How can Brexit Britain navigate Trump’s World?

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

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

What’s it got to do with Brexit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new proposal for UK-EU relations

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is ‘Mutual Recognition’?

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

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

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

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

What about expansive use of Dynamic Alignment?

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

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

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

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

So (why) would the EU agree to it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Note

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

Uncharted waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tories: stick or twist?

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

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

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

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

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

The coming showdown

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

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

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

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

When two tribes go to war

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

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

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

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

Unreformable?

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

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

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

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

The looming danger of Donald Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing the new political game

The first cricket test match I ever attended was England versus West Indies at the Oval in the baking hot summer of 1976. It was the final test of a series in which a truly magnificent West Indies side crushed England, to an even greater extent than the 3-0 scoreline suggests. It was also politically significant in terms of British race relations, having begun with the infamous pledge by England’s South African-born captain, Tony Greig, that his side would make the West Indies “grovel”. At the same time, the West Indies had enthusiastic support from Britons of West Indian descent, perhaps especially at the Oval, bringing steel drums and trumpets, much to the dismay of some English traditionalists. The racial and post-colonial politics of the series have been extensively discussed and are well-captured in the 2010 film Fire in Babylon.

I’m not sure to what extent I was aware of any of that at the time – I was only 11 – but what was apparent throughout the series, simply from a cricketing point of view, was that it wasn’t just that the West Indies were playing much better than England, but that they were playing an almost different, more modern, and certainly more thrilling game. That was most graphically visible at the Old Trafford test, when veteran English batsman Brian Close, who was 45 and had not played test cricket for nine years before being recalled that summer, was almost literally pulverized by the sublime fast bowling of Michael Holding.

Just as some English traditionalists abhorred the exuberance of the West Indies’ supporters, so too did they complain that such aggressive fast bowling ‘just wasn’t cricket’. But they were wrong. It was what cricket was becoming*. Inescapably, those complaints had more than a tinge of post-colonial angst and of racist outrage. Cricket, invented in England and exported to the colonies, was no longer that of the Bufton-Tuftons of the MCC and Lord’s, or, for that matter, of the working-class league cricket of northern England, where players like Close had their roots. And descendants of those who had once been slaves were the architects as well as the masters of this new cricket. At that Oval test I attended, Greig acknowledged that by going on all fours and ‘grovelling’ to the crowd.

Reactionary resentment

Well, I’ve been told before that cricketing analogies don’t have any resonance for many readers of this blog, so I’ll get to the point. I was reminded of all this by the publication this week of the Reform UK manifesto. I’ve already reviewed the specifically Brexit-related elements of this in a separate post which covers all the party manifestos, but it has a more general significance.

Part of that significance relates directly to the laments of the cricket traditionalists of my childhood. There is a lineal connection between the kind of ‘I want my country back’ nostalgia of the Reform party and that sense of not just English cricket, but England itself was being supplanted. There’s also a discernible connection between the post-colonial complaints of those traditionalists and the manifesto’s policy proposal that that “any teaching about a period or example of British or European imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-European occurrence of the same to ensure balance”.

Long before anyone talked much, at least in relation to British politics, about populism, it was being incubated in a reactionary resentment, a kind of sullen victimhood. Even in those days, now fifty years ago, I heard that phrase, ‘it’s not my country any more’ and, which is perhaps less heard now, the half-baffled, half-aggrieved one that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’. That strand of cultural politics never went away, but became subsumed within the coalition of voters and ideologies which Thatcherism assembled. It was a coalition which gradually unwound, and UKIP was one expression of that. But what we are now witnessing is the dramatic, and possibly permanent, fracturing of the traditionalist and populist right.

So there is a literal connection between my cricket story, as a vignette within this strand of politics, and this week’s Reform manifesto. But there is also a metaphorical one, which works in the opposite direction. The literal connection posits populist politics as linked to reactionary horror at the new cricket of the 1970s. But the metaphorical connection posits populism as a new kind of way of doing politics which is making established norms of political arguing and campaigning seem outmoded and redundant, just as the 1976 West Indies’ team made England’s cricketers seem obsolete, almost to the extent of playing a different game altogether.

