As we enter year III of actually existing Brexit, one would be forgiven to think that the acrimonious debates about Brexit should be settled by now. The evidence that it is not going according to plan simply seems overwhelming. Instead of friction less trade, the government now contracts disaster zone charity to support truck drivers at Dover. Instead of more trade with the world’s largest economies (except the EU), the UK is predicted to have the worst performance among all G7 countries. Instead, of sunlit uplands, people not only are facing an unprecedented drop in living standards, unprecedented – and quite possibly deadly – waiting times for medical treatment together with new bureaucratic burdens that crush small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Instead of extra billions for the NHS, in some areas lost EU funds are still not being matched by the UK government…
…and yet, the country still remains almost evenly split between those who want us to move on from Brexit and ‘make it work,’ and those who want to reverse it as soon as possible. The latest poll of polls does show a remarkable 58% majority for rejoining. At the same time, the (nearly) other half of the country (42%) still favours remaining outside. Nearly seven years on from the Referendum, the divisiveness of the Brexit issue has hence hardly abated, which is also reflected in a continuing public debate about what to do with Brexit.
That said, in the political arena, it would seem that despite all the obvious problems Brexit is creating there is an increasing political consensus around ‘moving on.’ Among those who want us to move on are not only those hard-core Brexiters who continue to denounce any critique of how Brexit is going as unpatriotic ‘remoaning,’ but also the government that does its best to avoid the topic of Brexit by blaming all the country’s problems on the pandemic and increasingly on striking workers. More surprisingly perhaps, the ‘moving on’ coalition also includes the Labour party, whose leader Keir Starmer still promises not to go back on the Referendum result of 2016 and instead to focus on ‘making Brexit work,’ while the Shadow Secretary of State for levelling-up dismissed any hopes of rejoining as ‘fantasy.’
To me, Labour’s approach makes some political sense. Most observers (e.g. Philip Stephens in the FT and Chris Grey) would agree that rejoining the EU is a question of decades not a question of years. For the next General Election (GE), which will take place by 2024, the question may therefore be irrelevant. In the meantime, we have to accept the reality that we are now outside the EU and somehow make that situation work as well as it can work. That does not mean that the situation will be better compared to had we not left the EU. Even less does it mean that Brexit can be made to work anywhere close to the way Brexiters had promised it would work. But whoever is in government for the next decades will have to focus on limiting, and if possible, reversing the damage Brexit has done to the UK and thus make it work better than it currently does. Yet, that focus on fixing the concrete problems Brexit has created comes with its own dangers.
The (not unproblematic) economic case against Brexit
An interesting – albeit subtle – shift in the public discourse about Brexit has resulted from the fact that as the damage becomes more obvious, opponents of Brexit attack the project by relying on evidence of the concrete failures to deliver on various promises. That is a solid and understandable strategy. Nothing is more powerful than confronting Brexiters with the reality of their fantasies.
It is a key reason why it is increasingly obvious that Brexiters have lost the post-Brexit narrative, which Chris Grey observed on his Brexit & Beyond blog back in May 2022: “If Brexit had been even half as successful as it was claimed it was going to be then, by now, you’d expect that to be easily demonstrable and increasingly self-evident even to those who had formerly doubted, or at least to a growing number of them.” Needless to say, that that statement holds true even more today than last year.
The economic reality, therefore, makes the work of critics of the Brexit project easier. However, it also comes with a risk: Attacking Brexit on the concrete failure to deliver on various promises turns the debate increasingly into one of implementation rather than principle. This is reflected in the Brexiter defence of their project, which now mostly relies on claiming that Brexit has been done in the way they wanted it done and that what we got is – due to the scheming and machinations of ‘Remainer public service’ – ‘Brexit in Name Only’ (ignoring of course that what we got is close to the hardest possible form of Brexit there could have been). But it is also implicitly underlying Starmer’s approach: Making Brexit work suggests – implicitly of course – that there is nothing wrong with Brexit per se, but it is a problem of implementation.
That makes this strategy potentially dangerous. Brexiters may be losing the narrative about the concrete benefits/failures of Brexit, but – it seems to me – they are winning the narrative about the principle of Brexit. In other words, as we focus on the concrete problems Brexit creates – as important as that is –, we risk inadvertently accepting the ideological claims and the process that brought about Brexit in the first place. Fighting the economic failures of Brexit is fighting the symptoms rather than the root cause of the problem, namely that it is based on a flawed ‘theory’ of how the world works. Of course, many of the economic problems created by Brexit are a result of the flawed understanding of the world that underlies the project. But fixing the economic issues does not necessarily address these more fundamental flaws.
