Brexit has failed, but there’s no solution in prospect

It’s not at all surprising that so many leading Brexiters, especially those not in government office, now pronounce, as Nigel Farage did this week, that “Brexit has failed” (though it is possible he was interrupted and intended to qualify that bald statement along the usual lines of ‘because it hasn’t been done properly’). It was always embedded in Brexit that this would happen, through a combination of the impossible promises made for it and the addiction to betrayalism and victimhood of so many of its advocates. Indeed, that has been a recurring theme of this blog, and of my book about Brexit.

The rumblings that Brexit has been betrayed, or is Brexit in Name Only, started even before the UK left the EU. But they began to grow more clamorous afterwards and there came a point, which seemed to occur around the time of Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson’s Telegraph column in November 2021 (£), after which it became a common complaint. Now, amongst Brexiters, it’s not even so much a complaint as an uncontentious statement of fact. Farage’s comment wasn’t shocking. Something similar is said day in and day out by Brexiters. For example, also this week, Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs wrote (£), not as the argument of her article but as the taken-for-granted first sentence of it, that “Brexit is dead in all but name.” There are any number of other examples.

Labour can now say the B-word but still not the F-word

No, none of that is surprising. What is surprising is that those who opposed Brexit, especially in the Labour Party, are so shy of saying the same thing. Keir Starmer’s policy of ‘Making Brexit Work’ implicitly acknowledges that Brexit has not been a success, but it is surely bizarre that it is taboo for him or any other Labour frontbencher to say in terms what to so many Brexiters is no more than self-evidently true. Brexit has failed.

Of course, what Brexiters like Farage mean by Brexit having failed is quite different to what Starmer means when he says it needs to be made to work. Starmer’s idea, which now seems little different to Rishi Sunak’s, is to rub some of the harder edges off the Brexit that Boris Johnson and David Frost negotiated, but without changing the fundamental nature of it. For Farage and others, by contrast, the issues are the continuing high level of net migration and the absence of significant regulatory divergence from the EU.

Labour’s policy was re-iterated by Starmer this week, when he committed to “improving” the Brexit trade deal whilst ruling out seeking to re-join either the single market or the EU, and there seems almost no chance of it changing before the next election. Their continuing lead in opinion polls and the results of the recent local elections will be taken to vindicate it, and, anyway, arguably it is the only realistic policy open to them in their first term of office.

Clearly Labour are also wary of allowing the Tories once more to weaponize Brexit against them, as happened this week when they floated the proposal to extend the right to vote in general elections to EU citizens living in the UK. Immediately, Tories started thundering that this was a plot to hold a vote to reverse Brexit. The fear of such attacks is understandable, although given that even the cautious policy of improving the TCA, which is due for review in 2026 anyway, was also represented as reneging on Brexit, arguably Starmer is taking the hit without getting much credit in return.

I still think that this approach could be augmented by the one I set out in my post last December, in brief, by stating that re-joining would be economically desirable but cannot be pursued responsibly or practically until embraced on a cross-party basis by the Tories. In this way, Labour could openly acknowledge the failure of Brexit whilst keeping the Tories responsible for owning it, and still limit the credibility of the accusation of seeking to undemocratically reverse Brexit.

As for the Brexiters’ diagnosis of their project having failed, this was given new impetus this week by two things.

Brexit delivers (one version of) one of its promises

The first is the expectation that figures are about to be released showing a record high level of net migration, exceeding the record already set by last November’s data. As Jonathan Portes, the leading economist in this area, has repeatedly pointed out, this is a policy area where Brexit has actually delivered what it promised, in the sense that freedom of movement of people has ended, and the UK sets its own immigration criteria and levels. That is also Grant Shapps’ defence of government policy. If Brexiters now feel betrayed, it is because of the dishonesty of a referendum campaign that certainly dog whistled to leave voters that immigration levels would fall.

As it happens, the public seem relatively relaxed about this not having happened, perhaps because of a recognition of post-pandemic labour shortages, but it still has salience amongst politicians on the political right, most notably Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Yet, again reflecting the dishonesty and incoherence of Brexit, her and others’ attempts to claim low immigration levels as a promise of Brexit are at odds with the prominent Brexiter business people like Tim Martin, Rocco Forte and Simon Wolfson who have called for a still more liberal regime.

At all events, Braverman is certainly at odds with the UK’s post-Brexit economic needs, as shown by Rishi Sunak’s announcement this week that more visas will be made available for agricultural workers. It is also the case that overseas students, who are rather stupidly included in migration figures, are vital, both economically and intellectually, to UK universities, one of the country’s few genuinely ‘world leading’ sectors.

Thin REUL

The other salt added to Brexiter wounds this week came with the fallout from the scaling back of the Retained EU Law (REUL) Bill, as pre-figured in my recent post, including the listing of the 600 pieces of law to be considered for cutting. This was presented as, and to an extent is, a pragmatic approach by Trade and Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, although she also managed to imply it resulted from civil service failings (£). But pragmatism is a dirty word to Tory Brexiters, with the likes of John Redwood and the ubiquitous Jacob Rees-Mogg denouncing it, and the creaking great-grandfather of Brexit, Bill Cash, ponderously deriding the triviality of the laws included in the listing.

It may be the case that axing these laws will have little or no effect, since many of them are defunct anyway – although there remain uncertainties and concerns (£) about whether this is so – but if Cash is right it doesn’t seem to occur to him or his fellows that this is one reason why their perpetual complaints about being under the yoke of EU law are so absurd. It certainly won’t occur to them that there are good reasons why their Brexit dream of de-regulation has foundered. One is just that, whatever they may have said since, neither this nor any other form of Brexit was specified at, and therefore mandated by, the referendum. Nor has it ever been put to the electorate by the Tory Party. So if they thought they could smuggle it in by stealth, under cover of Brexit, they have only their own dishonesty and incompetence to blame.

