Why do people hold the opinions that they have? What leads two individuals, of similar intellect, to reach completely different conclusions on any given subject matter?
There are three possible answers – the first is they have examined the evidence and have reached their viewpoint based on it.
The second is lived experience – a person who has worked in the NHS, or run a small business, will have reached conclusions based on the day-to-day realities of their working lives.
It’s the third that we’ll focus on in this context – people who form a set of opinions because they want to be seen to be fitting in with a certain crowd.
This can take many forms. How many students waving Palestinian flags on the university campus and repeating the chant of the person with the loudspeaker could answer a basic quiz on the history of the region, even on comparatively recent events of, say, the last 50 years? Not many. Do they know the difference between the PLO and Hamas? Would they recognise a picture of the late Yasser Arafat? If they are so concerned about human rights, why don’t they speak out about the rights of, say, women in Afghanistan or the plight of Imran Khan in Pakistan? Or Jimmy Lai being incarcerated in a Hong Kong prison? Nah, they just want to be seen fitting in with the virtuous leftist crowd on campus. There’s not much more to it than that.
Hong Kong businessman and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai pictured in prison
The same mindset is by no means confined to the university campus, and not everybody outgrows it as they enter full adulthood. A sizeable number of people who supported the Remain side in the 2016 referendum were guilty of this. Yes, there were people who argued their case based on logic and relevant expertise. They are worthy of our respect. But there were a lot – and I mean a lot – who supported Remain because they wanted to fit in with a certain crowd. They wanted their peers to regard them as anti-racist, tolerant, cosmopolitan, internationalist, welcoming and well-educated.
Ask them to explain their reasoning, before and after the referendum, and the answers were often very vague. You might have got some waffle about trade and them wanting their child to live in the EU during their university gap year, but there was little in the way of substance to their arguments.
My reasons for supporting Brexit – parliamentary sovereignty, the supremacy of UK courts, the ability to set our own immigration policy, the ability to set our own foreign policy, and the ability to form trade deals with the wider world, in growing economies, where people actually live, didn’t interest them very much.
They were willing to overlook a lot as a result – the EU’s internal corruption, its lack of democracy, its overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Greece, its burdensome regulations that were holding back innovation, its cruel agricultural policy that was preventing Third World farmers from having access to EU markets and lots more besides.
All too often, they were quick to label pro-Brexiteers as thick, racist, bigoted, uneducated, insular, little Englanders and lots more besides. They often did so from their leafy suburban home, which to quite a large extent insulated them from the negative effects of EU membership. To them, being in the EU meant a supply of cheap waiters and cheap nannies. They knew or cared little about the plumber or tradesman who was being undercut, the impact of wage suppression from the oversupply of cheap labour, or what it’s like to be on a housing register where demand massively outstrips supply.
A Brexiteer, no matter how well-educated, logical, rational and polite would have been an uncomfortable if not unwelcome presence at the Saturday night dinner party.
At the Last Night of the Proms each year, the campaign group, Thank EU for the Music, hands out free EU flags outside the Royal Albert Hall for people to take in and wave during the performances. Neither the campaign group nor the people waving the flags are exactly being discouraged by the BBC.
Thank EU for the Music activists outside the Royal Albert Hall
I can think of a number of people in my own life who let their masks slip on the morning it became apparent that the Leave side had won the referendum. I’m talking about people who like to be very virtuous about their internationalist and tolerant credentials who quickly showed themselves to be ill-mannered bad losers when things don’t go their way.
There is a section of British society that has spent the last decade in a sort of middle class intellectual sulk. They never did accept the result of the referendum, but their major fault is that they haven’t updated their arguments to reflect how the EU itself has changed in the last ten years.
I include Labour and Lib Dem politicians in that statement. Andrew Burnham’s main weakness appears to be foreign policy, an area in which he has little experience or expertise. He has, to quite a large extent, delegated responsibility on foreign affairs to Edward Miliband and the Foreign Office.
Even so, Mr Burnham has said he wants to see the UK rejoin the EU in the long-term. This week’s Labour conference in Liverpool was massively different in demographic to how it would’ve looked decades ago. This was a conference hall consisting of the middle class lanyard-wearing public sector worker, the charity worker and the university student. They spent most of the conference engaging in student union-style politics, even though in many cases they are far too old for it. To put it another way, there wouldn’t have been many entrepreneurs, small business owners or military veterans among the delegates.
Prime Minister Andrew Burnham addressing the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool
But an important question to ask Mr Burnham, or anybody else who shares his mindset, is why, in 2026, do they want the UK to join the EU? Have they thought it through, or is this merely a case of them wanting to be seen as nice, tolerant and internationalist?
They talk as though joining the single market and customs union, as a prelude to rejoining the EU, would magically transform the UK’s growth prospects. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The EU’s three biggest economies, Germany, France and Italy, are stagnant, and while the UK’s growth figures of the last five years have been nothing to write home about, they have nevertheless been higher than those three countries in each of the last five years bar one. Yes, that’s right, the UK’s economy has consistently grown by a larger figure than the EU powerhouses, despite being outside the single market and customs union. In some years, it has grown by two to three times as much as the EU’s ‘big three’.
Throwing our lot in with the slowest-growing group of economies in the developed world would not be a smart move.
Now let’s look at the political climate of those three countries: in France, Emmanuel Macron’s polling figures are dire, and every poll, no matter what spin you put on it, shows that Marine le Pen of the populist-right National Rally is set to become the country’s president next year.
In Germany, the very ‘hard right’ AfD has won two state elections in the east of the country during the last month. It also has a comfortable lead in the national polls. If a general election was held now, the AfD would likely have as many seats as the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats combined. Let that sink in. Even so, it wouldn’t be able to form a government because no other party will work with them.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia is set to be re-elected next year. It was frequently referred to as “far-right” by the BBC and other sections of the mainstream media when it initially came to power, but that has faded away with time. Meloni’s government gets referred to as the “most right-wing” in Italian history, but she has brought a sustained period of stability to Italian politics, and she is a stateswoman on the world stage. Her blunt speaking is also a breath of fresh air.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni
Beyond that, almost half the European Parliament is made up of varying shades of Right. Just four of the EU’s 27 commissioners are on the left. When new EU judges are appointed, they will reflect the populist right, in much the same way the Supreme Court judges in the USA reflect President Trump’s world view.
Spain, the Netherlands and Romania are all set to move firmly to the right in elections held during 2027.
There are sound reasons not to like the AfD and National Rally. The left’s initial hysteria over Giorgia Meloni looks absurdly overstated now, but even so, none of these are Mr Burnham, Mr Miliband or indeed Ed Davey’s type of people.
There’s also a real lack of deep thought into what rejoining the EU would actually entail. The UK would be under enormous pressure to join the euro and the Schengen free travel area. The rebate on EU membership fees negotiated by Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s and lasted until we left the bloc would not exist this time around.
What’s especially odd is the enthusiasm by the Europhiles for the customs union. They don’t appear to know what it actually is. Let’s be absolutely clear about one thing – joining the customs union does not and will not mean the end of customs checks. It does, however, mean that all member countries charge the same import duties for non-members.
Being inside the EU customs union would mean scrapping every trade deal we’ve signed since we left: Australia, Japan, India, the Gulf states – they’d all have to go. This, at a time when the Pacific trade nexus, the CPTPP is expanding, and countries as far and wide as Indonesia, Taiwan, Costa Rica and Ecuador, are applying to join the UK in it. If the UK rejoined the EU, we would, by definition, have to leave CPTPP.
There would also be the smaller, but irritating changes. The contactless card limit would immediately drop from £100 to £50. Do remember that this Labour government rather likes the freedoms Brexit brings when it suits it to do so, such as imposing 20% VAT on private school fees as an act of socialist spite. But that would have to go if the UK rejoined. Mr Burnham removing the 5% VAT on energy bills would be illegal under EU law.
Europhiles either don’t understand what the customs union is, or they see it as a gateway to full EU membership. Either way, joining it would be hugely damaging.
The UK is currently third in the world when it comes to developing AI, significantly behind the USA and China, but streets ahead of the EU, which is pretty much a nonentity in AI due to its heavy regulation and restrictions.
In other areas, the UK has diverged from EU policy to suit its own national interest – gene editing, targeted agricultural support, lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses and freeports to name a few.
We have also been spared the sleaze and corruption of the EU, which is nothing new in itself, but has continued apace since the UK left.
For example, there was the 2022 banknotes scandal, where MEPs were arrested when Belgian police found half a million euros in their homes, apparently to be distributed as bribes to Arab governments. We heard little about it in our own news bulletins – we’d left the bloc, it wasn’t our concern, but such matters would be in the forefront if we were to even consider rejoining.
The EU isn’t the beacon of freedom, tolerance and democracy its supporters make it out to be, either at multinational or national level. In 2011, the EU imposed unelected, technocratic governments on Greece and Italy. In 2014, it overthrew an unlovely, but nevertheless democratically-elected government in Ukraine. It imposed a heavy fine on Italy when it was fighting the pandemic. In Romania last year, a candidate who looked as though he was going to win the presidential election was banned.
Going back to France, the establishment banned Marine Le Pen from public office and handed her a suspended prison sentence when she looked like a credible threat to Macron (a court eventually overturned the ban in July this year and, as already stated, she’ll very likely win next year).
Two years ago in Germany, a parliament was thrown out by the people and a new one elected, but in the period after the election before the new one could take over, the old one made vast borrowing commitments to fund the Ukraine war, effectively binding its successor.
Three years ago in Poland, a new government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, darling of the Remainers a decade ago, was to ban a TV station it didn’t like.
It’s entirely possible that Mr Burnham largely knows most of this and is merely throwing some red meat to his support base. People say he’s a shrewd political operator – I, personally don’t see it, and he comes across as naïve and poorly-briefed on foreign affairs, but time will tell. The most likely scenario is that he will become massively unpopular around January when high energy bills start landing on people’s doormats as a consequence of absurd ‘Net Zero’ policies combined with the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed (the wide-ranging, serious consequences of it staying shut for much longer aren’t being talked about nearly enough).
Mr Burnham must also, surely, be aware that any attempt to rejoin the EU would dominate the political climate and toxify debate for years to come, as it did in and after 2016, to the point where the policy agenda he set out during his speech this week would be unachievable.
The pressing matters – the need to get Britain’s eye-watering public debt levels under control, the desperate need for welfare reform (don’t hold your breath on that happening with this government), properly securing our borders (don’t hold your breath on that, either) and lots more would go on the backburner. The EU issue would be at the forefront, everything else would need to be sacrificed or given low priority.
The percentage of UK exports going to the EU had been in decline long before the Brexit referendum. In 2000, the figure was 53.2%. That figure had fallen to 48.1% by 2010. In 2016, the year of the referendum, it stood at 42.8%. By last year, it had dropped further to 41.3%.
EU share of UK exports of goods and services, 2000–2025
It’s time to look to the future. The UK has little to gain and a huge amount to lose from EU membership. The EU’s heavy-regulation, high-interventionist approach is not a winning strategy in the 21st century.
When you encounter the section of British society that has never truly accepted the result of the referendum a decade ago, calmly state the arguments outlined in this article. You may encounter an open, receptive mind, but prepare yourself for a response consisting of outdated arguments, and, if they’re worshippers of LBC radio presenter James O’Brien, you can also expect a condescending, sneering attitude along with cheap insults.
I’m sure most of you will agree with me that the sitcom Porridge is as funny now as it was when it first aired in the 1970s.
Opinions are split as to whether its successor, Going Straight, reaches the same heights. I, personally think it does.
For those who aren’t familiar with Going Straight, the pretext is that Fletcher, played by the wonderful Ronnie Barker, has completed his prison sentence, and he begins a new chapter of his life living with his daughter, Ingrid (Patricia Brake) and son Raymond (Nicholas Lyndhurst) at the family home in Muswell Hill (then a far more affordable place for a regular family to live than it is today).
The series focuses on Fletcher’s struggles to readjust to the outside world, the difficulties he has in finding work as an ex-con, the temptation to fall back into the world of crime, and of a Britain that has changed considerably during the three years, eight months and four days he was in prison. Fletcher walked free from prison into a Britain of strikes and high inflation.
