Britain left the EU on January 31 2020. It was a deeply sad moment, and I was moved to write a Fond Farewell to the UK from an EU27 Citizen in three parts on the Progressive Pulse blog I had set up in 2017, as therapy and outreach. (Now we have the excellent Bylines Network). It was in Leonard Cohen’s words: “Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost”.
I had hoped this day would never come and had commuted from Northumberland to all the pro-EU People’s Vote marches in London, bar the one on Jo Cox’s anniversary, 2017, when I hosted a “More in Common” party for all our neighbours in our rural part of Northumberland (Kirkley). There were local marches and rallies too; click to read my account of the Sunderland People’s Vote March. My mood was dark, and I penned my most widely read piece, Fascism as a Methodology rather than an Ideology, which was widely circulated and quoted in Prof Chris Grey’s excellent Brexit Blog, for example.
This piece will examine the period from the UK’s exit from the EU to the election of the Labour Government in 2024. It was a very turbulent time, spanning three prime ministers, the Covid pandemic, and the advent of the war in Ukraine. Peak Brexit, or, in my mind, “Abyssal Brexit”, was reached during the Truss premiership, with a slow recovery afterwards.
The initial period
Having left the EU, the “trivial” task of negotiating the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was completed. It was now a legally binding international treaty, including the Northern Irish Protocol (NIP). We had now moved on to the far more complex talks about the future relationship, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). It always seemed impossible that the talks could be concluded successfully within the 11-month transition period (deadline 31 December). The fact that the WA took three years to negotiate was ominous.
Whereas the EU approach has been clear for some time, there has been lots of “sabre-rattling” from the UK. Surely now that Brexit had been achieved and the referendum mandate fully discharged, it was time to exit campaign mode and start governing?
More clarity on the UK’s approach has emerged from David Frost’s lecture in Brussels on February 17 (full text here). Alas, it still felt more like campaign mode than a serious attempt to confront reality and Britain’s weaker position after leaving the EU. The speech appeared flawed on many levels, rooted in Brexit Zealotry and exceptionalism rather than evidence, logic, strategy, and intellectual coherence. The intended audience seemed to be Brexit Zealots. If aimed at an EU audience, it could be read as insulting, arrogant, and, above all, naive. It seems that, rather than working with the EU and not content with Brexit, the current UK government was ultimately trying to weaken the EU.
I would have had more confidence if the chief Brexit negotiator had remained Ollie Robbins, but it fell to David Frost, in whom I had near-zero faith. He reminded me of David Davis: completely out of his depth, with even less charisma. By this stage I regularly interacted with many former British diplomats, whom I came to greatly respect. How was Frost so utterly incompetent and different to his excellent peers? Andrew Levi came up with the theory that he had been “abducted by aliens”.
It seems that rather than negotiating in “good faith “, it’s more than likely that the UK has no intention of doing an ambitious deal with the EU. Rather, it prefers what it euphemistically calls an “Australia-style agreement” (aka a no-deal dressed up in a sexy bikini) and blames the intransigent EU for any adverse outcomes. Their negotiating approach resembled madman theory rather than anything more conventional; they continually threatened a no-deal Brexit if the UK didn’t get what it wanted.
The UK as a whole seems to be moving toward a more authoritarian, poorer, and more closed country. The new points-based immigration system was economically and culturally impoverishing, and it was cynically designed to appeal to the basest instincts of the English electorate.
The main battleground and likely flashpoint was the NI protocol. Because trust in the UK was at an all-time low, the EU insisted it be included in the WA as a binding treaty. The Brexit Zealots hated it as it impinged on their sacred cow of absolute sovereignty, dreaming of a time when Britain bestrode the planet and didn’t have to make messy compromises with inferior foreigners. Dominic Cummings later admitted that the UK always intended to ditch the Northern Ireland Brexit deal and that “cheating foreigners is a core part of the job.”
The salience of Brexit fell down the agenda when the Covid-19 pandemic hit Britain. Brexit was off the headlines; indeed, much of the media lost interest. An opportunity for quiet competence to do a deal in the best interest of Britain without the faux outrage of the right-wing press?