The anti-politics of Brexitism

The Reform manifesto is a good example, starting with its insistence that it is not a manifesto but a ‘contract’ with voters. For that very insistence is nonsense in suggesting that it entails some sort of binding commitment, given that what it proposes is undeliverable. That this is so as regards its costings was quickly pointed out by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), but it is equally true as regards many of its core pledges. For example, picking up migrants in the Channel and returning them to France is, in practical terms, impossible, as is the commitment to ending NHS waiting lists. It is certainly true of the core pledge to cut immigration to the bone. And the Brexit pledges, which I discussed separately, may not be literally impossible, but would come at an economic and political cost which is not mentioned, and no doubt would be denied. If this manifesto were put into practice, it would make the Truss regime look like a model of competence and stability.

However, crucially, and this is the sense in which the populists are playing a different game to ‘normal’ politics, simply demonstrating that the manifesto is nonsense, and the ‘contract’ is fraudulent, cuts little or no ice. For, as Farage’s response to being told just that shows, they themselves are happy to admit that it isn’t actually being put forward as a programme for government, as they have no expectation of winning the election.

So what is presented as a contract, because ‘manifestos’ are the supposedly discredited vehicle for politicians to make promises that they break when elected, consists of promises which are pre-broken by the anticipation of not being elected. This is politics as anti-politics. As for things like the IFS calculations, they can simply be dismissed as the usual Establishment nay-saying, from forecasters who ‘always get things wrong’. Yet even that is not the whole story, since the manifesto is shameless in referring to the FT, two former Governors of the Bank of England and, indeed, the IFS as having endorsed parts of its economic programme.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it is a version of what happened with the referendum, where the Vote Leave campaigners made impossible, and often contradictory, pledges. They, too, rubbished experts who painstakingly explained the impossibilities and contradictions simply for being experts (whilst happily relying on the authority of those experts who supported them, many of whom are the same people who are behind the Reform manifesto). They, too, gained strength from their lies being debunked, since the very debunking helped the lies to circulate more widely (the £350 million a week for the NHS being the prime example). They, too, when asked to produce a workable plan for Brexit, insisted that they were not going to form a government, so it was not for them, as campaigners, to do so, and one reason they were able to get away with that was the expectation on both sides that they would not win anyway. In this sense, there’s a continuity between pro-Brexit populist politics and post-Brexit populist politics, making Brexitism a useful term to connect the two.

The last chance for Tory traditionalists?

Of course, it’s true that Reform is not going to win this election. So we might just say that none of this really matters. But it isn’t as straightforward as that. This is not Screaming Lord Sutch and the Monster Raving Loony Party, standing for laughs, even if its proposals might as well come from them. As with UKIP before, Farage and Reform are deadly serious and they now know, because of what happened with UKIP before, that it is perfectly possible to have a big political impact without winning much, if any, formal political power. This time Farage says, and there’s no reason to doubt him, that his aim is to take over the Tory Party and to become Prime Minister in 2029 (£).

In response, Rishi Sunak might be expected to counter-attack. At the moment, his only message to Reform voters is that they will be responsible for increasing the size of the expected Labour majority. He could, instead, denounce Reform’s policies as unworkable and damaging, just as he does other political opponents, especially Labour, if only on grounds of fiscal orthodoxy. That, after all, was his pitch when opposing Truss in the Tory leadership election, and when he took over from her having been proved right about the consequences of her policies. But he is unlikely to challenge Farage in that way and everyone knows why: many of his MPs and most of his party members are themselves broadly supportive of Reform’s agenda.

There was a very interesting interview this week on Nick Cohen’s The Lowdown podcast with the journalist Rafael Behr in which he makes the point, amongst many others, that Sunak almost inexplicably flunked standing up to the populists in his party after he had easily defeated their attempts to derail the Windsor Framework and defied their desire to scrap the entirety of Retained EU Law (both of which, by the way, are now Reform policies). I, myself, had speculated at the time of the Windsor Framework that it marked a new chapter.

In fact, Sunak proceeded to pander to the populists, especially with the Rwanda policy. Or, perhaps, he was not pandering to them so much as showing his own beliefs. Either way, he could not satisfy them, and, as has been the story under all the recent Tory leaders, they simply demanded more. Now, there is another moment, perhaps the very final one, for a Tory leader to challenge the populist right, if only as the last act of his political career, but he is unlikely to make use of it.

