As we reach the seventh anniversary of the referendum there is a flurry of assessments and comment pieces, as now happens on each anniversary of a milestone in the Brexit process. I’m not going to review them here, but their profusion, and the diversity of their claims and counter-claims are, in themselves, evidence that Brexit remains deeply divisive and hotly contested. And that is as much evidence of the failure of Brexit as the clear, established and growing public view that it was a mistake. For Brexit was never supposed to be a project of permanent division, a national future constantly contested and with a declining minority supporting it.
Conversely, imagine if Brexit had been a success. We might expect triumphant articles from Brexiters, trumpeting and celebrating this latest anniversary. Perhaps there would be replays of the campaign videos – like the Leave.EU one about the benefits Brexit would bring – ticking off, item by item, each promise that had come true. And, surely, there would be at least some one-time remainers recanting their opposition, swayed by a growing mass of evidence that daily life, and national prosperity and standing, had been improved.
Well, it’s still early in the day and, as I remarked last week, a Friday morning blog can get caught out, so perhaps, later in this anniversary day, we will see all of these things. But it’s not likely, and if it happens then it will be very different from the recent tenor of Brexit discussion. What we see instead is a mixture of defensiveness and blame-shifting and, most striking of all, a growing tendency for Brexiters to focus attention not on Brexit itself but on ‘remainers’.
The disgrace of Johnson
That focus takes various forms, and currently, because this anniversary has coincided with the public disgrace of Boris Johnson, it has also become bound up with that. I wrote at length about the connections between Johnson and Brexit in last week’s post and won’t repeat that, but it would still be worth reading by anyone taken in by claims made by, for example, Robert Tombs in The Telegraph (£), that commentators linking his downfall to Brexit are, somehow, ‘letting slip’ that the agenda behind the Privileges Committee report was not really about lying to the House of Commons.
That is also how the Brexiter press more generally has depicted the report, and this week’s Commons debate and vote upholding it, describing it as a “Remainer ‘show trial’” conducted by “vengeful technocrats” extracting “Remainer revenge”. And, almost invariably, this is seen not just as ‘punishment’ for Johnson supporting and enacting Brexit but as “the first step” (£) to reversing it. Or, perhaps, the outrage isn’t even rooted in such fears but something more visceral, as with former Brexit Party MEP Alex Phillips who declared herself “utterly sick with rage” at “all these smug Remoaners lining up to lambast Boris”.
The very obvious counter to all this, apart from the fact that the Committee’s report was unanimously agreed by its members who included Brexiters, lies in the composition of the Commons vote on whether to accept its findings and recommendations. It’s true that, shamefully, some 225 Tory MPs chose to abstain*, including, disgracefully, Rishi Sunak whose weak leadership has been plainly exposed, and another seven voted against. That is a terrible reflection on the willingness of Johnson’s supporters to pervert important democratic safeguards, though listening to some of their contributions to the debate it wasn’t always clear they even understood what the vote was actually about. For example, Lia Nici, holding the report containing all the evidence in her hands, declared that there was no evidence of Johnson’s wrongdoing on the wholly extraneous grounds that she had once been one of his Parliamentary Private Secretaries.
Still, 118 Tories voted to support the Committee, suggesting that the Conservative Party isn’t (yet) Trumpified in the manner of the Republicans. Crucially, amongst their number were some very committed Brexiters, including Steve Baker, John Baron, Graham Brady, Geoffrey Cox, David Davis, Daniel Kawczynski, Tim Loughton, Penny Mordaunt and, no doubt, others. The Tory Party is clearly deeply split on this, as it is on many issues, but the split on this occasion wasn’t a straightforward one between pro- and anti-Brexit MPs. For that reason alone it is absurd to depict what happened as a ‘Remainer show trial’ or as a prelude to reversing Brexit.
Picking over the entrails of ‘Project Fear’
But this obsession with ‘remainers’ goes much wider than the attempt to blame them for Johnson’s richly-deserved and far too belated disgrace. Not only do Brexiters no longer make reference to their own promises of seven years ago, but they are fixated on the now totally irrelevant remain campaign. For example, the Robert Tombs’ piece returns to one of his favourite topics in giving a potted history of ‘Project Fear’ claims as a prelude to some cod psychology which purports to explain why remainers and re-joiners continue to oppose Brexit. The rather obvious explanation that the evidence of its failure continues to increase seems not to occur to him.
It's not just ‘Project Fear’ in general that preoccupies the Brexiters. They are also still gunning for particular hate figures within the supposed project, a prime example being former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who reminded them that he had rightly anticipated that Brexit would have long-term inflationary effects – a key issue this week. Cue outrage from his perennial critic Jacob Rees-Mogg, and a dismissive assessment in CapX from, inevitably, Brexit Blob economist Julian Jessop. But whilst Jessop, rightly, accepts that Carney isn’t ascribing all current UK inflation to Brexit, he isn’t able to disprove that some of it is, something independent economists from Mohamed El-Erian of Queens’ College, Cambridge to Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute in the US see as self-evident, and which even the BBC, despite its hyper-caution about reporting Brexit bad news, just about accepts.
A much less predictable piece about ‘Project Fear’ appeared, also in CapX, written by Phil Craig. There has been so much written about Brexit now that it is very rare indeed to find a new take on it, but Craig succeeds, albeit only by dint of almost mind-blowing perversity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it was hailed as “a great article” by that fine judge of intellectual quality and coherent argument, um, David Frost.
Normally, two arguments are made about Project Fear by its critics. One is that since some of its worst predictions didn’t come true that means that all predictions of any Brexit damage, then or since, can safely be ignored. The other is that, since some of the predictions were worse than has actually happened, Brexit is vindicated. The first suffers from an obvious illogic (‘some warnings were false, therefore all warnings are false’). The second isn’t, to say the least, compelling defence of Brexit (‘it’s good because it’s not as bad as the worst that some said it would be’).
Whilst there is some validity in criticizing the use George Osborne, especially, made of the Treasury short-term forecast, especially, both versions of the argument typically operate by cherry-picking often de-contextualised claims from the remain campaign. It’s also quite wrong to equate remain campaign forecasts, accurate or not, with actual lies, such as the infamous ‘£350m a week for the NHS’ slogan that Craig gestures towards, which could never have been true. In any case, what the remain campaign said is irrelevant now, given that the leave campaign won and we’ve left the EU: all that matters is how Brexit has actually worked out.
But Craig’s new angle is to suggest that it is still relevant. He argues that ‘Project Fear’ shifted votes to ‘remain’ in the closing days of the campaign, making the ‘leave’ win much tighter than it would otherwise have been. This, he says, means that compared with the 60-40 win for leave that he believes could otherwise have occurred, the 52-48 win was less amenable to ‘losers’ consent’, and more likely to enable “conspiracy theories to flourish”, accounting for the continuing divisions.
This is nonsense at multiple levels (except, perhaps, if the implication is that the referendum should have required a ‘super-majority’), not least because there’s little or no evidence from the pre-referendum opinion polls that a 60-40 vote to leave was remotely likely. The highest level of support for leave recorded in those polls was 55%, in a single survey, and no other poll was anywhere near that.
Moreover, the ‘victim-blaming’ implication that remainers are at fault for what has happened subsequently because they didn’t lose heavily enough is a bizarre one. Even if Craig insists that remainer forecasts were lies, stripping their impact out would only make sense in this context if the impact of the leave campaign lies were similarly removed: does anyone seriously think that would have yielded a 52%, let alone a 60%, vote to leave? And, that being so, whilst Craig doesn’t seek to defend any of the leave lies, it is surely perverse to suggest that “the big lies, the ones that really shifted the dial” were told by the remain campaign.
Losers’ consent
Beyond that, though, is the whole question of ‘losers’ consent’. It’s true that some have focused on improprieties in the 2016 vote, including not just the conduct of the campaign but funding and possible Russian interference, though it’s not clear that a wider margin in the result would have assuaged those concerns rather than magnified them. But that wasn’t the biggest complaint. Far more important was the fact that what ‘leaving the EU’ meant was not specified by the referendum, so what the losers were being asked to consent to was only defined retrospectively. That would still have been a complaint, and an equally legitimate one, whatever the margin of their defeat.
It's also true that there was a demand for another vote. But the campaign for a People’s Vote was never, despite many claims to the contrary, a campaign to re-run the referendum, but to have a referendum with at least some knowledge (albeit not that of the eventual trade deal) of what, by 2018-2019, had become clearer about Brexit was going to mean in practice. That didn’t happen, because Brexiters knew or suspected that they would lose such a vote, and that’s one reason why Brexit continues to be so divisive: it did not, in the form it took, have majority support.
But even that might have gone away in time had the actually effects of Brexit not proved to be so dire (confirming at least some, if not all, of the ‘Project Fear warnings). Again, it is this, rather than issues of loser’s consent, or weird psychological preferences, or vindictiveness, or elite plotting, or any of the other convoluted arguments being put forward, which explains why Brexit is still divisive and still contentious.
Remainer ‘subversion’
For those not sated with Frost’s recommended readings, he praised another “excellent” article this week, this time from the more familiar pen of Graham Gudgin who, with Robert Tombs, co-edits the Brexit Blob's house-website Briefings for Britain, which is where the article appeared. Yet again, the focus is on the perceived sins of remainers, who this time are accused of “becoming increasingly desperate” and suffering “Brexit derangement syndrome”, supposedly because they “pin any and all negative events on Brexit”.
The latter is a typically hyperbolic claim designed to discredit by association in that, whilst I don’t doubt that examples can be found of it, no serious analysis of Brexit proceeds in that way. Certainly, serious analysts of things like travel disruption, trade levels, the labour market or inflation are at pains to try to separate out Brexit from other factors. The real issue is the refusal of Brexiters to accept that, whatever that separate impact may be, it is necessarily an extra burden, uniquely suffered by Britain.
Towards the end of Gudgin’s article is another version of the losers’ consent theme, but this time making one of the most persistent, and the most pernicious, claims within the Brexiter canon, that remainers in parliament “attempt[ed] to subvert the result of a legally-conducted referendum”. It's manifestly untrue. When was this attempt made?
The vote on triggering Article 50? But that was passed with a massive majority. The votes on May’s deal? But her deal was voted against by the Brexiters, on the basis it was not real Brexit, so that can’t have been an attempt to “subvert the result” of the referendum. A motion to hold another referendum (if that would be considered subversion)? But no such motion was passed. The vote on Johnson’s deal? But his Withdrawal Amendment Bill had passed second reading and its passage was only interrupted by his decision to hold the 2019 election. I suppose, for Brexiters, the other possible answer would be the Benn Act. But that was a vote to prevent no-deal Brexit, which was never proposed as an even conceivable version of Brexit at the referendum.
Humiliating remainers
Perhaps the crucial conceit in Gudgin’s piece is that “we always knew that a hardcore of remainers would never give up”, as if “this Remainer fight-back” arises from the eccentricity, if not “some sort of mental breakdown”, of a tiny, declining and deluded minority. Yet the fact is that a clear and growing majority of the public think that Brexit has been a mistake, and not because they are “like Jacobites … still attempting to reverse the Glorious Revolution more than half a century after the event” but because ordinary people, seven years from the referendum, have seen what it means and see it as having failed. As the pollster Peter Kellner wrote this week, “Britain is now an anti-Brexit country”.
Perhaps it is enragement about this which explains why so much Brexiter energy is directed at insulting remainers. Ever since the referendum result some Brexiters have seemed to enjoy the hurt and anguish it has caused remainers more than they do Brexit itself, which in itself has contributed to keeping all the divisions alive. That is even more the case now when, even in seeking to defend Brexit, they do not invite everyone, leaver and remainer alike, to relish its supposed success, but frame their argument in terms of humiliating Brexit’s critics.
A typical example is the recent Telegraph article by Ross Clark, headlined “Remainers predicting economic catastrophe have been utterly humiliated” (£). Before getting too excited, regular Telegraph readers might have recalled how, in March, David Frost told them that Remainers “are about to be humiliated” (£), that time by the agreement of UK accession to CPTPP and the 0.08% GDP uplift it might bring over 15 years. They might also have remembered that, last September, they were assured by Allister Heath that the “declinist remainer elite is about to be humiliated” (£), the reason on that occasion being the Truss mini-budget, which did indeed bring about humiliation – for its architects, and their cheerleaders like Heath.
At all events, any quailing remainer who continued reading the Clark piece might have felt utterly bemused rather than “utterly humiliated”. For it turned out that the prediction in question was made in January, not by ‘remainers’ but the IMF (for some Brexiters, of course, there is no distinction), and it was not of ‘catastrophe’ but, though the article didn’t spell this out, of a 0.6% contraction of UK GDP in 2023. Again not mentioned is that the IMF subsequently revised its forecast in April to a 0.3% contraction and in May to a 0.4% growth (one reason for the upgrade, by the way, was agreeing the Windsor Framework, regarded by Brexit Ultras as a betrayal).
The ‘utter humiliation’ suffered by this outdated forecast was that, according to Eurostat, the UK economy in fact grew by a dazzling 0.1% of GDP in each of the last two quarters. Wowza! Not only that but, to complete the humiliation, the Eurozone has “plunged into” a recession, having “slumped” by 0.1% in those same two quarters. Like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Clark attaches great significance to this as a justification of Brexit, although it is not at all clear why, since the UK was never part of the Eurozone, and its economic cycle rarely, if ever, coincided with it. Nor it is clear why a Eurozone recession should be good news since it is still such a major export market for the UK.
