As part of then-Prime Minister (PM) Theresa May’s supposed preparations for a no-deal Brexit, the government asked different departments of the UK’s civil service, including those responsible for food, agriculture, medicine, and chemicals, to come up with impact assessments. The worst-case scenarios (not leaked or released at the time of writing) were codenamed Black Swan. Michael Gove, the future Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (basically the deputy PM), dismissed Operation Black Swan as a “film about a ballet dancer” and even denied that it is a government document.

Despite government claims to the contrary; Operation Yellowhammer was not a worst-case scenario but contingency plans for likely outcomes of a no-deal Brexit. May’s Yellowhammer documents were leaked to the Mail on Sunday and warned of Britain’s vulnerability to chemical supplies for water purification.

The updated Yellowhammer documents prepared for the incoming Johnson government were also leaked, in this instance to the Sunday Times. Among other things, the documents note that Britain’s importation of packaged medicaments could be severely disrupted by border queues in the event of a no-deal Brexit, particularly where refrigerated medicines are concerned. It also notes the potential unavailability of foods and food price increases. The documents expose the flaws in the corporate, neoliberal globalized order that robs nations of their self-reliance.

But the very politicians now voting to stop a no-deal Brexit in order to prevent this kind of potentially dangerous disruption are the same who supported the infliction of similar pain on other, more vulnerable countries. The first was Libya in 2011. Parliament’s own inquiry into the bombing (led by the US as part of NATO’s mission) found that Britain’s involvement was based on erroneous intelligence.

LIBYA

The bombing also appeared to be a violation of international law, as it violated UN Security Council Resolution 1973. UNSCR 1973 allowed states to use “all necessary measures … to protect civilians” from Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. But the British Parliamentary report later acknowledged that civilians were not actually in danger. UNSCR 1973 also invokes Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which does not authorize military intervention in other states, but rather, allows the use of military operations to enforce actions short of invasion; for example, international blockades.

At the time, Dominic Grieve–now one of the politicians trying to stop a no-deal Brexit–was PM David Cameron’s Attorney General. Grieve’s job was to provide legal advice to the Cameron government on the Libya bombing. But the government refused to release Grieve’s advice in full. This suggests that Grieve advised that bombing Libya could constitute a war crime. If so, this could make Grieve himself complicit in war crimes. In addition, Grieve voted for the bombing in March 2011.

Another Parliamentary inquiry into the bombing states: “[we] respect the decision not to publish the advice [by Grieve] in full but are disappointed that the Prime Minister [Cameron] felt unable to share the advice with us on a private and confidential basis as this would have enabled us to scrutinise the operation in Libya more effectively.”

In 2018, with Britons still obsessed with Brexit, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization  reminded people of the consequences of NATO’s actions, including the ongoing civil war trigged by the bombing in 2011: “the crisis has exacerbated pre-existing challenges associated with agricultural production in Libya, including water scarcity, animal and plant diseases, desertification and labour shortages.”

This makes the disruption envisaged by Yellowhammer look small by comparison. (Ironically, in December 2018, when the Labour opposition brought a motion to force Theresa May’s Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, to release his legal advice on May’s Withdrawal Agreement with the EU, Grieve—who is now trying to stop a no-deal and get the Yellowhammer and prorogation communiqués published–told Parliament: “the Law Officers’ advice should not be published because it undermines the ability to provide proper confidential advice to Government.”)

IRAN

Let’s also consider the case of Iran. Under Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is entitled to enrich uranium for civilian energy. The US and EU, including Britain, accuse Iran of wanting to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapons programme. But successive reports of UN International Atomic Energy Agency find no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme. In order to force Iran into agreeing to a uranium enrichment limitation deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)), the US and EU imposed sanctions on Iran.

But the sanctions led to the kind of effects on Iran feared by those who now want to stop a no-deal Brexit in the UK. The science journal Nature reported that “A tightening of already draconian international economic sanctions against Iran is causing serious shortages of certain drugs, vaccines and other key medical supplies in the country, medical researchers and public-health officials are warning.”

Britain’s then-Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, told the Iranians that unless their government was compelled by popular pressure to agree to what became the JCPOA, “We can definitely make the pain much greater.” This appears to have been a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit collective punishments.

Under May and as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hammond was aware of the Yellowhammer documents and now, having been sacked by Boris Johnson, is serving Parliament an independent MP trying to stop a no-deal Brexit, fearing that the same “pain” that he helped to inflicted on Iran could happen to Britons in the event of a no-deal departure from the EU.

CONCLUSION

These examples show that the very politicians who now fear the dire impacts of a no-deal Brexit for Britain are the same who were part of the political machinery that inflicted similar misery on poor, vulnerable populations. Nobody in British media even notices. The Yellowhammer documents also remind us that the real enemies of people are their governments; in this case an explicitly reckless one willing to harm its population for the sake of political survival.

counterpunch.org

Given her ignominious failure as premier over the Brexit fiasco, it seemed a strange choice of topic as she addressed the Chatham House think tank in London this past week. Her speech dealt with the wider theme of rising “populist politics” in the US and Europe. And she sought to portray Putin as an archetypal sinister figure fomenting populist threat to the “liberal” democratic order.

At one point, May claimed: “No one comparing the quality of life or economic success of liberal democracies like the UK, France and Germany to the Russian Federation would conclude that our system is obsolete.”

This was supposed to be a riposte to an interview given by Putin to the Financial Times last month ahead of the G20 summit in Japan. During a lengthy interview on a wide range of issues, the Russian president was quoted as saying: “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”

Putin was apparently explaining a fairly straightforward and, to many observers, valid assessment of international politics. Namely, that Western establishments and institutions, including the mainstream media, are experiencing a crisis in authority. That crisis has arisen over several years due to popular perception that the governance of the political class is not delivering on democratic demands of accountability and economic progress. That in turn has led people to seek alternatives from the established parties, a movement in the US and Europe which is denigrated by the establishment as “populist” or rabble rousing.

Putin was not advocating any particular politics or political figures. He was merely pointing out the valid observation that the so-called liberal establishment has become obsolete, or dysfunctional.

In her speech this week, May sought to lay on a sinister spin to Putin’s remarks as being somehow him egging on authoritarianism and anti-democratic politics.

Another example of distortion came from Donald Tusk, the European Council President, who also said of Putin’s interview: “I strongly disagree with the main argument that liberalism is obsolete. Whoever claims that liberal democracy is obsolete, also claims that freedoms are obsolete, that the rule of law is obsolete and that human rights are obsolete… For us in Europe, these are and will remain essential and vibrant values. What I find really obsolete are: authoritarianism, personality cults, the rule of oligarchs.”

Tusk’s depiction of Putin being anti-democratic, anti-human rights and anti-law is a specious misdirection, or as May would say, “cynical falsehood”.

Political leaders like May and Tusk are living in denial. They seem to suffer from a charmed delusion that all is rosy with the state of Western democracy. That somehow Western states are the acme of benign “liberalism”.

By blaming evident deep-seated problems of poverty and apathy towards establishment politics on “sinister” targets of “populism” and “authoritarian strong men” is a form of escapism from reality.

In May’s case, she has added good reason to escape from reality. Her political career is ending in disaster and disgrace for having led Britain into a shambles over its Brexit departure from the European Union. Of course, she would like a distraction from her abysmal record, and she seemed to find one in her farewell speech by firing a dud diatribe at Putin.

But let’s re-examine her self-congratulatory claim more closely. “No one comparing the quality of life or economic success of liberal democracies like the UK, France and Germany to the Russian Federation would conclude that our system is obsolete.”

There are two parts to that. First, May is giving the usual establishment spiel about presumed superiority of Western “liberal democracy” as opposed to politics and governance in Russia.

