Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 19:02 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Wednesday 24 July 2019
2
grown signifi cantly” over the past decade,
even as “the middle ground has shrunk”.
This is not the UK you were told about.
Central to this country’s origin myth is that it doesn’t do
violent extremism. Britons never had a revolution, our
textbooks inform us, and never swooned over a dictator;
they preferred tolerance and a cup of tea. It wasn’t
entirely true – just ask those massacred at St Peter’s
Fields in 19th-century Manchester, or at Jallianwala
Bagh in 20th-century Punjab – but it formed the eternal
framing for the UK’s self-image. Until yesterday, when it
became laughably redundant.
As recently as the 2016 EU referendum , leave
mastermind Dominic Cummings froze out Nigel Farage
and his Ukippers on the grounds that they were too
nasty to win the vote. Yet today, Britain will have as its
prime minister a Conservative whose chief claim to the
job is that he can outfl ank the Farage army.
Add to that rancorous politics the shockwaves yet to
come. Even without a disastrous Brexit, the economy
is careering towards recession. The country’s entire
business model will have to be reinvented. And then
consider what crashing out of the EU without a deal
will do to national life. That prospect this spring led to
10,000 riot police being readied to go on the streets.
Johnson has been briefed by Whitehall offi cials that
no deal will produce civil unrest and possibly shortages
of fresh food and clean water – a briefi ng that, the
Sunday Times reports , left him “ visibly shaken ”.L
et us not waste our time pondering
whether the new prime minister is
prepared for such historic turbulence.
He isn’t. “ Do you look daunted? Do you
feel daunted?” he asked Tory activists
yesterday , expecting a big pantomime-
style “No!”, when a quieter, wiser
man would have known that the right
answer should be yes. This is the most daunting set of
circumstances Britain has faced in generations; we need
a prime minister ready to face up to them.
Instead, we have the blond Nero, tousling his hair
while the union disintegrates. Last week he promised the
party faithful that a Hallowe en Brexit would not cause a
Mars bar shortage. This week he compared leaving the
EU to the Apollo landing on the moon. His gift is for
rhetoric, not detail. His trademark is moneyed nihilism.
At the Foreign Offi ce his lack of preparedness as good as
condemned an innocent mother to an indefi nite term in
an Iranian prison. A s London’s mayor he scooped the
credit for Ken Livingstone winning the Olympics bid,
tried to stay on holiday during the 2011 riots, and spent
the rest of his time dreaming up monuments to himself:
Boris island airport, the garden bridge.
Among the iron laws of history is that when things
get tough, some people always get hurt more than
others. Among the iron laws of Johnson’s biography
is that he always put himself on the side of the bully.
Are you a Muslim wom an being spat at in the street?
Johnson will laugh at you as a letterbox in one of those
columns that earns him £275,000 a year. Are you a black
person suff ering racial abuse? Then enjoy our most
famous living Old Etonian joining in with his jibes about
“picanninies” and “watermelon smiles”.
At times, Johnson sounds like Donald Trump using
more syllables. But there is one crucial diff erence. The
US president will happily allow crowds to chant about
locking up Hillary Clinton or sending Ilhan Omar back
and not care about inciting violence. Trump is after
blood. Johnson, one suspects, would prefer a slobbering
snog. He just wants to be liked by whoever is in the
ascendancy. And the ascendant politician of our age is
Farage. It is the man once dubbed a fruitcake by David
Cameron who will lead our prime minister further and
further into extremism. And it will be a path easy for
Johnson to follow, as our politics become ever more
sour and our economy heads south.
At the moment when the country needs a truth-teller,
it has instead an incontinent liar. In one of this country’s
darkest hours, we have installed in No 10 the poor man’s
Winston Churchill. Except it isn’t a V for victory we see;
it’s a V-sign that the millionaire manchild is fl icking at
the rest of us.The Conservative party ha s fi nally got a leader it
deserves. As the country ’s next prime minister, Boris
Johnson won’t be able to outrun boring facts and hide
from bad publicity. He faces the most daunting challenge- that of how the UK can leave the European Union –
on entering No 10 since Winston Churchill in 1940. It is
fi tting because Mr Johnson is largely responsible for the
mess he now has to clear up. The signs are not promising.
His pledge that the UK will leave the EU on 31 October
“deal or no deal” is as politically expedient as it is
destructive. His bravado helped to win the leadership.
But it did not unnerve the EU and only hardened
opposition within the party. Burning bridges to Europe
is an act of arson not statesmanship. Leaving the EU
without a deal threatens to wreck the UK economy, break
up Britain and rekindle violence on the island of Ireland.
No wonder Mr Johnson says he can avoid a hard Brexit,
though he can’t say how. He thinks he will be protected
from harm if, and when, things go badly wrong. Yet his
praetorian guard are from the Tory hard right who , he
will fi nd out, prefer to give rather than obey orders.
Mr Johnson’s victory is the culmination of more than
two decades of Conservative folly, which began when
the party embraced populist Europhobia 20 years ago.
