Mr Kristof, I am sorry to see that you too have bought into the lazy idea that people voted for Brexit “because they were lied to”, as if they were stupid and unable to reach their own conclusions on the basis of experience and research.
Many of us voted Leave in the full knowledge that the process would not be easy and the outcome unpredictable.
We are where we are now, because politicians (and others with the money to pursue legal actions) were unwilling to accept the result of a democratic vote.
And please, fellow readers, don’t jump in with the “but the referendum was only advisory” argument. The then Prime Minister and the Remain campaign literature promised that the Government would abide by the result of the referendum.
It has been an interesting reminder that politicians’ promises are not worth the paper they’re written on.
13
I was against Brexit but after reading a current NYT article about corruption with EU's agricultural subsidies, I'm not sure. Why would taxpayers of any country want their money to go into the pockets of oligarchs and despots in Eastern Europe -- strongmen whom Trump drools over? By the way those guys and their systems are leftovers from socialism/communism. Maybe it's the EU that should break up along with Great Britain.
11
I toptally disagree. I believe that given the opportunity, Johnson would do much to unite the United Kingdon, and the weasely little scot Sturgeon will be put in her place. He will win them all over, just as he won over Leo Varadker. He has already made huge inroads to this end, given the circumstances he has inherited, and he will not be so foolish to ignore Wales, and Ireland. I dont know why the fourth estate is so determined to do him down, but perhaps they only thrive when there is doom and gloom, which sells more than success and positivity. (Traits Johnson has in buckets!!)
6
Will Great Britain Become Little England?
They already are, and a long time now. Try 40+ years.
Five weeks ago Iran sized a British tanker.
What did England do?
They protested.
Now, flashback just 100 years. There was an empire called " The Great Britain" with elastic colonial territories from India to the Falkland Islands. The British army and navy was the most fearful force on earth.
The rest is history.
Now, even the Irish and Scottish thumb their nose at # 10 Downing Street.
13
I can't think of anything more absurd and delusional than the Brexiteer promise that the nation is poised to be the "Singapore on the Thames." That so many British believe that nonsense is truly pathetic. The U.K. has an economy slightly larger than California's, but with twice its population per capita GDP is but a small fraction. The British economy is not very productive and hasn't been since WWI. Without its association with the EU, why would anyone bother investing in it? Aside from tourism, what does it produce that anyone wants to buy? What Johnson and Farange are promising is that once they've left, they'll implement the economic policies of Kansas and Britain will be great again. Because they've worked so very well for Kansas - a state whose governor suggested dismantling the public education system to balance its budget.
37
The Labour wants to know whether Boris Johnson’s senior adviser, David Cummings, was properly vetted before his appointment.
Cummings, described as Britains Steve Bannon, is a divisive figure. He was the campaign director and co-founder of Vote Leave, the official campaign in support of leaving the EU before coming to Downing Street.
Little is known about the three years Cummings spent in Russia from 1994 to 1997 after he graduated from Oxford University with a first in ancient and modern history, especially about his relationships with members of the group Conservative Friends of Russia.
Dominic Grieve, former attorney general, has called for the publication of a recent 50-page report on Russian meddling in the democratic process to be published before the general election, saying it contains knowledge “germane” to voters.
Despite polls suggesting that Johnson leads, it’s doubtful if his Tory Party will win big, given the loss of DUP, its junior partner in Parliament and other moderate Conservatives.
Nigel Farage's Brexit Party got a boost from Trump. But it has no other agenda.
Britons are exhausted and tired of Brexit. The election could go two directions that would either take Britain out of the EU as soon as possible, or reverse this foolhardy move altogether.
The two anti-Brexit parties, Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats might benefit from this election.
Johnson is a gambler and his premiership may just as well be short-lived.
7
A "Rule Britannia" delusion is exactly what is motivating "Brexiters", though I disagree in regard to Scotland: its forced removal from the EU will finally drive it to cede from the UK, leaving only England and Wales - the tragic outcome of deceit and arrogance.
3
"Famous Five"....how I loved those books and kids, um children, back in the early 1950's! From there to the Hardy Boys. Thanks for the reminder.
4
Lived in England shortly as a normal bloke (not just a tourist). Many years ago. Loved it.
But what struck me as a young adult so long ago was this: the English seem to insist on creating and fostering their own mostly unnecessary discomfort. Indeed they take comfort in discomfort.
And they like being internally inconsistent. Brilliant, urbane, atheist - no matter. They sure have a favorite family ghost story to tell and don't you dare say its hogwash. Hope you get my drift.
OK we're all like the English we just may have different ways of expressing our inconsistencies and predilections for self imposed discomforts and problems. As ordinary blokes Americans and their cultural cousins are not bad people just sometimes weirdly self-destructive and sometimes that spreads out to the "innocent".
So be it - human nature.
But today we have enemies that operate methodically, efficiently, purposely, and forcefully to exploit our self-destructive natures, fears, phobias, greed, apathy, cynicism, prejudices, legit concerns, etc. to bring liberal democracy down
Forces that corrupt elections, etc. to execute destruction from within. Technology today makes this easier/broadly possible.
Am I a crazy cote baying at the moon? Maybe in general but about this I am congruent with the experts. We're being played - liberal democracy in peril.
Likes of Boris/Donny/GOP - whether knowingly/willingly or not - are our enemies agents. Putin smiling. Hope the West wakes up!
11
Who 'won' and who 'lost' World War II?
America and the Soviet Union rose as the European Empires began their drifting doomed inevitable demographic demise.
Germany and Japan 'won' by losing their attempt to create their own replacement European and Asian based hegemony by the traditional violent military means. Germany's demographic scientific technological advantages and prowess coupled with a strategic geographic location. Japan tried to emulate and replace the British Empire in form and substance.
Germany and Japan turned to commerce as their means to conquer the world. China has chosen the same path.
China won by ending it's 500 year descent into irrelevance. Despite having been a civil secular demographic socioeconomic political diplomatic technological and scientific superpower for most of the past 2200 years. But China is aging and shrinking with a massive male gender imbalance and a below replacement birthrate.
Central and South Americans, Africans and Asians won as North American and European, Japanese populations are aging and shrinking with below replacement level birthrates. While they tried to resist exploitation of their lives, lands and natural resources by America, China, Europe,Japan and South Korea.
America and Europe have 5% and 7% of human population with about 48% of humanity's nominal GDP. Central and South American, African and Asian nations are growing younger and wealthier.
Democracy gave Boris Jonson. A republic gift was Donald Trump.
1
Why is it that a single vote with an unknown scope and method never be reconsidered by the very people who were asked to decide originally? This is truly insane because by now the world and Britain clearly sees the folly of Brexit and would reject any plan. How is it not a requirement that the final plan be again approved by the people not the politicians? Where in democratic philosophy are you prohibited from two votes?
3
When push comes to shove, if Brexiteers and Trump supporters were faced with the choice of a "stronger, wealthier, and more globalized" country or a "weaker, poorer, and more separate" country, it seems likely at this point that majorities of them would choose the latter.
What they want most is to go back to the way their country used to be. Their children and grandchildren may feel differently. But so what? Who cares what *they* think?
6
I wouldn’t mourn the UK too much. It was a toxic union that gave birth to a terrible colonial empire. The world will be better off without it. A United Ireland and an independent and free Scotland and Wales within a Europe of the Nations would be good news. Let’s let little England sort out its issues outside in the cold for a decade or two. The young people of England will lead it back to Europe after the toxic politics of the Brexiter generation has died off.
10
At least Britain shed its empire before coming apart at the seams. This makes it largely an internal, British disaster; if they want to jump off the cliff edge, have fun, it won’t matter to the world.
But America is coming apart in mid-flight, with a mad man at the helm, ignoring the role it has had for close to a century, and continues to play in world affairs today. If America crashes out of its duties blood will flow and civilizations will fall.
8
We shouldn't chastise many in Britain for falling under the spell of Johnson and Farage. They were told outright lies about what "Brexit" would mean. But here in the U.S. many fell under the spell of Donald Trump and his lies as well - people voiced their unhappiness with the economic disparities they are suffering by voting in the very people who participated in creating the economic inequalities at the root of people's anxiety. Historians will analyze how this came to pass for years, but the end result I fear is ultimately a much diminished U.S. and Britain - both economically and morally.
6
The problem with the Brexiteers and Trump's base, and many of the rightist movements in Europe is the fallacy that history is "dead."
Thinking that history is dead and people can now go willy-nilly without regard to each other or their neighbors is a disaster in the making. Neither Russia, China, nor religious extremism is going away, and none of them have kindly designs on the West. And who knows? In today's world, some outcropping of wealth born terrorists could erupt in either Africa, SE Asia or S America that could upset the whole applecart.
And then what? Instead of working with well-established allies, we now have a confederacy of dunces in which each tiny fragment of a country now must be negotiated with.
Furthermore, it isn't just self-defense that these half-witted nationalists are taking down the whole ship to get revenge on their favorite pique, It's that the actual mixture of cultural diversity generates greater achievement than parochial monocultural plots of earth.
America is great because of its diversity, and has always been so, whether recognized or not. Our original motto said so eloquently, Out of many, one.
Go ahead, Liechtenstein yourselves. Let the world pass you by, you will be the only ones to suffer.
3
There is another side to "Great Britain." Ask the people of India. Or just read about the American Revolutionary War.
No slaves in England, but the slaves in the colonies did exist. There was the trade in slaves, sugar, and then rum. Did the slaves in the southern states of America contribute to the economy back in merry old England? Yes, sadly they raised the cotton that went back to the mills in England to be made into cloth.
The pirates? Some would say they exist today, but now they run corporations, governments, and organized crime has never gone away. You might say Putin represents all three, at the same time.
Perhaps in the end, we get what we deserve. England is being torn apart by Brexit, and we have our own situation in the US. Voting has never been more important. We should not give up, no matter what. There are rough seas, but somehow, we have always been able to navigate thru the storms.
5
I'm a member of the Labour Party and there are many of us who are desperate to get a left wing government into power that will reverse the terrible cuts made by the Conservatives. This is life or death for a significant number of people here.
11
In europe, in north america, to a certain extend democracy has been hijacked by a gilded elite ensnaring the voters with populism and fascism. Checks and balances have been undermined. Media has been taken over by trolls, which consider their purpose in life to see the world burn.
We really should consider, that democracies can fail and become a travesty-show for oligarch. And when this happen, all countries become small, britain is just one of them.
9
It is the neo-liberal, austerity hardship regimes, imposed on the British workers by both Labor (under Blair & company) and Tories, that has alienated voters from the political Establishment in London and made them pursue the false solution of Nationalism . . . Similarly, the impoverishment of the American working class, under both pro-corporate Democrats and Republican Administrations, has misled too many of them to support President Trump's racist demagoguery . . . . But Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the USA are able (despite the media opposing them) to offer the voters a Socialist alternative for the first time in decades.
3
What stands out here is that Boris Johnson enjoys popularity in England. Just as FDR and American leader were inspired by Churchill and his great leadership during the darkest days of the Second World War, everyone in England is aware that we now have the worst leader possible in Trump... and Johnson is in with him. Trump is in with the Russians, who have been doing everything possible to undermine Democracy in the West and weaken NATO. And this also carries over to their efforts in England. Are the Brits not aware of this, and does it matter to them?
You mention an advisor to Tony Blair. Tony Blair is on the outs because he tried to help us. He couldn't have imagined that the Bush team he was helping would be so inept, both in the erroneous reasons for going into Iraq, and in their ineptness in fighting the war (they didn't even pick up abandoned weapons caches that would eventually be used against us), and their planning in the aftermath. Under the British Mandate, three ethnic groups that hate each other were put in the same country, and our guys didn't change this when they had the chance, because all they were interested in was the oil. (Cheney was even still on the payroll of Halliburton).
Blair meant well, but was duped by the Bush administration. So why don't the British realize this and rehabilitate him. He is the clearheaded leader they need now--not Corbyn who has gone over to the dark side on the Palestinians, or Johnson, who is in with Trump.
2
It's a maverick documentary that's long on substance, and seems to connect a lot of things that don't make sense otherwise. Like the Panama Papers, for instance. The EU is starting to enforce financial oversight and regulation to shut down institutions whose sole function is to avoid taxation. Is this why leaving the EU has suddenly become a pressing matter in the UK? Follow the money that bankrolled the whole push for Brexit, and so much of it is non-UK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8&t=60s
2
To answer the question posed in the title: No, it will not become Little England. i believe Mr. Kristof is a very talented journalist, however this analysis is painfully obvious and distant from the realities in the UK - and I am no Brexit supporter.
The sun actually set on the British Empire long ago probably after the First World War when the average member of the population saw once and for all that they were pawns of the Royals (heck the Kaiser, Tzar were all related to Victoria). After WW II the final nail went into the coffin when Churchill wanted a return to the good old days which meant no government health care, social services. It seems forgotten that the British population voted him out. Back to Empire the British made their wealth by paying off rulers, or chiefs or others in what became their various colonies to do their bidding. They shipped out the resources back to their homeland and turned out the goods that made them a powerhouse. In reality their military was not that large the people in the colonies were controlled by their own that the British had paid off. Today yes, let them leave the EU, Ireland will become whole again, when the British set it free after World War I they did what they were good at leave some territory that they controlled so Northern Ireland came to be. As for democracy the British were forced out of India, Malay, Aden, Kenya, the list is endless they did not go willing they were forced by armed revolt. They can be thanked for the mess in the Middle East where they used gas and left Palestine a mess. As one British diplomat said once "We get the pot boiling and then before the lid blows off we leave." Present day we have Trump they have his brother. Jim Trautman
3
I hate to seem so patriotically narcissistic, but I don't see the outcome of Brexit, either way having much effect on the US economy.
The Brexit issue is a side note, when once considers our forthcoming elections, healthcare, tax, immigration and wealth disparity concerns.
Oh how I wish for Roosevelt and Churchill to be born again.
2
Maybe, just maybe, the NY Times might consider publishing a pro-Brexit viewpoint. Until then, could the critics please engage the POLITICAL arguments for getting out of the EU superstate? I know that elites love unimpeded travel and the opportunity to watch bureaucrats jawbone ad nauseam about their federalist aims, but a majority of Britons voted to govern themselves. The vote needs to be respected.
3
If England were bereft of Scotland and Northern Ireland, it would still be 55 million people. Hardly "Little England". 90% of Britain is England, in population.
2
If any country is "hurdling towards a cliff" it us headed by Trump and the Republicans.
5
Their heart is not in this marriage. It is broken.
The EU’s founding principle of “Ever closer union” was not, is not and will not be acceptable to the “Leave”.
I have been in group travel tours where one person will just resist every decision of the group. Better for all concerned if that person can get off the tour group and do his own thing.
Just the same way, if after 350 and more years Scots do not feel integrated with the UK, why bother. Let them exit this union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
No need to shed tears for this break up. These places are not vanishing from the face of the earth. They are just going to belong to different clubs.
There will always be an England. Monarchy in Buckingham Palace. Tennis at Wimbledon. Cricket at Lords. Football at Wembley. Thames Regatta. Shows in West End. Warm beer. Fish and chips. National Health Services.
Cheers!
6
When Donald Trump won the presidency, I remarked that this is how a once-great nation commits suicide. That sentiment also applies to Boris, Brexit, and Britain.
4
I don’t want Great Britain to leave the EU. But oh how my heart aches for a United Ireland.
2
I was surprised there was no mention of Nigel Farage and his UKIP party, which engineered Brexit referendum in the first place and sold it with lies and demagoguery. He's back in the news again now, with the Brexit party, seeding more confusion into the process.
1
Kristoff, the Times’ resident expert on everything, tosses in a throwaway line that neither Johnson nor Corbyn are suited for Number 10. He gets it half-right.
Johnson has already shown his form. The promotion of policies delivered by a buffoonish temperment, which predates the rise of Trump by at least 15 years, is basically unfit for Office.
But what about Corbyn? Why does Kristoff toss him on his “unsuitable” pile? Its not for a lack of seriousness in policy or a credibility built over decades of public service as an MP arguing for those policies. Tell us, Nik, what is so awful about policies designed to eliminate zero-hour contracts? Use tax policy to adequately fund the NHS, education, and repairing the shredded middle and working classes now elecen years of austerity?
I suspect it may have more to do with Corbyn and the PLP’s lukewarm views towards the EU experiment. And rightly so based on anti-democratic and anti-union policies.
But this is all guesswork - tell us Nik, whats so wrong about a Corbyn led Labour going into power?
2
How ironic that N Ireland may be on its way towards favoring unification. I guess it shows that self interest wins out every time. The Republic should think twice lest they end up with healthy dose of Trumper equivalents.
3
A load of cobblers! Brexit has been coming for years, it began when it became clear that the Common Market the Brits signed on for was in fact a much more far reaching programme of European integration. Many wanted out of this malarkey and they voted out the first chance they could. The opportunistic politicians followed and not led this revolt. Brexit has already happened. If your wife tells you that she wants a divorce and you agree you are morally divorced, the formalities don't change anything.
Since WW2 Britain has been trying to maintain the power and influence that having an empire gave it without having one. Despite being humiliated by the United States in 1956 its leaders continued to delude themselves that their country was superior to the rest of Europe. This is what lies behind the British diffidence towards European integration which would benefit them if only they got off their high horse.
5
Note to Mr. Kristof:
STOP glorifying "Great" Britain!!
Europeans, especially "Great" Britain, not only played a central role in Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but also were responsible for European and British Colonialism.
Your hero, Winston Churchill, NEEDLESSLY starved at least a MILLION people in India to death in 1940s.
British looted india, starved its people and tried to enslave Indians.
How can you be so proud of Britain, Mr. Kristof?
Message from India.
3
Mr. Kristof you left out the most important part in your piece. I think that mentioning that Boris Johnson wanted to dissolve parliament is a big deal! He did not get his way though, but he did manage to suspend it.
I wonder - when was the last time Mr Kristof visited towns outside Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds? When has he spoken to actual Britons outside of London? I go to the U.K. once a month and while I know city-dwellers are in favor of staying, most blue collar rural residents are sick of watching jobs evaporate to Eastern European immigrants who will work for 70p on the pound.
This piece is reminiscent of his “Seattle has solved the drug problem” essay last month. Journalism from afar without regard for reality or the people’s opinion.
2
It’s been Little England for a long time, trading on its not so glorious colonial history. I am truly ashamed to be British. Whatever happens, I shall remain European.
5
Now, of course for the upside of the actual roll-out of Brexit: Little England can once again be an example for the world: this time as a fresh and vivid specimen of the economic, political, and social destruction that’s wrought by narcissistic demagogues of the Johnson-Trump type, particularly when balanced only by the unthinking following of impotent political ideologies of the Corbin variety.
And, better them, than us.
3
"Will Great Britain Become Little England?" Yup! It will still be a tiny mouse that irritatingly roars if Johnson holds office.
Just as Great Britain goes nuts and becomes Little England, the United States has gone nuts too and is becoming the Dis-United States of trump. Should trump hold on to power in 2020, it will provide serious and convincing grounds for California and perhaps a few other blue states to secede from the trump instigated disunion, just as Putin hoped when he installed the trump to the presidency with "Rupublican" help - as the trump spells it.
No one will have done more for an independent California, even an independent New York and ironically an independent Yankee 'New England', than trump. Unfortunately trump's white supremacists would try and create a separate nation of their own down south with the Lone Star state reclaiming independence.
Brexit will certainly cause an overall GDP drop, but no doubt the wealthiest at the top, like the Queen with her offshore accounts, will remain unaffected or will increase their wealth as is standard operating procedure as they evade any and all collective pain others below them are forced to absorb.
Irony that as former great empires are downsizing through weakness and ineptitude, Putin's Russia is up-sizing by competent brute force and corruptible capitalistic-greed.
1
Agree, but how do you pronounce "Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll" (I got the first part ......)
I Nick Kristof is always right on target. As crazy as the British situation is, I somehow feel we have more at risk in the next 12-15 months than they do. Trump will leave us weakened if he is beaten in 2020, but he will damage us irreparably if he gets 4 more years. He's be King Trump by then!
2
I own the three volume set by Jan (aka James) Morris on the British Empire. I can open these books up almost anywhere and read a few pages and be amazed by what they pulled off because of a navy, bureaucratic organization, hubris and timing. Hard to believe that a people that relentlessly inserted themselves into so many lives now just wants to be left alone. Morris is a brilliant writer and the story she tells is great history. (link)
https://www.amazon.com/Pax-Britannica-Trilogy-Farewell-Trumpets/dp/B0000COIG4/ref=pd_sbs_14_5/130-6116312-7695038?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B0000COIG4&pd_rd_r=c93b1397-943f-4cc8-99c9-56cbb001f7ef&pd_rd_w=6Egj7&pd_rd_wg=jdtm5&pf_rd_p=52b7592c-2dc9-4ac6-84d4-4bda6360045e&pf_rd_r=ZEC8B5PGRDC5DRA9RT40&psc=1&refRID=ZEC8B5PGRDC5DRA9RT40
1
Boris Johnson has done considerable damage to the U.K. and is likely to cause more trouble for everyone. In that respect Johnson resembles Donald Trump. Both men have major blind spots, both are very selfish and both have no hesitancy when it comes to telling big lies.
Each man presents an existential threat to the nation he has sworn to protect. It is a grim problem which worries and outrages good people on both sides of the Atlantic.
Emotionally, Johnson and Trump are like two peas in a pod. Boris Johnson has wasted the time of serious English, Scotch, Welsh and Irish people – both from the North and from the Republic. Donald Trump has wasted the time of serious Americans.
The minds of these self-absorbed men are in disarray, and it is extremely annoying that instead of addressing crises they created, their focus is on grabbing attention for themselves.
1
I have been calling Great Britain little Britain for a while.
Absolutely agree,the Liberal Democrat’s may save the day,campaigning for remain.
The right wing media are in a frenzy,and brexiteers and remainers are busy designing their uniforms.
Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself.
1
Let’s hope that Brexit is the start of the dissolution of the EU.
1
In my opinion, British people should stop looking at Europe from a purely economic or power point of view. Start looking at it as if it were their home too. Best regards from Padua (EU)
1
This is just one of many “twilight zone” elections happening around the globe. Hopefully sanity will prevail. Glad to hear Ralph the Wrecker survived. That sounds like a great story.
Sorry, why do we need the UK? Or Great Britain? That the northern part of Ireland is politically separated from the rest of Ireland is ridiculous. Common sense should unite Ireland without the murderous antics of provo splinters. As for Great Britain itself: the political madness is not the work of Boris Johnson. He is just the symptom. It is the English, the traditional English there in the midlands and the south who have gone nutso first for UKIP and then for Brexit and who will give Boris his majority. Why should the Scots stay with such lunatics? Or the Welsh. Scotland, Wales, and a united Ireland can all be countries within the EU, and little England can just stew on its roast beef and yorkshire pudding. I reckon its economy will sink, housing prices will fall, and I will be able to buy a nice seaside around Scarborough for retirement on my yankee dollars. Sounds good to me.
3
Lots of talk on why Boris (where didi he get his name from?) should not be trusted. No mention of some Jeremy Corbyn, why should he not be trusted either?
1
Great Britain will not become Little England, but England just might.
3
I really don’t mind if the UK ends up as England. History bites back and they owe so much to Scotland and Ireland. What bothers me are all the lies that surrounded the Brexit vote and will harm the most vulnerable.
2
Vive L'Écosse? And in Ireland, new meaning for "A Nation Once Again?" An independent Wales? Actually, the best answer is to remain the United Kingdom and within the European Union.
1
Sorry to say but after the spectacle of the last couple of years, the UK already is "Little England".
5
Scotland and Northern Ireland should leave Great Britain. They will be better served staying in the EU.
1
I´m definitely not a fan of Boris Johnson, and I find myself in a strange position to defend him, but he certainly does not deserve all the blame for the mess the UK is in.
For many years plutocrats, irresponsible demagogues and egomaniacs have driven it there. His only one of them.
Great job, Rupert Murdoch!
3
Little England as a prospect? It's been little since the 1930s, lost all credibility under Neville and was loosing the war until the USA intervened.
It's great to believe in the Empire when you sing Rule Britannia at the Proms but it's a sign of a delusional nation.
2
The immigration crisis has fueled a lot of these disastrous political choices, along with media manipulation. This includes manipulation by foreign nations in addition to that by native based concerns -- big money, religious infiltration of politics, and political parties.
Three factors fuel this problem, factors that are still being denied by large segments of the world, starting with America. They are: curbing global population rise (there were 2 billion people on the planet when I was born, now there are 7.5 and rising fast), Climate Change, and our continued reliance on war (death and destruction) as a means of "keeping the peace", an oxymoron if there ever was one.
All of the above eventually create massive waves of refugees. Even in my exclusive community of Montecito, Home of the Rich And Famous (and unknown me), we increasingly find ourselves fleeing from drought caused fires and rising population pressures that make our community even more unaffordable by all but the wealthy.
When will we turn off the entertainment and have real conversations about this?
1
"...and if the U.K. fragments and Britain’s economy continues to decline, it will be because of the foolhardy and mendacious campaign by Johnson and his enablers."
By "enablers" I hope Kristof means: the electorate. Granted, the horrible Johnson would be the proximate cause of the pending disaster. But just as with the reason the horrible Trump and the horrible Republicans in Congress exist, the cause-in-fact of Brexit and the UK's dissolution, if they occur, will be the people who voted for them.
The absolutism and deceit of the Remainers is appalling and I'm sad to see Nicholas in their camp. On the economics of the darn thing there are certainly three scenarios - things get better, the get worse or remain about the same. To listen to the Remain crowd they KNOW the outcome - for goodness sakes economists are all over the map as to the economic outcome of each quarter - they are are poor prognosticators of the future. In the US we were told by our economists for years that 5% was as low as unemployment could go - we are at 3.6% today. My gosh, how could those pointy heads be wrong?