The responsibility of voters

In any case, it’s probably too late. The genie of anti-politics will not easily be re-bottled. It thrives on attention and rebuttal (making even this blog a very small part of the problem), yet it also thrives when ignored or left unchallenged. So, what to do? No one has a satisfactory answer to that, but it surely has to be based upon facing down, rather than pandering to, populists, if only because pandering to them is self-defeating. Theresa May’s main argument, in itself a principled one, for delivering Brexit was that, were it to be abandoned, voters’ faith in democracy would be damaged. Yet, as was always inevitable, delivering Brexit did not satisfy its supporters and that also damaged their faith in democracy. And so those voters are now, once again, being mobilized by Farage.

Politicians obviously have a particular role in challenging Farage but, at the same time, I think it is insufficiently said, perhaps because it has become almost taboo to mention, that these voters themselves must take ultimate responsibility. They believed the impossible promises made for Brexit and yet, finding those promises not to have been delivered, are willing to accept still more impossible promises from the same people who made the previous ones. They revel in their worldly ability to see through the charlatanism of politicians who are ‘all the same’ and ‘just in it for themselves’, yet are entirely gullible in accepting obvious charlatans like Farage and Johnson as being ‘different’ and ignoring their obvious self-interest.

The numbers of voters involved aren’t small. On the basis of the latest opinion polls, Reform have 16% support and the Conservatives have 21%. Supposing that only a third of those Conservative voters have effectively the same views as Reform voters (and I think it is probably higher), that suggests a bedrock support for Farageist populism of 23%, or almost a quarter of voters. They will all have received years of free education, a lifetime of free health care, have or expect to have livable pensions, and have lived their entire lives without war or mass unemployment.

They are, in short, the beneficiaries of the post-war social democratic settlement and what still endures of it. That’s not to deny they may have all sorts of hardships and legitimate grievances, but by global and historical standards these are not the downtrodden and oppressed of the earth. I simply don’t buy the idea that many, if any, of these voters are so downtrodden and desperate that they can’t be blamed for latching on to any glimmer of hope, and are simply exploited by unscrupulous populists like Farage. It's an idea which is really just a misguided attempt at liberal understanding, or perhaps an expression of liberal guilt, and it plays straight into the hands of populists.

For to the extent that there is a near-taboo on saying such things it is, actually, just one of the many duplicities of such populists, who seize on it as ‘sneering elitism’. In fact, what could be more patronizing than to deny that voters are responsible for their choices? It’s true that criticizing such voters will do nothing to change their minds, and even, to the extent they hear the criticisms, it will probably cement their opinions, but it is still worth saying. Anyway, it’s not as if not criticizing them will make a difference either. And what certainly won’t make a difference is offering them undeliverable policies on the basis that to do otherwise would be disrespectful of their desire for such policies. On the contrary, as Brexit has shown, that just sets up a new cycle of resentment.

The coming political battle

There is a temptation to think that with a probably large, and possibly huge, Labour majority in prospect, it will be years before Conservatives or Reform matter again. I think that it would be a serious mistake to yield to that temptation. For one thing, Labour’s ability to win has to some considerable extent been achieved by Starmer ceding ground, in both tone and substance, to the populists, just as New Labour only won by ceding so much ground to the neo-liberals.

There’s an element of necessity to that in electoral systems where you can only win from the centre, given that the location of the centre changes over time. In one sense of politics, the centre is a reality that must be accommodated, and catered for, especially at elections. Starmer understands this, and It was Corbyn’s inability to do so which doomed him to oblivion. In another sense, which Corbyn understood and Starmer seems not to, the location of the centre is always a matter of political contestation, and that contest is continuous and not the same as, although it intersects with, electoral politics.

In that second sense, the battle with populism, as regards both its policy prescriptions and its anti-politics mode of conduct, will continue after the election. In fact, it will become especially important then because when, as will almost inevitably happen, and probably quite quickly, disillusion with the new government sets in, that will be a new moment of opportunity for the populists to say that the ‘mainstream’ political parties are ‘all the same’ and none of them will ever succeed. As they do so, there’s every possibility that Starmer’s government will try, just as Tory centrists did before, to accommodate and appease them, again pandering to rather than challenging their demands and, again, finding them implacable.

