That was apparent in Burnham’s shifting pronouncements on the European Union. Burnham never made a secret of his Remainerism when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester. Just last year he was trying to open up a conversation about rejoining. “I believe in unions of all kinds,” he bafflingly proclaimed: “the union of the UK. The EU benefited this country. Trade unions. People prosper more when they’re part of unions.” But the Makerfield constituency had voted Leave by two to one. Memories of the Remainer Burnham had therefore to be put out of Makerfield minds. Early in the by-election, he made the wise decision not to “re-run” the old arguments. That was enough to win the day; and now he is on track to be Prime Minister.

Plenty of Burnham’s old comrades-in-arms are, however, itching to re-run those arguments. Two days after the Makerfield by-election, on Saturday 20 June, the “March for Rejoin” descended on Westminster; 10 years of hurt never stopped them dreaming. The website advertising the march boasted a rather low-powered line-up. The only plausible A-lister was Neil Kinnock. He was joined by Layla Moran, a German MEP by the name of Terry Reintke, the anti-racism activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, and Madeleina Kay, author of Theresa Maybe in Brexitland (2018). Richard Morley, whose Rejoin EU Party got 35 votes in Makerfield, was there. Andy Burnham, who got 24,927, was not.

Burnham’s victory in Makerfield still should have put a spring in their step. The mere fact that a Remainer could win an old Leave seat, even if he had to hold his tongue, might be a sign that the Brexit divisions are a thing of the past, even that “Bregret” has taken hold and “Rejoin” is the future. Such a conclusion would be borne out by the polls. A stable majority of the British public, around 55%, supports the marchers’ mission. In the late 2010s it was common to hear the morbid claim that “cohort replacement” — the dying out of older Leave voters — made the eventual triumph of Remain a mathematical certainty. Generational patterns tell one half of the story; “Bregret” tells the other.

Burnham’s victory in Makerfield is not the only positive sign for Rejoin. One of the reasons it has been kept out of serious discourse is that nobody knows what rejoining looks like. Would we resume the status quo ante? Or would Britain, in punishment for its impertinence, have to swallow the Euro and Schengen Zone? Michel Barnier has recently said that the former ought to be on the table. For Rejoiners, that is an encouraging thing to hear.

The wind should have been in their sails. And yet they have the sad air of holdouts, of old men shouting at clouds. Despite the good conditions for Rejoin, they have not been able to sustain a mass movement. The “March for Rejoin” could not compete, in terms of numbers or élan, with Palestine marches, let alone the heights of the “People’s Vote”. They couldn’t get any celebrities; they couldn’t even bag Ed Davey. All they had to offer was a Who’s Who of Bluesky.

Burnham was right not to re-run the old arguments. Clearly that made sense in Leave-voting Makerfield; but he would be correct to apply the same instinct at the national level. I was too young to vote in the referendum in 2016, but I would have voted Remain, and nothing has happened in the 10 years since to shake my feeling that Brexit was, on balance, a mistake. Brexit has materially made my life worse in mundane, obnoxious ways. Living in Frankfurt last year, I had to wrestle with the German bureaucracy for months for a residence permit (eventually I gave up). And yet, I would sooner go through my German ordeal one thousand times over than join the “March for Rejoin”. I would stand in the queue at passport control for hundreds of hours if it meant I never had to hear the terms “Meaningful Vote”, “Malthouse”, or “Miller I and II”.

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How to end the Brexit shitshow

By Dominic Cummings

The march’s line-up was weak because the Rejoiners have been abandoned. Sir Keir Starmer was prince of Remain in the run-up to the 2019 general election; it was he who prevailed upon Jeremy Corbyn to gamble it all on a second referendum. He was the person responsible, second only to Corbyn himself, for Labour’s catastrophic defeat. He thus had every reason to forget about Brexit once he became party leader, and to hope that everybody else would forget about it too. When Sir Robert Peel was called to form a government in 1834, he, as an old anti-Reformer, had to address whether the Great Reform Act of 1832 was game for repeal. In the Tamworth Manifesto, the foundational document of the Conservative Party, Peel declared: “I consider the Reform Bill a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question, a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb, either by direct or insidious means.” Sir Keir, as he became Leader of the Opposition, had to perform the same trick. The “great constitutional question” had been resolved. Boris Johnson had won the general election; he “got Brexit done”. The second referendum gambit proved a miserable failure. It was now time, Starmer said, to move on, to “focus on the future”, to “look ahead”. These were clichés — evasive, self-exculpating clichés — but they were necessary. Without them, Starmer would have had no chance of becoming Prime Minister.

“Bregret”, though a real phenomenon, is simply no match for Brexit fatigue. It is telling that even the Liberal Democrats don’t want to open the can of worms. Their last manifesto promised to “fix the UK’s broken relationship with Europe”. This involved a “four-stage roadmap”, the fourth stage meekly “aiming” towards “seeking to rejoin the single market”. Aiming towards seeking, and not even EU membership — that was kicked into the long grass, as a vague “longer-term objective”. Jo Swinson learned the hard way the pitfalls of being a single-issue Remainer party; and Sir Ed was eager to drop that image. When the Lib Dems now urge Labour to drop their “torpor and timidity” on the EU, by which they merely mean that Labour should move to rejoin the single market, they are being timid themselves. Lord, make us an EU member — but not yet!

The most serious effort to put Rejoin on the agenda is Wes Streeting’s. This is probably a good strategy for internal party maneuvering. He lobbed it into the Makerfield by-election like a grenade; Burnham deflected it skillfully. Streeting, the shining hope of the Blairites, still found himself chided by the Master himself. “No one,” wrote Tony Blair in his essay, “was more passionately opposed to Brexit than I was.” But the negotiations, he continued, would be as backbreaking as the ones Monsieur Barnier put us through last time. Rejoin is no panacea. We should come to the negotiating table “from strength and not weakness”.

Absent any Prime Ministers past, present, or future, the case for Rejoin being made at the march in London has been left to an amateurish cadre of Remainer ultras. Their paladin — of course he is in the march’s line-up — is Steve Bray. The onetime Lib Dem candidate is infamous for his anti-Brexit campaigning stunts around Westminster; his magnum opus was when he interrupted Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a general election with “Things Can Only Get Better”. Thanks to 10 solid years of shouting “Stop Brexit!”, the poor man has become the face of the fevered mood of the late 2010s. Anthony Seldon’s new edited volume, The Brexit Effect, portrays him on the front cover, with his EU-flag cape and “Stop Brexit” top hat.

The British media has tended to cover Steve Bray as what he is: a sad, unhealthy obsessive. But he has been egged on in his pursuits, especially from abroad. In international coverage, Britain is still analyzed as “post-Brexit”; there is a general assumption that all its ills can be traced back to 2016. The idea of “Bregret” — and of a devoted, organized constituency for Rejoin — appears more often in the French and German broadsheets than it does in even The Guardian. Even in Denmark — not a country known for its sentimental Europhilia — Steve Bray is thus treated less as an odd curiosity than a serious public figure. “Steve Bray has been roaring about Brexit since the very beginning,” proclaims the Danish state broadcaster, “even when no one else could bear to hear about it.” The article goes on to suggest that this vox clamantis in deserto is being heard at last, and that when he shouts, he shouts for millions. The international Britain-watchers would be surprised, I think, by how little the Brexit debates reverberate today. Even Bray, this monomaniacal Remainer, has wider horizons. In April, as the Mandelson scandal was entering its third or fourth phase, Bray was blasting out Barry Manilow’s “Mandy”. What’s he got against the erstwhile European Commissioner for Trade? What does any of this have to do with Brexit?

The most interesting thing about Bray is that he was not political before 2016. Nothing could better encapsulate the problem with the Europhile, Remainer ideology. It has no deep roots in British culture. It was a synthetic product of the moment that followed the referendum. Practically nobody in Britain was waving around EU flags before 2016; you would have been looked at funny if you solemnly sang “Ode to Joy”. Nobody in Britain attached any romantic warmth to Brussels. But in the early hours of 24 June 2016, a kind of ethnogenesis occurred: at long last, the “British European” stepped forth. People who had never previously given much thought or care to the EU all of a sudden decided that it ought to be at the heart of their identity. It was, in a sense, a familiar, primitive impulse: initiates to the tribe marked themselves with the acronym “FBPE”, defining themselves against a Faragist outgroup. It became a powerful means of signifying what sort of person you were — softly Left, but in a “moderate”, “sensible” way; attentive to the “experts” and wary of “Russian disinformation”. Once the Remainers were routed, once Johnson had won, that Europhile ideology disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. If we do ever rejoin the EU, it will be for the hard-headed reasons we voted to remain in the EEC in 1975, the reasons most of the 48% in 2016 voted the way they did. It will have to be for banal reasons of economic security and strategic self-interest. It will be the vindication of George Osborne’s “Project Fear”, not of Steve Bray.

That is one big problem for the Rejoiners, one reason their grand vision isn’t taking off in quite the way the polls say it should. Another is that they are ideologically incapable of exploiting the situation at hand. There is obvious, tangible evidence that Brexit failed on its own terms — the Boriswave. But that is unwieldy material for Steve Bray and company. Among the Rejoiners it is an article of faith that Brexit cut Britain off from the world, reflecting and spawning an inward-looking rainy fascist island. This is hard to square with the simple fact that the government which enacted Brexit also oversaw the sharpest increase in immigration in British history. If neither side got what it wanted out of Brexit, in fact, it is natural to begin wondering whether Brexit mattered in the first place.