And spare me the deceit of a second referendum - the known negatives of the EU (yes Nicholas, the EU was bad for a lot of people) outweighed the chances for a better UK outside it. People have a right to dream of a better life and they voted for it. A second referendum which, per Labour, would NOT be about leaving or staying (surely the Brexiteers would win again) but would be Johnson's Leave plan vs Staying - an obvious attempt to split Brexiteers off by making them endorse Johnson's plan.
As years of parliamentary delay has shown and endless doomsday scenarios in the Remain media have amplified, in the end this is contempt for the British voters who in the eyes of the Remainers were too stupid to understand the greatness of rule from Brussels or appreciate the French cafes in London.
1
No mention here of the role played by the nefarious Nigel Farage and his
economic backers. Boris’s relationship with the dreaded Trump forces. And Russia’s big
desire to break up Europe. Pirates all?
Nigel Garage spews brexit hypocritical propaganda and as of today says he's not going to stand as an MP for his party. Obviously, he does not want scrutiny, especially when BoJo is trying to squash reported evidence of Russian interference and backing of the Leave campaign. Again, the road from austerity deprived Margate leads to Putin.
It already very much has, from the moment the referendum results came in there has been an ever widening divide of leave versus remain and there is no going back, this country is diminished because of it, families and freinds are parted and many no longer on speaking terms, we have all felt the strain of the wedge forced between us by the ones who would evade the EU tax avoidance directive, the iceberg into which this leaky boat is heading. The hateful things many people now feel justified to say out loud are many, and nasty... and one must wonder how far below the surface they really were anyway to have risen so fast. That many people are happy to swallow the propaganda and outright illegality of the thing are a given.. they were told they could have their "soveriegnty back" they were sold a fairy tale of nostalgia that was never gonig to be real... but that there are still so many who refuse to consider an alternative when presented with so many facts and so many alternatives is what is terrifying. So invested in their beliefs are so many people that to admit they were lied to would be a personal failure that will absolutely never happen. It is an absolute trajedy. AA Gill said it better than anyone else ever could in 2016 in an article in the Sunday Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/aa-gill-argues-the-case-against-brexit-kmnp83zrt Were he not to have shuffled off his mrtal coil I can only wonder what he would say now.
Will the "United States" become the UNUNITED States?
Will the "United States" become the little UNUNITED States?
Let's deal with the problems in the "United States" before we try to solve the problems of other countries.
You forgot to mention the execrable Jeremy Corbyn and the addle-pated Nigel Farage. With elected leaders like these, monarchy looks fantastic. At least, it would have the benefit of consistency.
All things have their season and they had a good run. From ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’ to the ‘United Kingdom’ to ‘England’. Scale down, stake stock, and perhaps rejuvenate.
A tale of two cities London and Washington both ruled by the worst leaders in their history, both doomed to the ash heap of history if the electorate cannot take back their countries from these despots, at least their off springs Canada, Australia and New Zealand have survived and prosper as real democracies.
Check out the demographics. Like Sweden and France and Belgium and others, England is in the relatively early stages of becoming a third world country. It would be more accurate to call it Arabindistan or something similar. In 50 years, the temperatures on earth and sea levels will be very similar to what they are now. But England will no longer be English, the Places of worship no longer predominantly Christian, and it’s people no longer part of the West. Demographics don’t lie.
2
on what basis was the pardon issued?
was he responsible for the deaths of others?
I think we can take the Brexit horror as you have described to our America. How? With our hardened parties ever so separate. They can't as yet physically but it is becoming a "mental" fence that divides us. Same with GB at the moment.
I will say that Mr. Kristof forced me to Google Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll as I was not sure he make that up or was part of the Harry Potter series. Anyway I'm glad he didn't use the longer version for that village in Wales: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
1
I called Brexit, Engxit.
The English' anxiety about their shrinking and irrelevant place in the world. Yes I am also in schadenfreude mode.
Mr. Kristof,
The English caused a lot of hurt onto the world, saving your ancestor from hanging notwithstanding.
2
What's so good about the EU?
Start today with the NYT's article, "The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk The EU For Millions" and the go back over - at best - lukewarm articles on individual countries and leaders, such as Germany and Angela Merkel. They're there.
Given such reporting by the NYT, why is it so surprising that some in the UK might want to try another way?
Brexit and US election campaigns were in 2016. Putin/Russian social media helped divide US electorate. Why have I not seen anything about the same interference with Brexit vote??
Where is the UK "Mueller report"?
1
It's for a long time "Little" britain. An example of people who are board and do self destruction in their spare time.
1
Why all this breathtaking coverage to Americans? What do we care? Let them do whatever ...Brexit ain’t no skin off our teeth...
Just a minor quibble: when discussing England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it is not Great Britain, but instead the United KIngdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - check the front of a passport! But just to be confusing, the photo page describes ones nationality as being a British Citizen. Perhaps after Brexit it will just be Great Britain (no Northern Ireland), or England and Wales (no Scotland), or just plain England. Methinks the likes of Johnson, Rees Mogg and the rest of the current Cabinet want precisely that.
No mention of immigration? That is what Brexit is all about but the Tories and the Red Top newspapers have changed that narrative.
Maybe Celtic Scotland and all Ireland should join as a new nation. Protestant Scotland would balance Catholic Ireland. Add in Wales and possible Cornwall and you have a unified Celtic Nation State. Perhaps Brittany and Gallicia will join.
1
Anything is better than living under the jackboots of the EU. The EU is dictatorial organization that forces laws on people that don't want them. If there is a crisis the EU will only make it worse. It is totally undemocratic with only a few countries having any power - i.e. Germany and France control the EU.
Drivel. The EU is as much a dictatorship as is the US.
1
Boris Johnson and Brexit, like trump are the WORST political developments to have happened to either country in 50 years. The damage caused by Brexit, Boris, and trump (and his enablers) is going to take decades to undo IF it can be undone.
Best thing for Britain will be for another Brexit referendum to take place and have leaving the EU massively defeated! While here in the USA we need an irrefutable overwhelming Democratic victory to banish trump... forever. Let him enjoy a prison putting green.
Putin wins most probably because Paul Manafort spent the 10 years preceding the year he became Campaign Manager for the Donald, working for Russian Oligarchs who worked to implement "Putin's Global Vision" which is to disrupt democracies and democratic leaning countries, install right wing leaders, including dictators, which Manafort was happy to accomplish on his annual salary of $10 million per year; so agitating for the right included spreading false information, inciting fear and misleading facts about immigrants, & generally becoming a self-centered, power hungry mind like the current US leader;Manafort, in his ten years of working for Russian Oligarchs, set up deep, hidden back channels to Russia to disperse money, plans, crimes, that no one could trace, and that's why Mueller's staff could not find them;all this to feed Putin's obsession to restore the "Russian Empire" which would make him Emperor, and isn't that exactly what the donald wants, to be a dictator with a classier title, Emperor; its the corruption & devastation of freedom, the return to rule by the wealthy, the destruction of the middle class, and worst of all, the hypocritical pro-life people are driven by those who want this "Empire" system and for that to work, they need more humans to function as the worker-bees, the peons, who will do the work of the Empire;shocking?, horrifying, sickening, you bet; but that's what the false preachers on the rabid right tell brainwashed on fox & hate radio.
2
What yo sow is what you get. You had divided multiple nations prior to their independence. I am not crying that Britain is falling apart.
2
As an British-educated American with British children and grandchildren, I can only fear for them and the other country where I feel at home. Cameron with his prank referendum that backfired and Johnson, that egoistical fool, will not be treated well by history.
1
Let's not forget India's independence and the partition of Pakistan (Mountbatten), the Corn Laws (Wellington), the Blacks and Tans (Churchill) , Afghanistan (Auckland and an indeterminate succession of others), Nigeria (Palmerston and others) and other triumphs of Britain's ruling class. Why would anyone expect anything better out of Brexit?
1
Strength in numbers, economy of scale, and all that. People don’t not get it as much as Mr. Kristof thinks they don’t.
Remain has acquired a Stepford quality. “See our credentials. You are fools if you don’t do as we...advise. The vessel’s design incorporates best principles. Orderly and harmonious. Have some cream tea. Try not to be indecorous.”
With such language I can keep you in the EU – or sell you sub-prime mortgages.
Invoking the Devil is facile. While Europe buys oil and politely abhors the Cossack, Britain takes deterrent seriously, putting teeth in Europe’s verbal support of Baltexit and Ukrexit. Union, you say?
Something in the cream, perhaps, enables Mr. Kristof to perceive a radiant haze enveloping Britain’s sculpted worthies. But England’s ascent is a messy bit, based often upon an improbable, bloody tack to which the best and the brightest were firmly opposed. Still as someone observed, by experiment the Brits at last get it right.
If the EU is “scientific” (as another large organization describes itself) it might allow such an experiment in the interest of self-correction. Unlike “Lexit” (and Concord) Brexit is non-violent and potentially reversible. Keen noses sense that the continent of Denmark protests too much.
A gentle European painter movingly depicted “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” Fine tuning of the Massachusetts business continues, but pedal (if not verbal) reviews remain favorable. Do take a breath, Mr. Kristof.
Problems in Britain did not start with Brexit.
The country has had a snarling sense of superiority and callousness to those who are not British elite for centuries.
Austerity is part and parcel of this.Unfortunately,poor brexiteers think they could be winners in this terrible game.
With all due respect, I think Mr. Kristoff's view of Johnson and Brexit mirror the view of elite British remainers. Let's see what the December election tells us.
Mr. Kristof apparently believes Unionism and Nationalism are "religions." Oh, well, given the current political tenor of the US in which the POTUS and his followers believe him to be "the Chosen One" and the VPOTUS is trying to turn the country into a theocracy, I suppose Americans can 't beblamed for not seeing a difference between politics and religion.
Great Britain should allow its “satellites” — Scotland and Northern Ireland — the right of self-government and independence. And while they’re at it, the Brits should also dump their anachronistic monarchy and the gossip mongers who profit from it. Their press should be paying more attention to world conflicts, war-scarred refugees, and the impacts of climate change; and less attention to the daily comings and goings of the Windsor family and the couture fashions they are wearing...
2
"It’s baffling for friends of Britain to see Johnson leading in the polls as he recklessly pursues a path that is damaging his country economically and risks dismembering it."
Why should I care if the UK breaks up and England has less power to mind other people's business? Good riddance to these lingering elements of English imperialism. Let the reactionaries and nationalists stew in their own foolishness.
1
British ancestry aside, it's discouraging that so much journalistic talent is being wasted reporting on Brexit versus examples of what makes E.U. membership so important.
1
The scandal of EU agricultural subsidies going to support eastern Europe strongmen like Viktor Orban of Hungary, as reported in today’s Times, certainly fortifies the "Leave" argument. And there are other issues, such as the undue influence of multi-national corporations over policy-making. And, of course, the biggest point of contention, the role of Germany.
Most liberals, on both sides of the Atlantic, will never concede that liberal ideals of globalism—free movement of people and goods—may be tainted by commercial opportunism, or may conflict with other, fundamental human needs and interests.
All the countries of the EU including Britain, have long felt under the German thumb, on both immigration and economic policies.
For years, Germany exploited a cheap Euro, and a beggar-thy-neighbor trading policy to created artificial trade surpluses with its trading partners, both in the EU and abroad.
At the same time, it squeezed other EU members out of foreign markets, thereby feeding the instability, both political and economic, that afflicts the EU today:
Jochen Bittner, German journalist: http://tinyurl.com/y8zc8qzp
Joschka Fischer, German politician: http://tinyurl.com/qbfqy5d
Eduardo Porter, Harvard University: http://tinyurl.com/nrcr95a
Ben Bernanke, Brookings Institute: http://tinyurl.com/q9gm2u5
The argument against "Leave" is not as simple as liberal pundits like to claim. If the Brits leave, they may be a little poorer, but they will have their country back.
1
Will GB become Little England. Yes, I hope so. Why? Because, that might wake up the United States of America to become aware that we might become the pawn of the United States of Russia, China, which Trump may require the Republican Party to name him President for Life for the Un United States of America. Lop off California and the Northeast states of NY, Ct, RI, Mass, Vermont and Maine..
Relieved to hear about the pardon. Would have missed his column. drat
If Brexit is what it takes to free England from the welfare burden of Northern Ireland and Scotland, then bring it in!
No lament here for the demise of the United Kingdom, especially regarding the tragic conquering and plantation of Ireland. Surprised Mr. Kristof is so enamored with imperialism and the brutal history of occupation. I would welcome a column from him lamenting the "lost" empire that includes India, the USA, Iran, Africa, and the rest of the conquered empire.
Whilst in agreement with the overall article, I am a trifle mystified by your attempt to encompass the UK by its geographic parameters.
The Orkneys to Cornwall is undestandable,but Belfast to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is not.
The direct distance between these 2 towns is only 100kms (62 miles) and the latter town is not even on the mainland of the UK, but located on an island off the coast of Wales.
You had a chance for a little alliteration with Londonderry to London….
But no, you decided to preemptively shrink the UK
?I will give you a year to name five great English painters. Ok, Turner and then.........and then.............? Again, I will give you a year, not ten minutes, an entire year. And, where did Turner go to learn how to paint?
Nothing better than an aging generation of bitter & frustrated ignorami to push a country to war, financial ruin, or straight off a cliff, arm in and arm, emboldened by their numbers, screaming "three cheers" or "we're N°1..."
Welcome to Little England and Putin's America.
1
I absolutely believe Britain will return to its 16th century Borders. Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland should depart, though I doubt the Republic of Ireland is excited at the thought of the expensive North joining it. England has earned the title of "Little England". It has exploited many Continents with its Colonialism and not getting its just reward.
2
@Philip W Wales was "joined" to England in the 1200's.
What is this "greatness" whose passing Nicholas laments? Ruling the seas? Dominating international trade? Being one of the Big Three who won WWII? Or Big Five who founded the UN? Or possessing the A-Bomb? Is any of this of any consequence? But if Nicholas means the quality of NHS or their universities or BBC or museums, then how any of these would be affected by the break-up of the UK? See no reason to get jittery about the future of the UK. Sure it is not only due to Boris Johnson that English want to leave and Scots to stay in the EU. If they decide to part ways, it's their sovereign right to do so. No real "greatness" will suffer as a result.
1
Brexit should never have been decided by a simple majority. 60 or 66% would have been more reasonable and less likely to cause a mess. You don't tear down something built over decades with a single, bare majority.
Further, there should have been two votes, not one. Even small town city councils frequently have a system requiring two affirmative votes, even to pass a 5 cent increase in water bills.
Third, the reports coming out at the time said the vote was advisory but immediately afterward the decision was treated as mandatory, no turning back. Why? How did it go from advisory to must do overnight?
I have a fundamental, unshakable faith in democracy as the best way forward for the human race but it is clear that in this country, and over the pond, we need experts, scholars and wise commentators to help guide opinion. With the rise of the internet and 24/7 news channels, now everyone thinks they are their own expert and can sort through the most complex problems in 3 minutes flat.
One lesson we all need to learn is respect for what we do not know, the capacity to withhold judgement while awaiting more information. One flaw of democracy is that when the people are wrong they have no one to blame it on and, thus, strict to their guns. Democracy means "never having to say you are sorry", even when you should be very sorry.
5
Giving Britain credit for nurturing the anti-slavery movement is outrageous.
Why is the truth outrageous? Just because they were fervent proponents of slavery shouldn’t take away from the fact that they were the first Western country to ban slavery.
2
I thought Great Britain became Little England sometime back in the early 1950s when the British withdrew from 'East of Suez,' leaving it to the US, - see where that got this country, - or perhaps in 1956 when the big bad golfer in chief told the British to withdraw from the Sinai, or the US would call its loans? Hey this led to Swinging London, and lots and lots of good music, and the Premier League . . . Aside from all this twaddle, why haven't people emphasized that the UK never really was part of Europe? Not to mention why the heck would the EU / EC take the UK back at this point?
I'd like to know why your ancestor, Ralph the Wrecker, was pardoned. And by whom.
1
Please stop the unctuous praise of the UK. They stole trillions from their beloved Indian colony. Not to mention Cecil Rhodes' Southern Africa gold rush and the Boar War. Ireland was starved so big landed UK interests could make their fortunes bigger. Guys like Johnson are the norm. All this talk of the EU being the cause of the UKs troubles when in fact the EU inflated the UKs position in the world. Get the Brits in a lather about immigration and they rush off to wreck the economy.
6
Little England indeed, and there’s barely any room on the path to turn around. They have company, however. Bad Company, as the USA could quickly become the Trump Confederacy, if that creature is not turned out, in one way or another. This is exactly what happens when stupid people vote en masse, and those that should know better can’t be bothered to show up.
Lesson learned ??? Or more of the same ? 2020.
5
Unless LibDems win what we knew as UK is gone. Corbyn and his transformed Labour P is not remainer. They will brexit. And a vote for Labour is a vote for racism.
1
Speaking as a Brit living in America:
The UK will be economically worse off if we leave the EU - yes. For many (and apparently including Kristof) that is the end of the argument. It isn't.
The EU continues to pursue the path of ever closer union which includes increasing rule from Brussels. This has caused much dismay not only in Britain.
The top tier in Brussels is appointed, not elected. It divorces those top bureaucrats from the reality on the ground.
The EU Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament attempts co-ordinate and have jurisdiction over 28 member countries that have their own national governments. (Imagine a large crowd trying to herd cats). Only the EU Parliament is directly voted for.
Massive amounts of money have been supplied by the richer members to economic basket cases like Greece and in agricultural subsidies to near-dictatorships like Hungary.
Johnson "... recklessly pursues a path that is damaging ..". Johnson took the helm through a party vote and is probably the only person in Parliament that can get a settlement of this vexing question that has remain unresolved for so very long.
There a now only two worse things than leaving the EU with the deal: leaving with no deal or even worse, diverting sufficient Conservative voters to the Brexit Party to allow the Labour leader, Corbyn to become Prime Minister.
Watch this space.
The far right and now Putin have discovered you don't win all at once, you have to chip away bit by bit. That is what they are doing to abortion rights, and what they are doing to democracy by causing drama within countries. The end game is Putin having his way , and the US and Europe looking like 1940's Germany.
2
Alas, Nick, "Great Britain" *is* Little England as far as this debate goes in its current incarnation.
1
Little England is set to become a nanobot as "The City of London" will become a ghost town without banker or underwriter. The exodus away from £ to ₣ will be supersonic and milkmaids, fishermen and draymen will rule England. Scotland and Ireland begone with good riddance. The EU have decided that you cannot save an idiot determined to become insignificant and meaningless.
1
Between a larcenous buffoon masquerading as PM and a troglodyte anti-semite labourist chief England is reaping the worst the imperial hubris offers: a sense of superiority over others, arrogance, belittling partners in the EU and - worst of all - rudderless leadership.
This is the nadir of England, indeed, it will be known as Little England.
3
Michaels Cody has it about right, and Mr. Kristol’s rosy, sentimental recall of the U.K. legacies ignores its true history of exploitation and military conquer of its neighbors. England conquered Ireland with the sword and cannon, and only later when forced out, carved out N. Ireland as its price for leaving. Forced wedding indeed. It’s history of mass slaughter in its colonies is well documented, exploiting indigenous people for profit in Africa, India, and Ireland, just to name a few. Dominance of the seas allowed it to grab American citizens from U.S. ships and forced them into service in the Royal Navy. Their naval power also exploitation of China and elsewhere. So much for the glorious
“United” Kingdom. As Ghandi aptly stated, all tyrants eventually fall.
2
Make Britain Great Again?! Then again, walls may go up but its ideas and gifts to world may either last for another 1000 years, whether one is a brit or not, or, the nostalgia will. Maybe a second renaissance is coming with all the people that might flee at the thought of the breakup.
Dear Mr. Kristof,
May I respectfully point out that Britain called itself Great as a result of its colonization of India and other countries and ruling and plundering them for centuries to benefit its people, its industry and its royalty, You might want to read a book called " Inglorious Empire" by Mr. Shashi Tharoor to get a full understanding of history. Instead of aspiring to be great again, Britain should just remain Britain, and rethink its position on leaving the EU for its own sake.
On a side note, I am an avid reader of your columns/books and have the deepest respect for the work you have done to help human trafficking of young girls in various countries. You documented your work so well in your book " Half the Sky", an eye opener. Kudos to you and Mrs .Kristof for your work .Thank you.
3
@Shailendra Vaidya
Agree. Let's not let nostalgia overtake the truth that the British Empire was based upon plundering, stealing, enslavement and butchering due to technological war-making advantages over its victims.
1
Great article.
Yes, Boris cannot handle his hair do much less the UK.
He is a joke indeed.
But what is happening in the UK is not that much different from what is happening in the US.
Both are successful countries with educated and racional people, so why is there such strong support for these flawed individuals with bad hair and reckless policies?
I think the reason is that individual's personal expectations in our societies are exceeding the capabilities and achievements - therefore causing frustration and ultimate disenchantment with the system. Social media constantly reminds people that others are doing much better than them.
3
Living in London (even though I am from Chicago), Mr. Kristof really sums up the drama. Divided and exhausted by the games between the politicians. But as we have seen through history, 'divide and conquer' works for those elite few; Gandhi pointed this out from the Imperialist times of the British rule in India.
When I meet new friends they are curious about Mr. Trump, I say, 'But you have your own version, yes?'
Thanks, Mr. Kristof—'dead in the ditch' will not be so easily forgotten (even though Parliament is not in session).
2
One issue with the article. Both the Czech Republic and Slovakia are in the EU after their peaceful and democratic breakup. No reason why Scotland would not be welcome in the EU under that rule rather rejected than the Catalonia example.
5
Whatever the cost of leaving the EU and its arrogant Brussels beaurocrats and impotent legislature in Strasbourg, I suspect that most English, who do not depend daily on "EU-connections" for their livelihood, will calculate that the price has been worth it. The plain truth is that EU Member countries are democracies in name and veneer only. What difference does it make who is elected leader in Italy, Greece, Netherlands, etc. if a substantial portion-maybe more than half-of the rules that really matter in your life are determined mostly by Germany, with France as usual supporter, and cannot be changed nor affected by that election?
So Brexit, the election of Trump, the fairly substantial electoral protests in Poland and Hungary, the fact that main political parties in both Denmark and Netherlands won recent elections ONLY by tilting to the right and adopting what have been called "nationalist" policies, are cries by the ordinary people against the "too-fast" changes, by regulation and rules, decided by unknown, unseen, unreachable, unelected "experts" and/or lifetime government employees of an international order.
Call these voters "nationalist" if you will; however, I suggest "localists" would be a more apt descriptive. This protest, this wave, is by no means over and is going to usher in strong victories to strong men, ending divided government in Britain and the U.S. Maybe then, some progress on the pending issues can be made.
3
The EU is a democratic institution and every country has a vote, it is not decided by Germany or France alone and fascism which you seem too think is a good idea is definitely not, just look what happened the last time fascism flourished in Europe!
7
Even more disconcerting is Trump's interference in the election. He is openly advocating for Brexit through Johnson and Farage. A weaker UK economically means they will have a difficult time projecting themselves militarily and economically around the world. A weaker ally with a special relationship with the US only serves no one but Putin and Xi.
2
@Rajiv Do you really think Trump's "intervention" here will generate votes for the Tories (or even Farage)? I think that misunderstands how very unpopular he and his vision of the US are, both in the UK and in Europe. (And possibly the world.)
@Chris Durban Other than Trump sucking up media attention for the day, I would hope that it boomerangs. It's disgusting that our President openly take sides in an ally's elections. @Chris Durban Other than Trump sucking up media attention for the day, I would hope that it boomerangs. It's disgusting that our President openly take sides in an ally's elections.
1
My relationship with the UK is one of conflicting emotions. In recent years I have become more tuned into my Irish heritage but my favorite city is London which I will visit in a couple of weeks. I am amazed that the British still claims Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands as they call them and N Ireland. The Bits still have a House of Lords and primogeniture still precludes women from holding noble titles. Brexit is simply another backward movement for the Brits . This is a story of the decline and fall of a formerly great empire which was built on conquest on plunder. The glory days are over.
4
@Edward McCarey McDonnell
All of those entities you mention can leave the UK any time they want. Scotland also has this option. Not likely to get our empire back at this rate.
1
In the short term Britain is likely to suffer economic consequences of Brexit, especially as the EU has a strong interest in dissuading other countries to follow Britain's path. However in the longer term, with Britain again taking charge of its own destiny instead of the Brussel overpaid bureaucrats, the British tradition of industrious economic management will lead to the UK once again be strong and independent.
Over time other countries in Europe will either follow Britain's example or otherwise take back control from Brussels.
2
England thinks it can do better outside of the EU. They have always been a pain ( thatcher swinging her pocketbook and Farage calling people names) . At this point everyone would just like to see the back of them. My favorite Dutch website features lawn chairs along the coast line, with beers in hand on the date they go, to “uitzwaaien” ( wave go bye to the Brits). It’s a hot mess , but time to just get on with it. Dag Groot Britanie.
4
I'm happy your rascally forebearer escaped his just deserts. But rest assured had he been a Scot, or a Paddy, his fate would have been irrevocably sealed. Probably in a pitch-cap, the usual method of executing Irish and other rebels. That is the nut of the British problem. Britishness is a great boon for the English, but it is often a great pain in the head for the rest of the UK's population. It was never a union of equals. And Brexit is just the latest proof.
5
Boris or Donnie - Heads you lose; Tails you lose.
3
Is the writer suggesting that Britain’s imperialist past is one to gloat over?
3
Many thanks for a clear sane look at what looks even nuttier living in the middle of all this.