The Covid-19 pandemic period
In February 2020, I watched with increasing alarm at the devastating effects it was having in Northern Italy, overwhelming the health service and spreading as the pandemic it obviously was. Northern Italy has one of the best health services in the world, and if it was overwhelmed. It would certainly overwhelm the NHS when the pandemic hit. Britain seemed to be shutting down far too late. I still remember being horrified that the Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid match went ahead on 11 March and even more stunned when the Cheltenham Festival went ahead as usual. When the UK eventually locked down on 23 March, it was a week or two late.
As the pandemic deepened, it would have made more sense to allow a longer negotiation period, as travelling between capitals was difficult. Brexiters, however, always gave me the feeling that Brexit was very fragile and time was definitely not on their side – momentum was building that Brexit had been a failure and a terrible mistake. As the entire Brexit process had been so traumatic, there was also a desire to escape from the nightmare and close the chapter.
As for the pandemic, Johnson gave every impression of not taking it seriously, missing five COBRA meetings and bragging about shaking hands with Covid patients. There were inadequate supplies of PPE and dubious fast-lane contracts, most famously Medpro, linked to Baroness Moane, which was later ordered to pay £121M in damages. Care homes for the elderly were particularly vulnerable.
There was the bizarre Barnard Castle trip by Dominic Cummings, and the Eat Out to Help Out scheme. Overall, there was an impression that HMG was incompetent and out of its depth. Later, the Partygate scandal came to dominate the news and the COVID enquiry exposed many failings. On the raw statistics, COVID deaths per capita in Britain were inexcusably higher than in Italy and nearly twice that of Ireland.
On the December 8, a rollout started of the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in the UK before it had been approved in the EU. This was absolutely allowable under EU rules, but desperate to find any Brexit benefit, it was claimed that this was only possible as we had left the EU. (Brexiters are still telling this lie; Gove did so recently on the 10th anniversary in The Spectator, and Johnson repeats it constantly).
While the spotlight was elsewhere, negotiations on the TCA continued and concluded within the 11-month period, with the agreement announced on December 24 and signed on the December 30. The NIP remained in place, under extreme strain from the Brexiters determined to torpedo it. The TCA was a maximalist hard Brexit, leaving, for example, the Customs Union, the Single Market, Euratom, Copernicus, ITER, Erasmus, and Horizon. David Frost resigned; speculation was that it was due to a lack of support for scrapping the Northern Ireland Protocol, but the reason given was concern about the government’s direction on Covid measures.
With a rapid vaccination rollout, pandemic-specific measures ended, lockdown measures were gradually eased, and things were back to normal over the summer. During this period, there was intense work to secure a UK-US Trade agreement, led by Liz Truss, then International Trade Secretary, but it amounted to nothing. Deals were done with Australia and New Zealand, and Japan and the UK joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). These were hailed as a triumph, but they contributed so little to GDP that they were of little economic value and did not replace EU membership. The Australia-UK deal, in particular, was heavily biased in Australia’s favour; it smacked of desperation, and, again, optics were more important than what was best for Britain.
Brexiters have a hatred of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) and have repeatedly attempted to torpedo it, including introducing a NIP bill that would be in direct contravention of the NIP itself and thus illegal under international law. Repeated threats to trigger Article 16 of the NIP, which allowed the suspension of the protocol under certain circumstances, came to nothing – none of the criteria were remotely met. For those wishing to relive the period, Chris Grey’s The moral turpitude of Brexit brinksmanship gives a good summary.
Yet another crisis was about to hit: the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which dominated the headlines for the next period.
Ukraine invasion
Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, expecting to be in Kyiv in a few days, take out Volodymyr Zelensky and install a puppet government. Not a war but a “Special Military Operation”. The Ukrainians had other ideas and defended their territory like tigers. Four days have now extended to over four years – longer than WWI.
How would Johnson react? There were credible reports that Russia influenced the outcome of the Brexit Referendum. Brexit was certainly very welcome to the Russians. The UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee reported a bizarre lack of interest from HMG. According to the committee, the UK government does not know – and, incredibly, did not try to find out.
Worries also persisted that Johnson was too close to both Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB officer, and his son Evgeny. He was a frequent visitor to their villa, Palazzo Terranova, in Umbria. On at least one occasion, as Foreign Secretary in 2018, without any aides. Evgeny was nominated for a peerage by Johnson in July 2020 and was appointed as a life peer on 19 November, 2020.
