There are many different ways that Brexit has been be analyzed in comparison to other historical events. The kind of comparison depends on what angle the observer comes at Brexit from. The "deal" that Theresa May has secured from the EU on Britain's post-EU status brings to mind other comparable historical events, and none of them look good.
An imperial vassal?
Earlier this year, this author compared the initial terms being offered to Britain as the price of a transition period to being asked to be the EU's "gimp". This was a graphic and deliberately harsh comparison, because the situation is historically so unusual. But the "deal" that Mrs May has secured from the EU now is even worse than that, precisely because the EU were forced into offering such a bad deal by May's own stupidity and intransigence.
The deal looks like "punishment" because Theresa May gave the EU no other option. In herself being unyielding on the issue of immigration controls and exiting the single market, this meant the EU could only offer Britain a deal that would be the worst of all worlds. May wanted to ensure that Britain could close off the free movement of people to and from the EU; but the price of that has been that Britain would be subservient to EU laws and customs, with no power over them and unable to act without the EU's consent. In any case, any future trade deal would be entirely on the EU's terms.
Meanwhile, as it would be outside the single market, Britain's exports into the EU would still rely on checks like most other "third countries", and making the country far less desirable as a place to foreign investors. And remember that this isn't just a "transitional" arrangement; its legal force is one that would exist in perpetuity until the EU says otherwise. In effect, it makes Britain a country without any of the advantages of EU membership, but with almost all the obligations; a country still firmly under the EU's thumb in spite of being outside it.
Talk of calling it "vassalage" might seem overblown, but in historical terms, the comparison isn't that far from the truth when you look at the details. Apart from independent control of its borders, the deal leaves Britain with control over little else in real terms, with the EU calling the shots on almost everything else, and Britain with no say, no redress and no legal power to stop it. By most reasonable terms, this is modern-day "vassalage".
It's clear from her apparent satisfaction with the deal that Mrs May is happy to see herself as effectively the EU's in-situ "colonial administrator" of Britain; a bland functionary overseeing the whims of the idiosyncratic locals. Their lot is not to make a fuss, but to keep their heads down and mind their own business. Under this deal with the EU, Theresa May rules as "quisling", content to rule the roost over an emasculated and moribund polity.
Back in the 19th century, the imperial powers talked of "spheres of influence". In the modern day, the EU has a broad sphere of influence that encompasses the EEA, and arguably also other nations in a customs union with it. The USA has this with NAFTA and its broader "soft power" influence. China has this too with its growing ambitions across Asia and Africa (with its "String Of Pearls" strategy) and even into Europe, with its "Belt and Road" strategy. Russia, too, has got in on the act by (re)establishing its own sphere of influence under the "Eurasian Economic Union (EEU)". The Arab Gulf States have the GCC.
Britain's exit from the EU, in this wider context, looks like nothing more than an act of dangerous self-harm. The deal that Theresa May has now accepted with the EU leaves Britain outside of any wider sphere of influence, except in the sense that it would be controlled by another sphere of influence: the EU. In current terms, Belarus would have more legal standing in its relationship with Russia (as part of the EEU) than Britain would have with the EU.
A moribund polity
But to return to the 19th century comparisons, the original "sick man of Europe" was Ottoman Turkey, which by the middle of that century was in a chronic state of mismanagement. The phrase was made famous by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who sought to take advantage of Constantinople's malaise and expand his own sphere of influence at Turkey's expense.
This was the wider context that led to the Crimean War, where France and Russia vied for primacy over the Ottoman court. France (and later, Britain) pushed back against Russian stratagems to undermine Ottoman sovereignty. The Tsar's aim was to make him the legal protector of Ottoman Orthodox Christians inside of the Turks' empire, thus fundamentally undermining the supremacy of Ottoman law. This situation doesn't sound too far from modern-day comparisons with the EU's desire to protect the rights of EU citizens in Britain post-Brexit.
The difference with the current situation is that in the EU's case, it is about protecting EU citizens' rights that they already have, and ensuring those rights are not lost. In the case of the dispute that eventually led to the Crimean War, it was never really about the "rights" of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire; it was about Russian influence being used as leverage. A better contemporary example would be how Russia today has granted automatic citizenship to separatist Russian-speaking regimes that have broke away from states like Georgia and Ukraine; like in the 19th century with the Ottomans, Russia today applies the same tactics to undermine its "enemies", and invokes the call to defend Russian "citizens" as a reason to attack them.
