Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

The country was split down the middle as regards EU membership, while the elite was perhaps 80% in favour, very difficult to achieve consensus.

Yeah I don't think it's an issue that'll be settled any time soon.

Reading Robert Saunders' book on the 1975 referendum and a really good article he did recently on the role of imperial nostalgia and the Commonwealth in both - and it is really striking how many of the arguments echo. Another echo is that both times among the most pro-Europe areas were Oxford and Cambridge.

For something as inconsequential as you make Brexit sound it sure took a lot of political time over the last decade in British politics.

Sorry I think I'm trying to say the opposite. It is contested and matters so any change will also suck up a huge amount of time and effort.

[Zanza]

For something as inconsequential as you make Brexit sound it sure took a lot of political time over the last decade in British politics.

Sorry I think I'm trying to say the opposite. It is contested and matters so any change will also suck up a huge amount of time and effort.

And I am saying that's silly if it is as inconsequential as you say. British politicians should spend their time on the other issues you name then.

[Sheilbh]

And I am saying that's silly if it is as inconsequential as you say. British politicians should spend their time on the other issues you name then.

I don't think it is inconsequential - being in the EU is hugely consequential constitutionally, EU law is everywhere and 4% of GDP over 10-15 years is not nothing. And it's not even just politics, it takes a lot of civil service work - going in or out is a huge administrative task.

The administrative work is inevitable but on the political side people really care on both sides and have very strong views and it is a very contested issue which will also always impact how much political time it consumes. For most of the time that was reflected in the fact that we had a minority government or one with a tiny majority. After the 2019 election it consumed a lot less time because there was a government with a very strong majority that could effectively control legislative time again.

[Zanza]

I can't follow your argument. On the one hand, you write that Brexit is just an "aggravating factor, but not cause" on the other hand it caused 4% GDP loss and significant constitutional turmoil. Those two somehow do not fit together for me.

I also have a different recollection of post 2019 election British politics than you. Seems to have taken significant time from HMG. What is true though is that it barely took legislative time. After all, parliament just rubber stamped the TCA within an hour or two.

[Josquius]

Yeah, brexit is obviously an issue in most things happening in the country today.
In some things it's the number one factor, in others just a factor of a factor. But add all these things together and you have death by a thousand slices.
Denying brexit is an issue because its not the number one factor for a lot of things is cope at best.

Also yes. Change for the sake of change is not good. Things can always get worse as brexit has shown.

The country was split down the middle as regards EU membership, while the elite was perhaps 80% in favour, very difficult to achieve consensus.

Pre brexit I'd say its something like 10-20% fanatically anti Europe, 10% Pro Europe , and the rest not giving much of a shit.

Once crap kicked off... I'd disagree with your split on the elite. Maybe a slight majority mildly against brexit but out shouted by the vehemance of those who hated Europe.

[Sheilbh]

I can't follow your argument. On the one hand, you write that Brexit is just an "aggravating factor, but not cause" on the other hand it caused 4% GDP loss and significant constitutional turmoil. Those two somehow do not fit together for me.

I don't think aggravating factor is diminishing it or saying it's inconsequential. It is an aggravating factor to the tune of growth being 4% of GDP lower than it would otherwise have been over 10-15 years with impact now being stronger than at the end of that period. As I say it is malaise not a shock. The impact is unevenly distributed and there are some sectors and businesses that have been/will be absolutely poleaxed. But in general it is small extra costs that will make selling a bit more difficult, growing a bit more difficult, buying a bit more expensive. Cumulatively that'll probably be to the tune of about 4% over 10-15 years.

But it isn't like covid, or energy costs, or other shocks. It isn't going to be the primary cause of much, instead it will be an aggravating factor of differing impact for everything.

I think it's hugely constitutionally important because the EU is a legal order whose laws have supremacy over domestic law (including constitutional law) in the event of conflict. So unplugging from that system (or joining it) is a big deal.

