A brown Brexit?

Whilst I was scrolling through Twitter, I stumbled across a blog-post by Jacob Reese-Mogg: An MP for the conservative Party and Leader of the House of Commons.

In the post he spewed the same empty platitudes around ‘reclamation of Sovereignty; likening Churchill to Boris and Freedom from the malignant orbit of the EU — to paraphrase a few of his musings.

Why do we cherish Sovereignty so much? It’s synonym is basically ‘control’ and freedom to governs one self and to make our rules accordingly.

But, let’s play along and stick with the notion of Sovereignty and see how this play out. Despite the tone of how this post started, I’m pretty upbeat about the long term composition of the UK.

Global Britain

When the Brexit campaign kicked off, it was sprinkled ever so elegantly with a dollop of racism packaged under the veneer of controlling our borders and keeping out terrorists.

Paradoxically, we also want to leave the EU and become a ‘Global Britain’. Which was always the case if the Empire was anything to go by.

We had a good crack at a ‘Global Britain’ and the residuals left behind by our Common Wealth and a rather pissed off India are an indicator of what happened last time when Britain was ‘Global’.

But things are different. India is on track to becoming a superpower. Australia will become a vassalage of the United States as Washington seeks to counterbalance the growing Chinese influence and South East Asia continues to show its potential as the inspiration of technological ideology.

The UK will be Sovereign but it’s people will be accountable to the world.

The UK is still a leader in Financial Services and inconclusively, a leader in Science through their sequencing of COVID and their vaccination work. But it also has an aging population. The supposed natives are getting older and even the immigration population that came across a few decades after the fall of Suez canal are starting to see a renewed faith in a higher being. As of writing, the NHS has beds available to support people who need it but not the staff.

Yet across India, the average age is 27 and the same liberal values are being forged and challenged to that of the United Kingdom. Women are fighting back against systematic oppression and the middle-class is setting their sights outside of the country to be educated.

The announcement that Erasmus would be replaced by the Turing project is a sign of the India influence. If viewed through the lenses of comparative advantage — India has the young and ambitious workforce and the UK has the educational and professional credentials to match. Expect more young Indians to venture to the UK to avail of this and see that they settle in the country also. Manchester and Birmingham and of course London will benefit from this due to their younger demographics and established Universities.

But the losers of this scheme will be young Britons for the simple reason in that there aren’t enough of them. Maybe if we adopted Russia’s approach of placing the mother on an archaic pedestal we would be able to change this but historically, we’ve always relied on immigration to drive population growth on this rock.

This is why the UK will do well, at least here. Brexit will have started off as a racist propaganda ploy but unintentionally, it will not be as bad as expected thanks to the former Commonwealth titans stepping in to claim a debt perhaps overdue to them.

It’s more nuanced than I’ve laid out. Modi wants a deal. But that only so far covers FDI and trade of goods and services. The UK needs to think about its changing age demographics and accommodate. Likewise India will want to have their cake and eat it. Send their kids to the UK and prevent brain drain by bringing them back. We haven’t even touched upon the supposed cultural liberation and freedom the UK provides. To the extent that students would want to come back and seek to settle here would be a boon for Boris and a bane for Modi.

From the looks of it, a trade deal of some sorts will happen. India will be the first of a few of the Kids helping out their abusive parent but the notion of Sovereignty doesn’t exist here. We can make our own rules? Fine. But like the Brexit deal showed, those rules and values will be compromised time and time again to ensure the long-term prosperity of the country. So it is a dissonance to claim ‘Sovereignty’ and a ‘Global Britain’ when on the global stage, the rules are dictated by Adam Smith and not by Jacob Reese-Mogg.

Brexit Britain will be alright. The United States has long ago taken over the mantle of the bastion of ‘The English Speaking peoples’’ and their soft and hard power greatly eclipses our own. Britain and not London, needs to prepare for a Global mindset because that is exactly what they are going to get. Unfortunately, the same people whom vilified the immigrants and bought into the rhetoric will now need to compete twice as hard to secure social and upward mobility and prepare not for a Hard or soft Brexit, but perhaps a Brown Brexit?

FYI

Winston Churchill was widely accepted to be a Francophile. He even said that if he could, he would rather be the President of the United States than that a PM of Britain. But most importantly, he was a true advocate for the United States of Europe. He felt a world order was possible where the British Empire, the United States and the European Union could dominate. Only two of the three remain. Context matters.

For his achievements, he did frequently vilify the Indians, labelling them ‘Ghastly beasts’ and even calling Hindus ‘Windbags’.

So when dealing with India, tread lightly with the Churchill* analogies.

*I still think Churchill is a great man and can separate his achievements from his view on the world at the time.