The Ballyhooed Bigly British Brexit Bust-up:
a drama for the ages
Prelude: a tale of Brexit to be told in seven acts
Ready for the boffo billionaire horror flick of the century? A capitalist extravaganza with cast of millions? A perfect ending to a perfectly awful year? Have I got a yarn for you — the inside story of the coming British Brexit Bust-up! A rare international dust-up pitting billionaire against billionaire with legions of powerful corporations rendered rudderless by the populist mob fury of Eton-endowed filthy-rich nobs.
If you thought Brexit was a revolt of long-suffering little Englanders against the Bullies of Brussels, think again. Tis a tale as old as the hills: when elephants tangle the little guys get stomped like grass.
But I have a curious twist to this English exit that is worthy of a Faulkner — one of these brawling Boys of Brexit elephants is/was a Governor of Mississippi. While motives are unclear — best put into that Rumsfeldian box of “known unknowns” — there is a distinctly fishy smell to the likes of Nigel Farage, Brexiteer par excellence, hobnobbing with Phil Bryant, governor of the poorest state in the American Union. Should the machinations of this shadowy gang lead to “no-deal” Brexit on the dawn of the New Year, that smell will turn into actual stink of rotting fish. And to quote the Bard, thereby hangs a tale.
Act 1: I’m gonna wait ‘till the midnight hour
My “Ballyhooed Bigly etc” title is homage to the populist scat stylings of our soon-to-be ex-President, Donald Trump. The one who reveled in the chaos of Brexit on his climb up, saying the UK Leave vote predicted his own future success in America. Which it did, with a caveat that success might not be the best descriptor for either Trump or Brexit. Hard to believe it’s just been 4.5 very-long years since that vainglorious summer when Britain decided on divorcing her continental pals.
On our side of the pond, going-it-alone is suddenly out-of-vogue as President-elect Biden prepares to re-up to the World Health Organization, rejoin the Paris Agreement and strike a peace deal with NATO. Despite COVID-19, Americans have a lot to be thankful for this holiday season. A coming vaccine. The prospect of a boringly competent government to administer it. And the reality that come January 1st we aren’t facing anything remotely like Brexit — despite Donald Trump’s best effort to divorce our own allies and trading partners. We may even come up roses when the clock strikes twelve New Year’s Eve, since Brexit means some prime English assets hitting the auction block. Most will be grabbed by the smart go-getters in Frankfurt, Paris, or Dublin. But New York could snag a chunk of the biggest prize: derivative trading in the City of London. From Reuters:
The City of London’s unfettered access to the European Union, its biggest customer, ends when the Brexit transition arrangements expire, and Brussels wants trading in euro-denominated derivatives to remain within its jurisdiction or in a country with “equivalent” standards to the bloc.
The United States already has that EU equivalence, while Britain is surrendering its equivalence rights January 1st with chances of clawing it back somewhere between slim and none. Turns out there are consequences to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s choice of a hard Brexit without any discussion of financial services. This isn’t just a future theoretical outcome, London is already bleeding banking according to Bloomberg:
As Britain and Brussels embark on the final stage of talks to determine their future trading relationship, the trickle of resources moving away from the City is turning into a steady stream. The biggest investment banks have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the midst of a global recession to lease real estate on the continent, while relocating activities and jobs to set up standalone operations in the EU … the shift is already posing questions about London’s future role in global finance.
Brexit must be the first time City bankers haven’t gotten their way since Julius Caesar and the Romans put London on the map. Expect one helluva of New Year’s Eve hangover as the clock strikes twelve on December 31st and Brexiteer dreams tumble down into the real world.
Act 2: Game of chicken on the White Cliffs of Dover
Given our post-election preoccupations with elections, coronavirus, and Trumpian denial of both, it’s easy to understand why Americans have paid little attention to the amazing brinkmanship-game playing out across the Atlantic. It’s quite the drama despite salvos of sleep-inducing jargon flung back-and-forth across the English Channel. Zero hour nears as negotiators of the UK and EU roar toward the Brexit no-deal cliff-edge like a pack of James Deans playing “chicken” with stolen roadsters. A single question dangles in the air: who will blink first?
As the first weekend of December arrived talks were still deadlocked at the 11th hour. EU negotiators tossed their briefing papers in the air and bustled home to Brussels on the Eurostar. Leaving it up to the big dogs, meaning telephone diplomacy between UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. The two agreed talks were deadlocked and punted business back to the negotiators with a twist: talks resumed in Brussels, not London. Anonymous “British sources close to the talks” spewed pessimism:
This is the final throw of the dice. There is a fair deal to be done that works for both sides, but this will only happen if the EU is willing to respect the fundamental principles of sovereignty and control.
