As Brexit Looms, Britain Bows to Trump's Will
President Trump speaks to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and
British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson as Britain's Prime Minister Theresa
May passes during a working dinner meeting at the NATO headquarters in
Brussels on May 25, 2017.
President Trump speaks to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and
British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson as Britain's Prime Minister Theresa
May passes during a working dinner meeting at the NATO headquarters in
Brussels on May 25, 2017.
Matt Dunham / AFP / Getty Images
By Sasha Abramsky, TruthoutPublished July 11, 2019
Iam back in London, in the place I grew up, and to me it feels like the
country is being set up to snap like a twig.
For three years now, the British political system has been sliced to pieces
by the impossibility of implementing a Brexit that delivers on the result of
the 2016 referendumto leave the European Union (EU), and does so in a way
that doesn't destroy the country's economy and transform the U.K.'s pound
into a vulnerable, soft currency.
Outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May presides over a coalition government
reliant on hardline Irish Unionists to preserve a slim parliamentary
majority. Because any exit from the EU will make Britain's dealings with
southern Ireland - which will still be in the EU - vastly more difficult,
and because Northern and Southern Ireland have free movement of people and
goods across their border, how to deal with that border became a huge
sticking point.
The Unionists felt May's government was going along with EU demands that
would effectively bring Northern Ireland closer to its independent neighbor
to the south, and weaken its bonds with the rest of the U.K. Meanwhile,
anti-Brexit Conservative Party moderates feared the terms of the deal would
leave Britain neither in nor fully out of the EU. And the other parties in
Parliament - notably the Labour, Liberal and Scottish Nationalist parties -
are deeply suspicious of the entire concept of Brexit and of the broader
Conservative agenda on social spending, civil liberties and immigration.
The result? Three years of political immobilization and one parliamentary
defeat after another after another for Prime Minister May's government.
In normal circumstances, May would have had to resign years ago, her
government brought down by momentous parliamentary revolts against her
central policy platform - delivering on Brexit. But, under the abnormal
circumstances that Britain is now swathed in, with a public catastrophically
divided over the country's future, and with both major political parties in
utter turmoil, it took three years for her tottering premiership to finally
come to an end. Finally, however, after the European Parliament election
results in May, in which the newly formed Brexit Party took one-third of the
vote and the Conservative and Labour votes imploded, the prime minister
announced that she would step down once a new Conservative Party leader was
chosen.
Trump is a predator and a carnivore; he knows how to go in for the kill, and
he knows how to humiliate an "ally" before that final act.
Two weeks from now, the Conservative Party's hard-core grassroots members
will finish choosingthe next leader of their party - which, in practical
terms, means the next prime minister. Despite the fact that a slew of
pollsshow that a slim majority of the population now favors remaining in the
EU, the logic of the moment makes it almost inevitable that the governing
party will veer far to the right. It will do so not because the country as a
whole occupies that political space, but because its base has, much like the
Republican Party's in the United States, fallen for the demagogic messages
of nationalists, for the faux nostalgia of imperialists longing for those
days of yore when the sun never set on the British Empire.
They will, if the polls are to be believed, choose right-wing Boris Johnson,
the one-time mayor of London and erstwhile foreign secretary, who has risen
like a phoenix from his political ashes to perch now on the edge of supreme
power. Johnson is far to the right on economic and social policy, and
utterly opportunistic when it comes to Europe - waffling on which side he
would back in the referendum until he concluded he had more political
capital to gain by supporting the Brexiteers. Since then, he has, like
Trump, created a political persona based far more around bluff than reality.
If and when Britain finds itself led by this man, the country will have
entered its version of the MAGA years, its political leaders selling a
snake-oil potion to voters by promising to somehow "Make Britain Great
Again" through embracing an anti-immigrant, anti-European, anti-regulatory
agenda that has virtually no grounding in economic or political realities.
If this scenario comes to pass, Johnson will arrive at 10 Downing Street
committedto Britain leaving the EU, with or without a deal, by the end of
October. He has promised to go for a no-deal if he doesn't get a
renegotiated Brexit deal from the 27 other member states of the European
Union, and to do so despite the fact that Britain's business community is
overwhelmingly opposedto this prospect; despite the fact that Parliament has
already votedto prevent a no-deal Brexit; and despite the fact that at least
30 Conservative MPs have already promised to rebelif he were to try to do
so.