So, at best, the election will be a moment to briefly pause and take some pleasure in the end of what have been some long and truly ghastly years for anyone who is both politically sentient and committed to honesty, rationality or even just basic competence in politics. But it will only be a pause. Brexit won’t have gone away, and nor will the politics that brought it. On the contrary, unless there is a highly unlikely fightback from its more traditionalist wing, there must be every chance that the Tory Party will fully embrace a Farageist National Conservatism, whether led by him or not. The Reform manifesto looks like, and is, a ridiculous joke but, as Farage gloated in the European Parliament after the referendum: “when I came here 17 years ago and said I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me. Well, you’re not laughing now”.

It’s true that winning an election on anything like such a manifesto will be difficult. If my back-of-the envelope calculation of there being perhaps 25% bedrock support for it is correct, that leaves a fair way to climb to form a government, even under first-past-the post. But a ‘NatCon’ party espousing something like that manifesto would have a lot of influential and rich backing and a lot of media support, and, as I observed last week, unless Labour prove to be really effective in government, its large majority could easily crumble in a low-turnout election in 2029. In any case, even without winning that election, if a party on such a manifesto came even within contention it would have at least one very important consequence: it would kill, stone-dead, any prospect of the re-joining the EU for years, if only because it would make it too risky for the EU to accept Britain as a member.

Metaphors to live by

In that post last week, I finished with the image of us all being lab rats within the post-Brexit laboratory of political science, but in some ways that is misleading. I was mainly thinking of the fact that only quite a small number of people will directly influence the internal politics of the Tory Party. But as a metaphor in a more general sense, it fails to recognize the agency which we all have, to at least some degree.

One of my favourite cartoons concerns the famous Pavlovian experiment in which, after repeatedly ringing a bell at the same time as feeding them meat, dogs were conditioned to salivate merely at the sound of a bell. That is to say, they had no agency and their behaviour was a conditioned reflex. In the cartoon, there are two dogs salivating and a scientist in a white coat holding a bell. One dog says to the other: have you noticed how every time we dribble, that guy Pavlov rings a bell? It’s a nice subversion of assumptions about where agency lies.

Or, to put it another way, going back to cricket. I’m not the avid follower of the game I was as a child and a young man, and in fact the last test match I went to was in 2000. It was the last day of what again was the last test of a series between England and the West Indies, again played at the Oval. Since 1976, much had changed in cricket, including the way that English cricket was organized and the England team played it. Much, too, had changed in society.

The 2000 match was watched by a packed, multi-racial, crowd, with both sides having enthusiastic support, and I don’t think there were any of the racist or colonialist undercurrents there had been in 1976. There was certainly nothing resembling the ‘grovel’ comment. England won that game, and narrowly won the series, but the teams were well-matched. More to the point, they were both playing recognizably the same game. Things change.

But there is no inevitability in how they change. That’s down to agency; to the decisions which, collectively, we make, not just at elections but every day.

 

*One might argue that it was not new anyway, and English complaints about the West Indies’ fast bowling were hypocritical. It was England, after all, who had deployed ‘Bodyline bowling’ in the 1930s. But I think a new cricket was emerging in the 1970s, part of which was to do with faster bowling becoming routine, hence it was shortly afterwards that helmets began to be worn and became the norm. And cricket was changing in other ways, too, away from the still rather amateurish ethos that had prevailed (e.g. as regards fitness or squad-building) as well as in its financial and commercial structure, and in game formats, playing styles etc.

‘I want my country back’: what’s in a phrase?

Lee Anderson’s decision this week to join the Reform Party, becoming its first, if unelected, MP brought into focus several of the Brexit themes I’ve been writing about in recent months. At the beginning of October, discussing the ways that Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad, I made specific reference to Anderson, then the Deputy Chairman, as illustrating how there are no discernible differences between many sections of the Tory Party and Reform. So, given the prompt of losing the Tory whip, it was an obvious move for him to make. It’s possible that other Tory MPs will follow him to Reform without that spur to action, but none have done so yet. And why should they? It is now obvious to all, as it should have been for a while, that, as I wrote in February 2023, Brexitism is eating Conservatism.

