A Right-led Brexit-loving British government coming next: What will the EU do?

In British politics, early autumn is the party conference season. Sadly, there is little mist or mellow fruitfulness in the gloomy conference halls of Birmingham or Manchester, but there is debate and discussion, and if you are in the opposition, it is one of the few moments in the year when you can get a little attention for your leading figures and their words.

Political obsessives love it.  The British public are less interested. In the past, the major conferences were broadcast live on TV, not just the main speeches but the entire proceedings.  Nowadays, yes, you can livestream, but most parties, even in government, count themselves lucky to get a few minutes on the ,evening TV news.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that the conference season does not change things like it used to. Pollsters and commentators desperately try to read meaning into any small shift in the polls, but in truth almost all the moves are just a random walk around the mean.

And indeed this year too, as far as we can tell so far, the polls have not shifted. Maybe overall there has been a very small tick up for Nigel Farage’s Reform, and a small tick down for the governing Labour party, who suffer from the disadvantage that the Prime Minister and the party’s leading figures are so unpopular that the more people see of them the less they like the party.  But basically nothing has changed.  The 50 per cent of the country voting to the Right are split 2-1 Reform-Conservative.  The 50 per cent voting Left are split 2-1-1 Labour-Lib Dem–Green, with Labour currently a little way in the lead.

These very divided polls look a lot like those in France or Germany, and indeed many other places.  But Britain has no Brandmauer, no firewall, no front républicain.  The result of an election with these polls would be Nigel Farage as prime minister, either an outright win or leading a coalition with the Conservatives.

It is true that there’s a long way to go yet. But this prospect means that shifts in policy on the Right matter – and there have been some of interest this conference season. With the Conservatives running after Reform, both parties are now in quite radical positions.

Both Reform and the Conservative Party are now firmly committed to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.  For Reform this is a matter of principle, while the Conservatives have justified their move with a lengthy report by the distinguished lawyer Lord Wolfson showing how impossible it is for Britain to control immigration while still subject to the Strasbourg court.  But both have ended up in the same place – a dismissal of the likelihood of any meaningful reform of the ECHR, rightly so in my view, and a firm decision to leave it.  So it is now very likely to happen after the next election.

Both have however sidestepped the biggest practical problem with this policy – what to do about Northern Ireland.  The Wolfson report rightly says that neither the Good Friday Agreement nor the Windsor Framework, the special arrangements that keep Northern Ireland under many EU trade rules, prevent the UK leaving the ECHR. But Wolfson also says that Northern Ireland will still need its own human rights regime if it is to be compliant with the Good Friday Agreement (and, though he does not go into this, with the Windsor Framework).  Nigel Farage too has mused that perhaps Northern Ireland might not be able to leave the ECHR at the same time as the rest of the country.

Neither Reform nor the Conservatives can leave it like that. If they do, there’s a real risk that they will simply generate a new version of the persistent post-Brexit problem of differential rules in Northern Ireland and an internal border along the Irish Sea.  This reality has proved disruptive enough since 2020.  It really mustn’t be made worse on such sensitive issues as human rights and migration.  If we are going to leave the ECHR, and we must, then we will also have to renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement and either renegotiate or abrogate the Windsor Framework. There really isn’t any other choice. Reform and the Conservatives need to face up to this – and so must the EU.

The other area where there has been a clear shift of policy is on net zero. Just as in the EU, popular opinion and hence politics is shifting fast. There is increasing scepticism about the value of renewable energy generation and increasing reluctance to pay the costs it entails.

Characteristically, Britain chose to implement net zero in a particularly intrusive and demanding way, with a Climate Change Act that legally requires the government to ensure the country meets interim emissions reductions targets, and thus ensures net zero affects every area of the country’s economy. Reform had already said they would scrap all these laws and stop subsidising renewables. The Conservatives have now said the same. For the first time therefore net zero and energy policy are a matter of clear Right/Left party political disagreement – and policy will change if Labour lose the next election. The incipient debate on this subject within EU member states and the European Parliament, so hard to make real because of the way the main political groupings mostly collaborate to suppress it, has now become a real dividing line in Britain. As I so often say, once again national democracies with real powers are better at reflecting popular opinion, debating the issues, and getting to good policy than multinational institutions that are disconnected from actual voters.

We can expect to see more of this in Britain over the next year or two. The policy competition on the Right between Reform and Conservatives will drive both to think things through better, explain things better, and get to better policy outcomes. How this plays out between the two parties is for the moment not clear. The Conservatives remain hamstrung by the fact that they could have delivered better policy when in government, but chose not to do so – so why, say Reform, should anyone believe them this time? For their part, Reform still lack institutional weight and an ability to develop policy in detail.

This will work itself through one way or another. Whatever happens, the EU, the Commission, its member states, need to start thinking about what a Right-led UK would do after the next election. They certainly should not rely on the current “reset” deals sticking. And they should contemplate the possibility of a more assertive, more competitive UK after the next election – an outcome which many expected to see after 2020. Better late than never.

The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG was Britain’s chief negotiator for exiting the European Union