2
You missed the role of Vladimir Putin in fomenting the anti-EU propaganda that led to the Brexit vote. Putin is playing his "Great Game" with the West and he is winning - in large measure because both the U.S. and Britain are led by ignorant, self-aggrandizing, dishonest, buffoons.
4
Political boundaries and alliances are not immutable. Leave or stay: it may matter a little or it may matter a lot—but I bet in 30 years few will remember or care.
I blame not the Brexiteers, but the EU for overplaying it’s hand. Clearly their strategy was to punish the Brits to scare the others. Great club if the main reason you stay is because you are afraid to leave.
3
Great Britain will be Lil’ England, just like the US will be the Lil’ US will be when Trump leaves office!
I hate to disagree with you about “a mighty union” bc we should remember the results of british colonialism and racism that we live with today:
Afghanistan
India Pakistan Kashmir
Israel Iraq Syria
South Africa Rhodesia
Myanmar
and please
don’t think it quaint that Belfast is part of the UK, think of it as the last refuge exploitive Britishness
5
Brexit is one of the dumbest ideas ever, but they can't keep having referendums about this. So they have another and stay wins by the same margin it lost by in 2016. The leaves will feel cheated. And so on. They made their bed of thorns.
2
Anyone who visits Britain or happens by the Brit newspapers in a European newsstand can't help but notice the flagrant ignorance and malice on display. Thus Brexit, Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Farage come as no surprise to those with eyes in their head. They and the Brexit mob are now THE BRITISH: ugly, deluded, ill-educated and rude, a cross between Fawlty Towers and Royston Vasey. Britain has lost all respect as a result and is on the verge of experiencing the consequences. Pity the young and the innocent.
The thing presently called Brexit will go down in history as a matched set with the Trump administration: the most stupendously idiotic betrayal of national interests, ever. Europe will have coughed up a toxic lump of fat and will be much healthier for the effort. Count on it.
Perhaps one day the British will wake up to the fact that governments are supposed to protect the public from grifters and idiots, not become a rabble of grifters capitalising on the resentments of idiots. Likewise America.
5
Very well said.
1
You make the mistake of thinking or believing that all British people support Brexit. A large portion of sane rational people are aghast at Brexit, Farage, Rees Mogg, Johnson etc. Pretty similar to how many Americans feel about the current abysmal administration in the USA!
1
"Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad"
3
it's the FAB five if you please.
Can you not see the racism in the Brexit vote? Really?
5
Brexit takes up a lot of space in the American news. I wish this climate crisis would get half as many headlines. For ultimately the climate crisis is of more consequence to our human species.
2
@Pseudonym
Perhaps there are some in the towers of power that WANT the human species to disappear: a cabal of honeybees, ungulates, snow leopards and Red List species.
One can hope that people there will be able to tell the difference between Britannia and Boristannia. But again, Trump got elected in the US.
1
Will GB become Little England ? Yes there is an excellent chance if the hair brained Breixt scheme goes through.
A "hard exit" would certainly be the sun setting on GB's influence and ability to move events for Western democracy in a positive manner. I see this happening as a potential possibility if Boris & his cronies pull off one of the biggest cons in British history. A major goal of Putin is to disrupt & if possible wreck the post WW 2 liberal democratic order. GB dissolving into just England with an economy akin to 1950's Albania would make him very happy. GB is a cornerstone of the liberal democratic order. Boris and his ilk are very usefull idiots indeed.
5
ironic to see this in this column....It’s baffling for friends of Britain to see Johnson leading in the polls....
not as baffling as trump being potus.
johnson is a buffoon but, for example, he's written a bio of churchill.
trump thinks andrew jackson was disappointed by the civil war.
3
@brupic
Which comic book did trump read to come up with that notion?
Nicholas Wotsisface: "Those of us sentimental about the U.K. — Shakespeare! Cream tea! The Beatles! The Famous Five! — feel as if we’re watching a dear friend quaff a few pints of bitter and hurtle toward a cliff."
Don't worry, mate. Those on the other side of the pond ("Shakespeare! Cream tea! The Beatles! (and don't forget the Stones)) are already taking consolation (is that it?) in the thought that they have good American friends (Mark Twain (the N word guy)! Iced tea! Elvis!) waiting with open arms to catch them at the bottom of the cliff. O yes (almost forgot) there's Donald too. (At least the Brits haven't sunk that low, yet). Now up here in Canada we are doing just fine, with our blackface Prime Minister. (Justin just asked me to ask Barack, "who does your make-up? It's amazing!") Moral of story: don't cast stones when you are jumping over the cliff yourself (we all are).
1
@John
John, your wryly inclusive comment is appreciated.
Boris Johnson is a bloody idiot...quite like Trump. He & his cronies lied about the financial benefits of Brexit to the people & his only motive to move forward with Brexit is that he'll stand to gain financially. Boris needs to crawl back under the rock from whence he came.
4
I've made the comment before and I'll make it again. The British should take their inability negotiate an advantageous exit with the EU has an indication of how their future bilateral trade negotiations with other countries are going to go. The English economy is large but it's not large enough to negotiate on even footing with entities like the US, the EU, China and India. They are going to find themselves holding the short end of the stick quite often. Brexit is a mistake.
5
This nonsense about the UK dissolving into it's various parts is for the birds. England funds Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland. Also if Boris is elected there will be no referendum in Scotland. He has already said he would not allow one. Nicola Sturgeon can shout all she wants but she will only get a referendum if people are stupid enough to allow the terrorist sympathising idiot Corbyn to become PM and I think that is unlikely. Wales voted to leave the EU and it's remain supporting Labour MPs are about to get a shock at the next election. N. Ireland takes more goverment money per head than anywhere else in the UK to keep it functioning and I'm not sure the people of Republic of Ireland really want to fund them.
Nicholas, why, exactly, do you group Corbyn with Johnson as "people who should never be trusted anywhere near Downing Street"? Right-wingers hate Corbyn's left-wing positions. Others smear him as anti-Semitic because he is critical of Israel. Neither disqualify him as a potential prime minister.
5
@Jo Salas Half the Israelis are critical of Israel's policies that is the reason why they can't form a government but Corbyn is an antisemite.
1
Corbyn and his youthful followers offer the British an alternative to the present austerity and hardship for the workers and obscene power & luxury for the rich . . .
One of your ancestor was Wreck-It Ralph?
That... is beyond awesome.
“Ireland” is a the name of the island. “Northern Ireland” is the name of the political country That is part of the United Kingdom that makes up about 1/4 of this land of Ireland. The “Republic of Ireland” is the name of the political country that makes up the rest of the island of Ireland. How hard is this, Kristof?
5
@Wyatt
Ireland is the name of the country with Dublin as its capital.
2
You’re wrong, Wyatt. Ireland is the name of the nation, not a geographic designation. Northern Ireland and the
Republic are merely the names of temporary governments imposed over the ages by English tyranny. At least that’s what my immigrant ancestors taught me.
1
Would it be fair to ask that for this type of article, you use self-evident truths in your first-paragraph premise?
"...nurtured representative democracy": did the colonies have a voice? Falklands were a colony until after the war.
"It nurtured the first antislavery movement"? You have not studied how people were treated in the colonies, right?
"stood up to Hitler." Britain was not any better. They won the war thus wrote the story but you can find many genocides in British history.
4
It's obvious that Boris Johnson is already in Putin's hands. Look at that hair cut .
4
Enjoy being a Russian colony England.
3
Egad. These creepy people possess nuclear weapons!
3
@Brock
Not if Jeremy Corbyn gets elected.
Every country has the right to shape it's destiny.With open border Europe ,Angela Merkel forced England to accept her policies.Once you are in a European Union country the doors are open to you to all of them.What if England is willing to pay the price any price to keep out Jihadists ,Sharia law supreme believers ,domestic terrorists?
1
In other words, is England ready to pay the price of prosperity and sanity to avoid an imaginary peril?
4
@McFadden
Try to be jew in modern Berlin and wear a skullcap and be attacked by Syrian or Palestinian refugees.Go to London as I did in 2018 and witness mass attacks by Islamist.Imaginary?
I’m a Jew who lives in London and quiet frankly you are talking arrant nonsense, I also spent a week in Berlin last year, same thing not a sign of the anti semitism that you imagine, lots of anti trump graffiti though!
2
If Mr. Kristof were truly concerned (rather than "sentimental") about Britain, he should have spoken up (as Enoch Powell did before him) to object to the immigration of so many non-British people. In any case, Mr. Kristof's logic is strange: He mentions "Shakespeare! Cream tea! The Beatles! The Famous Five!" -- not a single one of which was the product of the European Union. The people in favor of Brexit want England to remain English. To Mr. Kristof and the rest of the op-edders of the NYT, that is racist, selfish and silly. I, on the contrary, find it rather charming.
1
Here! Here!
Give a thought please for all the remainders who are being stripped of their European citizenship against their will.
2
This is a shallow paean to the cobbled together pastiche that is Great Britain /United Kingdom.
It ignores the fact that it was glued together by arms and conquest and even more egregiously this article ignores the fact that the United Kingdom was already torn apart in 1922 by Ireland leaving the Kingdom. So much for indissoluble greatness.
Sycophantic articles like this are just nostalgic nonsense.
An article looking forward to new self-determined countries would be more relevant but seems to be beyond this writer's grasp.
3
Remarkable, isn't it, how the human species operates.
Outsiders can look at festering, intense tribal hatreds like Sunni-Shia, Serbian-Turk, India-Pakistan, Republican-Democrat, Tutsi-Hutu, and be baffled why people with ultimately so much they share and would profit by cooperation, would be so locked into their mutually-destructive differences. Here again, we have Great Britain viscerally resisting their union with the Continent.
Of course, we hear the detailed, passionate commentary from the parties when we ask them about it, along with assurances that we can't come close to understanding the compelling and massive historical grievances and unyielding cultural realities that compel and cement their differences.
We listen and learn, but we remain baffled nonetheless, Brexiters.
2
Sadly, dear Kristof, who cares? The Brits have made a mess of lots of things -- India, Egypt, among some parts of the world, including all of Ireland. But, even without that, a band of nationalistic idiots voted to leave the best opportunity they had in many years for a comfortable existence -- just as 63 million idiots voted for Trump -- and all over immigration. Perhaps they deserve their comeuppance.
5
Why on earth was Ralph the Wrecker pardoned?
Perhaps this was the inspiration for Brecht's deus ex machina pardon of Mac the Ripper.
Little England, why stop there? Coming next: Mercia, East Anglia, Northumbria, Wessex, Sussex, Kent, Essex.
1
No, not “Little England”.
Little Northumbria. Little Mercia. Little East Anglia. Little Essex. Little Kent. Little Sussex. Little Wessex.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall
Who’s the littlest of them all?”
And Great London, holding all the Littles together.
3
Americans criticizing other countries just now is not a great look. Your people can’t agree on the most basic facts, you betray your allies, you elect a dangerous buffoon as leader, and you seem determined to destroy the world order that you helped build after WW2.
Why should anyone care what you think about anything?
5
May be it is a Turkish conspiracy, payback for breaking up the Ottoman Empire. Boris Johnson is, after all, a Turk named Boris Ali Kemal, his grandfather having changed the name to Ppear English. :-))
2
good riddance,
stole from India (estimated to be about 7 trillion now), Africa, and messed up the Middle East for oil
4
as Britain and USA scurry down the rabbit hole of history, one can only say, 'all things must pass'....vaya con dios
2
Boris is very Trump like in that he is simply a 'useful idiot' for the forces pushing Brexit and for those who benefit from a fragmented EU, namely Putin.
Trump is also Putin's 'useful idiot' who approves of Brexit. Trump must owe Putin's mob mucho $$ but then there is also the very possible black mail that seems to strengthen the argument that Trump is following Putin's direction.
Brexit will accomplish nothing that will benefit the English people, or those in Ireland, Scotland, etc. It is simply a chess move by Putin to further his goals to dominate the entire continent, witness as proof Trump's recent moves to hand the ME to Putin.
The demidogs will prevail only in the short term as citizens everywhere are rebelling against the massive corruption that has taken hold of modern life. We have all been sleeping for decades.
3
Yes.
And the winner is.........Russia! That you Donald Trump for your support of Brexit. Vladimir owes you one, or another one.
1
I’m sorry. What a load of nonsense. The UK is leaving the EU. It is not leaving Europe. It is not leaving the world. The NYT needs to grow up and start reporting with balance rather than liberal prejudice.
1
Yes I think they should model themselves on Fox News:)
"A mighty union..., running from the Orkneys to Cornwall..."? Doesn't more northerly Shetland count? Do re-check your map.
1
These are my people. Its a sad day/year, whatever. Wales will never leave the union. They have no real economy there so they will stay. But what good reason is there for Scotland and Northern Ireland to stay? They didn’t want brexit and they have sustainable economies without England. They should all vote to leave and leave England to go down the toilet. Save themselves.
4
Let’s hope the unlikely scenario comes to pass, and there’s another referendum. Leavers imagine Brexit will make Britain great again. It won’t. In fact, it will complete the UK’s decline. But genuine thinking is so much more trouble than magical thinking...
3
Give it to the Brits with their stiff upper lip to do the right thing and reinstate Bates, 'The Darling Buds of May', a novel by this little-known author in the States.
Orwell is less rosy in portraying George Bowling, in 'Coming Up For Air'. A journalist first, he remains grim, and at the end, the reader might wonder why 'Tubby' in revisiting the Past, does not take his life and put an end to it.
Perhaps a little dramatic, and England will always have Shakespeare.
In his journal, my late Irish-American father writes when living in Ireland, 'she feels at home with The People', a reference to the rural working-class.
Past sixty now, I am pleased to report that he was right, and childhood visits made for an ongoing affinity for everything Irish, while he was writing his ode to Ireland.
"The present situation: 'The British Lion, toothless and mangy though he may have become at home...struts around the Irish scene...as though he was still the supreme Lord of Creation".
"The Future": "Most average citizens in The Republic are convinced that force will provide the final solution (to Partition), and I report this to those outside so that they won't be too surprised to pick up their newspapers and find out that all hell has broken out again in Ireland" - (1969)
Ireland may finally be free, and England may remember "Unhappy is the man or nation whose destiny depends on the will of another". - Theodore Wolfe Tone
Guy Fawkes Day is upon us.
2
Yes it is tragic what is happening to England. But what happened to India, South Africa, Jamaica, China, and many other countries England looted and plundered for nearly 300 years was far worse.
Worse too was what happened to New York City and the tens of thousands of rebel POW's jailed in prison ships murdered there by callous indifference during the Revolutionary War.
And when we stood up for the rights of our seamen to be free from impressment by the brutal British Navy, they fought us again and burned down Washington DC to punctuate with an exclamation point their contempt for our country.
I find the British situation now more ironic than Nick does apparently, but I hope that nation of overrated dramatists and bankers finally find somebody who can cook.
33
@Dennis The War of 1812 was a long time ago, but the Americans also plundered York (Toronto).
1
Apropos of the Brexit referendum is Mencken's famous zinger, "Democracy is the theory that common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
5
Brilliant that Brits find themselves in this atrophying bog, in large measure over the prickly "whatever will we do about Ulster?"
After a thousand years of Brit enslavement, an army of leprechauns is giggling ceaselessly right now!
Good riddance. Let Great Britain break up, so that the Welsh can be free! Scotland, at least joined the UK by choice, but Wales was violently subjugated in 1283, their culture and traditions repressed, and all their leaders executed. Let the English lose their entire island except for England itself, it would serve them right.
@Samuel
1283, who will ever forget that year?
Brexit is a “scheme for profit”, given to the gullible people of Britain by those who want political advantage and money. There is nothing noble in any of this. In fact, it is pathetic and counter productive.
1
It’s the Brits’ foolish pride that is blinding their interest.
Reversal, that is sure lacking enthusiasm.
I hope they change their leadership first.
Brexit (and some US follies) is a testament to the high cost of stupidity. Those who want to save money by cutting education will only pay vastly more in the long run. America’s Founders recognized that democracy cannot survive the whims of an uninformed populace.
3
The best column on the Brexit nonsense I have read! Spot on about the incompetents leading the conservatives and labor. Yes, two fools who can't manage their own lives, let alone the life of the late great nation.
1
Fintan O’Toole is a most useful guide here, grasping the essentials of Brexit as only an Irish journalist can: loss of empire had to be soothed by substitution with Dunkirk spirit, the EU mendaciously turned into Nazi Germany.
So many outside London suffer from Thatcherite neglect, Brexit was the only form of protest available.
It’s all so sad.
1
Ah, Great Britain, the country that gave us slavery and colonialism.
1
@Jim Sack The country that outlawed slavery before we did.
3
@Jim Sack
I think you are providing a bit too much cover for Portugal, Spain and France.
1
The Assyrians, The Mongols, The Romans, The Arabs and many more, all well before Britain!
The bexiteers lied to the people. The people deserve a second referendum now that they see the ramifications of leaving.
1
Great Britain is the island on which England, Scotland, Wales ... lie. England is a country. It was never Great Britain. What you mean is something like "Will England Cease to Lord it Over the U.K. and Become just another country on Great Britain?" Not a catchy headline, but do try again.
2
"One of my British ancestors was Ralph the Wrecker, a pirate from Hunmanby in Yorkshire who set lights on the coast to fool ships so that they would crash on the rocks. He was finally arrested and sentenced to hang. As he stood on the gallows, the noose ready, a messenger galloped up with a pardon. Otherwise I might not be here."
Wow, that is a far stretch from the Polish peasants you claimed to be your ancestors. And those Armenians that escaped the Turks!
Are you perhaps related to Trump as well? He claimed he was Swedish at some point. And German and Scottish. LOL
1
What was the reason for the pardon? Did his actions cause loss of life? You seem to romanticize a rogue, which is easy to do with historical distance, but why should this be an example that sometimes second thoughts are best? Because you're alive? I see why that would be important to you. But what's wrong with parts of empire wanting their right to their own self determination? Is it merely because it may be economically foolhardy? Or do you think it's similar to a situation in which Texas might wish to secede?
Perhaps a better example of a saner second judgment would be the Athenians rethinking the fate of Mytilene in the Peloponnesian War.
Shakespeare's Richard the Third offered to trade his kingdom for a horse. That was in an excellent play. Mr. Johnson has turned out to be the horse the kingdom has been traded for. Is it for the power of having box-office draw and all the good and very bad attention? To kick Europe out of Britain or given all the economic and defense importance of Europe to Britain, is Britain on the verge of kicking itself out of Europe? And then act shocked to see people of Scotland and Northern Island decide their lot is better with European markets than the shrunken British tabloid-ruled once-inspirational country be the next Yorick who the rest of civilization will look at an empty skull and say "Alas Poor John Bull, I knew him well." No future place in the Pantheon of heroes of Great Britain for Mr. Johnson.
Divide and conquer. It’s Putin’s plan.
1
I would add that the forces pulling apart the UK - arrogance, entitlement, imperialism - were 600 years in the making. It's about time for the end.
1
Putin must think it’s Christmas every morning, no bombs or bullets, just a few ads encouraging xenophobia, help along the greed of the 1%, and bingo, he gets his the desired result.
5
UK is on a suicide watch. Brexit must be reversed and the UK must remain as an integral part of the European Union. I hope that the Liberal Democrats and Labour Party can create a new government, have a new referendum, and end this folly with
a UK back in the European Union as one of the leaders of a better and more progressive Europe!
1
"Over the centuries, Great Britain spawned the Industrial Revolution and nurtured representative democracy. It ruled the waves and created common law. It nurtured the first antislavery movement and stood up to Hitler."
That's one version of Britain's history.
Britain also did a massive amount of colonizing and plundering. By its very nature, colonization is brutal. Watch the recent movie Black '47 if you want to see what life was like for the colonized on the little island next to Britain.
It is up to the Irish and the Northern Irish if they want to re-unify. As an American, I have no say. But I do know my Irish parents and grandparents, if they were alive, would be delighted at the thought of an island of Ireland that was whole again.
3
Sorry Nick, it's already happened. And they did it to themselves.
1
It’s time to take away the UN Security Council permanent seat from the UK and give it to another country. This is not the post WW2 world anymore.
3
God willing England will stop subsidizing the sponging Scots and Ulster. Little England is sanity.
2
The "Great" Britain fractured apart numerous countries and decimated indigenous cultures in their colonialistic greed, slaves and all, killing millions. There is indeed such a thing as karma, choices and actions come back around. It is no surprise that difficulties are arising, likewise for the United States. It ain't gonna be pretty!
1
You say they are nuts but you don't say why.
A few percentage points of GDP?! GDP per head in the UK is around $40,000 per year. In 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected, it was half that.
Are the British twice as happy? I think not. Your focus on GDP is rubbish.
The key is that many Britons want to control their borders and their culture. Good for them.
A million Syrians let into Germany. I shake my head. That's self-destruction. That's the EU.
Oh, and Shakespeare wrote before the union of Scotland and England. He was a little Englander and seems to have done all right.
2
"A mighty union..., running from the Orkneys, ...to Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll." Indeed! Mr. Kristoff fails to mention India in his recitation of the virtues of the UK. India, where it dominated an entire continent of brown people and treated them, like America did its slaves, as less than human.
That's "lookin on the bright side of life" in the extreme.
Well give at least they didn’t ethnically cleanse India like the colonists tried to do to the native population of North America.
Brexit is an adventure in a world dying of boredom--probably what set the Wrecker on his path. Englanders will be thrown back on their own resources (either swim or sink), Scotland and Wales (like the Lost Cause South) have nowhere to go, and the ugly scar is removed from Ireland. They (Ireland) get to milk the EU for all it's worth without fear of losing their identity--you can't lose an island. Brexit re-islands Britain by slamming the door on the tunnel. A global identity is for modern man what the sea was for the Romans, an object of horror--a venture into the abyss: an identity with everyone is an identity with none, unless you're God. Globalist Utopias, Nick, ill suit creatures of habit.
The Unity to which you refer is short lasting from the date that the Conservative puritans threw out James and brought in William from Holland. Cromwell, another puritan, led a coup was appointed Leader with hereditary power. He destroyed the free Irish, who were Catholic.
In the 70s UK joined the EU by a small majority through another referendum, having begged to join since the 50s and being constantly rejected...by France. Almost 50% did not want to join and we and our successors want to leave. And excuse me but all sides lied in the referendum.
The USA is NOT a federation of countries with leadership being focussed in the hands of Germany and France. Whatever the failings on your own constitution it works for you. Please do not patronise us if we wish to return to the minor freedoms that we formerly enjoyed, with the economic issues that this enjoyment brings. This edition praises Switzerland. Sadly we have much to learn but there is a model.
1
The leadership of the EU is decided by all its members not merely the largest one’s. If the current state of the USA is anything to go by your constitution isn’t looking too good either!
The spirit of Ralph the Wrecker lives! I'm not surprised that Johnson, for all his flaws, leads in the polls. Regardless of the nay-saying of doom-mongers, a healthy majority of Brits seem to want to be rid of the EU. The British will do just fine, as they always have. I'm not so sure about the EU. I doubt it will last as long as the Congress of Vienna.
1
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a decidedly white-washed look at the history of “Great” Britain. To mention both the birth of the industrial revolution, without acknowledging the brutal regime of enslavement that funded it, and Churchill, without acknowledging the violence wrought across India, and then to wilfully leave out the rise in homophobic, transphobic and Islamaphobic hate crimes (among much else) that have attended the toxic Brexit rhetoric, is to continue to erase the contributions and perspectives of this country’s people of colour, LGBTQ communities and religious minorities. What the author of this article, and a nation of uneducated white people, forget is that this nation was never great. This situation comes as absolutely no surprise to those of us who have languished in the margins and been victim to its brutality. Jog on.
2
Having just read today’s companion article on the EU farm subsidy system, I think Britain is smart to leave this version of the EU. Do the farmers in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland.....even France, understand the political corruption their tax dollars are encouraging, enabling? How the EU, evidently so eager to absorb the Eastern European nations, has closed it’s eyes, and it’s responsibility.
‘In order to form a more perfect union...’ Sometimes, a leave-taking is necessary. What Britain once accomplished with military and naval power, they might now accomplish by setting a political, economic, social example of renewal, reorganization, with a literal emphasis on....small. Small manufacturing, agriculture, trade arrangements.
Yes, time to honorably retire that ‘royal’ legacy. Let those people live real lives, not globe-trotting to tout the....empire. Look too at the British pattern of land ownership (as we need to start doing here).
I doubt that this one NYTimes article on EU farm subsidies will change a continent, help with Brexit, but if I were a Brit, I’d reconsider staying with this blind, enabler of nationalistic corruption. Well out of it.
In reality, the UK is not a country of general choice. I correspond with people in Ireland and Scotland. They do not all see the English as just jolly,jolly, drinking tea and playing cricket Many of the people in those countries - yes, they are countries in and of themselves - feel that the union is maintained by force from Westminster with them paying the cost of losing their native languages and cultures, being forced to pretend to speak English, with a brogue, and mocked by the people in England who see them as second class Brits - definitely not English.
During a class I took pre-doc at the university on the history of the English language, it was pretty clear to me that the UK became what it is by bloodshed, absentee owners, starvation caused in Ireland by England, and various other non-kosher means of trickery. Many of my online friends would actually breathe a sigh of relief to be out from under the English yoke. One of my Scottish friends cited the International Court's ruling that the United States still illegally occupies the Kingdom of Hawai'i and that maybe Scotland should seek the same.
And there is the Brexit vote, which really means that the English, too, want the clock back to when they had Merry Olde England, the white flag with the red cross, and no more names like Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll.
3
@Robb Kvasnak we aren’t even members of the International Court. And there is no Kingdom of Hawaii - that’s what happens when you lose.