So all this was bogus as a defence of Brexit, but the present point is that its entire framing, like that of the other articles cited, illustrates Brexiters talking to a (presumably) sympathetic audience in ways suggesting that what is now the most important thing about Brexit is the demonization of remainers.
The problem with Brexit is Brexit itself
This is part of the explanation of why Brexit has failed, at a political level. You can hardly recruit converts to your cause by insulting and humiliating them. But the bigger issue is that the pre-occupation with doing so is an expression of the fact that there is nothing to celebrate about Brexit. The problem with Brexit isn’t anything to do with remainers, it is with Brexit itself.
It is the refusal of Brexiters to accept that which explains how their original obsession with leaving has now shifted to an obsession with remainers. That in turn is part of the attempt to show that Brexit has been ‘betrayed’ or ‘not done properly’ or ‘done in name only’. Taken together, it creates a vicious circle. The more that Brexiters themselves decry the Brexit we actually have, the less reason there is for the public, including leave voters, to support it, and the less the public support it, the more Brexiters turn their ire on remainers.
Rather than pick over the scabs of Project Fear or scratch at the psychosomatic rash of remainer revenge and plots, they would do better to satisfy the seven-year itch by returning to the Vote.EU video I mentioned above, or perhaps the Vote Leave one about the NHS. Not in a spirit of triumph, as they might have done had Brexit succeeded, but in order to recognize how preposterous were the promises they made for Brexit, and how comprehensively they have failed to transpire.
If capable of honesty, they would admit that the fault for what has happened since lies not with those who warned of it and tried to prevent it, but with those who made these promises and persuaded so many to believe them. And if capable of shame, they would hang their heads, as disgraced as their disgraceful leader.
*It shouldn’t be concluded that all the MPs who didn’t vote, including Tories, were registering lack of support for the Committee’s report (for example, Alberto Costa was one of them, although he was one of the Committee’s members). Some may have had legitimate reasons why they couldn’t attend.
Friday, 23 June 2023
Friday, 16 June 2023
Could this be a cathartic moment for Brexit Britain?
Writing a weekly blog that appears on a Friday morning carries an inherent risk of something important happening later in the day. So it was no doubt tempting fate to begin last week’s post with the observation that it had been a relatively quiet Brexit news week, only for Boris Johnson to resign as an MP that evening, having read the draft report of the Privileges Committee inquiry into whether he had misled the House of Commons over the ‘Partygate’ scandal.
Subsequently, yesterday, the final report was published, and it contained what the BBC’s Political Editor called a “punishingly brutal” and “devastating” judgment both on the original offences and on Johnson’s “campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation” of the Committee and its members, finding him guilty of multiple contempts of parliament. It was a verdict that left no room for doubt about Johnson, and could also be regarded as a vindication of the robustness of Britain’s democratic institutions that he should be held to account in this way, including in the very robust defence the Committee offered of its own process in the face of the vitriolic, Trumpian attacks against it by Johnson and his allies.
In other circumstances this would mark the end of a political career, the definitive exposure of a wholly dishonest ex-Prime Minister and, now, ex-MP, and that may well be the result. Yet, whatever Johnson’s ultimate fate, there is more at stake than that because it is not just about Johnson but about the wider politics of Brexit and of post-Brexit Britain. For this was, indeed, a major piece of ‘Brexit news’, even though, in principle, the inquiry had nothing to do with Brexit, because there’s an ineluctable link between Johnson and Brexit, such that it is impossible to discuss the one without the other.
Johnson and Brexit: conjoined twins
Brexit had many causes, and it is an over-simplification to say, as Guardian columnist Martin Kettle does, that “Brexit was Johnson and Johnson was Brexit”. But it’s quite plausible to say that but for Johnson’s involvement the campaign to leave would not have succeeded in winning its narrow majority. It’s certainly the case that he played a crucial role in shaping the form Brexit eventually took. And, looking at things from the other direction, it is at least arguable that, but for Brexit, he would never have become Prime Minister and that, but for his ambition to do so, he wouldn’t have supported Brexit.
So, like a safebreaker too careless and complacent to wear gloves, Johnson has left his fingerprints all over the Brexit crime scene. And just as his pathological dishonesty, entitled incompetence, grotesque egotism and moral depravity caused his downfall first as Prime Minister and now as an MP, so did they indelibly mark Brexit. From the outset, who better to front a campaign based on lies than someone to whom lying is first, never mind second, nature? Who better to deny the complex trade-offs entailed in the Brexit process than someone who applied his ‘cakeist’ philosophy to every aspect of his priapic, venal life? Who better to oversee a project based on vapid boasts and slogans than someone so lacking in substance and depth that to accuse him of vapidity would be the most generous of flatteries?
Perhaps the most disgraceful thing is that many of these criticisms of him, and more besides, would be made by those who supported leaving the EU. For they always knew that his involvement in it had no foundation of principle or belief. He was never ‘one of them’ – indeed he was never one of any particular group or ideology – he was useful to getting what they wanted, just as they were useful to him in getting what he wanted. This was no Luther or Calvin, dogmatically committed to Reformation, but a political Vicar of Bray, guided by opportunism, albeit with a view to glory rather than mere survival.
“Revenge for Brexit”
All of this is would be so regardless of whether Johnson’s resignation had any specific connection with Brexit. But, in fact, he himself chose to make them connected. Within his more general attempt to depict himself as the innocent victim of a ‘witch hunt’ and a ‘kangaroo court’ (for Johnson, whose supposed qualities as a wordsmith invariably yield snide metal not gold, has no fastidious objection to cliché) he explicitly claimed in his resignation letter, and since, that the reason he had been targeted was “to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result. My removal is the necessary first step, and I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about.”
It is hardly surprising that he should make this claim, and it is similar to the one made by Dominic Raab about his own resignation as well as those made about supposed ‘plots’ against Suella Braverman (£). In part, it is just a refusal to accept responsibility for his own wrong-doing. But it is also distinctively ‘Brexitist’ in tapping in to the familiar ‘victimhood’ narrative, and the associated idea that Brexit is some ‘anti-establishment’ revolt being undertaken in the face of a shadowy remainer elite ‘plot’ to foil it or ‘coup’ to overturn it.
Thus, equally unsurprisingly, it was taken up across the Brexit Blob as the explanation for Johnson’s demise, a further illustration of the way that Johnson has always been enabled by others and a reminder that, even now, there are still plenty of saddle-sniffers like David Frost to parrot the paranoid squawks about the ‘Remain establishment’ getting its dastardly way (£).
Of the many things that could be said of these fantasies about the anti-Brexit establishment, perhaps the most obvious is that, since Brexit did in fact happen, it can’t be very powerful or effective. The very obviousness of that fact may explain why Johnson defenders like Jake Berry are reduced to the transparent lie that Brexit has been “blocked” by the establishment. It’s a peculiarly self-defeating lie, as well, since his defenders are also adamant that Johnson’s great achievement was to ‘get Brexit done’.
In the case of the Privileges Committee’s judgment about Johnson, an anti-Brexit plot is an especially absurd allegation, since the majority of its members are Conservatives, and some of the most critical questioning of Johnson at the hearing came from Bernard Jenkin, one of the most hardline of Brexiters. Presumably this is why Johnson made a particular attempt to discredit him this week on the grounds that he had apparently broken lockdown rules himself, an utterly bogus argument since the Committee was investigating whether Johnson had misled parliament, not whether he had broken the rules.
Johnson, Brexit, and the Establishment
Even so, this idea of Brexit as an ‘anti-establishment’ project is a more complex and less risible one than it would appear from some of the sillier claims made about it. There is certainly a sense amongst the ‘Brexit Jacobins’ that all conventions and norms can be dispensed with in order to ‘save Brexit’. That was seen with the Prorogation, and the various threats to break international law with the Internal Market Bill and the NIP Bill. Johnson’s temperamental disdain for rules was useful for that, and his willingness to trash the process that judged him illustrates that disdain, but his anti-establishment credentials were as questionable as his Brexit ones.
That isn’t so much because of his decidedly elite, Eton and Oxford, background. As I’ve argued before, it isn’t this kind of elitism which populism necessarily objects to, especially if it is combined with some public perception of ‘authenticity’, which, perversely given the plasticity of his principles, Johnson enjoyed. Rather, the deeper ambiguity of Johnson is the sense that, despite that disdain for rules and conventions, he also wants the respect of the Establishment and the respectability of belonging to it.
In this way, he strikes me as somewhat different to Trump, despite the resemblances in their character and conduct. It is most obvious in his manifest desire to be compared to Churchill, and not the Churchill of his maverick ‘wilderness years’, but the Churchill acclaimed as a great national leader and international statesman. Clearly, Johnson lacked any of the necessary qualities to be such a figure – perversely, had he done so, the pandemic gave him the best opportunity short of war to display them – but the desire to be seen that way made him much more conventional than some of the ‘true Brexiters’.
Had those true Brexiters been right in thinking that Brexit was a national liberation which would unlock both freedom and prosperity then he might even have been acclaimed in that way. As it was, even had he been cut from finer cloth, he presided over what was doomed to be a divisive and damaging fiasco. And, actually, one of the reasons that he lost the support of Conservative MPs when Prime Minister was that the Brexit Ultras thought he was failing to deliver the deregulation they saw as what would make Brexit a success, and many of them thought he was too ‘soft’ in defying the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Similarly, whilst Nigel Farage may now float the idea of joining forces with Johnson to “defend the Brexit legacy”, and be “eternally grateful to him” (£) for delivering Brexit, it is the Brexit Johnson delivered which is what Farage regards as a failure. Whether that alliance comes about remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely, not least for the reasons set out on the politics.co. uk website by Josh Self (who, by the way, is emerging as one of the most acute of the new generation of political commentators).
Brexit Conservatism
It is more likely that Johnson has his sights set on a post-election return to leading the Tory Party. That, too, seems improbable right now but he still has some powerful, influential, and rich backers (£) and the idea is already being spoken of by his allies (£). Certainly his resignation letter seemed an attempt to position himself as ‘properly Conservative’ in the Liz Truss, tax-cutting, small-state mould which is surely the direction the Party will go in after Sunak. Again this entails getting Tories to forget that, when he was Prime Minister, his internal critics castigated him for not being a “real Conservative”. And then, of course, there was his call to “make the most of Brexit”, to which the response might be to ask why he didn’t do so in office if there is anything good to be made of it. As for his professed puzzlement about the government having “so passively abandoned the prospect of a free trade deal with the US”, that is easily answered: the US doesn’t want such a deal, and he had already discovered that when he was Prime Minister.
So all of this – along with reports of him planning a comeback to deliver “total Brexit”, whatever that may mean – looks like a pitch to lead what, writing in The American Conservative this week, David Frost called “Brexit Conservatism”. This essay sets out the application of ‘National Conservatism’ to the UK context, which has already attracted much interest in Tory circles, and which Frost has recently championed (it also reveals, yet again, that Frost’s sole point of intellectual reference is Edmund Burke). It might also be read as part of Frost’s own thinly-disguised ambitions to lead the Tory Party, although his greasily sycophantic tribute to Johnson (£) suggests he could be angling for a place in government if his old boss does stage a return. After all, it’s possible that, although neither self-awareness nor modesty are his most obvious characteristics, Frost might recognize that nor is the gift of charismatic leadership.
However, Johnson’s attempt to re-ignite the glowing embers of his political career with the bellows of Brexit isn’t just a way of appealing to Tory Party members in the unlikely event that he stands in a future leadership contest. For both him and his supporters It is also an attempt to retain political relevance by reference to that brief moment of triumph in 2016. His injunction, again in his resignation letter, to “remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit” seeks to revive the idea of Brexit as a (somewhat) popular project and of ‘the will of the people’ as a way to scarify opponents, as well as to garner support.
But that mandate was long ago discharged, and harking back to it ignores the fact that only a minority, and that a dwindling minority, now actually support Brexit. It also reflects the failure of Brexit, since the only achievement Brexiters can claim is having won the referendum or, perhaps, the fact of having left the EU. All the promises they made for what it would actually mean in practice have been discredited. Yet at another, and deeper, level it is about returning to the comfort zone of campaigning rather than governing. Even when actually in government Johnson and his fellow-Brexiters always acted as if they were still campaigning. Obviously, the whole shtick about being anti-establishment and anti-elite is a way of positing Brexiters as being powerless, or insurgent, even when in power, but it is especially useful to Johnson now that he is out of power.
Brexitist logic
All of this points to the wider issue of ‘Brexitism’. That is not quite the same as, though it relates to, Brexit Conservatism, in that it refers to a mode of logic (or illogic) rather than to a particular policy agenda. Central to that logic is the bogus anti-elitism and victimhood, just discussed, and also the ‘simplism’ in which complex problems have simple, supposedly ‘commonsense’ solutions.
Beyond that, though, Brexitism has other features which are more difficult to pin down. Possibly the main reason why, to me and many others, Brexit has seemed different from any other political division is the way it’s not just a matter of different opinions, interpretations, or even values in the normal sense. Rather, it’s that the very basic stuff of political debate, some shared commitment to basic facts, evidence, rational argument, and logical consistency is missing. Or, even, that having such a shared commitment matters or is possible.
