Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it

Opinion  Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.…

Imagine we were to suffer an economic catastrophe in which our real incomes fall by 30%, which would be by far the greatest recession in modern times. The response, one might imagine, would be equally dramatic; there’d be a backlash against the government - very likely causing serious political unrest - and our politics would be dominated by the question of what caused the slump and what to do about it.

In fact, we don’t have to imagine such a disaster. It has actually happened. In the last 20 years real GDP per person has grown by just 0.6% a year compared to 2.3% per year in the previous 50 years. This means that our real incomes are indeed 30% lower than they would be if that trend had continued.

What we do have to imagine, however, is the reaction. This disaster does not dominate politics and the political class devotes remarkably little serious thought about what to do about it.

In fact, in some ways they actually seem to want us to be even poorer. The Home Office itself recently estimated (pdf) that the government’s proposals to restrict immigration flows “will have a downward impact on GDP”. Equally, there’s little interest in rejoining the single market despite an estimate (pdf) from Nick Bloom and colleagues that Brexit “reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%”*.

To someone of my age, this is puzzling. In our formative years, the main political issue was economic growth and how to improve it, and ideas that were considered “bad for the economy” were usually rejected, often with derision. Today, by contrast, voters and their representatives seem to actually want a weaker economy.

Our political feedback mechanisms are broken. In principle, bad events should trigger a reaction which corrects or at least ameliorates the damage. So, for example, the slump of the 1930s lead to the election in 1945 of a government devoted to maintaining full employment; the breakdown of the social democratic system in the 70s led to Thatcherism; the decay of public services in the 90s led to Labour’s election in 1997. Etc.

But there seems little such feedback now. Instead, the political class is content to wallow in our economic dysfunction.

Why?

Partly, it’s because we are like the (apocryphal) frog in a pan of water: we don’t notice gradual changes until it’s too late. This is exacerbated by a media bias: it reports upon salient events more than slow-moving processes so a gradual loss of prosperity is ignored in a way that a sudden one isn’t. And it’s also because we don’t have a Jim Bowen showing us what we could have won; we just can’t see the counterfactual world in which we are 40% better off.

But there’s more to it than this, factors that explain why politicans are not trying to make us richer.

One lies in that notorious shout at Anand Menon during the Brexit referendum campaign: “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.” People don’t see a link between aggregate economic growth and their own personal fortunes. And in a sense, they are right. Our personal income depends more upon idiosyncratic events than the state of the national economy: will you keep your job? Will you get a better one? Will you stay healthy? Good or bad GDP numbers tweak the odds of these only slightly: you can lose your job in a boom and get a good one in a recession.

And in fact there is a downside to economic growth. It is a process of creative destruction. And destruction means there’s a chance you’ll lose your job or that the longstanding local company that for years was a familiar landmark will disappear. Even if you will get a better job, this is disconcerting and unsettling. Stagnation is more comfortable.

What we have here is something common in social science - a form of the fallacy of composition: what’s true of any individual is not true for society as a whole. And so things that would help society as a whole are under-appreciated.

This is true for another reason, pointed out by Mancur Olson. The winners from better economic growth are the dispersed millions who might on average become 5-10% better off than they would otherwise be over ten or 20 years. No individual has much incentive to go to the cost and trouble of forming a lobby group to press for such a small and far-off gain. Losers from such policies, however, do have such incentive as their losses are concentrated among fewer people - and the fewer people there are, the easier they are to organize. So utilties can successfully press for high prices; incumbent companies can oppose stronger competition policy; land-owners can resist demands for higher taxes on land; lawyers and accountants can oppose tax simplification; and financiers generally don’t want anything that would increase real interest rates and so depress asset prices.

What’s more, serious efforts to raise growth would ask questions of management: why is it so bad, and how might we change it? Again, this would upset powerful people.

And so we have strong client groups that support the status quo of economic stagnation but few that can successfully press for pro-growth policies. One virtue of relaxing planning restrictions is that it is one of the few things that might improve growth whilst also pleasing a special interest group.

Promoting economic growth doesn’t just mean alienating powerful interests, though. A drawback to growth has always been that it makes other people richer, income being a positional good. This is especially difficult now because growth requires the government to help people the political class dislikes. The UK’s comparative advantage lies in part in higher education and the creative arts - industries staffed by liberal metropolitans rather than the older less educated people who still read newspapers and so constitute what politicians regard as target voters.

