Britain's economy and government since the financial crisis: a problem of short-termism

There is ever more evidence that Britain is a country running on "borrowed time".


Economic short-termism 

Since the financial crisis, the country has never really recovered. All the figures show an economy that has levels of productivity so bad that they haven't been seen since the 18th century, before the country's industrialisation.
The pretense of a functioning "economy" exists, but it could be argued that all changes to the economy since the financial crisis have simply given the illusion of one. The economy that exists now is one of low productivity, low investment, low skills, low wages, and low security. Put in these terms, it makes one wonder how there's any real growth at all. There is a psychology of systematic short-termism, where many companies' only aim is to make ends meet until the next quarter. There is no thought given to longer-term planning; strategic thinking has gone out of the window.
This psychology has led, on one hand, to bringing down costs in any way possible: from companies like Carillion, who ran their affairs like a huge Ponzi Scheme, to the "casualisation" of the labour market, with the proliferation of zero hours contracts and deliberate underemployment. Meanwhile, the massive use of outsourcing is another way to cut costs, which is endemic in the public and private spheres. In this way, the illusion is created of the economy becoming more "flexible", as Larry Elliott mentioned in the linked article above, where it in fact simply becomes more nakedly exploitative. So the implication is that, since the financial crisis, the only way Britain's economy can stay on its feet is to regress back to 19th-century work practices. Except that the economy is doing so badly on some measures, that it's actually regressed to the 18th century.

And in spite of all these "flexible" measures introduced, services and construction, which make up to 80% of the overall economy, are floundering. With the retail sector going through what experts call a "transition", the effect on the ground is that those companies that are slow to adapt to the rise of internet shopping are simply losing customers at a punishing rate. Again, this is simply a symptom of a lack of strategic planning; something which seems depressingly common.
The irony here is that this has been predicted for years. With the collapse of manufacturing thirty years ago, retail and services have been taking up the slack. Except that now, thirty years on, retail itself seems to going through a similarly-testing period as was once experienced by manufacturing. Having an economy with such a large trade deficit thanks to the chronic lack of exports, Britain's is a consumption-led economy. Governments of the last thirty years have thought that "services are the future" for a country like Britain, which would fill the hole in the labour market left by the collapse of manufacturing.
After thirty years of "borrowed time", technology is beginning to test that theory on the high street, with very visible effects. In short, technology for many companies has been shown to reduce costs, with a need for fewer workers. Likewise, the rise in internet shopping has reduced the need for consumers to physically go to the shops on the high street. This "double whammy" has seen the proliferation of things like "self-service" checkouts and the gradual automisation of warehouse working, and also the closure of more and more high street shops and franchises as the footfall is simply drying up. While governments of the past thought that "services are the future", the "future" has since caught up with the economy. That "borrowed time" in which the economy was able to thrive on services alone, seems to be at an end.

These technological changes have been inevitable, but Britain's economy is poorly set-up to deal with them. For all the reasons mentioned earlier about how its labour market has "restructured" since the financial crisis, Britain's captains of industry have been too short-term in their thinking to consider the effect that these technological changes would have on the insecure and exploited workforce they have created.
As this underpaid and insecure workforce simply has much less money to spend, a "vicious circle" has been set up thanks to institutional short-termism. Workers with less money will consume less; if consumption declines, so do the fortunes of the companies that employ them. Everyone loses out, with the inevitable result being less money in the economy. This is the ultimate price of short-term thinking. It is an economic model that cannot work in the long-term.


Political short-termism

At another level, all the signs are that Britain has a political culture that is intellectually incapable of leading. Sharing all the same signs of malaise and short-termism as industry, the government is literally doing nothing about most of the country's problems, which are simply getting worse through government indolence. All that happens is that difficult decisions are kicked down the road, while the country's infrastructure, institutions and social bonds slowly fall apart.
Short-termism was the ultimate cause of the government's "austerity" agenda. It was politically expedient in 2010 for the government to claim that cutting the deficit was a necessary action, with spending needing to be cut across the board. However, all the economic figures since then have shown how austerity simply makes everyone poorer, including the government.
A government that spends less on government services that are there to improve public conditions is not saving money in the long-term. Companies with strategic thinking understand the importance of investment; government is the same. Governments that cut back on investment in their own population when the economy is doing badly are not helping the economy; they are making it worse. Reducing spending on mental health reduces people's mental health. Reducing spending on those with disabilities reduces how much money those with disabilities have etc. etc.