It’s about more than just lying, though it may entail that. It’s things like, to take a well-known example, trying to justify the ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ line by (amongst other things) weird logic-chopping about how ‘is joining’ denotes an ongoing process rather than carrying the obvious meaning that it is an accomplished fact and an imminent reality. Much of this blog has consisted of discussions of how this way of approaching politics has permeated the Brexit process itself (see, especially, all those posts specifically tagged ‘Brexit logic’), but this week’s furore over Johnson and the Privileges Committee illustrates its wider currency.
On the one hand, there is the Committee’s report, a textbook example of calm, forensic, evidence-based analysis and quasi-judicial rationality, and itself the outcome of an established institutional process of peer-based self-regulation with a public hearing at its heart. On the other hand, there are Johnson and his allies who, faced with all this, gurn out the dismissive line of it being ‘kangaroo court’, which no sensible or reasonable person could apply to that process and report, and despite the fact Johnson himself had deprecated the term before the Committee had reported. So any basic commitment to truth, let alone to consistency of argument, is simply dispensed with.
Then there are the numerous sub-arguments from Johnson and his defenders. For example, there’s the complaint that it should be voters, not other MPs, who decide who sits in Parliament. But, by resigning, Johnson forwent the chance for the electors in his constituency to make that decision. Or there’s the persistent attempt to discuss the findings in terms of the question of Johnson’s Covid rule-breaking or, relatedly, the actual or alleged Covid rulebreaking of other MPs or, as mentioned earlier, Bernard Jenkin, when the inquiry was solely about whether Johnson had misled parliament. Or the attempt to depict the Committee’s Chair, Harriet Harman, as having pre-judged Johnson in earlier remarks, when none of those complaining about this had voted against her chairing despite those remarks having already been known to them (£). Or, most ludicrous of all, the idea that the Committee had shown prejudice because during the hearing some of its members had made facial expressions of disbelief.
All of these arguments have a kind of ‘black is white’ craziness that makes them easy to discredit from the outside, and yet utterly impermeable amongst those who continue to advance them with stubborn obtuseness come what may. Moreover, within minutes of them first being aired they flow rapidly through the political ether to the point that, no matter how often discredited, they take on a permanent life, and not just on social media but ‘in real life’ with, in this case, members of the Committee having to be offered extra security in case of physical attacks on them.
And of course, both initially and ultimately, these arguments find confirmation by any criticism of them being dismissed as coming from actual or supposed ‘remainers’. One reason why this should be called Brexitism is because it spreads into every single aspect of political discourse. For example, already Rees-Mogg and others are trying to discredit the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid pandemic as being biased by “die-hard remainers” because reference was made on the first day to the possibility that no-deal Brexit planning got in the way of planning for a pandemic.
A cathartic moment?
This Brexitist twisting of logic and bare-faced denial of even basic facts had, in Johnson, its most skilled exponent, as it coincided his own character. Now that his practice of it has been so brutally and publicly exposed the question is not just what it means for him but what it will mean for Brexitism. Of course, Brexitism will never be expunged, but it might be marginalised. In this respect, there are grounds for very cautious optimism. It is significant, and very much to his credit, that so committed a Brexiter as Bernard Jenkin conducted himself as he did, as this certainly did much to blunt the Brexitist attack on the Committee. Similarly Penny Mordaunt, another Brexiter (and, indeed, one of the worst culprits in pushing the ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ line) spoke out in defence of the Committee.
More generally, it is notable that, whilst all Johnson’s defenders appear to be pro-Brexit, by no means all pro-Brexiters are defending Johnson. Indeed, amongst MPs, those defenders seem to be confined to the most obscure and peculiar even amongst the ranks of the obscure and peculiar. For example, anyone finding themselves reduced to being dependent upon ‘Sir’ Michael Fabricant to tour the studios to defend them might conclude that the jig is up. Against that optimism, there still seems to be a sense within the media that these fringe figures have to be represented for ‘balance’, giving the public the impression that there may to two sides to what was a cut and dried report.
An early and important test will be how Conservative MPs vote on Monday, including how many of them decide to abstain, when the Committee’s report will be debated. Beyond that, a great deal will depend on whether, with or without Johnson, what Frost calls Brexit Conservatism comes to dominate the Tory Party after the expected loss of the General Election.
Ultimately, that will matter a lot for British politics, but in one way at least it will be less immediately damaging than what we are currently living through. For this latest eruption of instability and infighting within what is, for now, the governing party has to be counted as the latest instalment of the political and reputational damage wrought by Brexit. The crucial question is whether it will also prove a cathartic moment? Could it, indeed, a be a further sign that, as I tentatively suggested in March, Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ has broken?
Nested within that are many sub-questions, or perhaps versions of the same question, which are currently being asked by many commentators from across the political spectrum. These include whether the UK system is proving more resilient than that of the US (£), how embedded the toxic myths of Brexit are, whether Johnson and Brexit have left a permanent legacy of political ‘doublethink’ (£), and whether this current Sunak-Starmer period marks a return to more conventional politics (£)?
The Privileges Committee has delivered its damning verdict on Johnson, but on these deeper questions the jury is still out.
Subsequently, yesterday, the final report was published, and it contained what the BBC’s Political Editor called a “punishingly brutal” and “devastating” judgment both on the original offences and on Johnson’s “campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation” of the Committee and its members, finding him guilty of multiple contempts of parliament. It was a verdict that left no room for doubt about Johnson, and could also be regarded as a vindication of the robustness of Britain’s democratic institutions that he should be held to account in this way, including in the very robust defence the Committee offered of its own process in the face of the vitriolic, Trumpian attacks against it by Johnson and his allies.
In other circumstances this would mark the end of a political career, the definitive exposure of a wholly dishonest ex-Prime Minister and, now, ex-MP, and that may well be the result. Yet, whatever Johnson’s ultimate fate, there is more at stake than that because it is not just about Johnson but about the wider politics of Brexit and of post-Brexit Britain. For this was, indeed, a major piece of ‘Brexit news’, even though, in principle, the inquiry had nothing to do with Brexit, because there’s an ineluctable link between Johnson and Brexit, such that it is impossible to discuss the one without the other.
Johnson and Brexit: conjoined twins
Brexit had many causes, and it is an over-simplification to say, as Guardian columnist Martin Kettle does, that “Brexit was Johnson and Johnson was Brexit”. But it’s quite plausible to say that but for Johnson’s involvement the campaign to leave would not have succeeded in winning its narrow majority. It’s certainly the case that he played a crucial role in shaping the form Brexit eventually took. And, looking at things from the other direction, it is at least arguable that, but for Brexit, he would never have become Prime Minister and that, but for his ambition to do so, he wouldn’t have supported Brexit.
So, like a safebreaker too careless and complacent to wear gloves, Johnson has left his fingerprints all over the Brexit crime scene. And just as his pathological dishonesty, entitled incompetence, grotesque egotism and moral depravity caused his downfall first as Prime Minister and now as an MP, so did they indelibly mark Brexit. From the outset, who better to front a campaign based on lies than someone to whom lying is first, never mind second, nature? Who better to deny the complex trade-offs entailed in the Brexit process than someone who applied his ‘cakeist’ philosophy to every aspect of his priapic, venal life? Who better to oversee a project based on vapid boasts and slogans than someone so lacking in substance and depth that to accuse him of vapidity would be the most generous of flatteries?
Perhaps the most disgraceful thing is that many of these criticisms of him, and more besides, would be made by those who supported leaving the EU. For they always knew that his involvement in it had no foundation of principle or belief. He was never ‘one of them’ – indeed he was never one of any particular group or ideology – he was useful to getting what they wanted, just as they were useful to him in getting what he wanted. This was no Luther or Calvin, dogmatically committed to Reformation, but a political Vicar of Bray, guided by opportunism, albeit with a view to glory rather than mere survival.
“Revenge for Brexit”
All of this is would be so regardless of whether Johnson’s resignation had any specific connection with Brexit. But, in fact, he himself chose to make them connected. Within his more general attempt to depict himself as the innocent victim of a ‘witch hunt’ and a ‘kangaroo court’ (for Johnson, whose supposed qualities as a wordsmith invariably yield snide metal not gold, has no fastidious objection to cliché) he explicitly claimed in his resignation letter, and since, that the reason he had been targeted was “to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result. My removal is the necessary first step, and I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about.”
It is hardly surprising that he should make this claim, and it is similar to the one made by Dominic Raab about his own resignation as well as those made about supposed ‘plots’ against Suella Braverman (£). In part, it is just a refusal to accept responsibility for his own wrong-doing. But it is also distinctively ‘Brexitist’ in tapping in to the familiar ‘victimhood’ narrative, and the associated idea that Brexit is some ‘anti-establishment’ revolt being undertaken in the face of a shadowy remainer elite ‘plot’ to foil it or ‘coup’ to overturn it.
Thus, equally unsurprisingly, it was taken up across the Brexit Blob as the explanation for Johnson’s demise, a further illustration of the way that Johnson has always been enabled by others and a reminder that, even now, there are still plenty of saddle-sniffers like David Frost to parrot the paranoid squawks about the ‘Remain establishment’ getting its dastardly way (£).
Of the many things that could be said of these fantasies about the anti-Brexit establishment, perhaps the most obvious is that, since Brexit did in fact happen, it can’t be very powerful or effective. The very obviousness of that fact may explain why Johnson defenders like Jake Berry are reduced to the transparent lie that Brexit has been “blocked” by the establishment. It’s a peculiarly self-defeating lie, as well, since his defenders are also adamant that Johnson’s great achievement was to ‘get Brexit done’.
In the case of the Privileges Committee’s judgment about Johnson, an anti-Brexit plot is an especially absurd allegation, since the majority of its members are Conservatives, and some of the most critical questioning of Johnson at the hearing came from Bernard Jenkin, one of the most hardline of Brexiters. Presumably this is why Johnson made a particular attempt to discredit him this week on the grounds that he had apparently broken lockdown rules himself, an utterly bogus argument since the Committee was investigating whether Johnson had misled parliament, not whether he had broken the rules.
Johnson, Brexit, and the Establishment
Even so, this idea of Brexit as an ‘anti-establishment’ project is a more complex and less risible one than it would appear from some of the sillier claims made about it. There is certainly a sense amongst the ‘Brexit Jacobins’ that all conventions and norms can be dispensed with in order to ‘save Brexit’. That was seen with the Prorogation, and the various threats to break international law with the Internal Market Bill and the NIP Bill. Johnson’s temperamental disdain for rules was useful for that, and his willingness to trash the process that judged him illustrates that disdain, but his anti-establishment credentials were as questionable as his Brexit ones.
That isn’t so much because of his decidedly elite, Eton and Oxford, background. As I’ve argued before, it isn’t this kind of elitism which populism necessarily objects to, especially if it is combined with some public perception of ‘authenticity’, which, perversely given the plasticity of his principles, Johnson enjoyed. Rather, the deeper ambiguity of Johnson is the sense that, despite that disdain for rules and conventions, he also wants the respect of the Establishment and the respectability of belonging to it.
In this way, he strikes me as somewhat different to Trump, despite the resemblances in their character and conduct. It is most obvious in his manifest desire to be compared to Churchill, and not the Churchill of his maverick ‘wilderness years’, but the Churchill acclaimed as a great national leader and international statesman. Clearly, Johnson lacked any of the necessary qualities to be such a figure – perversely, had he done so, the pandemic gave him the best opportunity short of war to display them – but the desire to be seen that way made him much more conventional than some of the ‘true Brexiters’.
Had those true Brexiters been right in thinking that Brexit was a national liberation which would unlock both freedom and prosperity then he might even have been acclaimed in that way. As it was, even had he been cut from finer cloth, he presided over what was doomed to be a divisive and damaging fiasco. And, actually, one of the reasons that he lost the support of Conservative MPs when Prime Minister was that the Brexit Ultras thought he was failing to deliver the deregulation they saw as what would make Brexit a success, and many of them thought he was too ‘soft’ in defying the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Similarly, whilst Nigel Farage may now float the idea of joining forces with Johnson to “defend the Brexit legacy”, and be “eternally grateful to him” (£) for delivering Brexit, it is the Brexit Johnson delivered which is what Farage regards as a failure. Whether that alliance comes about remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely, not least for the reasons set out on the politics.co. uk website by Josh Self (who, by the way, is emerging as one of the most acute of the new generation of political commentators).
Brexit Conservatism
It is more likely that Johnson has his sights set on a post-election return to leading the Tory Party. That, too, seems improbable right now but he still has some powerful, influential, and rich backers (£) and the idea is already being spoken of by his allies (£). Certainly his resignation letter seemed an attempt to position himself as ‘properly Conservative’ in the Liz Truss, tax-cutting, small-state mould which is surely the direction the Party will go in after Sunak. Again this entails getting Tories to forget that, when he was Prime Minister, his internal critics castigated him for not being a “real Conservative”. And then, of course, there was his call to “make the most of Brexit”, to which the response might be to ask why he didn’t do so in office if there is anything good to be made of it. As for his professed puzzlement about the government having “so passively abandoned the prospect of a free trade deal with the US”, that is easily answered: the US doesn’t want such a deal, and he had already discovered that when he was Prime Minister.
So all of this – along with reports of him planning a comeback to deliver “total Brexit”, whatever that may mean – looks like a pitch to lead what, writing in The American Conservative this week, David Frost called “Brexit Conservatism”. This essay sets out the application of ‘National Conservatism’ to the UK context, which has already attracted much interest in Tory circles, and which Frost has recently championed (it also reveals, yet again, that Frost’s sole point of intellectual reference is Edmund Burke). It might also be read as part of Frost’s own thinly-disguised ambitions to lead the Tory Party, although his greasily sycophantic tribute to Johnson (£) suggests he could be angling for a place in government if his old boss does stage a return. After all, it’s possible that, although neither self-awareness nor modesty are his most obvious characteristics, Frost might recognize that nor is the gift of charismatic leadership.
