Rejoin the agreeable discussions of world politics

A good piece, trailed in Briefings from Britain today, by R Tombs in Spiked,trying to puzzle out exactly what the case is for Rejoin.

As he notes, the economic arguments during the Referendum were motivated by Operation Fear, and the arguments now seems to depend on dubious comparisons with 'doppelganger' economies (much criticised, including in this blog -- which countries do you compare with the UK? How do you control the other variables like the Crash of 2008, oil price rises, wars, embargoes, Covid and policies like aiming for net zero?).

As a commentary in Briefings... puts it  

the Remain view (also a feature of the BBC documentary) ...[is that].. the years between 2016 and 2026 are abridged: ... there is a straight line from the referendum to soaring debt, poor productivity and border chaos. Remain, in this view, is vindicated. The lockdowns and failures of individual politicians are secondary consequences: Brexit is the first cause of our present woes.   

So what does that leave? Tombs seems to argue towards an autonomy for the political interests of what he comes close to identifying as a ruling class or elite. These are expressed in 'political' and personal terms -- they want to be included in  major political and economic decisions and the UK is no longer a big enough actor on the ''world stage'. First they pinned their hopes in the Commonwealth as a kind of free trade dominion,then the stages of the EU -- the initial Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market etc. They never committed to the ideology of European unification,unlike the political elite in European countries,most of whom had unfortunate pasts to live down and persistent rivalries to manage.

So there still is no strong case for Rejoin, or not one that can have public appeal. It has ideological appeal, but even there it is ill-formed, never quite explicit (it would be laughable if it were made explicit). The most popular aspects of it, like nationalism and patriotism, are self-defeating and anyway better expressed by various emergent right-wing alternatives,not monopolised by the major traditional political parties since the first decade of this century.

To put it bluntly -- what is the appeal of promoting the ideological interests, the wishes to belong, to have seats at various tables, to find a  new role fro themselves, of privileged knobs? 

 

The Briefings team have also produced a book. I have it. I'll deliver some summaries. Meanwhile, buy it on Amazon here 

Brexit: The Facts Strike Back

by Robert Tombs (Author), Graham Gudgin CBE (Author), Nick Busvine (Contributor), & 2 more

 

 

BBC admits Brexit bias but fails to acknowledge its ideology

Briefings for Britain this week contains an article by D Keighley of  News-Watch (mentioned a couple of times in this blog) which has been monitoring BBC output for years and continually argued for the existence of evidence based on various simple measures of bias. They have also been continually dismissed, usually by the BBC loftily claiming that the professional judgement of its broadcasters outweighs any mere academic analysis by outsiders. They are nice people, how can they be biased?

This time it is different (nearly):

On 4 June, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) partially upheld a News-watch complaint about an item broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme on 15 November 2024.  This is the first time that the BBC has formally accepted that one of our complaints about the impartiality of its Brexit coverage was justified. 

BBC Europe correspondent Katya Adler reported that [The Governor of the Bank of England, A Bailey]  had claimed that Brexit was one of the main reasons why the British economy was not performing as well as it could. Two guests were then invited to discuss his allegation: Sir John Gieve, a former deputy governor of the Bank, and Liam Byrne, the Labour MP and chairman of the Business and Trade Select Committee.

Both men broadly accepted Bailey’s diagnosis. The discussion then moved towards the same policy conclusion: Britain should reduce friction with the EU and pursue closer alignment....No guest was present to argue that Britain’s economic difficulties might instead be addressed by using more energetically the freedoms gained through Brexit.

The ECU [Executive Complaints Unit] accepted part of the complaint.... the competing arguments — closer EU alignment or greater exploitation of opportunities outside the EU — were “so clearly a controversial matter” that Today should at least have acknowledged the alternative. Its failure to do so fell below the BBC’s standards of impartiality. 

However, the ECU then defended the BBC against the charge of systematic bias, using an old argument we have seen before, voiced famously by none other than Emily Maitlis:

that Bailey’s diagnosis was broadly correct. This, [the Head of ECU] argued, reflected the predominant view among economists, and he had found no significant [NB] body of opinion maintaining that Brexit’s economic effect so far had been beneficial or even neutral....a BBC spokesman insisted that the BBC itself had “no view” on Brexit’s impact and was merely explaining the economic consensus.

 In response, Keighley points out that:

The BBC says it has no view, while granting one side of a contested argument the status of an authoritative consensus which need not be seriously challenged. That is not neutrality. It is a highly biased  editorial judgement about which claims count as established and which may be treated as marginal.

