If you’re not a frequent reader of this blog, and, if you’re at all normal, you most assuredly are not, you’re probably not aware that I make sort of a point of ignoring a lot of the big stories of the day, figuring that a lot of, you know, important people will be commenting on them, and, anyway, most of that sort of pundition involves making predictions, and I (mostly) avoid the prediction game, seeing it as largely the intellectual equivalent of three-card monte: make a “bold” prediction and, a month later, when it doesn’t pan out, well, so what? Worrying about the past is so last month! Here’s a new bold prediction to get excited about, one that might be true! Could be!
But I will make a prediction about poor Brit prime minister Theresa May’s Brexit proposal, which sounds like both a done deal—that is to say, one that will win the approval of both the EU and the British Parliament—and an unlovely and unloved one, one that will certainly further damage Theresa’s current reputation and in the future could effectively destroy her party and significantly damage her country as well.
There is no doubt that the Brexit agreement that May’s cabinet just approved bears very little resemblance to the sugar plum fantasies that danced in the heads of the angry, frightened Brits who voted yes in the Brexit referendum last year, while quite closely resembling the EU’s idea of a proper trip to the woodshed. A year or two from now, the folks who voted yes for Brexit may very likely discover that all they got for their brave defiance of the Brussels bureaucrats was not more of the same but rather less of it. When they realize that they’ve been had, they should take out their frustration of the bad boy pied pipers who led them down the road to disaster—the Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, who thought themselves to be so dangerous, and proved to be right—but Nigel, Boris, et al. will be nowhere to be seen, and it is the adults, Theresa May and those cabinet members who stuck with her, who will get the sack, and there will be no one to replace them, and no party to counter Jeremy Corbyn’s freak show.
Nigel and Boris no doubt believed that, once in power, they’d use Donald Trump tactics in their negotiations with other countries—sit down at the table, shout “Fuck You”, walk out, and then sidle back a couple of weeks later to sign on for 10% of what were supposed to be their non-negotiable demands. The problem is, a little country like Great Britain doesn’t get to say “Fuck You”. When a little country yells “Fuck You” the other side walks out, and they don’t come back. The U.S. has “Fuck You” money; China has “Fuck You” money; Germany has “Fuck You” money; Japan has “Fuck You” money; Saudi Arabia has “Fuck You” money; Russia has some; India has some; Great Britain has none.
In the U.S., populist “rage” led us to take as our head of state a man uniquely unqualified for that role. A disaster, to be sure, but Britain may be headed for something even worse: no leader at all. Times are hard all over.
UPDATE
May has already lost two cabinet ministers over this deal, in one day. Most of the people who voted for Brexit thought they were getting umpteen billion pounds for National Health and no foreigners. Well, it's already a guarantee that they'll be getting bupkis for National Health, because the money was never there to start with. Fewer immigrants is non-negotiable, but whether fewer foreigners will be enough consolation for fewer jobs for honest Brits is another question. The elitist folly that created a deeply unstable "New Europe" in a vain attempt to recapture the greatness of the past has generated an even greater populist folly, which bids fair to destroy them both. It is not the sleep of reason that brings forth monsters but its arrogance.