However, Johnson’s attempt to re-ignite the glowing embers of his political career with the bellows of Brexit isn’t just a way of appealing to Tory Party members in the unlikely event that he stands in a future leadership contest. For both him and his supporters It is also an attempt to retain political relevance by reference to that brief moment of triumph in 2016. His injunction, again in his resignation letter, to “remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit” seeks to revive the idea of Brexit as a (somewhat) popular project and of ‘the will of the people’ as a way to scarify opponents, as well as to garner support.
But that mandate was long ago discharged, and harking back to it ignores the fact that only a minority, and that a dwindling minority, now actually support Brexit. It also reflects the failure of Brexit, since the only achievement Brexiters can claim is having won the referendum or, perhaps, the fact of having left the EU. All the promises they made for what it would actually mean in practice have been discredited. Yet at another, and deeper, level it is about returning to the comfort zone of campaigning rather than governing. Even when actually in government Johnson and his fellow-Brexiters always acted as if they were still campaigning. Obviously, the whole shtick about being anti-establishment and anti-elite is a way of positing Brexiters as being powerless, or insurgent, even when in power, but it is especially useful to Johnson now that he is out of power.
Brexitist logic
All of this points to the wider issue of ‘Brexitism’. That is not quite the same as, though it relates to, Brexit Conservatism, in that it refers to a mode of logic (or illogic) rather than to a particular policy agenda. Central to that logic is the bogus anti-elitism and victimhood, just discussed, and also the ‘simplism’ in which complex problems have simple, supposedly ‘commonsense’ solutions.
Beyond that, though, Brexitism has other features which are more difficult to pin down. Possibly the main reason why, to me and many others, Brexit has seemed different from any other political division is the way it’s not just a matter of different opinions, interpretations, or even values in the normal sense. Rather, it’s that the very basic stuff of political debate, some shared commitment to basic facts, evidence, rational argument, and logical consistency is missing. Or, even, that having such a shared commitment matters or is possible.
It’s about more than just lying, though it may entail that. It’s things like, to take a well-known example, trying to justify the ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ line by (amongst other things) weird logic-chopping about how ‘is joining’ denotes an ongoing process rather than carrying the obvious meaning that it is an accomplished fact and an imminent reality. Much of this blog has consisted of discussions of how this way of approaching politics has permeated the Brexit process itself (see, especially, all those posts specifically tagged ‘Brexit logic’), but this week’s furore over Johnson and the Privileges Committee illustrates its wider currency.
On the one hand, there is the Committee’s report, a textbook example of calm, forensic, evidence-based analysis and quasi-judicial rationality, and itself the outcome of an established institutional process of peer-based self-regulation with a public hearing at its heart. On the other hand, there are Johnson and his allies who, faced with all this, gurn out the dismissive line of it being ‘kangaroo court’, which no sensible or reasonable person could apply to that process and report, and despite the fact Johnson himself had deprecated the term before the Committee had reported. So any basic commitment to truth, let alone to consistency of argument, is simply dispensed with.
Then there are the numerous sub-arguments from Johnson and his defenders. For example, there’s the complaint that it should be voters, not other MPs, who decide who sits in Parliament. But, by resigning, Johnson forwent the chance for the electors in his constituency to make that decision. Or there’s the persistent attempt to discuss the findings in terms of the question of Johnson’s Covid rule-breaking or, relatedly, the actual or alleged Covid rulebreaking of other MPs or, as mentioned earlier, Bernard Jenkin, when the inquiry was solely about whether Johnson had misled parliament. Or the attempt to depict the Committee’s Chair, Harriet Harman, as having pre-judged Johnson in earlier remarks, when none of those complaining about this had voted against her chairing despite those remarks having already been known to them (£). Or, most ludicrous of all, the idea that the Committee had shown prejudice because during the hearing some of its members had made facial expressions of disbelief.
All of these arguments have a kind of ‘black is white’ craziness that makes them easy to discredit from the outside, and yet utterly impermeable amongst those who continue to advance them with stubborn obtuseness come what may. Moreover, within minutes of them first being aired they flow rapidly through the political ether to the point that, no matter how often discredited, they take on a permanent life, and not just on social media but ‘in real life’ with, in this case, members of the Committee having to be offered extra security in case of physical attacks on them.
And of course, both initially and ultimately, these arguments find confirmation by any criticism of them being dismissed as coming from actual or supposed ‘remainers’. One reason why this should be called Brexitism is because it spreads into every single aspect of political discourse. For example, already Rees-Mogg and others are trying to discredit the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid pandemic as being biased by “die-hard remainers” because reference was made on the first day to the possibility that no-deal Brexit planning got in the way of planning for a pandemic.
A cathartic moment?
This Brexitist twisting of logic and bare-faced denial of even basic facts had, in Johnson, its most skilled exponent, as it coincided his own character. Now that his practice of it has been so brutally and publicly exposed the question is not just what it means for him but what it will mean for Brexitism. Of course, Brexitism will never be expunged, but it might be marginalised. In this respect, there are grounds for very cautious optimism. It is significant, and very much to his credit, that so committed a Brexiter as Bernard Jenkin conducted himself as he did, as this certainly did much to blunt the Brexitist attack on the Committee. Similarly Penny Mordaunt, another Brexiter (and, indeed, one of the worst culprits in pushing the ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ line) spoke out in defence of the Committee.
More generally, it is notable that, whilst all Johnson’s defenders appear to be pro-Brexit, by no means all pro-Brexiters are defending Johnson. Indeed, amongst MPs, those defenders seem to be confined to the most obscure and peculiar even amongst the ranks of the obscure and peculiar. For example, anyone finding themselves reduced to being dependent upon ‘Sir’ Michael Fabricant to tour the studios to defend them might conclude that the jig is up. Against that optimism, there still seems to be a sense within the media that these fringe figures have to be represented for ‘balance’, giving the public the impression that there may to two sides to what was a cut and dried report.
An early and important test will be how Conservative MPs vote on Monday, including how many of them decide to abstain, when the Committee’s report will be debated. Beyond that, a great deal will depend on whether, with or without Johnson, what Frost calls Brexit Conservatism comes to dominate the Tory Party after the expected loss of the General Election.
Ultimately, that will matter a lot for British politics, but in one way at least it will be less immediately damaging than what we are currently living through. For this latest eruption of instability and infighting within what is, for now, the governing party has to be counted as the latest instalment of the political and reputational damage wrought by Brexit. The crucial question is whether it will also prove a cathartic moment? Could it, indeed, a be a further sign that, as I tentatively suggested in March, Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ has broken?
Nested within that are many sub-questions, or perhaps versions of the same question, which are currently being asked by many commentators from across the political spectrum. These include whether the UK system is proving more resilient than that of the US (£), how embedded the toxic myths of Brexit are, whether Johnson and Brexit have left a permanent legacy of political ‘doublethink’ (£), and whether this current Sunak-Starmer period marks a return to more conventional politics (£)?
The Privileges Committee has delivered its damning verdict on Johnson, but on these deeper questions the jury is still out.
Friday, 9 June 2023
Could post-Brexit Britain lead global AI regulation?
It’s been a relatively quiet Brexit news week, with just the usual drip-drip of news about its negative impact on everything from the availability of au pairs to the production of strawberries to Brittany Ferries’ cross-channel freight volumes. As I remarked in a recent post, each individual piece of damage may be fairly small and easily dismissed, but the cumulative impact is ever-more alarming.
So in this post I’m going to focus primarily on Rishi Sunak’s ambition for the UK to lead international regulation in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI), an ambition for which he sought to gain US support during his visit to meet President Biden this week. It was also announced that the government proposes to host a 'global summit' on AI in London this autumn.
Were this ambition to be met it would not, of course, be a benefit of Brexit – the UK could just as easily have proposed itself for this role as an EU member, and for reasons discussed below would have been in a better position to do so – but it is clearly part of an attempt to define Britain’s global role after Brexit.
The UK as an AI regulator
AI and its regulation are very rapidly emerging as huge economic and political issues and, as initially reported in the Financial Times (£), Sunak’s proposals might involve the UK hosting both a CERN-style AI research centre and an international regulatory authority based on that for nuclear energy. These are not terrible ideas. The UK has a relatively strong research base in AI and AI ethics – and the latter ought to serve as a reminder that despite the typical right-wing refrain that only STEM subjects are useful, and everything else is ‘woke’ or ‘mickey mouse’, the reality is very different. Philosophy and many other humanities and social science disciplines are quite as important in many business and regulatory fields. That’s long been almost a truism in Silicon Valley, the government’s favourite template for a post-Brexit innovative economy.
The idea of the UK as an AI regulatory centre is also more realistic than previous ideas about how, after Brexit, the UK might create regulatory regimes in all kinds of areas in the expectation of attracting businesses to the UK because of its regulatory regime and, in due course, that regulatory regime emerging as the global regulatory standard. That approach was set out in the government’s January 2022 paper ‘The Benefits of Brexit’ (see, especially, pp. 24-29), as indicated by sub-headings such as ‘a sovereign approach’, ‘leading from the front’ and ‘setting high standards at home and globally’.
That is very much a relic of the now barely mentioned ‘Global Britain’ strategy, yet, as regards AI specifically, as recently as March of this year, in its policy paper introducing a consultation exercise that has still not been concluded, the government was talking hubristically of how “having exited the European Union we are free to establish a regulatory approach that enables us to establish the UK as an AI superpower.” Sunak’s latest ideas at least recognize that international regulation entails international agreement, rather than regulatory competition between unequal players.
In fact, they seem to owe something to, or at least are consistent with, the proposals in the June 2021 report by the Tony Blair Institute on the future of UK regulatory policy. These included that “the UK could strive to play a role as a regulatory convenor between the US and the EU … but only with the right focus and regulatory diplomacy strategy.”
The ironies of Brexit
Nevertheless, there is something deeply ironic about the UK, having not just left the EU but done so in a way that prioritizes national sovereignty in regulation, now proposing itself as being in the vanguard of international cooperation and regulation. Moreover, it serves to underscore the importance of hosting international regulatory organizations, and thus how much has been lost by Brexit leading to the departure from the UK of the European Medicines Agency and the European Banking Authority. Hosting such bodies can have a value way beyond themselves, as it tends to establish a whole eco-system of basic research and commercial application. It is very much to his shame that David Davis, when Brexit Secretary, fantasized that (£), somehow, the UK could continue to host those EU regulatory agencies post-Brexit. Never mind artificial intelligence, as so often Davis lacked the genuine sort.
That irony goes even deeper, given that for many Tory Brexiters the guiding thread of Brexit was not just national independence in regulation, but hostility to regulation in principle. As regards AI, that is also reflected in the proposals in the government’s consultation exercise, which are firmly tilted away from having a dedicated AI regulator even for the UK and towards a “light touch” regulatory model. In fairness, it could be said that developments in AI, and understanding of their implications, has moved very fast even in the three months since the exercise was launched, and everyone is scrambling to keep up. However, the Tories’ pre-disposition against regulation, both generally and in its current AI proposals, does damage the government’s credibility in now pushing to lead global AI regulation.
Moreover, Brexit has already exacted a price. As a Politico report this week explains, Sunak is making a pitch directly to the US because the UK doesn’t participate in EU-US forums like the Technology and Trade Council, where AI regulation is already being discussed, and the EU and the US, along with Canada, have already developed proposals for AI regulation, to be presented to the G7 this autumn. The UK’s supposed post-Brexit ‘nimbleness’ isn’t quite as nimble as all that, and, as in so many other areas, it suffers from not being ‘in the room’.
Mr. Sunak goes to Washington
Perhaps, as the Politico report suggests, the UK can have a role as leading the smaller players, outside the EU and the US. There’s quite a lot of evidence that Japan, in particular, and despite its initial anger about Brexit, which was seen as a breach of faith as regards Japanese investors in the UK, is keen to support and enable post-Brexit UK’s geo-political heft generally (not in relation to AI regulation, particularly), not least because of relations with China.
However, Sunak is clearly pitching for more than being just ‘the leader of the others’ as regards AI and its regulation. He will undoubtedly have been pleased with Biden’s words in the post-meeting press conference, saying “we are looking to Great Britain to help lead a way through this … there is no country we have greater faith in to help negotiate our way through this”, but what this means in practice remains to be seen (‘to help’ is not quite a ringing endorsement).
Of course, no one expected the issue to be settled in this single meeting, and the real question is whether the UK is well-placed to deliver. Although the US-UK relationship still matters to both countries, at the most general level, as Rafael Behr put it in his discussion of Sunak’s Washington visit, “it is a bald strategic fact that Brexit makes a British Prime Minister less useful to Washington. Without leverage in Brussels, Sunak is not in a position to broker deals with Biden.” Unusually, this prompted David Frost to engage with critics of Brexit, ‘taking to Twitter’, as they say, to denounce Behr’s “declinist worldview” (‘declinism’ being the standard Brexiter way of recasting the observable damage caused by Brexit as the negativity of those who observe it).
