Delusional Politics

by Hardeep Singh Puri

  —Prime Minister David Cameron, 24 June 2016 1

  Context Setting

  A poorly calculated and casually reached decision made over pizza at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in May 2012 culminated, four years later, in this speech outside 10 Downing Street on 24 June 2016. 2

  Prime Minister David Cameron resigned after suffering a devastating loss in a referendum that put the United Kingdom membership in the European Union to a popular vote.

  As the story goes, Cameron had been eating pizza at O’Hare while waiting for a commercial flight home following a NATO summit. He was with his Foreign Secretary William Hague and Chief of Staff Ed Llewellyn. The conversation that ultimately led to the unravelling of the United Kingdom apparently went something like this: We have a lot of Euro-sceptics in the party. Let us smoke them out. Let us have a referendum.

  Cameron had been on the lookout for an opportunity to reclaim face and leadership, not only in Parliament but within his own party. As leader of the Conservative Party since 2005, Cameron had endured over half a decade of growing pro-Brexit sentiment. This was, however, now becoming increasingly difficult to contain. The final straw, it seems, came some months prior to the conversation in the pizzeria, when in October 2011, eighty-one Conservative members of Parliament (MPs) staged a rebellion, calling for a referendum to determine Britain’s relationship with the European Union 3.

  Members of Cameron’s party had essentially backed the agenda of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). UKIP had, over time, reframed its identity to become the party of the ‘left-behinds’ of the country’s economic development. Their rallying cry became the face of the growing anti-immigrant sentiment that would pull the United Kingdom out of the EU.

  The rebel Tories supported Brexit for economic reasons, whereas UKIP supported it, at least in its messaging, for cultural reasons, calling for the UK’s identity to be reclaimed. 4 Despite different intentions, the UKIP had a reputation for tilting too far to the right, and the Tory rebellion reflected poorly on the party’s leadership.

  Cameron sealed the fate of the United Kingdom in his January 2013 Bloomberg speech, pledging to hold an ‘in or out’ referendum among the British people. The choice, he held, was between ‘leaving or being part of a new settlement in which Britain shapes and respects the rules of the single market but is protected by fair safeguards, and free of the spurious regulation which damages Europe’s competitiveness.’ 5 Voting to remain in the EU, according to Cameron, would be to renegotiate the terms of the relationship to rebalance the ‘gives’ with the ‘takes.’ The United Kingdom would maintain full access to the single market, while keeping the Polish worker out. This already indicated, in my opinion, early signs of major delusional thinking and which would in due course lead to a catastrophic decision.

  The trends of growing anti-EU sentiments, rise of populism, and increasing nationalism can be tied into the greater shift on continental Europe. In the year prior and in the phase leading up to Brexit, the traction gained by boisterous populist politicians—such as Marine Le Pen of the National Front party in France 6 and Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom in Netherlands 7—had been seen to rise and then subside. This offered to the members of the working and middle class a pacifier to their economic frustrations: exit the hazardous EU. Yet somehow, the United Kingdom is the only country in the EU that has now ended up on a path of devolution or unravelling, from an economic and once-territorial monolith, on to a path characterized by fragmentation.

  Descent to FUKEW

  ‘I have no illusions about the scale of the task ahead,’ Cameron said in his 2013 Bloomberg speech with reference to the referendum he had just announced. 8 This admission, as I discuss in detail in this chapter, is one of the few instances of accurate foresight that Cameron has shown in his political career. The remainder of his tenure as leader of the Conservative Party and as the prime minister is stained with delusion—delusion that has triggered the United Kingdom’s descent to FUKEW, the Former United Kingdom of England and Wales.

  The seeds of FUKEW were perhaps laid back in 2014, when Scotland conducted a referendum similar to Brexit, to determine whether it would remain part of the United Kingdom.

  In 2011, the Scottish National Party (SNP) won a surprising, but overwhelming majority, in the Scottish Parliamentary elections.

