{"id":96481,"date":"2017-08-07T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-08-07T11:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=96481"},"modified":"2017-08-06T12:18:43","modified_gmt":"2017-08-06T11:18:43","slug":"britain-the-end-of-a-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/08\/britain-the-end-of-a-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain: The End of a Fantasy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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British Prime Minister Theresa May on her way to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen\u2019s permission to form a minority government, London, June 9, 2017.
Toby Melville\/TPX\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

10 Jun 2017 – <\/em>To understand the sensational outcome of the British election, one must ask a basic question. What happens when phony populism collides with the real thing?<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s triumph for Brexit has often been paired with the rise of Donald Trump as evidence of a populist surge. But most of those joining in with the ecstasies of English nationalist self-assertion were imposters. Brexit is an elite project dressed up in rough attire. When its Oxbridge-educated champions coined the appealing slogan \u201cTake back control,\u201d they cleverly neglected to add that they really meant control by and for the elite. The problem is that, as the elections showed, too many voters thought the control should belong to themselves.<\/p>\n

Theresa May is a classic phony Brexiter. She didn\u2019t support it in last year\u2019s referendum and there is no reason to think that, in private, she has ever changed her mind. But she saw that the path to power led toward the cliff edge, from which Britain will take its leap into an unknown future entirely outside the European Union. Her strategy was one of appeasement\u2014of the nationalist zealots in her own party, of the voters who had backed the hard-right UK Independence Party (UKIP), and of the hysterically jingoistic Tory press, especially The Daily Mail<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The actual result of the referendum last year was narrow and ambiguous. Fifty-two percent of voters backed Brexit but we know that many of them did so because they were reassured by Boris Johnson\u2019s promise that, when it came to Europe, Britain could \u201chave its cake and eat it.\u201d It could both leave the EU and continue to enjoy all the benefits of membership. Britons could still trade freely with the EU and would be free to live, work, and study in any EU country just as before. This is, of course, a childish fantasy, and it is unlikely that Johnson himself really believed a word of it. It was just part of the game, a smart line that might win a debate at the Oxford Union.<\/p>\n

But what do you do when your crowd-pleasing applause lines have to become public policy? The twenty-seven remaining member states of the EU have to try to extract a rational outcome from an essentially irrational process. They have to ask the simple question: What do you Brits actually want? And the answer is that the Brits want what they can\u2019t possibly have. They want everything to change and everything to go as before. They want an end to immigration\u2014except for all the immigrants they need to run their economy and health service. They want it to be 1900, when Britain was a superpower and didn\u2019t have to make messy compromises with foreigners.<\/p>\n

To take power, May had to pretend that she, too, dreams these impossible dreams. And that led her to embrace a phony populism in which the narrow and ambiguous majority who voted for Brexit under false pretences are to be reimagined as \u201cthe people.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not conservatism\u2014it is pure Rousseau. The popular will had been established on that sacred referendum day. And it must not be defied or questioned. Hence, Theresa May\u2019s allies in The Daily Mail<\/em> using the language of the French revolutionary terror, characterizing recalcitrant judges and parliamentarians as \u201cenemies of the people\u201d and \u201csaboteurs.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is why May called an election. Her decision to do so\u2014when she had a working majority in parliament\u2014has been seen by some as pure vanity. But it was the inevitable result of the volkish<\/em> rhetoric she had adopted. A working majority was not enough\u2014the unified people must have a unified parliament and a single, uncontested leader: one people, one parliament, one Queen Theresa to stand on the cliffs of Dover and shake her spear of sovereignty at the damn continentals.<\/p>\n

And the funny thing is that this seemed possible. As recently as late April, with the Labour Party in disarray and its leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn deemed unelectable, the polls were putting the Tories twenty points ahead and telling May that her coronation was inevitable. All she had to do was repeat the words \u201cstrong and stable\u201d over and over and Labour would be crushed forever. The opposition would be reduced to a token smattering of old socialist cranks and self-evidently traitorous Scots. Britain would become in effect a one-party Tory state. An overawed Europe would bow before this display of British staunchness and concede a Brexit deal in which supplies of cake would be infinitely renewed.<\/p>\n

