, say that it was seeking a ‘bespoke customs treaty’ with the EU). If breaching that red line is now under internal discussion within the Labour Party, the reasons are obvious. In a general way, the government is desperate to boost economic growth. In a more specific way, I’ve several times made the obvious point that Labour’s long silence on the damage of Brexit was because they could hardly break it without also proposing a viable solution to it. So the government’s recent overt references to the costs of Brexit are inevitably forcing it now to consider such solutions.
However, whether a customs union would be much of a solution is questionable. Whilst the broadly negative economic effect of Brexit is indeed, as Bourne accepts, undeniable, the specific costs attributable to being outside the customs union have, so far as I know, never been disaggregated [1]. Moreover, the benefits of a customs treaty with the EU would depend on its terms and extensiveness. The Guardian report refers to unspecified House of Commons analysis estimating that “rejoining the customs union” could increase GDP by 2.2%. However, I think this is highly unlikely, if we take as accurate the OBR figure of GDP being 4% lower in the long run than it would otherwise be (admittedly, as I discussed recently, other estimates put the figure higher). For it is implausible that the costs of being outside the customs union, compared with the other main component of the costs, which come from being outside the single market, are half, or even close to half, of the total.
In fact, as trade expert Sam Lowe points out, the only real benefit of a customs union is to remove the rule of origin requirements for tariff-free trade in goods with the EU which exist within the existing UK-EU trade agreement (i.e. because, potentially, the entirety of goods trade with the EU would be tariff-free rather than being, as at present, conditional upon meeting rules of origin requirements). That would be very welcome for some products and industries, but the overall economic benefit would be relatively modest. On the other hand, it is surely the case that the costs of being outside the customs union exceed the benefits, which Starmer suggested at PMQs this week to be those coming from having an independent trade policy, since those benefits are nugatory (see Table 8, page 20, in link).
Customary disarray
In any case, it is by no means obvious how seriously we should take these latest rumours and counter-rumours, which are typical of a government in considerable disarray. Admittedly, some of the recent criticisms it has faced have been unfair, as shown by the way that the accusations that Rachel Reeves “lied” (£) ahead of the budget have unwound under scrutiny and calls for her to be investigated for breaking the ministerial code have been rejected by the independent ethics advisor. Likewise, the furious accusations made a few weeks ago that the government, and ‘Number 10’ in particular, blocked the prosecution of the ‘China spy case’ have been shown to be false by the report of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. And some of the attacks are simply ludicrous, such as the manufactured outrage about Reeves having ‘only’ been the winner of the 1993 ‘under-14 title for the British Women’s Chess Association Girls Championship’ rather than the ‘British girls’ under-14 champion’.
These and other stories are undoubtedly contributing to the impression that the government is useless and dishonest, and its failure to counter that impression effectively could itself be held against it. But it’s not necessary to indulge in false or unfair accusations to sustain the claim of governmental disarray and, in particular, the claim that it lacks any sense of coherent strategy or purpose.
It’s not just the chaotic leaks and hints about the budget. It’s the way that policies and initiatives appear or disappear at random. Examples include refusing to lift the ‘two child benefit’ cap and then embracing it as a central part of the government’s “moral mission”. Or suddenly floating the Digital ID Card scheme as a “priority”, without any details of how it would work, and then delaying even the consultation about it. Or, most recently, and again out of the blue, announcing a major policy to restrict trial by jury but, again, with no apparent idea about how or when this will be implemented. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits or demerits of any of these policies: my point is simply that they come from nowhere and, very often, go nowhere, or get reversed.
Customary absence of strategy
So within this context it’s reasonable to be sceptical about whether the latest ‘customs union’ rumours will amount to anything (personally, I don’t think they will), and that’s all the more so because within the specific policy area of relations with the EU the government is also woefully lacking in strategic coherence or consistency. This absence of strategy has been evident from the outset, and I wrote a detailed post in August 2024 about why it is a problem. That problem has become even more obvious since. For example, we have seen the government’s refusal to countenance a Youth Mobility Scheme, then to embrace an “ambitious” version of it, and currently to be mired in reportedly sour negotiations with the EU about how extensive it will be (£).
That sourness would appear to be replicated across the wider ‘reset’ negotiations, and these have now failed as regards the UK’s possible participation in SAFE, the EU defence loan fund, apparently because the price of doing so was deemed too high by the government (and, it seems, set so high because of France’s protectionism of its defence industry). Strangely, Thomas-Symonds commented that the UK “will still be able to participate in projects through SAFE on third-country terms”, as if this represented some kind of partial success rather than being the definition of what failure meant. Meanwhile, the January 2026 deadlines for agreeing linkages on Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) are looming and for all the talk from both the UK and the EU of wanting to move “swiftly” on this and other reset issues, there has been little sign of urgency (though there is, admittedly not for the first time, a report that agreement on UK participation in Erasmus+ is imminent).
That is understandable from an EU perspective. The issue of post-Brexit relations with the UK is no longer the priority it was during the Article 50 negotiations, and the broad contours of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU. It may be that the latest statements from the Trump regime, discussed below, will create more urgency for both the UK and the EU as regards cooperation, if not trade. But, even if so, as I’ve pointed out many times before there is very little sense for the EU in agreeing to substantially deeper relations when there is every prospect of a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government backtracking in a very few years’ time.
However, that possibility (both of there being such a government, and of it being able to backtrack) is not something independent of the present government’s conduct. That’s obviously true in a general way, because if this government were to perform better and be more popular, it would have a better chance of re-election. But it is also true in the narrow sense of this government’s EU strategy. For one of the things which such a strategy could deliver would be to begin the process of changing the domestic political narrative about the EU, and to begin to embed that narrative in a way that would make it less vulnerable to being undermined by future governments. To be more specific, for all that there has been some improvement in the tone of the UK-EU relationship under Labour, the domestic narrative remains one of suspicious, sullen instrumentalism. This in turn is what has made the reset negotiations a sour battle over budget contributions.
Changing the narrative
In this sense, even if the present noises about seeking a customs union do translate into government policy it will do nothing to change that narrative. It still positions the relationship as one of instrumental calculation just as, looking back, was the case throughout the UK’s membership. If there is to be a ‘reset’ of that decades-long narrative then it needs to encompass much more than simply regarding Brexit as a ‘mistake’ because of its economic costs (although that is true) and become a positive affirmation of European identity.
I don’t by this mean some starry-eyed idealism. The EU has, since its very earliest origins, been about a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of cooperation, not least as a vehicle for preventing its members going to war. For the UK, now, that means a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of sovereignty-sharing and of the realities of regionalism (in fact, if an UK-EU customs union comes to pass then its main value could be to symbolise that recognition). For whilst it’s true that sovereignty-sharing can bring with it economic advantages, that is neither the sole nor the deepest motivation. The deepest motivation is that of national strategy.
In a post in January 2019, I argued that Brexit was a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represented an unprecedented failure of British statecraft. It was not simply a bad strategy, but was the abandonment of any strategy at all. I still think that is the best post on this blog, or at least the one which best-articulates why I was, and still am, convinced that Brexit was a national catastrophe. In summary, the argument was that Brexit was based on a failure to understand the regionalization of economics and the multi-polar nature of international relations.
I obviously couldn’t predict the events that have happened since, but they have amply justified that analysis. I mean, in particular, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the second Trump presidency, and the continuing rise of autocratic China, as well as some of the effects of the pandemic on international supply chains. Over and over again in the course of these events it has been clear that the UK’s interests and values are substantially aligned with the EU’s, on all sorts of international issues apart from Ukraine, such as climate change, even as Brexit has severed the institutional connection between them. And, just in the last week, this has been forcefully re-emphasised by the publication of the US National Security Strategy.
Trump’s "declaration of political war"
This extraordinary and alarming document is, as Bill Emmott, the Chair of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, puts it “a declaration of [political] war against European democracy and the European way of life”. Brexit notwithstanding, the document makes no clear distinction between the UK and the EU [2] in terms of its endorsement of all the now-standard critiques of European countries that spew out daily from the American ethno-nationalist right. These include echoing the ‘great replacement theory’, the racist conspiracy theory that there is a concerted attempt to ‘replace indigenous Europeans’ (implicitly meaning white people) with ‘non-European immigrants’ (implicitly meaning non-whites, and especially Muslims), such that Europe faces imminent “civilizational erasure”, whilst offering active support to populist ethno-nationalist parties in European countries.
As readers of this blog probably know, Britain in general, and London and other large cities in particular, are now routinely depicted in America as crime-ridden hell-holes, subject to Sharia Law, where anyone who has the temerity to complain is immediately imprisoned on the personal diktat of Keir Starmer. It is insane but, aided and abetted by similarly insane diatribes from British populists, it is not just believed by many Americans but, with this strategy document, has now effectively been endorsed by the American state. It’s true that, when reading it, one should be aware that Trump is notoriously inconsistent, but most of the document echoes his and his allies’ longstanding views and commitments. That includes the way that the report is relentlessly pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, making it unsurprising that it was hailed by Moscow as largely aligned with Putin’s own strategic vision.
Thus, if it was not obvious before, there is now an open set of alliances and affinities between Trump, Putin and European, including British, populists. Equally obvious, and underscored by this week’s meeting between Farage and the Rassemblement National leader Jordan Bardella, are the alliances and affinities between Reform and other European populists.
Alarming as this is, it could also be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government. It’s becoming extremely unlikely that the US polity, or the ‘global order’, will ever return to the pre-Trump era even when Trump himself departs. That world has passed. This means that the already-apparent strategic mistake of Brexit has now become an imminent crisis. Any fantasy of ‘nimble’ Britain using its post-Brexit sovereignty to thread its way around the big power blocs, making selective accommodations with each of them, is now utterly redundant.
This doesn’t mean that rejoining – or more accurately joining – the EU is suddenly going to come on the agenda for either the UK or the EU. The road to that is long and unclear. But it could mean something like the course advocated this week by Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who chairs the Labour Movement for Europe. She proposes a thorough official investigation of the impact of Brexit; a more urgent and extensive, but less instrumental, approach to the UK-EU reset; and open parliamentary debates on the entire issue. Within this, she calls for the government to “forget red lines” but also for pro-Europeans to recognize that “rejoin is, right now, an impossibility”. In short, she is calling for openness, honesty and realism about Brexit and, without endorsing every word of the article, it is hard to disagree that this is precisely what has been lacking since 2016 (if not earlier).
