Charles Flanagan was the Irish foreign minister at the time of the 2016 Brexit referendum. He reacted to the referendum result with commendable speed and thoroughness. Flanagan briefed his counterparts in all the 26 remaining EU states about Ireland’s concerns. In particular, he argued for keeping the border open between the two parts of the island — Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland — and preserving the former’s position as a full member of the EU Single Market. This laid the foundation for the consistent support Ireland has had for its position from all the EU institutions.

Ditching the Northern Ireland Protocol is unConservative and May Break the UK

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If Flanagan emerges with credit, Keir Starmer does not. In her final days as prime minister, Theresa May tried to assemble a majority in the House of Commons for a deal that would have kept the entire UK in the EU Customs Union. This would have mitigated or removed the need for customs posts either at ports or land borders. To push this deal through, May needed the support of the opposition Labour Party. Collins observes that “Corbyn was relatively open to the deal, but Starmer, who was in theory strongly pro-EU, raised obstacles at every turn.”

This deal represented the last chance of a soft Brexit. For Starmer, defeating the Tories took a higher priority than preserving good international relations with the EU and Ireland. This episode does not bolster confidence in the potential Labour government in Westminster.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A Book on Brexit Shakes Confidence in the Labour Party appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Hurd has had a distinguished career, which included not only holding the office of the foreign secretary but also of the secretary of state for Northern Ireland. He is an excellent writer who combines historical analysis with vivid sketches of political personalities.

Published in 2009, this book shows how the life experiences and assumptions of successive foreign secretaries influence the content and outcome of diplomatic policies. There is a tension , throughout this long period, between two views of how Britain should conduct itself in its relations with its European neighbors.

The Two Views of Europe

One view was that the UK should seek to create, and participate in a structure of consultation which would help preserve peace in Europe. The best exponent of this approach was an Irishman, originally a member of parliament in the Irish parliament. In 1800, the Acts of Union united the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland (previously in personal union) to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Lord Castlereagh who had begun his political career in Ireland now moved to London, rose to be foreign secretary and helped to ensure that a defeated France was not humiliated in 1815. Arguably his work in the Congress of Vienna and afterwards helped preserve relative peace in Europe until 1914.

While Castlereagh believed in engagement, Lord Palmerston took the view that the UK should be somewhat more isolationist, intervening only to promote liberal causes while avoiding entanglements in Europe. Castlereagh had his supporters and so did Palmerston and, between the two of them, they set the two poles of British foreign policy when it came to Europe.

Forgotten Figures

Hurd shines the light on some figures that are forgotten today or do not get their deserved attention. He highlights the role of Ernest Bevin in helping found NATO, and thereby committing the US to the defense of Europe. Bevin’s efforts are very relevant to events today, and to maintaining the peace in Europe for the last 70 years.

Another figure who gets deserved recognition in Hurd’s book is Austen Chamberlain, the author of the Locarno Pact which reintegrated Germany into Europe and established good relations with its neighbors. This could have kept peace in Europe but for the economic crash and the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Unlike his half brother, Neville, Austen warned of the danger of Hitler before any other British leader, including Winston Churchill.

Decline of Empire and Changing Role of Foreign Secretary

The relative economic power of Britain peaked around 1870 after which it began to decline slowly. But the fact that so many parts of the world were still colored pink on the map as part of the British Empire led some statesmen to overestimate British power and the power of the foreign secretary.

In the earlier periods, the foreign secretary was in-charge of foreign policy. The prime minister supervised the foreign secretary mildly. Today, the prime minister plays a much more central role in foreign policy. Still, personalities matter and the best example of this phenomenon is Anthony Eden. Under Churchill, Eden was a good and methodical foreign secretary. He turned out to be a bad prime minister because he had no strong foreign secretary to restrain him over Suez in 1956.

If the UK overreached in 1956, it is in danger of withdrawing into its shell in 2021. The country is isolating itself in a dangerous way. The UK is conversing with itself, rather than conversing with its neighbors. None of the statesmen chronicled in Hurd’s book would have let that happen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post How Britain Has Seen Its Place in the World from 1815 to 1955 appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Far Right and the Politics of Feeling

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Rishi Sunak holds the economic future of the country in his hands through his control of the Treasury as chancellor of the exchequer. Kwasi Kwarteng is Sunak’s deputy, as secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy. Sajid Javid is in charge of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Facing them across the House of Commons sits David Lammy, �������dzܰ�’s shadow foreign secretary. Rosena Allin-Khan is �������dzܰ�’s minister of mental health, and the woman charged with getting her party from the opposition into government is Shabana Mahmood, �������dzܰ�’s national campaign coordinator.

Minority Representation

These men and women have little in common politically. Some are passionate capitalists, others fervent socialists. But all are members of Britain’s ethnic minorities. Some have family backgrounds in the Indian subcontinent. Others — an admittedly smaller number — can trace their roots to Africa. It is a little commented-upon fact that in Britain today, ethnic minorities are almost numerically represented in Parliament. Some 14% of the British population has an ethnic minority background, and 10% of MPs at the last general election in 2019 are black or Asian.

The key point is not simply the numbers, but rather that they are as likely to be found on in the governing Conservative Party as they are in the opposition Labour Party. Back in 1987, the situation was very different. Four ethnic minority MPs were elected that year: Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz. All were Labour members.

As the House of Commons Library , “Their number has increased at each general election since then — most notably from 2010 onwards … But if the ethnic make-up of the House of Commons reflected that of the UK population, there would be about 93 Members from ethnic minority backgrounds … Of the 65 ethnic minority Members, 41 (63%) are Labour and 22 are Conservatives (34%). There are two Liberal Democrat MPs from an ethnic minority background.” These MPs have not languished in obscurity. They have been promoted to the highest political offices of the land, by both major political parties.

The policies they would pursue could hardly be more different. Priti Patel has been roundly criticized by Labour for her virulent hostility to unrestricted migration and her determination to crack down on smuggling refugees over the English Channel from France. Her plans for “pushbacks” using the navy to deter migrants have been as “inhumane, unconscionable and extremely reckless.”

Patel’s background — her family came to Britain in the 1960s before dictator Idi Amin’s mass expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 — appears to have had little influence on her opinions or policies. Little wonder that she is a of the Conservative right and a potential successor to Boris Johnson as prime minister.

Zero Tolerance

The significance of the rise of Britain’s ethnic minorities through the ranks is that neither of the two main parties that dominate the country’s politics can any longer tolerate the kind of overt racism that was once a regular part of British culture. Patel and Allin-Khan may be poles apart politically, but neither would accept policies of the kind that once were espoused by the likes of the Enoch Powell.

His notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech from 1968, in which he warned against the impact not just of immigration but also of a bill before Parliament designed to fight racism, was widely welcomed. The Conservative right hailed him as a champion, and Labour-supporting London dockers marched to Parliament to show their support.

Does this imply that racism in Britain is a thing of the past? Emphatically not. But given Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, it means that only fringe parties, with little chance of winning seats in Parliament, are likely to take up the issue.

Overt racism is still nurtured by a section of British society. The Brexit referendum in 2016 brought out the worst in some communities. The attacks on Poles were particularly disgraceful, given the bravery of their , over 8,000 of whom fought in the critical Battle of Britain over the skies of England during World War II. No fewer than five neo-Nazi groups are banned in the UK, with Patel “evil white supremacist groups, who target vulnerable people across the world.” A third of all uncovered in Britain emanate from the far right.

None of this should be ignored. It is not inconceivable that overtly racist politics will rear its head once more in Britain, but neither the Conservative Party nor Labour is likely to support it. Only in extreme circumstances are they likely to flourish. As such, it may be that British politics can today be considered post-racial.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Has Britain Achieved a Post-Racial Politics? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Polexit: Is Poland on the Way Out of the EU?

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Freedom of movement in Europe was always something I took for granted. I saw Europe as part of our heritage, despite the grumblings of euroskeptics and sly articles in the British press about the perils of straight  and the metric system. 

I traveled a lot in my youth, but travel was never really the issue. Citizens of many countries from outside the EU can stay in the Schengen zone for up to 90 days without a visa. It wasn’t until 2009 that the  of being an EU citizen became obvious to me. 

Free to Work and Study in Europe 

I signed up for a master’s degree in Brussels, Belgium. The beauty of this was, as an EU citizen, the entire degree cost me only €500 ($560). It was taught in English and full of students from all over the world.

There was no paperwork to deal with, no need to prove income, no need to apply for any student visas. Education in Belgium was as open to me as education in my country of origin. And that would have been the same for education in any country in the EU. 

I stayed in Belgium for two years. During that time, I could work freely without any authorization. I taught English at the European Parliament. I also did a number of freelance jobs on the side. But I could have worked anywhere, from behind a bar, to the top levels of the European institutions. 

As an EU citizen, I had the right to live and work in Belgium, just as I did with any other country in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). No sponsorship needed, no work visa, no permission of any kind. 

I often traveled back and forth between London and Brussels. The Eurostar was, and still is, the best mode of transport. It takes you directly from the center of one capital into the center of the other. With an EU passport, going through immigration was quick and simple. In contrast, passport holders from outside the EU had to wait in a separate queue, all herded together. 

I didn’t use my EU freedom of movement rights again for 10 years. But that would be for the final time, as a big change was coming. 

The Vote That Changed Everything

In 2016, a majority of British voters decided the UK should leave the European Union. Millions of British citizens would soon lose their EU rights. People with Irish or other European relatives were desperately applying for second passports.

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The next few years were chaotic, full of political turmoil and tribalism. The Brexit referendum had the country down the middle, and things would never be the same again.

After the vote, there was a rapidly closing window of opportunity to move to the EU. I knew that was the only option for me. So, in the early weeks of 2020, I moved to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Time was running out by then, with the Brexit transition period in full swing. Within months, UK citizens would be officially relegated to third-country national status. 

There was no time to waste in securing  in Portugal. As an EU citizen, it was easy. I landed in Lisbon, took my passport and showed up at the nearest municipal office. Thirty minutes and €15 later, I had a five-year temporary residency document for Portugal. 

Portugal’s timeline is five years. All being well, that document will allow me to regain my EU rights sometime in 2025, this time as a proud citizen of Portugal — the country I chose.  

The EU project is far from perfect. Like any large-scale collaboration of humans, it’s fraught with issues. Yes, there’s corruption. Yes, there’s waste and inefficiency. Despite that, the EU is an ambitious project that emerged out of the devastation of the Second World War. The resulting economic cooperation has kept Europe peaceful ever since. In that sense, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Citizen of Another Somewhere

I don’t like nationalism. It’s too easily misused. And I can’t be proud of something that I didn’t achieve: the coincidence of being born on a certain piece of land. Does that mindset make me a “citizen of nowhere”? If so, that’s good. Thanks for the , Theresa. 

As the late John le Carre once said, “If you want to make me a citizen of nowhere, I will become a citizen of another somewhere.” An Englishman all his life, le Carre an Irish citizen, so disappointed was he at the fallout from Brexit. He was fortunate to have that Irish heritage. Not everyone does. And those that don’t have become second-class citizens in Europe.

National pride is artificially constructed to hold the nation-state together. It plays on our natural inclinations toward tribalism, which is merely an evolutionary hangover. Benedict Anderson’s classic book, “Imagined Communities,” explains these ideas better than I ever could.

Perhaps the EU is an “imagined community” too. But countries working together, no matter how flawed the process, is the only route we have to improving the world. It’s a project I’m determined to be part of. And if I can’t do so as a British citizen, then I’ll happily do so as a Portuguese. 

*[Samantha North is the founder of , an EU citizenship consultancy.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Value of EU Citizenship in a Post-Brexit World appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This distrust arose because the of the Ireland and Northern Ireland Protocol of the withdrawal agreement — the treaty that took the UK out of the EU — had been unilaterally by the British government. If a party to an international agreement takes it upon itself to unilaterally alter a deal, the whole basis of international agreements with that party disappears.

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The matters in dispute between the UK and the EU — the protocol and COVID-19 vaccines — remain unresolved. The European Union is taking the United Kingdom to over the protocol, but the court is unlikely to decide anything before the new deadline of April 30.

In the normal course of events, the TCA between the UK and the EU would be discussed in the relevant committee of the European Parliament, before coming to the plenary session of Parliament for ratification. The next meeting of the Committee on International Trade is due to take place on April 14-15, and the agenda for the meeting has been published. It includes a discussion on the enforcement of trade agreements, the general system of preferences and, significantly, trade-related aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It makes no mention of the TCA with the UK.

Trade-related aspects of the pandemic will inevitably include a discussion on vaccine protectionism, which is a highly contentious issue between the EU and the UK that has poisoned relations and led to bitter commentary in the media. The fact that the committee has not included a discussion of the TCA with the UK on its agenda for what may well be the only meeting it will have before the April deadline is potentially very significant.

Ratifying the Trade Deal

The TCA is a 1,246-page , and its contents, if ratified, will take precedence over EU law. To ratify such an agreement without proper scrutiny in the relevant committees could be seen as a dereliction of the European Parliament’s responsibility of scrutiny. We should not forget the scrutiny that was applied to the much more modest EU trade with Canada. The same goes for the with Mercosur states (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay).

Furthermore, the TCA would, if ratified, set up a network of committees to oversee its implementation. These will meet in private and their work will diminish the ongoing oversight by the European Parliament of a host of issues affecting all 27 EU member states. The TCA also contains a system of dispute-resolution mechanisms that will quickly be overwhelmed by work. The TCA has many items of unfinished business, on which the European Parliament will want to express a view. It is hard to see how any of this can be done before the end of April.

The UK government led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson has adopted a deliberately confrontational style in its negotiations with the European Union. The more rows there are, the happier the support base that Johnson is seeking to rally for his Conservative Party. Johnson’s European strategy has always been about electoral politics, not economic performance. This has led to almost complete confusion between the British government and the EU.

If the European Parliament ratifies the TCA without there having been seen to be a satisfactory outcome to the EU-UK negotiations about the Ireland and Northern Ireland Protocol and over the export of vaccines, it will be a political setback for Parliament and a source of immense satisfaction for Johnson.

Yet one should never underestimate the role emotion can play in politics. The entire Brexit saga is a story of repeated triumphs of emotion over reason — and the European Parliament is not immune to this ailment. Boris Johnson could be pushing his luck a bit far this time.

*[A version of this article was posted on John Bruton’s .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Risk of a No-Deal Brexit Remains appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Brexit Deal Presents Opportunities for a New Partnership

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After five years of radical uncertainty, it has become clear that the European Union and the United Kingdom will be taking separate paths on financial regulations — a financial “decoupling” that means a significant loss of business for the City. Whether the EU financial sector can gain much of what London loses will depend on the EU’s willingness to embrace further financial market integration.

Smart Sequencing Ensured an Orderly Brexit

As with the Y2K problem, the Brexit transition could have gone worse. It took more than luck to avoid financial instability along the way.

First, financial firms on both sides of the English Channel (and of the Irish Sea) worked hard and were able to preempt most of the operational challenges.

Second, despite all the recurring high-stakes drama between the UK government and the European Commission, the technical cooperation between the authorities actually in charge of financial stability, primarily the Bank of England and the European Central Bank (ECB), appears to have run smoothly.

Third, the negotiators phased the process in a smart way. The Brexit Withdrawal Agreement of January 2020 helped reduce uncertainty by ensuring that the UK government would meet its financial obligations to the EU, avoiding what would have been akin to selective default. That agreement kept the United Kingdom in the single market during the transition period beyond the country’s formal exit from the European Union on January 31, 2020. It also set a late-June deadline for the British government to extend the transition period beyond December 31, 2020. As London decided not to do so, that left six months of effective preparation.

To be sure, whether an EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) would be concluded remained unknown until late December. But that mattered comparatively little for financial services, since trade agreements typically do not cover them much. By one , the 1,259-page TCA (which is still  by the European Union) contains only six pages relevant for the financial sector.

The resulting legal environment for financial services between the European Union and the United Kingdom is unlikely to change much any time soon. Contrary to  in the United Kingdom, no bilateral negotiations on financial services are going on, except for a  of understanding expected this month that is not expected to bind the parties on substance.

From the EU perspective, the United Kingdom is now a “third country,” in other words an offshore financial center, following decades of onshore status. UK-registered financial firms have lost the right, or “passport,” to offer their services seamlessly anywhere in the EU single market. From a regulatory standpoint, they have no better access to that market than their peers in other third nations such as Japan, Singapore or the United States.

Equivalence Status for UK Financial Market Segments

Some segments of the financial sector in these other third countries actually have better single market access than British ones, because they are covered by a category in EU law allowing direct service provision by firms under a regulatory framework deemed “equivalent” to that in the European Union. The equivalence decision is at the European Commission’s discretion, even though it is based on a technical assessment. As a privilege and not a right, equivalence can be revoked on short notice.

So far, the European Commission has not granted the UK any such segment-specific equivalence, except in a time-limited manner for securities  until mid-2021 and clearing  until mid-2022. For the moment, the commission appears to be leaning  making the latter permanent. In most other market segments, the commission will not likely grant equivalence to the United Kingdom in the foreseeable future. This may appear inconsistent with the fact that almost all current UK regulations stem from the existing EU of law. But the UK authorities ( the Bank of England) have declined to commit to keeping that alignment intact.

The commission’s inclination to reduce EU dependence on the City of London is understandable. No comparable dependence on an offshore financial center has existed anywhere in recent financial history. Such dependence entails financial stability risk. In a crisis, UK authorities would not necessarily respond in a way that preserves vital EU interests. Think of the Icelandic crisis of 2008, when Reykjavik protected the failing banks’ domestic depositors but not  ones. It is hardly absurd for the European Union to try to reduce such a risk, even if — as appears to happen with  — some of the activity migrates from the United Kingdom to the United States or other third countries as a consequence, and not to the European Union.

At the same time, the  that keeping EU liquidity pooled in London is more efficient than any alternative is unpersuasive given the European Union’s own vast size. In addition, the European Commission also follows mercantilist impulses to lure activity away from London, even though these generally do not make economic sense. Added up, these factors provide little incentive for the commission to grant equivalence status to more UK financial market segments, unless some other high-level political motives come into play. None are apparent  now.

The UK Is Unlikely to Regain Lost Advantage

How the European Union and the United Kingdom will decouple will not be uniform across all parts of the financial system. Regulatory competition between them may become a “race to the bottom” or “to the top,” depending on market segments and the circumstances of the moment, without a uniform pattern. In any case, such labels are more a matter of judgment in financial regulation than in, say, tax competition.

In some areas, the European Union will be laxer, while in others, it will be the United Kingdom, as is presently the case between the EU and the US. For example, the European Union is more demanding than the United States on curbing bankers’  but easier when it comes to enforcing securities laws or setting capital  for banks. At least some forthcoming UK financial regulatory decisions may be aimed at keeping or attracting financial institutions in London, but they are still not likely to offset the loss of passport to the EU single market.

All these permutations suggest that the medium-term outlook for the City of London is unpromising, although the COVID-19 situation makes all quantitative observations more difficult to interpret. Once an onshore financial center for the entire EU single market, and a competitive offshore center for the rest of the world, the City has been reduced to an onshore center for the United Kingdom only and has become offshore for the European Union. That implies a different, in all likelihood less powerful, set of synergies across the City of London’s financial activities.

The few relevant quantitative data points available reinforce this bleak view. Job offerings in British finance, as tracked by consultancy Morgan McKinley, have  alarmingly since the 2016 Brexit referendum. The ECB (as bank supervisor) and national securities regulators coordinated by the European Securities and Markets Authority are tightening  for key personnel to reside mainly on EU territory rather than in the United Kingdom.

As by Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper, many financial firms’ Brexit policy until this year had been to “sit tight and do nothing until post-Brexit arrangements for finance forced [their] hand.” That phase has ended. Firms that drag their feet face regulatory disruption, as happened to broker  in late January. Tussles between regulators and regulated entities, rather than between the European Commission and the UK government, are where most of the financial-sector Brexit action is likely to be in 2021. These disputes typically happen behind closed doors, and the regulators typically hold most of the cards.

For all the optimistic in London of “Big Bang 2.0 or whatever,” the United Kingdom’s comparative advantage as the best location for financial business in the European time zone is unlikely to recover to its pre-Brexit level. The macroeconomic losses could be moderated or offset by cheaper currency and less expensive real estate in London, making the city a more attractive place to do nonfinancial business. Even so, a gap will likely remain for the UK government, which has for years depended heavily on financial sector– tax revenue.

The European Union stands to gain financial activity as a consequence of Brexit. How much and where is not clear yet. As some analysts had , Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Paris are the leaders for the relocation of international (non-EU) firms. Dublin and Luxembourg  in asset management, Frankfurt in investment banking and Amsterdam in trading. But EU success in terms of financial services competitiveness and stability will depend on further market integration, the pace of which remains hard to predict.

The European banking union is still only half-built because it lacks a consistent framework for bank crisis and deposit insurance. The grand EU rhetoric on “capital markets union” has yielded little actual reform since its  in 2014. Events like the still-unfolding  saga may force additional steps toward market integration, even though a proactive approach would be preferable.

The one near certainty is that London’s position in the European financial sector will be less than it used to be.

*[This article was originally published by  and the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A New European Financial Landscape Is Emerging appeared first on 51�Թ�.

As the second most important political entity of the British union, Scotland sees its quest for independence as symmetrical with Britain’s withdrawal from Europe. The Scots have long felt as oppressed by the English as the Brexiters felt oppressed by Brussels. Moreover, Scotland has traditionally felt a strong kinship with Europe. It once took the form of the , established in 1295 by France’s Philippe IV, as both nations opposed England. The idea of the alliance resurfaced in the troubled period after , the last of the Stuart kings of England, was forced to flee to France following the 1688 Glorious Revolution.

More recently, following the hesitating but finally successful integration of Great Britain into the EU in 1975, Scotland reveled in its European status. In June 2016, the Brexit referendum that then-Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to hold shocked the world by producing a victory for the “leave” camp. Scotland, however, unambiguously favored remaining in the European Union by a score of 62% to 38%. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, immediately saw a reason to hold a second referendum for Scottish secession from the UK, an initiative that had been attempted but in 2014. Today, the polls indicate a clear majority of Scots will vote for independence. This time around it will be justified by the UK’s effective withdrawal from Europe. Scotland feels a deeper loyalty and kinship to Europe than to England.

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The Scots are nevertheless divided. Breaking with England would revert to a situation that hasn’t existed since 1707, the year the Treaty of Union was signed. Creating a border between Scotland and England in the 21^st century will likely be more of a challenge than the knotty quandary still facing Northern Ireland concerning the unsettled question of a border that may need to be enforced with the Republic of Ireland, which is still part of the EU. The may have presciently anticipated the question of Scottish independence when he ordered the construction of his famous wall in 122 AD.

As disappointment with Brexit increases and polling shows the Scots as likely to show the same alacrity to exit their union as the Brexiters did with regard to the European one, the minority of Scottish “remainers,” known as unionists, are beginning to worry. To understand the nature of their panic,Al Jazeera one unionist, Sheena Francovich, a retiree from Argyllshire on Scotland’s west coast: “As far as I’m concerned, we had a vote [in 2014] and we voted to stay part of the UK and that’s end of story. Nobody has ever convinced me that [independence] would make any economic sense. If there was another vote and people did vote [Yes] it would be a sad, sad day.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Economic sense:

The idea that better economic conditions will result from a choice the person speaking has already made, despite having no access to the full range of factors that determine economic success or failure.

Contextual Note

Brexit has been officially in place for a month and a half. One commentator the gap that has become evident between the promises Prime Minister Boris Johnson made five years ago and the reality of what is turning into a new winter of discontent: “During the 2016 Brexit campaign, proponents promised businesses that leaving Europe would mean liberation from suffocating regulations and infernal bureaucracy that supposedly prevailed across the Channel. It was all a lie. Post-Brexit, British companies that trade with the EU now deal with expensive disruptions to their businesses, and watch as their export profits plunge.”

Boris Johnson and his cohorts cannot complain that it’s all because they haven’t had enough time to prepare. The Europeans were ready to allow the UK more time, but it wasBoris who that it was crucial to “get Brexit done.” The long-term consequences of Brexit, including the eventual dismantling of the United Kingdom, are unknown. But the short-term consequences have given an idea of the scope of the material and economic damage. It will take longer to assess the psychological and cultural damage. 

This will, of course, be compounded by the incalculable effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, not just on the economy, but on the entire youth of the nation. This is occurring at a curious moment of history, marked in recent decades by the vaunted interdependence associated with the idea of globalization. The edifice has begun to shatter, with nothing stable in view to replace it. Sheena Francovich may be right to say that any nation’s independence makes no “economic sense” — but neither does dependence.

On Sunday, for the first time, pro-independence parties have in Catalonia’s regional parliament, putting pressure on Spain to take into account a powerful centrifugal force that has been building for some time. The Catalans are already the drama unfolding in Scotland, hoping the much clearer case for Scottish independence prevails. Fragmentation as a reaction to decades of forced globalization may become a dominant trend of the 21^st century.

It doesn’t even stop there. The world has entered into a new era of uncertainty concerning the way people imagine their future. This has always been the biggest intangible factor of stability for any society. Political and cultural disarray has become the norm throughout the West and across much of the globe, including another “united” nation, the USA. The events of January 6 in Washington, DC, may portend the disunifying of the entity celebrated as “,” a scenario difficult to imagine. There are nevertheless telltale signs of serious cracks in the national narrative that, unlike the in Philadelphia, famous for its crack, offer no reassurance about a tranquil future.

Historical Note

The UK became united only slowly and in a largely haphazard way. When Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, died in 1603 leaving no successor to perpetuate the Tudor line, the rules of monarchy required seeking a new king among her cousins, the Stuarts. The nearest of kin was the reigning king of Scotland, James VI, son of Mary Stuart, Mary Queen of Scots, who was martyred by her cousin Elizabeth for remaining loyal to the Catholic faith. Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, to seal his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, had assumed the equivalent of papal authority over the newly created Anglican Church. 

The accession of the king of Scotland, who now became James I of England, established the Stuart family as future heirs to the throne. All did not go well. James’s son, Charles I, was dethroned and decapitated by Oliver Cromwell after a civil war in which the Roundheads (the anti-Anglican Puritans) defeated the Cavaliers (the royal army).

When, following the restoration of the monarchy, James II, son of Charles II and grandson of James, declared his Catholic faith and, to add insult to injury, had a son with his Catholic wife, the defenders of Protestant England were upset enough to stage a coup. A bloodless revolution took place. The Protestant establishment celebrated it as the Glorious Revolution. Luckily for the revolutionaries, James II’s first daughter, Mary, had had the good sense to marry a Dutch Protestant, William of Orange, and the couple were called back from the continent to reign over England.

Mary’s sister Anne became queen in 1702. Under her reign, the Acts of Union were ratified by the English and Scottish parliaments respectively, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain. The 18^th century witnessed the rapid expansion of the British empire. Scotland tagged along with the triumph, though sometimes grudgingly. The last attempt at securing Scotland’s independence was led by the Stuart pretender, , who had returned to Scotland from France via Ireland. The Scots and their allies were defeated ingloriously at the 40-minute battle of Culloden in 1746 by the equally inglorious duke of Cumberland, known to this day as “.”

Though the Scots quickly gave up on the hope of a Stuart restoration, they have never really forgotten the humiliation of Culloden. Brexit, for many Scots, is another Culloden.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Will Britain Become Scot-Free? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Yet the end result, due to the British quest for sovereignty, is a (very) hard Brexit. Although the movement of goods will continue with zero tariffs and zero quantitative restrictions, many new non-tariff trade barriers will arise when compared to single market membership. Services, including finance, are largely excluded from the treaty, and with very few exceptions, the British are leaving European projects such as Erasmus. London has also excluded foreign and security policy altogether from the institutional cooperation with the EU.

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Despite the restricted market access, the EU can claim to have achieved the inclusion of comprehensive instruments to ensure fair competition, a level playing field. This includes the possibility of reintroducing tariffs and other trade restrictions should there be a significant divergence in labor or environmental standards in the future. Both sides have achieved their remarkably defensive goals: Boris Johnson gets his hard Brexit, and the EU was able to defend its single market and its standards.

To Be Built Upon

The original idea of an “ambitious and deep partnership” between the EU and the UK, however, has fallen by the wayside. In the first few weeks of 2021, the EU and the UK have already squabbled over vaccines and the status of the EU ambassador in London. Nevertheless, if used wisely, the agreement could represent the low point in British-European relations, from which a new partnership emerges after the difficult Brexit negotiations. However, there are five reasons the TCA could enable an improvement in relations.

First, the trade deal does not mark the end of negotiations between London and Brussels. The agreement itself provides for a review after five years — that is, just under six months after the likely date of the next UK general election — in the course of which relations can also be deepened again. There is also a review clause for the Northern Ireland Protocol in 2024, transition periods for energy cooperation and fisheries, and further talks on data exchange and financial market services in 2021. Similar to Switzerland, there will be almost constant negotiations between the EU and the UK, albeit at a less politically dramatic level than recently. It is precisely this de-dramatization of relations that offers an opportunity to restore trust and improve cooperation.

Second, the agreement is designed to be built upon. It establishes institutionalized cooperation between London and Brussels with an EU-UK Partnership Council and a number of specialized committees, for example on trade in goods, energy cooperation and British participation in EU programs. It is explicitly designed as an umbrella agreement into whose overall institutional framework further supplementary agreements can be inserted.

Continued Interdependence

Third, economic relations will remain important for both sides despite new trade restrictions. The geographical proximity, the close integration of supply and production chains in many economic sectors, and the mutual importance in trade will ensure continued economic interdependence. The EU remains by far the largest export market for the UK, which, in turn, as the second biggest economy in Europe, will also continue to be a major economic partner (and competitor) for the union. Added to this are the level playing field provisions of the TCA, with both partners committing to maintaining existing EU standards as far as they affect trade and investments, and incentives have been created to keep pace with new standards.

Fourth, the willingness of both sides to make compromises to avoid a no-deal Brexit paradoxically also clearly revealed the common interests despite the difficult divorce. For example, the TCA declares climate policy to be a shared interest, in which the UK will play a central role in 2021 by hosting the next climate summit together with Italy. Opportunities will also present themselves here for trilateral cooperation with the new US administration. The continued participation of the British in a small number of EU programs, such as the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation program and parts of the data exchange in home affairs and justice policy, is also stronger than expected.

Fifth, with the combination of the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, Northern Ireland has become a shared responsibility of the UK and the EU. In order to keep the border open with the EU member state of the Republic of Ireland, the rules of the EU single market will continue to apply in Northern Ireland, whereas a trade border has been created in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Any deviation from EU standards will now require the UK government to weigh not only whether this breaks the level playing field rules — thus allowing the EU to erect trade barriers — but also whether new intra-UK trade barriers with Northern Ireland are created.

The EU equally has a responsibility in the interests of its member state Ireland to work with the British government to ensure that these complex arrangements work as smoothly as possible so as not to jeopardize peace in Northern Ireland.

The trade treaty, which came into being under great pressure, both temporal and political, thus achieves one thing above all — the creation of a foundation on which British-European relationship can be reconstructed. Hard Brexit is now a fact, and the step from EU membership to a third country with a trade agreement has been completed. But negotiations are from over: As neighbors, the EU and the UK will continue to negotiate and renegotiate their relationship in the foreseeable future. It is now up to the political leadership on both sides to determine how this foundation is used. The EU and Germany should be open to building on this foundation with options for deepening cooperation in areas where there were gaps left behind by the TCA due to time or political circumstances.

*[This  was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Brexit has been official only since January 1, 2021. It’s far too soon to expect any concrete results. Creative leadership needs a little bit of time to get going. Faced with a challenge, Britain’s creative managers will do the first thing all creative managers do, especially those with a sense of how the law works. They will search for loopholes and storm their way through them. Rest assured, Johnson’s government is already hard at work.

One example is the “working time directive,” an initiative, as by the Financial Times, that will rescind the 48-hour workweek limitation imposed by European law. This new directive is part of a promised “post-Brexit overhaul of UK labour markets.” This reform in the name of improved productivity theoretically violates the last-minute agreement signed a month ago with the EU but, apparently, there’s a loophole. The EU will have the right to protest only if it can “demonstrate the changes had a material impact on competition.” Let them try. That will keep the bureaucrats busy and it will take years to begin to make the case.

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The government claims this measure will help both businesses and workers in the UK, but Ed Miliband, �������dzܰ�’s shadow business secretary, begs to differ: “In the midst of the worst economic crisis in three centuries, ministers are preparing to tear up their promises to the British people and taking a sledgehammer to workers’ rights.”

Another example concerns the post-colonial habit of wealthy nations that have for decades been shipping their plastic waste to poor countries. Karen McVeigh in an for The Guardian, “’Loophole’ will let UK continue to ship plastic waste to poorer countries,” describes how the post-Brexit UK is “failing to honour its promise to curb shipments of plastic waste to developing countries.” This is all the more astonishing as Johnson’s Conservative Party, in a brave attempt to prove its ecological credentials, had taken a firm position condemning the practice. McVeigh writes: “Britain will continue to allow plastic waste to be exported to developing countries, despite a Tory party manifesto commitment to banning the practice, and promises of no regression of environmental standards post-Brexit.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Commitment:

A solemn promise intended to be kept unless it turns out to be costly or inconvenient.

Contextual Note

The point of a party’s manifesto has never been to define an ambitious legislative program that it intends to pass, but rather to give an idea of how its members imagine a utopian society might look. That’s what interests voters during an election campaign. It proves that the party has what can be called “a vision,” which has become a standard political commodity that can be fabricated practically instantly by experienced spin doctors.

The European Union had already taken an initiative on the question of plastic waste. The Tories vociferously claimed to agree with it and announced their commitment to implementing it. The European law became applicable at the beginning of this year. It requires the banning of “all non-recyclable plastic waste being shipped to developing nations from 1 January.” 

One of the reasons both the Europeans and the British Tories found this so convincing is that, apart from the catastrophic effects on the environment of the countries to which the waste is shipped, much of the plastic ends up polluting the oceans and seas of the world, including those that surround the isle of Britain. Now that the UK is nothing but an island, there is a selfish reason for the reform. But, as the world should now realize, selfish environmental reasons rarely trump selfish monetary reasons.

The government’s lawyers have taken a lesson from the recent legal history around the issue of sexual assault. They have drafted a condition that makes everything acceptable, so long as it is consensual. It even has a name: “prior informed consent.” In other words, the UK is committed to respecting the idea that “no means no.” McVeigh offers the details: “UK exports will now be made under a new system of ‘prior informed consent’, under which the importer has to agree to accept the waste, and has the opportunity to refuse it.”

Historical Note

The FT article quotes a government spokesperson, who clearly believes in Britain’s future vocation as an innovator that may serve as a model for others. It may fall short of a return to empire, but some people still remember the cultural leadership of the UK in the 1960s and 1970s. That was when the UK offered the world The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Carnaby Street, Monty Python, the Skinheads and punk rock. As per the British government, “Leaving the EU allows us to continue to be a standard-setter and protect and enhance UK workers’ rights.” 

As they have done for the past four years, the Johnsonite Tories see this as a turning point not only in the history of the British Isles, but a major event in world history. European standards were unbearably bureaucratic and led to sclerosis. The new deregulated standards of the UK are flexible and innovative, the stuff of a shining future.

Some may feel that this sounds like an appeal to the past, to the Thatcher years. That would be understandable coming from Margaret Thatcher’s party. But in terms of its capacity to produce plastic waste, the UK has no need to return to the glories of the past. It is already a leader. “Britain is one of the biggest producers of plastic waste in the world, second only to the US.” With 67 million inhabitants, the UK represents a little more than one-fifth of the population of the United States. Holding second place in such a competitive world is quite an accomplishment.

The article lists some of the countries to whom Britain exports its waste: Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia and Turkey. Finding a way to take advantage of poor countries is baked into British imperial culture. A Greenpeace political campaigner complained that “creating a loophole to allow the dumping of our plastic trash on environments and communities bodes very badly. This is not leadership, it’s failing to do the bare minimum.” What Greenpeace fails to appreciate is that, like limits on working hours, this measure is meant to make British businesses more competitive. Reducing the amount of plastic sold to consumers might hurt sales and profit margins.

The government makes the case that this is nothing more than a big misunderstanding. A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs confirmed the government pledge “to ban the export of all plastic waste to non-OECD countries.” Promises are for the future, not the present. After all, there was no precise timetable on the pledge. Instead, the department confirmed that “it had commissioned research to better understand existing UK plastic waste recycling capacity and would consult in due course on how to deliver its manifesto commitments.” Research by bureaucracy takes time. That was one of the main reasons Boris Johnson wanted to leave the European Union. Its bureaucracy made it difficult to expedite important business.

The problem Karen McVeigh cites is, therefore, clearly exaggerated. Even though Europe managed to get the law in place for the first day of this year, the much more efficient decision-making of a liberated, unbureaucratic Britain will only need several more months, years or, who knows, decades. After all, research is complicated and expensive, especially when you’re on your own and have to rely on your limited resources.

What the UK government wants us to understand is that the commitment is there. That should be enough. It will remain there with the same firm intention to carry it out until the date that the policy can be put into effect, whenever that may be, if, of course, no other unexpected event prevents that from occurring. In which case it will be reconsidered, more research will be conducted and subsequently a new commitment for future action will be announced.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post When Will Boris Johnson Be Committed? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

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Relief was the predominant emotion amongst the business community on both sides of the Channel before the New Year. Now that the dust has settled and attention has turned to the detail of the deal reached, there should be no illusions that the TCA ends EU-UK negotiations. We set out below what, in high-level terms, the TCA means for EU-UK trade in goods and services, and where there are gaps to fill and questions to still be answered over the coming months and years.

What Does the TCA Mean for Trade in Goods?