What a horrifying thought, perhaps the most horrifying of all, to the small group of protestors lining the streets of London 10 years after the referendum. Of course Brexit mattered: it was the point of no return in Britain’s decline, except only for the salvation offered now by Rejoin. There’s a sunk-cost fallacy: Brexit must really have mattered, or else why would these people have invested so much time and energy into fighting it? But the facts tell a different story.

Brexit was not what most of its supporters probably wanted it to be — a formal repudiation of decades of immigration policy. Nor was it what most of its opponents, in a spirit of Schadenfreude, wanted it to be — an economic catastrophe, the moment everything turned for the worse. On most economic graphs the financial crisis of 2008 appears as the real turning point. Brexit was, at most, a catalyst in Britain’s decline. Whatever economic consequences Brexit had were, in any case, swallowed up early on by the pandemic. We left the EU on 31 January 2020; 52 days later, Boris Johnson announced the lockdown. It will fall to the economic historians to disentangle the consequences of one from the other. But suffice to say, the present state of the EU hardly lends support to the notion that Britain would be doing much better if the referendum had gone the other way. Nor was Brexit especially significant constitutionally. It was not even the most constitutionally consequential referendum called by David Cameron: that accolade surely belongs to Scotland’s independence referendum two years earlier, which put a far more ancient and profound union on the line. In the years since Brexit we have discovered, much to our chagrin, that we are not as sovereign as the Leavers would have had us believe. We may be free from Brussels, but we are still shackled to Strasbourg. Theresa May was wrong about many things; but she might have been on to something when she laid down the bargain in 2016 of Britain remaining in the EU and leaving the ECHR. Remove all the passions of 2016–9, enter the cold light of day, and Brexit doesn’t seem to matter as much as everyone thought it did.

This, I think, is the conclusion that most people in Britain, Remainers and Leavers, have surreptitiously come to. Perhaps 55% of the British public really would rejoin the EU, if they could flick a switch and make it so. But how many would rank it in their top five or 10 priorities? How many really think, the way most people on the continent seem to, that Brexit was the defining moment in Britain’s recent history, that 2016 offers the master-key for understanding all that has happened since? Probably not many. What people wanted in 2019 — even many Remainers — was to “get Brexit done”; they were bored of it all, and there is no sign whatsoever that that boredom has abated. There is no clamoring, except from this small band of Rejoiners, for returning Brexit to the center of the national drama. It is bizarre, in retrospect, how much symbolic significance was attached to Brexit while these debates were occurring. It is quaint to recall how these arcane questions were indulged in, and with such gusto, all on the precipice of what proved to be a far greater crisis — the pandemic and lockdown. Hence the instinct, when beholding Steve Bray and his ilk, to feel a mixture of bemusement and pity. They are the only ones still fighting those old battles. The country, including Andy Burnham, has moved on. We are left to wonder not only why these people still care so much, but why the rest of us ever did.

The EU — the European Economic Community, as it was — is one of those institutions. In the years before the referendum, I made several arguments in favor of leaving. I said, if you look around, what do you see? You see a mix of stagnation, anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-future, bureaucracy — bureaucracy dedicated to Leninist bureaucratic centralism in Brussels, where everything will improve if everything is uniformly controlled by the Commission. But they’ve got low growth, high debt, nightmare pension systems, nightmare demographics, and immigration that is out of control and fueling the rise of extremist parties.

If you look at what’s happening technologically, increasingly it’s China and California which are dominating, and Europe is not in the game. Again, that was regarded as a very eccentric argument to make 10 years ago, but now it’s an obvious, very mainstream thing. 

I also argued that the regime in Britain is knackered and is failing, and the institutions are knackered, and they’re not going to be able to cope with the world that’s coming. That was an extremely niche view in 2015, regarded, generally speaking, as crazy. Now, of course, you can go on Twitter today, and you can see the vast majority of Westminster is now having to face up to the reality that the old parties are knackered, old Whitehall is knackered, the old media ecosystem is knackered, the universities have lost huge credibility, etc. etc. 

Also obvious is that Britain now has huge problems. In all sorts of ways we have not done what the Vote Leave plan was — and what we started doing in 2019 and 2020 — because the Tories stopped it all. But is the answer to that to say, “Oh yeah, we need the bureaucratic centralism of the European Commission, we need more EU AI acts, we need more of that kind of regulation, that’s the future”? Does anyone in their right mind really think that? 

So how does Westminster respond to this now? Westminster doesn’t want to face all the technology issues, never has done. Our political elites and Whitehall elites, for complicated reasons from the Sixties and Seventies, very deliberately and explicitly stepped back from thinking about frontier technology. 

So now people don’t want to look at those questions. Their response now is: instead of looking at all the very, very obvious big things like our totally farcical procurement system, totally farcical planning system, totally farcical energy, totally farcical housing, totally farcical MoD, totally farcical welfare, a Westminster and Whitehall that is pathological about on technology and doesn’t want to take it seriously — the answer to those problems is to rejoin the EU. 

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Why Brexit is back

By Mary Harrington

Why? Because the old people from the old system are determined not to face reality, determined not to face the future. They just want to retreat to their comfort zone, which is having more stupid culture wars about Brexit, because that’s where they’re happy. They’re pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow a great thing, when you can barely even see the single market in the data. If you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it’s super bad for the EU, you have a perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market. Westminster doesn’t want to face any of those problems either.

Go back to the Eighties and look at the newspapers at the time and the news at the time. There’s obviously a lot of bitter arguments, but the political class is actually engaged with the real issues of the British economy. That is actually what dominates the news, and you have a whole set of people reading things and arguing about them and making complicated arguments in public about what we have to do on privatization, you name it. 

You look at the 10 years since Brexit and it’s basically characterized by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. It’s a constant soap opera, and both sides — both sides in the sense of the kind of inside-Westminster Left and Right — have been much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020. The Guardian, the Telegraph, Labour and the Tories were happier arguing about that and arguing about Brexit than they were about dealing with any of these other actual core problems.

And Whitehall doesn’t care about these problems. Whitehall cares about preserving existing power and existing institutions and existing budgets, and it cares, most importantly, about itself retaining control over its own personnel caste system. That is its actual priority, and everything will always be sacrificed to that, as you saw in Covid, as you could see in Ukraine, as you can see on everything.

So now you’ve got stagnant growth, you’ve got completely pathological institutions that actually need real-terms increases in money just to stand still, and you’ve got political parties and senior civil servants completely dedicated to not changing how anything works. 

If you put those three things together, you’ve got what we can see all around us, which is every part of the system now failing, and those failings interacting with each other in various ways. So you’ve got a shitshow in that you can’t deport people, and you’re scraping crazy Afghans off the street and putting them in prison, but then that means you’ve got to let all these people out, and then that means you’ve got X, and then that means you’ve got Y, and then that means the budgets for these things are all knackered as well. So all these things are now starting to ping into each other. You haven’t just got one defunct bureaucracy, with internal silos going haywire, you’ve also got, horizontally, them all smashing into each other and breaking — and no one has authority to deal with the interactions between all these different parts of the system.

But in all sorts of ways, Britain is actually the best-placed country in the West. In practical terms, it is much easier to do real regime change in Britain than it is in America or anywhere in Europe, because of our unwritten constitution and the weird way in which the powers of the Prime Minister actually work. So, unlike Trump, the Prime Minister can go in today and say, “Fired, fired, fired, fired, fired. This government department is closed, and I’m creating a new one.” The civil service has to do it, and the courts can’t stop it, or even judicially review these things. In no other Western country is that possible. 

That is why you see two things happening on the Left now: one, the plan to change the electoral system to PR (proportional representation), and then, secondly, discussions about how you encode protections for the civil service to make it extremely difficult to actually do what I’m talking about. What they’re thinking is — and it’s actually logical from their point of view — that if you pass certain kinds of legislation defending the current Whitehall system, and then you do PR, you make it extremely hard for anybody coming in to actually change anything. You completely embed the current catastrophic situation, which is what they want to do.

What they’re terrified of is Nigel Farage doing some kind of Doge-type thing and saying, “Right, I’m going to bring in 20 hotshots, fire all the permanent secretaries, put them in charge of this, use the actual powers of the PM, close departments, open them, fire people, and then pass a whole series of primary legislation, repeal the Human Rights Act, repeal the Equality Act, reform how judicial review works, bin the Climate Change Act.” You go through 15 things, you whack them all in year one with primary legislation.

If you have an actual serious list of these things, the right way to do it would be that you draft all this legislation in opposition, you make the case in the election, in the manifesto, you win on the Thursday, and on Monday morning, these bills start hammering through into parliament. And you also make clear to the House of Lords that if anyone thinks that they can fuck around, we’re going straight at the King, we’ll appoint 600 new peers, and it’ll be blitzkrieg on you guys.