Much is made of Ingrid’s relationship with Fletcher’s former cellmate Lennie Godber (Richard Beckinsale), of which Fletcher initially has reservations, but he eventually comes to accept it.
OUR POLITICAL CLASS FEARS FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY
What does any of this have to do with the tenth anniversary of Brexit? Well, there is a scene in the first episode of Going Straight where a big comparison can be made.
Fletcher says his goodbyes to his fellow prisoners, and before leaving, he goes to the prison storage area where the personal belongings he arrived with are returned to him.
Prior to walking through the prison doors into freedom, the guard tells him that it’s not uncommon for freed prisoners to bang on the door to be allowed back in, because they cannot cope with freedom.
Fletcher assures the guard that it won’t happen to him, and that he was keen to get out and move on with his life. The prison doors open, and Fletcher steps outside to take in the fresh air. The guard says that he is supposed to see him walk off the premises because some prisoners want to be allowed back in, but Fletcher says that he’d really like to hear the door slam shut behind him before he leaves.
The guard reluctantly agrees and does as Fletcher requests. Fletcher tries to walk away, but he soon realises his coat is jammed in the gaps between the doors, and he can’t pull it out. So yes, he desperately bangs on the door for it to be reopened, but not for the reason the guard thought.
Norman Stanley Fletcher leaves Slade Prison, but not before he gets his coat stuck in the door
There is a direct comparison to be made between that scene in Going Straight and the British political establishment’s attitude to Brexit. Like the freed prisoner that cannot cope with the freedoms and flexibilities of the outside world, the British political classes cannot cope with the combination of freedom and responsibility that being outside the EU brings.
They are, at best, desperate to avoid that responsibility, and at worst, eager to nudge Britain back into the EU. The responsibility is too much for our modern-day political class.
MAKE NO MISTAKE – THE EU IS IN DECLINE
Let’s dispel a few myths. The EU of 2026 is not some land of milk and honey. Yes, when the UK joined what was then the EEC (Common Market) in 1973, Western Europe was a success story, and the UK was a basket case. That is certainly not the situation as it stands today.
The main EU economies are stagnant, and in some cases, including Germany and Italy, are growing even more slowly than the UK. The idea that by throwing our lot in with them we will become an economic powerhouse is ludicrous.
This is 2026. We live in a world where the USA innovates, China imitates…and the EU regulates.
To put the sheer scale of the EU’s decline into perspective, in the year 2000, around half of the 25 biggest companies in the world had EU headquarters. Today, there are only two (LVMH and Novo Nordisk).
There is no EU-based equivalent of Apple, Meta, Microsoft or Amazon. 20 years ago, the EU accounted for 30% of global GDP. Today, that figure stands at less than 20%.
Going beyond that, according to the list published by The Times, the UK has five universities in the world’s Top 30, and many more in the Top 100. Only the USA has more. The EU only has ONE in the Top 30, and even that’s only just – Munich occupies 30th place.
SIR KEIR IS NO FRIEND OF BREXIT, BUT HE’S NOT AFRAID TO USE ITS FREEDOMS WHEN IT SUITS HIM
Where does the soon-to-be ex-Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, fit into all this? Well, he is instinctively pro-EU – with his downright weird background in Pabloism, he is likely to be sympathetic to the Eurocommunist ideas and mindset of the EU. This is a man who voted to block Brexit 48 times in the House of Commons before he became Prime Minister.
During his time as Shadow Brexit Secretary, Sir Keir repeatedly voted against allowing a “No Deal” Brexit. I, too, was opposed to a “No Deal” Brexit, but for the reasons the late and much-missed Christopher Booker outlined in his Sunday Telegraph columns, namely that so much of our trading would have no legal basis without a deal. My favoured approach was a Norway-style arrangement – outside the EU, inside the Single Market and outside the Customs Union. I have written plenty about this elsewhere.
Sir Keir wasn’t motivated by such concerns. He was keen to block Brexit by any means available to him. By trying to prevent a “No Deal” Brexit, he effectively wanted to send Boris Johnson’s negotiators in, unable to walk away, and thereby incentivising the EU to offer us the worst deal possible. As anyone who has ever done a successful business deal on any level knows, the option to walk away in the event of a bad deal being offered is vital.
But hold on a moment. The current Labour government has been willing to use the freedoms and flexibilities Brexit offers when it suits itself to do so. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government rightly removed VAT on sanitary products for women in January 2021. That wouldn’t have been possible under EU law.
Less desirably, the current Labour government put 20% VAT on private school fees in an act of socialist spite. That, too, wouldn’t have been possible if the UK was still inside the EU. Current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch described England’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson as a ‘spiteful class warrior’ at PMQs last week. I was using the term ‘spiteful’ to describe the VAT on private school fees long before that.
The reality is that the super-rich won’t be much affected by the move. Those affected by the tax are middle class parents who sacrifice holidays and the latest gadgets to save their children from substandard comprehensive schools. Most of the people who are vociferously disapproving of Mrs Badenoch’s language are the same ones who happily call Reform supporters “racist” and the Tories “scum”.
Kemi Badenoch at PMQs on 24 June 2026
Let’s not forget that in recent years, the current Justice Secretary, David Lammy, described Brexiteer Tory MPs as “worse than Nazis” and said of Nigel Farage, “I will leave it for the public to come to their own judgments about someone who once flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger.”
When Mr Lammy’s accusation was proved to be baseless, he did not apologise.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood once accused Nigel Farage of being ‘worse than racist’ while she was at a fringe event at Labour Conference.
The foul-mouthed Angela Rayner, who is likely to return to the cabinet when the unremarkable Andrew Burnham becomes Prime Minister a few weeks from now, said of the Conservatives during a 2021 speech: “We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile … banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian … piece of scum,” before adding that she had “held back a little”.
Such language from the left is nothing new. In 2010, the then-Labour Whip David Wright called Tories ‘scum suckling pigs’ on social media.
On 4 July 1948, the day before the NHS was launched, the overrated Aneurin Bevan gave a speech in Manchester where he said of the Conservatives: “So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.”
Let’s not have any lectures about Mrs Badenoch’s choice of words from the left.
But back to Sir Keir Starmer’s true attitudes towards Brexit, one of his few redeeming qualities is his enthusiasm for making Britain an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powerhouse in the years ahead.
In March 2024, the EU Parliament adopted the EU AI Act. It seeks to ensure that AI systems will: “respect human dignity and autonomy; operate with a clear, predictable legal framework; and support democratic values.”
All those words sound very nice, but in reality, a bureaucratic approach to regulation has seen the EU fall way, way behind the USA and China, condemning it to being AI backwater.
By comparison, the UK is an AI powerhouse, behind only the USA and China. In March 2026, the outgoing Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, argued for increasing alignment with EU rules and greater development of AI in Britain. Nobody seemed to tell her she can have one or the other – but not both.
THE EU IS NEITHER KIND NOR BENEVOLANT
One of the most unpleasant aspects of the last ten years has been the way a certain section of British society has never accepted the result of the referendum.
It became noticeable at breakfast time on the morning after the result became known. The worst offenders, by far, belonged to the cosmopolitan classes who are normally quick to portray themselves as tolerant, sophisticated and cosmopolitan in outlook.
They immediately claimed foul play from the Leave campaign, while completely ignoring (or should that be “conveniently forgetting”?) the Remain campaign’s “Project Fear”?
For those of you who need reminding of how it went, we had the then-President of the USA, Barack Obama, telling the UK we would have to go to the “back of the queue” if we wanted a trade deal with the country he led (so much for a “special relationship”.
President Barack Obama delivers his “back of the queue” warning
Beyond that, the then-Chancellor, George Osborne, said there would need to be an “Emergency Budget” if the country voted to Leave the EU (it didn’t happen).
The then-President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, who is now Prime Minister of Poland, said that Brexit would bring the end of Western civilisation.
The then-Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, who is now Prime Minister of Canada, said that Brexit would lead to a spike in inflation. That did not happen. The increase in inflation happened some years after the Brexit vote due to a gross overreaction by governments in Britain and abroad to the Covid virus.
The section of society that has never truly accepted the result of the referendum congregates around a select group of sneering, deeply unpleasant individuals who actively undermine this country and want Brexit to fail. One example is LBC radio’s mid-morning presenter, James O’Brien, a playground bully who isn’t fit to lick the boots of others who’ve presented in the same timeslot over the years, from Brian Hayes to Richard Littlejohn.
A typical tweet from LBC radio presenter James O’Brien
Others who the “Remoaners” congregate around include Gary Lineker, Andrew Adonis, Jolyon Maugham, and, worst of all, Alastair Campbell.
Yes, New Labour’s thug-in-chief, he of the 2003 “dodgy dossier” has received a full rehabilitation from the chattering classes because of his unwillingness to accept Brexit. They don’t care about how his behaviour led to the deaths of British service personnel and thousands of innocent Iraqis. They don’t care about his yobbish, menacing behaviour towards Alex Phillips on Newsnight. No, he is now their poster boy. As far as they’re concerned, all is forgiven.
What else do these types like about the EU? Maybe it’s the EU-backed revolution in Ukraine in 2014 that saw an unlovely, but lawfully elected, non-aligned government led by President Viktor Yanukovych overthrown by an unconstitutional pro-NATO regime. A substantial number of those involved could fairly be described as Nazi-sympathising thugs.
Or maybe they like the EU’s “Troika” spending restrictions in Greece in 2015, that led to much unnecessary economic misery and political instability in the country.
Maybe it’s post-2000 Italy that they admire, where the economy barely grew in two decades because membership of the euro meant that Italian exports were priced too highly. In May 2018, the Italian President, Sergio Mattarella, moved way beyond the ceremonial role normally associated with his position when he effectively dismissed a coalition government consisting of the Lega Nord and Five Star movement. Mattarella blocked the new government’s choice of Finance Minister (Paolo Savona) because he was too critical of the European Union and the euro, citing a supposed piece of the constitution which prevents Italy leaving the euro.
Perhaps they like the fact that the European Union’s top court fined Italy €8.5 million in 2020 for its failure to recoup illegal state aid that had been provided to the hotel and tourism sector in Sardinia. They did so at a time when the Italian government was fighting the pandemic.
Maybe it’s Romania they admire, where a candidate who looked as though he was going to win the presidential election (Calin Georgescu) was banned from standing last year?
Maybe it’s France they like, where a woman who looked as though she was a challenger to President Macron (Marine Le Pen) was banned from public office and given a suspended prison sentence?
Or maybe it’s Germany they admire, where in late 2024, a parliament was thrown out by the people and a new one elected, but in the period after the election before the new one could take over, the old one made vast borrowing commitments to fund the Ukraine war, effectively binding its successor?
The most likely scenario is that the Remoaners are unconcerned with all of these things. They are mere inconveniences to be ignored. To them, the EU means the ability to treat the continent as a playground that is there for their convenience – holidays, food, wine, monuments and art galleries that they can inspect for their approval.
They are largely insulated from the negative impacts of uncontrolled mass immigration, including wage suppression due to an oversupply of cheap labour, pressures on the housing market and problems with social cohesion. To them, free movement means cheap nannies and cheap waiters for them to enjoy.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Let’s get one thing out of the way – Andrew Burnham is not going to solve the nation’s ills. He and Sir Keir Starmer don’t disagree on anything important.
Soon-to-be Prime Minister, Andrew Burnham
The same people who were getting excited by Sir Keir two years ago are now telling us that everything will be alright once we swap him for Mr Burnham.
Does any serious, thoughtful person really believe this guff? Is Mr Burnham the man who will get to grips with Britain’s spiralling welfare bill? The government spends more on welfare (not including pensions) than it receives in income tax revenues. That means everything else, from the NHS to education to defence, has to be paid for by other means.
The government also spends more on debt interest payments than it does on defence. Notice I said debt INTEREST payments, not “debt repayments”.