I don't agree that it caused constitutional turmoil - I think it caused political turmoil but they're not the same thing. I know it's not a popular view here - but I broadly side with the Talking Politics' guys view that it was how the British constitution works. There was a referendum which gave an instruction to parliament that most MPs profoundly disagreed with. MPs could not reach a position. So there was another election presenting two clear options on that issue and the public returned a large majority to one side. The referendum is a little bit innovative but that's basically the theory of how you resolve issues in our system. If parliament can't solve it you have an election, two sides with clear positions and the public choose - rinse and repeat as much as you need to until it's solved.

Even with prorogation - there have been similar controversies in Canada and Australia over the use of that power so it's not entirely unprecedented. In this case Johnson used it, within a week lower courts in England and Scotland had ruled on it and the largest possible panel of Supreme Court justices were hearing the case. Within a fortnight they had issued a unanimous ruling of all eleven justices on the panel that the prorogation was unlawful and setting it aside and parliament immediately re-opened as if it had not been adjourned. Again I don't think that indicates turmoil or vulnerability in the constitutional system but actually its robustness. I don't think it's the presence or lack of challenge that marks a stable constitutional system but how it deals with them - in that case swiftly, unanimously and in a way that was immediately accepted by all sides.

I also have a different recollection of post 2019 election British politics than you. Seems to have taken significant time from HMG. What is true though is that it barely took legislative time. After all, parliament just rubber stamped the TCA within an hour or two.

It took more time than it should - but practically within two months of the 2019 election covid hit. Between the withdrawal and the TCA there were two waves, all the furlough and other economic measures and the vaccine rollout had already started. There's no doubt it still took some time from government but there were other priorities at that point and it's impossible to counterfactual 2020, but it was wildly different than the 2016-20 years.

In part possibly because the vast majority of the work on future arrangement options had been done under Theresa May. A bit like the red wall where Theresa May increases the Tory vote by 6% but loses her majority, while Johnson increases it by 1.5% but wins an 80 seat majority.

[Tamas]

One part where I guess I agree with Sheilbh is that in our out is a moot point - we are out and if EU countries have just a semblance of sense they'll not entertain letting us back in for decades, and only after seeing a significant shift in British attitudes toward the whole EU project.

As I said earlier I think the optimal realistic approach for Labour is to gradually switch us to a Norway-like setup, which I am sure the EU would be more than happy to entertain. The process would of course be accompanied by the ceaseless complaints of the Farages and such, but the population would, I am fairly convinced, quietly support the approach - it is a good way to remove the economic damages without too openly admitting to ourselves that we were a country of fucking muppets, and at the end of it we'd have only lost the political influence within the EU - which might be better for all concerned.

[Sheilbh]

One part where I guess I agree with Sheilbh is that in our out is a moot point - we are out and if EU countries have just a semblance of sense they'll not entertain letting us back in for decades, and only after seeing a significant shift in British attitudes toward the whole EU project.

Yeah I do think that you shouldn't join (or shouldn't be allowed in) unless there is broad consensus across politics on it.

And I think there is even an echo here of the original sin of British membership. It was pitched entirely as a solution to economic problems and being about trade. The constitutional implications and political project behind the European Community were dismissed as scaremongering. It was the UK economy seeking a "common market miracle". I think there is an echo of that in the current focus on Europe as to help the economy without, I think, anyone making the case for the rest of the European project or much shift in opinion on that. Especially as the EU has moved on and will keep moving on - we're now at the stage of common debt, but Europe is still developing.

I think there needs to be broad consensus, as you say, around the EU project - not just that this will help our economy.

As I said earlier I think the optimal realistic approach for Labour is to gradually switch us to a Norway-like setup, which I am sure the EU would be more than happy to entertain. The process would of course be accompanied by the ceaseless complaints of the Farages and such, but the population would, I am fairly convinced, quietly support the approach - it is a good way to remove the economic damages without too openly admitting to ourselves that we were a country of fucking muppets, and at the end of it we'd have only lost the political influence within the EU - which might be better for all concerned.

I'm not so sure - I wonder what the numbers would look like once it got down to Norway: application of EU law without decision making, freedom of movement etc. I am not clear the support would hold up. It might happen and it might happen quickly once it does - but I think it's something a Labour government would be (rightly, in my view) very reluctant to touch in a first term.

