A muddled-up Britain

Hasan Suroor

IT’S a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world”. This line from the 1970s British pop song might well have been written to capture “the shook up” mood in Britain, a month after it voted to leave the EU, triggering a bizarre sequence of events that should finally lay to rest the myth of civility and timidity in British politics. Some Machiavellian tactics and dirty tricks witnessed over the past few weeks would put our own desi netas to shame. The new accidental Prime Minister, Theresa May, meanwhile, has been settling scores with her Tory party rivals and consolidating her power base while an anxious, confused and divided nation struggles to make sense of where it is headed after the Brexit vote.

The political climate is so febrile that it has been likened to that of the 1930s Germany with power slipping away from democratically elected institutions. “That (old) sense of the House of Commons as our cockpit of democracy is passing away,” according to writer-commentator Robert Harris, arguing that when power shifts  to the streets bypassing Parliament in the name of  “people power” — such as via a referendum — it creates a political vacuum ready to be exploited by “psychopaths” and rabble-rousers. It is this phenomenon that, critics say, is behind the reported  surge in hate crime against immigrants following the Brexit win, with the Far Right using it as a licence to target “foreigners”.

Meanwhile, May has magisterially declared “Brexit means Brexit”, except that nobody knows what it really means; there are as many interpretations as there are Brexiteers. There’s talk of “hard Brexit” and “soft Brexit”,  and re-running the referendum. Confusion over when Britain plans to trigger the Brexit process (it may not happen until 2017, or even later) has prompted  fears that the economy could fall into another recession as a result of prolonged uncertainty.

Yet, if you’re the sort who likes to  glean a silver lining even in the darkest of clouds, there might be something to cheer about. There is much excitement over May’s message to the nation — the brief speech she delivered on the steps of No. 10 after becoming Prime Minister. It has been praised for its inclusive tone, and the attempt to reach out to the working class and underprivileged Britons —flagging up social injustice as a “burning” issue. Observers were impressed by her unequivocal pledge that her government “will not be led by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours”. And her candid acknowledgment of widespread racial and gender bias. She has also vowed to crack down on corporate greed and warned that it isn’t going to be business as usual on her watch. There’s now even a new term for May’s brand of politics — “May-ism”, committed to building a “better and fairer Britain”, promised in her Downing Street speech.

It has now become clear that the Brexit vote was less about the EU; rather, it was a popular backlash — a modern-day “peasants’ revolt” as some have called it — against a perceived pro-rich, self-serving and cynical political system which has no time for ordinary people. The referendum became a lightning rod for millions of such people to give vent to their pent-up frustrations in a declaration of no-confidence in the mainstream political class. May’s claim to pursue a new kind of politics to reach out to the disaffected will be a step change  after six years  of harsh, ideologically-driven austerity and “small state” agenda that has left millions struggling for survival.

The Left had better watch out. For, if May is really able to pull off her “one nation, blue conservatism”, it will banish the Labour Party further to the margins, at a time, when it is at its weakest. Her proclaimed policy platform, which reads almost like a rehash of former Labour leader Ed Miliband’s manifesto, is an audacious raid on Labour territory. Cameron, too, had tried to steal Labour clothes by appropriating some of its popular policies, but May has declared a full-scale war. Immigration is the only issue on which she remains a hardline Tory to the core. However, Labour itself is under intense pressure from its MPs and many of its traditional voters to rethink its immigration stance to bring it in sync with public opinion. The fact is that there’s now a near political consensus around calls for “controlled” immigration; only the tone varies.

It’s still early days, but May has done well to abandon some of Cameron’s more regressive policies such as further austerity cuts to meet a self-inflicted target of a Budget surplus by 2020. And while about it, she sacked the man behind those policies  — Cameron’s Chancellor for the Exchequer, George Osborne, who  became a hate figure for working class families — a “posh” boy out of touch with the lives of common people. Also out is the previous government’s resident intellectual Michael Gove; and Cameron’s key backroom adviser on social policies, Oliver Letwin. May has carried out a ruthless cull of Cameron’s Eton-Oxford-Notting Hill  “set”, replacing it with men and women from more ordinary background. Most of her ministers come from working class families and went to state schools. Even Tony Blair’s Labour cabinet was posher than this.

May’s spin machine is suggesting that it is her “profound Christian convictions” (inherited from her late father who was a vicar) which have shaped her egalitarian approach. Yeah? Where does, then, her xenophobic line on immigration come from? What is that “inspired” by? It is always dangerous for politicians to advertise their faith. Blair famously boasted about his Catholic convictions that he claimed helped him choose between right and wrong. And then he went and bombed Iraq, triggering a human tragedy on a scale that no faith permits.

May must, indeed, be a good Christian; as I’ve no doubt that Blair is a good Catholic. But please spare us this evangelical nonsense. All that she has said and done so far is part of a smart tactical choreography intended to disingenuously distance herself from the Cameron government after having been at its heart for so many years; neutralise the Left; and present herself as a leader who listens to her people, and understands the message underlying the Brexit vote. May’s grand promises may ultimately go up in smoke as such pledges invariably do, but if she manages to make even the slightest dent in the status quo, Brexit might have been worth it. What a delicious irony it would be if it turns out that a cabal of right-wing Tory Brexiteers, inadvertently, ended up rolling back the last vestiges of Thatcherism. 

— The writer is a London-based commentator