Keir Starmer leaves, Andy Burnham enters, a moderate who invokes “hope” and, at times, uses the language of populists (“end 40 years of neoliberalism”). It will have its seventh prime minister in a decade. Easy diagnosis: the crisis is due to .
Ten years ago, on June 23, 2016, by a small margin, voters determined the British exit from the (EU). All said and done: as so many predicted, the United Kingdom chose to compress its economic growth. According to independent calculations, in this interval British GDP grew somewhere between 4% and 8% less than it could have and productive investments expanded 10% less.
Brexit propagandists banked on nostalgia. In a line parallel to Trump’s speech (“make the USA great again”), they promised to “regain control” of national destinies. The goal was to rescue a sovereignty supposedly hijacked by the EU, in order to restore a golden age: “we can see, ahead, the sunny meadows”, in the idyllic mirage conjured by Boris Johnson.
Sovereignty, a beautiful word, is also a source of misunderstandings. “The man in the desert is sovereign, but he can do nothing because he lacks power”, as explained by Michael Heseltine, from the defeated pro-Conservative Party. Today, too late, 57% of voters see Brexit as a disaster. Bregret (“Regret of Britain”, British repentance) took the place of Brexit.
The easy and correct diagnosis only scratches the surface of the phenomenon. The impulse that led to Brexit has deep roots, rooted in secular nostalgia. The United Kingdom emerged, triumphant and bankrupt, from the Second World War. His “special relationship” with the USA, along with the dream of the Empire’s permanence, overshadowed reality. The “precious stone set in the sea of silver,” in Shakespeare’s definition, was thought to be too powerful to be confined to Europe.
“British history and its interests lie far beyond the European continent”, proclaimed then Chancellor Anthony Eden in 1952, refusing the invitation to join the embryonic EU. Even after the loss of India (1947), the Suez catastrophe (1956) was necessary for the United Kingdom to accept its status as a middle power, beginning a long diplomatic journey to Europe. The accession, concluded in 1973, never consolidated as a consensus within the two traditional parties.
Brexit shattered British political stability. A decade ago, in the fatal referendum, an extreme right was born organized around Nigel Farage and evolved into the current Reform Party. The nostalgia never dried up, infiltrating the lower middle class and taking the forms of a vast underground protest against stagnant family incomes. In last year’s local elections, Farage’s party won 30% of the vote, ahead of Labor (20%), Liberal Democrats (17%) and Conservatives (15%). The biggest party in a nation that regrets Brexit is a radically anti-European party.
Burnham takes over the government with the challenge of stopping extremist growth. “Hope” is not enough. He will need to persuade Britons that it is impossible to reinvent the days when men wore hats.
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