With such a record of political opportunism, what are we to make of his promised renegotiation? While Eutopian liberals such as The Guardian’s Rafael Behr are hailing the promised renegotiation as a historical inevitability, smarter commentators such as Wolfgang Münchau have pointed out that, whatever Starmer might want, the EU has little incentive to re-open negotiations. And in any case, it is impossible to secure a better deal for Britain without re-entering the Customs Union and Single Market, both of which Starmer has ruled out.

With this in mind, Münchau considers the possibility that Eutopian liberals might be sufficiently emboldened — and perhaps boosted by diplomatic pressure from Brussels — to manoeuvre a future Starmer government into holding another referendum. This is despite the fact that a campaign to Rejoin the EU would have no more chance of winning than Remain did in 2016.

As sound as this reasoning is, it gives Starmer too much credit. He is no more serious about rejoining the EU than he was about Labour’s Green New Deal or boosting house-building. Both of these were supposedly flagship policies, and yet his party rapidly retreated from them at the slightest hint of contention or opportunity. In the first instance, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves pulled back from her much-vaunted programme of “Securonomics” and a “green prosperity plan” when it was pointed out that it would cost money. Then, more recently, Starmer helped to torpedo the efforts of Levelling Up minister Michael Gove, who was hoping to lift environmental restrictions on house-building.

But if Starmer’s pledge for a new Brexit deal is equally insincere, what is really going on here? In truth, his promises are less about Brussels than they are about managing his own party and manipulating the hopes of voters. There is a huge subsection of the British middle class, many of them supporters of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who have never recovered from the trauma of losing the EU referendum. For these people, Brexit has become the default explanation for everything that has gone wrong with the country and in their own lives — from energy costs and food inflation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and long airport queues. Recognising this psychic pain, Starmer is dangling the prospect of an existential salve; he is, in short, virtue-signalling.

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However as with most virtue-signalling policies, it will have no effect on the status quo. But the status quo is, in fact, a drift back towards the EU. And this drift, much like other policies associated with the liberal Left — from Net Zero targets to pro-trans social policy — has taken place under Tory rule. It was, after all, the Tories’ support for Nato’s war in Ukraine that has kept Britain entwined in the geopolitics of Brussels. Nothing symbolised this better than Boris Johnson flying to Kyiv rather than attend a party meeting in the Red Wall constituency of Doncaster in June 2022 — the same Red Wall constituencies that are now likely to swing back to Labour at the next general election.

And it was the current Tory Prime Minister who signed off on the Windsor Framework that has helped shore up the Northern Ireland Protocol. By ensuring that Northern Ireland’s economic integration into the Single Market is not compromised, Sunak is again undercutting the prospect of regulatory divergence from the EU. It was also Sunak who, in in October 2022, joined Emmanuel Macron’s so-called European Political Community (EPC) initiative — which is envisaged, in the new Franco-German report on restructuring EU membership, as the outermost tier of EU membership. Starmer’s declaration in Montreal at the weekend that he has no intention of diverging from the EU is not radical; after all, neither do the Tories.

A sovereign British foreign and economic policy in the medium term seems unlikely, then. Nonetheless, there are grounds for optimism for those who cherish national independence. Ultimately, the closer Britain draws to the EU, the more the shimmering mirage of Rejoin will fade, and the more difficult it will be to portray the EU as a cure for all our ills. The truth is that, for Rejoiners, no amount of rejoining will atone for our democratic sins. And even if Britain traversed all the tiers and outer layers of “associate EPC membership” to “full membership”, which would include membership of the Schengen Zone and even the eurozone currency union, the EU the Rejoiners know and love will already be long gone. Indeed, that same Franco-German report sees the future of the bloc as a series of concentric rings with multiple tiers of membership rather than a simple club of member-states.

The hard truth is that the EU of Rejoiners’ imagination disappeared in June 2016. It was an artefact of the era of US unipolarity and high globalisation. The very fact that Britain decided to withdraw was not a historical accident that can be rectified; it was a reverberation of deeper structural shifts in the global order, signalling the beginnings of a retreat from globalisation well before the pandemic and Russia’s invasion. This is Starmer’s Brexit mistake: as the EU dissolves into tiers, the politics of nostalgia will become increasingly impotent. 

It should help both of them. Since Montesquieu’s time, French stereotypes have credited British statesmen with wisdom and ruthlessness in the pursuit of economic advantage. Even 49 days of Liz Truss proved inadequate to shake them. Macron would like to lay claim to these Anglo-Saxon virtues as he leads the French through painful reforms to their welfare state. Starmer, meanwhile, gets further validation as Britain’s likely next prime minister: an important statesman will have anointed him.

At a time when British voters have felt increasing remorse over Brexit, a visit to the most important head of state in the European Union also allows Starmer to remind voters of the importance of “Europe”, and of his own foresight in backing Remain. At a conference in Montreal last weekend, he told an FT interviewer that the deal Boris Johnson struck with Brussels is “far too thin”, promising to renegotiate a closer trade relationship if he becomes prime minister.

But if that is Starmer’s reckoning, it may be a misjudgment. No one would call these halcyon days for the UK economy. But the idea that the country’s business climate is now uniquely bad appears to have been built from inaccurate data, according to revisions released by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month. The economy has been growing, not shrinking. It has returned to pro-Covid levels. Today, the worst-performing economy in the developed world is not the UK but Germany, for decades the motor of EU prosperity.

Germany’s poor showing is instructive. The countries of the EU made it a priority actively to limit and complicate trade with Britain in the wake of Brexit, in order to send the message that good relations with Europe now require EU membership. But the UK is a large economy, and sending that message came at a high price for French fishermen and German car manufacturers. Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and what happened to Britain in the wake of Brexit happened to Germany, as the United States pressed it to substitute more expensive American natural gas for Russian, and to “de-risk” its trade with Chinese industry. That’s the world of “free” trade: there is a price for marching to your own drummer. The UK is not the only country in the West that is operating under these new rules.

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Will Starmer be Britain's Merkel?

By Tom McTague

Britain has become much more insular in recent years. This does not mean it is complacent. On the contrary, it may be unduly demoralised. Misfortunes that look like glaring Tory policy failures — areas in which Starmer can make hay with almost any policy alternative — look far less bad in an international context. Britons may still be infuriated at Boris Johnson’s Covid misbehaviour. They should know, though, that from abroad, the media-driven investigations look like a hysterical overreaction. That a prime minister’s violating of a lockdown to celebrate a staffer’s birthday would rankle the public is understandable. That it would occasion the fall of a government is bizarre.

The British response to Covid was incompetent — but most people who kept abreast of continental news would have greatly preferred their local incompetence to the kind that prevailed in the EU. While people could stroll in fields and parks in the UK, Spain was a prison house. While British scientists were developing one of the world’s leading vaccines, France’s vaccine program, conferred on the Pasteur Institute, was an embarrassing washout for Macron.

Tory immigration policies look like another Brexit-era broken promise: The Government’s Illegal Migration Act, with its wacky-sounding idea of parking asylum-seekers in Rwanda rather than processing their claims, has wound up stymied in courts. The country is faced with an epidemic of “small boat” arrivals and rising migrant numbers. But Europe is faring worse. An immigration bill that Macron hoped would be the centrepiece of his government programme last spring is still stalled in the Senate.

“Europeanising” this discussion could, therefore, be a trap for Starmer. Yes, the Tories have screwed up. But the very outlandishness of the Rwanda plan sends a signal that someone in the party understands that the old paradigm has ceased to function. Starmer gives no such signals. His plans to staff up and improve claim-processing simply do not reckon with the extent to which Britain is out of room. His promises to “smash” the “criminal gangs” responsible for migration are misdirected. The public is not worried about the criminality of immigration; it is worried about the volume of immigration. The same goes for Starmer’s offer, in the spirit of “burden sharing”, to take some of the migrants now arriving on Italy’s shores. This, at a time when a half-dozen countries that are still in the EU — Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Latvia — say they want no migrants at all.

So while informally launching his election campaign with a visit to Paris appears to provide Starmer with an all-purpose policy stick for flogging the Tories, the experience of Brexit has left him with a difficult ideological hand to play. In the 2017 elections, in the wake of the Brexit referendum, Jeremy Corbyn ran what may have been the most brilliant national campaign since the Second World War. De-emphasising the opposition to Brexit that had come to dominate the Labour Party, the leftist pariah came within a whisker of toppling Theresa May and moving into No. 10. Yet two years later, Corbyn ran at the head of Labour’s worst showing since 1935.

What happened? Observers tend to focus on Dominic Cummings’s brilliance in reconfiguring Tory personnel and imparting Tory ideology, but Labour had something to do with the result, too. Basically, in the two years after Corbyn’s Brexit-neutral campaign, the party revealed itself as obsessed with getting rid of Brexit, by hook or by crook. Starmer himself was an enthusiastic supporter of a second referendum; Labour looked like a party of broken promises.

A lot of French commentary on Starmer has focused on how this ardent Remainer has made Brexit “un concept tabou”. It is not so mystifying. He is attempting to win 2017 results for Labour while running on its 2019 programme. That is why Starmer’s rhetoric on Europe has this stilted, abstract, impersonal sound. “There is no return to freedom of movement,” he has said. “We have left the EU.” Starmer discusses Europe the way Bill Clinton discussed extramarital sex during his scandal-peppered presidency — studiously avoiding discussion of what he has done and what he would do. Sex, or Europe as the case may be, just blows across the landscape in his vicinity, like a weather system.

Former chief European Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier told a British audience last winter: “The EU is no longer what you left.” Barnier meant this as a boast. New bonds of mutuality tied the various countries together, above all the massive Next Generation EU borrowing programme. But a person of British sensibilities would probably think this was worse. Thus far, Next Generation EU has disbursed little money. It has mainly been a tool for disciplining refractory countries like Italy and Poland. The EU has other such tools, and it is not shy about using them. The bloc offers even less scope for sovereignty than it did in 2016.

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Why Macron is invincible

By Christopher Caldwell

It’s a commonplace among Brexit foes that any return to the EU would take a lot of time. For instance, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, while believing the public has decisively repudiated Brexit, is not optimistic the country could be readmitted before 2036. A more likely Rejoin scenario would involve suddenness and an element of surprise — say, after the arrival in Westminster of an unexpectedly large anti-Brexit majority. But the plan would need to have been drawn out beforehand, and it would need a powerful European interlocutor who could ensure a positive European reception — a French president, say. And yet, as one observes the care with which Starmer is discussing these things on the eve of his first big foray into Europe, one is drawn to a surprising conclusion: Feelings about Brexit have shifted much less in the seven years since the referendum than Starmer’s more zealous supporters wish to think.

Brexit is possibly the most significant uprising in the capitalist West in the last 75 years — the reclaiming of sovereignty from a technocratic system. The people at the top of that system drew great benefits from it; their efforts to obstruct Brexit were not surprising. But the beneficiaries of the new system, whatever it is, are not people of power. They don’t think of themselves as beneficiaries of anything. Today they are grumbling. But once voters begin to focus on the concrete issues surrounding it, as they inevitably do in the course of a national election, politicians will discover that Brexit is still a dangerous issue. It may even still be a winning one.

Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate, or at least does so on the basis of age and health conditions rather than politics. Why, then, have views on how we should manage it — and particularly how we should treat vaccination — become so heartless, judgemental and politically tribal?

We have a milder case of it in Britain than some countries. But there’s a correlation between (broadly Remain-affiliated) liberal urbanites and the new hygiene-authoritarianism. This has been emerging for a while: back in 2020 the research group UK In A Changing Europe noted that while “it’s not the case that all Leavers are lockdown sceptics” nonetheless “it’s pretty much the case that all lockdown sceptics are Leavers”. More recently, 99 Tories voted against Covid passes before Christmas, compared to 22 in Labour.

In the US, analogous (and angrier) patterns emerge. Free-wheeling, mask-optional Republican Florida is pitted against Democrat California, which mandates indoor mask-wearing, including for all children over the age of two, and announced in October that vaccination would become mandatory for in-person school attendance. Vaccination is already mandatory for employment in the police force and healthcare on public-health grounds.

More interesting than arguing for either one side or the other, though, is what the arguments reveal about our ongoing political realignment. In particular, it sounds the death-knell for a relatively mild-mannered twentieth-century version of progressivism characterised by a desire to ensure the world is fair, and to avoid harming others.

What’s emerging to replace it is more bellicose, more ruthless — and increasingly religious. So-called “secular liberalism” has, in other words, stopped pretending to be secular. It’s been received opinion since the end of World War II that authoritarian religiosity was exclusive to the Right. Theodor Adorno’s 1950 The Authoritarian Personality cited batteries of research to argue that fascism, and the Holocaust, could be explained by the prevalence of an ‘Authoritarian Personality Type’. This ‘personality type’, he argued, was characterised by blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong, respect for submission to acknowledged authority, and a tendency to project one’s own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group.

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In turn, Adorno’s conviction that these behaviours are characteristic of the Right crops up again in a far more recent, but also influential book: Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 The Righteous Mind. Here, Haidt argued that the reason ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ routinely misunderstand one another is that there exist five ‘moral foundations’ on which we all base our political views: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt argues that liberals are only interested in care/harm and fairness/cheating, while the Right is attuned to all five foundations.

Does this apply in the Covid debate? Certainly at the surface, calls for coercive measures tend to start off with arguments about protecting people. For example, Scottish public health adviser Jason Leitch told BBC Good Morning Scotland that the aim of Covid passes was “to allow people to attend events and environments safely”.

At the core of this argument is the not unreasonable point that when it comes to physical wellbeing, we can’t be wholly individualistic. The moment you get ill or injure yourself as a consequence of having taken some risk (for example after breaking your leg skiing), you need care and are thus, by definition, no longer taking sole responsibility for your wellbeing.

Does this mean vaxx authoritarians have a point? Hiltzik points out that mandates have long existed on other health grounds where risk-taking imposes costs on wider society, such as seatbelt-wearing, smoking, or drink-driving. Insisting on the individual right to choose whether or not to be vaccinated therefore “places a perverse conception of individual “freedom” in opposition to the communal interest”.

We might simply shrug, and say this is just another data point for that 2021 study which showed that contra Adorno, there is abundant evidence for authoritarianism among left-liberals. Certainly, calls from self-identified progressives to “crush the resistance” to vaccines by making the lives of the unvaccinated a “total misery” might challenge the idea that the ‘authoritarian personality’ can only flourish on the Right.

But it’s the character and chosen terrain of the emerging progressive authoritarianism that’s distinctive. For it’s not merely a matter of progressives waking up to the possibility that they, too, may use coercive measures to pursue their chosen ends. It’s also the nature of those ends. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2020 fentanyl killed more Californians than Covid. But unlike Covid, the drug epidemic inspired few coercive measures — only safe injection sites, billboards encouraging users to take drugs with friends or programmes that pay them not to use.

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By Paul Kingsnorth

If avoiding harm justified coercive interventions, surely we’d have seen more of them in Californian drug policy. But their absence in the case of drug abuse, and fervent application in the case of virus control, suggests there’s a different motive at work than the prevention of harm.

In an Evening Standard piece last week, former editor Emily Sheffield argued that our capital city’s unvaccinated residents should “pay with their freedoms, not ours”. And on social media, we saw the same punitive ferocity recently when one American mother reported that when her son tested positive she didn’t just quarantine him but also “took the X-Box”, a measure more consistent with chastisement than infection control. The only reason she didn’t also confiscate the phone, she says, “is so he can text for food and water”.

Recently, we’ve had news that Omicron appears to be more infectious but milder, and research that indicates vaccination does very little to prevent transmission of the virus. So rationally, none of these vengeful attitudes make much sense. What’s going on?

The recent furore over the entry into Australia of (unvaccinated) tennis superstar Novak Djokovic offers a clue. One Melbourne journalist tweeted about how, since he was allowed into the country, fans “won’t want to come” to the tennis matches. Objectively, one single unvaccinated tennis player would make a negligible difference to someone’s risk of catching Covid; the only possible reason someone might skip the Australian Open because of Djokovic’s presence is if the fear was of a subtler, more metaphysical contagion.

In the Bay of Kells, in Ireland’s County Kerry, there’s a small secret graveyard that until recently was overgrown with brambles and largely forgotten. It was a place where grieving parents buried babies who died before they could be baptised — for the unbaptised were spiritually unclean, and therefore not permitted burial on a churchyard’s consecrated ground.

In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), GK Chesterton observed that “it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism”. Today the prescience of Chesterton’s remark is clear, as is the convergence in terms of social meaning between vaccination and baptism.

The growing tendency for ‘the vaccinated’ to treat ‘the unvaccinated’ as other or impure recalls the willingness of an earlier age to deny others simple forms of inclusion on the basis of baptism. Never mind what studies say about the efficacy of Covid vaccination in protecting us from severe illness (which evidence strongly suggests it does) or mitigating further infection (perhaps more debatable). Increasingly, vaccination carries a social meaning as well as a medical one. It’s a ritual infusion — albeit via injection, not anointment — of sacred liquid, whose application confers freedom from spiritual taint.

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Perhaps it’s just that the correlation between left-liberalism and secularism in both Britain and America has left progressives especially hungry for something to fill the God-shaped hole, and the yearning for measures that speak to the fundamental moral instinct Haidt calls ‘sanctity/degradation’. This might help account for the ongoing, fruitless, rationally debunked but nonetheless persistent obsession Tom Chivers recently noted, with disinfecting surfaces ‘because of Covid’ despite mounting evidence that the virus is airborne.

An increasingly post-Christian West, then, finds itself grabbing gratefully onto Covid hygiene theatre, in pursuit of a purity more metaphysical than bacterial. And as we’ve now spent two years clapping for carers, sharing dancing nurse videos, and creating window iconography and even altar-cloths to venerate medical professionals, it’s probably a bit late to rein this blossoming spiritualisation of hygiene.

For to imagine we can do so would be to say we still live in a world of reasoned debate. And when ‘experts’ offer ‘evidence’ to counter rumours of Covid propagandising, only to be met with derisive accusations of using fact-checking to propagandise, we might as well abandon ‘reasoned debate’ altogether and, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, stick two pencils up our noses and wear underpants on our heads.

Or, alternatively, start praying. Progressives spent half of the twentieth century telling us that this was pointless: the search for metaphysical purity was low-status, ‘authoritarian’ or simply obsolete, and reason replaced all that. Their children, though, have discovered that purification rituals don’t have to be confined to the individualistic realm of ‘juice cleanses’ or ‘clean eating’, but can be imposed on entire societies.

We can expect them to go on chasing that high. And meanwhile, it seems enough of the rest of us like having something to worship, and a suitable group of sinners to despise. If you don’t already pray, you might as well start; we all once again live in a religious world.

Where exactly is home for Labour? The answer was decisively revealed this week by the leader’s conference speech: home is an Islington townhouse in the year 1996. What a time to be British! Hugh Grant is shagging Liz Hurley. Princess Diana is sparklingly alive. Football means Skinner and Baddiel, not Heysel and Hillsborough. Damon and Noel are the new Mick and John. Somehow, Ian Hislop is actually quite funny.

Bonkers, barmy, grotesque Tories in pin-stripe suits dusted with dandruff are going mental over Europe. But on the telly, inspiring Tony and pragmatic Gordon are preparing, as smoothly professional as stockbrokers, for power. Things can only get… better.

Starmer did not have to mention Blair on Wednesday. The spirit of Tone was lurking underneath every word, dressed in greasy overalls, wrenching every rhetorical bolt into place. Tough on crime? Absolutely. Education? Say it three times baby.

More important than anything Starmer said was Peter Mandelson’s remark to Seumas Milne: “We’re back in control.”

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By Will Lloyd

Speaking of figures from the past who consistently ruin the breakfasts of Daily Mail readers, Gina Miller is back too. New New Labour was not the only centre party to stagger on to the scene in the last few days.

“The True & Fair Party” is her new political vehicle. Miller said: “This government needs to be held to account. Voters deserve better than the current politics of incompetence and self-interest.”

The party’s policies are yet to be announced, but they will be a homecoming for Miller as well. You have to imagine that they will be Rejoin-ishly pro-EU and described everywhere as “centrist”. Like every middle-aged product of British centrism, whether it is a political party, or a newspaper columnist, True & Fair would be better named: Let Down & Fed Up & Really Quite Tired.

Miller is, at least, about a thousand times more interesting than Sir Keir. In the long 2016 era, when the British middle-class were lost in a prolonged and anxious freak out, she was easily the most charismatic and exciting Remainer personality.

The others were lame. Elsewhere there was only terrible hair (A.C. Grayling), or needling over-familiarity (Alastair Campbell, Andrew Adonis), or sad, sullen machismo (Bob Geldof, James O’Brien, David Aaronovitch), or… Femi.

Miller was their antidote and foil. She intrigued in all senses. She was a cigar-smoking sports racer, and a parachutist. Her background was pure 1980s, pure Thatcherite graft. After her family lost its fortune, she chewed her way back through the class system, from hard-luck indigence to a £7 million Chelsea villa, by way of the City. She was serious and respected. A lawyerly battle axe. Joan of Arc to Remainers; the Terminator to Brexiteers.

She took flak, both of the legitimate and grimly racist sort. Her most intelligent profilers wondered whether her high-wire legal challenges to Brexit were motivated by “an extreme sense of civic duty” or the chance of another adrenaline rush.

The same question hovers over her new party. In a sense though the answer doesn’t matter. Like Starmer’s zombie centrism, True & Fair will fail, because there is no market for this politics anymore. Barely months have passed since the last attempts to rebuild the centre.

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By Ian Martin

During the Brexit years, centrist fever dreams rolled above the land like rain clouds. In 2017, a Twitter-famous tax lawyer called Jolyon Maugham wanted to launch a new party called “Spring”. His plans were big, massively big. According to the Guardian: “He would hold a 28-day festival at the football stadium in Maidenhead, [Theresa] May’s constituency. Each day would be dedicated to the national dress and cuisine of a different EU member state. For the finale, Maugham planned to announce that he was standing in Maidenhead as a Spring candidate.” That sounds like satire written after a long, drunken seance with the hooting spirit of Auberon Waugh, but apparently it’s true. In the end Maugham “decided he didn’t have enough time to go ahead with it”. A wise choice!

There were smaller, but no less Partridge-into-a-dictaphone visions that year. Former George Osborne aide James Chapman called for an anti-Brexit party called ‘The Democrats’ in a Twitter meltdown, which only ended after he’d demanded — sad machismo again — that Theresa May personally debate him outside parliament. Even PR Week (not exactly Guido Fawkes) was moved to call this “an extraordinary rant”. A few months later, the then Economist writer Jeremy Cliffe proposed setting up a party called “The Radicals” — pro-tech, pro-Europe, social-liberal — and ultimately, anti-ever amounting to anything.

The biggest centrist bubble blown and pricked was Change UK. Or was it The Independent Group for Change? Or the UK’s Independently Grouped Change? Or the UK Group’s Independent Change? Nobody — not even lead member Anna Soubry, who called the party “Change.org” in the Commons — was very sure. (The only Change UK question anybody really wanted to know the answer to was what moisturiser Chuka Umunna used. Sadly, he never told us.)

Formed by 11 MPs fleeing Labour and the Tories, and born in Nando’s, Change UK died in bathos when every single member lost their seat at the last general election. But for me, Change.Independence.UK only really expired for good when its former MEP candidate Gavin Esler was booted off Celebrity Masterchef this summer after serving a dessert condemned as “incomplete” by John Torrode. The judge’s cruel reception of this pudding, which was also compared to “soup”, exactly mirrored the British public’s reaction to Change UK, namely: “WTF is this supposed to be lads.”

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Anyway, by 2019 the public was done with soup. They wanted cake. At least Esler reached the Masterchef quarter finals — Change UK didn’t make it past two elections.

How many centrist parties have to get Hindenburged before this all stops? The strangest thing about Miller, and Starmer-Mandelson is that they can’t locate the centre ground at all. If there is a centre ground today in England, it is enormously unpalatable to those who self-identify as centrists. They would not vote for the “Hang the nonces, fund the NHS party”, but that’s where the centre is now.

