The month since my previous post has seen some small steps towards a UK-EU ‘reset’ but, far from being a period of relative quiet, the Christmas and New Year holiday has seen no let-up in populist hatred domestically and a dramatic worsening of the international scene.
In that
previous post I wrote that the glacial pace of the reset was too slow to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK. With Trump’s attack on Venezuela, that urgency is now even greater. As 2026 starts, the isolation and division which characterises post-Brexit Britain is clearer than ever and, although some criticisms of it are unfair, the government’s weakness and unpopularity make it inadequate to the task of dealing with the scale of the dangers the country faces.
The lessons of ErasmusAs foreshadowed in my last post, it was announced just before Christmas that
the UK will participate in the Erasmus+ study scheme from 2027. This represents perhaps the most significant, or at least most high-profile, ‘softening’ of Brexit since the terms of leaving were agreed by Boris Johnson, and the most tangible fruit of the Labour government’s ‘reset’. So it shouldn’t be dismissed as trivial. On the other hand, even leaving aside the wider issues discussed later in this post, it shouldn’t be forgotten that alongside any closening of relations there are,
as Politico reported this week, myriad ways in which changing EU regulations are creating ‘passive divergence’. And whilst
there are reports of new government measures to facilitate extensive UK ‘alignment’ with single market regulations,
the usual questions about what the EU will agree to remain. In many ways, the domestic discussion of Brexit is one of endless repetition.
That repetitiveness was evident in the predictable cries of ‘Brexit betrayal’ which greeted the Erasmus announcement, although admittedly they seemed rather half-hearted and ritualistic. That’s partly because it is now a hopelessly dated concept, which only has traction with a few obsessives:
public opinion is now firmly of the view that Brexit was a mistake, and in favour of closer relations with the EU. It’s also because, in the case of Erasmus, it’s obviously nonsense even within the Brexiters’ own terms. In January 2020
Johnson assured the House of Commons that the UK would continue to participate in the scheme, and, indeed, provision was made for that, in principle, in the subsequent Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
Perhaps for that reason, the Brexiters preferred to focus on the price tag, estimated to be £570 million in the first year, and possibly more in future years. As usual, their discussion contained a swirl of nonsense, such as comparing present costs with previous costs without allowing for inflation, ignoring the differences between Erasmus and Erasmus+, ignoring the savings from winding down the
inferior post-Brexit Turing scheme, and dismissing the benefits of Erasmus+ membership. None of that is worth taking the time to unpick.
The more salient point is that the cost actually illustrates just how good a deal, just from a narrow budgetary perspective, the UK used to have as an EU member,
paying £12.6 billion (net) in 2020. It is simply far less economical to negotiate selective participation in a range of (relatively) minor schemes, such as Erasmus + or the
Horizon Europe research programme. We’ll see that again if, as
Keir Starmer intimated last weekend is imminent, there are agreements on
SPS and
ETS/CBAM linkage. But, far from complaining about it, this is just another reason why the Brexiters should hang their heads in shame. So, too, should shame attach to
the other attack line they ran against joining Erasmus+ which, with wearying familiarity, was that it means “opening the door to a wave of arrivals from Turkey and North Africa”.
Brexit ironiesFamiliar as such xenophobia is, it has recently taken a peculiarly ironic twist. And this twist relates to the point about how Erasmus illustrates the unfolding costs of Brexit, yet is decried by Brexiters not in those terms, but as showing Labour to be economically incompetent. That twist is the flurry of stories bemoaning
the ‘great exodus’ of Poles and
the ‘great retreat’ of Romanians from the UK, both stories carried by the
Mail. In the latter case, although it was subsequently amended, the
original headline referred to Romanians as having “propped up the UK economy”. It hardly needs to be pointed out that the relentlessly hostile coverage of immigration from Eastern Europe – especially viciously directed at Romanians – from the
Mail and similar papers was a, and perhaps the, key reason for Brexit.
It is not, of course, that the
Mail has repented of its ways. These stories are being run not from any regret for Brexit, nor from any new-found recognition of the value of immigration, but with the particular angle that they show that under the Labour government the UK is becoming an economic failure with crumbling public services and spiralling crime, and that those who can escape are doing so. That some of this might, both in general, and in relation to the departure of EU nationals in particular, be due to Brexit is ignored and, instead, is ascribed entirely to the failures of the government since July 2024. In a similar vein, the post-Brexit trade deal with Australia, which the Brexiters once lauded as a great Brexit benefit, is
now being positioned by them (£) as an example of Labour ‘betraying’ British farmers. It will be one of the great political ironies if Labour end up being blamed both for the consequences of Brexit and for its betrayal.