The other is the sheer impracticality of most ideas for significant regulatory divergence, discussed in detail in numerous previous posts, including the recent one on REUL. I won’t repeat that here, but an illustration of the basic point came in a different form this week with the government’s announcement that British food products sold throughout the UK will have to carry a ‘not for sale in the EU’ label. This arises because the Windsor Framework requires food sold in Northern Ireland to be marked in this way, but it is to apply across the UK “for practical and philosophical” reasons.

Not for sale in the EU

The ‘philosophical’ reason is as a sop to unionists and Brexiters: Northern Ireland will not be treated differently, even though the labeling only conceals the basic truth that there is no longer a single Great Britain (GB) and Northern Ireland (NI) goods market. The ‘practical’ reason is so that businesses do not have to use different labelling according to whether the food is sold in GB or NI, and can avoid almost all checks on GB-produced food being transported for sale to NI.

Cue outrage from Brexiters (£), such as Iain Duncan Smith, who declared “this is not why we left the EU. We were meant to be leaving the EU to deregulate, not to over-regulate.” Clearly the penny still hasn’t dropped that acquiring the right to diverge on regulations, even if that right isn’t exercised, automatically increases red tape. That, along with the bureaucratic burdens of being outside the customs unions, is what Brexit has done to businesses, and greater divergence, as envisaged by those who want to scrap the entirety of REUL, ultimately leads, in effect, to the literal or metaphorical marking of all goods and services as ‘not for sale outside the UK’. Meanwhile, it requires those firms which do export to meet the standards of the EU or other destination markets: double regulation, exactly what the single market avoids for trade amongst its members, and, to an extent, with those countries that follow its regulations.

It is astonishing that this still isn’t understood, the more so as, at the same time as complaining that Britain has “squandered the opportunities of Brexit” by failing to deliver regulatory divergence, Brexiters like the Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn (£) are up in arms about the decision of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to block Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard, which the EU has now approved. And why is the CMA so foolish, according to Lynn? Because, he explains, “the UK simply does not matter that much. The EU was already looking increasingly ridiculous in its attempts to pose as the world’s regulator – the so-called ‘Brussels effect’, whereby its standards would be adopted globally … For the UK, accounting for only 2.3pc of global output, the idea is even more laughable.” The obligatory sideswipe against the EU aside, the point is both correct and obvious. Yet it seems to elude Brexiters in the wider context of regulatory divergence.  

Tories in turmoil

Although it’s not clear whether they will be able to do much about it when it returns from the mauling it is currently receiving in the House of Lords, the reaction from Tory Brexiters to the watering-down of the REUL Bill looks like being less muted than it was to the reversal they suffered with the Windsor Framework. There are various reasons for that.

Possibly they simply don’t care that much about the arrangements for Northern Ireland – after all, they agreed to the original Protocol which established the basic fact of the Irish Sea border – or reckon that most voters outside Northern Ireland don’t. By contrast, regulatory divergence matters to Brexiters a lot, and they may think that the idea of ‘still being subject to EU law’ will resonate with some leave voters. Moreover, whereas the Windsor Framework, once signed, became very difficult to re-open, and the government categorically confirmed this week that it will not do so (£), it will always be possible to push for the resuscitation of REUL or something like it.

But the biggest reason is, undoubtedly, the now tangible sense since the local election results that Sunak’s grip on power is fading, and that the Tory Party is in turmoil, effectively preparing for who will replace him after the next election is lost.

That was most evident this week with the appearance of Cabinet Ministers Michael Gove and Suella Braverman, as well as Tory MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Hayes, Lee Anderson and Danny Kruger, and aspiring MP Lord David Frost, at the ‘National Conservativism’ (NatCon) Conference, an ironically global gathering of extreme right-wing ideologues.

Meanwhile, at the weekend, there was a gathering of the ‘Conservative Democratic Organization’ (CDO), the pro-Johnson group of grassroots Tory Party members, founded by Peter Cruddas, the disgraced former Tory Party treasurer and Vote Leave and Tory Party donor, who now sits in the House of Lords courtesy of Johnson though against the advice of the Appointments Commission. Johnson himself didn’t bother to attend in person, but Priti Patel, Nadine Dorries and, yet again, Jacob Rees-Mogg did.

Part of what is going on here is simply some of the aspirant replacements for Sunak burnishing their leadership credentials. That almost certainly applies to Braverman, probably to Patel, possibly to Rees-Mogg, and conceivably even to Frost. In itself, that is indicative of Sunak’s faltering authority, as well as presenting a menu of options for his successor which might turn even the strongest stomach and dismay the unfussiest of eaters. More fundamentally, it is about the incipient ideological war within the Tory Party which is going to explode assuming they lose the next election.

I have written about the implications of the NatCon Conference for the Conservative Party in my ‘Brexit Britain’ in the latest edition of Byline Times, so won’t do so here. But the wider picture, as the Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff writes, is an attempt by “Tory populists” to capture “the ideological soul of the party” at the expense of “Tory realists”. It is a struggle inseparable from the entire story of Brexit and the Conservative Party, and the latest manifestation of the process I discussed at length in February, whereby ‘Brexitism’ threatens to completely displace ‘Traditionalism’ (in the same meaning as ‘realist’ rather than the NatCon sense of traditional Conservatism). Within that, as Rafael Behr wrote this week, Sunak “has not picked a side between reality and dogma, but stands awkwardly between them, in the churned-up bog of a political no man’s land, sinking.”