A few weeks ago, the Defence Secretary, John Healey, a mild-mannered and intelligent man, resigned from his post the day before a major announcement was due on defence policy because he believed Sir Keir wasn’t giving him the money he needed to do what was required to keep the country safe. This is serious stuff. This, from a government that gave huge pay rises to already well-paid train drivers, among other things.
Mr Burnham will not put an end to “Net Zero” quackery, nor will he properly get to grips with uncontrolled mass immigration. You can be sure public sector pay demands will become a big issue in the months ahead, and he’s unlikely to have the courage to tell them “no”.
Mr Burnham has expressed a desire for Britain to rejoin the EU in the long term, so he is hardly likely to see Brexit as an opportunity to be seized. Essentially, he is a puppet of the globalist agenda. He has no meaningful professional experience outside politics, having worked in political circles for his entire adult life. The calibre of person around him will be little better. There is hardly a wealth of talent on the Labour benches, and the civil service has been damaged by the reforms implemented during the Blair era.
So, what about the alternatives? Kemi Badenoch has improved massively as a House of Commons performer, and she makes a lot of the “right noises” nowadays. But the reality is that she was part of the Conservative government machinery between 2010-2024 that failed to put a stop to uncontrolled mass immigration, endorsed the ECHR and pretty much behaved like a continuation of the New Labour project for a lot of the time.
As a colleague, Mrs Badenoch long had a reputation for being rude, arrogant, entitled and highly disorganised. Yes, she has grown into the job, and may well have matured as a person in recent years, but while she’s talking a lot of sense these days, it contrasts massively with the policies she endorsed and help implement while in government.
Now here comes the bit a lot of people won’t like me saying…
NIGEL FARAGE AND REFORM HAVE PROBABLY PEAKED
Those of us who have had the misfortune to know Nigel Farage personally understand what his weaknesses are. I speak from experience on this. As a young adult, I was an active member of UKIP between the spring of 2003 and late 2006.
Mr Farage is a superb, charismatic public speaker and debater. But that is where his talents begin and end.
In the summer of 2004, UKIP did very well in the elections to the European Parliament, and in the months that followed, there was a serious opportunity to “scale up” the party into a credible opposition that could ultimately replace the Conservative Party.
But UKIP blew it, and by the end of 2006, it was too late. The problem was that UKIP could never decide whether it wanted to be a political party or a pressure group, and as a result, it became neither.
By taking the “pressure group” approach, they could have cast a wide net in appealing to Eurosceptics from across the political spectrum. Being opposed to Britain’s membership of the EU has never been a “left or right” issue.
The greatest ever speech made against the EEC/EC/EU project in this country was made by the then-Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell in 1962. At the 1975 referendum, most of the best speeches against continued EEC membership were made by Labour figures – Tony Benn, Peter Shore, Michael Foot and Barbara Castle. The tradition continued into the 2016 referendum with the excellent work done by Gisela Stuart, Graham Stringer, Kate Hoey and George Galloway.
Leftists have often been opposed to the EEC/EC/EU project for its lack of democracy and accountability, and of the damage its policies and regulations do to the British working class.
Around the time of the 2004 European elections, UKIP hired Dick Morris, a high-profile former political adviser to the White House during the Bill Clinton era, to professionalise its operations. Mr Morris said that the party should use the analogy of spokes in a wheel to attract a broad church. Essentially, the argument was that each spoke represented a problem in Britain, whether it’s the Common Agricultural Policy, or free movement of people or whatever, and it led to the centre of the wheel, which represented the EU.
Dick Morris
In short, the argument he wanted UKIP to forward was that for however long we’re ruled by the EU, it doesn’t matter which party forms the government in Westminster, because whatever you want, you cannot have. For the EU isn’t a single issue, all other issues flow from it.
The party didn’t really listen to Mr Morris, and his involvement ended in around 2005.
The second approach was to develop the party with a full set of policies on everything from health to education to the environment. By doing so, you inevitably alienate some Eurosceptics. Go for left-wing policies, and you alienate those on the right, adopt right-wing policies, and you alienate those on the left.
UKIP took neither approach, and the party’s website, and election leaflet literature, consisted of a badly worded mishmash of simplistic policies. The late and much-missed radio phone-in host Mike Dickin once described the UKIP website on air as though it was “written by a sixth-form college student on speed”. That was about right.
Although Mr Farage did not become UKIP leader until September 2006, his influence during the previous period was considerable, even though the party was led by former Conservative MP Roger Knapman, who I rather liked as a person, but he lacked the skillset and charisma to be an effective leader. He and Mr Farage couldn’t stand each other.
When it became clear Mr Farage would soon become leader, he set about starting rumours and discrediting his rivals. He also refused to delegate and professionalise the operation. By the winter of 2006, it was too late, and the party was not fit to make a serious impact beyond European parliamentary elections. They barely featured as a serious force at the 2010 general election, even though the Conservatives ran a bad campaign and failed to gain an overall majority when it was there for the taking.
The basic story of UKIP was that every few years, a new batch of people would either become UKIP MEPs or rise to near the top of the party in other ways. They would then fall out with Mr Farage, there would be a split, and the party would go backwards. Malicious rumour-spreading by Mr Farage’s cabal, combined with his philandering and drinking and other lifestyle habits would put people right off. The academic and blogger, Dr Richard North, is a good example of someone who quit working for Mr Farage because he was sick of putting him into the back of taxis when drunk in the early hours of the morning.
The point is this – history is now repeating itself with Reform UK. As with UKIP 20 years earlier, no other poppy is allowed to grow too tall with Mr Farage. He regards people of ability like Rupert Lowe, Ben Habib and others as a threat to his power. Malicious rumours and false information about them soon follows.
As a result, Reform UK hasn’t professionalised. By this stage, they should have a set of credible, fully costed policies and a “front bench in waiting” ready to sort out the country’s many ills.
Instead, Reform UK is not fulfilling even its basic duties in the local councils it controls. The Reform-controlled Warwickshire County Council is led by 19-year-old George Finch. I don’t claim to know him – he may well be a very nice and very capable young man, but at 19, he will not have the life experience, wisdom or nous to be an effective leader.
Beyond that, Reform councils have given us plenty of splits, stories of oddballs and cranks. Importantly, they haven’t grasped that even at local council level, the modern-day civil service will be dominated by the lanyard-wearing woke classes who will do their utmost to try and sabotage Reform’s policies. Their councillors were unprepared for that challenge and did not have a strategy in place to deal with it.
People are noticing that Reform are making a mess of things. At a national level, Reform led the polls throughout 2025, and in the latter part of the year, there were occasions when it was as high as 35%, taking it into overall majority territory.
But here we are, in mid-2026, and it more often hovers around the 25-28% range, still ahead of other parties, but some way short of an overall majority. A recent poll put Reform on 24%, only five points ahead of Labour.
Reform made huge gains in May’s local elections, but its performance compared to last year was weaker – the party got just under 35% of the vote compared to the figure of 41% in the 2025 local elections.
Frankly, at two key by-elections this year, in Gorton and Makerfield, Reform UK underperformed. They chose the wrong candidate on both occasions. In the period since the latter by-election that paved the way for Mr Burnham’s return to Westminster, Mr Farage gave a series of excruciating interviews where he provided shifty and contradictory answers as to an undeclared £5 million ‘gift’ from a British cryptocurrency billionaire based in Thailand. He didn’t even properly explain what the money was for.
At 62, Mr Farage’s risky lifestyle may be taking its toll. He is thinner than he was even a few months ago and has aged considerably. It may yet be a rough patch that he gets through and bounces back from, but his character remains unchanged from the boozy control freak I knew two decades ago.
WHERE ELSE CAN WE GO?
Look, I like the Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe. He has a lengthy track record as a successful businessman, he donates his monthly MP’s salary to local charities and worthy causes in his Great Yarmouth constituency, he is a straight talker, he isn’t afraid to make enemies and his important work in exposing the scale of Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs is to be commended (let’s not call them “Asian” as though they’re from Thailand, Malaysia or Japan – they are Pakistani Muslims and we should say as much). The report he published makes for grim and sobering reading. The sheer scale of the abuse was extraordinary.
Rupert Lowe MP
Mr Lowe was very much a victim of no poppy being allowed to grow too tall under Mr Farage. The usual false rumours and malicious information followed, and that led to his departure from Reform UK. His criticisms of the party in the period since have been fair and accurate.
The reason I have not actively endorsed Restore Britain is because I am concerned that his party has left itself open to attracting Tommy Robinson’s hangers on. It is vulnerable to entryism and “scaling up” the party will be hard. While Mr Lowe says many, many things I agree with on social media, the party is “light on policy” at the moment. This may change. I wish him well.
The party that most impresses me at the current time is the SDP. You may well be surprised that it still exists. The long-and-short of it is that the original SDP merged with the Liberal Party in 1988 to form the Liberal Democrats, but the SDP’s former leader, Dr David Owen, two other MPs and a minority of party activists formed a breakaway group also called the Social Democratic Party immediately afterwards. That continuing party dissolved itself in the aftermath of a by-election in Bootle, in which the party’s candidate received fewer votes than Screaming Lord Sutch’s Official Monster Raving Loony Party. However, some SDP activists met and voted to continue the party in defiance of its National Executive, leading to the creation in 1990 of the SDP under the leadership of the candidate who lost that by-election. The 1990 incarnation of the party has existed ever since.
Today, the party’s website contains a detailed manifesto and set of policies that I can endorse around 95% of. The disagreements I have are on matters of detail. Their leader, William Clouston, is a man of considerable intellect.
Ideologically, the party is wholly committed to Brexit. It blends social democratic economic policies with cultural conservatism, advocating a mixed-based social market economy.
The SDP supports a broad welfare state, public ownership of railways and utilities, lower economic inequality, and raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP. The party supports the reintroduction of grammar schools, a more selective education system, abolition of the BBC licence fee, stronger criminal sentencing, and the establishment of a National Care Service to organise and fund social care. It advocates for civic nationalism, an end to uncontrolled mass immigration, withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights, the Council of Europe, and the 1951 United Nations refugee convention.
All of this gets a very big “well done” from me. What’s the problem? Well, the big question is about “scaling up” the party without succumbing to splits and entryism. How do you successfully turn a train set into a train line? It is no easy task.
Beyond that, the possible replacements for the current two “main” parties aren’t very attractive. The Green Party under Zack Polanski’s entire raison d’être is based on a problem that doesn’t exist, namely a belief that climate change is caused by mankind, is doing immense damage to “the planet” and we need to completely transform the way we live, at enormous expense to ourselves, to prevent it. Essentially, they’re just another set of puppets working for the globalist agenda. Beyond that, they’re big on identity politics, giving puberty blockers to children, legalising hard drugs, running down our armed forces and other cranky stuff, like wanting to abolish private landlords. Oh, and they’re pro-EU. Sensible people should give them a wide berth.
The sarcastically-named Liberal Democrats are essentially dominated by Labour party refugees from the original SDP breakaway in the 1980s and their successors. It wasn’t immediately obvious during the 1990s under the leadership of the former Liberal, Paddy Ashdown, but nowadays it’s more clearly the case. Traditional liberalism in the mould of Jo Grimmond has been lost to mainstream British politics (though a small-scale Eurosceptic Liberal Party still exists to this day). And let’s not forget that however much Sir Edward Davey likes to make a clown of himself by dancing and singing silly songs, he was the Postal Affairs Minister between 2010-2012 when the Horizon IT Post Office scandal was unravelling. His initial refusal to meet, and then believe the principled, tenacious campaigner Sir Alan Bates suggests Sir Edward has very poor judgement. And yes, the Lib Dems are also pro-EU globalists and pushers of the man-made climate change agenda.
THE EU IS INCREASINGLY A LAND OF EXTREMISM AND CHAOS
I’ve probably already said enough about how the EU isn’t a land of paradise, but from a political perspective, the problems of their old, long-established parties collapsing is just as prevalent, and in some cases even more severe than in Britain.
