Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

I'm surprised by Sunak's poor showing.  Seems to me he has run a pretty much trouble free show.

It's an exhausted, divided, scandal-ridden government with no ideas that's been in power for 12 years and is now on the receiving end of broad public contempt.

Plus the big advantage Tories have always had historically is that they're more trusted on the economy. You only need to do a Truss once to trash that reputation.

It's really tough to see how they recover - especially as Johnson is permanently on manoeuvres (not necessarily a bad thing as it's mainly him calling for more support to Ukraine) and now Truss and her allies (again - how? ) are going to start agitating.

He's stabilised the Tory lead deficit at about 20-25%, which is better than it was under Truss. And given all that, he's doing pretty well (and can't think of any other senior Tory who'd be likely/capable of doing better).

[Tamas]

Yeah its like the staff fled the insane asylum except the janitor, so he is looking like a decent candidate to run everything himself as opposed to the alternative of promoting the patients.

[Josquius]

There's bound to have been some people who became very rich off Truss.

[The Brain]

The real treasure was the lettuce we met along the way.

[The Brain]

Yeah its like the staff fled the insane asylum except the janitor, so he is looking like a decent candidate to run everything himself as opposed to the alternative of promoting the patients.

It's a wanker placement game.

[Tamas]

Yeah its like the staff fled the insane asylum except the janitor, so he is looking like a decent candidate to run everything himself as opposed to the alternative of promoting the patients.

It's a wanker placement game.

 

[Sheilbh]

Len McCluskey popping up on Russell Brand's podcast agreeing that there was a "deep state" and mainstream media plot against Corbyn and that you can imagine the CIA in Langley "picking up the phone" to their counterparts in the "British establishment" wondering how they let "a real socialist" get this close to power - and to stop him.

It's another one of those left-right convergences - especially Brand's "journey". But McCluskey is more striking because he was a key Corbyn ally but also the General Secretary of Unite, which is the largest union in the UK, for 10 years until 2021.

I've said it before but I think the strongest Trump parallels in British politics were with Corbyn and his team/supporters.

Since 2021 Unite (and other unions) have broadly elected more industrial and less political leaders - so they're generally more interested in the terms and conditions of their members, rather than being heavily involved in Labour party politics. In the case of Unite the new General Secretary ordered two reports (including forensic accounting) into a big hotel development from the McCluskey era that I think was supposed to cost under £10 million but ended up costing almost £100 million. The plan was to announce the findings of the reports early this year, but I think because of what they found, they ended up handing it over to the police who have now launched investigations into bribery, fraud, money laundering and tax evasion.

Incidentally thehealth and safety contract for the development was awarded to the son of the then Mayor of Liverpool's company - the Mayor, his son and another director of that company (who amazingly was in prison for GBH - I think he slashed someone's face - when he became a director) were arrested in separate investigations for bribery and witness intimidation. I believe that investigation's been dropped.

In a bit of a flashback, they were arrested with Derek Hatton who was the Trotskyist deputy leader (but power behind the throne) of Liverpool's Militant tendency council in the 80s and has since transformed himself into a property developer in the city (with a lot of big Land Rovers with DEGSY personalised license plates). McCluskey himself is from Liverpool and was a local trade union ally of Militant, though he later broke with them - largely because he thought their political project was too sectarian, but fundamentally right.

No doubt all just a big state/British establishment/CIA plot

[Sheilbh]

Really interesting big poll and analysis on Bregret. The map (only three constituencies are not at least plurality Bregretful and only one is still majority that it was the right decision):


And the analysis. Particularly striking is that Brexit didn't fully dissolve old party loyalties as it seemed and some of us ( ) may have suggested might be happening in old posts. Instead they're re-asserting themselves - so the most Bregretful/biggest swing are the "Red Wall" old Labour seats that swung Tory:

Labour is winning the Brexit revolution
The party can capitalise on Tory failure
BY Tom McTague
January 30, 2023

Three years after Britain finally left the European Union, Brexit has not only lost its popularity, but also, it seems, its power. Today, according to new UnHerd polling, not only does a clear majority think the decision to leave was wrong, but a majority in every constituency in the country — bar one — feels the same. Even more significant than this, however, is the revelation that public views are beginning to harden down old party lines again, merging the old Tory and Labour divide with Leave and Remain. Brexit, that once-great scrambling event in British politics that sliced through the old partisan loyalties, has started to settle into a more easily understandable Left and Right-wing issue. And here's the potentially transformative effect of this great re-formation: it is now Labour who stands to gain from the Brexit revolution, not the Tories.

Between 2016 and 2019, Brexit allowed the Conservative Party to win over parts of the country it had previously found almost impossible to conquer. Boris Johnson's pledge to "Get Brexit Done" appealed to enough people in traditional Labour areas to flip scores of seats blue. Today, though the effect itself has flipped. Brexit has been done and most people have concluded it was a mistake. Swing areas in northern England, Wales and the Midlands have turned against Brexit more strongly than traditional Tory areas.

