“Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole
nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are
yourselves gone…In the name of God, go!”
Oliver Cromwell, the dissolution of the Long
Parliament, April 1653
Toxic Brexit
Alphen,
Netherlands. 15 February. This is blast and I make no apology for it. Britain
is broken and at war with itself. The utterly toxic Brexit debate seems now to
be wholly dominated by extremists; Little
Britons on one side, Remoaners who do not believe in Britain as a power or
even a country, and Little Englanders
on the other, who want foreigners out and long for an England that exists only
in their nostalgia. The division is so deep, the country so divided that were
this another age I fear Britain could be on the brink of a civil war. This week, lead Brexiteer Boris Johnson tried,
in his way, to seek common ground, but probably only further entrenched the
hatreds (yes, hatreds) that now exist on both sides of Britain’s polarised air
waves. Why has Brexit come to this, what are the consequences, and what, if
any, is the way out of this God awful mess?
Let me state
something at the beginning of this missive which might surprise Little Britons who seem to think Britain
is Lichtenstein-on-Sea without the money. According to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United Nations Britain still possesses either the 5th
or 6th largest economy of any state on the planet. The International
Institute for International Studies also has Britain as the 6th
biggest defence spender on Earth. If power is essentially a combination of
economic, diplomatic and military tools then Britain should not be able to
govern itself but also to exert real power and influence. Add Britain’s soft power, language and a tradition
of power that stretches back centuries and Britain could continue to be a major
force in the world if it wanted to. And yet, all that London exudes these days
is weakness, retreat and decline.
Little
Britons v Little Englanders
Why is
Britain so divided? The contrasting
profiles of the extremist Little Britons
and Little Englanders who dominate
the debate is illuminating. Little Britons tend to be younger and have
been taught to despise patriotism, that Britain is on the wrong side of
history, and seem only too happy to buy into the federalist propaganda of Promised
Land, a new Utopia called ‘Europe’. They
claim themselves to be ‘patriotic’, but in a very different way to Little
Englanders and in support of another ‘state’. Nor is it their fault. For over forty years much of the elite Establishment
(Westminster politicians and Whitehall bureaucrats combined), which also no
longer believes in Britain (see my 2015 book Little Britain) has quietly engineered a retreat from British
patriotism. This re-engineering of patriotism has also helped spawn a kind of
illiberal liberalism that hates anyone or anything that challenges its utterly
unworldly shibboleths, of which there are many.
Little Englanders are no
better. They tend to be older and long for the days when Britain was either a
superpower, or at least a ‘pocket superpower’ (a phrase I coined many years ago
in a piece for the then International
Herald Tribune). They reject the forces of globalism which are re-shaping
the world. Impossibly, many of them want Britain isolated from globalism which
Britain helped create, possibly more than any other state. Some Little Englanders are also quite often poorer
than middle class Little Britons. For
this group Brexit is a desperate cry from a group of people who believe
themselves ignored and despised by a liberal elite Establishment which has for
many years put the well-being and interests of the ‘other’ before them.
Another Munich?
This weekend
I will travel to the Munich Security Conference to take part in a high-level
US-German event. The Berlin-Washington
relationship is difficult, but essential. Indeed, given Britain’s spectacular demise
it is today the only transatlantic ‘special relationship’ that exists in anything
like substance. Yes, the Anglo-American intelligence and mil-mil relationship
remains close, but strong? In the
absence of a Britain willing and able to assert its interests or invest
properly in the tools of statecraft across the diplomatic and military spectrum,
or craft the policies of influence Britain will need as it leaves the EU, that
relationship will become even more one of master-supplicant. Indeed, one reason
the US-German relationship is so complex is precisely because it is one between
relative equals. If the US remains a European power its equal within Europe is Germany.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Theresa May will also be in Munich seeking to
re-assure the audience that Britain is, and will remain, committed to the
defence of Europe, as it should be. However, toxic Brexit begs yet another
question: how can the defence of Europe be strengthened if Britain is
broken?
Brexit has also
revealed an elite Establishment that has also lost the will to power that has
traditionally underpinned Britain’s security and defence effort. President Macron’s recent visit to Britain
hinted at the strategic consequences of broken Britain. Whilst Paris drives a hard Brexit bargain
behind the scenes President Macron is calling for the strengthening of France’s
vital strategic partnership with Britain.
The problem, Monsieur le President, is that if you and your Euro-mates
succeed in humiliating broken Britain the will to power that is an essential pillar
of European defence will, I fear, be completely destroyed. Yes, Britain will go through the NATO motions
by cooking the books to pretend London spends 2% on defence, when it does
not. However, this increasingly self-obsessed,
self-loathing nation will have little interest or desire to defend those who many
Little Englanders see as having helped
to humiliate Britain ‘pour encourager les
autres’. In other words, Little England could well become Little Britain.
Re-learning
the Art of Power
Seventy years
of managing decline, forty plus years of handing power to Brussels, and almost
eighty years of trying to hang on to America’s oft capricious coat-tails, has
emaciated Britain’s ability to exercise power, Or, to put it another way, Britain
is incapable of thinking strategically for itself. Yes, Britain can build all the large aircraft
carriers and nuclear submarines it likes, but if London lacks the capacity for
leadership such ‘toys’ are neither tokens of power nor greatness. At the very
least, post-Brexit London will need to re-learn the art of power. It is clear
from the split in Cabinet and Parliament that some of the elite want to try,
others simply do not believe it possible. This is dangerous. ‘Power’, or rather
its absence reveals itself in extremis. As
an Oxford historian and a strategic analyst of some modest note let me ‘un-reassure’
you; there will be a lot of extremis this
century.
