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.