If the government continually reduces how much money it feeds into the public sector, the ultimate result will be lower tax returns for the government. It is a self-defeating measure. The same has been true of the wider economy, where fewer well-paid jobs in the economy since the financial crisis have simply led to smaller tax returns to the government. The reason why the former Labour government got into such a huge deficit during the financial crisis was largely due to the fact the the economy's collapse resulted into catastrophic collapse in the government's tax receipts from the overall economy. Unemployed workers don't contribute to the tax system. People with less money spend less.

On a different level, while the "transition" the economy seems to be going through could act as a painful "reckoning" on corporate short-termism, Brexit could well act as a "reckoning" on the government's own pathological short-termism.
A referendum on the fate of the entire country was chosen for the short-term political gain with the government's own party. Since then, Theresa May's government has conducted the Brexit process with the sole aim of keeping the governing party together, regardless of its potentially-disastrous effect on the country in the long-term. It has made itself look both ridiculous and obstinate in the face of reality. The government seems not to care about this, as long as it is the EU who can be blamed for any problems later on.

Brexit may well be the ultimate "reckoning" for Britain's broken economy and government. As economic short-termism can only work for so long before time catches up with it, the same is true for the government and Brexit. For the government, time is running out, as the EU keeps reminding it.

The "Windrush" scandal, racism and British identity: the real meaning of the "hostile environment"

Is it possible for someone to live in a "Fascist" state without realizing it?

It all comes down to a matter of perspective. Some talk of how societies in the same country can live "parallel lives", completely ignorant of the other's way of existence. In this way, those who have a law-abiding life free of everyday concerns can be blithely unaware of how the government creates hardships and denies basic rights to others in society who are equally law-abiding, but are for some subjective reason, targets for persecution.
In the most infamous "Fascist" state, Nazi Germany, the hate and withdrawal of human rights that the government held for some sections of society such as the Jews was overt. Partly, this was due to the extreme ideological conditions that were created out of the Great Depression; in such circumstances, people were susceptible to the easy blaming of scapegoats in society. In the case of Fascist Italy, the Nazis' ideological predecessor, the "hate" was somewhat more nuanced, and the withdrawal of rights from some in society was more gradual.
In both cases, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were regimes that had come about through "revolution", albeit via the ballot box. Thus, their extremist ideology was a known quantity, and an overt part of their motivation. In this way, the population knew what the regime was going to do to "undesirable" segments of society, and knowingly supported it. In a similar manner, Apartheid South Africa dealt with its black population by considering them effectively as (to use the Nazi term) "Untermensch", whose legal rights were automatically less than the whites. The separatist regime in white-ruled Rhodesia had a similar mentality, even if it went about it in a more nuanced manner.

The treatment of the "Windrush" generation in Britain is not on the same level as these earlier examples, and may not be overtly racist, but their treatment is discriminatory and an abuse of their rights nonetheless. There is no government rule stating that people of a certain ethnicity and circumstance will have their rights withdrawn, but rights have been withdrawn nonetheless. It might not be government design that has led to certain segments of society having their rights withdrawn; but some segments of society have had their rights withdrawn nonetheless. These are not people who have broken any law; they are people who are seemingly random victims of government "persecution".
The law, however, is never random; it is only the seemingly random nature of the "persecution" that makes it appear that way. When a government decides to implement a law that reduces the rights of segments of society, for whatever reason, its motivation is overt. When a government makes a rule that disproportionately reduces the rights of one segment of society, how is this not persecution?
The British government's "hostile environment", while overtly introduced to reduce illegal immigration, has also reduced the rights in an similar manner to those of the "Windrush" generation. Apart from that, many law-abiding foreigners now live "parallel lives" to those Brits unaffected by, and seemingly ignorant to, the reality of the "hostile environment". This is the new reality that has meant rights that were previously protected are now uncertain, where the authorities are more likely to trust the word of a crooked (or paranoid) native than that of a victimized foreigner. Equally, punitive visa rules now mean that those Britons who have non-EU spouses are exiled from their own country unless they have well-paid jobs.

