Friday 13 January 2023

The great Brexit betrayal

I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest European Social Survey, but it must make depressing reading for the men and women behind Brexit. Far from it triggering the break up of the European Union, Brexit has had precisely the opposite effect. The populations of member states have seen what has happened to Britain and wisely decided that our fate isn’t for them. Even the Italians and the Dutch who had populist, far-right parties flirting with their own EU exit appear to have turned against it.  The war in Ukraine must have helped a bit, too.

The survey is led by the City University of London and is carried out every two years in 30 European nations. It found this year that respondents were less likely to vote to leave in every EU member state for which data was available.

Lewis Goodall, the former BBC journalist, tweeted about it:

A day before the poll was published, Nick Cohen, usually found in the Guardian, wrote a post on his Substack blog with his latest effort being a nice take on the motivation of Brexiteers. Cohen is a terrific writer, particularly on Brexit and the Conservative party, and always worth reading.

He likens what Brexiteers have achieved to the betrayal of Britain by members of the establishment who were spies for the Russians before and after WW2, as portrayed in John Le Carre’s novel: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, which Cohen has changed to give his post a title, Tinker Tailor Tory Traitor.

The day will come when Britain will see Farage, Johnson, Gove, and JRM as we did Burgess, Philby, Maclean, and Blunt, in the last century.  They hated America and resented Britain’s decline and wanted to smash the world order in any way they could. Brexiteers we’re hoping to do the same to the EU, resentful of its growing power.

Cohen writes: “This isn’t the leftist anger of the 2020s at the crimes of empire, but the elite despair of the 1970s at the loss of status. Smiley concludes that Haydon wanted to make himself a powerful figure in the world that was ignoring England by betraying the secrets of Britain and, crucially, of the new global power America.

"For all his professed devotion to the foreign creed of communism, Bill Haydon [the Soviet Mole] is a recognisable figure from the establishment. The Tory driven by despair to wreck the society he cannot abide. As our generation of Conservatives have done.”

“Radical right despair preceded the disaster that has engulfed the UK. The journey to our collapse began in the 1990s among Conservatives who could not cope with Tony Blair. Plenty on the left found him hard to take as well. Loss of power drove the Tory reaction, however, rather than ideological grievances. Here were men that thought themselves born to rule, or in the case of conservative commentators and hangers-on, born to influence the natural rulers of the country, and New Labour made them irrelevant for 13 years. It belittled them. What Conservatives said, thought, and wrote no longer mattered.”

“Appeals to the unknowable verdicts of posterity are the mark of desperate charlatans who know in their hearts their project has failed. Better to imagine vindication 50 or 100 years from now than acknowledge that they have betrayed their country more thoroughly than Kim Philby did in fact and Bill Haydon did in fiction.

“They have permanently weakened the England they profess to love, and compounded the fault by nearly bankrupting us with a deranged tax-cutting experiment. Even by their own nationalist standards they have failed. They made England little and its Conservative leaders ridiculous.

“The best measure of their betrayal is the oldest test for any government. When the electorate removes them from power, no Tory will be able to say that they left the country in a better state  [than] they found it.”

I think there is a lot of truth in Cohen's post. It may not have been deliberate, I don't believe all of them set out to 'make England little' - but they were indifferent to the outcome at best. As long as the hated European Union was damaged beyond repair, Britain could once again become a significant European power squabbling endlessly over trivia.  That ain't going to happen, obviously.

Don't forget, we tried to stop the EEC in the sixties with EFTA, a trade bloc designed to make the EEC redundant. That attempt failed, as Brexit is failing and will fail ultimately. Despite Putin's insanity in Ukraine, the growing economic and military power of the Chinese, and its sabre rattling in Taiwan, Brexiteers still think we can play a leading role in world affairs as a small mid-ranking nation on the shores of northwest Europe. 

We are for example, talking about sending Ukraine 10 Challenger tanks out of our total stock of 227. Russia has already lost 1,450 in Ukraine and is hemorrhaging them at the rate of 10 per day!  Poland has more (240) and the USA has 6,600 - about twice as many as Turkey.  Think about it. 

We don't have enough planes for our two expensive new aircraft carriers. One, HMS Prince of Wales, is currently in drydock at Rosyth in Scotland, having suffered serious problems with its propeller shaft. We are starting to look pathetic.

In the long term, Brexit is going to have the opposite effect to the intended one here as well. It will surely be the final acid test on whether or not Britain is a serious world-power or not. It will bring to an ignominious close, an argument that has gone on for seventy years - far too long.

And if you think anyone is going to take responsibility for the debacle, think again.

Jacob Rees Mogg for one doesn’t accept any personal responsibility and blames remainers for ‘undermining’ Brexit and making it more difficult for Britain to benefit from leaving the EU. 

That's right, it's all your fault.  Shame on you.


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