This week coming, May hands in her resignation as Conservative party prime minister to the unelected head of state, Queen Elizabeth. The British monarch and her heirs rule as official head of state by a presumed “divine order”. Some democracy that is!

May’s successor will either be Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt. The next prime minister of Britain will be elected solely by members of Britain’s Conservative party. As the Washington Post noted this week, the Tory party represents less than one per cent of the British population. So, the new leader of the United Kingdom is being decided not by a democratic national mandate, but by a tiny minority of party members whose demographic profile is typically rightwing, ardent nationalists, pro-militarist, white and elderly males. Moreover, the “selection” of new leader comes down to a choice between two politicians of highly dubious quality whose foreign policy tendency is to play sycophants to Washington. The way Johnson and Hunt have, for example, lent support to Trump’s reckless aggression towards Iran is a portent of further scraping and bowing to American warmongering typical of Britain’s “special relationship”.

In the second part of May’s presumed virtuous liberal democracy, she hails the “quality of economic success” of her nation as opposed to Russian society.

No-one, least of all Putin, is denying that reducing poverty is a social challenge for Russia. In a recent nationwide televised Q&A, the “elected” (please note) head of the Russian state called poverty reduction a priority for his government. However, Russia certainly doesn’t need advice from the United Kingdom or many other Western states on that issue.

A recent major study in Britain found that some 21 per cent of the population (14 million people) are living in poverty. Homelessness and aggravated crime figures are also off the charts due to collapsing public services over a decade of economic austerity as deliberate government policy. The inequality gap between super-rich and poverty among the mass of people has exploded to a chasm in Britain, as in the US and other Western states.

These are some of the urgent issues that Putin was referring to when he asserted the “liberal idea is obsolete”. Can anyone objectively surveying the bankrupt state of Western societies honestly dispute that?

Western states are fundamentally broken down because “liberalism” is an empty term which conceals rapacious corporate capitalism and the oligarchic rule of an elite political class. The advocates of “liberalism” like Britain’s May, Johnson, Hunt or Tusk are the ones who are anti-democracy, anti-human rights and anti-law. Their denial about the systemic cause of poverty and injustice within their own societies and their complicity in American imperialist warmongering in the Middle East or belligerence towards Russia and China is the true “quality” of their “democratic principles”.

If that’s not obsolete then what is? And that’s why May took a weird parting shot at Putin… in a desperate diversion from reality.

The about-to-leave prime minister, Theresa May, tried her best to get things on an even keel, but short-sighted politicians of her own and other parties did their successful best to make a shambles of the entire affair. What matters now in Britain is who becomes the next prime minister, and the signs are not good for the country, for Europe, and the wider world.

In order to examine the leadership contest it is necessary to briefly recapitulate the circumstances leading to the requirement to seek a new leader for the Conservative party which has been running the country shakily in a coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland.  In 2017 Theresa May made a massive error in calling a general election which she thought wrongly would give her party a clear majority.  In the House of Commons the governing party is that which has a majority of 326 out of 650 seats and the Conservatives got only 317. If it wanted to get into power, which is its main reason for taking any action whatever (as it is, to be fair, for the other parties), it had to accept the DUP as a partner, with its ten members of parliament.

This was the beginning of the downhill slide to chaos, greatly facilitated by the activities of several of May’s more devious colleagues on whom she imagined she could rely for support.

May’s primary mission was to get Britain out of the EU with the least damage possible, which was a difficult enough task without the complications caused by the disloyalty of many members of her government, two of whom, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, aspire to take over from May as prime minister on July 22. The BBC encapsulates their political careers by informing us that “Jeremy Hunt, who replaced Mr Johnson as foreign secretary last year, has more experience in government and has held more cabinet posts . . . Mr Johnson was the MP for Henley for seven years before being elected Mayor of London in 2008. He returned to Parliament as an MP… in 2015.” He resigned as foreign minister in July 2018.

In November 2018 May announced completion of an agreement to withdraw from the European Union, and it was accepted by the leaders of the other 27 EU countries. Common sense appeared to have prevailed — but not in the House of Commons (no pun intended), where the accord was rejected on January 15 by 432 to 202 votes.  One might imagine this result would have ended the matter, and that Britain would have exited the EU on March 29, as agreed by Brussels, and that the whole affair would be over.  But the ‘Withdrawal Agreement Bill’ went to two more votes and was again rejected in March by 391 to 242, and 344 to 286. The entire affair had developed into a farce. Which brings us to Boris Johnson.

When there are serious political contests it is wise to ignore the polls and consult the bookmakers, who are smart and make massive amounts of money from gamblers. The spokesman for the enormous bookmaking company Coral stated that “The betting very much suggests Boris Johnson is on course to be the next Prime Minister” and this is probably the best indicator. And it is the most frightening indicator, because Boris Johnson is an erratic menace who will not serve his country well.

As foreign minister  (‘Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs’) from July 2016 to July 2018 he was a disaster, which was presciently forecast by The Economist’s Bagehot who observed that appointing him to the post “is like putting a baboon at the wheel of the Rolls Royce. Sure, the steering wheel, clutch and accelerator will keep the baboon happy and busy. But the price in collateral damage could be high.”

After his resignation the BBC observed that “Boris Johnson’s job as foreign secretary was to convince the world that Brexit did not mean Britain’s withdrawal from global affairs. It is a task that few historians will conclude Mr Johnson achieved.”  Not only that, but Johnson upset, irritated and enraged numerous governments and individuals by his offbeat comments, before, during and after his tenure as the person “responsible for Britain’s relations with foreign governments and states.”

For example, when visiting Myanmar in 2017 it was reported that he “was inside the Shwedagon Pagoda, one of Burma’s most sacred Buddhist sites, when he began reciting lines from The Road to Mandalay, including one which ran: ‘The temple bells they say / Come you back you English soldier ’ The UK ambassador to Myanmar, Andrew Patrick, was forced to stop Johnson from reading out further lines, telling him it was ‘not appropriate’.”  On June 20 the UK’s Daily Mail had a laugh about Johnson being “branded a ‘circus act’ by his former deputy after it emerged he had accused the French of acting like ‘turds’ over Brexit. The former foreign secretary faced a backlash after the Mail revealed he had been recorded making the crude remark as part of a documentary.”

On June 30 Business Insider noted that “Boris Johnson has refused to apologise for his previous articles referring to black people as ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ and calling gay people ‘bumboys,’ claiming his comments were ‘wholly satirical”, which is patent nonsense.  He is a diplomatic loose cannon who in the words of the New York Times on June 29, has a “loose relationship with truth and principle”.

He has constantly reiterated that Britain will renegotiate the terms of Theresa May’s agreement, paying no attention to the flat statement by the European parliament’s Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, that chief among the “untruths” of Johnson “is the myth that Britain can tear up the withdrawal agreement that May negotiated with the EU, withhold its financial commitments to the bloc and simultaneously start negotiating free-trade deals.”

All EU leaders who have commented on Johnson’s futile fandangos have made exactly this point, but he continues to try to convince the British electorate that there will be acceptance of a different sort of deal.

This is the man who will become leader of the Conservative Party and thus prime minister of the United Kingdom on July 22 “when the roughly 160,000 Conservative Party members — 70 percent men, 97 percent white, average age 57” cast their votes. This process is wildly undemocratic, but then the whole dismal Brexit farce has shown that democracy is extremely shaky. The government would be better advised to concentrate on getting the country back on its tracks rather than indulging in the fantasy that, as Johnson wildly claims, exiting the European Union will mean that Britain can “have our cake and eat it”.  Disaster is not far off.

