Brexit Britain: "Let them eat cake"

By Dilip -

There is no mask that has slipped, just a change in the light that gives a dark edge to the same features. It is often this way with leaders on the way down. The trait people dislike is the origin of previous appeal inverted. The stolidity that once recommended Theresa May and Gordon Brown turned robotic. The charm of Tony Blair and David Cameron went from smooth to slippery.

With the current prime minister that trait is indifference to difficulty – meeting adversity with good cheer; solving problems by declaring them non-existent; clearing practical obstacles by leaps of the imagination. The ethos is expressed in Johnson’s subversion of a famous proverb: “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”

It has been a catchphrase of his for years, but it was the dilemmas posed by Brexit that turned it into a doctrine – cakeism. In the cakeist view, Britain could retain the benefits of EU membership without any obligation to European law. It meant leaving a trading bloc without loss of trade. It meant having different customs regimes for Great Britain and Northern Ireland without erecting a politically toxic customs border between them.

“I want you to see this as a cakeist treaty,” Johnson said of the post-Brexit trade deal he signed in December 2020. A year later: there is no cake, Conservative MPs are hungry, and voters are abandoning the bakery….

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/22/tories-cake-stuffed-boris-johnson-covid-restrictions-freedom


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