To Brexiteer Brits “sovereignty” means doing whatever they damn well please without having to listen to the French yammer on about it. It also symbolizes a return of the British Empire reincarnated as “Global Britain”. Here is Boris Johnson’s explainer:
We in the global community are in danger of forgetting the key insight of those great Scottish thinkers, the invisible hand of Adam Smith, and of course David Ricardo’s more subtle but indispensable principle of comparative advantage . . . this is the moment for us to think of our past and go up a gear again, to recapture the spirit of those seafaring ancestors . . . whose exploits brought not just riches but something even more important than that — and that was a global perspective.
Shakespeare has the best take on this Brexiteer global wet-dream: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.
Negotiations are stuck because to Europeans across the channel “sovereignty” means the Brits want to bend rules and subsidize industry while dumping cheap goods across the continent, out-competing EU companies by undercutting wages and health standards. These irreconcilable views of British “sovereignty” are behind the perpetual deadlock in talks, making Brexit itself feel like a defunct timepiece, the minute hand forever frozen a few minutes off midnight. I can’t remember how many final deadlines have been set only to move to a new date. Google final deadline Brexit and you get 45 million hits. I suspect the actual real, final-final deadline is December 31st.
Even if a last-minute deal is reached, Brits still get to fill out gazillions of customs declarations starting New Years Day: 200 million of them by Her Majesty’s Government reckoning — at a cost of £6.5bn a year — hitting the coronavirus-battered UK economy with new shock-waves. Just listen to Ben Fletcher, Director of the manufacturer’s trade organization Make UK:
I think there is a lot of nervousness and a lot of uncertainty. Some firms are saying to us: ‘We’re just not going to attempt to move goods in and out of the country, because we want to see how the land lies in the first couple of weeks.
With no-deal, trade bombs start dropping across England as exporters and importers pay hefty tariffs at World Trade Organization rates. Expect declines in automobile manufacturing with Nissan saying its plant in Sunderland employing 7000 British workers “will not be sustainable”. Ironically, Sunderland voted Leave. There will be disruption to other industrial sectors as well. British farmers suffer big time too with no-deal. One top economist predicts bankruptcy for one-third of farms inside five years with no-deal.
The list of affected activities is practically endless: education, scientific research, film and television production, etc. etc. A 2018 UK government report estimated that Brexit with a trade deal means a 4.9% drop in British GDP over 15 years. No deal equals 7.6% decline. Unemployment will increase under either outcome.
Both sides say 95% of the deal had been agreed, but the remaining 5% contains all the hard stuff. Three key things block progress: fishing rights, a dispute resolution process and something called “a level playing field” — i.e. common standards for both UK and EU. This “level playing field” is the arena for the Great British Sovereignty Games competition.
Most observers have long been ignoring the drama and calmly saying a deal would come, simply because there are so many bad consequences to no-deal. The hoping is based in this flawed syllogism:
Nations don’t willingly damage their economy
No-deal Brexit will badly damage both British and EU economies
Therefore, a deal will be struck
Josh Hardie with the Confederation of British Industry proffered the usual wishful thinking:
I find it almost impossible to believe that politicians on both sides would allow our countries to slip into no deal. The mutual interest in getting a deal has genuinely never been stronger …
The syllogism is flawed because it omitted some big Brexit realities. For one it didn’t account for the years of effort by hard-core Brexiteers who want no-deal Brexit come hell or high water.
And it’s not just local yobs glomming onto the likes of Nigel Farage. It’s also right-wing tabloids like the Daily Express with their pro-Brexit taunts:
Bombastic’ Boris Johnson ‘doesn’t have guts’ to do no-deal Brexit — ‘He’s bluffing us!’
Not to mention a gang of rich British Brexiteers blitzing for no-deal.
The “mutual interest in getting a deal” optimism also ignores the asymmetry of EU-UK economies and trade that makes the EU resistant to giving up key demands; In 2019 EU GDP = $15.59 trillion; while UK GDP = $2.83 trillion. The reality is any drop in trade will be felt much more intensely by Brits than single country in the EU. Britain takes a 100% hit from no-deal trade drops — whereas the EU drop spreads among 27 different countries. Twenty-two of these nations — including the big three of Germany, France and Italy — ship fewer than 3% of their goods to Britain.