As I documented on March 9 on this platform in my article “What Makes Gavin Run?” Williamson knows no shame or integrity and is the living embodiment of the repulsive, two-faced backstabber, intriguer and liar Sammy Glick in the great writer Budd Schulberg’s legendary 1941 novel of Hollywood “What Makes Sammy Run?” So he is a natural fit for Johnson, whose entire career has been dictated by similar shameless, reckless lies, opportunism and crass incompetence.

No one gets every, or usually most, professional predictions right, and in the news business sensible people make the best of their brilliant insights – or lucky guesses – when they can. But I have seldom hit a hole-in-one prediction that came true as quickly as my column on Williamson did.

On March 9, Williamson, after only a decade in the UK main chamber of parliament, the ancient House of Commons was still riding high and making a fool of himself insulting major nations from Russia to China and also the UK’s badly-needed European allies as the most incompetent defense chief in the modern history of his nation.

On May 1, less than two months after my article appeared – and with no causality that I could see – Williamson was humiliatingly sacked by his benefactor, Prime Minister Theresa May after being accused of leaking highly confidential national security information to the media.

Williamson immediately turned on his long-time benefactor Mrs. May savagely and helped drive her from office – which was admittedly long overdue. She resigned on June 7, just over a single month after sacking him.

Williamson then joined May’s arch-enemy, former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, who had relentlessly schemed to topple her for years and joined Johnson’s own campaign to win the leadership of the rapidly disintegrating Conservative Party and thence become prime minister.

At the time of writing, Johnson remains far in the lead in the contest to replace May as prime minister despite repeated attacks on his character, utter lack of political consistency, convictions or achievement and his entertainingly squalid private life.

Johnson is twice divorced with neither marriage lasting longer than five years and he is now being accused of screaming rows with his 20-years-younger girl friend that may or may not have involved him hitting her, which he naturally denies.

Through all this Williamson, who like Johnson himself does not lack for energy in the service of his own ambition, has been rounding up support for his new master among Conservative Party Members of Parliament.

According to many UK media reports – which Williamson understandably denies – his most effective weapons are bullying, bluster and threats. These are patterns of behavior which those who have worked for him or who have bothered following his career over the years find extremely convincing and in character (or, rather, lack of it).

Reports are also circulating in the UK media – which are usually well-connected and informed on such matters – that Williamson is holding out to be reappointed as the UK’s defense chief or as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland is my native land and is tiny in size. But over the past century and more it has repeatedly displayed an infinite capacity for generating wars, embarrassment and catastrophe for both Ireland and the UK, which otherwise get along easily and well.

Putting Williamson in charge of such a delicate, nervously balanced and ultra-sensitive province is like appointing a Sith Lord as head of the Jedi Knights in “Star Wars” or putting the late Boston underworld mass murderer Whitey Bulger in charge of the FBI.

Therefore it will probably happen.

Because like attracts like, competent honorable people in any country and culture seek to promote and advance others with the same qualities and empty, shallow sociopaths and confidence tricksters similarly admire and advance people exactly like themselves.

On Monday, June 24, without mentioning Williamson once, one of the UK’s most experienced and respected journalists, war correspondents and historians, Sir Max Hastings wrote a scathing article in the liberal “Guardian” newspaper entitled “I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfitted to be prime minister.”

Therefore Johnson will re-elevate Williamson, either to drive Northern Ireland back into civil war or destroy the remaining security of the entire UK as defense secretary once again. And Williamson will remain loyal, until he in his turn sees the chance to stab Johnson in the back and briefly rule as prime minister until he in his own turn is politically knifed and toppled by one of his own hand-picked sociopaths.

And Sammy Glick will rise again – on the suffering and smashed lives of everyone else.

But if you can wade through the tomes of what commentators are taking on board just to analyze what is actually happening – and you can turn away from the protests and the impressive creativity of British protestors who hate Trump – you are left with the simple question: who is the real winner? The UK or Trump?

Much is written about the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain and how, historically, both countries have stood by one another’s sides but in reality, despite the enormous fanfare and media bandwidth the trip is swallowing up, there is really very little if anything for Britain to extract from the unprecedented visit.

Although Trump was invited by the Queen, this hasn’t deterred him from capitalizing on the visit to promote himself for his reelection bid in 2020. Every single shot, every angle, every sound bite was crafted for the cameras; even Trump’s speech, a glowing appraisal of Queen Elizabeth II, was written for the sole purpose of making Trump, essentially, look like a Brit. A cynical viewer of the speeches might have noted how the Queen referred to his own Scottish ancestry (was that requested by his people?) as the British monarch might be hoping that Trump can help Britain during what are tumultuous times of uncertainty over Brexit.

Yet the massive PR campaign is only going to work for Trump and his campaign to get re-elected. Even the visit to Westminster Abbey and the laying of the wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier will be very well received by religious conservatives back home – a new target group of Trump’s. And the D-Day ceremony, no doubt, will work wonders for any members of the US military which might have been considered floating voters.

Historically, the special relationship between the UK and the US is really nothing more than an urban myth which has new life forced into it when both Washington and Westminster concurrently need it to serve their political purposes. George W Bush played this card brilliantly with Tony Blair who supported his erroneous venture in Iraq in 2003, based on entirely fabricated intelligence; Blair reciprocated by giving a glowing speech about the special relationship at the state of the union speech in the same year, bringing tears almost to the US president’s cherub like cheeks.

But where was the special relationship when the Falklands was invaded in 1982 by Argentinean forces loyal to a south American despot which Washington didn’t want to upset? Or indeed, where was that same special relationship, going further back, in 1965 when the US began a war in Vietnam, where a US president was told quite defiantly by Harold Wilson, that British soldiers would not be heading there? Even when the special relationship was managed by Churchill, it took the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour to bring America into WWII, after Britain took a beating of well over two years by Germany. Some chicken. Some neck.

And where is the special relationship now, today, when Trump’s moronic meddling in the Middle East, hoping to manufacture a war with Iran, will only destabilize the region and set back UK interests? Where is that same special relationship where Trump is threatening Britain over its 5G telecoms deal with Huawei – where the UK might be kicked out of the intel sharing ‘five eyes’ community?

The special relationship is really not special at all. But even if Trump wants to help the UK, there really isn’t too much there for him to even grapple with in the first place.

The Queen may well believe that Trump can break a political deadlock over Brexit and bolster Britain’s negotiating edge with the EU, but given that his track record in North Korea, Venezuela, China and Iran, it’s hard to imagine how his own unique ‘Midas Touch’ can help Britain. The truth is that even if Trump got involved, he would probably make the situation with the EU worse than it presently is.

Much hope is placed on Trump also conjuring up a new US-UK trade deal, but what pundits often miss out then they espouse such lofty ideas is that is won’t be Trump that ultimately signs that off – if it is to happen – but Congress. Trump may well put his weight behind the idea, but the detachment of Trump from Congress and in particular the Democrats, will be a deal breaker.

Trump is an extraordinary opportunist and the UK trip is all about backing himself both ways. Either as a second term President or as a businessman who cleans up post 2020, who will manipulate every second of video footage from the UK trip and whose daughter, Ivanka, is playing an increasingly high profile role – sparking questions whether his long term plans are to install her in the Oval office.

Everything Trump does is for the cameras and his complaints about the only US network covering the state visit being CNN are particularly amusing though, given that Atlanta broadcasted a documentary on the same day of his London arrival about Trump’s crooked real estate businesses which left humble people robbed of their savings through an ingenious scam whereby he sold his name to property developers and was required, by contract, to turn up with his family once a year to puff up the investors confidence. This is really all what we are seeing in the UK with Trump. Inflating himself and his family’s profile so as to cash in on more money to be extracted for a business empire which has a shocking track record of failure. One nugget in the CNN documentary which was interesting is how Trump’s investments in real estate in recent years were all cash. Where did that money come from, given that the New York Times has proven that Trump’s businesses have lost billions? Special relationships?