You smash that through in primary legislation, so you have that combination of primary legislation changing fundamentals, and you actually use the constitutional powers of the PM, as I’ve discussed, and the whole thing starts to shift. That’s what they are terrified of — correctly from their point of view — in Whitehall, in Labour, in the Inner Temple, etc. etc. And that’s why you start to see this mix of “Rejoin the EU”, PR, censorship, and embedding legislation to protect the civil service. They’re thinking that if they can bring off some combination of those things, then they can get to the state they want to, which is that they don’t have to worry about elections anymore. And they’ve convinced themselves that everyone who doesn’t agree with them now is fascist. Go back to pre-referendum: mainstream people in the system in Westminster hated me, thought I was crazy, stupid, wrong, but they didn’t say I was actually a fascist who should be in jail. Now, their argument about people like me is that we’re actually fascists who should be in jail and shouldn’t be allowed to actually participate in democratic politics.

So almost all the positive things that we could have changed after Brexit, Westminster, the Tories and Labour have been adamant in refusing to do. But just because of inertia, we haven’t adopted various of the EU regulations, and therefore we haven’t shot ourselves in both feet the way that Brussels has. As the old system fails, something new is being born — but for the moment, it is unclear exactly what.

***

This essay was adapted from Dominic Cummings’ interview on the Anglofuturism podcast.

For Cameron, it was an important symbolic victory, showing that Britain had a “special status inside the EU”. For his fellow EU premiers, it was a bewildering demand, especially when the man making it had assured them that he was desperate for the UK to remain inside the EU. It proved to be more revealing than either side realised, for its logic pointed to Brexit. Yet five months later, when the British electorate did collectively decide that the UK should exit the EU, the idea that the UK could do such thing was treated as an outcome that those involved in the negotiations could scarcely have envisaged.

When Cameron began his round of travels to European capitals in the middle of 2015 to try to win friends prior to the renegotiations, he wasn’t taken particularly seriously. Perhaps, paying too much attention to British political punditry, his fellow EU leaders had not expected the Conservatives to win a parliamentary majority at the general election that May. Perhaps they had not noticed that Cameron had included in the Conservative manifesto an assurance that any government he headed would not enter another coalition without first securing a commitment to a referendum on EU membership. Or perhaps, since they wouldn’t have contemplated doing such a thing themselves, they did not take Cameron to mean what he said — that if the British people voted for Brexit, Brexit is what would then happen.

Most EU governments, not least the German one, were also preoccupied with other matters and would remain so throughout Cameron’s ill-fated renegotiations. By the early summer, the risk for Angela Merkel was not whether British voters would choose to leave the EU but whether her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s attempt to expel Greece from the Euro would succeed. Only weeks after it failed — in part because Merkel made some small concessions to the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras — the German Chancellor threw Europe into tumult by upending the EU’s common asylum rules to cope with the numbers of refugees and migrants travelling from Turkey into southern Europe. By the time, in February 2016, Cameron sought to finalise his agreement, Merkel’s focus had shifted to procuring a definitive agreement with Recep Tayyip Erdogan to return migrants without strong asylum claims back to Turkey in exchange for reactivating accession talks for Ankara.

The fallout of these events seems to have blindsided Cameron. There could have scarcely been a less propitious time for any British government to have been demanding concessions from other EU states than a moment when opt-outs from the Euro, the EU’s asylum policy and Schengen – the borderless travel area that covers most of the EU – protected the UK from the crises with which most other member states were grappling.

But Cameron did not help himself. If he had acted like someone who really believed that the Eurozone crisis had so destabilised the UK’s membership of the EU that exit had to be a serious option, he might have secured his fellow leaders’ attention. Instead, he plunged into negotiations in Brussels according to a timetable in part constructed to help George Osborne become the next Conservative leader with a Remain campaign organisation already assembled and ready to go in London.

With no currency in the EU’s present-tense difficulties with which to bargain and unable to instil fear about the future, he all too predictably ended up with very little beyond the promise that the UK did not have to pretend it believed in the EU’s stated purpose. When he returned home, he had to ask British voters to Remain, having just put on an overt demonstration of how little influence the UK could exercise in a Union whose founding text he had disowned.

But the possibility that Cameron’s lack of guile and their inattention to British problems would lead to the UK leaving the EU eluded many in the EU too. (Whether it did Merkel must remain an open question.) In part, this complacency rendered the referendum result a psychic blow. If some teleological historical force is supposed to be the ultimate agent of ever-closer Union in Europe, then, the EU is not supposed to shrink, however “cold” — a word Merkel once used to describe Cameron’s view of the Union ­— the vision of passing leaders of individual member states.

Brexit would also prove a colossal practical distraction: as Emmanuel Macron later complained, it created “thousands of hours of work for European leaders”. Believing that there was a reasonable likelihood that those Remainers at Westminster who wanted to prevent Brexit would eventually prevail was easier than working out how the EU could reconstruct a different kind of relationship with the UK as a simultaneous competitor and partner.

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The EU is flunking its Brexit opportunity

By Helen Thompson

That Brexit would bequeath Ireland a serious problem, allied to the obvious difficulties Northern Ireland would pose to any government actually procuring parliamentary assent for a withdrawal treaty, only reinforced this impulse. Now that Brexit has occurred, Northern Ireland has become instead the most fraught component of the EU’s relations with the UK. This is in part because Northern Ireland remains the UK’s primary Brexit weakness. As a matter of legal principle, the Northern Ireland Protocol weakens the UK Union, and its practical operation destabilises Northern Irish politics. So long as Joe Biden is President, it is a serious complication to the UK’s Atlantic relations, too.

But the Northern Ireland Protocol is also the EU’s burden. Brussels must now reconcile its expressed commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its need to defend the borders of the Single Market,  in a situation where over the next decade or so there could be a border poll resulting in Northern Ireland becoming an inherent part of the EU’s legal order. Whether this is a prospect that EU governments can contemplate with any sanguineness remains to be seen.

Only the French government, after Macron came to power in May 2017, consequentially dissented from the effort to keep open the possibility of the UK staying in the EU, without which a different outcome in Northern Ireland might have materialised. Twice in 2019, Macron threatened to veto the extensions to the Article 50 deadline that first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson had to request. As Macron showed that October when he vetoed the start of accession talks for North Macedonia and Albania, the French President doesn’t believe that the EU is strengthened by sheer size. He thinks the Union needs to look like it is exercising power. For him, Brexit didn’t have to be stopped; rather, it had to be self-evident that it has deleterious consequences for Britain.

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Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

From the start, Macron also conceived the UK’s impending departure from the EU as an opportunity to reform the Eurozone by making it a debt-bearing Union, and delineating a more hierarchical EU with a Franco-German core and a ring of outer members retaining national monetary sovereignty. His opening bid, articulated in his big “Initiative for Europe” speech at the Sorbonne in September 2017, met much more British-style resistance than he envisaged.

His subsequent success during the first months of the pandemic in persuading Merkel to accept some shared debt may well prove only a temporary victory; since NextGenerationEU is for the EU and not just the Eurozone, it has also only deepened the tangle between the EU’s legal order and the Eurozone. But the chances that last year’s agreement to issue EU sovereign debt would have been realised had the UK still been inside the EU are slim, as indeed they would have been if the 2019 British General Election had led to a second referendum.

Macron is the heir of a long line of Pan-Europeanists who have believed, for geopolitical reasons, that the UK can have no part in a European economic and political union. But, like Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi who founded the Paneuropean movement in the 1920s, Macron strongly believes that the UK needs to be absorbed into a well-defined European security system. For Macron, there has never been a reason why Brexit should disrupt the bilateral Franco-British military relationship entrenched in the 2010 Lancaster House Treaties. Nor does he think that the EU’s own security architecture should constrain how the UK participates in collective European security matters, hence his push in 2018 to establish a structure for military action around the EU’s border in the European Intervention Initiative — which includes the UK.

As, in late 2019, it became clear that Johnson was likely to prevail over the parliamentary Remainers, Merkel joined Macron in calling for a post-Brexit European Security Council. But, emboldened by the Conservatives’ substantial parliamentary majority, Johnson has proved less pliable to Macron’s strategic ambitions than May. Contrary to the French President’s hopes, Johnson’s post-election government decided that foreign and security policy should not be any part of the negotiations on the future UK-EU relationship.

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The fate of the 'Anywhere' people

By Robert Tombs

In the absence of any confederal European architecture to ground broad foreign policy co-ordination, there has been little to constrain the divergent paths the UK and the EU have taken towards China since the middle of last year. To some degree, the weight of the UK’s historical relationship with Hong Kong and the nature of Germany’s deep economic relationship with China has made this separation near inevitable. But the British and French governments have pretty similar objectives in the Indo-Pacific. It is the absence of something akin to a European Security Council that ensures there will be less internal European pressure on Berlin to lead an EU policy that extends beyond economic and climate matters, and begins to engage with the probable future pressure points on access in the South China Sea.

Whether it is China or Northern Ireland, Britain’s relationship with the EU is beset with uncertainty. On Northern Ireland, Macron insists that the UK must stick to what it negotiated. But the Johnson government won’t take responsibility for protecting the Single Market any more than the EU will treat the Democratic Unionists as their problem. The present impasse has arisen from a series of misjudgements in the UK and continental capitals about the likely outcomes arising from the political constraints at work, played out against a backdrop of a world being transformed by Sino-American strategic rivalry. This is a fracture in European geopolitics for which neither the UK government nor the EU prepared. Now it is all too evident, the question is whether there is the political space for a grand bargain to repair it.

