Brexit and Liberal Democracy

Populism, Sovereignty, and the Nation-State

Amir Ali

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000421477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses Brexit in the larger context of the crisis in liberal democracies and the continuing rise of 'nationalism'. With electoral verdicts favouring right-wing populists across the world, the volume argues that Brexit has become a key event in understanding global political currents, as well as emerging as a watershed moment in the current political climate. The author focuses on the underlying currents that shaped the Brexit vote and delineates the various strands of arguments that inform the current political climate. The volume also locates the deepening divide within the discourse and understanding of democracy, as well the abysmally low level of rhetoric informing the debates around it. Further, it links this up with other 'nationalist' waves across the world, including South Asia.

A nuanced reading of a key event, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, especially political theory, political sociology and history.

1
Brexit

Beginning to write about a never-ending process

The writing of this book was begun three years after the 23 June 2016 referendum, in which, shockingly for many, a majority of 52 per cent of the electorate decided in favour of leaving the EU. The Brexit referendum has sent tremors right across the world. While the complex technicalities of the Brexit process tend to bore people, there has been a remarkable level of interest in the spectacle that Brexit has become. The British have just not seemed to be able to make up their minds about the terms on which they wanted to or could leave the EU. The coverage of Brexit in a country like China exceeded interest in the Trump presidential victory, the same year as the Brexit referendum.¹ This was just one measure of the kind of interest that was generated globally, despite the UK’s continuously shrinking influence, of which Brexit itself seemed to be one more confirmation.

Part of the Brexit spectacle was the manner in which former Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal with the EU to decide the terms of withdrawal was defeated three times by the British Parliament. The generally anodyne proceedings of the House of Commons, the lower popular chamber of the Parliament, acquired a riveting quality for television viewers. In those early days of the Brexit saga, no deal was not the frighteningly real prospect that it was to become with the assumption of the Prime Ministerial office by Boris Johnson. Theresa May, for as long as she occupied 10 Downing Street, came across as an uninspiring and robotic Prime Minister. Her political rhetoric was repetitive and suggested the malfunctioning monotony of a machine whose wiring had gone haywire and whose batteries were dying. This was an impression that was most effectively created by The Guardian’s parliamentary sketch-writer, John Crace.

However much hostility may have prevailed between her and other EU leaders, there were kind words that were said about her by the EU Commissioner Jean Claude Juncker, when he called her ‘a woman of courage’. His words suggested that there was a certain tenacity with which May pursued the deal that she was hammering out with the EU.² Juncker’s words sounded like a political obituary for the end of a political career that had been capped by a short Prime Ministerial stint. At the very end of that short Prime Ministerial stint, May’s actions in Downing Street, especially with regard to her Brexit deal, were similar to the actions of those merely going through the ritualistically mechanical motions prior to an imminent and impending political death. Her tenacity with regard to pursuing a deal presented a study in contrast to her successor Boris Johnson, who hardly showed any signs of seriousness.

For many observers of the Brexit phenomenon across the world and viewing it from the outside, Brexit has been an unbelievable phenomenon of a country not just at war with itself, but almost determined to cause self-harm. In the second week of August 2019, data from the Office for National Statistics revealed that the gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.1 per cent.³ With the previously parlous state of the economy that went into a double-dip recession back in 2012–2013, the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 has made the state of the UK economy truly precarious. One would have thought that this worldwide crisis and its associated uncertainties that have hit the UK especially hard would make Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his brave band of Brexiteers wary of pushing ahead. There were no signs of any such lowering of the rhetoric on Brexit.

The dismal economic figures in August 2019 could be seen as a response to the rather shocking declarations on the part of Boris Johnson, just before becoming Prime Minister, that the UK would leave the EU on 31 October 2019, come what may. Johnson, in his own words, suggested that Britain would exit the EU ‘do or die’.⁴ The callous indifference from Johnson with regard to the consequences of a no-deal Brexit is disturbing, to say the least. What explains the urgency and enthusiasm to take a step like no-deal when the implications of this are unknown, and all available indicators suggest that the results could very well be chaotic? The bleakness of a no-deal situation was laid out by the government’s six-page document Operation Yellowhammer, which warned, among many things, of huge disruptions to food-supply chains, a rise in food prices and a rise in public disorder.⁵ The brazen indifference with regard to no-deal Brexit has often been attributed to Johnson’s rather chaotic personality and his style of functioning in politics, where it has often been suggested that he has been embarrassingly underprepared for cabinet meetings.

Johnson’s style of functioning is akin to the high-risk gambler, who wagers on almost impossibly high stakes, hoping to rake in huge political benefits. This is most certainly an unhinged sort of politics, reckless to say the least, and tending to militate against even the slightest hint of warning and caution. Lurking in the shadows of Johnson’s No. 10 was the dark genius of Dominic Cummings, who seemed to be meticulously planning every single move to ensure that Britain left the EU without a deal. The intriguing question really is whose interest does this kind of an extreme no-deal move serve? The people who voted for Brexit did not factor in a no-deal Brexit. They were never told about one in the manner that Dominic Cummings’s genius invented the figure of £350 million a week that could be saved by leaving the EU and that could be channelized into the beleaguered National Health Service (NHS).⁶ The only self-serving interest fulfilled seems to be the small cabal that runs Johnson’s horrendously right-wing cabinet. Here, the pursuit of a no-deal Brexit seemed to have almost become the belief of a mystic cult, preparing for an apocalyptic end to Britain’s association with the EU, to be followed by the new golden dawn of British independence. Mr Johnson’s strategy has seemed to be an irresponsible and adventurist one of maximum risk and maximum disruption, true to his personality, and perhaps one should add his hairstyle as well.