In France, the political “middle ground” is all but disappearing, with public support largely split between what gets called the “far right” National Rally and the left-wing New Popular Front. I am instinctively wary of the term “far right” these days, as it is often used to describe anyone who believes in controlled borders and that a woman cannot have a penis. The current Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, was described by the achingly woke BBC as “far right” prior to her election in 2022. I see little evidence that she is anything other than a mainstream right-leaning leader.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is hardly an “extremist”
In Germany, the not-very-nice AfD, also called “far right”, frequently tops the polls, and moves are well underway by the German establishment to try and ban it.
Many other EU countries are experiencing similar seismic shifts away from the traditional “centre ground”.
Much of the enormous shift in political opinion throughout Europe can be attributed to the huge waves of migration from northern Africa that have utterly transformed the demographics of many towns and cities since 2010.
The destabilisation was caused by Barack Obama and David Cameron backing the “Arab Spring”, which led to mass chaos that continues to this day. Their support had little to do with concerns over human rights in the countries involved, and everything to do with Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi’s plans to create an African single currency, which was opposed by the Saudis and regarded as a threat to the dominance of the US dollar.
With the news cameras having long since moved on, Libya is effectively three separate countries. The sea crossings into Europe from the coast of Libya and elsewhere continue apace, and European leaders do not know how to stop it. We know little of those coming – their intentions, their criminal convictions, and their attitudes towards everything from the rights of women to road safety. It’s no wonder people are looking beyond the political mainstream for solutions.
CONCLUSION
The will of the British people was clearly expressed in the 2016 referendum. They wanted to leave the European Union, by a clear, though not massive majority.
The problem was that by Brexiting when we did, in the way we did, we “put the cart before the horse”.
To put it another way, we took a dangerous shortcut. The entire process and aftermath would have been far smoother and more successful if we had first of all elected a government that was committed to leaving the European Union, believed in Brexit, delivered Brexit and then took advantage of the opportunities it brought.
Instead, we’ve endured years of heel-dragging, cynical and devious attempts by our political class and the civil service to stop Brexit from happening.
At best, our political classes have regarded Brexit as a damage limitation exercise, rather than as an opportunity to be seized.
Sir Keir Starmer, while keen on the freedoms Brexit brings in the few key areas where it suits him, has nevertheless led a government that has tried to undo Brexit one policy at a time, keen as he is to appease his globalist masters.
Make no mistake, the freedoms of Brexit present an opportunity to reshape the country’s economy for the better, but we need to deregulate.
Much was made by the Remain campaign prior to the 2016 referendum of how Brexit would lead to Britain becoming “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Why would that be a problem? Singapore is an innovative, highly educated, “get up and go”, self-reliant economy fit for the 21st century. It is a country to be learned from, not to be sneered at.
Singapore, a country to learn from
There’s something really important about modern-day economic and employment policy that doesn’t get talked about enough: big, multinational corporations are very often IN FAVOUR of enhanced workers’ rights, a “National Living Wage” that is far higher in real terms than it was 20 years ago, “day one” employment rights and so on.
The big corporations can absorb the costs, but they know full-well that their smaller rivals cannot.
We need a government that is a friend to the entrepreneur and the small businessman, and that means deregulating and taking advantage of the freedoms Brexit brings.
To borrow an example from Singapore, the government could target an area of high unemployment and draw a square on a map. Anyone who starts a business that employs more than, say, 50 people in that area would pay no VAT or business rates for five years.
That’s the sort of thing Singapore did, and it’s something we in Britain should copy. It’s a win-win situation. Individuals are in jobs and paying taxes rather than sitting at home claiming benefits, would-be entrepreneurs are motivated to launch new businesses, and companies, whether established or newcomers, are encouraged to invest in the communities, employ and “skill up” the workforce, and with a pro-business environment, they are likely to stay well beyond the five years once the tax incentives are in place.
Such incentives would be illegal under EU law, but it’s perfectly possible for Britain to implement now we are outside the bloc.
The changes needed require a government with vision and ambition. Where is such a government going to come from?
BREXIT was only the beginning of a far wider political realignment across the United Kingdom. Things are now in an astonishing state of flux. The old assumptions of ‘safe seats’ no longer applies – that much is certain. What we do not yet know is where we are heading.
Five years have now passed since the Brexit referendum. A good, though imperfect deal, negotiated by Boris Johnson’s team, was implemented at the start of 2021. The absurd prophecies in the Remain campaign’s ‘Project Fear’ have not come to pass.
A trade deal with Australia has been agreed, which shows promise of being a catalyst to wider opportunities with the region. Large numbers of lives have been saved across the United Kingdom as a result of the speedy Covid vaccine programme, made possible because the country was not part of the EU’s botched central procurement. There’s already a lot to be thankful for as a result of Brexit.
The general election of 2019 saw red wall seats, namely constituencies that Labour had won with ease for generations, fall to the Conservatives. The recent by-election in Hartlepool demonstrated that this process is continuing.
To put events into perspective, in the era before Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power in 1979, general elections were fought along clear class-based politics. The Conservatives portrayed themselves as the party that loved the country. Labour portrayed themselves as the party that loved the poor.
A solid 40% block of working class voters could be relied upon to routinely vote Labour. A solid 40% block of middle class voters could be relied upon to vote Conservative. Elections were won and lost depending on how floating voters in the remaining 20% behaved in key constituencies.
This assumption began to break down during the Thatcher years. Heavy industry and the influence of trade unions in the political process declined massively within two electoral cycles. Supermarkets and retail parks stood where there were once coal mines. Working class people were given the opportunity to become home owners by purchasing their council houses on a massive discount.
Parsonage Retail Park in Leigh stands on the site of the former Parsonage Colliery
The concept of class became less important. Was a person less ‘working class’ because they swapped their miner’s helmet for a hairnet as they packed airline meals in a factory where the coal pit once stood? Is the school leaver who now goes to work in a call centre selling car insurance rather than a steel works less ‘working class’ as a result? Erm, you decide.
It took the Labour Party until 1989 to begin to fully acknowledge the extent to which society had changed in the previous decade. A process began with the controversial Policy Review of that year, and a process of modernisation continued into the 1990s. Labour fell short of gaining the electorate’s confidence in the general election of 1992, and Labour still struggled to adapt to the changes in the way people lived and worked. Under the leadership of John Smith, the old ‘Clause IV’ in Labour’s constitution, committing the party to common ownership of industry, was scrapped. Following Smith’s untimely death in 1994, the start of Tony Blair’s leadership saw the party rebranded ‘New Labour’, which Blair himself said was a ‘new political party’.
Labour leader Neil Kinnock in 1989
The Blair manifesto of 1997 saw Labour support enterprise, self-reliance, anti-statism, the liberalisation of the market economy, the privatisation of nationalised industries, utilities and public sector companies, the divestment of public housing, the introduction of market liberalism to both the public and non-market public sector, as well as the Thatcherite constraints on trade unions and local government.
New Labour had effectively parked its tanks on the Conservative Party’s lawn. New Labour managed to maintain the support of what remained of the working class electorate, but it also gained the backing of the new, swollen middle class, which led to it winning a 179 seat majority in 1997, against a Conservative government that appeared tired, weak and riddled by sleaze by that stage.
The reality of the New Labour years was hugely disappointing. A short list of New Labour’s failings, includes, but is not confined to:
Uncontrolled mass immigration, particularly in its early years, which transformed the demographics of many towns and cities. Civil servant Andrew Neather admitted years later that this was a deliberate ploy to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
Chancellor Gordon Brown selling off huge swathes of gold reserves when gold was at the bottom of its cycle.
Gordon Brown raiding the private pensions of people who had wisely planned properly for their retirement.
Gordon Brown’s disastrous private finance initiatives, which saw old Victorian hospitals replaced by gleaming new buildings, which nevertheless saddled the NHS with huge debt burdens for many decades afterwards.
Gordon Brown introducing 157 new taxes, many of them sneaky and found ‘in the small print’ of his Budgets.
Gordon Brown borrowing more money than all previous Chancellors in British history combined.
The decommissioning of Royal Yacht Britannia, upon which events held helped raised more than £3 billion for the Treasury between 1991 and 1995 alone.
Constitutional vandalism with an ill-thought-out and half-baked devolution project which has led to duplication, confusion and tension between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom.
The politicisation of the police and the education system with the doctrines of ‘diversity’ and ‘political correctness’.
Signing up to the EU Treaties of Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon, as well as the Social Chapter, all of which undermined the United Kingdom’s sovereignty and national independence.
Ill-conceived military action in Serbia and Kosovo.
Ill-conceived military action in Afghanistan.
An illegal war in Iraq based on a lie told by Mr Blair at the despatch box of the House of Commons about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which led to the deaths of British military personnel and countless innocent Iraqis.
Tuition fees, and the target of getting 50% of young people into universities. This achieved the cynical objectives of making youth unemployment appear far lower than it actually was, as well as saddling young people with debts that would take decades to pay off. Many were also studying for degrees that would be of little worth in terms of forming a sustainable career.
There’s lots more, but the sheer damage done to the country during the Blair years is only just beginning to be understood.
It took the Conservative Party a long time to regain the support of those who had supported it in 1992, as well as the millions of potential voters who had joined the electoral register in the intervening years. David Cameron’s dubious ‘modernisation’ of the Conservative Party from 2005 saw it accept large swathes of the New Labour project, just at the time when Blairism was falling out of fashion.
The recession of 2008 should’ve handed the 2010 general election to the Conservatives on a plate. Labour went into it having already raided the national piggy bank and saddled the public finances with huge debt during the ‘boom’ years (which themselves were more down to luck than Gordon Brown’s judgement as Chancellor), but when they finally lost power, Liam Byrne, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, left a note on the desk for his successor Philip Hammond, which said ‘I’m afraid there is no money.’
Despite Labour’s recklessness with the public finances, the Conservatives were unable to gain an overall majority and a coalition with the Liberal Democrats was needed to form a government. Cameron modelled himself on Blair, who he and George Osborne referred to as ‘The Master’ during their time in Downing St. Indeed, such was his admiration for Blair that when Blair left the despatch box as Prime Minister for last time in 2007, Cameron led the Conservative benches in a standing ovation. This is hardly an appropriate way to bid farewell to a war criminal who had wrecked the economy and committed gross acts of constitutional vandalism.
So what of the referendum of 2016? It is a myth that the Leave vote was based largely in former industrial areas in the north.
In the aftermath of the referendum, Lord Ashcroft Polling found that in terms of demographics, 59% of all Leave voters came from the:
A ((Upper middle class) Higher managerial, administrative or professional).
B ((Middle class) Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional), and
C1 ((Lower middle class) supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional) demographics. In other words, 59% of all Leave voters were middle class, and came from ‘white collar’ backgrounds.
Of those, 34% were A and B. Meanwhile, just 17% were from C2 (white van man, to use a cliché/caricature).
Therefore, we now know that the vote to leave the EU was largely due to the ‘Middle England’ vote.
It’s true that Ashcroft also found that professionals were the only social class group to vote majority Remain, 57% across the UK, but they were such a large group of voters, and turnout among them was so high, that they also constituted the largest group of Leave voters.
The cliché that the Leave vote was largely due to the North of England is also untrue. Picture a map of the UK in your head. Now draw a line, beginning at The Wash in East Anglia and ending at the Bristol Channel. 52% of all Leave votes came from BELOW that line.
There are a few hotspots in the South, such as London, Oxford and Cheltenham, that are the exception to this rule, where the majority voted Remain. In these areas, house prices and rents are high, and you have to be ‘doing well’ to live there, but across the rest of the South of England, a narrow majority voted Leave in almost every place.
Nevertheless, the Leave vote was to have a long-term and profound effect on voting habits, and its implications are only now beginning to be understood.
People voted Leave for a variety of reasons. For some, concerns about uncontrolled mass immigration were paramount. This links in with another key reason, which is an oversupply of cheap labour leading to the suppression of wages. For others, there were legitimate and well-founded concerns about the lack of democracy and accountability within the European Union. But the overriding factor is that for so many people, life in this country just isn’t very good, with poor public services, poor job security, and it being nigh on impossible to save money and get paid interest for it, or to make sufficient provisions for retirement.
