The coming brutal Tory civil war got underway last week. The first salvoes were launched by Kemi Badenoch, former business secretary and frontrunner in the leadership contest, during the first shadow cabinet meeting after the Conservative Party’s historic drubbing at the hands of the voters.
Conservative Party civil war
She attacked Rishi Sunak for calling the election without cabinet’s knowledge and accused her closest rival Suella Braverman, who was in Washington DC delivering a speech at the far-right National Conservatism Conference, of having a “very public” nervous breakdown. Badenoch also spoke about the importance of shadow cabinet discussions remaining confidential.
Her comments were quickly leaked and then tweeted by Stephen Swinford, political editor at The Times, causing Braverman to hit back, saying that “Kemi, and the rest of the cabinet, should not have nodded along, as they and Rishi took the party to disaster”.
It is clear from Braverman’s Washington speech that she wants the Tories to move closer to Reform voters by “talking credibly” to them and rendering Reform UK’s “separate existence” unnecessary. I assume this means a merger, a position which 47% of grassroots members are comfortable with while 48% are not, according to polling by Queen Mary University in London.
In the same poll by the way, Badenoch is shown to be well ahead in the race to become the next party leader.
The former business secretary has attacked Farage in the past and described his candidates as the “offcuts, the chaff that other parties have kicked out. It goes well beyond racism, [and] misogyny. It’s people who are not fit to make the decisions about your life”.
It looks like a substantial crack in the right of British politics that can only get wider and more irreparable as time goes on.
Reform splits
Reform UK are not immune to splits themselves. Ben Habib, a former Brexit Party MEP and Reform’s co-deputy leader is ‘considering his position’ after being summarily sacked and replaced by Richard Tice, the new MP for Boston and Skegness and the party’s former chair and leader until Farage returned in June, just before the election.
Habib has now called for the Reform UK Party, a limited company having just Nigel Paul Farage as the person with significant control, to be “democratised”.
Perhaps Habib, the CEO of First Property Group, a commercial property investment and fund management company, and apparently a shrewd businessman, should have thought about that before. That Farage is only in it for the money seems to have come as a surprise to him.
Brexit downsides
This week we added 10 more downsides to the dossier.
The economy
While 52 out of 56 countries worldwide are expected to see a rise in the number of millionaires resident, the UK is forecast to lose 17%, the most of any of the other four nations where a fall is predicted.
This is according to a recent report by the Swiss bank UBS, reported by the FT. The research also revealed that more millionaires had been leaving the UK than arriving over the past decade, with the UK suffering a net loss of 16,500 millionaires between 2017 and 2023. The UK’s withdrawal from the EU was said to be a factor.
Again according to the FT, Labour’s plans for closer alignment with the EU to boost trade and economic growth is not a simple or immediate fix to the problems caused by Brexit for several reasons, not least because there is no consensus in affected industries about what benefits different models of alignment might achieve.
Research by Gavekal, a Hong Kong based financial services company, shows that since the 2016 referendum, Britain has gone from the best performing major economy to among the worst.
They claim that the UK’s growth, productivity and living standards will continue to be weighed down by the structural handicap of Brexit. Gavekal say the obvious way to accelerate Britain’s dismal post-2016 growth rate, would require Labour to commit to rejoining the European customs union and then prepare for membership of the single market and a return to free movement of labour.
The FT’s Martin Wolf covers a new report that suggests the UK’s overall output losses due to Brexit (relative to a synthetic counterfactual) are at least 5% of GDP and that Brexit has reduced regional inequality, not by levelling up, but by “levelling down” – that is, by damaging Britain’s previously prosperous regions more than less prosperous ones.
Borders
UK government officials are said to fear tailbacks and chaos at UK ports in three months unless the EU again delays plans to introduce a biometric travel registration scheme requiring facial and finger scanning, according to The Guardian. A recent survey by the transport department showed that 69% of the UK public had not heard of the European entry/exit scheme, and 15% said it was likely to make them travel less.
Northern Ireland
Andrew Baxter, CEO of Europa Worldwide Group, who supported and even campaigned for Brexit, has admitted that it is “preventing the seamless transportation of goods for British businesses” and has increased complexity by “impacting transit times, increasing the amount of customs paperwork required, and could have costly and time-critical implications”.
Europa have now introduced a scheme to help ‘export’ goods to Northern Ireland with a team of 34 in Manchester and eight in Liverpool to help support ‘exporters’ across the North West.
Brexit may have benefited Baxter’s company but the extra 42 staff required to handle Northern Ireland bound freight is simply added friction which consumers will have to pay for.
Education
In a recent interview on BBC Radio 4, the government’s new chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said: “Brexit was definitely a problem for science. We were part of a very successful European funding scheme with very large collaborations, right the way across Europe.”
Sir Patrick added, “You can’t do the type of science that everyone’s trying to do and make progress in isolation. You need brains that come with other backgrounds, other thought processes, other training”.
He has now called for post-Brexit visa rules to be relaxed.
Health
An article in the London Review of Books by an anonymous GP about the shortages of medicines in the UK claims that in order to overcome trade barriers erected because of Brexit, the NHS is now paying extra costs to a private company – the international logistics firm Kuehne and Nagel – to circumvent those same barriers.
The National Supply Disruption Response was introduced in 2020 to give clinical providers access to an ‘express freight’ mechanism.
Citizens
In a rather obscure legal case, the UK Court of Appeal has ruled that two Albanians whose applications to settle in the UK were refused under the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) had their rights under the withdrawal agreement breached and that previous appeals should have been allowed.
Their passports had been stamped with the words: “Admitted to the United Kingdom under the Immigration (EEA) Regulations 2016” and the Home Office had argued this did not give any right of residence. The Court found that it amounted to facilitation of residence within the meaning of Article 10(2).
It’s not known how many other applicants to the EUSS were wrongfully rejected.
Research by UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) shows that EU citizens, who are not given a physical ID card but rather need to navigate an online process to use and prove their status, have reported on the frequent glitches in that system.
But, according to UKICE, even when it is working properly in a technical sense, the system does not work well for marginalised and vulnerable EU citizens, including many Roma, who often struggle to independently generate a ‘share code’ to prove status to an employer or prospective landlord.
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