Has Britain’s Brexit fever finally broken?

Where to start, after one of the biggest weeks for Brexit news for a long time? Perhaps with my post of a fortnight ago when I discussed two scenarios for Britain’s immediate post-Brexit future. In the first, there would be a gradual move to rapprochement with the EU, taking pragmatic steps to improve the tone and substantive quality of the relationship. In the second, there would be ongoing antagonism and an ideological drive to divergence. I suggested that what happened over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) negotiations would be a key test of which of these would prevail in the battle for the post-Brexit polity, and concluded that for the first scenario to come about the Brexit “fever has to pass”, which would then be followed by a long period of recuperation.

So, does the announcement on Monday of the ‘Windsor Framework’ (WF) as the outcome of the NIP negotiations mark the breaking of that fever? And what does it mean for achieving, or even going beyond, a scenario of rapprochement with the EU?

I’m not going to summarise the provisions of the WF here. The full suite of UK technical documents is available online, including the Command Paper which gives a detailed overview, with the corresponding EU documents appearing on the European Commission website. Moreover, there are numerous good summaries available including a House of Commons Library research briefing, an excellent detailed explainer from the Institute for Government, and an assessment from BBC Northern Ireland of what it means for Northern Irish businesses. It has also been widely reported in the news, as have the initial reactions of the main political parties.

Instead, in this post I will make a few observations and comments.

The Windsor Framework

The WF does not ‘replace’ the NIP, but rather amends and modifies its operations. That isn’t a criticism, because despite Brexiter fantasies there was never any possibility of it being otherwise, but it is a corrective to some of the claims and reports. The operational modifications are considerable and highly technical, will take time to implement, and the detailed ways that implementation will work will only emerge over time. There might also be unintended consequences: one which has already been flagged (£) is the possibility it will further depress GB-NI goods volumes through Wales’s already Brexit-ravaged ports, because they link to ports in Ireland rather than Northern Ireland.

Nor, despite claims by Rishi Sunak, has the WF “removed any sense of a border in the Irish Sea”. There will still be a border, and whilst it has been very considerably simplified, especially by the creation of the green and red channels, even the green lane does not mean a complete absence of border formalities. But there is no doubt that the WF is significantly better, in the sense of being operationally easier in this and many other ways: border frictions are probably the minimum they could be given the realities of Brexit.

In relation to governance and sovereignty, whether it is a better is open to interpretation as, of course, was whether the unmodified NIP was problematic in those respects. Northern Ireland is still treated differently to the rest of the UK (though unionists don’t always object to that) precisely because the Protocol means it remains in the EU single market for goods. As a result, there is still an ultimate role for the ECJ, as there was always going to be, and the new ‘Stormont Brake’ mechanism, whilst a significant innovation, doesn’t constitute the ‘unequivocal veto’ the government is presenting it as. However, again, the new governance arrangements represent the most minimum role for EU law and the least intrusive role for the ECJ that could realistically be envisaged.

In this sense, whilst the WF can be seen as having obtained very extensive ‘concessions’ from the EU, the reactions of the Brexit Ultras and the DUP are inherently matters of political judgement rather than the outcome of any ‘objective tests’ or legal scrutiny they might apply. It would be perfectly possible, taking the hard line that some in those groups have long adopted, to say that neither sovereignty nor parity with the rest of the UK have been achieved. If so, that would render any conceivable version of the NIP impossible. No doubt many in those groups would like to make that so, but they may not judge it politically viable to insist upon it, a point I’ll come back to.

To the extent that this is, indeed, a genuine improvement on the NIP, there are two obvious points to be made. Firstly, it is hardly a ‘triumph’ so much as further evidence of the dishonesty and incompetence of the original Johnson-Frost negotiation, of the dishonesty with which it was presented to the electorate, and of the dishonesty of the Tory MPs, and Tory and Brexit Party MEPs, who voted for it. Secondly, even having created that original mess, it would have been perfectly possible, as Fintan O’Toole explained this week, for something like the WF provisions to have been agreed at any point after the NIP became operational in 2021.

That it was not done before, and that it has been now, is because all of the Brexiter bluster about ‘playing hardball’ with the EU through drastic threats and unilateral breaking of agreements was not just hokum but bunkum. That in turn also discredits the recurrent Brexiter lie that it was the ‘remainer parliament’ making ‘no deal Brexit’ impossible which was the reason for agreeing the NIP they later disowned. The WF simply wouldn’t have happened if Sunak hadn’t paused the NIP Bill, something clear from multiple ‘insider’ accounts of the negotiations (£). All this is to Sunak’s considerable credit, as well as, apparently, to that of James Cleverley, Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker.

More generally, the WF happened because Sunak adopted a totally different approach, based on pragmatism, realism and ‘technocracy’ rather than ideology, fantasy and aggression. In other words, he not only dropped the threats, but, in a positive sense, replaced them with sensible engagement. This, and the related trust such an approach was able to engender, was something which Johnson was congenitally incapable of and which May, for all that she came to have some elements of Sunak’s pragmatism, couldn’t deliver on whilst the Brexiters were in full cry. For the first time since the Article 50 process began, the UK fielded a ‘serious’ negotiating team at the political level, comprised of Brexiters, certainly, but apparently relatively free of Brexitism.

A new chapter in post-Brexit relations?

With Sunak’s different approach has come something more than the delivery of the WF itself, in that there is now at least the possibility, explicitly expressed, of a complete re-set of UK-EU relations. One initial sign of that is that, within the WF, there is a commitment from the UK to completely drop the NIB Bill and for the EU to drop the infringement proceedings relating to the UK’s unilateral flouting of the NIP grace periods. More generally, in the Political Declaration it is stated that “the new way forward on the Windsor Framework marks a turning point in how both the United Kingdom and the European Union will work together collaboratively and constructively” (p.4).

The immediate fruits of that appeared during the press conference announcing the agreement, when Ursula von der Leyen indicated that UK participation in the Horizon Europe science programme could now be progressed, and Sunak spoke of other areas of possible co-operation, such as energy security. Moreover, again in the Political Declaration, “both the European Commission and the Government of the United Kingdom express their intention to fully exploit in the future the potential of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement” (p.1). So, here, there is an implicit recognition that, even within the limited remit of the TCA, the Johnson-Frost approach also delivered a sub-optimal outcome which the government will now seek to rectify.

The idea that the WF heralds a new and better chapter in UK-EU relations was underscored by the meeting between King Charles and von der Leyen. That occasioned much fury from the Brexiters (£), with Jacob Rees-Mogg clutching his pearls about constitutional impropriety (pearls made rather grubby by his own role in involving the monarchy at the time of the illegal Prorogation). Some saw it as an attempt to butter up the unionists by implying a Royal seal of approval for the deal. But I think its real significance, intended or not, and the real reason for Brexiters’ anger about it, was to symbolise a kind of healing of the rift and rancour that Brexit brought and hence to cement a re-set of relations.

Such as re-set has been on the cards for a while, partly because of Ukraine, and partly because the implosion of the Truss mini-budget put the issue of economic realism more centrally into UK politics than it had been since the Brexit referendum (and also did much to discredit the entire Brexitist world-view). It also, undoubtedly, has become more politically possible because of the now firmly established public view that Brexit was a mistake and has been highly damaging.

However, it is important to recognize that the WF, assuming it goes ahead, does not mark the point when Brexit is ‘done’, or even that the Protocol is done. In relation to both it is a moment, pivotal perhaps, but still only a moment, in what is and will always be the ongoing process, or processes, of Brexit. What the WF does, as regards the Protocol, is somewhat re-define those processes and, as regards Brexit more generally, potentially change the tone of the processes. So even if this is the beginning of a new chapter, it is only an early chapter in a very long book, itself only the first of several thick volumes.

The Ultras’ reactions

Naturally the Brexit Ultras, especially outside the Conservative Party, are viewing all this with dismay with, for example, Richard Tice of the Reform Party denouncing it as Brexit in Name Only (BRINO). But although that betrayal narrative will always fly with the hard core of leave voters it’s a message with diminishing traction because it has been the constant cry of wolf of people like Tice. Indeed, he implicitly recognizes this in saying that the WF “reinforces” BRINO. For if we already had BRINO then there’s not really anything new for him to complain about. Equally, the more insistent he is about BRINO the more he opens up the obvious question that, in that case, we might just as well reverse Brexit entirely.

The situation for the Ultras inside the Tory Party is rather different, not least because, unlike the Reform Party, they will soon be defending their seats at a General Election. In the immediate aftermath of the WF announcement they have been rather muted and are clearly split. The enthusiastic backing for the deal from Chris Heaton-Harris and, especially, Steve Baker did much to blunt any attack the ERG might have envisaged. It would also seem that the ‘traditionalist’ or ‘pragmatist’ sections of the party have been unusually robust in showing their impatience with the default vexatiousness of the Ultras and the default ambitiousness of Boris Johnson.