The identity of the Labour Party changed radically during the entryism of the Corbyn era, and that continues to this day. It is now a party made up of, and with a mindset of the middle class, white collar, public sector worker and the university student. It is worlds away from the ideology of northern working class communities, and this is reflected in voter behaviour.
Modern general elections are won and lost in medium-sized towns. The large cities, populated to a significant extent by white collar university educated public sector workers, are mostly seats held by Labour. Rural areas are held by the Conservatives (though there is evidence that this may be beginning to change – more on that later). It is those medium-sized towns where elections are won and lost, ie ‘red wall’ seats that once routinely voted Labour, but do not do so anymore – Bolsover, Sedgefield, Bridgend etc.
Evidence shows that how people voted in the referendum significantly impacts on how they vote in subsequent elections. Older people in medium-sized towns who voted Leave are far more likely to vote Conservative than recent graduates living in cities.
Many of those who have broken the habit of a lifetime in recent years by voting Conservative do so for reasons of culture and identity. In Sir Keir Starmer, they see a leader who not only did all he could to try to frustrate, water down and preferably block the Brexit the voted for, but they see a leader who is far more interested in ‘identity politics’ than the issues that directly affect their lives.
In Sir Keir, they see a man who posts pictures of himself on social media ‘taking the knee’ and getting into endless debates about pronouns and transgenderism, but doesn’t spend much time talking about jobs, inward investment, housing, public services, crime and all the other issues that regular, everyday people living in red wall seats are concerned about.
Despite the impact of the pandemic and a number of blunders by Boris Johnson’s government, Sir Keir’s Labour Party is still 20 points behind in the polls. At the upcoming by-election in Batley and Spen, formerly a safe Labour seat, it’s entirely possible that Labour will finish third behind the Conservatives and patriotic, old-school leftist George Galloway, standing for the Workers Party, a man who understands the concerns and issues of people living in areas such as this far better than the modern-day Labour leadership.
For Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, no seat in the post-industrial north is now ‘off limits’, but what do the voters there expect in return? These are not laissez-faire Thatcherites. They welcome a somewhat more interventionist role for the state. They are likely to be in receipt of state benefits, and will want that to continue. They are likely to welcome ‘big ticket’ infrastructure projects, improving transport and inward investment to the areas in which they live, improving standards of living and levels of employment.
But the issues of identity are also important. They voted Leave, and they meant Leave. They voted Conservative in 2019 on the back of Mr Johnson’s pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’, and on that, he has delivered, but come the next general election, they will want to see the tangible benefits of Brexit in their lives.
The new Conservative voters in these areas are also likely to be patriotic and highly unimpressed with woke culture and excessive political correctness. Phrases like ‘white privilege’ appear ghastly to them, when they have spent decades with a lack of jobs and poor-quality schools in their areas. They are fed up of being lectured and preached at, as well as being told what they can and can’t say, and being condemned as ‘racist’ when they are nothing of the sort. They are sick and tired of endless pandering to people with obscure agendas based on identity and performance offence takers. One example is of police offers painting their faces and fingernails with rainbow flags for ‘Pride’ marches, yet are nowhere to be seen when people report anti-social behaviour on their run-down estates. There are many others similar examples.
To be somewhat overly-simplistic, to maintain the support of red wall voters and to capitalise on opportunities to expand their appeal, the Conservatives will need to lean to the left economically and to the right on issues of culture and identity.
At present, the Conservatives are benefitting from goodwill expressed by the deliverance of the Brexit these people voted for five year ago, and a Labour Party grossly out of touch with their needs and concerns, as it obsesses about ‘identity politics’ and not much else.
The entryism of recent years has seen a nasty attitude develop, particularly among its younger, university-educated members. There is a lack of nuance with many of them, and this is amplified by their behaviour on social media. We’ve all seen it. They have a Twitter account where they put their pronouns next to their name, followed by a rainbow flag. Anyone who is just one step to the right of them is labelled ‘far right’. Anyone who is two steps to the right is labelled ‘fascist’. Sir Keir has done little to quell this or to try and re-engage with the voters whose trust he lost due to his stance on Brexit and his obsession with ‘identity politics’.
There have been small victories for Labour as a result of this. In the recent local council elections, they made substantial gains in leafy southern areas like Witney and Chipping Norton, which can, to an extent, be put down to substantial demographic changes with younger, university-educated people working in the public sector moving to the areas from cities within commuting distance. This may be reflected in areas which are similar in terms of appearance and demography in southern England, though it will not be substantial enough in number to make up for the ground Labour has lost in red wall seats.
Indeed, the recent by-election in Chesham and Amersham provided disturbing news for Labour. It had been a very safe Conservative seat since its creation in 1974, yet concerns over local issues, especially the damage the proposed HS2 railway line will do to the constituency, led to voters seeking an alternative this time around, and the Liberal Democrat candidate was duly elected. Labour, which polled 21% in the constituency as recently as the 2017 election, managed a miserable 1.6% on this occasion, finishing fourth behind the Greens.
Furthermore, Labour will need to regain many of the Scottish seats it has lost to the SNP over the last decade if it is to have any realistic hope of a House of Commons majority. That currently appears a very long way off.
The recent round of elections showed the main successes for Labour were in areas where the party had a track record to defend, especially where there was a known personality at the helm. In London, Sadiq Khan was returned as Mayor with a substantial majority, as was Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester. In Wales, Mark Drakeford was returned as First Minister with an increased mandate, as Labour won 30 of the 60 seats in the Welsh Parliament.
Andy Burnham was a rare success story for Labour in the elections of 2021
Khan, Burnham and Drakeford all succeeded in putting distance between themselves and Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership. The Labour parties of London, Greater Manchester and Wales all operate as semi-autonomous bodies from UK Labour, and this was to the benefit of the respective candidates.
A shining example of the paradox Labour now faces is in Wales. At the 2019 general election, the red wall phenomenon was every bit as real in medium-sized towns in Wales as it was in northern England and the Midlands. Constituencies like Bridgend and Wrexham went blue for much the same reasons as Don Valley and Workington. If there was a general election any time soon, the Conservatives would likely hold these seats and gain Newport East, which they narrowly missed out on winning in 2019 due to a substantial Brexit Party vote.
Yet at the recent Welsh Parliament elections, Labour held its seats and even made one constituency gain from Plaid Cymru. So what has happened? The first thing to point out is that turnout in Wales at the general election of 2019 was substantially higher than in the Welsh Parliament election of 2021 (66.6% compared to 46.6%), suggesting that a large number of people in Wales don’t take a huge amount of notice to what goes on in the devolved institution, or consider its work important enough to go out and vote. Or, an alternative explanation is that at the 2019 general election of 2019, a total of 557,234 people voted Conservative, yet in the Welsh Parliament constituency vote in 2021, just 289,802 voted for Conservative candidates. So 267,432 Conservative voters across Wales in December 2019 very often decided to stay at home in the Welsh Parliament election, while Labour persuaded a larger number of its support base to go out and vote.
Therefore, the question for the Conservatives in Wales is why did so many of those 289,802 voters consider it worthwhile voting for the party in relation to non-devolved matters for which Westminster is responsible such as the Treasury, foreign policy, defence, law and order and work and pensions, but did not consider it worthwhile endorsing the party for devolved matters such as health, education and housing?
The answer is likely to be that the Welsh Conservatives didn’t have the right policies, or the right people selling their policies to their potential voter base, whereas the UK Conservatives DID have the right polices and people selling them at the 2019 general election.
Yet on such a miserable turnout of 46.6% (actually a record high in the 21 years of devolution), Drakeford’s victory cannot be considered a ringing endorsement of Welsh Labour by the electorate.
Whether one is a supporter of the Conservative Party or not, we should not be too triumphalist with the current state of affairs. Democracy only works effectively when there is an opposition party that effectively holds the government of the day to account, and itself looks like a potential government in waiting.
These are the main purposes of the opposition, and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is failing miserably at both.
There is no easy solution to this conundrum. Replacing Sir Keir with the more credible Andy Burnham would only go a small way towards solving the problem, as the lack of available talent to make up a strong Shadow Cabinet team would hold him back. He would also be hindered by the demographic of the party membership which would steer its policies: Middle class, university-educated, southern, woke, obsessed with identity politics. In other words, worlds away from the needs and aspirations of those medium-sized towns in the Midlands and North he would need to gain the support of to win an election.
There is no going back to the assumptions of old in British politics. A journey of radical realignment is underway, but it is still far too early to determine what the final destination will be, or how long it will take to get there.
THE DEAL struck between the United Kingdom government and the European Union would’ve received much more scrutiny but for two things: Firstly, because it concluded during a particularly grim period of a global pandemic. Secondly, because it concluded on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
So what are we to make of it? There is a great deal of room for cautious optimism. This deal isn’t perfect, the United Kingdom hasn’t got everything it wants, there will be bumps in the road ahead, but Boris Johnson was given a mandate by the electorate a little over a year ago to get Brexit done, and on that, he has delivered.
Just think of how far we’ve come in the last two years. We had Prime Minister Theresa May and her Chequers surrender, a Withdrawal Agreement she’d negotiated that would’ve left us with Brexit in name only, leaving the United Kingdom with EU vassal status indefinitely. We had the disgraceful spectacle of a Parliament and a Speaker of the House of Commons doing everything they could to try to frustrate, delay, water down and preferably block Brexit. It felt at that time as though the best we could hope for was membership of EFTA, with a Norway-style arrangement. What we’ve now got is something far better.
Unlike Norway, the UK won’t have to pay a penny to Brussels for access to the Single Market. Boris Johnson’s team, headed by David Frost, has negotiated the first no-tariffs, no-quotas deal the EU has agreed with any other country.
Freedom of movement will end. European Court of Justice jurisdiction will end. We will regain control of our money, our borders and our laws.
Those who still don’t really accept the result of the 2016 referendum are talking a lot about the Erasmus European student exchange programme, which will no longer be accessible to British students. But the good news is it’s being replaced by a new scheme, named after the British Enigma genius Alan Turing, which’ll give students the chance to attend the best universities not just in Europe but anywhere the world.
The chairman of Tesco supermarkets, John Allen, says any changes to food prices after the deal has been implemented are likely to be ‘very modest indeed’ and would ‘hardly be felt in terms of the prices consumers are paying’.
Before and after the referendum, much of the mainstream British media, especially the BBC, has engaged in ‘Project Fear’. And the scaremongering has continued in recent months, especially from the BBC – and people are noticing. Last month, the media regular Ofcom showed just 58% of viewers trust BBC News to be impartial, that figure was below all the other mainstream TV news providers in the UK – Sky News , Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5. The BBC is the least trusted of them, and that is extraordinary.
Inevitably with this deal, the devil is in the detail. It was struck on Christmas Eve, most people’s minds have been on other things in the last few days. We’ve had 500 pages released already, with another 1,500 still to come. There are likely to be some unpleasant details buried deep in there, put in by sneaky but clever EU lawyers.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announces a Brexit deal has been agreed
There are two main areas of concern: The first is over fisheries. Since entering what was then the EEC in 1973, the British fishing industry has been utterly decimated as a direct consequence. Fishing rights feel ‘emotionally important’ in negotiations as a result, but in terms of fishing’s economic importance, it is minuscule. In 2016, turnover for the entire UK fishing industry was £725 million. To put that into perspective, the turnover for Harrods department store alone was £2 billion.
Those in what’s left of our fishing industry have good reason to be disappointed with this agreement, foreign vessels will still be allowed to trawl our waters and take a large chunk of the catch for the next five-and-a-half years. But come 2026, we’ll assume full autonomy over our fisheries, but on the plus side, that’ll give us time to rebuild our fishing fleet with the help of Government grants.
The other area that gives some cause for concern is regulatory alignment. There are level playing field measures which commit both the UK and the EU to maintain common standards on workers’ rights, as well as many social and environmental regulations. They don’t have to be identical, so the UK does not have to follow EU law, but they do have to be seen to protect fair competition. The UK has also agreed to stick to common principles on how state aid regimes work, and to an independent competition agency which will assess them – how ‘independent’ will that agency really be? That is a step too far for my liking, I’d prefer it if this wasn’t the case, but it’s something we can live with. It also means that the Government would likely face obstacles if it tried to nationalise a major industry or played a major interventionalist role in certain sectors. Could, for example, the Government create a major state-owned ship building company under this deal? Quite possibly not.