A leading Brexiteer (and likely next prime minister), Boris Johnson, declared in 2017 that “The independence of this country is being seriously compromised. It is this fundamental democratic problem – this erosion of democracy – that brings me into this fight.” The notion that British democracy is threatened by the European Union is ludicrous — but it continues to play well with voters.

Another front-running contender for the prime ministership is Michael Gove, a curiously repellent individual, who declared in February 2016 that “your government is not, ultimately, in control in hundreds of areas that matter. But by leaving the EU we can take control.”

More objectively the Financial Times observed that “The EU has no significant influence over the UK’s spending on (or policies towards) health, education, housing, pensions, welfare, infrastructure, culture or, for that matter, defence and aid,” but this doesn’t stop the likes of Gove and Johnson playing on the fears of citizens whose instinctive feelings include distrust and even detestation of foreigners.

One 2017 UK survey revealed that “56% of people felt local culture was threatened by ethnic minorities” and another that “When split by opinion in the EU referendum, 34 per cent of Leave voters admitted holding racist attitudes compared to 18 per cent of Remain voters, and similar proportions were seen in Conservative and Labour supporters respectively.” In 2019 a University of Manchester study found that “over 70% of ethnic minority workers [said] they have experienced racial harassment at work in the last five years, and around 60% [said] they have been subjected to unfair treatment by their employer because of their race.”

On the other hand, there are many sectors of the British economy in which foreign nationals are not harassed — because they own them. Hundreds of businesses in Britain have been taken over by foreigners, but neither Gove nor Johnson, these Britain-first patriots, have said a word about how they might “take control” of the former jewels in Britain’s commercial crown.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars is owned by Germany’s BMW group, Jaguar Landrover by India’s Tata, and British Steel by Greybull Capital which was set up “by Marc and Nathaniel Meyohas, the sons of a French corporate lawyer.” Take Control, anyone?

The UK’s largest airport, Heathrow, which has the most passenger traffic in Europe, is owned by an international consortium headed by Spain’s Ferrovial Group. An analysis in 2018 showed that Britain’s major public utilities — energy, railways and water — “are all to a significant degree foreign owned and have been exceptionally poorly managed, while at the same time making large distributions of dividends to their owners.” Ancient businesses such as the iconic toyshop, Hamleys (1760), Boots Chemists (1849), and Cadbury Chocolate (1831) are now owned by foreign firms whose tax payments to Britain are derisory. (For example, Mondelez, the owner of Cadbury “paid no corporation tax in Britain last year, despite reporting profit of more than £185 million.”)

It is ridiculous for “Vote Leave” to claim “We’ve lost control of trade” because of European Union rules and regulations. Britain has lost control of trade because governments have encouraged sinister foreign moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, a major Brexit propagandist, to plunder Britain’s economy and influence its politics to an unsettling degree.

It is apparent that Britain has been split apart by the campaign to leave Europe, and that objectivity has been spurned by the Brexit fanatics. They destroyed Prime Minister Theresa May who, no matter what one might think of her politics, tried her conscientious best to achieve some sort of deal with the European Union. Fat chance, with such as Gove and Johnson desperate to get her job.

Johnson began his career as a journalist and was sacked by The Times newspaper for fabricating a quotation to back up a story. Then in 2004 he told an outrageous lie concerning his sex life. He has the morals of a downmarket alley cat, and had denied reports that “the mother of his alleged mistress, Petronella Wyatt, said her daughter had become pregnant by him and had an abortion last month. Johnson, who is married with four children, had categorically dismissed the allegations… as an ‘inverted pyramid of piffle’ — and, crucially, had assured Tory leader Michael Howard they were untrue.” But they were true, and when he could no longer deny the truth he had to resign, but carried on up the political ladder, in spite of his glaring moral defects.

As noted by Foreign Policy, when President Obama said he thought Brexit was unwise, Johnson “dismissed the US president’s position as an ‘ancestral dislike of the British Empire’ derived from being ‘part-Kenyan’.” He then declared that voting for the Conservative Party “will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW.” Apparently he thought this was terribly funny.

His main opponent in the leadership race, and former ally, Michael Gove, hasn’t arranged any abortions or insulted presidents or indulged in crass jokes. He has confined his dubious activities to ripping off the British taxpayer.

Ten years ago the UK’s Daily Telegraph conducted an inquiry into the outrageous expenses claims made by British members of Parliament, and it’s rattling good reading. One of the main cheaters identified was Michael Gove (net worth three million pounds) who, among other things, spent many thousands of pound of taxpayer’s money when he “furnished his house in [an up-market London suburb]… [buying] a £331 Chinon armchair as well as a Manchu cabinet for £493 and a pair of elephant lamps for £134.0. He also claimed for a £750 Loire table — although the Commons’ authorities only allowed him to claim £600 — a birch Camargue chair worth £432 and a birdcage coffee table for £238.50.” When he was found to have fiddled his expenses claims he paid back £7000, but nothing could be done about retrieving the cash he made by moving house when he “submitted a £13,259 bill for the cost of the move, including his local authority searches, fees and stamp duty. In between the house moves, he stayed [in an hotel], charging the taxpayer more than £500 for a single night’s stay.”

Johnson and Gove are Britain’s main contenders to become Britain’s prime minister. One is a lying libertine, a lecherous adulterer who sneers at coloured people; and the other is a cheap trickster who has all the charm, attraction and talent of a sock full of wet spaghetti.

So Britain will continue to be out of control, with unpredictable consequences.

May’s entire public career bring to mind the title of Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera’s much loved 1984 novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

In truth, May is the opposite of the central characters in Kundera’s novel who find purpose, depth and an inspiring light in life through abandoning the superficial distractions of action, vanity or power in a great urban metropolis.

May in her political career, rather, never deviated from doggedly pursuing precisely those goals, even though she showed no talent, energy, success, moral passion or even pleasure in glumly trudging through whatever public position was required of her at any time. Her own lightness of being does indeed appear to have been unbearable.

Nine years of bungled, passive mediocrity is finally coming to an end. It started with May’s unending depressing trudge as home secretary (Britain’s interior minister) when she relentless cut police numbers and presided over the feminization, bureaucratic paralysis and slashed budgets of the country’s police forces. She thereby unraveled the basic Social Contract that had kept Britain relatively safe, pleasant and civilized for centuries. That has ended. Even without the insane American proliferation of guns, London is now far more unsafe than New York, with even its murder rate exceeding American metropolises.

May resigned in the end because she had failed yet again to convince her own Conservative Party – another victim of her unrelenting ineptitude – to rally behind any coherent or sensible policy to either execute Brexit – the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union – or to act decisively to reverse this uniquely stupid and suicidal policy.

The private, supposedly “real” Theresa May could yet turn out to be witty, scathing, skeptical or charismatic when the inevitable exculpatory memoirs are written by her inner circle. However, this does seem extremely unlikely. Revealingly, she only chose lieutenants as mediocre, crass, dim and inept as she always was herself.

May does however, like the worse Roman emperors deserve to be a subject of endless fascination for historians and students of popular history for centuries and millennia to come. Her fascination will come not from any positive qualities or negative vices but from her astonishing lack of both.

May did not create but inherited the Brexit decision after her predecessor David Cameron recklessly approved the referendum vote on staying in the European Union (EU) or leaving it. But over the past three years she has completely failed to repair any of the damage she inherited. At every stage she made a bad situation worse. She lacked every requisite for any competent national leader. She could not inspire ether love or fear. She could not even generate hatred – at most a weary, universal contempt.

