Boris Johnson: a Hitler satire "Brexit bunker" tribute act and funny fable to authoritarian comedy acts

 If Alexander Borisovich DePfeffel Johnsonov could be compared to Hitler, it would only be in the sense that he was a man destined for the greatness of his own ego. The "World King" became the ruler of Brexit Britain. As the Ayran dictator of the English master race, England was, under his guidance, fated for greatness. His boundless energy and optimism would whizz-bang the nation into orgiastic delight under his personality, as he flew the flag of Brexit, the cult that he knew he was destined to lead as soon as he decided to choose to write the article in favour of Brexit that would lead him to victory in the referendum (or not).

But he didn't want Britain to really leave the EU. He just wanted to back the losing side in the referendum, and lap up the honour in defeat at Leave losing the 2016 EU referendum, so that he could take Cameron's place when he stood down shortly before the 2020 UK election. That would leave Boris ideally place to rule and dominate politics in the UK for that coming decade, his place in history secure. Sure, he had no idea what he was going to do with that power when he had it, much like Cameron. But being Prime Minister was much more important than having a plan for the country.

But he went on and won the bloody referendum, didn't he? Him and Michael, Goebbels to his Hitler, had to look like they had a plan when they won. It was lucky in a way that the two of them managed to cock up the leadership battle after Cameron fell on his sword so that it was nasty Mrs May who took the fall for the mess of the negotiations. She was never suited to power either. May was far too serious, with her own neuroses that haunted her like demons in the dark shadows of power, lurking in the back of her mind. The Brexit demons got to her in the end, sending her slightly mad probably.

But not Alexander the great, the Ayran superhero! He was biding his time, allowing May to take the blame for everything that was going wrong. Everyone knew about his energy and hypnotic power. When May finally gave in, her soul broken by the Brexit monster, it was Boris' turn to demonstrate his vision for Britain, giving Brexit a personality cult that it truly deserved. For Boris would be Brexit's dear leader, with the drive and dynamism of a blonde Hitler but with a better sense of humour and minus the anti-Semitism! Sure, Boris was a womanizer, a liar, a casual racist and almost completely amoral, but at least he was a lovable rogue! And having Michael "Goebbels" Gove at his side was a stroke of genius: Michael playing the straight man and the dissembling propagandist to Boris' affable fool-cum-secret genius. 

Then there was Dom. He was the man who never smiled, and when he did. you had the right idea to run very far away. Dom was the Martin Bormann of the gang. The real power behind the throne. He was the real ideologue, even more than Michael or Boris was. Boris was just doing Brexit for the bantz. No-one could really do anything without Dom's consent, and Dom controlled access even to Boris. Dom allowed Michael to take over control of the logistics and media side of Brexit - for Michael was more of details man than the fantasizing Aryan leader - while Dom controlled the wider strategic vision. 

This was how they came to win the public's adulation so quickly, with the motivational rhetoric and simple solutions - "Take Back Control" became "Get Brexit Done". TBC, GBD. Easy. Now at the height of Dom's powers at this point, he was able to get Boris to replace his new finance minister with an even newer one one more amenable to their agenda.  It was all about GBD, and the economy was to become a tool to the might of Brexit.

But the great leader suffered a cruel twist of fate: at the pinnacle of his success, a great pestilence stuck him down like Thor's hammer. The Gods were cruel to the unbelievers, and Boris had not prayed hard enough to the Brexit sigil for the nation's Aryan master to be protected. Struck down and debilitated for a time, the nation lurched without his divine inspiration and leadership. Brexit Britain's foreign minister struggled to fill the place of Alexander Borisovich, and in this time even Dom "Bormann" Cummings lapsed in his focus, his sight failing him on the way to Barnard Castle. It was a dark time for the nation and the government.

When the leader came back from his respite there were many praising the return of the triumphant lion, waiting for the personification of the Brexit cult to inspire us all again. Alas, it was not to be. For the leader's health was not what it was; he seemed to lack focus, drive and certainty of purpose. He came to rely more and more on Dom while also limiting his own public appearances to a minimum. His sense of judgement, once sharp, had dulled and become fogged by indecision, paranoia and corrupt motivations. Those in the higher echelons of the party looked at the sclerotic and chaotic running of the government and saw a power play of personalities incapable of rational thoughts; for the elite had become poisoned by an amoral thirst for autocracy at all costs. And behind this most of all was Dom.

Murmurings in the ranks talked darkly of the time after the leader, for all could see that "the once-and-future king" was a ghost of his former self. Like May before him, something had sucked the life out of his soul. For her it was the essence of Brexit itself; for him it was divine intervention that had snatched away the essence of the leader's energy. Brexit it seemed, was a cursed cause. 

Who could take over the mantle of the Brexit sigil after the assumed saviour, Alexander Borisovich? Who was worthy? Some talked of Michael "Goebbels" Gove being the natural successor, given the longevity of his connection with the Ayran superman. But outside enemies were circling. Brexit Britain had few friends in the world thanks to the self-defeating fanaticism of its most ardent disciples. No-one wanted it to succeed; it was a doomed religion.

Now that Brexit was destined to ruin the country after all, once the dear leader himself eventually retired into obscurity, the leadership of the cause seemed a hopeless endeavour. Whoever took over would only act as an "Admiral Doenitz", there to formalize the death warrant of the Brexit death-cult. And few were willing to do that. There was no fame in surrendering the cause. Once it was all to "take back control", by now people were pleading to "Get Brexit Undone", to end the madness.

But the true believers needed a scapegoat, as they had used May before the dear leader. Michael "Goebbels" Gove was too cunning to allow himself that dishonour; better to coax another into the role. That way at least, the blame could be transferred from the fanatical ideologues that had ruined the country to another malleable cypher. That way at least, the flame of Brexit could still live on to be passed to another generation, and the brief glorious period of Brexit could be misremembered in myth... 

 

The British government's Coronavirus response: "gaslighting" the UK population and Brexit "psy-ops"?

 The UK government's response to the Coronavirus pandemic has become more and more chaotic and confused in recent weeks. 

The government's strategy for dealing with the pandemic has from the start has been like that of how UK governments of the past have dealt with many national crises - the "command and control" instinct, with the Conservative Party having a particular instinct for centralized decision-making on one hand, while simultaneously outsourcing operations to unaccountable and inefficient private service providers (which coincidentally often have some kind of nepotistic link to someone in government).  

Heading into the autumn and a predictable rise in infections, this has left Britain's ability to deal with the virus highly compromised. The UK government appears to have had no clear strategy: a "track and trace" system that has effectively broken down; a testing system that is incapable of dealing with an increase in demand for tests; and worst of all, a "lockdown" that whose rules and regional nuances have become so confused and contradictory that they make no logical sense and are impossible for any reasonable person to keep a track of from one week to the next. More on this in a moment.

The sheer levels of appalling incompetence on Brexit meanwhile were sharply raised by Ed Milliband in parliament recently. On both Brexit and the Coronavirus, the Boris Johnson's government seem to have to have no coherent strategy; on both key issues for Britain, if him and his government have a strategy at all, it is about blaming others for the government's own failings. 

On Brexit, any failure to get a deal with the EU is always put down to the EU's "unreasonable" behaviour; on the Coronavirus meanwhile, ministers have been blaming the British public itself for the the government's own strategic failure.

What is interesting in the case of the virus is that surveys have shown that a surprisingly large segment of the population agree with the government's pointing the fingers at its own electorate. In other words, they believe that it is not the government's responsibility to look after the public health of the country, but the people's themselves!

"Gaslighting" a perpetually-anxious population?

This kind of psychological blame-transference is akin to "gaslighting": the abusive husband that makes the abused wife believe that it is her fault she is being abused, because she isn't doing enough to earn her husband's respect. But equally, the government's success in getting people to turn on each other rather than the government is a sign of the success of the kind of discreet "psychological warfare" that the government has been conducting through austerity for the last ten years. While "austerity" itself is supposed to be over (until the government finds some other justification for its return) the "nudge theory" approach by the government has shifted people' perceptions of how they view the government: they are now much more likely to blame individuals or each other for failings in the country than the government compared to ten years ago. This is also very useful for the government considering its plans for Brexit.