Brexiteers ignore this asymmetric reality and claim Britain has all the cards since the European Union is Britain’s largest trading partner, taking in 43% of the UK’s exports and accounting for 52% of British imports. It’s the tail wagging the dog and echoes the argument President Trump made when he slapped tariffs on Chinese goods, claiming China’s dependence on America would force them to cave on trade and buy even more soybeans. Remember how that turned out?
Last year’s UK election campaign already seems ages ago; it’s easy to forget Johnson’s claim that he had an “oven ready” trade deal waiting in the Brexit kitchen. The election slogan did the trick and landed the Tories their biggest majority since the glory days of the Iron Lady. But as it turns out, the Boris deal wasn’t even half-baked. Post-election he managed an Exit Agreement that formally booted Britain from the EU on February 1st, but with a transition period that kept everything the same until the end of the year. When coronavirus hit, the EU offered to extend that transition to two years, but Boris wouldn’t hear of it. The Tory mantra was Brexit by December 31 or bust. Nine months on bust is looking real possible and cliff edge really is midnight December 31st — miss the deadline and no-deal Brexit goes live with broad swaths of the British economy coming up pumpkins.
Act 3: The Rockefeller way: turning disaster into opportunity
Most ignore a deeper truth behind Brexit deadlock. It isn’t that issues on the table can’t be resolved in a mutually satisfactory way. It’s that Brexit was never about issues in the first place.
Brexit is a battle of interests. Most pointedly, the interests of two very different notions of capitalism that emerged from the world’s “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. George Monbiot eloquently captured the capitalist split in this Guardian essay:
Broadly speaking, there are two dominant forms of capitalist enterprise. The first could be described as housetrained capitalism. It seeks an accommodation with the administrative state, and benefits from stability, predictability and the regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors. It can coexist with a tame and feeble form of democracy.
The second could be described as warlord capitalism. This sees all restraints on accumulation — including taxes, regulations and the public ownership of essential services — as illegitimate. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of profit-making …
Monbiot sees Brexit as a capitalist civil war. What he dubs “warlord capitalism” is not new; it’s the oldest capitalism of all, the one invented by the Spanish when they stole Aztec gold to create modern European banking. The same laissez-faire capitalism we’ve had in centuries since. More recently Ayn Rand promoted it under the rubrik “Objectivism”. With Reagan and Thatcher it sailed beneath the “Chicago School of Economics” banner of Milton Friedman. It’s also the libertarianism of the Austrian school of economics developed by Ludwig von Mises and popularized in the U.S. by Friedrich Hayek. The Austerians resurrected it from the wreck of the Great Recession as ”austerity politics”. This is a god with a thousand names but free-market fundamentalism might be the best.
The infamous robber baron John D. Rockefeller had a favorite saying: “I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity!” Fitting for the fanatic free-market fundamentalists of Brexit.
The prospective disaster of no-deal doesn’t sharpen minds toward compromise because in a world controlled by risk capitalists, disaster brings opportunity. Katrina flooded New Orleans with water and human sharks that broke teacher unions and privatized the public schools. They gobbled up land and property on the cheap, to later sell it dear. The principles of this “disaster capitalism” were first identified by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine — and the Great Recession proved how right she was.
It wasn’t just different flavors of capitalists yanking at each other in the Brexit tug-of-war. The British Labour Party also split. Party leader Jeremy Corbyn never really liked the EU, so he waffled on Brexit whenever the subject came up. The ambivalence was shared by much of the Labour Left, who believe socialism and the EU to be incompatible bedfellows. Ten Labor MPs actively supported Leave during the 2016 referendum.
The left isn’t wrong. The EU began life as a trade federation and only later evolved into a supra-national body managing a multi-nation confederation. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher enthusiastically used the single market to advance her vision of capitalism, resulting in pushback from Labour; the 1983 Labour election manifesto even called for an early Brexit:
… the European Economic Community … was never devised to suit us … British withdrawal from the Community is the right policy for Britain …
The EU, however, is a strange beast; it isn’t just a capitalist creation expanding corporate power, it also carries socialist genes. It was the French Socialist politician Jacques Delors who transformed the European Economic Community into the European Union. His intention was always for the single market to conclude in a “social espace européen, which has still to be created”. He argued that the EU could use its regulatory powers to bring about “social Europe” — meaning a “socially embedded capitalism” opposed to the Milton Friedman version then running rampant through Ronald Reagan’s America.
