A shambles, inside a fiasco
Seven summers ago, a study into the state of democracy in Britain warned that it was in “long-term terminal decline” due to corporate power, unrepresentative politicians and apathetic voters. And that was before Brexit. Before 10 Downing Street was home to the feckless David Cameron. Or the hapless Theresa May. Or the preposterous Boris Johnson.
Before the Mother of Parliaments was turned into a shambolic laughing stock worthy of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. All we can say is, God save the Queen and all her subjects. Let’s recap: In 2016, David Cameron risked Britain’s membership in the European Union on what amounted to a coin toss — a referendum he had promised years earlier to let voters decide whether Britain should leave or remain in the EU. Cameron resigned when his “remain” side lost. He was succeeded by May, whose fatal miscalculation was to call an election hoping to strengthen her hand, only to be badly reduced.
To her credit, May negotiated a departure agreement with the EU, which then was overwhelmingly rejected by MPs. And she, too, was soon rejected by her Conservative party.
May was succeeded by Johnson, the former London mayor whose political calling card is arrogance and buffoonery.
Like Donald Trump, Johnson is a son of privilege somehow masquerading as the voice of the common man.
His attempt at political hardball — not a wise play — was to suspend Parliament for five weeks in order to deliver Brexit by the Oct. 31 deadline (Halloween, no less), with or without an exit deal in place. As a result, bloody hell broke loose. On Tuesday, opposition and rebel Tory MPs seized control of the Brexit process from Johnson.
They scuppered his plan to leave the EU without an agreement, then thwarted his wish for a snap election to decide the issue.
It might still be possible for Johnson to call an election this fall once a bill preventing a no-deal Brexit is passed by the House of Lords.
“What he doesn’t want is an election down the road when we’re all eating barbecued rat,” Baroness Rosalind Scott, a member of the Lords, explained sweetly.
The only consolation in all this, perhaps, is that some Conservative MPs mustered the fortitude to put Parliament and country ahead of the prime minister. Speaker John Bercow has deservedly become a global celebrity. And such British epithets as “chlorinated chicken” and “great big girl’s blouse” have pleased fans of the parliamentary joust.
In all, though, the mud-wrestling over Brexit has outdone any divorce proceeding for acrimony, bitterness and duplicity. These days, Westminster is less likely to conjure up images of Disraeli and Churchill than it is Jerry Springer.
Even those who voted to leave the EU surely didn’t imagine it would be done in so destructive a manner, or that the vote might have been tainted in the same fashion as that which elected Trump.
In February of this year, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the British House of Commons found “strong evidence pointing to hostile state actors influencing democratic processes” such as the Brexit vote in 2016.
“Kremlin-aligned media published significant numbers of unique articles about the EU referendum,” it said. “The articles that went most viral had the heaviest anti-EU bias.”
Many Britons — in a United Kingdom that isn’t all that united, with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Londoners voting against Brexit — now believe they were misled, lied to and manipulated.
All things considered, it may be that 2016 is as historic a year as 1917 in Russian history, the year that country tossed cyberspanners in the works of the world’s two great democracies.
It seems a chap called Peter Wilding, author and founder of a British think-tank, is responsible for coining the term “Brexit” back in 2012 to describe the United Kingdom’s proposed withdrawal from the European Union.
It was all supposed to be so simple, the most amicable of splits, the British freed from the domineering and regulatory absurdities of the EU, to say nothing of the waves of foreigners flooding its green and pleasant land.
Unfettered, Britain would be free to regain its former glory. Sort of a, Make the Empire Great Again, you might say.
“The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want,” Michael Gove, who would later become environment minister, once boasted.
The political graveyards are littered, alas, with those for whom grand promises and poor execution was the epitaph.
In time, that excellent wordsmith Wilding came to rue his coinage.
He called Brexit a “sad” word — one that has surely caused vast millions of migraines and created a political gong-show so egregious that Der Spiegel online recently referred to Britain as the “Isle of Madness.”
What the brilliant old English satirist Evelyn Waugh would have made of it all we are only left to guess.
Like Donald Trump, Johnson is a son of privilege somehow masquerading as the voice of the common man