Inevitably Frost’s complaint was, implicitly, based on his persistently simplistic understanding of sovereignty. First, he asserted that “the purpose of British policy is not to be ‘useful to Washington’ … it’s to pursue our own interests.” It apparently doesn’t occur to him that the UK might judge it to be in its own interests to be useful to Washington and, for better or worse, has often tended to do so, the Iraq War being an obvious example.
Frost then continued that he doesn’t “agree that those interests are best pursued [via EU membership, because] it is better to define and then pursue them ourselves, through alliances and partnerships of various kinds.” It apparently doesn’t occur to him that, as an EU member, the UK always defined and pursued its own interests, including the development of the single market and eastwards expansion, and that one means of pursuing them was through the ‘alliance and partnership’ of EU membership. And if Frost means that EU membership precluded the UK pursuing its perceived interests then, once again, Iraq gives the lie to that. There is hardly a more profound expression of sovereignty than the decision to go to war.
What Frost doesn’t comment on, though Behr mentions it, is the way that what used to be seen as the totemic Brexit gain of a US-UK Free Trade Agreement is not on the agenda of Sunak’s visit. That is not a news item, and was clear even before Liz Truss publicly acknowledged last September that there is no prospect of such a deal. Still, it is striking how quiet the Brexiters have gone considering that, in July 2017 Digby Jones was crowing that “remoaners” must be hating the fact that a US trade deal was “in the bag”. Even those who did not make such transparently false claims, but did hold out a deal as a key prize of Brexit, have never admitted that they simply got that wrong.
Pointing this out isn’t petulant point-scoring. It matters because it is becoming increasingly common for Brexiters like Frost, and some more neutral commentators, to talk as if various piecemeal deals on trade or security or other kinds of cooperation, including this AI role if it comes off, somehow justify leaving the EU. But, even leaving aside that some of the examples commonly given (e.g. AUKUS) didn’t require Brexit, and others (e.g. CPTPP) at best do no more than slightly mitigate the damage it causes, Brexit should be judged not on these things but against all the promises that Brexiters made for it. It’s one thing to make the best of a bad job, quite another to forget that it wasn’t sold in such dismal terms.
Can the UK be trusted?
All that aside, and quite apart from the way that Brexit inevitably reduced the UK’s influence with the EU and the US, the idea of the UK leading global regulation is undermined because the way Brexit was undertaken damaged Britain’s reputation for political stability and even for commitment to the rule of law. It is, to say the least, unfortunate that a country aspiring to a global regulatory role should not only have indicated its willingness to break international law but on more than one occasion asserted that, by definition, national sovereignty trumps such law. There’s a reputational price to be paid for Brexit Jacobinism.
Sunak may have introduced some stability and pragmatism, especially with the Windsor Framework, but his own words at the post-meeting news conference, about knowing that “some people have wondered what kind of partner Britain would be after leaving the EU”, show an awareness that the memories of the last seven years have yet to fade. Biden may have expressed “faith” in the UK but he won’t have forgotten the shenanigans over the Northern Ireland Protocol, and will still be watching to see how the Windsor Framework is implemented.
In any case, for all Sunak’s reassuring noises, he has only weak control over a party of which some sections are still in denial about why Liz Truss crashed and burned, and are openly flirting with ‘National Conservatism’. So the world is well aware that lurking behind Sunak’s gloss is a party seething with antagonism not just towards the EU and to Biden’s US, but towards the ECHR, IMF, OECD and even the WHO. Whilst such sentiments can be found in other countries, the fact of Brexit and of those voices being influential in the governing party certainly don’t help to make the UK seem a stable or attractive site for international regulatory leadership. You can hardly dismiss existing international institutions as the ‘Globalist Establishment’ whilst credibly proposing to establish a new one.
In any case, even leaving aside post-Brexit Britain’s trustworthiness, there are also questions about its operational capacity to undertake big projects like that of AI regulation. Although of a very different nature, nowhere is that more obvious than in the much-delayed introduction of import controls on goods from the EU. I discussed this most recently a couple of weeks ago, but at that time I missed something little-reported outside the specialist trade press, namely that earlier last month, apparently in response to industry lobbying of the government, the requirements for most fruit and vegetable imports have been relaxed, so that they will be treated as “low” rather than “medium” risk, with corresponding reductions in paperwork and physical inspections.
That’s good news so far as it goes, as it should reduce disruption to supplies (though it shouldn’t be forgotten that by doing so, it also increases the risks of a plant disease being imported). However, it also adds to the problems relating to ‘groupage’, which also proved to be so difficult when the EU introduced post-Brexit controls on imports from the UK. In practice, this means that mixed-loads of low-risk and medium-risk products are liable to be stopped for inspection, so even if someone is importing low-risk vegetables it won’t help them much if they are shipped in the same consignment as a medium-risk product. This will hit small businesses and specialist product lines especially hard as, again, happened when EU import controls were introduced.
The fact that the import control regime is still being worked out, years after the decision that Brexit meant ‘hard Brexit’ made import controls inevitable, shows how inept the Tory Brexit governments have been. Even now, less than four months before the next tranche of controls come in, those who have to operate them at ports don’t know what is going to be involved, to the extent of not knowing whether 1% or 30% of food imports from the EU will need to be checked.
All this is a big Brexit story in itself, as it is likely to lead to shortages of some products and higher food prices in the UK. But, amidst the general sense that ‘nothing works in the UK anymore’, it will surely also contribute to international scepticism about the idea of the UK leading AI regulation. After all, if post-Brexit Britain can’t even cope with the most basic consequences for the most basic goods of the regulatory border created by its new-found ‘independence’ from the EU, can it really be relied upon to take the lead in the most complex, advanced and fast-moving of global regulatory challenges?
Labouring a point
This brings me back to Labour’s Brexit policy, my discussion of which in last week’s post got a distinctly mixed reaction on social media. I’ll come back briefly to that, but as regards something like the UK pitching to lead AI regulation a Labour government would have an advantage over a Tory one simply because it would not be contaminated with the deregulatory madness and hostility to global institutions of the Brexit Ultras. That still doesn’t mean it would happen, but it would be a more favourable political environment within which to try it, though, by then, events will probably have overtaken us as regards AI. But the general point holds: in the eyes of many foreign capitals, a Labour government would be a return to normality.
Normality, here, means rationality and trustworthiness, but it would be unrealistic to think that, simply by electing a Labour government, the UK’s international reputation is going to be instantly restored. That will take a long time, which is partly why any prospect of (re)joining the EU is a long time away. Those insisting that this should be Labour’s policy for the next parliament need to ask themselves what value there would be in proposing something that would whip up huge controversy in the UK, to the point that there might not even be a Labour government, but if there was such a government with such a policy then the EU would be bound to turn the idea down unless or until it ceased to be controversial in the UK.
That observation isn’t negated by Michel Barnier’s widely-quoted comment this week that “the door is open” for the UK to join. Apart from the fact that it isn’t up to him (though he’s clearly a well-informed and credible voice), it would be absurd to interpret that to mean that an application for membership would be accepted unconditionally and without question. It’s not just the issue of negotiating the terms of membership, it’s whether there was a stable, sustained and unambiguous commitment in the UK to membership. Someone might say to an alcoholic spouse who has walked out of the family home that the door is always open for their return. It doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have to dry out before they were welcomed back.
Of course, I may well be proved wrong. Who, after the last seven years of politics, would be rash enough to make unequivocal predictions? But, having seen what became of the Brexiters’ pursuit of unicorns over those years, I’m not immediately persuaded of the merits of chasing what, at least for now, seem to be rejoiner hippocampi.
So in this post I’m going to focus primarily on Rishi Sunak’s ambition for the UK to lead international regulation in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI), an ambition for which he sought to gain US support during his visit to meet President Biden this week. It was also announced that the government proposes to host a 'global summit' on AI in London this autumn.
Were this ambition to be met it would not, of course, be a benefit of Brexit – the UK could just as easily have proposed itself for this role as an EU member, and for reasons discussed below would have been in a better position to do so – but it is clearly part of an attempt to define Britain’s global role after Brexit.
The UK as an AI regulator
AI and its regulation are very rapidly emerging as huge economic and political issues and, as initially reported in the Financial Times (£), Sunak’s proposals might involve the UK hosting both a CERN-style AI research centre and an international regulatory authority based on that for nuclear energy. These are not terrible ideas. The UK has a relatively strong research base in AI and AI ethics – and the latter ought to serve as a reminder that despite the typical right-wing refrain that only STEM subjects are useful, and everything else is ‘woke’ or ‘mickey mouse’, the reality is very different. Philosophy and many other humanities and social science disciplines are quite as important in many business and regulatory fields. That’s long been almost a truism in Silicon Valley, the government’s favourite template for a post-Brexit innovative economy.
The idea of the UK as an AI regulatory centre is also more realistic than previous ideas about how, after Brexit, the UK might create regulatory regimes in all kinds of areas in the expectation of attracting businesses to the UK because of its regulatory regime and, in due course, that regulatory regime emerging as the global regulatory standard. That approach was set out in the government’s January 2022 paper ‘The Benefits of Brexit’ (see, especially, pp. 24-29), as indicated by sub-headings such as ‘a sovereign approach’, ‘leading from the front’ and ‘setting high standards at home and globally’.
That is very much a relic of the now barely mentioned ‘Global Britain’ strategy, yet, as regards AI specifically, as recently as March of this year, in its policy paper introducing a consultation exercise that has still not been concluded, the government was talking hubristically of how “having exited the European Union we are free to establish a regulatory approach that enables us to establish the UK as an AI superpower.” Sunak’s latest ideas at least recognize that international regulation entails international agreement, rather than regulatory competition between unequal players.
In fact, they seem to owe something to, or at least are consistent with, the proposals in the June 2021 report by the Tony Blair Institute on the future of UK regulatory policy. These included that “the UK could strive to play a role as a regulatory convenor between the US and the EU … but only with the right focus and regulatory diplomacy strategy.”
The ironies of Brexit
Nevertheless, there is something deeply ironic about the UK, having not just left the EU but done so in a way that prioritizes national sovereignty in regulation, now proposing itself as being in the vanguard of international cooperation and regulation. Moreover, it serves to underscore the importance of hosting international regulatory organizations, and thus how much has been lost by Brexit leading to the departure from the UK of the European Medicines Agency and the European Banking Authority. Hosting such bodies can have a value way beyond themselves, as it tends to establish a whole eco-system of basic research and commercial application. It is very much to his shame that David Davis, when Brexit Secretary, fantasized that (£), somehow, the UK could continue to host those EU regulatory agencies post-Brexit. Never mind artificial intelligence, as so often Davis lacked the genuine sort.
That irony goes even deeper, given that for many Tory Brexiters the guiding thread of Brexit was not just national independence in regulation, but hostility to regulation in principle. As regards AI, that is also reflected in the proposals in the government’s consultation exercise, which are firmly tilted away from having a dedicated AI regulator even for the UK and towards a “light touch” regulatory model. In fairness, it could be said that developments in AI, and understanding of their implications, has moved very fast even in the three months since the exercise was launched, and everyone is scrambling to keep up. However, the Tories’ pre-disposition against regulation, both generally and in its current AI proposals, does damage the government’s credibility in now pushing to lead global AI regulation.
Moreover, Brexit has already exacted a price. As a Politico report this week explains, Sunak is making a pitch directly to the US because the UK doesn’t participate in EU-US forums like the Technology and Trade Council, where AI regulation is already being discussed, and the EU and the US, along with Canada, have already developed proposals for AI regulation, to be presented to the G7 this autumn. The UK’s supposed post-Brexit ‘nimbleness’ isn’t quite as nimble as all that, and, as in so many other areas, it suffers from not being ‘in the room’.
Mr. Sunak goes to Washington
Perhaps, as the Politico report suggests, the UK can have a role as leading the smaller players, outside the EU and the US. There’s quite a lot of evidence that Japan, in particular, and despite its initial anger about Brexit, which was seen as a breach of faith as regards Japanese investors in the UK, is keen to support and enable post-Brexit UK’s geo-political heft generally (not in relation to AI regulation, particularly), not least because of relations with China.
However, Sunak is clearly pitching for more than being just ‘the leader of the others’ as regards AI and its regulation. He will undoubtedly have been pleased with Biden’s words in the post-meeting press conference, saying “we are looking to Great Britain to help lead a way through this … there is no country we have greater faith in to help negotiate our way through this”, but what this means in practice remains to be seen (‘to help’ is not quite a ringing endorsement).
Of course, no one expected the issue to be settled in this single meeting, and the real question is whether the UK is well-placed to deliver. Although the US-UK relationship still matters to both countries, at the most general level, as Rafael Behr put it in his discussion of Sunak’s Washington visit, “it is a bald strategic fact that Brexit makes a British Prime Minister less useful to Washington. Without leverage in Brussels, Sunak is not in a position to broker deals with Biden.” Unusually, this prompted David Frost to engage with critics of Brexit, ‘taking to Twitter’, as they say, to denounce Behr’s “declinist worldview” (‘declinism’ being the standard Brexiter way of recasting the observable damage caused by Brexit as the negativity of those who observe it).
Inevitably Frost’s complaint was, implicitly, based on his persistently simplistic understanding of sovereignty. First, he asserted that “the purpose of British policy is not to be ‘useful to Washington’ … it’s to pursue our own interests.” It apparently doesn’t occur to him that the UK might judge it to be in its own interests to be useful to Washington and, for better or worse, has often tended to do so, the Iraq War being an obvious example.
