The leaks to the media over the weekend were quite correct. Yesterday morning, London time (yesterday evening in Australia), Keir Starmer stood outside number ten Downing Street to announce his resignation as prime minister, just two days short of the tenth anniversary of the morning that one of his predecessors, David Cameron, performed the same task on the same spot.
In the interim, another four prime ministers have come and gone, making Starmer the sixth in a decade – a record unmatched for almost two hundred years. Each departure had its own unique features, but all of them were heavily influenced by the rise of far-right politics (often and misleadingly called “populism”), which in turn was set off by the event that triggered Cameron’s resignation: the narrow victory the previous day of the “Leave” side in the Brexit referendum.
Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, with a vote of 51.9%, was not the sole cause of the mess in which the world finds itself today. There were already alarming signs of the reawakening of demons that had lain dormant for a long time. And no sane person would say that the world before 2016 was in a state of perfection; there were many problems and many injustices that were always going to feed discontent.
Nonetheless, it is striking just how much seemed to flow from that one June day. It is the one unavoidable milepost on the road. Before it, things look manageable; after, they look like they are on a slippery slope downwards. Without Brexit, Donald Trump’s narrow victory later the same year looks less likely; without that, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 becomes harder to imagine.
And we know, in turn, what the main drivers of Brexit were. It was an expression of narrow, xenophobic nationalism, driven by a desire to “take back control”, not of some abstract sovereignty (voting is not an abstract exercise) but of decision-making in one particular sphere: the exclusion of foreigners.
The nativists, however, were not numerous enough to achieve victory on their own. The referendum result depended critically on two other groups. One was a section of free traders and free-marketers who focused on the EU as a bureaucratic, protectionist nightmare and dreamt of creating in its place a Britain open to the world, a north Atlantic Singapore. The other group, their mirror image, was a section of the unreconstructed left, who focused on the EU as an enforcer of neoliberal capitalism and followed Tony Benn’s dream of a socialist and isolationist Britain.
Each group had got hold of part of the truth. The EU really is committed to something like free-market capitalism, and it does pursue that goal by crazily bureaucratic means, often at the expense of poorer countries on the outer. But both were deluded fools to think that Brexit would further their aims. A movement driven by xenophobes was never going to produce either a free-market paradise or a socialist utopia; it was going to produce an impoverished economy shot through with hatred of immigrants. And it did.
Andy Burnham, Starmer’s presumptive successor, seems to understand the problem, at least to the extent of confronting the far right rather than making concessions to it – although he has walked back his previous support for rejoining the EU. Starmer never seemed to realise that appeasement was a losing strategy; confronted with a campaign of political assassination, his instinct was to temporise and make concessions rather than make a stand on principle
Whether Burnham has the skills to lead a successful resistance is another question. The media are already full of competing assessments of his strengths and weaknesses, and no doubt there will be many more to come. (On the more critical side, this from Ian Leslie is very good.) But the revolt from the far right that found its first notable expression in Brexit is no longer a matter for Britain alone, and it’s not just Britain that needs to find leaders who can face down the enemies of civilisation.
The World is Not Enough 