I've been reading about Brexit for what? Three and a half years now? I still don't truly understand it. And I certainly don't understand why a majority of Britons are putting their faith in this clown Boris Johnson. But look at the US. Look what we've done to ourselves. It's just as inexplicable. I can, however, relate to Scotland wanting to get England off its back. I think that in the US, a separation of blue and red states looks like a far better idea than the fatally fractured "union" we have now. I have absolutely nothing in common with Trump voters, and I'm really, really tired of the almost endless invective against Democrats and progressives that spews from his Twitter account and from FOX news. I say, "Let's just get away from them," which seems to be what many Irish and Scottish people are saying as well. I get it.
3
Very interesting article in today's Times, Nick. You might want to read it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/world/europe/eu-farm-subsidy-hungary.html
The single largest line item in the EU budget is agricultural subsidies (3x the US program, which is also egregious). So the British taxpayer subsidizes Hungarian oligarchs and the whole program is cloaked in secrecy. No wonder the Brexit vote won. I am surprised (not) that NY Times doesn't connect the dots between British distaste for the EU and institutional corruption as described in this article.
2
Headed for obsolescence. That’s the UK after Brexit.
1
Has GB considered selling off some of its parts for quick cash? I am confident that DT and crew would be interested in purchasing either Scotland or Wales. There must be some great hotel sites still available and golf is better when not played on an ice sheet. Forget the climate change thing, it's a hoax. It would just be great/perfect for everyone involved in the deal. The solution to all the turmoil could just be a phone call away.
"...torn asunder by the demagoguery of politicians like Johnson who can’t manage even their personal lives, let alone a nation." Good line. Gonna have to re-purpose this one for future use in the good ol' US of A.
1
If the UK would spin apart, it will just be following the general trend of recent Eurasian history starting with the break-up of the Soviet Union, followed by the splitting apart of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Perhaps this is a natural trend of deconstruction of an artificial mosaic of nation-states. If so, then Prime Minister Johnson is nothing more than a bystander at a divorce proceeding, and not the unique villain that Mr. Kristof seems to think he is.
England should never have been in Ireland in the first place so what's wrong with a re-united Ireland? And what's wrong with a free and totally independent Scotland? Many countries, including the US, have freed themselves from English imperialism so why not let the voters of Scotland and Northern Ireland decide their own destiny? Using the threat of not being welcome into the European Union is no reason to remain part of a shrinking "United" Kingdom.
5
The original sin with Brexit was having a simple majority carry the day.
For such a monumental decision a 55/45 approval or possibly a 60/40 approval to leave the EU should have been the benchmark.
Even without the disinformation campaign by domestic and international entities, the idea was too significant for a normal vote.
I know the Brexiteers would have howled in protest that the process was being stacked against them, but how many people on the fence might have asserted themselves with a super majority requirement. Which at least would have truly been a mandate.
3
"It’s far from clear that the European Union would welcome Scotland back, for fear of encouraging separatists in places like Catalonia."
This is a bad analogy. Spain is already a member of the EU, and the EU does not want to encourage separatists among its member states. But it should have no objection to separatists among non-members, especially when the regions seeking separation were formerly part of the EU.
5
Nick Cohen, highly regarded journalist and political commentator in the Observer, points out that "The divide in Brexit Britain is not based on class but on age and education: 70% of voters whose educational attainment was only GCSE (high school) or lower and 64% of over-65s voted to leave"
This points to a colossal failure in our educational system.
6
It’s convenient to blame working-class folks for this disaster, but I’m about as educated as it gets—and it’s been my experience that if you really, really need things fouled up, get somebody with a PhD.
Plain old folks just don’t have the smarts and educational background to talk themselves into the true lunacies or to maintain their nuttinesses in the face of facts.
Remember...Brexit was thought up and pushed by a passel of Oxbridge types, and incompetently opposed by the same.
1
@Premila Hoon
Interesting. Demographers can probably tell us how many of those over 65s have died in the past 3 years and how many people (too young to vote 3 years ago) have attained that privilege. Then we can ask ourselves how these changes might affect polling - and will continue to affect polling day by day by day by day....
1
No doubt Brexit will be the end of "Great" Britain.
And not only because Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will willingly depart the mess they've allowed themselves to drawn into by leaving the EU; but because the entire financial structures and institutions that has allowed Britain a certain degree of prosperity will vanish.
That much is evident with the mass exodus of banks and businesses to the continent, without so much as a second thought -- and no doubt some of the Commonwealth countries will also be on board if it comes down to a matter of their survival.
In the interim, and in face of all that's transpired since the idea of Brexit first came about, it's hard to believe that the majority of Brits still want to go through with it.
And if Prime Minister Boris Johnson thinks the U.S. is going to come riding to the rescue, he had better think again.
In all likelihood Great Britain and this country are going to suffer the same fate with their isolationist policies.
They will both end up by being very little.
7
I don’t know much about Russian interference in the Brexit vote but I know that there were ‘irregularities’. A relative of mine who is not a British citizen (Canadian) and his partner who is a Danish citizen, living in London for a number of years, both voted in the referendum.
1
Even Little England is too ecumenical a term. Brexit is about Singapore on the Thames, as they say over there. Only the Home Counties and a few other neighboring areas are really welcome as hinterland. However, the Tories can't be bothered to create a real Singapore. They won't even fund the police, much less education.
1
Scotland is a done deal. They are gone already, for all practical purposes.
6
Great Britain became "little England" in the 1950s. Without their resource rich colonies, they became what they really are, a resource poor, directionless, has been little country. The only reason Great Britain even exists is the billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lifes America sacrifices to keep it afloat since 1939. If it actually leaves the EU it will become the 3rd world country that only its participation in the EU delayed. It survives on European banking with will move out if it is not longer a member of the EU.
2
The foundation of the 2016 Brexit vote was already apparent in Britain's original 1967 application to the Common Market (EEC)
In May 1967, de Gaulle argued that Britain’s entry into the EEC would only be possible when ‘this great people, so magnificently gifted with ability and courage, should be on their own behalf and for themselves achieve a profound economic and political transformation, which would allow them to join the Six Continentals’.
He also pointed out the contradiction between Britain saying it accepted without restriction all the provisions that governed the six members, while at the same time asking for a negotiation. Britain could either accept the provisions or couldn’t, de Gaulle observed. Something that was again seen in Britain's efforts to leave the EU.
Having run through the history of Britain’s lack of serious engagement with the original European project, de Gaulle suggested that Britain were now back at the EC’s door because of ‘the great economic, financial, monetary and social difficulties with which Britain is at grips’. Well, that application, he said, could not be successful without ‘a radical transformation of Great Britain that is necessary in order for her to be able to join the continental States’.
After 52 years that 'radical transformation' proved impossible which is why the foundation of the Brexit divorce vote is based on irreconcilable differences.
2
@GerardM -
Interesting.
1
De Gaulle always was a considerable twit. And how’s that transformation of France been going?
1
@Robert
Well, based on the number of people who visit countries, France receives about 87 million visitors, the world's most, while the UK gets about 38 million.
So, whatever France is doing people seem to like it.
1
I''m a Scot whose dad was from Northern Ireland. If there is a disaster in the smaller countries Westminster will still provide support and intervention. Scottish bagpipers wil continue to lead British troops into battle and life will continue because we are forever intertwined. My little Scottish village is twinned with a small French town. We will all still be Europeans and hopefully someday my fellow Americans will join us as global citizens in the battle against climate change. there will always be bigots and moaners on both sides who complain that we are a drain on the NHS, but we are not just neighbours or adjoining nations. We are a family of nations.
4
@Maureen You don't seem to have lived here for a while. The only family I see is a very dysfunctional one which is headed for divorce. Yes, Scotland will continue to be intertwined with the rest of the UK, just like parents and kids in divorced families are frequently never really fully separated. But it is necessary for Scotland to divorce itself from the navel gazing small mindedness apparent in England for its own good.
3
Commentary on this side of the Atlantic seems to look at Brexit only from the perspective of the UK, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland. But what about from the perspective of the EU?
So far, its other members have stuck together. I think they see a solid UK as making for a stronger EU within and without the EU. On the other hand, the UK, long before Brexit, demanded--and has often gotten--specail treatment and has slowed EU integration. It has, "cherry-picked." This would stop were the UK to exit.
Will the parts come back? Perhaps the eventual result might be an EU with two or three new members, Scotland and England/Wales and one larger old member, a united Ireland. That may seem far-fetched, but today, it seems conceivable.
If a disunited kingdom does remain, what will its roll in the EU be? Just asking.
3
It seems to me that the inability of two successive PM's to get their Brexit deals through Parliament suggests that the original premise of Brexit was, and remains, wrong. Just like the huckster on this side of the Atlantic told us about tariffs, Brexit was promised to be easy to accomplish and would be immensely beneficial. The European Union has been holding the gate open for some time and the Brits can't quite bring themselves to walk through it. Maybe it is time to reconsider "the will of the people".
7
@David DiRoma -
The root problem is, to successfully pull something like this off requires central planning — just about the last term that one can apply to the UK’s (soon to be the “DK’s”, “D” as in “disintegrated”) economy.
A half millennium ago Henry VIII confronted the very real prospect of the French invading south England. After he concentrated his army and navy there he called a council of war to inform his commanders about what he had decided to do. About an actual invasion of his island kingdom he supposedly said: “... it would be a very great feat of arms that I do not think they can do.” Although the direction is reversed I suspect Brexit falls into the same category.
If ever there should have been a requirement for a super majority vote, Brexit was it. No decision of such immense consequence should have been decided by such a slim majority. That simply begged the mess it all has become. We can’t raise a tax to provide wild fire defenses in California without securing a super majority. Something as profoundly changing as Brexit has to be broadly supported or face ultimate doom.
2
Unfortunately the British people hardly have a choice. Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. I would say NO to both.
I don’t know much about the leader of the Liberal Party but maybe the voters will be so disgusted with Johnson and Corbyn, they decide to give them a chance.
@Maxi -
Say “no” to both, Boris Johnson probably wins.
Had Jill Stein dropped out of the 2016 race early on would we be dissecting and discussing our collective agonies with “President Trump” today? And would Bush have defeated Gore had Ralph Nader done the same?
The UK is already greatly reduced, and Brexit is just an attempt to rejuvenate the idea of imperial Britain. Not gonna happen. There may be continuing self-delusion south of the border, but that's all it is. Brexit will further diminish the UK and make it a further lapdog of the US (the so-called 'special relationship' notwithstanding). When the first Scottish referendum happened, we in Scotland were told staying in the UK was the only way to stay in the EU. I voted remain. When we vote next year (hopefully) in another independence referendum, I will likely vote to leave the UK - because England is destroying itself and because I want to remain part of the EU. I think Mr. Kristof is wrong - the EU will welcome Scotland with open arms. While there are concerns about Catalonia, etc., Scotland will be in a different situation - having been ripped out of the EU against its wishes, the EU will want to reintegrate a new country which embraces the core ideals of the EU. It will not be easy, and there are many things to work out a long the way, but having been part of a 200,000 strong pro-independence march a few weeks ago, I think the tide is turning in favor of independence. Perhaps we will rebuild Hadrians wall since there will have to be some sort of hard border, but we will open it for refugees from England who want something better than what the Tories are peddling.
15
Netflix came out with a it's version of Henry V. It caught my attention because England usually drags out the Shakespeare play when ever they're about to go to war.
This version is different. It shows Henry duped into a war with France by greedy advisors. By movies end there is a beautiful marriage between Henry and a French princess, symbolic of England and mainland Europe. England has to behave itself or she said otherwise the bedroom was off limits.
It's hard to get fact filled news anymore. I'm told depending, Brexit is good or bad. I'm told the same about the EU. I'm rarely told why but I know what to feel. I'm not sure if Shakespeare works better algorithms but we live in a visceral world so it's a start. Empty vessels we are ready to be filled.
1
Brexit imbroglio clearly indicates the lack of trust in the institutions of democracy.
“The European Union’s official research bureau found that less than 30% of Europeans had faith in their national parliaments and governments – some of the lowest figures in years, and an indication that almost three-quarters of people distrust their countries’ most important political institutions. Everywhere in the west, political parties – the key players in our democracies – are among the least trusted institutions in society. Although certain skepticism is an essential component of citizenship in a free society, we are justified in asking how widespread this distrust might be and at what point healthy skepticism tips over into outright aversion”.
This is an unsettling and explosive era in when there is steep decline in the faith in politics. What does it mean for the stability of a country if more and more people warily keep track of the activities of an authority that they increasingly distrust? How much derision can a system endure, especially now that everyone can share their deeply felt opinions online?
Perhaps the remedy suggested in Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, David Van Reybrouck, might resonate better. It was argued that “If democracy is in a bad state and marred by chronic distrust, what is the remedy? An ancient solution: sortition, or the selection of officials from the general public through a lottery system.
1
@N.G Krishnan -
You ignore right-wing partisan media’s role in poisoning the debate (Murdoch’s especially).
“Brussels” definitely did create some problems for the UK. But if the subsequent imbroglio reveals anything, it’s how fraught with peril the separation process actually is.
I suspect it’s infeasible.
1
Britain is no longer great. One could argue that it’s cruel, calculating imperialism did far more harm to the world then it’s governance model. Who allowed slavery in the American colonies but not the home country? Look at the mess they left in India, Middle East, Africa and China. Opium as a way to conquer and control? Mason-Dixon Line to divide the colonies? Who else but the British? They are now reaping domestically what they have sown internationally for centuries. Humility may at long last come to England. Hopefully the US will learn from watching.
10
In Trump's "Merika", we're witnessing for the first time since the Civil War, casual talk of this country disintegrating. Splitting the country into at least 2 warring tribes, who may never be reconciled, and a lot of that is due to the skewed perceptions presented by our legitimate and illegitimate media, filling Americans with facts and 'alternate-facts'. Unless we wake up from the relentless nightmare of Trump, the U.S. may follow the U.K. into oblivion. And wouldn't that be exactly what Vladimir Putin wants?
4
Yes, the UK will be gone and all that will be left is a small insignificant island. There will be massive nostalgia for great days past but they will never return. The world will move on without them. The Royal family? The death of the beloved queen will put an end to that too. No one will be wanting to continue paying for this living relic.
5
This piece is yet another fragment to set me wondering if the American union can survive. With people like the Lt. Governor of Texas telling a Trump rally that the opposition is their enemy, how long can it be before such talk takes on deadly serious potentials? The reports on the thousands of rancid tweets from the White House show that lots of fuel has been added to the fire.
Why did Lincoln and those of his time work so hard to preserve it when what was then 1/3 of the nation wanted no part of it? 600,000 American lives were lost in that effort and the wounds from the civil war that ended in 1865 still rattle around causing division and distrust.
We need individually and collectively to be more careful with one another, to look for what we can agree on instead of searching for points of disagreement and, indeed, hatred. If we don't, we could easily come to a crossroads that most people don't want to take and rightly fear.
12
@Doug Terry You make some very good points. But I've examined my conscience about this, over and over again. The split in this country, the viciousness of the "conversation" and the lies that are pumped out by Trump's personal propaganda machine, FOX news, and by Trump himself, are the cause of fanning the flames of hatred and division in this country. I'm a person who is more than willing to take the blame about almost anything, but not this. Democrats hold the candle of good government and civil discourse, higher than Republicans do, because Republicans long ago abandoned their principles and became the cult of Donald Trump. I don't see that going away anytime soon. And, honestly, if we could have only ended slavery without the Civil War, I would have been fine with letting the South secede. Slavery was one of the most obscene "institutions" that has ever existed, But have you traveled through the South lately? I know there are exceptions, like Austiin, and I know there are good people there, but there are also an awful lot of people still fighting the Civil War and who still believe slavery was a good thing. It's a really scary place. Listen to the Lieutenant Governor of Texas - and he's not the exception, he's the norm. I also know that the North has a lot of racists and right wing nut jobs, but it's not institutionalized in the North the way it is in the South.
2
The main lesson I am drawing from the British election is the danger of a divided opposition in a first-past-the-post electoral system. Combined, Labour, Lib Dems, and Greens have a majority in the polls, but because they are fragmented, the Conservatives are likely to win a majority of the seats despite winning only a plurality of the popular vote. Voters opposed to Trump in the US should stay unified.
7
sometimes, throughout history , people vote major determinations with little or no understanding of the consequences.. They are hopeful, or not, that those whose skill and intellect.. and judgement they respect, have been honest in their leadership and advice.. The Brexit vote may have been just one of those times when good advice was run over and bad advice was run with. I'm inclined to believe that,as the argument over these past three years has been joined.. that even Parliament might agree with this assessment.
2
If Brexit leads the English to extricate themselves from England-occupied Scotland, and England-occupied Wales, and England-occupied Ireland - it might lead these colonies to think about existing independently, engaging the world community on their own, developing their own core competencies (of which they have plenty of), and control over them own resources. All good things.
If Brexit leads the English to remove themselves from a socialist, income distribution scheme (to countries along the Mediterranean, given to profligacy, authoritarianism, backwardness, corruption), and go it alone - well, no one is more qualified. This is a country that has warred with everyone, everywhere, and largely prevailed. They will again.
What they have going for them is what makes people like me - almost entirely disconnected from England - total Anglophiles. That would be their culture, their democratic institutions, the literature, their sense of humor, sense of fair play (a list too long to gloss over). This is not a weak country that was able to gain from EU (like say were Portugal, Spain, Greece, and now Eastern European countries). This was a strong country chained by collectivism.
These notions of gloom and doom will not have real world analogs. England will emerge, regroup, and start punching above its weight soon enough. I am aware it is xenophobia and tribalism that triggered this move, but the country will rebound in no time. I am bullish and buying. Sell if you want.
2
@Kalidan
They’ll always have 1940, too.
History will have its way regardless of all attempts to halt its progress (or lack of progress depending on one's point of view.) Dynastic configurations in Europe , such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, gave way after World War I into squabbling "nation" states which, it would seem, are now reconfiguring themselves into some sort of federated status. Leaving Brexit strikes me as a foolish attempt to retain the "old ways" from the inevitable new union of these former squabbling nation states into a United Europe, Somehow the various religious, linguistic and other cultural variations that make humanity so interesting seem to survive whatever new-fangled configuration of "political" entities result. In the meantime may I suggest that foes of the EU stop trying to prevent the tide from coming in.
You will only get your feet wet.
1
Twenty years ago the novelist Julian Barnes wrote a book called "England, England," in which the "real" England becomes so bedraggled that a Rupert Murdoch-type entrepreneur builds a Disneyfied version of the country on the Isle of Wright and the Prince as well as Parliament decide it's better to be part of an entertainment property and get paid for ceremony, than remain in London and govern. "It could never happen," my book group insisted. "Oh yeah?" I said, "just wait." (For decades I have similarly insisted that America is Britain 20 year behind, with better teeth. Though thanks to DJT, we're closing in on the 20 years.)
12
Britain hasn't been great since the end of World War II when it found it self broke and bereft of its former Empire. After the war the British dissolved their army, dismantled their navy, and corrupted their political process while extending class and race discrimination. London, once a financial capital of the world became a backwater of back room deals and deep political corruption. The labor party became almost powerless. Investment in new industry and new technology came to a halt. Not since the Beatles has there been an export from Great Britain that is worth the world's attention. The fiasco of Ireland brought no real peace and only bloodshed for years. A brief moment of glory was the Falkland's war but even that was tainted when a British warship, built with an aluminum superstructure, not steel, burned and sank when hit by an Exocet missile, provided by France. So much for "Brittania Rules the Seas"...they couldn't even build a steel warship. The sun has set on Great Britain. Maybe instead of supporting a rotting monarchy (which they claim to love) and ending the House of Lords (wealth and heritage equals power) and also, making an attempt at Democracy would help reignite the interest of the people of Great Britain. Surely this Parliament is doing no good.
8
So what happened? Germany and Italy should have been dismantled and the spoils of war split among Russia, France, Britain and the US. Two world wars and a hundred million lives and billions of British pounds, French francs, and American dollars wasted fighting the Germans. Germany provided zero to the USA in reparations and in fact the USA paid through the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany. Why? To keep Stalin at bay.
"A mighty union that had lasted hundreds of years, running from the Orkneys to Cornwall, from Belfast to Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, would have been torn asunder...". I appreciate the poetry, but the Union hasn't had this permanence or longevity. Scotland and England joined together in 1707, and Ireland was added 94 years later, only then for 26 counties of Ireland to depart in 1922.
4
Sadly, yes, GB will become little England. But, the "greatest country in the world," the United States, is no longer that, either. We have dug our own graves, with complacency and hubris, and it will take enormous unity and singleness of mind(s) to turn this around, make our countries the refuges and sanctuaries we want them to be, in order return to greatness, which will be defined in an entirely different way. Let the MAJORITIES rule, and never look away, again.
5
@ChesBay -- Isolation always makes you small, and in Britain's case, this costly isolation will lead back to war in Northern Ireland. Does anyone ever really THINK about the consequences of their ill-considered decisions? They are already torturing and killing people at the Irish border. Does anybody really think that Johnson or Farage can make any people/country friendly deals with the rest of the world? Maybe the kinds of great "deals" that our Criminal-in-Chief makes, that is--none, or at least illegal ones.
People voted for Brexit before they really knew the ramifications. Now that more than two years have passed and the eventualities have been discussed, a new vote would be by a better informed public. I think they deserve another vote.
9
Brexit is predicted to be a failure. Perhaps, we ought to give some thought as to how the U.K. might react when the most popular country song on British radio is" If You're the Last One to Leave London, Turn Out the Lights".
The EU provides the UK with a market, a growing population, economic growth and an opportunity to lead the EU and NATO. Unfortunately, Great Britain is seizing the opportunity to become Little England. That would be a land of squires, tenant farmers and pirates. You ancestor, Ralph the Wrecker would feel at home there.
4
The Brexit referendum was unfair for a simple reason. The leave option was a one word answer to a very complex problem; leave how and under what new rules? These questions were never seriously addressed, except with false promises.
In the U. S. we have a similar problem. While the Democrats must have a complete plan for every proposal, Trump and the Republicans throw out proposals to lower drug prices or restore manufacturing which amount to nothing more than platitudes.
8
Brexit is just another example of the shortcomings of direct democracy. The really important votes should be made by the people’s representatives who, hopefully, are more attune to the ramifications of their decisions. Recent history, both here and in other parts of the world, has not always shown that to be the case but I’d still throw my lot in that direction rather than rely on angry populist led referendum.
3
It's strange how Trump and Putin are working 'hand in glove' to weaken the U.K. and possibly tear it apart, thus hurting the Western Alliance in the process. I just don't see how the U.S. gains by Trump's pro-Brexit agenda. Lately, Nigel Farage has been whispering into Trump's ear and Trump is now threatening Boris Johnson. Hopefully the citizens of the U.K. recognize a red flag and a bad omen when they see one.
6
People always pull out the 'Brexit's the will of the people' argument. The vote was very close so in effect it was the will of half of the people. Not a good recipe for success. And that vote came at a particularly stressful time. We were in the middle of a financial crisis. People were struggling to get by and afraid. Many were desperate for change. Add to that the influx of Syrian refugees into Europe at the time. Remember ''the jungle', the
encampments of refugees in Calais, France, trying to get to the UK? This was picked up by the populist parties to enflame xenophobia. All of these factors, plus Russian meddling and lies promoted by the pro Brexit campaign tipped the referendum. Now, with many of these problems resolved or no longer urgent, the truth of Brexit is revealed and it's not pretty. Now that people have had a chance to understand more deeply the likely outcome of a Brexit deal, the 'will of the people' appears to have shifted, but the foaming at the mouth Brexiteers can't face this fact and simply shout louder in spasms of denial. Unfortunately Jeremy Corbin, the opposition leader, also tends to favour Brexit so there is no effective opposition, allowing Boris Johnson's woefully divided Tory party to drift to the top. That is why the UK is where it is. If we really want the 'will of the people' to succeed, we would hold an honest and informed second referendum but because the UK has already taken a stance, pride prevents it from turning back.
11
There are 100's of 1000's of homeless people in Britain and much larger numbers of hungry.countless more are underhoused,living in former public housing that are now slums or bedsits or couch sleeping.
Austerity cuts have left rural towns without community centers,local buses,inadequate food relief.The bedroom tax and universal credit and zero contract hours for workers are leaving people in dire straits.Cuts to the NHS,health professionals from abroad leaving d/t Brexit etc,etc.
The "Great" in Britain has long been associated with pomp and empire.(They supported the south in us civil war)
The elite schools have long been known for intolerance,severe prejudice and "boys will be boys"
bullying.
Britain's problems did not suddenly arise with Brexit
despite the pretty images in Downton Abbey.
15
@Laura Downton Abbey is a euphemism for upper-class exploitation, showing well dressed, somewhat stiff "ladies" and "lords" in a make-believe, Disneyfied castle. It is a fairy tale for conservative dreamers. In that world, I would probably not even have been the boy who shoves the stairs under the coach so that the nobility could step out easily. But most people see themselves as the smug diners being waited on by starving servants. It was a birth lottery with racist, nationalist roots deciding who was on top and who was on the bottom.
2
One problem with the Brexit referendum was that there were two choices on the ballot (leave or remain) and three camps of voters (hard Brexit, soft Brexit and no Brexit). It is mathematically impossible for the majority to be happy with any political solution. When voters aren't given options to unite around they will find plenty of reasons to divide.