There is also clearly an awareness, not just from the pragmatists but also shown by Rees-Mogg, that inflicting a defeat on Sunak as a vehicle for a Johnson comeback would carry huge electoral dangers for the already floundering government. Johnson himself initially remained silent, and didn’t even attend Sunak’s announcement in the Commons. But yesterday he said he would “find it very difficult to vote for” the deal, and expressed a preference to return to the approach of the NIP Bill. However, to the extent he said he “hoped it would work”, he held off from outright condemnation and seemed to imply that if the DUP accepted it then so would he. (The speech itself included a litany of dishonesty about Brexit which I don’t have space to discuss: suffice to say there were no new lies).

This is all in marked contrast to the talk from just two weeks ago of a Johnson-led rebellion of 100 or more Tory MPs. There’s an element of chicken and egg here, since a groundswell of rebellion would embolden Johnson to take his chance to lead it, whilst the absence of leadership from Johnson means there is little for potential rebels to rally around. It’s a further illustration of his less than Churchillian propensity to ‘lead from behind’.

Then, too, as Rafael Behr points out this week, “the terrain of battle [provided by the WF] is so small – a scrap of European court jurisdiction under a mound of procedural safeguards in Northern Ireland”. Creating a massive political crisis from such unpromising materials is hardly likely to impress bemused and, at least outside Northern Ireland, largely indifferent voters, and nor does it provide an especially heroic hill for even the most red-faced and plumply excitable of the Spartans to die on. The only Brexiter MP so far to suggest she might entertain doing so is Nadine Dorries (£) and it’s not clear that, even amongst those who in some cases could, not uncharitably, be called somewhat unhinged, hers is a voice that commands immediate respect.

Is Brexitism dying?

As a result of all this, it's tempting to argue, as Behr does, that this moment reveals that “Brexitism is dying and Johnsonism may be dead”, which I suppose is another way of saying the Brexit ‘fever has broken’. It is certainly the case that the Brexitists have been wrong-footed and are floundering. It’s also true that this is one of Johnson’s lowest moments, with his own failed Brexit deal exposed, along with the depravity of his naked opportunism. From that point of view, we might be seeing a significant shift in the ‘Brexitist versus Traditionalist’ civil war in Conservatism that I discussed in a recent post. But I think it is a little early to write the obituaries just yet.

First and foremost, there is still the matter of the DUP reaction, with reports that they are split on which way to go. That split undoubtedly reflects the fact that their decision isn’t so much about the terms of the WF as what advantage they may or may not see in continuing to have a pretext to collapse the power-sharing institutions. In this sense, whilst ostensibly taking time to get legal assessment of the deal, this is, as I said earlier, primarily a political calculation.

Sunak has strongly implied that the WF will go ahead, unchanged, even if the DUP continue to refuse to allow the Northern Ireland Assembly to sit. But, if so, it’s clear that Johnson and at least some of the ERG will take their cue from the DUP (£) to argue that what it now suits them to call the primary rationale for the WF has not been realised. As they wait, the ERG have also turned the matter over to its ludicrously named ‘Star Chamber’ for legal scrutiny.

One straw in the wind as to how the Ultras are thinking came with David Frost’s response to the WF (£). In general, it showed not a shred of insight into his own culpabilities and failures, but the fact that Frost has about as much self-awareness as a toilet seat is hardly news. More interestingly, the article contained neither a complete repudiation nor a complete welcome of the WF. Thus it recognized that there were some substantive improvements that were “worth having”, and implied that the agreement was likely to go ahead. But it also recognized that the “fundamental Protocol framework” remains in place, ascribing this, inevitably, to Sunak’s failure to maintain the threat of passing the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill.

In this way, Frost left open the possibility of a more full-throated rejection of the WF in the future. So in effect he is waiting to see which way the wind now blows: notably, he tweeted his article as being only “an initial comment” on the deal given the complexity of the documents. But, on the basis of what he has already said, it’s clear that whatever the detail of those documents, the WF is not, in his own terms, the wholesale re-writing, still less ditching, of the Protocol that he and other Brexiters want.

A similar line is being taken by Jacob Rees-Mogg, now moonlighting as a presenter on GB News, who appears to regard it as some dastardly EU trick that the letter of international treaties is binding. But, again, his comments about the continuing role of EU law in Northern Ireland show that, even without reading the small print, he already thinks the WF violates the Brexiters’ version of ‘sovereignty’. In short, as with Johnson’s predictably self-serving stance, this is all about buying time during which it’s possible that the initial momentum Sunak got for the WF may stall whilst that of a rebellion grows in advance of the promised vote.

For what it’s worth, my sense is that as this week has progressed the opposition to the WF has slightly hardened, with an increasing cohesiveness in the attack lines the Ultras are running and, though that might simply reflect the way the deal was revealed, the more time that passes the more opposition to it will consolidate. Certainly if the DUP were to reject the deal it would do so.

The other aspect of the fate of Brexitism is the question, assuming the WF does go ahead, of how ruthlessly or consistently Sunak will then follow-through. In particular, is he really willing to heap further coals on the ERG’s head by scrapping, or at least slowing the time frames of, the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL)? If so, that would be a fresh blow for the Ultras (though it might also galvanize them to re-group). If not, then, apart from being yet another Brexit hit to business (£), the rapprochement with the EU that the WF presages will falter and, conversely, Brexitism will be given a new lease of life.

What does it mean for remainers/re-joiners?

So much for the Brexiters. What about remainers and re-joiners? In general terms, they should welcome the WF as, at least potentially, a return to some kind of realism and pragmatism. If nothing else, if the outcome is to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly to operation, and to help stability there, then that is something everyone should be pleased about. Many of us, not just in Northern Ireland, though of course especially there, have dark memories of the decades before the peace process and the Belfast Good Friday Agreement.

Beyond that, there’s a degree of relief in an improved tone in UK-EU relations after all these years of hostility, a hostility that was totally unnecessary even given Brexit. Moreover, to the extent that it may create something like a scenario of ‘rapprochement’, that would be, as I’ve argued before, a necessary but not sufficient condition for the possibility of joining the single market, a customs union, and even the EU itself.

Against that, it would be unhelpful to remainers, and simply untrue in itself, if either the WF or the improved relations that could flow from it were widely regarded by the public as having ‘got Brexit done’ or having done anything to redeem the damage of Brexit other than to have sanded some of its very roughest edges. It just undoes some of the worst, most egregious and most unnecessary harm of Brexit, whilst serving as a reminder of the utter incompetence of the way it was done. The core, irreducible damage of Brexit continues.

However, it’s important not to be trapped into a version of the Leninist maxim that ‘it has to get worse before it can get better’ or, to put that differently, it may be that it had got as bad as it is going to and we are now on an upward curve. In particular, it is highly notable that within a few hours of the WF announcement numerous people, including the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, were beginning to ask the question that if this was indeed a good deal for Northern Ireland then what about the rest of the UK? It is a question that has gained salience during the week with Sunak’s repeated argument that being in both the EU single market for goods and the UK single market is a huge advantage.

We’ve been here before. In the early days of the NIP Michael Gove repeatedly stressed that Northern Ireland had “the best of both worlds” for exactly that reason. But that was before it was actually implemented and the idea got lost as the NIP became mired in rows. Now it has returned, and with new force given that there is so much evidence of how economically damaging leaving the single market has been. And if it is accepted that the single market for goods is advantageous, then why not services?

The same reasoning applies to non-economic issues. If Horizon, why not Erasmus? If science and education, why not climate and environment? If energy security, then why not security in all its aspects? If sanctions, then why not foreign and defence policy? If ‘small boats’, then why not replicate Dublin 3 regulations? Ultimately, once the basic premise of co-operation, as outlined in the WF, is established then all of these questions become re-opened. In this way, the UK might discover through painful experiment the principles of co-operation that are ingrained into, and institutionalised by, the EU. Of course, this is exactly the path that the Brexiters fear the WF leads to: which is all the more reason for remainers and re-joiners to support it.

But there is also a conundrum in doing so. It could be that Sunak reaps political rewards for the WF, either directly, for the agreement itself, or, more likely, indirectly, in the sense of having shown he can ‘solve problems’ and control his own party. If that yields improved opinion poll ratings for the Tories, then it will do much to keep the Brexit Ultras under control, which should cement his more cooperative approach to the EU. However, it is all but impossible to conceive that his approach would go beyond friendly cooperation to, say, joining the single market, still less the EU. So if, along with other things (e.g. reduced inflation), the WF contributed to him to winning the next election, unlikely as that currently seems, then ‘friendly co-operation’ might become the end-state for the medium-term. There could be worse things than that, of course, but there could be much better.

So what about Labour?

It's here that Labour policy becomes crucial. If the WF is significant in potentially re-setting UK-EU relations, it is also significant in its potential to recalibrate the domestic politics of Brexit. For what Sunak has done with the WF is, in effect, to adopt the entirety of Labour’s current position as government policy, which is why Labour had no choice but to support it (and, anyway, were right to do so). Labour, as Keir Starmer and David Lammy have made clear, propose improving the tone of relations, resolving the NIP row, extending co-operation, and making full use of the possibilities of the TCA for a closer trading and security relationship. All that is now, explicitly, Sunak’s policy.