Worse still, a serious assault upon stagnation might require governments to reduce inequalities of wealth and power. Gabriel Zucman and colleagues have shown (pdf) that there is, in the long-run, “a strong positive association between equality and productivity.” This doesn’t mean that governments can raise productivity merely by taxing the rich more. It means instead having the sort of institutions that increase both equality and productivity such as education and training for all rather than just a few; good infrastructure and public services; stronger worker rights and unions so firms have to invest in raising productivity rather than simple sweat labour harder; and a democratic ethos (at least) in workplaces.

All this means that the political class has little incentive to think seriously about economic growth. Indeed, it has little incentive to think at all. The malefaction that is current affairs broadcasting has far more hours to fill than there are experts. The upshot is that the airwaves are occupied by know-nothings. And this further helps to skew the agenda away from economics: whereas it requires knowledge to talk about economics (or the welfare system or NHS etc) any fool can spout off about culture wars, and often does**. And so immigration and trans people dominate the agenda to the detriment of economics.

Which suits more people than merely dumbed-down TV and radio producers. Much of the political class would rather not ask questions about capitalism or challenge vested interests and would rather focus on immigrants instead. And stagnation helps them do this. It breeds reactionary politics partly because it fosters status anxiety, and people who look down want to punch down. Also, it creates a yearning for those better days in the past*** before immigrants arrived. And thirdly because stagnation closes pubs and shops and so reduces the sense of community and turns people towards the internet with its cranky right-wingers. In these ways better economic growth would threaten to put an end to the grift that is culture war politics. Why rock the boat?

And so we have a bad equilibrium. Instead of stagnation causing a desire for and interest in pro-growth policies, it actually strengthens the pressures on politicians to wallow in that stagnation.

The question is not therefore merely how to raise economic growth: any economist could give you half a dozen ideas. It’s: how can we create a public sphere in which politicians are incentivized to raise growth when this requires them to confront vested interests and the media?

But, but, but. To paraphrase Trotsky’s cliche, you might not be interested in economic growth, but economic growth is interested in you.

For one thing, a stagnant economy makes politics a zero-sum game. Without growth, better public services require less private consumption (unless you believe in the magic beans of higher public sector productivity). That comes with huge risks - not least of which being that shop and pub closures might further strengthen the far right.

And for another, economic growth has historically been a means of legitimating capitalist liberal democracies. For decades such polities have literally delivered the goods and the promise of doing so in the future. In a stagnant economy, this source of legitimation disappears.

There are therefore good reasons why sensible politicians for decades wanted to raise growth - because doing so avoids that most awkward question for them: socialism or barbarism?

* I’m sceptical about that estimate. A world in which capital spending was rising strongly after 2016 would probably be one in which interest rates were higher, thereby choking off some growth. And the idea that planning for Brexit distracted managers from raising productivity takes too rosy a view of their inclinations and abilities. Nevetheless, there can be no serious dispute that rejoining the single market would make us better off.

** Perhaps the rot began (or began to be evident) 30 years ago when Gordon Brown used the phrase “post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory” and the response was mockery rather than curiosity.

*** A recent Ipsos poll found that 63% of people say Britain was a happier place in 1975, perhaps forgetting the high inflation, strikes and pub bombings.

The conviction of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong is another hostile act. How can Britain ignore Beijing’s provocations and human rights abuses?

The UK pushed hard to secure the release of Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher and British citizen who was a leading light in Hong Kong’s brutally suppressed pro-democracy movement. So, too, did press freedom and human rights campaigners. But the Beijing-appointed high court judges in the former colony convicted him anyway, finding Lai guilty last week on fake charges of trying to “destabilise” the Chinese Communist party (CCP). For Xi Jinping, China’s dictator-emperor, there is no greater crime.