The centre wants nationalised railways and birched criminals. It wants its borders closed and its healthcare free at the point of access. It is fear and loathing, and charity and kindliness; a truly mutant hybrid of Paul Dacre and Jeremy Corbyn. Pundits would love the English to be the stout and sensible strivers described in Orwell’s The Lion and The Unicorn; sadly, I fear the reality is that they are more like the suspicious and cruel folk described in Chesterton’s The Secret People.

And they’re getting stranger all the time. England is weirding. David Icke has never been so adored. Football fans descended on Nuneaton to defend a half-forgotten statue of George Eliot from BLM; no, they had not read Middlemarch. Parents style their children as Captain Tom. Sports mascots become ultra-large poppies every November. Jackie Weaver publishes books. There are candlelit vigils or protests on a seemingly daily basis.

The mood is jittery, not only in the petrol queues. The writer Clive Martin calls it “Radical Normal”. Gina Miller and Keir Starmer probably don’t know much about Radical Normal, but it has more to do with the future of British politics than they do.

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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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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.

If Peter Mandelson’s old stamping ground turns blue then seats like Doncaster North (held by Ed Miliband) and Normanton (held by Yvette Cooper) will be next. That should concentrate minds.

Yet with the Downing Street clown show doing its best to sabotage the Conservative campaign, it could still be Boris on the ropes by Monday, not Sir Keir, and that would be an absolute disaster… for the Labour Party. If voters deliver a mixed message, then Labour won’t understand it.

Mind you, it might not understand an unmixed message. Just look at 2019. No fewer than 50 Red Wall seats turned blue at the General Election, but who did Labour replace Jeremy Corbyn with? A middle-class, southern Remainer who devised the party’s disastrous second referendum policy. Brilliant.

So don’t blame the voters if they have to repeat themselves. The first home truth that needs to get through loud and clear is the most obvious: Labour is useless at picking leaders.

A party leader has to satisfy two fundamental tests — one positive, the other negative. He (and with Labour it always is a he) has to be sufficiently attractive while also not excessively repulsive. No Labour leader has passed both tests since Tony Blair was elected 27 years ago; none of them have won a general election.

While Sir Keir passes the negative test, it’s increasingly clear that he fails the positive test. With Jeremy Corbyn it was the other way round, hugely loveable to a core of voters and extremely off-putting to the rest. Ed Miliband satisfied neither test and nor, by the end, did Gordon Brown.

So the most immediate way in which an electoral calamity would be good for Labour is forcing a choice of new leader on the basis of electability and electability alone. The membership might just be up for that, the favourite now being Andy Burnham — the former Cabinet minister and current Mayor of Greater Manchester.

In 2015, Burnham was decisively rejected by Labour members in favour of Jeremy Corbyn, who outpolled him three-to-one; if he’s now the front runner that’s quite the turnaround. Then again, if party members are willing to go back the future they might as well go the extra mile — and consider a candidate like Dan Jarvis.

A former British Army officer, Jarvis is the current Mayor of the Sheffield City Region. Unlike Burnham, he’s also a sitting MP — for Barnsley Central, a surviving chunk of the Red Wall. This is a constituency where the Brexit Party took 30% of the vote in 2019, less than four thousand votes behind Labour.

How on Earth did that happen?

Labour won’t find the answers until they accept a second home truth, which is that Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer are equal co-authors of the party’s misfortune.

The heated debate between the Corbynites and Starmerites as to which side is to blame overlooks the possibility that they both are. Labour is polarised between two kinds of wrong and unelectable — the tendencies represented by Momentum on the one hand and the People’s Vote campaign on the other. Both are failed projects, and they’ve left Labour revolving uselessly around an axis of feeble. The party cannot make progress until it declares both groups a busted flush and moves on.

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Dan Jarvis hinted at just such a need in a recent essay for the Fabian Society pamphlet, Hearts and Minds: Winning the working-class vote:

“We would be naïve to think that changes at the top of the party and an end to the Brexit wars mean an automatic return to business as usual,” he wrote: “The political landscape has shifted, we must adapt or risk fading into obscurity like some of our sister parties on the continent.”

But what would that require? Jarvis pleads with his party to “better understand how notions such as patriotism, sovereignty and national security relate to people’s lived experiences.” He also observes that “local and regional pride is accepted, celebrated, even encouraged, but when the discussion moves to national pride, many in our party begin to feel uneasy.”

That’s putting it mildly. When Starmer tried to wrap himself in the Union Jack, parts of his party freaked out. It could have been his opportunity to face down those who see our national flag as symbol of hate and racism, but he clearly doesn’t have the stomach for a fight.

The Jarvis solution is to acknowledge the bad parts of our national history — “the Britain of empire and conquest”, as he puts it, while celebrating “the Britain of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and the miners’ strike.” But are enough voters interested in this brand of Old Labour nostalgia?

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Matthew Parris has dismissed the Labour movement as “a gluey, opaque, illiberal freemasonry of bonkers activists, passive supporters, historical resentments, myths and legend.” Labour, he feels, is an impediment to change: “21st-century Britain will never warm to this 20th-century dinosaur, waving its banners of extinct mining unions.”

Labour’s predicament is that Jarvis and Parris are equally right and wrong. Much of the middle-class Left has no interest in Jarvis’s patriotic socialism and much of the working class has no interest in what Parris stands for. Without both sets of voters there is no path to power for the Left, yet Labour is clearly incapable of bringing them together in sufficient numbers.

And that leads us to the third, and most difficult, home truth that the party has to accept: it can’t defeat the Tories alone.

Britain today has only one major party — the Conservatives. They can be beaten, but only by an alliance of smaller parties, of which Labour would be the obviously leading member. Not splitting the non-Tory vote is hardly a new idea, but this latest incarnation of the “progressive alliance” would also serve a more radical purpose: the unbundling of the Labour Party.

It’s clear that Labour will never retake the Red Wall unless its leadership is free to develop a moderate and patriotic platform – and this can’t be done with either the Corbynites or the hardcore Remainers on board.

In order to persuade them to leave, the Labour leader needs make them an offer they can’t refuse — an electorally viable future outside Labour. Under our current voting system, Labour would stand aside to give other progressive parties a free run in a defined number of constituencies, concentrated in the big cities and university towns.

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If this works — if Labour retakes the Red Wall and a progressive alliance gains a majority — then that still leaves the problem of reconciling the difference stripes of leftish opinion. But this would be less painful as part of a negotiation to form a government than as a bitter factional struggle within one party.

Denmark provides an example of how it can work. There, the main centre-left party are the Social Democrats, who govern with the support of several smaller progressive groups. Under Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Social Democrats have gained support by combining welfarist policies with a tough line on immigration and national security. Whatever one might think of these policies, they’re electorally successful — and the rest of the Left goes along with it. Indeed Denmark is one of the last places in western European with a significant centre-left to speak of.

But can we really imagine Labour embarking upon such a radically different future? Yes — but only if it has no other option, and knows it faces oblivion. Given a choice between seizing the day or clutching at straws, it will always go for the straws. It’s easier, it’s less painful, and it’s ultimately disastrous. If Labour are humiliated today, it will be the wake-up call they need.

London looks extraordinary from up here, immortal in its way, a proving ground for the capitalist dream of unending growth. In all the time I have lived here, I have never felt so blissfully remote from the economic forces embodied by that view. Since the imposition of the first lockdown last March, I have scarcely crossed the river, let alone loitered in the cultural and commercial districts, which, in times of normality, so often coaxed millions of us into their gleaming centre

In many respects, this has been a tonic. During these months of geographical constraint, our preoccupations have become localised, almost parochial: the vexatious subject of “Low Traffic Neighbourhoods”; the question of which local park cafes serve alcohol.

Only now, as Covid restrictions ease and a mayoral election comes into focus, has that spell started to break. With it comes a need to look back to that horizon, and return to the issues besetting the city at large.

The rogue’s gallery of candidates for the mayoralty betrays a city which, like the wider country, remains ill at ease with itself. To rose-tinted liberals, London is still the ultimate city, a cradle of tolerant coexistence, the place where multiculturalism works. To those on the histrionic Right, London is anarchy, plagued by terror-attacks, no-go zones and spiralling crime.

The truth, inevitably, is somewhere in between. London is not a Powellian ruin. But, for a lifelong resident like me, it is no longer possible to pretend that it is a unified, contented and enviable place either. Indeed, the most disturbing question raised in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire has not gone away: how did London become a place that no longer functions for those who live here?

I suspect the answer, if it could be boiled down into a single word, would be property. In my other life, I do occasional work as a landscape gardener, tending the lawns and flowerbeds of south London’s more affluent inner-suburbs. Recently, a neighbour sidled up to me to complain about the homogenisation of her neighbourhood. I wrote about this very subject last year for UnHerd.

Next door to where I was working, someone with a lot of money had commissioned an overhaul of their semi, and the excavation conveyors were churning all day long, puking up London clay to make space for a new basement. “When we moved here 40 years ago, I was a junior legal researcher, my husband was an assistant lecturer,” the neighbour said, over the din. “This road was all teachers and police officers. Public servants. Now it’s just bankers, bankers, bankers.”

How did this happen? The erosion of London’s social-housing stock, which once inoculated the city against the creation of rich and poor ghettoes, is certainly one reason; the globe-trotting tendencies of the super-rich another. Disproportionate city incomes have furnished a portion of residents with the financial leverage to recast an area overnight if it becomes popular with a certain milieu, while the suburban dream, which only 20 years ago still lured people out of the inner-city, seemed, prior to Covid, to have expired.

Together, these processes have combined to dissolve London’s mixed communities, as well as the post-war history of town-planning which once ensured that no area of affluence could become an island, aloof from the rest of society.

The emptiness of Central London’s commercial quarters over the past year was prefigured long before in the city’s slew of new luxury residential developments, which have been devoid of people ever since they were finished. To walk through places like the Nine Elms Regeneration Area in the early months of 2020 was to enter a grotesque dystopia of late capitalism run amok.

All over town, vast welters of such towers are still in the throes of construction, invariably encircled by hoardings depicting attractive people at rest and play. But residents know that these apartments are less homes to be lived in than bricks-and-mortar commodities; investment opportunities that until recently were seen as safer than any government bond.

The sense of dislocation created by these joyless plazas is in large part architectural. London used to be a low-slung city, but these towers are vertiginous and carbuncular, looming over the besieged remnants of what came before.

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Arguably more significant than their aesthetic dissonance was the social upheaval they precipitated. As these towers grew, socio-demographic lines that once felt blurred became abrupt and pronounced, as people moved into economic enclaves and poverty was pushed outwards into peripheries and ghettoes of disadvantage. Traditional places of commonality, where shoulders rubbed, soon disappeared.

Prior to lockdown, I was frequently struck by the way in which once-diverse high streets were evolving to reflect these more stratified times: the poorer areas with their betting and pawn shops, the wealthier ones lined with estate agents, restaurants and prim cafes. Our civic spaces and landmarks were being commodified, as cash-strapped councils looked to make up budget shortfalls by monetising their assets, repurposing public libraries into private gyms. Boundaries, both real and imagined, had started to rise across the inner-city.

As established communities fractured and dissipated, the streets began to feel more febrile. People in their 30s, unable to afford the cost of raising a family here, were starting to leave in droves. And we who remained were left with a curious sense that we were an inconvenient vestige of a city that no longer exists, obdurate stone buildings amidst a forest of steel and glass.

Pre-pandemic London remained successful in many ways: as a summer playground for the super-rich; as a giant laundromat for the global kleptocracy; as an iconographic background for tourist photos and the glossy pages of a Hong Kong realtor’s brochure. But as a constellation of established communities? Not anymore; London’s covenant was coming undone.

The misery this has imposed in the city’s margins is all too easy to ignore. The more obvious victims, such as the council tenants living in mould-infested tower blocks, are rarely heard. Their abasement, like so much which afflicts the London underclass, is hidden away, in foodbanks concealed behind council estates, or displaced out of town.

But to focus exclusively on such misery is to miss a wider, more inchoate malaise — of a city adrift, changing in ways its residents don’t condone. Cities are always prone to endless flux, but when a city changes this fast, and on such an inhuman scale — when it starts to wear its inequality so gaudily — it is impossible to live here without feeling unmoored.

Suddenly, each new skyscraper feels like an act of violence; each house renovation a desecration. Wealthy newcomers appear not as new neighbours but as colonisers; hipster beards and vintage shops become hallmarks of an enemy within. Each international bar or café, an effigy of the melting pot it supplanted, becomes a reminder that London’s hallowed diversity is often merely ornamental — a desirable backdrop so long as it doesn’t press too close.

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So much of our yearning for the London we’ve lost seems ostensibly counter-intuitive. The city I grew up in was hardly an urban paradise. Many of my most vivid memories are recalled with a maternal hand at my back, ushering me past scenes of a recessional metropolis, rendered in grey. Cardboard shanties still proliferated beneath the Southbank undercrofts; on Oxford Street, grifters peddled counterfeit perfume from splayed suitcases. Back then the air was tubercular, the Thames flowed an effluent brown, and every road seemed dappled with litter, chewing gum, and dog shit in varying stages of putrefaction.

Yet I still yearn for that time before it was all cleaned-up and prettified. Before the pigeon-feed sellers had been turfed from Trafalgar Square. The other day I saw a car with a bumper-sticker which read: “Make Peckham Shit Again”, and I couldn’t help but smile at the oxymoron it conveyed. We have become a paradox: the progressive city nostalgic for the past.

Meanwhile, apologists for the gentrification of inner-London exonerate its degradations with platitudes about “market forces” — it’s just another reality of late capitalism, up there with sweat-shop labour and the atrophying high-street. It is something we grumble about on social media, but, for the most part, can’t bring ourselves to protest over because it would be like screaming at the tide.

Besides, don’t these market forces come with perks? As a tsunami of foreign property investment increased demand for a stagnating supply, and successive governments tailored housing policy to sustain the boom, those of us who own homes have seen their value rocket. In recent decades, owning a house in London has become the UK’s easiest path to fast cash. This is the city’s guilty secret: that so many of us have suckled on this indemnity that we cannot admit its inherent madness.

The 2016 Brexit vote exposed the intractability of these hypocrisies, as the predominantly Left-leaning city found itself in a Faustian pact, at once lamenting the financial sector’s malignant influence but terrified at the implications of its potential evacuation. Combined with the effects of the pandemic, suddenly an economy predicated on casino banking and rentier capitalism feels frail, one fiscal paroxysm from catastrophe.

Perhaps this is why we were so ready to let it go; so prepared, when Covid provided the pretext, to retreat into our respective streets, leaving the inner city to get on with its fire-sale unscrutinised.

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It remains to be seen what long-term impact the Covid year will have on London’s trajectory. It doesn’t seem wholly naïve to hope that its resuscitation of civic engagement might act as a breakwater against the city’s atomisation and its darkening mood. Lockdown has forced its neophiles to engage with their local neighbourhoods, and stalled the speculation that was so ruthlessly reshaping them. In some respects, at least, the last year could prove to be for the city’s benefit.

But, still, London’s reanimation brings with it a sense of foreboding. The fact that the wider city has only really registered over the last year as a backdrop to ill-tempered protest — in images of marching lockdown sceptics and police cordons defending Churchill’s statue — may foreshadow a summer of discontent, as the city’s unleashed energy turns sour and the economic fall-out from Covid starts to pinch.

Amid the excitement of rebirth, the queasy feeling many of us experience upon seeing roads thronged with traffic and parks strewn with revellers’ litter serves as a reminder that one of the intractable problems with London is that there are a lot of people. And people are often unbearable.

Now the giant stirs. The mayor will have a job to do.

Hartlepool, Labour since 1964, is one of the most significant by-elections for years. If Labour loses, the pressure on an already wobbly Sir Keir Starmer will be immense. It will give his Left-wing critics ammunition and his Right-wing critics yet more evidence that the broader realignment of British politics is only just getting started.

So, it’s no wonder that a new idea about Labour’s future has been embraced so keenly. Labour, it is argued, should turn to the ‘Blue Wall’; it is not a wall per se, more a sprinkling of liberalising, suburban hotspots across the country which the Conservatives have held for a while, and which are trending towards Labour.

In his insightful blog, political analyst Steve Akehurst identifies 41 seats which have been held by the Conservatives since at least 2010, where Labour or the Liberal Democrats have overperformed their national swing in 2017 and 2019 and where the Conservative majority is below 10,000. Seats causing particular excitement include those of big-name Tories like Steve Baker in Wycombe, Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Wood Green, and Graham Brady in Altrincham – and even Uxbridge, Boris Johnson’s seat.

“They largely lean Remain”, writes Akehurst, “and so have larger numbers of the demographics that have turned against the Tories since 2016: under 40s, university educated, more socially liberal. More likely to prioritise issues like climate or housing.”

On a good day, assuming a swing of between 3.75 and 5.75 points, and with Labour over-performing in these “Blue Wall” areas, Akehurst estimates that Labour could win anywhere between 15 and 26 of these seats. Assuming the Conservatives lost some other marginal seats, the collapse of the Blue Wall could demolish Boris Johnson’s majority, put Labour back in power and give journalists one hell of a revenge story.

It is an appealing thesis, not least for political analysts who desperately want it to happen. It is no secret that many of the people who write about politics also tend to be graduates who lean to the Left and want the pendulum to swing back in their direction. Many spent 2019 urging Labour to swing behind a second referendum, while downplaying the disastrous impact this would have in its heartlands and ignoring the fact that Johnson could easily offset losses to liberals by invading the Red Wall, where workers had been drifting away from Labour for 20 years.

Which is exactly what happened. Of the 57 seats the Conservatives gained in 2019, all but three came directly from Labour — and of those 54 seats, 50 voted Leave. While the Conservative vote increased by 1.2 points nationally, it surged by 10.2 points in the Red Wall. The Tories not only massively overperformed in these seats, they reshaped their party around a Leave vote that is more geographically efficient than the liberal vote: spread out enough to have more electoral impact.

And this is why I do not find the Blue Wall thesis convincing. The numbers. It is simply not big enough to bring down Boris Johnson’s majority. Even if Labour were to overperform here, it still needs to find significant gains elsewhere. This is what happens when you double down on liberals in a first-past-the-post system. While your analysts might tell you that you are putting a bet on the future, liberals are often too strongly concentrated in the big cities and university towns to deliver the broad support that you need for a stomping majority in an electoral system like Britain’s. Liberals are increasingly flocking to the big cities and university towns, where Labour is already dominant. This is why Sadiq Khan does not need to worry about his re-election next month.

The Blue Wall strategy also relies on Labour doing a far better job of unifying the liberal factions, which it failed to do in 2019, when only half of Remainers voted Labour and one in eight voted Green or Liberal Democrat. Even today, the latter still hold 12% of the vote while disillusionment with Keir Starmer’s leadership appears to be strengthening rather than weakening, especially among the young graduates who loved Jeremy Corbyn and whose strong turnout is a prerequisite to making any Blue Wall strategy effective. With the Brexit Party resting in peace, the risk of internecine rivalry is greater on the Left than the Right.

More fundamentally, the Blue Wall thesis ignores the fact that the Red Wall has only been partially dismantled. There are still many, many more seats that could easily fall to the Conservatives, so long as Boris Johnson stays committed to the deeper transformation of British politics that is underway — a transformation that is seeing his party rally a cross-class coalition of blue-collar and affluent cultural conservatives.

Here is just one statistic to keep in mind. Of the 44 most marginal Labour seats today, 39 are outside of London and the South. I call this the “Red Wall 2.0”. These are seats that have small majorities of 4,000 votes or less, are filled with pro-Brexit, cultural conservative workers who lean Left on the economy and Right on culture, and which have been trending Conservative.

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More than a dozen are scattered across the North West and North East while another 13 are in the once reliable People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. These are places that are filled with hard-working, patriotic Brits who want the Government to reform an economy rigged against them while preserving a culture they see as being under threat from increasingly illiberal “woke” activists.

One of those seats, Wentworth and Dearne, is currently represented by Labour MP John Healey, who grasps the fact that across a large swathe of the Midlands, Yorkshire and North the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall was only just starting in 2019. As recently as 2017, Healey’s majority was 15,000 votes. Today, it is 2,165.

It is just a small swing from joining neighbouring Don Valley, which was held by Labour from 1922 until 2019, in the Conservative camp. This is perhaps why Healey has just released a collection of essays by Labour MPs who, like him, have seen their once solid majorities crumble from over 10,000 votes to less than 4,000.

They represent the “new Labour marginals” — the seats that New Labour types once said had nowhere else to go but which ever since then have been trending Conservative. Healey points to people “who feel Labour left them before they left Labour”.

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“Those who feel let down by Labour describe at best an unwillingness to listen, with no respect for their experience, and at worst a rejection of their views as ignorant or backward”, he goes on.

These areas exhibit all of the features that now define the new Conservative Party electorate; blue-collar, pro-Brexit, culturally conservative and hacked off. They are the people who Toby Perkins, Labour MP for Chesterfield, describes as being denied thousands of new factory jobs by Sports Direct which instead gave them to migrants from Eastern Europe, “while voters felt progressive opinion refused even to consider the problem, much less propose solutions”.

Labour MPs who represent newly marginal seats include Yvette Cooper, whose majority crashed from over 15,000 votes in 2015 to just 1,276 today, Dan Jarvis, whose majority has fallen from over 15,000 votes to just 3,571 and Jonathan Reynolds whose majority has been cut in half, falling to just 2,946 votes. Labour strongholds have become redoubts.

At the core of this is who Healey calls the “real middle”, which is “not the middle-class that became New Labour’s fixation”. The real middle, he argues, are the “ten million aspirational workers who live on ordinary incomes around the average of £24,908. They often live in one of the 14 English towns that cover 16 constituencies like Stevenage, Crawley and Harlow. In 1997, New Labour won all but one of them. By 2015, they represented none of them.”

If we take an even looser definition of “marginal” and look, like Akehurst, at seats with (Labour) majorities of less than 10,000 votes then there are 105 seats where the Brexit Party or Conservative Party are second, 82 of which lie outside of London and southeastern England. They include Doncaster Central, Doncaster North, Halifax, Kingston-upon Hull West and Hessle, Rotherham, Barnsley East, Batley and Spen and Barnsley Central. And they include Hartlepool, which is why the forthcoming by-election on May 6 is so important.

If the Conservatives take Hartlepool or come close to doing so, then the implication is not just that Johnson will defend his existing Red Wall at the next election but could easily add another 40 or so seats to it. That would tilt British politics into a much deeper realignment that sees the Tories sink even longer roots into northern, working-class heartlands and Labour increasingly retreat to liberal enclaves.

This is ultimately why the reshaping of British politics is so traumatic for Labour, especially in England. In Healey’s essays you can detect a real fear among some in Labour that the party could soon be breathing its last breath across a large swathe of its oldest and most cherished territory. We could well be on the cusp of an even greater shock. And this is why I for one shall not be holding my breath when it comes to tales about the imminent revenge of the Blue Wall.

Was it worth it? All the turmoil, anger, effort and worry since 2016? Remainers will unanimously say “No!”: how much better the world would be if we had remained docilely within the embrace of Brussels. Many Leavers will also say “No!”: how much better if our rulers had stored up their courage and walked out. We shall never be able to say which of these imaginary scenarios might have been true, which is what makes them so attractive to those who hold them.

Both would have had their costs. Had we voted, in 2016, to Remain, we would probably have been increasingly marginalised inside an EU set on greater centralisation of power, but which, as the history of the last 20 years has shown ever more clearly, lacks democratic legitimacy. The EU has become a political black hole, sucking authority away from its member states, but unable to use it to solve its increasing problems. Success for the EU has become little more than staving off disaster. The most obvious example of this, of course, is the insoluble problem of the eurozone: creator of poverty and unemployment, kept afloat on an ocean of debt, benefitting a few countries at the expense of the others.

