The Brexit Decade

Another chair short in the Number 10 musical chairs farce.

A Decade of Self-Harm

Even irony has come to joke at the expense of the United Kingdom. On the eve of the 10^th anniversary of the Brexit vote, the sixth prime minister since that act of unmitigated self-harm resigned.

Whether you like it or not, Brexit made the UK ungovernable, and it is the spectre of Brexit that has deftly conducted the dirge of musical chairs at 10 Downing Street.

Obviously, the personification of this rotten enterprise is Nigel Farage, along with all the cloaks of calumnious obfuscation he has donned aboard the various political vehicles he has ridden to beguile the natives.

Cameron's Fatal Gamble

In trying to outmanoeuvre and upstage Farage, David Cameron promised an in-out referendum without thresholds, believing he could gamble with our future in Europe and win. He lost. Once the result was announced, he resigned.

The chicanery between Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, who were the opportunistic ruling party figureheads of the Brexit proposition, meant that Theresa May, a remainer, became prime minister.

Everything she tried to negotiate with Europe was rubbished and undermined by the antics of Boris Johnson and a cohort of implacables. First, Theresa May gambled away her majority, and every Brexit negotiation ended in stalemate. She resigned within three years.

Johnson Gets Brexit Done

Boris Johnson then took the helm and purged the Tory Party of the reasonable, level-headed and moderate One Nation Tories, before calling an election to "Get Brexit Done".

The least qualified person ever to negotiate a deal, having had a background in the Scottish whisky industry, became the point man: Lord David Frost. What he brought back was a mishmash of imponderables, and we signed ourselves out of prosperity just as the coronavirus took hold of the world.

Boris made stringent rules for us, with punitive fines for breaking them, yet he and his staff were partying in Downing Street. That scandal, along with a few others, engulfed his premiership and culminated in the resignation of more than half his cabinet. It soon dawned on him that he had to go. He held office for three years.

Truss and the Lettuce

Enter Liz Truss, who, after kissing hands at Balmoral, may well have hastened the demise of Queen Elizabeth II two days later. Her curtsey was so awkward that you couldn't tell if she was flat-footed, bow-legged, or suffering from some yet unexplained ailment of her lower ambulatory system. Rather than laugh, you pitied her.

Her uncosted mini-budget, aiming to introduce us as the new Singapore on Thames, one of the sunlit uplands of Brexit, much as Canaan was given to the Jews, wreaked havoc on the financial markets.

The fallout was so drastic that she sacked her Chancellor of the Exchequer and brought in a Tory grandee of a sort, Jeremy Hunt. The sand was running out of her hourglass; days became minutes, and even a patch of lettuce outlasted her. She was gone in 50 days.

Sunak Steadies the Ship

Rishi Sunak, the first Asian, the first Hindu, and possibly the richest ever prime minister, walked into 10 Downing Street. He steadied the ship that had been caught in various post-Covid, Brexit and immigration eddies. We were in a spiral, and it was only a matter of time before we lost our heads in a dizzy spell.

He called an election about twenty months into his premiership and handed the reins over to the Labour Party in a landslide, after the party had been out of power for 14 years.

Starmer's Short Tenure

Sir Keir Starmer was now at the helm, honourable and lawyerly. After a number of missteps, bad calls and U-turns, his popularity sank so low that by the local elections of May 2026 the Parliamentary Labour Party had decided he could not lead them into the next general election. A few weeks short of two years as prime minister, he resigned.

It is likely that Andy Burnham will become the next prime minister. Meanwhile, in one way or another, the office has been haunted by the banshee cries of Nigel Farage, first in UKIP, then in the Brexit Party, and now in Reform.

The Myth of Control

One of the things Brexit was supposed to give us back control of was our borders. It now transpires that the problem was never Europe, but policies within our own domain.