Assuming that policy holds, it is both a challenge and an opportunity for Labour. A challenge because it deprives them of a distinctive policy and makes their offer to erstwhile remainers look even more puny. An opportunity because it creates a political space, and arguably a political necessity, to be more ambitious. That space was opening anyway, because of public disaffection with Brexit, but the WF makes it larger. It will be harder for Sunak to ridicule that for being too soft on Brexit when it is not only the logic of his own position but also the same critique as the Brexiters make of him.

Of course it’s possible, as Rafael Behr’s column argues, that Starmer will now simply park Brexit as a ‘non-partisan’ issue. But there’s likely to be considerable pressure from within his own party to do more than that.  It’s of note that within hours of the WF being announced the senior Labour MP Chris Bryant raised the point that if Northern Ireland benefitted from the EU single market then the same should be true for the rest of the UK.

Arguably Starmer has prematurely boxed himself into a corner by setting red lines against the single market or a customs union, but there is some wriggle-room since he has generally couched things in terms of there being ‘no political case’ for the single market. It would be just about possible to use that as cover to say that the politics subsequently changed, and apart from its electoral appeal to most Labour voters that would burnish Starmer’s increasingly positive relationship with business. It’s not likely, but it’s more likely than it was because of the WF, and may become still more so before we get to the next general election.

A moment of hope?

So, after all this, has Britain’s Brexit fever broken? It’s a little too early to be sure – and even if it has, further relapses are to be expected - but I think it is possible. It would have been almost unthinkable before now that the UK Prime Minister and the European Commission President would have given the kind of joint press conference that we saw this week, either in substance or in tone.

It would have been still more unthinkable that it could have happened without an immediate, overwhelming outpouring of angry opposition from Tory Brexiters and the Brexit media. That may still come, but so far it has mostly had a strangely weary and resigned quality. But perhaps a better sign of whether the fever has broken will be if, indeed, Labour develop a more ambitious policy, since this would show that the fear that Brexit is too hot to touch was subsiding.

If there has been a shift, it isn’t simply because of the Windsor Framework, or even just because of Sunak’s consensual approach. It is a result of many things – Ukraine and the Truss mini-budget fiasco, as I mentioned earlier, but also sheer exhaustion and boredom. More fundamentally, it reflects the growing realization, over many months now, of just what a disaster Brexit has been. Even Brexiters now offer only the most lacklustre of defences for their project and, crucially, defences are all they are. The grand national liberation they once proclaimed has turned to ashes.

So although it is a moment for a modest amount of hope, it is a hope which is the bitter fruit of failure. After all, if the Brexit fever has broken, it was the fever of a self-injected malady. And if a corner has been turned, it is only to the long road of re-building from those ashes, the legacy the Brexiters bequeathed, and their monument too.

Sunak's Protocol no-show is entangled in Brexit lies

Two weeks ago I posted about the ongoing schism between ‘Brexitists’ and ‘Traditionalists’ within British Conservatism. Then, last week, I wrote about the battle for the post-Brexit polity in terms of whether a scenario of ‘rapprochement’ with the EU will emerge, or one of a constant ‘repetition’ of antagonism towards the EU. Clearly these two things are intimately related, especially whilst the Conservatives are in government. 

In both posts, I made the obvious point that a key moment in all these issues was approaching, in the form of a possible deal over the operation and application of the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). That moment has now arrived in that, although the anticipated announcement of that deal this week didn’t happen, the pre-announcement politics have become intense.

It seems certain an agreement won’t be unveiled until at least next week, and what then happens will have potentially major implications for the country, UK-EU post-Brexit relations, the Tory Party and Rishi Sunak’s premiership. The implications are no less great if, after all the indications of an imminent resolution, Sunak suddenly announces that he hasn’t been able to reach a deal. And he surely can’t continue much longer without doing one or the other.

In the meantime, this provides an opportunity to take stock of where we are now, how we got here, and what may happen next. As ever with Brexit, it’s a complicated story.

Where are we now?

Last Friday it was reported (£) that Sunak “appears determined to take on Tory Eurosceptics by striking a compromise with Brussels”. On Sunday the story was (£) that Sunak was ‘pausing’ the deal because of ERG and DUP opposition, but by Monday we were told he was ‘pressing ahead’ despite this opposition which, on Tuesday, he was “relaxed” about. Such contradictory reports have continued all week, under cover of repeated claims from the government that there is ongoing “intensive work” with the EU. But Tony Connelly, RTE’s invariably reliable Europe Editor, tweeted that, but for a few loose ends, the substance of the talks had finished last weekend. So it really does come down to Sunak’s domestic political management now, which is unfortunate given that, in Anand Menon’s words, he is “truly awful” at politics.

It’s not clear what he is waiting for, since it is unlikely that there is much else he can do to satisfy his anticipated opponents if they stick to their maximalist demands. Perhaps some haggling might buy off the DUP, but there is no public sign that is in prospect. Nor is there any sign of the ERG* withdrawing their opposition to anything that it’s likely Sunak could have negotiated with the EU, even if that includes the quite substantial concessions on setting VAT and other taxes and on state aid provisions which some reports have claimed.

It may be that Sunak is hoping that will change under the influence of Northern Ireland Secretary and former ERG Chair Chris Heaton-Harris, who is widely reported to be enthusiastically supporting (£) whatever has been agreed. That hope would be further raised if Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, another ex-Chair of the ERG, endorsed the agreement but, conversely, if rumours he may resign over the agreement come true that would surely boost a rebellion.

It's also not at this point clear whether there will be a parliamentary vote on any deal. There is no legal requirement for one. Although in response to Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) on Wednesday Sunak said that Parliament would be able “to express its views”, that could be interpreted either way. But, even if none were proposed by the government, the ERG might find a way to engineer a vote. If so, the government would win with Labour support, which itself would be damaging to Sunak.

It’s also possible that Labour (or perhaps the SNP) could table an Opposition day debate, not with a view to defeating the government but exposing Tory divisions. It was certainly telling that Starmer used all six of his PMQs to ask about the Protocol, given his habitual reticence on anything Brexit-related. But this is one Brexit area where Labour feels on safe ground and, indeed, Sunak’s rather weedy attempts to dismiss Starmer’s approach as rooted in opposition to Brexit and a willingness to “surrender” to the EU hardly made sense given that he supports Sunak’s policy.

But, vote or no vote, if the ERG decide to exact revenge on Sunak they have plenty of ways of doing so. There are already threats of ministerial resignations (£), and with Boris Johnson stirring the pot and the strong possibility of poor results in the May local elections, who would bet against yet another Tory leader being toppled, ludicrous as that would be?

How did we get here? A very brief history of dishonesty

It’s easy to imagine that some in the general public hearing news reports about the NIP this week are puzzled. Surely Brexit was ‘done’ some time ago, and all the parliamentary rows about it a thing of the past? After all, that was exactly what voters were told would happen if Johnson won the 2019 General Election. But, of course, it was a lie, and it was a lie that grew from a series of earlier lies and led to countless more.

Those lies started before the Referendum, when Johnson and others insisted that a vote to leave the EU would have no implications for the Irish border, or for the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and the associated peace process. In doing so, they dismissed or ignored explicit warnings to the contrary. This still lies at the heart of some Brexiters’ opposition to the NIP: they don’t believe any need for it exists.

This isn’t the place to reprise all the twists and turns of the search for magical ‘alternative arrangements’ which would square the circle of a border being unavoidable but there being no place where a border would be politically acceptable. Such arrangements were never found, and even Shanker Singham, the Brexiters’ go-to trade expert, who chaired the Alternative Arrangements Commission, recognized that on the core issue of Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) regulations there is no alternative other than for Northern Ireland to follow the same rules as Ireland (and therefore the EU). Yet, extraordinarily, this week Brexiter Bernard Jenkin was again floating ‘alternative arrangements’ for an Irish land border as the solution.

In due course Theresa May came up with the solution of the backstop, which the Brexiters rejected as they claimed it would mean the UK remaining in a permanent customs territory with the EU. It most likely would have done, although in principle it would only exist ‘unless or until’ alternative arrangements were in place. That this didn’t satisfy the Brexiters demonstrated that they knew that their claims about the feasibility of alternative arrangements were also lies.

So Johnson came up with ‘the front stop’, the basis of the NIP, which created an Irish Sea border. But he lied about that, too, denying that it meant such a border. It seems likely that he also lied by telling ERG MPs that the arrangement was only temporary (see also revelations made by Dominic Cummings). Johnson then sold it as the oven ready deal to voters, and the Brexiters – Tory MPs and Tory and Brexit Party MEPs – subsequently voted for it in both the UK and European Parliaments.

Ever since, there has been a torrent of lies about it, many of them told by David Frost who negotiated the Protocol apparently unburdened by the knowledge of just how awful it was. If only he were capable of such reticence now. These lies include that it was only agreed under duress because the ‘remainer parliament’ had deprived Johnson of the ‘leverage’ of ‘no deal Brexit’; that it was only ever intended to be temporary; that the consequences of it weren’t known; that the EU wasn’t expected to apply it too literally; that it has damaged the Northern Ireland economy.