Firstly, the good news. Under the TCA, there are no tariffs or quotas on cross-border trade in qualifying goods between the United Kingdom and the European Union. In this regard, the TCA goes further than any EU trade agreement negotiated with a third country. This is a hugely positive outcome for businesses with UK and EU supply chains, particularly in sectors such as the automotive and agri-food industries, where tariffs imposed on so-called World Trade Organization terms under a no-deal Brexit would have been high.  

However, it is crucial for those involved in cross-border trade to appreciate that only goods that are of EU or UK origin benefit from zero tariffs and zero quotas under the TCA. Rules of origin are a key component of every trade agreement and determine the “economic nationality” of products. Under the TCA, a product will attract a tariff if a certain percentage (beyond a “tolerance level”) of its pre-finished value or components are not of either UK or EU origin. The tolerance levels vary from product to product and require careful analysis. Therefore, businesses will need to understand the originating status of all the goods they trade between the UK and the EU to ensure they benefit from the zero tariffs and quotas under the agreement. Businesses will also need to ensure that their supply chains understand the new self-certification procedures to prove the origin of goods.

Beyond the qualified good news on tariffs and quotas, the deal is less helpful in that full regulatory approvals are required for goods being imported into the EU from the UK and vice versa. While in certain important sectors (automotive, chemicals and pharmaceuticals) the UK and the EU agreed on specific rules to reduce technical barriers to trade, the UK government did not achieve its longstanding negotiating objective of securing broad mutual recognition on product standards.

Therefore, from January 1, 2021, all products exported from the EU to the UK will have to comply with the UK’s technical regulations and will be subject to any applicable regulatory compliance checks and controls. Similarly, all products imported from the UK to the EU will need to comply with EU technical regulations and will be subject to all applicable regulatory compliance obligations, checks and controls.

There will also be specific changes to food and plant safety standards under the TCA. UK agri-food exporters will have to meet all EU sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) import requirements with immediate effect. In this sector, UK exports will be subject to official controls carried out by member state authorities at border control posts. Similarly, EU agri-food exporters will have to meet all UK SPS import requirements, following certain phase-in periods the UK government has provided.

Far from being a “bonfire of red tape” promised by certain advocates of Brexit before the 2016 referendum, the TCA introduces a “bonanza of new red tape” for businesses who wish to sell their products in both UK and EU markets. On January 8, UK Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, that there would be “significant additional disruption” at UK borders over the coming weeks as a result of customs changes and regulatory checks.

What Does the TCA Mean for Trade in Services?

As has been widely noted by commentators, the deal on services is far thinner than on goods. More than 40% of the UK’s exports to the EU are services, and the sector accounts for around 80% of the UK’s economic activity. As an inevitable consequence of leaving the EU single market, UK service suppliers will lose their automatic right to offer services across the union. UK business will have to comply with a patchwork of complex host-country rules which vary from country to country and may need to establish themselves in the EU to continue operating. Many have already done so.

The level of market access will also depend on the way the service is supplied. There are four “modes” for this. Services can be supplied on a cross-border basis from the home country of the supplier, for example over the internet; to the consumer in the country of the supplier, such as a tourist traveling abroad and purchasing services; via a locally-established enterprise owned by the foreign service supplier; or through the temporary presence in the territory of another country by a service supplier who is a natural person.

All of this means that UK-established businesses will need to look at domestic regulations on service access in each EU member state in which they seek to operate, and vice versa for EU-established businesses seeking market access in the UK.

A Basis for Ongoing Negotiations

The TCA does not mark the end of EU-UK negotiations, and in some areas these discussions start immediately. For example, the agreement has provided an end to so-called passporting of financial services under which banks, insurers and other financial service firms authorized in the UK had automatic right to access EU markets and vice versa.

The EU and the UK have committed to agree on a memorandum of understanding that will establish a framework of regulatory cooperation in financial services by March this year. With an end to passporting, it is likely that there will be more friction in cross-border financial services, but the extent of that friction depends on the outcome of future negotiations between EU and UK governments and regulators.

To take another example of importance to the UK economy, the TCA does not provide for the automatic mutual recognition of professional qualifications. As of January 1, UK nationals, irrespective of where they acquired their qualifications, and EU citizens with qualifications acquired in the UK, will need to have their qualifications recognized in the relevant EU member state on the basis of that state’s domestic rules. However, the TCA leaves the door open for the EU and the UK to agree on additional arrangements in the future for the mutual recognition of qualifications, something that professional bodies will be pushing for immediately.

Whilst there has been understandable relief from politicians, businesses and populations on both sides of the Channel suffering from Brexit fatigue that a deal — any deal — has been reached, the sheer extent to which the TCA envisages ongoing negotiations between the UK and the EU on issues both large and small over the months and years ahead has not been widely appreciated.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Brexit Trade Deal Brings Temporary, If Not Lasting, Relief appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Go to extreme and unreasonable lengths:

An expression that those who habitually go to extreme and unreasonable lengths in everything they do like to apply to those who oppose any of their extremely unreasonable acts

Contextual Note

We live in an era in which extreme and unreasonable discourse and action have become the most reliable tool for those seeking political, economic or social success. It explains how purveyors of extreme and unreasonable discourse have won recent elections in nations as diverse as the US, the UK, India, the Philippines and Brazil, to mention only those countries. 

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Whether their names are Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Silvio Berlusconi, Rodrigo Duterte, Elon Musk or Kanye West, each in his own patented way has perfected the art of outrageous hyperreality that thrives on projecting a personality that is extreme and unreasonable. The phenomenon goes beyond politics. In fact, it originates in the world of entertainment. West, an American rapper, did as much to inspire President Trump’s approach to politics as Trump did to convince West he could have a future in politics.

The Guardian’s readers may be left wondering what kind of exceptionally outrageous behavior could merit Johnson, the British prime minister, calling European negotiators’ behavior “extreme and unreasonable.” Even during his career as a journalist before moving into politics, Johnson specialized in extreme and unreasonable exaggeration in his reporting of the news.

In 2016, Johnson also went from the extreme of preparing an article for publication in The Telegraph in which he in favor of Britain remaining in Europe and warned that leaving the EU would provoke an “economic shock,” to leading the wing of the Conservative Party in the “leave” campaign for Brexit. That permitted him to identify himself with the cause of Brexit and assume the leadership of that faction of a party officially committed to remaining as a member of the European Union. He sensed that it would be the shortest route to Downing Street as he witnessed the wavering fortunes of David Cameron, the prime minister at the time.

So, what terribly extreme and unreasonable actions are the Europeans guilty of in Johnson’s eyes? Very simply, they disapprove of his “internal market bill,” which calls for unilaterally overturning the withdrawal agreement Johnson signed last year to presumably settle the initial political conditions of the UK leaving the European Union. On Johnson’s own initiative, that agreement drew a border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, which together make up the United Kingdom. 

The law he is now proposing would permit him to effectively erase that border, leading to the necessity of creating a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Keeping that border open as provided by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement — a deal that ended the violence between Catholics and Protestants — was the required condition for reaching any kind of permanent solution to the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union.

Now, key members of Johnson’s cabinet have begun to revolt, as this is a clear violation of the terms of the withdrawal agreement that took so long to hammer out. Britain’s former ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, now out that the bill will be “hugely damaging to our international reputation.” He warned that “it could deter other countries from entering into agreements with the UK in the future.” He wasn’t alone. Five former British prime ministers have also expressed concern over the move. Darroch speculated on what might happen “if people think the Brits are just going to say: we didn’t like this on reflection, and we would like to rewrite this part unilaterally.”

Historical Note

During the centuries when the British dominated the world and owned an empire on which the sun never set, as a people they acquired the reputation of being committed to “fair play.” The French, who never had an entente with the British that was deeper than merely cordial, to this day identify the British as a people who want to be respected for maintaining the cultural value of fair play, at least as it applies to sports.

The French have never been naive. They have always recognized that their British neighbors were perfectly capable of perfidy. To this day, the French will ironically trot out the expression “perfide Albion” to explain Britain’s positions concerning other nations. But Albion’s traditional perfidy was always subtle, carrying an air of reasonableness and delivered with what appeared to be a complicit smile. Boris Johnson’s is both extreme and unreasonable.

Empires will always be suspected of perfidy, if only because everyone understands that they can, on a whim, betray treaties and agreements — and even their own stated principles and values — as they rely on their military prowess and financial clout to carry them through. To some extent, this becomes the law of empires, their way of indicating that the countries they deal with have a greater interest in being nice to them than they do in being nice to the others. 

The irony this time — and some see it as a tragedy — lies in the fact that Britain hasn’t been an empire for at least 70 years. Johnson has become little more than Shakespeare’s “poor player who struts and frets his hour upon a stage” and someday soon will be heard no more. The burning question, when it comes to Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump — whose exit may be announced in November — is this: What will the damaged landscape look like when those leaders specialized in upending their own cultures are gone?

As the world breathlessly awaits the major events that affect every nation in the world — starting with the US presidential election in November and including the unabating drama of the waxing and waning of hopes to see the end of the COVID-19 pandemic — the British have the added angst of speculating about just how irreparably damaging what appears to be an inevitable “hard Brexit” on January 1, 2021, is likely to be. One thing seems to be sure: it will be both extreme and unreasonable. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Boris Johnson Pushes Unreason to an Extreme appeared first on 51�Թ�.

There are only around 50 working days left in which to make a broader agreement for a post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the EU. The consequences of failing to do so for Ireland will be as profound — and perhaps even as long-lasting — as those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A failure to reach a UK-EU agreement would mean a deep rift between the UK and Ireland. It would also mean heightened tensions within Northern Ireland, disruptions to century-old business relations and a succession of high-profile court cases between the EU and the UK dragging on for years.

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Issues on which a deal could have easily been reached in amicable give-and-take negotiations will be used as hostages or leverage on other matters. The economic and political damage would be incalculable. And we must do everything we can to avoid this.

Changing the EU trade commissioner, , under such circumstances would be dangerous. Trying to change horses in midstream is always difficult. But attempting to do so at the height of a flood — in high winds — would be even more so.

The EU would lose an exceptionally competent trade commissioner when he was never more needed. An Irishman would no longer hold the trade portfolio. The independence of the European Commission, a vital ingredient in the EU’s success, would have been compromised — a huge loss for all smaller EU states.

According to the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, talks between the European Union and the UK, which ended last week, seemed at times to be going “backwards rather than forwards.” The impasse has been reached for three reasons.

The Meaning of Sovereignty

First, the two sides have set themselves incompatible objectives. The European Union wants a wide-ranging “economic partnership” between the UK and the EU, with a “level playing field” for “open and fair” competition. The UK agreed to this objective in the joint political declaration made with the EU at the time of the withdrawal agreement, which was reached in October 2019.

Since then, the UK has held a general election with the ruling Conservative Party winning an overall majority in Parliament, and it has changed its mind. It is now insisting, in the uncompromising of it chief negotiator, David Frost, on “sovereign control of our own laws, borders, and waters.”

This formula fails to take account of the fact that any agreement the UK might make with the EU (or with anyone else) on standards for goods, services or food items necessarily involves a diminution of sovereign control. Even being in the World Trade Organization (WTO) involves accepting its rulings, which are a diminution of “sovereign control.” This is why US President Donald Trump does not like the WTO and is trying to undermine it.

The 2019 withdrawal agreement from the EU also involves a diminution of sovereign control by Westminster over the laws that will apply in Northern Ireland and thus within the UK. That agreement obliges the UK to apply EU laws on tariffs and standards to goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain — i.e., going from one part of the UK to another.

This obligation is one of the reasons given by a group of UK parliamentarians — including Iain Duncan Smith, David Trimble, Bill Cash, Owen Paterson and Sammy Wilson — for wanting the UK to pull out from the withdrawal agreement, even though most of them voted for it last year.

Sovereignty is a metaphysical concept, not a practical policy. Attempting to apply it literally would make structured and predictable international cooperation between states impossible. That is not understood by many in the Conservative Party.

The Method of Negotiation

Second, the negotiating method has proved challenging. The legal and political timetables do not gel. The UK wants to discuss the legal texts of a possible free trade agreement first and leave the controversial issues — like competition and fisheries — until the endgame in October. But the EU wants serious engagement to start on these sticking points straight away.

Any resolution of these matters will require complex legal drafting, which cannot be left to the last minute. After all, these texts will have to be approved by the European and British Parliaments before the end of 2020. There can be no ambiguities or late-night sloppy drafting.

The problem is that the UK negotiator cannot yet get instructions on the compromises he can make from Boris Johnson, the British prime minister. Johnson is instead preoccupied with combating the spread of the COVID-19 disease, as well as keeping the likes of Duncan Smith and Co. onside. The prime minister is a last-minute type of guy.

Trade Relations With Other Blocs

Third, there is the matter of making provisions for the trade agreements the UK wants to make in the future with other countries, such as the US, Japan and New Zealand. Freedom to make such deals was presented to UK voters as one of the benefits of Brexit.

The underlying problem here is that the UK government has yet to make up its mind on whether it will continue with the European Union’s strict precautionary policy on food safety or adopt the more permissive approach favored by the US. Similar policy choices will have to be made by the UK on chemicals, energy efficiency displays and geographical indicators.

The more the UK diverges from existing EU standards on these issues, the more intrusive the controls on goods coming into Northern Ireland from Britain will have to be, and the more acute the distress will be for Unionist circles in Northern Ireland. Issues that are uncontroversial in themselves will assume vast symbolic significance and threaten peace on the island of Ireland

The UK is likely to be forced to make side deals with the US on issues like hormone-treated beef, genetically modified organisms and chlorinated chicken. The US questions the scientific basis for the existing EU restrictions and has won a WTO case on beef over this. It would probably win on chlorinated chicken, too.

If Britain conceded to the US on hormones and chlorination, this would create control problems at the border between the UK and the EU, wherever that border is in Ireland. Either UK officials would enforce EU rules on hormones and chlorination on the entry of beef or chicken to this island, or there would be a huge international court case.

All this shows that, in the absence of some sort of partnership agreement between the EU and the UK, relations could spiral out of control. Ireland, as well as the European Union, needs its best team on the pitch to ensure that this does not happen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Negotiating the End of Brexit appeared first on 51�Թ�.

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Six months and a global pandemic later, Britain faces the unique and unprecedented challenge of redefining its place in a world that is in the midst of a historic watershed moment. The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a catalyst for deep-rooted trends that have long been evident to politicians, policymakers and analysts alike — none more so than the tectonic shift in the globe’s geopolitical center of gravity from West to East.

Whether it be China’s much-publicized “” diplomacy against states criticizing its initial response to the outbreak, or the initial success of East Asian states in  the pandemic using artificial intelligence and digital surveillance, COVID-19 has shown that the much-hyped “Asian century” is not merely a future prognosis but a present-day reality.

Brexit Britain on the World Stage

If the pandemic has served to boost Asia’s image on the world stage, the opposite is true for Brexit Britain. The UK’s bumbling response to the COVID-19 crisis has confirmed many of the suspicions of ill-placed grandeur held in foreign capitals since the referendum to leave the European Union in 2016.

Despite Johnson’s boastful  in Britain’s “world-beating” response to the novel coronavirus (which causes the COVID-19 disease), fatal early errors by the government — notably the initial refusal to enforce a lockdown in a forlorn effort to preserve the economy — have resulted in Britain suffering the worst of both worlds. Not only is the UK facing one of the highest per-capita death rates and the worst economic fallout as a result of COVID-19 in the developed world, but the situation has been exacerbated by the looming threat of no post-Brexit trade deal being agreed with the EU by the end of 2020.

In this context, a global Britain’s success in navigating the increasingly volatile “new normal” of the post-pandemic geopolitical order will hinge more than ever on the government’s ability to leverage ties with partners old and new across the Asian continent.

Johnson’s vision of a buccaneering global Britain on the world stage is fundamentally predicated upon two core pillars: trade and security. Whitehall is acutely aware that Britain’s ability to harness the ascendance of Asia’s emerging powerhouses hinges upon striking a fragile balance between these two, often inconsistent, objectives.

On one hand, Britain’s strategic planners look hungrily toward contemporary geopolitical hotspots like the South China Sea as testing grounds for a new  security footprint in the Indo-Pacific region. Britain’s armed forces already possess a string of strategic outposts, from the Brunei-based Gurkha garrison to Royal Naval logistical hubs in Singapore and Diego Garcia. The recently formed UK Defence Staff (Asia Pacific) has outlined plans for a further base in Southeast Asia in a bid to affirm Britain’s commitment to upholding the regional security architecture.

In a symbolic gesture, the scheduled deployment of the Royal Navy’s brand new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, to conduct “freedom of navigation” patrols in the disputed South China Sea during 2021 is indicative of a wholesale rejection of the strategic retrenchment from east of Suez that has typified British security policy in the Indo-Pacific since the 1960s.

Beijing’s Sphere of Influence

Nevertheless, such grandiose ambitions of a more assertive military and diplomatic footprint in Asia do not come without their costs. Given China’s increasingly assertive posture on the international stage since the outbreak of COVID-19, it is not unreasonable to expect the diplomatic blowback from Britain’s perceived meddling within Beijing’s sphere of influence to grow stronger in the post-COVID era.

In July, after the UK offered citizenship to almost 3 million Hong Kong residents following Beijing’s implementation of a controversial new security law in Britain’s ex-colony, China issued a strongly-worded yet ambiguous  of “retaliation.” China’s response is illustrative of the fact that Brexit Britain’s ability to fully harness the Asian century is dependent upon London playing second fiddle to the preferences of Tokyo, Beijing and New Delhi.  

Despite Johnson’s lofty  hailing Britain’s post-Brexit transformation into a “great, global trading nation,” such a vision is not exactly conducive to geopolitical maneuvers that can all too readily be perceived as antagonistic by prospective partners. For instance, Whitehall’s  over the contracting of Huawei, a Chinese technology company, to construct large tracts of Britain’s 5G infrastructure over national security concerns does not bode well for a future UK–China free trade deal. Similarly, efforts to introduce restrictions on immigration via the adoption of an Australia-style points-based system have proved to be a sticking point in post-Brexit trade negotiations with India, the former “jewel of the empire” with whom Britain shares extensive historical, cultural and linguistic ties.

As a global Britain seeks to navigate a post-pandemic order characterized by increased great power antagonism, retreating globalization and resurgent authoritarianism, Whitehall’s strategic planners must be prepared to make hard-headed compromises between geopolitical and economic objectives in Asia in a manner that has been sorely lacking from Brexit negotiations with Britain’s European partners. Cut adrift from Europe at a time when the global order is becoming increasingly fragmented into competing regional blocs, a rudderless Britain lacking a coherent, sustainable vision of how it seeks to engage with Asia’s emerging superpowers risks becoming caught in the middle of an escalating cold war between the US and China.

Reason for Optimism

Despite the gloomy prognosis for a global Britain standing at the dawn of the Asian century, there remains reason for optimism once the short-term shockwaves of the pandemic have receded. Britain’s elite universities retain a mystical allure for ambitious young Asians seeking a world-class education. China, India, Hong Kong and Malaysia  for four of the top five countries of origin for international students in the UK. In addition, with two leading vaccine candidates in development at Oxford and Imperial, a British breakthrough in the fight against COVID-19 would further bolster Britain’s reputation as a global hub of research and innovation.

Such cutting-edge academic expertise — combined with London’s enduring status as a global financial center, post-2021 visa and immigration reforms  highly-skilled professionals, and the cultural imprint of large Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Chinese diasporas — ensures that even post-Brexit Britain possesses the latent potential not only to attract top-class Asian talent, but also to emerge as one of the Asian century’s biggest winners outside of the Indo-Pacific. Whilst Brexit has undercut the Blairite vision of Britain as a “pivotal power” bridging the gap between the US and Europe, the United Kingdom’s deep-rooted historical, cultural, linguistic and economic ties with Asia’s rising powers provide ample scope for recasting Britain as a pivot on a grander scale: as a global hub bridging East and West.

However, such aspirations remain little more than wishful thinking unless British policymakers can formulate a coherent approach toward the Asian century, which has so far been absent. Nevertheless, tentative steps have been taken in such a direction over recent months. Whitehall’s  of the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office is likely to deal a blow to British influence in less-developed corners of Asia, at least in the short term. Yet Johnson’s renewed commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on foreign aid enables a more cohesive, long-term approach with developmental issues, allowing funding to be streamlined toward teams of world-class specialists, such as the UK Climate Change Unit in Indonesia or the Stabilisation Unit supporting post-conflict reconstruction in fragile states like Pakistan and Myanmar.

Similarly, the Foreign Office’s recent  of an “All of Asia” strategy is indicative of a more comprehensive approach to forging partnerships across the continent, balancing conflicting security, diplomatic, trade, developmental priorities, as illustrated through the establishment of the UK’s first permanent mission to Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc in January 2020.

Before It Sets Sail

As the nature of post-pandemic global order emerges over the coming months and years, a global Britain will find itself navigating a turbulent geopolitical environment made infinitely more challenging by the aftershocks of the coronavirus. This includes a worldwide economic crisis, decreased globalization, declining faith in multilateral institutions and rising great power tension, all of which threaten to derail Johnson’s post-Brexit voyage into the unknown before it has even set sail.

Whilst Britain and its Western allies have bungled their response to the public health crisis, Asia’s dynamic rising powers are already bouncing back from the pandemic and laying the building blocks to ensure that the 21st century truly is Asian. From Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative” to New Delhi’s “Make in India” to ambitious future vision projects such as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, Vision of Indonesia 2045 or Kazakhstan 2050, Asia’s emerging powerhouses all champion integrated strategic frameworks to harness the unprecedented shift in global wealth and power eastward, which the COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed.

A global Britain’s greatest mistake would be to supplement such a long-term calculated strategy with the half-baked geopolitical gambits that have so far typified Brexit Britain’s approach to the world’s largest continent. Indeed, for the UK to truly unleash its full potential in the dawning Asian century, it must look to Asia itself for inspiration.

*[Will Marshall is an intern at , which is a media partner of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Brexit Transition Period Will Be Extended

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Perhaps it was unrealistic for Barnier to have expected the UK to engage seriously with the trade-offs and concessions that are essential to a long-term trade agreement while Johnson was in the hospital. Brexit is Boris’ big thing. He made it. Other Tory ministers have no leeway to make Brexit decisions without his personal imprimatur. He has purged the Conservative Party of all significant figures who might have advocated a different vision of a post-Brexit trade agreement with the EU.

The point of Barnier’s intervention is that now Johnson is back at work, he will need to give clear strategic leadership to the UK negotiating team. If he fails to do so, we will end up on January 1, 2021, with no post-Brexit deal on future relations and an incipient trade war between the UK and the EU — and Ireland will be on the front line.

The scars left by the COVID-19 pandemic will eventually fade, but those left by a willfully bad Brexit —  whether brought on deliberately or by inattention — may never heal. This is because a bad Brexit will be a deliberate political act, whereas COVID-19 is just a reminder of our shared human vulnerability. 

No Draft Proposal on Future Relations

In 2019, Johnson signed up to an EU withdrawal treaty to allow the UK to leave the union. This legally committed the UK to customs, controls between Britain and Northern Ireland, so as to avoid checks of goods between the north and south on the island of Ireland. So far, Barnier says he has detected no evidence that the UK is making serious preparations to do this. An attempt by the UK to back out of these ratified legal commitments would be seen as a sign of profound bad faith.

Barnier said that negotiating by video link due to the pandemic was “surreal,” but that the deadlines to be met are very real. The first deadline is the end of June. This is the last date at which an extension to the transition period beyond December 31 might be agreed upon by both sides. While the EU would almost certainly agree to this, there is no sign that the UK will. Tory politicians repeatedly say they will not extend.

This tight deadline would be fine if the UK was engaging seriously and purposefully in the talks. But, according to Barnier, the Brits have not yet even produced a full version of a draft agreement that would reflect their expectations of future relations between the UK and the European Union. The EU, on the other hand, produced its full draft weeks ago. Without full texts of the proposals, it is hard to begin real negotiations.

So far, the UK has only produced portions of the proposed treaty. The UK insists that Barnier keep these parts of the draft UK text secret and not share them with the 27 member states of the EU. Giving Barnier texts that he cannot share with those on whose behalf he is negotiating is just wasting his time. It seems that UK negotiators are adopting this strange tactic because they have no clear political direction from their own side. They do not know whether these proposals are even acceptable in the UK.

In the political declaration that accompanied the EU withdrawal deal, Prime Minister Johnson agreed that his government would use its best endeavors to reach an agreement on fisheries by the end of July. This would be vital if the UK fishing industry were to be able to continue to export its surplus fish to the EU. Apparently, there has not been serious engagement from the British side on this matter either.

Level Playing Field

The other issue on which Barnier detected a lack of engagement by the UK was the so-called “level-playing-field” question. The EU wants binding guarantees that the UK will not — through state subsidies or via lax environmental or labor rules — give its exporters an artificial advantage over EU (and Irish) competitors.

This issue is becoming a difficult issue within the EU itself. In response to the COVID-19 economic downturn, some wealthier EU states (like Germany) are giving generous cash/liquidity support to the industries in their own countries. On the other hand, EU states with weaker budgetary positions (Italy, Spain and perhaps even Ireland) cannot compete with this.

It is understandable that temporary help may be given to prevent firms from going bust in the wake of the economic disruption. But what is temporary at the beginning can easily become indefinite, and what is indefinite can become permanent. Subsidies are addictive.

The reason we have a common agricultural policy in the EU is that when the common market was created, nobody wanted rich countries to be able to give their farmers an advantage over farmers in countries whose governments could not afford the same level of help. The same consideration applies to industry. Subsidies should be equal or they should not be given at all.

State aid must be regulated inside the EU if a level playing field is to be preserved. To make a convincing case for a level playing field between the European Union and the UK, the EU side will need to show it is doing so internally. This will be a test for President Ursula von der Leyen as a German commissioner.

Will COVID-19 Hide the Pain of Brexit?

Which way will Johnson turn on the terms of a deal with the EU? It is unlikely he will look for an extension to the transition period beyond the end of this year. He wants a hard Brexit, a clean break as he would misleadingly call it, but he knows it will be very painful. He probably thinks the pain of a hard Brexit — or no agreement at all on future relations — at the end of December will be concealed by the even greater and more immediate pain of the economic slump caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Brexit will not be blamed for the pain. But if the transition period is postponed until January 2022, the Brexit pain will be much more visible to voters.

The Conservative Party has become the Brexit Party. It is driven by a narrative around reestablishing British identity and is quite insensitive to economic or trade arguments. It wants Brexit done quickly because it fears the British people might change their minds. That is why there is such a mad rush. It is not rational — it is imperative.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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COVID-19 Makes Johnson and Trump Reject Thatcher and Reagan

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Yet some asked a serious question: What lies ahead for the post-Brexit trade talks between the UK and the European Union? The 11-month transition period, which ends on December 31, was considered too short by pretty much everyone except the UK government even before the world came to a standstill. During this period, the United Kingdom remains in the EU customs union and single market.

The fact that the EU’s Michel Barnier and the UK’s Boris Johnson came down with COVID-19 was just the cherry on the cake. There have been  and legitimate from UK industries, charities and Welsh and Scottish politicians, calling for talks to be put on hold and for the transition period to be extended. This would allow the UK government and the EU to focus on getting the situation with the coronavirus pandemic under control first. So why, in some sort of 2019 re-run, is Prime Minister Johnson insisting that the UK will end the transition period by December? 

Getting Brexit Done at All Costs

The most incredible thing about Brexit is just how sacrosanct it has become. I cannot help but compare this to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, much as it was based on a deep-rooted and long-standing wariness of one side toward the other. In both cases, the divorce was first and foremost a political move.

What is different about Brexit, however, is that an election promise adhered to a little too religiously has become the grand symbol of the will of the people — the litmus test by which British democracy is measured. If the election promise in 2010 to not raise university tuition fees had been adhered to with at least half the vigor, we would all be literally better off and the Liberal Democrats wouldn’t be wondering if they will ever regain their political influence ever again. But that’s another story.

The point is that the only thing that came to matter was that Brexit was done at all costs. Brexiteers were convinced it was right and just, and most “remainers” — despite the exasperated “it was all nonsense anyway” remarks on social media — resigned themselves to the reality of leaving the EU.  

Johnson is the person who promised the British public that Brexit can and will be done and, what’s more, that it will be beneficial, easy and quick. He is the last in line of politicians around whom a Brexit-anchored cult of personality has developed and which has carried him through to Number 10. I still remember his “independence day”  on a BBC-televised debate in June 2016 as the moment I knew the “vote leave” campaign was going to win the Brexit referendum. He has been there from “take back control” to “get Brexit done,” which won him a resounding electoral victory in December 2019.

By then, Johnson managed to convince most — including myself, despite my best intentions — that he was the only man for the job. Seemingly, nothing was going to stand in his way, domestically or internationally, in finishing the Brexit story and moving onto the process of “healing,” among other priorities. And then, just like that, a global pandemic requiring literal healing has pulled his perfectly placed rug out from under his feet.  

For around half a decade, Brexit has been pretty much the only thing that mattered in the UK. Even now, there are enough Britons out there who see the postponement of trade talks as a ploy to keep the UK aligned with the EU for longer. For some, the European Union’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is further proof that the UK is better off out of the union. (The EU’s failure to communicate properly about what it is doing, why it matters and how it benefits its citizens is once again a subject in itself.)

Facts and Reason

Yet something has finally shifted. Facts and reason were forced back into fashion, leaving behind a sense of perspective — everything the Brexit debate has missed from the start. A global pandemic has turned people’s attention away from the Brexit boogeyman hiding under their bed to a real threat with potentially deadly consequences. Brexit is being exposed for what it is at this stage: a nation pulling out of a series of treaties, not an identity-making moment. This task has now been brushed aside by a monumental challenge for the world. 

This is not to say the task is insignificant. Despite the rhetoric coming out of Number 10 in the run-up to January 31 that the Brexit story was over with the UK leaving the EU, both sides know the hardest part still lies ahead. The idea that Britain could leave the union with no trade agreement would have caused chaos a couple of years ago, never mind now with the inevitable global recession that’s coming. 

Despite the health crisis taking center stage, the EU tabled a full proposal of a draft treaty on March 13. The UK, meanwhile, has only put down a handful of documents covering trade, transport, aviation and nuclear cooperation, all the while insisting on getting a final agreement by the end of the year. Regardless of when and how the talks continue, the days when Brexit commanded the sole attention of the UK and the EU are over. 

Prime Minister Johnson knows this. The fact that he is not yet agreeing to prolong the transition period indicates two things.

First, just like the rest of us, he is adapting to the current situation, trying to hold on to the hope that life will, at some point, go back to normal — at least partially. As prime minister of a country that is outside of the EU with no agreed trade deal during a pandemic that is bound to be followed by a global economic crisis, even Johnson can be cut some slack for being slightly disoriented.

Second, Johnson has been aptly as “a man who waits to see the way the crowd is running and then dashes in front and says: follow me.” He is biding his time to either strike fast should the coronavirus suddenly abate and still just about deliver on his promises, or to wait for a moment when the public mood is just right for him to announce that emotion must give way to reason.

Having watched Boris for the best part of a decade, I believe he can wear the suit of a crisis manager just as well as he wore the habit of a high priest of Brexit, if that is what the situation calls for.  

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On April 4, the Labour Party has finally replaced the much despised Jeremy Corbyn. A day before Saturday’s election, The Economist’s greeted Starmer’s election with approval while expressing some slight trepidation. It reminded readers that the doughty Sir Keir is replacing “the party’s most disastrous leader ever” but helpfully suggests the new leader “should beware of ‘war socialism,’” without offering a clear explanation of what is meant by “war socialism.” 

The term has in the past been used to describe the effort a government makes to mobilize its industries and its people to contribute to equipping the military to fight a war. But with no general election in sight before 2024, it’s difficult to imagine an opposition leader with the authority to command an economy warring with a virus. What exactly is Bagehot worried about?

The concern becomes slightly clearer when the editorial cites the sudden optimism felt in Corbyn’s socialist camp after the 2017 general election that robbed Theresa May of a Tory majority, followed by the December election: “The catastrophic failure of 2019 dispelled that illusion and reconciled all but fanatics to the idea that politics is the art of the possible.”

War socialism thus appears to correlate with an impossible ideology adopted by fanatics who refuse to respect the divine right of free markets, the only reality that The Economist recognizes as “possible.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Art of the possible:

A synonym for the status quo, all other political or economic systems being deemed impossible.

Contextual Note

For those who are familiar with The Economist, the editorialist Bagehot is not an actual author but a nom de plume chosen for its historical resonance. Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) was The Economist’s legendary 19^th-century editor-in-chief, a diligent and prolific promoter of economic liberalism. Today’s Bagehot is Adrian Wooldridge, an atypical journalist with an Oxford D Phil in philosophy (Balliol, no less). Woodridge wandered into journalism after a stint as a fellow of All Souls College, the only Oxford college that has no students, only fellows. In other words, Wooldridge is a disciplined intellectual intimately familiar with Britain’s and the world’s elites.

Like other British commentators, Wooldridge is trying to come to grips with two major national and international dramas that have converged in time but lack any direct link of historical logic. The coronavirus pandemic has delivered what some suspect and others fear may be a fatal blow to the status quo of Western economies. But the existing political and economic order in the UK had already reached an advanced stage of precarity with the ongoing, never quite resolved existential drama of Brexit. This year has left Britons wondering when they can leave their homes and when (and how) they will leave Europe. They also realize, with growing concern, that in 2019 they elected Boris Johnson to run both of those shows — and keep them running until 2024.

After Johnson’s historic but already atypical victory in December — made atypical and, to some extent, meaningless by Brexit — the change of leadership in the Labour Party should normally stir little more than vague curiosity. The fact that commentators are wondering about Starmer’s ability to handle the issues reflects a real, but widely shared (and rarely expressed) suspicion that Johnson may not last long as prime minister. That means that if new elections were to take place as a result of unforeseeable events, there could be some electoral suspense. Anti-Brexit Tories and diehard Blairites in particular have clung to the hope of seeing things come back to normal by canceling Brexit while there’s still time before the final bell at the end of the year. But now they have the added concern with getting back to normal once the pandemic recedes.

In the leadership race, many commentators saw Starmer as the Labour candidate who represented a possible return to the “radical centrist” or the Third Way of Tony Blair, a position The Economist would have no problem embracing. But Wooldridge can’t suppress his nagging fear that the new Labour leader, having promised to unify the party, may be tempted to make too many concessions to the Corbynites, who still constitute the main and most vocal base of the party.

The Independent, a newspaper equally favorable to radical centrism, has expressed its hope that Starmer will “compromise with a basically right-wing electorate that rejected it so decisively in December.” With some alarm it a different problem: “Starmer’s victory may be broad … but the enthusiasm will not run deep. There is no army of Starmerites willing to die in a ditch for him. He has no Momentum and Corbynistas, but instead the grudging respect of those who soberly realise he is their last great hope of winning another election. Starmer has electability, in other words, but not the charisma to inspire a fanbase.”

This echoes what many in the Democratic Party in the US are now saying about the party’s presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, with a similar note of worry. In both cases, the candidate deemed “electable” turns out to be singularly uninspiring. In normal reasoning, this should cast doubt on the notion that such candidates are electable. It should also inspire reflection that establishment centrism may be the problem rather than the solution. An “electable” candidate appears to one who is pleasing to the oligarchy, with a promise to defend “normalcy.” Such candidates must show themselves to be malleable, easily influenced or managed by the less visible and more powerful interests that control the economy and politics.

Though no one dares admit it, partly because Johnson’s has never been higher, British mainstream media across much of the political spectrum may no longer be counting on Boris Johnson to be the leader who defines the UK’s future. With the battle against a pandemic raging, and the end-of-the-year Brexit guillotine sharpened to fall possibly before the virus is defeated, many commentators appear to hope that Labour under Starmer, once he has rejected “war socialism” and realigned with a Blairite defense of the status quo, could provide the impetus to bring back the pre-Brexit, pre-coronavirus neoliberal order. 

Wooldridge offers this comforting observation to counter those who see radical change in the air: “But the current expansion of the state does not represent a philosophical conversion to the case for revolution. … This debt-fuelled expansion will certainly lead to higher taxes in the long term but it will also put a constraint on the state’s future ambitions.” In other words, the massive debt incurred in the effort to save the status quo and bring it back to life will inevitably imply austerity in the future, as was the case with the 2008-09 bailout of the economy.

Wooldridge knows how society works. He is convinced that people will vote the same way in a post-coronavirus world as they did last December. Referring to the hyper-Keynesian measures taken to counter the virus, he adds: “Any or all of these policies might be wise, radical (in a good way) and eminently in the national interest — but they did bomb at the last general election.” The Independent sends the same message: If Starmer “sticks to so much of the 2019 programme, as he has pledged to, he risks a further lethal defeat at the hands of the Tories come 2024.”

At the very end of his article, Wooldridge finally offers some clarity concerning his definition of “war socialism”: If Starmer “bets on a new era of big-government socialism, he will waste his political capital.” We should take that as Wooldridge’s lesson in how political capitalism works.

Historical Note

Walter Bagehot was the prolific collaborator of The Economist’s founder, James Wilson, considered by many to be the father of the ideology of liberalism that dominated economic thinking in the 19^th century and eventually led to the theoretical work of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman in the 20^th century. It is still the driving force behind The Economist that colors the ideological stance of its reporting, despite its solid commitment to serious, factual analysis of economic news. In 2018, on its 175^th anniversary, The Economist to producing “a manifesto for renewing liberalism.”

In 2018, Adrian Wooldridge affirmed his renewed liberalism when he co-authored “Capitalism in America: a History” with former president of the Fed, Alan Greenspan. The New York Times as an ode to Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction” and a “plea to re-embrace America’s long-held capitalist traditions and entrepreneurial culture in order to rescue the country from its current ‘fading dynamism.’” 