Why we need to keep remoaning
A good illustration of how Brexiters are winning the narrative about the principle of Brexit is the most interesting Byline Times conversation between Hardeep Matharu, Annette Dittert, and David Goodhart. In that conversation, to bat off evidence about Brexit’s economic damage, Goodhart makes the now increasingly common Brexiter claim that the gains in terms of ‘democracy’ and ‘sovereignty’ are worth the economic price we are paying for Brexit. Thus, he states that ‘the fact that Britain’s GDP is going to be 4% smaller than it would have over a 20-year period seems relatively small compared to the win for democracy.’ He also considers that other European countries are ‘falling behind’ Britain, because they let EU rules be imposed on them, while Britain has a ‘more robust democracy.’ Both statements go unchallenged even though they are so obviously wrong. For one, the Leave campaign did promise a ‘no downsides Brexit’ in both political and economic terms and promised all sorts of economic benefits from leaving the EU – there was no mention of a possible trade-off. But more importantly, it also seems patently obvious that British democracy has taken a serious hit due to Brexit and is in as much danger as the British economy because of it. Not only is there the undeniable and well-document ongoing executive power grab that undermines parliamentary sovereignty, but also are there numerous attempts to disenfranchise the British voters through voter IDs, changes to the mandate of the Electoral Commission etc (for details see my previous blog post).
It would seem that opponents of the illiberal populism that drove Brexit have largely abandoned that battlefield to focus on the urgent matter of Brexit’s economic damage, which is understandable given the pressing issues and the cost-of-living crisis. But it is dangerous. It creates a sense that we all agree that the Brexit referendum was won fair and square. It was not. Not only was the Referendum campaign marred by irregularities and the electoral law was repeatedly broken by the Vote Leave campaign. There is also still the possibility that there was foreign interference in the campaign, although the government decided that it did not want to know.
Of course, to some readers, this will sound like ‘remoaner whining’ and I guess it is precisely that. But the fact is that we should always bemoan the way in which British democracy was slapped in the face in a farce of a referendum that can be considered democratic only if we ignore the fact that democracies need to follow the rule of law, comply with constitutional standards, and that the tyranny of the majority is not true democracy. As such, we should not ‘move on’ and never accept the referendum as a legitimate expression of what the people in this country wanted. If we do, we push the boundaries of what politicians in this country are allowed to do. We set a precedent that it is okay for a slim majority of the voting population to remove fundamental rights form the minority. We accept that electoral results that come about through illegal means still have to be accepted. We also accept that two of the four nations making up the UK can be force against their will to accept a fundamental change to their nations’ place in the world.
All this is not a ‘win for British democracy.’ It is the beginning of its end. That is why we need to keep ‘remoaning.’ Not just regarding the economic impact of Brexit, but the way it was imposed on the people in this country.
Why we need to win the ‘culture wars’
On this blog, I have repeatedly argued that the sooner we move the Brexit debate away from focussing on the ‘culture wars’ aspect (British supremacy, sovereignty, independence) towards its economic realities, the better for those who seek to defeat the nationalist project driving it. Increasingly, I believe that may be wrong. Brexiters and the right-wing press have shown in the past year that however bad Brexit’s economic damage gets, they will always be able to spin the narrative in a way that allows people to continue believing in the principle of the Brexit project…if only there had not been a pandemic, if only there hadn’t been a Remainer Parliament when the TCA was negotiated, if only the EU were not punishing us, if only Johnson had not been ousted, if only the Civil Service were not conspiring against Brexit etc etc…Brexiters will always be able to blame anyone but themselves for the mess they created. As such, pointing out the economic reality of Brexit will never be enough to defeat them. Indeed, while many prominent Brexiters’ political career is intimately linked to Brexit, perhaps somewhat paradoxically Brexit is not really about Brexit for its most fervent promoters. In fact, as I have argued many times before, Brexit has always only ever been a means for Brexiters to gain power within the Tory party and ultimately pursue their interests from a position of power. That goes for all the Egocrats that Brexit has spewed out as well as for the ‘grey eminences’ in the European Research Group (ERG) that now hold hostage the government and the Tory party. Brexit always will be a tool for these political entrepreneurs to push forward their personal and ideological agendas. If they are defeated on Brexit, they will move on to something else.
To some extent, there are signs that this is already happening, e.g. when Justice Secretary Dominic Raab once again suggested that the UK might be leaving the European Convention for Human Rights. The impression one gets is that deprived of a scapegoat after having left the EU, Brexiters bellicose victimhood is in search for a new foreign villain who can be blamed for the UK’s many problems. Once the ECHR is slain, Brexiter bellicose victimhood will move on to the next villain…and so on for all eternity. The only way to make it stop is for reason to prevail over the culture warriors.