According to David Gauke, it is “perfectly plausible” that after the election the NatCon (or Populist or Brexitist) takeover of the Tory Party will succeed, and whilst that may do little for its electoral fortunes it will make it impossible for as long as it lasts to envisage a cross-party agreement on substantively closening the relationship with the EU, which would surely be a pre-condition of the EU considering such a change.

Damage and decline continue

As the Tories implode, the damage and decline caused by Brexit grows remorselessly. One issue which put Brexit in the headlines this week has been lurking ever since the TCA was agreed – I think I first mentioned it in January 2021, though, astonishingly, Kemi Badenoch says it “isn’t to do with Brexit” – namely the looming end-of-year deadline by which, in order for electric vehicles to be traded tariff-free between the EU and the UK, their batteries must be at least 60% (by value) sourced in the EU or the UK. Without urgent action, car makers, including Vauxhall, are likely to close factories in the UK.

There is a fairly straightforward, if temporary, solution which Sam Lowe, who has been flagging up this issue for years, explains is to extend the deadline for the application of this ‘rule of origin’ (the link given also explains in more detail the intricacies of this issue, which are greater than my summary of it). But the underlying problem is that the UK has failed to develop what was supposedly one of its post-Brexit industrial priorities, the development of a domestic electric battery industry, exemplified by the failure of BritishVolt gigafactory. And, lurking beneath that, is the UK’s lack of access to the critical minerals needed for such batteries and lack of capacity to process them.

This temporary solution requires, of course, EU agreement to amend the TCA: having ‘sovereignty’ doesn’t give untrammeled freedom of action. As it happens, the EU also faces these problems, making it quite feasible that an extension will be agreed. But the crucial issue will be what happens then. Both the US and the EU (£) are devoting huge resources to securing the minerals and processing capacity, and developing the battery manufacturing capacity, so as to be free of reliance on, especially, Chinese imports. This in turn is linked to the even wider issue, which I discussed in August 2021, about the EU drive for ‘technological autonomy’ and its active efforts to secure supplies of critical raw materials (it also arguably links to the even wider matter of what the growing protectionism of both the EU and the US means for the UK).

There’s little sign that the UK has the political will or resources to do the same. So, even assuming an extension is agreed, if by its expiry the EU has succeeded in making the necessary developments and the UK hasn’t then it will presumably mark the end, in effect, of the UK car industry. And, on the more general issue, that the UK will be squeezed between the US, EU and China in the race for secure and stable access to the materials needed for advanced manufacturing (it’s not just batteries they’re needed for) and, crucially, environmentally sustainable advanced manufacturing. As with regulation, the UK is too small to go it alone.

In a somewhat related way, it was also reported this week (£) that post-Brexit interim arrangements for energy trading make costs for British consumers £1.1 billion a year higher than they would otherwise be. It’s yet another example of the failure of Brexit, and – as with another Brexit development this week, an agreement about how to address the ‘small boats crisis’ (£) – the remedy is closer cooperation with the EU. Yet such remedies are seen by those most willing to admit in public that Brexit has failed as being the cause of, rather than the solution to, that failure.

The invariable cry of those Brexiters bemoaning all this failure is, like Rocco Forte this week (£), that post-Brexit Britain has lapsed into ‘declinism’, which is equally invariably blamed on the “declinist Remainer elite” (£). It’s the same analysis that lay behind Truss’s disastrous mini-budget. The irony is painful. For the reality is that the more Brexit is pursued in the manner they want the more sharply Britain declines.

This is the serious stuff of high-level strategy. It isn’t remotely addressed by the government’s blithe assurances of its commitment to ‘finding solutions’, solutions that don’t exist within the parameters of the Brexit it has created. Nor is it 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. There is little sign that the British polity is getting close to that point, and by the time it does the decline may have become irreversible.

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

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

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

Why Anderson matters

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

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

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

Nostalgia - or déjà vu?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When nostalgia turns vicious

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

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

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

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

Inverted snobbery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are the baddies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A joke

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

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

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

 

References

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

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

Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad

I’ve written several times on this blog about the problems that Brexit has caused the Labour Party. More recently, it has become increasingly obvious that it has had far more profound and damaging consequences for the Tories, and I wrote in some detail last February about how ‘Brexitism’ is eating Conservatism. Now, although Labour continues to agonize about not alienating leave voters in the ‘Red Wall’ seats, it is beginning to craft some kind of post-Brexit stability for itself. Whereas Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad, as their party conference this week made abundantly clear.

The two things are not completely separate, as illustrated by the Tory Party’s thuggish Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson. A former coal miner and long-time Labour Party member, who also served as a Labour councillor, his early political heroes (£) were Arthur Scargill, Dennis Skinner and Tony Benn. Now a Tory MP and GB News presenter, he is not just ferociously pro-Brexit but a cartoonishly ‘prolier than thou’ populist, espousing the predictable litany of ‘things we’re not allowed to say’, from supporting the death penalty to telling asylum seekers to “f*** off back to France”.

So, to the extent he represents a certain segment of the traditional Labour core vote, he is indicative of part of the problem Brexit poses for Labour. But Anderson’s greater significance is that he fits perfectly into the post-Brexit Tory Party alongside those, from Jacob Rees-Mogg through to Suella Braverman, with whom he might otherwise have little in common. At the same time, there’s really no discernible difference between his beliefs and those of the Reform Party, as illustrated by his cringingly fawning ‘interview’ of Nigel Farage on his very first GB News show.

In one way, there’s nothing new about this. Populism has always brought together certain kinds of far-right and certain kinds of far-left people. What is new is what it has done to the Tory Party, and at the heart of that lies Brexit.