Protesting to China’s ambassador, the UK’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, condemned the trial as “politically motivated”. She’s right, of course – but her angry words will make no difference. Beijing’s contempt for Britain’s views is as painfully obvious as the UK’s weakness and indecision in the face of Chinese hubris. The breaking of its solemn promise to respect Hong Kong’s freedoms after the 1997 handover typifies the arrogance and untrustworthiness of Xi’s CCP.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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The Russian strategy of exporting chaos to provoke extremism only works if liberals succumb to cynicism and despair

I once spent an exasperating week showing a Russian friend around London. He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops – all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so I asked my friend if there was anything at all about Britain that impressed him. “The stability,” he said without hesitation. “You can feel the stability.”

That was a different world; the late 1990s. I don’t remember the year, but I remember knowing what my friend was talking about because I had felt the same culture shock in reverse when first visiting Russia.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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Is it the case, as many are suggesting, that the Brexit wind is starting to change or, in a different metaphor, that the tide has turned? It’s tempting to think so when seeing Ryan Bourne, one of the original ‘Economists for Brexit’, argue that the economic costs of Brexit are now undeniable (£). Admittedly, the piece is caveated and, admittedly, Bourne was hardly the most high-profile even of the rather exclusive club of economists who believed Brexit was a good idea. Still, such honesty from the advocates of Brexit is sufficiently rare to make it noteworthy. Meanwhile, Jeremy Warner, has recently written that “Brexit has been an unmitigated economic failure” (£). I may be wrong, but I don’t think Warner was ever an advocate of Brexit but, even so, it’s quite something for a senior business and economics commentator of the Telegraph, of all papers, to say such a thing.

Perhaps more striking was Kemi Badenoch’s quiet inclusion of Brexit in a list of recent economic “shocks”, with the implication that it had been a “foolish” policy. It was said almost in passing and it’s perfectly possible she didn’t understand the implications. Or perhaps, rather as happened with the Suez crisis, it is now seen as self-evident that Brexit is a mistake. But, if so, it is simply not enough to pass over it as if it had been some unfortunate accident upon which it is better not to dwell. It needs to be openly acknowledged and its consequences addressed. Moreover, even if the Brexit tide is turning then, to mangle several metaphors, it is doing so at too glacial a pace to avoid the juggernaut of change in the international order, and the urgent choices this is now imposing on the UK.

Customary confusions

One piece of evidence cited for the ‘turning tide’ thesis is the rash of speculation that the government is considering ‘rejoining the customs union’. Seasoned Brexit-watchers will appreciate the weight of exhaustion and depression carried in the scare quotes I put around those words. For as I and many others have been trying to explain ever since 2016, Britain cannot join, rejoin (or, as used to be discussed, stay in) the customs union without being a member of the EU. What might be possible would be to agree to be in a customs union with the EU, in the way, though not necessarily on the same terms, that Turkey has agreed with the EU. This distinction and its implications have recently been re-explained by Joel Reland of UKICE.

This isn’t just a matter of being pedantic about terminology. I understand why some people might use ‘rejoining the customs union’ as a shorthand term. But the way that it is still being used by senior politicians and journalists is indicative of the way that, almost ten years since the referendum, too many of them still don’t really understand what Brexit means. Yet even that doesn’t fully explain the exhaustion and depression, because what goes with the lack of understanding is a sense that we’re still casting around for ways to ‘leave the EU without really leaving the EU’. In relation to customs, I’ve lost count of the number of possible arrangements that have been floated over the years but my post of May 2018 captures some of that dismal story. So it may be not so much a matter of the ‘tide turning’ as yet another iteration of its ebb and flow.

Either way, a Guardian report last weekend suggested that a customs union is being actively, albeit informally, discussed within government, and that the elevation of Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds to the Cabinet might give added impetus to this discussion (yet, a few days later, he poured scorn on the idea). Meanwhile, the Mail angrily reported that Justice Secretary David Lammy “refused seven times to rule out” rejoining the customs union (which, typically of the paper, it not only misdescribes as such, but also misdescribes as “reversing Brexit”), as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting and, according to an angrily-headlined non-story in the Express, Rachel Reeves. There’s certainly some evidence that voters, especially Labour voters, would welcome it, but Keir Starmer has said he is not “planning” any such move, and most Labour MPs abstained on a LibDem-initiated parliamentary vote this week.

