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Why I’m standing for the Rejoin EU Party in Kensington & Bayswater

Brexit is easily the most significant development in UK history of the past 40 years. It is also, so far, the most substantial of the twin revolts underway within all Western societies by both some of the greatest losers, and some of the greatest winners, from the neo-liberal political, economic and cultural orthodoxy in that period.

The losers, elements of the growing underclass, of the increasingly squeezed middle class, of the young without inherited wealth, of the old without adequate health and welfare, of the left-behind regions and communities and of the ignored and denigrated followers of traditional faiths and values, provided the votes. Ones of pure protest, for there was no programme. The winners, elements of the old rich and the new super-rich, provided the funding. They had, and have, a programme: to diminish democracy and the rule of law, so as to prevent these institutions (especially ones with international reach like the EU) from supporting a more substantial revolt by the losers against their plutocratic privileges. Hence their evident sympathy for Xi and Putin.

The US is the state whose institutions carry the greatest international reach and where these twin revolts, in Donald Trump’s current campaign to become not so much America’s next President, as her first dictator, are now most obvious and threatening. Brexit owes a lot to those Republicans now enabling this sinister endeavour. They fostered Farage, and his fellow-travellers within the Conservative Party, far more than any Chinese and Russian interests. And the 2016 referendum was won by the same sort of supporters, electoral and financial, employing the same tactics of serial contempt for truth and constitutional norms, as then made Trump US President.

Now, the omerta of these supporters to Trump: of ritually re-telling the lie that he won the last presidential election, matches exactly the Conservatives’ omerta to Farage: of ritually re-telling the lie that Brexit has merit. And Farage’s ambition to take over the Conservative Party, is a copy of Trump’s completed takeover of the Republican Party. An ambition which will be greatly advanced if Reform do well on July 4th and massively amplified if Trump becomes President on November 5th.

The rise of neo-nationalist parties show there are similar revolts underway in the EU. However, the guard-rails for democracy and the rule of law are far stronger there than in the US and the UK. Some of the reasons for this are technical: the supranational power of the Single Market and the euro, balanced by the national power of the European Council derived from proportional voting systems. Some are political: these parties now concentrate on issues like immigration, trade protection and security, which can only be addressed effectively at a European level, and so no longer seek to dismantle the EU, but to use it to implement their policies. And some, perhaps the most important, are cultural: the still-long shadow of a dark past. The happier history, of the UK especially, has made us complacent about the risks we are now running.

And despite Trump, democracy and the rule of law is probably less endangered in the US than in the UK. Modern America is not the late Roman Republic. It has enormous economic strength and a written constitution imposing limits on absolutism. Britain has neither. Brexit, and now the drive by Farage and his supporters inside the Conservative Party to complete that divorce by destroying mainstream Conservatism, threaten to politicise the split in the British national identity, which has existed since the end of our Empire, between affinity to America and affinity to Europe. This could be very dangerous, as the valid historical parallel with our profound and protracted crisis of the 17th century, when England was torn between emulating absolutist, Catholic France, and oligarchic, Protestant Holland warns.

Given what is now at stake, it’s grotesque that none of the main opposition parties in this General Election are really even mentioning Brexit, except in the most marginal manner. July 4th must mark the end of this national evasion and delusion. The nation must admit that leaving the EU has been a monumental mistake which simply has to be reversed. The deep divisions and deprivations in our society which caused the 2016 referendum result can only be addressed by re-joining the EU, as full members, with all this would entail. For only that will bring sufficient growth. Only that will head off the threat to our democracy and rule of law which Farage, in alliance with Trump, with all this would entail, represents. So it is especially vital that Conservatives are part of this admission and reversal.

The Rejoin EU Party is standing in the General Election to highlight the general point that for Britain to be saved, it must become again a European country. I am standing for the Rejoin EU Party in Kensington and Bayswater, for so long a key Conservative seat, and where I have lived for a large part of my life, especially to highlight also the specific point that for moderate non-Labour politics to be saved, the Conservatives must become again a pro-European party.

John Stevens, Rejoin EU Party candidate, Kensington & Bayswater

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The shadow of Brexit and the future of Conservatism

Two weeks before polling day, this General Election is already the most extraordinary of modern times. The victor has been beyond doubt from the start and there’s been no sign of the tightening of opinion polls in favour of the incumbent government usual in previous comparable contests. Indeed, the reverse – a steady further deterioration of its position – has happened.

