So, Brexit

[jsburbidge]

As far as I can tell the UK government is so broken that regardless of what happens with Brexit it's pretty much impossible to predict what they're going to be like five years from now. Both major parties are splintering and (aside from the SNP in Scotland) this does not seem to be sending significant support to the existing alternative parties, such as the SDP and Greens.

Part of the current particular mess in the UK is the result of their botched implementation of the fixed date election model. A government does not now fall automatically on the failure of major legislation; an explicit no-confidence motion is required. However, the Tory caucus rebels and DUP who abandoned May on her Brexit bill are quite willing to support her on a no-confidence motion.

This has decoupled governmental responsibility to parliament from the ability to hold office. As a result, what began as a clash between claims of authority from direct and representative democracy has become an evacuation of parliamentary legitimacy.

It hasn't been helped by the epic political stupidity and pigheadedness of Theresa May, who has spent the last two years trying to avoid a permanent split in the Tory party. This is likely entirely futile. If they preside over a no-deal crashout they will be unelectable for the next generation - after the first six months of chaos - even if Labour were to drop Corbyn for the shambling corpse of Marx redivivus.

Whether either Labour or the Conservatives will last out the coming decade is looking problematic. How many parliamentary conventions will get bowled over during the course of the same period is unknowable.

The underlying dynamic is another matter altogether. There's a direct line between the apprentice anti-Huguenot riots in the 1590s and the anti-immigrant animus which drove a large chunk of the referendum vote; the general increase in inequality nudging a large swathe of western populations into the pursuit of populist nostrums isn't much help either. From one point of view much of this is very old. Combined with the new technological pressures on the workforce and the upending of large parts of the status quo by climate change it may be making for a political context where the ability to govern for any significant amount of time before being dropped for the next leader or movement peddling easy answers may be a vanishing feature of government in the Anglosphere.

Comments

[chickenfeet]

I'm not convinced that a shambolic no deal Brexit will make the Tories unelectable. The narrative will be that all the chaos is entirely due to EU intransigence (nasty foreigners) and there will be enough people who buy that line; with the help of Murdoch and the BBC, to make it possible for a Tory party taking a neo-Fascist Trumpist line to get elected. Make Britain (England) Great Again. It will likely lead to Scottish independence but that only reinforces the Tory position in rump UK.

[graydon]

I think it's not so much "large parts of the status quo" as the whole thing; I am pretty sure the great political question of our time is what to do instead of the status quo.

It also looks like the UK has gone failed-state. The usual reasons are loss of "ability to maintain borders" or "ability to maintain order", which they have, but it looks like "ability to resolve political questions with finality" has gone completely.

[jsburbidge]

In many states, this would be about where the army steps in ... except that the UK has (since Cromwell) never suffered much from the "man on a white horse" problem (they've had one general become PM, and Wellington was sort of a special case; compare the US (Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Eisenhower)) and their military culture is dead set against that sort of thing.

I really have no idea of how they get back from here, or how they go forward. The institutions of control - police and taxation and regulatory bodies and so forth - are still functional, but Brexit isn't the only scandal that's been eating away at the perceived legitimacy of the governing élites (Windrush, Grenfell Tower fire, failure of Universal Credit, NHS problems). The most likely immediate effect at the government level, at a guess, will be a splintering of political support to minor parties, creating a series of hung parliaments and general legislative paralysis, with a host of really critical issues to deal with looming. Beyond that... I don't know.

[graydon]

All tradition aside, the UK army is much too small to even try to exert civil control, even if was all at home.

Generally, they've got the same option we do; takeover by a party interested in dealing with things are they are, rather than fighting about which settings to use on a doomed status quo. Rather like going off the gold standard after the Great War, the sooner the better.

Also if the cessation-of-trade Hard Brexit happens, it doesn't take very long for people to starve. In that case I'm going to be highly surprised if it's not a successor state or states. And that's the sheaf of outcomes that has "nuclear blackmail" in it, which, well.

I stocked up on shaving soap around Christmas because it's made in the UK and, well, prudence. There was a risk. I admit I was not expecting things to get anything like this bad.

[jsburbidge]

The problem being, there and here, that no such party appears to be on the horizon; which, given that dealing with things as they are means, effectively, ditching late-stage capitalism and the internal combustion engine, is not all that surprising, at least until people start treating this as the moral equivalent of being on a war footing.

Good point about the shaving soap. I use a couple of kinds, and one bowl lasts several months but it's the sort of thing I should think of (I do have one cake if shaving soap in reserve).

[graydon]

Given the expected consequences in dead and destroyed, "war footing" is pretty mild. I keep failing to understand why we're not there yet. (Most people don't see little carets over each numeral in sequence when they're reciting their credit card over the phone, either.)

I mean, I very much hope not, but given an actual hard Brexit I'd expect what Fendrihan's has now is all we can expect to see for the foreseeable.

[dewline]

Do you suppose that Rees-Mogg fancies himself the next Cromwell?