Customary questions

That this vote was held reflected the fact that a customs union has long been advocated by the LibDems, whilst Labour MPs’ abstentions reflected that it would cross one of their party’s high-profile manifesto ‘red lines’ (although if that ever comes to be breached then, ironically, the very inaccuracy of the term provides a sliver of wriggle room, since the government could, truthfully if tricksily, say that it was seeking a ‘bespoke customs treaty’ with the EU). If breaching that red line is now under internal discussion within the Labour Party, the reasons are obvious. In a general way, the government is desperate to boost economic growth. In a more specific way, I’ve several times made the obvious point that Labour’s long silence on the damage of Brexit was because they could hardly break it without also proposing a viable solution to it. So the government’s recent overt references to the costs of Brexit are inevitably forcing it now to consider such solutions.

However, whether a customs union would be much of a solution is questionable. Whilst the broadly negative economic effect of Brexit is indeed, as Bourne accepts, undeniable, the specific costs attributable to being outside the customs union have, so far as I know, never been disaggregated [1]. Moreover, the benefits of a customs treaty with the EU would depend on its terms and extensiveness. The Guardian report refers to unspecified House of Commons analysis estimating that “rejoining the customs union” could increase GDP by 2.2%. However, I think this is highly unlikely, if we take as accurate the OBR figure of GDP being 4% lower in the long run than it would otherwise be (admittedly, as I discussed recently, other estimates put the figure higher). For it is implausible that the costs of being outside the customs union, compared with the other main component of the costs, which come from being outside the single market, are half, or even close to half, of the total.

In fact, as trade expert Sam Lowe points out, the only real benefit of a customs union is to remove the rule of origin requirements for tariff-free trade in goods with the EU which exist within the existing UK-EU trade agreement (i.e. because, potentially, the entirety of goods trade with the EU would be tariff-free rather than being, as at present, conditional upon meeting rules of origin requirements). That would be very welcome for some products and industries, but the overall economic benefit would be relatively modest. On the other hand, it is surely the case that the costs of being outside the customs union exceed the benefits, which Starmer suggested at PMQs this week to be those coming from having an independent trade policy, since those benefits are nugatory (see Table 8, page 20, in link).

Customary disarray

In any case, it is by no means obvious how seriously we should take these latest rumours and counter-rumours, which are typical of a government in considerable disarray. Admittedly, some of the recent criticisms it has faced have been unfair, as shown by the way that the accusations that Rachel Reeves “lied” (£) ahead of the budget have unwound under scrutiny and calls for her to be investigated for breaking the ministerial code have been rejected by the independent ethics advisor. Likewise, the furious accusations made a few weeks ago that the government, and ‘Number 10’ in particular, blocked the prosecution of the ‘China spy case’ have been shown to be false by the report of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. And some of the attacks are simply ludicrous, such as the manufactured outrage about Reeves having ‘only’ been the winner of the 1993 ‘under-14 title for the British Women’s Chess Association Girls Championship’ rather than the ‘British girls’ under-14 champion’.

These and other stories are undoubtedly contributing to the impression that the government is useless and dishonest, and its failure to counter that impression effectively could itself be held against it. But it’s not necessary to indulge in false or unfair accusations to sustain the claim of governmental disarray and, in particular, the claim that it lacks any sense of coherent strategy or purpose.

It’s not just the chaotic leaks and hints about the budget. It’s the way that policies and initiatives appear or disappear at random. Examples include refusing to lift the ‘two child benefit’ cap and then embracing it as a central part of the government’s “moral mission”. Or suddenly floating the Digital ID Card scheme as a “priority”, without any details of how it would work, and then delaying even the consultation about it. Or, most recently, and again out of the blue, announcing a major policy to restrict trial by jury but, again, with no apparent idea about how or when this will be implemented. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits or demerits of any of these policies: my point is simply that they come from nowhere and, very often, go nowhere, or get reversed.

Customary absence of strategy

So within this context it’s reasonable to be sceptical about whether the latest ‘customs union’ rumours will amount to anything (personally, I don’t think they will), and that’s all the more so because within the specific policy area of relations with the EU the government is also woefully lacking in strategic coherence or consistency. This absence of strategy has been evident from the outset, and I wrote a detailed post in August 2024 about why it is a problem. That problem has become even more obvious since. For example, we have seen the government’s refusal to countenance a Youth Mobility Scheme, then to embrace an “ambitious” version of it, and currently to be mired in reportedly sour negotiations with the EU about how extensive it will be (£).