Thus the end-game for the Brexitist (or NatCon populists, or Five Families, or whatever label we might use for them) is to take complete control of the Tory Party after it loses the election, and then to bring Reform Party voters and politicians, perhaps including Nigel Farage, into an invigorated ‘true Conservative’ Party. Meanwhile, the job of Reform is to siphon off as much as possible of the vote, so as to inflict a catastrophic defeat upon Sunak, facilitating the Brexitist takeover and paving the way for an actual or effective merger. Who knows, Anderson himself may re-enter the Tory fold in the process. Or perhaps he will disappear into well-deserved oblivion, a footnote in dusty volumes of political history.

Why Anderson matters

Whatever his personal fate, the more interesting thing about his defection (though, technically, it wasn’t quite that, given that he had already lost the Tory whip) was the way Anderson explained his motivation. It was, he announced, using the kind of grave tone that implied it was some deeply thought-out, startlingly original insight, because “I want my country back”. Fellow Brexitist Andrea Jenkyns was in agreement, though apparently miffed since she had been “saying this for months!”, as if she had the copyright. In fact, it was exactly the decades-old cliché which I referred to in my post only a couple of weeks ago when discussing the politics of nostalgia feeding what I called ‘radical Brexitism’ (though the precise words I used there were ‘I just want my country back’).

Anderson claims, probably rightly, that his is a desire shared by “millions of people up and down the country”, although whether, as populists believe, it amounts to a (‘silent’) majority is another question. Allison Pearson in the Telegraph (£) certainly thinks, using a formulation with a certain redolence, that “Lee Anderson was right.” And it is the extent to which his idea has support, rather than Anderson himself, that matters. It is at least part of what gave us Brexit, but in doing so, as I suggested in my post, that revealed how chimerical it is as a political goal. After all, immediately after the referendum, Nigel Farage declared that “We’ve got our country back” and yet now, eight years later, Anderson and his ‘millions of others’ are still complaining, still aggrieved, still making the same demand.

One thing I didn’t know when I wrote my own post about nostalgia, but learned about this week from a poster on X-Twitter, is that in 2016 the critic A.A. Gill wrote a highly incisive critique of the ‘I want my country back’ motif, and its role in the nostalgia that informed the case to leave the EU. It is far better-written, and far more amusing, than my own effort, but there’s one important thing which Gill doesn’t mention, and which I only briefly touched on, which is that, whilst the demand suggests that at some point in the past those making it had ‘had their country’, but lost it due to recent changes, that suggestion is invalidated by the way that the demand is an old and recurring one.

Nostalgia - or déjà vu?

I certainly recall it being an expression which was widely used by adults when I was growing up in the 1970s. It was a sentiment channeled by Margaret Thatcher who, as the distinguished sociologist Stuart Hall wrote: “has always spoken quite authentically on behalf of those people who felt they were left behind by permissiveness … challenged by the sexual revolution, who never wanted a libertarian society” [1].

That was most obviously connected with the then prevalent Mary Whitehouse crusade against moral decline, a backlash against the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, and as such may seem rather passé now. However, something similar continues to exercise the Conservative right, as shown this week (£) by Melanie Phillips’ equation of populism with social conservatism and traditional family values. That’s a view shared by the co-leaders of the New Conservatives, Tory MPs Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, and notably all three make the foundational Brexitist claim that the vote for Brexit was an indication that their socially conservative policies have majority support. Notably, too, all three of them, plus Anderson, were amongst the speakers at last year’s London NatCon Conference.

In other words, the conservative, and sometimes Christian conservative, critique of ‘the permissive society’ is by no means an historical curio from the 1970s. Certainly there is much contemporary resonance in the way that those who Hall described (using a term familiar from Brexit, though with an accent on its cultural rather than its economic meaning) as “left behind” were as alarmed about rising crime and disorder as they were by sexual licence.

That alarm was examined, at the same kind of time, by another sociologist, Geoffrey Pearson. His analysis showed how such fears in the 1970s and 1980s typically referenced an imagined past, vaguely referred to as ‘about 20 years ago’, before things got ‘out of control’. Yet, he demonstrated, going back about 20 years to the 1950s and 1960s revealed that exactly the same fears were being expressed, and also with reference to the period ‘about 20 years ago’ or ‘since the war’, and so on back into the even more distant past [2].

