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 

 

Aunty gets preachy after the Referendum

I took too long to find this. It sprang to prominence again after the case where Trump called out the BBC in a clear case of dubious editing of one of his speeches (although the BBC denied partisan intent).

I heard of individual items now and then on BBC bias but I finally tracked the whole thing. It is the excellent News Watch, a site that has been monitoring the BBC for years and applying various kinds of analyses of bias to its outputs.

Some measures of bias are pretty simple -- counting the number of time spent on reporting items, or time allocated to speakers defending particular positions (see below).

It also touches on classic themes, reminiscent of famous work in the past, like the Glasgow University Media Group (still going, and with a list of the classic stuff here) which analysed less obvious signs of preference --where spokespersons were interviewed, for example (in the studio when their opinions belonged to a cosy consensus or, literally, as outsiders in the street).

News Watch has had a number of tussles with the BBC over the years, trying to get them to take its work seriously. The BBC will not accept any 'quantitative' or 'academic' analysis of patterns, but focuses only on individual programmes and claims its staff depend on their indefinable professional judgement to decide matters like 'balance' (although the Government imposes simple constraints during elections or referenda, for example, on the number of minutes that can be devoted to spokespersons from each 'side').

News Watch says: 

Mr Hutt [ the Director of the BBC Complaints Unit], ... does not believe that academic techniques of content analysis of the type used by News-watch can be used to assess bias. It boils down to that, to him, that 9:4 imbalance was totally irrelevant because any attempt at ‘simple quantification’ of BBC content is not helpful. He argues that views about the EU/EEC are not generally ‘binary’ and that in any case, someone who might be classed as ‘pro-EU’ might actually have been making an impartial contribution.

The last one is quite a good point. But someone classed as pro-Brexit might also be capable of an impartial contribution too, of course --evidently not for the BBC. 

News Watch has pursued its complaints to Government regulating bodies and to the courts, without success. The BBC remains safe from NW's criticism, regulating itself, applying its own standards of 'due impartiality', an undefinable term, meaning, in effect, whatever BBC broadcasters define it as meaning. The BBC has advisers and regulators of course -- they are often BBC people too.

News Watch is struggling with current ideological campaigns running at the BBC, principally favouring the usual politics of climate change and gender diversity, but here, I am obliged to their earlier work on Brexit -- and embarrassed not to have summarised it before.There is a large dossier on Europe and Brexit.

Highlights include that in one radio programme in 2018:

18 of the 24 [speakers]  were pro-EU/anti-Brexit; only three were anti-EU/pro-Brexit; two contributors made points both for and against; and one was neutral.  The imbalance was startling. The 18 who made negative points on Brexit delivered 3,824 words (76 percent of words spoken by guests in this category), those speaking positively 352 words (seven per cent), and mixed/neutral speakers 838 words (17 per cent). The anti-Brexit to pro-Brexit word count ratio was thus almost 11 to one. The ratio of pro-EU to anti-EU speakers in this category was 6:1. 

A radio programme 2018 introduced a feature called a 'reality check',  a mechanism that [the BBC] say is ‘objective’checking the reality of Brexit:'. The BBC’s ‘reality check’ correspondent Chris Morris...[had earlier] ...presented a five-part series called Brexit: a Guide for the Perplexed. His lens was so distorted that 18 out his 24 main interviewees were anti-Brexit and only seven per cent of the words spoken were from the withdrawal perspective.

After a complaint was received about a radio programme in 2018 a standard BBC defence was offered: 

that the BBC was receiving complaints that its Brexit coverage was biased from both ‘sides’, those who supported Brexit and those who opposed it. Because of this, it was risibly suggested, complaints of editorial imbalance must be unfounded.... two BBC bigwigs – Gavin Allen, controller of daily news programmes, and Ric Bailey, chief political adviser – confirmed why, in their view, the BBC’s coverage was completely impartial and met Charter requirements.... Today presenter Nick Robinson – now seemingly firmly ensconced as the Corporation’s defender-in-chief – was wheeled out to defend the relentless tide of anti-Brexit negativity.

Citing another careful content analysis in 2018, Craig Byers of the website Is the BBC Biased?:

painstakingly tracked every mention on BBC programmes of the word ‘Brexit’ between Monday and Friday last week (April 16-20).

What he found was a deluge of Brexit negativity. Craig’s blog needs to be read in full to appreciate the sheer scale. It permeated every element of its news output and even percolated down to BBC1’s The One Show and EastEnders, which had a pointed reference to these ‘tough Brexit times’. In the BBC’s world, Brexit was a threat to EU immigrants (in the context of the Windrush developments), to farmers, to interest rates, to airlines, to personal privacy (via Cambridge Analytica), to house prices, to security in Northern Ireland, and more.

Perhaps the best single item is News-Watch's  summary of the BBC's output 'The Brexit Collection', its own collection of Brexit programmes (so presumably a collection that represents the BBC's unbiased policy), broadcast post-referendum, when there was all the turmoil of negotiation and threats to organise Parliamentary coups reported in this blog, and a big push for a second referendum  News-Watch.co says its analysis shows :

Brexit came under sustained negative attack... Analysis by News-watch shows that only 23% of contributors in the programmes as a whole spoke in favour of Brexit, against 58% in favour of Remain and 19% who gave a neutral or factual commentary...Nine programmes and six features, amounting to 5 hours 20 minutes of programming, were strongly anti-Brexit, contained unchallenged predictions that civil unrest and rioting were now on the horizon and cast the ‘out’ vote in negative terms, inferring that the result had been a consequence of racism and xenophobia
 

...Nine programmes and six features, amounting to 5 hours 20 minutes of programming, were strongly anti-Brexit, contained unchallenged predictions that civil unrest and rioting were now on the horizon and cast the ‘out’ vote in negative terms, inferring that the result had been a consequence of racism and xenophobia

A specific example was :

Brexit Street (occasional series PM [a BBC radio programme] , 20 July – 12 August, 2016). This was a totally flawed exercise in which an atypical street with atypical problems was depicted as representative of the Brexit vote.The series began on Radio 4’s PM programme in July, and its premise is that a regular stream of reports from this ‘ordinary street’ in Thornaby-on-Tees (between Middlesbrough and Stockton) will illuminate the underlying reasons for the referendum vote and its subsequent impact on residents and the locale. However, research by News-watch has identified it is not an ordinary street at all. House prices there are a third of the national average, and the local council has taken a very high number of asylum seekers, many of whom have been housed in ‘Brexit Street’ itself. The reporter, Emma Jane Kirby spoke of houses peppered with satellite dishes, low home ownership, high unemployment and daytime street drinkers. The focus of the early programmes has been on the problems of the asylum seekers and the apparent negative attitudes of locals towards them, including verbal and physical abuse and Swastika graffiti painted onto doors. The initial choice of interviewees has also included a high number of unemployed people who are very angry with the government that it has allowed Teesside to become rundown. To date, the interviewees have all been drawn from the DE social grades, and thus in a fundamental overall sense, the choice of material cannot at all representative of the national Brexit vote. Thus PM is being deeply misleading in its claims about the series. They have chosen a street where problems related to recent incomers are disproportionately high, and the intent seems to try show that the Brexit vote was based heavily on such tensions. Clearly, they may have been an element of voting choice, but not to this extent.

 

The analysis is focused on radio programmes which is a limitation, and there is a lack of methods to analyses specific images in TV programmes -- they need Glasgow Media Group for that. Even so, the 'serious' TV output from the BBC -- news and current affairs -- clearly falls within the scope of this analysis.