Throughout all that, there has also been a torrent of legal and quasi-legal nonsense about how Article 16 could be used to get round the Protocol (it wouldn’t), about how Article 13.8 means the Protocol was not permanent (it doesn’t), about whether the Protocol violated the GFA (see below), and about how parliament has the sovereign right to over-ride international law (it doesn’t). Such claims come and go, are endlessly discredited, only to re-appear. At the same time, it shouldn’t be forgotten that, almost since it came into force, the UK flouted its provisions by unilaterally extending several of the ’grace periods’ for implementation. Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland itself, the DUP used the Protocol as a justification to collapse the power-sharing institutions.

None of this should be shrugged off as ancient history. This edifice of lies isn’t just what created the current mess, it is also what needs to be demolished if there is ever to be any prospect of genuine progress.

The Protocol and the Belfast Good Friday Agreement

Within all of the lies, one which has again featured prominently this week warrants more detailed discussion. Although the ERG and the DUP are advancing similar arguments against agreeing any changes to the NIP short of, effectively, scrapping it, the two are not the same and have different interests. The ERG showed, in backing Johnson’s deal, that they didn’t ultimately give tuppence about the unionist case against the Protocol. It suits them now to say that the DUP must be satisfied so that the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive can be restored, just as it suits them to say that the NIP jeopardises the GFA. But that isn’t what they said at the time when Johnson explicitly stated in Parliament that it was “fully compatible” with the GFA.

As usual, there are numerous different strands to disentangle in all this. One is the persistent claim from the DUP, now taken up opportunistically by the ERG, that the NIP violates the principle of ‘cross-community consent’ in the GFA. But this principle doesn’t apply to making international treaties such as the NIP, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the Protocol doesn’t violate the Northern Ireland Act (the legislation which implemented the GFA in the UK). Perhaps even those of us lacking the legal eminence of the Supreme Court might have suspected that any case whose applicants included Ben Habib and Kate Hoey might have flaws. In particular, and amongst other things, its ruling rejected the claim that the Act required a referendum in Northern Ireland on the Protocol on the basis of it being a ‘constitutional change’. In any case, if that claim had any logical (let alone legal) force then it would surely apply to Brexit itself, which didn’t have majority support in Northern Ireland.

However, the invocation of the GFA is more political than legal. The Brexiters bitterly resent the extent to which the EU and Ireland successfully established that the GFA must be honoured by not creating a land border in Ireland. But they realised that this was a powerful legitimating argument and, in particular, one that had traction in the US, especially once Joe Biden came to power. So they co-opted it to bolster international support as well as to give them domestic cover. That started under Johnson, with, for example, the visit of the then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to the US in September 2020 (just as footage emerged that he had not even read the GFA) and continued after Biden’s election with, for example, the visit of ‘special envoy’ Conor Burns last June.

Notably, this no longer seems to be a line which Sunak is pursuing and, indeed, it is precisely the fact that he seems to have accepted the basic architecture of the NIP which explains ERG and DUP suspicions of an imminent ‘sell-out’. But it is a line the ERG/DUP are still pushing hard, as for example in Iain Duncan Smith’s article in the Sunday Telegraph (£) this week. It was a particularly repellent piece in the way the way it invoked the killings during the Troubles, when Smith himself had been a soldier in Northern Ireland. For despite the emotional blackmail of his lament that “given so much sacrifice, I cannot understand why we would risk its demise now” he not only voted for the Protocol but derided those calling for lengthy debate or scrutiny of it.

Nor should it be forgotten that, before the referendum, the then Northern Ireland Secretary and ERG member Theresa Villiers said it was “highly irresponsible” even to mention the possible effect on peace in Northern Ireland. It strikes me that then was exactly the time when it was responsible to do so, and massively irresponsible to leave it until now to do so.

The problem isn’t the NIP, it’s Brexit itself

With that said, and whatever the legalities of the GFA, it’s undeniable that the NIP has caused a major political problem in Northern Ireland. The DUP’s refusal to participate in the power-sharing institutions may be unjustifiable, especially given the consent mechanism which, as things stand, would be satisfied since a majority of current MLAs support the Protocol, as, indeed, do the majority of people in Northern Ireland. Yet the political reality of the DUP’s stance can’t be ignored and, certainly, the unhappiness amongst many in the unionist community shouldn’t be ignored. That the DUP’s own support for Brexit has contributed to this situation is true, and an effective debating point, but it doesn’t affect that political reality. In this sense, although I disagree with it in many respects, Tom McTague’s article in UnHerd this week about the concerns of unionists has some validity.

But this, rather than the GFA narrowly conceived, reveals the real issue that John Major and Tony Blair warned about so forcibly, but to so little effect, before the Referendum. In Major’s words at the time, a vote to leave would mean “throwing all of the pieces of the constitutional jigsaw into the air”. He has been proved right. Brexit threw a huge rock into the delicately calibrated mechanisms and compromises of the entire peace process, the ground from which the institutional fruit of the GFA and the NI Assembly grew.

Moreover, once Brexit became defined as hard Brexit it created the infamous ‘Trilemma’ to which there is no solution (or, more accurately, no solutions other than abandoning hard Brexit, or Irish re-unification). The addition of the need to keep the Assembly operational being adopted as a requirement, not just of the DUP but of the UK government, has added a fourth leg to that to create what in the past I have called the ‘Quadrilemma’ (a usage which, alas, hasn’t caught on).

In short, the problem isn’t the Protocol, it’s Brexit itself. There is no solution, or certainly no good solution, and the Brexiters have signally failed to come up with one. For the most part they now airily say that ‘Mutual Enforcement’ is the answer (and yet another version of it has been wheeled out this week). But it is one that has been considered and found inoperable, principally, as with 'alternative arrangements’ in general, because of the complexity and density of Ireland-Northern Ireland supply chains, especially as regards agricultural goods and the enforcement of SPS regulations. It’s also somewhat ironic to continue to float it even as the UK as a whole fails to implement controls on EU imports risking, as the NFU warned again last week, a “disastrous” food scandal. It is precisely the risk of spreading animal diseases and consequent impacts on the food chain that is one of the biggest practical objections to Mutual Enforcement.

Mutual Enforcement is also, as even its proponents recognize, a solution that relies upon high trust between the UK and the EU, trust that the UK, and the Brexiters in particular, have squandered, not least by breaking the original agreement and by constant ‘hardball’ threats to disapply it. Indeed, even as they push this high-trust solution, the Brexiters, including Johnson and Truss, are still insisting (£) that it is vital to continue with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, with its threat of unilateral disapplication, to ‘put pressure’ on the EU. If Mutual Enforcement could ever have been a technically viable proposal the Brexiters have ensured that it is politically impossible.

So, in the absence of a better solution, some version of applying the existing Protocol is all that is achievable. Even within that framework a better version than what Sunak is likely to have agreed with the EU would be possible, were it not for the Brexiters’ intransigent refusal to accept the EU offer of dynamic alignment of SPS regulations, which would do much to make the Irish Sea border thinner. Yet, for all their professed concern about political stability in Northern Ireland, they still prize an abstract ideal of ‘sovereignty’ above it.

What happens now?

Much of this continues to go round and round the same old debates and issues of the last seven years. But the context of Sunak’s current dilemma is somewhat distinctive. This is for several reasons, the first of which is Sunak himself. His central pitch is of being a ‘pragmatist’ who is ‘economically competent’ and a ‘problem solver’ which means that, more than was the case for Johnson or Truss, failing to resolve the stand-off with the EU would be reputationally damaging for him. Conversely, and especially given the government’s unpopularity and the severe ongoing economic problems, actions that might lead ultimately to a trade war with the EU, and the opprobrium of the US, would hardly demonstrate such pragmatism or economic competence.

Equally, opponents of his putative deal are not in the same position they once were. The DUP risk the impatience, especially of younger and less sectarian voters, at the prospect of the endless suspension of the Assembly and, with that, the festering of many bread-and-butter political problems (though it’s true they also face pressure from the even more extreme unionist parties). Bobby McDonagh, the former Irish Ambassador to the EU, argues that a Protocol deal would actually be in the DUP’s best interests.

As for the ERG, they may well find that provoking a political and perhaps economic crisis over a problem the public was told had been solved, and one most of them care little about anyway, will not be at all popular. That’s all the more so given that most voters think Brexit was a mistake that has damaged the economy, and at a time of food shortages which are attributable in part to Brexit. The Brexit Ultras may even reflect that, egged on by Johnson for his own transparently self-interested reasons, they risk creating, or hastening, the implosion of the government and the Tory Party altogether.

At all events, it’s hard to see how Sunak can postpone things much longer. Apart from anything else, doing so isn’t cost-free. It takes up political time and energy, and saps the UK’s international reputation at a time when Ukraine, in particular, requires international cooperation. It leaves UK participation in Horizon Europe on hold. It leaves Northern Ireland in limbo. Perhaps worst of all, because it leaves open the ultimate possibility of trade sanctions from the EU, it has a dampening effect on investment, already chilled by Brexit itself. Conversely, as Bloomberg reported this week, reaching a sustainable deal would give a major boost to investment and economic growth.