While there is far more evidence to support a "cascade failure" of incompetence behind the government's Coronavirus response than some kind of dark conspiracy, what is clear is that the government's chaotic and ever-changing strategy (and laws) on the virus have left the public disoriented and anxious. Rules are changed at short notice on some occasions while at other times their communication is staggered many days in advance of their actual implementation, so they are not implemented until after the population have had a weekend to congregate together (and potentially spread the virus further). If there a rational strategy in place behind these endlessly contradictory approaches, it is impossible to discern. But as already mentioned, the government have already laid in the "strategy" of blaming the population themselves for the spread of the virus.  

Under these circumstances, an anxious and disoriented population would be more willing to accede to greater government control over aspects of their privacy and their daily lives. Such controls have already been happening, both in legislation and greater use of technology for the sake of "public order".

Under the cover of a public health emergency, laws have been passed by the government without any real parliamentary consultation; "temporary" laws that the government would equally be able to conveniently keep on after Brexit. And while a covert power grab is underway, the government produces guidance and law changes on the Coronavirus that change from week to week. The public cannot keep up with these perpetually-changing restrictions, and you wonder if that is down to government incompetence or something else.

A perpetually anxious and confused population is also one that is easy for governments to control. This is something that authoritarian governments know very well; and Britain's government structure is still among the most centralized and authoritarian in nature in the democratic world. 

It is also well-observed that Britons are perhaps among the most anxious and neurotic of the national populations in the democratic world. Some of this is due to history and culture, with Britain still having a hierarchical culture of  a "landowning aristocracy" and "landless tenants", a long history of social inequality and lack of social mobility. These issues have only got worse over the last forty years, and especially in the last ten years after the detrimental effects of the financial crisis and austerity on the stability and quality of the job market and social cohesion.

So the levels of anxiety in Britain's population were already high; with the Coronavirus and the government's chaotic "blame the people" strategy in dealing with it, the government seem to want the British population to turn on themselves. Thus distracted, this kind of psychological environment would be an ideal one for an authoritarian government to make whatever changes it thought it could get away with. This is the kind of thing that Naomi Klein talked about in "The Shock Doctrine". An increased role for outsourced government contracts to unaccountable corporations and a greater corrupt symbiosis between them a favoured government figures. In such an amoral environment, these Brexiteers all fail upwards, with the law only applying to "ordinary people". 

While Brexit is at its heart a Libertarian project, the authoritarian and corrupt instincts of Britain's Brexiteers are never far away. These people are only "Libertarian" in the sense that they hate the idea of having to help the "ordinary person". This is why there a view that Brexit will leave the wider state to shrink to a bare minimum of support for the general population, while leaving the Brexit "elite" to further integrate their corrupt connections between government and big business. Like in any corrupt authoritarian state, Brexit will be about subsidizing the Brexiteer elite. Meanwhile, the people will be too disoriented by the perpetually-changing situation to know where to target their blame; they have already been "trained" to blame each other.   

Brexit, CANZUK and Tony Abbott: a vision of "Empire 2.0"?

 The appointment of Tony Abbott as a UK trade advisor is one of the clearest signs that Britain's government sees CANZUK as a primary plank of its Brexit trade strategy.

Brexit has been an ideological project from its birth, with the Libertarian wing of the Conservative Party and like-minded supporters. Their vision was of Britain not as a part of the EU, who it sees in ideological opposition to their agenda, but seeing Britain instead as a "thalassocratic" power, a power of the seas as the British Empire had been.

This is not to equate Libertarians as the same as old-fashioned imperialists; the rationale is different, even if the effect is not that far different in reality. However, Libertarians in Britain see their agenda in the same fantastical light, almost entirely separated from rational and coherent thought. More on that in a moment.

The purpose of having someone like Tony Abbott as a trade advisor is transparently-clear - to facilitate the closer ties that Britain's government would want with Australia. Other ideological allies in Canada and New Zealand have also expressed a like-minded desire to have closer bonds with Britain. 

"Rule, Britannia!"

The thinking behind CANZUK from Britain's point of view is equally transparent. 

The fact that, within CANZUK, Britain would be the largest power, in terms of financial clout and population, can hardly be a coincidence. It's easy to see its British advocates as seeing Britain within CANZUK as the power with the financial might to support the resource-rich economies of Australia and Canada, for example. In this sense, Britain within CANZUK would see itself as the primary power within a trade association, and (presumably) able to dictate much of the agenda of the group. Russia within the EEU (an economic grouping of former Soviet states that Russia dominates) performs the same function, and the similarities cannot be mere coincidence.

In this sense, CANZUK would be to the UK what the EEU is to Russia: a tool of vainglorious power projection, and a kind of "legacy empire", in recreating something of its former imperial reach. 

It would only be a matter of time before the UK is bossing about its more junior "partners" in the trading bloc. No wonder that some in Australia are already calling Tony Abbott a "foreign agent" for working with Britain. At the same time time, Britain's role within CANZUK would only further encourage British arrogance on the global stage. While the Royal Navy is only a shadow of its imperial former self, the two enormous aircraft carriers built to roam the seas are further vainglorious symbols of Britain's power projection. It's not hard to imagine Britain encouraging other compliant states to join its "trade bloc" (Singapore has already been mentioned), and the more far-flung its reach, the more Britain's imperial vanity as a global power is stroked.

While the CANZUK group are all multicultural democracies, it is also a grouping of the former "White Dominions"; the same former colonies that had been the initial target of Britain's postwar labour outreach when Britain was in a manpower shortage. The fact that it was the Caribbean and South Asian parts of the empire that answered the call was not what the British government had actually intended. The "Windrush generation" wasn't actually part of the plan - the UK was really hoping for Aussies, Canadians and Kiwis instead. In a subconscious way then, isn't CANZUK also a way to turn back the clock? While CANZUK these days is a Libertarian project, it still has great emotional appeal to old-fashioned sentiments and nostalgia, with many of the older generation having memories of relatives moving "Down Under", for example. The feeling in Britain that "they" are "like us" is a strongly emotional one, with historical memory playing a far greater role than rational or practical thought. The feeling that Europeans are someone not "like us" is part of the emotional justification for CANZUK. It is an idea based on emotional pull; a dangerous game to play when all rational sense says it's an idea that makes no economic sense. 

Empire of irrationality

CANZUK has little economic or logistical reasoning behind the concept. The actual benefits to the nations, in terms of freedom of movement for trade and labour, are questionable as relatively little trade is done between them to begin with, at least compared to each country's close neighbours and larger trading partners. In Britain and Canada's case, especially so. Then there is the question of logistics and how to think that trading with countries thousands of miles away will make more sense than Britain trading mainly with countries just across the channel. CANZUK is an idea that appeals mainly to Anglophone romantics like Daniel Hannan (who by no small coincidence is, like Tony Abbott, also a British trade advisor). 

If the idea from Britain's point of view is that CANZUK is meant to be a replacement for EU trade, then only the merest glance at the comparison will make the idea seem not only absurd but idiotic. The population of the EU is nearly 300 million, while the population of Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined is barely equal to the UK's. How do CANZUK's proponent's in Britain expect to get enough trade from such a smaller trading bloc? But again, fantastical ideas overrule any kind of rational thought when it comes to most things on Brexit.

The British government's "Command and Control" Coronavirus omni-shambles

The news that the 400,000 items of PPE the UK government ordered from Turkey had to be sent back is somehow befitting of an institution that has been shown to be clueless in their actions.

The government's systematic incompetence is made worse by its own dissemination, equaled by the way in which criticism of its actions is framed as being unhelpful or biased, as though a time of crisis should somehow absolve the government of accountability. In Hungary for example, that is indeed exactly the government's position.