Picking sides
Creasy is another of the voices who, like those with which I began this post, see the present moment as one where, as she puts it, “a window of opportunity to change course may be opening”, partly for the reasons of national strategy just alluded to: “not just because we want better trade but because, in a world shaped by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Britain and Europe need each other more than ever.” I’ve written in that past about this new global divide, and how it has rendered Brexit an even more obvious strategic mistake, but the new US National Security Strategy clarifies what is at stake.
As Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times explains, it:
“… makes clear that there is now a battle under way between two different versions of the west — which pits the US and Europe against each other. The Trump administration view of “western civilisation” is based on race, Christianity and nationalism. The European version is a liberal view founded on democracy, human rights and the rule of law, including international law.”
But this moment is not just one that clarifies international relations, it also clarifies the nature of UK domestic political choices. More than ever before it is obvious that Reform and much of the Conservative Party are completely aligned with the Trump view of ‘western civilization’, which makes the next general election crucial. For the real test of whether the Brexit ‘tide has turned’ will be whether the electorate – now, as Peter Kellner argues, a very different one to that of 2016 – has learned the lesson of referendum or whether it repeats its folly by endorsing Brexitism in 2029.
That is still some way off but here, too, the increasing scrutiny that Farage and his party, to his fury and consternation, are facing might suggest that the tide is turning. What is less in evidence is much sign that Starmer’s Labour understand the epochal choice which is underway and that it is going to have to pick a side, and quickly. Or, more alarmingly, the apparently growing influence of ‘Blue Labour’ in Number 10 means it will understand that there is such a choice – and will pick the wrong side.
Notes
[1] There was a government estimate in 2018 that being out of the customs union would reduce GDP by 1%, but this was a forecast based on broad, generic models. What I haven’t seen is a post-Brexit estimate of the costs of being outside the customs union in the light of the actually-agreed Trade and Cooperation Agreement and its subsequent impact.
[2] The strategy document does talk of “Britain and Ireland” as distinct from “continental Europe”, but as Ireland is an EU member this seems to be a geographical rather than a political distinction. It is also clear from Trump’s subsequent diatribe about both Paris and London (and especially London’s Mayor) that when he talks of ‘Europe’ he does not differentiate between the EU and the UK. So much for being "Mr Brexit". So much for Brexit, for that matter.
As the scheduled date of the next post would be Boxing Day, this will be the last post of this year. I will resume on Friday 9 January 2026.
Friday, 19 September 2025
There is another country
In the two weeks since my last post, the speed and scale of events has been almost impossible to keep up with. The result is yet another very long post and I am considering reverting to posting weekly. It seems likely, especially given the slightly changed focus of the blog, that there is always going to be plenty to say.
In that previous post, after reviewing the summer’s confected crisis over asylum hotels, I wrote about the political terrain of the next few years being characterized by a battle over whether Brexit Britain is to become Brexitist Britain. Now, that doesn’t seem so much prescient as complacently languid, as if that battle were not already well under way.
Flagging dangers
This was brought home to me within a couple of days of writing the post. It wasn’t, primarily, because of that weekend’s Reform UK conference since its mixture of vileness, weirdness and madness was not exactly unexpected. Instead it was when, for the first time, I saw not just roundabouts but very long stretches of roads in my area with St. George’s flags (and occasional Union Jacks) hanging on every single lamp post for mile after mile [1]. Of course, I had read about this happening all over the country, but seeing it for myself was different. The effect was not celebratory or unifying, it was sinister, threatening, and – in its unmissable historical echoes – fascistic.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that this isn’t a word I use casually and, in any case, it is a documented fact that the origins of this spate of flag-flying lie with far-right activist groups. It is not about jolly yeomen putting out the bunting, but masked men bent on intimidation. So it was dishonest and dangerous for Labour politicians like Yvette Cooper to argue that it is in any sense a “symbol of Britain coming together” (£). It has clearly arisen on the back of this summer’s asylum hotel ‘protests’, and, as has been widely remarked, seems to symbolise division and exclusion rather than unity and inclusion.
What is actually worse, and more literally fascistic, is that it amounts to a demand for compulsory ‘unity’ through the sequestration of the public space. Criticize it, and you are deemed to have failed an imposed ‘loyalty test’. Most obviously it is aimed at immigrants, but more generally at the ‘enemies within’ – the liberally-minded and tolerant.
Sanctimony and hypocrisy
Against this background, the news broke of the murder of Charlie Kirk in the US. Immediately that was used as a pretext to attack liberals in the most vicious of terms. Whereas, only a few days before, the right in the UK and the US had been screaming about the ‘injustice’ of punishing Lucy Connelly for her use of violently inflammatory language, suddenly all they could talk of was how the liberal-left was responsible for the killing because of the language used to attack Trump and his supporters. Yet, whilst admonishing those on the left for expressing their opinions, Kirk was presented as a free speech martyr, murdered simply for speaking his mind and inviting others – in the familiar tactic of every tedious internet troll – to ‘prove me wrong’.
With equal hypocrisy, these free speech absolutists started to demand, and procure, punishments for those, including the Global Opinions Editor of the Washington Post, who refused to join in with the sanctimonious beatification of Kirk by, for example, referring to his own hate-filled rhetoric. But this is not just a matter of illogic or hypocrisy. It is part of the way that the right weaponizes liberalism against itself in a kind of political jiu-jitsu. Thus the right demands, and largely receives, civility from its political opponents, whilst refusing to accord any civility whatsoever in return. It is an asymmetry dissected in Jonathan Freedland’s compelling analysis of the Kirk murder and its aftermath.
The United States was already in a very dark place, as charted by Professor Christina Pagel’s excellent Substack post, and it is now much darker. That isn’t so much because of the possibility of escalating acts of individual violence, although that is clearly a risk, but because of the possibility of escalating state violence against its actual or perceived internal enemies.
Kirk was hardly known in this country, but his killing also had immediate reverberations here. This is just one example of a point made in a BlueSky post in response to my attempt to define Brexitism. The poster said, rightly, that one of its weaknesses was a failure to discuss the many important linkages between the far-right in the US and the UK, linkages which are both ideological and financial. Actually, it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to write in terms of the far-right, since in both the US and the UK what used to be the respectable, centrist right of politics has been virtually eviscerated.
Thuggery
At all events, following Kirk’s murder, British Brexitists immediately began to recycle (£) the talking points of the American right in pursuit of the UK culture war. His death was then invoked during last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, which attracted possibly as many as 150,000 people to London and resulted in several violent clashes with the police. This was massively short of the three million persistently, and falsely, claimed on social media, but there is no doubt that it marked a significant show of strength, and was perhaps the largest rally of its kind in the UK in recent history.
Robinson seems to be allied with, and is perhaps a member of, Advance UK, the splinter group of Reform led by Ben Habib. But, again, it is increasingly meaningless to differentiate between far-right thugs and Reform, and in fact doing so panders to Nigel Farage’s pretensions to be ‘respectable’. For example, Reform Chairman David Bull was happy to endorse the rally as a gathering of “the silent majority”, whilst Farage opined that “the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people”. Moreover, there is now a steady flow of defectors from the Tories to Reform, the latest examples including former MPs Maria Caulfield and Nadine Dorries, an acquisition of perhaps rather dubious value, and, more significantly, Danny Kruger, the oleaginous MP who was once co-leader of the New Conservative group and is strongly associated with the (paradoxically international) National Conservatism movement. Meanwhile, the Tory Party itself continues to espouse positions almost identical to those of Reform.
The American connection was most strikingly evident in Elon Musk’s extraordinarily inflammatory appearance at the rally, which included a call for the dissolution of parliament and threats that “violence is coming”. In fact, although those were the most widely quoted parts of it, what was more chilling was the way he, quite calmly, articulated or assumed an entire world view based on fantasies, distortions and lies. In a way, it was more unsettling than a spittle-flecked rant and, echoing all the invocations of ‘the silent majority’, his pitch was to the supposedly ordinary, apolitical, commonsense people of Britain.
As with the outbreak of flag-thuggery, any idea that the rally was about ‘uniting’ the country is transparently absurd. Equally, although hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers is undoubtedly the source of its core support, it is now abundantly clear that it has a more general, and very serious, intention to destroy the present government and, with that, to destroy the entire foundations of liberal democracy. It is not being hidden. Elon Musk said it, in terms. Others at the rally spoke openly of the need to assassinate Keir Starmer, even as ‘the left’ was being castigated for inciting the killing of Charlie Kirk (and, despite what some apologists say in the comments on the report linked to, this wasn’t just a ‘rogue individual’: social media is awash with similar calls).
This constitutes a dangerous moment for Britain. It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed. That has happened for many reasons, including the influence of the US right, and not just in Brexit Britain (France furnishes another example), but some of them are certainly related to Brexit and Brexitism. In particular, the relentless attacks on established institutions which Brexit gave rise to, and perhaps especially the prorogation of parliament, even though it ultimately failed, have enfeebled and de-legitimized those institutions.
Labour’s failure to lead
Worse than that, or perhaps it is simply one aspect of it, the Labour government now appears both unwilling and unable to stand up to what is happening or even to acknowledge its gravity. It has condoned rather than condemned the flagging movement and initially refused to condemn the things which were said at the Robinson rally, only the violence that accompanied it. Some condemnation did come, later, but it seemed to have been forced out under pressure, rather than being visceral, and didn’t carry any sense of the urgency of the situation. It is as if Starmer, and other government ministers, have internalized the accusations coming from Trump, Musk, and J.D. Vance, as well as from the British right, about being opposed to ‘free speech’. But no one is asking Starmer to ban such rallies, merely to use his own free speech, and his position, to lead the challenge to the things which are being said at them.
More generally, the government seems dazed by the events unfolding around it, and to have lost control of the events unfolding within it. The Angela Rayner resignation, and its aftermath, shortly followed by the Peter Mandelson fiasco, and then the resignation of Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, don’t just exemplify that loss of internal control, they exacerbate the external events. For they serve to promote one of the core drivers of Brexitism, namely that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is nothing to lose, and perhaps everything to gain, by rejecting the entirety of mainstream politics.
The reasons why the government has fallen into such disarray have been widely discussed, many of them circling around the supposed migration crisis. But that issue is only part of the government’s wider malaise which, although there are a range of diagnoses, almost all commentators ascribe to its failure to communicate its fundamental purpose and guiding values. Even more damningly, many suspect that the failure is not one of communication but of a terrible dark hole such that there is no fundamental purpose, nor any guiding values, to be communicated.