To a slightly lesser extent, all of this also applies if the outcome is, as some Conservatives are suggesting, some kind of ‘fudge’ in which Sunak gets a deal but it is not accepted as an end-state, with Brexiters continuing to agitate for further changes and negotiations and Sunak at least indulging that possibility. One way he might do that would be to continue with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, albeit holding off making use of its powers, to persuade the ERG that it might be used in some further negotiation. Doing so would continue the pattern of Tory leaders trying to ‘manage’ the ERG when national, if not party, interest requires standing up to them robustly. I doubt he has the stomach for that, though.

Finally, apart from all the other costs of not reaching an agreement with the EU, capitulating to the ERG will not solve Sunak’s political problems either. The existing Protocol would still be in place and hence, presumably, so too would the DUP’s refusal to allow the Assembly to sit. Within the Tory Party, such capitulation would inflame the increasingly vociferous ‘pragmatist’ faction, who are threatening to vote down the NIP Bill if it continues its passage as, in this scenario, it surely would. (They would also presumably do so if, as a sop to the ERG, Sunak chose to continue with the Bill even after having done a deal.)

So, returning to the general themes with which I began, whatever Sunak does now it will not resolve the schism in Conservatism. Whether he over-rides the Ultras or capitulates to them it will continue, and may well intensify quickly. In terms of re-setting relations with the EU, over-riding the Ultras and doing a deal will certainly help, but less so if it is only seen as a temporary fix, as just described, or if accompanied by a ‘consolation prize’ in the form of, say, continuing at pace with the Retained EU Law Bill.

For now, as so often before, we are enduring the ‘will they, won’t they’ Theatre of the Absurd of Brexit. And, as always, the outcome hinges on the perpetual civil war within Conservatism and the perpetual dance around the deranged sensibilities and insufferable arrogance of the political grotesques who prosecute it.

 

 

*I continue to use the term ERG, in line with the media and for ease of exposition. But the actual membership of the ERG is reported to be dwindling, and the Brexit Ultra opposition to the NIP, and potentially to Sunak’s deal, within the Tory Party is much wider.

The battle for Britain’s post-Brexit polity

In the book I wrote about Brexit I anticipated (pp. 275-278) two broad scenarios for how the immediate future would develop once the realities of Brexit began to be felt (the book itself ended with the end of the transition period). These scenarios weren’t about ‘staying out’ versus ‘re-joining’, though they might eventually have implications for that, but about different ways of ‘being out’.

Post-Brexit scenarios

In the first scenario, the bitter domestic debate and the corresponding antagonism towards the EU would gradually die down. The inescapable facts of geographical proximity and of economic and regulatory interdependence would normalize the UK-EU relationship, in that it would come to be viewed as a rather dull issue to be approached in pragmatic terms, and seen through the prism of UK strategic interests rather than Brexit per se. The first concrete outcome of that would come with making use of the provisions within the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) to deepen it as regards both trade and security.

In the second scenario, the UK would be stuck in a perpetual Brexit ‘Groundhog Day’. The approach to relations with the EU would be one of permanent hostility, resentment and suspicion. And there would be a similar hostility to attempts from the supposed ‘Establishment’ and ‘liberal elite’ to improve those relations. The economic damage of Brexit would be blamed on ‘EU punishment’ rather than Brexit itself, and the Referendum vote would continue to be used as a supposed mandate for ever-greater divergence from the EU and even as a mandate for a “Brexit 2.0” of leaving the ECHR.

‘Scenario one’ might be called one of ‘rapprochement’ or perhaps ‘amelioration’, and ‘scenario two’ might be called one of ‘repetition’ or even ‘intensification’.

Elements of both of them have been on display this week. That is because we are now witnessing, on a daily basis, a battle that will determine which, if either, of these scenarios will prevail as the consensus view of the UK polity, broadly conceived.

It is a battle played out in contestations over the nature and extent of Brexit damage, over specific post-Brexit policies including the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Retained EU Law Bill, in all the less visible interchanges between interest groups and the government over post-Brexit funding schemes or regulatory regimes, and in increasingly vociferous denunciations of the ECHR, especially in the context of ‘the small boats crisis’.

The current state of play

By the ‘UK polity, broadly conceived’, I mean the nexus of political parties and political actors, civil society organizations, the commentariat and media, including social media, and public opinion. I stress that, because it is not, as some seem to think, simply about what the opinion polls say, important as that is. Public opinion is certainly a necessary condition in settling which scenario emerges, but it is not a sufficient one.

It is indeed the case that public opinion is settling towards the first scenario. Some 47% (and 30% of leave voters) want a closer relationship with the EU, though what is meant by ‘closer’ is not homogenous, with just 14% (and 18% of leave voters) wanting it to be more distant than at present. That is still not a majority, but it is a very strong lead. It is likely that political actors, in the sense of business groups, trade unions and numerous lobbying groups, are even more united in favouring scenario one, as evidenced for example by the many signatories to a letter calling on the government to abandon the Retained EU Law Bill (£).

However, the commentariat and media remain as split as ever, and scenario two still has enthusiastic support in, for example, the pages of the Telegraph, Mail and Express. There has been some change in the way that is expressed, though, with the tone becoming notably more defensive as the evidence of Brexit damage has mounted (£) and as commentators realize they are losing the battle of the narrative and, with it, public support.

As for the government, in line with my post last week it is hopelessly stuck. It’s clear that there are elements, including Rishi Sunak himself, which see the need for something like the first scenario on grounds of economic and political pragmatism. That is evident in numerous reports that Sunak wants a resolution on the Northern Ireland Protocol, but the fix he is in is reflected by other reports saying he has been “sitting on” an agreed deal for the last week, presumably for fear of the Brexit Ultras’ reaction. That looks like the final gasp of what for a long time seems to have been a policy of hoping that ‘something will turn up’. It hasn’t, and it’s likely he’ll find out next week what that reaction will be: already their opposition is growing louder (£).

The same desire for rapprochement is also evident in the government’s decision not to continue to contest the legal challenge to its treatment of EU citizens with pre-settled status and, in a more general way, in the Bloomberg report this week that Sunak has asked senior ministers and officials to draw up plans for a less acrimonious relationship with the EU. But, again, the same report highlighted the risk of a backlash to any such plans from the Ultras. And it’s not even as if the government itself has a coherent approach to EU relations since, in other reports this week, there are plans to “snub” the EU Horizon science funding programme, itself delayed purely because of the Protocol row.

Overall, whilst there may be some impetus to scenario one under Sunak, and he may even make some headway, there is no possibility of it becoming the settled consensus under this government. On the other hand, all the other political parties, apart from the Reform Party and DUP, are supportive of, at the very least, scenario one and certainly opposed to scenario two. The Labour Party, in particular, has effectively made scenario one its policy. So it does seem likely that, assuming a Labour election win, the next government will seek to enact it.

However, it’s crucial to understand that this would be a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for it actually happening. The key point is the earlier point that what is at issue is a consensus across the UK polity. Such a consensus doesn’t mean total agreement, which is never going to happen anyway. Instead it means scenario one dominating, and support for scenario two becoming the province of marginal and fringe actors in politics and the media. In particular, creating a consensus around scenario one will need significant buy-in from at least some who supported Brexit as well as from those who opposed it.

The Ditchley Park meeting

From that point of view, reports of a “secret” meeting held at the end of last week at Ditchley Park to “discuss the failings of Brexit and how to remedy them in the national interest” was an interesting development. The meeting brought together Brexiters (including Tories Michael Gove, Michael Howard and Norman Lamont, and Labour’s Gisela Stuart who co-chaired Vote Leave) and erstwhile remainers (including Labour’s David Lammy and Peter Mandelson, and the Tory David Lidington), as well as several former civil servants and some business leaders.

I call it ‘interesting’ not because it is going to yield anything in the way of concrete consequences, but because it is a tiny example, and so far as I know the first of its kind, of what a wider and long-term process of consensus-building for scenario one would look like. It is also, as Martin Fletcher of the New Statesman observes, perhaps the first time that as prominent a Brexiter as Gove has come anywhere close to acknowledging the failures of Brexit. Not that it should be over-stated: Gove, unlike those Labour MPs who attended, did so without the knowledge or consent of his party leader.

Brexiter reactions

That such a consensus is very far from being in the offing is also shown by the “near-hysterical responses” to news of the meeting. The most predictable came from Nigel Farage, with his autonomic reflex moan that “the full sell-out of Brexit is underway”. The Brexiter press took the same approach (£). You have to wonder just how often something can be sold out before there ceases to be anything left to betray. Brexiters like Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph (£) perhaps recognize this, but she draws the equally ludicrous conclusion that “Brexit was finally condemned to death in the gilded splendour of Ditchley Park”!

The Mail was sufficiently infuriated to run three items about the meeting – a report, an editorial, and a comment article by Steven Glover. Inevitably, the main attacks were multiple versions of the line that this was “a cynical remainer plot to derail Brexit”, but it was a line which made little sense, precisely because of the presence of “apparently unapologetic leavers” (though note the implied question raised by the word ‘apparently’) like “sinuous” Michael Gove (again, note the language: no one can fault tabloid journalists on their capacity to insinuate meaning). Nor could it be squared with the fact that neither re-joining the EU nor re-joining the single market were on the agenda. Indeed, all that was on the agenda was precisely the kind of rapprochement that I have called ‘scenario one’.