Apart from the modern comparison to vassalage, Britain today draws other uncomfortable parallels to the Ottoman situation.
As a country, the nation is not being led in any meaningful sense by its government; it is staggering from one year to the next. For decades now, Britain has been led by short-term tactics from the heart of government. Since the end of empire, Britain has struggled to adapt to life in the modern world. It's industries quickly becoming inefficient and with its markets drying up, Britain joined the EU as a statement of realism. It knew that Britain could no longer survive on its own, given how the world was changing.
The problem was with the solution. This was not the fault of the EU (unlike what some "leavers" think), but with the Libertarians who took control of the economic and political agenda forty years ago. The result of this agenda was to turn dozens of towns and cities across the country into places that no longer had a real function: mining towns and manufacturing centres died. What replaced them was low-skilled work in the service industry. The agenda was only suited to London and the South-East, for that was where those who would make money from the agenda happened to live.
This expanded the levels of inequality in the country to a gulf. Since the financial crisis, the government have pursued an agenda that ever more brazenly amoral. The polity that pursues a Libertarian agenda does so now regardless of the damage it is doing to public finances and wider society; it does so because it has no other ideas.
A recent OECD report explained how Britain has become one of the most heavily-indebted nations in the world. Due to the government's cumulative asset-stripping, the government no longer has many assets to offset any loans or borrowing. The result of this mindless strategy is a massive black hole in public finances.
Meanwhile, things like the basic defence of the country and law and order are left to rack and ruin. The "Royal Navy" has become a sad decimated joke, made all the more ridiculous by having built an enormous aircraft carrier that we don't need and even lack the planes for. The country has a scattering of territorial outposts around the world, but (like with the Falkland Islands) no longer has the practical means to defend them. The air force is so cut to the bone it barely able to patrol the skies above Britain; likewise with the army, which is spread thin across various conflict zones, and is struggling to attract enough recruits as it is.
The state of law and order in Britain, thanks to cuts of government funding, has meant that in parts of the country there are simply not enough police to deal with crime, leaving people to deal with it themselves; meanwhile, thanks to cuts of government funding the state of Britain's prisons is so bad that they have become more dangerous than the streets outside. Britain is a society that is falling apart.
The Libertarian agenda, through the pursuit of austerity and welfare reform, has led to a surge, not only in inequality, but in crime, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse and malnutrition. In this sense, Britain literally has become today's "sick man of Europe", because the British government is destroying its society.
Monday, November 26, 2018
Saturday, November 24, 2018
The rise of Tommy Robinson: the far-right, UKIP and modern-day Populism in Britain
The rise of English far-right activist Tommy Robinson to that of global "cult" status has now been cemented with news that he is likely to be made a millionaire thanks to support from well-heeled, like-minded extremists across the Atlantic.
While his entry to the country is still being discouraged by US authorities, his fame at both the "grassroots" level, and with those high up in the right-wing political food chain, is well-established. As part of Steve Bannon's grand scheme ("The Movement"), Robinson is now central to Bannon's plans for a co-ordinated effort to bring together Populist movements across Europe. In spite of the fact that Bannon's plans are illegal in many of the countries he's targeting, this has had no effect on Bannon's overall plan, and the central role that Robinson can be seen to play in it.
Robinson's notoriety was established with the high-profile events organized when he led the English Defence League (EDL). This group's agenda was openly Islamophobic. While its adherents would claim that their ire was not aimed as Muslims as a whole but rather its extremist elements, in practical terms the group's followers have openly Islamophobic views. It is clear that large numbers of the EDL's followers see Islam as a cultural threat to British identity, and therefore see Muslims as an inherent "threat" to them.
By focusing in particular on the cases of Child Abuse "rings" in various Pakistani communities that have come to light in recent years, the EDL have seen their cause as a kind of moral mission. Comparisons to how in the early years of the Nazi Party, their "brownshirts" would target Jews and Communists as a plague on German culture, are plain to see.
Robinson himself claimed to have become disgusted with the EDL's lurch into blatant prejudice, which caused the end to his association with the group. However, by then becoming involved with other similar movements like the British offshoot of "PEGIDA" in Germany, his motivations became hard to miss.
Robinson was "reinventing" himself as a kind of social justice warrior. His notoriety continued with his violent conduct involving brushes with the law, while at the same time he was now claiming himself to be a victim of police harassment and a supporter of free speech. This then culminated in his prosecution and imprisonment for contempt, which played directly into his narrative as a victim of the establishment's curtailment of free speech.
