Fiasco of the Year

In a crowded field, one decision stands out as worst of all

In the vain effort to keep my students awake, I am always on the lookout for fresh material to integrate into my teaching. For instance, back in 2020 I was fortunate enough (if that is the right sentiment) to be teaching the work of Thomas Hobbes in my political philosophy course, just as the first Covid wave hit Europe, which offered a real-time example of state authority.  At the time, China was locking people up in their apartments to contain the virus’ spread, while European countries were pretending life could go on as normal: a remarkable juxtaposition of state power versus individual liberty. And we know how that panned out.    

Well, 2022 has been a banner year for providing the kind of high-quality fiascos that, while they may not bode well for the future, nonetheless provide good fodder for the classroom. But which has been the worst?

Now, if you were expecting Elon Musk to take first prize for going around firing whoever he could find at Twitter and randomly unplugging servers, all while tweeting like he’s applying for a shitposter position at 4-chan, prepare to be disappointed. While Musk’s “leadership” at Twitter will most definitely become part of “how not to fuck things up” in future strategy classes, there is I think an even more vivid and obvious example both of exceptionally poor decision-making and of sullen refusal to acknowledge the obvious.

I speak of the raging shitshow that is Brexit, which admittedly has been a multi-year fiasco, but this year is the first in which the full consequences of the idiotic choice to leave the EU have made themselves felt. If, unlike me, you are not a British citizen and therefore not singularly inconvenienced by the results of the 2016 referendum, and hence not in a state of permanent annoyance at the insane short-sightedness of the 51,9% of voters who voted leave, then you may not have been following the slow-motion train-wreck that has overtaken Britain this year.

The main headline, of course, was the clown-show that was staged at the top of the Tory party over the summer, as three Prime Ministers went and came and went in the space of about as many weeks, like so many first-graders shuffling to get their place in line before belting out a tuneless rendition of Silent Night at the school Christmas pageant.

The exceedingly brief tenure of Liz Truss, famously lasting less time than the shelf life of a head of lettuce (as the Economist drolly noted), was amusing, but also revealing of just how confining the corner is into which the absurd decision to leave the EU has painted the country. To wit: if the whole idea of Brexit was to restore the sovereignty of Great Britain (Make Britain Great Again, one might say), then Truss’ amuse-bouche of a prime-ministership demonstrated just how little sovereignty is actually wielded in today’s world of international finance and credit markets when you’re going it alone. Lower taxes for wealth creators? Markets say no. Next PM please.

Current office-holder Rishi Sunak, although he sounds at least as human as the new ChatGPT, is probably not the kind of John Bull encapsulation of Britishness that the Anti-EU nativists of the heartland who enthusiastically voted leave were hoping for. To be fair, when one’s net worth is measured in the many hundreds of millions, the common touch can be difficult to muster. The fact that Sunak can summon even human-adjacent empathy is, in this context, something of a marvel.   

But I have been watching (with what I admit is an unhealthy dose of Schadenfreude) over the last few months as the true debacle of Brexit has been making itself felt beyond the farce of Tory Party politics. As the year closes, the country has tipped into chaos. Nurses, ambulance drivers, railway & airport workers, teachers, and the postal workers are all in various stages of going on strike.  When your health, transportation, and educational infrastructure are all dysfunctional, you have what some might call a serious problem, but what I would call the inevitable result of taking the epically-bad, self-destructive decision to cut yourself off from your main trading partner and, incidentally, a reliable source of workers for the very sectors that are now going on strike. Add in the exceptional increase in energy costs, bad for most, worse for Brits, and it’s little wonder that Britons need the kind of diversion that learning all the ways people were mean to Meghan Markle can provide.

Britain got – is lucky the word? – that the Pandemic arrived when it did, just after article 50 was finalised and the Brits, like a car-chasing dog, got what they wanted. The Covid years of ’20 and ’21 masked the real effect of Brexit because almost every EU country faced serious challenges. But other EU-member countries, if they had 99 problems, Brexit wasn’t one, so it was only a matter of time before the sheer lunacy of the 2016 referendum would start to make itself felt. High inflation, a shrinking economy, weakened currency, workplace disruptions, reams of new bureaucracy, diminished standing in the world, and infrastructural dysfunction - Brexit is bringing many, many poisoned gifts.       

Anyway, all of this is well-enough known, and I needn’t recount the full litany of fuckery that the Brits have brought upon themselves. Except the one that I think is most notable, which is that there is almost no public discourse that makes a clear and unambiguous link between Brexit and the current fiasco. Obviously, the government doesn’t want to talk about it. Like the kid who just peed in the pool, they are hoping people will quietly ignore it. The real fiasco is elsewhere. The political opposition (Labour Party), currently led by a slice of unbuttered, stale-bread masquerading as a man, cannot bring itself to acknowledge the truth, which is that Brexit has been, from top to bottom, a pure disaster. But more widely, British media steadfastly refuses to draw the obvious link between this revived Winter of Discontent and Brexit.

From the perspective of the public discourse, Brexit is as if someone has just cut off a finger, still holding the knife, yet looking around agog, wondering why they’re bleeding.  

In my class, I used to cite the turn-of-the-century merger between AOL and Time Warner as one of the best examples of very poor decision-making, driven by narrative belief. Brexit is like that – an irrational, narrative-driven strategy that was very costly, produced no upside, and eventually had to be written-off – only at the level of an entire nation. Unlike a corporation, which can turn their idiocy into a tax write-down after quietly ejecting senior management with shiny golden parachutes, Britain will need another solution. And the first step is to acknowledge the obvious: Brexit was - and remains - an unqualified disaster, and this needs to be stated, and restated, and restated again, as its consequences become increasing unavoidable.

But if one cannot admit openly the scope of the error to oneself, what chance is there to fix it? That is a true fiasco - not only where everything has gone off the rails, but where there is no obvious path to restitution.