Whereas European immigrants were near enough that they could, if they wished, return home every weekend, the immigrants now arrive in larger numbers from further afield. They cannot return home every weekend; they are full settlers with family ties that must be accommodated if their services are to be procured for the nation.

Likewise, Brexit was supposed to ignite a bonfire of rules, mostly from the EU. Yet to trade with any trading bloc, we need alignment and agreement on standards.

We were once involved in crafting those rules, but for the purposes of ease of business, the very rules we thought we could jettison must now be absorbed into our regulatory system for seamless commercial activity. We are rule takers where we were once rule makers, in concert with the community to which we belonged.

No Justice in Sight

Then there is the question of how the UK economy has suffered since Brexit, with the loss of about 6% in GDP. You may not be able to call Brexit a failure, but if it looks like one and walks like one, there can be no other conclusion.

The fight for the soul of the country continues as we struggle to get the facts before the people, who are bombarded and cajoled into working against their self-interest, sold easy solutions to complex problems.

We cannot defeat geography. Europe is our closest trading partner, and a softening of Brexit, with a bold and courageous defence of the associated policies, is needed.

They say a majority would now vote against Brexit. The fact is, the perpetrators of this travesty have never been held accountable, and it is doubtful we'll ever get justice for the harm they caused. What a wasted decade.

A Google NotebookLM AI Podcast on this blog

Opinion: I'll rather have a smug pilot

The NewYorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank

Catching up on The Week

By coincidence, I was on a flight back from Frankfurt when I encountered the above cartoon in an outdated copy of my subscription to The Week magazine. I am probably 6 to 8 weeks behind and I doubt if I’ll eventually catch up with the issues I have missed.

The Week is both an aggregator of the best news stories globally with sections that offer contemporary analysis issues and events, social, political, economic, scientific and about life in general. I will sometimes have The Week lead me to do more research on topics I have been introduced to. The Week has become my preferred magazine subscription.

The point the cartoon makes is succinct and deep; when taken in the context of the political earthquakes of rejected orthodoxy in #Brexit, referendums in Columbia, Italy and Hungary, the election of Donald Trump in the United States of America, it can only be concluded that we live in fearfully interesting times.

Chuck the pilot for a tyro

Now, to imagine that someone rather than a competent, well-trained pilot with the necessary qualifications, essential sobriety, and the presence of mind was at the controls of the flight I took from Frankfurt to Manchester is at best scary and with the knowledge, bordering on the suicidal.

Then to think, in having an unqualified pilot volunteer to take the controls just as all the other passengers' vote to jettison the qualified one just because they feel they have been ignored, disrespected, thought little of or just out of unfounded dislike. No, it does not bear thinking of.

Yet, that is what we did in 2016, the situation exemplified in the statement of Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary when he said, “People in this country have had enough of experts.”

The function of the expert

Now, experts are supposed to have the full knowledge and experience in their areas of expertise. However, being an expert does not make you perfect, even with all the data to hand, there might be variables completely outside the control of the expert to be able to give a definitive statement that represents the outcome that eventually is experienced.

However, the expert is not only necessary, they are also important to the decision-making process especially when met with a crisis that would call on experience to resolve. An expert as a pilot knowing how to land a plane if an engine is lost or the landing gear does not deploy. The expert as a consultant that told me that they knew how to treat my cancer, but the variable outside their control was my physiology, that alone could determine if I survived or died within 5 weeks.

The experts that were thought little of by Michael Gove were the economists who thought post-Brexit Britain would be disastrous. Whilst things have not turned out so bad, things are less than perfect, in fact, everything is in flux with the pound scraping the bottom of the barrel in the foreign exchange markets. Once Brexit is triggered the uncertainty might lead to other unintended shocks to the economy, no one can say, but the experts are there at least to give some guidance.

Taking offence at smug pilots

The other narrative of the ‘smug pilot’ is an aversion to fact, truth, knowledge, and expertise. The tendency not to need to verify anything before it is accepted and relayed as the truth it is not. There was a lot of that during the referendum campaign in the UK and quite a good deal of that in this cycle of the US presidential campaign.

