Theresa May: the survival instinct and the "talisman" of Brexit

If Theresa May has one overlying quality, it is an indomitable survival instinct.

While her personality flaws are legion (and have been commented on by this author), she seems to have a strange knack for outwitting her enemies. What is so odd about this is that she seems otherwise so incompetent, with an unnerving ability to antagonize her existing enemies and create yet new ones. And yet, when it comes to the crucial moment, she seems to possess an almost supernatural ability to survive politically.
She can be wounded, but as yet possesses an inability to accept her own demise. When necessary, she manages to find a way to expose the weaknesses of her opponents and at the same time muster enough loyalists around her to see them off.

It is that, or that she is just plain "lucky" in her choice of enemies.

In a sense David Cameron was "lucky" to have got as far as he did before he needed to resign. In his time as Prime Minister, he rolled the dice one too many times, thinking that his run of good fortune was almost endless; his over-confidence was eventually exposed.
With Theresa May, however, we are dealing with a different form of political animal; a political creature that, with an almost ghoulish quality to its character, seems almost indestructible to normal, mortal means.

To use a more symbolic analogy, she has sent her troops needlessly into a near-defeat in battle, but was not overthrown by them; has removed or forced out countless of her courtiers; has ruled over her land as an impenetrable, immovable and incompetent autocrat; and now has survived an attempt at her overthrow from within.
All this she has achieved by making repeated, insincere claims to heed her followers' advice at the critical moment, which mollify her critics, but then are seemingly "forgotten" by her a short time later.
It's hard to judge if she is knowingly, repeatedly deceitful or just completely lacking in self-awareness of her actions. But the fact that she repeats the same behaviour again and again suggests it can only be the former, which makes her followers either appallingly gullible or just held in hock to her rule from fear alone. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is "fear" (of the alternative) that is the key to May's unusual power (more on this is a moment).

Is is possible for a person so inept and yet wield such powers of fortitude and survival? Perhaps "Brexit" can explain a lot of it.


The "talisman" of Brexit

Many have spoke about how Brexit has utterly changed the political landscape of Britain.

Something else that it has also done is change the nature of political leadership. For whoever is Prime Minister during the "Brexit process" can also claim, through the extraordinary circumstances of the referendum, to be the sole arbiter of the nation's will.
In this way, parliament has become an irrelevance since the referendum, as the Prime Minister can claim (and has) that parliament would be subverting the vote of the referendum if it opposes her. This was the very claim she made when she called the snap election last year, and this claim has been repeated whenever it criticized whatever actions on Brexit she unilaterally decided. As far as Theresa May was concerned, she seemed to see her rule as a "higher duty" to the nation, regardless of what parliament, or even many in her own party, wanted.

So "Brexit" has become something almost esoteric or "supernatural" in its power: a simple word with a meaning that somehow bestows extraordinary power on its wielder. "Brexit" means whatever its wielder wants it to mean. This is why the meaningless phrase "Brexit means Brexit" is in fact as meaningful in its meaninglessness as Theresa May requires. It means nothing, or it means everything.

"Brexit" in itself is simply an instrument - or talisman, if you like - of power. To stretch the esoteric meaning even further, this is why Andy Serkis' take on "Brexit" was, for all its satirical meaning, still so unnervingly close to the bone.

As well as being a symbolic instrument of power, it is also a poison. Brexit has undeniably poisoned the social fabric of the country, perhaps for ever.

But in the meantime, it has given Theresa May an unusual power and a strange aura of political invincibility. The symbolic "talisman" of Brexit protects Theresa May from all enemies, confounding them at the crucial moment by creating an aura of fear.
She can be wounded by her opponents, but as the wielder of the Brexit "talisman", it also has the power of exposing the fear that others have of the alternative. Theresa May's plan might be awful, but she can still exploit the remainers' fear of "Hard Brexit" and the Brexiteers' fear of "No Brexit" without being overthrown by either (or both) in the process. In the middle of this are those on the government "payroll", whose combined loyalty and fear of any other leader than May are enough to see off her opponents. This is the symbolic power that "Brexit" has over those who oppose its wielder; it exploits their fear.

Equally, the counter-intuitive maxim that my enemies' strength is their weakness; my weakness is my strength rings true here. The Brexit "talisman" even serves May as her ultimate protection regardless of her apparent weakness, for as long as she wields the ultimate power over Brexit, she cannot be safely removed.
In this way, the "talisman" of Brexit defends May's position by playing up her apparent frailty, and exploiting fear in another way. May also uses her own frailty as an instrument of power, appealing to her enemies' sense of pity. In this way, Brexit can make its wielder even seem as a victim or a hostage to her enemies' mercy - portraying May as a creature of pity that allows her to continue with her power, tricking her enemies into granting her clemency for as long as the Brexit "talisman" requires.

May can only be removed from power once the "power" of Brexit itself has passed; in other words, she is politically immovable before "Brexit Day". But by that point of course, Brexit's potential for destructive power will have reached its peak, because if parliament do not agree to May's autocratic "deal", we are instantly into "no deal" and the nightmare scenario.
To continue the talisman analogy, a "no deal" Brexit will have destroyed not only its "wielder" (Theresa May), but the whole land as well. "Mordor" consumes "Middle-Earth". Perhaps the Brexit "talisman" wants to destroy Britain.

This was why David Cameron opened Pandora's Box when he allowed the issue of Europe to dictate his tenure. Brexit is a poison that cannot be satisfied; it is an "instrument of power" that is as seductive as is it dangerous.

Once it is wielded, its only purpose can be to destroy.

Brexit: an inevitable "perfect storm"?

There's an interesting narrative that explains that "Brexit" was an inevitable event for Britain. This author looked at a couple of different perspectives on this narrative recently, but it's also worthwhile to look at how a confluence of events, political short-termism and an intellectual failure at Westminster led to making "Brexit", and even now a "no-deal Brexit", seem inevitable.

The author has been reading "All Out War", a political masterpiece that explains the narrative of Brexit within the context of the Conservative Party. What's striking about the decision of David Cameron to call for a referendum on EU membership was how it was made to seem like an inevitable decision due to a combination of events and political self-interest.
The problem started when, in order to become party leader in 2005, he indulged the whims of the Eurosceptic right in his party by saying he would withdraw the party from the wider EPP group in the European Parliament. In spite of his rhetoric of being a strong leader, he gradually surrendered more and more ground to the hard-right fringe in the party; and once they smelt blood, they kept coming back for larger and larger bites. It became impossible to stop feeding the crocodile.
After he had failed to win a majority in 2010, his decision to join a coalition with the LibDems had two main political effects: it angered the hard-right within his party (leading to Cameron's need to appease them further, even if only superficially), and it also led to UKIP becoming the third party in British politics. Cameron's decision to announce an EU referendum in his "Bloomberg" speech in early 2013 was a sign of a political leader only capable of reacting to events: he felt forced into doing it due to the double threat from both UKIP to the party, and to the ever more vocal hard-right within the party itself.

Some question whether the referendum decision was really inevitable. The answer seems to be that had Cameron not acted when he did (with UKIP on course to win the 2014 European elections), he would have been challenged for the leadership soon afterwards by someone with the support of the hard-right in the party; and his successor would have demanded a referendum in any case. So seen this way, the EU referendum would have happened regardless, only under slightly different circumstances. The referendum, given the confluence of circumstances, seems to have an inevitable outcome.
Another "alternate narrative" would be to question what would have happened if Cameron had decided after the 2010 election to rule as a minority government instead of a coalition. Would there have been a referendum in that case? The LibDems as outside government might have become stronger in parliament by being able to challenge the Tories on key issues, while Cameron himself would have been much more vulnerable to challenges from the hard-right in his own party as a minority government (i.e. somewhat like the situation that May faces now).
But this is doubtless what Cameron would have thought himself at the time, and makes it all the more unlikely; Cameron ideologically had more in common with the LibDem leader, Nick Clegg, than those in the far-right in his own party, making the coalition something that would have temperamentally suited Cameron, given what we know of his personality. That "what if?" situation was never a likely one. The idea of a "historic" coalition would also have appealed to his more vain sensibilities (of wanting a "legacy"), while it would keep the hard-right in his party at bay. As was reported later, whenever the hard-right complained of a coalition policy, Cameron always blamed the LibDems; while whenever the LibDems complained of a coalition policy, Cameron always blamed the hard right. It was a politically-convenient, if typically short-sighted, strategy.

Winning the 2015 election made the referendum a certainty, while wider events in Europe - the migration crisis of that summer - made the referendum an even more politically-charged event. Losing the referendum was never something that Cameron seems to have seriously considered until perhaps the day of the vote itself (when he wrote a speech for both outcomes). As said elsewhere, because the referendum was manipulated by the "Brexit Agenda" into representing a plebiscite on the whole "status quo" of modern Britain, anyone who felt let-down by the government in some way could use the vote to express their frustration. Meanwhile, the heartstrings of the older cohort of the electorate were being pulled by a combination of nostalgia and hysteria to "take back control". The referendum result was not inevitable, but the combination of those factors already mentioned skewed the likelihood of the result going the way of "leave" enough to make the difference.

