Listen, Vlad, old boy – can you cut me a deal?
PM BORIS AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER Europe is playing hardball, President Trump is AWOL and we’re forced to court paranoid Putin... an apocalyptic Brexit future brilliantly imagined
PUFFING along gilded corridors, past Kremlin Regiment ceremonial guards, Prime Minister Boris Johnson reaches President Putin’s outer office and steels himself. After a long wait, he is ushered inside Putin’s inner sanctum. ‘Tovarisch!’ Boris exclaims, forgetting the Soviet era is over. ‘Boris!’ replies his host. ‘Your name is Russian, too.’
Johnson, in Moscow to negotiate a new trade alliance, mumbles about his Turkish ancestry, forcing a smirk from President Putin. The Prime Minister explains: ‘Listen Vlad, old boy, the problem is that since Brexit – basically a peasants’ revolt almost on the scale of your Pugachev rebellion in the 18th Century – the pound has tanked against the dollar and the EU is playing hardball.’
Boris explains this means that Britain is in the market for an energy deal with the President’s friends at Gazprom. Putin can afford to be generous, thanks to a divided EU rescinding economic sanctions. But there is a small favour he needs concerning Poland…
The Russian basks in his new status as lord of all he surveys, though his ever more powerful neighbours in China are never far from his thoughts. By now, Donald Trump, buoyed by the Brexit vote and a global shift towards a type of politics that favours national interest over international co-operation, is ensconced in the White House.
This is the fictional world we could face as the consequences of Brexit reverberate for years to come. It is a world which, for the first time since the end of the 19th Century, has no dominant power thanks to the diminished influence of Britain, a fractured EU and an America that appears increasingly introspective.
Ultimately, last week’s vote could hasten the end of the West’s ability to write the rulebook, and we should fully anticipate others shaping the world we inhabit when Moscow and Beijing fill the power vacuum.
There’s little our Government will be able to do about it. Whoever becomes Prime Minister in October will be fully engaged in unravelling the complex treaties that connect us with the EU, while trying to prevent the Scots heading for the exit.
It is instructive that the response of the Brexit leaders in victory was not to announce an action plan, but to call for a pause. That’s because there is no plan. There never could be. In truth, the triumphant Leave side is an unstable alliance of libertarian free marketeers, who envisage us roving the seas in the buccaneer Britannia, and angry supporters who want our education, health and welfare systems protected from ‘leeching’ immigrants. This is like mixing oil and water.
Sooner rather than later, the new Government will have to explain to its supporters why their living standards have fallen as Britain tries to become more ‘globally competitive’ – slippery code for the erosion of wages and workers’ rights.
Meanwhile, if it is true to its word, the Brexit Government will itself boost ‘quality’ immigration from beyond the EU.
Secondary ripples are already being felt across a divided Europe. While the undistinguished leaders of the EU, Juncker, Schulz and Tusk included, try to rapidly bundle an obstreperous Britain out of the door like an angry drunk at a cocktail party, none of the problems of the continent will be addressed, notably how to deal with waves of migrants and refugees from the failed states in Africa and the Middle East. Mean- while, the EU is criss-crossed by fault lines.
Authoritarian nationalists are already in power in Hungary and Poland. Southern far-Left populists will grow more strident in their resistance to austerity dictated by severe northern cent-pinchers – especially if the far-Left alliance does well in today’s Spanish General Election. We may yet see the
implosion of Greece this summer under an avalanche of debt.
Like the UK, Belgium and Spain face the threat of nationalist secession. The disintegration of traditional parties means new actors and unstable coalitions. Further referendums on EU membership, in Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, will be hard to resist.
Without Britain, German domi- nance becomes more glaring, especially with France floundering under a hapless president who, the joke goes, makes it rain even when he visits a tropical island in the Pacific.
Both countries have major elections looming. The French presidency is likely to be captured by conservative Gaullists, though after the UK referendum, the prospects for Marine Le Pen are brighter. In Germany, the Social Democrats are cosying up to hard-Left former communists, while the conservative CDU is under threat from the raucous Alternative für Deutschland.
Italy’s government may not survive a referendum in October.
The widest repercussions will be in the areas of defence and security, however. Most have failed to notice the poor shape of Nato. Britain is one of the very few European members that meet the target of committing two per cent of their GDP to defence.
Britain was crucial, too, in imposing economic sanctions on Russia. Now an erratic Gaullist France and a neutralist Germany will compete for Moscow’s favours.
Putin already has the Greek Syriza government in his pocket, and the Italians are wobbly about sanctions because they depend on Gazprom.
Putin already acts as patron-inchief of European populists and sundry separatists. In Syria, he has subverted Western alliances in the Middle East, with every local potentate from Israel’s Netanyahu to Saudi King Salman paying homage in Moscow. The Chinese are doing much the same with their economic might in Africa and Latin America, while menacing Asian neighbours in the seas around them.
THUS the stage is set for a tsunami that could wipe away the world as we know it. Since 1945, we have lived under international institutions and legal norms the West established. But Brexit has undermined its European pillar. Brexit endangers Britain’s global influence, too. There have been warnings we might lose our permanent seat at the UN Security Council. And whatever reassuring noises Washington makes for now, it is regarded there as a strategic disaster.
The next Government face a cold reality that flies in the face of their rhetoric of ‘taking back control’.
They will find that none of the consequences of globalisation that so galvanised their supporters will suddenly disappear thanks to Brexit. Nor will they have a magic money pot to disburse to globalisation’s angry British victims. Buyer’s remorse can be a very vicious thing.