The application of the government's malice appears random, but in fact targets the poor, the disabled, the non-white and the foreign. There is a reason why wealthy, educated "Aryan"-looking individuals are far less likely to be victims of the authorities' wrath, and why poor, illiterate "foreign-looking" people are disproportionately more likely to be victims. It is not "institutional racism" by law; it is the government allowing personal prejudice to determine how segments of society are dealt with. In such circumstances, government officials, public sector workers and others are left to subjectively determine if someone is "worth the risk" of being given the benefit of the doubt. With the "hostile environment" meaning people no longer have the "benefit of the doubt", prejudice and not wanting to take the risk means the law-abiding are losing their rights. This conduct is typical of that seen in authoritarian states, where rule of law is seemingly arbitrary, and human rights unequal.
This is certainly the case with how the "Windrush" generation have been dealt with by the British government, whose rights have been taken away arbitrarily, without the government even openly aware of it. They have literally become a "forgotten" part of society; in a Kafkaesque way, erased from government records. While the Nazis persecuted the Jews by design, the "Windrush" generation have been "persecuted" by ignorant neglect.

This ignorant neglect extends to all of the various segments of society mentioned before: the poor, disabled, foreign and non-White. It is a telling observation that many of those outside of Britain, in a stereotypical manner, see the country almost as a whites-only country. To outsiders' eyes, Britain becomes almost as "Aryan" as Germany was to the Nazi stereotype. This kind of lazy prejudice seems to now have infected the mindset of even those who live and were born here: British identity has become white identity. Anyone who is British and non-white becomes, by extension, not "really" British. Anyone who is British but has foreign connections or foreign interests is, by extension, not "really" British.
This mentality is what lies at the heart of Theresa May's insular, parochial and mean-spirited vision of Britain. This is what lies behind her criticism of citizens of the world being "citizens of nowhere". This explains her enthusiasm for creating a "hostile environment". While it is never overtly stated that the Britain she wants to restore is the one from her childhood, it is implied through all the rhetoric that her government uses. The point is that she doesn't need to state it overtly for it to be understood implicitly. It is an implicit hostility to the poor, disabled, non-white and the foreign. The "hostile environment" is a glimpse into the twisted, inner psyche of Theresa May.

It is this "implicit" culture of hostility that is what everyone in society has subconsciously registered. The culture of hostility that existed in the far-right regimes mentioned at the beginning was was overt and sanctioned in law. The "hostile environment" is not in the statute books written as such, because that would be too insensitive for today's times. Instead it is put in terms that make it seem simply a rigorous application of existing rules.
This is how the vast majority of society would be unaware even of its existence. As how those affected by its insidious effects can appear random and thus not actively "discriminated against", it is easy for those outside its grasp to think that nothing was wrong whatsoever.
This is why the question at the very start was asked. If nothing was wrong with how things appeared, how would the average person be aware of the reality?

This is where the media has a role. It is the media's role to report the news and issues of the day. But if those in charge of the media have an agenda of their own, how can the average person know the difference between "agenda" and a more objective truth?
The "hostile environment", it should be remembered, was largely a media invention that was then pursued by Theresa May and her government for selfish, political interests. She did not do it because she truly, deeply felt that foreign immigration was a threat to British security. She did it gain favour with influential media moguls and advance her own career.

One wonders when she was talking years ago about the "Nasty Party", that she wasn't really talking in some way of her own inner demons. Those petty, reactionary tendencies she once decried are the same ones that now guide her. But one suspects they always were, and that once she had a taste of power in the halls of government, it was impossible to restrain them. May's relationship with the hate-filled right-wing media and her elevation to the queen of the "Nasty Party" brings to mind the story of the protagonist in Klaus Mann's novel, "Mephisto".
In leading the Home Office in the way she did, and introducing the "hostile environment", she has sunk Britain into a kind of moral pit, with everything else about the administration she now leads falling into the same misanthropic mentality.

Psychopathy in politics: callous indifference versus deliberate harm (1)

It could be argued that there are two kinds of psychopathy, and two different manifestations of the behaviour.