  Established post a referendum in 1997, 9 the Scottish Parliament had never in its short history seen a party win full majority. 10 Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP and the first minister, declared on polling day that the mandate his party had received gave it the ‘moral authority’ to conduct a referendum on Scotland’s full independence. 11 David Cameron, a year into his first term as prime minister, retorted, ‘If they want to hold a referendum I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre I have.’ 12

  The narrative driven by the ‘Yes’ camp (i.e. those who advocated for Scotland attaining full independence) during the 2014 Scottish referendum, was much the same as those of Brexiters in 2016.

  Scotland has traditionally voted to the left of the political spectrum in the UK—from 2001, it has elected only one Conservative MP into Westminster. 13 Post-Thatcher and with the rise of ‘New Labour’ under PM Tony Blair in the UK, Scotland had for nearly two decades, felt short-changed by the policies made in London. And following the Conservatives forming a coalition government in 2011, Scotland had reached tipping point in their angst against the British elite ignoring their demands. This was akin to Brexiters referring to the capital of the European Union, Brussels, as one steeped in bureaucratic dogma, constraining and limiting the freedom of London.

  Beyond the narrative, the methods used, and the vote-base targeted by the ‘Yes’ campaign, too should have served as a warning sign to PM Cameron when he hastily announced his decision to conduct the Brexit referendum.

  The pro-independence surge and mood in Scotland was largely fuelled by a grass-roots movement which was then capitalized by the political leadership of the SNP. While much of the grandeur of the campaign was largely financed by SNP supporters, it was efforts such as the one by the National Collective, which crowd-sourced £30,000 in under six weeks to stage an arts festival, Yestival, that really galvanized supporters. 14 And these supporters were largely those citizens who had not only not gained by the globalization process of the preceding decades, but were in fact on the losing side, with jobs in manufacturing, construction, and mining, moving eastward. They were predominantly working-class, performing blue-collar jobs, who got their education not in elite British institutions such as Eton and Harrow, but state schools, those funded by the government they had elected. 15 With British wealth moving further south in the UK, concentrating in and around London as the nation’s capital became the financial services hub of the world, the disgruntlement among this class of Scotland was palpable. 16

  Alex Salmond, much like Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party in 2016, would leverage this sentiment and champion himself as the messiah of the ‘left-behind’ Scot. A graduate of the University of St Andrews, which is known for attracting a class of Britain that Salmond now vehemently opposed, 17 Salmond became the face of anti-austerity which had come to dominate the economic discourse around Europe. He advocated a return to the pre-Thatcher days, where socialism and a welfare-state were the bedrock of Britain’s economic policy, and steadfastly opposed big corporations, claiming ‘The London Cabinet met in private behind the security screen in the HQ of Shell Oil. Big oil meets big government with small ideas.’ 18

  And although the ‘Yes’ campaign eventually lost the referendum by a significant margin, the sentiments it was able to raise during the lead-up to the vote have come to dominate the political discourse in the UK. The ‘take back the country’ nationalism as propagated by the SNP, aptly predicted what was about to hit the UK two years later.

  History

  It would be instructive to briefly go into the period prior to and during British
colonialism in India and trace its dominion to the present day, which allows for a fitting juxtaposition with the state of modern-day England. The story, in the shortest terms possible, is of how a small-time economic entity became an international corporation-turned-aggressive colonial power 19 within the blink of an eye, and as the saying goes, the rest is history.

  On the eve of 1601, Queen Elizabeth I established the English East India Company (EIC), an economic entity which went on to become a corporate entity, which would monopolize trade between England and the countries along the Indian Ocean. 20 By re-exporting Indian goods to the rest of Europe, the EIC exploited and streamed wealth and fortunes from the East to the pockets of the company’s officials in London. The company enjoyed the naval military protection of the British government, 21 who saw it in their best interest to stifle foreign competition.