The logic of some of the Mail’s secondary lines of attack was also rather hard to follow. Apparently the secret nature of the meeting was evidence of its sinister intent, but so too was the fact that the leak of it having been held had appeared in the “Europhile Observer”. So was the cunning plot to conceal the meeting’s existence or to reveal it? Equally, David Frost ponderously warning, like a lumpen schoolboy who has diligently memorized the textbook without understanding its meaning, that the “establishment want to unravel the deals we did in 2020” was at odds with his own perpetual insistence that the Protocol, which is a key part of those deals, is not sacrosanct and, indeed, should be ‘unravelled’.

Most splenetic of all was someone called Carol Malone on GB News, who delivered a diatribe about “the anti-democratic treacherous elites” who by meeting to discuss how to make Brexit work better had apparently “spat on democracy and spat on the British people”. Goodness knows how unhinged she would have been had the meeting been a discussion of how to abandon Brexit altogether.

‘Remainer’ reactions

Perhaps less predictable were the negative reactions* from some of those who are anti-Brexit, although Martin Fletcher, referred to earlier, gave a qualified positive response and others were willing to give it a very cautious welcome. But some were almost as suspicious of the secrecy as the Brexiters, though it’s surely obvious that this was precisely because of the sensitivity of holding such a meeting, a sensitivity amply demonstrated by the ferocious response to its disclosure. In any case, whilst it is true the meeting wasn’t publicized by Ditchley Park, it wasn’t quite the conspiratorial event some depict it to be. To my mind, the level of confidentiality was sensible rather than sinister although, of course, ultimately such conversations will have to be public if a consensus for scenario one is to be created.

Many comments were disdainful of the lack of representation from any party other than Tories and Labour, or from trade unions and lobby groups. That’s a reasonable criticism, and, again, ultimately consensus-building would need a broader base, but it’s not indefensible to have a narrow group for what was widely recognized to be an unprecedented meeting, and one which would seem to have been very exploratory in nature.

In particular, some of these comments about lack of inclusiveness seemed to assume that the meeting had some kind of official or semi-official status that would, or could, give rise to a new national ‘plan’. Perhaps that was encouraged by the misleading reporting of the meeting as being a ‘Summit’. At all events it is obviously nonsense: such a meeting has no power at all, and certainly isn’t the basis of some kind of cross-party government or policy initiative. For that reason, similar comments about the lack of EU involvement were wide of the mark. The entire significance of the meeting, such as it is, lies in it (conceivably) being a tiny first step towards, specifically, domestic consensus-building around a very modest agenda.

Other comments jeered at precisely that modesty, insisting that no discussion was worthwhile that did not have re-joining the EU, or at least the single market, on the agenda. This is almost the mirror-image of the Brexiters’ criticisms, in that whereas they falsely assert that this was the real agenda and it was an attempt to sell out leavers, the re-join critics dismiss it for not having this agenda and being an attempt to sell out remainers.

Re-joiners beware

Underlying this is what I am increasingly coming to see as almost as big a block to ‘scenario one’ as that of the Brexit Ultras – the insistence by some that re-joining is something that will be quickly and easily achieved. I don’t think that is so, for the reasons I discussed in a video this week as a guest of Federal Trust (again, the comments beneath are instructive). But, whether I am right or wrong, the key point is that if re-joining is going to happen in whatever timescale, a necessary condition for it will be the creation of scenario one rather than scenario two. If scenario two becomes dominant, then re-joining will most certainly not happen. If scenario one takes hold then re-joining is by no means assured, but it becomes possible.

The danger, then, is that if even the tiniest step taken towards scenario one is dismissed out-of-hand by re-joiners and dismissed out-of-hand by Brexiters, then it will never happen. By insisting that only their preferred perfect outcome is acceptable, re-joiners, unwittingly no doubt, aid Brexiters in their rejection of it. In turn this makes it easier for scenario two to emerge. I don’t mean by this that re-joiners should give up on campaigning for their preferred outcome, just that they make that outcome much harder to achieve if they insist that anything other than the near-immediate delivery of that outcome is pointless or even, in a kind of reversal of the standard Brexiter line, a ‘betrayal’.

Commenting on reactions to the Ditchley Park meeting from “annoyed Remainers and EU commentators”, Helene von Bismarck, an eminent German historian specializing in Britain’s international relations, wrote “Too little, too late, they say. I am impatient too, but seriously, where do you want to start? If nothing except a Time Machine transporting you back to 2015 will make you happy, the future is bleak”. She also, rightly, pointed out that the meeting doesn’t constitute any kind of a turning point but at least – or at best – part of a process of facing up to the realities of Brexit.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that the agenda of that meeting did, in itself, face those realities. Gerhard Schnyder, in his discussion of it on his latest Brexit Impact Tracker is also absolutely right to say that:

“… eventually, the country will have to come together and heal the deep wounds Brexit has inflicted on the British body politic. But not on any terms. The risk is that if ‘moving on’ happens without a proper analysis of why Brexit took place and why it was never going to work, the ideas that drove the Brexit fringe of the UK’s political sphere will continue to cast their long shadows over the inevitable process of softening hard Brexit.”

However, that is not going to happen in one moment of revelation. The ‘proper analysis’ already exists; the political issue is to establish it as a consensus, which means enrolling at least some committed and leading Brexiters through a repudiation of their entrenched beliefs. That will take time and patience.

One implication of this could just conceivably be imminent. Although it is unlikely, suppose that Sunak decided that the only way of securing the deal with the EU to revise the Protocol was to take up Keir Starmer’s offer of Labour support, or even just threaten to do so to bring his rebels into line? If so, re-joiners should resist the temptation to denounce Labour for ‘propping up’ Brexit and instead see it as a significant move towards creating scenario one through a cross-party agreement that marginalizes the Brexit Ultras and undermines their desire for scenario two.

A battle for high stakes

The stakes here are very high. Each of the scenarios I sketched has very different consequences. For scenario one, rapprochement and amelioration lead to ‘restoration’, by which I don’t, or don’t simply, mean eventual re-joining, but a thorough repudiation and marginalization of the entire populist or Brexitist project. For scenario two, repetition and intensification lead to ‘pariahdom’, meaning international isolation and domestic authoritarianism and immiseration. But it’s also possible that the current situation, in which the two scenarios are contested with neither becoming dominant, will become the permanent one. That scenario, which we could call ‘muddling along’, actually seems quite likely at the moment and if so would lead to permanent economic and geo-political decline, as well perpetual political and cultural strife.

How re-joiners decide to conduct themselves will be one, though clearly only one, of the factors in what now happens in terms of these post-Brexit scenarios. The extent of the damage of Brexit and how widely that damage is recognized is one of many others. So is the scale of the expected Tory defeat at the next election and how the Tory Party then responds. A Labour government will take us some way to scenario one, though won’t be enough to do so in itself, and will presumably improve the TCA (and, to pre-empt some objections, no, that doesn’t mean ‘cherry-picking’ and, no, it won’t come close to reversing the economic damage of Brexit).

Getting from that to any kind of re-joining (whether of EU or single market) will need a situation to develop where it is the settled ambition of both government and official opposition parties, rather as it was in the 1960s when (unsuccessful) applications to join the EU were made by both Conservative and Labour governments, though, post-Brexit, any such application would need to be preceded by a referendum. In other words, as then, and quite differently than was the case with Brexit, joining would become an established national strategy.

The British polity is currently nowhere near that point. And it may never get to that point (and that won’t be hastened but delayed if, as some think, it needs to be preceded by reforming the ‘first past the post system’, which would mean electing a government with such a policy and then holding, and winning, a referendum on that, before even getting to the question of re-joining).

The long road ahead

But if things are ever to get to that point it will start with baby steps like the Ditchley Park meeting (even to call that a baby step is to over-state the case), after which there could and would certainly need to be far more confident and significant strides. The Brexiters, even as their cause languishes in the opinion polls, will still have the power to keep trying to trip that process up. They can only be aided in that if re-joiners and erstwhile remainers jeer at and belittle every fledgling attempt to walk.

Of course it is absurd, infuriating, ludicrous that we should be in such a situation, and that it is not possible simply to say, as one might in everyday life, that a terrible mistake was made and that it should be put right as quickly as possible. But, politically, that isn’t possible because of the deep and toxic nature of Brexit and the bitter divisions that still exist over it, including over the very idea that it was a terrible mistake. For evidence of that, just look at the extraordinary anger even something as trivial as the Ditchley Park meeting provoked. The poison can’t just be sucked and spat out. The fever has to pass and, even then, a long recuperation will be needed.

In the time that takes, the costs of Brexit will rack up, higher and higher. That’s disastrous. But one of the many damages caused by Brexit is precisely the fact that even the process of reversing it entails huge costs.