Frost then continued that he doesn’t “agree that those interests are best pursued [via EU membership, because] it is better to define and then pursue them ourselves, through alliances and partnerships of various kinds.” It apparently doesn’t occur to him that, as an EU member, the UK always defined and pursued its own interests, including the development of the single market and eastwards expansion, and that one means of pursuing them was through the ‘alliance and partnership’ of EU membership. And if Frost means that EU membership precluded the UK pursuing its perceived interests then, once again, Iraq gives the lie to that. There is hardly a more profound expression of sovereignty than the decision to go to war.
What Frost doesn’t comment on, though Behr mentions it, is the way that what used to be seen as the totemic Brexit gain of a US-UK Free Trade Agreement is not on the agenda of Sunak’s visit. That is not a news item, and was clear even before Liz Truss publicly acknowledged last September that there is no prospect of such a deal. Still, it is striking how quiet the Brexiters have gone considering that, in July 2017 Digby Jones was crowing that “remoaners” must be hating the fact that a US trade deal was “in the bag”. Even those who did not make such transparently false claims, but did hold out a deal as a key prize of Brexit, have never admitted that they simply got that wrong.
Pointing this out isn’t petulant point-scoring. It matters because it is becoming increasingly common for Brexiters like Frost, and some more neutral commentators, to talk as if various piecemeal deals on trade or security or other kinds of cooperation, including this AI role if it comes off, somehow justify leaving the EU. But, even leaving aside that some of the examples commonly given (e.g. AUKUS) didn’t require Brexit, and others (e.g. CPTPP) at best do no more than slightly mitigate the damage it causes, Brexit should be judged not on these things but against all the promises that Brexiters made for it. It’s one thing to make the best of a bad job, quite another to forget that it wasn’t sold in such dismal terms.
Can the UK be trusted?
All that aside, and quite apart from the way that Brexit inevitably reduced the UK’s influence with the EU and the US, the idea of the UK leading global regulation is undermined because the way Brexit was undertaken damaged Britain’s reputation for political stability and even for commitment to the rule of law. It is, to say the least, unfortunate that a country aspiring to a global regulatory role should not only have indicated its willingness to break international law but on more than one occasion asserted that, by definition, national sovereignty trumps such law. There’s a reputational price to be paid for Brexit Jacobinism.
Sunak may have introduced some stability and pragmatism, especially with the Windsor Framework, but his own words at the post-meeting news conference, about knowing that “some people have wondered what kind of partner Britain would be after leaving the EU”, show an awareness that the memories of the last seven years have yet to fade. Biden may have expressed “faith” in the UK but he won’t have forgotten the shenanigans over the Northern Ireland Protocol, and will still be watching to see how the Windsor Framework is implemented.
In any case, for all Sunak’s reassuring noises, he has only weak control over a party of which some sections are still in denial about why Liz Truss crashed and burned, and are openly flirting with ‘National Conservatism’. So the world is well aware that lurking behind Sunak’s gloss is a party seething with antagonism not just towards the EU and to Biden’s US, but towards the ECHR, IMF, OECD and even the WHO. Whilst such sentiments can be found in other countries, the fact of Brexit and of those voices being influential in the governing party certainly don’t help to make the UK seem a stable or attractive site for international regulatory leadership. You can hardly dismiss existing international institutions as the ‘Globalist Establishment’ whilst credibly proposing to establish a new one.
In any case, even leaving aside post-Brexit Britain’s trustworthiness, there are also questions about its operational capacity to undertake big projects like that of AI regulation. Although of a very different nature, nowhere is that more obvious than in the much-delayed introduction of import controls on goods from the EU. I discussed this most recently a couple of weeks ago, but at that time I missed something little-reported outside the specialist trade press, namely that earlier last month, apparently in response to industry lobbying of the government, the requirements for most fruit and vegetable imports have been relaxed, so that they will be treated as “low” rather than “medium” risk, with corresponding reductions in paperwork and physical inspections.
That’s good news so far as it goes, as it should reduce disruption to supplies (though it shouldn’t be forgotten that by doing so, it also increases the risks of a plant disease being imported). However, it also adds to the problems relating to ‘groupage’, which also proved to be so difficult when the EU introduced post-Brexit controls on imports from the UK. In practice, this means that mixed-loads of low-risk and medium-risk products are liable to be stopped for inspection, so even if someone is importing low-risk vegetables it won’t help them much if they are shipped in the same consignment as a medium-risk product. This will hit small businesses and specialist product lines especially hard as, again, happened when EU import controls were introduced.
The fact that the import control regime is still being worked out, years after the decision that Brexit meant ‘hard Brexit’ made import controls inevitable, shows how inept the Tory Brexit governments have been. Even now, less than four months before the next tranche of controls come in, those who have to operate them at ports don’t know what is going to be involved, to the extent of not knowing whether 1% or 30% of food imports from the EU will need to be checked.
All this is a big Brexit story in itself, as it is likely to lead to shortages of some products and higher food prices in the UK. But, amidst the general sense that ‘nothing works in the UK anymore’, it will surely also contribute to international scepticism about the idea of the UK leading AI regulation. After all, if post-Brexit Britain can’t even cope with the most basic consequences for the most basic goods of the regulatory border created by its new-found ‘independence’ from the EU, can it really be relied upon to take the lead in the most complex, advanced and fast-moving of global regulatory challenges?
Labouring a point
This brings me back to Labour’s Brexit policy, my discussion of which in last week’s post got a distinctly mixed reaction on social media. I’ll come back briefly to that, but as regards something like the UK pitching to lead AI regulation a Labour government would have an advantage over a Tory one simply because it would not be contaminated with the deregulatory madness and hostility to global institutions of the Brexit Ultras. That still doesn’t mean it would happen, but it would be a more favourable political environment within which to try it, though, by then, events will probably have overtaken us as regards AI. But the general point holds: in the eyes of many foreign capitals, a Labour government would be a return to normality.
Normality, here, means rationality and trustworthiness, but it would be unrealistic to think that, simply by electing a Labour government, the UK’s international reputation is going to be instantly restored. That will take a long time, which is partly why any prospect of (re)joining the EU is a long time away. Those insisting that this should be Labour’s policy for the next parliament need to ask themselves what value there would be in proposing something that would whip up huge controversy in the UK, to the point that there might not even be a Labour government, but if there was such a government with such a policy then the EU would be bound to turn the idea down unless or until it ceased to be controversial in the UK.
That observation isn’t negated by Michel Barnier’s widely-quoted comment this week that “the door is open” for the UK to join. Apart from the fact that it isn’t up to him (though he’s clearly a well-informed and credible voice), it would be absurd to interpret that to mean that an application for membership would be accepted unconditionally and without question. It’s not just the issue of negotiating the terms of membership, it’s whether there was a stable, sustained and unambiguous commitment in the UK to membership. Someone might say to an alcoholic spouse who has walked out of the family home that the door is always open for their return. It doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have to dry out before they were welcomed back.
Of course, I may well be proved wrong. Who, after the last seven years of politics, would be rash enough to make unequivocal predictions? But, having seen what became of the Brexiters’ pursuit of unicorns over those years, I’m not immediately persuaded of the merits of chasing what, at least for now, seem to be rejoiner hippocampi.
Friday, 2 June 2023
As Brexit fails, attention turns to Labour
The failure of Brexit is now widely acknowledged and ever-more openly discussed. But there isn’t going to be some quick, neat or easy epochal change. Brexiters aren’t going to give up quietly, and the process of addressing the failure of Brexit is going to be complex and fraught with difficulties.
Still, there is a gradual shift under way. For a long time after the transition period ended, the damage Brexit was causing lurked in the shadows. It’s not that it wasn’t reported, but those reports were often piecemeal in nature, rather than drawn together, and Brexit often featured in the small print as a factor in whatever damage was being discussed rather than as the headlines. That is increasingly changing, with a good example being the two-part series assessing Brexit in this week’s Times newspaper (here and here). There’s far too much in it for me to summarise but, although striving almost painfully at times to be ‘balanced’, the overall picture was undeniably clear, and undeniably negative.
Even without much media prompting, and despite a barrage of pro-Brexit reporting from some parts of the media, as well as much Tory boosterism, the public view has for many months been settling to the view that Brexit was a mistake and has failed. The latest YouGov polling records its lowest-ever level of people thinking Brexit was the right choice (31%) and the joint highest-ever level of those thinking it was a mistake (56%). It also shows 62% think Brexit has been ‘more of a failure’ and just 9% that it has been ‘more of a success’. Inevitably the responses of leave voters and remain voters are rather different, but even amongst leave voters the figures are 37% saying failure and 20% saying success, with a lot who think ‘neither’ (35% of leaver voters compared with just 6% of remain voters).
It's worth pausing to consider just how damning an indictment of Brexit those figures are, so I’ll repeat them. Just 9% of all electors, and only 20% even of those who voted for it, think Brexit is a success. By comparison, a 2019 survey found that 16% of the UK adult population believe that the moon landing was staged.
Brexit betrayed
However, there’s an important difference between those remain voters who think Brexit is a failure, of whom about three-quarters think it was always going to be, and those leave voters who think it is a failure, of whom about three-quarters think that it could have been a success if it had been implemented differently. That isn’t a surprising finding, but it matters because it shows that disillusionment with Brexit ‘as an idea’ is far from universal, and also that there is quite a deep seam of opinion susceptible to a narrative of Brexit ‘betrayal’.
It's a seam which Brexiters were always going to mine assiduously, and a particularly unhinged example was provided by Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn last Friday. It wasn’t just about Brexit, but slurs about ‘salivating remoaners’ with ‘loyalty to the EU’ permeated a wider attack on the “New Establishment” – an apparent nod towards political scientist Matthew Goodwin’s half-baked ‘new Elite’ theory - and its supposed “coup” against the government. But careful readers, if such the Mail has, would notice, even if Littlejohn is too careless a writer to realise it, that this was all rather let down by the observation that “to describe all this as a conspiracy is not entirely accurate [as] it's not co-ordinated.” So not, in fact, a “coup” at all.
This kind of ‘stab in the back’ myth (the on-line version of Littlejohn’s article was actually illustrated with a bloody dagger) has always been the most dangerous potential outcome of Brexit, and Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian recently and rightly warned that what follows from it “may be very dark indeed”. That said, it’s worth remembering that, with or without Brexit, Littlejohn has been squeezing stuff like this out of his anger-tightened sphincter into the eager maw of the Mail’s lavatory bowl for 30 years, on and off. In fact, the kind of aggressive victimhood of a ‘lost country’ his writing exemplifies is a big part of what drove the leave vote. It’s not even the first time he has posited a “coup staged by remainers” – he did so as recently as October 2022 – despite having assured his readers in January 2021 that Brexit was “all over bar the shouting”. You couldn’t make it up, to coin a phrase.
Whilst Littlejohn fulminates, other members of the Brexiter commentariat have adopted a more listless and resigned attitude to how the glorious possibilities of Brexit have been squandered. For example, Fred de Fossard of the Legatum Institute wearily bemoans (£) the government’s failure to pursue a deregulatory agenda, though that was never the automatic consequence even of hard Brexit, and laments the forthcoming introduction of import controls, which was. The “climbdown” on Retained EU Law is also dolefully recounted (“the less said about [it] the better”, de Fossard sighs), but with no recognition of why that, or any of the other foregone ‘opportunities’, have failed to materialize. Indeed, scratch the surface and the explanation offered is a more urbane version of Littlejohn’s, whereby “our entrenched bureaucracy ensures [that voters always] get the same Left-wing, Europhile outcomes”. As a result, “the whole concept of Brexit” is now imperilled, the sometime special adviser to Jacob Rees-Mogg glumly concludes.
Brexit’s last defences
Whether blamed on betrayal, or just lack of political will, these responses at least acknowledge that Brexit hasn’t been a success. But some Brexiters aren’t ready to accept that (and never will be). Instead, individual pieces of economic good news are still trumpeted as evidence that it has been triumph, a recent example being the thuggish Tory MP Lee Anderson's boast that the reported decision by Tata to build a gigafactory in Britain rather than Spain is “another Brexit bonus”. The obvious problem is that something can only be a Brexit benefit if it couldn’t or wouldn’t have happened without Brexit, which isn’t the case in this example. And, of course, even where there are any such benefits, they need to be set against the many costs to justify Brexit as a success overall.
It’s also typical of such claims to invoke a strawman that ‘remainers said there would be no more investment after Brexit’ or ‘remainers said there’d be no more trade with the EU after Brexit’, or the slightly different one that ‘remainers blame all Britain’s economic problems on Brexit’. Needless to say, no serious analyst has ever suggested such things, but even if they had then the most it would mean is that Brexit hasn’t been as bad as some said it would be, or that it may not have been a success, but at least it hasn’t been a failure.
For example, in a Telegraph article (£) the pro-Brexit economist Julian Jessop discusses the impact of Brexit on the services sector. It’s headlined as a “success story”, but the content is less ebullient. “If one thinks back to all the apocalyptic claims made by Remainers, our services industry should be a smoking ruin by now”, he says, conjuring up “doomsday predictions”. But worry not, for “the overall impact has been far less than feared”. It’s hardly an inspiring defence. To be fair, Jessop recognizes this, saying “it is not enough just to say that Brexit has been less damaging than expected. It was supposed to benefit the City. But this is a process.” However, this is just another of the stock defences: the benefits are always just over the horizon.
