Democracy gone awry; people demanding change

Brexit is straining the British political system, as it has since the referendum in June 2016. Conservative Party leader Theresa May, up against the pressure of her mandate to effect a divorce from the European Union by the end of March, has brought home a "deal" which nobody likes. This may either somehow win a majority in Parliament or possibly bring down her government. This post is not about the substance of Brexit negotiations; I wouldn't begin to suggest I grasped either the economics or the intra-Brit political implications.

But I'm certainly interested in understanding how the dis-United Kingdom came to vote narrowly to jump ship from the continent. From where I sit, this looks like a self-destructive democratic belly flop, only exceeded by our own narrow election of an incompetent, grafting, petulant narcissist to the US presidency.

And so I turned to Anthony Barnett's The Lure of Greatness. Barnett has campaigned for political reform in Britain for decades and is the founder of the important international portal Open Democracy.

Barnett sees Brexit and the Trump election as fruit of the same poisoned tree: the betrayal of trust by two intertwined national ruling elites which gave us the Iraq war on phony pretexts and a financial crisis which trashed the prosperity of middle classes while sparing the wealthy 1 percent. And so, on both sides of the Atlantic, the people

made a judgement: to roll the dice. ... [There were] two core claims [from] the Leave and Trump campaigns, used to wrap their vile deceits. One: the political system is corrupted, wrong and unacceptable. This is so in the UK and the EU as well as the USA. Two: it can be changed. Knowing the first is true, and the second could be, turned the two campaigns into movements with energy and motivation that maximised their appeal and turnout.

He goes on to point out an underlying truth which easily gets lost (and which we've just seen proved out in the midterm elections):

I am not saying that the system is only or nothing but corrupt, and fixed by money and the machine. Were that the case it would not be possible to change it – and neither Trump or Brexit could have won. It is because the US and the UK are open, crudely democratic, law-based and free, that change is possible.

He goes on to explain the vote in the United Kingdom to leave the EU as the product of the particular shape of government that country has inherited from its imperial past. Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have emerged from a history of colonial status within Britain and acquired their own representative elected assemblies with "devolved" powers. London has become a fabulously wealthy international business hub, cosmopolitan and little dependent on its English hinterland. Meanwhile, the numerous English people of the English countryside who once turned the map of the planet the red representing Her Majesty's Empire have ended up with no institution of government that is theirs. Parliament in Westminster is the national governing body, not their particular site of power.

When the voters of the UK were asked if they wanted to renew their membership of the European Union, it became a vote on how the country is governed. Different forces, tangible and intangible, were at work. These included immigration, the refugee emergency, the effects of austerity, the outrageous rip-off of the financial crash, the loosening of loyalties thanks to the internet, the undemocratic nature of the EU, the implosion of social democracy. The majority response to these forces in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the second-and third-largest nations of the UK, was to seek closer relations with the EU, with more and better continental solidarity. A similar response came from London, the global city. But across England-without-London, the comeback was the opposite. This is the central fact of the referendum’s outcome.

Britain is a post-empire hybrid. ... English hostility to the European Union is based on a delusion of its influence, linked to a nihilistic sense of the futility of Westminster. Unlike all other parts of the UK and the EU, England has no government of its own.

By being committed to the British Westminster and Whitehall, the English deprive themselves of their own political self-determination. This is the irony. The real foreign threat comes from their British masters. Their attachment to [formerly imperial] Britain prevents the English from realising themselves.

Barnett has many other topics in addition to the British/English democracy deficit that I've highlighted here. He's a social democrat; a critical supporter of a Labour party he doesn't think quite exists; a proponent of recognizing that migration is simply part of historic human nature. His commentary on the Trump phenomenon is both hard to refute -- and just a hair off, like listening to the BBC report on US politics and knowing they've got the emphasis a little wrong, again.

But if you aspire at all to follow the twists and turns that Brexit will create for the our English-speaking cousins over the next few years, The Lure makes an accessible starting point. We too live in an imperial power past its prime. What can we learn from the travails of a kindred democracy further down the post-imperial adjustment path?