 

 

*I am mainly referring here to reaction on social media. In line with my usual practice I don’t link to tweets unless they are from public figures, but if anyone doubts the veracity of my account of these reactions see, for example, some of the responses to my own tweet of the original report of the meeting.

How Brexitism is eating Conservatism

It’s almost impossible to over-state the extent to which Brexit is bound up with the peculiarities, schisms, crises and in some parts almost madness of modern British Conservativism. In the 1970s and early 1980s opposition to British membership of what became the EU was the province of Bennites on the left and Powellite nationalists on the right. The inclusion of leaving the EEC in the Labour Party’s 1983 manifesto was seen as a key part of the wider political foolishness of what became called ‘the longest suicide note in history’. By the 1990s the mainstream Labour movement had entirely abandoned this Euroscepticism and it lived on only amongst a fairly small group of what we now call Lexiters.

But Conservatism embraced ever more virulent versions of it. Within the Tory Party, that grew from the 1992 Maastricht rebels, and became incubated as a ‘party within a party’ by the European Research Group (ERG) founded in 1993. Meanwhile, the Referendum Party and UKIP emerged, with the latter enduring to become a significant electoral force in votes and in European Parliamentary seats, if not in Westminster. David Cameron sought in vain to stop his party ‘banging on about Europe’, whilst describing UKIP as “a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”.

A tale of two parties

However, what is now far clearer than perhaps it was at the time is that UKIP developed not so much as a separate party but as a kind of pressure group within Conservatism as a whole. Thus Nigel Farage had started out as a Conservative Party member, leaving in protest at Maastricht but, ideologically, there was, and still is, little if any difference between him and the ERG. Indeed the ERG had multiple links with UKIP and other anti-EU groups and parties. There has also always been a lot of interchange at the level of grass roots party membership between the Conservatives and UKIP, and a certain amount between its MPs and MEPs.

As a pressure group, Farage and UKIP (and, later, the Brexit Party and, now, the Reform Party) were critical in getting Cameron’s Conservative Party to hold the 2016 referendum. In a similar way, during the Referendum, the official Vote Leave campaign and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign were, whilst at loggerheads in terms of personalities, effectively complementary. Thus Vote Leave was able to make the ‘respectable’ leave case whilst Leave.EU could run a more stridently populist and anti-immigration campaign. All the votes garnered counted equally, after all.

Then, in the 2019 General Election, Farage’s decision not to run candidates in Conservative-held seats, reversing his previous stance, helped to give Boris Johnson his majority to ‘get Brexit done’, and certainly ensured that his majority was as large as it was. That election also saw the purging of many Tory MPs who were, or were seen as, anti-Brexit, or were just of a more moderate bent than the Brexiters. Thus, all the way through the process that led to Brexit, there has been a kind of on-and-off alliance, albeit wearing the paradoxical clothes of rivalry, between chunks of the Tory Party and the Farage parties.

Why does any of this matter now? The answer is because it is not ancient history, and it’s not even just recent history: it continues to be a key dynamic in the politics of post-Brexit Britain and in particular in the battle within British Conservatism about what ‘true Conservatism’ is.

Brexitists and Traditionalists

Thus Conservatism now consists of a dominant group which is pro-Brexit, pro-low tax, pro-deregulation, lockdown-sceptic, net-zero-sceptic, anti-woke etc. It is tempting to call them libertarians, but they are only selectively that (e.g. they are lockdown sceptics but authoritarian about public protests and human rights generally). This group spans much of the Tory Party and all of the Reform Party, as well as their media cheerleaders. They might be called populists, Brexit Ultras (or perhaps just Ultras, which captures their extremism) or Brexitists, which captures their mind-set. They, of course, would describe themselves as ‘true Conservatives’ or simply ‘Conservatives’, but in doing so they deliberately ignore another kind of Conservative.

These other Conservatives are, whatever the Brexitists may think, certainly on the political right. They are not necessarily anti-Brexit and, even if some were remainers, few are now re-joiners. But they aren’t fanatical about Brexit, don’t position themselves as ‘anti-Establishment’, are pro-business, fiscally ‘orthodox’, rationalists, and support the rule of law, including international law. They might be called Traditionalists or Pragmatists. Their natural, but increasingly precarious, home is the Tory Party and they probably don’t exist at all in the Reform Party.

It's this context, rather than the personal idiosyncrasies that she certainly possesses, which explains Liz Truss’s attempt this week to re-habilitate herself: she is the aspirant leader of the Brexitists. And it is this which explains the divisions which Rishi Sunak faces over Brexit policy and other issues, because he doesn’t really belong to, and therefore isn’t really trusted by, either group. More generally, these things show post-Brexit politics is already changing the political right, and may create an even more profound transformation.

What Truss has learned: nothing

In his recent excellent essay on Liz Truss’s premiership, the historian Robert Saunders emphasises that she “did not fall into No. 10 from a spaceship, like some twin-set Mr Bean. She won the leadership because she best expressed what Conservatism has become”. It’s true that she had the taint of having supported remaining in the EU, but she readily shrugged off that skin.

Theresa May had done that too, but always seemed to have embraced Brexit only as a dutiful reality. That was genuine, and Brexiters were quite wrong to doubt it, but it was not enthusiastic. In that sense, for all that she employed many of the Brexitists’ tropes when Prime Minister, and certainly shared the Brexiter hostility to freedom of movement of people, she remained a Traditionalist. Truss, by contrast, already a fervent free-market, deregulatory ideologue, became a true convert, a “born-again Ultra” as I first described her when she was Foreign Secretary. And, in my discussion of her leadership bid, I suggested she was all the more zealous precisely because of the recency of her conversion.

That zealotry was the hallmark of the defining – and in effect only – act of her short administration, the infamous ‘mini-budget’. It was, in all but name, the Brexit budget, hailed as such by Brexiter commentators and politicians. Crucially this enthusiastic greeting came not just from within the Conservative Party but from across the Brexitists, including, notably, Nigel Farage. When the whole thing fell apart so spectacularly, that same alliance was united in ascribing its failure to the Establishment, remainers and, even, ‘left-wing’ market traders, and united in urging her not to change course.

Five months later, Truss’s Sunday Telegraph ‘essay’ (£) reprises these explanations. As an account of a political downfall, it must count as one of the least self-reflective and most complacent imaginable. It might be summed up as an assertion that if she had a flaw it was that she was right all along (Louis Ashworth of the Financial Times has provided a damning line-by-line analysis of the article). In this way it actually, if unintentionally, did explain what went wrong with her premiership, which was, indeed, her certainty of her rectitude against all reason and evidence.

Why learning nothing cements Truss’s Brexitist credentials

That lack of self-insight was widely, and rightly, mocked. However, even if her flaws are psychological their consequences, and the conclusions they lead her to, are distinctively political. Moreover, they are distinctively Brexitist, and from that perspective her refusal to recant her beliefs in the face of the evidence of what they led to is a strength rather than a flaw. As with Brexit itself, true belief is all. Hence her insistence that she was brought down by “the economic Establishment” and, with that, what Marina Hyde calls “the sheer nonsense victimhood” of Truss’s account. That victimhood is, as I’ve stressed so often on the blog, most recently last week, one of the central and defining threads of Brexitism.

A particularly revealing aspect of this ‘sheer nonsense’ is Truss’s complaint that she hadn’t been warned by officials of the risks of the mini-budget. That’s in part just another version of blaming the Establishment and of victimhood as well, but it inflects them in a particular way. It seems to suggest not just obstructionism from the civil service but also incompetence. In this way it is rather contradictory, positioning officialdom as at once all-powerful and at the same time totally ineffectual (the same contradiction is manifest in the way that the EU is depicted as both a powerful bully and a corpse on the point of collapse – such contradictions being one of characteristics of Ur-fascism identified by Umberto Eco).

In any case, it is totally indefensible as an account of the mini-budget for two reasons. One is that it hardly needed official advice to know the dangers to sterling and the bond market. They were being written about by huge swathes of commentators at the time, even including this lowly blog. They may not have identified the particular issue of what that would mean for pension funds, which Truss refers to specifically, but even if it is true that it didn’t figure in official advice (a big if), the collapse of the bond market was calamitous enough in itself to be the cause of her downfall according to former Chancellor George Osborne.

The second reason that blaming lack of advice is an indefensible excuse is that it is abundantly obvious, and another prime example of her Brexitism, that she side-lined the advice from civil servants and others precisely because she regarded it as coming from the ‘economic Establishment’. That was evident in the sacking of Treasury boss, Tom Scholar, in advance of the mini-budget, ignoring IFS forecasts, excluding the OBR, and her hostility to the Bank of England. Conversely, it was evident in her reliance on, and total infatuation with, the advice of the small group of pro-Brexit, radical free market think-tankers and economists associated with the IEA and similar groups, and especially Patrick Minford.