Farage and the ‘UKIPisation’ of the Tory Party

There are multiple dimensions to this, and they are interconnected and difficult to put into sequence. Perhaps the first of them is that, in using the referendum to outflank and marginalise UKIP, the outcome of the vote has ironically been to ‘UKIPise’ the Tory Party. That started to happen even before the 2017 election and has solidified since, so that by this week, as Lewis Goodall of the News Agents remarked, “you could have been at a UKIP or Brexit Party conference”.

That seems to apply not only to its grass-roots membership but to many, perhaps most, of its MPs, with almost all ‘remainers’ having been pushed out before the 2019 election. With them, the more socially liberal wing of the parliamentary party has also been very significantly eroded. That matters electorally, because those MPs, the David Gaukes and the Dominic Grieves, represented a certain kind of Tory voter the party is now liable to lose, potentially threatening its ‘Blue Wall’.

Yet, also ironically, the UKIPisation of the Tory Party has failed to reduce the fear its leadership has of the threat it faces from UKIP’s successor, the Reform Party, and especially the threat it would face if Farage returned to lead some version of that party. The Tories ‘getting Brexit done’ has by no means got rid of the Farage threat. That is partly because, inevitably, he spearheads the idea that Brexit has been betrayed by the Tories. It’s also because he and the people he represents will always depict Tory positions, especially on immigration and asylum seekers, no matter how extreme, as not going far enough.

But what is feared by the Tory leadership is loved by many, perhaps now most, within the party, including those jostling to take it over from Sunak, and the not unrelated seething mass of groupuscules advocating various versions of New and True Conservatism including National Conservatism, Common Sense Conservatism and Conservative Democracy. For them, Farage is not an external threat but a welcome friend. Hence the warm welcome he got at the conference, which apparently – no sniggering at the back, please - he attended in his capacity as a "journalist". Indeed, the Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie observed that “party members would choose him as leader if they could”.

That may be unlikely to happen, but Farage clearly, and correctly, sees himself as a significant player in influencing the party’s direction and its future leadership, which he opined was “the real debate this week”. That framing of the conference was in itself an act of hostility towards Sunak, as was his  enthusiastic endorsement (£) of Liz Truss’s approach to economic policy. Yes, it’s astonishing that anyone could think that, but Truss herself certainly continues to do so (£), as, presumably, do the “huge crowd”, which included Farage, who came to hear her speech to the conference fringe, given less than a year after her ignominious downfall.

Farage, whose political instincts are as acute as they are malign, was right about the central theme of the conference, and it wasn’t Sunak’s announcements about there being extra trains on the Dullchester to Snoreham line in ten years’ time, even though these dominated the reports of his less than visionary speech. It was, as Sam Coates of Sky News put it, “the existential questions about what the next iteration of the Conservative Party stands for”.

That Farage is now openly playing a role in these questions, inside the party he left in 1992 and has tormented ever since, may also seem astonishing. But to many in the current party he is not a torment but an inspiration. So is the GB News channel he fronts, as Priti Patel aggressively asserted at the Conservative Democratic Organization’s dinner before dancing with him, the would-be Princess to his irredeemably ugly frog. For that channel is now the mouthpiece for what the bulk of the Tory Party, quite as much as the Reform Party, believes in, and its studios are awash with Tory MPs interviewing each other.

The enemy at the top

To the New and True Conservative Jacobins, the enemy is neither Farage nor the Reform Party, it is Rishi Sunak and the remnants of moderate or even vaguely pragmatic conservatism. It is a curious fate for Sunak, a fiscally conservative Thatcherite, not to mention a supporter of Brexit. When he became an MP in 2015 that put him towards the right of the party. Just seven years later, the new Tories regard him as a ‘globalist’, even a ‘socialist’ and, of course, a ‘betrayer of Brexit’, if not a ‘closet remainer’. 

His clumsy attempts to placate them – from his new-found scepticism about the Net Zero agenda, to his insane embrace of the ’15-minute City’ conspiracy theory – have no impact on that. And they will, correctly, see it only as a sign of his weakness that he accepted the possibility Farage might be allowed rejoin the Tory Party, and as a further humiliation that Farage immediately rebuffed the idea (though, interestingly, he hasn’t entirely ruled it out for the future).

As many of his predecessors as Tory leader found, the more Sunak tries to please the extremists, the more they demand. His situation differs from them in two ways, though. One is that the extremists are no longer a fringe group within the party but becoming its mainstream, and include members of the cabinet like Braverman. The other, which is all that is saving him for now, is that even the extremists, such as Rees-Mogg, reluctantly realise that it is impractical to depose him before the next election. 

Clearly these two things point in different directions, but they are both bad for Sunak. If and when he loses the election, of course he will be ousted. But if, by some chance, he wins it then they will continue to attack him, though I suppose if he won by a large majority they might hold off doing so for a few weeks. The True and New Conservatives aren’t going away.

Brexit sowed the wind

The present state of the Tory Party isn’t all about Brexit, but Brexit lies at its heart. It is what started the rampage of populism, with its imagination of a singular ‘will of the people’ and, with that, the hunt for heretics and traitors, the denunciations and the witch-burnings, the suspicion of any hint of a lack of true belief. Hence, to give just one example, former Chancellor Philip Hammond, who, like Sunak, was a hyper-wealthy, almost stereotypical Thatcherite Eurosceptic as well as a spreadsheet technocrat, ended up being accused of “betrayal” for not supporting ‘no-deal Brexit’, and even facing calls that he be “tried for treason”.

