Theresa May, Salzburg and the "Brexit speech": a psychological portrait of narcissism

It has been a year since Theresa May's Florence Speech, where she set out what aims the British government had. A year on from that, almost to the day, we had the events of the informal EU heads' meeting in Salzburg.

Looking back over the events of the year that has transpired since May's Florence speech, we see a pattern of behaviour from Theresa May in her treatment of the negotiations with the EU. The "vision" that her Florence speech set out was never one that the EU could or would ever accept; it would break their own rules, for a start.
However, in the desire for the negotiations to move forward from "Phase 1", last December the EU agreed to a compromise - a "fudge" - on the intractable issue of Northern Ireland, where the UK agreed to a "backstop" if the UK failed to provide a solution to the problem of the NI border. Negotiations moved forward on the clear understanding that the UK would provide a solution to the EU in due course. However, the compromise was quickly backtracked on by the UK, who claimed a different "interpretation" to the wording of what was agreed with the EU. Meanwhile, the UK government have pushed back the submission of a "solution" to the NI border at every opportunity. Like an errant student, May has wangled extension after extension on the submission deadline of their homework to teacher. At some point, the teacher's patience is bound to snap.


Ending the indulgence

After nine months of this charade, it is not unreasonable for the EU to have felt duped. After doing what they could to move things forward for the benefit of Theresa May last December, they found out later on they had been "played". May's tactics seen in this way appear as those someone taking advantage of the others' charity, eking out negotiations with the EU by playing on their fears of May being replaced by a hardliner if they didn't compromise. On top of that, the British government's other strategy of getting the EU "on side" was to have their ministers going around the various EU capitals in a ham-fisted "divide and rule" approach that ignored the EU's hierarchy and institutions. Both these approaches seem to have convinced the EU that their indulgence of May's behaviour has only worked out against them, making May more brazen in her approach rather than more compromising. More on that in a moment.

May's "Chequers" plan was meant to have been a method of resolving the outstanding issues, including Northern Ireland, and also of providing the grounding for a future relationship. But given that the plan was only really there to hold together the opposing sides of her party, the EU's opinion seems to have been only an afterthought. Almost as soon as the plan's contents were public in July, the EU explained how they were impractical and broke the rules of the single market, as was obvious to anyone who understood how the EU functioned as an institution. The EU reiterated the possible alternatives; options that the EU had explained to the British government from the start of the negotiations.
So May went into the Salzburg meeting, with the EU having already rejected key aspects of the plan, as well as even a large part of her own party. When she talked to the other EU heads on Wednesday, the EU leaders were then stunned by the tone of her "pitch" to them: that her Chequers deal was the only one she could offer, she couldn't change it, and that the onus was on the EU to compromise. It was May's stubborn refusal to budge that had provoked the strong words from Donald Tusk and others on Thursday, and which led to May's bizarre and tetchy press conference that afternoon.

As the expectation was that some kind of "bridging" compromise was bound to be reached at Salzburg (i.e. one that could see a basis for further discussions in October), what had made the actual conclusion so abrupt had been May's inability to be flexible. One wonders if her personality is the culprit, as it has been for most of her failings as a national leader. As she appears to have a personality indicative of some pathological form of narcissism, this might explain how she could have arrived at the Salzburg meeting with such a delusional view of how events would transpire. While this can only be conjecture, circumstantial evidence of how she runs her government within a "bunker" of sycophantic advisors suggests that May doesn't know what the EU is really thinking because no-one around her is inclined to tell her. In this way, her brittle ego only listens to people she trusts, and those she trusts can only maintain that trust by telling her things that don't contradict her own world-view.
 Bringing in a comparable (and relevant) example from reality television, is "Amy's Baking Company". This is a company that featured on Gordon Ramsay's well-known programme, ran by a woman (the eponymous Amy) who is literally incapable of handling criticism.

Ramsay is incapable of getting even basic points across to Amy, who is defended from the rest of the world by her "enabling" husband. Any criticism is seen as an "attack". As a result, Ramsay decides he's wasting his time trying to change someone who cannot change.
Tusk and the other EU leaders seem to have reacted to May's stance on Wednesday in a similar way: for them, May's inability to compromise at this late stage seems to have been the last straw.

With May's position being so tenuous after the Chequers plan bombed with her own party, it's also possible that May felt she needed to talk "tough" at Salzburg in order to shore up her position for the party conference. But if that was true, then this was also the fault of her poor strategic thinking; something that is another of her unfortunate traits. Talking tough to the EU would make it all the harder to climb down in her party's eyes in time for a compromise in October. If she had compromised as the EU was expecting her to do, the party conference would have been tempestuous at best, putting at jeopardy the compromises needed for any positive outcome in October. She would have needed to tell the party a few unpleasant home truths at conference about what was realistic to achieve; but again, May is not temperamentally the type to make waves, and her stubborn streak also extends to her political durability.
When she returned to the UK, she then made an impromptu speech.


