Battered by Brexit

Brexit and Liberal Democracy: Populism, Sovereignty, and the Nation-State

Author: Amir Ali

Publisher: Routledge

Pages: 148

Price: Rs 3,674

This book arrives at a time when the Brexit debate in Britain, insofar as it relates to the wisdom of Britain’s contentious decision to leave the European Union (EU), has run its course, bar the shouting. Not least because it has been overshadowed by the Covid-19 crisis and other political scandals featuring many of Brexit’s leading stars, notably Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself.

Nearly six years after the event, both the winners and losers of the acrimonious 2016 referendum are done rehearsing old arguments. And the discussion has moved on from Brexit’s shameful backstory of half-truths and brazen lies to where does post-Brexit Britain go from here? The honest answer is: Nowhere. The Brexit masterminds seem to have no coherent ideas about how to realise their grand vision of a “global Britain”, fully in control of its own destiny.

The truth is that it was all very woolly to begin with, characterised by “a series of dislikes” starting with the EU, as the author, a senior Jawaharlal Nehru University academic, points out. Brexit was marketed as a project to liberate Britain from the EU’s alleged stranglehold by “taking back control” of its borders and sovereignty. How this was to be translated on the ground was left deliberately vague to appeal to a wider constituency beyond EU-haters. It looked like a clever strategy at the time but has now come to haunt Mr Johnson and his band of Brexit brothers.

“The driving force behind Brexit was the idea of an assertive sovereignty that needed to be won back from the EU. [But] what will the UK do with the sovereignty that has been restored? It may look like worthless piece of ornamentation that no one knows what to do with...,” writes Professor Amir Ali, likening it to “a stash of currency whose value rapidly depletes, rendering it largely worthless”.

Britain is agonisingly trapped in a halfway house between Brexit and the promised brave new world. This is how it must feel to be stuck in purgatory waiting for eternal salvation. But one doesn’t have to be a soothsayer to know that there’s little prospect of salvation and the country is staring into a steep abyss. Even many previously ardent Brexiteers are now experiencing buyers’ remorse as they realise they were sold a pup.

This book’s detailed re-telling of the toxic referendum campaign, its aftermath, and the crude political shenanigans over the terms of an EU exit deal should appeal to overseas scholars who are unfamiliar with the complexities of Brexit —and who wish to get a deeper understanding of the forces behind it, their motives, and personal ambitions.

Its larger theme, however, is the role of Brexit in the deepening crisis in liberal democracies and the rise of populist nationalism in many parts of the world, including India. “The year 2016 almost seems like a base year from which we can easily mark off a worsening and deteriorating situation for the very idea of liberal democracy itself,” the author argues.

This has become a popular narrative among Western academics and spawned a number of books on the subject, but this is perhaps the first major study to come out of India. Essentially it echoes the Western liberal consensus which sees Brexit as the midwife of illiberal tendencies in democratic countries.

The point often overlooked, however, is that the trend long precedes Brexit. Populist nationalism had already arrived in India, Turkey and eastern Europe by the time Brits caught up with it. Also, Donald Trump was already on the scene by the summer of 2016, and might have gone on to win the Presidential election irrespective of Brexit. Americans are not normally known to follow the British; it’s invariably the other way round.

But it’s true that Brexit was not just a vote against EU bureaucracy or for British sovereignty, which was never under threat anyway. It became a lightning rod for a cocktail of simmering grievances, real or imagined, against the liberal establishment bringing together a cast of strange bedfellows from sections of white working classes and right-wing populist demagogues to ex-communists, maverick libertarians and many traditional Labour voters. Brexit became a one-stop shop for assorted populist flag-waving agendas.

As John Le Carre said: “To be a nationalist you need enemies and the shabbiest trick in the Brexiteer’s box was to make an enemy of Europe.” And it worked.

Considering that there has been little serious debate on Brexit in India this book is to be welcomed. More importantly, it marks a rare break from Indian academia’s extraordinary lack of intellectual curiosity about anything outside their specialism. However, because the book is written from a distance and inevitably relies heavily on secondary, mostly Left-liberal sources, a few problems of interpretation have crept in. For instance, the author says Brexit was driven among other things by Islamophobia and suggests that Mr Johnson is an Islamophobe based on a passing comment about Muslim women in an article.

Mr Johnson’s quote has been torn out of context and grossly misinterpreted by his critics. His article actually argued against calls at that time to ban the burqa. He wrote that Muslim women should be allowed to wear what they liked even if they looked like letter-boxes. Of course, his choice of words was extremely poor but for all his many sins Mr Johnson is not an Islamophobe — though, of course, he has no qualms about aligning himself with them for opportunistic reasons. 

The reviewer is a UK-based commentator