7
I am not one for nationalist sentiment, Braveheart kitsch etc. - nationalism has tended to serve as a smokescreen for capitalist elite interests and as a means of fooling the underclasses into becoming miltary and economic cannonfodder in those elite's pursuits of grandeur. What does matter is that the UK and particular its socio-economically most vulnerable citizens have been choked in a stranglehold of Tory austerity politics thanks to the alliance of finance capitalists and petit bourgeois reactionaries delivering Tory majorities due to the ridiclously undemocratic winner-take-all electoral system that the US suffers from as well. This will not end and therefore Scotland, Walens and NI would all be better off seceding and then regrouping with Ireland as a "Celtic Confederation" modelled on the close cooperation of the Scandinavian countries and reintegrated into the EU (with a much stronger voice than as isolated mini-nations bordering England). Little England can then transform itself into New Singapore or Trumpland as it pleases, though it's more likely to go the way anticipated in Julian Barnes' lovely novel England, England.
17
The British Government has been working hard at making the British people poorer and the rich extremely rich for the last 40 years. Ever since Thatcher came to power.
The whole point of Brexit is to turn the UK into a tax haven for the extremely rich, outside EU laws to crack down on tax havens. There is no other purpose to it. It is why the British Government is so relaxed about the destruction that Brexit will cause to the British economy.
30
In our extremely polarized and uninformed world the UK is just like us, no matter what happens a very large part of the population will be unhappy. I think if politicians and the media presented a truthful discussion of problems we could come to a compromise however its now impossible. The UK will self-destruct over Brexit as we will over trump.
6
For me, from an Irishmans' perspective, having been born in the West of Ireland, with one Grandfather born in Glasgow, and having spent some years in London as a young man, and while feeling some youthful animosity towards the English, because of their abuse of my native land, oddly I can't help but like them.
A decent lot, by and large, except for their "mad as hatters" political leaders.
With respect to the North of Ireland, and I speak entirely from experience as I have dozens of close relatives there, the people in the North are concerned with life and living, and while there may be some distant tribal desire for a United Ireland, they really couldn't care less.
It's entirely possible that the election in December will see Johnson out, and the Brexit madness just an unpleasant memory, and the English will begin to steady their ship and and put it back on course with the European Union, which is where the majority of the English want to be.
And Johnson, like our Narcissist In-Chief, will be out in the cold, adrift in the desert wilderness of his own mind.
There are times in the life of nations when a kind of lunacy seems to prevail; fortunately enough reasonable people see it for what it is, and slowly but surely normalcy is restored.
15
Unfortunately although I agree with a lot of what Mr Kristol says I am not sure that the resulting break up of the British Isles into distinct countries joining the European Union will happen.Most of the learned classes predictions on the results of Britain leaving the EU have been found either to be untrue or greatly exaggerated convincing those that voted to leave that they had been lied to all along.Not dissimilar than your own papers economist predicting the collapse of the economic system in the US if Trump were elected.The British people feel that their history and culture is being destroyed by waves of immigration from former colonies,and they are fed up with their leaders trying to sell them muticulturism and the total lack of interest on the part of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh having any desire to assimilate into British culture.Native populations throughout Europe are becoming more and more angry at what they see as their political leaders great lies on the benefits of immigration wherever it is from.
2
@Able The British might have thought of the consequences of Empire before they set out to burden themselves upon so many populations around the globe. Now the gun-ships and imperial governors may have come home but they left sufficient imprint on many countries such that some portion of the formerly colonized people have, for various reasons, a desire to live in the land had such an impact upon their cultures and economies. For a former imperial power to shrug and deny those people from around the world a place on their shores is the height of arrogance. The piper must be paid.
7
@Able one word : Yellowhammer.
Some of the economic effects have been felt but Brexit has not yet happened and economic dislocation of a no deal is yet to come. Lied to indeed, including in the profound lack of perspective of your comment.
2
But all of the author's arguments against brexit were debated at the time, and still the people voted for brexit. It's incredible to me how blithely progressives call for a second referendum, as if we should keep voting until we get the results they want.
3
“So I know that the British are capable of a change of heart — and we friends of England are hoping for another so that Britain can remain Great.“
Hearts beat and they change with the prevailing moods, but a form of government needs ballast to stay on an even keel. The vote to join the EU was a two thirds majority, the vote to leave was just a simple majority. A strong commitment to join the EU should not have been overturned by a whim to leave.
The Brits should have a referendum on the majority needed to leave.
9
Western Liberal Democracy was the antidote for Aristocracy and Monarchy. In the old system well described by Ken Follett in his trilogy starting with "The Pillars of the Earth", the Aristocracy and the Church had all the power and the "little People" had to put up with what they got. Even our system nodded to the "landed" as the democracy until we established universal suffrage. With the small loophole of the electoral college, the Aristocracy is back. Only the "little people" pay taxes, L. Helmsley. In order to get the little people to go along, we needed Marketing Psychology, celebrity worship and social media. The forces of civility, tolerance of "other" and universal respect has been challenged and is losing. The nobility, seriousness and rational thought needed for democracy is being pushed out by the foibles of the Media, legitimate as well, and the science of Marketing to which we are all inured.
9
There is something almost mechanistic about Brexit. Referenda are antithetical to the British Constitution i.e. parliamentary government. It is sand in the gas tank. the people rule either indirectly through parliament or directly through referenda as in Switzerland (more a bit later). 2016 referendum - leave. 2017 general election - hung parliament. It is simply a question of where does buck (pound) stop. There cannot be two final authorities.
Look at the referendum. Yes or No on massively complicated even complex matter.
The Swiss. A petition from the people asks for a referendum on a matter. If the petition succeeds, the matter is debated in Parliament and a very specific and detailed question is asked. The government sends out a packet of information (not biased and dishonest campaign slogans) to all voters. It had better be good too. Recently the Swiss Supreme Court struck down a referendum ruling that the information packet was inadequate. Finally, on a matter like Brexit, success requires not a simple majority but a majority in a majority of cantons. Not one Swiss rule was followed.
Shambolic and Putinic.
8
Mr. Kristoff, the question of whether Britain leaves or stays in the European Union was already addressed by the will of a majority of British voters. Are we to have a different view when it comes to the will of a majority expressed in a legitimate vote in a nation that has an older democratic process than America's? Really, there's all this "the sky is falling" talk and your column, Mr. Kristoff, reinforces this sensationalism. Let's not forget that Brexit is happenning because an election decided it. There was no royal or executive decree to force Brexit on the people of Great Britain. They have the legal and political right to follow through with Brexit. Mr. Kristoff, we should respect this right.
14
@John Q. Public
It was a referendum, not an election. Held on a day when a storm that closed Waterloo station kept thousands of commuters from voting.
25
@KGirsch Yes, it was a referendum decided by a vote. Pardon me for using the term "election." Yes, there are times when people, for one reason or another, are unable to vote. Wasn't enough to nulify the referendum. Again, the will of the voting majority was expressed.
4
@John Q. Public : The key is whether the Brexit vote was a "legitimate" vote. Every objective non-partisan observer would agree that it was not.
33
"It’s baffling for friends of Britain to see Johnson leading in the polls as he recklessly pursues a path that is damaging his country economically and risks dismembering it."
One might say the same of the British about us, baffling beyond belief that America not only nominated bust elected a reckless loudmouth president systematically dismembering our institutions and endangering our economy with mounting deficits.
But I digress. I'm with you, Mr. Kristof, in your hopes that Corbyn and the Liberal Democrat party could form a government and promptly hold a referendum.
The only way to guarantee that Brexit truly is the will of the people is to have them vote again, with no Russian interference or buckets of lies by angry politicians pulling the wool over rural Britons.
Maybe if Britain rids itself of the Brexit deceit, it would encourage people in this country to come to their senses too.
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@ChristineMcM Good comment, and I like it when you “digress.”
4
@ChristineMcM They already voted.
It's a very "EU" sentiment to not like the outcome, so heck, let's just vote until we get the answer we like.
If a nation like Britain can declare that the 48% "won" against the 52%, then what is left? If Brexit doesn't happen, then Britain cannot claim to be a representative democracy from here forward. Even under the EU, the nation will be fragmented by disparate loyalties.
At least here in the US, we haven't (yet) tossed a system we've all agreed to live by out the window just because some of us don't like the outcome.
@ChristineMcM This is what happens when you elect politicians whose party motto is to "reduce government to the size it can be drowned in a bathtub".
3
I couldn't agree more - after spending years in education there, it is my country, too. With all its quirks, I have a great fondness for it and feel the same pain as the author Mr Kristof does.
However, I disagree vehemently with the author's opinion that Europe will not take in Scotland as a member because of Catalonia.
The two cases are fundamentally different. While Catalonia would be seceding from an EU member-state and thus taking Catalonia in would be vetoed by other member-states - not just Spain - for fear of creating precedent,
Scotland on the other hand as a wonderful nation with much to offer, would be seceding from a non-member state (the UK post-Brexit), and is already far more welcome than say North Macedonia or Albania.
The author should read many such welcoming statements from European decision-makers and opinion-shapers.
231
@Prof Dr Ramesh Kumar Biswas Exactly. We are already set up to be compliant with EU laws and directives. The EU is popular in Scotland (such that we voted to remain in the UK after being repeatedly told that the 'only way to stay in the EU is to vote to stay in the UK" - how hollow that looks now; and 62% of voters in Scotland voted to remain in the EU) and we share values and aspirations with the EU. Indeed, I'd say at the moment we have more shared aspirations with the EU than we do with the UK.
21
British society is fractured along a fault line between those looking forward to the future and the little englanders driving off a cliff by looking at life through the rear view mirror. The sentiment now is the British passport will now be stamped with a scarlet letter and feelings are raw against those they feel have taken it all away for them and their children, and will only suffer for it. Consult the Yellowhammer contingency planning document produced by the government itself if you have any doubts about the impact.
So that sentiment is changing fast to a thing of the past , precipitated by Brexit and the prospect of the loss of mobility rights within the EU. Some resolutely declare themselves as European (and also British, the notions are Not incompatible except to small minds). Others are now grasping what they've taken for granted their entire lives, and understand what they'll soon miss out on. The current generation of brits has grown up with the idea they can hop across the channel, find a higher standard and quality of life, and settle in unfettered by any restriction, for work, buy property and reside for holidays with a view to retirement. Some are very angry that their lives and plans have been up ended for less than naught.
I can't say it's the intentional result as some claim today , only history can make that judgement but I daresay the result does look a weaker, divided disunion.
8
hange is inevitable and so are unintended consequences. For years, nations wanted to join the EU to share in its success. It was inevitable one well-off nation would feel it could do better on its own, not wanting to be bothered by sharing success and of course this nation would have to be GB. Conservative leaders of the faded superpower wanted to Make GB Great Again, or at least gain control of the government. Even though the Brexit campaign was fueled by fear and lies, almost no one now believes GB will emerge from the EU stronger and richer. Even so there could be other unimaginable dire consequences waiting to unfold. A Great Britain, Shakespeare, warned that unimagined consequences awaited bold acts, even those well intended. Just ask Friar Laurence how that secret marriage between the two teens worked out.
1
The union of England with Scotland, Ireland, and even Wales were forced weddings at best, with the English army holding the shotgun. Would it be that horrible if these people were in their own countries after all these centuries?
Northern Ireland shares much more, culturally, with the rest of the Irish people than it does with the English. Scotland existed as a distinct kingdom without the help of the English for a good long time. Yes, the dissolution would be harmfully in terms of the economy. As those opposed to Mr. Trump often say, there is more to life than a GDP.
Being neither a citizen of Great Britain or the EU, nor being English, I do not feel competent to venture a valid opinion of Brexit. I understand the economic arguments against it, and the arguments in favor in terms of self-determination. I think it is up to the British citizens to determine which has more weight, and up the the Scots, Irish, and Welsh to decide if the decisions of the English bear sufficient weight to convince them to stay united. If they do not, it would be hypocritical for the English to object to the dissolution of Great Britain after removing themselves from the EU.
354
@michaelscody Thanks for your comment on my column. And I grudgingly agree that in a democracy, voters have the right to make terrible choices for their country. But I would argue that the referendum to leave was decided by a thin margin after a campaign of deception by Russia and by Brits like Boris who claimed that Britain would come out ahead by leaving. Their economic arguments were simply lies, and most polls show that today a majority of Brits want to stay in the European Union. So, yes, democracy matters and the people's will should prevail -- so hold a second referendum, without Russian interference, and with the remain camp confronting the lies, and see who wins.
898
@Nicholas Kristof You expressed the most lucid solution. Let's hope for a second and honest referendum to end this painful problem for the British people.
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@Nicholas Kristof The "referendum" is no democracy. If democracy is truly rule of the people (popular sovereignty), then transient majorities should not make fundamental decisions. They should be reserved for an enduring supermajority. That is the core precept of the US Constitution and why it works. As Churchill put it, Americans will always do the right thing after they've tried everything else. We give ourselves a chance to stumble on the right thing.
47
I've come to believe that Boris Johnson may well be the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The British Trump is well on his way to destroying the UK as is Trump going that way here. Interesting new world. I wonder who the next leadership will be.
4
Winston Churchill also famously said, "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." One wonders why Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.
7
Ah yes, how wonderful to be a part of the EU with all that debt in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal and nobody to pay it. Things like this always end badly with a financial wildfire which consumes everyone in its path.
3
At least Nagaland will be free!
One of the problems that is difficult to solve is that it is one-person one-vote, that is how we resolved democracy. And as nations become older and the age distribution leans towards older voters, democracy ends punishing the younger with the view of the older, that while they may have more experience, they also have a lesser hold on the near future and perhaps old grudges.
No system is perfect. And England voting itself out of the union is an example. But it is not an example that shows that democracy is a failure, it is just one of many turns. Some succeed and some fail.
The United States itself is a loose coalition of states with rather distinct cultures: See Trump vs California. Brexit can be a prelude of what's to come to the US.
1
I always thought Brexit was a mistake. When Trump was a candidate, a reporter asked his opinion of Brexit. Reply : "What's Brexit?" Now he gives advice about all of it. But, if Brexit brings about a united Ireland, then it's a grand thing.
12
Living in the UK just now. Brexit is a done deal. The weariness of the citizenry at the interminable and degrading debate over Brexit is inclining the populace to the Bojo platform: Let's (just) get Brexit done.
Many who say they voted "remain" say they lost, they're tired, and" let's just do it." That, coupled with the Little England impulses visible in banking, food, culture, and of course politics means a weakened country, ripe for, as you point out, secession. Sad, but it's like a drunken relative: you can exhort and pay for treatment, and reason, but in the end, you can't stop the self-destruction if he's careless and willful.
4
The people of the UK were invited to vote on whether they wished to leave the EU.
They voted in favour of "Leave."
Members of Parliament, instead of acting on the peoples' vote, attempted to obstruct it.
Putting aside what one thinks of Johnson as a person, he is attempting to carry out the expressed wishes of the referendum.
The whole problem would have been prevented if the UK had the good sense to employ Canada's "Clarity Act."
1
The politicians did not obstruct anything. No-one could agree on what brexit is because it wasn't defined. It was a sledgehammer Cameron used to squash the little Englanders in his own and it crushed him instead. And then everyone quit because they wanted nothing to do with Brexit, including the ponce Farage leader of UKIP who championed it! And it has been a backstabbing farce of soul crushing dimensions ever since.
The referendum was non binding because a binding referendum is illegal under the British parliamentary system, for good reason as the results demonstrate. As a Canadian you should know that. And May tried to bypass parliament and force Brexit on the UK on executive privilege alone.
When one doesn't have a clue what happened and how is it wise to give advice or does it simply reveal the depths of one's ignorance?
2
If only the Labour Party could come up with someone more centrist and less alarming to many people than Jeremy Corbyn!
Also, in the last referendum British people living and working in the EU were not permitted to vote- and I'm certain almost all of them would have voted REMAIN.
Yes, EU regulations are burdensome and unwieldy - but leaving would be worse.
Sign me a bewildered Ex-Pat....
5
Britain does not need to be dependent on the EU.
It made its first big mistake when it hastened to leave the Indian subcontinent that resulted in the break up of India into India and Pakistan. It should have stayed , gotten rid of all the rulers of big and small states that had looted India for thousands of years and kept India as part of the Commonwealth but then so did Britain, to the tune of 55 trillion dollars. Had Britain stayed it would have led to true integration of the entire subcontinent.
@Indian Diner , had Britain stayed the Commonwealth as a single democracy and a single free trading unit would be a reality.
And Meghan Markle would be the queen.
1
@Indian Diner , we can still do it. reintegrate the Indian subcontinent with Meghan Markel as the head of the Commonwealth.
The agreement that Mr. Johnson has negotiated with the EU representatives and which he wants the British Parliament to agree on is not a clear rupture between the two parties. Instead it provides for a transitional period of one or two years during which the two parties have to negotiate a free trade agreement with zero customs between them which, with other provisions, will set the new relationship between Britain and the UE. In he mean time, little will change. Therefore, it is not true that a hard Brexit is what Mr. Johnson is proposing.
The breakup of the United Kingdom began with the Republic of Ireland after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921. But the Republic of Ireland paid a heavy economic cost breaking from the United Kingdom in that era. A series of economic wars occurred between Ireland and the UK in the 1930s. It was also one of the reason that Ireland did not support the UK during WWII. Yet, Ireland has succeeded in the long term based on innovation and hard work.
In a similar way, I would not count England out. When I go to Oxford, I'm blown away at the innovation, research and industry of England. I see Brexit as an opportunity for England. It could force England to up its game, or sink into the slough. But just like Ireland's break with the UK, England will not get any favorable treatment from the EU. It will be up to England to find a new way forward on its own.
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@Pat
Doesn’t a huge chunk of academic research funding come from the EU? Will that funding continue post Brexit, or will it be redirected to institutions in member states?
6
@Dan
Yes, items like Horizon 2020 and so on are funded by the EU. My honest opinion is that UK based funding mechanisms through Innovate UK, SBIRs, and other innovation funds are actually more focused than the European funding. But the best model would be to have more venture capitalists.
2
@Pat
Thanks for the insight.
Language means something, particularly in the main stream media. Boris Johnson has no "plan", at least in the generally accepted meaning of the term. No reliable data, no rational analysis, no knowledgable discussion and no negotiation. What Mr. Johnson has doesn't even rise to the level of "hope". It's a confidence game the end of which is some egotistical benefit to Mr. Johnson, on which he seems to thrive and substantial risk of loss to the British state and its people.
2
Johnson looks like a trumpster to me . As the USA works toward impeachment of trump the Brits should get rid of Johnson .
@T.E.Duggan -
Yes, but Boris just wants to be right. Not be in the right, or do the right thing. He just wants to get his way, for everyone to surrender, agree to his stance, his decision however stupid and awful it might be; what constitutes “being right” by his lights. If he thinks it’s right it must be right because he thought so, so “don’t confuse me with facts” that might question — or even contradict — my previous decision, on which I’ve staked everything, including Britain’s future.
He’s like the captain of RMS Titanic in that way. Informed by nearby ships that icebergs had been sighted in the area he ordered high speed be maintained so as to leave the danger zone as quickly as possible, also because they were scheduled to dock the next afternoon. Besides, Titanic was unsinkable. So why slow down or (God forbid) stop and wait for sunrise — if you’re unsinkable? What could possibly go wrong?
We know the answer to that question and that story’s sorry ending, now, don’t we?
The UK must not place their destiny in the hands of their current politicians in Parliament. They are more concerned wealth and power for themselves than for a United Kingdom. The UK has similarities to America, we would be nothing had it not been for our States that came together and formed one nation. The UK's strength, as in the past, is its people from all four states. They gave so much of it away accepting the demands of the EU they lost themselves. Parliament better get their act together and start talking as one nation, or they too will follow the U.S. with its crumbling nation of partisanship politics.
4
Sorry but I don’t think you are aware that EU directives have given the UK 25 days of holiday (vacation) leave (we had 10 days pre EU), strong human rights via the European judicial system, the ability to live and work in 27 other countries without a visa or work permit, access to health care across the EU (this summer I was seriously ill in southern France with Salmonella, in intensive care for 2 days and all I had to do is show my EU health card— no fees were charged) and free trade with over 450 million people. This is to say nothing of the peace and prosperity seen across much of the EU...no wars between EU countries since the EEC was founded. If I were living in Scotland I too would vote to leave the UK as the English have gone bonkers with Brexit mania.
24
@Paul Marc ...excellent points that you make. I was thinking more along the lines of identity, but possibly all four states of the UK should become independent countries, and no longer should London control the strings. Ultimately it is the decision of the people. Maybe the answer lies in another referendum on Brexit. Maybe the anti Tories in Parliament are right. How can one decide?
Hmm... On the one hand a party that, if elected, would see the end of the United Kingdom, the privatization of the National Health Service, the destruction of the social safety net, the elimination of the few human rights guaranteed by the EU--not to mention opening the door to American mass products that don't meet European health or safety standards. On the other side a party that would reverse privatization, move the country away from the nostalgic feudalism that it still clings to, and attempt to unify all citizens by a referendum on the Brexit question.
What's a capitalist to do?
6
There's a great scene in the delightful movie "Hope and Glory" (about a family living in London during the German bombing) where the main character is in class listening to a boring lecture by the teacher who is proudly pointing out on a world map all the "pink bits" that are the British Empire. It's funny and sad at the same time. There are far fewer of those bits today, and England may think it's still an empire, but sadly, it is not anywhere near as powerful or influential as it was 100 or even 50 years ago. And why not be honest about it: Most Brits that I know do not, consider themselves to be "European." I think if you asked most Brits, they might think of themselves as part of the EU economically, but in every other way they are a society unto themselves. Indeed, if they want to be separate, that's OK, but they will pay a very high price for leaving the EU.
8
British society is fractured along this fault line between those looking forward to the future and the little englanders driving off a cliff by looking at life through the rear view mirror. The sentiment now is the British passport will now be stamped with a scarlet letter and feelings are raw against those they feel have taken it all away for them and their children, and will only suffer for it. Consult the Yellowhammer contingency planning document produced by the government itself if you have any doubts about the impact.
So that sentiment is changing fast to a thing of the past , precipitated by Brexit and the prospect of the loss of mobility rights within the EU. Some resolutely declare themselves as European (and also British, the notions are Not incompatible except to small minds). Others are now grasping what they've taken for granted their entire lives, and understand what they'll soon miss out on. The current generation of brits has grown up with the idea they can hop across the channel, find a higher standard and quality of life, and settle in unfettered by any restriction, for work, buy property and reside for holidays with a view to retirement. Some are very angry that their lives and plans have been up ended for less than naught.
6
Why aren’t we content that Johnson gets his way, that hard Brexit? No matter what their Parliament say, what his opponents do, or even what their constitution says, Johnson boasted he delivers the hard Brexit. Better not let him win the chicken race as a mature and reasonable negotiator (a seriously laughable lie). Much better let him and his supporters suffer as well as the rest of England. Well, yes, let Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland stay in EU, or more explicitly said, let them be independent from England.
1
The fault is not Boris Johnson, any more than it is Trump in the UK. It's the genetic makeup of humans who prefer flamboyant leaders when conditions are challenging. These politicians are just fulfilling the human genetic destiny.
Certainly later citizens will regret the UK breakup, just as former Yugoslavians regret the breakup of that country. But these guys have refined the science of social media persuasion, and there is really nothing that the rational minority can do. Throughout history, there were many stable and benevolent civilizations that came to an end through the irascible acts of leaders, supported by the populace. So will that of the UK.
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@Inveterate
No state comes close to the EU or US in going over the people’s heads with rapid revolutionary change. Thus the entire West is swirling down the drain rapidly and nothing can stop this.
An excellent piece, but I would disagree that the EU would prevent Scotland rejoining the Union. It is likely that the EU would allow an independent Scotland to re-enter the EU, although perhaps full re-integration might take some years.
Leaving a non-EU country to rejoin the Union would be seen as being different to say Catalonia trying to become an independent country within the Union - a move that might start such demands from Bavaria, Silesia, the Basque Region, Brittany etc. A Catalonian secession would be seen as destabilising to the Union, but Scottish re-accession would be seen to do the opposite.
It should also be considered that Ireland has already obtained a commitment that, should Northern Ireland reunify with the South, it will instantaneously return to the Union. This is likely to be a incentive for the growing number in Northern Ireland who are on the France about the national question there.
9
A small majority in Northern Ireland favoring reunification with the south is not particularly meaningful until the breakdown of the poll by religion is determined. Although sectarian passions have cooled as younger generations come along, there is still festering tension below the surface. I suspect a great majority of Protestants prefer staying with Britain and a great a great majority of Catholics prefer merging with Ireland.
4
The reason that the great majority of protestants want to stay with GB and the the great majority of Catholics want to join Ireland is that the great majority of protestants are decedents of the English or Scots and the great majority of Catholics are Irish.
They are all defined by their ancestry not their religion.
@Joel Sanders
I’ll say there is still festering tension. And it only as deep below the surface as the wall that Unionists are still building to corral Catholics.
Much of what you've said about Britain applies at least as well to the US. I was just reading about how Trump is preventing California from addressing its climate crisis. This is on top of all the other ways that Trump and the Republican Party prove that they are simply evil every day of the week. Yet, Trump enjoys solid support - a remarkable and irrefutable commentary on the character of the American people. The British are revealing themselves too. And, yes, I know that there are complex factors at work in both cases. But there is a risk of overcomplicating an analysis. Sometimes, when people show you what they are, you believe them.
9
@Shaun Narine well Shaun please know that there are more people in the US that want djt out than in. If he wins in 2020, expect a tidal wave of ex-Americans flooding into Canada!
We are working hard to be rid of him, before he ruins what is left of our once honorable country.
I dont think one can understand BoJo's apparent popularity without taking into account the complete failure of the Labour Party to act as an opposition party since the Brexit referendum 3+ years ago. Labour has not opposed Brexit in any meaningful way for fear of alienating the relatively few Labour constituencies that voted for Brexit, and more importantly because Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a looney left relic from the 1970s who sees Brexit as the best attempt to build Soviet-aligned socialism in the UK. Most people I know will not vote for either BoJo or Corbyn.