First, there is what may be termed the psychopathy of "callous indifference". This is psychopath that has an aim, and will achieve that aim regardless of the cost to others. The aim is the only thing that matters, and those that get in the way only have themselves to blame if they get hurt. At the extreme level, there are historical figures like Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union with complete callous indifference to the fate of its population. He had a plan for the country, and no-one would be allowed to get in his way; if that meant millions of Ukrainians dying of starvation, or millions of others being killed and imprisoned by the government during the "terror", so be it. This even extended to his own family.
At the more mundane level, there are criminal gangs and the mafia, who get rid of people who are a "nuisance". Similarly, there are "white collar criminals" who will break the law and ignore regulations in order to make a profit. These are all manifestations of "callous indifference".
When it comes to government, there are governments ruled by those who have an aim, and are prepared to carry out that aim regardless of the cost to any innocent individuals caught up the government's scheme. It takes a large amount of callous indifference from government when they are shown real-life innocent individuals whose lives have been wrecked by government decisions, to still continue with the same aim regardless.

Second, there is the psychopath that perpetuates deliberate harm. This is the psychopath who (to use the British legal phrase), with malice aforethought, deliberately decides to do harm to others. His aim of deliberate harm is to "punish". An obvious historical example of this is Adolf Hitler, whose hatred of the Jews led to his conscious decision to try and wipe them out.

The focus of this article is on the first type: callous indifference, and how this is manifested in everyday politics.
Below, we'll look at some examples of government policy in contemporary Britain that could be construed as actions of "psychopathic" callous indifference.


Britain's "austerity" government" - a modern "case study" in callous indifference

The British government's policy of "austerity", enacted since 2010, has been its guiding principle. The idea, on the face of it, was to bring Britain's finances back into an even keel after suffering during the financial crisis. Explained in straightforward terms of "balancing the books", this garnered a lot of public support, at least initially. But this simplistic explanation masked the hidden truth.

The austerity agenda has pervaded all aspects of government, from local government services to the police and armed forces, the welfare system and public services. With local government budgets cut by up to fifty percent in some cases, this has had a predictable and devastating effect on social care provision, with this having a cascade effect on mental health services, the elderly and so on. The surge in the number of homeless people is inevitably tied up with the fact that those in need of help from the state are simply being left to fend for themselves due to the lack of resources now provided by the state, with the predictable result that some have become the homeless "refugees" of the government's austerity agenda.
The "reforms" to the welfare system, enacted mainly under the watch of Iain Duncan Smith, have had a similar effect. From the introduction of Universal Credit, to the earlier changes to how disability was assessed, has meant that every reason humanly possible is being provided to withdraw funds from those in need. With a regime introduced that assumes that those asking for welfare are "fakers", coupled with one that creates an internal working environment where those working under the system not meeting targets under risk of losing their jobs, there is a culture of fear, both on those in need and those assessing that need. Those working for the state apply the rules rigidly for fear of official retribution; those who suffer the consequences of these rules can fear for their very future.
This culture of fear is deliberate. The fear created is systemically no different from that which has existed in authoritarian regimes; the only difference is the extremity of application. It is a fear borne of insecurity, that nothing and no-one is to be relied upon, and one small change can bring personal disaster. It has the double effect of dissuading some from even attempting to gain welfare that they are entitled to, while those who are on welfare live in constant fear of some small accidental event (like missing an appointment because of an unreliable transport network) resulting in a "sanction". The ultimate result of this can be being cut off from state support completely, regardless of the consequences.
While the government's aim of the austerity agenda may not be to punish sections of society deliberately, the "hidden truth" referred to earlier is that the idea is to deliberately reduce the size of the state. It takes a large amount of callous indifference to ignore the fact that this would have a seriously detrimental, even dangerous, effect on some segments of society. But the government doesn't care, because its aim is reducing the size of the state, regardless of its effect on society.


Theresa May's "hostile environment"

It takes a certain kind of willful ignorance of the lives of others to think that creating an immigration system designed with an inbuilt assumption of "guilty before innocent" is going to only punish the guilty. Whereas in the past, Home Office officials were allowed a fair degree of leniency about how stringently they enforced the rules, under Theresa May's watch as Home Secretary, this turned into the "hostile environment". This meant officials were to follow the rules to a tee, for fear of bring reprimanded or sacked. Those applicants who, for whatever reason, failed to provide the correct documentation, were to be denied. There should be no exceptions.
One early example of this was when the rules were changed around five or six years ago, so that only those British subjects who earn a high enough salary in Britain are allowed the right to live with their non-EU spouses and children in the UK. These rules are among the most punitive in the world, certainly in the developed world. This is a rule of such basic inhumanity that it has created "skype families", or has simply meant that there are a segment of British subjects with families that are forced into exile from Britain; due to government policy, some British families are unable to live in Britain.

