New Statesman: The rise of the new Toryism

In the multiparty electoral systems of Europe, formerly dominant conservative parties have yielded ground to the right. Everywhere politics is trying to deal with what Tony Judt called “one long scream of resentment” and everywhere the pivotal question is immigration. The reverberations began in February 2000 when Jorg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party of Austria entered the government. Its nasty rallying cry has become sadly common: to be against Überfremdung (over-foreignisation). Today, the National Front has replaced the Republicans as the repository of the right in France.[...]

The Conservative Party is not far behind. Go back to the 1951 UK general election, won by Winston Churchill. If at the time you had known the income and the occupational status of a voter, you would have been able to predict who they voted for. By 2019 the predictive power of social class had disappeared entirely. Somewhere hidden in his surface clowning, Boris Johnson has absorbed this point and responded to it. To anyone schooled in the more doctrinal left, the British Conservative Party can seem versatile to the point of emptiness. It is a party that has gone from a split over free trade in 1846 to late-Victorian imperial preference, to tariff protectionism under Stanley Baldwin, to rampant free-market capitalism under Margaret Thatcher, to a departure from the single market she helped to create. [...]

Johnson’s brand of conservatism might be best understood as an English Gaullism. Serge Bernstein’s definition of Gaullism – neither left nor right, affirming sovereignty over the nostrums of class, a strong state and exceptionalism in foreign policy – sounds much like Johnson’s peculiar adaptation of conservatism. The closest to the usual tradition you can get is to say he is responding to circumstances that, as Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, “give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect”.

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The Guardian: How the right’s radical thinktanks reshaped the Conservative party

Libertarian thinktanks in the US, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have had this sort of close relationship with incoming Republican administrations for years, furnishing them with staff and readymade policies. Thinktanks – non-governmental organisations that research policies with the aim of shaping government – have long been influential in British politics, too, on both left and right, but the sheer number of connections between Johnson’s cabinet and ultra free market thinktanks was something new. In the period immediately before the Brexit referendum and in the years since, a stream of prominent British politicians and campaigners, including Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, have flown to the US to meet with thinktanks such as the AEI and the Heritage Foundation, often at the expense of those thinktanks, seeking out ideas, support and networking opportunities. Meanwhile, US thinktanks and their affiliates, which are largely funded by rightwing American billionaires and corporate donations, have teamed up with British politicians and London-based counterparts such as the IEA, the Legatum Institute and the Initiative for Free Trade, to help write detailed proposals for what the UK’s departure from the EU, and its future relationships with both the EU and the US, should look like, raising questions about foreign influence on British politics. [...]

One key Atlas strategy involves using the media to shape the political debate. By encouraging the creation of more and more thinktanks – a never-ending production line of new “institutes”, “centres” and “foundations”, whose acronyms blur into each other – the network can generate a “constant river of commentary” from its experts, says Andrew Simms, a veteran of environmental thinktanks who has often debated against members of Atlas-affiliated organisations. A predominantly rightwing British media have been happy to give them space. This gives the impression of widespread support for what may be minority or fringe points of view. The thinktanks’ contribution to the post-referendum Brexit debate was a turbo-charged version of what they have long done on issues such as tax and climate, where they have disputed the scientific consensus, argues Simms. “It’s a belief system. They go very ‘big picture’ to shift the tide of opinion.” [...]

We asked Oliver Letwin, the former Conservative minister who helped lead the Tory backbench rebellion against a no-deal Brexit, how influential he thought the free market thinktanks were. He said that occasionally they had shifted the political terrain, but mostly the dynamic worked the other way round. Earlier in his career, he recalled, he had commissioned some of the UK ones to write pamphlets – but only to justify what he had already decided to do: “One alights magpie-like on these, if they tend to your argument. But 95% of the reports they produce are just junk.” He doubted they had played much role in Brexit policy. Why, then, did he think so many Conservative politicians had made trips to the US thinktanks? He seemed baffled by this. “Do they? I have no idea.” [...]

“The clique that think about Europe and nothing else now dominate every aspect of the party,” said Margot James, the former Conservative digital and culture minister. “It’s just different to the one I joined.” When James entered parliament in 2010, she became a member of the Free Enterprise Group and went to IEA events, but eventually found the thinktank’s views too rigidly ideological. James now feels that a number of MPs have adopted the IEA’s ideas “lock, stock and barrel” and that Johnson had surrounded himself with “dogmatic small-state” conservatives. “Oh, there are people at No 10 who would honestly make your hair stand on end,” she said.