Brexit is not a controlled experiment. Its economic consequences cannot be isolated with scientific precision from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, energy prices, inflation, interest rates, taxation, regulation, migration, political instability or the decisions of successive British governments. The headline estimates most frequently cited are produced by counterfactual models comparing actual performance with an imagined Britain that remained inside the EU.

Such models may be useful, but they are not observable facts. Their assumptions can be disputed, and they cannot determine how Britain might have performed had governments pursued different tax, energy, regulatory or trade policies after leaving.

Indeed, Sir John Gieve himself acknowledged during the Today discussion that measuring Brexit’s impact was “extremely difficult” and that economic models were not good at measuring large shocks. That caveat ought to have encouraged rigorous questioning. Instead, it was submerged beneath an editorial structure that moved smoothly from “Brexit has caused damage” to “closer alignment is the remedy”....

Keighley gets close to a general understanding of ideology as a whole structure of argument, often not conscious, but assumed as normal judgement: 

skewed framing: the premise chosen for discussion, the credentials accorded to particular sources, the selection of guests, the questions not asked and the range of policy solutions deemed respectable.

 Keighley points out that 'There is, of course,  a substantial alternative argument advanced by rafts of economists'. As I said, in my rebuke to Maitlis, the BBC need  only to have looked at W Keegan in the Guardian, fer Chrissake, let alone edition after edition of Briefings for Brexit as it then was.

There is another disturbing aspect of the case: unexplained delay. Normally, the rules of the BBC complaints process stipulate completion within months...The ECU identified the imbalance only at the point of remedy. It failed to recognise that the diagnosis had already been framed in a manner which disadvantaged the Brexit case.

 Again, a classic procedure -- masterly inaction, characteristic of the whole Professional Managerial Class,usually clearly combined with eventual admissions of personal incompetence, lapses of judgement, and subsequent apology but never recognition of systematic ideology. As Lukacs said, generations ago -- the bourgeoisie literally cannot think of alternatives to their worldviews.

 

 

 

 

Rejoiner hearts leap as King of the North triumphs

Remainer hearts lifted a bit (not too much) as Burnham won a by-election for Labour, because he defeated Reform at least, and has supported Rejoin in the past, although a recent national poll suggests a large minority suspect his integrity despite his local support (most don't know, of course). The Times did its best by publishing photos of him as an effete Cambridge English graduate, years ago, looking like a member of an elite dining club, rather than his current chosen image of hardened Northern son of the soil. He is a Blairite for my money.

D Cummings, by contrast, is usually seen as the wild man of British politics, a driving role behind Brexit as among the most heinous of his crimes. He was an adviser to Boris Johnson once, but was soon deposed. He has remained as a trenchant critic of the British state and its conservatism, and he writes on Substack and elsewhere.

This piece appeared on UnHerd, which is, alas, protected by a subscription barrier. It is typical Cummings prose:

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

They’re pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow a great thing, when you can barely even see the single market in the data. If you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it’s super bad for the EU, you have a perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market.

You look at the 10 years since Brexit and it’s basically characterised by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. It’s a constant soap opera, and both sides — both sides in the sense of the kind of inside-Westminster Left and Right — have been much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020. 

 

I looked up the item by Draghi in the Corriere della Serra (translation by Google). It is not exactly favourable for Cummings. It does argue that important matters including conflict and technological change are now decided by powerful state systems, not market or economic forces. He has in mind the USA, China and Russia, of course. By comparison, the EU still favours a rather weak and cumbersome state apparatus based on a 'common market'. 

 

While before we relied on markets for the direction of the economy today there are large-scale industrial policies. While before there was compliance with the rules today there is the use of military force and economic power to protect national interests. While before the state saw its powers shrink, all the instruments are now employed in the name of the government of the state.

Europe is poorly equipped in a world where geo-economy, security and stability of sources of supply more than efficiency inspire international trade relations.

 [original spacing and font size  -- sorry --  and emphasis]

That market is still riddled with internal barriers:

European states are about to have a giant military enterprise with 2 trillion euros - including a quarter in Germany - of additional defence expenditures planned between now and 2031. Yet we have internal barriers that are equivalent to a tariff of 64% on machinery and 95% on metals.