Now the recently-highlighted status of the "Windrush generation" has shown the cross-over of the "hostile environment" and the "austerity" agenda. In the case of those who arrived to the UK from the Caribbean fifty years ago (around half a million, by some estimates), the only documentary evidence of their arrival was on their landing cards from decades earlier. But thanks to the Home Office's necessary "downsizing" in the first months of May's tenure, these documents were all thrown away for want of space in their new location.
Now these people can no longer prove when they entered the UK legally, as the documents were discarded by the very department that later on would need them to prove these people's rights. In this sense, the government has made them "non-persons", whose rights have been literally thrown in the trash.
You could call this sheer incompetence on a mammoth scale, but that would ignore the deliberate necessity for those in charge to assume that the people affected by this would all have other means to prove how long they had lived in the UK. But, in the absence of any national ID card system, the government itself only recognizes a small number of historical documents in such cases, as those in charge ought to know. This was why those landing cards, as anachronistic as they are, were so important (as well an indictment of the government's lack of proper systems). Because the government's own method of recording historical data is so haphazard and chaotic, without a British passport or UK birth certificate to properly declare your nationality, it's often difficult to prove your own identity over a period of decades. In this way, the onus is put on the individual to somehow have to hand a huge sheaf of documentary records proving his rights over decades, as the government itself simply has no organised historical system of records worthy of the name. This is nuts, but this is "the system". As said before, government officials would know this.
The fact that officials discarded those people's documents without question can only be seen as an act of callous indifference, that leaves the rights of those people affected up in the air. In effect, they have no rights, at least compared other British citizens, as they do not have the documents to prove it; the government threw them away. And being up against a Home Office that is no longer allowed to show leniency in special cases, how can they prove what rights they are entitled to?
Government assurances that these people will be treated fairly are facile and worthless, as the only way to ensure these people's rights would be to change the law on the government's "hostile environment", which is politically unthinkable. And this still does not magically bring back documents the government have destroyed.
The government has shown time and again it can never be trusted to "do the right thing", as the default setting of the system now in place under Theresa May is one of callous indifference that has aims and targets to be reached, regardless of the cost to those innocents caught in its trap, whose rights are removed arbitrarily. Just be thankful if you're not one of them, I suppose?

The callous indifference of the "hostile environment" also turns landlords, employers, hospitals and schools into virtual immigration enforcement officers in their own right, as they are now legally obliged  - under fear of government sanction - to check the status of who come under their orbit. The "hostile environment" has created a society of spies. What this means in practice is that those people even suspected of being illegal immigrants can be caught in this web of paranoia and prejudice. This is one way how those of the "Windrush generation" discovered their rights had been removed; by, for instance an employer or hospital checking their records and discovering (thanks to government actions) they're "not on the system".
The "hostile environment" has thus allowed basic racism and prejudice to re-emerge, where Britain is heading back to the hateful culture of "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs". While the government might blithely state that only the guilty have something to fear, the realities of this involve wary landlords denying tenancy to people that "seem foreign", while more unscrupulous landlords house foreigners in unsafe (and illegal) tenancies, with the tenants too afraid to report them. The same is true for the public sector, where staff are now meant to check the status of anyone they suspect i.e. who "seems foreign". While Theresa May's idea was to create a "hostile environment" that made it almost impossible for illegal immigrants to live in the UK, the reality is that this now applies in much the same way to many foreigners in general, and even some Brits as well.

The British government's "austerity" agenda, coupled with its "hostile environment", are thus two examples of callous indifference that can be seen in politics. This is what happens when the mentality of the psychopath enters government: an unflinching bureaucracy of fear.

Brexit, revolutionary parallels and the "Batman" analogy

Some commentators have called Brexit a kind of "revolution"; this blogger has referred to it in the past as a kind of "coup by stealth", and there is plenty of evidence to support this view. A small faction of one party, supported by actors outside of the official political process, hijacked the machinery of state to enact their own narrow agenda, regardless of the lack of popular support for it in the population. Under the colours of UKIP, what was initially thought of as a kind of "popular uprising" in the ballot box, has transformed into an agenda that seeks to destroy almost everything most people recognise about the modern British civilisation. In this sense, to use that common lamentation: the revolution had been betrayed! Those that saw leaving the EU as an opportunity to make Britain a more just nation were always bound to be left disillusioned in the face of much more powerful interests that wished to use Brexit for their own amoral purposes.