The problem for the Tories is that all those voters who regret Brexit also see it as synonymous with the Conservative Party. Labour, on the other hand, has become associated with Remain — even though it rejects the idea of rejoining the EU and has vowed to "make Brexit work". Labour, then, finds itself in the enviable position of benefiting from the Tory party's association with Brexit, but without having to actually risk reopening the old wounds of the referendum by pledging to rejoin the EU. "Making Brexit Work" is smart politics — for now.

We have been here before. Look at what happened in Scotland after the independence referendum. There, the No campaign saw off the independence movement in 2014, but the parties associated with its victory became unpopular shortly after. The same thing didn't happen immediately after the Brexit referendum, but the effect might just have been delayed by parliament's failure to deliver on that result until 2020. So, we may now be witnessing the "loser's premium" that couldn't kick in until Brexit had actually been delivered.

This could be potentially transformative, but is not without some peril for Labour — and the country. The more voters declare their regret over Brexit, the more pressure there will be from Remainers to re-open the constitutional question over Europe — in the same way that the issue of independence has not gone away in Scotland. It is at this point that the difference between believing that Britain should not have left the EU, and believing it should open negotiations (and almost certainly hold another referendum) to rejoin will also emerge. The old conditions of British membership, remember, have gone and so "Rejoin" is not "reverse Brexit"; it now means creating something new. Would this mean, then, even higher budget contributions than before, the adoption of the euro and accession to Schengen? It seems impossible that David Cameron's renegotiated membership plan (remember that?) could somehow be resurrected. The history of Britain's entry — and exit — negotiations suggests very strongly that it will not be Britain who sets the terms, but the EU.

Starmer is therefore right to conclude that "Making Brexit Work" is a far surer bet than Rejoin: he could capitalise on the public's disappointment with Brexit. However, there is another challenge for Starmer and the Labour Party. Just as Franklin Roosevelt was said to have saved capitalism from itself in the Thirties (a disputed claim, of course) by deploying the full power of the state to wrench the country out of its great depression, it may fall to Starmer — the man who called for a second referendum — to save Brexit from itself. There are plenty of people, of course, who think it is simply not possible to make it work, who believe that the only option is ever more close alignment with the EU — thereby undermining the very purpose of Brexit in the first place. If the only way to make Brexit work is to give up control by adopting whatever laws are passed in Brussels, this, to put it mildly, does not seem a very sensible place to be.

Labour, though, insists this is not its plan — or, at least, not the entirety of its plan. It does want to reduce "unnecessary" trade barriers, seek more "equivalence" and "cooperation", but it has pledged to "use our flexibility outside of the EU to ensure British regulation is adapted to suit British needs". As it pushes this, the more Labour will create a record which it will, logically, want to defend but which would be impossible inside the EU and would have to be abandoned if the country rejoined. In other words, the more Starmer succeeds on his own terms by making Brexit work, the more he will have created a new status quo, embedding the very project more and more of his voters believe was a fundamental mistake. Fate is a funny thing.

Just because the Labour party is currently committed to making it work doesn't guarantee the security of the Brexiteer project. In 20 years, Britain went from voting for Tony Blair to voting for Brexit. And it was only 25 years before Blair that Britain joined the Common Market. Nothing is set in stone: over time, attitudes and positions shift. What we now see as marginal, politically impossible propositions can suddenly become possible and then popular and then, after being adopted, apparently inevitable. Just think of monetarism and floating currencies, for example, both marginal policies in the Seventies that became government policy in the Eighties. The idea of leaving the EU itself was once considered too extreme for all but the most hardline eurosceptics as well. Then it became the majority view in the country. There's nothing to say the same can't happen to Rejoin.

This current shift in public mood against Brexit isn't just a Labour victory — it is very much a Tory defeat. The referendum in 2016 revealed a pent-up frustration with the status quo. Taken literally, it was a vote, according to the Leave manifesto, to control immigration, spend more money (and by implication, improve) public services  particularly the NHS — and change the basic economic settlement to improve more people's living standards which had stagnated. Those who voted Leave did so for lots of different reasons, of course. For some it was a vote in favour of dramatic changes to the economy and the country; for others to slow or stop the dramatic changes they felt were already happening and for which they blamed EU membership. Sevenoaks voted to leave, as did Sunderland.