In the mouth of madness

After May's plan was rejected by the EU, the manner of that rejection (and Tusk's "instagram") seems to have affected May quite profoundly. Her surprise at the EU's inability to compromise seemed genuine, and thus the rejection of her plan she took as a personal affront. She had been publicly shamed, as far as she was concerned.
But with the way she approached the Salzburg meeting, she seems to have taken the attitude of the ever-indulged narcissist: as the EU had always compromised over her wishes, why wouldn't they do so again? Couldn't the EU see that Chequers wasn't already a "compromise" as far as May was concerned? Therefore, it was the EU's "turn" to do the same. This seems to have been her take on the situation, going to Salzburg.
But again, it seems clear that May simply doesn't "get it": there are some things the EU cannot compromise on, such as breaching their own rules. This had been clear from the very start. But May, like the typical narcissist, just doesn't listen. She only listens to people that confirm her own bias.

The rationale for the impromptu speech on Friday afternoon may well have been aimed at securing her position with her party, but the tone of the speech seems to have been driven by narcissistic rage. She singles out Donald Tusk for criticism, and uses untruth and psychological projection to accuse the EU of being disrespectful; quite a bold accusation, considering how much the British government had taking the EU for fools for the last nine months, as mentioned earlier. Making liberal use of her infamous "death stare", it is a speech that is designed for domestic audiences; but to the objective observer, it looks like the speech of someone on the verge of losing all self-control (and self-respect). She then reiterates her inability to compromise, demanding like she did in Salzburg that the EU must shift their position, or there would be no deal.

The effect of the speech on the talks, given what she said, is to increase the likelihood of "no deal" even higher. With now less than a month before the last real meeting, and with the party conference likely to be belligerent towards any kind of compromise with the EU, May's behaviour has brought the talks effectively to an end.
An inability to listen, an inability to change, and May's fragile ego seem to have brought Britain into the mouth of the abyss.

The psychology of Conservatism and Nationalism: a "controlled environment", or is it just Narcissism?

Broadly-speaking, nationalism could be said to act as a psychological "comfort blanket". There is a lot to be said for the argument that people who are ideologically-conservative also desire a "controlled environment"; in other words, they require the psychological security of an environment where they feel "safe", where things are familiar, and where things don't change. This last point is the entire nature of Conservatism as an ideology.
The psychology of narcissism is inherently tied to this. The concept of a "controlled environment" is something that can be found in narcissists, who seek to have the last say in how people behave who they interact with, and require an environment where things stay exactly as they are, in a state of controlled inertia.
In the same way that the concept of change scares a conservative, "change" terrifies a narcissist. Both react to "change" as a threat, as it challenges the carefully-constructed environment that they have created for themselves. The carefully-constructed environment both narcissists and conservatives have created stems from insecurity.

The family member or partner of a narcissist, if they allow the narcissist to have their own way (as it is the easiest way to avoid conflict), will find decisions made for them by the narcissist, their possessions are no longer their own, and the company they choose no longer a matter of their free-will. The narcissist is a "control freak" at heart, because of their innate insecurity. That insecurity inhabits itself through the establishment of a "controlled environment" at home, and an irrational (and unethical) desire to impose their will on to others in the world in general; the world must be moulded to suit the narcissist's desires, rather than the narcissist adapt to reality.
This can also be exhibited as an intense and pathological inability to change their views (i.e. stubbornness), even if that causes them (and others) far more problems than it would if they had changed their mind in the first place. This is more accurately a kind of neurosis - mental incapacity - where things must be done as the narcissist decided, as to admit that they were wrong would create a crisis of confidence in their own fragile sense of self-esteem. In Britain, Theresa May seems to be a good real-world example of a personality that is so neurotic (and innately narcissistic) in her inability to change, she would rather the country go to ruin than bring herself to admit her judgement was wrong.
Again, this stems from insecurity, as it is psychologically difficult for the narcissist to change their perspective on the world; they see it as easier to get the world to change for them. The narcissists' sense of self-esteem is so fragile that anything that threatens to change their own carefully-constructed and cast-iron perception of the world must be either disregarded or disparaged.
And when that "carefully-constructed perception" is destroyed, the reaction from the narcissist is the same as a child's tantrum: anger, fury, vindictiveness and spite at the source of their "pain". At their worst, the narcissist reacts to their world-view being shown as an illusory fantasy as the highest form of betrayal, lashing out at even those that care for them if they are unable to "get even" with the ultimate source of the "problem". Someone must pay for the narcissist's emotional suffering, even if it redirected at the innocent, or even those that they claim to care about the most. The narcissist's rage can be something fearsome to behold.

The behaviour above that describes the narcissist also applies to the ideological nationalist, and to conservative thinking on general. At its most toxic level, this can manifest itself as far-right extremism, such as seen in the alt-right or Islamic fundamentalism. This is the psychology of the "loser" who wants to get revenge on society. In the male-dominated world of the far-right, it is about the creation of a society where men are superior to women, culture is homogeneous, and unorthodox thinking is suppressed and persecuted; the logical conclusion of a narcissist's "controlled environment", writ large. This is the narcissists' "power fantasy".
 The psychology of Hitler is the most extreme manifestation of this type of "malignant narcissism" embodied in one person, as his "nationalism" was a psychological projection of his childhood insecurities, creating Nazi Germany as the manifestation of his disturbed ego. In a different manner, J Edgar Hoover is another example of someone with his own insecurities (also seen in his widely-reported dysfunctional personal life) who led the FBI as his own personal "controlled environment" through the tenures of eight presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon. In this manner, he ruled the USA as a "power behind the throne" for decades, using his position to indulge his own prejudices on the nation, with the power to potentially decide the fate of millions at his whim. In the end it was Nixon, another personality with a mass of insecurities, that oversaw Hoover's slide into irrelevance.

