What If..?

Samizdat via Brian Micklethwait wonders what convulsive forces might collide with the UK’s currently volatile political scene:

Perhaps the EU will actually inform Britain, publicly, clearly, that it now rules it, and that merely British elections really do indeed now count for absolutely nothing, and maybe the British people will accept that, which will change things rather, will it not? Or maybe they won’t accept it, ditto…

Perhaps there will be a new Peasants Revolt (Peasants Revolts always happen just when, and just because, nobody expects them, not even the Peasants)…

Perhaps Scottish independence will (a) soon happen, with (b) all kinds of dramatic and unpredictable knock-on effects, such as England leaving the EU but not Scotland. Or Wales…

The deep problem is that the interaction of UK and EU normative processes now makes government so complex and unwieldy that the handling of many policies is inexplicable to ordinary voters or indeed most politicians. So politicians default to populist issues and noises instead.

The public sense that this is not right, but as there is no obvious way of effecting radical simplification a sense of frustration and detachment grows apace.

Thus party politics here and across Europe slumps into a sort of decadent Reality/Gladiator Show, where the team with the hottest looks and best lines gets to preside for a while but ultimately unhappily over this confusion.

Basically, in Life there are only three Political Options:

• either the sensible centre stays wide and robust, and marginalises the lunatic extremes (UK politics for the past 200 years or so)
• or the lunatic extremes expand and squeeze – even eliminate – the sensible centre (Stalin, Hitler, Mugabe, Iran)
• or an uneasy equilibrium is established (today’s Russia, China?)

How would we know if we Brits were approaching a Tipping Point, moving from the first Option-state to one of the others?

This was the sense of my MTS/Non-MTS analysis for former Yugoslavia back in 1984.

The unbendable official policy assumption was that Yugoslavia would ‘muddle through somehow’.

I questioned that assumption. I was chided for being ‘argumentative’.

But Yugoslavia didn’t muddle through somehow.

Are we now right to expect to continue indefinitely to do so?