We never quite got to the capitalism envisioned by Jacque Delors, but the EU version of it is quite a bit less raw — more “house-trained” in Monbiot’s phrasing — than the feral sort the Tory Brexiteers intend to release on the UK come January 2021. Which is why the EU is sticking to its guns on rules that contain Brexiteer capitalism. The Brexiteer version might gain in a world without rules — but if the rules do hold, the “house-trained” capitalists of the EU stand to profit most from Brexit disaster. The Irish economist David McWilliams sums it up nicely:
Finally, we have Brexit. Next week is make or break. My hunch is that a deal will be done because Downing Street, although it looks really quite deranged, hasn’t gone full economic kamikaze yet. Joe Biden’s victory in the US might even have some impact on strategic thinking in London.
But internationally Britain’s reputation is in tatters. For a country like Ireland that attracts international capital and talent, Britain’s lurch from incompetence to farce only reinforces the attractiveness of Ireland as an investment location.
Taken together, the vaccine, the low interest rates and the madness of King Boris provide a golden opportunity for Ireland. We must grasp it.
Manufacturing is one of those golden opportunities. Car making for example. As it turns out, no British automobile is actually British. India owns Jaguar and Land Rover, the Chinese have Lotus, and Germans control Mini-Cooper, Rolls-Royce and Bentley. The French run Vauxhall Motors and Canadians acquired the James Bond favorite, Aston Martin. The owners of these brands decide the future of British car making, not the UK; and if the 20th century proved anything, it was that factories are moveable things.
Act 4: Mad King Boris
David McWilliams sees ”Mad King Boris”; Will Hutton at the Guardian compares Johnson to Winston Churchill — but not the heroic Churchill of the Blitz. The earlier foolish Churchill, the one everyone likes to forget. The man behind the British return to the gold standard in 1925, a principle cause of the Great Depression. This is Hutton’s take:
Superimposed on the disaster of Covid, it [Brexit] will be regarded by future generations with the incredulity we regard the return to the gold standard. British business is to adjust as seamlessly and as quickly to the impending trade wrench as it was meant to do in 1925 to a vastly overvalued exchange rate. World economic pre-eminence will again magically return, as global Britain, freed from the regulatory chains of socialist Europe, spearheads a new era of burgeoning free trade.
No matter that trade in 2020 is not in bulk cotton and coal but in precision-engineered complex artefacts and sophisticated business advice and services. The preconditions are mutually recognised standards, specifications, qualifications and rules, a negotiated framework in which sovereignty is shared to deliver the gains from trade. But Brexiters, as the then chancellor, Winston Churchill, did in 1925, look to an imagined past. Britain is to be a sovereign free trader beholden to no one. That is a green light for hedge funds to speculate, for free ports to become paradises for anything-goes-capitalism and for ministers to spray cash to chums, unconstrained by EU rules.
The metaphor is on-target — Johnson does see himself as Boris Churchill. But it wasn’t a Churchill act that landed him the job of Prime Minister — it was his comedy show made of bumbling speeches and court jester entertainments, all of which made him appear harmless to the public and political enemies alike. Remember the Olympic zip wire stunt gone wrong with its indelible image of dangling Boris, Union Jacks aloft in each mitt? Even Johnson’s name inspires comedy: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But the bumbling is performance. Ian Dent is a journalist who copped to the act:
… those who have watched his speeches multiple times realize that the entire presentation, including seemingly off-the-cuff jokes and stories where he appears to lose the thread halfway through, is replicated word for word. It’s all pretend.
Another key Johnson pose is indecision. Before deciding which way to jump on Brexit, Johnson secretly wrote two different but opposite editorials on Remain vs. Leave. This was his case against Brexit in the op-ed he opted not to publish:
There are some big questions that the “out” side need to answer. Almost everyone expects there to be some sort of economic shock as a result of a Brexit. How big would it be? I am sure that the doomsters are exaggerating the fallout — but are they completely wrong? And how can we know?
And then there is the worry about Scotland, and the possibility that an English-only “leave” vote could lead to the break-up of the union … It is surely a boon for the world and for Europe that she [Britain] should be intimately engaged in the EU. This is a market on our doorstep, ready for further exploitation by British firms … Why are we so determined to turn our back on it?
This “previously unseen article” conveniently leaked a few months after the Tory “Remainer” PM Theresa May tapped Johnson as Foreign Minister; a key part of the job was negotiating a Brexit trade deal. For Johnson, indecision is a political weapon that hides his ruthlessness and keen sense of timing. It was how he took down two Tory Prime Ministers in succession before grabbing the job for himself. Indecision has also been his negotiating hallmark throughout Brexit, obscuring his quest for the hardest Brexit possible — no-deal being the holy grail from get-go. Johnson is unbothered by the damage he will unleash because he has neither empathy nor any core principles. His North Star is power, the gaining and keeping of it.