A remarkable recent study by a German think-tank estimated that EU membership since 2000 had cost every Frenchman on average 56,000 euros, and every Italian 74,000, whereas every German had gained 25,000. Although we would have been outside the euro, we would have been partially responsible for its rickety structure. This has been further undermined by the devastation of the Covid crisis, aggravated by the EU’s divisive and ineffective financial rescue package, and, as if to add insult to injury, rounded off with tardy and incompetent planning for vaccination. So the purely negative advantages of being outside the EU are potentially huge. For one thing, the Commission has calculated that the UK would have been liable for 84 billion euros in its next budgetary cycle.

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By Ed West

So why not just walk away? Tempting indeed. Boris must surely have wondered whether this was at last his 1940 moment: “I felt … that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” Some naïve press hyperbole has even called this the worst crisis since 1940. Fortunately, it is infinitely less grave. Nevertheless, Boris has had to deal with a divided country, a divided party, a ruthlessly hostile and opportunist opposition, uncontrolled and largely hostile media (how would Churchill have coped with today’s BBC?), and nationalists licking their lips. Was Macron’s cynical Channel blockade an attempt at intimidation? If so, the Government’s own clumsiness is largely to blame: it managed to turn a scientific advantage into a global disaster, giving our rivals and enemies a field day. So a deal at least wins short-term relief, and takes the wind out of the sails of Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon. It will not stop hard-line Remainers from blaming everything on Brexit. But it will smooth things down over the next few weeks and months. And a week is a long time in politics.

This is not the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning. Professor Pangloss might argue that through a chaotic process of political Darwinism we have arrived at the necessary (and, therefore, best possible) outcome . Think back across the aeons to 2016. Few people had any idea what Brexit ought to mean. ‘Hard’ Brexiteers thought of a Norway option, or rejoining EFTA or the European Economic Area. Mrs May and her advisors — wise (or so one would have thought) from years of negotiations in Brussels — imagined some “bespoke” deal, “ambitious” and wide ranging. Some Brexiteers predicted an easy negotiation: to reach a free trade agreement with people with whom we already had free trade.

How simple minded we were to think that the people who ran the EU would simply accept the UK’s decision, and pragmatically work out the most mutually beneficial future relationship. That is not how the EU operates, as we have seen most recently in Greece and Italy. Challenges to Mr Verhofstadt’s mighty empire have to be defeated, or the whole structure might begin to unravel. The EU were encouraged to think that they could repeat in Britain what they had succeeded with in Greece and Italy (not to mention Ireland and Denmark) by the tireless campaigning of Remain to try to undo the referendum — a strategy now condemned by Lord Mandelson for failing in its stated aim, but which succeeded brilliantly from the EU’s point of view in undermining the British government’s position throughout. The EU and the Remainers managed to set the terms of the debate: it was all about the UK’s “access” to the EU market, ignoring the need of key EU countries for “access” to the UK’s market (the most valuable in the world both for Germany and France), and of course to our fisheries.

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By Ryan Gilbey

The May government’s incoherent strategy, made worse by the unconstitutional antics of parliament, led to a disastrous Withdrawal Agreement and the trap of the Northern Ireland backstop. Boris Johnson inherited this poisoned chalice, from which Remainers gloated he would have to drink. It was impossible, so went the argument, to get the EU to change its mind. It held all the cards, and the UK was a pathetic supplicant with delusions of grandeur. As a former British representative to the EU proclaimed in the House of Lords, “We will huff and puff but, in the end, we will basically come to heel”.

Well, it seems we haven’t: if anything, the EU side seems to have blinked. It will take some time for the details of this agreement to be scrutinised. The traditional British approach — centuries old — of not looking too closely at texts in the assumption that common sense would prevail has, we must hope, now been abandoned. In dealing with the EU, you read the small print and count your spoons. We must assume that every loophole will be exploited by an organisation that fears our departure and begrudges our possible future success, because it reflects badly on itself.

But, at first sight, this agreement seems to assure the essentials. We will not be subject to EU law or the European Court. We will not be vulnerable to one-sided economic blackmail. Even our long-suffering fishing industry will have the chance to revive. We shall be freer to continue (as has been happening for 20 years) shifting our trade away from the EU to more profitable regions. In future we shall have no one to blame for our shortcomings but ourselves. The end of the beginning. What comes now will be harder still.

“And naturally,” he replied, “the Catholics are the royalists and the Protestants are the republicans?” Hailing from a Swiss-French background, Jaccottet had understood “loyalists” as “royalists” — correctly — and made a logical inference, based on his understanding of Catholicism and its traditional association with the crown.

It’s an example of how our tribal alliances sometimes defy logic, at least to outsiders, and for odd historical reasons. Similarly, imagine explaining to a stranger that in Britain there are two tribes, one nationalist and one globalist, and they are aligned with a European civilisation-state on the one hand and with more liberal multiracial federations on the other?

This is not to make the fatuous point that “Remainers are the real racists”, which is not true, only to point out that political-tribal loyalties are often irrational, and can change for equally irrational reasons. We’ve only just come to the end of what was supposed to be David Cameron’s second term, but the world of politics has changed immeasurably since his departure, and it continues to change still. In five or ten years’ time, when Brexit has been and gone, will the two parties of Left and Right have evolved into the parties of rejoin and stay out? Considering the events of 2020 so far, and the way geopolitics is changing, it might not be so simple.

Britain only left the EU on 31 January, and has already moved noticeably closer to Australia and Canada in foreign policy matters, the three countries issuing joint statements on Hong Kong.

This was entirely as some Leave campaigners imagined, fulfilling the dream of “CANZUK”, an association of free trade and free movement between the four English-speaking Commonwealth countries. The idea was viewed with suspicion by some on the Left as being about kith and kin, or part of some deluded imperial nostalgia, yet one of Global Britain’s first acts in this new alliance was to offer British citizenship to the people of Hong Kong, potentially increasing immigration by hundreds of thousands.

Elsewhere, Britain has been busily securing a trade agreement with Turkey, a deal worth £20billion that will make it easier for Turks entering Britain.

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France, in contrast, is sending gun boats to the eastern Mediterranean to support Greece against a Turkish regime that appears increasingly aggressive and chauvinistic, a perception not helped by Erdogan’s decision to turn the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque (which France protested, but Britain remained silent over). France and Turkey are at odds over Libya, but to say that this is just about power, money or resources would be wrong, since the post-Brexit world appears to see the two western European powers embarking on their own historic world missions.

France has traditionally seen its role as protecting Christians in the east, and the current French president is aware of his historical position as the secular leader of Christendom, the heir of Charlemagne. Macron was once a hero to Britain’s centrists, but he is no Blairite; indeed it has been observed that while Boris Johnson poses as a populist he is a technocrat at heart, while the outwardly technocrat Macro is in reality a Gaullist.

France is not alone, and a recent meeting of MEPs discussing Turkish aggression was described as like “seeing the reappearance of Pope Pius V calling on the Holy Alliance against Turkey and mobilizing the fleets of Christendom to face the Ottoman invasion.”

The EU has prided itself on being post-historic, universalist and liberal, but in an increasingly hostile world during a troubled decade, and facing two revanchist powers to its east, it may be forced into becoming more of a “civilization-state”.

Ths is not entirely impossible; most of continental Europe is nothing like as progressive as British Remainers imagine, and Britain has always been one of the most liberal members, both socially and economically. From the start of the European project Britain was heavily involved in framing ideas of “human rights” into the European legal system, even if this became a widely disliked phrase in the British conservative press.

So while France’s world role appears to be defending the frontiers of Christendom, Britain’s post-Brexit leaders see their mission as reviving the 19^th-century gospel of free trade. That was always a core part of the Vote Leave ideal, and it is certainly not a populist or nationalistic idea — although it is to some extent a nostalgic one.

Indeed, while the “Anglosphere” is a term with strong centre-Right Atlanticist undertones, by any real measurement the English-speaking nations are the most liberal on earth.

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In continental Europe, only the small Scandinavian countries are comparable and Germany — and even more so France — are further to the Right on core progressive issues like race relations, gender equality and gay rights. (They may be more socially democratic, but that is another matter). Compare Macron’s firm opposition to the BLM iconoclasm with the British Government’s response.

If Joe Biden wins in November, the continual liberal direction of the US will accelerate, bringing the Anglosphere with it, since we have almost no immunity to American cultural trends. It is true that almost all western countries are becoming more liberal — even in Poland, where conservatives just sneaked the recent election, time may be against them — but the English-speaking world is moving at a more rapid rate. In the US, the youngest generation are way, way to the Left of their elders, while their peers in France are among the biggest supporters of the radical Right.

In Britain, despite the anguish that followed the referendum and dire warnings that foreign-born residents would flee, immigration has remained at record highs, with no signs of decline. Meanwhile attitudes to immigration and race have continued to become far more liberal since 2016. It’s strange to think that while this was happening the BBC broadcast an Agatha Christie adaptation un-subtly comparing Brexit Britain to the 1930s, a reflection of how utterly deluded a large section of the commentariat and cultural elite have become since 2016, engaged in collective political hypochondria in which every flag is a swastika just as every lump is cancer.

While Brexit and Boris Johnson have taken the wind out of national populism in Britain, it remains a much stronger force on the continent; it’s not improbable that a member of the Le Pen family will become France’s first female head of state in the coming years, while in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands populism has far from gone away.

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By Aris Roussinos

One-third of ethnic minority Britons supported Brexit, and while people voted in that referendum for a number of reasons, some were certainly attracted to a global Britain in which Indians, Nigerians and other Commonwealth citizens might have as much of a place here as continental Europeans. The Brexit coalition played up this historical link in order to deflect accusations of racism (but then they could do so, knowing that people with strongly racist views were unlikely to vote for their opponents). The edgiest the official Vote Leave campaign ever got were the notorious adverts warning about Turks coming here, ironically, as it turns out, since the new trade deal will almost certainly mean more Turkish immigration than would have been allowed if we were in the EU. It seems unlikely that any deal with India or other substantial world economies won’t contain similar clauses.

Yet Leave voters, like Remainers, are more favourable to EU compared with non-EU immigration, and Ukip’s rise in the polls began before the post-2004 influx of eastern Europeans, during when most migration was from outside the continent. The increase in Polish immigration just made the subject more respectable to discuss.

The typical English conservative sympathetic to national populism has more in common with the values of the European Union than with the Anglosphere — both socially and, increasingly, economically. Similarly, British progressives are far more interested in the United States and its ongoing political drama than they are with what happens 22 miles across the Channel; many could name numerous black American victims of police brutality, but wouldn’t be able to pick out the Dutch prime minister in a line-up of other random tall people riding a bicycle. The US is not just more progressive than Europe, but its progressivism is more aggressive and far more proselytising. Many voters are, indeed, in the wrong camp.

From the vantage point of 2020, this thought experiment in which Leave and Remain switch sides might all seem improbable, since Brexit and Remain identities are extremely pronounced — far more so than Labour or Tory self-identification before the referendum. Indeed, Remainerism is probably the most passionate tribal identity that has emerged in England since the days when people fought over Holy Communion and transubstantiation.

Yet group identity can transform swiftly, as can tribal policy positions. Republican voters went from being pro-free trade to anti in rapid time, following the leadership of Donald Trump, and reflecting the fact that political views often follow social cues and party identity, not any particularly logical reasoning.

Back in 1997 it would have seemed ridiculous that the Conservatives would become the party of the working class, especially in the north, so it’s not inconceivable that there might be a “great realignment” on Europe, with internationalist Remainers embracing Global Britain and nationalists finding common cause with allies on the continent. Stranger things have happened, and in the 2020s, stranger things will.

This is true even for British liberals who, reeling since the night of 23 June, 2016, have made the continent a sort of spiritual home as they’ve become alienated from their countrymen.

Right-thinking Britons see their country as an embarrassment sliding towards populism, a sad contrast to the moral superpower that is Germany and France under centrist leader Emmanuel Macron. Yet the Continent of the Anglo liberal imagination is as unreal as the supposed nostalgic Britain of yesteryear loved by Leavers.

Italy

Britain, many people fear, is moving away from the European dream and towards fascism. It’s such an established meme that even the most recent BBC Agatha Christie adaptation was a thinly-veiled analogy about 1930s fascism and Brexit.

Yet people keep on coming to this Nazi hellhole, with the fabled “Brexodus” of migrants leaving the country actually seeing an extra 212,000 people arriving last year, and with record numbers of foreign students, too.

The fascist Brexit Britain theory is held among a minority of Remainers because they’re measuring the country by a theoretical ideal rather than comparing it to other — real — countries. So while the hate crime “surge” following the referendum mostly involved very minor incidents, Italy saw a number of openly racist murders during the late 2010s.

Whether they’re connected or not, Italy has also had a populist Right-wing government in power for most of the past four years, and the Lega may well return — at around 33% in the polls, it is by some distance the most popular party. Italian politics has been, as long as anyone can remember, chaotic and unstable, which makes me wonder if Mary Beard’s Italian colleagues who make her feel “embarrassed” about Brexit have been paying attention to their own country.

France

A central theme of fascism is a love of violence against ideological opponents, and so a visitor from outer space with a vague understanding of our human political philosophy would probably conclude that there was only one fascist state in the EU — France, where the brutality of the police is on a scale that would be unfathomable in England.

Among the recent victims of the gleefully violent French police is a teenager who lost an eye in Strasbourg and an elderly woman in Marseilles who died from her injuries after being hit by a rubber bullet. Just this month prosecutors launched a probe after a video appeared to show a policeman firing point-blank at protestors with a riot control gun.

France is quite far down from Britain in the Freedom International rating, and treats minorities like Roma in a way that would do more than embarrass liberal Brits.

Right-wingers often complain that the horrific behaviour of the French police towards the gilets jaunes has received scant coverage in the BBC; certainly if Hungary or Poland treated their citizens like that, I’m pretty sure it would be on our news more. But then France has always been a politically violent country.

The last mass murder of protesters in England occurred in 1819, when 18 people were killed by authorities in Manchester; in France police in Paris killed up to three hundred unarmed protesters in 1961.

Had anything even vaguely comparable happened during the US Civil Rights era it would have been the subject of about 500 films and even my children in an English primary school would now be learning about it now. But then Anglo liberals are fascinated with the Anglo world; not so much by the continent.

France is different to England, in some ways far more traditional; for example, the same-sex marriage campaign there was opposed by enormous protests, while, like many continental countries, it has a 12-week limit for abortion, when even talk of a 20 weeks-limit would have the Anglo commentariat dressing up in those Handmaid’s Tale outfits.

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Germany

Germany also has strict laws on abortion and its rate is around a third that of England, while it only passed same-sex marriage in 2017, against the wishes of liberal idol Angela Merkel.

But no one cares, because a certain type of Anglo sees Germany as flame-carrier of all that is good and forward-thinking, locked in a battle with the forces of darkness towards the east — Hungary, Poland and especially Russia.

Yet Germany is, if not Russia’s ally, then a close trading partner; it has far, far better relations with the country than Britain does, largely built on energy supply, and Germany’s support for the Nord Stream gas pipeline makes it far easier for Moscow to exert pressure on the west. Europe’s biggest economy also gives far less in international aid than Britain, which donates more than any other country in the continent and is, proportionally, the sixth-most generous.

Scandinavia

Even more so, Scandinavia is seen as an ultra-progressive paradise to British progressives, especially those who — like me — enjoy Borgen. Yet neither Denmark nor Sweden are as social democratic as Anglos believe, with large private sector involvement in areas run by the state over here; in Denmark even the ambulances are privatised, while Sweden is fiscally more free market than the US, and has three times as many private health operations as Britain (proportionally).

Denmark also has immigration restrictions that would have British academics in full “Toby Young has said something” outrage mode — and these were put in place by its centre-Left party.

Are the Danes racist bigots? By any measurement they are among the most tolerant, liberal people on earth — they just don’t share the Anglo elite’s belief that immigration controls are necessarily immoral, a worldview that makes us quite unusual globally.

The Nordic countries generally also have fewer females in top jobs compared with the United States, and a smaller proportion of women studying STEM subjects than Islamic countries like Malaysia and Oman.

British progressives see patriotism, and particularly its violent, heroic element, to be positively primitive. Because they’re not keen on the idea of dying for their country they assume other liberal nations are like them — and yet the Swedes and Finn do not feel the same way and are positively gagging for a chance, way ahead of any other non-ex-Soviet European state.

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Racism

Although Britain has fallen to fascism, it curiously remains by most measurements one of the least racist countries, the least worried about inter-racial marriage, or living next door to people of a different race.

Britain is also unique among European countries in having a tiny education gap between the children of natives and immigrants, whereas in every continental country it is large.

Europeans are far less pro-immigration than Americans are, while Britons are among the most pro-immigration of Europeans, and public attitudes towards immigrants have softened further since the referendum.

Americans and Britons also have stronger sensitives about race than continental Europeans. Recently Italian football authorities decided to take a stand against racism in the game, so they hired artists to paint… monkeys. Many Italians are of course embarrassed by this, but something like that would never have seen the light of day in England.

On a similar note, every December lots of Anglo-liberals are shocked to learn that the Dutch have a festival once a year where people black up as Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete”.

Although it is true that the Netherlands is a more liberal — and generally better — version of England, it is different to ours. It also has a far stronger religious element, which might surprise people who rarely travel beyond Amsterdam. Britain’s progressive sibling even has its own Bible Belt, where women are discouraged from wearing short skirts and swearing is even prohibited in some communities.

Healthcare

Perhaps no subject brings out the parochial Brit more than healthcare, most of whom believe that there are two systems in the world: our NHS, and the American system where paramedics rifle through your wallet before giving you CPR. Most remain blissfully unaware that many of our neighbours do not have an NHS. Germany doesn’t. France doesn’t. Switzerland doesn’t.

Germany and France both have the “Bismarck system”, not the “Beveridge Model” used in Britain, and have much better healthcare outcomes.

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Citizenship

When the Home Secretary suggested that London-born jihadi Shamima Begum should be stripped of her nationality it was widely denounced as racist by UK media, American media, and even by Al Jazeera, the network owned by the not-at-all-racist Qatari state.

Is taking away the citizenship of a jihadi born in the country that odd? The Germans do it, and so do the Danes, and I wouldn’t call either of those countries fascist dystopias. Even the proposal to allow a jihadi bride with two children to return to Norway has brought down the country’s government, which includes the populist-right Progress Party.

But then the whole idea of jus soli — that being born in a state confers some natural right to live there — is far from universal. The French have long had it, and so have the Americans, yet it’s never been the norm in Germany or other countries. And why would it? Different countries have different traditions.

Free movement

Despite all the despair about Brexit taking away our freedom to live, love and travel the world, not many Brits choose to live in continental Europe.

Of those who do are large minority are retirees, especially in Spain, people who aren’t taking the opportunity to explore the world but just want less winter in their autumn years. There are just 6,000 Brits in Poland, for example, about 0.6% of the number of Poles in Britain, while even the numbers in France are small compared to the French diasporas in London, and the age difference between the two groups is significant.

This isn’t a criticism – I live about 10 miles from where I grew up – but the rhetoric of Europeanism and of free movement isn’t matched by the reality.

Likewise with students and their opportunity to explore the continent; lots of young Britons would like to study in the EU, but then several non-EU states take part in the Erasmus scheme too, and the country they most want to live in is, of course, the United States.

International affairs 

People who worry that Britain’s relations with our European partners also need to bear in mind that Italy and France are now so at loggerheads that they’re engaged in a sort of proxy war in Libya, each backing different shady militias in that benighted country.

In contrast Britain, France and Germany have grown increasingly close on military matters since 2016, a by-product of the United States’ inevitable drift away from Europe towards Asia, with various joint statements reflecting the stronger three-nation alliance.

There are two continental Europes: the fictional one of the British liberal imagination, and the reality; both are indeed lovely places, but they are rather different to each other; and despite globalisation, the internet and all that business, the continent still remains very much isolated.

Of course there will be plenty of complaining and buck-passing. The devotees of the cult of Corbyn will spend the coming days blaming their loss on the media, on big business and — naturally — Brexit. Indeed they have already started.

But it is only the Brexit excuse which has even the slightest plausibility. Brexit was one of the things which did it for the Labour party in this election. But not for the reason that the Corbyn cult-ists would like to think.

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The reality was that yesterday the country reasserted the answer it had given to the political class in 2016. That year the British public were asked a very straightforward question: did we want to ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ within the EU? The country voted that it would like to leave but here we are, three and a half years later, still in the EU. And there are a number of attitudes that parties putting themselves before the electorate in such an era can aspire to hold.

The Labour party probably didn’t have the worst policy in this election. That honour must be given to the Liberal Democrats, led by Jo Swinson, who lost her own seat in East Dumbartonshire last night.

Swinson’s idea was that not only would the Liberal Democrats continue to oppose the result of the 2016 referendum; but that they would hypothetically oppose the results of any future referendum. According to the Liberal Democrats it was a viable policy to campaign for a second EU referendum but to say that if the public asked to leave the EU again the Liberal Democrats would still not see through that policy.

It isn’t hard to see the problem in that stance. It is against the whole principle of democracy. If elected representatives not only refuse to do what the public ask, but also promise that they will ignore the public in perpetuity, then it is not surprising if the public take the view that the normal democratic process has effectively been suspended and that business as usual can no longer be pursued. The Liberal Democrats, and their leader, received the verdict they deserved from the British people last night.

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But the Labour party had the next worst policy on the matter of Brexit. Corbyn — a life-long Eurosceptic leading a predominantly ‘Remain’ Parliamentary party — had attempted to straddle an impossible divide over the last three and a half years. He had tried to accept the 2016 referendum result and tried to ignore it. He had tried to be against a second referendum and then in favour of it. He had tried to pretend that he wanted to stay in the EU but could see the possibilities of leaving. Those Corbynites who are pounding the studios this morning trying to blame Brexit for their dear leader’s loss are not onto nothing.

Meanwhile, it might be noted that every single one of those MPs from the Conservative and Labour parties who joined ‘The Independent Group for Change’ without calling a by-election, and otherwise used their position to campaign to remain in the EU, lost their seats. From Chuka Umunna (who ended up jumping again, to the Lib Dems, and losing for them) to the vitriolic and unlamented Anna Soubry in Broxtowe. All were given the heave-ho by electorates who were sick of being taken advantage of .

But perhaps once the dust has settled, the bigger picture could once again be observed. The fact is that last night’s results — and in particular the sight of northern, working-class, historically Labour seats going Conservative — should be the biggest possible signal to the still resistant political class.

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By Graeme Archer

In the last three and half years it has become a commonplace to say that Britain’s politics have been divided and even toxic. But there is just one central cause for that. The 2016 referendum was the first democratic vote in these islands which looked as though it would not be acted upon by Parliament. We were thrown into three and half years of bitter, recriminative politics because a largely Remain-supporting Parliament decided that it knew better than the people and that on this, for the first time in the history of our democracy, the people needed to be ignored.

Of course that changes everything. It shifts the whole game. If some votes are upheld and others are not then you do not really live in a democracy. The realisation that this was the case was the reason why some of us always said that once the referendum vote of 2016 had been cast there was no form of Brexit that could be worse than having no Brexit at all.

The toxicity of recent years — the language in particular — has been much commented upon. But at its root was always and only this one fact: that there were people who had decided they would try to ignore, get around or otherwise trick the British public into not giving them what they had asked for. Looking back it is remarkable what wasted years these have been. And how many talented people have wasted their time.

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By Giles Fraser

Those former prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair might have helped this country out by assisting or even leading negotiations on our departure from the EU and future trade deals. Instead, they spent their time trying to conspire with Brussels to keep Britain in the EU. Politicians and former politicians from across the main parties did the same thing.

And one after another they demonstrated that they would do everything in their power to frustrate the 2016 vote and nothing whatsoever to help their country given the choice that that country had made. Former titans of politics such as Michael Heseltine reduced themselves to spittle-laden appearances on television where their aim appeared to be simply to be as nasty and vitriolic as possible. What exactly did that achieve?

In the past I have described the situation of some Remain-ers since 2016 as being akin to that of people trying to work their way through the stages of grief. And they have got stuck, unable to get to acceptance, on the stages of bargaining and denial. Perhaps the results of this election can finally put this whole sorry period to bed. The British public voted for Brexit in 2016. They voted for it again yesterday. There’s no way around it. Our future is outside of the EU. It is time that the Remainers finally joined the Leavers in making the best go we can of this.