The great hateThese stories are in turn part of a ferocious and increasingly unhinged attack upon the Labour government and, more fundamentally, upon the nature of contemporary Britain. It’s not unusual for Labour governments to face hostility from the right-wing media and, goodness knows, this government has done plenty of things which warrant criticism, but I don’t think that it has ever been on this scale before. What is certainly distinctive is the way that it is now taking the form of an almost psychotic frenzy of hatred directed at almost everything about Britain. That has been developing for a while, but has been especially striking over the holiday period, including an outpouring of social media fury about the
King’s Speech having been ‘traitorous’ (specifically for referring to diversity as a strength, but his supposed treachery is a recurring far-right claim), and about
London’s New Year firework display showing the stars of the EU flag at one stage.
The latter is just one part of what has become a tidal wave of ‘anti-London’ diatribes, depicting Britain’s capital city as a lawless dystopia, which is apparently to be the theme
of Reform’s campaign for the Mayoralty. These diatribes, as
Robert Shrimsley recently discussed in the Financial Times (£), have as their guiding thread the linkage of this supposed dystopia to London’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and are almost invariably accompanied by viciously racist comments about Mayor Sadiq Khan, comments echoed and amplified by
Donald Trump’s obsessive verbal bullying of Khan.
There can certainly be no mistaking the viciousness and racism of the way that not just London but the whole of Britain is being portrayed as in the grip of an explosion of crime. Numerous high-profile media and social media influencers routinely highlight in lurid detail every crime, especially every sexual crime, committed by anyone with a dark skin and a foreign-sounding name, especially a Muslim-sounding name. That they never mention the much larger number of crimes committed by white Britons reveals something worse than hypocrisy. It reveals that they don’t actually care about the crimes, or the victims of crimes, but regard them solely as an opportunity to pursue their vendetta. And from that it is not a huge step to surmise that at least some of them actually welcome such crimes being committed, so as to provide yet another weapon in this campaign of hate and fearmongering. Increasingly, these same people are talking openly about the possibility, and even the need, for civil unrest or even civil war.
Readers may notice that I have neither named nor linked to any of these influencers, and that is because, despite invariably bleating about free speech, and the tyranny of cancel culture, these people would certainly seek to arraign me before the court of social media, and perhaps the court of libel, were it to come to their attention that I had done so. That is just one part of the climate of fear they have already created. We are now truly in the situation – the exact obverse of what they claim to be the case for critics of multi-culturalism – that we all know what is going on but we aren’t allowed to say it.
Of course, it can be objected that these media commentators, and the legions of their followers who share their comments, are only a relatively small, extremist, bubble who have always been with us in one form or another. It’s all too easy to scroll though ‘X’ and get a distorted picture of where public opinion lies. But it’s my impression – that’s all it is, and I can’t prove it – that the scale and the ferocity of it have increased substantially in recent months, and that it is gaining increasing
traction with the general public. That need not, and probably does not, mean that all the wild claims and spittle-flecked hatred achieve public endorsement, but it does mean that they seep, slightly diluted, into every-day ‘common sense’.
Starmer’s woesThis is one plausible explanation for a
highly revealing opinion poll published just before Christmas which showed a huge gulf between perceptions of whether 2025 had been a good year for respondents, personally, and whether it had been a good year for the country (and their expectations for 2026). For example, 36% thought 2025 had been good for them personally, and 27% thought it had been bad, whereas 6% thought it had been a good year for the country and 66% thought it had been bad. Other polls have shown similar disjunctures in relation to crime, the NHS, the impact of asylum seekers and so on.
My suggestion is that this reflects the malign influence of a commentariat determined to depict a country in crisis (and since the purpose of influencers is, by definition, to have influence, this is not an unreasonable suggestion). And whilst their agenda is transparently one based not just on racism but on hostility to all manifestations of social liberalism, it is unintentionally aided by those on the liberal-left who, angered and disappointed by the inadequacy of the Labour government, have their own reasons to join in. As with the hostility of the right-wing press, that is the fate of all Labour governments, even those considerably less inept than the present one, but the current version is different, for two reasons.