I was reminded of this when Reform leader Richard Tice expanded on Anderson’s reference to wanting his country back by talking about the way things have changed “over the last 25 years or so” (I can’t find the link, unfortunately, but elsewhere he waxed lyrical about the 1980s and 90s), showing the enduring relevance of the pattern of ever-refreshed, ahistorical grievance that Geoffrey Pearson identified. Even more pertinently, Pearson showed how the sense of crime and social breakdown, and the decline of traditional British or English (and he notes the frequent slippage between the two, also evident today) virtues, both in the 1980s and in previous periods, going back to the nineteenth century, was almost invariably linked to immigration and the arrival of ‘alien’ cultures.

This is also almost invariably what lies behind contemporary demands to ‘get my country back’, with Allison Pearson writing that “our nation is being abducted by aliens” (though also, inadvertently, demonstrating the endless recurrence of these claims by opening her article with a mournful lament for England written by Philip Larkin in 1946). It is plainly what Anderson meant, as suggested by his reference to his desire being to “speak my mind” (prompting some giggles from the assembled journalists), presumably a nod towards his remarks about Sadiq Khan which led to him losing the Tory whip. That was made explicit when he went on to use his new-found freedom by airing his “concerns” about legal and illegal migration and “hate marches”, concerns which he, just like his predecessors, ran seamlessly together with those about “street crime” and “the shoplifters” who go unpunished.

It’s not just immigration which is a recurring theme. The preoccupation Anderson and his fellows have with fighting culture wars against ‘wokery’ also reprises earlier anguish about ‘political correctness gone mad’ and, in Geoffrey Pearson’s telling, the persistent 1970s complaint about “the 'softy-softy, namby-pamby pussyfooting' of the 'so-called experts’” (p.4). That latter side-swipe at experts is another point of resonance with Brexit and Brexitism, as is the reference to social liberalism, which could effectively be expressed in the present-day terms of wokery, snowflakes, and safe spaces. Conversely, it’s not hard to imagine the next line being a quote from some preposterously-named, reactionary, over-privileged, 1970s warhorse of a Tory MP calling for the workshy to be conscripted for compulsory national service. But in fact that call was made just his week (£), by the fabulously wealthy, ferociously pro-Brexit Tory MP Richard Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, and descendent of pioneers of the sugar and slave trade.

In short, with some minor modifications of language and emphasis, there’s really no difference between the complaints made by people like Anderson, Tice, Cates, Kruger et al. now, and those made by their predecessors at the very time, whatever the time, they want to ‘get back’ to.

When nostalgia turns vicious

It's important to notice these recurrences and continuities partly because they help to explain why the demand to ‘have our country back’ is based upon an imagination of past stability and harmony – what might be called ‘simple nostalgia’ – which means that, even if the clock could be turned back, the recovered past would not be what people think they remember. But what is even more important is that it reveals the essential dishonesty of the pretension to moderation and reasonableness. That pretension is implicit in the word ‘just’ in the phrase ‘I just want my country back’, as if it were merely a humble demand. It also figures when that word is used in a different way, namely the claim commonly made by such populists that they ‘have nothing against immigration or immigrants, it’s just that the numbers have got too big’, or that they ‘have nothing against equality, it’s just that it has gone too far now’.

Yet the fact that such suggestions are recurrent, so that even when, say, immigration levels were much lower than they have been in recent years, exactly the same disclaimers were made, shows populists to have a highly immoderate agenda, which might be called ‘vicious nostalgia’. That is, they say that it is only now that immigration is too high that they are concerned, but in fact they said the same thing when immigration was lower. So were their demands ever to be satisfied, say by enforcing a low immigration cap, they would immediately demand even more extreme restrictions, all the way down to compulsory repatriation or even worse. For once the basic premise of ‘getting our country back’ is accepted, the list of who no longer belongs, of who is not ‘us’ but ‘them’, can only get longer. This is also an illustration of Brexitism, in that it is the wider application of the way that, with Brexit, as soon as one form of it was proposed, there was a demand that only an even harder form would be ‘true Brexit’.

This does not just apply to immigration. That is but one, albeit crucial, aspect of the more fundamental issue of who are the ‘we’ or ‘us’ in all this. Even leaving aside the obvious question of whether it refers to the English or the British, it is always implicit, and often explicit, that ‘getting our country back’ means, like Brexit, expunging ‘the enemies of the people’ and the ‘saboteurs’, and the ‘wokerati’ more generally. So what happens to all these people, numerous and powerful enough to have taken ‘our country’ from us? Public recantation? Imprisonment? Re-education? Deportation? And who are to be the arbiters of what is acceptable in ‘our country’? A Star Chamber of Lee Anderson and his pals?