Yet alongside such ferocious dogmatism lies the constant disappointment with Brexit. That was always going to exist, but Sunak’s relative ‘pragmatism’ has provided a new excuse for the Brexiters. To them, the Windsor Framework, the climbdown over scrapping all EU Retained Law, the resumption of Horizon membership, and the various other ad hoc accommodations he has made, all feed the Brexiters’ sense, itself the flip-side of their revolutionary purism, that Brexit hasn’t worked because ‘it has never been tried properly’. To take just one recent, but spectacularly stupid, example, the Telegraph’s Tom Harris this week foot-stamped about how “this useless government is destroying the Brexit dream” (£)*.

It is also Brexit which has led the Tory Party to all but turn its back on the business interests that used to be at its core. Boris Johnson’s ‘f*** business’ comment may have been a throwaway remark, but it had a deep resonance. Most businesses, whether large or small, were opposed to Brexit, and many are now deeply concerned about its effects. So, with Brexit the primary test of purity of belief, business is now – not entirely, but to an extent which would have been unthinkable a few years ago – positioned as the enemy. And that is not just for lack of Brexit belief, but for the now associated sins of ‘wokeness’ and being part of the Establishment or ‘the Blob’.

Something similar applies to huge swathes of professionals, civil servants, and just about every established institution including the Bank of England, the judiciary, the Church of England, many charities, and perhaps even the King (£). Like the evisceration of social liberals from the Tory Party, and to some extent overlapping with it, this has electoral consequences because many of those written off so disparagingly were the kinds of people whose interests the Tory Party used to represent and upon whose votes they could usually rely.

The new ‘politics of envy’

Again, this is not just about Brexit but it started with Brexit. Being a remainer is invariably first on the list of features, usually followed by ‘wokeness’ and university education, defining the ‘new elite’. This is the term repetitively ground out by the Conservative populists’ academic cheerleader Matthew Goodwin, himself a speaker at this year’s London NatCon conference, who has made the astonishing social scientific discovery that there are quite a lot of middle-class people in economically advanced societies. Even more astonishing, and apparently deeply sinister, he has discovered that they “live in the most affluent and trendy districts” and  “marry and socialise” with each other (£).

It’s worth reflecting how remarkable it is that, as with the hostility to business and professionals, populist Tories now regard the educated and affluent middle-class in general as being amongst the enemies of the people rather than being part of their core vote. In a similar vein, Suella Braverman’s ugly and depraved conference diatribe against immigration linked opposition to her bigotry and incompetence not just to those who “are desperate to reverse Brexit” but to those rich enough to have “luxury beliefs”, to employ gardeners and cleaners, and to have second homes. It is again remarkable that what used to call itself ‘the party of aspiration’ should now have such disdain for the well-to-do, to the point of regarding them as ‘unpatriotic’. It is equally striking that it now practises the ‘politics of envy’ that it used to disparage.

But this is the true face of the populist Conservatism that is engulfing the Tory Party, with Braverman also having been one of the speakers at the NatCon conference, along with Anderson, Cates, Rees-Mogg, David Frost and other Tory politicians. And it isn’t just about calibrating to different kind of voters from those who have traditionally supported them. It goes right to the heart of how these populist Tories govern, or do when they get the chance.

This was exemplified by the Truss mini-budget which, as I discussed at the time, was not just a ‘Brexit budget’ because it was hailed as one which would deliver Brexit, but because it was constructed in explicit rejection of the institutions and advice of ‘the Establishment’. They had opposed Brexit with their ‘Project Fear’ warnings, but Brexit had been voted for and done anyway. So Brexit morphed into ‘Brexitism’ where almost all institutions and most expertise are suspect. The market reaction to the mini-budget showed the recklessness of that, and very briefly shocked the Brexitists into relative silence. But they have quickly forgotten all that.

Brexitism: a different kind of ideology

It's something of a myth that the Tory Party used to be pragmatic rather than ideological. Thatcherism was nakedly ideological, and even before 1979 there were plenty of Tories who held her beliefs. Nor was Thatcher averse to populism, especially in relation to immigration. For example, her infamous remark about British people fearing they might be “swamped by people of a different culture” was similar to the kinds of things Braverman said this week.

But Brexitism is ideological in a different way, by being detached from almost any commitment to reality or truthfulness. Thatcherites had ideological positions, for example on the privatisation of nationalised industries, but there was nothing fantastical about them. Those industries existed and, rightly or wrongly, it was possible to privatise them, as the Tories did. The claims Tories made for what that would do for their efficiency, or cost-effectiveness, or investment may have been flawed, and the flaws may have flowed from their ideological assumptions about markets and the state. But they were not delusions or lies in the way that characterised Brexit, for example in the denial that it had any implications for a Northern Ireland border, or the assertion that post-Brexit trade with the EU could be frictionless. In this sense, Brexitism, unlike Thatcherism, is a distinctively post-truth ideology.

Likewise, every single budget under Thatcher – every budget under any Prime Minister of any party, for that matter – was ideological, but Truss’s ‘true Brexit’ mini-budget was ideological in a different way in its refusal to accept the realities of what it meant. That was demonstrated not simply, or not so much, in its formulation as in the response to its consequences, which Truss and her supporters still ascribe to Establishment plotting rather than market sentiment. And this detachment from reality now goes right down to such things as the ridiculous claims from the Environment Secretary Claire Coutinho that she has put a stop to a ‘meat tax’ that never existed.

Even Sunak engages in a degree of this post-truth Brexitist ideology, including the ‘no meat tax’ calumny. More importantly, in his conference speech extolling the pragmatism and honesty he claims to bring to politics, Sunak quite brazenly lied about the benefits of Brexit, including making the absurd suggestion that it has boosted UK economic growth, for which there is not a shred of evidence. There’s no surprise in that, as no Tory leader can speak the truth about Brexit, but it shows that Sunak has little interest in addressing the concerns even of Tory voters, of whom a not negligible 29% think leaving the EU was a mistake, 38% think it has been more of a failure than a success, and just 22% think has been more of a success than a failure. The ‘Brexitists’ certainly don’t have any interest at all in doing so.