As home secretary and then as prime minster, May at every point did the bidding of Britain’s ever more powerful Security Deep State. She never for a moment questioned the public line demonizing Russia when a former Russian defector was poisoned in Salisbury with a bizarre biological agent.

We now know that on her watch as home secretary and prime minister, Christopher Steele, one of the foremost officials in the SIS Secret Intelligence Service or MI-6 for many years, put together for Fusion GPS, then acting for the Hillary Clinton campaign the notorious Trump Dossier about the future president’s alleged compromising behavior in Russia, which has never received any independent confirmation whatsoever for any of its lurid assertions.

What Theresa May presents us with therefore at the end of the day is a leader who rose not because of her qualities but because of her total lack of them.

In her almost three years running her country, she was never commanding, decisive or charismatic. She had no public wit, small talk or memorable turn of phrase whatsoever.

May could not read people: She was always a sucker for insincere flattery and appointed the most entertaining and embarrassing buffoons (Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson), unscrupulous selfish, power-hungry backstabbing and disloyal demagogues (Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson of course) and simply totally inept clowns (International Trade Minister Liam Fox and Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union David Davis) to the most senior and vital positions of state.

Being a Black Hole herself, the only people she was capable of reaching out to were ciphers even more insignificant than herself.

It is impossible to think of a single positive quality she brought to the national leadership during her seemingly endless time in it. Now she is gone at last leaving a worse mess than ever behind her. Her being was so light that her departure will not be missed or even remembered. It was her presence that was unbearable. I am sure Milan Kundera understood.

Even David Cameron could see the damage Dacre and The Daily Mail were doing to the national narrative in terms of Europe and attempted to have Dacre fired. All of a sudden, some of the pieces of this complex political puzzle fall into place in this excerpt from Barnett’s book and a piece in openDemocracy.

Anthony BARNETT

The referendum’s outcome caught everyone unprepared. Michael Gove, whose forceful decision to support Leave turned the campaign, was fast asleep. He had gone to bed confident that he had made his stand and the country would continue as before. He and his wife Sarah Vine were woken by a call at 4.45, as she recounted in her column. ‘“Michael?” a voice said. “Michael, guess what? We’ve won!” There was a short pause while he put on his glasses. “Gosh,” he said. “I suppose I had better get up.” The government too was taken by surprise. Cameron simply resigned. Only the Bank of England had a contingency plan, to provide extra credit to steady the markets. This was hardly long-term.

Following Cameron’s resignation, the Brexiteers had fallen out amongst themselves in farcical confusion, and May emerged as the only disciplined and serious politician in contention. Far from being prepared herself, she had supported Remain. The way she backed the Cameron government had been low-key, reflecting her loathing of his and Osborne’s methods. But in a private, off-the-record discussion at Goldman Sachs on 26 May 2016, a month before the vote, she told its financial specialists: ‘I think the economic arguments are clear … I think being part of a 500-million trading bloc is significant for us. I think … a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe,’ and: ‘one of my messages in terms of the issue of the referendum, actually we shouldn’t be voting to try to recreate the past, we should be voting for what is right for the future’.

The country voted the other way. Cameron was decapitated. The Tory Party leadership contest was announced on the evening of 29 June, May declared her bid to be prime minister next morning – and set out what has now become the UK’s policy on Brexit. She decided she was the best person to ‘recreate the past’. At least she understood what she was doing as she put herself forward to be the party’s and the country’s leader. This is how she explained her change of mind:

“We’ve just emerged from a bruising and often divisive campaign. Throughout, I made clear that on balance I favoured staying inside the EU – because of the economic risk of leaving, the importance of cooperation on security matters, and the threat to the Union between England and Scotland – but I also said that the sky would not fall in if we left … now the decision has been made, let’s make the most of the opportunities … the task in front of us is no longer about deciding whether we should leave or remain. The country has spoken, and the United Kingdom will leave the EU. The job now is about uniting the Party, uniting the country – securing the Union – and negotiating the best possible deal for Britain.

The sense of the vulnerability of the Union as her priority is present from the start:

“The process of withdrawal will be complex, and it will require hard work, serious work, and detailed work. And it means we need a Prime Minister who is a tough negotiator, and ready to do the job from day one.”

And Brexit itself? A famous phrase was born.

“First, Brexit means Brexit. The campaign was fought, the vote was held, turnout was high, and the public gave their verdict. There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to re-join it through the back door, and no second referendum. The country voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the Government and of Parliament to make sure we do just that. Second, there should be no general election until 2020. There should be a normal Autumn Statement, held in the normal way at the normal time, and no emergency Budget.”

She then developed an unequivocal statement that promised a government that works for everyone; to alleviate the injustices of life for blacks, for women and for white working-class men. It was said to have been drafted for her by Nick Timothy, who had immediately joined her campaign team having, significantly, worked for Leave. He is now her joint chief-of-staff. They added this barb for Cameron and Osborne:

“Frankly, not everybody in Westminster understands what it’s like to live like this, and some need to be told that what the government does isn’t a game. It’s a serious business that has real consequences for people’s lives.”

May had met with Dacre before she made this leadership announcement and knew his concerns . The same evening ‘it must be Theresa’ was emblazoned across the Mail’s front page. Readers were directed to the editorial, which bears Dacre’s hallmarks. Normally, it said, the Mail ‘would not show its hand until the end of a contest’. But with the Tories disintegrating before the public’s eyes, ‘what the country needs most is a solid and steady hand on the tiller’. It added that May should bring senior Brexiteers into the government with her. Which she duly did. ‘The need for a new era of cleaner, more honest, gimmick-free politics has never been greater’.

The next day the Mail ran a profile of May that dug out everything positive that could be found. Its headline in bold was: ‘The vicar’s daughter who met her husband at a Conservative disco: Deadly serious. Utterly steely. After all those Etonians, could this grammar school girl, whose grandmothers were in service, be just what Britain needs?’ A question so loaded it fell off the page. Buried in the profile, a reader could discern reports suggesting she had a chronic inability to delegate.

In the short time span between the referendum and her standing for leader, Theresa May did not so much win over the Daily Mail, as the Daily Mail, its voice, views and priorities, recruited her. With no record of originality, her version of profound reflection is to declare that she ‘gets things done’. After twenty-five years in politics, Theresa May has no obvious connections to any think tank. Although she works with Nick Timothy, who has a considerable grasp of Conservative history and policy, she herself shows no interest in ideas, saying only that in order to conserve you must change. As the country faces an unprecedented concatenation of economic, strategic, diplomatic and constitutional uncertainty, and needs a leader with imagination, it has got one who prides herself in getting on with the job, not rethinking what the job is. Serious and determined, May is a first-rate second-rank politician. Beggars can’t be choosers, Dacre must have decided and did his best to project her as the new Thatcher, full of strength and inner conviction.

Every holder of her office is now haunted by the way Margaret Thatcher reshaped the country. But Thatcher’s conviction was harnessed to a formidable programme of domestic transformation and a new culture of government, whether you liked it or not. During her four years leading her party in opposition, Thatcher and her team prepared for power, spending meeting after meeting analysing the nature of British decline and trying to understand how to confront it. John Hoskyns, who became her head of policy in Downing Street, ‘spent a year preparing a huge diagram showing how all aspects of decline were connected’. Not only was Thatcher the candidate of a significant network of strategists, supported by think tanks, she carried Hayek in her handbag and generated what her official biographer calls ‘wonderment at the phenomenon of a party leader in search of ideas’.