Personally I also think the shift in opinion on immigration is to do with the end of free movement and the perception that it is now within the control of democratic domestic politics. Until the causes of that dramatic shift can be disentangled I'd be loath to put it at risk. I'd rather be a high immigration country without freedom of movement that's relaxed about it than a high immigration country with freedom of movement that's angsty about it.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I think the EU would be mad to let us in until there was, say, a settled 2:1 majority here in favour. That is not going to happen for a while, 25 years or so, so there is little point continuing to fuss about it.

However, I do hope that we are moving out of the pointless posturing phase and that the UK and the EU can develop a pragmatic relationship that benefits both as time passes. The "Windsor Framework" being step 1 in that direction.

[The Brain]

Yeah talk of rejoining the EU isn't meaningful. The UK picked a lane. A stupid lane, sure, but that's neither here nor there.

[Sheilbh]

Lots of pieces trying to explain Starmer as he is likely to be next PM - and this one is great:

Irish lessons taught Keir Starmer about power
A clue as to what drives the Labour leader lies in the years he spent trying to bring about change in Northern Ireland
Patrick Maguire
Monday March 06 2023, 12.01am, The Times

In Great Contemporaries, his little book of eulogies for the statesmen who shaped his age, Winston Churchill recalls the arrival of Charles Stewart Parnell in a Commons incapable of imagining the Irish outside of a pub brawl, confession booth or slum. Aloof, intense and effortlessly statesmanlike, this well-bred Protestant leader of Irish nationalism subverted the prejudice and paddywhackery that came all too easily to Punch cartoonists. "He is," wrote Churchill, "the most English Irishman ever yet seen."

After the week Westminster has endured, that line strikes a plangent chord. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and the Northern Ireland protocol loom as inescapably over Rishi Sunak as Parnell and home rule did over Gladstone. Now Sue Gray — daughter of Irish immigrants, sometime Armagh publican, former permanent secretary of Stormont's finance department — has quit the civil service for the Labour Party. There is no longer any doubt. Sir Keir Starmer is the most Irish Englishman yet seen in British politics, a mirror of Churchill's Parnell. By that I don't mean Starmer is of Irish descent like his predecessors Jim Callaghan or Sir Tony Blair, all four of whose children have the passport. He isn't. Nor that he merely loves Ireland, though like so many Englishmen unencumbered by family ties and unacquainted with the mundane and malign aspects of its national life, he does. These men have always been ripe for parody: consider George Bernard Shaw's Broadbent, the uptight Londoner in John Bull's Other Island. After one visit he is bewitched and beguiled. "I can hardly trust myself to say how much I like it," he says. "The magic of this Irish scene . . . "

Now read these lines from Starmer's last visit to Belfast, in January. Sentimentality only tends to intrude into his speeches when Ireland does. "After we were married, my wife and I took our first holiday here, because I wanted to show her Northern Ireland, the people and communities that I'd met," he said. "I was in love with this island and that love has stayed with me."

This stuff is sincerely meant. He spent new year 2023 on the Cork coast. In October, he told the Commons: "Donegal is a special place to me and my family." He plays five-a-side in that county's Gaelic football jersey. The island is to him what the Scillies were to Harold Wilson.

His has turned out to be a very Irish political project. Not just because a man called Doyle will text me to complain about any mistakes in this column. Or because of Gray, his new chief of staff, whose father Leo grew up on the Irish border in Fermanagh. Nor Morgan McSweeney, the Corkman who joined Labour on the day the Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998 and has spent the past three years purging the Corbynites. Having served his political apprenticeship in local government on Lambeth council, once an impregnable citadel of the hard left, his is a mission driven by his hatred for Labour's version of gombeenism — the boss politics of petty, parish-pump corruption so pervasive in the smalltown Ireland of his youth.

You can trace Starmer's professions of love for the island and its people to the five years he spent travelling back and forth to Northern Ireland as a human rights adviser to its new police force between 2003 and 2008. There we finally find the elusive essence of Starmer the politician. All he knows about power and how to wield it was learnt there.