But its latest variants are not very contagious and cause little harm to the body politic. The National Farmers’ Union tries to revive Project Fear with stories of vast herds of Australian cattle, while Oxford dons insist that Rhodes Must Fall — for the Empire, so some of them insist, is the key to Brexit. One of their most vocal members, indeed, co-authored a book explaining that Brexit was due to “a nostalgia for a time when life was easier, and Britain could simply get rich by killing people of colour and stealing their stuff”. So here is the anti-Brexit cause boiled down to its primitive components: vested interest, and visceral alienation.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Brexit battle has quickly receded into memory. Was it really only five years ago? We are already commemorating the date: “Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars / And say ‘These wounds I had on Brexit day’.” In 2016, leaving the EU seemed a British eccentricity, whether to be praised or blamed. On one hand, it was the product of domestic politics: David Cameron’s miscalculated effort to silence the Tory Eurosceptics. On the other, it was the long-term result of a peculiar national history: having suffered less than elsewhere from the wars, revolutions and foreign occupations of the 20^th century, the British were far less attached to the “vision” of a United Europe, and hence far less patient with its failings.

But five years on, Brexit seems to be one symptom of broader changes in Europe and the world. At a political level, it was a popular reaction not only against globalisation, but against the political manifestation of globalisation, in which, for a generation, national governments had ceded increasing powers to international bodies. Peter Mair, in his already classic work Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, called it the “withdrawal of the elites” into supranational institutions, in which the “horizontal” approval of other politicians outweighed the “vertical” support of the electorate.

This was the catalyst for “taking back control”. In many, if not all, democratic countries, there have been manifestations of this desire, invariably messy and disruptive. Brexit turned out to be a relatively quick and clean solution, compared, at least, with the turmoil in the United States or the political paralysis in France.

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Why Remain lost

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

At the international level, the brief period of Western (above all American) hegemony after the fall of the Soviet Union was sharply ended by the failures in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Libya. This was underlined by the massive presence of China, and more particularly by the sudden collapse of optimistic expectations that China could be integrated into an international order created and still led by the West. For critics of Brexit, leaving the EU inevitably weakens Britain and undermines Western solidarity at the worst moment. At best, they argue, we shall be isolated, and at the mercy of great power blocs, whereas European membership gave us protection and a voice within a mighty organisation that could maintain itself against the United States and China. We shall see.

But at the moment, things look different. The EU is embarrassingly marginal in world politics. Most of its members do not want, and are not powerful enough, to play “the great game”, and so the EU itself is only a simulacrum of the Great Power. It has a flag, but not an army; and indeed, not a policy. Its dominant member, Germany, is increasingly dependent on China for its exports, and on Russia for its energy.

The EU cannot be relied on to play the smallest role in areas of danger: the Middle East, the Pacific or Africa. France’s failing attempt to hold back Islamist onslaught in central Africa depends on a few RAF helicopters. Deterring Russian adventures in the Baltic depends on a handful of British units in their traditional “tripwire” role. Should we not be asking ourselves why we are doing this, for an EU that is feckless and hostile, and whose main endeavour seems to be causing trouble in Northern Ireland?

And then there was the pandemic, a sudden materialisation of the dangers of the 21^st century: the perils of globalisation; the ruthless irresponsibility of China; the absence of effective global organisations; the complacency of the West … But nowhere so far have the political consequences been more severe than in the EU. It would be tedious and unnecessary to rehearse its failings. Suffice it to say that it proved worse than irrelevant in the sort of situation that its defenders commonly used to justify it: a crisis that “crosses frontiers”.

In this case, the EU’s member states had to restore frontiers and rely on themselves for vaccines. The glorious vision of a “sovereign Europe” has faded. Even Emmanuel Macron, the only remaining federalist champion of substance, relies on various permutations of Project Fear. Like the old Austro-Hungarian empire, the EU continues because it cannot be either reformed or replaced. But in neither case did that prevent its members from quarrelling.

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Did we really 'take back control'?

By Philip Cunliffe

What has become of the 48.1% of the British electorate — 16 million people — who voted in 2016 to Remain? The largest group (43% of them), according to Lord Ashcroft’s exit poll on 23 June, feared the economic consequences of leaving, and another 20% feared national isolation. Only 9% felt strong attachment to the European vision. As the fears of post-Brexit disaster have evaporated, and the EU has shown itself increasingly accident-prone and intransigent, support for the EU logically declines, as recent polls suggest.

Moreover, the Remain vote is dispersed among several parties. Only one of these remains politically formidable and openly “Rejoin”: the Scottish National Party. That it should cling to the EU is understandable: only EU membership (whatever the cost) makes independence feasible. But Europhilia is a waning asset. Every blunder or failing in Brussels must make the SNP’s strategy less attractive to rational voters. Its failure to win even 50% of voters in the recent Scottish elections is eloquent.

The same logic applies to Northern Ireland: unity with the South might have seemed attractive to middle-of-the-road voters as long as Britain and Ireland were both EU members. However justifiably annoyed Northern voters might be with both London and Brussels, for Northern Ireland to break fully from its main economic partner would be far worse. If the Protocol is either made to work or — which seems increasingly likely — junked, then unification will more than ever seem something that many Irish people on both sides of the border aspire to, as long as it is not actually imminent.

So that leaves the rather small number of British voters — and the even smaller number of English voters — who remain unreservedly attached to, or at least nostalgic about, the EU. Can anyone imagine a serious politician sounding a clarion call for Britain to return to the fold? The most they seem to be aiming for is to keep the maximum degree of linkage. Keeping Australian beef out, while allowing Irish beef in. Trying to retain regulatory alignment, presumably so as to maintain Britain as a lucrative market for EU goods (hence our huge trade deficit) while hampering trade with other continents.

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Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Other than that, we have the Omega Variant of Brexit — the culture wars. How many of the 150 or so Oxford dons who are boycotting Oriel College because of its failure to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes do you think voted “Leave”? I suppose the culture wars could be dismissed as froth, as perhaps in a few years they will be: “Because,” as Burke wrote, “half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink… pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

Nevertheless, as one who belongs to the Acrididea order myself, I do find it interesting. George Orwell observed 80 years ago that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality” — though today I think he might have to add America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. The “decolonisation” movement in all its ramifications seems to be a rejection of national identity, or at least of those identities which are stigmatised as pillars of an oppressive world system — a view that manages to leave genuine oppressors in the clear.

Orwell went on to criticise the “negative, querulous attitude… the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power”. Except that now, they have considerable power within our cultural institutions. Is this the fate of the Anywhere people? Aspiring to be citizens of the world, but discontented wherever they live? Supporting the EU. Supporting “decolonisation”. La lutte continue!

I am not starry-eyed about rural Britain or the state of farming. My last book, English Pastoral, was about the mess we’re in and why. We seem unable to understand — or care enough about — creating food systems that reconcile farming with nature. There is, whether we want to hear it or not, a collapse in farmland biodiversity. Since more than 70% of Britain is farmed, that collapse is devastating. And yes, a lot of this happened under the EU’s frequently barmy Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

We got into our current mess by copying the intensive farming methods of other countries after WWII: hyper-specialisation; mono-cultures; ending mixed rotational farming; making fields ever bigger; using artificial nutrients, herbicides and insecticides; over-ploughing; and separating animal livestock into intensive systems that are grain or soy-based — all propped up with an armoury of medicines, wormers and insecticides.

We took some of the edges off these policies by being in the EU, which regulated and constrained our agriculture (it was quick to ban antibiotics as growth promoters, for example — something that’s still legal in the US). For better or worse, we now have farming standards and sensibilities aligned with the EU.

Post-Brexit, we had a choice. Would we ask British farmers to compete with the rest of the world on equal terms — or not? Competing on equal terms under free trade would mean we’d have to follow the methods of other countries — probably of the world’s most intensive farming landscapes.

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Brexit is a betrayal of Britain's farmers

By James Rebanks

But we wanted something better on our islands. We were told that Brexit could be “green”, with farmers protected and rewarded for working with nature, not against it. We were told repeatedly by the Government that it wouldn’t sign trade deals that would allow imports of food produced in systems with lower standards. We were told that allowing them was unfair and would undermine efforts here to do better. Our farmers, we were told, would be asked to do exceptional things — and supported, but not through the blunt EU tool of propping up farmer incomes.

Many farmers were up for that. I was one of them. On our farm in the Lake District, we’re planting 25,000 trees, restoring three miles of hedgerow, restoring our old wildflower hay meadows, re-wiggling rivers and creating wetlands.

It is possible to find sensitive ways to produce great food, while helping repair nature in the British landscape. But when we signed the trade deal with Australia, we killed this idea stone dead. Now, we are asking British farmers to compete with Australian farmers on equal terms of free trade — regardless of the impact that competition might have. Regardless of their production methods and systems.