Within the overall sense of chaos at the centre, the government has failed in almost every area of public health. The chaos over PPE provision is followed by the ventilator supply chaos, where the the ventilators asked for haven't met the government's standards, partly due to misunderstanding. The fact that these haven't been needed may well be a reprieve in one sense, though the fact that there have been thousands of elderly dying in care homes rather than being taken to hospital dampens any remote sense of "success" in the ventilators asked for not being used.

This comes on top of the closure of the London Nightingale hospital, which is marked as a sign of "success", while at the same time highlighting the unused beds there that could have been used for those dying in care homes, or the many "excess deaths" that are happening in the community as a result of people not going to any hospital at all. The hospitals opened for Covid-19 patients are not being used for their presumed purpose, while general hospitals are seeing far fewer non Covid-19 patients. The overall "excess deaths" tell us the story on that.

Then there is the testing fiasco. The "100,000 tests a day by the end of April" was only reached by fiddling the figures, and testing has since fell back to its previous modest levels. Within that, there are stories of tests being lost, poor communication, and so on.
The government is beginning to implement the system that South Korea had for "test, track and trace", albeit two months late, when it becomes a great deal more difficult to implement effectively. The small-scale trial testing system on the Isle of Wight has software issues, as well as being of questionable use when it requires close contact with people (i.e. breaking social distancing rules) in order to pass on information around the community.

The overall picture, then, is one of a government out of its depth. The rest of the world has been looking on at this level of incompetence in disbelief, while the government-friendly side of the media has been keen to deflect blame (NHS staff apparently being more likely to support Labour, so they are therefore "biased" against the government) or to gloss over the ongoing disaster entirely, with stories about Boris Johnson's bravery when in hospital, for example.


A hierarchy set up to fail

One of the key linking elements in this institutional incompetence is the organisation of government itself, and the ingrained thinking within government figures that any kind of crisis such as this must be "led from the centre". To be fair, this is a view that has been held within government for decades, but is especially true of the conservative wing.
It's best to understand England in particular as a historically hierarchical society, with its "public school" education system being the most important method of maintaining power within a limited core of society. By this thinking, power remains within the overall hands of  "the establishment": a loose social grouping of like-minded and similarly-educated people. Through their shared social connections, those in "the establishment" use the media, politics, and the arts to maintain their insidious grip on society. Those in society outside their esteemed group often have no idea why the lives of so many in Britain are set up to fail from birth, but merely take it fatalistically as their lot in life. This is the idea.

In George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four", the party operative O'Brien said "the purpose of power is power". With Britain, the Conservative government's rationale is similar. They believe they are the "natural party of government", and so their own incompetence is dismissed as something that couldn't be helped. Their natural assumption is that, as their own education has come from being part of the elite, anyone else in charge could only do an even worse job.
Their incompetence, though, stems from the corrupt nature of the hierarchy, with people being promoted far beyond their capabilities. Personal loyalty and ideological purity are the key to career advancement; competence and intelligence are merely coincidental. The so-called "elite" is no more intelligent than any other person in society, and in many cases, much less intelligent. You only have to look at how badly departments are ran by their ministers.

In many ways, England's historical hierarchy continues into politics today, with much of the media's portrayal of Westminster as a latter-day "medieval court", with daily reporting of metaphorical "palace intrigue" the norm. Many of these journalists being from the same "elite" background as the politicians, those selfsame journalists often seek public office themselves (such as the Prime Minister and his deputy, to name just two). This is just one illustration of the corrupting nature of the hierarchy, and explains a lot behind the motivation of the popular press.

So understanding the effect all this has on the government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we can see that the government's own prejudice is to centralize control: for power to effective, the government's own hierarchical prejudice means that it is loathe to relinquish decision-making to those it doesn't trust. By this rationale, the only time it might feasibly relinquish control down the chain of command would be to undermine confidence in those lower down (i.e. only give others power to make sure they screw it up).
For example, one of the problems NHS England has had in obtaining PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic is due to the byzantine fracturing of the decision-making process. This fracturing happened when the government "reformed" the NHS in the early years of the Coalition. What was meant to be a decentralizing "reform" of a top-heavy institution turned it into one with thousands more middle managers. Now with dozens of smaller NHS authorities chasing after the same PPE, the result has been chaos and in-fighting within the NHS, all as a result of the "reforms" the Conservative government carried out during Cameron's tenure. One assumes this effect wasn't intentional, but by making decentralization a by-word for chaos, it boosts the government's own hierarchical prejudice for its own ends.

By contrast, Germany's federal structure has been to its advantage in this public health crisis. Its form of decentralizing power is designed for flexibility; unlike the British institution, where the government seems to make sure that decentralizing can only result in chaos and incompetence. The British government's own prejudice is for "Command and Control", to assume that only central government can have all the information or the key expertise, and against allowing others lower down in the pecking order the agency to make decisions on the spot. This all comes from the country's historical hierarchy.

In this public health crisis, this effect is deadly.


 

Lions Led By Donkeys, again: the NHS and the British government's Coronavirus response

It's a hundred years, or thereabouts, since the Spanish Flu pandemic, which followed on from the chaos and carnage of the First World War.

That war led, in many cases, to a collapse of the old social order in societies across Europe. In spite of avoiding the threat of revolution that rose elsewhere, Britain's own ruling class was not immune to the human consequences of war, and many aristocratic families lost people as well as everyone else. There was a hope that because of this the ruling class would learn the error of its ways and build "Home For Heroes" after the war. Alas, they did not. There was enormous suspicion of "Socialism" from the ruling elite, and it took another global war for effective social change to occur, with the Labour government of 1945 leading to the NHS and the wider "welfare state".

The phrase "lions led by donkeys" was coined during the Great War to describe how Britain's incompetent, callous and out-of-depth generals caused the deaths of thousands of their soldiers, who loyally died for "King and Country".
Over a hundred year later, most agree that the battle against the global Coronavirus pandemic is a "war" ("World War C", if you like). In this battle, those on the front line are health professionals rather than soldiers, putting their lives on the line for everyone else's sake. But from Britain's experience, what we see from the government's response (and "strategy") are an echo what happened during the First World War: those in charge being clueless or callous in their response.

In government, the initial strategy seems to have been to follow the idea of "herd immunity", which not only goes against all recognised scientific practice on the response to pandemics, but also shows a complete misunderstanding of the original concept (which can only work after there is already a vaccine in circulation). This author has already stated how this approach bears distinct similarities to the "laissez faire" ideology of Libertarian thought, which many government ministers follow (including, the Prime Minister, his deputy, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary just for starters).

This deeper ideological bias prevalent within government is deeply disturbing when it is applied to public health during a deadly pandemic. This kind of ideological prejudice in these circumstances is effectively casting a death sentence to a proportion of the population, either directly (by saying that people should get a potentially deadly disease), or indirectly (through the knock-on effect of causing the deaths of those who would have been saved had the hospitals not been overrun by a pandemic).

This kind of callousness is chilling to anyone with an iota of humanity. It demonstrates that those in government should be nowhere near the corridors of power. It demonstrates that their actions are detrimental to the public good and the public heath of the country.


Callous and incompetent

The main areas where the British government's strategy and organisation has been either dangerously callous or incompetent include those of testing, the effectiveness of the national "lockdown", and the issue of supply (of PPE to front-line staff, as well as protecting the vulnerable).

The responses to the first two of these issues (testing and the approach to a "lockdown") are ones that mostly obviously have the fingerprints of Libertarian thinking over them. To return to the military analogy from before, mass testing during a pandemic is the way to discover how large is the "army" you are going to war with. Fighting a virus without knowing how many people in the population are infected by it is like fighting a war against an army whose numbers and capability you are completely blind to. It is leading a battle based on belief alone, with rationalism and planning abandoned to the wind. It is insane. This was also government policy, until very recently.

