Shit happens

In the resignation letter she sent to Boris Johnson last week, Britain’s work and pensions minister Amber Rudd – who has at least stood up for her principles by quitting his fanatically pro-Brexit government – revealed yet again the delusions that even the most clear-sighted Conservatives appear to have been labouring under. I quote (my emphasis):

I joined your Cabinet in good faith; accepting that ‘no deal’ had to be on the table, because it was the means by which we would have the best chance of achieving a new deal to leave on October 31.

This can only mean that Rudd still seriously believed that the ‘threat’ of a no-deal Brexit would eventually scare Brussels into abandoning one of its key principles: protecting the external borders of the European Union and its single market – one of them the border between Northern Ireland (which will soon have to leave the EU along with the rest of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (which will remain a member state).

Only now, less than 50 days before the projected date of Brexit, is reality starting to dawn in Westminster – namely that a no-deal Brexit is not seen in Brussels or other EU capitals as the worst-case scenario. Far worse would be exposing Europe’s single market to disruption by leaving holes in one of its key borders.

Rudd’s letter then continued: However, I no longer believe leaving with a deal is the Government’s main objective.

As the saying goes, duh. Johnson has never been in this for the good of his country. It’s all about clinging onto power, if necessary by foisting another general election on British voters while the polls still look good – although here he may be counting his chickens (or, as the French more graphically put it, ‘selling the bear’s hide before you’ve killed it’). Quite a large number of Tory-held seats where the main challenger is the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrat party have paper-thin majorities, whereas there are hardly any seats left where a Labour incumbent is threatened by the Lib Dems. In other words, any further surge in the Lib Dem vote – which looks likely – would surely harm Johnson’s own party far more than it would his Labour opponents. And the tiny majority he inherited from Theresa May has now been whittled away to less than nothing. Even the 10 Northern Irish (DUP) seats on which May depended no longer count for anything – prompting speculation that Johnson may now in fact be prepared to ditch them, just to save his own political skin. Both he and the DUP have of course denied it; but such is Boris’s reputation for trickery that no-one would put it past him.

He may just want to consider what has happened to Italy’s neofascist minister Matteo Salvini, who brought down his unholy government coalition with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement in the hope of forcing an election and riding to power on the crest of favourable opinion polls. Instead, the opposition has united around the principle that the far right has to be kept out at all costs and that, as a founding member of the EU’s predecessor the EEC, Italy should be cooperating with it rather than obstructing it.

Back in Britain, the hardly less neofascist leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage, has ‘jumped the gun’ by offering Johnson a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours election deal: don’t stand against my party in places where it can eat into a potentially xenophobic working-class Labour majority, and we won’t stand against yours anywhere else. In other words, if we achieve our ‘common’ goal of leaving the EU with or without a deal, then we can parcel out the spoils.

In Italy this very strategy is now being derided by Salvini – following his failed coup which he hoped would bring him pieni poteri (‘full powers’) – as a ‘pact to share out ministerial seats’; and he has threatened the democratic political ‘establishment’ with the ‘popular will’ of la piazza, noisy public demonstrations with much waving of  the Italian flag, as if he and only he represents what he is now calling la vera Italia, ‘the real Italy’.

In Britain, Johnson’s coup is so far succeeding – but much good will this do him, let alone his country. Both the Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar and the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier have made it abundantly clear that they now expect the UK to ‘crash out’ of the EU with ‘no deal’, and that it is entirely up to Britain to do something about it. After three years spent waiting for the Brits to stop dithering, the EU’s patience has run out.

The problem for Johnson’s British opponents – who have not made a good job of this either – is that they are now insisting he should go to Brussels and ask for yet another three-month extension of the Brexit (‘Article 50’), period, until late January 2020. Not only has he refused point-blank to do so, but few people on the EU side can see any reason for this to happen. Since Britain has nothing else to offer, why should Brussels waste even more of its time on the whole pathetic circus?

The British opposition – whether pro-Brexit-but-with-a-deal, or outright anti-Brexit – has let itself be manoeuvred into a trap. Its only way out of the dilemma is to hope the EU will do something it has no intention of doing, and would now be very unwise to allow: let the Brits dictate what happens.

If the EU thus finds itself helping Johnson achieve his own short-term, short-sighted and above all selfish political aims, simply by sticking to principles it cannot afford to abandon, so be it. The question remains what will become of Johnson, Farage and their kind when the UK does leave the Union without any kind of deal, and the awful truth becomes apparent: far from entering a ‘golden age’, still less regaining its former ‘imperial greatness’, the country will be almost instantly exposed to economic chaos and social unrest that could persist for years. The chances of favourable trade deals with the EU will then be minimal, for Brussels will no longer trust the Brits farther than it can throw them.

A leading British police force has today warned that criminal elements may take full advantage of the inevitably ensuing food and medicine shortages; and loth though I am to predict something I might then – quite wrongly – be suspected of wanting, I now seriously fear the prospect of political assassination, or perhaps even a military takeover of a country lapsing into anarchy.

Britain has so far been spared such excesses, which have been so sadly common elsewhere; but Brexit may have succeeded in changing all that. The small-minded, blinkered and politically untutored men and women who have whipped up nationalistic emotions for purely personal gain will surely be judged very harshly by history – but by then the damage could be irrevocable. It was precisely such things that the EU and its predecessors were set up to prevent a recurrence of – but then Britain stomped in.

In retrospect, it might have been better if De Gaulle had lived long enough to maintain his veto on British membership until Thatcher came to power and set her jingoistic conservative agenda. But such, for good or ill, are the twists and turns of history – or, as the man said, ‘shit happens’.