What makes this all the more damaging is that to the extent that the government has ever made its purpose and values clear it was in the election campaign to present Labour as the calm, competent antidote to the chaotic politics of the post-referendum years. In other words, whilst any government would wish to avoid being in chaos, it is far more dangerous for one built specifically, and almost solely, on the promise of stability. This, by the way, makes talk of the Labour party jettisoning Starmer and installing a new leader, especially when there is no obviously outstanding successor, utterly bizarre.
Navigating between complacency and alarmism
However, I think there is another issue here, and it also grows in large part out of Brexit. Whilst many voters may have hoped for a less chaotic politics than the period after 2016, which saw five Prime Ministers in almost as many years, the media and commentariat became addicted to it. There has always been an element of that in political reporting, since drama and chaos make good copy, but to my mind (and I accept that this is purely impressionistic) it has intensified. No doubt that is about more than Brexit, as much of it is bound up with the changing nature of the news cycle, and the impact of social media. But Brexit supplied an addictive rush of political drama and, like all addictions, users have to keep chasing the high. Current speculation about an early election, as well about the idea of a leadership challenge to Starmer, are examples.
From this point of view, as the veteran political commentator Philip Stephens argues, it is important not to get carried away by the current media narrative of a government in crisis. Yet there is clearly a very difficult line to tread here. On the one hand, there are serious and dangerous events unfolding, and ignoring them would be irresponsibly complacent. On the other hand, part of what is driving those events is the promulgation by the political right of a narrative of crisis which it seeks to exploit, and accepting or even amplifying that narrative would be irresponsibly alarmist.
If there is a way of navigating through this tricky territory then it entails offering a compelling counter-narrative. That means matching the undeniably old and new media-savviness of the populists, providing a positive alternative to, rather than just a rebuttal of, what they are pumping out, and in the process defusing the pervasive sense of crisis. The responsibility for providing it rests with anyone with any kind of public voice but, inevitably, it must rest primarily with politicians, and especially with the government.
And the government has a particular incentive to do so, partly to meet the pressing demand for an articulation of the government’s fundamental purpose and guiding values, and partly as a matter of electoral calculation. Its present strategy of aping Reform advantages Farage whilst alienating many who might otherwise support Labour, and academic research suggests that it will be an electorally costly strategy. The consequence could well be a Reform government or, less discussed but probably more likely, a hung parliament with an uncertain outcome for the formation of a government. This isn’t just future political danger for Labour, it is a present political and economic danger because, as the economics commentator Simon Nixon recently pointed out, in relation to current bond market jitters, “the biggest risk to UK financial stability is not this government, but the justified fear of what might follow if it fails”.
We want our country back
Central to such a counter-narrative is the need to displace the far-right’s pretensions to speak for ‘decent ordinary people’ or the ‘silent majority’. Doing that means discarding one of the central features of Brexitism, the idea that when it came to a single-issue vote – the referendum on EU membership – it was revealed that the populist claim to represent that silent majority was true.
That, and the subsequent associated rhetoric of ‘the will of the people’ versus ‘the elite’, cowed mainstream politicians and was particularly disconcerting for those on the left who regarded themselves as the voice of the people and as the challengers to the elitism. It also fed a kind of liberal guilt amongst, especially, middle-class progressives, suggesting they were ‘out of touch’ with ‘real people’, particularly as regards immigration. All of this has enabled Brexitists, including Farage and Robinson, to trade with increasing success on their version of Britain and ‘British values’, including, as the widespread use of the St. George’s flag shows, conflating Britain with England.
So, in concrete terms, offering a counter-narrative means providing a different version of Britain. It has become almost a cliché to remark on the contrast between the image of Britain projected in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and that of the Brexit referendum just four years later. The first was optimistic, inclusive and tolerant, paying ample reference to the past but confident about the present and future, and tinged with an ironic, playful humour. The second was sour, insular, intolerant, fearful, unhealthily obsessed with past glories, and utterly lacking in any humour or pleasure.
There is an opportunity here for the non-Brexitist mainstream to develop its own political jiu-jitsu, appropriating the constant Brexitist demand that ‘we want our country back’. Doing so would not be a nostalgic lament for an unrecoverable past. That first Britain is still available, including for England, as was more recently suggested in discussions of ‘progressive patriotism’ at the time of the Euro 2020 football tournament.
In that previous post, after reviewing the summer’s confected crisis over asylum hotels, I wrote about the political terrain of the next few years being characterized by a battle over whether Brexit Britain is to become Brexitist Britain. Now, that doesn’t seem so much prescient as complacently languid, as if that battle were not already well under way.
Flagging dangers
This was brought home to me within a couple of days of writing the post. It wasn’t, primarily, because of that weekend’s Reform UK conference since its mixture of vileness, weirdness and madness was not exactly unexpected. Instead it was when, for the first time, I saw not just roundabouts but very long stretches of roads in my area with St. George’s flags (and occasional Union Jacks) hanging on every single lamp post for mile after mile [1]. Of course, I had read about this happening all over the country, but seeing it for myself was different. The effect was not celebratory or unifying, it was sinister, threatening, and – in its unmissable historical echoes – fascistic.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that this isn’t a word I use casually and, in any case, it is a documented fact that the origins of this spate of flag-flying lie with far-right activist groups. It is not about jolly yeomen putting out the bunting, but masked men bent on intimidation. So it was dishonest and dangerous for Labour politicians like Yvette Cooper to argue that it is in any sense a “symbol of Britain coming together” (£). It has clearly arisen on the back of this summer’s asylum hotel ‘protests’, and, as has been widely remarked, seems to symbolise division and exclusion rather than unity and inclusion.
What is actually worse, and more literally fascistic, is that it amounts to a demand for compulsory ‘unity’ through the sequestration of the public space. Criticize it, and you are deemed to have failed an imposed ‘loyalty test’. Most obviously it is aimed at immigrants, but more generally at the ‘enemies within’ – the liberally-minded and tolerant.
Sanctimony and hypocrisy
Against this background, the news broke of the murder of Charlie Kirk in the US. Immediately that was used as a pretext to attack liberals in the most vicious of terms. Whereas, only a few days before, the right in the UK and the US had been screaming about the ‘injustice’ of punishing Lucy Connelly for her use of violently inflammatory language, suddenly all they could talk of was how the liberal-left was responsible for the killing because of the language used to attack Trump and his supporters. Yet, whilst admonishing those on the left for expressing their opinions, Kirk was presented as a free speech martyr, murdered simply for speaking his mind and inviting others – in the familiar tactic of every tedious internet troll – to ‘prove me wrong’.
With equal hypocrisy, these free speech absolutists started to demand, and procure, punishments for those, including the Global Opinions Editor of the Washington Post, who refused to join in with the sanctimonious beatification of Kirk by, for example, referring to his own hate-filled rhetoric. But this is not just a matter of illogic or hypocrisy. It is part of the way that the right weaponizes liberalism against itself in a kind of political jiu-jitsu. Thus the right demands, and largely receives, civility from its political opponents, whilst refusing to accord any civility whatsoever in return. It is an asymmetry dissected in Jonathan Freedland’s compelling analysis of the Kirk murder and its aftermath.
The United States was already in a very dark place, as charted by Professor Christina Pagel’s excellent Substack post, and it is now much darker. That isn’t so much because of the possibility of escalating acts of individual violence, although that is clearly a risk, but because of the possibility of escalating state violence against its actual or perceived internal enemies.
Kirk was hardly known in this country, but his killing also had immediate reverberations here. This is just one example of a point made in a BlueSky post in response to my attempt to define Brexitism. The poster said, rightly, that one of its weaknesses was a failure to discuss the many important linkages between the far-right in the US and the UK, linkages which are both ideological and financial. Actually, it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to write in terms of the far-right, since in both the US and the UK what used to be the respectable, centrist right of politics has been virtually eviscerated.
Thuggery
At all events, following Kirk’s murder, British Brexitists immediately began to recycle (£) the talking points of the American right in pursuit of the UK culture war. His death was then invoked during last weekend’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, which attracted possibly as many as 150,000 people to London and resulted in several violent clashes with the police. This was massively short of the three million persistently, and falsely, claimed on social media, but there is no doubt that it marked a significant show of strength, and was perhaps the largest rally of its kind in the UK in recent history.
Robinson seems to be allied with, and is perhaps a member of, Advance UK, the splinter group of Reform led by Ben Habib. But, again, it is increasingly meaningless to differentiate between far-right thugs and Reform, and in fact doing so panders to Nigel Farage’s pretensions to be ‘respectable’. For example, Reform Chairman David Bull was happy to endorse the rally as a gathering of “the silent majority”, whilst Farage opined that “the vast majority of people that turned up were good, ordinary, decent people”. Moreover, there is now a steady flow of defectors from the Tories to Reform, the latest examples including former MPs Maria Caulfield and Nadine Dorries, an acquisition of perhaps rather dubious value, and, more significantly, Danny Kruger, the oleaginous MP who was once co-leader of the New Conservative group and is strongly associated with the (paradoxically international) National Conservatism movement. Meanwhile, the Tory Party itself continues to espouse positions almost identical to those of Reform.
The American connection was most strikingly evident in Elon Musk’s extraordinarily inflammatory appearance at the rally, which included a call for the dissolution of parliament and threats that “violence is coming”. In fact, although those were the most widely quoted parts of it, what was more chilling was the way he, quite calmly, articulated or assumed an entire world view based on fantasies, distortions and lies. In a way, it was more unsettling than a spittle-flecked rant and, echoing all the invocations of ‘the silent majority’, his pitch was to the supposedly ordinary, apolitical, commonsense people of Britain.
As with the outbreak of flag-thuggery, any idea that the rally was about ‘uniting’ the country is transparently absurd. Equally, although hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers is undoubtedly the source of its core support, it is now abundantly clear that it has a more general, and very serious, intention to destroy the present government and, with that, to destroy the entire foundations of liberal democracy. It is not being hidden. Elon Musk said it, in terms. Others at the rally spoke openly of the need to assassinate Keir Starmer, even as ‘the left’ was being castigated for inciting the killing of Charlie Kirk (and, despite what some apologists say in the comments on the report linked to, this wasn’t just a ‘rogue individual’: social media is awash with similar calls).
This constitutes a dangerous moment for Britain. It seems to be quite different to earlier versions of far-right politics which, whilst aggressively anti-immigration, were not, apart from a very small fringe, intent on a wholesale overthrow of the established political order. Yet, now, it is becoming almost mainstream to speak as if that political order has entirely failed. That has happened for many reasons, including the influence of the US right, and not just in Brexit Britain (France furnishes another example), but some of them are certainly related to Brexit and Brexitism. In particular, the relentless attacks on established institutions which Brexit gave rise to, and perhaps especially the prorogation of parliament, even though it ultimately failed, have enfeebled and de-legitimized those institutions.
