Distributed to Congress by Irish National Caucus
“ Today the British Parliament voted to block a no-deal Brexit, which is very good. It could, of course, cause Boris Johnson to seek a general election. Attached is an article from the Irish Times of Dublin that gives Members of Congress a helpful background to the hubris of empire thinking behind the madness of Brexit.”
—Fr. Sean McManus
Simplistic view of Europe
has pushed UK into Brexit abyss
Johnson leads myopic world view where
complexity of EU is bulldozed by colonial will …
… ignorance and free-trading
powerhouse delusions have made him and his Brexiteers unable to
comprehend how Ireland can stand up to Great Britain.
Ian Dunt. Irish Times. Dublin. Tuesday, September 3, 2019.
(Ian Dunt is editor of political news website politics.co.uk)
You can predict the next action of Boris Johnson’s government quite
easily. Simply imagine the approach which would show the least moral,
intellectual or political understanding of the situation, and that is the
one he will follow.
His strategy with parliament this week is to try and bully it into
submission. He shows precisely no understanding of – or interest in –
his opponents. He has no capacity to try and provide a compromise
position. And he has overestimated his own leverage. It is, in short,
a domestic rerun of the Brexiteer’s miscalculations over the
“Backstop.”
The Brexit debate often gets bogged down in technical details –
parliamentary standing orders, customs procedures, principles of
regulatory alignment. But at its heart there is an emotional battle taking
place between two different views of the world.
The “Remain” side is generally comfortable with Britain exercising
influence through a union of nations. They’re typically open to
detail, strategically fairly modest and have an admiration for the
competence of European leaders.
The “Leave” side harks back to a period of unchallenged British
colonial strength, has a deep-seated hatred of detail, believes in
the triumph of the will, and views European politicians as limp
technocrats.
That world view has a long history, in which the current prime minister
played no small part. When he worked as Brussels correspondent for
the Telegraph between 1989 and 1994, he pioneered a new form of
quasi-fictional reporting on nonsense news items like size
limitations on condoms and bans on prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps.
At the time, it all seemed fairly jolly – an ultimately harmless form of
instinctive Little Englander prejudice. But it helped cement a
specific variant of the Eurosceptic world view, which took firm hold in
what is now the Brexit electorate.
It was distinct from that of its fellow constitutional Eurosceptics, who
were wary of legal overreach in the Maastricht Treaty and of the
potential volatility of having a monetary union without any overarching
fiscal or banking arrangements to complement it.
Hysterical offence
That kind of Euroscepticism was built on an understanding of the
complexity of the European project, a grudging admiration for the
legal and political achievements that had secured it, and a realistic
assessment of Britain’s relative strength within it.
The Johnson brand of Euroscepticism was different. It despised complexity.
It dismissed the complex reality of trying to create harmonized
regulations for a Single Market in favor of hysterical offense at rules on
noise levels for lawnmowers. It convinced itself instead that these rules
were the deranged product of a class of European technocrats with
nothing better to do but meddle in other people’s jovial
prawn-cocktail-crisp-eating lives.
And, as a corollary of that, it viewed Britain as this immensely powerful,
freewheeling, imaginative, free-trading powerhouse constrained by
continental bureaucracy.
That world view helps explain the sense of bafflement and outrage with
which hardline Brexiteers met the “Backstop” negotiations. It
was simply incomprehensible to them that tiny Ireland would be able to
stand up to Great Britain. It was a reversal of basic historical
laws. The idea that smaller nations gained strength by working within
transnational organisations like the EU had not occurred to them,
because their entire assumption about it was that it weakened member
states.
The detail of the proposal prompted a similar reaction. They had not
bothered to understand the manner in which a customs union eradicated
tariffs, country-of-origin checks and customs declarations within its
borders, nor the way Single Market alignment eliminates regulatory
checks. This was the world of detail, which was considered at
best incomprehensible or at worst some sort of trick played by
continental-types on common-sense British pragmatists.
There was no appreciation of the motives, moral commitment or intellectual
capacity of their negotiating partners. And this type of myopic
approach was not just unseemly. It also made them strategically
ineffective.
Jacobean cult
A willingness to compromise was therefore replaced by a commitment to
the absolute triumph of the will. If Brexiteers simply believed
hard enough, all the details of other countries’ negotiating priorities
and the technical requirements of trade would disappear. Brexit
thought retreated into a kind of Jacobean cult, in which the content of
its beliefs mattered less than its adherents’ undying willingness to
commit to them.
When the “Backstop” proposal was published, they simply could not
understand what they were looking at, even though the broad outlines
of what it would entail had been public knowledge for months. The
emotional shock ultimately brought down Theresa May’s administration.
The same process is now playing out in parliament, as it enters its most
important week in recent memory – and quite probably in our lifetime.
Johnson is threatening to remove the whip from Tory MPs who back rebel
legislation against no deal. It is a spectacular sight. A prime
minister with no majority is threatening to slash it even further if he
does not get his way, seemingly unaware of the fact that this
compromises his own position as much as it does their own.
Some people believe – probably rightly – that his ultimate aim is a
general election, either in October or, if possible, just after the
no-deal exit is delivered.
Quite why this would be a desirable outcome for him is unclear. His
hardline position threatens his seats in Scotland
and Conservative-Lib Dem marginals. There is little evidence
suggesting he could make up those seats by flipping over Leave voters
in traditionally Labour areas.
If no-deal happened, the resulting chaos would make it dramatically less
likely that he could secure a majority. Although it is not clear that
he has understood the evidence enough to recognise this.
The overwhelming lack of interest in detail and absolute commitment to the
triumph of the will, infused with an elixir of unabashed nationalism,
dominates the minds of those in No 10, forcing them into the same errors
over and over again.
That error is based on a world view which took hold of the right of
British politics for decades and which Johnson himself helped create.
History has a cruel sense of humor.
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