This may sound to some actual historians more like the celebration of “war capitalism,” if only because the capitalist culture and the success stories they describe wouldn’t have been possible without war, territorial conquest and, at times, genocidal bloodshed, all instrumental in building the industrial empires the authors admire. After dedicating the 19^th century to spreading its economic organization across the North American continent, the proponents of “creative destruction” began — in 1898 with the Spanish-American War — to spread their empire across the globe. 

Today, with a pandemic wreaking havoc on the economy, Wooldridge is less focused on renewing liberalism than saving it from its own creative destruction. He looks forward to a comforting repeat of history, when governments can — as they did a century ago — say they have defeated the aggressive viral enemy. “When that blessed day comes, voters will desire nothing so much as a ‘return to normalcy’, just as they did in the 1920s after the first world war and the Spanish flu.”

Imagining a 21^st-century version of the Treaty of Versailles, Wooldridge imagines the historians’ future verdict on how we dealt with the current pandemic. They will see it as “a temporary crisis that involved a weird combination of admirable collectivism and irritating restrictions on personal freedom.” He acknowledges the debt incurred to respond to the pandemic will mean a new regime of austerity for everyone.

But he also imagines that average citizens will then gleefully return to their routine of being obedient consumers and refrain from asking why governments couldn’t start making the collective investments required to look after, and even anticipate, their needs, rather than waiting for crises to occur that drive entire societies into panic, only to saddle them with new layers of debt and subservience.

Wooldridge dismisses by name Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein and Grace Blakeley — thinkers who have begun wondering whether, after all that has happened, any rational being could uncritically countenance an unthinking return to the kind of laissez-faire normalcy he imagines the sacred cause of liberalism requires. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that it isn’t just the nuts and bolts of the economy that will be different when the crisis is over, but the perceptions and mindsets of entire populations.

[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Coronavirus Outbreak Puts the World’s Governments on Notice

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The motive is ideological, though they claim their strategy is fixed in science and fact. The remarkable successes witnessed in China and the vital lessons to be learned from its experience are simply being ignored. Speaking on the BBC’s Today Programme on February 28, Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, put it in more palatable terms: Being a “mature” democracy means that Britain’s government does not need to act like China’s.

Business as Usual

A point which he and many others in Britain seem to have forgotten is that in China most families have elderly relatives living with them. If the coronavirus strikes, younger people will see their parents and grandparents suffer and, in all too many cases, die. Empathy, sympathy and common humanity more than any other consideration explain China’s willingness to sacrifice economic growth rather than the old and the vulnerable.

In Britain, elderly relatives are mostly put out of sight and left out of mind. It’s hard to tell how many avoidable deaths will be needed before younger people realize that it is their own elderly relatives who are being sacrificed. But only then, I fear, will the government and its medical advisers abandon the perverse and callous pride they take in putting economy and normality first, and in avoiding the decisions and expenditure which in China have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

For now, people in the UK are being told to wash their hands frequently and for at least 20 seconds on each occasion. They are told to blow their noses into tissue and bin it. They are told not to touch their faces. They are told to stay at home if they are unwell. This will slow up the inevitable spread of the virus and buy time, though for what is unclear. Neither schools, universities nor places of work — including Parliament — will close. Trains and buses will stick to their routines. Under no circumstances will cities be closed off and their populations quarantined in their homes.

Even as the of cases grows, “the vast majority of people in this country” can and should go about their business as usual. Food supplies to the supermarkets will be maintained. The police will continue to police and the fire service will fight fires, although their priorities may change. The National Health Service will delay non-urgent care. If teachers are sick, larger classes will be permitted. If schools do have to close, it will be as a last resort and only in the event of a major epidemic, in which case grandparents — whose age puts them most at risk — will be asked to look after children who have all the while been kept in class passing the virus amongst themselves. If doctors and nurses fall by the wayside, retired colleagues and unqualified students will be recruited. People over 70 — except, presumably retired doctors, nurses and teachers — will be banned from attending large gatherings.

Younger people who volunteer to work in whatever capacity is needed to fill the gaps left in public services will have their jobs kept for them for a month. Small businesses will receive financial help. Research into the virus will be stepped up.

So confident is it, Downing Street has even overruled the Department of Health and decided not to remain part of the through which members of the European Union coordinate cross-border action to prevent, control or mitigate pandemics. At the same time, surveyed said the country was unprepared for the outbreak; just 8 of 1,618 shared the government’s optimism.

Normality at Whatever Cost

Normality is to be preserved, no matter what. People are told that the chances of any one person catching the virus are small. This may well be true for me or you, but someone will catch it. And for as long as each of us feels that the chances of infection remain small, the number of cases and deaths will mount. People are told that there will be “excess” deaths as if each death is merely a death foretold — a death moved from one accounting period to a marginally earlier one. People are told the will be less than 1%, a figure based on the expectation that there are many more people with the virus than reported.

Meanwhile, the figure given by the World Health Organization (WHO) is 3.4%, a number that is not just in China but in other major outbreaks around the world. The truth is no one will know what the death rate is until long after the outbreak has subsided. Yet the British government has already decided what “fact” it wants to put its faith in.

It is often said that only fools learn from their own experience. In Boris Johnson, we have the worst of fools. But he and his entourage — for that is what the government has become — will not even have that excuse, for they have been warned again and again about their lack of preparedness and the vacuity of their plans. “Act now, pull out all the stops, and learn from China,” cries out the .

“Negligent” and “ridiculous” is how many GPs (general practitioners, in the UK the first port of call for people who feel unwell) the government’s response. There are insufficient beds and health workers even at the best of times, and beds for the critically ill and ventilators are in even . The clown and his court are fully culpable for what is about to happen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The British Government Is About to Fail on Coronavirus appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On the opposite side, Michel Barnier, the EU chief negotiator, quickly replied by stating that “the EU will stick to its prior commitments,” indicating that the European Union will keep its intransigent stance in the coming talks, firmly rejecting the possibility of a EU-Canada style deal. Amalie de Montchalin, the , has echoed this sentiment. Each side’s entrenched stances are reminiscent of the negotiations that went into agreeing on Brexit to begin with.

As the Fog of Getting Brexit Done Begins to Settle, What’s Next for Britain?

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While it is tempting to argue which side has more of an interest in coming to a beneficial trade deal, it remains an open question as to who the stronger party is. Nevertheless, Johnson’s strong Brexit belief is an undeniable advantage over a divided Europe. Johnson can benefit from the new strategy of the radical right in Europe: abandoning an open call for EU withdrawal for gradually imposing its presence within Brussels. Barnier, be warned?

Singapore-on-the-Thames?

The EU is pointing to a comprehensive framework, with the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg having the last word in case of disputes. The UK would prefer a deal with no tariffs and quotas for trade and a set of different ad hoc agreements covering fields such as fisheries, financial issues, aviation and migration. For Johnson, CETA, the Canada-EU trade deal, is the very ideal scenario, which the EU has ruled out altogether.

In the case a deal is not reached by both sides by the end of the year, the chances of the UK adopting basic the World Trade Organization’s default rules are likely. At this moment, every consideration about the future of the UK with a no-deal Brexit is highly speculative. Considering there is little doubt that the costs of Brexit paid for by the UK are already to be around $170 billion, the price that will be paid in the future is not easy to calculate.

Some policy experts have already referred to the possibility of a tax haven, or a “Singapore-on-the-Thames” hypothesis. However, this would be expensive domestically, according to a at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development: “The negative impact of Brexit on UK competitiveness may push the UK to be even more aggressive in its tax offer. A further step in that direction would really turn the UK into a tax haven type of economy. … The mood of the people is certainly not about giving more benefits to large MNEs (Multi-National Enterprises), making it a hard move to any new government.”

The move would jeopardize the possibility of building a friendly relationship with former EU partners. However, a helping hand is coming from the radical right in Europe and its new stance of increasingly integrating itself in the EU’s institutional mechanisms. If the move succeeds, the EU may find itself increasingly friendly toward sovereigntists and radical-right parties across the continent. 

Help for Johnson

Johnson and the UK delegation will find strong support among the European radical-right parties. The EU’s inflexibility in the coming talks will provide fodder for Matteo Salvini and Marine Le Pen. Those populist leaders have openly abandoned the idea of a withdrawal from the European Union, which would also be too detrimental in electoral terms, preferring the possibility of changing the rules of the game from within. In fact, the euroskepticism of the 2010s that produced calls for a withdrawal from the EU has largely given way to a different far-right strategy: to gain influence within European structures and use them to advance its agenda.

This about-face partly reflects the interests of the electorate. Le Pen’s National Rally has stepped back from the idea of Frexit and leaving the euro bloc because “The French people have shown that they remain attached to the single currency,” according to a . Or, as Salvini, the leader of Italy’s League party, has said, “We don’t want to leave anything; we want to change the rules of the EU from the inside.”

That Frexit and Italexit have been abandoned, at least for the time being, can already be seen in the rather mild reactions by the far-right parties to Brexit at the end of January. , and Vox’s all agreed on the necessity to respect the “will of the people” and also warned the European Union not to use Brexit negotiations to punish the UK, deterring other EU member states from considering the possibility of a withdrawal.

Also, the populist Brothers of Italy, lead by , have recently been gathering important electoral support by openly supporting a positive attitude toward EU institutions that have to be “” in accordance with the will of the European people. In synthesis, all major far-right parties in Europe, with the exception of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a few others, are now cautious about using the threat of a possible withdrawal. The AfD has openly called for Germany’s , the first major German party to adopt such a policy.

While we had thought that we’d gotten over the worst of Brexit, it seems there is a lot more to come. With a tough deadline set for December this year, Boris Johnson has upped the ante, demanding the EU gets its act together and negotiates a mutually beneficial trade deal. But is it that simple? As we have shown, far-right parties and the pro-European camp are divided over a lot. The same would go for how far the bloc is willing to “punish” the UK for its decision to walk away. After all, the EU must remember the huge financial vacuum it is still grappling with since Brexit officially came into force.

Johnson too must be wary of pushing too hard, lest all those doomsday forecasts for the British economy come to pass. Moreover, all those considerations should take into account the broader picture: all the instability deriving by the COVID-19 pandemic affecting economies and financial markets, the precarious constantly teetering on the edge of a large-scale conflict, and the upcoming US presidential election.

*[The  is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Homer uses over and over again, such as “clever Odysseus” or “wise Nestor” for easy memorization. Trump is a master of repetitive catchphrases and nicknames like “crooked Hilary” or “sleepy Joe” for easy “hashtagization.”

Did You Say High Culture Was Dead?

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Even though Homer lived in times when information was transmitted only in oral form, Trump managed to become president with as little recourse to the written word as possible. More precisely, Twitter’s 240 characters were enough. But is the issue bigger than Trump and Twitter as far as mass communication is concerned today? Is the Twitter age, in fact, a post-written age? To understand the character of the written word as well as its implications, a little history could be helpful.

The Written Age

Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan and his colleagues from the Toronto School of Communication traced the transition from the “acoustic age” of Homer to the “written age” of Plato, who banned oral poets Homer and Hesiod from his “Republic.” Plato was concerned that information transmitted orally limits the acquisition of new knowledge, since for hundreds of years the pre-literate Greeks could only recite by heart the same oral epics instead of moving on to acquiring new information.

By writing down the oral Socratic dialogues and praising the eye that “radiates with intelligence,” Plato set forth a new era in the history of communication. Literacy replaced tribal memorization with private analysis and scrutiny, which would eventually become the bedrock of Western liberal democracy and way of thought. The acoustic age of the ear gave way to the written age, dominated by the eye. As McLuhan says in “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” the eye detribalized the Greek because he could now have a private “point of view” on what he merely heard from the minstrel.

A few centuries after Gutenberg, Nietzsche would say that “The German does not read aloud, does not read for the ear, but merely with his eyes: he has put his ears away in the drawer.” A few years ago, Google illustrated McLuhan’s understanding of the different epochs in the history of communication with this .

But the 20^th century brought back the ear from the drawer with radio, television and the internet. The electronic age allowed mass communication to take on an acoustic form once again. As with any technology, the aim is always facilitation, speed and ease of use and, as far as communication is concerned, there is nothing easier than the spoken word. For example, Siri and Alexa were designed for that very reason.

Paradoxically, the faster and more efficient mass communication becomes in the digital age, the closer it gets to the acoustic age of Homer. “We are marching backwards into the future,” McLuhan warned several decades before the internet. Or, as Harold Innis writes in “The Bias of Communication,” “Improvements in communication … make for increased difficulties of understanding.”

Today, the written word loses its dominance, and books are just not the dominant media of communication anymore, neither digitally nor on paper. Several show that reading is in in the West as opposed to digital and social media use. In the electronic age of fast information, the book’s status itself is reserved as a feel-good beach companion rather than the primary source of information.

The simple act of reading turns almost into an of slow reading. Books are so “slow” in the digital age that they have to be revived through and . In this new “acoustic” environment dominated by TV, podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube and Netflix, the written word has to catch up and adapt. It has to become closer to the spoken word in terms of speed and facilitation. And this brings us to Twitter, the equivalent of Siri and Alexa in the public sphere of mass communication.

Short, Inconsequential Bursts of Information

Twitter’s acoustic features are already implied in the name itself. According to its CEO Jack Dorsey, the name “a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds.” Trump is the first to he uses Twitter like a spoken word: “So when somebody says something about me, I am able to go bing, bing, bing, and I take care of it … The other way, I would never get the word out.” The US president even speaks in hashtags. The #crookedHilary hashtag became so popular that he even attempted to from Twitter and turn it into an emoji.

The hashtag is a catchphrase that has to be recognizable and memorable — a trick already used in Homer’s acoustic days. Present on all social media by now, the hashtag is like the Homeric poem: One needs to keep repeating it until it has an effect. The more widely a hashtag is used, the more influential it becomes in public discourse. Very complex issues are crammed down into a simple cluster of words and “fly” across the global cyberspace like a spoken word.

Neither nor were intended by their originators in the way we know them today. A by the think tank Bruegel found that analyzing the #Brexit hashtag was more accurate for predicting the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum than what opinion polls, betting odds and political pundits projected. Once something becomes a hashtag, it morphs into a thing of its own by the power of popular use.

And this is where sophisticated democratic debate suffers. and are less in control of political debate and are rather led by hashtags themselves, just like the Greek listeners who were fully influenced by the Homeric epics. Is technology bringing us back to Homer’s acoustic age? If so, then we would perhaps study the ancient heroes to better understand our current leaders.

*[Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly named the Bruegel think tank as Brueghel. Updated 2/18/2020 at 11 a.m. GMT.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Is Twitter Killing the Written Word? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Bridge:

A physical structure whose material reality is often less important than its symbolic value.

Contextual Note

Until January 31 of this year, there was both a tunnel linking Britain to the continent and a powerful (metaphorical) bridge called the European Union. Now the tunnel is all that connects England and Europe. Johnson’s engineers are hard at work dismantling that symbolic bridge, which may explain why Boris feels the still-united kingdom needs a new physical bridge — a symbol to replace a symbol. That the experts believe building it and keeping it functioning may prove impossible doesn’t change the fact that Boris needs it for its symbolism.

Britain’s latest prime minister, who has so often juggled with the truth, should probably take up a more serious form of juggling. His past decisions and opportunistic promises have put him in his current position. He now finds himself having to coordinate the trajectories of a number of objects that he has sent flying through the air in random directions while proclaiming to the outside world that he is in total control.

For the moment the film is in slow motion, and we can only see the initial moments. This allows today’s spectators to admire the perilous positions of the various objects and wonder how the master juggler will manage the trick of keeping the movement going without any of the objects crashing to the floor.

A still camera that could peer behind the public mask might show us that the permanent schoolboy smile of the juggler has turned to a grimace of concern. For the moment, just two months after his triumphal election, things haven’t been going quite as Boris had planned. He is discovering a sea of troubles and an ocean of concern. Europe is still unconvinced that the two parties will be able to hammer out a definitive trade deal by the end of the year, and the Europeans are willing to prolong it. And now his Atlantic strategy is up in the air.

On the European front, ever confident in his expert juggling ability, Boris has imposed an absolute cut-off date. His insistence on getting Brexit done opens the door to the great unknown. Europe be damned. Johnson has hinted that the problem will be at least partially solved by a rapidly negotiated trade agreement with his dear friend at the helm of the US, Donald Trump. Together, the two of them had hatched a plan to leave the European Union standing on the sidelines.

Alas, Boris Johnson’s soulmate relationship with The Donald has encountered a serious hurdle. Since Brexit itself was a kind of declaration of independence, Johnson was astute enough to realize that to please his electors and remain consistent with his values, he had at least to maintain the illusion of independence by showing that he could play hardball with the US, just as he has been playing hardball with Europe.

He thought he had found a symbolic way of doing that when, in the face of US objections to Britain’s buying in Chinese technology, he offered to compromise by doing only a partial deal with Trump’s archenemy, Huawei. (Actually Trump has many other archenemies, but China is clearly the archest, if only because of its size and power). 

Trump reacted immediately, feeling that Boris was pushing the symbolism too far when Johnson ignored his pleas and threats and committed to signing a modified deal with Huawei. But even reduced to a partial commitment that claimed to avoid all security risks wasn’t enough to satisfy Trump. The Donald sees China’s powerfully funded and well-organized advances in technology as a threat to the prevailing US primacy in the field. Trump insists that any friend or trading partner of his must commit to an absolute boycott.

Johnson bravely stood his ground, citing the interests of the British people and the economy. But Trump wouldn’t have it. Business Insider that “President Donald Trump reportedly vented his fury with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson during an ‘apoplectic’ phone call last week.” By countering the will of his bosom friend Donald Trump and allowing China’s telecom giant Huawei to provide 5G infrastructure for the UK, Johnson now finds himself cut off from the privileged status of being the first to do a trade deal with the US, before Europe.

So now, with no lifeline to Europe, does Johnson have to choose between Trump and Xi Jinping? The good news for Johnson and the bad news for Trump is that Germany and the rest of Europe are not only coming to Johnson’s defense but making the radical decision to openly defy Trump, something they have consistently failed to do in the past. Business Insider now informs us not only that “the German government is also preparing to rule out a ban on Huawei” but also that “Other European leaders are set to follow their lead and defy Trump after the president failed to follow-through on his threats to the UK.”

The irony should escape no one. Europe is showing its solidarity with the man who canceled the UK’s solidarity with Europe. Still, that leaves Johnson with a closed door across the Channel and now, at least for the moment, a door slammed shut across the Atlantic. At least Canada is still in the Commonwealth. 

But Johnson is aware that there is an even bigger problem in the offing: the permanence of the United Kingdom. For at least two good reasons it runs the risk of rapidly becoming disunited. Northern Ireland is in limbo. You could compare it metaphorically to the “hanging chad” in Florida’s notorious 2000 presidential election. We don’t know if Ulster belongs to Europe, Britain or both. And Scotland appears ready to declare its candidacy for European status as an independent nation as soon as the Brexit transition period ends. Johnson wants to tie Scotland and Northern Ireland together with a bridge — a UK bridge designed to function as the knot that holds the northern Celtic lands firmly attached to England.

If the specter of disunity hanging over Johnson’s head is more like a sword of Damocles than a Floridian chad, it becomes easier to explain the prime minister’s obsession with building a bridge many will be tempted to call “Johnson’s Folly.” The bridge, if it existed, would clearly have a positive economic impact on both the Scottish and Northern Irish sides in a newly united kingdom. But juggling a 22-mile bridge with the left hand and Donald Trump with the right — while Europe stands opposite taunting the juggler to his face, and Scotland cries for liberation — may end up unsettling the sense of balance and rhythm even of a star performer like Boris Johnson.

Historical Note

Bridges are great symbols. Because people perceive them not just as useful means of overcoming natural obstacles such as rivers or chasms but also as symbols of a strong connection, the misuse of bridges can lead to disastrous results. If the damage is only symbolic, most people won’t complain too directly, even if it brings about suffering, as Brexit is most likely to do. But if a bridge becomes a public symbol of the designer’s or promoter’s folly, it can destroy that person’s reputation.

In many places throughout history, there have been “bridges to nowhere,” constructions that never made sense or could not be completed. As a dedicated to these bridges informs us, “Bridges to nowhere are international monuments of failure.” Will this be the fate of Boris Johnson’s bridge?

The British have had funny takes on projects for bridges, none funnier than the maintenance project for a real bridge — the Menai bridge in Wales — mentioned in Lewis Carroll’s “.” Carroll wrote the song in “Through the Looking Glass” as a parody of William Wordsworth’s poem, “Resolution and Independence.” In it, Wordsworth describes his encounter with an impoverished leech-gatherer on a desolate moor in England’s Lake District. Struck by the miserable condition of the man, the poet asks him, “What occupation do you there pursue?”

In Carroll’s parody, the poet asks a similar question but then explains why he, like Wordsworth’s wandering poet, was so distracted by his own thoughts that he failed to pay attention to what the old man told him: 

“I heard him then, for I had just

Completed my design

To keep the Menai bridge from rust

By boiling it in wine.”

The experts appear to think that the White Knight’s solution for the maintenance of the Menai bridge is at least as realistic as Johnson’s plan to build a bridge across the Irish Sea. Though lacking in strong symbolism, Carroll’s would certainly be less expensive, unless the British were required to pay heavy duties on imported French wine.

[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Boris Johnson’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Good riddance to guests who overstay their welcome.

The UK was always demanding special exceptions to the rules. It was always attempting to smuggle its ridiculous laissez-faire ideas into continental practices. It was always boasting of its extramarital affairs with America. And, mon dieu, could it drone on at dinner about the “good old days” when the sun never set on its imperialist expanse. John Bull, indeed!

Unwelcome Guests

There’s no better example of this British bull than Nigel Farage, the man who practically engineered Brexit. What do you suppose he was doing for a living for the last two decades? Managing a Union Jack flag factory? Running a fish-and-chips shop in London? Growing turnips somewhere in the British countryside? No, the man who made a career of hating the EU served in the European Parliament non-stop since 1999.

He was  ($130,000) a year for doing the work of a termite, eating away the foundations of the house into which he’d been invited. Part of his time was also spent misspending funds, which forced the EU to dock his pay. At least when he complained of EU corruption, he could present one indisputable case to prove his point.

Farage’s departure from the European Parliament was of a piece with his undistinguished tenure as parliamentarian. “I’m hoping this begins the end of this project,” he crowed on his last day in the body as he waved his little Union Jack. “It’s a bad project, it isn’t just undemocratic, it’s anti-democratic.” Seems to me that the European Parliament was overly democratic by letting someone so obnoxious bite the hand that had fed him, year after year, for two decades.

What Will Be Left of Great Britain?

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As for the speechifying and flag-waving, the Parliament’s vice president, Mairead McGuinness, was having none of it. “If you disobey the rules, you get cut off,” she  to the misbehaving Farage. “Please sit down, resume your seats, put your flags away — you’re leaving — and take them with you.”

It’s too bad no one ever said something like that to Boris Johnson, the erstwhile prime minister of what will soon be the incredibly shrinking United Kingdom. Johnson joined Farage in misleading the British public into cutting off their own noses to spite the EU’s face. Johnson is wittier than Farage, more willing to make fun of himself and his pomposities. But he’s still a prat. In the end, the pair have turned out to be the glycerol and nitric acid of Brexit — harmless by themselves but recklessly explosive in combination.

The nitroglycerin blast won’t reach across the Channel. The European Union will survive Brexit, thank you very much. No, Brexit will turn out to be a suicide attack on the UK itself.

Goodbye Scotland?

The hardy people of Scotland didn’t want to leave the European Union. By a margin of 62% to 38%, they voted “” in the 2016 referendum. It was unanimous across all 32 council areas.

In the last UK election in December, meanwhile, the Scottish National Party (SNP)  the results, gaining 13 more seats to hold a commanding 48 of 59 Scottish seats in the British Parliament (it currently holds a majority in the Scottish Parliament as well). Labor, having failed to clearly support “remain,” dropped to a single seat.

The head of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon, is angling to hold another referendum on Scottish independence. The Johnson government is , and that the 2014 referendum — which supported remaining in the UK by a margin of 55% to 45% — was a “once in a generation” opportunity. Sturgeon could very well retort that, because of Brexit, the UK has aged a generation in the last three years.

Support for independence today in Scotland is as close as Brexit was in 2016. The latest polls put it at around 51%. But that will likely increase as the economic impact of Brexit begins to hit. Of course, Scottish independence would also be a step toward rejoining the European Union. According to the outgoing president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, there’s  about an independent Scotland applying for admission.

The enthusiasm goes both ways, since the Scottish economy depends a great deal on Europe. In 2018, Scottish exports to the EU  to reach £16 billion. That’s less than a third of what goes to the rest of the UK, but it’s still a significant amount. Moreover, because of a , Scotland has relied on EU nationals to staff the tourism and service sectors. As a sign of their europhilia, the Scots  last week to keep the EU flag flying outside their devolved parliament in Edinburgh. Take that, Nigel Farage!

Goodbye Northern Ireland?

Northern Ireland also wanted to stay in the EU — not quite so much as Scotland, but still by a  of 56% to 44% in the 2016 referendum.

Brexit could have the most calamitous impact on the peace that has held between unionists and republicans in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement that effectively ended the war between these two communities also softened the border between the two parts of Ireland through demilitarization and increased cross-border exchanges.

Ever since, it’s been a delicate balance between the north and the south, and between Northern Ireland and the UK. But at least everyone was part of the EU. Not anymore. Since the Republic of Ireland remains part of the EU, a special arrangement has been made to keep Northern Ireland part of Europe’s customs union. But that will push the boundary between the UK and Ireland into the sea and also require all sorts of paperwork for the trade that passes between the two.

The unionists are upset that their link to the UK has been weakened. The republicans are angry that they’re no longer part of the EU alongside the Republic of Ireland. The various paramilitaries associated with these communities , though it’s unlikely that Brexit by itself will reignite the conflict.

But the long-held dream of republicans in Northern Ireland — unification with the south — is now back on the table. And that might push the unionists up against the wall. Many are furious at Boris Johnson’s betrayal of Northern Ireland at the EU negotiating table and might probably view unification with the south as a detour back into the EU. But other unionists might be willing to go to any length to prevent that scenario.

As Nick Laird  in The New York Review of Books: “The old binary national and religious distinctions would be complicated with economic questions, and questions about whether the Northern Irish want to be yoked to insular self-defeating Little Englanders who couldn’t care less about them, or to the largest single market in the world, which, for whatever its faults, was founded on the postwar ideals of peace and fraternity and prosperity.”

Of course, the longer Northern Ireland debates this question, the more the question might answer itself. “The demographics of Northern Ireland have been steadily shifting,”  James Angelos in The New York Times. “Within the decade, a majority of its people will be Catholic, making the prospect of a united Ireland seem almost inevitable.”

Goodbye Prosperity?

First off, even though the UK is now officially out of the EU as of January 31, no one knows what the economic impact will be because of the one-year grace period before any of the consequences of withdrawal begin to kick in.

The UK has dodged the bullet of a no-deal exit, which would have been truly catastrophic. But during this transition period, it now faces a second bullet. Johnson is threatening a no- free-trade exit as part of his negotiations with the EU, refusing to accept European rules and regulations in exchange for privileged access to the EU market.

Even if the two sides narrow their differences, the UK will be hard hit by losing the benefits of membership. The Brexiteers have been counting on a trade deal with the United States to take up the slack. Given how vindictive and unpredictable Donald Trump can be on trade issues, that’s an especially poor horse to bet on.

According to researchers at the London School of Economics, Britons  of 6.4% in per capita income. Whatever the UK saves in its payments to the EU — about  — will be more than offset by the cost of divorce, . The UK will lose out not only on the import and export side. UK businesses won’t be able to bid on public contracts in EU member states. The UK will have to forgo R&D resources from Brussels. Young Britons won’t be able to find work so easily on the continent.

Brexit optimists point to a couple of strong indicators in the current British economy, such as low unemployment, low inflation and accelerated wage growth. See, they say, the gloom-and-doomers are wrong. But this last year has been the worst non-recession growth year in the UK since World War II.

The economic shock delivered by the initial Brexit vote in 2016  out of the British pockets that they might have ordinarily had if the vote had gone in the “remain” direction. Financial services and other businesses have  in assets to other European cities. Foreign investors who might have set up factories in England as a way to access the European market, like Honda and Nissan, are looking elsewhere. Last year, the rate of investment into the UK  to the lowest in six years.

Johnson is hoping that he can remake England into a low-wage, low-regulation alternative to the European Union, a “” Singapore? Hah, the UK should be so lucky. It will be more like Louisiana, which has also pursued a “low road” approach to competing for investment. Despite being a haven for oil and chemical companies, Louisiana is one of the two  in the country and comes in  of most environmentally friendly states.

The Holy Grail

The Holy Grail of the Brexiteers is not just leaving the EU but also destroying the institution, as Farage so indelicately put it. Even here, though Brexit has proven self-defeating.

The British experience of withdrawal has served as  to the rest of Europe. No other exits are on the horizon. Brexit has revealed just how beneficial EU membership is — and also the exorbitant cost of divorce.

The far right remains euroskeptical. It has also grown more powerful politically since 2016 and has more representation in the European Parliament. This access, however, has changed the political calculus. Now the euroskeptics are looking at how to change the EU from within, which is frankly a more dangerous prospect.

But that’s a European debate, which no longer will include the British. The UK is pursuing a different Holy Grail: success outside the European Union. And how likely is that prospect?

To understand the UK’s current predicament, let’s go back to the scene involving the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

The Black Knight stands before a bridge to block King Arthur from crossing. Undeterred, Arthur promptly cuts off the Black Knight’s left arm.

“’Tis but a scratch,” the Black Knight says, brandishing the sword with his other arm.

Arthur promptly cuts off this arm as well.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” says the Black Knight.

Arthur cuts off first one leg and then the other.

“All right,” says what remains of the Black Knight, “let’s call it a draw.”

That’s England, limbless after its battle with the EU. Goodbye Scotland, Northern Ireland and general prosperity. Brexit has left the UK with barely a leg to stand on. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson might call that a victory. Other Brexiteers might gamely declare it a draw. Everyone else will see it much more clearly: as a veritable rout.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Brexit Is a Suicide Attack on the UK Itself appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Today, the far right faces a watershed year. After the 2019 European Parliament elections, the European far-right bloc has doubled in size, and Boris Johnson has finally extricated the UK from the European Union — a dream of the far right for some time. On the other hand, Trump heads into an election year amid his own impeachment trial.

The success of the Brexit referendum and Trump’s long-shot presidential bid in 2016 signaled a global turn to the right. Will 2020 deliver a different verdict?

Responding to Impeachment

The news of Donald Trump’s impeachment spread across the world in the hours after the historic House vote in mid-December in favor of impeachment. However, world leaders and high-profile politicians generally reserved judgment on the event. “World reaction muted to nonexistent” was the in USA Today. Some responses were general, as when China’s The Global Times took the opportunity of the impeachment to point out the growing “flaws of Western-style democracy.”

Two major exceptions to the lack of reaction from politicians worldwide were Russian President Vladimir Putin and Italy’s leader of the far-right League party, Matteo Salvini. Both expressed strong support for Trump, predicting that he would not only survive the proceedings, but even benefit from the impeachment in terms of electoral support. Both Putin and Salvini condemned the Democratic Party for trying to reverse the will of the people outside the ballot box. The Russian president, during his annual press conference, stated that the Democrats were simply trying to reverse their 2016 loss by “.”

Salvini’s League is leading the polls with 31% support. He not only expressed support for Trump, but Indeed, Salvini may also face legal proceedings in 2020 for having blocked a refugee transport from docking at an Italian harbor last year. As with Trump’s impeachment, the Italian senate will decide whether the proceedings will take place or not.

Other Trump allies around the world have been notably quiet. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, overwhelmed by his own corruption scandal, was careful to put distance between Israel and the United States over Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, hit by the threat of US trade sanctions, has also not come out strongly in support of Trump in this hour of need. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined Trump at the White House in November and appeared before journalists just as the impeachment hearings were getting started in the House. It was a sign of support for Trump, certainly, but otherwise Erdogan has been quiet about the political challenges the US president faces.

With the exception of Israel and the Philippines, where he remains popular, Trump has very low favorability ratings around the world. Based on conducted in 32 countries last year, only 29% of people have confidence in the US president. Even in countries with right-wing leadership, like the UK and Hungary, Trump’s numbers are in the low 30s. No doubt that helps explain why Boris Johnson took pains to ask Trump not to “interfere” in the UK elections at the end of last year.

Trump’s erratic policies, his tendency to slap trade sanctions even on close allies, and his mercurial temperament also help explain why the coterie of right-wing and populist leaders around the world are adopting a wait-and-see approach to Trump’s political future.

Brexit and the European Far Right

In Europe, the reactions of far-right parties to Brexit were similarly low-key and revolved around two messages: respect the popular vote and avoid painful negotiations. In particular, , and Vox’s all agreed on the necessity to respect the “will of the people” and also warned the European Union not to use painful Brexit negotiations to punish the UK and deter other member states from contemplating withdrawal.

Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel, leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), expressed similar sentiments. However, the AfD has called for a , the first major German party to adopt such a policy. Indeed, the major far-right parties in Europe, with the exception of AfD and a few others, are very cautious about threatening a possible withdrawal from the European Union. Even Spain’s Vox, which captured around 15% of the vote in last year’s election, is not enthusiastic about a “Spaxit,” even though an EU court ruling in favor of parliamentary immunity for jailed Catalan separatist leaders has to support EU withdrawal in response.

The euroskepticism of the 2010s that produced calls for a withdrawal from the EU has largely given way to a different far-right strategy: to gain influence within European structures and use them to advance its agenda.

Partly this about-face reflects the interests of the electorate. The National Rally has stepped back from the idea of “Frexit” and leaving the euro bloc because “The French people have shown that they remain attached to the single currency,” . Or, as Salvini has said, “We don’t want to leave anything; we want to change the rules of the EU from the inside.” The country where sentiment to leave the EU is highest is the Czech Republic, and it only hits 34%.

The other part of the story is the growing far-right representation in the European Parliament, the coordination of far-right parties in the European space, and the influence of far-right NGOs like CitizenGo. The UK has always been something of an outlier in the European Union — joining late and negotiating multiple exceptions to EU rules. It looks as if Brexit will be an outlier as well.

What’s Next?

In 2017, given the victories of Trump and Brexit the year before, Geert Wilder was justified in his optimism about the future of the far right. In the next few years, he could point to other reasons to be cheerful: the win for Bolsonaro in Brazil, the reelection of Narendra Modi in India, the success of the far right in the Hungarian and Polish parliamentary elections, the electoral surges of Vox in Spain and AfD in Germany.

The situation in 2020 is not so clear. Scandals have overwhelmed key leaders like Netanyahu, Bolsonaro and Trump himself. The far right’s participation in the Austrian coalition government came to an end as a result of another corruption scandal. Despite much media exposure, the efforts of Steve Bannon, Trump’s ideological adviser, to build a “Nationalist International” have not borne fruit.

Much depends on two factors: the results of the Brexit negotiations and the outcome of the 2020 US election. If Britain suffers economically as a result of withdrawal from the EU, the backlash against Johnson and his populist politics will be significant. And if Donald Trump loses in November — in the Electoral College as well as in the popular vote — it will send a strong message that his brand of illiberal, xenophobic populism lacks enduring appeal.

The triumphalism of the far right and its claims of an inevitable march away from liberalism will suffer a major blow. However, the cautious approach by far-right parties worldwide to Trump’s impeachment and Brexit may well signal that those political actors are now adopting long-term strategies to gain power. Their long-term strategy is shifting to a slower infiltration of democratic institutions both at the national that supranational level.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Will 2020 Be Another Victory Year for Trump and Brexit? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On Sunday, Kobe Bryant’s helicopter pilot promised to get to the group’s destination on time for a 12 p.m. girls’ basketball game. They encountered thick fog and, minutes before reaching their destination, nine people perished. The British people hope that their new pilot — who has made the conscious choice of flying his vehicle into the fog of historical uncertainty to meet a deadline of his own creation — will have more luck.

A week that began with Kobe Bryant’s demise continued with the long-delayed, but suddenly accelerated announcement of US president Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” for the Middle East. What most people noticed upon discovering its contents was that its terms, requirements and recommendations demonstrated that its authors hadn’t the foggiest notion of the history and culture of the region, to say nothing of their disregard of the authority of international law.

With the aim of correcting the errors of the past and replacing the fog of war with what they believed was the sunshine of peace and prosperity, the readings of all the political meters tell us that the Trump team is headed for a crash that resembles a diplomatic remake of “Black Hawk Down.”

The week will draw to a close at midnight on Friday, January 31, with the Brexit helicopter finally taking off to hover for the next 11 months over an agitated sea of hoped-for transition while crossing across a multitude of fogbanks during that time.

Euronews : “Johnson has made clear he wants to reach a long-term deal with the EU as quickly as possible, but EU negotiators have warned that the deadline is unrealistic.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Unrealistic:

The ideal quality of a political program that will excite a populist politician’s base long before the obvious consequences of the program or policy can become apparent.

Contextual Note

Americans experienced the Battle of Mogadishu and the downing of two military helicopters in 1993 as a humiliation for the government and its policies. But America being the nation where there’s always a silver lining or a light at the end of the tunnel, it was also as a moment in which individual American heroism could emerge in a form that Hollywood could successfully exploit less than a decade later, reviving Americans’ faith in individual courage and valor.

The war and chaos of Somalia continues to this day, along with US military presence. As a matter of ideological principle, the US refuses to abandon what it considers a theater of the war on terror, but despite its technology, sheer fire power and resolve, the US hasn’t been able to provide even a glimmer of stability. Not one of the four presidents since that battle has found a way of dealing with the contradictions of the region. The fog of voluntary misunderstanding is too thick.