Basically, Donald Trump got away with murder literally and Hillary Clinton could not get away with a mere email scandal, the end result would be an interesting 2017 where a man who has never ever held elective office, whose antecedents in business leaves much to be desired, with such thin skin, given to slights and vituperation, lacking in decorum and class would now assume the mantle of the leader of the free world.

Democracy’s suicide pact

Like the man in the cartoon says, “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” A man with no verifiable experience apart from the willingness to take a risk that could lead to the loss of souls along with the plane has just been voted in to fly the plane. You wonder if everyone who raised their hands in that plane thought of the possible consequences of their collective votes.

Maybe, they were on a suicide mission just because they have taken umbrage at ‘smug pilots that have lost touch with regular passengers like them’, that is where we are with the democracy we have played in 2016, if we do not crash land with the loss of all souls in a major air disaster, we might just count ourselves lucky.

I’ll rather have a smug pilot at the helm of the plane than someone who makes me feel special, but knows nothing about how to fly a plane.

#Brexit: He traded his kingdom for horse shit

The truth is expendable

Probably there is much to be said of the EU Referendum results that have commenced the divorce of the UK from the European Union.

Throughout the campaign, it was difficult for me to elicit from all the talking points, the propaganda, the debates and outright lies that made up the interaction with the public what was fact from fiction, understatement from exaggeration, fear-mongering from bare-faced reality and snake-oil remedies from wild assumptions.

However, what it more or less confirmed to me was the need to redefine Modern Democracy as “The government of the sentimentally cajoled, by charismatic confidence tricksters for untrammelled vested interests.”

Appealing to emotions

Worse still was the fact that literally all expert opinion was rubbished, dismissed, debunked or excoriated as fallacies were deployed with soundbite efficiency, completely ignoring any semblance of objectivity, truth, data or fact.

They appealed to our basest instincts and excited such raw passions that one young mother of two and an elected representative of a Yorkshire constituency was shot, stabbed and killed by a mental incompetent fuelled by the hateful rhetoric that had pervaded the discourse. Pandora’s box was opened and every kind of poisonous view let lose without compunction.

The most potent fallacy in the #Brexit debate was the appeal to emotion on the matter of immigration, it became the focal point by which a 0.5% increase in our population was made to look like a 5% influx of undesirables taking liberties and abusing the hospitality of our generosity that we had reached breaking point.

A reckless gamble

Prime Minister David Cameron, took a political gamble and with hindsight he had no chance against the charismatic buffoonery of Boris Johnson and the caddish affability of Nigel Farage. He is to be consigned to the scrapheap of history as the man under whose watch the United Kingdom faced an existential crisis of disintegration and ostracism from its closest partners.

He had lost his deft touch, in another statesmanlike setting, he would have put in some hurdles beyond a simple majority, this was the lowest threshold possible and on a 52% - 48% share in favour of #Brexit, we are in the realm of uncertainty, in uncharted waters, subject to avoidable but understandable turmoil, turbulence and volatility, unsure of what the future holds and this is supposed to be our Independence Day.

At the very least, a higher percentage threshold should have been met, the four-country lock suggested by Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland should have been in the mixed, ensuring unanimity of all regions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, before we agree to #Brexit and the 16-17-year-old cohort should have been allowed to vote.

Not that this might have changed the result, but whatever victory for whichever side would have been hard fought for and more than well-deserved. Worse than Shakespearean Richard III, David Cameron did not trade his kingdom for a horse, but for horse shit.

For now, the country is split down the middle, he has resigned, the pound was in freefall, the stock market took a battering along with bourses of our allies and the leader of the opposition faces a vote of no confidence.

We’ll suffer for this

Europe has also gone shrill and strident, the next meeting of the heads of government does not have the United Kingdom as an invitee, we have more than tough times ahead, we are most likely going to be harshly dealt with to ensure the referendum we just concluded does not become an excitable contagion to others.