As the result caught the political establishment completely by surprise, how would they react to it? Thus far, the political establishment - in the guise of David Cameron - had reacted to events by giving in to their whims at almost every juncture. In short, the establishment had shown itself to be weak and easily-swayed, more interested in short-term political survival than thinking of the longer game. The same was shown to be true of his successor, Theresa May.
However, May's personality and perspective couldn't seem more different from Cameron's. At a time of apparent "national crisis", Cameron had formed the coalition; this had been an act that, on the surface at least, seemed to stick it to the hard-right, and put "national interest" before party politicking. Time would soon show the error of this kind view of Cameron's essentially self-serving character.
May's political assessment of the situation after the referendum lacked any of Cameron's political subtleties. Seeing things through the narrow lens of Westminster politics, leave had "won" (regardless of by how modest the difference was); by the adversarial rationale of traditional British politics, therefore, she decided with her adviser, Nick Timothy, that Britain had to choose a path outside of the single market and customs union. Cameron had "lost", and with it so had the whole liberal, metropolitan part of British society. Seeming even more short-sighted in her thinking than Cameron, May decided to completely dismiss the wishes and rights of half of the population. In her eyes, it seems they no longer existed as people.

This explained how May's first party conference as Prime Minister felt like a complete embrace (if not theft) of the cultural world-view of UKIP, with her government now transformed into a UKIP government in all but name. Given the adversarial nature of British politics, it seems inevitable that Cameron's successor would have been either a supporter of "leave", or someone (like May) who felt obliged to follow this course of action to the bitter end, regardless. May's character has since shown that her stubborn personality, and her intellectual rigidity, is what has marked how her key decisions (and missteps) have been made.
Given the unique circumstances posed by the referendum, the formation of a "national government" would have been a more sensible act afterwards. But as the "coalition" of 2010 was formed out of Cameron's opportunism rather than genuine bipartisanship, this only demonstrated that there was simply no real culture for such a thing in Westminster. Politics had become too adversarial and those in power lacked any intellectual flexibility. They had simply become good at finding the faults in others and someone else to blame for their own failings. It was simply the way things had always been done; to survive till the next electoral cycle, whichever way you can.

It is also this poisonous culture that has shown the deficiencies of Westminster when brought up against a genuine national crisis in "Brexit". Theresa May's manner of dealing with "Brexit" and the EU negotiations has been all about short-term survival.
Her early decision to leave the single market and customs union was to show she was "serious" about understanding Brexit, regardless of the longer-term consequences. Her decision to invoke Article 50 used the same narrow logic; to appease those in the party who thought she would somehow go back on her word. Since the negotiations with the EU started, it has always been about trying to find an approach that somehow appeased both sides of her party, with the EU as an afterthought. In the end, this has meant that, since invoking Article 50, every time she has prevented the party from self-destructing by finding some nonsensical stop-gap, she has only reduced yet further the amount of time available to get a deal from the EU before the time runs out. Short-term politicking only works for so long in the outside world.
In this way, Brexit has shown to the world the limited skill-set available to the British political establishment. As no deal that would be acceptable to the EU would be able to get a majority in Westminster due to the level of bitter division, the inevitable consequence is Britain leaving the EU without a deal. Something which is meant to politically impossible becomes unavoidable in the face of political infighting and indecision. All the evidence is that the government are more interested in avoiding the short-term blame for any chaos that happens, saying that it was somehow all the EU's fault. They will fall back on the age-old excuses, even in the face of their political self-destruction.

In that sense, Brexit looks more like an inevitable "perfect storm": with a "house divided" and a political class completely out of their depth, it's hard to see what the state of British politics will look like a year from now.

Brexit and the Iraq War: "The Shock Doctrine" applied to The UK

Perhaps one of the most persuasive arguments that the EU referendum was a historic mistake is how much political discourse and British society has been poisoned by it since. David Cameron called the referendum in order to resolve the poison that "Europe" had caused to the Conservative Party for the last thirty years. Instead, that poison spread like a cancer across the fabric of British society, dividing communities and segments of society in a "culture war" that continues to this day, with every sign that these divisions may be there for the long-term.
To the objective eye, Britain has been transformed into a nation at war with its own identity, with "Leavers" and "Remainers" marking the new ideological and cultural divide. On the one hand, Brexit is the issue that is the "elephant in the room" at social gatherings, that few people will dare raise in unfamiliar company, for the risk of causing open argument and hostility. On the other hand, this form of "self-censorship" of debate on the issue makes it a "fait accompli" where the most important event in Britain's post-war history becomes a closed issue, where talking about it only provokes talk of trying to reverse a democratic decision.

Brexit is the most contentious issue that Britain has faced since the Iraq War, which itself brought about the million-man march. The crossover of controversy of the two events is hard to miss: the "false prospectus" used to justify the war in Iraq is mirrored by the lies over the threat of Turkey joining the EU, the "Brexit bus" NHS pledge, and so on; the lack of planning over the Iraq war is matched by the lack of planning by the government over Brexit; the complacency that the coalition would be greeted in open arms in Iraq is matched by the complacency that post-Brexit Britain will somehow be a paradise. And all behind this is the same Libertarian agenda; the same agenda that Naomi Klein spoke long about in "The Shock Doctrine".
In this way, it can be argued that the "Neocons" in the Bush administration that led the call to war in Iraq (for the purpose of profiteering) are matched by those Libertarians in Britain and outside who see Brexit as the opportunity to make money from post-Brexit "disaster capitalism". These are the people who are advising the British government.
This is one reason why the negotiations have been going so badly. There are those with vested interests who need the negotiations to fail in order for their plan to come to fruition, by making sure that any proposal that the British government sends to Brussels is bound to be unacceptable. This way, they simply have to continue this farce until the time runs out, and then they can blame the EU for being "uncompromising". This was evident as long ago as during May's Florence speech, and it was even clear from her Lancaster House speech eighteen months ago, before she invoked article 50, that she saw Britain's course as separate from European institutions like the single market, ECJ and customs union. The course for Britain of the "Hard Brexit" of Libertarians' dreams has been the plan since almost the very beginning, as soon as May became Prime Minister. All the talk of compromise from Britain has simply been to keep the Euro-friendly MPs in the Conservative Party from rebelling, and it should now be clear to them they've been played for fools. The rebels' ultimate loyalty to their party was always the trump card that the "Brexiteers" had over any real concern for the country's future; the rebels' ultimate "weakness" was the hold that the Libertarian far-right in the party had over them, whose demands (also called the Brexit "Taliban") could never be reasoned with.

Going back to Iraq, we know now that the Iraq War was a humanitarian disaster for the country. Regardless of where you stand on the Saddam Hussein regime (which was unquestionably awful for many Iraqis), the real thing that matters is the opinion of Iraqis themselves. The opinions of those that are old enough to remember living as adults during Saddam's time vary of course, depending on who you talk to. Of the various groups in the country, arguably the Kurds have done the best out of post-invasion Iraq, but all those that have benefited have done so due to the anarchic and corrupt situation and/or loss of control from the centre.
"Anarchy" and "loss of central control" are two things that can also be found when the Libertarian lobby take control of a society. Those Iraqis that do have nostalgia for Saddam's time (Sunnis, mostly) talk of the stability, which is something that is easily taken for granted and only appreciated when it is lost. If the Libertarian agenda represents one thing, it is economic and social instability (also known as "creative destruction"); precisely what has happened to Iraq since the invasion.

The "creative destruction" analogy - transplanted from the Middle East to the Anglo-sphere - also holds true for post-Brexit Britain.  And the comparison that is valid has already been made - about those behind the drive to the war in Iraq and those in the "Brexit Agenda" i.e. Libertarians. As mentioned at the start, Brexit has poisoned British society, in a way that may well be irreversible. The cultural fractures that have been created seem impossible to reconcile. Meanwhile, the status of the country itself is in flux, with things only becoming clearer next year, when Britain leaves the EU. When that happens, it is difficult to predict what the result will be. While the EU referendum brought to the surface the many injustices present in British society, it seems that the government in Edinburgh, after initially threatening another independence referendum after the Brexit vote, is keeping its powder dry for the moment. Sensibly, they want to wait until it is clear what path Britain will take before deciding its next step.
What Brexit makes clear is how fragile the bonds that hold British society together really are. Holyrood is waiting; it is hard to believe that they would not respond themselves if they see their future as tied to an "English corpse", destroying itself due to the machinations of a self-centred and amoral right-wing clique, its infrastructure gobbled up by "vulture capitalists".
In such a situation, optimism about Britain's immediate future is difficult to summon. There is no chance that the government will reverse course, partly because it is seen as politically-impossible, but more importantly, because the vested interests guiding the government are too powerful to resist. The "bandwagon" cannot be turned around. Like how the coalition's armies preparing for war in Iraq were impossible send back home without fighting, Theresa May cannot do a U-turn on Brexit, regardless of how bad it might be. The dye is cast.

The "apocalyptic" scenario would involve the break-up of the UK. As mentioned, Scotland would see no reason to remain tied to an "English corpse".
Culturally-speaking, this author has found some unerring parallels to British society and the former Yugoslavia. While no-one in their right mind would make direct comparisons with Britain's future and the break-up of Yugoslavia (!), more general cultural comparisons may be possible. Like how Serbia dominated Yugoslavia economically and culturally, so does England in the UK. Likewise, Serbia's own sense of identity is tied to its history and cultural dominance over its immediate neighbours (e.g. Croats, Bosnians and so on) is matched by England's innate sense of cultural superiority over the other nations of the UK. Brexit can also be ultimately seen as an expression of pathological English nationalism, especially when surveys show how many English people would prefer Brexit even at the expense of the integrity of the UK. Looking at Yugoslavia, it could be argued that it was Serbian resentment at devolving more powers to the constituent assembles of Federal Yugoslavia that created the tensions that led to the country's break-up. The same tensions have been evident, and gradually rising, in the UK for nearly twenty years.
The fact that Scotland's independence referendum preceded the EU referendum by two years cannot have been a coincidence in stoking English nationalist sentiment. All that was needed was the added factor of economic woes and financial inequality (also present in Federal Yugoslavia in the 1980s, it should be added), and - hey presto! - you have the perfect ingredients for an "English backlash". Given how it was England that voted by a comfortable margin for Brexit, while in either Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there was only a narrow vote to leave, or sizable votes to remain, this puts a clear "nationalist" complexion on events.

