Three years ago, a narrow majority of British voters supported a campaign to take their country out of the European Union. A day later, many who had voted Leave were searching online for details on what, exactly, a separation from Europe entailed. Within a week it was clear that in addition to its tactical use of racism and xenophobia, much of the platform had been either an exaggeration, misrepresentation or outright lie. Each subsequent week has made the ensuing political upheaval – which has now cost two prime ministers their jobs and may shortly claim a third – ever more chaotic and divisive.
The Brexit vote made clear that Britain’s traditional parties no longer align with the voting public, at least when it comes to the question of Europe. Revelations about the shady propaganda campaign which delivered the winning fraction of the Leave vote also showed that upstart populists have perfected the art of tailoring their messages to a consequential portion of the electorate. Endless wrangling over the practical details of Brexit has also raised difficult and possibly unanswerable questions about the correct interpretation of Article 50, the subtleties of the Irish backstop, arcana about trade negotiations, and half-a-dozen equally complex issues. With each new faux pas, British politicians have shown that none of them really knew, in 2016 or at any point since, how nightmarishly complicated any form of Brexit would be.
When Boris Johnson prorogued parliament earlier this week, in order to strengthen his hand for “do or die” negotiations with the EU, critics bemoaned the end of British democracy and warned of a “slow moving coup.” Johnson can hardly complain about this hyperbole since his chronic melodrama about Europe – not to mention the Leave campaign’s obsession with “Independence” and “taking back control” – made operatic patriotism the new default for British political discourse. His confusion of rhetorical registers betrays the attempt to have it both ways, for while he insists that prorogation is merely procedural he has also warned the rebels in his party that any disloyalty could inflict “lasting and catastrophic damage to the major parties in this country.”
In fact, Johnson’s gamble is wilder than it seems. Despite vanishingly long odds he is betting that a simultaneous game of chicken with Brussels and his domestic rivals will yield previously unattainable outcomes. This Trumpian manoeuvre has obvious tactical appeal, but it is almost certain to prove strategically disastrous. When he speaks about frustrating the people’s mandate to leave Europe the bluff is farcical. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown made this transparently clear when he recently noted that the current deadline could easily be extended within a few days, a remark which exposed Johnson’s histrionics and made him more vulnerable to a no-confidence vote in October.
Three years of embarrassments in Westminster have revealed serious flaws in the model which remains the default for Caribbean democracy. In remarks that were recently caught by a hot mic in Helsinki, UK defence secretary Ben Wallace summarized these quite succinctly: “Parliament has been very good at saying what it doesn’t want. It has been awful at saying what it wants. That’s the reality. So eventually any leader has to, you know, try. … Our system is a winner-takes-all system. If you win a parliamentary majority you control everything, you control the timetable. There’s no written separation, so … you pretty much are in command of the whole thing. And we’ve suddenly found ourselves with no majority and a coalition and that’s not easy for our system.”
What the UK has discovered during the last three years, many West Indians have known for decades. Democracy rises or sinks to the level of its practitioners and when the ship of state is manned by clowns and opportunists it continually finds itself in stormy weather, or poised to run aground.
