Douglas Carswell, the sole Ukip MP during the referendum, was raised in Uganda;
Arron Banks, who bankrolled Ukip and the xenophobic Leave.EU campaign, spent his childhood in South Africa, where his father
ran sugar estates, as well as in Kenya, Ghana and Somalia;
Henry Bolton, the current head of Ukip, was born and raised partly in Kenya; Robert Oxley, head of media for Vote Leave, has strong family ties to Zimbabwe. One can only speculate about how much impact these formative years had on their political outlook, (Carswell attributes his libertarianism to Idi Amin’s “arbitrary rule”) but it would be odd to conclude they didn’t have any.
This awakening would be funny (abroad they find it hilarious) if it were not so consequential. Johnson told the Commons the
EU27 could “go whistle” for an extortionate Brexit bill. They whistled; now
we will cough, to the tune of £35-40bn.
During her 2017 election campaign, Theresa May, channelling her inner Thatcher, boasted about being a “
bloody difficult woman”. “The next man to find that out will be Jean-Claude Juncker,” she claimed. In fact Juncker, the president of the European commission, and his team have found May more overwhelmed and befuddled than overwhelming and belligerent. After one Downing Street
dinner, European negotiators concluded that she “does not live on planet Mars but rather in a galaxy very far away”.
In a recent private meeting between May and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the two leaders reportedly found themselves in a
tragicomic conversational loop. May kept telling Merkel: “Make me an offer.” To which Merkel would reply: “But you’re leaving – we don’t have to make you an offer. Come on, what do you want?” To which May would retort: “Make me an offer.”
A change of leader won’t make this right. Lacking authority and coherence, haemorrhaging relevance and credibility, May is a faithful reflection not only of her government but of the country at this moment. Brexiteers have ostensibly got what they want: Brexit. They assumed we could dictate the terms; we can’t. They assumed we could just walk away; we can’t. They had no more plans for leaving than a dog chasing a car has to drive it. They are now finding out how little sovereignty means for a country the size of Britain in a neoliberal globalised economy
beyond blue passports (which we could have had anyway). What we need isn’t a change of leader but a change of direction.
May is no more personally to blame for the mess we are in with Europe than
Anthony Eden was for the mess with the 1956 Suez crisis – which provides a more salient parallel for Britain than the second world war. It took Britain and France overplaying their hand, in punishing Egypt for seizing the Suez canal from colonial control and nationalising it, to realise their imperial influence had been eclipsed by the US and was now in decline.
“France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States,” the West German chancellor at the time, Konrad Adenauer, told the French foreign minister. “Not Germany either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world: that is to unite Europe … We have no time to waste; Europe will be your revenge.”
Once again, Britain has overplayed its hand. Preferring to live in the past rather than learn from it, we find ourselves diminished in the present and clueless about the future.
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Obviously a Guardian perspective. But it is interesting that a lot of the leaders of the Leave campaign grew up as privileged ex-pats. Add the deluded Daniel Hannon to the list above. They all crave a UK that they saw from afar through a prism of tea served by servants, Grand Britannia and love for the motherland.