This is all the result of the poison of Brexit, stoked by a Libertarian agenda.

Brexit and the Conservative Party: a political nervous breakdown

There's a perceptible "last days of the Roman Empire" feel to Britain's governance under Theresa May and the Conservative Party.

Brexit seems to the Tories like the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown: some kind of unresolved psychological trauma that has been haunting the party's psyche ever since the UK joined the EEC, pushed to the back of the collective party's mind, until it was forcibly brought to the front of their attention by UKIP and David Cameron's referendum.
The issue could have been ignored, I suppose; UKIP would have won the European elections in 2014 regardless of whatever Cameron decided to do. That fate was settled with the unique result of the 2010 election, that kicked out the Labour Party, but neither gave a ringing endorsement to the Tories either. So we had the "coalition", with the result that Britain's three main parties were either in government, or had just been tarnished by it. It was this landscape that gave UKIP its opportunity.
As UKIP were really just the outside "radical wing" of the Conservatives, with many Tory MPs having views that were barely distinguishable from UKIP itself, the result was a "militant" arm of the governing party, with "moral support" from UKIP. This was the landscape that Cameron had to deal with after the 2010 election. The decision to give in to these pressures, rather than "ride out" the storm until the next election, tells us a lot about Cameron's personality. As well as appeasing this dual threat from his own party's radicals and the guerrilla tactics of UKIP, he also called the referendum for other, more vain, reasoning; he called for it simply because he assumed he would win.

Once the referendum was "lost", Cameron effectively handed to moral authority of his party (and the government) to his party's "militant wing", and the agenda of UKIP. The result of this was that Theresa May copied much of UKIP's rhetoric as well large parts of its social agenda, in order to appear on the side of the 52%. Apart from leaving the EU, May went even further with her radical envisaging of Britian's role outside the EU: to leave leave not only the single market, but the customs union as well; something that not even many UKIP supporters had considered feasible. Thus, in May's over-zealousness in want to appear on the side of the 52%, she went down a path that only a fraction of her own party's backbenchers (represented by the "European Research Group") followed.

In this sense, May's course of action since the referendum has been to place the government into the hands of the radical agenda of a faction in her party. She has disavowed any hint of moderation, and doggedly pursued an agenda that to any reasoned person's eyes looks completely unhinged. Although she has been able to keep her cabinet and her party's divisions from bringing down the government, this has only been achieved through her and her ministers' pronouncements that are feats in nonsensical semantic waffle. The government and its party are only held together by their fear of allowing Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister if they should fall. On Brexit, the Conservatives are impossibly divided.

As Michel Barnier has said, the clock is ticking. As well as the "clock ticking" on Brexit, the clock may also be ticking on the fate of the Conservative Party. Because the party has brought its own European psycho-drama out into the open, as it once fatefully did in the late '80s and early '90s, any observer can see that the party's differences are intractable. Now that the "clock is ticking", sooner or later, Theresa May, or her successor (more on that in a moment) will have to decide. If they don't decide, the EU will decide for them.
Theresa May so far has kept the government together simply by not dealing with the central issue, but putting it off repeatedly at each juncture with more useless waffle. The central issue is Britain's future relationship with the EU, and what the government's agreed position is. The problem is that the government doesn't have one. As the party is really a coalition of ideas, with the radicals in the ascendancy, everyone has a different opinion, as can be seen by ministers giving contradictory views on Brexit, even on the same day.

None of the options look good for the Conservatives.

If Theresa May somehow manages to get the government to have an agreed position that is somehow agreeable to the EU, this implies that a compromise would be involved, which would infuriate the radicals. The result of this could well be May losing confidence of her backbenchers and a new (radical) leader being selected, leading to a retraction of any previously-made agreement. Therefore Britain would likely leave the EU without any agreed terms (i.e. WTO). The result of this on the British economy is likely to be catastrophic, with the Conservative government getting the blame.
If May continues to procrastinate (as expected) and fails to reach an agreement on a transitional deal with the EU, the Tories will do badly in the local elections in May. This is likely to precipitate a leadership challenge and a new (radical) leader. Therefore Britain would likely leave the EU without any agreed terms (i.e. WTO). The result of this on the British economy is likely to be catastrophic, with the Conservative government getting the blame.
If May continues to procrastinate (as expected), fails to reach an agreement on a transitional deal with the EU, but the Tories don't challenge her leadership, then May will continue through the rest of the Brexit process until next year, when she can then be safely replaced and any mess can be blamed on her. The difficulty this would bring, and the likelihood of leaving the EU without a deal before March 2019, is that the Conservative Party's inner contradictions on Britain's future may well reach a point of detonation.
A last option (for the sake of brevity I've reduced them to four) is that the government somehow falls completely later on this year as a result of an impasse in the talks with the EU, or the government being forced to make a choice on Brexit that is simply impossible for some parliamentarians to accept; they would rather Labour take the heat for any future Brexit fall-out than themselves.

With the clock ticking, the EU will soon force the government to choose, or the EU will choose for it. If the government chooses a "soft" of "hard" Brexit (which will be indicated by how the transition talks pan out), it will anger one of the sides of its party, as just said. If the government doesn't decide, the EU will assume that the UK wants a "hard" Brexit, for the lack of receiving any other instruction from London. Ditto result for the Conservative Party.

Put it these terms, the Conservative government is quickly running out of time. They will face their fate, regardless of what they say or do. It is unavoidable. For now, they are running around like headless chickens, talking about Brexit "blue sky" thinking for how to make their contradictory and nonsensical ideas become a reality.
But Brussels will give the hammer blow of reality to the Conservative government sooner or later. What will be the state of the Conservative Party after that is anyone's guess. This fatalistic "end of days" narrative that seems to apply to the Tories reminds me of an article I wrote several years ago about the film "The Dark Knight Rises" and the psychology of the antagonist, Bane: it feels as though the Tories are in hock to their own ideological "league of shadows" - the "radical" Brexiteers - who are hell-bent on completely severing Britain's relationship with Europe, regardless of its impact on Britain or even their own party.
The looming threat of "hard Brexit" (like in the plot of "The Dark Knight Rises") feels a lot like the slow countdown of an economic time-bomb; the radical Brexiteers are either blindly-ignorant to this fate, or seem to implicitly welcome it, for their own reasons. "Hard Brexit" seems as the economic equivalent to Gotham's nuclear bomb, where the only people who hope for "zero hour" are the ones that either hope to get rich from Britain's carcass, or have a violent, millennarian agenda that requires the collapse of British society.
In this real-life "Gothic tale", the only saviour seems to come from the voices of the sane, who are being ignored.

An ABC of immorality: From Austerity to Brexit and Carillion

Morality is a political issue, and different sides of the political spectrum tend to see what is "moral" and "immoral" in a different way. To say that something is "immoral" is to make a judgement on another person's behaviour i.e. that what someone else is doing is "wrong" and harmful.

Politics enters the equation when you answer the question: "wrong" to who? For example, conservative morality (what many would call "traditional values") teaches us that homosexuality is "immoral", while capital punishment is not. Liberal morality would consider the former to be neither moral nor immoral (as it is private behaviour and not "harmful" to anyone else), while the latter (capital punishment) would be immoral as a form of state-sanctioned murder, apart from its ineffectiveness as a deterrent. In this way, liberals would see the traditionalists' view of morality as more emotional that rational: capital punishment is "moral" because it makes traditionalists "feel good"; likewise, homosexuality is "immoral" because it makes traditionalists "feel bad". For moral traditionalists, it is not about what is better for society, but what makes them feel better themselves. It is a form of moral imposition of their perspective on the rest of society. While traditionalists always couch their morality in the perspective of what is meant to be better for everyone, the reality is that they are imposing their morality, in dictating what they think others must and must not do. This "moral imposition" has been displayed in its most sadistic form in the territories controlled by ISIS.

Traditionalists in Britain see the liberal changes in social policy, such as the legalisation of gay marriage, to be a sign of the country's immorality. It is not coincidence that there is a large overlap in the same people who oppose gay marriage also being against EU membership, and against policies such as foreign aid, while also believing that a large proportion of welfare recipients are "scroungers".
From a liberal perspective, what traditionalists see as "wrong" are nothing of the sort; meanwhile, the real problems that exist in society (such as poverty, crime and social disparity) are explained by traditionalists as being down to individual decisions; choices that people have decided to make. Those at the top of the pile are there on merit, and therefore their behaviour is automatically considered more "moral" than those at the bottom.

Put in this perspective, both liberals and traditionalists in contemporary Britain may well think that the country has entered a pit of moral lassitude and denigration, but for very different reasons.

The symbolism of decline, decay and a rotten state slowly falling to pieces seems to run through Theresa May's government.
It was the Grenfell Tower fire that seemed a physical symbol this. The fact that this fire happened due to a careless attitude towards the rules, as well as a careless attitude towards residents' safety, epitomises all that is morally wrong with modern Britain. The rules, so it seemed, were only there "for show": the many loopholes in the system in place demonstrated how little those in charge of the systems in place really cared. What mattered was the appearance of safety, the appearance of following the rules. Then there are other examples related to Grenfell, that demonstrate the sheer "fuck you" attitude prevalent in some of the elite towards those less fortunate than themselves.
The immorality of those in the elite in Britain is now becoming more and more transparent. There was a time when their views were expressed in private, knowing that they would face a rightful barrage of criticism if they were ever leaked out to the wider public; now these immoral ("non-PC") views are expressed openly. In this way, the immoral elite are lauded by some parts of the press for "saying it how it is".