Welfare and environmental standards are completely different in Australia. According to the RSPCA, Australian farmers are legally allowed to keep hens in battery cages and sows in stalls. They can feed hormones to and hot-brand their cattle and take the skin off sheep in a practice called “mulesing” (perhaps don’t Google it). Of course, Australians can make their own rules and live by them, and you can make your own mind up about each of these practices. Not all Australian farms use them, but that’s not the point. The point is that all of these things are legal in Australia and banned in Britain.

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The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

The problem is not that Australian farmers are terrible or have an awful product. I’ve been on many Australian farms. They are fine people, and some are exceptional farmers (I have learnt a lot from them). They operate in an entirely different ecological and economic context, and the British people have a different sensibility about key issues. There is no credible defence for allowing foreign farmers to import their produce into our country, when they can undercut us by farming beneath standards we insist on here. Especially if this fact is then hidden from shoppers by vague labelling, or hidden in processed or cooked foods.

No one wants our farmers to achieve the scale of Australian sheep farms. The British landscape can’t scale up enough to compete, without grave damage to its remaining biodiversity. Ideally, we need a landscape of small fields with hedges, wildflowers, grasses, scrub and trees — which allow our native flora and fauna to thrive. There is no doubt that we can feed ourselves well from better farming, if we get serious about it and support it.

But this week British farmers realised that, for all the “green” talk, we are now being asked to do more (not less) of the things that got us into our current mess. Get big. Get efficient. Or get out.

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Tories have to choose between beef and liberty

By Danny Kruger

There is, theoretically, an emerging system (called “Environmental Land Management Schemes” or ELMS) that might reward farmers for promoting public goods — nature — alongside their farming. But in practice it is nowhere to be seen, probably highly bureaucratic, and almost certainly lowers the income of farmers relative to the old CAP system — therefore increasing the pressures to exploit land more, not less.

The problem is ideological — it is all based on a misunderstanding that we can be as “efficient” as North America on our productive land and have nature round the edges. We can’t. We actually need patchwork mixed farming landscapes that replicate our native ecosystems. Farming intensification robs us of that. This isn’t debatable, it is the ecological truth.

In the wake of the Australian free trade agreement, we will be told the usual nonsense about cheapening food for the poorest in our society. (The people who say this don’t care two hoots about poverty in any other context.) In reality, cheapening food is more often a mask for the horrific cheapening of labour, and a sop for people caught on the wrong end of systemic inequalities. Let the plebs eat KFC — but for God’s sake don’t raise taxes and redistribute wealth.

This should be seen for what it is. A displacement. A scam. A government that won’t put its own land and its people first isn’t worthy of the name. It is little more than a self-serving ideological cult.

Farmers are drawing a simple and obvious conclusion: intensify or die. And this is a disaster for the British landscape: a total, unmitigated disaster that will unfold over the years.

Perhaps worst of all, for me, is that this deal has killed support among farmers for higher welfare and ecological standards and regulation. I can’t win that argument with my farming friends now — not now they’re unprotected from being undercut by imports. They say, “We are competing with lower standards … We don’t run fucking butterfly farms”. Sadly, they have to do what they have to do, and we will all be the poorer for it.

It was a striking reversal. For many of its partisans, Brexit had been cast in terms of restoring freedoms — freedoms that had allegedly been lost to an overbearing European superstate, whose pettifogging bureaucrats had tied the nation up in red tape, and whose arrogant judges trampled over ancient liberties with new-fangled human rights. The winning slogan of the Vote Leave campaign — “Take back control” — spoke to this sense of political disempowerment and drift, and offered the tantalising prospect of granting people more sway over their own lives.

Yet within weeks of leaving the EU, Britain endured the most drastic restrictions on national freedoms seen in peacetime. How was it that the promise of greater freedoms was so quickly dashed? How was it that a democratic bid for greater popular power ended up so powerless? Could the cycle of lockdowns enacted since March 2020 snuff out the gains of Brexit?

Britain was, of course, far from being the only country to enter lockdown. For supporters of the EU, the global pandemic was a salutary reminder of the realities of global interdependence, puncturing the nationalistic conceit that a country could choose its own fate. Yet the cycle of lockdowns since March 2020, as well as the Government’s shambolic response to the pandemic, reveals more about the failures of British politics than it offers moral fables about global interdependence.

It wasn’t Remainer revanchists in the People’s Vote campaign and the Liberal Democrats who put the nation under house arrest, but a British government elected to enact Brexit. It was a Conservative government, widely castigated for its allegedly crude populism, that palmed off its authority on to a technocratic body, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), to oversee lockdown. What this tells us is that the impulse to curb civil society and to rule through unelected institutions on the basis of technocratic authority is not an imported problem. The authority of Sage revealed that the EU was not a foreign imposition, but that it grew out of problems that were deeply embedded in the relations between British state and society.

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Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Three national lockdowns later, it is easy to forget just how exceptional Brexit was. It represented the first secession from the EU, an organisation that had hitherto only ever expanded to absorb more states. It was the first major EU referendum that was neither ignored (as had happened with the French and Dutch referendums of 2005 and Greek referendum of 2015), nor put to another vote (as happened in Ireland in 2008). It was the first sustained democratic revolt against the new free trade blocs that were explicitly designed to make economic policy impervious to popular will. It was the only popular revolt that came in the wake of the great financial crash of 2008 that made any lasting impact.

All the great populist revolts between 2008 and 2020 have variously been defeated at the ballot box, surrendered to their opponents or battered themselves into oblivion: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Donald Trump in the US. Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral insurrection collapsed in less than two years — notably, after Corbyn conceded to the prospect of a second referendum. In France and Italy, the populist Right — Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini — have both retreated from talk of quitting the EU or abandoning the euro.

All this makes the fact of Britain’s successful secession from the EU the more remarkable. In Britain, Brexit was repeatedly vindicated at the ballot box over the course of the general election of 2017, the European parliamentary elections of 2019 and the general election of 2019. Yet by March 2020 Britain’s democratic exceptionalism appeared to have evaporated overnight.

Despite these putative democratic gains, the British government’s response to the pandemic clearly revealed a state that was unable to harness popular power or convert democratic legitimacy to effectively overcome the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, Britain tumbled into the authoritarian pattern of lockdowns, the global precedent for which was set by the Chinese Communist Party: individual isolation, social distancing, rigid restrictions on public life and civil liberties.

Deeming itself as inessential as any other middle-class office job, parliament dissolved itself, even as it promulgated draconian legislation against its own citizens. Throughout the pandemic, the British state has consistently treated its citizens as a threat to each other, rather than as agents whose collective capacities could be mobilised against the virus.

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Is the EU about to crumble?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The immediate response of civil society early last year, which saw spontaneous neighbourhood and county networks springing up to organise services and food delivery to those who were isolating and vulnerable, indicated strong impulses to collective self-help and social solidarity. Yet the Government was unable to use such unifying impulses to mount a collective response to the pandemic, instead enacting restrictions on collective life more severe than those in wartime. The 600,000-strong NHS volunteer army that rapidly emerged in early 2020 petered out, as the state did not have the wherewithal to deploy it.

This ultimately revealed the incapacity of the Tory government and British state to convert popular will and social solidarity into enhanced state capacity to tackle the pandemic. This enhanced capacity could have been used not only to support the self-isolating and vulnerable with extra social services, but also to expand public health capacity — for instance, expanding support services, deploying extra cleaning staff in hospitals and expanding the administrative capacity of the NHS.

The more recent recruitment of vaccine volunteers this year provides an insight into what an effective mobilisation of the public may have looked like early on in the pandemic. But with furlough, lockdown and stay-at-home orders, national demobilisation and public passivity was the order of the day — and indeed, it turned out to be amenable to many of the middle classes.

Lockdown, then, was ultimately an artefact of a lack of state capacity. It was justified, after all, by the need to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed. This reflected the reality of an underfunded public health system and a state run on “lean” just-in-time principles, as if it were a supermarket serving customers rather than a public body serving its citizens. With the NHS having become dependent on sucking up medical professionals from abroad instead of expanding its training capacity, when the pandemic struck there were fewer medics that could be released from their training early to supplement front-line medical staff, while none could be absorbed. The British state was so market-efficient that it notoriously did not even have a surplus of functioning personal protective equipment.

Yet despite all this, state capacity is not a purely technical affair — to do with the number of public employees, their training, the efficiency of government procedures and institutions — but is also a question of legitimacy and authority. Indeed, without legitimacy and authority, public capacity is meaningless.

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The EU's most shameful betrayal

By Giles Fraser

The EU is designed precisely to create this kind of hollowed-out state — not only as a result of ECJ rulings and its collective treaty commitments to neoliberalism and austerity, but more importantly because it is designed to make states impervious to popular will and democratic choice by embedding them in supranational institutions. The failures of the British state throughout the pandemic show that even as we have formally seceded from the EU, Britain remains to all intents and purposes a member-state.

That is to say, the British state remains not only authoritarian and brittle, it is also incapable of expanding state capacity by converting popular will into government action. The most important limits confronting the British state are not to be found in its borrowing capacity or fiscal rectitude, or its capacity to cut trade deals beyond Brussels, but in its relationship with its own citizens.