Never, has a nation had the voice to express itself and squandered it on irrational fear of the other considering it has a not too distant history of dominating over 25% of the world in its heyday. The Great British Empire which was at its height just a century ago has collapsed upon itself with a whimper, and whilst in 1982, Margaret Thatcher put the Great back in Britain after the Falklands war, in 2016, David Cameron has welded the Little to England in our march out of the door from Europe.

The consequences of #Brexit will be more far-reaching than we have ever contemplated, and the people who promised us the world if we #Brexit probably only have loads of sorrow, tears, pain, sweat and blood to offer.

Welcome to the new world.

On #Brexit: We must remain for our democracy

The Control

Much has been said about taking back control by the proponents and outsized figureheads of the #Brexit campaign, and maybe they have a point.

However, there will be immediate and long-term consequences if the United Kingdom votes for #Brexit.

The main issue is our democracy and that has been a serious debating point throughout this referendum discussion. We have a parliamentary democracy in the UK, and though I did not vote for the Conservative Party in the last general election, I am happy to be represented by the government of the day.

Some of their policies are not to my liking, but the people in charge headed by David Cameron who we voted for have maintained a somewhat steady course from 2010 in a coalition and then as a majority government since 2015. This parliament, come what may, will run until 2020.

The coup

If we do vote #Brexit, this the very likely scenario, there will be a palace coup, David Cameron and his cabinet will probably be thrown out and we face the possibility of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister with senior cabinet figures in Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith, I will not be surprised if Nigel Farage is flung into the House of Lords in gratitude.

Whilst this will be a democratic exercise within the ruling party, it is unlikely to bear the hallmarks of the democracy we desire and it will run until 2020. None of these personalities have ever held a great office of state, that is Prime Minister, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary.

Iain Duncan Smith has been a leader of opposition, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London and Michael Gove is the Justice Secretary, the government of the UK carries a greater responsibility than these men have ever faced, they will be tyros, inexperienced, learning on the job and at the same time trying to negotiate a new identity for the UK in the world.

The greenhorns

It is my humble opinion that this task will be well beyond their experience and capacity to manage that the UK will probably both suffer internally and internationally for this venture into two uncertainties of experience and unquantified hope.

There is every reason to be energised by the concept of an Independence Day tomorrow, but give it a thought, on economic matters, they have no insight, on immigration, they have held no such responsibility. On negotiations even Boris Johnson could not bring to fruition the night travel he promised on London transport, Michael Gove literally frustrated the teachers rather than persuade them, Iain Duncan Smith presided over a regime where the vulnerable were victimised and Nigel Farage besides being abusive and rude in the European Parliament could not win his own constituency last year.

These are the untested and untried people, we are about to hand our country to, to take us on an untried and untested journey outside Europe outside of the people on the remain side have gathered a wide coalition, many of whom hold offices of responsibility and have validated contacts with our partners far and wide around the world.

 Some realism

Yes, we can be bloody-minded and adventurous as Britons, and indeed, if there were a different set of tested experienced people to hand control over to, the case for #Brexit might have been stronger to me, but there is nothing in #Brexit than a suicidal attempt in the unknown, for the unseen, in the uncharted, for a destination unscripted, there is just too much unappealing about this matter to hand it over to this crowd.

It is for this reason, even if we are persuaded of no other that I will appeal so earnestly that we vote to remain, for continuity in the hands of the experienced, for some confidence in competence even in the uncertain times ahead, a sense of quantified risk in what we know as opposed to a whole set of unknown unknowns.

This is just too great to risk for independence in the hands of greenhorns.

We must vote to remain.

Cyclone Nargis: The death knell of the military junta

Time to act

Just as nature abhors a vacuum the humanity of our tortured earth has to begin to abhor despotic governments that care more for entrenching their regimes rather than rising up to the challenge of the government they portend to run in service of their people.