Agreement with Cummings so far, but then Draghi argues for the same old option.He is certainly not in favour of national independence. What we ned is -- greater centralisation of 'Europe', especially financial centralisation, the adoption of 'common debt' ( central banking)...  

for example with an agreement on projects of common European interest and with their common funding, an essential condition for achieving the technologically necessary and economically self-sufficient dimension . ...Only forms of common debt can support large-scale European projects that insufficient fragmented national efforts would never be able to implement 

In a way this still supports Cummings,because this was the  issue before and all along.There is no soft form of 'alignment' with the EU. The old 'common market' is indeed dead. It is Europe as a superpower or nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

'The success stories enabled by Brexit'

 A rare subhead in the media today, a comment article in the Times by F Nelson (behind a paywall alas). Nelson is fed up with the commentaries from all sides about 'broken Britain' and points to areas of growth and optimism (for him):

 1. The start up of new AI and tech businesses, sufficient to turn King's Cross, hitherto a rundown part of London into  a 'thriving tech campus', with new money from investors from Silicon Valley. Not all are UK owned but typical founders are '[immigrant-related] Londoners who grew up in relative poverty...went to Oxbridge...flourished in a London that had become Europe's most successful melting pot'. Some companies have been spectacularly successful and are [currently] worth billions. Some have subsequently been sold to Google or Microsoft but on condition that they stayed in London. One founder gained a Noble Prize in Chemistry.

The point is that this boom owes much to 'Labour's adept use of Brexit powers' for Nelson, 'light-touch AI regulation' as opposed to EU regulations, providing a 'Goldilocks" moment for the UK, according to two Polish innovators -- 'regulation light enough to encourage innovation and assertive enough to keep people safe'

 2.New medicine, some of it from AI-discoverd drugs. 'In the EU the path [to patient trial] takes years', in Britain, months, and this has led to drug company spinoffs,one of which 'raised £1.6bn this month'. The UK has a 'fast-track system', but the EU has no equivalent.

Two general factors help further confound the sceptics, who rightly doubt the  saving graces of high tech. Border control helps manage globalisation and attract skilled immigrants [if it does], and the residual effetcs of 'British culture', the traditions of learning and intellectual effort, 'the accumulation of ideas, institutions, habits and talent that makes a country more than the sum of its GDP statistics'.

Nelson is quoting the views of one of those successful tech entrepreneurs and Nobel Prize winners here, 'Britishness as a concept, welding together native and newcomer, poor and posh', and it is unlikely to be shared widely[!]. I have many objections to this view myself, of course.

Even so, Nelson is right to say that there is something positive to say, and it would be 'ironic if Labour implodes because it doesn't know what it's doing right'.But then, the new petit bourgeoisie are conservative, suspicious of science and tech, or ambitious self-made people, and they think of British culture as genteel novels and European cuisine, so I doubt these arguments would appeal to most Remainers.

 

Make Britain great again, says a Remainer/Rejoiner

My nostalgia trip contnues with today's Graun and beloved Rafael Behr:

Without a reckoning about the epic strategic error of leaving the EU, there is no serious debate about the country’s future place in the world 

After summarising recent Great Events including military adventures in Iran, Behr urges a new role for Britain:

Britain can choose to be a partner in that project or accept a role as adjunct. National power could be boosted in an alliance of neighbours with broadly aligned global interests. Or it can be circumscribed by the Brexit cult of sovereignty that sees regulatory harmonisation with Europe as colonisation but welcomes subordination to US tech giants and industrial lobbies, which it calls free trade....British politics is not grappling with this predicament, which requires an honest audit of exorbitant costs and negligible benefits of life outside the EU... 

The electoral advantage in shutting down hard questions about Britain’s place in the world postponed the search for answers and confined it to the barren field of Brexit-believing policy options. Having failed to situate national problems in their proper global context, Labour ended up splashing around in the shallow end of political debate. That is the comfort zone of demagogues who blame the country’s ills on immigrants and benefits claimants. 

 Labour has had to reintroduce ambiguity about Rejoin, of course. Burnham is standing in a constituency that voted for Reform in reent local elections. He was a Rejoiner until last week. Back to Behr:

Farage, the ideological godfather of Brexit, doesn’t dare boast of it as an accomplishment. His model of future Britain is as a satrapy in a Maga-led US empire 

Behr thinks he can appeal to British expansionists better than Reform [I thought  British power was a fantasy only entertainde by nasty right-wingers?]

There is a reason why “take back control” was such an effective slogan in the referendum. It spoke to feelings of anxiety and lack of agency in a world of disorienting change.