Either way, it was a vote against the old system. Yet for most people, nothing has changed — or if it has, it has got noticeably worse. And so is it any wonder people believe it was a mistake? Britain has erected a trade border within its own country without bothering to enforce its own borders. It has signed trade deals which seem to make it harder for British producers to export without making it harder for foreign competitors to import into Britain. It has allowed immigration to increase, failed to stop the small boat crossings, let the health service fall to bits and begun a new round of austerity. The Tories couldn't have designed a set of outcomes less in keeping with the spirit of the Leave vote. The truth is, the Tory party lost its grip on the revolution — and is now paying the price.

I think there is something of an irony that for Labour's political interests it will need to make Brexit work (and I think there's a credible left approach to that which has broader political support than the right alternative), which is a policy it's supporters hate - the more they deliver, the less urgent the need to remedy Brexit will be. As he says, it's an odd twist of fate.

The thing I'm still amazed by is the absolute failure of re-joiners to start politically organising. I don't understand why the Lib Dems haven't transformed into a full-throated re-join party - maybe because some of their historic strongholds which they hope to win back are quite Brexity? But I also don't really get why re-joiners haven't engaged in some light entryism to take over the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems have about 75,000 members and could easily be taken over by an organised re-join campaign. I've said before but I think part of it is that a lot of the re-joiny groups seem to have a bit of a disdain for the "political" more generally so anything as sordid as engaging in party politics is beneath them.

And this highlights again what I think is a really important difference between the UK and US in terms of Trump/polarisation/Brexit/partisanship: public opinion shifts in Britain in a way that it just seems very static in the US.

Edit: Also there's a widget to see how Bregretful your constituency is - apparently I'm in the 23rd most regretful constituency which sounds about right
https://britain.unherd.com/

[Tamas]

Organising re-joiners is probably pointless. I don't think the EU would be keen to go through the trouble if rejoining, again giving a job to Farage, and then doing Brexit ágain in 10 years.

The only realistic least damage done option is for a Labour government to quietly turn us into Norway when it comes to relationship with the EU. Everyone will pretend this is not humiliating and making us look ridiculous, and everyone moves on.

[Josquius]

Curious that Boston remains a hole that should be given back to the sea.

[Sheilbh]

Organising re-joiners is probably pointless. I don't think the EU would be keen to go through the trouble if rejoining, again giving a job to Farage, and then doing Brexit ágain in 10 years.

The only realistic least damage done option is for a Labour government to quietly turn us into Norway when it comes to relationship with the EU. Everyone will pretend this is not humiliating and making us look ridiculous, and everyone moves on.

Yeah - personally I don't think that's possible

Curious that Boston remains a hole that should be given back to the sea.

I don't think there's an area of the country I have less of preconception/image in my head of than Lincolnshire

All I really know is that it's the heart of Brexitland. But I either know or have a stereotypical idea of most of the country. Lincolnshire's just a bit of a gap

[Valmy]

Even in Britain Boston is full of assholes.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Another in a long list of recent articles basically saying "things are really bad in Britain and it has a bleak future", from Foreign Policy:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/03/britain-worse-off-1970s

Britain Is Much Worse Off Than It Understands
Things weren't nearly this bad in the 1970s—but the country's leaders haven't grasped that yet.
By Simon Tilford, the director of the Oracle Partnership.

FEBRUARY 3, 2023, 7:22 AM
By any criteria, the United Kingdom faces a serious economic and social crisis, one that will deepen without big shifts in policy. Yet there is little sense of this crisis among the country's elite, not least its politicians.

The power of narratives helps explain this disconnect. The gap between the U.K.'s reality as portrayed by the dominant narrative of its economy's performance and real life as experienced by its average citizen has widened to the breaking point. The resulting political distortions are now making the underlying problems even worse.

Narratives and the emotional impulses that drive them play an underappreciated role in our understanding of the way economies work and whether they are perceived to be performing well or not. Sometimes, there is real grounding to those narratives; other times, they are largely fictional constructs. This does not necessarily mean that those who believe them and propagate them are dishonest, only that their personal experience may not be representative of the economy as a whole.

The 1970s in the U.K. are widely portrayed as a decade of economic stagnation and political strife, which only came to an end with a paradigm shift in economic policymaking at the end of the decade. According to the dominant narrative, this opened the way for a successful drive to curb the power of special interest groups, such as organized labor, sound macroeconomic policies, and much improved economic performance. The 1970s are seen as a failed decade and the 1980s as one of renaissance—the benefits of which last until today.

Although there is no doubting the scale of the economic challenges faced by the United Kingdom in the 1970s, not least those brought on by the oil crisis and very confrontational labor relations, popular perceptions of the 1970s and 1980s draw more on fictional creations than reality.

Across developed economies, the 1970s was not a worse decade than the 1980s in terms of growth, productivity, and living standards. Even in the U.K., which was forced to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1976, growth rates stacked up better in the 1970s than the 1980s, averaging 3.38 percent per year against 3.0 percent. The country ran a substantial trade deficit at the height of the so-called Barber Boom—named after the Conservative then-Chancellor Anthony Barber—but then surpluses for much of the rest of the decade. By contrast, the U.K. was running record trade deficits of almost 5 percent of GDP by 1989.