Therefore, ultimately, we will have to wade into the ‘culture wars’ and defeat Brexiters on the front of their underlying ideology in order to set the country onto the path of renewal and recovery.
What I mean by that is not that I am hoping for the “woke” to defeat the right-wing nationalists, or for – what David Goodhart calls the ‘anywheres’ to defeat the ‘somewheres.’ In my – probably controversial view – the woke movement is a symptom of the same malaise that created the right-wing nationalist backlash against liberalism, not a solution to it. Thereover, by ‘we’ I do not mean adherents to a specific brand of left-wing political ideology, but rather anyone believing in the value of reason and Liberalism (writ large), whether they are left, right, or centre. In that sense, winning the culture wars does not mean imposing a ‘woke’ conception of the world on nationalists. What I mean by it instead is that those parts of civil society and politics that unapologetically defend reason and liberalism manage to build a broad public consensus that rejects the reality-distorting conspiracy theories, the hate-based politicising, and the false explanations of our current problems that have led to the culture wars and made Brexit possible in the first place.
Winning the ‘culture wars’ to fix the economy – and vice-versa
Winning the ‘culture wars’ will also help with the economic issues created by Brexit. In an excellent article in the Byline Times (I’m referring to the print version, which seems slightly different from the online version), Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar discuss the strange new alliances between formerly left-wing Marxist and conservative communitarian ‘culture warriors.’ They make the excellent point that dividing the working class into somewheres and anywheres, with the former explicitly being defined as ‘white working class’ and the latter including working class minorities together with the (mostly white) urban elites’, is a powerful strategy to divide the working class. Conversely, the left-wing culture warriors’ insistence on ‘white privilege’ while ignoring all the socio-economic depravation white working-class people are facing is equally divisive. According to Bloomfield and Edgar parts of the working classes ‘are antagonised by being called privileged when they often work for low wages with little job security or live in places scarred by decades of under-investment.’
What this analysis suggests is that sparking off a culture war has allowed political parties to largely ignore the real economic problems that drive much of the discontent and hatred that is poisoning our political culture. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly obvious that many of the economic problems plaguing the country cannot be explained just by Brexit – which only made dire situation worse still – and even less by Truss’s short-lived economic madness, rather, wrong-headed economic policies implemented over more than a decade has weakened the UK’s economy to the extent that it has become very fragile. Here, the economic orthodoxy that has given us austerity is chief amongst the root causes of our troubles as John Burn-Murdoch shows. The shift of the public’s attention to the ‘culture wars’ has allowed politicians to avoid facing up to that economic reality.
At the same time, genuinely addressing the economic grievances that result from the economic orthodoxy, would make it possible to overcome the ‘culture wars’ mindset that is still prevailing in the country. If the socio-economic situation in the former industrial areas in the North of England were better, I’m sure people living there would be much less tempted to hate me – the foreign-born, North London-dwelling academic – much less than they are told to do right now.
One way to win the ‘culture wars’ would hence be to be serious about tackling the long-standing structural, economic problems that provided the fertile soil on which extremist, divisive, hate-driven ideologies can flourish. This week’s political events possibly provide some hints at whether this is likely to happen under a new – non-Tory – government.
Starmer: Tory light or Trojan horse?
An almost comical start to the political year was provided by the leaders of the two largest parties in the country. When it became known that Keir Starmer would deliver his first keynote speech of the year on January 5th, Downing Street – evidently in a rush – announced a speech by the PM for January 4th. Worse still, both party leaders held their speeches in the same place, the Here East building in East London. The temporal and geographical proximity of the two speeches is comical, but it is also quite telling in terms of the proximity of their economic programmes. At least, that is the take professor Richard Murphy adopted on his blog. According to him, there is little daylight between the economic approaches of the two leaders. Indeed, “[b]oth believe government must be run like households. Neither has the slightest grasp of macroeconomics that any good prime minister must possess. And neither is willing to mention the biggest issues the country faces (what the country is; EU relations; Northern Ireland; inflation matching pay rises to prevent recession; the overwhelming need to address climate change as a priority of greater significance than growth; the unaffordability of housing; crushing inequality; the gross injustice of student debt; electoral reform; the cost of childcare; the social care crisis and so much more).”
From this perspective, both post-Truss Tory economics and labour economics under Starmer are a continuation of the sort of flawed orthodox economics that created the conditions for Brexit. Starmer’s orthodoxy may be a bit more compassionate than the Tories,’ but fundamentally, it will not correct the fundamental misguided policies of the past forty years, most importantly austerity, stagnating wages and underinvestment in public services and infrastructure.