"Moral regression"

The liberalisation of society and the progress towards a more moral (i.e. considerate) view of dealing with others such as minorities is now facing a strong push-back from traditionalists, who support the regressive agenda driven by UKIP. The financial crisis seems to have been the hinge point on this "moral regression". Up to that point, David Cameron had supported many aspects of the progressive social agenda of the governing Labour Party, including its stance on public spending. But the financial crisis saw him opportunistically support "austerity" as a way to differentiate his party, and create a real "moral" difference between their visions.
Put in this perspective, "austerity" was labelled as a "moral" act, as a way to restore the traditional values of society. Aside from his progressive agenda on issue like gay marriage, on the issue of "austerity" and its wider social effect, Cameron became almost puritanical in his use of this agenda as a way to remodel the morality of British society. However, the reality of this agenda, in meaning to reduce public spending as a deliberate act to change society, was to make society more unequal.

As "austerity" has now caused councils to radically scale back on the kinds of services they can provide, the day-to-day reality has meant less money to maintain street lighting, clean the streets and collect rubbish. And that's just the things that can be seen on the surface. When the same agenda is applied to the criminal justice system, the result is more crime. When it is applied to the welfare system - such as through "reforms" like Universal Credit and changes to other benefits - the result is more poverty; poverty that means that some people cannot even afford to properly eat, or afford to live in proper accommodation. The visible effect of this is a huge spike in homelessness and rough sleeping. The effect of "austerity" has been to make some parts of the country resemble a "failed state".
This is the real "moral" effect of austerity, and this agenda is pushed even further by those who support Brexit. The case for leaving the EU was put into words that made it seem like a divine cause ("Take Back Control!"); the EU was seen as an "immoral" institution that was undemocratic and destroyed Britain's ability to manage its own affairs. The EU was seen as the reason for many of Britain's ills; the reason that many parts of the UK felt ignored was (apparently) because of the EU.
This campaign was based on deceit and exploitation of people's genuine fears to further the agenda of an immoral few. After David Cameron had used his position as Prime Minister to gamble the future of the country on a party dispute, Theresa May grabbed hold of the "Brexit Agenda" to cement her own place in power.


A moral nadir?

Theresa May has presided over perhaps the most immoral British government in living memory. At a personal level, May's only quality as a politician seems to be able to disseminate, abusing the use of the English language in order to communicate garbage. All of her apparent "strengths" are merely a sign of her lack of empathy, while she sits in Downing Street as the "zombie Prime Minister". In the first phase of her premiership, the day-to-day running of her office was done by two advisers who everyone else was terrified of and who seemed to be ones really in charge. After losing the election she called, they were sacked, and her government continued only due to a billion-pound payment (in effect, a "bribe") to the DUP. As this was a payment whose effect was simply to keep May in power, the moral denigration of government had thus reached new depths.
This was going on at the same time as the Grenfell fire, while the Brexit negotiations that went on through the latter half of the year were being ran from Britain by a government whose strategy seemed designed to madden its European partners in its incoherence, double-dealing and dishonesty. Meanwhile, the government was treating parliament with contempt over its handling of Brexit.

By the time that three ministers had resigned (or been sacked) in the space of seven weeks due to various personal and professional failings, nothing seemed surprising any more. Even the fact that in the first of those resignations, the Defence Secretary was succeeded by a man who kept a pet tarantula in his parliamentary office, felt like something that was to be expected of a former Chief Whip. The "freak show" of personalities that now run the government, while parliament legislates in a building that is literally falling apart (and is a fire hazard) is emblematic of the moral collapse at the heart of the country.

Apart from the slow-motion train-wreck that is Brexit, the news about Carillion's collapse explained how broken the government-backed system of "crony capitalism" really is. This is a system that literally makes no economic sense to the government, other than to give the appearance of private sector success, while appearing to save the government money. Like with the fake system of health and safety in place at Grenfell, PFI is another "fake" system. Carillion ran its business like a Ponzi scheme, with each new contract paying for the last one. This follows the same path as has happened in other sectors, like energy and transport.
Lies and the facade of following the rules are what runs through how contemporary Britain seems to be ran. The housing market in London is supported by dirty money from Russia, the Middle East and elsewhere. The tax system is there only "for show", as the rich know all the loopholes they can use to avoid it, leaving it to the "little people" to be the ones that follow the rules. The only "moral" people, it seems, are those not rich enough to know how to exploit everyone else.

Brexit and The English Civil War: Populism versus "Papism"?

It could be argued that the seeds of Brexit go back five hundred years.

British Euroscepticism is an old creed which has usually been a mask for English Nationalism, of one sort or another. But at its heart is a paranoia against Europe, and a particular conspiracy theory that centres on an all-powerful, trans-national ("papist") elite.

The paranoiac, Eurosceptic conspiracy theorists of today (i.e. the zealot "Brexiteers") seem to echo with the same kind of dark delusions as those of 16th and 17th century England. The same could well be said of the ancient roots of modern Anti-Semitism, but that's another story.
The Reformation of Martin Luther five hundred years ago was in many ways about "taking back control" from a over-mighty, corrupt and centralizing elite, based in Rome. This movement also crossed the channel to England. It was the personal whims of Henry VIII rather than Martin Luther that eventually brought about the "English Reformation", and he came to see the power of the papacy in England as a direct threat to his own. One direct result of this was the dissolution of the monasteries, an act of barbarous, monarchical thievery masked behind faith. The febrile atmosphere in the country led to Protestant paranoia against Rome and its ally, Hapsburg Spain, and by the reign of Elizabeth, war.

By the time the Stuart kings came to the throne in the first half of the 17th century, Protestant paranoia had to be tamed. "Splendid Isolation" was also self-destructive. This resulted in a more nuanced and pragmatic approach by the Stuarts towards Catholic Spain and the "Papist" threat; it was a period of  English "detente" towards Europe, where relations were improved and connections made. This went so far as leaving some English Protestants into thinking that James, and Charles in particular, were Papists in all but name. Their autocratic actions also fed the view that the Stuart kings were behaving far more like the Papist autocrats on the Continent than the more consensual rulers they had been led to believe in (regardless of the past reality of Henry VIII's reign).
It was this atmosphere of Protestant paranoia over a "Papist", foreign-minded king that led to the English Civil War. The king's forces, the Cavaliers, were seen as foppish, condescending autocrats, while parliament's forces, the Roundheads, were portrayed as sober-minded reformers. The resulting "Commonwealth" of the victorious Roundheads, however, rapidly turned into a virtual Puritan revolution. While the purpose of the Civil war was the restoration of parliament, it actually turned into the autocracy of Oliver Cromwell and his fellow Puritan Protestants where parliament was sidelined; a hard-line faction of parliament had taken control of the country and hijacked its fate. In the end, this situation couldn't last, and we had the Restoration not long after Cromwell's death.


The "new Puritanism"?

We seem to be repeating a variation on the same story centuries later.

Four hundred years ago, while Protestants in England were becoming fed up with James' indulgence of Hapsburg Spain, the seeds were also sown for the Thirty Years' War. This saw Hapsburg (and fellow-Papist) Austria fight against Protestants across the Holy Roman Empire. This Protestant "insurgency" against a centralizing autocracy devastated the heart of Europe.
Ironically, the Hapsburgs also had a part to play in Europe's coming-together after the Second World War. The Treaty Of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War and created a peace in Europe that lasted for generations; The Treaty of Rome created the framework for European peace and co-operation after the Second World war.
The Eurosceptics of today wouldn't have missed the historical irony (or implicit symbolism) of the framework for a centralised, European administration being signed in Rome. For the paranoid conspiracy theorists, the whole thing reeked of centuries-old autocratic "Papism", re-imagined in a modern setting. For the paranoid conspiracy theorists, Hapsburg hands even seemed be on the choice of Brussels (and Strasbourg) as its administrative centres; both cities that once were at the heart of "Papist" Austrian and Spanish Hapsburg lands. Belgium is still staunchly Catholic. Eurosceptics' paranoia that the European Union was simply a reconstituted Holy Roman Empire assailed against "democratizing" Protestantism would have been undimmed.
My point is not to argue if these ideas are based in fact (and regardless of any wider symbolism, European integration is a well-established fact); it is that these ideas have been used by paranoid Eurosceptics for the purpose of their own agenda. That agenda seems to be a form of economic and ideological "Puritanism": a kind of 21st century "Commonwealth", with all the potential upheaval that entails.

