Hard Brexit inescapable

Hard Brexit inescapable

Brexiting. A series on being English. # 10

Having written brazenly about Brexit, it is imperative that I put my neck out and predict what will happen. So far, all my predictions on Brexit based on cultural idiosyncrasies of the English (not the British) have proven to be quite accurate.

My prediction is that there will be a delay for three months that will be extended for perhaps another six months. After that, there will most probably be a hard Brexit, i.e. a no-deal Brexit.

In the meantime, there will be a general election that will solve nothing.
The Brexiteers will remain against another referendum, having won with a tiny minority that could easily turn the other way around now that people have started to understand better what Brexit really means. If the Brexiteers prevail by not having another referendum, a hard Brexit, i.e. without a deal with the EU, is unavoidable, even after 9 months of delay.
Below follow 8 reasons why Brexit will play out like this.

One's understanding of the situation can be simplified into a dualistic view as follows:
There is a part of England that does not want to depart from their well-ensconced, self-sufficient ideas, born in the 18th and 19th century and and borne out from about 1830 - 1947; and there is a part of England that wants to do away with empire think and feudal ideas that still reign supreme in England and which have become part of their culture. One side wants to connect with the world because they want to cooperate with the world as equals, the other side wants to disconnect because they consider themselves so superior in their thinking and attitudes that others on this planet simply have to listen and follow them as the manifest leaders. The division is about 50/50 and not 80/20 as one would expect in a modernizing country. So, they will not be able to agree with one another and therefore a hard Brexit is, in the end, unavoidable.

I cannot gauge the minds of each MP individually, so we have to rely on broad, cultural logic.
The following cultural elements are present, which make a sound Brexit deal impossible:

• (addition of 20190317) There is simply no type of deal that does not contain one or more deal breakers which destroy a parliamentary majority. The intransigence of MPs makes an acceptable deal simply impossible. Intransigence and sacrifice are considered high values in England, perhaps even in all of Great Britain.
• Theresa May has been mishandling the Brexit deal from the outset by not involving all relevant parties but going at it alone, like any good Oxfordian would have done. (Explanation of 20190412 : click here) One of her misguided ideas were the twelve red lines that could not be crossed. (See above in a picture by the EU negotiator Barnier.) Uttered in 2016 for internal party politics of the Tories, she has kept to it so far and thereby destroyed the possibility of any good deal.
• Brexit was proposed and caused by a confluence of an effort to unsaddle Theresa May as PM and replace her by Boris Johnson on the one hand (a Bullingdon Boy prank) and people who live in the past and think their ideas are superior to anything else, even reality. Such people are unlikely to confess to their crimes or to the irrelevancy of their ideas for modern times.
• Little England laments deeply Great Britain, or rather "England', having lost her position in the world as superpower and loathes even more that its influence continues to shrink. Many people in England still cannot believe they have been relegated to being an ordinary country on this planet, and start to wonder if it is such a good idea that outside the Common Wealth comedy and silliness, however brilliant, is now seen as their main export product. This is why they won't give up any more territory nor are willing to put any of their territories in a 'status aparte'. They want to keep full control as much as possible. These people vote conservative or UKIP and therefore are dead-against any deal that does not keep Northern Ireland and Gibraltar as an entail, i.e. an inalienable part of the lands of Great Britain. This means that the only sensible and workable solution, using the Irish Sea as the border between the EU and the UK, is unacceptable to them. They will keep voting against any sensible deal with the EU. Note that the most vociferous elements of this movement, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, have not offered any form of solution other than a Brexit without a deal which is impossible to implement in Ireland unless you want to have another civil war there.
• Brexit happens to collide with a history of age-old civil wars about religion and autonomy in Ireland. The open border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has brought peace but violent sentiments are still lingering, lurking in the background to flare up at a moment's notice. This point is the opposite of the point above and therefore the Irish question is insoluble. You cannot have an open border and a hard border at the same time, especially not with the way this particular border has been drawn, with deep protrusions in one another's land because there was a village or house that belonged to the other religion or something like that. No sense there at all, e.g. near the city of Clones there is a stretch of the Irish A3 that has four border crossings within 8 kilometres.
• In practice, the Backstop will keep Great Britain in the European Union until further notice if no solution about the Irish Border can be reached. But such a redemption is impossible as we have seen in the point above. The Backstop can be dissolved at any moment by either party but then there will be an immediate hard border in Ireland that neither party wants. Because the tenuousness of the possibility of realising in practice the conditions mentioned in the Backstop, which will require great technological advances, it has become a popular punching ball; everybody is against it, or so they say. This means that the Remainers as well as the Leavers both do not want the Backstop part of the deal but it is part of the negotiated deal of 500+ pages by Theresa May. This piece of insanity, typical for politicians and Little English alike, leads to a hard Brexit that nobody wants.
• Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party is not interested in any of the above, not being part of Oxford and not being highly intelligent but being very street-smart. He is interested in getting Labour into power and topple the iron grip of Conservatives over the land. As this has little to do with Brexiting, his own party is voting divided or, better said, votes 'freely' on the deal by Theresa May. However, they all want to come into power as well because that is the goal of the politician. So, they will join Corbyn in any vote that will topple the Conservatives and this can only be achieved by having another election. Many in Labour think that Brexit is a bad idea so they are in favour of another referendum on Brexit. Both options need a delay of Brexit but even if the Labour Party would win the elections, it is unclear whether Brexit is off the table
• As we have seen with the 27 February 2019 vote on May's Brexit Deal, there are also some who voted against the EU deal for petty reasons of constituency- or even private interests. This is a cultural element because in England, local gentry always has considered the goings-on in London as interference in their prerogatives of ruling their lands, that used to be owned, tilled or toiled by their ancestors.
• And last but not least, there is the typically English cultural trait that inflicting self-harm is considered a heroic act that deserves praise and has merit on its own. So, shooting oneself in the leg by doing a hard Brexit is not as unpopular as Continentals like me may think.

A note on Scotland

After a hard Brexit, Scotland will apply for independence, which will be refused by the English, especially those of Little England, and then there will be a situation as in Spain with Castilians against the Catalans. The English Oxfordians will wage a vicious propaganda war against anyone who dares to speak of secession and this will scare many Scottish, like in 2014. But this time, there will also be many Scottish who have experienced the duplicity of the promises by the Oxfordian politicians of Westminster and therefore refuse to be frightened and bullied into submission like they were in 2014. So, Scotland will vote for secession this time but, like always, its wishes will not be honoured. In the end, after years of quarrel and negotiations about trade and defence and oil (yes, it is all about money, what else did you think?), Scotland will enter the Common Wealth as an area with a 'status aparte'.

The Philosopher of Culture,
March 7, 2019