'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) 

Public opinion on leaving

 Briefings for Britain today has a link to an article by D Frost, a lead negotiator during Brexit, on alittle-discussed issue so far in the sly campaign to Rejoin. What terms would the UK be able to get if they rejoined? We have already seen ridiculous terms to join European defence pacts/banks (£6.5bn as I recall). What would further integration involve?

Frost quotes from a recent speech from Sikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister:

To those who want to go further and rejoin (in truth, virtually the entire Cabinet), he points out what we all know: “Britain will not get the same deal that it had before.” He tells the British political class to “internalise ... the fundamental European deal that you get more benefits in return for more pooling of sovereignty”. He underlines our past opt-outs from the Schengen passport-free area and from the Euro (let us pass lightly over the fact that Poland has no such opt-out but has still not joined) and our budget rebate. “You wouldn’t get that kind of deal today,” he added 

 

Frost also clarifies the usual stuff about how rejoining the EU is now popular among UK voters. It might well be the case that they say that leaving was the wrong decision (in fact, they seem to say that leaving has done harm or damaged the economy which are different issues), but rejoining as the way forward does not follow. There is less support for that. Frost again

The other good reason is that British voters are not ready or willing to do it anyway. A poll last autumn from Queen Mary University of London showed that. Asked about 20 different policy areas relevant to EU decision-making, including some of those Sikorski mentions, clear absolute majorities of voters wanted decisions on 17 of them to be taken by the UK government only. Even among Labour voters that was true of 15 of them. That’s why Sikorski is right to say “you probably would reject the deal”.

 Frost continues:

We know the answers to these questions. The truth about the EU’s current structure – the unelected Commission accumulating discretionary power, the EU courts expanding EU powers beyond treaty limits, the fiscal rules bypassing national parliaments, the migration policy overriding democratic mandates, the rule-of-law mechanisms deployed selectively against political opponents – is that none of it has ever been properly discussed or endorsed by most European voters. Who knows whether... [voters would]... really endorse the “deal” and its consequences for their daily lives? 

I looked up the poll from Queen Mary Uni It is a YouGov opinion poll of 4534 people, with all the usual reservations, including rather small numbers in some of the cells. They mention one problem -- they did not ask directly or immediately about Brexit voting preferences for fear of a 'tribal' answer that would distort the responses. The results are still interesting:

[There has been] public dissatisfaction with Brexit since 2020 and a decline in support for Leave since 2016.... Conventional interpretions [include] that voters regret leaving the EU, there has been too much change [departure?] from EU membership, voters decided to go back to the way things were. [But there are] alternative explanations:the British public are dissatisfied with Brexit because not much has changed since leaving the EU, the Government has not made much use of new policy levers.

They asked people for preferences in 20 policy areas – should these be decided by the UK Government alone, cooperation with other governments, or with the EU. There was a majority for UK alone option among all parties (NB the numbers in some cells were very small).

Of particular policies, there was majority support for railway nationalisation (75%) , employment law (68%), refusing entry to criminals (67%), state aid for regions (66%) , immigration rules (58%), controlling the export of live animals (53%). All got majority support except AI regulation, data protection, trade rules (47%–44%). 

There was not much difference between the social classes. Even Remain voters supported the 'UK alone' option (below) in 15 answers These are, like opinions on all general policy statements, pretty ambiguous of course. How can you largely disapprove of the export of live animals yet not largely disapprove of trade rules. And we all know how trade rules and immigration policy have been connected. Maybe the percentage orders can also be taken as rank orders of importance?

 

 

 

The left behind have not declined?

I am currently working through the very detailed analysis of voting behaviour and intentions in Sobolewska and Ford (2020) Brexitland. I will post some more blogs about the book when I have time. It suggests three main political parties (in the informal sense) are at work in Britain -- identity conservatives (overwhelmingly white working class and school leavers), conviction identity liberals (white, university graduates, new petit bourgois (npb) or what they call the professional and managerial class), essential identity liberals (ethnic groups who want to defend their rights but do not support general identity politics for gays etc). The former group delivered Brexit -- but were seen as a declining force. 

So it  is easy to guess that identity liberals now find a home with the Greens, maybe some still with LibDems or Labour. The only other finding from Curtice (see previous post) is that Muslim areas saw a fall in Labour support this time, and we have seen a few Muslim independent MPs and others. Identity liberals both conviction and necessity formed the coalition at the base of New Labour and then the Lib-Con Coalition.The identity conservatives deserted Labour (and Conservative) after seeing them as all alike, in the early 2000s and just abstained in increasing numbers. 

Then the Brexit Party rallied them to the cause of Leave -- Farage wove together popular sentiments against increased immigration (not racism though, the authors insist, but ethnocentrism).  If so, why? Still opposed to immigration mostly? Or still concerned to stop Rejoin? Or still engaging in defensive class politics against the npb? Some cunning hegemonic weave of all three?

The bafflement and fear of the npb have remained unabated. I have not analysed it as closely, but you can detect the main themes being deployed against Reform as against Brexiteers. They are racist, rooted in the past, unable to modernise, illiterate, uncultured, little Englanders, irrational, unable to see the benefits of cosmopolitan, outward-looking, open, individualistc, tolerant Britain. Farage is personally repellent, ugly,corrupt. Liberals have threatened to leave the UK if Farage comes to power.

Brexit kraken awakes?

There have been several ominous signs that Remainerism was stirring again, including frequent assertions that leaving the EU had inflicted harm on te UK economy. Briefings for Britain have done their best to make their case again and again that these claims are dubious -- briefly that 

(1) the comparisons are sometimes with a packet of national economies that include the US (which is growing rapidly)

(2) comparisons with France and Germany show modest differences, even a slight positive gain for the UK

(3) major factors have affected economic growth that would have been operative inside the EU anyway -- the Crash of 2008--9, Covid, the war in Ukraine, the current crisis in Iran, the growth of China etc 

It took me a while to grasp the continued slightly muted support for K Starmer as Prime Minister among the new petit-bourgoisie in the media, but then it became clear -- Starmer is the only hope for pushing closer ties with the EU. The new petit bourgeoisie more widely are attracted by the identity politics of the Greens who are also in favour of Rejoin, but the respectable media are a bit wary of them: Starmer is their man.

In the reent local election coverage , the mass rejection of Starmer has been softbrushed a bit, although it inevitably erupted with vox pops. Media commentatros warned against chaos if the leader were replaced, and tried some amusing soothing diversions. A lot of coverage on the BBC was devoted to Welsh politics,for example, not usually considered a mainstream issue. Labour was massively rejected there but by a nationalist party, so good old nationalist identity, which the BBC has always supported, can be seen as a main cause (Plaid Cymru are also, like the Scot Nats, pro-EU and vice versa since the EU has long tolerated little cultural minorities within its union: it is just other political unions it doesn't like).

The Reform Party, which is so far outside the pale that the BBC anad C4 can hardly bring itself to mention it, gained the major success in the local polls. For non-UK readers of this blog (who seem to be frequent), Reform is a nationalist party led by Nigel Farage. Both came to power out of the Brexit Party which had such success in the European Parliament elections and then in the Referendum. 

Was Brexit a factor in the local elections? You would not expect the mainstream media to comment these days, of course, even though it seems an obvious topic to pursue given the continuity of Farage, but neither can be given publicity. However, a piece in todays Times suggests it was. Curtice, a pollster, says:

Where Leave won more than 60% of the vote in 2016, Reform won 40% on average. Where less than 40% backed Brexit, Reform's tally was just 10%. Many of the voters who backed Boris Johnson to "get Brexit done" in 2019 have now switched to NIgel Farage's party