My initial worries that he was too close to the Russians were unfounded, and Johnson was a very strong supporter of Ukraine. It was exactly the stage where he could project his inner Churchill and look like an international statesman. As his image deteriorated at home, it seemed that he was using frequent visits to Ukraine as both a kind of therapy and to shore up his popularity with the British public.
The fall of Johnson
Johnson was losing his shine with the British public. Inflation rose to close to 10% in 2022. For those concerned about immigration being too high, numbers surged to over a million, though net migration remained marginally below a million. The main driver of his unpopularity, however, was the Partygate Scandal. For MPs, the Chris Pincher and Owen Paterson scandals played a big part, showing a complete lack of political judgement. Boris Johnson announced his resignation as Prime Minister on 7 July, 2022, following a mass resignation of government ministers and pressure from his party.
The abyssal premiership of Liz Truss
After a contest among Tory MPs to find Johnson’s replacement, two candidates were chosen for the membership to decide between: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.Truss won the contest and became PM on 6 September.
If Johnson imagined himself as Churchill, Truss imagined herself as Thatcher. Truss often dressed similarly to Thatcher and staged bizarre photo shoots, including one in which she sat on a tank to replicate her hero. I found Truss utterly lacking in charisma and living in a bizarre 55 Tufton St “Think Tank” world dominated by the American right and utterly detached from reality.
The Queen died two days later, and the first few weeks of Truss’s premiership were dominated by the 10-day national mourning period.
Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, announced large-scale borrowing and tax cuts in a radical mini-budget on 23 September. The mini-budget was initially hailed by the right-wing press as a triumph and a true Tory budget, and Farage described it as “the best Conservative Budget since 1986”.
The philosophy behind the Budget was very much that of the Brexiters, and Chris Grey saw it as a logical end point of Brexit in his piece The week the wheels came off the Brexit Britain bus. It rapidly became clear that the budget was a monumental disaster, with the pound falling dramatically to its lowest value ever against the dollar (£1.035 on Asian markets) and spooking bond markets. The BoE had to make a dramatic intervention as a “run dynamic” on pension funds developed – a wholesale equivalent of the run which destroyed Northern Rock. Had they not intervened, there would have been mass insolvencies of pension funds within hours.
Truss was a Brexit Zealot. As Maryin Wolf wrote in the FT, “The dominant characteristic of zealots is their conviction that reality must adapt to their desires, rather than the other way around.”
Truss sacked Kwarteng as Chancellor, installed Jeremy Hunt, and essentially ditched the budget. However, the damage was done, and Truss, holed below the waterline, announced on 20 October her intention to resign as party leader and as prime minister. The shortest premiership ever, lasting 49 days and famously being outlived by a lettuce,
The Tory brand, which was built largely on economic competence, was thrashed. I was reminded of the Black Wednesday Sterling Crisis under John Major’s premiership in September 1992, 30 years earlier, to within a few days. Then the Tories never recovered in opinion polls, leading to a landslide Labour victory in 1997 under Blair. It seemed likely that something similar would happen at the next General Election.
This was, hopefully, the end of the line for the more fanatical Brexit Zealots; the new PM would be more pragmatic and more honest, and HMG would become more evidence-based rather than faith-based. Crawling out of the abyss would, however, be a very slow process.
The Sunak premiership
Sunak was elected unopposed as her successor and succeeded her as leader on 24 October and as prime minister on 25 October.
After Johnson and Truss, Sunak seemed a considerable improvement. On Brexit, the madman theory of his two predecessors had been completely discredited, and I was hoping for a period of stability and greater realism, especially regarding the Northern Irish Protocol.
Indeed, this proved to be the case, and the Windsor Framework was unveiled at the end of February, with the name chosen to appeal to Unionists. There was some worry the DUP and Brexit Zealots would kill it in parliament, but in the end it was approved by a landslide: 515 for and only 29 against. It appeared that the tide had indeed been turned and a more pragmatic approach followed. The DUP’s leverage had been greatly diminished as they could no longer blackmail the May minority government. Even in Northern Ireland, their power was waning as Sinn Féin became the largest party.