This is no time to highlight the hypocrisy of America’s criticism of Burma having failed to perform when Hurricane Katrina struck, we should take the lessons from that event to realise that a quick response to disaster, calling on all resources available to the global community is the only way to alleviate present suffering.

No relief from suspicion networks

With a stranglehold on government for 46 years and a network of spies with a extremely paranoid aversion to foreign interaction, one would have thought that network serve any purpose in disaster relief but it really serves no useful purpose for succouring suffering.

It just beggars belief that the military junta are incapable of helping their people and would not relent in their obduracy to accept ready help from professional disaster relief agencies to help their people.

Referendum trumps disaster relief

100,000 people have probably died from effect of cyclone Nargis and we can expect a similar number to die from the tardiness to get relief to them – there are dead bodies floating in the water and on land and I do not think the people are anywhere near the point of organising themselves to start mass burials.

They must be smarting from the outrageous dereliction of duty of their government to address their predicament when their help and support is most needed.

The absurdity of it all is we have a disaster of epic proportions, the worst that has ever hit Burma and they have set their priorities for a referendum to take place today – the army has been deployed to monitor the referendum rather than do disaster relief.

Their end is nigh

The military junta has no doubt lit the fuse that would lead to their terminal decline, their referendum and stranglehold on government would not save them.

Having not ever learnt to mobilise their huge army for civil activities, they can never have the logistics to manage this disaster, where their visa offices should be running in overdrive admitting foreign aid relief professionals, they have been closed for public holidays not to resume till Tuesday.

Appeals falling on deaf ears

Meanwhile, the pictures on my television leave me amazed that there is no groundswell of utter condemnation from the so-called friends of Burma – where has the compassion of humanity gone?

This attitude leaves all disaster relief agencies in a quandary; their appeals are failing on deaf ears because no one believes their donations would get anywhere near the suffering Burmese because of those nasty generals.

Change and regime change

There is ever good deed in charging those generals with crimes against humanity and every good cause to engender regime change just as should be done for Zimbabwe and North Korea.

We cannot continue to countenance the suffering of our fellow mankind brought on my other men for their gain much as we should have the greater cause of ridding our world of all governments that lacked the expressly given mandate of the people they assert rule over.

The uprising that would sweep the military junta of Burma from power would be bloody but they will go so much for what they did by failing to do what they should – no people can allow such idle despots to continue to rule over them for much long, a year or maybe more, but they will go and good riddance, it would be.

Putin and Chavez - Great Leader or Dear Leader?

Overstaying your incumbency

If democracy is just the ability to walk out and vote and hopefully get your vote counted we had a demonstration of that concept yesterday.

I cannot however say that the use of democratic means to decide a direction of governance ends up in a democratic situation – we saw examples of that in Russia and Venezuela.

The week before, it was the elections in Australia where John Howard who had been in leadership over a decade had failed to realise that he had overstayed his welcome.

He lost the premiership and on confirmation would most likely lose his parliamentary seat. That is a damning indictment of a leader who had brought great progress and prosperity to his nation, but somehow, leaders have a tendency to be absorbed by arrogance and hubris that makes them think no one else could do the job better than they have been doing.

Leaders who have become bosses

This incumbency-complex that gravitates towards a pseudo-dictatorship is dangerous because the leader begins to project his ideas as right and hence the only solution whilst regaling us with the idea that leadership is really tough.

This kind of conviction plagued Tony Blair towards the end of his long premiership which left him almost the most unpopular prime minister for generations at the time of his leaving; it has plagued George W. Bush, but now he is moving into a multilateral phase possibly to secure a legacy for himself in the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Abusing democratic process

The Russia and Venezuela, Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez have been schemed to use the democratic process to entrench their incumbency, Mr. Putin would most likely metamorphose into a Prime Minister with considerably more powers than the incumbent has and would serve under a President that would be made into a ceremonial head of state.

