Boris Johnson believes he is the modern Churchill. He even walks like Churchill. He sees himself as the outsider of British politics - just as Churchill was in his marginal years. Boris thinks he will deal with the modern equivalent of Dunkirk (when the British army was saved from the Nazi's) by leading a Brexit battle and a Corbyn war. Like Churchill, Johnson's key partner in the world is the USA. But unlike Churchill with his decaying British Empire, Boris has far fewer resources to play with. He will need to be a 'supplicant' to the US, a term that was used to describe Britain in the EU by Johnson's campaign manager in the recent Tory Party vote. Even so, Johnson simply cannot accept his and the UK's status as number 2 (or 3) in a modern Europe.
Churchill hated the Nazis and then the 'Reds' and believed he would unite the country and win a partnership with the US on that basis. Boris thinks he will unite the Tory Party if he gets some sort of Brexit and then he will unite the country by getting rid of the Corbynite 'Reds'. And then of course the US will truly kick the British door in, courtesy of Boris.
In reality Johnson is not so much a Churchill as a mini Trump. Unlike Churchill he doesn't speak well in Parliament. He tries to shout to people over the heads of the Tory Party and Britain's MPs. Unlike Trump, who's strategic desire is to break up the EU as one of the three, great capitalist, competitive blocks, Britain's mini-Trump could not care less about the EU or Brexit (anymore than his apparent recent love for British democracy.) When Boris wrote his famous two articles for the Times as the EU referendum started, one for remaining in the EU and the other to leave, he was working out which would provide for his future leadership. His conclusion was that breaking up the rich, Etonian elite, who called Boris 'the Yeti' at school and were amused by, but not interested in him, using the EU referendum as a battering ram would better serve his purpose to get himself to the leadership of the Tory Party and the country. Boris has achieved his goal. Britain's government is now the most right wing government since Thatcher and it will go much much faster than Thatcher if he has his way.
Johnson's goal is not ultimately related to Brexit. He wants Brexit out of the way. He speculates that the EU will probably accept some compromise on a deal. But it does not really matter. If he can sweep Brexit away, if necessary without a deal, he can call his General Election, hopefully defeat Labour, then make any deals he wants or can get. He will use the summer recess of Britain's Parliament to go out on his Trumpety campaign - for a new, greater Britain! Hurrah!
Obstacles.
Despite the continuing bitter manoeuvres inside the Labour Party (a fight to the death led by many Labour MPs and the Deputy Labour leader over anti-semitism and over Corbyn's leadership) social polling continuously shows deep support for radical changes in the economy and the politics of austerity Britain. These views were reflected in the support for Labour's 2017 Manifesto, especially among the young and they continue.
Meanwhile, despite Boris's promise of a 'Golden Britain', his brutal 'removal' of Brexit is more likely to lead to yet more sacrifices, very quickly, for the least well-off in the UK. This changes the dominant focus on Brexit itself. It returns people who are suffering, back to the more basic issues of poverty, welfare and want. The social damage of an ill thought out Brexit applies either with a bodged up version of ex PM Teresa May's 'plan,' or with the UK coming out of the EU without any deal. Even if Boris throws £ billions at various services etc, it will not be fast enough to turn the realities of decline anytime soon. Boris, like Trump, claims he is opening up a golden future. Sadly and inevitably a golden future is well over the horizon. And a rapid General Election, based on Boris's dependence on harsh US trade deals and on the decline of key economic infrastructure, is both a likely and a deadly event for him. The image of a renewed 'great Britain' blows away as quickly as it was concocted. Already it does not appeal to the majority in the UK who did not grow up in the imperial sunset. If there is a focal point provided by mass movements, by the Labour leadership and the active hostility to Boris which smolders today, it will be blown away.
Somewhere in Johnson's misty nightmares is also the prospect that the UK itself may fall apart. But he's not sure when or why that might happen and it's too alarming for him to seriously consider for now. No; he intends to sort Brexit - then Corbyn, in that order. Then he might consider the Irish and the Scots.
But Johnson will have to face the shift in Northern Ireland as the half-dead Democratic Unionist Party get trapped by a 'no deal' or whatever version of it that is presented as Boris's 'breakthrough'. The majority of Northern Irish people who voted to stay in the EU will begin to force a Northern Irish election. The extinction of the DUP as the majority party in the province is perilously close.
Boris is also (un)cordially hated in Scotland. His leadership of the UK reignites the memories of Thatcher, Scotland's democratic deficit and the hated Poll Tax. It stimulates a second wind in favour of an independence referendum on the entirely correct basis of political oppression in an outdated Britain. Again, 'a greater Britain' is not welcome. Scotland, alongside Northern Ireland have already begun the physical break up of the 'great' in Boris's version of a new 'Great Britain'. One has the second largest mass party in favour of Britain's dissolution and the other has the government pushing for independence.
Charades
The noise and glitter around Boris suddenly uniting a desperate, lazy and worn out Tory government is as fragile as a firework on a rainy night. His appeal to 'making Britain great again', the real, Trumpite vision of the new British Prime Minister, is as fake as his news which he made up for the Times. (And got sacked for.) Which is not at all to say that this charade doesn't need to be challenged, and challenged by a more coherent, practical and exciting alternative. The British do seek change. Its society is not working for the vast majority. They are going backwards. The big majority are insecure, declining in health, homes, in wealth and in basic rights. A dramatic vision of a different sort, with a set of countries coming from Britain that dedicate their political and economic principles to the lives of all who are its citizens, without the public schools, without the pure white judges, the declining living standards for 90% - all and more of which is getting worse, has yet to be presented, in full - and as a great and deep democratic future for all.