Indeed, if you look at the overall figures for the electorate in Scotland, and include those who didn’t vote in 2016 — a group that is perennially ignored in this sort of discussion — you find that 42% of adult Scots voted to Remain, another 26% voted to Leave, and 33% didn’t vote at all.

In other words, sit 10 random Scots around a table, perhaps at one of the many election-themed Christmas parties next month, and four will be Remain voters, three will be Leave voters, and three will have stayed home. The dining partner you turn to first will be more likely not to have voted Remain than to have done so.

(If this was an academic article we would now have a lengthy footnote about the need to treat overall turnout figures — and therefore statistics about non-voters — with a bit of caution. It’s not an academic article, so you’ll have to take our word for it. But even so, our basic point stands.)

The same sort of claim is often made about London — which as everyone knows is packed full of metrosexual Remainers — despite it being a city where 40% voted Leave; or, on the other side of the coin, about somewhere like the West Midlands, the most Leave-voting region in the UK, but where 41% voted to Remain. Of the 12 regions or nations in the UK, only one of them (Scotland) had a split more extreme than 60:40 one way or the other, and even there, only very marginally so.

Of course, regions are big places, which contain multitudes. You get more polarisation if you look at smaller geographic units, whether it’s the local authorities by which the referendum results were originally counted (but which are of very uneven size), or the smaller parliamentary constituencies (for which, in most cases, we have estimates). But most of those are pretty diverse, too.

Of the local authorities, for example, the majority were no more divided than 60:40 one way or the other, and just 24 (that is, 6% of all the local authority counting areas) saw a pattern of voting that was divided by 70:30 or more. Of the 650 parliamentary constituencies, 59% were at most divided by 60:40, and just 59 (or 9%) saw a division greater than 70:30.

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Places such as Boston (on one end of the spectrum), where 76% of people voted Leave, or Lambeth (at the other), which was 79% Remain, really are the exceptions. Most areas are just not that polarised. And even in these outliers, once you factor in the non-voters, the apparent overwhelming hegemony of the “winning” side is much reduced. Walk down a street in Boston, for example, and under 60% of people you encounter will have voted Leave. In Lambeth, the most Remain-voting authority in the UK, only 53% of all those who could vote, voted Remain.

We’re not saying that regional variations didn’t exist in votes and views on Brexit. Of course they did, and do, and we’ve both happily written about them in the past. But they were differences of scale or direction, and were often quite small; yet instead of being treated as such, they’ve become fossilised into a series of false binaries that now dominate far too much of our political discussion. There isn’t, for example, really any such thing as a “Leave constituency” or a “Remain city” — although we will grant an exception to Gibraltar (96% Remain), where you do have to feel a bit sorry for the 4%.

Nor are we trying to claim that Brexit does not divide Britain. It does, and in important ways. People identify as Leave or Remain, in a greater way than they do with political parties, and see the world through these lenses — just as they used to view politics through partisan eyes.

Multiple pieces of research have shown the extent to which this can make us judge people or not want them as their friends. A new study, in a book we’ve edited (and which is available for a very reasonable price) shows that the referendum vote can even affect how who you want to move in next door to you, far more so than any of the other variables that were tested.

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At this point you might, fairly, object that everyone happily refers to parliamentary constituencies as Labour or Conservative or whatever, despite the fact that not everyone in those constituencies will have voted for the winning party. You could even argue the problem is worse in Westminster elections, where because of the electoral system it is usually the case these days that the local MP is someone most voters did not back .

Yet this seems to us slightly different. For one thing, in our first-past-the-post system, a party “winning” a seat actually matters — each seat won changes the outcome, in a way that doesn’t apply in the referendum. And besides, maybe we would anyway do better to remember that while a party may win a seat, they don’t own it or all the people in it.

You might also object that we are both massive hypocrites, because we’re pretty certain that if you searched the things we have written in the past, you would almost certainly find examples of us committing these very errors. To which we can only plead guilty, and pray in our defence Luke’s gospel, chapter 15, verse 7: “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance”.

And you could also argue that we’re over-reacting, that these phrases are just useful shorthands, and that everyone knows they are not to be taken as absolute. Sure, shorthands are fine and often essential — except we would argue that not everyone does know this, and that through repetition alone shorthands can come to be seen as true.

Too much of the discussion following the referendum has focused on the majority outcomes in areas, and not enough on the presence of minorities. That tendency has real consequences for what policies we get on things like Brexit, and whose voices get heard.

The same applies, by the way, to much of the discussion of the socio-economic or demographic cleavages in the Brexit vote. You know all the clichés: the middle class voted Remain, as did the young and BME voters and graduates; the working class, the old and those who did not go to university voted Leave.

True, the majority of each of these groups did indeed back that outcome (although again, in several cases, once you factor in non-voters even that doesn’t always hold), but there were millions, literally millions, of exceptions, who too often get written out of the narrative. There are a whole series of overlooked Brexit tribes — old Remainers, graduate Leavers, BME Leavers, working-class Remainers, middle-class Leavers — who still get almost completely ignored in most discussion.

Ditto for party divisions. We hear very little about Conservative Remainers, even though their behaviour was one of the key drivers of the outcome at the last election, and people seem to completely ignore SNP-voting Leavers (a group that, proportionately, was about the same size as Labour Leavers, and were also crucial to the 2017 result).

With Labour, curiously, the opposite occurs: we hear a lot about Labour Leavers, probably too much, and not quite enough about Labour Remainers, despite the latter making up the majority of Labour supporters in 2016, 2017 and now.

Suggested reading

How it could all go wrong for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

These two errors frequently come together when discussing the relationship between political parties and the referendum. Just because a majority of people in a constituency voted Leave, and just because a constituency returned a Labour MP, this does not mean that a majority of Labour voters in that seat voted Leave. This has now been pointed out so often that it should not need repetition, but it clearly does, because people keep on making this mistake.

The most recent debunking came from British Election Study data, which showed that even in seats where a majority voted to Leave, most Labour voters in that seat had voted to Remain. Yet in turn, much of the coverage of this work then suffered from exactly the same problem of focussing only on the majority group.

In their haste to argue that this showed that Labour needed to please its Remain-backing voters, many commentators overlooked that the very same study showed significant minorities (around 40%) of Labour voters in these seats who had voted Leave. It would be a brave electoral strategy that would stick two fingers up to 40% of your support.

If you are on Twitter, we would recommend an account called @VoterBritish. It’s a bot, which is tweeting details of the thousands of people who took part in the British Election Study, one respondent at a time. Each tweet summarises key information about the individual, and then reveals who they voted for.

It constantly surprises you: you read that someone favours hanging, wants to grind down the poor, loves Brexit and favours tax cuts, but then discover they voted Remain and Liberal Democrat. (We’ve made that one up, although there probably is someone like that lurking in the data set somewhere.)

The bot is a reminder of the point we are trying to make: that the statements we often make about people in elections or referenda are, or at least should be, probabilistic, not absolute. It’s not that there are not under-pinning factors driving the way people vote, merely that voters are much more complicated than most discussion of this sort of analysis ever seems allows.

Even individual voters are complex and contradictory, so this will certainly be true of any group of voters — whether we define them by place, or profession, or past vote or anything else.

Philip Cowley and Robert Ford’s Sex, Lies, and Politics: The Secret Influences That Drive our Political Choices is published by Biteback.

It will be the country’s 22nd general election since 1945. And it’s the fifth nationwide election to be held in the past four years — something which reflects not only the record rate of volatility in British politics, but the extent to which the ‘Europe question’ has pushed one of the world’s most stable two-party systems into a state of almost continual flux.

For Prime Minister Johnson, the election will determine whether his premiership ends as a brief footnote, or full chapter, in the history of British politics. The campaign should throw light on whether ‘Johnson-ism’ really exists; whether a small but intriguing collection of ‘one-nation’ policies can find their full expression as a coherent body of thought.

Could these ideas make a meaningful contribution to a conservative philosophy that for much of the past quarter-century has appeared timid, lost and devoid of serious thought? Or will they, in the shadow of defeat, be quickly forgotten?

From the same author

How it could all go wrong for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

His party’s future hangs in the balance, too. If the Conservative party can embrace a realignment of its electorate, then it stands a chance of not being cast into opposition. What started as a home for elites, before turning to more liberal middle-class professionals, the party is now having to speak ever more loudly to blue-collar Britain and social conservatives. The logic of this election demands that the Conservative Party develop a new language in order to connect with groups that have felt left behind and left out by the relentless onward march of social liberalism. The coming weeks will reveal whether Conservatives are willing to fundamentally re-orientate themselves to find success.

For the Leader of the Opposition, the election will ultimately decide the fate of his more radical and quixotic left-wing project. Either Corbynism will be consigned to history as a curious, disruptive but ultimately ephemeral detour in the history of the Labour movement — as dictated by the unwritten law that mainstream parties must be punished for ideological radicalism — or it will, instead, morph into a genuinely transformative government that paves the way for a fundamental and radical restructuring of Britain’s economy and society. The former leaves room for a rebooted challenge from moderate social democrats; the latter will shut them out for a generation.

From the same author

Can Boris win back Brexit Party voters?

By Matthew Goodwin

As for Labour itself, this ballot will determine whether the party that was founded to represent an alienated working-class continues to move away from these people and increasingly toward middle-class graduates, the capital and university towns. Inevitably, the few  remaining ambiguous politicians will be pushed into adopting unambiguous positions on Brexit. The volume on their support for Leave or Remain, a second referendum or not, will have to be turned up. Already, Jeremy Corbyn is underlining his support for a second referendum. But what this will do to latent tensions in the party’s political geography, between the winners and losers, remains to be seen. Come December, it could be tearing them apart.

For those advocates of a second referendum, meanwhile, the next election will clarify the future of their proposal — whether it remains rooted in reality or, instead, drifts further and perhaps finally into the realm of fantasy. For them, an election loss will force a campaign to ‘remain’ to evolve into a longer-term and far harder campaign to ‘re-join’. An election victory, on the other hand, will provide a rare opportunity to remedy the failures that led to the defeat of 2016. What does victory look like? Anything other than a strong Labour majority or Labour-led coalition will, almost certainly, bring the lingering conversation about a second ballot on EU membership to a close.

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How Jeremy Corbyn could get the top job

By Peter Franklin

Lastly, for the country’s increasingly fragile party system this is an election that will determine whether it remains gridlocked in the world of multi-party politics or returns to its natural state of two-party dominance. Fragmentation and resurgent populism have surged to the surface of our politics over the past three years; this election should tell us whether this is a fleeting phenomenon or new reality.

Below the surface, nearly half of all voters have, since 2010, been switching their allegiance from one party to another; December 12 could see this underlying church reach new heights, or provide a sign that voters are beginning to settle into their new, albeit weaker, attachments. And it should also signal whether our new divides over Brexit really are replacing the traditional idea of ‘Left versus Right’ to the extent that some claim. The 2017 election provided good reason to be sceptical of those who argue that ‘everything is now about Brexit’. This one may yet deliver further surprises for exactly the same reason.

Overall, this is an election that has been called to resolve the Brexit crisis. We are returning to the people because of the failure of parliament to successfully navigate through this crisis. It is, for this reason, an election that offers something for everybody — Remainers and Leavers, liberals and conservatives. As Richard Nixon said: “There’s nothing wrong with this country which a good election can’t fix!” Let’s hope it’s fifth time lucky.

According to this study the average male pees about 220ml – half a pint, give or take – a go. Let’s face it, the teen was probably drunk, so let’s say he managed double that. That means that the water dumped was, roughly, 0.0000003% pee. (Not counting the pee from the animals that presumably pee – and poo, and die – in it on a regular basis, of course.) There was absolutely no way that the pee could have affected health or, for that matter, even been detected, but the administrator responsible felt that customers would be uncomfortable “drinking water that’s been contaminated by some yahoo who decided to pee into a reservoir”.

The last time it happened (it has happened more than once!) the same administrator took the same action, this time ascribing his decision to the “yuck factor”. “I can imagine how many people would be saying ‘I made orange juice with that water this morning’,” he said.

I was reminded of this when I saw a story about food standards, and the things we’ll have to accept if Britain signs a hasty post-Brexit trade deal with the USA. Not just chlorinated chicken – the US rules require that producers adhere to a “Defect Levels Handbook”, which, according to Business Insider, sets out “the maximum number of foreign bodies like maggots, insect fragments and mould that can be in food products before they are put on the market”.

For instance, acceptable levels include “up to 30 insect fragments in a 100-gram jar of peanut butter; as well as 11 rodent hairs in a 25-gram container of paprika; or 3 milligrams of mammalian excreta (typically rat or mouse excrement) per each pound of ginger”.

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Dominic Cummings is no chicken

By Tom Chivers

Barry Gardiner, the shadow Brexit secretary, told Greenpeace’s (admirable) investigative journalism department, Unearthed, that “Their rules specify ‘acceptable levels’ of maggots in orange juice, rat droppings in ginger and hormone levels in beef. The right level should be zero.”

But it isn’t, any more than the “right level” of pee in a reservoir should be zero. There is, absolutely, rodent hair in peanut butter made in the EU, and maggots in EU-regulated orange juice. The fact that the levels are not explicitly limited does not make that any less true – in fact, you could argue that the US approach is both more honest and more stringent than the EU version. At least they have a hard limit on how much rat poo is allowed in a pound of ginger.

It’s also more complicated than that, as a (pro-Brexit, if that matters) former environmental health officer points out. These aren’t maximum permissible levels, but “actionable limits”: i.e. the FDA will automatically prosecute producers if their goods contain more than that level. They may still prosecute, even if the levels are lower, if it is shown that producers are not taking good care.

There are no EU-wide “actionable limits”; countries set their own best practice guidelines. England has a “due diligence” defence: if the food you sell turns out to be contaminated, then if you show that you did your best to avoid contamination, then you are not at fault. It’s fairly similar to the US system.

But fundamentally, the situation is that it is practically and economically impossible to ensure a total absence of contaminants in food. So the grown-up thing to do is to accept that your peanut butter will contain some near-homeopathic levels of rat poo, and that your reservoir will contain some human bodily fluids.

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Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

This isn’t to say that a US trade deal won’t lead to lowered standards or increased rat-poo concentrations. Perhaps it will. But it is not that Brexit will mean we all end up eating maggots. We already eat maggots.

The trouble is we’ve all gone a bit Brexit-mad. At least, I think it’s Brexit – perhaps we were mad already, but I am sure it’s worse. For instance: Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times reports that some unnamed minister thinks that the post-no-deal traffic jams in Kent will lead to an upsurge in dogging, as all the bored lorry drivers sitting by the M20 into Dover look for ways of alleviating the tedium. I mean, I guess it’s possible, Minister, although – since only about 1% of lorry drivers are female and presumably most of the rest are straight – I foresee some logistical problems.

It’s not just that. I gather that the Lib Dems are spying on us now, using data bought from supermarkets, census information and the products of their own doorstep canvassing to create a profile of every voter, in a shocking dystopian move that is the exact same as all the other political parties have done. I should say, there may be a real privacy issue here – Labour got in trouble with the Information Commissioner’s Office last year for buying data on a million new and expectant mothers from a baby website, and it could be that the Lib Dems obtained, are holding or are using the data in some non-GDPR-compliant way.

But post-Cambridge Analytica, which, as I understand it, essentially did some very standard psephological profiling and then dressed it up as master manipulation, we all seem to be jumping at shadows. Every bog-standard attempt to work out which voters are more likely to be worth sending leaflets to is now political witchcraft; Dominic Cummings getting user data off the gov.uk website, his fingers twitching the puppet strings.

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How political bias blinds us

By Matthew Goodwin

The whole Brexit thing, to some degree, began with obviously ridiculous stories about the EU – many of them written by our current prime minister – which readers were eager to believe because they confirmed what they already believed. Bendy bananas, extra-small Italian condoms, secret plans to create a European empire, that sort of thing.

Now we’re all at it: unsurprisingly, since it’s not just Brexiters who are prone to motivated reasoning, or overexcitement. Brexit derangement syndrome has everyone panicking about everything: Lib Dem spies, dogging lorries, maggot-infested foods, Boris Johnson the dictator, traitor MPs undermining democracy.

The trouble is that Brexit, especially a no-deal Brexit, is bound to have profound consequences: on prices; on how we transport nuclear materials, and how we do scientific research; people could lose jobs, the economy may slow and the Government be left with less money for things like the NHS. But it becomes very difficult to tease out the crazy from the realistic.

That, though, just makes it all the more important that we try. If we cry wolf at everything, then when we want to say “no, this one actually is really bad”, then people will (reasonably) be less willing to believe us. If we shout about maggoty orange juice and rat hairs in our peanut butter, then it’ll be harder to get people to listen when medicine shortages loom, which they might. Or, to bring us back to the beginning: if you drain the reservoir every time someone pees in it, what will you do when it gets infested with giardia microbes?

But he didn’t go quietly. The very day after his leaving party — held in the oak-panelled gloom of the old governor’s boardroom in the original part of Broadcasting House — the Daily Mail‘s front-page headline trumpeted: “BBC Icon savages bias … at the Beeb” and devoted many of the inside pages to extracts from his autobiography A Day Like Today. And I must admit, as someone who has spent many years trying to explain why bias at the BBC is so insidious and so important, my spirits rose; at last, I thought, a powerful endorsement from an unexpected source.

I enjoyed that small but gratifying spasm of affirmation particularly as Mr Humphrys was good enough to name check me and my work in the Mail extracts. But it turns out the paper’s take was somewhat misleading; a close reading of the book shows that yes, Humphrys does have his criticisms, but they are quite limited in scope. What actually emerges is just how much of a BBC man he is, whether he recognises it or not. Which might come as some consolation to the BBC’s director-general, Lord Hall, who, over the bad wine and foul canapes, had heaped praise on his star presenter only to wake the following morning to find that Humphrys had written disobliging things about the Corporation in the paper that is a sworn enemy.

The criticisms of the BBC that Humphrys makes in the book, to my mind come nowhere near the heart of the matter; they stem, rather from his own life story and prejudices. And Humphrys’ life has certainly been a fascinating one. As often is the case it is the early years which come across most vividly and in his case it is the stark poverty of his family background that grips the reader.

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Who will miss John Humphrys?

By Giles Fraser

One of five children — one of whom died tragically young — Humphrys was born in Cardiff during the war to a father who scraped a meagre living as a freelance french-polisher. His memories of those years underline the distance we have travelled as a nation during his lifetime; we have become immeasurably richer and it is impossible to imagine any family today enduring the privations his did. But Humphrys enjoyed one inestimable blessing: he was raised in a loving and stable family that cherished its children and put the greatest store on education. Working-class families today enjoy a standard of living undreamt of by his parents; but for so many children, of all classes, what is missing today is that emotional security he enjoyed.

There is one anecdote that struck me forcibly; the young John had to go to hospital for treatment on a cyst at the base of his spine. As he was lying, face down and butt naked, the consultant arrived with his ‘firm’ of juniors. The great man eyed the patient and declaimed: “the trouble with this boy is that he doesn’t bathe regularly” leaving the boy in question “cringing with shame and embarrassment”. The crass lack of empathy is breath-taking; did that man not understand that there was no proper bathroom in the Humphrys’ home? That ‘regular bathing’ was a luxury denied to many poor folk?

Understandably, slights like this left the young Humphrys with a substantial chip on his shoulder — an inbuilt resentment of the arrogance and entitlement of those who took the good things in life for granted. But that very sense of unfairness was also the spur which gave Humphrys his cutting edge and turned him into the formidable interrogator of the rich and powerful.

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On Brexit, Auntie just can't help herself

By Robin Aitken

Humphrys’ journalistic career is one which many another hack would envy; as a reporter he had stand-out talent; after working on local papers in south Wales The Sunday Times tried to recruit him. Unfortunately for them a job offer with TWW — the local commercial TV franchise — came along at the same moment and the glamour of TV seduced him. After that he had a stellar ascent; the BBC took him on and, still in his twenties, he was given the plum posting as BBC TV’s first Washington correspondent. Such things do not happen by accident; the BBC knew a ‘good operator’ when they saw one. Successful reporters have to have a range of skills — mental acuity, intellectual curiosity, verbal dexterity — they also need a measure of good luck. And, as he admits, he had more than his fair share arriving in his new job just as the Watergate scandal began to unfold culminating in the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

After that came South Africa, then a roving brief, then a stint as a newsreader on the Nine O’Clock News (the first journalist, as opposed to presenter, to do so) and then his true destiny when the offer of presenting Today came along. He admits he had reservations about the job; he’d never done radio, had always worked from scripts and wasn’t sure he had the personality to carry it off. At first he wasn’t a great success: I remember a cricket-loving BBC radio editor who likened him to a “medium-paced stock bowler, no variation in his game”. A bit unfair, perhaps, but in the early 1990s he didn’t seem like a natural. But he grew into the role and eventually established himself as the dominant personality on the BBC’s most important news and current affairs programme, a favourite with listeners and probably the most feared interviewer in the land.

His role as Today’s anchor man put him at the centre of some of the most significant political episodes of the past three decades. The chapter in the book devoted to the Iraq war makes for fascinating reading; that was perhaps Humphrys’ finest hour when he put Tony Blair’s government on the rack. Blair’s reputation never recovered from that dishonest war, and Humphrys’ forensic interviews played a large part in his fall from grace. He was a central figure too in the downfall of George Entwistle, the short-lived BBC director-general. In what Humphrys called “a catastrophically shoddy piece of reporting” Newsnight had wrongly named Lord McAlpine, a former Tory Party treasurer, as a paedophile rapist. Entwistle surprisingly offered himself up for interview on Today where, with steely precision, Humphrys laid bare his ineptitude; he resigned a few hours later.

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Why should the BBC censor the public?

By Douglas Murray

But what of those ‘savage’ criticisms of the BBC? They fall into three main categories: he views the corporation’s boss class with great suspicion; he thinks the BBC has become too middle-class and therefore unable to understand what motivates that section of the population which isn’t; and he thinks the BBC is too driven by political correctness. There is force in all these but they are stock complaints; so standard in fact that the BBC has seen fit to mock itself in these terms in the brilliantly satirical W1A series. The Daily Mail chose to highlight Humphrys’ remarks about how the BBC greeted the Leave vote in the referendum: there was anger and bafflement, he says, because BBC people just could not understand how anyone, let alone a majority of the populace, could possibly vote to leave an organisation so obviously wonderful.

But in the course of the book Humphrys reveals himself to be, among other things, an atheist, a republican who would like to see the end of the monarchy, and a Remain voter. He is, I suspect, a thoroughgoing social liberal, arguing strongly, for instance, for euthanasia for those suffering from terminal diseases. Whereas for me and those who think like me, the exclusion of socially conservative voices and the denigration of the values of social conservatism by the BBC make a mockery of its proclaimed impartiality, these things do not seem to trouble Mr Humphrys much.

Although he remarks on the BBC’s default liberal-left reflexes there is no follow-through on the shocking lack of internal political diversity; the BBC has become a political monoculture. The corporation might now be trying hard to employ the ‘correct’ percentages of black, brown and white people reflecting the population at large but there is no corresponding political diversity; if there were, conservative opinions would be better represented in the output. To social conservatives, and there are millions of us, issues such as multiculturalism, feminism, divorce, abortion and euthanasia are still controversial but our voices go unheard because we are unrepresented within the BBC itself.

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How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

When I was a reporter on Today and the gossip turned to the character of our lead presenter, as inevitably it sometimes did, it used often to be said that the one thing about John was that you couldn’t tell what his politics were. And he says in the book that at one time or another he has voted for all the mainstream parties. Having read his book though, a much clearer picture of the man emerges; sure he has his gripes about the BBC often expressed with an appealing vinegary sharpness: but actually, deep-down, he’s one of Auntie’s men even while he finds her sometimes maddening.

And this should come as no real surprise; the BBC only tolerates dissent if it is kept within certain bounds. John Humphrys’ criticisms — that the BBC is left-liberal by instinct — are very similar to those made by Jeremy Paxman but the fact remains that, despite their eminence, neither man was able to do much to affect Auntie’s core prejudices. Because this isn’t a something that individual BBC journalists, however famous, can do much to change. It is the deep-rooted political culture of the BBC, formed over many decades, which is the problem and it can only be addressed by systematic reform.