Going into the psychology of nationalism (and Conservatism in general), the core tenet is about people wanting to preserve things they way they were when they were a child. At the most extreme embodiment, Hitler seemed to have his own fantastical version of Germany in his head: psychologists have talked of him having a "God Complex" coming from his mother, who  died when he was an adolescent. In this sense, his idolization of Germany before the First World War (and his desire to unite all German-speaking peoples) may have come from the insecurity felt by the loss of his beloved mother; to equate pre-war Germany with the time his mother was still alive, which then morphed into thinking that creating a greater Germany would somehow assuage his feelings of loss for his mother. With other accumulated insecurities piled on top of this, such as his acquired hatred of the Jews, we see the blinkered, twisted vision of a man who seeks to create the ultimate "controlled environment".
Hitler is the extreme embodiment of this; at a more prosaic level, conservatives in general seem to psychologically hark back to a time when things were more "familiar", when the world seemed like a simpler, less unpredictable, place. This inevitably goes back to the time of their childhood. But the desire to "turn back the clock" can itself only come from the desire to change reality as it exists now; an irrational (and even unethical) desire to impose their will on the rest of society. This is the core psychology of the narcissist.

While this desire for "turning back the clock" can in some ways be just harmless fantasizing ("stop the world, I want to get off!"), there are plenty of examples of where this has led to a surge of narcissistic rage when this fantasy is resisted by others. The violence of the alt-right in the USA, and now the surge of far-right violence in Britain and Europe, are all signs of narcissistic rage. Unwilling to accept that diversity of opinion and culture is a normal part of life in the developed world, the far-right seek to express their frustration that they cannot "turn back the clock"; thus they seek to impose their version of a "controlled environment" by use of violence and intimidation.
At a different level, the same can be seen in Britain with the rhetoric of "Brexiteers", who talk of saboteurs, appeasement and betrayal. This is the same language that a narcissist would use when confronted with people who refuse to follow their commands. When this is writ large in supportive elements of the media, this harsh rhetoric only encourages others to carry out violence in their name.

The psychology of Populism and Donald Trump is the psychology of narcissism, in the same way that "Brexit" is the irrational psychology of narcissism. But the world cannot be tamed to follow his vision as the narcissist would like to think it is. The politics of "Brexit" and Donald Trump are about "nativism", and wanting to make society more homogeneous and more predictable, as it was when its supporters were growing up. If the world cannot be made to do as the narcissist pleases, then they will construct their own "controlled environment" at home where they can feel safe. This is the psychological root of American isolationism; and it is the logical conclusion that "Brexit" will take, once its architects see that the world does not care what they think, and cannot be cajoled into doing what they want.
The stereotypical old-aged conservative is the man (or woman) who is sat at home, alone and friendless, complaining to anyone who will listen about how the world has changed beyond recognition, how nothing is as good as it used to be, and how he no longer feels like he belongs in the world.
It is a sad existence, and one that is entirely self-inflicted.

Brexit and Britain's slow decline: a society falling to pieces?

Britain in 2018 seems like a country having a kind of slow-burning nervous breakdown. From a social point of view, the bonds that hold society together seem to be falling apart, while from an economic point of view, swathes of the country are populated by towns and cities that have simply lost their purpose, seeming to be there just because people happen to be there, not because the people really have anything to do there.
Both these issues, in the two links highlighted, come at the social and economic perspective from differing ideological ends of the spectrum, but the conclusion that can be reached appears similar: that Britain is socially-broken, and economically-moribund.

The nature of British society has fundamentally changed since the end of the Second World War. Like all developed countries, it has gone from being a male-dominated society, to one where women have a great role in the working world (note, I am not saying that women have "equal rights"; there is still a long way to go on that score). Society has become more racially-diverse (though, again, that does not mean racially-equal), and more sexually-liberal (generally-speaking; in some ways it could be argued to even have backslid, depending on the issue).
On top of that, social bonds have loosened, partly due to changing social attitudes, and also due to the changing (and more unpredictable) nature of work. The "changing nature of work" is partially a result of government strategy (or sometimes, lack of): in the last thirty years, the British economy has shifted massively in the direction of London, exacerbating a slide that had already began with the demise of empire.

Here is where the two articles mentioned at the start overlap in their concerns. The social bonds that have broken have done so as a result, at least in part, due to economic policy. The Libertarians that led the Thatcher government saw how the larger part of the population outside of the South-east of the country were being supported by the industries that were inefficient. Their solution was to either get rid of them, or if they didn't change, allow them to die. Thus we had the huge structural change of the economy from the 1980s onward, with a service-led economy that was only sustainable in the long-term for one part of the country: London and the South-east of England.
The social effects of this were not hard to predict, and are evident in every town and city outside of the South-east of England. In those towns and cities most badly affected by having their key industries disappear, the jobs that replaced them were primarily low-skilled, low-paid and low in productive value. In short, they were what could also be called "shit jobs", where job satisfaction was through the floor.
The vicious circle of this is that it affects all parts of the local community: unhappy workers are also unhealthy workers, low-skilled workers are much more likely to resort to alcohol or substance abuse, domestic violence, and so on. And then there are the unemployed, and unemployable, for whom these issues are even more acute. So the long-term effect is to create, on top of "shit jobs", "shit towns". Not surprisingly, there are even websites devoted to this whole issue.

