Whatever way you voted in 2016, I suspect that many of us have the same image of post-Brexit Britain. It is easier to capture in a cartoon than in prose but it looks something like this. A chap tries to make a leap across a canyon, falls ever so slightly short and as a result gets wedged in a crevice. And there he is – stuck. Neither on one side or the other and gaining the benefits of neither ledge.
The Conservative party obviously carries a large amount of responsibility for this – not least for the fact that European law still dictates our insane migration policy. But the current government must also take its share of responsibility. If we were run by competent men and women of vision then getting out of the spot we are in could be possible. Instead it appears that Labour policy is to actually push us further down the crevice.
On issue after issue Britain is in this same netherworld
Because of the Labour party’s obvious attraction to the EU, they will not take this country an inch further away from it. Keir Starmer and his party have already signalled that if a trade war were to erupt between the US and the EU, then the UK would side with the EU. But at the same time, Britain has never been more unlike our European friends. Right-wing politics dominates the continent and is only rising. And it’s not just ‘right-wing politics’ as it might be defined by any remaining producer at Newsnight, but proper right-wing stuff of a kind that even causes me to make a whistling noise at times.
Geert Wilders is now the head of the largest party in the Dutch parliament. This is a man who was idiotically refused entry into the UK by a Labour home secretary (the hopeless Jacqui Smith) because of his ‘divisive’ and ‘extreme’ views. Not so long ago Giorgia Meloni was endlessly described as ‘fascist’ and ‘far-right’. Today, as Italian Prime Minister, she is recognised as one of the more moderate leaders in the EU bloc.
And here is where our current government has managed to play an absolute political blinder. Because while we’ve never been further away from the Europeans, the geniuses in charge seem to have decided to make sure that the American government doesn’t like us either.
You don’t have to resort to the extreme case of Sadiq Khan, but let’s. This is a man who chose to spend his time over inauguration weekend warning, originally enough, that Donald Trump’s return to the White House spells the return of ‘fascism’. On inauguration day he posted a picture on X of himself standing in front of a billboard in Piccadilly Circus that boasted the slogan ‘London is, and will always be, a place for everyone ♥’.
This message was obviously meant to stand in stark contrast to the terrible extremism that has broken out in the US. Although if Khan were capable of looking locally, rather than attempting to cast his gaze abroad, he might see that London being ‘for everyone’ is a large part of its problem. Many Londoners feel that London ought not to be a place for machete gangs and knife murderers, phone-robbers and bicycle stealers, rape gangs and anti-British lunatics. But that’s a matter of personal preference, I suppose.
On almost every major issue Britain is now a country that is failing to tack itself to anyone on the world stage while also lacking a viable long-term view on almost anything. This week, Mayor Khan also announced that he intends to launch a legal challenge if the Prime Minister backs a third runway for Heathrow airport. This is the sort of thing that signals a country in a serious stalemate, not to mention decline. After all, you can either decide to grow outside investment or you can decide to throw your lot in with people like Ed Miliband, who never saw an investment opportunity they didn’t wish to demolish.
Which brings me to another matter: the idiotic decision of successive post-2016 governments to get everything wrong in new ways. One of the reasons Boris Johnson’s government wasted what little time it had was that it sucked so hard on the net-zero bong and presumed to ‘lead by example’. This Labour government is likewise full of people who think that Britain should immiserate its economy and energy policy by ‘leading the world’ into anti-fossil fuel ultimatums. The fact that the Chinese Communist party is busily building coal-fired power stations and nuclear power plants might suggest to you – as it does to me – that the CCP is not much looking to Miliband. If they ever do think of him I imagine they think him rather silly and presumptuous.
Johnson’s only excuse for mainlining this nonsense was that he wanted to demonstrate to Joe Biden that he wasn’t Trump. But now Johnson and Biden could not be further from power and we have a US President who has promised in his first speech in office to ‘drill, baby, drill’. Once again the energy policies of Johnson and Miliband look more like the debunked ideas of yesterday’s men than a case of leading by example.
On issue after issue Britain is in this same netherworld. Our government has no idea how to grow the economy, is trying to tax its way to growth, is busy chasing out the rich and making the ambitious scram. Having one side of Britain stuck against the European side of the cliff, we have a government with no apparent desire to clamber out of the ravine on to the booming American side. Instead our politicians preen and fall back on student slogans and banalities so past their sell-by date that they would shame the discount shelf at the Co-op.
There was a time when one of the great slogans in our country’s history was ‘Very well, alone’. Whether on immigration, crime, the economy, energy or foreign policy, we are now in that strange position again. But not in a good way. Not in a good way at all.
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