Is populism popular?

Indeed, at one level, it seems as if the Brexitists no longer care about winning elections, and all that matters to them is ideological purity. But, though there may be an element of this, I think the truth is more that their ideological purity leads them to believe that it offers a route to winning elections. They see the Conservatives’ current weak position in the opinion polls and refuse to recognize that it derives from voters’ gradual disenchantment with Johnson and sudden disenchantment with Truss. So they conclude, according to taste, that if Johnson had stayed or if Truss had toughed it out then their poll ratings would have risen. And, now, they urge Sunak towards ‘true Conservatism’, certain that it will be popular and, if the election proves it not to be, waiting to ascribe that to him not going far enough and not being a true believer. At that point, they will install a Braverman, or some other New and True Conservative, in the expectation that this will bring them to power again in 2029.

In short, I think they have mistaken populist policies for popular policies, especially given the changing demography of the electorate. The core reason, again, is Brexit. It was the moment when the longstanding populist belief that they speak for ‘the silent majority’ seemed to be vindicated, and they saw further vindication in the 2019 ‘get Brexit done’ election. Indeed the Tory MP Miriam Cates, who is one of the NatCon’s rising stars, explicitly locates British National Conservatism as emerging from these two events. It is a massive over-reading, and over-simplification, of those votes, and especially of the narrow referendum victory, but it gave them licence to claim ownership of the ‘will of the people’ and to depict their opponents as ‘enemies of the people’. It made politics toxic and, in the process, they poisoned themselves.

Of course, perhaps their analysis is right, and when they get their New and True Conservative Party it will prove wildly popular, or at least popular enough to deliver an election victory in 2029. That could be especially likely if they face a Labour government which has been lacklustre or worse. Certainly there is no cause for complacency, and still less for amusement, about what is happening to the Tory Party. In his weekly Guardian column, Rafael Behr, touching on many of the themes I’ve written about in this post, rightly concludes that “there is something disturbing about a regime that is too ridiculous to trust with power yet too powerful to be written off with ridicule”. That will continue to be true even if, as looks increasingly likely, they lose the next election and become completely taken over by Brexitist populism, if only because, even out of office, they will have much media backing.

However, the difference between my analysis and that of the populists isn’t just about the content of the prediction. It is also about a difference that goes to the heart of the irrationality of Brexitism. That difference is that if they prove to be right then I would accept that my analysis was proved wrong. But if I prove to be right then, without a shadow of a doubt, they will deny that their analysis has been proved wrong. They will say it just means that it wasn’t true ‘True Conservatism’ and insist that the answer is to do it again, but this time properly. Exactly as they do of Brexit, the ultimate source of the madness that now afflicts them.

 

*This headline was later amended to the less punchy one of “The Government risks destroying the Brexit dream”, but the original lives on in the URL.

The Brexit battles never went away, and they’ve got a long way to go

A recurrent observation – made sometimes with surprise and sometimes with a kind of perverse nostalgia - about this week’s political and parliamentary events is that it is ‘as if the Brexit battles have returned’. And it is true that, like an ageing rock band, re-formed to reprise its well-worn hits despite the much-publicized hostilities of its members, there were some all too familiar sights and sounds. Thus, as the Rwanda Bill ‘crisis vote’ approached, there were fevered speculations, briefings and counter-briefings, and crisis talks with the almost endless number of factions that make up what can still just about be called the Conservative Party.

As with such a band, it came as a slight surprise to learn that some of its members had not long ago died of self-abuse, as when the raddled features of Mark Francois emerged to announce the findings of the self-important dolts of the ERG ‘Star Chamber’, chaired by the apparently indestructible Bill Cash. The show even began in the time-honoured way with a rendition of the classic ‘cave-in of the Tory moderates’, to set the toes tapping. Francois did, however, introduce one new number, ’the Five Families’ which, it seems, refers to a grouping of some the right-wing factions which, indeed, have much in common.

The Brexit battles never went away

But the observation is wrong. It is not ‘as if the Brexit battles have returned’. They are the same battles, and they never went away, and they are explicitly seen as such by people like ‘New Conservative’ Miriam Cates. There are multiple, interwoven strands to this. One is that, as I suggested in my book on Brexit, a possible post-Brexit scenario would be a push for a Brexit 2.0 of derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and, indeed, for months now, there have been growing calls from the Tory right for just that.

That scenario seemed possible not just because of the insatiability of Brexiters but because, as discussed in last week’s post, even before the referendum they conflated issues of EU membership with those of the ECHR. For that matter, it shouldn’t be forgotten that during that period, when Theresa May was still a remainer, she argued for withdrawal from the ECHR, whatever the outcome of the referendum, and that later, as Prime Minister, she vowed to fight the 2020 election (sic) on a platform of ECHR derogation (£).

It’s true that derogation isn’t what is at issue with the Rwanda Bill, which instead is an attempt to legislate to ‘disapply’ in domestic law some provisions within the ECHR, and certain other international agreements, in relation to the Rwanda policy (Dr Alice Donald and Dr Joelle Grogan of UK in a Changing Europe provide a detailed explanation of its provisions). However, some of the right-wing critics of the Bill would certainly prefer derogation, and all of them want it to go further in disapplying international law, especially in relation to whether individual appeals against trans-shipment to Rwanda would be allowable. In this sense, they are indeed pushing for a Brexit 2.0 scenario.