This was all true before the financial crisis, where the economy outside of the South-east was funded by massive household credit and a large dollop of self-delusion, helped along by the self-interest of the The City. Property speculation is a "British disease" seldom seen in Europe; those countries that had succumbed to this mania (such as Spain) seem to have learned their lesson since the financial crisis.
Not so in Britain, where the self-delusion goes on and on, for lack of any rational alternative. An economy based on services alone cannot maintain a population of sixty million in the long-term. It is economically impossible. To paraphrase a famous political saying, a service-based economy might fund some of the economy all of the time, or all the economy some of the time, but not all of the economy all of the time. The Libertarians who led this structural change more than thirty years ago were not stupid; they knew that a service-based economy would leave half of the country in a permanently-moribund (or deluded) state. They just didn't care.
Bringing this up-to-date, the Libertarians that are leading the charge for Britain to leave the EU without a "deal", seem to be even less interested in the fate of those that are already falling by the wayside in society as it is. The potential consequences of Britain leaving the EU without a deal have been looked at elsewhere, but it is telling of the extent of Britain's decline that the country could be so easily hijacked by the dangerous agenda of these ideological extremists.

Outside of the self-contained bubble that is London and the affluent South-east, the decline of British society since 2010 is visibly evident. The surge in rough sleeping, the surge in food banks, the surge in drug use (even in the countryside), the surge in casual violence etc. etc. These are all unmistakable indications of a society falling apart. With government cutting local spending by half, with some councils already bankrupt or close to it, the predictable social effects are all there in plain sight. The government has an agenda that tells everyone that they no longer care; not about crime, not about poverty, not about the vulnerable.
Inequality in Britain has been high compared to other developed nations for decades, but the post-war consensus was a genuine attempt to reverse that. The Libertarian "project" of Margaret Thatcher quickly "restored" Britain's famed levels of inequality, with some of her advocates even claiming that inequality was a good thing. This is the classic response of a Libertarian. Since the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, they have "succeeded" in reversing all the good work that the previous Labour administration had done in reducing child poverty; in just seven years the Conservatives had "succeeded" in more than doubling child poverty levels, that had been previously halved over thirteen years under Labour. I suppose to a Libertarian, that would be marked as an "achievement"?

The Libertarian "project" that was started under Thatcher has now reached its logical conclusion with Brexit and austerity. After 2010, the latter was economically-justified by the government after the financial crisis on the grounds of necessity, even if there were few economists who could find any real evidence to support its imposition today; its justification was only ever ideological rather than economic. Support for Brexit was then led by a hard-right Libertarian faction with the Conservative Party itself (which itself had its roots going back to Thatcher's time), which has had effective control of the government since it won the referendum. In seeking a "Hard Brexit", they are pursuing what they see as Thatcher's undying wish: to convert Britain into a neo-liberal "utopia".

Politically and ideologically, then, it seems that Britain has run out of road. The ten years since the financial crisis have just seen Britain being led down the road of smaller and smaller gains for more and more economic pain, till the point that no-one can go on any more, as the fate of the "zombie" British high street tells us. This is the take that Pete North (in the linked piece at the start of this article) seems to have.
I have some sympathy with his wider point, but he offers no solutions. He offers Brexit as a "solution" in that it offers seismic change to the fabric of Britain's economy and society. Thus may be true, but the same could be said of declaring war on your nearest neighbour. It isn't a real "solution" if all it offers is chaos for the sake of chaos.

Arguing in favour of chaos isn't offering solutions; it's nihilism. British society deserves more than that; unless you think that British society isn't worth saving. But that (I would argue) would make you little better than a Fascist.
In this toxic social environment, it's no wonder we have "culture wars" between "remainers" and "leavers", where an ideological civil war is taking place at all levels of society; masquerading at times as a war of "them" and "us", it pits the working class against middle class, town life versus city life, even man against woman. Thus far, the "culture war" has remained, barely-concealed, just below the surface, only breaking through at isolated moments and flashpoints. Brexit has come to symbolize both everything that is wrong with modern Britain, and everything that must change to restore Britain. It is a "culture war" that has its roots going back nearly five hundred years.

It's true that, in the current state of affairs, this schizophrenia might only be properly resolved, one way or the other, by Brexit. It is the realisation of this that is so depressing.

Psychopathy in politics: callous indifference versus deliberate harm (2)

It's difficult for most right-minded people to think that their government (outside of war) is capable to deliberately seeking to harm people. But when the evidence smacks you right in the face, it's hard not to notice.
In in article some months back, this author wrote about how government actions can be driven by a desire to achieve goals, regardless of the wider cost to society. As alluded to in that article, this kind of "callous indifference", in its most inhumane form, can take the form of a dictator (such as Stalin) wiping out his opponents through willful mass starvation - the brutal logical conclusion of "the ends justify the means".
At a different level of indifference, the government of Theresa May created the "hostile environment", which has destroyed the livelihoods and quality of life of many British people (such as those married to non-EU citizens) and naturalized British citizens (such as the "Windrush" generation, and others). At the same time, the continuation of the "austerity" agenda has destroyed the livelihoods and quality of life of many disabled people in Britain in particular, as well as creating an antagonistic atmosphere in society towards those claiming welfare in general. The antagonostic atmosphere of the "hostile environment" also creates a situation where landlords are implicitly given a free pass to fall back on their prejudices to deny tenancy rights to any foreigner they are suspicious of.
This could all be documented under a policy of institutional "callous indifference". However, the British government is also guilty of going deliberately out of its way to make life almost impossible for many asylum seekers.

