Britain’s Rump Trumpocracy: An Imperial State – Without An Empire

As the US moves away and Brexit crumbles, former Prime Minister John Major has exposed the isolation and colonial nostalgia of Britain, argues Hardeep Matharu

“Complacency and nostalgia are the route to national decline,” said Sir John Major in a speech this week. In the Brexit vote, “fiction defeated fact and fostered a belief in a past that never was, whilst boosting enthusiasm for a future that may never be… If that mode of politics takes root, it will kill all respect in our system of government.”

The former Conservative Prime Minister was speaking just days after Donald Trump was voted out of the White House. His rival in the US presidential race, Joe Biden, marked the announcement of his victory with a photo of himself smiling in a baseball cap stitched with the words ‘We Just Did’. The slogan was seen as a response and riposte to Trump’s most popular brand merchandise: his ‘MAGA’ hat, proclaiming his promise to ‘Make America Great Again’.

Claims of a glorious return to a fictionalised past and the creation of a better future can be seen in both the ascendancy of Trump and the Brexit vote in the UK. The appetite for messages with connotations to a lost greatness – the need to Make America Great Again and to Take Back Control – has had far-reaching consequences for both countries. 

But, while the US has decided to turn its back on Trump, although not decisively repudiating his toxic brand of authoritarian populism, Britain under Boris Johnson seems to be sailing ever more into winds swirling with dreams of a mythologised past; a new and mighty ‘Global Britain’; a return to an imperial state – without an empire.

Led by an Etonian ruling class who have shown that they will answer to nobody, Brexit has been portrayed by our leadership as signifying Britain’s return to the world stage, free of the shackles of the European Union. Not only does this display a ridiculous historical myopia and expose an unresolved identity crisis, it is a deeply flawed narrative.

“The prospect of Britain retaining its status as the leading global power in the face of the defeat of its empire was presented by British politicians in 1961 as a major reason in favour of joining the European Economic Community,” the academic Dr Nadine El-Enany has observed. “Britain’s profound colonial amnesia and imperial ambition now see it making a drastic manoeuvre away from the EU.”

Historian and Yale professor Timothy Snyder has said that “Brexiteers are right that Brexit would bring back Empire. This time, though, England would be the colonised, not the coloniser”.

In both Brexit and Trump’s MAGA, he sees projects embodying a “politics of eternity” – a grand narrative about what is possible placing “one nation at the centre of a cyclical story”. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with its mystic tales of historic victimhood and suffering, is a prime example.

“Eternity politicians leap from one moment to another, over decades or centuries, to build a myth of innocence and danger,” he has noted. “They imagine cycles of threat in the past, creating an imagined pattern that they realise in the present by producing artificial crises and daily drama.”

Both MAGA and the Vote Leave campaign’s Take Back Control advocated returning to a successful past snatched away; offering recognition and meaning for their supporters but no real practical solutions. But practical solutions are not the point.

For Snyder, such projects also tend to be ‘sadopopulist’ in their nature – premised on the concept that people are willing to undergo pain in order to feel better about themselves and their place in the world. No matter if Trump and Brexit don’t actually improve the lives of those who voted for them, their deliverance takes the form of a psychic ‘winning’ through which people feel better off because scapegoated others are to be made worse off. While proclaiming to empower, such projects cloak a politics of destruction and division. 

In the case of Brexit, the ‘others’ were European immigrants. With MAGA, it was Mexicans crossing the border, liberals and people of colour. While Trump’s ‘America First’ policy was seen as an isolationist approach to foreign affairs, its historical significance was not lost on those who recognised the slogan as a nod to the America First Committee – a pressure group set up to campaign against the US entering the Second World War with anti-Semitic and pro-fascist leanings.

While the US under Biden is likely to return to its more traditional, dominant role on the global stage, positioning itself once again as the ‘world’s policeman’, Sir John Major bluntly highlighted this week how far in the opposite direction Britain is going – despite its Government’s own rhetoric.

“We are no longer a great power,” he told London’s Middle Temple. “We will never be so again. In a world of nearly eight billion people, well under 1% are British. We are a top second-rank power.”

He said “our hefty international influence rested on our history and reputation, buttressed by our membership of the EU and our close alliance with the US. Suddenly, we are no longer an irreplaceable bridge between Europe and America. We are now less relevant to them both”.

Brexit is a “bitterly divisive policy” that “uncorked a populism that may be difficult t