Oxford-educated, erudite and an at-times entertaining speaker, Johnson
appears on the surface to have nothing in common with the crass, thug-like
Trump. Scratch that surface, however, and they are very much birds of a
feather. Like Trump's agenda, Johnson's agenda is deeply oligarchic: It
relies on cutting the tax base to the bone, on chopping away at any and all
red tape, and on "freeing" the market in ways that will eviscerate the
social safety net. And like Trump, Johnson also works to persuade working
people to buy into policies that will inflict economic hurt upon their own
communities by playing on the xenophobic mob sentiment of his base and
through demonizing the supranational European project embodied in the EU and
its free movement of people and of goods.
In normal times, no U.K. government would accept such humiliating treatment.
Johnson will come to power in a country more politically isolated and
damaged than at any time since the early dogdays of World War II. Having
squandered all good will within Europe, he will be forced, as I wrotefor
Truthout last month, to bow down before pretty much every aberrant act and
gesture and opinion of Trump's America. Trump is a predator and a carnivore;
he knows how to go in for the kill, and he knows how to humiliate an "ally"
before that final act. He gets off on making people beg for mercy.
That is what Trump's otherwise unfathomable Twitter storms on Monday and
Tuesday were really about. Responding to leaked confidential cables- in
which the U.K. ambassador to the U.S. labeled Trump inept, incompetent, his
administration abnormal and dysfunctional, and Trump himself as likely to
end up disgraced - Trump not only attacked the ambassador in extraordinarily
personal and vicious terms, but issued a broadsideagainst Theresa May
herself. He declared the U.S. government would no longer work with the U.K.
ambassador, and reveled in the fact that Britain would soon have a new prime
minister (this despite her probable successor, Johnson, himself having
slammed Trump in 2015 as being stupifyingly ignorantand unfit to be
president.)
The clear implication of Monday's Twitter storm was that Trump would have a
say in who Britain's new leader would be, and that he would then dictate who
Britain would send to Washington, D.C., as its new ambassador.
Again, in normal times, no U.K. government would accept such humiliating
treatment. The public would demand they stand firm; Parliament would expect
that they resist such infringements from an "ally"; cabinet members would
line up to denounce the inappropriateness, the offensiveness of Trump's
diktat. But, in these times of withered British potential, in these times
when opportunists rule the roost, it's more than likely Britain's new
leaders, preoccupied to the point of obsession with Brexit, will indulge
even these extraordinary Trumpian demands.
It's now probable that the next British ambassador to the United States will
in practice be hand-picked by Donald J. Trump.
In the Conservative Party's televised leadership debate on Tuesday, Boris
Johnson repeatedly refused to back Ambassador Darroch; within 24 hours, the
ambassador had concluded he had no choice but to resign. It's now probable
that the next British ambassador to the United States will in practice be
hand-picked by Donald J. Trump. This is a humiliation ritual no country in
modern diplomatic history has had to endure; it has echoes of Hitler forcing
the Austrian prime minister to resign so that he could install one who would
go along with his annexation of the subordinated country. It is, quite
arguably, the greatest diplomatic humiliation the British foreign service
has suffered since the Munich conference that handed over Czechoslovakia to
the Nazis.
Imagining the reverse - the U.K.'s leaders publicly denouncing the White
House, publicly declaring the American ambassador to be persona non grata,
and essentially ordering Washington to find a more suitable diplomat for the
post - is entirely unthinkable. It's an exercise in absurdism. U.S. leaders
can't even fathom the limits on sovereignty implied by the existence of an
International Criminal Court; there's no way in hell they would accept other
countries determining U.S. diplomatic personnel. Yet, so desperate will be
the U.K.'s next leaders to secure American friendship in the face of a
potentially economically calamitous Brexit that they will likely swallow all
the fecal matter Trump decides to send their way, smile, and say how
wonderful it tastes.
It all fills me with a terrible sadness. There is something so very, very
squalid about this state of affairs, and something so entirely
self-defeating about Britain's rush to turn friends into foes and to
exchange the open society for a world of walls. And looming over it all,
there is something so impossibly cruel about the predatory responses of
Trump's United State
