12/30/2023 0 Comments Clipy crossword![]() One of the surest signs of England’s strange political condition is the way that the right seems to benefit from the very chaos it causes. It is an appealing vision, but I am not sure the world works like that any more. When people realise their error, perhaps the political mainstream will realign in a pro-European direction eventually, Labour may rediscover its European voice and lead us back in. (It is telling that in July 2016, Davis used the publication of the Chilcot report about Iraq to accuse Tony Blair of being a liar – and then, three months later, brazenly told the House of Commons that if leaving the EU went to plan: “There will be no downside to Brexit at all, only a considerable upside.”)Īmong some of the people we once termed remainers, there seems to be a belief that the chaos Brexit causes will sooner or later have beneficial political effects. In that context, their eventual championing of Brexit represented something grim: people using a collapse in trust they themselves had contributed to, to build support for a course of action that risked squashing trust yet further. One of the most overlooked aspects of modern British history is the fact that the supporters of military intervention included such Conservatives as Johnson, David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood and Michael Gove. It also alerted us to how far institutions could be pushed away from the demands of truth and sense.įor any serious politician, Iraq should have been a salutary lesson in how big deceptions change things in messy and unpredictable ways, and the pretext for a profound rethink about how politics and power operate. That conflict and its aftermath, as the former UN ambassador Jeremy Greenstock later put it, was “one of those things that got people in this country thinking our elite, our toffs, our leaders up there are not listening to us, are not looking after us in the way that we want”. If that collective belief has so far shown no obvious signs of fading (indeed, it lives on in the implied links Johnson draws between Brexit and “levelling up”), that is probably an indication of how much faith some people still have in it – and, by implication, what a seismic moment we will have reached when it no longer makes any sense.īrexit was also an expression of a dire breakdown in public trust, which had been under way for several years, furthered by the effects on politics of the internet, intensified by the MPs’ expenses scandal, and traceable in large part to the war in Iraq. Europe, they had endlessly been told, was a drain on both the UK’s attention and money: as one Brexit voter told me in 2018, the simplest available solution was to “get out, and repair the country”. Many did so not out of bigotry or nastiness, but a kind of desperate belief that things might finally get better. When some people backed leave, it was the first time they had voted in their lives. What is still underestimated is how much hope a lot of people were thereby encouraged to invest in the idea of leaving the EU. We all know the promises made by Brexiteers in pursuit of what they wanted – of cheaper food, easy trade deals, that £350m extra a week for the NHS, and all the rest. And I wonder: in cabinet meetings and ministerial get-togethers, do they laugh at the apparent absurdity of it all, or anxiously exchange estimates of when the roof might finally start to fall in? ![]() Yet the Conservative party is still ahead in the polls, apparently shored up by the weakness of the Labour party and the clear, optimistic narrative that Boris Johnson has so far managed to project on to events. The prime minister goes off to Marbella, where he pretends to paint pictures the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, is said to be pinning his hopes for an easing of the current energy crisis on a “wet, windy and mild” winter. In response to ministers’ threats to suspend the trading arrangements for Northern Ireland – that we are now told the government never believed in to start with – there is reportedly pressure within the EU to begin preparations for a trade war. Ships are diverted from UK ports because no drivers can be found to transport their cargo once it is offloaded. W hat must it be like to be in the inner circles of this government, watching the economy bounce from crisis to crisis? Shortages mount, while livestock that suddenly cannot be put into the food chain is slaughtered and sent to rendering plants.
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