Still less compelling is the current fashion for comparing UK economic performance with that of Germany (£), or perhaps a wider selection of EU countries (£), selected over this or that timeframe, to argue that the UK’s is no worse, and perhaps slightly better. That fashion seems to have arisen because the IMF, its forecasts suddenly now in favour with the Brexiters who usually disparage them, upgraded its 2023 forecast for the UK from a 0.3% contraction to a 0.4% expansion, whilst forecasting the German economy to shrink by 0.1%.
Even if it made sense to ascribe these (rather negligible) differences to Brexit, it would not be much of an argument because, again, Brexit wasn’t undertaken on the basis that it wouldn’t be a failure but that it would be positively advantageous. But, in any case, it doesn’t make any sense. Whether in the EU or not, the UK’s economy, like any member state, fluctuates at different times and for sometimes different reasons to that of Germany (or any other individual country). In particular, Germany’s current economic difficulties are very obviously connected to its rapid diversification from over-dependence on Russian energy. So, except as a kind of schoolyard ‘what about you?’ taunt, such comparisons tell us nothing one way or the other about Brexit.
The key comparisons are between Brexit UK and how the UK would have performed without Brexit. That inevitably involves a counterfactual model, and the latest version of the best-known such model, the Springford CER ‘doppelgänger’, shows that by June 2022 the UK GDP was 5.5% lower than it would have been without Brexit. That may overestimate the damage or may underestimate it. But (to the best of my knowledge) neither the government nor any of the pro-Brexit economists have ever produced a comparable counterfactual model showing Brexit to have been economically beneficial to the UK. So on this key test there is, at the very least, no evidence of Brexit being an economic success.
What about Labour?
With Brexiters now engaged in the last stages of their attempt to deny Brexit has failed, and the latest stages of developing fantasies about why it has failed, and with the Sunak government in the throes of a protracted death, attention is increasingly turning to the prospects of a Labour administration. Interestingly, Brexiter fears for what that will bring are diametrically opposite to those of many erstwhile remainers. At least some Brexiters are convinced that Labour has “a secret 10-year plan to take Britain back into the EU” (£), whereas some remainers believe that there is no difference at all between Labour and Tory approaches to Brexit. The reality is more complex than either view allows.
Although by definition it’s unprovable either way, it’s absurd to think that Starmer has a ‘secret plan’ to re-join the EU. There’s literally no evidence for it, so Brexiters are wrong and rejoiners are right about that. However, it’s true that the logic of Labour’s position on Brexit – everything it says about the damage of it – points in the direction of eventually re-joining. So, forgetting any idea of a secret plan, the Brexiters are right to suspect that this would be the direction of travel for Labour (though they may be wrong that it will be the point of arrival), and re-joiners are wrong to dismiss the possibility of it going in that direction (though they may be right that it won’t be the point of arrival).
Remainer or re-joiner scepticism about Labour’s intentions was reinforced this week by Keir Starmer’s Express article, in which he again re-iterated Labour’s policy of no return to the EU, single market or customs union, but of wanting to improve the existing UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Most strikingly, and to many remainers most reprehensibly, he referred to the inadequate nature of that deal as meaning that “our European friends and competitors are not just eating our lunch – they’re nicking our dinner money as well”.
The clue to understanding this article is the polling figures I referred to earlier. It was written for the three-quarters of the 37% of Leave voters who believe Brexit has failed because of the way it has been implemented. More particularly, it was written for the erstwhile and potential Labour voters within that group who may be minded to blame that on the Tories. That is an important segment of voters for Labour to speak to, and the Express is a good place to reach it, with the pitch being based on tapping into, but subverting, the narrative of Brexit betrayal. The language may have been ugly and grating, but politics can be a dirty business, or at least it is for those who value winning above high-mindedness.
Of course, there is a tactical dilemma for Labour: in making its appeal to such voters it may lose support elsewhere (£), and there’s some polling evidence that this is happening. But the delicate calculation is presumably that many who respond to things like the Express article by angrily saying ‘I’ll never vote for Labour now’ will, when it comes to it, do so. Or, if not, that the votes lost will be in constituencies where the outcome isn’t affected, whilst those gained prove decisive in other seats. Again, it’s all grubby stuff for the squeamish, but perhaps they should reflect that after fourteen years in opposition squeamishness isn’t something Labour can afford to indulge.
Beneath Labour’s tactics
Tactics aside, what matters is what lies beneath. In his discussion of Starmer’s article, Ian Dunt, who has been consistently acute in his analysis of Brexit from the start, and often very critical of Labour, argues that “in truth, Labour’s Brexit position is far more nuanced, and much more radical, than it first appears. It has been carefully couched in the language of Brexit defence, but the proposals themselves promise a return to a much closer relationship with the Continent. It is the start of a journey back to Europe.”
The key word here is “journey” or, as I’ve put it, ‘direction of travel’. Starmer is cautiously going with the grain of public opinion, with a poll this week suggesting that 53% of voters favour ‘closer ties’ with the EU, and even in strongly vote-leaving areas a plurality doing so. What they mean by it is undoubtedly varied, but a first-term Labour government can be expected to push its possible meanings to the maximum it could without breaking manifesto commitments or suffering too much electoral kickback.
For an important example of what this would mean, in a footnote to my previous post I suggested that the seemingly arcane difference between Swiss-style ‘dynamic alignment’ and New Zealand-style ‘regulatory equivalence’ in Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) standards might become an issue under a Labour government, since Labour’s apparently preferred policy of a New Zealand-style deal had already been rejected by the EU, whilst a Swiss-style deal had been ruled out by Starmer.
I meant that we might hear more about this in years to come, so it was much to my amusement that, just a few hours later, and presumably coincidentally, the Telegraph carried a report (£) ‘revealing’ this EU rejection of a New Zealand-style deal and, with almost heart-stopping irony, quoting David Frost castigating Starmer for “trying to sell unnegotiable fantasy proposals to voters”. In a mirror-image of that critique, some remainers, too, leapt on this report as evidence that Starmer was just reproducing the impossibilities of “cakeism”.
But it is easy to imagine Labour in power, having pledged in their manifesto to negotiate a ‘veterinary agreement with the EU’, agreeing dynamic alignment with the EU. That isn’t cakeism, as it has already been offered by the EU, and the fact that Starmer has previously said he doesn’t want a Swiss-style deal will be irrelevant as he has also said he wants a ‘bespoke deal’ and, almost by definition, any UK-EU deal will be that. Will electors who support ‘closer ties with the EU’ object? Highly unlikely. And if there is a ‘bespoke UK-EU’ SPS dynamic alignment deal then it means the hard Brexit ECJ red line will have been comprehensively breached, allowing it to be breached in all manner of other ways, in relation to trade, security, and participation in various programmes and agencies.
Beneath Labour’s hints
Much of this has already been hinted at by the public statements of Starmer and other senior Labour politicians, including Rachel Reeves and David Lammy. A much more detailed set of proposals for what it could mean in practice was published this week by the UK Trade and Business Commission, an unofficial but highly professional grouping of cross-party MPs, business people and experts. Their report, which is based on extensive evidence-gathering from a huge range of stakeholders and experts, contains 114 recommendations. So far as I can see, all of them are compatible with Labour’s stated position and so the report amounts to a blueprint of how to operationalize that position.
Some, though by no means all, of this entails EU agreement, and there are obviously important questions about whether that would be forthcoming, and a particularly valid question about the extent to which Labour are putting too much reliance on using the scheduled 2026 TCA review as an occasion for a more substantial re-negotiation. It certainly isn’t automatically entailed by the review. However, in his recent evidence to the European Parliament, Anton Spisak, a Brexit expert at the Tony Blair Institute, urges that both the EU and the UK would be wise to use it in that way, so as to “begin a more strategic discussion”.
It is at least possible that this view will prevail and, of course, it will still entail negotiation, but much that could have been negotiated had it not been for the Frost-Johnson ‘sovereignty’ line will become possible. Nor is the TCA review the only game in town. The European Political Community (EPoC), established last year and which had its second meeting yesterday, offers the UK a new vehicle for dialogue and cooperation with the rest of the European continent. How it develops remains to be seen but, with enthusiastic and effective participation, which would be unlike Sunak’s approach to it but consistent with Labour’s stated policies, the UK could at the least repair some of the relational and reputational damage of Brexit. Potentially, there would be more substantive outcomes.
All of this could be done without violating Labour’s red lines on rejoining the EU, the single market or the customs union. Those red lines don’t prematurely box Labour into a corner because there’s just no way that, simply from an EU perspective, the UK re-joining is viable in the timeframe of the next parliament: we’re in that corner anyway. Equally, going as far as possible within those red lines wouldn’t be ‘re-joining by stealth’ since there would be no re-joining unless there was a referendum. It would all be subsumed within the rubric of ‘closer ties’ and ‘co-operation’, potentially leading to such a referendum, perhaps in Labour’s second term, as Dunt suggests.
This is exactly what Brexiters fear, which is also why the hostility of some remainers/ rejoiners to Labour’s approach is misjudged. At the very least, even if it never gets to that point, the ameliorations Labour are likely to enact will be somewhat better than the current situation, and much better than would be the case if the Tories were re-elected and the Brexit Ultras got their way.
The long road ahead
This isn’t to disown what I said In a recent post, where I argued that the strategic problems posed by the failure of Brexit are not “addressed by Labour’s pledge to make Brexit work, since the solutions don’t exist within the modest tinkering with Brexit that Starmer has committed to. Not until the diagnosis that Brexit is a failure is accompanied by realism and honesty about the causes and solutions can it be addressed”. It’s true that even if what I’ve said about Labour’s position today is right it still fails to meet this test, but the issue is the process and timescale for getting to that point. It is clear that this is going to take some time, so the question is whether a Labour government would take use closer to or further from that point.
On this, to quote Ian Dunt again, “if you put aside the tedious and unconvincing hardline rhetoric, a clear picture emerges. Brexit is collapsing. And Britain is, slowly but surely, drifting back to Europe”. It’s also true that the longer this drift takes, the more damage that will accrue in the meantime. That’s undeniable, even if Labour isn’t able to admit it. But it presumably goes without saying, at least to readers of this blog, that Brexit was a seismic event, so the political road to rebuilding from the earthquake is going to be arduous and slow. Opinion polls showing increasing national regret are vital, but they are a long way from being enough. Like it or not, we’re still barely on the first step of that road but, that being so, the worst thing we can do is refuse to take it because it is only a step. Equally, it’s perfectly right to keep pushing for the next steps, and necessary, too, if they are to be taken.
Still, there is a gradual shift under way. For a long time after the transition period ended, the damage Brexit was causing lurked in the shadows. It’s not that it wasn’t reported, but those reports were often piecemeal in nature, rather than drawn together, and Brexit often featured in the small print as a factor in whatever damage was being discussed rather than as the headlines. That is increasingly changing, with a good example being the two-part series assessing Brexit in this week’s Times newspaper (here and here). There’s far too much in it for me to summarise but, although striving almost painfully at times to be ‘balanced’, the overall picture was undeniably clear, and undeniably negative.
Even without much media prompting, and despite a barrage of pro-Brexit reporting from some parts of the media, as well as much Tory boosterism, the public view has for many months been settling to the view that Brexit was a mistake and has failed. The latest YouGov polling records its lowest-ever level of people thinking Brexit was the right choice (31%) and the joint highest-ever level of those thinking it was a mistake (56%). It also shows 62% think Brexit has been ‘more of a failure’ and just 9% that it has been ‘more of a success’. Inevitably the responses of leave voters and remain voters are rather different, but even amongst leave voters the figures are 37% saying failure and 20% saying success, with a lot who think ‘neither’ (35% of leaver voters compared with just 6% of remain voters).
It's worth pausing to consider just how damning an indictment of Brexit those figures are, so I’ll repeat them. Just 9% of all electors, and only 20% even of those who voted for it, think Brexit is a success. By comparison, a 2019 survey found that 16% of the UK adult population believe that the moon landing was staged.
Brexit betrayed
However, there’s an important difference between those remain voters who think Brexit is a failure, of whom about three-quarters think it was always going to be, and those leave voters who think it is a failure, of whom about three-quarters think that it could have been a success if it had been implemented differently. That isn’t a surprising finding, but it matters because it shows that disillusionment with Brexit ‘as an idea’ is far from universal, and also that there is quite a deep seam of opinion susceptible to a narrative of Brexit ‘betrayal’.
It's a seam which Brexiters were always going to mine assiduously, and a particularly unhinged example was provided by Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn last Friday. It wasn’t just about Brexit, but slurs about ‘salivating remoaners’ with ‘loyalty to the EU’ permeated a wider attack on the “New Establishment” – an apparent nod towards political scientist Matthew Goodwin’s half-baked ‘new Elite’ theory - and its supposed “coup” against the government. But careful readers, if such the Mail has, would notice, even if Littlejohn is too careless a writer to realise it, that this was all rather let down by the observation that “to describe all this as a conspiracy is not entirely accurate [as] it's not co-ordinated.” So not, in fact, a “coup” at all.
This kind of ‘stab in the back’ myth (the on-line version of Littlejohn’s article was actually illustrated with a bloody dagger) has always been the most dangerous potential outcome of Brexit, and Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian recently and rightly warned that what follows from it “may be very dark indeed”. That said, it’s worth remembering that, with or without Brexit, Littlejohn has been squeezing stuff like this out of his anger-tightened sphincter into the eager maw of the Mail’s lavatory bowl for 30 years, on and off. In fact, the kind of aggressive victimhood of a ‘lost country’ his writing exemplifies is a big part of what drove the leave vote. It’s not even the first time he has posited a “coup staged by remainers” – he did so as recently as October 2022 – despite having assured his readers in January 2021 that Brexit was “all over bar the shouting”. You couldn’t make it up, to coin a phrase.
