The Political Psychology of Brexit and the British Leadership

DALLAS: Brexit is a political statement. At the heart of Brexit are issues of race and class. Brexit is a statement driven by abject racism. The British government proposes to implement a policy avowedly racist in nature, and one that will set back relationships.

The atmosphere in Britain is composed of a noxious mixture of two compounds. The first is a race compound. It is a collective inability to accept immigration, and the second is a class compound involving cynical manipulation of collective sentiments by politicians to achieve personal ends.

Immigration as Driver of Brexit: Human beings are mobile creatures, and this has meant the diffusion of ethnicities over the world. As one lot of ethnicities have gotten to a place a bit earlier, they are resentful of another ethnicity subsequently turning up.

This turf protection is a simple and repetitive biological phenomenon that losers in an evolutionary race engage in. It breeds an inability to tolerate demographic diversities that are expressed in Brexit-type decisions to depart from collective entities such as the EU.

In the past it might have taken 365 days to go to a place 365 miles away to settle there. Today, in 365 minutes one can get to a place 3,650 miles away to settle down. Transition speed today is 15,000 times faster than in the past.

In the past, an immigration assimilation process was subtle. Today’s immigration assimilation process is overwhelming. Technology has been the driver of the contemporary phenomenon. Sociology has been the victim of the process of globalization and immigration. Psychology has been the culprit that has driven political options.

These political contingencies have arisen because a once-dominant racial and ethnic grouping has become surrounded by diversity pockets of many other ethnicities. Consequently, while Brexit has been a cry of pain, the racial dimension can be understood by the notion that six hungry hyenas can bring down one tiger. The tiger is surrounded and in mortal danger.

Hence, the psychology of Brexit has been a visceral reaction by the British to a loss of native identity fostered by a sociology of modern Britain that reflects substantial heterogeneity. Among the people of Britain, rational thoughts have retreated in response to powerful emotional forces.

A large group of British individuals, those who voted to leave the EU in the referendum, have been unable to tolerate the demographic diversities that has accompanied the diffusion of mankind throughout human history. The vote for Brexit has been a means of halting the diversification of the demographic composition of the United Kingdom, and in possibly reversing the multi-cultural nature of contemporary heterogeneous human societies.

Dealing with Brexit: Yet, rather than being statesmanlike, encouraging a cooling of passions through education and engendering emollient behavior, thereby altering the logic of discourse to change direction towards a liberal and progressive future, the British government has been shrill, jingoistic and perverse.

Nevertheless, as the Brexit drama keeps unfolding, this has created an institutional disruption of high magnitude, with British society sinking deeper into quicksand. In the light of the visit of a British delegation to India, it is worth understanding the psychology inherent in the politics of the Brexit policy.

The Agents of Brexit: The entire Brexit referendum strategy for European disengagement had been to shock and awe simple natives with the hubris of an exclusivity based on an assumed cultural superiority. To understand those driving Brexit, it is useful to appreciate the sociology of British political leadership.

By and large, political leadership in Britain has emerged from the rosters of Oxford University, with a little bit from Cambridge, where students have been instructed that they are to go forth and govern, they are brainwashed that they are the best of breed in the world, and that the entire world needs their leadership.

Even if physically British colonies no longer exist, Oxbridge students are taught to go forth and colonize the less fortunate minds, which happens to belong to the rest of the world. It has been a “Sanders of the River” image, where a not-so-bright man holds together a fractious and unruly group of natives simply by a commanding presence and the force of character.

This has been a Victorian model of behavior, in which a person, influenced by feelings of self-assertiveness engendered by belief structures, has lorded it over natives who have thereupon looked to their White masters as ma-bap (masters). This is the caricature of colonial empire builders and imperial administrators.

To add to this hubristic mess, those who have been privately educated, in other words attended public school, have been instilled with a ruling-elite ethos at an earlier age.

This imprinting of class distinctions has led to social and political relationships being influenced by an ethos supporting the creation of hierarchies based on norms in vogue in imperial times.

Another dimension of this privately-educated class has been a disdain for analytical education, which would generate professional skills, and a fondness for conceptualization and verbalization as if the entire world was a parliamentary debating chamber or stage.

As a consequence of the educational background of members of the political class, in early stages of careers for many post-college employments have involved associations with public relations firms, think tanks, or research groups in political parties. For this model of careers, technical skills and knowledge are superfluous.

Members of this educationally-homogenous grouping are professionally wordsmiths, at home in a milieu where the production of turgid prose is the rationale for existence. Other than being demagogues, the class has no real expertise. Such is the depiction of the political class in today’s Britain.

Members of this class have no vocation; nor a motivation for engaging in public life to be of service to society. These individuals lack technical skills to be in finance, and administrative skills to be in the civil services. They lack intellectual skills to be an academic or commitment to join the priesthood.

Yet, these vacuous individuals possess the skills of con-artists in being smooth, suave, seductive, silky and smiling to sell anything. Their best skill is in the practice of briefing against each other, and they possess no loyalty to a higher cause other than their own.

Political Class Behavior and Brexit: The imagined world for this class is a demographically-pure Britain, run by ancestors of this particular group, which would be the world’s source of manufactured output, technology, capital and ideas. In this romantic idyll, immigration has altered human composition of Britain. Human heterogeneity is unacceptable to this group.

An anti-immigrant stance has been the leitmotif of the Brexit movement. The hollow case for Brexit, constructed on a platform of racism, divisiveness and biological exclusivity, has been sold to the public to gain approval for the cause of departure from the EU.

Yet, immigration is a major aspect of trade. The key type of capital in the world is human capital. To deny the human logic associated with immigration, as the Brexit purveyors do, is to deny the existence of the natural process inherent in human evolution.

Ninety years ago Netaji Subhas Bose had foreseen something like Brexit, writing about Europe that “Further jealousy and economic rivalry is bound to give rise to frequent fratricidal and internecine wars in Europe……….Europe is systematically and deliberately engendering race prejudice between white and colored races by proclaiming in season and out of season the supremacy of the whites. This more than anything else will help to consolidate the whole of Asia against the onslaught of Europe.”

In line with what Netaji had forecast, the head of British government, who belongs to this class, has continually stated that Brexit means Brexit. In other words, the direct implication is that, come what may, a racist policy will be implemented. Such imperial approaches are simply unacceptable in the 21st century. It is now time that Asia turns its back on Europe, and for India to tell the British that their overtures are totally unwelcome.

(Cover Photograph : British Prime Minister Theresa May on 3 day visit to India from today. At the TECH summit with PM Narendra Modi)

(The writer is Professor of Technology Strategy at the University of Texas at Dallas)