  The EIC’s involvement with the emergence of urban centres, and financial and economic institutions inevitably gave the Brits unfettered political influence. 22 Over the course of three presidencies, the EIC by 1803 had built up an army of 2,60,000 British and Indian soldiers, which was double the size of the British army. 23

  The EIC was eventually nationalized in 1858 following the so-called Mutiny or the First War of Independence in India in 1857. Back in London, the House of Commons pegged the Indian rebellion and the unmatched bloodshed on both sides of the war on EIC’s mismanagement. The company rule ended and the British Crown assumed control of India. 24

  The British empire continued to grow in size, hitting its historical peak after World War I, at which time it ‘ruled a population of between 470 and 570 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world’s population’ and ‘about a quarter of the Earth’s total land area.’ 25

  World War II brought with it the spoils of war. In August 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, which set the stage for the establishment of the United Nations (UN) some years later. 26 In 1945 at the Yalta Conference, the ‘Big Three’—the US, UK and Soviet Union—joined hands to design the structure of the UN, in particular the Security Council, which would be mandated to maintain international peace and security. 27 The Big Three along with two other allied powers, China and France, laid claim to permanent seats on the council. 28

  In the two decades following World War II, the United Kingdom—along with other European countries who are currently witnessing the severest spike in right-wing populism—opened its borders to lure low-wage workers to supplement its manufacturing boom. Workers from eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the former colonies trickled into the country. Job opportunities were plenty; absent the competition with natives for employment, anti-immigrant sentiment was practically non-existent, and the immigrants were largely viewed as guest workers. 29 Social welfare was universally accepted among and heeded by all political parties, and it was superbly complemented by the country’s economic growth. Brits had ‘never had it so good’. 30 The United Kingdom was speeding forward and no one was being left behind.

  Then in 1973 came the slowdown. 31 The United Kingdom found itself with a deficit in employment opportunities and a surplus of workers, many of whom were non-European immigrants. 32 The government attempted to incentivize the foreign workers to return to their countries but to no avail. Instead, the workers brought their families and reproduced at higher rates than the natives. 33 Unemployment in the country surged, and suddenly the natives in the UK saw immigrants as competition, as a threat to their national identity, and as unwelcome visitors who were blocking the natives’ path to economic prosperity.

  In 1979, the Conservative Party leader and newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced economically conservative tax legislation. Thatcher deregulated and lowered taxes on businesses and the wealthy, which put smaller companies out of business and left fewer industries standing. 34 Despite the eventual redemption of the British economy, the vast majority of the working class felt alienated as the inequality gap widened.

  Across the North Sea, communist ideology was being driven further east. The collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 fuelled a new wave of immigrants and asylum seekers into Western Europe, where the economy was once again booming. 35 This, paired with Thatcherism, marginalized the voice of the frustrated working class, creating an opening for populist politics.

  In the UK, parties on the right capitalized on the blue-collar angst and anti-immigrant sentiments. Right-wing populists maintained their economic agenda behind the scenes, while prioritizing—publicly, at least—anti-immigration.

  The UK Independence Party (UKIP) spearheaded this movement, with its primarily less-educated, blue-collar, white-male base at its tail. Founded in 1993 during a transformational point in the UK, UKIP called its base the ‘left-behinds’ of the country’s economic growth and pledged itself as the people’s voice against the establishment that coddled the immigrants. UKIP’s base expanded in waves, most notably in the mid-2000s, when some Eastern European countries joined the EU, bringing with them another influx of immigrants. 36

  At the head of the UKIP was Nigel Farage, a man who would later gain international notoriety for his leadership style. Farage, a former Tory who left his party after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, was elected leader of the Eurosceptic UKIP in 2006. 37 After years of the party seemingly gaining no notable traction, Farage, following the abysmal results of the 2010 general election, reoriented the party’s agenda, anchored in pulling the United Kingdom out of the EU—his message essentially being that the UK’s immigrant crisis could be mended by closing the country’s borders. 38

  Farage was successful. In the 2014 European Parliament elections, for the first time in modern history, UKIP raced to victory over the Conservative and Labour Parties, winning twenty-four seats (Labour won twenty and came in second, while the Conservatives came a close third winning nineteen). 39 Farage’s ‘political earthquake’ 40 was a turning point in UKIP history and a cause for concern for the other two parties that had grown accustomed to a near-two-party system, the Liberal Democrats already having demonstrated their willingness for cohabitation.