This is the sharp end of the "hostile environment", where indifference to harm transforms into active facilitation of harm to people. The highlighted link above explains how the British government makes an active policy of appealing against court decisions to grant asylum, even when the vast majority of those appeals fail. In other words, the government has a policy of denying basic rights to asylum seekers that have already been legally granted by its own courts. What's all the more extraordinary about this is that the government is wasting public money pursuing hopeless appeals, whose only function is to deny rights (that have already been legally-granted) to asylum seekers, and to prolong their misery.
Put into context, not only is this abusing the rights of legal asylum seekers, it is also misusing public funds in order to do so. As the government-sanctioned appeals simply stretch out the amount of time that asylum seekers are unable to receive government support (or the right to any kind of humane existence), this is not about "callous indifference" to harm, but active pursuance of harm towards asylum seekers. This is the logical conclusion of creating a "hostile environment": implementing a policy that actively seeks to make people's lives miserable, even those who are legally-entitled to (and ought to expect) humanitarian support from the state.
The fact that the government are effectively misusing taxpayers money to achieve this travesty is all the more sickening: taxpayers are subsidizing the active mistreatment of asylum seekers in the UK. The policy of the government to pursue appeals against granting asylum when there is no real evidence to support them is, almost by definition, an act of irrational institutional sadism. It is wasting public funds to be cruel for the sake of being cruel.

The term "hostile environment", by its very meaning, has malevolent overtones. To be "hostile" to people is to be threatening and to wish them ill. The "hostile environment" that the British government has created towards asylum seekers is one where their existence in the UK seems to be deliberately made as unpleasant as humanly possible, short of actually building internment camps for them (the UK already has some notorious "detention centres", ran by private contractors who are given more-or-less free reign, with little effective government oversight. The public prisons are, not surprisingly, in a similarly anarchic state).
To play devil's advocate, I suppose an argument could be made to compare it to the treatment of the French authorities, which generally create an environment where asylum seekers are left in a kind of neglectful indifference (and any camps are eventually disbanded by the authorities). In that narrow sense, could Britain's "hostile environment" be argued to be more "humane" than just letting asylum seekers live in camps in the British countryside, until they dispersed of their own accord, as seems to happen in France? This is still doubtful logic, as the "hostile environment" in Britain functions in much the same way as it would in France: in France it is administrative bureaucracy that encourages asylum seekers to migrate to the UK; when in the UK is it the "hostile environment" that creates a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare for them instead. There are no disorganized camps like in France, but UK policy turns asylum seekers into housebound paupers (if they are lucky), and has numerous "detention centres". Then there are those that disappear into the black economy as a result of all this.


A "compliant environment"

The term "hostile environment" has been replaced by "compliant environment", though few would appear to be fooled. "Compliance" is another term bathed in banal, institutional syntax, but describe actions that make pursuing cruelty active government policy. The policy hasn't changed; only its presentation has.
The term "compliant" follows from the notion that those who comply with the rules have nothing to fear; except that all the evidence has now shown that the government actively seeks to persecute asylum seekers who have already been proven in law to require humanitarian protection by the British government. It is the government who are failing to comply with their own "compliant environment". And going back to the case of the "Windrush" generation, these include people whose own documents have been confiscated by the government, either through gross negligence or callous indifference; documents that proved their legal rights. Again, the government show how they cannot be trusted to follow their own rules. It is those that are most vulnerable in society in this case who are the most likely to suffer; their rights taken away from them for the sin of choosing to take officialdom at its word.

The sense of betrayal, at discovering that the high moral regard that the British government is based on is really an illusion, must be strong with those who have suffered as a result of this. It is like if you discovered that your father, who had raised you and you trusted implicitly for years, is actually a monster. With the government, it is a case of: do as I say, not as I do.
Presiding over all this is Theresa May. Those who support her say that, in close quarters, she is kind-hearted and warm. This may be true, but her supporters also seem blind to the more realistic view that May is kind-hearted and warm to people she likes and understands; there is far more evidence to suggest that, outside of her narrow social circle, she deals with issues in a far more mean-spirited and narrow-minded way.
This may well come from her parochial and socially-conservative upbringing, which means she struggles to humanly relate to those outside of her own background, and is temperamentally resistant to change. When turned into an "ideology" or government strategy, the result is the "hostile environment"; in a sense, an instrument of May's own inner psychology. Her officials are meant to apply the rules as set out by her. The "Cool Britannia" of twenty years ago has turned into "Cruel Britannia" under Theresa May.
The moral hypocrisy of Theresa May and her government is what really stands out in this "do as I say, not as I do" philosophy. As an ostensibly religious person, it's hard to fathom how she squares her Christian morality with her government's treatment of asylum seekers, the "Windrush" generation, and the most vulnerable in society in general. The "hostile environment" is an immoral policy, reeking in antipathy, and used in a way that deliberately harms people.
And yet Theresa May is still a church-going, seemingly moralistic person (or claims to be). Ignorance cannot be an excuse, as the real-world results of her government's policy have been known for a long time. It is much more likely about cynical political calculation, as that has been her strategy ever since she arrived at the Home Office (these kinds of stories go down well with the party grassroots, as they make her look resolute on immigration). Besides, who cares about the suffering of those who cannot vote and have no voice? It's already been made clear that she doesn't care about the fate of even her own citizens, if they have opinions and lifestyles that are different from her, so making some "third world" foreigners suffer just for the sake of it would be even easier to sanction.