It was this that gave him international "cult" status, and cemented his high-profile reputation with people like Steve Bannon. Since then, Robinson's popularity has been shown to include serving members of the armed forces (no surprise there). More significantly, he has attracted the support of UKIP's leader, Gerald Batten.
This is significant for a few reasons. While UKIP had become largely an irrelevance since Theresa May stole many of their clothes after the EU referendum two years ago, the way in which she has managed to turn almost everyone in her party against her "deal" can only be a boon for UKIP.
If May's deal gets though parliament, those in the Tory right would accuse her of betrayal. This will naturally lead to a surge among the grassroots back towards UKIP as the "natural" party of Euroscepticism and nativism, as it was before 2016. On the other hand, if we get a "no deal" scenario, UKIP are likely to prosper in the longer-run as they can claim that it was through trusting the Tories that caused the situation to become so chaotic - so the accusation of "betrayal" can be used again. Finally, if somehow the end result is that Britain remains in the EU for wont of any better alternative, UKIP can again blame the Tories for making the issue so toxic, leaving their party as the last "honorable" bastion of English nationalism.
Batten's strategy of bringing Robinson under his wing might be cynical, but it makes a fair amount of political sense in some ways. Nigel Farage, the original charisma behind UKIP's rise, has savaged Batten's strategy of allowing UKIP to flirt with the far-right. But Farage himself may well be misreading how the political climate has changed since the referendum.
This is partly Farage's own fault. The author recently read a report into UKIP's electoral strategy from twenty years ago, when Farage was advocating for the party to make a breakthrough in Westminster. Farage's strategy was to focus on getting UKIP MPs elected into the British parliament. As a strategy, it was a complete failure. Meanwhile, from 1998 onward, UKIP's representation in the EU parliament went from strength to strength, leading to them becoming the largest UK party in Brussels in 2014. And while this surge in EU representation was happening, UKIP's representation in Westminster only ever came to two MPs out of more than six hundred (both of whom were Tory defectors).
In this way, we can see that Farage's strategic understanding of the reality of British politics is weak. By misunderstanding the correct method to bring about UKIP's success all those years ago, today he misunderstands the motivations for people now supporting UKIP.
Farage took UKIP in the direction towards being a Libertarian party. While this is a simplification (and there were many inconsistencies), Farage's motivation seemed to be about making UKIP support a broadly Libertarian agenda, very similar to that supported by the "Brexiteers" in the Conservative Party (e.g. the ERG) today. This explained the overlap in much of their ideology.
The inconsistency was about marrying this with the inevitable "nativist" rhetoric than underlined the English nationalism of UKIP's core message. This was why UKIP attracted a range of support, from right-wing Libertarians that wanted Britain to become a "free trade paradise" outside the EU, to traditional cultural Conservatives from places as eclectic as Clacton, Keighley and Camarthen. This was how UKIP was able to bridge the class divide, by appealing to the innate petty prejudices of the "common man". This was how Farage created his "people's army".
Those "petty prejudices" are the core root of Populism. Its ideology, almost by definition, is about appealing to people's petty prejudices. UKIP grew in strength on the back of explaining events like the migration crisis, growing domestic inequality and the Conservative government's austerity agenda through the prism of prejudice. By arguing that the government were more interested in housing and financially supporting Europeans and migrants, UKIP fed into a toxic atmosphere, culminating in the referendum result of 2016.
A "natural" alliance?
By this point, Farage seems to have been unaware (or delusional) about the nature of the monster he had created.
Farage seems to have believed he had made UKIP a Libertarian party, while in reality it had only grown in mass support by using Populist rhetoric. So when he stepped down after the referendum, he left a party that was Populist in nature. Meanwhile, with Theresa May turning the governing Conservative Party into one that simply copied wholesale much of UKIP's pre-referendum agenda, Farage's party had nowhere else to go but further to the right. Jeremy Corbyn has done much the same with the Labour Party, taking the party of the official opposition into territory that was once filled by George Galloway's hard-left "Respect" Party.
The logical conclusion of UKIP's shift to the Populist right is Gerald Batten now endorsing Tommy Robinson. As mentioned earlier, Farage misunderstands the motivations of those that now support UKIP, because the party now represents more than a mere Libertarian fantasy; it now represents the Populist mood that is more cultural than political. Farage's disgust at what is happening to UKIP feels more like private self-loathing at the monster he belatedly realizes he created.