Then there is the issue of the so-called "lockdown". Again, the government's prejudice towards Libertarian "laissez-faire" thinking is apparent. The "lockdown" that the government introduced still remains "advisory", with the police having limited enforcement powers. While lots of shops, cafes, restaurants, pubs and the like have closed, there are still plenty of businesses that are operating almost as normal. Many haven't closed because the "lockdown" is advisory and not a legal obligation, meaning they cannot make any claim from their insurers.
Meanwhile, the government's wish to rely on the public's own "self enforcement" is simply about naively relying on people's "better nature" rather than understanding the essential irrationality of human behaviour, especially in the face of uncertainty. The overall communication approach from the government has been appallingly-confused, with different ministers giving different advice, and it being unclear who (if anyone) is actually in charge.

Other countries look at the way Britain's government has handled the "lockdown" with despair. To the outside world, Britain's government looks like it has a completely chaotic strategy, with no coherent plan and no coherent enforcement.

Finally, we come to the issue of supply.
On the issue of testing, the government's lack of co-ordination with the chemicals industry is another reason (on top of the government's previous "herd immunity" strategy) why the process is appallingly sclerotic.
The same lack of co-ordination is true with supplying PPE, which now means many health professionals are exposing themselves to the virus without suitable protection. In this way, the wider health sector, thanks to government incompetence, is rapidly turning into a breeding ground for the virus. Even the PPE that health professionals do get is of a lower quality of standard compared to that worn by health professionals in Italy. This is without even mentioning the social care sector, whose provision of PPE is pitiful, and the provision of food by the government to those deemed most vulnerable (as they cannot leave their homes) is so poor it would embarrass a Food Aid worker in the Third World.

The "Nightingale" hospitals being built in a matter of days are a great demonstration of the army's strengths in a crisis, and it feels poetic that in Britain's part in "World War C", it is the army coming to the aid of this pandemic's battered front line. But beds are one thing, and there is the question of staffing for the hospitals, as well as supply of ventilators, oxygen, and so on. Good will and clapping our health workers is the least they deserve, but applause doesn't save lives. Again, on these issues the government are found wanting, with centralisation of the decision-making process being a recurring problem.
It is in this kind of crisis that Britain being one of the most centralised states in the Western world is having a knock-on effect, to the detriment of public health.

We haven't even covered the mismanagement of the government's financial response to the pandemic, which has involved lots of good words, but with poor communication, little (if any) co-ordination between agencies, and little in the way on concrete action to prevent mass unemployment, a steep rise in poverty and all the social knock-on effects that would bring.

All these issues were true in a different context during the First World War, and recurred in other ways more recently during the Falklands War (when the military went to war without adequate air cover, and its victory was down to blind luck). Later in the eighties, there was the Hillsborough disaster, where police incompetence and/or callousness led to the death of nearly a hundred football supporters. These are all situations where the incompetent, negligent or callous actions of people in positions of power led to people's deaths.

In in the Coronavirus pandemic, the actions of those in the decision-making process in Britain must not be forgotten.

Coronavirus in the UK: a Brexit "stress test"?

A country’s culture tells us a lot about how it reacts to a crisis. When the Coronavirus hit Italy, the government put the entire country in quarantine (this literally being the place where the term “quarantine” was invented). When the Coronavirus came to Britain, the government’s approach has been one of “Keep Calm and Carry On” (as though stiff upper lip is a coherent strategy against a pandemic).

The advice the government is following comes from its Chief Scientist, who is in fact a behavioural scientist. This makes one wonder if Britain's official reaction to the Coronavirus isn't then turning into a kind of mass behavioural science experiment imposed on its population. 

Britain’s strategy rests not only on a lot of counter-intuitive thinking; it is also the dead opposite to what the rest of the world seems to be doing. Why?

Libertarian “behavioural science”

There is an attitude of “let things run their natural course” at work here, which is a mentality shared by proponents of laissez-faire Libertarianism. The “behavioural science” aspect of the government’s strategy is about “nudging” human behavior rather than through implementing drastic measures that could cause panic. In other words, the government wants the British population to be acquiescent and placid; fatalistic, almost, about the coming epidemic.

The government naturally has its own reasons for not wanting to create a panicked population, but the strategy here also seems to rest on some aspects of British culture as well. Fatalism and stoicism are two aspects of the British psyche that have been honed through different “crisis points” over the centuries, most recently the Second World War. Boris Johnson’s grave demeanour during these Coronavirus press conferences, feels deliberately designed to engender morbid acceptance of what is to come. In another (probably deliberate) way it feels like a quietly-knowing echo of the kind of “blood, toil, tears and sweat” of Churchill fame (which at the time definitely did not reassure everyone at all, by the way). Thus we have the national leader implicitly evoking the nostalgic spirit of “national struggle” and ultimate sacrifice, with the latter being seen as an inevitable consequence of the former. Those at the most risk, the elderly and the infirm, are already being made to be seen by the wider population as, to an extent, helpless victims of viral “natural selection”.

The scientific strategy seems to rest on allowing most of the population to be exposed to the virus naturally, with people’s own immune systems given time to fight it off. In this sense, the government seems to have already accepted that the health care system is unable to cope, and is encouraging people to “look after themselves”.

The fact that this strategy goes against all the official WHO advice and the responses of most other governments in the world is telling. It tells us the British government approach is a combination of Libertarian thinking backed up by the fatalism inherent in the British psyche. One wonders if some in the government haven’t already seen the “learning potential” from taking this “ideological strategy” to a pandemic outbreak to see how the same strategy could be used across the country more widely to deal with the political effects of Brexit next year.

Coronavirus: an opportune Brexit “stress test”?

If people can acquiesce to losing, for example, potentially half a million people on the back of ideological “science”, what else could they accept?

The dark echoes that this fatalism to mass death leads to need no explanation. Already Britain is a country where homeless people are left to die on the streets or in seclusion in the countryside and some of the disabled live in starved penury; people acquiesce as people are made homeless and the disabled starve thanks to government indifference. Such things are accepted, so it isn’t hard to see how that same population could accept potentially half a million dead as “one of those things”.

This is a society that has been “nudged” for the last ten years to accept what was once unacceptable in a civilized society. The British government’s approach to the Coronavirus has all the hallmarks of being ideological in its nature, against the approach recommended by the world’s health authorities. The ideological project that is “Brexit” intends to radically transform the structure of British society. Already weakened by a decade of austerity and welfare “reform”, those social structures are only supported by a government that seems willing to let a viral outbreak dissolve much of what’s left of British society’s communal bonds. 

With so many already homeless, so many disabled left to their fate, why would care about the old and infirm dying in a viral outbreak? This would be Darwinian "natural selection" on a national scale.

By making people acquiesce to the idea of half a million dead as somehow “feasible”, it psychologically prepares them for the ideological mayhem that a Libertarian “Brexit” would inflict on them afterwards. Worn down by a decade of austerity and a year of viral deaths, whatever ideological plans the government has for “Brexit Britain” would be accepted as almost trivial by comparison. There would be no effective opposition left.

In this sense, there could be a very discreet (and deliberate) psychological strategy behind the government’s “laissez-faire” attitude to the Coronavirus outbreak (as their strategy is so plainly at odds with every other country’s): using the outbreak as a way to “stress test” specific structural aspects of society, while weakening public resistance to the radical (and at one time, unthinkable) social change to come afterwards.

The “national struggle” that the Coronavirus is now being portrayed as by the British government evokes the jingoistic spirit of Britain’s mythologized past on one hand and the stoic fatalism in the British psyche on the other. The acceptance of the radical ideology of Brexit after the national trauma that an ideological approach to the Coronavirus could inflict could well be something the government is banking on.

The “ideological laboratory” that Britain has been for the last ten years seems to be stepping up in its approach, with Brexit as its endgame; in the case of the Coronavirus, using Britain’s population as expendable “guinea pigs” seems like just the logical conclusion of that when applied to medical science.

Finally, there is the idea of the virus as a "test of national character". By being able to deal with the Coronavirus with its own ideological approach, it implies that Britain can deal with any kind of adversity. The mythology of Britain's supposed exceptionalism fits the Coronavirus outbreak into the narrative of Brexit.

