A Crisis Of Relevancy

Now that Donald Trump has been served his eviction notice, Brexit Britain finds itself in a lonely place. Afua Hirsch writes:

After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, an American friend compared the nativist populism of the United States with the state of Brexit Britain. “You think it’s bad that Britain voted to leave the EU,” he told me. “America has voted to leave itself.”

Following the American example, Boris Johnson's government took a similarly outrageous turn:

Under cover of the past four years of regression, the British government has been running riot. However badly our leaders behaved, though, they knew there was a larger, more powerful democracy behaving even worse. Conservative attacks on the independence of the judiciary, for example, may represent an unprecedented assault on our constitution. But for Trump, lashing out personally at individual judges on Twitter became routine.

The British government’s relaxed attitude about violating international law has prompted the condemnation of nearly all living former prime ministers. But Trump led the way in tearing up international agreements and withdrawing from multilateral organisations.

And, just as Trump stoked long-simmering racial divisions, Johnson did the same:

In Britain we have had to endure an equalities minister who suggests anti-racism reading materials are illegal in school, a foreign minister who derided Black Lives Matter as a Game of Thrones spoof, and Boris Johnson himself, as ready to insult black children in Africa as he was the black president in the White House. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris is said to “hate” Johnson for claiming Obama held a grudge against Britain because of his “part-Kenyan” heritage. The prime minister’s comments have not aged well.

The Kenya reference was not accidental. Much of Johnson’s political strategy rests on foundations of imperial pride and colonial nostalgia. That was compatible with the “special relationship” when the American president was, like him, similarly smitten by an imagined great white past. Lamenting the decline of this relationship has become a national pastime in Britain – traditionally at just such moments as this, when a change of guard in the White House threatens the status quo. What is clear is that, insofar as the special relationship does exist, it’s rooted in “shared cultural values”. This phrase, whenever deployed by Britain, is almost always code for: “We colonised you once, and how well you’ve done from it.”

Tories pumped with pride from this same history – gloriously bragging in song that “Britons never shall be slaves” – are unlikely to find its seductive power holds much sway within the incoming US administration. The government ignored British ethnic minorities when we offered the truth of our own lineages to counter this propaganda. Ignoring the president and vice-president of America is slightly harder to pull off.

That leaves Johnson looking particularly fragile and exposed. This week one of his predecessors, John Major – no stranger to strained relations with America when he was in office – warned that “complacency and nostalgia are the route to national decline”. Britain needed a reality check, Major cautioned. “We are no longer an irreplaceable bridge between Europe and America. We are now less relevant to them both.”

Both the United States and Britain now face a crisis of relevancy. Mr. Johnson would be wise to rethink his whole project.

Image: businessinsider.com

Self Destruction Is In The Air

In Washington, the subject is impeachment. In London, the subject is implosion. And the leaders in both capitals are looking for someone else to blame. Andrew Rawley writes:

Very often, what matters in politics is not how you play the game, but how you place the blame. No one knows this better than Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. His career would have been terminated long ago did he not possess a talent for wriggling out of responsibility for his behaviour in both his personal and political life. The biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore, who once employed him as a journalist, sometimes refers to Mr Johnson as “the greased albino piglet”.

We are now entering the most intense round of the Brexit blame game. For three years, Remainers have pointed infuriated fingers at Mr Johnson and the other frontmen of the Leave campaign for flogging a bogus prospectus that Brexit would be a painless “piece of cake”, not never-ending agony. Since it cannot be the Brexiters’ fault that their promises have not been fulfilled, they must find someone else to blame and that would be intransigent Europeans, obstructive parliamentarians, quisling civil servants and meddling judges. With less than a month to go before the Halloween deadline, and an election hovering on the horizon as well, the issue of culpability is going to become even more fiercely contested. We approach the endgame of the blame game.

Boris Johnson finds himself in a bind of his own making:

He has repeatedly declared that Britain will be leaving, with or without a deal, at the end of October, “come what may”, “whatever the circumstances”, “do or die”. Repeats of that pledge, delivered under the slogan “Get Brexit done”, won the loudest applause during his speech to last week’s Tory conference. Except that the Benn Act, passed by parliament in September, makes it illegal for him to pursue a crash-out Brexit and requires him to ask for a further extension in the event that there is no agreement. How does the greased piglet wriggle out of this one?

In Washington, the text messages which were delivered last week to three committees of the House of Representatives were the 21st century version of Nixon's tapes. Donald Trump will howl, blaming everybody but himself for his impeachment. And Boris Johnson will squeal like a greased piglet, blaming everybody but himself for his implosion.

Self destruction is in the air.

Image: Twitter