Taking the most extreme and audacious steps could well have become the new style of doing politics, which contrasts with earlier, more ponderous and deliberative ways of trying to evolve some semblance of consensus. That seems to be the bygone style of more cautious politicians. There seems to be a premium on taking the more audacious and risky political moves, outwitting the opponent in the process and leaving many gobsmacked. The Indian Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, seems to have perfected such political tactics. His sudden and shocking decision to demonetize 86 per cent of India’s currency supply on 8 November 2016, incidentally the very day of Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the US, would be an instance of this blitzkrieg style of politics, where the opposition remains shell-shocked by the sheer audacity of the move.⁷ This was again seen in Mr Modi’s decision in August 2019 to abrogate Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which was an instance of a familiar asymmetrical federalism that gave special status and autonomy to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This special status was an acknowledgement of the specific historical circumstances leading to the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian Union in 1947. Here was another instance of a complete throwing of all constitutional caution to the wind in a move that has been seen by some as the political equivalent of the earlier demonetization decision.

A new Blitzkrieg style of politics

The unfolding Brexit saga, and the kind of politician that it has positioned as Prime Minister in Boris Johnson, represents the inauguration of a new kind of blitzkrieg politics, intended to shock and awe. The unthinkable, in this case no-deal Brexit, moves from the realms of remote possibility to perhaps the only possibility. The aspect of throwing all constitutional caution to the wind, which accompanies this kind of politics, was especially evident when Boris Johnson initially suggested that he could prorogue Parliament to prevent it from interfering with his much-desired Brexit on 31 October 2019. To the disbelief and outrage of many, that is precisely what he did towards the end of August 2019. In a remarkable judgement, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament for five weeks was unlawful.⁸

There also emerged, just a few weeks into the Johnson premiership, the likelihood of calling a snap general election, just before or immediately after the Brexit deadline. This desire to call an election was to go on to become something of an obsession with Johnson and his supporters, as Parliament kept blocking him and frustrating him in early September 2019 by preventing an early election and blocking the possibility of a no-deal Brexit.⁹ Indeed, the successive defeats that he was humiliatingly subjected to showed the manner in which Parliament was able to run rings around him. The crass populism that Johnson then took recourse to was to cry out for the voice of the people. The enthusiasm for an election that Johnson has displayed can only be interpreted in terms of the high-stakes politics that forms the framework of analysis here. In other words, the transformation of politics that we have witnessed in the last few years of the second decade of the twenty-first century is a movement away from subtle-manoeuvring and back-channel parleys to high-octane rhetoric and the taking of the most reckless course of political action. Johnson’s call for an election was his only way out of the unbelievable political course of action that he had embarked upon. He boxed himself into a corner with Parliament surrounding him, and his only way out was by proroguing Parliament and then the subsequent dissolving of this very same Parliament through the call for an election, in the hope that it would yield a more pliant one. With his success in the December 2019 Parliamentary election, the worst instincts of democracy seem to have come to his rescue.

As if all of this was not edge-of-the-seat thriller politics enough, the loss of Mr Johnson’s parliamentary majority by the decision of the Conservative MP Philip Lee to cross the floor of the house to join the Liberal-Democrats only added to the drama. This dramatic crossing of the floor was timed just as Johnson was giving a statement in the House of Commons.¹⁰ Johnson’s predictably populist strategy has been to cast Parliament as the impediment and obstacle in the way of the people’s will. The playing off of Parliament against the people was not only a cynically populist ploy, but also seemed to represent desperation on the part of Johnson. The only way forward from the high-stakes gambling politics that it has been suggested he is prone to doing is to go to the people in a general election in the hope that people would be so revolted by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that they would deliver in his lap a popular mandate that his Premiership so clearly lacked. That is exactly what happened.

This audacious, high-stakes gambling politics that has emerged not just in the UK but in many liberal-democracies across the world is symptomatic of a deepening crisis of liberal-democracy. The possibility of liberal-democracies resolving this kind of turbulent politics is bleak, and this could culminate in the very termination or death of liberal-democracy itself.¹¹ Perhaps a little apocalyptically, it is suggested that the Brexit phenomenon is not merely representative of a worsening crisis of liberal-democracy, but more ominously holds out the very real possibility of reaching to the brink of the death of the liberal-democratic order across the world.¹²

Over-zealous commitment to the electoral component of democracy

The blitzkrieg style of audacious, high-stakes politics is further combined with an exaggerated and over-zealous commitment on the part of politicians to the electoral component of democracy. It has felt a little strange when politicians have revealed such zeal to honour the Brexit referendum result. This is done despite the referendum being an advisory one and significant evidence that the referendum result was skewed to the Leave side by the workings of Cambridge Analytica, which harvested Facebook data of millions of voters who were then sent targeted messages so that they could just be pushed over to vote leave. There was a degree of psychological...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Brexit: beginning to write about a never-ending process
• 2 The Thatcherite prelude to Brexit
• 3 Brexit, the 2007 financial crisis and austerity
• 4 ‘Let’s take back control’: Brexit and the assertion of sovereignty
• 5 Brexit and the worsening climate of democracy
• 6 Brexit, and the sum of all fears: racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism
• Conclusion: Brexit: conclusively inconclusive?
• Index