Labour’s failure to lead
Worse than that, or perhaps it is simply one aspect of it, the Labour government now appears both unwilling and unable to stand up to what is happening or even to acknowledge its gravity. It has condoned rather than condemned the flagging movement and initially refused to condemn the things which were said at the Robinson rally, only the violence that accompanied it. Some condemnation did come, later, but it seemed to have been forced out under pressure, rather than being visceral, and didn’t carry any sense of the urgency of the situation. It is as if Starmer, and other government ministers, have internalized the accusations coming from Trump, Musk, and J.D. Vance, as well as from the British right, about being opposed to ‘free speech’. But no one is asking Starmer to ban such rallies, merely to use his own free speech, and his position, to lead the challenge to the things which are being said at them.
More generally, the government seems dazed by the events unfolding around it, and to have lost control of the events unfolding within it. The Angela Rayner resignation, and its aftermath, shortly followed by the Peter Mandelson fiasco, and then the resignation of Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, don’t just exemplify that loss of internal control, they exacerbate the external events. For they serve to promote one of the core drivers of Brexitism, namely that ‘all politicians are the same’ and that there is nothing to lose, and perhaps everything to gain, by rejecting the entirety of mainstream politics.
The reasons why the government has fallen into such disarray have been widely discussed, many of them circling around the supposed migration crisis. But that issue is only part of the government’s wider malaise which, although there are a range of diagnoses, almost all commentators ascribe to its failure to communicate its fundamental purpose and guiding values. Even more damningly, many suspect that the failure is not one of communication but of a terrible dark hole such that there is no fundamental purpose, nor any guiding values, to be communicated.
What makes this all the more damaging is that to the extent that the government has ever made its purpose and values clear it was in the election campaign to present Labour as the calm, competent antidote to the chaotic politics of the post-referendum years. In other words, whilst any government would wish to avoid being in chaos, it is far more dangerous for one built specifically, and almost solely, on the promise of stability. This, by the way, makes talk of the Labour party jettisoning Starmer and installing a new leader, especially when there is no obviously outstanding successor, utterly bizarre.
Navigating between complacency and alarmism
However, I think there is another issue here, and it also grows in large part out of Brexit. Whilst many voters may have hoped for a less chaotic politics than the period after 2016, which saw five Prime Ministers in almost as many years, the media and commentariat became addicted to it. There has always been an element of that in political reporting, since drama and chaos make good copy, but to my mind (and I accept that this is purely impressionistic) it has intensified. No doubt that is about more than Brexit, as much of it is bound up with the changing nature of the news cycle, and the impact of social media. But Brexit supplied an addictive rush of political drama and, like all addictions, users have to keep chasing the high. Current speculation about an early election, as well about the idea of a leadership challenge to Starmer, are examples.
From this point of view, as the veteran political commentator Philip Stephens argues, it is important not to get carried away by the current media narrative of a government in crisis. Yet there is clearly a very difficult line to tread here. On the one hand, there are serious and dangerous events unfolding, and ignoring them would be irresponsibly complacent. On the other hand, part of what is driving those events is the promulgation by the political right of a narrative of crisis which it seeks to exploit, and accepting or even amplifying that narrative would be irresponsibly alarmist.
If there is a way of navigating through this tricky territory then it entails offering a compelling counter-narrative. That means matching the undeniably old and new media-savviness of the populists, providing a positive alternative to, rather than just a rebuttal of, what they are pumping out, and in the process defusing the pervasive sense of crisis. The responsibility for providing it rests with anyone with any kind of public voice but, inevitably, it must rest primarily with politicians, and especially with the government.
And the government has a particular incentive to do so, partly to meet the pressing demand for an articulation of the government’s fundamental purpose and guiding values, and partly as a matter of electoral calculation. Its present strategy of aping Reform advantages Farage whilst alienating many who might otherwise support Labour, and academic research suggests that it will be an electorally costly strategy. The consequence could well be a Reform government or, less discussed but probably more likely, a hung parliament with an uncertain outcome for the formation of a government. This isn’t just future political danger for Labour, it is a present political and economic danger because, as the economics commentator Simon Nixon recently pointed out, in relation to current bond market jitters, “the biggest risk to UK financial stability is not this government, but the justified fear of what might follow if it fails”.
We want our country back
Central to such a counter-narrative is the need to displace the far-right’s pretensions to speak for ‘decent ordinary people’ or the ‘silent majority’. Doing that means discarding one of the central features of Brexitism, the idea that when it came to a single-issue vote – the referendum on EU membership – it was revealed that the populist claim to represent that silent majority was true.
That, and the subsequent associated rhetoric of ‘the will of the people’ versus ‘the elite’, cowed mainstream politicians and was particularly disconcerting for those on the left who regarded themselves as the voice of the people and as the challengers to the elitism. It also fed a kind of liberal guilt amongst, especially, middle-class progressives, suggesting they were ‘out of touch’ with ‘real people’, particularly as regards immigration. All of this has enabled Brexitists, including Farage and Robinson, to trade with increasing success on their version of Britain and ‘British values’, including, as the widespread use of the St. George’s flag shows, conflating Britain with England.
So, in concrete terms, offering a counter-narrative means providing a different version of Britain. It has become almost a cliché to remark on the contrast between the image of Britain projected in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and that of the Brexit referendum just four years later. The first was optimistic, inclusive and tolerant, paying ample reference to the past but confident about the present and future, and tinged with an ironic, playful humour. The second was sour, insular, intolerant, fearful, unhealthily obsessed with past glories, and utterly lacking in any humour or pleasure.
There is an opportunity here for the non-Brexitist mainstream to develop its own political jiu-jitsu, appropriating the constant Brexitist demand that ‘we want our country back’. Doing so would not be a nostalgic lament for an unrecoverable past. That first Britain is still available, including for England, as was more recently suggested in discussions of ‘progressive patriotism’ at the time of the Euro 2020 football tournament.
Articulating it as the real Britain, and the true expression of British values would not go against the grain of public opinion but with it. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the veteran political scientist Professor Sir John Curtice provided a fascinating overview of the current political scene which included discussion of the latest British Social Attitudes Survey. This showed the disparities between the views and values of the public in general and those of 2024 Reform voters. These include that 31% of the public believe that migrants have undermined rather than enriched the country's culture compared with 81% of Reform voters; 32% think migrants have been bad for the country's economy (73% of Reform voters); and 18% think attempts to give equal opportunities for black and Asian people have gone too far (49% of Reform voters).
This, and much other data, gives quantitative support to the claim that Reform does not speak for ‘the people’ in a general sense, or for some mythical ‘silent majority’. Britain really is a more tolerant country than the one Farage, Robinson or the Tories claim it to be. Indeed, if anything, it is this tolerance which characterizes ‘the silent majority’, or at least one which is silenced in the sense that none of what used to be called the ‘main Westminster parties’, including the governing Labour Party, speak for it. Instead, the tolerant majority are constantly told that they are the ‘out of touch elite’.
The alternative, then, is to speak for this sense of Britain and Britishness, stressing rather than denying the success of multi-culturalism and, perhaps even more importantly, replacing sullen or alternatively vainglorious nostalgia with an optimistic vision for the future as a framing for concrete policies to achieve it, including on asylum-seeking. I’m not suggesting this would be easy. But it is almost a truism that parties which don’t seem to like their country are not likely to appeal to its voters, and it is striking the extent to which both Reform and the Tories trade on dismay for ‘what this country has become’.
Denying scoundrels the refuge of patriotism
Articulating Britishness in this way would serve to position Farage, Reform, and other Brexitists as un-British. It isn’t effective simply to ‘call them out’ as ‘racists’ or ‘fascists’ which, whilst it may give a self-congratulatory sense of ‘No pasaran’ steadfastness, is easily laughed off by their supporters and potential supporters, and cements their sense of being hectored by prissy middle-class liberals. But questioning their Britishness is another matter, as is the counterpart of attacking Farage on one of his weakest flanks, his lack of patriotism.
Keir Starmer has not been scared to embrace patriotism, rightly in my view. Doing so has often been taboo for the British left, as George Orwell long ago pointed out, and as was vividly illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s adolescent refusal to sing the National Anthem in 2015. It may be that there are still some on the liberal-left who feel queasy about anything that smacks of nationalism, but, frankly, we don’t have the luxury of such scruples. Without a positive articulation of patriotism the field is left to aggressive and authoritarian nationalists. So Starmer is right to talk about patriotism, but he needs to do so in a way which articulates Britishness in a radically different way to the far-right version and to the equally Brexitist ‘Blue Labour’ version.
Doing so would make the sharp attacks on Farage’s patriotism which Starmer has previously made more effective. It would enable a linkage to be made between the extreme illiberal authoritarianism of Farage’s call for mass deportations and his open admiration for Putin, his (at best) equivocation about Ukraine, and his sycophantic association with Trump. Farage’s vulnerability to those charges, including amongst his own supporters, has been shown before, for example in the reaction to his comments about Putin, Ukraine and NATO in 2024. Nor is Farage alone in this vulnerability. It is shared by Robinson, with his support from Musk and his documented ties to Russia.
Moreover, exposing the right in this way would create a coherence with the government’s foreign and defence policies. Amongst all the other developments in the last fortnight, we have seen fresh evidence of Putin’s aggressive intent, with drone flights into Polish and Romanian airspaces. This is not incidental to what is happening domestically. In both cases aggressive nationalism is in the ascendant, and in both cases it is emboldened by Trump, a testament to both his power and his weakness.
Which brings me finally to Trump’s visit to the UK this week. But what, really, is there to say? We all know that for ‘reasons of State’ the British government, like every government around the world, has to try to deal with this vile, sociopathic bully, and feeding his grotesque ego with some pageantry is one obvious way to do so. But the America he is creating is already another country from that which we have known and, in the current battle for our own future, that country is on the side of darkness. Ultimately, and the sooner the better, winning that battle will entail weaning ourselves from our dependence upon it.
Prospects
No doubt others would articulate this battle in different ways, but I think there is now a widespread understanding that this country is in a period of fundamental conflict not just in its politics but about its polity; a battle for its identity and, if it is not too overblown to say, for its soul. The radical right certainly knows what is stake. So should the rest of us. The way I articulate it is in terms of a conflict between ‘Brexitism’ and ‘Anti-Brexitism’, and it has been evident since the very early days of the Brexit process. I don’t, obviously, mean that history started in 2016 but there’s plenty of evidence, including some of the other data in the John Curtice analysis that I referred to earlier, that Brexit is an enduring political inflexion point.