In prospect isn’t merely the largest reversal of fortune under our hitherto normally stable, if not really very representative, first-past-the-post electoral system – from a Conservative majority in 2019 deemed at the time as assuring two terms in office, to a Labour majority many anticipate as sufficient to guarantee power lasting decades.

We’re apparently witnessing the probable de-facto destruction of the Conservative Party without creating any alternative to constitute a numerically credible, let alone ideologically coherent, opposition. For what can be expected from the remaining rump of the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, Northern Ireland’s parties, the Greens and – if it wins any seats at all – Reform UK?  

Already participants and pundits, particularly Conservative ones, are trying to comprehend the coming cataclysm: a catastrophe seemingly so complete and contrary to even relatively recent expectations as to defy conventional explanations. The disruption of normal life caused by the Covid pandemic, Putin’s Ukraine invasion, China’s challenge to the US-led global political and economic order and America’s response, its ramifications in the Middle East, the climate-change debate, the corrupt character of Boris Johnson, the ineptitude of Liz Truss and the peculiar persona of Rishi Sunak, are all prayed in aid, to differing degrees.

Within the Conservative Party, such enquiry is already assuming the form of blame allocation between its various factions in anticipation of a jackal-like fight for its carcass.

But there’s one explanation so far absent from this impending autopsy and its likely acrimonious aftermath, absent as it has also been from the policy debates in this election. Almost exactly eight years on, Brexit’s shadow still looms over everything: for the nation, the loss and for Conservatives, the cause, that now dare not speak its name. It should surely be blindingly obvious that this greatest and most disastrous decision of our post-war history, the culmination of a generation-long controversy that has hamstrung our national strategic will and corroded Conservatism to its very core, is the one factor equal in magnitude both to the evasion of reality that infects our democracy generally and to the governing party’s imminent evisceration.

Critical to the country’s – and particularly the Conservatives’ – capacity to recognize this truth will be the performance of Reform. Nigel Farage has been deceiving and distracting the public, particularly the Tories, so assiduously for so long and has, yet again, been permitted by our media, so grossly self-serving and supine, when it’s not actually mendacious, to command a level of attention out of all proportion to his probable post-election parliamentary position that it’s easy to overlook the extent to which he too is now suffering under the shadow of Brexit.

His return to the fray, after his earlier intention to campaign in what he considered the more important campaign of his friend and role model Donald Trump, despite the best polling efforts of Aaron Banks and his friends, has not significantly improved the likely performance of Reform in the forthcoming ballot, though it has evidently enhanced the propensity to panic in Conservative ranks.

Again obviously, this is because Farage, more than anybody else, brought us Brexit. Now less than a quarter of the electorate believe leaving the EU was the right decision and that proportion continues, with good reason,  to decline. Reform’s flagship policy, with which it’s intimately and inexorably identified, is a failure: one so great it undermines the plausibility of every other policy it now proposes. Indeed, Brexit is especially a failure on Farage’s own terms. He sold it, above all, as essential to reducing and even eliminating immigration. By this was meant, though rarely admitted, not primarily culturally European immigrants, but those from outside of Europe, who constituted a greater cultural challenge to a perceived traditional British, or English, identity. But by ending EU Freedom of Movement, in precise terms a labour mobility, not an immigration policy, since the overwhelming majority of European citizens coming here returned to their home countries after a period, has resulted in an enormous increase precisely in people coming from outside of Europe, the overwhelming majority of whom do seek permanent settlement here.

Reform is trying to pretend, like Communists explaining the fall of the Soviet Empire, that the failure of Brexit, and specifically the failure over controlling immigration, was due to Brexit not being implemented properly, and to the machinations of malevolent saboteurs. But given the structure of our own economy and its interactions with that of the wider world, it couldn’t have been otherwise. Prospects are good that this election will mark the moment the British people admit this fact and, notwithstanding the utter lack of leadership from Labour and the Lib Dems in their campaigns, begin to put real pressure upon the new government to begin the process of reversing Brexit. Ironically, Farage’s personal intervention has made this more likely. However, whether it also marks the moment Conservatives admit it is another, albeit in the short run, secondary matter. Here, the effect of Farage’s personal intervention is more ambiguous. But in the longer run, of course, for the nation to re-join the EU, there must be pro-European conviction right across the political spectrum.

One thing is already certain – Labour has won this election. So pro-Europeans have the opportunity, in several seats, to cast a more meaningful vote: for the Rejoin EU Party, for this will send the most explicit message that such is the path the nation must now travel – almost eight years since the EU referendum.

John Stevens, Rejoin EU Party candidate, Kensington & Bayswater

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