As with Protestants' suspicion of the allegiance of the Stuart kings of four hundred years ago, Eurosceptics of today would have had their paranoia fueled by the administrations of Blair and Cameron, who were both innately Euro-phile (and ironically, like James and Charles Stuart, both of Scottish stock). Like how Protestants of four hundred years ago would have yearned back to the times of the staunch Protestantism of Elizabeth, today's Eurosceptics yearn back to the certainties of the Thatcher era; another strong woman, they would say, who did not shy from battling Europe.
Like King James, Blair's fate seems to have been to repair relations with Europe, strained after years of quasi-isolation. He otherwise left a long legacy of mixed fortunes during his time in power. James's successor, Charles, took James' autocratic tendency even further, but with far less tact.
Cameron's political fate as the "heir to Blair", in a manner of speaking, also seemed to have gone the way of Charles'. Some of the historical parallels are striking. Foppish and condescending like Charles, Cameron's career at the top was a series of misjudgments. It was trouble with Scotland that started Charles' troubles with parliament in England; after recklessly thinking he had solved the trouble north of the border, Charles thought his troubles with parliament would as easily be solved. They were not, and neither were his troubles with Scotland. The same could be said of Cameron, when his "victory" over the Scottish referendum led him to think he could as easily solve the problem his own faction had with Europe. By acting in a condescending way towards his enemies and behaving like a reckless autocrat, Cameron's fate came to a messy political end.
After being defeated by the "Puritanical" Eurosceptic faction, Cameron was succeeded by Theresa May. The daughter of a vicar, she seemed to match the Brexit Puritans' demeanor for a mean-spirited, petty-minded form of government. In allowing a hostile political environment for the Eurosceptics' paranoia to grow unchecked, she seems to be continuing this inadvertent "reprise" of the mid-17th century narrative: as a female Cromwell, symbolic head of the Puritan "Brexit" revolution that sought to seek out and destroy the remaining vestiges of "Papist" Pro-Europeanism. For these modern Puritans, "Hard Brexit" is their version of the rapture, with their foreign-minded "Papist" enemies rightly deserving of their fate in the rhetorical flames.

The "Brexiteers" of today share the same paranoia towards the continent that the Protestant Puritans had four hundred years ago. The themes are the same, even if the European institutions they attack are different; once it was Rome that was the enemy, while now it is Brussels. As mentioned earlier, the sharper-eyed (and more conspiratorial) Eurosceptics may point to the symbolic "Papist connection" between Brussels and Rome.
Four hundred years ago, the Puritans' allies in Europe were to be found in the Lutheran states of Northern Europe, as they allied against Rome and its Hapsburg allies in Spain and Austria. Today, the "Brexiteers" find their allies in the Populist anti-European movements. These are ideological descendants to the anti-clerical Lutherans that fought against a centralizing Rome, except now their "centralizing" enemies are based in Brussels, with the support of Berlin and Paris.

This is the narrative that has overtaken Britain's politics. These are the "culture wars" that have been fought in the minds of Britain's population, on behalf of a "Puritan" Brexit agenda. The new "English Civil War" has already been fought in the form of the EU referendum: to continue the analogy, the foppish Pro-European "Cavaliers" lost, and the stern-minded Eurosceptic "Roundheads" won.

For the Brexit "Puritans", a new "Commonwealth" beckons; though what it means for everyone else, only time will tell.

Brexit: The Ultimate Blunder? How this is Theresa May's "Poll Tax"

The excellent book "The Blunders Of Our Governments" goes into great depth at how governments get things wrong, often with catastrophic results. The scale of the catastrophe just depends on the scale of the blunder.

One of the biggest (and most famous) "blunders" by any UK government in modern times was the Poll Tax. Looking at the sheer incompetence of how the government is managing its Brexit strategy, it's hard not to to draw parallels with how the Thatcher government blundered into a crisis entirely of its own making, and the current one. Some of the time scale over the issues - how it was a "slow burner" that gradually gained more and more inescapable momentum - also matches. To see how well the events of thirty years ago and today mirror each other, we'll have a look at the basics of what went wrong with the Poll Tax.

The idea of the Poll tax had its formation in the 1970s, thanks to think tanks that looked at "outside-of-the-box" solutions (mirroring what we see today with the government's Brexit strategy). The idea was one of a number of options at reforming "the rates", where council tax was paid only by those who owned property in the area. By early 1985, after the government had began its privatisation agenda, it looked in more detail at reforming local government and the system of "the rates", to make it equitable, so that everyone paid what was fair. In a famous meeting at Chequers, the Poll Tax was one of a few options put to the government, but by a series of interactions, some high-placed people in government saw the Poll Tax as the only true way to fully reform the system; all the other options seemed either unfair or meaningless half-measures. After a period of time, further discussions and discreet lobbying (also - looking at the practicality of the idea - from some in the civil service), it was in the end agreed that the only way for it to work was for a "big bang" implementation. In other words, having some kind of "transitional" arrangement was pointless and administratively confusing; much better to go straight from one system to the next, and iron out any potential glitches along the way. Those in government against all this (and there were a number of them) were silenced by the momentum that gradually built in favour of this radical reform; they were also quick to make their opposition well-known to others in government, to avoid any guilt by association.
Thus the Poll Tax was introduced through a combination of groupthink in government, as well as cultural disconnect. The problems (and the riots) are well-known. It now clear that the selfsame mistakes have took place with Brexit thirty years later, but now on a scale (and potential impact) many times greater.

Like with the Poll Tax, Brexit was a "slow-burner". Initially it was an issue with a small faction of the Conservative Party, some media hacks, editors and the like. But all these people had influence (and with that, gravitas) as well as money to back them up. Like with the Poll Tax, Brexit became an issue thanks to political events: where the Poll Tax came to be seen by Thatcher as a way to reform troublesome local councils, Brexit (or, at least, the initial offer of a referendum) came to be seen as way by Cameron to silence the hard-right in the party that were more ideological kin to UKIP. It took around five years (from the Chequers meeting in 1985 to it being implemented in 1990) for the Poll Tax to fully burst into life, warts and all. Brexit - if we call March 2019 its "implementation" - will have come to exist in the public sphere for a similar period, when the EU referendum was first promised by Cameron in early 2013. Like how the Poll Tax was ambushed on the rest of government, who were then hostages to its fate, Brexit made the same of Cameron, when the referendum made Brexit a reality. His successor, Theresa May, was then even more beholden to the hard-right ideologues in the party, even though she was not a fervent believer in the idea herself. As mentioned earlier with the Poll Tax, it was the desire for a "big bang", as well as the desire to make a radical reform, that led to the chaos of its implementation; the desire among some in government for a "Hard Brexit" without a transitional arrangement follows the same blinkered thinking that dismisses compromises such as staying in the EEA or EFTA as a "betrayal" of the cause. This stubbornness leaves the potential for heaven knows what kind of chaos to the UK economy come March 2019.

Once May succeeded Cameron as Prime Minister, Brexit took on a whole life of its own, like the Poll Tax did with the Thatcher government thirty years ago. Those who opposed the Poll Tax were seen as "wets" or lacking the boldness necessary for real reform; those now opposed to "Hard Brexit" are these days seen as "Remoaners" or saboteurs who are trying to undermine the government. This is the result of groupthink and cultural disconnect, as well as a deferential respect for those in authority, assuming that they must know what they are talking about . If anything, these issues are far worse this time around, given how high the stakes are. With the Poll Tax, those affected could (and many did) ignore their threatening letters from councils, which resulted in an eventual (partial) climb-down from the government; by contrast, the economy of the entire country is at stake thanks to the current "blunder", and the only way to escape it would be to flee abroad.

The Thatcher government had almost a "revolutionary" aura about it at times. Cameron's and May's government have been in some ways even more radical, and not in a good way. The desire for "reform" among the hard-right in government led to various ministers leading their departments as their own pet project. In a sense, Cameron's relaxed attitude to ministers pursuing their own agendas also led to scandal and scandal: the direct result of having an "experimental" government agenda.
This is what marks out the Conservative government of today as being different from earlier incarnations: whereas earlier governments took risks from time to time, the current government seem to actively encourage them. If you are not a risk-taker, it seems, then you lack the drive and radicalism necessary for the government's wider agenda. This kind of callous recklessness and shallow disregard for the wider consequences is unprecedented in any British government of modern times: it's almost as if they want things to fail. While some of it is down to the glaring incompetence of ministers, some of it can only be driven by the agenda of an amoral, manipulative few.

Thatcher's Poll Tax ultimately was a sign of the government losing the plot; it was only a change of Prime Minister, and a little luck, that allowed the Conservatives to stay in power for seven more years from its initial implementation disaster. A "Hard Brexit" would be a disaster on a scale a thousand times more disruptive; who knows what the political ramifications of that would be?

Brexit: A Very British Coup, and how UKIP subverted democracy

It's now clear in which direction British politics is heading.

Several months ago I wrote about the rightward direction that the government under Theresa May seemed to be heading in. Now that the Brexit negotiations are in full swing, and parliament has returned from summer break to discuss its implications, it's ever clearer that we don't really have a Conservative government in power: we have a UKIP government, under another name.

The Home Office leak of its immigration plans, timed to coincide with parliament's return to session, looked to all intents and purposes identical to UKIP's immigration plans for an Australian-style points system. In some ways, it looked even more draconian, in the way that bio-metric technology would be used to keep a track on EU immigrants and the restrictions placed on the duration of their stay.

Apart from immigration policy, it's also clear that the repatriation of powers in the "Repeal Bill" is meant to act as a way to radically increase autocratic power to the government, away from parliament, so it can unilaterally change the law. There's a reason these are called "Henry VIII powers": because no government since then has succeeded in circumventing parliament in such a way. Charles I tried; Oliver Cromwell succeeded, for a time. These are not good comparisons the government should be wanting to be compared to, and it should be sending chills down the spines of our sitting MPs.
But for many on the government benches, it doesn't. Why?


A Very British Coup

What we are witnessing is the emasculation of parliament.

Apart from the intent contained inside the "Repeal Bill", the government are also seeking to subvert the committee process that is used to amend (i.e. improve) parliamentary legislation. By doing this, it again seeking to silence opposition to its own interpretation of the law, making passage through parliament nothing more than a "rubber stamp".
To be fair, there are plenty of Conservative MPs who are as appalled at the government's "power grab" as on the opposition side. In the same manner, there are a number of Conservative MPs who are appalled at the government's Brexit plan, which, again, seems indistinguishable from UKIP's original plan. If those Conservative MPs actually voted with their conscience, they could easily prevent the government from carrying out its "power grab" into the realm of quasi-authoritarianism. Similarly, those MPs could easily deny the government a majority in parliament to carry out its plan for a "Hard Brexit" that would see Britain cut off from all free trade with Europe. But those MPs seem to be emasculated; more like sheep than parliamentarians.