In a way, this is the story of Brexit as a whole, albeit written on a smaller canvas, with the warnings of civil servants and others dismissed and derided as ‘Project Fear’, ‘declinism’ or obstructionism and then, when things go horribly wrong, blame it on the very people whose warnings were ignored. It was on display this week in David Davis’s assertion that the civil service had done a “really crap job” of negotiating Brexit. Again it’s an account that shows precisely zero self-awareness but, again, its political importance lies in the underlying failure to accept that Brexit, like the mini-budget, foundered on realities. For even If it were true that civil servants were anti-Brexit and wanted to obstruct it, and even if they had been replaced wholesale with ‘true believers’, those realities would not have changed. For particular example, no official could have enacted Davis’s own claim that there was a way to have “the exact same benefits” of the single market and customs union without belonging to either. It was impossible.

Sunak’s inheritance

So in these various ways, Truss showed in her ‘rehabilitation essay’, just as she did in her premiership, the Brexitism that unites the Farageists outside the party and the dominant Brexitist strand within her own. Her capacity to do so might not have lasted had she stayed in power because it is highly likely that, sooner or later, it was a unity that would have fallen apart on the familiar rocks of ‘betrayal’ and ‘purity’, and schisms would have emerged.

In particular, had she survived in office she would have faced exactly the same issues as Boris Johnson would have over the Northern Ireland Protocol. If she did a deal, she would have been turned on by the Brexit Ultras within and outside the Tory Party. If she did not, she would have faced both the practical consequences and also, possibly, rebellion within her party if the outcome were to break international law by unilaterally disapplying the Protocol.

That last point is an important one, reflecting my argument that whilst Brexitism is in the ascendant within British Conservatism, a rump of traditionalism or pragmatism endures within the Conservative Party. And, rump though it is, it remains large enough to defeat the government, despite the ostensible size of its majority in the House of Commons.  

It is exactly this dynamic that Sunak now faces. Despite leading the Tory Party and despite being pro-Brexit, he is not regarded by the Brexitists as being a ‘true Brexiter’ or, by extension, a Brexitist. Instead, they regard him, much as they did Cameron, as a ‘socialist’ and a ‘globalist’. And, of course, he was not the choice of the party membership, largely for these reasons. Indeed, the main supposed quality that brought him to power was the ‘pragmatism’ which, to the Brexitists, is code for compromise and betrayal.

The most obvious flashpoint will, indeed, be over the Protocol. With rumours of an imminent deal growing, so too are the signs of a Brexiter rebellion (using, ironically given their constant denunciations of remainer parliamentary ‘chicanery’, the mechanism of a ‘prayer motion’ to force a debate on the construction of border posts). Reportedly as a means to head off such a rebellion, Sunak is floating the idea (£) of derogating from the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) as “red meat” to satisfy them. And, indeed, this is one of the various things the ‘true Conservative’ axis yearns for.

Yet if Sunak thinks that any amount of red meat will ever satisfy them he hasn’t been paying attention: nothing will ever satisfy them. Beyond that lies the absurdity that if this is a plan to distract from doing a pragmatic deal on the Protocol, easing relations with the EU and the US, it would immediately provoke a new crisis in those relations since derogating from the ECHR would very likely violate the Good Friday Agreement.

At the same time, it would also be very likely to trigger the opposition of the Traditionalists, who are already making noises to that effect (£). This perhaps explains why there are contradictory briefings about the government’s intentions, with some reports saying that there are ‘no plans” to derogate. Overall, the effect is both an illustration of Sunak’s dilemma but also adds to it, since to one side it gives the message that he is not really committed to this policy and to the other that he might just pursue it anyway, thus alienating both. So he is now caught in a vice: his supposed pragmatism is anathema to the Brexitists, whilst the concessions he makes to the Brexitists mean that the Traditionalists suspect him of lacking the pragmatism which is one of their defining values.

A very similar situation obtains with the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL). It began, of course, under Truss’s premiership, and Sunak’s reported enthusiasm for it, and especially for the time frame for sunsetting EU laws, has waxed and waned. Nevertheless it was passed unamended in the Commons and is currently being debated in the House of Lords. That debate again shows the clear split – clearer in the Lords than the Commons – between these different kinds of Conservatism.

It is a split which isn’t so much, despite what Brexiters try to claim, between Brexiters and remainers as between Brexitists and Traditionalists. That distinction is well-captured by a phrase used by Michael Heseltine – a remainer, most certainly, but, equally certainly, a Conservative – in the Lords’ debate, when he spoke of the “Robespierrian fanaticism” of Brexitists like Jacob Rees-Mogg, and invoked Margaret Thatcher’s role in creating the single market. It’s that Jacobin fanaticism that marks the divide in modern Conservatism, for all that both lay claim to the mantle of Thatcherism. And it is in evidence not just in relation to specifically Brexit-related issues but also in relation to net zero, say, or even the debates about current legislation of public protests.

Is a fundamental re-alignment in prospect?

Sunak is certainly too weak to resolve any of this. It goes beyond anything that can be resolved by the usual tricks of balancing political factions, such as he showed this week in appointing the tandem act of Greg Hands and Lee Anderson as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Party. Indeed the immediate rows about Anderson’s support for the death penalty and his views of food banks simply served to demonstrate the depth of the Brexitist-Traditionalist schism.

But even a less weak and more accomplished leader would fare no better because, fundamentally, it isn’t soluble without a complete re-structuring of the political parties. To a large extent because of Brexit, what has emerged is a situation where the Tory Party is no longer contiguous with the dominant ideology of British Conservatism and can no longer act as a broad coalition of different factions.

I say ‘no longer’ because this isn’t an entirely new situation. It has echoes of the way that Thatcher herself presided over a party split between ‘wets’ and ‘dries’, and which gradually, if not entirely, marginalised the ‘wets’. But the differences between Brexitists and Traditionalists inside the current Tory Party are more existential. They don’t just rest on different apprehensions of Conservatism but on entirely different approaches to the conduct of political life, perhaps even to the meaning of political life.

Even if that distinction with previous splits is overstated, the other difference is that, now, there is an artificial split between the Tory Brexitists and the Reform Party Brexitists which has no analogue in the Thatcher years. In those years Tories may have been internally split in the move from its one nation tradition to Thatcher’s far more ideological and market-orientated approach. But there was no powerful, lurking external grouping of Thatcherites claiming to be the voice of ‘true Thatcherism’, and able to mobilise perhaps 15% of the electorate, mainly at the Tories’ expense, as she wrought those changes on her party. Nor, of course, was there an equivalent external grouping of the old-style, one nation wets. Plus she was in government and winning elections as she changed the party – a very different prospect from being in opposition after, perhaps, a heavy election defeat and after having been in power for over a decade.

Taken together, this suggests there is a logical case for a fundamental re-grouping to occur on the right of British politics assuming such an electoral defeat. There will certainly be an almighty battle at that point and, if my analysis is right, that is very likely to lead to one of two scenarios. The Brexitists might combine into one ‘new Conservative’ party, making the Reform Party redundant and routing the last remnants of Traditionalism to the wilderness, or in some cases to the LibDems or even Labour. Or, though perhaps less likely, at least in the immediate aftermath of electoral defeat, the Traditionalists might win out within the Tory Party, shedding the Brexitists to a Farage-type outfit.

The strange death of Conservative England?

In either scenario, everything would then depend on how voters responded, especially in the context of changing political demography which is likely to prove unfavourable to any configuration of Conservatism. Would enough of them back whichever of those parties emerged, making it a viable future government? Or would there be a permanent or near-permanent split on the right which would keep them out of power forever (unless the first past the post system is changed)?

If that last situation is the outcome, we might just be witnessing the start of what will come to be called ‘the strange death of Conservative England’. Admittedly this is not the first time this has been predicted, and the prediction has proved wrong. Even so it is hard to resist the thought, voiced this week by David Gauke, the former Tory Minister who in my terms would be a Traditionalist, that “Brexit is slowly killing the Conservative Party”. Many will not mourn that, though they may be dismayed by what replaces it.

 

Footnote

I recognize the many difficulties with the Brexitist and Traditionalist framing of this post. For example, it might be said that a certain kind of ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ Tory traditionalist has much in common with, say, Lee Anderson who on my account is a Brexitist. Likewise those who fall within my use of ‘Traditionalist’ would include ‘Cameroonian’ Conservatives who sought a more diverse and less ‘nasty’ party, as well as old school grandees of an almost Macmillanite hue.

Nor does the Brexitist-Traditionalist distinction entirely map on to Brexit support. For example, Lord (Michael) Howard is certainly a Brexiter, but his opposition to the illegal clauses of the Internal Market Bill marks him out as a Traditionalist rather than a Brexitist. It would also, no doubt, be true that there are different factions within each of the categories of Brexitist and Traditionalist, as well as people (David Davis? Bill Cash?) who don’t sit very well within either, Sunak being a particularly important and interesting case, as discussed in this post to an extent. Even so, I think these terms, or something like them, capture the primary divide within current Conservatism.

There’s also a lot to be said about how Thatcherism relates to these categories and, perhaps, the way that she was able, for a while anyway, to yoke together a certain kind of populist and insurgent politics (somewhat akin to Brexitism) with a certain kind of pragmatism and respect for institutions (somewhat akin to Traditionalism). This partly explains why, as I mention in passing, both are able to iconise her, in the same way as both pro- and anti-Brexiters are able to invoke her.

But this is a blog post, not a PhD thesis!