While the treatment of the "Windrush" generation could be called a policy of "callous indifference", for the government to misuse public funds to actively make asylum seekers' lives intolerable is nothing less than sadistic.

Ideology and psychology: Libertarian motivation, right-wing thinking and historic comparison

The link between psychology and ideology is something that cannot be underestimated in terms of its human impact, as politics is about human decisions; flawed psychology leads to flawed decision-making.
This author has written before about the disturbing links between sociopathy and political advancement. The world of politics attracts those who seek either amoral self-advancement, or those who wish to expunge their own psychological insecurities by imposing their own twisted world-view on the rest of society.

In the UK, the issue of Britain's membership of the EU was at one time something of an obsession with "cranks". Nowadays, those one-time "cranks" are in the position of holding the government "hostage", ensuring that their vision of Britain outside the EU is enacted in full.

Who are these people? What are their backgrounds and motivations? Looking at some of the more high-profile of the "Brexiteers" in more detail, a few common themes appear.
First of all, there is the fairly obvious issue that the large majority of those in favour "Hard Brexit" are Libertarians. Brexit has always been a Libertarian project at its heart, going back thirty years. It should be asked how many of the electorate would call themselves "Libertarians": 20%, if not even less than that?
The Libertarian mindset is one of strongly individualistic, anti-government (and psychologically anti-social) motivations. It is vigorously anti-Communist, against any use of government power outside of the bare minimum. This is the reason for the Libertarian sense of historic "betrayal" by the EU. As they thought in entering the EU they were entering the world's largest free trade zone, the resulting regulations and rules that then went with that, along with "ever closer union", they saw as a personal affront to Libertarian "freedom".
When a Libertarian talks of "freedom", they are talking about economic "laissez-faire" freedom: the freedom from government rules, and the freedom to trade and make money without rules. Thus the EU, in needing to have rules in order to create a "level playing field" within the single market, becomes the Libertarians' enemy. While to an objective observer, rules and regulations can be seen to have a common-sense application when dealing with a open border economy involving dozens of countries, to a Libertarian, these rules and regulations become something more sinister: a threat to the Libertarian's "freedom".

In this way, Libertarians have a highly-concrete (and personal) sense of their own individuality and "freedom", where anything that reduces their ability to act as they wish is seen as a threat to themselves personally. This explains how "Brexiteers" respond to any attempt on compromise over Brexit as anathema: having invested so much of their own time and careers to it, they "internalize" their ideology, calling those who call for compromise as "appeasers" or "saboteurs".
This violent rhetoric partially may come from the psychology innate in Libertarian thought itself, which with its strongly individualist themes also encourages an inherently aggressive, masculine world-view. This testosterone-fueled culture that comes from Libertarian thought has pervaded Western thinking, particularly in the dog-eat-dog world of the "Anglo-sphere", where inequality is seen not only as inevitable but actually a positive thing for society, and where personal "drive" is what matters in life, rather than your social background. In this way, poverty is seen as the result of personal failings rather than the result of wider injustice in society. Such a stark, unforgiving moral universe has uncomfortable parallels with even more extreme right-wing ideologies.


Where the "military" and the "diaspora" meet

A closer break-down of the people advocating Brexit reveals yet more curiosities.
Apart from the shared ideology of Libertarianism, a disproportionate number of "Brexiteers" come from military backgrounds: people like (former ministers) Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis and Steve Baker have all had military careers of one sort or another, while some other "Brexiteers" (such as current minister Penny Mordaunt) have military connections through their parents.
A disproportionate number of "Brexiteers" are also what might be called part of the historic white British "diaspora": people who were either born and raised outside the UK (but also outside Europe), or have spent part of their time growing up abroad, or spent a significant part of their adult life abroad. Prominent examples include Boris Johnson (born in New York), Douglas Carswell (born and raised in Africa), Daniel Hannan (born in Peru), Arron Banks (who has significant interests in South Africa), and others.
Lastly, there is yet another disproportionately-represented segment within the "Brexiteers": those of non-white background who are also "products of empire" like some of the white British "diaspora" already mentioned. The significant trio of Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Suella Fernandes stand out here: all three are Libertarians, of South Asian heritage, and from different parts of the former colonies - Pakistan, Uganda, and Kenya-India respectively. These people are either ministers, former ministers, or powerful personages within the "Brexiteer" side of the Conservative Party.

What this all adds up to is a revealing character portrait of the motivations and backgrounds behind "Brexit". In short, what it tells us is that disproportionate numbers of Libertarians are former-military and/or legacy products (i.e. children) of the "empire".
Should this be surprising? Probably not, but being able to look at the cold, hard facts in this way certainly brings a fresh perspective on the whole "Brexit Agenda". It has been said that "Brexit" is really about creating "Empire 2.0": the "colonial" background of some of the key people involved lends itself to the view that they indeed wish to leave the EU in order to establish a kind of "Commonwealth-with-bells-on". Theresa May's current traipsing around Africa seems to support that viewpoint.