In a published by the Harvard Business Review referencing the film, Thomas W. Britt cites the work of researchers who “studied these soldiers to understand the psychological impact of working in a situation where the mission is unclear and success a remote possibility. Their studies reveal that the soldiers didn’t find the threat of battle hardest to endure. What they found so discouraging was that they couldn’t do the job they were trained to do.”

As the battle to resolve Brexit begins, should this serve as a warning to Boris Johnson? How clear is Boris about his mission? Is success more than a remote possibility? Did he even have a mission other than that of finding and exploiting a theme that would propel him to 10 Downing Street? His electoral slogan before the December elections was “Get Brexit done.” With no visibility about what “done” might mean, navigating in the fog of his own desire to leave his mark on history, Johnson reduced his policy to simply defining two deadlines: the first, an artificially imposed date at which, like George W. Bush in 2003, he might unfurl his banner and announce that his mission was accomplished.

That first date is today, January 31. It arrived all by itself, no effort required. The clocks are working. The hours and minutes have been ticking off, even if Big Ben has — for reasons unrelated to Brexit — . At midnight Brussels time, Johnson can savor victory.

The second date is December 31, 2020. The UK prime minister has ensured that there can be no turning back, that everything must be accomplished by that date. The helicopter is on its way and the basketball game will start at the planned time. It’s time to hurry, even if the weather isn’t that great.

Many commentators have seen the hoped-for success of Brexit, at best, as only a remote possibility. And that’s only supposing there aren’t too many fog warnings along the way. Worse, nobody has an idea of what success might look like in geopolitical terms. How will people in the UK and abroad see Britain’s place in the world? Johnson seemed to be counting on Trump, whose electoral success, and to some extent his personality, he tried to imitate. But the fog of political uncertainty has become so thick in Washington that if Trump survives the current impeachment drama, polls indicate he could easily lose this year’s election. Unmoored from Europe, uncertain of how to tighten the UK’s relationship with the US, what is Johnson’s vision? 

Like the soldiers of “Black Hawk Down,” the non-political actors of the British economy will be brave and courageous. But if they don’t know where they stand in the global economy and power network, will they be able to accomplish a mission they no longer understand? It isn’t a question of cowardice or confusion. It’s a question of getting a sense of where this is all leading.

What about Dominic Cummings’ proposed massive of the civil service? Will the UK find its entire government and social infrastructure in a situation where the people who make the system work feel that, like the soldiers cited in the study mentioned above, they can’t “do the job they were trained to do?”

Historical Note

Boris Johnson can celebrate this fateful day simply because it has officially arrived. In practical terms, nothing has changed. Everything remains to be defined, from borders and customs procedures to the fine details of a multitude of laws and regulations. The fog of contrary intentions and uncharted negotiations will be thickening over the next 11 months.

But like the Trump-Kushner’s team’s approach to the “deal of the century” in the Middle East, Johnson appears to believe that deep problems of identity and community that govern people’s lives and spirits can be solved by imagining cleverly calculated trade-offs focused on the self-interest of the negotiators and the supposed competence of the technocrats.

When a military strategist looks at the map of the terrain, everything is clear except the real conditions on the ground. In the case of Brexit as of February 1, there isn’t even a map. When the troops set foot on the ground, they discover that they have to deal with the wind, rain or sweltering heat, all of which makes the experience seem far less rational than the theoretical strategy and tactics formulated beforehand. Even more significantly, they begin to realize that they also have to deal with the fog of their own misunderstanding and sheer ignorance of a situation they’ve never been in on a terrain they’ve never seen. 

Boris claims to be a student of history and has even authored historical books. Apart from his adulation of Winston Churchill, has he seriously reflected on the events of the 20^th century?  The (ongoing) chain of continually tragic events that are the consequences of Britain’s most monumentally influential initiative of the past century, the 1917 Balfour Declaration — a doomed exercise in map drawing — should have taught Boris that you need more than a map in your head or even on paper to make politics work.

Today’s date, January 31, is purely symbolic. December 31 represents a true challenge. Reaching the divorce agreement with Europe won’t be easy. The Europeans believe it’s a goal impossible to achieve by the end of the year. But the map that shows where the UK sits in the global community after that date has yet to be drawn up. The border passing through the Irish Sea was a clever invention, but even that will be fraught with new unforeseen consequences. Will the UK itself remain intact? Nobody knows.

The fog that is already setting in that will make even the perception of the details to be included in the future Brexit map a daunting challenge. They must become visible through the steaming vapor before the map can be drawn. Navigating Britain’s ship of state — or the helicopter of state, in its modern version — is likely to prove an impossible task. Go Boris! Now’s your chance. Get it done! And the fog be damned!

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post As the Fog of Getting Brexit Done Begins to Settle, What’s Next for Britain? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Every four years, the US holds its presidential election, which is always considered of monumental importance, but never so much as in 2020. Unlike 2016, when everyone anticipated the election of a “more-of-the-same” candidate in the person of Hillary Clinton, this year the US presidential election is built around the agonizing suspense associated with sitting US President Donald Trump’s life, image and character. The election has existential implications for the Democratic Party and, depending on the outcome, potentially on the Republican Party as well. To say nothing of American democracy itself.

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If the suspense wasn’t already intense enough, the end of 2019 saw the official launch and successful first stage of Trump’s impeachment. More like a comic interlude than high drama, the impeachment process has significantly complicated the electoral logic that pundits have so much fun playing with.

In the UK, the never-ending Brexit drama may actually be ending… or rather starting. It had already kept people entertained for the best part of three and a half years by its utterance inconsequence. By 2019, this had led to a meltdown of the Conservative Party until it was miraculously revived by the least likely person, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

At the end of last year, the world learned not only that Johnson now held all the reins of power, but that Brexit was actually going to happen. Dates were announced, but what Brexit would look and feel like for the people and the economy was less certain than earlier in 2019 when everyone across the political spectrum teamed up to prevent any decision from being made.

Those two issues alone — the US presidency and Brexit — meant that both North America and all of Europe were ensconced in a guessing game about the possible shape of their future.

Alongside those two high-profile dramas, there was the ever-shifting trade war between the world’s two richest economies, the US and China. Its outcome will directly affect nearly 2 billion people and indirectly touch the entire globe. Will one man’s tweets determine the fate of the global economy? That question alone describes a state of prolonged suspense that people have amazingly learned to live with. And the fact that we accept that suspense tells us what kind of watershed in history we have now reached.

And there was India, after an election confirmed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stranglehold over the institutions of a nation with a population nearly the size of China’s. India is already teetering on the brink of a populist civil war under the leadership of a prime minister who is sure of his power and less and less concerned with hiding his proto-fascist proclivities. Many smaller nations have been undergoing similar trends, one of the larger ones being Brazil under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.

In the background, the human race — especially its younger generations now championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (youngish) and Greta Thunberg (youngest) — struggles with the continued incapacity of governments and other institutions of authority to deal with the ever more obvious effects of climate change. The imminent disaster is gathering momentum in the face of a universal refusal on the part of governments to act in any significant way.

Then, as the year 2020 opened for business following New Year’s celebrations, President Trump, while playing golf in Florida, made the monumental decision to throw the entire Middle East off balance by assassinating popular Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi militia leader. Since that event on January 3, everyone has been left wondering what this means for the “forever wars” that Trump promised to end. Are they ending, gaining speed, simply “refueling” or turning into something altogether different? Everyone agrees that there will be a significant impact. But what will it be?

The Guardian that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani “said Washington did not realise what a great mistake it had made” and that “US citizens would be feeling the impact for years to come.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Feeling the impact:

Living in fear of undefined forces due to the impossibility of anticipating what decisions dominant political institutions may make at any given moment

Contextual note

Ever since George W. Bush’s declaration of the “war on terror” in 2001, geopolitics has become a game of impact-creating events — in other words, a war not “on terror” but “of terror.” Before Rouhani could speak about US citizens “feeling the impact,” Iranians had acquired the habit of of US sanctions and threats, as the BBC reported in 2018. But that had already been the case for the Iraqi people following the first Gulf War in 1990. The UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq in the deaths of 500,000 children. The methodology of terror had already been tried and tested.

General Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike. Blanketing the skies of numerous countries across Asia and Africa with potentially murderous drones has become the principal means of terrorizing entire populations in the name of the “self-defense of American lives,” as explained and justified by specialized in national security issues.

The people who live in zones where US military drones are constantly flying overhead live in a permanent state of “feeling the impact.” In other words, terror has literally replaced every traditional form of diplomacy. And now the Iranians appear to be saying to Americans in the Middle East: It’s your turn to get used to it.

Historical note

The real drama we see unfolding today concerns the perception people have of how the political history we are living through is constructed. In the West, governments and the political cultures they produced have, since the end of World War II, consistently sought to manage historical processes. That is how they reassure their own populations. They regard the conflicts and crises that will always emerge as tests of their ability to control sequences of events. 

In the past 30 years, those means have increasingly come to resemble strategies of terror. Whether it’s sanctions, threats of reprisals (as a response to the most recent reprisal from the other side) or drone warfare, the aim is to inspire in their adversaries a terrified sense of helplessness. Justifying the Soleimani assassination, former US vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman spelled out the according to his lights: “[H]is death will diminish the chances of a wider conflict because the demonstration of our willingness to kill him will give Iranian leaders (and probably others like Kim Jong Un) much to fear.” It’s reassuring to know that fear of sudden assassination will keep us safe. That isn’t what history tells us, but it is Lieberman.

Rule by fear has even come to seem like a way of life, a feature of everyone’s landscape, not just political leaders, who in fact are the least vulnerable. For a lot of people in a lot of troubled nations, terror and suspicion have become something certain, something they can count on experiencing on a regular basis. But with the advent of Donald Trump — a man who might at any given moment reach for his iPhone to tweet something incoherent or launch a nuclear war — the uncertainty principle that rules the world has become exponentially magnified. 

The only honest way to characterize our focused 2020 vision of history and its processes is as a monumental blur. It’s no longer a question of guessing who will win an ongoing war (nobody) or an ideological dispute (ideology has been replaced by profit), or even who will gain or lose an advantage in conflicts that just keep plodding on. The stable state version of the geopolitical universe, in which things would just carry on, has given way to a big bang view of history, one of implosion rather than explosion.

What’s different is that now it is no longer a question of understanding how any group of people — whether it’s a nation, region, ideology or religion — will find a way of muddling through and eventually taking control. Every existing political and cultural foundation (and, first of all, the very notion of democracy) finds itself in a state of existential threat or dire uncertainty. But whereas in the past people saw revolution as the means of restoring stability, even that perspective has disappeared.

The news we watch on television will still be about the effort we make to maintain continuity in the face of adversity, especially within the consumer society where there’s still plenty to consume, at least until the atmosphere itself takes its revenge. But even that continuity of unbridled consumption (increasingly of opioids) has never looked quite as precarious as it does today. In reality, it barely exists. Only hyperreality keeps the illusion alive.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Living in a World Where Everyone Is Invited to Feel the Impact appeared first on 51�Թ�.

360° Context: Britain Faces a Historic Election

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Throughout the election campaign, even pessimists had clung to the hope of an opposition coalition emerging from a hung Parliament. But the likely coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, were decimated, and Labour lost strongholds in northern England it had held for decades. The “red wall” in working-class constituency after constituency crumbled like chalk dust. The vaunted socialist and blue-collar consciousness of middle-class North London found itself dramatically out of touch with a national working class with no sense of historical romanticism.

The Questions to Ask

So, the first question is: What will happen to an abjectly defeated Labour Party? This is particularly pertinent in the event of a two-term Johnson administration looming ahead. Which Labour Party will emerge after another decade in opposition? That will mean 19 years outside of government. Whoever replaces Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may well no longer be in charge 10 years from now, so all the recriminations and power plays in the party today may be meaningless.

The second question is: What kind of relationship will Britain have with a European Union it has formally left? Not that leaving will be as abrupt as Brexit cheerleaders might imagine. There is still an 11-month transition period in which a trade deal has to be finalized — and it may well take, bravado notwithstanding, much longer. But from the end of January 2020, the UK will no longer have a seat at the high European table, and the EU will be weakened as a bloc in the face of the American and Chinese superpowers.

But if the EU is weakened, how will Britain alone face up to the US and China? If it marries itself to the US, will there be a bride price that will seriously weaken the independence of British institutions? There is much concern about the US “buying into” the National Health Service (NHS) and the rising cost of drugs. But if the future is a Sino-American trade war and power struggle, will Britain — with much Chinese penetration already in its economy — be a pawn in US hands?

The third question is precisely to do with Britain versus any other identity. As the United Kingdom, Great Britain is part of a union with Northern Ireland. As Great Britain, England is in a union with Scotland. Throughout the Brexit negotiations to leave the EU, there were serious Irish and Northern Irish concerns. Yet the first major schismatic fault-line would seem to lie with the Scots — the Scottish National Party swept the polls north of the border on December 12 — seeking another referendum for independence.

A legal vote on Scottish independence can only be sanctioned in Westminster, not in Edinburgh. The Scots will be mulling, nevertheless, a Catalonian-style unilateral referendum and using it as moral leverage in difficult and likely protracted discussions and confrontations with Westminster. The one thing Prime Minister Johnson is unlikely to have is any guaranteed unity in the British project.

So, those are the questions no pundit can immediately answer. All of them point to difficult choices and perilous negotiations. Only if all three areas prove disastrous for Johnson would the Labour Party have much chance to stake a real claim to power after his first term. But what are the Labour Party’s postures and policies on all three issues?

The Future of Labour

The first is to do with a power struggle within Labour, with any outcome not guaranteed to indicate the shape and direction of the party 10 years from now. But a Corbynista party under new leadership would have to distance itself, if not in terms of policy, then in terms of style from the defeated grand old man of the left.

The policy itself, however, bears thought. Not everything can be solved by public ownership and intervention. The move away from one-dimensionality is unavoidable for any more youthful leadership. And it can’t be North London appearing to speak for (and “educate”) the “unwashed” northern masses. The move to the left under Corbyn appeared far too much like a Leninist vanguard party project, in which the working class would be led to its apotheosis as satisfied producers under wise leadership. It was elitist and condescending, but it represented a trenchant vocabulary and conception.

If Labour turns back to the center, however, in what way can this avoid identification with former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s New Labour years? This essentially means there can be no traditional left in a Labour future, and there can be no modern centrism that smacks of Blair. So, what is there left for Labour?

Post-Brexit Relations

As for the UK’s relationship with the EU, that requires punditry amidst terrains of unknowns. The world is in the middle of trade wars that might yet see the UK cling closer to the EU in ways unforeseen in the election campaign.

As food prices rise, European common agricultural policy subsidies are withdrawn, and new food suppliers cannot be found — or found only with great transport costs — the UK agricultural sector looks set to be decimated. New tariff barriers, unless successfully negotiated downward over the next 11 months, would raise the prices on almost all imported commodities in a land with declining manufacturing capacities, alongside agriculture that cannot survive without subsidies.

But to have a “Brexit in name only” would mean a repudiation of a sentiment that was stirred into existence. This did not exist before then-Prime Minister David Cameron’s referendum on EU membership in 2016. Brexit became the bogeyman for all real and imagined dissatisfactions. It was chiefly attractive because it said someone else was to blame, and that someone else was the European Union. That all parties in Westminster were out of touch with the masses and that the referendum result was a slap in the face of elite rule is belied by the huge majority that Johnson has now received.

The European bogeyman label has stuck. But the prime minister must now contrive a relationship that seems distant while struggling to stay close enough to minimize economic shocks.

As for the Labour Party, the time to have fought Brexit hard was during the 2016 referendum. Corbyn was so lukewarm and lackluster at the time that it seemed only a personal conviction toward leaving the EU could explain his continuation of such equivocal lukewarmness toward the European project throughout the administrations of Theresa May and Boris Johnson. If Corbyn betrayed an essential little Englander sense of being on the left — without any outreach to a pan-European working class at all — then he must take the blame at least for being a poor leader of the opposition. He scarcely opposed the government at all in its flagship policy.

The (Dis)United Kingdom

The third issue is whether there will still be a United Kingdom in the years to come. That is perhaps the great historical question. But the union has never been so imperiled. Scottish rhetoric is one thing, but it seems a genuine Scottish nationalism has been stirred from the Cameron years till this day.

In 2014, Prime Minister Cameron only won his referendum on Scottish independence with the help of Labour Party dignitaries like Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. There is no one left in Corbyn’s Labour Party who can reach out to the Scots. Labour and the Conservative Party were thrashed in the general election results for Scotland.

This third question is an open one, with perhaps a longer timeframe for a final outcome than even the difficult resolutions required for the first two. But it is not a question that will fade away — or even fade very much.

So, this is a historic moment for what is now the UK. There is a sense that the country deserves a reduced sense of self. That sense of self still advertises the outcome of World War II as dependent almost entirely on British heroism — never mind the US, the Commonwealth and the Soviets sacrificing huge armies for the defeat of Nazi Germany, together with the heroism of several European underground and partisan organizations.

Yet the likelihood is that a British reduction in real terms would instead reinforce the myth of the plucky and tiny England against all foes. Such a plucky and tiny England might be the exact apotheosis of all the currents of thought, opportunism and grandstanding that have marked the country in the last decade — with perhaps some decades of rue to come, crouched behind the porous barricade of needless mythology.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post What Will Be Left of Great Britain? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom came down with chills and high fever in 2016. In the most optimistic scenario, the passage of the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union and then Donald Trump’s electoral victory some months later would inoculate the general population against an even more serious illness. Surely, once Britons got a foretaste of exiting the EU, they would come to their senses and run back into the embrace of Brussels. Likewise, Americans would experience the horror of a Trump presidency and kick him out of office after his first term (or even before).

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So far, so bad. In the UK general election on December 12, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party won a decisive victory over both the wavering Labour Party and the more EU-friendly Liberal Democrats. With his commanding parliamentary majority, Prime Minister Johnson will be able to usher the UK out of the EU, and there’s little that anyone can do to stop him.

Meanwhile, across the pond, Congress is impeaching an American president for only the third time in history. That, on the face of it, would seem to be a resolute response to the disease that is Donald Trump. But President Trump isn’t going anywhere. According to a number of indications this week, his chances of reelection in 20202 have even been improved by impeachment — or, at the very least, not adversely affected by it.

Democracy is supposed to be the political system that allows citizens to learn from their mistakes. But what happens when those mistakes are so momentous that they threaten to overwhelm the system and its vaunted self-correction mechanisms? We’ve been suffering from flu symptoms only to learn that just around the corner is the political equivalent of Ebola.

Johnson’s Folly

In the run-up to the recent UK election, Johnson couldn’t seem to stop making mistakes. He threatened to pull the UK out of the EU even without a withdrawal deal, a move so disruptive that members of his own party bolted into opposition. He invoked emergency powers over Parliament to force a vote on his Brexit proposal. He lost vote after vote in the House of Commons.

Through it all, Johnson was his usual buffoonish self, a true English eccentric who has lied and cheated his way to the top. He should have been tossed out of office simply for being an insufferable poser.

But Johnson survived because he knew three things. The Labour Party was a house divided between those who favored staying in the EU and those who wanted out. The leader of the party, Jeremy Corbyn, was deeply unpopular, even in some Labour strongholds. And the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Jo Swinson, was eager for new elections, over the objections of her senior associates,  she could climb over two unpopular parties to reach the top of the political heap.

Johnson was thus able to fall back on his only option: call an early election and hope to repopulate Parliament with his own people. True to form, he has pulled off yet another improbable win.

Labour, meanwhile, suffered an epic fail, losing some seats it had continuously occupied . Corbyn, having presided over this disaster, will be out on his ear. The Liberal Democrats lost ground in Parliament, and Swinson herself couldn’t even hold onto her seat.

Up north, the pro-EU Scottish National Party (SNP) has consolidated its control in Scotland and will be pushing as hard as possible for another referendum on independence from the UK. Johnson has a large enough parliamentary majority to prevent that from happening for the time being. But the United Kingdom may well be the first casualty of Brexit.

The EU leadership, meanwhile, is  that Britain will finally follow through on its plan. The UK has always been a pain in the EU’s butt — demanding innumerable exemptions from EU rules, refusing to join the common currency and serving as a European foothold for American-style laissez-faire capitalism. Finally, there’s an end in sight for the seemingly endless Brexit negotiations, which represented yet another example of British intransigence.

Even though the British population didn’t experience a Brexit backlash in this election, there has been a cautionary backlash within the EU itself. No other country is seriously considering to leave the union at this point. But that’s not necessarily good news. The euroskeptics who were so excited by Brexit have begun to embrace a different strategy: take over the EU. If you were lukewarm about European integration before — because of its neoliberalism, its retreat on immigration, its bureaucratic excesses — you’re going to be even less enthusiastic if the likes of Brexiteer Nigel Farage takes over.

The Brits might have second thoughts about Brexit when their economy tanks, the Conservative Party eviscerates what’s left of the British welfare state, and the removal of EU benefits (like retiring on a British pension to a sunny Mediterranean country) hits home. A future backlash is certainly possible. But crawling back into the EU will not be so easy — and that’s if the EU will have them.

Nevertheless, He Persisted

Jeff Van Drew was a Democratic congressman from New Jersey. He entered the US Congress in 2018 by flipping a district that Trump won two years earlier by five points. The New Jersey legislator positioned himself as a moderate Democrat. He was one of only two congressional Democrats to vote against moving forward with the impeachment hearings.

He hasn’t switched his position on impeachment. But he is switching parties. Despite  that he was a lifelong Democrat, Van Drew decided to become a Republican this month. It wasn’t so much the pull factor from Trump’s party as much as the push factor from the Democrats. The New York Times reported on a poll of Democratic primary voters in his New Jersey district that showed 71% of them less likely to vote for Van Drew if he continued to oppose impeachment.

Van Drew is not leading a rush to the exits. The Democrats, with enough votes to impeach in the House, are not cracking down on dissenters. And public opinion continues to favor impeachment, at least among Democratic voters ().

The problem is that a lot of politicians are calculating that impeachment is not a winning issue in heavily-Republican areas or potential swing districts. If you’re a Republican, you face a revolt among your constituents if you consider voting for impeachment. Fewer than 10% of Republican voters support impeaching the president. Plus, you risk a fatwa from Trump.

Consider the  of Elise Stefanik, a moderate congresswoman who was never gung ho about Trump’s presidential aspirations. When the impeachment hearings began, she became Trump’s attack dog on the House Intelligence Committee. In so doing, she has solidified her Republican Party voter base and gotten a big lift from the president himself. Is it disgusting? Yes, absolutely. Is it politically astute? Yes, unfortunately.

Or what about Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for president in 2016 whose looks Trump insulted on his way to the nomination? She  that Trump should be impeached. But she still might vote for him in 2020.

She’s not alone. A majority of Americans , but recent polling puts Trump ahead of all Democratic rivals on a head-to-head basis. According to a , Trump leads Joe Biden by 3%, Bernie Sanders by 5%, Elizabeth Warren by 8% and Pete Buttigieg by 10%. In September, in a , the top five Democratic hopefuls were beating Trump, with Biden up by an astounding 16%, Sanders 12%, Warren 11%, Kamala Harris 10% and Buttigieg 6%. That was only a few months ago. So, yes, there’s a backlash. But it seems to be against the Democrats, not Trump. As I wrote back in September:

“Impeachment of Trump, at this point, is both a legal and moral necessity. It’s also very likely a political trap. 

Trump relishes the role of an underdog, persecuted by the powerful. It’s what enables him to connect to a political base that, aside from his deep-pocket funders, feels disempowered by a rigged economy and a sclerotic political system. Impeachment, for this constituency, vindicates the narrative of the ‘deep state.’ 

Indeed, it suggests that the entire state is out to get Trump — which it is and should. But impeachment is the only thing that can turn the most powerful man in the world into a cornered victim and thus, for a significant number of American voters, a sympathetic character.”

It helps, of course, that the president can point to soaring economic indicators, recently announced trade deals with China and our North American neighbors, and a  included in the recent budget bill.

It’s galling that a scofflaw can remain sufficiently popular to win elections. No doubt Trump is eyeing the example of Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines who has presided over the extrajudicial killing of thousands of people and yet maintains nearly .

Trump invited Duterte to the White House and praised his deadly war on drugs. Duterte, after all, is the living proof that you can shoot people indiscriminately and still maintain your popularity. Trump, unleashed in a second term, might just try to test the applicability of that model to the US.

A Dangerous Acclimatization

There’s been more than one mass shooting a day in the United States this year: 396 as of December 16, according to the . Despite all the political handwringing and the  shift in public opinion over the last few years in favor of stricter gun control laws, federal policy has barely shifted. No assault rifle ban. No “red flag” law. No universal background check.

What has happened instead? After the mass shootings this summer, companies with names TuffyPacks reported a  in sales of bullet-proof backpacks. Parents are taking prophylactic measures that are pathetically insufficient. Mass shootings are the new normal. Suck it up and move on.

Americans have similarly adjusted to the criminal actions of the president, his violent policies at the border, his verbal abuse of virtually everyone. We haven’t bought TuffyPacks to protect ourselves from the White House. Our skins have just grown tougher.

And that’s the saddest part of all. It’s just a lot harder to generate a backlash when our backs have become accustomed to the lash.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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360° Context: Britain Faces a Historic Election

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On December 10, this author took the view that the Tories would be back in power because they seemed to have the most loyal flock. That view has been vindicated resoundingly.

The Labour Party is in complete disarray. Corbyn has been weighed, measured and found wanting. While he has promised to step down, he has failed to resign unlike his predecessors. In defeat, a full-scale civil war has broken out in the Labour Party. In the words of , the only Labour MP from Scotland, “This party must listen and this party must respond or this party will die.”

From New Labour to the Left

To be fair, Labour has problems that go beyond Corbyn. The New Labour that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown created lost its sheen with the Iraq War of 2003 and the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Both Blair and Brown were Margaret Thatcher’s political children. One of them emulated her Falklands adventure by taking the UK into intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Iraq. The other followed the Iron Lady’s “Big Bang” reforms with “” regulation of the City of London. Both Iraq and light touch ended up in disasters.

Many in the Labour Party were deeply uncomfortable with Blair’s imperial militarism and Brown’s financial capitalism. They saw both these leaders making a Faustian pact with Mephistopheles for the proverbial kiss with Helen. They were both seduced by power and reneged on principles that Labour once held dear. Once Brown lost in 2010, the old guard mounted a comeback. First, Ed Miliband beat his Blairite brother, David, to become the party leader. Then, Corbyn won the Labour leadership election in 2015, marking a major lurch to the left.

Corbyn was an unlikely leader of the Labour Party. In the Blair and Brown years, Labour had turned staunchly European. Yet it is important to remember that Labour campaigned against joining the European Economic Community (EEC) in the 1975 referendum. Thanks to the Maastricht Treaty, the EEC became the European Union in 1993. Corbyn was a part of that Labour campaign even as Thatcher and the Tories argued to join the EEC. It took to modernize Labour and turn it into a pro-European party.

Yet euroskeptic elements remained. Corbyn was one of them. Suspicions abound that he remains opposed to the EU and is a closet Brexiteer. Corbyn certainly did not campaign to “remain” in the European Union with much energy or enthusiasm in 2016. In the general election on December 12, 2019, his position on Brexit was a fudge that tried to reconcile the tension between Blairites who have sworn an oath of fealty to the EU and working-class supporters who voted for Brexit. Faced with the crystal clarity of Johnson’s message “get Brexit done,” Corbyn’s fudge melted spectacularly.

Corbyn’s authoritarian leadership style, lack of nimbleness and terrible public speaking ensured that he was not seen as prime ministerial material. Accusations of anti-Semitism dogged the Labour Party under his tenure. Corbyn’s front bench lacked both experience and talent. Even traditional Labour voters lost faith in their party’s leadership and switched sides to the once-hated Tories. Unless the Labour Party elects a charismatic leader who unifies warring factions and crafts a modern message, it will spend a decade or more in opposition.

The Rest of the Opposition

The Liberal Democrats cast off with great hopes during the election. Unfortunately, their ship has rammed into the rocks. Young leader Jo Swinson lost her own seat and promptly resigned. She lacked the intellectual ballast or silver tongue to be a match for Johnson, and her claim to be a prime ministerial candidate smacked of hubris. Swinson’s bet on opposing Brexit and reversing the result of the 2016 referendum did not cut ice with voters. The Liberal Democrats did split the vote and helped the Tories achieve victory. This led columnist to argue that the party is “ an anachronistic political spoiler” that “should disband.” On current trends, the Liberal Democrats are destined to stay in the doldrums for the next few years.

This election was also notable for the reduced relevance of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. The Conservatives no longer need the former in the House of Commons and have sucked oxygen from Farage’s mob. The DUP’s loss to unionists and republicans has long-term implications. A majority in Northern Ireland has voted for parties that favor union with Ireland, putting the unity of the UK at risk.

In fact, and numerous pundits are pontificating about the break-up of the UK. The Scottish National Party (SNP) won 48 of the 59 seats in Scotland. If Johnson has the mandate in England, Nicola Sturgeon has the backing of Scotland. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the UK was part of the EU. During the Brexit referendum, Scots voted to remain in the EU. Sturgeon is making a credible argument that Scotland “” in the UK “against its will.” She has sounded the clarion call for another independence referendum by declaring that “the will of the Scottish people cannot be ignored.” The union of England and Scotland of 1707 vintage is certainly at risk.

And the Tories?

What is not at risk is the future of the Conservative Party. The natural party of power has reinvented itself yet again. Some members of Johnson’s team are bullish about life outside the EU. They are already plotting to attract the insurance market from Hong Kong to London as the Asian metropolis suffers from incessant protests that are making business onerous if not impossible. They want London to be a Singapore-style safe haven for capital from around the world unconstrained by EU rules.

Like Singapore, they want the UK to invest in public infrastructure, state schools and the National Health Service (NHS). Apart from a supply-side boost, there is a demand-side policy too. Brexit will enable Tories to ease pressure on public services and scarce resources by curbing immigration. Dominic Cummings, the Svengali figure in Johnson’s team, is now the dominant intellectual force in British politics. After shifting politics to the right, he plans to shift economic policy to the left and steal �������dzܰ�’s clothes, leaving the opposition naked for the next election or two.

Andrew Sullivan, a former president of the Oxford Union who knew Johnson in those days, recently wrote an article on the prime minister’s . The Pied Piper has managed to “engage and co-opt rather than dismiss and demonize” the Brexit discontent. In a little-watched , Cummings spoke about the strategy the Tories followed to do so. As per Johnson’s strategist, the EU-project was “driving the growth of extremism” and Brexit will “drain the poison of a lot of political debates.” All four of Cummings’s grandparents served in World War II. For all his faults, this shadowy figure genuinely cares about schools, hospitals and the working class.

Johnson might be a cavalier but, as Sullivan observes, he can connect with people from other backgrounds. He was successful as mayor of London and won a second term in a city with a natural Labour majority. Unlike David Cameron and George Osborne, Johnson never believed in austerity and opposed “” of the poor in London. As prime minister, he is promising higher public spending and lower taxes while acting tough on crime, terrorism and immigration. In fact, Cummings and Johnson might be about to move the Tories and the UK away from its Thatcherite roots. If they do so successfully, the UK might have a good shot at staying united.

What Happens to the EU?

Make no mistake, Johnson’s emphatic victory is terrible news for the European Union. The eurozone is in trouble. It is experiencing anemic growth and high unemployment. Productivity is stubbornly refusing to rise. In fact, the contradictions of a single currency are threatening to derail the entire European project. There is a strong argument to be made that Greece and Germany should not have the same currency. They are far too different from one another. The same monetary policy for the two countries does both of them a disservice, exacerbating existing imbalances.

Even as the euro currency creates new tensions, the sovereign debt crisis is straining common bonds. The Europeans and the International Monetary Fund might have bailed out Greece with its economy a little over $300 billion. Italy with its economy of about $2 trillion and a debt-GDP ratio of is too big for anyone to bail out. German taxpayers are going to balk at the bill.

Instead of honestly tackling its financial crisis, Europe has elected to take the “” approach of prolonging payment timetables and believing in the fiction that countries like Greece or Italy will pay back their debts. Instead, Europe has been practicing “socialism for the financial sector and austerity for everyone else.” Naturally, this is causing resentment. In Italy, Matteo Salvini rose to power on the basis of public anger against Brussels.

Countries such as Poland and Hungary are also rocking the EU boat. Even in France and Germany, euroskeptic parties are on the rise. The democratic deficit in Brussels does not help. Neither does the red tape. While some European officials are outstanding, many are utterly inefficient if not corrupt. Brussels is simply too removed from Marseille or Munich and Europeans still do not feel an emotional connection with it.

If Johnson and Cummings pull off a successful Brexit, centrifugal tendencies in Europe will increase. Italy might join the UK in opting to leave the EU and so might other countries. If that happens, Johnson would be a modern-day Henry VIII. He would have taken back control from Brussels just as the portly 16-century king threw off the yoke of Rome. Brexit might seem like yet another case of British pluck, foresight and cunning.

Of course, Europeans could come together to form a closer union. A fiscal union might emerge to complement its monetary union. Structural reforms might resolve its contradictions. Yet that seems unlikely. In the short run at least, the EU will suffer.

What Happens to the US?

In the US, commentators often compare Johnson to President Donald Trump. Johnson’s victory has sent shivers down liberals and enthused conservatives. Both are drawing their own lessons.

Roger Cohen sounded the bugle in and warned that Trump could win in 2020. In a rambling piece, he called Brexit “a national tragedy” and asserted that the triumph of emotion over reason in the age of Facebook queers the pitch for the likes of Johnson and Trump. Cohen’s comparison is superficial and does Johnson a disservice. Johnson may be a lying scoundrel, but he is no Trump.

Jon Sopel of the also got in on the act. He warned Democrats against choosing Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren who might be American counterparts of Corbyn. He pointed out that Blair won a third term despite voters seeing him as “smarmy, George W. Bush’s poodle, in the pocket of big business – and a war criminal.”

Corbyn lost despite promising more money for NHS, nationalization of key industries and free broadband for everyone. The fact that working-class workers turned their backs on Labour in a class-divided society is a key lesson for Democrats. The Green New Deal and the Medicare for All plan might smack of socialism. Bigger government and higher taxes are not easy sells in Anglo-Saxon lands. In the US, socialism is a dirty word and Democrats could gift the election to Trump by flirting with it.

On , Cal Thomas argued that Johnson’s victory is similar to Thatcher’s triumph in 1979. It presages a second term for Trump just as the “Iron Lady” paved the path for Ronald Reagan. The news headlines, social media chatter and liberal outrage will be trumped by a booming economy, soaring stock markets and healthy job numbers. In 2016, the vote for Brexit was followed by a mandate for Trump.

The 2020 presidential election is some way off and these commentators might be premature in their predictions. The immediate item on the agenda for both countries is a US-UK trade deal. Johnson and Cummings plan to wrap up trade deals around the world and strengthen their hand against the EU. They will be bending their backs to get a trade deal done by next year.

They might have an ally in the White House. Trump is embroiled in impeachment proceedings. He has been a vocal supporter of Brexit and an opponent of the European project. A trade deal with the UK will take away attention from the proceedings and spite EU bigwigs. In an election year, it would make for good political theater. Waving a “great trade deal” around might bolster Trump’s image in the eyes of his supporters. Anglo-Saxon democracies have much in common and Johnson’s victory will inevitably affect politics across the pond.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Castigating those who failed to forecast and believe in Johnson’s resounding victory, Cummings complained, “All these better than average educated Remainer campaigner types who have waved around for eight weeks, for the last four months and didn’t understand what was going on and didn’t understand they were driving everyone mad.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Educated:

Politically irrelevant and incapable of understanding reality

Contextual Note

It’s true that taken literally, Cummings seems to express respect for “average” education. That may sound like a very democratic attitude, but it could also be read as an elitist way of saying that it’s easier to govern people who don’t do too much thinking. His message can be translated as: Wake up, eggheads, you live in an increasingly uneducated world, so get in line, drop your pretensions and enjoy life in the new world order where you won’t be tempted to distract the ignorant masses who can live very happily without the bother of complex thought.

According to , Cummings, who lurked in the background during the election campaign, intends to play a very active role in Johnson’s government. He will be entrusted to shape and transform the intellectual culture of the new administration. “Cummings will aim to stuff the Whitehall machine with scientists, mathematicians and ‘creators’ from the startup world in a bid to turbo-boost activity,” Politico reports. In other words, post-Brexit Britain can expect to be subjected to a seriously technocratic drift, with the aim perhaps of duplicating the success of the US military-industrial complex. “Cummings floated bringing in Cabinet ministers from outside parliament and shaping government agencies in the mold of a U.S. military research team.”

This is the traditional Pentagon to Silicon Valley model of the US military-industrial economy, built on combining military logic, technological innovation and privileged entrepreneurship into a dominating economic force that stretches its fingers across the globe. Many suspect, with good reason, that British political and economic culture is ill-adapted to that model. But when forced by Brexit to rethink everything, that may seem as good a way to go as any other.

It does seem to confirm what many predicted and others feared that once cast off from Europe, Britain will drift into US territorial waters. Whether that means a gradual or even sudden takeover of Britain’s beloved National Health Service (NHS) by American health care corporations remains to be seen. After first entertaining the prospect of a US takeover of the NHS as a condition for a comprehensive trade deal, both Johnson and Donald Trump have vehemently denied any such intention. But once negotiations begin, there is no guarantee that movement in that direction will not take place.

Historical Note

In fairness to the man and his plan, not only would Cummings never oppose the idea of education, but he champions it. Educated at the prestigious Durham School and Oxford, where he earned a first in ancient and modern history, Cummings knows the value of a traditional, humanistic education that has always served to define Britain’s elite. With his deep knowledge of history, he understands better than anyone that educating the elite is not quite the same thing as educating the masses, especially in this age of high tech.