9
Yes Corbyn is for Brexit and has colluded with the Tories to bring the UK to the precipice because it would leave his hands as free on policy as it would the Tories, whose own economic plans are as much a relic as his own.
And it is just galling to hear Labour supporters claiming today Labour is the party of Remain and tactical voting (for them) is the best way to achieve it, just because they've had a party conference recently. But who could trust them or Corbyn now either not to mess it up or wilfully bring on Brexit?
3
In my opinion, if the UK breaks up and Northern Ireland is reunified with the Republic of Ireland, it won't be so much of a Balkanization of anything but rather making an island whole again. I would hope that this could be done with much thought and care and peacefully.
8
Mr. Kristof,
Like you, I wish the Brexit vote had never taken place.
But polls, polls, polls. We live in the Golden Age of Pollsters. It wasn’t only polls- the actual popular vote was millions in favor of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. A poll taken the day after the election would have revealed the same. Should there have been another election - every week for the ensuing 3 years and counting?
2
And the polls were accurate. What the result reveals isn't faulty polls but the known respective flaws in US and UK representative democracy.
So correct, deflection is always used by by demagogues as done here with your remark on polls.
3
@Andy
I am not sure I follow you, even though I recognise the flaws of representative democracy. The original comment was about polls. If I remember correctly, prior to the Brexit referendum, the polls fairly regularly revealed near 50%-50% outcomes and the outcome was indeed a close one. The polls were accurate. If one week later a poll was conducted and revealed the same result, would that be the end of it? Or would disbelief and upset prompt another poll a week later, and so on and on. What is the shelf life of a referendum or an election? Up to what date can consumers return the goods they purchased? Had Parliament and the EU come to rapid agreement/resolution within a few months of the referendum, would polls seeking to determine whether voters wanted a redo still be in order?
@The North
Yes it's clear you don't follow.
If we're talking about brexit, we're not speaking in an abstract general case. If you poll on a flub you'll get a flub, which brings one to the question of the flaws of British democracy and more widely society.
So no, I and no person educated in the practise of democracy considers the brexit referendum anything but fundamentally flawed much less what the Tories subsequently made of it. I won't even argue the point of legitimacy, it simply isn't, and you may follow up the question on your own time without the benefit of my input.
Should a second referendum ballot be passed no doubt all parties would take the question seriously and provide a clear choice, unlike Cameron's vetsion. If a clear choice cannot be negotiated then it simply does not exist, and the British will have to manage with a fractious parliament under positions hardened by time.
What a pity and I say best of luck to them.
3
It is sad to see what is happening to the once Great Britain /United Kingdom we grew up in and strongly feel it was Michael Farage at the bottom of it all when he started agitating with his Brexit Party resulting in today's complete and utter chaos. Being as the Referendum result was practically on a knife edge we strongly felt then that a new referendum would have settled the issue once and for all but wiser minds thought not. Boris Johnson's brother left the Conservative Party in dismay at the way things were evolving.
On a more positive note, we can only hope that Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic will eventually become united once again. The days of the Irish Ascendancy no longer hold the sway they once did, people more in tune with today's events and rational thinking leaders realising that a United Ireland is better than the sum of it's parts, able to achieve far more with one voice, a most desired resolution. We hope it will happen. As for Scotland the referendum result was a resounding no to separation, yet to see what Wales decides. All this chaos over there has a very familiar tone here.
4
@Alice Lodge
The vote by the Scots to remain in the UK was partly predicated on UK membership in the EU and partly on the sense that the rest of the U.K. were not mostly bonkers and bigots. Neither of those circumstances still obtain. The next referendum in Scotland will be interesting.
8
@Alice Lodge there is much more support now in Scotland for independance and EU membership.
2
It may look messy, but the UK is working through a real issue, which can still result in a sensible and pragmatic outcome, which does not necessarily mean staying in the EU. On the basis that you cannot fool all the people all the time, Brits have generally been unimpressed by populist extremists and it is the centre ground that generally holds the power. Boris Johnson appears to have entered into an unholy pact with the faux-libertarian tea-party wing of his party to win the leadership and as a result has been forced into an election which is unlikely to produce a majority, and will probably result in another hung Parliament. Ultimately the only way through the conundrum is a pivot to the middle, which Theresa May was on the point of doing when she was removed at the behest of the hardliners. Boris Johnson could have left the EU in January or earlier with a soft Brexit, for which there was a majority in Parliament, possibly with a confirmatory referendum. This probably remains the practical solution. It is hopefully unlikely that either extreme will win the the majority they wish for to impose their ideology on the rest of us. A strong partnership with the EU, on the basis of EU not US regulatory standards, has the potential to be world-beating. Politics are changing in the UK and the government will have to learn to work with Parliament rather than against it, but the result will hopefully be a return to sense and pragmatism.
1
I say this as a convinced Remainer: sometimes, there is no turning the clock back. It is just time to get on, play through your errors and then see how to fix it. We've been leaving psychologically since June 2016; our politics has been all about one subject while EU continues to try to forge a future, with Brexit being only one of many factors. The UK-based EU agencies - the EBA and the medicines agency, have decamped to the Continent. UK appointments in EU agencies have all but ceased.
But more importantly, all our political focus of the last three years has been on getting out. And with Labour unable to take a stand, there is no viable Remain opposition.
A second referendum would settle nothing, just sow years' more discord. Continued stalling tactics, or even a reversal that keeps us in the EU, with leave us as a nightmare EU member, divided against itself, capable of blocking EU initiatives but not actually able to do anything constructive.
So let's take the dive. Get it out of our system, the great catharsis, enjoy our recovered, undiluted, pristine sovereignty, free of the dreaded shackles of Brussels.
Once we get that out of the way, and take a cold hard look at where self-interests really lie, we will enter into a long period of continual negotiations with the EU - 10 years or so, would be my guess - and end up with a Norway-plus like relationship, which we could have had from the start.
I, by the way, am a naturalized Brit, born in the U.S.
5
And I'm rolling my eyes in Paris where tens of thousands of Brits are having their lives up ended by such flippant attitudes. Commenting from Madrid no less...
2
Many Brexiters are so determined to exit the EU that they are deaf to any efforts of rational argument. I was talking with an extremely nice British couple who simply turned aside any objections - the economy? "They're exaggerating the problems." Losing Ireland and Scotland? "We're better off without them anyway." I didn't know them well enough to push it further, but I would have liked to explore their idea of the future beyond the slogans of "not being pushed around."
11
The level of sustained popularity which Boris and the Conservatives manage to retain here in the UK is deeply worrying to all us Brits who can see the reality of what’s happening.
The fact is leaving the EU will be economically harmful, but also harmful in terms of the loss of security, research grants, environmental protection and workers rights, health insurance abroad, and not to mention the loss of EU citizenship rights to live and travel freely across 27 other countries.
In terms of why people voted to Leave and Boris remains popular. It is due to the British media being mostly controlled by offshore oligarchs who want England to become a tax haven. Our population has literally been brainwashed into believing the opposite of the truth, and it continues. Read the headlines of the Daily Mail, Express, Daily Telegraph, the Sun. Parliament is ‘the enemy of the people’ for blocking Brexit. Boris is a hero. The BBC is too neutral to challenge this.
If I think about it for too long I become anxious. Young people like myself will move abroad if this continues (we just need visas now).
Oh and the December election campaign will likely be won through online manipulation, again, led by wealthy donors (plus Russians). Plus, many people are so tired of hearing about Brexit, they unquestionably want to “Get Brexit done” (Boris’ slogan).
Friends used to wonder if Trump or Brexit was worse. It seems Brexit - there is no obvious equivalent of impeachment for this complex long con.
17
@Alice B it seems we are living the same nightmare, except I'm in the US with the djt abomination. But our situations are so similar - the propaganda, the lies, the anger, the Putin meddling.
At least in the UK you can have an election without waiting 4 long years.
Impeaching djt may happen, but the Senate will never remove him. We have to wait until Nov. 2020 for that resolution.
1
Mr Kristof appears puzzled why a free people would reject subordinating themselves to an all-encompassing nanny state known as the EU.
The benefits are nice, of course, but in the final analysis for many voters it all comes down to a desire for individual liberty.
Democrats and ‘progressives’ simply do not understand that.
1
@EGD
Then why on earth did they join in the first place?
My ancestors left for North America in the 17th and 18th Centuries, on my mother's side from Antrim County, Ireland. This is a brilliant essay. Perfect in style and content.
1
The referendum was flawed, and I agree with you Mr. Kristof that Russian interference was likely responsible for the thin margin that prevailed in Brexit's favor.
However, the key point is that a referendum WAS held. In my native state of Kashmir, we were promised one as well over 70 years ago; by Britain and India and the UN and pretty much the entire world. Fast forward to 2019, since August 5 this year, Kashmir has instead been converted into a giant prison where 8 million humans have been imprisoned in their own homes and their basic freedoms like the press, internet, landlines and cellphones taken away and the world is largely mum.
There's talk of needing another referendum in the UK. I agree, it is vital to its preservation as a great nation.
Can you please, Mr. Kristof, also use your good offices and the power of your pen to also fight for the restoration of the basic rights of Kashmiris? We too would love an independently monitored and administered plebiscite, if only the world would spare a little time to focus on us...
8
Northern Ireland has been the single greatest problem in the non-implementation of the referendum results over the past three years. The outsized influence of the DUP after May's disastrous decision to hold an election held the rest of the UK hostage. If Brexit does indeed lead to a united Ireland my opinion is that the rest of the UK would be far better off without it - regardless of whether or not they stay in the EU.
4
It's o.k., Nicholas. Brexit is a small price to pay for getting the Brits out of N.I. Scotland can join the EEA as an independent nation where they can thrive until such time as England comes back to its senses.
4
I have spent some time in England, Scotland and Ireland. When I am in Scotland and Ireland I endear myself to everyone I meet by criticizing he English. Their smiles could not be any broader. These cultures are very distinct and there is no stronger force than culture. The "United" in the United Kingdom has always been tenuous.
9
The preeminent issue in Irish politics and consciousness since 1922 and limited independence has been the partition imposed on the island. But so dramatic has membership of the EU impacted the island - no borders, free movement, access to Europe-wide health care, access to universities in all 28 member states, massive EU-funding for infrastructure, universities, Peace initiatives - visit NI, signs everywhere funded by the EU - that the division of the island hardly features anymore in the national discourse. Unionists, Nationalists can go their own way, have Irish or UK passports, regard themselves as Irish, Brits, European. This is the immense miracle that is the EU - the most immense peace project in the history of the world.
I am confident Brexit will be aborted - not least because of the immense accomplishment of Irish diplomats, politicians. And Nancy Pelosi who addressing the Irish parliament rubbished the notion of any "bigly" trade deal which damages the Good Friday Agreement.
The immense solidarity of the 26 Remain EU states with Ireland - despite immense economic costs to some countries - totally rubbished the notion that the Germany behemoth id the control center of the EU. This immense solidarity is a seminal event in EU history.
5
I think the SNP's sense of urgency is far more likely to be driven by the fact that current levels of spending by the Scottish Govt. are unsustainable at the current rates of taxation and the SNP know all too well that putting income tax up and/or cutting state spending this side of a referendum would not be a vote winner. They know a fiscal crunch is coming soon and so they want to hold a second referendum before it does.
The other thought I had was that, while I think you are correct to say that the EU does not want to encourage regional separatist movements, I think it would be very difficult indeed for the EU to say to Scotland: "The UK left the EU, you in response left the UK, but you can't come back in.". Spain is not about to leave the EU and many Scots voted "No" in their independence referendum because they were told staying in the UK was the surest way of keeping Scotland in the EU (haha).
2
It is more than a bit specious to claim that the SNP want the balloting over before the Alex Salmond case goes to court. On what, precisely, did you base that? The SNP had zero influence on when the General Election is to be held, because the SNP - and all the other Scottish, or quasi-Scottish parties sitting in Westminster, have pretty much zero influence over anything that does not exclusively have to do with Scotland. And THAT is why the SNP wants the balloting over: so that the UK government, whichever flavor it turns out to be, will finally get the message that we are serious about taking our destiny into our own hands and have the right to do so.
5
How odd that Nicholas studiously recounts all the economic forecasts on what the Brexit may create without one syllable about the explosion of knifings, sex crimes and prostitution in Britain anf throughout Scandinavia. Thank goodness he's not biased, huh?
The people who always felt part of Britain have to stand quietly by and allow total unknowns shipped into their neighborhoods by the lords of power and majesty in the European Union.
At least many on the continent were able to purchase guns for protection. Go visit what we used to call London to see how quickly a great city can revert to a collection of third-world danger zones the police can't even enter.
But the other countries of Europe without so many uninvited guests are seeing all the British people they want asking for permission to join their countries instead.
@L osservatore
Perhaps if Britain had not colonized all of those third world countries full of brown people, I would have some sympathy for your position. As it is, the payoff of a possible United Ireland is alone worth the economic and political self immolation of the U.K.
1
I live in London and nothing could be further from the truth than this post, perhaps they have been drinking from the Kool Aid fountain at Trump Tower?
1
Interesting to see how the comments circle around the idea that GB and the USA are loosing their place as the center of the democratic world. Europe remains an extraordinary group of democratic nations absorbing people completely outside its languages, race, beliefs and traditions. We have big problems but we are not tearing ourselves apart as the Brits and Ricans are doing.
7
@Jo Ann - - Congratulations on living in one part of the democratic West that trusts its citizens to own and maintain firearms.
Perhaps we will airlift some of our extraneous Ivy-League graduates boiling over in anger at the nerve of American voters to come fill open positions in Switzerland.
(But we won't act like Brussels and force you to accept them.)
To be clear I wouldn't have voted for Brexit and was a little surprised by the result, but as I don't live in the UK has no impact on me.
You make a number of points, all possible I guess. Except you ignore a few things. Brexit won the referendum. In the subsequent election both major parties promised it and their combined support increased. Then in the recent EU elections, the largest party overall is now the Brexit party. That all indicates fairly strong support for Brexit.
While England maybe be little it has 84% of the population of Great Britain, making it seem rather popular compared to the provinces.
Not long ago the independence vote in Scotland lost by a wide margin. Sturgeon herself is not dis-similar to Corbyn in outlook and would certainly have her eyes on EU welfare.
The EU meanwhile is a bit of a problem. The Southern states are moribund, the EU has negative interest rates and France is mostly held up by Germany. Northern EU gets the currency benefit at the expense of the Southern states. In most countries un-employment is stubbornly high.
Besides which there are many countries on the planet that aren't in the EU and seem to do OK.
So I'm not sure that the UK will fall on its knees should it end up leaving. Although I'm much surer that the election will not resolve anything much anyway.
So far as economic catastrophe, I recall the same people and more, said even the brexit vote would bring on a recession. It didn't.
5
@Paul The largest party overall may have been the Brexit party - in England. In Scotland, it was the SNP. And Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU, while one of the main scare tactics of the anti-independence movement in 2014 was that if Scotland left the UK, it would not be allowed to join the EU - along with several other lies. As the wool is being slowly pulled off the eyes of Scots, support for independence is growing day by day. It will happen.
7
This kind of reasonable sounding misinformation is exactly what has convinced a badly educated UK population that the source of their woes is the EU. it is, of course, a load of codswallop.
1
My family is still mostly in Ireland. We don't want a united Ireland, tyvm. Britain created it - let them deal with it.
The population in the South is about 5 million. We are getting along nicely. Despite perceptions, we are not vehemently Catholic - recent nationwide referendums approved same-sex marriage and abortion.
The pop in the North is about 2 million, roughly split 50/50 between (this isn't a religious war) Unionists (Brit-favorers, in favor of the UK union) and nationalists (in favor if being Irish).
If you united the two, Ireland would go to 7m people from 5, and 1 million of those would be people who despise Ireland.
That won't work. The north, with its dismal economy, is Britain's problem.
9
@Alex
If they despise Ireland, why do they live there. Sovereign England awaits them, I’m sure.
This story takes as a given that Corbyn would ruin his country.
It also takes as a given the bromides of the wealthy Tories in the "The Nasty Party" that the only future for their country is to suffer the predations of their own wealthy elite.
Britain has a long history of corrupt elites staying wealthy by preying on others. Ralph the Wrecker did not work alone. He got that pardon because he was well connected. The cargo of those wrecked ships had to be brought ashore, stored, kept hidden, and then moved into trade for sale. There were aristocrats behind that, and they got much of the money.
Maybe the hysteria of their wealthy elite can fend off Corbyn's efforts to help Labour even as they take the rest of what they have not destroyed. There is no reason to accept here the version they tell there. That is believing Boris, and we know that is wrong, and deny doing it even while doing it in this way.
6
Starting out with a nostalgia-fest does not help. Brexit supporters want a return to some mythical past that includes the swinging sixties (or part of it), Enid Blyton (and her casual racism) and a combination of Miss Marple and Downton Abbey. This has never existed and never will,
Johnson is an erudite barbarian, he will do whatever it takes to get and maintain power,
One .thing that is missing from the analysis in the article is the English perspective. Polls suggest that Brexit supporters would be happy for the uk to be broken up if they get Brexit. It is a short step from there to England deciding to break up the union and rid itself of the troublesome Scots (and their legal system) and the Welsh who are not generally Conservative supporters. This would greatly enhance the chances of Johnson staying in power.
5
1) The Famous Five by Enid Blyton
oh....those are sweet memories.
Thank you, Mr Kristof.
2) I have come around to thinking exiting the EU doesn't have to be the end of the world. One of the good things isolation does is foster individuality. In Australia, we do not have many mass coffee and restaurant chains because people like their 'local' hangs. The strength of local hangs meant Starbucks had to close two thirds of their locations. Independent spirit and all. Britain can look at this in the same way. Little England could be glorious. Quaint and unique. Special. In a lovely way.
15
I don' like cheap shots. Kristoff makes the case why Johnson isn't fit to be PM. Fine, and I happen to agree. But then he says the same about Corbyn. Why? I'm sure a case can be made, but without explanation it's a cheap shot.
4
Corbyn is an anti-Semite whose economic views will sink the UK even farther down into the fiscal abyss.
Brexit is a serious threat to the United Kingdom's power and prestige. It is no freedom from Euro control. It will shut down trade markets for Britain and arouse feelings of hostility among citizens of the traditional kingdom.
Like most Americans, the English are not well educated on the consequences of decisions they make at the ballot box. They wear their Union Jack version of Mega hats not realizing foreign powers are working to diminish them.
18
@Jose moreno
Yup. And when whatever is left of the U.K. tries to negotiate trade deals with the EU, they will find that those pesky restrictions on the content and production of whatever they try to export to the EU remain in place. And the French, Scottish, and Irish contingent of the EU is not to just sit by while newly sovereign England tries to encroach on fishing grounds. It will get ugly, and England will lose.
1
Seems like there are some commonalities we share with Great Britain these days. We are both being led by men determined to turn their countries in on themselves. The shared insular tendencies of both men may end up producing a "little England" while on the other side of the pond our man seems determined to steal a name from Richard E. Byrd. Welcome to Little America.
7
What really galls a lot of the Remain side is that the government billed the Brexit referendum as "non-binding" and "advisory." For that reason, a lot of people who would have voted "remain" ignored it, while the Leave side actively got out the vote.
Yet once they won this "non-binding" referendum, they treated it as an unbreakable mandate. This is in spite of massive anti-Brexit demonstrations around the country.
One British friend suggest that the whole Brexit campaign was prompted by the prospect of the EU instituting new restrictions on overseas financial holdings.
15
Will Great Britain Become Little England? Yes, most certainly. Their colonies are gone, their Navy is small and their economy is soft. England is a financial center, not a manufacturing hub or technology center.
The service sector of the economy as a whole is now the largest in England, with manufacturing and primary industries in decline. The only major secondary industry that is growing is the construction industry, fueled by economic growth provided mainly by the growing services, administrative and financial sector. There is not much to crow about.
8
@DENOTE REDMOND
But they can become an offshore tax haven. It won’t help average Englanders, but the elites will do just fine.
Dear Mr. D. Redmond,
"Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;".
There will always be an England, if not a Great Britain.
"the sea's proud daughter...".
Thank you, England,
of some of my forbears,
most truly,
Woff
1
@DENOTE REDMOND It is a technology center.
Mr. Kristof. Thank you.
This has all to do with Brexit. With the exception of his back and forth trips to Brussels, Mr. Johnson doesn't say much on the subject. It is unclear whether a referendum will be held together with the Dec elections. Possibly, there are many in England who are not in favor of a Brexit.
As Mr. Kristof opines here, England tends to lose, pulling out of the EU. If Great Britain, as we call them, were to lose Ireland, Scotland and Wales, that would surely result in a Little England. The British becoming isolated, may not even have the need for a Commonwealth Office in London. Populists have everything to promise. All done to stay in power and gain power. They have very little or no love or interest in the people and country.
6
The UK and the US, and perhaps Western democracy in toto, are going the way of Rome. It's the life cycle of cultures and civilizations. We're in the waning phase, a time of increasing chaos and dissolving of institutions and political behavioral norms and mores. We no longer have internal cohesion, a common commitment, and authentic, healthy patriotism.
That Boris and Trump were expressed by the two societies is a direct result of Reagan/Thatcherism, which fostered anti-government cynicism and mistrust, engaged in fearmongering demagoguery about "the other," unleashed the dogs of greed and kleptocracy by reckless deregulation, and in general sabotaged good government. It was a philosophical bludgeon where a regulatory scalpel perhaps was called for, manipulated by plutocrats and power grabbers.
A major aggravant is the exponentially accelerating power of information technology. Democracy has not solved the dilemma of needing to regulate it to keep nefarious actors from abusing it without repressing freedom of expression. I'm not sure it can, and it surely seems it won't before the technology is greatly empowering authoritarian and totalitarian forces, both within the public sector and the private sector, and both within the two countries and among other nations of the world. What we see in China's repression of the Uighurs and in Russia's manipulation of politics in the UK and the US may foretell the future of the rest of the 21st century. And meanwhile, the world burns...
22
It's very interesting that Mr. Kristof has brought the issues of the breakup of the UK and Brexit together in the same piece. I wonder how many of the people in Wales and Scotland who have never liked English domination also wanted Brexit. Certainly the young are split on this issue. Most of the sentiment that you refer to is really for English culture, not UK culture though. Nevertheless, thank you for bringing Enid Blyton into your piece.
3
@Clovis Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU. My impressions, from reading a great deal about the matter and talking to my neighbours, friends, hairdressers, taxi drivers, etc., etc., is that a minor percentage of Scots who are pro-independence are also anti-EU. However, they also know that independence is the most important thing - after all, before an independent Scotland can join the EU, the matter would have to be put to the people, and they can have their say on that matter at that time. Lacking independence, we have no say either way. To Boris and the rest of the English, we are nothing more than an irritating gadfly up here in the north, and I think they will be sad to lose our money (and electricity, and water, and oil) but otherwise happy to be rid of us.
2
Mr. Kristof, Great Britain has not been great for a very very long time and probably never will be again. Its time passed long ago.
As for elections, the only thing worse than Mr. Johnson is Mr. Corbyn and Labour.
3
Hopefully elites in both the UK and the US will start to wake up and realize that if immigration isn't handled properly, the country becomes a political basket case. Those who don't listen to ballots end up listening to bullets.
2
“Will Great Britain Become Little England?”
It already has. England historically was a small nation poor in resources despite being rich in language. It climbed out of poverty for a time because of seafaring skills, technology and science(to a large extent acquired from Scotland) and coal (much of it from Wales), which made industrialization possible. Colonialism also helped with cheap labor, natural resources, and sometimes cannon fodder. Now all that has been expended, obsolesced, and superseded. The choice to go it alone can only lead to insignificance.
Despite their transgressions, they have more often than not been a positive force. Sad to see good friends destroy themselves.
12
“The U.K. is headed for a new election on Dec. 12, at a time when both its major parties are headed by people who should never be trusted anywhere near Downing Street.”
At least in the UK, both parties are committed to the National Health Service and in many respects divisions outside of Brexit are not nearly like they are in the the U.S. The leader of the Tories at least recognizes that climate change is a fact and should be reduced.
In the USA, we should not be too critical of the Johnson-Corbyn debacle but instead see the horror show ahead if Trump is re-elected.
8
Regarding the Scotland England split, the Catalonia analogy is irrelevant. Scotland and England were two sovereign nations that formed a political union in a treaty of union in1707. That union can be dissolved. Scotland has been informed that the welcome mat would be out. The Scottish economy has been participating in the European economy since the early Middle Ages as Scottish merchants traded into the Baltic Sea, the Low Countries and France. Ties with France were especially deep.
32
Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain (the island consisting of Wales, Scotland and England). However, it is part of the United Kingdom ('The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland', to give it its full moniker). Using the term 'United Kingdom' (or: 'U.K.' or 'UK' for short) also ensures that the thousands of islands around the coast of the island of Great Britain don't get left out.
10
If Brexit occurs and Scotland and Northern Ireland were independent of Britain, England would be like a bigger, rainier Lichtenstein. And about as relevant.
15
Same national anthem, too!
When Denmark joined the European Union the semi-autonomous part of Denmark, Greenland decided to not become part of the Europeans Union.
By the same token, when the semi-autonomous regions of the U.K., Northern Ireland and Scotland, voted to stay in the European Union that should be respected. Just because there are more English people than Norther Irish or Scottish that does not mean that they should be overruled - on the contrary, their wishes should be respected.
There is much discussion about the Irish backstop, but I have yet to hear anybody suggesting that the Northern Irish people to be asked - so far the only ones who have been asked are the Oranges, and they don't really represent the Northern Irish people.
18
It seems to me the ballot that should be held is on the single question of whether to leave the EU under the terms of the latest agreement, or remain.