Without a doubt Johnson sold his soul to grab the PM job. But to whom? That is the prime question about the Prime Minister; it also is his gambler’s tell for what’s next in Brexit.
Act 5: The Bad Boys of Brexit
Alright, I teased a reveal about the owner of the Boris Johnson soul, but it’s traded in shares and I don’t actually know the majority owner; I do have ideas as to likely shareholders. Reporting yields names of Brexit money men such as financial tycoons Peter Cruddas and Peter Hargreaves who invested heavily in the Boris Leave campaign. Then there are the press barons. The Brexit-backing billionaire Barclay twins who turned the Daily Telegraph into a Boris-backing bastion. Or the pro-Brexit Daily Mail of Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, whose name says it all. And last but not least, the Brexit-loving Rupert Murdoch of The Sun. The man who gifted the world Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump and Brexit (with Tony Blair as side-course). Last February when Britain formally left the EU Peter Hargreaves summed up the prevailing mood for this lot:
I haven’t really got what I wanted. I wanted a complete exit
In other words, no-deal or bust.
But Boris is also beholden to a rougher gang, the one that got Brexit over the top — the self-styled “Bad Boys of Brexit”, with entrepreneur Arron Banks leading the pack. In 2014 Banks was the one who dropped one million pounds on UKIP (UK Independence Party) turning Nigel Farage into a household name and Brexit into a political movement. This in turn caused PM David Cameron to make the fatal chess-move when he agreed to a Brexit vote to stop UKIP poaching Tory votes. Without the Bad Boys, there is no Brexit. And they did it by turning Brexit into cultural warfare. Ed Caesar writing in The New Yorker has a particularly good account:
“We played the media like a Stradivarius,” noting that “if we spent eight million in the referendum, we got thirty-five, forty million in free publicity” by outraging liberal commentators. This tactic had an obvious model across the Atlantic. “We are going to be blunt, edgy, and controversial, Donald Trump-style,” Banks wrote in “The Bad Boys of Brexit,” adding, “If BBC Producers aren’t spluttering organic muesli over their breakfast tables every morning, we won’t be doing our job.”
With days to go before the referendum, Farage unveiled a new ukip poster. The words “breaking point,” in giant red letters, were superimposed on a photograph of a snaking line of dark-skinned immigrants waiting to enter the E.U. Many observers denounced the poster as racist. A few hours after the launch, the Labour M.P. Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right nationalist, Thomas Mair, who shouted “Britain First” as he shot and stabbed her. Farage was pilloried.
Banks told me that Farage wanted to shelve the new campaign, but that he and [Banks sidekick Andy] Wigmore urged him to “hold his nerve.” Even after Cox’s death, he said, polls indicated that immigration remained “the №1 issue, by a runaway margin.” Banks told me that there was nothing wrong with the image or with its message. “It was a war,” he said. “Anything goes.”
Other names cluster around this Banks-Wigmore-Farage core in a black hole of dark motives and money. Headlining the list: populist provocateur Steve Bannon, Johnson consigliere Dominic Cummings, the American billionaire Robert Mercer and of course Donald Trump. Others are integral to the plot even if their role is muddy, such as man-about-town pro-Brexit gadfly Lord Ashcroft who conveniently lives in the tax-haven of Belize. I’ll give Lord Ashcroft the reveal of the oddest member of the Bad Boys of Brexit band: Governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi. Here’s the tweet:
Act 6: Down the rabbit hole: Mississippi adventures of the Brexit Bad Boys
Governor Bryant first met Nigel Farage at the Republican National Convention in 2016 as it anointed Donald Trump its presidential candidate. Some of the best reporting on the strange relationship between the Governor and the Brexit Bad Boys belongs to the Mississippi indie weekly, Jackson Free Press and its star reporter Ashton Pittman:
Several weeks later, in late August 2016, Bryant entertained Farage and a host of Brexiteers at the governor’s mansion in downtown Jackson, including multi-millionaire Leave.EU financier and co-founder Arron Banks.
“In real old-school style, the ladies said goodnight, and the men went into the converted garage outside, which was full of motorbikes, old Chevy cars, comfy chairs, a full bar and the best tobacco the South could offer,” Banks wrote, describing that evening in his 2016 book, “The Bad Boys of Brexit.”