The reason for this is simple, and appalling: fear.

A small clique of hard-line MPs - who represent less than 15% of the party's cohort - demand the most extreme form of exit from the EU. This would mean leaving the free market and customs union on Day One of Brexit, in March 2019, without any kind of meaningful transition period. The Brexit Secretary, David Davis, seems to agree (well, maybe - his idea seems to change from day to day). Apart from the maddening incoherence of this point of view, is the fact that this outcome was not what the referendum was about. The UK voted to leave the EU; the vote said nothing about EFTA, for example, which the UK has been in since 1961, long before Britain joined the then EEC. The Brexit Secretary seems to be acting of his own accord, deciding what Britain's relationship with Europe will be, without any regard to parliament's point of view, or indeed, those of the actual electorate. The only points of view whose his seem to coincide with are the hard-line clique mentioned earlier.
While there is a "debate" in parliament about the government's policy, the government's strategy of dealing with parliament is a) to avoid answering any questions at all, b) imply that they "the government knows best", c) to suggest that opposing the government is to betray "the will of the people". This is the language of authoritarianism. There is no meaningful "debate" on Brexit in parliament at all, for the government seems to have no intention of paying any attention to it. It is just "going through the motions", turning parliament into a toothless talking shop.
What makes this all even worse is that those hard-line MPs (who now have the ear of the government) have even less of legitimate platform for their agenda than before the general election. Before the election, Theresa May said she had called it in order to strengthen her hand in the negotiations. The implication was that the larger the mandate she received, the freer she would be to carry-out a "Hard Brexit". As we know, the opposite happened: she is still in government, but only thanks to the DUP. The rational conclusion to reach from the election was that those who wanted a "Hard Brexit" lost. And yet they are the ones still dictating policy. Counter-intuitively, it is thanks to the government's precarious position in parliament that allows these hard-liners to blackmail the moderates into silence. In the same way that the DUP were able to demand a ransom from the government as its price for power, the party's hard-liners are able to do the same over Brexit.

Those Conservative MPs concerned about this process have been emasculated by fear. While a hard-line cohort of MPs seem able to dictate government policy, those concerned by this subversive take-over have been silenced into submission by the even greater fear stoked from the thought of losing an election to Jeremy Corbyn. In other words, the party's moderate MPs really are being held hostage: by the fear of losing power, they are ready to hand the fate of the nation over to extremists.
In a "First-Past-The-Post" electoral system, an "extremist" government was meant to be virtually impossible. It looks like some of them have found a way. And now, using authoritarian tactics, we are on the cusp of a quasi-autocratic government.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
What happened in Germany in 1932 is held as a warning to all of us. It's also worth remembering that the reason Hitler gained power was thanks to a "deal" with the mainstream Conservatives. It was the threat of Communism that had helped to focus minds in the Conservatives to do a deal with the Nazis: rather Hitler than the hammer and sickle. He was technically meant to be the junior partner in a coalition: although he was Chancellor, he was meant to be held in check by his deputy, the mainstream Conservative, Von Pappen; mainstream Conservatives also held the vast majority of government posts. But very quickly, it was the tail that was wagging the dog.
The same cowardly mindset seems to in today's "moderates" in the Conservative Party.


How To Subvert Democracy

Let's remember how we got here.

Currently, UKIP are polling around five per cent in the polls; not much more than they were in 2010. And yet, as we have seen, the Conservative government is now carrying out wholesale UKIP policy. Why?

As it is the threat of losing power that is keeping "moderate" Tory MPs subservient to the "hard-line" agenda today, it was Cameron's worry of losing power that made him cave in to demands for an EU referendum.
This is how extremists are able to control the agenda in a "First Past The Post" electoral system: by blackmailing the governing party into backing extremism.  A handful of hard-liners thus make the fear of conceding power to the opposition greater than the fear of conceding the agenda to extremism. David Cameron began the precedent;  Theresa May has taken it one stage further.

As Cameron's 2010 government was a coalition, it left him in a precarious position. With UKIP rising in the polls, and a cohort of his own MPs sharing that party's Euroscepticism, Cameron thought he was being clever to try and deal with the issue by promising a referendum. But the reason for this decision was one borne from weakness and cowardice: thanks to not winning the 2010 election outright, it gave a disproportionate power to the "hard-liners" in his own party. This was one reason why the 2010-15 parliament was one of the most rebellious for decades.
He could have stood up to the "hard-liners" in his party, by "calling their bluff" (such as telling them if they didn't like the Conservatives' pro-EU policy, they were free to join UKIP). As it happens, two of them did just that, but that was eighteen months after after Cameron's "Bloomberg Speech" in which he promised an EU referendum if his party won the next election. They left the party after Cameron had already partly caved-in on their agenda.
So by not standing up to the "hard-liners" in the Conservative Party to begin with, he allowed them to set the agenda on Europe. And in the end, this cost him his job. The fear of losing the next election (by shedding support to UKIP) made him cave-in to their agenda, and thus once the sharks smelled blood, they went after him to finish off the job. The irony here is that the referendum was probably never really meant to have happened even after Cameron had made the promise, because he wasn't expecting his party to win the election in 2015 outright. As it was assumed another hung parliament would be the most likely result again, it was equally assumed the referendum idea would be dropped in the post-election talks with the pro-European Liberal Democrats. That "plan" went down the toilet when the Conservatives won a majority, forcing Cameron into carrying out the promised referendum - one which he never expected to lose. Such things can happen when you try to be too clever by half; like with Von Pappen's plan to "tame" Hitler by making him Chancellor.

Even before Theresa May decided to implement the UKIP agenda, that party had already cost one Prime Minister his job. Now we see that she saw a cynical opportunity to destroy UKIP by becoming UKIP. Except that you don't destroy an ideology by implementing it under a different name. There were signs of her nationalistic and authoritarian leanings when she was Home Secretary; now it is clear that her own personal inclinations are much closer to the "hard-liners" in the party than the "moderates".

For those in UKIP this must be a bitter-sweet moment: in their moment of triumph, a government is implementing entire swathes of their agenda, and the party isn't even in power. All they had to do was scare the Prime Minister a bit.

For more on the "Brexit Agenda", and what it means for Britain, look at the following article.

Lazy, Ignorant and Entitled: the real reasons Britain voted for Brexit?

There are a whole host of reasons why Brexit happened. Some commentators focus on the role of David Cameron in allowing the situation to arise in the way it did, and for his handling of the issue as a personal act of political indulgence. Others focus on the economic factors that led to large sections of the "disenfranchised" working class voting Leave almost as a form of protest. Again, others look at the rise of UKIP and the populist tendency since the financial crisis. The second and third points are related, though, and prior to the financial crisis it was the BNP who were also tapping into this previously-ignored segment of society, before being superseded by UKIP.

In some ways, then, Brexit could be called the "triumph of the losers"; those who have "lost out" in the modern world (read; globalisation) and want things back the way they were before (when life was easier for them). It is usually termed as a wish to turn back then clock.
Populism has been on the rise since the financial crisis throughout Europe, and as we have seen with Donald Trump, in the USA. The same could also be said of Turkey, who are soon to have a referendum on turning their country into a quasi-authoritarian presidency. Populism is an ideology in its own right, although often loosely-defined. In another sense, it is also a psychology of its own. It is that "psychology", and the psychology of the Brexit-supporter, that the author wants to focus on.

Lazy?

Many of those who voted "Leave" were unskilled workers, who felt their livelihoods had become jeopardized by Eastern Europeans who have undercut them. This is the claim that many of those voters made, in any case.
It is true that there are agencies that recruit solely non-British workers from abroad, and it is true that many of the Eastern Europeans do work for a lower wage, especially in the unregulated black market. But this is far from the whole story. A recent article (there have been a number like this) spoke of how many sectors of industry recruit large numbers of Europeans simply because so few British workers apply for those jobs. It is true that many of these jobs are not well paid, but they are still legitimate salaries.
A simple - if brutally-frank - conclusion to reach is that low-skilled British workers feel that those kinds of jobs (such as in the hospitality sector, but especially seasonal farming work) are too difficult for them. With anti-social hours ("when can find the time to go out?"; "do I really have to get up a four in the morning?") and often physically demanding ("I'm not getting my hands dirty!"), these jobs compare poorly with the sedentary, generic services sector that many of them may be used to. But the point is that someone has to do these jobs; and if not enough "natives" are willing to apply for them, then employers simply have no other choice. This assessment of the reality reflects poorly on the local labour force, and  makes you wonder what the local employers think of them.

So the complaint of "foreigners taking our jobs" doesn't really ring true; those workers making this complaint simply are making an incoherent argument that - even if their argument was valid - would anyway suggest that foreign workers had greater levels of labour flexibility than them. In which case,  why don't the locals try to do better than the foreigners, rather than try to "fix" the economy into an inefficient model that's more in their favour? But as we have seen, their case falls flat in reality; either way, the locals simply look "lazy".

This might sound like a blunt assessment given that British workers are among the hardest-working employees in the EU (in hours worked per week); but this is also the case because of inefficient working practises, which are likely to get worse outside of EU regulation. So be careful what you wish for!