Those feelings haven’t gone away. They are more severe because Britain’s capacity to influence global events was diminished, not boosted, by leaving the EU. This is the argument at its core. I suspect a lot of people are open to persuasion, if not persuaded already: the road to control leads back to Europe.

As misunderstandings go, this has got to be a good one. Taking back control was not about immigration or the democratic deficit in the EC, it was about some James Bond fantasy of Britain playing a world role again!

 

 

Remaining in the same old dead ends

I haven't read the blessed Grauniad for some while, but now Remain/Rejoin is stirring, I thought I wold to see if my favourites have moved on. Er...no

G Monbiot still nurtures his fears and loathing voters who disagree with him, this time directed at the by-election possibly going to Reform and a general crisis in British political culture (various worthies on chat shows have also pursued this line -- in Britain ungovernable etc)

Nothing sums up the death of accountability like the prospect of Nigel Farage in No 10

The general thesis weaves together the latest scandal beloved by the chattering classes -- the £5m 'personal' donation to Farage from a cryptofund billionaire (currently being investigated and mentioned on every BBC programme):

Perhaps our most poignant political folk tale is the notion of accountability. Those who hurt and undermine us will be punished, while those who help us will be rewarded. In reality, little in either business or politics could be further from the truth. A more reliable rule is that those who generate insecurity profit from it. 

The link goes to a book by N Klein, but a dogwhistle lest us prick up our ears to the anxiety provoked by cryptocurrency. Mussolini  provoked a sense of constant national crisis, Monbiot tells us, [just him?] which helped him to power, and from there it is easy:

[Farage]  was to the decision to leave the EU what Mussolini was to the decision to join the first world war. Like that other slightly rightwing figure, he promised miracles with a policy that instead delivered misery and retreat. 

The electorate is to blame. The disillusion with the two big parties arises because voters  “consistently and systematically punish incumbents for conditions beyond their control”. They also do not realise the consequences of their decisions ( Brexit),and vote for snake-oil salesmen who promise hope.

The problem is that, busy with our lives, our attention yanked from one crisis to another, we don’t have the mental space to keep receipts....[well, the petit bourgeoisie are very good at that] One result is that the more crises we face, the less accountable politics becomes.

Labour's unpopularity arises because: 

The animating force of Starmer’s team is its extreme and irrational hostility to the Labour left, a hostility it brought into government as a national programme.  

Monbiot thinks this aggressive stance has put off voters: 'There’s a basic rule in politics and in life: hate people and they will hate you back.'. But like all liberals, he doesn't see that this constant contempt also might drive people from the GUardian worldview and into Brexit and then Reform. 

Lies on the bus revisited

Readers will remember the major campaign by Remainers about the 'lies on the bus', the claim by Johnson and other members of his campaign, that the UK paid £350m a week to the EU as members. Lies because that was the gross figure that did not allow for rebates and discounts,which reduced the contribution by about a third (as I recall). Nevertheless, the furore disclosed an uncomfortable truth -- Britain was indeed a net contributor, despite the common claims that the EU had provided money for us to build various facilities, from leisure centres to motorway bridges, displayed nightly on TV news items and represented by plaques on the buildings.

Issues of contribution have reappeared. Private Eye this edition (1675 May2026) is normally resolutely Remainer, but its small mildly sceptical column  disclosed that Brexiteers claimed a net benefit of £9.4bn from not making contributions to the EU, but this was wrong (typical spin). 'The "dividend" has been steadily whittled away as successive governments realised they do, in fact, want to cherry pick'

That whittling began with the 'billions the UK has paid towards the pensions of British Eurocrats', and went on to include £2.2bn for access to Horizon Europe research and development. This Government has paid £750m to access the student exchange scheme Erasmus and E766m to France to limit small boat crossings. They are talking about access to the SAFE programme (Security Action for Europe) , but resiled from the demand for a £6bn joining fee in favour of a 'hefty contgribution' to the E90bn loan to Ukraine, and talks about the European Innovation Council Fund.

 The extra proposal for future closer alignment are estimated to cost £1bn a year. 

 

Overall, Google's AI system says that:

Between 2019 and the end of 2024, the UK paid a total of approximately £63.3 billion to the EU, which consisted of £38.3 billion in standard membership contributions (up to January 2020) and £25 billion for the Withdrawal Agreement "divorce bill" (up to December 2024)