  UKIP’s anti-immigrant, anti-EU populist campaign continued to gain support in areas in which it previously had no political presence. With public sentiment clearly changing, members of the Conservative Party in 2011 rebelled against its party leader and Prime Minister David Cameron, calling for a referendum on Britain’s membership in the EU. 41 Euroscepticism was not novel to the Tories; the party had regularly demanded that power be brought back from Brussels to London. But combined with the encroaching Eurosceptic UKIP and its supporters, Cameron was backed into a corner.

  Given the populist nature of the opposition, Cameron was for all intents and purposes the least fit among the various candidate to tackle the growing dissent.

  Cameron

  During the inflection point of the United Kingdom’s economic boom in the early to mid-1970s, when Brits were being tossed into unemployment, Cameron was beginning his education at Heatherdown Preparatory School, an exclusive all-boys boarding school reserved for children of the elite. 42

  Amidst a devastating economic recession in England, Cameron, along with classmates from the Royal family, ventured on a three-week trip to South Africa, led by the headmaster at Heatherdown. This trip was followed shortly after by a classmate’s birthday party in the United States, where the schoolboys toured around New York, Disneyland in Florida, the Grand Canyon, and Hollywood. 43

  Around this time, the United Kingdom was on a turbulent trip of its own. On 5 June 1975, the UK held a national referendum—the only one of its kind until Cameron’s premiership—to vote on whether the country should remain in the European Community. The similarity of the 1975 referendum to the one that would take place forty years later is baffling. Prime Minister Harold Wilson from the Labour Party had announced the referendum as—in Margaret Thatcher’s words—‘a tactical device to get o
ver a split in their own party’. 44

  The Conservative Party successfully campaigned for the ‘Yes’ vote to keep the UK in the common market. But unfortunately for Thatcher, her party’s successors would make the same mistake precisely forty years later, with far more devastating results.

  Upon graduating from Heatherdown, Cameron went to Eton College, another all-boys boarding school. His years at Eton were once again seasoned with opportunities unavailable to his peers, let alone teenagers outside of the institution. His parents’ connections laid before him internships and other career openings within the UK Parliament and overseas. 45 In his political career, Cameron has attempted to keep his Eton years in the shadows. As his political opponents argue, Cameron’s sheltered life from one elite boarding school to another and his two silver spoons put him ‘out of touch with the electorate’ 46—an accusation that would later prove true in his years as party leader and prime minister.

  In 2015, authors Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott released an ‘unauthorized biography’ of Cameron titled Call Me Dave. 47 The biography unveils Cameron’s years at Oxford University, portraying the duality of a young man ‘destined for a political career’ 48 and a student derailed by teenage debauchery. At Oxford, Cameron was part of the Bullingdon Club, a society notorious for its illicit-drug use, an unhealthy drinking culture, and dubious sexual escapades. 49 While Cameron dismissed the rumour of his ‘dalliance’ with a severed pig’s head, 50 the fact that such activities were commonplace in the society is telling of the environment that influenced his formative political years.

  Soon after his partying years at Oxford, Cameron started working for the Conservative Party in September 1988, shortly after Thatcher was re-elected for the third term as the prime minister. He began in the Conservative Research Department where he quickly scaled the ranks. Following Thatcher’s ouster, Cameron regularly briefed her replacement, Prime Minister John Major, and prepared him for the 1992 general election. 51 With the Tories’ victory, Cameron had made a mark among his peers.