It was always bound to be so.
The author has long been a fan of the director Christopher Nolan, in particular his take on the "Batman" story and its symbolism. In the guise of the Joker, Nolan created a persona that was the archetypal anarchic, nihilistic psychopath. In the wider story of the "League Of Shadows" that appeared in the first and last of the "Dark Knight" trilogy, Nolan had created a narrative of a secret group that wished to use Gotham as a moral lesson on the rest of the world, where its moral decay would be "purged". In sense, as explained in the video here (talking about the character Bane in particular), Nolan takes the many historical lessons and examples from past revolutions such as the Jacobins in France or the Bolsheviks in Russia. Others have compared Nolan's narrative in "The Dark Knight Rises" to the contemporaneous "Occupy" movement, though Nolan himself said this was just coincidental; he simply uses characters like Bane to explain how revolutionary ideas and rhetoric have always been used as instruments against perceived moral corruption, and how the "cure" has always turned out to be worse than the "disease".
The story of the "The Dark Knight Rises" is also a case-study in how interest groups (such as Wayne's business rival, the industrialist, Daggett) can inadvertently become vehicles for extremist agendas (such as Bane's). Brexit is simply a real-life example of the same commonly-found narrative.


"It doesn't matter who we are. What matters is our plan"

The anti-European movement in Britain had been a vehicle for political change since the Maastricht Treaty of twenty-five years ago. This had brought together a variety of people with different ideologies, and it should not be forgotten that when Britain first joined the then-EEC it was the Labour Party that was most skeptical about greater ties with Europe; this view only changed gradually, until the roles had been reversed with the Tories by the time of the Maastricht Treaty. This meant that, although it was usually right-wing Libertarians who were making most of the running on the anti-Europe agenda (and were the ones behind the creation of UKIP), there were still other elements that were attracted to the cause for their own reasons, who blamed the EU for their woes.
The rise of UKIP from a fringe movement twenty years ago to one that (for a while) dominated the political agenda can be explained by the deliberate diffuseness of its appeal. It was Nigel Farage's charisma that held the party together and saw it appeal to greater numbers of the disillusioned. At one point referring to his party as a "People's Army", Farage appeared as the ultimate anti-establishment figure, even though he was a privately-educated man of "The City" with a strongly Libertarian agenda.
The fact that Brexit's Libertarian agenda has outlasted the political fortunes of Farage and UKIP tells us about how the movement has become much more than about one man or one party. To paraphrase the Bane quote at the head of the paragraph, it doesn't matter who's in charge of Brexit; what matters is Brexit. As long as Brexit is carried out, nothing else matters. This is what makes Brexit seem more and more like an ideological kind of "suicide pact", that ought to be implemented no matter what, regardless of the cost to everyone else. For their moralistic version of purity to be reached, the corrupt status quo must be purged, even if they destroy Britain as we know it in the process. Maybe that's one reason why some wags refer to the ideologues as the "Brexit Taliban". They have a plan, and they can't be reasoned with.

"Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you"

Brexit was only possible because of years of political complacency from the establishment. David Cameron, in an act of supreme arrogance, assumed that he would easily win a referendum on the EU, and thus put the issue of Europe to bed for a generation at least. In being part of the EU for more than forty years, the pro-EU establishment had considered the arguments for being a member of the EU to be virtually self-evident. Since the defeat of the Tory "bastards" in parliament during the Maastricht Treaty debate, the issue of the EU had been settled for twenty years. They were thus were ill-prepared against an opposing side that not only had the better rhetoric, but also were better organised and had greater self-belief. Like the Bane quote at the head of the paragraph, the establishment had forgotten how to fight for their ideas.
In the "Dark Knight" trilogy, Bruce Wayne symbolises establishment values, but by the time Bane and his revolutionary agenda appear on the scene, he is unprepared, and is defeated by Bane (at least temporarily). This can be seen, on a one-on-one scale, as an analogy for all populist and extremist movements that have threatened the established order. In the past, they were movements such as Bolshevism and Fascism, but in the modern era, these movements have been personified across the world in different parts of Europe and Asia through populist "strongman" regimes and ideological agendas. They have only been allowed to flourish due to the weakness and complacency of the existing order.