Brexit "culture wars", Meghan Markle, traditionalism and the royal family

The self-imposed exile of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is one of the many casualties of the “culture war” that has been taking place in Britain for most of the last ten years. It has intensified in the last five years to the point of infecting the image of the royal family itself. The whiff of racism is implicit in the way that the popular press (the “Daily Mail” being the most vivid example) has reacted to Meghan Markle’s behavior, criticizing her for the same actions that Kate Middleton has been otherwise fawned over for. It is incredible that two women can be treated so differently for doing the same things (one – of mixed-race heritage – scorned, the other – of white British descent – praised). The only identifiable difference between them is their racial heritage, and to not see that at the reason for how differently they have been treated by the popular press is to be delusional to what is going onin people’s brains.

Why do the popular press (and its very vocal readership) fawn over Kate on the one hand, and scorn Meghan on the other? Apart from the racial undertones, what else it going on?

“Embodying British values”

The “culture war” that has encompassed Brexit also overlaps into broader cultural issues of national identity, and both these issues affect each other. To “traditionalists”, the royal family represents a link to the values of the past: of deference to authority, ultra-orthodox family life, and maintaining “dignity” through an aversion to displays of emotion. These values are, to those traditionalists, embodied in the Queen Elizabeth II, who grew up at a time when these values were shared not only by traditionalists, but by most of the general public.

This behavior had been instilled in her father, George VI, and her uncle, Edward VIII, by George V, the queen’s grandfather. Those values, however, were noticeably absent from Edward VIII, and his very public persona and charisma made him immensely popular to the public, but hated by the traditionalists. His relationship with Wallis Simpson was only the most obvious example of how he wished to rule as a king in his own singular (and modern) style, against the values that the traditionalists held dear. This was a very public “culture war” that the traditionalists won, at Edward VIII’s expense; it was a “culture war” that cost the king his crown.

Edward VIII’s sympathies towards Fascism were, by comparison, a distraction; his views were shared by many others in the elite at the time, and what made it inconvenient was that Edward was sharing publicly views that many held in the elite held privately. Edward VIII “embarrassed” the image of the royal family by being indiscreet, and it was this that the traditionalists were determined to stamp out. Once he was “exiled” he could be conveniently dismissed as a “crank”.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are victims to similar sort of “culture war” today: by being open in their views, by engaging with public causes (in much the same way that Edward VIII did), being openly liberal, somehow, they are bringing the image of the royal family into disrepute. Nearly a hundred years on, Meghan Markle receives the same levels of scorn from traditionalists that Wallis Simpson did, with the added dimension of Markle’s mixed-race background.

So Harry and Meghan, to escape further scorn from the popular press, have exiled themselves to Canada; jumping before they were pushed, to save the embarrassment of being “shipped off to the Bahamas” like Edward and Wallis Simpson were.

The dimension of race in today’s situation is emblematic of how the idea of “liberal” Britain became a myth. The popular press wants a monarchy that lives in their minds as an unchanging symbol of the past, rather than a representation of the present. It wants a monarchy with the cosmetic appearance of modernity, but with its “modus operandi” unchanged for eternity.

The Japanese once revered their emperor as a god; the traditionalists revere the Queen and her family as a living representation of British values; or more exactly, of the values they want to mythologize. While the 1990s were a time when the royal family’s veneer of respectability lost much of its sheen, as the Queen has grew older, she has still represented a continuity of values that traditionalists in modern Britain hanker for once more. Like Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, who ruled that empire for more than fifty years through the industrial revolution to the First World War, Queen Elizabeth II has ruled Britain (and its dying empire) through many social and cultural changes.

Traditionalists’ “culture war” against modernity and liberal values is summed up in the values that spawned “Brexit” as much as the values that forced Harry and Meghan into self-imposed exile. In some ways, they are victims of the same “culture war” that has forced many Europeans to leave the UK; in the battle of values and culture, the values of tradition, the reverence of authority and mythologizing the past have beaten the values of liberalism and globalism.

“Natural selection”

As the monarchy represents traditional values, it also implicitly represents the ideology of elitism and inherited superiority. For traditionalists, that innate “superiority” (and implicit “purity”) is threatened by globalism and multiculturalism. This is the real stem of the racism that Meghan Markle has faced: traditionalists, at their heart, cannot abide the idea of a black woman marrying into the white Anglo-Saxon “elite” that the royal family represents. For the royal family to maintain its “royal” lineage and its elitist power, in traditionalists’ eyes it must remain “pure”.

This is the ugly prejudice and elitism that lies under the surface of Britain’s cultural traditionalists: for Britain to remain special, its royal family must remain pure. This is not so far removed from the thinking of racial eugenicists that was prevalent a hundred years ago, and the fact that such thinking has refused to die (and even seen a resurgence) tells us that Britain’s form of hierarchical racism has been long-hidden under a façade of respectability and a pretense of egalitarianism.

Britain’s traditionalist elite has maintained its hold by adapting to change; but allowing a mixed-race American woman into the royal family was always a step too far for them; thus she had to be discreetly encouraged to live as a “royal” in name only, if not meek and subserbient then better to have her exiled outside Britain. That she has done what they always wanted has then allowed them to blame it on her own “egoistic” personality. The conservative tendency has won.

These are the same kind of traditionalists that blame “Europe” for holding Britain back, blaming the egos of EU bureaucrats for not giving Britain what it wants; and when Britain gets what it wants – “Brexit” – they still blame the EU bureaucrats for sabotaging Britain’s destiny regardless.

Traditionalists blame immigrants (and Britain’s modern multiethnic society) for a litany of problems: from crime, to unemployment to welfare scams. If you read the “Daily Mail” this is certainly the impression you will get. The same tropes used in the 1930s are being repeated in the age of the internet; only this time, technology is doing the job much more efficiently, reinforcing prejudices and solidifying the cultural divides.

The traditionalists can’t turn back the clock on multicultural Britain, but they can make it uncomfortable for those who don’t fit in to their prejudices: people from “foreign descent” who are “uppity” for instance, and should learn to respect what Britain “has done for them”. In their eyes, Meghan Markle should be “grateful” for being in the royal family (and therefore keep her mouth shut, one assumes).

Traditionalists can accept multiculturalism as long as it is on their terms; if people start using their own languages on public transport then “it no longer feels like Britain any more”, and so on. Immigrants are only acceptable if they are “useful”, doing the jobs that Brits don’t want. Immigrants are meant to feel grateful that they are the underclass; they are meant to feel grateful for the dehumanizing articles written about them in the popular press. Non-whites, traditionalists assume, are all meant to be thought of as “foreigners” who can never be allowed to feel truly at home in Britain; they are there “on sufferance”, at the whim and pleasure of its “natives”.

Britain, as traditionalists see it, is an implicit “white power”. Britain’s historical power as an empire, it is assumed, came about from Britain’s inherent superiority. Its ability to dominate the world, given its relative puniness in geographical terms, can only be explained by the innate superiority of its natives. Britain’s historical dominance can only be seen as due to Darwinian “natural selection” that enabled its people to make its fortune beyond its shores. In this thinking, inequality is part of the natural order, and those Britons that have thrived abroad did so due to their own innate superiority.

The irony of this form of "eugenic mythology" is that many outside Britain implicitly admire the country for that very reason, seeing Britain as a country that has produced a multitude of intelligent scientists, academics, traders and adventurers. It is this mythology of Britain always able to "punch above its weight" and "thrive on adversity" that has led to Brexit’s most ardent supporters thinking that the nation is more than capable of thriving outside the EU in the 21^st century (as some kind of fantastical super-human innovation and trade hub that operates outside of the laws of reality).

Britain, in traditionalists’ eyes, is a nation that lost its empire due to ungrateful “colonials” and the conspiracies of foreign powers, rather than due to changes in global commerce and inefficient techniques at home. The mythology of Britain as a “global power” reliant on only itself, with a royal family acting as both an instrument and symbol of that innate power, is the myth the traditionalists maintain in spite of the uncomfortable (and embarrassing) reality staring them in the face.

