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The comic style with which Prime Minister Theresa May and her fractious Conservative Party have made their excuses and begun to exit the European Union stage has done a great service to the remaining 27 European Union member states.
EU relieved without the UK?
If there was speculation in the run-up to the Brexit Referendum in 2016 that Britain’s decision could trigger Europe’s own domino effect and encourage other Eurosceptic political leaders – in countries such Sweden or Denmark – to flirt with their own "SwExit" or "Dexit" – it is speculation that has been quashed by the most peculiar British farce unfolding in London.
To paraphrase the British government's embattled Brexit Secretary David Davis, appearing before a committee at the House of Commons, “I don’t think anybody is likely to follow us down this route, we’re a very different country.” Quite.
In the absence of the UK, the European core, led by Germany and France, will feel somewhat liberated and embrace a post-Brexit world with some relief as they begin to accelerate much needed reforms in areas ranging from security to taxation. Years of indulging UK ambivalence about the EU project are quietly coming to an end.
With just twelve months to go until the two-year Article 50 withdrawal negotiation period comes to an end, pro-Brexit enthusiasts are already referring to March 29, 2019 as "Independence Day" – the day the UK will formally leave the European Union.
Pro-Europe protesters prepare to board a bus to bring their anti-Brexit message on "EU Superhero day" on the first anniversary of Article 50 being triggered for Britain to leave the European Union, March 28, 2018, London, England.
Thanks to a 21-month transition deal struck this month with Brussels, however, Britons will wake up on the 30th with very little changed.
Until 31 December 2020, the UK will retain the benefits of the single market and customs union albeit while losing its role in any decision-making institutions.
As power over a final decision on Brexit has shifted and the prime minister has been forced to increasingly take account of parliamentary arithmetic, the Labour Party has become emboldened in its calls for the UK to remain part of a customs union with the EU.
Labour’s Keir Starmer’s stealth-like attack on the delusional early promises of the May Government (“free, frictionless, tariff-free access to the single market,” “the easiest negotiation in human history”) and their subsequent back-tracking, is calibrated – above all – to cultivate the support of a critical number of dissidents within the Conservative Party’s parliamentary party.
Dark web of neoliberal networks
A series of media headlines this week have immersed elements of the 2016 Brexit leave campaigns in a firestorm of whistle-blower allegations of breaches in data security and claims that UK laws limiting campaign funding may have been flouted.
At the center of these allegations are two young whistle-blowers, Shahmir Sanni and Christopher Wylie, and a network of data analytics companies steeped in the dark arts of psychological operations: Aggregate IQ (Canada) and Cambridge Analytics (UK) together with its parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL).
Canadian data analytics expert and whistle-blower, Christopher Wylie, poses for photographs outside a press conference in London, March 26, 2018.
The SCL Group is a private British strategic communications and "global election management agency" and company, which performs data mining and analysis on its target audience, applying the insights of psychology and behavior change.
The most influential psychological discovery behind these techniques of social control is "prospect theory": under conditions of uncertainty, human behavior violates expected utility theory (a fundamental assumption of economists that we almost always act to maximize our gains). Human irrationality has been made predictable.
Dr Henrik Enderlein of the Jacques Delors Institute in Berlin has described how the Brexit process shows that there is a fundamental economic contradiction in the populist Brexit promise to "take back control."
Disconnecting an economy from its main trading partners implies abandoning degrees of freedom, not increasing them. This is because "European integration is a meaningful and largely successful attempt to build a political bridge between the nation state and economic globalization. Participation in the EU means more political control, not less."
Anti-Brexit demonstrators wave European Union flags from the top deck of a bus parked outside the Houses of Parliament in London, March 29, 2018.
What voters were not aware of was the extent to which the leave campaign exploited and fed confusion, turning expertise gleaned during years of neo-colonial psychological operations in the field on its home audience.
Britain’s imperial and military past is manifest today – in part – in what the campaign group War on Want has described as the UK’s role as a world center for the privatization of war and the military industry including psychological operations. Adam Ramsey claims that "this whole history is exactly what Brexit was about for many of the powerful people who pushed for it."
Power comes from networks of people, and the wing of the British ruling class in and around the military has moved rapidly into the world of privatized war. These are also the British networks with an ideological and material stake in radical right politics and links to transnational capitalist interests who wanted to deliver a blow to the European Union.
The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of APD.
(CGTN)
