Table Of ContentBREXIT AND LIBERAL
DEMOCRACY
This book analyses Brexit in the larger context of the crisis in liberal democracies and
the continuing rise of ‘nationalism’. With electoral verdicts favouring right-wing
populists across the world, the volume argues that Brexit has become a key event in
understanding global political currents, as well as emerging as a watershed moment
in the current political climate. The author focuses on the underlying currents that
shaped the Brexit vote and delineates the various strands of arguments that inform
the current political climate. The volume also locates the deepening divide within
the discourse and understanding of democracy, as well as the abysmally low level
of rhetoric informing the debates around it. Further, it links this up with other
‘nationalist’ waves across the world, including South Asia.
A nuanced reading of a key event, this book will be of great interest to scholars
and researchers of politics, especially political theory, political sociology and history.
Amir Ali teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi. Previously, he taught at the Department of Political Science, Jamia
Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and was Agatha Harrison Memorial Visiting Fellow at
St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He has written a book on South Asian
Islam and British Multiculturalism (Routledge, 2016).
BREXIT AND LIBERAL
DEMOCRACY
Populism, Sovereignty, and the
Nation-State
Amir Ali
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Amir Ali
The right of Amir Ali to be identified as author of this work has been
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CONTENTS
Preface vi
1 Brexit: beginning to write about a never-ending process 1
2 The Thatcherite prelude to Brexit 27
3 Brexit, the 2007 financial crisis and austerity 53
4 ‘Let’s take back control’: Brexit and the assertion
of sovereignty 74
5 Brexit and the worsening climate of democracy 93
6 Brexit, and the sum of all fears: racism, Islamophobia
and anti-Semitism 117
Conclusion: Brexit: conclusively inconclusive? 139
Index 145
PREFACE
The 2005 movie V for Vendetta is set in the dystopian future of 2020, the very year
when Britain declared its independence from the European Union (EU), was then
ravaged by the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic and, by all available indica-
tors throughout the year 2020, was on course to crash out of the EU without a
deal on the last day of the year. It was perhaps the Biden victory in the November
elections that prevented this, and a deal was struck a day before Christmas Eve. It
quickly became another excuse for Prime Minister Boris Johnson to engage in yet
another round of superficial grandstanding before the inevitable devil in the detail
of the document caught up with him. Some years earlier, his predecessor Theresa
May had suggested, in a speech in January 2017, that ‘no deal was better than a
bad deal’.1 The deal arrived at by Johnson was clearly a case of any deal being
better than no deal. V for Vendetta is a bleak depiction of a Britain that has fallen
into the hands of an autocrat and is challenged by an anarchist who decides to
blow up Parliament, like the 5 November 1605 Gunpowder plot. Boris Johnson’s
tenure as Prime Minister has significantly undermined parliamentary democracy.
His particular manner of excoriating parliament can be said to have parallels with
the dystopian setting of the movie as Johnson continues to create a bleak Brexit
landscape, all the while suggesting to his people that things are going to be just fine.
This book arose out of a sense of disquiet from the results of the 23 June 2016
referendum, in which a narrow majority in the UK voted to leave the EU. That
sense of disquiet only kept growing over the last four years as the realization
dawned that the UK was intent on, or at least the narrow elite leading the UK,
was intent on leading the country out of the EU through the hardest of Brexits.
As the years have rolled by, this book argues that the climate of democracy has sig-
nificantly worsened. The shock aftereffects of Brexit were reinforced with the vic-
tory of Donald Trump in the November 2016 US Presidential elections. Elections
across the world seemed to be returning far-right populists to power in ever-larger
Preface vii
numbers. And then in the year 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic hit the world.
Even in the face of an unprecedented pandemic of this magnitude, it seemed that
the task of Brexit could not be postponed, and the simple message was that Brexit
had to be done, come what may.
One of the primary concerns of this book is the question of liberal-democracy
and whether the theory and practice of this kind of polity can be sustained in the
UK and across the world. The victory of Joe Biden in the US Presidential elections
was met with relief in many quarters, as there emerged a feeling that democracy
may have just been saved by the skin of its teeth. Chapter 5 deals very centrally
with the idea of Brexit and liberal democracy. This also explains the main title of
this book. In terms of the three other concepts contained in the sub-title after
the colon, ‘sovereignty’, ‘populism’ and ‘nation-state’, sovereignty receives separate
treatment with one full chapter (Chapter 4) devoted to it. The other two concepts
are to be found, explained and aiding in the explanation in all the other chapters.
The idea of the nation-state is to be found mentioned in many chapters, but it is
in the last chapter (Chapter 6, ‘Brexit and the sum of all fears’) that the nation-
state serves as the central conceptual rubric to understand the phenomena of anti-
Semitism and Islamophobia. Similarly, when it comes to the concept of populism,
references to it are to be found in Chapter 1 of the book and in Chapter 2 on the
‘Thatcherite prelude to Brexit’ and also in Chapter 3 on ‘Brexit, the 2007 financial
crisis and Austerity’. However, the concept of populism can be said to resolve itself
completely in Chapter 4 on sovereignty.