Five years since the Brexit referendum, and two years since the end of the transition period, Brexit remains in some fundamental ways, an unrealised vision — a promise of greater self-government, of national renewal, of popular autonomy. As the Government prolongs public restrictions and state technocrats pore over plans to normalise the bio-security state, the promise of taking back control seems as remote a prospect as ever.

Yet despite decades of atomisation, the early popular response to the pandemic — especially visible in the communal self-help networks — indicate that there is a deep impulse for social solidarity and collective empowerment. The only thing that’s lacking? Political vision.

So reads the introduction to the famous Edwardian children’s book Our Island Story, a work that exemplified a certain idea of Britain. It was a country that was unique, blessed by God with a destiny, the narrative drawing on mythical ideas that went back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s famously implausible 12^th century history of the island. Britain — or, more specifically, England — was different.

Just as the 17^th century Puritans saw England as the new Israel – indeed some took it further to suggest we were the Israelites — so the Victorians had come to think of the country as unique, a new Athens in glorious isolation. Britain was part of Europe, but not of it, and instead destined to rule the oceans and its great dominions overseas.

British exceptionalism was a seductively ego-affirming idea, but then if you belong to a smallish country that ends up ruling a quarter of the world, you’d probably start to conclude you were special, too. Today, the empire is no more but the British are still exceptional — although perhaps not in quite the same way.

Five years ago this week the country’s thought-leaders were given the shock of their lives when the electorate voted against all advice and apparent common sense to leave a trading bloc on which their economy was dependent. The decision seemed to lack any reason, an act of wilful self-harm, “shitting the bed” as one comedian called it.

Unable to explain this idiocy, journalists and academics came to the conclusion that it could be explained by British, or more particularly, English exceptionalism — a deluded belief that the country was somehow special.

It was a common theme that the English – the most Eurosceptic of the home nations – considered themselves somehow exceptional, unique, which became the subject of numerous articles, academic papers and treatise.

One scholar traced this British exceptionalism back to the Napoleonic Wars, when the country’s elite constructed an idea of an island story. Another even even linked Brexit to Our Island Story, suggesting that “Support for this seemingly innocuous children’s bedtime story should therefore be understood as an important ideational element in a predominantly English Eurosceptic disengagement from the EU and a re-engagement with the Anglosphere amongst Conservatives”.

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Fascism isn't coming

By Ed West

A columnist warned how this dangerous ideology, with its “tawdry jingoism, the faux-patriotism, the cynical use of the flag to exploit the people’s belief in ‘British exceptionalism’”, could even be to blame for the country’s disastrous handling of Covid.

Yet in Europe at least the British are exceptional in a completely different way, not in feeling themselves special or above the rest. England – not Britain – is unique in being so uncomfortable with itself, so filled with self-disdain.

In no other country are symbols of nationhood so likely to provoke such disgust or mockery, to be considered either distasteful, vulgar or actually hateful. In no other country would a front-bench politician slyly mock a voter for flying the flag. To a certain section of society every defeat for England is cheered, every victory lamented. This was the problem at the heart of the debate five years ago, the real British exceptionalism.

In this we are strangely unique, since neither the German nor French Left feel discomfort with national symbolism in the same way as the British. French intellectuals are down on their country — they’re down on everything — and Germans are ashamed of their past. Artists everywhere tend to be more self-critical than the population at large. But among European countries only in England is there such revulsion and cringe at the symbolism of the nation, and the people who celebrate it.

This autoAnglophobia was epitomised by the actress Emma Thompson, who during the run-up to the referendum described her homeland as “a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, I mean really, a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island”.

Thompson, who more recently flew from Los Angeles to London to attend a climate change rally, could not have better personified her caste; raised from old theatre stock in Hampstead, attending one of Camden’s elite state schools and then Cambridge, she described herself as “European”, but for a certain type of Briton that means less an identification with the inheritance of Rome and Greece than membership of a community of belief. It means being internationalist, open-minded, progressive, university-educated… just not British.

The English are exceptional in their “oikophobia”, as Roger Scruton defined the “need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ours”.  Scruton argued that it is “a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes” but which is common among intellectuals and artists of all sorts. The English are the worst at it.

None of this is new; the British intelligentsia has hated the country for at least two centuries, to the extent of supporting opponents far more sinister than the EU.

Yet while such disdain was once confined to small literary circles, today its association with education and high status has allowed it to mimetically spread through the institutions. Today even august bodies like the National Trust are dominated by people who find patriotism just a bit distasteful, and would be horrified to promote it. In what other countries would the publishing industry have a whole genre of books devoted to denigrating the country’s history, showing that actually we’re the worst at everything; that every victory wasn’t really ours; that our heroes were monsters.

It is also a strangely parochial belief, this idea that Britain is somehow uniquely bad, as if everywhere doesn’t have similar problems, often worse. But then British internationalism is one of the most parochial belief systems in the world; we laud the NHS as the finest moral legacy of mankind, while in the rest of Europe it’s a laughing stock. Our commentariat bemoan that our country is going down the dark path of nationalism because our PM once made an off-colour joke, while across the Channel politicians compete to appear the most hostile to Islam. Indeed, Britain is unusually liberal for European standards, and of most social issues has become noticeably more liberal since 2016.

For all that it was about Europe, and the world, the referendum debate was really about two competing visions of what it meant to be British; even the Remainer identity, with its EU flags and affected xenophilia, was a particularly British tribal allegiance, dominated by Thames Valley Liberal Democrats who are nice people and like Radio 3 and the Proms.

For a certain type of progressive, British patriotism or nationalism is nothing to celebrate, and always contains something dark within, the neanderthal and skinhead just waiting to emerge. A recent article by a former Labour MP warned that “although we British have long been prone to outbreaks of nationalism, until recently obsessive flag waving was by and large confined to small far-right parties, Northern Irish Unionists and a bunch of Hooray Henrys and Henriettas at the Last Night of the Proms. But the Brexit referendum and its aftermath has ushered in a new era. Something fundamental has changed. With the coming of Brexit the nationalist genie is out of the bottle and will not easily be put back.”

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What if Leave and Remain switched sides?

By Ed West

Next year France may well elect Marine Le Pen as president; in Rome the Brothers of Italy party is surging ahead, while everyone’s favourite liberal paradise, Denmark, has an immigration and asylum system that would have British Tories, let alone liberals, in fits.

When ministers suggest government buildings might fly the British flag, rather than the Pride colours or trans flag or whatever the liturgy dictates this week, there are howls of outrage from people who seem uninterested that this is normal everywhere else in Europe. It’s seen as some unprovoked “culture war”, as if the Left hasn’t been engaged in a forever culture war for decades. Wanting to fly the flag is not exceptional; thinking the British are above flag-waving is the exceptionalism.

So what is different about England? Much of it has to do with the country’s main class fault-line, between a socially liberal haute bourgeoisie and a conservative petty bourgeoisie (apologies for my French, fellow patriotic Britishers).

Explaining why he found Radio 4 so irritating, the novelist Tim Lott once explained that the liberal middle class “is the voice of the upper echelons of the BBC” and they are in conflict with Middle Englanders, “essentially people with nice homes and decent incomes and a commitment to abiding by the law and even a sense of patriotism. The LMC see them as retrograde and primitive – those damn Daily Mail readers.”

Auto-Anglophobia is defined by a disgust of a certain idea of England. When Thompson made her comments it was leapt upon immediately by the Daily Mail, which asked “Why DO so many leftie and luvvies loathe this country”, which is a legitimate question, although it might also be said that it’s not exactly the country they hate but YOU, the Middle Englanders.

No recent book better summarises this fault than the Harry Potter series, where each of the villains represent different archetypes of the Liberal Middle Class’s enemies, from the small-minded suburban NIMBY Uncle Vernon to the future Bullingdon boy Malfoy.

The AutoAnglophobic intellectual isn’t against nationalism per se; they fawn over the Celtic variety, that earthy, authentic love of country, and when did Celtic nationalism ever kill anyone? Some proclaim how they long to be Scottish, just as once they might have claimed Irish or, if they were clutching at straws, Cornish ancestry. Some even dream of a separate Scottish nation, a British version of Vermont, progressive and egalitarian.

Similarly, “flag-shagger” as an insult almost invariably comes from people with flags in their Twitter bio – Palestine flags, EU flags, gay flags, trans flags, any flags just as long as they’re high status rather than low — the Union Jack and, worse still, the prole’s apron that is the St George’s Cross. You might see the latter in a middle-class areas during the later stages of a football tournament, but otherwise Rod Liddle was right to say that in north London you’re more likely to see the Palestinian colours being flown.

The conservative response to this disdain is often disingenuously defensive of the nation and its people, when indeed there is lots to dislike about England. The bone-headed officiousness of many in authority, which has come out to the fore in lockdown. The yobbishness, which is far more noticeable than in other European countries. The fact that you have signs in theme parks telling men to keep their tops on. We aren’t the world’s biggest drunks, but we’re probably the most unpleasant. Although much improved, England football fans can be horrible in the flesh; thuggish, racist and intimidating.

Visiting Holland always brings out my inner Remainer, because the people just seem like a better version of the English; the Germans are more cultured and take serious things like opera seriously; Italy is dysfunctional but Italians are intrinsically more civilised than us, and the Scandinavians run things in such a fairer way. And the French; well, I’m sure they have their good qualities, too. (Joke! I love the French.)