A further sign that relations with the EU were improving came when the UK became an associate member of Horizon Europe and gained access to Copernicus on December 4. This was extremely good news. Hopefully, joining Erasmus+ wouldn’t be too far off. The watering down of the retained EU law bill was also very welcome.
One of the promises of the Brexiters was that it would reduce the salience of immigration and resentment toward foreigners, as the new immigration system would ensure a higher-quality class of immigrants. Immigration was, of course, a perfect wedge issue for the far right, and Farage was a master of exploiting it to the full.
Small boat crossings of asylum seekers across the Channel became a major issue. This lined the pockets of criminal smuggling gangs and was extremely dangerous, with a risk of drowning for the wretched refugees. My solution would have been to give them all free ferry tickets and process the asylum claims promptly, rapidly deporting people who did not qualify. Had Brexit not happened, these asylum seekers could have been immediately returned to France under the Dublin Convention.
Depressingly, performative cruelty seemed to be more politically popular, labelling asylum seekers as illegal immigrants, and setting up the Rwanda Asylum Plan, with zero evidence that it would reduce small boat crossings. Apparently it was “common sense” that it would. The scheme was very controversial, with numerous legal challenges. In the end, the total cost of the scheme is estimated at £700 million, with only four migrants voluntarily relocated during its implementation.
The end of fourteen years of Tory rule
As stated, the popularity of the Tory government was torpedoed by Liz Truss. It seemed clear that when a general election was called, there would be a heavy Tory defeat. Sunak could have held on to the very last moment, the 5th anniversary of Johnson’s triumphant GE, 12 December 2024, but decided to call a summer election on 4 July.
This was a very different election to 2019, which in England was essentially a two-horse race: the Tories secured an 80-seat majority (365 seats) with 43.6% of the vote, and Labour 202 seats on 32.1% of the vote.
The major difference in 2024 was that Farage’s party, now branded Reform UK, did not stand down, splitting the right-wing vote. Tactical voting was used very effectively on the progressive side, with Labour and the Lib Dems not fighting each other, but lending support constituency by constituency, depending on the most likely winner. The Greens were also becoming a more powerful electoral force, but many Green members voted tactically for the progressive candidate most likely to get the Tories out (#GTTO).
Labour won by a landslide, securing 412 seats, giving it a majority of 174. But on only 33.7% of the vote. Turnout at 59.7% was 7.8 percentage points lower than in 2019. Indeed, in 2019 Labour secured more votes under Corbyn, 10,269,051, as compared to 9,708,716 under Starmer. A majority a mile wide, but an inch deep. Commentators called it a Sandcastle Majority – built on very shallow or almost no foundations.
Labour had used a “Ming Vase Strategy” in their campaigning and seemed to have no grand vision. It was a very different feeling to 1997, when Blair had won 418 seats and his landslide majority. Then there was real optimism. Now, sadly, just a hope that things might slowly get better.
I was most pleased by the local election result in my own constituency, Hexham, which is now the largest geographically in England following the boundary changes of 2024. It was won by Labour for the first time ever with Joe Morris as the new MP. It had been a Conservative/Unionist seat since 1918, and Liberal before that. Even though I am a Green Party member, I lent him my vote.
Dominic Cummings was considered instrumental in Johnson’s triumph in 2019, and Morgan McSweeney in Starmer’s victory in 2024. I hoped that Labour had prepared for government and would hit the ground running as Blair and Brown had done in 1997. Would McSweeney and Starmer prove as effective in government?
Conclusion
This has been a helicopter view of a turbulent four-and-a-half-year period, with four prime ministers (Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer), and two major crises: the Covid Pandemic and the Ukraine War. Peak Brexit madness was reached during the Truss premiership. Sunak began the crawl out of the Brexit Abyss. Could Starmer continue and even accelerate the process? I wished the Starmer premiership and Labour government well, but the inheritance was dreadful; if I can be profane, it was “a crock of shit”, and I feared it would be a Pyrrhic Victory easily turning into disaster.
It would certainly help if Starmer had a honeymoon period as Blair did in ’97. I hope my pessimism was unjustified and the Starmer government would restore quiet competence and boring normality.
Part 6 covers the Starmer years and the state of the nation. Part 7 will look forward and suggest solutions to our multitudinous problems.