Another Sheffield professor – Michael Jacobs – however, disagrees and sees Starmer as a ‘closet radical’ and Labour’s economic programme as much more radical than critiques understand. He points towards the spending promises on the energy transition as well as the industrial strategy. The problem though is that these promises are hardly credible if the fiscal conservative approach to public debt and borrowing is to be pursued (the idea seems to be to fix the country without spending a penny). That fiscal conservative also leads Labour to continue relying on approaches that have failed in the past, most importantly the reliance on public private partnerships (PPPs) in delivering public services. As Carillion has shown, most of the time, PPPs end up being imbalanced deals that socialise the risks and privatise the profits associated with the service to be delivered.
So, however radical Labour’s industrial strategy might be, it is embedded in an orthodox macroeconomic policy framework that makes it doubtful whether the numbers really add up. Again, Jacobs is more optimistic expecting Labour “to equalise the tax rates paid on capital gains and dividends with those on wages” as well as make other changes to the tax system that could raise £26bn a year.
Jacobs also points out labour’s commitment to workers’ rights and wages, which – according to him – would make strikes less common. This constitutes a fundamentally different approach to Sunak’s government, whose response to the current strike wave is to curb workers’ rights to strike. Here, Starmer does seem to be focussing on the underlying issue, while the Tories seek to supress the symptoms of a rotten economic model.
If Jacobs is right and Starmer’s right-wing performances are only part of a persona while his actual policies are closer to Corbyn’s than to those of Blair or Brown, then the question is how that will go down with the public. This strategy sounds like a Trojan horse strategy, where what is publicly stated on the tin is not what is inside. Depending on what the Labour manifesto will say, there may be a risk of creating a split personality and preparing the ground for a feeling of betrayal after a possible Labour electoral victory.
At the same time, it may be a good strategy to overcome the inherent bias in the UK electoral system towards older generations (which in all likelihood will get worse at the next GE due to voter IDs) and deliver for the younger ones what they prefer. Indeed, in an intriguing column John Burn-Murdoch shows that the millennials do not seem to follow previous generations pattern of becoming more conservative with age, but at age 35 they are considerably more left-wing than previous age cohorts. That makes intuitive sense given the declining opportunities and living standards that generation is facing. To be a conservative you need to have something you want to conserve.
There is a question mark over whether Starmer may be pushing his conservative, Brexit-embracing persona too far. The most striking element hinting at this possibility this week was Starmer’s attempt to reclaim the Brexiter slogan ‘taking back control’ for Labour by proposing a ‘take back control bill’. Opinions are very divided about whether that was a smart move or setting himself up for a backlash. Marketing scholar Thomas Robinson considered the move akin to Doppelgänger branding strategy, where a company uses a the motto or logo of a rival against the brand in order to repurpose it. Indeed, when Starmer says ‘take back control’ he is talking about decentralisation of the UK’s political system, rather than the Brexit promise of the British people – via parliamentary sovereignty – taking back control from Brussels (which in practice has turned into an all-powerful, largely unaccountable government taking back control from Parliament). This would be an important change in the British political system. Yet, given the fiscal conservatism Starmer seems to adhere to, the suggested decentralisation will not be backed up with sufficient financial means for local authorities to deliver the services they are meant to deliver. If that is case, decentralisation will only be a means for the Westminster government to shift blame for austerity to the local level.
Whichever is the case, to come back to my initial point, Starmer’s strategy is another case where the Brexit project is being attacked based on its implementation rather than its principle. Yes, we can and should take back control, but the Tories have done it wrong! That may be true, but the point is that Labour explicitly buys into the Tory discourse by saying we cannot spend our way out of the Tory mess, which is a very problematic statement given that underinvestment is a key reason for the Tory mess as Richard Murphy points out.
In short, then, we still seem quite a far way off the necessary honesty about the root causes of Brexit to move towards addressing the country’s political and economic problems. In political terms, if we only focus on pointing out that Brexiters have not delivered what they promised, we reduce the issue to a problem of policy implementation and perhaps competence, rather than exposing the fundamentally dishonest way in which Brexit was achieved. If we do that, Brexiters win that part of the post-Brexit narrative, which will have repercussions for British democracy for generations to come. In economic terms, the ‘culture wars’ are one of the key reasons why these problems are so difficult to tackle, because they prevent the necessary political coalition from emerging. Therefore, winning the culture wars is a key element in making the country ready to ‘move on’ from its current state.