The news is a foreign country

This month I started tweeting about my home country as if its news was happening somewhere else — somewhere a bit closer to the region that I cover, as the Southern Africa bureau chief of the Financial Times.

Well, it’s a hobby.

But there is also a half-serious point behind it, about language and institutions in ‘Brexit Britain’. We’ll get to that point in a second.

But first, since an editor in Friday morning conference took some mild interest in the week’s rather intense political developments in this curious and far-off country, there was a commission to write a catch-up news analysis for the weekend world section…

In a Fractured British State, Separatists See Their Moment

Separatists in Britain’s oil-rich north said this week that they would hold a fresh independence vote only a few years after previously being narrowly defeated, in a major escalation of the political crisis consuming the divided Atlantic seaboard country.

Announcing the vote on Monday, the Scottish Popular Liberation Movement said that it could take place as soon as next year — openly defying the United Kingdom federal government in the far-off southern capital, London.

Preparations for a vote would underline the fragile authority at home of a revisionist power as it prepares for a simultaneous confrontation with 27 of its near neighbours over what it sees as the injustice of the regional order.

“Our efforts at compromise have instead been met with a brick wall of intransigence,” the separatist leader, Nicola Sturgeon, said from the provincial capital, Edinburgh.

She added that the vote would be held once the terms of the UK’s separation from regional bodies — where negotiations will soon begin — were known.

The move signals that a hard line recently taken on north-south power-sharing by Premier Theresa May, leader of the ruling English People’s Congress, has dramatically backfired — despite the separatists losing a similar vote only in 2014. While the EPC could block a new vote, such a move may only play into the separatists’ hands.

The premier had made a plea for unity earlier this month — insisting “at heart we are one people.” But this week she responded to the vote plan by threatening the SPLM that “politics is not a game.”

Linking the independence vote to success in the regional exit negotiations may also embolden secessionist parties in other areas of the UK — such as its restive but often ignored northwest, where recent elections revealed a hardening sectarian divide.

Western diplomats fear that last year’s plebiscite on membership of a regional development community has exposed irresolvable tensions in the UK’s ramshackle multinational structure — which investors buying up the country’s sizeable debt may be yet to price in.

Bets on shorting the currency — down a fifth against hard currencies like the US dollar since the regional membership vote — are rising. But few investors are, as yet, seriously considering the consequences of a break-up which may leave behind several one-party statelets squabbling over currency redenomination and debt restructuring.

The SPLM’s renewed bid for independence, part of a decades-long struggle, has come despite a collapse in revenue from nearby offshore oil fields, and questions over which currency a new state would adopt.

Even so, direct calls to popular sovereignty through referendums — now held at a rate of every two years — have increasingly become the only way to navigate the decaying elite consensus on how to run the union, a largely colonial-era construct.

Also this week, the bloated and sclerotic union parliament voted against giving itself a meaningful say on the exit negotiations.

Younger than the United States, with a much longer history on the British isles of separate warring nations, the union’s break-up could quickly follow a so-called ‘hard’ exit from regional treaties — where EPC policy has quickly radicalised amid intense factional conflict over patronage and positions.

There are doubts whether the union will remain capable of sustaining the fiscal transfers needed to mask the massive economic disparities between parts of the country.

Workers in London are the highest-paid in Europe — but their compatriots in Cornwall, a beneficiary of funds from the regional community and where secessionist sentiment is also stirring, are paid less in absolute terms than workers in Sicily and southern Italy.

Investors are also growing increasingly concerned about balance-of-payments financing for the country, which has a current account deficit of over 5 per cent — large, by emerging-market standards — especially if negotiations on exit terms founder.

Members of the EPC politburo dismiss the concerns, saying that “no deal is better than a bad deal” and that the country’s neighbours have no choice but to sell it cars and wine.

The EPC’s grip on power at a federal level increasingly rests on dominating just one of the UK’s four nations — aided by the implosion of the Workers’ Party, once the main opposition, but now hobbled by the post-industrial decline of its heartlands.

In her call for independence, Ms Sturgeon said that EPC rule was likely “until 2030 or beyond.”

The EPC’s revolutionary sovereigntist ideology — reinforced in attacks on the judiciary, “enemies of the will of the people” and “citizens of nowhere” — has diminished its ability to counter movements for self-determination within the UK itself, even as this rhetoric has been deployed to silence the losing side in last year’s divisive vote.

Premier May — a feared former state security minister — seized control of the state last year during several weeks of political chaos unleashed by the vote, and after all her rivals in the EPC’s ensuing power struggle withdrew in suspicious circumstances.

According to demoralised civil servants, May is said to be concentrating decision-making from a ‘bunker’ somewhere in Whitehall, a leadership compound named after the palace of one of the bloodiest warlords in English history.

In a sign that rivals of the premier are beginning to build power-bases outside the rubber-stamp parliament, a finance minister she purged last year re-emerged this week, heading a newspaper in the capital — one previously loyal to the government — while remaining a legislator.

Despite this emerging liberal faction, the premier has largely conceded to demands by EPC hardliners over the shape of the withdrawal negotiations, such as confirming even before talks have begun that the UK will leave a region-wide ‘single market’ for goods and services.

The office of premier, which is not directly elected despite its effective presidential authority, controls the parliament on behalf of the state’s traditionalist supreme leader — who at the age of 90 will soon present the country with another fraught transition of [cont. page 94]

OK, so parts of that are ever so slightly tongue in cheek. (The story’s grasp of the local political geography also leaves a lot to be desired, frankly.)

Still, what was the serious half of the point?

Well, we could start with Robert Walpole, Britain’s first modern prime minister.

It’s been said his talent lay in “understanding his own country, and his foible, inattention to every other country, by which it was impossible he could thoroughly understand his own.” Emphasis mine. This has practically been a British political tradition ever since.

Other than parodying the language of foreign correspondentese — though I can’t do justice to such highlights of the genre as ‘If It Happened There,’ the former Slate series — the point wasn’t to write an ‘as if’ analysis of UK politics that simply teleports the scene to parts of Africa or Asia.

That would be a bit crass, in post-colonial terms. It would also ignore the political diversity of those places.

But what a foreign correspondent can do is show readers the underlying political logic of an outwardly strange society — even (or especially) when this logic goes unspoken by the inhabitants.

This is, perhaps, inherently comparative. At the very least, it might help readers reflect that it is dangerous anywhere to assume that institutions always function as they’re supposed to. Politics is indeed — as someone recently put it — not a game.

(For example, here’s something I just wrote on South Africa, which at the end of the day is still a young democracy — and is dealing with a lot of this kind of conflict over institutions.)

So — Brexit appears in the story above, but it isn’t the story, although a domestically-produced piece might make it so.

Much more interesting to a reader who isn’t as obsessed about the blow by blow as the inhabitants — nor has a clue as to whether it’s a good or bad idea for the country — might be the questions it has unleashed about the nature of the UK, which is after all a complex multinational state, although maybe sometimes it pretends it isn’t.

Although perhaps those questions unleashed Brexit? A difficult one.

None of us really knows what will happen with Brexit itself. But we are all beginning to recognise that politics in Britain has moved up to that bigger, more institutional (even constitutional) level for the time being. Next time you look for an insight on that — it may not just be in the UK news pages.