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Brexit: was it worth it?

By Ed West

Likewise, much of the urban liberal critique of the British establishment is entirely justified. Our class system is not unique, but no one else really has such a divide between the private and state school sectors, for instance, nor such domination by one school in producing a lot of quite mediocre national leaders. The absence of revolution or war has been a blessing, but it has allowed us to avoid reform where it is needed.

And England is exceptional in some ways. The biggest event in our history took place ten thousand years ago when Doggerland was flooded. It is hard to invade an island, and so the country remained unaffected by the rule of Napoleon, or Hitler, leaving different legal and measuring systems, and a different psychology.

That silver sea has made us a happy breed of men, but it has also made us a complacent breed – the perfect conditions for oikophobia. In countries which have been trampled over by armies down the years an artist who disdained the ground where his ancestors had been starved or raped would be tiresome; in an island which had not endured foreign occupation or tyranny for centuries it’s indulged.

It’s an ancient tradition, going back at least to the late 18^th century. The French Revolution was cheered by many in Britain, but many of those continued cheering even after it had descended into bloodshed, and war with Britain. Many of Britain’s intelligentsia praised Napoleon as “the Great Man of the People of France, the Liberator of Europe”, in the words of one radical MP. Charles Fox praised the French dictator, Britain’s arch-enemy, as “the most stupendous monument of human wisdom”. The great polemicist William Godwin – husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley – wrote that Bonaparte was “infinitely more dear to the people of France” than ever, even after it became clear he was a tyrant. William Wordsworth, once enthusiastic about revolution, had after France invaded Switzerland in 1798 lamented of his home country “Oh grief that Earth’s best hopes rest all with thee!”

Among the most enthusiastically self-hating were the Unitarians, who felt that Britain was uniquely immoral. One Unitarian minister, Ebenezer Aldred, said that Britain was the real Beast of Revelation, “guilty of imperialism, slave trading and sodomy”, in Robert Tomb’s words.

The intelligentsia’s disdain for the country that had nurtured them became more pronounced in the 20^th century as Britain’s prestige declined, much of it influenced by a class disgust of the newspaper-reading “clerks”. It began at Cambridge University, where around the time of the First World War Lytton Strachey’s brilliantly timed Eminent Victorians marked the start of a cultural shift, after which the intelligentsia would always hate Britain.

The Bloomsbury set were the most notorious, among them Virginia Woolf and EM Forster, who combined following an egalitarian creed with snobbery for the ordinary British. A Room With a View, his novel about English tourists in Italy, is filled with contempt for the Brit abroad, who sophisticated English travellers have for centuries looked down on.

In fact back during the days of Grand Tour, the Whig Earl of Chesterfield told his son “You are not sent abroad to converse with your own countrymen… among them, in general, you will get little knowledge, no language, and I am sure, no manners… Their pleasure of the table end in beastly drunkenness, low riot, broken windows, and very often (as they well deserve) broken bones”.

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The mindset became starker in the 1930s; in the famous 1933 Oxford Union debate, the country’s future leaders voted that “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country” by 275 votes against 153.

Orwell accused the country’s intelligentsia in the 1930s of “chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British”. Unsurprisingly, when he wrote Nineteen-Eighty-Four, he saw that if there was hope against the new ideology, it would lie with the proles.

Intellectuals like Virginia Woolf didn’t understand why the workers continued to love their country, despite everything. Even during the darkest days of the War they refused to give up hope: on 17 June, 1940, Home Intelligence found a mood of “gloomy apprehension” to be most common in “the middle classes and women”. Working-class men, despite what the experts believed, thought we would win, and that even if we didn’t — we should fight anyway.

Since then, disdain for the country has spread from a small circle at Cambridge to the entire upper echelons of society; it has become a mark of status. It was noticeable after Brexit that many of those claiming to speak for “the 3 million” EU citizens here (who turned out to be 5 million) argued their case by insulting Britain, saying that a lazy country needed them.

This might seem ungrateful, but it was really a sign of integration, doing what the Brits do. (Just as high-status Asian-Americans talk about white supremacy because that’s what high-status Americans do.)

In fact, this has long been a mark of fitting in. Before The Satanic Verses affair, Salman Rushdie had ingratiated himself with the British cultural elite by comparing the country to Nazi Germany for Channel 4; more recently, foreign-born British journalists and cultural figures attack Britain for being racist; what looks like ingratitude is just newcomers imitating a society’s high-status beliefs. Two hundred years ago they might have joined the Church of England; now they join the Church of Hating England.

Bohemians are good for society; it needs them. But when bohemian mores spread too widely it can start to turn into universal cynicism and distrust, and eventually populism.

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The disdain that many people feel for Britain certainly didn’t help Remain’s cause. In the weeks leading up to the vote, a bunch of bankers would come up with important but rather boring forecasts of just how skint we would be if we left; then some idiot would tweet that they’d lose their nanny if we left, unaware of how much that was the point, to punish an urban elite who enjoyed the full privileges of globalisation without the social contract that comes with being part of a national community. Perhaps the abiding image of the campaign was Bob Geldof, do-gooder par excellence — and a genuinely decent man by all accounts, who has done actual good — sticking two fingers up at British fishermen during a rather bad tempered, but comical, day of protests.

After the referendum, another social media trend was for people to post pictures of themselves on skiing holidays, looking sad because they were saying goodbye to Europe. Some posed with themselves eating continental food, because now they sadly never to eat a croissant again. This was done without any self-awareness, and the abiding message was “look how much I despise you all”.

The problem for Remain, and for progressives generally, is that everything is now so out in the open. Back in 2004 Thomas Frank wrote in What’s The Matter with Kansas? his polemic on working-class conservatism, that Right-wing media had created a fantasy where “all-powerful liberals who run the country… are contemptuous of the tastes and beliefs of the people who inhabit it.”

Yet since then, social media has proved the conservative fantasy to be obviously true, and it’s possible that nations, like families, need the little white lies to keep things going; if we all knew what the people around us really thought about us, things would fall apart very soon. And in Britain it became obvious that large numbers of the cultural elite really do hate the country.

It is that disdain for Englishness that partly explains Brexit. People will often put up with being ruled by people who cheat them, or lie to them, or who mismanage the country — as recent polls illustrate. But they won’t put up with being ruled by those who openly despise them.

If you knew nothing else, and you were told that there was a public mood of discontent with the status quo, this line-up of speakers would give you a strong hint about who won the vote two days later. The middle-aged, establishment figures would surely have lost.

Except they didn’t. The three white, middle-aged MPs were Gisela Stuart, Andrea Leadsom and Boris Johnson. Their opponents were Ruth Davidson, Sadiq Khan and the TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady.

It is easy to imagine how pleased the Remain campaign must have been with the composition of their trio: a Scot who is also a lesbian, a military vet and a Tory; a working class Londoner from a British-Pakistani background; and the first woman ever to get to the top of the organised labour movement. The collective image they projected could hardly have been more inclusive or well calibrated to the complex realities of Britain in 2016.

It was also, of course, quite useless. Complexity and variousness did not carry Remain to victory in 2016. These qualities also proved, in the struggle to prevent a very hard Brexit, not only ineffective but arguably counterproductive.

All things being equal, it seems obvious that, in a democracy, a broad alliance is always better than a narrow movement. The problem for Remain is that all things were not equal. When national identity becomes the dominant issue, it rips up the familiar score. Harping on one note becomes much easier than trying to conduct an orchestra with too many instruments.

It is hard to avoid the old (and admittedly cliched) Greek image of the fox that knows many things and the hedgehog that knows one big thing. Remainers were animated by many different things. Leavers were defined by one big thing.

To leave the European Union was to be out. To remain was to be in. But in what exactly? There were far too many answers to that question and most of them were in conflict with each other.

What polity, what place, what imagined community could Nicola Sturgeon and Keir Starmer, Gerry Adams and Dominic Grieve, Caroline Lucas and David Cameron collectively conjure? There was none because there could not be. On almost everything except the desirability of not leaving the EU, Remainers had profoundly different visions of what the UK should be, and indeed sharply conflicting views on whether it should exist at all.

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Embodying a persuasive idea of contemporary Britain is actually a very hard thing to do. Is Ruth Davidson the kind of Tory with whom most English conservatives would identify? Do Sadiq Khan’s working-class credentials evoke a sense of solidarity among working class voters in the Midlands? What political weight does the organised labour movement represented by Frances O’Grady really carry any more?

Defining a collective identity is difficult in any country, but much more so in a multi-national kingdom with shifting and uncertain notions of its own past, of its place in the world, of the relationships between its constituent parts, of the politics of social class, and of attitudes to migration and globalisation.

The great irony of Brexit is that it did in fact generate a kind of collective identity for Remainers. But it did so only in reaction to defeat. Remain lost because its only real binding agent was a sense of loss. It had to be beaten before it could discover a collective self. By definition, that was too late.

It is true of course that Leavers didn’t agree with each other about what Brexit really meant. But the crucial difference is that they didn’t have to. For the one big thing that nationalist movements know is not who “we” are. It is who we are not. Leavers had a deep-rooted sense of their Other, their dislike and distrust of the EU. For Remainers, the Other was merely the Leavers. If, as W.B. Yeats claimed, there is “More substance in our enmities / Than in our love”, the Leavers had the great benefit of enmities whose substance had been formed over centuries rather than mere years.