More generally, it might also be guessed that the "colonial" and military background to many of these people would skew their own view of how they see the world and Britain itself. Military people always have tended to be more nationalistic, arguably seeing their nation in a far more emotional (and personal) way than the ordinary person. Equally, those with a "colonial" background may well tend to see Britain through the eyes of mythology: their own distant upbringing taking the rhetoric of Britain as a "sceptred isle", a bastion of civilisation, all too literally, lacking the perspective that close experience of a country creates. In this way, in having a narrow (even disconnected) experience of "real" Britain, they have fallen for their own propaganda.
From a psychological point of view, they therefore invest personally in believing in Britain's unique status, becoming staunch defenders of its freedoms while ignoring its many flaws; and when they see the EU, they see an institution that threatens their own sense of Britain's mythology. As a result, they lash out at anything and anyone that threatens to destroy their own carefully-formed (and insecure) version of the world. "Brexit" therefore is about creating the Britain of Libertarians' own mythology.
The end result is that their view of Britain's place in the world is through the lens of its former imperial status and its status as a military power; by contrast, Britain's physical proximity to Europe they see more as a threat than an opportunity, skewed through the prejudice of two World Wars.

This mythology of Britain is what Libertarians are obsessed with; their own prejudice against Europe comes from their own personal background, equating EU bureaucracy with the slippery slope to Communist oppression and/or dictatorial autocracy that they may have heard about or experienced abroad. Thus they react to EU regulations as though they were the same as Soviet oppression or totalitarian methods of control. The rose-tinted perspective that many Libertarians have of the "colonies" from their parents' stories thus lead them into (masculine) fantasies about restoring British power and prestige, fueled by their own sense of having something to prove.


German parallels

This isn't the first time that ideology and a nation's fate has been guided by the fantasies and prejudice of an alliance of ex-military and "diaspora" ideologues.
Where there are "cranks" that are today Libertarians guiding Britain down an unknown and unstable path, a hundred years ago in Germany, "cranks" of a different kind were also fighting against the spread of Communism in Europe.
By 1919, Germany was in a state of institutional flux, with a weak centre of power in the aftermath of the First World War. Into the void stepped an alliance of ex-military "Freikorps"; right-wing nationalists who sought someone to blame for the mess. They then gained the trust of the German "diaspora" of the (former) Russian Empire, who began to flee from the Russian civil war to Germany: these were people of aristocratic stock (known as "Baltic Germans"), whose heritage went back centuries, to the time when Germans - then called the "Teutonic Knights" - ruled over vast tracts of the Eastern Baltic. These "Baltic Germans" were ardently anti-Communist, and had their own rose-tinted views of what Germany could look like if it were able to take advantage of the opportunity in the east and recapture its "lost lands" in the Baltic.
Into this mix was added their own prejudice. The "Baltic Germans" anti-Communism was also influenced by one of the most influential of their kin: Fyodor Vinberg. Under his tutelage, the Baltic Germans were able to influence a large part of the "Freikorps" into believing Communism was also part of a larger Jewish plot to take over the world. Thus Anti-Semitism became established in right-wing circles of German society thanks to the German "diaspora"; one of those listening was Adolf Hitler. The extreme views of those Baltic Germans went on to feature in "Mein Kampf".

Extremism can take many forms. A hundred years ago, it was the rise of Communism that led to the rise in Anti-Semitism. Today, what were once the fringe views of Libertarians have come to dominate political discourse in British politics. Their own prejudices - their irrational hatred of Europe, and their fantastical view of British exceptionalism - are leading Britain down a path where xenophobia has become normalized, and where casual violence goes unpunished.

This can't end well.

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: a monumental "cock-up", or a "project" designed to destroy Britain? Historical parallels with Russia

There exist two competing schools of thought that try to explain how "Brexit" has been allowed to happen in the uniquely-disruptive way that it has.
On one hand, there's the thinking that the referendum and the government's slide into anarchic paralysis is the result of a gradual accumulation of amassed incompetence over the years, matched with a complacency of their vaunted position: in other words, a chaotic "Brexit" was made inevitable by the mismanagement and dysfunction at the heart of British politics. In this sense, for the ideological supporters of this (delusional) thinking, "Brexit" is a "coup de grace" that sees the final self-destruction of the "elite", to replaced by something "better".
One the other, there's the argument that "Brexit" is the result of malevolent design: the "disaster capitalism" theory, that sees a group of vested interests take advantage of the opportunities presented in the unique circumstances in British politics after the financial crisis. Put in those terms, "Brexit" is an idea that has been introduced from outside the political sphere, like a bacillus uniquely-designed to poison and divide British society, ripping apart its political class in a way that no other issue could. A hundred years ago, a small group of Russian extremists were able to take control of a weak and paralyzed Russian state, turning society against itself in a civil war, and completely re-shape the country in its own image. That same merciless "Marxist" zeal of ideology seems to guide many of those who support "Brexit" in government, where the only solution to any problem is the one that seems designed to cause the most disruption.

The more obvious analysis is that the truth is somewhere in between: the inherent weakness and disconnected elite of Britain, made clear from the financial crisis onward, are taken advantage of by the "Brexit agenda". Able to easily manipulate events due to this weakness and a society already fragmented by a weak economy and an indifferent government, the establishment falls into every trap set for it.