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Jeremy Corbyn, London, June 9, 2017. Daniel Leal-Olivas\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

There were three problems. Firstly, May demanded her enormous majority so that she could ride out into the Brexit battle without having to worry about mutterings in the ranks behind her. But she has no clue what the battle is supposed to be for. Because May doesn\u2019t actually believe in Brexit, she\u2019s improvising a way forward very roughly sketched out by other people. She\u2019s a terrible actor mouthing a script in which there is no plot and no credible ending that is not an anti-climax. Brexit is a back-of-the-envelope proposition. Strip away the post-imperial make-believe and the Little England nostalgia, and there\u2019s almost nothing there, no clear sense of how a middling European country with little native industry can hope to thrive by cutting itself off from its biggest trading partner and most important political alliance.<\/p>\n

May demanded a mandate to negotiate\u2014but negotiate what exactly? She literally could not say. All she could articulate were two slogans: \u201cBrexit means Brexit\u201d and \u201cNo deal is better than a bad deal.\u201d The first collapses ideology into tautology. The second is a patent absurdity: with \u201cno deal\u201d there is no trade, the planes won\u2019t fly and all the supply chains snap. To win an election, you need a convincing narrative but May herself doesn\u2019t know what the Brexit story is.<\/p>\n

Secondly, if you\u2019re going to try the uno duce, una voce<\/em> trick, you need a charismatic leader with a strong voice. The Tories tried to build a personality cult around a woman who doesn\u2019t have much of a personality. May is a common or garden Home Counties conservative politician. Her stock in trade is prudence, caution, and stubbornness. The vicar\u2019s daughter was woefully miscast as the Robespierre of the Brexit revolution, the embodiment of the British popular will sending saboteurs to the guillotine. She is awkward, wooden, and, as it turned out, prone to panic and indecision under pressure.<\/p>\n

But to be fair to May, her wavering embodied a much deeper set of contradictions. Those words she repeated so robotically, \u201cstrong and stable,\u201d would ring just as hollow in the mouth of any other Conservative politician. This is a party that has plunged its country into an existential crisis because it was too weak to stand up to a minority of nationalist zealots and tabloid press barons. It is as strong as a jellyfish and as stable as a flea.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, the idea of a single British people united by the Brexit vote is ludicrous. Not only do Scotland, Northern Ireland, and London have large anti-Brexit majorities, but many of those who did vote for Brexit are deeply unhappy about the effects of the Conservative government\u2019s austerity policies on healthcare, education, and other public services. (One of these services is policing, and May\u2019s direct responsibility for a reduction in police numbers neutralized any potential swing toward the Conservatives as a result of the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London.)<\/p>\n

This unrest found a voice in Corbyn\u2019s unabashedly left-wing Labour manifesto, with its clear promises to end austerity and fund better public services by taxing corporations and the very wealthy. May\u2019s appeal to \u201cthe people\u201d as a mystic entity came up against Corbyn\u2019s appeal to real people in their daily lives, longing not for a date with national destiny but for a good school, a functioning National Health Service, and decent public transport. Phony populism came up against a more genuine brand of anti-establishment radicalism that convinced the young and the marginalized that they had something to come out and vote for.<\/p>\n

In electoral terms, of course, the two forces have pretty much canceled each other out. May will form a government with the support of the Protestant fundamentalist Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland. That government will be weak and unstable and it will have no real authority to negotiate a potentially momentous agreement with the European Union. Brexit is thus far from being a done deal: it can\u2019t be done without a reliable partner for the EU to negotiate with. There isn\u2019t one now and there may not be one for quite some time\u2014at least until after another election, but quite probably not even then. The reliance on a spurious notion of the \u201cpopular will\u201d has left Britain with no clear notion of who \u201cthe people\u201d are and what they really want.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

Fintan O\u2019Toole is a columnist with <\/em>The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. His book on George Bernard Shaw, <\/em>Judging Shaw, will be published in Fall 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nybooks.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

10 Jun 2017 – To understand the sensational outcome of the British election, one must ask a basic question. What happens when phony populism collides with the real thing? … The reliance on a spurious notion of the \u201cpopular will\u201d has left Britain with no clear notion of who \u201cthe people\u201d are and what they really want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}