Within weeks, Farage and Banks joined Bryant for a Trump rally at the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson. Trump called Farage up to join him onstage, hugging him and congratulating him on the Brexit referendum’s success. The bombastic U.K. politician and radio host recounted the Leave.EU campaign’s story before swooning over the “promise” he saw in Trump, with their shared hatred of the so-called “establishment.”
The New Yorker has Banks version of it:
“You could palpably feel the atmosphere,” Banks recalled. Despite polls to the contrary, he felt certain that Trump was going to win. It had been the same with Brexit, Banks said: “The journalists were, like, ‘This isn’t happening — we don’t want it to happen, therefore it won’t happen.’ ”
After Trump followed Brexit with a win of his own, Governor Bryant attended the Inauguration — which included a British Brexit party with Farage and Banks. The Jackson Free Press reports Bryant speaking about the Mississippi Trump rally, talking up how the crowd was “enthralled with Farage”:
“And they were drinking the Kool-Aid and licking the jar. They were fired up. This man had spoke their language. They understood what he was talking about,” the often-awkward governor said, perhaps unaware that “drinking the Kool-Aid” refers to the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. Hundreds died in a mass suicide there after drinking poisoned Kool-Aid at the urging of The People’s Temple cult leader Jim Jones … What Trump and Farage showed the Mississippi crowd at that rally, Bryant told supporters at the 2017 inauguration party, was that “if you’re dedicated, and you’re pure of heart, you can help change the world.”
“And my friend Nigel Farage and Donald Trump did just that,” he said.
Changing the world. Governor Bryant said the quiet part of Brexit out loud. It was never just about Britain, it was about re-orienting the world to spin on a Boris Johnson-Donald Trump populist axis. A world of wealthy men creating global alliances to attack “globalism”. From the Jackson Free Press:
Sara Wallace Goodman, a University of California Irvine political scientist who wrote the book, “Immigration and Membership Politics in Western Europe,” said it is ironic that nationalist leaders would form a global alliance around an anti-globalist cause.
“It’s this really interesting phenomenon that we refer to as global nationalism, which is a contradictory term, right? … That’s a really new element — a sort of trans-continental network of nationalists,” Goodman told the Jackson Free Press. “They fund each other; they’re all illiberal. That’s the commonality they share. They oppose liberal values, which include tolerance, recognition of diversity, equality and individual rights.”
After Trump’s election Arron Banks returned to Mississippi again and again, building the relationship with Governor Bryant. This tweet shows them at one of the biggest Mississippi rituals of all — Ole Miss football.
In 2018 with a governor greasing the runway, Banks and his partner/side-kick Andy Wigmore moved their AI data operation Big Data Dolphins to a computer complex at the University of Mississippi; it’s a complicated story connected to the data work Cambridge Analytica did for Brexit. The University of Mississippi scrapped the deal after Brittany Kaiser, a former executive of Cambridge Analytica, accused Banks and Wiggins of stealing U.K. citizens’ personal data along with Cambridge Analytica internal procedures. Reporting by Taylor Vance of the Daily Mississippian:
The investigation involving the university began when former Cambridge Analytica business development director Brittany Kaiser testified in the British House of Commons on April 17 that two business executives, Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore, started the data company to create their own version of Cambridge Analytica.
“Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore have told multiple individuals that they took my proposal and copied it and they created their own Cambridge Analytica, which they called Big Data Dolphins in partnership with the data science department at the University of Mississippi,” Kaiser said.
But the Ole Miss setback didn’t setback a blossoming Mississippi-British alliance. Governor Bryant convinced the UK to locate the first American office of The Royal Commonwealth Society in Jackson, Mississippi with Bryant as board chairman.
Bryant was tasked with getting the U.S. to agree to a UK free trade deal after Brexit. The London tabloid The Daily Express reported Bryant saying that President Trump was on board:
I don’t want to speak for the President but I can tell you his affection for and support of Great Britain is very strong … He talks about free trade deals all the time and I would imagine this would be at the front of the queue.
As part of the job Bryant got to hobnob with royals at Buckingham Palace.
After Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019, Nigel Farage launched World4Brexit, a new pro-Brexit group based in the United States. Phil Bryant joined World4Brexit as a board member working alongside Peggy Grande, chair of the group.
After Johnson’s landslide Parliamentary victory last December World4Brexit head Peggy Grande used a Fox News editorial to boast about the bright future of Brexit populism.