On the 27th of June the former leader of Scottish Labour said 'there is a serious prospect' that Jeremy Corbyn would agree to hold a second independence referendum (in Scotland.) Kezia Dugdale said she believes Mr Corbyn would give consent for indyref2 if he needed SNP support to form a government after a general election. Despite the clear call in the Labour Manifesto of 2017 to keep the union and not to hold a new referendum on Scotland, Corbyn has personally stated that he would support a second referendum if 'the Scots' called for one'.
In part, this was an item of news buried in the BBC News on the Internet and generally unmentioned in TV news in England. But it was and remains a critical question for the UK's future.
The very ex-Tory leader Teresa May made a speech about the UK's Union (4 July). Most commentators who bothered making any comment about her plan to review Devolution ... and her big new thought about how the THE UNION should work ... cringed at the hypocrisy and emptiness of May's discovery - that there were all these other places, besides England, who, it turns out, were in the same country!
One result was Boris Johnson (Britain's next Prime Minister) spending a whole sentence or two on how he was going to be Prime Minister of 'The whole Union!' Now that North Sea Oil (and its wealth) is out of the way (the strange Norwegians mostly put their oil returns in 'The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund', which reached $2 Trillion this year) the Scots could however at least be sure that they would be as poor as the rest of the overwhelming majority of the UK.
The fight for Scottish independence has a long history. The Scottish Labour Party backed independence in the late teens and early twenties of the 20th century. But it was the emergence of the national movement from the late 1970s and 80's that revealed the main basis of Scotland's right to its own self-determination. Scotland (unlike Northern Ireland, but similar to Wales) have both experienced long periods in their modern history where they have been politically oppressed; by an English government and its state. Northern Ireland, on the other hand, was set up as a ruthless, imperial toehold, built to undermine full Irish independence. The apartheid state, set up by Britain in Northern Ireland, was dominated by a totally second rate existence, socially, religiously, economically, racially, as well as politically, for all republicans. The Northern Irish arrangement was created and dominated by British imperialism.
Both Scotland and Wales were not created by British imperialism. Although there were significant echoes of the Irish national experiences (the organised hostility to waves of immigration of the Irish to the west of Scotland, the second rate treatment of Welsh miners etc.,) these countries were not established as imperialist colonies and, in a general sense, were not ruled as imperial colonies. (For example the first British King was Scottish and the Scottish ruling class, eg in banking and financial services, has always been a significant part of the British ruling class. The industrial revolution, denied in whole or in part to Britain's colonies, was never blocked in Wales or Scotland.)
This distinction, between the Irish question and current national movements in Scotland and Wales, is relevant to what is happening now to the UK. Historically speaking, British imperialism was finally brought down by independence movements across the whole globe, including in Ireland, following the two World Wars. (In Northern Ireland the war of independence has only recently finished.) The process now emerging among the movements organising for the separation of mainland Britain, is instead a decisive political act, within what remains of Britain's imperial heartland. And its fundamental character, in Britain's mainland, is that it is a key step towards overturning the whole of Britain's role in, and its subservience to, the domination of globalisation. The 'break up' of Britain is, in that sense, a thoroughly progressive act; an act that is a key part of the reorganisation of the politics and economics of Britain itself. Scottish (and if called-for, Welsh) independence are necessary acts to reverse Britain's political and economic systems - but they are not sufficient.
Why necessary? Why not sufficient?
It is necessary because the deeply required, indeed essential, disruption and transformation of British politics and economics is currently held up by the siege towers built over centuries, designed to protect Britain's ruling class. And those siege towers; the City of London, the 'First Passed the Post' voting system, the 'Home Counties', the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge universities, the Monarchy, the Lords, the select judiciary and the rigid class structure of the armed forces and on and on, are rooted in southern England. Breaking domination of these institutions in Scotland, in Wales will not be possible unless these parts of Britain become separate, critical nations - for themselves. Breaking away from the UK is a solid platform - for breaking up Britain. If the separation is denied or fails to carry through in the struggle to create a new type of nation, a great, not to say historic advance will be lost not just for the new nations but for all in Britain.
The paradox is that the unification of working class people across Britain (see current divisions over Brexit) can only open out once the core structures of Britain, post imperial Britain and its 'special relationships' are denied and then broken down.
Not sufficient? 'Solving' the national question in Scotland (and Wales) however will not be sufficient. Precisely because these struggles are not a battle to overthrow imperialist domination. They are struggles to identify and then secure the political system which those nations reflect and want - as against their participation in political systems which constantly deny their political choices. But of course the political wishes and requirements of the Scottish and Welsh people (should they demand it) lie on a bedrock of economic foundations that criss-cross the globe. To begin the process of moving the predominant economics in the world, in order to meet the requirements of most of the people in your country, is eminently an international requirement.
Again, the paradox of the new nations of the old Britain, is their requirement to reach to all those who seek the same destination as themselves wherever they can be found - not as a kind act - but as an essential necessity.