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TLDR News: Tactical Voting in the Leadership Election

Throughout the Conservative leadership contest theirs been speculation that candidates have encouraged their supporters to vote tactically. With the final two candidates selected we look back over the process and examine if there really been tactical voting going on.

Metro News: Past of top Brexiteers comes back to haunt them on massive billboards

Giant posters have emerged showing previous quotes and promises of prominent Brexit politicians. 

Pro-Remain group Led By Donkeys put up the billboards around Dover to remind people of what our MPs said.

The group said: ‘If they want us to trust their judgment as we enter the choppy waters of Brexit it’s right that we remind ourselves of their record.’ 

The new posters include quotes from arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, Prime Minister Theresa May, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox.  

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Independent: An unexpected new group, Brexiteers against Brexit, threatens Theresa May’s plan

We have gone through the looking-glass to a world in which Philip Hammond, the chancellor and leading Remainer, said this morning we would be better off outside the EU, while a new movement of Brexiteers against Brexit has sprung up to argue, in effect, that we might as well stay in the EU.[...]

The prime minister and her small band of loyalists, now reinforced by another Remainer-for-Brexit, Amber Rudd, will argue that the backstop would be “mutually uncomfortable”. The UK government wouldn’t like the European Court of Justice having a say over parts of the Northern Ireland economy; while EU27 governments think British, especially Northern Irish, companies would have an unfair advantage because they would not be bound enough by EU law. [...]

Then there is the option of postponing Brexit while we have another referendum. Johnson and Raab ought to vote for that, but they won’t, and I still don’t think there are enough pro-EU MPs who would back it if they could have May’s deal instead. Once a final-say referendum has been defeated, the only options left would be May’s deal or leaving without a deal, and we know which way most MPs ought to go on that, even if we can’t be sure they will.

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The Guardian: For hard-right revolutionaries, Brexit is cover for a different end

The vultures circle a wounded prime minister, who is attacked by the hordes of extremists in her party while beset by new inconvenient facts daily exposing the damage Brexit can do. Look, the British army is preparing for the worst: emergency troops are at the ready. Operation Temperer, which usually provides soldiers for terrorist attacks, is now ordered to make 10,000 soldiers available to keep order on the streets and in shops, and to distribute emergency medicines in case of a no-deal crash-out. [...]

What few realise is that we are living through a revolution that has been a long time brewing among Tory party entryists. Those clawing to dethrone Theresa May are of a different ilk, only just within a recognisable Tory penumbra. Infiltrators, bent on destroying from within the party that harbours them, inhabit another planet from Heath, Clarke or Heseltine – but nor are they Thatcher’s children, either. Leaving Europe is only a part of their revolutionary project, a means not an end. Because they are revolutionaries, the more dramatic the break and the wilder the chaos, the better. They are bent on the creative destruction of a stagnant old order, so as to plough up the ground for a fertile new radical right beginning. Tax-haven Singapore beckons. [...]

Their seminal work in 2012 was Britannia Unchained, written with other 2010 young turks, Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Chris Skidmore. They belong to the much larger – 40 or so – Free Enterprise Group of MPs, sponsored by the Institute of Economic Affairs, which handles their media. (The IEA is under investigation by the Charity Commission after a Guardian/Greenpeace investigation into US cash for ministerial access and Brexit campaigning.) [...]

This cadre is so much more extreme than Thatcherism that they iconoclastically dismiss her era. “The last 30 years of public debate have been dominated by leftwing thinking,” says their book, which gained notoriety for its most famous line: “British workers are the worst idlers in the world” who “prefer a lie-in to hard work”. With that, they blamed low UK productivity on the workforce, not on a failure to invest. [...]

Raab says no deal would be a “manageable situation”. Yes, they would find it useful. Just as David Cameron and George Osborne used the cover of the great crash to roll out their state-shrinking agenda, so Raab and his Free Enterprise Group would use Brexit havoc to take a yet more radical axe to the state.

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CityLab: Britain Finally Has a Brexit Deal. Everyone Hates It.

