Americans might be forgiven for asking, what the Hell is going on in Britain right now? Well, so are a lot of us Brits, after a month of breathtaking political lunacy and bloodletting. Let me try to sum up everything that has happened, and the unhappy future that we now face.
In the last few years, a populist far right party called UKIP (UK Independence Party) has grown in popularity, propelled by massive coverage in the right-wing media. It's an astroturf movement, a sort of British Tea Party, whose solution to any problem is to pretend it doesn't exist (climate change), or blame it on foreigners (everything else). UKIP’s particular goal was for Britain to leave the European Union or EU (i.e. to ‘Brexit’). Harried by UKIP and its sympathisers within his own ruling right wing Tory (Conservative) party, Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s EU membership.
Cameron was confident that 'Remain' (in the EU) would win, but he reckoned without two things. First, a lot of the public were thoroughly fed up with politics, and saw voting ‘Leave’ as a way to kick the establishment, particularly because Cameron himself was seen as the face of the Remain campaign. It doesn't help that Britain's 'First Past The Post' electoral system produces grossly distorted results at elections, for example delivering UKIP only one MP (out of 650) despite winning 14% of the national vote in the 2015 election. Many who voted Leave seemed both surprised and upset when the side they voted for actually won. Clearly Britons are not used to their votes actually mattering.
The second unexpected twist was when Cameron's arch rival within the Tories, Boris Johnson, decided to support the Leave campaign. Boris has been compared to Donald Trump, but he's more the British Sarah Palin: ambitious, amusing, gaffe-prone, vaguely OK when given a local office with moderate power (in his case Mayor of London), but terrifyingly inept on the national level. He said, for example, that Obama has an ancestral dislike of Britain because of his ‘part-Kenyan’ heritage. Despite this, Johnson was an extremely popular figure, whose support gave the Leave campaign credibility with the electorate, and helped dissociate it from the toxic racism peddled by UKIP.
So, despite making a series of untrue or ridiculous claims (e.g. that bunches containing more than 3 bananas were banned by the EU), the Leave campaign won the referendum by 52% to 48%, leaving Britain shocked, divided and paralysed.
It seems that Boris had hoped to deliver for the Leave campaign a brave and narrow defeat, a very British heroic failure that would propel him towards becoming Prime Minister in Cameron's place. Neither Boris nor anyone else had a clue what Brexit would actually look like, still less a plan. So, Cameron promptly called their bluff by resigning as soon as the referendum result was announced, triggering a leadership contest and effectively telling Boris and co, ‘you made this mess, you sort it out.’ Boris flapped around ineffectually for several days, causing fellow Leave campaigner Michael Gove to knife him in the back by publicly announcing that Boris wasn't fit to lead Britain. Boris withdrew from the leadership contest; Gove stood instead, but was soon rejected by fellow Tories for his treachery.
This left two candidates to replace Cameron. Theresa May, an apparently competent woman who never expresses an opinion about anything unless she absolutely has to, was up against Andrea Leadsom, a previously unknown figure with little ministerial experience. Within days, Leadsom had told a news reporter that being a mother would make her a better leader than the childless May; Leadsom was inexplicably furious when the reporter did her job and published the story. Then, complaining about unfair scrutiny by the press and others, Leadsom withdrew from the race. A Leadership contest that was expected to take months was over in 12 days. Cameron and his family were promptly bundled out of 10 Downing Street, and May was installed as his successor, without a vote being cast.
New Leader, strange choices
Mrs May gave a bold speech about unifying the country, and making it work for everyone, not just the privileged. For a few hours, people might have believed her, until she started appointing her cabinet. Incredibly, the gaffe-prone Boris Johnson was made Foreign Secretary. Only Mrs May knows why. Imagine, for a moment that Romney had won the 2012 election and made Sarah Palin Secretary of State, and you'll get how a lot of Brits are feeling right now.
