I have immense respect for Professor Chris Grey. His writings on Brexit have been nothing short of brilliant over the past few years. I don’t think anyone else even comes close to the sheer depth of his knowledge of the subject or his logic and analytical skills. His regular Friday blog post is required reading for people like me and I assume perhaps you. This week’s effort was a review of a book by Tim Bale: The Conservative Party After Brexit. Turmoil and Transformation. Bale is a Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London. I am sure his book is all that Grey says it is. But I disagree strongly with two points in the review.
This is Grey:
“Bale’s analysis is a useful corrective for those who, like me, tend to write, at least implicitly, as if Brexit was pretty much the only political issue of the last seven years. That is just about defensible for the period up to January 2020, when the UK left the EU, but it is simply not true after that.”
What?
I think Brexit has undoubtedly been the only political issue of the last seven years, particularly AFTER January 2020. The 2019 leadership and general elections brought Johnson, followed disastrously by Truss/Kwarteng and Rishi Sunak, to Downing Street and power and marked a big shift rightward in the party’s political outlook.
Moderates like Grieve, Gauke, Sandbach, etc were kicked out and replaced by a lot of pro-Brexit fanatics. In my opinion, you need to be a halfwit to go around openly arguing for Brexit. So, if it isn’t absolutely front and centre of events, as when we were negotiating directly with the EU, it is at the very least indirectly driving almost everything else.
In fact, I would go as far as to say in the last seven years the various Tory governments have done very little which isn’t Brexit related in one way or another. This is one of the reasons they are going to lose heavily in the next general election.
I'm not the only one that thinks the Tories have lost the plot. This is what John Oxley wrote (in The Spectator no less) in August 2022 before Truss became PM:
"Even in power [the Tory party] remains incapable of generating and delivering credible policies, incapable of using its resources to tackle the challenges ahead. In an uncertain world, it struggles to decide what it wants to do, and struggles to implement the few ideas it has."
Oxley has followed it up a year later warning of evisceration next year. Neither article mentions Brexit but you would need to be deaf and blind to imagine it somehow separate to or disconnected from the party's decline. It has become UKIP - and after Brexit, a rabble without a cause.
Does anyone truly think Johnson, Braverman or Priti Patel would have occupied one of the great offices of state without Brexit? The others - Jenrick, Dowden, Phipp and so on - are all extremely low calibre at best but got their promotion because they were happy to support Brexit. And men like Cummings and Frost would never have got anywhere near the centre of power.
Bales' view of Brexit can apparently be summed up thus:
"...Brexit is also re-positioned, but this time as being continuous with the mundane realities of politics and so, in that different sense, again understandable as ‘business as usual’. For example, although this may reflect my own naivety, I was struck by the way that, throughout [Bales'] account, Tory politicians are shown to have approached Brexit not – or not simply, or even primarily – as a massive upheaval of national geo-political strategy but as an opportunity to gain party political advantage." (My emphasis)
If that's true, it is even more stupidly shameful than I imagined.
Bale, by the way even thinks that the Tories "might just prove more resilient than many of their opponents imagine” and wouldn't at the moment “bet the farm” on them losing the next election.
Really? I would.
The second point is not so much about Bales’ view of what might happen to the Tories over the next few years, something which he “leaves open” apparently, but about Chris Grey’s.
“My [i.e. Grey's] own expectation, for what very little it is worth, is that assuming defeat at the next election, the Tories will spin off into the weird world of the emergent ‘National Conservatism’ before electoral defeats, and the realities of electoral demographics, pull them back to something more recognizably normal. The only rider to that is that things would change dramatically if the ‘first past the post’ system were reformed in the meanwhile, but that doesn’t seem likely.”
He implies the party will stay together after an electoral defeat. I think there will be a split. There are already rumblings from the ERG and the extreme Eurosceptics and I cannot see these people ever accepting Britain needs to rejoin the single market or the EU. And the grassroots membership is much nearer to UKIP and The Reform Party than the One-Nation Tories of old.
I don’t say the split will be into two equal blocs and it may well see the formation of a huge, anti-EU political grouping, a sort of super UKIP, but I don’t see that lasting a second massive electoral defeat. The Tories are a formidable electoral force with an insatiable hunger for power. If that means ditching Brexit, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.
Those who can’t reconcile themselves to that reality will drift off to oblivion.
There is a link to another review of Bales' book from March this year by Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian, from which this is an extract:
“A lot has been written about what the Brexit misadventure has inflicted upon our country. Here, Tim Bale, one of the very best of our political historians, examines what it has done to the Conservative Party. He contends persuasively that the Brexit virus has transformed the Tories from a mainstream party of the centre-right into an unstable amalgam of radical rightwing populists, hyper-libertarians and market fundamentalists.
"The Conservatives – the clue was in the name – used to be the party that revered and defended the institutions. Now Tories act like – or at least think it convenient to pose as – an anti-establishment outfit. Which requires epic amounts of cheek, given they’ve been ruling for nearly 13 years. They rage not just about 'the woke' and 'lefty laywers', but also against the judiciary, the civil service, parliamentary scrutiny, the universities, the BBC, the Bank of England, the CBI and 'any of the other shadowy forces determined to deny "the people" the "common sense’"policies they supposedly long for'. Traditional Tories used to flinch at ideological fanaticism, thinking both themselves and Britain best served by the pragmatic adaptation to circumstances. Juvenile zealotry and extreme partisanship have become very prevalent in today’s Tory party.”
He's not wrong, is he?
Finally, on the immigration issue, Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon and Shadow Minister for Immigration was on Newsnight last week talking about the chaos in the Home Office over the detention and processing of migrants who cross the Channel in small boats. Over 750 arrived on Friday bringing the total since 2018 to 100,000 while the 39 asylum seekers put onto the Bibby Stockholm barge the other day, had to be taken off when the water supply was found to be contaminated with legionella.
Kinnock said the first thing a Labour government would do is "negotiate a returns agreement with the EU." I nearly fell off my chair!
Why would France want to accept thousands of these asylum seekers back? They would then have to find accommodation and process their claims - assuming the individuals themselves could be persuaded to make one. You can’t force someone to apply for asylum if they don’t want to.
The French would then have to either let them go to build makeshift camps around Calais and wait for another opportunity to come to the UK or send them back to whichever EU country they came to France from. It's a huge amount of difficult administrative and diplomatic work that you might just undertake in solidarity with another member state but for a third country? Never.
This is the sort of Alice-in-Wonderland world you get into by trying to "make Brexit work."