Cummings has plenty of ideas about education. He even sees it as the key to redefining Britain’s place in the world. Politico states it in these terms: “His ultimate dream is to make Britain the ‘school of the world’ — a leading nation in education and science, in a bid to help civilization counter existential threats such as nuclear war and resource conflict.” His goal is to “‘change our economy for the better, making it more productive and fairer’ by boosting long-term productivity, science, technology and helping the regions.”

This plan aims at creating what we might call a secondary US-style elite, rather than the primary elite that will continue to be supplied by Oxford and Cambridge. These two universities (especially humanistic Oxford) have populated the political class with leaders like Cummings and his former boss, Michael Gove, who is remembered as possibly the in modern British history. Gove is also a pillar of Prime Minister Johnson’s team.

The new secondary elite that follows the American model consists of skilled workers and business-minded entrepreneurs. The educational infrastructure Cummings is promoting focuses on STEM instruction (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), which is the opposite of his own background. The new programs will serve to populate promising tech startups with up-to-date coders, while simultaneously launching brilliant entrepreneurial careers of tech-minded business people intent on bolstering the British economy, driven by the noble dream of becoming billionaires. The Oxbridge elite, with its deep understanding of history and the psychology of the masses,  will continue to sit above this secondary elite and manage the big issues of society, including government itself and investment in high tech.

In other words, Cummings’ grand vision of education, which he in 2013 (calling it “Odyssean Education”), is largely inspired by American models. This appears to reflect his obsession with applying and cashing in on recipes created in the US to run its ever-expanding military-industrial empire.

If Cummings’ influence on the Johnson government turns out to be as significant as Politico suggests, two hypotheses emerge concerning the implementation of his vision of Britain’s future contribution to history.

The first is that the UK joins the American imperium as a junior partner. Cummings has bought into US business and political culture, lock, stock and barrel. Rather than attempt to rival an immensely powerful competitor, it would make more sense to join forces, though to some extent that is already the case through NATO.

The second is that, given what most observers recognize as the decline of America’s global leadership — borne out by the very statistics Cummings seem enamored of (falling life expectancy, an opioid crisis, a growing suicide rate, student debt, permanent gun violence, rising inequality, religious fundamentalism) — Britain could once again take over its leadership of the English-speaking world and be a beacon for humanity. He may be counting on Johnson’s charisma to carry this one off. 

This may sound like plagiarism. Isn’t that the dream Steve Bannon had for Donald Trump, a certified ignoramus who, for the past three years, has had the unexpected narcissistic pleasure of seeing himself at the head of what is still the most powerful political, economic and military-political entity on earth?

Bannon has moved on to spearhead an attempt at the conquest of Europe, though this has met with ambiguous results. He dreams of pulling together an international coalition of populist, nationalist movements that logically could have included Johnson but will probably have to settle with the other Brit who made Brexit:. The Brexit Party leader contributed to Johnson’s victory in a gesture of self-sacrifice by pulling away from challenging the Tories in constituencies where they might have been weakened by splitting the pro-Brexit vote. Farage has now that he will come to the US to help Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Many have depicted Cummings as Boris Johnson’s Steve Bannon. In contrast with Bannon’s relationship with Trump, Cummings probably sees the literate, erudite Oxford-educated Johnson — author of a book on the Roman Empire and another on Winston Churchill — as providing the springboard for a new English Renaissance in which even some of the traditional working-class people will benefit from an “average” STEM education to bolster the development of a Silicon Valley-style economy for the UK.

With Johnson’s comfortable majority in Parliament, Cummings may feel he has a boulevard in front of him to achieve his plan of turning Britain into the “city upon the hill” that the US can no longer credibly claim to be. This may be (in his mind) the opportunity for Old England to take over New England’s nearly 400-year-old legendary title.

This assumes that Johnson can control his own Conservative Party’s currently silenced “remainers,” find ways of flattering the voters of �������dzܰ�’s former “red wall” in the North, manage the difficult and lengthy negotiations for a new trade agreement with the EU from a position of weakness, and find a way of defusing Scotland’s seething anger. He will also have to deal with the disturbance to the economy as soon as Brexit kicks into effect, while also finding clever ways to deflect the blame from himself.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Whether we apply these observations to Thursday’s election in Algeria or the United Kingdom, the previous paragraph accurately describes a wider moment of history that now concerns every democracy across the globe. Both of Thursday’s elections underline, in contrasting ways, the unfortunately growing meaninglessness of the ritual of democratic elections. In Algeria, a majority of the people abstained from voting. In the UK a near majority (45%) of the people abstained from any form of critical thinking, but voted anyway.

This time, 60% of Algerians qualified electors voted not to vote. Their message was clear. After decades of arbitrary rule, and nearly a year of repeated peaceful protests, they are still waiting for democracy. Not just an election, but democracy. On the same day, the UK went through a similar ritual and, in a very different way, made a similar point. The British, poised between the comically arbitrary attempt at direct democracy — the 2016 EU referendum — and the constantly exasperating and inconclusive exercise of parliamentary democracy under Prime Minister Theresa May, the public has woken up from its latest election and is left, more than ever before, wondering how democracy works and what it is even useful for.

Renunciation of Critical Thinking

While it might sound severe to claim that British voters massively abandoned critical thinking, the easily verifiable fact that the sitting prime minister who led his party to a resounding victory is someone who lives and breathes by slogans and easily detectable lies, points to a high level of either gullibility or misplaced confidence among the voters. Their capacity to place their confidence in a new form of political boldness, with brutally strong ideas but no sense of their consequences, echoes the experience of the United States for the past three years.

It literally entails the renunciation of critical thinking, or even the notion of accountability. It relies on the hope that decisions whose consequences are too complicated to think about will be made without further ado by a resolute leader, piercing the abscess of prolonged uncertainty. And while it might sound like trivial carping to call inconsequential what many have identified a “a historic election,” it’s important to remember that “inconsequential” can have two meanings. The first, “devoid of any kind of consequence,” obviously does not apply.

There will definitely be dramatic consequences stemming from Boris Johnson’s victory. Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) has made it clear that Scotland may be on the verge of a — possibly an internal cold war — with the nation of England that has decided to secede from the union (with Europe) that Scotland has voted to belong to. At the same time, Johnson appears ready to put Northern Ireland in limbo, unified economically with Europe and politically with a post-Brexit tenuously-united kingdom.

The second meaning of “inconsequential” — “incapable of resolving uncertainty” — does seem to apply, unless by some miraculous feat of persuasion Boris Johnson manages to unite, not just the kingdoms that make up the UK, but also the parties, the businesses and the nebulous middle class/working class who still have no clear idea of what It means to “leave,” even if that is their clear preference. 

In his victory speech, Johnson was adamant. Yes, leave they will. Brexit will be done. The refrain has practically turned into an echo of “.” Whether that will is the deity’s, the people’s or Johnson’s doesn’t seem to matter since — for all the charming humility of the prime minister’s joyous (once all the smashing was done) — Johnson appears to see all three as total convergent. 

Democracy’s Romance with Liars

Once upon a time, in modern civilization there existed a grand idea that wasn’t always easy to apply but always worth trying. Innovative political thinkers gave it the label — “democracy.” After surveying the damage from numerous recent elections, those same thinkers may have to admit that today the label still exists, but the grand idea seems to have been swallowed up in a whirlwind of chaotic electoral rituals and processes.

For the past three years, the British have started asking themselves some serious questions. Was the 2016 referendum an election, as Johnson and even Theresa May have assiduously asserted? They claimed that by that vote the electorate had validated a program for government summarized in a single word, “leave”? Now, with slightly more reason, Johnson seems to be proclaiming that this week’s election was a referendum. He made it clear that there will be no second referendum precisely because that is the meaning he attributes to this vote.

Just as, twice in less than 20 years, the United States has achieved an apocalyptic confusion at the core of its own democracy by denying the election of the leader the majority voted for — thanks to the antiquated and unrepresentative relic called the Electoral College — the British parliamentary system has evolved to the point of turning democracy into a highly uncertain system for founding and buttressing a government’s authority. Elections have become a vacuous popularity contest in which policies are now compressed into slogans and victory promised to the personality that best succeeds in embodying a slogan.

Until recently, the idea of democracy prevalent in the West contained two fundamental premises that most people accepted and adhered to. The first affirmed that it was a system designed to allow people to compose and orientate their governments through elections in which motivated citizens had the choice of standing as representatives of their community and the right, if not the civic duty, to vote for the brave citizens who made that choice. The second assumed that people who ran for office could be trusted with the truth and that they could be expected to demand the truth to ensure and sanction capable government.

This formulation of the ideal failed to anticipate the creation of a political class. It supposed that those who were elected retained their identity as citizens while adding to that basic political identity a specific mission of representation through their participation in the governance of the state. Abraham Lincoln called it government of the people, by the people and for the people.

The structure of the modern state in democracies has undermined that ideal to the extent that it has fostered the creation of a political elite closely connected with numerous interests that escape any form of democratic control. It means that the people are on one side, the political class in the middle, and hidden on the other side is an oligarchic class with which the political class is invited (but not obliged) to identify.

Lucid observers will notice degrees of identification with the oligarchy between different politicians. Personalities such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders seem closer to the original ideal to the extent that they appear to be less attracted to identify with the oligarchic class. There can be little doubt about the parties either a Johnson or a Trump are ready to identify with.

The modern economy has found a myriad of ways of undermining the second premise of democracy: the importance and the stability of truth. In a culture that has been conditioned by the ideology of capitalism in which every individual pursues his or her own self-interest, persuasion — originally straddling logic and rhetoric — becomes a primary rather than secondary function of transactional behavior. The exercise of persuasion then fatally evolves toward the simplicity of the slogan.

Boris Johnson’s victory speech perfectly illustrates the success of this subversion of democracy. At various points, he prompted his audience to chant his electoral slogans and concluded by wittily forcing a repetition of his all-purpose, single dominant slogan: “Get Brexit done.”

The Walrus Has Defeated the Carpenter

In the run up to the election, this author pointed to the uncanny political prescience of 19^th-century author of “Alice in Wonderland.” In his delightfully absurd poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” whether consciously or not, Lewis Carroll devised his own oblique way of describing the foreign policy of the British Empire. He also seized on the occasion to compare two stereotypes of British politicians.

Were he alive today, Carroll would have recognized in Boris Johnson as conforming to his type represented by the bombastic Walrus. Johnson even walks like a lumbering Walrus. Evoking the future glory of an independent Britain that in one sweeping motion has severed its ties to the continent and is on course to provide a new model of leadership for the world, Johnson reminds us of the Walrus’s grand vision of sweeping away all the sand from the beach, even if it meant employing seven maids with seven mops.

With Johnson camped in the role of the Walrus, Jeremy Corbyn correspondingly slipped into the part of the Carpenter, who, having heard the Walrus’s project to clear the sand, curtly expressed his doubt, about both “remain” and “leave.” The Carpenter preferred focusing on pragmatic matters such as making sure there were enough slices of bread.

The Walrus excelled at lying and hypocritically declaring his sympathy even with the oyster he was feasting on. In 21^st-century democracies — whether it’s the US, the UK, India, Brazil or Hungary — those who lie the most and the hardest tend to win elections. It’s the age of the Walrus. Johnson was a far better liar than any other candidate. He made Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage seem too hopelessly sincere and straightforward. (Farage has since declared to working for an even more powerful liar: Donald Trump).

In contrast with the ever-serious and visibly vindictive Trump, Johnson possesses a wonderfully British style of lying. Trump’s style is perfectly adapted to US culture but is clearly out of place in Britain, where he is universally despised. Conversely, Americans would not buy into Johnson’s style of lying the way they have bought into Trump’s.

Americans to call Johnson’s demeanor a “silly style,” not nearly assertive and businesslike enough for American tastes. The Brits prefer to call Johnson’s style “eccentric” and “shambolic,” even “clownish,” which — in the nation that gave the world Benny Hill, “The Goon Show” and “Monty Python” — have long been deemed not just acceptable but even endearing as the attributes of a benevolent ruling class that has a capacity for being entertaining. Observant commentators have noticed how carefully Johnson cultivates this style — it’s what permits him to lie as repetitively and brazenly as he does. People relate his lies to the forgivable shortcomings of an erudite bumbler.

The Power of Lies

Sifting through the statistics of the election, political analyst that “education is a strong predictor of changes in the Conservative and Labour vote.” He calls it “the new dividing line of British politics.” The trend in this election showed a correlation between the percentage of graduates in any constituency and votes for or against the Tories. It now appears that the higher the level of education, the more likely it is that voters will be critical of simplistic reasoning and slogan-based policymaking.

Johnson may have studied Trump’s success in the US and adapted his style and the degree of his mendacity to British demographics. Trump had his worst results along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards where education levels were higher and where the prestige of education remained a significant feature of the local culture.

But he eked out his victory, not only in rural areas where education levels are traditionally lower, but especially in the declining industrial areas where many people can no longer afford education. These less educated populations tend to be more responsive to slogans and populist rhetoric. The gutting of British industry made conditions more favorable to politicians capable of reducing their thinking to the level of oft-repeated slogans.

The current success of outright liars represents a major threat not just to democracy but to the future of even the idea of democracy. Richard Nixon resigned and Bill Clinton was impeached not over their irresponsible acts or eventual crimes, but over the fact that they lied. British politicians have traditionally feared being caught out for lying and for centuries have cultivated the art of rhetorically hedging their rhetoric to disguise their lies. Hiding and distorting the truth have always been key components of the art of political rhetoric, but outright lying has in the past been treated as shameful and disqualifying.

As Bob Dylan famously sang, though not to make the same point, “the times they are a-changin’.” Lying has now achieved the prestigious status of an effective short-term strategy. But its long-term consequences are likely to be disastrous for the survival of democracy.

Rule by Liars

Just as murder led Macbeth to the throne, lying has led Johnson to obtaining a solid majority in Parliament. And just as Macbeth underestimated the struggle with his own conscience, Johnson may well have underestimated the likely blow-back from his lies, to say nothing of the obvious complications of Brexit and a cold war with Scotland.

The conquest of power through the force of lies creates more than ideological division among the population. As this general election demonstrates, it has started pitting the more educated against the less educated. This may be a part of a longer-term trend of the dumbing-down of education itself, whose value has increasingly been focused, throughout the Western world, not on its content or its contribution to national or local culture, but to its vocational end — the prospect of getting a job.

But the damage goes further. It implicitly divides the population into those who accept lies and those who are offended by lies. Even though the latter may be a minority, a regime that thrives on lies sends the sinister message that critical thinking will be suspect because it leads to useless complications and constitutes an obstacle to social harmony. It sets the stage for ever more arbitrary styles of governance.

At a deeper level, rule by liars repositions the question of trust that has always been essential to democracy: It uncouples trust from the criterion of truth. Instead the population places its trust, as Max Weber theorized more than a century ago, in the power and determination of a charismatic personality. However shambolic and eccentric Boris Johnson may seem, and however spontaneous Trump’s form of speaking without thinking appears to be, their avid embrace of lies means that the bond of trust on which democracy relies risks being irreparably broken.

The very nearly simultaneous release by the The Washington Post of the — revealing how three administrations (Bush, Obama and Trump) have consistently lied about the costly and never-ending wars in the Middle East — provides another indication of the decline of democratic values and the eventual disappearance of the conditions in which democratic values can exist. The publication of 18 years of lies exposed for the first time to the light of day, available for anyone to read has, perhaps not surprisingly, produced in the popular media — and this as the lies continue to this day.

The voting populations of our evolved democracies have apparently learned to accept, and even expect, that their governments lie. Worse, they seem to believe that lying is such a common feature of a government’s activity that without it nothing would work.

On Thursday a majority of Algerians refused to vote because their government lies to them and refuses to listen. That same Thursday, 45% of British voters voted to offer the reins of government to a man they unquestionably know is perfectly comfortable lying to them over and over again.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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360˚ Insight: Can Anything Unite the United Kingdom?

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Representative democracy, or so political theorists have told us, is all about making compromises. Even in majoritarian systems such as the UK, politics is not supposed to be a game of “winner takes all.” Reality is — as the result of the Brexit referendum made glaringly obvious — that today there are as many voters for as there are voters against on most important issues. Politics, as Max Weber famously put it, is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards,” hardly conducive to the likes of Donald Trump or, for that matter, Boris Johnson.

Yet today, that lesson seems to have fallen to the wayside. The contemporary political landscape is characterized by extreme polarization — and not only in Britain or the US.

Unreasonable People

In its most rudimentary form, extreme polarization means that even reasonable people have nothing to say to each other. Political polarization divides families and separates close relatives who, for instance during Thanksgiving dinner, desperately avoid mentioning politics — in line with the famous “Fawlty Towers” quip, “Don’t mention the war!” — in order to avoid that dinner ending in a fist fight. Knowing, for instance, that somebody voted for Trump, more often that not has meant the end of friendships and even communication among relatives.

A number of secular developments account for today’s polarization. Not all of them are grounded in politics. In fact, most of them are not. Yet — and this is the problem — they unfortunately find their expression and release most noticeably in politics. Brexit is but one, albeit prominent, example. There is no compromise between those who consider Britain’s exit from the EU the solution to everything that has gone wrong in the country and those, like the Scots, who consider Brexit a disaster.

The same holds true for Donald Trump. He might be somewhat unhinged, and he might be competing for the honor of being the worst president in recent American history (suddenly George W. Bush doesn’t look that bad any more). But for diehard Trumpistas — and they still exist, many of them evangelicals who lack any sense of irony — “The Donald” continues to be the man of providence, like Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi a on mission from God, to snatch America’s WASP-cum-WC (C stands for Catholicism) cultural supremacy from the clutches of secular, multicultural, “liberal” perversion.

It would be convenient to attribute extreme polarization to the nefarious influence of radical right-wing populism in Western democracies. To be sure, radical right-wing populist politicians such as Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Nigel Farage and Santiago Abascal (the strongman of Spain’s VOX) have made it their political business to stoke the fire of anger, fear and resentment. In reality, however, their appeal at the polls is but a reflection/expression of secular developments that fuel polarization. In order to understand what is happening today, it might be useful to take a brief trip down memory lane.

The Second Coming

In the 1890s, American populists came together and formed a political party, which at one point had the potential to seriously threaten the two major parties. This was a period in American history characterized by enormous turmoil — economic, social, cultural. Mark Twain called it the “Gilded Age,” a moniker which entered the pages of American historiography. The age, however, was only gilded for a small minority. For most Americans at the time, the reality looked quite different.

The populists “hit the nerve of the time” when, in their , they charged that “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes — tramps and millionaires.” The analysis was a tad exaggerated. But it reflected a reality: the inexorable advance of blatant inequality across American society.

What we are witnessing today is the second coming of the Gilded Age, not only in the United States, but also in Europe. Inequality has escalated, even in countries such as Sweden, once touted as the paragon of social equality and harmony. Even in Switzerland the times have changed, with Teslas replacing Maseratis and Ferraris as the latest status symbols of the rich and famous.

Income, and particularly wealth, inequality might be the most visible cause of polarization. Yet it is certainly not the most significant one. Much more significant are regional disparities, particularly the growing gap between metropolitan cities and rural areas. In the United States, according to a report by the , by 2030, 25 cities will account for a whopping 60% of job growth, while rural areas for little more than 1%. As an recently put it, growing “regional disparities are built into the mechanisms of globalisation” leading to the “marginalisation” of a growing number of regions and increased geographical polarization in advanced capitalist countries.

Most importantly, geographical concentration has resulted is what another has characterized as the emergence of “superstar cities” — urban conglomerates such as London, Paris, Munich, New York, Mumbai and Shenzhen. What they have in common is that they are hubs of global finance, business, technology and innovation. While the top 50 superstar cities account for only 8% of the global population, they account for 45% percent of headquarters of firms with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

Payback Day

What metropolitan areas also share is a cosmopolitan outlook, an openness to the world. Here we have the second major cause of polarization — what sociologists have identified as a rapidly growing cosmopolitan/parochial cleavage. Cosmopolitans promote universal values, such as global human rights, multiculturalism and global/transborder solidarity. Against that, parochialists defend the integrity of local identity, cultural autonomy, (national) sovereignty and the “right to difference.”

Cosmopolitanism is the ethical outlook of a highly educated, highly mobile new middle class concentrated in big cities and university towns, such as London and Oxford. Hardly surprising, majorities in both cities voted against Brexit and, one would expect, against the Conservatives in yesterday’s election. Against that, “Johnson land” consists largely of what “the places that don’t matter” — Britain’s equivalent to America’s “fly-over country.”

The outcome of the December 12 election was above all owed to the electoral backlash of the by now famous “” — a symbol that stands for ordinary working-class voters, white, male, with little “cultural capital” and particularly hard hit by deindustrialization and globalization. Like their American counterparts who voted for Trump, they are desperate, without illusions and out for revenge. A couple of decades ago, Austrian political scientists coined to phrase “Wahltag ist Zahltag” — election day is payback day — in order to explain the dramatic gains of Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party in the 1990s. If there ever was a Zahltag, it was yesterday in Great Britain.

Cosmopolitanism and parochialism are not necessarily incompatible. Unfortunately, political entrepreneurs have generally found it easier to bank on one or the other rather than seeking a middle ground. The victim of this development has been the moderate center. The dismal showing by the Liberal Democrats in this election is paradigmatic. One of the central doctrines in political science used to be that elections are won in the center, a notion shattered by the election of Donald Trump.

Today, it seems elections are won on the margins, if only because in recent decades the margins have dramatically grown, particularly on the nativist right. On the margins, electoral choice is primarily driven by emotions: anxiety, anger and resentment, and by strong sentiments of revenge. Ironically, in these times, the vote is one of the few means for those who feel ignored and abandoned by the political establishment to express their rage. This explains �������dzܰ�’s dramatic losses in once safe constituencies. In the age of extreme polarization, betrayal — real or imagined — is unforgivable.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The old adage that the opposition never wins elections, but it is the government that loses them, could well apply in this instance. But it was never on the cards leading up to the UK general election. Nobody truly expected that the people of Britain would make their decisions in the way they did, electing the Conservative Party in significant numbers and putting Labour firmly in second place, now in the position of having to comprehend such a heavy defeat.

360° Context: Britain Faces a Historic Election

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Yet the Labour Party membership is bigger than ever, the manifesto was largely popular — even seen as revolutionary by some — and there was enough will against Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Tories. However, that was supplanted by the very negative campaigning against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in much of the media.

For anyone not having met the man, forming an adverse opinion of him was the only outcome. Too many people branded Corbyn as anti-Semitic, a terrorist sympathizer or a communist — and many believed this. Too many voters felt the need to “get Brexit done” and believed it was Labour standing in the way.

The Tories

On the other side, the Tories have weaponized every electioneering technique available to them. From the famous Saatchi & Saatchi advertisement boards in the 1980s that helped Margaret Thatcher secure thumping victories to today’s world of micro-targeting wavering voters in marginal seats, this has been the main strategy to swing the electorate. And as the big tech giants continue to support most political advertising unchecked, these kinds of problems will remain.

So, what happens now is the $64,000 question. After a minor cabinet reshuffle, Johnson will attempt to get Brexit done soon after Christmas. The very right wing of the party wants the UK to leave the European Union without both a withdrawal agreement and a trade deal, and the prospect of that has increased because of this election outcome. The implications of a no-deal exit have been discussed at length for months if not years, yet a very limited few remain hell-bent on the result.

With a weakened opposition, the Tories will feel galvanized, exuberant and well up for all the hardest battles to come. With a majority in Parliament, they will have the numbers to push through the Brexit deal that only they want.

The Opposition

But for any functioning democracy, the opposition is fundamentally important, and so it is absolutely right that Labour works out its failings and comes to terms with it quickly. A momentum that has been the backbone of the party’s resurgence is not going to go away.

So many people who believe in the ideas of wealth redistribution; taxing the super-rich disproportionately higher than everyone else; equality of opportunity and outcome; social care and social protection; social trust and social cohesion; community development, diversity and multiculturalism; and strong public services that are efficient and appropriate for today’s needs in a complex, interdependent economy have to stick to their guns. One possible scenario is that the minimum period of a five-year term in office could be reduced if the Tories make a complete hatchet job of Brexit and the people begin to rise up and the opposition parties get their acts together.

It is not all doom and gloom just yet. The election results suggest a bloody smack on the nose of the Labour Party, but it can heal and work out its direction again quickly enough. Without a doubt, change is required at the top and there needs to be greater clarity of messaging and content for the centrists and the party membership.

In many ways, it seemed as if there were three Labour groups that failed to work together as one party. The membership is youthful and pro-left on many fronts, but MPs are unsure of their positions and some are still tempted by Blairism, while the leadership that is relatively hard left had a bigger fight on their hands from within their own ranks.

There will be many challenges ahead. The new Conservative MPs will feel emboldened, almost drooling at the prospect of what awaits them. For the opposition parties, theirs is a need for rebirth. For the people of the country and for all who have a stake in wanting it to remain a beacon of light and hope, there is always the opportunity to make some kind of difference. It is not time to give up, but the time to reflect and then rebound. The fight is not over yet.

*[This article was cross-posted on .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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This is all too much for the London-encamped, Oxbridge-educated, pseudo-liberal intelligentsia, some of whom feel free to brandish Corbyn a threat to national security. Who the people of Britain are going to believe and follow will invariably reflect on their predilections. Let us first examine some obvious truths.

Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party

The recent furor in relation to accusations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party deserves particular scrutiny. This is not just because anti-Semitism in any of its forms is completely abhorrent, but because the question of anti-Semitism in Labour is a particular line of attack for the pro-Tory press and for those who wish to silence criticism of the dominant, neoconservative economic and political outlook.

The fact is that questions of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party have been investigated and are being dealt with. In general, issues of anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom are relatively limited, although any kind of violence or intolerance toward minority groups needs to be addressed fully. Corbyn and the Labour Party are invested in a fight against racism, intolerance and bigotry, but the details are never fully elaborated on in the media. As a result, the general perception is that anti-Semitism is rife, that it is unchecked or that it persists in spite of all the utterances against it.

This is nefarious mendacity at some level. At another, it is deeply disingenuous — an attempt to do one thing: to ensure that Corbyn never becomes prime minister. The reality of the matter is that there is far more anti-Semitism among the Tories than Labour. Left-leaning critics of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians are far more capable of separating this from the trouncing of people of the Jewish faith per se, which many on the right often do not.

Why is there is so much enmity toward the possibility of Corbyn as prime minister? Is it because of his lifelong commitment to the cruel injustices meted out against Palestinians at the behest of various Israeli governments that have been tilting further to the right? Is it because Corbyn has been a staunch anti-war campaigner, specifically in relation to the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003?

We now know that the war in Iraq was a neoconservative project based on lies and deceit at the highest levels of public office, and all in an effort to maintain control over key energy supplies in the Middle East when Saddam Hussein wanted to shift away from petrodollars and toward the euro. The unnecessary invasion of Libya in 2011 had much to do with the ambitions of Muammar Gaddafi in wanting to switch to trading the country’s vast oil reserves in a new African dinar.

Seducing Politicians

Sadly, there are large international conglomerates with interests in energy, technology and the financial sector whose ambitions are to ensure further deregulation of economic policy at home and a neoconservative foreign policy abroad. These interests seduce politicians.

Too many of today’s Westminster MPs are vacuous. Their desires to increase their net worth after their lives in politics are over is thoroughly palpable. It has a significant impact on the democratic process, with politicians looking ahead for a future career propped up by these very same international players. It is a generational corruption of the political classes. Conservatives, Blairites, Liberal Democrats and other sycophants of the new world order have fallen foul of the ambitions of wealthy and highly-organized others.

This is not to provide a conspiratorial air to the discussion here. The corruption of politics is not new to the “global north.” Oligarchic powers and the military-industrial complex dictate US politics.

In the UK, findings on the Russian oligarchic influences motivating the likes of Johnson are suppressed in case they might reveal unfortunate truths. The ambitions of the Conservative Party to introduce further deregulation of taxation policy while opening up new markets and trade laws under the guise of Brexit — with all of the lies around “taking back control” or managing “our own laws” — are means to suppress the truth to support those who would wish to exploit further opportunities for the very few. Corbyn stands in complete opposition to all of these concerns and has done consistently over the years. Various dark and dishonest interests want to prevent exposure of their ill-gotten gains.

Who Will Win?

The battle lines are drawn. Divisions are increasingly set in stone. But who will win the election on December 12 is as unclear as ever. The chances are that it will be a hung Parliament, leaving a radical new economic plan offered by Labour, supported by leading economists, dead in the water.

If the Tories form a government of sorts, and with Johnson at the helm, do not expect it “to get Brexit done.” This mere focus-group-derived slogan is targeted to appeal to the frustrated and the flummoxed to move matters swiftly forward. In reality, to undo 40 years of trade laws and regulations with the European Union could take up to a decade of hard and painful negotiations where only the ordinary people of Britain suffer.

So, what is the point of this general election — the third in five years? The answer is that there is no point at all. It is happening because Brexit will not go away with any clarity or purpose for anyone, least alone for the people who instigated the sorry, sad, sordid and unnecessary affair in 2016. But the election has come and it is time for Britain to decide.

The Tories intend to drive Brexit through no matter the cost or the wider implications for society as a whole. But there is a chance to make a change to the status quo in this election. The electorate is getting wiser to the machinations of elitist political interests. And perhaps there is a surprise awaiting us all. Somehow, though, I am not holding my breath.

*[An earlier version of this article was published on .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The debate about the Irish backstop means that the British themselves are now unsure about the answer to that question. Even more mysterious to non-Brits is the question of how a declared “constitutional monarchy” with a high-profile royal family is governed. Many who wonder about what is united in the United Kingdom also ask themselves the question: What is great about Great Britain? The nation is on the fringes of Europe and about to drift out to sea, guided by its new and as yet unelected navigator, Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Can it really be called both great and united?

Never has the official name of a nation contained a more misleading description of its reality. It’s true that every so often — thanks to the mysterious and anonymous Electoral College that, in recent years, elected two luminous US presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, who actually lost the popular vote — the world is reminded that the 50 states of the US have, from the point of view of pure democracy, never been formally united. But no one inside or outside the US entertains any doubts about the unified power and universal purpose of the nation, however chaotic its leadership and however contradictory its policies.

The Crisis of Cultural and Political Authority

In contrast, the UK clearly lost both its sense of power and unique purpose with the dissolution of the British Empire following World War II. It has been struggling to find it ever since. After a decade of “angry young men” who appeared to be lost souls, The Beatles, Carnaby Street and Monty Python brought what was once remembered as “Merry England” back to life in terms of cultural impact in the second half of the 1960s. In the 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, embracing the sobriquet of the “Iron Lady,” profiting from the windfall of North Sea oil, endowed the nation with a form of ideological leadership that helped define the belief system of late 20th-century globalized capitalism.

But Thatcher couldn’t have done it alone. She thrived in the shadow of US President Ronald Reagan. Whereas she earned her stripes and achieved her glory thanks to the skirmish called the Falklands War, Reagan stepped up in front of the microphones and TV cameras to lead the war against an “evil empire.” Eventually (some people say) his policies defeated it because that empire imploded in 1989.

Thatcher nevertheless committed Britain to a position of relative strength in the expanding European Union largely because of her belief in the commercial value of the European single market. She never believed in the EU as a political entity. For a while, though, she felt there was a real  “Thatcherism on a European scale.” The ambiguity of her attitude set the stage for the drama of Brexit that would unfold under David Cameron’s premiership a quarter of a century after her departure from politics.

Following Thatcher by a decade, Tony Blair reconstructed Labour partly in Thatcher’s image, profiting from the renewed prestige the Iron Lady had earned for the nation. Just as Thatcher’s authority depended on her game of mirrors with Reagan in the White House, Blair prospered by becoming the accomplice of Bill Clinton and then, slightly less comprehensibly, George W. Bush. In contrast with other prime ministers, both Thatcher and Blair excelled at rhetorical leadership in the absence of global political power.

Can the Omelet Return the State of Whole Eggs?

Now, after nearly four years of Brexit melodrama, the lingering divide over “remain” versus “leave” has produced and prolonged an existential debate around the identity of a kingdom that is manifestly no longer united. To complicate things further, after the seemingly never-ending cliffhanger of Theresa May’s negotiated EU withdrawal agreement, the nation is now in the throes of preparing for a general election on December 12 in the hope of achieving some form of closure. Unlike the straightforward electoral battles of the past, this campaign puts on full display the visible, profound disunity of the two dominant parties, the Conservatives and Labour. Divided by Brexit, the internal wrangling of the parties has significantly contributed to the general, rudderless disunity of the nation.

The two parties are not only divided between “remain” and “leave,” but the “leavers” themselves, especially among the Tories, are divided over a hard and soft Brexit. As if that wasn’t enough, they are further divided over the personalities of their two leaders: Boris Johnson — an ambitious, mendacious and narcissistic upstart — and Jeremy Corbyn, apparently too puritanically socialist for the taste of some in his party (especially the Blairite loyalists who truly believe in the merits of capitalism).

Then there are the parties that actually know what they want — the Liberal Democrats, on one side, and the Brexit Party, on the other. But even those who agree with their relatively simple electoral credo (“remain” for the Lib Dems and “leave” for the Brexit Party) appear, according to , to be drifting away from parties that have no chance of governing and even less of bridging the growing divide if called upon to govern.

Adding to the confusion is the increasingly doubtful status of Northern Ireland and Scotland within a future version of the unified kingdom. In Johnson’s new “acceptable” draft of a withdrawal treaty from the EU, Northern Ireland will effectively remain within the European customs and tariffs zone while remaining politically “united” with the UK government in London. At least during a period of transitioning to something else, it will retain a soft border with the Republic of Ireland and acquire a hard border with its own nation.

It required great British ingenuity to come up with that solution, much more than  seven maids with seven mops could have done when planning to clear the sand from a beach. At the same time, Scotland — a country but not a nation — whose population voted to remain within the EU, will most likely hold a new referendum for independence, with the ambition of having its own place in Europe once the government in Westminster finalizes Brexit. That will give new life to , possibly provoking a fit of jealousy on the part of Donald Trump who could well end up accusing the Roman emperor of stealing his ideas.

Can Gravity Restore Its Dissipating Force?

In short, the picture of the nation that emerges is that of a complex series of powerful centrifugal forces pushing away from the unified center, with no gravitational force to pull any of the elements back together. Unless, of course, we are to believe that the magnetic personality of Prime Minister Johnson can somehow provide that missing gravitational force. If toward the end of the 17th century the Englishman Isaac Newton could offer the world gravity — until then an unknown concept — a modern Englishman with a strong sense of mission, a charismatic personality and an unkempt mop of blond hair that demonstrates the ability to defy gravity might also find the resources to make it work for the political benefit of his people.

Until recently, the polls seemed to point to this hypothesis. If Johnson were to be elected with the resounding majority that some  (366 seats to �������dzܰ�’s 199), perhaps the prime minister would find himself in a position of allowing him to play the dominant role he has so long coveted. He may even be dreaming that, with the requisite amount of power and influence, with the dissociation of the union, he could envisage abolishing the anachronistic name of the United Kingdom and calling it, say, “Johnsonia.” And because even a megalomaniac like Johnson would quickly realize that what’s left of the formerly united kingdom could hardly survive on its own after definitively cutting its ties with Europe, eventually the prime minister would have the option of applying for Johnsonia to become the 51st state of the “United States of Trumplandia,” which some predict will be the fate of the US if President Trump wins a second term in 2020.

The absurdity of the reflections in the preceding paragraph serves only to demonstrate the degraded state of democracy today. The idea that impetuous, inveterate liars — including Trump, Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro — have discovered the secret to winning elections in populous nations that play a significant role in geopolitics tells us something about the health of democratic institutions today. If democracy is only about who can mobilize the means to win elections and referendums, then it’s time to admit that democracy isn’t just imperfect but, in its current form, it has become perverse.

Democracy has never sat comfortably with an empire or even a monarchy, but until recently it has managed to maintain a certain stability. Today’s crisis in the UK, which illustrates the general problem, boils down to two contrasting interpretations of the workings of democracy: in the , commenting on today’s crisis, the conflict lies “between a parliamentary democracy and direct democracy.”

The parliamentary model has failed to produce any solution. The 2016 Brexit referendum — an example of direct democracy — reached a simple decision without defining the terms of the choice given to the people. Whereas the meaning of “remain” didn’t require a great deal of thought, no one had any clear or even unclear idea of the meaning of “leave.” What the British population has now discovered is that no authority exists who can provide that meaning. This means that, without a second Brexit referendum, in which the meaning will be seriously debated and presumably understood by the voting population, chaos is likely to ensue for a long time to come. Even if there is a second referendum, nothing ensures that chaos will not ensue anyway.

Lewis Carroll’s Insight into Brexit and the UK General Election

The suspense of the last four years has for many people become addictive. Britain has assumed a new identity of being permanently on the brink. On the brink of what? Brexit? A newly-motivated Europe that will welcome back its straying member? Being gobbled up by the US? Forging a new empire to take over from a declining Pax Americana?

Perhaps Lewis Carroll, whose poem cited above, the “Walrus and the Carpenter,” from his book, “Alice in Wonderland,” can offer some insight. Carroll’s poem offers an oblique critique of the methods of empire in the second half of 19th-century Britain. Although commentators on the poem often insist that it’s just nonsensical entertainment for children, Carroll offers hints right from the start that he is thinking all along about the British geopolitical system and has identified features that are present even today, more than 150 years after its publication.

The poem begins with an implicit reference to a cliché that had been circulating for decades before Carroll wrote his poem, “The sun never sets on the British �𳾱辱����”:

“The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright –
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.”