You see Extremis is where the rubber of
leadership hits the hard road of reality. It was that capacity to lead in extremis which made Churchill a great
leader in crisis. It is the lack of such capacity which reveals Theresa May’s
inability to lead and which will condemn her to be one of Britain’s worst-ever
prime ministers.
A New Britain?
There is no
doubt in my mind that Boris Johnson is genuine in his desire to re-create a
political consensus that would better enable sound governance. He said so in a speech he made this week on
Brexit, albeit in that ever so BoJo way – part Churchill, part Groucho Marx. Unfortunately, he is simply the wrong man to
mend my country. He is simply a representative of a failed political elite, a failed
political generation that has led Britain into this sad place. It is a sign of
the times that the choice I will soon have at the ballot box will be between divided
incompetents and closet (and not-so-closet) Marxists.
The British
people deserve better. As the opinion polls continue to suggest most British
people – the unheard of and unheard from majority – simply want May to get on
with Brexit. Maybe, just maybe, over the next fortnight May will finally take a
firm position on Brexit and present how she sees Britain’s future relationship
with the EU beyond the slippery clichés of the Lancaster Gate speech orthe
begging platitudes of the Florence speech, which to my mind read more like May
‘running something past’ Brussels. If not, then I fear an uncertain May and her
quarrelling ‘team’ will ‘lead’ Britain to the worst-of-all Brexit worlds: a
half-Brexit, a Conga Brexit – half-in, half-out with little room for Britain to
shake anything much about. On this I am
with BoJo.
What to do?
Whatever
happens post-Brexit (and hard though it is to believe there will be a
post-Brexit) Britain will need to start again as a power. To that end, a new
generation of politicians must be bought forward and quickly who are untainted
by the disaster of Brexit. New
leaders who can hopefully breathe some life back into the very ‘idea’ of
Britain, before the waiting predatory nationalists and secessionists move again
to tear the country apart. It is a
re-start that cannot come soon enough.
This future Britain does not need to be my Britain, but it does need to
be need to be a Britain that properly understands the dangers of remaining
glued to political decadence. It is
political decadence which has driven London’s fantastical retreat from
political realism and made Britain, Europe and the wider world very much more
insecure places than need be.
At the very
least Boris Johnson and Phillip Hammond, with his visionless ‘we only recognise
as much threat as we can afford’ nonsense, must be cast into the footnote of
history where they belong. PM May? For once, just for once, she must
demonstrate she understands what ‘leadership’ really means by showing she has
some idea of how to get Britain out of this bloody mess. Indeed, if she sits on
the Euro-fence much longer she will not only develop rust, she will become permanently
skewered, and my country with it. Her chronic indecision has exacerbated the
division within the country and encouraged hard-liners in Brussels to believe that
not only can they humiliate Britain, but as former British Euro-crat Lord Kerr suggested
recently, bring Britain to heel, like some misbehaving dog.
Get Out of
the Gutter, Britain!
Anyone of any
political sense knows that Brexit is hard.
It is made harder by a Civil Service that really believes the ‘sovereign
will’ of the people to be wrong on Brexit.
However, the real tragedy of Brexit is that had the Cabinet been even
vaguely well-led, and ever-so-slightly more unified Brexit need not be anything
like as hard as Britain’s ‘leaders’ have made it. In the political vacuum created by this lack
of leadership extremist Little Britons
and Little Englanders between them have
come close to wrecking Britain as a power, possibly as a state, and even
potentially as a society. The rest of us
just look on aghast.
Britain today
is a hollowed-out husk of a once Great Power that punches well below its weight
in the world, led by a political elite obsessed with input-led,
virtue-signalling, rather than properly upholding the responsibilities that
power imposes. For those of us who,
somehow, still believe in Britain Brexit has become a sadly all-too-predicted
disaster. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why, in spite of my profound
concerns about the drift of the EU towards soft authoritarianism, and having undertaken
a detailed SWOT analysis prior to the June 2016 referendum, I decided that on
balance Britain should remain in the EU.
Still, I despair of those ‘we know best’ elite Little Britons doing all they can to destroy Brexit. What on Earth do they think they are doing
seeking to over-turn a legitimate vote?
If they succeed, just what kind of country do they think they will
‘inherit’? Whatever happened to that
sound pragmatic application of Britain that once underpinned the ‘greatness’ of
Britain? Not to mention those head in
the sand Little Englanders who seem
to want a return to the 1950s, and want it now!
Britain IS still
a Great Power and, on paper at least, will remain so for the foreseeable future. However, a state can possess all the nominal
economic and military power in the world, but if the elite Establishment is
split asunder and unable to craft coherent policy and strategy then influence drains
away like summer rain down a storm gutter.
And, in my long-life, I have never seen Britain so firmly mired in the
gutter as now. Sadly, that is what
happens when people who do not believe in either an idea or the country they
lead take power. For them everything is impossible, nothing possible.
One final
thought, if Brexit means more of the utter irresponsibility on show from
Honourable Members of the so-called Mother of Parliaments then perhaps Oliver
Cromwell had a point! After all, Britain’s ‘sovereign’ Parliament, far from
governing in the name of the people is simply the cock-pit where this new civil
war is being fought.
Julian
Lindley-French