The Pro-leave campaign was initially fueled by bullish self-confidence: It presented a vision of a Britain poised to resume its rightful place as a world-straddling superpower. Figures like Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson assured voters that, thanks to Britain’s economic might, the E.U. would swiftly fall into line to broker a favorable deal, desperate to ensure that we kept on buying its goods at high volume. We were fed fantastical visions of a buccaneering, neo-imperial nation that would reject complicated entanglements with our European neighbors and reinforce muscular global trade links with states in the former empire. These states, it was assumed, would jump at the chance to rekindle closer economic relations with their former exploiter. [...]

It’s not just that these assertions were unfounded. They showed a fundamental overestimation of Britain’s power and prestige, of its ability to bend other states to its will. The E.U. has not as yet capitulated to a single meaningful demand from a British government that has frequently looked weak and confused. [...]

This lack of realism on behalf of the pro-Brexit camp has been accompanied by a staggering ignorance of the world in which Britain orbits. Over the last 28 months, we have heard a Northern Ireland Secretary admit that, before taking office, she didn’t know that people in the province voted along sectarian lines. We have seen an MP who thought all U.K. citizens were eligible for Irish passports (in fact available only by Irish birth, descent or marriage). This month, Brexit secretary Dominic Raab (who resigned this morning) revealed that he had only recently discovered the importance of the port of Dover—Britain’s main access point to France—for international trade.[...]

But anyone familiar with the brutal way the E.U. has treated Greece since the financial crisis will not see it as an inherently ineffectual organization. It is a union, one whose ability to keep rank in a crisis has proved a painful, surprising lesson to Brexiters in love with the idea of going it alone.

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The New York Review of Books: How Brexit Broke Up Britain

But that’s not actually what Brexit is about. The real agenda of the Hard Brexiteers is not, in this sense, about taking back control; it is about letting go of control. For people like Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, the dream is not of a change in which regulation happens, but of a completion of the deregulating neoliberal project set in motion by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The Brexit fantasy is of an “open” and “global” Britain, unshackled from EU regulation, that can lower its environmental, health, and labor standards and unleash a new golden age of buccaneering hyper-capitalism. Again, this is a perfectly coherent (if repellent) agenda. But it is not what most of those who voted for Brexit think it is supposed to be. And this gap makes it impossible to say what “the British” want—they want contradictory things.

The second question is who is supposed to be taking control: Who, in other words, are “the people” to whom power is supposedly being returned? Here we find the other thing that dare not speak its name: English nationalism. Brexit is in part a response to a development that has been underway since the turn of the century. In reaction to the Belfast Agreement of 1998 that created a new political space in Northern Ireland and the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 that did the same for another part of the UK, there has been a rapid change in the way English people see their national identity. Increasingly, they are not British, but English. This resurgent identity has not been explicitly articulated by any mainstream party and surveys have shown a growing sense of English alienation from the center of London government in Westminster and Whitehall. Brexit, which is overwhelming an English phenomenon, is in part an expression of this frustration. In Anthony Barnett’s blunt and pithy phrase from his 2017 book The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America’s Trump, “Unable to exit Britain, the English did the next-best thing and told the EU to fuck off.”

There is stark and overwhelming evidence that the English people who voted for Brexit do not, on the whole, care about the United Kingdom and in particular do not care about that part of it called Northern Ireland. When asked in the recent “Future of England” survey whether “the unravelling of the peace process in Northern Ireland” is a “price worth paying” for Brexit that allows them to “take back control,” fully 83 percent of Leave voters and 73 percent of Conservative voters in England agree that it is. This is not, surely, mere mindless cruelty; it expresses a deep belief that Northern Ireland is not “us,” that what happens “over there” is not “our” responsibility. Equally, in the Channel 4 survey, asked how they would feel if “Brexit leads to Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom and joining the Republic of Ireland,” 61 percent of Leave voters said they would be “not very concerned” or “not at all concerned.”

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The Atlantic: Britain Is Rushing to Seal a Brexit Deal Few Support

May needs at least 320 lawmakers to back her deal in a final vote for it to pass. Without a parliamentary majority or a unified party behind her, it’s estimated May can only count on as many as 235 party loyalists, as well as four to five Labour lawmakers. Those who have already pledged to vote against her deal include a group of as many as 40 Hard-Brexit Conservatives, a majority of Labour lawmakers, as well as the SNP (35 lawmakers), Liberal Democrats (12), Plaid Cymru (four), and the Greens (one). [...]