One is, indeed, the sheer ferocity of the onslaught. The
extent of the loathing of Labour (£), and especially of Starmer and Reeves, seems totally out of proportion to any offences they may have committed. The other difference is the nature of the end-game. Unlike in the past, this is not all leading to the installation of a Conservative government. It is leading to a Reform, or some kind of Reform-Tory, government of a sort we have never seen before. Its agenda will be one bent on the destruction of established institutions – it tells you something when even the King is depicted as an enemy of the people – and the rule of law, whilst also being dangerously incompetent (as Reform’s record in local government abundantly demonstrates).
There’s no concealment of what is in prospect. Farage’s
‘New Year message’ spelt it out. When a politician starts talking about the government “making sure the young are taught correctly about our history”, you can be certain that authoritarianism is in the offing; when he starts talking about making “the UK the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency” you can be certain that this authoritarianism will be accompanied by economic chaos. There’s plenty more to be alarmed about in Farage’s vision of the future, but for present purposes note that its opening framing is that Britain is “gloomier” than it has ever been, with people “frightened to walk down the street”. It is precisely the picture painted by the far-right influencers on social media, rendered in slightly sanitized form for a public softened-up by their influence to be receptive to Farage’s message.
There is little reason to have any confidence in the Labour government’s ability to blunt this message. That is partly for the widely-discussed reasons of its communicative failures, lack of a coherent policy or ideological agenda, and Starmer’s constipated, uninspiring leadership. But it is also because of the implications of the opinion poll just mentioned. Starmer’s
New Year message was one rooted in the standard centre-left position, not unreasonable in itself, that voters want to see concrete change in their lives, and especially improvements in their living standards and public services. Yet, as that opinion poll shows, even if voters’ personal experiences are positive, they can still regard the country as a whole as being in a parlous position.
It is very hard to tackle that political mentality through any policy agenda, in the normal sense of the term. If it can be tackled, it is through a convincing counter-narrative to that of Farage et al. Since his narrative is primarily based on blaming immigration and multi-culturalism for everything, the counter to it must be to provide positive advocacy of those things. And it is probably already too late for Starmer’s Labour to do that since they have so frequently deployed, in both rhetoric and policy, precisely the same narrative as Farage, apparently in the misguided belief that doing so will reduce his support.
I don’t mean by this the stupidity that ‘there’s no difference’ between Starmer and Farage or Labour and Reform, the line being pushed
by Green party leader Zack Polanski (and, yes, I do know how many readers of this blog are going to take umbrage at my comment). Anyone who thinks that is in for a nasty shock if we get a Farage-led government. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there is now a sense that public opinion about Starmer has crossed a threshold whereby almost anything he says or does is derided from almost all points of the political spectrum.
The Venezuela crisisThis was evident in reactions to his response to the biggest event since my last post, Trump’s attack on Venezuela. It was a
highly diplomatic response, in the literal sense of the term, avoiding open criticism of Trump’s actions but also avoiding endorsement of them. Critics on the right
immediately denounced it for that lack of endorsement, which they attributed to “the long love affair the Left has enjoyed with the basket-case communist country” and “his party's veneration of Nicolas Maduro's failed regime”. This was self-evidently ludicrous, since the statement said that the UK “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime”.
Meanwhile, critics on the liberal-left falsely
claimed that Starmer had explicitly supported what Trump had done, whereas in fact he has been studiedly silent about that, a silence leading many, including
LibDem leader Ed Davey, to demand that he condemn it as illegal. But giddy moral rectitude is an easy indulgence for those who have no responsibility for its consequences. The reality is that open condemnation from Starmer would be both foolhardy and pointless, and
the statements from Emmanuel Macron and Friederich Merz, as well as
from Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, were similarly cautious for the same reason.
That reason is so obvious it should hardly need stating: the UK and the EU are far too dependent on US defence and intelligence capabilities to risk being subjected to Trump’s thin-skinned vengeful bullying. It is apparently not just Brexiters who need to understand that the UK is no longer a world power. Equally, it is not just Brexiters who need to lose their infatuation with WW2 comparisons: in particular, comparisons with pre-war
appeasement of Hitler are entirely bogus because, unlike then, the situation we face is one where a longstanding major ally has gone rogue whilst we are still trapped in very high dependence upon them. This is an astonishingly dangerous situation and navigating it requires a far more serious response than most of Starmer’s critics seem to understand but also, I fear, than he, himself, understands.