The traditionalists will find out who wins when mythology trades comes face to face with reality next year.

Nazi Satanism in Britain: the far-right, esoteric occult ideology and chaos

Britain might seem like an unlikely location as a crucible of far-right radicalism and Nazi-Satanism.  In recent years, though, a succession of extreme far-right groups, advocating violence and Satanic ideologies, have proliferated in the UK.

It’s important to understand what these groups really represent. On the whole, they are NOT “Nazis” in what many think of in the traditional sense; since the Second World War, many so-called “neo-Nazi” groups are more exactly “Nazi-inspired” than direct ideological successors. While there are have been plenty of far-right nationalist groups in recent decades that certainly continue the anti-Semitic “race war” ideology of the Nazis, many other groups take their inspiration from the Nazis in a more esoteric form.

In this sense, the Satanist far-right groups in the UK nowadays (like in other parts of the Christian West) are “Nazi” in the sense that they see the Nazi ideology and the persona of Hitler as an “inspiration” for their own nihilistic, anti-Christian agenda. They see the Nazis as a "force of chaotic energy" that fits their own. Their agenda is the destruction of Western civilization, as the Nazis was, through the use of extreme violence and “shock tactics”; but the "Nazi Satanists" of today are using their own moral degeneracy as a weapon to infect the rest of society like a virus. These are the same tactics that Fascism used nearly a hundred years ago,using extreme violence and powerful esoteric rhetoric to instill chaos in society, and not unlike how Islamic fundamentalists have done in the era since 9/11, ISIS in particular wanting to create their own "Islamo-Fascist" state in the Middle East.

Violence, moral degradation and psychological terror are the weapons that the far-right uses, along with spreading paranoia and conspiracy theories. It’s no coincidence that “climate skepticism”, “flat earth theory” and campaigns against “cultural Marxism” are all propagated within the far right; the origins of these beliefs are anti-Semitic in their origin, and some of them go back a hundred years or more.


Fascism as a modern-day "in-joke"

At the same time, however, the “crackpot” beliefs disseminated by the far right (and the Nazi-Satanist creed in particular) are held as a kind of “in-joke” by their own ranks. 
Unlike when Fascism and Nazism first appeared, the 21^st century incarnation doesn’t take itself too seriously; it spreads nonsensical beliefs and conspiracy theories more as a tactic to confuse society (i.e. as a form of psychological terror). The rituals held by the Nazi-Satanist groups in Britain, for example, are clearly absurd, and are meant to be; but they instill terror in everyone else all the same, which is entirely beneficial to their cause; their cause is to instill fear, confusion, moral degradation and chaos. 
This is why when the “alt-right” first came to popular prominence through the image of “Pepe the Frog”, it was all meant as a joke at everyone else’s expense; the joke was on society, and society – unclear about how to interpret what was happening – played along at its own deprecation.

This was how the “alt-right” was able to become so powerful, disproportionate to its own numbers. Other Populist groups achieved a similar level of recognition and “air-time” using the same tactics, making their fringe ideas mainstream by exploiting the malleability of fallibility of society’s beliefs. When no-one can claim to know what is right or wrong, or true or false, a land of “alternative facts” is never far away.  

Likewise, by spreading fear and confusion, the agenda of the pagan far-right is furthered. Using, for instance, a picture of Hitler as part of a Satanic ritual is certainly shocking; but then, that is the entire point. When the far-right advocates social or ethnic cleansing, it does so more than anything to influence wider opinion, by making these views “normal”. By spreading these ideas on social media, for example, its chaotic ideology seeps into the popular imagination. This is how “random” acts of violence, or hate crimes on the street, become more and more endemic. Views that would have once have been seen as extremely racist or hateful (and indeed still are, by any objective standard) are instead seen as “typical”.

The mainstream media plays along with this, by giving these extreme views a form of “moral equivalence” on talk shows or debates. Extreme views are then publicized without criticism, or not even by pointing out where they are factually inaccurate. In this way, nonsensical beliefs become “mainstream”.

This has been happening gradually since 9/11, but accelerated after the global financial crisis, and Britain has been one of the crucibles of this ideological transformation. These days, Britain has become a country in the grip of a “belief-based” project. No one in their right mind thinks that Britain could benefit economically from leaving the EU, but the power of belief over facts was behind what led to the referendum result in 2016.

The power of belief – of “the will” – is also a strongly-held concept in the far-right. The fact that some of the beliefs are nonsensical, as mentioned earlier, is also a kind of “in-joke” at the expense of society; if they can convince the rest of society that they are serious they have already succeeded in their task at manipulating society.  

This is why the psychology of the “cult” is so similar to that of the far-right: they are ran according to belief systems that defy rational thought; their agenda is, indeed, to destroy rational thought (or at least, make enough people question it). If their beliefs are then shown to be in error when they come up against reality, it is not the fault of their belief system, but reality itself that in in error; the only explanation for this dichotomy must be some kind of conspiracy against them.

This is why conspiracy theories find such fertile ground in the far-right: they are the only way to rationalize how their beliefs are so self-evidently nonsensical.


The cult of chaos

Britain nowadays seems a fertile ground for conspiracy theories,“magical thinking” and “cultish” ideology. All these things have come together under the convenient banner of “Brexit”, and it is no coincidence that the same crackpot conspiracies once held by the far-right gradually came to be held by a large portion of the electorate: the EU is responsible for all the ills in British society; the EU is a Jewish plot; the EU wants to abolish the British army etc. etc.

The “Nazi Satanists” in Britain are meanwhile reveling in the potential they see for chaos; spreading race hate, hate between the Abrahamic religions, hate for minorities, outsiders and those from alternative lifestyles. Their aim is to create fear and chaos between them all in order to make civilization disintegrate, and replace the old order with an ideology completely free of morality; an age of Satan. 
No-one in their right mind expects Britain to morally desintigrate to that extent; but Nazi Satanists only need their degenerate beliefs to infect enough of society to create moral disorder and a spike in intra-community violence in order to consider their methods to have been successful. Their use of the internet is the way they have been promoting their extreme ideas.

Britain has a tradition of the esoteric and the occult, with Aleister Crowley being one of its most famous figures. It was said his disciples tried to form a connection between him and Hitler, in the end to no effect. The esoteric world blossomed in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, around the same time as in the UK. The factors behind the fascination were the same; the rapid change in society and technology sent many looking to alternative routes for guidance amidst the uncertainty of an ever-changing world; falling back on ancient wisdom was something that had a strong tradition in both German and British paganism, through Nordic and Celtic (Druid) culture.

Satanism has become mixed in with these among the modern far-right in Britain. Fascism, since the global financial crisis, has had a "reboot" as a force for energetic, chaotic change. The hypnotic power of esoteric symbolism has seen a new home in the changing social and economic climate in Britain, and it will take a radical rethink if its dark forces are to be defeated.

Brexit Britain: a rogue state, hostile power, and government of lies

Britain’s government is establishing itself as one that no foreign power in their right mind should trust.

The conditions to Britain leaving the EU with the “withdrawal agreement” (a legal document) included Britain having specific obligations, in particular about Northern Ireland. It has since come to light that, not entirely surprisingly, the government – under Boris Johnson’s tutelage – has been looking at finding ways to “get around” the obligations on Northern Ireland they agreed to with the EU - to ignore them while pretending they haven't. The minutiae of those obligations don’t matter so much here as much as the message that Britain is clearly sending to the EU: “You trust us to do what we agreed to? More fool you”

A "rogue state"

The message this sends to the EU, and to the rest of the world watching, is that post-EU Britain is happy to act as a “rogue state” in terms of its legal obligations. If you sign a treaty with Britain, its government is saying, don’t expect us to honour it; we have no honour.