The United Kingdom and the European Union have never been a comfortable fit, going right back to when Prime Minister Edward Heath took us into what was then the EEC in 1973. At that time, and in the referendum of 1975, the British people were told that this was essentially about creating closer trading links, but in reality it has always been a political project, and the concept of ‘ever closer union’ in terms of political union has never sat very easily with the United Kingdom. And from the time of the Maastricht Treaty onwards, it was very clear indeed that this was more about politics than about trade – principles of sovereignty, parliamentary democracy and accountability were at stake.
The European Union is not so much a capitalist institution, it’s more corporatist. It is a friend to big multinationals but it isn’t on the side of small and medium sized businesses. An important point that’s often overlooked is that big, multinational corporations very often support layers of bureaucracy and new regulations, because they have the money and resources to implement them, but they also know full well that small and medium sized business very often will be severely damaged by more regulations and red tape. For small and medium sized business to thrive, they need flexibility and a much lower level of regulation.
There was always a tension because of our histories. Continental Europe has a history of Civil Law. The United Kingdom’s legal system is based on Common Law, the Magna Carta, Habeus Corpus, and the relationship between the citizen and the state is completely different. In the United Kingdom, the principle always was that you were free to do whatever you wished unless it was prohibited by law. In many European countries, the state tells you what your rights as citizens are. And because of these very different systems and ways of interpreting law, implementing EU law in the United Kingdom has often been an uncomfortable experience.
It’s also important to point out that because EU law overrode laws made by the House of Commons, as far as the British people were concerned, whatever you want, you cannot have. It didn’t matter if all 650 MPs in the House of Commons were opposed to a piece of legislation. EU law always took precedent over what was decided in the UK Parliament.
So now that we are free from the shackles of the EU, we have some big decisions to make as to what sort of a country we want to build. Do we want to go down the route of Singapore, with an entrepreneurial, low-regulation economy, or do we favour a different model along socialist, interventionist lines, which would also have been impossible while in the EU? There’s a big debate to be had about that, the size of the task is enormous – there are a significant number of MPs in the House of Commons who are not up to the job, the calibre of elected representative across all parties will need to improve, but it’s an important debate to have now we have the flexibility we didn’t have in the EU.
Is this deal absolute perfection? No. Is it considerably better than Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement? Definitely. Is it better than being part of the undemocratic and bureaucratic European Union? Undoubtedly, yes.
There will be some teething troubles and some bumps along the road in the months ahead, but all in all, there’s much to celebrate with this agreement. People in so-called ‘red wall’ seats that had been Labour for generations took a huge leap of faith last December by electing Conservative MPs on a key manifesto pledge of getting Brexit done. On that, Boris Johnson has delivered.
AS THINGS stand, a so-called ‘no deal’ Brexit appears more likely than ever. Prime Minister Boris Johnson raised the stakes earlier today with his statement that referred to the need for the UK to prepare for an ‘Australian’ style deal with the EU, pronouncing: “For whatever reason it’s clear from the summit that after 45 years of membership, they are not willing – unless there’s some fundamental change of approach – to offer this country the same terms as Canada. And so with high hearts and complete confidence we will prepare to embrace the alternative.”
Boris Johnson’s ‘Australian’ comment was all to typical of a man whose professional life (not just his political career) has been characterised by a lack of clear thinking, and an inability to fully grasp the issues at hand or pay attention to detail.
Mr Johnson doesn’t have a political philosophy as such. As Ken Livingstone, his predecessor as Mayor of London put it, the only thing Boris Johnson believes in is ‘being there’. He was never a committed Brexiteer. Indeed, prior to the referendum, he wrote two articles for the Daily Mail, one supporting Remain, the other supporting Leave, and only decided at the last moment which was to be published and which was to be spiked. Mr Johnson was not a known Eurosceptic during his time as a journalist, nor during his tenure as Mayor. He made the calculation to support Leave based on his own political self-interest, and it was a decision that surprised the then-Prime Minister, David Cameron.
Due to his inability to grasp detail, Boris Johnson’s entire political career has been one based on haphazard, snap decision making, of leaving the hard work to others, before moving on to whatever comes into his head next. His ‘Australia’ comment was just the latest example of this. To compare the UK’s relationship with the EU to Australia’s relationship with the EU is ridiculous.
The EU comprises 11% of Australian goods trade and 19% of its services trade. Total EU-Australia trade amounted to around £111 billion in 2018/19 (at 2018 exchange rates).
For the UK, in 2018, the EU comprised 52% of its goods trade and 44% of its services trade. UK-EU trade is almost six times Australia-EU trade in terms of value, at £660 billion in 2018.
Australia’s main exports to the EU are raw materials, namely coal and gold, which make up two-fifths of its total exports to the bloc.
The UK exports a more varied range of mainly manufactured goods, such as cars, food products and pharmaceuticals. These latter are much more highly regulated industries and, although they would face tariffs in a no deal scenario, they would also encounter significant non-tariff, regulatory barriers.
And this is what’s at the heart of the problem. In the event of a so-called ‘no-deal’ Brexit, much of what goes on in this country would have no legal basis. For example, most of the world’s best Formula One teams are based near Silverstone racetrack. The agreement that allows them to move their cars and parts in and out of the country umpteen times per season would not exist. Nor would the agreement that allows racehorses in and out of the country with ease. There are numerous other similar examples, across many sectors.
On the other hand, I cannot think of a single item of food or drink that couldn’t be sourced from outside the EU if it was absolutely necessary. In terms of items on the supermarket shelf, a ‘no deal’ Brexit may well result in short-term disruption as supplies are rebalanced, but we should avoid talking in terms of an ‘apocalypse scenario’ and alarmism. Getting items in and out of the country would be a bureaucratic nuisance and would cause businesses all manner of problems, but it would not be the alarmist scenario predicted by some on the Remain side who still don’t accept the result of the 2016 referendum more than four years later.
Time is of the essence. The entire business community can handle bad news a LOT better than it can handle uncertainty. If you’ve received bad news, you can act accordingly. If there’s a poor deal coming, or no deal at all, business can use the time to adapt and adjust for that. It’s the not knowing that’s causing a lot of the angst and unrest, and with that in mind, clarity on what the situation will be come 01st January 2021 needs to be given by the end of October at the latest.
November is going to be a very difficult time for this country, as Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s furloughing scheme is scaled back. A large number of people are facing the very real possibility of redundancy. If we, personally don’t lose our jobs, there’s a very high chance we’ll have friends or family members who do lose their jobs. And for all of us, places we like, restaurants, pubs, cinemas, will be closing for good, and it won’t be pleasant. With that in mind, even the most committed Brexiteer would appreciate some clarity as to what the situation will be come January, which is why the end of this month is the realistic cut-off point for negotiations.
We also need a sense of perspective when ‘playing our hand’ in negotiations. Since entering what was then the EEC in 1973, the British fishing industry has been utterly decimated as a direct consequence. Fishing rights feel ‘emotionally important’ in negotiations as a result, but in terms of fishing’s economic importance, it is minuscule. In 2016, turnover for the entire UK fishing industry was £725 million. To put that into perspective, the turnover for Harrods department store alone was £2 billion.
Since the referendum of June 2016, a huge amount of time has been wasted. Theresa May became Prime Minister not long afterwards, and she was a Remain supporter during the referendum campaign, albeit a low-key one. She had a reputation throughout her political career as being dithery and indecisive, these were hardly qualities we needed when entering into tough negotiations with the EU. Furthermore, she had the mindset of treating Brexit as a damage limitation exercise rather than an opportunity to reshape the British economy and restore parliamentary democracy and accountability in a world that has changed enormously since Britain entered what was then called the EEC in 1973.
The most concerning aspect of both Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s handling of Brexit is just how little they, or their inner circle of advisers knew about how the European Union and its institutions work.
So what could have been done differently? First of all, whoever succeeded David Cameron as Prime Minister should have put together a ‘Brexit advisory group’, a sort of ‘mini Cabinet’ consisting of people who actually understood how the EU works, and could therefore prepare a clear strategy for negotiations with Michel Barnier and his team.
Christopher Booker
Top of the list should have been the academic Richard North, whose understanding of the EU is second-to-none. Next should have been his regular working partner, the late journalist Christopher Booker, founder of Private Eye magazine who for decades had detailed the damaging impact of EU membership upon British life through his books, newspaper columns and public speeches.
Further members of the group should have been Conservative MPs Sir John Redwood and David Davis (the original Brexit Secretary), both of whom have decades of relevant experience. The final member should have been the then-Labour MP Gisela Stuart, who earned the respect of Leave supporters with her displays during the campaign in TV debates and public speeches. Her presence among the group would have not only added a fresh perspective, but would have acknowledged the reality that a very large number of Labour supporters voted Leave in the referendum, that Euroscepticism was by no means confined to the right wing of the political spectrum, and this was a ‘mini Cabinet’ of able people from across the political spectrum.
Instead, both Theresa May and Boris Johnson have lacked people with the relevant expertise needed to understand just how profoundly different in law, interpretation and character the European Union is to the United Kingdom. Their advisers consist largely of people of little relevant experience, and civil service mandarins who regard Brexit as a ‘negative’ and at best, like Mrs May, a damage limitation exercise, rather than an opportunity to be seized.
The Norway Option
Have you ever been sitting in your living room on a summer’s day with your window open, when a bird flew in? The window is wide open, yet despite your best efforts, the bird seems to panic and fly everywhere except through that open window? Because that is what the last four-and-a-bit years have been like in terms of Brexit negotiations.
All along, there was a clear, well-defined roadmap out of the EU that would’ve give the UK a relatively straightforward, though, imperfect solution, and that’s the so-called Norway Option.
It’s effectively a ‘take it off the shelf and plug it in’ Brexit, but the UK Government foolishly ruled it out, both in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum and in the years since. It had the support of the likes of Booker and North, as well as of principled MPs like Stephen Kinnock, who supported a Remain vote but respected the verdict of the people, and saw this as a way forward that both implemented Brexit and ensured economic disruption was kept to a minimum.
Here’s how it works: Norway is not, nor never has been, a member of the European Union. It is, however, a member of the European Economic Area (EEA).
If the UK chose to stay in the EEA, we would be able to leave the EU, agree our own trade deals with non-EU countries (since we would NOT be in the Customs Union), and would stay in the Single Market.
Crucially, we would also be able to suspend ‘freedom of movement’ since EEA members are allowed to activate Article 112 of the EEA agreement, known as the ‘emergency brake’. This method has been used by Lichtenstein to suspend ‘freedom of movement’ indefinitely, and implement its own quota system. As a far larger country with much more clout, the UK could do the same with ease.
There are, inevitably, downsides to EEA membership. We would still have to pay some money every year, though nowhere near as much as at present. We’d also have to accept their regulations when we traded with them, but then again, we also have to accept the rules of the USA, China, India or any other country we choose to trade with, which is reasonable.
But on the crucial matters – Parliamentary sovereignty, the supremacy of British courts, immigration controls, the ability to form trade deals with the wider world, and the ability to form a genuinely independent foreign policy, we would be winners on all counts.
Sadly, that window of opportunity has now passed. Boris Johnson is playing a reckless ‘high stakes’ game. It’s still entirely possible that the EU will return with a new, improved ‘counter offer’ next week. A ‘no deal’ Brexit would harm them as well, since they sell more to the UK than the other way around. But the game Mr Johnson is playing is cavalier and dangerous. The business community has enough to worry about right now without the problems and uncertainty a ‘no deal’ scenario would bring.
Even if the news is bad, Mr Johnson owes it to all importers and exporters to ensure clarity by the end of the month, so they can prepare for the reality of what the start of 2021 will bring.
EARLIER today, I appeared on Radio Sputnik to discuss the latest developments with Brexit negotiations.
It’s now October and there are two fundamental truths that we should focus our minds on at the moment.