From that point of view, what I have discussed in this post could be part of a viable strategy to marginalize Brexitism and, conversely, to mobilise ‘anti-Brexitism’. It could also, not coincidentally, be part of a viable strategy to revitalize Labour’s electoral fortunes by doing several things at once: provide a novel line for a drama-addicted media, break with one of the central deformations of Brexitist politics, meet the demand for a coherent statement of its purpose and values, marginalize Reform, and re-galvanize its liberal-left support. But this is not a cynical statement of tactics. It would be a more moral politics and, crucially, a more truthful politics, at least partly reversing out of the cul-de-sac of Brexit and Brexitism.
To my mind, the conflict over Brexitism and the fate of the Labour government are linked, at least for the time being, in that it seems very difficult to envisage a way of marginalizing Brexitism which does not involve the main party of organized labour and, more or less, of social democracy, especially given that it is the governing party. In the longer term that may change, but I’m not sure we have the luxury of thinking in the longer term. For that reason, too, this post has been more prescriptive than usual and, whilst accepting that the prescriptions may be flawed, incomplete, and undoubtedly unpalatable to some readers of this blog, I believe something like them is vital [2]. As to the prospect of the Labour government enacting anything remotely like them, well, that seems unlikely.
Notes
[1] See the report starting about 18 seconds into this link, which will only be viewable in the UK to BBC licence holders. It turns out that all these flags were put up by one man. That, too, gives the lie to the idea of some huge groundswell driven by ‘the silent majority’, but it also emphasizes how small numbers of people are being allowed to dominate what are public spaces.
[2] Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of similar prescriptions from James O’Malley in a Substack post and especially encouraging is the video clip embedded within it where Labour MP Lizzi Collinge articulates very much the kind of counter-narrative of patriotism I have in mind.
This, and much other data, gives quantitative support to the claim that Reform does not speak for ‘the people’ in a general sense, or for some mythical ‘silent majority’. Britain really is a more tolerant country than the one Farage, Robinson or the Tories claim it to be. Indeed, if anything, it is this tolerance which characterizes ‘the silent majority’, or at least one which is silenced in the sense that none of what used to be called the ‘main Westminster parties’, including the governing Labour Party, speak for it. Instead, the tolerant majority are constantly told that they are the ‘out of touch elite’.
The alternative, then, is to speak for this sense of Britain and Britishness, stressing rather than denying the success of multi-culturalism and, perhaps even more importantly, replacing sullen or alternatively vainglorious nostalgia with an optimistic vision for the future as a framing for concrete policies to achieve it, including on asylum-seeking. I’m not suggesting this would be easy. But it is almost a truism that parties which don’t seem to like their country are not likely to appeal to its voters, and it is striking the extent to which both Reform and the Tories trade on dismay for ‘what this country has become’.
Denying scoundrels the refuge of patriotism
Articulating Britishness in this way would serve to position Farage, Reform, and other Brexitists as un-British. It isn’t effective simply to ‘call them out’ as ‘racists’ or ‘fascists’ which, whilst it may give a self-congratulatory sense of ‘No pasaran’ steadfastness, is easily laughed off by their supporters and potential supporters, and cements their sense of being hectored by prissy middle-class liberals. But questioning their Britishness is another matter, as is the counterpart of attacking Farage on one of his weakest flanks, his lack of patriotism.
Keir Starmer has not been scared to embrace patriotism, rightly in my view. Doing so has often been taboo for the British left, as George Orwell long ago pointed out, and as was vividly illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s adolescent refusal to sing the National Anthem in 2015. It may be that there are still some on the liberal-left who feel queasy about anything that smacks of nationalism, but, frankly, we don’t have the luxury of such scruples. Without a positive articulation of patriotism the field is left to aggressive and authoritarian nationalists. So Starmer is right to talk about patriotism, but he needs to do so in a way which articulates Britishness in a radically different way to the far-right version and to the equally Brexitist ‘Blue Labour’ version.
Doing so would make the sharp attacks on Farage’s patriotism which Starmer has previously made more effective. It would enable a linkage to be made between the extreme illiberal authoritarianism of Farage’s call for mass deportations and his open admiration for Putin, his (at best) equivocation about Ukraine, and his sycophantic association with Trump. Farage’s vulnerability to those charges, including amongst his own supporters, has been shown before, for example in the reaction to his comments about Putin, Ukraine and NATO in 2024. Nor is Farage alone in this vulnerability. It is shared by Robinson, with his support from Musk and his documented ties to Russia.
Moreover, exposing the right in this way would create a coherence with the government’s foreign and defence policies. Amongst all the other developments in the last fortnight, we have seen fresh evidence of Putin’s aggressive intent, with drone flights into Polish and Romanian airspaces. This is not incidental to what is happening domestically. In both cases aggressive nationalism is in the ascendant, and in both cases it is emboldened by Trump, a testament to both his power and his weakness.
Which brings me finally to Trump’s visit to the UK this week. But what, really, is there to say? We all know that for ‘reasons of State’ the British government, like every government around the world, has to try to deal with this vile, sociopathic bully, and feeding his grotesque ego with some pageantry is one obvious way to do so. But the America he is creating is already another country from that which we have known and, in the current battle for our own future, that country is on the side of darkness. Ultimately, and the sooner the better, winning that battle will entail weaning ourselves from our dependence upon it.
Prospects
No doubt others would articulate this battle in different ways, but I think there is now a widespread understanding that this country is in a period of fundamental conflict not just in its politics but about its polity; a battle for its identity and, if it is not too overblown to say, for its soul. The radical right certainly knows what is stake. So should the rest of us. The way I articulate it is in terms of a conflict between ‘Brexitism’ and ‘Anti-Brexitism’, and it has been evident since the very early days of the Brexit process. I don’t, obviously, mean that history started in 2016 but there’s plenty of evidence, including some of the other data in the John Curtice analysis that I referred to earlier, that Brexit is an enduring political inflexion point.
From that point of view, what I have discussed in this post could be part of a viable strategy to marginalize Brexitism and, conversely, to mobilise ‘anti-Brexitism’. It could also, not coincidentally, be part of a viable strategy to revitalize Labour’s electoral fortunes by doing several things at once: provide a novel line for a drama-addicted media, break with one of the central deformations of Brexitist politics, meet the demand for a coherent statement of its purpose and values, marginalize Reform, and re-galvanize its liberal-left support. But this is not a cynical statement of tactics. It would be a more moral politics and, crucially, a more truthful politics, at least partly reversing out of the cul-de-sac of Brexit and Brexitism.
To my mind, the conflict over Brexitism and the fate of the Labour government are linked, at least for the time being, in that it seems very difficult to envisage a way of marginalizing Brexitism which does not involve the main party of organized labour and, more or less, of social democracy, especially given that it is the governing party. In the longer term that may change, but I’m not sure we have the luxury of thinking in the longer term. For that reason, too, this post has been more prescriptive than usual and, whilst accepting that the prescriptions may be flawed, incomplete, and undoubtedly unpalatable to some readers of this blog, I believe something like them is vital [2]. As to the prospect of the Labour government enacting anything remotely like them, well, that seems unlikely.
Notes
[1] See the report starting about 18 seconds into this link, which will only be viewable in the UK to BBC licence holders. It turns out that all these flags were put up by one man. That, too, gives the lie to the idea of some huge groundswell driven by ‘the silent majority’, but it also emphasizes how small numbers of people are being allowed to dominate what are public spaces.
[2] Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of similar prescriptions from James O’Malley in a Substack post and especially encouraging is the video clip embedded within it where Labour MP Lizzi Collinge articulates very much the kind of counter-narrative of patriotism I have in mind.
Friday, 16 May 2025
Not dealing with Brexitism
It’s hard to keep up with what is happening in the world of trade, even just considering those aspects which have a direct or indirect Brexit connection. Since my last post, there has been a flurry of activity, including a deal, of sorts, between the US and China which, for now at least, seems to mark a truce in their trade war. That, along with some other developments, suggests that Trump is now desperate to row back on the chaos that his ‘Liberation Day tariffs’ unleashed. On the other hand, there are signs that he proposes to double down on his hostility to the EU.
The recently announced UK-US ‘trade deal’ is one, relatively minor, aspect of these developments. It, too, is evidence of Trump’s backtracking, and it could be read as part of an attempt by him to increase divisions between the UK and the EU. At all events, along with the UK-India deal, it forms the background to next week’s UK-EU Summit. The outcome of that may, whether in what it does or what it does not achieve, mark a new phase in the Brexit saga, but there is little sign of Britain dealing with 'Brexitism'.
The UK-US ‘trade deal’
As always with anything Brexit-related, it’s a big task just to strip away the lies, half-truths and misunderstandings, and that becomes even more difficult when Donald Trump is involved. When the deal was announced, both Trump and Keir Starmer talked as if it was a historic breakthrough, and suggested that it was the long-touted post-Brexit Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It was nothing of the sort, and nor was it ever going to be. As I explained in a post last November, when Trump’s tariffs had not been announced but were in prospect, if it was going to be anything it would be an ‘exemption deal’, meaning that it would exempt the UK from some, if not all, of Trump’s new tariffs.
The difference is significant, not least because it means that the best it could achieve would be a return to the status quo ante. That is, it might avoid Trump’s new tariffs but not improve the terms of trade that had already existed. To an extent, at least, that is what has happened. In headline terms, the new blanket 10% ‘reciprocal tariff’ remains on all goods, but the 25% tariff on cars has been removed up to a quota of 100,000 vehicles sold per year (but these will still be liable to the 10% tariff). The 25% tariff on steel and aluminium has also been scrapped, but it seems there will also be some quota limit on that (the details are not clear). In return, the UK has agreed to scrap tariffs on an increased quota of US beef (with some reciprocal increase in access to the US beef market), and to scrap tariffs on US ethanol within a high quota.
So, a very limited deal. But, as quickly emerged when the text was published, it is not even a deal, in the sense that it is (explicitly) not a legally binding agreement and that many details are still to be agreed, most glaringly, perhaps, in relation to pharmaceuticals trade. As Alison Morrow of CNN Business put it, it is not so much as deal as “a concept of a deal”. That isn’t to say that none of it will come into effect, because there is evidently some political commitment to it. So at least some of it very probably will. But given Trump’s proven unreliability to stick to the terms even of legally binding deals, it is even harder to be confident that he will honour, or even continue to recognize, any political commitments.