Though May appears to have avoided the high-profile cabinet resignations that have plagued these negotiations, a figure who could be key to the deal’s success in the days and weeks ahead is Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, the prime minister’s pick to usher the deal through to its final phase after Davis’s resignation over the summer. A committed Brexiteer, Raab has been among the most vocal in cabinet against a deal that risks keeping the U.K. closely aligned with the EU. If he is able to accept a provision to maintain some regulatory and customs alignment with the bloc to maintain the status quo at the Irish border, there is a chance others will too. [...]

Ultimately, however, the fate of May’s plan won’t be decided by cabinet, but by parliamentary calculus. Conservative Brexiteer Peter Bone warned the prime minister in the House of Commons on Wednesday that if reports of the draft deal’s contents are true, the agreement could be dead on arrival. “You are not delivering the Brexit people voted for,” he said, “and today you will lose the support of many Conservative MPs and millions of voters across the country.”

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The Guardian: Has nobody told Dominic Raab that Britain is an island?

In July 2016, on the eve of his appointment as secretary of state for Brexit, David Davis predicted that the whole thing would be a doddle. Brussels would cater to Britain’s needs and the prime minister would simultaneously negotiate “a free trade area massively larger than the EU”. Within a year, Davis had changed his tune. It was complicated, he conceded. In June 2017, he told an audience of business leaders that the intricacies of the negotiations “make the Nasa moonshot look quite simple”. In July 2018, Davis resigned. [...]

Last night, at a tech industry event, Raab admitted that his grasp of the detail had been upgraded with some salient facts – such as the importance of the Channel to commerce with Europe. “I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this,” he said. “But if you look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.”[...]

A remain-supporting former cabinet minister once told me of frustration in dealing with pro-leave ministers in the early months of the May government. When presented with technical Brexit-related issues in their departments, the true believers would cry foul, saying obstacles were being blown out of proportion, or that the real problem was a lack of will and the solution was more faith. Thus the ludicrous situation arose where the people most seriously engaged in trying to imagine a way forward – the prime minister and the chancellor – had both voted remain. David Davis was the exception, since his job allowed no ducking of difficult questions. He had to confront facts and, when he resisted, the facts won.

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The Guardian: Britain’s arrogant attempts to hoodwink the EU have sacrificed all trust

There is a reason why Britain is being dragged kicking and screaming from the backstop to the withdrawal agreement. Since the start of this process, our government has confirmed every European fear and British stereotype. The UK has sought to divide and rule, bypassing the European commission and playing member states off against one another; ceaselessly demanded unique privileges unavailable to either members or non-members; and continued to insist upon fantasy technology at the Irish border to prevent the return of all-too-real sectarian violence.

Our long reputation has always preceded us but, immediately after the referendum, the EU held out genuine hope that the government might behave reasonably. Certainly, Britain’s official narrative centred around building goodwill and demonstrating good faith. But, in reality, Theresa May quickly compounded tactical errors with pointless offence. The 2016 “citizens of nowhere” conference speech horrified EU diplomats, who also objected to the threatening tone of the Lancaster House speech and Article 50 letter. In May 2017, the prime minister even accused “bureaucrats of Brussels” ​of meddling in the UK election. Boris Johnson’s rhetoric about punishment beatings and whistling for money, and Jeremy Hunt’s likening of the bloc to a Soviet prison did little to help.

The EU expected domestic Tory theatre, but ministers’ hostile language has also bled into personal relationships. Johnson, David Davis and Dominic Raab have all been deemed abrasive figures, and EU officials report numerous breaches of courtesy and protocol. Character and personality matter, and British arrogance has not won friends or influence.

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Politico: EU shoots down Theresa May’s customs plan

“The EU cannot — and the EU will not — delegate the application of its customs policy and rules, VAT and excise duty collection, to a non-member who would not be subject to the EU’s governance structures,” Barnier said. [...]

While Barnier and Raab reiterated their hope of completing a withdrawal treaty by October, they also said negotiators would not meet again until mid-August — a schedule that calls into question their repeated statements that talks need to be intensified and infused with new energy. Meanwhile, there has been a flurry of increased activity in Brussels and London to prepare for the possibility of a so-called “no-deal” scenario under which the U.K. would crash out of the EU on March 29, 2019 without a formal treaty. [...]