The Tories decided that to win power they would need
to fuse attempts to politici se immigration for electoral
gain with Eurosceptic propaganda of the kind Mr
Johnson revelled in dishing out. It is worth recalling the
absurdity of William Hague warning in 2001 that the UK
risked becoming a “foreign land”, pitting “the people”
against the “liberal elite”. A year later Margaret Thatcher
bizarrely urged Britain – and the hapless Tory leader
Iain Duncan Smith – to quit the EU because the continent
We are very unlikely to fi nd out who arranged for
thugs to rampage through a Hong Kong train station ,
armed with wooden sticks and metal rods, hospitalising
45 peaceful passengers. Yet if their approach was
indiscriminate, their target was clear – protest ers
returning from an anti-government march – and their
purpose equally plain: intimidation.
A pro-Beijing legislator was seen shaking the hands
of the white-clad thugs at Yuen Long and has portrayed
the men as local residents “defending their homes”.
Carrie Lam, the region’s chief executive, condemned
Sunday night’s violence – but spent more time criticising
protest ers who had surrounded Beijing’s liaison offi ce
and defaced its sign. Many in the protest movement
disagree with such tactics. But political attacks on
property can hardly be compared to a vicious assault
that broke bones and left one man in critical condition.
There is a long history of thugs handling political
business on the Chinese mainland – where local offi cials
often outsource forced demolitions, for example – and
in Hong Kong too. Back in 1993, the then chief of China’s
Public Security Bureau said explicitly of triads that
“as long as these people are patriotic, as long as they
are concerned with Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability,
we should unite with them ”. In 2014, triads attacked
pro-democracy demonstrators in the later stages of
the umbrella movement.continually needed saving by the Anglosphere,
adding, “Nazism was a European ideology, the
Third Reich an attempt at European domination”.
Mr Johnson made a similar ridiculous point when
fronting the 2016 leave campaign.
In this radicalising process a referendum
became the chosen political device to avoid the
Conservative party having to reveal its splits over
Europe. Mr Hague campaigned to save the pound
and off ered a referendum on any further extension
of EU powers. By 2005 Michael Howard was pushing
hard for a referendum on an EU constitution.
When David Cameron became Tory leader he
parked the populism, marooning voters who had
been whipped up into a frenzy by his predecessors’
rhetoric. Nigel Farage seized the opportunities
presented and the rise of Ukip forced Mr Cameron
into fi rst shelving key elements of his modernising
project before, in 2013, committing to the Brexit
referendum – a decision that did not shoot Mr
Farage’s fox and led to the UK’s vote to leave the EU.
The lesson for Mr Johnson to learn is that when
centre-right politicians adopt the language and
policies of populist nationalism, the only victory is
for the hardliners. Mr Farage now leads the Brexit
party and is riding high in the polls. If Mr Johnson
thinks he can sup with the devil he might fi nd
that he sits down at the table as a guest and ends
up as dessert. Nowhere is this more obvious than
with Donald Trump, whose friendship comes at
a steep cost. The price will be to bearhug the hard
Brexit that Mr Johnson wants to avoid. Without
that, Mr Trump cannot secure the US-UK trade
deal that he prizes. Scooping up the votes of hard
leavers can also repel more people than it attracts.
Early polling of Mr Johnson’s appeal appears to
bear this out. Populist movements want to overturn
constitutional governments so that the groups they
defi ne as enemies of the people can be targeted.
That’s why they need to be confronted, within and
without the Tory party. Mr Johnson plays the clown.
But the circus will move on, only to leave a broken
country in its wake.So far six men have been arrested for unlawful
assembly in connection with the Yuen Long violence,
and police sources have said there are gang links.
But the real question is not who they are, but why
they were able to perpetrate their vicious attack.
Harsh policing in 2014 and at the start of these
protests, including the use of tear gas and rubber
bullets , had already battered the hard-won authority
of the police with residents. Now people want to
know why, in a region with more than twice as
many police per capita as England, it took so long
for offi cers to reach the scene of the violence. While
police claim they were tied up by the demonstration ,
witnesses say offi cers failed to arrest thugs even
when they did reach the station. The assailants
seemed so confi dent of impunity that some of those
fi lmed beating people were not even masked.
Ms Lam and Hong Kong’s police chief have
angrily denied allegations of collusion, with the
chief executive calling them insulting. If Hong Kong
police are to retain any credibility whatsoever,
they must pursue Sunday’s attackers every bit as
assiduously as they have pro-democracy activists,
while the government must launch fully independent
investigations of both the policing of demonstrations
and the tardy response to the Yuen Long attacks, as
protest ers have demanded. Don’t hold your breath.
But a refusal by authorities to take this chilling
attack seriously will guarantee that mistrust and
antagonism continues to spiral. (Some worry that
the assaults were intended to goad protest ers into
violence themselves.) While some will no doubt heed
the thugs and stay away from future demonstrations,
others appear more determined than ever to take
to the streets. There are already calls for a rally at
Yuen Long. And the protests, now in their seventh
week, will burn on instead of burning out. Continued from frontPolice should pursue
thugs, not the peaceful
protest ers they target
Hong Kong
Conservative party
With Boris Johnson as PM
Britain faces a hard Brexit
after years of a clown
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A combustible nation - led by a
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