Two years and three months have gone by since the United Kingdom decided to humiliate itself in front of a whole continent. The country wanted to leave the European Union without knowing how to; it still doesn’t.
The Brexit negotiations are going horribly wrong. In truth, they’ve never gone well, not even for a day. But the bigger problem originated from before, from the old idea – which both the radical right and left entertained – that Brexit could solve Britain’s woes. As if by magic. How delusional.
And while exiting the EU appears more in line with nationalist principles, the fact that any strand of the left should be in agreement about it is veritably unintelligible. What about all the work done to protect workers and the environment? Minutiae, the rhetoric goes.
You could understand certain leftist idealists from the 1960s and ’70s. Everything still had to be achieved. But now? This is an attitude that also splits progressives in rivalling groups for the benefit of regressives like Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove and many others. What an undeserved gift.
Prime Minister Theresa May has made one mistake after the other, and this was bad enough. She’s been banging on about immigration as the worst of all evils for many years, since her Home Office days. EU citizens will no longer be given priority to live and work in Britain in a radical overhaul of immigration policy after Brexit, May said the other day. “[Our policy] ends freedom of movement once and for all,” she maintained, adding that British tourists and workers would likely face restrictions when travelling in the EU.
This is a politician who does not care about ordinary people’s legitimate ambitions in life – to learn, to discover. Empowering goals. Freedom is about well-being. May wants to restrict it for everyone, Britons and Europeans alike. (She still clings onto power thanks to the above-mentioned gift from a divided Labour movement.)
But these are just the final stages of this horrible story, imbued in xenophobia, demagogy and ideology from beginning to end. The fact of the matter is that before May it was David Cameron who could have stopped the situation from precipitating by capping austerity. This brought the country to the chaotic situation that eventually triggered the suffering leading up to the madness of the 2016 plebiscite.
And yet the Tories are not the only ones who don’t have the interests of the British at heart. At the party conference in Liverpool, Labour practically refused to acknowledge that a second referendum to abolish Brexit would be on the cards.
These two parties are now strictly-English (not British) whose influence over a united country is shrinking year on year. They can’t and won’t see it. They have both forgotten that the Scottish did not want Brexit; that they voted in a 2014 referendum which nearly saw a break away from London. Not to mention the ongoing malaise of the Irish north and south of the border; or London itself: the capital also voted against Brexit.
With highly ideological political leaders both on the right and left (turbo-capitalists versus turbo-communists), all showing either selective memory or the memory of a goldfish, no wonder the UK finds it impossible to remedy the total disgrace it has brought upon itself. Even worse, it has left those looking at it as the world’s bastion of pragmatism, sensibility and meritocracy completely and utterly baffled. Were these just figments of an Anglophile’s imagination?