Many of these workers are victims of the changes that have happened to the British economy over the last thirty years, but the reality is that complaining about it will change nothing; simply, many of these people have failed to react or change to circumstances. It's true that many of them are the "losers" of modern-day globalisation. The easy answer of blaming "Europe" for everything, as was the argument from the Leave camp, explains why this was appealing to low-skilled workers: it required nothing to believe an idea that explains away their own misfortune, while doing nothing to tackle the real issues.
As said earlier, it sounds like they want to turn back the clock. This was why they voted for Brexit. But looking at things objectively, this is simply a set of workers, already shown to be "lazy" and entitled when compared to their foreign counterparts, wanting to "fix" the system yet further in the expectation that they could have control over the supply of the labour force, regardless of the the intellectual incoherence of this idea. In any case, the kind of economy they are supporting by backing Brexit is the type of low-wage economy with fewer workers' rights that would make them even worse-off than they are currently.
This is why "Brexit" was a victory for the lazy anti-intellectualism of the anti-globalisation forces: like in all Populist movements, its supporters want to be "protected" from reality, while being duped into supporting something that actually would work against their interests.

Thirty years ago the comedy series "Auf Weidersehn, Pet" highlighted a serious issue, and showed a simple way to resolve it: move to where the work is, as thousands of other Europeans do every year. Which leads on to another issue that many Brits have...

Ignorant?

We've looked at how many of the sectors in industry are reliant on European workers due to a lazy sense of entitlement from the local workforce. Some could even assign this to a "Post-Imperial" psychology of expecting others to do the "hard" work for them (such as exists in the Arab Gulf States). But there is another form of "laziness" that also afflicts many Brits: intellectual laziness.

As we have seen, many of the lower-skilled native workforce are guilty of blaming Europeans for their problems. What makes this worse is that Britain is singularly-exceptional in the EU. It has a population that consciously denies itself the full advantage of one of the EU's "four freedoms"; the freedom of labour, simply because, unlike other Europeans, British people don't bother to learn a foreign language.

While it is true that English is the lingua franca of the world, it is this willful ignorance that reflects badly on the British compared to other European nations. Britain has been in the EU for more than forty years, but most of its population have used the freedom of movement simply to indulge their holiday plans, and then casually expect to be able to speak their language in another country. Put in another way, many Brits' attitude towards Europe is to treat the EU like Post-Imperial "colonies", where they are expected, as Brits, to be treated in a superior manner.

It is this mentality that has fed a lazy thinking towards Europe and Britain's place in the EU. If "Europe" is seen by many Brits and the place "over there" only to go on holiday, buy "duty free" and make fun of foreigners' funny accents, how does this help to create a constructive attitude? Unlike other EU countries' workers, who are happy to travel to work in other parts of the EU, Brits tend to use their freedom to travel simply for leisure or for the purpose of retirement. Of the Brits who do live in different parts of the EU, the vast majority are retirees in Spain. The unwillingness to learn a foreign language is one of the major factors towards this difference.
It is true that the European continent's history of wars over the centuries - and especially the last century - that helped to engender an atmosphere of co-operation and amity. It is true that Britain's cultural history is separated from that in many ways; it could be argued that Britain's relationship with Europe is too influenced by its cultural failure to come to terms with the loss of Empire, as many seeing the EU somehow as a replacement for it. But this does not excuse intellectual laziness.

The intellectual laziness that comes from not learning a foreign language has limited how British people can fully benefit from being in the EU, creating a huge self-inflicted bias against the institution. As said earlier, other countries do not have this problem (at least, not to Britain's extent. Many criticise the French on the same grounds, but contrary to common misconception, many French people know at least some English: they simply don't like using it in their own country).

Put in these terms, many Brits attitude to being a part of the EU could seen as intellectually lazy and entitled, ignorant of what the EU stands for, and willfully-ignorant of the opportunities that being a member of the EU represents. When you are part of a multi-national, multi-lingual labour market and can't be bothered to learn a foreign language, you're simply limiting your own options, especially when the workers in the other countries are doing the exact opposite.
This is what makes British workers' criticism of Europeans who come to work in the UK especially galling; in learning a foreign language to work in the UK, the Europeans are doing something that Brits are too lazy to bother doing; yet they are criticized for bothering to make full use of the European labour market, unlike the British.

No wonder Europeans have found the British attitude so unfathomable: many Brits seem to have chosen to leave a club they never even tried to make full use of (or bothering to fully understand the rules), while criticising the others who did. It makes "Brexit" supporters sound like the kind of people who join a gym to lose weight, give up after a couple of times, then complain that it's the gym's fault that they haven't lost any weight. The cultural ignorance towards Europe that seems prevalent in many Brexit supporters is a result of intellectual laziness, and a narcissistic expectation of special treatment. But again, this is a tendency that appears throughout Populist movements.
Which brings us to the other main issue....

Entitled?

Since Britain has joined the EU, it has been one of the largest net contributors to the fund. This is a point that many Eurosceptic politicians have made over the years, and was a major factor in Margaret Thatcher getting her famous "rebate" after being in "the club" for ten years.
But the fact that the UK is the second-largest contributor (Germany being the largest) is hardly surprising, given the size of the UK economy and its population. France is a famous beneficiary of  the CAP, but as we have seen, there are other aspects of its EU membership where the UK has been holding itself back, such as treating the EU simply as one big holiday destination rather than a huge potential work-zone.
Britain's relationship with the EU since its membership has always seemed "semi-detached", and that's been part of the problem. Of course, the EU exists as an association of mutual self-interest for those involved, so all countries will fight their own corner. The "apogee" of Britain's engagement with the EU was clearly in the early years of the Blair premiership (until Brown's resistance against joining the Euro); since then, and especially under the Cameron administration, it has simply been a matter of the UK trying to get the EU to see things from their point of view i.e. that "Europe" was an unpopular cause at home. It was Cameron's liking of "feeding the crocodile" of Euroscepticism that Europeans found exasperating, damaging Britain's relations with the EU for cheap political gain, and was the (unsurprising) cause of his resignation.
While Eurosceptics found Britain's membership of the EU to be some kind of debilitating autocracy,  the reality was that Britain was able to get its way almost all of the time on the key issues that mattered: apart from Thatcher getting a rebate, Britain was able to opt out of Schengen, the Euro, and the social chapter. Britain's "semi-detached" status was therefore thanks to the EU indulging British exceptionalism as far as it could reasonably go without breaking its own rules. But, this was still not enough for the Eurosceptics that wanted to have their cake and eat it while in the EU, with that attitude persisting with Brexit. This sense of entitlement is therefore endemic.

When looking at who voted for Brexit, a clear generation gap can be seen. What's telling about this is that it's the generation who already have a "triple lock" pension (and a holiday home in Spain?) who are still yet unsatisfied with their lot; they are the "have their cake and eat it" generation, if you will, who want their lives protected at all costs. A cynic might add that this is the problem with democracy, when it's the older generation who do most of the voting: in a democracy, a politician must satisfy his voters. This is something that the prize Machiavellian George Osborne was all too aware of.

So David Cameron's "feeding the crocodile" may have made some short-term political sense in a way, though it adds up to horrible long-term strategy: after all, Greece got itself into a financial mess by years and years of politicians simply doing what the voters asked of them: giving them more and more money. This is the ultimate route that Populism takes, and why it always ends in tears.
Politicians have to be leaders "ahead of the curve" as well as being responsive to the electorate; this is one reason why many people in the UK bought into the "austerity" agenda, even though it was based on a false narrative of events (that Labour overspending caused the financial crisis, rather than the banks' reckless mismanagement). People believed it because they liked the idea of a politician "taking a lead" on events and telling them what appeared an "unpalatable truth". But Cameron's reasons for backing "austerity" weren't about genuine leadership; it was about opportunistic political "differentiation", making the Conservatives seem forthright compared to the seemingly-evasive Labour party.
And now that Theresa May has inherited that legacy of Brexit, she seems determined to follow the same path, indulging the worst aspects of Populism by turning her party into a re-branded "UKIP" that steals all their clothes. Meanwhile, those who stand against that, it is implied, are "anti-British" and "doing the country down". It is no wonder that the atmosphere in the country has turned uglier towards foreigners, and even countrymen who are worried about their future.

The "Brexit generation", if we can call them that, are those who are also more likely to vote Conservative i.e. the over-50's (who, of course, are more likely to be voters at all): the same people who are concerned about protecting their status, their (paid for) homes (or second homes), and are wistfully looking back to a time of their childhood when "Britannia ruled the waves".
Looking at it rationally, it's hard to know exactly why these people are so anti-European. What has modern-day Europe ever done to them personally? Why do they despise Brussels? The most common complaint, apart from "immigration" (see the points above) is about loss of sovereignty. But as alluded to before, these are the rules by how the club works: you trade in some sovereignty to get greater freedom of movement, trade and labour, not to mention greater employment rights, investment opportunities, and so on. If Brits don't want to take full advantage of that, it's Britain's problem, not Europe's. They simply don't understand the rules of the game, or can't be bothered to do so.

But this is the point: many of these people are driven by emotional prejudice and historical antipathy that pre-dates Britain joining the EU, rather than due to any rational argument. They still hate Germany because of the war, and think that all Europeans are inherently untrustworthy. They want the Britain of their childhood, with their lovely blue passports, and fewer "brown people". Policy made on such fantastical pretensions, and in favour of people who support such nonsensical thinking, is bound to result in disappointment, if not worse.

Britain is about to find out.

Narcissism and politics: David Cameron's resignation and the EU referendum

David Cameron's career is, in many ways, a parable of the ascent and (inevitable) demise of the narcissist as politician.
In a previous article, we've looked at Cameron's rise to party leader and Prime Minister, through the prism of the narcissist. The nature of his fall was as much the result his own personality and narcissism as any other part of his career; in some ways, even more so.