The contrast with May could not be greater. Despite this there was a striking and formidable coherence to the general direction set by the new prime minister as soon as she formed her government. Overnight, all her ministers were singing from the same song-sheet, and doing so comfortably. She turned the party’s face against the city slickers of globalisation and positioned its social and economic aims to support the ‘just about managing’, the very people Labour’s Ed Miliband had been scorned for identifying as the ‘squeezed middle’ in 2010 – and was greeted as if she were extraordinarily far-sighted. In all this, she adopted a formed ideology and set of attitudes: she embraced the perspective of the Daily Mail. She spoke like its editorials: in short, clear, purposive sentences that left you in no doubt what to think. Across her party everyone grasped the culture and its pitch – they had been reading it year in and year out: ‘The British people have spoken’; ‘Brexit means Brexit’; ‘hard work’; ‘serious business’; ‘no backsliding on Brexit’, ‘no second referendum’. Above all, Theresa May shared the Mail’s sense of England’s grievances, especially with migrants – and England’s desire to be British.

These are circulation-building stances for a newspaper. They offer the clarity, spirit and alarmism readers enjoy. But not the politics for a situation as grave as Brexit. In her first speech to her party conference as leader, in October 2015, the prime minister announced she would activate Article 50 in March 2017.

It was a moment of the utmost gravity. She should have – but did not – recognise, measure and reach out to the immense divisions that Brexit could open within the country. She could have – but did not – consider the implications for the entire continent that Britain once helped liberate from fascism. Instead, her tone, brevity and practical approach were identical to a Daily Mail editorial.

There was no offer of an open process to explore how best to proceed that might muddy the water. It was not inclusive, it was directive. The Financial Timesreports that at ‘the heart of her new administration is a coterie of loyal and long-serving advisers’. Two exceptions: her private secretary, inherited from Cameron – ‘It may be no coincidence that he came from a security background’– and her new official spokesperson … the former political editor of the Daily Mail.

She took into Downing Street a tight team drawn from her six years in the Home Office. Its bleak culture at the coalface of immigration, border control, surveillance and what America calls homeland security reinforced an approach that fits with the Mail and has a specific government culture of surveillance and selection behind it. Will Davies calls it the ‘protective state’ that is ‘ready to discriminate, and won’t be ashamed to admit it. It will discriminate regarding good and bad economic activity; it will discriminate between good and bad migrants; it will discriminate between good and bad ways of life’ – and it will introduce grammar schools to discriminate between children. To fulfil this you need to know who is good and bad, and May’s most lasting legislative achievement before she became premier was the Investigatory Powers Act that became law at the end of 2016. This legalised all the illegal bugging and snooping that the UK’s deep state had been undertaking. The Act is the most intrusive authorisation of powers of surveillance in the West, permitting police and a wide range of officials the right to monitor metadata without a warrant.

Theresa May has become already a historic figure in the way her labile predecessor Cameron was not. She may be limited but she has integrity. Even though she supported Remain, she is now genuine in her commitment. We have seen that Cameron’s team identified those who wanted to leave the EU in their ‘hearts’ but were willing to follow the wisdom of their ‘heads’ and pockets and vote for Europe, to be the key constituency they had to convince. Theresa May shows every sign that she was one of them, willing to support remain pragmatically but longing to sign up to Leave in her heart. One public emblem of this is the 40-page pamphlet she co-authored with Nick Timothy in 2007, on how to restore parliament’s sovereignty over EU legislation. It expresses frustration with the failure of the UK system to get a grip on EU legislation that is regarded as an intrusion.

When England’s voters defied the pragmatic argument about the economic benefits of EU membership and Cameron resigned, they gave May a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become prime minister. Her heart leapt at the chance. She has embraced what she is doing. She is not being hypocritical or lying. Her heartbeat is synchronised with each edition of the Daily Mail.

It provided the no-nonsense, Brexit-means-Brexit headline approach she embraced. It set cutting back on immigrants – which is different from being in control of how many come – as a top objective, along with removing the UK from the orbit of the European Court of Justice (which adjudicates the EU’s single market). Both these now count for more than economic growth. This means the real Brexit.

At first, no one in the UK’s business circles and across Europe was sure what would happen. There were many options, many ways to Brexit. It dawned on them that what May stated when she announced her candidacy, and then in her October 2016 speech to the Tory conference, she meant. More than that, she was relishing the challenge. She is enjoying her role, as the woman who will deliver Brexit. She wants to put immigration control and removing the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, before the economy. For her, it is about self-government and taking back control. Her control. Not the people’s: they have spoken, and that is enough.

May’s problem, and more important, her country’s, is that such an approach is not going to work. To embark on any considerable public enterprise you need three things. First, you need the ambition to really want the objective. It might change its final shape as other forces impinge, but you must fully will the end in its broad dimensions. Second, you must will the means: the effort, the daily discipline, the demands on others, the focus, determination and, when necessary, patience. With respect to Brexit, Theresa May has these two aspects in full degree. She really wants Brexit as she conceives it. She is really determined to achieve it by every means at her disposal.

But there is a third aspect as well, that is out of your control. There need to be the resources to carry you through. These are not just money, time and skills. They include, above all else, other people ready to join you, who want to make your aims their own, who release energy and invention and solve problems and think like you while thinking for themselves. The greater the aim, the more you need others acting independently to achieve the goal. If it is transformative, as Brexit is, it needs to become a movement. If it cannot create popularity, the effort will fail.

Theresa May does not have the capacity to appeal to a movement across all Britain that can make a success of Brexit in this way. She needs people and the country to come together, but her approach is sundering the nations and fragmenting the English. Yet she can steer no other course. Without the ability to orchestrate, which involves trusting others to play well, she cannot mobilise the unified support she needs and already claims as fact. On 17 January, the prime minister set out her Plan for Britain not to the House of Commons but to the ambassadors from the EU, assembled in Lancaster House. ‘After all the division and discord,’ she told them, ‘the country is coming together.’ Clearly, it is not. The words felt more like an instruction.

The rigidity to her approach stems from the trap she finds herself in, of Britishness and Brexit. As we have seen, it fell to her to fuse together the Cameron Remain campaign vision of a World Britain and the Leave campaign’s Global Britain into her own Big Britishness. She has borrowed the Leave campaign’s slogan. But for her it necessitates a domestic programme of social intervention and equalisation not a bonfire of regulations. To deliver her Brexit means mobilising the public to ‘come together’. This needs a big, open democratic process, and something else too. For as May warned before the referendum, there will be serious costs and losses for the British economy. She needs to level with the people, raise their morale with inspiring defiance, to prepare the country for a five- to ten-year turnaround if all goes well. But how can she do this when the promise of Brexit was a treasure chest of free trade? She herself did not make this claim and has been careful not to repeat it. Her colleagues did. But she failed to repudiate their optimism at the start. By implication, the public is looking for hundreds of millions for the NHS, oodles of business from global expansion and a great spurt of growth as the country is ‘liberated’ from Euro-restrictions.

Managing this expectation will be hard enough. She carries an even larger constraint around her neck. Retaining ‘our precious Union’ is her stated priority. What she regards as the glittering necklace of Britishness is becoming her noose. It prevents any frank and democratic process that would, for example, be a space where the Scots and Northern Irish could work for their own relationship with the EU. For her, a child of Churchillism, their leaving and thereby ending Britain is unimaginable.

There is only one route to May’s Brexit, therefore. It has to be imposed: ‘There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to re-join it through the back door, and no second referendum.’ The word ‘must’ is stamped on the whole thing from the start, in her election address, before she even was prime minister. It defines her approach in the language of the Mail. ‘The country’ will not be allowed to change its mind so far as she is concerned.

This is hardly the best way to bring people together. At the beginning of her Plan for Britain, the prime minister said Brexit ‘means taking the opportunity of this great moment of national change to step back and ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be’. But she was not asking that all-important question, she was answering it – and cutting off any further debate. Her conclusion: ‘I want us to be a truly Global Britain.’ She mentioned ‘Global Britain’ eleven times and the phrase is capitalised in the official text of the speech on the Downing Street website; the harmonics with Great Britain, the lure of the time we shaped the world, is inescapable.