The Russian constitution precludes Mr. Putin from serving another term as President, but being absorbed with the idea that no one else can rule Russia in his stead with authority and purpose, he would assume another national leadership post to keep in control.

The was a time I sympathised with Hugo Chavez and the leader of a developing economy that was ploughing some of the nation’s resources and moneys into improving the plight of the poor who had been left uncatered for by successive governments.

America’s moral laxity

Unfortunately, his mildly socialist rhetoric has gained virulence and notoriety exacerbated by America’s complacency when he was overthrown some 6 years ago.

America always fails to learn and lead in the matters of fairness, justice and balance when the issues of democracy, civil rights and oil collide. It acts like a multi-dimensional chameleon in the pursuit of self-interest instead of upholding the mantle of liberal democracies built on vibrant capitalist economies – thereby, it has little moral authority and the only muscle is seems to be able to wield is the projection of military power anywhere on the globe.

Even bullies eventually have their come-uppance and America is sometimes left with allies who can only lend support in word but hardly in means.

Chavez – all mouth

Having arrogated to himself presidential rule-by-decree, Mr. Chavez was not satisfied with the extent of executive authority as his socialism bandwagon gathered steam towards a 21^st Century aberration.

The theory of socialism probably has idealist and Utopian goals, the practice however has yield much less of that ideal – it entrenches a ruling elite that brooks no opposition; it stifles open debate; oppresses the free media; enacts laws for the purpose of exercising omniscience in all areas of the community and society whilst producing too much government that fosters corruption, reduces efficiency, promotes nepotism (See, Time.com - Where everyone important is a Chavez) and sycophancy and eventually destroys the country.

The Time Magazine in Petro Laggard highlights the fact that Venezuela sits on one of the largest reserves of heavy crude which needs large injections of cash to realise and maintain – not much seems to be done to ensure that this “golden goose” of the oil industry remains healthy to satisfy Venezuela’s obligations to the increasing demands for fossil fuels.

Democracy sometimes delivers

However, the referendum that failed yesterday by a margin of just 2% is a welcome development for a motor-mouth that was running out of control.

The question again is why one man thinks out of every good person that can be mentioned in his country, he is the only one who can properly govern his country and bring the goods home.

France is working hard to rescind the 35-hour-week because it offers no particular economic competitive advantage in a global economy and Mr. Chavez proposed to bribe his people with a 36-hour-week, reduced from 44 – no nation of slothful laggards can survive with that slovenly demeanour – projects would take forever and considering the red-tape that socialist ministries can spurn, the country would most definitely grind to a halt.

In the times of almost $100/barrel oil, Mr. Chavez seems to be awash with much cash and little sense of the fact that Venezuela belongs to a global economy, his quest to control the Central Bank of Venezuela is no less the money-grab of a highwayman – it takes more that socialist dogma to run a bank.

Yes, the Venezuelans love their leader but not enough to allow him manipulate the democratic process to deliver a dictatorship thriving on the cult of personality, for that, I am very glad.

Democracy sometimes grates

Mr. Putin has deployed every Soviet tool to grab the election for the United Russia Party that he supports, they have all the means to change the constitution to whatever they might desire, however, I would suppose they would limit their greed to knowing that capability.

All people of a nation should be happy to vote if there was a level playing field in the democratic process – it would appear, hurdles were put in the way of opposition parties who were harassed by thugs and miscreants, they never had equal access to the media, workers were threatened with their livelihoods if they did not toe of the line and monitors did not have untrammelled access to ensure the elections were free and fair.

The party leader announced yesterday that the national leader is Mr. Putin and one can only wonder if this leader would be in the mould of the Dear Leader or the Great Leader none of which augurs well.

On two ends of the world, leaders drunk on the proceeds of oil and intoxicated with power have tried to assume eternal incumbency and omnipotence – one succeeded and the other failed.