Barnier restated the EU27’s long-declared and brightest red lines: the single market and the four freedoms, including the freedom of movement of workers, are indivisible and non-negotiable. But on Thursday he was more explicit in saying that the EU would not cede “control of our money, law and borders” to the U.K. if it is not bound to the bloc.  [...]

“President Juncker’s visit to Washington yesterday shows the importance of our Common Commercial Policy,” Barnier said. “It shows that we are stronger together.” Juncker’s deal with Trump also illustrated how firmly the EU stays committed to its core principles even in the toughest of negotiations.

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Politico: Theresa May takes control of Brexit

May’s power grab is confirmation that she has now taken complete control over the process, alongside her chief Brexit adviser, Olly Robbins, and is likely to further fuel accusations that she is moving further away from the Brexiteers in her party who felt reassured by Raab’s appointment.

Speaking at the Brexit Select Committee Tuesday afternoon Robbins said Raab would still be Barnier’s main interlocutor and the prime minister’s statement was simply a reflection that May was in overall charge. [...]

However, it will now fall to Number 10 Downing Street and Robbins’ “Europe Unit” to lead the negotiations with Brussels. “I will lead the negotiations with the European Union, with the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union deputising on my behalf,” May says. “Both of us will be supported by the Cabinet Office Europe Unit and with this in mind the Europe Unit will have overall responsibility for the preparation and conduct of the negotiations, drawing upon support from DExEU and other departments as required.”

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The Guardian: How can the Brexit stalemate be broken?

Discussions in Brussels will continue over the summer, key leavers including Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom are still onside, and some analysts believe it would do no harm for May to have to abandon aspects of the Chequers deal that the EU27 would always be likely to reject – including the complex “facilitated customs arrangement”.

According to Anand Menon, the director of the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, the ERG has “scuppered a plan that could never have worked: calm down everyone”. [...]

Paradoxically, the article 50 deadline of March next year could also strengthen May’s hand. A good proportion of MPs in her party – though not many of the ERG – and Labour are convinced that leaving the EU with no deal would be a disaster. So as time runs out, it will become less and less practical for MPs to try to send May back to the drawing board.

The deadline also makes it less tempting for the hardliners to throw May overboard, by firing off 48 letters to Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee, and trigger a vote of no confidence in an attempt to replace her.  [...]

Cowley says: “Labour has a four- or five-point lead in some polls. That’s as nothing compared to what I think you’d see if we had a general election fought with the Conservative party in the state they’re in at the moment, because they would just fall in on themselves.”

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Bloomberg: Trump Isn’t Getting the Brexit He Wanted

That trade deal is prized by Brexiters as proof it was all worth it. The U.S. is Britain’s largest single-country export market, though it is well behind the EU, where about 43 percent of U.K. goods and services exports go and which is the source of 54 percent of imports. But it’s difficult to believe it matters that much to Trump. The U.S. does more trade with Canada, Mexico and China. A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement would be nice, especially as a reward for Britain’s security support. But it’s not the kind of deal that is going to keep Trump up at night. [...]

It’s becoming clear now to Britons that the promised benefits of Brexit aren’t likely to materialize, and that the best they can hope for is a divorce settlement with Europe that minimizes the disadvantages of leaving. [...]

May’s plan is so offensive to hardcore Brexiters that two senior ministers resigned in the days after her plan was revealed to the cabinet, and many more have been plotting to undermine it. And yet, it’s just an opening bid in negotiations that have a long way to run. There’s every possibility that the EU — which insists that its single market freedoms of goods, labor, capital and services cannot be turned into an a la carte buffet — will reject the offer. There’s still a possibility that the U.K. and the EU will not reach a deal, in which case a very harsh Brexit that exposes Britain to hostile economic relations with longtime allies indeed is possible.  [...]

Both Brexiters and Trump channeled dissatisfaction with the status quo and capitalized on the emotional draw of a clean break with an established order. But both movements lacked a workable vision of a new order. Trump stumbles from border-control edicts to tariffs to summit-wrecking. In the same way, British hard-leavers still haven’t articulated a vision of Brexit that is workable, as the new Brexit minister Dominic Raab noted on Thursday.

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