Imperial greatness was a joint project and to have a chance of working ‘going global’ must be too. At one point May asserts: ‘A stronger Britain demands that we do something else – strengthen the precious union between the four nations of the United Kingdom’, but later, ‘one of the reasons that Britain’s democracy has been such a success for so many years is the strength of our identity as one nation’. Is it four nations or is it one nation? To the Europeans she explained that Brexit is an attempt ‘to restore, as we see it … national self-determination …’ But if the Scots ask for national self-determination, they are sharply condemned as divisive. The prime minister is not being muddled: she is having it both ways. The English have done this for far too long. As I showed earlier, to the world the English see themselves as one nation: Britain. Amongst ourselves, we can talk of our four different nations. As she put it to the Scots, speaking in Glasgow, the government is determined that there will be no new barriers ‘within our own union’. The words ‘our own’ reveal what is taking place. What is projected by her as a British voice is heard in Scotland as the cold command of England claiming possession.

The prime minister has succumbed to a most human, and in a leader the most dangerous, of pressures. She is projecting her desire as reality. ‘After all the division and discord, the country is coming together’ when it isn’t. ‘The referendum was divisive at times. And those divisions have taken time to heal’ – as if they have healed. What we are witnessing in Theresa May is an English voice, in charge of its ‘precious union’, determined to bend Britain, and therefore in the first place Scotland, to its will. Already, her insistence is tying her in knots. Writing in the magazine of the Holyrood parliament, she told Scots to behave, saying:

“When we take decisions on a UK-basis, whether in a referendum or a general election, every individual has an equal voice. So, in June last year, when the UK as a whole was asked if we should leave or remain in the European Union, every voter had an equal say and the collective answer was final.”

The logic seems impeccable until you examine it. If every individual had an equal voice in general elections, we would have proportional representation and coalition government. More important, who asked ‘the UK as a whole’? The prime minister identifies herself with this question. It presumes the ‘collective answer’ that she claims was demonstrated by its answer. Any doubts about the centrality and force of May’s determination with respect to Scotland were blown away by her extraordinary speech in Glasgow to the Scottish Conservatives, which included:

“I wanted to make clear that strengthening and sustaining the bonds that unite us is a personal priority for me … the fundamental unity of the British people which underwrites our whole existence as a United Kingdom … We need to build a new ‘collective responsibility’ across the United Kingdom, which unites all layers of government … I am determined to ensure that as we leave the EU, we do so as one United Kingdom … a unique responsibility to preserve the integrity and future viability of the United Kingdom, which we will not shirk … at the heart of the United Kingdom is the unity of our people: a unity of interests, outlook and principles. This transcends politics and institutions, the constitution and the economy … We are four nations, but at heart we are one people. That solidarity is the essence of our United Kingdom …”

A unity that ‘transcends’ even the constitution. In the age of Brexit and Trump, when rebellion against traditional authority is the spirit of the time, I’d think twice about laying down the law in such terms, that insist on her personal priority as a matter of fate.

She claims she has answered the question ‘What kind of country are we?’ It is Global Britain with our Parliamentary Sovereignty. When she explained this to Europe’s ambassadors, she added:

“Our political traditions are different. Unlike other European countries, we have no written constitution, but the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty is the basis of our unwritten constitutional settlement. We have only a recent history of devolved governance – though it has rapidly embedded itself – and we have little history of coalition government. The public expect to be able to hold their governments to account very directly, and as a result supranational institutions as strong as those created by the European Union sit very uneasily in relation to our political history and way of life.”

As I argued above, there is an incompatibility between absolutist Britain and the EU. But you can see here how the residues of Churchillist defiance and Thatcherite conviction have fused into a toxic stubbornness. May assumes that her holy trinity of the Union, the unwritten constitution and Parliamentary Sovereignty are in fine fettle. She has to. But they are not. They are fundamentally weakened and incoherent. The EU ambassadors to the Court of St James have their advisers and consult widely. They are aware of the ailing nature of the UK constitution. They will not be taken in, even if they are impressed by the inflexibility of May’s personal determination.

May is a grammar-school traditionalist. Her chosen method for delivery is a return to Whitehall Knows Best – which at its frequent worst is secretive, even despotic. In this way, she has set her face against the energy and originality of the vote to Leave. By describing the arrival of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parliaments as merely a peculiar ‘devolved governance’, she hints at a famous (for those in the know) dismissive phrase of Enoch Powell: ‘Power devolved is power retained’. As for coalition, we will have no more of such ‘little histories’!

She is taking the UK out of the EU to preserve the Westminster system, with national parliaments reduced to local government, human rights removed from being constitutional claims, less freedom of information, the Lords put back in their place – this is Britain in 1972 when Theresa May was sixteen, and the British were good subjects who still admired our leaders.

May’s close advisers describe their approach as a ‘new model conservatism’, with overtones of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. But he led a civil war that oversaw a regicide – not just the summary firing of a chancellor of the exchequer out of the back door of Downing Street. If Brexit was an uprising against the governing ‘political elite’ and their international friends, it was also a challenge to the way policies are imposed. ‘Take back control’ has thrilling, democratic implications if it means that people themselves start to take control. Brexit was not just about unfair policies, it was also directed at who made decisions and how policy is decided. Freedom from the European Union should have delivered the country on a more democratic course, replacing the hyper-centralisation of Whitehall and winner-takes-all elected dictatorship as well. Instead, re-imposing them will crush the vitality and democracy out of Brexit.

The positive energy of the Leave campaign was rooted in a spirit of rebellion that goes back to the seventeenth century. For the most part deeply comatose, it was always latent – and has been awakened. This time a modern Cromwell, even in the guise of Theresa Britannia, is unlikely to triumph.

For three reasons. First, Brexit is just beginning. After the Welsh assembly was endorsed by its sliver of a majority, Ron Davies, the then Welsh Labour leader, said ‘devolution is a process not an event’. What was true for Wales is far more so for Brexit. There is nothing ‘final’ about it, nor should there be. Brexit demands, as May herself says, people ‘coming together’ and the ‘country uniting’. This won’t happen when people are told they must unite and are given ultimatums about what is final. For Brexit to work as a process, it needs to grow and gather support, not be dictated. The example of Thatcher’s firmness and success fills the air thanks to the tabloids. Thatcher’s belligerent leadership worked only when she also released individual capacities, opened markets whether for houses or on the trading floors, and empowered individualism. When she sought to insist on an unfair poll tax designed to drive voters from the electoral register, and began to regiment the population, she was broken.

Second, Brexit is an old people’s home. What does trading as ‘Global Britain’ mean to a young person who wants to live in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid or Lisbon? The YouGov survey of 5,500 voters on the day of the referendum shows the 18–24 age group backing Remain by 71 per cent. It was pensioners over sixty-five who supported Leave by 64 per cent, and won the day. Among the under-25s, young women voted by an overwhelming 80 per cent to 20 per cent for Europe. The future is becoming more feminine, more open and cooperative with other peoples and cultures, less obsessed with absolute sovereignty. The ineluctable demography of the new networked nationalism will undo Brexit absolutism.

Third, the force of Brexit is nativist and the natives who voted for it are the English, in rebellion against being treated as natives in the only way they can rebel – so far. The UK referendum on membership of the EU was not about the economics, as the Remain side ruefully acknowledged after the vote. It was about what kind of country we want to be. Does England therefore have the right to decide what kind of countries Scotland and Ireland want to be?

The prime minister is caught up in a profound, unstoppable, reimagining of what the United Kingdom means, even as she insists that she will not accept such reimagining. Her idea of a Global Britain more interested in trade with Uruguay than with Umbria is a spectral hope in the swirling fortunes of a world on fire, while young women across all of Britain’s nations look the other way.