The article mentioned looks at how Cameron took control of his party by effectively making the success of the party reliant on the success of the leader; the party became popular because he was popular. In this sense, like many narcissist-politicians, the party became a form of "personality cult". He modernised the party, becoming known as the "heir to Blair" in the process. He took a look at how to make his party popular, recruiting Steve Hilton in the process; this was the "hug a hoodie" period before the financial crisis. These were the positives that Cameron brought to his role; but there were far more negatives in the long run.

Over his career he became known as masterful at tactics, but hopeless at strategy. His superficial charm was noticeable and what gave him an automatic sense of gravitas. The problem with this was that it perhaps too often it gave him an automatic sense of invincibility. We'll look at this in more detail in a moment.
The superficial charm, along with some other more unpleasant characteristics, have seemed to point to a darker aspect of Cameron's personality. While he has plenty of admirers and his circle of supporters are fiercely-defensive of his character and motives, a more distanced look at his career at the pinnacle of politics for six years (plus his four-and-a-half years as leader of the opposition) leads to a less sympathetic assessment. While he himself said that "all careers end in failure", his own failure was one he brought about on himself. It is this seismic failure that will always define him.

Politics as a poker game

Some see politics and power as a game of chess; others see it as a game of poker. A famous example of the former would be the cynical "grand master" of geo-politics in the early 21st century, Vladimir Putin. This is a man who will do whatever he needs to in order to preserve power, exploit weaknesses in his enemies, and grab opportunities to extend influence. Cameron's partner-in-power, George Osborne, is someone who also played politics as a chess game, using his position as chancellor to trap and destroy his enemies.
David Cameron, though, sees it as a game of poker, He would never admit this himself probably, but the evidence is there to see when you look at the judgments and decisions he has made as leader of his party and, more significantly, as Prime Minister.

Cameron is the ultimate "risk-taker" as politician. It is easier, and more instructive, to look at the progress of Cameron's career as a series of decisions and judgments (or "gambles"), and how this affected (or reinforced) the somewhat callous, risk-taking aspect to his character, ultimately resulting in an explosive "ultimate gamble".
This goes back all the way to his initial rise to the leadership of the Conservative Party. His main challenger for the leadership in 2005 was David Davis. As Davis was known as an arch Euro-sceptic, and Cameron's views on Europe were more nuanced, in order to win the support of the party's hard right, he declared that if he became Conservative leader he would take them out of the European People's Party (EPP), the EU's largest group of conservatism in the parliament. This declaration was key to getting the support he needed, and then he carried through with his promise to take his party out of the EPP. This was largely unremarked on in Britain at the time, but it was not in the Europe. It was never forgotten in Europe's major capitals how Cameron played to his party's anti-European instincts for his own personal gain; as would be repeated ten years later.

While this decision might not be a "gamble" as such, it was a judgement that would start a ball rolling and have long implications.

Cameron's relationship with the parliamentary party was almost always unstable, due to the distrust they felt over what they saw as his instinctive "Europeanism". Like during John Major's tenure, he was always having to play a balancing act between doing things to remain popular with the wider electorate (and thus in office), and doing things to stay on the right side of his MPs. His instincts were to the former, with the occasional piece of red meat thrown to the latter when the need arose. It was this strategy of effectively "winging it" with his own MPs (and thus the fate of the country) that would lead to the fateful "Bloomberg Speech" in early 2013.

His parliamentary party were taken aback when he failed to win the 2010 election outright; when Cameron then took the decision (and thus his first real "gamble") to join in a full coalition with the Liberal Democrats, many of them were incensed, and it took all his charm to keep them on his side. But even that was only temporary.
This "gamble" of coalition government led to a further "gamble" the following year, in the form of the AV referendum. This referendum on changing the voting system was one of the LibDems' terms in the Coalition Agreement; Cameron was taking a risk, for if he lost it, his party would have permanently fewer seats in parliament (and he would, one assumes, not be long in his job). Luckily for him, the risk was in fact over-stated, and due to the winning over the support of the Labour party, the "no" side won comfortably. Cameron had taken his first major domestic gamble, and won.

By 2012, though, the LibDems were causing trouble. After accepting austerity and losing the AV referendum, their leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was becoming increasingly unpopular, and so needed something to raise his party's profile than being seen as the Conservatives' "enabler". According to the Coalition Agreement, the AV referendum was tied to changes on constituency boundary reform, which would benefit the Conservatives (at the expense of Labour and the LibDems). However, the LibDems now said that boundary reform was tied to House Of Lords reform; they would not support boundary reform without Lords' reform.
This led to boundary reform can being kicked down the road till after the 2015 election after the LibDems' Lords' reform failed, which infuriated many of Cameron's MPs. They were further infuriated by another decision (read "gamble") that Cameron took, to support gay marriage.

It was partly due to these factors (and the rise of UKIP) that led Cameron to feel the need to give his rebellious MP some "red meat"; the result of this was the fateful "Bloomberg Speech". In other words, his "gambles" in one direction had led to the need to "hedge" in the other.

Meanwhile, Cameron took his first foreign policy "gamble" early in 2011, with the intervention in Libya. The "Arab Spring" affected him quite strongly and, with the support of Nicholas Sarkozy, took the war in Libya to be a kind of personal crusade. It was a largely Anglo-French operation, but what was meant to be an operation that had learned the mistakes of Iraq turned into one that simply repeated them, albeit in a slightly different form. Once Muammar Qaddafi was gone, Cameron's attention rapidly waned; even before that, Cameron's "strategy" in Libya was proving to be almost non-existent. To be blunt, while Cameron may have had good intentions, to outsiders it looked like an exercise in foreign policy "attention seeking". The fact that Libya quickly collapsed into civil war due to a lack of Anglo-French guidance or oversight told its own story. Cameron's "gamble" in Libya is something that Britain seemed to quickly forget; meanwhile, Libyans are living it every day.

That trend of Cameron "taking his eye off the ball" did not get any better with the vote on war in Syria two years later. Again, Cameron's character flaws shown themselves to lead to a blunder of his own making. This was another case of him rolling the dice with high stakes in foreign affairs, and losing.

Raising the stakes

So far, Cameron's "gambles" had either paid off, or (at a superficial level) his "losses" had not critically damaged his position; he would lick his wounds and move on. In this sense, you could see where Cameron might get the impression that he was "getting quite good" at making judgement calls, in spite of the reality. He seemed to be quite good at shrugging off the occasional knock-back as part of a learning curve. The problem with this was that it might lead him to think his judgement was getting better with each "gamble" he made. It wasn't; it was simply that the stakes were getting higher each time.

Cameron has been called an "Essay Crisis" Prime Minister: he would often lack the drive and attention to deal with a problem until the last minute, when he would suddenly bring it all together as if by magic. It also meant that he was liable to panic at the final moment.

This was true of the Scottish Referendum, when during the negotiations with Alex Salmond he gave way on some issues, as long as the vote was an "either-or" and London would decide the timing of the vote. As the polls suggested a comfortable majority for staying part of the UK when the campaign started, Cameron saw this as a way to "lance the boil" of Scottish independence, while also catching Alex Salmond on the back foot.
As we know, the polls narrowed dramatically in the final weeks of the campaign, resulting in Cameron's panicky "vow" with the other major party leaders for more powers for Scotland to stay part of the UK (as an aside here, with Scotland being the only other kingdom in the "United Kingdom", Scotland leaving the UK would effectively mean the name would no longer have any meaning; so Scotland was effectively voting to abolish "the UK").
Again, this was another moment when Cameron was truly "risking it all". But no sooner had the referendum been won that he was again "hedging" with his own troublesome backbenchers by calling for EVEL; currying favour with Scotland one day, and with the English shires the next. No wonder people saw him as untrustworthy.

As we have seen, Cameron had been a "lucky" Prime Minister. The after-shocks of the referendum had huge effects on the politics of Scotland, with horrifying effects for Labour. Come the general election, it meant that Labour had to win dozens of seats in England to stand a chance. Cameron's use of Lynton Crosby, combined with a ruthless assault on the seats of the coalition partners, meant that his party was able to create an almost "perfect victory".
The strategy Cameron used in the election campaign was risky, especially as - in relentlessly attacking the LibDems - they were undermining the very party they thought they would need to form a functioning government. And, indeed, the "perfect victory" was almost too perfect: for it meant that with the LibDems no longer there in government to block an EU referendum, he would have to go through with his promise. This would prove to be a hideous irony.

And so Cameron arrived at his biggest gamble of all. As he had won so many other battles, and often played his hand with mastery over the past six years, he thought he had done enough to win the referendum, so he could go on to the final, glorious years of his premiership. In many ways, he used the same strategy ("Project Fear") in the EU referendum as he had in the Scottish referendum. He made many assumptions - mostly false -  about the state of politics in the UK. Forgetting that UKIP were doing to Labour in the Northern England what the SNP had done to them in Scotland was a huge error of judgment on Cameron's part. This meant that Labour could not "rely" on "their" voters to vote the way they wanted, to fateful effect.

It was Cameron's "Essay Crisis" too many. He had looked at his hand of poker, and misjudged the table when he needed his judgment the most, when the stakes could not have been higher - for him or the country. The tendency for Cameron to be the expert of "winging it", of recklessly assuming "everything will be fine", of over-estimating his own judgment, finally came to destroy him.

In the end, also the manner of his resignation was told us something of his character. He was infamously quoted as saying after the result was clear "I'm not here for the hard shit", or words to that effect.