That sourness would appear to be replicated across the wider ‘reset’ negotiations, and these have now failed as regards the UK’s possible participation in SAFE, the EU defence loan fund, apparently because the price of doing so was deemed too high by the government (and, it seems, set so high because of France’s protectionism of its defence industry). Strangely, Thomas-Symonds commented that the UK “will still be able to participate in projects through SAFE on third-country terms”, as if this represented some kind of partial success rather than being the definition of what failure meant. Meanwhile, the January 2026 deadlines for agreeing linkages on Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) are looming and for all the talk from both the UK and the EU of wanting to move “swiftly” on this and other reset issues, there has been little sign of urgency (though there is, admittedly not for the first time, a report that agreement on UK participation in Erasmus+ is imminent).

That is understandable from an EU perspective. The issue of post-Brexit relations with the UK is no longer the priority it was during the Article 50 negotiations, and the broad contours of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement work fairly well for the EU. It may be that the latest statements from the Trump regime, discussed below, will create more urgency for both the UK and the EU as regards cooperation, if not trade. But, even if so, as I’ve pointed out many times before there is very little sense for the EU in agreeing to substantially deeper relations when there is every prospect of a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government backtracking in a very few years’ time.

However, that possibility (both of there being such a government, and of it being able to backtrack) is not something independent of the present government’s conduct. That’s obviously true in a general way, because if this government were to perform better and be more popular, it would have a better chance of re-election. But it is also true in the narrow sense of this government’s EU strategy. For one of the things which such a strategy could deliver would be to begin the process of changing the domestic political narrative about the EU, and to begin to embed that narrative in a way that would make it less vulnerable to being undermined by future governments. To be more specific, for all that there has been some improvement in the tone of the UK-EU relationship under Labour, the domestic narrative remains one of suspicious, sullen instrumentalism. This in turn is what has made the reset negotiations a sour battle over budget contributions.

Changing the narrative

In this sense, even if the present noises about seeking a customs union do translate into government policy it will do nothing to change that narrative. It still positions the relationship as one of instrumental calculation just as, looking back, was the case throughout the UK’s membership. If there is to be a ‘reset’ of that decades-long narrative then it needs to encompass much more than simply regarding Brexit as a ‘mistake’ because of its economic costs (although that is true) and become a positive affirmation of European identity.

I don’t by this mean some starry-eyed idealism. The EU has, since its very earliest origins, been about a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of cooperation, not least as a vehicle for preventing its members going to war. For the UK, now, that means a pragmatic recognition of the desirability of sovereignty-sharing and of the realities of regionalism (in fact, if an UK-EU customs union comes to pass then its main value could be to symbolise that recognition). For whilst it’s true that sovereignty-sharing can bring with it economic advantages, that is neither the sole nor the deepest motivation. The deepest motivation is that of national strategy.

In a post in January 2019, I argued that Brexit was a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represented an unprecedented failure of British statecraft. It was not simply a bad strategy, but was the abandonment of any strategy at all. I still think that is the best post on this blog, or at least the one which best-articulates why I was, and still am, convinced that Brexit was a national catastrophe. In summary, the argument was that Brexit was based on a failure to understand the regionalization of economics and the multi-polar nature of international relations.

I obviously couldn’t predict the events that have happened since, but they have amply justified that analysis. I mean, in particular, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the second Trump presidency, and the continuing rise of autocratic China, as well as some of the effects of the pandemic on international supply chains. Over and over again in the course of these events it has been clear that the UK’s interests and values are substantially aligned with the EU’s, on all sorts of international issues apart from Ukraine, such as climate change, even as Brexit has severed the institutional connection between them. And, just in the last week, this has been forcefully re-emphasised by the publication of the US National Security Strategy.

Trump’s "declaration of political war"

This extraordinary and alarming document is, as Bill Emmott, the Chair of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, puts it “a declaration of [political] war against European democracy and the European way of life”. Brexit notwithstanding, the document makes no clear distinction between the UK and the EU [2] in terms of its endorsement of all the now-standard critiques of European countries that spew out daily from the American ethno-nationalist right. These include echoing the ‘great replacement theory’, the racist conspiracy theory that there is a concerted attempt to ‘replace indigenous Europeans’ (implicitly meaning white people) with ‘non-European immigrants’ (implicitly meaning non-whites, and especially Muslims), such that Europe faces imminent “civilizational erasure”, whilst offering active support to populist ethno-nationalist parties in European countries.