This movement of the political tectonic plates will surely cause a tsunami of reaction across the pond, here in the U.S., as well around the world.
A controversial leader with both wide support and lots of criticism, Johnson happened to be in the right place at the right time when the tidal wave of public opinion ushered in a new era for the U.K. and turned the pages of history simultaneously forward — to finally Leave the European Union — and backward — in returning the United Kingdom to national sovereignty and independence.
They never believed that their future opportunities for trade and growth were tied to a small, declining population in Europe with fragile, failing leadership and crumbling economies, but rather looked to the U.S., to the Commonwealth nations and to the waiting world, knowing they would be welcomed back to trade and work together and align for good globally once out of the confines of E.U. oversight.
This historic election is the final nail in the coffin of the globalist experiment. It has failed in dramatic and spectacular fashion and with the U.K.’s imminent exit now from the EU, there will likely be other countries lined up right behind them also plotting their plan of escape … Just as we saw the 2016 Brexit vote as a precursor to the 2016 Trump victory, the progressive left here in the U.S. should take this as a warning shot across the bow.
In 2019 as he prepared to leave office after two terms, Bryant played Mississippi kingmaker, pushing a slate of GOP candidates to continue his hardline, hard-right race-based politics. Bryant’s style, however, is quite at odds with the in-your-face anti-immigrant racism of Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. He’s soft-spoken, jovial and at times funny. He refers to opponents as “our friends on the left”. I know from my own sources that he can work across the political aisle — as he did when enabling funding for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. He also promotes up-and-coming Black political stars in Mississippi such as Nic Lott — although Lott lost his primary bid for Public Service Commissioner despite the Governor’s support. Phil Bryant is the perfect velvet glove for the hardcore populist-fist racism of the Brexiteer/Trump era. Bryant continues his “globalist” work as lobbyist at Jackson-based Bryant, Songy, Snell Global Partners. Their motto: Solving Problems. Creating Opportunities.
As a born-and-bred Mississippian, I’m not surprised to see my home state in the center of Brexit. Mississippi has long operated on a grand scale with a taste for secession. It was the Mississippian Jefferson Davis who became head of the Confederacy. After the failure of that enterprise, my state created the “Mississippi Plan” of 1875 that returned the South to ex-confederate rule and paved the path to Jim Crow segregation across the entire South. Hitler’s lawyers later based their race laws on the segregation codes of Mississippi. When the Supreme Court overturned segregation, Mississippi created the White Citizens’ Council to push back. On the plus side, Mississippi was ground zero for the Civil Rights Movement, and played midwife to Black Power along the way. We also birthed the blues, Elvis and writers Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and Richard Wright.
Today’s Mississippi keeps in the center of things because it excels at national politics of the right-wing kind. Starting with Senator James Eastland and continuing under Trent Lott, Haley Barbour and now Phil Bryant, Mississippi conservatives command a wide-ranging good-ole-boy network, grounded in Mississippi but influential throughout the country, a power exercised in the corridors and back-rooms of right-wing America. In his book, The Fall of the House of Zeus, Journalist Curtis Wilkie said Mississippi insiders call this network “the force”. Wilkie describes its creation under Eastland:
The network teemed with unreconstructed segregationists …the organization did not function like a big city machine, rewarding political loyalty with patronage jobs. Instead it operated as a confederation of individuals with common, conservative interests … they took their cues from Eastland, and following the Sphinx-like characteristics of the senator, who rarely made public speeches, they preferred to carry out their work in private.
Nothing has changed in the years since except the names of the sphinx. That and that the sphinxes are all-in for Brexit — with right-wing America in tow.
Act 7: The rotting fruit of Brexit
Brexit arrives with a bang January one. With both sides seemingly giving up on a trade deal, the Royal Navy said warships will interdict any French fishing boat foolish enough to sail British waters. The Guardian writes:
Although the offshore patrol ships carry machine guns, they would not be expected to use weapons against EU fishing boats.
Johnson’s Cabinet quietly doubled the UK inventory of these military patrol boats from four to eight in preparation for no-deal. That the Tory government is readying for hostilities with French fishermen says everything you need to know about the state of negotiations. The sides will probably keep talking right up to the New Year, but it seems that Johnson egged on by Bad Brexit Boys has made up his mind for no-deal. Lord Ashcroft fired this tweet at Boris during one of the many tense negotiating moments:
At dinner Wednesday in Brussels @BorisJohnson grip your marbles tight, pour lead in your pencil, don’t go wobbly and don’t cross your stated red lines…good fortune..
