Why Brexit Britain Is Imploding Into a Global Pariah

Britain Humiliated Itself by Imploding From a Modern Democracy into a Far Right Wing Country — And the World Is Running Away From It as Fast as It Can

Image Credit: Patrick Semansky

Recently, Joe Biden paid a visit to Ireland. And there, something happened. It wasn’t just — as much of the media’s made it out to be — a weepy homage to his heritage. It was bigger than that. He gave a series of speeches — dazzling ones. He stepped into the shoes of an American President. He exuded not just swagger and bravado — but stood there as the leader of the goddamned free world, and it listened.

(Sigh, leftists won’t like me saying that, but — let’s get real. Who else is?)

Americans didn’t pay enough attention to this — they’ve got enough problems of their own. And in those dazzling speeches, where he spoke of “shared values,” like democracy, prosperity, the power of peace, the necessity of modernity, something else happened, too. Diplomacy? It’s as much or more about what’s unsaid. Who you didn’t meet with. And in this case? The snub was as loud as a volcano exploding.

Biden didn’t even mention Britain. He could have added a line or two — just that — about Britain also being America’s partner, friend, having a commitment to shared values of democracy and prosperity and peace, standing shoulder to shoulder with it. He didn’t.

That speaks more than volumes. It’s hard for to overstate what it means for an American President to…pointedly…snub…ostracize…Britain.

Britain’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, begged to meet with Biden. Biden had…LOL…a coffee with him. Rishi grinned up eagerly at Biden. Please, say something nice. About us! Anything! Biden wouldn’t even meet his eyes.

Brits don’t really understand that look. It’s an American one. Translation? Son, what the hell have you done to your country? Are you…are you…an idiot? A fool? I can’t even look at you. I have zero respect for you, because, son, you are behaving in a disgusting way. You’re embarrassing yourself. We’re trying to build a free world over here. Meanwhile? You’re busy trying to…do the opposite. Until you grow up? America won’t have a damned thing to do with you. It won’t even look at you.

Sunak then invited Biden for a formal meeting — and Biden, LOL, went to a funeral instead. In the world of international diplomacy? An American President…treating a British Prime Minister like that? It’s like standing up someone for a date and saying the dog made you do it. It is meant to signal the outer limits of disdain, contempt. It is meant to be humiliating. To send a signal. America is not your friend. We don’t like you. Not anymore.

Because, well…look at what you’ve become.

British media did a terrible job of interpreting the events above. It didn’t tell the story at all. So it’s left to me, as an American, to tell you, openly, what it all really means. Even America’s breaking up with Britain. An American President not willing to give a British PM literally the time of day? Not even able to look them in the eyes? Sitting there with a pained, strained expression, looking away, telling the world, I don’t want to be here with this fool, this fanatic, this lunatic, who’s blowing up his own country? It is as clear as it could possibly be. Brits might not get it — but everyone else likely understands exactly what Joe Biden’s pained expression, unable to meet Rishi Sunak’s eyes, means. Breakup time.

Biden was sending the world in no uncertain terms — its leaders, diplomats, fellow Presidents — a message. Britain is now a pariah state. Persona non grata to America — and when America says that? A President as deeply respected now around the world as Biden is? The world listens.

So why does Biden feel like this? After all, what would have been usual in these circumstances — natural — would have been a few days in London, making nice with Britain’s PM and political establishment, photo-ops between an American President and Britain’s elite of all kinds. Biden wouldn’t do even a minute of that, and was clearly advised not to. That Britain was toxic. That it was to be treated as a pariah.

Why?

It was left to a French MEP — Member of European Parliament — to say out loud what Biden couldn’t, because an American President doesn’t have to say such things out loud.

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, a French MEP and member of the Delegation to the EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, said that those on both the left and right of the EU Parliament felt the Tory Government has lurched to the “far right”.

What Suella Braverman says cannot be accepted even from Christian Democrats from Luxembourg, or Netherlands, or Sweden. They cannot accept some of what Suella Braverman says when she says she’s happy to see people being sent [to Rwanda],” she told i. “It’s the rhetoric. I would say that what is very frightening for a lot of us is the words more than the acts. The acts themselves, we never really know, because it’s so blurry. So what we have left to judge on is the wording. And the wording is very, very populist and sometimes far right.”

She added: “Today there’s a big comparison made: the UK looks like the US when it was Trump. That would be the general, from left or right, everyone would tend to think: UK politics today is like US politics when it was Trump.”

Ms Braverman made headlines last year when she said that seeing a flight take asylum seekers to Rwanda was her “dream” and “obsession”. She also drew fury from her peers when she described opposition from Tory MPs to Liz Truss’s plan to scrap the top tax rate as a “coup”.