As readers of this blog probably know, Britain in general, and London and other large cities in particular, are now routinely depicted in America as crime-ridden hell-holes, subject to Sharia Law, where anyone who has the temerity to complain is immediately imprisoned on the personal diktat of Keir Starmer. It is insane but, aided and abetted by similarly insane diatribes from British populists, it is not just believed by many Americans but, with this strategy document, has now effectively been endorsed by the American state. It’s true that, when reading it, one should be aware that Trump is notoriously inconsistent, but most of the document echoes his and his allies’ longstanding views and commitments. That includes the way that the report is relentlessly pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, making it unsurprising that it was hailed by Moscow as largely aligned with Putin’s own strategic vision.

Thus, if it was not obvious before, there is now an open set of alliances and affinities between Trump, Putin and European, including British, populists. Equally obvious, and underscored by this week’s meeting between Farage and the Rassemblement National leader Jordan Bardella, are the alliances and affinities between Reform and other European populists.

Alarming as this is, it could also be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government. It’s becoming extremely unlikely that the US polity, or the ‘global order’, will ever return to the pre-Trump era even when Trump himself departs. That world has passed. This means that the already-apparent strategic mistake of Brexit has now become an imminent crisis. Any fantasy of ‘nimble’ Britain using its post-Brexit sovereignty to thread its way around the big power blocs, making selective accommodations with each of them, is now utterly redundant.

This doesn’t mean that rejoining – or more accurately joining – the EU is suddenly going to come on the agenda for either the UK or the EU. The road to that is long and unclear. But it could mean something like the course advocated this week by Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who chairs the Labour Movement for Europe. She proposes a thorough official investigation of the impact of Brexit; a more urgent and extensive, but less instrumental, approach to the UK-EU reset; and open parliamentary debates on the entire issue. Within this, she calls for the government to “forget red lines” but also for pro-Europeans to recognize that “rejoin is, right now, an impossibility”. In short, she is calling for openness, honesty and realism about Brexit and, without endorsing every word of the article, it is hard to disagree that this is precisely what has been lacking since 2016 (if not earlier).

Picking sides

Creasy is another of the voices who, like those with which I began this post, see the present moment as one where, as she puts it, “a window of opportunity to change course may be opening”, partly for the reasons of national strategy just alluded to: “not just because we want better trade but because, in a world shaped by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Britain and Europe need each other more than ever.” I’ve written in that past about this new global divide, and how it has rendered Brexit an even more obvious strategic mistake, but the new US National Security Strategy clarifies what is at stake.

As Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times explains, it:

“… makes clear that there is now a battle under way between two different versions of the west — which pits the US and Europe against each other. The Trump administration view of “western civilisation” is based on race, Christianity and nationalism. The European version is a liberal view founded on democracy, human rights and the rule of law, including international law.”

But this moment is not just one that clarifies international relations, it also clarifies the nature of UK domestic political choices. More than ever before it is obvious that Reform and much of the Conservative Party are completely aligned with the Trump view of ‘western civilization’, which makes the next general election crucial. For the real test of whether the Brexit ‘tide has turned’ will be whether the electorate – now, as Peter Kellner argues, a very different one to that of 2016 – has learned the lesson of referendum or whether it repeats its folly by endorsing Brexitism in 2029.

That is still some way off but here, too, the increasing scrutiny that Farage and his party, to his fury and consternation, are facing might suggest that the tide is turning. What is less in evidence is much sign that Starmer’s Labour understand the epochal choice which is underway and that it is going to have to pick a side, and quickly. Or, more alarmingly, the apparently growing influence of ‘Blue Labour’ in Number 10 means it will understand that there is such a choice – and will pick the wrong side.

 

Notes

[1] There was a government estimate in 2018 that being out of the customs union would reduce GDP by 1%, but this was a forecast based on broad, generic models. What I haven’t seen is a post-Brexit estimate of the costs of being outside the customs union in the light of the actually-agreed Trade and Cooperation Agreement and its subsequent impact.