Starmer’s optionsWere Starmer to denounce Trump it would have zero effect on what the US does. And, precisely because it would have no effect on the US, it would also do nothing to constrain Russia and China. Certainly, any idea that issuing a robust communiqué about Venezuela would inhibit
Trump’s increasingly vocal threats to take control of Greenland is utterly ludicrous. But it would be highly likely to prompt US retaliation. And suppose that, for example, that retaliation was to cut the UK out of counter-terrorism intelligence-sharing, and the result was a successful terrorist attack. Who, then, would applaud Starmer’s ‘courage’? Instead, he would be pilloried, including by the very people who now condemn him, for his failure to manage relations with the US, no matter who the President was. Even without such drastic retaliation, the prospects for holding Trump to any kind of
support for Ukraine would be even further reduced.
To that extent, Starmer’s conduct this week has been well-judged. But the real point about the Venezuela attack is that it is the latest and starkest reminder, to both the UK and the EU, that they need to reduce and ultimately end reliance upon the US with maximum urgency. And the horrible suspicion is that Starmer, and at least some EU leaders, hold the delusion that they just have to ‘wait it out’ and Trump will disappear and ‘normality’ will return. If so, apart from it being highly questionable that there will be such a return, it ignores that much can happen meanwhile. That includes Trump acting on his latest threats to Colombia and Cuba, though if and when that happens the UK and EU responses are likely to be similar to those which have followed the Venezuela attack, and for the same reason. The hard truth is that it is in the interests of neither the UK nor the EU to die on the hill of an unwinnable war of words about Latin American sovereignty: the crucial line for transatlantic relations is Greenland.
The Trump administration’s words could not be clearer: it is
explicit policy that Greenland is to become part of the US. If acted upon, that will be the point at which what remains of the entire post-WW2 international order collapses, more even than any outcome in Ukraine,
because Denmark is a member of NATO. There are signs that this is the line which the UK and the EU are gearing up to defend. Starmer’s language this week in
defending Greenland’s sovereignty has been far less ambiguous than what he said about Venezuela, and the
joint statement he signed with several EU/NATO leaders on Tuesday was even more robust. In this case, unlike protesting about Venezuela, there is a possibility that words could make a difference: it’s just possible that even Trump will baulk at the enormity of what an annexation of Greenland would mean.
However, it is equally, if not more, likely that it will have no effect (the Tuesday statement certainly
had no immediate impact on US demands), and that likelihood increases if words are all there are. So, either way, words are emphatically not enough. They must be backed by actions and, as the very fact of there being a joint statement implies, those actions must involve both the UK and the EU. What is needed, not at some vague future date but
right now, is the rapid development of intense and close UK-EU cooperation on every facet of defence, security, and intelligence capability. The demand on Starmer should not be for him to make pointless and counter-productive rhetorical gestures about Venezuela, but to pursue this course of action as an overriding national priority.
Surrounded and dividedThat, inevitably, brings us back to Brexit, which has made such a course of action far more difficult for both the UK and the EU. The Venezuela attack is the
sharpest reminder yet of the geo-political folly of Brexit, which I discussed in detail most recently in
my last post of 2025. In particular, it underscores that we are now in an era where great powers
carve out spheres of influence based on brute force rather than any system of rules and rights. Hence there could hardly have been a more inane response than
Farage’s suggestion that the attack might “make China and Russia think twice”, since it will self-evidently
embolden them to grab control in their own spheres. That inanity was also a reminder of the utter disaster that would ensue were Farage ever to become Prime Minister.
Some compare this new era to the international relations of the Nineteenth Century: if so, one difference is that the UK is no longer amongst the great powers. Others suggest that the post-war rules-based international order never amounted to much, and the brute force of great powers persisted: if so, one difference is that the UK can no longer look to be within the protective umbrella of the US and instead, like the EU, is regarded as itself being a target for political interference,
as the US National Security Strategy makes clear. Brexit was always a strategic error for the UK but, as things have turned out, it also came at exactly the moment to make that error catastrophic.
In this context, the government’s baby-steps, such as joining Erasmus+ and speaking in increasingly positive terms
about “closer ties” with the EU, whilst welcome in themselves, are wholly inadequate to the situation of being squashed between two predatory super-powers. Meanwhile, the Brexitist opposition to even those steps, and the pro-Trump and
pro-Putin populist and far-right campaign to destabilize Britain from within, are ever-more obviously the activities of a Fifth Column.
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