The first is that time is short. The Brexit negotiations are NOT something that can be taken right up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. Realistically, they are going to have to be concluded by the end of this month so that businesses and ports can prepare to implement whatever the reality will be from the start of January.
The second is that the entire business community can handle bad news a LOT better than it can handle uncertainty. If you’ve received bad news, you can act accordingly. If there’s a poor deal coming, or no deal at all, business can use the time to adapt and adjust for that. It’s the not knowing that’s causing a lot of the angst and unrest. The lingering uncertainty is doing nobody any good at all.
The British people voted for Brexit 52% to 48% in the referendum of 2016. In 2017, we had a General Election where both the Conservative and Labour parties made a firm commitment to implement the result of the referendum. And at the end of 2019, we had another General Election, where a Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson won a clear mandate from the British people, with an 80 seat majority, to implement the result of the referendum. And they won seats that had been Labour for living memory for even the oldest members of society.
The British people voted Leave, and they reaffirmed that decision in TWO General elections since the referendum.
However, even as recently as last December’s General Election, nobody could have predicted what a horrendous year 2020 would be not only for Britain, but for the world. The Covid pandemic has changed everything. We saw this week how Cineworld is going to mothball all 127 of its UK cinemas until at least March of next year. Will they ever reopen? Who knows? Just yesterday, pub chain Greene King announced it was cutting 800 jobs. 79 sites will be closed for the time being, some of those will close permanently.
Come the end of the month, Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s furloughing scheme is being rebranded, in real terms this means that it’s being scaled back quite considerably as employers are asked to take on more of the burden of paying staff for effectively not working. That’ll inevitably mean a huge number of redundancies in the retail and hospitality sectors.
Let’s not mince words on this – next month, November, is going to be a very difficult time for this country. A large number of people are facing the very real possibility of redundancy. If we, personally don’t lose our jobs, there’s a very high chance we’ll have friends or family members who do lose their jobs. And for all of us, places we like, restaurants, pubs, cinemas, will be closing for good, and it won’t be pleasant.
Even the most committed Brexiteer would appreciate some clarity as to what the situation will be come January, which is why the end of this month is really as far as we can push talks, with a more likely scenario being things really hot up next week.
Later in the interview, I was invited to comment on today’s news that the Information Commissioner has concluded that Cambridge Analytica was ‘not involved’ in the EU referendum following a three-year investigation.
I concluded by saying that the British people gave their endorsement of Brexit in the referendum of 2016, again in the 2017 General Election, and again in last December’s General Election, which a Boris Johnson-led Conservative Party won with an 80 seat majority on the back of a key manifesto pledge to deliver Brexit.
A full and complete Brexit means:
National sovereignty.
The supremacy of British courts.
The ability to set controls on immigration.
The ability to form trade deals with the wider world.
A truly independent foreign policy.
Anything less than this falls short of the Brexit the British people voted for.
HOW LIKELY is a so-called ‘No Deal’ Brexit at the moment? The deadline for extending transition period talks expired on 30 June, and, in theory, if no agreement is in place by 31 December, the United Kingdom will not have a trade deal in place with the European Union, so will trade on World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms in future.
The Prime Minister has hinted that he wants to step up the intensity of talks and that he wants the outline of a deal to be agreed by the end of July. That seems highly unlikely to happen. The EU has said that October 31 is a more realistic deadline, but that would leave businesses with just two months to prepare for the changes that follow.
These deadlines were already very tight indeed even without the added complication of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although an extension to the transition phase is no longer possible, it does seem very likely that we’ll end up with an extension, but that it’ll be called something else.
The most obvious way of doing this would be to amend the end date of the transition period in the Withdrawal Agreement, but this would almost certainly require the European Court of Justice to give its legal opinion first.
An alternative option is to create a new transition period to begin on 1 January 2021. A third possibility is to create an implementation phase as part of the future relationship treaty. A fourth option is to create an implementation phase to prepare for a potential no-deal exit.
Since the referendum of June 2016, a huge amount of time has been wasted. Theresa May became Prime Minister not long afterwards, and she was a Remain supporter during the referendum campaign, albeit a low-key one. She had a reputation throughout her political career as being dithery and indecisive, these were hardly qualities we needed when entering into tough negotiations with the EU. Furthermore, she had the mindset of treating Brexit as a damage limitation exercise rather than an opportunity to reshape the British economy and restore parliamentary democracy and accountability in a world that has changed enormously since Britain entered what was then called the EEC in 1973.
As for Boris Johnson, it’s worth remembering that he hedged his bets – he had no real track record as a Eurosceptic until the time the referendum was called. The then-Prime Minister David Cameron was taken by surprise when Mr Johnson backed Leave rather than Remain. I suspect, as is so often the case with Mr Johnson, he was calculating what was the best option in terms of his political career. I see little evidence that it was based on principle.
The most concerning aspect of both Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s handling of Brexit is just how little they, or their inner circle of advisers knows about how the European Union and its institutions work.
So what could have been done differently? First of all, whoever succeeded David Cameron as Prime Minister should have put together a ‘Brexit advisory group’, a sort of ‘mini Cabinet’ consisting of people who actually understood how the EU works, and could therefore prepare a clear strategy for negotiations with Michel Barnier and his team.
Much-missed: Christopher Booker
Top of the list should have been the academic Richard North, whose understanding of the EU is second-to-none. Next should have been his regular working partner, the late journalist Christopher Booker, founder of Private Eye magazine who for decades had detailed the damaging impact of EU membership upon British life through his books, newspaper columns and public speeches.
Further members of the group should have been Conservative MPs Sir John Redwood and David Davis (the original Brexit Secretary), both of whom have decades of relevant experience. The final member should have been the then-Labour MP Gisela Stuart, who earned the respect of Leave supporters with her displays during the campaign in TV debates and public speeches. Her presence among the group would have not only added a fresh perspective, but would have acknowledged the reality that a very large number of Labour supporters voted Leave in the referendum, that Euroscepticism was by no means confined to the right wing of the political spectrum, and this was a ‘mini Cabinet’ of able people from across the political spectrum.
Instead, both Theresa May and Boris Johnson have lacked people with the relevant expertise needed to understand just how profoundly different in law, interpretation and character the European Union is to the United Kingdom. Their advisers consist largely of people of little relevant experience, and civil service mandarins who regard Brexit as a ‘negative’ and at best, like Mrs May, a damage limitation exercise, rather than an opportunity to be seized.
Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove
Earlier this month, the Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove outlined a new £700 million package for new infrastructure, the hiring of staff and advanced technology at the border, ahead of whatever will follow the transition period deadline. The blueprint also outlined new regulations on trade and it made clear that the UK was leaving both the Single Market and the Customs Union.
These developments were barely reported at all in the mainstream UK media. But are we sleepwalking towards problems? How many people, when they hear the terms ‘Single Market’ and ‘Customs Union’ banded about in the media have a clue what they actually mean and how it affects their lives? Most don’t. Very little effort has been made by the mainstream media to explain the meanings of these terms.
The Single Market has no specific legal definition. It essentially means ‘single regulatory regime’. It aims to break down all barriers to trading across the EU and even to non-EU member states by ensuring the ‘four freedoms’ – goods, services, capital and labour.
Free movement of goods, services and capital means the elimination of tariffs and reduces costs and administrative burdens by applying the same set of rules (ie ‘single regulatory regime’) among all those states which are a member of it.
The free movement of labour is more controversial, for it effectively means accepting unlimited, indefinite levels of immigration from other EU states, regardless of their skill level. It explains why Theresa May failed to get immigration levels down to her target of ‘the tens of thousands’ in every single one of her six years as Home Secretary, and why we needed to build a city the size of Cardiff every single year to keep up with immigration rates.
The Customs Union ensures all member countries charge the same import duties to non-members. For Brexit to be a success, it is essential that the UK is not part of the Customs Union. It will prevent our country from being able to agree free trade deals with the wider world, or even set tariffs on our own terms to countries where no free trade deal exists. The importance of not being part of the Customs Union cannot be understated – if we remained in that, it would be very difficult indeed to form trade deals with the wider world, specifically in relation to goods rather than services.
With that in mind, what would the consequences be of a so-called ‘No Deal’ Brexit? First of all, the ‘apocalypse scenario’ in terms of the supermarket shelves being bare should be treated as an absurdity. There is not single item of food or drink that couldn’t be sourced from outside the EU if we absolutely had to, but it is also right to point out that there would be significant short-term disruption as supply chains were re balanced and sourced elsewhere, though these difficulties would be quickly resolved.
The dangers of a so-called ‘No Deal’ Brexit go well beyond the prospect of queues stretching down the motorway near Dover. The most pressing danger lies with the issue of energy supplies.
Didcot Power Station
Leaving the European Economic Area would severely increase the risk of the lights going out. We’ve had years of needlessly closing down reliable fossil-fuel based sources of electricity, such as the Didcot A power station, an act of dogmatic self-harm in the name of meeting EU ‘climate change’ quotas implemented most enthusiastically by Ed Miliband when he was Energy Secretary in Gordon Brown’s Labour Government. To put this absurdity into context, the UK’s whole electrical generation capacity, in all forms of power, is 85 gigawatts. If we gave up using electricity entirely, it would make no difference to the impact of Chinese coal burning, fuelled by enormous new coal fields in Inner Mongolia.
This flawed dogma has led the UK to depend increasingly on unreliable wind and solar energy, the main problems being that it’s often just not very windy or very sunny. As a result, we rely on importing increasing levels of power from abroad via inter-connector cables.
Let us take just one evening as an example of how vulnerable UK energy supplies now are. On the evening of Wednesday 4 July 2018, roughly the same time of year as we’re in at the moment, only 1% of the UK’s energy needs was coming from wind, and none at all from solar. 60% was coming from gas and 26% from nuclear. As is often the case, to keep our grid functioning, we had to import 11% from France and the Netherlands.
According to the National Grid, over the next decade, we plan to more than quadruple the current 4 gigawatt capacity of our inter-connectors to 18.5 gigawatts via new cables from France, Belgium, Norway and Iceland. This is to keep the grid functioning when it’s planned that 68% of our generating capacity will derive from weather-dependant wind and solar, which can plummet to zero at any time under the wrong weather conditions.
But this system relies on the UK being in the ‘European Energy Market’ which sets complex rules that allow it to operate. As the European Commission’s Notice to Stakeholders on cross-border trade in electricity makes clear, once we become a ‘third country’, the EU could refuse to certify us as continuing participants.
The danger is clear, so what is the solution? Have you ever been sitting in your living room on a summer’s day with your window open, when a bird flew in? The window is wide open, yet despite your best efforts, the bird seems to panic and fly everywhere except through that open window?
That is effectively the situation the UK is in right now with the EU. There is a relatively straightforward, though imperfect solution, and that’s the so-called Norway Option. It’s effectively a ‘take it off the shelf and plug it in’ Brexit, but the UK Government has foolishly ruled it out, both in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, and again in Michael Gove’s announcement earlier this month.
Here’s how it works: Norway is not, nor never has been, a member of the European Union. It is, however, a member of the European Economic Area (EEA).
If the UK chose to stay in the EEA, we would be able to leave the EU, agree our own trade deals with non-EU countries (since we would NOT be in the Customs Union), and will stay in the Single Market.
Crucially, we would also be able to suspend ‘freedom of movement’ since EEA members are allowed to activate Article 112 of the EEA agreement, known as the ‘emergency brake’. This method has been used by Lichtenstein to suspend ‘freedom of movement’ indefinitely, and implement its own quota system. As a far larger country with much more clout, the UK could do the same with ease.
There are, inevitably, downsides to EEA membership. We would still have to pay some money every year, though nowhere near as much as at present. We’d also have to accept their regulations when we traded with them, but then again, we also have to accept the rules of the USA, China, India or any other country we choose to trade with, which is reasonable.
But on the crucial matters – Parliamentary sovereignty, the supremacy of British courts, immigration controls, the ability to form trade deals with the wider world, and the ability to form a genuinely independent foreign policy, we would be winners on all counts.
The business community has enough to worry about at the moment – it doesn’t need to have the hassle of endless red tape and delays at customs hanging over it.