That it happened at all reflects the weakness and neediness of both sides. Unlike the EU or China, the UK is simply not strong enough to take on the US in a trade war. The UK also has a pressing political and economic need to shield its car and steel industries from Trump’s tariffs. But the US is weak too. Trump’s tariff policy has backfired on him very badly, and, as I suggested recently, that has made him keen to start ‘doing deals’ with his victims so as to give the impression that this had been his strategy all along, and to reverse some of the damage he has inflicted on himself and the US economy. Thus, as many commentators noted once it had been announced, Trump needed a deal, and quickly.
The timing may also have reflected a desire to make an announcement on VE Day so as to get in some sanctimonious references to the wartime alliance and the ‘special relationship’ or at least, since Trump’s ego is considerably greater than his grasp of detail, to ‘historic’ events. Timing aside, the terms of this trade non-deal also reflected the neediness of both parties. The UK has not had to make any of the concessions that had been speculated about on tech firm regulation and taxation, or on food standards (there will be cheaper US beef, but it will not be ‘hormone-treated’), a point I’ll come back to. The UK also resisted demands to reduce pork tariffs. To that extent, the reported jubilation in the Starmer government is understandable. The UK gave surprisingly little for what, at least in political terms, was quite helpful to the government.
Nevertheless, to repeat, the overall effect is to leave the UK worse off than it was before Trump launched his tariff offensive. Starmer shouldn’t be blamed for that, as it’s highly unlikely any other outcome could have been agreed on remotely viable terms, and what was achieved is worthwhile for the car and steel industries, but in a normal world it wouldn’t be seen as a triumph. There is also a more complex issue, identified by the UK Trade Policy Observatory’s (UCTPO) analysis of the deal. Referring to an aspect which I have not mentioned so far, namely what the agreement says about supply chain security, UKTPO warn that, depending on exactly what it comes to mean in practice, it may well push the UK towards provisions which will be unpopular with China, with retaliation possible. It’s a specific illustration of another point I made in an earlier post, about how post-Brexit Britain is obliged to duck and dive between not just the US and the EU but, also, China.
Brexit dimensions
What of Brexit more generally in all this? It’s true by definition that the UK could not have agreed such a deal had it still been a member of the EU, or even if simply in a customs union with the EU. Whether it proves ‘better’ than whatever the EU agrees or doesn’t agree with the US remains to be seen. What is certainly striking is that it has wrong-footed the Brexiters (as shown, rather deliciously, by a disagreement between the Tice-Oakeshott Reform power couple). Some, at least initially, hailed it, in the way Trump did, as the post-Brexit trade deal he had always promised, although they quickly latched on to the implicit criticism of the Tories contained in that, as well as the explicit lie it entailed.
Very soon, Kemi Badenoch was complaining that the deal had “shafted” the UK (£), bemoaning that it was, indeed, not a comprehensive FTA. In short, we had the unedifying spectacle of Labour at least implying that it had delivered the key trade promise of the Brexiters, and Conservative Brexiters criticizing the government for not delivering what is simply not available for agreement with Trump, any more than it was with Biden, but pretending otherwise. It was yet another small illustration of the fundamental dishonesty Brexit has brought to British politics.
Beyond domestic politics, there’s a deeper issue in play with this deal. Again, I’ve gestured towards it in a previous post (I’m sorry to keep doing this self-referencing, but the various discussions obviously connect together, and linking to where points were previously made means I don’t have to repeat explanations or background). That issue is what all this means for ‘WTO rules’.
It’s not just that the Brexiters used to sloganize ‘Let’s Go WTO’ as a supposed alternative to any trade deal at all with the EU, or that ‘regaining our seat at the WTO’ was supposed to be some great prize, it is that their whole economic vision of post-Brexit Britain was predicated on the existence of a global trade order. Trump is now ripping that up, and both Alan Beattie, the Financial Times’ trade expert (£), and the UKTPO analysis suggest that the UK-US deal, specifically, flouts WTO principles and undermines the multi-lateral trading system.
The UK-India deal
All this came in the wake of the announcement of a UK-India trade deal. The two stories are, as BBC Economics Editor Faisal Islam argues, very likely to be related. That is, the general mayhem Trump is causing to international trade may have provided an incentive to complete what has hitherto been regarded as an “elusive” deal. However, the two deals are very different. For the UK-India deal is a trade deal, both in the sense of being a genuine FTA and of being (or at least being the basis of) a legally binding agreement. Moreover, it sits within, and does not undermine, the WTO framework. Indeed, the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy suggests that “may be one of the biggest achievements of this agreement”.
Although the full details have yet to be published, reports based on the government’s summary of what has been agreed suggest there will be a fairly comprehensive removal of tariffs, with whisky and cars two of the UK sectors most likely to benefit, and garments and footwear amongst the benefitting Indian sectors. There’s less sign of liberalization of services trade, which some, especially in the financial services sector, had hoped for, although that is not surprising (lack of services coverage is one of the reasons why FTAs are so different to the EU single market). However, of potential importance to some UK firms, and potential controversy in India, UK access to the public procurement market should increase.
It was always anticipated that the block to this FTA would be an Indian requirement for a relaxation of UK immigration policy – something even less likely to be agreed by the present government, which is, if possible, even more obsessed with reducing immigration at whatever the economic cost than its Tory predecessors, something I will return to. That turned out not to be the case (although perhaps, had it been agreed, it might have enabled a deeper deal), and the only tangentially immigration-related issue was an agreement to exempt Indian workers on short-term visas from National Insurance Contributions (NICs).
Once again Brexiters were wrong-footed. This was a deal they had long-advocated as a Brexit prize, and Jacob Rees-Mogg greeted it as “exactly what Brexit promised”. But Kemi Badenoch latched onto the NIC provision (as, more unexpectedly, did the LibDems), either unaware of or ignoring the fact that such arrangements (which are reciprocal for UK workers) have been agreed with numerous countries in the past. Nigel Farage also weighed in, denouncing the deal as “truly appalling”, and as selling out British workers and farmers.
All this was, as with the US deal, pure opportunism (one senior Indian official was even quoted as saying that Badenoch had agreed the NIC provision in principle when she was Trade Secretary). There’s no doubt whatsoever that the Tories would have done the same deal. But the Brexiter reactions, especially Farage’s, also point to one of the biggest of the many contradictions which have run throughout the entire Brexit project, that between nativist protectionism and globalist free trade. Hence the idiotic situation that Brexiters can now regard the UK-India deal as both a vindication and a betrayal of Brexit.
A Brexit benefit?
To the extent that the deal is being claimed as a ‘Brexit benefit’, the usual arguments apply. Yes, it could only be made because the UK has left the EU. But according to official calculations its economic value, an estimated 0.1% increase to GDP after 15 years, whilst slightly greater than the FTAs with Australia (0.08%) and New Zealand (0.03%), is nugatory compared with the costs of Brexit (minus 4%). Given that Brexit has happened, there’s a case for doing such deals, but the idea that they in any way justify Brexit is absurd. In any case, it is reported in the Indian media that the ongoing EU-India trade negotiations are likely to be accelerated, again precisely because of the impetus injected by Trump’s trade mayhem.
Of course, whenever the economic deficiencies of their project are pointed out to Brexiters, they invariably fall back on some version of their ideas about sovereignty and democracy. In relation to trade deals, they used to make much of the idea that, with Brexit, the people’s representatives in parliament would ‘regain control’ over ratification of FTAs. That was always based on a false premise, because as an EU member the UK could have held parliamentary votes on FTAs made by the EU, potentially even blocking them, but it waived that right. As for the present situation, whilst it might fairly be said that the UK-US deal is so flimsy and indefinite it hardly warrants a vote, that is not true of the UK-India deal. Yet the government has stated that, in line with post-Brexit legislation and practice, there will be no vote. So that’s another supposed ‘Brexit benefit’ that has quietly been discredited.
Where does all this leave the UK-EU reset?
The short answer to that is that it leaves it exactly where it was before, except that we are now only a couple of days away from the EU Summit at which (perhaps) the tangible details of what the ‘reset’ is going to mean will be unveiled [1]. As such, most of what I wrote in my previous post still applies, but it is worth spelling out one particularly important issue. The fact that the UK-US deal explicitly affirmed that US products sold in the UK must meet UK SPS standards (i.e. no hormone-treated beef, chlorinated chicken etc.) means that there is no (new) obstacle to a UK-EU SPS agreement. This is the issue many commentators have identified as the key indication of whether the UK is going to ‘choose’ between aligning with the US or the EU. It seems to have chosen the EU (which is consistent with what the latest UKICE report shows to be the general direction of regulatory policy).
That should not be a surprise to readers of this blog, as I’ve repeatedly argued (in the face of some sceptical responses) that it was highly unlikely that the government would agree anything with the US, or anyone else, to prevent what has always been Labour’s central, most repeatedly stated, reset ambition. It obviously remains to be seen if there will be a UK-EU SPS agreement, but the possibility remains open. I don’t think that quite amounts to the UK-US deal being a “triumph for remainers”, as Adam Bienkov argues, but it does endorse their core economic proposition of the centrality of geography to trade. Certainly the deal doesn’t mean that (taken in conjunction with the India deal) “the Rejoiner dream [has] finally died”, as pro-Brexit commentator Ambrose Pritchard-Evans claims.
Assuming there will now be a UK-EU SPS deal (in principle, if not immediately in detail), the important question is what else, if anything, gets announced next week. Over and above the widely expected defence and security pact, there are several possibilities, as outlined in my previous post, and there’s not much point in reviewing the various rumours and speculations there have been since. We’ll know soon enough.
The recently announced UK-US ‘trade deal’ is one, relatively minor, aspect of these developments. It, too, is evidence of Trump’s backtracking, and it could be read as part of an attempt by him to increase divisions between the UK and the EU. At all events, along with the UK-India deal, it forms the background to next week’s UK-EU Summit. The outcome of that may, whether in what it does or what it does not achieve, mark a new phase in the Brexit saga, but there is little sign of Britain dealing with 'Brexitism'.
The UK-US ‘trade deal’
As always with anything Brexit-related, it’s a big task just to strip away the lies, half-truths and misunderstandings, and that becomes even more difficult when Donald Trump is involved. When the deal was announced, both Trump and Keir Starmer talked as if it was a historic breakthrough, and suggested that it was the long-touted post-Brexit Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It was nothing of the sort, and nor was it ever going to be. As I explained in a post last November, when Trump’s tariffs had not been announced but were in prospect, if it was going to be anything it would be an ‘exemption deal’, meaning that it would exempt the UK from some, if not all, of Trump’s new tariffs.