Closely inter-twined with that is the issue of whether the current Bill itself threatens to break international law. The government claims that it is framed in a way which stays just short of that, and this is the basis on which the ‘moderates’ of the One Nation group backed it. However, the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights issued a statement this week arguing that, even as drafted, it already breaches international law, a view endorsed by Professor Mark Elliot of Cambridge University, a leading authority in this area. In flirting with violating international law, or even actually doing so, the Rwanda Bill again represents a continuation, rather than a re-appearance, of something that began with Brexit. For it was not until the Internal Market Bill (IMB) of September 2020, which threatened to break some provisions in the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), that any British Minister had proposed legislation which would self-avowedly break international law.

The two aspects of Brexit nihilism

That threat arose again, with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in 2022, and although, in both cases, it did not actually happen, it shows how Brexit, specifically, has proved the catalyst for an almost nihilistic frenzy on the political right. One aspect of that is a kind of Jacobinism in which no measure is too extreme if it delivers Brexit, whether the price be the economic one of ‘no deal Brexit’ or the reputational one of reneging on international agreements. From quite early in the Brexit process, and especially once Boris Johnson came to power, international pariahdom seemed to matter not at all to the Brexiters. It is now abundantly clear that he signed the NIP without intending to honour it, and that many Brexiters who voted for it in parliament did so in the expectation that it would not be honoured.

A second aspect of this nihilism, related but slightly different, is a doctrinaire and wholly absurd idea of parliamentary sovereignty, within which international law is not just something that can be ignored but something which is actually meaningless. On this argument, which has been foregrounded again in relation to the Rwanda Bill (£), because parliament is sovereign it cannot be bound or constrained by anything else. At the time of the IMB proposals, this ludicrous argument was actually endorsed by the then Attorney General Suella Braverman.

That it is ludicrous was explained at that time, again by Mark Elliott, and, now, he has written of the Rwanda Bill that:

“it proceeds on the basis of the sleight of hand that the UK Parliament, because it is sovereign, can somehow free the Government from its international legal obligations. But this is to conflate the sovereignty of the UK Parliament in domestic law with the UK’s sovereignty on the international plane as a State. It is precisely in exercise of its State sovereignty that the UK can enter, and has entered, into binding treaty obligations.”

At its extreme, this idea of parliamentary sovereignty leaves no constitutional place for domestic courts, let alone international ones (actually, at its most extreme, as noted in my last post and amplified by Ian Dunt’s Substack, it proposes that parliament is sovereign over reality itself).

It is important to understand that these are not arcane points of legal or political theory. They have a crucial practical importance. For one thing, the UK is hardly in a position to call on other states, be it China, Russia or Israel, to act within international law and to respect human rights if its position is that sovereignty allows every country to do whatever it wants. For another, the UK is hardly an attractive partner for other countries to strike deals with, whether about trade or, even, asylum processing, if it reserves the right to violate those deals. And, for a third, which should matter to everyone, this doctrine makes it possible that parliament might act to remove any and every right from any or all of us, with no recourse to any court. It is precisely to constrain that possibility that we need the principle that there are some laws and rights that transcend the power of nation states.

It may seem as if these two aspects of Brexitist nihilism – the ‘Jacobin’ ruthlessness that the end justifies the means, and the ‘sovereigntist’ idea that parliament is unconstrained – are the same. But the reason I said they are ‘slightly different’ is because at times they contradict each other, even though they are often espoused by the same people.

Specifically, throughout the Brexit process, the idea of the ‘will of the people’ was often claimed by Brexiters to mean that sovereignty lay, indeed, with ‘the people’, and the constant accusation was that parliament was improperly ‘thwarting’ this will. But, if parliament is sovereign, how could there be anything improper in this (even assuming that was what parliament was doing)?  Moreover, the most extreme example of the Jacobin aspect was when Boris Johnson and his minions unlawfully prorogued parliament showing, in fact, utter contempt for parliamentary sovereignty. For, remember, their specific objection was to the way that parliament itself was passing legislation like the Benn Act (to prevent no-deal Brexit) in defiance of the Executive.

More generally, Brexit has been used as a pretext to sideline parliament, for example through the burgeoning use of ‘Henry VIII powers’ and, of course, but for the first Gina Miller case, parliament would not have had a vote on triggering Article 50. As with prorogation, it was only the courts which acted to constrain political power and, in these cases, to constrain the power not of parliament but of the Executive.

Rwanda Bill: Brexitism won the day without winning the vote    

In short Brexit nihilism is ludicrous in theory, dangerous in practice, and incoherent in both theory and practice. But it hasn’t just re-emerged for an encore with the Rwanda Bill. It is embedded in British politics. That is most obviously the case with the Tory Party which, as I wrote a couple of months ago, has been driven mad by Brexit. Even longer ago, in August 2022 when the Tories were engaged in choosing their new leader, who subsequently turned out to be Liz Truss, I made the point, which has become almost a cliché since then, that the Tory Party had become ‘unleadable’.

That had been only temporarily masked by Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory. It gave the government a substantial majority – albeit one now whittled away to 56 by by-election losses and expulsions – but, actually, apart from the very early vote to pass the Withdrawal Agreement that ‘got Brexit done’ (sic), it was always a fragile majority, and factionalism and infighting were never far from the surface. Then, following the Truss implosion, Rishi Sunak briefly had enough control over the Brexit Ultras to squash the rebellion over his Windsor Framework, which at one stage threatened to muster more than 100 rebels but in the end fizzled out. At that time, I, like others, wondered if Britain’s Brexit fever had finally broken.