The BBC constantly frets about whether numerically it properly reflects the skin colour and sexual orientation of the nation; it’s time it woke up to the fact that a much greater problem is that it needs to redress the colossal political imbalance within its own ranks.

A Day Like Today is published by William Collins, £20

First, Ignatieff’s argument is a reminder about how Brexit could not have been better designed to undermine the very conditions of a healthy deliberative democracy.

“Adversaries … will beat you if they can,” he said, “but they will accept the verdict of a fair fight. This, and a willingness to play by the rules, is what good-faith democracy demands. Between enemies, trust is impossible. They do not play by the rules (or if they do, only as a means to an end) and if they win, they will try to rewrite the rules, so that they can never be beaten again.”

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Will our Brexit conflict ever be resolved?

By Giles Fraser

The problem we have, is that the very meta conditions for good adversarial politics are precisely what we are now arguing about. Adversaries will accept the verdict of a fair fight, he insists. Ah, but the fight — the referendum itself — wasn’t fair, argue Remainers, citing shady Russian influence or the presence of dark money. Rubbish, Leavers reply. For them, this line of argument is precisely akin to those who “will try to rewrite the rules, so that they can never be beaten again”. In other words, the framing conditions for limited adversarial conflict have been seriously damaged. And without them, adversaries become enemies.

But there are other, perhaps more surprising voices, that go so far as to argue that Ignatieff’s conditions for a fair fight between adversaries are themselves loaded in favour of the status quo.

The political theorist Chantal Mouffe, writing in The Guardian, describes political contestation as always and necessarily involving an “us” versus a “them”. Indeed, she insists, the politics of consensus as typified by the third way ‘big tent’ movements of Clinton and Blair were always the attempt to by-pass legitimate contestation by the presentation of a false consensus in which voices of dissent were silenced or delegitimised.

These movements assumed that the big ideological questions had been largely settled and that, after the fall of the Berlin wall, politics was essentially little more than a glorified management exercise between people who broadly agreed on their basic goals and aspirations. Following the Iraq war and the financial collapse of 2008, this idea of a common framework no longer seems to exist. Politics has become genuinely agonistic again. Little wonder Tony Blair has admitted he does not understand politics any more.

suggested reading

Can our politics survive Brexit?

By James Kirkup

Does this idea of agonistic politics threaten the distinction between enemies and adversaries? Perhaps it does. For despite the fact that Mouffe is a thinker of the Left, she acknowledges the profound influence on her thinking of the work of the Nazi law professor Carl Schmitt, and in particular of his concept of the political as necessarily involving the contestation between “friend and enemy”. In other words, for Schmitt and Mouffe, the idea of the enemy is built into the very existence of the political, just as the idea of beauty is built into aesthetics and the idea of the good is built into mortality. It is of its very essence.

“A political community exists wherever a group of people are willing to engage in political life by distinguishing themselves from outsiders through the drawing of a friend-enemy distinction,” writes Lars Vinx, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

“Liberal states, in Schmitt’s view, have a tendency to fail to distinguish properly between friends and enemies, and thus to extend rights of membership to those who do not truly belong to the political nation. In a liberal state, Schmitt fears, the political nation will slowly wither and die as a result of spreading de-politicisation, it will succumb to internal strife, or it will be overwhelmed by external enemies who are more politically united.”

Whatever the grain of truth some may recognise in this description, one would have thought that Schmitt’s unrepentant Nazi past would disqualify him as a political commentator who has helpful things to say about our present circumstances. And one might not be especially surprised that his influence reaches the likes of Steve Bannon and extreme Russian nationalists — even to the Chinese leader President Xi Jinping — who are all reaching for Schmitt. But what is more troubling is the extent to which his philosophy is now receiving thoughtful consideration even amid the supposedly liberal institutes of higher learning. As Gideon Rachmann noted in the Financial Times this year:

“Perhaps more surprisingly, the study of Schmitt has also entered the academic mainstream. In 2017, Oxford University Press published The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt. The blurb notes: ‘Despite Schmitt’s rabid anti-Semitism … the appeal of his trenchant critiques of … representative democracy and international law … is undiminished.’”

So, Nazi past aside (and I can’t believe I am even typing such words while currently living in Israel) what exactly is wrong with the friend/enemy distinction as the basis for political life? Partly, it is the failure to recognise that politics involves the negotiation of multiple identities, commitments and desires. There is not just one “us” and one “them” in the political, but overlapping and shifting patterns of solidarity.

I have political ‘friends’ in one area of life who are ‘enemies’ in another. I share with some a commitment to the redistribution of wealth, I share with others a belief in Brexit, elsewhere I share with some a common religious faith and with others a belief that climate change is real and a human creation, and so on — and these groups are decidedly not the same. In other words, those who are ‘friends’ in one area of political life are ‘enemies’ in another — which is to say that the very distinction between friends and enemies breaks down very quickly in the real world of political contestation.

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A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

OK, there is something to Mouffe’s “us” and “them” distinction to this extent: the centrist politics of consensus is often a way of silencing diverse opinions and maintaining the status quo – its default option being to advantage those who recognise their own values being met within the present arrangements. I suspect the Queensbury rules favoured the Marquis of Queensbury. Likewise, Ignatieff’s rules of the political game may indeed favour his own liberal world view. Such rules can — sometimes should — be challenged.

So I don’t go along with much of the general pearl-clutching that politics has become too heated. Heat is the inevitable by-product of political change. But it is immature – and dangerous — to think that this makes you and I enemies. Tomorrow we will be on the same side about something different. This too will pass.

We met as the 48-year-old was clearing up for the day on his fish stall in Doncaster Market. “I hope Boris Johnson will sort it all out,” he told me.

Mitchell, like many in this town at the heart of South Yorkshire’s mining community, is a lifelong Labour voter. Yet he admits to liking Johnson, who visited the market earlier this month, where he bought some English plums and a cob loaf. “People here were very impressed with him,” he said. “The other MPs all want to line their pockets but Boris seems in it for the good of the country.”

Mitchell, who hopes fish prices will fall post-Brexit after seeing his margins badly squeezed in recent months, views Johnson as closer to ordinary folk than most Conservatives, despite his Eton education and fondness for classical quips. “Boris does not seem a Tory to me. In the past Tories have been all la-di-da and posh but he seems more down to earth, not really posh at all.”

Since the affable fishmonger was dismissive of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, I asked if he would put his cross next to the Conservative candidate at the next general election?

“No, I don’t think I would vote Tory,” he replied. “I like the Brexit Party. They are very similar in views to the Tories and Boris, while Boris and Nigel Farage also have similar views. I’d like to give them a chance.” I told him I was puzzled by this, given his desire for Brexit and admiration for the Prime Minister. “I don’t really know why I couldn’t vote Tory,” he said. “Maybe the Tories just seem southern, while Labour is the Northern party.”

And here lies the pivotal issue for British politics as the prospect of an election looms over the divided country. For the Tories, bound so firmly to Brexit, need to win scores of seats in the Midlands and North to make up for heavy losses that are anticipated in the Remain strongholds of Scotland, London and the south-east.

But can they really make significant incursions in traditional Labour heartlands?

So I went to Doncaster — which voted 69% Leave; has comparatively low rates of immigration; and three Labour MPs — to explore whether the party of Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron has a chance of winning over Labour supporters infuriated by Westminster’s failure to resolve Brexit.

Tiffany Allen, 52, a mother of four who works in social care, votes Labour because “it has always been for working class people” and backed Brexit out of frustration with the decline of public services and bad government.

“We were just fed up with the country,” she explained, detailing to me how the care system had declined “disgracefully” over her 25 years working in the sector. “No-one can get anywhere. Work, pensions, the NHS – it all seems a bit rubbish these days.”

She shares the widespread disgust over Westminster that I heard again and again from all shades of opinion — but admires Johnson, despite saying he was a clown. “I’m cross with everyone else, but not him,” she said. “There’s just something I really like about him – it may be that he seems laid back, he speaks our language.”

Allen should be a prime target for Labour. She works in the public sector. She saw her wages drop when moving to Doncaster from Stockport three years ago. She is worried about the NHS, which is treating her mother with dementia and son with terminal cancer.

She even admitted to liking Corbyn at first — until the Labour leader refused to meet US president Donald Trump, which she thought demeaned his position. Now she has no time for him and does not believe he could fund all his spendthrift promises.

So the big question: could she bring herself to put her cross next to a Tory in the voting booth? “It is all bizarre – but I think I could cope with voting Conservative,” she smiled.

Such voters show how fast the tectonic plates are moving in our politics. They are the reason Johnson was willing to visit Doncaster — where former Labour leader Ed Miliband sits on a 14,024 majority —  at the risk of facing public anger over austerity. This shift was recognised by Johnson when warned by a rebel MP the Tories could lose Guildford, among the truest of blue seats with a majority of 17,040 in 2017, if they backed hard Brexit. “Guildford will have to go then,” the Prime Minister replied.

The election, assuming it arrives soon, will be coloured by Brexit and speed up the electoral changes seen in recent elections as the Tories twist towards older, poorer and less well-educated citizens and Labour woos middle-class, affluent voters.

My snapshot, an escape from London’s bubble to drill down into views of northern voters, was fascinating. It was not a scientific study — I merely talked to people around town — although a polling firm source said my findings echoed focus groups they held in the same area last week.

“All they care about is that the 2016 referendum result is respected,” said my contact, who was testing views of Leavers. “They see it as a north-south issue, with northern working class people wanting to leave and southern people trying to thwart them.”

In fact, Danny Dorling, a professor of geography at Oxford University, has actually found that while some northern towns voted heavily for Brexit the bulk of support came from southern English voters. But perception is everything in politics.

What I did find in Doncaster was widespread disgust with Westminster, immense distrust of politicians and intense dismay on all sides Brexit has not been resolved. “They should all be sacked – they can’t do their job properly,” said Paul Singleton, a forklift truck driver.

Not one person had anything good to say about Corbyn — and several lifelong party supporters were scathing, sometimes over minor issues such as refusing to bow to the Queen. Both Remainers and Leavers saw the party sitting on the fence over Brexit and spraying around spending promises that cannot be fulfilled.

This is astonishing for an area such as South Yorkshire, with its history of mining and municipal socialism. But my findings only underline polls showing Corbyn with the lowest approval ratings on record for an opposition leader, while Labour is level-pegging with the Liberal Democrats nine points behind the bitterly-divided Tories.

“It’s in my blood but I don’t know if I’ll vote Labour or not vote at all,” said Gaz Skoof, 38, a Remain-voting structural engineer from a mining family background. “It’s all just a mess, an embarrassment on the global stage. I’m fed up with it all.”

Skoof was contemptuous of Nigel Farage, who held a rally in Doncaster this month. Yet he did say that his father, who stood on picket lines during the 1980s miners strike, was likely to back the Brexit Party. “A lot of people will be swayed by them.” Indeed, a poll back in April had the Brexit Party down to win most votes.

When I asked Skoof about Johnson, he smiled before saying he admired his efforts on Brexit — highlighting the bizarre confidence many voters place in a politician with a record for duplicity, whose brief stint as Prime Minister has failed at every turn.

Yet not everyone is convinced. “I like Boris because he is quirky but I would not vote for him because he’s told  too many lies and fibs,” said Heather Stewart, a Labour Leaver who works in a pharmacy. “I don’t think he will deliver. I don’t trust him.”

Some responses I heard on Johnson echoed those I heard in the United States when talking to Trump supporters in states such as West Virginia: that he is different to other politicians, that he is selfless, that he talks their language. Others dismiss him as a buffoon, a clown, a joker. Clearly many people see every player in the Brexit drama and every twist in the debate through the prism of their own views, which only fuels the divisions and hardens attitudes.

And the stakes are high. David Smith, a Tory-voting health and safety official, said he would switch to the Brexit Party if Johnson failed to deliver on his oft-repeated promise to leave by October 31st. “I want a leader that keeps his word,” he said. Smith sees the stalemate as ‘parliament versus the people’ — and said many locals might vote Tory for the first time in their lives if Brexit goes through. “This is Labour heartland so it’s a big thing for them,” he said. “But if he fails, they will go to Farage.”

One local Labour source said voters might grumble about Brexit but most would stick with the party. “I notice on doorstep conversations that when you get them on to other issues, people say it is true, we are electing a government for five years.” Like many other northern towns, Doncaster was hit hard by austerity with council spending falling almost one-third since the Tories took office in 2010 despite rising social care pressures and above-average number of workless households.

Yet as Smith said, dumping Labour for the Tories is a big step for voters in an area such as this. For some, it is too big a leap — especially when the Brexit Party offers an alternative vehicle for angry Leavers to display their dismay over the deadlock.

Perhaps this struggle was best shown to me by Rob and Jenny, a couple in their fifties who I met as they left a supermarket. They are both lifelong Labour voters who backed Brexit, despise Corbyn and intend defecting to other parties. Jenny, a cook, said she would probably back the Tories since “Boris is trying to do his best”. But her partner was sceptical about his agenda, worried by Tory bickering, infuriated about immigration and saw Farage as “the only one who can get us out”.

Before we parted Rob repeated a now familiar refrain: voting for the Conservatives would be a betrayal of his background, having been brought up in a mining family in the colliery village of Denaby Main. “I can’t vote Tory – it is in my blood.”

Such complexities of heritage and outlook defy crude certainties of analysts, politicians and strategists. It makes predictions so uncertain as we struggle with the Brexit referendum fallout that is corroding constitutional and political norms.

Few would argue with Stephen Carling, 64, a palliative care nurse I met standing by Frenchgate shopping centre opposite the shuttered Thomas Cook shop as heavy rain fell on a grey urban landscape. “It’s a crazy time for this country,” he said. He told me he voted to leave. “I thought we were a strong country, we might have a couple of tough years but we’d get through. But I’d have voted to stay if I knew what I know now because people like farmers and small businesses are going to suffer.

“I think it will come to a second referendum — but I don’t really agree with this. They should just do what people the country voted for – and if they go against this, people will just ask why they should bother voting?”

It is foolish to draw firm conclusions from such a flying visit, especially given the volatility of politics and unpredictability of public opinion. Yet it is clear discontent is growing, democracy creaking and Johnson’s divisive strategy may be paying some dividends in unlikely places.

Will it be enough? I am sceptical. And his populist approach — pitting ‘the people’ against ‘parliament’ and ‘the elites’ — is extraordinarily high-risk as another Brexit deadline looms: for himself, for his party and for his fearful country already so lacking faith in its tarnished political class.

“None of them have a clue,” said former soldier John Hanson, 71, a Tory-voting Remainer from nearby Bawtry, who did five tours of duty during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. On this point, at least, I found agreement in Doncaster.

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This is, we are told throughout conference in Brighton, a new Labour: organised, united, filled with generous and effective policies — they have found dragon gold — repentant on anti-Semitism and ready to take the fight to the external, rather than the internal, enemy. None of this is true.

I read politics by detail, not spouted fantasies. At a small fringe meeting on the freighted subject of the abuse of women in public life – about 90% of attendees were female, of course, in this party of equality — delegates complained to Diane Abbott, one of the most abused women in public life, that they suffered misogynist abuse in their party.

How could they hope to change the world, one asked, if they could not change themselves? Abbott allowed that internal party misogyny was “wrong”, but said little else on it, before turning to external enemies, and their evils — as she does on radio, attacking Tories, refusing to see cruelty if it is close to her. Then she left, and the room sank with disappointment; nothing would be done about the “Brocialists”.

I have seen this before, when Luciana Berger told her testimony about the anti-Semitic abuse she has suffered in parliament. Diane Abbott could not look at her, as if the sisterly feelings do not extend as far as Berger; do not extend beyond political allies. I wonder if Abbott is inured to it, except when it happens to her. That would be excusable in any other woman but an aspiring Home Secretary.

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A far better attended event was “The Media War on Labour and How to Defeat It”, which throbbed with conspiracism. The best way to defeat it, of course, is to stop providing opportunity for them — Tony Blair managed to seduce the media to three election victories — but that would require self-reflection. So, they provide opportunity like a man punching himself in the face.

There was the attempted coup against the deputy leader Tom Watson. It was aborted, but “Shun Tom Watson” leaflets were still circulated, and a rally planned during his speech. Both the speech and the rally were later cancelled. Everything was thwarted.

The resignation of Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s close aide, citing “a lack of professionalism, competence and human decency” at the top of the party was another opportunity for the media to write lies — I mean truth — about Labour.  “I no longer have faith we can succeed,” he said.  They blame the media for reporting on splits. They do not look to the cause — that they do, actually, split.

The insanity of the vote on the “Back Remain Now” motion, in which the chair appeared to change her mind about Conference’s wishes after the General Secretary muttered her wishes in her ear was more opportunity. If it was machination, it was appallingly done. Enemies would say: you cannot even manage to be effectively corrupt.

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And again, and always now, anti-Semitism. Labour is raging on the accusations, which prod its essential benevolence, the belief on which it depends; but not on the reality, about which they are completely in denial. The reality is that delegates to Labour in Brighton all passed, as they walked into Conference, a cartoon of a warplane decorated with a Star of David bombing Jeremy Corbyn on his podium.

You cannot govern without attention to detail. You cannot be moral without attention to detail either, whatever you tell yourself. The police removed it, after complaints from the Jewish community, but Corbyn, who lies to himself above all on these matters, claimed it was he who had it removed. He said so on his Twitter feed.

All week, internal saboteurs — real, not imagined — fizzed around the edges, their psychological imperatives disguised, and not well, as political aims. They are conspiracists; they need to believe themselves oppressed by some great enemy because it explains all their failures in life. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) established themselves in the Rialto theatre and spouted the usual conspiracy theories about Zionism and Blairites and Momentum. John McDonnell is still their president; that aside, he says he has nothing to do with them.

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Labour should be careful what it wishes for

By Paul Embery

Labour was my party and I struggle, as I nod at their policies, and approve of them, to understand why I trust them so little under Corbyn. I think it is their monomania, their paranoia, their loathing of internal critics – a lack of compassion for the different – and sometimes, I wonder how much they actually respect parliamentary democracy: if you are certain you are right, you do not need it.

It would enrage them to hear it, but they are as responsible for brutal political language as anyone; they have been calling Tories murderers for years. If you agree with them, they are kindest people in the world. If you don’t, they hate you, and hatred does not play well on the doorsteps in Hove.

You can argue whether a Socialist project in a country which is also a constitutional monarchy where the Queen has a 72% approval rating (Corbyn’s is 21%) and Downton Abbey, a film about servants longing to serve is No.1 at the box office, will ever be tenable, or is mere dreaming. Sometimes I find it very touching dreaming. At the reinstate Clause 4 rally in a church hall where they pondered a different anomaly – why can’t we share? – I actually wept bourgeois tears.

But this remains a party in denial about itself, and how others view it. Corbyn’s speech was followed by a mass singing of the hymn Jerusalem. Considering Labour’s relationship with the Anglo-Jewish community, it did not feel like a call to arms to the desperate beyond the Labour Party who need a functioning opposition. It felt, rather, like something maiming itself.

As some Remainers have rightly pointed out, we are, and have long been, a nation of immigrants. And the idea that we can or should be protecting something ethnically pure and unique about our society is not just a fantasy, but a form of racism that must rightly be called out for what it is.

What I want to explore is whether there is also a largely unacknowledged racism in one of the intellectual tributaries to the Remain instinct, and one that, because largely unacknowledged, is dangerously insidious — not least because it is often dressed up as a positive thing. I will call this instinct ‘universalism’.

In writing about the racist traditions in his own country, the French Marxist philosopher, Etienne Balibar, tries to explain what he describes as “historical fact that is difficult to admit”:

“There is, no doubt, a specifically French brand of the doctrines of Aryianism and biological geneticism, but the true ‘French ideology’ is not to be found in these: it lies, rather, in the idea that the culture has been entrusted with a universal mission to educate the human race. There corresponds to this mission a practice of assimilating dominated populations and a consequent need to differentiate and rank individuals or groups in terms of their greater or lesser aptitude for — or resistance to – assimilation. It was this simultaneously subtle and crushing form of exclusion/inclusion which was deployed in the process of colonisation and the strictly French (or ‘democratic’) variant of the ‘White man’s burden’.”

In other words, just as there is a racism of wanting to maintain some sort of ethnic distinctiveness and difference, there is also a type of racism implicit within universalism too – that all the peoples of the earth ought to submit to a common set of moral and political standards. One might put it this way: there is a racism of over-emphasising the importance of cultural difference and distinctiveness, but there is also a racism of wanting to obliterate difference in the name of some common universal framework: be it ‘democracy’ or ‘Western values’.

When I spoke to the Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony for Confessions, he made the point that the God of the Jews is unique in not imagining universal peace to come about through a process of conquest. All other gods in the ancient world, he maintained, thought that universal peace would come about when everybody else in the world thought the same way they did. Nebuchadnezzar and his god did not seek to conquer enemies because he believed in war but because he believed in peace though sameness. To use a more modern formulation, they believed in a ‘world order’. Their armies wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Today we might call it ‘liberal interventionism’.

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In contrast, Hazony maintains, the God of Israel believed in borders. Not as a form of ethnic exclusivism — there is much in the Hebrew scriptures about welcoming the stranger and those in need — and nor as a way of maintaining that ‘my people are better than your people’, but rather more as a type of political humility. In a world of borders, distinctiveness is maintained. In a world without borders, distinctiveness is obliterated. And the obliteration of difference, even if done with the best of intentions, easily amounts to the domination of a backward people by an enlightened one.

And I write enlightened advisedly, because nothing has given the universalising instinct more impetus than the enlightenment. Kant is a case in point. He imagined ‘Perpetual Peace‘ as the implementation of enlightenment values. But these values also carried within themselves clearly racist estimations of those who did not share these values. He maintained, for instance, that the Chinese, Indians, Africans and the indigenous peoples of America were incapable of doing philosophy. Here is one example among many:

“The race of Negroes .. [is] full of affect and passion, very lively, chatty and vain. It can be educated, but only to the extent of servants, i.e they can be trained.”

It is because of examples such as this that Kehinde Andrews, another Confessions guest, has described the Enlightenment as “white man’s identity politics”. But these days we know better, the universalist maintains. Well, tell that to the woman on the beach in France arrested for wearing the burkini, thus offending against western values. Or those banned from wearing a headscarf in school.

The insidious racism of the Left

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Religion is often at the root of the trouble. Critics of religion of the Dawkins school often maintain that it counts against religion that faith in God is subject to so much local colour. They point out that those born in one particular place are likely to believe in the gods of that place, as if this is some sort of gotcha observation, clearly undermining the claims made by that religion.

But this is a gotcha only by the standards of modern, i.e. post enlightenment, notions of universalism. Faith does not aspire to the same sort of universalism as mathematics, for instance. Faith is stubbornly rooted in place and time. It grows out of shared experience. It is an expression of local forms of imaginative solidarity. That, to me, is not a weakness; it is precisely its strength.

I write these words sitting in a café in Tel Aviv, a relatively new town that is an expression of the desire of the Jewish people to maintain their distinctiveness. The way I see it, part of the reason the Labour party in Britain gets Israel so wrong, and the reason it continually falls into anti-Semitism despite its repeated protestations of anti-racism, is not so much that it wants to protect Palestinians from Israeli occupation, but that it refuses to recognise that the desire to maintain religious and cultural distinctiveness is a legitimate aspiration in the modern world.

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To return to Balibar, Israel is the political expression of a refusal to assimilate, to be assimilated – and not least because many of its citizens are still only a generation away from a murderous project to eliminate difference, designed and executed in the very heartlands of the enlightenment.

I do not deny – and nor does Hazony – that borders often mean border disputes and therefore conflict. We live in a fallen world. But the desire that we all submit to the same rules, the same cultural framework, is the far greater danger, threatening as it does the very diversity that the Left so often proclaims as one of its objectives.