It’s clear that despite Johnson’s Trumpian bloviating, the UK has no bargaining power to get a better deal.
So, put it to a vote.
6
Why can't England do what Norway did - stay indie but with no taxes for trade with the EU - a kind of NAFTA? I don't get why that can't be the compromise solution?
2
@roger
Well, Norway still plays by most of the rules of the EU. Those rules are the sticking point in England, and the EU won’t relax them just to get second rate trade deals with a third rate economy.
It's a conflict between increased wish for nationalism / independence and a reality of economic integration with the world. Supporters of both sides see themselves as correct and can't find a middle ground. Nationalism /extremism = poorer. More economic integrations = less nationalism so to speak as perceived.
But this aim for nationalism may end up become a great hype of nationalism for a little England in the end. If that's the risk, it may be a lose lose scenario.
5
@B Nguyen
The irony being that Scottish Nationalist want to remain in Europe.
1
The Empire was always English, not British, so this is a continued collapse. As for the appeal of Boris - well, narratives are powerful things and the idiosyncratic Englishman is an archetype. Downton Abbey has done for the English psyche what "Dallas" did for America: legitimized the ruling class. Then, as you point out, as in USA, there is no effective opposition to demagogues. This is because we are transforming into a new politics of open v closed societies and the opposition to closed society, masquerading as the protection of a great society, is not yet fully formed. Interesting times.
5
@chris Actaully as just about everyone knows the Empire was Scottish . . .
Mr. Kristof, with all due respect, your article does not take into account the historical facts that the effort of forcing a United Kingdom in Northern Ireland included denial of voting rights in local elections to people who didn't hold property, i.e. Catholics of native Irish descent. This ensured that the Unionist minority controlled the government. This is why there were so many civil rights marches in Northern Ireland in the late 1960's and early 1970's, in part inspired by the American civil rights marches of that era. People died peacefully protesting for their basic civil rights in Northern Ireland, and politicians of all sides were under threat.
There is no operational assembly in Northern Ireland now for 2 years, civil servants are making decisions with no political governance. To say that the loss of the UK is to somehow lose a 'stable democracy' is to ignore these facts and that it has only existed as such in Northern Ireland for perhaps 15 years under the Good Friday Agreement.
Brexit is not to be confused with arguments for or against Irish unity. However, let's not pretend that 'stable democracy' exists throughout the UK. Furthermore, social inequality is a problem in the UK which is a factor driving Brexit. The referendum didn't really get into the effects it would have on the union if the countries within it had differing voting results. It ignored the work done on devolution of government.
19
It is interesting how the shattering of the UK mirrors in so many ways the shattering of unity in our American union and that nationalism which is meant to bring the US and the UK together would shatter us into warring tribes . we live in a shrinking world that demands cooperation with neighbors and if people like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump denies this need we only become smaller and out of touch not greater.
10
Little England? -- If my memory serves me right, President John Kennedy was quotated as saying, "England is only a small island". Indeed, Britannia no longer rules the seas, and its leftist Labour governments have been restricting and undermining its social backbone -- the hereditary peerage.
4
@Tuvw Xyz Leftist, Labour governments? Have you sort of forgotten that the UK has been largely under Tory rule since 1965, other than eight years since 1997? As for the hereditary peerage being the social backbone of the country, I am choking too hard with laughter to respond.
Madison was right. Representative democracy is better than direct democracy. Unfortunately David Cameron decided to take this momentous decision away from Parliament and give it to the people through a plebiscite. Huge mistake. We (and Britain) have representatives for a reason. They have the time, resources, and expertise (or at least the access to expertise) to research issues and debate them thoroughly before choosing. Voters act on impulse, often with limited information and an excess of emotion. Democracy is a good idea. Just don't take it too far.
11
@617to416 If voters are not capable of making well-considered decisions as for political affairs, what enables them to choose politically qualified representatives?
And don't forget: Trump was not chosen by the voters but by representatives, the electors of the Electoral College.
Great piece Nicholas, the one thing it misses is fulfilling a direct Putin objective - weakening Nato. A UK out of the EU will almost certainly prompt Scotland to leave the UK which then puts Scottish naval facilities and UK military capabilities in question. Even British Intelligence capabilities will be impacted. At a minimum there will be period of uncertainty and transition that gives Putin/Russia a window of opportunity,
On a separate note - thanks for all that you do, keep up the great work.
9
Having arrived here 12 years ago from the US it soon dawned on me that the Scots and the Welsh largely dislike the English and the English reciprocate with disdain. They still feel they are separate nations. This is despite the union with the Scots more than three centuries ago and the annexation of Wales almost five centuries ago. Being “British” doesn’t mean so much.
As for Northern Ireland, wouldn’t it be better to reunite all of Ireland? Sure, the hard-line bigots among the Protestants of Northern Ireland would be enraged, but they are a dwindling relic and still viewed as occupiers by many Irish.
Brexit will economically devastate those who most ardently desire it, just as tRump is devastating the regions that support him. Brexit, a childish fantasy like MAGA, seems to be the spark that will make the incongruous Union disintegrate into little bits that will be insignificant on the world stage forever after.
39
Without an empire to exploit, what is the British ruling class going to do? It's already pretty much ruined the rest of British society. I used to think there would always be an England; now I'm scared to see what comes next.
9
I think about Europe's history of deadly, catastrophic wars. I think about the hope that a European Union might bind the region together to prevent future wars.
Then I shake my head at this movement to tear the European Union apart.
Who would gain from a fractured, weaker Europe? Putin? Certainly not the Europeans.
41
I left the UK 30 years ago and am absolutely amazed that the Tory party has majority support for anything. Their austerity policies created the economic conditions that they then multiplied with racist pro Brexit rhetoric. Post Brexit UK will become a tax dodgers haven to the EU, where appropriate regulation of the worst actors in society will cease and inequality will surge.
16
@Tobergill I left the UK 35 years ago and like you I find it hard to fathom how the Tory party manages to maintain majority support after all of the economic and social destruction their policies have caused since I left. I worry that my family and friends who still live in England are going to go through a very rough patch over the next decade or so.
7
London has a "Lord North" street, commemorating the "great man" who lost most of British North America.
6
@Jonathan Katz It's only about one block long. Perhaps a reflection of how well he was regarded.
4
Nicholas, you replied to one reader on how you are mystified why Boris Johnson continues to do so well in the polls. It made me think of Trump. Now, Donald's poll numbers overall remain relatively low. Yet, he has total psychological control over his rabid MAGA followers, and he has his cowardly and spineless congressional Republicans scared to death of him. What gives? Then we cross The Pond and witness the Boris factor. Again what gives? And this question is directed to the people of England itself. Not to put us down, but I will anyway, I have always perceived our family in England to be the grown-ups, more mature, smarter, and certainly more rational and sensible. Are the planets out of alignment? Is it the nativism and bigotry which plagues both nations, which became exacerbated with the influx of Middle Eastern refugees? I have to think and wonder about that other wickedly smart person who aspires to take over the world. His name, of course, is Putin. I have to say that if all roads lead back to this guy in Russia he is winning.
77
We can see a similar development elsewhere in Europe, too. This is no doubt stoked by Putin (and others), but I think we must be prepared to accept that the much (and unfairly) maligned globalization is also a victim of its own success. The rest of the world is catching up, and catching up fast. At the same time in the developed countries we see a flow towards the big cities, which depletes more remote regions and means a reduction in services and shops etc. My guess is that what is required is a concerted effort at regional policies to help such regions get back on their feet.
6
@Kathy Lollock
What a thoughtful comment. As for what gives with Johnson and Trump - I think that with both men, their political success has less to do with how voters feel about them and more to do with how those men make voters feel about themselves. And what they make voters feel is safe and proud, largely through xenophobia. It is deeply cynical and manipulative, but I think that we, as the opposition to such figures and their movements, would do well to speak to voters along those lines, but in an honest and responsible way.
And yes Putin, far more clever than Trump or Johnson, is winning. He is helping to fracture alliances and weaken competitor nations.
Thanks for what you wrote. Take care.
17
@NM “...and more to do with how those men make voters feel about themselves.” Keen insight, NM. T and J are willful and deliberate reflections of too many’s lesser angels, sadly the dark sides of all beings.
3
Such a timely and important exhortation by Nicholas Kristof. It is tragic that our traditionally moderate country's future is juxtapositioned between a right wing nationalist party keen to turn us into an offshore tax haven - and a far left party keen to turn us into a Marxist state. The Leave campaign lied blatantly about the 'Brexit dividend'. There have been no consequences. There is very little doubt that Russia interfered with the 2016 referendum. Boris Johnson's government appears to be blocking the release of the report by the Intelligence Committee on this subject. I wonder why?
There is, however, hope in the form of a re-energised Lib Dem party, which is unambiguously pro-remain - and therefore well placed to act as kingmaker and moderator. Let us pray that our country will step back from the precipice.
5
The problem is encapsulated in the mantra “Brexit means Brexit” which is so misleading because when the vote was taken, nobody knew what Brexit would mean. Brexit does not mean what people thought it meant, and now that there is more clarity there should be a chance for the lemmings to reevaluate their current course.
17
This is the global version of elites who tsk tsk over residents of the US heartland “voting against their self interest.” Johnson and conservatives will win in the election, Brexit will happen, and the world will keep spinning. England’s economy may even rebound, to the supreme disappointment of the mandarins who know - KNOW! - that Brexit will be a disaster
Good luck with that. Be sure to submit a note in 3 years when the NHS is rubble, the over rated pound has crashed to earth, banking has moved to Frankfurt and Paris, real estate has cratered in London causing values and equity to plummet throughout the country, and the captive countries that were compelled to be part of “great” Britain have moved on. I lived in England for 10 years, having left a year after the Brexit referendum, and I have listened to deluded visions of the greatness that will follow Brexit for quite some time now. As I said, talk to me in 3 years.
41
A few years ago I was driving through Bosnia, and as we went through town after town where the only obvious industry was a scrap car dump, I remarked to my driving companion, that Bosnia was forever going to be an economic backwater. It will never create a Google, a Facebook, a twitter. It’s too small.
Being British by birth, it pains me no end that we seem to be witnessing the Balkanization of the UK.
Economically - it will be a catastrophe, for them, and the world
...but Russia , and its puppet Trump, will love it.
34
@Allan B In my opinion, if the UK breaks up and Northern Ireland is reunified with the Republic of Ireland, it won't be so much of a Balkanization of anything but rather making an island whole again. I would hope that this could be done with much thought and care and peacefully.
4
@Allan B I think if Northern Ireland is to secede from the UK peacefully and join the Republic of Ireland and the EU, then that could be a boon for Northern Ireland. It could cease to be the backwater that it is today. In my opinion, it is just so silly that Northern Ireland is a part of the UK. It is obviously a part of another island entirely.
2
I'm afraid the English will get what they deserve if they choose Boris, just as we will get what we deserve if we reelect Trump. The difference is that we are much larger and richer with enviable natural resources. We can probably survive Trump and his policies. The UK, or a dismembered UK, sans the EU will only thrive if we rush to their side. The UK should look at Trump's abandonment of the Kurds and the current impeachment issue with Ukraine. What will be the quid pro quo for little England?
14
Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers helped create the Brexit debacle in the UK (while his US media interests helped elect an older, oranger and less intelligent version of Johnson here). Lies favoring the Leave side were rampant.
If the UK crumbles, it will not be simply from a lack of moral leadership and voter discernment. It will be because of paid propaganda supplied by commercial/social mass media. “Free speech” has become an excuse for greed or for a CEO’s wish to “Just lemme do what I wanna do.”
7
I kind of wish Pitt has just given us seats in Parliament. The world would be a better place.
1
It will surprise many if it only lasts a decade, but maybe they won't be much surprised if it manages merely 15 more years
1
Hey media, news flash: The Brits are never leaving the EU!
You know what is really baffling? The media actually still thinks that Great Britain is going to follow through on Brexit. British voters passed the Brexit referendum in the Summer of 2016, and today, they are no closer to leaving the EU than they were before that vote. The reason is simple, there is no Brexit formulation that will not be disastrous for Great Britain, and a majority of British lawmakers are unwilling to vote for such a disaster.
Brexit has been one of the greatest non-story stories of all time, a true nothing burger.
5
I think you misunderstand the entity you call Great Britain. It is really England with minuscule appendages, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Together their populations and wealth are not much more than 10% of the whole. England is the big dog and the United Kingdom is a smoke screen over their dominance. The Irish and the Scots had to be starved and slaughtered into submission. What is now the Irish Republic fought to leave and are now happily prospering in the EU. Scotland should do the same and despite what you say about not encouraging separations I think the EU would embrace them-one of the basic EU tenets is helping small countries. As to the English, maybe they will eventually shed their superiority complex and archaic class distinctions and rejoin the EU enthusiastically. As De Gaulle saw many years ago the English still think the "Sceptered Isle" is superior; that's the real source of their "one leg in, one leg out" relationship with the EU.
26
Since I was 25 yrs old (53 now) I've been researching how and why modern democracy was failing and drifting into dysfunction, particularly in the US but also in Canada and Britain to lesser extents. (Much lesser extent in Canada it has turned out so far.)
Nothing I read or heard suggested anythign as absurd and malignant as what's happening in the US would happen, but it was clear the ship was going to hit the rocks somehow. The system's feedback loop was short circuited with the notion that every problem in the world can be reduced to a PR problem and dealth with and dismissed that way. The system hasn't been working for more and more people for a long time now, for complex and myriad reasons. I think to a large extent this is what's happening in Britain too, the system hasn't been working for a critical mass of people.
Essentially they, like their American counterparts, can see only a choice between a party that won't even acknowledge their concerns (the left) and a party that talks fo their concerns and pushes simplistic, wrong, demented, self-serving solutions (the right). They're gong with the one that pretends to listen.
I hope they turn it around too.
5
I have no sentimentality for Great Britain or its United Kingdom. The irony of Brexit is the longing of its proponents to return to the days of an economic and militarily powerful Britain for Britons with full and autonomous control of its borders and its destiny. And how did that Britain achieve and maintain that power? By systematically conquering and subjugating indigenous peoples all over the world to build an empire on which the sun never set. Now the shoe is on the other foot, with Britain having been "invaded" by foreigners and having surrendered its autonomy to a more powerful empire in the EU. So, I say let Britain withdraw into its shell, and see how great it can be without the ability to dominate and colonize half of the world. Maybe that will serve as a warning to an America that is next in line for its own day of reckoning.
15
Oh, if the shoe of that messenger’s horse’s had been in want of a nail.
Stuff happens, Nicholas. As with the stock market, there’s not a teleology to history. Nations rise, rule, and fade. And new ones arise. Egypt, FWIW, was dominant for three thousand years. You can hold on to the UK of the Empire, or alternately, to the Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. Better check quickly if the cakes got burnt.
2
Boris Johnson won the leave vote due to his outrageous lies. At the core was the NHS. Brits love the NHS. Free treatment, free GP visits, free operations, free drugs, etc, with no deductable & no co-pays.
Boris famously claimed that the UK could spend £350 million a WEEK on the NHS, funded purely by money saved from not paying EU subs. Outrageous claims for GDP growth, free trade deals & the sudden ability to somehow sell stuff to the test of the world were repeatedly made by Johnson & his cronies.
That, allied to racism, sealed the deal. Ironically, the areas that voted leave were amongst those with the lowest number of immigrants.
So we've ended up with a god awful deal from Boris, that bears no resemblance to what people thought they were getting. For that reason alone, a 2nd referendum - presented as a confirmationary ballot - is absolutely essential.
I think the break-up of the UK is unlikely to happen. Northern Ireland would be a war zone if they were subsumed into Ireland. The Scots economy is simply too small to support independence, whilst Wales are clinging onto England as they realise the Welsh economy is the smallest and worst in the UK.
Having said this, there appear to be many, many voters who decide to believe everything they are told, as long as it supports their beliefs."Alternative facts", if you like.
As a Welshman, I'm ashamed Wales voted to leave, I'm praying for a second referendum & I hope England don't apply to leave Wales!
8
@Dean The Scottish Economy provides the UK Exchequer with more revenue that in receives from Westminster to the devoted Scottish Government.
Scotland has the Oil and Gas Fields within its territorial waters. Hydro Electric and Wind Generated power. Is self sufficient in renewable energy - wind and hydro produce. Whisky is the largest export of the UK but is registered as a revenue through London.
Ee have the most highly educated population in Europe according to the OECD. Our residents do not pay University like most EU Countries the EU Parliament is on record as being welcome to Scotland's return to the EU. Spain has raised no objection to an Independent Scotland despite what Kristof implies. Evidence that he is not fully conversant with the relevant facts regarding Scotland taus. Scotland has more resources than Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, Ireland and Croatia all successful members of the EU with similar size of population.
H could keep on all day and night with relevant facts that support the case for a successful indecent Scotland within the EU. You will not find them is such a opinion piece by Mr. Kristoff.
Cheers
Umiliviniq
2
As a Scot living in London in 2014 I joined an anti-Independence rally in Trafalgar. I waved a Union Jack.
After three years of Conservative Party lies and failure, I am coming round to Scottish independence as the way forward for Scotland as an independent member of the EU (which would welcome Scotland). Just look at how the EU has defended Irish sovereignty.
Oh, and Spain isn’t trying to take Catalonia out of the EU against its will, so that argument doesn’t stack. The EU will welcome us back as rejoining citizens.
14
I entirely agree about Scottish EU membership. Scotland is being dragged out of the EU against its will. The EU will I believe fast track the membership application of a former member that already meets all the requirements for membership.
15
@JohnR -- Lots of changes in store. For EU member Scotland, the Euro, not the pound sterling, north of Gretna Green. That will be fun. And for ex-Britain, loss of the UN security-council seat -- eighty years ago, as a consolation for abandoning an empire, that seat made sense... but now that the UK is, at best, Belgium with nuclear weapons? Poor England, a shrivelled raisin pretending that she is still a grape.
5
Boris Johnson must not have given much thought to where he is going to find the money to continue operating a Great Britannia-sized fleet and military based with a solely English tax base, and without North Sea oil revenue. Is he ready to be head of a third- rate military power, with the concomitant loss of prestige and influence? He apparently has not paid attention to has been happening in Catalonia. Following that autonomic government’s unilateral, unconstitutional/illegal declaration of independence, over 4,000 corporate headquarters have moved from - including all of its major banks. The reasons are obvious: the majority of their customers are in Spain and the EU. From outside the E.U., they would have faced untenable competitive disadvantages against their competitors remaining in the E.U. Another reason was distrust that any newly established government that did not respect or observe established legal norms before becoming independent, would all of a sudden become respectful and observant of legal norms; if it ever became independent. Catalonia’s population is about 7 million people. There’s no reason to expect that a corporate exodus following Brexit without a negotiated trade agreement would not be concomitantly much larger than Catalonia’s.
4
It is a very interesting question. If politicians lie, does that make election results- or indeed referendum results - invalid? It strikes me that would be a tough bar for most elections to beat! I voted ‘remain’. I don’t agree with those who oppose free movement. I think that EU membership has on balance been a boon for the U.K. Nevertheless I do not dispute that the majority of my countrymen voted to leave. I don’t think they did this because of Russia. I don’t really think they did it from a rational assessment of arguments put forward by politicians. I have no idea how a 2nd referendum would go, and indeed what might follow say a small 52-48 vote the other way! I am not sure it would help. I think the whole issue has become blown out of proportion by articles like this. If the Conservatives won the election, I think we should pass their deal and take the consequences- even if I don’t agree with the reasoning of many. That is how democracy works. If that leads to changes in Northern Ireland or Scotland, so be it. I would hope those decisions would also be democratic. Nothing is pre-determined anyway. Your assumptions of economic decline and recrimination may not in fact be accurate- even though I admit they are widespread. I just don’t think it is as dramatic or epochal a decision as most commentators.
6
A good post. But the decision to leave the EU is an epoch defining one even if you do not think so. Name one other economic power that has deliberately sundered all its closest trading relationships and exited all its free trade agreements? The UK is essentially going back to the pre-1973 economic world, prior to its joining the then EEC. But that works lies nearly 50 years in the past and no longer exists. It was a world of considerable tariff and non-tariff barriers, it was also a world of great and expensive trade bureaucracy which is now being unnecessarily imposed on UK businesses. Watch the exodus of businesses who will want to be closer to they trading partners. Watch the fall in inward investment.
There are no discernible upsides today Brexit. Only downsides. Optimism for one’s nation is a good thing but it must surely be founded on a rational basis, not just hope. There is no rational basis for Brexit. It is made up of a melange of emotional reactions mostly Ill-founded. And that’s the problem. The sunny uplands don’t exist. Nor does the world that most Brexiteers wish for in their nostalgia for a return to a past that never in fact existed.
9
It's worth remembering that the Electoral Commission declared the Referendum result illegal due to massive overspending by the Leave Campaign and Russian interference. For some reason, the Pro-Brexit government has tried to bury the news and pretend everything is fine and dandy. That along with a timid and cowed BBC, plus the millionaires running the newspapers (none of whom technically live in the UK for tax reasons) leads to today's poll. I have no doubt that when the economy totally tanks the claim will be "it was not my fault" but instead fifth column remainers.
I always thought UK democracy could muddle through everything. I was sorely mistaken.
7
As a fellow Yorkshireman, from the West Riding, I would say you are focusing on trivialities. So the economy contracts by 3.5%, so what? It contracted a lot more during the 2nd world war and nobody said that was important. The issue is, is England a Culture and Nation worth standing up for? If not, why are we bothering anyway? And, parenthetically, I have no problem with the Welsh and Scots but they should not expect any special treatment. As regards Northern Ireland. I suggest the Protestants arm themselves as the IRA has repeatedly shown that, to quote Mao, power comes from the barrel of a gun.
So because the UK economy suffered more damage in WW2 then Brexit is ok because it causes less damage? But Brexit is self imposed. WW2 was not. And who exactly is threatening British values and culture? The EU? Seriously?
And here ladies and gentlemen we have the mindset of the classic Brexiteer; a category of person willing to accept extraordinary self imposed economic and social damage in pursuit of protecting an amorphous something which was never lost to begin with.
1
@Bryan
The Orangemen are already armed and are threatening cross border violence. Anyway, the Tories threw them under the bus.
1
It's very sad indeed. Mr Kristof, you captured that feeling so accurately. I have just finished rereading Things Fall Apart by the Nigerian author Chenua Achebce and one of the themes of this great novel is the rise anf fall of societies, and indeed Achebe quotes Yates for the inspitartion
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the earth"
Societies per Yates and Achebe collapse under the strain of fatal internal flaws and external forces. In Britain's case the former is the culprit.
3
The EU (and Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) will be better off without England. England, meanwhile, will become an isolated economic backwater. Maybe one day, the English will realize their empire is gone, they're not superior to EU countries, and they're not deserving of special treatment.
12
The parallels behind Russia's documented interference in the Brexit vote and the documented interference in 2016 election of Donald Trump are crystal clear. The weakening of the EU and NATO by Trump, Brexit and Johnson is invaluable to Vladimir Putin.
Brexit's current promoter, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump are cut from the same white nationalist cloth. Hopefully Britain and the US will find ways to correct the serious errors associated with placing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump in office at the expense of a strong western alliance.
16
In 2017 a general election was held to consolidate the advisory (non-binding) referendum of 2016. In that general election the parties against leaving on Tory terms gained far more votes than the Tories, and the Tories failed to gain a majority. In an alliance with the DUP, which had 38% support in NI in the local elections, the Tories tried to ram through a Brexit deal, and failed. The Tories then tried another version that most in NI would accept but that the DUP voted against. Now, with a first past the post system for general elections, the Tories may win a majority with only 40% of the vote. Where, pray tell, is the mandate for Brexit? The only mandate will come from a referendum that endorses a specific Brexit deal.
3
It might well be the final sunset for Britain, or the last act of the British drama.
In case you missed it, Samuel Johnson (who was as brilliant as Boris Johnson is dense) was cited several times in a short column by Harry Eyres in the Independent back in April 2018. For example, Eyres talks about Samuel Johnson's definition of "exit" (as in "Brexit"): "An exit for him is, first, 'the term set in the margin of plays to mark the time at which the player goes off stage,' then secondly, 'Recess, departure; act of quitting the stage; act of quitting the theatre of life.'" I can't agree more. And of course the most famous Samuel Johnson quote works here as well: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
3
China and Russia are looking to extend influence and empire while the West is fragmenting from nationalism and internal polarization. East and West, oligarchs reign supreme. History is regressing.
4
One of the more interesting points is that nobody In the U.K. other than the Orangemen in Northern Ireland seem to care at all about “...the Union...”. Furthermore, nobody seems terribly interested in being in union with them, in particular.
A good point by NK that the EU might not want to admit an independent Scotland to avoid a possible precedent for Catalonia and elsewhere.
2
Size is overrated. A country doesn't have to be big to be great. Switzerland is small, landlocked and lacks natural resources, yet it is stable, fair and prosperous. Israel, Singapore and (until recently) Hong Kong managed to build thriving societies with little more than their hard work and enterprising spirits. On the other hand, Russia spans 11 time zones and possesses every natural resource; yet it is a corrupt mess.
England, regardless of its size, will not fail because of its fair and fairly enforced laws and the enterprising traditions of its people.
2
The last time I visited Britain, I could barely afford the short stay. If Brexit goes through and what remains is little Albion, it could be much cheaper. That would be the upside.
4
As a US citizen with UK roots, I'm thinking the younger generation that has come of age since the fiasco started will vote to remain - if they get the chance. Who needs a fragmented Europe? Look what happened in the 1900s: Two World Wars.