The first line reminds us that Britain “rules the waves,” but the comic idea of daring to shine in the middle of the night points directly to the cliché about the sun never setting on the empire, something the moon justifiably objects to in the following stanza (the sun “had got no business to be there after the day was done”).

The story of the poem concerns a pair of Englishmen who stroll on the beach and then befriend a bed of oysters. They incite the mollusks to exert themselves in a walk upon the beach before mobilizing their superior knowledge of “ships and sails and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings” to lull their victims into a state in which they have no choice but to become the two Englishmen’s lunch.

The Walrus appears as the overfed, self-satisfied pontificating and profiteering Englishman wandering upon foreign shores who believes his command of culture gives him the power to manage the world, physically, economically and socially. Even before discovering the oysters on the beach, the two Englishmen speculate on the methods that would allow them to engage in the meritorious exercise of clearing the beach of its sand, presumably to make the environment resemble his idea of an organized, civilized world: “‘If this were only cleared away,’ They said, ‘it would be grand!’”

The carpenter plays the role of the engineer or colonial administrator who will put the Walrus’ plans into action. He has no personality, only technical savvy and theoretical knowledge of what’s possible and not possible. He is a realist who employs materialistic logic to solve problems. To the Walrus’ wish for a solution to clear the beach involving maids with mops, he replies, “I doubt it,” showing he recognizes the gap between the conquering Englishman’s ambition to reorganize the world and the more resistant physical reality of that world. The fact that the Carpenter sheds a bitter tear tells us two things: that, despite his realism, he identifies with the Walrus’ imperial logic and he regrets his powerlessness to change some features of the environment according to their desire.

The story of the oysters, which begins immediately after the failed plan to clear the beach, provides a perfect example of the psychological methods employed by the roving agents of the British Empire. They first establish contact with the rulers of the societies they wish to reorganize and exploit for their own purposes. In this case, the eldest, wisest oyster suspects a foul motive and declines the offer of a “pleasant walk, a pleasant talk” on the beach. Four unwary younger oysters, ambitious to profit from the solicitations of the visitors turn out to be all “eager for the treat.” These are the unsuspecting locals the British can appeal to for their profit, which in this case takes the form of eating them for their lunch after a leisurely chat.

Naturally, leaders of traditional societies tend to resist the blandishments of the European masters who came to enlighten them by sharing with them their advanced wisdom. The Englishmen state that they can only accompany four at a time. But when the eldest oyster resists, they extend their offer to the masses, seeking to identify those who are “eager” to take advantage of what appears to be the generous offer of the rich invader. It’s the world of Gunga Din, where the natives can hope to be gainfully employed by the tenors of an advanced civilization.

When he sees the potential for profit, the Walrus has no objection to breaking his own rule of “only four” and accepting the hordes of oysters who will follow the two men to their feasting place, a rock that’s “conveniently low.”

The rest of the story demonstrates another Victorian idea, a colonial variation on Charles Darwin’s scientific notion of “survival of the fittest.” The Walrus and the Carpenter must eat to survive. The “convenience” of stuffing themselves on the oysters who had trotted after them was too great to forgo.

In short, the poem offers a comically absurd view of British colonialism. It reflects on the discourse and strategies of seduction that include pseudo-scientific expertise that convey the aura of superiority of the British over the natives. From the practical work of clearing beaches to speculating on the attributes of pigs, the British represent the finesse of evolved civilization.

The final outcome — devouring the oysters — reflects the fundamental racism that accompanies the British imperial project. The two interlopers initially treat the oysters as if they were equals, proposing to cooperate, share and collaborate. The Walrus and Carpenter control the conversation and propose the topics. They include production and management of resources (cabbages), government (kings), industrial production (shoes, ships, sealing wax) and intellectual matters in the form of abstract scientific research and logical thinking (“why the sea is boiling hot … whether pigs have wings”). The Walrus and Carpenter set the agenda and never consider listening to the oysters.

The oysters are literally exploited to the death, in this case by being eaten. The British had no qualms about devouring the lives of the populations they conquered, not by eating them but by manipulating them in all sorts of “scientific” ways as they demonstrated their skills at social engineering. The final irony concerns the emotional hypocrisy with which imperial conquest was carried out. Just before eating them, the Walrus takes the opportunity to reaffirm his public commitment to the human values of civilization. He regrets his act at the very moment of completing it: “‘It seems a shame,’ the Walrus said, ‘To play them such a trick.’” He adds, “I weep for you… I deeply sympathize” and immediately stuffs himself on the delicious oysters.

After the recital of the poem, the discussion of its impact and meaning between Alice and the Tweedle twins brings us forward to the world of today’s politics:

“‘I like the Walrus best,’ said Alice: ‘because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.’ He ate more than the Carpenter, though,’ said Tweedledee. ‘You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took: contrariwise.’ 

‘That was mean!’ Alice said indignantly. ‘Then I like the Carpenter best — if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.’ ‘But he ate as many as he could get,’ said Tweedledum.
This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, ‘Well! They were both very unpleasant characters.’”

Alice reacts in the way the British population would have been expected to at the time. She tries to decide whom she likes best between the Walrus and the Carpenter. A choice similar to “leave” or “remain” or between Johnson and Corbyn.

Applying Carroll’s Wisdom to Today’s Election

The moral problem (Carroll calls it the “puzzler”) is reduced to a personality contest, meaning that any reflection on how and why the observed injustice occurred — its systemic causes — is banished. Carroll presents his implicit criticism of a political system that offers no other choices than between two “unpleasant characters.” This observation is ironically underlined by the fact that this dialogue is led by none other than the utterly interchangeable Tweedle twins.

Which brings us back to today’s politics leading up to the UK general election. Just like Alice, British voters must make what is essentially a new binary choice between the portly Walrus (Johnson?), who tells lies and takes as much as possible for himself, and the lithe Carpenter (Corbyn?), who refuses to comment on the crucial issue the Walrus mentions — the shame of playing “them such a trick” expresses: “The Carpenter said nothing but ‘The butter’s spread too thick!’”

To some extent, the parties today reflect the situation Lewis Carroll described a century and a half ago. Inspired by the lessons from the poem, Labour would be wise to raise the moral question Alice struggled with. They might suggest voters ask themselves: Which of the two characters do they think would be more inclined to lie about his intentions and eat as many oysters as possible? Contrariwise (as Carroll would say), the question Tories may hope the voters will seek an answer to would be this: Which of the two characters has the greater ability to successfully plan and execute the “trick” that will reduce the population of unwanted oysters on the beach?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Less than three months ago, the Liberal Democrats were riding high in the polls when they gathered in Bournemouth for the party’s autumn conference. They were buoyed by their performance in both the local and the European elections earlier in the year, in addition to defections of the likes of Chuka Umunna and Sam Gyimah from Labour and the Conservatives, respectively. The latter of the two was introduced on stage at the conference to the loud cheers of the party faithful.

After Brexit

It appears that against this backdrop, the Lib Dems devised a general election strategy based on two pillars of out-remaining all “remainers” and running a presidential-like campaign aimed at contrasting the difference between Jo Swinson — a young mother of two from an ordinary background — with other main party leaders, all of whom are older men from privileged backgrounds.

Against this backdrop, senior party strategists briefed activists, donors, candidates and the media on the Liberal Democrats’ chances of securing a minimum of 80 seats in the event of a general election. Some even talked up the idea of the Lib Dems competing for 200 seats across the country. But fortunes change quickly during election campaigns. With the benefit of hindsight, one might be able to point out that the Liberal Democrats did a dismal job of managing expectations, both internally and externally.

Critics have argued that the party’s central electoral offer of revoking Article 50 and the PR campaign around Swinson were both ill-advised and poorly executed. Both were dropped mid-way through the election campaign, as the Liberal Democrats calibrated their message and concentrated on stopping Brexit and preventing Boris Johnson from gaining a majority.

This neatly brings us to the key question of this article: Is this election marking the end of liberal Britain in the age of extremes? The other version of this question, which points to the immediate urgency of this election, is the one which I have heard on the doorsteps over the past few weeks: What do the Lib Dems stand for beyond wanting to stop Brexit?

The response from the Lib Dems is clear: This election is first about stopping Brexit. But they also have a liberal vision that is firmly progressive and egalitarian, and marks their departure from “” orthodoxy that ruled the party during Nick Clegg’s leadership.

A Case for Liberal Britain

It’s fair to say that the Lib Dem manifesto is the most sensible of all the main political parties and has been praised by many across the board. The — an independent think tank focused on improving the standard of living of low and middle-income families — had stated that the Lib Dem “plans are the most progressive, the plans that will help the poorest people the most.” The independent had declared the Liberal Democrats as the only party with “” manifesto.

The Economist — the bastion of establishment neoliberals — had the Liberal Democrats as the best choice ahead of Thursday’s election. These endorsements make the Liberal Democrats the sensible political actors in the turbulent and divided world of British politics and further highlights the challenges faced by the Lib Dems and Jo Swinson in making liberalism a permanent fixture of the British political scene.

It is now clear that there’s no substantial market for the center-right liberalism mainly advocated by “The Orange Book” liberals who thrived under the leadership of Nick Clegg. In fact, every major study indicates that only an egalitarian version of liberalism can bring about prosperity for the Liberal Democrats and make them a permanent presence on the British political scene once again. The Liberal Democrat manifesto for this election is underpinned by the principles of egalitarian liberalism. This will be a long and challenging journey for the Liberal Democrats, but it’s their only path for breaking out of the existential threats that they’ve been dealing with for the past few years.

On the eve of the election, all indications point to a Conservative majority, but it’s still perfectly plausible that the electorate might vote in a hung Parliament. If that were to occur, the Liberal Democrats might be able to stop Brexit in conjunction with other political parties, but that entirely depends on how many seats the party is able to secure on December 12.

This general election is most certainly one of the most consequential in recent history. A majority for the Conservative Party will strengthen the case for a hard Brexit and will see the United Kingdom heading out of the EU with major consequences for the union as there will be restlessness in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Such an outcome will also mark the end of liberal Britain. But anything other than a Tory majority leaves the door open for the possibility of a softer Brexit or even remaining in the European Union via another referendum.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Johnson’s time in 10 Downing Street has been tumultuous. The House of Commons defied him a staggering 12 times, the Supreme Court voted unanimously against his decision to suspend Parliament and his own brother resigned from the cabinet. Johnson kicked out 21 rebel MPs from his own party. They included big beast Ken Clarke, rising star Rory Stewart and Winston Churchill’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames. Despite the odds, Johnson has still managed to get a new Brexit deal with the EU. It is this deal that he wants voters to back.

There is method in Johnson’s madness. Both Tory insiders and journalists speak of a Svengali who has cast a spell on the prime minister and masterminded his strategy. Johnson plays the good cop, turning on his legendary charisma, charm, wit, banter and humor. Svengali Dominic Cummings, the founder of “leave” campaign, plays bad cop, marking out victims, putting the knife in and then twisting it. Despised by former Prime Minister , Cummings has been called a Tory Bolshevik. While Johnson with his oratory and energy plays Vladimir Lenin, Cummings with his plotting and cunning plays Joseph Stalin.

The Civil War Is Back

As Stewart has observed in a candid , Cummings is a Machiavellian operator with a gift for communication in the modern age. “Take back control,” a slogan Cummings created, became a mantra that resonated deeply in an island with a sacrosanct tradition of parliamentary sovereignty and memory of global empire. The calling to spend the £350 million ($461 million) per week the UK sends to the EU on the National Health Service (NHS) instead was political theater of the very highest order.

Johnson and Cummings have been itching for an election from the very day they entered 10 Downing Street. They have pitched themselves as the keepers of the democratic flame who regard the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum as inviolable. They see the “remain” camp as hopelessly fragmented. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats cannot work together. They will inevitably split the vote, giving the Conservatives a clear path to power.

In this worldview, the Liberal Democrats are now a single-issue pressure group. They are obsessed only with Europe. Led by a “shouty hockey mom,” they lack intellectual ballast of yore when Paddy Ashdown led them with splendid gravitas if not spectacular electoral success. More importantly, the Lib Dems are now an anti-democratic party because they have rejected the result of the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union.

In this worldview, Corbyn’s Labour Party is unelectable. The threatening New Labour project of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is dead. A Marxist anti-Semite with dodgy friends from Palestine and Northern Ireland is now in charge. Labour has returned to the days of Michael Foot under whom it lurched to the left, allowing Margaret Thatcher to ride her victory chariot to Number 10.

Johnson and Cummings have bet that the Brexit faithful will deliver a Tory majority in the House of Commons on December 12. Therefore, the party had to be purged of “namby-pambies and fuddy-duddies” to win a majority. Learning from Theresa May’s lackluster performance in the 2017 election, Johnson and Cummings are going to the public with a new deal and asking for a majority to “get Brexit done.”

This strategy to swing right to win the election and then move back to the center sounds eminently sensible. However, there is a fly in the ointment. The country is deeply divided. The Conservative Party has morphed into a party of Brexit. It is not quite the broad church it was until recently. A victory on December 12 might well be Pyrrhic because a potential Tory cabinet will inevitably lack some of the party’s best minds.

In fact, the UK has never been so divided since the English Civil War of 1642-51. Labour has emulated the Tories in purging the party of its own heretics. The Corbynistas now control the commanding heights of the party and dream of doing the same with the economy. They want Scandinavian-style socialism and have no time for New Labour apostates. Like the Conservative Party, Labour is now thin on talent and of dissent.

Along with the two main parties, the rest of the country is divided too. The (SNP) led by Nicola Sturgeon is campaigning on a simple question: “[W]ho will decide Scotland’s future — Westminster leaders like Boris Johnson or the people who live here?” After a similar vote in 2014, the SNP wants another referendum on the question of Scottish independence because the UK will no longer be in the EU and most Scots voted for “remain.” Johnson, Corbyn and Swinson have all rejected the call for a second Scottish referendum, but this seismic fault line could end the much-vaunted unity of the United Kingdom.

Even as dour Presbyterian Scots may bring future peril, Northern Ireland is already simmering. May’s Brexit deal collapsed in part because of the . This was a special provision of the EU withdrawal agreement that prevented a hard border on the island of Ireland. That question has not gone away. Johnson’s deal is not making the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the strident Protestant party of Northern Ireland, terribly happy. Since 2017, the Tories have been in power thanks to DUP support, and a hung parliament might make matters for Johnson’s Brexit deal tricky.

In any case, the peace in Northern Ireland is far more fragile than it seems. The DUP and Sinn Féin, the Catholic party that wants reunification with Ireland, have fallen out. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brought peace to this troubled land and envisaged a power-sharing agreement. After the Brexit referendum, the DUP and Sinn Féin have bickered bitterly. Since early 2017, Northern Ireland has had no government because the two parties have been unable to share power. Consequently, major decisions involving millions of pounds and affecting the lives of the people are simply not being made. Nurses are striking, people are restive and the return of violence is a distinct possibility.

The Cavalier Leads the Roundhead

On July 24, this author observed that the history of the UK has long been “a ding-dong battle between cavaliers and roundheads.” Old Etonian Cameron is clearly a cavalier while the vicar’s daughter May is a roundhead. This divide exists even within the Labour Party. Blair was a cavalier while Brown a roundhead. Today, the contrast could not be sharper.

Johnson, the 20th-Old Etonian prime minister, a scholar of classics at Balliol College, Oxford and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, is the classic cavalier. Corbyn, a self-proclaimed democratic , a student who left school with the lowest-possible passing grades and a supporter of underdogs from Latin America to Africa, is a redoubtable roundhead.

Like Thatcher, another roundhead, Corbyn is a conviction politician. The Labour leader opposed selective education and, therefore, did not want his son to attend a grammar school. A frugal vegetarian, an avid gardener and a supporter of unilateral disarmament, Corbyn is a cardholding member of the old guard of the Labour Party. Corbyn’s unlikely rise to power stems from public resentment against George Osborne’s austerity measures that inflicted pain and hardship on the most vulnerable sections of society. In 2017, he did unexpectedly well against May. Now, Corbyn is against a completely different political animal and evidence suggests that he is struggling.

Corbyn’s Achilles’ heel is his lack of clarity on Brexit. There is reason to suspect that Corbyn is a closet Brexiteer. His claim to be “” on Brexit might be forced because his party members lie largely in the “remain” camp. Corbyn is promising to negotiate a third Brexit deal with the EU if he enters Number 10 that will protect trade, jobs and the peace process in Northern Ireland. The trouble for Corbyn is that the country is suffering from Brexit fatigue and wants the protracted political soap opera to end. On Brexit, the issue voters care most about according to opinion polls, the Labour leader has not been able to put daylight between Johnson and himself.

As pointed out earlier, Johnson could not be more different to Corbyn. His own sister him as “charming, ruthless, single-minded, determined” and disciplined. Conrad Black, who hired him as editor of The Spectator, has called him “a scoundrel” who is “very clever and very likable” but is really “a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear.” Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, has the philandering Johnson “our [Silvio] Berlusconi but somehow it’s funnier.”

Like Berlusconi, Johnson is a populist Pied Piper. Like the , he is also “a politician with no convictions.” Clarke, Soames and others who know him well have come to a similar conclusion. Johnson does have preternatural confidence and extraordinary swagger that comes from a deep belief that he was born to rule. Johnson’s sister remarks that the Tory leader knows that “life is a competition and he always wants to be top.” At university, Johnson became president of the prestigious Oxford Union after losing out the first time around. At Eton, he competed so ferociously that he broke his nose four times on the rugby pitch. Even as a young boy, Johnson wanted to be world king. He may be short of conviction but certainly not of ambition.

As Labour’s Ken Livingstone observed after losing to Johnson twice in the London mayoral race, the Old Etonian knows how to make people feel good about themselves. In this election, Johnson’s high energy, cheery, witty style of campaigning seems to be working even with some minorities. With his , the prime minister has cannily wooed British Indians. To be fair, most British Indians swapped sympathies from Labour to the Conservatives in 2015 after Cameron’s with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. By showing up in a  with his partner clad in a sari, Johnson has British Indians singing Bollywood-style  in Hindi.

Apart the “Boris effect,” Tories have a structural advantage that Cummings understands only too well. They have more money than other parties. They are the natural party of power in a class-divided society where people may resent but ultimately defer to their social superiors. Besides, the “leave” camp is less fragmented than the “remain.” Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party not contesting the 317 seats won by the Conservative Party in the 2017 election, and many members of Farage’s party are gravitating toward the Tories. This gives Johnson’s party a huge advantage in the UK’s first-past-the-post system.

In this electoral system, if there are five candidates who win 36%, 30%, 18%, 10% and 6% of the vote in any constituency, the one who wins the most votes — i.e., 36% in this example — becomes MP. Unlike proportional representation, the seats in Parliament are not divided among different parties in accordance with the national percentage of the votes they receive. The party that wins the most seats governs and the Tories are in poll position. The wily cavalier fox seems set to beat the naive roundhead hedgehog, “get Brexit done” and inaugurate a new era in British politics.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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But you would also think that the current global momentum in public sentiment and concern regarding climate change is the strongest it has ever been. With Extinction Rebellion demonstrations, the climate school strikes all around the world and heightened warnings from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and climate scientists in general, there has never been so much coverage of global warming and climate change. With the UN COP25 conference is underway in Spain, and with the UK due to host the COP26 in Glasgow in 2020, climate change would surely climb up the ladder of issues for clarification by all parties involved.

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For the exercise, let’s have a look at the two parties’ policies on climate change.

�������dzܰ�’s for the election, titled “It’s Time for Real Change,” puts environmental issues under the heading of “A Green Industrial Revolution” at the top of its agenda and places Brexit near the end of the manifesto. This prioritizing of environmental issues is in itself is significant, and some say it is unprecedented in UK politics. The chapter begins with: “This election is about the crisis of living standards and the climate and environmental emergency. Whether we are ready or not, we stand on the brink of unstoppable change.”

If the party wins the election, it will launch a National Transformation Fund of £400 billion ($527 billion) and rewrite the Treasury’s investment rules to guarantee that every penny spent is compatible with our climate and environmental targets — and that the costs of not acting are fully accounted for too. Of this, £250 billion will directly fund the transition through a Green Transformation Fund dedicated to renewable and low-carbon energy and transport, biodiversity and environmental restoration.

Labour further proposes a revenue-raiser in an £11-billion windfall tax on oil and gas companies which would create a “just transition fund” to help shift the UK toward a green economy without causing mass job losses.

In contrast, the Conservative Party’s climate policies, while they are placed on a lower standing than Brexit, nevertheless promise the generation of 80% of UK’s power from renewables by 2030 and bring forward the deadline for a net-zero carbon emissions target from 2050 to 2045. They plan to expand electric vehicle uptake and a moratorium — not a ban — on fracking. But some may be disappointed with the party’s policy freezing fuel duty, banning onshore wind farms, ending subsidies for solar panels and approving significant spending on building new roads.

Interestingly, Brexit will have a number of impacts on climate change, not least of which is the general influence of the EU on environmental protection in general but, more directly, on the availability of funds for any greenhouse gas reduction or renewable-power-generation projects. Also, perhaps more subtly and indirectly, if a no-deal Brexit is to take place — and if the UK is to align itself more closely with the US on trade — then any reference or negotiation on climate issues may be taken off the table.

According to , there is a clear correlation between Tory and Labour voters when it comes to Brexit and climate change. Labour voters expect their party to put a higher priority on climate change action and, similarly, Brexit voters place less priority on climate policy. The latest opinion polls show the Conservative Party in front, with a healthy lead over Labour. This may well be due to the Brexit factor. 

So, if you were to give a score to the two parties, it would be fair to say that the Conservatives have done a lot of good work since 2010 in cutting emissions, but need to do more in future, while Labour could perhaps have been less cautious in its promises. Much depends on how Brexit is handled, how negotiations take shape post-Brexit, and how much the electorate trusts each party.

However, with just a few days until election day, there is still time for public opinion to shift, particularly as the public absorbs the parties’ other policies such as climate change. As Harold Wilson once said, one week is a long time in politics. But in today’s world, even 24 hours can change everything.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, doesn’t believe in economic and social rights, claiming that it is “too hard to hire and fire people” in the UK, and has “obnoxious bigots.” And the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is opposed to gay marriage and abortion, even in cases of incest and rape.

If the Tories win this election, so many of our rights — from workers’ rights to women’s rights and everything in between — will be under threat. Even the most basic right of all — the right to life — is at risk. The euphemistically pledges to “update” the Human Rights Act. But let’s be clear, they won’t be “updating” it to strengthen our existing rights or add new ones — they will be stripping away important protections that apply to us all. Remember, this is the same party that in 2015 pledged to scrap the Human Rights Act altogether. With a Conservative majority, none of our hard-fought-for and hard-won rights will be safe.

Our Human Rights

By contrast, the current Labour shadow cabinet is united by its belief in — and respect for — human rights. Jeremy Corbyn has spent his whole life fighting for the rights of others, both here in the UK and overseas, and the party front bench is packed with human rights lawyers, advocates and campaigners.

If Labour wins the election, we will have a home secretary who is committed to civil liberties. Diane Abbott has fought tirelessly for the victims of the and for women held indefinitely in immigration detention centers such as Yarl’s Wood and Brook House. Rather than punishing migrants, Labour will end indefinite detention and use the money saved to support survivors of trafficking and modern slavery. Instead of bringing back hanging, Labour will restore funding for prisons and provide support for people with mental health problems and drug addictions.

A Labour government would not just protect our existing rights but would create new ones. Labour has pledged to introduce a brand new right to food. Social rights like this are needed more than ever before. In the last decade, the use of has increased by more than 5,000%. It is a moral disgrace that so many of our citizens have been driven to this. Labour will put an end to “food-bank Britain” and ensure that no child goes hungry in the fifth richest country in the world.

As well as food, Labour will end rough sleeping within five years, build thousands of new homes and ensure everyone has access to free education through a National Education Service.

But our human rights are meaningless if we cannot enforce them in the courts. The Tories know that, which is why they cut the Ministry of Justice budget — including critical funding for legal aid — more than any other department. There are now legal aid deserts all over the county, and millions of people have been left without access to justice. That is why Labour has committed not only to restore funding for early legal advice, but also to hire hundreds of community lawyers and build an expanded network of law centers. Labour will treat access to justice as a fundamental human right, the same as education or health care.

Beyond Our Borders

The protection of human rights would not stop at our borders. A Labour government — with Emily Thornberry as foreign secretary — would put human rights and international humanitarian law at the heart of Britain’s foreign policy. This means immediately suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen and conducting a root-and-branch reform of our arms-export regime.

As Thornberry said at the party conference earlier this year, Labour will never put strategic alliances with dictators like Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman before our responsibility to uphold human rights and protect lives across the world. Our government should never turn a blind eye while our “allies” murder journalists and drop bombs on buses full of innocent children.

With Labour in charge, Britain would be a beacon of hope around the world, standing up for democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights. But this also means coming to terms with our own history, which is why Labour would conduct an audit of the impact of Britain’s colonial legacy to better understand our contribution to violence and insecurity around the world. Only by acknowledging this can Britain credibly criticize human rights abuses in other countries, especially former colonies.

With so much focus on Brexit, it is important to remember what else is at stake in this election. Boris Johnson and his cabinet are so opposed to human rights that they are challenging their very existence. A Johnson government would not hesitate to turn back the clock on human rights progress — and even go so far as to repeal the Human Rights Act. This is what is at stake in this election and what we are fighting for. Labour will always protect and respect our human rights. The Conservatives will destroy them.  

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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British democracy has been dysfunctional since the 2016 Brexit referendum to leave the European Union. This is the second early election in three years. This is precisely what British MPs sought to avoid through the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011. That legislation set a five-year period between general elections. Prior to 2011, a sitting prime minister could call an election at any point during his or her premiership. Now, that power lies with the House of Commons, and it has voted for an early election after much drama over the last two years.

The Story of the 2019 Election

In 2017, Parliament voted for an early election. Theresa May, the then-prime minister, wanted to secure a clear majority in Parliament for Brexit negotiations with the EU. May’s Conservative Party won 42.4% of the vote, its highest share since 1983. Yet it was not just Tories that got a high percentage of the vote. The Labour Party won 40%, its largest share since 2001. Labour might not have returned to power but, led by Jeremy Corbyn, it surprised and analysts, gaining 30 seats.

With a hung Parliament and no clear majority for either party, May was forced to seek the support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), founded by the late Protestant preacher Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland, to continue as prime minister. In late 2018, a weakened May agreed a Brexit withdrawal agreement with the EU, but the House of Commons rejected her deal thrice. Consequently, in May 2019, she announced that she was stepping down as prime minister.

May’s resignation set off a leadership election in the Conservative Party. Its 160,000 members voted for Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and the leader of the “leave” campaign during the Brexit referendum. Taking over as prime minister on July 24, Johnson promised to “deliver Brexit, unite the country and defeat Jeremy Corbyn.”

Johnson’s brief premiership has been eventful. He that he would “rather be dead in a ditch” than stay on in the EU after October 31, the deadline to depart from the union. Even his younger brother resigned from the cabinet. The prime minister repeatedly promised to take the UK out of the EU “deal or no deal,” but the House of Commons foiled his plans by prohibiting a no-deal Brexit. This was thanks to the rebellion of 21 Tory MPs who voted against the government, the first of Johnson’s .

In September, Johnson suspended Parliament. However, the unanimously ruled against his decision. In an 11-0 verdict, the justices held that the prime minister had “acted unlawfully in shutting down the sovereign body” in the British Constitution.

Despite numerous setbacks at home, Johnson agreed a new Brexit deal with the EU on October 17. A majority of British MPs backed this withdrawal agreement but rejected Johnson’s plan to get it through Parliament in three days, leaving it “.” The prime minister sought a way out of this impasse by forcing an early election on , the first UK general election in this month since 1923.

Why Does the UK Election Matter?

The election is historic because different parties are offering radically different visions for the UK’s future. This does not happen each time the country goes to the polls. In the 1950s, the Labour and Conservative parties moved to a broad consensus on economic policy. In fact, The Economist coined the term “” because Conservative Rab Butler and Labour Hugh Gaitskell were indistinguishable in policy terms when they were chancellor of the Exchequer.

In 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour wrested power from John Major’s Conservatives. However, there was not much daylight between the policies of the two parties. Similarly, there was little to separate David Cameron’s victorious Tories from the vanquished New Labour in 2010. Britain’s adversarial politics and tradition of feisty debate often magnifies policy differences but hides the common ground and shared beliefs on which its parliamentary politics generally operates.

Yet there are elections when seismic shifts occur. In 1945, led the Labour Party to a historic victory. His government created the modern British welfare state with its fabled National Health Service (NHS). Attlee also presided over the decolonization of much of the British Empire.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s election brought Butskellism to an end. Inspired by Austrian economist , the “Iron Lady” championed free markets and rolled back the role of the state. Thatcher privatized most nationalized industries, lowered taxes and encouraged homeownership. Her “” reforms deregulated financial markets and made the City of London a rival to Wall Street.

The election on December 12 is similar to the elections of 1945 and 1979. This was clearly in evidence on December 6 when Johnson and Corbyn squared off in a televised . They jousted over the future of the NHS, the UK-US relationship and, of course, Britain’s ties with the EU. Corbyn promised democratic, Scandinavian-style socialism and Johnson promised “one-nation conservatism” in which “a dynamic market economy” would “pay for fantastic public services.”

Unlike 1945 and 1979, though, the December 12 election might not just be a two-horse race. Smaller parties may punch above their weight. The Liberal Democrats were in a coalition government with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015. Now, they are attracting attention again because they have vowed to the Brexit referendum and remain in the EU. The party plans to replace rates for small businesses with a new land-value tax on landlords. It aims to boost entrepreneurship as well and redevelop town centers and high streets. This might be music to the ears of some voters.

In 2019, regional parties are more important than ever with the Scottish National Party (SNP) to be on the ascendant. In 2016, Scotland voted against Brexit. In 2014, the Scots voted to stay in the UK but, at that time, the UK was a part of the EU. It is possible that an SNP victory might put Scottish independence back on the agenda and give the party a say in the formation of the future government in Westminster.

The DUP, which has supported the Conservative government since 2017, hopes to have “” after the election. It supports Brexit but opposes Johnson’s withdrawal deal. Its Catholic rival, Sinn Féin, bitterly opposes Brexit. In 2017, the Northern Ireland Executive collapsed because of differences between Sinn Féin and the DUP. Since then, the situation has and the Royal College of Nursing has plans to start for the first time in its 103-year existence. Both parties of Northern Ireland are important in this election.

Finally, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party cannot be underestimated. In November, Farage decided not to contest the the Conservatives won in 2017. Over the years, he has been the single biggest proponent of Brexit. Like the DUP, Farage’s party opposes Johnson’s Brexit deal. Some of his party members disagree. These Brexiteers are supporting the Conservatives instead because they are unwilling to risk Brexit. Furthermore, Farage’s party has appeal among the working class and could potentially take away votes from Labour, queering the pitch for the Conservatives.

Rarely have so many variables been at play when the British have queued up to cast their votes. This election will define an era.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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360° Context: Britain Faces a Historic Election

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Maybe it is because I am an immigrant myself, or maybe it’s that I am just a weird foreign policy nerd, but I would like to hear what our politicians think about what is going on in Egypt right now, where 60,000 prisoners of conscience are jailed in appalling conditions and where a president, ousted in a  2013 coup, died in June during a trial on espionage charges. As a UN noted on November 8, Mohammed Morsi was held in solitary confinement for six years, forced to sleep on a concrete floor and denied treatment for his diabetes and high blood pressure. The report went on to say that because of the denial of medical treatment, President Morsi “progressively lost the vision in his left eye, had recurrent diabetic comas and fainted repeatedly.”

Agnes Callamard, the UN’s special rapporteur on and a lead author of the report, wrote that “The authorities were warned repeatedly that Dr. Morsi’s prison conditions would gradually undermine his health to the point of killing him. There is no evidence they acted to address these concerns, even though the consequences were foreseeable.” The report concluded that “Dr. Morsi’s death after enduring those conditions could amount to a State-sanctioned arbitrary killing.” Note: a state-sanctioned arbitrary killing of the first and only democratically elected president in Egypt’s history. Any thoughts on that from our politicians?

I would like to know what steps Britain’s new government will take to work toward ending the war in Yemen. The tell an awful story: nearly 100,000 dead, 4,500 instances where civilians have been directly targeted — the Saudi-led coalition being responsible for two-thirds of this and the rebel Houthis the rest; 13 million Yemeni civilians facing starvation; critical infrastructure such as hospitals, schools and electricity plants destroyed in a war that is into its fifth year.

Have our politicians conveniently forgotten the support that Britain has given the Saudis? As Arron Merat wrote in a recent Guardian , “Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs — dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors.” So yes, I would like to hear from the party leaders what role the UK could play in pushing forward a peace initiative.

I might also want to know what those vying to form a government feel about the remarkable protests that have brought millions of young Arabs into the streets in Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon. They are protesting for an end to corruption. They are sick and tired of old sectarian politics. They want an end to the repression. The UK didn’t do much in the last Arab Spring save stand by the dictators and abandon the protesters. Any thoughts on fresh approaches? I didn’t think so.

And we are still happy — very happy — to do business with the Saudis, whose crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This is a man who routinely jails anyone even remotely suspected of not being loyal to his arbitrary, cruel and dictatorial rule. Oh, and will we continue in our contented way to do business with the United Arab Emirates who detained and tortured a British student, , and who have sentenced the distinguished human rights advocate Ahmed Mansoor to 10 years in prison? Of course we will!

And as the Iranian authorities carry out their ruthless assault on protesters who are being hit with the double whammy of a corrupt and brutal regime and the campaign of relentless sanctions imposed by the United States, where are we on that nuclear deal? Do we think the Trump approach is working? Do we know what happens to the deal? Do we even care? I’d like those questionS put to each and every party leader.

I’d like to know what they make of Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria, of the support that outside forces are giving a renegade general in the Libyan Civil War, or how we can support Tunisia’s fragile democracy. I would love to hear their thoughts on the so-called “deal of the century.” Do they really think that Jared Kushner’s bully’s plan will end the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians? There are a lot of answers I’d like to hear, but the questions are not being asked. A note to my UK media colleagues covering the election: It is not too late to start asking.

We are told that everything will be sorted out once we just get past that damn Brexit barrier. But surely we, the humble voters, deserve to know what sort of foreign policy those who hope to form a government will have and how our government behaves in the world and in a region as crucial to global peace and security as the Middle East.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Is Europe Really Ready for Its Own Military Force?

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Defining Macron’s foreign policy style has to do with to what degree the French president recognizes himself in certain Gaullist impulses or movements. This is something that has been pointed out , after several occasions where Macron criticized the United Kingdom over Brexit, Italy over its populist government or, more recently, the United States for unilaterally imposing that would harm major US companies such as Amazon. Some commentators have seen this as a move to take the lead in Europe, at a moment when other European leaders are being weakened.

One Against All

Macron’s comments to The Economist reveal the discrepancy between his deepest aspirations — the need for ensuring peace and stability in Europe — and what he described as the return of the Great Powers competition, where the European Union seems unable and unwilling to act. The context in which the interview was recorded, just days after Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria, underlines the frustration of having to deal with some difficult allies.

Interestingly, the French leader took this opportunity to use forceful rhetoric by going back to what could be seen as a traditional French defiance vis-à-vis the alliance. Even after the full return of France within the integrated military command structures of NATO — which took place in 2009 — there were some debates on its necessity. Hubert Vedrine, an iconic minister of foreign affairs under President François Mitterrand, concluded that France had .

Yet since his election in 2017, Macron has decided to go it alone. In a speech at La Sorbonne in September 2017, the president of the French Republic unveiled his idea of an initiative that would facilitate the emergence of a European strategic culture and create the preconditions to conduct coordinated and jointly prepared future commitments. This is aimed at reinforcing the ability Europeans have to act together and to carry out all possible military operations on a whole spectrum of issues that could affect Europe’s security.

However, it took almost a year to start implementing this cooperation. The first nine ministers of defense signed the letter of intent in June 2018. And, despite all the potential benefits of such an initiative, there were some concerns about possible duplication with NATO or/and EU. Macron believed — and still does — that Europeans have to start moving from words to actions and to explain their commitment to European security by engaging in operations. This happened at a moment when US commitment in Europe was wary, with US President Donald Trump refusing to back Article 5, which caused some tension among those member states who have been under Soviet rule. Macron did not consider the particular situation of those countries for which US commitment to their defense has been essential.

By revealing, very loudly, that there were concerns, Macron has echoed Hans Christian Andersen’s tale by saying that, yes, the king was naked. By doing so just weeks before the celebrations of NATO’s 70^th anniversary in London, Macron has spoiled the expectations of the summit, which was supposed to celebrate unity and renewed cohesion.

Where Next?

Of course, no other European leaders agreed with the assessment. Angela Merkel was the first to condemn the Macron’s comments. As weeks passed by, the invectives went on, culminating with Erdogan asking if Macron was not brain dead himself, and even with Trump calling the French analysis “insulting.”

So, what purpose did these comments serve? First of all, France has taken credit for asking NATO to do more in the fight against terrorism, and by shifting the focus to the south and the complex security operations France leads in the Sahel — two directions aligned with . Second, it has forced NATO to accept the principle of a “to further strengthen NATO’s political dimension including consultation.” Third, it has created enough turmoil to wake up NATO, but also to force Europeans to think more for themselves.

Somehow, Macron has taken a bet that, in the long run, might benefit NATO, the EU and himself. In forcing the US to reinvest in the alliance, by making the Europeans aware that the US security guarantee might be coming to an end, and by again being at the center of attention — even if this center is of criticism — Macron might have played a better hand than he imagined.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Has Macron Given NATO a Much Needed Wake-Up Call? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

These goals have been recently voiced by . The question remains as to how many allies among the European countries he has.