[2] The strategy document does talk of “Britain and Ireland” as distinct from “continental Europe”, but as Ireland is an EU member this seems to be a geographical rather than a political distinction. It is also clear from Trump’s subsequent diatribe about both Paris and London (and especially London’s Mayor) that when he talks of ‘Europe’ he does not differentiate between the EU and the UK. So much for being "Mr Brexit". So much for Brexit, for that matter.

 

As the scheduled date of the next post would be Boxing Day, this will be the last post of this year. I will resume on Friday 9 January 2026.

A lot of you are confused by politics today. One reason for this is that the language politicians use can be misleading. Here, in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce and William Donaldson, is part of a dictionary which might help.

Anonymous briefing (n). A claim which needn’t be burdened with any evidence.

Centrist (n). One who deplores the rise of the far right whilst applauding the economic and political conditions which caused it.

Churchill, Winston (n). A mythological character who bears no relation to any person living or dead. See also: Thatcher, Margaret.

Classical liberal (n). One who professed the virtues of free trade, until he realized he preferred Trump and Brexit to economic theory.

Committed (adj). To have an opinion which will soon change. See also: support, full.

Confident (adj). Overconfident.

Confidence (n). An attribute which its possessors believe to be a substitute for work or learning. See Johnson, Boris; Badenoch, Kemi.

Conservatism (n). The search for a moral or intellectual defence of inequality.

Corruption (n). A practice which, we are asked to believe, is confined solely to poorer or southern European countries.

Country, the (n). The rich.

Credible (adj). A candidate able to win the support of media opinion, though often lacking other abilities.

Debate (n). An exchange of lies and half-truths for the benefit of posh white men.

Fiscal rules (n). Short-lived inventions intended to placate lobby correspondents.

Forecast (n). An account of events which will not happen.

Free market (n). An economic institution to be inflicted upon others. See bankers; Bezos, Jeff.

Free speech (n). The entitlement to express an opinion which is not worth hearing.

Immigration (n). The scapegoat for our social and economic problems.

Impartial (adj). Indifferent between truth and falsehood.

Impunity (n). One of the virtues of the rich.

Independent (adj). One who acts in favour of regressive vested interests. See Ofwat, Ofcom, Ofgem, Prescott, Michael.

Incentive (n). A hand-out to people one likes, as a disincentive is a punishment of those one doesn’t.

Iron-clad (adj). Slow, inflexible, outdated and liable to sink. See fiscal rules.

Integrity (n). Dishonesty.

Journalism (n). Honest and truthful accounts of events insofar as these are compatible with the prejudices of billionaire cranks.

Judgement (n). Mistake.

Legitimate concerns (n). Racism.

Libertarian (n). A narcissist who wants freedom for himself but not others.

Lobby correspondent (n). One who mistakes gossip for politics.

Moderate (n). A fanatic who supports the status quo whatever it happens to be.

National interest (n). One’s own interest.

Patriot (n). Traitor. See Farage, Nigel.

People, the (n). That fraction of the population who are old white racists. See also England, middle; wall, red.

Pro-growth (adj). Pro-business, or at least those businesses that lobby the best.

Prudence (n). Opposition to public spending, even when it pays for itself.

Public inquiry (n). A means of employing lawyers to prevent meaningful decisions.

Public opinion (n). That governs politics, except when it challenges the interests of the rich.

Reform (v,t). the act of making something worse.

Reform UK (n). See patriot, legitimate concerns.

Social democracy (n). The triumph of hope over experience.

Social media (n). A source of racism and hate, to be distinguished from conventional media which has always been truthful and civilized.

Social science (n). Something of which politicians must be ignorant.

Tough choice (n). A decision to impoverish those who are already poor, rarely accompanied by evidence that it was indeed tough.

Trade-off (n). A properly tough choice, which must always be avoided. See dividend, defence; runway, third, Sizewell C.

Unaffordable (adj). Any tax or government spending one disapproves of. See also: burden.

Vox pop (n). A survey of elderly people in a market square on a weekday afternoon, undertaken by one unacquainted with selection bias.

Woke (n). A belief that one should be polite to others, which is now regarded as a hateful ideology.