Britain’s imperial past has many examples of how it has abandoned its obligations, legal or moral. Ireland knows all about that,when the British government allowed a million Irish people to starve to death. But Britain has been masterful over the years in creating a myth of Britain always siding with the “good guy”; of being a beacon for democracy and human rights. It was always much more cynically pragmatic than that in reality, only surrendering its colonies when they no longer became economically viable or worth the military effort to hold on to; it has also been a friend to many loathsome regimes at one time or another.

The British government today seems to believe its own historic myths, which may be one reason why the government is acting in such bad faith with the EU. In falling for its own myth of Britain as an “exceptional” nation, it follows that its politicians think international rules don’t apply to them. The fact that Britain (through its numerous tax havens) is the leading instigator of global tax evasion tells you enough. The EU tolerated this kind of behavior when Britain was a member state (and Luxembourg is likewise culpable in that regard, if on a much smaller scale); but now Britain is outside the EU and is self-evidently set on a strategic path that opposes (or is actively hostile to) the EU’s interests, Britain can only be regarded as a threat. The fact that the British government is happy for it to be known that its promises amount to nothing tells the EU that it is dealing with a hostile power.

The fact that the British government disseminates lies can hardly be surprising either. Even the Prime Minister in his earlier career as a journalist became infamous for creating “fake news”, long before the term was widely-used. Nothing that comes from the government’s mouth should be taken at face value; its signature on a legal document is apparently meaningless as well. It only chooses to abide by agreements when it suits them.

This, then, is the meaning of a “rogue state” when applied to Britain’s government: one that has a selective application of the rule of law. While Britain’s legal system has long been respected around the world, its twisted application of law means that London is the litigation capital of the world. “Brexit Britain” is a country where judges are seen by parts of the media as “enemies of the people”, while the government – and the infamous Home Office in particular – are habitual exploiters of the legal system to overturn judgments that go against them. The fact that these attempts are often expensive failures is just a sign of how the government happily misuses public funds simply on a savage point of principle.

This doesn’t even mention how the government is routinely denying the legal rights of citizens on a daily basis: people like the “Windrush generation”, some of whom have been denied their rights, lost their jobs and deported (or exiled) for just having the wrong skin colour. The same is expected to happen to many Europeans too, given time. 

Then there are the tens of thousands of homeless whose plight is often due to a collapse of the social care system. Britain as a “rogue state” is one where many of the mentally ill and disabled are abandoned by the state to fend for themselves on the street, with a system designed to torment them yet further. Britain today is a country that allows some of its mentally ill and disabled to literally starve to death. It isn’t the government’s active policy; it simply doesn’t care what happens to them.

The “rogue state” that Britain is becoming is an inevitable consequence of the “Brexit Agenda”: not caring about rules; not caring about the consequences of its actions. It is, at its heart, an amoral creed. 

Brexit Britain is a project ran by and headed by shysters and charlatans, crooks and ne’er-do-wells. Its agenda can only appeal to the worst elements of human nature: cranks who see it as an opportunity to pursue their own fringe obsessions; vultures who see Britain as a way to make their fortune at other people’s expense; careerists who see it as the easiest way to advance themselves, no matter how.

This has been true in many other countries as well, of course. Britain is just rediscovering its corrupt heart, with all the other corrupt countries in the world looking on at Britain as another member of their rogue’s gallery.

The irony of Britain’s “rogue status” in the eyes of the rest of the world is that it is a self-defeating cause. Going back to the issue of Northern Ireland, making things more difficult for the Republic of Ireland only makes things harder on relations with the USA as well as the EU; for the US Congress is a huge supporter of Ireland, and no trade deal can be endorsed without its support. So the British government’s “FU” attitude to the EU is also a two fingers to the USA as well. This leaves Britain without the support of both its closest trading bloc and the most powerful country in the world.

Maybe this is why Britain’s government post-EU is cosying up to China and the Gulf States: one-party states and autocratic monarchies might be where Britain’s government sees its future: as "dodgy" banker,  private tutor, luxury goods maker and tech provider to the world’s least democratic states.  

Brexit ideology: the dangerous realm of cranks, crooks and control freaks

Brexit's detractors have never had to look far for evidence that "Brexit" was an idea that consumed the imagination of cranks. Linked to this is the tendency for many of Brexit's most vocal advocates being ideologues whose interests were in a more "flexible" interpretation of the law; such as using loopholes for the purposes of aggressive tax avoidance, and a more general desire to remove state power from the interests of an unregulated private sector wherever possible: "Britannia Unchained".


Cranks

This author has written before about the dangerous attraction that Brexit has to a myriad of ideological extremists and fantastical fanatics. These are people who have their own agenda to pursue through Brexit, and typically fall in to the camp of being either libertarian ideologues, racial nationalists or far left socialists.

We only have to look at the people occupying the most significant offices of the state, and the people whose advice they rely on. Most of the key positions in the British government are occupied by ideological Libertarians (of "Britannia Unchained" fame), or are advised by them.
The main with the most significant (and unchecked) real power is Dominic Cummings (more on him later). His clarion call to attract "weirdos" into the corridors of power tells us everything about what kind of "project" Brexit Britain has become: a vehicle for radical ideological and structural change of the country, of its priorities, and its place in the world.

In a sense this "change" might all sound exciting (and the Prime Minister is a skilled purveyor of the cult of charismatic enthusiasm). A look at the kind of "weirdos" Cummings is attracting to the highest levels of government tells us something much different, however: some of these are people who don't so much think "out of the box" as think the morally unthinkable, and are happy to say it in public as well. In other words, Brexit is an idea that attracts the morally unscrupulous (more on that below), as well as giving fuel to innate prejudices, dark paranoia and loopy fantasies.
Build a bridge across a three-hundred-metre-deep, bomb-strewn stretch of ocean? Sure! Engineering flights of fancy; dreams of Britain as a eugenically-purified nation of super-intelligent go-getters (thanks to a rigorous immigration programme of only the very best and brightest while also breeding out the native degenerates). In this kind of alternative dimension of being, Britain rules the waves, not as an imperial power of old, but as an island race of technologically-advanced geniuses. These cranks have truly become drunk on their own absurd propaganda.
All that has stopped Britain from ruling the waves, apparently, has been its own lack of self-belief. Britain outside the EU can literally reach for the stars.


Crooks

Then there is the attraction that Brexit poses to another plethora of "outside actors"; foreign interests that see Brexit as a corrupt opportunity to peddle their influence at the expense of Britain's own moral standing. Given the ridiculous levels of delusion present in the highest levels of government, it's no surprise that some outside the EU are looking at post-EU Britain as a turkey ready for carving.

Outside of the EU, Britain is already in talks with China and actors in the Middle East, for example. The farrago over Huawei is only a taster of the kind of things to come, as Britain faces a world that sees Britain outside the EU as a pygmy on stilts. Britain has no serious clout to defend its own interests; in this new plane of existence, it only has the power of its own lack of self-awareness, unaware that everyone else sees itself as an emperor with no clothes.

The things that Britain has to offer the global economy are its financial industry, the related  "fintech" industry, and the high regard of its education system. It is also good at making things that kill people, and is one of the world's centres for enabling tax evasion. Based on this, it is easy to see how post-EU Britain will become an ever-more nefarious magnet for providing high-end services to the globe's rogue states and criminally-minded mega-rich.

What else, after all, can Britain offer? It has nothing else that the world really wants. Think of it as Switzerland with a coastline, but one that can't even properly feed and house its own native population.


Control freaks

Presiding over this state of affairs are Boris Johnson and his key adviser, Dominic Cummings.

The "bloodbath" of ministerial restructuring that heralded Johnson's ascent to the premiership (and the more recent one that took place the day before Valentine's Day) demonstrated his ruthless application of power. While Johnson can be charismatic, he is also a control freak; the latter trait he also shares with the chief adviser he brought in with him to Downing Street, Dominic Cummings. Johnson's idea of government is far more absolutist in its internal application than any previous Prime Minister in living memory; a populist tendency he shares with Donald Trump.