“This universalism is indeed a form of racism”, writes the brilliant Rabbi Daniel Boyarin. Until the Left begins to recognise that its own version of ‘one size fits all’ universalism contains within itself “coercive discourses of sameness”, and various forms of implicit – sometimes explicit — racism, it will never begin to address, or even understand and recognise, the anti-Semitism that it promotes.

How can we be racists, when we want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, thinks the leftist, not appreciating that, as with the gods of old, this desire for harmony through sameness is the very root of the trouble.

This is what Twitter tells me every day. But as I pointed out the other week, while Johnson is routinely portrayed as a textbook case of failure, the key groups of voters that will decide his fate hold a very different view. Since becoming Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s ‘net favourability’ score among all voters has increased by five points. Among Leavers it is up by 16-points. Among Conservatives it is up by 21-points.

Twitter tells me @BorisJohnson has been a disaster

The data tells me that since entering Number 10 his ratings are:

-UP among all voters by 5 points

-UP among Leavers by 16 points

–UP among Conservatives by 21 points

Always. Challenge. Groupthink.https://t.co/glkO9RkCLb

— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) September 17, 2019

Notwithstanding the general hysteria and catastrophism that has followed every twist and turn of the Johnson premiership, YouGov notes that “the ongoing Brexit chaos hasn’t adversely affected the PM’s favourability figures — which are, in fact, slightly higher now than they were when he first moved into Downing Street”.

In fact, despite the furore over Johnson’s suspension of parliament, the dismissal of special advisors, the expulsion of 21 moderate Conservative MPs and the PM’s allegedly dictatorial tendencies, support for the Conservative Party has increased.

The week before Johnson became Prime Minister, his party averaged 24% The week after he entered Downing Street it jumped to 29%. Today, it is 33%. Groupthink tells us that Johnson is making his party unelectable. The data tells us that Labour has only been ahead in one of the last 40 opinion polls.

There is, of course, a lot that could still go wrong for Johnson. With the SNP still dominant in Scotland, Britain’s electoral map is more constrained. Volatility is high and so it is much harder for either of the two main parties to win a majority.

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But if Johnson’s strategy is to mobilise Brexit Britain while exploiting a divided Remain camp, then, so far, it seems to be working. All he needs to do now is capture between one-third and a half of what remains of Nigel Farage’s vote. If he does that,  then he will almost certainly cruise to a comfortable majority and his stay in No 10 will be longer than many of his critics think.

But all of this speaks to a deeper point. It underlines why — with a fresh election on the horizon — we should be far more critical of herd thinking than we currently are.

Think for a moment about all of the shocks that have rocked British politics. The triumph of UKIP at the European elections in 2014. David Cameron’s surprise majority in 2015. The rise of the SNP in Scotland. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader. The Leave victory in 2016. The Trump victory a few months later. The hung parliament in 2017. And the strong result for Corbyn’s Labour.

Most of the political Twitterati herd did not see these shocks coming. The experts didn’t help much either.

In 2015, hundreds of academics, journalists and pollsters were asked in a survey to predict the outcome of the general election. This was based on the popular idea that there is “wisdom in crowds”. These crowds predicted a hung parliament in which Ed Miliband and the Labour Party commanded the largest number of seats while the Liberal Democrats and SNP held the balance of power. The reality was the first Conservative majority since 1992.

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More complex election forecasts didn’t offer us much insight either. In fact, few, if any, successfully forecast the result. The most generous prediction gave the Conservatives 296 seats while the polling ‘guru’ Nate Silver was also way off, predicting 278. In the end, Cameron won 330 seats. Political scientists were left to reflect on what one described as their “substantial over-confidence in predictions of the election outcome”.

More recently, experts would tweet out Jeremy Corbyn’s dismal leadership ratings like clockwork every month: “Look how terrible he is!” But then Labour presided over the highest share of the vote since Tony Blair’s second landslide. The experts went quiet. As one academic rightly argued, the response to Corbyn reflected a wider problem: a tendency among experts to prioritise not objective analysis but their own normative positions and a desire to conform to the established ideological orthodoxy.

Much the same could be said about Brexit.

When the referendum arrived in 2016, another survey of nearly 600 experts delivered a remarkably clear view. Nearly 90% expected Remain to win. Just 5% felt that Brexit was the most likely outcome. Journalists were noticeably worse: 97% predicted Remain and just 3% Brexit. And most expected Remain to win by at least 10-points. There were simply too few people willing to question and challenge the herd thinking.

And then came the 2017 general election. This time around “[t]he prevailing view [of another expert survey]…was that the Conservatives will secure a large majority, with an implied probability of 65% that they will win a majority of more than one hundred seats”.

Once again this view was bolstered by even more technical election forecasts, all but one of which confidently predicted a solid Conservative majority (take a look for yourself). The largest majority of 124 seats was forecast by Ian Warren, an expert on the Labour vote.

It is easy to bash election predictions and take this argument too far, of course. We should remember that the forecasters had a better election in 2010 (although Nate Silver was still wide of the mark as he was, again, in 2016). And while, last week, Ipsos-MORI revealed that only 23% of people think that pollsters are trustworthy, the polls have actually got more right than people think.

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The problem is that some of the things that they have called correctly — some online studies showed a swing to Leave, there were some state-level polls in the US that pointed to a Trump victory, or the MRP model that predicted a hung parliament in 2017 — were simply never accepted by the herd. Too many people only saw what they wanted to see.

Like the much-derided economists who failed to see the financial crisis coming, it seems only fair to ask why so many political analysts have failed to diagnose a succession of shocks. Often, it has been those who are closest to the world of politics who have been consistently outflanked by political change.

I suspect that several factors are at play.

The sharp liberal Left slant that runs through the Twitter and university communities ensures that few people have strong links to the values and voters that run against the dominant ideological orthodoxy. Ideological cocoons prevent experts from seeing, and engaging with, the wider world.

Rather than challenge our priors, it is much easier to let motivated reasoning — a bias toward an outcome or decision that confirms with what we already know — win the day. As a result, anything or anybody that deviates from the consensus and the herd is challenged, undermined or simply ignored.

Furthermore, and as Philip Tetlock, author of Superforecasting argues, experts tend to suffer from a potent interplay of over-confidence, binary thinking, a herding instinct and, to be blunt, hubris. All of this undermines their ability to gauge the public mood in an increasingly volatile political environment. This seems especially likely when most of the movements that are challenging the status quo are anchored in communities that most highly-educated and privileged experts simply do not understand.

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To this we can add the dominance of the polls in shaping much of our media commentary, which is deeply problematic. Inaccurate polls feed inaccurate forecasts while many journalists, understandably, lack the time and skills to question the methodological choices being pursued. Equally, it’s easy to disregard those polls that simply don’t fit your requirements.

All of this underlines why — with a fresh election on the horizon — we all need to be far more sceptical of what we are told and more willing to challenge the consensus.

Tetlock suggested that the art and science of prediction is a skill that can be improved with practice. The jury is still out on that one. For the rest of us, one might suggest that another lesson can be taken from recent history: always challenge the herd.

It would be Britain’s fifth nationwide contest in four years. It would also be highly unpredictable. Yet conventional wisdom already tells us that it would most probably deliver a healthy Tory majority. You don’t need to spend long in SW1 to hear confident Conservatives pointing to Jeremy Corbyn’s abysmal leadership ratings, Labour’s dire position in the polls and how Jo Swinson and the resurgent Liberal Democrats are splitting the Remain vote. The most popular prediction goes something like this: constrained by parliament, and rebels from inside his own party, Boris Johnson goes to the country with a ‘people versus Parliament’ message and is rewarded with a massive majority.

But hang on a minute. Isn’t one of the key lessons from the past decade that conventional wisdom should always be challenged. So let’s do that: how could it go wrong for Johnson?

First of all, if you work out average support in the polls for all of the parties over the past month, then the Conservative Party is not sitting in majority territory. It is sitting on 32% with Labour on 24%, the Lib Dems 18%, Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party on 13%, the Greens on 6% and the SNP on 4%. With these numbers, Boris Johnson might just squeak into majority territory but it would be close — and volatile.

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Then, there is the main lesson from the election in 2017, which many observers have already forgotten: during campaigns things can change both quickly and radically.

So let’s say that, as in 2017, Labour runs a competent and fairly populist campaign of its own. Corbyn spends six weeks unloading on “Britain Trump”, framing Boris as the embodiment of the wealthy elite and painting the Tories as having more interest in building a Singapore-on-Thames than helping ordinary workers or the environment.

Let’s also say that while Labour and the Liberal Democrats steer clear of a formal alliance, enough Remainers have the good sense to vote tactically, switching to Labour in Labour-Conservative marginals or to the Lib Dems in seats where they are the main opposition. Sure, tactical voting rarely works but maybe this time it is different.

And let’s assume that, while the Conservatives lose a handful of seats in Scotland, where they are no longer led by Ruth Davidson, Johnson struggles to win over Leavers in Labour territory who might look at him and decide that, actually, he isn’t really like them at all.

If you can’t quite picture this, then you only need go back to 2017, when despite endless talk about a Conservative raid on Labour heartlands, Theresa May only walked away with half-a-dozen pro-Brexit Labour seats.

All of these scenarios are entirely plausible. But there is also something else that could go wrong for Johnson. It concerns the one person who Conservatives have consistently underestimated.

“Deliver [Brexit] or politically die”, boomed the leader of the Brexit Party last week. Nigel Farage was in town to send a message to Johnson – it was an offer and a threat.

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The offer? If the Conservatives commit fully to leaving the EU without a deal, then the Brexit Party is willing to join them in an electoral pact, providing unconditional support. The threat? If Johnson instead pivots away from a no-deal and back to a version of Theresa May’s unpopular withdrawal deal, then the Brexit Party will unload all that it has against the Conservatives at the next election.

“I want to make this pledge from the Brexit Party”, Farage continued. “The withdrawal agreement is not Brexit. The withdrawal agreement is a betrayal of what 17.4 million people voted for and if you go with the withdrawal agreement … we will fight you in every single seat up and down the length and breadth of the United Kingdom.”

The problem for Johnson is that things are starting to work against him and for Farage. Clearly, much depends on timing. If the Prime Minister survives the challenge this week, and goes on to orchestrate a no-deal Brexit then Farage and the Brexit Party become less of a problem. The Farage fox is shot.

But if he does not, if he is forced to scrap a no-deal, or even manages to retain the threat of a no-deal but then pushes for a revised withdrawal agreement at the end of October before calling a general election, then it is easy to see how Farage — who will be left as the only politician in Britain advocating a clean break from the EU — remains a major obstacle to a Conservative majority. It is true that most voters do not want a no-deal Brexit. But it is also true that many Conservative voters do.

Brexit Party insiders are adamant that if Johnson pushes for a revised version of Mrs May’s deal, then they will throw everything at the election. As one said to me: “We have not come all this way to sign up to May’s deal, which even with changes to the backstop keeps us very closely aligned to the EU. If necessary, we will burn the house down.” There has long been a nihilistic tendency among the Faragists. Many would prefer to bring the Tories down and see Prime Minister Corbyn, than see their life’s work reduced to a soft Brexit.

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The coming Conservative catastrophe

By Matthew Goodwin

This is why a revised withdrawal agreement — or a ‘BRINO’ (Brexit In Name Only) — could easily breathe new life into the Brexit Party. And this is why it is investing so heavily in preparation for the next election. The party has already selected more than 500 parliamentary candidates, has money and has established itself as a political brand.

It also has something UKIP did not at the last general election. Conservatives who point to UKIP’s collapse in 2017 should remember that their challenger was led by the unknown and ridiculed Paul Nuttall. This time will be different. Farage personally distrusts Johnson. He represents the very establishment that the Brexit Party leader has been railing against his entire life. I suspect that Farage will both want and relish the fight.

It is no secret that Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the team in No 10 have little time for Farage. But they also know that they cannot ignore him. This is not the 2016 referendum. The context is completely different. At a general election, constituency races are greatly affected by challenger parties. And with the Brexit Party pulling much of its vote from disillusioned Tories this challenger really matters.

We can already see this in the polls. Since team Johnson arrived in Downing Street, average support for the Brexit Party has fallen. In the month before Johnson’s arrival Farage was averaging 20%; he has since averaged 14%. This reflects how many Eurosceptic Tories have ‘returned home’. One month before Johnson became Prime Minister nearly 40 per cent of people who had voted Conservative in 2017 had defected to Farage. In the latest polls, it has tumbled to 18%.

But the problem for Johnson is that it has not fallen enough. Farage still holds more than one in four Leavers, including a significant number of ex-Conservatives who favour a no-deal Brexit and are clearly waiting to make up their minds about where Johnson will land. This is more than enough to cost the Conservatives dozens of marginal seats, perhaps even a majority. The problem was on full display at the recent by-election in Brecon and Radnorshire, where the Brexit Party cost Johnson an early victory despite only polling 10%.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Some Conservatives point to 2015 and argue that they were still able to win a majority back then despite facing a serious Farage insurgency. But this owed much to Cameron stealing 27 seats from the Liberal Democrats — an avenue that will not be open to Johnson and his team at the next election. Given the inevitable backlash from Remainers, the resurgent Liberal Democrats and probable losses in Scotland, the Conservatives will have less room for manoeuvre.

An additional problem is that the Conservatives routinely fall into the trap of believing that all of Farage’s followers are just like them, and only need a slight nudge to ‘come home’. But this is to overlook the nature of his vote.

Farage’s following has always had three tributaries: anti-EU, anti-immigration and anti-Westminster. Johnson is appealing to the first — though he could easily suffer if he is effectively forced to give up on a no-deal this week. But he is not doing much to speak to the other two. Promises to do more to tackle regional inequality might help. But will the Brexit Party’s mainly working-class voters defect back to a liberal-conservative who is relaxed on immigration and embodies the upper-class establishment? I doubt it. It seems more plausible to me that this vote will remain quite ‘sticky’ — Farage will hold onto more than enough support to cause problems.

This is why some Conservatives are — I know for a fact — thinking seriously about Farage’s offer. Those who are in favour point to a number of things. Put the two parties together and you get close to 50% of the national vote. Two pro-Brexit parties, the thinking goes, would unify the Leave electorate, exploit a divided Remain Alliance and have a much better chance in the 158 Labour seats that voted for Brexit in 2016.

Such a dramatic realignment of British politics would also be helped by the fact that while many Labour leavers would never entertain ‘the Tories’, they certainly would entertain Farage. Johnson would therefore be likely leave the election with a majority large enough to allow him to be a truly transformative Prime Minister, with little opposition to his domestic agenda. Farage argues this alliance would “be unstoppable”.

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The 10 brains behind Dominic Cummings

By Peter Franklin

But others are deeply sceptical about a pact. First, it is not clear how it would work. One model was developed in 2010, when UKIP discreetly agreed a series of informal non-aggression pacts with committed Eurosceptic MPs. The deal was simple. UKIP would stand down against MPs who could be trusted to make the case for a referendum on EU membership in the House of Commons. In the end, as I documented in a book with Caitlin Milazzo, seven deals were made. These included people who would go on to play a key role in the battle for Brexit: Douglas Carswell, Mark Reckless, Philip Hollobone, Philip Davies and Janice Atkinson, alongside a couple of others. Four of the seven won their seats and three (Carswell, Reckless, Akinson) later defected to UKIP.

A similar deal today might see the Brexit Party agree to stand down against Conservatives who are both committed to a no-deal Brexit and who consistently opposed May’s deal – there are nearly 30 of these so-called ‘Spartans’.  So MPs such as Steve Baker, John Baron and Peter Bone would not have to worry about internecine warfare. In return, the Conservatives might give the Brexit Party a free pass in a select number of Labour seats where UKIP finished second in 2015, where a majority of people then voted for Brexit in 2016, and where, in reality, the Conservative Party has little chance of causing an upset. These might include northern seats such as Heywood and Middleton, Rotherham, Hartlepool or Rother Valley.

Look at the numbers, though, and you realise that this does not really make sense. Farage’s hand is weakened by the fact that most of the Conservative ‘Spartans’ are safe and do not need a deal with the Brexit Party to hold their seats. There are a few exceptions. Steve Baker, James Duddridge, Adam Holloway, Andrea Jenkyns, David Jones and, in particular, Lee Rowley in North East Derbyshire and Theresa Villiers in Chipping Barnet are more vulnerable, with majorities of fewer than 10,000 votes, and some of just a few hundred. But most hold large majorities of more than 10,000 or 20,000 votes. There is little prospect that Bill Cash, Owen Paterson, John Baron, Peter Bone, Suella Braverman, Mark Francois and Bernard Jenkin will lose their seats, for example. So why bother with a deal?

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Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

A pact would really only make sense if it were to focus on marginal seats. If, rather than select seats according to Farage’s preferred criteria – loyalty to no-deal — the Brexit Party simply agrees to stand down in, say, the 50 most marginal seats, from Southampton Itchen to Stockton South, this would allow the Conservatives to consolidate the Leave vote. It would also improve their chances of holding back the Liberal Democrats and Labour along the ‘Blue Wall’ in the southwest. But that would require Farage trusting Johnson and his team to really deliver a clean break.

And this is where we encounter another problem: personalities. Dominic Cummings has made no secret of his disdain for Farage, while Johnson will want to put clear blue water between his politics and those of the Brexit Party leader. Farage, meanwhile, thinks that Cummings is “untrustworthy” and is not a “true believer” in Brexit. He is very distrusting of Johnson and probably does not view him as a ‘proper’ social conservative.

Given the extreme volatility in British politics, the continuing Brexit fallout and the likelihood of a fresh general election, Boris Johnson may be tempted to go to the country much sooner than people think. But he will also need to come up with a way of side-stepping the Brexit Party, which will settle for nothing less than a clean break from the EU.

Farage will happily unload all that he has left to stop a soft Brexit, even if this means splitting the Leave vote, making it harder for Johnson to win a commanding majority and potentially putting Jeremy Corbyn into Number 10 Downing Street. And this is where we meet the greatest Brexit irony of them all: the man who devoted his life to Brexit will end up preventing it from happening.

The reaction was a reminder of just how much of a difference the disposition and life-philosophy of political leaders makes. Three years of Theresa May’s fearful, procedural style of government had smothered politics in a deathly, but comforting, torpor – Brexit had become a never-ending story, in which politicians would always be discussing options and deadlines would always be extended. There’s something rather nice about stalemate: a political version of Freud’s “death instinct”, where everyone gets to hide from the horror of actual, you know, events.

Yesterday’s announcement marked the end of that whole paradigm. The new occupants of No 10 are animated by the opposite instinct, in ways that many find deeply unsettling. Here, suddenly, is a government which delights in using the levers of power it has available and bringing events to a head.

The prorogation is not a coup. It has been designed with just enough points of justification to fall narrowly short of a constitutional outrage (it allows for the conventional September recess for party conferences, the new Queen’s Speech, and time for debate both at the start and end of the period before 31 October) but it is, without doubt, a brazen use of executive power to set the timetable for political advantage.

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Why should Boris trust Channel 4?

By Douglas Murray

Its main effect will be to bring the action forward, so that the Remainer coalition in parliament will have to make its counter-move immediately and boldly when parliament resumes. To procrastinate is to lose. It’s the opposite of what we have been used to in the never-ending story of Brexit.

Looming large over this pivot to action is the figure of Dominic Cummings, the PM’s de facto chief of staff and architect of the Brexit campaign. To Brexiteers, Cummings is a hero; to Remainers, he’s a villain. To almost everyone he is intriguing and alarming in equal measure. Anyone who watched his extraordinarily rude testimony to the Commons Select Committee over the referendum campaign, or observed his lofty refusal to return when invited back, would realise that he’s an unusual character. He doesn’t seem to feel fear; he is devoid of deference to authority; and he is obsessed with theory and radical thinking.

Such strength of conviction can be attractive. Certainly, his team in No 10 seems to like his vision and clarity of purpose. But while the characteristic of being existentially unafraid of action may be found in a disproportionate number of history’s heroes and villains, it’s also at odds with the genteel traditions of British democracy. He’s not chummy or collegiate; he’s contemptuous of precedent, and in a country without a formal constitution that feels scary.

His well-documented obsession with game theory and process also has the effect of flattening the whole of politics into tactical warfare. When the warring parties are different arms of the British state – the executive versus the legislature – it feels especially uncomfortable. Of course, there are always tactics and ‘pathways to victory’ in politics, but the main pathway is usually to win the argument on its merits.

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Dominic Cummings is no chicken

By Tom Chivers

Now, the decisive phase of the Brexit story will take place with an almost exclusive focus on process and little attention to the underlying arguments. It completes the professionalisation of our politics, the conversion of voters into speculators and tacticians, co-conspirators in a procedural game. YouGov has already polled voters on their approval of prorogation as a strategic device – an odd thing for voters to have to think about.

The combination of Cummings with his boss, Boris Johnson, only heightens the sense of unease. Where Boris famously sees both sides of an argument (remember those newspaper columns he drafted for and against Brexit?), Cummings sees things perhaps deceptively clearly. Where Cummings is hard-edged and uninterested in being liked, Boris is eager to please. The combination fuels fantasies of Cummings as an evil Rasputin figure, whispering instructions into his genial master’s ear.

Boris’s own personality is famously hard to pin down; he’s changeable and weirdly detached from the consequences of his actions. Where Theresa May used to appear at world summits visibly strained to breaking point, Boris seems to find them… fun. There is a disconnect between the gravity of all these events and the cheerful blond who pops up on news clips to say how everything is going swimmingly (sometimes literally). No death-instinct on view here: the Prime Minister continues to visibly enjoy himself.

Inside No 10 they have it all mapped out: what happens if there’s a vote of no confidence next week, what happens if Parliament legislates to thwart their timetable, when an election is most likely to be. It remains to be seen whether the odd couple at the centre of power will be credited with executing a perfect masterplan or whether it will all go spectacularly wrong for them in ways they haven’t foreseen. But what’s clear is that in the ‘OODA loop’, the ‘Observe-Orient-Decide-Act’ theory of combat strategy that Cummings is known to favour, we are now firmly in the Action phase. Welcome to the endgame.

More from this author

Farage has found Boris's weak spot

By Freddie Sayers

The trouble is that it’s very hard to study. If you see that readers of Right-wing papers are more likely to vote for Right-wing parties, you can’t conclude that the one causes the other; it could just be that people who vote for Right-wing parties enjoy reading that they’re right to do so.

That’s why there’s been some excitement about a new report, not yet published or peer-reviewed but available in preprint form. Its authors saw the opportunity for a natural experiment: the impact of Merseyside’s post-Hillsborough boycott of The Sun on Eurosceptic attitudes in the region.

In 1989, 95 Liverpool FC fans were killed in Britain’s worst football stadium disaster; a 96th, Tony Bland, died four years later, having been in a coma caused by brain damage from the crush. The Sun blamed the disaster on the Liverpool fans themselves, accusing them of urinating on police and picking the pockets of the dead, under a banner headline of “THE TRUTH”.

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It has since been shown that none of this was true and that the disaster was the result of failings by the police and other emergency services. Liverpudlians, appalled by the Sun’s coverage, boycotted the newspaper – not just Liverpool fans, but their Evertonian rivals and the rest of the city, too.

The authors of this new study reasoned that, since the boycott was mainly in the Merseyside area and the rest of the country was largely untouched by it, they could see the impact of the Sun’s Eurosceptic campaigning on attitudes to Europe. They looked at responses to the statement “Britain should continue its EC/EU membership” in the British Social Attitudes surveys between 1983 and 2004, and compared those in the 15 Merseyside constituencies to the rest of the country.

The study says that Sun readership on Merseyside post-Hillsborough fell from around 55,000 daily sales to about 12,000, although that is an estimate because News International did not release regional figures. It sounds believable to me, though: I went to university in Liverpool and most newsagents didn’t stock it; you’d see “don’t buy The S*n” written on walls or the backs of replica football tops. It was very much despised there, and understandably so.

But the study then goes on to say that the boycott led to an “8 percentage-points to a 15 percentage-points decrease in Euroscepticism” in Merseyside. And this is what caused the excitement. The authors argue, and the papers have reported, that this shows how sustained media campaigns have major impacts on public opinion.