She didn't stop there. May abolished the department of Energy and Climate Change, and made the incompetent Leadsom the new Environment Secretary. Leadsom is a woman whose suitability for the job is best summed up by the fact that she had to be told that climate change was real. That is admittedly an improvement on many Tory right-wingers who insist that it isn't, but you can bet that these climate deniers will be slithering up to Leadsom and exploiting her cluelessness to convince her that all the scientists are wrong. Leadsom celebrated her appointment by stating that all men are potential paedophiles.
Most inexplicably of all, while nearly all government ministers were moved or replaced, the worst of the lot somehow keep his job. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has riled NHS staff to the point where doctors took the almost unprecedented step of going on strike. Sacking Hunt would have fixed this problem overnight; keeping him in post suggests a hidden agenda to privatise the NHS.
Perhaps most worrying of all is that right-wingers David Davis and Liam Fox have been put in charge of negotiating Britain's trade future. Neither will blink at permanently trading away workers' rights or environmental protection in exchange for lucrative, TTIP-style trade deals trade deals, to replace all the business that will inevitably be lost along with EU membership. If these are signed, a future progressive government might not be able to reverse Tory policies without being sued by foreign corporations.
To summarise, we have a new leader whose real views we know next to nothing about, who is determined to drag us out of the EU even though she knows it’s a bad idea, and who's appointed what’s been called the most right-wing cabinet in recent memory. She refuses to guarantee that millions of EU nationals who have settled in Britain under free movement rules will not be forcibly deported once Brexit is completed. Businesses are halting investment and talking about relocating abroad, the pound has plummetted, and incidents of racism have massively increased. Plus, Brexit will cost colossal amounts of money - not least because the government will have to hire hundreds of (foreign!) negotiators to make it work. The government has already abandoned all thoughts of cutting the budget deficit. Austerity has officially failed, but don't expect any extra money for the ordinary folk or services harmed by it. We face years of uncertainty and spiralling debts, while progressive needs are ignored, and it is hard to see a single positive from the events of the past month.
Opposition goes AWOL
So what are the opposition parties doing about all this? The main one, Labour, is tearing itself apart. A year ago the membership elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Imagine a scruffier, more radical and far more uncompromising version of Bernie Sanders. While Corbyn connects very well with party activists, and indeed quite a few voters, most of his own MPs are totally against him. He's an old man who's spent most of his life rebelling against his own party; he knows his own politics but not how to make the necessary compromises required to lead a large political party. During the referendum, he supposedly supported Remain, but kept undermining the Remain camp's own arguments, and probably helped Leave win. That was the last straw for his MPs, four fifths of whom are now desperate to get rid of him. Cue massive infighting, bullying and intimidation from both sides; they have all forgotten who the real enemy is. Really, Corbyn belongs in a different, more radical left-wing party than most Labour MPs, but if the party split then our crude electoral system would exclude both from any hope of returning to government.
Britain's third party, the Liberal Democrats, were almost annihilated at the last election, a punishment for forming a coalition with the Tories in 2010. However, given that the coalition government brought relative stability, whereas 15 months of Tory-only rule has created a mess that will take decades to fix, perhaps the voters might be encouraged to reassess the Lib Dem contribution. There is also the Green Party, who have a solid set of highly progressive policies, but it’s hard for them to be heard due to the unfair electoral system and a media that would much rather talk about UKIP.
Only in Scotland do the Tories currently face large scale, well-organised opposition. The Nationalist SNP runs the devolved government here, and is led by Nicola Sturgeon, easily the most talented UK politician of her generation. The nationalists lost the 2014 referendum for Scottish Independence, probably because they had ample passion but lacked crucial details for what would follow if Scotland left the UK - specifically what currency we'd have, and whether we'd be able to stay in the EU. Then in 2016, 62% of Scots voted to stay in the EU, and this has put Scottish Independence firmly back on the table, as Sturgeon has promised to prevent Scotland from being dragged out of the EU against its wishes, any way she can. The main obstacle to this may be EU countries like Spain, who don't want to encourage Scotland's readmission to the EU as an independent state, fearful that it would encourage separatists within their own borders. Sturgeon will need to find a way round this. Nonetheless, appetite for Scottish Independence has undoubtedly been boosted by recent events. Those like myself who in 2014 thought the Union with England was worth saving, are now finding that we're not so sure.