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Suddenly, startlingly, the elephant in the room has trumpeted. Until that unexpected eruption the rule in polite society was to ignore the great imponderable in the Brexit debacle: the possibility that, in the event of the referendum verdict being reversed by Parliament, things might turn nasty; that the despised masses might intervene robustly to impose their will on the recalcitrant elites.
As the Brexit farce plays out at Westminster, the media diligently canvass the views on Brexit of the most obscure Liberal Democrat backbench MPs; the opinion of 17.4 million Leave voters goes disregarded. However, the notion that such anti-democratic behaviour is stoking dangerous fires of resentment, with untold potential consequences, is unsayable. Or was until now.
“The British road to Dirty War” is an academic analysis, published by the Bruges Group, whose authors are David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World, and MLR Smith, Professor of Strategic Theory and head of the Department of War Studies, to which Professor Betz also belongs, at King’s College London. Their paper is a well-argued analysis of the imminent danger of a violent public response to the establishment’s attempt to destroy Brexit.
That two academics whose discipline is war studies should feel it relevant to include the British political scene within their remit is in itself testimony to how dangerously our politics has degenerated. The two academics, who believe the underlying tensions predate Brexit, describe the background to the crisis as “a Conservative party that doesn’t conserve, a Labour party that doesn’t represent the interests of the working class, and a Liberal Democrat Party that is neither liberal nor democratic”.
After considering phenomena of recent history such as the emergence of “a monochrome political establishment” and its progress towards “state capture”, the authors demonstrate how violence and threats (e.g. by Jihadists) are effective in cowing modern governments, though they maintain a facade of authority, while the populace “merely light candles and hug teddy bears”. That is now changing.
Citing Ted Robert Gurr, author of “Why Men Rebel”, an analysis of the cause of revolutions, the academics record the dominant view that “people rebel not so much when they are materially deprived or when they are repressed but when a significant gap materialises between the future they have been promised and expect and the reality of their actual circumstance”. You do not need a university doctorate to make the connection between that observed principle and the denying of Brexit to an electorate that voted for it.
The authors review the Remain faction’s “throwing away the rule book” in order to “corral the British population into a Hobson’s choice between Brexit-In-Name-Only and no-Brexit” and “the ultimate gamble of the political class” that Britons do not rebel. This they believe to be a dangerous delusion: “That the political class was taken aback by the 2016 referendum result, demonstrated that it has only a tenuous grasp of the feelings and aspirations of the wider population.”
They argue that historical British quiescence was an insular phenomenon; in this age of mass communication movements such as the Yellow Jackets could spring up here. They see the key issue being “the corrosion of democratic legitimacy” which “probably will lead” to radicalisation and violence.
One cabinet minister, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, recently broke the establishment rule of Omerta by saying of failure to deliver Brexit: “It will open the door to extremist populist political forces in this country of the kind we see in other countries in Europe. If MPs who represent seats that voted 70 per cent to leave say ‘sorry guys, we’re still going to have freedom of movement’, they will turn against the political mainstream.”
His words were denounced as “gutter politics” and one Roy Hattersley, apparently once an ornament of Ramsay MacDonald’s cabinet, dismissed Grayling, on the grounds he was not an expert on these matters. Responding to Hattersley, Professors Betz and Smith vigorously assert their own credentials.
“But we are expert on these matters. We have for decades studied why things fall apart, how a stable, essentially self-policing, productive society can turn into an ungovernable tumult roiling with rage. We know that this happens at first very slowly, a creep-creep-creeping to the limit; and then very fast indeed after the limit has been passed.” Their conclusion is, to all but the most deranged Remainers, thought-provoking: “This is the British road to dirty war. The political classes are sowing the wind. They shall reap the whirlwind.”
For two and a half years we have been bombarded with propaganda about the supposed perils of a “no-deal” Brexit. As this paper confirms, the most serious danger would actually be incurred by preventing or crippling Brexit. The spectacle of a cabal of MPs, abetted by the Speaker of the House of Commons, supposedly the chief guardian of parliamentary democracy, destroying the traditional rules of Parliament for the purpose of frustrating the outcome of the largest democratic exercise in British history sends an unmistakable signal to even the least aware citizens.
It suggests that democracy is a sham and that they are the dupes who have been fooled. In a post-deferential age, where online rage is the norm and politicians are the objects of near-universal contempt, what response is such a provocation likely to generate? The elites badly need to pause and think about that, but it is unlikely they will. Unless they desist from their lemming stampede to disaster, this will be a very different country five years from now and they will not feature in the post-liberal, post-globalist settlement.
“Populism” is the propagandist term coined by the elites to besmirch democracy. It fools nobody: across Europe more and more people are proudly assuming that label. As this timely warning from academe confirms, a public reckoning with a political class that has not only presumed to manage Britain’s decline but has promoted it may not be far off. It is likely the determining voice in the Brexit endgame will be the one that G K Chesterton invoked in 1907:
“Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.”
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.