So in these and other ways the apparently humble, slightly self-pitying, lament that ‘I just want my country back’ leads, or at the very least points, to the darkest corridors and most degraded chambers of human history.

Inverted snobbery

This mock-humility finds another kind of expression, superficially benign but deeply malign, which again was illustrated by Anderson’s explanation of his defection - all this in a statement which lasted just under two minutes! Rehearsing his trademark ‘prolier than thou’ schtick, he simpered that “I might not know some of these long words that people use in parliament”.

At one level, it was a horrible, Uriah Heep-ish, attempt to ingratiate himself – horrible not least for trading on precisely the stereotype of the northern working class which populists like Anderson ascribe to ‘the sneering remoaner elite’. At another level, it was self-evidently an example of the passive-aggressive inverted snobbery which some Brexiters have made their own. For it’s quite obvious that Anderson is not inarticulate, and doesn’t regard himself as such, but wants to use the idea that he is as a way of depicting himself as a plucky, plain-speaking underdog, standing up against effete privilege. It evidently struck Cambridge graduate Allison Pearson that way, as she breathlessly recounted how he had spoken in his “no-nonsense, Nottinghamshire miner’s style”, for all the world like Constance Chatterley meeting Oliver Mellors for the first time.

Again this is worth commenting on because it has a much wider currency and significance than Anderson himself. It is a recurring conceit amongst Brexiters, on both the right and the left, that their opponents are cushioned, self-indulgent, and privileged. Examples include representing ‘remainers’ as only concerned to keep their cheap EU nannies or plumbers, or to preserve the ease with which they can take foreign holidays or own holiday homes. It was evident recently in some responses to the report that the introduction of import controls has, predictably, led to shortages of artisanal delicatessen products, responses which were reminiscent of the comment in Gill’s essay about the desire to go “back to gooseberries, not avocados”.

It’s cartoonish at multiple levels, as if working-class people never go abroad, never employ childminders or plumbers, and subsist solely on bread-and-dripping and pints of wallop. But it serves an important purpose, which is to ignore the significant levels of support for leaving the EU amongst affluent middle-class southerners as well as the significant support for remaining in the EU across the UK, but especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland, amongst poor and working-class people.

Indeed part of its dishonesty is not to differentiate between ‘poor’ and ‘working class’ at all, even though the notion of the Red Wall was originally bound up with Labour-held constituencies where there were large numbers of people with characteristics of home ownership and small-business ownership which associated with voting Tory in other parts of the country. It was these older, probably leave-voting, working class but relatively affluent voters who were central to turning the Red Wall blue in the 2019 election. They may not be rich, but they are not living precariously on the very fringes of society, unacquainted with avocados and confining their holidays to Bridlington. Ignoring this is again part of a rhetorical strategy to depict Brexit – and the more extensive agenda of Brexitism – as being the people’s crusade against the elite.

So just as ‘I want my country back’ codes a vicious agenda of exclusion, Anderson’s ‘man of the people’ act, and similar efforts by Farage and others, mobilize inverted snobbery in pursuit of that agenda.  

Who are the baddies?

We can obviously expect the Brexitists to go on mining this seam, and it will be much easier to do so in opposition than in government. That’s because, as with Brexit itself, it can’t translate its promises into deliverable policy. This is one of the reasons why Sunak’s government is in such a mess, as it constantly tries to assuage the unassuageable demands of the Brexitists within the party and the electorate, whilst maintaining at least a semblance of rationality and competence. Hence Sunak’s periodic forays into populism, such as last year’s embrace of the ’15 minute city’ conspiracy theory, which go nowhere in policy terms.

More recently, and to the present point, his strange, impromptu speech condemning extremism was evidently designed to speak to current concerns - about the safety of MPs, rising Islamophobic and antisemitic attacks, public disorder and ‘no go zones’ - some of which are genuine, but others exaggerated or deployed opportunistically by Brexitists. Indeed it spoke to precisely the issues and events which were the proximate cause of Anderson’s demise as a Tory MP, and promised “a new robust framework” to deal with extremism (the first step, it later emerged, being to get Michael Gove to define it).

