Consequences of the Brexit mess

There are moments when events have moved to high drama, when rationality is lost. Perspective is gone, maturity is gone, and principles are gone too. Lately, the UK has reached such a moment, in a descent by a previously ordered nation into farce and firefighting that holds lessons for us all.

As it is, the UK is one of our own principle trading partners. It will not go well for Kenya as Great Britain tips over into spending gridlock and civil mayhem. The UK is also the fifth largest economy in the world, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and, for a long time, a mature and measured nation, where civil strife was improbable, and civil war unthinkable.

Yet it is now moving towards breakdown.

For those who have not followed the twists of the increasingly bitter dispute over the island’s European Union membership, the UK’s Conservative Party held its ranks together as internal divisions emerged over Europe by offering a referendum on EU membership.

It was a poll that exposed the accumulated weaknesses of the British media, which could not find its way to explain to the voting masses what role the EU served in British life and instead determined that fair reporting was to provide a platform to campaign lies, such as that leaving Europe would deliver Sh47 billion a week to the UK’s health service.

Untested and unchecked, such lies shaped voting and outcomes, and 17 million Britons voted to leave the EU. It was not a majority, ever. The ‘remainers’ were complacent.

Too many stayed at home: more than two thirds of British voters never voted for Brexit, and of those who did vote for it, many were ill informed and have since changed their minds. Polls show ‘leavers’ could never muster a second win.

Yet, somewhere in the system, the political consequences (largely for the Conservative Party) of admitting that it was all a bad idea, have kept the minority Brexit train on its rails, in a toxic cocktail that has been aided by an opposition leader who has never supported EU membership, and will not lead any Brexit opposition.

Thus, matters of numbers, minorities, majorities, and votes have all been discarded.

The citizenry currently enjoy daily pictures of a pro-Brexit march where an estimated 200 protesters claim they are being betrayed, which is cited by the government, alongside equal space to a petition now signed by 5.6 million Britons calling for an abandonment of Brexit, which the government has said it will ignore.

No one is moved to comment that a nation of over 60 million people cannot be run to please 200 protesters, or even two lorries blocking a motorway.

In parliament, the Prime Minister no longer accepts the democratic modes of voting, where a defeat is a defeat. Now, her Brexit deal just gets re-presented for another vote, over and over, until, she hopes, MPs will finally vote for it. And the whole country continues to hurtle to a now revised final European deadline.

Reputation

Yet, as the UK squirms like a snake on a skewer, all thought for its own reputation are long gone. How must it be for British diplomats these days, or those who enter trade talks or any negotiation, to sit in serious rooms with serious people, and explain the nonsense of Britian’s so-called ‘people’s will’?

Is this any longer a fit member of the UNSC? Does the UK any longer have the right to pronounce on any other nation’s politics or democracies, when it has lost all decorum?

In truth, every government should look now at the behaviour of the British government and opposition and learn that nothing is invisible in the 21st Century. People are always watching. Investors have left the UK, factories are closing and whole industries are moving.

But the real lesson is how fast stability can be undermined and how fast reputation can be ruined.

We sometimes forget that in Kenya, that the world is always watching. But see now how it looks from the other side, watching the British behaving badly.

Losing measure and sense does not engender respect, or herald success. It only damages.