Whilst Littlejohn fulminates, other members of the Brexiter commentariat have adopted a more listless and resigned attitude to how the glorious possibilities of Brexit have been squandered. For example, Fred de Fossard of the Legatum Institute wearily bemoans (£) the government’s failure to pursue a deregulatory agenda, though that was never the automatic consequence even of hard Brexit, and laments the forthcoming introduction of import controls, which was. The “climbdown” on Retained EU Law is also dolefully recounted (“the less said about [it] the better”, de Fossard sighs), but with no recognition of why that, or any of the other foregone ‘opportunities’, have failed to materialize. Indeed, scratch the surface and the explanation offered is a more urbane version of Littlejohn’s, whereby “our entrenched bureaucracy ensures [that voters always] get the same Left-wing, Europhile outcomes”. As a result, “the whole concept of Brexit” is now imperilled, the sometime special adviser to Jacob Rees-Mogg glumly concludes.
Brexit’s last defences
Whether blamed on betrayal, or just lack of political will, these responses at least acknowledge that Brexit hasn’t been a success. But some Brexiters aren’t ready to accept that (and never will be). Instead, individual pieces of economic good news are still trumpeted as evidence that it has been triumph, a recent example being the thuggish Tory MP Lee Anderson's boast that the reported decision by Tata to build a gigafactory in Britain rather than Spain is “another Brexit bonus”. The obvious problem is that something can only be a Brexit benefit if it couldn’t or wouldn’t have happened without Brexit, which isn’t the case in this example. And, of course, even where there are any such benefits, they need to be set against the many costs to justify Brexit as a success overall.
It’s also typical of such claims to invoke a strawman that ‘remainers said there would be no more investment after Brexit’ or ‘remainers said there’d be no more trade with the EU after Brexit’, or the slightly different one that ‘remainers blame all Britain’s economic problems on Brexit’. Needless to say, no serious analyst has ever suggested such things, but even if they had then the most it would mean is that Brexit hasn’t been as bad as some said it would be, or that it may not have been a success, but at least it hasn’t been a failure.
For example, in a Telegraph article (£) the pro-Brexit economist Julian Jessop discusses the impact of Brexit on the services sector. It’s headlined as a “success story”, but the content is less ebullient. “If one thinks back to all the apocalyptic claims made by Remainers, our services industry should be a smoking ruin by now”, he says, conjuring up “doomsday predictions”. But worry not, for “the overall impact has been far less than feared”. It’s hardly an inspiring defence. To be fair, Jessop recognizes this, saying “it is not enough just to say that Brexit has been less damaging than expected. It was supposed to benefit the City. But this is a process.” However, this is just another of the stock defences: the benefits are always just over the horizon.
Still less compelling is the current fashion for comparing UK economic performance with that of Germany (£), or perhaps a wider selection of EU countries (£), selected over this or that timeframe, to argue that the UK’s is no worse, and perhaps slightly better. That fashion seems to have arisen because the IMF, its forecasts suddenly now in favour with the Brexiters who usually disparage them, upgraded its 2023 forecast for the UK from a 0.3% contraction to a 0.4% expansion, whilst forecasting the German economy to shrink by 0.1%.
Even if it made sense to ascribe these (rather negligible) differences to Brexit, it would not be much of an argument because, again, Brexit wasn’t undertaken on the basis that it wouldn’t be a failure but that it would be positively advantageous. But, in any case, it doesn’t make any sense. Whether in the EU or not, the UK’s economy, like any member state, fluctuates at different times and for sometimes different reasons to that of Germany (or any other individual country). In particular, Germany’s current economic difficulties are very obviously connected to its rapid diversification from over-dependence on Russian energy. So, except as a kind of schoolyard ‘what about you?’ taunt, such comparisons tell us nothing one way or the other about Brexit.
The key comparisons are between Brexit UK and how the UK would have performed without Brexit. That inevitably involves a counterfactual model, and the latest version of the best-known such model, the Springford CER ‘doppelgänger’, shows that by June 2022 the UK GDP was 5.5% lower than it would have been without Brexit. That may overestimate the damage or may underestimate it. But (to the best of my knowledge) neither the government nor any of the pro-Brexit economists have ever produced a comparable counterfactual model showing Brexit to have been economically beneficial to the UK. So on this key test there is, at the very least, no evidence of Brexit being an economic success.
What about Labour?
With Brexiters now engaged in the last stages of their attempt to deny Brexit has failed, and the latest stages of developing fantasies about why it has failed, and with the Sunak government in the throes of a protracted death, attention is increasingly turning to the prospects of a Labour administration. Interestingly, Brexiter fears for what that will bring are diametrically opposite to those of many erstwhile remainers. At least some Brexiters are convinced that Labour has “a secret 10-year plan to take Britain back into the EU” (£), whereas some remainers believe that there is no difference at all between Labour and Tory approaches to Brexit. The reality is more complex than either view allows.
Although by definition it’s unprovable either way, it’s absurd to think that Starmer has a ‘secret plan’ to re-join the EU. There’s literally no evidence for it, so Brexiters are wrong and rejoiners are right about that. However, it’s true that the logic of Labour’s position on Brexit – everything it says about the damage of it – points in the direction of eventually re-joining. So, forgetting any idea of a secret plan, the Brexiters are right to suspect that this would be the direction of travel for Labour (though they may be wrong that it will be the point of arrival), and re-joiners are wrong to dismiss the possibility of it going in that direction (though they may be right that it won’t be the point of arrival).
Remainer or re-joiner scepticism about Labour’s intentions was reinforced this week by Keir Starmer’s Express article, in which he again re-iterated Labour’s policy of no return to the EU, single market or customs union, but of wanting to improve the existing UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Most strikingly, and to many remainers most reprehensibly, he referred to the inadequate nature of that deal as meaning that “our European friends and competitors are not just eating our lunch – they’re nicking our dinner money as well”.
The clue to understanding this article is the polling figures I referred to earlier. It was written for the three-quarters of the 37% of Leave voters who believe Brexit has failed because of the way it has been implemented. More particularly, it was written for the erstwhile and potential Labour voters within that group who may be minded to blame that on the Tories. That is an important segment of voters for Labour to speak to, and the Express is a good place to reach it, with the pitch being based on tapping into, but subverting, the narrative of Brexit betrayal. The language may have been ugly and grating, but politics can be a dirty business, or at least it is for those who value winning above high-mindedness.
Of course, there is a tactical dilemma for Labour: in making its appeal to such voters it may lose support elsewhere (£), and there’s some polling evidence that this is happening. But the delicate calculation is presumably that many who respond to things like the Express article by angrily saying ‘I’ll never vote for Labour now’ will, when it comes to it, do so. Or, if not, that the votes lost will be in constituencies where the outcome isn’t affected, whilst those gained prove decisive in other seats. Again, it’s all grubby stuff for the squeamish, but perhaps they should reflect that after fourteen years in opposition squeamishness isn’t something Labour can afford to indulge.
Beneath Labour’s tactics
Tactics aside, what matters is what lies beneath. In his discussion of Starmer’s article, Ian Dunt, who has been consistently acute in his analysis of Brexit from the start, and often very critical of Labour, argues that “in truth, Labour’s Brexit position is far more nuanced, and much more radical, than it first appears. It has been carefully couched in the language of Brexit defence, but the proposals themselves promise a return to a much closer relationship with the Continent. It is the start of a journey back to Europe.”
The key word here is “journey” or, as I’ve put it, ‘direction of travel’. Starmer is cautiously going with the grain of public opinion, with a poll this week suggesting that 53% of voters favour ‘closer ties’ with the EU, and even in strongly vote-leaving areas a plurality doing so. What they mean by it is undoubtedly varied, but a first-term Labour government can be expected to push its possible meanings to the maximum it could without breaking manifesto commitments or suffering too much electoral kickback.
For an important example of what this would mean, in a footnote to my previous post I suggested that the seemingly arcane difference between Swiss-style ‘dynamic alignment’ and New Zealand-style ‘regulatory equivalence’ in Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) standards might become an issue under a Labour government, since Labour’s apparently preferred policy of a New Zealand-style deal had already been rejected by the EU, whilst a Swiss-style deal had been ruled out by Starmer.
I meant that we might hear more about this in years to come, so it was much to my amusement that, just a few hours later, and presumably coincidentally, the Telegraph carried a report (£) ‘revealing’ this EU rejection of a New Zealand-style deal and, with almost heart-stopping irony, quoting David Frost castigating Starmer for “trying to sell unnegotiable fantasy proposals to voters”. In a mirror-image of that critique, some remainers, too, leapt on this report as evidence that Starmer was just reproducing the impossibilities of “cakeism”.
But it is easy to imagine Labour in power, having pledged in their manifesto to negotiate a ‘veterinary agreement with the EU’, agreeing dynamic alignment with the EU. That isn’t cakeism, as it has already been offered by the EU, and the fact that Starmer has previously said he doesn’t want a Swiss-style deal will be irrelevant as he has also said he wants a ‘bespoke deal’ and, almost by definition, any UK-EU deal will be that. Will electors who support ‘closer ties with the EU’ object? Highly unlikely. And if there is a ‘bespoke UK-EU’ SPS dynamic alignment deal then it means the hard Brexit ECJ red line will have been comprehensively breached, allowing it to be breached in all manner of other ways, in relation to trade, security, and participation in various programmes and agencies.
Beneath Labour’s hints
Much of this has already been hinted at by the public statements of Starmer and other senior Labour politicians, including Rachel Reeves and David Lammy. A much more detailed set of proposals for what it could mean in practice was published this week by the UK Trade and Business Commission, an unofficial but highly professional grouping of cross-party MPs, business people and experts. Their report, which is based on extensive evidence-gathering from a huge range of stakeholders and experts, contains 114 recommendations. So far as I can see, all of them are compatible with Labour’s stated position and so the report amounts to a blueprint of how to operationalize that position.
Some, though by no means all, of this entails EU agreement, and there are obviously important questions about whether that would be forthcoming, and a particularly valid question about the extent to which Labour are putting too much reliance on using the scheduled 2026 TCA review as an occasion for a more substantial re-negotiation. It certainly isn’t automatically entailed by the review. However, in his recent evidence to the European Parliament, Anton Spisak, a Brexit expert at the Tony Blair Institute, urges that both the EU and the UK would be wise to use it in that way, so as to “begin a more strategic discussion”.
It is at least possible that this view will prevail and, of course, it will still entail negotiation, but much that could have been negotiated had it not been for the Frost-Johnson ‘sovereignty’ line will become possible. Nor is the TCA review the only game in town. The European Political Community (EPoC), established last year and which had its second meeting yesterday, offers the UK a new vehicle for dialogue and cooperation with the rest of the European continent. How it develops remains to be seen but, with enthusiastic and effective participation, which would be unlike Sunak’s approach to it but consistent with Labour’s stated policies, the UK could at the least repair some of the relational and reputational damage of Brexit. Potentially, there would be more substantive outcomes.
All of this could be done without violating Labour’s red lines on rejoining the EU, the single market or the customs union. Those red lines don’t prematurely box Labour into a corner because there’s just no way that, simply from an EU perspective, the UK re-joining is viable in the timeframe of the next parliament: we’re in that corner anyway. Equally, going as far as possible within those red lines wouldn’t be ‘re-joining by stealth’ since there would be no re-joining unless there was a referendum. It would all be subsumed within the rubric of ‘closer ties’ and ‘co-operation’, potentially leading to such a referendum, perhaps in Labour’s second term, as Dunt suggests.
This is exactly what Brexiters fear, which is also why the hostility of some remainers/ rejoiners to Labour’s approach is misjudged. At the very least, even if it never gets to that point, the ameliorations Labour are likely to enact will be somewhat better than the current situation, and much better than would be the case if the Tories were re-elected and the Brexit Ultras got their way.
The long road ahead
This isn’t to disown what I said In a recent post, where I argued that the strategic problems posed by the failure of Brexit are not “addressed by Labour’s pledge to make Brexit work, since the solutions don’t exist within the modest tinkering with Brexit that Starmer has committed to. Not until the diagnosis that Brexit is a failure is accompanied by realism and honesty about the causes and solutions can it be addressed”. It’s true that even if what I’ve said about Labour’s position today is right it still fails to meet this test, but the issue is the process and timescale for getting to that point. It is clear that this is going to take some time, so the question is whether a Labour government would take use closer to or further from that point.
On this, to quote Ian Dunt again, “if you put aside the tedious and unconvincing hardline rhetoric, a clear picture emerges. Brexit is collapsing. And Britain is, slowly but surely, drifting back to Europe”. It’s also true that the longer this drift takes, the more damage that will accrue in the meantime. That’s undeniable, even if Labour isn’t able to admit it. But it presumably goes without saying, at least to readers of this blog, that Brexit was a seismic event, so the political road to rebuilding from the earthquake is going to be arduous and slow. Opinion polls showing increasing national regret are vital, but they are a long way from being enough. Like it or not, we’re still barely on the first step of that road but, that being so, the worst thing we can do is refuse to take it because it is only a step. Equally, it’s perfectly right to keep pushing for the next steps, and necessary, too, if they are to be taken.
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