Russian parallels

Going back to Russia a hundred years ago, some of the parallels with Britain today are disconcerting. The "Brexiteers" take the place in contemporary Britain for the Bolsheviks of Russia; modern-day ideologues hell-bent with missionary zeal. The wider social effect that the financial crisis of 2008 had on Britain was not so dissimilar from that of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Granted, 2008 did not of course lead to "revolution" and anarchy in Britain as it did in Russia in 1905, but that was due Gordon Brown's government bailing-out the banks. If that had not happened, the financial sector would have totally collapsed resulting in unprecedented social disorder, like what really happened (under a different set of factors) in Russia 103 years earlier.
Russia's government action deferred unrest and revolt in 1905; in a similar manner, Brown's actions deferred Britain's social collapse in 2008. But deferring a problem doesn't solve it. This author has written before about how the 2011 riots in England brought to mind some uncomfortable parallels with the mass social unrest in Russia in 1905, but that article was written long before "Brexit" raised its head as an issue.
"Brexit" in this way feels like a social "reckoning" for Britain's government not dealing with the many social and economic issues in the country since the financial crisis; in the same way that the social shock of Russia entering the First World War created the circumstances that allowed the Bolsheviks to take advantage of a time of chaos. In the case of modern-day Britain, however, it is the ideological hard-right of the Libertarians that is taking control of events, shaping them to their own ends.
It took twelve years - 1905 to 1917 - for the Russian central apparatus to collapse under the strain of events; in Britain, it is a period of eleven years from the time from the financial crisis to the Brexit "year zero" to come in 2019. All the signs are that the British government has no idea what it is doing when it comes to Brexit, and leaving the EU without any plan in place next year will bring the structural apparatus of the country to its knees. It is this calamity that the Libertarian "Brexiteers" (read "Marxists") plan to take full advantage of.

The "cock-up" narrative of Brexit follows the same historical trends that happened to the creaking apparatus of Imperial Russia in the run-up to the Bolshevik Revolution. Britain's economy has given the phrase "false economy" a double meaning: the government and the private sector both cutting costs, through "austerity" and the "gig economy" respectively. These twin demons have been the result of a pathology of short-term thinking, cutting costs through an ideology that ends up costing far more to society in the long-run. Equally, the other sense of Britain's "false economy" is that the economy is running, effectively, on empty; it just hasn't become obviously apparent to everyone, as long as everyone keeps on pretending otherwise. The only visible sign of the malaise has been the retail casualties on the high street, which do feel like the first victims of this insidious "disease".
Britain's economy since the financial crisis has had the worst level of growth (i.e. the worst "recovery") of all major industrialized economies. On top of that, wages have stagnated relative to inflation, and jobs are less secure than in living memory. Nobody really has any money, while private debt has spiraled. In this way, there is nothing to hold up the British economy in the face of any national crisis. With those in power stuck in their complacency, Brexit is clearly the "crisis" that no-one in the establishment is remotely qualified to handle.
Imperial Russia's economy in the run-up to the First World War was in robust shape, at least on the surface. 1905 had been a shock, but the powers-that-be had been able to keep the economy going, and the social unrest had been effectively suppressed with the heavy hand of the Imperial secret police, the Okhrana. Thus, in spite of high levels of political violence, superficially the Russian state appeared strong. However, this masked the fact that Russia in 1914 was still a backwardly-ran country with a meagre industrial base compared to its rivals, with a highly-centralized state and enormous levels of deprivation for a "major" power. Much the same can be said of Britain even today.
The "cock-up" on Russia's part in the First World War was in having a policy of supporting a wildly-ambitious (and unruly) Serbian state, and when forced into war against Austrian aggression towards Serbia, Tsar Nicholas allowed his army to mobilize against (at the time, still technically neutral) Germany as well. In this way, Russia's muddled military strategy rapidly escalated a regional war into a continental war, leading to Russia's own eventual internal implosion.

The Bolsheviks have been called by historians as a German "bacillus", planted by the Kaiser into Russia to (successfully) knock them out of the war. The "Brexit Agenda" can be called less a grassroots movement than an "astro-turf" project, in many ways also implanted by "outside interests". In the modern, post-national age, those "interests" are corporate and disparate, faceless and yet omnipresent. In the past, such "revolutions" were the cause of mass movements; today they can be the cause of narrow, shadowy interest groups, able to manipulate events behind the scenes.
The Bolshevik Revolution was a shock to the rest of the world as Russia's highly-centralized state was seen as the last place that the Marxist menace could achieve power. In a similar manner, the way in which "Brexit" has come to transform Britain from a land of careful conservative dependability, to one consumed by irrational ideological zealotry, has blind-sided all foreign observers.
The highly-centralized and deeply-unequal nature of both Imperial Russia and the British state were one of the weak points in both powers, exploited by Bolsheviks and Brexiteers respectively. This allowed a deep well of social resentment outside the capital to fester; all that was required was for someone to find a scapegoat to channel that resentment into popular support. For the Bolsheviks the enemy was the "bourgoisie"; for the Brexiteers, it was the EU.
Equally, as stated elsewhere, the cause of the Bolsheviks and the cause of the Brexiteers was only ever, in reality, a marginal cause held by an insignificant minority. It was only a specific set of events that allowed them to come to prominence, and dominate the narrative. It was the weakness of the Russian state a hundred years ago, and the British state today, that allowed this to happen.

A "cock up" by the Tsar led to his downfall by the Bolsheviks; a "cock up" by Westminster has led to the path of its potential downfall by Brexit.