While the perception of the need for stronger defense capabilities of the European Union seems to go unchallenged, member states can’t agree on the scope, goals or structure this cooperation should have. The internal divergence of the different blocs within the EU remains and has manifested itself in the approach to Russia, Turkey and the migration crisis, all of which have ignited fierce debates on the extent and direction of the involvement that the EU should provide.

Is Europe Ready to Do More on Security Matters?

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The political guidelines for the next European Commission speak of the attempt for a genuine European Defence Union within the next five years. However, given different defense priorities and eagerness for integration among member states, the path forward is not yet really clear.

United in Goal, Divided in Scope and Direction

European defense integration divides member states even within the usually cohesive blocs. Take, for example, central and Eastern Europe, which can be split among the Baltic states, Poland and Romania on one hand, and the remaining V4 countries — Slovenia, Croatia and Bulgaria — on the other. They not only have different perceptions toward Russia as their main threat, but also attitudes toward NATO. For instance, while central Europe is strongly influenced by the proximity of the Russian threat and looks to NATO for its security, Eastern Europe has lukewarm views on Russia due to its critical positions toward the EU.

At the same time, all of these groups are cautious about transferring more power to Brussels, as they do not hold high levels of trust toward France or Germany, albeit for different reasons. They are still at odds with the ambitions of the bigger EU countries, such as France and Germany, which believe that they should focus on developing common European defense structures.

The security and the defense threats arose after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its activities in the Eastern Ukraine, the migration crisis from the Middle East and Northern Africa, and have peaked at the worsening of relations with the traditional guarantor of European security — the United States.

With the establishment of the office of the high representative of the union for foreign affairs and security policy and the increasing voices calling for greater European responsibility, the EU has met the obvious problem: the implementation of these ambitions in practice. To elaborate on the immortal line that with great power comes great responsibility, it should be added that with the assumption of such responsibility, one needs to have actual power. For Europe this means creating military and defense capabilities and interoperability between the European military equipment. In addition, there needs to be an establishment of the organizational structure that would also define the priorities that European defense should fulfil.

The main blocs have different ideas regarding not just the specific projects of defense cooperation, framework of the new defense strategy, response to the recent rifts with the US or the level of the strategic autonomy that the EU should be striving for. This provides numerous options for the European Union to go forward. The EU can either become united behind a centralized approach of the leading countries or have the form of a “coalition of the willing.” It can focus on complementing NATO in specific areas on the ground or become a replacement for it.

Practical Application

There have been discussions, even among experienced military personnel across Europe, disagreeing about the key steps needed to motivate the EU countries to put their money where their mouths are. Furthermore, there is a level of disagreement — and resulting distrust — between the eastern/northern tier of the EU/NATO countries focusing more on the NATO platform and setting their eyes on Russia, and the southern/western tier preferring a more supranational approach with greater stress on migration aspects and the Mediterranean region. The two groups of countries have different historical narratives, so overcoming the split may prove to be a difficult task.

The EU-NATO nexus has been undergoing several problems since Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency entered the picture. What is more, the structure of EU-NATO cooperation has to be established in light of the non-EU European members, like Norway or, soon perhaps, the United Kingdom. There will have to be a clear division of responsibility, even as President Macron makes a statement about the clinical death of NATO.

The irony of this situation is that a push by President Trump to make the NATO countries fulfil their obligations may be beneficial to motivating the countries to be more active in finding prospective projects of cooperation with other EU members as they are operating with a higher budget. But without a strategy, there is a considerable agreement that this approach will fail to achieve its objectives.

The current activities of the EU focus on soft security missions, from the Balkans to Africa, while the key flagship initiative is the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO — a multi-layered and multi-purpose initiative that has the potential of forming the foundation of a credible EU defense force. Further steps will also have to include the creation of a directorate general for defense and more financial commitments in terms of defense cooperation.

The last of the structural developments that will have a definite impact is the formation of the European Defence Fund (EDF), which aims to increase member states’ investment in defense research to improve interoperability of the different national defense forces. It is expected that the budget allocated to the EDF under the EU’s next Multiannual Financial Framework will ($14.3 billion). The use of this fund will be contested by different groups of European countries. Other points of contention would be active initiatives such as the European Intervention Initiative (EI2), led by France.

Despite these internal disagreements on shape and size, it will probably be engagement outside of EU borders that proves critical in deciding whether the EU can ever truly act externally as a single force.

*[This article is published GLOSBEC DIFF GOV — European Governance: Potential of Differentiated Cooperation  project supported by . 

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the content, which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. ]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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That narrative might be changing. It began on September 17 when Israel went to polls and ended on September 24 when, in the UK, the Supreme Court declared the proroguing of Parliament to be illegal and, in the US, the Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The developments in Israel, Britain and the US hold important lessons for India.

Israel Shows Netanyahu the Door

Modern republics are a delicate dance among the three branches of government — legislative, executive and judicial — and the fourth estate of the media. In the case of Israel, although it defines itself as a “Jewish and democratic state” and the “nation-state of Jewish people,” the constitution does not discriminate among its citizens based on religion. However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has exploited ethnoreligious fault lines among Jews and Arabs for more than a decade. His fear-mongering and race-baiting have been so successful that he has managed to ride out a wave of credible while in office.

When the Israeli law enforcement agencies and Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit refused to toe Netanyahu’s line, his supporters introduced a bill in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to grant the prime minister immunity against prosecution. After the elections in April delivered a split verdict, preventing Netanyahu from garnering a majority in the Knesset, he refused to give opposing parties a chance to form a government and brazenly called for another election instead. In the run-up to the second election in September, he openly the idea of annexing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which the Palestinians see as part of a future state.

The second-place finish of Netanyahu’s Likud party in the unprecedented second election in a year demonstrates the resilience of Israeli democracy. While Netanyahu wanted an outright majority and another term to protect himself from indictment, voters ushered him to the door. On November 21, he was on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

Since 2009, Netanyahu has carefully manipulated the media, controlled public opinion with incendiary rhetoric and ruled the executive branch with a tight fist. But fearless law enforcement agencies, an attorney general with a sense of duty and an independent judiciary eventually caught up with him. Even President Trump, who has been one of Netanyahu’s staunchest allies, has belatedly distanced himself from Netanyahu by announcing that the US relationship is with Israel and not with its prime minister.

Boris Is Forced to Hit the Brakes

Less than a week after the Israeli elections, the verdict by the UK Supreme Court calling British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament illegal was a pleasant surprise.

Ever since the ill-fated 2016 Brexit referendum held by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, British politics has resembled a circus. The birthplace of the Westminster system of government, widely adopted around the world, has been lurching from one quandary to another for the past three years. While the government of Theresa May repeatedly failed to pass a Brexit deal to allow the UK to leave the European Union, none of her decisions resembled a constitutional crisis like the one Johnson precipitated when, on August 28, he recommended a five-week suspension of Parliament to the queen.

The attempted power-grab by Johnson, a populist prime minister, was unprecedented and intended to prevent Parliament from deliberating over various Brexit options before the October 31 deadline. As the ceremonial head of state, the queen had to remain above the fray. Legal analysts had predicted that the judicial branch might not be able to reverse Johnson’s recommendation. Bitter divisions among rival political parties, which were on display during then-Prime Minister May’s attempts to pass her EU withdrawal deal through Parliament, inspired little hope that the legislative branch would push back against Johnson.

In a remarkable display of individual and institutional fortitude, both the legislative and judicial branches rose to the occasion. Before Parliament was suspended, 21 of Johnson’s own Conservative Party members sided with the united opposition to force him to request an extension to the Brexit deadline and prevent the UK from crashing out of the EU, which is commonly referred to as a no-deal Brexit.

By the time Parliament was suspended on September 10, the populist executive’s hands were effectively tied when MPs voted against Johnson’s proposal to call an early general election, which would have still allowed him to execute a no-deal Brexit on October 31. Despite the nature of the executive branch as subordinate to the legislative branch, Johnson tried bypassing it. When Parliament reasserted its supremacy, he tried to play the martyr card. After another month of wrangling, a slim majority of Parliament seemed to have agreed on a potential withdrawal deal, but Johnson was forced to ask the EU to extend the Brexit deadline, which is now set to January 31, 2020.

The Supreme Court verdict on September 24 went a step further. In a ruling seeped in symbolism, the first female chief justice of the UK declared Johnson’s recommendation to prorogue Parliament to be illegal.

The Westminster system was born in the UK, but it lacks a codified constitution in its home. A judicially conservative Supreme Court could have easily stayed neutral without attracting public wrath, but the flipside of an uncodified constitution is the power it gives to the judiciary to set legal precedents. It is a double-edged sword that can give activist judges the power to bring the entire system down.

Yet in this case, the unanimous verdict created an important legal precedent. The fact that the British system has survived since its inception through Magna Carta of 1215, and that 11 Supreme Court judges unanimously ruled against Johnson in one of its gravest constitutional crises, reaffirmed the faith of the global liberal community in self-government.

Trump Faces Impeachment

On the same day as the UK Supreme Court’s ruling, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump. The move could potentially end the disdain the president has displayed for constitutional norms in running the American executive branch.

Unlike Israel and Britain, the American system prides itself on the well-designed checks and balances among the three co-equal branches of government. Over the past few decades, the executive branch has arguably become more equal than the others. Yet no American leader has ever shattered presidential norms as ruthlessly as Trump has since his inauguration in January 2017.

So far, the judicial branch has held its own in its battles against the Trump administration regarding the Muslim travel ban, funding for a border wall, immigration policies, the Mueller investigations and more. While the administration managed to overcome judicial scrutiny with the Muslim ban by repeatedly tweaking executive orders, Trump has been effective in using the inherent sluggishness of the judiciary to his advantage by delaying all legitimate oversight and investigative powers of the legislative branch in other cases.

Trump’s media machine has flooded airwaves with so many lies that voters are bitterly divided on the issue of whether the president’s behavior is normal, let alone impeachable. After the Democratic Party took control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, it found it difficult to sway public opinion in favor of impeachment in spite of launching multiple investigations and gathering credible evidence of obstruction of justice.

It was freedom of the press that came to the legislative branch’s rescue. While the House had been doggedly pursuing the withholding of military aid to Ukraine since July — albeit behind closed doors — two explosive reports, first in and then in , forced Speaker Pelosi’s hand in ordering an impeachment inquiry.

It is difficult to predict whether the Republican-controlled Senate will vote to remove Trump from office, but based on all the evidence that has already come out, it is likely that the House will impeach Trump. The delicate dance among the various branches of the US system of government has, at least temporarily, strengthened the legislative branch’s hand. Unless Trump resigns, he may go down as only the third US president to be impeached by the House regardless of whether he is removed from office by the Senate.

And in India…

The contrast with the situation in India couldn’t be more jarring. Ever since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s election win in 2014 with a majority in the Lok Sabha — the lower house of Parliament — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has systematically whatever little freedom Indian media enjoyed. It has meticulously the process of political fundraising to practically hold the entire democratic system hostage. In its lust for power, the government has brushed aside warnings that the new electoral bond scheme of political funding is susceptible to direct foreign influence and counterfeiting by enemy countries. The scheme was rushed through Parliament without much scrutiny, despite the objections of the Reserve Bank of India that it undercuts its authority as the sole issuer of currency — a fundamental change in the country’s monetary policy with potentially far-reaching consequences.

After its resounding reelection in May 2019 with a stronger majority, the executive branch has practically made the Lok Sabha a rubber stamp for its right-wing social agenda. Seemingly unconstitutional bills like the abrogation of Article 370 of the constitution in relation to the special status of Kashmir, selectively criminalizing the use of triple talaq (instant divorce) among Indian Muslims, and amending the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) have received Parliament’s approval with little legislative scrutiny.

While several legal challenges are listed for hearing in the Indian Supreme Court over the coming weeks, the court has mostly been a bystander until now. It has deferred to the executive branch even in cases related to habeas corpus and denial of fundamental rights to Jammu and Kashmir residents since the abrogation of Article 370, bolstering that the government is eroding the independence of the judiciary.

The Indian economy is currently in shambles with the highest rate in almost five decades and manufacturing plants are announcing staff layoffs and halting of production every month. Despite this, 50,000 adoring Indian and Indian-American fans of the populist prime minister — enjoying the freedom of expression and individual liberty guaranteed in the US — filled a football stadium in Houston, Texas, to hail the dismantling of democratic institutions in India.

The delicate dance of democracy in Israel, Britain and the US may be forcing a day of reckoning on their democratically-elected populist leaders, but the majority of Indians at home and overseas are still cheerleading as the government erodes the separation of powers.

*[Updated: November 25, 2019]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The antibodies of common sense, decency, honesty and skepticism would have destroyed them all before they emerged. The result of the election, scheduled for December 12, will confirm the diagnosis that Britain has lost all ability to resist. 

Britain became infected because it failed to follow the rules of safe politics. After the fall of its empire, the UK dallied with the Commonwealth, the European Union, being America’s best friend. The Commonwealth made Britain feel better about the mass looting of the empire, but that lasted only until the Brits fell in love with the EU.

The EU seemed to satisfy Britain’s desire to be more efficient, like Germany, and more stylish and cool, like everybody else. The UK tried to be the lubricant in US-EU relations, but found the US preferred rough trade. The Brits then tried to be best friends with China, but found China took its pleasure and did not pay the bills. London invited all the oligarchs with their black money from Russia and the Middle East to shack up. That made many bankers rich, but left the UK feeling dirty and ashamed.

Too many casual unprotected relationships, none of them monogamous, opened the Brits to infection that lowered resistance to extremist ideologies to dangerous levels. The opportunists and malignant players saw an opportunity — the Russians, the Little Englanders, the anti-immigrants, xenophobes and the entitled. All have taken advantage of Britain’s weakened state. The UK was once a pillar of stability and civilization at the crossroads of the world. Now, the cancers of intolerance, racialism, demagoguery and nativism have taken hold.

There is no anti-retroviral drug. There are only palliatives and pain killers. The independent Conservatives, the Lib Dems and some moderate Labour politicians are trying to lead the UK back to healthy living and sane politics. Their voices are a minority and are shouted down. Their common sense and moderation may salve the feelings and deaden the pain of the remaining healthy parts the UK constituency, but they are not a cure. The queen, who could at least raise an eyebrow, has remained aloof. Unlike her father, she is — and always has been — content to reign over decline and fall.

Boris Johnson has lied to his employers, his wives, girlfriends, his political allies and of course the UK public — remember the Brexit bus? He is a bombast, a rabble rouser and not safe in taxis. Farage is an embarrassment. His relationship with US President Donald Trump should be warning enough.

Jeremy Corbyn may passionately believe his Marxist — or rather Trotskyist — philosophy. There is room in the UK for a left-wing conscience, but never should anyone with his convictions be allowed in No. 10. Corbyn could never reconcile himself to the UK’s past and its alliances. He would return the contents of the British Museum to anyone that has a claim — and that metaphor applies to most of the rest of the UK economy, its defense and self-esteem.

The outlook is bleak. Whatever the outcome of the election, the UK will never recover its poise, its reputation, its influence or prestige. The virus will have done its work.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The manifesto also explicitly glorified “war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism … the beautiful ideas which kill.” In our own time, there has been much discussion around the ways in which “incendiary” language creates a dangerous political atmosphere. What can we learn from turning to an earlier period in modern history?

Angry Words, Violent Actions

The 1909 declaration was the founding “Manifesto of Futurism,” and its author was an eccentric, Egyptian-born Italian writer, artist and political radical Filippo Tommasso Marinetti. Marinetti would go on to promote fascism, and the art of the Futurists — with its obsession with speed, technology and, increasingly, military power — would be close to one of the official styles of the fascist revolution. The attitude of the “Futurist Manifesto,” a piece of writing that emerged long before the seizure of power by the Fascists in Italy in 1922, is an extreme example of a phenomenon which is very much with us now. What is the connection between rhetorical and actual violence? When do angry words become violent actions, and how should they be resisted?

The manifesto of 1909 was not the only type of document circulating Europe in this time period that extolled violence, of course, and not all of these types of rhetoric are linked to what we would now call the radical right. Yet the manifesto seems unique in the extreme, extravagant and performative nature of its language. It seems intentionally to goad its readers, promoting an aggressive misogyny —“We want to glorify … contempt for women,” it states — and a joy in destruction for its own sake.

“We want,” writes Marinetti, “to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” The manifesto is littered with references to violence, war and destruction. It was a “manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence,” which wanted to “heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries,” because “art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.”

If such “extremist” language cannot be shown to have had a direct impact on the squadristi violence of fascism in the 1920s and the violence of the National Fascist Party regime in power at home and abroad, Marinetti certainly cheered on fascist imperialism and was always a consistently pro-military figure. Indeed, the Futurists had initially agitated for Italy to enter the First World War in 1914. By the time of Marinetti’s death in 1944, the writer and artist was creating eulogies to Italian fighting units and remained loyal to the fascist cause, even as represented by the Nazi-backed puppet state of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana.

In 1945, the fascist-supporting American poet Ezra Pound placed the ghost of the recently-deceased Marinetti in his “Canto 72,” promising retribution for the defeat of the Axis powers at the battle of El Alamein. In this context, the relation of violent language to actual violence is complex and layered. Futurist and fascist agitators glorified war and violence at the same time as the street fighting and, later, imperialist wars of fascism, played out in the real world.

Cause and Effect

Cause and effect cannot be straightforwardly demonstrated here. Yet language surely creates a context in which violent acts may become increasingly commonplace. In contemporary Britain, the fevered atmosphere around Brexit has similarly given birth to a situation in which angry words and incendiary language are paralleled with a rise in radical-right street action. Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissed concerns raised in the House of Commons by the Labour MP Paula Sherriff that his rhetoric would or could fuel violence as “so much humbug.”

In the prime minister’s mind, terms like “surrender,” used to describe the Brexit Withdrawal Bill designed by the opposition and rebel Conservative MPs to prevent a no-deal Brexit, are simply his usual colorful rhetoric. But Johnson is now supported by radical-right actors like the self-styled Tommy Robinson / Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, founder of the English Defence League. “We back Boris,” Yaxley-Lennon at the beginning of September, referring repeatedly to those who opposed the prime minister as “traitors.”

“Death to traitors, freedom for Britain,” was famously what Thomas Mair, the murderer of the Labour MP Jo Cox, had shouted when asked his name during his court trial. The link between the prime minister’s rhetoric — along other leaders of the pro-Brexit “mainstream” right — and radical-right violence is not a question of a smoking gun or a straightforward case of cause and effect. Rather, the use of violent language causes an atmosphere where sentiments emerging from supposedly responsible politicians are mirrored back to them by the agitators of the radical right.

Florid, excessive language that hints at violence then often incites a more shocking response from its listeners. For example, at an event at the Conservative Party conference, Boris Johnson suggested that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn be “removed” and placed in a “figurative rocket” to “send him into orbit.” But Johnson’s words — a cartoonish vision with an attempt at humor — were interrupted by voices from the Tory activists on the floor, who suggested Corbyn be put in a “noose” and sent to “traitor’s gate” in a reference to the prisoners’ entrance to the Tower of London.

In this context, Johnson’s jokey rhetoric was reflected back to him in words that seemed to suggest a far more visceral and violent reaction to opposition politicians. In particular, the repeated use of the word “traitor” in the rhetoric of both radical-right thugs like Yaxley-Lennon, murderers like Mair and the activists of a supposedly mainstream UK political party is disturbing.

If there is not always a direct link between words and violence, there is nonetheless a sense that violent language incites, creating an effect of heightened tension, enabling its select audiences to delight in the prospect of destruction and battle. The philosopher Thorsten Botz-Borstein has compared the aesthetics of Italian Futurism to that of the so-called Islamic State. For Botz-Borstein, the nihilism at the heart of both projects exalts in the prospect of violent destruction, particularly through the use of technology.

This is by no means to compare the language of Boris Johnson and other politicians with the Islamic State. However, violent language — even language that only gestures toward violence — creates its own effects, its own momentum, which it cannot always control. In the 1935 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German critic Walter Benjamin described fascism as a product of a self-alienation that had reached “such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

We must avoid the temptation of thinking that language is “overstating” political desires, that nobody really wants the kind of violence or chaos being gestured to. For this underestimates the power — the aesthetic power — of language to create or encourage these desires in its listeners.

*[The  is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post When Angry Words Become Violent Actions appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is struggling to push his country out of Europe despite mounting opposition and parliamentary roadblocks. And in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just failed to form a new government, giving his nemesis a chance of his own, even as the likelihood that he will face criminal charges grows.

These men, nationalist rebels against the postwar liberal democratic consensus, have become heroes for the far-right anti-globalist movement that has grown so dramatically in recent years. But now they are in trouble. Are we finally seeing real cracks in the global far right?

To be sure, the ethno-nationalist movement, or, if you prefer, the populist right-wing movement, hardly seems to have slowed. In countries like Hungary, Poland, Greece, Russia and any number of other places, authoritarian and illiberal regimes and leaders have been on the march for years now. Public opinion in many of these nations has swung increasingly against the postwar liberal consensus.

But it seems undeniable that some real pushback has materialized, especially in recent months. That may be a sign that civil society in these countries is more resilient than it has appeared in recent years — that the forces opposing right-wing nationalism are gaining, if not a lot, at least some new strength.

In the US, every day brings new revelations that seem to ensure that Trump will be impeached, even if the odds of him being convicted and removed from office still seem fairly low. In Great Britain, even though Johnson is still lionized by the pro-Brexit right, the prime minister still faces a steep uphill battle to getting a deal with the European Union that will satisfy his many critics — provided that his party wins the general election scheduled for December 12. In Israel, if Netanyhu’s political rival, Benny Gantz, has promised not to form a coalition with Likud if Netanyahu remains prime minister after being indicted. Prosecutors are moving toward indicting Netanyahu on corruption charges.

In none of these countries has the left shown itself to be stronger than the political right represented by their top leaders. But the three men are each facing potential career-ending catastrophes and a weakening of their political parties. At the same time, the radical right, which to a large extent supports these leaders in each of these countries, is facing new troubles.

In the US, particularly, there is a new awareness of white-supremacist violence, which law enforcement officials now agree is the principal terrorist threat. In all of them, online companies like Google are increasingly “de-platforming” radical-right groups — removing their content from the internet. And, as an anecdotal matter, resistance by civil society groups to the rise of the radical right seems to be on the upswing.

We are nowhere near a real tipping point that would signal a reversal of the rise of the extreme right in recent decades. The causes of the crisis — a rapidly changing world, financial inequities, racial conflicts and rising immigration, among others — have not lessened at all. But in the end it may be that, unlike what Europe saw in the 1930s, resistance to a long drift to the right is swelling. We can only hope that these signs are real.

*[The  is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post New Cracks in the Global Far Right? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Donald Trump declared last Thursday that the next meeting of the Group of Seven would be held at his own Doral resort in Florida. According to former ethics chief , “There is no definition of corruption that would not cover the president participating in a contract awarded to himself. So, if this is not corrupt, nothing is corrupt.” 

By Saturday, Trump had reversed himself. The pushback from former government officials and the mainstream media had little to do with Trump’s decision. It was all about his Republican Party colleagues  that they were having difficulty keeping a straight face when mounting a defense of presidential actions.  

Trump’s Two-Step

In the past, Trump has been forced to scale back on his proposals by the courts (Muslim ban), by Congress (the border wall), by lobbyists (gun control). Through it all, the Republican Party has gone along with varying degrees of enthusiasm ranging from mild toadyism to personality-cult devotion. But Trump’s standing within his party after more than two years of see-no-evil and hear-no-evil compliance with the chief is finally begin to slip. The two proximate reasons for this slippage are Syria and Ukraine. And Trump is backpedaling on both of these fronts as well.

The impeachment inquiry currently hinges on whether Trump offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky anything in exchange for digging up dirt on political rival Joe Biden and his son, as well as possible interference by Ukraine in the 2016 presidential election. A number of former administration officials — most recently and definitively, diplomat  — have asserted that Trump held up the delivery of military assistance to Kiev as part of a quid pro quo.

Even the administration itself has acknowledged the quid pro quo. Last Thursday, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told the press that, yes, the administration made military assistance conditional on three elements including Trump’s political ask. Further, this tactic is so routine, according to Mulvaney, that critics should “get over it.” Mulvaney was faithfully parroting Trump’s position. But the chief of staff can’t get away with the same wink-wink-nod-nod nonsense that the president routinely peddles: “Oh, I was just joking!” 

Mulvaney tried to pretend in an  that he didn’t say what he said at the press conference. When confronted with video evidence, he could do nothing but squirm. He will soon suffer the same fate as previous lickspittle advisers who couldn’t dance the Trump two-step nimbly enough. 

Meanwhile, the president continues to reverse himself on Syria. His announcement this month of a complete withdrawal of US troops from the country — the second such attempt to “cut and run,” as Republicans once liked to characterize Democrats trying to end US military engagements overseas — met with resistance from practically everyone: Trump’s own national security team, a bipartisan majority in Congress, various overseas allies. 

Again, Republican Party resistance has proven key as Trump backpedaled once again. It turns out that US troops will indeed remain in Syria: to . The Kurds in the north will find no comfort in that announcement. The five-day ceasefire that Vice President Mike Pence negotiated with Turkey is running out, and Erdogan has  to “crush the heads” of any Kurdish fighters who have remained in the buffer zone. 

Trump has also  that he might provide a cut of the oil profits to the beleaguered Kurds. Which Kurds? The ones who have fled to Iraq? The families of those killed after the withdrawal of US troops? Syrian Kurds don’t need to be reminded of the anti-war slogan from the 2000s — “No Blood for Oil” — but it seems that Trump, who says that he opposed the Iraq War, needs a refresher course. 

Trump’s backpedaling on the Doral, Ukraine and Syria has nothing to do with any fundamental rethinking of these policies. The president is only interested in finding ways of normalizing his outrageous conduct.

In his televised cabinet meeting this week, Trump did his own amending of the Constitution when he  that the emoluments clause, which prohibits presidents from personally profiting from their position thanks to the US government or foreign governments, is “phony.” The retreat on the Doral will soon be replaced by some other blatant violation of the emoluments clause because Trump is determined not just to interpret the Constitution for his own benefit but to rewrite it in his inimitable style.

Trump is giving ground tactically. But he remains committed to demonstrating that he can invite foreign governments to interfere in US elections, that he can violate the Constitution and make money hand over fist during his White House tenancy, and that he can hand over the reins of geopolitics not to some international authority like the UN but to ruthless autocrats in Ankara and Moscow who care as little about human rights as the current US president does. Retreat, after all, is for losers.

Brexit Redux

Boris Johnson is like a bad magician: It’s painful to watch him fail over and over to pull a rabbit from his hat. To ram his cherished Brexit through Parliament by an October 31 deadline, he has resorted to any number of tricks: suspend the institution, kick people out of his own party, call an early election. He even did something that he obviously has a great distaste for: He negotiated another deal with the European Union. Then he brought that deal back for a vote in Parliament. 

The British Parliament isn’t charmed by boyish, boorish Boris. On Saturday, it voted to delay any vote on the EU deal until the implementing legislation has been passed. Johnson tried to hold another vote, but the speaker nixed that idea as a violation of parliamentary regulations. So, Johnson pursued Plan B: push through the implementing legislation.

On Tuesday, the British Parliament actually passed a second reading of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill. But then it handed Johnson yet another defeat by refusing to fast-track that bill. So, there’s little to no chance that Brexit can happen by the end of October.

And the vote on the withdrawal agreement doesn’t really reflect how Parliament feels about the latest EU-approved version of Brexit. The next stage in the parliamentary process is the committee stage where MPs debate the bill line by line. Then there’s a report stage, with an opportunity for amendment, and a “” stage of going back and forth between the House of Commons and House of Lords. In other words, given that the bill has a long way to go before a third reading, some members may have assented to the second reading just to move on to the more important vote of the day: rejecting the prime minister’s preposterous timeline.

On Saturday, a million people  to demand another Brexit referendum. Indeed, Britons have increasingly had  about leaving the EU — or perhaps the reversal in sentiment is just a function of older Brexiteers dying off and a new “remain” generation coming into its own — there’s been net loss and a net gain of  since 2016.

Even more startling, 52% of the population wants to decide this standoff through a second referendum, according to the , versus the mere 23% that prefers Parliament to be the final arbiter. But as in the United States, the leader can count on a group of fanatics that refuse to change their position regardless of new evidence or a change of circumstances. Consider these : “Sixty-three percent of Conservative Party supporters would rather see Scotland secede from the United Kingdom than abandon the Brexit project. Sixty-one percent of Conservatives would accept significant damage to the British economy to achieve Brexit. Fifty-nine percent would let Northern Ireland go. Fifty-four percent would rather see the Conservative Party itself destroyed than yield on Brexit.”

I’d be interested in hearing how many Conservative Party members would rather see their own heads explode than give up on Brexit. 

Idiocy is not, of course, the monopoly of the Conservatives. Despite the popularity of a second referendum, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is  and then a referendum (with the party  on whether to stay or leave the EU). This is inexplicable, because a second referendum is immensely popular, and Labour is not. Most polls show the Conservative Party with a  in public opinion.

As for Boris Johnson, he’s willing to backpedal as far as he has to in order to get his Brexit. Trump’s retreats are all part of the normalization of his grotesqueries across a range of issues. Johnson, however, is a , for he cares about only one thing. He’ll move his spiny little body any which way to achieve his one goal.

Turkish Leap

There’s an expression in French: reculer pour mieux sauter. It means, literally, to step back in order to better jump forward. That’s what Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done in Syria. He took a big step forward when he invaded Syria earlier this month. When Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Ankara last week, they came away with what seemed to be a concession. Erdogan  a five-day truce to give Kurdish fighters a chance to clear the area. 

Those five days are up, and Erdogan has stepped back again. In a deal brokered with Russia, Turkey has agreed to stop its incursion, pull back its soldiers and limit its operations to a six-mile swath of territory in northern Syria, alongside Russian troops. It will also maintain “” over a 20-mile belt of land that it seized.

While Trump goes back and forth on his Syria policy, Erdogan has been very clear. He has achieved his goal: clearing a broad swath of northern Syrian territory of Kurdish influence. The autonomous Kurdish republic — a thorn in the side of Syria, Turkey and Russia — is now gone. Erdogan can afford to step back because he has accomplished his mission.

It’s not as if the Turkish leader has stepped back in order to leap further into Syria. He doesn’t harbor further territorial ambitions. Turkey absorbed a chunk of Syria back in 1939 — now Hatay province — and that seems to have satisfied Ankara. But Erdogan has much larger ambitions. He wants nuclear weapons — not the 50 or so nukes that the United States houses at Incirlik air base, but nukes of his own.

Write David Sanger and William Broad in : “With Turkey now in open confrontation with its NATO allies, having gambled and won a bet that it could conduct a military incursion into Syria and get away with it, Mr. Erdogan’s threat takes on new meaning. If the United States could not prevent the Turkish leader from routing its Kurdish allies, how can it stop him from building a nuclear weapon or following Iran in gathering the technology to do so?”

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Which brings the story back to Donald Trump. He has failed to get an agreement with North Korea that restrains its nuclear complex. He ripped up a deal with Iran that contained its nuclear complex, and he has nurtured Turkey’s dream of joining the nuclear club. 

Trump has backpedaled so furiously on nuclear proliferation that it has become a full-scale retreat. It’s just one more example of the fatuousness of his “art of the deal.” Trump’s failed reputation as a dealmaker may not be sufficient, if the , to earn him a loss at the polls in 2020. But his failed and fraudulent deal-making on Ukraine may yet result in his removal from office by impeachment. 

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Art of the Back-Pedal appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In his career spanning over 40 years, Mahbubani has dedicated his academic scholarship to the growing geopolitical and economic influence of Asia. His books are a break from the traditional Western narrative of Asian societies, where overarching political problems are a roadblock to economic and social development.

In “Has the West Lost It?” Mahbubani dispels myths around Asian countries such as Malaysia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, which have achieved tremendous growth in the last 30 years. On the other hand, the Western world has failed to take care of its working class, which has been forced to the fringes. Mahbubani argues that the rise of countries like China and India mean that the West is no longer the most dominant force in world politics, and that it now has to learn to share, even abandon, its position and adapt to a world it can no longer dominate.

In this edition of The Interview, 51�Թ� talks to Mahbubani about his latest book, the need for the West to listen to the East, and the strategy the Western world should adopt to maintain its global relevance.

The text has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ankita Mukhopadhyay: In many of your recent speeches, interviews and books, you have focused on the West vs. East debate. Why do you choose to focus your work on this dynamic?

Kishore Mahbubani: The West has been dominant for 200 years in world history, which is a historical aberration. In the 19^th century, Europe dominated the world, in the 20^th century, the US dominated the world. Many in the US and Europe assume that this is the natural state of affairs and want their dominance to continue into the 21^st century. However, I refer to Western dominance as a major historical aberration, because from year 1 to 1820, the two largest economies of the world were China and India. The US and Europe only took off in the last 200 years.

All aberrations come to a natural end. The rise of Asia is natural and was bound to happen someday. Today, in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, the number one economy in the world is China, number two is US, number three is India, and number four is Japan. Out of the top four, the clear winner is Asia. Even though economic power is now shifting to Asia, the West is reluctant to accept this shift. The West continues to intervene in many unnecessary conflicts. These unnecessary interventions have drained spirits and resources and demoralized Western societies. To prevent the West from losing it, the West needs to adopt a 3M strategy: minimalist, multilateralist and Machiavellian.

Minimalism is a call to do less rather than more. The West has wasted a lot of resources fighting unnecessary wars, especially in the Middle East and the Islamic world. The Islamic world will be better off if the West doesn’t intervene. A key example of a region that benefited from minimalism is South East Asia. This region used to be called the “Balkans of Asia” owing to Western intervention. In fact, two of the biggest wars following World War II were fought in South East Asia — the Vietnam War and the Sino-Vietnamese War. Now the region is at peace because Western intervention is at its minimum.

Multilateralism means strengthening the global multilateral institutions that the West has created, particularly the UN family of institutions, which were a gift from the West to the world. My friend once said that the world is shrinking and becoming a small global village. But it is shocking to see that the West, particularly the US, is consistently undermining this. In my book, “Has the West Lost It,” I argue that it is against Western interests to undermine the world order. The West, at the end of the day, presents a in the global village, as 88% of the world’s population is outside the West. It is unwise for 12% of the world’s population to try and dominate the world on its own.

The third prong of a new Western strategy must be a Machiavellian approach. Former US President Bill Clinton gave a at Yale in 2003 in which he said that if the US has to be the world’s number one country, it can keep doing what it’s doing, and it can keep being unilateral. But if the US can conceive of a world where it’s no longer number one, and China is the number one economy, then it is surely in the US’ best interests to strengthen multilateral institutions than constrain the next big country, which is China. So, if [the West] wants to be Machiavellian and constrain China, it must strengthen multilateral institutions.

Mukhopadhyay: In your latest book, you argue that the lack of democracy in much of Asia will not hinder its rise. Asia’s economic growth and collective belief in efficient governance will enable the East to overtake the West. What about the risk of non-democratic and non-accountable institutions holding Asia back in the long run?

Mahbubani: In my view, in the long run, all countries will eventually become democratic. I don’t visualize a possibility that China will never become a democracy. The West is mistaken in wanting to make the world democratic overnight. The lesson of history is that countries have faced a disastrous situation when they tried to become democratic overnight. A good example is the former Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia became a democracy overnight. The Russian economy imploded, life expectancy in Russia went down, infant mortality went up. A lot of people suffered because of this sudden advent of democracy.

It’s always better to move to democracy slowly and gradually. China is doing the right thing in transforming society slowly. Even though China is not a democracy, the amount of personal freedom Chinese people enjoy has grown significantly. When I first went to China in 1980, Chinese people couldn’t choose what to wear, where to live, where to work, where to study, where to travel — the list of restrictions goes on. Today, the Chinese people can choose where to live, what to wear, where to work, and over a 100 million people freely travel overseas. There’s been an explosion of personal freedoms even under the Communist Party of China. China is transforming itself gradually and successfully — and China should be allowed to do so, instead of disrupting the process.

Mukhopadhyay: You spent many years working in the Singaporean government as a diplomat and were Singapore’s permanent representative to the United Nations. The UN is one of the West’s most powerful creations since World War II, but arguably it might also be its weakest link. What reforms must the West bring to institutions like the UN, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to retain its pole position in the world order?

Mahbubani: I frequently speak about the East and West dynamic because the West has been trying to control the world for too long. I think this a strategic mistake. For example, you referred to the World Bank and the IMF in your question. Why is it that the World Bank, founded over 70 years ago, still insists that it must be , and why does the IMF insist that it should be led by a European — disqualifying 80% of the world’s population? Are they saying that there are no good Indians or Chinese who can run the World Bank? I think Raghuram Rajan, of India, will make a great head of the IMF. Ex-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or Montek Singh Ahluwalia could run the World Bank.

It’s crazy that you have this condition, which is, in some ways, racist. Basically, it means that if you don’t belong to the Western nations, you can’t run these institutions. The time has come for the West to stop insisting that these institutions be controlled by the West. They should learn to be more democratic and offer the remaining 88% of the world an opportunity to manage these institutions. By the rest of the world, I don’t mean just China. China doesn’t make up the majority of Asia. Of the 3.5 to 3.6 billion Asians, China makes up only 1.4 billion. The rest of Asia can also have a say in managing these global institutions.

Mukhopadhyay: So, having Western powers dominate integral institutions like the UN Security Council (UNSC) really hinders world progress?

Mahbubani: Definitely, and it’s absurd! Singapore served for two years in the UNSC when I was an ambassador to the UN. I know the UNSC very well. In theory, it has 15 members — five permanent and 10 elected members. But this dynamic also shows you how distorted the UNSC has become. It is not controlled by the elected members, it is controlled by the five permanent members — the US, UK, China, Russia and France. And you can’t remove them because they can veto their own removal.