The difference to the egoism mania of Trump is that Johnson and Cummings seem to have agreed some kind of mutually-beneficial "pact", where Johnson delegates certain areas of policy and strategic control to Cummings. There had been rumours (such as over the decision over HS2) that Cummings' influence had been on the wane since the election in December, but those must have been well and truly squashed by the manner of forcing the chancellor Sajid Javid's resignation after being barely seven months in the job.
Cummings' malign influence had been responsible for getting Javid's own advisers removed the previous autumn, and it is now clear that both Johnson and Cummings see the Treasury, as well as some other departments, as simply vehicles of the prime minister's own strategy: there to tell him how something can be done, not if it should be done. Ministers that disagree cannot expect to be tolerated for very long. Cummings was already seen to be behind the extraordinary expulsion of more than twenty Conservative MPs from the party whip back in September (at a time when the government was already in a precarious position in parliament).
With Johnson at the helm and Cummings at his side, theirs was a partnership of convenience, with the adviser seemingly happy to play the role of sinister villain sidekick and Johnson as the "lovable rogue". Together, they achieved a lot and ripped up as many precedents in a few short months.
In this way, Johnson has made his premiership much more about a "cult of the charismatic leader" than has been known before in British politics. Theresa May's own attempts at "control freakery" were almost comically-inept by comparison. Johnson, with Cummings' at his side, has destroyed his political adversaries in short order, leaving him as a popular leader, with near-autocratic political inclinations.

Johnson's childhood fascination with ancient Greece, you wonder, might have a large part to play in this, with its chain of famed dictators, philosophers, lunatics and tyrants. Johnson's unstable upbringing and his near-constant necessity for praise and attention, leaves him with an ego that craves a desire for approval, as well as a desire to make his mark on history; to be a "man ahead of his time". This is something that he shares with Cummings, whose own sense of grand sweep of history allows him to indulge his own grandiose view of his own intelligence.
These two men are the ones in control of Britain's immediate future. They have used their skills to seize it, in a way that would have seemed unimaginable only a year ago. There is still an open question about what they will do with their near-unstoppable power, given their low regard for those that get in their way, and what they have done with it so far.
We may soon see.

Brexit psychology: the victory of delusion

"Brexit" is an idea based on delusions, both paranoid and fantastical.

The crowd that gathered in Parliament Square to celebrate "Brexit" at eleven o'clock on the 31st January were celebrating the victory of their own delusions. They were "free". They were free from European oppression.
What "victory" had they won? As summarized brilliantly by Tom Peck in the linked article above "what makes Britain’s independence day different from most, though not all, that have gone before it is that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants". Britain has become "the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by. We have won our freedom from our own imagined nightmares. We have liberated ourselves from the terrors of the monster under the bed that was never there. We are the children that never grew up"

Brexiteers have won freedom from their own imagined nightmares. Britain has freed itself from the invisible monster. St George has slayed the dragon that never existed. England is a country at war with its own shadow, a dog chasing its own tail.
You get the picture.

In Britain leaving the EU, the EU has also lost a valuable member. As Ian Dunt says "Britain joined late, but when it did it brought something unique: a caution which is needed in any grand project. That detachment is now portrayed as a sign that Britain never fitted in. It's nonsense. Any number of European states, except for perhaps Germany, could have succumbed to jingoistic populism. We were just the only ones stupid enough to hold a referendum on it. Britain's careful approach to Europe suited it and provided something valuable to the manner in which the project evolved"

One of the EU's missed opportunities was that Britain's involvement could have been used to rein in the political urge to continually crave for more and more "more Europe", with political decisions based on pragmatisn rather than ideology. Instead, we have had the UK as a EU member whose perspective was too often under-utilized, by itself as well as other member-states. Now Britain has left, its internal politics intoxicated by its own delusions, and the rest of the EU faces a populist insurgency slowly eating itself from the inside out.


Paranoid delusions

Those Brexiteer delusions mentioned earlier have been there for decades. There is a recurring sense that these are people who could only be happy if they have an enemy, even if it is one that is entirely illusory. George Orwell said a thing or two about that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it's a psychological trick that politicians have used down the ages. Technological advances have allowed them to refine their techniques, and the rise of populist rhetoric has seen the resurgence of that old chestnut, "the other". It can be any "other", as long as it can be used to take the blame.

What makes it different today is the use of "plausible deniability" by the populist leaders whenever their acolytes use that rhetoric to project harm. There's always the "nod and a wink" about populist rhetoric, from Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and all the others. If far-right violence and hate crimes are increasing, it's because of provocations from the other side, never from theirs ("there was blame on both sides" etc.). They are always "isolated incidents", except when highlighted to show how liberal society is failing. You can never argue against their rationalizing of violence, because they don't use rational arguments. 
The rhetoric of division serves a purpose - to provide an "other" to aim their frusatrations at, whether it be foreign plots (the EU's "agenda") or fear of loss of culture (immigration). With Brexit, the emotive argument used has been that Britain has been "humiliated" countless times over the decades by Europe, and more generally "held back" from fulfilling its greatness. 
While it's true that joining the EEC was originally a decicion based on the changing global strategic situation, the kind of "deal" that Britain has got out of it over the decades has been one that has involved various "opt outs" compared to other member-states (on Schengen, the social chapter, the rebate, the Euro etc.); in fact either proving Britain's more advantageous "exceptional" status with the bloc, or the ability of Britain to get more than should deserve. Either way, to other European countries, Britain's complaint of "bullying" by the EU looks like the complaints of a country with a dire lack of self-awareness.

The British print media have much to blame for this sense of eternal paranoia, or "Europhobia". The culture of pychologically equating "Europe" with the Second World War - also thanks to films and TV series - has led to Britain, and England in particular, with a sense of greivance against "Europe" totally out kilter with reality. The sense of the EU being a co-operative project is lost to them, with "Europe" used by David Cameron when it was necessary to prove his Eurosceptic credentials to the hardliners in his own party. The EU became the "whipping boy" of the British psyche, which ended with Cameron being eaten by the monster he couldn't stop feeding.
By the time of the referendum, the EU was being blamed for almost everything possible: from illegal immigration from the Middle East and Africa, to the closing down of factories in the North-east of England. Nothing was the fault of Britain's own government, if it could be conveniently blamed on the EU. 


Fantastical delusions

Similarly, Brexit supporters often sound like they ought to be sci-fi/fantasy aficionados. The vision they have of Britain outside the EU is one where Britain is able to transcend global rules and norms. 

In the same way that they fantastically blame the EU for holding Britain back for decades, they claim that "Britannia Unchained" can become a 21st century buccaneer: using language more commonly found in sci-fi fandom, they claim that Britain can be a pioneer in the tech industry (as though no other country has thought of it before), or can become a "supercharged" leader in space technology, for example. Why not build a Britain space fleet to colonize other planets, for that matter? Money is no object to them. No ambition seems too fantastical to hold.

Likewise, Brexiteers live in a world of 21st century make-believe; a fantasy realm where borders are frictionless even though there are no agreements in place to allow it. The Britain they imagine is one where the geographical reality of the country's berth right next to Europe is forgotten; instead of it being mere practical, financial and logistical sense to do the bulk of our trade with our neighbours, Britain should be imagined as a country where it is as logistically simple to trade with Australia as it is with Austria. 
Britain, in their eyes, is not tethered to Europe by geography at all, but is in effect a giant floating island, like "Laputa" in Gulliver's Travels, able to move around the world and trade with whom it wishes at will.  

All this is imagined because of emotional ties to the past. If these fantastical delusions are not permitted to happen, then it is the fault of Europe, or a conspiracy to "do down" Britain from within. Then the paranoid delusions take over to cloak the fantastical nature of their imaginations. These people are, emotionally-speaking, mere children in adult bodies. 

Brexit Britain is a country fuelled by the infantile instincts of a nation that has yet to grow up. Boris Johnson is, in this sense, the leader to a cult of age-regression.