Yet British politicians, and not just Conservative ones, still talk about the risk of a return to the 1970s, as if that decade was the nadir of U.K. economic performance. There is still a tendency to raise the specter of a return to 1970s as a warning. There is little sense that the current crisis is comparable with the 1970s, let alone worse. On the face of it, this is odd.

Although the U.K. was a relative growth laggard during the 1970s, this was nothing in comparison to today's current collapse in living standards. Average U.K. real wages are now lower than 18 years ago, which is unprecedented in the country's peacetime economic history.

On most measures, the country has the most limited welfare state of any developed country, including the United States, with the result being that working households are shouldering more risk than their peers and—as the Resolution Foundation recently found—today's young Britons face paying far more in tax than they will ever receive back in terms of pensions and other benefits. The reverse is true of older cohorts.

There is also an unprecedented housing crisis, with young people increasingly excluded from home ownership if they cannot access family wealth. Public services are under unprecedented pressure, especially health care. Excess deaths have risen while Britain is the only country in Europe suffering from declining life expectancy.

The U.K. is also running a large, structural trade deficit. Were its economy growing rapidly, driven by high rates of capital investment, this would be less of a concern. However, it is not. Britain faces a deepening economic growth crisis, not least because business investment is running at the lowest level in the G-7. The trade deficit matters: The trajectory is unsustainable, implying as it does a rapid increase in liabilities to the rest of the world.

If the U.K.'s economic performance is so poor, why are comparisons with the 1970s considered outlandish? Narratives are often crafted by those who have profited from the changes, especially if those winners are powerful people in politics and media. The policy shifts in the late 1970s and early 1980s benefited particular groups within society—the better off, primarily—leading to a steep rise in inequality. The United Kingdom remains one of the most unequal developed countries to this day, according to the Equality Trust.

In a very unequal society, people with the influence to sustain narratives tend to be insulated from what is happening to most of the population. Many individuals genuinely think the country's economic situation is better than it is because their personal circumstances are strong. They are among the higher earners and have wealth to cushion themselves against risk. In the U.K., they also tend to have generous private pensions and usually bought their houses before prices rose dramatically relative to earnings.

Second, there is an abiding belief that the U.K. must be performing well because it is run how an economy should be run according to the dominant narrative—that is, with a small state, limited welfare benefits to provide the right incentives, and relatively low taxes on high incomes and wealth to encourage risk-taking and hence economic growth. This encourages denial about the scale of the country's underperformance or a tendency to scapegoat others for it—be it the poor for being lazy or immigrants for consuming public services and scarce housing.

In reality, there is plenty of evidence—not least from the IMF—that high levels of inequality are bad for economic growth, that a bare bones welfare state makes it hard for people to take risks and hence holds back social mobility and productivity growth, and that the underfunding of public goods—in particular health care, education, and infrastructure—hurts economic growth potential. There is certainly no correlation between the size of a country's state and its economic performance. However, a narrative can be seductive if it legitimizes a system people personally benefit from.

The third reason is that the U.K.'s political class is loath to admit the scale of the problem because to do so would mean calling into question Brexit, which neither of the main political parties is willing to do—the Conservative Party because many of its politicians and a majority of its voters continue to believe in Brexit and the Labour Party because it fears losing the votes of Brexit supporters in close fought parliamentary seats in England's midlands and north. This leads the country's politicians to downplay the scale of the problems and ignore policies—such as rejoining the European Union's single market—that could alleviate them.

The bigger the gap between the dominant narrative and reality experienced by most people, the greater the political risk. A government needs to be honest about the challenges a country faces and put in place long-term strategies to address them. Voters do not expect miracles, but they need to feel confident that things are moving in the right direction. If not, the way is open for social unrest, a loss of respect for political institutions, and growing ungovernability.

[Sheilbh]

It's a bit of a weird piece - as you say latest in a long line pieces but seems to feel like it's the first/some brave bit of truth-telling rather than fairly commonplace.

It's just quite odd on the 70s, on diagnosis and solution. Also with it's talk of "dominant narrative" and "groups who benefited" it feels like someone who is trying to write about ideology and class without using those words for some reason (perhaps a bit of discomfort at where that might lead).

Personally of the "Britain is more fucked than it thinks" pieces, I've found the Adam Tooze and David Edgerton takes on this a bit more interesting, if more pessimistic.

[Josquius]

Maybe trying too hard and over stating things but the reply is a yes from me.

We are overdue for a reckoning for the narrative of the glorious 80s and the overwhelmingly awful on every measure 70s. Given 2008 did little to alter this fiction I am not hopeful of reality being restored any time soon. If ever.