20
At this stage I fear the the tortured debate, exacerbated by Tory mendaciousness, has already done far too much to the concept of the EU in the minds of far too many among the English. I certainly hope that the Brits leave, the sooner because it is hard to imagine this Brexit-fractured United Kingdom playing a constructive role in the future. History once more seems to validate yet another of De Gaulle's judgments --- the British are just not a natural fit into the European project. I am pleased that Johnson's agreement has won the approval of the Irish and seems consistent with the Good Friday Agreement. Johnson, at least in this instance, was sharp enough to realize that at some point the Irish border would have to be addressed. Any future trade deal with the EU would demand it and the US Congress has made it pretty clear that there can be no USA-UK trade agreement that does not also respect the Irish peace process.
1
Russia successfully weaponized Brexit by triggering a xenofobiche reflex—even among the many second-generation Eastern European Brits. Yet, once outside of the EU, the Channel will be an international border between France and England, not unlike between Lybia and Italy or Turkey and Greece. Come Brexit, I envision hundreds of ships with thousands of refugees approaching the white cliffs of Dover, visible from Calais, on the first day of “independent” Britain. Ironically, this will benefit the UK.
3
People of the UK are not the slaves of the EU. On the contrary, they've been quite the leaders, especially in finance. And all over the EU, English has become lingua franca, displacing French. Major in any technical subject in Germany, Sweden, or many other EU countries, and the courses will all be in English. The UK has been a model of centuries of stability for countries of Europe, something hard for Germany, Italy or France to take on. I guess the Brexiteers just can't stand having so much respect and admiration.
5
Oh come on, Nicholas. Britain is a democracy & they voted to leave. Perhaps it’s not economically optimal, but it’s what the people decided. Do you seriously propose they should be overruled by elites who are convinced they know better? If so, I think you betray your rural Oregonian roots. Democracy means the common people get to decide, for better or for worse.
3
Is geography destiny? If so, would the columnist advocate a EU style union between Canada, the USA and Mexico? It is hypocritical for Americans to complain about the UK choosing to leave the EU when no American would ever advocate the USA joining the EU itself regardless of any economic benefits from doing so.
1
@Michaele Alles : Huh? by what "logic" would the US be considered a European country??
rather than a preoccupation with russians under the rug, people writing on the 'left' really need to honestly assess the deep seated resentment of successful elites felt by all of those people left behind in this rapidly changing world. they truly might be despicable, but their numbers are almost assuring a continuation of the nightmare governments seen on both sides of the atlantic.
the amount of wealth centralized in england and especially in london is obscene, no wonder the periphery basking in schadenfreunde as they fiddle while the uk burns! i can only hope that wales, cornwall and scotland find their way to a better future finally free of the english...
1
"both its major parties are headed by people who should never be trusted anywhere near Downing Street." That summarizes the situation in a nutshell.
16
Absolutely, in the same way that Trump is making an attempt at autocracy, Brexit is an attempt to nix Britain.
4
Yes, "Prime Minister Boris Johnson may be the death of the United Kingdom" but the real accountability would fall to the British voting public, for it is they who serve as the ultimate enablers of governance.
The same reasoning, of course, applies to us in the brave land of unprecedented misrule following a collective people's choice. Our democracy isn't perfect; neither is Britain's, but they represent the best exemplars of self-governance the world has so far produced.
Perhaps we have been persuaded by loud charlatans to reject the institutions our forebears treasured. If so, we'll probably detest the consequences.
6
"The U.K. is headed for a new election on Dec. 12, at a time when both its major parties are headed by people who should never be trusted anywhere near Downing Street. "
This is false equivalence, Nicholas Kristof style. He does not even attempt to justify the implicit claim that the two leaders are as bad as one another. Corbyn has never lied; Johnson has made it an art form, mirroring Trump. Corbyn's policies seek to improve the lives of the poor, ordinary workers and the disadvantaged; whereas Johnson and his right-wing Tories will deepen social inequality, further dismantling the welfare state. Corbyn is committed to a final people's say on Brexit, which Kristof partly acknowledges, in contrast to Johnson's out-at-any-cost mentality.
A Labour victory would take the steam out of Scottish independence. A Conservative win would do the opposite.
7
@philip proust : A Corbyn victory will never happen. Johnson is PM only because Corbyn is unelectable. The key to this election will be the Liberal Democrats. IF they can win enough votes and seats and they are able and willing to form a government with Labor, but not with a PM Cobyn, then Great Britain has a chance to save itself from the Brexit disaster.
5
@philip proust - To my great regret, Corbyn -- besides being all those good things that you name - also is a weaselling anti-Semite; weaselling in himself (what IS his stance on Brexit? Today?) and anti-Semite in what he not only tolerates but also endorses and fosters among members of the party that he leads.
He is a horror. LibDem for me.
1
Most people in the US (including Mr. Kristof) don’t truly understand the Brexit situation. Would the US give up sovereignty to a bureaucratic dictatorship made up from surrounding countries? The idea is laughable yet most US commentators think that’s exactly what the UK should continue to support. The situation is really quite simple. The British people voted 40 years ago to join the European Union. This was mostly a free trade agreement. What they voted for then and what it became are vastly different things. The 2016 referendum was the first time the British people were able to opine on the reality of the EU, which constituted a major loss of sovereignty. Why does no one comment on the fact that the president of the European Council is unelected?
So no Mr. Kristof, the British people have not gone nuts. The politicians created this mess as they should have listened to their people long ago, and addressed the scope creep of the EU. The implementation of this decision so far has of course been a debacle but that is due to terrible planning, leadership and negotiation. The will of the British people is completely rational.
4
@Edward please read up on American history. The EU doesn’t look very much like the current US federal government but it actually looks a fair bit like the US federal government of the late 18th century and first half of the 19th. In fact, similar arguments were made by states at the time with respect to the federal government. Especially by southern states.
10
@Edward
US stands for United States. And while sovereignty is seen as residing in the people, there was that time when the States relinquished some of their authority to form a more perfect. Britain leaving the EU is now like California leaving the Union, hence the surprise Americans feel about Brexit.
9
Dear Edward,
You don’t seem to understand EU either. It made great concessions to David Cameron to show its good will and to keep UK into this great transnational project. Halas, after a micro targeted disinformation campaign, the Leave won by a slim margin.
Perhaps for the best ? Without England, EU may be able to push the more social agenda UK has always opposed.
And you, Edward will enjoy the chemical flavor of these foods freed from the EU standard.
3
"And as religion becomes less important on both sides of the border, pressure for Irish unification will grow."
The dispute was never really about religion. It was about ethnicity and politics. British Unionists against Irish Republicans.
4
@Polaris
I sincerely doubt Ian Paisley would have agreed with any such notion.
@Polaris, it was about lack of the right to vote (in Northern Ireland until the early 1970's) and own property for the native Irish. The plantation of Ulster, and Ireland generally, included: ethnic cleansing, forced deportations of whole villages, imprisonment of starving children for stealing food, confiscation of property and people, slavery, rape, cultural imperialism (including public flogging for speaking Irish language in public, making you change your name to English, changing all the placenames to English), burning of churches, etc.
Religion was very much an issue because King Henry VIII of England seized all Catholic church property and this is why people had to hide to have Mass and children were taught in 'hedge schools'. It is why they had to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act.
Thankfully, the Good Friday Agreement provided a way to bring communities together to govern and to overcome the sectarianism of the past several hundred years.
1
Ralph the Wrecker's mistake was not paying his taxes to the Crown. A long time ago, they set up a commission to investigate piracy. It is now known that the man leading the commission (SIr John Killigrew) was a notorious pirate and smuggler. It seems the Crown didn't mind pirates too much as long as they paid taxes.
There is also something in British law called salvage rights. Once a ship goes aground, it is perfectly legal to strip it of all it's cargo. Finders keepers! This still occasionally happens, even to modern wrecks.
4
Many have argued that Americans elected Trump because they are not thinking critically, because public schools in the US are underfunded and not doing their jobs effectively. So why did the British vote for Brexit? Because they also have an inadequate educational system? Who has the best schools then? Russia?
There are obviously those with superior persuasion skills who are quite adept at filling the heads of voters with lies. And at just the right times. The other side, on both sides of the pond, must take them seriously. Very seriously.
I agree that another vote is the best way out. There is wisdom in the crowd. Perhaps even more the second time around, given what we have been seeing since the first time around? Let's hope so.
And since no one else has asked: did he steal the cargo? Were people killed in the shipwrecks? Why did Ralph get a pardon? Was he sent to prison? Any any relation to our contemporary Wreck-It Ralph?
21
@Blue Moon
We like to think that political problems could be met with academic solutions, but unfortunately, both Brexit and Trump's election come from things beyond the cerebral. Appeals to xenophobia and national pride, which fueled both voting outcomes, are more visceral than intellectual. I think that there is hope yet in both citizenries, but we have to be careful to reach people with appealing pitches and not just to where we might wish to speak to them.
Thanks for what you wrote. Take care.
4
@Blue Moon : The best schools in the developed world nowadays seem to be in Finland. And, I agree, the cleanest and most democratic solution would be a second Brexit vote whereby all lies and manipulations by either side would by severely criminally punished. But it will not happen under Johnson as he knows that he would lose that vote.
6
@NM
Trump and Johnson use fear and intolerance as their preferred weapons against us. They try to cater to our worst impulses. And not surprisingly, their arguments are shallow and weak.
Churchill famously said that Americans can be counted on to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else. It looks like our British allies have caught a stiff measure of that?
Like us, they will wind up doing the right thing in the end.
After all, hope springs eternal.
And unity triumphs over division ... every time.
3
Most stories and comments on Brexit, seem to assume if it is realized that it will be the end of the journey. It can and will likely be far more dynamic than people image.
Brexit offers the opportunity to reinvent Britain and the European Union. As old ties are broken new ones can emerge. There are risks to be sure, but there are also rewards.
3
@Sendero Caribe --
"So many eggs will be broken!" -- Yes, but think of the glory of the omelette to come...
The late A A Gill wrote this:
We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex: Escape from the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side. Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “’Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?”
Maybe. But I don't think so.
There is chaos in the US and Great Britain. Trump had a lot to do with both. I have lived in Panamá for 10 years. In 2009 there were half a dozen Latin American financially sound democracies. Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia and Panamá. Now there is one. Panamá. Trump has had a lot to do with that also. He has increased chaos in Mexico and the Northern Triangle. His Venezuelan policy has been a complete failure. That has put Colombia in jeapordy. Colombia is the only country separating Venezuela from Panamá. Venezuelans would rather come to Panamá than the US. Its economy is growing faster and it is a Spanish speaking country.
When you put a Trump in office he does not only bring chaos to the US, he brings it to the whole world.
69
@James Ricciardi How exactly did Trump bring chaos to the UK?
@James Ricciardi I should have added two points. Panamá has a real president, not Trump. Trump supported the right wing fascist candidate in Brazil who won and now wants to let the Amazon rainforest burn.
@Sendero Caribe He supported Boris Johnson and undermined Theresa May.
I have a modest idea to help the Scots and Welsh over their fears of leaving England and not being allowed entry to the European Union afterwards. Join together with Ireland, which is already in the Union, to form a Great Celtlandia (or whatever) next to Little England! With a strong economy (a reunited Ireland); access to European markets via what were once English ports in Scotland and Wales; well-educated, English-speaking citizens; and no hard borders to worry about, the hard-working Celts could well dominate their old overlords. Stranger things have happened.
66
@Emma Ess - I was thinking the same thing!
1
@Emma Ess Bring back the Celtic languages a well?
Halleluja. In this insane world with leaders who have no right in leading continue to wreck what's been built over many centuries, I pray that common sense will prevail but I am doubtful.
11
The British made a mess of it when they voted for Brexit without a clear understanding of all that would entail. May and Johnson have made it worse. I hope they have a do-over and stick with the EU.
74
Yes
Brexit is a bad thing
Very similar to our bad thing
Glad to be old and pity my Draft age grandchildren
I won’t be late, Jimi
12
@Lost In America "Well, I stand up next to a mountain
Chop it down with the edge of my hand".
No, I'm not saying it was a prophecy, I am just (enjoying) saying.
1
One strongly suspects Mr. Kristof does not rue the reduction of the British Empire from 12 million square miles to 100 thousand. How do its Celtic conquests differ for him? But if they do…
“Scottish delegation? Let me see. Oh yes, your seats are right over there, in the third row, between the delegations from Lithuania and Nepal.”
2
As all my foreign friends note: The Brits have Johnson and we have our president. We're both in trouble.
193
@Judy Fern Indeed. Not long after the US election, I ran into two people visiting from Northern Ireland and remarked that it seemed they had their hands full with Brexit. They acknowledged that, and said it seemed we all had our hands full.
6
Vladimir Putin (as in the USA) is the obvious hidden hand that has fostered mayhem and disruption in the UK. History will show that he has instigated internal strife and played upon the weaknesses of unfettered golden age capitalism.
67
It's impossible to miss the grotesque similarities between Britain and the US at this time, besides the cartoon characters of our two inept leaders.
Britain voted yes to Brexit by the slimmest of margins, for many of the same reasons America chose Trump by the Electoral College rather than popular support. Those reasons include misinformation campaigns, out-of-control immigration, frustration with bureaucracy, and increasing economic inequality. Voters felt helpless in the face of the onslaught of challenges to their livelihoods as well as the existing order, and rebelled by making a choice that would have been inconceivable a decade or more ago.
Just as Britain's election in one month will define their nation for the foreseeable future, so will our election in one year. As I interact with my many friends around the US and around the world, I fear for the future of both nations. For better or for worse, our two nations set the tone for the Western world. If we continue to promote snake oil and isolationism, that infection will clearly spread around the world - and before we know it, we're back where we were in 1937.
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Mr. Kristof, Thank you for always making things so clear -- and fair.
You are one of the bright beacons of hope that I joyfully read several times a week.
We are all so much richer to have your words appear on the pages of the NY Times.
Here is to hope -- for the UK, the USA, the children fighting climate change, all the immigrants suffering unspeakable acts at the border, for humanity at large.
Not everyone is a crook or evil. It just seems that way now.
You remind us of that.
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1.7m Brexit voters are already dead.
3m youngster have since passed the threshold to vote.
That is why the Brexiters loath to have a new referendum. It was a fluke that somehow slipped through - and it was originally just considered an oddity, and advisory referendum still to be decided by the Parliament. Until that May woman called an election and ran on a platform to deliver Brexit, which she did not even believe in, just to fulfill her pathetic ambition to be Prime Minister.
May the UK break apart. Can't wait.
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As a Scot, now a Canadian Citizen I lament the predicament of my native country. I believe that leaving the EU is the final straw, but that the problem goes back much further.
Scotland has not had the kind of government it wants since the disaster of 1979. When they voted for Blair there was a brief hope, until they realised he was simply 'Thatcher Lite'. The current, incompetent, heartless government is beyond the pale.
What Scotland wants is a social democratic government, similar to those in Scandinavia, and to be a part of an ever closer European Union, wherein lies the best economic future.
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Then, finally, we can talk of an America made up of CA and most of the coastal states. Problems for shure, but rich and united enough to fix them. That's progress. And Donald's off in FL.
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@zarf11 The coastal states, including my home of California, are/will be the hardest hit areas by climate change. California's $8 billion dollar treasury surplus was quickly decimated two years ago by that last bad season of drought caused fires. My daughter in Houston has been flooded twice in three years by "Hundred Year Hurricanes". Miami and most of Florida is fighting with sea water creep into their groundwater and soil Etc etc etc......
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I enjoyed your article. This is a subject regularly discussed in my community but there is always an argument presented that a Democratic vote was taken and should be honoured. At what stage in Modern Democracy do we recognise that that vote is being undermined by new technologies and external forces with other interests. Or was this always the way. Democracy and Emperors Clothes come to mind.
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We all generally admire and thank our ancestors for at least obvious reasons. So, in that spirit, I'll say my Irish ancestors, such as my immigrant great-grandfather who fled the British enforced Great Starvation, I hope the evils of the British Empire inflicted on the globe are finally brought home to its present day surviving "elite" and their supporters in Brexit.
I'm guessing not a small number of survivors of that colonial power, say in India and the Middle East will not be in mourning for the English.
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@Yankee49 but why should millions of young people who voted to remain, and who are not nostalgic for empire, also suffer as a result? Also the economic crash will affect those with lower incomes and precarious jobs more than the elite (as always).
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@Alice B Please note that I referenced British "elite" (e.g. Etonian Boris) and their supporters. That actually a majority of Brits who work for a living suffer may or may be reflected in the upcoming election. If that majority, regardless of age, votes to Remain, will that address the underlying problems of nationalism/populism?
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@Yankee49 Oh Dear ! The fact is that starvation was a constant threat throughout Europe and the world in those days the stories of Irish (Catholic) farmers exporting high qualityfood to England are true but normal even today in the world
Ireland had the British workhouse system of poor relief probably the best in h the world at that time but it was simply overwhelmed by the loss of the potato crop
A big question is why didnt the Irish eat the fish that was swarming around Ireland near the coasts where most people lived and that couldnt be exported Incidentally
how did your ancestors actually get into the USA?
Most US ports blocked Irish immigrants
Only British Canada allowed the Irish in on free British government paid tickets
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My mom was born in England, as were 3 of her 6 siblings. Her parents retained their British accent despite moving to the USA between the 2 World Wars. I have visited England several times, socialized with cousins and friends there, and always considered the people there to be kind, welcoming, and to have much wisdom. It seems that anti-immigration sentiments are taking over much of the “Free World.” Our fathers and grandfathers fought against this madness. When will we learn that immigrants seeking asylum are not evil, but will enrich our culture?
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@Marion Keenan
Enrich? Or change? Maybe some people don’t want their culture changed. Particularly if it costs only a few hundred dollars a year to prevent it from changing. Wouldn’t you fiend a few hundred dollars per year to preserve something really valuable to you?
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@Marion Keenan There are those immigrants who would like to turn your country into an Islamic state. Evil or not is in the eyes of the beholder.
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@Marion Keenan Like the Bataclan immigrants, you mean?
Another example for always voting. I don’t remember the exact figure, but I am sure Johnson and company didn’t have a majority of eligible voters.
Where have all the voters gone, long time passing...when will they ever learn?
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@Melvyn Magree GB is a country with more than 2 major parties. You don't need a absolute majority to be elected an MP, just more votes than any of the other candidates in your constituency. Because regional differences in voting traditions and living condition, effectively 30- 35 percent of total votes normally give a party complete control UK's government.
If the UK election system were changed to require run-off elections when no candidate had a majority, the MP elected would better represent his constituency. This could encourage the "missing voters" to show up and vote.
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The genesis of the Uk over a 1000 yeaqrs ago was a collection of smaller kingdoms like Essex,Wessex, Murcia and others that coalesced under Viking and Norman invaders. Their new ,kingdom expanded to include modern day Great Britain and ultimately an expanse of the world from the Americas to Asia and Africa to Australasia. Now after little more than a century it has succeeded in going from that to the original nucleus of what was a little part of England to what may be just a 'little England' Much of what happened did so as part of an evolution of history. What is now about to occur need not have!
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Reading a novel by Noah Hawley about conspiracies in which a character says, 'follow the money, see who benefits'. The obvious winners from Brexit--so far--are currency speculators and Putin. Is that all? It's all very murky and opaque and that's worrisome. Yeah. At the very least. Worrisome.
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@Cody McCall You're certainly right that Putin wins, and that's presumably why he interfered with the referendum in the first place. And demagogues like Boris Johnson have managed to claw their way to power and have obviously benefited. But what mystifies me is why Boris still does so well in the polls (although Jeremy Corbyn's many weaknesses explain some of that).
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@Cody McCall Lately, every time I read the news, whether it's Syria, or Brexit, or Trump in the White House, the conclusion is "Putin wins." Shouldn't this be a bigger cause for concern?
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@Nicholas Kristof
Democracy isn't prepared for the weaponization of information/propaganda to the level it's now targeting key voters via social media, data analytics, etc. And again following the money gets us back to Putin, plus a coalition of global plutocrats pushing for oil, tax cuts, tax havens, and related anti-democratic goals.
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As a mature brit with an English mother and Hungarian father, I feel naturally feel a bit half and half, a bit culturally different than my English side of the family. I wanted us to remain or at least keep ties with a deal allowing freedom of movement and work, live in the EU, ect. If we crash with a hard Brexit and the UK breaks up, I am planning to migrate to Panama or Costa Rica. I will feel I would not really belong, living with all the 'pure englanders' who see anything other as somewhat 'foreign, other and suspicious' When I migrate, at least I feel not quite a 'fake', I will know I am a 'foreigner in others country, rather than feeling like one in my own.
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There were lots of Americans who said they’d flee if Trump won. Nine did
@Steph
Did you not understand, that the freedom of movement is only given to members of the EU? The EU is sick of special status for the fickle UK. No one wants them anymore.
Costa Rica - I could get used to that myself.
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@Steph Yes, snobishness has its limits.
you don’t explain why it would be a bad thing
for Scotland to become independent.
or Wales?
Also, as much as Brexit might have big economic costs,
there is no discussion of other issues.
If Brexit occurs, will England be more democratic or less
will there be more civil liberties or less?
I am reminded that when Britain considered abolishing the slave trade
and slavery in the sugar plantation islands, the reason given for not doing it now
was the economic hit. Why not delay that decision until later.
It was always the economy first
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@martin henner What has democracy got to do with it? The UK has an unelected Head of State, and unelected Upper House and its antiquated first past the post electoral system means that votes in a small handful of key constituencies are the only ones that influence the result of an election. The nett effect of that means that 65% or so of all votes cast are meaningless. And don't get me started on the way the non-binding advisory only referendum was conducted. Oh! And while we're at it perhaps someone could explain how it is that a report into Russian interference in the electoral process has been quietly shelved. Democratic? The UK may be a lot of things but democratic isn't one of them.
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Should Brexit becomes a reality, Boris will have successfully led Great Britain down the road to minor league status and easy pickings for Trump who will gladly offer them a trade deal to match their reduced role in world trade.
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@priscus
Hey, why not? England is a island, just like Greenland. Tromp's failed offer to buy Greeland might fall on the more receptive Johnson ears.
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Nothing against the British people, assuming they aren’t related to the Windsors, but there is something objectively funny about the fact that the day after the Brexit referendum, the question Google’d the most was: “what is the European Union?”
Kids these days.
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@ubique
It wasn't the Kids, though (as uneducated as the UK elite likes their citizens). It was the now dead pensioners who gifted their people Brexit.
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@ubique yes! Like the folks who think that Judge Judy is a Supreme Court Justice. Ignorance is so sad.
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I believe that it's about immigration and the perceived lack of control at the border. If a deal could be reached to give the UK control over who comes in, most British people would want to remain. I think that the ruling conservatives are more focused on removing EU regulations such as paid maternity leave and paid vacations such as we are denied in the US. The border control issue is their weapon to stir up their base. Sound familiar?
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@alnohara
The Brits were used to the fact that they could travel almost anywhere without visa while folks from those countries needed them - talking about Africa, Asia, South America etc. - that is OVER.
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@alnohara Well, yes but bear in mind that the EU regulations allow for some border control (e.g., if EU citizens don't find a job in 3 months they have to leave). However, the UK does not track people moving to the country; in part due to the lack of a national ID system. Again the UK blames the EU for something that is really a UK issue and that could be achieved if the UK wanted it!
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I agree that Brexit passed because of immigration frustrations and fears. Angela Merkel meant well, but the images of that massive migration in 2015 were terrifying to a lot of observers. In addition, at the same time, there was serious consideration of welcoming Turkey into the EU. So there was the added cloud (to some) of an additional 40 million predominantly Muslim EU citizens, newly free to roam across borders and reside where they pleased. Policy makers at the time ignored the rumblings of fear, discontent and cultural dislocation from their elitist perch. And here we are. Not just saddled with Brexit, but also the travesty of Trump as president, due to the same visceral fears of the masses. It would behoove policy makers to pay attention to the fears of those whom they supposedly represent, and try to work with them instead of presuming to know what’s best for everyone.
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I believe that it's about immigration and the perceived lack of control at the border. If a deal could be reached to give the UK control over who comes in, most British people would want to remain. I think that the ruling conservatives are more focused on removing EU regulations such as paid maternity leave and paid vacations such as we are denied in the US. The border control issue is their weapon to stir up their base. Sound familiar?
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Perhaps a "little England" is what the majority of Brits want. They may be willing to endure the pain and loss of influence to, in the words Greta Garbo, be let alone.
Who are we to judge? I can't imagine what they think about their American cousins.
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@Tom Q Tom, thanks for commenting on my column. And you're right: Brits have the right to choose "Little England" if that's what they want. But the polls indicate that that is not what they want. They were disquieted by immigration and were told they could save a ton of money and thrive outside of the European Union. They were misled, and a majority now seem to want to stay in Europe (if polls are to be believed, and I admit they are both close and dubious).
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@Nicholas Kristof
Nick you are wrong on several points.
1. Wales voted to leave as well and recent polls have the brexit Tories leading there.
2.Project fear envisaged economic meltdown just by voting to leave, we were told by our chancellor of emergency budgets and a brexit recession. In reality of late the UK economy is outperforming the eurozone.
3. The polls regarding a second referendum are still very close and let's remember prior to the initial referndum remain we nearly always ahead.
4. The issues that caused the UK to vote leave remain ie open borders and a desire for a return to comprehensive self governance.
5. Let's remember the UK has a huge balance if payments deficit with the EU, with the rest of the world we run a surplus.
6. Most of us just want to get this done and the deal Boris has negotiated is imo decent.
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@Paul "Most of us just want to get this done" - Who is this "most of us" of whom you speak? Anyone who's been paying attention realizes that passing the Withdrawal Agreement is just the end of the beginning and what follows is years and years and years and years of trade negotiations. Brexit won't be "done" for a very long time.
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