More importantly still, the last thing UK citizens need in the months and years ahead are worries about power cuts becoming a regular part of life.
Years of foolish obedience to EU and ‘climate change’ dogma have left national energy supplies dangerously vulnerable. That situation was entirely avoidable. Now, before it is too late, our Government and EU negotiators need to appreciate the scale and danger of what is at stake in terms of energy supplies in the event of a ‘No Deal’ Brexit.
Brexit has been on the back burner over the last four months as Britain and the world’s attention was focused on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. But Brexit will return to the limelight next week. Here’s what to expect:
It does appear as though we’re on the track to a ‘No Deal’. The end of June is the last possible date by which an extension to the December 31st deadline can be agreed, and the UK Government has made it clear that they’re not going to apply for one, and the EU appears to have accepted that as fact, so where does that leave us?
Next Monday (22 June), Boris Johnson and and the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are expected to announce a timetable of intensified negotiations this summer, including some face-to-face meetings to try and break the deadlock.
And this is a case of competing visions: The EU wants a comprehensive deal covering all areas, whereas the UK wants a sector by sector deal on the various components. That’s a fundamental difference in what the starting point of negotiations should be, and it does look as though there’s not much appetite for the UK’s preferred approach at EU level.
Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, the December 31 deadline was already incredibly tight. Once it’s been agreed, it will require ratification from 38 different legislative bodies across the EU, which isn’t an easy task by any means.
It’s very unlikely indeed that there’ll be a deal in place before the autumn. Nobody seriously expects it. The EU insists the 31 October is the latest date a deal can be reached if it is to be ratified by December 31st. Meeting that October deadline is also going to be a tough ask.
So, apart from the competing visions as to whether we have a catch-all deal, or a sector-by-sector deal, what are the main sticking points?
The fishing industry, which actually makes up only 0.1% of GDP in the UK, is a big sticking point. The UK’s fishing industry has been utterly decimated in the 47 years since Edward Heath signed away control of Britain’s fishing waters to Brussels.
The EU coastal nations have a dream of keeping the same quotas they had to fish in UK waters as they had when the UK was an EU member. Whereas for the UK, as small as the fishing industry now is, there’s a lot of emotion attached to the issue, and it’s a case of the EU respecting the UK’s post-Brexit sovereignty. Is there a compromise to be found there? I don’t know. Is there even the appetite to compromise?
The other is on EU competition rules. The EU fears that the UK will create a low-regulation society in respect of labour and environmental standards. The EU wants the UK to mirror its evolving state aid, labour and environmental standards forevermore.
Is there a way through this? Well, a possible compromise is that the UK will agree not to lower labour and environmental laws below the current standards, BUT the catch there is that it limits the UK’s flexibility, and that might well have consequences in forming trade deals with the wider world as well as in attracting inward investment.
A ‘No Deal’ is a very real possibility. I’m not one of these people that is predicting the apocalypse if we end up in that situation, but I’m certainly not saying it would be plain sailing by any means. What concerns me is that MPs, even advisers who are flippant about a ‘no deal’ don’t seem to understand how the EU works.
In ‘no deal’ scenario, there are so many things that happen in this country that would have no legal basis, for example; most of the world’s best Formula One teams are based near Silverstone and the agreement that allows racing cars to get in and out of the country around 20 times per season would not be in place ,and there are many other examples like this.
The other side to the coin is that I cannot think of a single item of food or drink that couldn’t be sourced from elsewhere in the world if we had to, now that would mean in the short term that there could be disruption on the supermarket shelves as supply chains are re-balanced, but I don’t believe the apocalypse scenario at all.
We would be looking at short-term disruption and a significant degree of inconvenience? Yes? Would it be the end of the world? No. Would everything eventually be sorted out? Yes
Something that’s also entirely possible is that come the latter part of the year, the EU and the UK would find a way of fudging an extension, we’d get what is in reality an extension, but they won’t call it that, they’ll put a different label on it to save face.
DID THE good old days ever really exist? If we are honest with ourselves, every generation is a trade-off between a range of good things lost and good things gained.
I’m 36, and I’m guessing almost everyone who is roughly my age heard stories from their grandparents about how they grew up in an era where there was a much stronger community spirit and everyone left their front doors open.
There probably was a lot of truth in those stories. But they were told with rose-tinted spectacles on. These happy qualities were combined with World War II between 1939 and 1945, and rationing that went on for years after the war ended. Healthcare wasn’t anything like as well-developed as it is now, people worked long, grim hours in heavy industry, television was in its infancy, there was limited choice with radio programming, washing was done by hand, using soapy water and a mangle, the iron had to be warmed up on the fireplace, which in turn had to be lit manually and topped up with coal. A heavenly utopia this certainly was not.
I suspect I am in danger of falling into the same trap when I talk to today’s children and teenagers about the not-so-distant past. I started school in an era where BBC computers were the standard. Over time, we progressed to the RM Nimbus, the CD Rom, and then, a couple of years into secondary school, dial-up internet became commonplace. Most people didn’t have a mobile phone until the early 2000s, and even then, it was just for calls and texts, both of which were very expensive by modern standards.
Gimme 5, with Jenny Powell, Nobby the Sheep and Lewis MacLeod
But what about the rose-tinted bits? As a product of my generation, what did I experience that today’s youngsters will never get to know? I’m thinking of the ‘proper’ Saturday morning children’s telly that existed until around the mid-1990s (Going Live, Ghost Train, Motormouth, Live & Kicking, Gimme 5 etc), the likelihood of having a gloriously musty community cinema within walking distance of your house, snooker clubs, now largely closed, Sunday League cricket on BBC Two, free-to-air top flight football live on ITV every week, ‘proper’ independent local radio stations that felt like part of the community, local high streets that had family-run butchers and bakers.
I turned 18 in 2001, and entered an adult world of pubs where a pint cost less than £2, and of night clubs that were far bigger in size and greater in number than those that still exist today – there was somewhere to cater for all tastes, and you could dance the night away with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
The world that my grandparents’ generation looked back upon nostalgically – the sense of community, families that were undoubtedly closer, was lost, but what was gained were huge improvements in medicine, diet, technology, personal choice, and a loosening of sexual morals which redefined over time what most members of society regarded as acceptable. Did we have to ‘lose the good to gain the good’? Probably not. But it demonstrates that all generations are a trade-off between good things lost and good things gained.
Wales’s First Minister Mark Drakeford displays his ‘woke’ credentials at the Pride Cymru march in August 2019
Would I swap my experiences for those of today’s teenagers? No. I don’t really wish I was a teenager in today’s era. I find the music mostly dull and uninspiring (a lot of younger people seem to agree with me). Today’s pop music doesn’t seem all that ‘popular’ on the whole. I wouldn’t swap my experiences for ones where I’m constantly staring into my phone or getting permanently offended and outraged by non-‘woke’ opinions, the main hobby of so many of today’s university students. Social life for young people strikes me as quite boring on the whole, and somewhat sterile compared to what my generation had on offer. But they may well see things differently.
That said, there are some undeniable truths about how things were better once-upon-a-time. Maybe, just maybe, my parents’ generation, the ‘baby boomers’, had the best of all worlds. They grew up at a time when rationing was coming to an end, enjoyed the music and liberation of the 1960s, and there was a sort of unwritten social contract in place that was assumed to still exist even when I was growing up 30 years later, but that in reality broke down long ago. Let me explain:
There has long been a general undercurrent to schooling that if you work hard, pass your exams, and go on to university, you would get your rewards with a much higher standard of living as an adult than those who made very little effort and left school with no skills.
George Cole starred in a series of memorable Leeds Building Society adverts, where interest rates were in double figures
Those that did well at school from my parents’ generation and went to university during, say, the late 1960s or early 70s, could quite reasonably expect certain things in return: To receive a grant for going to university; to get a stable, well-paid job upon graduation, which included a company pension; to be able to save money in a building society account which paid a steady rate of interest; to be able to buy a nice house in one of the better districts of the town or city, on a mortgage worth two-and-a-half times their salary; to be able to afford to keep one parent (usually the mother) at home during the children’s pre-school years; and to be able to retire in their late 50s and early 60s.
I graduated in 2005, and the reality for my generation, and those that has followed, is proving entirely different. There are no grants for going to university, instead, you will be saddled with debt, in the forms of both tuition fees and living costs. It is entirely possible that if one recent graduate marries another, they will have a combined student debt of more than £60,000 before they even begin their life’s journey together; A well-paid job upon graduation? Forget it. This is a world of short-term contracts, low job security and stagnant wages; Company pensions? Forget it. You’re now on your own when it comes to private pensions, and you’re going to have to be prepared to take a significant amount of risk with any money you save; Likewise, building society interest rates on savings have more-or-less disappeared – now you’ll have to sign up to risky portfolios linked to the stock market; You want to buy a nice house in one of the nicer areas of town? You might be able to get a box-like house on a soulless new estate at a push, but large sections of the city will be out of reach for you, and even that will be on a mortgage of five or six times your salary. You want to keep one parent at home while the children are young? You can forget that as well – there are no incentives for that, so a lot of it will be left to grandparents and taxpayer-subsidised ‘childcare’, where you had your very young children over to paid strangers. And as for retirement? That won’t come until your late 60s at the very earliest.
The ‘winners’ in modern society aren’t the graduates, the teachers, the doctors, the nurses, or in many cases even the lawyers (most of whom don’t make anything like the amount of money the cliché implies). Those making the serious money are the Premier League footballers and airhead reality TV ‘stars’.
The ‘unwritten contract’ that if you work hard at school and get a degree, you’ll be able to enjoy a good standard of living, is largely false in modern Britain.
Right now, I do feel nostalgic for a past, but a very recent past, a past we can all remember. I’m referring to the past of a few months ago, where the main topics of debate were nearly always Brexit and VAR. Ah, those really were ‘the good old days’, weren’t they?
Ah, Brexit. Whatever happened to that? Well, it’s still enshrined in both UK and EU law that the transition period ends on 31 December this year, and there have been signs this week that despite the COVID-19 pandemic, attempts to resume discussions are underway. Whether that proves realistic is another matter. It now seems likely talks will take place by videoconference in the weeks beginning 20 April, 11 May and 01 June.
People from across the social spectrum voted for Brexit for a variety of reasons – concerns over loss of sovereignty, concerns over the social impact of uncontrolled mass immigration, the suppression of wages caused by high levels of immigration, the lack of accountability at the EU, the impact of EU regulation on small and medium-sized businesses, and many more reasons besides. But at the root cause of it was a feeling that life in modern Britain just isn’t very good, and the deal today’s young and early middle-aged people are getting, as outlined above, graduates and non-graduates, is a good demonstration as to why.
The pandemic isn’t going to go away any time soon, and when we re-emerge, there will be a great deal of rebuilding and reconstructing to be done in various forms. Every penny the Government has borrowed to subsidise those unable to work at the moment will have to be paid back in tax rises and cuts to other areas of public expenditure. It will take a long time to recover from the economic impact of the pandemic.
We are facing stark reminders of those who are doing the really important work in society: Doctors, nurses, cleaners, supermarket shelf-stackers, lorry drivers, postmen and women, the armed forces, the emergency services and care workers.
Yes, it’s quite right that those who have spent years studying and passing exams earn a higher wage than those who have not, but all of those listed above are doing vital work, and deserve a dignified standard of living.
I don’t begrudge Premier League footballers a good wage – they are entertainers with a short career that could be cut short through injury at any time, but when the top Premier League stars earn in a week what it would take a nurse 15 years to earn, something has gone very wrong with the way in which our society is structured. And I say this as a ‘responsible capitalist’.
As for reality TV stars who are famous for nothing more than having sex on television, what do they really offer to society that’s of any worth? Why do so many young people, especially teenage and twentysomething women, so often look up to and idolise them? They can earn millions of pounds in what are short, shallow careers, with no discernible talent whatsoever.
Brexit provides a chance to reshape British society. The coronavirus pandemic is reminding us of who and what is actually important. Let us not squander the opportunities that will follow to transform society for the better.