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How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

I am pretty sceptical. For one thing, when you look in the paper at the graph of attitudes towards Europe on Merseyside, Euroscepticism was declining pre-1989, and it continued to decline post-1989. There doesn’t seem to be a noticeable change at or shortly after 1989 itself; it levels off in the 1990s. The “control” group – a “synthetic Merseyside”, or conglomeration of other English areas weighted for similarity to the Liverpool area – also declines in Euroscepticism, just rather more slowly, and then increases for a bit in the early 1990s. Eyeballing it, at least, it doesn’t scream “Hillsborough did this” to me; it looks like some longer-term trend.

I’m also intrigued to note that, in the actual 2016 referendum, Liverpool (the city, not Merseyside) voted 58.2% Remain. Manchester, just up the road and (they’ll both hate me for saying this, but) relatively similar economically and culturally, voted 60.4% Remain. If somewhere between 8 and 15% of that Liverpool vote is due to the boycott, what drove the Manchester Remain vote? After all, they still read The Sun there. Alternatively, you could just say that most big cities tended, outside the North-East, to vote Remain. Or you could point out that both are big university towns, and that young people tend to be less Eurosceptic.

For another thing, the effect seems enormous. Let’s assume that the sales figures were correct, and that it did indeed drop from 55,000 daily readers to 12,000. If all 43,000 daily readers who stopped taking The Sun immediately became Europhiles overnight that would represent about 3% of the total population of Merseyside.

If we only look at the population of Liverpool itself – around the 450,000 mark – it’s about 10%, but the study does say it’s looking at Merseyside sales. And, still, it would need pretty much every single former Sun reader to have started as a Eurosceptic and become a Europhile for the 8 to 15% figure to make sense.

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By Tom Chivers

This doesn’t mean it’s not true. You could tell some complex story about knock-on effects: several people reading the same newspaper, or the Eurosceptic at the pub suddenly going quiet and no longer spreading the word to his or her friends. But I am sceptical.

Of course, we still need to explain why Merseyside started out as more Eurosceptic than the country at large and ended up less. I could reach for my favourite explanation, which is “a lot of this stuff is essentially random and any explanation will be post-hoc storytelling”. But I think I might indulge in some post-hoc storytelling of my own, actually.

Liverpool is, traditionally, a hugely Labour city; of the 15 Merseyside constituencies, 12 are held by Labour, and two by former Labour MPs who have left the party since 2017; the seaside area of Southport, which is well to the north of the city, is the only one held by a Tory.

Liverpool seriously hates the Tories and it especially hates Margaret Thatcher. In the 1975 referendum, the Conservative party – led by Thatcher – largely backed a Yes vote to join the EU; the governing Labour party, led by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was split. Wilson backed Yes but (as in the 2016 referendum) Cabinet collective responsibility was put aside and several ministers campaigned for No.

In general, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Labour was the more Eurosceptic of the two main parties. And, in Liverpool in particular, the Labour council was heavily influenced by Derek Hatton of the Militant Tendency, who voted No in 1975. It was only in 1983 that Neil Kinnock made Labour explicitly pro-Europe, but Militant and Bennite Labourites still fought back (Denis Healey and others formed the Labour Against The Euro group as late as 2002, although that was specifically against joining the single currency). Meanwhile, Tory Eurosceptics became ever more vocal over the same period.

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By Tom Chivers

I can’t find a way of plotting levels of Labour Euroscepticism, but you could easily tell a story in which Liverpool’s wariness of European integration decreases at the same rate that Labour’s does, until around the John Major period when Conservatives were tearing themselves apart over Europe. At this point, even the previously Europhile Thatcher has swapped teams.

Suddenly, if you’re a Labour-voting Liverpudlian, you see that the hated Tories are associated with the anti-Europe side and Labour with the pro. So you answer the polling question accordingly.

Is that really what happened? Maybe? It’s a just-so story I came up with a few minutes ago. All we really know is that Merseyside shed its Euroscepticism more quickly than the rest of the country. That’s hardly surprising, in itself – it’s an ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan port city, it has three universities, it’s proudly Left-wing; I’m not sure there’s anything to explain.

But we like explanations, and we particularly like explanations that provide us with a clear antagonist who we can blame. After all, if the boycott made Liverpool pro-Europe, then The Sun made the rest of the country anti-Europe, and we can blame it for the referendum result. And in these Brexit-riven days, people will cling to this, even though the study doesn’t prove it was The Sun wot dun it.

Overlooking the overlooked

James Bloodworth, journalist and author of the Orwell Prize nominated book Hired

If only May had acted upon those promises she made in that first speech as leader – the one that has become reduced to her ‘citizens of nowhere’ dig – things could have been so different.

In that keynote, delivered to a conference just after the Brexit vote, she surprised all the complacent neo-liberals in her party by lamenting the “division and unfairness all around”.

“Our society should work for everyone,” she told conference delegates, before running through a list of areas in which it wasn’t.

“If you can’t afford to get onto the property ladder… if your pay has stagnated for several years in a row… if you’ve been trying to say things need to change for years and your complaints fall on deaf ears, it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you.”

May took digs at fat cats, tax avoiders and “citizens of nowhere”, pledging to tackle the injustices of low pay and precarious work.

The rest is history. All these promises fell by the wayside as her premiership progressed. Sure, the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices – which May’s government commissioned – did come up with some interesting and proactive suggestions. And the government promised to at least consult on all but one of Matthew Taylor’s recommendations. But then… nothing.

This was her great opportunity. This is where she could have made a difference to the lives of so many of those people who had voted in the referendum for change. But like so much else, workplace reform was gradually subsumed by Brexit.

So Brexit created Theresa, then destroyed Theresa. And it also contributed to her greatest failure as PM: that signal failure to significantly improve the lives of the ‘left behinds’ she pledged to serve back in 2016.

Her intransigence

Polly Mackenzie, director of Demos

Theresa May’s failure is all Ken Clarke’s fault. He accidentally gave her a brand identity when he was caught on camera calling her a “bloody difficult woman”. She loved it. Her team loved it. Conservative MPs who spent their teenage years pining over a Margaret Thatcher poster loved it. Bloody difficult woman, Mrs May thought: that’s who to be if I want to be loved.

She was always intransigent, as Home Secretary. But once “bloody difficult” got hung around her neck, she revelled in it, sticking to positions as rigidly as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, who got rusted into paralysis by unexpected rainfall.

She fought and argued, unblinkingly, for her withdrawal agreement long after it was dead, long after the body was rolled through the crematorium and the ashes were scattered.

I can understand why she clung to the belief that intransigence would, in the end, pay a political dividend. It seems to be the path to popularity in politics today. The No Deal Brexiteers refuse to budge, even if that risks no Brexit at all – and yet their tribe love them. Jeremy Corbyn built an entire political career out of never changing his mind and young people chant his name at festivals.

The problem, Theresa, is that intransigence only works for ideologues. You can’t be rigidly pragmatic, any more than the Tin Man could start dancing without having his joints oiled. In your resignation speech, you stressed the importance of compromise: the whole point of compromising is that you have to bring people together. If no-one will join you on the dance floor, you need to find a different song. We can only hope the next Prime Minister will do so.

The hostile environment

Bidisha, writer, broadcaster and film-maker

Theresa May’s biggest failure was as Home Secretary, not as Prime Minister. In 2013, she gave a now-notorious speech at the Home Office, introducing the central tenets of the ‘hostile environment’. To me – and this is just my opinion – it was a racist, aggressive, inhumane and sadistic warning. The hostile environment has persisted since then, unabated. It has fanned the flames of (what I see as) an increasingly openly racist, xenophobic and insular England. It has worsened with Brexit – for which it laid the groundwork.

I’ve reminded myself of that Home Office speech when, over the last three years, I’ve started feeling sympathy for Theresa May as Prime Minister. Well – not sympathy, exactly, but a kind of wonder at how she manages to get up every morning, put together an outfit and get through her day of work. She inherited the ultimate ‘glass cliff’ job: cleaning up a man’s stupid mess. David Cameron’s opinion poll on Brexit was callous and dangerous.

May might have convinced herself that she should and must and could ‘deliver Brexit’. She might have shown a steeliness, and an impressive poker face, in calling a snap election that caused her to lose her mandate – and in repeatedly forcing votes on the same unsatisfactory deal. But she does not have the fine shrewdness and responsiveness of the true political survivor – and neither did her predecessor.

May’s resignation speech showed, finally, an awareness of her own isolation and powerlessness. But ultimately, this is a mess of Cameron’s making. Brexit is a mistake and a catastrophe that poisons anyone who touches it, be they Tory, Labour or anything else. May’s departure is simply another inevitable episode in an unpleasant and unnecessary crisis – one that reflects the growing darkness of the political landscape.

The backstop

Helen Thompson, professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge

Theresa May’s departure was probably inevitable from the moment she lost her gamble to establish a Conservative majority big enough to get her withdrawal agreement through the House of Commons.

But she made one crucial misjudgement after the general election. In December 2017, she accepted the EU’s demand that the terms of the UK’s departure include a commitment that nothing would change on the Irish border. After an uproar, she redefined her backstop so that it applied to the whole of the UK, rather than just Northern Ireland – but this alteration left unaltered the commitment to prioritise the Irish border.

Whether the move was justifiable or not, in subordinating Brexit to another claim, May damaged the supply and confidence arrangement with the DUP; gave her ERG critics a permanent line of attack; fuelled the concern among part of the Leave coalition that she was pursuing Brexit in name only; and gave those in Parliament who want to stop Brexit reason to think it could be abandoned. In this political environment, she needed considerable good fortune.

The Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, tried to help her with the concessions made before the second meaningful vote, but did not reckon on Geoffrey Cox’s intervention. John Bercow repeatedly tried to thwart her – and managed to, right up until his refusal to take Gareth Snell and Lisa Nandy’s amendment on the third meaningful vote. But Cox was articulating the backstop’s legal logic, and the Speaker had his opportunity because the backstop gave anti-Brexit MPs a justification to keep fighting.

She chose in December 2017 a way of delivering Brexit that had little chance of success and has now paid the price.

Her empty words

Paul Embery, firefighter and trade union official

Theresa May’s finest two moments as prime minister were her inaugural and valedictory speeches. The rest was abject failure.

Her maiden address on the steps of Downing Street in 2016 hit the sort of unifying note that appealed not just to traditional Tory voters but also to those in the working-class Labour heartlands. She spoke of leading a One Nation government, tackling poverty and putting the interests of working-class families before those of the rich and powerful.

This was buttressed by her first Tory conference speech as prime minister, in which she railed against the international elites, untrammelled markets and the concept of being a “citizen of nowhere”. It was a pitch towards those who were, let’s say, not entirely sold on the idea of a liberal, cosmopolitan, borderless world dominated by global corporations.

She had parked her tanks squarely on Labour’s lawn – and some of us inside the Labour party saw danger ahead.

But the rhetoric didn’t match the reality, and her premiership quickly reverted to stale Tory dogma. Most destructively, she continued David Cameron’s programme of austerity, which had always been as needless as it was damaging, and caused suffering to the very people she claimed to be standing up for.

In her departure speech, she mentioned the tragedy of Grenfell Tower and the need to ensure that such a disaster never happens again. These words will ring a bit hollow to those, like me, who work in the fire and rescue service and have witnessed the savage cuts that have been inflicted on our industry over recent years.

On Brexit, she made all the right sounds early on. She had no choice but to affirm that the UK would leave the EU, if necessary, without a deal (frankly, no prime minister could do otherwise without handing an effective veto to the EU). But when the time came, she bottled it. And from that moment, her credibility was shot.

Her final address emphasised the value of compromise. It has its place, of course. But in trying to please everyone, you sometimes end up pleasing no-one. As, in the end, she discovered to her cost.

Her untruthfulness

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and Director of the Mile End Institute

After the initial surge of sympathy provoked in my sentimental old soul by Theresa May’s tears at the end of her speech in Downing Street, all I could think of Oscar Wilde’s words on Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone,” Wilde wrote, “to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

It was a speech of epic self-delusion and self-justification, followed by a veritable flood of hypocrisy from many of those who had made her life – indeed, all our lives – a misery for the last two years. Ultimately, though, they aren’t to blame for the mess the country and the Conservative Party is in today. She is. Where, then, did it all go so terribly wrong?

It was as soon as she stepped through the door of Number Ten Downing Street. Instead of turning round and telling people, particularly in her own party, the truth – namely that the referendum was a close run thing, that people had voted Leave for a myriad of different reasons, that the Irish border was bound to prove problematic, and that, more generally, the EU-27 weren’t going to allow the UK to have its cake and eat it – she decided to present herself as Brexitier-than-thou.

Quite why we can only guess. There are a number of possibilities, even leaving aside the temptation to cast her erstwhile adviser, Nick Timothy as the serpent.

Perhaps it was pure partisan opportunism – the thought of the Tories pulling off Brexit and pulling in many of the four million voters who had supported UKIP in 2015. Perhaps it was the need to prove her personal bona fides after playing the role of reluctant Remainer in the referendum campaign. Perhaps it was her tendency, after five years as Home Secretary, to see everything through the prism of immigration: Vote Leave stressed it; therefore the referendum was won on it; therefore free movement must end; therefore hard Brexit.

From that initial decision everything else flowed.

Her lack of persuasiveness

Jenny McCartney, Journalist and Author

I do not doubt that Mrs May loves her country, as she avowed this morning, and has a strong conception of duty and public service – why else would she have so stoically endured the vitriol constantly poured upon her? The trouble was that the country did not feel as if Mrs May loved it. In that she resembled one of those parents who find themselves tragically estranged from a child for whom they had a powerful internal affection, but seemed unable fully to translate that affection convincingly into words or, often, deeds. 

It was Mrs May who, in 2002, warned that the Conservative Party was in danger of becoming ‘the nasty party’. Yet, in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, her delay in assuring EU nationals of their secure future in the UK indicated a lack of emotional intelligence at a time when the country badly needed such direction. So too did the human distress caused by the Windrush scandal, which stemmed from policies put in place during her time as Home Secretary.

The ‘precariat,’ despite her post-referendum assurances, have felt no more secure under her time in office. Her task of enacting Brexit was a thankless and fiendishly difficult one, but under her direction the UK, at key points, has also seemed an unnecessarily ungenerous place. 

May has great doggedness – an important quality in political life – but an absence of persuasiveness. That proved a dangerous combination. The doggedness repeatedly drew her back to preferred solutions – but without the ability to persuade others of their merits and absorb their concerns, repetition did not improve the outcome. Yet if May’s flaw has, in large part, been sincerity without communication, we must guard now against falling into the opposite trap, and possibly a worse one: a Prime Minister who can communicate without sincerity.

The system

Peter Franklin, editor of UnHerd’s UnPacked column

The political obituaries have already been written: Theresa May was a terrible Prime Minister.

Well, they’re right about that – but for the wrong reasons. Her mistakes and weaknesses, though many and significant, were not crucial mistakes or fatal weaknesses. They did not make all the difference. Rather the most obvious failure of her premiership is a failure of the entire political system: government, opposition, media, every bit of the machine – all the way up to the EU itself, whose collective, history-changing decision it was to make an example, not an ally, of Brexit Britain.

Our own politicians have made that pathetically easy for them. There is not a single faction of any size in this parliament that has shown genuine leadership on Brexit – and precious few individuals. They have wilfully confused compromise with betrayal, and principle with their own self-interest.

Together they made Theresa May’s job an impossible one. It’s hard to look back over the flowchart of her decisions and identify an alternative pathway that would have produced a different result. Given the system she was operating within, she was doomed from the moment she lost her majority – and she’d quite possibly have been doomed if she hadn’t called the snap election.

But this is not to absolve her from all responsibility. Rather, what she’s to blame for is not primarily the decisions she made, but those she didn’t make. The original sin of her premiership was not doing anything about the system that made her downfall inevitable.

There were attacks on the previous regime, but they were petty ones – from the very public humiliation of George Osborne to the ‘not invented here’ abandonment of promising policy initiatives like the Northern Powerhouse and the Life Chances Strategy. At the same time, she left in place many of the worst policies of the Cameron era – such as the counter-productive ‘Help to Buy’ scheme for aspiring homeowners (which is in fact a subsidy for the big developers); the sinking student loan system; and the white elephants of Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, HS2 and Heathrow expansion.

Despite promises of “an economy that works for everyone”, there was no obvious sign of any fundamental shift in the priorities of the system – not in infrastructure investment from London to our other great cities; not in education spending from the bloated university system to the under-resourced technical education sector; not in the tax burden the parasitic rentier class places on those struggling for a stake in the productive economy.

From Whitehall and Westminster, where the power-hoarding and hucksterish culture of politics became more entrenched than ever, to the still left-behind communities that Theresa May imagined would swing behind her insubstantial rhetoric, it became obvious that, in her words, “nothing has changed”.

The failure to deliver Brexit is both a symbol – and ultimately the result – of that much bigger failure.

A few weeks later, the Labour MP and prominent Remainer, David Lammy, appeared on the Andrew Marr Show and compared leading Brexiteers to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, although Lammy later noted that the comparison to Nazis and supporters of apartheid in South Africa “was not strong enough”.

Around the same time, Remainers on social media, including the head of an academic organisation, were sharing a graphic of the Nazi swastika alongside a logo of UKIP and the new Brexit Party with the caption: “Same shit, different logo”.

Ever since Britain voted for Brexit, the portrayal of Leavers, either directly or indirectly, as racists, Nazis and extremists has been a constant feature of our national debate. “Let’s be honest what’s really driving Brexit”, read the title of a Matthew d’Ancona column last year, “Bigotry.”

Further reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

Urban liberals such as D’Ancona, Snow, Lammy and countless others are not interested in evidence. Indeed, one irony of Britain’s post-referendum debate is that while prominent Remainers have traced the vote for Brexit to ‘misinformation’, ‘fake news’, ‘post-truth politics’ and the dismissal of experts, they have simultaneously been the most willing of all to ignore the expert studies of why 17.4 million people decided to leave the EU. These studies show, clearly, that the Brexit vote was anchored in an array of legitimate grievances about a broken economic, social and political settlement.

But this evidence does not correspond with the confirmation bias of Remainers that has been on display ever since the vote, and which has led Lammy and his ilk to believe that early 21st-century Britain is somehow equivalent to Weimar Germany, or D’Ancona to conclude it is dominated by racists.

“I am forced to conclude that there is now a sufficiency of Britons who just don’t much like people of foreign extraction”, he mused, “and certainly don’t want many more of them around the place.”

These accounts make me wonder where this leaves the one in three black and minority ethnic voters who voted for Brexit, the incredibly diverse towns like Birmingham, Luton and Slough which provided majority support for Leave, or the academic studies which show, clearly, how racial prejudice in Britain has been consistently declining since the 1980s. Moreover, how do these accounts of “bigoted” Leavers fit with the growing pile of research we now have that suggests that it is Remainers, not Leavers, who might have a problem with tolerance.

Further reading

Who's most intolerant in America?

By Peter Franklin

A few months ago, in the United States, I stumbled across an interesting survey. It suggested that today only one in ten Americans thinks that interracial marriage is a ‘bad thing’. This is a remarkable achievement for a society where as recently as the 1950s more than nine in ten said they would be uncomfortable with this idea. Liberals often forget their achievements.

The same trend has also been visible here in Britain, where support for interracial marriage has been consistently rising while measures of prejudice against non-white groups have been showing a consistent and quite dramatic decline. These are not the metrics you would expect to see if Britain really were about to give birth to the modern-day equivalent of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP.

But even more interesting was a parallel finding about political polarisation; while the vast majority of Americans now have no problem with interracial marriage, about four in ten of them would have a problem if a relative married somebody from a different political tribe. Americans are more likely to take issue with marriage across political lines than marrying across ethnic and religious lines.

But if you drill down deeper, then you find something even more striking; it is Left-leaning voters who are most likely to have a problem with their ideological counterparts. One example was a recent finding that while 45% of Democrats would be unhappy if their child married a Republican, only 35% of Republicans would feel the same way if their child married a Democrat.

Ordinarily it might be tempting to put this down to the insanity of American politics but, worryingly, this now also appears to be happening in Britain. While growing numbers of us are putting ‘social distance’ between ourselves and those who hold a different political outlook, this is especially likely to take place on the Left, or Remain, end of the spectrum. According to one recent poll by YouGov, for example, while 11% of Leavers would mind a little or a lot if a relative married across the Brexit divide, this jumped to 37% among Remainers.

Further reading

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

I wanted to explore this in more detail and so, with political psychologist Aleksandra Cichocka, we asked a sample of Leavers and Remainers how they would feel about getting closer to the other tribe, from having them as an acquaintance, to the idea of their child marrying somebody from the other tribe.

Consistently, Remainers were more likely than Leavers to distance themselves from the other side: while 80% of Leavers are open to having a Remainer acquaintance, only 70% of Remainers feel the same way; while 79% of Leavers are open to having a Remainer co-worker, only 67% of Remainers feel the same way; while 78% of Leavers would not mind having a Remainer living next door, only 65% of Remainers feel the same; while 80% of Leavers would be willing to have a Remainer as a friend, only 61% of Remainers feel the same way; and, lastly, while 75% of Leavers would be willing to have their child enter into a romantic relationship with a Remainer, only 53% of Remainers would want to see their child in a relationship with a Leaver.

Remainers, who routinely present themselves as the vanguard of liberalism, tolerance and moderation, sometimes don’t seem that liberal at all. Ever since the political shocks of 2016 much of our (liberal) media has latched on to an incredibly simplistic ‘open versus closed’ framework; Remainers, we are told, are open, while Leavers are closed. Yet, if anything, it appears that the former can be more closed off to alternative views than the latter. The reality is far more complex than the likes of Lammy, Snow and D’Ancona would have us believe.

Further reading

The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

We are not the first to point to this. Recently, the academic Noah Carl brought together a whole body of research to show how people who hold Left-wing and liberal views are almost always more likely than people who hold Right-wing and conservative views to block or un-friend their ideological counterparts on social media (this was also happening before Trump, by the way). Others have similarly found that Left-leaning voters in the US are more likely than Right-leaning voters to stop following people who they disagree with. Summarising other research, a journalist in the US recently concluded that while the political Left might consider itself more open-minded than the Right, “research shows that liberals are just as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals”.

Back in Britain, many on the Left and those in the Remain camp do not engage with this evidence because it undermines the concerted effort to portray the vote for Brexit as a proxy for Right-wing extremism on the march, or an indicator for their belief that the country is sliding into the same conditions that gave rise to Adolf Hitler. I suspect that their stronger desire to disassociate from the other camp helps to explain why many so Remainers have been so quick to ‘catastrophise’ about voters with whom they probably have very little interaction with.

Catastrophising, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt note in their recent book The Coddling of the American Mind, is what we do when we believe that something is far worse than it is, usually after an event or moment has challenged our values and beliefs. Psychologists associate catastrophising with the parallel traits of overthinking, magnification, feelings of helplessness and a tendency to view an event (or an election result) as being much worse, dire or severe than it really was.

Have Remainers lost perspective?

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When prominent Remainers compare Eurosceptics to Nazis, or modern-day Britain to the Weimar Republic, they are engaging in something that has defined much of our post-referendum debate: liberal ‘catastrophising’ – a cognitive distortion leading them to expect, and become obsessed by, the worst of all possible outcomes.

The distortion means that Brexit is not an uncomfortable democratic result but rather signals the rebirth of fascism. The 2016 referendum was not a valid democratic exercise but was hijacked by the Russians. The ERG is not a fringe group of eccentric Eurosceptic reactionaries who are obsessed about trade but is somehow equivalent to the virulent anti-Semitic, white supremacist and revolutionary Nazis, and so on.

The irony is that liberal catastrophisers engage in exactly the same behaviour that they associate with populists and Right-wing extremists; they overgeneralise; they label others; they engage in Manichean ‘good-versus-bad’ dichotomous thinking; they lose perspective; and they become obsessed with apocalyptic-style scenarios.

Rather than assessing things rationally, and engaging with those who hold different points of view, they cling to comfort blankets, such as catastrophising, distancing and emotional reasoning.