Robinson's place in this as a "social justice warrior" is that UKIP are exploiting the cultural overlap between his Islamophobic agenda and UKIP's own agenda of base Populism. With the issue of Brexit now reaching a point where many of its supporters are bound to feel a sense of betrayal, Batten's strategy seems to be to ensure the party are well-placed to hoover up those disillusioned with the Conservative Party's bungling of Brexit. With the mood towards immigrants and "the other" hardening since the referendum, Batten's strategy may well be to follow this poisonous mood to its logical conclusion. He has seen the direction that the national mood has taken, and sees UKIP as being in the primary position to take advantage when the time comes.
Whether UKIP will ever reach the levels of support they had before the referendum is pure speculation at this point; it depends on what the actual outcome of Brexit will be. But Theresa May's own cynical strategy of copying UKIP's agenda after the referendum forced UKIP further to the right. With her then doing such a disastrous job of the Brexit negotiations, there are bound to be a lot of angry people: the end result may well be the eventual resurgence of UKIP as a far-right party. In the febrile climate of Britain post-Brexit, who can say how radicalized the political landscape could become? This is what Gerald Batten's alliance with Tommy Robinson seems to foresee.
In this way, Britain could currently be called one of the most unstable democracies in the developed world. The alliance of Tommy Robinson with Gerald Batten, under the wider tutelage of Steve Bannon, might seem like a fringe movement at the moment, but it's clear that these people are also biding their time, planning their strategy, and waiting for the right moment. Their "moment" may well come.
While his entry to the country is still being discouraged by US authorities, his fame at both the "grassroots" level, and with those high up in the right-wing political food chain, is well-established. As part of Steve Bannon's grand scheme ("The Movement"), Robinson is now central to Bannon's plans for a co-ordinated effort to bring together Populist movements across Europe. In spite of the fact that Bannon's plans are illegal in many of the countries he's targeting, this has had no effect on Bannon's overall plan, and the central role that Robinson can be seen to play in it.
Robinson's notoriety was established with the high-profile events organized when he led the English Defence League (EDL). This group's agenda was openly Islamophobic. While its adherents would claim that their ire was not aimed as Muslims as a whole but rather its extremist elements, in practical terms the group's followers have openly Islamophobic views. It is clear that large numbers of the EDL's followers see Islam as a cultural threat to British identity, and therefore see Muslims as an inherent "threat" to them.
By focusing in particular on the cases of Child Abuse "rings" in various Pakistani communities that have come to light in recent years, the EDL have seen their cause as a kind of moral mission. Comparisons to how in the early years of the Nazi Party, their "brownshirts" would target Jews and Communists as a plague on German culture, are plain to see.
Robinson himself claimed to have become disgusted with the EDL's lurch into blatant prejudice, which caused the end to his association with the group. However, by then becoming involved with other similar movements like the British offshoot of "PEGIDA" in Germany, his motivations became hard to miss.
Robinson was "reinventing" himself as a kind of social justice warrior. His notoriety continued with his violent conduct involving brushes with the law, while at the same time he was now claiming himself to be a victim of police harassment and a supporter of free speech. This then culminated in his prosecution and imprisonment for contempt, which played directly into his narrative as a victim of the establishment's curtailment of free speech.
It was this that gave him international "cult" status, and cemented his high-profile reputation with people like Steve Bannon. Since then, Robinson's popularity has been shown to include serving members of the armed forces (no surprise there). More significantly, he has attracted the support of UKIP's leader, Gerald Batten.
This is significant for a few reasons. While UKIP had become largely an irrelevance since Theresa May stole many of their clothes after the EU referendum two years ago, the way in which she has managed to turn almost everyone in her party against her "deal" can only be a boon for UKIP.
If May's deal gets though parliament, those in the Tory right would accuse her of betrayal. This will naturally lead to a surge among the grassroots back towards UKIP as the "natural" party of Euroscepticism and nativism, as it was before 2016. On the other hand, if we get a "no deal" scenario, UKIP are likely to prosper in the longer-run as they can claim that it was through trusting the Tories that caused the situation to become so chaotic - so the accusation of "betrayal" can be used again. Finally, if somehow the end result is that Britain remains in the EU for wont of any better alternative, UKIP can again blame the Tories for making the issue so toxic, leaving their party as the last "honorable" bastion of English nationalism.
Batten's strategy of bringing Robinson under his wing might be cynical, but it makes a fair amount of political sense in some ways. Nigel Farage, the original charisma behind UKIP's rise, has savaged Batten's strategy of allowing UKIP to flirt with the far-right. But Farage himself may well be misreading how the political climate has changed since the referendum.