It is absurd that the only criteria for a permanent representation in the UNSC is that you must have won World War II in 1945. Over 74 years have gone by since 1945, so why do we still see the domination of these five countries in the UNSC? I don’t object to the veto. I believe that the UNSC should have the veto, but it should not belong to yesterday’s powers — it should belong to tomorrow’s powers.

For example, the United Kingdom, which is slowly becoming the disunited Kingdom, should give up its permanent membership to India, because India has a bigger claim to the seat given that its economy is bigger than that of UK’s. India’s population of 1.3 billion is about 20 times larger than that of the UK. It’s absurd that the UK has given up its colonial rights in many ways but it still wants to preserve its permanent seat in the UNSC. A change is necessary.

I proposed a 7-7-7 formula for reform of the UNSC in my book, “.” I also refer to this formula in “Has the West Lost It?” I have proposed that the new seven permanent members of the UNSC should be the US, Russia, China, India, Brazil and Nigeria (the latter three are the most populous states in the world), and one seat should be reserved for Europe, because it mainly operates as one economy. Therefore, the UNSC will not be dominated by the West anymore.

I have also proposed seven semi-permanent members, because when a country becomes a permanent member of the UNSC, its neighbor can object. For example, when Brazil wants to become a member, Argentina can object. If Nigeria wants to become a permanent member, South Africa can object. In the case of India, Pakistan blocks the claim. I propose a new scheme by which countries like Pakistan will become semi-permanent members of the Security Council, and they would have a permanent seat every eight years. Then there will be seven elected members from smaller states. This 7-7-7 formula will make the Security Council more representative of the 7.5 billion people of the world and not primarily the 12% who live in the West.

Mukhopadhyay: The Western media focus a lot on the political problems in Asian countries such as China, India and Pakistan. Recently, the UN Security Council the revocation of Article 370, which granted special autonomous status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. What are the biggest political challenges for China and India in the long run?

Mahbubani: As I mentioned earlier, in PPP terms, the number one economy in the world is China, number three is India. By 2050, number one will be China, number two will be India, and number three will be the US. India is about to enter a geopolitical sweet spot. India will now be courted actively by both the US and China. In my book, I suggest that it’s time for India to be Machiavellian and to work out where its interests lie. Imagine a see-saw. On the see-saw, you have US and China sitting on opposite sides. The best place for India is to stand in the middle. If India puts its foot on the see-saw, it will affect the balance. For India to achieve this middle position, it needs to have equally good relations with both countries. India is capable of doing that, and if it does so, it will enhance its geopolitical usefulness, and its geopolitical weight will be far greater than that of Pakistan.

I love the Anglo-Saxon media and I think the Financial Times and The Economist are great newspapers. Nonetheless, they still reflect an Anglo-Saxon point of view. The Anglo-Saxon population of the world is confined to five countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. If you add up the total numbers of Anglo-Saxon population in the world, it’s about 425 million. That’s just 5% of the world’s population. But this 5% dominates the global airwaves, and they usually give you all the bad news about India and Pakistan. They will never give you the good news.

In my new book, I talk about the success stories such as the startling fall in global poverty rates. A lot of the poverty reduction has taken place in Asia. Even countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have a bad image in the Western media, have improved their economies significantly. They have achieved over 5% growth in 20 years! It’s shocking to see how these countries have improved. In the case of Malaysia, the improvement is quite stunning: Its poverty rate went down to 1.7% in 2012 from 51.2% in 1958.

Mukhopadhyay: In June 2018, Joseph Nye criticized your book in the for making an “easy target” of the West, while giving China a “free ride.” You have repeatedly chosen to defend China and highlight the advantages of Xi Jinping’s “rational good governance.” Why did you call Xi Jinping an exemplar of good governance?

Mahbubani: Joseph Nye is an American social scientist and he believes in data. The data tells me that the only developed country where the average income of the bottom 50% has gone down over the last 30 years is the US. The country where the average income of the bottom 50% has gone up the fastest is China. You must judge good governance not in terms of good ideology, but in terms of results and its impact on the bottom 50%.

Clearly, I am not giving Xi Jinping a “free ride” — I am just providing the data. The data shows that the US has neglected its bottom 50%, and China has improved the well-being of its bottom 50% faster and more comprehensively than any other country. That’s what good governance is about. If you go by any indicator — poverty reduction, life expectancy, infant mortality — the data will show you that life expectancy is going down in the US. In China it’s the opposite. My next book, which I hope to produce next year, gives data on how the American elites have failed their working-class population. That’s why the US has elected an irrational leader, while China is lucky to have a rational leader like Xi Jinping.

---

Trump is attacked very much in the West for everything he does. In this case, however, I think that Trump should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for talking to Kim Jong-un.

Amartya Sen once said that if you are going to have proper development, you need the invisible hand of the free market and the visible hand of free governance. What has gone wrong in the US is that you have the invisible hand, but not the visible hand. You can find a lot of data that will show you that the US today is no longer a democracy — it’s a plutocracy, where all the . By contrast, in both India and China, the government continues to play a significant role in the governing. That’s why the bottom 50% in India has experienced a significant improvement in the standard of living.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong suffers from the American problem where the bottom 50% of the population has not seen an improvement in their standard of living because it has become a plutocracy like the US. Good governance isn’t a fight about which country is a democracy and which isn’t. It is about which societies are taking care of the bottom 50% of the population.

Mukhopadhyay: Europe is undergoing a period of economic stagnation. Italy is on the brink of a major debt crisis, Greece has forced other European countries to question the existence of the eurozone. Post-Brexit, the , and even the German economy is teetering on the . How will the European slowdown affect the global economy? Will Asia suffer or will Europe’s loss be Asia’s gain?

Mahbubani: Both Europe and the US have to make strategic adjustments with the world to become more competitive. When India and China developed, they put in millions of workers into the global free-market system. Joseph Schumpeter calls this “creative destruction,” which is inevitable when you put new workers into the market, and other workers lose their jobs.

Europeans can still do well, but the European governments must help their people learn new skills, different from those China and India are strong in. European governments have failed to provide skills training, and this failure to take care of the working classes is the reason why the US now has a leader like Donald Trump, and in Europe populist parties are taking power. The Europeans can adjust and work with Asia, and that can be a great future for the world. I want the West to do well — I don’t want the West to fail. My book is intended to be a gift to the West and not a condemnation.

Mukhopadhyay: By imposing its version of democracy in places like Iraq, the West has caused much conflict. Does the West need to stop intervening, or should it make human rights, not geopolitics, the basis of its foreign policy?

Mahbubani: Before intervention, there’s one thing we need to address — bombing. The West needs to stop dropping bombs. China hasn’t fought a major war in 40 years, it has not fired a bullet across its border in 30 years. In contrast, even under the rule of Barack Obama, who was a peaceful American leader, in the last year of his presidency, the US over 26,000 bombs on seven countries. We have to stop dropping bombs. Look at Libya. France went into Libya, the US went into Libya, and now that the country is broken, they have left.

I would like to cite a quote in my book, by an Indian diplomat, Shyam Saran, on Western intervention: “In most cases, the post-intervention situation has been rendered worse, the violence more lethal, and the suffering of the people who were supposed to be protected much more severe than before. Iraq is an earlier instance, Libya and Syria are the more recent ones. A similar story is playing itself out in Ukraine. In each case, no careful thought was given to the possible consequences of the intervention.”

All I am saying is, Why waste money and resources to kill people and make countries worse off?

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Mukhopadhyay: However, US involvement in North Korea was a positive move to curb nuclear weaponry. How can the West continue to involve itself constructively in world affairs, particularly in countries like North Korea?

Mahbubani: Here I am going to say something surprising. Trump is attacked very much in the West for everything he does. In this case, however, I think that Trump should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for talking to Kim Jong-un. And he did the right thing in doing so, because he employed diplomacy. It’s a pity that Obama didn’t go to Iran, and Clinton didn’t go to Cuba to talk to Castro. I think Donald Trump is braver than his predecessors in talking to an enemy.

Even though Trump did the right thing, he was surrounded by advisers like John Bolton, who, instead of negotiating a deal with North Korea, wanted to strong-arm the country into acceding to all US demands, without offering anything in return. Now that Trump has sacked Bolton, I hope that he goes back to North Korea. I am convinced that the North Koreans are rational people. If you give them a win-win deal and reduce sanctions, they will begin to work with the rest of the world and begin to scale back on their nuclear weapons.

Mukhopadhyay: How can the West change its misunderstanding of the East?

Mahbubani: The West needs to stop being arrogant and start listening to the East. I have published seven books and realized that there is a great paradox about the US: It has the world’s most open society, but it has a closed mind. The Americans don’t like to listen to foreign voices. There’s a kind of a bubble that American intellectuals are caught in, in which they don’t listen to foreign voices. I write sharply to break through this bubble so that they listen to foreign voices.

If the US and Europe can learn to listen to the world and break through their bubble, they will learn to listen to foreign voices. I will give you an example. When Europe and India were negotiating a free trade agreement, Europe told India that you must respect the European human rights provisions. Shashi Tharoor, a member of Parliament in India, gave a brilliant and said: “I am convinced that if Europe were to insist on imposing conditionality of such a sort on the FTA, then India would refuse to cooperate. You can’t forget history, you can’t forget that for 200 years others have led India’s business and politics, and it is much more important for us to insist on our own rights than to strike an FTA. As simple as that.”

Therefore, it’s time for the West to stop being arrogant toward the East and start listening.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Western Dominance Is a Historical Aberration appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Some as young as 14 have been linked to this form of terrorism. Since 2018, the police and Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, have carried out 80 investigations into those motivated by such and threatening violence, while the that it had held more than 30 individuals associated with the far right under anti-terrorism laws last year — an increase on previous years.

While the preponderance of terrorism-related arrests and plots in Britain remain linked to jihadists, and while Basu made a point to note far-right terrorism “is small but it is my fastest-growing problem,” Met and Home Office statistics, as well as mounting concerns about the increased visibility of the far right, signal a timeliness in confronting the place of the far right in Britain today.

It is important to recall the distinctions in definition in light of the announcement. Terrorism has a particular created by the British government and applied by the Crown Prosecution Service. It claims that terrorism “is the use of threat of action both in and outside the UK, designed to influence any international government or organisation or to intimidate the public. It must also be for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.”

While such language may appear expansive, terrorism in the legal sense — and in the sense that Basu used it — is narrower than colloquial definitions. It is the escalation of extremism, the violent manifestation of intolerance and threats to harm those viewed as “outsiders” or “others.” Its usage should be seen to signal the seriousness of the threat these groups pose to society.

Outward Expression

In recent years, Britain has witnessed the rise of several prominent political figures and parties promoting extreme positions regarding national identity and tolerance, marshaling a kind of creeping growth in far-right rhetoric and violence. As the chief executive of Hope Not Hate advocacy group told , “We have long warned about the rising threat from the far right. Small groups of hardcore Nazis are increasingly willing to commit extreme acts of violence, while a wider pool of DIY fascists are engaging in campaigns of harassment against public figures, especially those who oppose Brexit.”

Debates over immigration, religion and Britain’s relationship with Europe, for example, have given those advancing extremist positions new talking points as well. Groups including, though not limited to, the English Defence League, Generation Identity/Identitarian Movement and Britain First, as well as members of the more amorphous Free Tommy Robinson movement, have attained considerable visibility on the streets and television broadcasts in Britain all while being accused of promoting racist or Islamophobic ideas. Radio Aryan, an online station broadcasting an array of racist and anti-Semitic content, has also in recent months. Controversial political parties such as For Britain and the National Front are likewise said to have been founded on exclusionary and extremist ideologies.

Extremist rhetoric has found outward expression as well. Religiously-motivated have more than quadrupled since 2011, and race-related hate crimes almost doubled between 2011/2012 and 2017/2018. While reported hate crimes include non-violent expressions of hatred such as graffiti and verbal abuse, physical violence has also been manifesting in the last two years. In March, a man yelling racial abuses stabbed a young man in . Over the summer, that neo-Nazi groups had been conducting night time, masked rituals and gatherings in various National Trust sites. In September, a neo-Nazi organization threatened to West Midlands policeman Chief Constable Dave Thompson, labelling him a “race traitor.”

News from overseas, meanwhile, compounds concerns over what might come of far-right extremism and terrorism in Britain. In recent years, several far right related mass stabbings or shootings in the United States, Norway, Italy and New Zealand have made international news. Germany’s interior ministry, meanwhile, has that indicate that they believe more than 12,000 far-right Germans are “inclined towards violence,” and another 12,000 hold far-right extremist views.

While there is a distinction between extremism and terrorism — between holding extreme views and being a terrorist — they are obviously related. Propaganda from political parties and individuals is often cited by or found in the homes of those perpetrating far-right terrorism, and thus appears to be galvanizing or reinforcing violent beliefs.

No Plan

The timing of the declaration that the far-right is Britain’s fastest growing terrorist threat, when taken in light of other recent decisions by counterterrorism police services, has proven controversial. For example, just days after Basu’s statement, he went on to say that he had no plan to combat the proliferation of alleged white nationalist group Generation Identity in Britain. (A split within Generation Identity, a pan-European group, has recently occurred, leaving Generation Identity to rebrand itself as the Identitarian Movement). He : “I don’t have [a plan] for a very good reason — because until they cross a criminal threshold it’s not my business.”

Some have argued that Generation Identity/Identitarian Movement does pose a threat to Britons through their political stances — including perpetuating the myth of the “great replacement” and calling for the “remigration” of Muslims living in Europe — which mirror those of many held by the violent nationalists responsible for mass shootings in Norway, Christchurch and El Paso. They also note the group’s direct link to the Christchurch shooter through donations he made to another branch of the group.

The group’s leadership has previously that they do not promote violence, and that the financial relationship between their group and the Christchurch shooter predated his violent activities and was tentative at best. Nevertheless, their of practicing “peaceful and creative protest that succeeds without threats or intimidation” stand in contrast to those who accuse them of promoting an agenda hostile to immigrants and non-Europeans.

The UK government’s response to fighting terrorist recruitment, far right and otherwise, has also faced considerable criticism in recent years, both relating to its ideological biases and effectiveness. For example, the government’s anti-radicalization program, Prevent, which Basu promoted, has seen an increase in referrals between 2016 and 2018, from 10% to 18%. However, the program is subject to an ongoing independent review, and activists and observers alike have doubted its ability to properly screen for radicalization. Additionally, to date, the government has only used its proscription powers against the group National Action and its aliases. MI5, meanwhile, only assumed a in investigating far-right terrorism this time last year, and the UK terror threat level system did not include consideration for until this July.

During his briefing, Basu clearly stated that the police “can’t arrest ourselves out of this problem,” encouraging others to assume responsibility for preventing the radicalization of Britons. Policing right-wing terrorism has proven a challenge, and as Basu admitted of the police’s methods of tackling the far right, “some of the criticisms that we did not look at white supremacist, right-wing violence as terrorism in the past is probably justified.” Meanwhile, lone actors such as in the Christchurch mosque shootings can be difficult to identify in advance of a violent attack.

Considerable radicalization also occurs online and through anonymized or encrypted communication. Moreover, with recruits as young as 14, radicalization in a wide array of arenas, including online and at home, must be considered.

Some social media and online payment companies alike have pledged to de-platform, de-monetize or otherwise limit far-right actors and groups online — two important steps in preventing the spread of radicalizing materials and reducing terrorists’ access to funding. The Met and other policing authorities’ declarations about the problem of far-right terrorism and the plots they have foiled thus far represent another promising development. Vigilance on the part of individual citizens will likely prove itself another essential ingredient in de-escalation. There is no magic bullet to defeat far-right terrorism in Britain, but declarations such as that made by the Met at the very least are vital in helping us know how to fight the battle.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Far-Right Terrorism Is Now Britain’s Fastest Growing Problem appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The DC protests were part of a that involved an estimated 6.6 million people. In New Zealand, 3.5% of the population participated. Melbourne, Berlin and London  of 100,000 people. In Seattle, over 1,000 workers  of Amazon headquarters, demanding that the company reduce its carbon emissions to zero.

It wasn’t just the children of the privileged in the industrialized world who were out on the streets. Protests took place in , including 15 cities in the Philippines,  and  Africa.

Around the World

The global climate strike is just the latest mass protest this year. Demonstrations have roiled Hong Kong since the beginning of the summer. Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets in Moscow through the fall to protest restrictions on local elections. Thousands of Brazilians  major cities to condemn their president’s handling of the Amazon fires, and the same outrage prompted people to gather with placards  all over the world. Protests against Venezuela’s leadership that broke out on January 1 have recently dwindled even as demonstrations to remove Haiti’s president  and security forces  on Iraqis protesting the corruption and inefficiency of their government.

Anti-government rallies in Serbia became some of the  in Europe this summer. Elsewhere in Europe, the yellow vests continued to target the government of Emmanuel Macron into 2019. In the UK, thousands gathered to protest Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suspension of Parliament in September.

Protesters marched last month in South Africa  rising violence against women. At the beginning of the year, the Women’s March 2019 again focused anger at Donald Trump and his administration’s record on women’s issues, while gun control supporters held “recess rallies” around the United States in August to push for stricter limits on firearms. After massive protests helped oust the previous prime minister in 2016, candlelight this last weekend as 800,000 people gathered to support an embattled justice minister and his reform agenda.

Analysts almost daily bemoan the erosion of democratic values that has accompanied the rise of autocratic politicians. Indeed, recourse to the streets can be a sign that people no longer believe that the ordinary mechanisms of democracy are working. Viewed another way, however, the sheer number of protests and their geographic spread prove that 2019 was a banner year for engagement, for participation, for democracy. As protesters like to chant, this is what democracy looks like.

Ahead to the Past?

Fifty years ago, young people also declared that they were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. In Warsaw in 1968, Polish students demonstrated in defense of free speech and against police brutality. It was part of a larger rebellion in the Soviet bloc, led by Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” reforms in Czechoslovakia. Students in Germany  their rebellious counterparts on the other side of the Iron Curtain as part of their own campus actions. In Paris, meanwhile, French students took over the streets with slogans like “Be realistic, demand the impossible.”

It was a worldwide phenomenon. Students mobilized in Mexico, Pakistan and Japan. The first protests against the military dictatorship began in Brazil. And, of course, huge anti-Vietnam War demonstrations convulsed the United States. Then as now, young people were upset with government repression, grievous policies of war and environmental destruction, and systemic sclerosis. They were critical of an imposed political consensus — by military juntas, communist governments and the joint efforts of liberal and conservative politicians in the democratic world.

But there was also hope. Young people believed in 1968 that they could create new societies — at the micro-level in communes, in newly radicalized city councils and even at a national level like Dubcek’s experiment in Czechoslovakia. “Beneath the paving stones — the beach!” French students wrote on the walls of Paris that year.

Alas, many of the protests of 1968 ended in tragedy. The Polish government threw the students in jail. The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and ended Dubcek’s experiment. The Mexican government killed untold number of students. Richard Nixon was reelected in the United States, and the Vietnam War dragged on for another seven years. Today, young people are operating under a sky full of ominous clouds. They aren’t filling the streets to create a new world so much as to save the old, imperfect one. If 1968 was a year of utopian protest, 2019 has been one long effort to prevent a dystopian future.

The Clampdown

The protests of 2019, so far at least, have not produced much change. In some countries, the pushback has been terrifying. During a summer of escalating protests, Russian authorities detained 2,000 people, most of them young. The vast majority of the detainees were subsequently released. But several were convicted of various offenses, including inciting a riot, and sentenced to several years in prison. “I can say with certainty that Russia is striving inevitably towards freedom,” 21-year-old protester Egor Zhukov . “I don’t know whether I will be freed, but Russia certainly will be.” He is currently  and has been put on a government blacklist of terrorists. This week,  to the streets in Moscow to demand the release of all those arrested over the summer.

As China celebrated its 70th year of Communist Party rule, protesters in Hong Kong tried to upstage the proceedings. For the first time, police fired live ammunition at the crowds. One high school student was . Of the 51 people who went to the hospital, two are in critical condition. The protests, which have been going on for over 100 days, have not been entirely nonviolent. Protesters have thrown gasoline bombs and beaten police with metal pipes. The policy, too, have been increasingly aggressive. An air of desperation is settling over the scene.

In the United States, a few scattered protests have taken place in support of the impeachment of Donald Trump. The president’s wrath, meanwhile, has been focused closer to home. Trump has lashed out at the person who blew the whistle on his conduct with foreign leaders, which precipitated the Democratic Party’s decision to press ahead with an impeachment inquiry. Trump  the CIA whistleblower “close to a spy” — well, duh, the person does work for the CIA — and a “traitor.” Trump publicly lamented that the United States no longer treats traitors the way it once did (presumably by imposing the death penalty). Given his willingness to put his own interests — and occasionally the interests of other countries — above the national interest, Trump may one day soon be relieved that the United States has changed its policy toward traitors.

Even worse, Trump has  pastor Robert Jeffress’ contention that the United States could descend into a “civil war” if the president is impeached. This is the closest that a president has come to a call to arms within the country since the 1850s. It’s one thing for an autocrat like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping to use the apparatus of the state to suppress protests. It’s quite another for a democratically elected leader to threaten to call on his well-armed supporters to rise up against the state itself.

As in 1968, the protesters can’t expect immediate results. It took 20 more years before the student protesters in Poland and Czechoslovakia would oust the governments that suppressed them. Mexico is no longer a one-party state, and Pakistan is more or less a democracy. Despite Jair Bolsonaro’s best efforts, Brazil has not returned to the days of military dictatorship.

Patience, however, is not the best strategy when it comes to climate change. The ice continues to melt. The temperatures continue to rise. Extreme weather events continue to happen. As the old advertising jingle used to go, you can’t fool Mother Nature. The #FridaysForFuture movement isn’t really a bunch of rebellious students. If they had one unified message last month, it was: Please, for the sake of the planet, listen to your Mother!

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The New Age of Protest appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In Britain, show that 31% of the population believes Islam poses a threat to the British way of life, with 18% holding extremely negative views of Muslims. A 2017 undertaken in 27 European nations illustrates how Islamophobia has become one of the most “commonplace expressions of racist prejudice,” with countries like Germany experiencing a threefold increase in attacks on Muslims from 2015-16, following the arrival of over 1 million migrants at the height of the refugee crisis. This year alone, there have been over , with assaults estimated to have post-9/11 levels back in 2017.  

Islamophobia has become a prevalent talking point for political leaders, used to garner public support, distract from other pressing issues and perpetuate an us-versus-them narrative for political gain. Conservative political leaders have played a major role in inciting anti-Muslim sentiment by exaggerating threats of homegrown terrorism and often painting Islam as incompatible with Western values. Even when political leaders do not appear to be deliberately targeting Muslims, they often fail to represent minorities’ interests or respond to their needs. This apathy can further entrench structural barriers that minorities, including Muslims, face, not to mention impacts on their access to equal opportunities.

In this edition of The Interview, 51�Թ� talks to Tahir Abbas, assistant professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at the University of Leiden and a visiting senior fellow at the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Abbas has written widely on Islamophobia, including most recently on how Britain’s Conservative Party from exploiting it. His , “Islamophobia and Radicalisation: A Vicious Cycle,” released on September 23, explores how Islamophobia and radicalization intersect and reinforce each other.

The text has been edited for clarity.

Dina Yazdani: Please set the stage for us: How would you define Islamophobia?

Tahir Abbas: In very simple terms, it’s the idea of the fear or dread of Islam and Muslims. It’s a broad definition that was largely put forward by the Runnymede Trust in 1996, which attempted to try and capture the meaning and the impact of Islamophobia at a time when the Bosnian crisis was going on, at a time when geopolitics was shifting away from the old East-West problematics. I think it’s that, and there are interrelated concepts within that space. We have issues of direct observable problems of structural racism and discrimination — violence toward women who wear the headscarf, mosque attacks — to issues around cultural distancing — stereotyping, orientalism — which has a much wider societal impact, not just in terms of outcomes on institutions, like when it comes to hiring practices, which suggests Islamophobia in structural terms, but we also see casual racism toward Muslims as a whole, which is much more of a cultural phenomenon.

Yazdani: Where has its front stage been?

Abbas: Well, a lot of it is coming out of the “global north” experience, predominantly, starting out in Western Europe with the experience of postwar migration acting as a backdrop to that reality. And then, more recently, across the pond from North Africa, where we see Muslim groups who were relatively integrated and assimilated into American society pre-9/11 finding themselves facing similar issues around discrimination and victimization — disproportionately in terms of the criminal justice system, vilification of the press, demonization in the press by groups presenting a them-versus-us dichotomy.

Yazdani: In a 2018 for the Middle East Eye, you described there was “mounting evidence” of “organized Islamophobia” in both Europe and the US, and that “the lived realities of brown and black people in some of the poorest parts of the country is ongoing evidence of policies that have not only excluded minorities but also demonised them.” What policies are fueling this anti-Muslim sentiment and reinforcing these divisions across the Western world?

Abbas: These policies are an implication rather than a direct result, in the sense that when we think about housing policies, we think about it as social policies allocation. So, for example, migrant groups coming into the UK in the 1990s to the 2000s from Iraq, Afghanistan and more recently from Somalia, Syria, etc., are located into areas that are experiencing downward pressures, areas that face decline and that have an existing majority population that is feeling left behind and alienated. So when they see these Muslim groups moving into their areas, seemingly protected by the state, they feel resentful and sometimes mobilized around this.

When we see some of these activities across Britain and Europe, we see that it’s often these poor parts with Muslim groups where there are more profound patterns of resistance around that. So at one level it’s a question of social housing allocation, and on another level it has to do with housing and markets, and the inability of Muslim groups to find themselves in the position to move out of poorer areas due to various gatekeeping issues within the private housing sector.

There is also exclusionary behavior at the level of the state, and even the [market] — this notion of “white flight,” which is crude. But it tells us something about when certain areas have minorities, Muslims moving into them has a knock-on effect of reducing average household prices and increasing the rate of concentration of those new groups. Often, people who come to those areas wanting to share a particular lived experience has resulted in existing issues of isolation and alienation, such as Muslim groups who grew up in poorer areas, whose children qualify for universities and get professional qualifications, who don’t immediately move into purely affluent, white neighborhoods even if they could because they want to retain certain links with their communities of origin — including, places of worship, etc. So there is often a tradeoff. It’s also a result of fear and a result of discrimination, because upwardly mobilizing Muslims going into affluent white areas faces hostility and racism of a different kind.

Yazdani: Building on that knock-on effect, what effect have policies promoting multiculturalism or, on the other hand, integration, had on Islamophobia?

Abbas: Integration is the idea of the state providing certain opportunities, spaces for minorities because they have signed a contract of sorts that acknowledges their citizenship and status in society legally, but also culturally, socially, politically. It’s the idea of a social contract. In exchange, the minorities provide a sense of engagement, participation — they pay taxes, they turn up to vote. In return, the state says it recognizes that they may want places of worship, mosques, Islamic centers — and that we are tolerant and open-minded enough to provide that, because it’s only right, and also because we afforded the same kind of privileges to other minority groups over the years.

Although, for example, when it comes to Muslim education, Muslim education [in Britain] didn’t kick into place until 1997, although there have been Jewish schools with state school funding since 1944, although it’s a much smaller community. Integration requires a sense of acceptance — and a sense of acceptance on the part of minority communities that they have a role and a sense of responsibility as citizens. There has been increasing pressures on the idea of differences, which might be seen as acceptable in a diverse society; the idea that diversity itself has been placed under pressure because there’s been a real resistance to multiculturalism, particularly in light of events like 9/11 and 7/7 [London bombings], where it was felt that some of these differences are spaces in which extremism flourishes and where there is a menace for national security to think about.

It’s a misunderstanding. It’s extremism, and also a lack of enthusiasm about the idea of diversity among particular institutions and individuals in elite society.

Yazdani: What are the most egregious examples of organized Islamophobia over the past few years? Where has it been manifested?

Abbas: A lot of it has been online, and it has quite a degree of mobilization online, in terms of pushing out Islamophobia sentiments — including notions of fake news, exaggerated news, distorted news — which perpetuate the almost daily view that Muslims are a problem or a threat, a fifth column. The tropes of Islamophobia are that [Muslims] are disproportionately feeding off the welfare state, and all of these concerns around extremism and terrorism which never really go away and keep bubbling up. So the online space is a major space in which the sentiments of Islamophobia are generated, repackaged, reformulated and recommunicated.

Some of that is orchestrated, well-organized and well-funded, as has been reported by many in terms of the far right. The role of various groups, which exist to fund anti-Muslim sentiment online, is to push Islamophobic sentiment for their own political means, some of which leans into far-right thinking.

Yazdani: Following that far-right thinking, what role have policymakers, lawmakers and politicians played in fueling this anti-Muslim sentiment?

Abbas: We have this area of populism, authoritarianism and elitism that sort of characterizes a lot of the “global north.” We’ve got the global economic crash of 2008 as a recent backdrop here, huge wealth, inequalities as a result of the disproportionate impact of austerity on poorer groups — we’ve seen all of these effects on Britain, [] in the UN special rapporteur report, etc. This has been an ideological program, not one derived from sound economic thinking even.

Economic inequalities, in these times, have resulted in political polarization. The center is hollowed out, and it’s the peripheral voices of the far right and far left, Islamists and all the other extremist groups that have an amplified voice in this political space, while the center ground — in this extreme sort of attempt to capture the center — has been diffused to such an extent that there’s nothing that holds it together anymore. That’s why we’ve got these extreme voices coming into the center, via these figures that provoke these populist sentiment, like [Donald] Trump, [Viktor] Orbán, [Narednra] Modi, [Recep Tayyip] Erdoǧan — and to an extent also Brexit — that are symptoms of this hollowing out of this political center.

Yazdani: In 2005, France experienced widespread riots by French Muslims, mostly living in the banlieus, on the outskirts of major cities. This was an eruption of injustice perceived by these French Muslims who felt, despite identifying as French and being French citizens, disenfranchised and marginalized in France. Looking back at this example, and similar moments of backlash by the Muslim communities witnessed in more recent history but perhaps on a smaller scale, how do second generation Muslims experience Islamophobia and experience their ethnic and cultural identity differently when compared to more recent immigrants?

Islamophobia has a way of destabilizing all sorts of social relations. We have to try and stick our necks out a little bit, knowing that even in doing so, we’re going to face potential blocks along the way.

Abbas: The second generation have got a foot in both camps. They were born in a new country, often to parents born in another country. Being born in a new country, they learn the language of the new country, and go through the education in the new country. They are expected to go through these hoops in a way that everybody else is under the same conditions and under the same expectations. For example, in a meritocratic liberal society, if you work hard and achieve quality education, you will be rewarded with returns to your human capital investments.

However, patterns of discrimination do not abate when we think of the impact of change from the first to the second generation. The first generation were heavily discriminated against, from the jobs they got from the outset, in terms of their mobility or lack thereof, that led to them being trapped in those poor areas. The second generation are born in a new country, and they have the expectations of the people in their peer groups more generally, but they are not getting the chances. They’re feeling the same kind of frustrations [as the first generation], and often it’s a lot worse. So those pressures are doubly felt — they feel that they carry the discrimination and racism of their parents before them.

These huge patterns of discrimination felt from the second generation meant that men and women go through the educational system, but do not experience the kind of relative performance you would expect them to. There are some studies done on this [suggesting] that maybe you can put this down to the lag of experience from the first generation. So there are going to be language gaps, there are going to be certain social capital gaps, like who you know rather than what you know that helps in certain professions, like law and media. This lack of capital explains a great deal of the lag. These are non-discriminatory factors. But that’s a real ruse, because we have to understand that there are various stages of discrimination that are accumulative.

What starts as not being able to get the job you want having done the degree you achieved, having gone through the local school systems, means that there are patterns of discrimination that stay with you from the very beginning. We know from recent studies and observations around who has power, status in society, that it’s the self-selected, privately educated and, in the case of England, folks from a narrow set of schools and universities — two in the case of the UK. And while minorities do feed into that process, there are disproportionate effects that need to be taken into consideration.

Yes, there are people who move up the social ladder and achieve a certain level of success beyond expectations to be had at the start, but there is a great deal of people who lag behind and have all the talent, all the skills and all the capacities which aren’t realized because of system patterns and institutional dynamics around discrimination and racism that affect all groups of color. In today’s world, there’s a layer of Muslims within all groups who are also a feature in that.

Yazdani: Earlier you mentioned radicalization. On that topic, many believe that what drives Islamophibia is the fear that Islam promotes violence and makes Muslims more prone to being radicalized than adherents of other religions. They point to the rise of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and their offshoots, and attacks by Muslim terrorists around the world. What are the driving factors behind radicalization among Muslims, especially Muslim youth, and how do anti-Muslim sentiments feed into that?

Abbas: There are lots of schools of thought on what drives radicalization. We have essentially a spectrum of push and pull factors. The push factors are structural problems: unemployment, disadvantages, poverty, alienation, marginalization, inequality — and the pull factor is ideology. It takes an angry young man to reach out to online forums or literature to find arguments that somehow support their grievances, sense of injustice, perceptions on racism and the reality of racism in their society, whether it’s to their friends, parents, or to themselves or local communities.

In wanting to redress all of that, they find it a totalizing, unique, all-capturing closed set in violence and extremism, combined with a sense of adventure, thrill and masculinity, a sense of belongingness. This “groupdom” that comes with those movements, especially in the Middle East and with the rise, and now fall, of the Islamic State, which acts as a pull.

Depending on whom you listen to and what their arguments are, many would say that it’s all about ideology, because there are poor, marginalized, alienated, unemployed Muslim men who don’t become terrorists. In fact, the mass majority don’t, and there are middle class, upward mobile and privately educated Muslim men who commit terrorism. This isn’t the norm. Far more research is pointing out to a combination of structural conditions and ideological factors.

From my research into this field over the last 10 to 15 years, of talking to people who have been radicalized and have gone off to carry out missions abroad, locked away for crimes — or locked away in Guantanamo on crimes that were unfounded — there is a sense of grievance, a sense of anger. A sense of “You’re not recognizing my potential as a human being, as a man and as a woman. I’m angry, and bereaved, and have no real way of really addressing this unless I do something about it myself. I cannot look to even my own existence or my local faith community setup. The imams don’t understand where I’m coming from, and their narrow interpretations do not support my worldview or aspirations.”

So they take an even narrower perspective on Islam and the lure of adventure, thrill and totalizing solutions become the routes through which they enter into violence extremism. So this is the broad playing field around the radicalization process — and it can be a process. People can move from one end to the other, can move back, in an out of different stages throughout all of this.

There’s not a linearity in the process as a whole. A linearity in this field can lead to all sorts of accusations that it takes a moment for a Muslim to become an extremist, because of the potential that is always within. There’s a lot of discourse within the counterterrorism field that conservative Muslims are steps away from becoming violent extremists. And so deradicalization and preventing violent extremism has inadvertently, or deliberately, traversed into the wider field of what it is to be a Muslim in the “global north” and in the “global south,” where in fact Muslims are killing other Muslims in far greater numbers than we would imagine elsewhere.

So, there are these push factors and pull factors, depending on how you see it — because, again, ideology feeds into the research process. The think tank and policy world, everyone has an agenda here. Academics are supposed to cut through all of this, but the work that we do in academia on this is quite diverse. But it’s difficult to talk to former terrorists, talk to family members, difficult to access police records, court cases and files, so we have to do a sentimental, sectional analysis after the event — surveys, things like that.

Yazdani: You’ve argued that, contrary to public perception, Islamism is not just a term to describe fundamentalism, but that it can also be a progressive idea. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Abbas: Yes. So when you’ve got Islamism branded about as somehow a given concept in relation to the idea that it’s naturally tending toward violence, then you’ve got an ideological problem that contaminates the study of Muslims and extremism. Islamism in broad and simple terms means the idea of using Islam, engaging with Islam through a political lens.

Now, if you’re a citizen in Europe and you see Islam as a force for justice, charity, community development, sharing with others in local area settings — but also in terms of building ideas and working together toward [resolving] the issues; and if you see that role as one of being a good Muslim, then your ideals are not shaped by violence or extremism, but by the idea of being a good Muslim through the lens of thinking about focusing on humanity and the needs of humans who are different, are unequal, have existing problems; when your religious principles teach you that it’s an aspiration to want to better a lot of humanity by working together and knowing each other through this process.

These kinds of spiritual, political, cultural outlooks can also be defined under the rubric Islamism might use, but they’re wholesale neglected. In a recent book of ours, we talk about how Muslims are actively engaging with their societies and citizens in their new countries, using a Muslim framing and Islamic intellectual awareness they have often determined themselves through their own individual interpretations and are acting as good citizens in every sense of the word, and as good Muslims in every sense of the word. That, for me, is progressive Islamism.

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Yazdani: As Muslims, whether we wear the hijab or not, pray or not, whether we’re black or white, or anything in between, I think it’d be hard to find one of us who had not experienced some level of Islamophobia. Taking your professorial hat off, what advice would you give to Muslims experiencing Islamophobia?

Abbas: I would say that it is a tough time in the world today. We have to recognize that for what it is. It’s not some kind of simplistic light vs. dark, good vs. evil end of times, Venetian view on the world — there are a lot of complexities and subtleties, and we have to understand it as well as we can. We have to understand that things are going to be tough, and we have to fix things. But we also have to realize that there’s a great deal of mobilization around resistance, not just among Muslims, but among the left-leaning individuals, institutions, all over the world. And I think it’s important to build those alliances, bridge those alliances and forge movements that traverse immediate differences, because we’re all in this together in many ways.

Islamophobia has a way of destabilizing all sorts of social relations. We have to try and stick our necks out a little bit, knowing that even in doing so, we’re going to face potential blocks along the way.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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