Further reading

No Bregrets: 10 predictions for 2019

By Matthew Goodwin

Such irrationality, of course, is by no means unique to the Left. Those on the Right fall foul of the same mechanisms. Populists routinely catastrophise when talking about demographic projections, the decline of white populations, Islamist terrorism or the capacity of Islam to integrate into Western ways of life.

The trouble is that as our value divides continue to rise to the surface, and are exacerbated by social media, this behaviour looks set to become more, rather than less, common on all sides. But at this particular moment in our history, it does seem to be most prominent among those who claim to be most tolerant among us.

Cognitive behavioural therapists would suggest six ways forward for those struggling most; acknowledging that sometimes things do not go your way; trying to recognise when your thoughts are irrational; trying to disrupt catastrophic thought patterns; thinking about a different and more positive outcome; repeating positive affirmations; and engaging in stress-relieving techniques.

We need to think far more seriously about ways of building far more stable and resilient bridges across these different communities. Remainers, in particular, might consider how they are responding to our post-referendum environment – and should certainly stop harping on about Nazis, extremists and intolerance.

“The mighty collective power of the UK’s £20bn advertising industry – which has been united in its support for Remain – has failed to find the compelling messaging we so desperately needed. Shame on us.”

For Christine Beale, global editor-in-chief for the industry magazine Campaign, and  her fellow PR and advertising gurus, Brexit presented a mighty wake-up call. Their job is to ‘sell’ us buying choices and opinions, and on the 24^th June 2016 their collective power had been found wanting. The sector was left licking its wounds.

The Referendum was direct democracy, unmediated by party politics and our first-past-the-post electoral system. Votes in safe seats counted equally to those in swing seats. The fixation of party managers on the latter, which simplifies their messaging efforts no end in general elections, was only of marginal importance here.

Suggested reading

The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

For those in the business of influencing, the message was clear – they had to do a lot better. They had to get serious, and far more political, and that meant turning their attention to democracy itself.

Once their initial outrage and despair had cleared, it was clear that campaigners for Remain were going to continue the fight, and that they would not be short of funding to do so. Over time they have consolidated around two fully-staffed operations: People’s Vote (headed by the City PR man Roland Rudd, with Peter Mandelson as a director) and Best for Britain, Gina Miller’s outfit that George Soros has funded.

A large part of their efforts has been focused on media management straight from the conventional PR-Mandelson playbook: lining up a succession of important and well-known folk to make targeted interventions in the public arena, co-ordinated by messaging and timed to have maximum impact on politics.

Day after wearisome day we have seen and heard the results of this as figures from our economic, cultural and political elites have been wheeled out to recycle the approved lines of the day: some variation on ‘Brexit is a disaster and must be overturned for our own good’.

Suggested reading

Time to scrap these toxic parties

By Polly Mackenzie

These efforts have appeared overwhelming at times, dominating our public sphere. But the campaigners have also realised that this sort of pressure is only part of what they need; that they are vulnerable to charges of elitism. They have seen that direct democracy is different; that 17.4 million votes needs more than a renewed Establishment push to overcome.

Hence the campaigners sought to reach out and build a ‘movement’; to defeat one instance of direct democracy with other versions – hoping that this will culminate in a second referendum on their terms; a People’s Vote. The drive to convert Leave voters goes on, but with limited success. It has been in mobilising Remain voters to participate – by posting on their social media, by marching, signing petitions and making donations – that they have been much more successful.

Just recently we have seen the astonishing success of these efforts. At the time of writing the Revoke Article 50 petition has secured nearly 6 million signatures. At the same time campaigners have managed to get mainstream media to report their claims that their march in London on Saturday attracted a million people (the likely real number is less than 400,000; still impressive but nowhere near the iconic figure claimed).

Suggested reading

On Brexit, Auntie just can't help herself

By Robin Aitken

We know that Remain voters tend to be much more educated, younger, more networked and also wealthier than Leave voters on average. Check out the Revoke petition sorted by constituency and you will find a list of the wealthiest urban areas in the country, overwhelmingly in London. They are places full of people connected into networks of political, economic and cultural power; and also fully equipped with new technology to access the latest messaging and talking points.

In other words, the average Remainer participating in these activities is the sort of person that advertising and consumer public relations target anyway as a matter of course. They have proved relatively easy to reach and to mobilise.

Brexit voters are rather more elusive. This has been both a strength and a weakness for the pro-Brexit side. It is a strength because they have been mostly impervious to the daily bombardment of media messaging, both before the Referendum and since. But it is a weakness because this lack of connectedness reflects a general lack of access and organisation, a lack of political power beyond that basic ability to go out and vote.

We can see this in the contrast between the several well-attended anti-Brexit marches and the dearth of similar efforts – or rather successful efforts – to defend Brexit. Saturday’s gathering in London may have been much smaller than the campaigners and their media supporters said, but 400,000 is still a big number – and the widespread positive media coverage testifies to its success.

Suggested reading

Brexit's unheard voices

By Rakib Ehsan

Compare this to Leave Means Leave’s effort, led by Nigel Farage, albeit without his presence for most of it. The idea of marching from Sunderland to London to protest is a powerful one, evoking the Jarrow March of the 1930s. However Farage is a divisive figure, the numbers have been small and the effort has gained little media coverage.

This relates to a wider issue. While the London media can hardly move for pro-Remain voices from various groups, pro-Leave ones are much thinner on the ground. Pro-Brexit activities struggle for funds, and are hampered by the greater dispersion of Leave voters. Compare Remain and Leave campaigning now and you see on the one hand a professional, well-funded and proactive operation and on the other a motley crew of small organisations and individuals who are constantly in reactive mode, bickering with each other and responding to what the other side are doing rather than setting the agenda themselves.

The Brexit vote was perhaps the only way in which those people who voted for Brexit could bypass established political and economic power and get themselves heard on their own terms.

At least for a brief window, a powerless, disorganised rabble shook things up and defeated the powers-that-be – by voting.

However, those powers have regrouped, adjusted and redeployed since this rebellion. They have mobilised their most ardent supporters, gathering them together to form a group that has developed a strong identity; a class consciousness even. They have learned the techniques of direct democracy and deployed them to re-assert their own power.

These and other counter-moves have left the largest exercise in direct democracy this country has seen in tatters, torn apart from every side: from within the Government itself, by most of our media and major institutions, but also online and in the streets.

This is what political power does. It wins.

Her former Party shames itself, so Ms Berger has taken back control of her political future. At least she has that. She could stand as a TIGger, an Eyore or even, one day, a Labour candidate again – don’t ever forget the moral force with which she delivered her exit speech. She has control.

Control matters; without it, little else does. At work, the other day, in a Skype meeting – you know, you’re all in different places but you’re working together in a virtual ‘meeting room’ on your computer – William (on the other side of the world) said, “Can I just add [some text] on this page?”. As he clicked his cursor onto the menu, the message “Do you want William to take back control?” flashed up on mine. I said: “My favourite phrase!” and everyone laughed.

I say “everyone” and “laughed” but it would be more correct to note that the responses divided us neatly in two. The Leavers (I guess) laughed heartily. Others – Remainers? – were more nervous. More a polite cough, as though I’d said something controversial, like “Women are adult females”. Take Back Control was a genius brand for Leave, and Continuity Remain, or TIG, as it’s styled itself, has noticed.

Suggested reading

Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

Control of the narrative: that’s what TIG is about, and it’s why I feel sorry for Luciana Berger. Because her important message to the planet – look what Labour has become, and shudder, in horror – has been lost in the TIG’s principal narrative choice: that we must stay within the EU, and that it is reasonable and open-minded to do so, regardless of the referendum. That’s why Chuka, and not Luciana, is TIG’s de facto leader: as shiny a pro-EU Blairite as you could hope to find. 

I’d always reckoned that a Blairite, pro-EU, pro-“human rights”, pro-Identity Politics grouping would be electorally toxic beyond a few metropolitan enclaves: those relatively small geographies whose denizens are rich enough to be protected from the consequence of their voting behaviour. I’ll admit to having daydreamed about watching Gina Miller taking her case to the voters of Sunderland, or Harlow (for example) with something approaching glee.

Wrong again, Graeme! Who needs elections? They cause trouble, foment division. I forgot that, however unpopular, pro-EU Blairites need appeal to a single constituency – basically, the BBC – to assert their power over the narrative. That’s why Anna Soubry was all over the airwaves last week, insinuating that the PM has “a problem with immigration” (who’s dog-whistling now?). This is a claim about the PM that lacks credibility, to put it politely.

Never mind: make it anyway. It’ll stick. That’s what matters, isn’t it? To be virtuous and to prove it, by smearing.

Suggested reading

The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

Since the referendum, the cries of pain from a section of the losing side have been loud. That pain is getting louder (search #FBPE on Twitter, if you don’t believe me). The only way I can understand this dynamic – everyone’s side loses elections from time to time, everyone is sometimes in the minority – is that the initial shock of losing control has atrophied into a solid, determined attempt to take it back.

The worldview of the TIGgers, and most of the media – a globalist, open-borders, fashionable identity politics worldview – has been dominant for decades. At first it must have felt like a bereavement, to see Utopia rejected by a majority of the people who constitute your audience and your electorate. Weren’t the deplorables listening?

Since electorally the game is up, power must be reclaimed by other means. So rapidly and smoothly has this happened, that if you blink you’ll miss the latest example. Here’s an editor at Sky News casually asserting that being a Tory who supports Brexit makes you “far Right”. Here is the endless sequence of articles, instructing you to accept Begum’s return to the UK (it’s easy to support her return to Bethnal Green, if you rarely step outside Hampstead). Here’s David Lammy, claiming that “beyond all reasonable doubt” Mrs May is “a little England suburban xenophobe”.

“Problems with immigrants”, “far Right”, “suburban” (Lammy is channeling Jonathan Miller and his hatred of Thatcher’s “odious suburban gentility”) – it’s not hard to discern the picture the ultra-Remainers are painting. The campaign is to make “I usually vote Conservative, because I believe in fiscal sanity, and I’d like to respect the result of the Referendum” cognate with having a swastika tattooed on your forehead and hanging a “No dogs no Irish etc” sign in your net-curtained window. All from a continuity ‘centre’ which is so adept at leadership that it let its own movement be taken over by Jeremy Corbyn.

Suggested reading

How politics is poisoning the truth

By Graeme Archer

They might get away with it. The values I worship – be neighbourly but not nosy, don’t spit on the street or throw litter, don’t make bus journeys intolerable for others through naked, brutal selfishness, don’t socialise customs which glamorise violence – are irredeemably bourgeois, irredeemably suburban, irredeemably unfashionable. I’d hazard a guess that the suburbs are also, mostly but not uniformly, opposed to having ISIS supporters in the country and in favour of leaving the EU (or at least of respecting the result of the 2016 vote).

The virtual meeting room of our politics is underway, pulling us together from our various locations. There’s an empty page on the screen, the cursor is blinking, and it’s time to write a vision for the country’s future. Starting with a blank page is always frightening, but usually worthwhile – and there is space here for voices who aren’t normally permitted to be the author, to be in control of the pen.

Or…. What’s this? We could just reload the version we junked yesterday? Someone – Chuka, Anna, David – wants to reprint their just-deleted version onto the page. And the system is asking: “Do you want them to take back control?”

Please: click “No”, before they shut you out of the room forever.

I read it while I was snatching a break away from the hospital where my father has lain for weeks; a hospital hundreds of miles and across a sea from my own home. He’s there as a result of malnutrition not caused by an inadequate diet, hypothermia not caused by a cold house, gastric problems and a skin disease that has gone undiagnosed and become rampant – in part because it is so difficult to get oneself in front of one of the NHS’s increasingly rare dermatologists. I have been here for weeks.

Sparking Fraser’s fury was an unnamed woman who had rung her father’s doctor to request help changing his shitty pants. I picture her as one of those Midsomer Murder characters who you know is a wrong’un because she arrives in Badger’s Behind in a convertible sports car and red lipstick.

Sparking my fury was the utter dissimilarity between what Fraser subsequently described – the idea that, busy with our exciting, narcissistic lives, we children are all too keen to offload the grim bits to any passing care worker, however low-paid or temporary – and the grinding reality of what I, and millions like me, are experiencing as we desperately try to care for our loved ones.

Suggested reading

Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

Far from “casting off our responsibilities”, our daily reality is the fear of missing the subtle changes in our relatives’ conditions that an expert would know spelled danger. Our reality is knowing we would go to the mattresses for them, even as we sideline other parts of our lives, knowing that this in itself causes the sick and frail distress.

For here is the truth: bottom-wiping is easy. Nobody wants to do it, but everyone can. That a bum-cleaning refusenik can be produced is not an argument for societal and familial breakdown. Even the one who so infuriated Fraser and his GP friend might have her good points: I admire her persistence, for example, in actually getting through to her father’s surgery and to a medical practitioner. Fortunately, she wasn’t asking for an appointment, for which, at my own father’s practice, the wait stands at two weeks.

This is where the carer’s struggle lies; not with the willingness or capacity of anyone – Brexiteers and Remainers alike – to provide loved ones with basic care-giving or, in Giles’s words, a “highly successful form of mutual care”. Our struggle is in accessing medical services and navigating the profoundly tangled thicket of systems, departments and organisations. This is the scandal, not a daughter’s willingness – or otherwise – to come home and get her hands dirty.

For this “rootless Ronin” has come home to spend hours discussing her father with healthcare professionals. By far the most intractable and bewildering moments have related to procedure: a test that is repeated, not to see if there have been any changes, but because it was originally carried out at another hospital, which operates under a different authority, and which therefore does not automatically share its results; or those lab findings which are expected promptly, but which prove mysteriously elusive even to the doctor who ordered them in the same building; or attempts to borrow the equipment to help my father at home that requires a gargantuan and cross-departmental swapping of paperwork to procure. There’s also the feeling that, too often, the advice you’re getting is driven not by medical necessity but by an unseen matrix of spreadsheets and cost centres.

Suggested reading

Our shameful social care crisis

By James Bloodworth

My bottom line is not “individual acquisition and self-advancement“, it is the relentless determination to have my father assessed not merely as a set of symptoms, but as a person who exists in continuous time – not only at the moments when the professionals glide to his bedside. The crux is not that he weighs only nine and a half stone, but that a year ago he weighed eleven; not that his skin is failing to perform its basic task of retaining body heat, but that he has been freezing for months, even as the rest of us cast off our jumpers in his stiflingly hot flat.

It is not that the doctors do not know this, or that they do not care; it is that they are busy, busy, busy. In my fantasy, we sit down in a quiet space, and I calmly detail all the manifestations of my father’s sickness; in response, they blend what I have said with clinical observations and the results of scopes, scans, biopsies and blood tests, and slowly a picture and a plan emerge.

The reality, however, is that every night I return from hospital to my father’s flat and have to block out the picture of him lying uncomfortably in his bed by obsessively cleaning. I have to banish the fear that, as happened the other day, an unknown doctor will appear by his bed, give a cursory glance at his hands and say, “looks like eczema to me”.

Paradoxically, per Fraser’s argument, that I can give my dad this support, unconditionally and open-endedly, relies on my not being at the centre of a traditional family unit, or bound to a conventional job. Having met my partner relatively late on, we do not have children; were we to, I would not at the moment be able to care for them. So, fine, my partner would increase his share of childcare; but how would he work? Most people can cover these issues for a week, but for months? A year? Five years?

Suggested reading

Can we be trusted with euthanasia?

By Ian Birrell

And that I’m continuing to work at all, albeit in drastically reduced amounts, is possible because I can freelance from anywhere; because my professional life is both precarious and adaptable. And because I learned that lesson from my parents, who spent their young, post-war lives shifting across the globe – not as rejection of their own families, but because those families had been fragmented by death and instability. They met as crew on a cruise ship.

One consequence of this was that my parents’ friends were from everywhere; my godmother a Norwegian who married an Italian, my father’s Polish chums in Acton, waiters and chefs and shopworkers from Morocco, France, Portugal. Now, my father has extra-large, bandage-friendly socks knitted for him my Polish friend’s grandmother, a woman he will never meet; his bedside is festooned with get well cards made by the Irish nieces I acquired through falling in love with their uncle.

In Ireland, too, in the countryside where I’ve made a home, my Irish family has lit a candle for my dad. Back in England, I am supported by my own friends, who send loving messages and offers of help and who make whirlwind trips to see me. Among all of these is my closest friend and her wife, who have taken their turn at dad’s bedside, brought him gluten-free cake and essays by Clive James and made him laugh.

I can never repay them, but then I don’t have to. What Fraser fails to understand is that the pulling apart and reshaping of the family unit through movement and mobility has enlarged, rather than diminished, the canvas on which we can love one another. “Are you all family?” asked a nurse, one evening, as my friends sat with us. I was about to explain the ins and outs, and then simply said, because it is true in the most important ways: “Yes.”

There are several key obstacles to this. The first is that very few Leavers have changed their minds. In the nearly three years that have passed since the first referendum there has certainly been a slight drift toward Remain. But the scale of this shift is routinely exaggerated by the second referendum herd.

Only last week, the latest poll by Survation had Remain on 55% and Leave on 45%, while the ‘poll of polls’, which calculates an average from all polls, gives the two camps similar figures. Allowing for a margin of error of three points, the argument that the ‘will of the people’ has fundamentally changed should be met with scepticism.

These numbers are also similar to those seen in the final week of the first referendum, with pollsters like YouGov, Populus, ComRes and ORB all putting Remain ahead. Look a bit closer and you also see that very few Leavers display ‘Bregret’; even today, after everything, 90% say that the vote for Brexit was ‘right’. In fact, it is actually people who did not vote in 2016 who now lean heavily toward Remain. So the question the Second Referendum agitators must consider is, will 2016’s non-voters turnout when it matters? And we don’t really know. It still looks like a coin toss.

Suggested reading

Brexit's unheard voices

By Rakib Ehsab

Those campaigning for a second ballot must also grapple with the inconvenient fact that most people don’t want one. As my colleague Sir John Curtice has pointed out, the popularity of a second referendum is “clearly largely confined to those who wish to reverse Brexit”. Indeed, according to recent polling, most people think that the original result should be respected. Even when pollsters remind them of the gridlock within parliament, only 36% think that a second referendum is a ‘good idea’. Dragging reluctant voters back to the ballot box to have a say on something that they do not really want to have a say on is risky, especially when Leavers will argue that Remain ‘just doesn’t get it’.

And I’m not entirely sure that they do get it. If they did, they would not be issuing economic warnings from the snowy hills of Davos. Some readers might argue that this is a cheap shot – but one key lesson of 2016 is that optics matter. The ideal script for Leavers has always been the one trotted out by distant politicians in faraway places talking only about economics. In recent weeks, Tony Blair, George Osborne and Roland Rudd were perfectly willing to deliver those lines on cue.

These optics are key because a second referendum is bound to be far more anti-establishment than the first. There will be much less talk about trade and much more talk about all that is wrong with Westminster. Leavers will inevitably claim that that the political class have ruined Brexit, ignored people’s concerns and been unable to reach a decision. They will also argue that politicians have actively sought to  thwart the entire project despite voting for the first referendum to take place, Article 50 to be triggered, standing on manifestos committed to leaving the EU and then voting for the Withdrawal Act. We already know that anti-establishment populism and distrust of politics was a significant driver of support for Leave (for research see here and here). It’s not hard to imagine how these drivers will become even stronger.

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Britain does need to tread carefully. Last week, the Edelman group found that 61% of all British people feel that their views are not represented in politics; 59% believe that government is not listening to ‘people like them’; and 58% feel that most politicians are not being honest with the public. Similarly, ComRes discovered that nearly eight in ten Brits feel that politicians are not taking into account the views or concerns of ordinary people while nearly two-thirds feel that the main parties do not offer an appealing choice of who to vote for. Clearly, some of these disillusioned voters are Remainers but the warning signs of a larger rebellion against the established politicians are visible. This is what Leavers are planning on, of course. Their slogan will be ‘Tell them again’.

Remain, meanwhile, needs to stop arguing that those who voted for Brexit did not really know what they were voting for. This sits uneasily with all that we know about Leavers. As virtually every study has shown, most Leavers did know, at least in broad terms, why they were voting for Brexit. They wanted powers returned from the EU to the nation state and they wanted to end freedom of movement, which they see as being central to slowing overall immigration into Britain.

Many also wanted a wider shake-up of what they see as a broken settlement; a place where London gets a lot and everywhere else gets a little; where influence and status are too strongly organized around the university-educated middle-class; where economic power is too strongly concentrated in financial services; where some of our prominent liberal commentators can come across as uncaring, condescending or even openly dismissive of traditional ways of life; and where the national conversation can appear neglectful or contemptuous towards Leavers. Remainers tend to struggle with conversations about things that are not material and extend beyond individual rights; things like dignity, recognition, solidarity, belonging, tradition, identity and culture.

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For example, one reaction to the Brexit vote that has angered Leavers has been the rush to frame them as bigots, racists, the perpetrators of hate crime and as coming exclusively from the white working-class. Vox-pops with white pensioners complaining about immigration in Stoke-on-Trent or Clacton dominate. Meanwhile, we’ve heard almost nothing from minority ethnic, affluent or liberal Leavers who also made Brexit possible. If Brexit really was only driven by white workers who had been battered by Thatcherism and austerity, who just wanted better wages and a bit more job security, then all of this would be much simpler. But it was not. Anxiety about cultural and social change mattered as much, if not more so, than anxiety about economics.

Rather than change the messengers and the message, many Remain leaders are stuck in an ‘economic doom loop’, recycling and endlessly repeating claims about domestic economic risk. This is deeply problematic not least because when people think about the EU they tend to stress external risks: large-scale migration, borders, security, the refugee crisis, terrorism, whether the EU is sufficiently democratic and transparent, and whether it really is possible to reform things like free movement.

Furthermore, while economically insulated middle-class Leavers are unlikely to be swayed by the argument that Brexit will shave a few points off growth, economically left behind Leavers are convinced that today’s economic settlement, which they are being asked to sustain, is exactly why they have been left behind.

I think there are also other reasons to question this strategy. Irrespective of the validity of the claims, we are now at a point in British politics where voters have been subjected to nearly a decade’s worth of economic catastrophising. Warnings about the economy ran through the 2010, 2015 and 2017 general election campaigns, as well as the 2014 campaign against Scottish independence and the 2016 campaign against Brexit. Voters are not only tired of elections but are perhaps also tired of the strategy.

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Even when Leavers do think about the economy they are also often not thinking about the short-term shocks. Remainers should reflect on the fact that while many Leavers accepted at the time of the 2016 referendum that Brexit could well entail some economic disruption, this would be worth it for the longer-term gains. Today, for example, Leavers appear fairly convinced that five years from now, their households will be better off as a result of the country leaving the EU.

Lastly, the relentless focus on economic catastrophe is also at odds with the objective economic reality that now surrounds us. I think, on balance, it is reasonable to claim that Brexit has curbed some growth and that No Deal would cause disruption. It is also true that levels of pessimism about the economy are reaching levels that we have not come close to since the depths of the financial crisis, though I suspect that the drivers of this are actually mixed and not all down to Brexit.

But it is hard to convince voters that the sky is about to collapse when Britain is experiencing the strongest labour market figures on record and as wages are now beginning to outstrip inflation. Unlike when Britain initially voted to stay in the European Community in the 1970s, when the country really was the ‘sick man of Europe’, we now live in an age when growth across the globe is forecast to slow, including and perhaps most importantly in China, while the fundamentals of the Eurozone area look far from strong.

Economic activity in the EU area has now fallen to the slowest pace in five years, manufacturing is squeezed, business confidence is down and there are still big problems with banks, debt and unemployment, especially in the south. I’m just not convinced that asking people to compare Britain’s economy with the picture across the Channel is a wise move in the current environment.

In any case, after last week’s votes in parliament, the likelihood of a second vote has receded. But those continuing to campaign for another referendum would do well to consider the points above. Too few have reflected on the lessons of 2016, a basic problem that will also likely hold back any new anti-Brexit ‘centrist’ party. In fact, they’re making the same mistakes all over again. And given that Remain seems unable to change the messenger or message, a second referendum could easily deliver the same outcome as the first.