This may have been intended to placate Brexitists, perhaps even to promise them that they were about to get their country back! Yet, far from being satisfied, they were infuriated because Sunak included far-right extremism in his condemnation. Yet he could hardly do otherwise without losing all credibility as a mainstream politician, given the widespread evidence of such extremism, including, for example, the fact that last year saw the highest ever number of those in prison for far-right terror offences.

So, suddenly, the Brexitists began to be concerned that the “robust framework” this speech was going to lead to might include them, with, most prominently, Miriam Cates fearing that “attempting to define such nebulous terms as ‘extremism’ and ‘British values’ will have a further chilling effect on those with lawful, conservative views”. Quite what existing ‘chilling effect’ there is on expressing ‘lawful, conservative views’ was not clear when Cates wrote those words, and has become even less so since, given Sunak’s equanimity about holding on to Frank Hester’s money, despite his remarks about Diane Abbott.

At all events, the Brexitists needn’t worry about facing their ‘are we the baddies?’ moment because, ironically, what is almost certainly going to unfold is a textbook illustration of why populism can’t give rise to workable policy. After all, it’s not as if we haven’t been round this loop before, sometimes even with Gove flying the plane, in the fruitless quest for a definition of British values which isn’t either so narrow as to exclude everything except Morris dancing and eating baked beans or so broad as to include everything but satanic rituals and cannibalism.  As it turned out, although he did produce a new definition of extremism yesterday, Gove seems to have avoided re-opening the issue of ‘British values’ directly. Perhaps he felt, as my father did when faced with the task of telling me ‘the facts of life’, that it was better to leave the details only vaguely hinted at (so that at the time, and for some years afterwards, I thought he had been explaining the basic skills I would need if I wanted to pursue a career in plumbing).

What will happen with Gove’s definition, which has already predictably been criticised for going too far and for not going far enough, remains to be seen. I suspect that in practical terms it will amount to nothing and will soon be forgotten. But what Cates’ initial reaction inadvertently demonstrated was the essential fatuity of the central Brexitist ideas of ‘the people’, ‘the will of the people’, and, with that, of their outgrowth in the slogan ‘I want my country back’. For all of these things falter on the same rock as attempting to define British values. There simply is no single ‘people’, with a single ‘will’, and a single set of values, and nor is there a single ‘country’ that belongs as of right to one segment of it. There’s almost certainly not even any agreement within the segment which ‘wants their country back’ about what that actually means, just as there was no agreement amongst those who wanted Brexit about what that meant.

A joke

The fundamental problem in all this is that attempts to define extremism in what is still a liberal democracy inevitably rely on some notion of the tolerance of diversity of beliefs, lifestyles, speech and so on. But, at the same time, the underlying implication of the desire to ‘have our country back’ is the politics of vicious exclusion which is at odds with such tolerance and, itself, a form of extremism. Of course liberal democracies can, should, and do have laws prohibiting many kinds of extremist behaviour, from terrorism to hate speech, as the UK does. Yet, evidently, that is not enough for Anderson and the millions who agree with him.

However, although what is, again, still a liberal democracy isn’t going to give those people what they want, most politicians, and certainly Sunak, continue to pander to them. That is a doomed enterprise, since they remain aggrieved, and it is unsatisfactory for everyone else because it constantly gets in the way of useful, productive and effective politics. It is the political equivalent of indulging a childish tantrum and, again, Brexit provides the template.

Perhaps the best response whenever someone shrieks ‘I want my country back’ would be to say: ‘Well you can’t. You’ve been given Brexit, and that’s more than enough. So suck it up’. It’s true that such treatment would provoke screaming populist rage about the insufferable arrogance of the liberal elite, but that reminds me of one of my favourite jokes, in which a man goes to the doctor, who prescribes a medicine but warns that its side-effects are depression, weight gain, impotence and hair loss. The patient replies that he already has the side-effects, so he might as well start taking the medicine.

 

References

[1] Quoted in Philip Whitehead, The Writing on the Wall. Britain in the 1970s. London: Michael Joseph, 1985.

[2] Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan. A History of Respectable Fears. London: Macmillan, 1983.