"Do you feel in charge?"

Once the referendum was won, Theresa May took political control of the process by becoming an acolyte to the cause. After first of all taking the Conservative Party into the same realm as UKIP in the party conference, this then resulted in not long afterwards declaring that the UK would also leave the single market and customs union. It should be remembered that few of the leave campaigners actually were calling for this during the referendum campaign; they saw no reason to leave the single market in itself, as they saw it would damage Britain's economy. However, as Nolan's narrative in "The Dark Knight Returns" demonstrates, the agenda of one cause can quickly become mutated into a more extreme "pure" version. So, after the referendum May's government became enthralled by the agenda of "Hard Brexit", whereby the people with the real power behind events made their presence felt.
This is how interest groups like "Legatum" (and the ERG in parliament) have become the people really running the government's Brexit agenda. While how, using the quote in the heading above, Bane mocks Daggett to demonstrate who's really in control of Gotham, it is in real-life the "moneyed interests" in Brexit who have the final say, who look at those disparate, amateurish groups that naively supported the referendum campaign with such disdain. UKIP had its moment in the spotlight, but was really nothing more than a pawn, a vessel, that the "moneyed interests" could use to get what they wanted; once it had served its purpose, it could be discarded like political trash, and has been. Nolan demonstrated this point in the film with how Bane dealt so casually with Daggett, whose money and infrastructure had been so important for him, until they weren't. The Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia dealt with the short-lived Liberal Kerensky government in much the same way, overthrowing it once it had ceased to be useful.


"Take control of your city!"

In "The Dark Knight", Bane sees himself as Gotham's "reckoning", to put a definitive end to the city's moral degradation. As all revolutions may be called a sort of "reckoning", Brexit has been seen by some of its advocates as a similar kind of moral "reckoning". It is seen as an opportunity to reset the agenda and put right many of Britain's wrongs. The fact that such thinking is naive at best is immaterial. Britain has many things wrong with it, but a "reckoning" is not the right way to go about it, especially when there are so many opportunists who are more interested in using the potential chaos for their own ends. Some might welcome the possibility of the system collapsing around them, but most of those that do are not doing so for altruistic reasons.
The "reckoning" that Bane presents in "The Dark Knight Rises" is a false revolution, not with greater morality but with even worse immorality. He explains this to Bruce Wayne; how Bane would offer hope to poison the city's soul, by letting them doing absolutely anything they wanted. In this way, Nolan succeeds in getting to the core of all failed revolutions: they offer freedom but create even greater oppression than before; it is simply of a different nature. This is the hideous irony of the "Brexit Agenda", and how it simply seems to take the ideology of "austerity" to its logical, amoral conclusion. Libertarianism isn't freedom in the "civilised" sense of the word, but merely "freedom" in the sense that you are "free" to fend for yourself, thanks to absolute government indifference to your fate. It is a "freedom" that allows homeless people to die on the street, disabled people to go hungry, and health system to collapse. To outsiders looking on, it might look less like "freedom" and more like a descent to a moral abyss.

While the agenda of Brexit has rhetorically shifted ever harder, this has been matched with a populist rhetoric that has no modern parallel in Britain. The way that the Brexit rhetoric of "Take back control" (as well as how Trump's) mirrors with that of Bane is striking, and tells us how well Nolan as a writer can see the universality of revolutionary themes. To its advocates, Brexit is the instrument of Britain's salvation, to extract itself from the rule of a corrupt elite. To those opposed to it - "Remainers" - it is a false idol.
The kind of "freedom" that the Brexiteers advocate is one where Britain is an island legally "untethered" from cross-national commitments; not only the EU, but a swathe of other associated legal treaties that Britain needs to be signed up to in order to function as a 21st century global power. The image from "The Dark Knight Rises", where the bridges to Gotham are all destroyed (bar one), seems a startlingly apt metaphor for the "burning the bridges" rhetoric that the Brexiteers seem to have in mind. It would not only cut Britain off from its closest trading market, but also (thanks to losing all the associated EU trade deals) make it much harder to trade with most of the world. It would do huge damage to Britain's reputation as a reliable nation to do business with, as well as cause unprecedented disruption to Britain's own internal economy.

This is what the Brexiteers mean by "taking back control".