Starmer, the bright young thing of the progressive Bar, had arrived restless and frustrated. Forcing changes to the law via the courts, in protracted, attritional cases against the police in particular, was a long and lonely process. "I was still a human rights lawyer railing against the system from the outside," he told me in the weeks before he won the Labour leadership three years ago. Northern Ireland showed him another way.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary, distrusted by nationalists as the uniformed wing of unionist supremacy, had been abolished and replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), overseen by a cross-community policing board. Starmer observed officers as they dealt with disorder at parades and deployed water cannon at riots. Every year he set dozens of recommendations for change, not unlike the missions for government he unveiled last month. Almost unthinkably, Starmer said in 2005 the PSNI had come to have a better human rights record than any other UK police force. "Some of the things I thought that needed to change in police services we achieved more quickly than we achieved in strategic litigation," Starmer told me 15 years later. "I came better to understand how you can change by being inside and getting the trust of people."

There it is: how you can change by being inside. Hence the jump from law to politics. That is how we make sense of Starmer and his breakneck transformations from campaigning defence barrister to director of public prosecutions, Bennite to born-again Blairite, Europhile to Brexiteer. His critics chalk these up as opportunistic compromises in the pursuit of power — a Tory attack line coming to a social media feed near you. But really it is that lesson from his time in Northern Ireland, methodically applied again and again.

To no other Labour leader has the place been as fundamental to their understanding of politics and power. How could it? When Callaghan arrived at the Home Office in 1967, on the eve of the Troubles, the few Whitehall officials who worked on Northern Ireland were also responsible for London taxis, British Summer Time and the nationalised pubs of Carlisle.

Blair may have brokered the Good Friday agreement but Starmer lived it, an unprecedented experiment in building an entirely new kind of state. Devolving power. Reforming institutions that looked unfixable. Long-term, incremental change. Doing, not thinking. Gray, who Starmer has chosen to run his own remodelled state, has — like McSweeney — lived it too.

It is not a vision of Labour politics that would have excited the young Starmer. Nor is it the Good Friday agreement of Mo Mowlam's secular sainthood. It is a politics of windowless conference rooms and ringbinders full of exacting recommendations on things like bespoke training courses for public sector employees. It is a politics of bureaucratic fixes and committees and annual reports. That is the unromantic Ireland that made the Labour leader a politician. Britain could be next.

[Jacob]

Sounds pretty alright to me.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah. I agree - I still worry about his political instincts and I think so far his team aren't great when pushed on issues. But I'm also not sure Sunak has very good political instincts and at this point it might not matter.

It's an odd thing about this moment that PM and Leader of the Opposition were both first elected in 2015 so have had incredibly rapid ascents. Which I think makes it difficult to understand what motivates them (similar to Cameron when he became Tory leader). They don't have the backstory or record that party leaders more normally do. Blair, May, Johnson and Truss were MPs for about 12 years before becoming leader, Brown for about 25 and Corbyn for about 30 - Cameron is the other exception.

And I thought this was really interesting in providing a bit of that grounding and context for Starmer. In it's way being locked in windowless rooms in negotiations through binders of agenda items is the traditional grounding for a Labour leader. They're very often committeemen whether in union or party politics who rise through the ranks - it's only when it's in extreme distress that the Labour Party will ever look for a potentially charismatic leader (while the Tories love a bit of flamboyance, clearly)

I'm still fascinated by the turn from Corbyn shadow cabinet and quite a left wing leadership campaign to Corbyn kicked out of the Labour Party, not going to be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate and an incredibly ruthless purge of the left in terms of parliamentary candidates.

[Josquius]

For all the cries of a conspiracy against the left you see from certain circles, the reality is with the way Corbyn has gone on he couldn't not have been kicked.

[Sheilbh]

I'm with you on Corbyn - and I think if any new leader wanted to try to credibly they'd put anti-semitism behind them and to re-build the party's relationship with the Jewish community, I don't think they could have had Corbyn hanging round. And it's very much Starmer's credit that I think he has achieved that.

The stuff on how many selections are being tilted in the favour of the leadership's candidate and how many credible candidates from the Labour left are not even making the long list is happening though. It's way beyond what Corbyn and the hard left manage when they were in charge, or even what New Labour did. That article is really interesting because I'd not made the connection of gombeen man politics and the hard-left - but I live next door to Lambeth and I can fully understand it if local government there is the campaign director's background.