Dinner was that last-ditch EU supper date on December 9th when Johnson met European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels to salvage a trade deal. It ended with a no-deal impasse but plans to keep talking. A lot of Brits voted for Johnson thinking he would “get Brexit done” and everyone could move on. The sad truth is Brexit will never “get done”. Martin Kettle writing in the Guardian compares it to the partition of Ireland one hundred years ago:
Settling Brexit once and for all may have been the Conservative party’s wishful goal in the election that took place 12 months ago. But it has simply not happened, in spite of Britain’s departure from the EU. Nor will it happen. Like partition, the issues that getting Brexit done was supposed to resolve will still be live when those who voted in 2016 are long dead.
Trade with the EU being one of those many issues, with fish the most immediate hot mess. British fishermen voted for Brexit with many backing no-deal in hopes of netting a bigger share of fish swimming in British waters. If they get their no-deal it will be pyrrhic; 80% of the UK catch is exported to Europe; no-deal tariffs sink their prime export market. In other Brexit culinary news, new custom checks on the border will create mounds of rotten fruit. One glance at Brexit’s future:
Brexit stockpiling is causing 10-mile lorry queues and delays of up to five hours in Calais, it has emerged, as hopes of a trade deal fade … The tailbacks give a glimpse of things to come next year when customs, standards and immigration checks will kick in on both sides of the channel.
The Brexit Bad Boy wet-dreams may actually end the United Kingdom. Under the 2020 Brexit exit agreement, Northern Ireland remains in the EU economic zone. Duty gets paid on English imports with a complicated rebate system for items that don’t cross the Northern Ireland/Irish border. Meaning Northern Ireland remains in the EU single market with trade binding Irish north and south ever more tightly as time goes on. Support is building in the North for Irish reunification, especially among the young. Another UK trouble spot is Wales with the Welsh political party Plaid Cymru pushing independence. The Brexit-disunion rubber really hits the road in Scotland where Brexit is extremely unpopular. The SNP — Scottish National Party — is calling for a new independence referendum after upcoming elections in May; 58% of Scots already want a split with the UK.
Monday December 14th already seems ages ago in the Brexit time machine. It was supposed to be the final, final deadline for deal. Until it wasn’t. The EU did what it always does with a stuck-negotiation: kick the can down the road. So negotiations will continue, right up to December 31st most likely. The delay will supercharge Brexit chaos if it’s no-deal at the end. But even if Boris bucks Brexiteers and does a deal, the one on offer is thin and far from frictionless, with “costly rules-of-origin and regulatory compliance checks at borders” according to Tom Kibasi at the Guardian.
The 14th of December was important for another, bigger Brexit reason. It’s the day the American Electoral College met to select the next President of the United States. The Supreme Court smashed the last of Trump’s absurd attempts to overthrow the vote, leaving the Electoral College result a foregone conclusion: the next US President will be an Irish-American seeking closer relations with the EU. Biden is already crimping Boris Brexit schemes — in September Johnson tried for Northern Irish backsies on the exit agreement he had signed with the EU. He backed off after Biden warned Britain not to screw the Good Friday Agreement:
We do not want a guarded border, We want to make sure — we’ve worked too long to get Ireland worked out … The idea of having a border north and south once again being closed is just not right, we’ve just got to keep the border open.
The Bad Boys of Brexit roadmap planned a different route. Arron Banks and pals placed bets on deregulation, Donald Trump and promises of a UK-US trade deal. Their goal? Redirect the world toward Bad Boys capitalism. You know, same thing as Robert Reich’s market fundamentalism, George Monbiot’s warlord capitalism and Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism. But the revolution came up short in America leaving Britain to go it alone.
Despite the continuing failure of negotiations, Boris may yet agree to some version of a hard-deal before all is said and done, so it’s too early to say how bad Brexit will be. But it’s not too late to understand the thinking of the Bad Boys behind it. My favorite Irish economist, David McWilliams, nailed it with his tweet:
On #Brexit. The UK’s negotiating stance is “we will turn our country into a sweatshop, and you Europeans can’t stop us”. Truly extraordinary position when UK’s essential economic problem is low productivity, the Brexiters entire strategy is based on explicitly driving it lower!
I grew up in a place where this economic theory is the main game in town; I know how it ends. My journalist-wife and I recently wrote about Mississippi success in reaching economic rock-bottom. Thing is, it does end well for some; a few rich folks get even richer. Just ask our Bad Boys of Brexit ex-gov Phil Bryant. He’s tickled pink with the results.