That has proved not to be the case. Although Sunak also won this week’s Rwanda Bill vote, with many of the ‘five families’ abstaining rather than voting against, the circumstances are very different to the Windsor Framework vote. For one thing, this is only the beginning of a legislative process which, assuming House of Lords opposition, has no realistic chance of being completed before the next election. There are plenty more votes on possible amendments to come which the rebels may win.

For another, even though the Brexitists want to make the legislation even ‘harder’, its existence even in its current form shows the extent to which their ideology has captured “the soul of the Conservative Party”. A rather naïve column from Iain Martin in the Times (£) suggested that what happened this week was that the “moderate MPs” who form “the bulk of the parliamentary party” had shown how marginal the “fundamentalist Brexiteers” have become. What that misses is just how immoderate the entire party has become, so that what would once have been an extreme position is now mainstream.

Because this wasn’t Sunak ‘the pragmatist’ of the Windsor Framework, temporarily putting the Ultras back in their box. It was Sunak, with the support of the ‘moderates’, making as one of his central priorities an unworkable, immoral, and probably illegal populist policy, that began with Johnson, and finding that, as always, the Ultras want more. It doesn’t even matter if they don’t get that from Sunak now since, as Robert Shrimsley astutely pointed out this week, it will just be grist to their post-election mill that his government failed by not being ‘pure’ enough in its Conservatism.

Where is the Tory Party heading?

But the Tory Party is really no longer discussable without reference to Reform and Nigel Farage. Clearly that has been true for a while, going right back to UKIP and the roots of the referendum. It was certainly obvious at the last election, when Farage stood down from fighting most Tory-held seats. Now, the two are inseparable, both at the level of electoral fortunes and, perhaps more importantly, because there is no discernible ideological difference between Reform and most of – if we must call them so – the ‘five families’.

That’s especially so for the New Conservatives and National Conservatives, and there’s almost a sense – or am I imagining it? – that the ERG now seems slightly dated and quaintly respectable by comparison with this new breed of Tory rightwingers. Bill Cash may be many things, but he isn’t a Jonathan Gullis or a Lee Anderson. Even Francois is more ludicrous than sinister. It’s a bit like the way that ‘old school’ gangland bosses like the Krays were displaced by even more ruthlessly violent psychopaths. Say what you like about the ERG, but at least they looked after their own and loved their dear old mum, so to speak.

At all events, there’s no doubt the direction the Tories are heading in, at least in the short-term, assuming they lose the next election (and it’s telling that an ambitious one-time ‘moderate’ like Robert Jenrick is now re-positioning himself in anticipation of this direction). Even if Martin was right that there are still ‘moderates’ in the parliamentary party, it is undeniable that the membership, which will choose its next leader, is far from moderate. The Johnson-Farage dream ticket may just be a dream (or, perhaps, a nightmare), but the fact that anyone would even float such an idea, or that others pine for a Liz Truss comeback, shows the madness that is in the air. We may even see a complete re-alignment of the British Right, drawing in Reform but excluding what has previously been understood as Conservative traditionalism (for all that such an alignment would claim to be one towards ‘true Conservatism’), with it becoming the Brexitist Party in all but name.

Such a party, perhaps more likely led by one of the NewCons like Cates rather than one of the more familiar throwbacks like Braverman, and endorsed if not joined by Farage, would campaign not just on draconian anti-immigration policies but also on derogating from the ECHR and, very likely, reneging on the NIP.  This might doom the right to electoral irrelevance, but that certainly can’t be assumed, especially after the Brexit vote, even if the 2024 election sees a virtual Tory wipe-out. There is probably bedrock support of around 25%-30% of the electorate for such a Brexitist or NatCon party, augmented by some who habitually don’t vote and others who, after a few years of a Labour government, come to think that any kind of change, and any kind of ‘kick to the Establishment’ is justified.

That could create an electoral coalition similar to that which Vote Leave constructed, and, unlike then, it might only need, say, 40% of the vote rather than 50% to win an election, and it would have vociferous support from many sections of the media. Even if it only came close to winning, that might cement a NatCon takeover of the party for another electoral cycle, and for so long as it wasn’t in power then the many internal contradictions of its likely economic programme, which Times columnist Danny Finkelstein identified this week, could be glossed over. Indeed, as with UKIP and Brexiters in general, such a party could be far more effective and influential as a campaigning protest movement than as a government.

The Brexit battle to come

This is just speculation. But, assuming it has any plausibility at all, it is highly relevant speculation at least in relation to what will undoubtedly be continuing debate about re-joining the EU or the single market. That was given new impetus this week by a widely-discussed article by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times suggesting re-joining is highly unlikely any time soon, if ever. Other views are available, of course. But my point here, and of course I and many others have made it many times, is that for as long as there is a feasible scenario in which an incoming British government would seek to overturn any version of re-joining which might have occurred, such re-joining would never be countenanced by the EU. In this sense, the political battle for ‘anti-Brexiters’ for the time being is not to re-join, or even to try to persuade Labour to have a re-join policy, but to expunge Brexitism from British politics, or at least confine it to the margins.

Clearly things may play out differently. Even Wolf acknowledges the possibility that, say, a re-elected Trump pulling the US out of NATO would create such a geo-political shock that all bets would be off. So, too, might something as yet completely unforeseen, and perhaps (even) worse. But it would seem foolhardy, and even more pessimistic than Wolf himself, to work on that assumption when the scenario I have described is, for the time being, the more likely one.

On that cheery note, I’m signing off for Christmas and the New Year (unless something big happens). Many thanks to all who have read and publicized the blog this year and, in more recent months, left comments. I nearly decided to give up on it when I reached the seven-year mark, but here we still are. I’ll re-start early in 2024.

 

If you are stuck for a Christmas present for someone, why not buy them a copy of the updated edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to), published by Biteback in September 2023?