In terms of disquiet, the researching and writing of this book have proceeded
along with the possibility of a no-deal Brexit moving from the far-flung fringes of
extreme right-wing daydreaming to almost being presented as fait accompli during
Boris Johnson’s prime ministerial tenure. Brexit has drawn widespread attention
from across the world on account of the political spectacle that it has become, a
spectacle accentuated by the robotic monotony of former British Prime Minister
Theresa May and aggravated by the buffoonery of her successor Boris Johnson.
The continuing interest in Brexit has seemed to belie, at least for the time being,
the sense that Britain does not really matter anymore, with the inevitability of
British decline from the heights of imperial domination to the agonies of deindus-
trialization often cited as the reason. A group of ardent, hard-line Brexiteers has
attempted to revive interest in the countries of the former British Empire as a post-
Brexit trade strategy, almost preposterously suggesting that the Commonwealth
could replace the EU.
When two referendums took place in the French-speaking province of Que-
bec in 1980 and 1995 to decide independence from Canada, people were tired of
the regular happening of such political exercises. The exercise would derisively
be referred to as the ‘never-endum referendum’.2 Supporters of Brexit have been
largely successful in preventing a second referendum and thereby ruling out the
possibility of a ‘never-endum referendum’. The Brexit process has, however, led
to the exiting of the UK from the EU becoming a never-ending future, a veritable
Brexiternity.3
viii Preface
The writing of a large part of this book happened under the curious circum-
stances of the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown. As a result, possibilities of trav-
elling and applying for research funding were ruled out. An enterprise such as
writing a book results in the accumulation of many debts of gratitude. The most
immediate ones go to my wife Asfa and our daughters Asma and Madiha. We
remained ensconced in our house on the JNU campus during the days of the
lockdown. Asfa has ensured that I was able to proceed with the writing of the
book, even as I inflicted upon everyone in the household some of the more boring
details of the Brexit process. My elder daughter, Asma, has often listened patiently
and good naturedly to things I would have to say. Madiha, the younger one, thinks
Brexit is boring and has advised me that I should write more stories, especially
funny ones, and that illustrations in my book might just help. It is this advice that
I need to think about more seriously. My parents have always asked me about the
progress of the writing on the daily basis that we chat on video calls, almost as if
they were asking me if I had done my homework. My parents-in-law stayed with
us for a while as I made revisions to the book and the presence of grandparents
made my daughters perhaps pester me just a little bit less, and this would have most
certainly helped in advancing the cause of the book.
I would like to thank all of my colleagues at the Centre for Political Studies,
JNU, and in particular the office staff, as it was always such a relief to see them
during the lockdown days every time I went to my office to pick up books and
papers. Sometimes, I think that it was a miracle that we could continue with some
semblance of academic activities as we held online meetings and taught remotely
to students sitting in far-flung corners of the country. In particular, I must men-
tion Asha Sarangi, who, as Chairperson in the tumultuous times that we have been
through, has stuck to the job with a tenacity that is admirable, to say the least.
Gurpreet Mahajan has never allowed any of my ideas to escape the critical scrutiny
of her gaze. Rajarshi Dasgupta has always had something insightful to say whenever
he read some of the popular pieces in the media that I wrote on Brexit. To my
students at JNU, whose absence for many months from the campus gave it such a
deserted and forlorn look during the days of the lockdown, I can only say that it
has been a sheer delight to watch them return to the campus and to welcome them
back with the renewed hope that the cause of meaningful academia that JNU has
always stood for shall never be abandoned. It has reminded of those wonderful lines
from the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz: Gulon mein rang bhare baad-e-nau-bahar
chaley/Chaley bhi aao ki gulshan ka kaarobaar chaley (The flowers must be filled with
colours and the balmy winds of yet another spring must begin to blow again/Come
hasten here now as the garden’s tasks await your arrival to begin all over again).
Aakash Chakrabarty at Routledge has, over the years, become a dear friend as he
has, with his gentle smile, encouraged and watched another vague idea grow into
a manuscript and then a book.
Amir Ali
New Delhi
Preface ix
Notes
1 ‘FactCheck: did Nigel Farage coin the phrase “no deal is better than a bad deal” ’?
thejournal.ie, 14 May 2019. www.thejournal.ie/nigel-farage-no-deal-bbc-fact-check-
4632847-May2019/. Accessed 23 January 2021.
2 Nick Bryant, ‘Neverendum referendum: voting on independence Quebec-style’,
BBC News, 7 September 2014. www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29077213. Accessed 9
February 2021.
3 Denis Macshane, Brexiternity: The Uncertain Fate of Britain, I.B. Tauris, London, 2019.