The difference is significant, not least because it means that the best it could achieve would be a return to the status quo ante. That is, it might avoid Trump’s new tariffs but not improve the terms of trade that had already existed. To an extent, at least, that is what has happened. In headline terms, the new blanket 10% ‘reciprocal tariff’ remains on all goods, but the 25% tariff on cars has been removed up to a quota of 100,000 vehicles sold per year (but these will still be liable to the 10% tariff). The 25% tariff on steel and aluminium has also been scrapped, but it seems there will also be some quota limit on that (the details are not clear). In return, the UK has agreed to scrap tariffs on an increased quota of US beef (with some reciprocal increase in access to the US beef market), and to scrap tariffs on US ethanol within a high quota.
So, a very limited deal. But, as quickly emerged when the text was published, it is not even a deal, in the sense that it is (explicitly) not a legally binding agreement and that many details are still to be agreed, most glaringly, perhaps, in relation to pharmaceuticals trade. As Alison Morrow of CNN Business put it, it is not so much as deal as “a concept of a deal”. That isn’t to say that none of it will come into effect, because there is evidently some political commitment to it. So at least some of it very probably will. But given Trump’s proven unreliability to stick to the terms even of legally binding deals, it is even harder to be confident that he will honour, or even continue to recognize, any political commitments.
That it happened at all reflects the weakness and neediness of both sides. Unlike the EU or China, the UK is simply not strong enough to take on the US in a trade war. The UK also has a pressing political and economic need to shield its car and steel industries from Trump’s tariffs. But the US is weak too. Trump’s tariff policy has backfired on him very badly, and, as I suggested recently, that has made him keen to start ‘doing deals’ with his victims so as to give the impression that this had been his strategy all along, and to reverse some of the damage he has inflicted on himself and the US economy. Thus, as many commentators noted once it had been announced, Trump needed a deal, and quickly.
The timing may also have reflected a desire to make an announcement on VE Day so as to get in some sanctimonious references to the wartime alliance and the ‘special relationship’ or at least, since Trump’s ego is considerably greater than his grasp of detail, to ‘historic’ events. Timing aside, the terms of this trade non-deal also reflected the neediness of both parties. The UK has not had to make any of the concessions that had been speculated about on tech firm regulation and taxation, or on food standards (there will be cheaper US beef, but it will not be ‘hormone-treated’), a point I’ll come back to. The UK also resisted demands to reduce pork tariffs. To that extent, the reported jubilation in the Starmer government is understandable. The UK gave surprisingly little for what, at least in political terms, was quite helpful to the government.
Nevertheless, to repeat, the overall effect is to leave the UK worse off than it was before Trump launched his tariff offensive. Starmer shouldn’t be blamed for that, as it’s highly unlikely any other outcome could have been agreed on remotely viable terms, and what was achieved is worthwhile for the car and steel industries, but in a normal world it wouldn’t be seen as a triumph. There is also a more complex issue, identified by the UK Trade Policy Observatory’s (UCTPO) analysis of the deal. Referring to an aspect which I have not mentioned so far, namely what the agreement says about supply chain security, UKTPO warn that, depending on exactly what it comes to mean in practice, it may well push the UK towards provisions which will be unpopular with China, with retaliation possible. It’s a specific illustration of another point I made in an earlier post, about how post-Brexit Britain is obliged to duck and dive between not just the US and the EU but, also, China.
Brexit dimensions
What of Brexit more generally in all this? It’s true by definition that the UK could not have agreed such a deal had it still been a member of the EU, or even if simply in a customs union with the EU. Whether it proves ‘better’ than whatever the EU agrees or doesn’t agree with the US remains to be seen. What is certainly striking is that it has wrong-footed the Brexiters (as shown, rather deliciously, by a disagreement between the Tice-Oakeshott Reform power couple). Some, at least initially, hailed it, in the way Trump did, as the post-Brexit trade deal he had always promised, although they quickly latched on to the implicit criticism of the Tories contained in that, as well as the explicit lie it entailed.
Very soon, Kemi Badenoch was complaining that the deal had “shafted” the UK (£), bemoaning that it was, indeed, not a comprehensive FTA. In short, we had the unedifying spectacle of Labour at least implying that it had delivered the key trade promise of the Brexiters, and Conservative Brexiters criticizing the government for not delivering what is simply not available for agreement with Trump, any more than it was with Biden, but pretending otherwise. It was yet another small illustration of the fundamental dishonesty Brexit has brought to British politics.
Beyond domestic politics, there’s a deeper issue in play with this deal. Again, I’ve gestured towards it in a previous post (I’m sorry to keep doing this self-referencing, but the various discussions obviously connect together, and linking to where points were previously made means I don’t have to repeat explanations or background). That issue is what all this means for ‘WTO rules’.
It’s not just that the Brexiters used to sloganize ‘Let’s Go WTO’ as a supposed alternative to any trade deal at all with the EU, or that ‘regaining our seat at the WTO’ was supposed to be some great prize, it is that their whole economic vision of post-Brexit Britain was predicated on the existence of a global trade order. Trump is now ripping that up, and both Alan Beattie, the Financial Times’ trade expert (£), and the UKTPO analysis suggest that the UK-US deal, specifically, flouts WTO principles and undermines the multi-lateral trading system.
The UK-India deal
All this came in the wake of the announcement of a UK-India trade deal. The two stories are, as BBC Economics Editor Faisal Islam argues, very likely to be related. That is, the general mayhem Trump is causing to international trade may have provided an incentive to complete what has hitherto been regarded as an “elusive” deal. However, the two deals are very different. For the UK-India deal is a trade deal, both in the sense of being a genuine FTA and of being (or at least being the basis of) a legally binding agreement. Moreover, it sits within, and does not undermine, the WTO framework. Indeed, the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy suggests that “may be one of the biggest achievements of this agreement”.
Although the full details have yet to be published, reports based on the government’s summary of what has been agreed suggest there will be a fairly comprehensive removal of tariffs, with whisky and cars two of the UK sectors most likely to benefit, and garments and footwear amongst the benefitting Indian sectors. There’s less sign of liberalization of services trade, which some, especially in the financial services sector, had hoped for, although that is not surprising (lack of services coverage is one of the reasons why FTAs are so different to the EU single market). However, of potential importance to some UK firms, and potential controversy in India, UK access to the public procurement market should increase.
It was always anticipated that the block to this FTA would be an Indian requirement for a relaxation of UK immigration policy – something even less likely to be agreed by the present government, which is, if possible, even more obsessed with reducing immigration at whatever the economic cost than its Tory predecessors, something I will return to. That turned out not to be the case (although perhaps, had it been agreed, it might have enabled a deeper deal), and the only tangentially immigration-related issue was an agreement to exempt Indian workers on short-term visas from National Insurance Contributions (NICs).
Once again Brexiters were wrong-footed. This was a deal they had long-advocated as a Brexit prize, and Jacob Rees-Mogg greeted it as “exactly what Brexit promised”. But Kemi Badenoch latched onto the NIC provision (as, more unexpectedly, did the LibDems), either unaware of or ignoring the fact that such arrangements (which are reciprocal for UK workers) have been agreed with numerous countries in the past. Nigel Farage also weighed in, denouncing the deal as “truly appalling”, and as selling out British workers and farmers.
All this was, as with the US deal, pure opportunism (one senior Indian official was even quoted as saying that Badenoch had agreed the NIC provision in principle when she was Trade Secretary). There’s no doubt whatsoever that the Tories would have done the same deal. But the Brexiter reactions, especially Farage’s, also point to one of the biggest of the many contradictions which have run throughout the entire Brexit project, that between nativist protectionism and globalist free trade. Hence the idiotic situation that Brexiters can now regard the UK-India deal as both a vindication and a betrayal of Brexit.
A Brexit benefit?
To the extent that the deal is being claimed as a ‘Brexit benefit’, the usual arguments apply. Yes, it could only be made because the UK has left the EU. But according to official calculations its economic value, an estimated 0.1% increase to GDP after 15 years, whilst slightly greater than the FTAs with Australia (0.08%) and New Zealand (0.03%), is nugatory compared with the costs of Brexit (minus 4%). Given that Brexit has happened, there’s a case for doing such deals, but the idea that they in any way justify Brexit is absurd. In any case, it is reported in the Indian media that the ongoing EU-India trade negotiations are likely to be accelerated, again precisely because of the impetus injected by Trump’s trade mayhem.
Of course, whenever the economic deficiencies of their project are pointed out to Brexiters, they invariably fall back on some version of their ideas about sovereignty and democracy. In relation to trade deals, they used to make much of the idea that, with Brexit, the people’s representatives in parliament would ‘regain control’ over ratification of FTAs. That was always based on a false premise, because as an EU member the UK could have held parliamentary votes on FTAs made by the EU, potentially even blocking them, but it waived that right. As for the present situation, whilst it might fairly be said that the UK-US deal is so flimsy and indefinite it hardly warrants a vote, that is not true of the UK-India deal. Yet the government has stated that, in line with post-Brexit legislation and practice, there will be no vote. So that’s another supposed ‘Brexit benefit’ that has quietly been discredited.
Where does all this leave the UK-EU reset?
The short answer to that is that it leaves it exactly where it was before, except that we are now only a couple of days away from the EU Summit at which (perhaps) the tangible details of what the ‘reset’ is going to mean will be unveiled [1]. As such, most of what I wrote in my previous post still applies, but it is worth spelling out one particularly important issue. The fact that the UK-US deal explicitly affirmed that US products sold in the UK must meet UK SPS standards (i.e. no hormone-treated beef, chlorinated chicken etc.) means that there is no (new) obstacle to a UK-EU SPS agreement. This is the issue many commentators have identified as the key indication of whether the UK is going to ‘choose’ between aligning with the US or the EU. It seems to have chosen the EU (which is consistent with what the latest UKICE report shows to be the general direction of regulatory policy).
That should not be a surprise to readers of this blog, as I’ve repeatedly argued (in the face of some sceptical responses) that it was highly unlikely that the government would agree anything with the US, or anyone else, to prevent what has always been Labour’s central, most repeatedly stated, reset ambition. It obviously remains to be seen if there will be a UK-EU SPS agreement, but the possibility remains open. I don’t think that quite amounts to the UK-US deal being a “triumph for remainers”, as Adam Bienkov argues, but it does endorse their core economic proposition of the centrality of geography to trade. Certainly the deal doesn’t mean that (taken in conjunction with the India deal) “the Rejoiner dream [has] finally died”, as pro-Brexit commentator Ambrose Pritchard-Evans claims.