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By Larry Siedentop

If, like me, you’re Irish, it seemed very funny that Brexiteers were casting England (and it was very much England) as an oppressed nation, a colonised country being given the chance to overthrow its imperial overlords. (The picture on the door of Nigel Farage’s office at the European Parliament was not of himself but of the 19th century Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.)

I remember laughing out loud when Johnson, in his summing up at the end of that Great Debate, said that “Thursday can be our country’s independence day” — a claim that Farage indeed repeated when the result of the referendum came in. This notion of England as Kenya or Ireland or India at the end of empire seemed too over the top as a performance of victimhood to have much purchase on the minds of voters.

I was wrong. The idea of Brexit as the rising up of a subjugated nation clearly did seem real to many voters. And once that is the case, you are in very different game. Because if you’re Irish you also know that national insurgencies have a great advantage. They capture the idea of freedom as an end in itself — they do not have to say what you will be free to do.

Once you generate the belief that you are in a movement towards independence, you establish a temporal order. First, we become independent. Then we decide what to do with our freedom. There may be various promises about what we aspire to when we have broken away from our oppressor, but they exist in a different time zone, the one that only becomes real after we’ve broken our chains.

Remainers, confused by the innate absurdity of the idea of enslaved Britannia, never quite understood this. They stuck with two assumptions that had ceased to apply once the Leavers had successfully generated the idea of Brexit as a nationalist revolution. One is that it surely must matter deeply that the Brexiteers betrayed their promises. The other is that it also mattered that the Brexiteers had no agreed idea of what form Brexit should take.

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Thus, when the Brexiteers very quickly disowned the infamous pledge from the side of the bus — £350 million a week for the NHS — Remainers expected outrage from voters who had been so cynically misled. There was none because the promise was about the afterlife, the time that lies on the far side of the great defining moment of independence. It was always in a different category of reality.

The same, incidentally, goes for all the threats made by the Remain side, even the ones that were (unlike the Project Fear vision of an immediate one-way trip to Hell in a handcart) well founded. They existed, for Leavers, in that nebulous never-never land of the future, another country where they do things differently.

Nor was the Brexit project really weakened by what, in a different kind of political discourse, ought to have doomed it. The deep internal divisions about whether the UK should remain within, or at least be closely aligned with, the EU’s single market, made it look like the Leave cause would implode under the pressure of its own contradictions. It did not seem foolish to believe this as Theresa May’s haplessness turned to a paralysis that shaded into anarchy.

But in fact even this disarray was a kind of strength for the Leave cause. The profound uncertainty about what Brexit would mean in reality allowed it to sustain its character as a gesture, a notion, a one-off act of liberation. It kept it on the plane where it was most inviolable, unsullied by mere detail: reclaimed sovereignty, golden age, sunlit uplands.

Think, by way of contrast, of why the SNP lost the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014. It provided the details: 900 pages on what an independent Scotland would look like. This was a target-rich environment and unionists could see all the weak points at which to aim their fire. The very vagueness of Brexit saved it from this fate. Remainers never knew, until the endgame, what the deal was going to be. They were always chasing a shadow.

What could Remainers have done differently? Well, as we say in Ireland, you wouldn’t start from here. If there was going to be an epic debate about how the peoples of the UK see themselves, you would not start with David Cameron’s glib promise of a referendum on Europe to appease his internal malcontents. You would not begin with a smug assumption that questions of identity could be shooed away with dire warnings about trade.

You would have started with a recognition that, in the wake of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and the establishment of the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales the following year, ideas of belonging have become deeply unsettled within the UK. You would have engaged in particular with the growing evidence from the turn of the century onwards of an emergent but unformed English nationalism and thought about how it could be expressed, not just as a “not them” but as a positive “us”.

The Leavers were talking, though usually in reactionary and often in absurd ways, about identity. Remainers largely disdained such talk as innately reprehensible. But an identity crisis doesn’t go away if you ignore it. Leave offered some kind of an answer — albeit a very bad one. Remain barely recognised the question.

Almost five years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the bloc faces an existential question: which, if any, of the remaining 27 countries will be next?

European cohesion is threatened by a range of serious issues; some internal, some external. Mass migration and the challenge it poses to integration remains the most daunting challenge. Last year may have seen a lull in migrant crossings as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, but they are ramping back up, largely from Libya. (Indeed, it is surely only a matter of time before politicians fall prey to their usual smoke and mirrors rhetoric about the “benefits” of mass migration in the context of an ageing population, without much credence given to concerns for cultural integration or assimilation.)

Meanwhile, the EU remains plagued by recurrent tensions over its pandemic response, particularly in regard to vaccine distribution. The European Recovery Fund also had a shaky path to approval, which left many member-states dissatisfied.

But will another member state leave? If you believe the bookies, the odds-on favourite is Italy (available at 3/1) — followed by Greece (6/1) and France (8/1). But as the Brexit referendum demonstrated, the bookies don’t always make the right call — and it would be unwise to rule out the country sitting in fourth place: the Netherlands (12/1). In fact, I believe it’s a strong contender. 

Of all the EU-27 countries, I am most familiar with the Netherlands, where I served as a Member of Parliament from 2003 until 2006. One of my strongest memories of that period was my first trip, along with some of the freshmen Dutch legislators, to the European Parliament in Brussels. Compared with our modest parliament building, the EU building was grand and impressive.

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At lunch, which started as early as 11.30am, we were welcomed with trays of tall flutes filled with the best champagne. We were then served a lavish meal, accompanied by bottle after bottle of wine. This “working” lunch went on until 3.30 p.m.

The week after, back in the national Parliament canteen with its modest assortment of sandwiches, my Dutch colleagues and I were obsessed with one question: who paid for this scandalous extravagance? In the years since, the Dutch have continued to question the financial benefit of remaining an EU member — and it’s not hard to see why.

In 2018, for example, the Netherlands contributed €4.845 billion to the EU; but in return, Brussels spent only €2.470 billion in the country. The European Union’s own website claims that “the EU budget doesn’t aim to redistribute wealth”; in the Netherlands, that doesn’t seem to quite add up.

Over the past decade, the Dutch, who are notoriously frugal, have become increasingly frustrated with the frivolity of EU spending. Exacerbating this irritation is the fact that the Netherlands is the largest net contributor to the EU budget per capita. Meanwhile, the Dutch parliament is grappling over how to afford the maintenance of the equivalent of their NHS and the rising costs of healthcare for an ageing society. Dutch health authorities estimate healthcare spending will double between 2020 and 2040, to €200 billion euros per year, up from €106 billion in 2019.

More important, though, are questions pertaining to national sovereignty and control over sensitive political issues. Every Tuesday morning, I and my fellow MPs would gather to debate both domestic and international issues. Naturally, these discussions sometimes became heated — but this principally occurred when we were told that a decision had to be made by an anonymous, faraway EU official, rather than by us.

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Increasingly, we found that we didn’t have the last word on many of the issues that mattered most to us: immigration, terrorism and agriculture, among others. Nor was this feeling confined to the Dutch political class. When, in 2005, EU countries were presented with the prospect of creating a bloc-wide constitution, only two countries held a referendum that ultimately rejected the proposals: the Netherlands and France.

True, there are still glaring differences between the UK and the Netherlands that make “Nexit” seem impractical. The UK wisely never joined the monetary union, while the Netherlands was among the first to adopt the euro two decades ago. Not only do they share a currency with much of the continent, the Netherlands is also more dependent on the single market than Britain was. And then there’s the fact that the United Kingdom is the sixth-largest economy in the world, while the Netherlands trails a distant 17th (with four other European Union countries ranking higher). While the Dutch see their country as the gateway to Europe, they are not their own island, separated by a Channel, apart from the rest of Europe.

Yet, since I left office, the frictions between the EU and the Netherlands have only worsened. This month, I&O Research, a research agency for the Dutch government, released a report that showed “a larger proportion of the Dutch are still dissatisfied (43%) than satisfied (37%) with what the European Union is doing”.

And while this same report confirmed that there is still nothing close to a majority for “Nexit” — a position with adherents only among the populist FvD and PVV parties — it did reveal that “in a referendum on whether the Netherlands should remain a member of the European Union, 61% would now vote for ‘remain in the EU.’” Less than a year ago, the figure was 72 percent. That is a striking decrease of support for the EU. The 61% figure is also striking for another reason — it’s lower than the proportion of Brits who supported Remain a year before the Brexit vote (66%). And we all know how that turned out.

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Context was everything in the UK five years ago. We forget now how unlikely Brexit seemed to most commentators — until the first, stunning results came in from northern English cities such as Sunderland.

Today, the context has shifted for one fundamental reason. Brexit has happened, and it has not been the unmitigated disaster that so many Remainers predicted. On the contrary, the UK’s superior vaccine strategy — nimble where the EU’s was lumbering and bureaucratic — provided a better advertisement for “taking back control” than anything in the original Leave campaign.

Could watching a successful exit by the UK push the Dutch population further in this direction? Don’t rule it out.