The urge to bluster is universal among reckless men who have risked everything. They boom that events have proved them right, as if booming can drown the thought that they have made a colossal error. As their mistakes can cause the worst damage, politicians, propagandists and the politically committed in general are the worst blusterers of all.
The front page of the Daily Express on Aug. 8, 1939, contained one of the finest blusters in British history. Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor, had so supported appeasing Hitler he dropped Winston Churchill from his pages for warning of the Nazi threat.
Beaverbrook and his journalists were desperate to prove that they had not betrayed their nation. Under the headline “No War This Year,” the Express assured its readers that no less an authority than “Mr Selkirk Panton,” the paper’s Berlin correspondent, believed that “Herr Hitler, despite all his mysticism, is a hard-headed, hard-boiled politician... He will not risk everything over some hasty action.”
On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. On Sept. 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
As luck would have it, on Sept. 3 this year — 77 years to the day after its “no war this year” prediction failed so spectacularly — the print edition of the Express led with the headline that Britain was in a “Brexit boom.”
Along with the rest of the right-wing press and the politicians who led Britain to this pass, the Express is loud in its insistence that the “doom mongers” had been proved wrong.
Now, as then, we see the same desperation to believe that the Conservatives have not betrayed their nation and the same refusal to face reality. Britain is not in recession because the Bank of England has pumped cheap money into the economy with Weimaresque abandon and reduced interest rates to their lowest level ever.
Keynes’ “euthanasia of the rentier” is upon us and might be an appealing prospect if the rentiers whose interest payments were vanishing were the misers of 19th-century fiction. However, as everyone saving for a pension is a rentier now, the Brexit “boom” rests on the central bank ordering a miserable future for millions.
The lie direct of the Brexit campaign was that the EU costs Britain ￡350 million (US$466 million) a week. The bigger lie, which some Leave supporters might even have believed, was that there were no hard choices. The British could have it all. Immigration controls, prosperity, access to EU markets without compliance with EU laws... Whatever they wanted, at no cost at all.
Or as Leave campaigner Boris Johnson, a politician who has never made the mistake of believing what he says, told his credulous supporters: “This is a great country and great economy, and I think people know we can do brilliantly if we take back control.”
An honest version of Johnson (if you can imagine such a creature) would have gone to the Nissan car workers in Sunderland and said words to the effect of: We may be able to deliver the immigration controls you want if we leave the single market, but there is a risk that you will lose your jobs if we do.
The cynicism of the Leave campaigners’ failure to lay out the difficult decisions shocked the naive, but these were charlatans fighting a campaign they were prepared to win without honor.
What ought to shock even the most cynical observer of public life is that the deceit continues to this day.
No government minister has gone to farmers in Wales, lorry drivers in Birmingham, Airbus engineers in Filton, let alone car workers in Sunderland, and warned them how the differences between a hard and soft Brexit could ruin their lives.
Conservative politicians stay silent because they lack the intellectual honesty to say that Brexit has made Britain smaller. You can see the nation shrinking in the way leaders at the G20 treated British Prime Minister Theresa May as an awkward “crasher,” who had got in by mistake; in Japan’s undiplomatic hints that not just Nissan, but all Japanese businesses in Britain will think about leaving if we leave the single market; and in the US’ and Australia’s announcements that securing a trade deal with the EU comes before securing trade deals with Britain.
Not that Britain can secure trade deals just like that. If you wish to get a measure of the mess the country is in, read the papers former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has produced on the hair-raising practical obstacles ahead.
The right promised it would free the British from “Brussels red tape,” to quote one example among many. Yet a new trade deal will result in “significantly more red tape for British companies exporting to the EU as British exporters will have to obtain proof of origin certificates from their national customs authorities,” certificates that are to increase trade costs with the EU by between 4 percent and 15 percent.
Britain cannot strike agreements with 50 nations currently covered by the EU arrangements until it strikes a trade deal with the EU, because everyone else will want to know where Britain stands.
Britain will not strike a deal with the EU, for — what? — three, five, 10 years? How many jobs will be lost and foreign investors driven away in the process is a subject the prime minister needs to start talking about.
Instead of facing up to the scale of the uncertainty, today’s Conservatives kid themselves as their predecessors did in the 1930s. Listen to Conservative ministers and read the right-wing press, delusion is on display everywhere.
Boris Johnson says Britain is a great country. Not any more. What greatness Britain possessed came from its alliances. By voting to leave the British have ignored the advice of every friend they had in the world. Now Britain is asking the countries it spurned to help it and they are finding reasons to look away.
The right says the EU will want to give Britain a better deal out than it had in because the EU nations will still want their exporters to sell to us. They do not look at how politically impossible it would be for Europe’s leaders to tear up EU rules when they are having to face down their own xenophobes and europhobes.
They do not have a shred of evidence that the EU will appease Britain. Just a forlorn hope and an echo of voices from the time of the British appeasers. They were as convinced that they were dealing with “hard-headed, hard-boiled politicians,” who would do whatever Britain wanted and not “risk everything over some hasty action.”
They were as befuddled.
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