Assuming there will now be a UK-EU SPS deal (in principle, if not immediately in detail), the important question is what else, if anything, gets announced next week. Over and above the widely expected defence and security pact, there are several possibilities, as outlined in my previous post, and there’s not much point in reviewing the various rumours and speculations there have been since. We’ll know soon enough.
What resetting means
That previous post attracted a certain amount of negative comment on social media. In particular, one poster on Bluesky [2] repeatedly and aggressively criticized me for having said that Labour’s red lines are fixed which, they insisted, meant I was indulging in British ‘exceptionalism’ whereby the EU was expected to make all the compromises and to find the solutions for the problems Brexit has caused the UK. It was a slightly bizarre accusation given the number of times over the last nine years I have criticized such a position, which has indeed often been in evidence. More importantly, it was simply ignorant. It is a fact that the Labour red lines have not changed, and a fact that they necessarily put a massive restriction on what can be agreed by the EU. But that certainly does not mean that there is no space for agreeing anything beyond what was negotiated by Boris Johnson and David Frost (a view which, ironically, mirrors Frost’s own criticisms of the reset).
That is for two reasons. One is that the UK under Labour does seem to have dropped one of the Johnson-Frost (and May) red lines of doctrinaire objection to any role for the ECJ and European Law. Admittedly this has never been formally stated, but, for years now, it has been notably absent from Labour’s list of red lines. If that is indeed so, it potentially opens up new areas for agreement that had been closed down by the UK, including but not limited to an SPS agreement, without entailing any concession from the EU on the need for ECJ jurisdiction. The other is that, even within its red lines, the Johnson-Frost deal was in many respects minimalistic, because of their hang-up about sovereignty in a more diffuse sense (i.e. beyond even what those red lines of necessity betokened). This is one reason why the quite expansive possibilities – possibilities envisaged by the EU quite as much as the UK – in the (non-binding) Political Declaration, which accompanied the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement, were never brought to fruition. There is now at least the potential to revisit them.
Nor, to address another repeated, and related, criticism made of that post, does doing so automatically amount to UK attempts at ‘cherry-picking’ or ‘cakeism’. Those concepts, whilst certainly highly relevant at some stages of the Brexit process (and, again, I've exhaustively catalogued and criticized this) have been rendered largely redundant since the UK became a third country to the EU. There are no cherries to try to pick, because the UK has foregone the pie. Now, the only issue is whether both the UK and the EU see it as being in their own interests to make agreements over cooperation in specific areas or participation in specific programmes. Indeed, that began to happen under the Sunak government, with the UK-Frontex deal on tackling irregular migration and the admission of the UK to the Horizon Europe and Copernicus programmes.
Trust in Starmer’s Britain?
If cherry-picking is no longer of much, if any, relevance to understanding Brexit events, new considerations have emerged. One is whether, contrary to what I have said, the UK-US deal, whilst not in its provisions affecting what the EU and UK might agree, could do so by antagonizing EU leaders. As I said above, that could well have been part of Trump’s intentions in making the deal and, even if not, the agreement hardly showed the UK standing in solidarity with other targets of Trump’s aggression. Again, I discussed this in a recent post, pondering that, if such a deal happened, it might simply be regarded by other countries as understandable realpolitik. That remains an open question, but the positive reaction to the agreement from Germany’s new Chancellor Friederich Merz might at least suggest that this is possible.
The other issue is that of domestic politics. Here, Simon Nixon makes the interesting argument that the US and India deals have provided Starmer with political cover for a maximal reset, by presenting himself as having just delivered on the Brexiters’ key trade promises. That could be so, but what is quite clear is that the Brexiters’ attack on the reset is continuing to gather force, and Badenoch has already threatened (£) to reverse anything agreed that “betrays Brexit”. Such threats are now the most potent weapon in the Brexiters’ arsenal, and they (rather than previous concerns about cherry-picking) are the most obvious disincentive to the EU to agree to a substantive reset.
Equally, the sight of Keir Starmer not just rehashing Brexiter nonsense about trade deals but now invoking their ‘taking back control’ slogan when launching this week’s morally reprehensible, politically counter-productive, and economically illiterate anti-immigration crusade is hardly likely to inspire confidence and trust from the EU. It hardly matters whether Starmer really believes what he said, or whether it is dishonesty resulting from fear of the Reform Party. Either way, quite as much as Badenoch and Farage, he is showing that ‘Brexitism’ is entrenched and that he has no intention of trying to challenge it.
I’ve referred several times to my recent posts on this blog, including the last one, and sometimes mentioned occasions where my expectations have proved accurate, or defended what I’ve written against criticisms. However I will freely admit that one of the main arguments of the last post, to the effect that Starmer had the opportunity to challenge Farage head on, and ‘reset’ domestic politics away from Brexitism, has already been shown to be hopelessly naive. It is now clear that isn’t going to happen. Next week there should be a clearer sense of whether Labour’s approach to the reset with the EU is going to be another missed opportunity to start to deal with the damage of Brexit.
Notes
[1] It is always worth recalling that, any reset aside, the UK has still not implemented all of the provisions of the original Withdrawal Agreement, nor some parts of the Windsor Framework. Moreover, there is still no deal on Gibraltar, although reports this week (£) suggested (not for the first time) that one is imminent. Indeed, the resolution of outstanding issues, perhaps especially Gibraltar, may well be part of the conditions for a reset of any significance.
[2] In line with my normal practice of not ‘punching down’ by linking to individual social media accounts, except when they are those of public figures, I will not identify the poster in question. In any case, some others were almost equally unpleasant.
That previous post attracted a certain amount of negative comment on social media. In particular, one poster on Bluesky [2] repeatedly and aggressively criticized me for having said that Labour’s red lines are fixed which, they insisted, meant I was indulging in British ‘exceptionalism’ whereby the EU was expected to make all the compromises and to find the solutions for the problems Brexit has caused the UK. It was a slightly bizarre accusation given the number of times over the last nine years I have criticized such a position, which has indeed often been in evidence. More importantly, it was simply ignorant. It is a fact that the Labour red lines have not changed, and a fact that they necessarily put a massive restriction on what can be agreed by the EU. But that certainly does not mean that there is no space for agreeing anything beyond what was negotiated by Boris Johnson and David Frost (a view which, ironically, mirrors Frost’s own criticisms of the reset).
That is for two reasons. One is that the UK under Labour does seem to have dropped one of the Johnson-Frost (and May) red lines of doctrinaire objection to any role for the ECJ and European Law. Admittedly this has never been formally stated, but, for years now, it has been notably absent from Labour’s list of red lines. If that is indeed so, it potentially opens up new areas for agreement that had been closed down by the UK, including but not limited to an SPS agreement, without entailing any concession from the EU on the need for ECJ jurisdiction. The other is that, even within its red lines, the Johnson-Frost deal was in many respects minimalistic, because of their hang-up about sovereignty in a more diffuse sense (i.e. beyond even what those red lines of necessity betokened). This is one reason why the quite expansive possibilities – possibilities envisaged by the EU quite as much as the UK – in the (non-binding) Political Declaration, which accompanied the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement, were never brought to fruition. There is now at least the potential to revisit them.
Nor, to address another repeated, and related, criticism made of that post, does doing so automatically amount to UK attempts at ‘cherry-picking’ or ‘cakeism’. Those concepts, whilst certainly highly relevant at some stages of the Brexit process (and, again, I've exhaustively catalogued and criticized this) have been rendered largely redundant since the UK became a third country to the EU. There are no cherries to try to pick, because the UK has foregone the pie. Now, the only issue is whether both the UK and the EU see it as being in their own interests to make agreements over cooperation in specific areas or participation in specific programmes. Indeed, that began to happen under the Sunak government, with the UK-Frontex deal on tackling irregular migration and the admission of the UK to the Horizon Europe and Copernicus programmes.
Trust in Starmer’s Britain?
If cherry-picking is no longer of much, if any, relevance to understanding Brexit events, new considerations have emerged. One is whether, contrary to what I have said, the UK-US deal, whilst not in its provisions affecting what the EU and UK might agree, could do so by antagonizing EU leaders. As I said above, that could well have been part of Trump’s intentions in making the deal and, even if not, the agreement hardly showed the UK standing in solidarity with other targets of Trump’s aggression. Again, I discussed this in a recent post, pondering that, if such a deal happened, it might simply be regarded by other countries as understandable realpolitik. That remains an open question, but the positive reaction to the agreement from Germany’s new Chancellor Friederich Merz might at least suggest that this is possible.
The other issue is that of domestic politics. Here, Simon Nixon makes the interesting argument that the US and India deals have provided Starmer with political cover for a maximal reset, by presenting himself as having just delivered on the Brexiters’ key trade promises. That could be so, but what is quite clear is that the Brexiters’ attack on the reset is continuing to gather force, and Badenoch has already threatened (£) to reverse anything agreed that “betrays Brexit”. Such threats are now the most potent weapon in the Brexiters’ arsenal, and they (rather than previous concerns about cherry-picking) are the most obvious disincentive to the EU to agree to a substantive reset.
Equally, the sight of Keir Starmer not just rehashing Brexiter nonsense about trade deals but now invoking their ‘taking back control’ slogan when launching this week’s morally reprehensible, politically counter-productive, and economically illiterate anti-immigration crusade is hardly likely to inspire confidence and trust from the EU. It hardly matters whether Starmer really believes what he said, or whether it is dishonesty resulting from fear of the Reform Party. Either way, quite as much as Badenoch and Farage, he is showing that ‘Brexitism’ is entrenched and that he has no intention of trying to challenge it.
I’ve referred several times to my recent posts on this blog, including the last one, and sometimes mentioned occasions where my expectations have proved accurate, or defended what I’ve written against criticisms. However I will freely admit that one of the main arguments of the last post, to the effect that Starmer had the opportunity to challenge Farage head on, and ‘reset’ domestic politics away from Brexitism, has already been shown to be hopelessly naive. It is now clear that isn’t going to happen. Next week there should be a clearer sense of whether Labour’s approach to the reset with the EU is going to be another missed opportunity to start to deal with the damage of Brexit.
Notes
[1] It is always worth recalling that, any reset aside, the UK has still not implemented all of the provisions of the original Withdrawal Agreement, nor some parts of the Windsor Framework. Moreover, there is still no deal on Gibraltar, although reports this week (£) suggested (not for the first time) that one is imminent. Indeed, the resolution of outstanding issues, perhaps especially Gibraltar, may well be part of the conditions for a reset of any significance.
[2] In line with my normal practice of not ‘punching down’ by linking to individual social media accounts, except when they are those of public figures, I will not identify the poster in question. In any case, some others were almost equally unpleasant.
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