In the first part of this book, I showed how Brexit and Trump were driven by a desire to make a jailbreak out of the prison of meaningless language, elite gobbledegook and an imposed powerlessness and inequity while those in charge do marvellously well. The breakout was overdue. The tragedy of the mass escapes of 2016 is that they were led by political mafiosi and scoundrels cashing in on the discontent.

Apply this rough-and-ready description of the positive spirit of Brexit Britain today, as May pipes the UK out of the EU. Unlike Trump, who is an experienced godfather and campaigned single-mindedly, the Brexit Cosa Nostra are all over the place. Boris Johnson, Andrea Leadsom, Nigel Farage, Daniel Hannan, Michael Gove – this is a hopeless bunch of ne’er-do-wells who can barely shoot straight even when they aim at each other. Thanks to their incitement, the English breached the walls of elite language, unaccountable Euro-sovereignty and the unctuous hypocrisy of globalist regulation – only to find themselves without a reliable guide to sustain their liberation.

Then, striding purposefully from the home office of the prison itself, came sub-commander May. She told them: I understand you. You are right. The conditions were atrocious. The people in charge claimed to belong to the whole world and belonged nowhere. I applaud your resolve to be rid of them. Also, there has been discrimination. Relations with other prisons have been conducted only to the benefit of the owner (for the prison is privatised). From now on I am your commander. I will speak in plain language. We will take back control, with myself in charge. Close the gates and get back to your cells, or we will lose our precious union. No one can escape to declare their national cell-block independent. We are one prison again.

The United Kingdom as a prison of nations? I think not.

truepublica.org.uk

3.1% of those eligible to vote bothered to go to a polling station and vote Tory in an important UK wide election last week. That’s 1 voter in every 33. Yet the Tory Party is shortly going to choose internally, from within its despised ranks, the next Prime Minister of the UK, even though that Tory Party does not even command a majority at Westminster. That is how dysfunctional the UK constitution has become.

Meantime the SNP were runaway victors in Scotland and Sinn Fein topped the poll on first preferences in Northern Ireland. The UK is disintegrating before our eyes. I pray the SNP leadership finally discovers the courage to seize the moment.

There is a huge amount of wishful thinking in the popular twitter meme that SNP, Libdem, Change plus Green votes just outweigh Brexit plus UKIP votes. This wilfully ignores the fact that a very high percentage of the residual Tory vote are Brexiteers- their Remainers have, like Heseltine, decamped their vote to the LibDems. Any Remainer voting Tory would be certifiable.

The figures are also distorted by adding in Scotland. In Scotland the SNP, Green and Lib Dem vote outweighed the Brexit and Ukip vote by a massive four to one. Scotland being 11% of the total vote in this election, that tilts the overall calculation towards Remain by a full net 5% (duly allowing for the small Tory and Labour votes in Scotland). If you do the figures for England alone, it is absolutely plain that the people of England wish to Brexit. Nobody has the right to stop England from Brexiting as it wishes. What is needed is a mature and friendly acceptance that this means the UK must split.

I stood twice for election in Parliamentary elections in England as an independent anti-war candidate. The first time, in Blackburn in 2005, the BBC broadcast a radio debate between the candidates but excluded me on the basis that I had “no evidence of popular support.” I polled 5.0%.

When I stood later in Norwich, the same thing happened again, and I pointed out that I had obtained 5% in Blackburn. The BBC told me that 5% was not enough public support to be given airtime.

I shall be fascinated to see if they apply that to Change UK and their 3%. Don’t hold your breath. I am rather proud that just on my own, with a few blog readers helping, I am more popular with the electorate than this massively hyped new political party.

I was a Liberal, then a Liberal Democrat, member for over 30 years. I made the stupid mistake of not realising how far the party had moved to the right during my years of working abroad, and anyone who has any understanding of history will know that for the party of Gladstone, Rosebery and Home Rule to brand itself as a Unionist party is an abomination. So there is little remaining affection, but nevertheless I would advise my remaining LibDem friends not to contemplate any kind of merger, alliance or accommodation with ChangeUK.

The LibDems are on the up, whereas ChangeUK are on the way to oblivion. Politically ChangeUK, with its unrepentant Tories and the right of the right wing Blairites, would drag the LibDems still further rightward and make remote the chance of living down the coalition betrayals that almost destroyed the party. Finally, why the LibDems would want to import the most virulent and corrupt pro-Israel lobbying in the UK into the party is beyond me. ChangeUK should simply be ignored on its route to entirely deserved extinction.

craigmurray.org.uk

Though it’s initial reaction was muted, GBP has moved decidedly higher in recent trade (after a brief selloff following May’s announcement), putting the British currency on track to end its record two-week losing streak of uninterrupted declines.

Conventional wisdom would dictate that May’s resignation could open the door for Brexiteers to seize control of the Conservative Party and steer the UK toward a ‘no deal’ exit. So why is the pound rallying? Lars Merklin, a strategist at Danske Bank, has a theory.

The pound’s advance after Prime Minister Theresa May said she would be stepping down shows that her resignation does not necessarily mean a no-deal Brexit, according to Lars Merklin, a strategist at Danske Bank.

“We view the GBP move as being in line with our expectation: this is not a straight road to a no-deal Brexit,” Merklin says. “The market pricing in past weeks have slipped towards that direction.”

“We see the risk in favor of a stronger GBP.”

The lack of a further sell-off or trend break is in itself a signal that markets are not adding to the odds of no-deal, which makes sense, he says.

Fighting off tears after rattling off her accomplishments and thanking the people of the UK for the ‘honor of a lifetime’, Theresa May said Friday that she will resign on Friday, June 7 – two weeks from now – after a rebellion within the conservative party finally forced her to step down.

During her tumultuous tenure as PM, May survived two no-confidence votes.

Though May will stay on as caretaker until a new leader can be chosen, the race to succeed May begins now…odds are that a ‘Brexiteer’ will fill the role. Whatever happens, the contest should take a few weeks, and afterwards May will be on her way back to Maidenhead.

“It is and will always remain a deep regret for me that I was not able to deliver Brexit…I was not able to reach a consensus…that job will now fall to my successor,” May said.

Between now and May’s resignation, May still has work to do: President Trump will travel to the UK for a state visit, while Europe will also celebrate the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

It’s fitting that May touted the virtues of her moderate approach to governance during her resignation speech, considering that her attempts to chart a middle path through Brexit ended up alienating hard-core Brexiteers and remainers alike. Her fate was effectively sealed nearly two years ago, after she called for a general election that cost the Tories their majority in Parliament and emboldened Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The pound’s reaction was relatively muted, as May’s decision to step down had been telegraphed well in advance.

Watch May’s remarks below:

The discussion now turns to whom May’s successor might be. Here’s a list of likely candidates courtesy of the Independent.

• Boris Johnson, former foreign secretary
• Andrea Leadsom, former Commons leader
• Sajid Javid, home secretary
• Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary
• Michael Gove, environment secretary
• Dominic Raab, former Brexit secretary
• Matt Hancock, health secretary

Boris Johnson, who resigned as May’s foreign secretary back in July over May’s “Chequers Deal” – the first outline of what would evolve into the withdrawal agreement – is widely seen as the front-runner in the leadership contest. Unlike May, who voted to remain during the 2016 referendum, Johnson has staked out a position as a leader of the Tory Brexiteers, though he did break ranks to back May’s deal on its third go-round through the Commons. The leadership election process takes four-to-six weeks, which means we won’t know who will be the next PM until mid-summer. Ultimately, registered Tories from across the UK will choose the next PM in a UK-wide vote.

zerohedge.com