This is partly Farage's own fault. The author recently read a report into UKIP's electoral strategy from twenty years ago, when Farage was advocating for the party to make a breakthrough in Westminster. Farage's strategy was to focus on getting UKIP MPs elected into the British parliament. As a strategy, it was a complete failure. Meanwhile, from 1998 onward, UKIP's representation in the EU parliament went from strength to strength, leading to them becoming the largest UK party in Brussels in 2014. And while this surge in EU representation was happening, UKIP's representation in Westminster only ever came to two MPs out of more than six hundred (both of whom were Tory defectors).
In this way, we can see that Farage's strategic understanding of the reality of British politics is weak. By misunderstanding the correct method to bring about UKIP's success all those years ago, today he misunderstands the motivations for people now supporting UKIP.
Farage took UKIP in the direction towards being a Libertarian party. While this is a simplification (and there were many inconsistencies), Farage's motivation seemed to be about making UKIP support a broadly Libertarian agenda, very similar to that supported by the "Brexiteers" in the Conservative Party (e.g. the ERG) today. This explained the overlap in much of their ideology.
The inconsistency was about marrying this with the inevitable "nativist" rhetoric than underlined the English nationalism of UKIP's core message. This was why UKIP attracted a range of support, from right-wing Libertarians that wanted Britain to become a "free trade paradise" outside the EU, to traditional cultural Conservatives from places as eclectic as Clacton, Keighley and Camarthen. This was how UKIP was able to bridge the class divide, by appealing to the innate petty prejudices of the "common man". This was how Farage created his "people's army".
Those "petty prejudices" are the core root of Populism. Its ideology, almost by definition, is about appealing to people's petty prejudices. UKIP grew in strength on the back of explaining events like the migration crisis, growing domestic inequality and the Conservative government's austerity agenda through the prism of prejudice. By arguing that the government were more interested in housing and financially supporting Europeans and migrants, UKIP fed into a toxic atmosphere, culminating in the referendum result of 2016.
A "natural" alliance?
By this point, Farage seems to have been unaware (or delusional) about the nature of the monster he had created.
Farage seems to have believed he had made UKIP a Libertarian party, while in reality it had only grown in mass support by using Populist rhetoric. So when he stepped down after the referendum, he left a party that was Populist in nature. Meanwhile, with Theresa May turning the governing Conservative Party into one that simply copied wholesale much of UKIP's pre-referendum agenda, Farage's party had nowhere else to go but further to the right. Jeremy Corbyn has done much the same with the Labour Party, taking the party of the official opposition into territory that was once filled by George Galloway's hard-left "Respect" Party.
The logical conclusion of UKIP's shift to the Populist right is Gerald Batten now endorsing Tommy Robinson. As mentioned earlier, Farage misunderstands the motivations of those that now support UKIP, because the party now represents more than a mere Libertarian fantasy; it now represents the Populist mood that is more cultural than political. Farage's disgust at what is happening to UKIP feels more like private self-loathing at the monster he belatedly realizes he created.
Robinson's place in this as a "social justice warrior" is that UKIP are exploiting the cultural overlap between his Islamophobic agenda and UKIP's own agenda of base Populism. With the issue of Brexit now reaching a point where many of its supporters are bound to feel a sense of betrayal, Batten's strategy seems to be to ensure the party are well-placed to hoover up those disillusioned with the Conservative Party's bungling of Brexit. With the mood towards immigrants and "the other" hardening since the referendum, Batten's strategy may well be to follow this poisonous mood to its logical conclusion. He has seen the direction that the national mood has taken, and sees UKIP as being in the primary position to take advantage when the time comes.
Whether UKIP will ever reach the levels of support they had before the referendum is pure speculation at this point; it depends on what the actual outcome of Brexit will be. But Theresa May's own cynical strategy of copying UKIP's agenda after the referendum forced UKIP further to the right. With her then doing such a disastrous job of the Brexit negotiations, there are bound to be a lot of angry people: the end result may well be the eventual resurgence of UKIP as a far-right party. In the febrile climate of Britain post-Brexit, who can say how radicalized the political landscape could become? This is what Gerald Batten's alliance with Tommy Robinson seems to foresee.
In this way, Britain could currently be called one of the most unstable democracies in the developed world. The alliance of Tommy Robinson with Gerald Batten, under the wider tutelage of Steve Bannon, might seem like a fringe movement at the moment, but it's clear that these people are also biding their time, planning their strategy, and waiting for the right moment. Their "moment" may well come.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)