On revolving door Britain
English original of article published in Italian by La Stampa today. My apologies for rewriting Dante's famous Canto VI, "Ahi serva Italia...", but Britain truly is in Purgatorio
“Ahi serva Britannia, di dolore ostello, nave senza nocchiere in gran tempesta, non donna di province ma bordello!”
Is it fair to say that Dante’s words should now be applied to my native country, Great Britain? Well, with the resignation of Liz Truss as prime minister the country now knows that by the end of next week when the Conservatives say they will choose her successor Britain will during 2022 alone have seen three prime ministers, perhaps five chancellors of the exchequer and, sadly, two monarchs.
I will leave to one side the question of whether we should include the bordello, although the notoriously drunken parties in Number Ten Downing Street during Boris Johnson’s tenure might well have caused Dante to consider that word. But we can be sure that in political terms Britain has been a “nave senza nocchiere”, ever since the Brexit referendum on that fateful June day, just over six years ago.
Britain’s current political turmoil can clearly be traced back to that decision. This is not, at least not directly, due to the economic consequences of Brexit, which have not yet truly become clear to most of the British public, thanks to the much more dramatic impact of the coronavirus pandemic and now the war in Ukraine.
The connection back to the Brexit vote is that the decision to leave the European Union was made without any agreed, or even publicly debated, plan about what to do next. It was a strictly negative decision, not one made with any alternative strategy in mind.
The result is that in the succeeding years British political life, especially political life in the Conservative Party, has been a mixture of Stalin-like purges of the disloyal and the dissident, long periods of policy paralysis that can be likened to a political nervous breakdown, and a search for simple solutions and slogans.
Britain’s current instability is an instability of the political mind, not one of feuding personalities as has often been the case in Italy. Going through changes of government, as Italy often does, is quite different from going through frequent changes of mind and of strategic direction.
Boris Johnson, during his three years as prime minister from 2019 until July 2022, was a ruthless user of purges but also a walking display of confusion and incoherence. Was he in favour of cutting taxes and exploiting Brexit through deregulation, so as to turn Britain into what came to be called a “Singapore on Thames”? Or in favour of intervening with industrial support in ways membership of the EU made difficult, while spending generously on public pensions and dealing with regional inequality?
The answer was that he was in favour of all of this and more, without wishing to confront the trade-offs and contradictions that this involved. Most of all, however, he was in favour of finding simple, easy to understand slogans.
So the Brexit referendum was won with “Take Back Control” and Johnson then triumphed in the 2019 general election by shouting “Get Brexit Done”. Except that neither he nor any of his ministers knew how they wanted to use that regained “control” and that even now, in 2022, Brexit remains incomplete since Britain is still arguing with the European Union over the status of its region of Northern Ireland, and over the implications of Johnson’s own agreement that Northern Ireland would stay part of the EU single market for goods.
Now that she has resigned Liz Truss at least can boast that she has a place in the political history books: having survived in office for just 45 days, she now holds the record as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister ever. And 10 of those days consisted of the official mourning period for Queen Elizabeth.
More profoundly, what her ill-fated period in office showed was how the ruling Brexit class has reacted to the lack of a coherent or agreed strategy by searching for an ideological substitute. To critics like me, the Truss episode can be likened to a group of religious zealots, Tory Taliban, who talk only to each other and come to believe only their chosen scriptures.
It has still been a surprise. Truss had done six ministerial jobs in her ten years in Parliament, so she should have had some understanding of process, of institutional requirements, of the value of expert advice. Instead she acted as if she thought she was a Silicon Valley start-up which worships the idea of “moving fast and breaking things”.
What comes next? Britain’s hope must be for a general election, so as to have a more open debate about our national direction and to elect a government with some sort of coherent idea of what it wants to do. Until we get there, however, we can expect more instability, more factional battles inside the Conservative Party.
If you want proof, just look at the fact that some Tory MPs are seriously proposing Boris Johnson as a potential candidate to replace Truss, barely four months since half his government resigned in protest at his scandals and incompetence. Hopefully, they will see the bordello in time, and change their minds. Ahi serva Britannica…
If Boris comes back I'd lose my confidence in your political system. in its ability to fix things and recognize problems. Politics should be a serious matter but it is turning into a farce. can someone stop him?